Ghe understood something else now that he had not before.
The River did not know about the priesthood, did not even know they existed. To him, they were blank spaces, nothing. And the center of his pain—the dark vortex that bled his power, drew him relentlessly into slumber—Ghe knew what that was. He had been there, many times.
It was the Great Water Temple itself.
X A Game of Slap
TSEM met them near the edge of the camp. He was perched on an old house foundation, fending off a swarm of curious children. When Hezhi saw him, she slid down from behind Brother Horse and flew across the intervening distance to him.
“Princess,” Tsem growled, “where have you been?”
“I'll tell you later,” Hezhi said. “Right now, stay close to me. Please.”
“Of course, Princess.” The Giant turned wary eyes on the newcomers and said—loudly enough for the horsemen to hear, in his broken Mang: “They not hurt Princess, do they?”
“No,” she answered. “They only escorted me back here.”
“Princess, this is not the palace,” Tsem said more quietly in their own language. “You can't go running off alone whenever you want.”
“I know,” she said. “I know that.”
Brother Horse spoke to Tsem, also in Nholish. “Giant, take your mistress back to my yekt. Keep close watch on her. Things are happening I must attend to, and I need for you to keep her safe. I will send Yuu'han around, as well.”
“What?” Tsem asked. “What is happening?”
“I am not sure,” the old man replied. “I will come tell you when I know.” Hezhi noticed that Moss—and Chuuzek, of course—seemed restless.
Chuuzek confirmed that by growling to his cousin, “What is this babbling? What are they saying?” Moss shrugged, conveying his own puzzlement.
Ignoring them, Brother Horse turned to Hezhi and continued in her language. “Please do not fear me, child. I know what you saw, and it is nothing for you to fear. I should have explained more before asking you to see, that is all. Accept my apology, and I will come speak with you as soon as I can. In the yekt, with your Giant present.” He smiled, and she could not help believing him; his sincerity, for the moment, was more real than the strangeness she remembered.
Brother Horse switched back to Mang to speak to the other horsemen. “I am sorry to have been impolite,” he said. “The Giant knows but little of our speech.”
“I could teach him a word or two,” Chuuzek snapped. Moss only nodded.
“It was my honor to meet you, cousin,” Moss said to Hezhi, emphasizing “cousin.” “I hope to speak to you of your homeland soon. I have many questions about the great city, and I have never seen it for myself.”
Hezhi nodded politely but did not answer aloud. With Tsem's massive hand on her shoulder, the two of them made their way through the crowd. Behind them, whoops went up as horsemen rode up to meet the newcomers.
“What is this all about, Princess?” Tsem asked again, as they moved toward the yekt they were staying in.
“I wish I knew,” Hezhi told him glumly.
HEZHI noticed that Yuu'han appeared not long afterward, subtly. He sat near the fire outside of the yekt, talking with animation about something with a warrior near his own age. Hezhi noticed, however, that his eyes wandered the camp, fastening more than occasionally on the yekt.
“Is he trying to keep us in or keep someone else out?” she wondered, and Tsem's brow ridges bunched deeper. He did not repeat his earlier question, but Hezhi explained her meeting with Moss and Chuuzek. She skirted around the issue of why she had run off into the desert in the first place; she did not want to talk about that until she understood more. Tsem seemed content enough with that; after all, he had spent countless hours in Nhol following her at a discreet distance when she sought privacy by wandering the labyrinthine ways of the abandoned and ancient sections of the palace.
“I wonder what this means, this war?” Tsem asked.
“I don't know. I think that at the least, it means Perkar and Ngangata will receive a poor welcome when they return.”
“But what does that mean to us? To you?”
“I hope Brother Horse will tell us when he returns.” She paused. “I think Brother Horse believes me to be in some sort of danger.”
“That seems obvious,” Tsem replied. “But what sort of danger? What would these Mang want with you?”
Hezhi spread her hands to acknowledge her ignorance.
Tsem sighed. “I understood things in the palace. There I could protect you. Here … here I know nothing. We should leave this place, Princess.”
“And go where? There is nowhere we will understand better. And of course we cannot go back to Nhol.”
“Another city perhaps. Lhe, Hui…”
“Those are very far away, Tsem. How would we get there, just you and I? And when we got there, what would we do? They would not accept me as royalty there. We would have to live in their Southtowns.”
“Where do you say, then?”
Hezhi thought about that for a moment. “Here may be as good a place as any. Or…”
“Yes?”
“Perhaps with Perkar's people.”
Tsem grimaced at that. “His people are no better than these. Barbarians.”
“Well, then,” Hezhi grunted, dismissing the whole question with the back of her hand.
“You once said we might seek out my mother's people,” Tsem put in, unwilling to let the matter drop.
“Yes, I did, didn't I?” Hezhi said. “But where do they live? How would we find them? The two of us cannot travel alone. Can you build a fire, or kill game, or set a snare? I can't.” She looked up at Tsem squarely. “Back then, Tsem, it seemed as if the whole world was open to us. Now I see things in a different light.” She hesitated for just an instant before going on. “Yet there is something I can do, something to give us some choice, I think.”
“That being?” Tsem grunted, rolling his massive head back on his shoulders.
“Brother Horse says I have a gift for sorcery. It is the only thing I have, it seems.”
“You have me, Princess.”
Hezhi softened her voice and patted the Giant's arm. “And never doubt how much I value that, Tsem. You are my only true friend. But here, in this place, value is counted in terms of kin, and we have none. It is counted in horses, and we have none. It is counted in yekts and war honors and hunting trophies, and we have none. Nor are we likely to acquire any of those things.”
The Giant nodded ruefully. “Yes, I can see that.”
“But they also reckon worth in power, and that, perhaps, I have.”
“Witchery is dangerous, Princess.”
“Yes. Yes, but it is the only thing I have to make a place for us. And if we are ever to go where we will, we must have people willing to help us. We must have some way to pay them.”
“Or coerce them.”
“Yes,” Hezhi admitted softly. “I thought of that, too.”
THE village was not as Perkar and Ngangata had left it: it had bled out over the plain, filled it with color and life, horses pounding around makeshift racetracks, riotous noise. It was wild, barbaric, exciting—and not altogether unfamiliar. It had the quality of a homecoming or a hay gathering, though it was bigger, brighter, and more boisterous.
Where he and Ngangata rode, however, faces pinched tight in suspicion, even faces they knew, and by that Perkar understood that the news of the war had already come to Brother Horse's village. How could it not, with clans from the entire Mang world attending?
“It might have been best not to come here at all,” Ngangata gritted from the corner of his mouth.
“We have no choice,” Perkar muttered back, wondering how many warriors he and Harka could take before all of his heart-strands were severed. His sword made him much more powerful than mortal, but it did not make him invincible; the Blackgod had made that more than clear to him.