28 - An anaraseye's ransom

I spent what was left of the day memorizing what I had drawn. The sun fell behind the mountains, we ate, and the night turned dark as black wool, with a new moon and patchy clouds which thickened to solid. When Kesariga ordered us to bed, it was so dark one could barely see one’s hand in front of one’s face, away from torches; perfect.

He took the first sentry-duty, with Ramiha. I started gearing up for darkwork, putting on my soft black leathern shoes, my black sweater and trousers, and arming myself with my two daggers and my shortsword. “Curse it,” Krero said. “I knew this would happen, the moment anyone put me in any rank over you. You know I’m supposed to not let anyone leave, Fourth Chevenga.”

“So you didn’t see me,” I answered. “You were asleep, it was hardly your fault.”

“So I was,” he said after a moment. “As a matter of fact, we all were. Weren’t we?”

“Where are you going, Cheng?” That was Mana.

“Into the Lakan camp, to kill Inkrajen.” Sometimes the best lie is truth so preposterous no one will believe it.

“Ah, I see.” His voice was sage. “Well, be sure it’s his safe time of the month.” They all began snoring loudly, and Krero buried his head under the covers.

I put two small torches and a tinder-box in my backpack, darkened my face and hands with soot-blackened grease and slicked my hair back straight with oil. Outside, I was seen but not noticed, assumed to be on some errand. At the edges of our camp, I saw the torch-hooks of the sentries, held dead still; the moment one moves, a check is made. As I crept in the grass through the first line, I found myself sweating. It occurred to me they would almost certainly strike before they challenged, seeing a dark figure crawling along the ground. Far worse than being killed by Lakans: for one thing, no one would ever know why the Ascendant had been stealing out of the Yeoli camp in the dark of night. But I can shout before he strikes, I thought; then it will be merely an extreme embarrassment. I could have just told them I had clearance, but of course they’d check, because of my age. Always my age. I prefer sneaking to lying anyway.

I took the mountain-girl’s goat-track, slipped around two Lakan guards where a stream crossed it—they had a signal fire the camp could see, ready to light—by foot-groping over fallen trees and rocks. Now I was in their territory. I had been taught not to think of that as a wall, but as a sieve. This was still Yeola-e, in scent and feel and spirit; the land would be kinder to me than to them.

I came to the streamside path going down, a faint ribbon of slate black against velvet black. A thought came to me: should I stumble into someone in the camp and hope to be mistaken for a Lakan, I should smell like one, and they wear scent. Coming to a meadow I felt for flowers, smeared a few on me. Through branches of feathery black, the lights of the Lakan camp came into sight below. There were two more sentries where the path joined the cleared land; I cut around them, and hopped a stone fence into a pasture. This had not been burned off, but the crops beyond had. I smelled lingering smoke, and ash raised by my own footsteps.

It was now I began to wonder whether I was in my right mind. I only got to the front this morning, I thought, and here I am a stone’s throw from fourteen thousand enemy soldiers plus who-knew-how-many other Lakans, planning to be in their midst. What in the bounds of all that exists induced me to do this? Sweat broke out cold on me again, I started shaking all over, and tasted the taste that precedes vomiting. Krero’s assertion, “Chevenga knows no fear,” seemed a bitter joke now. I could still go back, and nothing lost, as I had determined to if it appeared too dangerous; I crouched in the corner of two stone fences to reconsider, and almost chose that.

But, seizing hold of myself, I saw I was thinking the wrong thoughts for a warrior, fear pretending to be sense. Nothing has happened that should make me change my plan, I reminded myself; the night is just as dark, no alarm has been sounded, and as far as I know I haven’t mislaid any of my skills along the path. I took the deep slow breaths Azaila had taught me, down into my centre, from which fear and strength both come. The vomit-taste faded, and I saw truth; the terror was just a child’s feeling, not reality. When my head was clear again, I went on.

They had knocked down all the near fences to get rid of hiding places, but had built no palisade, intending to attack us soon, win, and camp in Shairao, in Inkrajen’s confident style. We’ll see how that goes after tonight. The sentries had no lights, and did indeed call each other, in sequence around the ring; I’d be given away soon if I knifed one even silently. The signal word I practiced a few times in a whisper. But to go between them I must creep across scorched ground, every movement raising ash-dust, and they were nowhere more than fifteen paces apart. They might not see or hear me; but if they had a lick of sense they’d smell the dust I raised.

Well, so much for that, reasoned one part of my mind, time to go back to bed. Then I thought of the stream: dark, trickling loudly, containing no twigs to snap or dust to raise, the channel it cut in the earth just deep and wide enough to hide someone small and slender. I knew where it ran from my map; doubling back, I hitched my pack high, set my teeth against the cold and lion-crawled in.

Careful not to slip on the slime-covered rocks, I worked my way past the first line of sentries, passing almost within spear’s reach of one; I heard him clear his throat. The second line did not call, being the secret sentries; the first I knew of them was their spear-heads. Just as I was past them I sensed a moving spear, being carried right towards me.

I can’t have been seen, I told myself, freezing; they’d all be calling and running. More likely he was changing with another. He moved at a walk, meaning to cross the stream. If he uses his spear to vault over, I thought, I keep my silence or I’m done; I wonder where on me he’ll plant it. Or if he hears my teeth chattering; I clenched them tight. If a man pisses on you, how do you make the sound it should make in a stream? His footsteps drummed the earth beside my ear; I closed my eyes and turned my head down lest the whites or some spot I’d missed on my face with the soot show white. He leaped right over my back.

I crawled on, aching to the bones, now, with the cold, until I was among the tents; there I lifted myself out, careful not to let the dripping from my clothes make noise. It seemed ten years since I’d left our camp.

The Lakan camp smelled more of horses, and spicy food. There was quiet but for snoring. I foot-groped; in our camp I had known by heart where the guy-ropes were, from having pitched such tents; here every one was different, and closer together than ours, so that I almost did trip over them a few times.

Inkrajen’s quarters loomed against the sky. It had two levels, the ground level a cross, each arm wide and high as a small house, the upper level square-built with a turret-roof, glowing faintly with a light from within which I could see by the softness of the shadows shining through two walls of cloth. Along its corners were the silhouettes of what seemed to be pillars until I saw they were giant tassels. On the ground, one guard stood at each of the eight points of the cross.

I got down again and aimed for a crook of the cross twenty paces of open ground away, telling myself not to be afraid lest they smell my fear. It took me the time it takes to walk from Vae Arahi to Terera, my muscles screaming all the way to leap up and run; I dared not even open my eyes when the wind was not making some sound, nor when the guards were looking my way.

Then, sheltered in the shadows of the corner, I gained bitter intelligence by my gift. Two armed people stood awake in the upper chamber. I understood. He slept not only with light in his room, but two bodyguards.

My heart sank as if it would fall out of me. I should have known before I came it would be impossible, I thought; why would Inkrajen be any more of a fool at night than day? What commander makes an attack on such slight reconnaissance as a glance from a cliff? Having come all that deadly way to no purpose, it almost seemed too much trouble to creep all the way back, having failed. I remembered a story my mother had once told me, from the Enchian wars: in the morning they’d found a young Enchian assassin sitting stone-still in a hiding place in the middle of the Yeoli camp, who gave himself up without resistance, confessing everything in tears. Now I understood why.

But, I knew, I was thinking with emotion rather than thought again. I imagined my friends waking up to find me gone, the faces of my parents as they heard the news, Hurai, cursing my idiocy while he and a smug Inkrajen haggled over the ransom price of one anaraseye, slightly used. It was back, or onward, all, or nothing.

Seizing myself, I thought, I have time before dawn. The two guards are human; sooner or later one of them must visit the latrine.

I cut a slit along the edge between floor and wall of the ground story of the great tent, and crawled through it into darkness like a wall of coal before one’s eyes, that makes them scream for light and in desperation see non-existent dancing shapes. I lay still, just to listen; how many could be sleeping in such a huge tent I could not know, though the Lakan habit of sleeping with a dagger under the pillow helped. The air was thick with scent. I felt canvas floor, a quilt, a hard shape beneath it; that stirred, with a man’s low grunt, turning me to ice. I think it was his knee.

Groping my way around them towards the center I found a canvas wall, with a door-flap edged with small tassels, which I opened just enough to fit through. It followed that in a tent big as a building there should be corridors; sure enough, I was in one now, which formed a square around the central chamber. At one corner of the square was the one doorway to the outside, from which a ladder of painted wood led upward; but knowing that a Lakan on guard holds his spear in his right hand and wears his sword on his left hip, I could tell the two guards above both faced it.

Somewhere there had to be tent-poles. Feeling at the corners of the central room I found through the satin the hardness of wood. The upper chamber was supported on four posts at each corner. Delicately I cut my way in; here there was enough light leaking through chinks in the floor of the upper chamber to see shapes and light-catching things. Before me lay a wooden cage, centered in the room; in it on satin bedding slept a Lakan boy who by the line of his shoulder was about my age, wearing a golden arm-ring a finger-width thick. Some favored slave, I guessed, and had no more thought for him but that he must not wake. He could not attack me, nor I him, other than by throwing blades through the bars, but he could call the alarm.

I climbed halfway up the pole and felt around its top. This wall was attached to the edge of the platform planks with knotted ropes, and the canvas ceiling of the corridor likewise joined. I felt the outer wall of cloth; it had two layers, canvas and netting, fixed at the base only by silken cords tied in bows. Around the sleeping chamber was a promenade, to be opened in fine weather. No doubt he ran battles from it.

The boy tossed; around his neck he wore a collar that was either counterfeit or worth an anaraseye’s ransom. I untied knots, quickly. On the balcony, it struck me, my silhouette might be visible from outside. Not that the guards would think to look up here; that would require admitting to themselves that an intruder had crossed the ground in front of their eyes, a lapse warranting death. Still, I kept flat on the planks. Inside someone shifted his weight, making the floor creak. So often in life one finds oneself blessing the same thing one has cursed some other time; now I was thankful I was young, and light.

I lion-crawled to behind the shadow of what I guessed was a tall and grand headboard—the bed centered between the two guards—and turned my dagger over to use its unused edge. A blade must be sharp, to cut through silk both fast and quietly. I knelt, careful not to creak the floor, and waited.

Time passed, and my senses went sharper still. I counted how many times they shifted, how many times they raised water-cups, swallowed, then quietly put them down, blessing each draught; what goes in must come out. A breeze flopped the canvas and the flags, creaked the ropes; then it stilled, letting the calls of the guards sound clear from all around, even the distant ones. Somewhere a baby bawled; satin swished, a different sound than canvas. Time passed. Cold found me again, tonguing me through my mail-shirt from my sodden sweater; I drove calm and warmth outward into my skin by will. Time passed, and my legs and ankles went stiff; fearing they would lock too tightly to move when the moment came, I gingerly shifted.

Time passed; I counted my breaths, had to shift again. Time passed, and I ran through my multiplication tables, poetry I’d memorized, lines from the statutes of Yeola-e, obscene songs. Time passed and I loosed all my blades in their scabbards and told myself fairy tales. Time passed and I felt I had to piss myself, but told myself firmly that I had drunk nothing so it was not truly necessary. Time passed and I got thirstier and wondered if these men had bladders of steel and how far off dawn was; might I have to sneak all the way back out without an attempt, and try it again tomorrow night?

Time passed, and I imagined myself sitting here all night and through into the day, so silent no one would find me, and indeed all through the war; when they dismantled the tent they’d just roll me up with the poles, and when it was pitched anew I would be sitting here still all through every night of the war, waiting for one of Inkrajen’s guards to piss.