Storm Bride

by J. S. Bangs

  Then she felt a beat in the ground, like the sound of a distant drum. Dhuja burst through the door of the yurt and shouted a command at Tuulo.

  Immediately, both women flew into motion. Dhuja danced as nimbly as a deer fly, gathering up small things here and there throughout the yurt and packing them into a small box. Tuulo waddled, but she too picked up a handful of items and laid them in Dhuja’s box. Uya stood there, dumb and useless. She lumbered over to the open box and peered in, but Dhuja slapped her hand. She pointed at the door and shouted a single word.

  “Do you want me to leave?” Uya asked.

  The word leapt three more times from Dhuja’s mouth, and she pushed Uya to the door. Fine, she would leave. She had wanted to get outside from the moment the barbarians brought her there.

  Outside, the air was parched and hot, and the sunlight, like a fist. Sweat beaded on her face. At the edge of the earthen circle, she precariously lowered herself into a squat, her belly hanging between her knees. The noise of some ruckus from the far side of the camp reached her, though she had no idea what it could be.

  Dhuja and Tuulo appeared carrying the little chest between them. Dhuja grabbed a fistful of salt from the pouch that was always between her breasts and threw it onto the burnt circle, muttering a prayer so fast that Uya wasn’t sure she actually used words. She stepped through, holding Tuulo’s hand, then motioned for Uya to follow.

  Uya hesitated, dumbstruck. She had figured out one thing in her time here, and that was that she was not supposed to cross the line of burnt earth. She had no idea why the savages kept this custom, but every time she got within two paces of the line Dhuja appeared from somewhere and, screaming, dragged her back into the yurt. And now they wanted her to cross.

  She almost wanted to sit, just to be petulant. But Dhuja’s face bore not her ordinary scowl, but terror. Tuulo’s eyes were grim with worry. Maybe she should listen to what they suggested.

  She crossed the bridge of salt that Dhuja had laid.

  Reaching the other side of the burnt circle felt like liberation, as if the boundary of earth were a wall that kept her from breathing real air. She straightened a bit and felt the baby squirm in her belly.

  Two horses approached them from the camp. The first rider took the chest that Dhuja and Tuulo had packed, strapped it to the horse’s rump, then helped Tuulo onto the back of the horse, sitting with her legs on one side of the animal. The second rider extended his hand to Uya.

  The rider and Dhuja helped her to ascend and settle onto the horse’s back with her legs resting alongside the saddle. Then Dhuja got up with a surprisingly agile leap and settled herself beside Uya. The horses began to walk away from camp.

  Away? Uya craned her head and took in the Khaatat encampment with a jolt of sudden realization. About a quarter of the yurts were in the middle of hasty deconstruction. Women and men scurried through the camp like squirrels. Many more little chests, leather pouches, and other things were being loaded onto the backs of horses.

  And she finally realized what she was hearing further down, beyond the far end of the camp circle. It was the violent crash of fighting. The Yakhat were under attack. And they were fleeing.

  Joy fluttered up through her breast. Who would attack the Yakhat but the Prasei? Her people, the people of her city and her enna! And if the fighting were here, she just might reach them. They might drive off the Yakhat entirely. If only she could get there, they’d take her back with them, back to the city, after they had driven away the last of the savages. If only.

  The women joined a thin line of people trickling away from the camp. Every step that the horse took was taking her further away from her people and closer to whatever retreat these Yakhat had prepared. If she were going to do it, she would have to do it now.

  She jumped from the back of the horse.

  The ground slapped the soles of her feet with unexpected violence, and she pitched forward to catch herself on her palms. The baby squirmed at the sudden movement, and her belly groaned in pain. She pushed herself to her feet. Running was bulky and awkward. Her knees pushed against her belly, and she cupped her hands about the extra weight to reduce the painful jostling. Her whole body seemed to sway with the bulk of her added girth. The grass prickled her swollen feet, her breasts bounced like dead fish, and her lungs heaved with exertion. But she ran.

  Shouts followed her. Ahead, there was a tremendous roaring. The ground seemed to be shaking under her feet, but that had to be only the exertion of the pregnancy. Horses were flying about madly in front of her, mingled with—yes, it was, just as she had hoped. Prasei! Yellow-skinned, white-clad, unhorsed. Her own people. They had come for her. She was almost free. She began to smile.

  Hooves pounded the earth behind her. She glanced back. One of the men who guarded the retreat was running after her.

  “Not this time.” Uya gulped a breath and willed her legs to carry her forward faster, swallowing the pain of her breasts and stomach.

  Not fast enough. The rider snagged her by the edge of her tunic. She squirmed, pulled away, and fell to a knee in the grass. She clutched at her wobbling stomach, then scrambled forward on her hands and knees. The earth was moving, she realized once all her limbs were on the ground. Why?

  No time to think of that. Her pursuer turned back to her. She heaved herself to her feet and ran again. Only a hundred feet from the battle where her people could find her. She ran as fast as her legs and her swollen body could carry her. But the horse gained. Another breath, and he would be on her again.

  The earth pitched. The shaking sent her sprawling forward. She glimpsed a horse above her, its frothy neck stretched out splitting the sky, its lips opened in panic. Hooves pounded the earth on either side of her. The ground lurched again. A geyser of stones erupted on every side, and the horse fell, screaming.

  A hoof glanced off her face. Her vision splintered, and she tasted blood. The horse’s flailing legs struck her chest, her belly, her thighs. Her whole body burst with pain.

  She tried to breathe in but only choked. Her eyes opened, but everything she saw was haloed in hazy white. Beside her, the horse still thrashed, unable to regain its feet. Its rider was pinned beneath it, shouting madly and thrashing about on the ground. Pain was everywhere, pressing down on her like a pestle crushing corn. She gasped in a mouthful of air.

  The rider appeared above her, shouting incoherently. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t do anything at all except wrench one breath at a time from her bruised lungs. Every time her chest filled, they pressed against her ribs like a knife. She sobbed once, but the sound sent splinters of pain through her body. She bit her lip to hold back any further sound.

  The man went away. She worked on breathing.

  Now Dhuja appeared above her. What a strange relief it was to see that horrible woman. There were others, too, shadows moving in her peripheral vision, but they were irrelevant to her goal of continuing to breathe despite the agony. Hands slipped under her arms and around her ankles. Dhuja gave a command, and they lifted her off the ground.

  She screamed then bit her tongue against the pain. Blood filled her mouth. They carried her for a very, very long time. It felt as if they were taking her all the way back to Prasa. Finally, Dhuja gave another command, and they lowered her onto a blanket on the grass. The men disappeared. Dhuja stripped away Uya’s torn and bloody tunic and began to prod at her abdomen with her bony fingers.

  It was becoming easier to breathe. Dhuja’s fingers found a place on Uya’s belly that made her breaths into screams. She played her hands across the rest of Uya’s body, finding the places that were tender, all the while muttering. Then she dipped her fingers in salt and began to touch it to Uya’s wounds. Uya whimpered and winced back, but the sting of the salt was almost a gentle pain. She could handle it. She locked her teeth. Tears gushed silently from her eyes.

  Dhuja barked an order at someone. Up came her sh
oulders, padded by a roll of blankets, and a leather canteen was thrust into her mouth. She swallowed two mouthfuls of water, then rested, gasping for breath. She opened her eyes and looked down her abdomen.

  Bloody red gashes stretched from her sternum across her right breast. A thin cut oozed blood, but Dhuja pressed rags against it as she watched. A scrape scored the top of her belly. Everywhere there was blood smeared with dirt. Her back was a single blade of pain, beginning below her shoulders and stabbing down between her legs. She didn’t think she could stand, let alone walk.

  Dhuja wiped the blood from Uya’s skin and took out a knife. Its tip found the edge of her skirt and cut down, splitting the winding fabric so that the old midwife could fold it aside.

  That was when Uya saw that her thighs were greasy with blood that dripped out from between her legs and pooled on the ground.

  A horror greater than pain bubbled up. “No,” she whispered, “Please, no.”

  There was movement at her head, and she realized that Tuulo was kneeling there, holding Uya’s head on the roll of blankets. Tuulo hushed her and placed her hand on Uya’s cheek.

  Dhuja used the torn skirt to mop up the blood gathered between Uya’s legs. With quiet, steady movements Dhuja went again over Uya’s nude, bloodied body, wiped away the blood, and pressed salt into every gash she found.

  Uya closed her eyes. She was tired. So tired. Dhuja’s treatments felt like caresses. Only once did she feel a prick that stirred her awake, and when she looked down, she saw that a thorn was sticking out of her skin, holding the widest of her wounds together.

  Then her stomach tightened.

  It was as if every muscle of her abdomen had drawn together at once over a thorn. She whimpered and clutched at Tuulo’s hand on her cheek. It hurt, but she had felt nothing but pain for so long that it hardly made any difference.

  It receded, and her breath came back to her at its regular pace.

  But that sensation meant it was starting, really and truly starting. “Mother,” she whimpered. “Mother, where are you? Saotse, Nei, Rada. Do I really have to do this without you? Please, can’t you be here with me?” She began to weep.

  Tuulo reached down and wiped the tears from Uya’s cheeks. She muttered something in their barbarian tongue. Uya clutched at Tuulo’s wrist and folded her hand inside Tuulo’s. A savage’s hand, a murderer’s wife in place of her own enna.

  Another tightness passed over her, stronger and more painful than the first. Then another, and another. They were coming fast, too fast. Uya had been there when Aunt Mariku gave birth to Chrasu, and her mother had prepared her in every way she could. So she knew that something was wrong, that a normal birth would not gallop forward at this rate. A glance at Dhuja’s grim face confirmed it.

  A pang of agony crushed her thought. Each pain came quicker, and each time it was sharper, brighter, longer. Teeth of hot bronze tore at her insides. The bones beneath her belly seemed to be breaking in half. The wounds on her breast and stomach no longer even registered. The valleys that came between the peaks of anguish gave her just enough time to breathe deep and pull together the tatters of her energy. There was no more time to think. There was rest, sweet rest, all too short, and then screaming.

  Tuulo pushed a brine-soaked rag into her mouth. Uya ground the threads in her teeth when the pain came, and she sucked the brine when it passed. Dhuja poured hot water over her belly and thighs. It scalded, and the scalding was like a kiss.

  She looked up, once, and saw that the sky was dark. It had been noon when they fled the yurt. Had so much time passed?

  Why isn’t it over yet?

  Tuulo wrapped her arms around Uya’s shoulders and pushed her upright, as if to make her stand. “No, no,” Uya said. Her strength was gone, her energy wrung out by labor. “I can’t stand. I have no strength.” But Tuulo got her onto her knees, propping her up and holding her from behind. Dhuja crouched in front of them, one hand on the top of Uya’s belly, the other between her legs seeking whatever clues the midwife knew to find.

  The pain went on. The valleys and respites from the labor disappeared, smearing the thrashing of her womb together into an unending, unbearable agony.

  It changed, becoming, if such a thing were possible, worse. The bones of her hips felt as if they were being torn apart, inch by inch, but they wouldn’t just break and give her some relief. And in the middle of the torment came an urgency. A need to push. To expel. To end it.

  She pushed. Dhuja and Tuulo were both murmuring at her, though she understood nothing that they said. Her teeth ground together as she grunted and groaned. She had a few breaths’ respite, then again. Then again. Then again.

  Her strength was flagging. Tuulo was all that kept her upright, and when the next urge to push seized her, she pressed only a moment, then relented. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t. I’m done.”

  A vicious stream of language erupted from Dhuja’s mouth. She stuck her fingers into the birth canal, then held up a single bloody finger, pointing at the highest knuckle. Uya understood: That was all the further she had left.

  She pushed. She pushed again. On the third time she felt something slip. Dhuja was pulling. Tuulo was shouting. Then once more, and it was over.

  She collapsed against Tuulo. She breathed, feeling the absence of pain as if it were the most blessed thing in the world.

  Only after a moment of rest was she aware of the silence.

  No.

  She had known. She had known when the horse fell atop her, from the time she felt the blow to her belly, from Dhuja’s face as the labor began too quickly. But still, no, please, no. Not here. Not alone, not after this. Not when everything else she loved had also died, too.

  “Let me see!” She shook herself free of Tuulo’s grasp. Tuulo tried to take hold of her again, but Dhuja reached out and stopped Tuulo’s wrist. With her other hand she offered something tiny and blue to Uya.

  It was a boy. He was beautiful.

  He had been dead for hours.

  She cupped her hands around her son, and she pressed his limp, motionless body against her breasts. Silently cooing, she rocked him back and forth, and she washed the blood off him with her tears.

  Chapter 17

  Saotse

  Night fell, and the party collapsed onto the ground as if they had been dropped. Saotse fell out of the Tagoa’s arms onto all fours. Pain cascaded down her arm, and she cried and collapsed to the ground. The smell of grass and wet earth filled her mouth, and the mournful, vicious buzz of Sorrow welled up. She thrust it firmly aside. Another minute in the fullness of the Power, and she might die.

  “Help her,” Tagoa said. “Someone.”

  Hands and muttering voices descended over her and rolled her onto her back.

  “I’m fine,” she tried to say. “I’ll be all right.” But the words were feathery and choked with dust, and they knew better. And perhaps she wasn’t fine. She felt her limbs shaking as she lay on the ground, and her heart warbled in her chest. The nearness of the earth made her breath unsteady. Sorrow rose up from the ground like water from a spring, and though Saotse pushed the Power away, it threatened to drown her.

  Someone said, “It’s still bleeding.” Voices clattered together like rocks in the surf above her.

  “Do we have any rags?”

  “The wall that she raised…”

  “No, we—”

  “I don’t care, tear your shirt.”

  “Oarsa help us, it terrifies me.”

  “… have to keep her alive.”

  She cleared her throat and gathered enough voice to say, “Lift me up.”

  “What was that?”

  “Raise me up. Put something under me. Don’t let me touch the ground.”

  So they did, and the sweet, smothering nimbus of the Power receded a little. Saotse’s heart calmed, and she began to breathe air
rather than earth.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered so only Sorrow could hear. “This old mortal cannot hold so much of you.”

  She was aware, now, of the pain in her shoulder, like a hot, bright shard of pottery against the grinding ache in all her bones and muscles. They were dabbing her with water, cleaning the wound, binding it with rags.

  “It’s not bad,” the voice nearest her said. “He only got the tip of his knife into your shoulder. You’ll be fine, Grandmother.”

  The next voice was Tagoa’s. “A little closer, a little further down, and she would be dead. And then we all would be dead.”

  Palam’s voice broke the awkward silence. “So we would be. What’s your point?”

  “This was a bad idea.”

  “I don’t see why you think that. I’d say that the attack was a great success. We killed a tremendous number of them, and we got all the way to their camp itself. And we escaped with our lives.”

  “Not all of us did,” said someone else, whose name Saotse could not recall.

  Palam grumbled. “No battle is without losses. Their totems will get the highest honor on your ancestor totem.”

  Tagoa raised his voice. “You’d care a little more if it had been you. And what would the kenda have said if we lost one of his enna?”

  Another awkward silence followed.

  “I’m sorry,” Palam said. “I spoke rashly.”

  The man standing over Saotse finished dressing her wound. “There. You’ll be good at least until we make it back to Ruhasu.”

  “Thank you,” Saotse said. She lifted her voice just enough to make it heard by Tagoa and the messenger. “I agree with Palam. We brought the battle to the Yakhat and made them know fear. And we did this untrained and unprepared. If any of us knew much about the art of war, the man who came from behind would never have reached me.”

  “The fact that none of us know anything about war isn’t a reason to consider this a victory,” Tagoa said. “We should be mourning.”