by Diana Rivers
Then, as we rode farther down, I began to see the ruins. Some were of stone, many were of charred wood, and a few looked very recent. There were even some bones scattered on the ground that appeared to be human. Near the bottom of the hill, overlooking the sea, we came on the ruins of a huge stone building that might once have been a meeting hall. Suddenly I noticed a half-buried skull staring back at me, and the reality of all that had happened there swept over me in a rush.
Before I saw them or even heard their voices, I could feel the angry presence of men somewhere on the road before us. I rode up by Lorren to warn him. He nodded and looked tense but did not seem surprised. Finally, we came around a bend in the road and could see ahead of us, blocking the way, a small band of heavily armed Kourmairi men. They were sending out waves of fear and anger.
“That is Garrell, one of their leaders. Let me go first and speak with him.” Without waiting for a response from me, Lorren rode forward, calling out, “Good morning to you, Garrell. Remember me? I am Lorren the Wanderer. I come to you unarmed and in peace.” He held up his hands to show they were empty. “I ask that you come forward and meet with me in the road.” There was a tense moment while the Kourmairi conferred among themselves. Then a young man with a long red scar running down the side of his face rode forward to meet with Lorren. He did not unsheathe his sword, but his visage was surly and scowling. The look he sent in my direction was murderous. I did not trust him with Lorren, yet I had no choice but to sit and watch. To move forward at that moment might only have made things worse and endangered us both.
Garrell stopped a few feet from Lorren. “Why have you brought these Hadra here to occupy our land? You thought to hide them by the standing stones, but our sentries have spied them out. You said you would consult with us first. Now you have broken your word, just as I said you would. How could we have been such fools as to trust a Shokarn?”
“Garrell, I am no longer a Shokarn. The Shokarn want me as little as I want them. I am a Wanderer now, and I keep my word. It is a pledge of honor. No one will occupy this land without your full consent and that of the others. Tazzil is the one who needed to give her answer, and she was already traveling with those others. The Hadra would not let her come alone.”
“Is that one Tazzil?” There was scathing contempt in his tone. Under it, I felt his fear pounding like the fast-beating heart of a rabbit. I also felt his anger at being forced to deal with Lorren and especially with me. Clearly, this was not his choice. Now it was time. I rode forward, dismounted several feet away, and walked to meet him with slow, steady steps, never taking my eyes from his face.
From close up the scar was much more obvious, a jagged red line that ran from his scalp down along the side of his face. It went all the way to his chin. The healer in me thought how it could be mended, or at least lessened, though it seemed unlikely I would ever have the chance. Garrell’s appearance struck me as a strange mixture of carelessness and pride. His clothes were ragged and filthy but put together in some semblance of a uniform. He sat stiff and upright on his horse, staring straight ahead.
I made a slight nod of my head and said with as much quiet dignity as I could summon, “Good day to you, Garrell. Yes, I am Tazzil. I am a Hadra, one of the Star-Born. Lorren told me of this place and it is indeed very beautiful. I would gladly settle here, but only if there is acceptance from both sides. We will take nothing from another and want nothing that is not freely given. It is not the Hadra way to take from others.”
As I spoke, I thought to thank the Goddess or whoever it was who had helped me that night in my struggle. I could not have answered Garrell that way the day before. All my rage would have flared up in his face; all my greedy desire that wanted to take up a sword to possess this place. Now I could answer quietly and feel calm in my heart, though this man might well be the one who stood between me and what I most desired in the world. I held out my hands, palms up. “As it must be,” I said quietly and stepped back.
“See that you keep to your word then, Hadra. You may look at the land, but nothing more, not until we have met together and decided.” With that, he wheeled his horse around and rode back toward the others. With a shout he rode past them and they all turned to follow, galloping off so fast that in seconds, all that was left was their dust.
“Well, not a very friendly sort. How have you managed to speak to him at all?”
“Not easily, and with a great deal of patience. His father and uncle were both killed in this conflict; you can see the mark of it on his face. He has very little trust for anyone. The Wanderers are the ones who began the process and arranged for this present truce. I could not have done any of that on my own. And perhaps, after all, I even had some help from the Goddess in holding my tongue. Clearly, you did.” With that, he laughed and winked at me.
I had a moment of feeling indignant, thinking that he was laughing at me. Then suddenly I was laughing with him, bent low over Dancer’s back, swaying back and forth, laughing as much from relief as from humor. I was very glad those men were not still blocking our way.
When we rode back to the place of standing stones, we were greeted by a great shout. The Hadra swarmed all over us with questions. I suppose they had not really trusted Lorren after all. I whispered in Alyeeta’s ear that she could unspell him now. As the questions mounted, I made them all come sit around me in a circle. Then I told them, in words and mind pictures, everything I could of that place. I told them what it looked like and what had happened to me that night and in the end, with some reluctance, I even spoke of our encounter with Garrell and his men.
Chapter Thirteen
There seemed no sense or order to this meeting—and no goal. Men from the opposing camps wrangled on and on. They shouted at one another, made threats, and called out insults to each other’s ancestry. The air was thick with menace, as if at any moment heated words might lead to blows or worse. I could not understand what was happening or why we Hadra were there at all. Lorren made no move to create order or to shape a plan. Nor did Conath or Turin, two of the Wanderers who had brought Lorren into our camp and had also helped in setting up this meeting. They simply stood off to the side and watched, nodding and conferring quietly with each other.
The only woman among the Wanderers was a tall, dark woman with a commanding presence named Bathrani. With a swath of bright fabric wound around her head and more of that same bright fabric as a robe, her appearance drew instant notice, even in that tumultuous scene. She must have been more than six feet tall and towered over some of the men. Going back and forth from one side to the other, saying a few words to this one or that one, she almost seemed to be a thread, weaving them together.
When Lorren had brought her to meet me, she had given me a quick, bright smile, her teeth flashing in her dark face. Her hands, when she gripped mine, were full of power. After we met and just before the meeting began, I saw her conferring with Lorren and Olna, heads bent together as they talked intently. At the end I heard Lorren say, “Yes, the women are the key. Go ask the women…” Then I watched as Olna and Bathrani went out among the women, but I had no idea what they hoped to accomplish. Among the Koormir it is clearly the men who have the power, not the women. When I asked Lorren, all he would say was, “Trust me a little longer, Tazzil.”
Now, listening to these men go on and on, my small store of trust was fast running out. The day was growing hot, there was little shade, and the noise of angry male voices was scraping on my nerves. They sounded like wrathful bees whose hive had been broken open.
The Hadra around me were growing restless and casting accusing looks in my direction. The Witches, Alyeeta and Telakeet, were off to one side, muttering to each other. After some particularly loud exchange of insults between the Kourmairi, Telakeet raised her voice and spat out contemptuously, “Men! They are still just as I remember them, more quarrelsome than the Hadra at their worst and far more trouble than they are worth. If this is any example, then I thank the Goddess for keeping me clear of th
em most of my life.”
With a grin full of malice, Alyeeta leaned forward and answered, “They do have their uses at moments, Telakeet, even you would have to admit that. Or have you forgotten?” Telakeet’s furious reply was lost to me in the uproar. Personally, I could see no good outcome to this meeting.
As there were no buildings of any size left standing, we were meeting in a wide cleared space next to the river, a space big enough to have been an Essu ground. There were several hundred Koormir in that clearing, so if they had decided to attack us, we would have been hard put to defend ourselves. It seemed a lot to trust our safety to four Wanderers, though at the moment most of the Kourmairi’s animosity was directed toward each other, with little attention left for us.
Lorren had gone ahead of us that morning, to meet with the other Wanderers and arrange for this gathering. A large circle of stones had been laid out in the center of the clearing with a line drawn through the middle of it. Norn’s clan had gathered on one side of this circle and Garrell’s on the other, with the men at the front and the women and children to the back. A space had been left at one end of the circle for us to sit between the warring parties. We were all there except for Olna, who was off with Bathrani on her own mysterious mission, and Zheran, who had jumped up with a sudden exclamation of surprise and vanished among the women of Norn’s tribe.
It seemed that some agreements had been made, for the men appeared to be unarmed and they remained sitting—at least most of the time. The women, on the other hand, were free to move about at the back of the circle, tending to the children and the cookfires, as long as they stayed out of the opposing camp. They were not, however, above trading insults with each other across the line or shouting out their own litany of wrongs.
When this listing of grievances and shouting of threats and abuse had gone on for two hours or more and I was ready to faint from heat and thirst, Lorren called out loudly, over the turmoil, “Are the women ready?” I could hear Olna answering from the back like some distant echo, “No, the women are not ready yet.” I had no idea what manner of thing was being planned. Though I was nominally leader there, it seemed no one had seen fit to tell me. Numb and despairing, I listened as the wrangling went on again, though with less force and energy. The men were beginning to repeat themselves. There was a kind of weariness in their voices, as if all that rage had taken its toll and could not be maintained at such a pitch. It made my head ache and my ears ring. The whole thing seemed pointless and useless, almost beyond endurance.
Suddenly, just as I was about to leap to my feet shouting, “STOP!” I felt a strange sense of presence in back of me. I looked up to see Bathrani standing there, tall, quiet, and very powerful. One by one, the men noticed her and stopped talking. When there was total silence in that place, she said in a commanding voice, “The women are ready to speak now.”
Instantly, men leapt up to protest, and for that moment, at least, they were united. “Our women do not speak for us.” “They cannot make the peace, since we are the ones who do the fighting.” “Kourmairi women do not tell their men what to do.” “Women have no place in the councils of men.” Many other such things were said. There was amazing agreement between all those men, who only moments before had been ready to hack each other to pieces. At last, Turin beat on a pot that Olna had passed to him and shouted, “Sit down, all of you! That was our agreement, that you men would remain sitting.”
Grumbling and muttering, the men sat down again, with obvious reluctance. When Lorren could make himself heard, he said in a voice full of mockery and challenge, “I think you are afraid of your women. You are afraid of what they will say, and so you shout them down. Is that how brave men act?”
There was more muttering to that, until Garrell spoke out angrily, “What are you saying? I have never been afraid of any woman’s words.” His jaw was clenched and his scar had turned an angry, throbbing red.
Norn, not to be outdone, said the same, adding, “Let them speak, what harm can it do? It is still our decision to make.” There was a weight of weariness in his voice.
Then Olna called out to Bathrani, “Is it time now?” And Bathrani answered, “Yes, it is time.”
The last time I had noticed the Kourmairi women they had been in opposite camps, glowering at each other, cursing, spitting, and jeering. Whatever had happened among them had certainly not caught my attention. Now they came into the meeting with Bathrani leading them, her head held high and her walk slow and solemn. The women came quietly, walking single file behind each other, every other one from the opposing clan. They walked down the dividing line itself, entering the circle from the side opposite ours. When they had entirely filled that space, they all sat down as if at a signal.
Now the men were in an uproar. Lorren raised his hand, taking some power in that meeting for the first time. “Quiet!” he shouted, trying to make himself heard. “You men have had your say and your say and your say all day long, for whatever it has amounted to. And what have you accomplished? Can you say you have made peace? We are no closer to any kind of agreement than when we started. Let the women speak. You have agreed to that, and you must honor your word or you disgrace yourselves before them.” He turned to the women. “Are you ready?”
Tenairis of Zelandria rose with difficulty, aided by two other women. She was stooped and leaned on a stick. Her voice quavered with age, but she had the fierce visage of a hawk as she stared straight ahead. “We are ready,” she said with a nod. “Each of us who needs to speak will stand in turn to say what she has to say. We will speak what is in our hearts as we are moved to do so. We have agreed that we will not interrupt each other’s words. I have been asked by these others to begin, as I am the oldest here and have likely seen the most killing.”
She looked all around the circle, then took a deep breath and began, “We say the fighting is over. This is the end of it! It has gone on long enough! Cede the Hadra this place, where so many of our people have died; let their bones rest at last. Perhaps these strange new women can make an island of peace between us, for clearly you men cannot. There is more land up and down the coast and unclaimed land down the river. We need a place where we can raise our children without fear, where our homes will not be burnt down over our heads. If you cannot make peace today and abide by it, then do not come back tonight to your beds. You will find no welcome there. You may beat us, you may even kill us in your anger, but we will not turn from that. You cannot do much worse than you have already done.
“As for me, I oppose any continuation of this fighting. If it goes on, I intend to get in the way however I can. You may break all my old bones if it pleases you, for your hands are certainly stronger than mine and you have weapons. Death might even be welcome, after all I have seen. How can you hurt me more than you have already hurt me with your war? My old husband is dead, my son is dead, my beautiful granddaughter wanders among us maimed and witless. I could go on and on, but let the other women speak. I say this is enough!” She banged the ground with her stick. “ENOUGH!”
“Enough!” “Enough!” “Enough!” The women around her echoed her words like a strange, rough chorus as Tenairis sat down again. I shivered and chills went up my back.
Next, Raylia of Indaran stood up and said, “I am with Tenairis in everything she says, but I will speak my own grief here. I saw my sister violated, raped and murdered before my eyes, by men who were my mother’s cousin’s sons, men who should have been her suitors, not her killers. We need an end to this, before we are all dead. Then who will care what clan we come from or what grievances we carry? The birds-of-death do not care, they feast.”
Another woman stood up. She was gaunt and thin, with a strangely ravaged face. I could feel the tension among the men. They even seemed to draw together, in spite of their enmity. There was some muttering among them, and one even blurted out, “No, not again! I do not want to hear it again.”
Bathrani said firmly, “Let her speak.”
But this woman did no
t speak. Instead, in terrible silence, she looked around at the men, one by one, until all eyes were on her. Then, with no word spoken, she slowly raised the sleeve of her tunic with her left hand. There was no arm there. The man who had spoken before cried out, “No! Enough! Stop!” She turned a mirthless grin on him while she continued raising the sleeve till it reached her shoulder. There was a raw, red stump where her arm should have been. Slowly she raised that stump and pointed it all about, as if it spoke for her. Then, still moving slowly, she lowered her sleeve again, bowed to the men, and took her place. The man who had called out turned away and staggered off, retching.
After a moment of silence another woman rose and cleared her throat. “Few women marry for love. I was one of the lucky ones. Now, for this piece of ground, my man is dead. Warriors, what will you give me to ease that loss? Vengeance? Another killing? Another mother’s son dead? Another woman’s husband murdered? Will I rejoice in her grief? Will it heal mine? I do not want a dead man’s body. I want my own man home in my arms. I want back the years of living together that we will never have. You have stolen them from us with your fighting. What can you give me with your bloody hands that has any worth in my life? STOP! STOP!” Screaming that word, she threw herself down on the ground and beat the earth with her fists. Women gathered around to comfort her as she wailed and thrashed about.
Then Garrell’s young wife, Friana, leapt to her feet. She held a baby to her breast. “I say to the men of my clan: If you cannot make peace this day, then I will go to live in Sierran’s house and be her sister there. If you come to kill her and her sister and her children and her man, I will stand in the doorway with my baby in my arms and you must kill me first, you who are my uncles and my brothers. You must kill me first, my husband.” There was a gasp of horror from some of the listeners.
