He had flinched, and his face had drained. She’d thought then that he regretted sparing her life; indeed, that he might even change his mind. Instead, he turned away and an instant later he was gone.
Did she know that her words would wound him? Why should they? Was he not proud of his glorious deed?
Of course, Bakal had since failed to become the leader of the Barghast. Perhaps he had already seen the power slipping from his grasp, that night. So she followed him now. Had tethered herself to him, all with the intention of taking back her words, and yet not one step she took in pursuit found her any closer. Days now, nights of hovering like a ghost beyond the edge of his hearth-fire. She had witnessed the attempt on him by the first assassin, a Barahn warrior desperate for status—Strahl had cut him down five strides from Bakal. The next time it had been an arrow sent through the darkness, missing Bakal’s head by less than a hand’s-width. Strahl and three other warriors had rushed off after the archer but they had lost the would-be killer.
Upon returning, Strahl had muttered about Estaral’s spectral presence—calling her the Reaper’s eyes, wondering if she stayed close in order to witness Bakal’s death. It seemed Strahl believed she hated Bakal for killing her husband. But the notion of hate had never even occurred to her, not for him, anyway.
She wanted to speak with Bakal. She wanted to explain and if she could understand her own motivations from that night, why, she would do just that. Salve the wound, perhaps heal it completely. They shared something, the two of them, didn’t they? He must have understood, even if Strahl didn’t.
But now they spoke of a battle with the Akrynnai, a final clash to decide who would rule this land. Maral Eb would lead the Barghast, warriors in their tens of thousands. It had been one thing for the Akrynnai to strike clan camps—now at last all of the White Face Barghast were assembled and no tribe in the world could defeat such an army. Even so, Bakal might die in the battle—he would be commanding the Senan after all, and it was inconceivable to imagine Maral Eb being so arrogant as not to position the most powerful clan in the line’s centre. No, the Senan would form the jagged wedge and it would cut savage and deep.
She should approach him soon, perhaps this very night. If only to take back my words. He struck them down to save my life, after all. He said so. Even though I was the cause of so much—
She had missed something, and now Bakal had sent Strahl away and was dropping back to her side. Suddenly her mouth was dry.
‘Estaral, I must ask of you a favour.’
Something in his tone whispered darkness. No more death. Please. If she had other lovers—
‘Hetan,’ he said under his breath. ‘You are among the women who guard her at night.’
She blinked. ‘Not for much longer, Bakal,’ she said. ‘She is past the time of fleeing. There is nothing in her eyes. She is hobbled. Last night there were but two of us.’
‘And tonight there will be one.’
‘Perhaps not even that. Warriors will use her, likely through the night.’
‘Gods’ shit, I didn’t think of that!’
‘If you want her—’
‘I do not. Listen, with the sun’s fall, as warriors gather for their meals, can you be the one to feed her?’
‘The food just falls from her mouth,’ Estaral said. ‘We let the children do that—it entertains them, forcing it down as if she was a babe.’
‘Not tonight. Take it on yourself.’
‘Why?’ I want to speak with you. Take things back. I want to lie with you, Bakal, and take back so much more.
He fixed his eyes upon her own, searching for something—she quickly glanced away, in case he discovered her thoughts. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Why are you women so eager to hobble another woman?’
‘I had no hand in that.’
‘That is not what I asked.’
She had never before considered such a thing. It was what was done. It had always been so. ‘Women have claws.’
‘I know—I’ve seen it often enough. I’ve seen it in battle. But hobbling—that’s different. Isn’t it?’
She refused to meet his eyes. ‘You don’t understand. I didn’t mean the claws of a warrior. I meant the claws we keep hidden, the ones we use only against other women.’
‘But why?’
‘You speak now in the way Onos Toolan did—all his questions about the things we’ve always done. Was it not this that saw him killed, Bakal? He kept questioning things that he had no right to question.’
She saw as he lifted his right hand. He seemed to be studying it.
His knife hand.
‘His blood,’ he whispered, ‘has poisoned me.’
‘When we turn on our own,’ she said, struggling to put her thoughts into words, ‘it is as water in a skin finds a hole. There is so much . . . weight—’
‘Pressure.’
‘Yes, that is the word. We turn on our own, to ease the pressure. All eyes are on her, not us. All desire—’ she stopped then, stifling a gasp.
But he’d caught it—he’d caught it all. ‘Are men the reason then? Is that what you’re saying?’
She felt a flush of anger, like knuckles rapping up her spine. ‘Answer me this, Bakal’—and she met his wide eyes unflinchingly—‘how many times was your touch truly tender? Upon your wife? Tell me, how often did you laugh with your friends when you saw a woman emerge from her home with blood crusting her lip, a welt beneath an eye? “Oh, the wild wolf rutted last night!” And then you grin and you laugh—do you think we do not hear? Do you think we do not see? Hobble her! Take her, all of you! And, for as long as she lifts to you, you leave us alone!’
Heads had turned at her venomous tone—even if they could not quite make out her words, as she had delivered them low, like the hiss of a dog-snake as it wraps tight the crushed body in its embrace. She saw a few mocking smiles, saw the muted swirls of unheard jests. ‘Bound tight in murder, those two, and already they spit at each other!’ ‘No wonder their mates leapt into each other’s arms!’
Bakal managed to hold her glare a moment longer, as if he could hold back her furious, bitter words, and then he looked ahead once more. A rough sigh escaped him. ‘I remember his nonsense—or so I thought it at the time. His tales of the Imass—he said the greatest proof of strength a male warrior could display was found in not once touching his mate with anything but tenderness.’
‘And you sneered.’
‘I saw women sneer at that, too.’
‘And if we hadn’t, Bakal? If you’d seen us with something else in our eyes?’
He grimaced and then nodded. ‘A night or two of the wild wolf—’
‘To beat out such treasonous ideas, yes. You did not understand—none of you did. If you hadn’t killed him, he would have changed us all.’
‘And women such as Sekara the Vile?’
She curled her lip. ‘What of them?’
He grunted. ‘Of course. Greed and power are her only lovers—in that, she is no different from us men.’
‘What do you want with Hetan?’
‘Nothing. Never mind.’
‘You no longer trust me. Perhaps you never did. It was only the pool of blood we’re both standing in.’
‘You follow me. You stand just beyond the firelight every night.’
I am alone. Can’t you see that? ‘Why did you murder him? I will tell you. It’s because you saw him as a threat, and he was surely that, wasn’t he?’
‘I—I did not—’ He halted, shook his head. ‘I want to steal her away. I want it to end.’
‘It’s too late. Hetan is dead inside. Long dead. You took away her husband. You took away her children. And then you—we—took away her body. A flower cut from its root quickly dies.’
‘Estaral.’
He was holding on to a secret, she realized.
Bakal glanced at her. ‘Cafal.’
She felt her throat tighten—was it panic? Or the promise of vengeance? Retribution? Even if it
meant her own death? Oh, I see now. We’re still falling.
‘He is close,’ Bakal went on under his breath. ‘He wants her back. He wants me to steal her away. Estaral, I need your help—’
She searched his face. ‘You would do this for him? Do you hate him that much, Bakal?’
She might as well have struck him in the face.
‘He—he is a shaman, a healer—’
‘No Barghast shaman has ever healed one of the hobbled.’
‘None has tried!’
‘Perhaps it is as you say, Bakal. I see that you do not want to wound Cafal. You would do this to give to him what he seeks.’
He nodded once, as if unable to speak.
‘I will take her from the children,’ Estaral said. ‘I will lead her to the west end of the camp. But, Bakal, there will be pickets—we are at the eve of battle—’
‘I know. Leave the warriors to me.’
She didn’t know why she was doing this. Nor did she understand the man walking at her side. But what difference did knowing make? Just as easy to live in ignorance, scraped clean of expectation, emptied of beliefs and faith, even hopes. Hetan is hobbled. No different in the end from every other woman suffering the same fate. She’s been cut down inside, and the stem lies bruised and lifeless. She was once a great warrior. She was once proud, her wit sharp as a thorn, ever quick to laugh but never with cruelty. She was indeed a host of virtues, but they had availed her nothing. No strength of will survives hobbling. Not a single virtue. This is the secret of humiliation: the deadliest weapon the Barghast have.
She could see Hetan up ahead, her matted hair, her stumbles brought up by the crooked staff the hobbled were permitted when on the march. The daughter of Humbrall Taur was barely recognizable. Did her father’s spirit stand witness, there in the Reaper’s shadow? Or had he turned away?
No, he rides his last son’s soul. That must be what has so maddened Cafal.
Well, to honour Hetan’s father, she would do this. When the Barghast came to rest at this day’s end. She was tired. She was thirsty. She hoped it would be soon.
______
Kashat pointed. ‘See there, brother. The ridge forms half a circle.’
‘Not much of a slope,’ Sagal muttered.
‘Look around,’ Kashat said, snorting. ‘It’s about the best we can manage. This land is pocked, but those pocks are old and worn down. Anyway, that ridge marks the biggest of those pocks—you can see that for yourself. And the slope is rocky—they would lose horses charging up that.’
‘So they flank us instead.’
‘We make strongpoints at both ends, with crescents of archers positioned behind them to take any riders attempting an encirclement.’
‘With the rear barricaded by the wagons.’
‘Held by mixed archers and pike-wielders, yes, exactly. Listen, Sagal, by this time tomorrow we’ll be picking loot from heaps of corpses. The Akrynnai army will be shattered, their villages undefended—we can march into the heart of their territory and claim it for ourselves.’
‘An end to the Warleader, the rise of the first Barghast King.’
Kashat nodded. ‘And we shall be princes, and the King shall grant us provinces to rule. Our very own herds. Horses, bhederin, rodara. We shall have Akrynnai slaves, as many of their young women as we want, and we shall live in keeps—do you remember, Sagal? When we were young, our first war, marching down to Capustan—we saw the great stone keeps all in ruin along the river. We shall build ourselves those, one each.’
Sagal grinned at his brother. ‘Let us return to the host, and see if our great King is in any better mood than when we left him.’
They turned back, slinging their spears over their shoulders and jogging to rejoin the vanguard of the column. The sun glared through the dust above the glittering forest of barbed iron, transforming the cloud into a penumbra of gold. Vultures rode the deepening sky to either side. Barely two turns of the beaker before dusk arrived—the night ahead promised to be busy.
The half-dozen Akryn scouts rode between the narrow, twisting gullies and out on to the flats where the dust still drifted above the rubbish left behind by the Barghast. They cut across that churned-up trail and cantered southward. The sun had just left the sky, dropping behind a bank of clouds dark as a shadowed cliff-face on the western horizon, and dusk bled into the air.
When the drum of horse hoofs finally faded, Cafal edged out from the deeper of the two gullies. The bastards had held him back too long—the great cauldrons would be steaming in the Barghast camp, the foul reek of six parts animal blood to two parts water and sour wine, and all the uncured meat still rank with the taste of slaughter. Squads would be shaking out, amidst curses that they would have to eat salted strips of smoked bhederin, sharing a skin of warm water on their patrols between the pickets. The Barghast encampment would be seething with activity.
One of Bakal’s warriors had found him a short time earlier, delivering the details of the plan. It would probably fail, but Cafal did not care. If he died attempting to steal her back, then this torment would end. For one of them, at least. It was a selfish desire, but selfish desires were all he had left.
I am the last of Father’s children, the last not dead or broken. Father, you so struggled to become the great leader of the White Faces. And now I wonder, if you had turned away from the attempt, if you had quenched your ambition, where would you and your children be right now? Spirits reborn, would we even be here, on this cursed continent?
I know for a fact that Onos Toolan wanted a peaceful life, his head down beneath the winds that had once ravaged his soul. He was flesh, he was life—after so long—and what have we done? Did we embrace him? Did the White Face Barghast welcome him as a guest? Were we the honourable hosts we proclaim to be? Ah, such lies we tell ourselves. Our every comfort proves false in the end.
He moved cautiously along the battered trail. Already the glow from the cookfires stained the way ahead. He could not see the picket stations or the patrols—coming in from the west had disadvantaged him, but soon the darkness would paint them as silhouettes against the camp’s hearths. In any case, he did not have to draw too close. Bakal would deliver her, or so he claimed.
The face of Setoc rose in his mind, and behind it flashed the horrible scene of her body spinning away from his blow, the looseness of her neck—had he heard a snap? He didn’t know. But the way she fell. Her flopping limbs—yes, there was a crack, a sickening sound of bones breaking, a sound driving like a spike into his skull. He had heard it and he’d refused to hear it, but such refusal failed and so its dread echo reverberated through him. He had killed her. How could he face that?
He could not.
Hetan. Think of Hetan. You can save this one. The same hand that killed Setoc can save Hetan. Can you make that be enough, Cafal? Can you?
His contempt for himself was matched only by his contempt for the Barghast gods—he knew they were the cause behind all of this—another gift by my own hand. They had despised Onos Toolan. Unable to reach into his foreign blood, his foreign ideas, they had poisoned the hearts of every Barghast warrior against the Warleader. And now they held their mortal children in their hands, and every strange face was an enemy’s face, every unfamiliar notion was a deadly threat to the Barghast and their way of life.
But the only people safe from change are the ones lying inside sealed tombs. You drowned your fear in ambition and see where you’ve brought us? This is the eve of our annihilation.
I have seen the Akrynnai army, and I will voice no warning. I will not rush into the camp and exhort Maral Eb to seek peace. I will do nothing to save any of them, not even Bakal. He knows what comes, if not the details, and he does not flinch.
Remember him, Cafal. He will die true to the pure virtues so quickly abused by those who possess none of them. He will be used as his kind have been used for thousands of years, among thousands of civilizations. He is one among the bloody fodder for empty tyrants and their pathetic wants. Wi
thout him, the great scything blade of history sings through nothing but air.
Would that such virtue could face down the tyrants. That the weapon turn in their sweaty hands. Would that the only blood spilled belonged to them and them alone.
Go on, Maral Eb. Walk out on to the plain and cross swords with Irkullas. Kill each other and then the rest of us can just walk away. Swords? Why such formality? Why not just bare hands and teeth? Tear each other to pieces! Like two wolves fighting to rule the pack—whichever one limps away triumphant will be eyed by the next one in line. And on it goes, and really, do any of the rest of us give a fuck? At least wolves don’t make other wolves fight their battles for them. No, our tyrants are smarter than wolves, aren’t they?
He halted and crouched down. He was in the place he was supposed to be.
The jade talons raked up from the southern horizon, and from the plain to the west a fox loosed an eerie, piercing cry. Night had arrived.
Estaral grasped the girl by her braid and flung her back. They had been trying to force goat shit into Hetan’s mouth—her face was smeared from the cheeks down.
Spitting in rage, the girl scrambled to her feet, her cohorts closing round her. Eyes blazed. ‘My father will see you hobbled for that!’
‘I doubt it,’ Estaral replied. ‘What man wants to take a woman stinking of shit? You’ll be lucky to keep your hide, Faranda. Now, all of you, get away from here—I know you all, and I’ve not yet decided whether to tell your fathers about this.’
They bolted.
Estaral knelt before Hetan, pulling up handfuls of grass to wipe her mouth and chin. ‘Even the bad rules are breaking,’ she said. ‘We keep falling and falling, Hetan. Be glad you cannot see what has become of your people.’
But those words rang false. Be glad? Be glad they chopped off the fronts of your feet? Be glad they raped you so many times you couldn’t feel a damned bhederin pounding into you by now? No. And if the Akrynnai chop off our feet and rape us come tomorrow, who will weep for the White Faces?