“Did you know that men long ago believed that it was the wind that swelled the bellies of the young women?” Baagh said to me during one of those nights of our sailing journey. “Yes, they didn’t know that man, woman, they couldn’t imagine. The ancient ones claimed it was the wind.”
Baagh is gone now. He disappeared soon after we reached the New Kar-Tioo and no one has seen or heard from him.
“Sail on, sail on,” I whisper, trying to lull myself back to sleep.
It is too late.
I gather the bow and the quiver, I put on the boots and the fading gray dog-hide, and I let her know.
“I’m going hunting.”
She won’t say that it’s too dark or warn me about the bone-cracking cold and the wolf packs. She is sleeping, sleeping with seed and she won’t even hear me leaving.
This is my child inside her, I know it, even though I don’t know what to make of it. I’ve seen women around me with bellies full, others breastfeeding, women who had shared my tent when I was a Firstblade. All those babies were my children, Leke’s, Noki’s. Anyone’s and everyone’s. This one is different, though I can’t feel it yet, she wants to make me believe it is different. Zeria has changed again since we came back to the Forest, she already moves more slowly and glows with the youthfulness of the spring flowers. Her skin has become as smooth as the leaves of the licorice plant, her song the life-giving cold water of the rivulet. What am I to do? Do I need to prepare against the enemies who will descend upon us?
They’ll come from everywhere. I know that now. Sani from Sirol will gather more men and come to take revenge when the time comes, the Empires of the East and the West will rise and invade, the Northerners, Malan and his hordes will be back soon, but not as soon as I feared when I first heard of it.
I’ve ridden with Leke back and forth to Sirol to get fresh news. The Trackers who arrived first said that Malan would be back in three moons after the Great Feast of Spring. But three moons have come and gone, and only a few Archers have reached Sirol. It takes much longer for the thousands to cross the steppe. Not that I worry about the thousands. I only worry about Malan.
“He is not in a hurry,” said Irhan, First of the Trackers. “Khun Malan is recruiting all othertribers from warlords to common men and women. He’ll be the last to arrive. Forget what they say; they want to spread the fear before he is back, make sure that we are prepared to feed the hordes. You won’t see him back until next spring.”
Malan, the enemy I see, he is the one I worry about as if I learned nothing from all that battle training.
Defend yourself against the one facing you, but you’ll die by the arrow you won’t see coming. Defend yourself from the young and the strong, but it is the old and wise you should fear most. They survived so much longer than they should have, they cannot die. Fear them. Find them. The old and wise.
Sah-Ouna. Where is she? Baagh. I shouldn’t have let Baagh leave.
The enemy I cannot see.
At the first breath of dawn, I venture alone in the Forest to hunt. The sun is rising on my back and between the tree trunks, and I don’t need the torchlight. I found deer tracks, two of them, a young fawn and a larger one, a mother doe. I chose a spot at higher ground, and the wind blows softly toward me, my scent escaping back to the ravine and away from the deer. They won’t smell me or hear me. I just need to be patient. They’ll be here soon; they always come, this is their home, and they cannot abandon it.
I wait alone, not daring to make the slightest sound. The morning breeze chills my bones, it makes me feel like a whole day has passed. Bluebells have blossomed in spots, but I have no time to marvel at the beauty of flowers. I am hunting. And then it comes, first the sounds, then the motion. Antlers, thin legs, moving between the branches and the shrubs. The bronze skin of the mother doe, same color as the dead leaves. She is pacing slowly, glowing and beautiful as all young mothers are, unaware of the danger. She doesn’t look to my direction. Death always comes from what we ignore, not what we fear. I nock the arrow; I wait until the doe takes a few more steps to have a clear arrow path. Not a single shrub between my bow and the doe’s heart. Its skin is reflecting the blaze of the sunrise. The fawn runs ahead, and the doe follows slowly. I don’t have time; it will soon disappear behind the trees.
I make a sudden grunting noise, the doe hears it and freezes in place, she turns her head toward me, I feel her eyes piercing through my skull, this is the last chance, either I let the arrow go now, or she lives, the arrow whistles, the doe is frozen like a clay statue that the children of the river gods placed there for me to worship. A swishing sound, not even a breath, the arrow hits the doe, and she jerks her hind legs high, a reflex to the sting. A funny jerking move, as funny as death can be. And then she starts running, faster than any deer can run. Only now she runs, but now it is too late.
Should I have run once I heard that Malan was coming back? Before the evil gets close enough to hurt us? Will I run when he makes it back to Sirol? Will it matter then or will it be too late?
“Khun Malan is coming to conquer the West, Da-Ren. For your own good, I hope you find those paths soon,” Irhan said when I last saw him in Sirol.
The whitetail doe is running, she reaches the edge of the clearing; a few more hops and she will disappear behind the trees. Did I hit her? I am sure I did. And then her heart bursts, the legs feel it first, she still tries to run but she can’t anymore. Her legs jerk a few last hops, left, right, back, front, and then she falls on the bluebells, and she won’t move again. I walk up to her; the young fawn is long gone and will never look back. A few blood drops, still bubbling red on top of the licorice leaves—so soft their skin—but I don’t need a trail of blood to find the doe. I saw her fall; she is there. Eyes wide open, her only revenge. I embrace her. She is still warm; her legs are curling away from me. I pull out the arrow, a tiny red spot only two fingers wide. You would think it would take more for this magnificent beast to die. But I aimed for the heart. Her spirit escapes to the underworld, and all I have in front of me is a piece of meat now. I tie it from the hind legs up the branch, I cut the skin and pull the guts out, the heart; the heart I grab in my fist.
“Did you know that the ancient witches would burn a heart whenever they prayed for a goddess’s favor? It is the strongest of magic, a heart; but not any heart. It has to be the heart of the innocent,” said Baagh to me once, when we were sailing across the sea. “Seven lives, seven hearts, the strongest of magic. So, they thought. To defeat death, resurrect the dead. Anastasis.”
I walk back to the huts; the morning is breathing a mist around them, hiding them from the eyes of any enemy. In my left hand, I hold the antlers, the severed head, the hide, all in one piece. On my right shoulder, I carry the skinned deer to feed Zeria, the mother of my child. I burned the heart already.
I try to make out the figures of my comrades among the mist. Leke and Temin sitting together, Vani leading his horses to graze. There is one figure that I wouldn’t mistake for a Dasal or a warrior of the Tribe, a tall old man, hair of silver, chanting othertriber words and stirring a boiling pot in the open. He turns to face me. He talks pointing the wooden ladle at me as if he continues a conversation that we had going for some time.
“Did you know that Malan is on his way back? Come next spring he’ll be in Sirol. East and West are preparing for war,” says Baagh.
“I heard.”
I lie. I didn’t know about the war preparations. How does he know?
“It is time for you to run away, Da-Ren.”
Zeria appears at the door of our hut, one hand on her hip, the other on her belly. Twenty-five times I’ve seen spring, and this one is the most glorious. She smiles and waves, silent and graceful as a doe in a morning forest.
LXXVII.
Drusa
Twenty-Fifth Winter. “Firstblade”
On the longest night of winter, everyone prays. Baagh, the Blades, the Dasal, they all worship something and someone who will be born on th
at night. A tree, a half-god, a new world. The snow has covered the forest with a white sheet of emptiness, but the hearts of the living are still strong. They pray and hope.
It is almost time; it won’t be long before Zeria gives birth. We take shelter around the fire, the night embraces our huts just after noon and doesn’t forgive those wandering.
“You say what? You want to run away?”
“We must. Baagh says that everyone is descending upon us. East, West, Malan.” I don’t even look at her; I keep looking at the door.
“Baagh helped me back in Sirol. But I wouldn’t trust a word that man says. Don’t trust the priests, Da-Ren,” says Zeria.
“We have enough men. I’ve counted almost two hundred Dasal and loyal warriors of the Tribe, here. We can venture north.”
“Oh, is it safe there? North? Have I told you the tale of the fallow deer? A deer fought and died, a deer ran and died too.”
And the third deer found the song and killed the wolf. What does that mean?
“This no tale. We can’t sing our way out of this, Zeria.”
“Maybe we can’t. Someone, someday will come who will. But this is where we belong. I’ll give birth here; spring will come again. Maybe it is our fate to die here, but let them choose only how we die. We’ll choose how we live, without fear.”
I am not the arrow anymore. I don’t fly, unstoppable, aiming only to kill. I have become the shield. I am not the wolf. The male wolf gives birth but worries about no cub of his. The pack cares for the young, all for each one. As we did back in Sirol. Even the buck doesn’t care for its young; it leaves the doe to take care of them. What have I become? I am not the raging fire anymore, I have become a pond of calm water. At moments it is blissful, yet how long can it last?
I blabber these thoughts one too many times, and Zeria is losing her patience.
“Do you want to be the buck and abandon your young? Be the buck, if that’s who you are. But there are other animals, maybe not as beautiful but stronger. The eagle. The eagle mates, builds a nest, and feeds its young. The eagle is braver. Be the eagle, Da-Ren.”
The night Zeria gave birth I was far away from New Kar-Tioo. I had journeyed north with Leke and the rest, trying to find a path to the West. I didn’t go to her until the sixth day after the birth. The women had gathered the seven newborns of our first spring in the Forest in one hut, and they were breastfeeding them.
I tried to enter the hut, only to have a Dasal elder shake her head and block my passage.
“Not like this,” she said.
I washed and shortened the beard to stubble, left my blades in my hut and then returned. I walked up to Zeria who didn’t get up to greet me.
“Better I never learn which boy is mine,” I said to her.
“I had a girl,” she cut with a sharp tone in her voice. “Why don’t you want to know?”
Because that’s how I was born, and it’s too late for me to change. Words I couldn’t say.
I looked at all of them. Seven babies, soft and helpless, lying upon animal skins in swaddling clothes, some sleeping peacefully, a couple of them crying, one staring silently with wide open eyes.
“Seven?” I asked.
“Twelve babies were born since the last summer moon. Seven survived.”
“Does it have your eyes?”
“No, she has yours,” she said.
“Good, but still, it’s better that no Ouna-Ma Witch ever knows which one is the boy—“
“Girl.”
“—the girl of the blue-eyed forest-witch and the ninestar. Or else they will hunt her down some day.”
A child-girl of my own? Never had I dreamed her, in any of my dreams.
“Then I won’t tell you which one I yours,” she said. “We’ll follow your wishes. The rest of your men don’t care either. Let’s hide them. For their own good.”
“No one should ever know,” I added, but I kept looking at them, and it was already too late. The one with those wide-open brown eyes. Too late.
“I already know, Zeria.”
“How do you know?”
It is so obvious, and the thought alone—that I already know—gives me gooseflesh.
That little one, brown eyes, bow-shaped upper lip, and the chestnut-colored fuzz on top of its head. She was mine.
“That one,” I said.
She didn’t answer, and yet I sensed a smile of satisfaction trying to hide behind her eyes.
The one who moved her arms like they were blades, her eyes, like two smoldering coals, lit up the moment they saw me. She was the one who didn’t cry when I approached.
“Get out right away,” Zeria said, pushing me with one hand. “I’ll never tell you who she is. I’ll raise her here with the other newborns, together with the other mothers. I’ll hide her. For her own good.”
“Zeria, we must leave soon. Malan is very close, and so are all his warriors. They will not be afraid of the Forest anymore.”
“Have they started preparing for war in Sirol?” she asked.
They had never stopped.
“No,” I answered.
She grabbed a baby girl that was laying on the skins and started to breastfeed. She couldn’t fool me, I already knew which one was mine, and I avoided looking her way.
“Where is Drusa, the slave woman?” I asked.
“She left yesterday.”
“Did she run away? I’ll have the men—”
“No, let her go. It’s better that way.”
“Go where? She won’t survive unless she knows a path back to the West.”
“Let her go,” Zeria raised her voice.
“I need to get back to Sirol. Malan is coming,” I said as I walked to the door.
The winter night was empty of life, and the wind had died down. I had lived all four seasons with her in the New Kar-Tioo, and I only wished for a thousand more.
“Be the eagle, Da-Ren,” she said.
If I was the eagle, I could fly high that very moment and see the first of Malan’s hordes cutting a dark path through the snowy valley of Sirol.
LXXVIII.
Red for the Earth
Twenty-Sixth Spring. “Firstblade”
The forest of trees disappeared behind me and gave way to the forest of warriors who kept coming for a hundred days and more. Thirty-five thousand hungry and desperate had left six springs ago for the campaign southeast, yet the Trackers said that more than forty thousand were returning. If ever there was a successful campaign, it was Malan’s.
The Reghen and the Ouna-Mas came first surrounded by the Rods. The towering guards wore dark bearskin overcoats and carried spears with three-cut red-black banners that fluttered over the witches like bleeding crows. The endless Packs of the Archers followed, but it took me some time to recognize them. Some wore hats decorated with feathers of the eagle, the heron, and the peacock. Others had multi-coiled arm rings ending in bronze-carved mauler heads or horse heads. Men from another tribe, fair-haired and tall came farther behind. They carried smaller bows and short blades, and their cloud-white shields were painted with a green coiling snake. I stopped one of them as he was walking by me and grabbed him by the arm to take a good look at his shield. Demon horns and bat wings, lion jaw and a serpent’s tongue. Those othertribers were marching in Sirol, greeted with cheers, donning painted drakons on their shields.
All tribes of the northeast came, fortune-hunters and warlords who have knelt to Malan followed by their men, and some by women and children. Even those I used to call Crossers came, donning shiny helms and scaled armors down to their knees. They carried lances taller than two men in height that swayed like cypress treetops in the wind. Men from the edges of the steppe followed; their hay-colored hair tied high in a ponytail on top of their heads. They came from every tribe to serve the new king who never suffered defeat and the Goddess who favored him.
It was a parade of a thousand colors, day and night, with cymbals, kettledrums and blow-horns, each tribe trying to outdo the previ
ous ones in clangor and pomposity. After a while, I couldn’t tell our men apart from the rest. The ones who had returned were something else. The Craftsmen had acquired great fame and respect during the campaign, and their leaders wore heavy gold chains around their necks and thick copper bracelets on their wrists. The Trackers wore hides of giant cats, tigers and leopards, the most exotic animals signifying rank and how far they’d been in the whole wide world. Men came from the northern steppe with loose long hair and green-brown eyes, wearing tall hairy boots and carrying double-headed axes. A human skull was carved where the edges met above the haft, and some said it was an actual enameled skull. Most of them were drinking, even as they rode, from animal horns. Leading them was a giant who towered two palms over me and walked on foot, as he carried their standard, the enormous skull of an auroch, tied on a pole. Thirteen black aurochs followed behind the horses, a worthy gift for Enaka.
Chestnut-colored men came from the desert far east tribes that were defeated by Malan. They carried small bows, long spears, and wicker shields. They were scantily dressed, and their wiry muscled women rode beside them, dressed the same way, with loops of neckropes hanging from their shoulder. Many rode the fast and light-footed horses of the Crossers of the South, which couldn’t endure even one winter in Sirol.
They all came with great show as if they had to prove something. What, I didn’t know. Did they expect us to kneel before them and kiss their feet? To abandon the iron valley and surrender it to them? To worship them even though we were the victors and they were the defeated? To cut off their balls and stuff them down their throats?
Many days passed until the bulk of the Blades arrived, a few hundred of my men who had survived the battle of Apelo, mixed with many swordfighters of the South. The hay-colored man who had replaced me in Apelo was their Firstblade. Some of my men wore their dog skins over chainmail armors and carried the tear-shaped poplar and leather shields of the Crossers. Those I’d made Chiefs had been replaced, most likely after their deaths, and the new ones wore gold chains around their necks. Angels slaying drakons were still painted on the shields of the Crossers, yet the crosses were all erased. The Blades’ shields were decorated with a Sun and a half Selene.
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