Pyrebound - 9.4

Chapter 9.4 – Pyrebound
Three hours later, Beshi was back in his sheath on Ram’s hip, and he and Darun were walking hand in hand down the streets of Dul Karagi unsupervised. Imbri, Bal, and Shazru were off buying gear for the trip with Piridur’s money; their offer to come along had been rebuffed by Imbri, who said that she’d have an easier time cooperating with the two of them later if she didn’t have to put up with them now. Ram didn’t mind. He was happy enough just to take a private walk with Darun, even with most of the pyre’s shops closed and streets deserted for white day. “Where exactly are we going?”

“It’s a surprise, Ram darling. Don’t you like surprises?”

“Every surprise I’ve had for the past bloom or so has been bad. And since when am I ‘darling’?”

“Since last night. I’m your contractual mistress, remember? Be sure to shake down Piridur later so you can buy me something nice. As for surprises, I planned this one, so relax. I promise it’ll be nicer than the one you just gave the others. Even if you weren’t considerate enough to do it when I was there to watch. I’m forgiving like that.”

They were headed to the South Gate Market, and Ram considered asking her just what it was she’d stuffed in his pockets that day. But she led him right past the shuttered stalls, out the unguarded south gate itself, into the great forests that fed Dul Karagi’s timber industry. She slowed down noticeably once they reached the shade of the trees, where the pyre-light couldn’t sustain her, and Ram put an arm around her sagging shoulders. “We don’t need to do this today, Darun.”

“Yes, we do,” she said, straightening herself with visible effort. “We’re leaving in the morning. I’m a big girl, I can take it.” And she sped up again, racing ahead on her wobbly legs. Once the woods and the orchards were behind them, she led him to one of the bondservants’ dormitories. The white sun was beginning to set, and a crowd of the field-hands had gathered in front of the building, around a great heap of dirt big enough to bury a man in. They all stopped as Ram and Darun drew near; the look they got wasn’t hostile, exactly, but it wasn’t friendly either.

Darun waved cheerily at them all the same. “Hey, there. Got enough to spare a bite?” She fished a silver tanbir out of her pocket with her other hand. They promptly stopped staring, and spread a blanket on the ground for them. A pair of little girls did the spreading; Ram got the feeling this group were all one mass of cousins.

“What is this, a little bonded restaurant?” he said, as she surrendered the silver to a bondswoman, and they both sat down.

“Just something they do at the end of white day,” she explained. “It’s the only chance they get to have fun. We paid a little to crash their party, so now we’re guests.” The bondswoman she’d paid handed them a pair of cups. Whatever was in them smelled stronger than beer. Ram sipped his without enthusiasm; poor people didn’t pick such drinks for their flavor, and his haranu seemed to think of inebriation as an injury it needed to heal. He could probably win any number of games and bets at bars, he gloomily reflected, if he ever got a reason to try.

Meanwhile, a small cluster of bondsmen cautiously broke up the mound with long iron implements; there were large stones buried under the dirt, and a wisp of smoke drifted out as they drew near the center of the pile. A few of them put on mitts to cast the stones aside, and when half or more of the mound had been dissected they triumphantly drew forth an enormous clay pot covered in ash. After a perfunctory whisk, they pulled off the lid to reveal a thick, steaming bed of savory wheat-and-onion pilaf. It looked like half a pig was mixed in with it, in little lumps of meat and bone. The two little girls clapped and whooped.

The older, more practical women were already passing around bowls and spoons. The rule seemed to be to serve oneself, with no deference to age or gender, and the first man was already sitting down with a large helping before his friends were done hauling the rest of the pots out of the makeshift oven. There were beans in one, and some kind of vegetable in another.

By dispensing with manners, they could serve out an astonishing amount of food in short order, and soon enough Ram and Darun were back on their blanket with heaping bowls. He’d had better food, from time to time, Ram thought as he chewed on a hunk of pork, but never anything quite like it. There were flavors in there that he couldn’t recall ever tasting before.

“You guys do this every white day?” Ram asked a man sitting on the ground next to him. He’d seldom eaten this good at Urapu, and these were field drudges.

“Only harvest time,” the man answered, with an accent Ram couldn’t quite place. “Foreman pays for it, sends the handmaiden around to heat the stones. We don’t feast, we don’t work good. We lose tools, get in fights, get sick, have accidents. Delays the harvest.” His expression was perfectly straight, but Ram caught his meaning perfectly, and sat back with a smile.

“What are you chuckling about?” Darun asked him around a mouthful of stewed fruit.

“All that time, watching these people from the tower on guard duty, I always thought they were helpless.” Like fat, stupid cows, he didn’t say. They were all short, with puffy faces and lumbering gaits that spoke of a hard life on mostly bad food. But even a cow knew where the best grass was, didn’t she? He felt like there ought to be some encouraging lesson in there for him.

The huge pots were emptied quickly enough, with a large extended family of bondservants eating plus Ram and Darun. He could see similar gatherings around other earth-heaps in the distance, lit by the mingled lights of moon, stars, and pyre. As their hosts here finished up, they set bowls and spoons aside, and three of the men fetched a pair ofpipes and a drum out of the house.

“This was a good surprise,” he said, as they started playing, and the others sang along. “Thank you.”

“Told you,” she said.

“I wouldn’t have expected you to take me to a place like this, though.”

“It’s only my second time. Ushna took us here, once, when we were in the area, low on cash, and not feeling too welcome inside the walls.” She gave him a significant look as she said the last.

He wouldn’t have expected that kind of thoughtfulness from her, either. But instead of saying so, he leaned over to kiss her on the forehead. She tilted her face back to take it on the lips instead. “What am I, your kid sister?”

“No, but … “ he waved a hand at the bonded family.

“You see all those brats they’ve got? I think they’ve done it a couple of times, Ram. Not like they’re paying much attention to us, anyway.”

It was true, they weren’t. But he wished she hadn’t said that. What would they do if—

“Hey!” She snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Knock that off. Do your damn brooding on your own time, lover.”

He tried to swallow his irritation. “Do you really never want to settle down, Darun?”

“No, I’d say I’ve spent enough of my life depending on men. I’ll take your company, and anything else you want to give me. But I don’t want your kids, and I’m not signing over my title.”

“You make it sound—“

“Like it is, Ram. Like it is.” There was no arguing with Darun when she took that tone.

Their hosts had set aside the instruments now, and the man with the drum was telling the story of Rasha and the three hunters. Ram hadn’t heard it since he was eight or so; he thought the man was doing a credible job of it, but he’d always remember Father’s version as better. This man didn’t do Rasha’s voice in the proper deep growl. The audience still laughed as he tricked each man in turn into giving up his meat for a nonexistent treasure. “They’re hearthless, aren’t they?” he said, as much to change the subject as anything else. “Or they used to be. Father knew this story.”

“Most of the bonded families are, I think. Caught or bought or gave themselves up kindlings back. Still telling the same old stories about the big rat.”

“I always liked the Rasha stories,” Ram protested.

“Yeah, Ushna knew them too. They’re not as funny if you’ve ever met a real rasha. We might run into a couple out there, and we’ll see how you like them when they’re trying to bite your leg off.” She twisted around to look past the dormitory, into the gloom of the fresh-cut fields. “Did you hear something just—oh, hell!”

The bonded family were still engrossed in the story, and only two turned to look when she sprang to her feet. Even when she ran into their dorm, and slammed the door shut behind her, they looked more confused than upset. By then Ram, too, was on his feet, straining his eyes to see just what was coming out of the darkness. Several things, by the look of them, quite large, and moving fast.

He had Beshi out and ready to swing without having to think. The bondswomen’s shrieking sounded faint and distant, an irrelevant nuisance. All his attention was on the danger from the fields; he thought he could feel the ground shake as the dark shapes approached.

His blood was so hot that he barely noticed the pain in his shoulder, only stepped back a little, grunting with the impact. It didn’t occur to him to wonder about it until some seconds later, when the pain failed to diminish. Then he looked down, and saw an arrow protruding from his shoulder. He tore it loose and flung it aside. The flesh immediately closed up, and he looked up just in time to be knocked flying by something enormous.

When he got his wind and wits back, he was lying near the heap of dirt and stones, with a rapidly knitting gash across his chest and Beshi lying on the ground some distance away. One of the men was on the ground next to him, groaning and clutching at the arrow in his guts. There were two more in the back of a woman lying facedown several feet away, and several stuck in the ground. He couldn’t see the rest of their hosts, but they weren’t safe, wherever they’d gone; the enemy were forming into a loose ring around the building. There were at least five or six of them, masked men in long coats, riding ugly horned beasts nearly the size of Nusun. Moonchildren.

He got up to run for Beshi, only to be knocked down by a stabbing pain in his back. Again, it did not go away, and the position made it awkward for him to reach behind and yank the nuisance out. By the time he got it free and pushed himself off the ground, he’d been struck by another, in the back of his thigh. He coughed and spat the blood out of his lungs, and flung himself back towards the scant cover of the half-dissected mound. With the cursed thing in his leg, he only made it halfway, and felt another sting in the small of his back as he landed.

He freed his leg and back, was shot in the hand. Tugged the arrow out, was shot in the shoulder again. One of the big rocks was in reach of his left hand; he caught it and rose up again, spinning around to throw it at the closest target. He caught the beast right in its hideous face, and it reared up with a piercing scream, throwing its rider, before stumbling away. A dart dug into Ram’s side as he fled once more to his pitiful shelter. One down. How many to go?

The spirit laughed inside him. It didn’t matter how many, it said, since he could take an arrow better than they could take a rock. Ram himself wasn’t so sure. More arrows spattered the ground around his feet as he cowered in the dirt plucking the offending spines out of his body. He’d bought himself a moment with that throw, but another rider was circling about to a better position. In seconds he’d have a clear shot.

There was a scratching noise from the piled earth behind him, and a shower of dirt from above; Ram scrambled back from the mound again just in time to see a long, horned head blotting out the stars, a half-second before the flimsy hollow hill gave way and brute and rider fell in a cascade of tumbling rocks on top of him. The stones alone were enough to knock him flat; the moonbrute itself landed straddling him, bashing its chest into his face.

He had another brief grace, a few seconds while the beast picked its clawed feet out of the wreckage. But its every move scraped and scuffed Ram against the rocks. He could barely breathe for the smell of it. It was all he could do to paw about with one hand until he found another rock, then swing it up hard against one hairy flank. The brute screeched and bolted.

Ram took a brief eternity to piece his wits and knit his bones together again. Then he sat up; nobody noticed. The wounded brute had picked a fight with one of the others in its rage, nearly killing both riders in the process; they, and most of their friends, were occupied with trying to pry the vicious creatures apart.

Beshi was about twenty feet away. There was no point in tiptoeing; Ram made a mad scuttle for his sword, and seconds later was up on his feet, armed, intact, and full of fire. The moonchildren didn’t see him until he was nearly on them. The nearest wheeled his mount around to lunge at Ram, who had a second’s glimpse of a long snout full of fangs before he swung up with the sword and cut the ugly head clean off.

Its rider landed on the point as the brute’s corpse fell over. Ram tore the blade loose, and charged the next nearest with teeth bared and clenched to hold back a mad laugh. Arrows flew wild about him, and one tore a furrow across his arm, but he barely noticed. He kicked off the ground, and the God’s strength lifted him up, soaring over the brute’s head to take its rider through the chest.

They fell off the creature in a tumble together, man and corpse, rolling their separate ways when they hit the ground. Ram kept a tight grip on Beshi, and sprang to his feet ready to fight on, but the moonchildren were already turning to run, riding hard for the open desert. For a demented moment Ram yearned, against all reason, to chase after them, and cut down the rearmost one after the other for raising a hand against the anointed priest of Dul Karagi. Then his mind returned, and he put Beshi firmly back in his sheath.

Three of the enemy lay dead on the ground, with two slain moonbrutes. A third, riderless beast wheezed and limped its way after the others, plainly favoring one side. Possibly it would die too, but Ram didn’t care about moonbrutes. They seemed to be every bit as horrible as their reputation suggested. And their riders?

Ram turned to the nearest of the dead, the last to fall, and took off his mask. It was well-secured; he had to pull back the dark hood, exposing a mop of fine, pale hair, and unwrap the strips of cloth that held the crude metal likeness over the dead flesh. The face underneath was utterly livid, whiter even than Imbri’s, but handsome in a thin and bloodless way. That long nose, those arched brows, might all have been carved from perfect ice. He couldn’t say if it was really a moonchild, but no man of the Dominion looked like that.

Four of the bondservants were lying on the ground, three men and a woman; it took only moments to verify that it was too late to save any. The rest of them were staring out of the windows of the dormitory in shock, or poking their heads timidly around the corner of the building. Ram himself was fine, except for the cold, sick feeling in his stomach. He couldn’t escape the conviction that he should have done better, should have protected them, though he couldn’t say how.

There was only one way he could think of to banish that sick feeling. “Darun,” he called to the house, “come on out of there. We’re going to go see the Lugal.”