Possibly, Shoka thought, the men were amazed that Taizu sat there to be made up in bloody bandages, instead of shape-shifting herself; but no one asked—which just meant, he reckoned, that they made up their own reasons, which he had rather not ask, or even imagine.
Damn, the capacity of people to believe when they had to—when otherwise they had to know it was just themselves and no one god-blessed or special who had to ride into Anogi and romance their way past the Regent's hire-ons.
He had rather have had a demon or two, himself, given a choice.
But for a second choice, in a crisis where wit counted, he had as soon have Taizu.
It was a tired handful of mercenaries who rode down among the scatter of brown board buildings and fisher-shacks below Anogi southtown—that was what Shoka hoped the town saw, eleven men in motley armor plastered with yellow dust, and horses whose color had started bay and gone to ghost-yellow like their riders; one rider with a bandaged face, the cloth crusted with dirt and old blood and new, and that rider slumping wearily in the saddle among the rest, some of whom had lesser wounds. Not a prosperous group—and all the attention the town of Anogi paid to them as they rode was a surly glance and, continually down the street, the quiet latching of shutters and doors.
Click. Thump.
Through the town and down among the mercenaries on guard by the river—a slovenly camp, gear scattered around an evening-fire of boards, outside the ferryman's hut—
"It's hell back there," Shoka said, squatting there with a bored mercenary squad leader while his men waited on the ferry to come, doing a little trading for rice and a little dried fish—"Listen, don't be robbing us. That's a lousy piece." He indicated the thin one, and the man threw a broken bit of fish onto the dirty sacking, looked up at him with a that's-the-limit kind of scowl. "I'll tell you," Shoka said conversationally, "I'm from Bagoi, myself, and I'd just as soon be back there. Nothing but damn lies. They won't fight, the captain says. Hell. They cut us up. They fair cut us up down south."
"Where are they setting up?"
"No damn place, no damn place, that's what's going on down there! Whole place is coming loose around the edges. I don't like it. Me and mine, we'd like to cut out down by Mandi, get the hell out of here, but we ain't got paid, that's what, and it's going to be a hell of a long winter—"
"This Saukendar—this warlord that's supposed to've come in. You seen anything of that?"
"I dunno. I dunno what went through us. We ain't seen nothing except where we was supposed to find ours, there was theirs, and all I know, the captain's dead, there ain't no pay and I said to mine, We're going north, that's what—north, over-river, go up, get clear and get somewheres we get paid, damn right—Get enough money ahead we can get back home if this goes bad—"
"You think it's going that way?"
"Hell, I dunno, I dunno." He saw with relief the ferry pulling in toward shore. He folded up the sacking scrap around the fish, stuffed it in his bag and got up. "I tell you this—it ain't a bad thing to know where the road out is right now. We ain't spending from now on. That's how I think it is."
The mercenary gave him a worried look.
"They're headed up straight north," Shoka said. "Lungan, that's what I think; that's where they're coming across, coming right for the capital, and then watch the whole damn place come apart. I'd rather face regular soldiers than any damn farmers picking at you from hedges, I'll tell you that. But it ain't like you'll see any action here . . . not much chance. ..."
As the ferry pulled in.
Eleven riders and horses: there might have been townsmen and farmers with notions of using the ferry this morning, but no one came up to share the space. The horses went anxiously down the small board pier to the loading area, had to be tightly held when they felt the heave of the water (Jiro would have walked on in grand disdain, even after all these years) and one thanked the gods there were three stout-railed stalls on the deck, or one of the horses at least would have drowned itself, most likely the black-stockinged bay with the scarred chest. (Good riddance, Shoka thought of that horse, considering matters all along the trail. But it settled, with its head firmly lashed to the high rail.)
The real town of Anogi inched closer as the ferrymen plied the big oars—a free-moving ferry, this, the Hisei being too big and too trafficked to be crossed with ropes—a kind of barge that described a crescent-shaped course from shore to shore, a compromise with the current, while larger and smaller craft bound downriver went straight courses past, fishing boats and cargo boats and such. Business had not stopped at least: there was that much normalcy about the river, as if there were nothing at all going on to the south—but then, people who lived by trade, had to trade, and soldiers ate rice and used cloth and iron. And fishermen had to fish: the world might be askew and disaster threatening, but those boats had to go out so long as the weather permitted.
"You shouldn't talk to them," Taizu muttered, as they held close to the stall rails, keeping the horses calm while the ferry pitched in the wake of a passing barge. "You took a chance. You always said, don't take—"
"I bargained us another half a fish," Shoka said. "I thought that was damned sharp of me."
"Don't joke! There's too many of them!"
"We're fine. Don't look worried."
"Don't look worried! What else—"
A riverman came past, running toward the bow, and Taizu swallowed it down fast. They were coming in at Anogi proper, which loomed up in tiers above the riverside, the two halves of the city somewhat skewed from each other across the Hisei—but that was the way the current brought the ferry ashore, and that was the way the two halves had grown.
"Poor boy," Shoka said. "Don't try to talk. You'll open that up again."
Taizu glared at him.
"Trust me," Shoka said, and rested a hand on her shoulder. "We're doing just fine. Aren't we?"
"Not if you go talking to soldiers!"
"But I was one," Shoka said. "Don't worry about that part. Where are the damn levies from Choedri, that's what I'd give a lot to know. Maybe off at Anogi garrison. Maybe in Lungan or beyond it. It's not something I can ask without telling too much. But I used to have resources in Lungan. We'll see if anyone's left."
"And if they're scared enough of Ghita—"
"There's that risk. There's always that risk. People change. Loyalties do. Don't think I haven't thought about that."
"Who are you going to talk to?" she hissed; and choked off whatever came next: the riverman was coming back past, headed astern in the general commotion of putting in at the landing.
"Old acquaintances," Shoka said under his breath, and looked out over the bow of the ferry aimed toward Anogi north.
He thought of the old man and Lungan in about the same breath. He wondered was Jojin still alive—whether an aged grammarian had been too political to survive; or whether Jojin's priestly connections had saved his neck.
Two days on the road and he had gotten nothing from the ferry-guard, back there on the Tengu shore, of anything he did not know or could not have guessed. The general situation was all too old to gossip about, the present details too intricate to navigate in blind questions with a man who could raise a general alarm—that was what he had sensed when he had abandoned his attempt to get news and skirted around the edges of matters.
So he had gotten back to the matter of the fish, very quickly, and tried to answer nothing and gather what he could by implication.
About Saukendar: yes, the mercenaries north of the river knew he was abroad.
About trouble, even a collapse of the south into chaos: that certainly worried them but they had no trouble believing it.