by J. S. Bangs
As soon as Keshlik emerged from the storehouse’s shadow, he heard Bhaalit.
“Come, Keshlik! There’s something you should see.” Bhaalit stood with Dheijit of the Tanoutut and Choudhap of the Lougok at the edges of the square, watching the ongoing debauch.
As soon as Keshlik joined them, Dheijit said, “We’ve found the chief of the city.”
“Eh?” Keshlik asked. “I would have thought that he had fled. Or died.”
“He fled. A group of our warriors came across a band of four trying to sneak out of a lodge on the south fringe of the city. They followed the band a little ways and found a small encampment just south of the city. He was among them.”
“The others?”
“We killed some, scattered the rest. But this one spoke Guza, and he claimed to be the city’s chief.”
Keshlik grunted. “Take me to him.”
Bhaalit pointed to the shadow of the largest lodge. “He’s over there.”
An old man was sitting on the ground between two listless Yakhat warriors. When Keshlik approached, he struggled to his feet and haughtily looked down his long, narrow nose. His gray hair hung from the top of his head to his waist, bound by a clasp of silver at the neck, and he wore a cloak of otter fur. Mud splattered his face and cloak.
Keshlik walked to within a handsbreadth of him and looked him in the eye. The man did not flinch or look away. “Are you the chief of this city?” he asked in Guza.
“I am.” He pointed to the lodge behind them. “This is my family’s lodge.”
His accent was peculiar, but his speech was intelligible. “This was your family’s lodge,” Keshlik said. “You have no claim to it now.”
“You blood-smeared dogs haven’t undone my inheritance of this place.”
Keshlik smirked. “No one cares that you once belonged to this place.” The old man stiffened but didn’t respond. “Where were you going?”
“To the south.”
Keshlik smacked the man across the mouth. “Don’t tell me things I already know. Now where were you going?”
The chief raised a hand to his wrinkled cheek. His pride seemed to smolder. “To Kendilar,” he said quietly.
“What is Kendilar?”
“A city.”
“Give me better answers, or you’ll take another fist to the mouth. Are there other chiefs there?”
“The kenda is there.”
“The kenda? Who is that? Use words that I understand.”
The old man pulled his cloak around his shoulders and glowered.
“Talk, old man, or I’ll cut your eyeballs out.”
The chief spat on Keshlik’s foot. The warriors around them surged forward, screaming and waving spears.
“Stop,” Keshlik said. He wiped the chief’s saliva from his boot. “Why did you do that?”
“Nothing I do will save my life, anyway. The only reason I’ve told you as much as I have is I want you to know that your doom is coming. The kenda is chief of a city twenty times larger than this one, where the lodges are made of stone and the ancestor totems are silver. I sent him word of your approach when I first learned of it, and in a few days, the story of Prasa’s fall will reach him. We are children of Vanasenar, and our alliance goes back to the Breaking. He has more spears than there are trees in the forest. It will be the end of you. And when your men lie dead in the grass, he will piss on your grave.”
Keshlik looked to Bhaalit and the other tribal speakers. They understood the man’s speech, though the rest of the warriors standing guard did not. Bhaalit shrugged.
“If it’s true,” Bhaalit said in Yakhat, “there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
“And the man did us a favor by telling us.” Keshlik turned back to the chief and spoke in Guza. “This was your lodge?”
The chief nodded.
“And these animal totems represent your ancestors?”
Wariness darkened the chief’s face. He didn’t respond.
Keshlik looked at Bhaalit but spoke in Guza. “Tie this man in the square so he can see the lodge. Have our men fasten ropes around the pole and pull it to the ground, then let every warrior come to shit on these glorious, silver-inlaid totems—though maybe we should scrape the silver out of them first. When you’re done, torch the pole and the lodge. Only then is the chief allowed to die.”
Chapter 9
Saotse
Saotse awoke to damp and chilly silence. The ground beneath her fingers was cold and wet. The leaves overhead shook ominously. So she had slept, but for how long? The sun must have set; the air was cool with the touch of evening. Obviously no one had found her. That was probably a good thing. But now she was awake, and it was night, and she had to decide what to do and where to go.
Far above her, a breeze whispered in the crown of the trees, and the branches muttered and moaned. Chaoare’s voice rippled in the wind, but the Power herself was far away, and the spirits of the trees barely quivered. Water lapped against the shore not too far away, and its slosh carried the faintest echo of the sea’s thunder and the terrible roaring of Oarsa. Saotse could feel it even now, and it made her bones ache. “Oarsa, help us,” she whispered again, but even as she said it, her hope receded like the tide from the shore. Oarsa had not answered her once in the past fifty years. If the Powers of this place had not intervened to save the city, then her prayers wouldn’t rouse them now.
A moan of despair spilled from her mouth. She was alone, entirely alone. Uya and Oire had not come. She knew that Nei had been dead from the moment that the first charge broke through their line. But Uya? Oire? Chrasu? The rest of the enna? Were they dead, or had they forgotten her? Had they fled to safety alone?
She heard no human voices. The battle must have been long gone, then. She lay her head against the ground. Pine needles pricked at her forehead, and loamy soil pressed against her temples.
The smell of moss, earthworms, and mushrooms flooded her with loneliness and heartbreak. She whimpered and curled into a ball. The vastness of her abandonment oppressed her. In her solitude, she remembered every footstep from there to her home, across the high plains, the passes and the cold deserts and the steppes, the plains and the marshes. Every step drenched in blood and soaked in strife. She was endlessly longing, endlessly seeking the place of her marriage—
With a gasp, Saotse returned to herself. That was not her memory. Whose, then?
As soon as she asked, she knew. She felt the strange Power keening just below the surface of the earth, alone and far from home. Saotse had fallen from her own sadness into the chasm of the Power’s. The Power was one of the invaders, but she was not one of them, not with the warriors. Their voices roiled with a different strength, darker and windy and flashing with rage. The loneliness of the earth was not theirs. But the earth one wielded tremendous power, though it was unfocused, scattered, as fine as dust.
She touched her forehead again to the earth, breathing deep the dark earthiness of the soil. She opened herself to the touch of the Power, inviting the spirit to speak. Unlike Chaoare and Oarsa and the others whose names she knew, this one did not shy away, did not hover just beyond the crying of her lonely soul. As if sinking into a pool of mud, Saotse slipped slowly into the Power’s sorrow.
The spirit soaked her. Her mouth and her nostrils felt as if they filled with dirt, and her fingers reached into the soil like roots. Down, down, down, burrowing with the blind, fertile things of the earth, a sister to moles and earthworms, a mother to ants. She bore trees on her shoulders and grew mushrooms from her hands. She exhaled grass. Her thighs were hills; her feet, an outcropping of stone.
We are lonely. Saotse spoke for herself, but her voice was of the Power that embraced her. She was crushed with a memory: a husband who flashed like lightning, strong and fierce as the whirlwind, now distant and estranged, still receding from her with the children that they ha
d borne.
Saotse added her own thoughts, of the enna that was kind to her but was not her family, of the girl who had been like her sister but who bloomed into womanhood just as Saotse faded into age, of loneliness, of abandonment.
This is not our home. Home was a marsh that stretched from horizon to horizon, soft wet earth covered with reeds, thick with birds, pregnant with fish, garbed in swampy mist. Little dry hillocks rose above the murk, where men lived and tended herds of dirty white cattle, where women wove clothes from reeds and sang songs.
Saotse added her home from the depth of her memories: a line of wooden cottages above the sea, clinging to the walls of a fjord. Blue mountains rising overhead like knives. The sky white and icy in winter. A hearth of stone, yellow flames kindled by wrinkled brown hands, a haven against the screaming winds.
They have destroyed it. Blood watered the earth. The soil turned black, the water red. Men groaned and gurgled as they were hacked to pieces, gutted, torn. Women wept and begged for mercy. The Power was torn from her husband. She was torn from her family. This hour of destruction bestrode time like a mountain over the plains. It did not pass. She was raped every dawn; her husband was killed every evening. The horror and the sorrow bloomed like the grass, renewed every day in perpetual memory.
Saotse added the sound of hooves, the screams of the enna, and the smoke of Prasa. Wails of despair went up from both of them.
“Did you hear that?”
Saotse woke as if from a dream. She was a woman again. She was alone, beneath a shrub, hidden in a stand of spruce. The Power had left her. No, not again. I can’t bear it!—but in the moment that she thought she was alone, she smelled again the humid breath of the broken-hearted earth. Saotse relaxed. The Power, whatever her name, did not seem eager to abandon her.
And now, present in herself, feeling only the dirt beneath her hands, she heard a second voice reply, “Be quiet, or they’ll hear you.”
There were two of them, both men. They were Prasei, not invaders, judging by their voices and the furtive way they shuffled through the wood. The invaders did not speak Praseo. And if these were Prasei, then they might be able to help her.
Saotse raised her voice just above a whisper. “Hello?”
Their movement stopped. “Who’s there?” someone replied, with a suspicious edge to their voice.
“I’m from Prasa,” she said. “Of Nei’s enna. I hid here, but I can’t see you—”
“Quiet,” he scolded. “There are still riders in the city. Where are you?”
“Beneath a bush of some kind. Here, let me come.” She began to crawl toward the sound of their talking.
“Can you see me waving?”
“I’m blind.”
“Blind?” The man grunted in annoyance. The other muttered something just below her hearing, but she could guess what it was.
“Don’t leave me,” she said. “My enna is gone. I’ve been hiding here all day. Please, I’ll just—”
“Quiet! I think I can hear you moving.” Their steps rustled closer to her. “Can you wave? Are you standing up?”
“I can stand.” Her knees creaked with cold stiffness as she bent them to rise. A little gasp of pain escaped her mouth.
“I see her,” said the second man, the one who had muttered. “Just behind that spruce.”
“Stay there. We’ll come to you.”
Footsteps crunched through the thicket. A heavy hand touched her shoulder. “Over here, auntie. Quiet.”
She turned toward the voice, and the man’s hand took hers. His skin was rough and callused, a worker’s hand.
“We have a canoe at the water’s edge, but we have to stick to the woods. Can you follow?”
“You might need to carry her,” the other said.
“No, I can walk,” she insisted. “I’m not a cripple.”
“Good. What’s your name, auntie?”
“Saotse.”
“Really? I’ve never heard that name before.”
“I’m not from here.” A twinge of shame tightened her belly. “I am a swift woman.”
“What?” asked the other man. His voice was rougher, thicker, suggesting he was much older than the one holding her hand. “She’s not even Prasei?”
“I’ve lived here for many years,” she said. “In Nei’s enna, as I said.”
“Never mind,” said the younger one beside her. “I am Tagoa, and my brother is Bera.”
“May the Powers remember your names.”
Bera snorted. “Better than they remembered the names of Prasa. Now, let’s go.”
Tagoa pulled her forward, and she kept up, feeling ahead with her toes to find the roots and the stones that she had to step over, ducking wherever the man warned her of spruce branches. The lapping of the seashore grew closer. The scent of the wood mingled with the cool smell of the water, and the ground under her feet changed from moss and fallen needles into bristly shore grass.
“So what now,” Bera said. “Do we leave her here and go back?”
“We can’t leave her here,” Tagoa replied. “Anyone who rode by the shore would see her, and then they’d find the canoe, and then we’d be done for.”
“But we didn’t come for an old woman!”
“Well, we’ve got what we’ve got.”
“We could have her lie down in the canoe and wait.”
“I would do that,” she said. Hiding in the strangers’ canoe was humiliating, but at that moment, she was happy to trade her pride for her life.
Bera growled. “Fine, but we’ll have to find what we can quickly. Hurry up and get her in the canoe.”
With a sigh, Tagoa tugged on her hand. “You’ll have to follow me. We hid the canoe in the brush. If you lie down in the bottom, you should be safe. We’ll be back before long.”
They hurried along the shore. A thorny shore brush scratched at her legs, then her knee knocked against the wooden side of a canoe.
“Up, now.” Tagoa grabbed her elbow and helped her up. The canoe rocked in the mud as Saotse knelt in the bottom. “Just wait a little while. We won’t be long.”
They sloshed up the shore until their steps padded into the grass and disappeared. Saotse knelt with her head between her knees, trying not to shake and set the canoe splashing in the shallow water. A chill had started in her feet, wet and exposed to the cool night air. But at least someone had found her. If she had stayed in the copse, with the city full of raiders, it might have been days before someone found her, and… She would not think about it.
Her misery descended like a mist. She briefly felt the keening of the earthy Power. But the water touching the canoe stirred. A distant presence, vast and deep, thrummed in her chest with a painful sweetness. It was him, and even this attenuated echo nearly overwhelmed her. It brought forth a memory of splashing in the surf as a girl, of the water rising up to kiss her, of the whales ascending to proudly bear their master’s maid.
Oarsa. The faint footfall was as close as she had heard him since she had first descended onto the shores of the Prasei, and he was drawing closer. He passed by now? Now, when the city was already ruined? Now, when she had wept for him for decades? Anger welled.
The waters around the canoe sang. Her mouth filled with the smell of seawater and sand, and she felt the Power’s tug like a current swallowing a canoe. No. Her toes dug into the floor of the canoe, and she braced herself against the sides as if the sea’s Power would lift her bodily into the water. No.
And like letting out a breath pent up under the water, he passed. The water ceased leaping. The winds moved. She was alone again.
She shook for a moment in the floor of the canoe, then realized that she could hear her rescuers approaching.
“—Most of it,” Tagoa said.
“But we found the cask, and that’s what’s important. Auntie, are you still there?�
��
Saotse raised herself to her knees. The canoe wobbled beneath her. “I’m here.”
“Good, but get back down!” A moment later, they splashed into the shallows and dropped something into the bottom of the boat. The canoe tipped to one side as someone climbed in next to Saotse, then the other began to push the craft free of the sucking mud. A moment later he, too, leapt over the prow and nudged the canoe away from shore with an oar.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Saotse asked.
Bera laughed from the front of the canoe. “Most of the city is burned already. The raiders have been through most of the lodges. But we got the things we wanted from our lodge.”
“And where are we going now?”
“Ruhasu.”
Ruhasu was a fishing village on the shores of the bay a few miles north of Prasa. In the fall, after the salmon run, the Ruhasei would bring the surplus of the fish they had smoked and sell it to the traders. Saotse had spent many an hour assisting Nei in that barter.
“Have many other Prasei fled that way?” she asked. Maybe Uya, Oire, Chrasu, and others will be waiting for me there.
“My father’s enna is in Ruhasu, so we moved most of ours up that way. My brother and I turned back only to see if we could find anything in the city of use to us.”
“Ah.” So they were from the poor regions just south of the river. And they were cowards and looters. But they were also alive, in the same pitiable state as Saotse.
“I expect you’re right, though, auntie. Ruhasu will grow in the next few days,” Tagoa said quietly. “We’re not the only ones who got away. We’ll see who else drifts in.”
The water around the raft gurgled with their oar strokes. Saotse heard a muttered word in its movement, and she felt Oarsa’s whisper. She put her hands over her ears and hid her head in the bottom of the canoe until the Power’s presence abated, and she heard no more save the rippling of their oars.
Chapter 10
Uya
Uya had learned exactly two of their names: Keshlik and Juyut. She practiced turning Keshlik’s name into a curse, spitting it violently from her lips ask if she were expelling a fish bone. Their language had just the sound for swearing, too. It was full of short, rough sounds, like stones on the seashore grinding together.
