Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (70 page)

Jemel shivered; he would cross the Sands on foot with a leaking waterskin, sooner than go to sea in a boat. The two vast congregations of water that he had seen, the Dead Waters and this river in Surayon, both attested to the wisdom of his fears. The one was washed through and through with alien malignity, the other was a penned demon at the head of the valley and a stretching giant here, swelling with its own potent life. And they were both insignificant, he was told, as weak as starlight next to the moons weight and majesty, when they were considered next to the sea.

He would not see the sea this day, at least. He had that comfort. Surayon had never reached so far. Folded or open, it had never made a wall across the width of Outremer; the river splayed out, he'd been told, as the mountains fell, and a broad salt marsh lay between the valley and the coast, where sea and river mingled. Going north or south, men followed the road that hugged the hills, unless they chose the nutshell ride and took a boat to sea.

When Surayon was Folded, that road acquired a Fold of its own. Marron had told him of it, carefully not saying from whom he had heard the story. Jemel knew: silence, namelessness meant Sieur Anton.

But the road was open now, it led into Surayon like a woven thread and not directly through it like a stitch in a hem. An army had marched up that road yesterday, one of the armies that had come to harrow the valley. Jemel could not reach the sea today if he had chosen to; half the fighting men of Outremer lay between it and him.

The formal fields and their defensive, deceptive walls had been left behind swifter than he had looked for. As the mountains had diminished to north and south, so too had the walls; as the valley had broadened and stretched itself, so too had the fields. Now they rode through olive-groves and pastures, there was sheep-dung in the turf and ought probably to have been the sheep themselves cropping in the shade, except that war had come to Surayon and the flocks were taken or fled.

That was the only way that he could see the war, in its absences: no flocks of sheep or goats, no women fetching water from the springs, no idle men or boys at play among the trees. As he could hear it only in its silences, no voices on the wind, no birdsong. The harsh sounds of crickets he could hear, louder than they ought to be against the hush; anything more clever than a cricket was gone or simply beaten down by dread, by the taint of wet smoke encroaching.

There was nothing to be seen but the low shoulders of the hills outflung in scarps and vales, these
gentle
r slopes he rode on, groves and orchards and sweet green forage. Nothing was burning in his sight, though he stood high in the stirrups; there was only the smell of it like a song to destruction, a promise of what he was to find.

That smell must be riding further than he'd thought it could on this wet and heavy wind. He was still confused by the scale of the country, confused both ways at once. He had problems with the idea of borders in any case, of a line drawn across the land to say that this is one people and that is another. There were tribal boundaries in the Sands, of course there were, but they were as fluid as the Sands themselves, shifting in the winds or with the strengths of the tribes that held them. Permanence was different, difficult, he'd take the steady rocking of a camel's saddle any day over the steadiness of rock. And tribal lands were measured in days of riding, a week was not too long to span Saren country; here he had stood on the Princip's terrace and seen the northern border of Surayon, turned his head and seen the southern, a single valley that he could walk across in half a day and they called it a country, an independent state.

So he had squeezed his imagination, compressed his understanding until he knew that Surayon was small, the pip within the lemon. But they had been riding since the first dawn, sun-up behind the mountains and its creeping light across the sky to say so, looking for the war and had not found it. There was no surprise that he could see among the men he rode with, so he supposed that the land had not been stretched during the hours of darkness, while time had been cruelly stretching out beside him in the bed. A man of Surayon should know his own borders, penned as he'd been all his life within them. The army they rode to meet was not so near as he'd thought; its smoke had far outrun it.

That might be just as well, as they were ill-provided to face an army. Two dozen men, well-mounted but lightly armed: this was going Sharai-style and all very well for a tribal raiding-party in the Sands, but his companions were Patric and would not understand the way of it. Patrics rode in batt
alions and fought like chained li
ons, face to face until one fell. They won their victories by weight — weight of armour, weight of numbers, as they ruled the lands they governed by the weight of the stone that they cut and moved and built with - or else by simple stubbornness, outwaiting their enemies, being the last in the field at the end. They would think it shameful to strike and run as the Sharai did. It was how the Patrics had taken all this country long ago, by standing and dying and never moving on. They had pinned it down with their castles, ripped it open with their ploughshares, built a web of roads and cities all throughout. So he had heard, at least, that these lost lands had been made bad country for the Sharai way of war. But this band was fitted for nothing more. Perhaps they might come upon other Surayonnaise, before they met the army out of Ascariel; perhaps they might make a little army of their own. If so, Jemel would still not stand and hack in line, as the Patrics did. He could ride scout, stand off and use his arrows, harry the enemy's flanks, whatever came best to him at the time, how it all fell out
...

Or none of those, if it all fell out as the wise men had been urging all night. Riding in the stink of war with weapons at belt and back, it was hard to remember that they might not fight with those they went to meet. Riding in a weary rage, it was hard to remember why he had chosen to ride with these Patric companions sooner than fight against them; it would be harder yet if they did not bring him to any kind of fighting.

There was still none to be seen as he guided his mount between twisted trees to the crest of another rise, a running rib from the southern hills. Gazing westerly, he saw land roll and roll into a far-distant haze, thicker and wetter than the shimmering heat that brought the mirage; he thought he might almost see a gleam at its heart, sunlight dazzling on immeasurable water. If Marron had been with him and no one else, if things had been utterly other than they were, he thought that one or other of them would have said the word, and they would have ridden on together until their horses were knee-deep in an ocean.

He had never seen an ocean, and still never thought to see one.

He turned his head away from what might have been the sea, and looked left to where the man Markam had ridden up beside him.

'You promised me a road, from south to north; you promised me an army, and I do not see either one.'

The smile he got in response showed no teeth, and no humour. 'Patience, hornet. You see that shale cliff, a league to the west and south of here? That marks a break in the hills, and a long vale running southerly. That's where the road lies, and that must be where the army lies; they have made a scorched hell of the vale,' and for the first time there was real passion in his voice, a pure fury, 'and have spent the night sleeping in their own creation. For now, we will ride on towards the road, which runs low behind a ridge ahead; and if we meet a scouting-party before we come to the vale's mouth, and if those scouts have yesterday's orders still in their minds, to do to all of us here what they have done to our friends and cousins in the vale there — well, perhaps we will see If a desert hornet deserves its reputation. I confess, I would welcome the chance. The Princip could have no complaint if we were attacked, and had to defend ourselves.'

Jemel thought he would be equally glad of it, for very different reasons. He had no love of this ravaged land and nothing invested in it; only a raging distress that was easier to handle if he called it simply rage, and would be easier yet if he could stop thinking at all and channel it simply from his heart into his hand.

And then he could, and did; and there was nothing, nothing at all to be glad about.

They came out of the ground, out of the harsh and sour soil that was compacted so hard around the roots of ancient trees, that had been trodden for generations by foot or hoof and disturbed only by the slow stretching of those roots beneath, soaked and baked and soaked again until it made a solid coherent mass with the rocks it covered. No grass grew there in the trees' shade, nothing grew but the trees themselves and they had to reach far down between the rocks to find anything good to feed on. Embittered by a lack of care, that soil could have nurtured nothing but the twisted olive and its black thoughts.

Nothing till now. Now the ground, that soil, those rocks all trembled beneath the gathered horses' hooves, startling beasts and riders both. Jemel had heard tell of tremors
in
the earth, that could rattle mountains till the land slipped from its stony core, shake buildings into their component dust, rip cracks in solid ground wide enough to swallow camels and their burdens too. He had never felt one himself and gave the stories little credence, preferring the certain knowledge of his own feet as they told him that sand might shift on the wind, shale might slip under a man's weight but what lay beneath was immovable with age and mass and endurance, all the potent majesty of rock.

His horse danced, or the ground danced beneath it; it whinnied with anxiety, and he had to bend low over its suddenly sweating neck to reassure it, when he felt most like crying out himself with shock and fear. There was a terrible wrongness to this, the same chill touch as when the sun went black in the middle of the day, and that he had seen once in his childhood.

Stooping forward with his head against the horse s ear, he could watch the earth below. He could see dust rising in
little
puffs and wisps, like steam forcing from under a pot-lid. He could see the hard-baked cracks in that crusty soil stir and widen, he could see great plates of earth pull free of rocks they must have bound like mortar for a century or longer; he saw a gnarled and blackened tree-root twist as though the olives themselves were coming alive within this living land, as though they would pull up their deep-delving taproots and join the march of armies. Perhaps they would, perhaps the trees would be the Princips last defence, a long-hidden sorcery of horror.

But the trees, all this grove of trees would topple before it marched. It must do, with no binding at its roots to hold its old trunks upright. The soil seemed to upwell suddenly, all along the ridge where the horses fretted; and then it burst open, shattered, erupted into clods and dust. It broke like eggshell before the many-headed battering of innumerable serpents, all coddled as it seemed in the same deep nest. They hurled that smashed shell high, and Jemel had just a moment to see them clearly before the debris fell back in a blinding, unbreathable cloud.

Thick as his thigh they were, and black as the olives' thoughts. They flowed up and out of their dark dwelling like those thoughts made viable, twisting and glistening like the distant river as it picked itself apart like so many silverdark threads fraying into the marshland ahead.

Serpents did he name them, in that moment of their eruption? They had mouths like serpents, though their teeth were something other, unnatural needles and far too many of them, no mortal creature could eat with teeth like that. They broke out like a knot of vipers, bodies all tangled together, and they surged apart something like the river indeed, what had been one becoming many, a twisted rope in all its separate threads; but these threads were obsidian and they looked as hard as stone, as flexible as wire, as swift as a whip.

Even those needle teeth were black, and the brief glimpse he had of a gaping throat behind, ridged like a dog's. Then the choking murk descended, most of it crumbled into a bitter grit that stung the eyes, invaded nose and mouth and stifled breath.

Jemel had lived through a three-day sandstorm once, and lesser storms were commonplace in the deep of the desert. For this, he needn't even think of hood and veil; it would pass, and worse things would happen before it did.

Worse things were happening already. Horses were screaming beyond where he could see. A man's voice joined the screaming there was no terror in that cry, nor in the horses', only pure agony, the voice of courage driven beyond extremity. Those teeth were finding out their targets in the filth; 'ifrit were feeding.

No question in his mind, but that these were 'ifrit. All but buried in all that black, he had seen hints of red like jewels aflame, eyes hidden deep where it would take a long needle to come at them. He could see them still, flashes of fire through the dust as the serpent-beasts quested for men.

Or for horses. He hadn't realised, hadn't felt it rise, only his body reacting all unaware to keep him mounted and balanced while his eyes strained and his mind raced, but his own mount had reared, its forelegs kicking wildly as though it scrabbled for a safe stand in mid-air; something worse than the lack of one made the animal topple suddenly sideways, made it crash hard to ground, made it scream.

Jemel was off already before it struck, diving and rolling. He felt more than the thick shaft of the bow beneath his back, in that tumbling roll; there was sharp rock and shifting clods of earth, but also there was something fat and hard that moved beneath his weight, reacted to it, reared up against it. He must have rolled clean across the body of an 'ifrit as it unwound itself from the tangle of its brethren, turning its hot eyes and chilly mind towards the slaughter to come.