An hour later, the sun rose, and faint outlines of light shone through woods. Fava had crushed some ferns while backing into her hiding place. She straightened them now, scooped detritus in front of her cubbyhole to conceal herself.
Thousands of Blade Kin began to pass through the woods just after sunrise, marching south toward Muskrat Creek, loping through the woods so softly that Fava hardly heard them, and only saw them as shadows in green capes.
It made her wonder, Could it be that fifty of them passed by during the night for every one that I heard in the darkness?
She dared not move. There might be scouts or outliers about. There might be guards watching over the town. It would be better to wait, even if it meant that she didn’t move all day.
Two hours later, no one else had passed, and Wayan whispered, “I have to pee.”
She let him up. He walked a short distance, peed. When he finished, he ambled back, then fell asleep in her arms. No one else moved through the woods all day long. Near dusk, she saw one lone person creeping through the woods toward town, a woman that she recognized: Anorath’s wife, Vo-olai.
Fava stood, waved for Vo-olai to come hide, but Vo-olai stopped and stared at Fava as if she were some strange animal.
Vo-olai’s eyes were rimmed with red, and her pants and tunic covered with mud. She looked like a wild creature, something that had spent the week crawling through brush.
“No,” she said.
“Come, please!” Fava hissed, but Vo-olai kept walking. Then she turned and spoke as casually as if they had just met on the street. “Have you seen Anorath today? Or Tchula? I can’t find them.”
Fava knew then that Vo-olai had worms in her head. A night of running from the Blade Kin had damaged her mind.
Fava hissed, “Why don’t you come here and wait for them with me.”
“No, I really think, I really think, they need me,” Vo-olai said. “I must find them.”
“Where do you think they are?” Fava asked.
“I’m not sure,” Vo-olai said, and she began ambling back toward town.
Fava wanted to call her, but dared not raise her voice. She climbed back under the log, planning to wait, but little Wayan looked at her with such fear and accusation in his eyes that she said, “Should we go save her?”
Wayan nodded his head.
He doesn’t know what he’s asking, Fava thought. He doesn’t understand the risk. Yet she couldn’t just leave the woman to her own devices.
Fava picked up Wayan, and shot out from under the log, chasing after Vo-olai.
When Vo-olai heard the pursuit, she took off sprinting, blindly racing toward town, and Fava knew she could not catch her, not while carrying Wayan.
They fell behind.
Fava and Wayan crept to town slowly; the sun was fading in a bloody sky. She studied the road ahead. Everything was so open here: fields ran back to the trees, and you could see for half a mile. She stopped, fought the creeping sensation that she was being watched.
In many ways the town looked the same. Two cats ran across the road in front of her, twitching their tails. Pigs rooted in the field behind Oolan’s house. Yet the houses were smoking ruins, charred walls.
Blackened brick chimneys pointed to the sky. Fava looked at the little squares of ash and debris where houses had been, amazed at how small the homes appeared. The height, the wooden cross-beams, all had given them a blocky solidness, a sense of permanence that had evaporated like dew in the morning sun.
Down the street a quarter of a mile, an old sow cave bear dug among the ashes of a home, looking for fruit or vegetables or grain, and Fava decided that the bear would not have stayed if other people were around.
The Blade Kin must be gone for good. Tentatively, she walked the road.
As she passed her parents’ home, Fava stopped. The hunting trophies that had sat for so many years in her father’s house lay in the ashes, just bits of whitened bone and cracked teeth. The great mastodon tusks that he kept in his hallway were split by heat.
The blade of his sword lay in the ashes. She walked through the rooms, surprised to find that the ashes were cold already. In the kitchen, in a hole in the floor where vegetables were stored, she found some potatoes and apples and onions. She sat with Wayan and tried to eat a potato that had cooked on one side, but her stomach objected, and she could not force it down.
She didn’t know if she was too frightened to eat, or if the grief-that-kills had come upon her. She knew only that she could not eat.
So she fed Wayan a bit, pocketed some apples, then they headed up the trail to their own home.
Fava was surprised to find it still standing. Four dead Blade Kin were laid out on the front doorstep, the way that a cat will leave dead mice by the door as a present.
Wayan turned away, buried his face in Fava’s chest, afraid to look at them. All of the dead Blade Kin wore the strange masked hoods with glass eyes, but their weapons had been taken. So Tull had killed at least four of them.
Fava walked into the house, found it ransacked. Few clothes, no weapons. But the bedding and blankets remained, along with dishes and cooking pots, the winter food. Wayan leapt down from her arms immediately, ran to the beds and picked up a carved mammoth behind a mattress and began to play.
Fava wondered if Tull could still be near. Perhaps he was moving the items to a safer place?
But, no. Whoever had ransacked the house was not a person bent on survival. The blankets had been left, the food. Tull must have been captured, along with their valuables. Perhaps he had been caught while trying to empty the house. Yet even that made no sense.
Fava sat on the floor a moment, peered outside. She felt suddenly weak with grief, dizzy. She fingered two empty bullet casings on the floor. Tull had killed at least four Blade Kin, and he had been caught.
She went to search for Vo-olai. She didn’t have to go far. Just where the road dipped, the redwood bridge spanned the Smilodon River. Vo-olai stood in the middle of the bridge, holding her hands over her face and weeping.
Fava stopped, stared down at the docks. The old people of town lay in the street by the docks, twisted in odd shapes, ragged bloody holes in their throats. At least thirty lay there, including Vo-olai’s grandparents.
Fava’s heart pounded. She picked up Wayan, ran down to the docks, searched for Tull among the dead. After several minutes, Vo-olai came to sit and hold her grandmother’s hand in the dusk.
Everything was so quiet; the sun had set. Clouds were coming in, soft white clouds that smelled of snow. Up the street, in the human part of town, another bear had come to feed on burned garbage.
It paced back and forth up by the inn, between the bodies of dead Blade Kin, afraid to come any closer to Fava and Vo-olai.
“We better leave,” Fava whispered, tugging at Vo-olai. “All this blood, it might bring wolves or sabertooths.” She did not say it, but she was even more afraid that the Blade Kin might return.
Vo-olai said, “At least, let’s give our dead to the river.”
So Fava helped drag the old people to the docks, and gently laid them in the water, watched them drift to sea.
“Come,” Fava said when they were done, “let’s go back to my house. It isn’t burned.”
Vo-olai turned and collapsed into Fava’s arms, sobbing. Until that moment, Fava had tried to be strong, knowing that if she showed her fear, her utter desolation, it would only hurt Wayan. But now darkness took her, and she cried for her husband, and wailed for her family. Grief filled the hollow of her chest.
“I want to die! I want to die!” Vo-olai shouted, and Fava held her and said, “No! Don’t say that!”
“What do I have to live for? My husband is gone! My family is gone! How can I ever find them? We don’t even know where they went! The Blade Kin could have carried them anywhere.”
“I saw a ship in the harbor,” Fava said. “They were carried away in a ship. That means they’ve gone to Bashevgo. They aren’t dead.”
“But they’re slaves.”
Fava licked her lips. “Maybe they will escape. They might come looking for us.”
Vo-olai nodded doubtfully, scanning the streets of town as if at any moment a whole crowd of refugees would come rushing out of the forest.
Fava studied her, realized that this was good. At least if Vo-olai had some hope, the killing grief would not come upon her.
“Let’s go back to my house,” Fava offered. “We can sleep there for the night.” She took Vo-olai’s hand then, and the girl followed automatically, almost unaware of her surroundings. “When did you sleep last?”
Vo-olai watched the fallen houses as she went by, as if still stunned. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“It’s not important,” Fava said.
When they got off the dirt road onto the trail that led to Fava’s, her fear subsided. The short twisted pines and wild rhododendron along the trail hid them somewhat, and Fava no longer had the prickly sensation that she was being watched.
She took Vo-olai into the house, set her on the bed, and fed her an apple. Vo-olai sat, and Wayan patted her back. “We should go hide somewhere,” Vo-olai said. “The Blade Kin are sweeping through the Rough. We should go hide in the woods, wait until Anorath escapes.”
“Or go down to White Rock,” Fava said. “The Blade Kin would never find us down in the mines.”
“Yes.” Vo-olai said. Vo-olai did not eat her apple, only held it. She looked at the floor for a long time.
Wayan found a brush on the floor and began combing the twigs from Vo-olai’s hair. “Anorath and Tchula won’t be coming back, will they?” Vo-olai said, “No one ever escapes from Bashevgo.”
“Maybe not,” Fava answered. “Yet we must be here, if they do.”
Vo-olai sighed deeply, staring at the floor, her brow furrowed. “No one ever comes back.…”
“We can make a home in the woods,” Fava said, worried. The girl’s eyes weren’t focusing properly. “We could live together and have fun, the way we did when we were children. And we could wait. Even in Bashevgo, they can’t always watch the slaves.”
“Fava, I’m going to go to Bashevgo,” Vo-olai, said, her voice panicky. “I’m going to go live with my husband and sons. If we can’t live here, at least we can live together as Thralls.”
“You wouldn’t be the first to do that,” Fava answered calmly, trying to soothe her.
Vo-olai nodded, set her apple on the floor. “Well, that’s it. I’ll go to Bashevgo.”
Wayan looked at Fava. He asked, “Is Tull in Bashevgo?”
Fava sat beside him. “Yes, I think so.”
“Are we going to go there?”
Fava pursed her lips, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t want to go,” Wayan said.
It was full night now. Fava laid Wayan and Vo-olai on the mattress, put a blanket on them. She could not help hesitating, sitting beside the bed and just touching the mattress where Tull had laid his head.
The kwea, the remembered pleasure she felt from this place, so filled her with longing. Outside, snow began to fall; she made a small fire, hoping its feeble light and smoke would not attract any Blade Kin. By the time she had finished setting the fire, Vo-olai and Wayan had fallen into an exhausted sleep.
Being afraid takes much energy, she realized.
Fava searched the house again. Much of what they owned had been taken—clothes and weapons—but they had food and bedding and pots for cooking. I can get clothing, Fava decided, if I’m willing.
She stepped out into the darkness by the doorstep to loot the bodies of the dead Blade Kin. Their dark capes were thick and warm, as were the cotton tunics under their armor. Two of them wore packs which contained food and heavy overcloaks that would blend into the forest and brush. In one of the packs, Fava found a long knife and a sheath, the kind humans sometimes used for fighting.
She stopped for a moment, recognized the futility of what she was doing.
All my life, she thought, I’ve been afraid the slavers would come get me, and now I’m planning to give myself to them? The gods are playing cruel jokes with me.
She looked at the dead men at her feet. The Blade Kin would be hard on Tull for that. And he had killed more of their ilk at Denai. The Blade Kin would punish him.
The despair came heavier, darker, in deep waves. It knotted her stomach, and Fava bent over and retched, spitting up the small bit of potato she had eaten.
She’d known other women who grieved like this, women who starved themselves when their husbands died. The simple act of going to him might save her life.
Fava tried to think of Tull, tried to imagine living with him in Bashevgo. Perhaps they would have to work hard, but they would live side by side, and so the work would be easier.
Fava knew that she was young and pretty, that the Blade Kin would rape her, and she tried to imagine what it would be like, both for her and for Tull.
Tull would never be able to take it. He would kill any Blade Kin that touched her, and in the end they would execute him. She knew that Tull could never survive as a slave, and Fava realized that she wouldn’t want to survive herself. Her stomach knotted again, and she wanted to vomit.
She untied the straps to the Blade Kin’s body armor, took off their leather cuirasses. The snow began falling on them, already an inch deep.
When she stripped the under-tunic from the second body, she was surprised to find that it had tits. She felt to make sure, then pulled off the woman’s headgear.
There was little light to see by, but this Blade Kin was indeed a woman, a Pwi woman with a kindly face. Fava turned the girl’s head, saw that she had only one ear, a left ear pierced for earrings.
Fava grunted in surprise. She had heard of female Blade Kin, knew they were rare. She stared at the corpse for a long time, at the tall black boots, at the under-tunic and body armor.
She pulled on the boots, and found that they fit her. She held the stiff leather cuirass up to her own torso and found that it would have fit, if Tull hadn’t put a bullet through the woman’s belly.
She sat for a long time, in the darkness, with the snow falling. This little house, this little bay, felt so peaceful and quiet with the snow falling, the muffled world.
Fava closed her eyes, and the kwea of her house seemed to swell around her like a mist—the comfort she felt in Tull’s arms, the beauty of their wedding night. The raw unsatisfied lust she felt for him—not a lust for his body, but a lust for his life, for his dreams of spending a life together.
And from down the trail, even though her parents’ house was in ashes, she could still feel the years of happiness built up by accretion, weighing heavily. She recalled playing tag with her older brother around the lilac bush, the smell of an elk roast, the thrill of the day when her father first returned from Hotland bringing her the tooth of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and the funny stories he told of how her uncle had tried to ride a triceratops.
For Fava, the kwea of peace and joy, and dreams of peace and joy, lay upon the hills like a wet blanket of snow, muffling the recent cries of war. She wanted joy for her children. Nothing less. To offer less would be impossible.
Fava thought, If my husband is in Bashevgo, then I must go and free him, and to do that, I must look the part.
She pulled her long-knife from her sheath, and in one fluid move sliced off her right ear.
She sat, surprised for a moment by the searing hot pain, holding the stump of her ear.
Among the Blade Kin, a soldier always gave his ear to his first commander. Fava thought briefly of saving the ear, giving it to Tull when she found him, and she laughed and tossed the ragged piece of flesh into the brush.
A moment later, she became aware of something moving stealthily nearby. She peered up through the falling snow.
Someone—a shadow—hesitated on the trail leading to the house, only a dozen paces away, a human Blade Kin dressed all in black.
The human stepped closer and
said, “There’s always someone stupid enough to return.”
***
Chapter 22: A Passing Grief
“Shhh …” one of the women in the cage hissed. “The Blade Kin are coming.” She huddled on a mat and ratted her hair so that if the Blade Kin came for sex, they would not take her.
Tull lay on his pallet. The ship vibrated from the workings of its great engines as it eased over giant swells in the ocean, a vast steel behemoth.
Tull lay in its belly as he had for days and nights. He could not tell the difference anymore. Sometimes, the ship stopped, and cannon fire rolled like thunder over the decks, then prisoners would swell into her belly—dazed Pwi with mud on their hands from working the fields, rich merchants dressed in finery and amazement—all of them shoved forward, down into the belly of the ship.
But this was not one of those times. Tull looked out over the cell. A hundred men, women, and children lay on their mats, unmoving, trying to feign sleep. Overhead, in the gloom, Blade Kin looked down from their outposts.
Keys rattled outside the cell door, and it swung open on well-oiled hinges. Tull lay listening for the whimpers of the Pwi women and children.
Someone softly walked to the mat next to his.
The girl on the mat there was named Ruwatta, a delicate child of eleven from the town of Fish Haven, as were most others in this cell. Tull closed his ears, closed his heart, as the Blade Kin took her.
There was no stopping it. Tull knew that. He could have jumped the Blade Kin warrior, managed even to break his neck, but the Blade Kin in the turrets above would just shoot him, perhaps killing the child in the process. He had seen it happen before.
Someone tapped his foot. Tull pretended not to notice, hoping they would go away. They tapped his foot again.
He turned over, thinking that the Blade Kin would take him, too, this time.
Above him stood a Neanderthal woman dressed in black robes with red trim, the uniform of a Carnadine sorcerer. Four Blade Kin guards stood behind her.
She studied him in the gloom, her mouth a tight line, betraying no hint of emotion. She bent over, studying his face, gazing into his eyes, as if she were a sculptor who hoped someday to make an image by memory.
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