Gown of Shadow and Flame

by A. E. Marling

  The animals spotted her and lowered horns that would make broadswords seem welcoming. She was not in the habit of wasting Black Wine on cows. Her magic created truth, but it was the kind of truth that had to be fed into each mind before people understood.

  Waning sunlight ate at her spell, dissolving it, but enough magic slipped into the cows' eyes to blind them for a breath. Celaise scurried past them to safety.

  Or so she had hoped. The biggest Headless she had seen ran amok. Around her, women clutched children, calves, and each other. One mother's ear bled from how she worried at a horn earring. Another woman had gone hoarse from muttering reassurances to children who grew more scared by the second.

  “Daddy's with the other warriors now and with Tall Tachamwa so you don't need to fret or think he won't stop the bad Rock-Back because he will and he won't be hurt and we won't be hurt and…”

  “Celaise!” Jerani's bright voice called her name amid the crash and thump of the Headless.

  She tried to pull on her True Dress, to answer his cry. Her fingers trembled with her hunger as she gripped the wonderful fabric. It felt like a refreshing breeze blowing over her palms, sliding out of her hands. She snapped her fingers together, but it was too late.

  Her gown was ripped from her by the dregs of daylight.

  The attempt drained her Black Wine, and auras of ghost worms swam through her eyes in warning of an onrushing hunger migraine. Need to Feast. All the fear around her smelled of a banquet. At least she had not slipped into the Void.

  She would have to wait before trying her magic again. “Night will come.”

  “What, Abi?” A mother looked to her daughter, thinking she had spoken. Noticing Celaise, she sniffed and shifted away.

  Spectral ripples from the migraine clouded Celaise's left eye, but she managed to see Jerani holding his sister. Anza's dirty dress scrunched up around her legs as she clutched a bleeding eye. Her left one too. Celaise wondered if it ached, stung. Beside the agony of her belly, Celaise thought she felt something else while gazing at the hurt girl, some twinge.

  Cows staggered back from the onslaught of rocky moving mounds. Cattle shook their heads in a daze, dropping to their knees. Their moos rang with outrage.

  A cow reared, cracking its horns down on a predator. The cow staggered away, bawling. One horn ended in a jagged spray of blood. The horn had broken like a shell, the inside empty. Celaise supposed she should have expected it to be hollow, at that size. The cow rolled on its side, groaning. Celaise was glad Anza had covered her good eye too and could not see the messy sight.

  Jerani had left his sister alone to try to pull his brother away from the rogue Headless.

  Wedan said, “Stop kicking my gourd!”

  “Get back!” Jerani's lean frame shoved his rounder brother behind him. “Before you're lamed.”

  “I'm not your son.”

  She was angry at Wedan for endangering Jerani's life. Celaise wanted Jerani to stay alive and fight. Besides, the delicious scent of his fear tickled her nose.

  A woman pressed salve into the broken horn of the fallen cow and wrapped it in leather swaddling. Other women dragged injured men clear of the melee. Celaise wanted to do something, rather than sit and mold. She was breaking the third edict of society by being lazy. But not by choice. Her claw hand clenched as far as it could, a half-fist. How could a cripple help?

  She prodded the nearest woman with her crutch. “Fight with them. Plenty of dropped spears about.”

  Braids circling over her scalp, the woman had long legs and toned strength in her arms and shoulders. Celaise bet she could outfight Wedan, with one hand at her side carrying a baby.

  “What? No, no.” The woman grimaced at a spear fallen near a man gripping his side. “I couldn't.”

  “They're just as sharp in a woman's hand.”

  “No. I mean, maybe, but what if I'm hurt? Scarred.” Her eyes slid from Celaise's mouth to her twisted foot. Celaise wanted to tell her it was the Sun Dragon's curse, not Celaise's true body, but saying so would reveal too much.

  Celaise asked, “What if you don't help now and are killed later?”

  The woman only squeezed her knees, the tips of her fingers white from pressure.

  The tribesman shouted, “Hero! Hero!”

  Dirt splashed into the air from the cloven hooves of the Greatheart bull. With a snorting and a blowing, it charged toward the massive Rock-Back. Two man-sized horns galloped forward with tips black and shanks broad.

  “He-ro!” they chanted. “He-ro!”

  Hope flickered underneath her head-searing hunger. If anything can stop that Rock-Back, it's those horns.

  The glitter-eyed predator squatted at the last moment, and the horns hit too high, smacking off hard ridges. From the sound, Celaise thought a horn must have shattered, but neither had.

  One clawed leg snapped at Hero, shredding the loose skin dangling below his neck. The bull croaked out a moo and backstepped, tail thrashing as he turned and galloped closer to Celaise.

  The hope left her, leaving Celaise with her hunger and headache. She wrapped an arm behind her head while the other with the stiff joint grasped her thudding temples.

  She shut her eyes and would have kept them closed, but a new blend of anxiety distracted her. It reminded her of undercooked fish, and she glanced among the nearby children. It lacked the depth and layered texture of an adult's fear, though most children smelled sweeter.

  Anza had crawled away from the fighting, keeping one hand over her hurt eye. The bull now stood over her, protectively, as if that could make amends for running from the fight. White hair tufted forward from the animal's belly, close behind Anza's head. Farther back, two testicles the size of pomegranates dangled between its legs, and Celaise found them disturbing, particularly so close to the girl. She thought they must knock the bull's knees and break its stride.

  Celaise's bleary eyes closed in on the source of the fish scent. A nervous Skin-Back leaped onto Hero's leg and scuttled up its shoulder, leaving bleeding punctures in the speckled hide. The bull bellowed and scythed a horn at the oily creature but missed.

  Celaise said, “A Skin-Back!”

  The women fell over themselves to get away. Children screamed. Anza only clutched her hands tighter over her head. In moments, the Skin-Back would reach the bull's spine, and Celaise imagined the massive animal collapsing on top of the girl. Her neck'll break!

  Pain rippled outward from Celaise's knee and hip as she stood. Her back clicked, and her left shoulder sagged with every uneven step toward the bull. The Skin-Back clambered behind the bull's hump and a long beak shot from its gummy snout. The creature angled its head to puncture Hero's spine.

  The crutch slid forward in Celaise's grasp and batted the Skin-Back with a sound like stepping into mud. Hero swung his oar-sized horns down to crush the little beast.

  “Why,” Celaise asked, “was I the one who had do that?” She was the least able of all the women there.

  One woman's lip curled to reveal white teeth as she glanced over Celaise. “Wouldn't matter if the Skin-Back scarred you, now would it? Outlander.”

  Celaise clattered away, woozy with embarrassment, and with a vague idea of finding someone to tend to Anza's eye. Celaise stumbled over a shrub she had not seen through the haze of her migraine and made a second mistake by trying to catch her fall on her bad right hand. The stiff fingers creaked, the bone shards in her wrist digging into her nerves. Agony rammed up the inside of her arm, and she pissed herself.

  “Night will come,” she hissed. “Night will come, night will come, night will—”

  She heard a scream and assumed it was her own, until a blast of cinnamon terror forced her to look to the battle. Through one squinting eye, she saw Wedan pinned under a clawed leg, gashed, and trod over.

  Jerani pulled him away. His younger brother gripped his belly. He reeked of caramel and pumpkin wafers—the smell of the dying.

  “Please, let him live,” Jerani said through clen
ched teeth.

  It had happened moments before the warriors forced the giant Rock-Back out of the tribe. The monster must have sensed a weakness in the ring of spears and clubs, lashing out at Wedan. Jerani thwacked the flat grey foot. One claw snapped off to lie bloody on the ground, but that left two more on the hind leg to savage his brother.

  Jerani's arms and legs throbbed with a strength he did not know he had as he dragged his brother away from the clomping dust-storm of the Rock-Back.

  Jerani slipped once on blood, bashed his knee, but that did not matter. Collapsing beside his brother, Jerani lifted the sodden shreds of cloth to look at the wound.

  It was not good. Deep, wide, and he can't bleed like that for long. His brother's lips blanched, his eyes bulging with pain. A trembling moan whistled from him.

  Should have been faster with my club, Jerani thought, knocked its foot away. The image of those claws raking his brother seared into his mind. Should've gotten him out of the fight. Shouldn't have let him get that spear.

  Wedan still clenched the horn spear. Jerani doubted he could pry it loose, even after Wedan died.

  No, he won't die! He won't. Jerani felt as if rainwater pumped out of his heart, chilling his body. His shaking hands tore his brother's clothes and wrapped them as bandages around his body. Someone handed Jerani strips of leather, and he fumbled them into place as well.

  It would not be enough to staunch the bleeding. He could see that, and he rocked back onto his heels, feeling at once distant and disoriented. He had seen this before. The past was repeating, looping back through his head and mixing up his thoughts.

  His brother shrank before his eyes, turning into the gaunt figure of his mother. She had wasted away, could not even feed or wash herself, every part of her shriveling except for that bulge under her neck. The one lump of flesh. It was all the twelve-year-old Jerani could think of, could look at. His mother had turned into a giant dark bullfrog, her throat bulging in one endless, terrifying croak.

  She was no longer a woman, not his mother, not even a person. Just the lump, with a few bones attached.

  Jerani knew what he had to do. His father had been gone since the dry season, and that left only Jerani to bring his mother back.

  He knocked off the dull bits of his best obsidian knife, its edge a black shard. The thing that had once been his mother struggled, the lump trying to protect itself by twitching a bone here and there, but Jerani persevered.

  After the final cut and the lump rolled away, Jerani at last could see his mother again. Her beautiful dark eyes with their brown flecks like leaves floating in a deep pond. His mother reached up to him with a bird-thin arm, brushed his cheek, then slumped into a faint.

  He could not stop the bleeding, even with the poultices he had snuck from the Holy Woman. Tighter and tighter he wrapped the bandages, until part of him knew she could no longer breathe, but he did it anyway. Then all he could do was cradle his mother in his arms. His shocked mind wondered how this strong woman—who had once picked him up to place him on Hero's back for a ride—had become so small. Like a child. My little, sick child.

  His brother stumbled in to see him drenched with blood and holding their mother. “Look, she's herself again,” Jerani said. Wedan ran away screaming. Anza cried in the corner of the house, and only then did Jerani realize she must have been wailing the whole time. He had not noticed, been too focused on freeing his mother. This, most of all, filled him with shame in the following years. At least Anza was too young to remember.

  Jerani held his head in his sticky hands, though he was no longer sure if it was his mother's blood or his brother's. He did not know where he was.

  A figure of light crouched beside him. He saw a man who looked like his father, or how his father's corpse would have appeared if moonlight pumped through his veins.

  Gio took the body from his son's arms and unwrapped the bandages.

  Yes, Jerani thought, father should have come back in time to save mother. This was how it should have been. Only, the dying person looked pudgier than his mother had been, and shorter.

  The man reached into the belly wound, and brightness pulsed from his hands. Light branched outward. Guts glowed like white snakes, refolding together, and skin rippled and closed around Gio's arm, almost swallowing his hand. He pulled it out at the last moment.

  Wedan blinked and gasped. “F-father?”

  As Gio stood, Jerani felt as if he floated with relief and happiness, gliding over fields of fresh grass. His father may have come back a year too late for their mother, but Jerani could forgive him that. He had saved his son, saved Jerani's brother, and he would cure Anza's eye next, and the family could all live together again and sip milk around the fire, and Gio could tell his sons how to be men, and all would be well.

  “Father.” Wedan held up the spear. “I've saved this for you. It's yours.”

  Gio never looked at the spear, did not even seem to hear his son. He walked by the Greatheart bull and past the sobbing Anza.

  Jerani wanted to stay beside his brother. He wanted nothing to do with the Bright Palm, but he forced himself to run after him, for Anza's sake. “Father…Gio, Anza hurt her eye, too.”

  “She won't die. She bleeds.” The Bright Palm spoke with a flat voice. “The wound was caused by claw.”

  Jerani did not see what difference it made. “She's hurting.”

  “If you see anyone killed without blood, this I must know. Night nears, and I suspect a Feaster.”

  Jerani looked about and noticed the light on the horizon was dimming. And the battle had ended, for now.

  Women blew on embers, and campfires brightened. Warriors replaced broken obsidian knives and spear horns, in preparation for the next fight. Calves lay behind their vigilant mothers. In the near distance, the Rock-Backs pattered closer and closer to a frenzy.

  Jerani caught up to Gio again. “She's Anza, your daughter.” He reached out to grab the Bright Palm but stopped short of touching him. “She may lose the eye.”

  The Bright Palm walked away.

  “Don't you remember any of us?” Jerani called after him.

  Jerani expected Gio to turn around, smiling, and they would all agree what a good joke he had played on them, pretending not to care for them, acting like a stranger. From now on it'll be different, boys, he would promise.

  He never looked back. Jerani burned all over, as if he had swallowed lava. Lifting his war club, he wanted to run after his father—no, the Bright Palm—and bash his head in. That isn't really Gio, your father, he thought. He can't be.

  After a few ragged breaths, Jerani returned to his brother. His torn clothing had left him mostly naked. A scar stretched like spilled milk from his ribs to his crotch.

  “Wear this.” Jerani handed Wedan a calf hide, without meeting his eyes.

  Jerani jogged to Anza to hold her as she cried bloody tears. He felt destroyed with exhaustion. He thought he should pry Anza's hand off her face and look at the wound, but he was afraid to see it. Even if we live, he thought, she might be scarred for life. Women milked cows, and they had to be perfect in mind and body, lest they anger the gods, and no warrior wanted a wife who could not milk.

  Jerani hated himself for doing it, but he set her down to look for the Holy Woman. She would be able to help. While jogging around the tribe, Jerani glanced out of the ring of horns and saw the giant Rock-Back had rejoined the rest of its pack. The big one began drumming its feet on top of one of its fellows. Three smaller ones beat their forelegs against their leader.

  A warrior peered between a cow's horns. “Er, think that's their way of saying they give up?”

  Tall Tachamwa trudged closer and cringed. “They like their dancing before eating.”

  In the fading light, Jerani could not see much of the neighboring tribes, but he heard battle sounds from all directions. We'll have no help from them, he thought.

  Jerani completed the circle of the camp to find the Holy Woman leaning over Anza. Someone else must ha
ve brought help.

  “Open your eye, dear. Wider now.” The Holy Woman snapped her fingers at a woman nearby, Chiya. “The sacred water.”

  Chiya handed over the gourd, and even this simple motion she made graceful. Firelight glistened off the layered braids of Chiya's hair.

  The Holy Woman pressed her lips together, pouring the cow's sacred water onto the wound. Anza trembled, but Jerani held her head still as a poultice was patted into her eye. Her head was wrapped.

  “Just a scratch,” the Holy Woman said. Her eyes snapped up to Jerani then his copper bracelet. “Why're you waiting to call the kantress? Your head full of spear grass?”

  “There's something wrong with it, I think.” He brought the gashed piece of copper to the level of his nose. “Celaise?”

  “The gods send help when we deserve it.” The Holy Woman walked to a wounded warrior.

  Chiya frowned down at Jerani. “You shit yourself?”

  Skin-Back gore had dried into crusts on his legs, from the one he had squashed with his belt. “No. It's not mine.”

  “Someone else shit on you?” Chiya's lip twisted up in a sneer.

  Jerani realized how ridiculous he sounded, but he found he could not care. He held his sister closer.

  “Chiya.” Isafo the warrior loomed over Jerani and handed her a Rock-Back's claw. “This is for you.”

  She held the claw between two delicate fingers and looked up at Isafo through her lashes. “How did you get so brave?”

  Jerani recognized the claw. “Hey! I knocked that off. With my club.”

  Her eyes tightened. “Jerani, why do you have to be such a braggart?”

  Isafo and Chiya left together, while Jerani shuddered at the unfairness of it all. Pulling himself out of a watering hole of disgust, he rubbed Anza's hands to comfort her. “Does it hurt much?”

  She shivered. A leather strip was wrapped over one eye with a poultice weave of dried grass poking out from the edges.