Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (49 page)

They must have been expecting this day for a generation. The wounded were making for the palace, as quickly as they might, riding or walking or carried on stretchers; their families would go with them, or else into the city below. Its walls would protect them, they could help to protect its walls. Good. But they needed no one to shout them where to go, any more than they needed swords to watch them. On this road, they were in no danger except from the sky, and that was narrow between the hedges; besides, Jemel had never heard that the Patrics could fly, and he knew that the Sharai could not.

'Ifrit could fly, if they took that shape upon themselves. Jemel had a bow slung across his saddle-horn, but no blessed arrows. Better not to look for 'ifrit, then, for fear of calling them with his questing. There was trouble enough in Surayon; the tribes were in the east, Patrics in the north and the west, and it was a small, small country. What need 'ifrit in the air, or anywhere? A small doomed country, bleeding already; when the various armies met, it would be drowned in blood. Not all its own, but enough, oh God, enough. This land would be rank for a lifetime. The other Patrics called it cursed already; they would learn better, or their children's children would. There were places of great slaughter in the Sands, where dry bones still rolled in the wind. Here they would rot and stink, and poison all the water that this greedy country claimed.

There was water everywhere: he saw it, heard it, smelled it, breathed it. His horse waded in it, and there was mud in the ruts on the road and mud in the ditches. There must have been more mud, the road must have been mud entirely for the wagons to make those ruts; but even now at summers end, the earth was wet enough to ooze a little, openly under the sun.

That and the noise perhaps should have warned him, even before the walls fell away to open grassland and a road that ran straight at last. He should perhaps have been prepared, though nothing, he thought, could have prepared him truly; only enough that perhaps he could have pretended, he needn't have sat staring like a slack-jawed lackwit.

Jemel had seen the Dead Waters, but they were poison and just another wonder of the Sands. Besides, they didn't move, except when the djinni moved them. They only lay like a salt plain, vast and glimmering and useless, harbouring nothing good. Or had done, till Elisande came to interfere. They might grow sweet again now, he supposed; then they would be a wonder indeed, so very much water and all of it to drink. Then let the Beni Rus and other near tribes look to their borders; so much water must spell a great quantity of war.

There was less water here, immeasurably less if it were or could be measured by the moment, but even so he had to sit and stare, no, gape in a way that he had not - he thought, he hoped - at that other shore, before those other waters.

Jemel had seen an inland sea, but he had never seen a river. Neither had he ever seen a bridge. He knew the words from stories, and from talking with his friends; he had seen aqueducts and
castle
s, and thought he knew both how water would flow
within a course — slowly, quietl
y - and how men would build a crossing-way above it, strong and straight and practical.

But this was Surayon, and he was wrong and twice wrong, as a young man often is when he imagines that things will be as he has drawn them in his mind.

For all the seemi
ng gentl
eness, the roundness of the valleys bowl, the slopes were steep above. This much he knew; the palace was set at the road's height and he and Marron had ridden down from the heights today. The headwaters that fed the river were set far higher, up where only goat-paths and foolish children climbed, and there were many of them in the mountain ranges to north and east and south. Snowmelt and spring rains would bring a torrent in their season; even here in summer's lee, Surayon never ran dry and neither did its river. There was always rain, blowing in from the sea and caught by the mountain wall; the Sands were dry because Outremer was not, and this was the wettest of all of Outremer. If the rains should fail, there were still springs and hidden lakes high above, lakes that froze in winter and glared back at sunlight so that they could feed frosty streams with their meltwaters all summer long. Such streams plunged toward the valley, young and hectic; met each other, and became a rabble; heard others like themselves, and raced to meet them too.

And so soon, very soon, all come together, they made this river that Jemel sat staring at: this riotous roaring body that flexed ice-green muscles and spat a bitter, glittering froth, that even at this dead end of its season was still a fury contained but not caged within its channel of rock, that threatened to reach out and snatch him in.

If he'd not been mounted, if he'd been standing on his own weak legs and closer to the bank, he thought it wouldn't need to make so much effort. He thought he'd have been sucked in simply by the noise and the rush and the irresistibility of it. Even seated with hands gripping saddle-horn and heels clamped into horses sides, he still felt dizzy, unrooted, plucked at, dismayed.

He didn't think to wonder what men might call the river. It was a wild thing and far beyond the impertinence of naming. As well name the lion that kills your flock at night, the eagle that takes a lamb, the sun that drops you dead after it has soothed its own thirst by drinking all your water from your skin
...

And then there was the bridge.

Something broad and solid and built entirely of stone Jemel would have looked for, knowing how the Patric mind turned always to weight instead of speed, how they felt that a
castle
conquered a land: a very fixed point with squat heavy legs driven deep to deny the force and chaos of the river, armoured perhaps at either end with turrets and embrasures, perhaps even gates against a more deliberate enemy. Serviceable and ugly he would have expected it to be, and defensible in Patric terms, which meant standing and standing and never giving way.

Instead he saw a bow bent against the sky, a challenge against all reason. When he saw people and horses use it as a bridge, he thought that was brave and impertinent, another kind of challenge. Even when he was close enough to see that it actually was a bridge, innocent as he was he did not for one moment believe that all bridges were like this, nor even - or especially not - all the bridges that the Patrics built.

Before and some way before the road ever reached the river, it met a stone embankment, a ramp, a pier that lifted it into a smooth, steep climb to echo the fall of the hillside behind. Leaping from the piers end came the bridge itself, a tracery of beams interlocked to form a single graceful, high and unsupported arch that bent too steeply and stretched too far surely to be any unaided work of man.

It spanned not only the river, but a wide margin of land on either bank. Jemel couldn't see any reason for that, unless it were the simple reason that they could do it, they could build so high and so strikingly and therefore they had done it, for their own triumphant pleasure and no more. Which perhaps was more djinn than human — he remembered the levelled mountain, the soaring pillar - and certainly not at all Patric.

Roads followed the line of the river on either bank, but again at a distance from it, so that the footings of the bridge served as crossroads. The margin beyond was thickly grassed, right to the river's edge; land here in the valley might be fertile, but there was little enough of it and none to spare. The Sharai
did not farm, but even to Jemel’
s inexperienced eye that grass looked rich and long, ready to be cut and dried in the sun to make hay for the winter.

Today at least, though, another use had been found for those broad margins. Thin but constant streams of people were trailing in from west and east, some on foot and some on horseback, none of them on the roads. Those would be sacrosanct, Jemel guessed, not to have warriors or urgent messengers delayed by refugees. Where the people met at the bridge armed men were taking their horses from them, except for those who were fit enough to ride but too hurt to walk. The impounded beasts were tethered in lines beneath the bridge's arch. Close beside them Jemel could see a few figures lying in the grass, men and women too exhausted or too badly wounded even to ride any further, defeated perhaps by the prospect of the long climb up to the Princip's palace. Children could be carried in a man
’
s arms or a woman's at need, they'd met a few such on the way, but these would need stretchers if the djinni didn't come for them.

He and Marron rode slowly on towards the bridge, shifting their own mounts onto the grass to leave this road free for the refugees. Some were burned and smoke-stained, some were bleeding or had bled; all looked numb, defeated, too worn to show the fear that must be eating at them. Scanning the sky and the far horizons, Jemel saw firesign everywhere but no hint of any enemy.

Two men from th
e bridge's guard came walking towards them, hands on sword-hilts, not quite threatening but visibly wary of strangers in Sharai dress. With an effort, Jemel kept his own sword-hand in plain sight on the horse's reins.

'Who are you, and where are you bound?'

'Guests of the Princip,' Jemel replied economically. 'Where bound? I think perhaps here. He sent us to watch the road, and to help the wounded; but they need no help that we can give' —
unless the djinni come, that's better help than any, and they'll never know that we gave it —
'and that road watches itself.'

The one man smiled thinly, while the other went on watching. 'Aye, we've had thirty years to build for this day. The croplands are labyrinths, both sides of the valley. They'll slow down any army.'

Slow, yes, but no more than that. Not halt, and not defeat. The Sharai liked to fight in the open, on the move, on horse or camelback; they would hate that maze of walls and shadows as much as they hated sieges and
castle
warfare. He thought perhaps that was why Rhabat had always been a place of truce, because no tribe would want to battle for it. But hate it or not, the tribes would enter the labyrinth and take it, field by field if they needed to. It wasn't a
castle
or anything like, it couldn't be seriously defended.

No more could the Princip's palace; and the town of Surayon had walls, but no other fortifications that Jemel had seen. No keep, certainly no
castle
, nowhere to make a stand. And yet they'd had thirty years, and knew that this day must come
...

Are all your defences meant only for delay?' he asked, as soon as the question occurred to him. It won him a suspicious scowl, but after a moment he got his answer too.

'Well, if the Princip mounts you, he must vouch for you -though I'll dismount you myself, in a moment. Yes, lad, they are. We couldn't ever fight and hope to win, there aren't enough of us and never will be. We could build a
castle
stronger than the Roq de Ranco
n, and it would still fall in the end. So we delay and delay, and pull our people back into the high vales, where the roads don't run. There are stronger defences there, walls from cliff to chasm, and no space for siege-engines to reduce them; those we can hold for a while.'

'And when they fall? Or when there is no food, when your stores are gone?'

'Then we're gone too. Princip's guests or not, I'll still keep some of our secrets in the folds of my own mind. But they won't have the massacre they've come for, neither your people nor his,' with a nod at Marron.

It is the Patrics who seek your deaths, Patric -
my
people want
only
the land and the holy places.
..

But at that moment a woman came shambling towards them, her head swathed in a crude blood-soaked linen bandage that came down to cover one eye and half her cheek, but still couldn't cover the whole of her hurt: he could see the clotted tail of a curving slash reach out from below the bandage, almost to the corner of her mouth.

He didn't need to see the way she shied away in a touch of pure terror, that moment when she lifted her gaze from the road to see who sat the horses. Even on so little evidence, a thumbs-length showing of a wound, Jemel could name the weapon and the blow that did that to her, and neither was Patric.

Head-cut from a scimitar, from a mounted Sharai,
and he could have been ashamed of his people, except that shame would be no use to her, nor him, nor anyone. He sat quite still, watching as she edged past on the further side of the road, as she lowered her head and trudged on to face the hard climb up to the palace and some measure of healing, though she would carry the scar for life and had probably lost the eye already. Then he turned back to the guard and said, 'You might have given her a horse. Or I could go after her and offer mine
...'

'No,' the man said, as Jemel had known that he would. 'She's fit to walk, if barely. Horses are reserved for fighting men, that's why we're here. We'll take yours too, if you ve no pressing need for them.'

Neither he nor Marron could argue any pressing need, now that they'd seen the situation on the road. He thought perhaps that was another reason why the Princip had sent them here; it might have been the best use he could make of them, to deliver two more mounts from his stable.

The guard was already reaching for his bridle. Jemel would have nodded, dismounted, handed over the reins with no argument, except that just then there was a shout from across the river.