Fall of a Kingdom (The Farsala Trilogy) (22 page)

A
FTER SO MANY MONTHS
of practice, finding her own spirit, her shilshadu, was easier for Soraya. She still had to meditate to reach that bright, still place within her, instead of just opening a mental door and stepping through, as Maok did, but she could find it. She sat in Maok’s hutch, cross-legged, as the old woman had taught her—not that anyone could have stood under the low ceiling—and tried once more to speak to fire.

Touching the fire’s spirit wasn’t too hard, for fire called to her in its bright, hot dance. It was a hungry spirit, Soraya had discovered, its only will to consume and burn—to consume so that the glory of its world-dance-heat might go on, for the moment it stopped eating, it died. The difficulty lay in convincing something so mindlessly self-centered not to eat her.

Not me,
Soraya willed. Her spirit, matched and melded to the fire’s, carried her will. Her skin felt hot. Her body was hunger—hunger to feed the glorious heat.
But I am you,
Soraya told the small pile of embers glowing dully on the cupped stone that sat before her.
I am your heat. I am your hunger. You don’t eat me.

She felt it respond, yielding in the way of mindless things.
We are one. You don’t eat me.

Slowly, holding her breathing steady, keeping their spirits melded, she reached out and touched the coals…and felt heat sear her skin, eating, burning.

Her shilshadu-va, her spirit trance, crashed like a pile of kicked blocks. She snatched her hand back, swearing, and plunged her fingers into the pot of cool water she’d placed ready.
Curse the stupid stuff! I can talk to it. Why can’t I persuade it?

“Fire’s hard,” said Maok placidly.

Soraya had become accustomed to the way her teacher addressed her thoughts, even though Maok swore she couldn’t read minds. “I know this,” Soraya said carefully in her clumsy Suud.

When Soraya had decided to return to their camp, Maok had insisted she learn Suud. Soraya had agreed, as long as she was able to learn magic, too.

She had spent most of the winter with the Suud, and she’d made enough progress in the language that she could understand almost everything that was said, even if she couldn’t always find the words she needed to reply. She wished magic had been as easy.

“I know,” she repeated with a sigh. “But this is last other chance I can try, talking to fire.” Azura knew she’d tried often enough before.

Maok grinned. She often did, after Soraya spoke. “You’ve done very well in such a short time, my girl. Many can’t even talk to fire for months. Some never can. And you’ve mastered water. Do you want that colder, by the way?”

“Yes, but I do myself.” Soraya gathered the remnants of the trance and sought her shilshadu, waiting till her vision seemed sharper and the homely objects in Maok’s hutch grew vivid and distinct. Then she reached for the water, for its delight in even the small movement it made around her fingers. She reminded it of melting snow, of ice, of cold streams and deep lakes. The water around her scorched fingers was frigid now.

“A babe can work water,” Soraya grumbled. Water loved to change; all you had to do was remind it. Not like fire at all. Or, still worse, stone, whose spirit she couldn’t even find, though Maok swore it had one. “At least I never will take cold bath again.” Not that she’d ever taken a cold bath. Even living with the Suud, she only needed to wait till Maok or one of the other All Speakers went to the bathing pool, and then she joined them.

“Fire’s hard,” Maok repeated. “It has too much will, too much need, to yield easily. And unlike an animal, it has no mind to be changed.”

“You do it,” said Soraya. “Abab does it.”

Maok laughed. “But Elid can’t. Amark can’t. Many can’t. You have a spirit that matches well with fire. It will come to you. Eventually.”

Soraya scowled. “Do you must leave?”

“You know we must.” Maok’s voice was gentle.

Soraya did know it. The game was well thinned—not just the jackal pack, but the gazelle, the rabbits, even the big lizards that had proved so tasty when she’d finally brought herself to try one.

The root plants along the stream bank and the bushy herbs were nearly all harvested. The Suud had planted more, and they’d be big and ripe when the tribe returned again, but that would be many months in the future. Now they had to move on.

“I think it will take much days for me to persuade fire,” said Soraya. “Big much.” She knew how foolish she sounded, but the Suud had eight different words for “many,” depending on how much more or less than twenty they were talking about. Since the day she’d told the camp cook that there were more sweet roots in the stew than there were stars in the sky, she’d settled for the sillysounding but safer, “much” and “big much.”

“Well, you won’t do it tonight,” said Maok. “Take a break. I’d send you out to play tracker if it wasn’t moon dark.”

Soraya grimaced in agreement. She loved “tracker,” though that simple word was a poor translation for something as complex and important as bao’ok. To the Suud, bao’ok was more important than magic.

At first Soraya had thought it was because so much of their existence depended on hunting. She was a fair huntress herself, better than most deghasses, but having seen Suud trackers at work, she’d been unsurprised to find that she wasn’t nearly as good as they were.

She’d been lucky, when she first found the tribe, that she’d chosen a gift of food to pay her debt. After passing bao’ok, a boy brought food to the tribe he sought to join, in token of the skills he would use to support them. Of course, Soraya hadn’t passed bao’ok, but Maok had considered her action to be a sign that the tribe should accept her for a time. Aside from that initial gift, however, Soraya couldn’t offer the tribe much support—compared to the Suud, her hunting skills were laughable.

It wasn’t that they worked magic to hunt either. You could talk to the spirit of an animal, certainly. It was far easier than reaching the spirits of inanimate things, for even the smallest and least-significant living creature was self-aware. This had amazed Soraya; who could have imagined that butterflies
knew
they were beautiful? They did. Their whole existence centered on flashing their lovely wings before mate after mate but never showing them to predators. And she’d thought
she
was vain. Soraya had knelt in the flower-studded grass beside the bathing pool, laughing in delight, and the Suud, understanding, had smiled and let her be.

They could have used magic to hunt. You could convince an animal that you were a member of its herd or flock and lure it right to your hand. But once you touched a creature’s shilshadu, it was very hard to kill it. Soraya understood why the Suud generally used their magic only on plants and inanimate things.

But bao’ok, as she’d soon learned, wasn’t about hunting animals—it was about hunting men. She hadn’t understood why for some time. She’d watched the toddlers playing their hiding games. Watched the older children tracking one another. She’d gone out with Elid and some of the others near her own age, and she’d helped—or hindered—them as they stalked one another through the rocky maze, setting small, embarrassing traps and ambushes. But she hadn’t really understood bao’ok until the night she went out gathering kiok with Sulib, the girl she’d carried into camp that first night.

Sulib pointed to a series of rusty-looking streaks on the rock face that towered above them. “That’s what they come to get,” she said.

“What who come get?” Soraya asked slowly. She wasn’t certain she’d understood all the words.

“The kula of dirt,” said the little girl. The streaked rock was the hard granite of the great cliff, not sandstone.

“What is kula?”

The child frowned, searching for words Soraya might know. She shrugged. “Kula. This is kula.” She knelt by a sandy bank and began digging like a badger. “To move the dirt. To take it away and make a muob.”

“Dig,” said Soraya. “Kula is ‘digging,’ and muob is ‘hole.’”

Sulib looked baffled.

“Kula makes muob?” Soraya asked, to be certain.

The girl’s face brightened. “Yes. You dig to make a hole.”

“They who come.” Soraya found a kiok bush with several ripe fruits on it and began picking, careful of the thorns. “They dig the dirt? Miners? You mean this is what the miners come for?” She’d switched to Faran in midsentence, and Sulib gave her an exasperated look.

“Ayan,” said Soraya. Sorry. She said the word for “sorry” a lot these days. Curious, she put down the basket and climbed up the slope of loose scree at the bottom of the cliff. She still couldn’t reach the streaks, several yards above her outstretched hands. They didn’t look like much. Nothing glittered in the moonlight, as gold or gems might. What was it her father said lured miners into the badlands? Some kind of better iron? No, iron ore that would make better steel. That was it. She shrugged and went back to picking fruit.

But that night she had mentioned the incident to Maok and was astonished when the woman’s expression darkened.

“Sulib shouldn’t have shown you. It was lahu’uash. Girl, you must not speak of this to your own people. Ever.”

“I won’t,” said Soraya, startled by the intensity in Maok’s voice. Then she felt something brush against her mind. Not pressure as much as something that wanted to be pressure, like the feeling that made horses run before a storm. Soraya’s first impulse was to flee, but she knew to the bottom of her soul that Maok wouldn’t hurt her. Her teacher had never touched her mind before, but Soraya didn’t sense Maok’s spirit, just that soft, questing touch.

“It’s worth luabu
money
,” said Maok, using the Faran word for “money,” since the Suud had none. Soraya didn’t know exactly how much luabu was, but she knew it was a
lot
more than twenty.

“It is nothing for me,” said Soraya honestly. “I have big much
money.
”

The sense of pressure in her mind seemed to ease, though the touch was still there.

“You are your father’s daughter,” Maok murmured.

“You know my father?” asked Soraya, startled. He had said he stayed with the Suud for a time, but none of the others had mentioned him. “I assumed that he stayed with another tribe.”

“He did,” said Maok. “But word gets around. If the diggers of dirt come, we will probably have to kill them. That’s why this is important.”

“Kill them? But…” Soraya found it hard to picture her new friends killing anyone. Then she remembered something else her father had said. “The miners, the diggers in dirt, they kill you, don’t they?”

“Not in the beginning,” said Maok. “At first they steal our men and force them to dig. And the younger women, to faru. But it comes to killing, in the end.”

“I understand,” said Soraya, chilled. “I won’t talk anyone of this thing. I…I
swear
it.”

She didn’t know if Maok understood the Faran word, or if what she learned from Soraya’s mind reassured her, but the strange not-quite-pressure vanished.

Soraya had let the topic go then, but she soon realized why bao’ok, the hunting of men, was so important to the tribe. After that, when the trackers took her with them, she understood that it was an honor, that she had been included in the tribe’s defense. Like a boy who had brought his food gift to the tribe. Like a warrior, instead of a girl. It was a lot of fun—and something her mother would never have permitted her to do, which made it even better. If it hadn’t been moon dark tonight, Soraya would have abandoned her last chance to talk to the fire and gone with the trackers.

“It’s bad I can’t persuade my eyes to let me see in the dark, like you the tribe can.” The first time Soraya had gotten a close look at a Suud’s eyes in dim light, she’d been amazed at how wide their pupils could expand. She’d long since become accustomed to their djinn-pale hair and skin, but those huge, black pupils still looked unnatural. Almost inhuman.

Those eyes let the Suud roam the inky night almost as if it were broad daylight. Soraya, who could barely see her hand in front of her face if she walked away from the fires, was restricted to the campsite after dark.

Maok snorted. “You can only talk the body into fixing what’s wrong, not changing what’s right. Your eyes are the way they’re supposed to be, day-dweller.”

It was a mildly insulting term for Farsalans. They had others that were worse. And Soraya had become so accustomed to staying up at night and sleeping in the sunlight that on the rare occasions when she went back to the croft to check in with her keepers, she yawned through the days and had trouble sleeping when darkness fell.

“But there’s so much you can change, can heal. Like Oluk’s…” Soraya searched for the right word:
Infected? Fevered? Bad?
“Like Oluk’s fever-bad thumb. Or Dumud’s hurt knee. These things could be killing or…or
crippling
in my people.” Even for deghans, who got the best medical care, doctors couldn’t work the kind of miracles she’d seen in this camp. “If you use magic for my people, you could get
money
. Big much than for baskets. There is a fever that kills people who work in the…the wet places. They go to harvest silk, they make big much
money,
but the fever kills them. What would you do about the fever of the wet places?”