Steles of the Sky (61 page)

It settled on Temur’s chest and flipped closed its wings. The primary feathers crossed over its back like a pair of swords. Samarkar knew to lean close: there was no doubt in her heart that this was the vulture that had followed them from one end of the world to the other, beneath every conceivable sky.

Edene leaned close with her.

The vulture thrust its head between theirs, and in the human voice of an old man—an old, arrogant, Qersnyk man—it whispered:
Re Temur Qutluqh.

Twice it whispered, as if to be sure they had heard. It fixed them each with a rheumy, withering gaze. Then it pulled its head back, flipped its wings again to settle them, and waddled off toward the field of corpses as if it had important business there.

“Thank you, Grandfather!” Edene called after it, her gaze unwavering. Samarkar realized she herself had one hand outstretched as if requesting some benediction.

Edene leaned down to Temur to whisper his true name just once into each ear. Samarkar watched, fascinated. When Edene sat back up, she knuckled a tearless eye and said, “Now his ghost can rest, and he can tell his name to the other vultures when they carry him back to the Eternal Sky.”

“That bird followed us from Tsarepheth to Ala-Din and back again.”

Edene’s smile was thin. “Do you think the spirit of Re Temusan Khagan would let so little a thing as death keep him from his family duties?”

Samarkar could easily imagine the spirit of the Great Khagan carried heavenward on such wings, and refusing to move on until the question of his succession was settled to his liking. “If he was anything like Temur,” she said, “no.”

*   *   *

It was Hrahima who found Hsiung, crumpled among the Kyivvan dead on the Dragon Road, at the edge of Samarkar’s crater. The mud had turned his robe the color of the earth, and one hand was cast across his face in a pose of abject surrender. But he did not smell dead, and when Hrahima crouched next to him he moaned softly.

She had a skin of rice wine and trickled some into his mouth. His hand dropped, caught her wrist, and he smiled. Blood crusted his eyelids shut, but the sockets were sunken behind them, and she did not think it would be any use to soak them clean.

“Master War?” he asked, after she fed him a few more spoonfuls of wine.

“Alive,” she answered. “You won’t be quit of your obligations that easily, old friend.”

*   *   *

Edene—one cradleboard slung on either side of the Padparadscha Seat, which fitted Bansh as if she had been born to wear that saddle—found the female Rukh among the rice fields of the Dragon Lake Valley, soaked in mud, surrounded by unhappy villagers, and stunningly alive. She had a broken leg, a wrenched wing, and seemed dazed and disoriented—but the flocks of her younglings surrounded her, and they seemed to be feeding her—and neither she nor they would let anyone approach her.

She drank the muddy water in which she sat, and eventually recovered herself enough to hop and flap to the verge of the lake and bathe in its clearer waters.

On the third day, her mate spiraled out of the translucent sky of Song, and everybody in the vicinity decided they were better off sightseeing from a distance until the Rukhs felt well enough to leave.

*   *   *

Other wizards, Nilufer’s witch, and those with some skill for it tended the wounded. The Ideal Mares had vanished with the deaths of al-Sepehr and Temur, which was one less problem and one more. To Samarkar fell the administration of the camp and the disposition of the survivors. She was not without help: she had Hong-la, Zhan Zhang, and Jurchadai … and Temur’s grandfather, who accepted the death of his grandson with a brutal kind of stoicism that worried Samarkar even as she understood it. It was the same look he’d worn when Temur informed him of the death of his daughter. Samarkar hadn’t liked it then, either.

But there was not much she could do, other than let him work. Tesefahun buried himself in helping to organize the cleanup efforts. “What about the prisoners?” he asked.

“There are no prisoners. Send them home, or let them stay. I care not; the war is over.”

“Kara Mehmed?”

She lifted her eyes at that. “He lives?”

Tesefahun nodded.

“Does Captain Iskandar?”

“He’s wounded. But Hong-la thinks he’ll make it.”

“Then Mehmed is his problem.”

“And Mehmed’s woman?” Tesefahun paused. “A slave. A poetess. You heard her sing.”

“Does she wish to stay with Mehmed?”

“She begs an audience.”

“Fine,” said Samarkar. “Whatever. She can stay if she wants, and I’ll talk to her after the funeral. Oh. Before Tzitzik goes—”

He nodded. “We’re already searching the other camp for the skull of Danupati.”

“Good,” said Samarkar. “She really ought to take that with her, and put it back where it belongs.”

Tsareg Sarangerel was serving as Samarkar’s runner—her page, in Rasan terms. As Tesefahun was leaving, she poked her head in through the door-hide and said, “Samarkar, there is a smith to see you.”

“Send him in.”

He was a Qersnyk, and she found she preferred their straightforward approach to all the scraping and cringing. She straightened up on her bolsters and heaped rugs and cushions, wincing when she heard her back crack. “Tea?” she offered.

“No, Doctor,” he said, using the Song word. “Thank you.” He dipped his head and held a flat cloth packet out to her. “The Khagan ordered this. Before.”

She gestured him to lay it down. “I will see that you are paid.”

“I was paid,” he said, and bowed once quickly—awkwardly—before showing himself out again.

Curiously, she picked it up. It was hard, convex, slightly bumpy within the wrappings. She peeled them back, and found herself holding an ornate chamfron—a horse’s face-armor—in beaten gold, studded with cabochon rubies.

“Oh, Temur,” Samarkar said. She laid it before her on the carpet and dropped her head into her hands. “I’ll see she gets it from you, love.”

*   *   *

There were enough wounded for everyone to practice on a share. Tsering and Hong-la found themselves side by side in the medical pavilions quite often, and Tsering took comfort in his skill, his power, his calm professionalism as she had so often before. She was not prepared, as they scrubbed their hands between patients, for him to treat her with awe.

When she complained, he gave her a sideways look and said, “You will be numbered in the histories of our order, as one of the wizards whose work is to be studied.”

“Oh, I’m a regular Tsechen of the Five Eyes,” she replied.

“He had power,” said Hong-la. “Power is useless without the work of the scholar. And he never rode a dragon, Tsering-la.”

She wound a bandage tighter, had to go back and loosen it again. She shrugged. “We are who we pretend to be, they say. And when we stop pretending?”

“Then we’re nothing at all.” The smile in his voice reminded her that they were wizards, and some of their power grew from that nothingness, and being able to hold its peace and certainty within.

Her face hot, Tsering glanced away. “I’m going to check the amputations for wound fever,” she said, and told herself she could not sense the weight of his attention on her shoulders as she ducked and walked away.

*   *   *

Ümmühan could not bear to face the woman who had killed Saadet ai-Mukhtar. But she thought—just barely—that she could stand to talk to the Wizard Samarkar. After all, it was not as if Samarkar were a complete stranger. From within the safety of her scented cage, Ümmühan had watched her and her allies fence verbally with the old caliph. It was better than facing Edene, or—worse—begging asylum from the newly reinstated Uthman Fourteenth. Idly, Ümmühan wondered if history would remember him as Uthman Fourteenth
and
Fifteenth.

It didn’t matter, she supposed. One king was as bad as another, unless he was the sort of king who taxed and harassed someone other than you. Or other than the Hasitani.

Still, when Ümmühan was led by her guards into the white-house and before Samarkar, her ostentatious courtesy and self-prostration concealed no little actual awe. The woman wore black, a worn coat and boots and trousers, frayed leather gloves, a thick braid no paler in color. The only brightness on her was the collar of carved jade panels and river pearls at her throat.

Ümmühan snuck another glance between genuflections—and stopped her elaborate self-abasement at once when she caught the exasperated look on Samarkar’s face. Ümmühan knelt, finally, her veils in some disarray, and waited.

“Leave us,” Samarkar said to unseen guards and attendants.

There was a rustle as they did. When it ended, Samarkar continued. Her Uthman was very good. “Speak, Ümmühan. What do you require of me?”

“I beg my freedom,” Ümmühan said. “My master is defeated. I am a spoil of war. I beg of you release me.”

“If you are not a slave, poetess, how will you live?”

Ümmühan dared to raise her face. Samarkar was leaning forward, elbows on her knees.

Ümmühan read the expression of honest interest that the wizard wore and said, “I am no mere poetess, Wizard, if you will forgive my impertinence. I am a historian and a scholar. I could be of use to your court.”

The wizard sat back, face suddenly a porcelain mask. “You don’t want to go back to the caliphate?”

“I would ask a boon of Uthman Caliph,” she admitted. “I do think my poetry had some little effect on the troops that turned back to his service. I had been sowing my vipers among their ranks all the long march here. I have … some little influence.”

“I have heard you sing,” said Samarkar. “I do not think you over-brag. I cannot promise on the caliph’s behalf, of course, but I can give him your request. What is it?”

“I wish him to protect the temples of the Hasitani,” Ümmühan said. “That is all. And perhaps make it easier for young women who wish to study rather than to marry to enter their ranks.”

“Huh,” said Samarkar. “Well, I’ll ask. But elaborate: you wish to stay here? Among barbarians?”

Ümmühan bowed her head. She folded her hands in her kneeling lap and tried to look demure. “There is history here to be written,” she said. “There are poems such as have never been heard—in dragon-scale, in stallion’s mane, in the actions of God through the hands of men.”

“Gods,” Samarkar corrected.

Ümmühan let herself smile behind her veil. “We may debate that as much as you wish.”

It startled Samarkar into a laugh. “You’re a missionary.”

“And a historian,” Ümmühan agreed. She meant
poet
as part of
historian,
but she imagined the Wizard Samarkar probably understood it.

Samarkar said, “I’ll want your oath not to seek vengeance here.”

“You have it.”

“I’ll want your oath you are no agent of a foreign power.”

Ümmühan laid herself almost flat on the rugs again. “You have it.”

“Oh, sit up,” said Samarkar. “We’re all spoiled by Qersnyk informality around here. If you keep crawling to people, someone will trip over you.”

Silently, Ümmühan obeyed. She sat very still while the wizard studied her.

Abruptly, Samarkar seemed to come to a decision. She said, “I will put you in the charge of the Wizard Tesefahun. His magic is good Falzeen stuff, not my heathen witchery. I’ll want to read your poems.”

“To censor them,” Ümmühan said, understanding.

“Because poetry is a sort of comfort,” said the Wizard Samarkar.

*   *   *

The first time Bansh wore the ruby gilt chamfron was at Temur’s funeral. He would be exposed to the sky on a platform, left for the carrion birds to bring home to the Eternal Sky, as was the way of his people. But first he would be fixed in a saddle in his armor so he could ride to that final destination as befitted a Khagan.

It had to be Bansh that bore him home, because Saadet’s curse was not broken with her death or his, and still no other horse would bear him.

Samarkar found this all a little horrific and macabre. But no one was asking her opinion, just that she ride and observe. That, she could do. And even carry one of Edene’s children, slung in a cradleboard on Afrit’s withers. Hsiung sat beside them, supported in a sedan-chair for now, until his strength returned. Hrahima draped an arm over Afrit’s withers before the saddlebow. She leaned on the colt and the colt leaned on her, just as if they were not prey and predator. Across the open space, Samarkar could see the Dowager Yangchen’s set face among the red coats of her guards. Though their eyes met, though perhaps a debt of gratitude was owed for Yangchen’s assistance in the final battle, Samarkar had nothing to say to her brother’s widow.

The funeral began at Soft-dawn, with all imperial, barbaric pomp and circumstance. Drums were beaten, swords heaped up like jackstraws around the scaffolding. Bansh paced regally along an avenue lined with mounted mourners despite the deadweight on her back—until she came even with Afrit, Edene, Hsiung, Hrahima, and Samarkar. Then she turned and bowed—a horsy scrape, one leg tucked, nose bent to earth in a delicate bend—and reared up, dragging her rein from the hand of the young man leading her.

She crouched back and dug in as if faced with a steep hill. Then she hurled herself up and forward: at a gallop, snorting, she leaped into the sky. Her hooves rang on the air, that familiar crystalline, carrying tone. She whinnied, and Afrit whinnied after her—but she did not turn, and he did not follow.

Buldshak bumped Samarkar’s knee. Samarkar felt a pain in her hand and looked down to see Edene clutching it, squeezing her fingers. She glanced over, and Edene’s cheeks were glossy-wet, her lashes spiked and shining over her dark, dark eyes.

The sky dimmed swiftly, as if the sun were eclipsed—as if a veil were thrown across it. The bay mare seemed to shimmer as she climbed, her white foot flashing like a star with every stride. The night sky prickled out over them—over a land in Song, guarded by a dragon, which had never before seen a night—and this was a steppe night, thick with stars and moons.

She searched for Temur’s moon, reflexively. But of course it was not there. Not at first, and not as the mare and her grisly rider faded from view, as they had once before.