Beneath Ceaseless Skies #145

by Seth Dickinson

  She signs to Suro Bulayo. “We have spears to spare,” she says. “Eat and say farewell to your families. We leave tonight.”

  Of all of them, Marantic Lind looks the most afraid.

  * * *

  “Are you a coward?” she asks him.

  They run the blind steppe beneath the infinite stars, north across the grass, through the windbreaker trees and the fields waiting for water to wake the Black Atora’s earth.

  “My strengths are hard to see,” Marantic Lind says. He shrugs and grins his sparrow grin. “I was an orphan and a slave. I was carried far from here, to a land of salt and scholars, and told I would never find my way back. But look: here I am!”

  He keeps pace with her, and the Flock keeps pace with him, formless but persistent. Not as fast as her retinue, but faster than she expected. Their shared fire, bolstering the weak.

  The sliver of moon gives little light and as they run north Rider Bray chews over the possibility of ambush. “Suro Bulayo!” she calls. “We should throw out a screen—”

  “No need.” Marantic Lind points to the horizon. “A little starlight multiplied by many eyes, and your night becomes our day. We see clearly.”

  A chill takes Rider Bray. “Clever,” she says.

  For a moment she glimpses the web of power that binds them all together, these rough and ragged bonds.

  “Isn’t it?” Marantic Lind looks giddy. “Isn’t it, though? And only the beginning, only a little trick. Hau Nidane could rule the Black Atora, and with the world’s tribute she could be immortal.”

  “It is one thing to see in the dark,” she says. “Another to stand against the mighty. Consider your people, Marantic Lind. They have husbands, wives, children. They may fight so close to home, but they will never go out to war in the name of Hau Nidane.”

  “The Nidani are a desperate people,” he says. For a moment he does not look at all like a child or a bird. “Beset by starvation and pestilence and war. Given cause, they will fight.”

  “The common tribute cannot fight a war,” she says. “We have our _övalye and our Queen for a reason, Marantic Lind.”

  “So that we can spend our fire to feed them, while we starve? So that we can send our strength to the Queen, while we labor at the stone?”

  “Consider your position,” she says softly. “Speak with care.”

  A cry goes up from the eastern edge of the Flock. “Runners! Runners to the east!”

  Rider Bray follows their gestures and sees the glint of moonlight pinned on naked speartips, four minutes distant at a steady pace. The distant runners fly no signal kites. “Harvesters,” she says.

  Marantic Lind shouts to his Flock, but already they have begun to unravel. A woman breaks from the eastern file, spear across her shoulders, jaw set, running toward the distant Harvester. “Neida!” someone shouts. “Neida, wait!”

  But this woman Neida will not wait. A man named Wick scrambles after her and he draws a whole thread of companions out after him until the whole eastern side of the Flock—Walkers, mostly—has joined their ragged indecisive charge.

  “Will you command?” Bray asks Marantic Lind. She knows this pattern, knows how it will play out: eager to charge, eager to break.

  He touches his temples, eyes briefly shut. “I have learned many things,” he says. “Not this, though. Not this.”

  “I can save your Flock,” she says. “At your word I set myself between you and the enemy, and I screen your retreat. At your word.”

  In the distance the Harvester formation opens like a hand and their _övalye steps forth, spear and shield, eyes bright in Bray’s sight. He carries tribute fire, surely, but no great measure. The King of Emmer Wheat leaves him to gather from his own retinue, rather than giving him fire through a sleepless royal bond.

  “At your word, Marantic Lind,” she repeats.

  For just one instant his eyes beg for servitude, for command. Then he sets his jaw and turns.

  “Charge!” he cries. “Forward! Charge!”

  And the Flock charges, spilling itself across the steppe, a stumbling cataract of men and women waving spears.

  “Bray,” Suro Bulayo says tightly. “Do we help?”

  Rider Bray hefts a spear. Considers Marantic Lind, caught up in the tide, roaring his narrow lungs out as if arguing against his own heart.

  It will take one bloody moment to break them.

  Or one simple intercession to show Marantic Lind his foolishness.

  “We wait,” she says.

  The other _övalye closes at a bemused trot, and she sees the mantis mask of Ro Kahae, young among the Harvester sworn. He lifts his spear and throws from a great distance. In the stretched sight of battle-ready _övalye Rider Bray watches the shaft arc like dark lightning to take the woman Neida in her stomach. She screams.

  The man Wick stops to kneel by her and cry out, and the charge breaks around him. The _övalye Ro Kahae draws from his bundle of spears and kills two men with one cast. Someone throws back at him and he catches the shaft and snaps it as kindling across his knee.

  At the spectacle of his might the Flock’s charge slows and spreads. Spears fall short or go wide. Bray loses sight of Marantic Lind in the piling confusion.

  “Bray,” Suro Bulayo says. “They have no chance.”

  Ro Kahae laughs and draws his blade.

  Rider Bray draws breath and speaks as a booming drum. “The flanks!” she shouts. “The left and the right! Go! Go past him! Go for his tribute!”

  She leaps forward like a wind across the grass not to join battle with Ro Kahae but to push at the Flock, to add current to their faltering rush. “Kill his tribute!” she roars, bounding down their line. “Take the flanks! You—and you—rally your companions! Hold him!”

  Ro Kahae sees her and raises his spear but a mingled bunch of Horse and Walker step forward to cast spears and he must whirl away as all around the Flock streams past like the horns of a bull.

  She imagines Ro Kahae’s confusion, beset by this desperate fire-eyed mass, this rabid herd. Sövalye fight _övalye; this is the way of battle on the Black Atora. Retinues do not fight.

  She hears Marantic Lind: “Stand by the man beside you! He can only kill one of you at a time!”

  The screams of the wounded drown his shout, but then, somehow, it comes from another throat, and another, spreading man to woman, Walker to Horse: “Kill his tribute! Stand by the man beside you!”

  The Flock speaks. Ro Kahae hesitates, blade in hand, shield raised against the pressing mass. He roars challenge and his roar is thunder but the Flock’s chant matches him.

  Behind Ro Kahae the Flock falls upon his retinue, his spear-carriers and scouts. They have no fire in them for they have given it all to Ro Kahae and so they are no match for the men and women set upon them. When the first man among his retinue dies Ro Kahae feels it.

  “Rider!” Ro Kahae roars, name and epithet. “Rider!”

  He could kill them all if he stood and fought. But he has never met this kind of war, Rider Bray knows. He knows no way but the Black Atora way, the clash of _övalye.

  He draws away. The Flock screams derision at him.

  “Run!” Rider Bray roars. “Run, coward! Run!”

  He gets halfway to the horizon before the last of his retinue dies behind him, and with his fire so diminished he is only a man again.

  The Flock runs him down.

  “We won,” Marantic Lind pants. A wounded man shrieks in the grass behind him. “We won. Was it—I couldn’t see, I couldn’t understand what happened—was it you? Did you beat him?”

  “I cast no spears,” Rider Bray says. She signs to her retinue: see to the wounded. “You won.”

  She is _övalye. She must respect the argument of spears.

  * * *

  Some of the wounded cannot be moved, so the Flock makes camp on the steppe, huddled in the lee of a line of windbreaker trees. “No campfires,” Rider Bray commands. “No light.” She sends a runner back towards Uma Nonya to
report, carrying a measure of her fire.

  Suro Bulayo and the rest of her retinue bind wounds and guide the Flock in the prevention of sepsis, the setting of bones. “We could use your fire,” Marantic Lind says, flush with his victory, trailing her steps. “You should join them—”

  “And if another Harvester _övalye comes?”

  He sets a finger to his lips in thought. “Every minute I spend with you,” he says, “I discover new holes in my scholarship.”

  Someone screams at a bone set or a surgery begun. Marantic Lind closes his eyes for one guilty moment.

  She sits herself against a cedar trunk. “There are no wounded in sövalye war,” she says. “Just victor and vanquished.”

  He will not meet her eyes. “Maybe it’s best to let the people earn their victories,” he says. “Maybe we’d rather take our own wounds.”

  “Sit.”

  He folds himself against the trunk. “You saw how they fought,” he says, as if in petition. “You saw what they did against a true _övalye. Imagine a Flock in every village, a horde sweeping the steppe, across every splintered kingdom! Imagine an end to war and hunger and hurt.”

  He was a slave, she remembers, and feels as if a small unwise door inside her has come ajar. “It was a good battle,” she says. “Dishonorable and dirty. But good.”

  “I’ve never fought before.”

  “Let me tell you, then: the good ones are the ones you win.”

  He chuckles weakly.

  “It’s all right to be shaken.” She takes his shoulder. “Your Flock has power. They fight like idiots—but they can be taught.”

  He makes a mindless washing gesture, scrubbing his palms against his thighs. “How did you convince your Queen?” he asks.

  “To make me _övalye?”

  “Yes. Given that you’re—” He touches his jaw. “Narrow.”

  “I told her that we deserved to fight for ourselves,” she says.

  “And she listened?”

  “She’s a good Queen.” It feels good to say that. It feels good to speak the truth of who and what she is.

  But it feels good as well to remember Ro Kahae’s smug Walker face, run down and broken by the mingled mass—

  Of course Ro Kahae wore a mask. Of course she never saw his face.

  “A good Queen.” Marantic Lind considers the sores he has opened on his hands. “If such a thing exists. If one sleepless sovereign can justly rule so many.”

  Angry shouts from among the wounded: Walkers and Horse People shouting over a burial rite. “Whispers only!” Rider Bray shouts at them. “Unless you’re ready for another fight!”

  Marantic Lind leans forward with sudden intent. “You used to rule this steppe. Now you labor in our quarries, and all the animals you worshiped and lived with are dead by our hands. How can you serve a Walker queen? How can you accept your place?”

  It takes Rider Bray a moment to realize that you means Horse People and not _övalye. “I earned this,” she says, her gaze a challenge he will not meet. “I raised myself up with my own strength. I earned my place.”

  “Yes.” Marantic Lind looks across the huddled squabbling Flock. “You earned it. That’s good, isn’t it? That feels right.”

  What is your cause, Marantic Lind?

  She spits into the grassy humus and when he starts she laughs at him. “You’re a radical, Marantic Lind,” she says. “A dangerous, subversive radical.”

  He grins a sly grin.

  She gets to her feet. “When we return to Uma Nonya,” she says, “we begin to drill.”

  “The sky is so huge here,” he says. His grin has passed and suddenly he seems to have put aside some great part of his life. “I’d forgotten.”

  * * *

  They learn to cast spears, to burn tribute fire on the run and in the push of battle, to answer simple commands and treat basic wounds. They will never be good soldiers; they will never match even one good _övalye.

  But Rider Bray watches their progress with a kind of rebellious exultance, watches the shoulder-to-shoulder exertions of the Walkers and the Horse People with dizzy dreamlike want.

  Suro Bulayo tells her: “The Flock is spreading. They go home and teach their husbands and wives and friends to tribute each other.”

  “I know,” Rider Bray says.

  “It is treason,” he chides.

  “I know,” she says, and wants to laugh, for even he in all his patient wisdom does not see Marantic Lind’s ultimate design, the purpose that leaves her sweating awake at night, as sleepless as her Queen.

  I trust you to be fair in your report—

  What is your cause, Marantic Lind?

  She should tell the Queen. She must tell the Queen.

  She does not tell the Queen.

  A Walker woman in the riverside slum gives birth to a son and the Flock gathers when he sickens to pool their fire and make him well again.

  The moon fattens and thins like the calf of a running god but still the wet season rains do not come. The Black Atora lies dry and barren.

  Rider Bray runs fireless with Marantic Lind to help him build his strength and hears his wild fantasies of lands beyond the place where steppe meets sky and the world ends, lands of crashing salt water and towering stone.

  And a _övalye and his retinue come in from ranging patrol to gather new weapons. “We heard you defeated Ro Kahae the Mantis,” he says.

  Bray puffs her chest to boast as etiquette demands, but the _övalye spits. “We heard how it was done,” he says. “A true _övalye carries herself in battle. Rider.”

  The next day a file of the Flock comes home from a close patrol in frantic fear. Rider Bray listens to their report: six Harvester _övalye and their retinue less than an hour away, their kites red. Challenge to battle.

  “They come to take Uma Nonya,” she says. “They will each bear royal bond. Tribute portioned out by the King of Emmer Wheat.”

  “So we cannot starve them of fire by taking their retinue,” Marantic Lind says into the hush. “What do we do, then?”

  She looks to him and hefts a spear. Holds his gaze for a moment, to say: you know as well as I what you intend to do.

  “Bring everyone who knows how to Flock,” she says. “Meet them on the far side of the river, so we have depth for retreat. And kill them.”

  * * *

  “Six,” Marantic Lind says. “Six of them, with royal bond.” He paces the road at the foot of the bridge.

  The Flock mills at Rider Bray’s back: the fifty-odd original survivors and great clumps of neophytes, masons and carpenters, laborers and merchants, Horse People packed into nervous stripes among them. They have made their tribute to each other, though it is incomplete; some of the Walkers will not touch the Horse People.

  “Surely, in your travels, you have heard of victory against greater odds,” she says.

  Suro Bulayo chuckles softly.

  Marantic Lind steps close to confide. “We have five hundred at most,” he hisses. “And you, with your retinue and royal bond. Perhaps if we were to tribute the entire Flock to you—”

  “And what,” she whispers, “would that mean for you, Marantic Lind? What would it mean for your future, if you turned back now?”

  His eyes flicker. “Surely I mistake your meaning,” he says.

  “Surely not,” she says, and turns her back on him, to go among the Flock. His eyes follow her, wide with wonder, as she reaches for the closest man, finds his shoulder; utters, without hesitation, the old words: “Our fire—”

  Hands reach for her. On the horizon, six red kites soar.

  * * *

  The Flock offers six false _övalye as bait, six men and women full of power that they have never been trained to use. The Harvester _övalye descend on them with a powerful fury and not one of the false survives.

  But it is enough to draw the Harvesters in among the mass of the Flock, arrayed along the riverbank. Everywhere around the enemy presses the chanting horde, hundreds in their filth and
emaciated fury roaring the commands of Rider Bray, the mantras of Marantic Lind. Limbs swift with shared fire.

  Too weak. Too few.

  The Harvester champions shatter the Flock, rout the untrained masses back across the river bridges, in among the hovels of the Horse People that squat in the floodplain. Here Rider Bray arrays her trained cadre and her own retinue, to rally the retreating mass, to strike at the glory-hungry _övalye as they fill the winding streets with blood. Here the Flock shows its worth, sluicing its fire from fighter to fighter, throwing its weight behind a single champion and then splintering among a dozen avatars, giving the _övalye no clear target, no single threat to square against.

  But it is the voice of Marantic Lind that wins the day. “Rise!” he roars, echo carried down the bloody streets, from a hundred throats, from the riven quarry walls. “Rise and bring the mighty low! Trample them as they have trampled you!”

  Uma Nonya, damp quarry of the white Nidani stone, can offer no champions to stop the King of Emmer Wheat; and so, like a wounded hive, it issues forth a mob. They come out of their huddled homes and their desperate prayer circles, calling back the tribute they had given just that morning to the distant Queen, and they paw at each other and say, as the rumors told them to, our fire, our fire, given freely—

  Rider Bray, twined for the first time in the web of the Flock, feels the rising flood. Hundreds of new tributes tied into the net, animalistic, desperate, smeared in dust and blood and shit. Desperate to save their homes and themselves. To kill what they hate and fear.

  The discipline that Marantic Lind taught his Flock vanishes.

  “Rise!” Marantic Lind roars, his voice in a thousand mouths. “You have waited all your lives! Rise and kill _övalye!”

  And in the place of discipline the bloodlust and fury of a thousand minds passes through the web of tribute until Rider Bray knows in its entirety this summed thousandfold hate and feels that same summation in a thousand other minds and with that infinity of rage pressing upon her she roars her lungs empty with the need to kill.

  Somewhere in the blur of violence she sees fire and a face before her, pleading. She cannot understand mercy, and the face, narrow-jawed and mud-skinned, is too much like her own.