by Jasmine Walt
It was always the shriek of the carrion bird that brought her around afterwards, like the sacred minerals tribal shamans used to bring a dream-walker back to reality. It wasn't as though she fainted during battle—would to the Deities she could—but rather, she sort of went into herself and hid there, somewhere inside, while the deed was done. After all these years, she supposed her psyche had trained itself to recover only when it heard the sure signs of scavenge and she could know the fighting was over. Like now.
She dreaded the sound of the vulture like a dying man would, except for different reasons: while the dying dreaded the sound of imminent death, it reminded her that she still lived.
With reluctant dread she opened her eyes and let go a gust of breath. Without thinking, she turned in the direction of the bird's call. It was off to the left, circling over a copse of trees. She kept her gaze on the bird, knowing it would circle ever closer to her, bringing with it a brood of others to worry fruitlessly at the bodies littered across the now arid land in front of her. Still, watching the scavenger was far better than facing what she knew was in front of her. Infinitely better, too, than turning to what would wait behind her.
They would be coming soon.
She let her gaze travel from the broad wings of the carrion bird to the grove of trees beneath that were still lush and vibrant. Strange, how a small oasis of vegetation could be left at all, but there it was. She judged the distance to be at least one hundred horse strides away. So, the power still had its limits then. She did some quick calculations: a few hundred paces short of a leagua? Could that be right? If she remembered accurately, the last time she'd done battle, the line of growth had started just short of a kubit. She'd ridden it afterwards and counted the beats of her mount's hooves to be certain: five hundred horse strides at full gallop, so yes, a kubit if anything, but three times that much?
She measured the breadth of the distance with her eyes, imagining herself atop Barruch's back, his mane in her face as he galloped, measuring with breathless counts: one stride, two strides, three. This time the line seemed pressed back, almost a blur on the horizon. So it seemed that, although the power had limits, it was growing.
How long would it be before she couldn't see vegetation at all?
Best not to think about it. They would be here soon, inspecting her work, making sure each enemy and each child, grandchild, and friend of the enemy was gone. And the price of that annihilation was the loss of the very fluid that lent life to the area before she'd come.
She sighed and scanned the few hundred mount strides before her. Nothing but arid sand and crackled, dried out soil. The trees had become tinder on vertical stalks. It wasn't a desert by any stretch, but the vegetation had crinkled to dust and creatures of all sorts had fallen like apples from the trees to their bases. What grass or moss or shrubberies that had padded her bare feet when she'd climbed down from her mount and sent him with a slap back towards her camp, was now dust beneath her soles and dried husks of fiber beside her.
She knew without checking that the destruction went beneath her feet as well. If it stretched out for a leagua in all directions, it certainly went at least a quarter as deep into the ground.
The only thing belying the dryness was the cloud cover. So dense and broodingly heavy with water, it darkened the sky. The rain would come soon; the clouds wouldn't be able to hold themselves together under the weight of the water that fattened them. The lightning, too. Sparking the tinder of trees and shrubs, lighting the area with a blaze fierce, but temporary at best in the face of the inevitable downpour.
And then it would seem as if nothing had ever lived.
It didn't matter she'd been doing this since she'd been old enough to sit in a basket hanging from the side of her father's mount, she could never get over the sense of desolation left in her wake.
Water witch. It was a bastardized term that came from her mother's old tongue that, she had learned somewhere along the way, had originated as temptress of the life blood. She much preferred the original form to the bastardized phrase her father's people had begun to use long before her sixth birthday. That version, and the way they spat it out was filled with contempt. And fear. So much fear, even she began to understand why they ostracized her so.
At first, she'd thought it was because of her mother. Then she thought it was because of her father. Only when she gained her moon's blood in her twelfth season did she realize that both of those things were the most true.
The sound of horse hooves behind her stole her attention from the wasteland and from the memories of a childhood she didn't want to remember. Three riders abreast, one leading her mount, trotted closer. Scouts, of course, come to see if she'd done her job.
"Ho," She called out, and the rider leading her stallion dropped the reins. The horse picked up speed and cleared the distance to her in the time it took for her to take two steps toward him. She reached out for his nose so she could feel the wet. She was starved for fluid, to feel it on her skin, in her lungs. It felt good to have the snot and sweat against her palm. It felt real and grounding. Reins slapped against her other hand as he nuzzled against her, and with a deft movement she had looped them around her wrist so he would stay close.
Without looking at the other rider as he trotted closer, she reached into her saddle bag to feel for her tunic. She knew it was still there. It was a leather thing with sewn-in chips of garnet, a garment lovingly sun-bleached by her nurse so many years ago in anticipation of her wedding. Now, just over a decade later, it was the only thing left that would fit her, and she'd worn it so long nearly all the chips of garnet had long disappeared and the calf suede had softened even more to a nearly decadent linen feel against her skin. Even so, it was also grimy with her sweat. It had been a long trek finding these people.
She'd taken the tunic off, knowing the rain would come as she finished her task, making the leather difficult to wear in the torrent, later drying on her into a hard shell. She always took it off before battle then stood naked as she did her father's bidding, because it seemed the most respectful thing to do when you took the lives of others: to show your own vulnerability. Even so, for some reason this time, she was loath for the leader to see her undressed. He had a way of looking through her as though she didn't stand in front of him, but at the same time, of making her feel as though her nakedness was something abhorrent.
There were times she refused to get dressed just to make him pay for that look. She decided to leave her tunic where it was; he would never see her as a woman anyway. None of them ever did. Ever would. The other riders came up just as the clouds released the first drops of the surge. They kept their distance, but surveyed the battleground with some respect, if not deference.
She held tight to Barruch's rein and he sent a sulking pout her way, wanting his freedom; still, she didn't want to mount just yet. She needed to at least feel her feet on the ground when the rain came, wanted to feel it puddle upon, and then soak into, the gasping earth.
Drahl grunted and nodded at the prostrate form of a man a short distance away. "Was he the first?"
They rarely spoke to her, and she knew his question wasn't idle chitchat. He wanted to know if they'd charged her, if she'd slain them as they ran toward her, or if she'd gotten them from the back as they traveled unaware. Her father would want to know these things. He always wanted to know these things.
"He was the first," she said, and because she knew her father would want even more, added, "they didn't look as though they knew we were coming."
He nodded but didn't seem surprised.
She studied him. "But then, you knew that, didn't you?" She couldn't help the note of accusation she heard in her voice.
Instead of denying it or showing chagrin, he spat a thick globe of mucus that landed just next to his horse's hoof.
"It's not for a witch to question—only to serve."
She sucked in her bottom lip. Serve. Oh yes. She had served. She knew well her value to the tribe. She leveled him
with a direct stare that she kept despite his narrowed gaze and threatening brow.
"I'm still thirsty," she told him and was rewarded with a quick, but just as quickly recovered expression of fear.
The sense of pleasure left when she saw it had been replaced with the usual loathing. No matter. She'd gotten as used to the hatred of her father's people as she'd grown of killing.
"Leave me while I collect the seeds," she said, waving him away. She knew this time there would be no herding of slaves; this time, like the last time, and the time before that, it was all about killing.
The rain had become a pelting blanket by now and she would need to collect the dried eyes so her father could count the number of vanquished before the rain washed them away and into the crevices of caked earth as it split apart from itself.
She flipped open the hemp sack hanging from the side of Barruch's saddle and pulled out a leather pouch to tie to the pommel, this she would use to dump in the dried raisins that had once been the fleshy, seeing eyes of the living.
Barruch had been with her long enough to follow without being led as she crossed the cracked earth. He'd grown with her and was the only present her father had ever given her. She'd been thrilled to find the midnight colored foal tied to a stake on her sixth season just outside her nurse's hut outside the confines of the village walls. She'd been less thrilled when she discovered it was only because her father had tired of taking her to war on the back of his horse.
Barruch had been with her when she'd deliberately killed her first man. And he gained a sort of language with her that was entirely delivered through his body language. During his first battle, he'd walked sideways away from each fallen man, trying to get away without actually retreating.
The first man from this battlefield lay face down, and she had to push him with her foot to roll him over. Barruch high stepped around him, showing a dainty disdain for death. Even in the flash of water coming down Alaysha could see the blackened bits of the dead's eyes lying an inch apart on the soil. For some reason, every eye her power contacted dried so badly it snapped from the brittle stems that were once connecting fibers. When she was little, she'd thought of them as the seeds of their souls and worried they'd fall into the cracks of earth she'd created, there to lay down roots as the rain engulfed and nurtured them.
At first, she worried about it enough she suffered terrifying night visions as she slept, but as the years passed and no newly sprouted man came to take his vengeance, she stopped worrying at all and began instead to pray for it.
Now, a dozen years past that time, she merely stooped to retrieve the seeds and tried not to look at the man when she rose to throw his eyes into the pouch. No use. Before she could amble on to the next, a dozen paces away, she had glanced down at the shriveled face and gaping mouth and the sight of it held her gaze captive for long, regretful moments.
She wished it didn't have to be like this.
Desiccated, a human looked like strangely tanned leather; this man was no different. He had a tattau beneath his right arm, that much she could tell; that alone made him different from any other man she'd killed. She paused to trace the line of inked-in soot stretching from tricep to hip in what appeared to be a perfectly straight line—or could have been perfectly straight if not tightened into a warped ribbon of ink.
The tattau made her fidget. She herself had a ribbon of ink stretched into a perfect line. Her’s may have been stretched across her chin, but it was too much of a coincidence to ignore. She leaned in for closer study; it would be far too much coincidence if his tattau also showed stampings of skin through the ribbon, as hers did, mouthing flesh-words in a language she had never learned to decipher.
There, just discernible down the length of his ribcage were the symbols: not the exact same as her own, but similar enough that she knew the ribbon had been tattaued around open symbols. It was a strange mix, uncommon.
She looked up and scanned the grounds, letting the pools of rain drip down her bare shoulders. Through the cascade she saw a dozen other men lying at varying distances from her. She couldn't tell from her vantage point if they too were tattaued, but she could see they'd each been in various pursuits when she'd attacked them. Daily pursuits. Pursuits of regular living. One had a spilled basket of oval stones that had probably once been gathered eggs before she'd psyched the water from them; another lay next to a bundle of kindling, one clutched a spear, another a child. She squeezed her eyes shut at that one. The children always bothered her.
So. It was true, her belief that they had no idea they were about to face the Deities.
Past the dozen men who had been at toil when she'd arrived, sprawled now in unexpected death, squatted what she thought could be a dwelling. From her killing distance, she'd thought it was a hill; from this close, she could tell it had a maw of a door with desiccated thatch atop. A mud house, she thought, something that, in Sarum with its erections of stone and cement, she'd never seen but recognized from early childhood stories her nurse told of, while spinning sleeping tales about where she'd come from.
She lost herself in thought, trying vainly to catch the specter of memory and coax it into the light. What was it Nohma had said? It had something to do with those huts and these tattaus. Something about spirit fires and brown magic.
A crackle through dead brush startled her from her reverie, but she didn't need to turn around to know who it was. She could smell him; the red tobacco on his flesh, the musk of a dozen women, the sourness of a nursing babe that was his new favorite heir.
"It's you," she said and shifted so she could see him. She met her father's blue-eyed gaze with all the courage she could muster. He didn't usually come to witness her work, not since she had been very young and unreliable.
"I hadn't thought to see you, Father."
His gaze slid over her so quickly she doubted he saw her at all. It fell instead on the seeds nestled together in her palm.
"I come to see the battlefield, not to court a witch."
It stung. It always stung, that condescension. She should be used to it by now, but even eighteen years couldn't blunt the edge of that sword.
"A witch was useful enough for you on this battleground."
"Is there another use for a witch?"
She ignored the words. "Who were they, Father?"
He shrugged and rain ran off his shoulder to pool on the top of his boot.
"I see you've let the fluid return." He spread his arms to indicate the gathering storm.
It was her turn to shrug. "It always returns. It has nothing to do with me."
"So you always say." It was a simple statement, but it held a note of accusation. She knew he believed more of her.
Still, this was more than he'd spoken to her in a year and even though she hated herself for it, she pressed forward.
"This was no battlefield."
"A battlefield—a war—has many forms."
"And one of its forms is a peaceful village?"
He cocked his head as his gaze met hers, his hair so like his albino mount's mane, long and thick and tangled, plastered against his skull from the rain. He looked like a vulture then, with his great hooked nose and hooded brow. She should have seen the resemblance before. He was a bird of scavenge, not of prey.
"What were they to you, Father, these peaceful people?"
"Who said they were peaceful? And who said they were people? You know as well as any warrior, targets are things, not people." He turned on his heel in dismissal, kicked the hand of the prone corpse at her feet. "Now collect the seeds of yours and bring them for the count."
He took what she thought were deliberate steps toward his mount, but she caught him stealing a surreptitious glance at the horizon where the vultures were gathering, where the copse of trees was, where the fluid still rested in the fibers of each living thing there, and she saw him worry his bottom lip with his teeth.
And she wondered in that moment what might have Yuri, fierce Leader of a Thousand, Conqueror of
Hordes, so concerned.
2
The village was a small, mobile one. If she could name it, she'd have to call it nomadic, except it showed signs of having recently put down roots, and didn't seem to show an inclination of movement for a while. She was right about the mud hut. No community of people would take the time to pile soil into one place and hollow it out and thatch the top just to move on when the food source had thinned. In full view, she could tell that great care had been put into its erection; it could have been perfectly oval with vertical slits for air.
Yet, there were signs of travel too: many dwellings were the stick and skin kind that allowed for easy tear down and set up. And these were scattered in what was once a grassy clearing at the opening mouth of a great forest.
It had taken her father's camp and riders five days from Sarum to find a site close enough to the coming battle she would only have one full day of riding to reach this village. They'd been on campaign for most of the season already, and had stopped in Sarum for a mere five days when his scouts returned. There had been a flurry of activity then; she'd seen it from Barruch's stall as she mucked it out and Barruch watched her with a sense of entitlement she'd come to expect from him. She'd known the men would be moving out again soon; she'd traveled much in her years as Tool to the Emir, and she recognized the appearance of an army about to pull out.
She knew this clearing too and she knew the woods beyond. Both were on the cusp of a great body of water stretching farther than she could see and larger than she could drain. It was a smart place for an innocent village to lay down roots. A foolish spot for a target of annihilation to do so.
Alaysha had collected fifteen sets of eyes by the time she'd reached the hut: ten men, two children, and three women. One of the children had been an infant clutched in a woman's arms. She'd been pregnant, so she supposed she should increase the count to sixteen even though she'd have to explain to her father why she didn't have that many pairs of seeds.
