Storm Bride

by J. S. Bangs

  The Powers must have heard her. The ground grew prickly with fallen needles under her feet. She slowed then felt a spruce bough brush against her hair.

  Saotse dropped to her knees and crawled forward, feeling her way over the spruce roots—going deeper into the underbrush, to where the horses wouldn’t go, to where she might hide and be safe. Twigs and needles scratched her arms and face.

  She pushed ahead until she bumped into the base of a little bush, and she realized she was hemmed in by thicket too dense for her to crawl through. Any growth dense enough to stop her would certainly keep out the horses. The warriors would only find her if they came through on foot, and Oarsa help her, that wouldn’t happen. She curled onto her side and waited.

  Only then did she have time to wonder, Where are Oire and Uya? No one had followed her into the wood. There were no voices near her, no footsteps breaking through the brush. She rose to an elbow and strained to listen. But she heard nothing that might be their approach.

  She called anxiously, “Uya? Oire?”

  There was no response—but of course there wouldn’t be. They wouldn’t be foolish enough to shout and draw attention to themselves in the middle of a battle. Hopefully they had done as she had and curled beneath the roots of a spruce to wait for the warriors to recede.

  She lowered herself back to the ground. “Oarsa, if you have ever heard me, hear me now,” she whispered. “Help us. Help us.”

  Chapter 7

  Uya

  Uya would not believe that Nei was dead. Despite the gouge of the spear that ran from her breast to her belly, despite the pools of blood that stained the dirt of the footpath, despite the old woman’s stubborn, inexplicable silence. Her Eldest was immortal and impervious. She cried again and again, “Nei! Nei!”

  Others were shouting at her—Oire and Saotse and maybe Oarsa, for all she knew, but she ignored all them. If she could just get Nei to wake up, then the wise old woman would tell them how to get to safety.

  Her mother pulled at her shoulder and shouted nonsense, insisting that they leave. Couldn’t she see that Nei had fallen? Did she seriously think that they should leave her? Why didn’t her mother go help with someone else? Uya could see plenty of other people who had fallen down, and Oire would spend her time much better waking some of them up. Or at least she could take better care of Saotse, who was crying plaintively just out of Uya’s sight.

  “They’re coming!”

  The words tore Uya’s attention away from Nei, and she turned her head to see that, indeed, the warriors had reached the end of the meadow and were turning their horses again to Uya and the others who fled. The warriors had such fearsome, frightening faces, smeared with paint of black and red, and splattered with blood and bits of mud. Their spears’ tips were all bloody. Even their horses seemed to relish the fight—their mouths foamed and twisted, and they pawed the ground with sharp hooves that appeared able to crush any skull they found.

  Alarm began to build in her thoughts. Perhaps they could drag Nei to safety, if she wouldn’t wake up yet. Or maybe they could let her rest for a little while longer.

  Oire yelled something. Uya saw Saotse crawling away, hidden in the grass, then her mother grabbed her arm and jerked her off the path. She stumbled and fell to the ground. Her mother continued shouting at her, though Uya couldn’t imagine what she hoped to accomplish. The sound of horses’ hooves was very loud. Warriors began to blur through the edges of her vision.

  Then a horse was leaping forward, its rider crouched low and braced against his spear, the spear whose point was planted in Oire’s stomach. Without any sound that Uya could perceive, her mother’s hand slipped out of hers. The spearhead tore through flesh and emerged in a halo of blood and entrails. Oire spun a half-circle and fell.

  Uya couldn’t move. Her mother’s eyes were open. Her mother’s gut was open. And her mother, unlike Nei, was a creature of flesh and blood, a mortal, a person who might be killed by having her torso torn open with a spear. Uya began to tremble—though it was impossible, inconceivable that her Eldest could die, that she could be split open and lie helpless in a field rather than surrounded by her daughters and her sons, with all her enna. Nonetheless, she remembered that Nei was also made of flesh.

  Uya screamed.

  The warrior that had gutted her mother circled back and pointed his spear at Uya. She saw the bloody point rise, but her limbs were cold and stiff as clay. The point of bronze bobbed and weaved as the rider approached her, her doom dripping from it with the blood of her mother and her Eldest, and she merely watched and hoped she would die quickly. But the rider’s charge slowed. The point of the spear dropped, and the horses’ gallop ebbed to a walk. They stopped just in front of her, the warrior staring down at her as if unable to comprehend why she was there. Uya shivered.

  He uttered a short, hard word as if he were spitting out a stone. She backed up a step. She was not dead, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, and the warrior before her did not seem to want to kill her immediately. She took a few more steps away. The man flung a handful of gravelly syllables at her, then trotted his horse closer. If he expected her to just stand there and listen to him, he was going to be disappointed. She turned and ran with all her might.

  Her belly bounced, and the baby kicked in protest. Uya grunted and cradled her belly with her arms. With a swift flurry of hooves, the warrior overtook her and reared to a stop just in front of her. He jumped to the ground with a nimble leap.

  Uya ran the other way, but she had barely gone three steps before his arms wrapped around her, closed beneath her breasts and lifted her off the ground as easily as a mother might pick up a fleeing child. She screamed and kicked back at him, but the baby squirmed with every movement of hers, and she stopped after a moment. The warrior was completely nonplussed by her feeble struggles.

  Once she was still, he dropped her to the ground, and with a movement as swift as a grass snake, he seized both of her wrists and pinned her arms behind her back. He said something else in his horrible rocky tongue.

  “I don’t understand you,” Uya said. “Shut up.”

  He stopped and watched her for a moment. Then he clasped both her wrists in one hand and reached for something on his saddle. She squirmed and kicked again, but even one-handed, he was stronger than her. In a moment, the man had retrieved the length of rope looped over the saddle and began twisting the cord around her wrists.

  So he meant to take her captive. Captive, when every other member of the enna was slaughtered. A strange chill settled over her, a numbness as if she had fallen into the ocean in winter. The field was strewn with bodies. Nei, her Eldest, looked like a corn doll stained with berry juice. Her aunts lay in broken, horrible poses. There was Chrasu, last male of the enna, his body intact except for the skull, crushed by a horse’s hoof, looking like a broken gourd. Her mother was spitted on the warrior’s spear while she watched. But she was alive, and her child lived.

  The man had remounted his horse and tugged at the rope binding her wrists. She stumbled forward a step. The tension sent spasms of anguish up her back and made the skin of her belly stretch, and she clenched her teeth against the strain. The other warriors had left them behind by now, so they walked alone through the field, tending slightly toward the south. She counted more bodies. Should she have been sad? She searched her gut for any feeling of sadness or mourning but found nothing. She was beyond sadness. She just kept walking. In the distance moved what looked like little warriors with toy people fleeing from them and painted flames fluttering up from the tops of a few of the lodges.

  The man kept glancing back at her nervously, as if he thought she would bolt or attack him. He was older than she expected a warrior to be, gray at the temples, and his rough, short beard was streaked with white. Deep wrinkles folded around his eyes. Were it not for the bloody spear strapped to the side of his horse, she might have taken him for a kind old man, the El
dest of a fishing enna.

  Their path bent to the south. She saw the peak of a lodge pass on her right. Its roof was busy with crows returned from the feast of the battlefield. They passed the few other lodges that were scattered further south of the city.

  Ahead, at the southernmost extremity of the city, a pair of sentries waited in a clearing between the trees. The warrior leading her shouted something and nudged his horse forward, jogging Uya forward and making her cry out in pain. The man stopped, looked at her with an expression of pity, and then let her follow at the slow pace her pregnancy allowed.

  The sentries yelled back at them. A hurried dispute ensued between her captor and the two guards, which ended when the warrior finally handed his end of the rope to one of the sentries, then turned and galloped back to the north.

  The sentry gave her a suspicious look and spat a word that sounded like a curse. He jerked at her rope, much less gently than her original captor, and dragged her over to a nearby spruce. The bouncing of her belly and strain on her back made her whimper. The other sentry said something, and the two began to argue, pointing at this and that branch up and down the tree. It ended when the first threw his end of the rope over a low bough in disgust, and the other secured it with a sloppy knot. They turned their backs to her and resumed watching the forest.

  Maybe if she pulled on the knot, she could get it loose. Then she would merely be a single pregnant woman in the woods at the edge of a city that had been massacred. And then she would die. The thought came as a sort of relief. She would join the enna and be free of the aches of her body and the sorrow in her chest.

  But the baby kicked. Oh. She sagged against the tree and rested her head against the bark. No. She wouldn’t die yet. She couldn’t. Not yet.

  Chapter 8

  Keshlik

  By sundown, Keshlik had ridden the entire length of the city, north-to-south and east-to-west, four times. The city had been routed by noon, with the militia along the earthworks crushed between Bhaalit’s feint and the larger wave of Yakhat that had surged up from the south. Since then it had been a matter of driving scattered groups of women and unarmed men out of houses, finding the ones that were wealthy enough to loot, and burning or trashing the rest. Everyone that could had fled the city, and those that couldn’t had already been killed. Here and there little packs of desperate city dwellers still tried to salvage something from their ruined homes or gather the bodies of family, but they hid like rats whenever the Yakhat warriors came into view, and it wasn’t worth their trouble to chase them. The ecstasy of the battle had ebbed into tedium.

  He rode to the southern cordon to bring in the sentries. A rowdy sort of camp had formed up in the middle of the city, and there was no need to continue guarding the southern border.

  The men assigned to the southern cordon were testy and bored at that point, and resentful of being asked to guard his pregnant captive. When Keshlik told them to leave their posts and go claim their portion of the pillage, they charged off with whoops and hollers, leaving him alone with the woman he had taken. They had tied her to a tree and apparently ignored her after that. He rode up and dismounted.

  The woman turned toward him. She recognized him from the battle and didn’t flinch when he undid the knot binding her to the tree. He glanced at her wrists, still pinched together and chafing against the rope.

  “Do you want me to undo that?” he asked. An unbound prisoner was more troublesome to guard, but he would rather not keep her in pain.

  She stared at him in incomprehension. At least she didn’t seem to be afraid. A cowering, cringing captive was harder to deal with than one who would walk in a straight line. Plus, his obligation to the woman would require a certain amount of cooperation from her. He reached forward for the rope around her wrists. She pulled back, but a moment later, she understood his intention and offered him her hands. He soon had the knot undone and began to wind the rope into loops.

  She rubbed her wrists, studied him, then said something. Their language was soft and slippery, the sounds running together like water.

  He guessed at what she said and responded, “You’re welcome.”

  She continued to watch him, with an expression that seemed to combine confusion and sadness. He threw the rope loop over his horse’s back and pointed to the north. “Follow me. You’ll have to walk.”

  He accepted the risk that she might try to bolt, which would lead to a tedious and pointless chase, but the woman seemed to sense the futility of fleeing. Though her face betrayed a slight disappointment, she began to plod forward in the direction that Keshlik pointed.

  The city was already a ruin. Bodies littered the earth like stones, and the air swarmed with crows. The lodges were either burnt or spewing loot and rubbish from their doors. The woman’s eyes darted from ruin to ruin, but she neither wept nor recoiled. And when packs of drunken warriors careened by, swearing and singing, she didn’t flinch.

  He prodded her ahead of them into the center of the city, where they had found the largest and richest building. The open square in front of it was now filled with yurts and loot, warriors lighting up smoky fires, horses coming and going. The chief warriors of the tribes had taken up residence in former shops or warehouses, and they had heaped up piles of plunder and draped them with their tribal standards. The looting continued throughout the city, with men carrying in armfuls of furs, foods, and chests brimming with gold, silver, turquoise, and mother-of-pearl. Great casks of frothy wine had been discovered somewhere and set out in the middle of the square. Drunk fighters slouched around it, singing bawdy songs and shouting slobbery boasts at one another. Keshlik prodded the woman away from them. The younger warriors were weak in their fear of the Powers, and in their post-battle debauchery, even a pregnant woman might tempt them too much.

  A lofty lodge on the west side of the square bore the Khaatat banner. Juyut had stuck to the post that Keshlik had given him. He slouched in the doorway with his spear slung across his knees and a canteen of wine next to him, bumbling his way through a chant that recounted the kills he’d made that day. When he saw Keshlik approaching he stood quickly to his feet and shouted, “Hail, brother! Hail captain of the Yakhat war bands! Now what in Golgoyat’s nutsack did you bring with you?”

  “A woman,” Keshlik said.

  Juyut ogled the woman’s belly. He leaned toward Keshlik and attempted to whisper, “There were prettier girls in the city today, you know. And ones who were less… rotund.”

  “I brought her because she’s rotund. A woman this pregnant is under Khou’s protection. I couldn’t harm her.”

  “Khou’s protection? Does Khou protect the enemies of Golgoyat now, too?”

  “This one, she does.”

  Juyut glanced from Keshlik to the woman and back. “There were other pregnant women in the city today.” His expression wobbled between shame and amusement. “My men weren’t so protective of all of them.”

  “Then maybe your men should pray they don’t fall under Khou’s wrath.”

  “Khou’s wrath! Ha! A woman’s wrath! As if the warriors of Golgoyat are afraid of that.”

  “Don’t forget that Khou was Golgoyat’s wife.”

  “Was. Was, brother. But there’s been no wedding for the two of them since we left the Bans, which means that we warriors”—he shrugged indifferently—“what do we care?”

  There was, alas, a certain logic to that. He’d learned the fear of Khou as a boy in the Bans, but those born under Golgoyat’s spear had suckled different milk. Keshlik couldn’t force them into the old reverence, and he was no fool. Though he had never struck a madman or a pregnant woman, he knew better than to assume that every warrior in his charge respected those taboos. That was half his reason for taking the woman under his care: if he had left her alone, she would probably have been dead by now.

  “You’ll care if I say you care,” he told Juyut. “Now step aside.”r />
  “Aye, aye.” He ducked his head and stepped aside for Keshlik and the woman to pass. “I’ll care, if I have to.”

  The lodge was gloomy and dull on the inside. Its valuables had been ransacked and redistributed, and sloppy heaps of loot lined the walls. Juyut had cleared a place for his and Keshlik’s bedrolls. Keshlik pointed to the ground and told his captive, “You sleep here.”

  The woman stared at him blankly. He grunted and laid out a bedroll for the woman, then pointed at her, and then the bed. She shrieked and pulled away, backing into a corner in terror. He took her by the shoulders and tried to push her to the ground. She screamed and retreated further. Khou’s tits, why didn’t we bring any of the Guza translators with us?

  “I’m not going to hurt you!” Raising his own voice didn’t help, of course. She looked like a startled antelope.

  “Juyut!” His brother’s wine-ruddied face appeared in the doorway. “Stay here and make sure she doesn’t get away.”

  “What exactly are we doing with her?”

  “I took her as under Khou’s protection, and I’ll deliver her into Khou’s protection! She’ll stay with Tuulo. In the meantime, I have to meet with the other speakers, and she needs to eat. Find her something—there ought to be plenty to choose from.”

  Juyut looked annoyed, but he nodded. “When will you be back?”

  “Before midnight. Once I return, you can go join the revel. But if anything happens to the woman, you’ll pay for it with your own skin. Do you understand?”

  Juyut bowed and raised the canteen of wine. “As you say, my brother, my chief.”