Guardians of the Desert (Children of the Desert) (10 page)

Pre-dawn, the dying sliver of the Healer’s Moon was barely visible against a dense freckling of equally pale stars. Deiq tilted his head and scanned the sky, tracing constellations humans stopped tracking hundreds of years ago; many overlapped the new. The left paw and head of the Old Tiger now formed the chest and spear of the Hunter; the right wing of the Parrot was now seen by mankind as part of the Endless Fountain.

No doubt the Northern Church had declared even more alterations, with their own distorted pantheon in mind. Deiq had never bothered going north long enough to learn such minor matters. Exploring the differences might be an interesting pastime on the road, however, and he could use the original star-stories as a way of teaching Idisio about the
real
history of the world they walked through.

Slightly cheered, he returned his attention to the teyanain camp before him; what remained of it. Evkit’s grand tent, which had replaced the temporary
shall
offered to Alyea days ago, was as always the last to be broken down.

Three
athain
were taking great care with the folding and packing of the sturdy, silky material and deceptively slender poles.

Athain
. Not ordinary servants, but teyanain spirit-walkers. In travel clothes, the only signs of their sworn calling were the peculiar triple-split braids hanging from just behind their right ears. Deiq was careful not to stare, not to show how much it disturbed him that Evkit had athain breaking down his tent. Either Evkit held his own holy men in a dangerous contempt—not likely—or there was something special about the tent itself . . . something that couldn’t be trusted to ordinary hands.

Deiq itched to wander closer and sniff out any traces of several dangerous substances, most of which were strictly forbidden anywhere on the land of an active ha’rethe; knew he’d never get close enough without risking a rapid descent into open violence.

The teyanain took their privacy
seriously
. Deiq wouldn’t get anywhere near that tent or the chest it was being stored in, not for the entire of the journey back to the Horn. He knew better than to even look at it for too long.

If he’d known Evkit had three athain with him, he’d never have agreed to this madness. Ordinary travel with the teyanain was one thing, but three athain took it to an entirely new and much more dangerous level.

One athain, two athain, clee
; a children’s song from long before Alyea had been born.
Clee, clee, all we three; clee, claw, into the maw . . .
largely nonsense, as all children’s songs were, but drawn from a real fear and a real danger.

Too late to back out now.

Alyea, meanwhile, sat sipping thopuh tea with Lord Evkit, each sitting on a large, flat boulder dragged, centuries ago, to serve as seats for visitors camping outside the gates. Deiq inhaled the rich, tarry aroma and smiled; Evkit, at least, was serving the real thing.

Deiq could almost see the centuries the block sat on a back shelf of a small tea shop, while wars and negotiations raged by outside, soldiers and merchants and whores taking their turns amusing themselves in the main and side rooms; could hear the rattle of stone dice and goat-ivory telling-chips, the slap of seer-cards and the laughter of a woman well-amused by her company of the night. . . .

He sighed, opening eyes he hadn’t realized he’d closed. Evkit’s tent was completely stowed away, and the teacups were being collected, Alyea and Evkit rising gravely to their feet and bowing to each other. Time to move on, then.

“That was wonderful tea,” Alyea said, coming to stand beside Deiq. Her face held a glow of warmth and inner satisfaction. He blinked hard, forcing himself to stay in human-vision although he ached to see that glow tracing its way through her entire being in snaky, seductive spirals and swirls. “You should have tried some.”

He blinked again, lazily, and said, “I’ve had it. I could smell it. One’s as good as the other, for me.” He offered a dry smile, knowing she’d think the self-mocking expression to be aimed at her; and as expected, she flushed a little and turned away.

“Idisio,
you
should have tried it,” she said to the younger ha’ra’ha, as though determined to make the point to
somebody
. Idisio shook his head, expression grim.

“I won’t drink anything offered by a hand I don’t trust,” he said in a low voice, then glanced around apprehensively.

“Nobody heard,” Deiq assured him. “You did it right.”

Idisio relaxed noticeably and let out a soft breath.

Evkit turned from a quiet discussion with his athain and motioned the three forward.

“We go,” he said. “Shoes all in packs? Good. Barefoot always best, you trust me on that, you will see. Escort around you, yes? Walk in middle, no harm come to you. Hai, we move slow at first, then fast; you keep up, or you are carry. Hot sun, hot land; teyanain not stop, not afraid. You have water? Good. Drink little sips, but drink often, and tell when skin empty. We give more.”

“Don’t you need the water yourselves?” Alyea protested.

Evkit grinned, a sharp white flash of teeth. “We teyanain,” he said. “We carry water for you, and we find water along way for us. We all have water, all for you; ask, ask, when empty, we give. No shame, you not teyanain.” His dark stare moved to Deiq. “
You
, though, you not need.”

Deiq shook his head without speaking, all too aware of Alyea’s intent stare. Trust Evkit to start out the trip by highlighting their differences. And by pointing out that the teyanain wouldn’t be offering Deiq water, Evkit was, more subtly, putting him on notice:
You’re not our ally, and we are not yours.
Sharing water served as an unspoken bond when going out into the deep desert lands they had to cross.

Just the first of many small repercussions from allowing Evkit to sense that Alyea had the lead role at the moment. There would be more; and Deiq would have to endure them, because any attempt now to put himself back into the dominant position would earn the hostility of the teyanain they traveled with.

He returned a blank stare to Evkit’s mocking grin, refusing to give the bastard the satisfaction of a reaction. After a moment the teyanain lord turned away and yipped out orders. Nine teyanain guards took up places just outside arm’s reach, three each to left, right, and rear. The three athain stood two full arm’s lengths farther out, again to left, right, and rear; Evkit took the lead spot, some distance ahead of the party.

Servants laden with packs, panniers, and carry-poles settled into rougher lines behind; then everyone in the lead group stood perfectly still.

Alyea settled her pack on her shoulders again, fidgeting rather than truly needing to adjust the weight. Deiq stood still, knowing what was coming and unable to think of any way to warn her that wouldn’t interrupt the moment. The best he could risk offering was a carefully directed murmur: “
Aqeyva
.”

She jerked a little, and then seemed to understand. Her breathing deepened and her nervous twitching calmed. Idisio seemed to have grasped it on his own; he was doing a creditable impression of a lightly-breathing statue.

Deiq felt pressure growing in his ears and swallowed, clenching his jaw to redistribute the tension. Knowing it for a useless attempt didn’t stop the reflex. His ears popped, then filled again immediately. He worked his jaw three more times before managing to control his own instinctive twitching.

He found the small noises of the servants in the rear group tremendously distracting. They weren’t trained to this discipline, and had no way to know what they were doing interrupted his focus a hundred times a breath. He blinked, slow and lazy, and forced himself to forget they existed for the moment.

Gods
, he hated traveling with the teyanain. And he’d only ever walked in a group with one athain before, not a full
clee
; he began to suspect that he would have a shattering headache by the end of the day. He cut his eyes to the side to check Idisio, but the younger ha’ra’ha seemed perfectly calm, his eyes half-closed and hazed with almost-trance.

At last Deiq managed, knowing himself the last holdout, to master his breathing and ease his pulse into a matching rhythm with Alyea’s. A moment later he felt the dizzying shift over into being
one breathing creature with many
legs
.

It was a tremendous risk, a vulnerable moment no other living ha’ra’ha, and certainly no other First-Born, would ever have allowed—he discounted Idisio as too young and inexperienced to truly understand the implications of what was happening. But Deiq had no choice but to submit. To travel in a full clee there was no room for individualism. He had to let the athain lead the dance, or they wouldn’t travel a step; and under the dual pressure of protecting Alyea and keeping his own standing among the teyanain, he couldn’t back out.

Dimly, he heard the athain howl their travel-welcome; a long, yipping ululation that seemed to go on and on and on—but then things
blurred
, and Deiq realized that his body had begun moving.

There was no space left for fear, no space left for thought. The
clee
was moving, and nothing else mattered. The chill of the dawn moved into a scorching heat. Deiq adjusted his own temperature reflexively, soothed Alyea’s body to a reasonable warmth, nudged Idisio’s ragged breathing easy. He felt the athain working similarly with the warriors at each corner of the group, which now appeared to his altered perception as a diamond rather than a square arrangement.

The tight hold of the
clee
loosened in spots, now that they had everyone moving in synchrony. Deiq found himself able to think again, and prodded about to be sure the athain hadn’t pried where they weren’t welcome. But they’d politely—and honorably—restricted themselves to controlling the motor centers, and left memory and mind alone; he relaxed into their grip a little more, relieved.

If he’d wanted to, he could have taken sips from his waterskin. He could sense Alyea moving, with intense caution, to do just that at intervals.

On occasion the
clee
broke out into variations on the travel-song, meaning they’d found some obstacle ahead: possibly a snake, or a desert-scorpion nest. The athain never allowed that perception to filter into the guest-circle; whatever the issue, it disappeared under the hurricane-swirl of energies being channeled through Evkit and out ahead of them.

Deiq wondered what Alyea saw; wondered if she realized she was in the midst of an honor not one in a thousand desert lords ever received. A full
clee
! It was the stuff of legends, and Deiq had seen some of those legends in true life. Even the most exaggerated-sounding tales didn’t miss the truth by much.

The teyanain, as they often boasted, were
different
.

And gods, was he glad of that; and, just as strongly, glad that he rarely needed to deal with them, let alone travel with them. But he was grateful that Alyea was experiencing this for herself. While similar to what he’d done for her during their initial walk to Scratha Fortress from the Qisani, this was an entirely different flavor of compulsion, and one she would only benefit from knowing about.

She ought to come out of the clee-trance tonight with the much better understanding of just how godsdamned dangerous the teyanain were, at least; and that would make the next few days significantly easier on Deiq. She’d start listening to him again, and once she did that he could arrange a parting of ways with the teyanain, one that wouldn’t result in a disastrous, generations-long feud.

Gods
. The word tumbled over itself in the haze, and he almost laughed. For all that he used the terms and cant freely as any human, he’d never believed in the human gods. He knew what humans had worshiped before the emergence of the ha’reye, and it bore no resemblance at all to the Three, or even the Four; although, amusingly, the latter was probably closer.

The travel-end howl rose, fractured, rose and fractured, and once more; shaking everyone out of the trance and into themselves again. Deiq dropped to his knees, unable to stop himself. His whole body vibrated in belated protest of the compulsion, and a reddish haze laced the corners of his vision. He shut his eyes and dropped his chin to his chest, wrapping his arms around himself, and fought to rein in his hoarse breathing.

Violence crested and faded inside him. Again. Again.

“Hai, ha’ra’ha,” Evkit said, close at hand. “Drink.”

Deiq blinked, testing vision; blinked again, feeling as though sand scraped inside his eyelids, then looked up into Evkit’s dark, sober stare.

“You drink,” Evkit repeated, shaking a waterskin in front of Deiq’s face. Seeing that he had Deiq’s attention, he upended it and squirted a brief stream into his own mouth, then offered it to Deiq again. “You drink.”

Deiq very slowly unwrapped his arms from the fierce hug around his own ribs and closed the fingers of one hand around the waterskin. It scratched against his fingers; he could feel an inner bag sliding against the outer, rough-hide covering.

He paused another moment to look at Evkit and raise an eyebrow to be sure. The teyanain lord nodded and said, “You do well, ha’ra’ha. Desert truce.”

Deiq’s hand tightened reflexively around the skin, and he took a long drink to hide the slight convulsion of relief. The water hit the back of his dry throat like a blessing from the gods he’d just been thinking he didn’t believe in. He swallowed and coughed, took another drink, then handed back the waterskin with a deep nod of thanks.

Evkit returned the nod and moved on, squatting to offer water to Alyea. On her hands and knees, she looked something like an exhausted asp-jacau; her head hung, her breathing came in harsh pants. Deiq let them be. Evkit had already named Alyea
guest
, he wouldn’t hurt her at this point.

He looked for Idisio, expecting to see the younger ha’ra’ha in similar if not greater distress; but Idisio sat calmly cross-legged on the sand, eyes clear and bright, sipping from his own waterskin and watching Evkit tend to Alyea.

Idisio glanced up at Deiq, as though sensing the attention, and his mouth quirked a little. Late afternoon sun caught against his light brown hair, raising glimmering arrays of color. His skin, unlike Alyea’s, hardly showed any darkening from the day’s journey. Another day’s travel under the hot sun and Alyea could begin passing for a full southerner; Idisio, as ha’ra’ha, could stand naked under a desert noon heat for days and not darken significantly unless he wanted to. Just one more detail Deiq needed to explain. He put it aside for later, hoping he’d remember.

But the younger ha’ra’ha didn’t even seem
tired
from the long march; that part, Deiq didn’t understand at all.

“It’s just an aqeyva trance,” Idisio said, accurately reading Deiq’s expression. “I’ve been practicing those a lot lately. It’s not so hard to do it while moving.”

Deiq blinked, his pride stinging at being outdone so easily by a lesser ha’ra’ha; and found himself wondering if, after all, a hundred years with the Qisani ha’reye was such a high price to pay for walking away from this arrangement.

He’d never thought of himself as
old
before, and he didn’t like it one bit.