Outcaste

task, without every other woman setting his senses on fire and tempting him into trouble.

  He got up to rub cold water into his face, then tried once more to settle by staring at the whitewashed wall instead of the moon. He had done Paril a favour and unfortunately Paril was unlikely ever to know, which was irritating but necessary. Perhaps, he thought, the universe would reward him in kind by keeping him safe from the same affliction. Love, that apparently compulsive and overriding state of being in love, was something he had escaped so far, and he had some reason to hope that he was immune from its power.

  After only a few weeks of intensive training, he moved the women, without ceremony, into the cadet class. Although he did not personally supervise these sessions – in fact, it was Saghat who was commander in charge of cadet training – he went along on the first morning to watch his own success. He was rewarded by the sight of Mareil easily and elegantly overmastering three of the boys in a close jousting bout.

  It was a quiet triumph over Saghat, who had no choice but to ignore the fact that four of his cadets were female. There was no need to drive the point home, so Jay watched from the edge of the field without approaching him. If Saghat treated the girls more severely than the boys, it would be one more experience for them to learn from. He did not intend to intervene unless he heard of gross unfairness.

  Satisfied, he was about to leave in silence when he noticed that someone else was watching too. High above on the rampart which overhung the courtyard, Carral’s wife was leaning over the battlement.

  Since the battlement was also a pathway into the castle, he had an excuse to go that way. He took the stone steps as rapidly as he could without appearing to hurry.

  Dazil, however, did not move as he approached, except to turn her head to greet him with a cool half smile. “Good day, Commander.”

  “My lady.” Jay bowed shortly. It was politic to adopt the local mode of address. “Do you often watch the cadets train?”

  “No. But Lord Carral told me that your girl swordbearers would be joining the others today, so I thought I would take a look. I’ve never seen women fight before.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “From up here, I can’t tell them apart from the men.”

  Jay looked over the courtyard. It was true that the girls were indistinguishable from the other cadets, at least at a first glance over the neat pairs of sparring partners.

  “I can,” he said. “Women always move differently. You see the cadet in the front row, two from the right?”

  “The one whose partner just fell over?”

  “That’s Mareil. She’ll make a first class swordbearer.”

  “It sounds very odd to hear someone say that about a girl. But Lord Carral always says we’re out of step with the modern world here.”

  Tactfully, Jay did not comment on this. Instead, he said, “Would you like to learn?”

  “I doubt Lord Carral would think that was appropriate.”

  “So do I. What I asked was whether you would like to.”

  He had moved close to her as they both leaned over the wall to watch the cadets. Now she drew herself up and looked at him, fully.

  He was alarmed, just for a moment, that he might have made a mistake. Her unusual dark eyes were clear with meaning. But her expression softened as her held her gaze, and he felt the connection as distinctly as if she had reached out to touch him.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  “If you change your mind, I’m at your service.”

  She bowed her head, and turned back to the castle.

  Jay stayed where he was for some minutes, pretending to watch the activity on the field but instead sensing everything else immediately around him. The cold stone under his hands, the freezing wind against his right cheek, the smell of ice, and the distant, abrupt shouts from below. Winter, he thought, would be harsh on Car’a’vil.

  Six

  It was one mistake he never made, in fact; for if he had, he would not have survived so long. He saw and understood when the light of willing admiration shone in a woman’s face. He knew for certain who would let him touch her, and not betray him. Sometimes the look was innocent and uncertain, as Mareil’s had been, and sometimes it was direct, enticing, excited… as hers was.

  He was kept awake at night now not by frustration, but by painful excitement and compulsive searching about in his imagination for an opportunity. As commander in chief of the Car’a’vil battalion, he was quartered in one of the principal bed chambers of the castle in the same wing as Carral himself. Carral’s suite of rooms was at the far end of the same corridor, within hailing distance, and as far as Jay knew Dazil slept there too. So he was close to her at night, but the convenient proximity of the bed chambers also made his own room an impossibly dangerous meeting place. He knew of several possible venues outside the castle, such as an abandoned temple high on the north plain where he and the battalion camped overnight sometimes on long-range manoeuvres, but Dazil’s ordinary routine was so bound by the confines of the castle that her going far beyond it would certainly be noticed by others. And it had begun to snow.

  During the day, he conducted his duties as energetically as usual, but every action and every conversation, every sight and sound seemed transparent. Beyond them, he saw her dark eyes, touched the hot smoothness of her skin, tasted her mouth, and heard nothing. The heat of his thoughts was so intense that after dinner, especially if he saw her there – and she was always somewhere nearby now – he would walk out into the snow just to cool his brow.

  He was careful to behave normally, and not to give any outward signs of his preoccupied state. All the while, he watched for any chance to be alone with her.

  It was nearly three weeks before the Feast of the Vanishing Sun.

  They had celebrated the archaic festival of the Feast of the Vanishing Sun on his homeworld, too, but it was unknown on the warmer worlds of the Empire where the length of the day did not vary dramatically with the changing seasons. It was supposed to have originated in the days before Taysans first sailed the sea-beyond-the-sky, in the now-uninhabited northern lands of Taysar where the sun shone feebly and coldly for only a few hours a day in the deepest part of winter, or did not rise at all for some months of the year. It was said that the Feast had been taken by early sailors to these colder worlds, to alleviate the hardship and gloom of dark times.

  On Anhual, he recalled that it had been a festival full of spiritual significance and fervour. As kept by the swordbearers of Car’a’vil, it was an excuse to spend an entire night gorging on rich foods and drowning in fermented juice until no-one could stand upright, or move if he could.

  The great hall of the castle was decked in gold, representing the hope that the sun would return, and tables had been moved in from the dining hall and piled with roasted animals, exotic fruits which were certainly not indigenous to Car’a’vil, mounds of melth stuffed with berries, and wide bowls full of steaming glyn juice. A warlord’s throne of honour, a huge stone seat covered with elaborate carvings, had been carried to the podium at one end of the hall so that Carral could take his place in state and oversee his carousing henchmen.

  It was an extraordinary scene. Jay wondered how much the Swordbearer Caste leaders knew about what went on out here; whether they were aware that General Carral was routinely addressed as ‘my lord’ by his warriors as if he were of the Noble Caste, that he presided over his army like a figure from a historical drama, even that fermented juice was freely available and openly drunk.

  He had developed a simple technique for avoiding glyn juice, which involved accepting a full pitcher at the beginning of the evening, keeping it with him, and regularly raising it to his lips without actually drinking any.

  Carral, on the other hand, had clearly begun imbibing before the feast had properly started. When he stood up on the podium to open the festivities he had a goblet in one hand and his face was flushed.

  “Men,” he said. “Swordb
earers.”

  The hall fell silent.

  “Every year, every year at the Feast of the Vanishing Sun, we look back at the past, and we look forward, look forward to the future. Since I last stood here – since last year – Car’a’vil has seen bad times, and some good. Bad, Naril has gone beyond the mountains. Who would have thought, at the Feast last year, when he stood at my right hand. Good – we have a new commander in chief, Jhaval. Jhaval. Come here.”

  Without enthusiasm, Jay joined Carral on the podium.

  “He’s only have been here – what, six months? But in that time, he’s turned you all around. I don’t recognise the lacklustre spineless bunch of near-priests you were last summer. A toast! To Jhaval! Finest chief I ever had!”

  The company raised their tankards over their heads and cheered, but Jay found himself catching the eye of Saghat, who stood at the edge of the hall. He had lifted his cup only as far as his mouth, and his eyes were filled with a cold, speaking dislike. The intensity, the naked envy, surprised him; he had another moment of connection with this man, and for a few seconds – while everyone else in the hall shouted the name he had assumed – he tried to work out what it meant. He was not afraid that Saghat knew his secret, because there was no way that he could and anyway he would surely have denounced him already if he did, but his instincts were firing danger