Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (72 page)

Surayon might be either one, a useful onion or a beautiful pearl; she thought it would not matter, in the end. Outremer would destroy its mystery layer by layer, and justify it by that gritty heart; the Sharai would dig out whatever had value, take that and leave the rest, and never mind that it must rot abandoned.

There was smoke aplenty in the air, but that might still be from yesterday's burnings not extinguished yet. One house could smoulder for days unattended and there were dozens, maybe hundreds that had been put to the torch as the invaders passed through. And there were dozens, maybe hundreds of men Julianne could see coming and going, riding westerly or easterly alone or in small bands, some few afoot; even at the limits of her sight or the valley's turning she could identify Sharai and Patric by the dress they wore, and she could see how they kept their distances, how none of them closed for battle.

This might be news, it might be worth the telling; but when she looked around for Elisande she found her still busy, still muttering to herself head down and almost on hands and knees among the grasses.

..
Is this bloodwort? Yes, it is. Good for clotting, if there were enough to pack a wound, which there is not, and time enough to let it work, which there will not be. Still, pick it, save it, someone might prick their finger
...'

Elisande had decided - decreed, rather — that as there was no other conceivable use for this fleck of land in midstream or for these two girls upon it, and as Esren had brought them here to be useful, therefore it must intend them to serve as nurses and wards for the injured. It was her one known talent, after all, to heal the sick and the hurt; and Julianne had learned by helping her, they had been sick-nurses together in the Roq and in Rhabat and in the Princips palace yesterday. So why not here today, close to whatever action there must be? No doubt Esren would ferry the wounded across the water as they fell. If necessary, she would order it to do so. And in the meantime, she would scour every green and growing thing for any healing or nourishing effect whatsoever. This was a safe place, which might be why the djinni chose it; and she was a skilled healer, which must be why the djinni chose her; but still there was an element missing, something to force the place and the occasion, and she thought it must be some potent hidden herb that it was her task to seek out before the crisis came.

Or so she was pretending, at any rate: gazing at the ground with a fierce focus, refusing to look up or around as she picked and poked among the damp and heavy grasses, hoarding a poor harvest into the gathered belly of her skirt.

Julianne turned back to her vigil, looking for patterns in the movements of men and seeing none, living breathlessly from moment to hopeful moment until a sudden unexpected noise made her twist around sharply, and the words she might have been thinking to say unravelled themselves entirely as she went.

The noise came from Elisande - of course, there was no one and nothing else here that might have made it - and it was, startlingly, a laugh.

At least a sort of half-laugh, a choking, coughing sound of self-mockery. She had laid out all her gleanings neatly on a stretch of trampled grass, and now she was sitting back on her heels and looking at them, looking up at Julianne and back at her herbs again.

‘I’
m sorry, my love,' she said softly, not laughing now. 'That was pathetic'

'Do you think so?'

'Do you not?' Her voice had an edge of challenge again, to say that Elisande was not entirely blunted. 'Look at it, an hour's labour for this
...'
Her fingers played with what she had collected, lifting and letting fall. 'Any abandoned croft could show a better crop than this, and what, I'm going to heal half an army?'

'We don't have an abandoned croft, Elisande. All we have is what you can find, because I don't know a simple from a, from a—'

'Simpleton?'

'Anyway, you may not need to heal half an army. The armies have decided not to fight.'

'Have they? Truly?' A sudden heedless scramble to her feet, scattering half of what she had worked so hard to gather; she stared, stood on tiptoe as though an extra inch would show her a deeper truth, shaded her eyes with her hand and stared again.

After a while, though, she shook her head and sank back, sank down, sank almost utterly. Briefly Julianne felt a cold fury, only that she was not certain who to be so angry with: herself for raising such a fragile hope or Elisande for doing nothing to keep it perilously aloft, for so easily allowing it to fall.

'That's not peace,' she said, as though this were any kind of news. 'That's reconnoitring. They're sending out scouts, watching each other, waiting to strike
...'

Shifting about like pieces on a
gameboard,
but Julianne left that thought unspoken. 'I didn't say peace,' she said instead, 'I said they'd decided not to fight. They're not waiting to strike, they're just waiting. Watching each other, of course, but expecting something else to happen. It's better than yesterday, love. Would they have waited even this long, if they'd met yesterday? If they'd had a chance of meeting, two armies from Outremer and the Sharai?'

No, of course they wouldn't. There'd have been no courtesies of war, and no care in the planning: only a yell of hatred, a holy curse on all unbelievers and an instant charge from either side, from both. And they'd have ridden over Surayon and hardly noticed as they trampled lives, hopes, an entire people into the bloody dust.

They might yet; they would yet, if nothing else did happen. It was strange, disturbing to find herself yearning -praying, almost — for an assault, for men to die; but it was the only way she knew to stop them killing each other. If she were a player, she'd move her pieces now to make it happen, to force it quickly. She trusted neither side in this undeclared, unconvincing truce. It needed one hothead, one holy fool, no more than that
...

Elisande shrugged, the closest she could come to
perhaps you're right, perhaps it's too early to despair.
She gave a despairing look to the tumbled herbs that represented all her mornings work, another to the fertile but barren island on which they'd been marooned, and moaned. 'There has to be a point to this, there must be something that we're missing.' 'Must there?'

'Yes.
Yes! It's
not just that I want it, of course I do, I can't bear to sit and do nothing; but Esren said we'd be of most use here. Didn't it? Or did I dream that?'

'You know you didn't dream it, sweets. Don't work yourself into a passion.'

'Well, then. That's what it said - and the djinn know these things, Julianne, it
knew
we
’
d
be useful if it brought us here
...'

It knew they would be useful, but it didn't tell them how; likely both parts of that were significant. It wanted - or needed? - them to work it out for themselves. Or else to fail, perhaps that was their usefulness? Like leaving Marron at the palace, if only to stop him doing something that would make matters worse. He might stay where he was put, if he hadn't entirely lost that habit of obedience; Elisande emphatically would not. And so she was put here where she could do no harm at all, and Julianne with her to keep her from expiring in her fury
...

Well, it was possible. As likely as anything, so far as she could judge; at least as likely as Elisande's notion, that they had some significant purpose to fulfil if they could only outguess the djinni.

Just for form, she said, 'You could call it back, tell it to take us somewhere else

'I'm not sure it would come; and where should it take us anyway, what can we do? We did it all, last night - you with your voice, I with my hands. There is no more, if they will not let us fight. In any case, to leave would be,' a helpless gesture of her hands, surrender. Disaster, if the djinni has dealt straight with us. There is a purpose to this, Julianne; we can find it out; we will.'

And perhaps she would, if sheer determination were enough to draw forth answers. Privately Julianne doubted that, she'd too often seen determination defeated by simple ignorance, but she would not say so for the world.

She said nothing, then, and turned her attention back to the riders in the valley, north and south.

Of course the story changed, because it must; of course the change was for the worse, a degradation, a loss of hope. She thought it had never been otherwise, and never would. It was in the nature of humankind to hope, the nature of hope to fail, the nature of the world to decay. All life was a losing struggle against the weight of inevitable death.
God is history,
she thought suddenly, startling herself into a soft cry with the thought; she hadn't realised that she or anyone was fighting God, but the conclusion was irresistible. The djinn had foreknowledge, and even the djinn were fallible and so mortal; what else could be eternal than the sum of what had happened, the exactitude of knowledge - and how could she or anyone resist the past, or what it taught?

'What?' Elisande looked up from the depths of her silence, which had dragged her deeper and deeper down as though she sat in the bottom of a well, unreachable.

'Oh - uh, look. If there was a truce, it has been broken.' She didn't want to confess where her thinking had brought her, so far from the immediate anxiety of the day, into paths so twisted or so overhung with gloom. This was what had led her there, this was what mattered more: death had come back to Surayon, refreshed. This was what they had been waiting and watching for, what perhaps they had been set here to observe.

For some little time now, she had been watching an army emerge onto the northern flood-plain. No more scouts, no more reconnaissance — here were men in numbers, sure of their strength. Most wore black robes, though there were other colours among them; their officers had black cloaks thrown over white. They were the Ransomer army come down from the Roq, swollen by recruits en route as a river swells and swells in time of flood, between its rising and the sea.

They came down the single narrow road between the high-walled fields, a mirror to those on the opposite side of the river; they issued out in pairs abreast and spread across the grassland like a flood indeed, a slow-seeping darkness that invaded the bright green like a poison. Or like a swarm, she thought, bees to sting, locusts to consume utterly whatever they lighted on.

They could light on
little
here, except the earth itself to take possession of it; but that was bad enough, worse than bad. She had been guest of the Ransomers, she knew some of their intimacies at first hand and had heard tell of others. They were the last people she liked to see within these borders. Better the Sharai, who would pillage, burn the crops and houses and move on, leaving a corruptible governor behind to levy later tributes. That was slavery; but Ransomers would burn the people too. And build castles on the heights, and stay, and never trust because they never could. Their hand would always lie cold and heavy across this narrow, tender land. She tried to imagine a lifetime lived in its shadow and shuddered, and yearned to see the army of the Sharai come out of the smoke to the east there, to drive the Ransomers back. It was there, she knew, she had seen outriders come and go; she thought she could see a darker shadow building, the massing of the tribes. Under her husband Hasan, the only man who could bring them so together; and so it wasn't treachery to hope that the Sharai would be victorious over Outremer, it was loyalty to her new man and his people, and she could not be condemned for it.

Except by her father, her friends, her first husband Imber, all her old loyalties to blood and family and belief.
If they fight, we all lose,
she reminded herself fiercely, and struggled to put aside all wondering about tomorrow, how armies once encamped could be removed from Surayon again. The Sharai might not follow Hasan if he tried to lead them back to the Sands, away from war and glory; the Ransomers certainly would not follow Imber, and there was all her little influence swallowed up already. Her father had more, with the King's authority behind him, but she doubted whether Fulke would withdraw even for the King, when he had the God's will to enact and a generation of support from the fathers of the church.

Tomorrow, she would worry about that. If there were a tomorrow, for her or for any of them. At the moment, she was inclined to doubt it. She had no faith in these men, their muscles or their minds: not even in either her wise or her foolish husband, let alone in the hundreds and thousands else. Never mind their intentions, she thought that one or another of them would fling a blade or let an arrow fly, too soon and at the wrong target. Old enmities couldn't be put aside so speedily. There were too many blood-debts on either side, too heavy a burden of resentment. Each had their history, of cruelties and dispossession; each had their God, and as she had learned — or perhaps decided - those were the same thing, indistinguishable. What God or history demanded could not and would not be denied.

That was her fear, and there was only one way to avoid it: that both sides see men die, and see who killed them.

She waited, breathless and fearful, while long files of riders unwound across the plain; she watched a patrol detach to follow the line of the wall easterly, towards the hidden Sharai.

She thought she knew what she had to fear. She thought her Hasan would appear from the smoke, riding alone with the tribes behind; she thought some high-minded Ransomer - Marron's Sieur Anton, as like as not: there was a man who carried his nobility in every haunted muscle of his body, every nuance that his mind could unpick — would go to meet him, man to man and face to face; she thought they would speak with courtesy and respect on both sides, and somehow there woul
d be words said that must reluc
tandy, regretfully be answered with steel. She thought they would fight, because that was the style of the day. Hope must fail, men must be weak.