Fall of a Kingdom (The Farsala Trilogy) (9 page)

The peddler’s soft snort expressed a world of contempt for deghan politics, but he kept his horse and the absurdly named mule within the shelter of the trees, which was enough for Jiaan. He knew even the most skilled hunter couldn’t track them as fast as they could ride, though three horses and a mule left a trail even the peddler might have followed.

It soon became clear that the gap between them and their pursuers was widening. The brat excused herself, with a glare Jiaan didn’t dare challenge.

“Why shouldn’t she?” the peddler asked, seeing his frown. “Even I can see that we’re pulling away.”

“Yes, but we have to be able to keep out of their sight when we get there.”

“And where would ‘there’ be?”

“You’ll see,” said Jiaan shortly. The lady came back, straightening her clothes. Jiaan started to dismount, to help her up to the saddle, but she grasped the pommel, along with a handful of reins, and sprang up like a boy.

It seemed to take forever, but the sun was only half down the sky when they came abruptly out of the forest and stared into space. The peddler’s horse shied as his rider recoiled, and even Jiaan, who’d seen the site before, swallowed. “I told you you’d see.”

See, indeed. The cliff was half a dozen yards from their feet, but with a cliff that high, yards weren’t nearly enough. Beyond it the world fell away into the badlands, a maze of reddish rock pillars with only space between. So much space. Looking outward made Jiaan feel like he was standing in the sky, and his stomach grew hollow.

He had escorted the farm family to the lady’s refuge on ordinary mountain roads, but the commander had sworn that the desert was the best possible place to elude pursuit. Jiaan began to understand why; he didn’t even want to think about traversing that cliff, guided or not.

The girl dismounted and went to the edge of the abyss. Her arms lifted, almost as if she intended to take flight.

“Get back!” said Jiaan sharply.

Her dark gaze was reassuringly ironic. Earthbound. “Why? Don’t we have to go down?”

“Yes, but not here.” Jiaan swallowed again at the thought of descending that cliff, even on a trail. A good trail, the tribesman had assured him. He looked for the landmarks the Suud had pointed out. The huge, twisting spire to his left looked familiar. Sort of. “That way.”

A candlemark later Jiaan wasn’t so certain, for the spire’s appearance altered with every change in his angle of view. He tried to conceal his doubts from the others, like a real deghan would.

Sometimes they were able to travel in the trees, but sometimes they were forced onto the cliff edge, and that worried Jiaan for more reasons than the height. They were too visible. If the trail down was equally visible, they’d surely be…There!

The slight figure might have been a child, against the towering backdrop of the badlands, but the red-striped robe that concealed the woman’s vulnerable, white skin had become very familiar. The commander had had to double his price when the tribespeople had learned that this might take place in the daytime.

The tribeswoman sprinted up to them. “Good good!” The long sleeves, uncuffed and tied shut at the bottom to protect her hands, didn’t stop her from reaching up to lift her hood, carefully keeping out the direct sunlight as she did so. Her bizarre, pale eyes were bright with excitement. The irises were actually gray but hardly darker than the whites, and her pupils were little larger than pinpricks. She looked blind, and Jiaan wondered with a stab of worry how well their guides could see in the daylight.

“Man much long back,” she went on eagerly. “Down path, not see. Good come now.”

“How do you know where he is?” Jiaan asked.

She struggled for words and failed. “Tell. Know. Come now!” A small foot stamped impatiently.

Was that gesture universal? Jiaan smiled. “Very well. Good. Take us to the trail.” He looked around for some ravine or canyon that might give access to the desert so far below, but for as far as he could see the cliff was unbroken. “Is it far?”

The small woman snorted—another universal gesture, which she’d demonstrated often over the last week. She took a handful of strides to the edge of the cliff and turned back. Her face was hidden in the hood’s deep folds, but her voice was clear. “Here.”

“No.” Jiaan sighed. He hoped achieving communication wouldn’t take as long as it sometimes had. Gestures might help. He dismounted and went to join her. “Not the cliff, the trail down. Show us the tra—”

It opened at his feet, as if a djinn’s concealing spell had been banished, though Jiaan knew it had only been hidden by an angle of the rock. He peered over the edge.

The path tumbled down the rock face, turning back and forth on itself like the track of a hunted hare. It was about four feet wide where Jiaan stood, but the bottom looked no wider than a piece of string.

“No. It’s too open. They’ll see us. The horses won’t be able to make it.”

The small foot stamped again, raising a puff of dust. “Trail good. Horses good. Man back, us come now!”

The others dismounted and came to see for themselves. The peddler exclaimed in astonishment, and even the crazy…the lady Soraya seemed taken aback. But she was the one who looked up to meet Jiaan’s eyes.

“This was the plan. Do you have a better idea?”

IT WASN’T AS BAD as it had looked from above. As long as Jiaan kept his eyes on the trail and didn’t look down or out, it was better than he’d expected. The trail was generally three to four feet wide, though it narrowed in a few spots, until Jiaan worried about the horses. But, secure on their four feet, they were calmer than the humans who led them. Even the peddler had agreed to lead his horse and leave Duckie to follow on her own. Watching the surefooted mule pick her way down after them, Jiaan understood why.

It wasn’t always a life-threatening drop either, he told himself firmly. As you neared the sharp turns you could probably survive a fall to the next level of the track, and sometimes the slope softened, supporting a bush that a desperate hand might snatch. There were really only a dozen places where it felt as if they clung to a wrinkle in the rock’s ancient face and its slightest frown would pitch them off.

Finally his feet touched the earth of the desert floor. Jiaan looked up, stretching tense neck muscles. The cliff appeared almost as high looking up as it had looking down. In fact, it looked to him like they’d descended half a league, but that was surely impossible. Though, judging by the sweat that soaked his undershirt, he might have been running twice that far.

The peddler, the last to clatter off the trail, sighed and went to stroke his mule’s damp neck and whisper into her ears. He didn’t seem to be sweating as hard as Jiaan.

And except for the dust on her boots, the girl might have come from a stroll in a spring garden. “Shouldn’t we get out of sight?” She gestured at the cliff overhead. “Or were you planning to take a nap? Our hunters could come along at any time.”

Jiaan grimaced and let her mount on her own, since she did it so well. She was right. There really wasn’t time to kiss the ground.

THEY MADE CAMP that night at the base of a sandstone tower greater than any raised by man. At first Jiaan refused to let the tribeswoman make a fire, for fear their pursuers would see it from the cliff top, but soon she pointed to the glow of fires illuminating several rock faces in the distance, and Jiaan realized that there was no way to distinguish their fire from those of the scattered…hunting parties? Surely there couldn’t be that many tribes so close, in an area so barren.

“Besides,” the peddler pointed out, “after what happened today, they’d have to be stark mad to be coming down in the dark.”

All three of them grinned, united in delighted memory.

They had made it into the rocks before their stalkers reached the cliff top. Their guide had kept them out of sight, weaving through the maze like a shuttle through the warp, till suddenly Jiaan saw a formation he knew he’d seen before and looked down at their own tracks.

“Hey.” He said it softly, so as not to wake the echoes. “We’re going in circles.”

The woman, whom he’d mounted on the saddle behind him, gave him a look that made him grateful her vocabulary wasn’t up to much. “Look,” she said, as if speaking to a not-very-bright child. She pointed at their tracks, which they were now riding over. A bit later she led them round a bend; then she tugged his tunic and pointed behind them. “Look now.”

They had turned in a different direction than they had the last time—one set of tracks went left and the other right. Both sets were so recent, the hunters wouldn’t know which to follow.

After that Jiaan left the matter of eluding pursuit entirely in her hands. His favorite moment was when they’d reached the base of a spire, and she’d directed him and Soraya around one side and sent the peddler and his mule in the opposite direction. When they met on the other side, she signaled for them to keep going and meet back where they’d started. Then they rode back over their trail and got off on a dry riverbed they’d already taken so often that one more set of tracks would hardly show.

It wouldn’t take a skilled tracker long to figure out, but the sheer, artistic exuberance of all those backward and forward tracks still made Jiaan chuckle.

When they’d finally left the maze, it had been very simple. The tribeswoman had guided them along a central trail they must have taken half a dozen times, then they turned abruptly, going down a sandy defile. But as soon as they had rounded a bend in the narrow canyon, the woman jumped from Jiaan’s horse. He started to protest but then watched in astonishment as she cut several twiggy branches from a nearby bush and wove them into a broom with which she swept away their tracks. Then, after checking carefully to be certain the rock shadow would keep the setting sun from her skin, she had pulled off her robe and swung it over the sand in windy, sweeping arcs, erasing even the thin lines the broom had left. Given a few moments for the surface sand to dry, it would be impossible for anyone to tell that three horses and a mule had left the trail there. They never crossed their own tracks again.

Jiaan looked up now and met the woman’s odd, light eyes. She had taken off her robe in the warmth of the fire and wore only a thin shift, which revealed far too much of her moon-pale skin. Her hair looked like curling corn silk—unnatural. Jiaan smiled. “You are good,” he told her sincerely. “Good good!”

She grinned back at him—another universal human gesture. There were those who said the tribesfolk were djinn, or at least a djinn’s get, because of their pale skin and hair. Even that they had a djinn’s powers. Jiaan had scoffed, but he hadn’t
known;
now he did.

“My father said the Suud were the best trackers he’d ever seen,” Soraya told the peddler. “He took a troop into the badlands once, looking for some miners who’d gone missing, and they led him in circles for days. He said he’d never have gotten out if they hadn’t finally taken pity on him and led him to a trail up the cliff. He sent his men back and stayed on as their guest for several weeks.”

Jiaan suppressed a pang of startled jealousy. The commander hadn’t mentioned staying with the tribes to him, though he had told Jiaan that he thought the miners were dead. The only reason he’d been allowed to escape, he said, was because soon after he entered the desert, he’d come across a hunting party and had offered them neither violence nor insult, nor had he allowed his men to do so. He feared the miners hadn’t been so restrained.

“But why would miners come here at all?” Jiaan wondered aloud. It wasn’t quite as desolate as it had looked from above; there was grass, in scattered brown clumps, and bushes and even small trees by the stream not far from their camp. The desert obviously supported life, for the Suud tribes lived here, but he saw nothing that might lure anyone from more verdant lands. Unless…“I’ve never heard of the Suud trading anything but baskets. Is there gold here? Gems?”

The peddler snorted. “Nothing so useless. Probably nothing at all, but the mining camps are full of rumors that there’s iron ore in the desert that makes better steel than anything we get out of the mountains. A few fools go looking for it every year.”

“That’s right,” said Jiaan. “You sell in the mining camps. But why call them fools? A sword that won’t break is worth its weight in gold, and might sell for even more, if it’s well proven.”

“Oh, I’ve nothing but respect for good steel,” said the peddler. “I’m calling them fools because most of them don’t come back, and there’s no treasure of any kind worth dying for.”

A true peasant attitude. Jiaan looked at the lady, hoping she wouldn’t spoil the moment of amity by saying so. She pressed her lips together and looked down. The firelight revealed nothing in her smooth, sculpted face, but it occurred to Jiaan that she also might not be coming back.

THEY REACHED THE OLD CROFT around midday. The tribesman had joined them when they awoke, and his command of the Faran language was good enough to convey that their pursuers had left the badlands and were waiting for them to come back up the trail they’d used to descend. The other two huntsmen had joined them, even the man with the broken head. Jiaan was glad to hear it, and he was even more relieved when they left the desert by a different trail, which led up a small canyon and made him fear for his life in only a handful of places.

The croft was tucked into a snug mountain valley. The commander had discovered it on his expedition to the desert, but it had been abandoned even then. He didn’t think it was remarkable enough that any of the men who’d been with him would remember it.