Snowbrother

by S. M. Stirling

  The Kommand'ahan would never let us sack Bemedjaka, she thought; that was a cow better milked than slaughtered. There must be a new village within raiding-reach. But the treaty applies— ah, until second snowfall.

  1

  WINTER, 4962 A.D.

  It was quiet under the great pines. The cold cut like crystal, through fur and leather and the quilted padding under armor. Woodsmoke drifted on the air and mingled with the clean musky smell of horses and resin tang from the forest, yet each scent was leached to a ghost by the unmerciful chill of predawn. Yesterday's powder snow hung feathery from branch and trunk, blue-white on black, drinking every sound of wind and wood, muffling the clatter and stamp of sixty riders.

  The Kommanz warriors sat their horses in stolid silence, long used to worse in the driving blizzards of their native prairie far to the west. All were plains-bred: tall, fair-skinned under tan and windburn, mostly hawk-faced and high in the cheekbones. Long, light hair was braided under helms; pale eyes were slitted in the perpetual half-squint of plainsdwellers. With combat to await, they had shed bison-pelt cloaks for the western battle panoply: round shields of layered bullhide, blunt, conical steel helmets, long-skirted hauberks built up of fiberglass, lacquered leather, and silk cord. Their weapons were lance, wheelbow, curved sword, dagger, and lariat; many added strings of scalps, and all had jagged gaudy designs swirling over shield and breastplate, showing kinfast and Keep.

  One outlander was among them: a Minztan forester, sitting his horse with no trace of the westerners' ingrained skill. The marks of fire and blade showed on his body and bound hands. He was the last of the dozen they had captured; the scalps of the others dangled fresh from saddlehoms and belts.

  Shkai'ra Mek Kermak's-kin reached across and gripped him by the hair.

  "Newstead here?" she asked. Like many of her folk she had learned the forest speech, enough for trade and war.

  The Minztan nodded blearily, shuddering with the cold. Shkai'ra released him and raised a hand. One of the troopers behind him tossed her lance up to the overhand grip and reversed it, planting the bone butt knob between his shoulders. She pushed, and the Minztan tumbled to the snow with a grunt of pain.

  He floundered to his feet, shivering and drawing back from the figure that crouched before the horses. Alone of the Kommanza that one was unarmored and unarmed, carrying no trace of metal. Blue eyes stared sightlessly from a face made unreadable by looping ovals and tines of scar tissue, scars that had been rubbed with soot while they healed to leave their patterns ink-black against his flesh. On his head was a covering of hide and feathers and bison horns, and the fingers of his left hand tapped ceaselessly at the drum slung to his belt; on one side of it was the sigil of the spirit called Blood Drinker, on the other Flesh Eater. Before him was a knotted cord spread in a circle; within it was a dried eagle's claw, an ear cut from the Minztan with a flint Knife, a scattering of objects Shkai'ra could not have named.

  "Well?" she barked, using the superior-to-subject inflection.

  The shaman grinned at her with filed and rotten teeth. "Yes, oh, yes," he said in a soft, even voice. He nodded through the screen of trees toward the clearing two kilometers ahead. "I hold, hold their minds within mine." His hand darted out over the circle of cord; he gasped, yelped, chanted words. "Strong witches, much power within those walls. Soon they know I hold them: better you kill, yes. I will eat their hearts, brew magic from their blood, gain their power."

  From a pouch he pulled a piece of dried fungus and chewed with bitter pleasure. Then he turned, hand snaking out to touch the Minztan on the throat. The forester stilled, only his chest moving as he breathed, and the frantic motion of his eyes hunted for escape. The shaman drew a stone knife from under his jacket and slashed twice under the angle of the Minztan's jaw. Blood spurted, and still the victim stood, motionless except for shivering. The shaman's head darted forward, mouth fastening on the rivulet of blood, slurping noisily; when he withdrew the body dropped like an emptied sack.

  He leaped into the middle of his cord circle, beating again on his belt-drum. Turning swiftly he spat a fine spray of blood to the north, south, east, west.

  "Now," he gasped, then began a shuffling dance, chanting:

  "Hey-ya-ye-ye-ye-KIAKIA-yipye-he-he-he-ya—"

  Shkai'ra turned and gave a clenched-fist salute to the warband. No few grinned back, raising lances in salute; the free yeoman-farmers of Stonefort had an easy, unservile respect for their chiefs. Familiar faces from hunts and childhood training were shadowed to a gleam of eyes and teeth under the low brims of the helmets. Many had painted their faces for war, slashing designs of scarlet and black and green in the patterns of their clans; her own Red Hawks from the villages near the Keep, lesser numbers of Gold Dogs, Real Tigers, Running Bison. Shkai'ra wore only the Eagle on her forehead and the thunderbolts on her cheeks, her right as a scion of the ofzar class; the mark of Zaik Godlord, Begetter of Victoiy, Mother of Death.

  She felt the band's coiled eagerness as she turned back to her officers. They were mostly older than her nineteen summers, sent along to steady a troop of unblooded youths. My first raid.

  "No other sentries," she said. That brought a snort of incredulous contempt from the Kommanz officers; hard to believe even Minztan tree rabbits were that careless. "The shaman did his work well. Nothing left now but fighting; well be in their village and looting, drinking and fucking before Sun Retreat. Dismiss."

  The village in the clearing ahead was not large as Minztan steadings went: a dozen long log kinhalls with their barns, smokehouses, forges, saunas, enough for two hundred adults and as many children. There was a stockade of pointed logs, half-finished; more attention had been paid to clearing the fields. Other clearings would have been made hereabouts, wherever the thin glacial soil would yield oats and potatoes, or hay along the streams.

  The Minztans had not come this close to the edge of the steppe for farming; there was plenty of forest farther east, in the huge empty wastes that swept north from the city-lands through swamp, lake, and wood to the tundra. Trapping and hunting were good here too, but they would likely have planted near ore worth mining. Metals were rare everywhere and always precious; the Ancients had taken so much. Travelers' tales told of great circular lakes five kilometers across that marked the sites of their plundering. But Minztans were expert at finding old leavings, or ores too lean for the Ancestors to have bothered with.

  "Should be easy," Shkai'ra said to the man beside her. "Here, take the farlookers." She handed him a pair of binoculars from a case clipped to her saddlebow.

  "We're not here to butcher sheep," he replied dryly. Thirty years of raid and ambush had left Warmaster Eh'rik Davzin-kin with a wealth of sour pessimism and no illusions at all.

  Methodically he ran through a final check of the lacings on his armor and the positions of sword, dagger, bow, and lance. Taking the glasses for a careful sweep, he pushed his helmet back by the nasal to reveal a saturnine, seamed face with a tuft of grizzled chinbeard: balding, he had chosen a shaved skull rather than warrior braids.

  "Old croaker," Shkai'ra said affectionately. "Even sheep with horns make mutton."

  Sent along to restrain a warband where few but the Banner-leaders were over twenty-five, the Warmaster replied with a folk proverb: "There's a plowing time, a harvest time: boast at the funeral feast of your friend's deeds, for anytime is a time to die. Wait until we ride under Stonefort gate with the loot before you celebrate, Chiefkin."

  Loot. Well-wrought tools, fine cloth, metals, luxuries from the southlands, products traded from the cityfolk manufactories. Lenses for farlookers, paper, drugs, glassfiber for armor, secrets handed down from before the Godwar and the Year Without Sun. There was no knowing what they might find in those squared-log halls. And there would be captives to sell in the spring to the Valley traders; the forest folk were always in demand, being good with their hands and docile.

  Fame and glory and booty; success would bring her the beginnings of a Name, mak
e warriors eager to follow and share the fruits of cunning and gods-favored luck; and in the end there would be tablets and offerings for her ghost, to bring her before the gods and win fortunate rebirth.

  Or she might find death. She had no wish to die, but all Kommanza were sword-born; better to go with iron in your gut than in bed of fever or a bad birthing. And she had done enough, made sacrifice enough, to warrant reincarnation as a Kommanza…

  Yes, with luck (she made a curious gesture with her sword hand) this could be the beginning of…

  A giggle from the ground brought her thoughts back to the present. The spellsmith glanced slyly up out of eyes no longer filmed with trance.

  "The thought in your mind, Chiefkin," he tittered. "Be careful; for what you desire, the gods may grant." She jerked a thumb over her shoulder; the shaman nodded and slipped the cord tight with a snap.

  "Released, unbound," he said ceremoniously. "The veil I take from their eyes, the felt from their ears, the cord from their tongues." He trotted to the rear where his pony waited. What came next would be for the blade and the bow.

  Shkai'ra squinted at the sky. "Time?" she said.

  Eh'rik nodded.

  2

  "The Circle turns, the Circle turns,

  —bird and beast, tree and flower

  Brings Harmony to all we see,

  —birth and death each in its turn"

  Maihu Jonnah's-kin let her mind wander, freed by the gentle familiarity of the Litany. The words blended with the soft flow of the morning lantern, smells of beeswax polish and oatmeal steaming under goatsmilk and honey, warmth of her kinmates' hands in hers. Briefly, her consciousness touched theirs; the butterfly fidgeting of the neighbor's children, a kaleidoscope of thought and sense impressions from the adults. It was the fabric of a winter morning. For a moment, she frowned. There was a sense of… constraint? No, a blankness, out beyond the edge of perception. She shrugged it off; in a new settlement like this the Otherworld would be wary, and the folk had not had time to gain that totality of knowledge of their surroundings that would warn of any impending wrongness.

  A cheerful clatter and babble broke out as they sat; Minztans were carefree folk by choice. Maihu sipped thoughtfully at her herb tea, mapping out the day. Winter was busy for a highsmith: the usual assortment of broken tools, a half-dozen projects waiting in the forge to add to the kinfasts' store of trade-barter… and also other duties, she remembered with a sigh.

  "Dennai," she said.

  He looked up, spoon in hand. "Mai'?" he said. "Something on your mind?"

  "Doa," she affirmed. "The stockade. We really should get the rest of the upright timbers cut and stacked while the hard snow lasts." It would be difficult to move them after thaw, and everyone would be busy clearing and planting then.

  "Doa. And the other kinfasts would be less uneasy if you did the rites."

  She sighed again. Even among the New Way radicals who had founded Newstead, it was difficult to arouse much urgency about the details of defense. And of course no Minztan would fell a tree without the proper ceremonies of explanation and apology; such heedlessness had brought the fire down on the Old Ones. The Way of the Circle bred no priesthood, but Maihu was known as one whose meditation had brought her closer to the Harmony than most.

  "I'd be happier if the stockade was already finished," she said grimly. "Remember Annelu."

  Dennai winced: they had found her hanging head down and gutted over a game trail last fall, with Kommanz runes carved in her forehead.

  "Well," he said, "we've surely little to worry about until campaigning season."

  She shrugged; Newstead was just a little too far from the steppe for raiders whose horses must carry their own fodder.

  "Kinmate, I've lived thirty turnings of the Wheel here in the borderlands; you were born in the deep forest. This is less than two hundred kaelm from the grasslands, and our defense plan depends on the palisade as a base—or so the lakelander expert the Seeker hired said."

  Dennai's reply froze unuttered. He was no Adept, but he knew that wide, sightless stare; it was the Inner Eye. To use it so here, now, without ritual or preparation, was reckless; it bespoke a terrible urgency.

  Maihu had been probing at the constraining barrier without conscious thought. When it vanished there was a moment of mental staggering, as if a solid wall had vanished under her hand. Her awareness flooded outward, driven by unspoken need; she made no attempt to stop it. An Initiate learned to trust intuition. Swiftly, she withdrew from the flow of sensory data, shutting down the upper levels of her mind. She became mind-not-mind, one with the Harmony; into her flowed the manifold life of plant and insect, bird and beast, meshing. And there… the touch of… horses, far too many. She raised her perceptions up past the level of instinct, a shadowy awareness of her own reasoning mind returning; an invitation to the danger of backlash, without the patterning rituals. A wrongness, blaring, shrilling, hatred and despair and killing-lust, a coiled-snake readiness to spring. Maihu came to herself with a snap. Training pushed away the savage throb of pain in her temples; there would be time to pay the price later. Staggering, she fell against the wall, threw open the double-paned window and carved sash. Cold poured into the room, cold and a sound carrying faint but clear. Echoing, a harsh, deep-toned baying snarl.

  Dennai had heard it before, and the memory sent the tiny hairs along his spine crawling and struggling to rise. Kommanz Warhorns, the horns of the giant wild cattle of the prairie marshes, tipped with walrus ivory. A child whimpered, terrified by her kinparents' fear. Maihu's eyes swept her companions, printing the loved faces on her mind. Nausea welled in a lump of cold sickness under her heart.

  "Shennu," she said huskily. "Get the children over to the Smoot-kin's hail." Thank the Circle we didn't bring the youngest. Many of the Newstead settlers had left their infants with relatives until the village was completed.

  Her voice ground on: "Dennai, fetch the weapons. The rest of you, remember the plan; if we're pushed back from the barricade or the walls, we hold the hall and the lanes." A drum began to thud, and she heard the shouts of the villagers. Anger awoke as she saw the white faces of her kinmates.

  "We are the Seekers of the New Way," she said quietly and firmly. A part of her was surprised at the lack of tremor in her voice. "We do not seek war. War has come to us. Now we fight!"

  "Forest rats didn't think we could come this deep in winter," Shkai'ra mused, and spat. It froze with a crackle before it hit the ground, hard as the pooled blood of the sentry. Angled in her hand, a mirror caught the light of the sun as it rose above the trees and flashed it across the clearing. Somebody loosed a volley of soft curses when a lance tipped a branchload of soft snow on her helmet. No Kommanza liked the shut-in feeling of wooded country, and the eleven-foot shafts were awkward among the trees.

  The signal was answered from the opposite side of the opening, where the other troop of the warband waited: blink! then blinkblink, command code for "proceeding as ordered."

  From the woods opposite came the sudden weird daunting snarl of the warhoms, an endless bellowing roar that clamored through the trees, across four hundred meters of field to shiver in teeth and bone. The decoys walked their horses slowly out of the woods and paused to dress ranks. An alarm drum began to thud and the Minztans poured out of their homes, sleep-fuddled and half armed but ready to defend their village and moving to some sort of plan. Some dragged logs fitted with spiked stakes, and others overturned wagons and sleds to make an improvised wall across the open end of the palisade. Edged metal glinted behind it, ramming forward from ranks thick and dark. Binoculars brought them close; they were armed with long spears, or bills and halberds—heavy cutting polearms, with points for stabbing and hooks for dragging a rider down. Most of them seemed to have laminated wooden shields, and many had some sort of body armor; squares of boiled leather or bone on their jackets, or outfits of wooden splints; she saw iron-strapped leather helms, even a few all-steel types.

  "Two hundr
eds of them, maybe two hundreds and two tens," she said. "They're better equipped than I awaited."

  Eh'rik nodded, pursing his lips; the enemy were coming a little farther forward than optimum, tactically. Safer to barricade the laneways and force the battle to close quarters; discipline and archery and the terrible shock power of massed lancers would all be lessened among walls and narrowness. The Minztans would still lose, of course, but they would kill more of the Kommanz before they went down. Even forcing the raiders to kill was a victory of sorts; the Kommanza were here for loot and an easy blooding of their youngsters, not slaughter. He smiled coldly; a dead Minztan was dead meat, and beef was much cheaper. Alive, each prisoner was twenty half-fingerweight silver coins stamped with the five stars of the Pentapolis, packed by the hundreds in little oaken kegs… coins that would buy strength for Stonefort.

  Shkai'ra nodded. "We'll have to storm that barricade," she said. There were possibilities: fire-arrows for the houses… the picture was satisfying, Minztans screaming in the flames, running out with their hair and clothes burning to meet the arrows. No. We cannot destroy what we came to take.

  "Truth."

  Shkai'ra heeled her horse and the troop behind her walked their mounts into the clearing and began to trot toward the center; four Banners, a hundred and twenty warriors. The Minztans yelled defiance, a deep sound with an edge of fear in it. The Kommanz riders waited in disciplined silence, grinning like wolves. Their commander dipped her lance, brought it around in a circle and jabbed the point toward the barricade.

  A snarling blat of horn-call signaled acknowledgment from the other troop. They left their lances in rest and formed in a staggered column of twos, bringing out their wheelbows. Officers' whistles trilled, and they rocked forward into a gallop, nocking arrows. Shkai'ra leaned forward eagerly; now she could tell the reach and number of the Minztan bows. At three hundred meters from the enemy the column turned right and the warriors fired, high arching shots to drop their shafts behind the barricade. Four hundred meters was extreme range for a wheelbow; under one hundred it would punch through even first-quality armor. The Minztans answered with their crossbows and recurves, hunting weapons turned to war. A few Kommanza went down, and more horses; the survivors were scooped up by their comrades, riding pillion as the attacking column bent itself into a circle and then dropping down again when they were out of range.