The Warrior Who Carried Life

by Geoff Ryman

  Cara said nothing. Of course it was a she-wolf, it always was a she-wolf that they turned into. They could never be fierce in their real lives. Cara knew these people. Widows, unhappy wives, tame daughters, they made themselves excited by playing at magic. The villagers called them the Old Women, Kasawa, without strength or standing. Cara had very little respect for the Old Women. She had very little faith in their powers, but she would try anything now. A torch fluttered in the wind, in the dark.

  “Now we must wear the hood,” explained Sari, as if to a child. “So that we won’t see the mysteries, and be overwhelmed.”

  “Oh, we wouldn’t want that,” said Cara. She had been told what poor sort of mysteries were to come. Sari’s hands hesitated as they tried to push the hood over Cara’s head. They arched delicately away from Cara’s face. Sari, Cara realised, did not want to touch it. Did she think it was a disease that could be caught? Cara pulled the hood away from her and down over her own head, roughly. Sari wanted the face hidden? Good, so did Cara, and now it was.

  The hood smelled of stale food and other people’s breath. Cara could feel Sari hover over her, cowed now, and uncertain what to do next.

  “It begins soon?” Cara demanded.

  “Yes, yes it will. Our mistress is here.” Cara could hear slight rustlings in the scrub all around her. “Well, almost here. Her name is Burning Light in the Wilderness. She will come in a haze of fire. Then the demons will inspect you, and then there’s the trials, and then we take you to the Sanctum.” She made it sound like knitting. “Oh!” she suddenly exclaimed faintly, and moved away.

  Cara sat, waiting coldly and without anticipation. She heard a door slam, somewhere far off down the valley. Someone nearby coughed. Presumably, it was one of the demons.

  Suddenly there was a voice in the darkness, an old woman’s voice. “Child!” it quailed. “I am Burning Light!”

  It was Danlupu. Burning Light in the Wilderness was Old Mother Danlupu. Oh, yes? Cara began to smile. She could see the old woman in her mind, bobbing and quavering, clasping and unclasping her hands, unable to keep them still. Danlupu’s spirit was so unsteady, she never could be still. Cara’s smile went rueful with impatience. This was the head of the cult? She held on to measured hope only by an effort of will.

  “Demons are here,” said Danlupu in a high, strained little croak that was meant to be unsettling. “They are all about us, in the air.” At that moment, from all around Cara, came a hooting sound, like owls, or children playing at ghosts. “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!” went the Old Women.

  “They will inspect you now. You will feel them tasting you with their little tongues.”Come on, nonsense, thought Cara, come on, feebleness. And it came. The demons’ tongues were pine branches, and the women whisked her with them, making sounds.

  Kasawa, Kasawa, old, feeble. But in the Other Tongue, they had a different name. In the Other Country, across the mountains, they were called the Wensenara. That name meant the Secret Rose. There they ruled whole cities and lived encircled by fine, high walls. It was not impossible, surely, that some of their spells were real? Spells were only words, rhythms that unlocked the powers of the mind. Surely then, they depended on the powers of the people who used them. Cara had great faith in her own strength. She was not Kasawa.

  “Now you must walk across a stone that comes from the Land of the Dead!” Danlupu whispered.Get on with it, thought Cara, and stepped up onto it, promptly. It was ice. Cara, whose family had been rich and knowledgeable, knew of ice. She could feel the sawdust they had stored it in, under her bare feet. She ignored the cold, and walked. Cold and nonsense. Tuh. She could endure both.

  “And now the test of fire,” said Danlupu, and led her. Cara could feel the old woman’s hand quiver, like a frightened animal. She could feel the heat of the coals in front of her. Aunt Liri had warned her beforehand that if she walked straight ahead, she would find that the embers were only warm. Cara walked and it was true, but she wouldn’t have minded if the coals had burned her.

  “She is accepted! She is accepted!” cried Danlupu. Cara felt herself unmoved. The Kasawa would accept anyone, but most especially her. People in the village still remembered what her family had been. The Kasawa would imagine Cara’s interest showed that important people valued their knowledge. Cara valued their knowledge. She would try it, and it if didn’t work her hatred would carry her on to something else. Her hands were taken again, and then there was a crackling as a screen of dried branches was lifted up. Cara knew she was supposed to duck under them, but she felt a twist of anger and broke her way through them instead, with her hands and covered head. She felt herself enclosed in a small space. Many hands guided her and made her sit on a block of stone.

  “We have a new daughter,” Danlupu said, sounding pleased. “She is yet only a Bud, but she will be nourished by the first three spells. She will be warmed by the Spell of Fire, and watered by the Spell of Rain, and coaxed upwards by the Spell of Sitting in Air. Then will come the fourth spell. She will learn the Spell of the Butterfly, who changes. She must transform herself into a beast of the air, or water, or field. She will spend one year in that form, learning how the animals live. Then she will return to us as a Rose, a Blossom.”

  This was worth less than the muck cleared out of the stables, Cara thought. At least muck fed the ground. This fed only silliness. How could they really expect anyone to believe they had all spent a year as an animal. It amused Cara to try to imagine what sort of creature Danlupu had become. A very tall, tottering sort of marsh bird, perhaps, with untidy feathers. But no, Cara thought, any bird inhabited by Danlupu would surely be eaten long before a year was out.

  Her hands were on her face again.

  Following the lines of hard, swollen, scar tissue across cheeks and chin, she picked at the extraordinary peaks of skin, like budding horns, where her lips had been. Enraged at herself, she pulled her hands away, and pressed them between her knees. She did not want to remind the Old Women why she was here. People had stopped calling her Cal Cara, which meant Dear Daughter. They had begun to call her Cal Clicki. That meant the Destroyed Woman.

  And how was she destroyed? Her family were as broken as her face, and she could not forgive, and she could not forget, but as long as she could think or feel or move a limb, she was not Destroyed. The very name Clicki provoked a rage in her. The very name Galu made her go still and cold.

  Galu, she told herself, as the Old Women chanted. Galu, she repeated, to give herself heart. Galu, this was for the Galu, not for her. Anything that had the slightest chance of working she would bear with, for their sake, for what they had done.

  The Galu had come and sliced her face, yes, with knives. The knives were blue with a tinge of yellow along the edges. They must have been coated with an irritant. Nothing else could explain the stinging and the scarring. Yes, but that was the least of it. They had poured bitter oil on the rice in the granary, and set it alight. They fed human blood to the pigs so that no one could eat them, and they chopped at the udders of the goats so that the poor beasts would never again give milk. The youngest and strongest of the bondmen were killed, and their bodies stuffed into the well, or left to bloat in the paddies, so that even her father’s fields were tainted.

  “We will give you curse enough, old man,” the First Son of the Galu had said. “We will give you a daughter whom no one will wed, and sons who cannot work.” Then the arms and legs of her two brothers were cut away.

  The Old Women were still speaking in a chorus, about flowers. In the dark, under the hood, Cara remembered, though she did not want to.

  She remembered the baby brother she had tended in her mother’s place, Soriyo, whom she had called Tikki. She had also called him Proud Sailor, or Mast Climber, because he would scramble up the high fir trees on the cliffs. Tikki now sat swathed like a baby again, his face still young and beautiful, his belly growing fat, his brown eyes staring. When she went through the village, bartering their rich carpets or polished tools for food, she w
ould come back to find that Tikki had rolled out of bed onto his back, and, like a turtle, could not right himself. Wandering at night, because she could not sleep with hatred, she would stumble over him, crawling on his belly across the floor to pass water outside the house so that she would not have to empty his pot in the morning. He heard the jingling bells of Unwanted People as they passed on their way to market. Their wives in brazen, coloured dresses, would sell themselves along the road. She saw him shift with impatience then. He had never had a woman. When she tried to stroke his hair he tossed his head to escape her gentle, woman’s touch.

  “Kill me, Cara,” he asked her. “It’s the only way to deny them what they wanted.” Part of her, like a dark undertow, agreed with him. Her other, elder brother Caro, who had her name but whom she had never really known, now lived with his wife’s family—the last shame. They shut him away in a shed far from their house. At night, Cara could hear him bellowing in wordless rage, even from her far end of the long canyon. And Ata, Father, who had carried her on his broad shoulders, she remembered him too. He sat up now, not in bed, but tied to his old chair, so that he would not fall out of it. He glared ahead, never moving. “I am the earth,” he told her once. “I cannot be moved.” She fed him soup, or porridge, and wiped his white and iron-grey beard. She heard the wind wuthering at night in their empty sheep folds.

  Now, in the chamber, while the women murmured prayers, her anger came again, with nothing under the hood to block it out. It was sick and old and weary, this anger. She had known what would happen; she had seen it coming; and she had told them it was coming, her brave and handsome, foolish kinsmen. Farmers, they were farmers. Despite the family history, what did they know of fighting? Woman, they had called her, girl, what do you know of war, and the answer was more than they did. In the library that was her inheritance from the days when the Village by Long Water was a fortress, Cara had read about what they faced.

  The Galu had succeeded as Family to the Gar han Gara, whose name meant Even Pressure over the Land. No one knew what Galu gro Galo meant. They had appeared as if from nowhere, promising an end to the drought. It had seemed even then to Cara’s father, that if they had the power to end the drought, they had the power to cause it as well. Year by year the tribute they demanded increased. For fifteen years, the villagers paid it. Finally Cara’s father, and others after him, had refused.

  Cara remembered the gathering in the library of their house. It was a meeting for the men, but Cara had come.

  “The Galu are the ruling Family of the City,” she had toldthem. “They have all the Fighting Schools of the Family under them—the Men who Swim like Eels, the Men who are Baked . . .”

  There was a murmur of amused tolerance. “A woman’s words,” said Hasepi, her uncle and her father’s rival. “Do you counsel that we leave the village, Cara?”

  “Yes! Or pay the tax, even if it seems impossible, if you are not willing to take the great steps that are necessary to defend us!”

  “Cara, this is not your province,” warned her father.

  “If you are not going to pay, then make defence.”

  “The river is barricaded, and watched,” said Hesepi.

  “A wooden barricade? They have boats with iron prows. And how many men walk the barricade at night? Five? Six? How many of them show up? How many of them are asleep? If you want to blockade the valley, you must use stone, like the old walls.”

  “And flood the lower fields? This is my land, not yours, you are talking of.”

  “And it is my father who leads this rebellion, and the Galu know that.”

  “You have a wilful daughter, Eskigal. Rely on those who have experience, girl, not words in their heads from books.”

  “The only experience you have of war,” said Cara, tears welling up in her eyes and anger blocking her throat, “is setting dogs on women!”

  So the Village by Long Water had waited in its widening of the canyon, pastures and orchards on the higher slopes, paddies on the lower, and rows of houses cut into the rock of the sheer white cliffs.

  The Galu descended from above, at night, carried on the backs of the Men who Advance like Spiders. With them had also come the Men who Cut Horses, and the Men who have been Baked, and the Men with Wrists of Steel, and they were led by the Son of the Galu. His name was Galo gro Galu, and no one knew what that name meant.

  No one, that is, except Cara.

  She could see his face now. She would never be able to forget it, a smiling face, as white as the underbelly of fishes, with blue veins visible under the skin, white hair in oiled waves, beardless. He had smiled, smiled with dead, grey teeth, and wore long brown robes, like a woman shut away for menstruation. He wore no armour, no armour on a raid.

  When they came, Cara was sleeping in her bed. She still remembered the warmth of her room, in its last moment of security. She heard a noise, like the hissing of cats. Very suddenly, she was wide awake, listening. There was a slight clattering of metal on stone.Arrows, thought Cara, and a bondman dropping his sword. She was surprised at how quickly she moved. She threw off the quilt and stumbled through the lightless corridor to her brother’s room. “Up, Tikki, up,” she said, shaking him. “It’s come.” She grabbed his sleep-warmed arm; he stooped to pick up something; and she pulled him into the corridor to run to the last room where there was a secret cellar. Then, as suddenly as if there had been an explosion, the only door in or out of the Important House burst open and warriors and torchlight spilled into it.

  Tikki lunged forward, armed only with a sickle. A man coated in armour that should have weighed him down spun lightly around Tikki, and coming from behind hugged his throat and grabbed his sword arm.

  “Into that room, dear daughter, or he dies,” the warrior said, with a smile in his voice.

  There was a loud shout from farther down the corridor.Father! Cara thought. She thought they had simply struck him down. Then she heard him shout again. “Get out of my house! Villains! Men without souls!” They pulled him along the corridor in his nightshirt, a broad shouldered, bearded oak of a man. His great brown legs had little lines of wrinkles just under the swelling of the muscles of his thighs.

  They were herded into the room, Cara’s own room, with its ancient fresco of a feast, and its reed mats, the dried grasses she had put in a vase that morning. Beyond her windows, in the night, there was already fire, and unearthly shrieks from the animals. In her room stood the Men with Wrists of Steel, their armour in ringed segments that made them look like worms. There were the Men who are Baked, as she had read of them. Their skin was a caked, yellow scarring that felt no pain and resisted the slashing of swords. Their skin was cracked around the joints and their faces were like loaves of bread, with only wisps of hair and little eyes like currants. Her elder brother, Caro, and his shivering child wife were pushed into the room last of all, and then the soldiers parted into ranks and the Son of the Family, as silver as early morning, strode into Cara’s room with his dead grey smile.

  “We are not here to kill you,” he said. The smile was fixed and was turned towards each of them in turn. “If we kill you, the village would benefit. It would inherit your lands and this house. We are not here to benefit this village. We are here to make it work for us. You will help us do that. You will always be with them to remind them what happens to rebels. You will horrify them for us.” The smile turned to Cara’s father. “We will give you a daughter that no one will wed, and sons who cannot work.”

  “We cannot live, you take so much!” her father roared. “Do you want us all to die?”

  “Eventually, yes,” replied the Son. Then he said, “Start with the daughter. He must see his whole life demolished, step by step.”

  Cara’s arms were gripped and she was pulled down. She felt fury that her human soul should be overcome by animal strength. She could not move. She could not fight. She would not scream, she promised herself. She would not cry. Death in any form had to be faced in the end. The soldiers held her on her ow
n bed.

  Tikki’s arms were smooth and thick, with beautiful workings under the sheen of his skin. The arm with the sickle broke free and slashed the neck of a Man who is Baked. A warrior with a horse’s tail hanging from his helmet turned and with a casual swipe of the sword, cut through Tikki’s arm at the shoulder. It hung, held by a few ligaments and skin. Tikki gaped, unbelieving. With a brisk wrench the arm was removed and white powder was thrown over the wound. A warrior bound it with white strips, as Tikki watched, held up on his feet.

  Cara’s mind went dull. The Men who are Baked creaked when they walked. They creaked when they came towards her, creaked when they lifted up thonged skirts. Their genitals too had been burned away. Cara heard the unbuckling of armour behind her.

  “No,” said the Son of the Galu, a rise of warning in his voice. The warriors paused and relented. “Yes,” he said in approval. “I do not like that,” he said. “I only like the knife.” Then the knives had come. So skilfully wielded were they, that Cara would never have children.

  A grinning face, like Death itself.

  His first name, Cara had learned, in a tongue more ancient than that of the Other Country, meant Slug or Worm. Gro meant simply “inside.” His last name, Galu, the Family name, had made her breath catch when she understood it. It was the final, deepest reason for her being here among the Wensenara. The name Galu meant The Secret Rose.

  “Cara? Cara?” Someone was calling her name. She felt herself helped to her feet, and the hood was tugged away from her head. Her ruined face felt naked, as if the nerves were still exposed. She blinked and looked about her.

  She saw the Sanctum of the Wensenara. It was an old, disused feed bin hollowed out of the rock, with a few daubs of paint depicting the sign “Ama” for Mother. The ceremonial hood looked like something used to keep pots warm. It was being turned over and over in Aunt Liri’s hands. It was Liri, her mother’s sister, who had first suggested she join the cult. She beamed at Cara now, swollen it seemed with pride and excitement. And there, to Cara’s surprise, was Latch, her own bondwoman who hated her, and her maiden sister, Hara. They watched her, tight-lipped and pinched in the face.