Children of Earth and Sky (55 page)

It could not be determined which of his wives had been disgraced by being given to an infidel at night as a part of the prince's degenerate scheme. Because of this it was judged necessary to execute them all by strangling.

There are always innocents who die during times of fear and rage, no matter how gentle hands and heart might have been, how much tenderness lay within a soul under the night's stars.

S
he has never been anywhere but their farm. Morning journeys to the village with her parents and brothers in the wagon do not count. She knows that, or feels it, which is the same thing at her age.

She is sixteen and has only a vague idea of the world. How could she have more than that? She understands that much is out there beyond the river and wood, down the road both ways, that large events happen beyond the boundary markers of their fields, but it is difficult to
picture
this.

There is a khalif, there is an emperor. Women are said to wear beautiful clothing. She does not know what this would be. She has never seen silk though she's heard the word. Tidings come at times (to her father and brothers): of war or plague, a flooding of some far river, fire taking someone's barn. There are hadjuk raids. Sometimes those cause the fires. Usually, she has come to realize, news arrives long after an event. A fire will be ashes on wind, the barn rebuilt, a war lost or won before they know of it here, Milena thinks.

None of it really matters, except that to her it does. She can't explain why that is so, but it is. Yes, their lives carry on here—as they have, as she knows her own will—but every so often she has
to be shouted home by an angry brother or her mother. She'll be staring into the distance, east or west along the road, or south across it and the stream, when she's only been sent to the well for water again.

They survive. Winters are always hard. Her father is a careful man. She has two other brothers and they went off to join the khalif's army many years back. There wasn't enough to feed so many mouths, even though they'd changed religion long ago. The family had been Jaddite until her grandfather adopted Ashar's faith when the Osmanlis first came this way. Many people around here had done that. Most of them had.

You could cling to your beliefs, her father often said, but what good did that do if the head tax meant your family starved?

They'd paid taxes to the emperor north in her grandfather's youth, they paid them to the khalif now, and those two were—as best a man could tell, he'd said—much the same. Unless you stayed Jaddite and paid the head tax and died because of that.

There are enough Blessed Victims in the world
, her grandfather had reportedly declared when he made his decision. Milena has some memories of him from when she was small. A short, strong man, heavy beard, many teeth missing by then, and the tip of one ear. He limped, for a reason no one knew, not even her father. She'd asked, hadn't got an answer. He'd refused to use a stick.

There are four farms here, houses close to each other with the field attached to each stretching out, boundaries marked with big stones. It is safer having them laid out this way—if you aren't feuding with the others. One of the others is her uncle, one is a friend of her father's. The fourth is a family her father doesn't much like, but they have a son a little older than Milena, and discussions have begun. It is, she understands, complex. Land matters are.

Milena is unsure how she feels about this subject. She has unquiet nights, has had them for a while, has explored her body in the dark with a hand she pretends she isn't actually causing to do
what it does. And her daydreams can turn towards thoughts that unsettle. She isn't sure what she's looking for across the stream or along the road, but she looks.

The boy they are talking about, Dimitar, is smaller than she is, even if he's older by half a year. Milena is a big girl, strong, her father boasts about it. Dimitar's being smaller doesn't matter, she's told herself. But once, three years ago, they'd been by the riverbank (he was fishing) and twilight was coming, they'd be heading back soon, and Milena had kissed him on the cheek where he was standing with his pole and line above the dark, slow, summer water.

And Dimitar had grimaced and turned away and said, “You smell of onion, foh!” and he'd spat into the water. She'd walked home alone, face burning.

—

DID PEOPLE FORGET
things like that, she wondered now on a warm day nearing another summertime. They'd been young then, she'd forgotten she'd been eating an onion as she'd walked down to the stream where he was fishing. And, the bigger part of this: were there any alternatives for her to marry, live with, lie with, where they were, in the life they lived?

She was carrying the two buckets, the pole across her neck, as she headed for the well. The well had been discovered—all the young ones in the four families knew the story—by a water-finder hired by the grandfathers together. He'd cut a forked branch from a tree in the woods, walked about their lands for most of a day, then stopped at one place and said,
Dig here
.

The well lay near the end of Dimitar's family's land, towards the road and the stream but so much nearer than that rushing water, saving a long walk every time.

Milena was alone, filling the two buckets, thinking about what it might be like to have a man sleep beside her, then thinking about
her brothers who had gone away—who had been
able
to go away—when she saw someone coming along the road from the east.

People did come past, it
was
a road, but it didn't happen every day. Their road was lightly travelled, especially this spring. They knew the army of the khalif had been moving, somewhere to the east, headed for the Jaddite fortress. There were numbers spoken that made no sense to Milena. A lot of men was all she understood.

This one was more a boy than a man, she saw as he came nearer. But she also saw that he carried a sword and a bow, though he wasn't in a uniform of any kind. That ought to have caused her to retreat when he left the road and began crossing towards her at the well, but she didn't. It was midday, her brothers were in their field, and Dimitar and his father could be seen on the far side of theirs. They'd have seen this one, he was walking openly.

He stopped at a respectful distance and lifted a hand in greeting, called out, in Asharite, “Is it permitted to take water from your well?”

“You can do that if you like,” Milena said in Sauradian. She didn't like speaking Asharite. She thought it made her sound stupid and she knew she wasn't.

“I am grateful,” he replied, switching to Sauradian (not smoothly, but he did it, she noted). “It is a hot day to be on the road.”

He looked younger than her, but he was taller, a big-shouldered boy-man, and the weapons made him look older, as weapons tended to, she thought. Men with swords or cudgels walked differently in the village, she'd noticed.

On impulse, as he came up, Milena handed him the bucket she'd just filled. “Drink. I'll fill it again.”

He had red-blond hair and blue eyes—like her own, in fact, which was interesting. How such an obvious Jaddite could have weapons was a mystery.

Not one she was ever going to solve, of course.

He lifted the bucket to his mouth and drank. She knew their water had a metallic taste, but the boy showed no reaction. He splashed his hands into the bucket on the well rim and washed his face and neck. Then he took a leather flask and filled it.

She saw his gaze go past her. He nodded courteously. “Good day,” he said. “Thank you for the drink. I needed it.”

“Looks that way,” her brother Rastic said. He was the calmer of the two who remained on the farm. Milena glanced back. He was holding his scythe, but easily. This didn't feel like anything dangerous, but she was still a little excited.

“You're well armed,” Rastic said.

The stranger said, “Alone on the road. Have to be.”

“You know how to use those?”

“I do.” He didn't smile.

Milena decided not to think of him as a boy any more. It was interesting, Rastic heard those words but he didn't bristle or become aggressive (Mavro might have, but he was down at the other end of their field). Rastic just looked thoughtful, and maybe, Milena thought, a little bit careful.

“More rain than sun the last while,” he said.

The stranger nodded. “All spring. Good for you or bad, here?”

“Mostly good. We'll need it dry come harvest.”

“Then I'll wish you that,” the stranger said, “and be on my way.”

“Safe road,” Rastic said, leaning on his scythe handle.

“Do you want to stay for a meal?” Milena said in the same moment.

The two men looked at each other. Then Rastic smiled. “Yes, do that.”

“Only if I can cut wood or offer something for it,” the other man said.

“We aren't so poor we can't give a traveller a meal,” her brother said mildly.

The man with the same colour eyes as Milena smiled this time. “I'll be grateful for it, then. May I at least carry the water back?”

“You can do that,” Rastic allowed.

They waited for Milena to fill the buckets, since that was woman's work, then the stranger shouldered them with the pole on his neck, and the three of them walked back to their house.

The stranger's name was Neven. He was headed south and west, didn't say more than that.

He stayed a year.

The Eldest Daughter's terrace was good for the breezes, Leonora was learning, as the weather grew warm. If you walked forward, you could see towards the harbour and any boats coming from there to dock at one of their landing places.

Leonora had no idea who was coming now, but she did see a small craft pulling in. She was looking at Iulia Orsat in the herb garden—she was no longer with child but was still here, and had said she wanted to stay.

There were, indeed, methods known—to the two older women who tended their herbs—to cause a girl to no longer carry a child, and Iulia had never wavered in her determination that this one would not be born.

She'd never named the father. It was possible to guess darkly, and it was wiser—and perhaps kinder—not to do so. In addition to which, Leonora liked the Orsat girl, and was genuinely happy Iulia was staying. She was often in the garden, had shown a desire to learn from the older ones. She was healthy, not sad or angry. She had been teaching them songs from Gjadina Island. Some were extremely vulgar and very amusing.

Iulia's arrival had caused some entirely different thoughts as well. They were going to need, Leonora had come to realize, new ways of sustaining themselves on the isle, or life on Sinan would grow significantly less gracious than it had been.

Under Filipa di Lucaro, it was now clear, their comfortable circumstances had been paid for—quietly, and by routes Leonora was still working through in the records—by Seressa's Council of Twelve. For which Filipa had been an effective spy—and assassin.

Not a course available to Leonora, by inclination or opportunity. Which meant pursuing alternatives.

They might need to begin more widely offering the idea that women of good family (and not just those with reasons to withdraw from the world for a while) could find their lives richer here at the retreat. Younger daughters, especially, and perhaps not only from Dubrava. Families paid for this elsewhere, endowing a retreat to ensure their daughters lived in a manner that did them honour, perhaps also preparing the way for prayers when members of the family went to Jad and light.

The isle could also become a resting place for the dead, Leonora thought. The retreat could promise prayers in the sanctuary for ten, fifty, a hundred years, or even forever—at a cost, of course. Forever would cost a lot. Prayers from holy women were valued, though. She would need to learn what the price was elsewhere.

There was room to expand their cemetery, or introduce the idea of people being laid to rest in the sanctuary itself. This was, after all, the retreat where the last empress of Sarantium had chosen to live for twenty-five years in a life of piety. She amused herself a little with that thought. There weren't any people with whom she could share it, though.

A shame, thinking about it, that Eudoxia was laid to rest in Varena. Even though it had been Leonora who had planted the thought. Still, they did have her last belongings: jewellery, books, two sun disks, even the bed where the last empress had gone to the god.

There could be pilgrimages here. Perhaps the High Patriarch would consider making Eudoxia a Blessed Victim?
That
was worth
exploring. There were, Leonora thought, possibilities. Life, on a day in late spring—especially after they'd learned the khalif's army was in retreat—seemed more full of promise to her than it had in a long time.

She looked west at the morning sea, whitecaps on a blue that was nearly violet just now. She turned and looked down towards the pier, where that small boat had now docked and was being tied. She saw Pero Villani step out and start up the path between the vines, towards her.