Farlander (54 page)

Only Ash had saved him face, and then Baracha. They had taken on the demands of reaffirming vendetta, allowing Osh
to return to his room and close the door firmly behind him, there to grieve in his own private way.

Standing before the window now, an image came to Osh
’s mind of Baso laughing as a fork of lightning split the sky above his head. Osh
smiled at the recollection. He had not thought of it in many years.

It was a memory from the second day of their flight from the old country, following the final defeat of the People’s Army at the battle of Hung. Osh
had been the only general to escape from that fateful trap. In a fighting retreat, he and the tattered remnants of his command had made it to the surviving ships of the fleet, harboured thirty laqs up the coast. Without adequate provisions, in disarray, they had set sail towards the silk winds, knowing that their homeland was now lost to them, and exile their only remaining hope; and a slim hope, at that, as the overlords’ navy heaved into sight under full sail.

Unable to outrun them, the ships of his fleet found themselves trapped between the rocky coastline to the west and a storm front approaching from the deep ocean to the south, a sinker of ships if ever there was one; and, right behind, the closing ships of the enemy, outnumbering them at least three to one.

In a last throw of the dice, the fugitives in the fleet turned towards the approaching storm like the desperate men they were.

Baso had been merely a boy then, no more than sixteen, still clad proudly in his battered, oversized armour when most of the other survivors of the defeated People’s Army had removed theirs for fear of drowning. All had seemed lost in those dark hours at sea. Prayers to ancestors tumbled from quivering lips. Amid the screaming gales, rigging and masts broke loose, waves swamped decks and carried men away, capsized vessels entirely. No one expected to make it through alive. Even Osh
thought they were dead men, if not by the hands of their pursuers then by the ferocity of the storm; though he had kept his fears to himself as he ordered the fleet to push onwards, making a show of bravado for the sake of his men, though in reality, within his heart, he felt as broken as the rest of them.

But seeing Baso laugh out loud like that as the ship heaved under his feet and the sky raged above his head, so alive in the madness of the moment and without fear or worry for past or future, or even now . . . The sight had straightened Osh
’s spine a little, and lent him courage when he needed it most.

And now Baso was gone, like so many others, and precious few of Osh
’s original people remained. Kosh, Shiki, Ch’eng, Shin the Seer, Ash . . . he could count those left from the old country on a single hand now. Those few were all that linked Osh
to the distant past in his homeland. It seemed that as each one passed away he grew ever more vulnerable to their loss, and fretted ever more deeply about who might be next.

It would be Ash, he knew. Ash would go next, and his former apprentice would prove to be the bitterest loss of them all.

Ash was still out there somewhere, no doubt in Q’os in the midst of vendetta – at his age, by Dao! Osh
should never have let him go, he knew. Not a man in his condition. But, in his own grief, it hadn’t crossed Osh
’s mind to try and dissuade Ash from his decision, at least not until later, after he had already departed, when Osh
had paused to realize that his old friend was most likely not coming back from this one – just as Baso had not.