The Warrior Moon

by K Arsenault Rivera

  “So many of us,” Otgar corrects. “We’re all Qorin. The old-timers might be a few generations off, but Ganbatar’s people are already teaching them the latest drinking songs. But agreeing just because you hate our number won’t do. I hear you have problems with this Sarangarel woman?”

  “I want her dead,” is his simple answer. “You would, too, if you had been there. Burqila Alshara was never thirsty for glory the way this woman is. She’d take credit for lighting the sky if she could.”

  “My cousin would beat the shit out of her if she tried,” says Otgar. It occurs to her that she probably should not speak of her godly cousin so easily, but then she was thinking of the flesh-and-blood Shefali. All her life, Barsalai Shefali has been willing to fight a war at Barsatoq’s slightest indication. “Is it true she wants to raid the farms?”

  “She wants to raid everyone,” he says. “Sent riders against me and mine, too; had to kill some of our own people. It’s foul, what she’s doing. That kind of thing spreads sure as horserot.”

  Otgar’s mouth is a hard line. Worse and worse, it seems.

  “I’ll deal with her,” she says. “So long as you share this kumaq with me.”

  Borma’s quick to agree, just as Ganbatar had been. Otgar thinks herself lucky for this. That there haven’t yet been any fights is some sort of miracle—but there has always been a spirit of acceptance among the Qorin. Burqila was even taking in Hokkarans before they left.

  The next two to arrive are brothers: Adarakar Khalja and Begutei Narin. Begutei’s the elder of the two, but only barely—Otgar thinks he is a little younger than she is. Or, rather, than she was when she left.

  Here, too, she expects some friction: Adarakar and Begutei served as Sarangarel’s lieutenants when she went after the Surians. It was only after an armed regiment came after the clan that they started having doubts; a rout only solidified them. When Sarangarel ordered a raid on the Rassat, Adarakar and Begutei left with four hundred Qorin and twice that in horses. In doing so, they stymied Sarangarel’s more warlike ambitions, for without a sizable cavalry, there was little she could do.

  She expects them to be quarrelsome, expects them to tell her that she cannot beat Sarangarel—that sort of thing. If it were one of those novels Sakura likes so much, that is how it would go. But life is not so predictable as this: Burqila Alshara once saved Begutei’s life; he would never dream of betraying her. So it is that both of them swear fealty without much trouble.

  And this, of course, leaves only the woman herself.

  Otgar does not trust that she will come of her own accord; neither of them are idiots. She dispatches three hundred and twenty Qorin as scouts, split evenly among the eight directions, and while she waits for their tidings, she speaks to the boys. Ganbatar wants her imprisoned; the other three want her dead. She listens as they enumerate her crimes. While her blood boils, her mind also starts to wander—there is a mundaneness to these audiences she hadn’t expected to find when she was the one conducting them.

  It takes eight days, but the scouts return. Sarangarel is coming with an army: five hundred, bolstered in places by desert wanderers.

  And it is this, in the end, that seals her fate.

  Dorbentei Otgar rides out to meet this woman with five thousand of her own—the core group of Burqila’s most loyal soldiers, with the four-Kharsaq army added in for good measure. She finds them on the field—and they do not slow down upon seeing her. How Sarangarel inspires five hundred to fight against ten times that number is beyond Otgar’s ability to comprehend, but she does not need to comprehend it.

  She only needs to stop it.

  Under a white banner, she sends Temurin. To her astonishment, Sarangarel has enough tact not to shoot her on sight, and the message is safely delivered. Otgar awaits the answer atop her fat dun. Always meet the enemy mounted.

  It comes after only a few moments. The woman on the seal bay must be Sarangarel; she’s got the tallest banner, and she’s the one who hops off her horse when Temurin speaks. She, too, is the one who walks alongside Temurin’s horse to the center of the battlefield.

  Otgar calls for felt as she, too, dismounts. Ganbatar carries a roll of it on his shoulder, walking with her to meet Sarangarel. The other three follow—empty-handed, as a sign of good faith.

  Sarangarel is taller than Otgar expected, with a wiriness to her that suggests a withered plant. Still, she must begrudgingly admit there is something beautiful to her, in an otherworldly sort of way: her eyes are the size of Surian karo, her lips full and well-formed. She’s no Sakura, but she’s no Temurin, either.

  Temurin, for her part, nods to Otgar as the two groups meet. Otgar snaps, and the four Kharsaqs lay their felt out between the two women.

  Sarangarel puts her hands on her hips. “You’re younger than I thought you’d be.”

  “The lands north of the Wall don’t make much sense,” Otgar says. “Gives me a few extra years, though, and I can’t argue that. You know the terms?”

  “I beat you in a wrestling match, and you grant us our freedom,” is the girl’s answer. She glances at Otgar’s stiff leg, then away, as if to pretend nothing were amiss. Hiding that wicked smirk is easier said than done. “A foolish offer to make when you’ve got all those people behind you. Unless they’re paper tigers?”

  “They aren’t,” Otgar says. She takes off her deel, baring her chest in the process. Already there is a chill to the air—the sun will soon be setting. Goose pimples make her hair stand on end. “We just aren’t interested in spilling Qorin blood.”

  Sarangarel doesn’t undo her deel—she merely stands and watches as Otgar stretches. “There is no progress without violence,” she says. “You and your people abandoned us; what else were we to do? Qorin survive. If we have to take food out of someone else’s mouth to do it—who cares?”

  “The Sky does,” Otgar says. “I swear, wasn’t there anyone around to raise you right? We’ve got a whole new god, Sarangarel, and she’s always watching.”

  It is only then, when Otgar steps onto the felt, that Sarangarel mimics her. The girl falls into a travesty of a stance. A twinge of regret shoots through Otgar, but only a twinge. “I don’t see that god anywhere.”

  “That’s because I’m dealing with you,” Otgar says. She slaps her chest. “Now, come.”

  If this were one of Sakura’s stories, it would be grandiose and far reaching—there would be no sweating bodies, only glistening flesh; there would be no gnats, no scrapes, no true struggle anywhere to be seen. And in truth, it is like that in some ways: Sarangarel never stood a chance against the Qorin’s best wrestler.

  It is over quickly. Sarangarel dives for Otgar’s bad leg; Otgar catches her head between her arm and rib cage. Instead of throwing her—what the crowd would want to see—or taking this to the ground—where she could pummel some sense into the girl, as she deserves—Otgar instead shifts her hands. One grabs Sarangarel’s chin; the other her forehead.

  There is a moment of hesitation, a moment where Otgar asks if this is truly what she wants to do. After all that time spent ruminating over the consequences of murder—is this the thing to do?

  But it is as Borma said: this hatred, this anger, is like horserot. It will spread if not stamped out. There is too much to be gained from peace with the Hokkarans, too much to be lost by attacking them. By killing Sarangarel, she shows her meager followers what will happen to them if they continue this line of thought.

  And so Dorbentei Otgar twists Sarangarel’s head until she feels it really crack. The girl slumps over in her arms. Death clings to Otgar’s bare skin as she sets her down on the felt, as she gestures for the four Kharsaqs to wrap her up.

  “Listen to me,” she says, facing Sarangarel’s clan. They are young, so young, and Otgar cannot let their lives be stained with blood. She speaks from the very pit of her stomach, her voice echoing out beneath the Eternal Sky. “If any of you get it in your head to attack farms, I’ll do the same to you. And you’ll be lucky if it’s
me. Burqila Alshara’s going to be back soon, and when she is, she’ll show no mercy to anybody stupid enough to destroy her peace. Your ancestors dreamed of a day when they could live without worrying where their next meal came from—I’m not going to sit here and let you ruin it.”

  From the looks on their faces, from the rattle of their swords, she hasn’t won all of them over.

  She slaps her chest.

  “Put it this way,” she says. “I have five thousand here, and five more back by the mountain. The Hokkarans have ten times that just in the East. You want regular meals, you hunt here, or you trade with them. Anyone who’d like to say otherwise can come right up to fight me—if you really want to settle this like Qorin.”

  How do Barsalai and Barsatoq do this sort of thing? Burqila talked like this, too, but at least she didn’t have to actually say the words. And this kind of braggadocio was different when it was Burqila who bore the weight of the challenges. It’s easy to make Burqila sound intimidating—you hardly have to try.

  But who is she to make these threats? Dorbentei Otgar Bayasaaq, daughter of a murdered mother and an unknowing father; Dorbentei Otgar Bayasaaq, with her leg that she can’t stand on for more than an hour anymore, with her lost years; Dorbentei Otgar Bayasaaq, niece to a legend, cousin to a god.

  Who is she? The voice that spoke just now sounds so little like she imagines herself. Burqila told her more than once: if anything happens to her or Shefali, it will be Otgar who bears the Kharsa’s title. Still—she never imagined that day would actually come.

  That she’d be here, standing over a body, asking if anyone else wants her to kill them.

  She’s killed someone today.

  It’s a fact of Qorin life; it’s practically a requirement for a Kharsa.

  But there is this awful weight in her stomach all the same, this revulsion coating her skin at having killed one of her own, no matter the circumstances.

  Will it ever go away?

  Will she ever be Burqila?

  The air on the steppes is clear and dry; when it fills her lungs, she feels the prickle of cold her cousin wields like a knife. That blood is in her veins, too. There is something godly even in Dorbentei Otgar.

  She stands and she waits for challengers—but they never come. Five hundred Qorin lay down their arms and cross the empty grass. On the other side, they are met with hard stares and distrust—but not with swords, not with the crack that has carved itself into Dorbentei’s bones.

  There will be no war today.

  * * *

  IT IS LATE by the time she returns to her ger. Overhead, Grandmother Sky’s cloak is more brilliant than ever. If all the Qorin who ever lived cast their kumaq in four directions—even then there would not be so many blotches of white as there are stars. Otgar finds herself trying to spot her cousin’s face in the waxing moon, but it is a smooth crescent, without a nose that sticks out like a needle.

  Did her cousin see what happened earlier? Will she care, if she did? Since she’s left, Otgar has thought of her every day—it’s difficult not to with the nightly reminders—but never summoned her. She’s confident that if she ever needs Shefali’s help, there she will be, but she has not yet been brave enough to ask.

  And why should she? The Qorin have everything they need. Life for them is better than it has ever been, even without a god’s intervention. There is no reason to call for Shefali, who surely must have better things to attend to than the guilt that coats Dorbentei’s guts like spores of unknown fungus.

  But she does think of Burqila that way. From how to swing into the saddle to how she strings her bow, she thinks of Burqila and decides whether or not to emulate her.

  She thinks of Burqila, too, when one of the Four Kharsaqs says something foolish and there is no one to hear her joke about it. So many people thought of Burqila as aloof, as unfeeling—but this was only because she so rarely spoke. What they did not know was the woman’s sense of humor when it came to those who disappointed her. They did not know how vulgar she could be, or how much of her signing was really “Tell them whatever you think is right, I can’t be bothered.”

  None of those things make Burqila a bad leader—but they do make her a different one than people might imagine. The Burqila the clan speaks of in hushed voices as Otgar approaches her ger does not, in truth, exist.

  “She would have killed all of them,” says one.

  And so she might have—but she probably would have scared them shitless beforehand. It’s pointless to argue what Burqila might have done when none of this would have happened on her watch.

  “This new one, she’s soft,” says another.

  But Otgar killed a woman today, and there is nothing soft in that.

  “Why not call down Barsalai? Why not let her deal with it?”

  Because the Qorin must solve their own problems, as they always have, or else they will grow roots and die.

  Had she been with Burqila, she could have talked to her about this, about the things she’d heard; she could have asked her what to do.

  But Burqila is hundreds of li away if she is anywhere, and so Dorbentei must weather this alone.

  She walks through the camp to her ger—with a horsehair banner already flying overhead—and tries not to dwell.

  Otgar is midway there when she first hears the shouts.

  “Come! Come see!”

  “She’s here!”

  “It’s her!”

  The air somehow feels colder than it did earlier. Otgar takes a deep breath of it, watching as thousands of Qorin flock to the largest of the clan’s gers. Already there are some on their bellies outside with their heads under the flaps, already there are twenty packed outside of the door such that no one can get in. The dogs are having a wild time of it—how they bark!

  It’s enough to make Otgar laugh. Of course her cousin would show up on a day like this. Never when you wanted her, but always, somehow, when you needed her.

  “Out of the way, out of the way,” she mumbles. They listen—though grudgingly—and so the way to the ger is parted. She steps inside before she can really see what’s going on inside; the crowds are too thick to get a good view.

  Here are the first things she notices:

  It is cold here, truly cold; the tip of her nose numbs the moment she crosses the threshold.

  It is dark here, truly dark; and yet in spite of this, she can see good and well the god sitting on a folding chair near the eerie, lightless fire.

  It is home here, truly home; on a bench laid out next to her, a pale face in the dark ger, is Minami Sakura. There are shards of glass buried in her shoulder, her foot is covered in blood, her hair is a mess; she is covered in dust and she smells of that accursed swamp in Shiratori—but it is her.

  There is no one in the ger save the three of them.

  Otgar swallows. She is sure that there are words for this—but she hasn’t the slightest idea what they may be.

  Thankfully, Sakura does. “You’re supposed to tell us to catch our dogs.”

  “Whole damn crowd caught the dogs for you,” Otgar answers—this time, at least, she does not have to think. Sparring with Sakura this way is as natural as blinking.

  She stands in the threshold of the red door because she cannot force herself to move forward.

  Because if she does—what a foolish idea, that Sakura might smell the death on her.

  It is Barsalai who will. Her eyes land on her cousin’s, glowing as they are in the dark of the ger. To her surprise, Barsalai is the one that speaks first. “Today was difficult.”

  Otgar will never get used to hearing that echo in Shefali’s voice—not when she spent so many of their earlier years bullying her for sounding like a Hokkaran. How silly she feels to think of that now, how guilty—how close had she come to stamping out Shefali’s soft-spoken kindness?

  For this is a kindness, bringing Sakura here, and Otgar can’t even find the words to thank her.

  “Yeah. Today was—”

  “It
had to be done,” says Shefali. She looks into the fire as she speaks, and yet it feels as if she were standing right next to Otgar.

  She glances behind. The other Qorin have their faces pressed to the space behind her, stopped as if by a pane of glass. Otgar frowns—but she takes another step into the ger.

  “They can’t see in,” Shefali says. “Or hear. I wanted privacy.”

  “In a ger? Needlenose, you’ve been away too long.” The joke comes easy—she does not have to think about what happened today if she makes the joke.

  Even Barsalai chuckles a little. Sakura does, too, and that eases Otgar’s pain more than she’d like to admit. “A little privacy,” says Shefali. “I’ll stay for dinner.”

  “Your aaj would strangle you if you didn’t,” Otgar says. Now that she’s taken one step, it’s easier to take the next and the next. The spot near Sakura calls her the way their fire calls moths. “What are the two of you doing all the way out here?”

  “Dinner, as I said,” says Shefali. “I can taste now.”

  That she cannot taste Ganzorig’s stew is a tragedy left unsaid. There will be other things to eat. Otgar takes Sakura’s hand. “And you? Aren’t you hurt? I can get the sanvaartains to take a look…”

  “Thank you,” says Sakura, though it comes out with more of her Nishikomi drawl than usual. “I’d like that.”

  “You aren’t answering the question,” Otgar says. “And you’re quiet tonight. Are you sure this is Barsatoq’s cousin?”

  Sakura presses her lips together and flinches; something in Otgar dies. She scrambles. “I didn’t mean— I guess I don’t know where you’ve been—”

  “I went back to Nishikomi,” Sakura says. “But it wasn’t home anymore, so Barsalai offered to take me where I needed to be.”

  She says it all quickly—but she squeezes Otgar’s hand, and leans her head on Otgar’s shoulder. If she can smell the death, then she shows no sign of it.

  No questions spring to mind, but there are warnings. It is cold here, unspeakably cold; there will be little time to write, and no privacy to speak of; it is a hard life, even with the improvements; she doesn’t speak much of the language; she does not know their culture.