"He can't be dead," Sarie cried. She for sure had the wail of grief down pat. "He can't die without seeing his child!"
Uncle Doj stopped dead in his tracks, as numb as a poleaxed steer. Thai Dei stared at his sister and began making a whimpering sound. Since I was getting used to Nyueng Bao ways I assumed he was distraught because it would be impossible for him to marry off a sister who carried the child of an outsider.
Uncle Doj muttered, "I am beginning to believe your mother is wiser than we thought, Thai Dei. She blamed all this on Hong Tray. Now it begins to look like your grandmother was entirely too clever. Or we just misunderstood. Her prophecy may have included Murgen only indirectly. It might be about the child Sahra is carrying."
I understood that the woman in the swamp, twice seen already, must be Sarie herself.
"There will be no place for Sahra, then," Thai Dei said, pain obvious. "If she bears an outsider's bastard ... "
"Take me back," Sahra said. "If you won't let me be I will be Nyueng Bao no longer. I will go to my husband's people. There will be a place for me with the Black Company."
This was social heresy of an order so high that both Thai Dei and Uncle Doj were stricken speechless.
I do not believe I would have been speechless had I been able to get at those two right then. I lifted away. I had heard enough to know where I stood, where Sarie stood and where my faithful companion Thai Dei stood. The Old Man might not be right about the Nyueng Bao but he was for sure not wrong.
I skipped forward in time rapidly, tracking Sarie. Thai Dei and Uncle Doj took her to that temple where I had spotted her before. They left her in the hands of a great uncle who was a priest. Sahra was, in essence now, an orphan, though she was a grown woman twice married. The temple was where Nyueng Bao without family went. The temple became home. The priests and nuns became family. In return, the orphan was expected to dedicate his or her life to good works and whatever deities the Nyueng Bao worshipped.
Nobody ever set me straight on that, though the temple where they stashed Sahra boasted several idols that looked a lot like various Gunni gods.
Shadar have only one god of sufficient magnitude to warrant an idol and Vehdna doctrine proscribes any graven images at all.
I focused in on Sarie as she was today. I followed her about her duties for an hour. She was helping keep the temple clean, carrying water, helping with cooking, pretty much exactly what she would have done had she been living in one of the hamlets with a Nyueng Bao husband. But the people of the temple shunned her.
No one spoke to her except a priest to whom she was related. Nothing needed to be said. She had defiled herself. Her only visitor was an elderly gentleman named Banh Do Trang, a commercial factor whose friendship Sahra had won during the siege of Dejagore. Banh had been the interlocutor between us the last time Sahra's family had tried to keep us apart. He had made it possible for Sahra to slip away and reach me before she could be stopped.
Banh understood. Banh had loved a Gunni woman when he was young. He spent most of his time trading in the outside world. He did not think everything "other" was purely evil.
Banh was good people.
I searched hard and picked my moment carefully, when Sarie was at her afternoon prayer. I brought my point of view down in front of her, right at eye level. I exercised all my will. "Sarie. I am here. I love you. They lied to you. I am not dead."
Sarie made a little sound like a puppy whimpering. For an instant she seemed to stare right into my eyes. She seemed to see me. Then she bounced up and fled the room, terrified.
41
One-Eye just kept slapping me till I came out of it. "Goddamn, you little shit, quit it!" My face was sore. How long had he been pounding me? "I'm here! What the fuck's your problem?"
"You're doing a lot of yelling, Kid. And if you was talking any language your in-laws could understand you'd be up shit creek. Come on. Get it under control."
I got it under control. You have to learn to manage emotion if you are going to survive in our racket. But my heart continued to pound and my mind to race. I shook like I had a bad ague. One-Eye offered me a large cup of water. I drained it.
He said, "It's partly my fault. I wandered off. I didn't think you'd stay out that long. Thought you'd figure it out and get your ass back to see what we plan to do about it."
I croaked, "What you plan to do about it?"
"Don't got no plans. I think the Old Man was just gonna let it slide and keep his eyes open till he decided you needed to know."
"He wasn't going to tell me?"
One-Eye shrugged. Which meant probably not.
Croaker was no more enthralled by my marriage than were Sahra's people.
The bastard.
"I need to see him."
"He'll want to see you. When you've got yourself under control."
I grunted.
"You let me know when you can get by without a lot of screaming and carrying on."
"I can do that right now, you little shit! What did you guys mean, not telling me?"
"You let me know when you can get by without a lot of screaming and carrying on."
"You little shit." I was running out of venom. I had been out there a long time. I needed to eat. I had a feeling I would not be allowed a snack till after my interview with Croaker.
"You ready to talk?" Croaker asked. "Done with screaming and carrying on?"
"You guys spend the whole time I was ghostwalking rehearsing your act?"
"So what are your in-laws up to, Murgen?"
"I don't have the faintest fucking idea. But I'm thinking maybe I want to put Uncle Doj's feet in the fire and ask."
Croaker was drinking tea. Taglians are big tea drinkers. The Shadowlanders of these parts were bigger tea people. He took a sip. "You want some?"
"Yeah." I needed liquids.
"Think about this. We put him to the question on account of you suddenly know they fucked you over. You think anybody, Nyueng Bao or otherwise, might wonder how you suddenly knew when you're only like eight hundred miles from the evidence?"
"I don't care—"
"Exactly. You're not thinking about anything but you. But anything you do is going to touch every member of the Company. It might touch every man who came over those mountains with us. It might change the course of this war."
I wanted to belittle his claims because I was hurting bad and very much wanted to do some hurting of my own. I could not. Time enough had passed for reason to begin rearing its reasonable head. I bit down on the words that rose in my throat. I drank my tea. I thought. I said, "You're right. So what do we do?"
Croaker poured me some more tea. "I don't think we do anything. I think we go right on the way we have been. I think we do the trap-door spider thing. I think only three guys know what an incredible tool we've got and nobody else needs to know."
I grunted. I drank some tea. I said, "She thinks I'm dead. She's living her whole life based on that lie."
Croaker fiddled with his fire. He looked into his bag of liberated tea. One-Eye finally caught on. "Oh. Yeah. I figured you was familiar with that book of the Annals that was written by the Captain's woman." He showed me a sneer with a couple of teeth missing.
"Right. You just keep on being reasonable. See if I care. Shithead."
"I got a great idea, Kid. Come on back to the wagon with me. Something I found the other day you might be interested in."
Croaker said, "You guys don't wander too far. We're getting enough people in here now, it's time to start harassing Longshadow."
"Of course," One-Eye said. He ducked out the doorflap grumbling, "Just can't leave shit alone." I ducked out behind him. He did not stop. "We could sit out here for the next hundred years and not hurt nobody. Set up our own damned kingdom. Starve the son of a bitch out. But no! We got to do some kind of... " One-Eye glanced back. We were out of earshot of the Old Man. "Enough of that shit. You dickhead. You never told me about Goblin."