In Legend Born (14 page)

Tansen decided it was time to increase the pressure on Josarian, so he finally took his performance to Emeldar itself. He'd spent days bragging loudly wherever he went, letting his tongue run wild with incredible tales after a mere cup or two in every tavern he entered—and he entered quite a few. The stories were so blatantly improbable that surely any man of sense would suspect him of being a drunken braggart of little skill and less intelligence, especially after the incompetent show he'd made of killing the assassin. He sweetened the bait, too, with insulting allusions to Josarian's cowardice.

"Why doesn't he face me?" Tansen demanded of the men in the vine-covered courtyard of the tavern in Emeldar that day.

It was a warm afternoon, and the men of the village were resting after the midday meal, waiting for the sun to move a bit further across the sky before returning to their fields, pastures, and other back-breaking work. It was a glorious Silerian day, the kind Tansen had remembered with hungry longing during his long years in exile. The sky was a brilliant cerulean blue, a heat haze made the harsh mountains shimmer like gold, and the scents of spring perfumed the air. It was an afternoon to spend lying in the shade and enjoying the fragrance of the Silerian hills, or perhaps creeping into an empty shed or some isolated Kintish ruins to enjoy the sighs and softness of a woman. Instead, he was swallowing mediocre wine and swaggering more than the slain assassin had ever dreamed of doing.

"I'll
tell
you why he won't face me," Tansen continued, warming to his subject. "He's
afraid
, that's why!"

All the men glared. Many argued. One or two mumbled vague threats. A few were silently attentive, perhaps suspecting the stranger was right about Josarian. So things were going the way he'd expected.

"He's heard about all the men I've killed," Tansen sneered. "He's heard how I fought twenty Moorlanders by myself, and defeated them all."

"We've
all
heard that one," said an old man.

"Three or four times, at least," someone else muttered.

Tansen pretended not to hear. "He's heard how I killed a Society assassin without even breaking a sweat!"

"Quiet, friend," another man said uneasily.

Some things in Sileria were still the same, Tansen reflected. People still didn't like to hear the Honored Society mentioned out loud in public places. Even his own
shir
wounds seemed to throb a little more when he spoke the word aloud, but he knew that was just a boy's superstition.

The conversation, such as it was, continued in this vein for a few more minutes, with Tansen finally concluding that Josarian had no balls and couldn't perform even for a Kintish courtesan possessing the finest erotic sorcery known to her kind.

As a boy, he'd seen a man killed over such an insult. Not surprisingly, someone here jumped to his feet, a
yahr
in his hand and battle in his eyes. A relative of Josarian's, Tansen guessed, or at least a friend. The man was about Tan's age. His face was so handsome it was almost as pretty as a girl's, and the gossamer tunic he wore, which couldn't have been cheap, accentuated his good looks. He was a little on the small side, but wiry and quick.

"Easy Zimran," someone said, stepping between the two men.

Zimran tried to shove past his friend. "You heard what this
sriliah
said! Let me—"

"No, you idiot!" The man shoved Zimran down onto a stool and snapped, "Are you going to challenge him here, with Outlookers swarming all over the village? Use your head!"

The warning brought the pretty fellow to his senses. Fuming with impotent rage, he turned his back on Tansen and swallowed a huge gulp of wine.

Judging that he'd hit his target, Tansen studied the expressions of the men around him. Yes, no doubt about it; Josarian would hear about this, even if he was already a sojourner in the Otherworld.

"Tell Josarian I'll keep looking," Tansen warned the men, slamming down his cup. "Tell him I'll find him. He can't hide forever."

Actually, he
could
; and if he were smart, he would. But
shallaheen
were proud, and Tansen had by now flung too many insults at Josarian to be ignored. He had set the trap and baited it well. Now instinct told him that the outlaw's move would come soon. And Tan would be ready for him.

Pretending to be slightly drunk, he made his way out of the tavern. Once on the streets, he took care to stay well away from the main square, avoiding a potential confrontation with Outlookers. True, he'd been hired by their district commander, but most of them didn't know it, and he rather doubted his explanations would carry much weight with frustrated Outlookers tired of hunting for an elusive
shallah
rebel.

Apart from the main square and the market street, most of the Outlookers in Emeldar were posted around two houses clinging to a cliff at the edge of town: Josarian's and his sister's. Someone had identified the two dwellings to Tansen this morning. A widower, Josarian now shared his small stone house with a bachelor cousin who was said to be the bane of every father in the village.

Tansen strolled down a side street, letting people see him now that he was well out of sight of any Outlookers. The season was advancing, spring coming into full blossom. Soon it would be dark-moon again. Back in Cavasar, Koroll was undoubtedly growing restless. Well, patience was a virtue worth cultivating. After waiting nine years to come home, Tansen had little sympathy to spare for an ambitious Valdan who couldn't wait more than a moon cycle for a man's death.

Emeldar was not as pretty as Gamalan had been, and Darshon was only a hazy vision from here, shimmering dreamily in the distance. Tansen had seen the burnt offering-ground beyond the outskirts of Emeldar, the thick scars on people's palms, and the sacred lava stone which was the first stone laid in any
shallah
village ever built. But no matter how sincere their worship of Dar was, these people were too distant from Her angry mouth to know Her as the Gamalani had. Even now, the boy inside him felt Her hot gaze upon him, waiting, watching, judging him.

He felt other gazes, too, of course. Most of them were hostile, since everyone knew he had come here to kill Emeldar's favorite son. They were proud of Josarian's exploits. They smirked at the Outlookers who couldn't catch him. They had come to understand, Tansen saw, that the Valdani were vulnerable.

A pretty girl sat outside her doorway with her face turned away from the street, letting only her profile show: the signal of a modest, respectable girl who was available for courting. Tansen saw a young man pacing slowly back and forth with his companions, talking with them but keeping his eye on the girl. She turned her head away as he walked past, just enough to let him know that she had decided she was not available to
him
. Momentarily disheartened, the young man then made a show of not caring.

Had Tansen's life been different, he, too, might have participated in these early courting rituals. But his introduction to affairs of the heart, like his introduction to everything else that had shaped his life, had been sudden, brutal, and as cruel as the cut of a
shir
.

On a day like this, with the brilliant sunlight gleaming on a young woman's dark hair, he could see her again in his mind's eye, as clearly as if she stood there herself: Elelar. The delicate complexion, the graceful hands, the midnight black of her hair, the scent of her skin which had always made his belly quiver with naive hunger...

He shook off the memory, surprised at its piercing sharpness. Elelar was no
shallah
, but there was a strength, almost a harshness, in the beauty of a Silerian woman that was unlike that of women anywhere else in the three corners of the world. Seeing the women of his homeland for the first time in so many years was bound to remind him of her.

The young girl finally heeded her mother's repeated call to come inside the house. The long-sleeved tunic draped her body all the way down to her knees and, like the pantaloons she wore, was modestly loose. The material was light and gauzy, though, accommodating Sileria's hot climate, and the afternoon breeze melded it lovingly against her body. Tansen wasn't the only one who noticed the ripe young charms outlined so gracefully as she stood up. Ah, yes, that one would find a husband soon, judging by the hungry gazes that followed her every move. Tansen turned into another street leading away from town.

The streets of Emeldar were like those of any other
shallah
village: steep, rocky, and crowded with small houses made of the cream, amber, and peach colored stone of Sileria's mountains. The strange circumstances which Josarian's activities had brought upon Emeldar may have subdued some of the exuberance of the locals, but the scent of wild rosemary still perfumed the air, some slightly out-of-tune bard still wailed ancient melodies that echoed around the surrounding hills, and children still played in the streets while their parents or grandparents sat in the doorways and kept an eye on them.

No, Emeldar was not as pretty as Gamalan had been, but it stirred an ever-present hunger inside him for the home he would never see again, a home that no longer existed. It recalled the life of a boy who had never killed, never lost his loved ones, and never turned his back on Dar.

Tansen veered away from the memories—and from Emeldar. He was heading east, and he had made sure everyone knew it.

Zimran longed to see Josarian himself, to tell his cousin what a swaggering, drunken, uncouth lout the stranger was, but he couldn't wait all night by the cool spring in the hills where he'd promised to leave a message. There was a widow in need back in Emeldar, after all.

The lady's husband had gone off to join the
zanareen
last year after watching all his sheep die of thirst due to the feud between the Valdani and the Society; and now she counted on Zim to soothe the sorrow of her lonely nights. However, she was a modest woman who only let him visit her during the dark-moon, when she was convinced no one could see him sneak into her house. It wasn't quite dark-moon yet—Ejara hung low tonight, a glowing sliver of alabaster in the night's ebony ear—but the widow had missed Zimran sorely this month and was eager to begin the orgy of pleasure they would enjoy together for the next few nights. She'd managed to get close enough to him in the marketplace this morning to let him know she was ready:
Come tonight, come early, and be strong when you come.

Zimran grinned as he hid a hastily-knotted
jashar
under the usual rock near the spring. Why not let the lady keep believing that their affair was a secret and that half the village hadn't already guessed where he'd be sleeping tonight? A few whispered lies in the dark to ease her anxiety cost him nothing, after all.

And be strong when you come...
Ah, yes, his was a good life.

If only Josarian hadn't had the misfortune to get caught smuggling, and then compounded the error by killing two Outlookers. But what was done was done. Dar had turned Her face from them for a moment; they must be men and make the best of the situation.

Of course, with all the trouble Josarian had caused since then, there was now no chance of the Outlookers forgiving and forgetting, or even of their accepting a generous bribe. Zimran would never understand why, having gotten into this mess, Josarian now insisted on making it worse—looting and burning Outlooker outposts, harassing Valdani priests, murdering more Outlookers, and urging other
shallaheen
to do the same. These were not the acts of a rational man! Where had Zimran's happy, placid, fun-loving cousin gone? Everyone knew that Calidar had taken Josarian's heart to the Otherworld with her, but Zimran now suspected she'd taken all of his sense, too.

Arguing about it with Josarian made no difference, either.

"So what if Valdani can be killed as easily as
shallaheen?
" Zimran had said in exasperation one night not so long ago. "Let the Society do it! It's what they do best, anyhow."

"The Society doesn't kill them to defend us, they kill them to maintain their power over us!"

"It has always been this way," Zim argued. "Why do you think it should be different now, just because you've killed half a dozen Valdani?"

"Don't you see? If every one of us killed half a dozen Valdani—"

"Then the Emperor would just send twice as many to Sileria. What's the point?"

"Do you really want to spend the rest of your life watching the food we harvest, the livestock we raise, and the minerals we mine go to enrich the Valdani and pay for their wars of conquest against more people like us?"

"I want to spend the rest of my life getting rich from smuggling, and sleeping with grateful women who don't expect me to marry them," Zimran said with conviction.

And Josarian... Well, Josarian never stayed angry for long. He had merely smiled at that. "And so you shall, Zim. But I stumbled from the path one night, and I can never go back."