Children of Earth and Sky (15 page)

“No, you aren't as bad as them.” She doesn't smile back. She says, looking at the sea, not him, “From the time I came to Senjan I wanted to be allowed among the raiders. Inland, though. Not this. I wanted to fight Osmanlis.”

Another borderlands story, he thinks. He has heard these before. But everyone's story is their own, he also thinks. He wonders who died. Whose memory drives and aches in this woman. And how did she end up at sea? Are they raiding with women now?

He asks it. Why should he not, on his own ship?

She sighs. “This was my reward. They asked me what I wanted for saving our boats that night. I needed to be seen to be capable before I could go east. That won't happen now.”

She's addressed his earlier question after all, he realizes. Although, in truth, it will be obvious to everyone when they land. A Senjani woman is known to have killed Seressinis with arrows, a woman took part in this raid, carrying a bow, killing a man with it . . .

Nonetheless. “Thank you for answering,” he says.

She looks at him this time. After a moment she looks back out to sea.

He wonders what she is thinking. Doesn't ask. His own thought: it is likely she'll be killed after they reach Dubrava. Or handed to Seressa, as she's just surmised.

Sometimes there is nowhere to hide in the world.

The ship rises and falls. Marin looks at her profile while she stares at the slowly darkening sea, and that is the thought that comes to him, as if swooping and diving, swift and hard.

—

HE HAD LANCED
a painful boil for one of the mariners the day before. Had been looking in on the man in the sailors' quarters at sunrise, a lantern held by another man. They had heard loud sounds above. Both seamen swore violently.

“Senjani!” they'd exclaimed.

Neither moved, even as boots were heard coming down and men began entering the holds. The Dubravae mariners gestured for Miucci to stay with them. He had understood this was not an occasion for resistance. He'd taken guidance from them.

Until he saw Leonora stumble past their doorway, protesting, still in her sleeping robe, a pirate's hand on her arm, forcing her with him.

You didn't plan every moment of your life, even if you were a man who tended to be organized, methodical, precise.

You didn't plan your death either, usually.

He'd run to their own room, seized the first blade he found in his instrument case, hurried up the rungs of the ladder to the deck. And died there, to his very great surprise.

There had been a moment of extreme pain, white, fierce, a sword plunging into him, withdrawn. Then no pain at all. Nothing, astonishingly.

His body lay on the deck, bleeding from the belly, his knife
beside it. He was dead and he knew he was—and he was seeing it, seeing all of it, from beyond, from
somewhere.
Outside himself, as if floating, like a dandelion seed in spring. It was spring now. He remembered those floating seeds outside their home when he was young, watching them in wonder.

Leonora was on her knees beside his body. She was weeping. He didn't want her to be doing that. He didn't want to be dead. It was . . . disappointing. There were, Jacopo Miucci thought, so many things he still wanted to do.

He watched an arrow kill the man who'd killed him.

He felt, in some hard-to-fathom way, satisfaction, seeing that. He didn't know how he was seeing it. He didn't know where he was.

He seemed to be drifting higher, far above the deck, weightless, without substance. He was aware of sunlight but heard no sounds. He saw waves below, men below, himself lying below. It was extremely sorrowful, he thought.

Men were talking. The merchants, the pirates. He couldn't hear anything. He saw the Senjani boats. They seemed very small to have come all this way across the home sea to this western coast. He wondered who would miss him in the world now that he was gone, if anyone would. Leonora Valeri, for a little while, perhaps? Perhaps. She was crying beside his body. He saw her. He saw himself. He wondered what would happen to her now. That was a bad thought.

He drifted again. He was remembering those dandelion seeds, in childhood.

Stop her!

He had no idea who had said that. In his mind. How could he even hear? Who—?

Stop her! Now! She's going over the side!

Then he saw it. Leonora had risen from by his body and was moving purposefully across the deck. The men down there hadn't seen her yet, or realized what was happening.

Over the side? She was going into the sea!

How?
Miucci cried (somehow).
How do I stop her?

Tell her to stop! Help me hold her. Do something!

So he tried. He didn't want her to do this.
Tell her?
He called her name, shaped it in thought.

And saw her falter for an instant, then continue on. It gave him hope, impetus, urgency, seeing that. Sometimes, he had told patients, you needed only to take the first step towards walking again, after a broken bone had been set, for example, and then the next ones would come more easily. Only take the first step, he used to say.

He'd been a good physician. He knew it. He'd been on his way to becoming a better one. He was sure of that, too.

She was at the railing, and now he saw (high above) men turning to look at her, understanding belatedly.

Do something!
That harsh voice in his mind.

Miucci tried again. He forced himself downwards from this drifting height. He tried to move whatever of him was left here in the morning air above the
Blessed Ingacia.
And, by the grace offered by Jad to his children (could you speak of that when you were already dead?), he saw the railing nearer, and Leonora there.

No, my dear!
he said, in his mind.

He was right next to her now, above the sea, beside the ship, and he made whatever was left of him, whatever he
was
now, hovering here, dead on the deck,
push
as she lifted one leg to the rail. He felt another presence, that harsh one, pushing her from beside him.

The sea was below. He thought, for an instant, that if she jumped they would be together in death today, and then he drove that thought away and he said again, driving it at her,
No, my dear! Not yet, not this way.

And he realized that she was aware of him, or of
something
, because she stopped. She did stop.

He saw—floating, hovering, dead—the moment when her bare foot came back down to the deck. She stood as if becalmed, adrift, lost, confused.

My dear
, Miucci said again, gently this time.

He didn't know if she heard him. He saw that there were tears in her eyes, on her cheeks. For him? For her own lost future?

He didn't know. He couldn't know. He felt himself beginning to lift again, he couldn't resist it now, he was the one adrift (dandelion seed in a long-ago springtime). He heard, more faintly,
That was well done.
And then, a different tone,
I'm sorry.

And then he was high, really high, and still rising, the morning sun seemed to be below him, the sea and the ships so far below, and then they were gone because he was gone.

T
hey hadn't castrated him.

They did that at eight or nine years of age to almost all Jaddite boys taken on raids. They waited that long to see which ones were bigger, stronger, showed signs of promise as a fighter. He had done that. They had left him intact and sent him to this barracks at Mulkar to be trained for the djannis, the elite infantry of the khalif, might his reign last forever and his name be blessed under stars.

He was fourteen years old now. You didn't usually join the army and fight until you were sixteen, but sometimes you did, if there was a major war, west or east, in a given year. He hoped that might happen for him.

Training could be boring, the same things endlessly, but he never complained the way some of the others did. He understood that this was what training was, over and over so you didn't have to think when it happened for real, you just did what you had to do. He knew this was the path to stepping forward. Possibly. Not everyone stepped forward into high rank, Kasim reminded them in his classes. You carried on with your life, even so. You still had a life.

He wanted more than just carrying on, though. He wanted to be on battlefields winning glory, his name coming to the attention (you could dream, couldn't you?) of serdars, and even the khalif in Asharias, as a fearless warrior, a hewer and slayer of infidels.

His name was Damaz. It hadn't always been, but he'd been four years old when they took him and renamed him, and he couldn't remember his Jaddite name any more.

All the djannis, without exception, were Jaddite-born—seized as boys in raids and raised in the true faith of Ashar. They owed everything—their lives, their chance at fortune, their hope of paradise—to the khalif. It was a good way to ensure a loyal core to an army.

Sometimes at night, dreaming, he had thought he was close to reclaiming fragments of his childhood, drifting towards faces and names, but those dreams were rare, defined by images of fire, and he didn't really need to remember such things. What would be the point? His life was here, and how could it be better, whatever it had been in some village on the borderlands?

The djannis—even the young ones—were a commanding presence in Mulkar, a garrison town south of the road between Asharias and the Sauradian coastline. Mulkar, too, had had a different name once, apparently. Damaz didn't know what it was. He supposed he could ask Kasim, who knew such things.

In their green coats and high boots and the tall, emblematic hats bearing the crest of their regiment, the djannis strode through the city as if they ruled it. There was a governor here, of course. He would not cross them. No man was keen to cross the djannis, no woman inclined to deny one of them, even the boys being trained—though you could be gelded or even executed for causing trouble for a woman of rank or birth, so you avoided those.

They paraded and drilled in regiments, they fought each other with spear and sword, they trained with their bows. They went days without eating. They marched out from the walls, in winter,
too, and they tracked wolves and bears in snow and killed them if they found them. They had to stay outside the walls at night if they didn't find any. Some hated the hard bite of winter. Damaz wasn't bothered by it. He just disliked the waiting. All this delay. He carried within himself a feeling that time was rushing past him. He couldn't have said why he was in such a hurry.

He must have had a family but he had no images of them. He assumed they'd been killed in the raid when he'd been freed to come and train to be a djanni.

He had a mild aversion to fires, but he controlled it, and he didn't think anyone had noticed. It was a bad thing, to let others see your weaknesses.

They had done march-squares and turning manoeuvres this morning in a steady rain. Rain was bad. If the army was to set out for Woberg Fortress in the north they needed the roads to be good enough (and the rivers not in flood) for the great wall-smashing cannons not to bog down in mud.

Only the rain, the saying went, could forestall the grand khalif's designs. The rain hid the stars of Ashar, after all. It also blocked the sun and moons of the Jaddite and Kindath infidels, but that didn't signify.

Damaz wouldn't be part of this year's army, in any case. Whatever glory came wouldn't be his.

After the drilling the rain had eased. He'd walked from the barracks out to the marketplace in the city for a bowl of barley soup from a Kindath stall. Some of the infidels made good food, you needed to acknowledge that. There was a place for them among the star-born. The generous khalif tolerated infidels throughout his lands. They paid a tax to worship as they chose, and those taxes paid for soldiers and cannons, and gardens in Asharias. That had been Kasim again, explaining things.

When the bells for midday prayer sounded through the city, Damaz strolled to the nearest temple rather than back to the
barracks. He left his boots and hat by the doors and knelt in prayer, invoking Ashar and the god who had given him his visions under the desert stars. There were stars painted on the temple dome, as there always were. In the wealthiest temples they might be made of metal, swaying from chains.

There was a new wadji here, younger than the last one. A thinner beard, a piercing voice as he led the chants. Damaz didn't give him another thought until later in the day.

It was then, on the training ground after afternoon sword work (he was good with a sword, bigger than most of the trainees, and quicker), that he overheard Koçi telling his friends—followers was more like it, really—that the new wadji at the market temple had made an indecent suggestion to him after sundown prayers last night, and how he, Koçi, was not inclined to accept that from anyone, let alone a false, vile man pretending to serve Ashar in holiness.

Relations between men and boys were hardly rare among the djannis. A friendship with the right officer had been the key to many a young man's rise. Damaz had never been approached by anyone of rank; he was too big, was his own thought, not pretty enough with his freckled features. But he knew—they all knew—that if it came from a man not within the regiments a proposition was an offence. And a young wadji new to a garrison city had no status at all. He could raise the shield of his piety, but he needed to actually be pious, and have friends.

Still, Damaz felt there was something wrong, not quite believable about the story. The wadji was truly just-arrived, would he be so reckless? Koçi could have reported the man immediately, right in the temple. He could have gone to his regimental leader, or one of their own wadjis here at the barracks.

Damaz was thoughtful in geography and history class. This was always late in the afternoon, after they'd worn themselves out with drills and might (sometimes) be able to sit and listen. The class
was taught by Kasim. He had been an officer once, captured and mutilated by the Jaddites while scouting ahead of the army. He'd had his nose cut off by the savages and been sent west to the galleys to row until he died.

He'd escaped, instead, as a capable djanni could—and should. Had somehow made his way back. He didn't talk much about it, even when the boys asked, as they did, of course. He wore a silver attachment to hide his severed nose, affixed with silk ties that went behind his head.

He was, given the life he'd led, a thoughtful, composed man. The djannis had made a place for him as a teacher in Mulkar. They were all expected to be able to read and write in two or three languages, but the history and geography class was voluntary after you were twelve years old. Damaz never missed it unless they were outside the walls on a march.

They could all speak the Trakesian of today, but under Kasim a few of them were learning to read the writings of the long-ago city-states to the south. Poetry, dramas, he even gave them medical treatises to struggle through. Much of what their own doctors did today apparently came from Trakesia in its glory, two thousand years ago.

Ashar had not yet been born to have his vision in the desert night. There had been no star-worshippers, no Jaddites. The Kindath with their moons had apparently been present, along with other strange beliefs to the east, and the gods of Trakesia and those of Sauradia (where Mulkar was) had been a confusing diversity of powers.

Damaz usually enjoyed Kasim's classes, liked watching the young ones trying to look attentive and awake, remembering himself at that age, but he was distracted today. Kasim looked at him quizzically a few times, but said nothing. He was a teacher who waited for you to come to him.

Damaz didn't do that. He could have, but he didn't. Instead, when class was over and they all walked out into the cloudy
afternoon, he did something reckless in the hour before they were called to prayer.

You couldn't spy easily on another regiment's sleeping quarters. For one thing, there were soldiers and officers mixed in with the trainees, and the regiments had an intense, sometimes violent rivalry for precedence and recognition. It wasn't as though you could linger by a window and listen.

Still, Koçi was boastful and vain, and of those in their year he was certainly one of Damaz's rivals for an early promotion into the ranks. Each spring, one, sometimes two of the fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds
might
(there were no promises, ever) be elevated into the army and go to war, where glory was. Where a life might be found, amid the dealing of death to infidels.

So Damaz would probably have admitted, if pressed by someone like Kasim, that he had personal reasons for what he did in the darkening of late day, a breeze stirring the early leaves of trees. He walked towards the third regiment's quarters—Koçi's—and took a wide route to the back wall.

He looked around calmly, saw he was alone, and climbed to the flat roof. It was no achievement to get up a wall.

On the roof of any building here—they all knew this—you could place yourself near one of the chimneys and, if no fires were lit and smoking, crouch to listen to what was said inside. He was quiet in his movements. The room below was almost empty, but not quite. At the second of the chimneys he heard Koçi almost directly beneath him talking to a few others. It sounded like four voices.

You needed to be patient doing this, and lucky. Sometimes, they had been told, a spy in war might have to remain in place for days, knowing if he made a sound he might die. You voided yourself where you were, and hoped the smell didn't give you away. And if you were hungry you were hungry.

He didn't have to wait very long. They were talking about girls,
insulting some. One boasted of a Kindath who'd smiled at him. Koçi made it clear that if such a girl wasn't bedded within a day or two it was a disgrace to the man smiled upon.

“And if a wadji smiles at you?” one of the others asked slyly.

“Fuck that,” Koçi snapped.

“Oh, really?” a fourth voice taunted. There was laughter.

Koçi swore again. “Watch yourself,” he said. “We're going to deal with him tonight.”

“Did he really offer to bed you?”

“Course not. Wouldn't dare. I just don't like him.”

On the roof Damaz blinked. He didn't move.

“He's a wadji!” the fourth voice said again, moving from taunting to doubt.

“Right? And no wadjis like boys?”

“But he didn't
do
anything, you just said.”

“Didn't have to. Told you, I don't like him. We geld him, somebody better will come.”

“Because we don't like him?”

“We're djannis!” said Koçi. “Who tells us what to do?”

“Officers,” someone said.

“When they know,” said Koçi. Damaz heard him laugh. “They don't always need to know. Are you with me? You don't have to be, but this is a test, make no mistake.”

He had a forceful manner. The others were a year younger, one of them was twelve years old if the voice belonged to the one Damaz thought it did. They weren't about to gainsay Koçi.

It seemed he had been right.

To be planning an attack on a holy man spoke to boredom and viciousness more than anything else. The boredom he understood, the viciousness he had seen in Koçi, and some others, before. It wasn't an impediment in the army.

The wadji meant nothing to Damaz. Just another of the interchangeable faces of holiness sent to Mulkar, moving on after a time.
A nasal voice, not very musical. But from what he'd just heard there had been no incident. Koçi just saw a chance to confirm his power over other trainees. And if he was questioned by superiors, well, he had a group to support his story—which is what the conversation below now turned to.

There were many reasons to keep out of this, and no reason to interfere. Well, there might be. If any of them was going to move up to the ranks this spring Damaz wanted it to be himself. He was ready. And he truly didn't like the idea of a man being gelded so that a boy among the djannis could amuse and assert himself.

—

“YOU OVERHEARD THIS AT A WINDOW?
”

Damaz looked at his teacher. He shook his head. This might have been a mistake after all, coming to Kasim.

“On the roof?”

He nodded.

Kasim smiled. He had lit a lamp to read by, was sitting beside it. They were alone in the room. Classes were finished for the day.

“We used to do that,” the teacher said. “You can hear at a chimney when no fires are lit.”

Damaz nodded again. He had told the story to the one man he could think to trust. Kasim had seemed the only choice if he was going to talk to anyone. Damaz wasn't sure if he'd been right. He felt even less certain with the next words.

“You shouldn't have gone up,” his teacher said.

“I was trying to be fair. To be sure of what I believed.”

“I understand. But, you see, now that you are sure you have a difficulty.”

“I know that. That's why I came to you!”

Kasim smiled again but said, “A softer tongue, please.”