My Sister's Song

by Gail Carriger

  My Sister’s Song

  by Gail Carriger

  Wilberforsian Ink

  Text Copyright © 2011 Gail Carriger

  First Print Publication in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress XVII

  All Rights Reserved

  Book Design for Wilberforsian Ink

  by J. Daniel Sawyer

  Roman Sandal photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões

  Honey Bee 024 photo copyright © 2009 by cygnus921on Flickr

  The Dyavolski Most photo copyright © 2008 by Klearchos Kapoutsis

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

  This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.

  Also by Author

  The Parasol Protectorate Series

  Soulless

  Changeless

  Blameless

  Heartless

  Timeless

  My Sister’s Song

  by

  Gail Carriger

  Arite has told me I must write this down, since nearly ten summers have passed and secrecy is no longer strictly necessary. I said to her, “My fingers are more used to knives than quills, and you are the singer in the family, not I.” Arite only smiled and hummed a little tune. I told her that she was the one who gave me the idea, so she has just as much right to tell of it as I. And she would tell it better. Arite shook her head and said that the story was mine to tell. She is old enough now for me to listen to her. Mind you, I won’t do it often. I wasn’t born the elder for nothing. In this case my sister may be correct (a grudging admission), the story should be told. But in truth, it was her song that started it all.

  I was picking mushrooms from the mossy bank of the forest creek when I heard her singing. I was plucking them carefully, from the bottom of the stem so that they wouldn’t bruise. Those little gray wiggly capped mushrooms that hug the bases of the trees like children hiding their faces in their mother’s legs. The singing came, my sister’s voice, wound into the low vibrating burr of a bee Charmer. I did not know until then that she had mastered the bee’s song. At first I was delighted by the noise, it meant that the small flat cakes of bread father cooked for evening meal would be sticky sweet. Then I remembered the year time and the weather we’d been having.

  Judging by the sound she was about twenty paces away, and yet the song was near its finish. I took off fast, dropping my mushroom basket so that its precious cargo scattered on the moss. The second I realized the danger I began to yell. Fear lent me the Deer-god’s swiftness and I covered those twenty paces in a heartbeat. I reached her in time to see her gently lift, at the end of a forked stick, the first of the honey combs out of the hive. The combs were still green, capped with a thin covering of wax. Even so I could see that the honey inside was faintly red in color.

  Arite was bent over the hollowed stump, intent on her work and her song. Charmed by its vibrations the bees did not protest her presence, but they became slightly annoyed at my footsteps. She was touching a finger to the golden mass when I crashed into her. As I tackled her she stopped her song, dropped the honeycomb and began to yell. Without the song, the bees became instantly alert to her invasion.

  I took her with me in a roll, me yelling at her to stop, her yelling at me. She used several vulgar words I felt that a girl of thirteen summers ought not to know and resolved to have a talk with father on the subject of her play-fellows. The bees began to gather together, exchange tactical maneuvers and plans of attack, and then turned in a huddle toward us. I lifted her up and pushing her before me, charging us both toward the creek. Halfway there we began to flail our arms about our faces, batting away the stinging creatures. Arite hit the water first, still yelling at me, and submerged herself hurriedly. I followed suit. Both of us lifted up only to breathe, briefly exposing our mouths before sinking back down. The water was as full and as cold as only wet spring waters can be.

  Eventually, the bees became bored hovering above the cold stream and returned to assess the damage. My sister and I hauled ourselves out of the stream, decidedly bedraggled. Instantly, she began yelling again, calling me all kinds of a fool, telling me that she had been perfectly safe, many times she had sung the bees into submission. Finally, she settled into that type of deep seriousness and gravity that only the very young can achieve.

  “Mithra, I know you have been fighting for a year, but I have grown while you were away. The singers have been training me. I have the voice to be a Charmer. I am not meant to be a warrior like you. And from what I have seen of your brilliant actions this day,” she gestured to the welts already forming on her arm, “I certainly don’t want to!”

  She wore herself out and collapsed dejectedly upon the bank. I sat next to her wringing out my long warrior’s braid and looking not at all apologetic.

  “Did you, by any remote chance, mark the type of spring we were having this year? If you intend to become a Charmer you will have to know your bees better than this. By the Deer-god’s horns, Arite, you have lived your entire life in these parts, what possessed you to sing for honey after a wet spring? I barely stopped you before you took a taste, have you remembered nothing?”

  She gave me a blank look. I plucked one of the deep pink rhododendron flowers from a bush and waved it in front of her face. “Do you see any other flowers blooming? Any amarantha or oliander? No. Nothing but goatsbane throughout this wood, and all the surrounding countryside.”

  Arite lost her angered adulthood and lapsed into frightened childhood. Had I not reached her in time she might have eaten that honey. Both of us were raised on the stories, both of us learned by experience - do not eat honey after a wet spring. For when rains have continued longer than they should flowers are knocked from other plants, only the hearty rhododendron and her sister nerium survive to show glorious faces to the early sun. The bees are forced to choose between those two plants, goatsbane and dogsbane, each a deadly poison. The honey they produce is equally toxic, so strong that a taste brings on dreams and sickness, to children - death. When I first reached my moon-time the Melissai fed me a fingertip full so I could see my future. It was to be my only taste, unless of course my path was that of a seer, like them. Arite, just five summers, had watched me writhe and scream through the morning, and held my head as I lost several past meals onto the grass.

  In my dreams, a spider wove a net of light, a glorious pattern of gold which melted into honey when I touched it. Then the spider leaped and turn into a black wish-seed, and I knew that if I caught it I could have anything that I desired. I chased it through the forest and over the Inner Sea, its water black as coal. The seed settled there and was eaten by a silver fish.

  The Melissai said that the spider wove a net of war, and that I chased a wish of freedom toward a weapon of black and silver. So my role among the Heptakometes was determined. My dreams made me a warrior, but the Melissai always twisted the dream toward the profession best suited to the dreamer anyway. Arite would dream a song, or something that could be interpreted as a song. No one ever doubted that I would be a warrior, from the moment I walked – I ran, from the moment I spoke – I yelled. Arite would be a Charmer for her walk had always been a dance just as her words were always a song.

  “Come
,” I said, lifting her up from the bank and steering her back into the woods, “we have mushrooms to pick.”

  Arite and I returned to the village as the sky was darkening overhead. We had collected not only mushrooms but a few early fern fronds as well. Father was pleased with our provisions and we kept our encounter with the bees to ourselves. Joheri, my scout leader, raised her eyebrows at my stings, but asked no questions. I shrugged at her, days of silent marching making words unnecessary among arms-mates.

  Our warrior’s training camp was situated two hills over from the village proper. This was, ostensibly, to keep the noise level down. We warriors are a raucous bunch. After too much barley ale we are prone to barking songs rather than singing them. The Charmers complain. Many summers ago we moved, two hills over. Far enough for the yelling to be a faint mummer in the village but close enough to run and aide - should we be needed. I often felt that there was something else, a way in which our very energy interfered with the practices of the Melissai and the Charmers. Whatever the case it suited us all.

  The Melissai were to say that every step of that spring day was set for me to remember it in the week to come. Perhaps this is true. Had Arite not tampered with the bees I might never had thought to make warriors of them. But here I am getting ahead of myself (that too, is the mark of a warrior).

  I was back in the forest three days later. A two day march away from the place Arite and I found the bees, but still the same forest. My scout group and I were on a routine search. The Council of Ten Tribes, in its doubtful wisdom, had allied with our neighbor and long-time enemy, King Mithridates. We both heard the growling stomach of Rome who would devour us both. It was decided that together we might prove less digestible, like a rotten piece of meat. We would not kill her, of that we were certain, but we might make Rome unwilling to taste our particular region and focus on another.

  It was like a bitter wine to Mithridates, having to ally with us Heptakometes. We had kept him out of the lush south-east region of the Inner Sea for our entire recorded history. Our mobile groups of warrior-scouts harried his sluggish troops from the trees and then vanished. Unfamiliar with the terrain, unable to find food, and harassed, Mithridates’ soldiers inevitably ran. It wounded his dignity to ally with us - but even he recognized Rome for the hungry beast she was. It chewed our pride as well, until we saw the first centurion of Roman soldiers on our land. A bristling, impenetrable porcupine, with spines of spears and fur of chain-mail. The spring of Arite’s thirteenth year they were already beginning to harass our southern border. The villages to our west sen warriors with the news.

  Three scout groups from our village, mine among them, were dispatched to help our southern neighbors. Thus we moved through the forest toward the border of our territory and into the unknown.

  Joheri came into my tent and woke me well before dawn. “The other scout leaders and I have decided, Mithra, that you are to go ahead. You are the swiftest, the quietest and the most seasoned of my warriors. I want you off now, south along the stream, we will follow. You are to report back by eventide. Not to worry, we will disassemble your tent and carry your pack.”

  So it was that I was the first Heptakomete to see Romans on our land. I actually heard them first. They walk very loudly for the conquerors of the world. I wondered, as I climbed a convenient tree, how they could stand to announce their presence in such a way. They passed right under me, so close I could have spat upon their silly fringed helmets. As they passed, I realized the reason for the noise. The warriors in our village number thirty in all, but there are always scout groups out, even in the winter months, so all thirty are never together in one place. The most warriors I’ve seen at any one time is maybe sixty-five, the representatives who met with Mithridates, two summers before. All I knew was that below me there were many more than sixty-five. I had heard, but not believed, that the Romans traveled in squadrons of one-hundred strong. All male, theses warriors were garbed in matching leathers and carried something called spears (very long knives) and shields (like great squares of tree bark). Never had I truly believed the stories until I saw the centurion below me.

  I did not move as I sat in my tree above them, I hardly even breathed. All I did was count. I counted one hundred and one men. As luck would have it, the leader called a halt beneath my tree. I watched as they broke ranks and settled in the shade as far as I could see, leaning back against the bark or each other. They pulled out rations and began to eat, murmuring quietly in their peculiar tongue. They drank a blood red wine from brown flasks and ate a bread which was fat and almost white in color. I watched the leader closely. He sat a little apart from the others, surrounded by four men, whose helmet plumes were a little taller than the others. These, I surmised, were rather like scout leaders, only their scout groups would consist of twenty four warriors, instead of six. They five talked among themselves, but as I spoke no Latin I watched their behavior and the movement of their bodies. Apparently they were dissatisfied with the bread. Its consumption was accompanied by much twisting of the lips and wrinkling of the noses in disgust. Finally, the leader sighed and reached into his pack to produce a small ceramic jar wrapped in a linen cloth. Its contents were greeted with cries of delight and much gratitude, which the leader accepted as his due. The four scout-leaders dipped their white bread into the jar. Only then did I realize what it contained, a familiar thick golden mass of syrupy sweetness.

  They rested for only a brief time before their leader yelled a command and they reassembled the large stomping porcupine. I dropped soundlessly (not that it mattered considering the racket they made) from the tree, skirted around them to the west and ran to my companions. I estimated they were but two hours march behind me when I skidded to a halt at Joheri’s side. I explained what I had seen – one hundred strong, well armed and well protected from our arrows.

  The scout leaders met and decided to take to the trees and launch a surprise attack, much as we did against Mithridates’ squadrons. I lodged a formal protest, I felt that the Roman’s strange shields would protect them from such an assault. The leaders did not listen. What else could we do? We had no other way to deal with such a threat. Still, my objection was acknowledged and I was assigned the hilt position, to observe rather than lead in battle.

  We would wait in the branches until they were directly below us. We were to use all of our arrows from the trees and then drop to engage at knife point. As hilt it was, my duty to stay back and witness the attack’s success, or survive to report why it had failed. I was also the fastest of the runners and should we be defeated someone would have to get the information home.

  The attack faired better then I had expected. Caught by surprise the centurion (clearly was made up of unseasoned fighters) was slow to realize that the attack came from above. A few of our best archers were able to pick off Romans through the eyes, or by way of one of their few unarmed spots. But by the time we dropped down they had regrouped. Our knives were little match against their spears. If we managed to get close enough to one warrior his neighbor picked us off. Even if he didn’t, we could not get past those shields. The best thing, we found, was to role under, or force our way between two warriors, like a wedge, so that we were in the center of the porcupine and could attack from within. Joheri was the first to figure this tactic and managed to claim four to her honor before she was killed. I hugged back hilt and watched. I picked off those who broke ranks and noted that in single combat, unprotected by his fellows, a Roman was no match for a Heptakomete. I also saw that the female warriors seemed to disconcert the Romans. I counted our losses to theirs and though it was even, we hardly dented their number. By the time we had lost half our warriors I had seen enough. As back hilt it was my responsibility to whistle retreat. I whistled.

  We melted back into the trees our numbers halved, two of us been badly wounded. I carried one atop my back and Sokar carried the other. We ran due east until dark-fall, there I left them to tend to their injuries and ran north alone. All the scout leade
rs had been killed in the battle and I was the most seasoned warrior. By rights I should have stayed to lead those who survived. But I had back hilt and first scout. I was the one to report. I left Sokar in charge, he had two seasons of fight in him and had struck good and true during the battle. He was also unharmed and well thought of, so most able to lead.

  I did the three days of travel in one day and two nights of running, stopping only to drink. I arrived back at the village mid morning yelling warrior’s rites to instant assembly.

  The villagers, accustomed to such meetings from past battles with Mithridates, were quick to collect in the large central hut. There I told of the battle as quickly as possible. The remaining two scout groups, the Charmers and the Melissai sat before me, silent. I emphasized the great number in the Roman squadron. I explained that we were equally matched warrior to warrior, but that there were simply too many of them and they were barely two days behind me. They were headed roughly in the direction of our village, though they might pass us in favor of our neighbors to the east. A runner was immediately dispatched with this information to them and I was silent at last.

  So was everyone else.

  Finally my father spoke, “Mithra are you quite certain of the number?”

  I was still panting slightly from my run, “Quite certain. I know the number seems amazing but you must believe me.”

  A Melissai spoke, “We must consider all our options, please offer suggestions. It seems a direct confrontation is impossible. Even those attacks we have used against Mithridates are useless.”

  “We could send to Mithridates for aide.”

  “He would not get here in time.”