‘You are to obey me, soldier’s boy. Your father said so.’
At the time it seemed that I had no choice except to do as he said. I dismounted from the tubby little mare and looked around. There was nothing to see. If this was some sort of test, I feared I was failing it. As he had the evening before, Dewara sat down cross-legged on the dry earth. He seemed perfectly content to sit there and watch evening turn to full night.
My head ached and I felt my stomach clench with the nausea of unanswered hunger. Well, it would go away soon enough, I told myself. I decided I would make my bed a bit more comfortable than it had been the night before. I picked a place that looked more sandy than stony, at a good distance from Dewara. I had not forgotten his sneaking approach that morning. With my hands, I dug a slight depression in the sand about the size of my body. Curled in it, I could trap my body warmth during the chill of night. I was picking the larger rocks out of the bottom when Dewara stood and stretched. He walked over to my hole and looked at it disdainfully. ‘Planning to lay your eggs soon? It’s a fine nest for a sage hen.’
Replying would have required moving my cracked lips, so I let his jibe pass. I could not understand how thirst and hunger affected me so strongly and left him untouched. As if in answer to my thought, he muttered, ‘Weakling.’ He turned and walked back to his post and squatted down again. Feeling childish, I curled into my hole and closed my gritty eyes. I said my evening prayers silently, asking the good god to grant me strength and help me to discern what my father thought this man could teach me. Perhaps this endurance of privation was how he wished to measure me. Or perhaps this old enemy of my father planned to break his bargain with my father and torment me to my death.
Perhaps my father had been wrong to trust him.
Perhaps I was a weakling and a traitor to my father to doubt his judgment. ‘Make me proud, son,’ he had said. I prayed again for strength and courage, and sought sleep.
In the dark of night, I came awake. I smelled sausages. No. I smelled smoked meat. Foolishness. Then I heard a very small sound: the gurgle of a waterskin. My mind was playing tricks on me. Then I heard it again, and the slosh as it was lowered from Dewara’s mouth. It occurred to me that his loose robes could easily conceal such things as a waterskin and a wallet of dried meat. My sticky eyelids clung together as I opened my eyes. There is nothing darker than full night on the Midlands. The stars were distant and uninterested. Dewara was completely invisible to me.
Sergeant Duril had often counselled me that thirst, hunger, and sleeplessness can lead to a man making poor decisions. He said I could add lust to that list when I was a few years closer to full manhood. So now I pondered and then pondered again. Was this a test of my perseverance and endurance? Or had my father been deceived by his old enemy? Should I obey Dewara even if he was leading me to my death? Should I trust my father’s judgment or my own? My father was older and wiser than I. But he was not here and I was. I was too weary and too thirsty to think coherently. Yet I must make the decision. Obey or disobey. Trust or distrust.
I closed my eyes. I prayed to the good god for guidance, but heard only the sweep of wind across the plains. I slept fitfully. I dreamed that my father said that if I were worthy to be his son, I could endure this. Then the dream changed, and Sergeant Duril was saying that he’d always known I was stupid, that even the youngest child knew better than to venture out on the plains without water and food. Idiots deserved to die. How many times had he told me that? If a man couldn’t figure out how to take care of himself, then let him get himself killed and get out of the way before he brought down his whole regiment. I wandered out of my dream to sleeplessness. I was in the control of a savage who disliked me. I had no food or water. I doubted that there was water within a day’s walk of here, or that I could walk a full day without water. Grimness settled on me. I decided to sleep on my decision.
In the creep of dawn, I arose from my hollow in the sand. I went to where Dewara slept. He did not sleep. His eyes were open and watching me. It hurt even to try to speak but I croaked out the words. ‘I know you have water. Please give me some.’
He sat up slowly. ‘No.’ His hand was already on the haft of his swanneck. I had no weapon at all. He grinned at me. ‘Why don’t you try to take it?’
I stood there, anger, hatred and fear fighting for control of me. I decided I wanted to live. ‘I’m not stupid,’ I said. I turned away from him and walked toward the taldi.
He called after me, ‘You say you are “not stupid”. Is that another way to say “coward”?’
The words were like a knife in my back. I tried to ignore them. ‘Keeksha. Stand.’ The mare came to me.
‘Sometimes a man has to fight for what he needs to live. He has to fight, no matter what the odds.’ Dewara stood up, pulling his swanneck from its sheath. The bronze blade was gold in the rising sun. His face darkened with anger. ‘Get away from my animal. I forbid you to touch her.’
I grasped the mane at the base of her neck and heaved myself onto her.
‘Your father said you would obey me. You said you would obey me. I said that if you disobeyed me, I would notch your ear.’
‘I am going to find water.’ I don’t know why I even said those words.
‘You are not a man of your word. Neither is your father. But I am!’ he shouted after me as I rode off. ‘Dedem. Stand!’ At that, I kicked Keeksha into a run. Deprivation had weakened her as much as it had me, but she seemed to share my mind. We fled. I heard Dedem’s strong hoofbeats behind us. ‘It can’t be helped,’ I thought to myself. I leaned into Keeksha’s gallop and hung on.
The stallion was bigger and hardier than the mare. They were gaining on us. I had two objectives: to get away from Dewara and to find water before the mare’s strength gave out. I knew I would need her to get home. To those ends, I urged her to speed, guiding her back the way we had come. My somewhat rattled assessment of the situation was that by going back the way we had come, I knew that water was only two days away. A man can survive four days without food or water. Sergeant Duril had told me so. Yet he had added, kindly, that such survival was made more unlikely by exposure and exertion, and that a man who trusted his judgment after two days without food and water was as likely to die of foolishness as deprivation. I knew the horse could not run for two days straight, nor could I ride for that long. Yet my thinking was badly disordered by the fact that I was fleeing for my life, a new experience for me, and defying my father’s authority as I did so. The one seemed equally as terrifying as the other.
I did not get far. I had only a small lead over the Kidona. Urge the mare as I might, Dewara gained steadily until he was riding beside us. I clung grimly to Keeksha’s back and mane, for there was little else I could do. I saw him draw his swanneck and slapped the mare frantically, but she had no more speed to give. The deadly curved blade swiped the air over my head. I risked a kick at him, hoping more to distract him than unseat him. I nearly unseated myself as well, and I felt the mare’s pace falter. The shining metal swept past me again, and such was Dewara’s skill that, true to his threat, I felt the harsh bite of the blade as it passed through my ear. The act dealt me a scalp wound as well, one that immediately began to pour blood down the side of my neck. I screamed as the blade sliced through my flesh, both in pain and in terror. The shameful memory of that girlish shriek has never left me. Pain and the warm seep of thick blood down my neck became one sensation, making it impossible for me to assess how badly I was injured. I could only cling tighter to Keeksha and ride hard. I knew I had no chance of survival. The next pass of Dewara’s swanneck would finish me.
Astonishingly, he let me go.
It took a short time for me to realize that. Or perhaps a long time. I rode, my wound burning and my heart hammering so that I thought it would burst from my body. At any moment, I expected the swish of the blade and the quenching of light. The drumming of my own blood in my ears was such that at first I did not realize that his hoofbeats were fading. I ventured a glance to the side and then back. He was pulling his stallion in. As I fled, he sat, unmoving on his horse, watching me go. He laughed at me. I did not hear it, could not see his smile, and yet I knew it. He flourished his golden blade over his head and flapped his free arm derisively