Eternal Sky 01(90)
She didn’t relish doing the surgery here, on the edge of a cliff, surrounded by dead men—but asking the horse to move on with the arrow still imbedded in the wound was asking him to continue shredding his muscle. “Come hold his head?”
Temur did as she asked. A span or so away, Hrahima stood. She held up a crumpled scrap of rice paper, stained with red where she had touched the edges. There, sketched in confident, even flattering brush strokes, was a portrait of Temur.
“I think Qori Buqa knows you’re alive,” she said. “These dead men are not Nameless. They are mercenaries dressed as Nameless. But the one who fell or the one who fled—they might have been the real thing.”
“How do you know?” Payma asked.
“The Nameless tattoo their hands,” she said. “These have no marks.”
Temur’s face did a number of interesting things before he thought to press it against the gelding’s neck. He took a breath, and when he turned back to them his voice was steady. “A good thing they didn’t know I was traveling with a trio of warrior women. I wouldn’t have stood a chance alone.”
* * *
The mercenary dead—when Temur had a chance to examine them after helping Samarkar with her horse doctoring—did not resemble men of the east. They might not be Nameless, but like the Rahazeen he had met in his uncle Mongke’s court, they were taller and of a leggier build, and when he unwrapped the black gauze veils that covered their heads and faces, their skin was a warmer shade of brown. They wore bronze helms under the veils, and leather armor under their flowing tunics.
The veils too were a hint that they were imposters, being black and not true indigo.
They had high-bridged noses and high-arched cheekbones, and their staring eyes were brown as tea. Tea going milky, as death began to cloud them.
They stank like any dead man, of urine and voided bowels. Their bows were of a different manufacture than his own, longer than the span of his arms, and so he could not use their arrows. Of the ones he’d fired, he could reclaim none. Two had been spent for nothing, one was gone with a bolted horse, and the other had plunged over the cliff. He’d lost a fifth himself when he nearly fell, and he mourned it bitterly. There would be no new arrows unless he made them.
Thoughtfully, he examined the western fletchings. There was nothing wrong with the shafts or the heads—or even the fletchings, which were the undyed feathers of some bird Temur had never seen. His own people fletched arrows with the feathers of vultures, the birds that carried souls to rest. But there was no reason he could not rework these.…
He gathered as many as he could, bundling them up and hanging them from the packs of one of the mules when Payma returned with them—two of them, anyway; she had been unable to find the third, and Temur hoped for all their sakes that the wizards had overpacked.
They threw the bodies off the road, first searching them for unspoiled food and other useful objects. While they worked, all five animals crunched grain in nose bags. The gelding wore an awkward bandage on his hip, but the poppy seemed to have eased his pain.
Samarkar sat on a rock nearby, darning her trousers where the arrow had cut them, having already packed her wounds with a bluish powder and wrapped them tightly in white cotton gauze. It shone against the sturdy curve of her thigh, and Temur had to keep reminding himself not to stare. She winced as she pinched the needle, leading him to wonder if she had hurt her right hand, too. Payma slumped against a rock, snatching a few moments of sleep, and Hrahima stood sentry at the outside curve of the road, where she could see a distance in both directions.
Finally, Samarkar heaved herself up, struggled into the trousers, and stood painfully. She’d tied a sling for her injured arm but was not using it now. He knew that her wounds—especially the deep puncture in her arm—would stiffen overnight, the insulted muscles knotting hard as wood around them. Tomorrow, moving her leg or arm would be an agony. He’d have to massage the gelding’s leg tonight, if he was going to be able to walk tomorrow. Temur did not fancy leading a lame horse through more mountain roads, but they’d need the gelding if he healed. In the meantime, Payma could double up on Bansh or Buldshak, but that would wear the mares out faster, and they did not have remounts so the horses could rest on alternate days.
They were—unavoidably—going to do some walking. And Payma’s feet would not stand up to much of that until they healed, then hardened.
It would have been a hard enough journey with all of them sound and hale. Starting the trip exhausted and injured …
Temur shook his head. He was making things worse, not better. He gave Samarkar a small smile of encouragement and said, “Come on. Let’s put some more ground under us before sunset.”