The Flames of Shadam Khoreh (The Lays of Anuskaya) (9 page)

He guided his ab-sair until he was riding alongside Atiana. “Good day to you, m’lady.”

Atiana remained silent, her eyes fixed on the road ahead.

“Ah, you’re upset. I’ve come without a gift.” He kicked his ab-sair forward, riding into the scrub.

“Don’t, Nischka,” he heard Atiana call behind him.

He continued on, riding toward one of the tall cacti with the thousand arms. He urged the ab-sair forward and stood up on the saddle.

“Nischka, don’t!”

It was a thing easy enough to do on the beast’s wide shoulders. He rode forward, feeling the rhythm of the ab-sair’s powerful gait, and snatched one of the yellow flowers from an arm that hung well wide of the body of the plant. He guided the ab-sair back toward the group, still holding the flower high, and only then, when he was back by Atiana’s side, did he drop down and hold the flower out to her with a flourish.

She made no move to take it. She simply stared at him as if that were the most idiotic thing she’d ever seen.

“They smell like home,” he said, shaking it.

“They smell nothing of the sort.”

He shook it gently, and waited.

With an annoyed look, she accepted the flower and held it to her nose. Nikandr could still smell it: the scent of jasmine, which grew thick and strong in the gardens of Palotza Galostina, Atiana’s childhood home and the seat of her family’s power.

“You’re little more than a fool child, Nikandr Iaroslov.” She spoke the words, but there was a reluctant smile on her lips. She hid it with the flower, taking in the scent again. By the time she lowered it, the look was gone.

“I’ve been thinking,” Nikandr said.

“Have you?”

“I haven’t been truthful about the hezhan.”

“Do tell.”

“Atiana, please, let me get this out.”

She took a deep breath. “You’re right. Go on.”

“I miss the bond. You’ve known that for as long as I have, perhaps longer. But I think I didn’t realize just how much I missed Nasim. I knew him for only a short time before he took to the winds with Fahroz. We were separated by such great distances, and still I felt him. I didn’t know it, but he was there with me, all that time. I felt him growing.” Atiana made to speak, but he talked over her. “I know it sounds foolish, but I didn’t realize any of that until it was taken away from me. I felt him growing over those years. I felt his awareness expanding. I thought it was my own understanding, my own connection to Adhiya and the world around me. But it wasn’t. It never was. It was Nasim’s, or what little he granted me of it.

“On the Spar, when Nasim severed that connection, when he plunged that knife into me, that was all lost to me. Adhiya. The havahezhan. And Nasim. As strange as it sounds, he was like a son to me.” Ahead, the wind pulled up dirt from the desert floor, played with it. Nikandr pointedly ignored it. “While I was up on the cliff, I was thinking only of myself, but last night, lying in the tent, I realized how desperately I want to find Nasim.”

Atiana glanced at him, stared deeply into his eyes, and then focused on the way ahead once more. “So that you can forge a new bond with him?”

Nikandr shrugged. “Perhaps. But I think it’s more than that. We know that Nasim is one key to closing the rifts over Ghayavand. I felt as though, if I had some connection to him, I also had some power over the fate of the world.”

“But you do. That’s why we’re here, to find him.”

“I know, but this is different. There’s always been something about Nasim. I can’t explain it. It’s deep, and ancient. It’s power I’ve never had on my own.”

Atiana was quiet for a time. The only sound came from the plodding of the ab-sair’s hooves. He thought he’d angered her, and he was just about to apologize for making a mess of things again when she began talking. “I know what you mean. I felt the same of Sariya.” She placed the flower behind her ear and urged her mount closer to his. She took his hand and squeezed tenderly. “There are times when I miss that as well.”

She meant well by what she’d said, but it only served to remind them both that Sariya was dead. Nasim might be dead as well. They might be on a fool’s errand, coming to the desert, chasing Sariya’s daughter.

“We’ll find him,” she said, squeezing his hand one last time.

“I know,” he replied, but he wasn’t at all sure it was true.

They continued on toward Andakhara, reaching its outskirts within the hour. When they came abreast of the first of the simple mudbrick homes, the ab-sair wailed. Perhaps in answer, a goat brayed, and a bell clanged, and then a female goat heavy with milk trundled out from behind the nearby home. Her two kids followed, ducking their heads and drawing sharply from their mother’s teats while the mother stared on. As they passed the house—little more than a single room with a thatched roof—a black-haired girl wearing a blue shayla poked her head out from behind a corner.

Andakhara was more than just a caravanserai. There were enough homes for several thousand. On the edges of the village the houses littered the land like scrub brush—most of them with small fields of wheat or flax or bright orange gourds—but as they came closer to the central well, the houses were more tightly packed, including a cluster of larger buildings.

As they continued down a shallow slope, the road wound back and forth through the homes until they could no longer see the desert behind them. Nikandr watched the houses carefully, expecting to see the barrel of a musket poke out from a darkened window. But nothing of the sort happened, and they made their way to the center of the caravanserai. There was one large open-walled structure there. The well house. A dozen or so men stood beneath the shelter of the roof, talking, but they stopped as Nikandr and the others approached. One of them, a thin man with dark brown skin and a wide smile with several missing teeth, broke away, snapping his fingers at two boys as he came. He wore a cap of embroidered wool and a striped kaftan of bright blue and grey. On his hands were silver rings with yellow gemstones—citrine, perhaps, or beryl.

“The fates are kind,” he said in the dialect of Mahndi used in the desert. “Welcome to Andakhara.”

The boys accepted the reins of their ab-sair, waiting patiently for them to dismount. They’d discussed it on the way in, that they should not act as if anything were amiss, even if they feared it. The desert tribes did not like outsiders, and if there was any chance Soroush had gone missing for some innocent reason, they needed to find out. So they would follow their customs and remain as wary as they could until they could learn more.

Once they were all down, the boys took the ab-sair toward the watering trough as a well-muscled man pumped the well. He was bald, except for a full mustache and a trim black beard. He wore no shirt, which revealed the latticework of scars running across his shoulders and chest and arms. He seemed proud to display those scars, however he’d received them. The ab-sair emitted their wails and then fell to drinking the water from the trough, nudging one another out of the way as they did so.

Before offering greeting, Nikandr pulled his veil from his face. Atiana did the same with her veil. Then all four of them reached down and took a small amount of dirt from the dry earth. Nikandr rubbed it between his palms and then smudged a bit across his forehead, showing these men that they would share of their land, not simply use it.

When they were done, the wellmaster smiled and bowed his head. “My name is Dahud. Please, what can Andakhara offer you?”

As Atiana and Nikandr covered their faces once more, Ashan answered, “Rooms for the night, perhaps a handful of water before we leave.”

Dahud smiled widely and bowed his head once more. “In Andakhara you can set your worries aside, at least for the night. Or more, if you’d like.”

Most of the men in the well house had gone back to their conversation, but several were still watching, including the stout man at the pump. Dahud seemed to notice, for he glanced toward the well, and then motioned them toward a large clay building with a thatched roof. “There are few enough who remain for more than a night.” He tipped his head back toward the men. “You mightn’t guess it from the way they act, but we welcome those who do.”

“Another time,” Ashan said. “For now, there are places we must go.”

Dahud parted the beads that hung from the top of the squared doorway. Inside was a room with a dozen piles of pillows with shishas at the center of each. Two old men in striped kaftans sat on the far side of the room, drawing from the ivory-tipped tubes as a haze of smoke trailed up toward the ceiling. They looked toward the entrance, but then returned to their low conversation.

“Please,” Dahud said, motioning to a mound of pillows nearby. “You’ll have drink and smoke, and then we can talk.”

“We couldn’t,” Ashan said.

But Dahud already had his hands up. “A drink and a bit of smoke. Then we’ll talk.”

They waited there on those pillows for a long time. More men came to the smoke house, and then several old couples came in as well. A young woman entered from the back of the building, where Dahud had gone. Another one near Atiana’s age followed soon after. They wandered the room, greeting those who entered, bringing them tabbaq for their shishas and araq in deep blue glasses. They all but ignored Nikandr and the others. The sound of conversation and clinking glasses, even laughter, filled the room, and still Dahud did not come.

“We should go,” Atiana said after a time, echoing Nikandr’s own feelings.

Ashan, sitting cross-legged comfortably, merely patted the air with his hands and told them to wait.

Only after the sun went down did Dahud return. He came with a long-necked bottle. Nikandr found himself more eager to partake of the drink—whatever it was—than he would have guessed. As Dahud sat on the pillows across from Nikandr, the two women whisked in, handing glasses to each of them, including Sukharam, and placing a healthy amount of what smelled like very expensive tabbaq into the bowl of the shisha. After lighting it, they handed tubes to each of them and then left, attending to the crowd that filled the room.

Nikandr smelled the araq and was surprised how complex it was. It smelled of anise, but also of butter and smoke and honey and earth. The taste of it was deep, like a well through the center of a mountain. Nikandr closed his eyes as the warmth of it suffused his chest and gut. Were he alone he would have downed the entire glass and poured another, and perhaps downed that too. But he couldn’t. Not with the others watching so closely. He noticed Atiana watching him. He smiled to her, to tell her he was well, but she seemed as unconvinced as he was.

If only to assuage her, he took up his shisha and drew upon it, inhaling the smoke and holding it for as long as he could. He breathed it out slowly, up toward the ceiling as the taste of oak and loamy forest floor complicated the finish of the araq.

Dahud studied Nikandr’s face for longer than was polite. “You’re a long way from home.” Smoke wiggled out from his mouth and nostrils like a drakhen breathing fire. “I’m sure you know your way, but it’s good you’ve come through Andakhara instead of the taking the western paths.”

“And why is that?” Ashan asked.

Dahud’s smile was wicked. “They aren’t so kind among the hills.” He was perhaps fishing for information—where were they headed? what was their purpose?—but Nikandr would share none of this, and neither would the others.

 
No sooner had the thought come to him than Ashan said, “We’ve come seeking a boy.”

Nikandr snapped his head toward Ashan. He shook his head, hoping Dahud wouldn’t see, but he didn’t understand what Ashan was doing.

Dahud relaxed more deeply into his pillows as if he’d been afraid of their purpose here in Andakhara. “A boy,” he repeated as the young serving woman returned with a platter of dates.

Ashan waved to Sukharam. “As old as him, and a girl five years younger.”

“Who would they have been traveling with?”

“Only themselves.”

Dahud plucked a date filled with goat cheese and pistachios from a wooden tray and popped it into his mouth. “Describe them.”

“The girl had dark brown hair with bright blue eyes.”

“And the boy?”

“Hair the color of aged oak, and burning brown eyes. He might have worn the clothes of the Aramahn, but he would wear no stones. Neither would the girl.”

Dahud shrugged. “There was a girl who came through Andakhara three months ago. She had blue eyes, but she looked older than this young man”—he motioned to Sukharam—“and she came alone.” He took a deep pull off of the shisha, holding the smoke for a long time as the conversation and revelry continued around them. As he blew the smoke upward, adding to the layer hanging over the room, he peered more closely at Ashan. “Is there nothing else you’re searching for?”

Atiana looked cool, but Nikandr could tell from the way she held her hands tightly in her lap that she was nervous. Sukharam, however, seemed as cool as the winds of winter, and it was
Ashan
that seemed nervous. He licked his lips as if he were dying of thirst and glanced to the people over Nikandr’s shoulder.

Dahud leaned in. “I know much, and I know many people far beyond the reaches of this small caravanserai. If there’s anything, you need only name it.”

Ashan looked as though he were ready to ask a question, but then he suddenly looked down at his shisha tube as if it had offended him. “We seem to be out,” he said, motioning to the bowl.

“Ah,” Dahud said. “Right away.” He turned and snapped his fingers to get the attention of one of the women, the younger. As he did, Ashan nodded toward the crowd. Sitting at another shisha was the large man from the water house. He caught Nikandr’s eye and shook his head back and forth while staring pointedly at Dahud, who was still facing away.

The girl slipped off through the smokehouse crowd and Dahud turned back to them. “But a moment… Now, where were we?”

“The boy,” Ashan said. “You’ll ask after him?”

Dahud nodded. “You’ll stay for a day or two, won’t you?”

“We leave in the morning,” Nikandr replied.

For the first time Dahud gave Nikandr serious consideration. “Why, if you’ll forgive the question, are two from the islands here in the desert? This boy must owe you much to come searching so far.”