Farlander

'Are you all right, old friend?'

Osh arose into continuing silence, adjusted his false leg and limped across the room to where Ash perched on the deep, sunlit window seat.

'Yes,' replied Ash, but with his voice shaking. He pressed both temples with his fingers, trying to squeeze away the pain.

'The headaches again?' inquired Osh, resting a hand on his shoulder.

'Yes.'

'They grow worse, then?'

Ash fumbled deep inside his robe, then produced his pouch. His fingers shook as he opened it and drew out a dried dulce leaf. He placed it in his mouth, settling it between tongue and cheek.

'They have grown so bad recently, sometimes I cannot see at all.'

Osh's hand squeezed his shoulder. It was not like him, to offer a gesture of comfort.

Ash drew out another leaf and placed it inside his mouth, against the other cheek.

'Is there anything I can do for you? Ch'eng, perhaps?'

'No, master. He cannot help me.'

'Please, enough of the master. You ceased to be my apprentice a long, long time ago.'

The pain slowly subsided. Enough at least for Ash to smile back at him – though he avoided his master's eyes, which had grown watery and dark all of a sudden.

'We grow older than we think,' he said in an attempt at lightening the mood.

'No,' said Osh, as he shuffled back to his padded chair. 'You grow older than you think. I am already aware of my decrepitude, and plan to retire as soon as possible with what little dignity remains to me.'

'I have been pondering the same thing,' admitted Ash.

The old general settled back in his chair and fixed Ash with a look that was familiar after these long years – his head tilted back, his sharp features drawn in concentration, his hooded eyes appraising whoever was before them. 'I had hoped as much, when I saw you with an apprentice after all these years. What prompted your change of mind?'

'I have not changed my mind. But we had a conversation, you and I, some months ago. In my head.'

'When you were on the ice?'

He nodded.

'Perhaps, then, it was more than that. I had a dream some months back. It was very cold. You did not think you were going to make it.'

'No, I did not. But you offered me a bargain, and a promise that I would make it home alive if I agreed. So I took it.'

'I see. And what was this bargain?'

'That you would not stop me from my work, so long as I was training an apprentice.'

Osh chuckled. 'Ah, that would explain it. Yes, a fair bargain – one that I will stand by.'

'Good.'

'Tell me, then. How did you choose him?'

Ash was unsure of how to answer that. For a moment he was back in Bar-Khos, drifting in dreams during the long hot siesta, as a young man sneaked into his room to steal his purse.

Ash had been dreaming of home then: the little village of Asa, snuggling deep into a twist of the high valley floor – the view pitching sharply downwards past the many terraces of rice and barley to an endless stretch of blue sea that reached as far as the horizon.

Butai, his young wife, had been there, too. She was standing in the doorway of their cottage, a basket of wild flowers in her arms. She had a gift for making them into subtle perfumes, forever surprising him with new fragrances, and she was watching their son for a moment as he chopped wood in an easy, practised way; a boy of perhaps fourteen.

Ash had waved to them, but they did not see him – they were laughing instead at something the boy had said. Beautiful in her laughter, his wife looked as girlish as she ever had.

And then Ash had awakened in a strange room, in a strange city, in a strange land, in a strange life that was not in any way his own… his eyes wet with grief, the sense of loss within him as raw as though it had happened only yesterday. Pain washed through his head so sharply it was enough to blind him. He had called out to someone nearby, thinking for a moment that it was his son – yet, even as he did so, he knew that it could never be his son. In that same moment he had felt an isolation so all-consuming that he could not move for it. I will die alone, he had thought. Like this, blind, with no one by my side.

'It seems', he heard himself say to Osh, 'as though he was chosen for me.'

Osh accepted this, at least partly. 'For what purpose, do you wonder?'

'I do not know, but it is as though we both have need of each other in some way. I cannot say how.'

Osh nodded, with a knowing smile, but whatever it was that he suspected he chose not to voice it. Instead, he said, 'So you have not changed your mind about taking over the reins from me? I thought perhaps that you might, if I goaded you enough with Baracha's name.'

Ash could no longer meet his master's eyes.

'What would be the point? The illness is growing worse, and I do not think I have much time left to me. You know of my father, and his father before him. After their blindness struck, they went with great speed in the end.'

The smile on Osh's face faded, as a soberness came over him. He inhaled a sharp breath. 'I feared as much,' he admitted. 'But I hoped otherwise. I am deeply sorry, Ash. You are one of the few true friends I have left.'

A bluebird was singing outside in the courtyard. Ash turned his attention to it, away from his friend's untypical display of emotion.

The young Osh would never have been so open-hearted – not that Osh who had trained as Rshun back in the old country and in the old ways where only a few ever survived the ordeal. The same Osh who had left the original Rshun order after they had sided with the overlords, and who later became a soldier and fought at Hakk and Aga- sa, and somehow survived them both too; who had gone on to win honour after honour in the long war against the overlords, creating a name for himself, earning a high command in the ultimately doomed People's Army. Back then, it would have been unimaginable to hear the general lamenting so openly over the fate of a comrade. Even less so as he subsequently led them into exile, the only general able to fight his way out with his body of men intact after surviving the final, fateful trap that had destroyed the People's Revolution once and for all.

Osh had been lean and strong and tough in those days, a hard bastard in truth. His firm command had held them together on their long voyage to the Miders, when most of those in the fleet, including a grief-stricken Ash, had simply wished for death after their defeat and the loss of their loved ones either fallen in battle or left behind. When they had finally made it here to the Miders, and others in the fugitive fleet had taken up arms to serve as mercenaries for the Empire of Mann, or else turn against it, Osh had struck out on a different and much more uncertain path. The path of Rshun.

Yet here he was a withered old man on a withered old chair, both he and the chair sprouting tufts of hair and creaking every time their age-worn bodies shifted their weight; allowing his regrets to flow freely from his heart, as he finally looked towards the end.

Ash peered out from the high turret window over to the mali trees that clustered in the centre of the courtyard. The singing bluebird could be seen perching down there, its sky-blue plumage distinct against the bronze leaves.

'To be sad at passing is to be sad at life,' Ash quipped.

'I know,' said the old general, with a shake of his head.

The two veterans sat there in the dusty sunlight, listening for a time to the brief, fresh song of the late-summer bird. Calling out for a mate, Ash thought. A partner lost to it.

'I only wish…' Osh managed at last, but he faltered, and let the rest of his words hang there without being voiced.

'To see once more the Diamond Mountain,' Ash finished for him, reciting the old poem. 'And lay my lips on those I love.'

'Yes,' said Osh.

'I know, old friend.'