Eternal Sky 01(59)

She amused herself with fantasies of food as she walked, between the time spent teaching Temur whatever Rasan she could. He was a quick study, at least—he told her that his father had had many wives, from many lands, taken in the wake of conquest. They had taught the sons of the house their tongues, that they would have someone to speak to in it. He knew the Uthman tongue, as did Samarkar, quite a lot of Song, and some Aezin.

Samarkar was fluent in several dialects of the Song language. But she did not know Aezin—had, in fact, heard almost nothing of that land except that it lay to the south of Ctesifon, of Messaline, of the Celadon Highway that connected them all, and that it was rich in gold and jewels, and the people who lived there had skins burned black by the fierce light of their desert sun.

She’d never credited that last, but she found herself studying Temur’s face, finding elements of it familiar and others exotic. His color was dark, even for a Qersnyk, but the plainsmen had such a reputation for intermarrying with every nation they conquered that one could not exactly say that a steppe warrior looked like this or he looked like that. His eyes seemed wide open to her, his chin pointed and small, lips full and cheekbones high on either side of a nose tidy enough for even Rasan ideals of beauty. He wore his hair in a long plait, coiled up under his hat after the manner of his people, and as his health returned, he found the strength to unbraid, wash, oil, and comb it. When he did, she saw that it had a soft texture—more like fleece than her own hard, straight locks.

They practiced languages, conversing in Aezin when they did not speak in Rasan. The Rasan was not so different from Qersnyk or Song. The Aezin was more foreign, but Samarkar at least learned a little—and there was not much else to do besides walk.

On the fourth day of their journey, as they were ascending a switchback trail into the first of several high passes that would lead them eventually through the Steles of the Sky, Temur touched Samarkar’s arm and, with a gesture for silence, drew her attention up the slope. Something moved among the stones there—a stocky, long-furred feline, ocher in color, its pelt marked with spots and its tail barred with rings. She slowed and stopped the bay mare and the mules, all of which she was leading single file.

“Manul cat,” she said, giving him the Rasan word. The shadow of a circling vulture skipped down the stony slope at racing speed, passing between them.

“I wonder if Hrahima has seen it?”

Samarkar laughed. “I hope for its sake it’s seen her, or it might wind up baked over coals tonight.”

“The hide makes good hoods,” Temur said. “But they’re better to watch, living.”

It was true, and so Samarkar smiled, nodding. She tilted her head back, enjoying the wind in her hair and the first sight of an honest Rasan sky in eight days. The blues were bluer, she thought. It made her think of something. In Rasan—for his practice—she said to Temur, “Your folk worship the sky, do they not?”

Temur scuffed a foot on stone, climbing. His hands chafed each other. “He is not merely the sky. He is the Eternal Sky. And I would not say we worship him. We send the dead back to him; we tell the ravens and the vultures their true names, and the sacred carrion birds carry them home. And then anyone who knows the name can call you back when they wish your counsel.” He waved absently at the vulture that had just skimmed by overhead again in its hunting pattern of overlapping circles.

“A secret name,” Samarkar said, considering. “But others know it?”

“Not secret,” Temur said. “I mean, yes, secret. I do not know my true name, so the demons cannot use it to deceive me. But my family would know it.…”

He frowned abruptly and bent his efforts to faster climbing. Samarkar pretended she had to work to keep up, but at these heights, Temur’s best effort was nothing she couldn’t better.

His family is dead, she realized. When he dies, there is no one to tell the birds his name.

She wondered if that meant he, too, was doomed to walk the earth as a hungry ghost. Maybe it was time to change the subject. “Have you heard of the Carrion-King? Before I left, one of my brothers’ wives was reading about him. A kind of demigod, supposedly a Qersnyk.”

“Of course,” Temur said, bracing a foot on a stone and standing up on it. “But he wasn’t a Qersnyk; he was a sorcerer from Song or maybe one of the western horse clans. We call him the Sorcerer-Prince. In my homeland, they say he fought the Warrior-Gods of the Uthman Caliphate, and Song, and Rasa, and Messaline, and defeated them all. But they also say that the sky was hung much higher in those days. In the battles, the four ranges of mountains that supported the Eternal Sky’s pavilion were damaged, so the Sky’s roof sagged. And then the Sky came out to see what was the matter and put the Sorcerer-Prince in his place.”