Lingeria

by Daniel Kozuh

  “Let’s get to the top of this hill and pray that’s not where they are.” Roe started running before Norman could offer an alternate plan. They reached the top of the slope in record time, panting as their heads whipped around wildly, looking for the approaching Centaur.

  “There he is,” Roe shouting, pointing in the direction of Highpoint.

  A horse-human figure was galloping towards them, about a mile off, blackened by the setting sun. He was charging hard, fast, and angry.

  “He’s blocking our escape route.”

  “Then, let’s just keep going. Maybe we can make it to those trees.” Norman improvised, pointing to a small grove of birch trees that would offer little protection, even if they did make it.

  “It’s no good. They are just showing us that we have no escape. We could literally be surround by hundreds of …” Roe didn’t finish because Norman was already speeding down the hill towards the trees, letting gravity pump his legs harder than his muscles ever could, his body flapping wildly about as he tried to maintain balance. Calamity Jane trotted behind Norman, blissfully unaware of the danger they were in. Roe attempted to follow behind, his truncated legs tripping him up halfway down the hill. He faceplanted into the ground.

  Norman was in the trees when he realized that Roe was no longer behind him. He scanned the area, looking for him, and finally saw Roe’s dirtied, angry face pop up among the grass. Norman watched as his companion made his way towards him.

  Roe finally made it to the grove and sat next to Norman, disgruntled. Norman knelt behind an ample bush and watched the hill. Roe seemed to care less about their predicament.

  “You abandoned me,” Roe complained.

  “I’m sorry.” Norman brushed him off, “I didn’t realize you weren’t behind me. If you see someone run, then run yourself!”

  “That’s no excuse. As adventure companions, the only way we will stay safe is if we look out for one another.”

  “Okay, okay,” Norman grumbled. He had more important things on his mind.

  Janey found a shady patch of switch grass, already matted down from a previous guest. She circled a few times and laid down.

  “You would have just let them grab me, wouldn’t you of?” Roe said, not dropping it.

  “No, I would have … well, I would have tried to come rescue you. Better one of us caught than both of us.”

  “You have a twisted sense of comradery, sir. One does not leave another in the lurch, if –”

  “Shhhh!” Norman smacked Roe’s arm until he was silent.

  The Centaur was at the top of the hill, scanning for his prey. The sun and leaves were still making it difficult to see the creature clearly, but Norman could see its long hair, blowing around in the wind. A female, maybe?

  “Get your sword out,” Norman said, quietly. “This could get dangerous.”

  “What sword? I didn’t bring a sword.”

  “You didn’t bring a sword?!”

  “Did you bring a sword?” Roe retorted.

  “I don’t own a sword, Roe!”

  “Neither do I!”

  “You mean to tell me, we chose the more dangerous road, with bandits, trolls, and goddamn Centaurs and neither of us thought to bring a weapon?” Norman was basically yelling now and, because of this, the Centaur looked their way.

  “We’re doomed,” Roe said, plainly. “We can try to bribe him. Perhaps sell him your pet for meat.”

  The creature made its way down the hill. It turned slightly into the sun and its true form took shape. This was, in fact, no Centaur at all. It was a man on horseback. And it might not have been a mythical monster, but the rider was gigantic and unnerving. Norman felt little relief.

  As the rider closed in, more details emerged. The most notice of these was that this man on horseback was actually a woman – a warrior woman, clad in brown leather amour. When she was a hundred yards out from their inadequate hiding spot, Roe smiled with recognition. He stood up and walked out of the grove.

  “Roe! Roe, get back here!” Norman called.

  Roe stopped for a moment and looked back. “It’s Tahra!” Roe continued into the clearing and waved to the rider. She came to a stop a few feet from the Whittle and dismounted, her broadsword almost scraping the ground.

  Roe was right – it was Tahra. At nearly six-foot-two, Tahra was a whole lotta woman. She had unnaturally red hair that fell to the small of her back, with both sides of her head shorn to the skin and a snake tattoo on the right side of her skull. The inked picture wrapped around her neck and twisted its way down her spine. When he wrote it, Norman based the tattoo on how he thought the Inuit would depict a cobra striking – a bulbous black head with an open jaw, exposing two distended fangs. Her leather pleated skirt hung to her mid-thigh and her legs were thick and muscular. Norman could see her quads flexing as she walked to Roe. In fact, he couldn’t take his eyes off them. She had a strong jaw and high, sharp, cheekbones with expressive eyebrows arching across her forehead. A slight gap between her leather bustier and skirt revealed a set of deeply-defined abs and her arm muscles rolled like the hills on which Norman walked. Most disconcerting was the necklace of trophy teeth that she wore, which jangled as she walked.

  The Lingeria books never had a consistent lead character – the cast of characters and focus of each book varied, depending on the adventure and locations. There was Fane, a vagabond character; Laundren the wandering prince; Kroü The Valiant; Caughen, the giant/human half-breed; and Nazdim, the malevolent demon. The crowd favorite, however, was Tahra. When Norman made a rare appearance at fan conventions, people would arrive dressed as Tahra, holding art they drew of Tahra, and asking Norman if Tahra would be making an appearance in the next book. Ever the curmudgeon, Norman had left her out of the last book, to spite his own fans.

  Roe and Tahra talked for a moment and then Roe sold Norman out by pointing directly at him. Norman ducked behind the bush, but realized it wasn’t hiding anything.

  He stood up and waved like a goober. He exited the grove; stepping high to avoid roots and ivy. He looked up and saw that Tahra was walking to greet him as well, at a rather excited pace. Her face was locked onto him, her expression bullish.

  When she was within a few feet of Norman, he extended his hand. “Hi, you must be…,” and that was all he could get out before she broke his nose.

  SIX

  The Lord lifted, from his marble table, a cloth sack heavy with gold. He shook it about, the sharp clinking announcing its contents.

  “I need a man killed,” the Lord said.

  Tahra took the sack and felt its weight, approximating its value.“That is the down-payment,” the Lord said. “Another one of those awaits you after he is dead.”

  “Deal,” was all she said.

  “I should warn you, this man is a good man – well-loved; a family man, but he impedes my inter–”

  “I said deal.”

  - Tales of Lingeria: The Light Extinguished, Chapter 7

  What follows is a cursory breakdown relating to the tumultuous backstory of the warrior woman Tahra as taken from Tales of Lingeria Book 3: The Palladium Gauntlet.

  ****

  Tahra of Ocnus was born into the savage “Marked Tribe”, which controlled the northwest territory of Lingeria. The tribe was a happily combative faction that was left alone by the rest of the world due to their predisposition for war and murder. They were primarily identified by their ornately designed tribal tattoos. Norman crafted them from a lazy (and critically decried racially-insensitive) conglomeration of the Māori and Samoan cultures. When an outside force was unavailable for rampaging, the violence within the tribe imploded, turning inwards with a revolving door of ruling families and chieftains. Famously, King Rūn’nanawa only lasted three out of the five courses at the dinner celebration of his own inauguration.

  A complicated caste system rules the Marked Tribe. It essentially distilled into one major tenet: “women are the lowest priority”. A woman was never allowed to hold pow
er and the idea of polygamy was tilted heavily in favor of the males. Women were seen as little more than mortal incubators for future male members. Women would be all but eradicated, if the tribe found a way to grow eggs and gestate a fetus outside a womb. This was a scientific endeavor attempted by more than a few of the tribe’s witch doctors (who were all male, of course).

  A newborn male was met with fanfare and a circumcision ritual that lasted five days. A newborn female was considered a bad omen and, about a decade later, she was met with a wholly different ritual.

  At the southern edge of the Marked Tribe’s land was an acreage known as “The Vast” – a rectangular plot of land roughly a toss across and four tosses wide and surrounded on all sides by a thick forest of fir trees. The Vast, however, was filled with a field of golden wheat that grew about three sacks high.

  When a female of the Marked Tribe came of age (meaning she was capable of childbearing), she would be bound and marched to The Vast. The same went for Tahra, only a few days after her twelfth birthday.

  On the night Tahra became a woman, all of the tribe’s living females gathered in her house, her mother included, and explained to her the tribulations to come. Under the light of the moon, Tahra was forced to eat the placenta of a recently-born goat, and to listen to stories of pain and survival.

  The rite of passage necessitated that the female makes it from one side of The Vast to the other with no weapon or shield to aid her. If she was able to cross the expanse, she was deemed worthy of breeding Marked Men and she was accepted back into the tribe. If she refused to make the walk, she was promptly executed. If she died crossing the field, then her bones were considered cursed and left to rot in the clearing. Her soul was, according to tribal legend, eaten and shat out by The Karnons.

  The Karnons were giant, flightless birds that nested in The Vast and were fiercely territorial. A Karnon could be as tall as a man and could weigh up to eighty pecks. They resembled mutated, diseased parrots. A nasty fungus caused patches of their feathers to be replaced by a scabrous scale. Their beaks were strong and sharp like a vulture and on its feet there projected three colossal black claws that could fell a sapling in a single swipe. And, while flightless, a Karnon could leap up to ten sacks into the air, and twenty sacks in length, with pinpoint accuracy; pouncing on prey before it even knew what happened. They were the reason only one out of every ten females made it across The Vast.

  On the night before Tahra’s test, the warrior women all disrobed and exposed their Karnon scars as marks of pride. There was not a female in the room without one, each attacked and disfigured in their own unique way. They gave Tahra their tips and tricks for surviving the trial; each one contradicting the previous. Some said to run, other said to hide. Tahra’s mother sacrificed two fingers to give the Karnons a tasty distraction. It seemed that there was no strategy for besting the Karnons, other than luck and loss.

  At dawn the next morning, Tahra stood at the tree-line of The Vast, not half the size she would grow to be, with her father’s heavy hands coldly on her tiny shoulders. Her large green eyes already scanned the wheat for movement, unsure what was just the wind and what may be her death.

  Even as a child, Tahra seemed to have a genetic predisposition for conflict and aggression. Never much for talking, Tahra let her fists speak for her. However, if she witnessed foul, the whole tribe heard. Her father was by now well used to being reprimanded by the tribe royalty for his daughter’s suppositions. Tahra was notorious for her questioning of years of tribal philosophy and politics. There were more than a handful of elders anxiously awaiting the day they could shove this pesky uterus into The Vast and be done with her. Although, Chamel, the underground bookmaker of the tribe, had found that the tribe had Tahra’s odds of survival at 3-to-1 in her favor. No woman had ever pulled odds that good.

  Tahra felt her father push her from behind – she was taking too much time and making him look weak. This was the only encouragement she had felt from her father in twelve years – a casual nudge towards a ninety-percent chance of having her intestines spilled. He never would have told her this, but Tahra’s father had secretly wagered a month’s worth of grain on his daughter coming home alive. He had appeased enough angry fathers (whose sons were weeping over black eyes), to know his daughter could handle herself.

  To ensure the girls didn’t even stand a fighting chance, the men of the tribe would chant and holler, bang drums and rattle weapons together (from the protection of the forest), so as to rouse any Karnon that may still be sleeping.

  As she stepped, cautiously, into the open field, Tahra heard how loud her footfalls were. The dry wheat stalks cracked under her simple eighty-pound frame. She slipped off her sandals and found that she could use her bare feet to quietly fold the foliage down and lessen the sharp alarms. By leaving them unbroken, the stalks sprung back after Tahra stepped off, leaving little evidence of her trail (to the point where members of the tribe soon lost sight of her). One man climbed a tree and hollered a play-by-play down to his brothers.

  Unlike many of her terrified, frantic fore-sisters, who tried sprinting across the field, Tahra was slow, cautious, and deliberate. The sharp leaves sliced into her tender soles with every step, until she was painting the gold stems red with blood.

  Tahra was over a sack taller than the grass but kept herself hunched and hidden. She constantly scanned the heads of the shoots, deciphering every movement.

  She was about a third of the way across the field when the hunt was on. She had not been spotted yet, but she saw there were at least two Karnons heading in her direction, pursuing in a broad, uncertain pattern.

  A coarse rock that stubbed Tahra’s right foot was cursed and then blessed. Tahra picked up the heavy stone and, ensuring she wasn’t seen, chucked it towards the oncoming monsters. It fell with a thick thud, cracking a trail of wheat in its wake.

  The hunters swooped upon the distraction, only to find nothing but hardened earth. One particularly irritated Karnon picked up the rock in its beak and shattered it. This was answered by the second Karnon, with a series of shrill clicks and clucks.

  Seizing this brief window, while the monsters were distracted, Tahra sprinted towards the other side of The Vast. Her twig-like legs pumped as hard as they could, to the point where they burned and shot bullets of pain up her spine. A few footsteps later, she heard a Karnon let out an exclamatory chirp that prey had been spotted. Tahra threw herself to the ground and hoped her location wasn’t pinpointed.

  Tahra knew to keep moving. She was pushing herself along on her belly when she felt the thuds of the Karnons’ feet break into a run. They had found her. As the birds ran closer, their massive claws pounded the ground, sending shockwaves towards the terrified girl.

  Knowing she had been spotted, Tahra kicked herself to her feet and started to run again. She barely saw the shadow before the Karnon was on her from above, its foot landing on her ankle, smashing it instantly. Tahra’s scream called every Karnon in The Vast.

  The Karnon’s long toes curled completely around Tahra’s leg, like a shackle. Tahra yanked some wheat over her body as the predator snapped at her, creating a lousy shield.

  The only advice that seemed consistent from the female tribe members was that the only thing Karnons hated more than intruders was other Karnons. They may have hunted in groups, but rarely share a kill.

  They fought and killed one another so often it was a wonder the species survive and, ironically for Tahra (coming, as she did, from such a misogynist society), males were killed and eaten after mating. As the Karnon snapped at the twigs that covered her, Tahra’s hand slapped at the ground for anything that might help her. Eventually, it found something heavy and dense. Without even questioning what it might be, Tahra swung it at the killer. It turned out to be the sun-dried femur of another, long-dead Karnon, and it connected with the head of the live one. The adrenaline coursing through Tahra brought the weapon down so hard that it splintered bone and shattered the Karnon’s beak.
<
br />   The bird cried out and released its grip on the girl. Tahra wasn’t going to take any chances, however, and she drove the tip of the splintered bone through the Karnon’s foot and into the ground.

  With her one good leg, Tahra kicked herself away from the bird. She could see three other Karnons arrive, moments after she disappeared into the foliage. It seemed a debate occurred among the birds as to what to do next: on one hand they had an intruder, who appeared adept at avoiding them, and on the other they had one of their own kind injured and literally pinned to the ground.

  The choice was swift and simple. The innards of the first Karnon hit the dirt before its body did. The others were now preoccupied, pecking and snapping at the organs and intestines that oozed from the corpse. More hunters joined them, their heads soon swathed in blood from digging into the torso of their still-warm sister.

  Tahra remained low and quiet. She reached the tree-line on the far side of The Vast without another incident. All of The Marked Tribe, who had worked their way around the edge while Tahra fought for her life, exploded into rampant, chaotic cheering. Tahra had survived and was welcomed back into her fold. She was now fit to marry, bear children, and cook for a male.

  Her gait was hobbled and restricted as she approached her kin, passing herself from tree to tree for balance. Her father, grinning to his ears, even knelt his hulk to the ground and opened his arms to receive his daughter, but she passed him. Bloody, broken, and exhausted, she kept walking past her mother, past the Marked chieftain, past her unknown betrothed, past them all.

  She kept walking, without satchel or horse, nor gold or broadsword. She walked until she found Frann Road and then limped towards The Red City.

  ****

  It became clear to Tahra that there were only two skillsets she had, for which men would compensate her; the first was barbaric, unseemly and, frankly, revolting. The other was killing.