The Steel Remains

chapter 18

Egar rode out a couple of hours before sunset.

He didn’t really need the extra time; the Skaranak buried their dead relatively close to wherever they happened to be camped at the time, and their migrations across the steppe were roughly seasonal. As the anniversary of his father’s death swung around each year, so did the proximity of the grave Erkan was laid in. Egar could track it by the changes in the sky and the few windswept landmarks that marked the steppe, could feel it circling beyond the horizon as the seasons turned, curving slowly inward as the warmth ebbed from each year and winter crept in, closing on him like the anniversary itself.

He didn’t need the extra time.

But Sula was driving him up a f*cking guy rope right now with her youth and her breezy nomad matter-of-factness; she was blunt and clumsy around his feelings, would not give him space, thought sucking him off was the solution to pretty much everything.

Can hardly blame the lass. Not like you’ve given her any reason to think any different, is it?

So he told her lies as he dressed.

“I’ll do the last league on foot,” he said. “For respect.”

“But that’s stupid!”

He held down his temper with an effort. “It’s a tradition, Sula.”

“Yeah.” A throaty snort. “Not since my f*cking grandfather died, it isn’t.”

“Well, that wasn’t all that long ago, was it?”

She stared at him, stricken. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

It means I remember your grandfather as a young man about the camp. It means I’m easily old enough to be your father. It means you’re sixteen f*cking years old, girl, sitting in my yurt like you own it, and beyond all of that it means that at my age I really should know better than to keep doing this.

“Nothing,” he muttered. “Doesn’t mean anything. But traditions are, uhm, important things, Sula. They’re what holds the clan together.”

“You think I’m too young for you,” she wailed. “You’re going to pack me in, just like you did that Voronak bitch.”

“I’m not going to pack you in.”

“Yes, you are!”

And she dissolved in tears.

So then of course he had to go to her, had to hold her. He had to nuzzle at her neck and murmur in her ear as if she were a horse he hadn’t quite broken yet, had to tip back her chin with one hand and wipe away her tears with the other. Had to shelve the chilly, swelling sadness under his own ribs, had to force a grin as she stopped crying, had to tickle her and grope her through the red felt overshirt she’d appropriated from his clothing chest. Had, in fact, taken to wearing around the camp like a blazing f*cking declaration of what she spent her time doing in the clanmaster’s yurt.

Have to talk to her about that.

At some point.

“Look,” he said finally. “It’s f*cking freezing out there, right? Riding doesn’t keep you warm. That’s the real point. If I walk, I warm up. Chances are, that’s where the tradition comes from in the first place, right?”

She nodded doubtfully, sniffed, knuckled at one eye. He mashed his tongue hard into the back of his grin and wished she didn’t look so much like a f*cking child when she did that.

How come they all start out hot-eyed temptress minxes and all end up crying into your shirt like babies?

Isn’t it enough I have to carry the weight of the whole f*cking clan on my back? Urann’s aching balls, isn’t it enough that I came back, that I left Yhelteth and everything it held and rode home to be with my f*cking people? Isn’t it enough that I’ll probably f*cking die up here just like my father and never see Imrana’s face again?

No answer that he could hear.

You whine like a girl, Clanmaster. Worse than a girl—this girl wearing your shirt is at least weeping about the future, about something she might be able to change. She’s not the one moping around full of bitterness about a past you can’t do any f*cking thing about.

Now get a grip.

He tilted her chin back again.

“Sula, listen. I’ll be back as soon after dawn as I can make it. You wait for me, you keep things warm.”

He clowned it, raised brows, grabbed after a buttock and a breast again. “Know what I mean?”

He got a choked laugh out of her, and then a long, wet kiss. He got out pretty fast after that. Marnak had his horse saddled and waiting outside in the ruddy evening light, shield and lance and small ax slung, a bundle of blankets, firewood, and other provisions tied securely on. The older man stood a discreet distance off from the clanmaster’s yurt, beside his own horse and in grave conversation with a pair of camp guards. He glanced over as Egar pushed back the yurt door flap, left the other two men immediately to their own devices, and strode across. He surveyed his clanmaster without comment.

“All right?” he asked.

“Been better. You still want to ride along?”

“With you in that mood?” Marnak shrugged. “Sure, should be a bundle of fun.”

______

IN FACT, EGAR’S MOOD LIGHTENED SOMEWHAT AS THEY RODE OUT ACROSS the steppe and the camp fell behind. Slanting rays from the low winter sun turned the grassland a deceptively warm reddish gold, gave the sense that the evening might hold itself like this forever. The sky was clear and hollow blue, the band arched through it at a tilting angle, tinged a scintillating wash of ruddy shades to match the sunset. A keen wind came scything out of the north but the grease on their faces kept back its bite. The horses made an ambling pace, occasional clink or jingle from metal parts in the rig and the small iron talismans braided into their manes as they tossed their heads. Once or twice, a returning pair of herd minders would hail them as they passed, headed in for the evening meal.

It all felt a little like escape.

“You ever miss the south?” he asked Marnak eventually, when the quiet between the two of them had loosened to a wayfarer’s ease. “Ever think about going back?”

“Nope.”

He glanced across, surprised by the spike of vehemence. “Really? What, never? You don’t even miss the whores?”

“Got a wife now.” Marnak grinned in his beard. “And they got whores in Ishlin-ichan, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Even some Yhelteth girls there these days, if that’s your thing.”

Egar grunted. He knew that, too.

Marnak raised up a little in his saddle, gestured around at the steppe. “I mean, what’s not to be happy with here? Grazing that never ends, plenty of waterholes, slow-flowing rivers we don’t have to fight the Ishlinak for, plenty of space for everyone. Practically no raiding anymore, now the young guys all head off south instead. We don’t see the long runners much this far south and west, the wolves and steppe cats mostly leave us alone as well. We’ve got more meat on the hoof these days than we know what to do with. Got the clan, the people around us. What’s in Yhelteth to stack up against all that?”

Where’d you want me to start?

Views over the harbor, sunlight shimmering off endless ruffled blue to the horizon. Tall white towers at the headland, the slow spiral of a dozen big lizard raptors riding the thermals. The carping of gulls down on the wharf, the bang-bang on wood of fishermen repairing their boats.

Patios, sun-blasted and riotous with some flowering crimson creeper whose name you never did learn to pronounce right. Ornate ironwork on windows and doors, narrow white-walled streets that tricked away the sun’s assault. Cunningly crafted meeting nooks and warm stone benches set in deep pools of shade, the music of falling water somewhere beyond a screen.

Market stalls heaped high with brightly colored fruit you could smell at a dozen paces.

Philosophers and verse-makers declaiming from their pitches in the less pricey corners of each square, teahouses spilling out with the noisy back-and-forth quarrel of voices disputing everything under the sun: the advisability of trade with the western lands, the existence or not of evil spirits, the urban horse tax.

Books—the warm, leather-skinned weight of them in your hands, the way they smelled when you lifted them close to your face. The unfeasibly heart-jolting shock once, as a tome fell heavily open at some much-visited page, divided itself neatly in two blocky halves along the spine—and you thought, guiltily, that you’d broken it.

The lines and lines and lines and lines of squiggling black text, and Imrana’s long-nailed finger leading him along them.

The stir and billow of translucent window drapes as a sea breeze wandered in from the balcony and carried away some of the midday heat, cooled some of the sweat on your skin and hers.

The ebbing bustle of the day, the cries of street sellers growing somehow ever more mournful as the light thickened and a yellow-glow sprinkle of windows lit up across the city.

The aching, dusk skyline lament of the call to prayer—and ignoring it in slim, dark, orange-blossom-perfumed arms.

The riding lights of fishercraft out on the evening swell.

“Yeah, well,” he said.

Marnak concentrated on the grasslands ahead for a while. Maybe he could feel some of what was smoking off Egar.

“In the south, they paid me to kill other men,” he said tonelessly. “That’s well and good when you’re young. It seasons you, and it wins honor for your name, for your forefathers in the Sky Home. It brings you to the Dwellers’ notice.”

“It gets you laid.”

A chuckle. “It gets you laid. But the time comes you’re not a young man anymore. You start to lose the pleasure in it all. Truth is, I would have gone home long before I did, if the Scaled Folk hadn’t come.”

“Humanity’s finest hour, eh?”

The quote didn’t come out quite as sour as Egar intended. Despite everything, the clarion ring that Akal the Great had given to it still clung in faint echo. Marnak nodded to himself, so slightly it might have been the motion of the horse that caused it.

“For a while, it was.”

“Yeah, until you end up facing your own f*cking people across a line of lances.”

Marnak shrugged. “That never bothered me much. You take imperial coin, chances are sooner or later you’re going up against the League. You go up against the League, chances are sooner or later you’re going to find yourself facing Majak. Just the way it is. No different from squabbling with the Ishlinak up here like we used to. I fought for the League myself once or twice, back in the day, before the Empire really started hiring. And yeah, it always figured if we did ever beat the lizards, everyone’d go back to fighting each other again, just like before.”

“So why not stay and make some more coin?”

“Don’t think I didn’t give it some thought. I had a line commander’s commission by then. But like I said, it’s all well and good if you’re young. I just wasn’t anymore, wasn’t anything close to young.” Marnak shook his head bemusedly. These weren’t places his mind habitually went. “I don’t know, you get older and each battle you survive starts to feel like luck. You start wondering why you made it to the end of the day, why you’re still standing when the field is clogged with other men’s blood and corpses. Why the Dwellers are keeping you alive, what purpose the Sky Home has laid out for you. Like that. When the Scaled Folk came, I thought I’d understood that purpose. I thought I knew why I’d survived, thought I’d probably die fighting them, didn’t even mind that much so long as it was a good death.”

“But you didn’t die.”

“No.” Egar thought he heard something that was almost disappointment in the other man’s tone. “I didn’t.

Not even at Gallows Gap, and Urann knows we came close enough there. Now, that was a perfect place for a good death, if ever I saw one.”

And now it was Egar’s turn to chuckle. But it was a grim sound he made, not much humor in it.

Marnak’s lips bent in silent echo. “Instead of which, we all became heroes. You, me, even that f*cking faggot friend of yours.”

“Look, he wasn’t exactly my—”

“And next thing you know, we’re back to fighting humans again. And that’s fine, you know, like I said, but . . .” Another helpless gesture. “It got old. Felt like some kind of massive wheel coming right the way back around to start. There were all these new Majak kids flooding into Yhelteth on the recruiting wagon, looking to fill the gaps in the ranks, no f*cking clue what it was all about—”

“Yeah, I remember.” Mostly, what Egar remembered was wanting to break their shiny, enthusiastic faces for them. The fact that they reminded him so much of himself a decade earlier only made it worse.

“Weird times, huh?”

“You know what it felt like?” Marnak slipped off his cap, scrubbed vigorously at his scalp with the nails of a half-clenched fist. “You remember those round-and-round-about machines the Kiriath put into the tea gardens at Ynval? The ones with the wooden horses?”

“Yeah. Been on them a couple of times.”

“Yeah, well, you know what it’s like when the ride’s finished, then. Everything comes to a halt, you’re sitting there, getting used to the whole world not spinning around you, and you’ve got a whole new set of people, mostly kids, all swarming to get on. You don’t know whether you want to give up your seat or not, and then it suddenly hits you.” He slipped his cap back on again, shot Egar a sidelong glance. “You realize you don’t want to go around again. In fact, you’re not even f*cking sure anymore whether you really enjoyed it the first time around.”

They both laughed this time, and loud. Quick bark of tension released, then the looser, more reflective stretch of genuine amusement, shared under the massive sky. The small, human sounds it made held briefly against the landscape, then soaked away into the vast quiet and the wind, like piss into the ground.

“You know,” Marnak said, maybe loath to let the silence win. “I broke one of those horses once. I ever tell you that? I mean, broke its neck right f*cking off, hanging off it when I was blasted on pipe one time.

They were going to make me pay for the f*cking repairs, too, about half a week’s wages as it happens.

Called the City Guard on me when I wouldn’t cough up. I ever tell you that story?”

In fact, he had, but Egar shook his head amiably and the other man launched into the tale. There was an easy pleasure to be had from hearing the escapade again, all its wall-scaling, roof-leaping, harem-invading chases and shocks and reversals, plus a couple of fresh embellishments added into the mix, just to keep it sharp. It was like sitting around the fire and listening to a skilled storyteller run through the Tale of Takavach and the Mermaid’s Virtue, or something equally well worn.

When the tale was done, with Marnak safely back across the river and into barracks before dawn, when their laughter had soaked away once again, the clanmaster nodded and told another Yhelteth story from his own stock. How a noted imperial knight had once come home to find the young Egar in bed with his wives, all four of them at once. And you know, more than anything, that seemed to be what he was so pissed off about. Standing there, yelling at me with that f*cking stupid court sword in his fist.

Apparently, the Revelation says yes, you can have up to six wives, but it absolutely forbids you doing it with more than one of them at a time. Egar let drop the reins, spread his hands wide. Hell, how was I supposed to know that?

More laughter.

Another tale.

And so, eventually, they came to Erkan’s grave. They quieted and looked at each other. For a while they’d been able to forget where they were going, but that was over now. Egar dismounted.

“Thanks for the company.”

“Yeah.” Marnak cast glances around. A slight rise, a single stooped and gnarled tree with the ball of the declining sun tangled in its leafless branches. It was a bleak place, not made for the living.

“I’ll be fine,” Egar said quietly. “He was a good man in life, he isn’t going to hurt me now.”

Marnak grimaced. It wasn’t the received wisdom among the Majak that good men made good ghosts. A spirit must be placated, regardless of its origins; rituals must be honored. So said the shaman. No one ever explained exactly why, but the implication was that if you didn’t get that stuff right, there’d be a heavy price, for you and your people.

“Go on, get moving. You ride hard, you’ll make it back not much after full dark.” Egar watched the other man wheel his horse about. “Oh yeah, and if Sula asks, you left me half a league out, doing the last stretch on foot. Right?”

Marnak grinned back over his shoulder. “Right.” He clucked and heeled his horse into a gathering trot, canter, finally a full gallop back the way they’d come.

Egar watched him go, until horse and rider were a single dot that faded slowly into the gloom. Then he sighed and turned to his father’s grave.

It wasn’t much to look at. Steppe soils made for hard digging at this time of year, and the grave was shallow, piled over with rocks it took them the whole day to gather. They’d built the traditional cairn end pile at the buried man’s feet, warded it about with daubed symbols in the Skaranak colors and iron talismans hung off the stones on buffalo-hide thongs. They shredded tundra rose and crocus petals over the stones and set a dwarf oak sapling in the ground at Erkan’s head, so in a couple of years’ time he’d have shade when summer swung around.

Now the clan colors were bleached with age, and the branches of the grown tree were naked and skeletal overhead. Only the shaped iron ornaments remained, though—Egar squinted suspiciously—it looked as if even one or two of those might have been stolen from the grave over the past year.

“Motherf*cking Voronak tinks,” he muttered.

Yeah, this far south and west it’s just as likely Skaranak renegades, or even some bunch of f*ckwit explorers from the south. He’d seen Skaranak grave wards in more than one imperial museum over the years, had never quite been able to drive home to anyone the rage it aroused in him. In Yhelteth, in the city itself at least, they tolerated a variety of beliefs well enough, but behind that there was always the base assumption of a civilized superiority in the Revelation that never failed to piss him off. In the end, the imperials didn’t much care whose sensibilities they trampled on.

Let’s stick to the task at hand, shall we.

He left his horse to crop the grass a short distance off, unstoppered the rice wine flask he’d brought with him, held it lowered in clasped hands, and stood a moment looking down at the grave.

“Hey, Dad,” he said loudly. “Brought you something special this time.”

The quiet wind keened. There was no other reply for him.

“It’s good stuff. Used to drink it in the south all the time. This tavern down by the harbor had it, not far from Imrana’s place. I think you would have liked it in there, Dad. Noisy, full of all these tough guys off the docks. You could see the sea from the front door.” He paused, stared down at the cairn. “I would have liked to show you the sea, Dad.”

He blinked hard a couple of times. Cleared his throat.

“Can’t believe they’re selling this stuff in Ishlin-ichan these days. Bringing it all the way up here. Cost me a ball and an eye, of course, but hey, I’m the f*cking clanmaster these days, right?”

Got to relax, Eg. Loosen off. You’ve got a full night out here, and the sun isn’t even down yet.

He lifted the flask and tipped it, poured slowly and steadily, working little circles into the action. The rice wine splattered and darkened the stones, ticked and dripped in the dark places between. When the flask was empty, he upended it and shook out the last drops, then placed it carefully against the base of the cairn. His fingers lingered on it awhile, kept him bent there, face turned slightly away, listening to wind.

Then, abruptly, he straightened up. A grimace chased across his face—whether from the brief, flaring pain of holding the posture too long, or something else, he couldn’t say. He cleared his throat again.

“So—I guess, we’re going to build this vigil fire.”

He unsaddled the horse, set out his weapons, blankets, and provisions with drilled, soldier’s neatness.

Unbundled the firewood and put the fire together on the scorched and balding patch of grass that marked the previous vigils. The sun dropped free of the tree branches, hung increasingly low at the horizon. He shivered a little, gave it the occasional glance as he worked. He went about collecting a few storm-torn branches he’d noticed lying in the grass earlier, dragged them over and stamped them into manageable lengths, stripped the biggest of the twigs from them, and piled it all up beside the waiting fire. He reckoned the bundle he’d brought with him should last until dawn, but the extra couldn’t hurt. More importantly, the work had shaken some of the shiver from his bones.

He knelt by the unlit fire. Like most Majak, he carried kindling grass and flint in a dry pouch under his shirt. He now dug them out, struck sparks into a wiry fistful of the kindling until it caught, and then poked it carefully into the hollow heart of the fire pile. He tipped his head sideways, almost to the ground, and peered in. Smoke and tiny flames licked upward at the underside of the wood. The smaller pieces began to catch, smoldering and then popping alight. A cheery yellow light spilled out. The warmth of it washed his eyes and face, felt a little like tears. He hauled himself quickly upright again, back into the gathering gloom and chill of the air around him. He stowed the kindling pouch, brushed off his hands. Glanced back at the gnarled marker tree and the declining sun.

“Well, Dad, I—”

A figure stood there.

It was a hammerblow to his heart, an icy clutch of fear that dropped his right hand reflexively to the hilt of the knife at his hip.

It was not his father.

At least, not in any form that made sense. He saw a drab, full-length patched leather cloak of the sort favored by League sea captains, a soft-brimmed hat tilted forward to shade the face, though the sun was behind and in any case almost gone. Erkan, colorful, boisterous, a Majak to the bone, had never owned anything remotely resembling either item.

No. Wouldn’t have been seen dead wearing them, either.

Egar felt the corner of his mouth quirk. The humor pushed out the shock, brought in a shrewd skirmisher’s calculation instead. The cloaked figure looked to be alone. No visible companions or weapons, no horse nearby. Egar sidled a glance across to where his own mount stood, still placidly cropping the grass and apparently unaware of the newcomer, then to the neat piles of his gear on the ground—staff lance and ax, both well out of reach. He could not believe he’d allowed himself to be ambushed this easily.

He kept his hand loose on the hilt of his knife.

“I’m not here to harm you, Dragonbane.”

The voice came across the distance between them as if from much farther away, as if carried on the wind. Egar blinked at the effect.

“You know me?”

“After a fashion, yes. May I approach?”

“Are you armed?”

“No. I have no real need for such accoutrements.”

Egar set his mouth in a thin line. “You’re a shaman?”

Abruptly the cloaked figure loomed a scant two feet in front of him. It happened so fast, Egar would have sworn he never saw the newcomer move at all. A hand clamped brutally on his wrist, held it down so he could not have drawn his knife if his life depended on it. The face beneath the brim of the hat loomed, gaunt and hard-eyed. A gust of acrid chemical burning swirled in the wind, something like the smells that sometimes blew off the Kiriath brewing stacks south of An-Monal.

“There is not much time,” the voice admonished, no less distant sounding than before. “Your brothers are coming to murder you.”

And gone.

Egar jumped, and nearly fell down with the sudden release of the pressure on his arm. He cleared his knife from its sheath, belatedly, whirled about. The figure was nowhere to be seen. It was gone, into the chill of the air and the long grass, like memory of the voice into the wind, like the acrid chemical tang into the sweeter smell of wood smoke from the fire. Like the fading pressure on his wrist.

He wheeled about once more, breathing tightly, knife balanced on his palm.

Quiet, and thickening gray gloom across the steppe.

The band like a hoop of blood. His father’s cairn, the emptied flask laid beside it. The blackening silhouette of the tree.

“My brothers are in Ishlin-ichan,” he told the silence. “Getting drunk.”

He jerked his head westward, roughly the direction you’d take. Threw a glance out to the setting sun.

Saw silhouetted riders there, approaching.