Banner of the Damned (56 page)

He passed by the other Colendi staff, murmuring. I heard Anhar’s higher voice, and Birdy’s soft chuckle, then he was gone.

Tesar lifted me to the back of her horse. I felt as if I sat on a roof, an unsteady one as she mounted behind me. She tucked an efficient arm around my middle, and the rocking shifted to jolting.

Two, three steps, and I was very glad for that arm.

Most of the next week may be summed up in a word: ache.

The weather at least was benign as we followed a river up toward its source in exceedingly dramatic, slate-dark and tumbled mountains. When we began the descent into the long, gently inclined valley called Telyer Heyas, tension increased.

The Marlovens’ tension was due to military alertness. Within our little
circle, it was due to Marnda, who fought the impossible battle—to impose cleanliness, beauty, and order over a muddy, tumbled camp. She hovered over Lasva, counting every bite until the princess gripped her eating utensils with white knuckles, her eyelids shuttered. Marnda’s anxious, low pleading often sounded like a woman addressing an infant.

Marnda had only to see the rest of us to unloose a pent-up string of orders. As I had foreseen, my acquiescence had set a precedent. I was helping with plain sewing and laundry, so that the dressers could use their more skilled fingers for fine work.

The first nights, we hurt so much we did our work and went straight to sleep. Gradually that changed. When Lasva sat with us, she liked hearing poetry. At first, I was called upon to recite and then to read from one of the few books that Lasva had chosen to bring along.

But one night, when I had made an excuse to distance myself from the camp in order to practice my magic, I returned to discover Anhar reading. I had been trained to read well and to mimic the style of the speaker if I had to deliver a spoken message, but she was able to vary the voices of the poems’ different narrators.

When Lasva was alone with Ivandred in her tent, Tesar, Lnand, and Fnor Eveneth sat around the campfire. The female lancers traded off teaching Marloven lettering to Anhar, tall, thoughtful Pelis, and me. Occasionally Birdy joined us, sitting between Anhar and me and glancing from side to side as she wrote with her left hand, and I with my right.

I forced myself to practice magic each night before I laid my aching body at last in the bedroll. I thought about magic during the ride—better than thinking about how much I hurt—and each night I tried something a little different. I lit one candle, then two. One night I pulled a lick of flame from the campfire instead of another candle. The point of heat behind my brow intensified for a heartbeat, as it did when I lit two. But now I expected it, and instinctively enclosed it as soon as it appeared, like closing walnut shells around a spark. The faster I did that, the stronger the flame. Speed and control, then. Pull, speed, control.

Now that I understood the process, I began reviewing the patterns of syllables I’d memorized. As if someone had clapped on a glowglobe in a dark room, everything began to make sense. So I started from the beginning, and worked out how the patterns fit together.

The easiest was illusion, as it was ephemeral, a trick of light. It still did not mean I knew how to weave more complicated spells, but I could see that magic built on syllables that were fragments of Old Sartoran.

The pain from riding was incrementally less agonizing. I had learned
to be grateful for those moments of rest, for the bitter willow-bark steep that Tesar made for me, and even for the crude pan rye bread with cheese and boiled greens that formed our usual night meal. Ivandred had offered to find cooks familiar with Colendi food, but Lasva—of course—had said, “We shall begin as we shall live and eat the foods that you do.”

Belimas wept silently the rest of that night.

One night I squatted before the campfire, briefly alone. I used my time to make tiny illusory blossoms grow on my palm. They lasted no longer than a bubble, but I was charmed with my success. I made illusory blossoms until others of the staff joined me, talking as they often did about how much we might be paid once we reached Lasva’s new home. Nobody thought of it as
our
future home.

Then the Marlovens joined us. Tesar and Lnand brought out the slate on which Ivandred sketched the day’s map and how they would divide up their patrols. Lnand used her long pale braid to clean the chalk off, and they sat before the fire near two of the dressers. The Marloven women’s movements were easy and strong.

“Let’s see what you remember of the alphabet,” Tesar said, her gray eyes black in the ruddy firelight.

Chalk was difficult to write with, but I gripped it tightly and scrawled the letters.

“Good.”

Lnand smiled at Pelis, who blushed a little as she handed the slate back. “Good! You learn fast.” She smudged with her finger, then gave a soft chuckle, her breath clouding. Firelight gleamed in her eyelashes and warmed the brown of her eyes as she said, “When we were girls. We used to draw the vowel-sounds as close to circles as we could. When my grandmother was young they made them slanting down, see? Between the letters, like tufts of grass—”

She stilled, head lifting in a tiny jerk.

All I heard was galloping. Tesar exchanged a glance with Lnand while tipping her head, a hand briefly turned palm down. This was like fan language, but no signal I understood.

Tesar rose and loped away into the darkness, where I heard low, urgent voices. Then Lnand handed the slate and chalk to Anhar. “Before we rode into your country, people sometimes said to us,
Do not take ‘no’ as ‘no’ and ‘yes’ as ‘yes’ from a Colendi
. We spoke so little to your people when we were there. So I ask you, does ‘no’ mean ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ mean ‘no’?”

Pelis blushed. Anhar smiled. “Sometimes.”

“It is our custom to avoid a flat denial,” I said, “In particular in public, except with children or for purposes of instruction.”
And to assert rank
. “So we have words of compromise and degree, and gestures that modify.”

Tesar reappeared within the golden circle of firelight and dropped cross-legged to the ground in a single easy move.

I said, “May I ask if something might be amiss?”

Lnand’s lips moved as she repeated my words. Then she said, “By treaty, we must let the Telyers know if we cross the border.”

It was now us Colendi who turned from one to the other, each seeking enlightenment but only finding our own puzzlement mirrored. What could be worrying in so sensible and civilized a rule being properly observed?

Anhar said, “And so?”

“And so we have,” Lnand said.

She and Tesar waited, as if that explained everything. Lnand’s brows puckered. She could not have been over eighteen. Tesar was, at most, around twenty, like me. From a distance they had seemed older, harder, made of stone and steel.

“Shall we resume?” Lnand held up the slate in her scarred, callused hands.

Later, I walked out into the cold air, to check on our laundry scrupulously segregated from the plain Marloven cotton-linen. Segregated, but taking up exactly half of the available drying line. I looked at those drying clothes, aware that we Colendi numbered far fewer than the Marlovens, and remembered something disturbing that Nifta had said about bloodstains on some of their shirts.

I felt that sense of being observed. When I turned, there was Birdy with a cluster of Marlovens. The urge for civilized conversation—for his particular perspective—was irresistible, and so I said, “I would offer my aid with the animals if it might help.” I found it difficult to speak a conditional sentence in Marloven. Their verbs seemed variations of what must be, rather than what might, could, should, or would be.

Birdy said politely, “I don’t believe you have been trained.”

“I would like to learn,” I said, equally politely.

Birdy said in a dismissive voice very unlike his own, “You can scrub saddles. But don’t touch anything until I show you how.” I knew Birdy, so I could hear the laughter down deep, forming just the faintest tremor on the word “anything.”

That is how we ended up alone at a stream far from anyone else (except for the eternal roving guard) as I forced my protesting muscles to learn yet another new thing in soft-brushing quilted pads and saddle gear, so that Birdy could carry it back to air out near the picket line, as it was a clear night.

“Just copy what I do,” Birdy said in Old Sartoran. “They will assume that I am instructing you exhaustively the way they did me. As if I was four years old. Though I must say, their ways really are quite effective.”

There was a quick step. We both turned, and there was Anhar, carrying in each hand one of the Marlovens’ plain round travel cups. She held them out to us, saying, “Pelis made a tisane to warm us up and take away the aches.”

I took mine and gratefully sipped the listerblossom mixed with Sartoran leaf. Birdy sipped, closed his eyes, then held his cup out to Anhar and said, “Shall we share?”

“I thank you for the kind thought, but I already had mine,” Anhar said. “Birdy, are we in danger?”

“I was going to ask that very thing,” I exclaimed. “Nifta said she thinks that someone among them had been beaten. Why? They never do anything wrong.”

“A scout chose the wrong road. We’re having to correct that as best we can.”

“That’s reason to thrash someone?” I asked.

Anhar threw up her hands in the shadow-warding. “Is that going to happen to us?”

“They’ve never touched me,” Birdy said. “And I’ve made plenty of mistakes. They seem to have a different standard for themselves. It’s like court has its rules that are more elaborate than the rules for the rest of us Colendi.” He handed his empty cup to Anhar and the brush back to me, hefted a load of gear, and carried it swiftly away.

She looked after him, then sighed. Marnda was watching. Anhar took my empty cup and started back to our tents.

I remained where I was, working with the brush by the light of lanterns. Birdy’s voice drifted back, quick and assured in Marloven, and then came the swift chuff-chuff-chuff of his returning footsteps.

I tried to lift the saddle gear, and my lower back muscles protested.

“Don’t,” he cautioned, and then laughed, a puff of breath. “I couldn’t either, at first. You’ll want to bend at the knees, like the low sweep with the fan, and lift with your legs, not your back.” He stretched out his fingers to brush them against my back.

It was not a possessive caress, but—like Pelis’s touch on my hand—the signal was there: interest, question.

I backed away instinctively, saying, “That is most awkward.” I sensed in the way his hand dropped to his side, the subtle stiffening of his shoulders that I’d hurt him, so I pretended that the moment had not happened as I reached behind me to press my knuckles alongside my spine. “Can you tell me this, at least?
Is
there danger?”

“I don’t know. Prince Ivandred sent the outriders two days ahead instead of a day. That’s why you won’t see but two of Fnor’s women—they are scouting in teams.”

“What might be the problem? I would think scrupulous attention to a treaty is to be lauded.”

“Not if they think enemies will find out they are here.”

“Enemies!”

“That is the word they used, though they did not name anyone.” He sighed.

“The notion makes my neck cold, as if inimical eyes observe us.”

Birdy chuckled. “If it helps, they find you and the princess intimidating.”

“Me!”

“They call us peacocks. About you, they say you dance when you walk, like the princess, and they think we all sing our language, especially Anhar, when she reads to us at camp. And they are amazed that Colendi servants dress beautifully and smell like flowers.” Birdy’s voice changed a little, from teasing to reflective. “Though I notice Nifta no longer tucks flowers in those red braids of hers, and Belimas no longer arranges her hair in blossom-knots.”

“They are unhappy. And who can blame them?” I spread my hands. “I move as stiffly as an old goat, my backside hurts so. My clothes are always damp and grimy, and my new scent is essence of horse.”

The more I complained the more he laughed. I marveled over how that made me feel better as I walked back to my bedroll. Laughter was good—that was a common truism—but it was the quality of his laughter that warmed me, the shared companionship.

We had been proud of our ability to keep pace with the Marlovens until the day after my conversation with Birdy, when Ivandred gave the order for a hard ride, and our lancers relayed it to us.

“We’ve been on a hard ride.” Belimas was too angry to keep her voice low.

“Too hard,” Nifta mumbled. “I’m as skinny as…” She cast a look my way, then at Anhar, who was the thinnest of us all, and returned to her work without finishing her sentence. Nifta had been justifiably proud of her rounded shape, but it was true, we were all much more spare. It was not flattering to any of us. Our clothes would not fit when we reached civilization again.

“This has been an easy ride,” Fnor said as she slung her bow over her shoulder and walked away.

“As if we haven’t been shaken awake every day at Repose,” Anhar whispered to me as we walked back to our tents. She took a quick look around, then twitched her hip one way, her chin over her shoulder, tossed her tumbled hair and fingered it, her nose lifted as if something smelled—it was Belimas to the life. I gasped, and from behind came a snort of laughter as Birdy walked by, his arms loaded with horse gear. Anhar and I both smiled back.