Foul Tide's Turning (48 page)

‘What about the Carnehan boy? Should he have a reunion with his true love?’

‘Keep Carter Carnehan alive long enough to find Lady Cassandra. But don’t bother bringing him back,’ hissed Thomas. ‘The imperium will be given all the rebel armies’ survivors as slaves. They won’t need a wild fool who’s already escaped the empire’s shackles.’

‘It’s always risky flying with Rodal’s storms gusting against your tail,’ said Fetterman. ‘Easy enough to tumble out of a kite when you’re not a trained skyguard.’

Thomas imagined the shocked look on Carter’s face as she asked him to check the plane’s fin rudder, before resting a hand on his spine and shoving him through the open hatch.
Precious
. A pity Thomas would not be there to claim that memory as one of his trophies.
Still, there’ll be more than enough sport for me in the next few weeks
. The end of the rebellion would sate even his refined tastes.

Cassandra swayed on her horse, miserable to her core. Bad enough that whatever her tenuous status with the nomads, she was also a prisoner inside her own body; but she now had to share that misery with Sheplar and Kerge as prisoners of the Nijumeti. Lady Cassandra should have been saddle-sore after weeks riding north towards the heartland of the clansmen, but if there was one silver lining to having both legs paralysed, it was that the cramps and aches of life on horseback had even less effect on her now than the people of the plains who were born to it.

Sheplar and Kerge shared a single horse, one of the nags they had ridden out of Rodal, all the better to slow them down if they attempted to bolt for freedom. Not that they would, with their hands securely tied behind their backs and their horse flanked by nomad guards. A couple of days before, the small band of raiders had linked up with a bigger band from their clan, and now the combined force were riding towards whatever passed for the main encampment of Alexamir’s people. Cassandra’s ruminating was interrupted as the witch rider drew level with her and the two prisoners. Nurai seemed well-satisfied with Cassandra’s broken body.
She obviously thinks that Alexamir will abandon me soon enough. No threat to her, now. No threat to anybody
. Not that Cassandra’s feebleness was enough to stop the female nomad from flinging barbed comments at her.

‘I heard a thump in the night,’ said Nurai, gazing coldly at Cassandra. ‘I thought perhaps you had slipped your belt and slid off into the grass. But I see your saddle is still occupied.’

Cassandra didn’t bother to dignify that with a response.

‘Why have you kept us alive?’ demanded Sheplar. ‘It’s your tradition to mutilate Rodalians and leave our bones where we fall.’

‘That is not tradition, rice eater, that is practicality. The gods demand your sacrifice or your servitude.’

‘Your tribal group is no longer so … practical, womanling?’ asked Kerge.

She ignored the gask.

‘I will make a poor slave,’ said Sheplar.

‘Of that I have no doubt. Three broken foreigners,’ laughed Nurai. ‘A skyguard without his wooden pigeon, a forest man who cannot dream-walk, and a pampered chieftain’s daughter who cannot walk at all. The girl is only alive because of Alexamir’s foolish oath. As for you two, there are many reasons to keep breath in your lungs. You shall see how my people have changed soon enough.’ She laughed wickedly, and Cassandra had a sinking feeling that the two prisoners would not thank the witch rider for their survival when they reached their destination.

Kerge eyed the witch rider warily. ‘You caught us through the gift of future sight. Do you scry the branches of the great fractal tree and study its periodic boundary conditions?’

‘So, it is true then?’ said Nurai. ‘The forest people on the other side of the mountains can dream-walk without dreams, during the day?’

‘Through meditation and prayer in the direction of the universe,’ said Kerge, ‘usually. If you removed the bonds from my wrists and returned to me my calculator, I could show you our practice.’

‘We do not need your strange abacus machines or any knotty contortions of the mind to gaze into the future. It is a gift to the chosen from Kalu the Apportioner.’

‘If it is a gift from your deity, then the boon has been withdrawn from me,’ said Kerge. ‘My luck is depleted. I have been cast off the great tree and banished from the forests.’

‘I do not need to hear your tale to see your pitiable turn of fate,’ sneered Nurai. ‘Poor unlucky gask. Fate wishes you here, it seems. A nest full of cheeping, defective chicks that cannot take to the sky. But for what purpose? That we shall see.’

Nothing good for us
. Cassandra watched Nurai spur the horse forward to reach the head of the nomads’ column. ‘You should never have come back for me.’

‘That Nijumet rogue didn’t carry you off, did he?’ said Sheplar, accusingly. ‘You left Talatala with him willingly.’

‘Alexamir gave his word that he would free me when I asked; that he would see me returned to the imperium.’

‘A nomad’s words are but hot breath against a cold wind,’ said Sheplar. ‘And carry as much weight. How could you believe that blue-skinned dog?’

‘Well, I have been punished by the ancestors for my foolishness,’ said Cassandra, slapping the unfeeling calf of her leg. ‘I will never escape from you or anyone else again.’

‘I was taught the art of the flying wing by a master of the skyguard, Konadun, who earned such an injury,’ said Sheplar. ‘On the ground he was pushed in a wheeled chair by one of his pupils who fought for the honour, but in the air, our venerated flight master was a hawk, the equal of any of us. Konadun taught himself to fly again after his injury, using a flying wing with rudder pedals modified to hand controls.’

‘No one will fight for the honour of shoving me around,’ said Cassandra. She remembered what was expected of the celestial caste crippled duelling in the arena. A short-sword slid into the gut by the injured noble’s own hand, the stoicism of their end broadcast across the kino-screens for the education of the teeming populace.
Maybe Nurai will slip me my dagger back if I beg her. Or maybe she will just mock me and leave me like this. She’ll enjoy watching Alexamir abandon me
.

‘Konadun used to say that if the spirits had wished to stop him; they would have broken his neck, not his legs. ‘And that his will was still his to command, not fate’s to snap.’

‘I can’t even ride a horse properly,’ said Cassandra, dangling her reins in frustration. ‘Even kicking it to a canter or squeezing it to a halt is beyond me. Every day I must sit lashed up here like a sack of barley.’

‘Yet there you sit.’

‘Be quiet, mountain man,’ said Cassandra. ‘You have failed in your mission to recapture me as surely as I have failed in my duty to return to Vandia a free woman. My mother will never ransom my return now, nor my grandfather, nor anyone in the empire. They would only ask why I have not ended my life. My use to you and your savage friends as a hostage is at an end. If you see a chance to flee, take it. If you attempt to carry me with you, I will howl so loudly you shall think your ancestor’s spirits have breached the earth. I have no place in the world, now. I might as well be here as anywhere else.’

‘I have no place, either,’ said Kerge. ‘Perhaps we are all exiles, now.’

‘I follow my honour,’ said Sheplar, a touch too proudly for his reduced circumstances.

What fools these Rodalians are. Stubborn as the goats that climb their mountains, and about as attractive
. ‘Find me a knife and I will follow mine,’ said Cassandra.

‘If I see you try,’ said Sheplar, ‘
you
will hear a yell as if my ancestor’s spirits have breached the earth.’

I’ll bear that in mind, if it comes to it
. ‘If you will not help me, then leave me be.’

‘What makes you think we can escape?’ asked Sheplar.

‘I have seen the eyes of your slinking dog glinting in the dark as it prowls around the camp,’ said Cassandra. ‘It is not a wolf, although it looks as large as one. A wolf would attack the picketed horses at night. You used a scent hound to track me, didn’t you? And the creature is still on the loose, following us. It is clever and well disciplined. Perhaps clever enough to slip in one night when the guards are asleep and chew through your ropes?’

‘You have seen nothing but a hungry grass leopard, bumo,’ said Sheplar.

‘I have lost the use of my legs, mountain man, not my mind,’ said Cassandra. ‘My house’s hold, the Castle of Snakes, boasts high walls patrolled by guards with hounds every bit as loyal and wily as your dog. I can tell the difference between a leopard and a mastiff well enough.’

‘Believe what you will.’

‘I will not tell the nomads,’ said Cassandra. ‘You thought you were tracking me to save me. But nothing can do that, now. Leave with your spiky friend. But do not try to take me with you.’

‘These nomads are not a people to trust,’ said Sheplar.

‘I trust them to grow bored with me,’ said Cassandra. ‘And I trust their witch rider to end me sooner or later.’

‘There are no good ends out here.’

‘I will take an honourable one,’ said Cassandra. ‘And I have seen enough of those to know they are never easy.’

Sheplar shook his head sadly but kept his peace.

Cassandra slumped in the saddle.
I wonder if I will have my legs returned to me when I am reunited with my ancestors
? It seemed likely. No daughter of the empire would wish to exist for eternity as they were when they died an old crone. A pity that there were no priests of the Imperium Cosmocrator here to ask; although their answers, in Lady Cassandra’s experience, were suspiciously close to what the celestial caste desired to hear.
Of course the emperor is the highest of the gods; he deserves your fealty, as does your house from those you shepherd
.

They rode for another four days, a slow but relentless pace every day until it was too dark to see the ground, making camp in the deep of night. This was the riders’ way in winter. During the summer, they switched to travelling by night and resting during the baking heat of the day. After staking the horses and penning their sheep and goats, the nomads established a circle of dome-like tents, circular frames quickly set up with wooden poles unpacked from their saddle bags, woollen and sheep-hide felt stretched over as the tents’ skin. Each dwelling became a wheel-like home, exterior and interior both coloured with stitched patterns representing the six elements of life: fire, water, metal, wood, earth and flesh. The hide fabric also contained leering gargoyle-like visages of their gods, each heathen deity remade as an abstract symbol. Alexamir would appear in the evening and point them out to Cassandra, naming the gods and explaining their place in the Nijumet pantheon.

‘Why do you bother to carry me with you?’ asked Cassandra one evening, huddled under the warmth of a pile of blankets.
It doesn’t matter how many blankets I cover my legs with. They always feel cold now.
She shivered constantly; perhaps it had something to do with her injury. ‘Does your oath mean so much to you?’

‘My golden fox is still my golden fox,’ said Alexamir, squatting by her side inside the dome-like tent. ‘Even with her feet caught in a jaw-trap.’

‘If a horse was as lame as I, you would say a prayer, slit its throat and cook it.’

‘I do not think you will taste as good as horse steak,’ smiled Alexamir. ‘But perhaps when we reach the clan, they can find the salt to season you?’

‘I see my fate in your people’s eyes,’ said Cassandra. ‘In your witch rider’s.’

‘Nurai glares at everyone the same. She has a sour disposition. It is my eyes you should look at,’ said Alexamir.

‘Why do you take me with you?’

‘When you know the answer to that, you will know where you belong.’

‘I belong nowhere. I am not one of your riders. At home, I would be the shame of my house. I am no longer even a useful hostage for my enemies.’

‘This one,’ said Alexamir, tapping one of the symbols on the tent’s circular wall, ‘is the god of the grass, Atamva. His is the saying “Atamva always remembers”. It is taught that winter comes when Atamva forgets his love for his wife, the moon goddess Annayla. Spring is when his love stirs, and summer when he truly remembers his love. Atamva always remembers. This is your winter, golden fox. If Atamva can remember, you shall remember where you belong too.’

‘You are insufferable.’

‘Does that mean that Alexamir is faster and stronger and more daring than all lesser men?’

‘No, it means you have the sense of a horse.’

‘Good,’ smiled Alexamir. ‘Horses are far cleverer than they look. They can find hidden water where a man will die thirsty, and understand enough serpent speech to know where a viper is hiding in the grass ready to strike.’

‘Your insufferability stands, but perhaps I was overstating your good sense.’

Alexamir leant across and kissed her, the first warmth she had felt all day. Cassandra would have resisted more, but she could barely even roll out from under her blankets.
And I need the heat, surely I do
. She was drawn to it, despite her best intentions, like a moth to the camp fire’s light and heat outside. ‘How can you still want me?’

Alexamir got to his feet and bowed towards her before he exited the tent. ‘Dwell instead on how could I not?’

Despite herself, Cassandra felt a twinge of regret as the warrior departed.
You are a fool. So grateful for kind words that you can find false affection in your heart for anyone who speaks them to you
. How far had she fallen?
Atamva always remembers
. Cassandra rubbed her cold, dead legs.
And how can I ever forget this? A useless weight, worse than any slaves’ chains.

Their journey continued each day, much the same as the last, save for a couple of nights when a pack of hill wolves started trailing the column across an undulating expanse of land the nomads called the Copper-barrows. There were too many riders during the day for the wolves to muster the courage to attack, and at night the camp fires burned and held them back, fear of bush fires greater than any hunger they might feel. Cassandra heard a fierce howling one night, and after that she no longer glimpsed the scent hound she suspected belonged to her would-be rescuers. The wolves had claimed their meal and slunk away to leave the nomad party unmolested. The sad look on Sheplar’s face the next morning confirmed her suspicions. The aviator’s last hope of rescue had vanished, too, along with his luckless dog.