A few months with the Sossag had shown Peter they were as complex as any other people. For example, at home, his people had trained for war – a small caste of warriors within each tribe had trained hard. Among the Sossag, almost all men and no few women were warriors, and they never trained. Or rather, every other act was also training. Sossag warriors ran everywhere. There was never a time they walked, except to cross the village. Every hunt was training for war, and every war was practice for the hunt. Hunting in the Wild was war of a sort.
And so was gathering honey.
The first night, because he was fresh, Peter made a little oven from a bank of good clay and baked cornbread. Other men found rabbits and squirrels, and they were well fed, and no one needed a handful of pemmican. A young man – a distant cousin of his wife’s called Ayen-ta-naga – leaned over and grinned at him.
‘Men say your bread is worth coming to eat,’ he said. ‘By Tara’s bum, it is good to call you cousin.’ He laughed.
Other men nodded. In the early days no one had ever thanked him for his cooking, but now that he was fully Sossag, it seemed to be an odd, but real, fame. Nita Qwan, the life maker, was a cook. A damn good cook.
The second day it rained and he was wet, and cold. He didn’t relish sleeping in a pile of other men, but he did, and he was getting better at it – he got more sleep than he’d expected, and he rose to a drizzle that hadn’t quite extinguished the small fire that had warmed last night’s meat. He and his wife’s cousin built it big enough for the men to enjoy a little warmth. They made tea, drank it, pissed on the fire, and Ota Qwan told a sullen youngster named Gas-a-ho to carry the pot, which he did with an ill grace.
Peter stopped by the young man. ‘Wash it and put it into your honey pail,’ he said. ‘Much easier.’
The young man narrowed his lips, looked at Peter, and shrugged. ‘Fine,’ he said.
Later, when he was running beside the former slave, he said, ‘You were right. It’s easy. Tomorrow I’ll just offer to carry it.’
Peter knew he was supposed to grunt with amusement, but he nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘You know, the more work you do, the less crap they’ll give you.’
Gas-a-ho ran on in silence.
They ran all day. Peter was bone tired by the end, but proud, too – when he’d first joined the people these all-day runs had nearly killed him. Now, he understood their necessity.
He still hated to run.
That night it rained so hard that there was no point in making a fire. But Ota Qwan sent two of their older men up the ridge on their left – the north – and they found a cave. Really, it was more of an overhang than a cave, and the inhabitants – a troop of coyotes – had to be driven out. They gathered wood while their muscles cooled and the shaman’s son lit it with a flick of his hand. They ate pemmican; Peter – the cook – loved pemmican. Other men groaned and complained.
In the morning they ran west again. The weather cleared so that there was a lowering mist in the streambeds, low cloud rolled over their heads, but it didn’t actually rain. Peter got a deer through nothing but luck, standing with his back to a tree, pissing down a hill, he saw a doe break cover. He had all the time in the world to finish his business, string his bow, put an arrow to it and watch her stop innocently almost at his feet in a little gully. He watched her sniffing the air – spooked by his urine, no doubt – and he put an arrow neatly between her shoulder blades. She fell dead without a single bound, and the other warriors pounded his back and praised him.
They spent a day there, made shelters, and ate the deer and another that Gas-a-ho brought down. They dried some surplus meat and rose on the sixth day to run again. They had a dry trail and no rain so they ran further than any day before, yet stopped earlier, made a fire, and cooked a sort of stew of half-dried meat and pemmican and raspberries picked from bushes around the campsite.
At darkness, Ota Qwan tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Guard,’ he said. He went from man to man, naming night guards – an hour of lost sleep.
But they were deep in the Wild, and Nita Qwan knew Ota Qwan was right. He stared into the darkness for an hour – it was an easy watch. Towards the end Ota Qwan came to him with a lit pipe, and they shared it, passing the stone and antler pipe back and forth.
They sat in complete silence for long enough that Peter could see the passage of the stars overhead. He sighed.
Ota Qwan did the same. ‘Smell it?’ he asked suddenly.
Nita Qwan had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Smell what?’ he asked.
‘Honey,’ Ota Qwan said. ‘Sweet.’
Peter realised he’d thought it was a lingering taste of sweet tobacco. ‘Ah,’ he said.
‘Quick strike and we turn for home,’ Ota Qwan said. ‘There’s something out here with us. Probably boglins after the honey, too.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s plenty for everyone.’ His body rocked as he chuckled. Peter could feel him.
‘Better hope so, anyway,’ he said.
North and West of Lissen Carrak – Thorn
Thorn sat at the base of an immense maple tree, perhaps four or five centuries old, its branches a natural tent, its trunk home to myriad creatures great and small. A burl the size of a man projected from the trunk to make a rainproof shelter, even for a frame as large as Thorn’s.
Thorn didn’t mind rain, or snow, or sun. But the tree was beautiful, and full of power of its own, and the burl and the shelf seemed to have been made just for Thorn.
He was north of the lakes – two hundred leagues and more from Lissen Carrak. The Dark Sun could not track him here. Not that he heeded the Dark Sun.
That was all behind him.
Instead, Thorn sat in the rain, smelling the air. He had felt Ghause Muriens’ sending, and he let it wash over him. She was far away, and her sending did nothing but remind him how much he disliked her and her easy carnality and her foolish passions. She had positioned herself at court as Sophia’s enemy long ago, and even though the world had changed since then, still he found her easy to despise.
Sophia is dead.
Thorn shuddered.
Nonetheless, he disliked Ghause Muriens. Almost as much as he disliked moths. And butterflies. He flicked a stick-like hand to drive a large moth off his stony hide.
He disliked moths, he had since boyhood, but just now he disliked everything. Since his escape from the field of Lissen Carrak, Thorn had questioned everything – his allegiance to the Wild, the theory that supported his relationship to other creatures – even the soundness of his own mind.
He had been a fool to attempt command of an army. That way lay nothing but emptiness – it was an empty power. He wanted something more – something palpable only in the aether.
He wanted apotheosis. And no amount of temporal posturing would take him closer to his goal. He needed time to study, time to recover, time to evaluate. The world had proved far more complex than he had imagined – again.
If Thorn could have smiled, he would have. He rose, his immense legs creaking like trees in the wind, and put an armoured hand on the trunk of the ancient maple.
‘I will go into the far west, and learn a thing or two,’ he said aloud. His voice sounded harsh.
I have made myself a mockery of what I ought to be, he thought. But then the thought I shall retain this shape to remind myself of what I allowed to happen.
If he was having a conversation with the tree, it wasn’t answering. Thorn turned to walk west, and in that moment lightning struck.
The lightning struck all around him, a moment of awesome power. The great maple was destroyed, its heartwood reduced to steaming splinters, its great trunk split as if by a behemoth’s axe.
Thorn – whose body was bigger than a giant Ruk or a mighty troll – was struck to earth and pinned under the tree’s ancient branches. And still the air around him was like a thick porridge of sheer power.
If Thorn could have screamed, he would have.
Thorn felt he had been invaded. But not destroyed. There
was something in his head that he couldn’t fathom – in his web of tree roots and spiderwebs, where he cast his workings and remembered the hundreds of options he had to his potentia, he now had a black space, like rot in the sapwood of a healthy tree.
Nothing could track him here.
And yet something so powerful that Thorn couldn’t describe it had appeared, pinned him to the ground, invaded him, and vanished.
Just to the left, through the mountain of destroyed foliage, he could see an object sitting on leaves and branches as if the ruined tree was a massive nest.
It was a black egg, the size of a man’s head. But not a true egg, as it was covered in scales, with curious caps on either end – like armour.
An armoured egg.
It radiated power in the aether.
It radiated heat in the real.
Thorn put up shield after shield – glowing hemispheres of forest green, layered like a lady’s petticoats. Then he tuned, or created, phantasmic instruments to magnify, to probe, to explore. And as he did he used his powers and his massive strength to raise the corpse of the great tree off his body.
The egg – it was too obviously an egg to call it anything else – resisted his investigation.
Thorn had no immediate plans. He was, he suspected, in some sort of shock. He sat in the shelter of the burl, and watched and prodded the egg, and the edges of the raw blackness within himself.
He felt violated.
What was that entity? And what does it want?
An hour passed and it did not return. The armoured egg sat, generating heat, and Thorn was gradually filled with power – filled with purpose. For the first time since his defeat on the fells of Lissen Carrak, he knew what he wanted.
North of the Wall – Giannis Turkos
Giannis Turkos sat watching his Huran wife make him moccasins. He wasn’t really looking at her; instead he was thinking of the council at which he would speak.
She raised her eyes. ‘It is nothing,’ she said. ‘They will listen to you.’
He shook his head. ‘It is more complicated than—’ He paused. Two years among the Outwallers had killed his deep-seated belief that they were children to receive lessons, but some deep-seated prejudices remained. One was that he hated sharing his plans. And the Outwallers were not men of the Empire, nor yet even Albans. They were fickle, even whimsical, in a way that no civilised man would ever allow.
But he loved his wife. And he loved her people. Even when they were bent on a war he believed was pointless and destructive.
‘There’s tea,’ she said, sounding oddly childlike with her mouth full of sinew.
Turkos shrugged. He was too worried to drink tea. He stood, went out of their cabin, and found that many of his political opponents in the village were sitting on the front step of the cabin across the small area of packed earth that Turkos thought of as the Plataea. Big Pine waved.
Big Pine was his inveterate enemy at council. Despite that, they had hunted together last fall, killing many deer together and gathering many beaver pelts. Life among Outwallers was a curious mixture of adversarial and cooperative.
So Turkos waved back, and smiled. But being outdoors didn’t offer him sanctuary from his wife’s sharp eyes and sharper tongue – or rather, it only offered sanctuary at the cost of the elusive interrogation of two hundred and fifty other Huran adults. He slipped back through the moose-hide curtain and took the copper teapot off the fire. He poured them both tea in fine, Morean-made cups, and handed one to his wife, who looked at him with a mixture of amusement and gratitude common to wives in every culture when men do exactly what women expect them to. She spat her sinew into her hand, laid it aside, and drank her tea. He put Wild honey in his.
She shook her head. ‘You are like a child,’ she said fondly.
He sat back on his chair, which he’d built with his own hands, as no Outwaller would use such a thing, with a small lamp full of olive oil at his side, and read through the scroll that had come a month ago. Again.
The Logothete of the Drum to his servants in the woodlands and wastes, greeting.
It has come to our ears, and sounded softly on our drum, that the Emperor’s enemies are attempting to use the Outwallers as a weapon against the Empire. The drum whispers of a heavy Outwaller incursion into Alba in the spring; reliable whispers state that the culprits were Sossag and Abonaki. Any conflict between the Huran and the Sossag could spill into Thrake. Such an incursion into Thrake would have the most deleterious of effects on the economy of the Empire, and with God’s will and the Emperor’s beneficence, we hope to avert such calamity. Let all the Logothete’s servants take note and act accordingly. Further, elements within the palace have become less enthusiastic about the Emperor’s policies about land and the Outwallers than before. The Logothete’s servants are required to test every assertion of this office commencing with this message for authenticity.
The message was written in a magicked ink on vellum; it was also coded using a letter-number code that was itself changed every six months, and that code translated into a form of High Archaic little used elsewhere in the world. The message had been carried by one of the Emperor’s messengers; a powerful bird bred for the purpose. Yet under all these layers of protection, the Logothete – the Emperor’s spymaster – had written a message that conveyed very little information and a strong hint of internal betrayal.
Turkos read it again. He’d deciphered it six times, each time looking for a new key or a chance phrase that might lead him to see a different meaning. He’d tried it with last year’s key. He’d tried it with a training key he’d been taught at the University.
It said what it said.
Which was very little.
‘Speak from your heart,’ his wife said. ‘Not from the skin of a dead animal.’
Kailin was small, her slim body hard with muscle and with a strong face, not exactly pretty by Morean standards, a little broad, perhaps, but full of character – happy with laughter, fierce with frowns. He loved her face. It had the slightly slanted eyes and sharp cheekbones that reminded him that some of the Outwallers were not, in fact, escaped peasants – many were a race apart from his own.
She leaned forward, and kissed him.
‘Sinew breath,’ he said, and they both laughed.
He rolled up his parchment and slipped it back into the light bone message tube in which it had come. Then he kissed her again, running a hand down her side, but she swatted him away. ‘Get dressed,’ she said. ‘I’ll have these done by the time you’ve got all your finery on.’
He rose and went to their bed, where they had both laid out his speaking clothes – a carefully chosen mixture of Morean court attire and Huran finery. He had a kaftan of deerskin, cut in the Morean manner but edged in porcupine quill work; instead of hose he wore Huran leggings, with Etruscan beads on every seam. He wore a Morean shirt and braes. As he finished getting the leggings on and tied to his Morean soldier’s belt – some things he couldn’t give up – his wife bent and offered him the new moccasins.
They were magnificent – the flaps were stiff with purple-and-red-dyed porcupine quill and edged in carefully applied purple wampum.
Purple was one of the Outwaller’s favourite colours, but it made Turkos nervous. In the Empire it was a crime to wear purple without the Emperor’s express permission.
Which did not prevent him from admiring his wife’s work. ‘You make me look like a king!’ he said.
‘The Huran spit at kings,’ she said. ‘You look like a hero. Which you are. Go speak your piece.’ She helped him put his heavy cinqueda onto his military belt.
She pulled his cloak – which she had also made – from their sleeping pile. It was made of hundreds of black squirrel pelts stitched together invisibly and lined with bright red wool. She draped it around his shoulders and pinned it with the two pins of his Morean military rank: Stheno’s immortal gorgon’s head on his right shoulder in silver; Euryale’s head on his left shoulder in gold.
Then she handed him his axe – a light steel head with a smoking pipe cunningly worked into the back. He had learned to rest it in the crook of his arm with affected nonchalance for the duration of council meetings, even when they lasted for many hours.
She stretched on her tiptoes and kissed him again. ‘When you speak for the Emperor,’ she said, ‘remember that you are also my husband, and a Huran warrior. Remember that no man at the council is your foe – that all of you strive together for the good of the people.’
He smiled at her. ‘Sometimes, I think you are my mother, and I am a small boy.’
She grinned. Took his hand, and felt that it was trembling.
‘Oh, my dear! My strength!’ She pressed his hand to her left breast.
That took his mind off his worries. He smiled. His fingers moved, almost of their own volition.
‘I shouldn’t tell you this, but the matrons have already decided to do as you ask,’ she said. ‘No one wanted war with the Sossag except the Northerners.’ She sighed. ‘Now out!’ she said. ‘Your hand is making promises that the rest of you will not be here to keep!’
He tried to stoop through the deerskin curtain with all the dignity of two years practice and another twenty years at the courts of Morea.
In the street, dressed equally magnificently, was Big Pine. The man was a head taller than Turkos. They nodded to one and other and, as fate had sent them through their cabin doors together, they were forced to walk through the village together.
‘Everyone thinks we’ve come to an agreement,’ Turkos said. They could hear the whispers from every front step.
‘Perhaps we should,’ said the tall warrior. ‘We have a hundred paces. Tell me why we should raid the Northerners and not the Sossag? The Northerners have already struck the Sossag and taken prisoners. And burned villages. They will strike back at us.’