The Returning (14 page)

“But whose?”

“Ryuu,” said Bailey Nelsan. “Who did you think?”

Cam went red. He felt the heat scorching his throat and face, the back of his neck, then felt it go, leaving him cold. The war could have been halted, Brae alive, if he had loosed that arrow.

Layne traced out the pattern again. “You did see it where?”

Cam lifted one shoulder. “I—I do not know. I do just remember it.”

He still had Brae's bow. “Do you keep it,” Oda had said. “He'd want you to.” Cam would not let himself even think it, that Brae would not want him to, not if he had known that Cam let the Uplander Lord's son get away.

Oda Farmer died not long after his brother. Took some fever from the marsh maybe, who knew; was two days dying, and that was his war. They laid him out, hat over his face, the only burial he would get.

“We say he died brave and fighting,” said Bailey.

It made no sense to Cam. “For why?” If they died of fever, why was there shame in that?

It was a day or so later that Cam killed his first Uplander, on the gray and rocky bank of the Ald.

 

THE WAR WENT on and on and on. The two great armies did not meet again in numbers until the Battle for Dorn-Lannet, but dodged and jinked about each other. Cam's war was ambush and sniping, a war of nerves and secret, stalking slaughter, moving back and forth over the same territory, but slowly, slowly, Cam's own side always losing ground.

Years later—Cam did not know how many—he lay in the dark, belly to the ground, thorns pricking and picking at skin and clothes, watching the Uplander in gold-crested, red armor make a circuit of his men.

Cam thought of Kayforl. Kayforl, but it was not Da or Mam, nor the twins or his little sister that he thought about—it was Graceful Fenister who drifted into his thoughts, in her fine, unmuddied linen, cloistered and cosseted, her war a faraway fear and no more than a thing to be talked of over her head. He found comfort in it, with no clear idea why.

The Uplander Lord's son, Lord Gyaar, went afoot among his men, crouching at this fire to talk a moment, laughing with that soldier the next, standing with the guard a moment in silence, eyes seeming to see more than just the darkness. “Well fought,” he said. “How is that sword cut healing? See the quartermaster for more rice.”

This second chance to kill Lord Ryuu's son Cam also let pass.
Traitor.
The word beat in his head as he worked his way through the net of Uplander guards and soldiers-at-arms and camp-followers and ragged, hungry infantry back to his own side. “Ryuu and his son are said to be moving south again. Toward Dorn-Lannet.” Ever since Bailey had been done for, it was Cam who passed on the news and rumors.

“What are the odds we will be called to muster there,” said Layne.

Da Mansto held up three fingers. “Brae, Oda, Bailey.” He folded them with each name. “If we are to muster at Dorn-Lannet, then this will be the make-it or break-it battle for the South.” He was quiet a moment. “I wonder who of us will come out of it.”

“How different this war would be, if the Lord of Dorn-Lannet was more like to our enemy, for Lord Ryuu and his son are so clearly the better leaders.” Cam did not think of what he said, until the words were out.

Layne, in his sudden way, grabbed Cam by the collar. “Do not you say that.”

“Leave be,” said Da Mansto. “The fighting will come to us soon enough, without we starting it among ourselves.”

Cam fingered Brae's bow. “If Ryuu's son died, maybe this war would be done.”

No one said anything.

“And we could go home.”

“Don't you speak of it,” said Layne. Later, Cam had wondered if Layne had some presentiment, for he died the next day.

More gently, Da Mansto said, “Nothing will stop Lord Ryuu.”

Cam thought,
I could have
.

 

THAT WAS WHY he hesitated now, his sword ready to strike at the base of the bandit's neck. That was why, on a riverbed somewhere far from home, he had put an arrow in one man. Both because he had been unable to put one in another.

Though he had thrown away the stick, he knew the number of his dead. It was the highest he had learned to count to. What was one more to the tally?

Cam raised his sword but, his mind changing tack, turned the blow at the last moment. The bandit fell upon the roadway, scrabbling about in the dust in a frenzy of fear. Cam spat aside. “Get out of here.” He sheathed the sword.

If he rode steadily, he would make Dorn-Lannet before the month was done.

The yearning tore him, from the inside out.

D
IIDO FELT . . . “SQUASHED,” she said. “I'm being squashed. Bleuch.”

She twisted her head around, trying to look up to the village on the ridge, but Gaida kept her hand screwed in Diido's collar all the way across the camp. The sky hung low and gray, pushing the damp gray mist into the gray smoke from the campfires, so that the air held a drab mystery, tents and shanties coming up out of the muck, their colors all muted.

“Don't they know what the sun is here?”

“Enough of your talk.” Gaida rapped her knuckles on Diido's skull. “I've had it with your wet ways and blather.”

She dragged Diido to Selena's humpy, which was splat in the middle of the camp. The branches of the tree it was built against were woven together, part of the walls, and the front was open to the camp. Gaida loosed her hold on Diido and pushed her forward.

Selena stayed sat on a cushion, her bung foot stuck out in front of her. She looked at Diido from the top of her head to her bare, grubby feet. Diido looked down at the ground. Selena was the nearest thing to a wise-woman the camp had, which made it dangerous to meet her gaze.

“Selena.” Gaida made her voice special. “It's my husband. She rubs him up wrong and he her.”

“Is that so?” Selena's voice was deep as a man's, hoarse as if she pipe-smoked.

Gaida was silent; Selena was silent. Diido felt Gaida's grip tighten and tighten on her collar, loosening only when Selena spoke again. “Ya, ya. You can leave her here.”

And that's what Gaida did—just like that, she bowed and ran back across the camp, ran from Diido.

“Huh.” Diido watched her. “She's happy to see the back of me.” She kicked and kicked at the base of the tree, hard, so the stinging in her toes was bigger in her mind than Gaida leaving her.

“Here.” Selena thumped at the ground with her stick. “Help me up.”

Diido knelt by the cushion. Selena put one hand on her shoulder and Diido stood them both up.

“You're strong!”

Of course
. “Yes.”

“Yes,
ma'am
.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Diido rashly added, “Maybe, she feels bad; that's why she runs.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“What are you to her, that she needs to feel bad? Are you kin?” Selena's tone was matter-of-fact, but her questions hurt, and the hurt got in the way of the right words.

“Nothing,” said Diido. “I'm nothing but trouble, especially to her.”

 

SELENA'S LOOM HAD been burned and broken, somewhere back home, back north, in the City. A weaver was a prince or princess among workers, and Selena had been a princess among weavers. Not a princess like the Lords and ladies, but a princess because of the magic in her hands. All she had left of her royalty now were the rolls of fabric she had fled with from the north. They stood stacked against the wall of the humpy, travel-dusted, fading.

As night came on, guitars sounded in the camp, and song. “It'll be getting lively out there.”

Diido grinned. By
lively
, Selena meant wild. It always got wild when the guitars and songs and spirits came out, and they came out every night. Diido spread out her sleeping rug, and Selena's too, when the wise-woman rapped her with her cane.

She lay down in the doorway, waiting until Selena was asleep before creeping out to the campfires.

“Here she is,” they said, the drinkers, the guitar players. “What will it be?”

“Tell me what you want to hear,” said Diido.

“Let's have the one about the river god.”

So Diido sang the river-god song. As she sang, she saw the yellow roiling river of the City, the City that had been home. People came to the doorways of their huts and tents and sat, drawn by her voice. Diido sang “The Lament of the Pearl Diver,” the song of the fisherfolk of the river, who plied their round boats back and forth across the current. She sang a new song next, from the village up on the ridge, which she had heard being sung in the fields, and then she took herself back to the humpy and curled up in the doorway, Selena not stirring at all.

 

“YOU'RE USEFUL, I can see that.”

Diido sat up with a start. Selena was standing outside. She would have had to step over Diido to get out of the door, and Diido had not woken. By the doorway was a bowl with raw yams in it. Someone had put it there and Diido had slept through that too.

“I hate Gaida,” said Diido. Selena had her scouring the skin and dirt off the yams with sand.

“Save it for someone who's earned it.”

“It's not Giitan—he's my . . . my brother! But
she
never liked me, no.”

“Giitan your
brother
?” said Selena. “That's not what I heard.”

“Well, you heard wrong.” Diido did not look at Selena.

“Ah, did I?” Her stick poked at Diido. “Gaida's all right. But now with a child on the way—”

“I could've helped them.”

“Maybe you could have. Maybe you'd want to, but you wouldn't have. Talk's not enough.”

Diido didn't have a single word to throw back at Selena. She sat with the yams hanging in her hands until Selena cuffed her. “You going to nurse them or cook them?”

They ate the yams for breakfast. “You like how I cook them? I was put to work at a great house and they learned me how to cook. We wore silk aprons in the kitchen.” Diido hung their sleeping rugs, at Selena's direction, to air on the roof of the humpy. “I helped the housemaids, too, with these exact tasks.” She swept the floor in a great choking of dust. “Here, I can make it so comfortable.” She bade Selena get to her feet so she could plump up the cushion she sat on; polished her stick with spit and rubbing; filled up the water crock—

“You talk enough to break my head,” said Selena. “Be off and talk yourself out somewhere else. Come back when you can be quiet.”

 

DIIDO STOOD ON the road on the ridge. Without the shelter of the woods, the wind bit at her. She tucked her arms into her sleeves and spun a slow circle, looking. On her left the land fell away to foothills, woods, and finally the sea. The camp was clear to see, a mess of shacks under a gray film of woodsmoke. On the other side of the ridge from the camp, beyond the buildings that hedged the high street, fields stepped down the hill.

Diido liked it up here, closer to the sky. She liked the town, that the Downlanders called Kayforl, pretty and clean as the City had never been. She liked the curtains at the windows, all white; the pine trees by every front door, pruned so that the needles formed great green pom-poms, sprouting on the ends of the branches. She liked the cloths the women and girls wore over their hair with only a neat, pale-haired part showing. She wanted one for herself. She liked being among people: not angry, hungry people, like in the camp, but smiling people. Plump, smiling people. She liked it for that, but it could never be home. Home was the yellow river, the teeming, dirty, noisy City.

She reached the village common, and leaned on a wall clucking at the chickens on the other side until a woman came out shaking her headscarf at her. Sighing, Diido moved on.

Two boys followed her down the length of the street. One shouted something, and laughed. Diido turned. He said it again: “Scrull.”

Diido looked him up and down. He was puddingy and pale and very ugly. “Huh.” She flicked her fingers at him.

“Scru-ull.” That was the other one.

“Scurruull!” Diido tried the word out. “Yah! I seen worse than you, Pie-belly.” She turned so that she walked past them, going in the opposite direction. She came to the house with the chickens again and stopped a moment to look. She remembered chickens in the yard at home—

Whap!
Something hit the back of her head. Something sticky and smelly. Shit.