Fall of a Kingdom (The Farsala Trilogy) (16 page)

The arrow leaped from the string and hurtled across the distance to pierce the doe’s side, knocking her over, feet thrashing.

The time for stealth was past. Soraya jumped up and hurried to her prey.

It was probably dead by the time she reached it, but its legs still twitched, so Soraya drew her knife and cut its throat. Blood spurted, but not in rhythm with a beating heart.
Dead. Good.

Soraya had hunted with girls, and even grown women, who flinched and squealed at death, but she had no patience with them. Where did the silly things think meat came from, anyway? Still, she grimaced as she turned the doe so that she could reach its belly. She’d refused to clean game at first. That was for servants. But having servants to do it meant she had to bring at least Hejir with her, and her privacy was worth the sacrifice of some dignity. She’d let Hejir teach her to clean game, just as she was teaching him to track and stalk, and she’d become almost accustomed to blood on her hands and clothes, though the messiness of it still disgusted her.

More blood than usual this time,
Soraya realized. A desert gazelle might be smaller than one of the plains, but it couldn’t possibly fit in her satchel. After some thought she finished cutting through its throat and severed its head—why carry more weight than she had to?

She let the gazelle’s corpse bleed out as much as possible while she put on her sheepskin vest. Not only would it pad her shoulders, but she’d gotten chilled waiting for her shot. She packed her bow and quiver, then lifted the doe onto her shoulders with an unladylike grunt of effort.
Weeks
of meat for the table. But not so heavy that she couldn’t get it back up the trail.

Soraya bent carefully to pick up her satchel and set out. One of winter’s truths, in both the desert and the plains, was that the days were short. She had perhaps two or three candlemarks before darkness fell, but as she’d told her keepers, the moon would be near full tonight. Even in the woods, it would shed enough light to let her make it home. It would be cold in the mountains after dark, though.
So step up the pace.

Soraya walked briskly. She had no need for silence now, and she could take easier routes around obstacles she’d been forced to climb in pursuit of the herd, so she made good time. Between the noise she made and her focus on haste, it was some time before she noticed that she was being stalked.

What sound had reached her, she never knew. She simply froze, listening for something beyond the whisper of wind and her heartbeat. There! A jackal’s grunting cough.

Not a howl, so the ones he spoke to are close. Keep moving, but don’t run. If you run, so will they.

Jackals seldom attacked people—and only if their pack was very large—for they preferred smaller prey. They sometimes took a peasant child, but even a smallish woman should be safe.
Except,
Soraya thought grimly,
for smallish women who present themselves to jackal packs covered with blood.

It was the gazelle they really wanted, and she’d let them have it when the time was right.

Now that she was listening for the sounds, Soraya could hear occasional snorts and the scrape of claws on rock. Surely her imagination was magnifying their number. There couldn’t be as many as it sounded like. Soraya swallowed, but her mouth remained dry.

Here it was, the straight-walled, rocky canyon she remembered. The jackals would be forced to come into the open there, and they’d all be behind her.

Starting into the canyon, Soraya heard the scuff of their claws as they balked at revealing themselves. Or perhaps they were gathering their number for the charge.

She’d only gone a few dozen yards when they swarmed after her, yipping with excitement now that the chase had begun. There must be thirty of them! No matter. Soraya dropped the gazelle’s carcass and ran for the other end of the canyon, fear driving her pounding feet.

They would—surely they would—stop for the fresh, bloody kill instead of chasing her down. She had to look back, even if it cost her a precious fraction of her speed.

She saw the first of the pack reach the carcass and stop, just as she’d prayed they would. Almost all of them stopped, but a handful left the gazelle to the rest of the pack and came on after her.

Soraya hadn’t thought she could run any faster, but she did, flying over the sandy canyon floor, splashing through the stream without pause. But the jackals ran also, faster on four feet than she could ever be on two. She wasn’t going to make it, not even out of the canyon. She’d have to climb, but…There!

Soraya dropped her satchel. Maybe they’d think it was another carcass and stop to investigate, but she didn’t look back to see. All her focus was on her racing feet and the ledge, perhaps five yards above the canyon floor. But the rock face below it was almost sheer! She couldn’t—

She heard their panting behind her—too close! Soraya flung herself up the cliff, scrambling desperately for handholds, footholds, any way to reach the ledge.

Rocks snapped and crumbled under her boots, but not before lifting her a few precious feet. Claws scrabbled on the rock below, sending her swarming up the cliff like a lizard. Soraya dragged herself onto the ledge and rolled to the back of it, facing out, ripping her knife from its sheath with shaking hands.

No snarling faces appeared. She took a shuddering breath. Her whole body was shaking, but she twisted forward till she could peer over the edge.

Seven jackals sat on their haunches, watching her with the alertness of hounds who’ve treed a squirrel. They couldn’t climb the rocks. She was safe.

Soraya dropped back and lay with her eyes closed, waiting for her heart to stop hammering. The ledge, as she’d already observed, was about twice the width of her body at its widest point. It narrowed sharply as it stretched farther up the rock face.

Only now did she notice that her hands and fingers stung. Opening her eyes, she saw they were bruised and scraped—bleeding in places.

“Wonderful.” Her voice was cool and ironic, not quivering with terror, and that gave her the strength to sit up and take stock of her situation.

The jackals stared up at her. Soraya wondered why they weren’t with their brothers, who were tearing at the gazelle farther down the canyon. Perhaps they were lower in status—the last to be allowed at the kill. And therefore hungrier.
Hungry, peasant jackals. Joy.

Well, if she couldn’t go down, could she climb up? Not from where she was. Directly over her head was a smooth outcrop of sandstone. Soraya rose carefully to her hands and knees and crawled up the ledge as it angled across the canyon wall.

Below, the jackals rose to follow her.

After a few yards the overhang vanished, but there were still no handholds, and the ledge had narrowed to the point that she could no longer crawl along it. In the other direction the ledge narrowed even faster.

Soraya sighed and crawled backward to the widest place. She sat and looked down at the jackals. She’d have to wait them out. Even the most foolish hound grew bored with a treed squirrel eventually.

She wished she still had her bow and quiver, but she could never have reached the ledge burdened with her satchel. In fact, looking down, Soraya wondered how she’d done it even without the satchel. She couldn’t see any knobs or cracks that might support her hands or feet. She had to be five yards above the canyon floor. Too high to jump down without breaking an ankle at the least.

Oh well, she’d worry about that when the jackals left.

Soraya wished she had some food or, better yet, her water-skin. The race to the rocks had made her thirsty.

The sun had vanished behind the great cliff some time ago, and now Azura’s light was draining from the sky. Soraya opened the front of her vest and wrapped it around her tucked-up knees. Azura be praised that her father had sent her into exile with rough, boy’s clothes instead of a deghass’ silks. If she were a boy, she could piss on the watching jackals. In the spirit of defiance, she tried to do that anyway, but she didn’t have the range.

Soraya rearranged her clothes, awkward on the narrow ledge, and waited.

The jackals waited.

The canyon grew dark, but not so dark that Soraya couldn’t see the shadowy forms beneath her. The rest of the pack finished with the gazelle’s carcass, and most of them left, but four added themselves to the group below her. Soraya shivered.
That’s only a superstition,
she told herself firmly.
Just because there are eleven djinn, that doesn’t make everything that comes in elevens unlucky.

Still, why had only four chosen to join their friends?

And why had she told her servants she wouldn’t be back till after nightfall? They wouldn’t even start looking till dawn. Could they follow her to this distant canyon? Hejir was the best tracker among them. Soraya sighed. The jackals had to give up, eventually.

The moon rose above the great cliff, but it took some time to reach into Soraya’s canyon, filling it with silvery light and black shadows.

The jackals howled.

“You’re not frightening me with that,” Soraya told them, and herself. “Make all the noise you want—I’m up here and you’re down there, and that’s not going to change till you’ve given up and gone home.”

They watched her in ear-pricked silence for a long moment. Then a chorus of yips broke out and rose once more into a full-throated, eerie howl.

Soraya clapped her hands over her ears. “I’m not listening!” Then she grimaced. That was something Merdas did. His nurses said he’d probably outgrow it by the time he was four.

The jackals howled again, sounding for all the world like parents shouting down a stubborn toddler. Soraya lowered her hands and cursed them for the spawn of Borz and Gudarz, the djinn of greed and cruelty. The sheer childishness of it made her feel better. The jackals went on howling, but she shouted louder.

Suddenly they fell silent, their heads turning toward the end of the canyon. Soraya looked too.

Pale shadows drifted like ghosts over the canyon floor. Realizing they’d been seen, they stopped, as eerily still as the jackals. Then they charged, shouting and hurling stones. The jackals fled, yelping when the stones found targets.

The ghosts resolved themselves into a handful of Suud. Their hoods, blown back in the heat of the chase, revealed faces as pale as the moon overhead, as pale as the djinn armies Rostam had fought. Soraya wished they would use the spears they carried on the jackals, instead of stones.

Most of them ran on, chasing the jackals out of the canyon, but one tribesman stopped and came to the base of the cliff beneath Soraya’s ledge, looking up.

The moonlight on his pale skin showed his features clearly. He was young, perhaps her own age. Tangled, silky-looking hair fell to his shoulders. His robe, open at the front, displayed a lean, hairless chest and no more clothing than a strip of cloth wrapped around his hips and a pair of sandals. He should have been freezing, even in his robe, but perhaps he was accustomed to wearing next to nothing in the brisk night air. By the standards of his own folk, he was doubtless properly clad, and she was feeling gracious anyway.

Soraya smiled. “Thank you.” Was there any chance he’d understand her?

“You not trouble.” He grinned at her widening eyes. “I talk you Faran good good. Mother, Father, me trade you people. You scared scared, climb big up!”

Was he laughing at her? “I was not ‘scared scared,’” said Soraya. “Climbing up was the only sensible thing to do.”

His brow wrinkled. “Sen-si-ble. Smart? Climb smart,” he agreed. “Climb rock…” He paused, obviously at a loss for words, then he slapped the cliff face with both hands. “Not smart. Climb up you. Climb down?”

He
was
laughing at her, djinn curse him.

“You’re right,” Soraya admitted coolly. “I can’t climb down. I will require you, and the others, to assist me.”

The others were returning as she spoke. There were seven more of them, and three were women. Underneath their robes most of them wore simple, short tunics that left their legs bare from midthigh down, even two of the women. The third wore no more beneath her robe than the rude boy did.

“What?” the rude boy asked, his brows knitted in puzzlement.

“Bring me down,” said Soraya, choosing simple words and a commanding tone. “You”—she gestured to the approaching group to make the plural clear—“bring me”—now she gestured to herself—“down.” She pointed to the ground at the boy’s feet.
There, that should do it.

He evidently understood, for he stepped back a few paces and studied the rock face. Then he shrugged. “Not do. Big…” His hands moved, describing the steepness of the cliff. “You big scared scared climb up. We not scared scared. Not climb up. You talk rock. Talk rock, climb down.”

“Talk rock?” she echoed. What was he trying to say? “I can’t climb down. You have to come get me. Or bring a ladder.”

He frowned in bewilderment. “Lad-der?”

“Ladder.” Soraya mimed climbing rungs with her hands. “Ladder.”

His expression cleared. “Climb. Yes. Talk rock. Climb down.”