‘Absolutely. Looking forward to it,’ he murmured, then, louder, ‘I’m searching for my partner, Sour. Seen him?’
She wrinkled her broad nose. ‘The smelly fellow? Yes. Headed off with the scouts.’
Murk was surprised. ‘What’s he doing?’
She waved her irritation. ‘Asking a lot of foolish questions.’
‘Ah. Well. I will see you later then.’ He began backing away.
‘Yes! Till then!’
‘Right.’
As he walked away he heard her shouting to her comrades: ‘All alone he went! What a man! Who else would dare such a thing? Did I not choose well?’ He hung his head and felt his shoulders falling. Mercenaries nearby offered merciless grins. Some blew noisy kisses.
Then he ran into Burastan. The Seven Cities woman wore only her loose silk shirt and linen trousers. Her long dark hair hung dishevelled down over her shoulders and her arm was tightly wrapped. She seemed to glower at him, frowning. Annoyed, he snapped, ‘What are you looking at?’
‘Just trying to figure out what she sees.’
He pushed past her. ‘Thanks a lot.’ He happened to glance back and saw her still watching after him. What in the Abyss? Maybe it’s as they say: there’s nothing that interests a woman more than another woman’s interest.
He sat down in a nook of two roots of a tall wide tree. What the locals called a strangler fig. Here he sat, unable to sleep, and dawn was just a few hours away in any case.
It was after dawn that Sour emerged from the jungle verge accompanied by a gaggle of Oroth-en’s scouts. The mercenaries were already up building cookfires, readying equipment and changing bindings on wounds. Murk pushed himself up on to his numb tingling legs, stamped them, and headed over.
‘Where were you, dammit?’ he demanded, storming up. Then he paused, startled, as his partner turned to him. Gone was his rotting corroded helmet. His greasy curly mop of hair was pulled back and tied. And his face was painted in an approximation of the locals’ tattooing. Murk looked him up and down, unable to contain a sneer. ‘What’s all this? You’re no local.’
The man blinked his bulging mismatched eyes. ‘No. But these folks know what they’re doin’ so I figure-’
‘Well don’t. Everyone’s going to laugh at you and you’ll make us look like idiots. Now wash all that off.’
Sour’s pleased expression dropped and he kicked at the dirt. ‘I think it’s kinda like camouflage, their tattooing ’n’ all,’ he said, his head lowered. ‘I think it could help us, you know.’
‘You just look like a play-acting fool.’
Now Sour twisted his mud-caked fingers together, picking at the dried dirt. ‘I was just thinking that since they get by maybe we should look at how they do things, you know. Like their medicines!’ He shot a quick glance up. ‘You should see what they got out here. It’s amazing! They say there’s this one flower, and if you …’
He trailed off. Murk was shaking his head in obvious disapproval. ‘What’s got into you, Sour? You don’t sound like the man I used to know.’ He raised his hands. ‘Okay. Fine. So they’re new and different and interesting. That doesn’t mean you have to go all gushing puppy-eyed on them.’
‘I wasn’t …’
But Murk wasn’t looking at him any longer. Another figure had emerged from the verdant ocean-green of the hanging leaves. A smeared mixture of the ochre-red soil merged with the thick grey-green of clay covered the man from head to foot. Beneath this layer he wore only a light leather hauberk and a hanging skirt of loose cloth that fell to his knees. Leather swathing wound round his calves down to leather sandals. Twinned long-knives hung on two belts round his waist, and he carried a spear that was nothing more than a stripped branch. This he stamped into the ground as he halted before them. The twig clenched between his teeth slowly lowered.
‘What?’ the man grunted, and moved on past.
Sour was fairly hugging himself in suppressed glee. ‘You was sayin’?’ he prompted.
‘Nothing,’ Murk snapped, and he walked away.
* * *
A river stopped their eastward advance. They came upon it suddenly — as one comes across everything suddenly in the deep jungle. Pushing aside wide leaves, Hanu nearly pitched forward down the steep cliff of its shore in a repeat of his plunge into the sinkhole. As it was, he pulled himself back by grasping handholds of the thick leaves and wrenching the brush and nearby trunks. This set off an explosion of startled birds that spread their squawking and squalling alarm in all directions.
Among the dispersing storm Saeng glimpsed crimson longtailed parrots that glided across the river, a gyring flock of brilliant emerald parakeets, and many sunbirds with their bright gold breasts. A shower of flower petals followed the birds’ sudden flight. They floated down to cover Hanu’s glittering armour in a layer of even more intense sapphire blue and creamy gold.
‘Sunbirds!’ Hanu sent to her, pointing. Saeng nodded and covered a smile at the image of a yakshaka warrior decked out like a giddy child during the spring festival of Light. ‘Didn’t Mother say those birds were sacred to the old Sun worship?’
Saeng lost her smile. She shrugged her impatience. ‘They’re everywhere. Anyway,’ she gestured angrily to the sluggish course of the river, ‘how’re we going to get across that?’
‘I don’t know.’
Saeng agreed with the wariness she heard in her brother’s thoughts. She knew that others were not afraid of water, but her people were taught to avoid it as treacherous and the carrier of disease and sickness. She didn’t know anyone who could swim. As to boats or canoes — she’d never even seen one. And Hanu, well, he’d sink like a stone.
‘I suppose,’ Hanu continued, ‘we trace the shore and hope to find a village. They might have canoes.’
‘You can’t cross that! You’d sink … wouldn’t you?’
He edged back from the shore and started pushing his way south, clearing her a path. ‘Can’t be helped.’
Saeng followed, picking her way through the serrated knife-sharp edges of the broad leaves. ‘Hanu,’ she asked after a while, ‘in all that time,’ cruel gods — twelve years! Has it truly been that long? ‘was there anyone for you? A girlfriend? Perhaps even … a wife?’
He paused in his heaving aside of the thick brush. In his broad armoured back, hunched now, she read an aching sadness. Ancestors knew what emotions might have overcome her should she have dared to touch upon his thoughts. As it was, an image flashed across her mind of searing hot metal and, bewildering to her, an even more painful sense of burning shame. He turned to her, sap running in thick clots down his armoured arms, his helmed head lowered.
‘We are not allowed such things,’ he finally communicated, allowing only a tight sliver of a channel from his thoughts. ‘Our loyalty is to be absolute.’
‘Yet you … deserted.’
‘They were too late. I had already pledged my loyalty.’
Something in that frank declaration disturbed Saeng and she backed away. ‘To … me?’
Perhaps it was the closeness of their linked thoughts, but he seemed to understand her unease and he swept an armoured hand between them as if to diffuse her disquiet. ‘As your guardian, Saeng. You yourself conspired in this, yes?’
Yes, poor Hanu, I did. What choice did you ever have? There, you have found it. My true distress. You have spoken it. My guilt in your bindings. If not for them you never would have …
But she could not continue. Could not say it even to herself. And so she turned away to fiercely wipe her eyes, her lips clenched against sobs that tore at her throat. Oh, Hanu! What have I done to you …
Yet her brother continued, unaware. ‘All those nights, Saeng. Watching. Guarding you. After a time I saw hints of the passing spirits as they came to you. So many! The Nak-ta all pledging their service and loyalty … to you. I knew then that you were special. That the most important thing for me would be to somehow serve as well. And I know now what you were, are, to them. And to me.’