by Kate Elliott
All was silent except for the buzzing of flies. Even the wind had died, as if in deference to blood and death. If he did not think, he could move past. His hands were cold, but his face was hot in the sun, and his eyes hurt so badly he thought he would go blind.
Bai circled back to him, her expression serene. The ginnies remained hunkered down against her, gone a dull gray color. She seemed undisturbed, as if this were simply a ghastly mural painted on a wall that one might look at, or away from, as one pleased.
If he did not speak, he would be sick. “I’ve never seen . . . They cut off their hands!” He pressed the kerchief to his mouth as bile rose and tears burned in the corners of his eyes.
“No, they didn’t. If you look at the stumps, you’ll see they’re healed. Some better, some worse, some more recent than others. These people had already taken those injuries, days or months ago. Look what they have with them: grain, tools, blankets. These are refugees. I wonder what horror they were fleeing from. Out of the north.”
“I guess it caught them up.” Then the heaves hit, and he doubled over, ripped away the kerchief, and threw up on the road.
She stepped away neatly and waited him out. When he stopped retching, she said, “What of the village we passed through late yesterday? They’ll be in the path of these wolves. And after them, all those other villages we passed. We have to go back. Try to warn them.”
“I don’t want to go back,” he gasped. His mouth tasted horrible, although he’d had little except bile to vomit. He was dizzy; he could not get the world to stay still beneath him. “We’ll take what we need from these supplies.” He faltered. She was staring at him as if he had begun in truth to spin. “This will only go to rot, or be eaten by animals! I’m not a thief. The valuables they can keep, not that they can carry them in death. We have to go on! You must see that. I don’t want to go back to Olossi!”
“Neither do I. No need to alert the Olossi militia, or any holy officials to preside over the passing ceremony. No need even to drag the dead to a Sorrowing Tower, for you see—” She gestured toward the waiting vultures. “—the acolytes of the Merciless One are already come. They and the beetles and the open air will scour these poor dead bodies properly.”
“You’re heartless!”
“I am? You’re the one who wants to loot the murdered dead and keep on walking as if nothing happened.”
“We can do nothing for them! If we go back, we risk falling into slavery again. You know that!”
“It’s true. It’s a risk I’m not sure I’m willing to take. What do you suggest, then, Keshad?”
There was no way to look away from the scattered dead. Even if he closed his eyes, the bitter taste in his mouth and the smell rising in the air reminded him of the death that surrounded them. He wiped his eyes with the heel of a hand and found that core of orderly determination that had kept him going for twelve long years of servitude.
“So. So. We can continue on West Track through the Aua Gap and to Horn.”
“Where all the trouble lies.”
“So we hear. We can walk along West Track another couple of days until we reach the Passage. That road will take us north through the East Riding into Sohayil. Or we can walk south into the Lending.”
“There are no paths in the grasslands.”
“We can retrace our steps to Olossi and take the Rice Walk, maybe walk all the way to Sund or Sardia. Or we can walk southwest, back to Old Fort. At Old Fort, there’s a track that leads south along the foothills and eventually comes to the southern coast and West Farro.”
Bai walked to the nearest wagon and nudged a corpse of a woman with the end of her walking stick. The woman’s mouth gaped, and flies crawled in and out. She had no left hand, only a scarred stump. Bai was right: these were old wounds, poorly healed. The dead woman had been so poor that she was wearing an undyed hempen-cloth taloos, not even a coarse silk weave. The taloos had been mostly pulled off her, yanked up above her hips, and it was evident by the bloodstains on her thighs and pudenda that she had been raped multiple times before they had slit her throat.
“It seems foolish to go into the north, when that’s where all this trouble is coming from.” Bai set down the ginnies. She knelt beside the dead woman and tidied the taloos, pulling it down, straightening it. Then she crumbled the dry leaves of a sprig of lavender onto the corpse’s pale lips. The rest of the lavender was wedged where the chin had fallen against the shoulder. “See, here.” She pinched up a trifle between forefinger and thumb, whispered a prayer, and blew the fragments to the winds. “I saw lavender sprinkled on the other bodies, too. Some holy person has spoken the ceremonies over the dead, succored their ghosts, and opened a path through Spirit Gate. I suppose it was that Lady’s mendicant we saw last night. Aren’t you glad, now, that we gave her coin? It would have been blood money, otherwise, us clutching it to ourselves now that we’ve seen this.”
He sighed, touching his blessing bowl. Now was not the time to tell Bai that he no longer believed in the gods of the Hundred, because they had abandoned him.
Magic hissed, crest flaring, and opened his mouth wide as he turned to face Olossiward, staring intently west along the road. Mischief whipped her tail so fast that she seemed to turn around in a flash; she scuttled off the road and vanished into the brush. Magic looked at Bai, and abruptly Kesh understood the eye, the look, the color, the posture: Can’t we go now? How much longer do I have to stand here to protect you and your idiot brother?
“Trouble.” Bai scooped up Magic. “Off the road. Now.”
Numb, he followed her as she wove around the wreckage: the staring eyes that did not see the blue sky; a young child stabbed through the back; women, girls, and boys raped before, or after, they were murdered; an old man with his throat cut so deep, severing his spine, that his head had begun to roll off his shoulder because of the slope of the ground. The horror rang in his skull to the throbbing of his pulse. But he must not think on it. He and Bai had to save themselves. These dead could not be saved.
They pushed into the trees, following Mischief’s trail, but the pipe-brush and pine saplings gave little cover here in the month before the wet, when plants turned gold and brown as they withered. Back a way they ran, and shoved at last into a thicket of pipe-brush crowded close enough that they could crouch down in their center and peep out between thick stalks. Mischief was waiting here. As soon as Bai set down Magic, the female ginny pushed in close beside him. Bai scritched them, talking a low, soothing voice. They quieted. All went still.
Feet trampled the earth in a steady rhythm, moving fast but without the erratic thunder of the panicked. Bai put a hand on his shoulder as the first rank appeared, coming from the direction of Olossi and marching Hornward. Reminded by the pressure of her fingers, he stopped himself from crying out. There were about thirty armed wolves and at least that many unarmed youths and children bound by ropes and stumbling along with blank expressions of shock. The wolves pushed past the massacre without a glance to either side. These were hard-faced men, and a few women, most dressed variously in leather coats, or in coats with rings sewn on for added protection, or in lacquered hide coats molded to fit the torso; caps of hide curved around heads, held on with a chin strap. The rest wore short robes woven of hempen cloth and had bare feet and bare heads, hair tied up in knots of linen. All carried either spears or swords except one woman who rested a woodcutter’s axe on her left shoulder. A few handled wooden shields, while others held lacquered shields cut from hide. All of the shields had a bright red mark on them, a blurry crescent moon that looked as if it had been smeared there with fresh blood.
They had taken slaves in the ancient way, known in story but since outlawed according to the decree on Law Rock: No one shall take a slave as a prize in war. This was obviously part of that group which had passed Kesh and Bai last night, marching Olossiward. Now they marched back Hornward with their prize. What lay in the north, that wolves could bring war-gotten slaves to the hearths of honest, or dis
honest, citizens? How far and how deep had the shadows fallen?
He swayed, but Bai leaned against him to steady him. The ginnies were absolutely still. He was the only one whimpering under his breath. The wind had come up without him noticing, and the rustle of leaves hid his faint noises.
A child trotting along raised its eyes and saw the bodies sprawled everywhere. It gasped out a sob. The man walking next to it slapped it without breaking stride, and it hunched its shoulder and bit on a hand while the other young ones stared with wide eyes and bitten lips, and bent their stride to walk faster. Children never walked in so much silence. He looked at Bai, but he could see nothing familiar in her. She was a stranger, maybe not Bai at all but some demon who had taken Bai’s shape and now traveled with him on its own errand. Demons weren’t necessarily malicious. They simply had their own ways and their own hopes and fears, none of which had anything to do with humanity.
The party of slavers moved out of sight, leaving the dust to settle behind them. The orange silk caught in the thornberry fluttered, one corner twisting up and twisting down as it tried to wriggle free. It too was captive. In the trees, the vultures waited with the patience known to all servants of the gods. More had joined them, their scabrous heads light among the dark branches. The boldest lifted, and flapped awkwardly down to land next to a child’s body.
He began to shift, to go out there, but Bai caught his wrist in a fierce grip and stopped him. Magic had opened his mouth wide. Kesh was panting, his throat sour and his stomach heaving, but he swallowed it down until his eyes watered and he thought he would pass out.
The vulture exploded off the ground, taking wing.
They came at a trot, in the wake of the cadre. The two men wore short robes but no armor, and each one carried a bow, with a long knife strapped to his belt. Although the others had tramped past without stopping, these two slowed and paused, drawn at once to the bile Kesh had vomited up. They surveyed the ground; they conferred in low voices; bent over, they scoured the road’s dust for signs. Like their comrades, they ignored the bodies and the buzzing flies as easily if it were a sight they saw everyday, and perhaps it was.
Magic pressed himself against Bai’s side as one of the men, on hands and knees, followed the faint trail left by Kesh and Bai’s passage down the sloping verge and into the grassy cleared space between road and forest. His companion had an arrow ready, and he scanned the trees with a hard gaze that seemed to pierce right through the foliage.
Bai lifted both ginnies and fixed them on Kesh’s shoulders. He stifled a yelp. Mischief’s tongue flicked against his ear. Magic grunted, displeased to be dumped on this unappetizing male rival. But they stayed with claws clutching Kesh’s robe, gazes rising as Bai rose smoothly to her feet. She unfastened the top two ties on her sleeveless jacket, and pushed out of the thicket of pipe-brush. Once away from him, she made as much noise as she could pushing through branches as she approached the cleared verge.
Kesh was frozen, a coward, too stunned to respond as she placed herself in the open.
“Whew!” she said as the men saw her and the crawling one straightened with a leer on his face that made Kesh shiver with disgust. “I hate peeing in the woods.”
The way her jacket set on her shoulders changed somehow, its tight curve over her shoulders relaxing away as, he supposed, the front gaped open. The two men dropped their gazes right down to her breasts.
She leaped. She had a knife in her hand. Light winked on the blade. It sank into the chest of the closest man before Kesh could blink. Yet when he did blink, two or three times, as if he had a midge in his eye, afterward he saw a new movement, already begun. The other man had lunged, with hand gripped to the arrow. He thrust the arrow as though the barbed arrowhead were a spear. She sidestepped the thrust, kicked up into his groin so hard that bone snapped, and spun away as he howled and doubled over. Meanwhile, as if he had just realized he was dead, the first man collapsed in a flaccid heap, spirit fled.
A knife blade flashed. Somehow, the other man had unsheathed his own knife. Despite his injuries, he cut at her. She sprang, actually flipped twice—hands feet hands feet—and ended up on the other side of the dead man. With a graceful sweep, she bent low and came up with his sword. Blades clashed as long knife met short sword. She twisted hers, and flipped her wrist. The knife went flying and hit the ground with a thunk. He yelped, stumbled out of range, but went down with his companion’s sword buried up to its hilt in his gut. She shoved him onto his back as she let go the sword, scooped up his knife, and straddled him.
Face contorted with fear and pain, he thrashed, begging for mercy: “—pray you, Lady, I pray you—be merciful—”
“So I will be. You will be paid, in the same coin you took.” She cut his throat, jumped back as blood spilled, and tossed his knife onto his twitching body.
Turning, she raised a hand to wave. How strange, thought Kesh, that there was no blood on her palms. “Come on! Quickly! There may be another set of scouts.”
He rose, but his legs could only be moved in a shuffling stagger. The ginnies weighed heavily on his shoulders. He had to lean on her walking staff to stay upright.
She gave him a look, fastened up her ties, and hit the wreckage like a scavenging dog. She collected six bladders of drink and a basket with shoulder straps which she filled with wedges of cheese, flat bread, rice balls wrapped in se leaves, several precious pouches marked with the ideogram for dried tea leaves, and oilcloth wrapped around what was surely dried fish. His stomach hurt, just looking at it. His gaze skimmed across the open eyes and rictus grins of the dead, elided the splashes of dried blood. All at once, he dropped. The ginnies scrambled off as he heaved again. There was nothing in his stomach to lose.
She came back to him while he was still kneeling at the side of the road with a hand shading his eyes and his stomach clenched, all sharp pain.
“Blood takes people that way sometimes,” she said, setting the basket down by her feet.
Her voice could not be that of his sister. Zubaidit, whom he had once known, would have been screaming with hysterics. It infuriated him that this lilu had taken over Bai’s form and done violence with hands that ought to have belonged to gentle little Bai.
“I’ve never killed a man,” he said accusingly.
“Yet how many out of the empire have you sold into slavery over the years to buy us free from our debt?” she asked him. “Isn’t that a way of killing the life a person once had? Isn’t that what happened to us? And at least Hundred folk sell only their labor and have a hope of earning out their time. Those slaves from the south will never go home.”
The bile rising in his throat choked him.
Was it the same? No, not at all. Not at all.
“Where do we go?” he asked. All his determination had fled. The buzzing of the flies had sapped him. He was empty. A vulture, seeing them stay still for so long, sailed down to land beside a corpse, and bent its head to tear.
“We have to go back. Think of that village we came through yesterday in the afternoon.”
“It isn’t our fault their Ladytree rotted through and fell three years back and the new one is only a sapling. They ought to have allowed us to shelter for no coin in their empty council hall, instead of wanting to charge us just because they’re greedy.”
“It doesn’t matter how they treated us. We have to go back because it would be wrong to go on, knowing others will be used in this same way. Come on. I found food enough to last us a few days.”
“Looted from the dead.”
“I picked up forty vey, too, although I must say that these were desperately poor folk, to have so little. Or else the wolves already took their coin. Maybe so.”
The ginnies circled the basket, and she hoisted them to her shoulders. She took a few steps, paused, and turned back.
“Kesh?Kesh! Come on!”
Her voice had a bark, like that of a snapping dog. He startled as though struck, shook his shoulders, and rose to his feet. No use c
rying over what was already spilt.
“At least let’s stay off the road,” he said. “At least that much.”
“What difference will that make? They’re west of us and east of us now. We’re stuck between sections of their company, and I expect they have scouts moving through the forest. That’s what I would do, were I their captain. We’ll move faster on the road. The ginnies will warn us.”
Aui! No place was safe. He indicated the weapons carried by the dead men. “What about these?”
“Leave them. Unless you’re skilled with a bow.” She was already moving, her long legs flashing as she strode away from him, heading back toward Olossi, the one place he really did not want to go.
He hesitated. He had paid off all her debts. He was so furious that his anger tempted him to turn and walk away from her, deserting her and her idiot schemes and pious scolding.
He couldn’t do it.
The quivers were trapped under the dead men, and he didn’t want to touch them. He didn’t have the stomach to pull that sword free, but he picked up both bows and tossed away the littler one that was flimsy and had too light a draw. You could always sell a good bow. He grabbed the basket of looted food and drink, slung its straps over his shoulders beside his empty pack, tucked the bow in, and hurried after her. You had to stick by your kin. She was all he had.
She strode ahead, the ginnies’ tails hanging down behind like ornaments. He huffed along after her with nothing but a red rage and a flowering confusion in his mind. In his haste he did not even mark the huge shadow that overflew them until she cursed and ducked, although nothing had been thrown at her. The booming shriek of an eagle split the air above them. Now he looked up, but it was already too late. The reeve—for it was a reeve—was circling back.
