Farlander (32 page)

‘Good.’

‘Tell me, then. How did you choose him?’

Ash was unsure of how to answer that. For a moment he was back in Bar-Khos, drifting in dreams during the long hot siesta, as a young man sneaked into his room to steal his purse.

Ash had been dreaming of home then: the little village of Asa, snuggling deep into a twist of the high valley floor – the view pitching sharply downwards past the many terraces of rice and barley to an endless stretch of blue sea that reached as far as the horizon.

Butai, his young wife, had been there, too. She was standing in the doorway of their cottage, a basket of wild flowers in her arms. She had a gift for making them into subtle perfumes, forever surprising him with new fragrances, and she was watching their son for a moment as he chopped wood in an easy, practised way; a boy of perhaps fourteen.

Ash had waved to them, but they did not see him – they were laughing instead at something the boy had said. Beautiful in her laughter, his wife looked as girlish as she ever had.

And then Ash had awakened in a strange room, in a strange city, in a strange land, in a strange life that was not in any way his own . . . his eyes wet with grief, the sense of loss within him as raw as though it had happened only yesterday. Pain washed through his head so sharply it was enough to blind him. He had called out to someone nearby, thinking for a moment that it was his son – yet, even as he did so, he knew that it could never be his son. In that same moment he had felt an isolation so all-consuming that he could not move for it.
I will die alone
, he had thought.
Like this, blind, with no one by my side
.

‘It seems’, he heard himself say to Osh
, ‘as though he was chosen for me.’

Osh
accepted this, at least partly. ‘For what purpose, do you wonder?’

‘I do not know, but it is as though we both have need of each other in some way. I cannot say how.’

Osh
nodded, with a knowing smile, but whatever it was that he suspected he chose not to voice it. Instead, he said, ‘So you have not changed your mind about taking over the reins from me? I thought perhaps that you might, if I goaded you enough with Baracha’s name.’

Ash could no longer meet his master’s eyes.

‘What would be the point? The illness is growing worse, and I do not think I have much time left to me. You know of my father, and his father before him. After their blindness struck, they went with great speed in the end.’

The smile on Osh
’s face faded, as a soberness came over him. He inhaled a sharp breath. ‘I feared as much,’ he admitted. ‘But I hoped otherwise. I am deeply sorry, Ash. You are one of the few true friends I have left.’

A bluebird was singing outside in the courtyard. Ash turned his attention to it, away from his friend’s untypical display of emotion.

The young Osh
would never have been so open-hearted – not that Osh
who had trained as R
shun back in the old country and in the old ways where only a few ever survived the ordeal. The same Osh
who had left the original R
shun order after they had sided with the overlords, and who later became a soldier and fought at Hakk and Aga-sa, and somehow survived them both too; who had gone on to win honour after honour in the long war against the overlords, creating a name for himself, earning a high command in the ultimately doomed People’s Army. Back then, it would have been unimaginable to hear the general lamenting so openly over the fate of a comrade. Even less so as he subsequently led them into exile, the only general able to fight his way out with his body of men intact after surviving the final, fateful trap that had destroyed the People’s Revolution once and for all.

Osh
had been lean and strong and tough in those days, a hard bastard in truth. His firm command had held them together on their long voyage to the Midèr
s, when most of those in the fleet, including a grief-stricken Ash, had simply wished for death after their defeat and the loss of their loved ones either fallen in battle or left behind. When they had finally made it here to the Midèr
s, and others in the fugitive fleet had taken up arms to serve as mercenaries for the Empire of Mann, or else turn against it, Osh
had struck out on a different and much more uncertain path. The path of R
shun.