Steles of the Sky (27 page)

They had left Tesefahun’s men-at-arms in a Kyivvan town on the north coast of the White Sea, in charge of the dependents of both parties. There, they had sold the horses and such incidentals and fripperies as were not necessary to survival. Then Tesefahun, the man who was not Iskandar, and the six surviving Dead Men had taken ship with the pale-skinned northerners. They had endured the deck of the open boat with its dragon-headed prow, its striped, square sail, and its single bank of oars up the wide, calm waters of the river called Slavutych, to Kyiv. From the port—outside the city walls, and protected by separate fortifications entirely—to the city itself, Tesefahun had availed himself of the litter. He had had to restrain himself from turning around and making a rude, departing gesture in the general direction of the dragon’s gilt teeth as the disguised Dead Men bore him away. Just about anything was a more comfortable method of travel than that boat.

Now Kyiv was in sight, and with it the hope of wealth and perhaps even allies.

Tesefahun might have taken just a small bite of pleasure at the spark of disciplined wrath in the erstwhile guard-captain’s eyes when Tesefahun bossed him around. Something Tesefahun was careful only to do in front of witnesses, when it suited the roles they were playing. As the steady pace of the Dead Men bore them up the road to the great trade city of Kyiv, he refrained. It wasn’t that there was too much tension in him for the game, but at the moment he thought it unwise to provoke Captain Iskandar. Ato Tesefahun leaned over on the litter. Iskandar wore a squint, even though he shaded his eyes with his hand. He kept scanning the clusters of houses and fields scattered between them and the long-outgrown walls of Kyiv with frowning intensity.

“Don’t blink,” Tesefahun murmured. “Kara Mehmed’s entire army might pour out from behind a woodshed the moment your attention lapses.”

That was a dirtier look than usual, but Iskandar did not break character. “My lord has hired guardians,” he said dryly. “Can he fault them if they guard?”

The Dead Men, of course, showed no expression. They might have been marching stones.

Tesefahun said, “A man who takes himself too seriously will fail to find the humor when every joke takes him as its topic.”

Iskandar’s upper lip pinched in a grimace. “Not every joke,” he said. “There’s still the one about the soldier and the nomad girl.”

Iskandar kept his voice dry, but Tesefahun smirked. “And the one about the two priests of the Scholar-God.…”

Iskandar lengthened his stride, so the litter-bearing Dead Men trotted to keep up. Tesefahun grabbed at the poles as he was jounced. As they came up to the city walls with speed, Iskandar called back over his shoulder, “And a man who does not take his enemies seriously enough is more likely to end up on the point of a spear than the butt of a joke.
Master.
”

The walls swept back from heavy gates that had not, to the best of Tesefahun’s knowledge, been closed against a threat in his own long lifetime. Oiled and gleaming hinges attested to the fact that they could, however, on a moment’s notice. And Tesefahun had no doubt that this was practiced with regular drills. The massive and ready military machine of the Kyivvan empire had been the rock upon which both caliph and Khagan had broken and rolled back into the boundaries of their own empires like waves into the sea. That the boyars of the ruling households had never seen fit to attempt conquest in return had more to do with the richness of the fertile Kyivvan plains and valleys and the poverty of the lands south and east than it did any lack of might on their part. Caliphate nor Khaganate had anything Kyiv would want.

It was a measure of Kyiv’s smug sense of security that no one stopped or even seemed to take particular notice of Tesefahun, Iskandar, and their “mercenaries” as they entered.

The guards were easy to pick out of the crowd because they seemed to be chosen for their height, exceptional even among the generally tall and stocky Kyivvans. Guards lined either side of the street at the enormous, whitewashed block of the tower gatehouse, but they collected neither taxes, nor tolls, nor interfered with commerce in any fashion. They seemed content to watch as people eddied and swirled through a grim tunnel studded with the teeth of portcullises and the maws of murder-holes as unconcernedly as they might walk through their own front doors. Some of the guards did see fit to dice a little, though Tesefahun noticed that—like geese—two or three were always sharply alert while the rest went about other business.

The walls were as thick through as a tall man laid down head-to-foot four times, and as Tesefahun and his “retainers” emerged into the sunlight beyond the gatehouse he could see that their backs were braced and reinforced with enormous earthworks, slanted ramps carpeted green with grass. Goats and flocks of sheep grazed here and there on those steep slopes.

The wizard Tesefahun, builder and destroyer, architect of temples and palaces, thought he would not care to be the sapper tasked with bringing down the walls of Kyiv.

The city beyond lived up to the walls and the sprawl outside. The ferocious bustle of the entrance square broke quickly into tributary rivers along each of the five avenues that ran into the city. Tesefahun heard a dozen languages, and despite the reputation of Kyivvans for pallid, unhealthy skin that burned in the sun, he saw men and women as dark as or darker than himself—and many more closer to the tone of Iskandar and his men. But the majority were various unhealthy shades of yellowish or pinkish beige, and their hair all looked as if it had been bleached out with well-aged pregnant mare’s urine preparatory to taking a dye like the one Iskandar wore. They were, indeed, a towering race. If it were not for the litter, Tesefahun would have been eye level with the chins or chests of the majority of even the women.

Tesefahun was too old to stare. But one exceptionally tall man with a beard like brick and braided hair the color of beaten copper might have turned Tesefahun’s head under any circumstances. He was dressed in a self-consciously barbaric fashion, wrapped in furs and plaids, with an axe strapped across the shield slung over his shoulders and a chain shirt slapping his striding thighs. Tesefahun had played the exotic foreigner often enough to recognize the signs, and he would have liked to talk to this extravagant barbarian—but said barbarian was making much better time through the crowd than a litter and three other men could. This was not merely because he was a man alone. But as he stomped along the border of a street ahead of them, anyone who saw him coming quickly stepped aside.

Tesefahun considered shouting after him—but there was a fine line between drawing the right sort of attention to themselves to make their disguise seem natural, and becoming memorable.

Iskandar might be out of the court, but he hadn’t forgotten the skills of reading it. He noticed where Tesefahun was looking.

“You know what that is?” he asked, softly.

Tesefahun nodded. “One of the Skanda relatives of the Kyivvan Skray-lords. A warlord who happens to be a boyar’s cousin. I bet that’s awkward for everyone involved, but someone’s got to row the boats upstream.”

The armies of the north had “liberated” Kyiv some hundred years before, and the northern lords still retained very close ties of kinship, intermarriage, and trade with those of their blood that held Kyiv. Kyivvan trade flowed as much up the rivers to the north, in the summers at least, as it did south to the Celadon Highway. The confluence of two great rivers was not only the reason for the city’s existence. It was the source of its astounding size and wealth.

And this particular warlord was putting on a show for the peasantry as he stomped along—just displaying himself? Rabble-rousing? Moving to or from some appointment? There was a story here, and—as happened increasingly with Tesefahun’s encroaching age—he was forced to acknowledge that he’d likely never know more of it than this brief moment when his own story intersected it.

That the warlord felt the need to make such a display made Tesefahun’s fingertips prickle with nervousness. From Iskandar’s deepening frown, he was not alone.

For once, Tesefahun didn’t have anything witty to say about the lurking shade of Kara Mehmed. But he made a note to himself to discover the copper-headed man’s name and family affiliations, if that were possible.

“Let’s find food,” he suggested. Commanded, really—or so it would seem to anyone who overheard.

But it was Iskandar’s curt nod that confirmed the decision. “A market is a good place to eavesdrop. And my lord will of course need a bed before his important rounds of business tomorrow.”

Under Captain Iskandar’s direction, the Dead Men turned mercenaries turned litter bearers brought Tesefahun down street after narrowing street in which the patchwork materials of oft-repaired walls had been amended with whitewash until they matched—at least to cursory inspection. Kyivvan architecture tended to blockish buildings of three to five stories, tight rows of tiny square windows lining the tops of the second and higher floors. The roof details were arched, and small, round, plain domes proliferated.

They stopped to ask directions to a market once or twice. It turned out to be more challenging than expected to find someone who spoke passable Aezin or Uthman. Tesefahun’s Kyivvan was not entirely bad, but the role he was playing would be stronger if he did not seem the sort to lower himself to learn a foreign tongue, much less speak it poorly. Nevertheless, they eventually found their way to a square formed by the off-center crossing of two great boulevards and the perpendicular spike of a smaller side street. As if the city fathers, in paving, had just thrown their hands up in despair at the prospect of attempting to control the traffic patterns, the whole was a massive and uncontrolled snarl of wagons, riders, pedestrians, and less disciplined forms of conveyance.

Looking around, Tesefahun realized they had come diagonally across a good chunk of the city, and the hulking shape behind the far row of buildings was in fact another portion of the massive wall, and a second, east-facing gate. What he did not see was a market. A few scattered stalls and barrows, certainly—men peddling grilled meat threaded on straws for easy handling, women with parasol-shaded wheeled braziers over which they balanced griddles upon which they flipped a for-all-practical-purposes endless stream of small bubbly buckwheat cakes.

He called out to a prosperous-seeming passerby, a woman whose green skirts were kilted up to display an embroidered undergarment of a flaxen shade that matched her hair. She carried an empty basket and two bags of knotted string, which he took to be a positive sign that perhaps she could help them.

“Market?” he asked, frustrated enough to desert the dignity of his fictional station.

She cocked her head, brows drawn together. When he repeated himself, she frowned at him as if he were a mental deficient and pointed in the direction she’d already been headed, then swept her skirts together and continued on her way across the square, her basket swinging on her arm.

Surely those few stalls and barrows could not be it? Not in a city of this size? Or perhaps Kyiv kept market days, as so many smaller towns and villages did, and this was simply not one? Tesefahun frowned at the expanse of flagstones, the click of booted and clogged feet passing over the filth and muck, the men and women with their bags and baskets laden who must be coming from somewhere—

Such as the massive pale stone building on the opposite side of the square, which he had taken for a barracks or an armory with its street-level doors and windows covered by pierced stonework lattices. But people with empty baskets went in, and people with heavy baskets came out—and Tesefahun realized he’d been guilty of the sin of assuming that another land would share the customs with which he was familiar. And which might not make any sense in a clime where rain was not an occurrence all but confined to the monsoon, and where biting cold and iron-hard ground heaped with ice and snow was not a phenomenon isolated to the mountains.

His teachers at the University in Aezin would have been shamed by their student’s failure to observe—if they were not by now all dead of old age, as was more likely. The market, of course, was
indoors.

He related his revelation to Iskandar, who went from looking baffled to looking irritated in the pace of a second. To his credit—and he was one of the better of his dynasty, for all that was like saying a tapeworm was better than a guinea-worm—the sharp little shake of his head that set his twisted braids a-rattling betrayed the target of the irritation as himself rather than anything or anyone external.

“Of course,” he said. “How stupid.”

“Food and, eventually, lodging,” Tesefahun replied. “Let’s go.”

“Next time, I ride in the litter and you march alongside,” Iskandar replied.

“I’m lighter.”

Iskandar snorted. He struck out across the square. The Dead Men had learned their roles with the quick facility by which they seemed to pick up everything. The two not engaged in hauling Tesefahun about darted to the lead to clear a path for the litter; the other four kept pace with their “captain.”

Tesefahun settled back among his cushions and steepled his hands, enjoying the cool brightness of the afternoon now that they were out from among the closeness of the whitewashed alley walls with their patchwork construction of brick, stone, daub. He considered the architecture of the market more closely, now that he was aware of its purpose—and indeed, it would make a poor armory. There were too many doors—three at least on the long side facing him, one on each corner and one in the middle. That suggested there were probably an equivalent number on each of the sides.

Unlike other buildings in Kyiv, the market was not whitewashed, but instead built of wonderfully worked blocks of beige stone with only a little color variation. The façade was decorated with several towers, but otherwise blocky and square. The few windows, like the doors, were narrow, tall, and arched at the top, defended by ornate stone grilles. The second story was as blocky and square as the first, though smaller and shorter, and balanced atop the lower like a layer of a cake. The third story, however, was a fantasia of towers leading up to a roofline broken itself into a dozen or so of the ubiquitous small round domes that seemed everywhere in Kyiv. These were not the grand domes of Uthman architecture, which tended toward onion-shaped flares or enormous vaults, but either squat hemispheres like a half-orange laid cut-side down on a plate, or slightly more elongated ovals like half a sliced hen’s egg.