[New Sun 04] The Citadel of the Autarch

The big man slapped me on the back. “He’s not the best I ever had, but he’s good enough, and I trained him myself.

Mesrop and Lactan there are going to pass you those reins, and all you have to do is get up on him.

If you can do it without knocking Daria off, you can have her until we run you down.” He raised his voice: “All right, let him go!”

I had expected the two men to give me the reins. Instead they threw them at my face, and in snatching for them I missed them both. Someone goaded the piebald from behind, and the big man gave a peculiar, piercing whistle. The piebald had been taught to fight, like the destriers in the Bear Tower, and though his long teeth had not been augmented with metal, they had been left as nature made them and stood out from his mouth like knives.

I dodged a flashing forefoot and tried to grasp his halter; a blow from one of the whips caught me full across the face, and the piebald’s rush knocked me sprawling.

The troopers must have held him back or I would have been trampled. Perhaps they also helped me to my feet—I cannot be sure. My throat was full of dust, and blood from my forehead trickled into my eyes.

I went for him again, circling to the right to keep clear of his hoofs, but he turned more quickly than I, and the girl called Daria snapped both lashes before my face to throw me off. More from anger than any plan I seized one. The thong of the whipstock was around her wrist; when I jerked the lash she came with it, falling into my arms. She bit my ear, but I got her by the back of the neck, spun her around, dug fingers into one firm buttock and lifted her. Kicking the air, her legs seemed to startle the piebald. I backed him through the crowd until one of his tormentors goaded, him toward me, then stepped on his reins.

After that, it was easy. I dropped the girl, caught his halter, twisted his head, and kicked his forefeet from under him as we were taught to do with unruly clients. With a highpitched, animal scream he came crashing down. I was in the saddle before he could get his legs beneath him, and from there I lashed his flanks with the long reins and sent him bolting through the crowd, then turned him and charged them again.

All my life I had heard of the excitement of this kind of fighting, though I had never experienced it.

Now I found everything more than true. The troopers and their women were yelling and running, and a few flourished, swords. They might have threatened a thunderstorm with more effect—I rode over half a dozen at a sweep. The girl’s red hair flew like banner as she fled, but no human legs could have outdistanced that steed. We flashed past her, and I caught her by that flaming banner and threw her over the arcione before me.

A twisting trail led to a dark ravine, and that ravine to another. Deer scattered ahead of us; in three bounds we overtook a buck in velvet and shouldered him out of the way. While I had been Lictor of Thrax, I had-heard that the eclectics often raced game and leaped from their mounts to stab it. I believed those stories now—I could have cut the buck’s throat with a butcher knife.

We left him behind, crested a new hill and dashed down into a silent, wooded valley. When the piebald had run himself out, I let him find his own path among the trees, which were the largest I had seen since leaving Saltus; and when he stopped to crop the sparse, tender grass that grew between their roots, I halted and threw the reins on the ground as I had seen Guasacht do, then dismounted and helped the redhaired girl off.

“Thanks,” she said. And then, “You did it. I didn’t think you could.”

“Or you wouldn’t have agreed to this? I had supposed they made you.”

“I wouldn’t have given you that cut with the whip. You’ll want to repay me now, won’t you? With the reins, I suppose.”

“What makes you think that?” I was tired and sat down. Yellow flowers, each blossom no bigger than a drop of water, grew in the grass; I picked a few and found they smelled of calambac.

“You look the type. Besides, you carried me bottom up, and men who do that always want to hit it.”

“I never knew that. It’s an interesting thought.”

“I have a lot of them—that kind.” Quickly and gracefully she seated herself beside me and put a hand on my knee.

“Listen, it was the initiation, that’s all. We take turns, and it was my turn and I was supposed to hit you. Now it’s over.”

“I understand.”

“Then you won’t hurt me? That’s wonderful. We can have a good time here, really. Whatever you want and as much as you want, and we won’t go back until it’s time to eat”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t hurt you.”

Her face, which had been wreathed with forced smiles, fell, and she looked at the ground. I suggested that she might run away.

“That would only make it more fun for you, and you’d hurt me more before we were through.” Her hand crept up my thigh as she spoke. “You’re nice looking, you know. And so tall.” She made a sitting bow, pressing her face into my lap to give me a tingling kiss, then straightening up at once. “It could be nice. Really it could.”

“Or you could kill yourself. Have you a knife?”

For an instant, her mouth formed a perfect little circle.

“You’re crazy, aren’t you? I should have known.” She leaped to her feet.

I caught her by one ankle and sent her sprawling to the soft forest floor. Her shift was rotten with wear—a pull and it fell away. “You said you wouldn’t run.”

She looked over her shoulder at me with large eyes. I said, “You have no power over me, neither you nor they. I am not afraid of pain, or of death. There is only one living woman I desire, and no man but myself.”

XX. Patrol

WE HELD A PERIMETER no more than a couple of hundred paces across. For the most part, our enemies had only knives and axes—the axes and their tagged clothes recalled the volunteers I had helped Vodalus against in our necropolis—but there were hundreds of them already, and more coming.

The bacele had saddled up and left camp before dawn. The shadows were still long, somewhere along the shifting front, when a scout showed Guasacht the deep ruts of a coach travelling north. For three watches we tracked it.

The Ascian raiders who had captured it fought well, turning south to surprise us, then west, then north again like a writhing serpent; but always leaving a trail of dead, caught between our fire and that of the guards inside, who shot them through the loopholes. It was only toward the end, when the Ascians could no longer flee, that we grew aware of other hunters.

By noon, the little valley was surrounded. The gleaming steel coach with its dead and dying prisoners stood miredto the axles. Our Ascian prisoners squatted in front of it, guarded by our wounded. The Ascian officer spoke our tongue, and a watch earlier Guasacht had ordered him to free the coach and shot several Ascians when he had failed; thirty or more remained, nearly naked, listless and empty-eyed.

Their weapons were piled some distance off, near our tethered mounts.

Now Guasacht was making the rounds, and I saw him pause at the stump that sheltered the trooper next to me. One of the enemy put her head from behind a clump of brush some way up the slope. My contus struck her with a bolt of flame; she leaped by reflex, then curled up as spiders do when someone tosses them among the coals of a campfire. She had been white-faced beneath her red bandana, and I suddenly understood that she had been made to look—that there were those behind that brush who had disliked her, or at least not valued her, and who had forced her to look out. I fired again, slashing the green growth with the bolt and bringing a puff of acrid smoke that drifted toward me like her ghost