Saranja nodded, slid her hand inside her blouse and felt her way over the surface of Zald. Her lips moved as she mouthed the simple release formula. She withdrew the jewel and slipped it into Maja’s hand.
Maja knelt to whisper into Striclan’s ear.
“It’s worse than you’re telling him, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“There’s something I can do,” she said. “No, don’t let go. I’ll start at the edge. Please try not to watch.”
“Of course,” he said, and shifted to make room for her. A corner of the wound showed each side of his grasp. She put the ache in her head away, still there, but somewhere outside herself, and whispered to Jex to relax his shield. Naked to all the magic in the world she pressed the jewel to and fro around the right corner of the wound, feeling through the slithery blood for the torn edges and easing them together, above and below and back, above and below and back, again and again. Her hand and arm grew warm as the healing power flowed into them and on through the jewel. Ribek sighed and closed his eyes. She could feel his openness to what she was pouring into him, her whole life-force, all her love. The wound began to close.
“Where’s Pogo?” said Benayu suddenly. Vaguely, concentrating on what she was doing, Maja registered the change in his voice. On the surface, at least, this was the Benayu they had known before Larg.
“Stupid horse bolted almost at once, of course,” said Saranja. “Nobody’d even made a grab for him. Back the way we came, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll fetch her while Maja’s doing that. Come on, Sponge.”
Maja flinched to the shock of his changing, but her arm and hand kept their rhythm. By the time she recovered two identical dogs were loping away down the road. With her free hand she nudged Striclan’s fingers to the left to give her more wound to start on. Saranja appeared and knelt beside her with a water flask and a cloth and started to sponge away the blood from what she had already done, revealing a morsel of pink, new-healed flesh. Maja worked on.
“Perhaps it would help, while we are doing this, if I explained a little about myself,” said Striclan.
“I don’t know if it would help, but it would be interesting,” said Saranja.
“I hope both,” said Striclan, chuckling, though he must have noticed the dryness in her tone. “I am not by birth a Charargalid, though I was partly raised in Charargh.”
“Where’s Charargh?” said Saranja.
“Charar means ‘south,’ and Charargh is the South. It occupies the whole southern half of a continent on the other side of the world, and in fact dominates the northern half as well. Technically it is not a single nation, in the way that the Empire is a single nation, but a community of seven separate nations. Its full, formal name is Storgon Charargha, the Community of the South, but it acts and thinks like a single large nation. We speak of Southern Civilization, Southern Values.
“But as I say I am not a true native of Charargh. I was born in one of its dependencies because a generation ago the authorities decided that the time had come to deal with what they regarded as the problem of the Empire. For a great part of their early history the seven nations had been more or less at war with each other.”
Expertly, at Maja’s gentle nudge, he shifted his grip along the wound, but his voice didn’t falter. She stopped listening to concentrate on the healing. This was the difficult bit, where the slash was deepest, severing veins and nerves and sinews. She couldn’t reach in to touch them with the jewel, but she could reach through it to them and fill them with her own health and wholeness. She lost herself in a trance of healing. Striclan’s quiet voice was just a background to what she was doing, almost as meaningless as birdsong. A sharper interjection from Saranja broke through into her consciousness.
“You mean you’ve actually fought wars to persuade people to do things your way?”
“I’m afraid so. There was usually some kind of excuse, of course. And to the Southern way of thinking it would obviously be so much better for them in the end.”
“Not the ones who were dead.”
“No. And then they came up against the Empire. It was different from anything they had encountered before—so different and yet so obviously rich and successful that it seemed a threat to their whole way of thinking. They had known about it for centuries, of course, but…”
Maja moved Striclan’s fingers again and worked on.
Three miles to the south a traveling sandalmaker was riding a horse. He was drunk. Last evening, at a way station, he’d fallen in with a couple of friendly fellows and they’d wined and diced into the small hours, and he’d won heavily. But perhaps they’d drugged his wine, though they drank from the same flask, for he’d slept very late, and when at last he’d woken he’d found his companions gone along with his winnings and his mule and his stock of sandals and everything else he possessed. All they’d left him was a half-empty flask of wine, so he’d finished it off and started home, drunk again.
And then luck had smiled on him. He’d found a stray horse by the roadside, ready saddled and bridled. It was flecked with dried foam, so he guessed it had bolted from somewhere. It had skittered a bit as he tried to mount it, but in the end he’d hoisted himself into the saddle and persuaded the animal to move. He would sell it at the next market town he came to, he told himself, and if someone claimed it before then, well, maybe there’d be a reward.
Two dogs came loping up from behind him and started to pace along, one on either side. The one on his right raised its head and looked at him.
“That’s not your horse,” it said.
He blinked. He’d known he was drunk, but not this drunk.
“I’m taking him to his owner,” he said.
“That’s me,” said the dog.
“Don’t be stupid. Dogs don’t own horses.”
“You live and learn,” said the dog.
Both dogs loped forward, turned and barred the way. The horse stopped. The sandalmaker shook the reins and drummed his heels against the horse’s ribs, but it stayed where it was. It lowered its head. The dog licked its muzzle. The horse began to shrink.
In a moment it was no bigger than a pony, and in another his feet touched the ground. Two or three and more he was standing astraddle in the road with a child’s toy horse between his feet. The dog which had spoken to him picked it up in its mouth and winked at him. Both dogs trotted off the way they had come.
Distantly Maja felt the tremor of mild, almost playful magic, and recognized it as Benayu’s work.
“You can let go now,” she murmured, and moved to close the outer edge of the slash. She was swaying where she knelt, utterly weary, but at the same time wonderfully alive and fulfilled.
“But that’s absolutely appalling!” said Saranja. “You mean that because their own spies kept getting found out they kidnapped several hundred innocent people and took them to Charargh and bred them like farm animals so that when the kids grew up they could send them back to the Empire as spies! That’s quite as bad as anything I’ve heard about the Watchers!”
“In fact not many were kidnapped,” said Striclan. “Mostly we waylaid coastal shipping and persuaded some of those aboard to purchase men and women in the slave markets and ferry them out. They were then taken and established in a closed community on Palto, the nearby island which they already controlled, and there they replicated as closely as possible the conditions of the Empire. That is where I was born.
“The captives were not required to have children but were given considerable incentives to do so. I am the eldest of four siblings, not all by the same father, and my mother often said that as a result her life had been a great deal more comfortable than it would have been as a slave in Shankrili. She never expressed any bitterness over what had happened to her. Nevertheless, Miss Saranja, I am forced to agree with you that it was morally reprehensible, and even in my earliest childhood I was dimly aware that this was the case. I knew I did not belong on Palto.