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“ ‘Where the hand of fortune branches, Tara Bell’s child must choose.’ We stand on the road washed by the tides of war, you and I. Is it accident that has brought us here? I believe it is not. I believe our fortunes are sealed before we are born.”
He poured himself a second glass and topped up mine.
“Destiny and fortune are just words. I think you are ambitious, General. Ambition is not the same as destiny. You only want to say it is.”
He chuckled. “I like how you speak your mind, Cat. So few manage to be both honest and likable. That is one of your charms. Daniel had the same gift of speaking truth while making his listeners laugh. Do you want to know how I met them? Tara and Daniel, and Helene?”
A jolt like a blow from an axe split through my body. I managed to nod.
“I was a young captain in the army of the Numantian League. One of the princes who ruled the League had made a marriage alliance with a princely clan out of the city of Sala, one of the cities of the Wagadou Federation. The Wagadou Federation grew out of mostly Mande communities who had recently moved into the uninhabited lands northeast of the Rhenus River.”
“Those lands weren’t uninhabited. People lived there already.”
He waved a hand with a casual dismissal. “Herders and trappers, living in the most appalling conditions. Best of all, the new territory was fertile ground for cold mages.”
“Because of its proximity to the ice.”
“Yes, so I understand, although naturally I know little of cold magic. The prince sent me to Sala to escort the noblewoman he was to marry back to Numantia. Instead we found ourselves embroiled in a war against the Atrebates and their allies. The war exploded all across the far north, into the boreal forest and the Barrens. The Celts who live right up against the Barrens are called the Belgae, a barbaric people. A few mage Houses had moved into that area fifty years earlier and civilized them. So we marched north and crossed the Boreal River.”
He paused to drink.
I could not move, nor could I speak. I was frozen, as in ice.
“I met Daniel first, before either Tara or Helene. He was in the city of Sala, at the court of the ghana. He asked if he could travel north with our battalion because he wanted to explore the Barrens. Daniel was terribly entertaining. No man I’ve met before or since could keep a miserably cold and wet huddle of men around a guttering campfire laughing the way he could. He’d heard the Belgae were cannibals. Thought it might be best to investigate from a position of strength, if you will. With an army at his back.”
“Were they cannibals?” I thought of my grandfather, crouching by his cauldron.
He smiled. “He asked in every village we came to if it was true the Belgae were cannibals. And they all said the same thing.”
“What was that?”
“That they themselves weren’t, but the neighboring village, the one they’d been having a feud with for years, was certainly known to eat human flesh.”
I laughed.
He smiled, then sobered. “We fought a skirmish against those cursed Atrebates. Bad, marshy conditions, and low morale. Our cursed colonel turned tail and ran with his entire staff, those who were still alive. So I took over and managed an orderly retreat. We had to escape north because the Atrebates had blocked the road. We couldn’t go overland because the ground was a mire. We ended up in a village next to a mage House, Crescent House.”
I nodded. “Where your wife came from.”
“Yes.” His smile had a bittersweet quality. “And there she was.”
“Helene?”
“Tara. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. I thought she was a boy at first, for she was dressed in men’s clothing. She and her cousin and brother had been out hunting. They had come across remnants of the fighting and run back to warn the village with this mangy dog she kept for years and years—”
“She kept a dog?”
His gaze flashed up. I couldn’t be sure if my outburst had surprised him or if he was gauging the import of my expression before he went on. “As it happened, the village was a client village to Crescent House. The elders insisted I pay my respects to the mansa at Crescent House and explain how I and my troops had come into their territory. Tara accompanied us to give a report on what she had seen. Daniel came, because you could never stop him from doing what he wanted. There we met Helene.”
He poured himself another glass of sack, but I refused a third. The lamp cast gold and shadow over the table. And I thought to myself that maybe, just maybe, General Camjiata was a little lonely, a man who had lost the people he loved best.
He did not drink. He looked at me instead, his elbows braced on the table, his chin resting on his interlaced fingers. “You look so much like Tara.”
I toyed with the glass, turning it around just for something to do. He leaned a little closer.
“Catherine Bell Barahal.” A smile like regret wrinkled the corners of his eyes. “You should have been my daughter.”
I inhaled sharply. There was no reply to that!
