The spear thrust demanded by their strict tradition would at least grant a clean end to his suffering.
Night was fast approaching. Too starved and tired to argue, or strike out through the wilds on her own, Anja accepted the inevitable last choice. She must follow the example set by Mykkael before her, and accept the shamans’ protection.
Pride set her back straight. If she would cast herself upon Jantii tribe’s mercy, she would show no less than the steel of her royal dignity. She gave the elder her magisterial nod. As the warriors stepped in to lift Mykkael from her, she delivered her formal, last word. ‘Treat this man kindly. He has served his oath to my sire with great courage. For the sake of his honour, which has placed my safety foremost, I must accept his agreement.’
Anzbek thumped his staff.
The warriors bore in. As the captain’s slack frame was eased from Anja’s shoulders, she swayed, wrung to sudden light-headedness. The tribal woman instantly offered an arm and steadied her failing balance. As saving hands guided her step through the gloom, the princess glanced backwards just once.
Two of the warriors stood guard beside Stormfront, weapons held at the ready. Their vigilant stance was fluid as Mykkael’s must have been, before the misfortune of war had crippled his knee. Anzbek oversaw the greyheaded elders, who folded the wounded captain into the warmth of their own shed mantles. Their handling was firm, and showed respect for his injuries as they lowered him on to their makeshift litter. Steel spear tips glinted. Voices murmured and exclaimed in thick dialect. The rolling gutturals had a rhythmic beauty, if one had an ear for the music. Movement flurried as a tall spearman broke away and scolded someone unseen in the underbrush.
A wiry young boy Anja had not seen earlier slithered sheepishly out of a tree. Called to heel by Anzbek’s brisk gesture, he unreeled an object strung on a plaited string.
Moments later, the gusting breeze of a scavenging kerrie winnowed over the trees. The boy spun the contrivance over his head and whirled it in gyrating circles.
A keening note sawed through the night air. Put off by the ear-splitting sound, the predator sheared away, huffing smoke.
‘Come, sister,’ entreated the woman in her accented northern. ‘You are weary and tired. My people will fetch you hot water to bathe. While you soak your hurts, let us clean the unpleasant smell off your clothes and arrange for your rest and comfort.’
Amid drifting consciousness, King Isendon of Sessalie dreamed. A wizened shaman sat with his daughter, Anja, his gnarled hand placed at her heart. Ancient eyes closed, a battered sword on his knees, he raised his voice and started to sing. The failing monarch felt each note as the kin tie to his heir rang out in summoned vibration; and all over the kingdom under his rule, the gathering darkness of the sorcerer’s lines broke apart and scattered like vapour. The sweet notes pealed on until nary a shadow remained. When at due length the feat was accomplished, the king woke to find Jussoud bent above him. ‘Did you hear?’
The nomad nodded, wonder shining in his grey eyes.
‘Fetch Taskin,’ said the king, very clearly.
The commander’s voice answered, close by. ‘Your Majesty, I am with you.’
King Isendon smiled. ‘Captain Mysh kael brought my daughter to Tuinvardia alive. The allies she treats with have spared us.’ This said, the old monarch drew his last breath and, content, his exhausted heart rested.
XXXIX. Deliverance
THE OLD SHAMAN LIFTED HIS HAND FROM THE SWORD HILT THAT HAD ENABLED THE WARDINGS SUNG BY SANOUK SHAMANS FOR PROTECTION to be woven into Jantii circle’s singing. He opened black eyes. Before him sat the young princess whose bloodline had provided the bridge to cleanse the demonic incursion that had threatened Sessalie’s unspoiled ground. She was cleaned and fed, though scarcely rested, with borrowed clothes of Scoraign design, and her pale hair shining by firelight. As the surrounding shamans stirred out of trance, the eldest nodded his proud acknowledgement of their night’s difficult work.
Now the identity of the unknown invader could be addressed with safety.
Anzbek spoke. ‘The demon that tried to force conquest in Sessalie, and extend his reach to despoil Tuinvardia is known as Gorgenvain. Of Nine, he is Tenth. Let his Name and the song to dispel the powers of his bound sorcerers be recorded for all of eternity.’
The deed was finished, with the dread spell lines broken, that had sought to destroy Anja’s people. If the Kingdom of Devall yet stayed enslaved, the future was not without hope. The warrior had brought them Perincar’s patterns tattooed on to his scalp. He also carried the earlier mark invoking his desert-bred ancestry, drawn with Eishwin’s unequalled finesse. Scoraign elders possessed the initiate awareness to access the mysteries behind their own heritage. The combined sum of Mykkael’s wardings could forge them the new songs to enact an aggressive attack. The vizier’s master scribes owned the knowledge to decipher the wisdom inherent in Perincar’s legacy. The lore books in the emperor’s libraries would help them define the geometry, and configure the powerful banishments needed to counter Gorgenvain’s bid for expansion. Short curse, or long spell, with Tuinvardia’s assistance, Devall’s conquered ground might be freed.
Yet the young princess who had helped bring three nations’ salvation remained unconsoled, though her gratitude for the circle’s deliverance was phrased with heartfelt sincerity. Her green eyes still reflected deep sorrow, the source for which was the warrior.
‘Let me see him,’ she entreated. ‘Promise me Mykkael will live!’
Anzbek sighed. With the sword still cradled across reverent knees, he called upon vision, and weighed Anja’s anguish. Her birth gift of beauty was no longer untouched. The face she showed to the world had been pared to strong womanhood by the forces of grief and adversity. ‘Daughter, no wisdom in my possession can promise the course of the future.’
His eyes upon her shaded with pity, he gathered the steel, and his staff, and arose. Ancient though he was, and despite the late hour, he moved easily.
‘Come, daughter. You shall visit your warrior.’ Old hands raised the sword, and gave it into the princess’s keeping. ‘I award you the honour,’ said Anzbek. ‘You shall restore this treasured weapon to Mykkael’s side. Our people now share its song of bright warding. The gift of Sanouk protection should now be returned to the man who received it.’
They had laid the warrior on a bed of soft furs, behind a rough screen to lend privacy. The curtain had been fashioned from his torn surcoat. Although the device had faded with washing, Sessalie’s crown and falcon blazon shone like old blood in the firelight.
Mykkael lay motionless, stripped of his clothes, and covered in the dusky colours of the Scoraign elders’ borrowed mantles. His marked hands were still. His features seemed a grave mask in bronze, with the cleaned swath of silk embroidered with dragons pillowed under his head.
Anja stepped past the two warriors who stood vigil. She sank to her knees by the man who had served as her sworn protector and laid his longsword flat by his side. The battered steel seemed as hard used as his body, that now appeared scarcely breathing.
Grief blinded her. She blinked, but could not stop flooding tears. Hands raised to stem her unbearable sorrow, she gasped through her muffling fingers, ‘Don’t tell me he’s dying. Surely your healers hold hope for him?’
The old shaman regarded her, solemn in his peaked snakeskin hat, and his air of matchless dignity. ‘He is not for you, Princess. Will you leave him to us?’
Anja swallowed with difficulty. ‘Leave him? How can I? He said your kind would kill him because he did not merit tribal tattoos.’
Anzbek stared at her, thunderstruck. ‘Not merit?’ He gripped his birch staff, his brows snagged into a frown. ‘Princess Anja of Sessalie, are you naming this warrior an outcast?’
Anja met the shaman’s glaring black eyes, aroused to spitfire anger. ‘I name him my captain, and cherish his value. Unlike your tribes from the Scoraign, the life in his body is dear to me.’
Utt
erly taken aback, Anzbek jerked a fast gesture to the paired warriors, who now bristled. ‘Hold!’ he commanded, staying the fists aggressively gripped to their spears.
Due care must be taken. This princess was young, and bravely impulsive. She was also raggedly tired. She may not have intended to slight Jantii tribe’s hospitality, or use words that inferred a killing offence. Anzbek knelt and looked into her eyes, and there, read a fear too fierce to be tamed.
‘Daughter,’ he said gently. ‘How do you presume our Scoraign people have wronged him?’
‘He is of your own blood,’ Anja stated with heat. ‘Explain why his mother would expose him at birth.’
Anzbek folded his legs and sat down, his plain stave laid crosswise over his lap. ‘Did she in fact? Why don’t you tell me the facts as you believe they occurred?’
Anja coloured. Where was her right, as Sessalie’s princess, to speak of Mykkael’s private origins? And yet, she must. Her brash outcry had broached the matter headlong, and foreclosed the chance for tactful diplomacy. Princess enough to stand as ambassador, she addressed her duty unflinching. ‘Mykkael told me he was abandoned beside a caravan route as an infant. Northern traders found him, half starved and alone. Their family took him under their roof and raised him as one of their own.’
Anzbek absorbed this with stilled deliberation. Then he signalled his tensioned warriors to stand down. When he gave his considered response, his heart was not angry, but sorrowful. ‘The names of Mykkael’s parents are forgotten, this is true. The line of his ancestry is not known to us. This is our loss.’
Anzbek stared towards the fire. He murmured a prayer for the flames to consume his regret, then admitted the rest of his failure. ‘I cannot recover the story of the misfortune that turned this man’s path far astray from the clan that might have embraced him.’ He stroked Mykkael’s forehead, the contact all reverence. ‘I can say this much. Seer’s talent such as this warrior harbours is never exposed to the desert! If his birth mother was raised in tradition, if she followed the way of her tribe, she would have faced death before being parted from a child with such shining potential. More likely her infant was left to a caravan because her own life was threatened. She would have been pressed by starvation, or enemies, to have sacrificed a son as gifted as this one.’
When Anja bowed her head in raw anguish over the warrior’s chest, Anzbek reached out and took her clenched hands into his aged clasp. ‘Daughter, Mykkael is not outcast. If you claim the right to stand for his lost family, and appeal to Jantii people for his adoption, you must first release him from Sessalie’s service. Then fox clan circle would gladly sing him a name in tradition, and grant him his tribal tattoos.’
Anja paused, drawn up short. Pinned under the ancient shaman’s regard, she must see beyond spoken words. Agree, or refuse, the authority had been taken into her hands. The answer she gave could never be simple. If Mykkael died, he would receive last rites among strangers, but be granted the honour of kin. If he lived to resume his crown captaincy in Sessalie, and rejoined the court at her side, he would need no such barbaric markings. His desert-bred features already bespoke his foreign blood with a burdensome clarity. Just for being what he was, he seeded distrust and uneasiness amid Sessalie’s ingrown society.
King Isendon’s commission and the Lowergate garrison had always been too small a domain to contain him.
Anja gave way at last, unable to sustain the piercing awareness revealed in the shaman’s wise eyes. ‘Mykkael is dying,’ she whispered. ‘How should my choice matter if he does not rise from this sickbed?’
Anzbek nodded. ‘You are right to be anxious.’ His sage nature admired her forthright character, that dared to face the difficult truth. Since the young woman showed him her unflinching courage, the shaman related the facts as fox clan circle’s healer had told them.
‘Mykkael is strong and resilient. He has recovered from many past injuries that would have defeated a lesser spirit. Of his hurts, all are minor, except for the claw puncture low in his belly. That is the source of the fever he suffers, and that, he must battle if he is to walk in the sunlight. The poisons that sicken him rise from within. Princess, his life now hangs by a thread. Take hope from the fact he has been two days, fasting. His gut was empty at the time he was savaged. Our herbal infusions have flushed the rent clean. We have stitched the ripped bowel with boiled sinew, and kept the wound open for drainage. Your Mykkael could yet live if he can surmount the infection.’
Anja closed her eyes. Dread and uncertainty robbed the serenity from her pale, northern beauty. Sunlight against shadow, she bent her gaze to the warrior, her longing a blaze like new flame. ‘Mykkael is the strongest man I have known. What kind of life could your people give him?’
Anzbek squeezed her fingers. Then he blessed her braced strength, that dared to examine the future with selflessness. ‘I discern two paths, and a choice to be made, but my wisdom cannot lend you guidance. For that, you must wait until morning and place an appeal to Jantii tribe’s seer.’ The shaman unfolded his clasp and freed her chilled hands. Arisen, staff in hand, he waited amid the limitless peace of his silence.
For long moments, nothing moved but the dance of the fire the healer had left burning for light. Princess Anja of Sessalie surveyed the face of the man who had delivered her from the terrors of sorcerers, and the harrowing trials of Hell’s Chasm. Mykkael lay far removed, adrift in unconsciousness. Since words were useless, and tears served him mean tribute, she bent, kissed his lips, and reluctantly rose to her feet.
Anzbek steadied her stumbling step as she pushed past the curtain, abandoned to grief. His self-contained presence led her back to the women, who would see that she rested until daybreak, when the seer could be summoned for consultation.
The clouds cleared by morning. Under the cold light of dawn, the elder seer greeted Anja, clad in weathered hide and a belt of carved shells, passed down for untold generations. He clasped her young hands under the dripping boughs, beside the stilled verge of a catch basin under the cliffs. Ripples fled over the water’s bright surface, ephemerally fleeting as mortal lives, that were just as swiftly erased from the changing face of eternity. Surrounded by greenery and singing birds, the soothsayer gazed into the princess’s eyes.
His first words broke the pristine silence like a knife cut of pure despair. ‘Keep the warrior as yours, he will die of his injuries.’
Anja yanked back. ‘But that makes no sense!’ By her understanding of human nature, a spirit would strengthen when embraced by love, and wane away in its absence.
A flicker of sunlight brightened the high rim of the rock face overhead. A kerrie launched from its roost, spouting flame. As deeply inscrutable as time itself, the desert-bred seer withheld comment, wrapped in his mantle of deer hide.
‘Why?’ Anja entreated, scraped raw by her sorrow. ‘Why would Mykkael leave this world, when I care for nothing but giving him royal position and joy at my side?’
The seer watched her, still silent. His dark eyes were forthright as the blade on a Scoraign spear, that could warn without drawing blood.
Exposed by that terrible, impartial patience, the princess curbed anger that was hers alone. Like Anzbek, the old seer would leave her to sort out her feelings. He would let her declare herself without taking undue offence. No girl, but a woman raised for crown rule, Anja determined to carry the riddle beyond the self-blinded pain of her heartache. ‘What will the future bring if I should give Mykkael up?’
The seer tipped his grey head to watch a small sparrow alight on a twig. As though the tracks of the world’s fate rode upon the seeds it flew home to its nestlings, he said, ‘Your loved one may live, and perhaps find his happiness. As warrior, he will choose his own hour of death. Let him go, and I can tell you the wounding he suffers will not compel his release.’
The tiny bird flitted. Burdened by Anja’s cruel distress, the seer gathered his robes and perched on a mossy boulder.
‘Daughter,’ he said gently, ‘li
fe is not simple. The ties on a strong man’s spirit are seldom straightforward, or free. Your warrior believes himself bound to the weal of your kingdom. Do you see? That commitment is forcing his sacrifice.’
She was young, and a maiden. Her disbelief importuned him. ‘He will die,’ said the seer. ‘In your heart, you know this.’
That desolate truth hurt beyond all bearing. Yet Anja rejected the complacency of defeat. She did not require an old man’s gift of vision to sense the ebb of an indefatigable vitality. Mykkael, in his wisdom, saw more clearly than she. If he lived, he understood the full import of what she would ask. Tied by the oath he had sworn to her sire, he could do no less than stand guard throughout her triumphant return. On arrival in Sessalie, his heroic deeds would demand the accolade of crown gratitude. Anja’s young love would chain him to her side. And there, he would languish as an embarrassment, penned amid the stilted ways of a hidebound northern society. Mykkael’s barqui’ino mind and razor-sharp ethics made him too honest a cipher. The crown council would never abide the clarity that walked in his presence. Highgate’s titled families would never accept him.
When the stillness itself commanded response, Anja dared the same question she had broached to Anzbek the evening before. ‘What life will Mykkael have if I leave him?’
The seer shook his head. ‘If you give this man up, his future will no longer be yours, but his own. Though you ask, I cannot interpret his path. Not after his step becomes parted from yours.’
Anja clasped her arms, anguished. ‘If I set him free, what is there for me?’
‘Give me your hands,’ said the seer, not unkindly. ‘That is a choice I can show you.’ He gathered her chilled fingers into his own, which were seamed and warm as brown earth. Then he looked deeply into her eyes. ‘Anja of Sessalie, you will leave this place to forge an affiliation through marriage, and wed an emperor’s son, the youngest Prince of Tuinvardia. The pair of you will make your home in the mountains, and rule as King Isendon’s successors.’