by Tara Maya
Chapter One
Decision
Rthan
Rthan awakened from a pain-laced doze at the bottom of a hole. From the scratches on the stone walls, and from the height of those scratches, he surmised the pit had been built to hold bears. Cricking his neck to check for ravenous, prisoner-eating beasts, he saw not a bear, but the man he had recently fought.
Though every muscle in his body felt tauter than scraped hide, Rthan didn’t hesitate. He lunged at his enemy before the younger, uninjured man could attack first.
Kavio darted out the way without retaliating. “What do you hope to gain by fighting here, now? Save your strength, you stupid bull.”
Good point, actually. He should have killed Kavio before, but it wouldn’t help now. Rthan huffed to the far side of the pit. Above their heads, warriors patrolled the rim of the pit, and beyond that he could see beehive shaped houses. He rubbed behind his throbbing ear. Flakes of dried blood came away on his fingers.
Kavio cocked his head to one side and murmured something, not to Rthan, so it must have been fae. Not Blue. A smile spread over the young man’s face. “It seems the Initiates survived your attack, Blue Waters.”
Rthan shouldn’t have felt glad to hear future enemies had survived. To hide his relief, he said, “You could have made a final, clean blow instead of having one of your confederates bash me from behind like a coward.”
“Apparently your victim felt she deserved to get her blow in too.”
“Ah.” A vivid image of the woman he had tried to claim and protect flashed through his mind. Naturally, she would not have had any reason to thank him for his actions. He held onto the memory of her lush, half-naked body and flashing eyes, tempered in equal parts by guilt and admiration. She’d not have to mourn her children. He was glad.
Kavio paced the confines of the pit. He tested the rock with one finger, which came up chalky. “Limestone.”
“Rock is rock,” shrugged Rthan.
“Limestone is as different from granite as horsemeat is from hakurl.”
“Why are you a prisoner? You fought for the other side.”
“You noticed that right off, did you? And they say big men are stupid.”
“Don’t try my patience, nephew,” growled Rthan.
“I’m an exile. Hertio isn’t sure what to make of me.”
“You were exiled? Is that what you were going to tell Nargono?”
“Perhaps.”
“You told me before you were a mariah in Yellow Bear. Was that true, or just a lie to stop my knife?”
“It was true.” Kavio caressed the rock face. “For a week, I lived in this very pit. Look – my scratches. Limestone is soft enough for even a boy to make his mark, if he doesn’t mind losing his fingernails.”
“I know what my fate will be.” Rthan crossed his arms, leaned against the rock. “They will cut me and gut me like a trout. But what about you? To torture someone you owe a lifedebt is to piss on honor. The Yellow Bear are scum, but surely not even they would shred their own nets.”
Shadows crisscrossed the patch of sky overhead—the arrival of more warriors, gesticulating at Kavio. A rope scraped against the ledge. When the end dangled into the pit far enough, Kavio grabbed it and began to climb. “I suppose I’ll soon find out.”
Only after Kavio the Rain Dancer had gone did she appear. Rthan felt the familiar tug of pain and longing when he saw his un-daughter, but this time he couldn’t help but think of his enemy’s daughters as well, the unknown children who had almost died because of his raid.
“I wasn’t sure you could visit me, here,” he said.
She ran to him, gave him a big little-girl hug and pecked a kiss on his cheek. He took it as her farewell. He didn’t beg her to free him, and she didn’t offer. They both knew, despite her boasts, her powers were limited here. She melted away to sparkles and dew.
Alone, he walked to the place Kavio had stood and traced the tiny scratches in wall, at the level of a child.
Kavio
The Yellow Bear warriors brought Kavio to a kraal with high, impenetrable walls made from hundreds of twisted, gnarled branches and tree trunks, staked so tightly together that he could not see what lay within the barricade. He had to squeeze through the narrow entrance. The warriors who had escorted him did not follow. Instead, from outside the kraal, they hoisted wooden posts into the entrance to block it.
He could see why extra guards weren’t needed.
Kavio stood surrounded by elite warriors, a band of fifty he recognized as the Bear Shields, the finest warriors in all of Yellow Bear. Each held a stone mace, wood club, adz or spear. They wore their war paint and bear skin headdresses, something they would only don if they were prepared to spill blood. The war leader of the Bear Shields wore a Ladder-to-the-Sun emblem upon his shield. He stood next to War Chief Hertio, who wore dozens of gold bracelets and necklaces.
At a signal from their leader, all fifty roared at Kavio and attacked.
Since the day of his exile, when the mob had almost killed him, he’d given thought to what strategy one man could take against overwhelming odds. The bedrock of his strategy was to pit the mob against itself, so their greater numbers became their downfall.
Bows or slings would have changed the picture, but the Bear Shields all tried to engage Kavio at arm’s length. They vied with one another for the privilege of landing the blow to bring him down, with the result that they interfered with one another. Meanwhile, Kavio rolled under the feet of the first wave, slung himself around a post in the wall of the kraal, and jumped from shoulder to shoulder across the mob of angry men. On his trip over the heads of his foes, he snitched a short spear and an ax. He dropped and rolled in the dust on the far side of them.
This brought him into arm’s reach of both Hertio and the war leader of the Bear Sheilds. Kavio extended the weapons either side, a finger’s width shy of the throats of the two men.
“Put down your weapons or I’ll slay your leaders!” he shouted to the Bear Shields, who were just now wheeling around to face the direction he had gone.
Hertio did not look afraid. He glanced dryly at the war leader. “Satisfied, Thrano? Or do you still believe the description of his prowess during the battle at the Stone Hedge was exaggerated?”
“All right, he’s good,” Thrano said grudgingly. He shrugged to Kavio, half in apology, half explanation. “How could I be sure? For all I know, they made you a Zavaedi just because your father was one. Rainbow Labyrinth isn’t like Yellow Bear, who knows how they do things there.”
“We haven’t rotted as far as that,” said Kavio. “I earned my Shining Name, same as every man here. And I earned it in combat as well as in the kiva.”
“You saw for yourself, Thrano. So will you serve him, despite his youth?” Hertio asked.
“I serve only you, War Chief,” said Thrano. “But I will work with the Rain Dancer if you command it.”
“War Chief Hertio?” Kavio didn’t lower his weapons yet. “What is going on here?”
“Forgive my seeming lack of hospitality, nephew. You helped us save the Initiates and I’m grateful. I know you’ve been exiled. I’d like to offer you a home. And a purpose. And.” Hertio gestured to the Bear Shields. “An army.”
Hertio had not changed much in the seven years since Kavio had met him as a child. The man sweated garlic. His belly spread like a drunk’s grin. It was simple politeness to address any elder male as “uncle” but Kavio still recalled his conversations with Hertio from ten years ago with fondness befitting real kin. Never, however, would Kavio understimate the wily War Chief.
“You are too generous, uncle.”
“I am, aren’t I?” Hertio clapped Kavio’s back. “Today we must collect and count the deathdebts. We will blood the spear with our vengeance before the moon waxes.”
“No, I mean you are too generous. If you give me a place here as a war leader, it will drag Rainbow Labyrinth disputes into Yellow Bear.”
“The cub w
ants to teach the bear to catch fish.” Hertio punched Kavio in the arm, not quite playfully.
“I must decline.” The dust from the kraal felt hot in Kavio’s mouth. He was aware of the shuffling of the armed warriors, could hear some of them still panting from the fight. Hertio had ordered Kavio thrown in the bear pit before making this offer, an indignity that surely had been no oversight.
Rather than argue, Hertio gave orders to the men to fetch death jars, and invited Kavio to accompany them to the Tor of the Stone Hedge to collect the fallen. During the tramp to the other hillock, Hertio discussed the doings of his family since Kavio had last seen them.
“You remember, Lulla, my oldest daughter? She went through her Initiation three years ago, but I won’t let her marry until she’s finished her seven years as a Tavaedi. She’s a goldsmith. As I recall, the smelting ovens used to fascinate you.”
The stench reached their nostrils long before they topped the hill. The bodies had been dragged out of the three circles of stones and left lined up in two rows, friend and foe. Their skin oozed black. Kavio puzzled why until the Yellow Bear warriors approached, and a swarm of flies lifted away. One young warrior vomitted. The others whooped and taunted him, breaking the silence and the tension. After that, the men exchanged crude banter as they curled the corpses up into the death jars, though they took care not to mock their own dead. No one entered the circles of stone.
Kavio noted the clan marks on the faces of the enemy warriors. For a raid this size, he expected to find no more than a dozen different marks, but men culled from twice that number of clans had participated, just one or two men from each clan. Add in that many of the clans represented belonged to clan klatches, meaning more allied clans must have agreed tacitly to the venture, and he concluded Nargono the Blue Waters War Chief must be a charismatic man. Kavio had never met him.
The spears of the martyrs piled up. Twenty-eight warriors and three Tavaedies had died on their side, including one woman. A deathdebt tally of thirty-one called for more than firing arrows at random fishing boats from the shore. Vengeance demanded a major raid.
Hertio pointed to the spears. Soon, perhaps this evening or the next, while Rthan and the other war captives were tortured, the spears would be dipped in blood to acknowledge the deathdebts.
“You fought shoulder to shoulder with those heroes,” said Hertio. “Can you ignore the call of their blood?”
“Where will you attack?” Kavio asked. He knew what his father would answer. Blue Waters tribehold. A snake which bites once will bite twice, his father always said. Unless you cut off its head.
“Jumping Rock clanhold.”
“Uncle, no Jumping Rock warriors took part in the raid.”
“Not surprising,” said Hertio. “During a flood last year, most of the men died trying to save their boats. The survivors are elders, mothers and children. They have no powerful Tavaedies. It will be easy to kill thirty-one of them without any injuries of our own. We may even wipe out the whole clan.”
“Women and elders seem a poor offering to the courage of the dead.”
“Do you call me a coward?”
“No, uncle. I worry if you wipe out a whole clan, it will mean all out war between your tribe and theirs.”
“Is that why you walked away from your tribehold without a fight? I wondered if the Imorvae had grown so weak you had no allies.”
“I don’t want the blooded spear, for my tribe or yours.”
Hertio swatted away the buzzing flies. “You can’t escape war, Kavio, any more than you can stop pissing when you’re drunk. But some things outlast spilled blood. The Aelfae built this hill, but humans built all the others. Do you hear me? We built mountains! Long after you and I are dead, these mountains will still stand. How many humans come that close to immortality? Look at that!” He jabbed a finger against the morning fog, toward the dim shadow of the Unfinished Tor. “I’ll probably be curled up in some jar before I see that finished. After me, some chief with fire for blood will take the men away from building to attack the Blue Waters tribehold, and where a mountain might have stood to challenge eternity, there will only be muck and blood. Do things my way. Wipe out a clan of old women, do you think Nargono will care? They’ll have no relatives left to demand their deathdebts be paid, and Nargono won’t fight on behalf of a clan that sent him no warriors. After the raid, my men will return to working on the tor.”
A fly crawled on Kavio’s cheek. He flicked it away.
“You know I’m right,” said Hertio. “Take my offer. Or leave. Decide by the night of the victory feast.”
By now the men had arranged the death jars in a circle just inside the outer ring of menhirs, so, duty done, Hertio and his men left. After sundown, the Deathsworn would creep in to take the jars. Until daylight failed, Kavio had the tor to himself.
The battle had not allowed him time to examine the menhirs, but he did now. Just as he remembered, the stone had been scored with rows of odd, yet familiar marks. Squiggles, hashes, arrows, waves. Just like the designs painted upon so many houses, and upon the inner walls of the labyrinth back home. Excitement tingled down his spine. He could continue his exploration of the mystery here in Yellow Bear. If he stayed.
To make big decisions, he had a trick, though he hadn’t used it since the night before his trial, the night he fought with his mother. Searching the ground, he found it easy to collect the right kind of stone, silky, thumb-sized, like slingshot stones, which these probably had been. Once he amassed a pile, he sat well outside the megaliths, away from the jars and flies, and flattened two patches of turf. He began to set some stones on the left patch, others on the right. He ended with two even piles, a useless outcome.
That’s when he saw her—the girl he had rescued from the river. As with the first time he had seen her, he felt like a man who had been drinking sand all his life tasting water. She walked up the grassy hill and kept going, until she stood in the center of the three rings of sacred stones. Astonished at her brazenness, Kavio wondered if he should call out to her or wait to see what further sacrilage she would commit. She just stood there, turning slow circles, looking forlorn.
He crossed into the stone hedge to chide her. “We’re violating three taboos just by standing here.”
Like a sunflower, Dindi tilted her face to him, displaying relief, joy and confusion, the same way she’d looked when he rescued her from drowning. He’d forgotten how fully her emotions infused her expressions, reminding him of a tent lit from within by candles. She must have earned her windwheel during last night’s ceremony.
He wondered what Chromas she had, and if she danced Many-Banded or One-Banded. Many-Banded, definitely, he decided first, but then he wasn’t sure. He could not sense her aura at all. Not a glimmer.
“I never expected to see you again,” she said.
“I apologize,” he said. To her, he was just a mangy rover, an exile. “I know I pledged not to seek you out, but I thought I would be alone up here. Why are you here?”
“I have things to think about.”
“I hope they’re profound thoughts. In all the world, there are only seven sacred places that belong equally to the Fae, the Humans and the Deathsworn. You stand in one of them.”
“If it belongs to everyone, why can’t I stand here?”
“I can only tell you what I was told the first time I came here. It’s taboo.”
“So you’ve been to Yellow Bear tribehold before?”
“As a child. My father had a friend here—an enemy, actually, but Father brought me here to make amends.” That was as long a description of the tense peace negotiations between the Rainbow Labyrinth and Yellow Bear as he cared go into. No need to elaborate his own role as treaty hostage. “One night my father’s friend took me to this place and told me something interesting. These rings of stone look the same, but each one was built by a different people. Look.” He swept his arm to indicate the inner ring of megaliths. The morning sun chose the perfect moment to sh
ow itself and cast dramatic retangular shadows across the circle. “The Aelfae erected the tor and the first ring of stones. Humans built the second. This was long ago, before the war between the humans and the Aelfae, and in those days intermarriages between mortals and faeries were common. It is said that if a mortal can dance here for three days and three nights without stopping, he can look into the Circle of Eternity and survive.”
“Is that like a faery ring?”
“It is the faery ring. Humans have many dances but the fae have only one, which touches all times and all places. That’s why a human who joins a faery circle dies. Only immortals can survive eternity and then return to the present. Except here, where a mortal can see the past, or the future. But you’ll learn all this soon enough, now that you’re a Tavaedi. You don’t need to hear it from a scruffy exile.”
He scratched his chin, embarrassed by several dawns’ worth of stubble he’d had no opportunity to shave. He hadn’t applied mud in a while either. The day she’d paid him her lifedebt, she avoided looking him in the face, as if he disgusted her, and she cast her glance aside the same way now. Yet she didn’t order him to leave. She listened attentively as he babbled and lead her outside the taboo area, to the spot where he had assembled his two piles of pebbles.
“After the war against the Aelfae, the Deathsworn built the final ring, enclosing the other two. Someone told me this represents the plight of humankind, trapped between the vagaries of the fae and the Deathsworn, forced to make sacrifices to both.”
The speech had sounded more dramatic when he’d had an obsidian blade to his throat.
“Why are you here?” She picked up a stone from one of his piles. “What are these for?”
“I also have things to think about. I use the stones to help me.”
“How?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Another Tavaedi secret?”
He laughed, but he felt curiously protective of this odd habit, which he had never shared with anyone. “Hardly. Fine—I’ll explain. I have a decision to make. It doesn’t matter what, the point is there are reasons to do it, there are reasons not to do it. For each reason, I put a stone in one pile or the other, until I run out of reasons. I follow the larger pile.”
He waited for the delicate curl of her upper lip, or a baffled wrinkle in her foreward. Or giggling.
“Can I try it?” she asked.
Spread hands invited her to the piles of stones.
He remained alert for any hint of mockery, but Dindi soon became so absorbed he felt forgotten. First she scooped all the stones to her, then she began to place the stones one by one into a single pile on the right side. He kept waiting for her to add stones to the second pile, but she didn’t.
“You’re doing it wrong,” he finally burst, unable to contain himself. “You’re supposed to put some stones in each pile, reasons for and reasons against.”
“I know,” she said. “So far all of the reasons have been against.”
She kept going until she reached the final stone. She held it a long time before she placed it to the left, all by itself.
“That decision was easy.” Kavio envied her.
“Actually, I still haven’t made up my mind.”
“You can’t let one rock outweigh any other rock. Are you sure you understand the method?”
“Are you sure you do? What if there is only one stone which truly matters?”
He reached for the lone stone in the lefthand pile at the same time that she did and their hands touched. She smelled of wild flowers, and earthier, feminine flavors that made his blood pound in his ears.
“Thank you for sharing your thinking stones with me.” She whispered it so softly he had to lean forward to catch her words. “I know what I will do.”
“Dindi…” he said.
“I must go. There’s to be a banquet to honor some hero who fought in the battle here last night. Will you be there?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“I understand. Without a clan...” She looked uncomfortable again. “I’m so sorry.”
She left as she had come, a straight walk across the center of the three circles of stones he had taken such pains to warn her against. She disappeared down the hillock into a sea of grass. Stone by stone, he reassembled his own piles of thinking stones, and again ended with an even division. He picked up another stray pebble to be tiebreaker. Eyes closed, he could picture the exact way sunlight had dappled her cheek and bare arms when she’d asked, What if there is only one stone which truly matters?
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Dedication
For my mother,
who helped me begin the song,
and let me dance.
Acknowledgements
I began this novel, in a very different form, on the Online Writing Workshop and I would like to thank all the critiques I received from members there over the years. Thank you, too, to all my other writer friends who agreed to beta read various versions, to my editors, and to those of you who have been generous enough to share your affection for this book with me and with others. Your enthusiasm and encouragement means so much to me.
Copyright © 2010, 2011 by Tara Maya
Cover Design by Tara Maya
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of
1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval
system, without the prior written permission of the publisher
Misque
Misque Press
First North American Edition: December 2010.
Second Edition: February 2011.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real
persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Also by Tara Maya:
Conmergence
The Painted World, Stories, Vol. 1
Tomorrow We Dance
The Unfinished Song:
Initiate (January, 2011)
Taboo (April, 2011)
Sacrifice (June, 2011)