Dunes and Empty River behind, we rode west as the sun sank and reached the Elm in full darkness. The moon was so low that all I saw of the water were silvery slivers. But even as the wind from behind us grew stronger and louder, I heard that water-whisper I knew: the rush that ran down out of Elman, to the sea, gentle but steady . . . How close were we, I wondered, to where I’d played as a small child? Right at this moment, was I looking across to those same shallows?
As camp was raised Marszal Savhar found and called me from duties. ‘High Commander’s occupied,’ she said, folding her big arms against the cold.
‘With what?’ I said before thinking.
Of course she didn’t answer; just looked out at the darkness of the river. ‘So you’ll be reporting to me tonight.’
And so I did, knowing that nothing I’d seen was secret. Well, in a way it had been a secret – a lost piece of Vedish history – and for a moment I was tempted to keep it that way. I could be the only living person in the whole world who knew. But no; I told her everything I’d seen.
The soldiers’ fire had grown bright enough to light her eyes by the time I said that the ruin had been another temple and that more Builders’ Stones were there. She didn’t look all that surprised but I remembered these were soldiers. Not only that, but even among the engineers of the Guilds there were those who didn’t care about the stories of the Builders. What did they mean anymore? What did it matter if there were monument stones exactly like those at Calvallagh, Laudassa and Methar under some ancient, erg-drowned ruin? So what?
But there was more to it than that: ‘It just kept going on down, under the tower. I didn’t have time to reach where it was going, with the Sight I mean. But wherever that is, it’s really deep.’
‘Can you say in distance?’ asked Savhar.
I winced. ‘It’s hard to tell inside the Sight, sometimes. More than a mile though.’
‘You’re certain?’
‘Yes marszalekh.’ And I was. ‘Will we go back?’
She shook her head. ‘Not likely. For all the reasons you yourself have just now given. That structure’s entrance is trapped under the better part of a dune, the entire tower most likely submerged again by dawn with these winds rising, and one can’t dig through sand like that as one might dig through earth or rock. Sand simply shifts back into place. Nor have we Guild machines at our disposal.’
I nodded, grimly accepting it, as I looked out into the darkness of the river. ‘And there’s that lid . . .’
Solid iron. We’d never move it.
‘Just as you say,’ Savhar agreed, tone more clipped as if she’d just noticed this becoming a conversation. Some of her cavalry could hear. ‘Your findings will be conveyed to High Command,’ she added and started walking towards the campfire. ‘Return to your duties.’
----------------------------------------
We didn’t go back.
Unit quarters were taken in darkness next morning and we were moving at least two hours before first light. South down the Elm. At first I tried to keep my face from turning to the right and looking north, but soon the sun shot its golden rays over the westward lumps of the erg and poured across the borderlands. Somehow still there as I remembered. And beyond them, our mountains. Grey today.
Under the company’s hooves the earth softened. Then rose. Maybe it wouldn’t have been obvious that we were climbing very slightly but for the deepening gulch through which the Elm now carved its way. Something about the air began to change. When it should have been getting hotter, it seemed to hold back some dawn coolness. It had a smell now, and a taste; I remembered it. An hour later, looking down from the bay’s saddle, I saw pale grasses. And then the sky was full of gulls. Again on high ground, our view looked back to the Northern Erg: still a shadowy blanket with with red waves rippled through. Nothing moved across the distance.
We dismounted to drink our morning water. For once, the horses could graze too.
It must have been almost a year since the last time I’d seen the Rivan Gulf. At least up close. Erik would’ve taken me and Jerome to forage for cockles and pick mussels off the rocks. Now, with just a faint breeze in my face, I walked to the edge of the bluffs and tried to take in the wide grey-blue. As always, it felt too much for my small eyes to frame at once. So open out there. I thought of using the Sight. Maybe, if I did, it would carry me over the sea and wash me up on Naemian beaches . . .
‘You won’t see it,’ someone said. When I looked to see who was coming, it was Telmadh Eflan. Bracing his bandaged arm, he idled towards me along the bluff edge. Ever since that spear had been cast out of nowhere at us, he’d been less talkative than usual.
‘See what?’ I said.
‘Your country,’ he grinned. ‘That’s what you’re trying to see, no?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘My country’s . . .’
‘Commander can’t hear you, kid. We all know you’re not Elmine.’
As I thought. Even before we’d left, at the secret meeting, why else would all those heads around that table have nodded when I’d said about our escape from the borderlands in our carts?
Eflan stopped not far from where I stood, narrowed his eyes at the sea and raised his chin to the breeze. Still smiling. ‘Well. . .’ he breathed, ‘it’s out there, that’s for sure. Forty, fifty leagues from here.’
I looked out over the small waves.
‘Do you miss it?’
The question threw me.
I didn’t know. Though I had some memories, I’d been too young to really know it; know my homeland for myself. I did want to see it. But did I miss it, the way Erik and Sarah had missed it? My thoughts must have shown on my face because the smile Eflan gave me was strangely understanding.
‘You’re looking the wrong way, anyway,’ he said, and raised his good arm to point some way off to our right along the bluffs. True enough, I could still see the hazy figures of our mountains. ‘That way’s west.’
I stared a little longer at the grey shapes I’d grown up with, always there. Behind us.
Then took a deep breath of brackish air and forced it out. ‘Did you . . . lose friends at Shen Drumbar?’ I asked him.
The smile tightened. ‘Yeah. I did.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Now the breeze pulled some of his hair over his eyes. Shaking it away and not replying, he gripped his arm more tightly. So, in the space of a minute we’d both shown a face to the other. For a while we stood there, a yard apart, and didn’t speak; just watched the white chop of those waves in regimental lines, glinting sunrise-gold.
Then Eflan made a wincing sound. I saw him stoop. Close to the edge, where the grass became a bushy fringe, there was a flower. ‘The Ilovish anemone,’ he said, lifting a waxy purple petal and stroking it fondly. ‘Jewel of the desert. Don’t think I’ve ever seen one this far north.’
He picked the flower.
----------------------------------------
As we continued on our way south down the coast, I realised where we were going. The port-town, Balkh Radhi: I’d seen it on the Commander’s map. But something didn’t make sense. Due west of Antissa and heading south, the land we travelled was still completely untouched by the Rath. As far as a I knew, the only Vedish evacuees so far had been those from Verunia in the north. So why were the fishing villages we passed, clinging to the cliffs like chains of limpets – “balkhs” as they called them – all empty? No boats, no Vedans.
Eflan eventually moved up the column to ride with me for a while. Or maybe, since the formation was so loose, I’d fallen back. I asked him then.
‘Course, you’ll know about the Bronze Coast,’ he said. When I shook my head at him, he frowned. ‘Your master is the Honorary Caliph, yes? Chief Symphin?’
‘Yes,’ I said, wondering why his voice had dropped just there.
‘Well, his father and mother hailed from Radhi. They served the caliph.’
I hadn’t known that. ‘Who is the caliph?’
He shook his head. ‘No caliph, kid. Not on the coast. Not for fifty years.’
‘But all these villages . . .’
He made a sound in his throat; chuckle or scoff, I couldn’t tell. ‘Good man, that Symphin. I like him. But he’s no open scroll, for sure.’ I didn’t understand what he meant by that, but waited. ‘Not so strange, I suppose. Not many talk about it now.’
The way his open face closed told me that, whatever it was that no one talked about now, he’d thought I’d already known and now didn’t want to say.
I nodded to his arm, tucked inside his swathes. ‘How bad does that hurt?’
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‘Not so bad,’ he smiled back, reminding me of Con for a stinging moment. But this time it wasn’t with false bravery that he’d said it; more as if the fact surprised him a little. Then I remembered my own leg, today thrumming a dull ache, and how that hadn’t hurt at first. Still needed stitches fixed, I thought.
By late afternoon it was below us. Bigger than Drumbar, it too was empty of people but not totally in ruin. Some stretches of its outer wall were standing. Inside the half-moon they formed, rustic houses of brown clay and grey stone tumbled by rows into a cove. Most of the houses were at least partially collapsed; of those that weren’t the strong sea winds had taken bites out of their roofs, eating away at what had once been brown-black motleys of square tiles. There was no beach inside the cove; somehow the buildings that clustered closest to where I guessed a beach should be had stood up best against the winds.
The harbour dominated the place: a sprawling star-shaped seashell out on the water. Covered by what looked like a carapace of ruddy slats, it rose by tiers and inclines to a rounded roof of arches. The shell’s splayed points were the quays but not a single ship or boat was moored at any of them; just flotsam, kelp and rusted metal. Scabs of a long-dead shipyard.
Eflan pointed out the grandest house built into the northern bluffs. The caliph’s house. Its line of stately terraces which faced the harbour were still an elegant sight above the town.
Tightening formation, we made our way down through the balkh, between chapped houses, towards the shore and crossed the court before the entrance of the harbour. Then we halted at its steps.
As the Commander called me forward with Telmadh Eflan, I sensed unease among the soldiers of the company. Seeming a little uneasy himself, Plamen briskly told me to take up vigil inside the harbour and from there make a Sight-search of the seaward-facing cliffs. ‘The Telmadh will go with you,’ he said. ‘You have an hour.’
He clearly didn’t want to stay in Balkh Radhi for too long, small chance though there was of any Rath reaching us here. Unless, of course, there really was something to find.
Eflan led me up the steps and into the cool shade of the shell. An empty hollow was inside – not what I’d expected to find – the three seaward points of the shell all converging on a broad, high-ceilinged hall. A stone platform was in the middle.
‘The old harbourmaster’s dais,’ Eflan said with some wonder in his voice as he climbed it. ‘Last time I saw all this, I was your age.’ Hand propped on the back of a stone chair, he looked into the ceiling. From it I saw the chains that dangled loose, and he pointed behind me to where an enormous iron brazier lay in the litter of rubble. ‘That pyre used to light the watch-windows back in the day, sending signals to the trade ships that sailed up and down this coastline. Once, this port was just about as important as the fortress, you know. Centre for its trade in the gulf, while it lasted. Long gone, all that. High Commander won’t encamp here.’
‘What happened?’ I asked again, getting only more mystified by the note of regret in his voice, the unease of the other soldiers, and now hoping that he’d tell me since it was just the two of us.
He sat down in the stone chair on the left, so I climbed up the dais and sat in the one on the right. Then he took out the purple flower, and his knife – a much better blade than my stubby little chib. Deftly for just one hand, he scored a hole through his swathes and somehow threaded through the stem. ‘How do I look?’ he said, displaying the Ilovish anemone on his breast.
‘Like a girl,’ I grunted back.
‘Oi! No way to speak to an officer.’
He smiled and I did too, but mine hurt. So much like Con. . .
Now he eased against the stone, massaging his wounded arm. ‘What you’ve got to understand is that it was never about the people,’ he said, shifting. ‘It was about one man. Caliph Rafa. A braggart and a fool who loved nothing so much as to appear in silks and jewels before lordly men . . . In those days, see, the desert was still on speaking terms with Ered. Trading terms.’
Meeting his copper eyes, I nodded. All that made sense to me so far.
‘From the start,’ he grimaced, ‘Rafa had far more ambition than befits our Caliphate.’
‘What did he do?’
As Eflan turned clear eyes on me, I briefly wondered if he’d always been paler than the other Methans of his unit and I simply hadn’t noticed until now. ‘Betrayed the throne.’
‘Satrap Syphus?’
‘Hyphet,’ he corrected. ‘Hyphet the Second, our Satrap’s predecessor. Fifty years ago, remember.’
‘How’d he betray him?’
Eflan winced but not from his wound: I was a child again. ‘The royal marriage bed had been . . . compromised,’ he replied.
‘So the Satrap was unfaithful.’ I said it quickly so he’d know I wasn’t stupid. ‘I’m twelve—not six, telmadekh!’
He gushed a laugh, ‘Fair, fair enough! And yes, Hyphet was unfaithful. With Rafa’s sister, so it’s said. And when Rafa sought to expose him to the nation, then to sway Lostrian Ered against the Mooncircle Throne, the Satrap put him to death.’
Frowning, I nodded to that. ‘Treason.’ A word that would have meant nothing to me two months ago, was now very familiar. ‘Isn’t that what satraps always do?’
Eflan sighed, which I took as yes. ‘At any other time it would have been enough for him to die. Rafa had taken grievous insult from the Satrap’s indiscretions, it’s true. But by making so bold a challenge to the throne, he all but requested execution. A just execution. And it should have been enough.’
‘But it wasn’t.’
He stopped talking for a moment to moisten his mouth, then fold his lips until they were white or had they been that way before?
‘Satrap Hyphet suspected more. Traitors on the coast. Had done for years, no one knows why. After Rafa, those suspicions turned to fears. Wild, reckless fears. And then, in `3164, he passed decree which banished not only the Caliph’s household, but the entire population of the Bronze Coast from Vorth.’ His voice went deep as he said it. ‘They were exiled to—’
‘Elman,’ I finished for him.
For a beat he met my eyes. Then said, ‘That’s right. Our fish was sourced from Verunia’s shores after that, and the River Elm. But Vedish commerce was never the same. When Syphus the Second assumed the throne he recalled the exiles to the desert, but by then a generation had been lost. Relations with Ered had frayed to their thinnest and the proudest part of our Caliphate was in ruin. Of those who did return to Vorth, none came back to the Bronze Coast, save for brigands and pirates who destroyed almost everything that was left here including the Mooncircle fleet. Radhi and all of the fishing balkhs you saw on today’s ride have been empty ever since.’
With a swathe-sleeve he mopped some of the sweat under his fringe.
‘So that’s why no one talks about the Bronze Coast?’
A slow nod. ‘It’s a matter of shame, do you see. National shame. That one man, even a caliph, should die for his pride and foolishness is a cruelty this desert can bear. It is our way. But for exiles to be made of honest, faithful Vedans . . .’ He shook his head while, in my own, I thought it did sound like madness. Maybe the beginning of madness. I remembered clearly now those carven murals on the walls of that citadel tower that showed the caliph’s head cut off and his people walking away.
‘Rusper would have been Vedish,’ I thought aloud.
The soldier leaned his head back on the stone and closed his eyes, as if telling the story had been hard work. His breathing deepened. ‘Thought you’d get it.’
I didn’t grudge him for sleeping: it was my fault that he’d been hurt in the first place. So I pulled my legs up on the seat and crossed them underneath me. I thought about his story for a while, letting my eyes rove over the grey and empty walls of what was left of the harbour. So much lost. Fifty years was a long time to me, more than a lifetime. Yet for a nation, yesterday. So many things could have been different. And if a fate like that could hurt someone as young as Telmadh Eflan, I could only imagine what it still meant to Rusper Symphin. His parents had lived here, in Radhi; walked this stone . . .
Eflan’s breaths relaxed my muscles, calmed my thoughts. I drew my sleeve, thought simply river.
Pulled the lever and let go.
Faster than I expected the Sight was off the dais and out between the wind-bitten arches. It swept the walkways of the harbour. Off a barnacled pier it launched me out over the waves and spun me twice in the sea air.
That air then blew me away from the gulf and upwards, against the northern bluffs. Into the long-dead Rafa’s house by his long-abandoned terrace, I could look back and see the harbour where I sat inside a shell.
I cleaved to cliffsides and then plunged under waves.
Steeling my nerves against dark shapes of swimming things—fish, all of them—I drove as far down as I could, to the sea floor.
Here, in the Sight, I felt the water weighing down on my awareness from above, but just let go and let it fill me and the Sight to take command. The bluffs would hold me to direction.
Along them, far beneath the surf, I simply followed, looking for anything that opened in the depths or from the land.
Time disappeared, like in my dreams, and then it drowned.
When I woke up I knew the shape of Vorth’s entire western coast as if I’d sculpted it myself. A feeling I knew, at once, had changed me. A feeling I could never explain. I couldn’t tell how long I’d searched but now the hollow of the harbour was a duller, deeper tone. A calmness held me.
Completely still, I sat and listened to the movements of the company outside. They were getting ready to depart. Soon the High Commander and Marszal came from the steps. ‘Well?’ prompted Plamen with a dull echo.
‘Nothing,’ I said, echoing too.
He turned around immediately, passing Telmadh Shafra on his way out. Savhar gave a disappointed sigh and coaxed me down from the dais. ‘And wake Eflan,’ she said.
I turned and reached to shake—careful—his good arm. ‘We’re leaving now, telmadekh.’
His face was grey. Lips, eyelids, nostrils almost white.
‘Come on, ekhin Flint, you man or molerat?’ shouted Shafra. ‘Give him a tug!’
The harbour’s shell started to tremble under the gathering of hooves outside. I glanced to Savhar and saw that Plamen had turned back. Grief thrashed up through me like a wave, eyes filling up to their brims so fast it made me just as angry. I hadn’t known him, I told myself as Shafra said something low.
Plamen swore.
They carried Eflan out of the shell and laid him down on the quays. Plamen knelt next to Aznath who unbound the arm quickly. I watched between their shoulders, close enough to be blasted by the stink that erupted as the cloths came unwound. Plamen’s hands were dexterous as they pulled away the final fold from an oozing morass of open flesh and blood that fizzed and bubbled, black. He put his wrist against his mouth and stood while soldiers recoiled.
‘Same toxin,’ he told Savhar before he hissed another curse. ‘Slow-working but will kill once in the blood. The Telmadh was dead as soon as smitten by that spear.’ He glanced at Aznath and then shouted over the heads of the cavalry, ‘Wounded to inspect their injuries!’
I felt the controlled panic as soldiers helped their comrades to undress the recent wounds. For now at least I’d controlled my own feelings—wasn’t going to cry—but, like a coward, walked away so as not to share in their horror.
But there were no anguished cries and when I had the courage to look, bandages were wrapping wounds again. Relief flooded the holes that dread had gouged so quickly.
Eflan’s body was wrapped in a canvas from a tent, then taken to the end of a pier by four soldiers and burned there. Before they did, I took the little purple flower. And his knife. Marszal Savhar saw but didn’t stop me.
We made our camp up on the southward-facing cliffs above Radhi, just as Eflan had predicted. I didn’t want to be there now any more than anyone else did.
The sun slid into the gulf.
On the bluffs I saw the Marszal receive a falcon on her arm, so went to squat behind the command tent to hear the message it had brought. Artabh Keda had left Antissa and now sought our location. That was all. Too tired to care, I crawled into our tent without a meal.