No. They will kill you. And our children. And for me, something far worse. In a low whisper she then asked, ‘Shall we flee, then? In the night, unseen by anyone?’
He lowered his hands and, eyes on the storm, offered up a bleak smile that lanced her heart. ‘I am to be the coward I so want to be? And I do, beloved, I so want to be a coward. For you, for our children. Gods below, for myself.’
How many admissions could so crush a man like this? It seemed that in these past few moments she had seen them all.
‘What will you do?’ she asked, for it seemed that her role in all of this had vanished.
‘Select for me a hundred warriors, Hetan. My worst critics, my fiercest rivals.’
‘If you will lead a war-party, why just a hundred? Why so few?’
‘We will not find the enemy, only what they have left behind.’
‘You will set fire to their rage. And so bind them to you.’
He flinched. ‘Ah, beloved, you misunderstand. I mean to set fire not to rage, but fear.’
‘Am I permitted to accompany you, husband?’
‘And leave the children? No. Also, Cafal will return soon, with Talamandas. You must keep them here, to await our return.’
Without another word, she turned about and walked down to the throng. Rivals and critics, yes, there were plenty of those. She would have no difficulty in choosing a hundred. Or, indeed, a thousand.
With the smoke of cookfires spreading like grey shrouds through the dusk, Onos Toolan led a hundred warriors of the White Face Barghast out from the camp, the head of the column quickly disappearing in the darkness beyond.
Hetan had chosen a raised ridge to watch them leave. Off to her right a massive herd of bhederin milled, crowded together as was their habit when night descended. She could feel the heat from their bodies, saw the plume of their breaths drifting in streams. The herds had lost their caution with an ease that left Hetan faintly surprised. Perhaps some ancient memory had been stirred to life, the muddled comprehension that such proximity to the two-legged creatures kept away wolves and other predators. The Barghast knew to exercise tact in culling the herd, quietly separating the beasts they would slay from all the others.
So too, she realized, were the Barghast scattered, pulled apart, but not by the malevolent intent of some outside force. No, they had done this to themselves. Peace delivered a most virulent poison to those trained as warriors. Some fell into indolence; others found enemies closer to hand. ‘ Warrior, fix your gaze outward .’ An ancient saying among the Barghast. An admonition born of bitter experience, no doubt. Reminding her that little had changed among her people.
She looked away from the bhederin-but the column was well and truly gone, swallowed by the night. Tool had not waited long to set the league-devouring pace that made Barghast war-parties so dangerous to complacent enemies. Even in that, she knew her husband could run those warriors into the ground. Now that would humble those rivals.
Her thoughts about her own people, as the two thousand or so bhederin stood massed and motionless a stone’s throw away, had left her depressed, and the squabbling of the twins in the yurt only awaited her return before commencing once again, since the girls adored an audience. She was not quite ready for them. Too fragile with the battering she had received.
She missed the company of her brother with an intensity that ached in her chest.
The faintly lurid glow of the Jade Slashes drew her eyes to the south horizon. Lifting skyward to claw furrows across the breadth of the night-too easy to find omens beneath such heavenly violence; the elders had been bleating warnings for months now-and she suddenly wondered, with a faint catch of breath, if it had been too convenient to dismiss their dire mutterings as the usual disgruntled rubbish voiced by aching old men the world over. Change as the harbinger of disaster was an attitude destined to live for ever, feeding off the inevitable as it did and woefully blind to its own irony.
But some omens were just that. True omens. And some changes proved to be genuine disasters, and to stir sands already settled yielded shallow satisfaction.
When ruin is coming, we choose not to see it. We shift our focus, blurring the facts, the evidence before us. And we ready our masks of surprise, along with those of suffering and self-pity, and keep our fingers nimble for that oh-so-predictable cascade of innocence, that victim’s charade.
Before reaching for the sword. Because someone’s to blame. Someone is always to blame.
She spat into the gloom. She wanted to lie with a man this night. It almost did not matter who that man might be. She wanted her own method of escaping grim realities.
