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Chapter Nine

"I can walk," Aisha said fretfully. She was tired of the narrow cot of the infirmary wagon, tired of long lurching days with nothing to see but the swaying strings of herbs strung to the hoops overhead.

"Not yet," her nephew Barak said firmly. "But you can come out for supper. Come on, tanta, the fresh air will do you good."

She had been sponge-bathed, dressed in a new robe, and wrapped in a tanned muskylope hide. Barak lifted her, as easily as he might a child.

"Too thin," he said, ducking through the opened rear tilt of the wagon and dropping to the ground. "But we'll cure that, nu?"

The wagons had been drawn up in a circle, as they were every camp-time. Bandari travel-wains had no wooden tongue at the front, only a long trek-chain, with the muskylopes yoked on either side. When the big vehicles were pulled into the wagon-burg, the circular fort, the chains lashed them together. Outside, the herds were grazing under mounted guards, barely visible in the last slivers of dimday light declining into truenight. Inside was a small town. Leather roofs unrolled like curtains from rests along the wagon hoops, strung to poles; walls were let down and lashed into place. The inner doors were kept laced open for now, and the wagon Barak carried her to was an Aladdin's cave of rugs and blankets. Fires had been lit before most of the wagons, and the smell of cooking filled the air.

"Eat," Oom Karl said, tucking her in. He had a healer's neat hands and eye for detail. With a smile she did not understand he said again, "Eat, myn libkin, eat."

Aisha looked down at the bowl of muskylope stew. "I think you must be trying to fatten me for the slaughter, djinni," she said, with a scowl that was half a laugh.

Sannie came with a stack of hot thin wheatcakes, made from batter poured on an iron plate. She peeled off half a dozen and dropped them on the boiled-leather plate beside the bowl.

"Eat," she said.

Aisha took the bowl in her left hand, rolled up one of the flatbreads with her right, and scooped up the food. Karl sprinkled some coarse gray salt on it for her. It was so good to eat herself full.

"You need more food than ordinary folk," the mediko said.

Aisha stiffened slightly. Karl shook his head. "You're not responsible for your ancestry," he said sharply. "And none of it's bad in itself."

She looked at him round-eyed. "But—" she exclaimed. "You Bandari hate the Saurons worse than any others!"

He nodded. "We hate their bloody deeds, Khatun Aisha, their tyrannies and murders. Bandari don't—" he paused, shrugged "—mostly don't and the rest shouldn't, hate people for their ancestry alone. Yeweh and the Founders know all the ancestors of the People saw what comes of that. You're stronger and faster and you see farther; so does Barak, and Chaya—whom we made our Judge, remember. Where's the evil in that? It's what you do with yourself that matters."

Wordlessly, Aisha held out the emptied bowl. He went to the fire to fill it for her again, and brought back a rolled straw sack of latkke, powdered-potato pancakes fried in hot muskylope oil. The edges were crisp, the centers rich with onions and cheese.

"It's all so good," she said, savoring the rich tastes.

"You expect bad eating in a caravan of spice merchants?" Josepha bat Golda strolled over and squatted down on her heels. "Back among the living, I see."

Aisha nodded. Out among the fires, someone was tuning a fiddle, scraping the bow across the strings. To the west, the last sliver of Cat's Eye sank; two of the sister moons floated ghostly above it, translucent silver crescents. There was just light enough to touch the great peaks of the Atlas to the south, a last gleam on the savage glaciers that crowned the peaks. Sparks from the fires swirled upward into the night, lost among the frosted arch of stars.

"Spices and condiments," another merchant said from the tilt of his wagon next to theirs. "Fine brandies, candied fruits."

"And glass and mirrors, paper and ink," still another called.

"Fine steel, tooled harness, rich furs—"

Barak returned from a circuit of the camp and sprawled on the cushions.

" 'Have we not Indian carpets, dark as wine?' " he quoted. Aisha recognized the tone of a bard reciting poetry, if not the lines. Karl did, and took them up:

"'For we have rose-candy, we have spikenard—' " Josepha bat Golda caught the rhythm:

"'Mastic and terebinth and oil and spice—' " More voices joined them:

" 'And such sweet jams, meticulously jarred,
As God's awn Prophet eats in Paradise.' "

There was laughter, but Barak's strong baritone continued alone:

 
" 'And we have manuscripts in peacock styles,
By Ali of Damascus; we have swords,
Engraved with apes and storks and crocodiles,
And heavy beaten necklaces, for Lords.
Yet we travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned.
For lust of knowing what should not be known,
We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.' "
 

Barak gestured grandly at the night. Off in the distance a herdsman called, a Bactrian gave its burbling complaint. Farther still something squalled hungrily, and the animals shifted in the darkness.

"That's why I travel with the caravans," he said. "Not for your miser's pay, Tanta Josepha. The Pale's a grand place, but it can get confining. Ama Chaya will get me to settle down soon enough. What would the People be without their traders? Dull as dust."

"Not to mention poor." Josepha's voice was dry. "Watch the eloquence, Barak my lad, or you'll talk yourself into the kapetein's shoes."

He shuddered theatrically and flicked his fingers in a gesture against ill luck learned from the tribes. The master merchant went on: "That's like saying, what would we be without our ranchers?"

"Hungry," someone replied. "No scholars?"

"Ignorant. No warriors?"

"Dead, very dead."

More laughter. Sannie came by again, slapped down a tray of sweet pastries, and flopped after it to lie with her head in Barak's lap. "You have any idea what it's like making those on a camp oven?" she said. "Ai, leave one for me!"

Barak winked around a mouthful of baklava. "I should marry you just for your cooking," he said. She reached back to thump him in the ribs.

"I marry you, I expect you to hire a cook," she said. "I deserve it."

They went off hand in hand; the fiddler was warmed up, and some of the younger folk were dancing. Aisha leaned back in the nest of cushions and let her mind drift. Later she was conscious of strong arms lifting her back to the wagon. And a voice:

 
"Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells,
When shadows pass, gigantic, on the sand—
And softly through the silence beat the bells,
Along the Golden Road to Samarkand."
 

"I don't think they're friendly," Barak said. "One hundred twenty . . . three of them." His eyes narrowed; Aisha recognized the particular way they did it. Sauron vision, focused like a telescope or a hawk's eyes.

She did the same, shifting a little in the saddle; it was a long while since she'd had a good horse—Juchi had rarely been able to afford even a muskylope, while they wandered. The riders sprang out to view, across a kilometer. They were all of fighting age, heavily armed, with long twisted strings of black wool hanging from their caps and preceded by a standard of nine dark horsetails.

"Those aren't White Sheep Turks," Josepha said. She was using a brass telescope, and Karl fan Haller had his binoculars out. "Omin Hotal had better look to his sheep and camels."

"And his head," Barak went on grimly. "Those are the Kara Asva, the Black Horse Horde. A bad-natured tribe, and this bunch are a war-party on razziah, or I'm the Grand Lama Maitreya. From the number of horsetails, there are more of them about. That's an Aga Bey's standard."

"And none of them averse to paddling their paws in our goods, if we give them a chance." The chief merchant spat in the dirt. "Friendlies don't follow you for a day, without trying to parley."

"Trying to make us nervous," Barak said.

"Succeeding," Karl fan Haller replied. Aisha had been a little surprised to see him included among the leaders' deliberations, but among Bandari a mediko was highly respected. "They've got us outnumbered. Shall we circle the wagons?"

"Not much else we can do, except pay ransom, and I'll see them hung by their testicles first," Josepha said grimly. "Hate to stop. We're low on water, and I've got my doubts about the next well—it's chancy."

"Nu?" Barak sat in thought, drumming his fingers on the peak of his saddle. Then he showed his teeth; Aisha had learned a Bandarit term for that expression. It was a shit-kicking grin. He pulled his bow from the case at his saddlebow and dismounted.

"Oive, Barak, getting delusions of demigodhood, are we?" Josepha said sarcastically. The raiding party had ridden closer when the caravan stopped, but they were still nearly nine hundred meters away.

Barak was silent, still grinning. He selected an arrow from the quiver, a long slim one fletched with ice-eagle feathers and tipped with a narrow chisel-shaped point of polished drillbit tooth. Thoughtfully, he rolled it over his thumbnail to test the straightness, then tossed a pinch of dirt into the air, studied the way the grass tufts blew between him and the Kara Asva chieftain. Aisha watched with awe; not even the fabled bogatyri of legend could make such a shot. Bandari bows always looked a little odd to her—they had a rigid central section and flat limbs pinned to it, about the thickness of a man's thumb, and the string looped over small bronze wheels at the ends. The arms on Barak's bow were twice the usual thickness, and besides wood and sinew and horn, they were backed with strips of forged wootz steel.

He drew, not seeming to aim consciously, the point of the shaft coming up to a forty-five-degree angle. There was no sound but the creak of the bow, the hum of the string. Off in the distance, the Black Horse warriors were pointing and laughing . . . and he loosed.

The arrow disappeared, literally too fast to see. Aisha focused on the chieftain beneath the standard of the horsetails; he was a broad-shouldered man, his body and legs sheathed in armor of overlapping steel splints laced together. He braced both hands on the front of his saddle and stood in the stirrups to look ahead, expecting to see the arrow quivering in the steppe as a gesture of defiance.

The noise must have warned him. He looked up, and it took him squarely in the face; the point came out below the rear brim of his helmet. The body slid from the saddle and hit the ground with a thump, twitched a few times, and died.

Aisha understood why the Kara Avsa tribesmen looked silently down, then slung their chief across his saddle and turned away, heeling their horses into the distance-eating canter of nomads in a hurry. A kill by rifle bullet might have brought a charge on the caravan, would certainly have made the dead chief's kinsmen and noyok, sworn vassals, hungry for blood revenge. So would an arrow at normal range. In either case, they would have hung on the caravan's trail like stobor behind a muskylope herd. That shaft slicing down impossibly out of the sky was something human men could not counter; it was something only a hero—or a demon—could do.

"Barak!" one of the caravan guards shouted. They rushed forward to lift him to their shoulders. "Barak!Barak! Barak!"

 

Aisha felt a blush starting from somewhere around the level of her belly. "Bathe?" she said. "In plain sight?"

"Yes, it's all true." The healer laughed at her, reading her thoughts once more. She kept her eyes averted from him, looking at Sannie instead—who was not wearing anything either. "We bathe, whether we need to or not. And you could use the sun on that skin of yours. We all could; that's why the nomads get rickets so often, not enough sun on their hides, not to mention ringworm and scabies. So, out with you. Doctor's orders."

She stepped down from the wagon, hugging the rough wool of the blanket about herself, and stalked into the patch of volcanic sand.

"I promise, no one's going to look at you," Karl bar Edgar said kindly. "Anything you've got, we've already seen. And right now, we've seen it in better shape."

He must have seen her bare while she was sick, but he ostentatiously turned his back and walked over to where Barak sat. She flushed like a fool for relief—and aggravation. Thank Allah and the spirits, it was mostly women here, like a hammam . . . but the men were not far away, and they wore nothing. Gritting her teeth, she let fall the blanket and crouched. It was a warm day for a Haven spring on the high steppe. Most of the others looked comfortable enough. They rubbed themselves down with the pumice-like dust; there was barely enough water for humans and horses, and the last well had been dry. Sheep had died of thirst, and people grew rank if they let the grease stay on their skins too long.

She was still—despite her age—a maiden. That too was a matter for shame, not to do her duty to her family and bear children to carry on the name in honor. But in all her life, the only man before whom she had ever undressed was her father/brother.

Everyone, she noticed, kept weapons close at hand, despite the sentries. The Bandari women sunned themselves and braided one another's hair, gossiping with the brutal frankness she knew from the women's baths in a dozen towns, except that here they called comments over to the men from time to time, amid laughter and giggles from the younger girls.

"Like this," Sannie said, scrubbing at her flanks with the sand. She was stocky, muscular for a woman, with a little more spare flesh than Aisha had even after six cycles of being urged by everyone around to stuff herself.

"I know how to wash," Aisha snapped. Do they think I'm a total savage? she thought resentfully. Anyone who lived on the high steppe knew how to dust-bathe; water was often scarce. Those tribes who washed at all, that is; some just sewed themselves into a new layer of felt clothing as the old one rotted off. Her clan had always been more punctilious than most about the religious obligations—good Muslims washed before prayer—and Badri had taught Juchi and her children something of a Sauron's neatness.

"Here." Sannie returned with her own clothes and a package for Aisha.

"What is it?"

"Clothes. Your old ones were schmutzig, filthy. We had to throw them away."

"I cannot . . ."

"If it's the money, count them as a bounty. Didn't you kill the last Battlemaster of the Citadel? Look at it this way, we give value for value. We're in your debt."

"No," Aisha snapped.

Sannie sighed, then called over to the men's side: "Ai, Barak!"

Aisha lowered her eyes as her . . . cousin/nephew . . . came to them, but he was already partly dressed, bare feet but trousered legs. The mediko stood beside him.

"Tanta," Barak said, patience in his tone, "am I not the son of your mother's daughter?"

Is he going to claim authority over me? she thought rebelliously. He was the eldest male close kin present . . . .

"Yes," she said.

"And isn't it the custom among the tribes of the black tents just as much as the People, that kinfolk aid each other? Among the Bandari, it's the Law."

Aisha opened her mouth, then closed it again. More than half her life she had wandered with Juchi. Sometimes they had found work, for a little while, in places that did not know their name. More often they must starve or take charity from people who shoved food or silver at them and begged them to move on lest their curse bring ill luck to the land. Every mouthful given, in aversion or still worse in pity, had burned her gullet.

He claims me as kin for all to hear, she thought. And he said a place was hers by right. She fought down quick tears, and fought down hope too. "I will dress," she said.

"Good."

She unfolded the package; the clothes were clean and well made, but slightly worn with use. They smelled of the dried steppe wildflowers the Bandari put between layers in their clothes-chests. Sannie showed her the unfamiliar ties and buckles.

"What are these?" she asked, holding them up; ribbons, with silver threads woven in them.

"For the braids," Sannie said. "Here, Ilona, help me."

Aisha felt another set of fingers braid back her long black hair, tying it off with the ribbons. Her eyes went hot again, and she mumbled thanks.

 

"By Allah and the spirits, am I related to everyone in the Pale?" Aisha demanded.

She and Karl bar Edgar rode side by side, a little off from the caravan and its dust cloud. He had been explaining the complex network of marriage and adoption that tied her into the clans of the People through Chaya and Barak.

"Not everyone," the healer said, smiling. He did that more often, these last few months, and some of the deep sadness was gone from his eyes. Now you could see the lines beside them came more from laughter than frowns. "Not to me, for example. Nor to Chief Elder Go forward Meeker, if it comes to that. Or Hammer-of-God Jackson."

Even in Juchi's tribe, tied to the Pale by treaty and alliance, that had been a name to frighten children with. She shuddered. "Praise the Merciful, the Lovingkind for that."

Barak rode up. The guards were still full-armed and alert, and the man beside him was sweating under the armor and padding; it was a warm high-summer day, halfway through the Haven season. It would be a bold bandit gang that dared attack a caravan this close to the border of the Pale—but Haven bred plenty of those.

"Slandering poor Oom Hammer?" he said. "It's all a mishpocha, one big family, anyway . . . . We're nearly to the caravanserai," he added, pointing.

Aisha focused on the still-distant building. It was the standard sort of stopping-place on the better-travelled steppe routes, built in the Bandari style. A big square courtyard walled in stone, heaps of cut hay for animals, sleeping cubicles, and a tall water-cistern with a windmill pump. She frowned, then looked off toward the horizon. Yes, that snag of worn-down volcanic hill was familiar. The caravanserai, new-built of unweathered ashlar blocks, was not, and the road beside it was also new. It was wide enough for two wagons, neatly cambered and ditched on either side and covered in pounded crushed rock.

"Isn't this the pasture of—who leads my tribe now—"

"Tarik Shukkur Khan," Karl said.

"Tarik the Hunter? Still?" Aisha said, slightly surprised. "He must be ancient." He was a nephew of Dede Korkut. "Why this road, then?"

"It leads to Tallinn Valley and town," Karl said. "We, ah—" he coughed.

Barak came to his rescue: "We have a treaty of protection with them now," he said, "and a garrison to hold the valley mouth—we built a new fort, not on Angband's ruins, and a town wall."

Aisha glowered at her kinsman. Juchi had made the tribe great by making them overlords and protectors of Tallinn—and popular overlords, mild and just as well as strong and rightly feared. Tarik was no Juchi for ability, but he was a good man, as she remembered. Now it seemed the Pale had swallowed his inheritance.

Karl bar Edgar looked embarrassed. Barak shrugged in his armor. "After Juchi . . . left . . . the encampments of your tribe were thrown into confusion . . . ."

Believing the spirits had stolen their luck, Aisha thought. A demoralized tribe was easy prey for enemies. Guilt stabbed her.

"Then Quilland Base sent an expedition to Angband," Barak said.

"To rebuild it?" Aisha's voice was sharp with surprise. She would have heard of that, surely.

"So we thought. But they left again—and raided the Pale. Tried for the northernmost pass into Eden Valley, though it's high and rough. We sent them back bewailing their dead—if Saurons can mourn—sent them home sorry and sore, at least, and harried them north past the border. Then we stood on the defensive; it was a hard fight. But the Sauron mamzrim"—he spat to one side—"had left a cache of weapons in the ruins of Angband. It was," he added grudgingly, "clever."

He used the Bandarit term: slym. That could mean intelligence, but carried overtones of sneaky cunning. A man who had slymgetheid could outwit you and leave you all unknowing. Josepha bat Golda, for example, was universally acknowledged to be slym.

"Every tribe within half a year's travelling time came running." They would, for a chance at Sauron weapons. "But the weapons were booby-trapped. Then the tribes started fighting over them, and in the intervals, plundering the Tallinn Valley and the encampments of your folk. They sent to us for help—they were being destroyed. We call it the Aydin War. Afterwards they were both still weak, so they needed continued aid."

"And Tarik Shukkur Khan has a . . . treaty of protection with you now, too?"

"A treaty of perpetual friendship," Karl said gently.

I'd like to stuff you back into your bottle, djinni, Aisha thought. And I would, too, if the cork weren't already stuck . . . . A treaty of perpetual friendship that allowed for garrisons and roads from the Pale. She spurred her horse a little ahead and rode alone for the rest of the day.

 

"A bath!" Karl bar Edgar said with deep feeling. "A bath in water. A hot bath."

Aisha smiled back at him; he was a difficult man to remain angry with, although she was still a little distant with Barak. The trail had been very dry, the last little while, as Haven summer drew to its peak. They all wore masks of dust, cut through with sweat-runnels in the heat of trueday—although truenight was still chilly; this was the high steppe, after all.

Burg Kidmi—Fort Front, the northern anchor of the Pale's defenses—bulked ahead of them, along roads increasingly crowded. It stood on a height, partly built of squared stone and massive earthworks, partly chiseled out of the basalt rock itself, all in the form of a six-pointed star. Symbolic, and highly practical; it had the foursquare solidity Aisha was coming to associate with the works of the People, just as you could tell something of Sauron make by its angular austerity. Along the battlements and bunkers were brass cannon and long swivel-guns, catapults for hurling barrels of gunpowder, conduits for pouring the moat and sloping glacis full of burning coal-oil and muskylope lard.

It wasn't large, to one who had seen the Citadel, but impressive enough; the small town at its foot swarmed with trade, and so did the larger settlement of merchants' tents. Karl nodded proudly at her glance.

"It's only fallen once," he said. "One hundred and seventy-six T-years ago, to a combined expedition from Angband and Quilland Bases. The last of the defenders blew up the magazine when the Saurons came over the wall. Their losses were so great they pulled back. We rebuilt it stronger than ever."

From the tallest gate-tower flew the flag of the People; a six-pointed white star superimposed on a leaping antelope, flanked by flaming swords.

Karl's eyes narrowed suddenly. "Is that a black ribbon below the flag?"

Aisha focused her eyes. "Yes," she said. "A long pennant."

"Lord have mercy," the healer whispered. Aisha looked a question. "Someone of very high rank is ill; we put up the ribbon to ask for prayers—when the medikos say they can't do any more, and it's in God's hands. It's probably the kapetein. He's old, he hasn't been well. Christ have mercy."

The enhanced ears of Juchi's daughter caught the silence that spread through the caravan. Even Josepha bat Golda stopped her conversation with a fellow merchant; and that had been going on for hours, a blow-by-blow description of a barter deal with a Hayq trader—Pale merino wool for coarser carpet makings, via an exchange of promissory notes in Ashkabad. An accomplishment to boast of, getting the better of an Armenian . . . .

"Yeweh spare him," Barak said, riding up. His face was stricken, but behind him Sannie's eyes seemed to glow with hero worship. "Mordekai's been kapetein since before I was born—he was elected the year before my grandmother Dvora brought Chaya back to the Pale."

"From your mouth to His ear," Karl said. "And Christ's mercy on him, Barak—but he's an old, old man."

"A great man," Barak said. "The greatest of our kapeteins since Piet himself, maybe."

Juchi should have died like this! Aisha cried within herself. She tried to force herself to share her kinfolk's grief, but could not. Old and loved, sons and grandsons at his side, his people mourning him, his name held in honor forever!

 

"In a coma since last truenight," Yohan bar Non fan Daugvalipilis said. "The medikos say it's in God's hands."

The Bandari officer was a tall man with an ice-eagle's face and eyes paler than ice; his braid was ash-blond. If it were not for his Bandari dress and language and way of moving, Aisha would have instantly judged him Sauron—he had turned toward her when they were brought into the fortress of Burg Kidmi, and his nostrils flared to take her scent.

"It's like Cat's Eye disappearing," Barak said, shaking his head. "I can hardly believe it."

"You'd better. I love him like a father myself—but for him my mother would have been cast out on the steppe after Angband, and we'd have starved or worse. Thanks to him, him and Chaya and old Barak, I have a nation and a family and a high rank. But all men die, my friend, and he wouldn't want us standing around grieving when there's work to be done. I've got orders from your namesake—as soon as you get back, on to Strang you go, by relays of fast horses. Things are shifting like permafrost in spring. It's the bad side of having a man like Mordekai for so long; all the other factions have gotten hungry."

"I don't want it," Barak said softly. "I really don't."

"Does that matter?" Yohann dropped below human-norm audibility: "What matters is who wants you. A lot do. A lot don't, including those who aren't happy with Mordekai's policies toward us Orphans. Which are Chaya's policies, too."

"No factions based on blood!" Barak said sharply.

Yohann nodded. "Not from this side, surely," he said, speaking normally again. "You see why it's important to get you back, though. Incidentally, I'm under orders to stay here and keep an eye on Tarik's people; some of them have been meddling where they shouldn't." A brief smile. "Saves me having to forgive my mother-in-law for Ruth's Day—a small mercy. Her cooking is awful and she spoils my children rotten when we're on speaking terms with her."

Aisha broke in: "I go also. I have an interest in this. My aunt . . . my half-sister . . . Chaya would wish me to be there."

The commander's office was a plain whitewashed cube, high in the keep of Fort Kidmi. Through an open window came the keep . . . keep . . . keep of someone drilling troops; across from it was a stove, empty and swept in summer. There were filing cabinets, maps, a stone abacus with fanciful carving; the only decoration on the walls was a charcoal sketch of a smiling round-faced woman with a baby in her arms and two children standing by her. Yohann's eyes on hers were cold and measuring.

Barak broke in. "It's a family matter—mishpocha," he said.

The man with the Soldier's face made a purely haBandari shrug. "It was a blank kitb," he said; an open-ended requisition order. Good for mounts at any of the road-stations . . . or simply from anyone passing by, in extremity. "Judge Chaya will need her family there. So, I put Aisha bat Badri's name on the kitb."

"And mine," Karl bar Edgar said. "Since she's my patient."

"That'll be hard travel," Barak warned. Aisha was of Sauron blood, but for all that she was no expert rider, by nomad or Bandari standards. Barak had blood and skill both, and was a warrior in his prime. Karl was unaugmented human and no longer young.

"You're taking my patient, you're taking me," Karl told him. He glanced at Aisha and smiled crookedly. "Can't get away from your mediko that easy, khatun."

Yohann bar Non nodded and wrote their names on the order.

"May the anima of the Founders ride with you," he said, shaking Barak's hand. "Do what you must. Am Bandari hai!"

"The People live," Barak said, echoing the other man's words. "Shalom."

 

Strang was hushed, but crowded to bursting. The throngs in the streets pressed aside to let them past, murmuring Barak's name. Aisha watched them through a blur of exhaustion; the horses were fresh, changed at the Bashan Pass station, but the humans were reeling. Sannie sat slumped, cracked lips bleeding, and Karl bar Edgar was nearly unconscious. They cantered into the irregular square before the kapetein's house, to find it packed so densely that they had to dismount. Aisha helped Karl down from his horse and supported him for a moment. They went forward slowly, toward the line of soldiers that kept the crowd from the verandah—Edenite infantry with muskets, although they kept them slung and linked arms to thrust back the watchers.

When they were halfway to the steps a figure appeared on the second-story balcony. Aisha's vision snapped close; her sister/aunt Chaya, in Bandari formal clothes, her face drawn. She looked much older than Aisha's last memory of her, but that was vivid—the day when Juchi left Tallinn was not something she would ever forget. Then another man came out; Barak bar Sandor. He seemed much the same, except that his braid and short beard were mostly white now, rather than gray-streaked. More people crowded out, a mullah—they called such a man "rabbi" here, a tall funereal-looking Edenite in black, some younger figures who Aisha supposed must be the kapetein's grandchildren or even great-grandchildren.

Chaya raised her hands. "Kapetein Mordekai bar Pretorius fan Reenan has been gathered to his fathers," she said, and bowed her head.

Something between a sigh and a moan swept over the crowd. Aisha felt Karl bar Edgar stagger against her. He knelt, and the crowd rippled as they did likewise. Karl was sobbing; Barak's shoulders moved jerkily too. He reached down and brought up a palmful of dirt, smearing it across his face and cheeks. Then he grabbed the collar of his jacket and ripped it half across with effortless strength.

"The Lord gives, the Lord takes—" Chaya intoned, a catch in her voice.

"—Blessed be the name of the Lord," swept across the square and the city in a voice like a strong wind.

"Yisgadal v'yiskadash . . ." Barak said, in a voice thick with tears. Bandari prayers? Aisha knew enough now to recognize Ivrit, their holy tongue, but not to understand it.

The will of Allah, Aisha thought, touching her face with dirt and tearing her new clothes for courtesy's sake. This Bandari kha-khan had died full of years and honor. He would be buried among his fathers. Guilt was more sour than oxbane, envy sharper than the teeth of drillbits. Juchi's body fed maggots on the Saurons' pikes, seven thousand kilometers away.

Most of those she saw were weeping. Most of those who did not, looked lost and frightened. It was natural enough, she supposed. Kapetein Mordekai had ruled from their grandfathers' day. Under him the People had grown in numbers and knowledge and wealth; they had pushed back the threat of Angband which had lain over every generation since Piet's day, and made Tallinn theirs. Mordekai had extended their borders, left the Pale second only to the Citadel among the kingdoms of Haven in power, and infinitely happier and more just. She heard the question that ran from one to the next: Who will be father to the land now?

Some were without sorrow or fear; Aisha saw well-hidden pleasure in a few. Sannie's gaze fairly blazed with hope; her lover would rule the Pale, and she at his side.

Juchi, Juchi, Aisha keened within her soul, as she had not keened aloud when he died. She did not listen as Chaya spoke ritual words: established the period of mourning, explained how the Judge and kommandant h'gana would rule together until the election of a new kapetein. Her tears flowed now, brief Sauron tears, but it was for her own father and his stolen life, for what might have been. Let the Bandari think she mourned their ruler.

Chaya was concluding: " . . . and when we asked him, his last word was 'Barak.' " The weeping died to a low mutter, and Chaya's son stiffened. So did the grizzled old soldier on the balcony beside her. "Then he died. Barak bar Sandor has said he does not wish his name placed in nomination—but that is a matter for you, the People; it is by your will the kapetein rules, not his own. For ten cycles we will mourn; then we will choose. This is the eve of Ruth's Day, when we remind ourselves that strength and law joined love to make us one People. Go; renew the bond."

 

"There's a saying we have," said Karl bar Edgar. "May you live in interesting times. It's a curse." His voice cracked with tiredness, and he staggered occasionally as they were escorted through the crowd. It was breaking up anyway, quieter than usual for Bandari. Even the grim-faced Edenite soldiers around them seemed subdued; a few of them were crying too. The tears looked odd on their expressionless shaven faces.

"The Judge will be down soon," their officer said, once they reached a quieter spot by the side of the house.

"I know the saying," Aisha told Karl. "You stole it from the tribes." She forced herself not to bow her head or wring her hands—she was a suppliant here, but she had her pride—and stood upright. A little pair of worn silver scrolls hung over the door; she wondered what they signified.

The physician muttered under his breath. "This isn't the time I'd . . . you couldn't be coming here at a worse time. The old story about Judge Chaya being part Sauron." He shook his head. "No question about Barak's father, though. Even if Heber did choose to work in Tallinn."

"He's still of oom Piet's line," Sannie pointed out.

Aisha shrugged. For one who was accursed, all times were bad. She was outcast. What was it to her if the Bandari fought over their laws? And what bloodline was as corrupt as hers? What if Chaya recoils from me? Her memories of that day in Tallinn might be false, the lies of hope, or Chaya might have changed. Where shall I go? Wandering the world seemed natural while she did it. Now she'd had spell of something else, and the prospect of going back sickened her soul.

"Look," said Oom Karl. "I'm a healer. If I say it's normal to worry, you shouldn't blame yourself"

"Fine words for coward!" Aisha flared at him. "All right, then. I am afraid. Now you can despise me for that and for my family's curse. Watch the barbarian. Make sure she bathes. Show her how decent folk do it, just in case. And then you can watch how she walks. Watch how she talks. Watch to see if she eats differently, and comment on her manners. And watch out, for the time will come when she does something dreadful that will bring everyone she . . ." her voice wobbled. Furious, she went on, " . . . cares about to ruin. I've spent a lifetime doing that."

"Too long," murmured the physician. To Aisha's astonishment, he patted her hand. She jerked it away as if the touch had been a hot coal. "I meant what I said. You come to us in sad times. But Judge Chaya will do her best for you."

The door opened. Chaya came through, still in her long embroidered coat, but with her graying hair freed from its braids. She went straight to Aisha, holding out her arms. "My niece," she said. "Welcome home."

To her horror, Aisha was shaking. She felt Judge Chaya's shoulders shake too, then steady; and she embraced the older woman, her aunt and sister.

"Let's get her out of here," Chaya muttered. "If she breaks she'll hate herself." The Judge paused as if considering. "Worse than she already does."

Aisha felt herself steered into a building, thrust into a leather-framed chair, and held, always held, by those strong hands. Other footsteps followed; for once Aisha couldn't count them.

"No, Karl, I don't think she needs a sedative. Did she cry once while you were nursing her back to health? Not even once? Then she has got to cry it all out. Tell me about it, little one, little sister."

Little one? The last person who called her that had been her father—when he still had his sight. It was the compassion in Chaya's words and voice that broke her where exile and even the caravan's care of her had not. Aisha tried to break free of the Judge's grip. When she could not escape, she turned her face into the chair's high back and wept, sinking down until she was curled up on its broad seat like an injured child.

This time her tears poured down without drying. That too was a survival reflex; here, in this moist place, her body could afford the release.

"They didn't even bury him," she sobbed. "The Cyborg . . . he broke my father's arm—I heard him scream. He told my father, 'The Breedmaster who threw you out was an idiot.' He looked at me, and I had to fight him or he would have . . ." She shuddered, fighting for control, and she drew deep breaths of the valley air. "I killed him, but they have slain my father's honor."

Chaya rocked her as if she were a child. What a luxury, to be weak, to be little. She didn't think she ought to allow it. She didn't think she could stop it.

"I didn't hear this," Chaya remarked over Aisha's tumbled braids. "What have the mamzrim, the Sauron bastards, done this time?"

"Ran into a Sauron patrol on our way back from Nûrnen or thereabouts. Apparently"—Barak lowered his voice—"they dug old Juchi up, quartered him, and put him on stakes by the road for everyone to see. She overheard, of course."

Mother and son sat beside her and held her with a strength equal to her own. She wanted to stand, to scream, to strike out and smash the Sauron faces, to kill

"Karl, you had reports . . .?" Chaya prompted.

"I haven't released my patient," Karl announced, and collapsed.

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Framed