Page 43 of The Summer Pass

The sun was warm on the rock where Lill was lying, and he was surprisingly comfortable. He had only slept for a couple of hours at the beginning of the previous night, and since then he had done a lot of climbing. He was aware that he was beginning to fall asleep, and he decided to let it happen. He would have liked to stay awake watching Vanu down in the camp directing his Zashian recruits, but falling asleep with that image before his eyes seemed, just then, like the next best thing.

He woke when the sun was high overhead. Remembering immediately where he was, he crawled up to the edge of the rock again and peered over, looking for Vanu, but this time he couldn’t catch sight of him. He lay with his chin on his hands for a while, considering what to do. He was thinking more clearly now that he’d slept, and he found he keenly wanted to know what was going on here. More, he thought he needed to know, so he would know how to advise the villagers in Tsuruva. Vanu was up to something, and if there was any possibility that Lill could help …

Now that he was out from among the cursed fir trees and could see his destination, it was simple to figure out a path to get there without being seen. Simple, but he could see it would take the better part of a day because he would have to go around by the edge of the valley, up one side and down the other, to come unobserved to where Vanu’s camp was. That was all right; he didn’t want to get there before dark, anyway. He took some time to eat the dried meat and the apple he’d brought with him from Tsuruva, and set off.

It was tempting to stroll along, knowing he was well hidden on the edge of the forest from sight of the soldiers in the valley. But he recalled that someone must have been up this way to plant Vanu’s banner on the crag over Tagra Degra. He couldn’t trust that everyone was camped in the valley. So he went cautiously. It was what came naturally to him anyway; it was just that the prospect of seeing Vanu again was making him feel so light-hearted.

Near the head of the valley, the point where the fissure closed up and melted into the slope of the mountain, he found the remains of a small camp, where two or three men had spent at least one night, built a small fire, and made some effort to cover their traces—a little sloppily, but all the same, if Lill hadn’t been keeping an eye out for such traces, he would have missed them. Why the effort at concealment, he wondered? It was suspicious.

One explanation was that there was another camp, closer than the one in the valley, that these people had been concerned to hide their presence from. Sure enough, Lill hadn’t gone far before he came upon a trail, the first one he had seen in the forest, running uphill from the end of the valley. It looked like it had been there for some time, but it had certainly been travelled recently, possibly by a large party.

Lill felt torn. It was mid-afternoon by now; if he kept on the way he was going, he would reach Vanu’s camp by dusk, maybe sooner. If he followed this trail, he had no idea where it would lead, how much further up the mountain the people who had travelled it last might be by now. But his instinct told him he should try to find out.

He followed the trail cautiously, staying in the shadows of the trees; visibility both uphill and downhill was bad because the trail was curving sharply to the east. It was the route that would take you to the peak above Tagra Degra, Lill thought, if he had got the lay of the land accurately.

He knew he’d gone the right way when, pausing to look back along the trail behind him, he heard voices faintly floating down from somewhere above. They were singing. He couldn’t make out the words, but the music belonged to the mountains. He’d heard it before, in fact. It was one of the songs they had danced to the day after his wedding.

He went more cautiously still, and eventually he was able to abandon the trail altogether because he could follow the noise coming from the camp. Then he came upon the outer edge of the camp. Tent cloth was strung up between trees, and men were milling and lounging, polishing weapons and chatting. They looked at home under their makeshift shelters, at ease and ready for action.

Lill had grown up hearing stories of the fearsome, unpredictable warriors of the mountains, their way of melting untraceably into the forest after a raid, their mastery of the wild terrain of their homeland. It was strange to realize this was the first time he was actually seeing them in action.

The camp was huge, many times more men than he’d guessed based on the state of the trail they had travelled up the mountain. That was testimony to their skill at moving through the forest; they must have come up single-file, an immensely long train. Lill prowled around the edge of the camp, moving with all the stealth he possessed. In spite of himself, he could not shake off Firuduna’s warning about the tragic fate of being shot by one of Vanu’s guards. He felt painfully out of his element here. He had been trained to move silently through palace corridors and the grasslands of Akramarra; this wilderness of fir trees was a new test of his skills.

With no way of getting a clear view of the whole camp—even climbing a tree wouldn’t have afforded that—he couldn’t estimate how many men were here. There were no horses, no camp followers; if they had travelled any distance to get here, they must have left part of their entourage down the mountain somewhere. They wore no livery or uniform that would have marked them as part of someone’s train in particular; it wasn’t the custom in Hawakhurta, the way it was in Zash. Their weapons were a mixture of every conceivable thing, homemade and stolen from travellers through the mountain passes and traded from the nomads of the Steppes.

But who were they? If Vanu was camped in the valley behind them, and Vanu’s banner was flying from the crag above them⁠—

Abruptly, as he looked down a new vista between tree trunks, he got his answer. Vanu wasn’t camped in the valley. He had been down there directing the elite Zashian regiments he had somehow acquired, but these men up here were his too, and this was where he had made his own camp. There was a tent—a lightweight thing, just a little more elaborate than the awnings strung up by the other warriors—with the lion banner hanging outside it, and standing guard by the fire pit in front of it was Khatu.

Lill remembered that small camp he had stumbled upon in the forest, and suddenly he thought he might know what that was about.

The sun was sinking behind the mountains when Vanu returned to his camp. Lill was up in the branches of the sturdiest fir tree he could find, and watched the party arrive. It was Vanu and several Hawakhaba warriors whom Lill did not recognize. Mikhi was not there; she must have stayed below with the Zashian camp. Maybe that’s where the rest of them were, too, though Lill hadn’t been able to see them.

He was rewarded for his long, uncomfortable wait in the fir branches by a clear view of Vanu as he came up through the camp.

Vanu looked different. Across the vast chasm of the valley, Lill had recognized him instantly, but at this distance, an easy knife’s throw away—of course he still recognized him, he knew the moment he was coming. But he looked different.

It was mostly his clothes. Lill hadn’t really thought much about it before, but in Umtúshta, among his family, Vanu had dressed plainly. Now he was back in his role of leader of his people, and he was dressed for the part. He wore a sleeveless black vest with gold trim, open at the front, baring his chest and arms in the warm summer sun. A bright red kerchief was knotted around his neck, his hair was tied back, and he wore jewellery: gold armbands and rings and earrings. Lill had never seen him wear jewellery; when he thought about it, he couldn’t recall ever noticing that Vanu’s ears were pierced. He felt ashamed, professionally and personally, that such a detail had escaped him.

The gold and flashy clothes didn’t really suit Vanu. He was so beautiful in plain black or a faded nightshirt—the jewellery was a distraction.

There had always been something hard in Vanu’s expression, even when he was at ease. Now he looked … harrowed. Anguished. Like despair had been carved into the lines of his face. And nobody around him was acting as if they noticed or cared. He was injured; there was a bandage around his left forearm, though he wasn’t favouring it much, so perhaps it was old or only a scratch. Still, Lill had never seen him injured, though it must have been a regular state in his old life; his body was covered in scars.

He was hurt—sad and overdressed and hurt—and nobody seemed to care, and Lill was up a fucking tree and couldn’t …

What would Lill have been able to do anyway? He had to get hold of himself. There was a reason he was up here, aside from his need to see Vanu again. There was a more important reason. In fact, if he thought about it, right then he had a mission. The realization was steadying.

Vanu’s men lit their watch fires and cooked game that they had caught, and Khatu supervised the distribution of bread and beer. The men ate their evening meal. Khatu looked worse than Vanu, as if he’d lost weight and hadn’t slept in days. He was dragging himself around like a man sleepwalking in a bad dream, but he had a job and was doing it—competently, from the look of it.

Vanu sat inside his tent with a couple of his retainers, deep in conversation. The front of the tent didn’t close all the way, and Lill had a good view from his perch. Vanu had no interpreter, so he was talking aloud, though his hands would move too, automatically signing some of the words. From this Lill was able to get a fragmentary sense of what they were discussing.

Someone had been captured and was in Tagra Degra. Some other people were missing, and Vanu was more concerned with finding them than with anything else.

Was that why Lill had not seen any of the rest of Vanu’s household? Were they prisoners somewhere? Then he remembered the cat he had seen inside Tagra Degra. Could it have been Vanu’s daughters’ cat after all? He remembered the train of refugees from the villages further down the valley going into Tagra Degra. If Vanu’s family had been down there for some reason, they could have ended up in the fortress after the Great King’s men attacked. But Vanu was here with the Protector of Akramarra’s men, and the Protector himself was clearly the person who had been taken prisoner in a sortie by the besieged Tagra Degrans. Lill had seen him being brought in.

So far so good, that all fit together, though there were several pieces of the puzzle that Lill still didn’t understand. He didn’t need to understand them right now in order to do his job.

The men sitting with Vanu had brought out wine and were filling those cups made of horns that you couldn’t set down until they were empty. Vanu waved away an offered cup three times, his patience obviously diminishing. Khatu, who had been hovering by Vanu’s chair like a servant, yelled, “He said no!” at a grey-bearded chieftain-looking person and got a weary warning look from Vanu in return.