Page 15 of Fate of the Argosi

So much for keeping off the Way of Thunder, I thought bitterly.Fate makes fools of those who hold their vows in high esteem.

An old Mahdek saying. Funny that it came to me then, especially since fate had found a far better way to make a fool of me.

‘Chedran!’ screamed a young girl’s voice.

She didn’t sound scared at all. She sounded ecstatic.

More voices followed, shouting his name in delight, and then it was all bare feet slapping against soft dirt and arms and legs all over the place. One after another those kids hurled themselves at Chedran, hugging him and grinning stupid kid grins up at him and yapping so many disjointed pieces of what had happened since last they’d seen him that poor Conch leaped off my shoulder and went running into the bushes.

I felt Arissa’s arm around my shoulder. She leaned against me and asked, ‘Ferius, did that goat of yours unleash some kind of hallucinogenic fart without us noticing? Because I cannot be seeing what I think I’m seeing.’

I’m rarely lost for words, but this time I couldn’t do anything but stare at the way those kids kept grabbing onto Chedran, and the way that mean, sour-faced cuss couldn’t stop smiling, or the wetness in his eyes he tried and failed to blink away. ‘You are, quite simply, the most idiotic pack of half-witted clods it has ever been my misfortune to be saddled with,’ he growled.

That unleashed a torrent of laughter and giggles, which made the kids seem all the younger, even though most were teenagers and a couple were almost our age.

‘They love him,’ Arissa murmured, her head resting on my shoulder as if the incomprehensibility of the world had exhausted her too much to stand on her own. ‘Those kids absolutely adore him.’

I nodded, and found the words that had eluded me moments ago. ‘He’s their hero.’

I guess Chedran’s ears really were sharper than mine, because he began slowly extricating himself from his admirers and said, ‘No, I’m not.’ He turned to me, all the bitterness I’d seen these past weeks returned to his eyes, his jaw, even the tightness in his shoulders. With an almost accusatory gesture he pointed to me and said, ‘Everyone, this is Ferius Parfax.’

Silence fell harder than a ten-ton rock on a patch of wet sand. All the frantic enthusiasm, incoherent babbling and mad jumping around came to a stop as all twelve of the Mahdek runaways stared at me with eyes so wide it was like a giant golden statue had sprung up right behind me.

Arissa found this hilarious. ‘Hate to say it, Rat Girl,’ she whispered in my ear, ‘but you seem to be a lot more famous among your people than you thought.’

She was right. I didn’t need my arta precis to recognise what was unfolding before me. Two versions of the same tale: one written on those twelve awestruck faces, the other in Chedran’s disgusted scowl.

Few Mahdek ever get famous. Most of us either die young or live too long by staying small and quiet. Me though, I’d done things. Big things. Some of my actions had been good and noble, others . . . others less so, but each had left behind a story. When a people don’t get to build cities or erect statues of their heroes or monuments to their past, stories take on a fierce power. And a good story? The kind where a young Mahdek girl fights off Jan’Tep war mages and puts an end to mystical plagues, defies generals and princes, and most of all . . . most of all gets to live free of despair?

‘Go on,’ Chedran said to the runaways, who had abandoned their kin on account of all the stories they’d heard of a Mahdek girl who’d decided she was too special to live poor and humble. A girl who’d decided she didn’t need to be Mahdek at all, but could call herself an Argosi and take for herself whatever name, whatever destiny, she chose.

What those stories likely hadn’t mentioned was all the friends who’d saved me from my own stupidity along the way: Sir Rosarite and Sir Gervaise, two foreign warriors-of-honour who’d sacrificed their lives to give a terrified little girl a chance at happiness; Arissa, who’d protected me from thieves and bully boys and made me her partner in crime; Durral Brown, who’d showed me the Argosi ways and freed me from a Jan’Tep curse; Enna, his wife, who’d freed me from my own rage and bitterness.

Chedran never had that, I finally understood.But that’s not why he resents me. It’s those numbskull teenagers he’s no doubt rescued a dozen times since they ran off from their families, and yet I’m the one they’re looking up at like I stepped out of a storybook. Chedran’s their saviour, but I’m their—

‘Go on,’ Chedran urged the kids again, not unkindly. ‘Say hello to your hero.’

10

Never Meet Your Heroes

‘We . . . we had to leave,’ said a girl about my age with hair near as blonde as Arissa’s, mingled with enough tawny red strands to make you think of strawberries when she was smiling and a match flame when she wasn’t. Kievan was her name, which meant ‘summer berry’ in the Mahdek tongue. When she spoke, the other runaways paid attention.

‘Why?’ I asked, glancing around at the shadows filling the rickety old mining barracks. The rotted crossbeams holding up the sagging roof looked ready to give up the fight any second now. ‘You must’ve known the dangers out here on the frontier. Why flee the safety of your clans?’

‘There are no clans,’ Kievan corrected me. ‘Not any more. The massacres perpetrated against the Mahdek –’ She glanced nervously at Chedran, who was sitting cross-legged on the dusty wood floor with two of the littlest ones wrestling for his lap. ‘Our people,’ she amended, ‘huddle together like fugitives hiding from the world. Our elders have given up on our future.’

‘Perhaps it is difficult to envision the future when your children have abandoned their own culture,’ Chedran observed drily, one hand mussing the hair of the chubby-cheeked ten-year-old girl on his lap who’d successfully shoved away a boy so like her they had to be twins.

Murmurs rose from the other kids, most of whom I would have put at a year or two younger than Kievan. You can learn a lot watching the reactions of those who listen rather than talk. Durral likes to say that to an Argosi a conversation is a kind of music in which the silences are as important as the melodies, and the audience a choir whose whispers, mumblings and even intakes of breath are all part of the performance.

What I heard in the back-and-forth between Kievan and Chedran had the rhythm of an old argument to me. A familiar song repeated for the benefit of a newcomer, in hopes I might compose the ending that had eluded them for so long. Chedran though . . . the gentleness with which he treated those runaways gave my arta precis a headache. Bitterness and casual cruelty still burned beneath the surface, but around those kids he tamped it down like he was the flame of a hearth desperately trying to bring warmth without setting the house on fire.

‘I still hate him,’ Arissa muttered from the doorway, just loud enough for me to hear. Night’s chill was coming on fast, but she still hadn’t stepped inside the barracks. No surprise there: with its decomposing wooden bunks bolted along the floor and decaying grey walls bathed in shadow, this place didn’t look so different from a prison.

The silence left behind by Chedran’s discordant accusation was broken by an unexpected outburst of innocent, delighted laughter from the far end of the room. Conch was playfully butting the head of a boy seated on the floor whose unruly mop of brown hair was lustrous as polished oak. Say what you want about the Mahdek: no money, no magic, no military, but we sure do have pretty hair. Strange thing was, every time Conch tousled the boy’s hair, the kid’s hand jerked up to smooth it back across his forehead. He didn’t strike me as the type to fret over looking presentable.

‘Remeny, shush,’ one of the older kids hissed.

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