A Time of War. Katharine Kerr

twigs, and at last pieces of broken branch. As the light leapt and spread he moved back from the unwelcome heat. Meer was sitting with his head between his hands, his face turned as if he were staring into the fire. Seeing him look so defeated brought Jahdo a strange insight: never before had he argued with, much less bested, a grown man, and rather than exulting, he was frightened. Yet he refused to back down.

      ‘Well, tell me now. Why are you going east?’

      ‘It’s a long and bitter story, but you’re right enough that you should hear it. Pay attention, though, because I can only bear to repeat it this once.’ Meer cleared his throat several times before he went on. ‘I have an elder brother who became a powerful razkan, what you’d call a captain in your tongue, I suppose, the man who leads a group of warriors. And what with his raiding and then the legitimate battles between our various cities, he became famous, gathering many a free-born warrior round him, as well as the usual slave soldiers he bought with all his booty.’

      ‘Hold a moment. Slave soldiers? How can you give a slave weapons and make them fight?’

      ‘They’ve been bred and born among the Gel da’Thae, and they know that if they fight well, they’ll be set free.’

      ‘But still, I don’t understand. You think they’d just kill this razkan fellow and run away.’

      ‘Run to what? The wilderness? They know the civic authorities would hunt them down, and the gods wouldn’t help them the way they helped your people escape, because they’d be rebels and traitors.’

      ‘The gods helped us?’

      ‘Of course they did. They sent their own children to save and succour you, out on the grasslands to the south.’

      ‘I never did hear that before. I heard that it was some people who raised horses or suchlike. Why did the gods help us?’

      ‘Now here!’ Meer spoke with some asperity. ‘Do you want me to finish this tale or not? Fewer questions, if you please.’

      ‘I be sorry.’

      ‘Very well, then. Now, as I say, my brother, Thavrae his name is, his warrior’s name, I mean, though Svar was the name our mother gave him. Ah alas, woe betide the day she birthed him, and woe betide that his kin and clan have lived to see his infamy!’

      ‘What’s he been doing?’

      ‘Whoring after strange gods. Gods? Did I say gods? One of the three hundred sixty-four kinds of demon, more like! False gods, anyway. They’re supposed to be new gods. Now I ask you. If a god wasn’t around to help make the world, what kind of a god can she be? Gods don’t just pop up all of a sudden like, out of nowhere, appearing at your table like some unmarried uncle in search of a dinner!’

      Jahdo giggled.

      ‘Just so.’ Meer nodded firmly. ‘But for some years now these false prophets have been coming round, preaching these new gods to anyone stupid enough to listen. These so-called seers come from the wild tribes of the far north, where the demons have been appearing and working marvels, or so they say. Alshandra’s the name they mention most, a powerful goddess of war, or so they call her.’

      ‘Your people, they’d be liking her, then.’

      ‘Just so. But most of these prophets are gone now. Some got themselves caught and strangled in the public square by the authorities, and the rest haven’t been seen for some while. They’ve turned sensible, if you take my meaning, but a few fools have listened to them. And my brother, my own blood kin, little Svar as I’ll always think of him, he’s one of them, claiming allegiance to this Alshandra creature. It broke my mother’s heart.’

      ‘I’ll wager it did. That be too bad, Meer, really tis so.’ Jahdo was trying to imagine what the mother of a man such as Meer would be like – even more formidable than his own mother, he supposed. ‘I guess she could talk no sense into him, huh?’

      ‘No one could make him listen to reason, no one, not our mother, not our aunts, not our uncles. But anyway, some weeks ago Thavrae led his men out east.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Well, partly to spare our city outright war between his warband and that of his rivals. He did listen to our mother about that, when she begged him to take his men away before citizen slaughtered citizen in the streets. The authorities wanted to strangle him for blasphemy, you see, but you don’t just arrest a razkan when he’s got his warband round him.’

      ‘Then he does have some honour left.’

      ‘Some, truly, though a poor comfort to our mother it is.’

      ‘Wait a moment. You said these demons live in the north, right? Why did Thavrae head east?’

      ‘I’m coming to that part. Hush. Apparently he’d received an omen from the gods, sending him to fetch a particular thing from the lands of the Slavers.’

      ‘What was it?’

      ‘How would I know? But I was sent to find him and beg him to come home.’

      ‘Sent by your mother?’

      ‘Just so.’

      ‘Do you think you – I mean we – can find him?’

      ‘I don’t know.’ Meer sighed, running both hands through his tangled mane of hair. ‘By now he and his men should have found whatever this mysterious object is and be returning. I hope we’ll meet them on the road back.’

      ‘What road? We don’t even know where we’re going.’

      ‘True.’

      ‘Then how do you think we’ll ever find him?’

      ‘If I can get within a reasonable distance, the brother bond will guide us.’

      ‘The what?’

      ‘The brother bond.’ Meer hesitated for a long time. ‘Now, that’s one thing I can never explain to you, Jahdo, even if you were to walk away again and leave me here to starve. It’s a magick, and some magicks are Gel da’Thae. They cannot be shared. In the temple we swear holy vows.’

      ‘Well, all right, then. My mam does always say that if you swear a thing, it’s needful for you to do it. But I still don’t see how we’re going to find him. What if he goes north and we go south or somewhat like that?’

      ‘It might happen, truly. But a mother’s charge is a sacred charge, and I must travel and try.’

      Jahdo hesitated, considering.

      ‘Be you sure this is all you’re doing? I did hear you talking to Verrarc back home, Councilman Verrarc I mean, and you were talking about your mother and stuff, but I did get this strange feeling. You weren’t telling him everything, were you?’

      Meer laughed.

      ‘I figured I was choosing the cleverest lad in town, and I was right. But actually, I wasn’t lying. I was merely editing. I didn’t want to go into detail. There is somewhat about Councilman Verrarc that creeps my flesh. I hear things in his voice, somehow.’

      ‘Things?’

      ‘Overtones, odd hesitations, a peculiar timbre. He sounds enraged, but at the same time, he reeks of fear.’ Meer paused, considering. ‘I can barely put it into words, it’s such a subtle thing. But he’s an ominous man, in his way, an ominous man.’

      Jahdo shuddered. Yet once again the buried memory tried to rise, bringing with it a cold shudder. He caught his breath with a little gasp. Meer turned an inquiring ear his way.

      ‘Geese walking on my grave,’ Jahdo said. ‘O ych, I wish I hadn’t said that.’

      ‘More likely the evening breeze, lad. I wouldn’t take it as an omen.’

      Later, as Jahdo was falling asleep, he remembered that Meer had found him clever. In spite of the trouble this opinion had got him into, he was pleased.