Gods and Warriors

by Michelle Paver

  With a word and a chopping motion of her palm, the priestess cut her short. The girl stood seething with her shoulders up around her ears. The priestess turned back to the Sea. The girl was defeated.

  A young man—a slave?—approached the girl and touched her arm, but she shook him off. The young man didn’t look Keftian; Hylas didn’t know what he was. His skin was reddish brown and his eyes were rimmed with black. He wore a kilt of unbleached linen, and the amulet on his chest was a single staring eye. Like the Keftians, he had no beard; but even stranger than that, his smooth brown head was bald.

  Again he touched the girl’s arm and gestured to the tent. The fight went out of her and she followed him.

  The wine had its effect and the camp grew noisy; men stumbled into the pinewoods, then back to the fire. The Moon rose. At last things began to quiet down, and the tents went dark. A single guard remained by the fire. Soon he too was snoring.

  Holding his breath, Hylas crept past the tents and ducked behind a boulder a few paces from the fire. Now for the dangerous bit: the pebbly shore. He wished the moonlight wasn’t so bright.

  He was about to make his move when a shadowy figure slipped from the priestess’s tent and stole toward him. In consternation he recognized the girl.

  Go away, he snarled at her in his head.

  For one heart-stopping moment she passed so close that he heard the clink of her bracelets. She didn’t see him. When she reached the fire she halted and stood scowling down at it. Her fists were clenched, her body taut as a bowstring.

  What does she have to scowl about? thought Hylas. Somewhere in the mountains, Issi was battling to survive—and here was this rich girl who had everything: slaves, warm clothes, all the meat she could eat. What more could she possibly want?

  Suddenly the girl snatched a stick from the fire. She blew on its tip to make it glow red. She stared at it with alarming intensity, her bony chest rising and falling. Hylas saw that the spangles on her tunic weren’t bees, as he’d thought, but tiny double axes. Still she went on staring at the stick. He wondered if she was mad.

  Suddenly she sucked in her breath—and pressed the burning brand to her cheek.

  With a cry, she threw it away. Hylas couldn’t repress a start. She caught the movement and saw him. Her eyes widened. She cried out. The guard woke up, spotted Hylas, and shouted the alarm. Men burst from the tents.

  Warriors appeared at the edge of the woods. Crows. To his horror, Hylas realized that there must be a camp in there: a whole dark, silent camp of Crows that he’d never suspected.

  The first warrior reached the shore and spotted him. He saw the notch in Hylas’ earlobe. He shouted, “It’s one of them!”

  Hylas blundered past the girl and flung himself into the Sea.

  He went under and came up spluttering. Shouts behind him, and sounds of running feet. His food sack and water skin were dragging him down. He shrugged them off. Arrows whistled past him. He dived underwater and swam blindly for the boat.

  His hand struck wood. Somehow he scrambled in and untied it, found the oars and started rowing clumsily into the bay. He was used to handling light reed crafts, but this was much heavier; it bucked in the swell like a startled donkey.

  Over his shoulder he glimpsed men pushing another boat into the shallows—where had that come from? Already they were leaping in and hauling on the oars, and at the front an archer was crouching to take aim. Hylas ducked. The arrow hit the side of the boat and stuck there, quivering.

  He rowed till his muscles burned. Fool, he berated himself. The Keftians weren’t afraid of the Crows—because they were in league with them.

  As he struggled past the dark bulk of a headland, the swell strengthened and he felt it pulling at the boat. Then he was heading into a white wall of fog, and behind him the shouts of the Crows were abruptly muffled. The Sea was helping him.

  Hope lent him strength, and he rowed deeper into the fog.

  He paused to listen.

  No voices. No splash of oars. Just the slap and suck of waves against the sides of the boat, and his own sawing breath.

  “Thank you,” he murmured to whatever spirits might be listening.

  He rowed till he could row no more. With the last of his strength, he drew in the oars and curled up in the bottom of the boat. Fog beaded his tunic and lay clammily on his skin, and the Sea rocked him gently on her salty, sighing breast…

  He knows he’s asleep, and he’s furious with the mad Keftian girl for sneaking into his dream. She’s standing on the shore, waving a burning stick and sneering at him.

  “Where’s my sister!” he shouts at her.

  “She’s gone!” she taunts him in Keftian, which somehow he understands. “You went the wrong way, you’ll never find her now!”

  Her arm becomes longer and longer and she jabs the stick at the boat, burning a hole in it. The Sea rushes in. The mad girl howls with laughter. “The Fin People got Issi—and now they’ll get you too!”

  Hylas jolted awake.

  The fog had cleared and the sky was beginning to grow light. The Sea was still gently rocking him.

  Blearily, he sat up. To the east, the Sun was waking: Dawn was bleeding across the sky. To the west…

  To the west, the land was gone.

  In panic, he turned north—south—east—west.

  The land was gone.

  Around him there was nothing but Sea.

  9

  The Sea sounded different at night. Pirra felt as if it was mocking her failure to escape her fate. She’d thought that if she spoiled her face, she would avoid being wed. She was wrong.

  Her cheek was a blaze of agony. She kept reliving the moment she’d done it. The smell of burned flesh. The wild boy staring from the dark. And all for nothing.

  “Take these,” said Userref. He knelt at the entrance to her tent, holding out strips of fine linen and a small alabaster bowl of green sludge. His cloak was beaded with fog, his scalp and chin shadowed with stubble. His handsome face was stiff with disapproval. Like all Egyptians, he believed beauty was a gift from the gods. To him, what she’d done was blasphemy.

  “What’s in the bowl?” she said.

  “A salve, Favored One.”

  Favored One. He only called her that when he was angry.

  Without a word he passed her the bowl, then sat back on his heels. She dipped her finger in the sludge. She touched it to her cheek. Pain flared. She willed herself not to cry.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” he muttered. Snatching the bowl, he soaked a strip of linen in the salve, tilted her head sideways, and laid the wet dressing on the burn. She clenched her jaw so hard that it ached.

  Userref’s scowl deepened. “You’ll have a scar.”

  “That was the point,” she said.

  “Why? Why do such a thing?”

  “I thought no one would want a girl with a ruined face. I thought they’d send me back, and on the way I could escape.”

  “Tcha! How many times have I told you? You can’t fight your mother! You’ll never win!”

  She didn’t reply.

  Her mother had shown no emotion at what she’d done. Calmly, she’d appraised her daughter’s face. Then she’d said, “You know that this changes nothing.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Pirra had retorted. “The Lykonians will take one look at me and say no.”

  “No, they won’t. They can’t. Keftiu is too strong. You’ll go to Lapithos as agreed. All you’ve achieved is to make yourself into a creature no one wants to look at.”

  Userref fastened the dressing in place with a band of clean linen tied under her chin. “There. That’s the best I can do.”

  To keep him talking, Pirra asked what was in the salve, and he told her poppy juice and henna and a little wadju.

  That cheered her up a bit. He couldn’t be that angry with her if he’d used some of his wadju. It was a special kind of rock, ground very fine, and to Userref it was very precious, as it was the same fierce green as th
e face of his god. He used it as powerful medicine, and when he was homesick he smeared a little on his eyelids, to make himself dream of Egypt.

  Men’s voices drifted through the fog, and she asked him what was happening. “It’s the Crows coming back,” he said. “They lost the boy in the fog.”

  “Who was he anyway, and why were they after him?”

  “They say he’s just some goatherd. They say he tried to kill their Chieftain’s son.”

  “‘They say’?”

  His lip curled. “You know I never believe what strangers say; only Egyptians.”

  It was an old joke between them. She would have smiled if it hadn’t hurt so much.

  “Two fishing boats have put in as well,” he added. “They were scared of the Crows, but they got over it when we bought their catch.” He made to withdraw, but she held him back.

  “Userref? You will still be with me, won’t you? I mean, at the Chieftain’s stronghold?”

  Something about his hesitation made her go cold. “I was to have gone with you,” he said gently. “But then you did this to your face, and now your mother says I must leave you and return to Keftiu.”

  A black chasm opened before her. “But—I can’t be without you.”

  “It isn’t up to me, Pirra. You know that.”

  “But—why?”

  “I told you. She means to punish you for spoiling your face. She knows this will hit hardest.”

  “No!” Pirra clutched his arm. “No, she can’t do this!”

  “I’m sorry, little one. I—I said I’d look after you. And I can’t.”

  “Userref!”

  But he was gone.

  Pirra huddled in the dark, clutching her knees. She felt hollow and sick. Ever since she could remember, Userref had looked after her. Her first memory was of toddling along the top of a high wall, and him hauling her off it just before she fell. He’d caught lizards for her to play with, and told her stories of his animal-headed gods. He was more than a slave. He was the older brother she’d never had.

  The walls of the tent pressed in on her. She couldn’t breathe. Without stopping to put on her sandals, she ran out into the dark.

  Fog stole down her throat, and stones were sharp beneath her feet. She stumbled past shadowy figures in long black cloaks. They ignored her, heading for their camp among the pines.

  Pirra hated the Crows. They’d emerged from the woods as the ship dropped anchor, like real crows descending on a carcass. They said they’d been sent by the Lykonian Chieftain, but Pirra didn’t believe that. Those hard-faced warriors with their sinister obsidian arrows weren’t sent by anyone. She had been around powerful forces all her life, and she knew the smell of evil. In the Crows she sensed a darkness that made her skin crawl.

  Through the murk, she glimpsed a battered rowing boat drawn up on the pebbles. She realized that she’d reached the end of the bay.

  Next to the boat, an old man sat mending a net by the light of a smoky fish-oil lamp. He stank like a dunghill, and his tunic was the filthiest Pirra had ever seen. His straggly beard was crusted with snot.

  She stared at him and he threw her a rheumy glance. Then his gaze dropped to the gold bracelets on her wrists.

  Up in the hills, a bird called. Kee-yow, kee-yow.

  Pirra recognized it. Userref was good at bird calls, and he’d done this one because she’d wanted to hear the cry of a falcon.

  Suddenly she knew. That falcon was calling to her. It was telling her that this was her chance.

  Slipping one of the bracelets off her wrist, she held it out to the fisherman—and pointed at the Sea.

  10

  Telamon quickened his pace, while the falcon wheeled overhead. It had flown up from the south. He hoped this meant that Hylas had reached the Sea.

  He was sore from last night’s beating, and the food sack was chafing the weals on his back. His head was in a whirl. After the beating, his father had talked to him late into the night. “It’s time you played your part,” he’d said grimly. That turned out to mean wedding some Keftian girl from across the Sea, and shouldering the burden of who he was. His father had spoken of the Chieftaincy, and why he’d sought to distance Lykonia from what was happening in the rest of Akea. Afterward, Telamon had lain awake, feeling as if he was in a bad dream from which he couldn’t wake up. When he couldn’t bear it any longer, he’d slipped from the stronghold and run away. He tried not to think of his father’s face when he found out his son was gone.

  Telamon had taken the shortest trail up the Mountain, and around noon he reached the top of the pass. He ran to the rock where he and Hylas and Issi sometimes left messages. There was a pebble in the secret hollow, with a sign scratched in charcoal: a leaping frog. Telamon chewed his lip. Had Issi left it for Hylas, to tell him she was still alive? Or had Hylas left it for her? Or had one of them left it for him, to tell him—what?

  Hurriedly he scanned the ground for tracks, aware that he should have done this first, instead of trampling them. Hylas wouldn’t have made a mistake like that. Hylas knew all about following a trail: He could track a ghost over solid rock.

  From the moment he’d first seen Hylas, Telamon had wanted to be his friend. It was four winters ago, and he’d been hunting with his father. As they were passing the village, they’d come on some boys chucking stones at a small girl in a grimy badgerskin cloak, who was laying about her with a stick, even though they were twice her size. Then another boy had emerged from the woods, a scruffy figure in a filthy hareskin cape and rawhide boots caked with mud. Grabbing the girl by the belt, he’d faced the bullies and said, “Touch her again and I’ll break your legs.” They’d jeered at him—and he’d stared. Just stared. And they’d seen that he meant it, and slunk away.

  More than anything, Telamon had envied that boy. Those village boys had known at once that he would do what he said. Telamon feared that if it had been him, they would have put him to the test, and he would have failed.

  Near the meeting rock, he found several of Issi’s footprints and one of her brother’s. There’d been a storm in the night, and from the prints, he guessed that Hylas had been here before it, and Issi after.

  Her trail led west, down toward the marshes of Messenia. From where Telamon stood, he could just make them out in the distance, and beyond them the blue-gray blur of the Sea. Maybe he could catch up with her and together they’d find Hylas, coming to look for them. What a reunion that would be…

  He was about to start west when he saw the old woman crouching under the pine tree.

  She squatted on her haunches, her mountainous flesh juddering as she rocked on her heels. Telamon knew her. Everyone did. He was instantly on his guard.

  He should have guessed that Paria wouldn’t be deterred from roaming the Mountain. What did she care about warriors? She was Neleos’ mate and the village wisewoman; she could read the will of the gods in the ashes of a fire or the rustling of leaves, and she was skilled in curses and spells. No one wanted to cross a wisewoman, not even warriors of the House of Koronos.

  “You’re far from home, young master,” she said, baring a fetid ruin of black teeth.

  “And you, Old One,” he said warily. Drawing nearer, he caught her stink of stale urine, and saw lice moving in the folds of her tunic.

  “Where are you off to?” she said with an obsequious bow.

  He flushed. They both knew that her servility was a sham and a form of mockery. She knew he was scared of her.

  With a wheezy laugh, she patted the pine trunk. “Paria came to hear what her oracle has to say. But you, young master, you’re heading the wrong way. The Chieftain wants you at Lapithos.”

  He bristled. “You can’t know what my father wants.”

  “Ah, but Paria knows much without being told. Bad things afoot at Lapithos. Thestor wants his son.”

  Telamon hesitated. Should he follow Issi west, or turn back for home? “Read the leaves,” he told the wisewoman. “Tell me which way I should go.”

 
; From between her pendulous breasts she drew a little birdskin pouch. Shaking grit into her palm, she sprinkled it over the tree’s roots. “Bones,” she told him with a chuckle. “Bones ground fine, to feed my tree. The rich pay to ask the seer, while the poor pay Paria to listen to a tree—but it’s the same god that speaks through them both.”

  “If you want payment,” Telamon said impatiently, “you’ll have to wait.”

  She leered at him. “Paria is patient. She knows the young master will pay.”

  From nowhere a wind got up and soughed in the pine, and she cocked her head to listen, fixing Telamon with her black beetle eyes. He wanted to look away, but he couldn’t. Sweat trickled between his shoulder blades and stung the weals on his back. He felt her probing the dark corners of his spirit.

  At last she spoke. “The ways of men are tangled as roots. So is your heart, young master. That’s what my tree says.”

  “Th-that’s no answer,” stammered Telamon.

  Another fetid grin. “But it’s the truth.”

  “I didn’t ask for a riddle,” he cried angrily.

  Paria laughed and went back to feeding her tree.

  He paced up and down, thrashing at thistles with a stick. He had to find Issi and meet Hylas on the other side of the mountains—but his father needed him at Lapithos. Bad things afoot…

  He threw away the stick. His friends needed him more.

  With a curt nod to the wisewoman, Telamon shouldered his food sack and started west, toward the Sea.

  11

  The seabird had been following the boat all morning, glancing down at Hylas as if to say, What, still alive? He’d given up trying to hit it with an oar. He always missed.

  He’d been rowing north, but the Sea kept dragging him south. And still no sight of land. The Sun scorched his shoulders and made his head throb. Salt stung his wounded arm. He was so thirsty he couldn’t swallow—and hungry. He thought with longing of his food sack, left behind at the coast.

  He’d been scanning the horizon for ships till his eyes ached, but so far nothing, although he kept spotting sails in the distance that turned out to be waves. And yet he knew the Crows would come after him. They were relentless. They were like the Angry Ones in human form.