Graeme Talboys - Players of the Game

Jeniche shook her head. ‘Not sure there’s much point in telling you.’

Tohmarz smiled. ‘If these are the same people you first mentioned four days ago… The scouts have seen no one.’

‘One person. Always the same.’

‘Really?’

It was remarkable, thought Jeniche, how Tohmarz managed to sound grateful for the information whilst completely disbelieving it. All in one word.

‘If that’s what she said, that’s what she saw.’

‘Yes, Alltud, your loyalty is commendable, but I can’t keep sending scouts out hither and yon when the only person who has seen anything is Jeniche here.’

‘I’d trust her eyes over anyone else’s.’

Jeniche watched the two men squaring up. Alltud had become very quiet over the last few days and she couldn’t decide if this was just him testing the defences, as it were, or something deeper.

‘Then we must ask her to keep watching on our behalf and if she sees anything more alarming than… a moonstruck boyfriend of one of the riders… let us know.’

He kicked lightly against the flanks of his horse and carried on downhill to the rear guard. Jeniche mounted her own steed and, once Alltud had persuaded his own to turn round, they carried on up the slope. After a few moments, Alltud twisted in his saddle, thunder clouds still in his face. He dropped an eyelid in a solemn wink and Jeniche grinned.

She knew how much he wanted to go home. He talked of little else at night when they were camped out under strange skies, each day a little further south, a little further away from that orchard behind the library of the Great College of the Derw on Pengaver, one of the isles of Ynysvron. And when he talked, she thought more and more of Makamba where she had grown from a broken child into a confident young woman.

Try as she might to keep them suppressed, other memories were inextricably entwined and dragged to the surface. The light of happy times was surrounded by shadow. The misery of growing up in Antar, escaping across the desert to Makamba with little more than her life, the death of friends, the years of wandering after the Occassans appeared. At least Alltud knew his homeland was in safe hands. Jeniche had no homeland and no idea how the one place she had put down tentative roots now fared.

She shut down her memories and scanned the horizon once more, trying to keep her mind in the here and now. It was no more comforting a place to be. They felt like they had been in the saddle for a year. The dust of the road and the desert was deeply ingrained in their flesh, their food was getting stale and running low, and they smelled of horse. They were stiff, bruised, and bored, constantly wondering what they were really doing and where they were going. But now they knew how the pickets operated at night they were beginning to think seriously of cutting loose.

When the track widened and they could ride two abreast, Jeniche made sure they were well away from the others and then said, ‘Time, I think, for us to part company with this circus. Make our way home.’

Alltud nodded, looking ahead. ‘Before we get into those higher hills and our routes get limited.’

They had climbed steadily since leaving Alboran. Several days across the gently sloping fertile coastal region, with broad river valleys and prosperous villages. Several more through this slightly cooler upland of rough pasture and little hidden valleys where the farms and villages were smaller and poorer and the goats watched them with thoughtful eyes and half smiles. Ahead, higher hills could now be seen, hazy in the distance. Steep-sided and dark, stretching as far as the eye could see to east and west.

At least their grasp of Arbiq had improved. Several of the other riders were glad of the conversation and the chance to pick up a bit of Makamban or Ketic, Alltud’s native language. It passed the time and relieved the monotony of constant travel. All attempts to find out what they were or were not guarding, however, proved fruitless. Tohmarz knew. Everyone else just did what they were told.

As the sun began to set, they found the ground levelling off. The track they were on had taken them up into a wide, shallow valley where a near-empty river meandered. It was a curious, fractured place as if dumped onto an older landscape that was patiently re-asserting itself.

The path they followed brought them out along one edge of the valley at the foot of a low, notched ridge from which streams flowed at intervals, each cutting its own smaller valley back into the soil and rock of higher ground.

The floor of the main valley was mostly smooth, but large, erratic boulders cast long shadows across the wiry grass and scrub. There wasn’t a person or sign of settlement in sight. More than once they thought of their nearly empty saddle bags as they scouted for somewhere to camp that night.

Tohmarz chose a side valley, in the end. The further they travelled, the larger the tributary vales had become, branching and winding, cutting into the higher terrain. Most of them were dry although the presence of scrub and low withered trees were evidence of water beneath the ground, of seasonal floods. The one they chose had a reasonable flow of water in the very bottom of the stream bed. In the winter it would have been a different prospect as the scatter of boulders testified.

The horses were seen to first, as always. Details were then sent off to collect fuel for fires, pickets were set, and the troop settled itself as best it could in the long, twisting stony ravine.

Jeniche sat on her heels, lost in thought. Alltud returned from collecting a loaf of unleavened bread that one of the others had baked on a griddle. He stretched out beside her, broke the loaf in two, and handed her one half.

‘Seen any more of our camp follower?’ he asked before biting into his share of the bread.

‘Camp follower my bruised backside. Whoever it is, they’re good. They’ve kept pace with us for days and, apparently, they’re invisible. Not one other member of this troop has seen them.’

‘Well, neither have I.’

‘The other sixty? The scouts that Tohmarz may or may not have sent out? No sign of the person, their trail, their camp? Nothing?’

‘Perhaps they really are a useless bunch of ne’er-do-wells hired to act as a decoy.’

‘I’ll treat that observation with the derision it deserves.’

‘So, what else? You think he knows someone else is out there and he doesn’t care?’

She rolled a small pellet of the bread between thumb and finger before flicking it at Alltud. ‘I don’t suppose it matters in the long run.’

He sat up, brushing the pellet away as Jeniche looked round. ‘Why?’

‘Tomorrow night? We can head back toward this spot and then cross to the far side of the main valley before it gets properly light.’

‘Well, as far as a plan goes… It’s a plan.’

‘Right. Well, if you’ll just make up my bed, I have an appointment with a bush. If I can find one that’s private enough.’

In the quiet, Jeniche lay on her back and watched the stars. It was well past midnight and the Milky Way lay at an angle with a long irregular line of red stars pulsing slowly down its centre. Off to the right a blue star shone steadily, surrounded by a faint magenta aura. It was mesmerising and the clarity reminded her why Makamba came first to her thoughts so often. Ynysvron was wonderful, there were distinct attractions, but it was a land of cloud and mist.

Against the background of the slow stellar dance, she picked out the planets Baspati and Angraka, just as Teague, the astronomer at Makamba University, had taught her. And then the wandering stars which moved swiftly in their paths through the dark. She had watched them through Teague’s telescope. Odd-shaped objects that rotated and tumbled, catching the light. Put there by men, Teague had said, before the Evanescence. Sometimes they lost their way, breaking apart and blazing as they fell to Earth. She wished she had learned more; wished there had been time to learn more.