‘You know, my friend, you and I might be able to work very well together. You think, and I like that. Curse this winter weather! There won’t be another ship across in months now, and that means no news from Merryc till spring. But at any rate, what do you think of my bargain?’
Since answering too quickly would be suspicious, Baruma made a show of considering. After all, he reminded himself, gaining the Old One’s backing was only hypothetical, while the Hawkmaster’s offer was very real indeed – for better or for worse.
‘I think that it’s a crucial turning of my Fate, and that I’d be a fool to refuse it.’ Also a dead man if I refuse it, he added to himself. ‘How shall we seal it?’
‘The way these things are always sealed, my friend: in blood.’
‘Very well.’ Although he went ice-cold, he managed to keep his voice calm. ‘Whenever you wish to begin.’
Zandar’s caravan was working its way through hill country as they headed southwest along the spine of the island. On either side of the dusty road, field after field of dark green vegetables nestled in the valleys, criss-crossed with tiny irrigation ditches, sparkling with water. When the caravan rode by, the bent-back farmers would look up, stretch, and stare at the long string of pack mules and horses. Riding at the dusty end of the line, Taliaesyn would stare back and envy them: farmers or not, they were free men. Toward noon, the caravan came to a river, or more precisely, to a broad gulch, littered with rocks and small shrubs, where water ran down the middle in a small, mucky stream. Out in what current there was stood a huge wooden water wheel with buckets all along the rim. As, sweating in the sun, two slaves turned a crank under an overseer’s whip, the buckets dipped down, brought up the precious water, and emptied it into a wooden culvert that ran on stilts to the main irrigation ditch at the lip of the gulch. Seeing the scars on the slaves’ backs reminded Taliaesyn that he was lucky.
When Kryblano, a free man working as a caravan guard, dropped back beside him, Taliaesyn asked him the river’s name.
‘The En-ghidal. It’s dry now, all right, but soon the rains will start, and the flash-floods with them. We’ll be home by then, though.’
That night the caravan camped downhill from a farming village called Deblis, a tidy arrangement of some fifty square white-plastered houses, each with a little wooden fence around a vegetable patch in front and a chicken-coop behind. At sunset, Zandar took Taliaesyn and Kryblano in for the night-time market. Among the flower-blossom lights of oil-lamps, pedlars and local craftsmen squatted on the ground with their merchandise neatly arranged on pallets of woven rushes, but the local folk seemed to be standing around gossiping more than they were buying. Zandar’s goods, however, were a different thing. Once Taliaesyn got them unpacked and spread out, the village women clustered round to haggle for the little clay pots and packets of beaten-bark paper that held the precious spices.
After about an hour, as business was slackening off, Zandar sent Kryblano and Taliaesyn off to buy him some wine, and, generous employer and master that he was, gave Kryblano the money to buy himself and the slave a cup, too. After some poking around the village they found a tiny wine-shop set into the side of a house, a room smoky from oil-lamps where row after row of yellow clay jugs stood against the wall and patrons spilled out into the alley. While they sipped the flat cups of sweet red wine, Kryblano struck up a conversation with a pair of locals, but Taliaesyn stood a little behind him and spoke to nobody.
As they made their way back to the marketplace, Kryblano paused for a moment to slip down an alley and relieve himself in the dark. Carrying the wine jug for their master, Taliaesyn waited for him in the street, which was nearly as dark, and chewed over his continual nag of a problem: who am I, anyway? At a scrape of sandal on sand behind him, he turned and saw two men walking up to him, so purposefully and yet so quietly that he went on guard. Then he saw the bright gleam of a tiny dagger in one man’s hand, and the coil of fine silken rope in the other’s. Taliaesyn ducked to one side and kicked out as the steel flashed toward him, but he felt the dagger graze his arm. He threw the wine jug in his attacker’s face and grabbed the rope-carrier by the arm, twisting him round. When the man with the knife feinted in, Taliaesyn yelled an instinctive war-cry and shoved his struggling prisoner straight onto the blade. The man in his hands screamed and slumped forward with a gush of blood. As the second turned to flee, Kryblano came running, yelling his head off, and the alley filled with villagers drawn by the shouting. As they tackled the escaping assassin, Kryblano reached Taliaesyn’s side and grabbed his bleeding arm to look at the shallow wound.
Everyone was talking so fast that Taliaesyn had trouble understanding more than a few words. All at once he realized that his cut was burning and that he could no longer focus his eyes. By the light of oil lamps that shot up and wavered in great gobbets of flame he saw Zandar forcing his way through the crowd in the company of a stout man with grey hair. It was suddenly very hard to hear the voices around him. He did hear Kryblano, shouting in alarm; then there was a gauzy grey silence and a dark.
In the dark a light was burning. At first he thought it was the sun, but as he walked toward it he saw that it glowed red like a campfire, that indeed it was a fire, but a strange one, because in the middle of the flames crouched a tiny red dragon. Around the fire stood a black man holding the hand of a white woman and a black woman standing alone. When they saw him they laughed and waved to him. Instinctively he knew that he should complete the circle, and as soon as he’d linked up the partners, they all began to dance, circling round and round, faster and faster, until all four of them blurred together in a rush of silver light, and the dragon swelled up, huge and ominous in a roar of flames, calling out to him, calling his name …
‘Rhodry.’
He said the name aloud, and he was awake, lying on a blanket in the shade of a tree at the edge of the caravan camp. By the sun’s position he could tell that it was nearly noon. Although he was so dry that his tongue felt glued to the roof of his mouth, and his scratch from the night before still stung, he felt perfectly well and steady-headed, not at all like a man who’d taken a poisoned wound. When he spoke the name again, Zandar noticed that he was awake and came over with a waterskin.
‘So you’re alive, are you? Good.’
‘I’ve remembered my real name.’ Dry mouth or not, he felt his news so urgently it was like an ache. ‘It’s Rhodry.’
‘Well, by the gods and all their little piglets! Good, good for you. Here. Drink first; then we’ll talk.’
Taliaesyn drank as much as he could hold, waited a few moments, then found he could drink some more. Zandar hunkered down next to him and watched with a commercial sort of compassion.
‘There was some kind of poison on that blade,’ the trader said. ‘The village herbwoman was sure of that, but it couldn’t have been very strong.’
‘I don’t think it was poison. How about a simple drug, to knock me out and make me easy prey?’
‘If so, it failed badly. The man you had in your hands is dead.’
All at once Rhodry went cold all over, remembering that he was a slave.
‘And will I die for that?’
‘No. He attacked you, and the village headman is a friend of mine. What we all want to know is why he attacked you.’ Zandar gave him a grim smile. ‘Or let me guess: you can’t remember if you have any enemies who want you dead.’
‘I can’t, master. I’m sorry. I wish I could.’
‘Of course you do. Well, the headman’s going to have the other thief executed, and that will be an end to that. Think you can ride today?’
‘Oh yes. I feel fine. That’s why I think it was a drug, not a poison.’
‘Oh.’ Zandar considered this for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Well, let’s get out of this place and on the road, then. Maybe that will throw these mysterious enemies off your trail. I paid too much for you to have you slaughtered