Water Sleeps (28 page)

A chatty youngster of native stock and a more than customarily ambitious
disposition interviewed us at the military control point we encountered at the
southern end of the pass. He was not yet old enough to be pompously officious
but he would get there. Personally, he seemed more interested in foreign news
than in contraband or wanted men. “What’s going on up north?” he wanted to know.

“We’ve seen a lot of refugees lately.” He examined our meager possessions
without ever looking inside anything.

Gota and Doj rattled at one another in Nyueng Bao and pretended not to
understand the young man’s accented Taglian. I shrugged and responded in Jaicuri
at first, which is close enough to Taglian for the two peoples to understand one
another most of the time, but here it only frustrated the young official. I had
no desire to stand around gossiping with a functionary. “I do not know about
others. We have had nothing but decades of misfortune and suffering. We heard
there were opportunities down here so we abandoned the Land of Our Sorrows and
came.”

The official assumed I meant a particular country, as I had hoped, rather than
recognizing that the Land of Our Sorrows was the Vehdna way of describing where
a convert lived before he became acquainted with God.

“You say there are many others doing the same as us?” I tried to sound troubled.

“Recently, yes. Which is why I feared something might be afoot.”

He feared for the stability of the empire to which he had attached himself. I
could not resist a prank. “There were rumors that the Black Company had surfaced
in Taglios and was warring with the Protector. But there are always crazy
stories about the Black Company. They never mean anything. And they had nothing
to do with our decision.”

The young man became more unhappy. He passed us through without further
interest. I did not bother commending him but he was the only official we had
encountered since leaving Taglios who was making a serious effort to perform his
duties. And he was doing it only in hopes of getting ahead.

I never had to bring out the richly complex legend I have invented for our
foursome, in which Swan was my second husband, Gota the mother of my deceased
first spouse and Doj her cousin, all of us survivors of the wars. The story
would have played in any region where there had been any extended fighting.

Splatchcobbled family survival teams were not at all uncommon.

I complained, “I worked on weaving us a history all the way down here and I
never got to use it. Not once. Nobody’s doing their job.”

Doj smiled and winked and vanished into the broken ground beside the road, off
to reclaim the weapons we had hidden before approaching the checkpoint.

“Somebody should do something about that,” Swan declared. “Next vice-regal
subofficer I see, I’ll march right up and give him a piece of my mind. We all
pay taxes. We have a right to expect more effort from our officials.”

Gota woke up long enough to call Swan an idiot in Taglian and Nyueng Bao. She
told him he ought to shut up before even the God of Fools renounced him. Then
she closed her eyes and resumed snoring. Gota had begun to concern me. She had
shown less life every day for the past few months. Doj seemed to think she
believed she no longer had anything to live for.

Maybe Sahra could get her going again. We should be joining up with the others
before long. Maybe Sahra could get her excited about rescuing Thai Dei and the
Captured.

I was troubled about consequences. All these years I had striven toward the
undertaking we would launch before long, and now, for the first time, I had
begun to wonder what success might really mean. Those people buried out there
never were paragons of sanity and righteousness. They had had almost two decades
to ferment in their own juices. They were unlikely to entertain much brotherly
love toward the rest of the world.

And then there was the guardian demon Shivetya and, somewhere, the enchanted and
enchained thing worshipped by Narayan Singh and the Daughter of Night. Not to
mention the mysteries and dangers of the plain itself. And all the perils we did
not yet know.

Only Swan had any experience of that. He had nothing positive to report. Nor had
Murgen at any time over the years, though his experiences had been dramatically
different from Swan’s. Murgen had experienced the glittering plain in two worlds
at once. Swan seemed to have experienced the version in our world in sharper
focus. Even after so many years he could describe particular landmarks in
exquisite detail.

“How come you never talked about this before?”

“I never hid it, Sleepy. But there just don’t seem to be much percentage in
volunteering anything in this world. If I admit anything I know about that
place, next thing I’ll know is, good old Willow Swan is elected to go back up
there as the guide for a gang of invaders guaranteed to irritate the shit out of
whatever spirits haunt the place. Am I right? Or am I right?”

“You aren’t as stupid as you let on. I thought you didn’t see any spirits.”

“Not the way Murgen claimed he saw them but that don’t mean I didn’t feel them
creeping around. You’ll find out. You try to sleep at night when you feel hungry
shadows calling you from a few feet away. It’s like being inside a zoo with all
the predators in the world slavering just the other side of the bars. Bars that
you can’t see and can’t even feel and so have no way of knowing if they’re
trustworthy. And all this jabber ain’t doing my nerves any good at all, neither,

Sleepy.”

“We may never have to go up there, Swan—if the Key we’ve got is a fake or isn’t
any good anymore. Then there won’t be anything we can do but maybe set up your
brewery and pretend we never heard of the Protector or the Radisha or the Black
Company.”

“Be still, my heart. You know goddamn well that thing’s going to be the true
Key. Your god, my gods, somebody’s gods have got a boner for Willow Swan and
they’re gonna keep making sure that whatever happens, it’s gonna be the worst
possible thing and it’s gonna happen to me. I oughta run out on you now. I
oughta turn you in to the nearest royal official. Only that would let
Soulcatcher know that I’m still alive. Then she’d get real nasty, asking me why
I didn’t turn you in three, four months ago.”

“Not to mention you’d probably get yourself dead long before you could unearth
an official who cared enough to listen to you.”

“There’s that, too.”

Doj came back with the weapons. We passed them around, resumed traveling. Swan
continued eloquently describing himself as the firstborn son of Misfortune.

He went through these spells of high drama.

A half mile down the road we encountered a small peasants’ market. A few old
folks and youngsters who could not contribute much on the farm waited to take
advantage of travelers still shaking from the miseries of the mountains. Fresh
foods in season were their hot sellers but they retailed gossip at no charge as
long as you contributed a few snippets of your own. They found doings beyond the
Dandha Presh particularly intriguing.

I asked a young girl, who looked like she could be the little sister of the
customs official back up the road, “Do you remember many of the people who came
through here? My father was supposed to have come down ahead of us, to find us a
place to settle.” I proceeded to describe Narayan Singh in detail.

The child was a lighthearted thing, without a care or concern. Chances were she
did not recall what she had eaten for breakfast. She did not remember Narayan
but went off to find someone who might.

“Where was she when I was young enough to get married?” Swan grumbled. “She’ll
be pretty when she’s older and she doesn’t have a brain in her head to
complicate things.”

“Buy her. Bring her along. Raise her up right.”

“I’m not as pretty as I used to be.”

I tried to think of someone who was. Not even Sahra qualified.

I waited. Swan muttered. Doj and Gota wandered around, Uncle swapping tales and
Mother examining the wares for sale. Except for the produce, those were feeble.

She did acquire a scrawny chicken. The one positive of our travel team was that
there were no Gunni or Shadar to complicate mealtime. Only Gota, who kept trying
to do the cooking. Maybe I could murder the chicken in her sleep and get it
roasted before she woke up.

The girl brought a very old man. He was no help, either. He seemed interested
only in telling me what he thought I wanted to hear. But it did seem possible
that Narayan had come through the pass some time before we had.

I hoped Murgen was on the job and had alerted the others to the possibilities.

Doj and Gota headed on down the road before I finished with the locals,

surprised that my command of the language was adequate to the task. Evidently
Gota was tired of riding. The donkey certainly could use the break.

“Is that a pet?” the small girl asked.

“It’s a donkey,” I said, really astonished that I had been having so little
trouble communicating. They had donkeys down here, did they not?

“I know that. I meant the bird.”

“Huh! Well.” The white crow was perched on the donkey’s pack. It winked. It
laughed. It said, “Sister, sister,” and flapped into the air, then glided on
down the mountain.

Swan said, “I was just thinking I found an up side to this trip. It’s not
raining down here.”

“Maybe I’ll see if they’ll let me have the child. In exchange for your strong
back.”

“We’re getting a little too domestic here, Goodwife . . . Sleepy? Didn’t you
ever have a real name?”

“Anyanyadir, the Lost Princess of Jaicur. But even now my wicked stepmother has
discovered that I still live and has summoned the princes of the rakshasas to
bargain with them for my murder. Hey! I’m kidding. I’m Sleepy. And you’ve known
me practically since I started being Sleepy, off and on. So just let it be.”

O nce we cleared the mountains, it was no long journey to the site of Kiaulune.

Incredible destruction had been wrought there during the Shadowmaster wars, then
during the Kiaulune wars between the Radisha and those who chose to keep faith
with the Black Company. A pity most of the wreckage had been cleared away even
before Soulcatcher decided she could declare victory and go north to claim her
new place as Protector of All the Taglias. The Radisha should have seen it at
its worst, to understand what she had wrought by betraying her contract with the
Company. But the worst now existed only in the memories of survivors. The
once-clamorous valley now boasted a sizable town and a checkerboard of new farms
peopled by a mixture of natives, former prisoners of war and deserters from
every conceivable faction. Peace had broken out and was being enthusiastically
exploited on the presumption that it could not possibly last.

The transition from the old Kiaulune, once called Shadowcatch, and the new,

simply called the New Town, saw one thing remain unchanged. Over there on the
far slope of the valley, miles and miles away, beyond the crumbled, brush-strewn
ruins of once-mighty Overlook, where the land quickly changed from rich green to
almost barren brown, was the dreaded thing called the Shadowgate. It did not
stand out but I felt its call. I told my companions, “We have to be careful not
to get in a hurry now. Haste could be deadly.”

The Shadowgate was not just the only way we could get up onto the plain to go
free the Captured, it was also the only portal through which the shadows
imprisoned up there could escape and begin treating the whole world the way
their cousins had the destitute of Taglios. And that gate was in tender shape.

The Shadowmasters had injured and weakened it badly when gaining access to the
shadows they enslaved.

“We’re in complete agreement on that,” Uncle Doj replied. “All the lore
emphasizes the need for caution.”

There had been some disagreement between us lately. He had resumed his romance
with the idea of the Company Annalist becoming his understudy in the peculiar
role he played among the Nyueng Bao. The Company Annalist who had no great
interest in the job but Doj was one of those people who just have grave
difficulties getting their minds around the concept “No!”

“That’s new,” I said, indicating a small structure a quarter mile below the
Shadowgate, beside the road. “And I don’t like its looks.” It was hard to tell
from so far but the structure looked like a small fortification built of stone
salvaged from the rubble of Overlook.

Doj grunted. “A potential complication.”

Swan observed, “We keep standing around looking like spies, somebody’s going to
get unpleasant with us.”

A point not without substance, although those in charge seemed awfully lax. It
was obvious that trouble had not visited in a while. Quite probably not since
the Black Company left. “Somebody—probably named me, because I’m the only one
here who looks like what she says she is—will have to go scout around.” The
original plan had been for everybody to camp in the barrens not far downhill
from where that new structure now stood.

I was troubled. Someone should have been watching for us to come out of the
mountains. I hoped that was just Sahra’s oversight. She had been married to the
Company for an age but never did learn to think like a soldier. If nobody
offered good advice, or she chose to ignore the advice she was given because,

like many civilians, she could not grasp why all the little horsepuckey things
have to be done, she might not have thought it important to watch for us.

I prayed it was as simple as that.

Nobody demanded that I give them the role of scout. Poor me. More sore feet
while the rest of them loafed around in the shade of young pines.

The white crow materialized minutes after I turned the knee of a hill and the
others were out of sight. It swooped at me and squawked. It swooped at me again.

I tried to swat it like it was some huge, really annoying bug. It laughed and
came back, now squawking what sounded like words.

I got it. Finally. The bird wanted me to follow it. “Lead on, fell harbinger,

never forgetting that I’m not Gunni and therefore hobbled by no holy ban against
eating meat.” I had enjoyed, if that is the proper word, crow stew several times
during the lowest lows of my military career.

The crow had only my interests at heart. It led me straight to a large tent
village on a hillside overlooking the near outskirts of the New Town. Our people
had to be only some of the refugees housed there but Sahra’s hand was obvious
everywhere. The layout was neat and orderly and clean. Exactly as the Captain’s
rules insisted, though those are honored mainly in the breech when he is not
around.

I suffered an immediate conflict. Charge ahead to see everyone I had missed for
months? Or run back and collect my traveling companions? Once I started gabbing,

it might be hours before—

My choice got made for me. Tobo spotted me.

My first warning was a shout. “Sleepy!” A mass of churning arms and legs charged
in from the left and collected me in a totally unexpected hug.

I wriggled loose. “You’ve grown.” A lot. He was taller than me now. And his
voice had deepened. “You won’t be able to be Shiki anymore. The great men of
Taglios will be brokenhearted.”

“Goblin says it’s time I start breaking the girls’ hearts, anyway.” There was
not much doubt that he would have the power to do that. He was going to be a
handsome man who had no lack of confidence.

Uncharacteristically, I slipped an arm around his waist and walked down toward
where other familiar faces had begun to appear. “How was your journey?”

“Mostly kind of fun, except when they made me study, which was about all the
time. Sri Surendranath is worse than Goblin but he says I could be a scholar. So
Mother always backs them up whenever anybody wants to make me study. But we got
to see a lot of neat things. There was this temple in Praiphurbed that was
completely covered with carvings of people doing it all different ways—oh, I’m
sorry.” He reddened.

Tobo had a mental image of me as a sort of chaste nun. And most of my adult life
would not contradict that view. But I am not against interpersonal adventures, I
am just not interested myself. Probably because, Swan insists, I have not yet
run into the man whose animal presence completely overwhelms my intellectual
reluctance. Swan being a leading authority in his own mind.

He keeps volunteering. Who knows? Maybe someday I will become curious enough to
experiment, just to find out if I can be touched without running away to my
place to hide.

Now the others were wishing me welcome with a sincerity that set another place
inside me, a small, warm place, all aglow. My comrades. My brothers. All kinds
of rattle and chatter inundated me. Now we were going to do something. Now we
were going to get somewhere. Now we were going to kick some ass if we had to.

Sleepy was here to figure it all out and tell everybody where and when to stick
the knife.

“God knows all the secrets and all the jokes,” I said, “and I wish He’d share
the secret of the joke that explains why He created such a scruffy bunch of
hired killers.” I used a little finger to get rid of a tear before anybody
realized that it was not raining. “You guys look pretty fat for having been on
the road so long.”

Somebody said, “Shit, we been here waiting for you for a whole fuckin’ month.

Some of us. The slowest ones got here last week.”

“How’s One-Eye doing?” I asked as Sahra wriggled through the throng.

“He’s fucked up,” a voice volunteered. “How’d you know . . . ?”

I exchanged hugs with Sahra. She said, “We were starting to worry.” A question
clung to the edge of her statement.

“Tobo. Your grandmother and Uncle Doj are waiting in the woods back up the road.

Run up and tell them to come on down.”

“Where’re the rest?” somebody demanded.

“Swan is with them. The rest are behind us somewhere. We broke up into three
groups after we reached the highlands. There were crows around. We didn’t want
to give them anything obvious to watch.”

“We did the same thing after we left the barges,” Sahra told me. “Did you see
many crows? We saw only a few. They might not have been the Protector’s.”

“The white one keeps turning up.”

“We saw it, too. Are you hungry?”

“You kidding? I’ve been eating your mother’s cooking since we left Jaicur.” I
looked around. People were watching who were not Black Company. They might only
be refugees, too, but the enthusiasm of my reception was sure to cause talk.

Sahra laughed. It sounded more like the laughter of relief than that of good
humor. “How is Mother?”

“I think there’s something wrong, Sahra. She’s stopped being nasty, bitter old
Ky Gota. Most of the time she’s lost inside herself. And those times when she is
completely aware, she almost has manners.”

“In here.” Sahra lifted a tent flap. It was the largest tent in the encampment.

“And Uncle Doj?”

“A step slower but still Uncle Doj. He wants me to turn Nyueng Bao and be his
apprentice. Like I have a lot of free time being Murgen’s apprentice. He says
it’s just because he doesn’t have anybody else to pass his responsibilities on
to. Whatever they are. He seems to think I should sign on before he tells me
what for.”

“Did you get the Key?”

“We did. Uncle Doj has it in his pack. But Singh got away. Not unexpectedly. Did
he turn up here? We picked up rumors along the way that gave me the idea that he
was ahead of us and gaining ground. You do still have the girl?”

Sahra nodded. “But she’s a handful. I think bringing her south again put her in
closer touch with Kina. Common sense tells me we should break our promise and
kill her.” She settled on a cushion. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m completely worn
out. Keeping these people under control when there’s so little for them to do .

. . it’s a miracle that we haven’t had any major incidents . . . I bought a
farm.”

“You what?”

“I bought a farm. Not far from the Shadowgate. They tell me the soil is lousy,

but it’s a place where most of the men can stay out of sight and keep out of
trouble and even stay busy building housing or working the ground so we’ll
eventually be self-supporting. Half the gang is over there now. Most of these
guys here would be, too, except that Murgen said you were going to arrive today.

You made good time. We didn’t expect you for several more hours.”

“Does that mean you’re all caught up on what’s going on in the world outside?”

“I have a particularly talented husband who doesn’t always share everything with
me. And I don’t always share him with the others. And we both probably shouldn’t
be that way. There’re a thousand things we need to talk about, Sleepy. I don’t
know where to start. So why not just with, how are you?”