Steles of the Sky (54 page)

In the hours she had remaining, she and Saadet Khatun became inseparable. They spent hours on horseback, guarded by the Khatun’s Qersnyk guards, chaperoning each other.

Kara Mehmed took to encouraging her to go out more, for he commented more than once on the new enthusiasm and spontaneity she brought to his bed in the aftermath of those wild, joyous rides.

*   *   *

Samarkar returned to the white-house to find Edene and Ganjin gone, along with Afrit—no surprise, as Edene had already begun tying her son into the mannerly young stallion’s saddle—and Temur just awakening. He struggled up, eyes glossy and distant, and seemed relieved to see her brewing tea by the brazier.

“I know where to get the horses,” he said.

Samarkar gave the tea a final stir and strained it into two bowls. She handed one to Temur and sat beside him in the rumpled bedclothes to drink the other. They leaned together, shoulder to shoulder, and she contemplated the coiling steam as she waited for him to continue.

“I dreamed once of the Ideal Land, where the mares of every color run like bright rivers across an endless steppe. I dreamed of it again just now, and of Mother Night, and that shaman-rememberer Tolui.” He sipped tea, the expression on his face more concentration than dreaming. “There are horses there by the thousands. More than this little army could ever ride.”

“How will you get there?” Samarkar asked, not sure if she should feel like a seek-sorrow or as if she were being the practical one.

Temur waggled his eyebrows at her. “Do you think for an instant that Bansh cannot get me there?”

“You’re the Khagan. Shouldn’t you delegate?”

He shrugged. “I’m the one with the prophetic dreams.”

“Spoilsport,” she said, and hid her smile behind her bowl. When she lowered it again, she said, “You need to deal with that Song princess, Temur. And if you send her home, her father will just dispose of her in some even more desperate manner.”

“What am I supposed to do? Marry her? I have no
name,
Samarkar.”

“Lord Diao is offering an alliance. He’s taking a gamble that you will win. That is all this marriage is. Neither he nor she expects a Qersnyk marriage. You can marry her under the traditions of Song and … you know, if you had done it before now, you might have gotten troops out of it. Or saddles. Who knows?”

He blew a stray strand of hair from sleep-red eyes. “Curse you,” he said. “I’ll settle it after the war. After al-Sepehr.”

The tea was Song style, a mellow red oolong sweetened with puffed rice. Samarkar sipped before she said, “I wish we could take the fight to him.”

“Al-Sepehr? Better if
he’s
worn out from the road, and risking the late storms. Our best hope is that nature will whittle him down for us, because we have nothing that can stand against a battalion of indrik-zver. Not to mention the Rukh.”

“I thought our best hope was that Hsiung would find something in the map that we could use to rig an ambush.”

“Assuming the surgery works, this Soft-dawn.”

“Hong-la’s are the best hands he could be in. He did my neutering”—Temur frowned but held his tongue—“and if it has a chance of working, Hong-la is the one who can make it work.”

Temur grunted and changed the subject—or at least angled it differently. “If only the entrance to Edene’s Grave Roads was in a better position for hitting their flank.”

She smiled.

“You’re the stateswoman,” said Temur. “This is a war. I know how to handle
this.
”

“I think Hong-la and I will have something to say to the Rukh, anyway.” Samarkar balanced her bowl on her knees and stretched her fingers one against another. In a previous encounter, she’d managed to discomfit it badly by turning the wind against it. “Maybe … there is a way. To arrange an ambush. Even if Hsiung’s search doesn’t work.”

Quickly, she outlined her idea. “We will need the gunpowder. Such as has not already been used for rockets and fire arrows.”

He thought, and nodded. “You and Tsering see to it. In the meantime, I want to give you something.”

“Temur—”

“Hush,” he said, and kissed her mouth. He tasted of tea and sleep. She held her breath to keep the flavor when he leaned back again.

“I want you to have Afrit,” he said.

“Edene—”

“Edene agrees.”

She stared at him, but he looked away, into the brazier, and cuddled up to his tea. After a long time, he sighed and said, “No matter what happens to me—or to Edene—if the battle turns bad, you will take Ganjin and flee. Afrit will get you clear. Take him … take him to the Citadel. Take him somewhere where he might have a chance of surviving al-Sepehr.”

“I can’t take Edene’s son and not Edene—”

“She will be in the fight, Samarkar.”

“She’s
bearing
.”

“And she wears the Green Ring.”

She opened her mouth. She closed it. She spat a curse and finished off her tea.

“I hate this.”

Temur’s hand was warm on her knee. “That’s because you are wise, lovely Samarkar.”

*   *   *

Edene returned before twilight with Ganjin excited and bubbly and smelling of horse. She sat beside the brazier and slipped her son inside her blouse. Without asking, Temur came behind her. He brought a bone comb from his pocket, and strand by strand he unbound and oiled and combed out her hair.

Seeing this, Samarkar rose from the maps she was studying. She went to a trunk, and pulled out a book of Song epic poetry that she had borrowed from Zhan Zhang as an excuse to get to know him better. For on such things as friendships did empires rise or fall.

Beside the lamp, where the light was best, she settled herself and began to read aloud. She was halfway through the battles of the Conjured Emperor (who had apparently had rather a lot of them) when the door was pulled aside and Hsiung entered.

His face was serene, his eyes bright brown as Samarkar had never seen them. His new robes hung on a frame still unnaturally spare. He held a cloth in one hand, and Samarkar could see the watery red stains of bloody tears upon it.

He paused just inside the doorway and studied each of them in turn, then bowed and said, “It has been a privilege to know all of you. It is good to see you, finally.”

Samarkar had started to her feet, the book dangling from her hand. Guiltily, she closed it on a ribbon and set it aside. “Brother Hsiung…”

Whatever she might have said, it died in helplessness. Temur and Edene sat mute as well.

The corner of Hsiung’s mouth twitched up. “I know,” he said. “Believe me. Now, show me this map I am meant to be working on?”

*   *   *

They left at Soft-dusk.

In the end it was as it had been in the beginning; Temur alone with his liver-bay mare. That she had ribbons braided into her sparse mane now, in promise of the jeweled chamfron yet to come; that he wore a coat unmarred by battle and unstreaked by blood; that she was groomed to a mirror finish in the dazzling light; these things were insignificant. It was he and it was she, and they were together at the end of winter once again.

This time, there was a crowd to see them off, however, and a shaman-rememberer to bless their journey. And two women who hid their faces, but not their eyes, behind martial helms—one in armor of black lacquer, and one in armor of red metal that flickered flame.

Jurchadai finished his brief invocation, shook a rattle, flicked the dust of the steppe on Bansh’s hooves with a vulture’s feather. He stepped back and stamped the butt of his rattle-tipped staff on the earth.

Temur touched the bow slung by his thigh, and nodded. Then he gave Bansh the reins, and her head.

Though they had left the road clear before her, she mounted the air with the first stride. Temur felt the bunch and push of her powerful haunches, heard her hooves ring with every stride as if they were glass bells. Silence attended her first leap and her second: at her third there rose a shriek. At her fourth, the sound of cheering, and then she galloped into the sky on a rising battlement of noise.

Temur did not look down.

He had done this before—had he done this before?—though the mare had been of the color called storm and he had ridden pillion behind a man in horse-hoof armor, or behind a woman veiled in clouds of silk. The wind rushed in his ears. The cold of altitude burned his nose and fingertips. He did not look down.

He leaned into the small lee of Bansh’s surging neck as she romped joyously skyward. Surely they must strike the vast tent of the heavens soon, smell hair scorching in the fires of the—no, this was Song; there were no stars to burn them. But wait, the sky shivered, the violet-blue softness of dusk, yes, but without opposing sunrise and sunset burnishing the edges of the world. Instead, the eastern sky dimmed indigo, and the western breathed the last gasp of fading rose and gold.

A woman on a horse the streaked color of thunderclouds waited for him ahead, as if at the top of a hill.

She was hard to look at, her whole form lost in veils of indigo that bled off at the edges as if the night behind her had somehow gotten caught and wrapped about her. A plump brown hand held the reins. A curve of breast swelled the stretch of fabric. Stars gleamed in her hair, or perhaps her veil was spangled with diamonds and beaten mirrors, here and there.

He reined Bansh in before her—the mare sidled closer than he would have chosen—and found he had no words.

“Re Temur.” Her voice was the sigh of night winds. “I was beginning to think you’d never come.”

She lifted her right hand and folded down her veils. Temur found himself staring into the face of the shaman-rememberer Tolui, wearing a familiar smug-cat smile. Behind the veiled woman, as if Temur looked past her from the top of a cliff, a green and endless rolling landscape unfurled, grasslands waving to the horizon and beyond. Vast herds of horses roamed that landscape—mares in vivid mineral colors mortal steeds never approached: lavender, yellow, vermilion, crimson, and sky blue. Temur’s eye was caught by a stallion the color of lapis lazuli, streaks of sparkling gold threading his haunches and withers like stars in a midnight sky, his mane and tail blown forward by a bitter wind.

Temur could see through the woman with Tolui’s face, and through her storm-colored mare, as if they were sheerest silken veils. And it was a bright day beyond them, a bright and beautiful day, with all the steppe stretching out and the ragged mountains rising at the edge of the world to hold up a cerulean sky. The indigo stallion called; far away, another stallion answered him.
I am here with my mares, and a wise horse would avoid me.

Perhaps both stallions were wise, because Temur saw no sign of another herd approaching. He opened his mouth and cupped his hands to his ears, hoping to hear the second one again and locate him, but there was only the rustle of the wind blowing through the long green stalks of new vegetation.

Bansh sidled again, nickering to the storm-colored mare as if they were old friends. The woman with Tolui’s face raised her veils again. “You know this aid does not come without price, Temur Khagan.”

“Oh,” Temur said. “I understand.”

26

Bansh climbed, and climbed, and her hoofbeats and silhouette dwindled at a rate far greater than even her great speed justified. It seemed as if she ran through mist, though the sky was cloudless. It was not long before the dusk enveloped her.

Edene watched with head craned back, feeling the gorget of her armor press into her neck below her hair, wishing she had the solid warmth of a good mare under her.

She stood motionless until the Hard-sun rose, and Samarkar stood beside her. They might, in truth, have waited longer—but the thunder of merely earthbound hooves announced one of the Qersnyk outriders, the corpse of a juvenile rukh he’d shot draped across the rump of his mare, blood dripping.

He whooped as he rode, waving a hand in a circle over his head. Edene didn’t need to hear what he was shouting to know.

Here they come.

*   *   *

Armies have an inertia, a great, sliding, grinding weight like loaded wagons skidding. The deployment of Temur’s raggle-taggle troops were already nearly complete—half of them arrayed holding the gorge and barricading the Dragon Road beyond the valley’s mouth. The others—mostly ghulim and the Qersnyk who remained unmounted—were held in reserve. The monks vanished among the trees and the mountainous limestone spires as if they were ghosts in yellow ochre robes.

Edene heard the messenger in her white-house without so much as loosening the collar on her blazing armor. Hsiung was still bent over the map and though he gave only evidence of absorption in his task, she actually would have preferred him to eavesdrop. Temur had regaled her with enough stories of the monk’s courage and resourcefulness that she would not turn down any aid or perspective he might bring.

Edene finished listening to the scout’s information, and that of the two more messengers who arrived while she was debriefing him. She guessed that Samarkar would still be busy managing the few remaining troop deployments. And once that was finished, there would be nothing to do but wait.

But as Edene showed the last messenger out—before she even reached to loosen the straps on her armor—a familiar shimmer of heat and intention burst into presence behind her. Hsiung’s chair tumbled over with a crash, but she turned slowly. She would not show him startlement, weakness, or fear.

Only disdain.

“I was wondering when you’d show up,” she said, when her eye settled on the outline of the djinn. He still blazed actinic blue-white, limned in cooler flames. Her eyebrows sizzled. As she watched, his radiance dimmed until the lines of his face, the curl of his hair became apparent.

He bowed. She wished she could detect mockery in the gesture, but it was spare and crisp, not overelaborate at all. He said, “Perhaps you wish to speak in private?”

Over his shoulder, she met the monk’s gaze. He watched intently, with his newly bright eyes. “I have no secrets from Brother Hsiung.”

“Really?” Now the djinn was mocking. “Not even Stechko?”

“Why are you here?”