by Evan Winter
“How may I serve?” he asked, wondering if there was any chance that Nyah would leave.
“We need the rest of our army,” Tsiora said. “We need the fiefs to send us their Ihagu, but the umbusi are not cooperating.”
Unfortunately, Tau wasn’t surprised. “You’ve already had time to speak with them?”
“Through edifications we have,” Nyah said. “However, half the fiefs no longer send their Gifted to the meeting spots and the other half politely deny our requests for reinforcements.” It didn’t sound like she valued their politeness very much. “They say they can’t send their Ihagu. They say they need them to guard the newly seeded fields. Their excuse is that if the Xiddeen attack the unguarded fields, we’ll starve to death come Harvest and Hoard.”
“A decent argument, neh?” Tau asked.
Nyah crossed her arms. “The best false-faith arguments often come cloaked in the cloths of greater concern. Yes, if the Xiddeen attack the fields we’ll lose this cycle’s harvest, but that’s not why they resist us.”
“The umbusi are Nobles,” the queen said. “If they do not outright prefer that Odili and his Royals succeed in their coup, they certainly won’t be heartbroken if they do.”
“Have they turned against you, then?” Tau asked.
“Not yet, and not as a group,” she said. “They’re waiting to see which way the tree falls, and to avoid appearing seditious while they do it, they either keep their Gifted from receiving our messages or argue that sending their Ihagu risks the peninsula’s crops.”
“How do I help?” Tau asked, not sure there was much anyone could do.
“We need to be more convincing,” Tsiora said. “So we’ll see if the umbusi can deny their queen in person.”
Nyah huffed. She didn’t like the idea of the queen going to the umbusi but also didn’t speak against it. Tau reasoned that meant she thought it necessary.
“Beg pardon, Your Majesty, but won’t going to them make you look weak?” he asked.
“The umbusi can’t be allowed to defy us,” Tsiora said. “The ones who reply to our edicts with argument are alarming enough, but the ones breaking tradition, by no longer sending their Edifiers to meet with ours, they’re endangering us all.” Her foot stopped tapping. “We’ve held this peninsula as long as we have because of our ability to communicate across it, and no one gets to jeopardize that.”
The queen’s reasoning, cloaked in the cloths of greater concern, gave them not just the right but also the need to go to the fiefs and coerce them.
“I see,” Tau said, not liking where this was going. “You wish me to accompany you?”
“We do,” the queen said.
“As ever, I’ll do as you say, my queen, but we need more than Ihagu to return Palm City to your control,” Tau said. “I know the training in Isihogo has just begun, but by sending Auset and Ramia to us, you’ve made success possible. I don’t want to stop now. The fighters I’m training won’t be ready for the siege if we do.”
“You don’t have to stop,” Nyah said. “You’ll bring the ones you’re training with you.”
“While we wander from fief to fief? Eh … Queen Tsiora, one of them is badly injured—”
Nyah waved away Tau’s objection. “We’ll make a traveling cot for the Petty Noble, and Priestess Hafsa will accompany us to see to his needs.”
“Champion Solarin, if we’re to have our army, we must go and get it,” Tsiora said.
Tau bowed his head. “Yes, my queen.”
There was nothing to argue. The decision had already been made.
“Let’s not forget,” the queen said, a ghost of a smile playing across her lips, “this will mean you can practice your riding.”
Tau tried to separate the fruit from the seeds. “I do look forward to riding with you, my queen. I know that my upbringing was not … typical for a champion and I want to fulfill the duties of my role to the best of my abilities. It will be good to have the chance to speak with you at length. I have so many questions.”
He’d tried to be subtle, intending to hide his desire to learn more about the secret history of the Omehi behind flattery and courtly talk, but the queen spotted his destination like he’d marked it on a map.
“We won’t keep secrets from you,” she said, sitting forward in her chair. “You want to know who we are? You want to know our history? Our real history?”
“Queen Tsiora …,” said Nyah.
“I do,” said Tau.
“Then let’s start with its most painful truth,” she said. “The Cull are real.”
TALES
They left the next day. Hadith was told to stay back and the queen instructed him to ready the city to receive the rest of her army. The grand general was to prepare for battle.
Nyah, good to her word, made it possible for Jabari to travel. He was in a covered palanquin carried by four Ihashe, and Hafsa, priestess of the medicinal order, accompanied him. Their first stop was fief Kabundi, the nearest and largest of the flatland fiefs.
Shocked to see the queen and an entire military claw at her keep gates, Kabundi’s umbusi could do little but welcome Tsiora in, inviting her to a hurriedly prepared feast. The Lessers in the keep stared at Tau, reminding him of the Low Common girl he’d met in Citadel City. The umbusi’s husband stared too, with hatred.
But his hate, the umbusi’s fluster, none of it mattered. Queen Tsiora rode out and away from Kabundi with all its Ihagu in tow, and that night Tau joined the queen to hear more about the people the Omehi used to be.
“In the time immediately after Ananthi sealed Ukufa in Isihogo, the Cull were at their weakest,” Tsiora told him.
Tau, Tsiora, and Nyah were in the queen’s tent drinking from earthenware cups filled with watered-down olu and sitting across the fire pit from one another. It was a cold evening, and the pit and its glowing embers did more to create a comforting impression of heat than actually adding any. The space, smelling of charred wood, canvas, and flowers, reminded Tau of home, in the hut with Aren, and as Tsiora told her story, he fell into the tale, seeing its moments in her face, eyes, and lips.
“The Cull waited generations before their next attempt at conquest, and because the ones who waited were the same ones who had seen their master imprisoned, the waiting did nothing to weaken their resolve,” Tsiora said. “They swore their souls to Ukufa, the Insatiate, in exchange for a never-ending existence. The Insatiate kept his part of the bargain, and it was time for the Cull to keep theirs.
“For the rest of us, time softened the memories of the war between the Goddess and the Insatiate as generation after generation lived and died, again and again until the races of man forgot to keep watch on the lands from which the Cull had come.
“They attacked the Ndola first. The Ndola, a peaceful people with gifts ill-suited to death and its dealings, were conquered, and the Cull became their masters.
“We don’t know everything that happened next. What we can tell you is that the races of man did not retaliate against the Cull. Instead, they decided that their ancient enemy must have needed the Ndola’s more fertile land for food and resources. They decided that the Ndola had none to blame but themselves for being weak enough to have been bested.
“The Cull, they told themselves, were after easy prey and would stop once the weak and the indolent had been dominated. But our ancient enemies did not stop, and by the time the other races of man had accepted that the Cull never would, they were too few to stop them.
“The Chosen were one of the last that the Cull attacked. They came to our homeland at the head of an endless host of the conquered. They came to destroy the Goddess’s people, hoping to cast our gifts from the world, so that they might free Ukufa unopposed. It should have been the end of us, but the Goddess gave us her Guardians and we gave the Cull dragon fire.
“Where we fought, the world burned, and still it was not enough. The Cull led too many, and the ones who felt our fires in greatest number were the conquered, not the conquer
ors. It didn’t take long to realize that we could not withstand the Cull’s advance by ourselves, and there were few to whom we could turn.
“The strongest of the remaining free people on Osonte had always held themselves apart from the rest of the races of man, and in our desperation, we turned to them. We turned to the Nobles.
“They had always been warriors, and their gift was … uncomplicated. Their women and men were permanently connected to the Goddess’s power in Isihogo. The connection meant that their women were stronger, faster, and bigger than most, and their men were mountains made flesh.
“We begged them to help us and they refused. We told them that when the Cull were finished with us, they’d come for them. The Nobles laughed at that. ‘Blood will show,’ they said, ‘and no woman or man has blood as strong as ours.’
“We were desperate and we offered desperate things. We said that together we could defeat the Cull, take all their lands and the people they had conquered. Together, we said, we could rule Osonte. They laughed. ‘If we wanted Osonte, we would take it,’ they told us.”
Tau rarely interrupted Tsiora’s storytelling. He did then. “What did they want?”
“What does any such group, priding itself on being more than others, want?” she asked. “They wanted their claims and their beliefs about themselves to be true. They wanted to be more powerful and better than everyone else. So that’s what our queen promised them.”
“Enraging,” Tau said.
Tsiora nodded. “Her name is lost to time, but she was one of the most powerful Gifted this world has ever seen. She could walk the mists of Isihogo for a quarter moon before her shroud fell, and she’d seen the weave and weft of gifts from every race of man. She understood the nature of the Nobles’ power and she understood how to make it more.
“To convince them to join the Omehi, she offered the Nobles something they couldn’t just laugh away. She said she would indenture the whole of her people to them if their greatest warrior, their champion, lost to her champion in a contest of single combat.
“They were interested but suspicious. They asked to see her fighter, and she stunned them by saying that they could choose the man from their own ranks. She asked only that they give her a night with him, and then he would return to challenge their champion at the next sunset.
“Agreeing immediately, they sent out one of their weaker men, a rabble-rouser who had been imprisoned for speaking out against Noble culture. They mocked him and our monarch both, saying that if the duel concluded in her favor, she would be their queen too.
“The queen welcomed the man the Nobles had sent to her, and when they were alone, he went to his knees in front of her, begging forgiveness. ‘Though I will fight as hard as I’m able, I cannot defeat my opponent,’ he said. ‘He will kill me and you will lose your people.’
“The queen said this was not so. She told him what the Goddess had given her the gift to do, and the next day when the sun set, the queen of the Omehi took power from Isihogo and moved it through her champion. She enraged him and sent him to fight the greatest warrior the Nobles had ever known.
“The rabble-rouser, the reject, the man so weak his people cast him out, fought in the twilight of a day’s end until his opponent, the Noble’s champion, dressed in armor as black as night, fell. He was the greatest warrior the Nobles had ever known, and he died on Osonte’s sands, his red blood staining the black leather armor that could not save him from the power of an Omehian queen.
“Seeing their strongest fall to one of their weakest, the Nobles knew the stories they told themselves about who they were would be nothing but lies without the power we could give them. For them, there was only one choice, and from the youngest child to the eldest warrior, the Nobles knelt to the Omehi queen and swore fealty to her, joining us in our war against the Cull.
“The fighting that followed threatened to bleed a continent dry, and though the war saw humanity embrace its worst instincts, it could not overwhelm the greatest gifts the Goddess had given to the races of man—love and life.
“The Omehi queen came to care for the Noble she’d enraged, and he continued to stand by her side. In time, their love brought life into the world. They had a daughter, and with her birth, the Omehi and the Nobles became one people.
“But we were losing the war. The Cull ravaged the Nobles’ homeland, and with history repeating itself, we fled. The Omehi queen had promised victory and power. Instead, under her rule, the Nobles suffered a defeat beyond the scope of their cruelest nightmares.
“The queen faced threats to her rule, assassination attempts, and even open rebellion. They even called her a traitor, but how could anyone willing to suffer what she did be called that?
“When the Cull had the Omehi trapped, the queen called down a Guardian to protect the people she loved, and she set the earth on fire. It took days for her shroud to fade, and when it did, the demons that had been waiting tore her asunder.
“Her dragon, however, compelled by the memory of the queen’s will, blasted any who sought to follow the Omehi as well as the battleground on which the two sides had fought for more than an entire cycle of the moon. It is said that the land where that battle took place still streams with rivers of fire that smoke and fill the air with fumes so acrid they kill any who breathe it. Where we fight, the world burns.
“Facing total defeat, the Omehi were in no position to dismantle and remake their monarchy. So, the queen’s daughter took the throne, and though her father resisted it, a champion from one of the Noble royal families was chosen for her.
“The new queen tried to rule with her father’s help, but she was young, her people were without a home, on the run, and she was surrounded by women and men who shared half her blood and less of her ideals. Power was stripped from her through councils populated by Nobles alone.
“Until, betraying his family’s trust, her champion, having fallen in love with her, supported her against Noble interests, giving her the time she needed to become the woman she was destined to be. She was the last Omehi monarch on Osonte, and Queen Taifa Omehia was her mother’s daughter.
“We’d been pushed to the edge of the continent,” Tsiora explained. “There was nowhere left to go, and the Ruling and Guardian Councils decided that the Omehi would come to their end honorably. We’d die fighting so that even a history written by the Cull could not deny that, in the end, blood did show.
“But we didn’t die in a last stand. Queen Taifa gathered allies in secret, calling them the Shadow Council, and when the time came to choose between fleeing the only land they had ever known and a fight to the death against the Cull, the Ruling Council, Guardian Council, Gifted, and Sah Priests, infiltrated by the Shadow Council, voted for something else.”
Behind Tau, the flaps of the tent were pulled aside, startling him. It was Nyah. He’d been so wrapped in Tsiora’s history lesson that he’d missed the vizier’s approach.
“It grows late, my queen, and we’ve work to do this night,” she said. “Perhaps we should let the champion rest.”
It was a small thing, a turn of phrase, but Nyah knew he didn’t rest when he left the queen’s tent, and her words annoyed him. He tried to keep the emotion from his face, but the queen caught it.
“Remind us, Champion,” she said, “what do you do tonight?”
“I go to Isihogo, where I will fight for my life,” he told her.
“Normally, we’d wish you luck …”
“I thank you,” he said, “but it’ll make no difference to the outcome.”
He stood, ready to go, and in a rare show of respect, Nyah inclined her head to him. Tau returned the gesture. The vizier was not easy to like, but she never had anything but the queen’s interests at heart.
His head buzzing with the story of the Omehi, Nobles, and their queens, Tau left the tent to gather his fighters and lead them to damnation.
REBORN
In Isihogo it was always Uduak and Auset left with Tau. It was that way as night
s turned into days, days turned into visits to fiefs, and the visits meant more and more Ihagu soldiers joined to their cause. It was Uduak and Auset as Tau’s best fighters for a quarter moon that turned into a half moon and then into a full moon cycle. It was Uduak and Auset until, more and more often, they began to fall to Isihogo’s denizens before Jabari, and Jabari began to fight like a demon himself.
Tau couldn’t make sense of the change in his childhood friend, and one night, after his fighters could take no more and Jabari had been carried back to camp, Tau did not do as usual. He didn’t return to the underworld alone.
Instead, he walked back to the camp, heading over to Jabari’s palanquin. It was on the ground next to Priestess Hafsa’s tent. Its curtains were drawn and Tau couldn’t see inside, but if his suspicions were right, he didn’t need to.
He moved between two nearby and tightly packed tents, sat on the ground where he would not be seen, and took himself to the underworld. He found Jabari there, fighting.
Jabari’s surprise at seeing Tau almost got him killed when the demon he had engaged tried to claw his face off. He had to leap back to avoid its attack, and by the time he had his feet under him, the monster was charging. It swung for his head and he blocked with his sword, hissing through gritted teeth at the effort it took to keep the thing’s hooks away.
Without a word, Tau joined him, cutting at the demon and slicing away one of its hooks. It howled and staggered away, but more demons came from the mists to replace it. As in training, Tau and Jabari went back to back, fighting like that until there were too many to hold and they were overwhelmed.
Jabari died gruesomely and Tau was torn apart not long after. It didn’t matter. Tau went back to the mists and found Jabari there again. They fought together several more times, never speaking, and Jabari’s will to continue was astonishing. Just as Tau wondered how much more Jabari could take, he went into Isihogo and did not find him there.
Tau fought and died for another two spans, and when he had nothing left to give, he floundered back to his tent, collapsed on his bedroll, and told himself that he would do the same the next night, to see if Jabari would be there.
