by Evan Winter
Tendaji helped lift the wounded man and then helped Tau and Jabari. Once the last fighter was over the barricade, they shifted the rubble back in place, blocking the way.
Behind it, Tau had hoped to feel safe. He didn’t. Most of the Ihagu were injured, the ones fighting at the contested sections were being overwhelmed, and the townspeople were frantic.
Looking beyond the barricade, Tau saw that the hedeni were being heavily reinforced, and possibly a hundred more of them were racing down the paths and into the flats. Tau looked to Jabari, and for once, the optimistic second son looked worried. This was not a battle they could win. Even Jabari’s honor guard, if they made to Daba before everyone was dead, would only slow the inevitable.
“Get back, nkosi,” Tendaji cautioned, remembering Jabari’s honorific this time. “They’re coming.”
“Let them,” Jabari said, stepping up to the barricade.
Tendaji looked like he would say more. Instead, he shifted, making room.
Tau stepped up on Jabari’s other side. “For the queen,” he said with little conviction, which was still more than he felt.
“For the Goddess,” intoned Jabari and Tendaji together. The three men hefted their weapons. The barricade wouldn’t hold and they wouldn’t last, not against the number of hedeni coming for them, but they’d give a good accounting of themselves.
GUARDIANS
The first wave of hedeni hit the barricade, and it was madness. Tau stabbed and swung at limbs and faces. He sliced away someone’s fingers, praying they’d come from an enemy’s hand; was almost scalped by one of the raiders; and barely managed to push away a third before she could climb onto his side of the barricade.
It didn’t matter. There were too many. There had always been too many. It was why the Goddess had blessed her Chosen with gifts. It was why she had given them dragons.
The burst of fire exploded a hundred strides in front of the barricade, singeing Tau’s eyebrows. He threw himself back, away from the searing heat, and as soon as he regained some semblance of sense, he saw that Jabari and Tendaji were on the ground too. Tau tried to speak. His spit had been cooked away.
“Guardians!” yelled a hoarse voice from farther down the barricade. “Guardians!”
His vision swimming, Tau looked up and saw his first dragon up close. The behemoth, its body a mass of pure-black scales that drank in light and twisted the eye, ripped through the air. Tau watched it course toward the hedeni, sinuous tail trailing behind, lashing the smoke from Daba’s fires to hazy shreds.
When it was close enough, the black creature opened its maw and lit the evening with a twisting pillar of sun-bright flame, thick as three men. Tau tottered to his feet and climbed the barricade, watching the dragon’s chain of fire explode against the ground. The hedeni who were hit were vaporized, and the dragon flew on, past Daba’s plateau, turning for another pass.
“Tau?” said a voice he would recognize anywhere.
“Father,” he said, turning to face Aren Solarin.
“Why, Tau?” his father asked. “Why?”
Tau’s mouth opened and closed, no words coming.
“After I heard about the raid, I sought him out and ordered him to accompany me,” Jabari lied. “It’s my duty, as son of the umbusi, to fight with my mother’s men. I know I’m not yet an Indlovu, but this is my place, and I couldn’t come alone.”
Aren eyed Jabari and shouted to the nearby listeners. “Shore up the barricades! The Guardians won’t do us any good when the hedeni are mixed in with our own people.” The gawkers snapped into action. “Jabari, as inkokeli of your mother’s fighters, your place is best decided by me. By coming here, you’ve risked your life.”
Jabari was forced to nod, accepting as strict a chastisement as Aren could give him. Tau looked down and away. The words were also meant for him.
“Please, Aren, accept my apologies,” Jabari offered. “I’m only doing what I believe I must.” He lifted his chin and seemed to stand straighter. “I also went to the keep barracks. The guard knows I’m here. They’ll send men.”
Aren grunted. “Ill-advised, but smartly done. My men and I thank you for it. Now, stay back from the fighting.” He marched away to give his men more orders. “It would break my heart to have to tell your mother that you’d died.” More words meant for Tau.
“Ihagu,” Aren shouted. “Form up and help the townspeople carry what they can.” Everyone began moving. “If the Gifted have enough reason to call the Guardians, it means we must run.”
“Run?” Jabari asked Tau.
The roar of several hundred foreign voices answered in Tau’s place, and the two men stepped onto the barricade in time to see the full force of hedeni raiders charging in their direction.
“Goddess…,” said Tendaji, his voice little more than a whisper against the howling tumult racing their way.
“Away from the barricade,” ordered Tau’s father. “Run. Now!”
Jabari was off the barricade first, Tendaji and Tau right behind. Needing little encouragement from the Ihagu, the townspeople abandoned everything but their loved ones, and they ran too.
“We’re being herded,” shouted Jabari. “When the flats end, we’ll hit the cliffs. There are no paths this way.”
The raid had been well planned. The initial attacking force was large, but not too large. The Ihagu and townspeople had been led to believe they could hold Daba and had willingly trapped themselves with their backs to the cliffs. Once they’d done that, the hedeni launched their real attack, proving Tau’s father’s worst fears. This was no raid; it was an extermination.
The Guardian made a difference. It would thin the hedeni’s numbers, but like Aren had said, if the savages got in among the Chosen, the dragon would have to hold its fire or burn the people it had come to save. Tau thought this through and knew what would come next.
“Ihagu,” his father shouted. “Form up, battle lines.”
It was the only reasonable choice. The Ihagu would stand and fight. They’d slow the hedeni enough to allow the townspeople some chance at escape.
Tau stopped running and turned to face the horrifying mass of enemy flesh, with their sharpened bronze and bone. Tendaji was beside him, his presence a surprising comfort. His father ran up as well.
“Jabari, Tau,” he said. “I need you to guide the townspeople down the mountain. Take them to safety.”
“You ask too much, Aren,” Jabari replied. “I’ll be no help to them and you can’t save me from this fate. I’ll stay, just like every other fighter here.”
Conflicting emotions played across Aren’s face. Tau saw pride and fear warring with each other. He’d been trying to save them.
“We’ll show them what it means to be Chosen, Father,” Tau said, his hands shaking.
“So we will,” Aren said, holding Tau’s eyes with his, before turning to yell his orders to the rest. “Tighten the lines. Stand firm. Remember, the men to your left, to your right, they’re your sword brothers. Keep them safe and they’ll do the same for you.”
Aren stopped there, waiting for the right moment. It came quickly. “For the Goddess!” he bellowed.
“For the Goddess!” they screamed back as the hedeni front lines smashed into them.
WARRIORS
The fighting was a nightmare of bronze and blood. Weapons flashed in and out of Tau’s sight; he fought wildly, yelled himself hoarse, received a shallow but biting cut to the leg, and was pulled back by Nkiru, his father’s second-in-command. Tau tried to thank him, but the older warrior had moved on, his sword swinging at anything not Chosen.
Tau spotted his father and Jabari, and, slowed by his weakened leg, he pushed his way back to the front lines. Tendaji was beside him, until he wasn’t, the bitter fighting splitting them up.
Afraid of being separated from the Ihagu, Tau tried to get closer to his father and slipped. He went down and was nearly trampled by the press of women and men trying to kill one another. He pushed himself to a knee, the
head of a spear whizzed past his ear, and, blindly, he punched his sword at the spear holder, missing his mark but coming close enough to make the fighter curse and fall back into the clot of hedeni.
He scrambled to his feet and glanced down at what had made him fall. It was Tendaji, his head crushed. Tau’s stomach lurched and he stumbled away from the body, bumping into one of Aren’s men, who sliced him across the arm with an errant swing.
The cut was not a bad one, but Tau’s arm lit up in a line of pain. He hissed at the sting of it and found he was taking rapid, shallow breaths that didn’t help at all. His sight also seemed to be going, his vision closing in at the edges with black and red.
Panicked, in pain, and afraid he was going blind, he pushed back and away from the thickest fighting. He was about to flee, run down the mountainside with the townspeople, when a hedena attacked the Ihagu beside him.
The Ihagu was wrestling a hatchet from another raider and didn’t see the spear coming for his spine. He’d die without even knowing what killed him. Tau tried to call out a warning as he leapt forward, but nothing came out. His voice was gone.
He crashed into the spear-wielding savage and they went down, struggling, teeth bared, growling; then a sword flashed over Tau’s shoulder and into the hedena’s cheek, tearing the man’s face in two. The hedena gurgled, scrabbled at him, and went limp as Aren took Tau’s arm, hauling him to his feet.
“Back,” his father said, his sword point dragging in the dirt. “Their attack is failing.”
Tau, blood and muck coating him, looked for the man he’d tried to save. He found him nearby, on the ground and dead. Tau stared at the body. It didn’t make sense. He’d been alive a breath ago.
“The Ihashe and Indlovu are here,” his father told him. “Goddess be praised.”
Tau looked past the skirmish seething around him, and out there among the savages, he saw them—the might of the Chosen military.
Battling the hedeni were Ihashe, the elite fighters drafted from the Lesser castes, and Indlovu, the larger and more powerful Noble caste warriors. They all fought fiercely, but the main prong of the Chosen counterattack was led by a giant. He wore bronze-plated leather armor painted red and black. He had a shield on one arm and a shining bronze sword in the other hand. He was an Enraged Ingonyama.
The Ingonyama was close to twice Tau’s height, his arms bulging with muscle, and he moved faster than should have been possible for someone his size. He fought like a god.
“Hold the line,” Tau’s father ordered the Ihagu. “The military are here!”
In the time it took Aren to speak, the Ingonyama had cut his way through an entire line of hedeni, whipping his sword around hard enough to slice through two men in a single blow. Three more savages attacked and he belted the first away with his shield, kicked the next in the chest, and with the pommel of his sword, cracked the third’s skull like it was a rotten nut.
“Everyone, toward the Gifted! Move!” shouted Tau’s father, and the Ihagu beat a hasty retreat, running to the grouping of women in black robes near the cliffs.
“Incredible,” Jabari said, pointing to the Ingonyama. “He’s incredible.”
As kids, they would play at being Ingonyama, and Tau hadn’t forgotten Jabari’s heartbreak when Lekan, catching them at it, taunted his younger brother with the truth. Jabari’s blood, like that of all Petty Nobles and lower castes, was too weak to enrage.
“Faster!” said Aren, yanking on Tau’s gambeson.
They were near enough to the Gifted that Tau could see them, though not well. There were eight of them, in their traditional coal-black and flowing robes, and they were guarded by a ring of warriors. The Gifted had their hoods up, and the gold necklaces they all wore shimmered with light from the hamlet’s guttering fires.
Having reached a measure of safety, Aren’s men let their exhaustion take hold. Some dropped to their knees, and one scrawny Ihagu sat on the ground, staring at nothing. The man beside him had his sword up, as if expecting his companions to turn on him.
Tau sought out the Ingonyama. He was there, in what was left of Daba, destroying all he faced. Around him, his Indlovu dealt death like it was a choreographed dance. They, along with the Ingonyama, were the Chosen’s most devastating fighters.
Tau glanced at Jabari, who had found water and was drinking, spilling much of it. It was hard to believe that nothing more than a test and time separated the optimistic young Noble from being a full-blooded Indlovu. Jabari would test soon, and if he passed, he’d become an initiate of their citadel, train for three cycles, then go to war as one of them.
Tau’s father wanted the Lessers’ equivalent for him. He wanted Tau to test for the Ihashe, train at the closer of the two fighting schools reserved for Lessers, and serve in the military, just like he had. Aren’s service was what made it possible for him, a Low Common, to lead their fief’s Ihagu.
Before Tau was born, his father had trained to be an Ihashe and had fought as one, serving the military’s mandatory six cycles. It was in his final cycle of service that he met and fell in love with Imani Tafari, a beautiful, strong-willed High Common. He wooed her, and with his service complete, they ran away to Kerem, to escape her father’s wrath at the poor match.
In Kerem, Aren’s Ihashe background was valuable and he was made second-in-command of Umbusi Onai’s Ihagu. His wife did even better, landing a position in the keep.
Tau was born soon after, but in the first few cycles of his life, Imani grew weary of living like a Common. She left Aren. She left Tau too.
With the woman he loved lost to him, Aren gave himself over to two things: raising Tau and being the best fighter in the fief. In time, he came to lead the Ihagu, and when Jabari was old enough, the umbusi asked Aren to train him.
After Lekan, her firstborn, failed his testing, she couldn’t afford to hire an Indlovu teacher for Jabari. Tau’s father, though a large step down from an Indlovu, was the next best thing. Aren accepted without hesitation. Teaching Jabari meant he’d have time to train Tau as well.
Tau knew it was the best Aren could do to give him a solid start toward a good future, but in a burning hamlet, surrounded by the dead and dying, he was having a difficult time believing there was anything good about the violent path his father had prepared for him.
Zuri would have sucked her teeth, rolling her eyes at him. Since becoming a handmaiden, she had little time and less patience for Tau’s bouts of self-pity. Still, a smile would have followed the eye roll, and that would make everything better. She always made everything better, he thought, as a horn sounded across the flats, snatching him away from her memory and returning him to the nightmare of Daba.
At the far edge of the hamlet, a hedena held a horn. He blew it again, three short blasts followed by a longer one, and Tau prayed it was a call to retreat. Something felt wrong, though. It was the man beside the horn blower.
“What is it?” asked Jabari, startling Tau. He hadn’t heard him approach.
“The man beside the one blowing the horn,” Tau said. “I think that’s their inkokeli.”
“What does he look like?”
“He’s tall, almost the height of a Petty Noble, and well built. He’s wearing more than they usually do, and he’s carrying one of those bone spears. He’s… he’s burned, not just cursed. It looks like he’s been through a fire. Half his face is a ruin.”
“They aren’t leaving.”
Jabari was right. They weren’t. They were doing the opposite.
The hedeni, hearing the horn’s notes, came together but did not rush the barricade or the military men facing them. As one, they attacked the Enraged Ingonyama, ignoring the fighters around him.
“Stop them, Amara!” the Gifted nearest to Tau said to another black-robed woman.
The one named Amara lifted her hands, aiming past Tau at the charging hedeni. “They’re too far. It’ll splash,” she said.
“Try, damn you!” said the first Gifted, and Amara did.
En
ergy, like pulsing waves of heat, began to radiate from her fingers, thickening as it flew out and away. Enervation, Tau thought with wonder, before the edge of it struck him and the world disappeared.
VICTORY
Once, when he was younger, Tau climbed down the cliffs of Kerem to the beach below. He was with several other boys, and one of them dared him to go into the ocean, up to his waist. He said no and they called him a coward.
Tau made it four strides in and, with the water swirling around his knees, was swept off his feet and dragged out.
He was sucked under, pummeled and crushed by the ocean’s fury. He lived only because it was low tide and the water so close to the beach was shallow. The other boys had made a chain of arms to reach him, pulling him from the churning swell.
Being blasted by the Gifted felt like drowning in the ocean. It was as if Tau’s body was being dashed to pieces while the world around him warped and spun, and when the spinning stopped, things got worse.
Tau saw Daba, but everything was different. The colors had been torn away, leaving the hamlet, earth, and sky in shades of gray. An unnatural wind buffeted him, shrieking, burying the other sounds, while impenetrable mists obscured anything farther than twenty strides away.
Tau could see what had to be the other men who had been standing near him, but he couldn’t make sense of what he saw. The men, all in varying degrees of distress, were glowing with golden light. Tau looked down at himself. He was glowing too, and the glow had attracted something from the mists.
The creature was hidden and indistinct, but Tau could see more than enough. It moved in a lurching run on two feet, its balance aided by club-like hands on arms so long they could touch the ground. It had a flat face, red eyes, and a slavering mouth, and its skin seemed diseased.
The monster had Tau in its crimson gaze and roared. Tau couldn’t make himself move, and it came for him, careening out of the mists, reaching for him with misshapen hands. Tau’s legs gave out, and he opened his mouth to scream, fell and kept falling, through the ground, beyond the mists, beyond its grasp.