A minute later, the four Kushans exited the grove on the opposite side and began running west. They ran with a loping, ground-eating stride which they could maintain for hours.
They would need that stride. They had a rendezvous to keep. They were hunting a hunter.
The noble lady charged into the stables through the western gate, shouting angrily.
“The city has gone mad! We were attacked by dacoits!”
Startled, her husband and the stablekeeper turned away from the north gate, where they had been watching the explosions. The explosions were dying down, now. If nothing else, the pouring rain was smothering what was left of the holocaust. But there were still occasional rockets to be seen, firing off into the night sky.
The nobleman’s wife stalked forward. Her fury was obvious from her stride alone. The stablekeeper was thankful that he couldn’t see her face, due to the veil.
Shocked as he was by her sudden appearance, the stablekeeper still had the presence of mind to notice two things.
The man noticed the comely youthful form revealed under the sari, which rain had plastered to her body.
The low-caste man noticed the bloodstains spattering the tunics of her fierce-looking escort of soldiers.
The man disappeared, submerged by the reality of his caste. Like all humble men of India, outside Majarashtra and Rajputana, the last thing he wanted to see in his own domicile was heavily-armed, vicious-looking soldiers. He had been unhappy enough with the fifteen soldiers the nobleman had brought with him. Now, there were ten more of the creatures—and these, with the stains of murder still fresh on their armor and weapons.
The stablekeeper began to edge back. To the side, his wife was quietly but frenziedly driving the other members of his family into the modest house attached to the stables.
The nobleman restrained him with a hand. “Have no fear, stablekeeper,” he murmured. “These are my personal retainers. Disciplined men.”
He stepped forward to meet his wife. She was still spluttering her outrage.
“Be still, woman!” he commanded. “Are you injured?”
The wife fell instantly silent. The stablekeeper was impressed. Envious. He himself enjoyed no such obedience from his own spouse.
The wife shook her head, the veil rippling about her face. The gesture seemed sulky.
The nobleman turned to the man who was apparently the commander of his soldiers. “What happened?”
The soldier shrugged. “Don’t know. We were halfway here when”—he gestured to the north—“something erupted. It was like a volcano. A moment later, a great band of dacoits were assaulting us.” He shrugged, again. The gesture was all he needed to explain what happened next.
The stablekeeper was seized by a sudden, mad urge to laugh. He restrained it furiously. He could not imagine what would possess a band of dacoits to attack such a formidable body of soldiers. Lunatics.
But—it was a lunatic world. Not for the first time, the stablekeeper had a moment of regret that he had ever left his sane little village in Bengal. The moment was brief. Sane, that village was. Poverty-stricken, it was also. He had done well in Kausambi, for all that he hated the city.
While the nobleman took the time to inquire further as to the well-being of his wife and retainers, the stablekeeper took the time to examine the soldiers more closely.
Some breed of steppe barbarians, that much he knew. The physical appearance was quite distinct. The faces of those soldiers were akin, in their flat, slant-eyed way, to the faces of Chinese and Champa merchants he had seen occasionally in his youth, in the great Bengali port of Tamralipti. So was the yellowish tint to their skin. Even the top-knot into which the soldiers bound their hair, under the iron helmets, was half-familiar. Some Chinese favored a similar hairstyle. But no Chinese or Champa merchant ever had that lean, wolfish cast to his face.
Beyond that, the stablekeeper could not place them. Ye-tai, possibly—although they seemed less savage, for all their evident ferocity, than Ye-tai soldiers he had encountered, swaggering down the streets of Kausambi.
But he was not certain. As a Bengali, he had had little occasion to encounter barbarians from the far northwestern steppes. As a Bengali immigrant to Kausambi, the occasion had arisen. But, like all sane men, the stablekeeper had avoided such encounters like the plague.