Storm Bride

by J. S. Bangs

  Saotse’s companions went mute while the hubbub of the encampment rose up around them. They were going down a narrow path, with the noise of the encampment stretching away on both sides.

  “What do you see?” Saotse asked Tagoa. “You said something about the kenda’s pavilion.”

  “Ahead of us,” Tagoa said, “there are great tents, as big as a lodge, of white fabric with silver flags flying from the poles. There is a sword painted on the sides of the tent, with nine stars around it. Is that the kenda’s insignia?”

  “I don’t know,” Saotse said. Her ignorance shamed her. Did the kenda raise an ancestor totem over his lodge as in Prasa? Should she salute it? Should she address him as “Grandfather,” as she would the Eldest of another enna, or did he possess a title of his own?

  They stopped. Ahead of them, someone conversed with Palam in Yivrian. Palam said to them, “The rest of you from Ruhasu will be shown to your camp. The Kept, her aide, and those of the kenda’s enna will come with me.”

  Saotse took a moment to realize that “her aide” was Tagoa. He padded up next to the chariot and clutched her arm as if it were a stone in the sea. A tide of grumbling and barked orders washed away the rest of the party from Ruhasu, leaving only the three that the leader had mentioned.

  “Finally,” Palam muttered.

  The chariot lurched forward. Dimness swallowed Saotse’s head, and the muffled sounds of the camp dropped away. Voices speaking in clear, sharp Yivrian filled a narrow, roofed space. The pavilion quieted. A question shot like an arrow through the silence in a voice raspy with age.

  Palam carried on a short conversation with him, then addressed Saotse with a fear-drenched voice, “Grandmother, Kept of the unknown Power, can you rise?”

  She clenched the sides of the chariot and pushed herself to her feet. She sought the ground with her foot and stepped forward.

  To her surprise, the elderly speaker spoke in lightly accented Praseo. “Grandmother, you are the Kept who makes the earth shake?”

  “I am.” Her words bunched up on her tongue. “Forgive me, Grandfather, for I can’t see you. But I believe you are the kenda.”

  “How bold of you to assume that the first person to speak to you is the kenda himself.”

  “I do not mean to be bold.”

  “No? Do you mean to flatter me, then?”

  “No. I only… I just want to know with whom I speak.”

  He laughed. “Well, then I won’t deny that I am the kenda. And you are either a very bold liar or someone even more significant than myself.”

  “I am not a liar.”

  “I have heard some rather unlikely stories of your exploits. Perhaps you let others lie for you.”

  “I don’t know what stories you’ve heard. But I am truly Kept by the Power that I named Sorrow. My companions may tell you stories. True stories.”

  “So then, Grandchild,” the kenda said.

  “Yes, Grandfather?” Palam replied.

  “Is it true that this woman split the ground open and raised up a wall of stone to protect your retreat from the savages?”

  Palam began to answer in Yivrian, but the kenda cut him off. “Speak so that the Kept may understand you.”

  “My apologies, Grandfather,” he said in Praseo. “As I said, I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “And did she ruin an acre of forest by making the ground roil like water around the roots of the spruces?”

  “I didn’t see that, but I saw the result. It was… impressive. And terrifying.”

  “Terrifying, yes. Would it be too terrifying to ask the Kept for a demonstration, then? Or would I be too afraid?”

  Saotse straightened. “I would, Grandfather. But I worry that no one in this pavilion would survive.”

  She felt the quivering of the Power at her feet, and with a thought she could have joined herself to Sorrow and torn the pavilion apart. The Power was furious with grief, and the thought of sliding into her and losing herself in Sorrow’s grief and anger was a perpetual temptation. Once she had stirred Sorrow to move, she didn’t know if she could stop before someone was injured. So she resisted.

  The kenda suddenly switched into the rapid, tinkling-water tones of Hiksilipsi, and he was answered in kind by a female voice at the edge of the tent. The woman’s answer seemed to satisfy him, for he said, without the flinty edge of mockery that had marked his earlier conversation, “Well answered. Tliqyali, the Hiksilipsi woman here, will help you. You may call upon Sorrow, and she will ensure that nothing goes awry.”

  A soft female hand closed around hers. Saotse almost pulled away in fright, but the woman squeezed her hand and whispered to her, “I won’t hurt you. I will hold your hand and ensure that you don’t lose yourself in the Power.”

  “Can you do that?” Saotse asked.

  “I can. Don’t be afraid.”

  Saotse nodded, then bowed toward the kenda’s voice. “As you wish. Forgive me if this doesn’t go well.” And she opened herself to Sorrow.

  All around her were men with spears. She began to shake, reaching toward them with fists of stone, eager to lash out against her persecutors. Peace, Saotse thought, these are our allies, and the thought dissolved like dust in the pool of Sorrow. The stone fists collapsed, but her earthen shoulders shook. She would not strike, but she would weep, and her weeping made the soil of her fingers shudder and crumble. Her mouth opened, lips of sod tearing away from one another, and—

  A hand, a human hand, closed around hers, and pulled her out. The Power receded, and Saotse was a woman again, kneeling on the ground.

  The tent roared with confused babble. The smell of freshly turned soil and torn sod filled the air. Shouts thundered on every side, and feet stamped the ground. The sound was strangely disturbed, as if she were deafened on one side, and then she guessed that half of the pavilion had collapsed, and the sounds on that side were muffled and reflected strangely. Tliqyali still held her hand, and she whispered in Saotse’s ear, “Hurry forward!”

  She stumbled forward a few paces across uneven ground and heard the kenda call out to her, “Well, Grandmother, that was more than I expected!”

  Saotse had expected him to be angry, but his voice was friendly and bemused. “I’ve ruined your pavilion.”

  “They’ll raise it again. But be sure that no one will doubt the ferocity of Sorrow after this. Now, Tlaqyali would like to speak to you, and I would like to speak to my grandchild and your companions. Ruhasu is, from what I understand, the only village to have driven off an attack by the Yakhat, and you are certainly the only ones brave or foolish enough to attempt to attack them back. My generals and I would hear everything you know about them. Will you indulge us?”

  She wanted to say that she was by no means in charge of Ruhasu and that he should ask their akan. But rather than contradict the kenda, she simply said, “Yes.”

  “Excellent. You may rest for a while if you’d like. Tents have been prepared for you and for the entire contingent from Ruhasu. Tlaqyali will wait on you, and take you to their gathering as soon as you’re ready.”

  The woman’s soft, long-fingered hands slipped into Saotse’s palm again. “Come, Grandmother,” her heavily-accented Hiksilipsi voice said. “We have a table where you may rest and speak.”

  Tlaqyali led her out of the kenda’s pavilion across a stretch of grass through the smoke-rancid air and into another, cooler tent that smelled of pine and cedar. “Here,” she said. “There is a cushion that you may lie on.”

  With the woman holding her hand Saotse lowered herself to the ground and rested against a silk-covered cushion. She reached out and touched a table in front of her, then groped across it for food. The Hiksilipsi woman closed Saotse’s hand around a metal cup.

  “Wine.” She took Saotse’s other hand and briefly touched her fingers to cornbread, smoked fish, and apples that were laid out in
clay bowls. “Eat all that you’d like. Do you mind if I ask you questions while you eat?”

  “No,” Saotse said. She raised the cup of wine to her lips. The taste was sweet, heady, and fragrant. In Prasa, the enna rarely drank wine, and this was of a higher grade than she had ever tasted. She took two greedy swallows before setting the cup down with a twinge of embarrassment. She must not be seen to gorge herself. She had to maintain even more dignity than usual.

  Behind her, Tlaqyali withdrew a whispering sheet of birch-bark paper and cut the nib of a feather quill. She knelt on the grass a pace away from Saotse. “So you have communed with the Powers.”

  “Yes.” Saotse nibbled at a flake of smoked fish.

  “When did this begin?”

  “When I was a young woman.” Saotse recounted how Oarsa had called her across the ocean to Prasa, and then how she had felt the touch of Sorrow during the sack of Prasa. Tliqyali’s pen scratched over the paper. When she explained why she had given the name Sorrow to the unknown Power, the woman stopped.

  “So you’re certain that the Power who Keeps you is a woman?”

  “Of course I’m certain.”

  “How do you know?”

  Saotse paused. It wasn’t as if the Powers had bodies, yet she had never felt the slightest doubt that Sorrow was a woman. “I don’t know that I can explain,” she said quietly. “I know in the same way that I know that you are a woman. She has a woman’s voice, I might say.”

  “So she speaks to you in a voice that you can hear.”

  Saotse shook her head. “No. There is no voice, not in that way. But she has a presence, and her presence is female. I have no doubt about it.”

  “Interesting.” Tlaqyali wrote again on her page. “Among the Yivri, the Kept are always of the opposite sex of the Power that Keeps them.”

  “I have heard something of the sort,” Saotse said. What did this woman mean to imply?

  “So I wonder why you appear to be an exception.”

  “Are you saying there is something wrong with me? With Sorrow?”

  The woman hesitated. “I am merely asking questions.”

  “And why are you asking these questions?”

  “Because I am Hiksilipsi. Knowing the names and the habits of the Powers is my duty. And that’s why the kenda asked me to visit you.”

  “Perhaps the Powers from beyond the Gap follow different customs from your own,” Saotse said, more acidly than she meant to, and regretted it.

  But Tliqyali just laughed. “I suppose they might.” The whisper of pages suggested that the woman had put away her writing. “There is a shaman in Vanavar that you should speak to. He is not Kept, but he’s the nearest we had before you.”

  “After the battle.” Saotse yawned, feeling sluggish with wine and food. “I came here to give the kenda victory over the Yakhat, not to debate the nature of the Powers.” She paused, then added, “May I ask you a question, though?”

  “Of course.”

  “How did you pluck me out of Sorrow’s power? I didn’t know that such a thing was possible.”

  Tliqyali’s voice brightened, and she began to talk quickly. “It is very hard, especially with one of the Kept. But we Hiksilipsi are trained to sense and speak to the Powers from our mothers’ breasts, and we learn how to touch them and to withdraw from their touch as needed. So when I saw that you were too deep to quickly emerge, and that you had amply answered the kenda’s question, I pulled you out.”

  “But you aren’t Kept.”

  The woman laughed. “Nothing like it. You were born hearing the Powers, while the Hiksilipsi are trained into it. I will never do anything like what you do, but when what is needed is restraint, sometimes training is better than the gift. So I am happy to help you.”

  “Ah,” Saotse said. She would have liked to speak more with the woman, but she was exhausted from travel and from Sorrow. “Maybe when this is done I’ll come to Vanavar, like you said. But for now, I’d like to sleep.”

  “Of course,” the woman said. “I’ll take you back to your people. Rest well.”

  Chapter 20

  Uya

  The night was hot and clear, and the interior of the yurt was muggy. Tuulo lay on her side near one of the walls, talking quietly with Dhuja in the light of a butter lamp. Uya sat near the door, alone. She didn’t understand their conversation. She wouldn’t have spoken with them anyway. There were no words left in her mouth, no hope left in her heart.

  She rose to her feet, slowly, painfully. The rags between her legs still showed blood every morning. The bruises along her face and body had mellowed, fading from crow black to yellow, but the torn flesh still throbbed. She limped to the door of the yurt and pulled aside the flap.

  Dhuja barked a command from the rear of the tent. Her glare forbade Uya to leave. But Tuulo said something in return and rested her hand on Dhuja’s, then waved Uya out the door. Uya shook her head and ducked outside. She wouldn’t have listened to them anyway. What more could they possibly do to her? She wanted to go outside. To see again the ruin they had returned to.

  Prasa.

  When she had first realized that they were returning to Prasa, dread began to grow on her like a mold. The emptiness and desolation of the city were evidence that the Yakhat had won and that she would never have a home again. Watching the Yakhat set up their camp in the ruins was the final proof of that. The city was as scarred and dead as her womb. The Yakhat trampled the ravaged city, leaking blood from their boots and leaving her alone with her ruined body.

  Her breasts were hard with milk. The pain kept her awake at night. Dhuja offered her herbs to ease it, but she refused to take them.

  At least she could leave the filthy yurt, reeking of milk and blood. Her whole body was bent with pain. It was a quiet echo of the agony of birth, but it endured. It lay down with her every night and lashed her with its thorns. Sometimes she welcomed it, since it took her mind off the emptiness where her son should be. Other times she just wanted it to stop.

  She straightened and looked over the ghosts of the city. The Yakhat were encamped on the north side of the city, largely, with most of the warriors bunking in the plundered lodges, and only a few yurts set up here and there in the empty spaces. More and more Yakhat kept coming, far more than she had seen in the encampment where they originally held her. They were rallying for some purpose. She didn’t much care.

  She limped to the edge of the burnt circle and stepped over the line. At least she was no longer bound by that superstition. Was the circle supposed to protect her pregnancy? It had certainly failed at that. She started walking to the south.

  White moonlight lit the city’s bones. Toppled ancestor totems lay helter-skelter like driftwood logs next to the path. The lodges seemed grim and ghastly in the moonlight. Some of them glowed with fires lit inside them, where Yakhat warriors lodged like worms burrowing into a corpse. She soon reached the old market square before the Prasada’s lodge. It was strewn with the wreckage of plundered casks and muddy with horse manure. A few warriors and young women gathered in groups around the edges of the square. No one even spared her a glance. Perhaps they couldn’t even see her. She was the ghost of the dead city, invisible to them, the living, the murderers.

  She was close to the river, now, and the smell of reeds and water reached her on a breath of night air. It occurred to her that she could go visit the enna’s lodge. It was not much further, just across the bridge and a little ways down the path. A throb of homesickness pierced her. The enna, her home. She thought of the little path from the door down to the shore, the canoes that the men used for fishing, the hammock on the moon face of the lodge where she slept. Longing to see her home overwhelmed her, even if it was empty now, even if the enna was dead. She laughed bitterly. She was the Eldest of the enna now, which meant that by Prasei law the lodge was hers. Now she just had to convince the Yakhat to give it
to her.

  At the bridge, however, she paused. There were sentries here, two at each end of the bridge, lazing against the posts with spears on their knees, spitting over the side into the water. She paused in the shadow of a cedar, gathering her courage. Then she walked to the bridge and, without hesitating, started across. “I’m going to my lodge,” she said boldly.

  They shouted at her in Yakhat, and the nearest one ran forward and grabbed her arm. Upon seeing her face, he started and backed away, as if he only now recognized that she was not Yakhat. She continued across the bridge. They followed a pace behind her, shouting, but they seemed reluctant to touch her. Maybe they thought she was one of the city’s dead. Maybe they were afraid of ghosts.

  The two at the far end of the bridge tried to bar her way with their spears. She swatted their weapons aside and limped past them. They did not try to stop her. This surprised her, but she didn’t linger on the surprise. She considered it a blessing from the Powers.

  She followed the path to the lodge as the moon rose into the heights of the spruces. Her eyes searched the moonlit night for the outline of the lodge’s peak. She should have seen it by now.

  With a gasp of horror, she stopped. She had found it.

  All that remained were the charred corner posts, the ancestor totem, and a few cedar planks of the rear wall. The rest had been eaten by fire. She had forgotten the fire, somehow, had forgotten that the smell of smoke was what had driven them out of the lodge and to their doom. She had imagined that the lodge still stood, empty but whole. The charcoaled posts gleamed like the wings of beetles in the moonlight. She walked slowly up to the cinders of the lodge and placed her hand on one of the posts.

  A hoot haunted the night air. Wings whispered from the shadows of the lodge to the peak of the ancestor totem. Wide white feathers beat the air, and an owl settled onto the moonlit pole.