Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay

Author:Guy Gavriel Kay [Kay, Guy Gavriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2016-04-25T13:35:15+00:00

When Obravic sent an important message to Senjan, the court used two couriers, two days apart, for safety.

The identical messages that arrived (within a day of each other, as it happened) that spring were, indeed, important. You could also call them deadly.

There was never a moment when anyone in Senjan, whether at the meeting in the sanctuary, or privately in taverns or homes, or on the streets, or by the sea, spoke a word about not obeying.

Senjan remained what it always defined itself as being. In their own minds they were the eternally loyal warriors of the god. Hardship and death were always present, always close. They defied both.

If you were summoned to war for Jad, however far away, however hostile the lands between, you went to war.

They had done it before. They had died before, on the walls of Sarantium. Every Senjani hero there had died for the last Sarantine emperor. Not one came home, even as a body for burial. Senjan knew, in blood and sorrow, what it was to fight the infidels.

There were just under three hundred raiders in the town at the time the emperor’s summons came. After the breaking of the Seressini blockade they’d sent parties down the coast and, more recklessly, across the narrow sea to raid along the other coastline. And because it was spring, two large groups had gone through the pass towards the Osmanli villages that way. Captives to sell or sell back for ransom, oxen and sheep and goats were the usual coinage of these raids, if fortune favoured the just.

This was different. An imperial request, under seal, for a hundred fighting men to go all the way through lands controlled by Asharites, to defend Woberg Fortress. It presupposed they could even get there, with war headed that way. It meant much more than dealing with hadjuk bands and patrols. It meant the khalif’s army of invasion, forty thousand of them, perhaps more. They’d have to beat that army to the fortress—then get inside, to be besieged by it.

And then, if they held out, if the enemy could be caused to retreat as summer turned, it meant getting all the way back here across those same hard, dangerous lands.

It also meant leaving Senjan itself thinly populated with fighting men at a time when they had enemies on the water, too.

They never hesitated.

Three captains were assigned to choose the best men remaining in the town. Those with wounds or with wives expecting children were exempt. Men with small children were not; this was an imperial command. Two of the clerics were quick to name themselves for this journey. More surprisingly, three women indicated they wished to come—following an example set by Danica Gradek, not even Senjani by birth or for long, who had gone to sea with a raiding party this spring.

That party had returned from the far side of the narrow sea triumphantly—but with one of their own men dead, at her hand.

She had not come back with the boats.

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