Azkhantian Tales

by Ross, Deborah J.

  “Stand and fight! Cowards!” shouted the Gelon.

  Aimellina laughed as she rode away. She presented herself to the warleader with shining eyes and glowing cheeks.

  “Pah! They are nothing to fear! They are slow and stupid!”

  Itheryas, sitting on his chair of stretched camel-hide, stroked the coils of his beard. “Yet even a slow and stupid beast can turn deadly if it gets you within its claws. We must not underestimate the power of this one. Let us lead him ever onward, farther and farther from his own land. Let us see if the Gelon can eat grass and conjure water from the stones.”

  That night, the Azkhantians danced and mocked the stupid, cowardly Gelon. K’th flowed freely. Aimellina danced as wildly as any man, and that night she lay with Itheryas Warleader in his tent.

  o0o

  Far in the northern hills, along with the families and camel herds, Oomara awoke with a start. Her breath caught in her throat, her heart pounded, and there was a sweet melting ache in her loins. She had not taken joy in a man’s arms since her last husband died of a poisoned wound while hunting wild boar. Yet this was no memory of a tender lover that had come to her in the night. This was something more, tainted with magic . . .

  Moving by touch in the velvet darkness of her tent, she found her arrow-case and drew out a single, perfect shaft. The wood, once polished so smooth, was damp, as if with sweat.

  o0o

  Further and further, Itheryas led the Gelonian army, always taunting them, always beyond their reach. The Gelonian charges grew shorter, as they learned they could not catch the swift plains riders. One day, Aimellina’s scouting party saw that the Gelon had split their forces into three parts. One continued on its present course, thrusting deep into abandoned Azkhantian territory. The others went north and south, one toward the fever-ridden swamplands of the south, the other toward where the Azkhantians had sent their herds and families.

  Itheryas called his captains to discuss strategy. Although he had granted Aimellina no special favors since they had become lovers, he listened to her now, stroking his beard thoughtfully, as she urged that a small party — no more than three hands of riders — remain behind as a ruse to hold the main body of Gelon, while the rest raced north. At a fraction of their full strength, the northern Gelonian contingent alone could not overpower the Azkhantian host.

  The young men and women cheered Aimellina’s proposal, hoping they would be chosen to stay behind, a few against so many. Itheryas gave Aimellina the command. That night, he kissed her as tenderly as a daughter and sent her to her own tent alone.

  o0o

  The old woman shifted on her position on the chunk of black rock. Below her, smoke curled skyward from the cooking fires of the encampment. The sun was slowly burning off the morning’s haze, and the outlines of the hills grew sharper. Morning’s chill hung about her still, clinging to her like a familiar garment. Under her fingertips, the arrow felt warm. It quivered under her touch.

  o0o

  The Gelonian Imperials made camp by the Doharra Springs in the shape of a huge circle. They stayed there for many days. Aimellina rode closer and closer, jeering at them, calling them cowards, shooting arrows into the sky and then catching them with her bare hands. She lead her troop on a hare-hunt just beyond arrow range to show how little regard she gave the Gelon. Nothing would budge the Imperials.

  Then, the next morning, they were gone, fled in the darkness. The dust of their retreat could be seen in the far distance. Nothing remained of the encampment except latrine furrows and discarded packs. In places, the wiry plains-grass had been torn and beaten. Much of the campsite looked as if an army of moles had been at work, throwing up burrows and heaps of loose soil, only to have them smoothed over by the passage of men’s feet. Dust swirls arose like ghosts from the dry dirt.

  Aimellina and her riders sat on the little rise beyond the campsite and cheered. “Come on!” she cried, slinging her bow across her back. “Let’s see what gifts they’ve left for us!”

  She urged the dun gelding down toward the trampled earth. The pony bucked, fighting her. She dug her heels into its sides and forced it onward. Giving her ululating battle cry, she galloped toward the stretch of smoothed, bare earth. Her riders pounded close behind her, headed for the abandoned cart that was piled high with baggage.

  Without warning, Aimellina’s pony plunged to the ground. She looked down as the earth gave way beneath it. A ditch gaped beneath her. Instinct sent her scrambling off the pony’s back just before it crashed down upon the spearpoints braced in the ditch.

  Aimellina’s boots slipped on the shield that had covered the ditch, masked by a thin layer of dirt. The pony shrieked as it landed full force on the spears. Blood spurted from its neck and sides. It thrashed wildly. One hoof caught Aimellina on the side of the head. Her vision whirled and her stomach lurched. Pain lanced through her skull.

  Around her, she heard more ponies neighing, someone screaming, then the guttural battle chant of the Gelon.

  Aimellina clawed at the edge of the ditch. The dirt crumbled in her hand. Her feet tore and slipped on the slope. Then, as if some invisible hand caught her, sustained her, the earth grew steady beneath her toes. She scrambled up.

  The next instant, she’d drawn her knife from its sheath on her thigh. A Gelonian soldier lunged at her with a heavy bronze sword. Under his helmet, with its feathered crest, his shaven face was flushed and grim.

  Aimellina twisted, parrying the Gelon’s thrust as best she could. Her knees felt slippery; her heart pounded.

  All around her, the earth boiled over with Gelon in full battle armor. A hundred spearpoints clashed in the sun. As she turned to face her attacker, she caught a glimpse of one of her riders — only one — an instant before he was buried under a dozen Imperials.

  More Gelon — five or six — formed a circle around her. In one hand, each held a sword, angled so she could not pass their reach. Each protected his own body with a shield. She tried lunging this way and then that, but could not reach them.

  “Cowards!” She sliced through the air with her long knife. “Are you afraid to fight one woman?”

  The first Gelon — at least, she thought it was he, the way her vision blurred now and her ears sang high and sweet — straightened his shoulders.

  “Surrender!”

  “Never!” Aimellina cried. “Come at me, one to one, and I will spit your eyeballs on my blade and eat your liver raw!”

  “Surrender or death,” rumbled the Imperial.

  “Death, then! Death for both of us!” Her knife extended to its fullest range, Aimellina hurled herself at him.

  Something thudded against the side of her head and everything went black.

  o0o

  In her tent in the northern hills, Oomara woke screaming. Pain, endless pain . . . Her chest and belly were a mass of oozing burns, her left nipple torn out by pincers, her joints twisted until the bones splintered. A hundred moments of searing agony, a hundred moments of looming blackness from which something always held her back . . . .

  And still she did not die.

  And always came the questions, thundered at her in a voice she could barely understand.

  Where is the Azkhantian host? Where have they gone? North or south? Where? Where?

  Oomara pulled off her loose robe of camel-wool, clawed at the soft shift beneath it. She lifted her arms, surprised at the easy motion of her shoulders. Trembling fingers smoothed over her unbroken skin, traced the outlines of her unscarred left breast.

  She lit a lamp of camel-tallow and dressed, shivering in the cold. Her arrow-case lay as always beside her sleeping pillow. She reached inside. Her stomach curled as her fingers closed around the single, perfect shaft. As before, it was wet. She held it up to the light.

  Droplets of blood oozed silently from the wooden shaft.

  o0o

  She took only a single mount, a tough old mare like herself, a bag of grain and dried mutton, her bow and arrow-case. As she left, the enare
e watched from the edge of the camp. She wondered what curse might come if she strangled him with her bare hands. But something in the lonely figure, the way he hobbled from his tent, caught at her heart. It was said the enarees saw many things, and for this they paid a terrible price. The enaree’s death would not buy back Aimellina’s, or change what Oomara must do.

  The Gelon would not know which way they had gone, not yet. Aimellina had bought them that much time. The Azkhantian force would arrive that day or the next and move them all further into the northern badlands, where any pursuit could be countered by ambush.

  The arrow drew her south, as unerring as a lodestone. The mare trotted on, untiring. Hours melted into days of gray sky, gray dust, gray fear in her heart.

  Day by day, the arrow wept blood.

  Night by night, she awoke screaming.

  Where have they gone? North or south? Say the word and we will end your pain.

  By death, she knew they meant. But she could not die.

  o0o

  A woman sat on a crag of black rock, looking down on the broad flatness where the Gelon had set up their encampment. The sun was well up now. The night, with its tortured sleep, was over.

  Another day. Another day of pain.

  She drew out a single arrow, an arrow without flaw, straight and smooth, each vane of its feathering perfect. Like a lover, her bow welcomed her touch, the wood worn silken by years of use.

  Her left breast ached, as if filled with milk. She remembered the tug of a petal-soft mouth, the sweet moments of guiding the pony for her daughter’s first ride. The hot fierce pride as she watched Aimellina’s dancing swordplay, the way she sat her big dun pony, the eagle steadiness of her gaze, the sureness of her aim.

  Oomara stood and searched for a place to stand among the crannies and loose rock chips. Her feet came to rest, well apart, balanced, as if this place in the rock had always been waiting for her.

  She looked into the sky. The blue was so clear, it hurt her eyes. She imagined a hawk flying free, just beyond the limit of her aging eyes.

  She strung the bow and notched the arrow to the bowstring. Slowly, she drew the bow. She felt its power matched by the strength in her arms. A great stillness came over her. The haze overhead parted. The wind hushed.

  She looked unblinking at the sun and aimed. Loosed, the arrow shot free. The bow quivered in her hands. She soared with the arrow, straight to the heart of the sun’s brilliance. The earth fell away below her, the tiny figure of a black-cloaked woman on a rock as craggy and weather-seamed as she.

  Slower and slower she rose, until at last she curved back toward the earth. Each instant, she gathered strength and sureness.

  The returning arrow fell so straight, it was a mere dot against the bright splendor of the sky. She did not need to see it. She felt it singing in her blood, in her bones, in the pit of her belly, the center of joy.

  Air whistled by as the green and golden plains rushed to meet her. Then, at the last moment, she opened her arms, as if to welcome a lost child, and arched her chest to embrace the falling arrow.

  Silver pain shocked through her. She gasped and fell to her knees. Her body tumbled down the slope like a broken doll. She landed in a heap on a clump of jagged rocks. Below, in the Gelonian encampment, another body shuddered, another mouth curved in a smile of relief, another chest grew suddenly still. Her vision blurred and her eyes stung with unexpected tears. She had been prepared for the pain, for the fading of the day, but not for the sense of inexpressible tenderness that swept all through her, carrying her to the last.

  Enaree

  In the lingering summer twilight, the sweet wild musty smell of plainsgrass danced on the breeze. Camels lay chewing their cud, their double-humps round with fat. Roach-maned ponies stood head-to-tail along the picket lines, idly switching away the last flies of the day. Tents spread outward from a central fire, many of them ornamented with clan emblem, the black-winged hawk. From the smaller cookfires rose the smells of dried camel dung and charred meat.

  On this night, the enaree, one of the fabled eunuch-seers of Azkhantia, had commanded that everyone, even the untried children, gather together to witness, to remember . . . .

  Ythrae Daughter of Kosimarra Daughter of Shannivar stood watching with the other young women. Her gaze, clear as the sky after a storm, went to her father, Ishtotuch-chieftain, where he sat gray-faced and sweating in his chair of tooled camel-leather. From time to time, he stroked his left arm from shoulder to wrist as if to ease a secret pain, a pain that came from no wound any man could see.

  For the last cycle of the moon, the enaree had dosed the chieftain with foxflower and illbane, had painted dotted circles of protection in indigo paste around his eyes and navel, had forbidden him k’th and buttered tea, had in turns purged and fasted him. Now it was clear that ordinary measures had failed. Only the swearing of a false oath in the presence of a chieftain could resist natural healing. And only the enaree could divine the truth.

  The wealth of a clan is not in its camels or armed might, the old poet had said, so many years ago his name was lost. But in the vision of its enaree. Yet behind their backs, people spoke of the “women’s sickness” and called the enarees half-men.

  Two young strong warriors, one of them Ythrae’s childhood friend, Tenoshinakh, lowered themselves to the ground on either side of the chieftain and began drumming, not the passionate heartbeat of the dance, but slow, like the growl of a hunting cloud-leopard.

  The flap to the enaree’s tent lifted and the seer emerged. His hair was thin and unbound, his face bare as a woman’s, the body beneath the ceremonial robes flat and spare.

  He carried a bundle of salis branches and rolls of cured linden bark. As he circled the fire, he cast a handful of powdery stuff into the flame, causing it to flare and spark.

  Ythrae knew the uses of the linden bark, for the enaree had used it to divine the cause of her baby brother’s milk-fever.

  The enaree halted before Ythrae. Her nostrils caught the odor of burnt orienna. She steeled herself to answer his piercing gaze. His eyes, bright under pale brows so shaggy the hairs curled and twined with his eyelashes, were a strange pellucid gray.

  The enaree examined each member of the encampment. Some flushed coppery-red and a few hung their heads.

  So guilt reveals itself for anyone with eyes to see, she thought. Where was the magic in that?

  As he circled the camp fire, the enaree carried two salis wands in each hand, waving them as he went. After a few moments, Ythrae caught the pattern, the way the freshly-stripped wood gathered energy and then smoothed it out.

  The enaree walked the circle for a third time, shaking a fist-sized round box of fire-hardened leather from a camel’s hump. From the rattling sounds within, Ythrae guessed it held Tabilit’s Sacred Bones. She’d never seen them, only heard the same stories as everyone else, how the goddess in her compassion had cut off her own hand that the knucklebones, polished and preserved through the ages, might guide men to truth.

  When the seer finished the third circuit, he withdrew to his tent, presumably to study the bones. The tribesmen let out their collective breath, for such a test might daunt the most stalwart warrior and there was no loss of pride in that. A few talked in low nervous voices, but no one ventured a joke.

  Moments oozed by with infuriating slowness. The scent of orienna faded, a camel snored in the distance, a mother sat down to nurse her restive baby. At the picket lines, a pony squealed and made an abortive kick at its neighbor.

  Ishtotuch looked paler and sicker on his chair. He slumped, then drew himself upright.

  The enaree came back out of his tent. Ythrae expected him to make a solemn proclamation, point out the false-oath, or something equally dramatic. Instead, the seer approached her father the chief and whispered in his ear.

  Ishtotuch pulled himself erect in his chair, though he could not entirely control the quaver in his voice. “There is no more to be done.” He gestured to Tenoshinakh at his righ
t side. “I will rest now.”

  Everyone sighed with relief, everyone but Ythrae. Natural healing, herbs and poultices, wards against evil and therapeutic smoke, all of these could be understood and performed by most people, although they had special potency when an enaree did them. But to see falseness in a man’s heart, to hear the music of the stars, to bridge the spiritual and material worlds — if that were not the special gift of the enarees, then all of their learning and sacrifice of their manhood was for nothing. This she could not believe, not when the stars called to her in her own dreams.

  She started towards her father, but her path was blocked by people exchanging back-thumping hugs, others heading back to their own family groups. A camp dog got tangled in someone’s feet and there was a good deal of squealing and shouting. By the time she’d pushed through, the enaree had disappeared and her father was halfway to his own tent, leaning heavily on Tenoshinakh.

  “What happened?” she asked her father. “What did he say?”

  With a stern expression, Tenoshinakh gestured her that this was not the time to pester her father with questions.

  “Don’t you — ” She bit off her words.

  “No more concoctions!” Ishtotuch groaned. “All I need is rest.”

  Her father’s words made sense. He looked exhausted as he sagged in Tenoshinakh’s arms.

  She would have to ask the enaree himself.

  “Wait!” Tenoshinakh called after her. “Where are you going, you fool?”

  His words drifted behind her, unanswered.

  The enaree’s tent was much like any other, tanned camel-hide fitted over a frame of supple green salis wood. Others might be painted with the clan totem, the black-winged hawk, or pictographs of brave deeds in battle, or sometimes ornamented with trophies taken from the Gelon, who marched their armies and onager-drawn war carts across the steppe whenever they forgot what had always happened when they did. But this tent was dyed with blood-saffron in symbols that made Ythrae feel both excited and restless. The door flap was tied down.