“Your secret presence here is no secret,” Qamar said without preamble. “Even the most isolated family living in a shed I wouldn’t wish on a dying rat knows we’re here. And they also know where we are.”
“Explain yourself,” Allim ordered.
“Over a large plate of food and a very large jug of wine? Certainly. Lead on.”
By the time Qamar had finished his recital—and his meal—Allim was compelled to agree that he had earned a second jug of wine. “It seems you have stumbled across valuable information, Qamar. If the Cazdeyyans know we are here, and they know where we are, we have two choices. First, we can attempt to be where they think we are not.”
“That’s not feasible. They know their own lands, Allim. And I swear, their land is against us—or at least what grows on it is, which amounts to the same thing.”
Allim arched a brow, as if to enquire if Qamar truly thought his opinion was worth hearing. “Your reasons are not my reasons. In fact, I have no idea what you think you mean, but that matters not at all. I won’t march far and fast to outmaneuver the barbarians. It would be too great a hardship on the men.”
Qamar poured himself another measure of wine and said nothing.
“I have decided to pull these Cazdeyyans into battle as soon as possible. We will make no secret of our movements—”
“Not that they were secret before,” Qamar muttered into his winecup.
“—but we will move in such a way and to such a place as will invite them to believe us vulnerable to attack. Which, of course, we will not be.”
“Of course.” He did not say it as if he knew what he was talking about; they both knew he didn’t. But it seemed easier to agree with Allim, and besides, he wanted something. “May I have my horse back?”
“By Acuyib the Merciful, I wish I could lash you to the saddle and send you back to Hazganni! But the Empress would want an explanation of why I have failed to make a man of you, and I have no intention of failing.” He smiled grimly. “I trust we understand each other.”
“Perfectly.” Qamar smiled his sweetest and most innocent smile, rose, bowed, and left the tent—taking the second wine jug with him.
As far as Qamar understood, the Tza’ab then marched to a place no commander in his right mind would have chosen for a battle and waited for the Cazdeyyans to catch up. The barbarians accepted the invitation to a seemingly easy victory and hurried to the place Allim had chosen. Personally, Qamar didn’t see it—neither the apparent idiocy of the location nor the battle itself. If it had been his mother’s hope that he would find himself in war, she was wrong. He found nothing. In fact, he lost his horse, his sword, and his breakfast.
He’d had much too much to drink the night before, of course. But that wasn’t his fault: his arm was aching again, and the stench of the salve disgusted him past bearing. It had needed the best part of three winejugs before the pain was gone. Unfortunately, his balance went with it, and although he’d been aiming for his bedroll, he’d spent the night on the ground beside it. Dawn came hours earlier than it should have. The meal that came with it churned in his stomach, competing with the dreadful thud in his head. His arm hurt so much that it was scant wonder he couldn’t cinch the saddle girth quite tightly enough, nor grip his sword as firmly as he ought. So none of it was really his fault.
But his mother was going to flay him alive all the same.
A qabda’an screamed the charge. The onslaught of Cazdeyyan warriors on their tough little horses came over a hill like an ocean wave of dappled brown hides and red-and-yellow tunics and flashing swords. Qamar was never sure when exactly it was that his own sword slipped from his fingers, or when the saddle lurched to one side and he fell off his horse. But all at once he was sprawled on the ground, and the wave broke open to avoid him as if he was an inconveniently placed rock. All around him was the same disgusting pungent odor that had nearly turned his stomach in the forester’s hut. Nearly became definitely, and he curled onto his side and vomited.
This simply could not be happening to him. He kept telling himself that as the hoofbeats faded into the distance. He was Sheyqir Qamar al-Ma’aliq of Tza’ab Rih. Ayia, that didn’t matter as much as the fact that he had never fallen off a horse in his life. His arm hurt and his head ached, his blistered feet felt swollen inside his boots, and he was lying in the dirt with his cheek in his own stinking sickness, and there was a new pain all at once in his thigh that he didn’t understand. He began to wish he’d never been born.
“So much for your career as a soldier,” a voice said some unknown amount of time later.
Qamar’s body twitched fitfully, and his eyelids cracked open, and he saw one of his Shagara relations regarding him with sardonic brown eyes in a golden-skinned face.
“Whatever would your mother say?” the man went on.
Qamar considered it a genuine pity that he’d survived to eventually find out.
The man folded his arms across his chest, and Qamar saw the light shift on the hazziri around his neck. The stones were different from those he was used to seeing a healer wear. “Sheyqir Allim might have a pertinent word or two, as well.”
Qamar squeezed his eyes shut. His arm and thigh no longer hurt, but he still felt slightly sick, and the repulsive barbarian smell seemed stuck inside his nostrils of its own explicit will, for there could not be anyone among the healers who used native plants. Perhaps they were treating enemy wounded in the dawa’an sheymma. The stink really was insupportable; he wondered how anyone not born in this cursed land could endure it.
A different voice made Qamar’s eyes open in startlement. “Find out who this one is. The look of him is right, but perhaps he’s a Tariq or Azwadh cousin who merely looks like one of us.”
Empress Mairid had always maintained that her youngest son was in possession of a fairly good mind, even though he seldom chose to use it. He didn’t intentionally use it now, but it worked all the same.
They didn’t know who he was.
If nothing else about him, they ought to have recognized Azzad alMa’aliq’s topaz ring, if not al-Gallidh’s pearl.
These people were not Shagara healers.
No, they were Shagara—did not the first man have the eyes and golden skin, and had not the second man said one of us? Possibly they were healers—Qamar’s lack of pain suggested it.
But they were not Shagara healers of Tza’ab Rih.
There was only one conclusion, and it didn’t please him at all that his mother was right, and his mind had turned out to be a rather fine one after all, even when he wasn’t trying to use it.
These people were the renegade Shagara who lived no one knew where and did no one knew what. Tza’ab Rih had not heard from them in years—ever since Ab’ya Alessid had rid the land of them most gladly.
Ayia, they were living in Cazdeyya, and they were practicing the traditional Shagara arts of healing and of hazziri, and Qamar had the dismal feeling that Tza’ab Rih was going to hear from them again, and in very unpleasant fashion, once they found out his name.
Or they might just kill him, the way those of their angry persuasion had killed his great-grandfather Azzad.
Qamar had indeed been captured by that faction of the Shagara who had long since vanished into the barbarian lands. They were healers, and they crafted hazziri, but things had changed in the long years since the first of them fled Tza’ab Rih.
For one thing, they had learned perforce the properties and uses of the plants now available to them and had adapted their magic accordingly, for the time-honored methods and formulas were useless in a country where none of the familiar herbs and flowers grew.