Snare

The four trotted over and did what she asked.

Ammadin had them lay Zayn face-down in the grass behind her tent, then sent for Orador, the man who knew wound lore. He was a portly man, Orador, with a long drooping moustache, mostly grey, and a round face to match his belly. A young apprentice brewed herb-water at Ammadin’s fire while the master looked over Zayn’s wounds. Carefully he washed the blood off Zayn’s back with the herb-water, then poured keese over the stripes. When the liquor hit, Zayn’s fingers dug into the grass like a saur’s claws, but he made no noise at all.

‘That’ll keep the evil spirits away,’ Orador said cheerfully. ‘No bandages for you, boy. Air’s the best thing for these shallow wounds, and the bleeding’s stopped already.’

With a long sigh, Zayn turned his head and looked at Ammadin, hunkered down near him in the grass. His eyes were as distant from his pain as if he were merely taking the sun.

‘How soon can he ride?’ Ammadin said.

‘Today if I have to,’ Zayn whispered.

Orador laughed under his breath. ‘I like your guts, but you’ll need to rest for a couple of days, at least.’

‘Easy enough,’ Ammadin said. ‘The comnee won’t be riding for a while. When we do leave, Zayn, we’ll be heading east.’

‘Good.’ Zayn smiled briefly. ‘I’ve always been curious about the east.’

All at once, Ammadin felt danger, an odd intuition that seemed to rise out of no particular cause. For a moment she considered Zayn, lying utterly still in his exhaustion, his back as raw as a piece of freshly butchered meat. The warning came to her as the scent of anger. Puzzled, she stood up and found Palindor standing nearby with his arms crossed tightly over his chest. When he caught her glance, he turned on his heel and strode off. So that’s it! Ammadin thought. Well, I can handle a jealous young colt like him easy enough. She left Zayn under Orador’s care and went to find Apanador to tell him that she had a servant and the comnee a new rider.

After they left Samahgan, Warkannan led his men north rather than straight east, just as if he were indeed going to visit Arkazo’s family in their country villa. In this province, Zerribir, the larder of Kazrajistan, the land stretched out flat in a broad valley, all gold and red with crops – wheatian, oil beans, breadmoss, vegetables – tended by farmers who lived in white-washed cottages set among the rosy fields.

Graceful mosques, built of white-washed true-oak and adorned with minarets, rose out of the magenta view. Five times a day they heard the call to prayer, either carried on the wind from a distant spire or close at hand from a wayside shrine. They would dismount and stand in the road, holding their horses’ reins in one hand while they raised the other to point towards the sky, just as the Second Prophet had taught his people to pray when they were outside. Soutan would stand to one side, watching. One late afternoon Warkannan had enough of seeing him sneer.

‘And just what are you smirking about?’ Warkannan said.

‘Nothing.’ Soutan wiped the smile off his face. ‘Tell me something, Captain. Do you know what you’re pointing at?’

‘Of course. The holy city of Mekka.’

‘Which exists up in the air, floating along?’

‘Don’t be stupid! It’s a symbol of Paradise, where Mohammed’s soul went when he died.’

‘Ah. What would you say if I told you it was a real city, made of wood and vines like any other?’

Warkannan considered a number of blunt insults but discarded them. ‘Of course it was,’ he said instead. ‘Back in the Homelands somewhere. In a desert, if I remember rightly. That doesn’t mean it can’t have some sort of symbolic meaning as well.’

‘Yes, it was in a desert.’ Arkazo joined in. ‘And it was made of stones and mortar, not vines. They didn’t have as many earthquakes back in the Homelands.’

‘Very good.’ Soutan favoured him with a small smile. ‘There may be more to your mind than I thought.’

Arkazo’s face brightened with rage, but Warkannan cut him off. ‘Let’s get going,’ he snapped. ‘I want to make a few more miles before sunset.’

In this flat country the well-kept roads made travelling easy. Warkannan and his men managed a good twenty-five miles a day at a smooth, steady walk. Now and again they pulled their horses to the side of the road to allow a closed carriage to clatter past, drawn by four matched horses, carrying the womenfolk of some rich man behind its curtained windows. More often the roads ran beside canals, where they saw horse-drawn narrowboats glide by, piled high with produce.

‘It’s peaceful here,’ Soutan remarked one morning. ‘Peaceful and prosperous.’

‘For now it is,’ Warkannan said. ‘If there’s another round of new taxes, I don’t know what people are going to eat. The salt tax has damn near broken the farmers as it is. They have to work out in the sun, and salt’s no luxury to them. That’s something that Gemet will never understand, the greedy bastard – hard work and what it does to a man.’

‘Unfortunately, you’re quite right. I have no doubt that Jezro will take a very different view of the matter.’

‘Neither do I. God blessed us when He spared Jezro.’

‘As he damn well should, considering all the trouble you people have gone to for his sake.’

‘Now just what do you mean by that?’

‘Only that you left the Homelands to come here. Haven’t you ever wondered about those Homelands, Captain?’

Warkannan considered as they rode past a long maroon field of vegetables. Out among the rows farmers were harvesting, cutting leaves and piling them high in baskets. He could hear them singing as they worked.

‘From what I understand,’ Warkannan said at last, ‘we’re a lot better off here. The Homelands were filled with infidels and evil magic. It was so bad that the great Mullah Agvar was afraid the true faith would be lost.’

Soutan rolled his eyes heavenward. ‘No doubt that’s what you’ve been taught. Don’t you ever wonder if it’s true?’

‘No. Why would I? The mullahs are the ones who have all the old books and such. They’d know the truth.’

‘Maybe. What if they’re not telling the truth, though?’

‘Why wouldn’t they?’

‘To keep you from regretting what you’ve lost, the Homelands, I mean.’

‘Why would I regret a pack of filthy infidels and their tame demons?’

Soutan looked at him for a long moment, eyes wide in exaggerated amazement. ‘You belong in a museum, Captain,’ he said finally. ‘A pure example of a pure type.’

‘Now, watch it, Soutan!’

Soutan flinched as if he expected a blow. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to be insulting.’

Warkannan snorted, then changed the subject.

As they travelled north, they stopped now and then at a cavalry fort to see if they could pick up gossip or news that might point them to the Chosen’s spy. Warkannan’s twenty years of service had left him with plenty of friends, many of them stationed at one or the other of the chain of cavalry forts that bound the khanate together. It was at Haz Anjilar that he heard more about the officer cashiered out at Blosk.

Warkannan had left Soutan and Arkazo at the inn and gone alone to pay a courtesy call upon the commander, a colonel named Hikko who had once shared a border posting with him. Over glasses of arak, they agreed that the cavalry wasn’t what it used to be, that the young officers nowadays were slack and ill-educated, and that the enlisted men lacked a proper respect for authority.

‘What we need,’ Hikko said, ‘is a war. A good long campaign against the ChaMeech – now that would weed out the unfit. There’d be none of this lying around the barracks and arguing with the sergeants then.’

‘Can’t blame the men, I suppose,’ Warkannan said. ‘When you consider what they’ve got for officers.’

‘Now that’s true.’ Hikko shook his bald head sadly. ‘I’ve got a story along those lines. A fellow named Zayn Hassan. Everyone said he had a brilliant career ahead of him. He was stationed in Bariza, on his way up, but he couldn’t keep his hands off of some official’s wife.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He ended up cashiered, that’s what. Down in Blosk, they flogged him and turned him out. A comnee took him in, apparently. But you know what’s damned odd? No one knows the name of this very important cuckold or his wife. You’d think the womenfolk would have spread the gossip over half the khanate.’

Warkannan found himself very sober very fast. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’d think so. How many lashes did this Hassan get?’