The Sacred Band

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Kelis jogged up from the town at a steady pace. He told himself to be calm, to move efficiently but not in a hurry. He had just enough time. It wouldn’t do to attract attention with too much haste, or to trip and twist an ankle or something foolish like that. He had come too far-and brought Shen and Benabe too far-to spoil it with a careless mistake.

Since the night Kelis was attacked, they had traveled with all the stealth they could manage. It never felt like stealth, though, considering the crowd of Santoth that trailed them every step of the way. He had still not gotten used to them. He could still not quite believe that nobody outside their group saw them, but as he had no choice in the matter, he did the best he could. And the best he could do, he decided, was to ignore them.

It seemed to work.

They crossed through Balbara territory heading toward the trading city of Falik. It was exposed country, flat as a plate and spread like a clear night sky with a constellation of settlements, villages, and farms. The entire time, Kelis felt like any eye within twenty miles could see them. Gone was the solitude of the south. Daylong, from whatever scant shelter they found under acacia trees or beneath a geometry of cloth propped by Kelis’s iron spear, they watched movement on the horizon. Near or far, there was always somebody: herd boys switching droop-eared goats, teni root farmers piercing the ground with their pronged spears, groups of women attending to some work Kelis could not imagine, who seemed to communicate mainly in bursts of laughter.

Once an entire caravan of merchants trudged by not thirty feet from the cluster of rocks they huddled beside. Person after person waved at them in passing, singing a story in song that they passed from one person to another. Kelis did not catch all their Balbara words, but he knew enough of their traditions to know that their travel songs tended to incorporate whatever things they saw along the way. Likely, the group huddled beside the rocks had been documented in the song. So much for stealth.

They kept to their night travel, but it was harder here, with village or camp dogs always ready to wake the world to announce their passing. He had never seen such moisture on the plains. In the late hours of the night a knee-high layer of mist flowed across the ground like slow liquid, leaving their lower legs dripping wet. It was as if the land were dreaming itself into an ocean, making water phantoms.

In among the stew of races and cultures of Falik their progress changed. No running through these choked streets. The only hiding they could do was to walk in plain sight, to be invisible by being visible. Kelis had known many Balbara. He had fought with them during Aliver’s war and had hunted foulthings with a few of them under Mena’s command. Now, though, he made eye contact with no one. He knew that faces, marked with the dotted lines and swirls that the Balbara found beautiful, turned and followed his progress, but he did not look. That would invite interaction, make a certainty out of what might only be a question. He just kept moving, busy, distracted, like so many others.

They made a point of never walking together as a group of five. When they divided, the Santoth always stayed near Shen. Kelis tried to take comfort in this. They were there to protect her as well, right? They knew Aliver. Loved him. Kelis said the words. He knew them by heart. He took a measure of comfort in them, but only a tiny sliver. A moment later, he returned to fearing them more than Sinper Ou’s spies, more even than Corinn, whose reaction to the girl he could not predict, no matter how many times he tried to run through the moment in his mind.

Once, while walking with Leeka through a market at the edge of the city, Kelis lost the old warrior. He cast about for a moment and spotted him at a stall a ways back, bent over a table, studying something. He turned the other way and watched the Santoth’s backs as they followed the others out along the road that would take them away from the city. He retraced his steps.

Drawing up beside Leeka, he started to urge him on. The warrior said, “An Acacian blade. Look, Kelis, this was my weapon once.”

The Balbara stall keeper standing just on the other side of the narrow table said, “Nah, nah. This one was fair trade. Not yours.” He was a short man, with eyes that were set at irregular angles. It was hard to know what he was looking at, though he did not seem troubled by it.

“How much is it?” Leeka asked.

The stall keeper appeared to size him up before answering. With one eye or the other, he took in Leeka’s tattered robe, the leather cord at his waist, and the small satchel of supplies draped over his shoulder, then studied his weathered face. “Too much for you, old tortoise. Too much coin; too much blade. What, would you join Aliver’s war?”

“Aliver’s war?”

“Aliver’s war?” The stall keeper imitated Leeka’s Mainland accent. He looked to Kelis to share the absurdity of the question with him. Kelis returned nothing. “The coming war! The war with the invaders. The Snow King’s new war!”

Leeka blinked his green eyes. “The Snow King…”

“I know what you want. You want to dress fancy for the coronation. Is that so? You want to impress the king, make him think you’re an old warrior?”

“Coronation?”

“Do you know nothing? Or is it age? Too much wine in your young days?”

The Balbara found Leeka’s confusion hilarious. In what must have been a local dialect, he called something over his shoulder to a group of men playing stones a little distance away. They looked up, and one of them said something back. All of them laughed. Turning back to Leeka, the man grew suddenly friendly. “See if you remember this tomorrow. Aliver Akaran is reborn. He is to become king. Finally, he will be king! He’ll fight a war and we’ll get on with it. It’s good for Talay. Good for Balbara.” The man reached out and squeezed Leeka’s shoulder with one hand, even as he made a show of guarding the sword from him with the other. “But, no, old tortoise, I can’t sell you this steel at any price. This sword needs a warrior, not a grandfather. Walk on.”

Tension trembled on Leeka’s forehead. His eyes moved away from the man’s face and focused on the hand resting on his shoulder. For an awful moment, Kelis was sure the old warrior was going to break the man’s arm. The Balbara smiled, undeterred, but Kelis knew things about Leeka. The Leeka who had greeted them alone in a vast plain had been unreadable and strange. This Leeka was different, though Kelis had not noticed the change until now.

“Come, brother,” he said to Leeka. “You do not need this sword.” He slipped the wedge of his hand under the Balbara’s wrist and lifted it.

From there, at least, their journey north up the coast and then along the trade roads that ran along the western edge of the Teheen Hills proved easier. Without knowing they were doing so, they had joined a river of pilgrims flowing north, toward the shore, toward the isle of Acacia and the wonders it now purported to offer. All who could drop what they were doing to make the journey, it seemed, had done just that. Among them, the five travelers with their escort of sorcerers were just some of the many.

I found a boat,” Kelis said on meeting Benabe out a little way from their camp.

“Did you?”

“Yes.” Kelis moved to pass her, but Benabe stopped him.

She looked into his eyes for a long moment. “Perhaps we should go without them.”

He knew what she meant instantly. He had chewed on the same thought himself many times. “I did not book passage for them, but… I don’t imagine that will stop them from coming.”

“We could go ourselves,” Benabe said, bending urgency into her words, “leave them here.”

Could we? Kelis wondered. Had they power to? Had they the right? It wasn’t to Benabe or Naamen or Kelis that the Santoth spoke. It was to Aliver’s daughter. And it had been Aliver himself who first sought out the Santoth, found them, and came back even stronger and more driven for his time with them. Wiser. “Benabe, Aliver wanted nothing more than to bring the Santoth back into the world. He would have done what we are doing now, if he had lived and found the way. How can you ask me not to do a thing he thought was so important?”

Benabe did not have an answer. “We should have discussed this more.”

“We have discussed it plenty,” Kelis said. “All of us, in our heads.”

Naamen jogged over to them. “What?”

“I found a boat,” Kelis said again.

“An Acacian ship?” Naamen asked. “Do they know who you are?”

“No, nobody knows. And it’s not an Acacian ship.” He glanced at Shen. She lay sleeping on a narrow blanket cast on the hard ground. “You all will probably not like it much, but it’s the best I could do. Come. Wake Shen. We must go now.”

Naamen approached him as he gathered up their scant supplies. “And them?” the young man asked.

Kelis did not need to look up to know what he meant. He slipped their bowls and foodstuffs into his sack, then stood, slinging it onto his back as he did so. “Just the five of us,” he said. “That’s all I can account for. We will do what we do. They will do what they will do.”

What the Santoth did was shadow them as they came down from the toes of the Teheen Hills in which they had spent the last few nights. Before them ran the thin line of white sand that marked the northern shore of Talay. The Inner Sea stretched north toward the isle of Acacia, unseen but there, surely, just a little over the horizon. Though not a city or town, the entire area crawled with life. Flat transports crowded the long stretch of beach. Pilgrims like themselves converged from all landward directions. A network of wooden pens described ragged geometries from the beach up through the sea grass. Inside them, herds of creatures grazed. They were fat things, hairless and pink-and not just from the early sun.

“Pigs? You’re joking,” Benabe said, in a tone that indicated she knew he was not. “Those… are pig barges. Where is our ship?” She did not look directly at Kelis, choosing instead to scan the scene as if she had somehow overlooked a nice stout galley with their names emblazoned on its side.

Kelis slowed because she had, but he tried to keep them moving forward. “It’s the best way I’ve found. They’re taking pigs to sell on the raft of boats floating around Acacia. They asked no questions and they’re not Sinper Ou’s people. We’ll be safe on them. They will get us as far as the flotilla surrounding the island. Then we’ll have to make our way as best we can. We…” He cleared his throat, hesitated a moment, and then decided he might as well get it all out at once. “We will have disguises.”

“What disguises?”

“As pig keepers.”

The look of derision Benabe set on him made him feel like a naughty child facing a grandmother’s disapproval. She must have practiced the look, for she was too young to be so skilled at it. “I am no pig keeper.”

“Today you are,” Kelis said, “if you want to reach Acacia.”

“I thought you knew people. I thought you were connected to the royal family! I thought-”

“Pigs!” Shen said. She and Naamen had just caught up with them. “Look, Mother, pigs. Are there piglets?” She grabbed her mother’s hand and tugged her back into motion, fighting her reluctance with pure childish enthusiasm. As Kelis watched them, relieved, Shen glanced back and winked.

The hundreds of human feet and the thousands of hoofed ones had torn and slashed and gouged the white sand. The smell pushed straight for the backs of their throats. It fought against the fresh breeze blowing in from the water and seemed to be winning the battle. As was the sound warring with the peaceful lapping of the waves: oinks and grunts, squeals and shouts, voices raised in entreaty, booming with directions, announcing bargains on foodstuffs and fresh water for the journey.

Kelis, in the lead once more, kept them moving until he had retraced his route to the livestock merchant who controlled a small fleet of barges-only one of several such along the beach. He had agreed to carry them across, but it was no act of charity. He required both the coins Kelis had left in the sack and their labor. Divided up and set to different tasks, they worked the frantic loading of the barges: opening and closing pens, prodding animals to get them moving, luring them forward or kicking them onward, making human barriers to block one herd from mingling with another, loading slops into troughs that were then tugged onto the barges. A few minutes into the squealing chaos of it, and all of them were splattered with filth.

Leeka went to work with awkward solemnity. Naamen, Kelis noticed, kept his weak arm hidden beneath the shoulder wrap of his robe. He eschewed the shoveling duty a boy half his age directed him toward. He was adept at appearing both deaf and stricken with blind spots in his vision, much to the younger boy’s annoyance. Benabe wore an evil expression, one corner of her lip curling whenever she caught Kelis’s eye.

For Shen, however, the work looked more akin to play. She ran around with her arms outstretched, darting and shooing as if she were herding chickens instead of barrel-shaped swine several times her own weight. The pigs rushed from her with a wide-eyed intensity that stayed just this side of panic. It would have been comical, except for the animals’ agitation. Behind the girl the Santoth fanned out in wings. They changed nothing of their demeanor or silence. They simply shadowed her; and the pigs-whether seeing or sensing them-looked for escape that they found by rushing up the gangplanks onto the barges.

“I’ve never seen the like of that,” the merchant said, coming up and nudging Kelis with an elbow. He wore a perplexed grimace as his eyes followed Shen, taking no notice of the Santoth at all. “You ever want rid of her I have work that girl could do. Replace the whole lot of my boys. Be happy to see the back of them.”

Kelis did not answer.

A few chaotic hours later the pigs were loaded. Kelis stood ankle-deep in the water, watching as the others, having finished their tasks, joined him. The incoming tide had begun to lift the barges free of the bottom. They moved now with the undulation of the waves, much to the consternation of the passengers. Pigs crowded each barge so tightly that they stood shoulder to shoulder, haunch to haunch, sliding against one another with grunts of protest. Boys climbed into the rigging. Dangling above the animal’s backs, they worked on the sails that would catch the evening breeze and pull them from the shore.

“Is this safe?” Naamen asked. “I know we need to go, but…”

Kelis was not at all sure, but he said, “You saw the merchant. Does he look like a man who lets his pigs sink to the bottom of the sea? Acacia is close. Come.”

“Just a walk across a sea of swine,” Naamen said. He hoisted his sack up over his head and motioned for Shen to walk beside him. She began to, but then spun around.

The Santoth stood as if rooted to the shore, away from the waterline in the dry sand.

“Aren’t you coming?” Shen asked.

One of the Santoth said, “May we?”

Before Kelis could consider the question and the possible answers he would offer, Shen gave hers. “Of course, Nualo. You’ve come all this way. This is the easy part.”

“We may come with you?”

“I just said so.”

The Santoth lifted his foot and set it down a few inches farther, on the smooth wet sand. Another of them spoke, his voice tremulous, more solidly of this world than Kelis had imagined possible of them. “We may go to Acacia? You allow us?”

“That’s where we’ve been heading all this time. Yes, come on.”

A tremble passed through them that was different from the usual ripples and disturbances around them. They are afraid, Kelis thought.

“Shen,” still another Santoth said, “do you lift the banishment upon us?”

“Will you come if I do?”

“Yes,” they all answered.

Kelis splashed forward toward the girl. He reached for her arm. He suddenly wanted to stop her easy answer. “Shen, wait-”

“I lift it, then.” Shen waved her hand in the air to indicate something vanishing just like that. “There’s no banishment. Now, come. Ouch! Kelis, you’re hurting me.”

Kelis let go of her arm. He had not even realized he had grabbed it.

Shen massaged the arm with her other hand. “You are odd sometimes.”

She turned and walked up the gangplank onto the barge. The Santoth followed her. They dispersed across the raft, causing no more disturbance to the pigs than would a breeze touching them.

As he splashed through the ankle-deep water and stepped onto the gangplank, Kelis thought, Aliver, I pray this be right.