The Greys methodically applied their bamboo canes and invited the youths to take up any complaints with the Protector. The acolytes were smarter than they pretended. They got the hell out of there before the Greys used their whistles to invite all their friends to the caning.
All part of night in the city. Doj and I drifted onward.
Eventually he led me to a place called the Deer Park, which is an expanse of wilderness near the center of the city. It had been created by some despot of centuries past.
I told Doj, "I really don't need all this exercise." I wondered if he had some goofball plan to murder me and leave the body under the trees. But what would be the point?
Doj was Doj. With him, you never knew.
"I feel more comfortable here," he said. "But I never stay long. There is a company of rangers charged with keeping squatters out. They consider anyone not Taglian and high caste a squatter. This is good. This log has shaped itself to my posterior."
The log in question tripped me. I got back onto my feet and said, "I'm listening."
"Sit. This will take a while."
"Leave out the begats." Which was a Jaicuri Vehdna colloquialism having to do with difficulties memorizing scripture, which you have to do as a child. I meant, "Don't bother telling me whose fault it was and why they're such bloody villains for it. Just tell me what happened."
"Asking a storyteller not to embellish is like asking a fish to give up water."
"I do have to go to work tomorrow."
"As you will. You are aware, are you not, that the Free Companies of Khatovar and the roving bands of Stranglers who murder for the glory of Kina share a common ancestry?"
"There's enough suggestion in our recent Annals to allow for that interpretation," I admitted. Caution seemed indicated.
"My place amongst the Nyueng Bao would correspond roughly with yours as Annalist of the Black Company. It includes, as well, the role of the priest in the Strangler band—whose secondary obligation is to maintain a sound oral history of the band. Over the centuries the toog have lost their respect for education."
My own studies suggested that a great deal of evolution had taken place in my Company during those same centuries. Probably a lot more than had been the case with the Deceiver bands. They had stayed inside one culture that had not changed a lot. Meanwhile, the Black Company kept moving into stranger and stranger lands, old soldiers being replaced by young foreigners who had no connection with the past and no idea that Khatovar even existed.
Doj seemed to echo my thoughts. "The Strangler bands are pale imitations of the original Free Companies. The Black Company retains the name and some of the memories, but you're philosophically much farther from the original than the Deceivers are. Your band is ignorant of its true antecedents and has been kept that way willfully, mainly through the manipulations of the goddess Kina, but also, to a lesser extent, by others who didn't want your Company to become what it had been in another time."
I waited. He did not volunteer to explain. Doj was difficult that way.
He did, I suppose, do something that was even harder for him. He told the truth about his own people. "Nyueng Bao are the almost pure-blooded descendants of the people of one of the Free Companies. One that chose not to go back."
"But the Black Company is supposed to be the only one that didn't go back. The Annals say—"
"They tell you only what those who recorded them knew. My ancestors arrived here after the Black Company finished laying the land to waste and moved on north, already having lost sight of its divine mission. Deserting in its own way, through ignorance of what it was supposed to be. By then it was already three generations old and had made no effort to maintain the purity of its blood. It had just fought the war which is the first that your Annalists remember and was almost completely destroyed. That seems to be the fate of the Black Company. To be reduced to a handful, then to reconstitute itself. Again and again. Losing something of its previous self each time."
"And the fate of your Company?" I noted that he did not mention a name. No matter, really. No name would mean anything to me.
"To sink ever deeper into ignorance itself. I know the truth. I know the secrets and the old ways. But I'm the last. Unlike other Companies, we brought our families with us. We were a late experiment. We had too much to lose. We deserted. We went and hid in the swamps. But we've kept our lineage pure. Almost."
"And the pilgrimages? The old people who died in Jaicur? Hong Tray? And the great, dark, terrible secret of the Nyueng Bao that Sahra worries about so much?"
"The Nyueng Bao have many dark secrets. All the Free Companies had dark secrets. We were instruments of the darkness. The Soldiers of Darkness. The Bone Warriors charged with opening the way for Kina. Stone Soldiers warring for the honor of being remembered for all eternity, by having our names written in golden letters in glittering stone. We failed because our ancestors were imperfect in their devotion. In every company there were those who were too weak to bring on the Year of the Skulls."
"The old people?"
"Ky Dam and Hong Tray. Ky Dam was the last elected Nyueng Bao captain. There was no one to take his place. Hong Tray was a witch with the curse of foresight. She was the last true priest. Priestess."
"Curse of foresight?"
"She never foresaw anything good."
I sensed that he did not want to get into that subject. I recalled that Hong Tray's final prophecy involved Murgen and Sahra, which certainly was an offense to all right-thinking Nyueng Bao—and was not yet a prophecy completely fulfilled, probably.
"The great sin of the Nyueng Bao?"
"You had that idea from Sahra, of course. And she, like all those born after the coming of the Shadowmasters, believes that ‘sin' is what caused the Nyueng Bao to flee into the swamps. She believes wrongly. That flight involved no sin, but survival. The true black sin occurred within my own lifetime." His voice tightened up. He had strong feelings about this.
I waited.
"I was a small boy just taking my first small steps on the Path of the Sword when the stranger came. He was a personable man of middle years. His name was Ashutosh Yaksha. In the oldest form of the language Ashutosh meant something like Despair of the Wicked. Yaksha meant much the same as it does in Taglian today." Which was "good spirit." "People were prepared to believe he was a supernatural being because he had a white skin. A very pale, white skin, lighter than Goblin or Willow Swan, who sometimes get some sunlight. He wasn't an albino, though. He had normal eyes. His hair wasn't quite as blond as Swan's is. In sum, he was a magical creature to most Nyueng Bao. He spoke the language oddly but he did speak it. He said he wanted to study at the Vinh Gao Ghang temple, the fame of which had reached him far away.
"When pressed about his origins, he insisted that he hailed from ‘The Land of Unknown Shadows, beneath the stars of the Noose.' "
"He claimed to have come off the glittering stone?"
"Not quite. That was never clear. There or beyond. No one pressed him hard. Not even Ky Dam or Hong Tray, though he troubled them. Very early we learned that Ashutosh was a powerful sorcerer. And in those days many of the older people still knew about the origins of the Nyueng Bao. It was feared that he might have been sent to summon us home. That proved to be untrue. For a long time Ashutosh seemed to be nothing but what he claimed, a student who wanted to absorb whatever wisdom had accumulated at the temple of Ghanghesha. Which had been a holy place since the Nyueng Bao first entered the swamp."