Servants and Followers (The Legends of Arria, Volume 2) (59 page)

“
My name is Yaggee. I
saved your life. You owe me for that, Goga, at a great price.” She
said, turning back towards him with a pot in her hands.

He winced at the
sight of her face. He usually avoided female company, too busy with
his duties to his brother and Coe Aela to bother much about
friendship, love, and marriage to a woman, but at least he knew
that this woman was not pretty, and far from beautiful. He would
not have been interested in her. “How do you know my name? And what
sort of a price?” He asked. “I have little in the way of money with
me, and you
…
”

“
Oh, Goga, Goga,” She
said, ignoring his dismay as she put the pot down on the ground of
the cave, and submerged her hands into it. “I have no need of your
money. Not that you ever had enough that you could have given me to
satisfy your life debt.” She said, removing her hands from the pot,
now covered in a gooey, mud-like substance. “I am not cruel. I can
be reasonable.” She said, as she began smearing the muddy substance
onto his head and rubbing it in. “What I ask of you now is more
than enough to pay off your debt to me, and can put yourself at a
higher stance in life, because currently, baby, you are low, am I
right? As low as you have ever been, and you work for your
brother.”

“
So what do you want
out of me?” He asked, perturbed at her condescending treatment of
him, although the massage to his scalp felt nice and soothing,
easing the pain and weariness he had felt these past few days. He
wondered what was in the healing salve she was using.

“
I need a military
man for my mission, one that I hope you will enjoy as well, and you
are just the sort of man that I need for the job, especially with
your connections.” She said.

“
Connections? What
sort of connections?” He glanced up.

“
Don’t make me laugh,
Goga.” Yaggee said. “I may live in a cave, but I know enough about
you and your family that I am liable to want to be a part of it, to
know the advantages that you and your connections have brought you,
and you don’t even make use of half of
.
”

Goga immediately
tried to get up and leave, although the pain in his head increased
tenfold and he was forced to lie back down again. “I will not
tolerate being forced to do anything
revolting!” He cried.

“
Goga, I will not
force you to
…
” Yaggee huffed as she flicked
off the last of the healing salve back into the pot. “I may be a
witch, as some might call me, but at least I have some sense of
decency and decorum.” She picked up the pot, carrying it back off
to the side. “I will not ask you to do anything to compromise
yourself, your values, or your
tastes.”
She grimaced, turning back to him. “What I am asking you to do is
revolt
against King Sonnagh of
Arria.”

Goga stopped as he tried to sit up.
“Usurp the throne?” He asked.

“
That is exactly what
I am asking you to do.”

“
How? With what?”
Goga asked, gesturing around at the cave where she lived, void of
anything except her supplies, and himself, where he would probably
live from now on. “Humble as my circumstances are. As you may have
noticed, I don’t exactly have an army with me, not even a
platoon.”

“
That is where you
and I will come in,” She said, coming over to grasp his hand, “And
we will join forces, baby.”

“
You are scaring me.”
Goga managed to say, removing his hand from hers.

“
That is the way it
should be, Goga.” She smiled in a manner too devious and calculated
to be called true or warm.

That evening, after
settling down into their quarters, and then dining on the fine food
that Coe Wina had to offer, a treat after several days of climbing
and descending the Old Smoko with low rations, Basha stared out one
of the many windows in its Great Hall across a rugged landscape,
full of hills and mountains in the distance, with so many ‘dips’ or
vales in between them
,
similar to the sight that he had seen upon the
heights of Old Smoko, although everything had looked so much
smaller up there. Now that he was closer to the ground, or at least
as close as he could be on top of Coe Wina’s motte in Lord
Lagotaq’s castle, he began to see how far he would have to go to
traverse its length, the heights and falls he would have to take
along with the others, and he still did not know if he was going
the right way.

Should he turn back
now, go around Coe Aela without Captain Goga to chase them, and
risk crossing Black Wolves or other creatures on the return trip to
Coe Baba? Should he accept defeat in his inability to get the Cup,
blame for the loss of Sir Nickleby, and acknowledgement that he was
worthless to Jawen, a true balnor who did not deserve her? Perhaps
he should, although he was not sure if he was ready yet. He did not
know that
…

He heard footsteps
behind him, and turned around to see Monika approaching him.
“Hello, Monika, nice evening
wear.” He
said, staring at her.

“
Hello, Basha, I
suppose it is,” She said, staring out the window as well and
ignoring his final word.

She was wearing a
dress, not a particularly good dress
as
it did not fit her and
overwhelmed her body, but it was a dress nonetheless. Basha had
gotten used to her wearing trousers and shirts instead of a dress
as they traveled together, not really expecting her to change for
any reason when it was so practical for her, and so it was a big
surprise to him.

He might have missed
the fact that she was wearing a dress at the dining hall this
evening, especially as she was already seated by the time he came
down and he was distracted with his own thoughts, but there had
been a buzz in the air from Oaka, Gnat, and Fato on the other side
of the table
.
T
hey must have seen her arrive wearing the
dress. Was he always the last one to know, missing everything about
him, as he careened through life without a care
,
or at least not too
many cares, considering what he was going through? Perhaps he
should be more careful and observant of things around him, but he
was stumped right now about what to do or say at this point with
Monika. She wasn’t a ‘boy’ anymore, not in his eyes at least. She
could be
…
if he wasn’t already practically married to Jawen…

“
What are you
thinking about?” Monika asked, staring at him now.

“
Jawen.” Basha said,
not lying, definitely not lying, he was thinking about her in that
moment when he looked into Monika’s eyes.

“
Jawen, mm-hmm,”
Monika said, looking down. “She must be really special to you for
you to have gone to all of this trouble for,” She said.

“
You have no idea.”
Basha said, looking away from her now to stare out the window
again. “Jawen was
…
she has been my obsession for
many years now,” He confessed. “I have been in love with her ever
since I was a child, even when I did not know what true love was,
not really.” He said. “She was the first person to tell me the
truth about my birth, of my birth mother Kala. Not even my mother
Habala would tell me the truth about that until after I asked her,
when I had heard what Jawen had to say. She was honest and smart,
perhaps the smartest, most honest girl I had ever met up to that
point,” He said, adding ‘up to that point’ as he wondered if
Jawen’s honesty rivaled that of Monika’s, when Monika had kept such
secrets about herself and what she knew that he had no idea if he
knew the real Monika yet. Certainly Monika was intelligent, perhaps
even more intelligent than Jawen, although theirs were such
different types of intelligences, on such different matters, that
perhaps it was not fair to compare them. He was not the best judge
of character, after all, especially when he was so
flawed.

Monika rolled her eyes. “Right, go on,”
She said, and nothing else.

He continued, “I made
friends with her after awhile, after we apologized to each other,”
He said, not really wanting to explain about
her calling him a balnor
, “And then we were good friends for some time until our
fathers had a feud,” He said, again not explaining what had
happened to
between
their
father
s
, “And so we broke it off. We
were apart for many years, seeing different people in that time,
but I think that we were still in love with each other until that
fateful day, last Suma, when we met each other again, and kissed
for the first time ever.”

“
Kissed?” Monika
said, looking up. “You had not kissed anyone before
then?”

“
I had,” Basha said,
crimson
ing
as he did not want to mention Iibala’s name at
that point, when he had hated her so much once. “But this was the
first time that Jawen and I had ever kissed each other, even we
were friends we did not. But I felt something in that moment…”
Basha said, trying to grasp that moment in his mind, to recall the
sort of feeling he had when it was so long ago, and he felt like a
different person then.

“
I was there, and yet
I was not. I was inside myself and I was letting go of something
bigger than myself, something more furious and ferocious when I was
timid and scared, and I was alive, Monika, for the first time ever.
I wasn’t scared anymore. I could feel my breath race inside and
outside my body, I could feel my heart pounding like the ocean
overflowing the shore, and it was fantastic, Monika. I was so alive
and so happy then that I could roar, and leap up into the air if I
wanted to, and I wanted that moment to last forever. I wanted to be
with her forever, Jawen and me…we were so happy together.” He
sighed. “So happy.”

“
Good. Glad to hear
that,” Monika said, smiling weakly before she turned and walked
away from him. “Good night, Basha.”

“
Good night, Monika.
So happy,” He murmured, shaking his head, not turning around to
watch Monika’s departure as he could not bear to see it. He had to
avoid her, from now on, if he wanted to stay strong on his quest,
on his purpose to retrieve Tau’s Cup and bring it back to Jawen. He
hated to abandon his quest, which he had started and could not fail
in now, especially after all that they had gone through, all that
they had lost, and what had to lie further ahead for them, because
of him, he feared. He did not want to see the horrors of the
Wastelands, the traps set out for him by the minions of Doomba, but
if every step took him closer to the truths of the Tigora’l,
the tiger of light
,
his mother Kala, or even the
Knights of Arria with their Swords, perhaps he could stand the rest
of the trip, and the falls that they might have to take along the
way, especially if…they were together.

He stared up at the moon, and wished
that it would not fade away this night. He could not face the dawn
by himself.

Far away from Coe
Wina, a man sat alone in a chair by the fireside in his private
study, sipping a glass of wine and quietly reading a book as a
clock ticked away the minutes and hours on the mantelpiece. He
sighed to himself and shook his head as he flipped over onto
another page. He couldn’t quite understand everything that he read,
although he supposed that was the author’s choice and purpose in
how she compsed her work, to confuse the reader as much as possible
and give them a sense of disquiet and discomfort as they questioned
the material.

Occasionally, some details interested him more than others,
and he might have spent weeks deciphering some of the clues
and hints she teased at her readers,
if he felt so inclined, but other parts just had him shaking his
head and pressing on, deciding that it wasn’t worth the bother to
think about when there was more ahead, and it probably had little
or nothing to do with him, his affairs, or time period even. He
paused a moment in his perusal and stared at the inscription on the
next page: The Tiger Prophecy.

He
frowned to himself, staring at those familiar words, which he had
long ago memorized when he had first come across this obscure
prophecy, embedded in the pages of this obscure book,
The Writings of Wintha the
Wanderer
, which he had
discovered in the dusty pile of tomes that made up the Royal
Library. He had no clue at the time whether or not there were other
extant copies of the book that still remained, although he
suspected there had to be some other remnants of it somewhere,
fragments embedded in other books if not copies of this particular
volume.

Wintha
the Wanderer had been a
very
popular figure in her day over a thousand years ago, maybe even
over two thousand, and there were bound to have been hundreds of
copies made of her book at the time, if not thousands. Despite the
immense age and physical deterioration of the original copies,
there was bound to have been recreations and reproductions made of
her volume dozens of times since then, one of which he held now,
not an original copy, but as close as one could get to it thousands
of years later. Wintha the Wanderer’s words had real staying power,
it seemed, a timeless quality as, more often than not, her words
seemed to apply towards future scenarios that she could not have
possibly forseen so long ago, and yet here he was, staring at one
of her prophecies that might come true, if events so ran in that
direction.