The Executioness

by Tobias S. Buckell

  That was a true thing. But I held the axe out in my two hands. “You want me to use this axe, not a sword? Or a scimitar like you?”

  Bojdan tapped the hilt of his blade. “Do you have a sword? Have you suddenly come into money, and can afford to buy one from someone here in the caravan?”

  “No,” I muttered.

  “Then,” he said, “it will be the axe, because it is what you have. I have held it, while you were sleeping. It is well balanced. It is light, and easy to wield. Hold it two handed, just like when chopping wood. And remember, you hold a unique weapon.”

  He moved my hand up a little, and then the other down. “A unique weapon?” I asked.

  “Most men hold their shield with the left hand. With your axe, it is easy to switch it to a left handed strike, easier than learning to use a sword with your left. And you have a swing that comes easy to their unprotected side.” He held his shield up to demonstrate. “Swing slowly.”

  Like chopping at a tree from the left, I did, and I could see what he meant. He had to move aside to get the shield in front of him. “I’m making you move around,” I said.

  “You’re controlling the fight. From the first swing. There are other things you can do with the axe. For example, you can swing it past them and yank back, getting their neck with the downward facing edge of the axe’s point. You can stab at them with the upward point of the blade. Spike them with the side away from the blade shaped so conveniently just like a spearpoint. Use the axe as a hook, to sweep them off their feet.”

  There was more. And halfway through the slowly shown moves, I stopped. “You know a great deal about fighting with axes.”

  Bojdan paused. “It’s a peasant’s weapon… and my first.”

  “Why do so few use it then?” I asked. “Everyone has one.”

  Bojdan thought about it, as if for the first time. “It’s not the weapon of a warrior, but of the low peoples. It’s for chopping trees and bramble, not flesh. That is what fighters say. Did the guards in Khaim work for their meals, or do nothing but soldier?”

  “No,” I shook my head. “They only soldiered.”

  He grinned, and warmed to subject. “So whether mercenaries or trained soldiers, it’s the people who hold weapons who choose what they use the most. And they are not the same people who farm. So the axe isn’t seen as a battle weapon.”

  I understood. “And that is good for me.”

  “Maybe,” Bojdan shrugged. “There are many unusual weapons on the field. People who spend their lives loving weapons bring their preferred lover to the field of play. But it is not those small things that determine a battle. That is decided by things that take place long before foes meet.”

  I perked up. Bojdan commanded the fighting men of the caravan. It sounded like he had seen more combat than just scaring off bandits. “Like what?”

  “It is how many soldiers are raised,” he said. “Your axe will do you no good against a well aimed arrow. But an archer would have trouble escaping the jab of a sword. And so on. It is the mix of weapons and people, and how many you wield. It is how fresh they are. How healthy. Valor and intention are good for the heat of a battle, but if you are vastly outnumbered, there is only so much bravery can do.”

  I hefted the axe and thought about it. Bravery while charging the four Paikans had only gotten me beaten and left on the ground. “You need to win the battle before your first stroke.”

  Bojdan grinned. “Yes. And speaking of strokes, right there is a sapling we can take back for firewood for the cooks. Remember, chop from your left, the tree’s right, to get past its shield.”

  “What shield?” I asked.

  Bojdan walked past me even as I said that and strapped his shield to a branch that jutted out enough to be used as a temporary arm.

  “Get to it!” he ordered.

  And I took on the small tree as if it were a raider, or as I now thought of them, a Paikan, swinging past the shield and biting the axe into the meat of the sapling’s bark over and over again, until it toppled forward and Bojdan yanked me out of the way.

  “Never get so focused that you forget what else is around you,” he said, as the tree struck the ground beside us.

  For four weeks we continued. Slow moving practices against each other, and fast ones when I faced more trees. Bojdan carved a blunt axe out of wood for me, swaddled with cloth, and a light wooden scimitar padded just the same for himself.

  With these we dueled in the ever thickening woods beside the caravan. The road began to slowly move back away from the coast, into the foothills. The ever-present smell of salt faded away, and we stopped passing seaside villages.

  Few towns existed here in the thick overgrowth, due to bramble. Only a few solitary homesteads fought back, alone, becoming trapped by the increasing thicket and bramble just miles north of the road.

  Occasionally we saw dim figures watching us go past, and the guards fingered their arquebuses, but nothing ever happened.

  For a big man Bojdan moved damnably fast, constantly bruising my ribs and shoulders as we practiced, even slamming the padded scimitar down on my neck with swipes of his practice weapon.

  Every time he hit me he’d mutter ‘dead,’ in a toneless voice.

  But by the fourth week, he stopped saying that and moved on to ‘maimed.’

  After we fought, we’d run to catch back up to the caravan, sitting on the most rearward defense wagon, panting and catching our breath.

  I slept in a bunking wagon, filled with slat beds mounted on the walls. Ten women shared the tiny space, but I hardly knew them, even after four weeks. Except for Anezka, who’d been there as I woke up from my bramble sleep.

  I came to the wagon always tired after Bojdan’s training.

  I would crawl right into my bunk and fall sleep.

  Bojdan and his men never saw me weaken. I’d worked among men in the butcher shops enough to know their minds. To know that to show weakness, tears, or anything other than humor and rage was to invite judgment.

  But alone in the bunks, when sleep failed me, and I was alone with nothing more than the sounds of snoring women and the darkness that pressed against me, then

  I would sometimes surrender to tears as I thought about Set and Duram.

  Because of that, I feared being alone with my mind. So I trained every moment I could, worked every second I could bear.

  At first the women in the bunking wagon did not speak to me, or even meet my eyes, until the oldest, a lady with a leathery weathered face called Alka, asked if maybe I was fighting with Bojdan because I was not really a woman.

  “I bore two children the Paikans took,” I told her. “Torn from me like the old healer tore them from my body when they both refused to come easily. Would you have me expose myself to everyone in here to prove you wrong?”

  I grabbed the hems of my skirts as if to raise them.

  Alka shook her head quickly, scandalized, and the younger girls in the wagon laughed at her. “Of course she’s a woman,” the one called Anezka said. “She is the Executioness, remember? Not the Executioner!”

  I shook my head at Jal’s name for me. “Don’t call me that,” I asked. “I am just Tana.”

  The women settled at Anezka’s berating. Anezka was, I had found out, a Quartermaster. The large mass of caravaners in the trailing edge provided the needs of the whole human train. Anezka and others like her handled accounting for supplies, and kept the trade goods under lock and key.

  “There’s the Roadmaster,” she had explained once over a stewpot hanging from the balcony of the bunking wagon as we ate, “and then there’s the Quartermasters. We really run it all.”

  The more I listened to the women chat in the wagon, the more I realized they were the grease that kept the caravan’s wheels from seizing.

  There were questions and pieces of information constantly bandied around me between the bunks: whose aurochs needed better feed? How fast was the caravan going? By the way, Anezka had noted a couple days ago, the flo
ur was getting low, if they didn’t get some barrels refilled, they’d run out in a week.

  All these things and more these women knew.

  Jal directed the caravan, but my bunkmates made the caravan a living creature.

  And I was not one of them, though with the exception of Alka, they all treated me with careful politeness.

  At the start of the fifth week, Bojdan sent me out with Anezka and three other women for water, as one of the casks had sprung a leak.

  “We are near a small river that runs beside the road,” he said. “Keep a guard. It’s a safe area, but be careful.”

  Up and down the caravan flags whipped up onto small wooden masts at the rear of the wagons, giving the order to slow their pace.

  Anezka and her three companions pulled along a two wheeled cart with them, which had three empty barrels on it. They laughed and joked as we moved down a narrow dirt path through the trees out of sight of the caravan, to the babble of the tiny stream.

  “I like to oversee where the water comes from,” Anezka said. “Sometimes these three get timid and don’t want to wade clear out to the center where it’s freshest.”

  “It was just once,” one of them protested.

  “We all suffered for it for a week,” Anezka said. She looked over at me. “Will you leave us, when we get to Paika?”

  “Yes.” I walked beside her, and I looked around the forest as she talked.

  “That’s a shame. You could spend forever in that strange city, and never find someone,” she said.

  “You’ve seen it?” I asked.

  “Right after I joined the caravan to see the world, and Jal was negotiating the rights to travel in their territory,” Anezka said. “Building on building crammed into mazes of leaning streets. It’s on a hill, and everything looks ready to fall over on top over everything else. And it goes on and on, from the foothills and up.”

  We reached the river, and I helped her pull a barrel from the wagon and roll it into the river with a splash. Anezka guided it to the center, her skirts knee-deep in the strong current. “Well, if they are there to be found, I will find them. And if they are not to be found…”

  “Then what?” Anezka asked.

  “I will kill the bastards that killed them,” I said quietly.

  “That is good,” said one of the other women. “You do what few of us can. Most of us lost families to the Paikans, or our husbands. That’s why we joined the caravan. What else were we to do?”

  Anezka nodded. “They cull us. Or they take our youngest to large camps on some of the islands in their harbors, and off the coasts where we can never get to them. It’s there that they teach them the Paikan ways and thoughts.”

  Everyone nodded. “Paikan ways: they’re growing and growing.”

  Anezka then stopped the barrel back up. I moved to help her roll it, but she pointed.

  Five men had slipped out of the shadows of the trees on the opposite bank, hardly twenty feet from us, and I hadn’t noticed them. They had old, rusty swords, and were dressed in little more than rags.

  Realizing they had been seen, they splashed awkwardly across the hip-deep water at us, swords in hand.

  I picked up my axe. “Run for the caravan, but if they catch you, resist them any way you can,” I shouted. I saw the grins on the men’s faces as their splashing steps soaked their torn clothes. “Go!”

  So much for vengeance, I thought, my heart pounding. I would die slowing these attackers down enough so that Anezka and her friends could get to safety.

  Well, there were worse things to spend a life on.

  I only hoped my sons would forgive me.

  The men did not realize I’d picked up an axe, and I let my body shield it from their view.

  Until they got close. Then I drew it from behind me and swung at the nearest man. He had his sword up already, as his compatriots ran past, leaving him to deal with just me.

  After blocking his swing, I slid the axe down the blade, then shoved it forward, puncturing his stomach with the spike at the top of the axe’s curve.

  We both looked surprised that it had worked, and then I shoved him free to lie in the river, crying and groaning as his stomach spilled into the formerly clean river water.

  The four men had caught themselves four struggling women and were laughing.

  I ran, almost tripping over my skirts, and raised my axe up into the air and buried it into the lower spine of the first man I caught up to. Anezka, pinned underneath, screamed loudly enough the three remaining men paused. They looked over as the man on top of her rolled off. He began to spasm and gush blood now that the axe had been yanked free.

  The three others shoved the women away, and began to move at me.

  Bojdan hadn’t taught me how to take on three opponents at once.

  But he had taught me that a fight was won before the fight began. Digging deep inside I calmed myself and met their gazes with a grin.

  It was an anticipatory grin. As if the first two men I had just killed were no more than an appetizer, and this was about to be a course I was looking forward to.

  Never mind that I had killed one half because he expected no real resistance, and the other because his back was turned.

  “Who are you, lady?” one bandit asked.

  And Anezka stepped behind me. “Can’t you tell by the damned blade!” she cried out indignantly. “This is the Executioness!”

  They looked at the axe, and I wiped the blood from its edge with my thumb and tested the sharpness.

  When I looked back up at them, I saw I had won this battle, for there was fear there now. “The one who faced an entire party of Paikans,” one of them asked.

  “Yes, that one,” Anezka said.

  I walked forward, axe in hand, and the nearest man threw his sword at my feet. “I surrender my weapon,” he said.

  After a moment, the others did too.

  “Pick up the swords,” I ordered Anezka. She did, and handed them to the other women. “Run for the caravan,” I whispered to her. “Get Bojdan and some of his men, quick!”

  “Yes,” Anezka replied, wide-eyed. And she spun and ran.

  I turned back. Were there more men out in the woods? If I let these three go, would they come back for their revenge? “You three, see those barrels?” I asked.

  They nodded.

  “Get them aboard that cart, and pull it over here,” I ordered. They did so, quickly and with some grunting, and once the cart was in front of me, I hopped on. “Now follow those women back to the road. Do not give me any excuses to take your heads.”

  They again nodded.

  Sitting on top of a barrel, I watched them closely as they pulled the cart through the forest to the road. I remained calm outwardly, but inside my heart raced, my breath came short, and I was terrified of every shadow in the trees.

  When we broke out onto the road, the caravan was still slowly passing us by.

  Bojdan and three of his men rushed up to us. They looked at my prisoners with some shock.

  I leapt down from the cart, my bloodied axe over my shoulder, and grabbed Bojdan by the arm. “I would talk to you over here,” I said, and lead him around to the other side of a wagon, dodging the aurochs.

  Then I let my legs fold, and my breath come in staggered gasps. “Piss on them,” I spat, my voice breaking with fear. “There were five of them and one of me. Five!”

  Bojdan held me up. “Come, you need to go lie down,” he said gently. “You’ve done enough.”

  He walked me back down the road to a bunk wagon, empty of occupants. “What are you…” I asked.

  But he shoved me up onto the platform. “Go inside, rest for a moment, gather your thoughts. I will deal with these remaining men.”

  My hands shook, and I watched him pace along the wagon for a moment, then dart through the caravan and disappear.

  I crept into the darkness and curled up on someone’s unfamiliar smelling bunk. I kept curling up until my body could bear being squeezed by its
elf no more.

  When Bojdan finally came back, it might have been after an hour, or five. All I’d done was stare at a chipped piece of wood on the wall. I’d felt that the wagon had stopped. Maybe the whole caravan had. I knew dimly something was going on, but until that moment, hadn’t cared about finding out.

  Bojdan said nothing, but sat in the back of the wagon and waited until I rolled over to look at him.

  “It was different,” I finally said. “Not like the execution, or when I went for the raider in anger.”

  Bojdan just sat there.

  I continued. “I had to stay in control, and calm. I had to win the fight first.”

  “You did well,” said Bojdan. “Never doubt it. You are a good fighter.”

  “Why did the caravan stop?” I asked. “It’s not supposed to stop, right?”

  Bojdan grimaced. “Our way is blocked by a scouting party. Somewhere out in the woods, north of us, a man called Jiva has been raising the discontented to fight against the Paikans. You met five of their number earlier. They’re all from culled villages and towns out there.”

  “What do they want?”

  “Food, weapons, anything we have that we can trade. Their stores ran low in the march south through bramble and forest. They look hungry enough to attack us for our stores. And Jal is reluctant to trade with them, as the Paikans will be upset. So… negotiation continues.”

  “Ah.” I turned back over.

  After many long moments I twisted around and found Bojdan still there.

  “I will be fine,” I said.

  But the warrior shook his head. “Few are ever truly ‘fine’ after what you just did, after what we do. We can get back to being a reflection of our former self, but it’s somehow not quite the same. And only another like us understands what we mean.”

  “I know, but I want to be left to myself for now,” I told him. “Just for now.”

  “I will send for you when it is time for the night watch,” he said. “I will need all the warriors I can fetch by my side. Particularly if Jal and the scouts can’t come to an agreement.”

  I felt the wagon shake as he stepped out onto the road.

  Part Three