by J. S. Bangs
“I told you, I care nothing for your Golgoyat.”
“Then start learning his name now. The warrior of the thundercloud fights among us and has given us victory over every enemy so far. You will be no exception.”
“Then what is your counteroffer?”
“Our counteroffer is for you to die.” He looked at Juyut and Bhaalit and said in Yakhat, “Do we need to hear anything else here?”
The both shook their heads.
“Then let’s go.” He tapped his horse’s flank and turned her to leave.
A murmur of consternation stirred in the Yivrian forces behind them. Keshlik smiled slyly at Juyut as they returned to their own guard. He looked up at the sun, then back at the Yivrian lines. “If they engage today, we’ll hold them off and wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow we crush them.”
Chapter 22
Uya
The warriors had left that morning. Like ants scurrying away from a carcass, carrying the last of the city’s food stores with them so they could go… do what? Uya didn’t know.
She knelt outside the cocoon of the yurt and watched the moon. She couldn’t sleep. She hadn’t slept since returning to Prasa and its defiled lodges, and especially not since crossing to her old enna and making her vow. She needed to be vigilant.
Inside the tent, Tuulo whimpered in her sleep. Uya watched the cloud-scarred sky for any sign of the owl that she had seen, or any other omen of the Powers’ presence. So far tonight, nothing. The sun had long since set, and the air was growing chilly and damp. Perhaps she should go inside and try to rest. It was better than waiting outside in the cold.
She ducked into the yurt. The smells of curdled milk, butter lamps, and blood washed over her. But there was another sweet, damp odor in the tent tonight. Curious, Uya stepped forward. Her foot touched a puddle of warm fluid. She gasped. Tuulo twitched awake with a cry.
Dhuja woke and jabbered at Tuulo, who responded with short, quiet sentences. A wooden box scraped open, and the midwife’s face appeared briefly in the glow of an ember. A moment later, the whole yurt came awake in the soft light of the butter lamp. Tuulo was propped on an elbow, her skirt soaked from the waist down with the hot, sweet-smelling liquid slowly seeping into the ground below her. Dhuja crouched over her, continuing her stream of sharp, clipped commands.
Uya stepped back. A memory of panic and pain swallowed her. Her breath came quick. She groped for the door of the yurt behind her but found only the felt of the walls.
Dhuja looked up at her and barked a single word. Uya slid to the ground and began to weep.
Not again. Not—oh, it wasn’t even her baby, but she felt it as if it were, as if right now the thorn was entering between her legs and splitting her in half. Again, the stench of blood and the feel of her bones being wrenched apart. Again, her baby’s dead face staring up at her, stringy with shreds of afterbirth. No breath in the child she bore. No cries except her own.
A hand closed over hers. She looked up.
Tuulo was there. She smiled—she smiled somehow, holding the bottom of her belly with one hand and clasping Uya’s fist in hers. How could she smile, how could she move in the middle of that pain?
Tuulo tugged at Uya’s hand. Of course. Her water had just burst. The pain hadn’t even started yet. So she could smile. She could look at Uya with that horrible face full of pity and sympathy.
Though… the pinched look in her eyes, the quivering of the hand that clutched her belly as if she thought it might drop off. They showed fear. She had seen Uya’s travail and the dead thing that had come out in place of her living son. She, too, had grown slick with Uya’s blood and sweat that night.
She was afraid, and she was asking for Uya’s help, hoping that Uya might repay the help that she had received.
Repay? Uya’s oath rose up inside her, grumbling like a thundercloud, burning her stomach with its lightning.
She took Tuulo’s hand and led the woman back to the mat. Dhuja was pinning open the doors and opening the flue in the peak of the yurt, inviting the cool night air into the enclosure. Uya helped Tuulo lie on her side and straightened her coarse braid.
Then she leaned close and whispered into the woman’s ear, “I’ll help you, Tuulo. You helped me give birth, and I’ll help you. But you’ll never see your son alive. I’ll give you back exactly what you and your warriors gave me. And maybe when you see your child’s broken neck and your husband holds his cold, limp body, you’ll know the smallest part of what you’ve done to me and my people.”
Uya spent the first hours after midnight helping the other two women prepare for an imminent birth. Dhuja directed Uya with barks and gestures to build a fire outside the yurt, and a pair of Yakhat women rolled an enormous clay pot in from the camp and filled it with water. The midwife dressed Tuulo in a loose woven garment that barely reached to her thighs, then set her pacing the boundaries of the blessed circle. Tuulo padded repeatedly past Uya, grinning nervously every time. Sweat pooled on the tops of her ruddy cheeks, visible as greasy puddles even in the moonlight, but she seemed calm, even cheerful. Uya scowled and turned back to making the bed of coals for the water pot.
The moon crawled across the sky.
Every time Tuulo walked by, Uya expected to see her grimacing in pain, and every time, she was disappointed. A few times, Tuulo winced, as if she had stepped on a thorn. But where were the roaring pains that Uya had experienced?
As the night wore on, Dhuja kept grimacing and muttering in gravelly anger. Once Uya’s bed of coals was white and hot, she called Tuulo over and made the woman squat by the water pot. Her hand disappeared briefly under Tuulo’s skirt, and Tuulo clenched her teeth. Dhuja scowled.
She spat a word at Tuulo. Tuulo answered mildly. They seemed to argue for a few minutes, then Tuulo shrugged and returned to the yurt. At the entrance flap, she turned to Uya and said a Guza word.
“I don’t understand you,” Uya muttered.
Tuulo tried another word, then another. That third one, Uya recognized from the Guza trade manifests: “Blanket.”
“Blanket? You want a blanket. Why are you bothering me about this?”
Tuulo closed her eyes and patted the back of her head. Then she pointed back into the yurt.
“Ah, sleep,” Uya said. “You’re going back to sleep.” The labor was moving slowly—so slowly that Tuulo was going to return to her bed and sleep!
Dhuja made a sour-sounding comment, which Tuulo shushed. She disappeared into the yurt. Uya threw down the stick with which she had been stirring the coals. “Well, I’m certainly not going to stay here heating up water for a sleeping bitch. The moon’s still up. I’m going to get some rest, too.”
Dhuja looked back in incomprehension but made no effort to stop Uya as she limped back into the yurt.
The interior was lit in a soft orange glow of the lamp suspended from the ceiling. Tuulo opened her eyes and smiled at Uya when she came in. Uya found her own mat and lay down with her back turned to Tuulo.
Sleep washed over her like an ocean wave. A few times during the night, she awoke just enough to hear Tuulo murmuring and groaning in the pain, but she didn’t stir from her bed. She hadn’t forgotten that Tuulo was still her enemy.
The hours from midnight to dawn crawled by. She heard chickadees chirping at sunrise, but exhaustion tugged at her eyelids and pushed her back into restless slumber.
Finally, when the sun was a hand’s height above the eastern horizon, Uya came fully awake.
Tuulo was gone. The reed mat had bunched up from Tuulo’s shifting. Had something happened? Had the baby come? That couldn’t be. They would have called her. They needed her.
She left the yurt and found Tuulo and Dhuja together, a little ways from the now-dormant fire. Dhuja seemed not to have slept, but she had changed clothes. She wore a loose black skirt that came only to her knees, exposing her bony, veined calves to the wind,
and a simple cloth around her breasts and shoulders. Her waist and belly were bound with a broad red strip of fabric wrapped around her midsection.
Tuulo had her skirt hiked above her belly, and Dhuja was drawing lines on her with the burnt soil that bounded their yurt. A circle encompassed her belly, connected by waving lines to her thighs and breasts, with a double straight line descending directly downward. Dhuja gave Uya a dismissive glance, but Tuulo smiled at her and said something in greeting.
The last word of her greeting caught in her throat, and she winced, bending forward and grabbing Dhuja’s hand. Dhuja squeezed the hand back. Tuulo stood there, face hammered down in pain, then let out her breath with a desperate, wheezing gasp.
So her pains had finally begun in earnest. It was about time. May they be difficult and fruitless, Uya prayed.
Dhuja grimaced at Uya, and a long string of gibberish poured from her mouth. She pointed to Uya and then gestured toward the city, across the blessed circle.
“What?” Uya said. “You want me to leave?”
“No,” Tuulo said. Her voice was hoarse, and she pieced together the Guza words with slow, broken cadence. “Go. Go bring here… a man.”
Dhuja was back at Tuulo’s side. Uya rose, hesitant, but Dhuja barked at her again, and she sped out of the circle.
The sun had risen, and yellow dawn light lanced through the city. Where was she supposed to go? To find someone. A man. Any man, or some particular man? But she couldn’t possibly find anyone in particular, so she would have to take the first man she found and hope that Dhuja would take him. She ran toward the old market where the yurts had been pitched.
There were old Yakhat women crouched over crocks of milk at the edges of the market. Beyond the women were empty, blank buildings. She ran past them, past stalls of horses and burnt ancestor poles, and—there. A warrior sentry, alone, mounted. She ran to him and clasped his hand, shouting, “Tuulo! Tuulo!”
He cursed and kicked at her. She closed both her hands over his, repeating in Guza, “Dhuja! Tuulo! Come!” He scowled down at her with irritation but began to walk his horse forward at her insistence. She ran a few paces ahead, motioned for him to follow, and ran to the yurt with the warrior at her heels.
He waited at the boundary of the blessed circle while she ducked into the fetid yurt, where Dhuja and Tuulo had disappeared. On entering, she pointed back in the direction of the horseman, then knelt next to Tuulo. Dhuja shouted a command, then left with Tuulo kneeling next to Uya.
Tuulo wrapped her hands around Uya, then winced and leaned forward. Her breath stopped in her throat. Her fingers dug into Uya’s back, and she ground her teeth.
“Quiet,” Uya said in Praseo. She doubted Tuulo heard her words, anyway. “Quiet. It’ll be all right. You’ll make it.”
Though your son won’t. Even if you birth him alive, I’ll make sure of that.
Chapter 23
Saotse
The hooves of horses sounded like raindrops hitting the head of a drum. Saotse pinched the grass between her toes, and brushed briefly against Sorrow. The Power shuddered and keened. Danger and woe clashed in her voice, wild and unbound. Saotse only suffered a touch before pulling away.
Soon. Soon, my mother. The Yakhat are near. Soon we’ll meet them and crush our enemies.
It was morning. The meeting with the Yakhat commander had taken place the previous day, and she had gotten the full report of his threats against the Yivriindi, the Prasei, and against her personally. The report had not frightened her. The Yakhat remembered her, which meant they were afraid. Good.
She sat on the ground, though the kenda and most of his retinue were in chariots. She had insisted. If battle began in earnest, there would be no time to dismount from a chariot, and she needed to touch the earth to reach Sorrow. Tagoa had held her hand and led her through the line of chariots and spears to where she now sat.
The kenda himself sat in a chariot just beyond her reach. He whispered to his herald, and the herald repeated the command in a tremendous voice: “Tokotya!”
A drumbeat split the air. Three long, sonorous strikes beat against the air—gau gau gau—then the drums settled into an even two-stroke rhythm of thrim-throm, thrim-throm. The army stuttered forward in time to the beat, the spears clattering like the roar of the sea. They moved slowly, well within what Saotse could manage. Sorrow followed their every step.
The next command came: “Tonaltoya!”
The drums quieted. The march sputtered out and stopped. Quiet roared over the valley, pregnant with the army’s muttering, punctuated by the sound of distant hoofbeats.
“What do you see?” Saotse asked Tagoa.
“The kenda’s two lines of spears are set up in front of us,” he said. “The Yakhat are in clusters a half-mile away. They watched us march forward, but they haven’t moved to attack yet. Now the commanders are arranging the front line. They crouch. Their spears are planted in the dirt, pointed out in a line toward the horses, like a porcupine’s tail.”
The commands from the front line reached her as little scraps of Yivrian carried on the air. Spear shafts thudded against the ground. The wind rustled the clothes of the waiting soldiers.
Tagoa drew in his breath. “Now some of the Yakhat begin to move.”
The rumble of horses sounded like far-off thunder, growing closer.
“Do nothing yet, Kept,” the kenda said. “I will give the order.”
“They’re charging the line,” Tagoa went on, half to Saotse, half as if in response to the kenda. “No, they’re breaking away. Parallel to the line, now—look out!”
He grabbed Saotse’s hand and pulled her to the ground. An arrow whistled through the air and pricked the ground beyond them. Sorrow felt it as if the arrow had torn open her flesh, gurgling up in a geyser of fury and boiling earth. Saotse wrestled against the urge to lash out. Not yet.
“They’re shooting arrows into the front line,” Tagoa said, “charging past and firing wantonly, just like they did when we began our attack outside of the encampment. They move quickly, spread out, darting like bees.”
The kenda’s Yivrian commands rumbled out through his commanders. Arrows from their own side sang off bows. Howls of pain creaked up from their line, and on the far side, one or two injured horses wailed. The thunder of the hooves waned, then roared again. More arrows split the air.
The kenda shouted a new command in Yivrian, then repeated to Saotse and Tagoa, “Follow us! We move into battle!”
Tagoa pulled Saotse to her feet, and they bolted forward. There followed a confused time of shouting and running; of commands screamed in Yivrian, booming back and forth on every side; of pounding feet and clattering spears mixing on every side. Wild ululations from the Yakhat savages goaded them. Arrows buzzed through the air. Saotse ran, her hands clenching Tagoa’s, trusting his direction to ensure they wouldn’t fall prey to a stray spear or arrow. The creaking of the kenda’s chariot followed them, and shields and spearpoints battered each other on every side. Tagoa panted. Saotse’s knees burned.
They stopped. There was melee before them and to the right.
“What’s happening?” Saotse cried.
“The front line charged!” Tagoa said. “We caught up with them! But I see Yakhat on both sides of us, though the line holds—for now. Down!”
He pulled her to the ground. Arrows buzzed through the air like flies. Shields clattered against each other to their right, and frantic voices, shrill with panic, cried out in Yivrian. Hooves pounded the earth like hailstones.
Above the din, the kenda’s voice rolled across the battlefield like a wave crashing over the rocks—urging the Yivriindi to fight, to withstand, and to lash back—and a roar went up from the Yivrian host.
But thunder rumbled in the Yakhat hoofbeats. A black wind buffeted Saotse, meeting the courageous roaring where the kenda stood, and Saotse felt as if she w
ere adrift at sea, being beaten by their vast forces. The Yivrian cry of hope turned to dismay. She heard screams to the right.
“The line is broken,” Tagoa said. “The Yakhat charge through! Oarsa save us—”
The kenda roared, “Kept of Sorrow!”
She dropped to the ground and pressed her face into the dirt as if diving into the soil.
Sorrow and Saotse raged. At first she merely thrashed, sending cascades of dirt in every direction, insensitive to friend or foe. Men crawled over her like flies, and she swatted at them. But then, from the depths of the Power, Saotse remembered who she was. She mastered her fury and then directed it to where it needed to be.
Here her soil was pressed by unbound feet. She let these be. Here the points of hooves bruised her skin. She tore up the turf beneath them and buried them in a vomit of stone and soil. A line of horses charged. She opened her mouth, and they tumbled in to be chewed by her rocky teeth.
Spears crossed in battle a little ways away. She shook like a dog and threw them all to the ground, then spit up stones to fall on the horses and their riders. Their bones crunched beneath her missiles, and their blood watered her grasses.
Horses were retreating. She heard screams and felt injured men crawling across her like worms. A wave of rolling earth chased the fleeing line, pitching horses into the air, breaking their legs, throwing riders to the ground. The screams of men and horses sang. She crushed a man in her rocky fist.
A man’s hand was on her shoulder. She was a woman again, though the raging Power below her begged her to return.
“Enough.” It took her a moment to realize that it was the kenda, not Tagoa. “They’re retreating from the center. Quickly now, to the flank!”
He picked her off the ground as if she were a child and set her onto the bench of his chariot. He barked a command to his driver. The chariot bolted away, and they fell together onto the bench. Saotse could hear no change in the sounds of battle—the same cacophony of spears and shouts and hoofbeats assaulted her from every side, built upon the urgent clatter of the chariot’s wheels. But the kenda clearly saw something. Their harrowing ride lasted only a few seconds before the horses screamed and the chariot ground to a stop again. The kenda leapt down from the bench.
