"Do you know
how far
that is?" his mother Katyun shrieked, rounding upon him. This was the worst part, actually: she was normally so calm. He didn't like it at all when she was upset. It was also a difficult question. He didn't really know how far away his father was.
"I took clothes," he said, pointing at his pack on the floor. "And my second warm vest you made me. And some apples. And my knife in case I met someone bad."
"Perun defend us!" his mother Jarita exclaimed. She was dabbing at her eyes. "What are we to do? The boy isn't eight years old!"
Shaski wasn't sure what that had to do with anything.
His mother Katyun knelt down on the carpet before him. She took his hands between her own. "Shaski, my love, little love, listen to me. It is too far away. We do not have flying creatures to carry us, we have no spells or magic or anything to take us there."
"We can walk."
"We
can't,
Shaski, not in this world." She was still holding his hands. "He doesn't need us now. He is helping the Kings of Kings in a place in the west. He will meet us in Kabadh in the summer. You will see him then."
They still didn't understand. It was strange how grown people could fail to understand things, even though adults were supposed to know more than children and kept telling you that.
He said, "Summer is too long from now, and we mustn't go to Kabadh. That is the thing we have to tell father. And if he is too far to walk, let's get horses. Or mules. My father got a mule. I can ride one. We all can. You can take turns holding the baby when we ride."
"Holding the baby?" his mother Jarita exclaimed. "In the Lady's holy name, you want us
all
to do this mad thing?"
Shaski looked at her. "I said that. Before."
Really. Mothers. Did they ever listen? Did they think he
wanted
to do this alone? He didn't even have any idea where he was going. Only that his father had gone one way on the road out of town, so he had gone that way himself, and the place he was at was called Sarantum, or nearly that, and it was far. Everyone kept saying that. He had
understood
that he might not be there by nightfall, walking alone, and he didn't like the dark now, when his dreams came.
There was a silence. His mother Jarita slowly dried her eyes. His mother Katyun was looking at him strangely. She had let go of his hands. "Shaski," she said finally, "tell me why we mustn't go to Kabadh."
She had never asked him that before.
What he learned, as he explained to his mothers about the dreams and how he
felt
certain things, was that other people
didn't.
It confused him, that the pull to go away, and the other feeling-the shape of a black cloud hovering whenever they said the name
Kabadh
-was not something either of his mothers shared, or even understood.
It frightened them, Shaski saw, and that scared him. Looking at their rigid expressions when he finished speaking, he finally began to cry, his face crumpling, knuckles rubbing at his eyes. "I'm- I'm sorry, "he said. "For run- running away. I'm sorry."
It was seeing her son in tears-her son who never cried-that made Katyun realize, finally, that there was something very large at work here even if it was beyond her grasp. It was possible that the Lady Anahita had come to Kerakek, to this insignificant fortress town at the desert's edge and had laid her finger on Shaghir, their darling child, Shaski. And the Lady's touch could mark a human being. It was known.
"Perun guard us all, "Jarita murmured. Her face was white. "May Azal never know this house."
But he did, if what Shaski had told them was in any way the truth. The Enemy knew Kerakek already. And even Kabadh. A cloud, a shadow, Shaski had said. How should a child know of shadows like that? And Rustem, her husband, needed them in the west. More north than west, actually. Among the infidels in Sarantium, who worshipped a burning god in the sun. Something no one who knew the desert could ever do.
Katyun drew a breath. She knew there was a trap here for her, something seductive and dangerous. She didn't want to go to Kabadh. She had
never
wanted to go there. How could she survive in a court? Among the sort of women who were there? Even the idea kept her up at night, trembling, sick to her stomach, or brought dreams, shadows of her own.
She looked at Jarita, who had been so very brave, hiding the blackness of her grief at the tidings of Rustem's elevation in caste, his summons to the court. The summons that meant they were to find her another husband, another home, another father for Inissa, little Issa.
Jarita had done something Katyun didn't think she herself could have done. She had let Rustem, the husband she loved, go on his journey thinking she accepted this, that it even
pleased
her, so that his heart might not be troubled in the wake of such great tidings as he had received.
In Perun's name, the things that women did.
It
didn't
please her. It was tearing her apart. Katyun knew it. She could hear Jarita in the dark at night, both women awake in the small house. Rustem ought to have seen through the deception, but men-even clever men-tended to miss these things, and he'd been so greatly caught up in healing the king, and then the caste elevation and his mission to the west. He had
wanted
to believe Jarita's deception, and so he had. And in any case, it was not as if a man could refuse the King of Kings.
Katyun looked from Shaski to Jarita. Rustem had told her the night before he left that she would have to do the thinking for the family, that he was relying on her. Even the students were gone, to other masters. She was on her own with this, as with all things now.
The baby cried from the other room, waking from her afternoon sleep, swaddled in her wooden cradle near the fire.
Kerakek. Kabadh. The Shadow of Black Azal. The finger of the Lady touching them. Shaski's…
feelings
about these things. An understanding coming, late, of how he had always been… different from the other children they knew. She had seen it, actually, had resisted. Perhaps in the same way that Rustem had resisted knowing how Jarita really felt: wanting to believe she was happy, though it might wound his pride. Poor Jarita, so delicate and so beautiful. Sometimes there could be flowers in the desert, but not in many places and not for very long.
Sarantium. Even larger than Kabadh, they said. Katyun bit her lip.
She hugged Shaski and sent him to the kitchen to ask the cook for something to eat. He hadn't had his breakfast yet, had left the house in the dark while they slept. Jarita, still white-faced as a priestess on a night of the Sacred Flame, went to the baby.
Katyun sat alone, thinking hard. Then she summoned a servant and sent him to the fortress with a request that the garrison commander be so good as to honour them with a visit when time allowed.
Boredom. A sense of injustice. A peace bought with gold. They all came together for Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, in that winter of bitterness.
He never
used
to find it tedious here in Kerakek. He liked the desert, the south: it was what he knew, the world of his childhood. He enjoyed the visits from the camel-riding nomads, going out to drink palm wine with them in their tents, the slow gestures, silences, words doled out as carefully as water. The people of the sand were important here, buffers against the Sarantines, trading partners bringing spices and gold from the distant, fabled south on the ancient camel routes. And they were advance troops in any war.
Of course some of the desert wanderers were allied with Sarantium and traded there… which was why it mattered so much to keep those tribes that favoured Bassania happy. The soldiers didn't always understand that, but Vinaszh had grown up in Qandir, even farther south: the nuances of Ammuz and Soriyya and the nomads were no mystery to him. Or less of a mystery than they were to most men: no one could truthfully say they understood the peoples of the sand.
He had never nourished visions of himself in a more prominent place or role. He was a garrison commander in a world he comprehended well enough. It had been, until recently, a life that pleased him.
But this winter the court had come to Kerakek, and a good part of it-with the king himself-had lingered as an arrow wound healed, and the ripples that followed upon the deaths (some deserved, some not) of princes and royal wives subsided.
Vinaszh, who had played no small part in the events of a terrible day, had found himself altered after Shirvan and the court left. The fortress seemed empty to him. Bleak and echoing. The town was what it always had been… a dusty, eventless cluster of little homes. And the wind kept blowing from the desert. He had dreams in restless nights.
A disquiet had entered into the soul of Vinaszh the commander. The winter stretched like an uncrossable abyss, day passing, day passing, painfully slow, and then darkfall. The sand, which had never bothered him in his life, he now noticed all the time, everywhere, slipping through cracks in windows and under doors, into clothing, food, folds of skin, one's hair and beard, one's… thoughts.
He had begun drinking too much, starting too early in the day. He was intelligent enough to know that this was dangerous.
And it was as a consequence of all of these things that, when the doctor's servant climbed the winding path and steps up from the town and delivered that household's request for a visit when time allowed, time did allow, almost immediately.
Vinaszh hadn't the least idea what they wanted. It was a change, however something new in the blank, stolid routine of the days. That was enough. The doctor had left a while ago. He'd been planning to spend some days in Sarnica, Vinaszh seemed to remember. Depending on how lone; he'd lingered there, he might even be in Sarantium by now. The doctor's women were pretty, he recalled, both of them.
He sent the servant back with a coin and word that he'd be down the hill later in the day. As it happened, it was easy to be agreeable when the request came from the household of a man about to be elevated in caste and summoned to the royal court by the King of Kings himself. Honour beyond belief, really.
Not that Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, had been summoned anywhere, or promoted, or honoured, or… anything at all, actually. Not that anyone in the court had paid the least attention while they were here to whose
idea
it had been to intervene in that mighty company and-at considerable personal risk-urge the summoning of a local physician to the king's bedside that dreadful day earlier this winter. And who had then assisted the doctor
and
killed a murderous prince with his own blade.
It had crossed his mind to wonder if he was being-however unfairly-punished for the flung blade that stopped a treacherous son.
It could be. No one had said this, no one had even
spoken
to him, but someone like the round, shrewd vizier might say that his continued existence after such a deed was-or ought to be-seen as gift enough. He had slain royalty. Blood of the Great King's blood. With a dagger drawn and thrown in the presence of the king, the sacred Brother to the Sun and Moons. And yes, yes, he
had
done that, but he had been
ordered
to be on the alert for danger when Murash came back to the room. It had been an act of absolute duty.
Was he to be abandoned, forgotten here in the desert, for having saved the life of his king?
It happened. The world of Perun and Lady could not be said to be a place where just rewards held sway. The presence of Azal the Enemy meant that this would always be so, until Time itself came to an end.
Vinaszh was a soldier. He knew this to be true. The army was rife with injustice and corruption. And civilians-perfumed, sensuous court advisers, sly and unctuous-could choose to block the paths of honest, rough soldiers for their own reasons. It was the way of things. Not that understanding this made it easier to be enduring the process, if that was what was happening.
His father had never wanted him to go into the army. Had he remained a merchant down in Qandir, none of this would ever have come into his life.
He would have sand in his wine cups and bed and wouldn't care.
Men changed, Vinaszh decided, it was as simple-and as complicated-as that. It seemed that he himself had now changed. Things happened, small events or large ones, or perhaps time passed, nothing more than that-and you woke up one morning and were different. There had probably been a time, he thought, when Murash was content to be a prince of Bassania, son of his great father.
Difficult thoughts for a soldier. It would have been better to be in the field with an enemy to face. But there was no one to fight, nothing to do, and the wind kept blowing. There was sand in his cup right now, grit in the wine.
He ought to have been recognized for what he'd done. Truly, he ought to have been.
Some time after midday he went down the hill, riding towards the doctor's house. He was received by the two women in a front room with a fireplace. The younger one was
really
quite lovely, very dark eyes. The older was more poised, did all of the talking, her voice modestly low. What she said, however, took Vinaszh's thoughts abruptly from his own affairs.
Fate, chance, accident? An intercession of Perun? Who would presume to say? But the simple truth was that the soldier son of a merchant from Qandir, who happened at that time to be commander of the garrison at Kerakek, was a man more than a little disposed towards accepting such things as the woman told him that winter afternoon. The nature of the world was far beyond the grasp of men, everyone knew that. And here in the south, near the desert peoples with their inscrutable tribal rites, reports like this were not unknown.
At one point they sent for the boy at his request and Vinaszh asked him some questions, then they sent him back out again. He had answered readily enough, a serious child. He was happiest in his father's empty treatment rooms now, one of the women said, almost apologetically. They allowed him to play there. He was almost eight years old they said, when Vinaszh asked.