by H. M. Long
The Algatt crumpled like a sail without wind. The ferns swallowed him, settling with a gentle rustle.
Keeping low, I darted over to him and picked up his shield, shifted my grip to test the strength of my arm, then shoved my hatchet through my belt and took up his longer axe instead.
I allowed myself the briefest moment to let their weight settle into my limbs. The shard of Eang inside me reveled at the action, pulsing and radiating. Her euphoria, her hunger, met with my turmoil and began to hum through my every muscle, every vein.
My head lowered, my shoulders loosened, and I ran. I sprinted back through the forest toward the camp, flitting through beams of dusky light and passing right by a clutch of startled raiders.
I darted and wove, but no arrows chased me. Between my speed, the Algatt shield and the ensuing twilight, they likely couldn’t tell I was Eangen.
But they followed. Algatt whoops and howls filled the forest behind me and their soft, shushing progress broke into an outright charge. We’d be on the camp in moments – I recognized that rock, that tree, and streaked past two of Quentis’s wards with Algatt as my escort.
I nearly laughed, then choked as one of the closest invaders, a woman with yellow streaked into her sandy hair, diverted to run right beside me.
She saw my face at the same time as I saw an Arpa shout in the distance – a watchman?
“Eangen!” The Algatt raider gaped at my darker skin and hair, recoiled in shock, and then threw herself in front of me.
There was no use hiding now. I screamed, but the voice was not mine. It never was, not when the Fire possessed me like this. The Algatt crumpled and two more took her place, diving to intercept me with howls of desperate challenge – and dread.
“Eangi! Eangi!”
I burst out into the Arpa camp and the world slowed again. My gaze passed from the charging Algatt to the Arpa, scrambling into quadratic formation in the center of the camp, shields locked and eyes glinting behind their helmets. Their cookfires burned and, overhead, twilight turned the leaves into a rustling canopy of violet-grey.
Raiders surged between the tents and surrounded the southerners in seconds, howling and lunging and yipping, but they hadn’t forgotten about me. Four attackers closed in, cutting me off from the Arpa and the safety of their formation.
One Algatt charged me, shield at his left shoulder, weapon hidden from sight out behind him. I raised my own shield and braced.
We met with a teeth-jarring clatter. He used his height to flip his shield over mine and thrust the rim towards my throat with a violent scraping. His sword followed an instant behind, flashing towards the back of my thigh in the light of the nearest fire.
I gave way in one quick step, enough to let the edge of my shield slip free and avoid his strike. I dropped, hooking his ankle with my axe and hauling. The man went down, and I spun to face my next opponent.
A sword thrust rammed into my shield. Its wood nearly cracked off my forehead but I was already dropping again, spinning the shield to tear the sword from my attacker’s hand. I shook away the pain, knocked her shield aside and lashed my axe at her knees. Down.
I straightened to find myself chin to chin with a berserker, all but his beard and kohl-rimmed eyes concealed by an owl-eyed helmet. His bloody hands seized both sides of my head and twisted me forward. I let my body follow the motion, rolling, and by the time I’d come into a crouch, red liquid seeped down his neck. He tumbled into the arms of another warrior, who let out a horrified cry and buckled under him.
My consciousness settled deep inside me, sheltered while the Eangi burned. My movements became more distant, even to me; each thrust of my sword, each sprint of pursuit, each grind of my heel and blow against my shield.
This was every raid I had ever participated in, grim and distant. The Algatt I faced now, I had already defeated. The blows I took, I had already taken.
I saw Yske. Her face flickered across my vision as I struck down a rabid Algatt woman, little older than I. Her mass of white-blond braids spun as I sidestepped, caught her across the back of the neck with my shield and knocked her sprawling.
Someone grabbed me from behind. Simultaneously, I brought up my shield to stop the downward blow of a huge, bearded war axe. My shield cracked and the handle slipped from my fingers.
I shouted and the woman wielding the axe recoiled, clutching bleeding eyes.
I tried to knock my head into the jaw of the person holding me and met shoulder instead. My shield arm was crippled with pain. My attacker pinioned my right wrist, squeezing it so hard that I dropped my axe.
An arm locked around my throat and I heard a female voice shout some command. Her spear thrust towards my stomach.
Nisien barreled her over. A second later the arm left my throat as pale-eyed Estavius jerked my assailant free and drove a sword into his gut.
I stumbled forward, raking air into my lungs. A hand hauled me upright and I blinked gratefully into Nisien’s face.
Without a word he grabbed my fingers and pressed a sword into them.
The shard of Eang hurt me now, tearing my muscles and making my bones ache. This was the end of the Fire. When the blaze faded, I would be left with only my physical training and pain.
Between Nisien and Estavius, I fought my way to the shield wall. It distantly occurred to me that there had to be at least a hundred Algatt, which, subtracting the twenty strewn across the ground, was still a formidable force.
I fought until my knees gave out and my head swam. Finally, as I knelt in a forest of boots and wounded legionaries, Commander Polinus’s voice broke over the waning chaos. I didn’t have to speak Arpa to understand their meaning.
“Hold! Hold your ground!”
Pounding footsteps, shouts and a frantic horn signaled the Algatt’s flight. The legionaries maintained their position, eyes fixed outwards, heels braced against the churned earth.
I eased my hips into my heels and wheezed. No one spoke yet, though several of the injured moaned and sobbed. I looked away from them and glimpsed Nisien’s head, free of his helmet and silhouetted against the sky above. He glanced at me and, to my surprise, grinned.
Bands of firelight fell across me. The soldiers let their shields part and stepped outwards, guards still raised, swords and spears prodding each body they passed.
Estavius lay on his back not far away, head tilted to one side, eyes closed and his breathing shallow. Instinct, and an unexpected flutter of pity for the quiet man, made me reach out and loosen the scarf that protected his throat from chaffing. His eyes didn’t open, but he breathed more freely after that. Satisfied, I patted his armored chest and started to sink back onto the earth.
But as I moved, my eyes snagged on a cut on Estavius’s cheek. For an instant, I would have sworn that his blood glistened with an odd, amber hue. But when I blinked again, it was gone. Just a trick of the firelight and my own exhaustion.
Nisien sat down beside me, chest heaving. He smeared blood away from his mouth, then flopped backwards and let out a quavering laugh. The laugh strengthened after the first few hitches and turned wild; a mix of relief, elation, and shock.
I gazed at him. My consciousness had returned to my body now, creeping out of her sheltered corner and stretching back into my limbs. She was numb, she was weary, and she hated the taste of blood.
“Gods above and below,” Nisien spluttered, throwing red-streaked fingers towards the night sky and turning them about dazedly, “I’ve missed this.”
* * *
We buried ten legionaries at dawn the next day. As the men labored over shovels, Polinus approached me. He didn’t comment on my actions the night before, but there was a new candidness in his deep-set eyes.
“What should we do with the dead Algatt?”
His deference gave me a little strength.
“The Gatti will come back for them, after we leave,” I told Polinus, surveying the rows of Algatt corpses and pulling on the padded vest I had stolen from the dead blond woman. I
had a new axe and shield, too, not to mention pairs of proper throwing axes, boots, and legwraps.
I felt like an Eangi again, and yet, at the same time, strangely other. I refastened the warped collar I’d found in Lada to my belt and set my shoulders. “We’d dishonour the bodies if we buried them.”
“I see,” Polinus said. It looked like he had taken a set of claws to the face and, judging from the spacing of the fingers, I suspected they were female. “Are they likely to retaliate?”
“Yes. But it won’t be tomorrow.” I fumbled with my belt. My Fire had knitted most of my scratches and bruises before it died, but my shield arm was weak enough that I couldn’t tighten my fingers. “The Algatt are… skirmishers. They attack and run, tend their dead, gather more men, and attack again.”
“I see. So next time we might anticipate a larger force?”
“If one’s available.” I grimaced at the ties of my belt, frustration flaring. “Definitely. They’ll rally and hunt us down. But we should be in the mountains by then, and there’s a chance they won’t follow.”
Polinus accepted this and offered me his empty hands. “If I may?”
I nodded and moved my arms out of the way.
As the older man fastened my belt, he informed me, “I’ve assigned you a horse. See Castor before we ride out.”
Half an hour later, I unwillingly tracked down the legionary.
“She’s yours.” Castor threw a blanket over the back of a mare and hefted the saddle into place. He adjusted it, bent to find the girth, and tightened that. His tone light, he asked, “So, you turn men’s bones to dust? Is this a common barbarian practice?”
I ignored him and moved to meet my horse’s eye. She lifted her head from the grass and shook away a buzzing fly, her short white mane rippling in the morning light against a coat the color of creamed honey.
I didn’t look up until I felt the captain’s eyes run across me. Arrogance remained in the curl of his lips, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“It was impressive,” he admitted. “What you did last night.”
“I’m Eangi,” I replied simply.
Castor fitted the bridle over the horse’s head and tucked the bit into her mouth. She shuffled on her feet and shook her head again, this time accompanied by the ring of tack.
“You’re Eangi,” the legionary prompted.
“Yes. That, last night, that’s Eang’s gift. Her power is in our blood.”
“Ah.” One of his eyebrows arched at this. “I see. So, your parents are Eangi?
“No.” I absently scratched my horse’s neck, under her mane. “It doesn’t work like that. Does she have a name?”
“Who?”
“The horse. Does she have a name?”
“Melid. It means honey.”
I glanced down at the animal, who had gone back to lipping at the grass. “A fierce name for a warhorse.”
“Mmm,” he agreed, watching me. “What does Hessa mean?”
His sudden friendliness made me uncomfortable. I edged around his broader frame, choosing to step behind him instead of passing through the space between him and the horse.
As I crouched to shift my possessions into Melid’s saddlebags I replied, “‘Hes’ means boat. ‘Sa’ is… well, it’s not anything really. Not anymore. ‘Nae sa’ is what we say when someone is married or moves away. Or dies. ‘Nae sa – don’t look back’.”
“Then… ‘Look back to the boat’?” Castor offered. “‘Remember the boat’?”
I finished repacking the saddlebags, slipped them over Melid’s back and made sure they were secure. “Directly, yes. But the sense of it is more… ‘remember the past’, or ‘remember where we came from’. It’s an old name, from the time before we settled here. Before the tongues changed or we began to worship Eang.”
“Who did you barbarians worship before then?”
I rankled at the insult but tugged at a strap and replied with a dismissive, “No one remembers.”
In the back of my mind, however, Shanich’s words about greater gods, older gods called Thvynder and the Weaver and Eiohe, prodded at me. Had my people once known those names, too? Might Eang know them? And if so, why had she never told us?
Just how much might the goddess be hiding from her own people? The possibilities were too huge, and too heretical, to contemplate.
Castor took this with consideration. “Weren’t the Eangen and the Algatt one people, in the beginning? Before you started slaughtering one another?”
I straightened and gave him a cool stare. But he was taller than me and, by the twitch at the corner of his mouth, my gaze was less than intimidating.
“Yes,” I replied, taking him by surprise. The priestess woke in me then, armed with centuries of lore and song and prayers. Eangen history was courageous and proud, and I refused to be ashamed of it. “Before we came to carve out a life for ourselves. Before Eang came to us in the snow of the first winter. Before the Algatt found their god in the mountain and chose to live there, to worship him, instead of staying where the land was fertile and where Eang ruled. Long, long before your Empire.”
Castor nodded sagely. “Ah, yes. A heroic history. Yet you still defecate in the forest, build your houses from sticks and send your women to fight?”
My anger struck in a fierce white flash. It raced up my throat like a snake in the grass, evasive and uncatchable.
Just before it left my lips and struck the legionary down, Nisien stepped up to my shoulder. I closed a mouth full of heat and swallowed hard.
“Castor, leave the Eangi be.” Nisien banished the other man with a jerk of the head.
Castor shot a look between us, gave an over-ingratiating half-bow and strode away.
Nisien and I stood poised until the Arpa was out of earshot. Then Nisien let out a ragged breath. He retreated from my shoulder to lay a hand on Melid’s neck, looking like a man who had talked down a hungry bear.
“Did I just save that bastard?” he asked, both incredulous and unnerved.
I brushed hair from my face with both hands and filled my lungs with as much cool morning air as I could gather.
Taking this for an affirmative, Nisien examined me. “Castor’s rattled,” the Soulderni finally said. “So he’s trying to rattle you instead. You unnerved them last night, and that’s on top of losing so many men. I think only Polinus and two or three others had ever seen an Eangi fight. It’s savage, to them. Demonic. Not to mention the fact that you’re a woman.”
“If Polinus lets me take the horse, I’ll go on alone,” I suggested, more weary than offended. My offer was a reasonable one, but as soon as I made it, I hoped he would dissuade me. Whatever Nisien and I meant to one another by this point, whether friends or allies or comrades of circumstance, I desperately didn’t want to be alone again.
“If you kill Castor, you’ll have to go anyway,” Nisien quipped with a little too much truth to be humorous. “And if that’s not enough incentive to stave you, it will not end well for me either.”
“Well, if I did harm him, I’d make sure you weren’t connected. I won’t let you suffer for my sins.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I remembered speaking them to Eidr and Yske in a rainy night on Mount Thyr. I fidgeted with the contents of the saddlebags again, angling my face to hide a rush of grief.
Melid lifted her head and watched us through the walnut depths of her eyes, then flicked one ear. Nisien, lost in his own thoughts and unaware of the weight of my words, reached out to scratch her neck.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” I forced myself to switch topics. “Have you officially rejoined the army, or are you just here for me? Will you return to your mother when this is over?”
Nisien took the bridle and held the horse steady as I swung up into the saddle, though the placid mare needed no such direction.
“I’m here willingly,” he said. It was obvious that my question had sobered him; his preoccupied look slipped into a weighted, sightless stare. “Beyond that, I don’t
know.”
Around us, the rest of the men were mounting up. More than one of them noted Nisien’s and my proximity, but neither of us cared.
“You want to rejoin,” I observed after a momentary silence.
He scratched at Melid’s jaw. The first riders moved onto the road, leaving Nisien’s own horse conspicuously unoccupied.
That was when a flash caught my eye; sunlight reflecting off one of the men’s rectangular shields as he slung it across his back. Tugging his mount towards the road, he presented me with a clear view of a maned, feline head with a yawning mouth and a dead, empty stare.
The vision. I had seen that shield in my vision, the night I left Nisien and Euweth at the grove. The rest of the men carried shields with other symbols, majority being a boar with elongated tusks, while Estavius’s and Castor’s had a pattern of wings.
Nisien noted the direction of my gaze. “What is it?”
“Your shields. What do the different symbols mean?”
“What? Oh, each legion has one,” he replied, startled and maybe even a little hurt by my sudden distraction. “When I was in the Third, mine had two horse heads. The boar is General Athiliu’s. The wings are academy-trained, like Estavius.”
“And the mountain cat, with the mane?” I pressed, overrunning his last few words.
The Soulderni scanned for the shield in question. “The border legion east of the Pasidon, I believe, at the Nivari Gates. Why?”
“Aux, mount up!” Polinus bellowed.
We were about to be left behind. Nisien cast me one last glance before he crossed to his horse in four quick strides. He mounted with seamless grace and I nudged Melid in beside him.
“Eangi,” Polinus’s voice cut again over the uncoordinated ripple of hooves, swish of tails and creak of leather. “To the fore.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Polinus kept me at his side throughout most of the day. Since I knew the road and the land this was a valid request, but it kept Nisien and I separated.
During those long hours of silence and indecipherable Arpa conversation, my thoughts were my own. I contemplated my vision of the feline shield and what it might mean. Inevitably, I recalled the violence of the night before, but my mind shied away from that. Instead, I considered Eang, Ogam and Vistic. I wondered where Omaskat was and how I might find the milk-white lake, once I finally reached the mountains.
