A would-be songsmith stood before the company could grow too fuddled to listen:
"Bright as sunlight our banners flew,
Now black and crusted with battle-dew
Sun-born Chieftain Wisely leads us
The cunning killer
To plunder flies Scalps of foefolk
Clatter hard-frozen—"
Propped on one elbow at the head of the hall, Shkai'ra threw a string of gold southland city-made coins to the praise-singer, an extravagance that brought a yen of acclaim from the band. It was well to have a name for being an open-handed giver as well as lucky and skillful; that was expected of a chief. From time to time one warrior or another would stand to praise the deeds of a friend or lover; to each she gave their due, in words and gifts. It was important to gauge the cries that followed; what was for the praised one, and what for the reward. Too little or too much could arouse murderous jealousy, start feuds or leave resentment festering against her. In fact… yes, suddenly the importance of getting the band back quickly seemed clearer.
Better to cut cross-country if it was possible at all; that conviction formed clearly in her mind. The fighting had been too easy; there was too much pent-up bloodlust still swirling around.
Maihu watched the sacrifice through a hole in the carvings. The sight was disgusting. Her people made no animal offerings. For a moment, unwillingly, she resonated with the massed emotion that welled out at her, then she turned with a shudder as she felt a touch of rage and hunger that seemed almost inhuman. No spirit within the Circle would accept blood offerings; she supposed that the Kommanz gods must be of the outer realm, the saaitisfor beyond the mantle of life that surrounded the earth. Or … what had that philosopher in Raddock, in the southland, said? That if horses had gods, they would give them hooves and manes? Either the Ztrateke ahkomman had made their worshipers in their own image, or was it the other way around? Shocked, she put the impiety out of her mind: all the Otherworld was part of the Harmony, even the darker side. Only conscious will could put a creature outside that unity. She turned to her work. There was an endless line of Minztans swinging through from the kitchen, and she had been put in charge of a section of them. A mark of favor, she thought wryly, and saw the scowls and mutterings many aimed at her. That hurt. But what can I do? she thought. Now there was hope for those the Kommanza would leave behind. Surely the hunters had made Garnetseat by now. The rescue party would come, and if only she could leave word for them there would be hope for all her people. She did not expect outright attack on the village while the westerners held it. That would be an invitation to another disastrous defeat.
For a moment, red fantasies of victory and revenge ran through her mind, to be rejected with a shudder. Long ago, her ancestors had been pacifists. They had shed that, along with much other foolishness, those pampered children of machines and cities and crowds, those of them that lived through the terrible years and the thousand years it took the wounded earth to heal. Their descendants were tougher, far less sentimental; in a sense, they had become in truth what their forebears had played at being. But much of the original philosophy survived. Maihu would do what was necessary, but she vowed to herself that even now she would do it with regret and without pleasure. Small victory, to fight and overcome if you became what you battled.
As to what would happen in the woods, that would depend on her, on how much she could lull the suspicions of her captor, and what advantage could be taken of that. She would have to be cautious. The Kommanza was cunning and wary, and came of a people skilled in deception.
The noise within the hall rose as the food was finished and the serious drinking began; dice came out, couples and groups fell to loveplay with each other or the servants, and the weaker heads were rolled into furs and stowed in the corners. Maihu took a deep breath, hefted a tray with a jug, and walked into the room.
Shkai'ra had been drinking lightly. Just enough, she thought, sipping at her wooden bowl of juniper-scented beer. I'd not want to booze myself into a stupor tonight. Sighing with contentment, she lit a pipe of dreamweed and drew the acrid smoke deep into her lungs. That was better for a night like this; it enhanced the senses instead of dulling them, made her aware of every hair pressing against the body she had not bothered to clothe again, of fire-warmed air moving over her skin, the rustle and mutter of her followers, crackle of hearthfire, smells of smoke and meat, sweat and blood and spilled beer. It was just as well the weed was so expensive, she mused: otherwise folk would spend half their time on it. There wasn't even a hangover.
That struck her as somehow very funny. She was giggling helplessly when Maihu passed by. For a moment she was content to watch the sway of Maihu's body as she dodged grasping hands; tonight she was wearing a long shirt, southland silk worked in Minztan animal patterns.
"Hoi, what've you got there?" Shkai'ra called over the uproar.
"Wine, Chiefkin," Maihu replied, sinking down beside her.
The Kommanza passed her the pipe. Maihu hesitated. Her folk used dreamweed only on holy days, to bring spirit visions. Better to take it, she decided. Disobedience would undo her work, and the weed would help her relax and do what was needful. She puffed, and cooled her throat with some of the iced drink: white grape wine, a rare luxury here in the northlands. Soon she felt the floating, detached languor: fear turned into a faintly pleasurable sadness, weariness and disgust became things outside herself.
They lay for a few minutes in silence, passing the drug back and forth. "You've been useful," Shkai'ra said at last, her voice a soft purr. "Your landsfolk seem to take it ill, though. D'you need a guard?"
"Oh, no," Maihu replied dreamily, dropping the honorific "Chiefkin" unnoticed. "My people would never hurt one of their own. They just don't… understand."
"Indeed," the other chuckled. "But they understand who's stronger, well enough."
"Chiefkin, what about Taimi?"
"Put aside," Shkai'ra replied absently. "Never say I don't keep an oath, even to a slave. Besides, he'll need some rest before he's ready for me to take again."
She rolled over on her side, and Maihu followed her eyes, to where Eh'rik was struggling with a young Minztan. Thoroughly drunk, he was having trouble about it despite the bear strength that showed in cable-thick muscle running over his shoulders. The forester was a few years short of twenty, lithe and agile and desperate, the harder to grasp since her skin was wet-slick with spilled mead and sweat. Shkai'ra watched with dreamy interest; the villager was putting up a good fight for one untrained. And the warmaster was barely able to focus; he kept losing his grip and falling over. She giggled again at the comic sight. At last he got her bent over a low bench with one huge hand locked on the back of her neck, mounted, entered, and began thrusting heavily. The first sharp cries of pain gave way to sobs trickling harshly through clenched teeth and muffled by furs.
"He'd need even more if I let Eh'rik at him. The warmaster has a rough way about him, and no patience at all."
Maihu sighed and rolled onto her back, floating now. The sight had merely deepened her melancholy. Shkai'ra pulled off the Minztan's shirt and touched a bruise lightly where it lay yellow-brown on her skin.
"Does that hurt?" she asked.
"Yes," Maihu answered, closing her eyes. "Yes, a little."
"Tell me if anything I do hurts too much. I've no wish to give you pain tonight."
Puzzled, Maihu looked up, expecting mockery. She met a gray gaze cool with a predator's innocence in the narrow, hawk-handsome young face. And noticed how, bathed, the westerner smelled of fresh linen, smoke, clean sweat and beer and hard female flesh. With a sigh she closed her eyes again and put her arms around the other's neck. "As you will," she said. Their lips met, and their tongues. Drifting away, she dreamed herself into the past, into a night with a kin-mate months ago.
Slowly, the hours passed. Neither was bothered by onlookers: Minztans had little sense of privacy, the Kommanza none at all. Much later, Shkai'ra rolled away.
"Enough, for a while," she said, and lay quietly as her pulse slowed. Then she yawned hugely, stretched, and raised herself on one elbow, looking down on the Minztan with an unreadable expression. The room was darker now, and quieter; most of the celebrants were asleep.
"You did too, that time, didn't you?" she said.
Maihu sighed wordlessly and rolled on her side, curling up and nuzzling her face into the pile of furs. The drug had helped.
"Well," the Kommanza continued, leopard-sleepy and content. "You weren't hurting anyone but yourself by holding back. It's pleasant, but I don't set any great store by it."
She looked over to where the warmaster lay snoring. There was blood on his thighs. "That way you get pleasure for the count of ten, after as much work as roping and branding a calf… well enough every now and then, but…"
Shkai'ra touched the Minztan on the cheek. "Maihu, you've striven to make yourself valuable to me. Take advantage of it. You should get used to asking me for things."
Maihu struggled to think. It was difficult, with wine and dreamweed and afterglow surging slowly in her blood, urging her toward sleep. Still, this was the opportunity she had striven for, so…
"Well… if I could have some of my things, when you take us away?"
"Your tools? They'll go with you in any case."
"No, I mean things of my own… like that ornament you said I could keep, yesterday, and my books and… well, other things, that could remind me of home." That would sound thin to a Minztan's ears, but she hoped it would pass muster to someone unfamiliar with her people.
"Well enough, as long as you don't take too much weight, or witch-gear; I'll check. See, that wasn't hard, was it? Keep on the better side of me, and your life might be less bad than you await."
She nodded off toward sleep. "Work tomorrow," she said. "The scout should be back from the west. It'll be good if we can cut cross-country. The trade trail winds to keep to the watershed. Yes, best if we can head straight for home, down that frozen river."
Maihu stiffened. It blazed in her: that would be right past the Place of Summoning! Hope, hope beyond calculation; not only the news relayed to Garnetseat far faster than the Kommanza thought, not only the Seeker's band there ready to speed in pursuit, but this promise of aid from the Circle itself. Help that would wipe out the advantage of discipline and warskill that made rescue uncertain…
Even on the edge of sleep, Shkai'ra had noticed. Maihu moved to still the curiosity. The Kommanza laughed as small rough hands stroked insistently down over her breasts and belly and thighs.
"All right," she chuckled sleepily, coming to all fours. "No, roll over… legs up under my arms…" They were both tired. A half hour later, the Kommanza continued:
"… and now tell me the rest of that story, the one about the beavers who adopted the child they found crying by the stream."
Shkai'ra settled warm under the bearskin, falling asleep to the murmur, to dream of kindly unhuman faces and a baby playing unafraid in sparkling sunlit waters. But Maihu lay awake for minutes after, listening to the soft regular breathing in her ear. Her mind was on tales more darksome, of a certain tune learned at her Initiation, and the uses of it.
Narritanni reflected bitterly that there was a great deal of difference between drawing lines on a map and deploying fighters on real ground. The lines looked so solid, so real, that you could forget that they were made up of individuals, each isolated by tens of meters of empty ground. That they could not soar like eagles over the terrain. And the lines could interpenetrate. That had been how his advancing ranks had run into the Kommanz screen. Even with the speed they'd made he had not expected the enemy to still be in the village. They must think they had all the time since the Beginning, to be dawdling so! Of course, he reflected, on most previous raids they would have been quite right.
Luckily they had heard the scoutscreen coming long before the riders had a chance to detect them. No mistaking the crashing, clattering passage of an armored steppe warrior through the forest, nor the precisely spaced whistle signals. By the time the Kommanza had ridden into view all six of the Minztans had hidden, the Garnetseat villagers nearby as invisible as his own rangers. And so they might have stayed, slipping through the outer links of the Kornmanz mesh, if one of the volunteers had not let eagerness overwhelm a rudimentary sense of discipline. The man had stepped out from cover and shot with a reaction too swift for his companions to check.
The mounted warrior saw the motion from the corner of her eye. A frantic heave threw her down beside her horse on the side away from the attacker, hanging with one heel over the pommel. It was too slow to escape a hit, but the bolt struck glancingly on the curved surface of her shoulder guard. It clanged as the hard surface of the armor shed the iron head, and the bolt skittered away among the trees. But the motion was so violent that the whistle dropped from the rider's mouth.
What followed had a dreamlike slowness that reduced blinding speed to a nightmare crawl in the eyes of the helpless onlookers. In a single wrenching motion the warrior heaved herself back into the saddle. The horse waited only long enough to feel foot touch stirrup before it charged the Minztan archer. The Kommanza did not even bother to strike. The tall steppe charger knocked him down and trampled; Narritanni distinctly heard bones snap, saw blood spurt under the slamming hooves. Distantly, it occurred to him that once again his people had been betrayed by their reflexes: here, not to harm an animal without dire need. The horse was as deadly an opponent as the woman, and together their might was greater than simple addition would make it. But no one had thought to shoot the mount first. Not even the leader; he cursed himself bitterly for the lapse.
Two of the volunteer's fellows had risen from the snow to aid him: too late, and now the curved plains sword was out, swinging up and down with dreadful skill, cutting right and left. One of the Minztans dropped her spear and flopped, keening and clutching at a wrist three-quarters severed. Her life poured out on the snow. The other staggered back with a flap of face hanging down his neck and showing a red-and-white grin. The westerner followed, stabbing.
Alone against the three villagers, she would have won in scarce threescore heartbeats. But Narritanni and two of his rangers were there, and they were drilled fighters used to working in groups, skillful enough to help and not hinder each other. Two figures rose out of the bushes, ghostly in their patterned off-white camouflage smocks. One swung a hamstringing blow at the hocks of the war-horse, dodging the kick that might have spattered his brains. The other sent the spur of her billhook under the Kommanza's armpit, braced her feet, heaved. Unbalanced by the movement of her mount, the warrior fell with a jarring thud. The horse shrieked, high and terrible.
But the westerner was still quick and deadly dangerous. Boiling, she avoided the two-handed downsweep of the billhook. Her return stroke with the edge of the shield nearly broke the Minztan's knee. Collapsing, the horse had driven back its slayer. Beyond the crippled ranger at her feet stood Narritanni. The factors flowed through the Kommanza's mind in effortless calculation: she sprang to her feet and charged the man in chainmail.
It was a slim chance, but if she could kill him quickly enough she might distance the two with pole-arms, or perhaps find a spot where she could stand her back against cover and defeat them both. Despite the hero tales, nobody stood a chance in the open against two good opponents. For that, you needed advantage of position.
He shot her at twenty paces. The bolt nailed shield to arm as she charged at a dead run, the round bull-hide-and-fiberglass protector covering her from neck to thigh. Even then she might have reached him if the weapon had been a conventional one. It was surprise more than pain that made her shout as the second bolt thudded into the center of her breastplate. This is a terrible weapon, he thought as she staggered, crumpled, and fell. Blood leaked out of her mouth, first a trickle and then thick gouts pulsing out to soak the ends of her russet braids. Dying, she crawled toward him. Hating blue eyes locked on his. Drowning in her own life, she grunt
ed out the name of her god and with a last convulsive movement slashed her saber into the snow a meter from his feet.
The two soldiers of the New Way came up, one limping badly. That could mean a serious delay.
"Hurt badly?" he snapped.
"No, no, I—" The Minztan put more weight on the leg. "It's not broken, nothing's torn. I can force it if it's bandaged tight."
"Good." He tilted his head back and listened. The trilling came, first the simple recognition symbol and then something more complex and forceful. That message would be traveling back along the net to an officer. More of the steppe-dwellers would be coming, and very soon.
"Quick!" he said. The Garnetseat villager with the face wound had died: a stab through the throat. Grunting with the effort, for she was no light weight, he bore the body across to where he himself had stood to kill the westerner and put a hunting crossbow into stiffening hands. A corpse cooled swiftly in this weather.
"Come on, by the Circle, get the tracks covered up! Let's get out of here! No, leave it"—reflex, to salvage valuable metal, but not here—"leave everything.
Wait." He took the dead woman's spear and thrust it through the threshing horse's neck. That noise ceased. "With luck, they'll think these killed her and then died. Get out on our own backtrack." Skilled woods-runners knew many tricks to hide a trail, and the Seeker's followers had learned still more. They faded into the forest.
The volunteers were astonished when he ordered them to fall back. Patiently, he explained: "We can't fight them in open country. Even the clearing around Newstead is too large. We want them to withdraw, to get out into the forest where we can hit and run, perhaps free our people, harry them without presenting a target for their bows and lances. Now they'll be alerted unless they were fooled into thinking it was Newstead hunters who killed the sentry.
"We'll move forward after they pull out of the village. We should be much faster in the forest anyway, knowing the woods and not having unwilling prisoners to drag along."
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