At last, Ash spoke. "It's you," he said quietly.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kieran turned slowly to look at him, unwilling to understand. He saw that there was a streak of fresh blood on Ash's sleeve. So he'd got his deer after all. "What do you mean, it's me?"
"Look at it." Ash pointed at the statue's face. "Right down to the expression. I know it doesn't make sense, but that's you. I half expect the thing to open its mouth and say, You done staring yet?"
Kieran smiled a little at Ash's imitation of his voice, but an uncomfortable sense of recognition was stealing over him. "Maybe it's an ancestor of mine. That would be ironic, huh? If this -king, or whatever -- was my gazillion-times-great grandfather."
"Ironic? It would be spooky. It is spooky. Look, he's even got your hands, I think he's even as tall as you are. And I think... move the candle a little." Ash nudged his hand, and as the light moved, a reflection started up eerily in the statue's eyes. They weren't painted, as Kieran had assumed.
They were inlaid. And they were not black, but dark green.
"Well. That's... that's pretty fucking odd. Because, I mean, obviously it's not me, so I guess..."
"It's a portrait. Look at the details. Look at -- oh, there's a difference. His nose is a little crooked."
"It is?" Kieran ducked to get a better look, head-on, face-to-face with the statue.
When he found himself at the same level, head tilted at the same angle, he had the sudden impression he was looking in a mirror. And his reflection was laughing at him. He straightened suddenly and turned his back on it.
"That is creepy as fuck," he said quietly.
As he walked away, he could feel it staring at his back. He didn't realize he'd tensed up his injured shoulder until he was back in the big room and was surprised at a sudden lessening of the ache.
He went all the way outside, down the steps to the grass. He didn't feel quite clear of it until he was standing in the sunshine, listening to the buzzing of flies over the carcass of the deer that Ash had shot. The sun was over the mountains. The air was hot and still. The wound that had nearly killed him was healing practically overnight, Ash was turning out to be a damn good hunter, there had been that thing about being outside himself and the crushing sense of history he'd seen there, and now he'd found an unbelievable fortune in ancient gold, with which he could do nothing on account of being a fugitive, and a statue that looked way too much like him. Minus scars, plus a crooked nose. He was tired.
Ash came silently down behind him and put a hand on the small of his back. "You can blow out your candle now, if you want."
"Oh." With a startled laugh, Kieran pinched the wick. "What happened to the horse? I don't see it."
"She wandered off as soon as I unsaddled her. She's out there somewhere."
"Won't be hard to find, I guess."
"What do you suppose this place is? How come the people who put all that gold in there never came back for it? And why's it never been looted?"
"How should I know?"
Ash shrugged. "I'm just making noise, I guess. It's funny -- we've found this humongous pile of treasure, and we can't touch it."
"Yeah. We try to sell it, we'd get caught."
"Sell it? I was thinking about studying it. There's almost no Iavaian temple art left in the world, and here we've found all the lost altar furniture or something. How could you think about selling it?"
"How could I not? That stuff was made of solid gold!"
"But it's your --"
"Heritage. Huh." Kieran spat into the reflecting pool. "Lemme tell you something about heritage."
Ash took the candle and matches from him and set them on the bottom step. "Tell me while I butcher this deer. You can stop me if I'm about to do a bad job, because I've seen it done but I never did it myself."
"You're pretty good at killing 'em, for someone who's never done it before."
"I've hunted before, but it was a bit too civilized. My aunt and I always hired a couple of guys to come with us and do the icky stuff. I didn't even have to carry the raw meat. I watched them, though." He'd apparently watched closely enough, because he started with the right sort of cut.
Although he worked so slowly and meticulously that he seemed to be dissecting the thing for science, rather than butchering it for food.
Kieran sat down on the lower step to watch. It was a relief to be off his feet. He had no stamina.
Still, he thought he was doing pretty well, for someone who'd been dead the previous morning.
He held his right arm across his lap, to rest the shoulder. "What do you know about the war?" he said.
"Guess I don't have to ask which war you mean. Well, I know the official version, which goes something like: after about three hundred years of missionary work, Dalanists had gained a small number of converts in Iavaian territory. The rest of the people continued to worship devils and live sinfully. Then came the Nine Days' War, in which tribal leaders tried to abolish Dalanism.
The Iavaian Dalanists, fearing for their lives, petitioned the Commonwealth for assistance.
Commonwealth troops occupied and annexed the territory and imposed law and order, to the great benefit of the inhabitants, who are lazy benighted savages and should be grateful. Oh, I forgot to throw in the phrase 'minimal bloodshed' -- the histories always have to put that in somewhere. And then I know a bit of the unofficial version, which is that the reason the death tolls are so low is that the Commonwealth only counted armed enemies killed in organized conflict. Guerilla fighters are counted as bandits. Noncombatants aren't counted at all, even though -- I gather -- they died in droves."
"Ever talk with somebody who was there?"
"No. Never really got a chance to talk with any Iavaians but you, and I studiously avoided soldiers and Watchmen back home." He lifted his wrist as if to wipe his brow, but stopped, wrinkling his nose at the sheen of jelly-like deer blood that clung to it. He stripped off his shirt and tossed it in the reflecting pool, where it immediately became the center of a comet-shaped red cloud.
Kieran watched the thread of blood being swept down the stream, until Ash bent to his task again. Then he watched the working of bone and muscle under freckled skin. Remembered how Ash had splayed a hand across his back, a moment ago, how good it had been to feel that. The illusion of fragility was fading, the more he watched Ash's body. Abruptly he was glad he was wearing a makeshift kilt, instead of his tight leather pants.
"Well." Kieran cleared his throat, trying to get back on topic. "What they call the Nine Days War, that was actually about three years long. Only, it was the Dalanists who started it. Bands of
'em were knocking down temples and stealing stuff from them. These weren't really religious people, see, they were mercenaries. Mostly poppy farmers who got put out of work when the Tiwa'hanaka outlawed opium growing. Which they did because the Commonwealth made them do it."
"Yeah, with trade sanctions and stuff, I read about that. The Tiwawhatsit, that's the tribal ruling body, right?"
"The Five Tribes' Brotherhood, yeah. So these farmers were wrecking temples and holy sites, and any kind of religious or historical thing they could find. Which the Commonwealth was paying them to do. They found a lot more of 'em than the Eskaran army would've found, too, because they grew up being shown those places and told to be reverent. Also they were assassinating priests and holy people. Now, before the Annexation, most Iavaians with a Talent didn't do anything with it, but the ones who did were mostly priests. What I hear is that the Eskarans were offering a bounty for heads with shaved scalps. Because priests shaved their heads, male and female both. Five ya for a woman and eight for a man."
"Which is?"
"I dunno how much a ya was worth. I've seen the coins, people collect them and melt them down for the silver. I'd guess about half a throne."
"Okay. Go on. Presumably people got fed up with this."
"Right. And there were little skirmishes, and attempts to arrest the temple-burners, and so forth.
br /> But the way things were set up, each of the five tribes had its own army, and those were raised by levy from each clan, so they weren't real organized. And a couple tribes that didn't have a member on council, like the Riaha, the High Pass tribe, were represented at the clan level, but they resented that, so their troop levies weren't real cooperative."
"I'm impressed. You know a lot about this."
"It only happened thirty years ago. The Eskarans couldn't kill everybody who remembered. And arresting them for talking about it only works if they talk in public. Anyway, as soon as the Tiwa'hanaka started making some progress against the temple-burners, in jumps the Eskarne Theocratic Commonwealth, claiming its converts are being persecuted. On that basis they rounded up and imprisoned whole villages, and when they ran out of room in their prison camps, they just started killing everyone they found who wasn't for sure on their side. But like you said, they didn't count those, because they were noncombatants. By the time the Tiwa'hanaka got it through their thick heads that they couldn't make the invasion stop by lodging diplomatic protests, the Eskarans were dug in. And then the different tribes had different ideas about how to fight, and they argued, and some of 'em went off half-cocked, and some of 'em sat around blabbing until it was too late.
"When they finally did get right down to fighting, the ones who took any serious casualties fled or surrendered. The only ones who ran a decent war were the Tama, and even then, most of them bugged out when the going got too tough. I want to be proud of my clan, because they stuck it out to the end, but all they managed to do was get a whole generation wiped out. Men and women were both fighting by then, so only kids and old folks were left. My mom was raised by her grandma. She told me she'd had two brothers and a sister, but they died of cholera when they were moved into the cities."
"That's... that's really sad, Kieran. It's horrible."
"Sad? It's stupid! My point is that they brought it on themselves! It was their own fucking fault!
What were they thinking? There wasn't even a real border between them and the Commonwealth, just a river partway, and an imaginary line. The biggest military power in the world, which a hundred years ago took a big bite out of Paiwaar and then spent their time taking Yelorre and losing it and retaking it -- my point is, it should have been obvious there was a wolf at the door. A goddamn rabid wolf, camped out on their doorstep. But did they have a coherent political body that could make fast decisions if it had to? No. Did they have any solid diplomatic ties to anyone who could maybe step in on their side if it was needed? No! They pissed off Prandhar arguing over some dumb chunk of land nobody wanted anyway. And did they have a competent military force? No, they had a bunch of village bullies who'd been sent to drill because they were raising hell at home. Untrained, illiterate, narcissistic fuckwits who had more loyalty to their second cousins than to the People as a whole. What I'm saying is, we asked for it."
"You would have done it differently, I take it."
"Hell yeah."
"What's this? Do we eat this?"
"That's the liver. We eat that. We fry it with that eggplant you're so keen on, as soon as you're done there."
Ash gave a half-happy groan. "Never thought I could be so hungry while up to the elbows in lukewarm slithery guts."
"Welcome to the country life."
"Anyway. You were saying?"
"I was done."
"I don't get what brought that on, though. Just felt like ranting about history?"
"Oh. Well, I figure the reason all that treasure is holed up in here, is because it was hidden from the temple-burners. And I guess it makes me kinda mad that someone had the presence of mind, and the manpower, to move things like that big heavy statue here to this place nobody knew about, and then keep anyone from knowing about it all this time, but they couldn't get their shit together enough to fight a war. What the hell good does all that gold do anyone? They should've sold it to buy rifles. If they had a hiding place this good, they should've used it as a guerilla base.
Staged raids from here."
Ash was picking up speed, slicing off meal-sized strips and laying them out on the grass. Blood was running off his elbows, spattering his pants. The soles of his feet were black with dirt. He looked savage, primitive; his cultured voice was an amusing contrast. "Isn't this place kind of far away from things? I mean, to be any use as a staging area."
"Actually, it's only about fifteen miles to the road, that way. South," he added, as he realized Ash hadn't seen him pointing. "From there, only a couple days' ride to Canyon, and you can do it faster if you're on foot. If I'm not carrying much more than a canteen, a rifle, and a sack of lunch, I can do forty miles in a day, easy. That is, if I'm in top shape. I probably couldn't make it across the valley, right now."
"You'll get your strength back."
"Plus there's a built-in escape route. The way's a bit twisty, but if you go all the way downstream
-- you remember that dry riverbed? You must've followed it, to get here. Well, you follow that down about fifty more miles, and it runs into the Burn."
Now Ash craned around to look at him, frowning. There was a smudge of blood on one lens of his glasses, where he'd shoved them up his nose with the back of his hand. "Why would you want to do that?"
"Gotta swear you to secrecy." Kieran grinned to show it was a joke, but Ash took him seriously.
"Cross my heart."
"Little known fact, you can spend hours -- maybe days -- in the edge of the Burn and not get hurt. And the power, even on the fringe, will backlash down your trail and blur it out, so nobody can trace you by magic. The rumor is that the more Tama blood you've got in you, the less the Burn hurts you."
"Hence its name?"
"Yep."
"Do you think anyone's ever been to the middle of it?"
"Huh. No way. Thing's thirty-six miles across, and what I heard is that the fringe part ends about two miles in. After that -- bloosh."
"Bloosh?"
"Your nose bleeds, your ears bleed, and then you have about five minutes to get out before your brain turns to jelly and you die."
"Oh. Well, I should probably avoid the place, since I'm pretty sure I have no Tama blood in me whatsoever. Although I seem to have a great quantity of deer blood on me, so if you'll excuse me, I'm going to wash off."
"We should decide where the garbage goes."
"You decide."
"I guess just pitch it in those weeds over there. We really should bury it, but --"
"No shovel." Wrinkling his nose, Ash hoisted the bundle of hide, hooves, and guts, and hauled it into the thicket Kieran had indicated, about a hundred yards away. It still might attract coyotes and wildcats, not to mention flies, but at least the smell wouldn't reach them. Probably.
As Kieran levered himself off the step, he found he was formulating an excuse to join Ash in bathing. Several casual things to say about it ran through his mind. But none of them came out of his mouth. He watched Ash walk away, and stayed where he was. He told himself it was because he was still weak and sore from his injury, however fast it was healing.
So he decided to see what he could do about food. He'd just remembered that their only pan was currently full of beans.
The best way to deal with dried beans was to soak them for an hour, then boil them to mush, then fry the mush. But it was also possible to soak them overnight, then cook them lightly; he'd never liked them that way, but it crossed his mind to tie them up in a square of bandage gauze and hang them in the stream. Then they'd be ready tomorrow. That done, he set to slicing up the deer's liver. He'd never bothered slicing one before, just roasted it whole, so he made a literal hash of it.
Oh well, it was meat. Fortunately Ash returned, in wet pants, with an armload of wood, before Kieran could get too far into the eggplant.
"You plan to eat the stem?"
"Oh. Huh. I suck at this. You do it."
"Okay, you make the fire."
"My arm's tired."
"Yo
u can do it one-handed, right? Where's your sling? Put your sling back on."
"Cluck, cluck."
"I am not being a hen, you're being a -- the kind of person who makes everything worse by trying to be tough, I'm sure there's a word for it."
Kieran washed his hands, re-slung his arm, and built the fire. Then he leaned his back against the nearest pillar and dozed off in the afternoon sun.
The next thing he knew Ash was prodding him awake, looking concerned and a bit shaken.
"What's wrong?" Kieran glanced around, half expecting to see a rank of Watchmen charging across the valley.
"Time to eat."
"That's why you look like you found a bone in your applesauce?"
"Uh. No. You were talking in your sleep."