Warmaidens

by Kelly Coon

  “Did the arrow hit you?”

  “No. It hit the gazelle.”

  Iltani and I yanked off the shroud and I insisted on searching his neck, his chest, his legs for wounds as Iltani and Nanaea heaved the carcass off into the weeds.

  “I’m fine, Arammu. Just don’t…feel right.” He clambered out of the cart and stood there, covered in gore, eyes watering. Then he lurched away into the brush. Several seconds later, the sounds of him retching reached our ears.

  “Are you okay?” I called after him.

  “Just need a second. And, ah…new clothes. These stink and I cannot bear it.”

  I dug around in our things and took him a new tunic.

  He was bent over by a bush.

  “Do you need anything?”

  “Just hand over the tunic. Um…please. I will be fine in a moment.”

  I did, and walked back to the cart to give him some time to sort himself out.

  “I hope he feels better. That had to be difficult,” Nanaea said, sitting heavily on the edge of the cart while we waited for him.

  “Much more so than lying under some blankets.” Iltani poked her.

  “I’m grateful you gave me the easy job. Thank Selu you can think on your feet!” Nanaea shivered as a gust of wind fluttered the leaves above our heads.

  “Yes, though you’re lucky I don’t deck you for putting me on the spot.” I nudged her. “Crossed eyes?”

  Iltani cackled. “Let me say that for the rest of my life, if I ever need a good laugh, I’ll be pulling up that image of you in my head.”

  Nanaea giggled. “Show me what you looked like, Sister.”

  “No,” I protested, my face heating. “I refuse on principle.”

  “It was like this.” Iltani crossed her eyes and bared her teeth like a donkey, and before long, we were laughing so hard, stifling our voices with our tunics, that I was certain I might explode. After a few moments, we eyed each other, sighing in relief. We were through the gate. And now we could get to his farm.

  Nanaea pulled us both into a tight hug. “Iltani, we can always rely on you to think on your feet, you know that?”

  “That’s why I’m here.” She planted a loud kiss on each of our foreheads. “To keep you fools out of harm’s way.”

  And we laughed again because that was typically the furthest thing from the truth.

  HALF AN HOUR later, after finding a good spot to tie up the donkey and cart away from prying eyes until we could come back for them, I gave Dagan a precious pinch of dried ginger to rid the nausea from his guts. Then we were on our way. A thin veil of clouds clung to the night sky like spiderwebs. The square, tiered Palace loomed ahead, shimmering with torches in the dark. Houses stacked close together filtered into view once we got through the olive trees.

  “Be quiet and stay low,” I whispered to everyone as we passed within shouting distance of the poor part of the city to get to Dagan’s farm. As we kept to the wall, avoiding the main roads and other people’s watchful eyes, it was clear that Alu was not doing well at all. Dagan’s eyes grew round as we took in the devastation in my old neighborhood. Many huts were burned to the ground, and those that stood held more occupants than could possibly fit. People had erected tents on sticks with old quilts and were sleeping underneath them while burning embers held cookpots that had been scraped clean.

  “Why is everyone asleep?” Nanaea’s worried eyes met mine.

  “Must be a curfew,” Iltani said.

  “Malnourishment, too,” I whispered. “It makes you very tired.”

  My hand on Nanaea’s back, I directed her around a scraggly patch of weeds. Even in the middle of the night, you’d usually hear songs and laughter floating from nearby huts. It was comforting, in a way, that life went on even when you slept.

  But this was not the Alu I remembered. A dark, somber silence had settled over the citizens like a funeral cloak. We passed thirty handsbreadths from where my family’s hut should’ve been, but it was a blackened pile of ruin. There was nothing left but the top of my abum’s broken healing table, which was partially buried in the ground. Nanaea stopped and put a hand to her mouth.

  “Kammani.” Her eyes welled.

  “Come on.” I tugged her away from the memories of the times we’d spent in that old hut together. “No use thinking too much about it. There’s nothing we can do.”

  We trod past a spot near the wall where my abum had planted a row of yellow chamomile, and my heart fluttered. I ran my fingers over the sunshiny buds that still struggled for life as Nanaea sniffled behind me. This strain of chamomile used to be my father’s favorite flower because of its uses. The feathery stems soothed. The color, bright and cheery, pulled moods into the light. When ground, the leaves relieved storms in the mind.

  For me, they would be forever tied to my mother’s cold, dead face as she lay prepared for burial, cradling baby Bellessa. My father had covered her body with the flowers after I’d tossed the first mound of dirt into the grave, and as the stems landed on her, I’d expected her to laugh and swat them away. Her stillness shocked me. It was as if she’d been carved from sandstone. Her features, certainly hers, looked like those of another woman. Never before had I realized how important the soul was to the face’s shape until she lay there looking like herself, yet unrecognizable.

  All at once, Iltani pushed me down into the grasses along the wall. I tugged Nanaea after me, and Dagan dropped to his belly.

  “Iltani, what—”

  She held a finger furiously to her lips and pointed. A torch bobbed along the pathway, illuminating a pair of guardsmen armed as if going to war. Maces and sickleswords swayed at their sides as they checked their surroundings. Daggers gleamed at their waists. They even wore helmets like the Manzazu army, something they’d never done in the city while in service to our former lugal.

  My hair stood on end as they marched by, weapons clinking with their footfalls, mere handsbreadths from where we lay in the scrub. After they retreated into the gloom, we got up but stayed low, ducking and crouching toward what would be our base camp in Alu.

  We scooted past Iltani’s home before we ducked into the fields. She let her gaze linger hungrily on the little hut that looked as though it bulged at its sides, too many people stuffed inside to be comfortable. But after a moment, she looked away and hustled up to Dagan. Iltani had been flippant about leaving her mother and father in Alu. She never had any siblings, and never seemed to care that we’d left. In fact, not until this moment did I realize that she had any feelings about leaving them at all. Whenever I’d asked, she’d waved her hand and said that “of course” she missed them, but she’d always planned to leave Alu anyway, and felt fine about never seeing them again.

  Maybe that wasn’t even close to the truth.

  Dagan’s farm looked different than I remembered as we approached, looking over our shoulders for more guardsmen. His home was dark save for one lone torch in the front and a candle flickering from an interior window in the back. There was no noise, either, except the occasional bleat of a sheep and the chirring of the cicadas as we crossed through the golden-brown emmer fields.

  Dagan stopped, one hand on his dagger, his eyes watchful. Nanaea and I trudged up behind him.

  “It’s so quiet,” she murmured, still blinking back tears.

  “Yes, and I don’t like it. There are four boys in that home, and not one of them is making noise?”

  “But a curfew out here at the farm?” Iltani plucked one of the stalks of emmer and placed an end in her mouth. “The only way to enforce that is with—”

  “Gods! Get down!” Dagan pulled me to the ground, his arm around my waist. We lay together, Dagan’s chest pressed against mine, one big arm flung across my waist. “Iltani, lie low.”

  She sat but refused to lie down, though Nanaea had curled into a ball, arms over her
head.

  “There are guardsmen around the house!”

  “Selu save us,” I whispered. If there were guardsmen on the farm, that meant we didn’t have a safe place from which to work inside the walls of Alu. Anywhere else would be too close and exposed. Out here, nestled amid the crops with outbuildings scattered across the land, we would’ve been protected.

  Not anymore.

  Next to me, Dagan breathed heavily. He kissed my head absently, but his eyes roved around. “I’ll have to sneak up there. Someone is in my home, and I need to see who it is.”

  “Now it’s my turn to say no! Guardsmen are likely living in there!”

  “Well, where are my brothers? My ummum?” His eyes were anguished. “If anything happened to them…”

  “I’m sure they’re okay, my love.” I grabbed his chin. “We just have to figure out what to do now.”

  “I have to check on them. I only left Alu because I wanted to be with you. I should’ve forced all of them to come with us, too.”

  Iltani lifted one shoulder, freckled from the sunshine. “You’d never have forced your ummum to do anything she didn’t want to do, Dagan. You know that. That woman is as stubborn as a mule looking at a new gate.”

  “That’s true,” Dagan answered hoarsely. “But I’m going to find out where they are. There’s a path through the fields we plowed years back to make it easier to get from one to the other. I’ll take that to go check on them and I’ll stay down low. If I don’t come back in half an hour, leave here and go back to Wussuru. This night. Do not come after me. If they see any of you—well, besides you, Iltani—they will know that we’ve come back, and they will torture us until we tell them where Arwia is.”

  “But I—”

  Gently, Dagan rubbed his thumbs down my cheeks. “Promise me. Please, I beg you. Do this for me. If you’ve ever loved me, do not follow me. Swear it on Kasha’s and Nanaea’s lives.”

  His eyes were fierce, though his words and his touch were not. He’d never once asked me to swear. He was serious.

  “I swear it.” He was his own person and could make his own choices.

  He kissed me on the mouth with enough heat to melt the skin from my bones, and took off into the fields in a low crouch. I watched him go, a piece of my heart going with him, wondering if that kiss would be the last one I’d ever get.

  * * *

  “Listen, if I’d known Dagan could kiss like that, perhaps I would have tried to win his heart myself years ago.”

  “You’ve seen us kiss plenty of times before, Iltani.”

  “Not like that.” Iltani lay on her back, her knees in the air, not caring a whit that her backside was exposed for anyone to see. She picked the oblong berries off a stalk and crunched them raw between her teeth, likely to annoy me.

  “And as I stated, you wouldn’t have stood a chance. None of us did. That boy has loved my sister since we were children.” Nanaea lay pressed down in the emmer, her black curly hair spread wide around her head. A cloud meandered over the waning moon, obscuring her face from my line of sight.

  Chewing the skin around my thumb was doing nothing to quell my nerves. We hadn’t heard any shouting or screams, or even any commotion, but Dagan hadn’t yet returned.

  It’s nearing time to leave.

  I pushed up to my knees.

  “What are you doing?” Nanaea whispered. “Someone will see you!”

  But I ignored her, peeking over the tops of the emmer to catch a glimpse of the house. It was still, the flickering light in the back room snuffed out, the house barely illuminated by the torch in the front. I looked up at the clouds over the moon and cursed them to Alani for not letting me see. My heart in my throat, I sank into a squat.

  Then I heard rustling.

  It was fast. Swishing through the grain behind us. A deep voice rumbled.

  Nanaea sat up, her eyes wide, but Iltani refused to move.

  “Get up!” I fumbled in my healing satchel for my herb knife.

  “I’d rather take my death lying down.”

  Clutching the knife, I prepared to strike. To protect my sister at all costs.

  The swishing grew louder, and at once, a man was upon us.

  “Kammani!” Dagan’s whisper cut through the night, and relief coursed through my veins.

  “You terrified us!” I whispered, my heart pounding.

  He eyed my knife, and I tucked it into my satchel and hugged him tightly.

  “Is all well?” Nanaea stood, hands on hips, her eyes round in the moonlight. “How is Shep? Your ummum? The other brothers? Did the guardsmen see you?”

  “I’m sorry to say all is not well. Uruku has commandeered most of the fields and forced my brothers and the field hands to work them from dawn until dusk. They’ve raided our supplies. All my mother’s tinctures.”

  “Wait. All of them?” I asked.

  “Yes. Shep says nothing is left.” He looked at me grimly.

  “Well, then I cannot mix a poison!”

  “I know.” He set his lips. “We’ll have to get some elsewhere. And Rish—”

  From the direction of the house, I heard a plaintive cry, and a chill ran down my arms. “What’s wrong? Is he ill?”

  “He’s been wounded. And it doesn’t look good.”

  “Your ummum couldn’t heal him?”

  He shook his head, his throat bobbing. “She can’t because she has been taken by the guardsmen to the Palace for some untold reason. Shep told me they came a couple weeks ago. That’s how Rish got hurt. Trying to protect her.”

  “Oh Dagan, no.” I caught his big hands between mine. “Can I go to him? To look at his wound, at least? Are the guards there?”

  “No. They’ve just left. They come back in the dawn, Shep says.” He stared morosely over the fields he used to work daily.

  “Well, let’s go! I can heal him. And we can determine where we can get more tinctures and a safe place to camp until we take back our city.” I tugged my healing satchel up on my shoulders. “Come on. Nanaea, stay with me.”

  * * *

  Rish, a round-cheeked boy of eight years, stood in the common room, clutching a forearm that was slashed from elbow to wrist. Shep, just a year younger than Dagan, stood next to Rish, rubbing his head. “We tried to sew it up, but…” He let his voice trail away.

  Nanaea pulled both of them into tight hugs, Rish wincing when she brushed against his wound.

  “Let’s sit.” Dagan’s voice was hoarse, anxiety twisting his features as we crossed over the threshold and closed the door quietly behind us. “We don’t have long.”

  We formed a tight circle, Shep’s and Dagan’s eyes roving the room, ears perked up like a dog’s.

  “Are Marduk and Qishti asleep? And the field hands?” I asked.

  Dagan patted the ground next to him for Rish. “Yes, they’re in their beds, thank Selu.”

  Shep spoke. “I sent the field hands home. The guardsmen are working all of us hard and taking most of the crop. We still have enough to trade and eat, but you’d barely believe Marduk is fourteen from his face.” His voice took on an edge. “He looks as though he’s aged five years. And Qishti. He was always skinny as a stalk, but now his tunics hang on his frame. He’s starving himself out of worry for our ummum.”

  Rish patted his pudgy tummy. “I’m still eating good.”

  Dagan’s worried eyes filled with warmth. “You are, little man. For that, I am grateful. You eat your fill. You don’t need to worry, because big brother is here to take care of you.” He pulled Rish, entirely too big for such doings, onto his lap, and Rish settled back into his thick chest.

  I held my hand out to Rish. “Can I take a look at your arm, my sweet?”

  Rish’s eyes grew round when I scooted close, and he pulled his arm away from me. Even in the dim candlelight, I could
see the infection starting down at the bottom of the slash near his wrist. Could smell the bad humors beginning to fester. I pulled out my bone needle and thread from my healing satchel, but tucked them into my tunic so he couldn’t see them.

  “What happened, bub?”

  He buried his face in Dagan’s chest, and Shep’s nostrils flared as he answered. “Guardsmen came to the farm and grabbed Ummum. A couple of them held me, Qishti, and Marduk back. They thought we were the only ones who could hurt them, but they didn’t count on Rish.” His eyes momentarily glowed with pride. “He flew out of the house with a dagger and slashed a guardsman’s leg with it, and the man got mad and yanked the thing away. Sliced him right up the arm. He’s lucky he didn’t get him in the throat. It came close.”

  “Did they say why they took her?” Iltani took a swig from her flask.

  Shep looked Dagan in the eye. “I suspect it was because of you. They’re probably torturing our ummum to find out where you’ve gone. They have to suspect you left with Kammani and the nin, though no one has said anything about it.”

  “Uruku’s likely afraid to admit it for fear of looking weak,” I said.

  Shep’s amber eyes, so similar to Dagan’s yet set in a lean, rangy face, glittered with malice. “When I get a chance to repay Uruku for doing this to Rish and taking Ummum away, he will regret it. I promise you that.”

  Dagan met his brother’s eyes over the top of Rish’s head. “And I will help you avenge them both. Are there others who would help? We need to get Arwia back on the throne, and we’ll need a majority voice from the ensi’s council to do that.”

  Shep nodded. “I know there are others who would help. Ensi Puzu only sits on Uruku’s council to try to stop him. I’ve spoken with him in Assata’s Tavern. He says that Uruku is the evil Alani’s puppet and there are several of them who agree. Uruku maims or starves or kills those who don’t listen to him, so people have been quiet.”

  “But no one else has tried to challenge his throne?”

  “He kills anyone who’s tried.”