The light in the silver Fraortish's eyes faded. Tanshar slumped as he seemed to come back to himself. When Abivard judged the fortune-teller had fully returned to the world of rickety wicker chairs and the astounding range of smells from the bazaar, he asked, "What did that mean, what you just told me?"
Maybe Tanshar wasn't all the way back to the real world: his good eye looked as blank as the one that cataract clouded. "I have delivered the prophecy?" he asked, his voice small and uncertain.
"Yes, yes," Abivard said impatiently, repeating himself like his father. He gave Tanshar back the words he had uttered, doing his best to say them just as he had heard them.
The fortune-teller started to lean back in his chair, then thought better as it creaked and rustled under his weight. He took the armlet from Abivard and put it back on his parchment-skinned arm. That seemed to give him strength. Slowly he said, "Son of the dihqan, I remember nothing of this, nor did I speak to you. Someone-something-used me as an instrument." Despite the bake-oven heat, he shivered. "You will see I am no youth. In all my years of telling what might lay ahead, this has befallen me but twice before."
The little hairs prickled up on Abivard's arms and at the back of his neck. He felt caught up in something vastly bigger than he was. Cautiously he asked, "What happened those two times?"
"One was a skinny caravaneer, back around the time you were born," Tanshar said. "He was skinny because he was hungry. He told me I foresaw for him piles of silver and gems, and today he is rich in Mashiz."
"And the other?" Abivard asked.
For a moment, he didn't think Tanshar would answer. The fortune-teller's expression was directed inward, and he looked old, old. Then he said, "Once I was a lad myself, you know, a lad with a bride about to bear him his firstborn. She, too, asked me to look ahead."
So far as Abivard knew, Tanshar had always lived alone. "What did you see?" he asked, almost whispering.
"Nothing," Tanshar said. "I saw nothing." Again Abivard wondered if he would go on. At last he did: "She died in childbed four days later."
"The God give her peace." The words tasted empty in Abivard's mouth. He set a hand on Tanshar's bony knee. "Once for great good, once for great ill. And now me. What does your foretelling mean?"
"Son of the dihqan, I do not know," Tanshar answered. "I can say only that these things lie across your future. When and where and to what effect, I cannot guess and shall not lie to claim I can. You will discover them, or they you, as the God chooses to unwind the substance of the world."
Abivard took out three silver arkets and pressed them into the fortune-teller's hand. Tanshar rang them against one another, then shook his head and gave them back. "Offer these to the God, if that please you, but not to me. I did not speak these words, whether they came through me or not. I cannot accept your coin for them."
"Keep them, please," Abivard said, looking around the clean but barren little house. "To my mind, you stand more in need of them than the God."
But Tanshar again shook his head and refused to take the money. "They are not for me, I tell you. Had I read your future in the ordinary way, gauging what was to come by the motions of the Prophets' armlet between your hand and mine, I should be glad of the fee, for then I had earned it. For this-no."
One of the things Godarz had taught Abivard was to recognize a man's stubbornness and to know when to yield to it. "Let it be as you say, then." Abivard flung the arkets out the window. "Where they go now, and with whom, is in the God's hands."
Tanshar nodded. "That was well done. May the foretelling you heard through me mean only good for you."
"May it be so," Abivard said. When he rose from the chair, he bowed low to Tanshar, as he might have to one of the upper nobility. That seemed to distress the fortune-teller even more than the prophecy that had escaped its usual bounds. "Accept the salute, at least, for the God," Abivard told him, and, reluctantly, he did.
Abivard left the fortune-teller's house. He had thought to linger in the bazaar awhile longer, buying more small things he didn't really need so he could look at, maybe even talk with, the young women there. Not now, though.
He peered out over the sun-scorched land that ran out toward the Vek Rud River. Nothing much grew on it now, not at this season. Did that make it a broad field that was not a field? Prophecy had one problem: how to interpret it.
He turned and looked up the slope of the hill on which the stronghold perched. Was it the tower where honor would be won and lost? It didn't look like a tower to him, but who could judge how the God perceived things?
And what of the sea? Did Tanshar's words mean he would see it one day, as he hoped? Which sea had the fortune-teller meant? Who would shine a silver shield across it?
All questions-no answers. He wondered if he would have been happier with an ordinary foretelling. No, he decided. If nothing else, this surely meant he would be bound up in great events. "I don't want to watch my life slide by while I do nothing but count the days," he said aloud.
For all his father's teaching, he was still young.
In the days and weeks that followed, Abivard took to looking south and west from the walls. He knew what he was waiting to see. So did Godarz, who teased him about it every so often. But the dihqan spent a good deal of time at the corner where the eastern and the south-facing walls met, too.
Abivard felt justified in haunting that corner when he spied the rider approaching the stronghold. The horseman carried something out of the ordinary in his right hand. At first, Abivard saw only the wriggling motion. Then he recognized that a banner was making it. And then he saw the banner was red.
He let out a whoop that made heads turn his way all around the stronghold.
"The war banner!" he cried. "The war banner comes forth from Mashiz!"
He didn't know where Godarz had been, but his father stood on the wall beside him in less than a minute. The dihqan also peered south. "Aye, that is the war banner, and no mistake," he said. "Let's go down and greet the messenger, shall we? Let's go."
The horseman who carried the token of war was worn and dusty. Godarz greeted him with all the proper courtesies, pressing wine and honey cakes on him before inquiring of his business. That question, though, was but a formality.
The crimson banner, limp now that the messenger no longer rode at a fast trot, spoke for itself.
Still, Makuran was built on formality, and, just as Godarz had to ask the question, the messenger had to answer it. He raised the banner so the red silk fluttered again for a moment on its staff, then said, "Peroz King of Kings, having declared it the duty of every man of Makuran entitled to bear arms to band together to punish the Khamorth savages of the steppe for the depredations they have inflicted on his realm and for the connivance with Videssos the great enemy, now commands each high noble and dihqan to gather a suitable force to be joined to Peroz King of Kings' own armament, which shall progress toward and across the river Degird for the purpose of administering the aforesaid punishment."
Getting all that out in one breath was hard, thirsty work; when the messenger had finished, he took a long pull at the wine, then let out an even longer-and happier-sigh. Then he drank again.
Ever courteous, Godarz waited till he was comfortable before asking, "When will the armament of the King of Kings-may his years be many and his realm increase-reach the river Degird, pray?"
In effect, he was asking when it would reach the stronghold, which lay only a couple of days' journey south of the frontier. He was also asking-with perfect discretion-how serious the King of Kings was about going on campaign: the slower he and his army traveled, the less they were likely to accomplish.
The messenger answered, "Peroz King of Kings began mustering his forces the day news of the plainsmen's insolence reached him. The red banner began its journey through the land that same day. The army should reach this neighborhood inside the month."
Abivard blinked to hear that. Godarz didn't, but he might as well have. "He is serious," the dihqan murmured. "Serious."
The word ran through the courtyard. Men's heads-swarthy, long-faced, bearded: basically cut from the same cloth as Godarz and Abivard-solemnly bobbed up and down. The King of Kings of Makuran had great power, and most often wielded it with ponderousness to match.
"Peroz King of Kings does want to punish the steppe nomads," Abivard said. He got more nods for that, from his father among others. Excitement blazed in him. He'd been a boy the last time the King of Kings-it had been Valash then, Peroz's father-campaigned against the Khamorth. He still remembered the glorious look of the army as it had fared north, bright with banners. Godarz had gone with it and come back with a bloody flux, recalling that took some shine off the remembered glory.
But still… This time, he thought, I'll ride with them.
Godarz asked the messenger, "Will you lay over with us tonight? We'll feast you as best we can, for your own sake and for the news you bring. We on the frontier know the danger from the plainsmen; we know it well." One hand went to the scar he bore; a forefinger tracked the white streak in his beard.
"The dihqan is gracious," the messenger replied, but he shook his head. "I fear I cannot take advantage of your generosity. I have far to travel yet today; all the domains must hear the proclamation of the King of Kings, and time, you will have gathered, is short."
"So it is," Godarz said. "So it is." He turned to one of the cooks, who stood in the courtyard with everyone else. "Go back to the kitchens, Sakkiz. Fetch pocket bread stuffed with smoked mutton and onions, aye, and a skin of good wine, as well. Let no man say we sent the mouth of the King of Kings away hungry."
"The dihqan is gracious," the messenger said, now sincerely rather than out of formal politeness. He had meant what he had said about his journey's being urgent: no sooner had Sakkiz brought him the food and wine than he was on his way again, urging his horse up into a trot. He held the war banner high, so it fluttered with the breeze of his motion.
Abivard had eyes only for the crimson banner until a bend in the road took it behind some of the village houses and out of sight. Then, as if awakening from a dream, he glanced toward his father.
Godarz had been looking at him, too. Abivard had trouble reading the expression on his face. The dihqan gestured to him. "Here, step aside with me. We have things to talk about, you and I."
Abivard stepped aside with Godarz. The folk of the stronghold stood back and gave them room to talk privately. Makuraners were a polite folk. Had they been Videssians, they probably would have crowded forward to hear better. So tales from the east said, at any rate. Abivard had never set eyes on a Videssian in his life.
"I suppose you expect to come with me on this campaign," Godarz said. "I suppose you do."
"Yes, Father. You said I would." Abivard gave Godarz an appalled stare. Could his father have been thinking of leaving him behind? How could he hope to hold his head up in the stronghold, in the village, if he was judged not enough of a man to fight to defend the domain?