Children of Earth and Sky (34 page)

Just east of them a taut cord is stretched across the road. Marin can see it, but only because he knows where it is. It is, apparently, the third such obstacle. Only the first one was likely to down many horses and riders, Skandir said, but this one will slow the Osmanlis just where they need them slowed.

There had been, evidently, an earlier ambush involving almost half of Skandir's band. Those men will be galloping back, ahead of pursuit, if all has gone well. That is why haste is needed. Their own men know about the cords, of course. They know where they are. This has all been planned. Marin's party had simply arrived at a bad time. The fate of men, clerics teach, is not wholly in their own devising. Jad guards the virtuous.

Even so, men can be wise or foolish as well as virtuous. The merchant party was free to act prudently, moving off the road,
hiding until this is over. They had been advised to do this. All but two of them are hidden. They are in the forest, behind the cabins.

He isn't. Danica isn't.

“I hear them,” she says.

Then Marin hears it too. Horses on the road again. These should be Skandir's men, unless it has all gone wrong already. Eighteen of them, he'd said. Marin stares east.

Skandir's riders appear, galloping. There aren't eighteen of them. Marin sees them jump their horses over the cord. There is a tree south of the road and a boulder on this side where the rope is tied. Those will be their markers. These are not untrained brigands. Their commander had governed a wide sweep of Trakesia before the Osmanlis came, so had his father and grandfather, and back before those.

“Only twelve,” Danica says. “The bastards have killed six.”

Marin looks back at her. She looks like a huntress come out of the forest, he thinks. She even has a hunting dog beside her. Marin has no doubt Tico can kill a man.

“Soon,” she says, looking up the road. “Marin, you don't have to be here. You have your own tasks.”

“You're my task just now,” he says. She looks at him (she does) for a moment, and he sees her smile, ice breaking for a moment. He doesn't smile back. There is, he is thinking, a first battle for everyone who has ever gone to war. He hadn't thought he would have one himself. Even so. This is where he is, somewhere in Sauradia. This is the choice he seems to have made.

He turns away from her and he, too, stares east along the road.

Skandir's fleeing men turn their horses to make a stand, just below where they are watching, aligned with where twenty others are out of sight across the way. The riders in the road are taking up their bows. Short bows, like those the Asharites use. Danica is the only one with a full-length bow. That is why she's up here, in range for her, not for the Osmanlis. They hope.

And then,
now
, they are here: the soldiers of the khalif's army of Asharias. They aren't invading this place (they govern this place). They had been headed north, this need not be happening. But Rasca Tripon, called Skandir, has caused it to be so. Because some men (and some women) do not surrender to or accept the truths of their world.

Marin is pleased to find himself steady at this first sight of those who are now—in a way that they never have been—his enemies.

Skandir had smiled at Danica, before, as the merchants were hastening across the plank bridge towards the wood. “You killed a bird at that distance. Can you kill men shooting the other way?”

“I can,” was all she'd said.

“An easier target?” He'd seemed almost cheerful, Marin thought.

“It is,” Danica said. “You want me by the forest.”

“Yes. We engage them here. With luck, the numbers favour us. You are to make them even better.”

“I understand. It will happen.”

He looked at her. Lean, old, red-grey beard, yellow sash for the god. “I believe you,” he said. “I'll post a guard with you. An archer needs to have—”

“I'll be that guard,” Marin said.

Rasca Tripon turned to him. “This isn't your fight. Dubrava has always made that clear.”

“Today it is. Just for me. Not the others. Is there a tunic I can wear, to make me look like one of you?”

For a long time the older man stared at Marin.

“This is your woman?” he asked.

“No.”

“No,” Danica said in the same moment.

Skandir smiled thinly. “Then why?”

Marin looked at him. Two very tall men. “She saved me from an assassin. I owe her. And we . . . Dubrava turned you away, my lord.”

“I am no one's lord. You can handle a weapon?”

“Yes.” It would be pleading to say more.

A nod, an order spoken. A saddlebag was opened, a worn grey tunic tossed towards Marin. He caught it.

“I am honoured,” Marin said.

His own tunic is behind them in the trees. Wrapped in it are his rings (he likes rings) and his new Seressini hat. His boots and trousers are nondescript and muddy, clothing for the road. In the tunic of Skandir's man he doesn't look like what he is. If he dies here, it will not—it
might
not—lead the Osmanlis to the others, or to blame Dubrava. He'll just be one more infidel in Skandir's band, killed by the warriors of Ashar. Beheaded, most likely.

—

PERO VILLANI HAD GROWN
to manhood in a respectable home in Seressa, son of an artist judged (his son had known this, even when young) capable if not exceptional. Viero Villani had been good enough to work steadily as long as his fees were appropriate. Minor nobility commissions, smaller sanctuaries. A few times a fresco or a portrait for those of higher rank when artists better regarded had been unavailable. Good enough, in short, to have that home in Seressa and for some people to know his name.

His son had followed his vocation if not, currently, his path. He had not ever expected to find himself in the wilderness, hiding in a forest, awaiting the arrival of Osmanli soldiers and a battle between them and a rebel who was a legend, even over the water in Seressa.

Legends, if you crossed their path, could get you killed.

The guards were trying to keep the animals quiet. One of the Seressini merchants was wheezing and gulping in terror, dragging breath into his lungs. Pero didn't think the noise was a danger,
they were a long way back from the road where men had now turned to await the Osmanlis. Skandir was with these.

On impulse, wanting to remove himself from the fear surrounding him, Pero slipped away. He stayed in the forest, moving east towards where Danica was—with Marin Djivo guarding her, with her dog.

He came to a clearing within the wood. He kept low, moved to the edge of the forest, to where he could see out. He crouched behind an oak, the glade behind him, and watched. There was nothing, he thought, for an artist to do here but watch.

Danica and Marin were to his left. They were looking east so he did the same. It didn't take long. There was no loud drumming of hooves on the muddy road, no dust rising in the sunlight. The Asharites came into view, some riding cautiously, others running alongside. He thought there were about forty of them, though he wasn't good at judging numbers. There was a tripwire down there. The lead rider spotted it, alerted the others, bent to one side and slashed the cord with a curved sword.

He straightened, and died.

Danica had already released a second arrow and hit another rider before Pero realized that it was her long flight that had struck the man. The Asharites came on, straight for the raiders in the road.

“Once they are upon us,” Skandir had said just before Pero had followed the merchants towards the wood, “you'll need to be careful. I'd prefer not to be killed by a girl from Senjan.”

“So would they, I imagine,” Danica had said.

She was sending arrows at speed, trying to even the odds before the Asharites closed the gap, but the distance did close swiftly and Pero couldn't tell how many Osmanlis had fallen before the two companies met.

But in that moment Skandir's second group surged up and forward out of the field across the road and through the ditch over there—and there was a battle down below.

He heard shouts, commands, cries of pain and fury, the hard clanging of metal, and he was trembling where he watched within the trees.

He hated this, he realized—playing no role at all. He wasn't a fighter, but he'd never been a coward. So he moved. He kept low and backed up into the glade to continue east towards Danica and Marin. He could watch them, at the very least help defend her. There had been a thought the enemy would send men up to deal with her, that was why Marin was there. Deal with her meant
kill her
.

Pero crawled through the glade, moving as quickly as he could. Down close to the dark earth, he saw some metal objects, half buried, glint dully in the light filtering through spring leaves overhead. He looked at one of them—an amulet, very old, in the shape of a bird of some kind. He lifted it for a moment. He shivered. He put it back and left it there.

—

THEIR CAPTAIN WAS AT
THE FRONT.
He slashed the tripwire, and was the first to die.

Damaz had given his mount to an unhorsed cavalryman, he was running with the other djannis alongside. It was their second-in-command—now leading—who snapped the order as arrows kept coming from above the road by the forest.

“Take him out! Up there! There is only one. You, you, and you and you!”

Damaz was the third
you
. Two were horsemen who dismounted quickly, the fourth was another djanni. The riders left their horses in the road and the three of them leaped into the ditch beside. It was half filled with water, Damaz saw. Someone had taken away the plank bridges. Of course someone had. This had been planned to happen here.

This order was, he realized, folly. You could die of a commander's errors, but there was no
value
in that. He dropped into the ditch to the east of the other three. The water reached the top of
his boots. It was cold. He saw the others clamber out. They had a long, exposed distance to reach the archer.

In fact, he saw, the man by the trees had now stopped. Battle was joined in the road, men were tangled together. The order they'd been given was needless, wasteful. But it was his order, he was a soldier in battle. He saw the other three start across the field trying to keep out of sight. It wouldn't work. The space was too open.

Damaz stayed in the ditch, worked his way back along it the way they'd come, splashing through rainwater and sucking mud. He wondered if someone would think he was fleeing. That thought frightened him.

He peered over the edge of the ditch. Couldn't see his three companions now or the man with the bow by the trees. He climbed out, stayed as low as he could. The grass wasn't tall enough to conceal a man, but it was what he had. He started crawling towards the woods, angling even farther east as he went.

He needed to get through this space to the trees. He had a bow.

He heard a scream, and a curse. One of the other three had been hit. Damaz moved faster, elbows and knees through wet grass. He changed course, straight north towards the forest. The order had been a mistake, he thought, but this man was killing the khalif's soldiers and needed to die, whatever else happened here.

—

“THAT ONE ISN'T DEA
D
IN THE GRASS
,” Danica says.

“I know,” Marin snaps. “You hit him in the thigh.”

“Higher, with luck. There are two more.”

“I know,” he says again. “They are slipping west.” Something occurs to him, and with the thought he moves. “Danica, I'm going after them. They will be aiming to come into the trees that way—they'll find the others hiding!”

“No!” she cries. “Marin—these are djannis, you can't fight them!”

She is almost certainly correct. For some reason he doesn't care just now. Can warfare make men mad, as poets have always sung?

“Too many at risk there,” he says, starting forward. “Those men are my party. Cover me if these two stand up.” He calls it back to her. His eyes are forward, though.

“Marin,
stop
!”

He does. Looks at her this time, from several steps into the wet grass of the field. She is still by the trees, another arrow to string, her hair pinned but without the hat now, since she started releasing arrows at Asharites. Her dream, he thinks: to be doing this.

“You are . . . you are here to guard me!” she says. Her colour is high.

He hadn't expected that.

“I am,” he replies, and turns again, moving quickly, down and right, to where the Osmanlis had last been. He can hear the wounded one moaning. He leaves him there. Danica can kill him if she wants, he thinks.

Below him, in the loud roadway, it is difficult to tell what is happening now. A clotted mass of men are trying to end each other's lives. Horses are down and screaming.

He thinks—though he has no experience of judging this—that Skandir is prevailing. Between the men the Asharites lost to his ambushes and traps, and Danica here, and then the flanking attack from across the road, his guess is that this has been well-judged—though there will be losses. Dying men make terrible sounds, Marin Djivo thinks.

And a man can die in a meaningless skirmish on a road in Sauradia as easily as on the triple walls of Sarantium or in the siege of a northern fortress.

Or in a meadow by that same road. He sees the two soldiers. They are ahead of him, working west on their knees as he'd guessed. They will want to go north to the forest and concealment from which to attack the archer.

His sword comes out. He has fought men face to face, driven thieves to flight. He has never killed a man crawling away from him. He does so now. He thinks,
I will always remember this
. He drives his blade into the back of the nearer of the crawling soldiers.

A cry, and a grunt. The one ahead looks back. Rises up, sword out. His face shows fury, no fear. There is even, Marin has a moment to see, a ferocious contempt. Marin knows he can handle a blade. He also sees, from the uniform in front of him, that this is indeed a djanni, and that no merchant from Dubrava can expect—