The Warrior King: Book Three of the Seer King Trilogy Page 6

  Horns blatted from the captain’s deck, and passengers thronged the rails as the paddle wheel churned. I watched the people, marveling at how differently they all dressed, not like warders or soldiers, and once more realized the war’s effect. These weren’t the same people who’d traveled in peacetime. There were trekking merchants as always, but most of these were accompanied by guards, and their ages were quite young or well into middle age, few the normal age of men who choose danger for a life.

  Here were a gaggle of nautch dancers nattering on about the far cities of Numantia, but their silks were somewhat worn, and in the style of ten years gone. There were few families on holiday, either rich or poor. I saw Delta farmers, work-hardened faces and hands, muttering in low tones about this year’s rice crop and how poor the markets were.

  Boot heels rasped by my sandaled feet, and I saw gray, uniformed legs. There were two sets. My hand was on Perak’s dagger. If I was discovered, I’d kill one, bowl the other aside, and be overboard before anyone could take action.

  One voice said, “Nice friends to travel with, hmm?”

  I hoped he wasn’t expecting me to wake and respond and was fortunate, for the other Guardian said, “Doesn’t seem to bother him, now does it?” They laughed, moved on, and I began breathing once more.

  • • •

  In midriver, with no one watching, I took the amulet Tenedos had given me from its hiding place. I held it for a moment, considering, wondering, felt it grow warm, and hastily spun it over the side.

  Let him seek me among the fishes.

  • • •

  The Peace Guardians disembarked at our second landing, and I told Yakub how much the porridge he’d brought had helped my stomach, and I thought I could manage a bit of solid food now.

  Like most river craft, this ferry fed well, especially for travelers like ourselves who’d booked passage all the way across the Delta. I’d imagined I’d be enjoying one or another of the various roasts offered, or perhaps the smoked meats, but in fact I gloried in cascades of fresh fruit and vegetables, particularly legumes in the many variations Numantian cuisine offered. My body was telling me what it wanted, what it needed. Once my lust for green growing things was satiated, then I became interested in meat.

  Yakub was somewhat appalled at my appetite, wondering what sort of a demon he’d roused. I didn’t tell him an endless monotony of prison food, no matter how skillfully prepared, will make the most ascetic into a glutton, once he has the opportunity.

  Yakub had spent his … or the Tovieti’s … silver carefully, not paying for a compartment, but choosing to sleep on deck. This was hazardous, for thieves, generally members of the ferry’s crew, stalked the decks after dark, and these ferries were infamous for robberies, rapes, even the odd murder if a deck passenger fought for his purse too hard.

  Once someone approached us stealthily, heard the rasp of my sword being unsheathed, and turned away. Again I woke, hearing the sounds of a struggle, saw two men struggling, one old, one young, the young one with a knuckle bow. He didn’t see me until I was on him, and I clubbed him down with the iron pig clenched in my fist. The old man stood frozen, and I tipped the would-be robber overside and went back into the shadows before the old one could recover.

  I saw him the next day, going from man to man, peering into their faces, trying to identify his benefactor … or, possibly, to find a murderer to report to the ship’s officers. But he, too, wouldn’t approach my snakes, and the incident was ended.

  • • •

  Five days later, we reached the far banks of the Delta, put the wheels back on the cart, and disembarked in the small port of Kaldi. We stopped in a marketplace, bought a zebu and rope harness, and hitched the beast up. Outside the city, a highway ran north and south.

  “Here is where we part, soldier,” Yakub said. “I go north, to where the old emperor is building his army. He’ll have magicians, and magicians need spells, and spells need snakes.” He cackled. “And I have other things he needs.”

  I eyed his rags and the cart skeptically.

  “Aye, aye, aye,” he laughed. “Appears like there’s nothing, doesn’t it, doesn’t it? Just as the cart can hide a traveler, so snakes, and where they shit, can hide … oh, many, many things.

  “Many, many things,” he repeated, his shoulders shaking, and I bade him, with sudden fondness, fare-thee-well.

  I watched him become a dot on the dusty road, wondering what lay hidden in the sawdust in the snakes’ cages. Gold? Diamonds? Secret information? I didn’t know … but I did know one thing. Yakub, the Man of Snakes, was no crazier, and probably a great deal saner, than I.

  I turned away from the highway and took a winding side lane that led west and southwest.

  Toward Cimabue. Toward my home.

  • • •

  That night, over a low fire, roasting an unwary hare and potatoes I’d dug from a field in the coals below, I repeated the words to remove the scar. For an instant, I panicked, nothing at all coming to mind, then remembered, and the scar fell into my hand, and was tossed away.

  Little as I liked it, the beard I’d decided to not shave would make as good a disguise.

  • • •

  It was a very long way, almost two hundred leagues. But I didn’t walk the entire distance. Frequently there were caravans or just farmer’s carts heading for the next village or going home from market. Once they realized my sword wouldn’t be turned against them, they were glad for a warrior’s presence.

  But all too often they saw my blade and either galloped past or else, if they had armed men of their own, told me to move away into the fields or be killed. I obeyed sadly, for I could remember the times of peace under the emperor, when it was said a virgin could cross the kingdom with a bag of gold in each hand.

  Of course that was horse apples — the poor lass would’ve been lucky to make it a league beyond her village before she would’ve been both poorer and more experienced. But it was still a boast very much of the past.

  War hadn’t touched these lands, at least not obviously, and the soil was still dark and rich, the irrigation canals spidering away from the rivers still bringing life to the land.

  But their floodgates were rotten, the fields were all too often untilled, the canal banks sliding into the water, some of the waterways choked with weeds, as if the land was worn out and abandoned.

  Fruit trees were just beginning to flower in this Time of Births, but their unplucked fruit from the previous season was rotting remnants on the ground or still dangling from the limbs.

  Kites rose from the trees, their cry sounding raucously across emptiness.

  The scatter of farms under cultivation were being worked by women, old men, children.

  Where were the men, young, middle-aged?

  The whisper ran across the land: “Gone to the army, gone to war, gone to the emperor, gone to Maisir, gone to the Wheel, never to return …”

  • • •

  The days passed, and the weather grew warmer, the fresh rains welcome. I traveled at my own pace, for the first time in my life not having to be somewhere at a certain time, whether to quell an uprising, take over a new command, deal with a recalcitrant baron, or to lead or train soldiers.

  I saw no Peace Guardians, which didn’t surprise me, knowing so small a unit must restrict itself to the cities and, possibly, harrying Tenedos’s reforming army to the south. The scattering of warders in the small villages had little interest in anything beyond their own district, especially in regards to a well-armed man who kept to himself.

  I stopped when I felt like it, sometimes helping with the planting or with heavy work a farmer’s widow or children could not manage, and little by little remembered my boyhood skills helping my father’s tenants with their plowing, herding, animal husbandry. I’d work an hour, or a day, and then move on, my pack full of the fresh food that’d been all the pay I wanted.

  I also reminded myself of other skills, making a sling from tanned hides I found in
a desolate village and practicing with it as I traveled, stalking sambur who gloried in the still-fallow, empty farmlands, snaring guinea fowl, chickens, or ducks gone wild for my meals.

  I was alone and very content.

  • • •

  For the most part, my journey was undisturbed and uneventful. But there were some events that stayed with me …

  • • •

  The cart was overturned, its contents scattered, just beyond where the road had been cut through an embankment, perfect for an ambush.

  Three men were sprawled in the road, and a woman’s corpse lay half across the cart, a gaping wound in her chest, a look of horror on her face.

  Five children, three boys and two girls, were tied together like ducks for the marketplace. The older ones’ faces held hate, the younger ones’ terror.

  Eight men sat across the road from the wreckage, sharing a wineskin.

  I approached, sword in hand.

  A man stood, came toward me. He was big, bearded, and had a war hammer at his side.

  “Greetin’s,” he said.

  “Your doing?” I gestured at the shambles.

  “ ’A course,” he said. “Damn’ fool of a shitdigger went and stood against us. Hells, we di’n’t mean much damage. Mayhap sort through his goods, have a bit of sport wi’ his woman, no more.

  “’Stead, he kills two of us, and his wife afore we took him.

  “Fool of a waste, it is,” he said. “We’ll take the young ‘uns, see what the market is these times, ‘though there’s more’n enough spare babes already for the slavers.

  “If’n that one was more’n nine, ten, maybe we’d keep her, train her. But we ain’t got th’ time nor me th’ inclination. You innarested in buyin’ any of ‘em?”

  I shook my head.

  The big man looked me over carefully.

  “You look like a fighter. Innarested in joinin’ us? We do fair well, bein’ about th’ only band in the district.”

  “I’ve got my own work,” I said flatly. The man grunted.

  “I’ll warn you. A single man, these times, can have a hard way, with nobody t’ watch whilst he sleeps, or when his back’s turned.”

  “I’m not worried,” I said. “I’ve got a demon guarding me.”

  The big man looked worried, and two of his men got to their feet, making strange signs.

  “Thanks f’r th’ warning,” he said. “Pass on, then. Pass on quick.”

  I didn’t answer but kept moving. That night, I camped fireless, far from the road, but never saw them again.

  I tried to push the children’s faces from my mind, but failed. What could I have done? There were eight of them, odds no sane warrior would dream of facing.

  But I still had the taste of ashes in my mouth.

  • • •

  The farm had been prosperous, with three barns for livestock, a chicken run, a duck pond, a paddock, a long barracks for farmhands and a sturdy two-story house for the owners. Now the fields were desolate, the barns empty, and the buildings abandoned.

  Scavengers had picked through the debris, taking what they wanted, befouling what they didn’t. But they hadn’t destroyed everything, and I unearthed a man’s blouse that sort of fit, a pair of baggy pants that would do, and thought myself rich, now having a change in addition to the clothes on my back.

  I found two cooking pots, one for an unlucky partridge I’d brought down with a stone earlier, the other for a thick wild vegetable soup I’d been planning as I walked, harvesting here and there as I went. There were spices in small jars the looters had scorned, so I’d eat well … and sleep dry, for thunder grumbled outside, and I’d be grateful for shelter this night.

  I saw a gleam in the farmhouse’s great room, wondered if the scavengers had missed a coin, and picked up a small cast metal flag of Numantia. I knew what it was, had seen a hundred or more of them.

  Knowing myself a fool and what to expect, still I rubbed the flag, and two figures grew from nothingness. They were young men, actually boys, one perhaps nineteen, the other a couple of years younger, obviously his brother. They had close-shaven heads and wore the bare uniform of recruits in the Imperial Army.

  They grinned shyly, and one said, “What do you think of us, Da? Ma? They wouldn’t let us keep our hair, but they gave us these clothes in trade. Don’t we look like soldiers?”

  The other laughed. “He thinks he looks like a soldier. I don’t. But they’re trying to teach us how, and we’re working hard, and we haven’t gotten into any trouble.”

  The first turned serious. “They say we’ll be going south soon, to the frontiers and then into Maisir, to help the emperor destroy their evil king. Pray for us.”

  The second nodded. “Please. But … don’t worry. We’ll come to no harm. We promise.”

  They both held their smiles, then vanished.

  As I said, I’d seen the little cast flags before. Sorcerers by the dozens, little more than village mountebanks, really, haunted the army camps, in spite of the provosts’ best attempts to chase them away. They’d pose a recruit, cast a spell, and trap the moment in a flag, or a toy dagger or small horse, with a bit of the recruit’s spittle or blood. Naturally, the young soldier would pay well for this, and somehow it would get its way to the ones he loved.

  I wondered where in Maisir these boys had died. Penda? On the suebi? Irthing? Jarrah? Sidor? Or in some nameless swamp, in a flurried skirmish that left two or three bodies sprawled in the mud or the snow?

  And what of their Da and Ma? Why’d they leave everything? Had they word their sons were sore wounded in some hospital, left the land, and been snared in the web of war? No one but Irisu knew, Irisu and Saionji perhaps. I shivered, and the thunder rumbled more loudly.

  But I took my pots and spices and left the farm, finding poor shelter in a grove of trees half a mile distant. I don’t believe in ghosts, but that farmhouse was haunted.

  • • •

  One day I came on an odd sight. Nine or ten boys, perhaps fourteen to seventeen, all wearing the smock of farmers’ lads, were straggling along the road, behind a man wearing the old, banned uniform of the Imperial Army. I puzzled at this imposter as he came closer, and he hailed me cheerfully.

  Rather doubtfully I returned the greeting, and introduced myself using some name or other I made up on the moment.

  “I’m Color-Sergeant Tagagne, once Third Imperial Guards Corps, now serving the emperor directly,” he boomed.

  “And how might that be?”

  “Wait a moment, and I’ll tell you.” He turned to the boys. “You men, fall out around me. We’ll take a breather here before we go on.”

  The young men gratefully found a bit of shade under the roadside trees, close enough to hear our conversation.

  “Color-Sergeant?” I said doubtfully. “But the emperor’s army’s been dissolved and its men sent home.”

  “By who? The shit-for-brains who call themselves the Grand Council? By that homicidal fuck behind them who sits the throne in Maisir? Since when does the emperor listen to lickspittles like them?”

  I nodded agreement, and perhaps a bit of a smile came.

  “You look to have been one who served the emperor,” Tagagne said.

  “I was.”

  “For how long?”

  I could have told him the truth, that I was Laish Tenedos’s first follower. “For a long time.”

  “In Maisir?”

  I nodded once more.

  “Ah, that was terrible, terrible,” he sighed. “But by Saionji, we fought well.”

  I noted a couple of the farmboys shuddered at the death-goddess’s name.

  “We did,” I said. “But they fought better.”

  “The hells they did,” he said, a bit angry. “There were just more of them than we could kill. Otherwise, we’d be in Jarrah, wearing silk uniforms and each of us ruling a province.”

  “But we aren’t.”

  “But we will be again,” Tagagne said. “That’s wh
y these brave boys have taken the emperor’s coin. We’re heading for … for where I’m not supposed to say, and join the new army. We’re getting ready to fight back, proud again under the Emperor Tenedos’s banner,” he said, “and drive those jerk-off Councilors out of Nicias, and the mongrels who call themselves Peace Guardians into the Latane.

  “Those we don’t hang from the nearest tree first.”

  A couple of the boys grinned tightly at that idea, and I smiled as well. “Those bastards could do with more than a bit of hanging, I’ll agree.”

  “Then come help us,” Tagagne said. “You don’t appear crippled. Come back to the colors, lad, for there’s still fighting to be done, and Numantia to be won back.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m my own master now and want to keep it that way.”

  Tagagne shook his head. “I’ll not wave a white feather at you nor curse a man who served in Maisir. But there’s a hard wind abroad, and there’ll be no man permitted to sit the fence or plow his own furrow ‘til Numantia’s ruled by its own.

  “Come on, friend,” he cajoled. “Forget the hard times and the lost comrades, and remember the good times, the comradeship, the pride of your uniform, and the glory of marching under the emperor’s banners. These boys haven’t known that, haven’t had their share of glory yet, but they’re for it, they’re true Numantians all.”

  Honestly, in spite of the horror I knew war to be, I felt a bit of truth in Tagagne’s words, and remembered the fierce joy of being Tenedos’s warrior. But I also remembered … other things.

  “No, Sergeant,” I said. “But I’ll think well of you for offering.”

  “I’ll not press my cause,” Tagagne said. “There’ll be others who come to you, in other times, and maybe you’ll remember my words, and then join us, join us in making Numantia free.”

  He didn’t wait for a response but turned to his charges. “Come on now, you men, for we’ve a long road to go before night.”

  Obediently, they tramped off. I watched them over the hill. At its crest the last boy looked back and waved. I waved back, then went on my course.