Eternal Sky 01(95)
So it was not too unexpected when on one sunny day he came to her—rather than sending Saadet or a servant—and said, “Come and dine in my quarters today.”
Edene, who had just come in from bringing water to the rukh—which she did from beneath a metal grate, lest he decide to snatch up one of his attendants and make a meal of her—looked from al-Sepehr to her own sweat-soaked robes. She had sweated into her veil until it stuck against her face, but she knew better than to pick it away. She could not quite keep herself from covering the small rise of her belly with her hand, however. Qersnyk women knew about being raided away, willing or no, by men of other tribes. Edene’s own mother had been brought to the Tsareg clan by a husband who had cut her and her cart out of a traveling band.
If he kept that ring in the pocket of his robe, this might be her best chance to get it.
“When I have cleaned myself,” she said. And an hour later, she met him in his own austere chamber.
She knew not all the monks were celibate; some practiced with each other, some upon the women of the stronghold. To her surprise, however, al-Sepehr offered her no attentions beyond conversation and spiced lamb over some pearls of flour and water—dumplings the size of grains of sand. He made polite conversation, poured her tea, and averted his eyes from her face when she lowered her veil to place morsels of food in her mouth.
At one point, when he rose to fetch water, she took a moment to glance around his chamber. Spare, as she had noticed. Far plainer than her own. There was a low pallet, barely padded over stone. There was a chest at its foot.
And on the chest in a wooden tray lay a few personal articles, including a plain beaten band of green gold.
Edene might just have been about to touch it—her fingers trembling, twisted together behind her back, like those of a child who knows she’s not supposed to steal a preemptive bite of supper—when al-Sepehr returned with a tray of ices.
“I remembered you liked these,” he said, as she stepped away from the bed, grateful for the veil that hid her expression. “And it’s so hot out.”
She went back to her room frowning and contemplative. Her feet ached and her back ached, but her nausea was ebbing. If she was going to escape, she must do so now while she could still move and, no matter how uncomfortably, still run.
All the monks of the place spent their time each day in copying when they were not in the practice yard fighting. She began to get a sense of the rhythms of the place, the hours when things happened, the hours when things changed.
Until one day the pattern changed.
Edene awoke when dawn crept through the arched window of her room, painting the whitewashed stone window-ledge in rose and gold. Later in the day, the awnings would keep the afternoon sun from doing the same, but for now she had the glow. With it came unaccustomed raucous sounds from the courts below.
When she went to the window, veiling her face first, and leaned out, she witnessed a familiar kind of chaos. Everywhere, men bustled. They strapped on swords and piled goods into packs. They strode about with apparent ferocity of purpose, though Edene had no idea where they were going, and sometimes she saw the same one cross a courtyard repeatedly, seemingly at random.
These were monks and not Qersnyk, but an army preparing to march to battle looked the same at Ala-Din as it did among the white-houses of Qarash.
This, Edene thought. This is my chance.
* * *
Beyond the river, the steppe continued. It receded until it merged with the sky, gold and green, stretching out until Samarkar felt herself lost in the heart of something so vast and boundless that she took refuge in that emptiness she’d discovered in the dark under the Citadel. If she was nothing, then no vastness could make her small.
In that there was peace, as in the endless ripples of wind across tossing grasses racing to meet them, the endless bands of white clouds scudding across a windowpane sky. Her hair tangled in the ceaseless breezes; it blew from its braid and trailed across her eyes. They saw animals again—more Indrik-zver, antelope, wild horses with their dirty-black manes and dust-colored hides, the omnipresent vultures, and a steppe eagle with wings so broad Samarkar mistook it for a vulture, until Temur pointed out how its wings made the shape of a bow, not a triangle. Songbirds and crows harried at it as it flew, dwarfed by the spread of its wings.
Five hands and a day after leaving the mountains, they intersected the great road that led from Song to Messaline.
The Celadon Highway was named not for any quality of its own, but for the color of the rare and valuable pottery brought along it from the east.
It looked, Temur had to admit, somewhat unprepossessing—two ruts through the long grass, running to the east and west—until you stared at it long enough to realize that the ruts faded into blue distance in either direction without showing a bend or a curve.