His Conquering Sword (12 page)

Valye flushed and drew up her chin. “It isn’t proper.”

“Hyacinth,” said Yevgeni softly, “she’s right, of course.”

Of course he did anything his sister said. They went to bed that night on empty stomachs. Valye had first watch. Hyacinth crawled alone into his own tent and set the perimeter alert. He took off his clothes and slid them into the drying pouch slung at the base of the tent. Then he dozed, until Valye woke him for his half of the watch.

At dawn, while the others still slept, Hyacinth walked down to the water. In the quiet, he watched birds swarming over the pond and along the shore. Such abundance, and he was so hungry. Yevgeni and Valye weren’t around to see. He circled around to the far side of the pond, staying out at a safe distance, and then aimed his knife and fired.

It was like fishing for trout in a barrel—that was an old phrase his great-grandmother Nguyen always used. Within moments two dozen birds lay dead or stunned, some on the ground, some along the shore in and out of the reeds, most floating in the lake. He left the ones in the water and, with a great sense of pride and a fair measure of squeamishness, hoisted the others by their feet and carried them back to camp.

At camp, Valye and Yevgeni had woken up. Valye tended to the fire while Yevgeni tied Valye’s rolled-up tent onto a packhorse. Yevgeni flung up his head and saw Hyacinth. A look of such overwhelming relief passed over his features that Hyacinth was embarrassed.

“Look what I got!” he said instead, displaying the half-dozen birds he had salvaged from the massacre. “Now we can eat for the next day or two.”

Valye flung herself down on the damp ground and began to wail. Yevgeni simply stared. He looked as if he were in shock. He looked horrified.

Hyacinth actually turned around to see if some loathsome monster followed in his wake, but there was nothing there. A flight of birds erupted from the pond, driving up into the cloud-laden sky. A single hawk circled above, and abruptly, it folded its wings and dropped like a stone toward the ground.

“Build the fire,” said Yevgeni suddenly in a hoarse voice. “Valye, build the fire, quickly. We’ll give them back to her and beg her forgiveness. We’ll release them into her hands.”

“What about him?” Valye wailed. “Who will kill him?”

What, in the Lady’s Name, were they talking about?

“No one, damn it!” snapped Yevgeni. “It’s obvious he doesn’t know. Go on.”

“But she’ll demand retribution!” Valye cried.

“Just do as I say!”

“What’s going on?” demanded Hyacinth.

Yevgeni took in a deep breath, as if by main force of will he controlled himself, and strode over to Hyacinth. “Birds are sacred to us. Perhaps they aren’t to you khaja.” He put out his hand. “Give them to me.”

Relieved to be free of the limp birds, Hyacinth handed them over. Only to watch in shock as Yevgeni carried them across to the fire and, once its flames had gathered force and heat, simply laid them over the pit.

“Aren’t you supposed to pull the feathers off first, and maybe get rid of the heads and the feet?” Hyacinth asked, utterly confused.

“Take down your tent unless you want us to leave it here,” said Yevgeni in a voice so cold that Hyacinth abruptly knew that if he didn’t obey, he would be left behind as well. He obeyed. As he worked, Yevgeni and Valye stoked the fire, feeding it, nursing it, encouraging it to consume the birds. They chanted in singsong voices, sometimes together, sometimes separately, sometimes overlapping.

“Grandmother Night, forgive us for drawing ourselves to your attention. We beg your pardon. We draw back. It was a child’s error, that your messengers, your holy ones, were taken from life this day. Even you yourself did not blame your children when, all ignorant, they transgressed your laws. Spare us from your just retribution. Allow us to beg for your mercy. Look not upon us with your dreadful sight. We are not strong enough to endure the terrible glance of your eye. We send these messengers back to you, in the old way, to grace your lands once more. Grant us mercy for our transgression.”

They were praying. They were just going to burn the birds and leave them.

“How can you waste them like that?” demanded Hyacinth, stopping in the middle of his task and staring. “I’m hungry!”

“Valye.” Yevgeni dropped out of the singsong chant and motioned with a turn of his head toward the horses. “Saddle and pack up. Go. Quickly.” She glanced toward Hyacinth, but she obeyed her brother. Yevgeni looked back over his shoulder at Hyacinth and then away. Hyacinth felt that
he
himself had somehow taken on the aspect of a loathsome monster, but he didn’t understand what had happened. Drawing a knife, Yevgeni opened his palm out flat over the fire and before Hyacinth realized what he meant to do, he cut his own skin. Blood welled up. Yevgeni turned over his hand and let the blood drip into the fire.

“Take this offering, Grandmother Night, whose name is terrible to hear, whose glance is terrible to suffer, and grant us mercy, grant us forgiveness, for the death of these, your holy messengers.”

Blood scattered into the fire. Singed feathers poured an acrid odor into the air. Yevgeni rocked back on his heels and stood, clenching his hand tight to stop the bleeding.

“Get your tent down,” Yevgeni said to Hyacinth, so harshly that Hyacinth felt his courage and his heart melt within him. But he obeyed.

They packed up and rode on. The clouds scudded away. It did not rain. A low range of mountains loomed before them, the next obstacle.

Valye would not talk to him. Yevgeni answered his comments, his questions, in curt monosyllables, and finally Hyacinth gave up talking. He had never felt more alone in his life.

They climbed by winding paths up into the hills. A packhorse went lame around midday, picking up a stone in its hoof. They halted in the lee of a copse of trees that straggled along the steep slope that bounded the north wall of the valley up which they rode. Hills loomed around them. The sun burned bright overhead. Here between the rocks, it grew warm. It was a gloomy countryside. A few green shoots sprouted up, encouraged by the recent rains, but otherwise the land lay rocky and barren. Their trail wound up into the heights, and Yevgeni seemed sure that it would lead them over the hills and into Farisa country, past which lay the plains and freedom.

Hyacinth stood beside the horses under the shade of a clump of trees. Yevgeni and Valye argued over whether to kill the injured horse for food or to nurse it along.

“We have little enough now to carry,” said Valye.

“But if we get more, we’ll need it. We need remounts, in any case.” Yevgeni knelt and ran his hand along the horse’s leg. The animal was a kind, patient beast and submitted to this care equably enough. Yevgeni found the stone and drew it out, but the cut bled. He shook his head. “I’ve nothing to put on it for a compress.”

“I’ve got a
medical
kit,” said Hyacinth, tentatively, “but I don’t know if it works for horses. I don’t know—” He faltered, because Valye had turned her back on him. Yevgeni hung his head. “Oh, Goddess! You won’t even tell me what I’ve done, and it’s just plain stupid not to see if what I’ve got can help!”

Yevgeni had one pretension to beauty. He had a mobile, prettily-shaped mouth. His lips twitched now, and Hyacinth could tell he was struggling inwardly. Finally he flung his head back. “Let me see.”

Hyacinth rummaged in his saddlebags and brought out the med kit. He fingered through its riches and brought out the things that he thought would be most recognizable to Yevgeni; and in the end, they worked out a rough compress and some salve and decided to nurse the horse along.

Valye watched with disapproval. “Do you think you should accept his khaja medicine? It was his khaja ways that brought down
her
enmity on us.”

“We don’t know if she’s angry, yet,” retorted Yevgeni.

“You’re a fool if you think we won’t pay for it, Yevgeni.”

“I’m a fool four times over, then,” he snapped, “once for leaving the tribe to ride with Dmitri Mikhailov, once for agreeing to bring you with me, once for riding away with Vasil Veselov when I should have stayed and begged for mercy.”

“What about
him?”
Valye jerked her chin toward Hyacinth. “Five times, then, for taking up with him.”

“No,” said Yevgeni in a low voice, not looking toward Hyacinth though he must know that Hyacinth could hear every word they were saying. “Not for him. You don’t understand what it’s like to feel shame every time you look at a man with desire, to know you can never speak of your feelings to him. Oh, I thought for a while that Vasil might—but he needed a second in command, he needed men for a jahar, he used his beauty to make me think he might love me, but he never did, and then I felt ashamed for being a fool, for not knowing better. But
he
never made me feel ashamed. Because he never felt ashamed. That was a gift, Valye, but perhaps you can’t understand that.”

Her throat worked. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She had pulled back her hair into a long braid, but the sunlight betrayed how dirty it was. Dirt encrusted the cuffs and hem of her tunic and caked the knees of her trousers and the palms of her hands. Not that Hyacinth was any cleaner. “I’m sorry,” she said in a low voice. She offered a hand to Yevgeni and he accepted it, and she lifted him up and hugged him. “You’re all that I have, Yevgeni. I won’t judge you.”

He smiled tremulously. “You’re the best sister any man ever had, even if you are wild, and won’t listen when you ought to.” He kissed her on the cheek. A pang gripped Hyacinth’s heart, seeing their true feeling for each other, seeing their bond. Like the one he had once had with the actors in the Company. Was this how Yevgeni felt, riding in the army, as if he was always on the outside looking in?

Yevgeni pushed her away. “We’d better go. It’s never wise to stay in any place too long.”

Except that they already had stayed too long. Or perhaps their fate had been tracking them all along and simply chosen this moment to strike.

One moment, the scene was all silence. It was bleak, true enough, but there was hope in the way the path wound up into the heights, suggesting freedom in the distance, and hope in the way Yevgeni turned and with a shy smile glanced toward Hyacinth and away, as if he flirted with him. Then he stopped in mid-stride. His expression shifted abruptly. He canted his head to one side, listening. Hyacinth heard something, a gentle ring, the echo of a sound like a voice’s echo. Yevgeni drew his saber. Valye pulled her bow from its quiver. It was already strung; it was always strung. Hyacinth stared.

“Mount.” Yevgeni sprinted toward him.

Hyacinth heard a
whoof,
like air being expelled; heard the ring of bridle; heard the shout. Yevgeni called a warning. It all took place in a vast sink of time, drawn out so excruciatingly slowly that to experience it was painful. Valye staggered forward in the act of fitting an arrow to her bowstring. She half turned to raise and aim at the sudden clot of khaja riders on the ridge above them, but a strange shadow cut across her.

Two arrows stuck out of her back. She shot anyway. She shot again as the riders charged down toward them, and a man toppled from his horse. Yevgeni scrambled onto his horse and swung round to go back to her. His horse stumbled and staggered and crumpled to the ground, pierced through the neck with a mass of arrows. Thrown, Yevgeni tumbled down, landing at Valye’s feet. She shot again. An arrow skewered her in the thigh. Still she did not go down. A trio of arrows pinned Yevgeni to the ground, but he tore free of them and struggled up to stand next to her.

They were going to die.

Then Hyacinth remembered his knife. What did he care what prohibitions he broke? He drew it and raised it and fired. He saw nothing but a shimmering in the air. But the effect was stunning, and immediate. Twelve riders closed in on them, a thirteenth left back on the ground with an arrow in his chest. Twelve khaja men fell like stones from their saddles. That fast. The horses faltered. One went down. The other horses pulled up short not six paces in front of Yevgeni, riderless, confused, and probably half stunned themselves by the concussion.

“Gods!” cried Valye, whether from her wounds or from astonishment Hyacinth could not know. She collapsed to the ground at Yevgeni’s feet.

“Hyacinth, look after her!” Yevgeni cried. He ran forward, drawing his knife in his other hand, and knelt by the foremost khaja bandit. “Gods, he’s still breathing. So is he!” He glanced back toward Hyacinth, looking suspicious, looking apprehensive. Then, methodically, gruesomely, he slit each man’s throat.

Hyacinth roused himself out of his stupor and dropped the reins and ran over to Valye. Mercifully, she was unconscious. Blood bubbled out of her mouth, welling in and out in time to her labored breathing. Hyacinth fumbled in the med kit and brought out the scanner and ran it over her. Then he flipped over his slate and read the results into it. They flashed RED RED RED: condition critical; advise moving subject to urgent care facility immediately; wounds to deep tissue in thigh; damage to internal organs; right lung has been pierced; do you wish a more detailed diagnosis?

“No,” said Hyacinth.

“She’s going to die, isn’t she?” said Yevgeni. Hyacinth jumped, startled, and turned. Yevgeni limped up to him. He bled from his leg, from his arm, and from a gash to his head. “What is that?” He pointed with his bloodstained knife to the open slate.

“It’s a
hemi-modeler.
Maybe you’d know it as a
computer.
Never mind. It doesn’t matter what it is. Do you know how to get those arrows out?”

Yevgeni shrugged, staring at his young sister. “Yes, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen wounds. She’s breathing blood. It’s got her in the lungs. She won’t live.”

“She can, if I can get help.”

Yevgeni gave him a look of complete incomprehension and then knelt beside Valye and began the slow process of turning the arrows out of her wounds. Blood gushed. Hyacinth had to turn away before he threw up. He grabbed his slate and went and crouched beside the horses. He lifted the knife, and held it up so that it could read his retinal print, and then he released its code. For five minutes, he knew, it would pulse silently, broadcasting the distress signal. He tried to gauge how long it would take for them to get a ship here. Could they get one here soon enough to save Valye?