The Steel Remains (30 page)

“All right?” he asked.

“Been better. You still want to ride along?”

“With you in that mood?” Marnak shrugged. “Sure, should be a bundle of fun.”

IN FACT, EGAR'S MOOD LIGHTENED SOMEWHAT AS THEY RODE OUT ACROSS
the steppe and the camp fell behind. Slanting rays from the low winter sun turned the grassland a deceptively warm reddish gold, gave the sense that the evening might hold itself like this forever. The sky was clear and hollow blue, the band arched through it at a tilting angle, tinged a scintillating wash of ruddy shades to match the sunset. A keen wind came scything out of the north but the grease on their faces kept back its bite. The horses made an ambling pace, occasional clink or jingle from metal parts in the rig and the small iron talismans braided into their manes as they tossed their heads. Once or twice, a returning pair of herd minders would hail them as they passed, headed in for the evening meal.

It all felt a little like escape.

“You ever miss the south?” he asked Marnak eventually, when the quiet between the two of them had loosened to a wayfarer's ease. “Ever think about going back?”

“Nope.”

He glanced across, surprised by the spike of vehemence. “Really? What,
never?.
You don't even miss the whores?”

“Got a wife now.” Marnak grinned in his beard. “And they got whores in Ishlin- ichan, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Even some Yhelteth girls there these days, if that's your thing.”

Egar grunted. He knew that, too.

Marnak raised up a little in his saddle, gestured around at the steppe. “I mean, what's not to be happy with here? Grazing that never ends, plenty of waterholes, slow- flowing rivers we don't have to fight the Ishlinak for, plenty of space for everyone. Practically no raiding anymore, now the young guys all head off south instead. We don't see the long runners much this far south and west, the wolves and steppe cats mostly leave us alone as well. We've got more meat on the hoof these days than we know what to do with. Got the clan, the people around us. What's in Yhelteth to stack up against all that?”

Where'd you want me to start?

Views over the harbor, sunlight shimmering off endless ruffled blue to
the horizon. Tall white towers at the headland, the slow spiral of a dozen big lizard raptors riding the thermals. The carping of gulls down on the wharf the
bang-bang
on wood of fishermen repairing their boats.

Patios, sun- blasted and riotous with some flowering crimson creeper whose name you never did learn to pronounce right. Ornate ironwork on windows and doors, narrow white- walled streets that tricked away the sun's assault. Cunningly crafted meeting nooks and warm stone benches set in deep pools of shade, the music of falling water somewhere beyond a screen.

Market stalls heaped high with brightly colored fruit you could smell at a dozen paces. Philosophers and verse- makers declaiming from their pitches in the less pricey corners of each square, teahouses spilling out with the noisy back- and- forth quarrel of voices disputing everything under the sun: the advisability of trade with the western lands, the existence or not of evil spirits, the urban horse tax.

Books— the warm, leather- skinned weight of them in your hands, the way they smelled when you lifted them close to your face. The unfeasibly heart- jolting shock once, as a tome fell heavily open at some much- visited page, divided itself neatly in two blocky halves along the spine— and you thought, guiltily, that you'd broken it.

The lines and lines and lines and lines of squiggling black text, and Imrana's long- nailed finger leading him along them.

The stir and billow of translucent window drapes as a sea breeze wandered in from the balcony and carried away some of the midday heat, cooled some of the sweat on your skin and hers.

The ebbing bustle of the day, the cries of street sellers growing somehow ever more mournful as the light thickened and a yellow- glow sprinkle of windows lit up across the city.

The aching, dusk skyline lament of the call to prayer— and ignoring it in slim, dark, orange- blossom- perfumed arms.

The riding lights of fishercraft out on the evening swell.

“Yeah, well,” he said.

Marnak concentrated on the grasslands ahead for a while. Maybe he could feel some of what was smoking off Egar.

“In the south, they paid me to kill other men,” he said tonelessly “That's well and good when you're young. It seasons you, and it wins
honor for your name, for your forefathers in the Sky Home. It brings you to the Dwellers’ notice.”

“It gets you laid.”

A chuckle. “It gets you laid. But the time comes you're not a young man anymore. You start to lose the pleasure in it all. Truth is, I would have gone home long before I did, if the Scaled Folk hadn't come.”

“Humanity's finest hour,
eh?”

The quote didn't come out quite as sour as Egar intended. Despite everything, the clarion ring that Akal the Great had given to it still clung in faint echo. Marnak nodded to himself, so slightly it might have been the motion of the horse that caused it.

“For a while, it was.”

“Yeah, until you end up facing your own fucking people across a line of lances.”

Marnak shrugged. “That never bothered me much. You take imperial coin, chances are sooner or later you're going up against the League. You go up against the League, chances are sooner or later you're going to find yourself facing Majak. Just the way it is. No different from squabbling with the Ishlinak up here like we used to. I fought for the League myself once or twice, back in the day, before the Empire really started hiring. And yeah, it always figured if we did ever beat the lizards, every-one'd go back to fighting each other again, just like before.”

“So why not stay and make some more coin?”

“Don't think I didn't give it some thought. I had a line commander's commission by then. But like I said, it's all well and good if you're young. I just
wasn't
anymore, wasn't anything close to young.” Marnak shook his head bemusedly These weren't places his mind habitually went. “I don't know, you get older and each battle you survive starts to feel like luck. You start wondering why you made it to the end of the day, why you're still standing when the field is clogged with other men's blood and corpses. Why the Dwellers are keeping you alive, what purpose the Sky Home has laid out for you. Like that. When the Scaled Folk came, I thought I'd understood that purpose. I thought I knew why I'd survived, thought I'd probably die fighting them, didn't even mind that much so long as it was a good death.”

“But you didn't die.”

“No.” Egar thought he heard something that was almost disappointment in the other man's tone. “I didn't. Not even at Gallows Gap, and Urann knows we came close enough there. Now, that was a perfect place for a good death, if ever I saw one.”

And now it was Egar's turn to chuckle. But it was a grim sound he made, not much humor in it.

Marnak's lips bent in silent echo. “Instead of which, we all became heroes. You, me, even that fucking faggot friend of yours.”

“Look, he wasn't exactly my—”

“And next thing you know, we're back to fighting humans again. And that's fine, you know, like I said, but…” Another helpless gesture. “It got
old.
Felt like some kind of massive wheel coming right the way back around to start. There were all these new Majak kids flooding into Yhelteth on the recruiting wagon, looking to fill the gaps in the ranks, no fucking clue what it was all about—”

“Yeah, I remember.” Mostly, what Egar remembered was wanting to break their shiny, enthusiastic faces for them. The fact that they reminded him so much of himself a decade earlier only made it worse. “Weird times, huh?”

“You know what it felt like?” Marnak slipped off his cap, scrubbed vigorously at his scalp with the nails of a half- clenched fist. “You remember those round- and- round- about machines the Kiriath put into the tea gardens at Ynval? The ones with the wooden horses?”

“Yeah. Been on them a couple of times.”

“Yeah, well, you know what it's like when the ride's finished, then. Everything comes to a halt, you're sitting there, getting used to the whole world not spinning around you, and you've got a whole new set of people, mostly kids, all swarming to get on. You don't know whether you want to give up your seat or not, and then it suddenly hits you.” He slipped his cap back on again, shot Egar a sidelong glance. “You realize you don't
want
to go around again. In fact, you're not even fucking sure anymore whether you really enjoyed it the first time around.”

They both laughed this time, and loud. Quick bark of tension released, then the looser, more reflective stretch of genuine amusement,
shared under the massive sky. The small, human sounds it made held briefly against the landscape, then soaked away into the vast quiet and the wind, like piss into the ground.

“You know,” Marnak said, maybe loath to let the silence win. “I broke one of those horses once. I ever tell you that? I mean, broke its neck right fucking off, hanging off it when I was blasted on pipe one time. They were going to make me pay for the fucking repairs, too, about half a week's wages as it happens. Called the City Guard on me when I wouldn't cough up. I ever tell you that story?”

In fact, he had, but Egar shook his head amiably and the other man launched into the tale. There was an easy pleasure to be had from hearing the escapade again, all its wall- scaling, roof- leaping, harem-invading chases and shocks and reversals, plus a couple of fresh embellishments added into the mix, just to keep it sharp. It was like sitting around the fire and listening to a skilled storyteller run through the Tale of Takavach and the Mermaid's Virtue, or something equally well worn.

When the tale was done, with Marnak safely back across the river and into barracks before dawn, when their laughter had soaked away once again, the clanmaster nodded and told another Yhelteth story from his own stock. How a noted imperial knight had once come home to find the young Egar in bed with his wives, all four of them at once.
And you know, more than anything, that seemed to be what he was so pissed off about. Standing there, yelling at me with that fucking stupid court sword in his fist. Apparently, the Revelation says yes, you can have up to six wives, but it absolutely forbids you doing it with more than one of them at a time.
Egar let drop the reins, spread his hands wide.
Hell, how was
I
supposed to know that?

More laughter.

Another tale.

And so, eventually, they came to Erkan's grave. They quieted and looked at each other. For a while they'd been able to forget where they were going, but that was over now. Egar dismounted.

“Thanks for the company.”

“Yeah.” Marnak cast glances around. A slight rise, a single stooped
and gnarled tree with the ball of the declining sun tangled in its leafless branches. It was a bleak place, not made for the living.

“I'll be fine,” Egar said quietly. “He was a good man in life, he isn't going to hurt me now.”

Marnak grimaced. It wasn't the received wisdom among the Majak that good men made good ghosts. A spirit must be placated, regardless of its origins; rituals must be honored. So said the shaman. No one ever explained exactly why, but the implication was that if you didn't get that stuff right, there'd be a heavy price, for you and your people.

“Go on, get moving. You ride hard, you'll make it back not much after full dark.” Egar watched the other man wheel his horse about. “Oh yeah, and if Sula asks, you left me half a league out, doing the last stretch on foot. Right?”

Marnak grinned back over his shoulder. “Right.” He clucked and heeled his horse into a gathering trot, canter, finally a full gallop back the way they'd come.

Egar watched him go, until horse and rider were a single dot that faded slowly into the gloom. Then he sighed and turned to his father's grave.

It wasn't much to look at. Steppe soils made for hard digging at this time of year, and the grave was shallow, piled over with rocks it took them the whole day to gather. They'd built the traditional cairn end pile at the buried man's feet, warded it about with daubed symbols in the Skaranak colors and iron talismans hung off the stones on buffalo- hide thongs. They shredded tundra rose and crocus petals over the stones and set a dwarf oak sapling in the ground at Erkan's head, so in a couple of years’ time he'd have shade when summer swung around.

Now the clan colors were bleached with age, and the branches of the grown tree were naked and skeletal overhead. Only the shaped iron ornaments remained, though— Egar squinted suspiciously— it looked as if even one or two of those might have been stolen from the grave over the past year.

“Motherfucking Voronak tinks,” he muttered.

Yeah, this far south and west it's just as likely Skaranak renegades, or even some bunch of fuckwit explorers from the south.
He'd seen Skaranak
grave wards in more than one imperial museum over the years, had never quite been able to drive home to anyone the rage it aroused in him. In Yhelteth, in the city itself at least, they tolerated a variety of beliefs well enough, but behind that there was always the base assumption of a civilized superiority in the Revelation that never failed to piss him off. In the end, the imperials didn't much care whose sensibilities they trampled on.