The Land You Never Leave

by Angus Watson

  “Hang on, shouldn’t you be scouting ahead?” interrupted Sassa.

  “Arguably. But I ran ten miles ahead first thing and there’s nothing dangerous approaching, unless it’s coming at us faster than anything we’ve faced before. So, Yoki Choppa went to the empress and …”

  “I’ll take Ottar for you.” Chogolisa Earthquake reached out a gigantic hand.

  “You’ve already got Freydis.” Erik the Angry was keen to be rid of the increasingly heavy boy, but unwilling to look like a wimp.

  “Yes, but I can fit a child on each shoulder.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “We’ve discussed this. It’s not fair that I have endless stamina and the strength of a tribe because I’m powered by alchemy.”

  “Wap,” said Ottar.

  “He wants to ride with me on Chogolisa Earthquake,” said Freydis.

  “Well, if he wants to.” Erik reached up to lift the boy off, but Chogolisa plucked him up with one hand and swung him onto the broad ledge of her left shoulder, a good foot higher up than he’d been on Erik’s.

  “Woooooo-tah!” shouted Ottar. He giggled madly and gripped Chogolisa’s ear. She gritted her teeth but smiled.

  Hugin and Munin, Ottar’s racoons, yipped at the giant’s feet, outraged by the boy’s change in mount. They probably wanted attention, thought Erik. He bent to stroke one of them but it ran a few paces, turned and gave him the stinkeye. Ottar said something which appeased the animals and they strutted away, swishing their long stripy tails.

  “Where did you pick up the racoons?” Chogolisa asked.

  “They’ve been with this lot longer than me,” answered Erik.

  “Ah! You must be the exiled Wootah, who lived with the Lakchans.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Why on earth haven’t you mentioned that before?”

  Erik and Chogolisa had been walking together and chatting more and more every day, almost entirely about her, the Owsla and Calnia. Erik was happy with that. He was fascinated by her tales. He liked her voice and her gentle but wry take on life. It was difficult to reconcile this pretty, intelligent, sweet, albeit colossal young woman with the tales that people told about Chogolisa Earthquake, the monster who crushed heads and pulled spines from the backs of living victims.

  “You never asked me.”

  “I never asked ‘were you exiled from your tribe,’ but that’s hardly a standard question.”

  “I guess it didn’t come up.”

  “So why were you exiled? Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s all right. But it is a long story.”

  “Better start then.”

  Erik the Angry began the tale of his life. Freydis sang and Ottar chirped away about who knew what on Chogolisa Earthquake’s shoulders while the animals of the plains watched them pass.

  “So none of us knew that Erik was with the Lakchans. Well, Gunnhild did and I suppose Garth did, too. And maybe Wulf as well. I don’t know. Garth was killed. It was very sad. We were camping on the top of the highest cliff ever and—”

  Sofi Tornado took a deep breath as Bodil prattled on. It was her fault. Gunnhild had sewn the small bags for their power animals the night before and given them to Sofi in the morning, and Sofi had taken them without thanking her. Now Gunnhild wasn’t keeping Bodil away from Sofi as she’d said she would.

  She should have thanked her.

  And then she heard it.

  Something coming at them from up ahead, hidden by a gentle rise in the plain.

  “Shush!” she commanded Bodil.

  “You want me to be quiet? What is it, have you heard a bird or something? Sometimes, back in Hardwork, when we were—”

  Sofi swept the garrulous woman’s legs out from under her, pushed her down in the long grass, straddled her chest, whacked her protesting arms aside and pressed a hand over her mouth. Bodil writhed and grunted muffled outrage. Sofi Tornado pinched her nostrils shut and squeezed the air from her lungs with her legs.

  Finally the fool was silent and she could hear.

  She’d been right.

  There were dozens of animals galloping towards them. The animals were large deer—moose perhaps—and what sounded like many smaller versions of the monstrous dagger-tooth cat that had attacked them days before. The beasts were running heavily, as if every animal was bearing a burden. A burden about the same weight as a human rider.

  The approaching stampede was hidden for now behind the low rise, but they’d appear any moment. Sofi Tornado looked around. The nearest cover in the shifting green sea was a stand of trees maybe a mile away.

  As she opened her mouth to shout “Owsla, to me!”, Freydis the Mushroom Man girl yelled: “Baddies coming, lots of them!”

  The girl, perched high on Chogolisa Earthquake’s shoulders, had spotted the attackers first.

  “Owsla, to me!” shouted Sofi Tornado.

  “Wootah to me!” yelled Wulf the Fat.

  “Drums!” called Rappa Hoga, digging his heels into his dagger-tooth cat and pulling ahead.

  The twelve moose-mounted drummers struck up, initially mingling quietly with the reverberations of hooves and paws, but swiftly crescendoing into their own pulsating, thundering serenade.

  The squads of dagger-tooth cat cavalry accelerated, the herd of mounted moose stretched their canter into a gallop.

  Tansy Burna felt the familiar mixed rush of battle fear and battle joy spread along her limbs. She yelled “Come on!” to her squad as she squeezed her heels into her mount. The cat lurched and Tansy thundered across the plain, faster than most humans ever travelled, surrounded by other cavalry all urging their beasts ever faster. Immediately beside her were the five other riders in her squad, holding wooden staffs, bows with blunt arrows and catch nets. Varying degrees of smile played on their lips.

  Behind them came the hundred moose cavalry, some carrying bows and blunt arrows, some with catch poles, and others holding nets between two. Following them were six Empty Children riding bighorn sheep; the surprisingly speedy animals were very nearly keeping pace with the galloping cats and moose. The Empty Children were there in the unlikely event that a dagger-tooth cat lost its shit and attacked its rider or any other Badlander.

  Tansy wiped away wind-whipped tears. Birds flew and beasts scattered as they charged up the rise. The scout Nya Muka had reported seventeen walkers, including two children. The seventeen were going to get an almighty shock when over a hundred mounted warriors sprung out of the Ocean of Grass.

  The brow of the hill was nearer and nearer. They’d be on their quarry any moment. Tansy squeezed her legs all the harder. She wanted to see the surprise on their faces.

  “Shoot their archers only!” called Rappa Hoga, dodging the first of the enemy’s arrows.

  Tansy Burna shuddered. Battle was on!

  The Wootah looked at each other, some excited, some terrified. Invisible beyond the grassy rise ahead, drums and hooves and gods knew what else beat louder and louder, closer and closer. The ground shook. The very air shook.

  “What the fucking fuck is this shit?” said Erik the Angry, fear and wonder causing him to slip into the Lakchan dialect.

  “Language, Erik the Angry!” scolded Freydis the Annoying.

  “Buffalo stampede,” declared Keef, as nonchalant as a man identifying a butterfly.

  “No, Keef the Berserker, not buffalo,” corrected Freydis. “Baddies.”

  “Thyri, Keef, Bjarni, Erik, five-man swine formation on me,” said Wulf. Like Keef, he was about as ruffled as a patriarch allocating seats at a family supper. Erik was impressed. During his time with the more passionate Lakchans, he had forgotten just how important it was for Hardworker warriors to be absolutely cool in all circumstances, or at least look as if they were.

  Thyri Treelegs ran up and took her position, long-bladed sax and shield already in her hands, grinning. Erik hadn’t seen her grin before.

  “Sassa,” Wulf continued, “ten paces to the south,
bow ready, Finnbogi and Gunnhild, either side of her. Bodil, you and the children hide in the grass, ten paces back from Sassa.”

  Erik strode through the long grass to take his place next to Thyri Treelegs in the triangular swine formation. Fifty paces to the north, the Owsla were grouped around Sofi Tornado. They were going to fight their own battle. They clearly had no respect for the Wootah tribe’s fighting prowess, and, frankly, given who they were, you couldn’t blame them. But might whoever or whatever was coming be a match for the Calnian Owsla? It certainly sounded like there were an awful lot of them.

  Behind the warriors, Yoki Choppa was squatting in the grass, hunched over his smoking alchemical bowl. From where he was standing, Erik couldn’t see the warlock’s scant breechcloth and it looked like he was naked.

  Erik respected magic; he’d seen what it could do in the form of the Owsla, and he was grateful for his own mystical ability to commune with animals in his limited way, but medicine-powered magic needed an agent like the women of the Owsla and it needed time—years—to have any effect. One couldn’t just conjure magic out of a bowl and use it to kill a sparrow, let alone take on the amount of gods knew what that was charging at them. Unless, of course, there was something about Yoki Choppa that Erik didn’t know. There’d been so many surprises recently. Maybe Yoki Choppa was going to conjure up a thousand dragons to fight for them.

  That would be good. From the noise of the approaching force, they’d need about a thousand.

  Erik stood his ground, his heavy war club Turkey Friend light in his hand, half dreading, half fascinated to see what was coming over the hill.

  Sitsi Kestrel loosed an arrow the instant the first head poked over. As she’d expected, the man dodged, but she’d already shot four more of her stone-headed missiles into the space where his mount would come into view a moment later. Animals were not so good at avoiding arrows. She’d heard that Badlanders rode animals into battle and never quite believed it, but Sofi Tornado had told her that mounted warriors were coming and she was never wrong.

  The rider, a giant of a man, wrenched his ride to the side and avoided Sitsi’s arrows. She was almost put off shooting more when she saw that he was riding a dagger-tooth cat, and that there were more like him coming over the hill. She was distracted from the awesome sight by a salvo of arrows coming for her.

  Difficult thing to avoid, a salvo, was her last thought before something struck her head and she went down.

  Finnbogi the Boggy stood with Sofi Tornado’s stone axe in his hand, slack-jawed. He saw the man on the dagger-tooth cat bound over the brow, followed by more giant cat riders. Back in Hardwork, well before they’d become the Wootah tribe, he’d fantasised about killing a dagger-tooth cat to prove himself to Thyri. Now he was faced by dozens of the creatures, he understood that killing even one had never been a viable proposition.

  They weren’t much smaller than buffalo, yellow-furred with brown spots and, bizarrely, great dagger teeth maybe a foot long hanging from their upper jaw over their lower lip. Those teeth didn’t look very practical. How do they chew? Finnbogi wondered and—

  One of the Owsla fell: the big-eyed archer, Sitsi Kestrel.

  An Owsla down! They were fucked.

  While he was gawping, Sassa Lipchewer loosed three arrows.

  Many more than three came back at her. Sassa fell.

  Finnbogi dropped to the ground next to her. Her head was bleeding, but it wasn’t gushing. He swept her hair clear of the wound. She blinked her startlingly blue eyes and skewed her mouth back into its normal lip-twisted state.

  “I’m all right,” she said, sitting. She lifted a hand to her injury. “Whoa. Rear a deer, maybe I’m not.” She slumped back down.

  “Blunts,” said Gunnhild, holding up one of the arrows that the enemy had shot at them.

  Blunt arrows. And some of the mounted warriors were carrying nets. You didn’t have to be Ketil the Wise to devine the attackers’ game, thought Finnbogi. They weren’t trying to kill them, they were trying to catch them. But why? It was hard to think of a good reason. He gulped. It was easy to think of a lot of bad ones.

  “Right,” said Gunnhild, looking at him, leaning on her jewelled clothes beater, rechristened Scrayling Beater, “let others’ terror lend bravery to the fearful.”

  “I’m not terrif—” started Finnbogi, but she was off, beetling towards the charging riders at a surprisingly spry pace for a woman in her late forties. Or was it fifties now? Finnbogi wondered. What could it possibly be like to be as old as fifty?

  It was weird how trivial thoughts came to him in times of crisis, he thought; thoughts like the thought that trivial thoughts came to him.

  The little stone axe that Sofi Tornado had swapped for his sword wouldn’t be much use against the beasts and their warriors. Sassa’s bow was by his feet, though. He wasn’t a great archer by any means, but if he waited until they were close … who was he kidding?

  There were hundreds of warriors mounted on moose following the dagger-tooth cats over the brow of the hill. These had bigger nets.

  Gunnhild reached a dagger-tooth cat and swung her club. The rider bonked her on the head with a staff and she went down.

  They didn’t have a chance, outnumbered with nowhere to hide, and Finnbogi would take being wrapped in a net over a nasty head injury any day. He stood and waited to be captured.

  Sofi Tornado watched Gunnhild run out to meet the attackers, club swinging. She went down immediately. She really should have thanked the old woman for those bags.

  “Hold,” she commanded her own women.

  As the drums had boomed louder while the enemy was still out of sight, Sofi Tornado’s overriding emotion had been rage mixed with a dash of frustration and a large measure of lust for vengeance. Had Yoki Choppa not deliberately destroyed his supply of her power animal, she would have heard the army coming in enough time either to evade them or to find a favourable place to fight. The stand of trees a mile away, for example, would have been about a thousand times better suited than the open prairie to a small number of skilled warriors fighting a much larger number of mounted troops.

  On top of that, if Bodil hadn’t been gabbling nonsense without taking a breath, she would have heard the approaching army a good deal earlier. When this was over, people would pay.

  As soon as she saw the foe, however, anger and frustration were washed aside by a flood of elation. She’d heard of the concept of riding moose, but she’d never seen it. She’d never considered for a moment that people might ride dagger-tooth cats, but, by Innowak’s burning arse, what a great idea.

  And what a wonderful opponent. The attackers were Badlanders, she knew, and clearly they intended to capture rather than kill them. That would be their undoing. Possibly. There were an awful lot of them, and they were only five Owsla.

  An arrow struck Sitsi Kestrel and she fell.

  Four Owsla.

  Over with the Wootah, an arrow took out Sassa Lipchewer, then no more came. They’d targeted the archers as they were the only immediate threat. She did not like their confidence.

  The dagger-tooth cats were nearly on them. The riders raised their weapons.

  “Owsla,” she said, “free-form attack, now.”

  Paloma Pronghorn sprinted full-tilt at the six dagger-tooth cat riders heading for the Wootah. She was off to help the Wootah, not because she was kind, but because helping them would help them all. Their new allies were not as shit as Sofi believed. Compared to the Owsla, yes, the Mushroom Men were about as useful in a battle as a bag of tadpoles, but the people who made up their Hird were superior to the average warrior. While they’d be no match for riders on dagger-tooth cats, Paloma reckoned they’d at least hold their own against the cats themselves and Badlanders on foot, especially if those Badlanders were used to fighting on catback.

  So, as nets flailed and spears jabbed, she set about dismounting the riders.

  She grabbed the heel of the first and flipped him backwards. Dodging a paw swipe from
a dagger-tooth, she leapt and whacked her killing stick into the head of the next fellow, pirouetting as he fell, launching herself off the haunches of his cat, somersaulting and dropping two-footed into the chest of the next rider. Ramming him off his mount and launching herself at the same time, she flew backwards, twisting in the air. She cracked her killing stick into the head of a dagger-tooth and landed as it crashed down next to her. A back-handed flick with her stick dealt with its rider.

  As the Badlander collapsed, she heard Wulf the Fat shout “Charge!” He’d realised what she was doing and reacted. It was a satisfying start.

  Might things have turned out differently, she wondered later, if that moment’s smuggery hadn’t made her pause?

  She looked for her next victim and saw a yellow-eyed woman mounted on a dagger-tooth. She had her fist to her mouth. The fist was clutching a short blowpipe which she’d just blown. The dart from the pipe was inches from Paloma’s exposed midriff. There was no time to dodge. The dart pierced her flesh and stuck, short feathers juddering.

  “I wonder if it’s pois—” she had time to think before the world whirled itself into a nauseating spin and she went down.

  “Phew,” thought Tansy Burna, wheeling her own cat away as the one other remaining cat in her squad was joined by the next pack of six. She wondered what the Calnian woman’s power animal was to give her such incredible speed. All of the Badland Owsla were preternaturally fast, but this woman was faster. Tansy stifled the rush of excitement that she’d taken down an alchemically charged warrior—it wasn’t often an uncharged person like her managed that—and focused on the matter at hand.

  Her squad was beaten. There was no shame in that, not against a powered warrior. The gang of pale fighters were competent enough, but they were not powered. They were weird-looking, though—several of them had dyed their hair yellow. The female, stocky but fit and not as pale as the rest, was particularly effective. She’d knocked a cat unconscious with the pommel of her impossibly long iron knife, opened up several wounds in its rider and was winding up for the killing slash. Tansy Burna per-chooed a dart into her neck and she collapsed. The injured rider raised a hand in thanks.