‘Never.’
THE SINGER
The source, Singing City, Pechacan, Empire of Songs
I am the song. Song. I am the … I am the song and the song is good. The song is glory and war. I am war. I am the song. All will kneel, will kneel, will kneel before the song. Beneath the song. Under the song.
I am the …
I am …
Am I the song? Am I the song, Enet?
The song requires blood. Enet says. Blood. Bloodsong. Songblood. I am the song and the blood.
My song, my blood. Enet says.
I am the song. I am the blood. I am …
Enet says.
Enet.
I am the song and the song is blood.
Song. I am the song.
I am the … I am …
Am I?
I am the blood.
I am the blood and the blood is Enet.
Enet says.
Enet is the song.
XESSA
Sky City, Malel, Tokoban
29th day of the grand absence of the Great Star
She didn’t understand this type of warfare. She didn’t understand any of it: the tactics, the strategies, the retreats that became attacks or counter-manoeuvres. And she didn’t know how to fight people, either, not hand to hand when they had knives and spears, when they didn’t move like her enemies usually did.
Xessa’s opponents came at her from beneath. They were animals with claws and teeth, and while one had tried to pull her spear from her hands, she’d never learnt – or had to learn – to do the same. You couldn’t disarm a Drowned. You didn’t need to block high because their nature wasn’t to slash overhand. You knew the fight against a Drowned, even if you didn’t always come out of it unscathed. Xessa didn’t understand anything about this. The Tokob who’d had basic training in spear and bow work knew even less, and they were dying in droves, their presence barely slowing the Melody in each day’s battle.
Each battle that ended that much closer to the city walls as warriors died and were replaced, first with ejab, and then with anyone who could – and would – wield a weapon. There were children on the walls now, throwing stones from slings and struggling with bows. Children.
And the womb had been breached. Tayan was taken. ‘Then he’s one step closer to rescuing Lilla, isn’t he?’ Toxte had tried, but it had fallen flat, because they’d both – all – known the truth of how that would go from the start. Tayan was no warrior. If he’d made it out of the womb alive – if he reached the Empire of Songs alive – he wouldn’t be sold to the Melody. If Malel watched over him, he’d become a scribe or record-keeper, perhaps even a healing shaman – as long as he could chant the right prayers over his patients. What he wouldn’t do was find his way back to Lilla. Supposing Lilla is even still alive.
Ten days of battle, ten nights of mourning and raging and the desperate shouts from shamans for bandages, medicine, someone to please help me hold him, and through it all the final, terminal disintegration of the alliance between Tokob and Yaloh. For the last two days, the tribes had split completely, Tokob fighting on the western side of the city, Yaloh on the east.
They sent the barely trained civilians against the slave warriors, the ejab and farmers against the dog warriors, and the Paws against the eagles. Still it wasn’t enough. They knew it; Xessa knew it. She was going to fight anyway, because there was no other choice.
Gourds, jugs, bowls, and shallow platters were left on every roof and below every eave. They littered every open space, every plaza – a desperate attempt to gather enough water to live another day.
So much water that people slept in the plazas next to the platters and bowls to guard it from theft. So much that if the Drowned smelt it, they might climb the heavy mahogany gates and enter the city. Tayan would have been able to tell them otherwise from his time in Pechacan, but most people believed the Pechaqueh were somehow immune, and that the Drowned would come for the city, not the Melody. People were was so panicked by the rumour, on top of everything else, that a dozen old ejab, the spirit-magic having broken them years before, patrolled the streets. Ravaged by the magic they’d never thought to need again, slowed by it instead of strengthened, their limbs shaking as they held net and spear, still they did what they could, when they could. Otek was among them: Xessa’s surviving father, shambling through the northern quarter, plagued by spirits and perhaps soon by enemy warriors. Two had already died, their hearts unable to take the strain.
Xessa had never known anything like it, and the nobility of their sacrifice – the sheer fucking heartbreak of it – was enough to steal her breath.
It also strengthened her will. Ejab fought the Melody now, and so would she. She’d fight and die, or she’d fight and be taken captive, but she’d never give up. Because despite the losses and the hopelessness and the death stalking them, they were holding. And with every day that they held, they dealt more death to their enemies. They could still win this. They had to win this.
Xessa stretched and twisted, trying to get a sense of her body and the limits imposed on it by fatigue and injury. She ate and drank and pulled on her repaired armour. Ossa lay on a mat, his ears twitching but the rest of him unmoving. An arrow had skewered his shoulder the day before and he could barely walk. He’d endured so much in the last days, his flesh torn and muscles strained. He had to rest. She spent a few moments hand-feeding him and stroking his ears, shaking away fear at the thought of fighting without him at her side. None of the warriors had dogs and they managed well enough.
Xessa took a deep breath, sheathed her knife and collected the spear and blowpipe. She stepped over Ossa and left without a goodbye. She told herself it was because she didn’t want to disturb him, but really she couldn’t face the thought of it being the last time she ever kissed her dog.
Xessa found Lutek, Eja Esna and High Elder Apok standing on the council house’s gently sloping roof with Toxte and a few others. She climbed the external staircase and then looked down over the city. Her husband and his dog greeted her with kisses, but the sight of Ekka just made her stomach tighten again. The sky was boiling with clouds – the eja part of her cringed, but the rest of her, the Xessa who was thirsty, stared at them with hope.
The roads and buildings and plazas were milky-white, wet limestone and puddles and containers reflecting the stone-grey air, but Xessa didn’t concentrate on those. They weren’t the Sky City, not really. The city was retired ejab, tense and failing and doing their duty. It was children crying for dead family, crying for thirst, for fear. It was wounded warriors stumbling towards the healing caves, and shamans with sacks of medicine walking the walls and waiting at gates and scrabbling for plants and bandages that were running low. It was fear and panic and the whiff of defeat.
On both sides of the city the Melody were a dark mass, slashed with bright feathers and kilts and decorated shields, stark against the black stone and trampled shrubs. Archers kept them out of range while the first wave of warriors and armed civilians poured out of the gates to meet them.
To east and west, it was as if the Underworld had climbed up onto Malel’s skin and unleashed its horrors upon them.
In the west, Melody and Tokob came together. She imagined the shock through the ground and air as the two forces met, the impacts of spears and clubs on armour, through flesh, the stamps and falls and screams shivering the sky, splitting the earth, enough to make Malel weep for her children. Or perhaps hide her face in shame.
‘… lost the goddess’s protection,’ Eja Esna was saying when she could drag her gaze back to the group. The ejab chest heaved ragged breaths and her words were garbled, hard to read. ‘Vaqix died in the womb and then she’ – a finger jabbed in Xessa’s direction – ‘put that abomination in there and now Malel has taken her blessing from us. We’ve lost everything. Better to open our own throats, or throw ourselves at the Pechaqueh and let them kill us, than to live on without the goddess.’
What frightened Xessa most was tha
t no one contradicted her. For long seconds no one signed, no one spoke. Heat chased cold through her limbs.
‘We have not lost her blessing,’ Apok said eventually. ‘We have not. It is Malel for whom we fight. There will be no quiet surrender or despairing suicide. There will be no wild charge into the enemy ranks with the sole aim of dying. We are warriors and the lives and freedoms of every Toko, every Yalotl, depend on us. Will you let them down, Esna? Will you allow your brother’s children to be slaughtered without doing all you can to spare them? Are they worth so little?’
Esna stumbled back as though the words were knives. Her lip wobbled but she shook her head.
‘Then go with Lutek and fight. All of you, with Malel’s blessings, fight and win.’
Lutek slung her arm around Esna’s shoulders and steered her down the steps and Toxte took Xessa’s hand, pressing a kiss to her lips and hair, avoiding the paint on her brow and cheeks so he didn’t smear it. She kissed him back hungrily and recited her new daily prayer. I am eja. I will defend my people against all their enemies. Whether they bleed green or red, they will not beat me.
But save this man, Malel. Spare my husband.
What were they hearing as they jogged uphill? Aside from breath and blood and feet pounding the paths, what else could they hear? And did those sounds – of life and the deaths that ended it, of screams and the clash of weapons – provide strength or steal it? Xessa was glad not to know.
Ekka ran between her and Toxte. The dogs had never been trained for this, but they were protective of their owners and aggressive with strangers, and they had taken to the fight as though born to it.
Xessa wore the ejab symbols of courage and protection on her hands and face, but Lutek had taken a moment to draw the warrior’s bands on her biceps and wrists, and around her knees and ankles too. Xessa called on her ancestors and the spirits to guide her, her gaze travelling down to the side every few strides to look for Ossa. Each time he wasn’t there, her chest got a little tighter, her palms a little clammier.
Another incoherent prayer babbled in her head as they closed in on the rear of the Tokob line and wriggled through to the front. Instantly, they were in the battle, not allowed even a breath to adjust to the chaos all around them.
A warrior wearing a string of dog teeth around his neck lunged at her and she jabbed; he got a hand on her spear and nearly wrenched it from her grip, punching his own towards her as she stumbled. Desperately, Xessa let go with her right hand and twisted side-on to evade the flint point. She tried for a grab of her own and missed as he pulled back. He still had control of her spear, but the ball of her foot slammed into his chest hard enough to force him backwards and he finally let go. Xessa rammed her spear at his face, cutting the cheek and ripping through an ear. He screamed and she paused to let Ossa leap in and tear flesh from her enemy. He wasn’t there. The hesitation nearly killed her.
A second warrior stepped forward as the first fell back and swung a club, studded with obsidian shards, across Xessa’s chest, peeling open bamboo scales and salt-cotton like the petals of a dying flower. Clumsily, she batted it away with the shaft of her spear, the impact shuddering through her hands. One of the shards snagged on the wood and the weapons locked together. Xessa twisted the spear, taking the club out of the woman’s grip so unexpectedly that she didn’t know what to do next. The spear was still impaled on the club, useless.
The woman came for her with a knife and Xessa surrendered to her training, flinging the net hanging from the back of her belt. It snarled her enemy’s head and Xessa wrenched the club free and slammed it into the woman’s shoulder, smashing her collarbone, the obsidian opening her face and neck and chest. She fell to her knees and Xessa ripped it back out, dropped it and reeled in the net, coiling it in her hand. Net and spear. Just like a Drowned. Familiar.
But it was red blood spouting from her enemy. Red blood, not green. Nausea surged in Xessa’s dry throat; she tried to swallow and managed a look to her left and right to see who fought with her – Toxte left, a warrior right to take those threats she couldn’t hear coming, putting themselves at risk by doing so, for there was no one they could scream at for help. If Xessa didn’t see them in trouble, they were dead. A risk they took because the defenders needed every last warrior who could stand in line and wield a weapon. Because they were losing.
The next woman to step forward was taller than Xessa, heavier than her too, with a longer reach and front upper teeth filed to points – a Tlalox. Xessa bellowed at her and parried the axe off to her right and whipped her spear in a wide arc to club the woman in the head. She missed, not sure how, and the axe was slicing for her leg. Xessa leapt high, tried for another smack with her spear shaft, caught the warrior on the elbow as she landed, stumbled, and then she was on one knee and the axe this time would take her face off.
Ossa would leap in and tear out the woman’s belly, but Ossa wasn’t here, and Xessa’s reliance on him, on how they worked together, was going to get her killed. She shoved her spear at the Tlalox, a wild strike that just spoilt the woman’s aim. The obsidian axe blade missed Xessa’s head and shaved a chunk of flesh from the side of her left shoulder so that it hung down like a lolling tongue, salivating blood. She screamed in shock and hurt, and went for the knife, not the net, and lunged, stabbing wildly, avoiding the axe only by Malel’s grace, no skill involved. The blade went into the Tlaloxqueh arm, out and then back into her shoulder and her lead thigh and if the woman said anything, if she begged or cursed or prayed, it was beyond Xessa, who was lost in terror, knife hand pumping until the woman fell backwards and was dragged away so another warrior of the Empire could take her place. And then another. And another. And another. Would it ever end?
Someone wrapped an arm around her waist and dragged her backwards: Toxte, pulling her into the protection of the line. He pointed to the grotesque hanging flesh on her arm. ‘Shaman!’ he shouted in Xessa’s face and pushed her through the warriors clustered behind. Bloody knife in one bloody hand, bloody spear shaking in the other, she squeezed through the throng, chewing her tongue to stop from screaming every time someone pressed against her arm.
She reached the rear of the battle and a shaman was there with a queue of wounded waiting for him. He flicked a glance at her and indicated she join the back of the line. Dotted across the hillside were other shamans and other wounded. Above, sporadic flights of arrows flew from the city wall into the Melody, which retreated out of range. The Tokob facing them, sensing an advantage, gave chase.
Despair washed through Xessa when she understood the ruse. Her people were now more vulnerable, with further to run to get back to safety, while the Melody was out of arrowshot. In the chaos of battle, the Tokob probably had no idea what had happened; they’d sensed an advantage and taken it, and the Melody had turned it against them. How easily manipulated they were, like children playing at war. Warriors waiting for treatment, who had also seen and recognised the ploy, began sprinting towards the rear Paws, screaming at them to pull back under the protection of the walls, but Xessa had seen enough retreats become routs that she didn’t expect this one to be any different. She was simply, selfishly, glad that it wasn’t Toxte’s section that had fallen into the trap.
We’re going to lose. We’re running out of water and running out of warriors. There’s no winning this. We’re going to lose.
But we can make them fucking bleed.
She stood at the back of the line and resolutely didn’t pay attention to the agony pulsing down to her fingertips and up to the side of her head with every liquid thud of her heart. A boy and a girl dragging a trellis loaded with gourds passed, and one handed a container up to her. Water. Xessa tried to make it last, but four gulps and it was gone, not nearly enough to take the furry, insistent edge from her thirst. She stared after the children, but then the shaman was ready for her.
He tugged the bone needle and thread through Xessa’s wound, sealing up the hanging flesh, and then requested the bandage in her medicine
pouch: he’d run out. Already. When it was done he took her chin in a bloody hand and stared into her eyes. He gave her a brisk nod and pointed – back at the battle.
A manic laugh burst from her, but the shaman was implacable. The day wasn’t over yet and Xessa had promised to make them bleed.
It turned out killing people, even enemies trying to steal your land and home and freedom, was very different from killing the Drowned.
The latter filled her with savage joy, the former with a roiling, churning sickness that shamed her and that she knew none of the warriors were feeling. How could they? This was their purpose, their duty. They walked the jaguar path for this very reason, and she did not. The knowledge didn’t stop her sobbing like a lost child.
She sat on her doorstep in the last of the light, too weary to move any further. Toxte was checking on his family, trapped here now to await the final outcome of the war, but Ossa was with her. During her endless day he’d eaten a little of the meat she’d left him and drunk a lot of their precious water, and he seemed to be improving. He lay by her side with his head in her lap. His eyes were dull and his nose was dry, but his tail beat a gentle rhythm on the stone.
The faces of the dead rose in her mind and Xessa squeezed her eyes shut and leant forward to press against Ossa. His tongue found her chin.
We’re fighting for our lives. Every one of those warriors wanted to – tried to – kill me. They’ll kill us all if they can. They deserved it, deserved the deaths I gave them. They’re trying to steal us.
But they’re slaves. They’re just people like us. Forced to fight because otherwise the Pechaqueh will kill them.
No. No! They deserved it.
Xessa kissed away the tears that beaded Ossa’s skull like a crown of tiny polished diamonds. She’d fought hard and fought well. She’d protected her city and her people. She’d done what she had to – what they all had to. No one doubted that except her.
The Stone Knife Page 45