At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

by Kij Johnson

  My brother Ricard finally agreed. When the sleep time was over we would turn dawnward again. But I was too hot to sleep, too impatient, so I walked among the mare herd.

  Foals and their dams scattered at my passing. They seemed listless and irritable from the heat and the stagnating water, but they were fat and healthy, and their coats gleamed through a thin sheen of dust. I checked several horses for things I had recently treated. The blazed black mare’s right flank, ripped by tearthorn bushes, showed a dark shiny scar that was already blending into her hide. The small gray mare’s newborn foal had been attacked by feral dogs before I had found them and returned them to the herd; the filly’s shoulder was deformed by a bite but she moved easily. She would probably never sell. Still, her blood was good and as long as she could keep up, she should be a good broodmare.

  The sorrel mare’s was the last foal not yet born, and due very soon. Her belly was a huge copper-colored bloat. She shifted awkwardly from foot to foot but she let me handle her without resisting, too heavy and hot to care. Her mouth membranes were pink and healthy-looking, and her eyes were clear. When I thumped her abdomen, I felt movement, a sharp thump back.

  I heard a distant bark: one of my dogs, no doubt chasing birds far from camp. A second dog took up the sound. I looked out toward them, toward Dawn, and saw dark shapes.

  My uncle’s wife Brida and I started shouting at the same time. “Riders!” We ran toward the camp. “Strangers dawnward!”

  The tents had been quiet, dogs sleeping in the short shadows. Now my family ran to the central work area, and the dogs danced nervously about them. The three children in the family clung to their parents. Ricard had been sleeping in one of the tents; bare-chested and squinting in the light, he gestured and we all armed ourselves with knives and swords and spears.

  “The dogs,” he said to me.

  I nodded and pulled my whistles from my sash. They were a handful of silver tubes bound together with silk cords, each a different note to make the different commands. They were not as convenient as whistling the notes between my teeth but they carried. I whistled everyone out and alert, and dawnward. The dogs loped off, dark shapes galloping through the pale grass to meet the handful of man-shapes coming.

  The foremost rode under a banner but we could not see the color. I fingered my whistles, watching Ricard for direction. We had twenty dogs and eight adults. I would lose some dogs but we could stop these men in the unlikely event we needed to.

  “White,” my brother’s wife Jena said.

  Trading color: barter and news. Ricard relaxed and smiled and the armed ones lowered their weapons. My brother was new to his role and still likely to take the hard road to any decision. There are not many people on Ping; in the time it took for my sister Meg to get pregnant and bear her daughter Mara, I never saw strangers. This was our first contact since before our father had died and Ricard had assumed the family’s leadership: better that this be an easy meeting.

  “Peace,” he said.

  Jena nodded. “I’ll make the tea for the greetings.” She walked to the cooking fires, my nephews complaining beside her.

  “They might not be peaceful,” my uncle Den said.

  Ricard turned. “Why not? They ride under white.”

  “Still, better to—”

  Ricard laughed, “Den, we are nine and they’re six. They ride under white and no one would betray that. We’re not fighters but we’ll defend ourselves if we have to. What could they do?”

  “Ricard—” Den said sourly.

  “All right.” Ricard gestured impatiently. “Katia, send one of the dogs out to bring in Lara and Willem from the gelding herd. The geldings won’t wander far before they return. Satisfied?”

  I nodded and whistled for the young black bitch, and other herd. She loped away to the north. She did not know enough yet to be useful here, but my cousin and her husband would see her and know she was sent to summon them.

  “Let’s get the children out of the way,” my sister Meg said. “Rob, Mara, Stivan, into the sleep tent.” But no one moved. The children clung to their parents: tiny Stivan and Rob clutching Jena’s skirts, Mara holding Meg’s hand tightly. We stood there as though trapped out of time, flies hanging in honey.

  And then—the trick grassland plays on us—they were suddenly present. Time began again: the camp was flooded with noise and motion. The dogs whirled around the horsemen, jumping and barking. The strange horses flinched away from them. Several of the riders looked no more happy. One man had a whip with which he flailed around his horse’s flanks. The dogs thought this was a game, and danced away, grinning as dogs do.

  I whistled everyone and back. Obediently the dogs moved away. When they were far enough away not to make the strange horses nervous, I whistled drop, and they collapsed panting in the trampled grass.

  I had never seen such large horses. They stood so tall that I could barely see over their backs, with long rangy legs and rough coats. They all looked sick and exhausted, as though they had been ridden harder than they should. I recognized prayer flags, scraps of fabric and paper and hide that had been woven into tight little patterns and hung from their bridles.

  And I had never seen strangers like these: no surprise on Ping, where one might never see members of the same group twice in a lifetime. The barbarians—for so I thought them—were gold-skinned and flat-faced. The four men had shaved heads; the two women had long black braids that fell to their heels as they rode. They were dressed identically in knee-length dark quilted tunics split front and back for riding. The tunics would fold closed and secure with plain gold buttons close to the throat, but it was too hot for that; they wore them gaping open to show sweat-darkened shirts and trousers of undyed Pingworm silk.

  They were all warriors. Hung from their belts were knives and embroidered bow cases made of oiled cloth, covers flipped back. Block quivers nestled in the small of their backs. Their felted boots had toes that pointed up and notches in their shaped soles. The stirrups nestled in the notches: very sensible, worth trying to imitate.

  One of the riders said, “I am Huer, bodyguard to the emperor Erchua of the Tien, and the leader of this group.” Nonsense words to us, for all their being in the Trade language. He swung from his saddle and stood beside his blood-colored mare: a man just my height—and I am short for my people—and a dog’s lifetime older than me, with papery wrinkles seaming his face. A bright beetle’s wing and a strand of sky-blue beads hung from his dark brimless cap, his only ornamentation.

  “I am Ricard,” my brother said. “We are the Winden clan of the Moot people.” These would be nonsense words to them as well, but necessary for all that. “Greetings.”

  “Foals!” One of the barbarian women called out in Trade, then said something in a different tongue, pointing at the herd. Several dismounted.

  “Wait—” Ricard started; but exclaiming they walked into the herd.

  I whistled softly through my teeth, the tones for the two smartest dogs, the lead bitch and the gray-faced male, and look around and be wary. They rose and loped toward the herd.

  “Who made the noise?” the leader asked Ricard. “Why do the dogs go?”

  “Katia told them to.” Ricard gestured toward me. “She is our handler.”

  The stranger looked at me until I flushed and ducked my head. “She wastes her time training curs.”

  We had run into other barbarians who despised dogs as unclean. Ricard did not defend but only said, “She works medicine with the horses, too.”

  One of the barbarian women trotted toward us from the herd. “They are small but they are well,” she called to Huer. Her accent was thick but even through it I heard her excitement. “And all the foals. Completely healthy.”

  “Are you here to trade for horses?” Ricard asked.

  “Your horses are not sick?”

  “No.” Ricard said. “They’re the best horses on Ping. We have—”

  “You know horses?” the leader interrupted, staring at me.
“What makes them ill? You have medicines?”

  “Why?” I asked warily. “Do you seek help?”

  “Are any of the others healers?”

  “I am teaching one of the children, but—”

  “Which one?”

  I said nothing, but Mara huddled in Meg’s arms and hid her face in her mother’s sleeve.

  He turned away to look at Ricard. “I have important news. Are you all present?”

  “No,” Ricard said—too young to lead, I know now, to know better than to say this. “Lara and Willem are out with the geldings.”

  “Good,” the barbarian said and shouted a word. It seemed impossibly fast. The strangers pulled their short bows free of the cases at their hips and shot.

  The leader struck the metal whistles from my hand before I could get them to my lips. I dove for them, but he caught me as I dropped. I fought to free my hands from the folds of his tunic, to pull my knife.

  Three rounds of arrows had hissed through the air in the moment I had fought. Ricard was down, an arrow sprouting from his breastbone. Jena was fallen, Stivan beside her; I could not see the arrows. Den, Mikel, Brida, Meg, Daved: arrows and blood blooming from throats and breasts and backs. And the children.

  Several dogs broke the drop command. Silently my lead male launched himself at the leader’s throat. An arrow threw him sideways before he hit, but the young male dog behind him struck the man as he raised an arm to protect his face.

  My knife pulled free. I jabbed for the leader’s side as he shoved the male aside; whistled attack with my mouth, too soft and too late. I heard the dogs scream as they were shot.

  I howled with them and slashed again at the barbarian. Although I was good with a knife, he threw up his quilted bow case to snag the blade and disarmed me.

  My family and my dogs were down, but my lead bitch still crawled toward the man who held me, her hind legs dragging uselessly behind her. An arrow struck, and a second. She was dead before her head touched the ground.

  I screamed with rage. Insane with it, I fought my captor, snarling and biting like a dog myself, mad for killing. In the end, he crushed my face against his tunic until I hung in his hands, trying not to faint for lack of air. I heard whimpers and sighs and over them my niece Mara’s constant screaming, as though she had no need for breath.

  After a time, he loosed me. I fell to my knees, gasping for breath, heaving helplessly. The barbarians moved through the clearing with bloody knives. We had killed one of the strangers, and a woman knelt beside him and sang foreign words in a steady drone. The rest were injured in one way or another, from bites or knife wounds. One of the women held Mara off the ground with the child’s head pressed into her tunic to stifle her screams. She seemed unhurt.

  “You have your horse medicines?” I looked up. My captor was a dark silhouette against the high sun.

  When I was a girl, I had a fever once and nearly died. I saw everything around me as though through smoke then: things happened but they meant nothing. This was like that. I saw the light, the darkness; saw blood dripping from his arm where my dog had hurt him; heard his voice and a woman’s shouts giving orders to gather the mare herd which had scattered from the fight. But none of this was real.

  “Medicines?” he repeated more slowly, as though he were not certain I could understand his words.

  I stared at him.

  “They are mine now. And you,” he said and walked away.

  They were slicing the walls of the tents and pulling free the bundles and packets inside. I heard one calling from my open-roofed work tent. I knew that he had found my parfleches of tanned painted horsehide, and inside, all the boxes and jars and bottles and packets. Everything packed as I always kept them.

  My sister lay beside me. “Meg?” I asked before I saw dust lying undisturbed on her open eyes. Blood flowed sluggishly from her nose and mouth, but the arrow shaft over her heart seemed strangely bloodless. I whispered, “Mara’s alive, Mara’s all right.” More blood pooled on the dry ground, as though the soil had rejected it.

  Hidden in the grass, my dog whistles lay along the line of her outstretched arm, as though she had been reaching for them. I hid them in my sash, stood and walked shakily away.

  My dogs were scattered dead through the area, even some of the ones I had whistled away on tasks. Some looked asleep. One, the second lead male, had died biting at the arrow that pinned him by the flank to the ground.

  Several were missing altogether. Blood trails dribbled through the long grasses where dogs had been strong enough to escape or to find a private place to die. I thought of the whistle, but there would be no point to calling an injured one in to death.

  One of the missing dogs was the clan dog, a great long-legged golden male. His main duty was to run if anything happened to my family, to run and find the Moot as we had trained him to, my father and I. He would be seen there. The clan flag on his collar would be recognized and they would know my family was dead. Whoever was at the Moot would mourn us, and our scrolls would be closed and the name Winden remembered only in chants.

  Several dogs were not dead but I had no knife, no pain-killers to ease their suffering. I knelt in the bloodstained grass holding my gasping brindle bitch until my captor ran up and caught my arm. “You do not leave us,” he said. Her head hit the ground as I was jerked upright.

  “Kill her,” I said.

  He started to pull me toward the camp. I ripped myself free and pointed at the dying bitch. “Kill them all. Finish it.”

  “They are dogs.” He spat on the ground. “Unclean.”

  “Kill them.” I met his eyes until he said something guttural and gestured one of the others toward us, a youth barely into adulthood, more boy than man. They spoke back and forth for a moment, and the boy walked toward the dogs, pulling a long knife free. My uncle Bran’s knife. I recognized the notch at the tip.

  The leader bound my wrists with black cords and lifted me onto a horse, where he tied my feet to the stirrups. The strangers had taken nothing but my parfleches, the clan’s sextant, and a packet of gold and metal from ancient Earth that the family kept for bartering. Had kept. These were loaded on the backs of two mares. Mara seemed unconscious, held in front of her captor. The leader saw me staring at her. “To keep you honest,” he said.

  Riding and shouting, the other barbarians circled the loose mare-herd until they gathered into a ragged bunch, the queen watching the strangers warily. Through the smoke, I listened to their talk, for they seemed to speak Trade among themselves. I learned there were seven of them instead of the five I saw; two were scouts. The barbarians were going to move fifty mares and thirty-five foals with five riders and no dogs.

  The leader looked around and called, “Shen!”

  The boy dropped Bran’s knife in the grass and ran back to us, mounted a horse. He caught my eye. “Finished,” he said, not unkindly. “It was not painful.”

  My captor caught my reins and shouted to the others. We began to move toward Morning. Soon the camp was gone, the dark puddles of its collapsed tents no more than shadows. My family and my dogs would lie there until their bones baked in Noon and were lost forever. They would never return to n’dau.

  My family usually traveled only as much as we needed to keep the sun at n’dau or to find a trade fair or the Moot. I had never traveled like this: endless whiles of arrowing north and dawnward, riding until dirty foam flecked the horses’ coats and their riders fell asleep against their necks. I was bound too securely to escape, even were I free of the smoke, the not-caring. After a time, the woman, Suhui, handed my niece to the boy, Shen, as they rode. Mara’s face was dirty and she slept in the crook of his arm as though waking were too painful.

  I felt this way. I was awake, but the smoke was thick between me and the world. Nothing mattered, not even when I saw the gelding herd wandering far dawnward, Dana and Willem’s flattened shelter a shadow on the ground. The raiders had stopped there first, but they couldn’t bring the geldings into the mare
herd, not with new foals.

  The barbarians ate as they rode. I took strips of jerky in my bound hands when Huer gave them to me, but eventually my hands forgot their presence and they fell uneaten to the ground. I did not worry: the dogs would find them, and then remembered the dogs were gone. I swallowed when he held a waterskin to my lips. It was too much work to reject it.

  We left the ribbon of Earth grasses and crossed a ragged plateau scoured nearly bare of soil, leaving only stones of every size. Dry as it was, velvet Ping-moss filled each rock’s short shadow with dark green. Dawnward, when the sun had been lower in the sky, the moss had filled in longer shadows; dying as the shadows shortened, the moss became soil for pockets of Earth grass. Ping-moss was poisonous to horses but grass was edible, and the horses snatched mouthfuls, until they walked in an ankle-deep cloud of pollen.

  We came to a brackish stream, a thread following the broad bed of its Dawn self. The lead mare stopped, and the herd with her. Huer called a command and the riders moved upstream. Mara was awake. Shen swung her down to Suhui, who held her by the hand while pulling packs from horseback.

  “You will not run.” Huer stood beside my mare, hands busy on the cords that held my feet in the stirrups.

  The smoke in my head made it hard to think. I would not leave Mara. And where would I go, alone and unarmed, horseless and dogless, with a small child? They would catch me before I had gone a thousand paces. “I won’t run,” I said.

  He nodded and pulled me from the horse’s back. “Mei,” he said to the junior of the two women. “Take her.”

  Shrugging, Mei caught the trailing rope that led to my wrists. “Come.” On my leash like a dog in training, I moved into the long reeds away from the others to relieve myself, and then to rinse my face and throat with water that smelled of sulfur. Led back to the camp, I leaned against the mossy Dawn side of a rock. The shadow barely covered my knees when it should have spread over me like a blanket. So far from n’dau.