by J. S. Bangs
“Ah,” the man said. He seemed to relax a little. “So you haven’t been with the slavers recently.”
Kirshta shook his head. “They’re coming. Bad men. Take children away.”
The man shrugged and nodded. “It’s their season.”
Kirshta knitted his brows together, confused. “Season?”
“In the spring, when the snows break. That’s when they come.”
“They come,” Kirshta said. He took another swallow of milk, hoping to strengthen his voice. “They come tonight.”
The old man shivered and turned away from the door.
“Tonight,” Kirshta said loudly. “But you can escape.”
“Me?” the old man said. “They’ll never bother me.”
“Not you. Whole village.”
He looked at Kirshta with a narrow, suspicious eye. “How did you get away again? Are you working for them?”
“Not working,” Kirshta said angrily. “They are bad.” His infelicity with the language galled him. He only knew the words that a child knew, and he had forgotten even most of those. “But you know. They come, and you can fight them.”
“Yes, we know,” the old man said, looking at Kirshta in confused dismay. “We’ve known for days. The shepherds down the valley saw them coming and warned us.”
“Then you can get away,” Kirshta said, his hope rising. “Save yourselves. Or fight them.”
The man muttered something under his breath and made a sign to ward off evil. He turned away from Kirshta and crossed his arms, watching the pot of boiling milk.
“What are you doing?” Kirshta asked. “Will you tell them?”
“Tell them what?” the man said, stirring the pot of milk. He ladled a bit of it into a chipped clay cup for himself.
“To escape. To fight.”
The man shook his head. “No escape. No fight.”
“They’ll take your children,” Kirshta said. His voice rose at the end, and the sudden pressure made his windpipe constrict. He doubled over coughing and gagging. The goat-herder watched him for a moment, impassive and hostile. After a few minutes of wheezing and coughing, Kirshta was able to sit up again and look the old man in the eye.
“You fight,” Kirshta said. “You are many. They are few.”
The goat-herder shook his head. A sack of uncarded wool lay by the door, and he lowered himself down atop it, cradling his little cup of milk in both hands. He shook his head again. “Never fight. Not worth it. Never turns out well.”
“What do you mean?” Kirshta asked. “How can you—”
“You think you’re the only one?” the goat-herder suddenly asked, lashing Kirshta with a glare.
“The only one what?”
“Only one who ever wanted to fight.” He waved his hand with an angry, dismissive snap, nearly spilling his mug.
“There are others?”
“If you want to make trouble, you can join them.”
“Join them where?” Kirshta’s heart rose. He swallowed another bit of milk, felt his voice grow stronger, and felt a rush of power in his limbs.
“They are dead,” the goat-herder said. “And good riddance. Every time someone has tried to resist, the slavers have killed them, and then destroyed the village. Maybe not that day. Sometimes they come back a month or a year later.”
Kirshta’s hope deflated. “You don’t mean…”
“And who are you?” the man said fiercely, pulling back his trembling lips and showing Kirshta his rotten teeth. “You show up at my door in the middle of the night. You drink my milk, and now you want the whole village to go to its doom. I have never seen you. I have never heard of you. You look like one of us, but you speak like a lowlander. Why should I listen to you?”
Kirshta leaned against the rough stones of the hut’s wall, his head swimming. The power and sharpness of his will seemed to have dissolved with the old man’s rebuke. “I thought you would want to know,” he said.
“And what did you expect?”
Kirshta shook his mug in a flash of anger. “Courage. Men willing to fight for their families.”
“You speak like a lowlander,” the old man said. “We who live in the mountains have learned. We do not struggle. Better a few get taken than the whole village perish.”
“And if I go to the other houses? What then? Will they say the same thing?”
The man looked at him with eyes wavering between fear and timidity. “You lived here, but you don’t remember us. You were very young when they took you?”
“I was twelve,” Kirshta said. “Vapathi was nine.”
“Ah.” Then the man’s eyes grew wide, and he looked at Kirshta with a sudden burst of agitated energy. “You were the one? The one who was taken from the Holy?”
“What?” Kirshta said. “You know?”
A phlegmy laugh sounded in the goat-herder’s throat. He drank the last of his milk, then knelt next to a board near the little stone stove. He began to cut up a turnip and drop the slices into the pot of steaming milk, muttering and stealing long glances at Kirshta.
“The story was told up and down the mountains. Two taken from the mouth of the Holy. No good, that.” He shook his head and looked again at Kirshta as if Kirshta were a creature stepped out of myth. “Your father died three years later. Another man from farther south came to be the keeper of the Holy. So I heard. Three villages down from here. I don’t know much else about it.”
“And now?” Kirshta said. “You’ve learned nothing?”
“We have learned the same lesson we always learn.” He crushed a few leaves of dried sage and dropped them into the soup pot, then poked the coals beneath it. “We’ve lived in these mountains since forever. Before the Emperor, before the Kingdoms, before the sea-men came and named this place Amur. We know only one thing: everything is taken. The winter takes a lamb. The lowlanders take a child. She Who Devours takes our offerings. We hold on to nothing, and survive on what we have left. Anything else is like…”
He reached out a fist and closed it around a whorl of steam, then opened his hand to reveal nothing.
“Don’t talk to me about fighting. If you had grown to be an adult here, you would have known our way. We fight nothing. What is taken is taken.”
A sick, angry anxiety growled in Kirshta’s stomach. “And everyone in the village will say the same? No one will fight?”
The man gave him a scowl. “You can go ask them, and leave me alone.”
Kirshta set his clay cup down in the packed dust of the hut’s floor. “I will,” he said. “Thank you for the milk.”
The goat-herder waved for him to go. Kirshta pulled the canvas over the door aside and stepped out into the night.
Full darkness had fallen while he was talking in the stone hovel. Farther down the path to the village, most of the lamps in the windows had gone out. Would it be better if he woke someone? Should he go to the houses with lamps? Or should—
He heard a noise behind him. Coming from the north he saw a torch and heard the crunch of movement.
The slavers came.
There was no time. He scrambled up the walls of the valley, past the goat pens and into the shade of the pines. The darkness under their branches was as black as the inside of a stone. He crouched on a mound of grassy earth behind one of the larger trunks and watched the slavers approach.
The first house at which they stopped had a lamp burning in its window. The slaver’s pounding on the door frame was a heavy, violent sound, shaking the stones of the hut’s wall and sending echoes up the narrow valley. The curtain parted for a moment, and Kirshta heard a mother sobbing. Two men’s voices conversed. A child cried out, and someone laughed. The curtain fell. The sobbing of mother and child mingled. The slavers moved away from the door, a forlorn wail marking their passage.
They stopped at two more houses. At each it was the same. No one fought. No one cursed or struck. The captives were carried away with sorrow and wailing, but not a single swipe of violence. Kirshta watched fr
om his perch above the valley, fury and sorrow bubbling together like pitch in the cauldron of his belly.
The slavers returned the way they had come, winding through the heart of the village, carrying the sobbing children with them. No door opened, no window was cracked to see or to stop them. And then they were gone.
The old man had been right. Kirshta looked at the place where he had last seen the slavers’ fire.
These people have been downtrodden too long. They know nothing but submission. The knife of his will grew as hot as newly-forged bronze. This cannot go on.
And with the force of snow falling off a branch, realization came to him.
The slavers always come in this season, when She Who Devours is lulled to sleep with blood in the Holy. The slavers know the date. Vapathi was not brought along that night merely for Kirshta’s company. She was an offering, a gift of blood to buy another year of peace from those who devoured. She was always meant to be taken.
His breath stopped in his throat.
His father had known. His mother had known. His own capture was a tragedy, but Vapathi’s was planned. She was an offering.
His anger boiled.
Blood for the slavers, blood for She Who Devours. Give up the few to save the many.
He climbed a little higher and found a sheltered spot on the leeward side of a little hillock. There was nothing to do tonight. But farther down the valley, there were more villages and more victims waiting. He curled into a ball and warmed himself with the heat of his anger.
This will not go on.
Navran
“Come, come,” Yavada said eagerly as Navran, Josi, and Dastha stepped through the door into his estate in Ahunas. The smell of cumin and rose water mingled in the curtains of the doorway. A breath of cool air poured from deeper inside the building. “Thudra is in the inner chamber. Sundasha-kha is also waiting.”
“Everything ready?” Navran asked, catching Yavada’s eye.
“All is prepared, all is in place,” Yavada said. He smiled pleasantly at Navran and clasped his hands over his belly in satisfaction.
A pair of Navran’s retainers followed them through the doorway and set down a bronze-clad chest. Yavada cast a contemptuous glance at it, then gestured for his own couriers to lift it. He led them through an arched inner doorway into the estate. Josi leaned close to Navran and whispered, “Are you sure that Yavada-kha is on our side?”
A pang of regret passed through him like a thorn pressed into his palm.
He hadn’t told her.
“It’ll be fine,” he said quietly. “We have arranged something.”
Josi shook her head. “I don’t trust him.”
“We’ve had this argument already,” Navran snapped. He regretted it instantly.
Josi pulled away from him as if he had slapped her and folded her arms beneath her breasts.
To tell her was to press the nail through his palm and out the other side. He had tried a dozen times to gather the courage, to call her to his room and say what he and Yavada had agreed. Every time he had failed.
Yavada had been as good as his word and had shared the news with no one. Only he and Dastha knew.
But now, as the hour approached, Navran realized that not telling her until now might be worse. He tasted black dread like rancid oil on his tongue.
“If he lashes out—” she began.
“You’ll be safe,” Navran said. “I promise.”
They would all be safe, all except for Thudra. A fierce desire took hold of him. He wanted to grab Josi’s hand, to pull her aside and tell her everything. He would break down and sob. He would tear his clothes and throw himself to the ground. He would ruin their plan for entrapping Thudra.
He walked straight ahead, his head as rigid as if it were held on a spear shaft.
The same yellow room where they had first met with Thudra and Yavada two months ago, open on one side to the inner courtyard. Thudra was seated atop a scarlet cushion, dressed likewise in scarlet, with his hands folded in his lap and a ghost of an amused smile on his face. Thudra’s son Vidham stood attentively at Thudra’s right, and on the other side sulked Sundasha with two muscled retainers. Yavada entered and received a curt nod from Thudra, then he sat next to the deposed king.
Navran sat down across from Thudra and heard Dastha and Josi take up positions on either side of him. For a moment he and Thudra regarded each other across the table. Thudra’s smug, thin smile seemed to dare Navran to lash out.
“You came,” Thudra said finally. “I expected your shame would drive you away, and you’d abandon your charge to my depredations.” He gestured at Sundasha and let his teeth show between his lips.
“I am not ashamed,” Navran said. He pointed to the servants carrying the chest. They set it on the table between Navran and Thudra.
“Is this all of it?” Thudra said, pulling at the corner of his lip. “Really?”
“Navran-dar is an honorable man,” Josi said in a chilly voice. “He takes care of his charges and pays his debts.”
“Honorable, I’m sure,” Thudra said. “Don’t we always say the peasantry is honorable? It’s the only virtue they can afford.” He tapped the lid of the bronze-clad box. “But it looks like you can afford this, as well. Tell me, Navran-dar, how did your trollop scrape up so much money? She would have to bed every man in Virnas to gather so much silver.”
Josi reached across the table to slap Thudra. Navran grabbed her wrist.
“Don’t, Josi,” he said. His voice was level and calm, a stone lid over the boiling turmoil inside him. Josi’s hand dropped to her lap, and Navran addressed Thudra. “Sadja-dar was willing to ransom his nephew.”
“Ah, so you went mewling to your patron? Such a humiliating thing for a man who pretends to be a king.” Thudra shot Josi a contemptuous glance. “Why is she here, anyway?”
Josi put her hand on Navran’s shoulder. The touch was pleasant, but it felt like doom to Navran.
“My Purse is here to vouch for the contents of this chest,” he said.
“Are you sure she counted it properly? Perhaps her mind has been addled by too much groping with the king.”
“Count it,” Josi said icily, “if a goat such as yourself can learn to count.”
Thudra cackled to himself. “The King’s Purse is a delight. Very well.”
He leaned forward, cracked open the top of the chest, and pulled out the first purse of coins. He began to count them by fives on the top of the table.
“Thudra-kha, have I mentioned the happy news?” Yavada said abruptly. He rose and glanced over at the men holding Sundasha.
“What happy news?” Thudra said, without looking up from the table.
“My oldest daughter Utalni-kha is betrothed.”
This caused Thudra to look up. “Betrothed? To whom?”
“Navran-dar, king of Virnas.”
Josi gasped. She squeezed Navran’s shoulder, her fingers digging into his tendon. Thudra’s hand hovered over the stack of coins he had just counted. The stone lid of Navran’s control began to crack.
“What did you say?” Thudra asked.
Yavada nodded to his retainers. They released Sundasha with a little push toward Dastha, and the boy ran past the table and grasped Dastha’s hand with an expression of guarded relief.
Thudra glanced from Yavada to Navran. “This isn’t….” he began.
Yavada’s retainers moved to either side of Vidham and seized him by the upper arms. Thudra’s hand turned into a fist, and he pounded it against the table. “Yavada-kha, this is treachery.”
“This is an arrest,” Navran said. “Yavada-kha turns over an enemy to the rightful king.”
Thudra reached for his belt, and Navran glimpsed the ivory handle of a knife. Yavada hissed between his teeth.
“I would be careful, Thudra-kha. Your wife and daughters are already guarded in their rooms. I am holding Vidham. You are surrounded.”
Thudra’s eyes darted in wild panic. “Yavada-kha. You dun
g-eating maggot. Our families have generations of friendship. How dare you—”
“My daughter needs a proper dowry,” Yavada said. He opened his palm toward Thudra and gave him a bland, conciliatory smile. “I cannot give her to a king for nothing.”
Thudra tensed. His hand turned for a moment on the coral handle of his knife, his teeth showing between his lips, a storm of black hatred beneath his lashes.
Vidham broke away from Yavada’s retainers. He lunged at Navran, thrashing and punching. A blow struck Navran in the cheek, and his vision splintered. For a moment all he saw was a swirl of color. Shouting all around him.
He scrambled to his feet to see Dastha pinning the boy to the top of the table. One of Yavada’s retainers held a dagger to Thudra’s throat while the other pinned Thudra’s hand behind his back.
“You let go of my father!” the boy spat at Yavada. He thrashed, and Dastha slapped him across the face.
Dastha looked up at Navran. “Your nose is bleeding, Navran-dar,” he said.
Navran touched his upper lip and felt the sticky spread of blood. “I am.” He felt dizzy.
Yavada motioned for one of his servants. “Bring a hot rag to Navran-dar. And close Thudra-dar and his son in a room. Away from the women.” He glanced at Navran. “You’ll take them all to Virnas. Even the women, right? You have the men for it?”
“I have the men,” Navran grunted. A servant bowed before him and offered him a rag soaked in warm water. Navran pressed it against his nose. Dastha wrestled the boy to his feet, and he pulled him out of the room with Thudra and Yavada’s retainers.
“You’ll have to do something about the boy, too,” Yavada said as soon as they had left. “He’s old enough to be a threat, as he proved today. Old enough to want revenge.”
“I would have let him go,” Navran said quietly. “To live with his mother and sister.”
Yavada shook his head and tisked quietly. “That sort of sentiment is what got you into this situation in the first place. Now I must follow to ensure my guests are well taken care of. Excuse me a moment.”
Navran hung his head and let the blood from his nose soak the warm rag. Yavada left. The room filled with sudden silence, as only he and Josi remained.
