Heartless A Shieldmaiden's Voice: A Covenant Keeper Novel

by S. R. Karfelt

  DAYLIGHT CAME, AND Carole had to pee, but refused to open her eyes. She could sense the bulk of what was surely Sister Mary Josephine sitting in a chair near the entryway of the hut. What on earth was the nun who ran Rio Rancho Sisters of Mercy Orphanage—the very orphanage she’d been housed in until she was ten years old—doing here? Inside a veil where the only other of Carole’s kind that she’d known had just died? Could this possibly be a hallucination? It felt real, but didn’t they? Didn’t all schizophrenics think their hallucinations were real? Oh God, I’ve lost the ability to recognize reality. Maybe I’m in a coma. I hope I’m in a coma.

  Fastest made little sound as he pushed through the flap over the doorway, but Carole sensed him. “She’s still sleeping?” He sounded worried.

  “No. She’s just pretending. I don’t think she can go much longer, she needs to use the latrine.”

  Carole rose immediately and faced the nun. “Good Morning, Sister Mary Josephine.” It was real. No part of her mind could have recreated the acerbic nun so perfectly. Her face sagged a bit more and her hook nose seemed larger than last time she’d seen her, but the sharp green eyes were exactly the same, and she’d never noticed in childhood, but they were beautiful. Carole glanced towards Fastest, clad in the same jeans from yesterday, smudges of dirt dusting them. She moved to him and after a moment’s hesitation, awkwardly took his hands.

  “I’m sorry about Rutak. I don’t know what to say. It’s my fault he died, isn’t it?”

  He leaned forward and briefly touched his forehead to hers. “No. It was his choice. He said for you to use his gift wisely, Cahrul.” The dark eyes, ringed with darker lashes, teared up. “And to thank you for giving his death meaning.”

  Carole’s own eyes remained dry, but something twisted in her heart. Regret spread there, aching through her. Fastest put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed gently.

  “Grandfather said you would understand that, and it would comfort you.”

  The ache intensified. “I do understand, but I’m selfish. There are so many things I wanted to ask him.” She glanced towards the nun questioningly. Why is she here?

  “Your questions can wait. You need to get dressed before the ceremony.” But from the remembered tilt of Sister Mary Josephine’s stubborn chin, Carole knew she’d get no answers from her even after the ceremony.

  INSIDE THE BATH house Carole washed from a basin, scrubbing dried blood from under her arms and torso. Rubbing a cloth down her legs she found it dried between her toes. Surprised to realize how much blood she’d lost, she understood now why she was tired, despite the miraculous healing. Examining her body in the bright light streaming from openings high in the walls, she found not even the thin red scar remained on her breast. A heavyset woman stood in front of a large silver-framed obsidian mirror, braiding glass beads into her long frizzy hair and curiously watching Carole in their reflection.

  “Grandfather’s prayers still work in you. By night you will be strong again.”

  Moving to the mirror, Carole turned to search her back for the thick scar of the exit wound and found only a thin line. The woman unfolded a pale linen garment and slid it over Carole’s head. The thin fabric felt soft against her skin, and slid down the length of her body. The gown hugged her hips and most of her legs in long neat pleats, leaving only her arms bare. Both waistband and collar were blue, and colorful clay beads dangled. Carole ran her fingers through her freshly washed hair, and the woman handed her a plastic toothbrush still in its package.

  “Take it with you when you go. Grandfather didn’t like the outside world brought in, but sometimes we cheat. There’s toothpaste on the shelf.”

  OUTSIDE IN THE bright desert sunshine, Fastest waited wearing only a bit of linen across his hips. Turquoise beads decorated his glossy hair, hanging in a curtain down his back. Carole crossed the ground barefoot, trying not to wince with each step. Fastest moved gracefully to meet her, and led the way, his bare feet used to the invisible burrs infecting the ground.

  “The entire tribe will fast today, except for infants, even the oldest of the elders. We assumed you would too.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “You’ll need to rest after the ceremony. This won’t take long, but it can be taxing. Grandfather said your kind do not mourn death like we do, but he was with us for a very long time. We can’t let him go easily, and this will help us to heal. I think he would forgive us that.”

  They ascended the path towards the kiva, where hundreds of the tribe had already gathered. In the distance Carole could see Sister Mary Josephine directing youngsters away from the proceedings. She asked Fastest how the nun was tied to his people.

  “When I was a kid I saw her here with Rutak a couple of times, and right after you’d been here she came. I asked who she was that time. I always felt free to ask Grandfather anything, unfortunately he felt free not to answer me, but I figured she had something to do with your kind.”

  “Maybe, but she’s not my kind.”

  Fastest explained he’d met two others of her kind since he’d seen her last, both men, and he’d disliked them both. “All I really know about your people is they live in remote places far from large bodies of water—or perhaps it was close to water, I’m not sure. I know, Cahrul, that you want information about your people, but I don’t know very much.”

  “I didn’t mean to interrogate you, especially not today,” said Carole, looking around. They were in the middle of the village. The large open space appeared to be the main camp. Bowl shaped, with earthen benches dug in a circular pattern, it had been built stadium fashion. Fastest and Carole stood on the topmost spot of the dirt arena, looking down. People were spreading out, most standing in rows, but below a few men were gathering in the center. The women wore linen dresses like Carole, but most of the men were almost bare, like Fastest, wearing only the smallest bit of fabric.

  “Tell me what to do,” Carole said, noting the women heading towards the easternmost edge of the bowl.

  Fastest’s white teeth flashed briefly. “Follow your heart. That is what your people are best at, isn’t it?” He left her then, and made his way down the rows of dusty and weedy steps, to gather at the center of the camp with dozens of men. Despite his advice, Carole’s heart told her nothing. The voices told her she didn’t belong there and to leave, so she stayed right where she was instead of heading east with the other women. Watching as the tribe followed their hearts to their places, she noted with surprise that in the sea of dusky bodies there was a handful as light skinned as she was.

  Almost as one the crowd quieted. Instead of facing towards the bottom of the earthen bowl, everyone turned to face east, where most of the women stood. To Carole’s surprise she realized she wasn’t the only woman who hadn’t joined them. There were about a dozen women standing near her, most very old, and Sister Mary Josephine stood among them, dressed in her black habit, her old-fashioned long cap dangling down her back. The women on the eastern edge began doing something, and Carole focused her attention. At first they appeared to only rock and tear at their hair. When Carole realized the dark globs sticking on their gowns, and drifting to the ground was hair, she spotted a silver knife being passed from woman to woman. They were cutting their hair off. Yards and yards of dark glossy hair were being sawed away until woman after woman emerged with hair horribly similar to Carole’s.

  Her eyes cut to the men at the bottom of the circle. They had their own knives, and she watched as Fastest yanked his gorgeous beaded hair taut with one hand, and hacked at it with the blade. By the time he finished his scalp glistened raw and bald. The light-skinned man to his left took the knife. He scraped the blade through short dark hair, leaving one wide bald path down the middle of his scalp. To her dismay he then used the blade to cut his flesh. From his shoulder, across his chest, down to his hip he meticulously sliced before passing the knife to the next man.

  A silver blade had made its way to her group, and Carole watched curiously when Sist
er Mary Josephine took it, mentally contemplating the fact that she’d never seen the nun remove her cap, even the times the orphans had been taken to the local swimming pool when she’d been a child. The nun didn’t break tradition. Lifting the wicked knife to her face, she lightly slid it across her forehead, just once. A scarlet ribbon of blood appeared instantly, and she held the bloody weapon out for Carole to take.

  It was heavy in her hand, solid. Carole lifted it to her hairline, surprised at how the sharp edge easily cut a swath through her already short hair. Hefting it a second time, she cut another path on the opposite side, leaving twin stripes in its wake. Being the last woman in her group, she held onto the weapon, unsure what to do with it. The men to her left had their own knives. Sister Mary Josephine held out a calloused hand and Carole gave it back to her, but the nun grabbed her arm, straightened it, and sliced just below the crook of Carole’s elbow, repeating the maneuver until she’d left dozens of shallow scratches all the way to her wrist. Obediently Carole held out her left arm, knowing it was required.

  The nun handed the knife back to her, glaring meaningfully. Carole understood. Rutak had given his last for her. More than his entire tribe, she owed him a sacrifice. Carole had never hurt anyone for the purpose of causing them pain, but she knew how. Lifting her arm into the air, she repeated the marks from under her arm to her elbow, and again with the other arm, cutting deeper than the nun had. Expertly she ran the razor sharp blade between her fingers and against the sensitive tips. Without bothering to lift her gown she attacked her thighs and calves, shredding material along with flesh. In turn she lifted each foot to extract payment from the soles, and inflict pain between her toes. She’d begun work from chin to chest, cutting only as deep as she dared when the nun snatched the knife off of her, a horrified expression on her face.

  To the east the women began a hair-raising keening that sent shivers straight through Carole. A rhythmic chorus rose and fell, “Ah! Ahh! Ahhh!” The voices in her head had been criticizing the semantics of the ceremony, and fussing about possible infection from the cuts and shared blade, but they hadn’t protested her sacrifice. They surprised her and took up the tribe’s scream inside her head. The sound vibrated sharply through her and made goose bumps shiver painfully over her wounded flesh. Instinctively she joined in with a heartfelt shout of pain, feeling it. Pain for her loss, pain that she’d never know the things Rutak wouldn’t tell her, pain that she loved Ted and he ran to other women to escape it, pain that she left her daughter to hunt people like animals—at the bidding of those she was sworn to obey. “Ahhhhhhhhhh!” The sound ripped through her body, and she stopped only to draw breath and repeat it.

  After a time Carole rocked back and forth to the sound, and sensed that most of the crowd did the same. Her skin burned horribly, especially where salty tears dripped off her face and landed in shredded skin. Words started to come out. First it was simply no, a word soldiers were forbidden from saying. The faces of those she’d killed flittered through her mind, and she screamed no throughout, as though she could take back what she had done.

  Carole could almost see them.

  Grandpa. “No!”

  General Samish. “No!”

  Ambassador Causer. “No!”

  Miller—the terrorist who went for a swim and drowned with a foot tangled in a rope and his head dangling in the water, right in front of her dispassionate eyes. “No!”

  Trina—the Russian mother whose daughter started school while her mother’s body decayed in the hull of a ship. “No!”

  Thomas—the foolish nuclear engineer who hadn’t even fought back when she slammed her knife into his throat. “No!”

  In the end she shouted their names to the desert, knowing she’d done her duty. She was a soldier, and her pain was part of her sacrifice. Her shouts weakened, and she rocked slower, and in the end her words turned from sin and regret to those she missed. “Gran. Mom. Gran. Mom. Happy Easter.” She knew she wasn’t making any sense, but the words rasped from her sore throat, as loud as she could manage.

  Deaf now to the keening pain around her, she swayed in place, unable to manage another coherent word. She looked in confusion at a face that appeared right in front of her, recognizing him as the man who’d stood beside Fastest, and shaved his head and cut his chest. Why was he looking at her like that? Why were his golden eyes so familiar? Why was he crying?

  “Cahrul?” he rasped in his own hoarse voice. “My shieldmaiden daughter? Could ilu be this good to me?”

  My father is here. The Priest.

  The ground spun and reached up to grab her, and everything vanished.

  PAIN ROUSED CAROLE, sharp stinging pain all over her body. And arguing.

  “Don’t you dare heal those cuts! She made them for Rutak.” Sister Mary Josephine’s scathing voice demanded obedience. “She’ll be fine. The boy knows what he’s doing. Didn’t Rutak himself disinfect your wounds with clay when you were a boy on the reservation?”

  “I’m sure you saw evidence of that when I lived at the orphanage. Clay gathers in deep wounds and leaves a tattoo, especially on light skin. I still have the marks.” Carole recognized her father’s voice, though she hadn’t heard it since she was nearly four years old.

  Fastest’s strong hands were firmly rubbing what felt like dirt into the cuts on her arms. If she had any energy at all, she’d cry. He rubbed so hard that she swayed back and forth, like a boat on choppy water. It took a disoriented moment to realize she lay on a rope bed, inside a hut, with the remains of her dress bunched up around her thighs and her father and Fastest ministering to her self-inflected wounds.

  “Son, don’t put that clay on her neck. She’ll have orange stripes for the rest of her life.”

  “My name is Jonathan Redfeather,” Fastest’s voice replied politely, though he sounded as frustrated as her father. “Sister, why didn’t you stop her?”

  “She doesn’t listen to me!” The scathing voice replied. “I had to pull the knife out of her hands. Even as a child she never listened to me. She wouldn’t have ended up in half the trouble she got into in foster care, nor have wound up here shot if she had!”

  “She’s the one who got shot?” her father hissed. “Foster care! I left my daughter with you and you put her into foster care?”

  “I tried to keep her, Joseph. Things have changed since you were at the orphanage.” The scathing voice sounded genuinely contrite. Carole struggled to open her eyes. She wanted to see contrite on the nun’s face. She couldn’t quite manage it.

  Gentle hands slid softly over her bare feet. Despite the tender touch, the burning pain from the dirty cuts increased and she groaned.

  “You’re not doing your healing thing on her, are you?” The contrition had gone from the nun’s voice.

  “Not for the cuts, Sister.” The hands slid up her fiery legs. Strangely Carole began to feel better, stronger. It came in waves of energy from the touch of those soft hands. My father’s hands. They reached her hips and stomach, and moving upward, paused to linger right over her belly. She opened her eyes, struggling to focus. Whatever he was doing to her seemed magical. Despite that, she couldn’t quite manage to sit up, but her father’s face appeared over hers. He smiled. “You look so like your mother, so like Keight!”

  Carole gazed into wide eyes. His lashes were ridiculously long and when he blinked at her, it reminded her of Beth so much her heart ached.

  “I remember you,” she said. Her voice sounded froggy. Interrupting Fastest’s painful doctoring, she lifted an arm and grabbed her father’s hand so he couldn’t get away. He held it tightly and leaned closer to kiss her forehead, her nose, and then her lips, the way she sometimes did to Beth. Tears burned in her eyes. “What’s your name?”

  “Joseph Tural, Father Joseph Tural.”

  “Tural? Like Rutak Tural?” Carole searched his face for any remembered similarities to the old man’s face, but found none. He smiled at her question and shook his head. Joseph looked pale, slight, and g
raceful, and she suspected if he didn’t look so worried, and if his head hadn’t been shaved in a sort of awful reverse Mohawk, his plain features would have been kind. The type of face you’d trust instinctively. The long-lashed golden eyes that reminded her of Beth’s were the wrong color, but the open, honest clearness to them was the same as her daughter’s.

  There were so many questions she needed answers to. Head pounding and skin on fire, dizzy and aching, she asked questions while she had the chance. “Couldn’t you have visited? Or written? So I’d have known your name? What did you just do to me? Can you heal like Rutak? How does it work? What are we? Why can we do—stuff? Do you hear voices?”

  Joseph’s dark brows pulled together. “Don’t you remember anything I told you?”

  It took a moment to understand exactly what he meant. For a brief second Carole thought she’d missed something while being transported from the main camp to the hut she now found herself in. She tried to remember how she’d gotten there, and what had been said.

  Realizing that wasn’t what he meant, a sudden flash of angry heat shot through Carole. He still loomed close, gazing at her face, and she used their clasped hands to form a fist and roughly pushed him away with a punch, yanking her hand free. The voices violently protested the act, bellowing in her head, and Carole shouted over them.

  “Do I remember what you told me? You mean when I was three years old? Did you think I would?” Though physically shoved away, the touch of his heart didn’t go. It rested right beside hers, and it eased her anger, because she sensed the place in his heart where she belonged. It had been empty and aching all this time too. Knowing he’d shared her pain, she relented and admitted, “You said you loved me. I remember only that.”

  “If you only remembered one thing, that was the most important.” Joseph leaned close again, gently brushing the back of his fingers over her cheek. The touch of his heart, reassuring that she was indeed loved by her absentee father, kept her from pushing him away again.