Seablood

by Cameron Bolling

  Oleja matched his form blow for blow for the first several strikes. Once he struck her on the shoulder, and once she landed a blow to his ribs. She kept herself rooted in front of him, never shifting around, and used only the maneuvers she saw the Ahwan soldiers employing. The form felt odd—all offense with little defense, save blocking her opponents strikes with her own weapon. Just as she thought her victory neared, she found herself falling. Her helmet crashed hard against the ground; the taste of blood sprang into her mouth. Her opponent’s blunt spear tip pressed against her back. It felt as though her prosthetic was caught on something.

  She turned and looked back over her shoulder. One of the other men’s spear shafts remained pinned in the crook of her prosthetic where the metal limb arched backwards in a rounded point. The wielder looked down at her with a merciless grin.

  “Tripping your opponents is legal, isn’t that right?” Howls of laugher filled the air.

  Oleja kicked her prosthetic free. Her mind seethed. She knew the fire shone plain on her face.

  “I wasn’t fighting you.”

  “No, but you have to be prepared for attacks from all sides. Your enemies won’t wait their turn.”

  “You want a turn? Take it,” said Oleja, climbing back to her feet.

  The man shook his head. “I think I’ve seen plenty. I’m all set.”

  “Coward. Who wants a fair fight?”

  “You’re done!” shouted one person from the group. “Give it a rest!”

  Oleja faltered, scrambling for something more to say, but in her hesitation the rest of the group turned away, back to their earlier conversation. She grappled for words a second longer before turning her back on them all.

  In a rage, Oleja marched back up the hill.

  Chapter Eleven

  Clang! Clang!

  The air in the forge pulsed with the sound of a hammer striking metal. Oleja held the sword in one hand and the hammer in the other. Sure, there were automated hammers in the forge, powered by the rushing current of the river, but that didn’t help her now. Anger burned in her, hot enough to melt down the iron and steel in the forge, and she wanted to hammer. Nothing helped with anger like a hammer.

  Night had descended across the valley, leaving only the white light of the moon shining in through the windows to mix with the hot orange light of the fires in the forge, dim and flaring, casting long, deep shadows in the corners and beneath the benches. The smells of fire and metal and hot, burning coals weighed heavy on her senses. She didn’t care; she burned right alongside them.

  How dare the soldiers of Ahwan treat her with so much disrespect? To assume, moments after meeting her, that she knew nothing? That she was a fool? They treated her like a weak and unskilled fighter, as if she hadn’t spent years of her life doing nothing but training for a battle that still hung dark on the horizon. She taught herself everything she knew, using only the old stories she heard from Ude to guide her. She had pieced together the knowledge of how to make arrows and a bow for herself from pieces of weapons she found buried in the heap, thrown down to the canyon by accident, no doubt. The eclipsers would never throw down a splinter of a weapon by intent, but sometimes things slipped through the cracks. She had built herself up from nothing, all on her own—and if anyone asked her, she had done a damn good job of it.

  The soldiers all swung their spears with professional training. For them to reach their skill level, they’d needed only a fraction of the effort, the drive, the pain that it took her to achieve the same. And they looked down on her like she was nothing but a barbarian, fresh from the wilderness, swinging her spear around like she knew nothing at all of their “proper ways.”

  If anyone lacked in power and skill, it wasn’t her.

  She needed a new plan now. She could train more and win the soldiers over with time, but her people still waited back in the canyon. Until she returned, they sat there vulnerable, helpless, completely at the mercy of the eclipsers. And the eclipsers were far from merciful. She needed to get back, and soon. There was no time to sit around practicing to make herself worthy in the eyes of the soldiers, especially when that plan may never come to fruition.

  But she couldn’t just win them over with her fighting skills, superior as they may be—that much now shone as clear as the sun.

  What else could she use to gain their support? Tinkering? The skill helped her in a pinch, certainly, but she doubted an army of soldiers had use for such things. What good did some scrap metal serve them?

  If she still had her glider, at least she could show off the marvels of her tinkering skills. The glider sat at the peak of her ingenuity, the pinnacle of her work, but she didn’t have it anymore—nor the second version she used to escape Honn in the ruined city. Both lay in broken heaps somewhere in the desert. Even if she made a new one, it hardly seemed like something the soldiers would be overly impressed by. Sure, they might find it to be a fascinating novelty, but such a device offered no aid to an army. Fighting from the air required one’s enemies to be in the air as well, and when last Oleja checked, the people of Ahwan weren’t waging war on birds.

  Although, she could create something new—something beneficial to the soldiers, a device of war. If it worked well enough, she could even employ such a thing in her siege of Itsoh. Yes, devising such a contraption gave her an asset in multiple ways. That plan could work.

  But what to make? A new type of weapon, perhaps—but that was not so much tinkering as smithing, and to create a new weapon meant devising a whole new style of fighting along with it, something she certainly didn’t have the time for. Plus, with her luck, the soldiers would only see her new weapon and form as “barbaric.” No, she needed something better.

  A thought landed in her mind at once. What about a catapult, like the one she used to launch herself out of the village? She could make it mobile, and designed to launch projectiles rather than people, at a lower arc optimized for distance rather than height. Such a contraption—made correctly—could be devastating in battle, and even useful for defense. Bring innovation like that to Ahwan, and an army would rally itself. It was brilliant.

  Oleja cast aside the sword and hammer at once. Her forge duties could wait—she’d make up for the missed labor the next evening. Or, perhaps, maybe not. If she was to be off soon, leaving Ahwan behind forever, she didn’t need frivolous things like jobs and money. As long as she could get by until the army marched for Itsoh, none of the silly Ahwan customs mattered at all.

  She went to an empty workbench and grabbed some nearby pieces—bits of wood, a scrap hunk of metal, and other odds and ends. She set the metal lump in the center of the bench—a fulcrum, a place to start. Next, she took up a piece of wood and balanced it across the peak of the metal. With another metal scrap situated on the end of the wood, she reached again for the hammer.

  On The Heap, her setup had been temporary, pieced together from the junk available. With each use, the whole thing fell apart, and required setup anew for each launch thereafter. That kind of slow inefficiency wouldn’t do here—she needed it to fire, reload, and fire again in as short a time as possible.

  She let the end of the hammer fall onto the skyward end of the catapult. The metal lump jumped high into the air; Oleja caught it easily and returned it to the table where the other pieces of the catapult lay strewn about.

  A hinged midsection and more precisely cut pieces could form a more perfect body for the thing, one that didn’t crumble to bits with every use, and more room below the end of the lever would adjust the arc in the manner she wished. But one problem remained, and a large one at that: how would her new design fire? At The Heap, having a regular schedule of eclipsers dropping heavy objects from hundreds of feet above worked fine, but such an occurrence lurked with scarcity in most parts of the world. A system by which something had to be dropped from high above was too tricky to manage, and took up too much space—the city would need tall towers dedicated to dropping weights in order to fire the things, which made them
anything but portable, and any decrease in the height from which those weights were dropped meant a decrease in the distance the catapults could launch projectiles. No, that wouldn’t work. She needed an alternative.

  Oleja reassembled her miniature design and peered at it. She prodded at the wooden beam with one finger, watching it move up and down. Then the image snapped into clarity.

  She placed the projectile back on the end, but then put her hand firmly on the opposite side, holding it down. With her other hand, she pressed down on the projectile end. The wood bent in the middle, resisting her force as she pulled it back. When she didn’t dare push harder for fear of breaking the brittle wood, she released the side with the projectile. The scrap of metal flew into the air.

  Ting, ting, tingtingting. The metal bounced across the stone floor out of sight, Oleja’s hands too preoccupied to catch it again. She left it where it lay. A grin pulled at her lips.

  With a winch and crank, one or two soldiers could operate her design without the need for enormous hands or weights to match the scale of the catapult.

  A shed around behind the forge held lumber, and Oleja knew an old cart that seemed to have a permanent residence beside the structure as well. She could fetch wood from the shed and then build her catapult atop the cart, enabling her to not only get it down to the training pit, but also prove the weapon’s use in battle, as the ability to be moved alongside soldiers was a necessity.

  Oleja stepped up to the drawing slate on the wall and began to sketch out her plans. A long night of work lay ahead of her.

  The wheels of the old cart creaked, the whole thing swaying left and right over the uneven road. The structure atop the cart gathered gazes from every other person on the street, but Oleja didn’t mind—if anything, it was exactly what she wanted. Let them look—let them see the girl who pushed the greatest military advancement in Ahwan history along the road, readying to display it to the soldiers as they went about their training.

  She had hardly slept the night before, as work took priority and drove her onwards into the dawn. Truthfully, when the sun’s rays began to peek out over the mountains, they’d taken Oleja by surprise. Yet her focus remained unwavering on her work even as day broke around her.

  After finishing the catapult, she wheeled it down to her cabin and got a few hours’ rest, but before long she was up again, carting her cargo down through the city and westward towards the training pit. She didn’t want to waste any more time.

  The cart was not a large one, but designed to be pushed or pulled by one or two people—or, perhaps, by one eclipser. With the added weight of the catapult’s structure atop it, it certainly did not rank among the lightest burdens Oleja had ever borne, but neither did it fall in with the heaviest. She managed it without too much difficulty, though still her muscles ached, and she longed to have it at the training pit at last. Unfortunately, this burden was not one she could have Tor draw for her, so he kept up at her side.

  Soon, she arrived at the edge of the training pit. Just as the day before, she hung up her bag and bade Tor to sit and wait, though she fetched neither armor nor a weapon for herself. She had other business with the soldiers.

  Guiding the cart down the slope of the training pit proved to be the trickiest part of the journey, but enough eyes watched her as she began the descent that from among them a few helpful hands approached, despite knowing not what to make of the situation. Oleja pulled the catapult over to the site of her encounter with Helis and his group the day before. It appeared to be something of their spot, as once again they trained there. Oleja counted herself lucky—she didn’t know what sort of schedule the soldiers followed, but Helis seemed to spend a good deal of his time up at the palace as well. She wanted him—more so than any other—to witness what was about to occur. Thankfully, he would have a difficult time keeping his eyes away.

  She needed no gathering-cry to rally the soldiers around her; most flocked towards the strange object unbidden, curious at its nature and what purpose it served them on their training grounds. Helis and his crew soon found themselves among them.

  “What is that thing?” asked on man, at last voicing the question that sat on dozens of tongues around Oleja and the catapult.

  Oleja hopped up onto the side of the cart to where she could better see the others around her. “I am Oleja Raseari. I have here a contraption of my own creation. I worked through the night to bring this here to you all today in the name of Ahwan and its unending military success. This is a device that will bring many victories to the army and to the city.”

  “Is it a catapult or something?” asked one woman.

  “What’s a catapult?” shot back another from the crowd.

  “A catapult used in battle?” Murmurs continued to spread through the crowd. Oleja directed a smile at the woman who guessed correctly.

  “Who would like to be the one to test it out?” she asked, scanning the crowd. A few from the group raised curious or skeptical hands. One of Helis’s friends was among them.

  “You,” said Oleja, pointing to Helis’s friend. “Find me a large stone, about a foot or a foot and a half long and roughly rounded, then bring it back here.” The man looked back and forth between the people to either side of him. One shrugged, and then he left the crowd.

  Hardly a minute later he returned, bearing a stone of Oleja’s description. Oleja hopped off the cart and motioned for him to follow her around to the back of the thing. A thickly woven basket, mounted at eye-level to the beam of the contraption, waited empty.

  “Load the rock into here,” she said. The man did as instructed. As he drew back from the basket, she thought she saw him shoot a smirk at Helis and the others. She ignored it.

  Next, Oleja went around to the side. A large crank hung there; she pointed to it. “Turn this until you cannot any longer.” The soldier took the handle in both hands and began to crank. Slowly, the basket holding the stone reached for the ground. Oleja turned back to the people around her.

  “Everyone step back a bit—I don’t want anyone to get injured. The catapult will—”

  Snap, thwack!

  The soldier at the crank shouted in alarm and pain. Oleja whirled back around to see what had happened.

  The crank hung loose, no longer bound by the taut rope. The rope, too, dangled freely—snapped in two, the frayed ends splaying out into a hundred tiny threads. The basket had seemingly swung upwards and struck the soldier in the face; he clutched his nose in both palms as he backpedaled. After nearly colliding with Oleja, he fell back onto the hard dirt ground.

  More alarming, however, was the stone, which spun through the air, the momentum from the incomplete draw carrying it only far enough to reach the edge of the group. It arced upwards. Oleja tracked its trajectory with her eyes—a disappointing arc, certainly, but one that ended squarely in the midst of Helis and his fellow soldiers. Their eyes were drawn down to their collapsed friend.

  Oleja darted forwards, her eyes on the stone, bounding across the ground towards the soldiers. Helis took one step towards his friend, and then another. Oleja met him head on, throwing her shoulder against him, sending him reeling backwards as she plowed into him at full force. His feet scrambled across the ground as the falling stone crashed to the ground with a hard thud, just where he had stood a moment prior.

  Helis fell into the dirt. Oleja spun back to the crowd.

  Helis’s friend sat on the ground, blood pouring from his nose. Before she could stop herself, Oleja let out a loud huff of laughter.

  “That was not supposed to happen,” she said, her laughter petering out. “Not to worry—give me just a minute, I can have it fixed up easily and then I’ll proceed with the demonstration.” She hurried over to the crank where the snapped ends of the rope still swayed.

  “Or,” said Helis with a grunt, heaving himself back up to stand on his feet, “you can get this thing out of here and spare us the danger of whatever malfunction it will have next.”

  Oleja ground her
teeth, but she kept her composure. “It works fine, I promise you. Just some old rope is all.”

  Helis and the others from his group stepped forward, surrounding the soldier who still sat on the ground with one hand pressed to his face, blood dripping from his nose to roll in beads down his armor. The droplets left trails behind as they crawled across the polished surface.

  Oleja grabbed the two ends of the rope in either hand and made quick work of tying them back together, testing the knot in her grip to be sure it held. She could replace it later with new, fresh rope that stayed more cleanly in one piece, but the knot had to do for the moment. She went to fetch the stone next, and by the time she returned it to the basket, Helis had the soldier on his feet again with a cloth pressed to his bleeding nose.

  “All right, it’s fixed,” said Oleja, calling out to those around her. Sweeping her eyes across the crowd, her heart sank. Many already dispersed, and those who didn’t looked back at her skeptically. Some even wore an expression of disgust.

  “Haven’t you proven whatever you needed to?” asked one man from Helis’s group.

  “I came to prove that—”

  “That your craftsmanship is just as barbaric as your fighting style. Yeah, we got it.”

  As her anger spiked, Oleja reached back and spun the crank a few times until the force grew too difficult to push it farther. Keeping her eyes on the group, she let her hand hover over a lever—the release mechanism for the catapult, not unlike that of her old glider.

  “I came to prove that my skills are valuable to the army of Ahwan.” Power coursed through her words. On the last, she slammed her fist down on the release.

  Ka-thung. The arm of the catapult flung upwards. The stone shot through the air. Oleja did not watch it to see where it landed—she kept her focus on the soldiers.

  The one who mocked her craftsmanship shrugged. “Why not throw your rocks by hand if that’s how you wish to fight. That’s not how we choose to do battle here in Ahwan.” He turned and joined the rest of his group as they accompanied their bleeding friend up to the lip of the training pit.