The Tangled Lands

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  I saw Ixilon’s eyes flicker toward the fields outside the city, a seed of doubt in there. His face looked pale, his eyes tired, and he suddenly seemed as if he’d shrunken in on himself.

  “It is a challenge to my faith that we have achieved so little here on this coast,” he said. “When we first came to Paika to spread the Way, we were attacked. After we took Paika, we built it up even stronger so that we could protect our aftans and temples. And to defend ourselves, we trained larger and larger forces.

  “You all were so resistant to the Way, and it was so much easier to teach to the orphans from your wars and collapsed cities, that soon it became easier to bring the collapse ourselves. It is often only in destruction that many can rebuild themselves. That is how it was with us.”

  Ixilon looked back from the army outside his city’s walls to me, and I realized the man was shaken. “These cycles will never stop. We will always destroy ourselves.”

  “What in all the halls are you talking about?” I asked.

  “He’s talking about the Way,” Anezka said. “Tell him to shut up, and let’s leave.”

  But Ixilon ignored her. “The Five survivors found the Way. They were discovered on the southmost isle, forgotten, unable to build boats. The Five were all that remained of a whole island that had fought and killed itself, leaving the survivors to starve.

  “My ancestors brought the Five back to the civilized isles. At first the Five grew fat and happy, and enjoyed the sweet breezes and palm shade. Until they observed war between the islands. They grew troubled and were beset with visions of destruction and woe. They preached their visions on the streets together and starved themselves so that their ribs were like the hulls of half-finished ships.

  “They were hung for inciting riots, but their martyrdom spread their message. Their visions of the future. And the Way spread: the understanding that the island of our world was all that there was. To reach out, to fight for things that could not be shared, would only bring us cannibalism, death, and the laughter of the gods.”

  Ixilon looked at me now. “So I have brought destruction and chaos, but only to prevent even worse. I want to save this world.”

  “By destroying it first,” I said.

  “We are a practical people,” Ixilon said. “We are taught not to love things, to live austere lives and focus on productivity and wholeness. Some things that must be done are not inherently good. Even your people recognize this. It is like a parent spanking a child. Or like one of your leaders, who must use an executioner to kill magic users. We must pass the Way on, by any means, to your lands. It must be done.”

  “Then you are locked into your path, and I mine,” I told him. “We are tools, forged by the ripples of what has been done, quenched in the blood of our actions.”

  “Come,” Ixilon said, walking toward a turret door. “I have something to show you.”

  We followed him as he opened the door into a dim room. Two guards stood inside, and at a table, a large form sat in manacles by a bowl of fruits.

  “Jal, is that you?” I moved closer, and he looked up.

  He raised manacle-stained wrists to shield his eyes from the light. “Ah, the Executioness. I hear you are at the walls with an army, now. You’ve come far.”

  Ixilon stepped between us. “I could hand him back over to you. I could allow the caravan to run again.”

  “It’s too late for that,” I said. I wasn’t going to suddenly change everything just because Ixilon had found Jal. He was no lover, or family member. Just an employer. An acquaintance. Ixilon had maybe thought I had been a caravaner, and that he was offering me a deal.

  “I see that. Then I offer a mutual agreement. I will keep him here, safe for you,” Ixilon said. “If you promise me something. Because I believe you’re a person of your word.”

  I could hear the threat implicit. If I didn’t agree, Jal would be killed. Ixilon seemed to think that would weigh heavy on me. Let him think it. I didn’t care.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Do not kill the priests. Make them leave, but do not kill them. They teach the Way. They are not responsible for the Culling. That lies on me, and the others who serve with me. The moral weight of the Culling lies only with me and my soldiers. Would you agree?”

  I looked back at Jal in the shadows of the room, then at Ixilon. “I will say yes. But only because I do not want to draw the judgment of Borzai for killing holy men, no matter what gods they serve. We must all walk the halls of the gods someday.”

  Ixilon nodded. “I’m sorry we could not come to a peace.”

  “You forsook it the moment you rode with soldiers against children,” I told him.

  We left him still standing, looking out over his city.

  Back in the fold of the army I rode to Jiva. “He has nothing for us,” I told the warlord.

  He looked up at the city and winced. He’d been hoping for a surrender. Somehow. But now he nodded and rode off to make preparations.

  I stood up on the stirrups of the horse and looked down the slope of the plains, off to the soft valley and the distant, sun-glittered ocean.

  Ixilon could have been lying that my children were there. It was definitely a distraction to get me away from the battle.

  Yet, I would hate myself if I didn’t try to see for myself.

  I turned my horse’s head to ride for the harbor.

  But Anezka saw the move and grabbed my horse’s reins. “You can’t go,” she said firmly.

  “My children might be getting on boats to leave,” I said to her. “What would you have me do? It is the reason I came. Not to be in some great army. I came for them.”

  Anezka yanked on the reins to pull me alongside her. The horses huffed and sidled flank to flank. “If you leave, everyone will watch you flee for the valley. Many are here because they follow the Executioness. Your name, your reputation, has spread far and wide. If you leave, it will confuse their spirit.”

  “Their spirit? They are fighters. They are ready to avenge their families’ deaths.”

  “Many of them will hear you’re leaving to find your children, and run with you, hoping to find theirs,” Anezka said.

  I looked back at her. “As they should.”

  “No!” She grabbed my arm. “No. They shouldn’t. Here we all stand, ready to end the Culling. Ready to stop the stealing of children, the destruction of our towns. You would throw away the chance to end all that for just your needs? You are the mother to all these fighters, you created them. You are the mother to a new generation of people who will not live under the thumb of the Paikans.”

  I slumped in the saddle. “I did not ask for all that. I am just Tana.”

  “You are not just Tana; you haven’t been for months. And no one asks for the things that happen to them. You didn’t ask for Lesser Khaim to be burned, any more than I asked for the caravan to be destroyed. But it has happened. And now you can stop it from all happening again.”

  I thought about Ixilon and his cycles of destruction, then straightened. I looked out beyond the mountain toward the slope of the land, where it carried on toward the coast, where Paikan ships would be leaving.

  “I think you broke the last piece of me,” I told Anezka.

  “You and I were already broken,” she said, and then she led my horse deeper into the camp.

  The sun was orange and fat over the plains in its mid-morning bloat when the Paikans burst from their clanking gates. War elephants roared, the sound carrying out across the fields to us as we formed up.

  “He should hold behind his walls,” Anezka said as twenty elephants moved out onto the field, followed by a hundred Paikans on horseback. Four hundred soldiers followed the riders, each in a square group of fifty, those long spears bristling like a ship’s mast from each person. We could see lines of archers up on the walls, tiny faces looking back at us. “It would take us a year to breach them.”

  “Ixilon knows he will eventually need to fight,” I told her. “That’s what J
iva says. Better to do it upfront when the men are healthy and not starving, when they still believe they are invincible and eager instead of demoralized.”

  We stood on foot in a cluster of eight hundred women in the field, all of them armed with both arquebuses and axes. “He still thinks one of his men is better than four of us,” Anezka noted, looking at the numbers.

  Two thousand total armed women had come to the field. Those not in my square of eight hundred with arquebuses carried just simple axes. Jiva’s men were on their horses and ready to break for the gates from the side, preventing Ixilon from retreating back into the city.

  “We’ll soon find out,” I said to Anezka. “I’m just grateful he’s keeping his archers on the walls where they can’t reach us just yet.”

  The ground shook as the war elephants began their charge. I turned back around to look at my own army. They shifted, nervous at the sight of the armored elephants thundering toward them.

  Someone raised an arquebus, and Anezka spotted the movement and screamed, “Keep your weapons pointed down, do not fire until the order flags go up!”

  But I understood the impulse.

  There were five lines of women, our most untrained recruits, that we stood with. It was quickest to teach them how to aim and shoot the arquebus. They had all been the last to join.

  And breaking the Paikans depended on them more than the axe fighters.

  The elephants loomed larger, their armor clanking, the ground shaking. Paikans followed behind, the charge moving quicker as they closed.

  I could see the closest elephant’s eyes now. The wrinkles in its long trunk that slapped back and forth as it ran.

  The order flags whipped into the air, something Anezka had copied from the caravan to simplify ordering our untrained army around, and the first row of a hundred women raised their arquebuses. The entire row of newly hammered metal tubes gleamed. Slow burning fuses sparked down the line as they were lit.

  The second row, the moment the first row raised, also began preparing to fire.

  An elephant screamed rage and, in answer, the first line of arquebuses responded. The thunder of fire matched the earthquake of giants’ hooves. Smoke rose and filled the air, and then came the second line of thunder.

  Shrieks of inhuman pain pierced the smoke as the first of the elephants stumbled through the powder haze, crashed into the first line, and tumbled to the ground. Then another stumbled through.

  Women dropped their arquebuses and, though untrained with their axes, fell upon the elephants like they were firewood. They hacked at both their riders and the beasts as they writhed and screamed on the ground.

  “We told them to leave the elephants once they fell,” I snapped, frustrated.

  “They’re caught up in it all,” Anezka said. “There are lines behind them. It is not a problem yet.”

  Some were reloading though, even as the square formations of Paikans’ bristling long spears came quickly through the curtain of smoke. But they were expecting to find us scattered.

  Instead, they met three more rows of thunder, and then scattered pops from those in the remains of the first and second lines who had managed to reload their arquebuses.

  Paikans stumbled and fell, and the impenetrable wall of spears faltered.

  The axe women came from deep behind the lines and ran at the corners of the Paikan formations. They hit the spears in a bloody mangle of bodies and blades. The squares buckled and then split down their centers as the fighting degenerated into one-on-one combat.

  I still stood in the second line, no more than a hundred feet away from the stalled spearmen and fighting. A wounded elephant groaned just fifty feet off to my right, a large gray hill that prevented me from seeing Paika.

  I moved forward with Anezka, bringing my arquebus up only once, to sight on a raider that charged us. I fired.

  He dropped, and we stepped over him to climb the dying elephant and gain a better view of the hell that we had helped design.

  The clumped Paikans were slowly being overwhelmed all around me, but the well-armored soldiers on horses still milled about the gates of Paika.

  I raised my axe into the air and pointed at Paika. The faces of hundreds of women who had finished reloading their guns looked up at me.

  “Paika!” I screamed and waved the axe. We had stalled their spears, broken them apart, and now I wanted us to run through the open field and into the city. “Paika!”

  “Paika!” they screamed back.

  As I crawled down from the elephant I could hear the sound of Jiva’s horsemen moving now, galloping full tilt toward the raider horsemen.

  They swept past our side and surged ahead, their way clear, and we ran after them.

  Horse crashed into horse and the screams of the dying began once more. With the horsemen countered, the horde behind me swept through the Paikans as a rain of whispering arrows struck the ground all around us.

  Then we poured into the city itself, arquebuses firing. We threw the long, ungainly weapons aside for our axes as we met the archers and what few Paikan soldiers had been left inside. And my words to Ixilon came true as the axe-wielding women threw themselves with grim revenge against any armed Paikan they encountered.

  I ran up the streets, gasping for breath and dizzy from exertion, almost ready to pass out by the time we reached the last battlements.

  Anezka had run up the hills well ahead of me.

  “They never even had time to close the gate,” she said.

  “Then we’ve won!” I hadn’t even bloodied my axe, and it was over. We had torn the Paikans down. “We’ve done it.”

  From up here, as I looked around, I could see smoke beginning to billow up from the city. And the field was empty of living soldiers. Only the dead and injured, lying in the mud made by our feet, lay out there like small dolls or figures in a painting regarded from a distance.

  When I looked back at Anezka I did not see the same happiness. “There’s something you should see,” she said.

  She took me into the turret I’d been in the day before. My mouth dried even before the door opened, and I looked inside.

  An ashen-faced Ixilon looked back up at me, then quickly down at the table he sat at. His wrists were bound with rope. Behind him, Jal slumped. A long spear stuck out from his chest, spitting him in place.

  “You killed him anyway?” I asked.

  Ixilon licked his lips, and did not look up at me again. “A guard, not me.”

  A badly beaten guard in the corner of the room croaked, “Payback, for the whore who dared take the city.”

  The fury that lived inside me exploded. I grabbed my axe and crossed to where Ixilon lay with his head in his hands. I swung the axe deep, easily and precisely, toward the back of his neck.

  I swerved at the last second, and buried it into the wood of the table just short of his ear.

  “You failed,” I told Ixilon. “You failed as a man to keep just a simple promise to me, and you failed in your attempt to foist your Way upon this land: there will be no more Cullings now. And the land will be better for it.”

  I had done my duty for all the other mothers in these lands. But now it was time to do something I’d yearned to do since I’d met Ixilon. I ran from the room and into Anezka. “Get me a horse. Now!”

  “Please, listen to me first. Jiva’s dead; you need to talk to the commanders,” she said. “They need to hear from you—”

  “A damned horse! Now!” I shoved past her and ran down the cobblestones with a tired limp until I saw a horseman. “Give me your horse,” I demanded.

  “Who are you to . . . ,” he started to say, but then he saw the axe, and my face, and realized who I was, and slid off.

  “Tana!” Anezka called.

  “You are as much one of this army’s leaders as I am!” I shouted at her. “You take care of it. In my name if you must. But you take care of it.”

  I galloped off as fast as the horse could manage down the hill, around the curves, and then out th
e gates. I pushed the creature as hard as I dared, until foam flecked its mouth and it ignored my demands.

  Then I jumped down and stumbled along the empty roads of the small town that had sprung up to serve the Paikan harbor.

  Eyes looked fearfully out at me from behind gaps in shuttered windows.

  I staggered to the end of one of the piers and looked out at the gray sea, and in the far distance, watched a single sail slowly disappear over the edge of the ocean, headed south.

  It was doubtful my sons were on that last boat. But standing there, it felt like it.

  They had left me and moved on.

  I crumpled to the wooden planks. I could not find tears, but my body shook as if I were trying to remember how to cry.

  Anezka found me still on the edge of the pier hours later.

  She said nothing, but waited at the start of the stones of the waterfront until I decided myself to turn my back to the ocean.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked her.

  “It was truly as much your army as it was Jiva’s,” she said. “We’ve won. And now we need to plan what comes next.”

  I let myself get recaptured by her, and returned to the city.

  I think of philosophers as drug-addled dreamers who see only the reflections cast on their blackboards. The shadows of the world as it really exists around them. They say there is no such thing as good and evil. They talk about choice and flux, intersections and perspectives and situations.

  They may well be correct. Who am I, an old peasant mother, to question those who spend their lives poring over these questions? And since I decree it, any philosopher or religion that forsakes weapons at my city’s gate can come to Paika. My city. And they do so flock, like hungry sheep, to my markets.

  I did this for my sons, against counsel, so that they would have a city on the coast to return to if they chose. They follow the Way, now, and I cannot bring myself to chase those who follow the same beliefs as my sons from these coasts.