Children of Earth and Sky Read online

  He hoped they’d make that sort of mistake judging him. It might be possible to behave in such a way as to encourage it. That could even be amusing.

  The rain had stopped. It was quiet outside now. He wished he’d kept the girl, she’d have been warm. And the court might have drawn some conclusions about him. Not entirely false ones, he conceded, but it would be useful if they considered him only sensuous and incompetent.

  He lay in bed and thought about the pirates of Senjan, the raiders behind their reefs and walls. His first task here. He was to induce this emperor—who had actually remembered him, glimpsed once as a boy—to allow Seressa to destroy them in the name of goodwill and trade.

  He’d been authorized to offer money outright, not just loans. The emperor needed money. The Osmanlis would almost certainly be coming back against him in the spring.

  CHAPTER II

  She hadn’t intended to bring the dog when she went out on a moonless night to begin the next stage of her life.

  Problem was, Tico jumped in the boat while she was pushing it off the strand and refused to leave when she hissed a command at him. She knew that if she pushed him into the shallow water he’d start barking in protest, and she couldn’t allow that.

  So her dog was with her as she began rowing out into the black bay. It could have been comical, except it wasn’t because she was here to kill people, and for all her hard, cold reputation in Senjan, she had never done that.

  It was time, Danica thought.

  The Senjani named themselves heroes, warriors of the god defending a dangerous border. If she was going to make herself accepted as a raider among them, not just a someday mother of fighters (and daughter of one, and granddaughter), she needed to begin. And she had her vengeance to pursue. Not against Seressa, but this could be a start.

  No one knew she was out tonight in her family’s small boat. She’d been careful. She was unmarried, lived alone now in their house (everyone in her family was dead, since last summer). She could come and go silently at night, and all the young people in Senjan knew how to get through the town walls if they needed to, on the landward side, or down to the stony beach and the boats.

  The raid leaders might punish her after tonight, the emperor’s small garrison almost certainly would want to, but she was prepared for that. She just needed to succeed. Recklessness and pride, courage and faith in Jad, and prowess, that was how the Senjani understood themselves. They could punish her and still honour her—if she did what she was out here to do. If she was right about tonight.

  Nor did she find it distressing that the men she intended to kill were fellow worshippers of Jad, not god-denying Osmanlis—like the ones who had destroyed her own village years ago.

  Danica had no trouble summoning hatred for arrogant Seressa across the narrow sea. For one thing, that republic traded greedily with the infidels, betraying the god in pursuit of gold.

  For another, Seressa had been blockading Senjan, keeping all the boats pinned in the harbour or on the strand, and the town was hungry now. The Seressinis controlled Hrak Island, which was so near you could swim to it, and they’d forbidden the islanders, on pain of hanging, from dealing with Senjan. (There was some smuggling, but not enough, not nearly so.) They were bent on starving the Senjani, or destroying them if they came out. There was no mystery to it.

  A good-sized overland party of twenty raiders had gone east through the pass into Asharite lands a week ago, but end of winter was not a time to find much in the way of food there, and there were terrible risks.

  It was too early to know if the Osmanlis were advancing towards the imperial fortresses again this year, but they probably would be. Here in the west, the heroes of Senjan could try to capture animals or take villagers for ransom. They could fight the savage hadjuks in fair numbers if they met them, but not if those numbers were greatly increased, and not if the hadjuks had cavalry with them from the east.

  Everything carried risks for ordinary people these days. The powers in their courts didn’t appear to spend much time thinking about the heroes of Senjan—or any of the men and women on the borderlands.

  The triple border, they called it: Osmanli Empire, Holy Jaddite Empire, Republic of Seressa. Ambitions collided here. These lands were where good people suffered and died for their families and faith.

  The loyal heroes of Senjan were useful to their emperor. When there was war with Asharias they’d receive letters of praise on expensive paper from Obravic, and every so often half a dozen more soldiers to be garrisoned in the tall round tower inland from their walls, augmenting the handful usually here. But when the demands of trade, or finance, or conflicts among the Jaddite nations, or the need to end such conflicts, or whatever other factors in the lofty world of courts caused treaties to be made—well, then the raiders of Senjan, the heroes, became expendable. A problem, a threat to harmony if the Osmanli court or aggrieved Seressini ambassadors registered complaints.

  These bloodthirsty savages have violated our sworn peace with the Osmanlis, the terms of a treaty. They have seized shipped goods, raided villages, sold people into slavery . . . So Seressa had notoriously written.

  An emperor, reading that, needed to be more honourable, more aware, Danica thought, rowing under stars. Didn’t he understand what they needed from him? Villages or farms on a violent border divided by faith didn’t become peaceful because of pen strokes in courts far away.

  If you lived on stony land or by a stony strand you still needed to feed yourself and your children. Heroes and warriors shouldn’t be named savages so easily.

  If the emperor didn’t pay them to defend his land (their land!), or send soldiers to do it, or allow them to find goods and food for themselves, asking nothing of him, what did he want them to do? Die?

  If Senjani seafarers boarded trading galleys and roundships, it was only for goods belonging to heretics. Jaddite merchants with goods in the holds were protected. Or, well, they were supposed to be. They usually were. No one was going to deny that extremes of need and anger might cause some raiders to be a little careless in sorting which merchant various properties belonged to on a taken ship.

  Why do they ignore us in Obravic? she asked suddenly, in her mind.

  You want honourable behaviour from courts? A foolish wish, her grandfather said.

  I know, she replied, in thought, which was how she spoke with him. He’d been dead almost a year. The plague of last summer.

  It had taken her mother, too, which is why Danica was alone now. There were about seven or eight hundred people in Senjan most of the time (more took refuge if there was trouble inland). Almost two hundred had died here in two successive summers.

  There were no assurances in life, even if you prayed, honoured Jad, lived as decently as you could. Even if you had already suffered what someone might fairly have said was enough. But how did you measure what was enough? Who decided?

  Her mother didn’t talk to her in her mind. She was gone. So were her father and older brother, ten years ago in a burning village. They didn’t talk to her.

  Her grandfather was in her head at all times. They spoke to one another, clearly, silently. Had done so from the moment, just about, that he’d died.

  What just happened? he’d said. Exactly that, abruptly, in her mind, as Danica walked away from the pyre where he and her mother had burned with half a dozen other plague victims.

  She had screamed. Wheeled around in a mad, terrified circle, she remembered. Those beside her had thought it was grief.

  How are you here? she’d cried out, silently. Her eyes had been wide open, staring, seeing nothing.

  Danica! I don’t know!

  You died!

  I know I did.

  It was impossible, appalling. And became unimaginably comforting. She’d kept it secret, from that day to this night. There were those, and not just clerics, who would burn her if this became kno
wn.

  It defined her life now, as much as the deaths of her father and brother had—and the memory of their small, sweet little one, Neven, the younger brother taken by the hadjuks in that night raid years ago. The raid that had brought three of them fleeing to Senjan: her grandfather, her mother, herself at ten years old.

  So she talked in her thoughts with a man who was dead. She was as good with a bow as anyone in Senjan, better than anyone she knew with knives. Her grandfather had taught her both while he was alive, from when she was only a girl. There were no boys any more in the family to teach. They had both learned to handle boats here. It was what you did in Senjan. She had learned to kill with a thrown knife and a held one, to loose arrows from a boat, judging the movements of the sea. She was extremely good at that. It was why she had a chance to do what she was here to do tonight.

  She wasn’t, Danica knew, an especially conventional young woman.

  She swung her quiver around and checked the arrows: habit, routine. She’d brought a lot of them, odds were very much against a strike with each one, out here on the water. Her bow was dry. She’d been careful. A wet bowstring was next to useless. She wasn’t sure how far she’d have to aim—if this even happened. If the Seressinis were indeed coming. It wasn’t as if they’d made her a promise.

  It was a mild night, one of the first of a cold spring. Little wind. She couldn’t have done this in a rough sea. She dropped her cloak from her shoulders. She looked up at the stars. When she was young, back in their village, sleeping outdoors behind the house on hot summer nights, she used to fall asleep trying to count them. Numbers went on and on, apparently. So did stars. She could almost understand how Asharites might worship them. Except it meant denying Jad, and how could anyone do that?

  Tico was motionless at the prow, facing out to sea as if he were a figurehead. She wasn’t able to put into words how much she loved her dog. There was no one to say it to, anyhow.

  Wind now, a little: her grandfather, in her mind.

  I know, she replied quickly, although in truth she’d only become aware of it in the moment he told her. He was acute that way, sharper than she was when it came to certain things. He used her senses now—sight, smell, touch, sound, even taste. She didn’t understand how. Neither did he.

  She heard him laugh softly in her head, at the too-swift reply. He’d been a fighter, a hard, harsh man to the world. Not with his daughter and granddaughter, though. His name had also been Neven, her little brother named for him. She called him “zadek,” their family’s own name for “grandfather,” going back a long way, her mother had told her.

  She knew he was worried, didn’t approve of what she was doing. He’d been blunt about it. She had given him her reasons. They hadn’t satisfied. She cared about that, but she also didn’t. He was with her, but he didn’t control her life. He couldn’t do anything to stop her from doing what she chose. She also had the ability to close him off in her mind, shut down their exchanges and his ability to sense anything. She could do that any time she wanted. He hated it when she did.

  She didn’t like it either, in truth, though there were times (when she was with men, for example) when it was useful and extremely necessary. She was alone without him, though. There was Tico. But still.

  I did know it was changing, she protested.

  The freshening wind was north and east, could become a bura, in fact, which would make the sea dangerous, and almost impossible for a bow. These were her waters, however, her home now, since her first home had burned.

  You weren’t supposed to be angry with the god, it was presumption, heresy. Jad’s face on the domes and walls of sanctuaries showed his love for his children, the clerics said. Holy books taught his infinite compassion and courage, battling darkness every night for them. But there had been no compassion from the god, or the hadjuks, in her village that night. She dreamed of fires.

  And the proud and glorious Republic of Seressa, self-proclaimed Queen of the Sea, traded with those Osmanlis, by water routes and overland. And because of that trade, that greed, Seressa was starving the heroes of Senjan now, because the infidels were complaining.

  The Seressinis hanged raiders when they captured them, or just killed them on board ships and threw the bodies into the sea without Jad’s rites. They worshipped golden coins in Seressa more than the golden god, that was what people said.

  The wind eased. Not about to be a bura, she thought. She stopped rowing. She was far enough out for now. Her grandfather was silent, leaving her to concentrate on watching in the dark.

  The only thing he’d ever offered as an explanation for this impossible link they shared was that there were traditions in their family—her mother’s family, his—of wisewomen and second sight.

  Anything like this? she’d asked.

  No, he’d replied. Nothing I ever heard.

  She’d never experienced anything that suggested a wisewoman’s sight in herself, any access to the half-world, anything at all besides a defining anger, skill with a bow and knives, and the best eyesight in Senjan.

  That last was the other thing that made tonight possible. It was black on the water, only stars above, neither moon in the sky—which was why she was here now. She’d been fairly certain that if the Seressinis did do this they would come on a moonless night. They were vicious and arrogant, but never fools.

  Two war galleys, carrying three hundred and fifty oarsmen and mercenary fighters, with new bronze cannons from Seressa’s Arsenale, had been blocking the bay, both ends of Hrak Island, since winter’s end, but they hadn’t been able to do anything but that.

  The galleys were too big to come closer in. These were shallow, rocky, reef-protected seas, and Senjan’s walls and their own cannons could handle any shore party sent on foot from a landing farther south. Besides which, putting mercenaries ashore on lands formally ruled by the emperor could be seen as a declaration of war. Seressa and Obravic danced a dance, always, but there were too many other dangers in the world to start a war carelessly.

  The republic had tried to blockade Senjan before, but never with two war galleys. This was a huge investment of money and men and time, and neither ship’s captain could be happy sitting in open water with chilled, bored, restless fighters, achieving nothing for his own career.

  The blockade was working, however. It was doing real harm, though it was hard for those on the galleys to know that yet.

  In the past, the Senjani had always found ways of getting offshore, but this was different, with two deadly ships controlling the lanes to north and south of the island that led to sea.

  It seemed the Council of Twelve had decided the raiders had finally become too much of a nuisance to be endured. There had been mockery: songs and poetry. Seressa was not accustomed to being a source of amusement. They claimed this sea, they named it after themselves. And, more importantly, they guaranteed the safety of all ships coming up to dock by their canals for their merchants and markets. The heroes of Senjan, raiding to feed themselves, and for the greater glory of Jad, were a problem.

  Danica offered a thought to her grandfather.

  Yes, a thorn in the lion’s paw, he agreed.

  The Seressinis called themselves lions. A lion was on their flag and their red document seals. There were apparently lions on columns in the square before their palace, on either side of the slave market.

  Danica preferred to call them wild dogs, devious and dangerous. She thought she could kill some of them tonight, if they sent a skiff into the bay, intending to set fire to the Senjani boats drawn up on the strand below the walls.

  —

  HE WASN’T GOING to say he loved her or anything like that. That wasn’t the way the world went on Hrak Island. But Danica Gradek did drift into his dreams, and had done so for a while now. On the island and in Senjan there were women who interpreted dreams for a fee. Mirko didn’t need them for these.

 
She was unsettling, Danica. Different from any of the girls on Hrak, or in the town when he made his way across to trade fish or wine.

  You had to trade very cautiously these days. Seressa had forbidden anyone to deal with the pirates this spring. There were war galleys. You’d be flogged or branded if caught, could even be hanged, depending on who did the catching and how much your family could afford in bribes. Seressa almost certainly had spies in Senjan, too, so you needed to be careful that way, as well. Seressa had spies everywhere, was the general view.

  Danica was younger than him but always acted as if she were older. She could laugh, but not always when you’d said something you thought was amusing. She was too cold, the other men said, you’d freeze your balls making love to her. They talked about her, though.

  She handled a bow better than any of them. Better than anyone Mirko knew, anyhow. It was unnatural in a woman, wrong, ought to have been displeasing, but for Mirko it wasn’t. He didn’t know why. Her father, it was said, had been a famous fighter in his day. A man of reputation. He’d died in a hadjuk village raid, somewhere on the other side of the mountains.

  Danica was tall. Her mother had been, too. She had yellow hair and extremely light blue eyes. There was northern blood in the family. Her grandfather had had eyes like that. He’d been a scary figure when he came to Senjan, scarred and fierce, thick moustaches, a border hero of the old style, men said.

  She’d kissed him once, Danica. Just a few days ago, in fact. He’d been ashore south of the town walls with two casks of wine before dawn, thin blue moon setting. She and three others he knew had been waiting on the strand to buy from him. They’d used torches to signal from the beach.

  It happened he had learned something not long before and—on an impulse—he’d asked her to walk a little away from the others. There had been jokes, of course. Mirko didn’t mind, and she hadn’t looked as if she did. It was hard to read her and he wouldn’t claim to be good at understanding women, anyhow.