Fall of a Kingdom (The Farsala Trilogy) (11 page)

The leader snorted. “Bring me a strap.”

Panic flooded Kavi’s veins. Would they strangle him? He wrenched at the grip on his wrists, but it was hopeless. He tried to think of something else to say, to offer, but his throat locked closed, and his thoughts were fixed on the coming strap.

The leather loop fell over his hands, not his head, and breath shuddered into his lungs as his wrists were cinched together. They weren’t going to kill him now, or they wouldn’t bother to tie him up. Would they?

The leader’s hard weight lifted off his back. “Sit up,” he commanded. “But don’t try anything.” The metallic slither of a drawn sword reinforced the order, but Kavi’s knees were too wobbly to run, even if he’d been that stupid. He sat up and turned to face them. How had he ever imagined they could be anything but soldiers?

“The problem with keeping you alive as a source of information,” said the leader, “is that you’ll probably lie, at least some of the time. Sorting out scraps of truth from the rubbish will be more trouble than you’re worth.” His voice was quiet, almost conversational, but Kavi knew his life hung on the edge of that exquisite, gleaming blade. Even now, the pattern caught his eyes.

These people weren’t amateurs. If they intended to kill him, they’d have done it already. Kavi took a shuddering breath. “If you want to make sure I don’t lie, then check what I tell you against some other source. This doesn’t have to be a short-term deal.”

The leader’s eyes narrowed. “Deal. Are you trying to bargain with me?”

Kavi shivered, but a peddler recognized the time to push. “Yes. I have something you want, and you have something I want. If we trade, we’re both getting what we want. If we don’t, neither of us gets anything.”

“You’d betray your people for your life and a whole skin?” The leader’s voice was very gentle.

It was Kavi’s turn to snort. “Betray? I don’t owe the deghans anything. My people are peasants and craftsmen. Why should I die to prevent a change of masters? And I was thinking of money, in addition to life and a whole skin.” There, the bait was on the hook. He knew he shouldn’t twitch it, but he couldn’t resist adding: “Though I’d take the secret of making that steel even over gold.”

The wistful note in his voice was sincere. The leader laughed. “You sound like a smith.”

“I was. Once. The deghans put an end to it.”

Kavi rose with careful slowness to his knees and turned, twisting his hand in the strap to show them his right palm. The tip of that beautiful sword touched his fingers, nudging them down. Then the sword withdrew, and he turned back. “I have no loyalty to them. I’ll give you the high commander’s daughter on a platter, if you want her.” Could they hear the truth in his voice?

Eyes of a lighter brown than most peasants’ searched his. “We don’t kidnap the children of enemy commanders—that’s a weapon that cuts two ways.”

“But I do have something you’re wanting,” said Kavi. “Or you’d have killed me the moment you saw that I recognized your steel.” He held his breath, praying he was right.

“Maybe,” said the leader. “And maybe not. Tie his ankles, Morra. We’re taking him with us.”

T
HE
H
RUM KEPT TO THE FOOTHILLS
and Kavi saw no one he could have asked for help. Not that screaming for help would have resulted in anything except another prisoner. Or a corpse.

Kavi rode on Duckie’s back, bound and uncomfortable during the day, and he was shackled to a tree or a stone at night. They did him no harm, and they even shared out the contents of his pack among them so he could ride, but Kavi didn’t deceive himself about their ruthlessness. A ruthlessness, he slowly realized, that sprang mostly from fear. They knew what their fate would be if they were captured, so in the end…“We’re pretty much plowing the same field, aren’t we?”

He spoke softly, mostly to the stars trapped in the pine boughs overhead, but Alen, one of the handful of women who were part of the troop, was on watch tonight.

“I don’t know about that. For one thing, you’re chained up and we’re not.”

“That’s so,” Kavi admitted. On the first days of their journey he’d been afraid to speak to them. He’d picked up a few words of Hrum from chance meetings on the Trade Road; he’d hoped to travel into the empire himself one day and take another look at their famed watersteel. He’d heard that the empire was a just and lawful land—safe for travelers and traders. But his scant vocabulary was useless for translating the soldiers’ flashing, idiomatic conversations, and men whose lives were in danger cared little for law or justice. On the other hand, they must have some reason for keeping him alive. Soon Kavi started talking to them in Faran out of sheer boredom. He’d been cuffed for it once or twice by the more irascible ones, but most of them answered—or ignored him if they chose not to answer. Alen was one of the friendlier ones, so he went on. “But I think you’re almost more…nervous than I am. Especially when you’re going off.”

They didn’t always remain together. In fact, the group was actually composed of ten; two of them had been off scouting, or spying, or whatever it was they did, when Kavi first found them. They usually left in groups of two to four and almost always took one of the women with them—trying to look more harmless, Kavi supposed, though these women were far from harmless.
Women warriors.
They didn’t seem to be nobles either, for they carried water from the stream, cared for the animals, and shared in the other camp chores just as the men did.
Peasant
women warriors. The mind boggled.

Yet she wore the same rank marks as the men—at least, Kavi assumed the slashing diagonal bars that all the Hrum bore on their right shoulders were marks of rank. Alen had three bars. Only Raiban, the troop’s leader, had more.

“You can say that we’re scared,” said Alen amiably. She sat in the shadow of a tree trunk, her eyes searching the darkness. “Who wouldn’t be scared, in the midst of enemy territory?”

“It must be important,” said Kavi, “for them to risk so many of you.” With some of the others, this attempt to learn what they sought might have earned him a kick, but Alen grinned and said nothing.

Kavi sighed. “It’s not as if I’m going to be able to tell anyone.”

Which was true. The Hrum hadn’t been unduly brutal, but neither had they given him any chance to escape, and by now Kavi knew that they never relaxed their guard. A thoroughly professional attitude. He sighed again.

“If you can’t tell anyone, then why do you care?” Alen murmured.

“Because if I knew what kind of information you were looking for, I’d know what to offer.”

A jackal howled in the distance, and they both stiffened, but the reply was more distant still. Besides, jackals never took on a party this big unless they were starving.

“You’re right to be afraid,” said Kavi softly. “Djinn come out in the night too. And they don’t make any noise. That’s why we only go abroad in the day. The sun is Azura’s, but the night is theirs.”

Alen chuckled. “Sorry. Not buying.”

Kavi shrugged. “Worth a try. Some people really do believe in them, you know. At least, some deghans do. That’s what the temple is for, to combat djinn. If you’re a deghan and you’re bribing them with a big enough donation, you can get off a criminal charge by claiming that a djinn possessed you, and the temple will swear they exorcised it.”

“You’re kidding. An actual, legal charge?”

“Aye. It’s only for deghans, of course. The rest of us answer for our own temper or greed or whatnot.”

“But you said the high commander’s daughter was actually sacrificed. Left in the wilderness to propitiate your djinn or the temple or something.”

“Ah, but that was political. They’re hoping to catch the commander shielding her; then they can claim he’s unfit to lead the army and replace him. The deghans never have to pay for what they do. Not really.”

“Unfit? Because he refuses to sacrifice a child to some idiotic, ancient superstition?” She leaned back against the tree with a soft snort. “I don’t think we’ll have much trouble taking your army, peddler.”

Kavi was beginning to wonder about that himself.

When The Troop Finally Emerged from the foothills, everything looked the same as it did on the Farsalan side of the border. Even the Trade Road, close to the mountains here, where the land narrowed, looked the same. But now the Hrum soldiers rode down it openly, with their swords belted at their waists instead of rolled in blankets. The traders they passed pulled their wagons aside and nodded respectfully. All their swords were watersteel, Kavi noted. Straight blades, sharpened on both sides, unlike a Farsalan blade, which curved.

“You’ve taken Sendan,” Kavi muttered to Favius under the cover of the mules’ pounding hooves. Not that anyone would care what he learned now. His wrists were tied to Duckie’s pack frame, and guards rode in front, behind, and to either side of him. Favius, on his left with Duckie’s lead rein tied to his saddle, was the one who had padded the pack frame with blankets so it wasn’t quite so uncomfortable to ride.

“Pretty much,” Favius replied, not bothering to lower his voice. “There are still some pockets of resistance and a few large towns to take, but we’ve all the cities now, and the farmers are beginning to figure out we’re not so bad. It’ll be settled by midwinter, if you ask me—months ahead of schedule.”

They had a schedule for conquest? From what little Kavi had heard of the Hrum, that wasn’t impossible. Their empire had conquered dozens of countries in the last few centuries.

Kavi had been racking his brain over the last weeks for any information about them, but all he remembered, aside from their possession of the secret of watersteel, was that traders liked passing into their empire. Not just because they kept the peace as well as any civilized land, but also because inside the boundaries of the empire the whole length of the Trade Road was raised and paved with stone slabs. Kavi found that so improbable that he hadn’t entirely believed it, even though he’d heard it from several men. Certainly the road here was the same winding, muddy mess it was on the other side of the border, for the first of the winter rains had started a few days ago, and it had rained every afternoon since.

THE STORM THAT DAY arrived on schedule. Alen fastened up Kavi’s cloak for him, but soon the hood blew back, and rain soaked through his hair and ran down his neck to wet his back and shoulders. He had seldom been more grateful to see the walls of a town looming out of the thin, gray drizzle.

The gate guard was clad in the scarlet cloak of a Hrum soldier, with a fitted steel breastplate, and a crested helmet whose peaked brim kept some of the rain off his face. He spoke with Raiban and examined a set of documents that had been stitched into the lining of Raiban’s saddle till that morning. But soon he signaled the gatekeeper to open for them.

Mazad, where Kavi had grown up and learned his craft, was walled too—the only walled city in Farsala. He was familiar with the way stone caught the ring of iron-shod hooves and intensified it. On this dim, dripping evening the streets were all but empty. Even in the inn, where they lodged warm and dry for the night, the folk spoke only Sendan and made no move to help him, though he caught flashes of guilt or pity in their eyes before they turned away. Conquered people minded their own business. Kavi shivered, despite the warmth of the hearth fire.

The morning dawned fair, though the road was muddy enough to make Kavi grateful he wasn’t walking. If the soldiers complained, they did it in Hrum. But with or without complaints, they set a fast enough pace that they reached the rise that overlooked the Hrum camp just before midday.

When he first saw it, Kavi thought it must be a town, but no town he’d ever seen was laid out in squares like a game board. As they drew nearer he saw that the neat rows of peaked roofs were not houses, but tents, all of the same design, made with the same, drab canvas. His view was obscured as they rode down the hill to the staked palisade.

Raiban showed no papers here, for the guards recognized him and waved him on with a grin and a comment that sounded like a jest. Kavi was getting very tired of Hrum.

Inside the palisade the resemblance to a town was even greater, despite the lack of permanent buildings. The straight, muddy streets were full of people, and not all were dressed as soldiers, for some wore the leather of craftsmen or the drab cotton and wool of Sendar shopkeepers. There were also women among them who obviously weren’t soldiers, though Alen called greetings to a few of them. How many soldiers did the Hrum have here? Thousands? It was larger than any Farsalan army camp that Kavi had seen.

Raiban led them straight to the central square, where he was intercepted by another man, a superior officer, judging by the swirling bronze decorations on his breastplate and by the way Raiban laid his clenched fist over his heart at the sight of him.

The rest of the troop went off, taking Duckie with the other mules and leaving Kavi with Favius and Alen. Unlike most of the camp, which was filled with the soldiers’ tents, the central square was empty in the middle and surrounded by larger tents, whose function Kavi could often guess. The clang of a hammer identified the smithy, just as the domed ovens behind a long tent that ran down one whole side of the square told of a bakery and probably the camp’s kitchen. That guess was confirmed when a word from Favius to an old man, who wore only a rough drab tunic under his cloak, brought out half a loaf of bread and three bowls of bean soup. Was he a servant? A slave? The man wore no shackles and bore no marks of punishment, but a chill passed down Kavi’s spine. Even the deghans didn’t keep slaves. It was probably their only virtue.

Kavi’s captors untied his hands to let him eat. He considered refusing the food, but going hungry would do nothing to help the old man. He recognized the flat brown beans that formed the soup’s base, but the Hrum cook had added potatoes, beef, and pepper, where a Farsalan would have used onions, cumin, and perhaps raisins to enliven it.

When Kavi’s bowl was empty, Favius bound his wrists again and replied to Kavi’s protest with a single curt word: “Orders.”

A limping soldier supported by two of his fellows told Kavi the location of the surgeons’ tent; the number of men exiting the tent beyond it with new boots revealed the cobbler. As time dragged on Kavi developed guesses for all the tents on the square and was beginning to grow bored. The way everything was arranged in squares and rows was as tedious as it was alien. Even the latrines, when Favius took him there, were laid out in a straight line.

He was reduced to trying to guess the contents of the crates, barrels, and wagonloads that had been stored outside—what were those covered bundles that emerged from both the front and back of the carts that carried them?—and was almost grateful to see Raiban approaching with a couple of armed and armored Hrum, whose attitude proclaimed:
Guard.
Almost grateful.

Alen patted his shoulder before she left, but no one said anything in Faran until Raiban gestured to the guards. “They’ll take you to Substrategus Garren,” he told Kavi. “Don’t try anything.”

After almost three weeks together, Raiban should have known Kavi wasn’t that stupid, but saying so would be equally stupid. Kavi crossed the square meekly and went down the street between rows of tents. They were much larger than the common troopers’, though of the same cut and made of the same drab canvas—utterly unlike a deghan’s bright, luxurious pavilion. Officers’ quarters?

The tent he was taken to wasn’t the biggest, which stood at the end of the row, but the tent directly to its left.
Sub
strategus Garren.