Gawain by Blaze Ward

Author:Blaze Ward [Ward, Blaze]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644702376
Publisher: Knotted Road Press

Behrooz sat atop the wall, watching as the column approached the gate. The sun was almost down, but lights on tall poles made it almost daylight around them. ibn Rustah was parked off to one side, away from the main gate and out of the way. The rest of the village was here on the wall with him, them armed to the teeth to protect the place.

Well, those that had belonged a week ago. The newcomers just stood and watched as captured dazzlers and heavy machine guns tracked.

Yasmin led in her Excalibur she called Gawain, as two columns of old, battered trucks followed. Quiet sounds of shock and surprise carried, but Ardashir was silent on his left and the Sayyida on his his right.

“How?” Nahal Ghorbani Sayyida asked now, turning to face them. “She called them ronin. You explained what that meant.”

Behrooz leaned back enough that he could watch the outside, even as he could see these two speak.

“She obviously decided to turn them into samurai,” Ardashir replied with something of a shrug. “Yasmin did not say much when she called to alert us what she was doing. Merely that she was bringing most of the rest in.”

“Most?” the Sayyida asked.

“They had perhaps selected a new daimyo,” Ardashir said. “With Dehkordi dead, they would need a new leader.”

“And they would chose her?”

“Not with the first vote,” the old man smiled now. It was an ugly, knowing smile that Behrooz understood. “She probably did something utterly stupid like challenging the new leader to single combat.”

Behrooz nodded, even as the Sayyida gasped.

“Why would she do that?” the woman asked.

“She is building,” Behrooz interrupted now. “You cannot make bricks without straw. You cannot make kingdoms without men willing to fight for it.”

“But her against whatever man was strong enough, dangerous enough to take leadership?” she asked.

Behrooz laughed. It was a sharp, ugly bark remarkably similar to the sound Ardashir made.

“You will never meet a more dangerous human, Nahal Ghorbani Sayyida,” he replied. “I have seen her dance.”

The woman fell to silence, perhaps reappraising Yasmin Shir-Del as something more than just an expert mechanoid pilot with a dangerous dream. She was also that, but Behrooz could fill notebooks with such lists that encompassed the rest of the woman he had fallen in love with.

The world was like that.

“So now what?” the Sayyida asked, even as the team in charge of the gate backed it out of the gap and lowered the drawbridge.

Behrooz stirred and began to walk.

“Now, I would like to talk to Yasmin,” he said simply.

Glancing back, the other two had fallen in behind him, walking side by side in a way Behrooz found interesting. The Sayyida was young enough to be Ardashir’s daughter—and old enough to be Behrooz’s own mother—yet she stayed close to the old man, brushing against him occasionally.

Behrooz wondered if Ardashir might stay when Yasmin chose to move on, still looking for Herat and eventually a dragon across a stormy sea.

He crossed the short bridge and was outside the compound, in the space that had been a battlefield but two long days ago.

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