‘Poor woman’s as lost and fearful as she could be,’ Wren said as she squatted down beside Brennan and Hamdan.
‘Might be less so if she’d not tricked us,’ muttered Brennan.
‘The harm’s not mortal,’ said Wren calmly. ‘Yulan and Lorin seem to reckon we’ve time yet to do what we came here to do.’
‘Sooner the better,’ Brennan said. ‘I’ve never been so hot or grimy in my life. And every night, some evil swarm’s been biting me. Never hear or see a thing. But the itching, that I feel.’
‘Probably sandflies,’ Hamdan grunted. ‘Could be sting-ants. Maybe ghost scorpions.’
‘Ghost scorpions?’ Brennan repeated, alarm raising his eyebrows. ‘Really?’
‘No, not really,’ Hamdan said with a straight face.
‘Oh. I’d believe anything out here. Never seen so much angry life and so little water. Can’t seem to shake my thirst, no matter how much I drink.’
‘You give it time. You stay with the Free long enough, you’ll see worse places than this. Anyway, there’s a whole pool a couple of hundred paces beyond that hummock,’ Hamdan said, jabbing a thumb in the relevant direction.
‘A pool?’ Brennan echoed him, almost disbelieving.
‘Cool and fresh,’ Wren confirmed.
‘Let me clean myself,’ Marweh said unexpectedly behind them. ‘I haven’t been better than half-clean since the night I was taken.’
‘It’ll not kill you to wait another while,’ Hamdan told her without looking round. He was usually a good-humoured and rather forgiving man, but he had not yet found much amusement in the tale of Marweh and the waterskins.
‘Let the woman wash,’ Wren scolded him. ‘We’ve another hour or more before we ride on. For all that you men moan and bleat, she’s suffered more and worse than any of us. Just because she wounded your pride, you shouldn’t make yourselves cruel.’
Hamdan shrugged.
‘I’ll take her,’ Brennan sighed.
It looked like luxury. Brennan understood that it was just a long, shallow pool fringed by a few reeds and some small trees a bit-but not entirely-like the willows of his homeland. He understood how meagre and modest a place this would have seemed to him not long ago. And understanding all that, it still looked like luxury. After a few days breathing the heat and the dust of these wastes, it was almost intoxicating to see the sun glint on the surface of real water and to hear a gentle breeze stirring through those thin-leaved fronds.
There were dead trees and fallen branches at the water’s edge too. Perhaps there was not always water here; perhaps not all the trees had the stubbornness to wait out long, dry times. He noticed that and gave it no heed. He had eyes only for the life, the green. And the water that was here now, today, above all. It had drawn a flock of desert doves. They thronged the far side of the pool, little gems of soft colour.
Brennan knelt and scooped handfuls of the wonderful wet up to his lips. Marweh, beside him, did the same.
‘This land’s harder than any of you, slaver or Free,’ she murmured once they had slaked their thirst.
‘We don’t belong in the same breath as them.’
‘No? Men with swords all look much alike to my kind.’
He frowned at her, though in truth he was more annoyed at himself than her. He should not be concerned by what she thought of the Free.
‘I’m here to bathe, aren’t I?’ she asked.
He nodded distractedly, still staring at her. After a moment or two, she raised her eyebrows meaningfully.
‘You think what I deserve, after all of this, is to be humbled some more? You think I want any man but my husband to set eyes on me when I bathe?’
A few years ago, Brennan would have blushed at that. A woman even talking of her nakedness would have left him scrambling for excuses or a hiding place. Not so now. He had grown to manhood in more ways than one among the Free. Still, he should have thought of her modesty sooner. Much as he chafed at what she had done, and thought her a fool for it, he had no desire to humiliate her.
‘I’ll stand over there,’ he said, just a tiny trace of truculence in his tone. He did not want to appear too apologetic any more than he wished to appear cruel.
‘With your back turned.’
‘Fine. But you talk to me while you’re washing so I know you’re not swimming off.’
She laughed at that. The first time he had heard anything approaching amusement from her.
‘You think I’ll splash away, naked, into the desert?’
He shrugged, and set his back to the water.
He heard her clothes falling to the ground and water lapping at her ankles as she waded out. Then splashing, the fall of drops. The sound made him unexpectedly uncomfortable. Just a little. He could even imagine that if he listened to it for too long, or thought about it too deeply, he might rediscover the ability to blush.
‘Thought you were going to talk,’ he said gruffly.
‘About what? Can’t you hear well enough that I’m right here?’
‘I suppose so.’
She was quiet for a little while. Not long.
‘Do you have a family then?’ she asked. ‘That old one of you has two wives. How many have you got?’
‘None. I’ve a mother, and a brother and sister. Back where I came from. I’ve not seen them for years. Never knew my father.’
‘Ah,’ Marweh said, as if he had spoken more than he knew.
There was a gentle splashing and a pattering of drops on the surface of the pool. Brennan imagined her to be shaking her hair.
‘Ah, what?’ he demanded.
‘Think you’ve made yourself a new family, do you? A whole warband of fathers?’
‘No.’
‘Why do you do what you do then? You men of blood. Is it just that you like the fighting, the killing? You like the strength of it all, and the lording it over others?’
Brennan shook his head without knowing if she was even watching him. She could not be more wrong, he was sure, but he did not quite have his own words for why. He had heard many others among the Free speak of it now and again though. They had words.
‘It’s not that I like the fighting,’ he said. Which was not entirely true. It did excite him; he was not afraid of it. ‘In all the Kingdom there’s one who doesn’t bend the knee to anyone: Crex the King. There’s him, and there’s the Free, and there’s no one else. We’re the only ones save him who could be called by that name and have it be true. There’s no lord above us; there’s none below us.’
‘That what you do the fighting and the killing for then, is it? Nothing to do with all the gold, I don’t suppose.’
When she asked the question like that, Brennan did know the answer. He did not give it to her because he did not think she would really understand it, or entirely believe it.
The gold had never been that important. Not to him anyway. The Free did indeed make those who survived it rich, and there were those who fought and sometimes died for that very reason. They were not him. He fought and might die for those who did the same thing alongside him. For the shared, bright life they lived, that none who did not share it could ever fully comprehend. For the suffering they had shared, and the pleasures they had tasted and the fears they had conquered together. Yes, for the family they had become, some of them, just as Marweh said. Not that he was going to admit as much to her.
‘I don’t know how you can do it, all the killing,’ Marweh was saying. ‘Even men who deserve nothing better.’
‘We do what we must. You farm. I fight.’
He heard her rising out of the water, and instinctively started to turn his head a little.
‘You keep your eyes to yourself until I’m dried and dressed,’ she warned him, and he half-raised an apologetic hand. Kept his back to her and his gaze fixed on the dry grass before him. It was so close to the pool, that grass, yet still yellow and brittle-looking. Step just a few paces from the water and everything here was thirsty.
‘We all do what our nature calls us to,’ he said.
He had heard that from Lorin a while back. Lorin and Manadar, both of them, had movement in their nature. Unsettled. If Brennan was honest, he was not certain what his nature really called him to. Perhaps it would come to him one day. For now, it was enough to be a part of something much greater than he could ever be alone. To be among friends and family.