Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 Page 16

  The harsh, doleful tolling of the alarm stopped abruptly. The whole township seemed to be holding itself in stillness, all the clamour of the last minutes fallen to nothing. Marron gazed up at the baked mud of the arch above the gate and thought he could feel how ancient this place was, and how weary as it faced yet another force of men, yet another invasion. Weary but strong, strong in patience and in faith: and that faith would be rewarded, that patience would win in the end. This army would leave in the end, as every army before it. Selussin would remain.

  Strength to endure, simple survival - it was a quality that Marron admired, envied, hungered for. Every living man is a survivor, of course; every man endures everything he meets until he fails, until he dies. Marron had endured more than many and survived it, he expected to endure more yet and to survive that too; but it wasn't his own strength that had brought him this far or would take him further. The Ghost Walker is traditionally very hard to kill.

  The boy in him - what was left of the boy in him, when he could find it - yearned for another kind of life, but could not speak of it even to Jemel, especially to Jemel. He was ashamed of his own dreams, because even if there could be a life for him without the Daughter, it still wasn't his own strength that he dreamed of. He still wanted to live in strengths shadow, sooner than be strong himself.

  He'd seen many kinds of strength since he came to the Sanctuary Land. Here about Selussin was the simplest form, high walls that were undefended, that could do nothing but stand; and here came a couple of strong men who were anything but simple, who rode veiled against the dust they raised, whose hearts were as obscure as their deeds were daring.

  Hasan and Rudel, side by side: and even that could be significant, where the two dozen men who followed were indeed tribal chieftains and could each have claimed the place of honour at Hasan's elbow. Perhaps Rudel only rode there to save the others fighting for it; that was not impossible. Or perhaps Sharai had come to an accommodation with Surayon, thus far and no further, that was possible too. That could be hoped for, at least for a little longer...

  Any man arriving so, out of the Sands with a band of seasoned warriors at his back and first signs now of a greater force behind, any such must have caused the priests great anxiety. When such a man threw back hood and veil, gazed down and said with quiet authority, 'I am Hasan,' pure terror showed for a moment on their faces. All the world knew that Hasan was hungry for war with Outremer. If he'd chosen this time and this place to fight it, they could see the final end to Selussin's long history played out in blood and destruction, their libraries burned and their temples ransacked, their people s lives and their own consumed in blood and pain.

  The eldest among them, gaunt and white-bearded, recovered himself quickly. He took a slow pace forward, leaning on what might have been a staff of office or else simply a support for unsteady legs; he bowed his head lightly, a gesture of respect from priest to warrior but nothing more, no hint of a surrender; he said, 'Hasan, our gates are open to you as they are to all who follow the true faith, if you come in peace.'

  The gates were open in any case, however he came. Hasan bowed in his turn, though, and said, 'Always in peace to you, most holy.'

  'Your numbers do not suggest a mission of peace,' which was a challenge more direct than Marron or possibly Hasan had expected.

  'True. I come to reclaim one who is most precious to me, and has been stolen away, but she lies in the castle yonder,' a gesture towards the high dark shadow that the Patrics called Revanchard, 'not within your walls. The tribes will not disturb your teachings. I shall see to that.'

  The old priest nodded his gratitude, seeming to accept the promise at face value. Marron wondered if he could truly be so naive. Having come so far with an army at his back, Hasan was unlikely to settle for Julianne's recovery, whatever his agreement with Rudel. Outremer was too close, too tempting - who could say if he would ever gather such a mass of men again?

  Selussin's best hope must be to see the Sharai overrun the castle and then march on across the mountains, to fight their war within the borders of the Patric kingdom; their greatest fear would be a defeat for Hasan, a swift retreat with his enemies harrying hard. His men would flood into castle and township both, lacking time to lose themselves in the Sands; the decisive battle of this generation would be fought out against Selussin's walls, and that spelled doom, dust and ashes for the generations following.

  For the moment, though, all parties were prepared to pretend otherwise. After further exchanges of courtesy, the priests stepped back and Hasan rode in through the gates with the sheikhs following in a crush, crowding for position, not to be seen ceding place to any other.

  Rudel ceded place to them all, then came on only as far as the arch. A jerk of his head for beckoning, and both boys ran forward. Jemel went to his stirrup while Marron hung back, still close enough to unsettle the camel but not to drive it frantic.

  'Someone must gp back and speak to the tribes,' Rudel said, which means me, since these are all too grand to act as messenger, even to their own. Wait for me here, and be padent; it may take a deal of shouting before they'll listen.'

  'What will you tell them?' Marron called.

  'Much the same — wait, and be patient. Otherwise the hotheads will ride up to investigate the castle and either trigger a disaster or more likely fall to quarrelling among themselves when they find the gates slammed against them, while the old campaigners head for the town and make a liar of Hasan. I presume nothing's changed at the castle, Morakh is still there with Julianne?'

  'And the "ifrit, yes. But things have changed, Rudel, they're not alone any more...'

  'How so?'

  'Be quiet, Marron. It is mine to tell,' Jemel insisted. 'Rudel, we were watching the castle, Lisan and I, looking for a way in when people came, on foot, from across the mountains. About a hundred, not well armed, not warriors, women and children among them. They went in, and the gates were closed behind them. I came back, to tell Marron and Coren.'

  'And my daughter?'

  'She climbed the walls and went inside, we think. That was her intent.'

  Rudel sighed slowly. 'Of course it was. And nothing you could say would stop her. Don't look so guilt-ridden, Jemel; there's only one person I know of who could conceivably shift Elisande when her minds made up, and I gather he wasn't there.'

  No, I was talking with Coren, doing nothing while my friends took it on themselves to make something happen, and walked into danger without me. Rudel hadn't moved his eyes by so much as a fraction, but Marron understood him perfectly. So, he thought, did Jemel. Swiftly he said, 'Djinni Tachur told me that she was well,' which wasn't quite true but true enough.

  'Did it?' Like Coren, Rudel was instantly interested. 'What exactly did it say to you?'

  'That she was inside the castle, and unhurt.' Exacdy, it had said not dead yet, but he wouldn't pass that on to her father. 'It was seeking to stop me following her.'

  'Which it did, clearly. We must hope that it was right to do so. Unhurt does not necessarily mean uncaptured; she may be as much a prisoner as Julianne. If the djinni speaks to you again, Marron, you might ask it — or no, not ask, but try to find out. I must go to the tribes,' with a glance over his shoulder that drew the boys' eyes after, and showed them all the dust of the army's approach. 'Wait here.'

  He turned his camel almost savagely, beat it into a run; Jemel watched him go, and said, 'He is upset.'

  'Of course he's upset, she's his daughter. Never mind how bitter it is between them, she's still his daughter.'

  'Yes. Patrics are a strange people; they spit at each other in public, and where they love they conceal it.'

  'Not all of us,' Marron said softly.

  'No? Sometimes I think your heart is veiled, and no more honest than your eyes: not the true Marron that speaks to me or rides with me or lies beside me in the night, that one holds himself elsewhere.'

  'Jemel

  'Then I remember that it would have to be so, or you would n
ot be Marron, nor the Ghost Walker.' A brilliant smile, entirely unexpected; a sudden kiss, all the more so; a nudging elbow to drive him back into the shade of the wall, no more Patric madness in the sun. They sat down and settled their spines against mud that was as hard as rock, as hot as a rock in the land of the djinn after a morning's baking. Jemel squirmed for a minute, then said, 'This will cook us before he comes back, we might as well sit in an oven. Let's go up and watch the tribes disperse. Gambling is forbidden - but I would lay money on which will squabble over camping-grounds, and which squabbles will lead to blood. Hasan has led a war-party before, but never an army; and that was holy for us all, and this is a matter of honour and insult, or he says so, which is less than a matter of God. There will be some who do not want to ride for the sake of a Patric woman, and many who do not see why Hasan should need so many men and all the tribes together; true that she was taken from Rhabat, but from the house of the

  Beni Rus. It should be a Beni Rus affair at most. So they will be hot and angry after a long day at the end of many long and hard days before this; and now Rudel will tell them that they cannot come into the town nor go up to the castle by their own sheikhs' orders — that is not true, but he will say so, because he is not foolish, that one - and they will fight each other instead. Not much, perhaps, and not for long, but there will be fighting. It won't matter, though; nobody will die. They would not risk a blood-feud here.'

  Marron followed Jemel back up the steps and onto the wall, more Patric madness after all and perhaps it was infectious, like the tempers of the tribes. They stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the far dark mass of men in its slow dispersal.

  'You see?'

  Marron did indeed see, better than Jemel if more strangely. Through the red cast of the Daughter's eyes he saw a dozen sudden flurries, stabs of sunfire as the light caught a thrusting blade; he saw dark figures stumble and crouch wounded on the sandy ground, he could almost smell their blood from here; he saw himself as a raptor, or a vulture rather, drawn from great distances towards any hope of carrion, called to launch himself out off the wall on the strong wings of the Daughter.

  None of the injured died, though, as Jemel had predicted. Spilled blood was nothing, a scar of honour that laid no burden of debt or vengeance; and each time Rudel was there at speed, wheeling on his mount and gesturing widely, speaking too soft to hear or else crying out loud enough to stir the dead in their cemeteries in the dusty hills, doing whatever was needful to see knives sheathed and quarrels cooled. Each time he couched his camel and stepped into the brittle peace, to spend some little time talking as it seemed to those who had been wounded.

  'They will meet again to argue later, by the wells,' Jemel prophesied, 'but there will be no more weapons drawn. We will fight for water rights but never by the water, for fear that blood should taint it. It is a desert law, but it will hold here. It would hold anywhere. That is why your people pushed us back into the Sands, because there is so much water beyond the mountains there and they would poison it all to win the land, where we would not. I have heard that they drowned all their Sharai prisoners, sewed them into sacks and threw them into the water until they died

  That was an awesome death, clearly, terrible and shocking and profound. Marron had heard that all prisoners had been treated with honour and ransomed back to their tribes; he was inclined now to believe neither version. There were men of virtue and there were men of cruelty, and they could be found on either side. Some men could be both at once, but he didn't want to think about Sieur Anton.

  'Morakh attacked you by the well, before we reached Rhabat - when I brought Elisande back from the land of the djinn, when I ran to fetch Hasan, remember?'

  'I do not forget. Morakh fights by his own laws; he is no longer of the Sharai, and so no longer of the desert.'

  'You are a Sand Dancer yourself, or so you keep proclaiming. Doubly outcast, you, tribeless one. Does that mean you are no longer of the Sharai, or of the desert?'

  On some subjects, Jemel would not be teased; he gazed levelly back and said, 'You know what I am.'

  Not really, no. Servant, lover, follower, friend, all of those;

  and Sharai, and of the desert, and so the sworn enemy of Marron's people; and Sieur Anton's sworn enemy too, which only made him more complicated than ever — but Marron knew where he was, here at his side, and that was good enough. He would have kept the thought close, but remembered what Jemel had said about his veiled heart and tried to prove it untrue. 'You are with me,' he said, 'the Ghost Walker's companion.'

  'Indeed.' Jemel didn't seem satisfied, and in honesty Marron couldn't blame him. His tongue was tied, though; another figure stood always between them, forbidding any deeper confession. His heart was as infected as his blood; he was tainted by two worlds, two lives, yearned for both and could trust himself with neither.

  Jemel pulled his hood up then, enough of this Patric madness, and they stood in silence while the tribes slowly dispersed; stood until they saw a single rider come wearily back towards the town.

  They went down to meet Rudel where they had before, below the arch of the wall. This time he dismounted, and went to pass the reins to Jemel with a sigh of exhaustion; but he checked himself, this time seeing the state of those torn hands.

  'In the name of mercy, what have you been doing to yourself, lad? Losing one finger wasn't enough for you, but you had to try to take the rest off too?'

  'Climbing rocks that were edged like knives. Lisan healed them once, but I had to come back without her,' that last added like a deliberate reminder.

  'Yes, so you said. And I said you are to take no blame to yourself for that. Well, give them here. I have followed my daughter across Outremer; tired as I am, I can follow her in this also.'

  Marron wondered briefly why Rudel should be suddenly so tired, when he had seemed fresh enough an hour earlier; then he remembered the wounded among the Sharai, those stupid squabbles that had led inevitably to knifework. Of course, he would have healed there also. Indeed Marron had seen him do it, and not realised.

  Jemel's hands were not so serious a hurt, despite the pain they'd cost him. Coren's unguent had been enough to stem the bleeding; Rudel needed only a moment's magic to knit ripped flesh and skin together and leave them whole and quite unmarked. Jemel rubbed his thumbs across the pads of his fingers, where the deepest cuts had been, and said, 'Lisan took longer, and her touch was not so hot. . .'

  'There are some ways yet that I can best my daughter. Not in wilfulness: she had that from her mother, though her stubbornness is my own. It's an unhappy combination. Tell me more about these other people who came to the castle, Jemel; them I confess I don't understand.'

  'No more do I. It is as I told you, they were not an army, not all men; they looked like peasants, Patrics and Catari mixed, but they followed one man, and they ran like wolves.' Then, with a glance back over his shoulder, 'They ran as Marron runs, as if they could run all day and all night too. Perhaps they had done so, all through the mountains, but there was no sign of weariness on them. Not even on the children. And they went in as though they were expected, and closed the gates behind them, as I said. I cannot think what they would do with Morakh, nor he with them.'

  'No. It is strange, but all of this is strange. We had guessed that Morakh waited there for something; this may be it, although it is hard to understand. I'd been looking for Sand Dancers, perhaps, or more 'ifrit, an army of ghuls. Assumptions are dangerous; we must remember that, and be careful. I could wish that Elisande had been more careful, but that is the story of her life, and mine. At least she has a gift for being overlooked, when she chooses to use it. Now, where are we going? I remember the shape of this place, but little more; it is a long time since I last brought books to Selussin, or good wine to Revanchard.'

  'You've been inside the castle?' Marron demanded, a beat ahead of Jemel.

  'Yes, but years ago, and not so deep as my daughter. Not so deep by a distance now. Whether she's free or taken, she'l
l be down into the dungeons and looking for her friend, as she was at the Roq. I was never let in past the bailey. It was garrisoned by the duke's men in those days and they were a suspicious breed, wouldn't trust anyone who traded with the town. Wouldn't trust anyone at all, if they hadn't grown up as neighbours. You never came far enough in country to see it, Marron, but Outremer can be like that; and the closer you come to Ascariel, the worse it gets. It's not like being a stranger in the Sands, Jemel - the Sharai will either kill you or kill a goat to welcome you, but the Patrics will do neither. They will watch and guard, and never welcome.'

  Jemel frowned, opened his mouth to question - then closed it again and shook his head. Marron guessed that he didn't, wouldn't, couldn't understand.

  'My wine, though — that was welcome enough, after the beer they brewed below. They loved me for my wine and took me in, but never beyond the first court. Little use that knowledge is; we must rely on my errant Elisande, I fear, to find the way to Julianne. And then come back to tell us. Now,' again, clapping his hands as Jemel did this time take the camel's reins from him, where are you taking me?'

  'Uh, I'm not sure where Hasan has gone, with the chiefs...'

  Are you not? I am. Haven't you found the priests' house yet? I remember that, at least. The next building behind the great temple; every house hides its secrets here, but some at least reveal that they have great secrets to hide. This one has gates of bronze, etched with the words of the prophets. All the elders of all the temples live there in its safety, cut off from the sight of alluring women and the noise of those vexatious boys. That's where they'll take Hasan and his entourage, there's room enough. As an unbeliever — even a Surayonnaise unbeliever, and they've had some dealings with me and mine, a great many dealings over the years - I'd be no more let in there than you would, Marron, with your eyes on show. No, take me to Coren, wherever you've left him, and let us mourn together over our missing daughters.'

  Jemel led both camel and guest towards their rented quarters, while Marron trailed some distance behind. The camel must needs be bedded down in the small yard outside the house, where every family in Selussin kept what livestock it might possess: a mule, a few chickens, perhaps a goat or two. That would make it difficult for Marron to pass in and out without raising panic in the beast, which was foul-tempered enough already, groaning and tossing its head, balking at every tug. No help for it, though: there wasn't even a window that opened to the street. These Selussids kept their secrets locked behind high blank walls — but then so did Marron, or so Jemel claimed. That boy was good at learning secrets, though, and hearing names not spoken. He had reason enough to leave a veil over Marron's heart, when he knew what lay behind it.