The Warrior Who Carried Life

by Geoff Ryman

  Dear Daughter of

  the Important House

  They had to live wilder and faster. By the time they reached the Village by Long Water, they rode horses that they had stolen. Feeling themselves to be reckless and outside the law, they foolishly dressed like it. Instead of the plain dress of common folk, they had taken the rich garb that Stefile had dreamt of, plundered from the same caravan as the horses.

  Stefile wore a fine sheath dress from Aegoptus, to the South, made from the bleached fibres from the stems of a plant. It was translucent. She had to wear it over men’s trousers to ride. She had a tiny gold flower inserted in a nostril, and a crown of gold, and a sword, and a long red cape. Cara was an even stranger sight: a massive, scarred warrior in armour, but with large hangings of jewellery from his ears and neck and arms, and great swathes of lace billowing out from his shoulders and tucked away into his belt.

  Anyone would know that they were outlaws.

  They rode up the great canyon, between walls of sheer rock that were a blazing white, moving in and out of cool shade, past rapids, where prickles of moisture in the air danced on their skin. They had to cross landscapes of wet fallen rock at the base of waterfalls, where everything was made dazzling by sunlight in mist, and they couldn’t hear each other speak for the roaring noise. They made up their minds to go to The Other Country, in the North. The library of Cara’s house had books that would tell them about the language spoken there. They made each other very excited, imagining the life they would have there and the things they would see.

  Sometimes, though, in the heat of the day, away from the river, Stefile would go morose. “And this year, then. Is it true about this year?” she asked, her voice begging to hear that it was not.

  “It is, Stef. True.”

  Stefile could not really imagine it; she could not really believe that her handsome friend had once been a woman and would be one again. She gave the reins of her horse a sudden, uncalled for flick that meant bitterness. Either it was true, or Cara’s insistence meant that she was mad, and Stefile could accept neither. “Well, can you make yourself as you are now, again?”

  “I can’t, no, the spell only works once.”

  “So what happens to me then?”

  “We can only decide what to do when it happens,” Cara said. “Only then.”

  “How long is that? Until then?”

  “Through this winter, to the end of next summer.”

  “How will it happen?”

  “I don’t know, Stef.”

  “I have followed you, I have come with you. I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t believe it either, sometimes,” said Cara in a quiet voice.

  It was nearly dark when they entered the Village by Long Water, passing the first house, Manu Norig’s. The air was full of the smells of cooking; low talk came out the windows through which candlelight flickered on warm-coloured walls. They came upon Mala, a girl Cara had known from childhood, carrying water from the river. Without thinking, Cara greeted her. “Mala! Hello!” The girl glanced up at the armoured man and his blazoned doxy, and looked down, her face closed tight, and began to walk very quickly. Cara remembered then, and clicked at the horse to move on. Mala heard the sound, and broke into a run, dropping the bucket. She slammed and barred the door of her house behind her.

  As the darkness grew, so did the darkness of Cara’s thoughts. It was fine to talk of adventure in The Other Country; it was fine to see her village again, but inside her house, as enduring as death, awaited the ruins of her family, the desecrated bodies of her father and brother. They rode past the rocks where cloth was beaten clean by the river; they rode up a hard, gravelly track, to the base of the cliffs and around the corner of a giant wall of rock.

  “My house,” said Cara in a far-away voice, yearning for the house of her past.

  “That is where you live?” asked Stefile in wonder.

  The Important House was hewn out of the rock, midway up the cliff face, a line of dark windows over an overhang of limestone. Beside it, a kind of ceilinged yard had been hollowed out, with pens and stables within it for the animals in winter. The yard was empty. Two ramps of stairs made a zigzag up the face of the rock to it. There were buckets on pulleys, down to the well that no one drank from now. Around the well, below the house, clustered the round stone huts of the bondmen, and spreading out below them in layers of grassy ruin were the rice paddies down to the river and up the other side.

  It was a sad, slow ride up the steps, forward in one direction, back in another. The house seemed not so high off the ground as Cara remembered it, or so grand. Within the shelter of the rock it was already night, though the clouds above the opposite side of the canyon were still pink. They put the horses into the pens.

  “Do you want me with you?” Stefile asked.

  Cara thought, and answered honestly. “No, Stef. Stay here. I don’t know what I’m going to find.”

  The candles were in the old place, with the flints, just inside the only door. Cara struck them and the old kitchen flickered in ghostly light. The great round cistern, the fireplace that filled the yard with smoke, the old grey table. By the door was a row of heavy shoes that had not been needed since . . . Cara broke off the thought in haste.

  “Who’s there?” called out a voice, a strange voice, quavering in fear, that Cara at first did not recognise. She did not ever think of her father as being afraid.

  “It’s me, Father. Cara.” Her male voice sounded deep and close by within the rock. A new misgiving came upon her. Had Aunt Liri told them what had happened? Had he believed her? Would he even know Cara for who she was? Steeling herself for that, and for what she would see, Cara went into the next room.

  It was her father’s favourite room, the library, the only room in the house that had windows in two directions. She held the candle over her head.

  Her father and brothers sat strapped, limbless, to chairs and their bandages were filthy and they were riddled with what looked like sores and their hair was matted, and their ribs and the sinews of their necks showed straggly through their skin, and the place stank of urine. On her father’s face was a long fat vein that looked like an abscess.

  “Where is Liri? Where is she?” Cara wailed. “I told her to look after you! I told her to feed and wash you! Where is Liri?”

  “Liri? Liri cannot come near us,” her father raged, with feverish eyes sunk in a hollow face. “No one can come near us, for what you have done!”

  “Oh, Cara,” said Tikki, in a small sad voice.

  “Abomination! Abomination! Man-woman! Witch! You brought this on us!”

  “Brought what? Father, what is wrong?”

  She moved towards him, to hold him, comfort him, untangle his knotted hair. “Get away!” he roared at her.

  “Cara! Don’t come near!” Tikki wailed, and they writhed and twisted and shrugged their bonds, trying to rock the chairs backwards. “Don’t come near us!” Tikki whispered.

  The vein in her father’s face seemed to throb; what looked at first like two rows of metal thorns emerged through the skin. They glinted in the candlelight, encircling flesh, closing. The flesh disappeared, and out of her father’s face another tiny face slid out. It grinned, befanged, a visage like a child might model of a human face in clay, with tiny eyes that blinked. From all the sores, across the once handsome shoulders and breasts and bellies of her family, from behind their ears, out of their nostrils slipped things as thick as a finger. Worms.

  Cara’s male voice bellowed, harsh with horror, and she stepped back, moaning, shaking her head. “What is it? What is it?” Stefile called from outside. She ran into the room, and stopped, and fell utterly silent. Cara, shivering, found a chair. Stefile stood behind her, clasping the back of her neck.

  The worms looked at them, blinking. The worms spoke.

  “We do not want to do this,” said the worm in her father’s face, in a high, piping voice.

  “Forgive us, mistress,” said another.
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  “The Galu make us do this,” said a third. “We were their enemies, and this is how they punish us.”

  “But we must eat to live,” said the worm in her father’s face.

  “Do not come too near us. Do not sleep in this house, or we will find you too. When your family dies, do not carry them out. Leave them, or we will slip into you as you bear them.”

  “How . . . long do they have to live?” Cara found herself asking them.

  The worms turned to each other, and then looked back. “Sometime yet, mistress.” Cara’s father groaned, and shook his head. “We try not to pierce the vital organs for as long as we can. We try to make it last.”

  “We are sorry, mistress.”

  “We are sorry, sister.”

  “We were human too.”

  “They came in the night, Cara,” said Tikki. “They covered the floor. We couldn’t escape.”

  “How many nights ago?” Cara asked, and Tikki told her. The worms had come the night she had tried to kill the Galu. This was their revenge.

  “What are the Galu?” Cara demanded. “What manner of thing?”

  “They walk like men, mistress,” pleaded the worms, in fearful, squeaking voices.

  “They look like men.”

  “But they are not?” Cara demanded.

  “Oh do not make us answer that! We must not answer that! If we do that, they will punish us again.”

  “How could they punish you more horribly than this?” Cara asked, her voice controlled and even.

  “The Galu can always think of something worse,” whined the worm in her father’s face.

  “If you tell me,” Cara said, “I promise to set you free.”

  The worms looked at each other, back and forth, and nodded their heads. “They walk like men, but they are not. Their love is different. To have sons, they must be murdered, out of hatred, by the children of God. If they tempt the fallen children so, then a blossom rises out of them, bearing three eggs, which grow into their children who are exactly like them. The Galu cannot change. They can only grow more numerous.”

  “Which they are doing now.”

  “You were not the first.”

  “They love killing,” said the first worm.

  “They love pillage,” said another.

  “They yearn for the knife,” said a third.

  “They will bring ruin.”

  “Cara,” said Stefile, gripping her shoulder. “Cara, we must be away. You heard what they said. They will come for us.”

  “Yes,” said Cara in the same, flat, damaged, weary voice. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  Outside, in the yard, four of the Old Women stood, arms folded.

  “So, Cara,” said Mother Danlupu, and tutted. “You return to see what your precipitous spells have done.”

  “Casting yourself as a great sorceress,” said Hara. “You have caused a great disruption.”

  It was Latch whose eyes were hardest and most steady with hatred. “What a fool you look,” she said, her smile arching with disgust at the earrings and the lace and, of course, at Stefile.

  “Is there no pity?” Cara asked. “Then you are smaller than the worms. Even the worms have pity.” She drew her sword. “Get out of my house,” she said, calm, heavy.

  “Abomination!” whispered Latch, smiling. “Abomination,” they all whispered together. “Abomination,” and made signs against her, to keep away the evil things that followed her path.

  “Or would you rather sit in my father’s lap!” Cara suddenly roared, and grabbed hold of the nearest, old Danlupu, and pulled her backwards by both of her frail arms towards the house. Danlupu shrieked in terror at actually being seized, and bobbed, bird-like and helpless in Cara’s grasp, and began to weep. “Where is your Kasawa magic now? Where are your mighty spells?” Cara raged, and shook her, and the old woman began to beg.

  “Cara, stop, please, she is old!” Stefile begged.

  “In! In, and sit among the worms!” Cara held the old woman above the ground and her legs pumped in the air.

  “Cara, please!” shouted Stefile.

  Cara threw the old woman to the stone floor of the yard, and sat on her, and pressed a sword onto her throat. “What are you to the Galu?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know what you mean!” the old woman wailed.

  “Their full name means the Secret Rose, they become the Secret Rose, and Wensenara, your name means the same thing. What are you to the Galu?”

  “I know nothing about the Galu!” the woman wept, wretched.

  “When we came to offer help!” Hara’s voice shook with indignation.

  “Brave warrior to strike at an old women!” hissed Latch.

  “Hah!” cried Cara, and slapped her stingingly with the flat of her sword, and Latch shrieked and clutched her side, convinced she had been cut. Her sister gathered her in her arms and pulled her away.

  “Out! Out! Out!” Cara raved and hauled the old woman to her feet and flung her after her friends, who were running now, down the steps, sobbing with fear.

  Silence. The sound of wind up the valley and the distant sound of weeping. Very suddenly, Cara sat down on the stone.

  “Cara?” whispered Stefile. “Cara, Cara, Dear One. We can only leave. Come on.” She tried to pull, but Cara was unmovable, and staring.

  The wind in the reeds by the river made sounds like a sleeping child. All along the valley were lights in windows, as dim as fireflies, except around Cara’s house and the houses of her people, which were dark. There was no moon, only stars, but they were bright enough to show the river, winding as it always had, and to cast a line of silver along the top of the opposite cliffs, as large and familiar as the memories of her father. From somewhere, far away, someone began to sing in a high, unsteady voice.

  Tears spilled suddenly out of Cara’s eyes. She had to gasp to get her breath back, and she stood up abruptly and strode to the corner of the yard, to the stables that still smelled of animals, and pressed her face into the corner, caressing the stone with her forehead, and she wept, helplessly.

  “Oh, Cara,” said Stefile, and tried to comfort her, taking her arm, but the arm was as beyond comforting as the stone. “Cara, don’t weep. Weeping never does any good. It is bad to weep.”

  Cara simply turned to her, eyes bulging and wet, and screamed. What else was there to do but weep? She tore the earrings from her ears, and the lace from her shoulders.

  “Oh Cara,” whispered Stefile, and softly held her. “Peace.” Cara writhed in her arms, to fight off easy comfort, then succumbed to the pain and implacable reality, and rested against Stefile. They stood together a long time, in silence, as darkness progressed.

  Finally Cara was able to speak. “She saw it.”

  “Who?”

  “Ama,” replied Cara, and staggered away from the wall, pulling Stefile with her to the edge of the courtyard. “All of it,” she said in a far-away voice. “The Galu, the murders, and that in there. None of us understood, none of us knew what she meant. We thought she was mad.” Trembling, as if with weakness, Cara sat, slumping clumsily, legs dangling over the edge of the cliff, as she had when she was a child. “The harvest of blood, she said. The drought of womankind. The City is going to be destroyed, Stefile. We didn’t understand. I don’t think she wanted us to, then.”

  She stared ahead, unblinking. “They make us bestial, Stefile. They drive us. They make us as bad as them. They are not born of women, there are no women among them, they do not know of family and love and mothering. They only know the knife, and ruin and silence. They will grow and grow and grow, and we can’t fight them. If we fight them, we make them grow.”

  “Cara. My hand. You’re crushing it,” said Stefile, carefully, for Cara was beginning to unnerve her. Cara loosed her grip, and moved the hand to her lips, to kiss it. Instead, distracted, she began to mumble it in her mouth, taste its living saltiness. Fraught with wizardry and grief, she was seeing a picture in her mind.

  She saw a field, a wh
eat field she somehow knew, far away and it had been burnt black, and an army marched across it, an army of Galu, in perfect grinning ranks, each with a fixed, identical smile. Humankind was in danger of being replaced.

  “It’s not a question of revenge, Stef. It’s not a question of escape. There is no escape. We have to stop them, now, while they are still small.”

  “We can’t do that,” Stefile said, dreading another mission, and let a light blow from her clenched fist fall on Cara’s shoulder.

  “We have to. We’re the only ones who know.”

  “How, Cal? How can you fight something you can’t allow yourself to hit?”

  “We could tie them up. Lure them, trick them, into a cage.” She looked up at Stefile, blinking, confused, but no longer distraught and staring. The look reassured Stefile enough for her to become cross.

  “Oh, yes, and who will have to help you? How many times will they be fooled? How will you stop their brothers coming to untie them? Threaten them with a sword? And what about Haliki? He knew. What if all the Fighting Schools know, and are with them?”

  “It will . . . have to be a new answer. The answer is there. It already exists. My mother said there would be an answer. I think she said I would find it.” Cara tried to clear her mind, but it kept coming back to violence and entrapment. She felt a need to dissolve all her old ways of thinking. She said simply, “I need a vision.” She stood up.

  “Oh,Cara,” said Stefile in sudden fury. “Yes, you are a man, I suppose, to go down the wells.”

  “My mother went to the wells. She had a vision.” Unaccountably, Cara began to feel almost cheerful.

  “The vision,” said Stefile in weary scorn. “It is stupidity. The men march off into the hills, and starve themselves and drink nothing, and boil themselves in steam until they give themselves a fever, and then they say that they have seen things. To no one’s surprise but their own. The vision means nothing. It is babble. Even my brothers have had a vision.”

  “What did they see?” Cara asked, suddenly amused.