Katharine Kerr - A Time of War

Jahdo tried to speak and found his throat frozen. All he could do was make a small choking sound.

‘Here, what’s that mean?’ Meer said.

‘Naught.’ Jahdo grabbed a handful of grass and blew his nose.

The Gel da’Thae swung his massive head round as if he were looking Jahdo’s way, but he said nothing. All round in the velvet evening insects buzzed and chirred. Jahdo tossed the ill-used grass away.

‘Meer? Why are you going east?’

‘That’s a fitting question, considering how I’ve dragged you away from hearth and home, but I’m not going to answer it.’

‘Here! Not fair!’

‘Fair has naught to do with it.’

Jahdo felt all his homesickness boil and turn to rage. He scrambled to his feet.

‘Then you may just find your way without me. I’m going home.’

He grabbed a bag of food from the ground and marched off, sighting on the last glow of the setting sun. Behind him Meer howled, a huge sound as if ten wolves sang.

‘Come back, come back!’

Jahdo heard stumblings and cursings, but he kept walking.

‘Stop!’ Meer’s anguish floated after him. ‘Wait! I’ll tell you, then.’

Jahdo stopped and turned round, but he hesitated. In the last of the light he could just see the bard’s silhouette, flailing round with his stick as he tried to follow over the rocks and hummocks. He moved remarkably well, considering, but he was angling away fast from the path that Jahdo had actually taken. He’ll die out here without me, Jahdo thought.

‘Meer, stop! I’m coming back.’

The bard sobbed once in relief and held still. Jahdo led him back to their camp, sat Meer down on a log, then busied himself with striking sparks from his flint and steel until the readied tinder at last caught. Jahdo blew the spark into a flame, fed in a little dried grass, then some twigs, and at last pieces of broken branch. As the light leapt and spread he moved back from the unwelcome heat. Meer was sitting with his head between his hands, his face turned as if he were staring into the fire. Seeing him look so defeated brought Jahdo a strange insight: never before had he argued with, much less bested, a grown man, and rather than exulting, he was frightened. Yet he refused to back down.

‘Well, tell me now. Why are you going east?’

‘It’s a long and bitter story, but you’re right enough that you should hear it. Pay attention, though, because I can only bear to repeat it this once.’ Meer cleared his throat several times before he went on. ‘I have an elder brother who became a powerful razkan, what you’d call a captain in your tongue, I suppose, the man who leads a group of warriors. And what with his raiding and then the legitimate battles between our various cities, he became famous, gathering many a free-born warrior round him, as well as the usual slave soldiers he bought with all his booty.’

‘Hold a moment. Slave soldiers? How can you give a slave weapons and make them fight?’

‘They’ve been bred and born among the Gel da’Thae, and they know that if they fight well, they’ll be set free.’

‘But still, I don’t understand. You think they’d just kill this razkan fellow and run away.’

‘Run to what? The wilderness? They know the civic authorities would hunt them down, and the gods wouldn’t help them the way they helped your people escape, because they’d be rebels and traitors.’

‘The gods helped us?’

‘Of course they did. They sent their own children to save and succour you, out on the grasslands to the south.’

‘I never did hear that before. I heard that it was some people who raised horses or suchlike. Why did the gods help us?’

‘Now here!’ Meer spoke with some asperity. ‘Do you want me to finish this tale or not? Fewer questions, if you please.’

‘I be sorry.’

‘Very well, then. Now, as I say, my brother, Thavrae his name is, his warrior’s name, I mean, though Svar was the name our mother gave him. Ah alas, woe betide the day she birthed him, and woe betide that his kin and clan have lived to see his infamy!’

‘What’s he been doing?’

‘Whoring after strange gods. Gods? Did I say gods? One of the three hundred sixty-four kinds of demon, more like! False gods, anyway. They’re supposed to be new gods. Now I ask you. If a god wasn’t around to help make the world, what kind of a god can she be? Gods don’t just pop up all of a sudden like, out of nowhere, appearing at your table like some unmarried uncle in search of a dinner!’

Jahdo giggled.

‘Just so.’ Meer nodded firmly. ‘But for some years now these false prophets have been coming round, preaching these new gods to anyone stupid enough to listen. These so-called seers come from the wild tribes of the far north, where the demons have been appearing and working marvels, or so they say. Alshandra’s the name they mention most, a powerful goddess of war, or so they call her.’

‘Your people, they’d be liking her, then.’

‘Just so. But most of these prophets are gone now. Some got themselves caught and strangled in the public square by the authorities, and the rest haven’t been seen for some while. They’ve turned sensible, if you take my meaning, but a few fools have listened to them. And my brother, my own blood kin, little Svar as I’ll always think of him, he’s one of them, claiming allegiance to this Alshandra creature. It broke my mother’s heart.’

‘I’ll wager it did. That be too bad, Meer, really tis so.’ Jahdo was trying to imagine what the mother of a man such as Meer would be like – even more formidable than his own mother, he supposed. ‘I guess she could talk no sense into him, huh?’

‘No one could make him listen to reason, no one, not our mother, not our aunts, not our uncles. But anyway, some weeks ago Thavrae led his men out east.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, partly to spare our city outright war between his warband and that of his rivals. He did listen to our mother about that, when she begged him to take his men away before citizen slaughtered citizen in the streets. The authorities wanted to strangle him for blasphemy, you see, but you don’t just arrest a razkan when he’s got his warband round him.’

‘Then he does have some honour left.’

‘Some, truly, though a poor comfort to our mother it is.’

‘Wait a moment. You said these demons live in the north, right? Why did Thavrae head east?’

‘I’m coming to that part. Hush. Apparently he’d received an omen from the gods, sending him to fetch a particular thing from the lands of the Slavers.’

‘What was it?’

‘How would I know? But I was sent to find him and beg him to come home.’

‘Sent by your mother?’

‘Just so.’

‘Do you think you – I mean we – can find him?’

‘I don’t know.’ Meer sighed, running both hands through his tangled mane of hair. ‘By now he and his men should have found whatever this mysterious object is and be returning. I hope we’ll meet them on the road back.’

‘What road? We don’t even know where we’re going.’

‘True.’

‘Then how do you think we’ll ever find him?’

‘If I can get within a reasonable distance, the brother bond will guide us.’

‘The what?’

‘The brother bond.’ Meer hesitated for a long time. ‘Now, that’s one thing I can never explain to you, Jahdo, even if you were to walk away again and leave me here to starve. It’s a magick, and some magicks are Gel da’Thae. They cannot be shared. In the temple we swear holy vows.’

‘Well, all right, then. My mam does always say that if you swear a thing, it’s needful for you to do it. But I still don’t see how we’re going to find him. What if he goes north and we go south or somewhat like that?’