Hall of Smoke

by H. M. Long

  Omaskat bucked. He tried to loose his sword, but it was pinned under his body now. I threw all my weight into his back and tried to grab him by the hair with my bad hand, but pain made my vision blur.

  Ayo renewed her attack in a cacophony of barking and growling. Before I could raise an arm, she snapped at my head. Something tore.

  I struck at her with my free arm and was rewarded by a fraction of reprieve. Blood streamed down the side of my face and, in the second before this newer, fresher pain crashed down, I had the odd sensation of my ear dangling against itself.

  Hands hauled me backwards. I screamed from rage and pain and thrashed, trying to keep a hold on the hairpin.

  Someone slammed me into the ground. The picket of a nearby tent struck my ribs and the skin gave way with an odd pop.

  My hand spasmed and the hairpin dropped.

  Omaskat’s hoarse voice broke through the clamor. “Leave her! I said leave her!”

  The shouts continued.

  “Her ear, it’s… Mercy of Gadr, it’s hanging off.”

  “Hold back that hound!”

  “Brother, are you all right? Can you stand?”

  “Kill her! She has to be killed!”

  “That is my decision,” Omaskat hissed. “I said, leave her.”

  Through a haze, I watched him stagger towards me. Blood tricked from multiple punctures across his jaw and shoulder, but by the time he grabbed my tunic and hauled me to my feet, his boots were planted and his grasp like iron.

  I stared into his face. The veins around his mismatched eyes had burst and there was dirt ground into his teeth. It was a nightmarish thing to see, though I knew that I looked little better.

  He dragged me away. All the way through the camp I stumbled, followed by pointing fingers and gaping mouths. I was vaguely aware that people accompanied us for the first part of the journey, but at the edge of the camp, they fell away. This was a master’s business now; a master and his slave, and the dog with the bloodied maw who loped behind.

  I don’t know what I expected to happen. A beating and violation, certainly. Death, probably. But when he threw me onto the muddy riverbank and knelt over me, sword at my throat, I was still surprised at the nearness of my end. And once more, I realized just how unprepared for it I was.

  Death had never scared me before. Every Eangen and Eangi died in the knowledge that they were bound for the warm hearths of the High Halls, the company of our forebears and tables overflowing with the food and drink of the gods – a privilege unequivocally denied to the living. But until Eang shrove me, I had no place there and no hope of eternal rest with Eidr, when our days of song and revelry grew weary and we lay down for the Long Sleep.

  I’d never see my husband again.

  “Why?” Omaskat demanded, his voice cutting over the rush of the river and the distant, settling tumult of the camp. “I protected you!”

  “It is your fate. And mine.” Pain and anger made me bleary. My good hand slipped in the mud as I tried to push myself upright and his knuckles dug into my collarbone, the flat of his sword cold against my skin. “I have to do it.”

  “Fate? Eang knows nothing of Fate. You know nothing of Fate.” He snorted and shook his head, disgust written across his face. “Ask yourself this, Eangi. If she wants me dead, why not kill me herself?”

  I had no reply except what I had been taught: “It’s my fate. Ours. I was supposed to kill you in the Hall, back when I first met you. I have to do it now.”

  He laughed: a harsh thing, all sharps and edges. “Then why am I still breathing?”

  “Because I was weak.” My voice cracked. The sound horrified me, but I could no longer keep myself together. “Eang left me because of it. She left us and they all died. Because of me. I will kill you. Now or tomorrow. But I will make this right.”

  “A third question for you. Why doesn’t she help you? Look at you. You’re bleeding everywhere, your ear is on a thread. Doesn’t that hurt? I thought you were an Eangi. Turn my bones to dust. You can’t, can you? Because my god is truly a god, and Eang’s wrath cannot touch me.”

  I remembered the taste of Fire in my mouth, the way Algatt raiders had crumpled before my sword and gaze a dozen times. But when I looked to Omaskat, that Fire was still terribly, ominously absent.

  “Gadr doesn’t have that kind of power,” I protested.

  Instead of countering me he spat on the ground, half spittle, half blood from a punctured cheek. “Gadr isn’t my god. Didn’t Eang tell you why you’re supposed to kill me?”

  I blinked up at him, struck by his denial as much as his question. “What?”

  “Why am I to die?”

  “‘Why’ doesn’t matter. But who do you worship if not Gadr?”

  Exasperation burst from him in a scornful gust. “Can you not hear yourself? Or have both your ears gone?”

  This second reminder of my ear made my stomach churn. Instinctively, I reached up a weak hand and felt at the dangling wad of flesh. The top of my ear was torn off.

  Omaskat flicked his sword. I moved my fingers just in time to avoid the blade as he severed the last thread of skin.

  I didn’t feel it, but the shock made me scream. I struck out with my bad wrist, and the world cracked into blackness.

  The next thing I knew, the rush of the river was all around me. Part of the bank had collapsed and only Omaskat’s grip on my tunic stopped the torrent carrying me away.

  “Fate has her own mind,” Omaskat’s voice said. In my disoriented state, I could not figure out which shoulder he stood behind. “You’re free to go.”

  His hand opened and the river swallowed me whole.

  EIGHT

  I learned I was an Eangi in my fifth year. I remember the night in a child’s way – emotions and fragmentary images, now inseparably merged with the stories my elders told me afterwards.

  Raiders struck the outlying farms of the village of my birth, East Meade, just after dark. One moment the air was filled with the calls of birds, the scraping of kettles and a father singing a lullaby. Then came the horns and the screams.

  That singer was my uncle. He was, by far, the kindest human I had ever known. His voice was like a hearthside in the autumn and sunshine in wheat. My father called him lazy, though I never understood why. He worked, but he did not complain about it as the others did. He sang as he walked, slapping his thigh to beckon the hunting dogs that followed him wherever he went. He sang as he hauled wood. He sang as he strung up deer and butchered them on the edge of the village. And he sang his clutch of children to sleep, every night.

  From the loft where my sisters and I were bickering over the braiding of one another’s hair and who got to sleep closest to the open shutters, I could see his house. I avoided a flailing limb and crouched, straining to see my cousins through the shutters of their own loft. The grasses growing over the roofs of our houses hung low, laden with summer flowers. But I could just pick out movement in the shadows; young bodies, including Yske, adjusting their mats for the night.

  Despite the borrowed lullaby, it took a while for sleep to come. I tried to curl up against my eldest sister Hulda’s back, but she complained of the heat and pushed me away. I waited for her breathing to lengthen, then crept back up against her narrow ribs. I knew she would be cuddling me like a doll by morning, which I adored, and so I was satisfied with myself.

  After my uncle’s voice faded, and the last barking dog had been hushed, the last shuttle tucked into the loom and the last grains set to soak for morning, real quiet fell. I closed my eyes.

  Horns. Screaming. Dogs baying. An infant squalling. Hulda dragging me upright.

  “Gatti! Gatti! The Algatt!”

  I didn’t cry. I was too stunned for that. I sat in place, gawking as my mother came up the ladder to put knives in my older sisters’ hands. Then she dropped back down to the floor and pulled a padded tunic over her head.

  “Stay in the loft,” she snapped, then she braced one end of her bow against the side of
her boot and strung it.

  My father handed her a quiver of arrows and drew his own sword. Then, together, they vanished through the door.

  Silence fell inside the house, while beyond, the chaos amplified. Hulda pushed me into the corner with my youngest sister, Etha, and levelled a warning gaze.

  “Do not move.”

  I never forgot Hulda’s face that day. There was no fear there – perhaps she did not know enough to be afraid. She was angry as a wounded bear and she held the knife with vengeful purpose. Our last sister, Skay, kept looking to her, desperate to borrow her courage.

  My next memory was an Algatt man ascending the ladder to the loft. Hulda slashed his cheek open before he had even seen her. He toppled backwards, shouted, and hit the ground with a stomach-dropping thud.

  A woman with a painted face came next. At the same time, a third Algatt grabbed the edge of the loft with an easy grip and hauled himself up.

  Hulda shrieked at the woman and threw herself forward, slashing and diving. The woman’s eyes widened. She dodged, avoided smacking her head off a beam and snatched Skay around the waist in the same movement. Skay dropped her knife and howled, kicking and wailing until the woman’s arm locked across her throat. Her eyes bulged and her face began to redden.

  “Drop that,” the woman ordered Hulda.

  Hulda twisted, trying to keep both Algatt in sight. The male had a lean, loping frame and his eyes were an uncanny green, edged with kohl. He fingered a hatchet warily, watching Hulda’s feet, her shoulders, her eyes. She may have only been thirteen, but she was no fool.

  Etha clutched at my back, immobilized, eyes round as saucers. She smelled of urine. I pushed her further into the corner.

  Hulda threw the knife at the Algatt man without warning. He yelped and staggered back into the roof, loosing a rain of dust, dirt and disgruntled insects.

  He recovered and leapt at her. Now unarmed, Hulda hurled a piece of discarded clothing in his face and tried to dodge, but there was too little space. In an instant her shift was wound in his fist and he hurled her out of the loft.

  I heard her hit the table below: a scream, a thud, a clatter. Then stillness, broken by the hoot of an owl in the rafters on the other side of the house.

  What happened next came to me only through the stories. Skay said that I screamed and the female raider’s eyes bled. Hulda, half-conscious, said that another woman came and killed the man with his own hatchet. Etha, her memory thinner than mine, did not remember my presence at all.

  All I could remember was heat. Heat in my blood, heat in my mouth, the exhaustion that the Fire left in my bones, and the owl’s watching eyes.

  “She’s Eangi,” the headman told my father as the pyres of the dead, including my uncle and three of my cousins, burned at his back. “Send her to the Hall of Smoke in Albor.”

  NINE

  I drifted downriver. Time refused to be measured, but I imagined passing under a great archway of stone. I saw fires atop an endless wall, low mountains wrapped in tatters of cloud, and a rocky shoreline where a creature too large for a bear watched me with quiet, intelligent eyes. I saw the waving tops of cedars stretch into a sky smothered with stars. And then, in the waning light of afternoon, I realized a reed-woven riverman cradled me just above the surface of the river.

  Water rushed around us, folding and eddying around his slim frame. Perhaps he had been there all night, or perhaps he had only just arrived. I couldn’t recall.

  I stiffened. I was barely strong enough to open my eyes, let alone navigate the unscrupulous motives of a riverman. Beings of water and reed, they were creations of the Gods of the Old World, like woodmaidens and humans. They were unpredictable, creatures who long ago slipped through the boundaries of the High Halls and made their home in the Waking World. They were also reclusive, but it wasn’t unheard of for them to steal away young men and women for their entertainment, or to mold monsters from stone and clay.

  Weak as I was, it took me several minutes to even recall how I’d gotten into the water. My memory returned in flashes, then settled upon Omaskat’s face as he loomed over me – that moment when I’d expected to die.

  The fear came back, stark and real. Death. Eidr. Helplessness. Anger came hard on its heels, an indignant, blazing spark that sharpened my mind for a blissful instant. But the cold of the river came close behind, seeping into my clothes and thoughts alike.

  Why had Omaskat let me go? And where was I now?

  I pressed my eyes shut and focused on the arms around me. Riverman. Deal with the riverman first.

  “You are kind to me.” It was a statement, not thanks; his kind hated praise from humans as much as they hated their questions.

  “I have brought you to Oulden’s Feet.” The riverman’s voice was a warm burble, reverberating through his chest of woven reeds and willow wisps. “Tell your patron; I would have her in my debt during this upheaval. And remind her, Eangi, that she is as mortal as the rest of us.”

  “Oulden?” The question escaped my lips before I could stop it. Oulden was the god of the Soulderni people – beyond the borders of Eangen. “What upheaval? Do you mean the Algatt?”

  He set my feet on the silty bottom of the river and vanished under the surface. The water was clear, but I lost sight of him immediately, and he did not reappear.

  I collapsed onto a boulder, physical weakness overriding my bewilderment. Now that the riverman was gone, the cold of the water pushed deeper into my flesh. I was numb with shock, my nose streamed, and coughing wracked my chest. I needed to get out, needed to find shelter before nightfall.

  But the land around me was like nothing I had ever seen. Narrow hills and forest opened into a plain, bracketed by desolate mountains of iron-colored scrub and dark rock. The river took a slow bend here, broadening out towards islands and banks of fine black pebbles. These banks held back the approach of shoulder-high shrubs decorated with little pink flowers, interspersed with groves of bowing cedars. A bird or two darted among the foliage, but otherwise I might have been alone in the world.

  I stared at the shape of the river, trying to recall a map I had once seen.

  “This is Eangen.” In my memory, a warrior’s scarred finger traced across vellum. “Here’s the Algatt’s mountains, all across the north. This mountain here in the south – below the central Eangen clans like the Rioki and Amdur – that’s Mount Thyr, where the shrine of Eang is. Here’s Albor at its feet. There in the east, the Algatt’s mountains end in foothills of a sort. Iskir is there, guarding the north borders. Now the river Pasidon – no, here, ignore that one, it’s been dry for decades. Where are you from?”

  I had leant in closer to his side. These were the days before Eidr and I had claimed one another, and I was just awakening to the ways of men and women. I liked this warrior, one of those that often sheltered in the Hall of Smoke. He was older than I at fifteen, his shoulders broadening and his scent that of horse, smoke and road.

  “East Meade,” I replied.

  “So, here.” He pushed his finger west and identified the sketch of a lynx face, between Mount Thyr and the sea. Then he leant closer to me and let his hand drift down the Pasidon towards my hovering fingers. “The Pasidon flows south into the Ridings – the grass hills in northern Souldern – past this wall. That’s the fringe of the true Arpa Empire. Then it flows down into Souldern proper, the low mountains and valleys. Oulden’s land.”

  My curiosity was genuine. “The Arpa Empire? Have you been there?”

  “No.” He did not sound disappointed. Turning, he lowered his head over me and toyed with the end of my braid, which hung to my waist. “No desire to, either. We’re Eangen. You’re Eangi. This land is in our blood and bones. Why would we want to leave it?”

  And I had never left. Silently, I cursed my thirteen-year-old self, gawking at a beardless boy instead of memorizing the lines of the map he carried. But from what my people said of Souldern, with its open rock, gnarled trees and blithe shepherds, this river bend could b
e in its central valley.

  Cool dread settled in my stomach. Not only was this land utterly unfamiliar, but Souldern was Arpa-occupied. The archway and wall I’d seen in my delirious journey south must have been the border.

  I was in the Empire.

  Yet, the riverman had also said he’d brought me to Oulden’s Feet. I had no clue where that was, but as a priestess, I could begin to guess. Every god had a place where some of their presence lingered, even if they themselves were not physically present; a place of power, where the living, Waking World bled into the High Halls. Eang had her shrine in the field of poppies. Oulden must have his own holy ground – a place where his people could sit at his feet.

  And Oulden, being allied with Eang, might be able to help me.

  That thought gave me the strength to wade to the riverbank and strip, coughing and trembling the whole time. The sun still cut over the mountaintops and the breeze was not cold, but my wet clothes would do me more harm than good. Pebbles ground beneath my bare feet as I painstakingly shook out my tunic, loose trousers, leather shoes and woven legwraps. All were torn and stained with blood, though the rugged, birch-dyed brown of my trousers hid it better than the pale fireweed green of my tunic. Left in my linen undertunic, I scrubbed out what blood I could with one hand and threw the garments over a bush in a patch of waning, golden sunlight. Then I washed my aching body.

  Finally, I sat down in the sunset. The black rocks were warm, and I closed my eyes, feeling the first strands of dry hair tickle my cheeks.

  My hair. My heart dropped and my hand flew up to my head. My hairpin. The hairpin I had brought from Albor, Eidr’s gift, my last piece of home. I’d lost it in the struggle with Omaskat.

  I ground my eyes shut before I could cry. It was just a hairpin. It was not my husband himself. How could I mourn the loss of an item after all that had happened? My heart might hurt and my eyes sting with tears, but I couldn’t let myself crumble over it.

  Yet I was crumbling. The memories came now, gaining momentum until my chest ached so fiercely, I thought it might fracture.