At that the man Cajli lost speech entirely along with anything resembling prudence, and started for Riaan, spittle flying and his shortsword out and up. Lal nudged her churfa slightly with one knee, and Cajli ran full-tilt into the animal’s flank and bounced. Sitting on the ground, he gobbled commands that set Boudrigal and the four bondmen moving grimly forward. Boudrigal waved Lal and Soukyan aside; when they remained where they were, he bared his teeth briefly and kept coming.
Soukyan turned his head unhurriedly to look straight at Lal. He said, “I had forgotten about this country. I am sorry.”
“Mind the one on your left,” the old woman said. “You were always slower on that side.”
“True,” Soukyan said; and if Lal had not been expecting it, she would never have seen the bow come off his shoulder, nor the arrow melt to the string. The first shot, deliberately wide, made Boudrigal laugh outright, and he was still grinning when the second took his right leg from under him. Blood welled, but did not fountain, ah, he can still miss the artery when he wants to. The four churls froze where they stood, but Cajli sprang forward to clutch savagely at Lal, grunting, “Come down here to us, Grandmother. Come down, old bitch, come down.”
Once she could have kicked him off; now she landed tumbling, and was on her feet before he was, with the swordcane trained on his heart. “Let be,” she told him desperately, “let be,” but he roared and charged again, the shortsword that would have shattered her own blade swinging like a brush-cutter. Lal backed and backed, constantly warning, “Let be, do not trifle with old people. Old people are dangerous; old people don’t care.” Cajli paid no heed. She glimpsed Riaan’s broken face out of the corner of one eye, felt her churfa’s foul breath on her neck, and struck. The body remembers—slide, stamp, lunge, and away to the next before he knows he’s dead…. But she could not pull the swordcane out of his chest, and Cajli took it from her as he fell. Two of the bondmen were on her then, equally weaponless, clumsily battering her with their raw weight and momentum. She ducked, sidestepped, let herself go down and rolled, fumbling for the tiny dagger tucked ever inside her right boot. Boudrigal was bawling louder than the churfas in fury and pain; from shouts behind her she could tell that Soukyan was keeping the other two men at bay with his drawn bow and waiting, deadly patient as ever, for a clear shot at her attackers. Don’t kill them, Soukyan, not these, don’t kill them.
A stone flashed past her ear and cracked against the grubby temple of the man ineptly attempting to strangle her. He fell back, half-stunned, and she heard Riaan’s shrill, hoarse cry, distorted by his broken nose, “Groy, stop it! Chash, Stenyi, what are you doing? Leave the old ones alone—they’ve never harmed you, I’ve never harmed you, and those two have hurt you all your lives! Why are you fighting for them?”
The bondman still blundering against Lal faltered in obvious bewilderment. He rubbed a hand over his face, blinked at her, at the boy and Boudrigal, and Cajli’s motionless body, and half turned to help his groggy companion. The two besieging Soukyan also looked doubtful and confused, and for a single moment Lal thought all might yet be well. But Boudrigal, scrabbling to one knee, hysterical with rage and pain, shrieked, “Kill him, you miserable vermin! Kill them all, or I’ll burn your homes—I swear I will! Kill them now!”
“There are four of you, and he is alone!” Riaan shouted wildly. “Change your lives! Must you always be slaves?”
The four churls’ hesitation was brief: they consulted without words, weighing their entire histories and their bitter and precise understanding of the world against the ravings of a mad boy and the lives of two old strangers. Then they came resignedly on, by two and two, the red hounds yapping behind them, as though they had been set to clear land or plow it. Lal’s pair were slogging at her again, crowding her against her churfa, while Soukyan’s assailants kept shuffling in half-circles, feinting crudely to get in under the great bow. It was plain to them that the old brown man was reluctant to shoot, and they were accustomed to taking every small advantage they could get, without pondering.
Boudrigal had collapsed, increasingly delirious, but still yelling frenzied orders and threats. Riaan was firing stones from a herder’s sling so fast that two were often in the air at once—which was a good thing, since he was likely to hit one of his defenders at least half the time. Soukyan wheeled threateningly on him in a moment of exasperation, and was promptly rushed on his vulnerable left side. His churfa squalled and reared, and the bow flew from Soukyan’s hand as he hit the ground. Awkward as they were, the bondmen were on him before he could rise.
Standing considerably aside from herself, Lal watched in distant fascination as a lean old woman she almost recognized kicked one of her attackers in the groin, simultaneously catching the other in the throat with a bony elbow, bent to her boot in the same sleek motion and came up throwing. The daggerlet flickered in the dusk like a bright insect, and one of the ungainly men astride Soukyan cried out before he fell, the jeweled hilt humming in his right eye. His companion stared dumbly at him, then shrieked much louder and longer and fled away weeping into the woods. The old woman stooped swiftly to retrieve her dagger, wiped it on her leg, and walked over to free the swordcane from Cajli’s chest. She was humming absently to herself.
Boudrigal had fainted, and the boy Riaan looked ready to do the same. The two remaining bondmen were climbing to their feet, looking very tired. Glancing constantly sideways at Lal and Soukyan, they trudged to their fallen masters: one of them timorously closed Cajli’s eyes, while the second knelt by Boudrigal, trying vainly to tug the arrow out of his thigh and staunch the bleeding. Soukyan put him aside gently enough, snapped off the feathered end of the arrow and forced it on through the leg. Boudrigal woke, drew breath to scream, tried to spit, could do neither, and lost consciousness again.
Lal shook her head once, violently, as though waking herself from a clinging dream, and came to squat on her heels beside Soukyan. She cleaned Boudrigal’s wound as well as she could, ordering a dazed, silent Riaan to tear strips from his master’s shirt for a bandage. “We will bury your dead, if you like,” she said bluntly to the bondmen as she worked. “We are old, but we still clean up after ourselves.”
But the men shook their heads, answering that there were rites due Cajli that none but his high family could perform; that they themselves might only report his death and chance punishment for doing even that. The dead churl could not be buried at all, having failed his lord, but must be left for the birds and insects to devour. Only Boudrigal, injured, were the two survivors permitted to carry home; and he would need to be extensively purified of their touch when he recovered. They bore him up between them now and trotted away, showing neither sorrow nor fear, anger nor regret on their dirty, worn faces. They never looked back at Riaan.
Slow, buzzing shadows had already settled over the two bodies. Soukyan and Lal looked at each other, and Riaan saw that the old man was trembling, and that the black woman had her arms wrapped tightly around herself, as though trying to contain something on the verge of breaking free. Soukyan said quietly, “We always seem to be digging graves by moonlight, don’t we?”
“We have to bury the one I killed,” she answered. “I don’t care about him, but that one anyway. We have to.”
“They’ll just come back and dig him up,” Riaan blurted. “They will, I’ve seen them do it.” Soukyan nodded silently. Lal said, “Let them.”
It was full night by the time the three of them had gouged a shallow trench out of the ground and heaped it high with stones. Lal whispered something in her own language, and Soukyan said formally, “We had no wish to kill you. We forgive you for making us killers.” He stepped aside and looked at Riaan.
For a moment the boy stared blankly; then he knelt by the cairn, threw back his head and spoke to it. “Stenyi, you were a fool, and you died for nothing, nothing, as you always have and always will. I loved you. Good-bye.” He stood up slowly, his eyes dry and fiercely miserable under the moon.
?
??Your nose,” Soukyan said. He gripped the back of Riaan’s neck firmly with one hand, the broken nose with the other. Riaan yelped once, briefly. Soukyan said, “There, that is the best I can do. It will heal.” He turned to Lal. “Are you all right?”
“I hurt all bloody over,” she said petulantly. She was rubbing her left arm hard, and wincing slightly with each breath. “Gods, did I always bruise this easily? I had no idea I’d softened up so. Two minutes’ pushing and shoving with a couple of unarmed yokels, and I’m absolutely pulp. Disgusting.”
Soukyan smiled as well as he could through split, puffed lips. He had lost a side tooth, one eye was all but closed, and he grunted himself as he bent to pick up his bow. “My fault. We could have avoided this.”
“No,” Lal said. They both turned toward Riaan, who flushed under their regard, looking even younger than he was. “I am sorry you suffered hurt in saving my life,” he said with surprising dignity, “but you need not concern yourselves with me any further. I will take care of myself now. Good-bye. I am grateful.”
They watched him start on the way they had come, even attempting to hum jauntily as he walked, as Lal had done. He managed perhaps ten yards and crumpled down in slow sections. Soukyan limped over to raise him easily in his arms and regard Lal wryly. “I’m afraid this one is ours, after all.”
“Put him up with me, in front,” she said. “I can hold him on.”
“Churfas will not carry double. They will not, Lal.”
“Butterfly will.”
Soukyan almost dropped the boy. “Butterfly?”
“I named her,” Lal said calmly. “Or him, whichever. And if she won’t carry us both, I’ll walk. I most certainly need the exercise.”
The churfa did, after much vivid and well-phrased outrage, consent to carry two, and they went on until moonset, for fear of pursuit. Riaan slept through everything, whimpering now and then, but never waking, not even when he was lifted down, set carefully on dry grass in a weedchoked clearing and covered with Soukyan’s ragged spare cloak. Lal and Soukyan lay nearby, talking drowsily.
“My fault, my fault, all of it. If I had even half my old sense left, I would have remembered what the folk of this bloody country are like. Boudrigal—if only I had not shot him, it could have been different….”
“You think so?” The black woman’s voice was hard and cool. “If he had killed you, as Cajli meant to kill me—yes, I suppose that would have been different. I must say, I like this better.”
“Unarmed yokels,” Soukyan said bitterly. “That’s all they were, even those two. Pitiful. Pitiful. To think of the places we have been, we two, to think of the things that have happened to us, the things we have seen and done, and had to do, the strange friends we knew, and the enemies—the terrible, honorable enemies—and to end so, butchers of peasants on a country road. I am sick ashamed, Lal. I wish I had never lived to see this dawn.”
“I’m sure Boudrigal feels the same way,” she answered. “I have less pride than you. To me death is death; it is all equal, and honor doesn’t come into it. I wish I had not had to kill those men, yes, but it’s done. On to Kulpai.”
“Kulpai,” Soukyan said. “Kulpai. What possessed me? Why was it so important that I must drag you along with me on such an idiot journey? Forgive me, Lal. Go home—just leave me with this other idiot and go back to that wise, hard-bought life I could not leave the way I found it. I will not trouble you again.”
Lal was silent for such a while that Soukyan thought she had fallen asleep. He had almost drifted off himself, when he heard her voice: quiet and distant, but very clear. “I had my reasons for following you. Worrying about a mad old man was only one of them.” Then she did sleep, and so did he, and the sun was well past midday when they woke again.
Riaan had built a small fire, and was already cooking three small fish over it on peeled harishi-bush skewers. He had filled the waterskins from wherever he had found the fish, coaxed the churfas to a patch of the blue brambles they preferred, and was now sitting close by the fire, arms around his knees. His nose was still badly swollen, and a good half of his face was blotched purple with bruises. Nevertheless, he was a pleasant-looking boy, gray-eyed and black-haired, and he seemed content to be where he was, staring into the fire, waiting for them to wake. Lal had seen Choushi-wai just so, many a morning.
“I have never been this far from home,” he said quietly to them. “I have never seen people like you. Except for pilgrims and peddlers, I have never seen anyone I have not known all my life. And you can’t ever have met anyone as ignorant as I am.” His uncertain half-smile made him appear even younger than seventeen.
“I killed two just yesterday,” Lal said. The boy swallowed hard. Soukyan said, “We are bound for Kulpai. You may travel with us that far, or part company with us at Jahmanyar, as you decide. I think your masters will not follow.”
“No,” Riaan whispered, “no, they will not. They are ignorant too—they would think words like Kulpai and Jahmanyar were curses, or things to eat. I know they mean towns, cities, but I do not know what a town is, nor even another village. The moment I saw you, the two of you looking at me, I understood that I do not know anything, anything, not even what I do not know. I will be no use to you on your road, no company even, but only a stupid burden. Forget about me. Thank you, and forget me.”
Soukyan sat down by the fire without answering. He pulled one of the fish from its skewer and devoured it in three bites. “Good,” he said. “Very nice.” Lal patted Riaan’s shoulder lightly and took her own fish. She said only, “You have courage, and you can cook. Eat your breakfast, and then I will introduce you properly to Butterfly.”
Even down in open country, most nights had turned frosty, and there was not always dry wood enough to keep a fire alive until morning. The old people—by now thoroughly inured to the stench—slept closer and closer to the churfas for warmth. The boy made no complaint, but after watching him spend all one night walking up and down, beating his arms across his body, Soukyan disappeared early that day and caught up with them only after sunset, the thick-haired hide of a lowland guangsu, wild cousin to a rishu, bundled across his shoulders. “I gave the meat to the villagers who helped me with the curing,” he told them, grunting away Riaan’s gratitude. “They have a trick of tanning a skin quite quickly in this country—matter of hours, once the scraping’s done. Rough, sloppy way to do the job, but it will serve.” And Riaan slept warmer than they that night, as Lal pointed out several times.
It was indeed all farmland, once they were out of the hills. The pastures came first, the richest fields teeming with fat rishus and cloud-fluffy jejebhais; the poorest able to support only a few scrawny bipedal drushindis, worthless for anything but their droppings, which made both fuel and good fertilizer. Soukyan and Lal had met few enough people since Doule; now they could ride for a day or more without seeing another human. The sky was high and pale and constantly hazy, making distances almost impossible to estimate. It was all as fascinating to the boy as anything else would have been, but Lal found it dull, even depressing, and Soukyan pushed their mounts along briskly, hardly looking to left or right. “We can still reach Kulpai well before the snows, if we travel from first light to last. And if we don’t have to stop and bury anyone else.”
The orchards were better. The ground turned rolling again—though never swelling back into real hills—and the white sky broke up into thousands of tiny polished clouds. The leaves of the ki-trees were already as deep-golden as their wrinkly, fist-sized fruit, which were everywhere being gathered by swarms of yelping children with latticed nets on the ends of poles longer than they were tall. There were late-ripening maradis on the vine, as well, and there were even winter-apples, though Soukyan said they were used strictly as fodder this far south. Lal snatched a few as she rode under the sagging boughs, and taught Riaan how to eat them. He spat out the first, sampled another warily, and then ate all of hers.
He was easier with her than with Soukyan, despite
the guangsu hide. Mostly silent during the day, at night when they had bedded down in some thicket or coldly fragrant grove, he plagued her with ceaseless questions about the world beyond, and beyond that, and their lives in it. That much Lal had expected; what surprised her was how many of the questions had to do with her family, and Soukyan’s as well. When she said, “Riaan, I don’t really know,” or “Riaan, we don’t talk about certain things very much, he and I,” he seemed genuinely shocked, and she began slowly to understand.
“Churfas,” she said to Soukyan as they rode together. “They breed them like that, like animals.” She spoke in an old language they shared, while the boy dozed against her back. “He knows who his mother is, but that is all. He thinks he has half-brothers, half-sisters, but he can’t be sure. It’s a miracle to him that you and I actually know our families—it’s all he can do to imagine such a thing.” Her voice was completely without expression, as it became when she was very angry in a particular way.
“He might be better off,” the old man answered. “And yes, I do mean it, and I do know what I am saying. Perhaps they are wiser than we thought in that miserable hill country.”
“I know about your sister,” Lal said. “You know about—about what happened to me when I was stolen. This is different.”
“Is it, then? Is what happened to my sister—being sold by our parents to the vicious fool who killed her—is that any different from what has been done to Riaan all his life? At least he has never learned to love anyone who was to be snatched away from him forever—forever—between one minute and the next. Teach him to consider his blessings and be grateful.” Soukyan spoke no further for the rest of that day.
Two nights later, they made camp at the edge of one more orchard, dining on ki-fruit, the last of their dried fish, and water from a nearby stream. Soukyan told them that they were a day’s journey from the Churush road, and three from Jahmanyar. “Ten days at most, and we’ll be smelling Kulpai. Tell me you don’t remember the scent of Kulpai, Lal.”