Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (43 page)

Dark eyes flashed in the sunlight, hard hands hugged her too briefly, a caustic voice said, 'I wasn't offered a choice. Snatched from our tent, under the eyes of all our family — they'll be talking about it still, and blaming me. Or you, perhaps.'

Julianne's family too, although she didn't know them; there were still two senior wives she hadn't met, and children also. To her shame, she realised suddenly, she'd never even asked their names
...

Well, there would be time enough. A lifetime, possibly, if the luck fell that way. For now, 'They can blame me, if they choose. I asked for you. Do you, did the djinni tell you why?'

'It said Hasan was sick, no more than that. I didn't ask further.'

No, of course she hadn't asked. For swift mercy's sake,

Julianne forced a smile. 'He should be well now, only he hasn't woken yet. I'm sorry, I should have thought to tell the djinni to say he had been healed. He was very ill, though, an 'ifrit wounded him and he might have died; I thought you'd want to be here, I thought he'd want to see you
...'

'You were twice right, then — but what you mean is, you wanted me.' A hand gripped hers, greatly reassuring, and, 'Take me to our husband, then; and while I watch him, shameless, you can find yourself a veil.'

'Oh, Sherett, you don't need to wear it here!'

'In a stranger's house, for my husband to see me exposed before princes and slaves? Indeed I do, and so do you.'

Julianne groaned inwardly, but found a sudden determined stubbornness. 'I will not leave him,' she muttered forcefully, 'to go bothering servants in a house at war to fetch me a useless length of cloth. Sherett, I will not!'

'You are married now, we are married together — and you will dress and behave as a wife ought, and you will do as I say. I will teach you that, if I teach you nothing else. However,' relenting abruptly, surprisingly, 'there is perhaps no point in chasing a veil until someone brings you a decent robe to replace that filthy rag you're wearing. This is too fine a house for such neglect - but as you say, they are at war. I have seen that, though I barely know where I am. Here
...'

Hands tugged at her clothing, and she remembered with a sinking heart just how filthy it was indeed, and how filthy she was herself beneath it. Just at the word she could feel all the grime and the greasiness on skin and fabric both, the lank mats of her hair; no doubt she smelled quite rancid to one newly come from the dry clean air of the Sands. Probably she ought to go and seek out a change of dress, at least a jug of water if not a bath. Even if it meant missing Hasan as he woke, she oughtn't to let him see her in this state
...

But Sherett pulled the hood up over her head, found a way to twist the robe so that there was an extra fold that could be pulled across nose and mouth and held there, so long as she remembered to hold it.

'For now, that's sufficient. Till he wakes, till he's seen you and spoken to you. He's been hunting you so long, he wont want to wait. He has no more patience than a puppy, that one.'

That was so untrue that she might have protested it, if she hadn't been so grateful not to be sent away.

She guided Sherett — pointl
essly, the woman could see perfectly well for herself, but she did it anyway — over towards where their man lay quiet on his pallet. First there was Jemel, with his own quiet man; the two Sharai greeted each other, exchanged compliments and hopes, for all the world as though they had met by chance on neutral ground in the heart of the
mul'abarta.

Hasan still hadn't stirred. Only his blood stirred within him, and it was hard to be sure even of that. Every now and then Julianne was shaken by memories of the black sludge creeping from his veins, so that she had to snatch at the pulse of his neck or wrist to count the slow, healthy beating of his heart for reassurance.

No such fretful fancies for Sherett. She squatted beside his pallet, laid one hand firmly on his brow and spoke in a normal, everyday voice, as though halfway through a conversation with him.

'Well, you my man, you've been sleeping long enough.

The tribes are riding, and its time to wake. What, will you let them ride without you? Their head is yours if you will take it, man
...'

For a moment, he seemed to shift beneath her touch. Sherett merely tutted, and went on talking. 'Very well then, laze. If you will sleep deeper than my
sodar
could have sent you, I'll rouse you ruder than your mother ever did
...'

And she set her two hands, one on either temple of his head, and began
to sing: soft and slow and gentl
e, so that Julianne became deeply confused. She knew the
sodar
that sent strong men to sleep and restless girls with them, that had even lulled the Daughter into stasis. This sounded like enough to that, but simply overhearing it - in sunshine after a long night and a heavy meal, when she could and should have been drifting, drowsing, even solidly asleep despite every duty and summons of the day - her blood was stirring and her skin alive, crawling beneath the strata of her dirt. What it must be like for Hasan with that call focused on him, beating into his head and heart as he lay fathoms-deep in dreaming, she couldn't imagine and thought she never wanted to learn.

The effects of it were clear to be seen, however it felt inside. Hasan frowned, and his whole body shifted on the pallet; he opened his eyes and blinked up at his wife, while her hands shielded him from the sunlight and incidentally from any glimpse of Julianne. Well, perhaps it was incidental. 'What, still no rest?' he murmured, sounding more amused than querulous, more awake and aware than he had any right to be.

'Too much, already. Besides, God and the tribe and all the tribes together have claimed all the common hours that you have; and yet you are a husband too, though you are inclined to forget that. Is it any blame to us poor abandoned wives, if we seize any stray minute that we may?'

He must have heard that deliberate plural as clearly as Julianne did. He lifted his hand slowly to touch Sherett's brow in a gesture that was simple, private, modest and somehow heartshakingly erode all at once; then he said, 'Where is she?'

'Here, Hasan.'

He tried to turn his head, against the strict constraint of his wife's strong and determined fingers; and grunted as he felt it, and said, 'May I not look on what is my own, Sherett? Has she become ugly, since I saw her beauty last? Or is she marked,' seriously now, a tug of anger in his voice as though a sluice had opened, 'has that demon Morakh done her damage?'

'Oh, you may look all you like, so long as you lie still to do it. You are the one who has been marked, H
asan,' and a thumb stroked lightl
y over the triple scar on his cheek. 'You have been walking with death, and are barely back from the journey. What you may not do is move about, until the Princip has seen and spoken with you.'

'The Princip, is it? Am I in Surayon?'

'You are.'

And so is your army,
Julianne thought, though she said nothing. Hasan gave a short, soft sigh that might have meant anything. All he said was, 'That family seems to be dogging me. The son, the granddaughter, now the old man himself...'

Now she had to speak, and did. 'We brought you here to save your life, Hasan. Rudel lost his, in fetching you through the Folding.'

'Is Rudel dead? I am sorry, though my people may not be. These are stories that need to be told; later will do, if it be not too late. For now, immediately, show me my recovered jewel, Sherett. I promise, I will lie as still as— well, I had meant to say death, but not that. As still as an ailing man in the presence of his newest lady, not wishing to make a flailing, whimpering idiot of himself
...'

Sherett took her hands away and Julianne slid forward, to where he could see her easily without either turning his head or squinting into the suns glare. She remembered to hold the cloth across her face as a substitute veil; he reached up and touched his fingers to her brow, much as he had saluted her sister-wife.

'Julianne. Wife. I looked for you . . .'

'I know you did. And found me,'
in a manner of speaking, and too late.

'Did I? I remember finding a madman
...'
He frowned, and she could almost see the memory slip from his tenuous grasp. 'Well. Later. Show me, I said . . .'

His hand had no stronger grip than his mind, but it served to nip the veil from her unresisting fingers and ease it aside.

'Don't worry,' he said, 'I won't be scolded. There's only Sherett to see, and it'll be you that she blames.'

Now he smiled, and it had been worth long waiting for. Now he stroked her cheek, and pushed back her hood to draw her long hair free. She knelt patient while he played, not daring to risk a glance at Sherett. It was all she could do not to kiss at the inside of his wrist, where the skin might smell sourly of his recent illness but was still his, was a part of him and so near, so tempting, so easily reached for kissing after so long; and who cared if that made her no better than some tavern slut in Marasson, kissing every man who came in reach? There had been only the two come that close to her, and thus far they'd both escaped her kisses.

Thus far, and just a little further: she did resist the yearning, not to shock Sherett beyond bearing. Then she did take her husband
’
s hand and lay it firmly back on the blanket that covered him; and she did tuck her hair back inside her robe, and draw the hood up over, and pull her makeshift veil across her face again.

'You're too thin,' he said, reaching out again in defiance of her discipline, folding his hand loosely around her wrist. 'A girl should be slender, but not hollow. Were you much mistreated?'

She shook her head, but not in denial of anything he'd said. They were all of them too thin, she and all her friends; each of them had their reasons. 'Later,' she said, throwing his own word, his own decision back at him. 'Time enough for all our stories then. I'm being fattened up again, in any case. For now, if we can't talk about little things, things that don't matter — and they couldn't, how could they, when something that mattered so much was going on all about them, and they were the cause of it all? — 'then let's not talk at all. You may feel like you've slept an age, but most of that was with an 'ifrit inside you,' and even that was more than she should have said, judging by the bemused interest on his face. Hastily, trying to cover up, 'You still need rest—'

'—And food,' he interrupted, with a grin: thinner and less piratic than his standard, but convincing enough. Bathed in malice, she thought it.

'Yes, and food. Fit food,' with a little
gentle
malice of her own. 'No meat, no sweets, no feasting. Not till you're recovered.'

He groaned superbly. 'How shall I ever recover, if you starve me on slops?'

'Slowly,' Sherett said, reinforcing Julianne. 'In your sleep, largely. We're going to leave you for an hour now, will you lie still and rest, or shall I call up my
sodar
to enforce you to it? I'll fetch the Princip after, and then if he allows it you can sit up, take a drink and a little to eat.'

'Where is the Princip?'

'With his granddaughter,' Julianne said. 'With Rudel.'

'Then go, by all means, wherever it is that you are going. I have Jemel for company - and will you wake Marron, as you did me? What's wrong with him?'

'Let him sleep,' Julianne said shortly. That was another story she didn't want to tell. 'The longer the better, for Marron. And you're not to plague Jemel with questions. Jemel, if he tries, you have your own
sodar—'

'—And will use it. I promise.' She believed him. He ached visibly for silence, for solitude, so long as he could share them both with Marron. This all-but-empty palace was too populous for him, as Rhabat had been before. He wanted his friend fit and the open Sands, a spare camel and his wits and skills to live on, nothing more.

Perhaps he could have that now, she thought, with an unexpected flare of hope. Marron was harmless without the Daughter, meaningless in the machinations of the wise. They had no reason to keep him, and he surely had no reason to stay. So he would go, and Jemel would go beside him; and they would find no welcome anywhere in Outremer, so they would be bound for the desert in the end. For the desert and perhaps for happiness, in some scale
...

As was she, perhaps, in some scale. Hasan could make her happy, she thought, if he didn't bring too great a burden of grief and guilt dragging in his shadow — if he didn't seek to instal her in Ascariel, junior wife to its tyrant overlord of her conquered people. If he did that she would be needed, yes, useful beyond the uses of a junior wife, but not she thought happy.

Sherett could make her happy also, in other ways. Sometimes quite unexpectedly, as now, plucking her up by the elbow and wrenching her away without a word, without time to say another word to Hasan. For a moment she felt as though she'd been ripped from all the good that was left in her life. Then, as she was towed through the solarium, she found breath enough to ask, 'Where are we going?'

'In search of a bath, and fresh clothing. I have been caught in a sandstorm and felt cleaner afterwards than that djinni has left me, with all the wind's dust in my hair; you stink worse than a midden. Patrics may not care about such matters, but you will learn that we Sharai are a fastidious people.'