Shadow of the Horsemen (Kalie's Journey)

by Sandra Saidak

  “It’s a boy!” Brenia shouted. Kalie laughed. So concerned was she with getting the child to breathe, she had forgotten to look. Cassia would be so happy, she thought, as exhaustion crept upon her.

  “Kalie, she is bleeding too much!” Brenia cried in alarm. “I can’t stop it!”

  Kalie leapt back from the stupor to which she had been about to surrender. “Yes you can!” she shouted before she could even see what was happening.

  “Give me my son,” Cassia whispered. Fear clutched Kalie’s heart at the weakness of the sound.

  Brenia set the boy gently on his mother’s chest while she struggled to pack her birth canal with absorbent wool, applying as much pressure as she dared.

  “Raise her legs! Raise the whole lower part of her body!” Kalie shouted. She pulled the blankets and cushions from under Cassia’s back and head, and set them under her legs.

  “What? Why?” Brenia stared at her, baffled.

  Kalie struggled to find the words to explain something she half remembered from Hot Springs, but Brenia seemed to grasp it.

  “I don’t think it will work for this much bleeding, but we can try.”

  “More pressure!” Kalie cried, then, “Silence!” as the slave girls began the mourning song of a woman who dies giving birth.

  “Too much will kill her womb,” said Brenia.

  “She already has the son she was so willing to die for! Better that Cassia never have another than that the living one lose his mother!”

  Finally, the bleeding slowed to a normal level for after childbirth. Cassia was weak, and frighteningly pale, but she lived—and so did the child. It was a miracle all around.

  Maalke came to see his new son, just as the sky began to lighten in the east. “He shall be named Enak,” he said. With that, Cassia stirred, though Kalie hoped she would sleep through it, and begin to regain her strength. “I feared you would never give me a child, Beloved. Now that you have, I will give you new slippers and the richest of furs. And when we plunder the cities of the west, I will bring you jewels for your hair, and a dozen new slaves who will wait on you alone.” Cassia smiled and drifted back to sleep.

  Maalke turned to Kalie. “Make sure she’s ready to travel when the sun is up.”

  “Go to hell, Little Prick,” Kalie told him, then went to find her bedroll.

  Chapter 22

  Kalie awoke to the gentle pressure of Riyik’s hand on her shoulder. The sun was high above the eastern plains, and most of the camp was already moving in that direction. Cassia had been judged strong enough to be carried on a blanket slung between two slow moving horses, while her husband paced angrily, mortified that his wife was responsible for the delayed departure of the entire clan. Worse than that, Maalke was now last in line, the others already far ahead of his family.

  Kalie stayed near Cassia for the last two days of their journey to the big gathering. From what she had gleaned from the women around her, Cassia was recovering more slowly than a woman of Aahk was expected to after childbirth. Given the difficulties she had experienced, no one was surprised.

  Since Kalie had lost a night’s sleep to help Cassia, Riyik insisted she ride pillion with him on Thunder so she could doze if she needed to. She was riding with him that way when they reached the gathering.

  The sight spread out before her took her breath away. Black tents stretched to the far horizon. Three tribes were camped together, something unheard of in this part of the world. Kalie had come here to make the tribes turn on each other; to kill until there was no one left to threaten her world. But at the sight of them, doubt filled her: how could she fight this?

  Then, a strange kind of resolve filled her. Not an otherworldly power; just the detached certainty that whatever was to happen—not just this year but for centuries to come—was going to be decided here, on this plain in the next moon span. It would be, as the beastmen would say, a glorious battle.

  “Kalie?” Riyik was gazing up at her from the ground. “Are you ready to get down, now? Thunder needs to be fed and rubbed down.”

  While Kalie had been lost in whatever vision had seized her, the tribe had arrived at their destination. Suddenly overwhelmed by the noise and stench of what must have been at least three thousand people, and who knew how many animals, Kalie slid from the horse.

  “Are you all right?” Riyik asked, steadying her.

  “Yes, fine.” She looked around. “There’s just…so many of you.”

  “But remember, fewer than half the folk here are warriors.”

  Kalie looked up in surprise. Had Riyik been reading her mind? Or was he, too, calculating the strength of each side in the upcoming battle?

  But he was already leading Thunder to the horse-runs, so she couldn’t ask.

  There was no lake in this new summer campsite, only a spring, which was reserved for the horses, and a well, which would provide water for everyone else. That was good news for Kalie, for it meant that every morning, women would have to wait in long lines for their turn to get the day’s supply of water. And while Kalie now had servants to perform such chores for her, she insisted on doing it herself. There was no better source of information in the camp.

  By the time she returned to Riyik’s tent on the first morning, she thought her head would explode from the abundance of gossip, slander and quarrels she had overheard. Riyik took one look at her, and suggested they go for a ride.

  “Too much noise for you?” he asked her as they mounted their horses.

  “Too much everything!”

  Riyik laughed. “It’s like that for me, too, the first day the whole tribe is together again after a winter of just my clan.”

  “But now there’s three times the number than even you’re used to!”

  “I wonder if Haraak has at last bitten off more than he can chew. How about a race?”

  “Do you think I’m ready?”

  “You’ve taken to riding like you were born to it.” Riyik smiled as Kalie blushed at his praise. “Perhaps we should…”

  Kalie was never quite sure what happened next.

  Blossom reared up with a terrifying scream. Kalie’s attempt to do what Riyik had taught her for moments like this only resulted in the horse needing to buck twice to throw her from her back rather than once.

  Kalie landed on her back with a bone-jarring thump, so stunned she could only stare at the sight of a flailing hoof just above her face—and moving down until it filled her whole vision.

  Riyik pulled her out of the way, just as Blossom’s hoof grazed her forehead and took off a clump of hair. With that, the blessed numbness of a moment before gave way in a wash of pain throughout Kalie’s whole body that nearly left her senseless.

  Sometime later, she became aware of Riyik kneeling beside her. He dropped a dead snake into the grass and began feeling her body for injuries. “I’m all right,” she said, and then realized no sound was coming out.

  “Lie still,” said Riyik as he continued his examination. In some corner of Kalie’s mind, the healer she had become assessed Riyik’s manner and approved.

  “I don’t think anything is broken,” Riyik said. “But you’ve got a nasty scalp wound.” Kalie’s hand flew to her head and came away bloody. “Don’t worry, they always bleed like that. Camp isn’t far. Do you think you can walk?”

  Kalie wasn’t sure, but she let Riyik help her stand. “Where are the horses?” she asked, confused. The grassland was blurry, and the horses were nowhere in sight. She thought she could hear them, but it was hard to tell over the buzzing in her ears.

  Riyik nodded toward the dead snake. “It leapt up right in front of Blossom. I can’t tell if he bit her.” He picked up the brown and white serpent and set it gingerly in his pack. “Fortunately, this one’s just a karn, not the deadly basilisk which looks nearly the same. But to a horse it doesn’t matter: any snake will scare it to near madness, and when that happens, gods help even the best rider.”

  Everything was spinning and Kalie was having trouble heari
ng Riyik, but one thing flowed clearly into her muddled brain: snakes frighten horses. Of course, she already knew that. Didn’t she? Maybe. She couldn’t seem to concentrate. But there was something about snakes and horses that seemed like it should be important.

  As they reached the camp, she noticed that Riyik was carrying her. When had that happened?

  People swirled around them, exclaiming, asking questions, hurrying to gather up medicines and supplies.

  “Has she got the brain swell?” someone asked.

  “Now do you see why women shouldn’t ride?” demanded another.

  “I was watching them,” Kalie heard a younger man say—she thought it was one of the men Riyik hoped to bring west. “She kept her seat longer than some warriors I’ve seen when a snake frightened their horse!”

  They went into their tent. Riyik set Kalie gently onto her bedding, and every part of her body screamed in pain. Then someone was efficiently cleaning her head wound with a stinging ointment. She saw that it was Sarika, handmaiden to chief Zavan’s mother. Riyik brought her something murky in a bone cup.

  “Drink,” he told her. “It will dull the pain and help you sleep. But we’ll have to wake you up and check your eyes every so often. If you have the brain swell, we can’t let you sleep too long—or you might not wake up.”

  Kalie nodded to let him know she understood—she had done the same thing herself at Hot Springs—and instantly regretted the movement. The drink tasted terrible, but soon after, the pain became more tolerable. She should ask Riyik what was in it. The healers at Hot Springs would want to know about it. That was the last coherent thought she had for a long time.

  Kalie was running toward the setting sun. Monsters were chasing her and she had to warn her people. There! A city in the distance; she was almost home. Then horses with men growing from their backs rode between her and safety. There was the sound of harsh, masculine laughter.

  She turned to run a different way, but found a row of poles with rotting heads on top. Screaming, Kalie tried to find another way to run, only to find a hundred hissing snakes blocking her path.

  Suddenly, the snakes turned to face the horses, and now it was they who screamed, falling on the ground, while the men attached to them fell broken and helpless beneath them.

  “Snakes!” Kalie cried, sitting up.

  “Shh, it’s all right, the snake is dead.” Agafa took Kalie’s hand and gently eased her back to her blankets. Kalie peered through the open tent flaps at the night sky. The moon told her it was nearly dawn. Had she been asleep since the previous morning?

  “There were snakes,” Kalie said, trying to hold on to the remnant of the dream. Something in the dream was very important; she had to remember…

  “But not here,” Agafa whispered so as not to wake the others sleeping in the tent. “Do you want some more of the pain drink?”

  The dream faded and Kalie felt slightly nauseous, though whether from the nightmare or the concussion, she wasn’t sure. She was still in pain, but it was more of a dull ache than burning fire. “More of the drink, please,” she whispered.

  She meant to tell Agafa to get some sleep; that she didn’t need to be watched, or if she did, get someone else to take a turn, but sleep crept over her before she could form the words. All Kalie remembered as darkness took her was that horses were afraid of snakes, and even the deadliest warrior couldn’t kill anyone if he was trapped beneath a horse.

  By the next morning, Kalie was feeling better, although she still doubted she could get out of bed. Riyik made her, however, and insisted she walk in a large circle around Chief Kahlar’s section of the camp. While the aching was now confined to her back and neck, each step made them hurt more, and despite her healer’s training that told her that exercise was a necessary part of recovery, she still complained bitterly to Riyik.

  Her gentle husband had become tyrant, much to the amusement of the rest of the clan. When Kalie was ready to stop after one circuit and refuse to take another step, Cassia appeared beside her, quietly offering to keep Kalie company, as she needed exercise as well.

  Kalie could hardly admit she couldn’t keep up with a woman who had nearly died giving birth just days before. Cassia was nearly as white as a bleached bone, but she walked slowly, with purposeful measured steps, breathing deeply as Kalie had taught her.

  “My milk came in yesterday, did you know?” Cassia asked.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Kalie, trying to muster enthusiasm. “I don’t remember much after the horse threw me.”

  Cassia shook her head to Kalie’s offer of an arm for support, and shot her a sideways glance. “I hope you’ll take that fall as a warning to stay away from matters best left to men.”

  Kalie nodded cautiously. “Perhaps I don’t need any more riding lessons.”

  Cassia sighed; a sound of great relief. “My milk took so long! I was afraid I would have to ask another woman to nurse my son. Now I can do it myself.”

  “I was afraid your milk wouldn’t come at all,” said Kalie. “As difficult as the birth was.”

  Cassia moved her fingers in the sign against evil. “That would truly be a curse! Waiting all my life to bear a child, then not being able to feed him when he finally gets here.”

  “It would be sad, of course. But surely, with so many nursing mothers in your tribe…”

  Cassia shook her head. “What good is a woman who can’t nurse her own child?”

  Kalie sighed. “So many things make a woman useless in this place!” she said.

  At last the circuit was completed, and both women returned to Riyik’s tent and sank gratefully to the soft cushions that had been wedding gifts from both Brenia and Cassia. Riyik approached Kalie with a steaming pitch-lined basket. Kalie glared at him. “What new torture are you going to attempt?” she asked, emphasizing the last word.

  “Something you’ll like a lot more than walking.” Riyik set the basket beside Kalie, and she recognized oil from rendered sheep’s fat mixed with herbs she couldn’t quiet identify. “It’s something we use after riding accidents like yours. When rubbed into the skin it soothes sore muscles. I’ll rub some on you if you’ll let me.”

  Kalie was about to exclaim in shock that the people in this place had actually developed the art of massage, but decided not to risk the good humor surrounding her. Besides, she hadn’t had a good massage in more than a year—nor truly enjoyed one in more than seven. Even an unskilled masseuse would be better than trying it herself in her current state.

  To Kalie’s delight, Riyik worked her sore muscles with a skill that rivaled the best Healers in Hot Springs. The oil soaked deep into her skin and swept her away in utter bliss.

  With slow, deep pressure, Riyik’s hands traveled down the length of her back, then up again, drawing the pain from her aching shoulders. Even her tense neck muscles relaxed beneath his hands.

  Kalie nearly fell asleep, but to fall asleep meant missing out on this moment, and that she was not willing to do. She heard the others leave the tent, so now she and Riyik were alone. It occurred to Kalie that Riyik might choose to push this encounter into something beyond a backrub. Or that she could roll over and invite him to do so.

  But she did not, and the rhythmic motions of his hands continued exactly as they had, with variations to give her greater pleasure and nothing more. And for the first time since coming to this land, Kalie relaxed completely, knowing she was safe.

  Just before she drifted off into an exquisite sleep, Kalie decided that if they both lived long enough, she would one day indeed invite Riyik to do more.

  Chapter 23

  Kalie was several days in recovering. But Agafa managed the household well enough and Varena drew the water, and reported to Kalie all she heard each day at the well. Others came to visit, and Kalie was truly surprised at how many friends she had in this land. That hadn’t been part of her original plan, any more than getting married here was, but she found herself deeply moved nonetheless.

  They came in grou
ps to keep her company, and offer advice and herbal teas to speed her recovery. And they came alone, to ask advice on personal matters, or questions about the west, and what life would be like for them if the king actually decided to lead them all there. They came with news and gossip, often with hope of a reward, but sometimes, just because they knew Kalie was interested in such things.

  On the fourth morning after the accident, when Kalie had decided she was getting up and resuming her duties no matter how bad she felt, Agafa opened the tent flap to admit Danica, mother of Chief Zavan, who requested a private audience.

  Agafa and the other servants fled before Kalie had the chance to tell them to. Varena scooped up Yarik and hurried after them. Kalie was alone in the tent with one of the most powerful women in the tribe, who, she noticed, had not even brought Sarika with her.

  Interesting.

  “I have wanted to speak with you alone for some time,” the old woman began.

  “I would gladly have attended you any time you summoned me,” Kalie answered, in the careful tones one used in addressing a woman of high status.

  Danica shook her head dismissively. “Too many listening ears; too many wagging tongues. I had to wait for a pretext…”

  “Such as visiting an invalid?”

  Danica nodded. “Not that I would wish such a thing upon you. But it happened, and I knew I had to act soon—before you were up and about, stirring every pot and holding court among your followers.”

  Kalie felt a sudden chill. “Perhaps I have grown fond of resting all day while others do the work, and will simply linger in my tent all season.”