Chapter 4
A Battle-born Man
The next day’s dawn found us still with the smell of smoke in our noses and with sand and ash in our hair. But at least it found us alive. No one had emerged from our hasty tent-barricade yet, and so we had no idea how far our horses might have bolted or whether they had even survived.
“Little Sister,” Ymmen’s voice met me upon the moment that I woke. It was filled with gratitude, as well as fierce pride. It was still murky where we huddled, and surprisingly cold. I remembered Abioye leading me through the storm to where a wagon had been upturned against a stand of boulders and was already sheltering several people—guards and workers both—before charging back out into the dark. I had wanted to go with him, of course—but he had merely pointed at my hand and told me no.
‘And I need someone to tend to the injured’ the young man had added, and so began a long night of attempting to find clean bandages that weren’t already covered with grit. I didn’t know how much time had passed, but other groups arrived, some dragging bits of half-burnt canvas, which had to be added to the rest, forming as large and stable a structure as we could as we waited out the storm. The raiders who had attacked us were gone—and when Abioye had returned for a final time with the mechanical dragon, he confirmed that he could find no more people out there in the night—neither raider nor expedition-member.
‘At least, no one alive…’ he had muttered, before falling into a huddled and exhausted sleep, curled up like a baby amongst the scraps of supplies that some had brought.
He had been strong last night, I thought now, in the morning after our calamity.
“Surprisingly,” Ymmen agreed, and although I knew that he had referred to the man as ‘Poison Berry’ for his love of fine wines, I could sense that note of pride extended to Abioye’s actions, as well.
Tamin? Montfre? I whispered in my mind to the dragon.
“Safe. At the Stand-of-Trees-with TASTY rabbits,” Ymmen said, and I could guess what the three of them had dined on this morning. Which was more than I would be able to say, I thought. Our provisions were whatever scant things that those escaping the storm and the raid had picked up—and I didn’t know if it would last us but two days.
But there is always food on the Plains, my mother’s voice said in my memory.
“Yes. Tasty food,” Ymmen agreed with her memory. I got a sense that he would like her when they met.
If they ever meet. The reality of our situation shocked me out of my heartening conversation with the dragon. My mother, the Imanu, was already on Inyene’s list of the indebted. Tamin had told me that after I had been taken, my mother had borrowed hundreds of Torvald doubloons to get expensive scribes and clerks to fight Inyene’s bit of paper with other bits of paper, all in an attempt to get me free.
She had probably thought that the Middle Kingdom people of Torvald would only heed bits of serious-looking paper with serious-sounding names on them, I thought miserably. But, from what I now knew— thanks to Montfre and Abioye—it was actually Inyene who had used those bits of papers to dress up fancy-sounding lies. She had been the one to create fake clerks who loaned the money in the first place! Thereby making my mother and any other member who tried to fight her in the Middle Kingdom courts even more indebted to her—and destined for her Masaka mines.
I won’t let that happen, I swore to myself, as I shrugged aside Abioye’s cloak, stretched, and rose to meet the day. We had a lot to do—not only did we still have to find the Stone Crown, we had to stop Inyene’s schemes before any more of my people could be enslaved—and rescue those Daza who remained down her mines… But we’re not going to get very far if we don’t resupply what we lost in the sandstorm, I thought. The storm had cost us most of our bags of grains and dried provisions, and our horses. While we Daza could survive out here with our skills, that wasn’t the same as a long expedition across the plains, carrying any mining equipment as well! For a moment it all seemed like too much, but the warmth of the dragon’s pride in the back of my mind was enough to force me to my feet.
“Hunt the food in front of you, not the food of tomorrow,” Ymmen reassured me, in what I thought was quite an amazingly sage piece of wisdom.
Yes. Food, I thought. That was what we needed. More so than anything. We needed to get food and water for the expedition before we could do anything else. “You really do sound like Mother sometimes,” I muttered at Ymmen, earning a suspicious glance from the nearest of the guards.
“It’s a Daza thing.” I gave him a squinted smile, knowing that would be enough to make him forget about the fact I was talking to people who apparently weren’t there.
“They weren’t Daza, that’s for sure,” I murmured to the exhausted-looking face of Abioye as he walked beside me, talking about the events of last night. We had returned with a complement of Daza workers and some attendant guards to the scene of the previous night’s battle, and were now picking through it carefully, trying to find what had become of our provisions.
The scene of our camp, which had been a flat parcel of land bounded by a few standing boulders—now looked like a patch of wasteland. Heaps of red and golden dirt and sand drifts obscured any recognizable marker. Instead, I could see the odd bits of tent poles leaning out of the dunes here and there, with tattered bits of drooping canvas, looking sad and forlorn, still attached to them.
My foot tripped over something heavy in a spray of dirt, and when I looked back I saw that it was one of the wagon wheels, half-buried in the dirt. Abioye kicked at its edges as I scooped with my hands, to find that its axle had been broken, as if the entire wagon had been hurled in the very teeth of the wind.
“Stars. We’re lucky that any of us are alive at all…” Abioye muttered when he saw splintered wood. “Any storm strong enough to turn one of these over could have easily picked us up and thrown us for leagues—”
“Some of us were lucky,” I muttered back, and Abioye’s dark eyes and somber nod told me that he was thinking the same that I was.
How many people had we lost? At least eight or nine of the workers, I thought—mostly Daza, although there were a couple of the Middle Kingdom indentured slaves amongst their number. No one that I had known closely—but that didn’t lessen the tragedy. A handful of guards had also lost their lives—either disappearing like the workers mysteriously had—or killed by last night’s raiders. My mind snagged on them.
“The raiders. Who were they? They weren’t Daza, and they didn’t seem like Plains bandits…” I knew the type, as I had once been a part of a posse to scare off a gang of Westerner bandits who were venturing through our territory and terrorizing our village. There had been no blows in that fight, and no arrows fired or spears thrown—all it had taken to drive off the ragtag band of criminals had been to follow at a visible distance for a few days before they turned and ran back towards the mountains.
“They were too organized,” Abioye nodded. “By the time I realized what was happening and got to the mechanical dragon to help defend the camp—they had already managed to isolate the tents with the most people, and apparently they kept them in there, as they worked their way through the others.”