They battled forward. Here, though disorganized, the Habakar resistance proved fierce. The clot around the prince's blue lion shrank, and shrank, but each gain was hard won. Yermolov fell, and then a rider to her left. All at once, she came up beside Konstans. He grinned at her. Blood spattered his face and surcoat, and blood leaked from an arrow wound in his horse's withers.
'The stubborn bastard won't surrender!' he shouted. She could barely hear him. 'Here!' he cried. 'Pull your jahar back. We're getting pressed too close together.'
Obediently, she shouted aloud and found a flag to signal the withdrawal. Bit by bit, she pulled her jahar back and at last, coming out into the open, they formed back into ranks. What was left of them. She judged she had lost a third of her men.
The field lay open under the sky, churned into mud. Wounded and dead lay everywhere, in some places heaped in piles where they'd fallen over each other; in others, a single form lay tumbled alone on a sodden stretch of ground. From here, Nadine could see off to the north the line of riders and the gold banner that marked Bakhtiian's position. To the south she could not see, but she heard cries and the clamor of battle retreating away up into the hills. The clot around the Habakar prince shrank, and shrank, under the deadly press of two jahars. Abruptly, by a signal Nadine did not see, the jaran riders pulled away and a unit of archers rode up and began firing at will into the last knot of defenders.
'We'll ride south,' said Nadine, surveying her men. They rode, and for a while they hunted, cutting down the fleeing Habakar soldiers, those who had gotten that far.
But as afternoon lowered toward evening, Nadine turned them back and returned to the field to hunt for their own wounded and to round up those horses that could be saved. Already many of the light troops wandered the field, killing the Habakar wounded and stripping and marking the dead. A steady line of casualties walked or rode toward Bakhtiian's position, but Nadine noted that his gold banner had moved.
She found him by the corpse of the Habakar prince.
He glanced up, seeing her. He looked tired. 'He fought bravely enough,' he said, although Nadine was not sure he was really speaking to her, to his niece, at all. She had a strange feeling that he was speaking to less, almost as if he was defending himself to her. 'But he refused to surrender. Had he led the army on the field outside Qurat, the victory might not have gone our way so easily.'
Vershinin's nephew was stripping the body, and Nadine examined the dead Habakar prince with some interest- with his chest-length black beard, dark hair looped in double braids, and his throat red with his own blood. Not particularly handsome, but so few of the khaja were; still, he looked strong, and the wounds his body had suffered-some fresh, some old scars-proved his courage in battle. Evidently he had cut his own throat rather than surrender to the jaran. Or the arrow in his eye might have killed him. Of his guard, none lived.
'Vershinin,' Bakhtiian continued, 'I'll leave you to follow after, but I'm returning to Karkand with my guard now. I'll leave you three healers who've been trained by Dr. Hierakis. They'll judge those who can survive the journey back to the hospital, and those it would be more merciful to kill now.'
Nadine got leave for a few minutes to find her men among the wounded. She marked them, and was relieved to find over half those who had been missing, although at least one she judged would not make it back to camp. She found Yermolov; a chance cut by a khaja axman had severed the straps of his thigh armor, and a better aimed one had cut his exposed leg down to the bone, but already a healer cleaned mud and cloth out of it, muttering about something called sepsis.
'What is sepsis, Mother?' Nadine asked the elderly woman.
'There, you're done to fight again, young man,' said the woman to Yermolov, who wasn't all that young except perhaps in comparison to her. She grunted and got to her feet and crossed a patch of baked-dry mud to crouch down beside a wounded archer. Two young men trailed after her, burdened with strips of cloth, with pouches filled with water, and a paste of herbal ointment. 'Commander,' she said, looking briefly up at Nadine, 'it's what kills most of these men, or used to, at least. Dokhtor Hierakis has shown us how the wounds become infected with dirt and khaja blood, and so if we stop the infection, then the wound is likely to heal cleanly.'
'Ah.' Nadine left her to her work. 'Yermolov, I'll leave you to come with Vershinin. You'll take command of those of my jahar who are wounded.'
He nodded, and she changed to a remount and found her uncle again. It was dark by now. He had formed up his unit-most of whom had come through the battle with minor wounds or none at all-and was saying good-bye to the young Sakhalin commander and to Vershinin. Nadine waited patiently through the conference. She had no urgent desire to return to camp, but she could see that Ilya was obsessed with getting back to Karkand.
They started off. Nadine felt numb with exhaustion, and the torches bobbing up and down alongside her and all along the line disoriented her, making her dizzy. She rode without speaking, her jahar strung out in front of her where she rode beside her uncle.
'Dina,' said Ilya suddenly. He rode one of his remounts, a shaggy tarpan, and one of his guardsmen walked along to his left, bearing a torch to light the horse's way. 'I shouldn't have let you come with me. You're more valuable to me alive than dead.'
'Thank you,' she said dryly. 'Feodor reminds me of that all the time.'
'As well he might, since you're more valuable to the Grekov tribe alive than dead, too. But you fought well, in any case.' They rode for a while in silence. A new torch-bearer came to take the place of the other one, and they switched mounts and went on.
'Dina.' The torchlight illuminated part of his face, shifting on him, highlighting first his eyes, then his mouth, then the straight line of his nose, then his beard, then his eyes again. Otherwise, he rode in darkness. 'Why should Soerensen offer me Jeds? If Erthe defeats the khepellis, then won't Erthe itself be a threat to us?'
'Erthe lies far over the seas, Uncle. Surely they'd need many ships in order to bring an army here.'
'But what if it's the khepellis who have these ships? We know they can travel to any port along the coasts we know. And if the khepellis are as great a threat as Soerensen says they are, then we must unite against them. What if they want all the lands where humans now live?'
Nadine found herself a little confused by the conversation, since part of what he said made no sense to her. It sounded as if he had been negotiating with the Prince of Jeds. Over what, she wondered. 'Then you really do believe that they're zayinu? I never saw any khepellis. Those that came to Morava at the prince's behest arrived after I left.'
'They're zayinu. They're not like us. But how can Soerensen possess the loyalty of one of their merchant houses?' He said nothing for a long while. Nadine dozed.
His voice startled her awake, though he spoke softly. 'What if they want all the lands, from the plains north and east along the Golden Road, from Vidiya to Habakar all the way south to Jeds and even the lands that lie south from there? All the armies must unite against them. We must prepare for that. Someone who understands the threat must prepare for that.'
The night wore on. At last he called a halt and let them rest, men and horses alike, but in the morning they set off again, driven by Bakhtiian at a steady pace back toward Karkand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
He dreamed of a snow-swept landscape, of a single tree in a hollow, a scrap of cloth lying on the ground and a pathetic little fire burning but giving off no heat. His sister lay unmoving, pale gray, on the ground. For days she had tossed and turned in the grip of some demon, speaking words he could not understand. He had tried desperately to feed her with what little food he could gather from the winter-starved land, had tried to give her water, had tried to keep her warm. But at last the demon had drained her of life and now her last breath leaked out, too weak even to puff steam into the cold air. Her chest stopped moving, and her limbs went flaccid and, later, went stiff. He was alone in the wilderness.
'Don't leave me!' Aleksi gasped, and jerked up to find himself tangled in his own blankets, in his own tent. Sweat dampened him. The night air cooled his chest and back. He shivered. He forced himself to lie back down, but he could not sleep. At last, he rose and dressed and shrugged on a felt coat and walked outside. In the distance, he heard the arrhythmic thump of the artillery firing and the delayed crash of the missiles landing. In the four days since Bakhtiian had left, the noise had continued at such a constant rate that it was only now, in the predawn quiet
