Chapter Eight.

For two days, Zanja and Emil walked through unnamed lands, following a river of mud that Emil claimed was a wagontrack. Then, they turned east and traversed an uneven, rocky land until they started to pa.s.s a few desperately poor farmholds, and finally reached something resembling a cobbled road, though it was in poor repair. The road improved as they traveled, until they reached a flooded, fast-flowing river and a st.u.r.dy bridge with a bridgekeeper's cottage on the far side. Zanja paused to get her bearings. To her north lay rising land, possibly even mountains, obscured by the lowering sky. "That's Darton," Emil confirmed. So Zanja placed herself on the sprawling landscape of western Shaftal, with Darton to the north, and the region of Mear to the north of that. South Hill lay on the other side of the bridge they were about to cross. To its north lay Rees, which the Sainnites had devastated last summer. North of Rees lay Damar, where almost a year ago Zanja's horses and gear had been stolen by rogue Paladins. It seemed like a long time ago.

This southward-flowing river marked the limit of Sainnite control. Zanja said, "So the duty of South Hill Company is to prevent the Sainnites from crossing the bridge?"

"Essentially," Emil said. As they started across the bridge, cold rain again began to fall.* * *

They sheltered that night in a farmstead where Emil was welcomed like a beloved uncle, and was handed a bundle of letters and doc.u.ments that had been acc.u.mulating for him all winter. The next day, his face was creased along its squint lines like pleated cloth, but he did not reveal to Zanja the bad news that surely had awaited him in that bundle of letters. The rain that had become sleet during the night became a downpour again by dawn, and they slogged on through mud the consistency of undercooked porridge.

They walked past many tightly shuttered farmholds, and it was afternoon before they turned up a narrow, flooded wagontrack, pa.s.sing the leafless orchards and sodden fields of a large and well kept farm. Five houses and two barns cl.u.s.tered in the center of a pin-wheel of walled fields: a prosperous and ancient farmhold, with its doors and windows latched shut against the miserable weather. But suddenly a door slammed open and the dogs stood up in their shelters to bark, though even they were wise enough to stay out of the ram. A young woman came running barefoot through the muck and the downpour, only to restrain herself at the last moment as though she remembered how austere and learned was this gray-haired commander she seemed on the verge of embracing. Ankle-deep in the mud, she took his wet hand in hers. "I'm happy to see you, Emil."

"I gather it has been a dull winter."

"The winters are always dull!" she cried. Then, her gaze turned to Zanja's face, and there was a moment that seemed to last much too long before she turned back to Emil, hostile and questioning. As the rain poured down and the dogs fell silent, Emil made introductions, describing Zanja as a newcomer to South Hill Company, and Annis as a genius with explosives. Annis gave Zanja not even a nod of greeting.

"Come out of the rain," she said to Emil, and Zanja followed.

Inside the commonhouse, a roar of greeting lapsed quickly into silence, as though the people thought their old friend Emil had acquired a demonic shadow. The children rushed forward to help him with his boots and cape, but Zanja unstrapped her own boots and hung her own cape on the hook. Emil already had been drawn into the room by eager elders who wanted to hear the news. Zanja made her own way to the hearth, uninvited, where a dotty old man ensconced in a rocking chair smiled at her seraphically. Three hanging cradles, two of them occupied, swung from the rafters, and a nursing mother with an infant at her breast watched Zanja with surrept.i.tious anxiety. Zanja squatted on the hearthstones, though someone nearby offered her a chair, and after a while her wet shirt started to steam.

The room was as crowded as any Ashawala'i clan house. A family so big suggested prosperity in spite of hard times: a large and fertile farm, carefully managed and not destroyed yet by taxes. The room was filled with industry. On the big work table many projects progressed: socks being knitted, tools being repaired, writing and other necessary skills being taught, bread being kneaded and shirts being seamed.

Only the youngest and oldest were not working, and they were being watched and cared for instead.

At last, Emil, having done his guest's duty of exchanging news, said to Zanja across the room, "Are you getting warm? Perhaps some tea . . . ?" At least the elders were gracious enough to exclaim at their own rudeness once it was pointed out to them, and Emil escorted Zanja around the room, introducing her not as Zanja na'Tarwein but as Zanja Paladin. He knew everyone's name. Zanja constructed frail conversations out of the flimsy materials at hand: she admired babies and handiwork and what she had been able to see of the farm itself, and a.s.sured one stranger after another that she was delighted and honored to have wound up in South Hill. Emil said to her afterwards, "That was an impressive exhibition of good manners. You must be exhausted now."

"How many of these households do you have to visit?""Only ten or so right now. By autumn's end, though, I'll have visited them all. It's a foolish man who forgets that every loyalty is personal."

Zanja vaguely remembered having read something like that in Warfare. Though Emil frequently quoted the guidebook, and always with apparent seriousness, she already knew that while he did what he had to, it was not always without cynicism. Now, his performance was not for her, but for Annis, who had just come into the small sitting room with a tea tray.

"My parents want to know if you'll bide the night," she said.

Emil shook his head. "I want to be at Willis's house tonight, but I'm thinking I might leave Zanja here with you. If you would fetch Daye and Linde and a keg of gunpowder, we'll meet at Midway Barn in three day's time."

"She can lie in my bed," Annis said sullenly, and poured the tea. "Unless there's someone else you'd rather bed with," she added to Zanja.

"I beg your pardon, but I'm a stranger in this land and there's much I don't understand." Zanja expected she'd be saying these words, or words like them, rather frequently this season.

Emil seemed amused, and said to Annis, "The members of your family are afraid to talk to Zanja, but they'd sleep with her?"

Annis shrugged. "That's what I hear. Like you said, it's been a dull winter."

Emil shook his head. "It's not just a matter of sleeping," he explained to Zanja.

Zanja said, "My good manners have a limit."

Annis broke into a laugh and nearly spilled the tea. "Sleep with me, then," she said. "And I do mean sleep."

Zanja's first sight of South Hill Company was in a giant rebuilt barn on an abandoned farmstead with buildings fallen in on themselves and the fields long since returned to forest. She and Annis had followed a meandering course across the countryside, gathering companions and gear as they went. Among those who joined them was Linde, a middle-aged man who Annis said was heart-bonded to a man also in the company and Daye, a gray-haired grandmother, one of Emil's three lieutenants. Annis had been distant, offering grudging information only when Zanja asked for it, but Daye promptly set to teaching Zanja the lay of the land, the riverbanks and foot trails and hidey-holes where a hunted person could simply disappear.

Midway Barn was brightly illuminated by lanterns hanging from the rafters. The fifty people gathered there were uniformly pale-skinned, brown-haired, and stockily built. They seemed as featureless to Zanja as stones that lie stubbornly in a field. Her companions of the last two days having melted into the undistinguished brown, the only dye color their clothing makers seemed to know, Zanja felt herself painfully exposed and solitary. She started across the barn towards the cauldron bubbling upon a makeshift hearth, where Emil perched upon his camp stool with one leg stretched stiffly out before him.

She cut a swath of silence with her pa.s.sing, and had not taken ten steps before a stocky, muscular man confronted her, demanding to know her name and business.

"Sir, I am Zanja, newly come to this company." He looked her up and down. "You are no Paladin."

"Among my people I was a katrim, which is like a Paladin."

"What you are among your people matters not," the man declared.

"That is true," Zanja said, "since my people are all dead." She waited, cautious, wondering if the entire company would greet her with such hostility. But the others had fallen quiet, seeming content to listen while this belligerent man conducted the challenge and satisfied their curiosity.

The man turned and cried bitterly, "Emil, we are all kin in this company!"

Zanja heard Emil's quiet voice reply with supernatural mildness, "I am flattered to be counted among your kin, Willis. No doubt Zanja looks forward to the day that you accord her the same courtesy."

Zanja brought herself to say with a sincerity she hoped no one would realize was false, "Yes, sir, very much." But the belligerent man turned his back on her, ignoring the hand she offered. He squatted down among his cronies, who cl.u.s.tered around him like wolves greeting their leader. So Zanja learned, all in one moment, who her enemies were to be.

By the time the stew was ready, Daye had taken Zanja on a circuit of the barn, and told her the names and families of everyone present. She left her with Annis, while she and the other lieutenants, the belligerent man among them, conferred in a cl.u.s.ter around Emil, with their steaming porringers in their hands. "Willis is one of Emil's lieutenants?" Zanja asked.

"Willis, Perry, and Daye. The three of them started the company in the year of the fall, and we didn't get Emil until a year later. Until he showed up, Willis thought he would be the company commander forever.

He and Emil get along now, but they didn't always."

Zanja glanced at Annis, astonished because up until now Annis had scarcely spoken a complete sentence to her.

Annis said, "Willis doesn't like outsiders. But we aren't all like him."

"Of course you're not," Zanja replied, thinking that it was possible Willis's hostility might do her more good than harm, in the end.

Annis took her over to the stewpot to fill her porringer, and then they joined a circle that had formed to share a bread loaf and b.u.t.ter pot. Zanja exercised the good manners Emil had so ironically admired some days ago, and the people she ate with gradually began to gain some definition. They noticed and discussed her battle scars, and they told her how Paladins fought primarily by ambush, avoiding confrontations that put the more numerous and heavily armed Sainnites at an advantage. She admitted she would have to learn to use the distance weapons, the pistol and the crossbow.

The increasing sobriety of the lieutenants' conference muted the surrounding conversations after a while, and when Emil finally stood up from his camp stool, the company, already watchful, immediately fell silent to hear his words.

"It's spring again," Emil said. "And amazing though it seems even to me, this is my fifteenth year commanding South Hill Company. When I first arrived, I said to you that I was astounded and humbled to find myself in command, and fifteen years later, that at least has not changed. We've learned somehard lessons together in the meantime, and this year, I'm afraid, we have some even harder lessons to learn.

"Last summer," he continued, "While we succeeded in a.s.sa.s.sinating the commander of Wilton garrison, our neighbors in Rees were decimated by an a.s.sault the like of which no company in Shaftal has ever seen. By summer's end, forty Paladins had been killed, their families' farmholds razed, and at least a thousand people left with neither food nor shelter to see them through the winter. By summer's end, in fact, Damar Company and South Hill Company were fighting the battles in Rees, for no one in Rees could continue to fight.

"Now, I have learned that the commander of Rees garrison has been rea.s.signed to South Hill, and moved to Wilton garrison at the first thaw, along with most of the soldiers from her command in Rees.

The number of Sainnites in South Hill has nearly doubled to some two hundred soldiers. There seems little doubt that South Hill is to be their next target."

He paused. The jovial people crowded into the barn sat silent, stunned.

"I have had a few days to think about this," Emil said, "but I am sure that all of you have been thinking, all summer and winter, about what happened in Rees and about what you would do if it were your family against whom the Sainnites took retribution. It is our families that make us strong, by sheltering and feeding us, but they also make us vulnerable. My first thought is that we must find ways to prevent the Sainnites from knowing who we are, so that they cannot identify our families, either. My second is that, once the spring mud is over, you all must not visit your families again until autumn. We will find some other way to get food to eat and we'll take shelter in the woods."

He continued, "I have a little more to say, and then I'd like to hear what you are thinking. The mystery of Rees is this: the Paladins there followed the strategies that have worked for all of us for fifteen years, but in Rees they did not work. The company could not avoid the confrontations they knew they could not win. The company could not take the Sainnites by surprise. The company could not successfully hide from the enemy. So we need new strategies, and we need to use the old ones cautiously, without expecting that they will succeed. Above all, we need to be prepared, to expect that this year will not be like every other year."

As quietly as he had begun, Emil ended his address, and sat down to hear the debate that followed. He did not speak again, except when he was directly asked for more information, questions he often could not answer.

The discussion lasted late, and then broke up into smaller de' bates, some of which continued even after Zanja lay asleep with Annis curled companionably against her back. In dreams, she heard people argue about the logistics of food and shelter, about battle tactics, ambushes, and bolt-holes. In dreams she returned to Rees, but this time it was she who hid in the woods, demoralized and terrified. Towards dawn, she began to dream about the ma.s.sacre of her own people, and in her dreams she thought it was possible to prevent it this time, if only she could find a spare moment to read the book someone had handed her: not Mabin's Warfare, but a different book, with different rules.

She awoke thinking that there had been a mistake, that this was not her life at all. But, unfortunately, it was.

Chapter Nine

Annis began Zanja's education in a covert lead mine, where Zanja learned to recognize and extract lead ore, and practiced smelting it, and eventually poured her own pistol b.a.l.l.s. The gunpowder lesson proceeded in much the same way. Not until Zanja had filled her cartridge pouch with rounds of ammunition made by her own hands from ingredients she herself had found did she finally learn to load and shoot her pistols.

With the rains over, the company was to gather in the woods, in a place they felt confident no one could find for the first time without a guide. Even Annis could scarcely find it, for the place was undistinguished and what landmarks existed were practically as hard to find as the place itself. At last, with the sun setting, they arrived at a natural rocky clearing surrounded by thick forest, just in time to fill their porringers with pieces of roasted chicken and lumps of hard black bread. Living in the rough hills, Zanja and Annis had eaten little more than ground corn, so this meal looked like a feast.

She looked up from the feast to find Emil behind her, with a basket over his arm. She had been reciting people's names to herself while pretending to be interested in their eager discussion of the lives and loves of people she had never met.

"Can I help you with that basket?" she asked.

"It gets lighter all the time." He handed out pieces of apple cake to her companions, then sat beside her on a convenient stone. "I promised Daye I'd give you the bad news myself. The company will divide into three units, to give the enemy smaller and faster moving targets, and you're to be under Daye's command, at her request."

"That is not bad news," she said.

"You will be responsible for collecting bread from the farmholds, and distributing it to the company."

"I see. Well, sir, I'll do my best."

"The next time you call me 'sir,' I'll demote you."

"But how would it be possible to demote me further?"

"Zanja, it was a joke."

After he left, someone said kindly, "Bread is important."

"It is a child's job," she retorted. No one contradicted her.

"At least your face will become familiar across South Hill."

Zanja suspected that the commanders had another advantage in mind: They wished to obscure the links between the company and the farmholds, but without bread they could not survive long. So they gave the duty of collecting food from the farmholds to a stranger, who had no relatives to be executed in retaliation, and who could legitimately pretend to have never heard of South Hill Company. It was a sensible decision.

Still, Zanja went to bed angry, and woke up angry in the middle of the night, with a dull headache and afull bladder, and a vague sense of dread that seemed related to the dreams she could not remember. She crept past her sleeping companions and went a little way into the woods. She had re-b.u.t.toned her breeches and stood wondering why she wasn't going back to bed, when a voice spoke in the leafless branches overhead. "Zanja na'Tarwein."

A dark shape flapped against the stars, leading her further away from the clearing. She followed, with her heart in her throat. The night gave a sigh, as a brief breeze lifted and then fell still. The raven dropped out of the branches and stalked at her feet like a restless rag of night sky.

Zanja sank into a squat. "What are you doing here?"

The raven said, "You were more courteous when you thought I was a ghost."

"But now I know you are just a messenger, and that your messages are not supposed to be for me."

"Ha!" the raven cawed. "Norina thinks I serve at Karis's will, but you should know better."

"Should I? What do you serve, then, if not her will?"

"I serve her secret heart."

The raven G.o.d of the Ashawala'i was an amoral trickster, so Zanja found herself unable to believe entirely in this raven's honesty. She said, "Well, perhaps you can ignore Karis's promises, but I have to honor promises of my own. I am certain Norina would forbid me to talk with you." She rose to her feet to leave, though she was not certain she could walk away.

The raven said, "This evening, as the sun set, I saw a thing that might surprise you."

Zanja often had wished she could see from above, like a bird. She said politely, "What did you see, good raven?"

"I saw Samnite soldiers creeping through the woods."

Zanja's vague dread sharpened. "Are they creeping towards this encampment?"

"Oh, yes. They approach you from the west, spread out, to catch you in a net of soldiers as you try to flee."

"Then should we flee due east?"

"Northeast," the raven said. "The forest is not so thick there, and the land grows steep and rocky. It seems a good place to defend yourselves."

"Do you know if they outnumber us?" Zanja wondered, then, if the raven could even count. She could scarcely believe she was discussing battle tactics with a bird, and had to keep reminding herself that the raven shared Karis's intelligence.

"They are greater than your company, but not by much." She heard the dry sound of the raven running a wing feather through his beak. "Zanja na'Tarwein," he added, and she could have sworn it was the G.o.d that spoke to her, "you can be drearily punctilious."

He spread his wings, and, only mildly offended, she said hastily, "Well, tonight I appreciate your lack of punctiliousness. I'll try to leave some food for you in the camp."She found Emil with no little difficulty, finally locating him by his gear: the box that contained his tea set, and the camp stool that was never out of reach. He awakened at her touch. "Zanja?"

"I think we are in danger."

He sat up, and seemed to consider, or perhaps to consult his own talent for prescience. "Yes, we are indeed in danger." He reached for his boots. "It is the Sainnites, of course. I wonder how they found us."

"That I don't know. But I think they are to the west, spread out in the woods."

"Yes," he confirmed, in some surprise. "There's a place to the north and east where we might stage an ambush. What do you think?"

"Why not?"

She gave him a hand up, and he grunted as he put his weight on his bad leg. He held her hand for a moment longer than necessary. "Two fire bloods," he said thoughtfully. "This is an advantage I had not considered."

"I'll pack your gear for you," she said. "I know how you like it arranged."

What followed was the most swift, silent, and orderly retreat Zanja had ever seen. She had scarcely managed to buckle her belt and sling her knapsack on her shoulders when the company began moving into the woods. She delayed a moment to put a chicken carca.s.s and a handful of cracked corn atop a flat rock for the raven. By then, Daye had sent someone back for her, a laconic veteran who moved through the woods as a snake glides through gra.s.s. The abandoned clearing lay empty behind them, with only the warm ashes of the campfires to tell the story of how recently it had been occupied.

An occasional mimicked bird call, far ahead, gave the scattered company members a direction to follow.