“I never wish that,” I said.
“Why not? Have you given up your mad idea to go and do battle with the Navorans? Ramakoda would go with you, if I was dead.”
“I’ve not given it up, Mudiwar,” I said. “I believe in it more strongly than ever. When the time is right the Eagle will fly, and whether you lead your people, or Ramakoda leads them, is a small matter.”
“True, since we’d all be dead at the end of it,” he said. “My first responsibility as chieftain is to keep my people alive, Avala. Some of us may be enslaved, some slain by Navorans, but most of us are free, and we’re still a great nation—which is more than your pathetic bunch of Shinali can say.”
“You may be a great nation,” I said, “but you are a people oppressed, living in fear.”
“You’re wasting your breath. Go and do some work. Heal someone.”
I obeyed.
Chimaki and I were busy those first days of my return to the Igaal camp, for Mudiwar’s rapid improvement seemed like a miracle to his tribe, and many came who had gangrene and major illnesses Chimaki alone could not have cured. Together we amputated feet and fingers too gone with gangrene to save, and we removed a tumor from a woman’s abdomen, and mended the ruptured spleen of a youth who had been kicked by a horse. All our patients survived, and felt no pain, and slowly the tribe’s suspicion and hate toward me melted to a kind of grudging gratitude.
It was a peaceful spring, there in the circle of mountains in the great Himeko Ranges. On my free days, when Chimaki and I were not busy in the healing tent, Ishtok taught me to ride. One day, when I could ride well enough to go for several miles, we went out onto the plains north of the Himeko Mountains and lay in the long grass, watching the herds of wandering deer. I had taken my telescope, and Ishtok was intrigued by it, as he was by all things new and different.
“It is Navoran, isn’t it?” he said, lying on his back, examining the telescope closely.
“You spend more time looking at it than through it,” I said, smiling, lying beside him, looking up at the sky. “Yes, it is Navoran.”
“Do they have other things like this, the Navorans?”
So I told him of some of the wonders of Ravinath, without giving away too much about that place. I told him of the machines that measured time, of the great telescope, of the paintings and artworks, the carvings. “You’ll see it all one day,” I said. “We’ll walk the streets of the stone city, you and I, and I’ll show you the marvels I’ve seen.”
“Ah—you were there!”
“No. I’ve never been in the stone city.”
“You’re a mystery, Shinali woman,” he said, moving until his arm was about my neck, and I was lying with my head on his shoulder. “A worrying, maddening mystery. Lovable, though.”
“I’m glad you added that last,” I said.
“If it’s true that we’re to walk in the stone city one day, you’d better teach me Navoran words. I want to be able to talk with your blue-eyed kinsfolk. Tell me the Navoran words for the things around us. Begin with my favorite thing, the sun.”
So I did. I also told him what Zuleman had told me about our sun, that it was a star, our day-star. Ishtok thought about that a long time, then said, “If the night stars are also suns, why is the night dark?”
“The night stars are too far away to light our sky,” I said.
“Who told you these things?”
“A wise man. You’ll meet him one day.”
“Then I’ll need to talk to him, for I have as many questions for him as a bird has feathers. Tell me the Navoran words for sky, and day, and light.”
Three-and-twenty Navoran words he learned that afternoon, but still wanted to know more. As the sun went down he lay with his lips against my cheek, and asked, “Now tell me the words for you, and I, and love.”
I told them, and he repeated them to me in perfect Navoran, and then kissed my eyes and said the words, also in Navoran, “Blue skies I love.”
Until the sun set we lay there in the sweet-scented grass, holding each other, and he stroked my face and hair, but went no further.
It was dark when we got back to camp. We found that we had missed the evening meal, but Chimaki had kept some bowls of meat aside for us. While we ate, Mudiwar frowned and said that the next time we missed the meal, we could starve. Ishtok smiled and said, low so his father would not hear, that one kiss with me was worth starving for.
When I was not helping Chimaki in the healing tent or out riding with Ishtok, I had long talks with Ramakoda, and realized how deeply he longed to unite all the tribes and to put an end to Navoran oppression.
“Could you not do it, without your father?” I asked.
He shook his head. “To defy a chieftain, even if that chieftain is old and beyond reason,” he said, “is to commit the worst crime by Igaal law. We will have to be patient, Avala. But you will be pleased to know that I talked with the chieftain of Ishtok’s Hena tribe, when they were here, and the Hena are willing to rise up and strike back at Navora. The Navorans have captured many of the wild horses in the far north, leaving few for the Hena. It affects us, too, for we trade for horses from the Hena. It seems that Navoran greed is never satisfied. Now they want our horses, as well as our people.”
A pain passed through him, and he sighed deeply, his eyes searching my face. “I trust you with my life, Avala,” he said, “yet I suspect you visited the place of our enemies while you were gone from us. I’ve seen the thing you call a telescope, and Ishtok tells me it is Navoran. Tell me, were you there, in the stone city? Did you see my sons?”
“No, I was not there, Ramakoda. I can’t give you news of your sons, I’m sorry.”
“But you won’t say where you were?”
“No.”
He looked out across the lake, for we were sitting on the stony shore, watching some of the children play on floating logs. “My father thinks you were with the gods in the mountains,” he said. “You’ve come back with strong munakshi. My wife says you warned her yesterday not to eat the fresh pot of soup she had made. She gave some of the soup to a dog, and it died soon after. You saved many lives. The whole tribe is talking about it. You have a seer’s powers.”
“It was just a feeling I had, about the soup,” I said. “I think one of the herbs she put in it was not what she thought it was. Our plants are different from the northern ones she is used to. This morning I went gathering with her and showed her which herbs we use that are safe.”
He looked at me again and lifted his right hand and touched my sleeve in the sign of gratitude. “Then I thank Shimit for your feelings,” he said. “May you always heed them. And may we always listen.”
Spring blazed into summer, and Mudiwar began to talk of moving the camp to a far place by the Nyranjeera Lakes. But before he made his final decision, I had a dream that changed things for us all.
It was a dream of a bowl of bread. The bread was fresh and good, but the clay bowl was old and cracked, with jagged bits about the rim. One of the cracks was very deep, and ants came through it and soon were crawling all over the bread. Then the ants went away, and the bread was left crumbling. Soon there were only fragments left, and birds came and ate them. I thought the birds were crows at first, but then I saw that they were the death buzzards, and the bowl was not a bowl at all, but a hollow in the earth, and what I had thought were pale bits of bread were human bones.
I woke sweating, breathless. I knew, within five heartbeats, that the dream was a warning of death, that the hollow in the earth was the valley ringed by mountains, where we camped, and the crack in the bowl was the one narrow gorge leading in; and I knew that the bread was the tribe, and the ants were an invading army. But how close was that army?
Without waking anyone, I pulled on my dress, got the map I had made in Ravinath, and crept outside. The eastern skies were growing light, and the lake lay like a sheet of steel under the dark mountains. On the stones near the water’s edge, facing west, I spread the map. For a whil
e I sat in front of it, my eyes half closed. The lines I had drawn, the mountains and territories and rivers, were vague images in the growing dawn. My breath slowed, and I entered that state close to dreaming, though I was awake and alert. I saw through the map, beyond it, and was as a bird flying high, looking down on the great Himeko Mountains, speeding along the gleaming Ekiya, southward. And I saw them, small and numerous as ants: soldiers, riding hard. And with them came a coldness, a sense of impending death. I withdrew, breathed deep again, flew in my mind back to the shore of the lake, to Mudiwar’s camp. My heart was thundering. Midmorning the soldiers would be here.
Trying to be calm, I lifted the amulet from Sheel Chandra, and pressed it to my brow. The gold was cool, but the stone between the eagle’s wings was warm. All my mind turned to that great man and the tower in which we used to sit together. I saw it clearly, the glass roof above, the carved stone walls, the window that would be open now, to the dawn skies. I saw his chair, and him there, waiting. He looked as he had the first time I ever saw him, beautiful as carven stone, his long mustache and hair silver, his face utterly majestic and tranquil. His eyes were closed, his hands turned palm upward on his knees. I knelt before him and laid one of my hands upon one of his, palm to palm. He did not move, but I felt the warmth of him.
“Master?” I whispered, wondering if I was as real to him as he was to me.
“What is it, dear heart?” he said. His lips did not move, but I heard his words clearly. Perhaps I heard them only with the ears of my heart.
“Soldiers are coming, Master,” I said. “Will you help me shield us, please? To make our tribe invisible?”
“This is not a time for shielding,” he said. “This is a time for battle. Many will die, but great good will come of the evil. Do not take up a weapon yourself. Remember all I taught you.”
“Will you protect us?”
“You are already protected, beloved, and many will live who otherwise would have died. Go. Do not be distracted. Make haste to Mudiwar.”
“Thank you, Master.” I bent my head and kissed his open palm. The room grew dim; my sight of him diminished. There was wind, the feeling of cold streaming by, the grayness of the coming dawn. Then I saw the map before me and felt the hardness of the amulet pressed too close, now, against my brow. I lowered it, placed it within my dress. Quickly, I began to roll up the map. But suddenly, in the space of a single heart pulse, I glimpsed something else on the map. There was a flash of gray light, a vision as from high above, an image of a company of men farther north, also riding hard. No coldness this time, but still a sense of urgency. Mystified, I would have searched farther, found out more, but Sheel Chandra’s words came back to me: “Do not be distracted. Make haste to Mudiwar.” So I finished rolling up the map, and ran back to the chieftain’s tent.
I put the map in the chest of my belongings and stepped over the sleeping people to Mudiwar’s bed. Kneeling, I shook his shoulder. “I’ve had a dream!” I whispered. “A warning. Soldiers are coming.”
He sat up, instantly awake. Those nearest his bed, hearing my voice, the urgency in it, sat up blinking, scrambling for their clothes. Others fumbled to light the lamps.
“Tell me,” said Mudiwar.
So I told him the dream and my interpretation of it. Around us, people listened, half dressed, their faces pale in the flickering lamps. Before the sun was over the tops of the mountains, Mudiwar had called a council, and the whole tribe was gathered on the stony shore of the river.
“Avala has a word for us about a dream,” he said. “It is a warning. We will heed her words.”
Then he nodded at me, and I told them all of my dream and the terrible meaning. I finished with the words, “Soldiers will come through the gorge, many soldiers. They will be here when the sun has not long been up. But do not be afraid; we are protected, and a great good will come of this. Take heart.”
There were a few moments of silence, and I felt the doubt, the terror. Then Mudiwar said, his voice echoing across the still lake, “We will prepare for battle! Men will ride to the opening of the gorge, and surprise the invaders, and kill as many as they can before they reach the camp. Women will fight from the tents. The old and infirm, women heavy with children unborn, and children too young to fight, will flee to that cave our hunters told us of, up the western slope. The path is not difficult. The old men will take bows and spears, to defend you if necessary. May the gods be with us all.”
22
We were dismissed, and the gray dawn about the tents became frenzied with people running, children crying, and dogs barking. In Mudiwar’s tent chests were thrown open. People were strapping the great, curved Igaal war knives to their belts, and packing arrows into quivers. Children wailed as their mothers got them ready to leave, kissing their faces, crying. Little ones struggled and howled as the older children dragged them out to the long line of those leaving for the cave. Fathers were giving last-minute instructions to their older sons, and the youths were wrought up, excited, afraid, as they strapped on their quivers full of arrows, and tested bowstrings. Seeing it all, seeing the solemn, excited faces, a thrill of fear went through me. I thought of the soldiers I had seen during the shielding in Ravinath. I thought of their heavy bronze armor, their great warhorses, the shields and mighty swords, and the strange steel crossbows. And I looked about me at Mudiwar’s people, some of them not much more than eleven summers old, getting ready to fight. I was covering them all with protection, when Mudiwar’s gong signaled the time for the men to leave for the gorge.
With many of the women, I ran out to see them go. All the horses were ready, waiting on the shore of the lake, restive with the fear they caught. Incredibly it was quiet, save for the snorting of the horses, and the last-moment farewells, spoken low, and the soft words of encouragement and love. I went to say farewell to Ishtok. He seemed suddenly older, sterner, and I realized, with an awful suddenness, that by this day’s end one of us, or both, might be dead or in captivity. The All-father moved in strange ways, and even with Sheel Chandra’s protection, nothing was certain. I passed my hands over his face, down his chest, covering him with a light he could not see. “Be safe, dear heart,” I said.
Suddenly he hugged me to him, and kissed my brow. We made the Shinali farewell, and he swung himself up onto his horse. Then the men were riding off, their bows and spears glinting in the pale morning sun, their backs straight and proud. As I watched them go I shielded them, too, though it was hard to do it alone. I wondered how many of them would ride back.
Women were hurrying back to the tents, but I ran to the healing tent. I was thankful that it was on its own at the end of the lake opposite the gorge, where it would not be likely to be trampled by the great Navoran warhorses. Even so, I stood before it awhile, praying, protecting it, shielding it. When I went back to the other tents, the healing tent was invisible, concealed behind a line of trees that were not there before.
Back in Mudiwar’s tent, the wooden chests had been hauled into a long line across the floor, opposite the tent entrance. They were piled two or three high, making a strong wall, and covered with blankets and carpets. The women would fight from behind it, at least a little bit safe from Navoran arrows. All the women were armed with bows and had knives in their belts.
Trying to be calm, I crouched beside Chimaki. She glanced at me and frowned a little, seeing me unarmed. Then she said, with a fleeting smile, “Of course you can’t fight, Avala. Not kill people of your own blood.”
“I won’t kill,” I said, “but I’ll rescue as many as I can, and take them to our healing tent.”
She nodded, and we fell silent while we waited. The air in the tent was breathless, taut like a bow at full draw.
Then the noise broke out—the clamor of men yelling, horses screaming, and the strange, high shriek that was the Igaal battle cry. About our tents the dogs were going wild, yipping and howling like wolves. I could hardly breathe for the sudden fear that tore over me. The woman on the other side of me wi
ped her hands on her skirt, one at a time, then placed her arrow again. We both were shaking.
And outside the noise went on and on, screams of men and horses, shouts, and battle cries, echoing round and round the mountains, until it seemed that there were twenty battles around us. Gradually the sounds came nearer. Horses approached; we heard a man’s voice, loud and urgent, giving orders in Navoran. Women screamed, and soldiers shouted. A horse thundered close; a sword slashed along our tent. It struck a pole, cut the bindings holding the tent up, and the roof skins fell on us. I could see nothing; all was confusion, terror, people screaming and shouting. I could hardly move for the weight of the tent on me. I smelled burning, and smoke swirled around. I crawled out from under the tent. All around the edges other women were crawling out, some with their bows, some with knives in their hands.
Around us was dust and turmoil and noise. Soldiers and warriors fought from their horses, struggling as the beasts met and clashed; others fought on foot, hand to hand. It seemed there was no time; all happened slowly, and I had time to look. Soldiers rode off with Igaal people across the saddles in front of them, were shot with arrows as they rode, or else their captives stabbed them. Some captives were trampled under the horses as they tried to jump free. I saw an Igaal bowman on foot, aiming at a soldier with an Igaal girl on the horse in front of him; the soldier rushed at him, cut off the man’s head while the arrow shot wild. A warrior with a hunting knife fought against a soldier with a sword; the warrior lost his knife and his arm, then fell, screaming, his belly slit. Some Igaal men, wounded, were dragged along by their terrified horses. Fleeing women were hunted down by soldiers on horseback, caught by their hair, and hauled up onto the horses. A youth fell, had only his hunting knife left; a soldier rode over him, and I saw him underneath the hooves, slashing at the horse with his knife. The animal reared, screaming, then fell, pinning its rider under it with the bloodied boy. I saw a woman defend her wounded son, fighting off a soldier with only a cooking pot, using it as a shield. The soldier was grinning, enjoying the sport, his great sword clanging on the pot like a gong, until she tired, and he sliced off both her arms and left her there, while he rode off with the boy. Some people fled into the lake, were ridden down by soldiers, and slain. The lake edge turned scarlet. All the way between our tents and the mouth of the gorge, men and horses lay on the ground, wounded and screaming. Soldiers rode with branches set alight, burning tents. Wounded people tried to crawl away, were trampled by the Navoran horses.