by Marc Secchia
Now, all in him was instinct. Running to the slain soldier, he scrabbled at the man’s belt and found his curved sikimar. The two-foot blade stuck in its scabbard, but he wrenched it free. He dashed over to the gong. It was dangling eight feet below the platform, but was still attached to its rope and cracked frame. He swarmed down the rope like the pick of a Dragonship’s crew, took the sword in his left hand, and began to strike the metal repeatedly with the pommel.
DONG! DONG-DONG!
Jakani screamed, “Alert! Alert! Fire in the orchards! Bandits!”
Chapter 10: Retribution
FOREWARNED, THE VILLAGERS had only minutes before fifty or more ill-favoured thugs came rushing through the trees, waving brands that they tossed up onto the rush roofs. Then, they drew long daggers and, kicking down the doors of huts, swarmed within to butcher the occupants with a bloodthirsty lack of inhibition that staggered Jakani. Screams rang in the night.
The lamko fought back with kitchen knives and clubs and improvised weapons. They barricaded the doorways and resisted strongly, but they were isolated in each house while the bandits seemed organised enough to attack in loose teams.
He saw sights he knew would be seared on his memory forever.
Hot wrath crammed into his craw. Just like with his father, he could not stand by. Jakani coiled. Go, go, go!
The sikimar’s blade became an extension of his will as he rushed into the fray, flailing left and right with the blade before his training took over and he began to strike out with clear focus and deadly purpose. Wham! Zing! Blade and hand, foot and knee blurred through the gloom at inhuman speeds. He spun between two leering, gap-toothed men before seizing their collars and forcing them to run their knives into each other. He pilfered their belt knives and sent the blades spinning into the night. Most of his throws struck true, relieving a neighbour who faced four men trying to force their way through his doorway. He leaped over a man who had pierced a child in the abdomen, and with a clean swing of the blade lifted his head off his shoulders.
Die, scum!
The firelight played crazily upon his senses. Jakani could not contain himself. Everywhere he saw the men coming, dragging women and children out of the houses to butcher them until blood ran as thick and red as the clay dirt, and the crimson-hued wildness grew into a feral monster within him. He snatched up a hand plow and wielded that together with his blade, smashing a man twenty feet through the air with a mighty swing.
They were Eastern like him, yet not. Their smell was wrong and their accents, different. They fought with a certain sense of discipline, yet were devoid of any semblance of honour or mercy. The cruel daggers winked and stabbed everywhere he turned, and behind them came the flames, spreading through the orchards surrounding the village.
Faster! Jakani willed himself to ever-greater feats of speed and strength. He hurtled past his father to shoulder-charge three men into the wall of a hut. Kerblam! He rebounded, but they did not. Hanzaki pressed a handful of sharp metal shards into his hand. “Use these.”
He had unleashed ten of them before his father took his next breath, and it was as if an invisible scythe had whipped the group of bandits running toward them off their feet.
Appalled, he paused. These were lives. Men who had lived and breathed, men like him –
Hanzaki roared, “You are Nikuko! Fight!”
Jakani leaped onto a barrel and from there onto the roof of the nearest hut. He ran over the ridgepole and down the other side, found the thickest knot of bandits, and fell upon them like a vengeful bolt of lightning from on high. He wielded the plow like a farmer harrowing a field of lives, and when he was struck, he felt nothing but slight jolts. No pain. He broke through the shutters of a barred hut to let a family out before they burned alive, and then smashed back through their doorway to ambush a bandit from the inside. He had no chance, but neither did the infant whose throat he had just slit. Both fell dead into the dirt.
Again his father found him. “Down below! With me!”
“You’re bleeding.”
“So are you.”
Jakani wiped blood out of his eye. “How many are they?”
“Don’t know – but these are no lamko,” Hanzaki growled. “Know this: your warning saved many lives. Now follow me!”
He would learn later that the fighting in his own village lasted a mere ten minutes. They left guards posted and ran to the next village, where the slaughter had been worse, then on to a third, which was half engulfed in flames. Most of the people had fled to a major ‘hall’ hut, which was besieged on all sides and afire besides. Faces blurred before him. Gap-toothed leers. Bandits shocked by cold steel sliding into their lungs. Broad, flat features crushed by the blur of an iron-hard elbow. A surprised grunt as a man folded over his outthrust foot. Hanzaki’s dagger pierced the man’s neck right through.
Jakani danced, and his dance was death.
* * * *
As a bloody, smoke-filled dawn rose over House Cyraxana and its estate, Tytiana’s father raged up and down his hall. “I’ll have blood for this – this outrage!” he roared. “Blood! No-one attacks my house and lives to tell the tale – no one!”
He had been this way since the first alarm gongs rang, and stories of the night’s mayhem began to emerge. Lamko attacking the plantations. Lamko attacking each other. Fire in the night. Great banks of black smoke slowly drifted away to the West. People were coughing and sniffing, but out there it was carnage, she understood from the overseers’ garbled reports. Her mind was here, but her heart flew to Jakani and his family. What had happened to them? What of his mother, who had reminded her with a simple gesture of her own loss, piercing her soul with the exquisite, unbearable anguish of release into grieving?
Juzzakarr spat, “I will have the truth out of these mud-grubbing trash pickers! Overseers! Bring them here. Bring every last filthy lamko and assemble them on the lawn. I don’t care if they’re dead – bring them! Someone among them must know who is responsible. No-one crosses me like this. NO ONE!”
One overseer began, “High Master, what of the old, and infirm –”
“Shut your flapping maw! I want every last mud-born moron here by noon, or you’ll stand with them! Understood?” Her father cursed the man luridly, and to her shock, Tytiana heard more of herself in his red-faced, uncouth tirade than she had ever imagined.
How could she be like him?
Dazed …
He was issuing orders now. Security. Warehouses. Checking the House storage and readiness. Getting Dragonships aloft to survey the damage. “Tytiana! Go inspect your work. It’s too valuable to be lost during an insurrection like this.”
“Aye, father.”
Shaken, she hurried out of the back entrance and crossed the courtyard to her arboretum. Thankfully it did not appear damaged, although some of the raiders had come within a quarter-mile of the House.
Jakani was waiting for her, and he looked awful.
She summoned him with a curt toss of her head. “Come. Tell me everything.”
His story emerged in dull gasps; how he had woken early and discovered the attack, and what he had done and seen since. The smell of smoke hung heavy about him, and she did not want to ask what was splattered upon his trouser leg and shirt front. He was holding the egg the whole time as he spoke, turning it over and over in his bruised, grubby fingers. How had he stolen it? Tytiana kept her questions to herself, however, for his tale consumed her completely. He kept saying, ‘And then I killed another.’ ‘I saw a man –’ and there would be another atrocity. Another slaying. A child, a grandmother, a family man. It was too much for her to take in at once. He was bleeding from a dozen wounds.
In his voice was no life, only despair.
In his eyes, she saw the soul of a man who had walked through the uttermost hells.
Tytiana extracted key information from him patiently. The attackers were foreign, not lamko. How the fires had been set according to a plan, before the bloodshed began. How many of the
bandits had laughed as they killed and licked up the blood of their victims.
“And the egg?” she asked at last. “You burgled my bedroom?”
“You only wish,” he grunted.
“I – excuse me?” For once words failed her, and that was probably very much for the better.
The old glint flashed into being beneath his drawn brow, at last. “My apologies, o Choice. I misspoke. The egg was sitting on my hearth when I arrived home yesterday evening. This will sound a bit crazy, but I do wonder if it travels … somehow? Magically. I most certainly did not –”
“I believe you.”
“What?”
“You say, ‘I beg your pardon, o Choice Tytiana’,” she corrected, only for the pleasure of seeing his lips quirk into the slightest of smiles. “And then I say, ‘I need to warn you that my father has ordered an assembly of all lamko on the field at noon.’ He intends to find out who caused this destruction. But mostly, he is looking for blood.”
“Blood?” Jakani said faintly. “There’s been more than enough of that.”
“He will blame you lamko.”
“I see.”
“Go now, and take that message to whatever leaders your people have. I will try to speak to my father and tell him what you have told me; that these were not your people …”
Jakani pressed the egg into her fingers. “I’m also not sure it doesn’t speak to me.”
“I’m not sure you aren’t five wraps short of a bolt of silk, boy. Go. You are dismissed from work until the morrow.”
* * * *
The lamko started streaming in from all corners of the estate two hours before noon. They came quickly. No-one would dare to be tardy for the High Master’s appointment.
Standing on the fourth step of the imposing, colonnaded front entrance of House Cyraxana, behind and to her father’s right hand, Tytiana surveyed the crowd in the hope of seeing Jakani’s family. He had left without giving her assurance of their safety. Scenarios stormed through her mind. Knives cutting. Fire immolating. Little Airi … oh heavens, would he not have said something had the worst happened?
They came barefoot and in rags. They came upon litters and beds, in slings and carried upon backs. They came with family in hand and babes in arm. Some came hanging like bloody scarecrows set upon tall staves, and some had to crawl. The dark-haired ranks gathered in eerie silence. Despite the numbers swelling as the poorest and lowest caste covered the front lawn – doubtless the Under-Master Gardener was having apoplexy at the thought of what horrors the populace might introduce to his precious expanse of the finest sward money could buy – they spoke not a word amongst themselves. All were Eastern, very different to the fair-haired, finely dressed group arrayed upon the steps. And her. She must stand out like a red flag waving amidst the fair and dark masses.
After her father had refused to hear any explanation, Tytiana had decided she would remove her headscarf. Just a small sign, but Juzzakarr would take note.
Now came processions bearing the dead. Four men to a litter. The ranks parted for them. As they reached the front of the crowd, the funeral column split in two. One group laid down their charges with care in a narrow clear space at the front of the crowd. The other dumped bodies in a pile.
Those must be the bandits. They were as unwashed as the rest of this mob, but Tytiana thought she could detect some differences – they appeared stockier and broader in the face, and their clothes had a dissimilar cut. Just as dead, however. And now she began to realise how many visible injuries there were in the crowd. There had been ten such bandit mobs raiding the villages and setting the orchards alight, she understood. The wounds were horrific. A single sweep of her eyes picked out three persons nursing bloodied stumps of arms. Here was a man lying upon a litter, his abdominal area bright with blood. He was groaning soundlessly as sweat shone thick upon his brow. There, a limping child, the calf muscle hanging away from the bone … why would anyone fake this? Why could her father not see, nor did he seem to care …
“Lamko! Attend!” Her father’s rich, powerful bass rolled out over the crowd. He knew how to speak in public. “I am the High Master Juzzakarr, lord and owner of this estate that supports your lives. Terrible deeds were done last night. Orchards were burned and great wealth squandered! I have brought you here today to demand to know who is responsible for this outrage – this insurrection against your rightful masters! Someone amongst you lamko scum must know who the ringleaders are. Bring them before me right now, or I swear you will all suffer the consequences.”
In a moment, a very elderly man stepped forward and bowed deeply. He called up, “High Master, these attackers were not of our tribe. We –”
“Lies! Lies and fabrications!”
The wispy white hair bobbed again, another bow. “High Master, we beg your patience. These men are not from our community, nor from Helyon –”
“Silence, you fool! I said lamko were responsible!” Juzzakarr roared. “You are meant to be an honourable people! I will have the truth out of you, or you will all be punished, down to the last babe!”
The accusation appeared to confuse the old man. He shook his head slowly. “O great Master, the truth lies before you.” He indicated the pile of bodies. “These filthy sons of dishonour are nothing to do with – aaaah!”
The way he clutched his chest, Tytiana thought at first one of the soldiers lined up either side of the lawn and behind the High Master in case of trouble, had surreptitiously used him as target practice. It certainly looked that way; the crowd of lamko shifted uncertainly with a low muttering like faraway thunder, and there was argument this way and that as some tried to show the High Master or his officials the disparities between them and these bandits, while her father by the second grew visibly more and more irate. He would not change his mind. Now other accusations flew forth; laziness, ingratitude and sedition, hiding of weapons and secret training camps of lamko soldiers. Spittle flecked her father’s lips as he marched up and down, haranguing the crowd. She knew how he had been talking even before she left, pounding the table as he spat vitriol about how the lamko needed to be put in their place, disciplined, subjugated!
She searched for that giveaway glint. There. Left-centre. Something deep inside her chest turned over. He was not watching Juzzakarr. Only her.
Tytiana stiffened instinctively. How his gaze burned; how it reamed and demanded and ignited the flame within her … oh, that beast, she must resist his mysterious power …
Her father was fire-bent on punishment this day. It was not in the nature of these people to disagree or disobey their masters. Or was it? Jakani certainly seethed with unexpected passions. Having lived all her life upon Helyon, save one year, she realised she understood precious little about their culture and values. Something inside of her wanted them to rise up. Revolt. Demand their rights! Yet a century of servitude dictated otherwise. And the heat within her surged uncontainable.
“Overseers! Whip them all – ten stripes or until they bleed!”
“Even the infants?” someone muttered.
“ALL!” roared her father.
How were her sisters viewing this? Did they see these people – did they see him – with contempt? Sariaki had been deemed too young to witness this spectacle. Zihaeri looked frozen. Quiraeli’s eyes glistened with incipient tears.
Then, to her horror as she hesitated on the cusp of taking what action she knew not, she saw someone crawling out of the crowd. Isimi. She could not walk, but she crawled between the row of corpses and the pile of bandits until she reached the base of the white steps, and from there she called up in a clear voice, “O High Master, may I receive all the stripes for my family?”
She picked out Jakani’s face as if he stood alone upon that lawn. Stricken. Hanzaki, carved of stone. They would not come. Tytiana understood one small thing, at last. This was Isimi’s honour choice, was it not? No interference was possible.
Juzzakarr whirled upon the petitioner. “No, you may not! I have de
creed the punishment.”
Isimi gazed up at him as if she could see into his soul. “Then, o High Master, I beg permission to take every stripe for every infant in our congregation, even if it kills me.”
Magnificent!
Tytiana’s throat swelled with the hammering of her heart. A lamko woman was a million times the Human being her father would ever be.
Her father could not have expected that. He stiffened until he resembled a Dragonship stanchion. If his gaze could have slain her, Tytiana imagined, he would have without a second thought, for his white-knuckled grip upon the Nestrakil at his chest simulated a slow, twisting motion that she knew he longed to apply to Isimi’s neck. Shiver. That gemstone … but Jakani’s mother knelt before him upon her thickly callused knees, and the power of her spirit was too much for him. Tytiana’s heart wept thick rivers of fire for her gesture. That was how she remembered her mother; temperate, yet with a core of unbreakable, even majestic dignity.
“Have mercy upon our little ones, High Master. I am already crippled. What is my life worth in comparison to many new, strong workers?”
Like a dark willow weeping, her hair swayed to the ground.
The overseers seemed unable to move. A great growl exploded from her father’s chest. Rushing down the steps, he tore a coiled whip out of an overseer’s hand. “Am I surrounded by fools and incompetents? I’ll show you how it’s done!”
The egg wriggled inside the pouch at her belt. Her gaze lifted convulsively. Golden radiance seemed to arc from Jakani to her, spearing through her treacherous eyes to invade her soul. As her father raised the long whip, her hand rose too, and caught its coiling tip with a motion quicker than she could credit.
“Stop.”
His powerful swing tightened the whip-end about her wrist. Tytiana found herself yanked off her feet. She stumbled down the steps and fell half upon gravel and half upon the grass at Juzzakarr’s feet, right alongside Isimi’s bowed form.
“You – Tytiana?” His face hove above her like a purple moon. “You, of all people, dare to defy me?”
