Steles of the Sky (46 page)

She couldn’t deny that power. She knew it. She had lived it—taught it—for twenty years. But neither could she accept its validity, if it were somehow seen as justifying Feroushi and Khraveh having been taken from her.

She sighed and looked down at the snow. “And what of you, Hryorah? You have come to us in an hour of danger; will you stand against this poisonous Nameless and his poisonous designs? Where is the Sun Within on the topic of stopping al-Sepehr?”

Hryorah tried to stare her down—and succeeded. Hrahima’s chin dropped as if someone had taken her head and pushed it forward. She cringed, ears flat, like a cowed cub.

And she persisted. “He is a threat to more than Re Temur, Sister Hryorah.”

“If it is your Immanent Destiny,” Hryorah said, “then I would be persuaded to aid you. But as it is … Monkey politics, Hrahima. Monkey wizards, monkey wars.”

Whiskers flat against her cheeks, Hrahima snarled. “We live in the same world.”

“Monkey politics,” Hryorah repeated. “Monkey wars.”

Hrahima’s tail lashed, but she forced her head up, her gaze to Faranghis. “You?” she asked.

“Sister,” he said kindly, “come home.”

“I don’t want your damned destiny, do you understand? I don’t want your fucking place in the world!”

Faranghis stepped back before Hrahima’s ferocity. Hryorah closed her fingers over the gleaming gold, and lowered her hand to her side.

“Then peace be with you,” she said. “Sister Hrahima.”

Hrahima was pretty sure it wasn’t peace she wanted, either. She knew what she wanted. And it was gone.

22

The Cho-tse emissaries left the day after they arrived, and it was very plain that they had not gotten what they wanted. Temur was becoming accustomed to the ghulim who came into Edene’s white-house every so often to confer with her and glided out again like silent ghosts. Though Temur had begun to feel that the grind of winter would be unending, and that spring and war were a distant unreality, the first signs of their imminent inevitability were appearing. Mares were coming into season, ewes swelling with lambs. Bansh was bred to a smoke-colored stud of Temurbataar’s line in hopes of a filly, this time, and Edene began breaking Afrit to saddle. He took to it as naturally as he took to the breeding pen, where he covered half a dozen mares despite his youth. At six months of age, he had the bone and stamina of a three-year-old, and his fine long neck was starting to develop stallion muscle.

His unnatural growth and Bansh’s spectacular run on mist and snow seemed to have had an effect on the Qersnyk perceptions of Bansh and her colt; they were seen as frankly supernatural now, and—at least by the folk who had already chosen to follow Temur—they were accepted as proof of divine favor.

While Bansh was in the breeding pen, Temur borrowed Buldshak—and discovered that the rose-gray treated him with the same horror she might have displayed if one of the Cho-tse had tried to mount her. Bansh would let him ride, and Afrit acted no differently toward Temur than any other young stallion still learning his manners.

“The curse,” Temur said to Samarkar, reclining back into her arms. The warmth of her body seemed to pull the pain and tension from his shoulders. “Saadet’s curse.”

“What a good thing Bansh is not merely a horse,” she replied.

*   *   *

It turned out that Jurchadai had a genius for administration—a genius that was in grave demand as the roads became passable and the valley began to fill up with more and more people. The shaman-rememberer joined Hong-la in apportioning resources and campsites and settling disputes, freeing up Temur for the ever-more-important business of, as he put it, being a display monarch.

Temur found himself increasingly boggled that this many folk would rally to his banner under any condition, but after a short while he … did not so much accept it as force himself to stop questioning it.

He didn’t have time, anyway. His days became a spiral of strategy meetings, fealty-swearings, requests for healing, and intelligence reports. There were more men of fighting age among the new arrivals, some of whom were the remnants of Temur’s brother Qulan’s army. This necessitated drills and training, wherein Dead Men would learn to fight on the same side as Lizard People—but no matter how much they trained and practiced, the experienced general in Temur’s head knew it could never be sufficient. Al-Sepehr had his own men, Qori Buqa’s, and probably the armies of Kara Mehmed. Temur had the scraps and refugees of four or five fallen cities, a Cho-tse, and a mismatched band of wizards, priests, and sorcerers. Lizard Folk were fierce fighters, and so were Dead Men … but he didn’t have enough of anything to let him sleep at night.

Temur came to rely on Tsareg Oljei and Tsareg Toragana for just about everything pertaining to the running of the camp—at first because they were doing it, and had already been doing it. But he felt confirmed in his decision when they pressed the children into service as messengers, and began sending them around with little bags of purple salt from the Rasan stores, and instructing everyone in what the signal would be for an attack and in how to salt their weapons against blood ghosts.

There was no recent sign of blood ghosts. But they, like Temur, had witnessed the first attack. And he was comforted that someone else would think of defenses, even if he hadn’t.

Samarkar, Hong-la, and Tsering kept their limited number of smiths and artisans busy building engines of war. It was likely that al-Sepehr would bring the battle to them, and she wanted to be prepared. They did not have the forge and foundry facilities to manufacture cannon, so she set them to making arrow-cannons: rows of bamboo tubes, lashed in tiers, that could be stuffed with arrows strapped to rockets. They did not have enough mares for all the mounted warriors, so she arranged for cousins to share horses so everyone could drill. Of course the horses needed rest too—another limiting factor on their readiness.

“We still need more horses,” she told Temur, one day out by the corral where the nucleus of his Sacred Herd was kept when they were not in use among the Qersnyk warriors. Among them were duns bear-colored, eagle-colored, and sand. There were three colors of roans, seven kinds of spots, six colors of bay—including Bansh, and including a blood-nosed bay filly who might have been a black horse, except where she looked as if she had plunged her muzzle into a slaughterhouse trough. There was a bay mare who looked like she’d run through milk, her legs and belly and muzzle white, the rest of her shining metallic mahogany under the rising and setting suns. There was the mouse-colored dun Jerboa, and the rose-gray Buldshak. And there was Afrit, palest of them all, and no other white or ghost-colored horses at all.

Temur watched them, frowning. Samarkar put herself against the rail beside his shoulder. “We’ll face al-Sepehr when he comes.”

“If I thought it would help anything, I’d sue for peace,” said Temur. “We’re not ready to fight this war.”

“The only peace the Nameless offer is eternal peace. They are not conquerors; they’re devourers. They were raised by wolves.”

Temur snorted. “Wolves have strong families, honor their parents, raise cubs with love and discipline, and work together for the good of the clan. Al-Sepehr is no wolf.”

“Fine,” Samarkar said. “He’s a very human monster, then.”

He ground the toe of his boot into the muddy earth. “When I promised to assemble a Sacred Herd, I was relying on my ability to use Afrit to produce some of the rarer colors—I can breed him to a sorrel mare and get a pearl foal, for example. And as fast as he’s growing … But it will be most of a year before his first foals are on the ground. There’s no way I can find or breed another twelve colors of horses before we go to war. And as you said, even with Tzitzik’s lot, we just don’t have enough horses.”

“Well,” Samarkar began, and frowned.

Temur’s mouth did something odd and uncomfortable-looking. “That’ll teach me to make grand gestures?”

She smiled. “We’ll just have to figure out a way to game the system, then.”

He stared at her. She stared back.

“What?” she said.

“I love you.”

“Good,” she said. And touched his cheek before she smiled.

*   *   *

Tsering had first begun teaching Samarkar how to make gunpowder on the journey to Kashe that had ended with their discovery that the city was destroyed and their rescue of the very ill Temur. Now, they stood side by side over trays of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, mixing them in careful proportions and checking each other’s work while Hong-la performed the office of safety inspector. They worked in a covered tent, closer to the road than the rest of the encampment.

It was routine work, if meticulous. And deeply satisfying.

On this particular day, their camaraderie included Temur, who was taking a brief moment to hide from his duties and learn a little about the capabilities of gun powder. He found it unexpectedly fascinating.

Until the lesson was interrupted by the splashing footsteps of a runner, approaching up the road. A Rasani youth, one of the scouts and sentries that had been posted under Hrahima’s command since the roads began to clear, he was moving fast. He dropped to a crouch before Temur. “An army!” he cried.

“Qersnyk riders?”

“Temple monks,” the youth replied. “Thirty score, I’d say.”

Temur’s heart swelled with conflicting emotions: relief, disbelief, joy. He touched the runner on the head and turned to Samarkar. “He did it,” he said, barely accepting what he heard in his own words. “He brought help after all.”

*   *   *

When the cherry and plum blossoms weighted the tree boughs like late season snow and the farmers’ mud-clotted oxen leaned into plow collars, the final army marched in. Five hundred shaven-headed monks in robes dyed a half-dozen drab vegetable colors, barefoot or in sandals, made tidier lines than Temur had ever seen outside of the illustrations in a book on tactics. Like a watercolor of a Song Imperial Army, from the days when there had been a Song Imperium.

Having had a warning of their approach, he sat in Bansh’s saddle on a small rise to review them. On Temur’s left rode Tesefahun on his stocky, pig-bellied roan. Beyond him, Edene, Ganjin in his cradleboard at her knee, stroking Buldshak’s sparse, red-silver mane. Her hand rested over her belly, which did not yet show a bulge, but his heart flared sun-warm in his chest at the sight. On his left rode Samarkar on the white-face mouse-dun, wearing the wizard’s armor Tesefahun had given her with the helm slung by her knee.

My family.

Also arrayed in the group at the top of the rise were Tzitzik, Iskandar who had been Uthman Caliph, Chatagai and his mother Nilufer … and Hrahima, standing out of the horses’ direct line of sight and a little downwind.

The faces of the monks struck Temur most—how different they were, under the superficial façade of regularity and conformity presented by their ordered ranks. But they covered the full range of Song types—and at the back of the ranks, he could see some that were fresh-faced, scared … terribly young.

His own age, Temur realized with a shock. In years only, not in experience. He searched among them for Hsiung. When Temur found the monk, it was an even more brutal twist inside of him. Hsiung was not in line with the others. Instead, he was in a group off to the side, and he rested the fingers of his left hand on a novice’s sleeve as if he needed the guidance. The sash knotted over his robe was not dyed, and Temur had an unpleasant premonition that he knew why.

“Samarkar—”

She reined Jerboa closer. “I see,” she said in a low voice. Another might have found her clinical tone indicative of a chilly soul. Temur knew she had been trained to make it so. “I would not have expected his blindness to progress so fast.”

With Hsiung stood several other monks and what Temur assumed from their black square-sleeved coats were Song emissaries of some sort. There was also a tall, center-wheeled cart with an enclosed box and curtained windows. One of the curtains twitched as Temur glanced that way. Someone shy and important, he deduced, resided within.

Well, one of the nice things about being Khagan was that he could be pretty sure he’d eventually be introduced.

“Send someone for Hong-la,” Temur said to Samarkar. “I need somebody who can handle Song functionary ranks.”

Those varied from kingdom to kingdom within what had been the Song Imperium. But they had some common elements, arising from the same roots. Temur knew some of it: he’d spent his childhood fighting on the borders of Song, after all—and some Qersnyk holdings, like Dragon Lake itself, were ethnically still very much beholden to southern customs. The Wizard Hong, on the other hand, had been raised from birth to be a court eunuch.
He
knew the intricacies well enough to explain the nuances to Song princes. Which was a grasp of etiquette that might even be too refined, if Temur were minded to present himself as a Qersnyk barbarian.

The ill-assorted array of allies accompanying him as he stood in review of his troops might be enough to establish that, of course. But Temur found that another one of the nice things about being Khagan was that he didn’t have to be arsed to care.

The monks and functionaries with Brother Hsiung began to come forward, the wagon rolling with them. Temur saw the subtle movements of Samarkar’s hands behind her mare’s neck as she prepared—but did not yet raise—her wards. But the monks stopped a respectful distance away and below—at the bottom of the hillock.

The novice led Brother Hsiung forward, and—apparently speaking for Hsiung—introduced the primary members of his order, beginning with a leathery one-handed fellow in a black sash named War-zi: Master War.

Like the rank-and-file arrayed below, these elders wore a selection of earth-toned fabrics. As they were introduced, Temur’s suspicion that these monks represented more orders than just Brother Hsiung’s was confirmed.

Hsiung had delivered more than he promised, as he so often did. And he looked thin, weary. Temur, who had seen the sturdy monk cover as much road in a day as the best mare he’d ever known, smoothed away a frown.