He hesitated, and then with infinite tenderness he set to wiping Roshana free of the liquid filth that smeared her buttocks, her thighs, her private places.
‘How long since you ate?’ Rakhsar asked his twin, his face close to hers.
‘No food — I cannot stomach it, even the thought.’
‘We are a long way from the garden and the nightingales, Roshana. You must keep life in you.’
‘I want clean water. I am so thirsty.’
‘We’ll find some tonight.’ They had not realised just how different the world beyond the palace was. Not just in the obvious things, but in the very food they ate and the water they craved. The peasant farmers of Pleninash drank a liquid that was as opaque as soup, called it water, and seemed to thrive on it, as did Kurun and Ushau. Rakhsar could just tolerate it, but it had devastated Roshana.
‘We will sleep in comfort tonight,’ Rakhsar said fiercely. ‘I promise you that.’
Beside him, Kurun finished his task, and pulled Roshana’s garments down over her legs. Hesitantly, he patted the Kefren princess’s thigh.
‘Take your paws off my sister,’ Rakhsar snapped.
‘Forgive me, lord.’
‘Do not forget your station, Kurun. I value you, but you are still only a slave.’
The boy hung his head. ‘Yes, master.’
‘Good.’ Rakhsar touched Kurun under the chin, raising his head. ‘Now help me get her to the horses.’
Off the road the countryside was a patchwork of dyked fields in which rice rose green and thick from the water. There were raised causeways of red earth which the travellers took in single file, and each led to a junction of fruit trees — which they knew now to leave alone, for they were not yet ripe, though even the sight of the hanging peaches and pears set their soured mouths watering.
At the centre of each cluster of fields and clumped orchards would be a mud-brick hut with the earth packed into a yard around it, sometimes a rough wooden fence hemming in a few chickens, or a brace of hogs. They had avoided these little steadings up until now, but Rakhsar did not know how many more nights in the open Roshana could survive.
This night would be different.
A hufsa woman saw them as she went to the well with a leather bucket. She stopped in her tracks, and a naked toddler came running after her and set its fists in her skirts and began to wail.
‘Talk to her,’ Rakhsar told Kurun. ‘Tell her we want food, clean water set to boil, and a place to sleep. I will pay her husband.’ His hand settled on the hilt of the scimitar, and he made sure the woman saw it.
It was interminable, this reasoning with people. Rakhsar was not accustomed to it. All his life he had stated what he wanted and it had been instantly to hand. He could barely get by in the common Asurian that the hufsan spoke, and this far into the backwaters of the empire, the people knew no Kefren.
And yet this, too, is my own country.
It had been easier crossing the Magron, for there were more places to hide in the high country, and the water was good, the highland folk a sturdy, hospitable breed who were used to seeing high-caste Kefren come and go. Their travels in the mountains had accorded more with Rakhsar’s notions of what a heroic escape should be. At least at first.
They had lost Maidek and Maryam to an avalanche, and the horses too. Ushau had dug the rest of them out of the suffocating layered snow one by one, and the rest of their passage had been on foot. They had become thieves in the night, stealing and poaching to eat, afraid of every shadow, barely able to light a fire in the dark to keep the blood in their veins from freezing. Like dogs, they had huddled together, all differences in caste and station forgotten in the struggle to survive.
But it had hardened them. Kurun had healed with the astonishing speed of the young, and Ushau was well- nigh indestructible. Rakhsar had adjusted also, something long buried in him rising to the challenge. Even savouring it, as an angry man will savour his own fury.
But Roshana had shrunk before their eyes, a bird unaccustomed to life outside the cage.
And now it had begun to tease Rakhsar’s thoughts in the darkest spaces of the night.
What if she dies?
And even; she slows us down. Better to leave her, somewhere safe.
But if they did, Ushau would stay with her, no question. Perhaps the boy, too. Rakhsar had no illusions about his own ability to generate loyalty.
And so they had limped along, down into the warm wet plains of the Middle Empire at last, into a floundering march of muck and insects and noisome water. No-one asked Rakhsar where they were going, and there were times he no longer knew himself. He knew only that they must continue west, ahead of Kouros’s agents. They could not stop moving. They had come too far to be caught now.
But he knew also that there were not many more pasangs left in them.
The interior of the mud house was smoke-blackened, the earth floor packed hard as marble. The woman of the house was baking flatbreads on a stone griddle above the fire, turning them with the easy flick of long practice. The child clung to her leg, and when urine dribbled unheeded down its own, a little pi-dog came fawning out of a corner and licked it clean, before retreating apologetically again.
Roshana lay on a mud-built platform, covered in a thick mat of woven reeds. Aside from two stools made from the hewn cylinders of a palm trunk, this was the house’s only furniture. The woman had a large shallow pot of poor iron which she took down from its place on the wall as if it were a king’s crown, and setting it on the coals she dashed oil into it from a gourd and then tossed in some greens and corn. This she poked at for a few seconds, then tilted up the pot and emptied the shining contents onto two flatbreads. They were rolled up, torn in two, and offered round.
No-one spoke. It seemed to Rakhsar he had never in his life tasted anything so fine. Kurun smiled up at the woman from where he squatted on the floor, and she smiled back, warming to his beauty and his youth. Ushau thanked her gravely in Asurian, prayed briefly over the morsel, and then ate it in two bites, closing his eyes as he chewed.
Roshana could not eat. She lay on the woven reeds shivering, though it was sweating-hot in the house. The woman bent over her, touched her white forehead, sniffed, and then before Rakhsar could stop her, she had lifted up his sister’s robes and was peering below, frowning.
Rakhsar leapt up. ‘Don’t touch her!’
The woman cowered, and the child began to cry. In the corner the little pi-dog bared his teeth and snarled.
‘Master, she means no harm,’ Kurun said. The boy rose and held out his hands like a priest blessing them both.
‘My sister is not to be gawked at by some swamp-caste bitch hufsa.’
The woman spoke, lifting her child into her arms, gesturing to Roshana and then to Rakhsar.
‘She wants us to leave.’
Rakhsar reached inside his sash-purse, which was now as thin as the sash itself. He found two copper obols and held them out. ‘Give these to her. Tell her my sister must sleep here tonight. We cannot leave.’
The woman took the money, and her eyes grew shrewd. She spoke again.
‘She says she can help the lady Roshana.’
‘Well, let’s see if she can, Kurun. But I shall watch over her, and if she does us wrong, I shall have Ushau break her neck. And her brat’s, too.’
The woman was alone. As they sat there through the night, she told Kurun that her husband had been sent for by the Great King to fight in his army, and had gone east some weeks before.
She talked almost continually as she worked, and little by little the sense of the words began to order itself to Rakhsar. Asurian and High Kefren had once been the same language, but the high castes that dwelt in the ziggurats had drawn apart from the hufsan who made up the bulk of the empire, and over centuries of privilege their speech patterns had changed. Since the Great King spoke this evolving language, so did every courtier, high ranking officer and civil servant of the empire. It had become the language of the rulers.
