Resplendent Air 11 RY 765
Shrouded by dusk and the many-layered thickness of jungle foliage it was not possible to see far. Zuven scrambled into the lower branches at the advent of voices, searching for a revelatory glimpse. He saw only a general lessening of gloom – the mark of cleared area. If there were lights in the distance they remained hidden. This was not unexpected. Cooking fires were small things of smoke and carefully worked coals. Poor villages were not likely to waste precious oil on lamps.
Sentries, and there was surely some form of watch kept, would not bear torches.
Sound proved a better guide. Distant whispers were broken twice by sharp sounds in succession, the distinctive chopping of a blade against wood. Smell, too, carried important clues. The slow-burn of cooking meat circulated languidly through the humid air. Pork, the soldier reckoned. A common enough meat in these lands, which husbanded pigs easily enough, but also a luxury.
"This may be a local feast day," he told the sorceress upon his descent.
"It is late enough to hope we shall interrupt only the drunken after-reverie," Bian returned, agreeing. "But if not we shall have to make do. It is likely planting related. It is warmer here, so the seasons match. They are liable to have begun earlier."
Planting was dictated by the patterns of rain, not heat, in these southern lands, but the monsoons tracked with warmth as well, so Zuven admitted privately that Bian could well be correct. "They will have dogs," he cautioned. Nowhere did men live that canines did not follow. After an afternoon merging with the jungle floor they were likely proof against scent, but Icil reeked with the potent sweat of elephants and would surely be noticed.
"And we will let them find us," the sorceress countered. "We are not planning an attack. We must approach openly, and in friendship."
"And if they attack?" Isolated people were rarely without strange customs regarding outsiders, or so he'd been taught, and there was always the possibility of Wyld-taint.
"Then we defend ourselves," it was a cold acknowledgement of the differences in power between the sides. "But it should not come to that." Bian's face was filled with stern confidence. Her body thrummed with forceful anticipation.
She turned to the soldier, reaching inside her robes and pulling free a small object. Once out, it nestled in her palm, the size of a large egg. A blue ovoid, translucent and pale as the sky, it was clear through, revealing a white-crystal lattice dancing about within. "You should take this." She extended her arm. "By the dragons' grace I can learn any tongue at a word, and know many already. I doubt you hold that charm, but this hearthstone will provide."
Picking up the sphere between his fingers Zuven realized to his shame that he had not even considered this difficulty. "Thank you," he placed the hearthstone in the empty right shoulder socket of his armor. He turned his head away, struggling to hide his embarrassment.
"Another reason for this smallest of parties," Bian smiled wickedly. "A large group could never completely bridge the barrier."
Turning, the sorceress looked north. "I do not think it wise to approach from the river, it is almost certainly sacred in some measure. Better to circle around north and approach from that direction, the way any Tengese traders would come."
Agreeing with this strategy, Zuven led them in a wide wheel around the gap in the canopy. It took the better part of an hour. The fields they circled were somewhat extensive, covering almost the entirety of a relatively level section of landscape. He suspected there was a long, looping bend in the river's path here. Even so, the village was not large. He guessed no more than two dozen households, perhaps a talon or so in people, all packed densely within their fields and paddies.
Passing this conjecture to Bian, the sorceress spun it one step further. "Too small," she reasoned. "A village this size cannot persist in isolation. Something here denies the ordinary patterns of peasant life."
"There could be other villages, on other small rivers," Zuven countered, though he broadly agreed. "Narrow trails would be easily missed." He doubted these people owned carts, or yeddim. They would use buffalo trains for transport, the altitude made elephants unlikely.
"No," the sorceress brushed aside the mundane objections. "Too much essence has been channeled to obscure this place. I suspect the dragon lines have been bent around this demense. What I do not know is why. It is not defensive. The jungle is no place for armies, and only a fool would think a few tangling creepers and miserable worms would keep out the Raksha, or Beastmen."
"Guild slavers?" There had been military exercises centered on protecting particular yeddim-caravan setups. Such lumbering beasts would have been halted by this forest. "Or a rival tribe?"
"Perhaps," fiery blue eyes narrowed. "It could be, and it is always possible that we have simply entered the domain of a particularly oppressive local god. This is a land suited to Wood Kings, and they are harsh, but I will not leave this mystery to mere guesses." She turned to Zuven. "Consider it your charge while visiting. Find out who it is these people fear so, and who guards them."
The soldier nodded in agreement, but he felt little confidence. Surely such questions were Bian's parlance. He would count it lucky if he avoided breaking the most hallowed taboos of this tribe.
Boundaries between jungle and field were abrupt, as much as such things could be, and marked by a black line across the ground. Charred soil, the mark of clearing by fire. It was a feature of agriculture familiar to the soldier. A handful of steps later, when they came up to strung posts bound with yams vines above raised soil ridges, the memories struck with goremaul force.
The smells were different, and yet the same. Absent sea wind was replaced by a cool mountain mist. Pork curled with potent spices, all blending into the universal pepper tinge that dominated through time. Stink from blood, refuse, and worms pervaded this localized concentration of humanity, nestled within unforgiving forest.
It was, terribly, a homecoming.
Dogs yipped, leaves rustled. Fires crackled. Above it all men and women chanted rhythmically. The nuance and cadence, the very sounds used to form words, were unfamiliar, a family of language separated from his native islands by the ruination of plague and eight centuries of drift, but essence wrapped his ears, parsing all words through the crystalline matrix extruded from a glacier-covered mountain thousands of leagues away. He understood everything.
It was a joyous chant, celebratory and infused with raucous, alcohol-boosted levity. Call and repeat, the pattern circled, alternating male-female-child. Joking comparisons of men with animals, women with food, it was lightly insulting. This game was likewise familiar to Zuven. He had to shake his whole body, forcing violent vibrations through the muscles, to break the spell.
This was not home. Ytiran was gone, never to return, a past lost to him; one never truly his to begin with. The jungle scents and sounds, the cooking and camaraderie, the villagers unbound, these were the vestiges of a different life. They belonged to a boy without a future, not to Ragara Zuven, exalted of Sextes Jylis.
He was a soldier of the Realm, in service of empire, family, and faith. Protect the honored savant. This was his charge. Everything else would be, must be, carved out and forgotten.
A hand pushed down, delicately but firmly, on his shoulder. "It can be strange to hear speech in that way at first. Do not worry, your ear will acclimate to it soon."
Contact was comforting, as was shared concern. The coolly logical air aspect might fail to fully grasp the source of his discomfort, but she was not uncaring. Zuven swallowed once, rebuilding his focus, and then stepped forward.
Bian imposed her lithe frame in his path. "I will lead from this point," she ordered, calm but absolute. "Watch my back and keep Icil in hand. I do not want him mauling any dogs, or children," she amended darkly.
In An-Teng the elephant had drawn curious interest from countless street urchins, but his compact strength was more than their match. Even an idle loving blow from the trunk, a friendly gesture among his kin, could send an unprepared adult sprawling. Fearing nothing that did not tower over him, he could do far worse if moved to anger by aggression. His former owner had claimed the elephant had slain both bear and boar.
The soldier believed it, and took pebbly gray skin in hand, guiding him using the saddlebag straps.
The mounded ridges harboring growing yellow tubers were broken up by small patches of vegetables. A ragged wall of fruit trees marked a secondary barrier before they crossed to the edge of newly planted rice paddies. These flooded squares made a checkerboard pattern all the way to the river's edge. Agriculture compact in its intensity, slaved to this small, tiny in truth, patch of fertile clearing. The demands of hungry mouths rested heavily upon it.
At first glance the setup resembled the paddy fields of An-Teng, but with each second a new discrepancy was added to the assessment, until the pile they formed became too great for the soldier to coherently process. The roots were the same, but the plant that had sprouted was wholly new.
It was at the edge of the fruit trees where they were at last met and challenged.
