Fight Like A Girl

by Juliet E. McKenna

  “So what are you doing getting yourself in among the infantry, boy?” Kathje growled. She wasn’t drunk, not yet, but her temper was always on a short leash. Fierce, loyal, a roaring terror in the line, a rowdy, unsinkable friend.

  “If I’m going to be an officer I need to know what it’s like in the line, right? I know what you think,” Tenshin said. “Officer-whelp, out to get his hands dirty and get in the way. But even if I am supposed to lead, one day, how can I do it if I don’t know what it’s like for those I’m leading? How do I know if I even can? I can’t learn that up on a hill, watching the action through an eyeglass, can I?”

  This time the look the rest of them shared was a touch more thoughtful. They’d all survived commanders with no more idea of life in the line than a newborn babe. Sometimes not by much.

  “Well, good for you, then,” Riven said, and the boy had grinned as though she’d given him a present. They’d all drunk a fair bit and Tenshin had shown them the ring. “Pa gave it to me. Gave me a lot of stuff about it being my granda’s and to remember who I was and never take it off – he said it so often I’m surprised he didn’t have it welded to me. I think he thinks if I see it every time I use my hand, I’ll remember who I am and come to my senses, take up the post I was meant for.” He sighed. “But the wretched thing rubs when I use a sword, so . . .” he retied the cord it swung from, and slung it around his neck.

  He’d acquitted himself well enough. Sharp, skilled, a fast learner – and, like Ordel, he was a sight tougher than he looked. By the time Crishnak came along, he was well on the way to being a Dancer.

  There had been rumours for weeks. They’d found a halfway decent tavern and piled in, the whole company. The innkeep had looked scared half to death. But they were the Dancers. They drank hard, but no-one made trouble. It became their tavern, in the nights before the battle.

  That last night, they’d known something big was coming, the next day. They got a little noisy. Ordel brought his fiddle. Tenshin proved to have a pleasant tenor, Riven could carry a tune, and the pair of them sang duets, the songs going from cheery to maudlin to obscene and back to maudlin.

  Lod and Dark Jashy got into a conversation about magic swords, Lod swore he’d actually used one, once. Dark Jashy said the damn things were a liability. “Can’t put your trust it,” he said. “People start relying on the magic, they don’t use the blade like they should.”

  Big Jashy and Tunning were feeling each other up, not very discreetly, under the table. Marthe was trying to teach Brack a new card game. “Every time you play Kings, you get screwed. Every fucking time. You gotta learn another game.”

  “I like Kings.”

  “You like losing money?”

  “Kathje, tell him.”

  “What are you putting him off Kings for? You’ve been paying for your drinks out of his losses for a year . . .”

  “I was hoping he’d learn. He ain’t learned. It’s embarrassing. Makes us look bad.”

  Eventually Tenshin declared himself hoarse, and drunk, and made off. He wasn’t that drunk – none of them were, not even Kathje; they’d been doing this too long to risk thick heads and shaking hands the next day. Riven found the boy’s ring on the floor when she scrabbled under the table for her coat, and picked it up to give it back to him. But the next morning had been a scramble and then they’d been in that fucking valley.

  She closed her eyes at the last memory of that bright blond head, shining against the darkening sky. The ring felt cold and heavy in her hand.

  I should take it back.

  Riven had sent Ordel’s fiddle to his sister, hardly able to bear touching it. Kathje’s spare sword went to the only name she had for her, some man. A brother, a son? She didn’t know. She’d not sent messages with them. She had no words. The things she wrapped and sent away had no meaning, or too much, now that the people who’d borne them were ash on the wind. She wondered if the summer growth had covered the blackened cliffs by now. It seemed impossible, even obscene. In her mind the place was scorched lifeless, and should remain so. After all, it had been the target of the gods’ hatred, hadn’t it?

  And now there was this damned ring.

  I should take it back.

  Her weariness dragged at her. She wanted nothing more than to lie in the long grass under the trees, and stop. Stop fighting, stop jolting at every shadow, stop shaking so badly when she tried to light a lantern that she’d given up bothering, stop revisiting that fucking valley every night . . . someone would find the wretched ring, and take it to the boy’s family, or sell it, and what business was it of hers? She couldn’t even recall his last name, he’d been that new. Brassen? Brishen? They’d know it at the barracks.

  If you don’t take it there, his family may never get it back.

  What of it? They’d never get their boy back, either, and that, presumably, mattered more.

  Whoever finds it will think I stole it from him.

  Who cared?

  She didn’t. No, she didn’t. She couldn’t.

  That’s all that will be remembered of you. And not just of you. The only one of the Dancers not to die at Crishnak, a thief?

  Oh, she was so tired. The grass looked soft, a good place to rest.

  Is that what’s to be left of the Dancers’ reputation?

  What did it matter, now?

  But the Dancers were ash on the wind, and who would guard their memory if she did not?

  *

  When Riven turned up at the barracks, the place echoingly empty; half the troops disbanded, now the war was over; she felt the whispers before she heard them. While she waited for the record-keeper to finish shuffling papers, sitting on a hard chair in a small room that smelled of dust, she heard footsteps in the corridor. She knew they were making excuses to pass by so they could look in at her. Last of the Dancers.

  She knew what she looked like. Skinny, flesh scoured away. Her thick dark curling hair, that she’d always been proud of, always washed when there was water to be had, now rough and dry and streaked with grey.

  But she’d washed it, before she came here. In a horse-trough, but she’d washed it. And she’d cleaned her armour as best she could.

  The record-keeper huffed and muttered. “Wait here.”

  Riven folded her arms and sat. She should have just left the damn ring and gone. Once there was paper in it, you were in for hours of waiting. She should have remembered.

  It wasn’t the record-keeper who came back. An older woman, thickset, scarred. Eyepatch and officer’s marks. “Follow me.”

  “Ma’am, I just want to return a keepsake to the boy’s family. I’m not . . .”

  “Yes, you are.”

  Riven, sighing, followed, thinking of the long grass under the graveyard trees. Another room, neat, empty of everything but a table and two chairs, a jug, tankards. An open window letting in the crisp air from the hills and echoes of drill from the practice ground. Surely they weren’t going to ask her to re-enlist? She’d served her time and more. She felt a vagrant flicker of pride.

  The officer sat, gestured her to do likewise. “All right, soldier. Tell me about this ring.”

  “Ma’am, I told the records-keeper. The last night, in the tavern, I found it after the boy went to bed. I was going to give it back to him the next morning, but . . .” she shrugged. “They rousted us out in such a hurry, I didn’t have a chance . . .” her throat dried.

  The officer shoved a tankard at her.

  Riven drank. Water. A pity. “We were on the field, then. And after, I forgot. I found it in my pocket this morning.”

  “You didn’t try and sell it, then?”

  “Sell it? I didn’t know I had it, till this morning.”

  “That can be checked.”

  Riven felt anger, sick and hot, pushing up through the weariness. “You think I’d have sold it?”

  “You signed out. From the look of you, you need money.”

  “I’m a Dancer, Ma’am.” Riven stood up, shaking. “
If you know who the boy’s family are, I’ll thank you to get the ring back to them.” Stupidly, furiously, she said, “I’ll check.” She turned for the door.

  “Sit down, soldier.”

  Habit was so strong, she almost did. Then she said, “I’m not a soldier anymore.”

  “You just said you were a Dancer.”

  “Yes. I was. But the Dancers are gone.”

  “Yes,” the woman said. “Yes, and it’s . . .” she sighed. “Look, I can only give you advice. You’re no longer under my command or anyone else’s. But the ring will get back to Lord Braish. And you’d best not be here when that happens.”

  Riven, her hand on the door, stopped. “I wasn’t planning to be,” she said.

  “That’s it, is it? Yes, I thought you had the look. What, you don’t think I’ve seen it before? You’re not the first, girl, not by a long way. War doesn’t always end when the fighting’s over. Take my advice. Go back.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Go back. Go to Crishnak. Look the place over. Yes, I know it’s the last thing you want. But it’ll cleanse you. And then, keep going. Find another town. Another profession.”

  Riven heard herself make a strange noise, like a crow trying to laugh. “Like what?”

  “You’re young. Right now, you feel old, but compared to me, you’re a stripling. You’re healthy, or will be if you start eating more than you drink. And there were no fools in the Dancers. You’ll do, but you need a new start, and you’ll best get it by going backwards.”

  The woman stood up, and held out a purse. “Back pay.”

  Riven took the purse. “Thank you.”

  “You’re dismissed.”

  “Ma’am.”

  She went.

  Crishnak.

  She looked up as she left the barracks, up to where the hills jabbed the sky. Three days’ walking would take her there.

  No.

  But her feet would not move back towards the graveyard.

  She stood until a shout from the practice ground made her jump, spilling the purse. Coins tumbled into dust. Riven picked them up, one by one, brushed off the dirt. Why had she taken it? She wasn’t owed any back pay, she’d always kept track. Like she’d always paid what she owed.

  Not thinking, purposefully not thinking, holding her mind like a cup of dark liquid she dared not spill, she bought water, food. A flask of the local spirit that tasted of bitter flowers. The weather was easing towards summer. It had been winter, in the valley, she realised, laughing that strange crow laugh again and shocking the boy who took her money so that he too dropped coins, ringing on the countertop. Winter, it had been winter. Snow had melted and run down the rocks, hissing, in the brief terrible heat. Then she forced her mind quiet again, liquid, its surface reflecting only emptiness.

  Locked in silence, she started to walk. Her footsteps trod out their names.

  Kathje, Ordel, Lod, Marthe, Brack, Tunning, Big Jashy, Dark Jashy, Young Tenshin.

  Out of the town, not looking back. She slept in a barn, the first night; the second, another farmer offered her a bed. An empty room, kept neat. A rag doll with open arms sat in the worn chair. A son, a daughter, lost in the war? She didn’t ask. He was a slow-moving man, face harshly used by weather, time, and grief. “It’s cold yet to sleep out,” he said.

  “I’ve done it before. And I . . . talk, in the night.”

  He snorted. “If my wife’s snores couldn’t wake me in forty years, that won’t.”

  Screams might. She couldn’t bring herself to say it, or much else. She was tired. She let him make up the bed. He stewed rabbit for supper, served it at the big scrubbed table with room for six. When Riven dropped her fork, she bent to fetch it and saw a woman’s dusty slippers, waiting under a stool by the door for their owner to kick off muddy boots and ease her feet into comfort. The dust was thick as fur.

  Riven crept out to the barn with the blankets, once the farmer was abed, trusting a soldier’s habit of early waking to get her back indoors before he rose.

  The dream changed that night. Young Tenshin stood next to her, where Kathje had been. “I can’t go home,” he said. “They’re angry because I changed my name.”

  “You have to. Go home,” she said, knowing that he had to leave, had to get out of there, because the fire was coming. “If you go home they all can.”

  “But they won’t let me,” he said, and his voice was full of dreadful mourning, and then the fire came.

  When she woke, half out of the barn door with a scream still raw in her throat, the chained dog barking like a maniac, she thought, He didn’t change his name, I just couldn’t remember it.

  Of course, farmers rise early too. He made no comment when he found her in the barn, but gave her a hearty breakfast, and refused payment. “Ah, I always make too much, the food’ll only go to the pigs and they’re fat enough.”

  He pushed a greasy parcel into her hand as she left, and turned away before she could thank him. He looked small and old. I should have slept in that room he offered, she thought, as though one night could change the house’s emptiness.

  That day the road rose into the hills. Water ran in trickling rills through a greening landscape; birds flickered and peeped in the low bushes. She caught the scent of burning, and nausea rose in her throat, but it was only a campfire.

  The road that had led to hell had become ordinary. Farm carts. A small girl riding a donkey, kicking dirty heels. Dogs. Daily life. Not her sort of daily life, not what she’d known since she was eighteen, but . . . daily life. She let it pass her, nodded if someone greeted her, held the bowl of her thoughts steady.

  But her hands were shaking. The liquid in the bowl rippled, shuddered with broken images. She thought about stopping, opening the farmer’s greasy parcel of food, but her throat was too tight for eating and she knew if she sat down she wouldn’t move, would stay seated at the side of the road until she turned to stone and the moss grew over her.

  Kathje, Ordel, Lod, Marthe, Brack, Tunning, Big Jashy, Dark Jashy, Young Tenshin.

  She heard Kathje’s laugh from a passing couple. Big Jashy grinned at her from the back of a cart.

  I should go back now, before I go completely mad. That’ll be the end of this.

  You’ve been mad for months, Riven.

  Her feet kept moving.

  There were yellow flowers in the grass the exact colour of Young Tenshin’s hair. A bird sang like Ordel’s fiddle, ridiculously cheerful.

  There was the narrow pass, the stone throat that had swallowed them. The ground was green between the stones, speckled with bright colour, here and there something shining. Nature had thrown an embroidered cloth along the valley, hiding death.

  Burning.

  But there was no smell of it.

  The rocks were streaked with black. She touched one of the streaks with a shaking hand. It didn’t stain her fingers – not ash, not after all these months of rain and snow. The rock was scarred.

  It had been magical fire, she’d always known that, but somehow the marked rock confirmed it. Hot enough to scar stone, and she’d survived. How?

  The cold hill wind hissed and shook the feather-headed grasses, made the little bright flowers tremble.

  Screams.

  But there was only the hissing of the wind and the high far call of a bird circling, up against the blue.

  Riven, her legs numb, walked towards the back of the valley. Between the grasses, the earth was black. Ash was good for growing things, her farmer mother had told her, many years ago. This ash must be rich. No wonder there were so many flowers.

  Something gleamed. A strange, smooth stone, with a streak of coppery brilliance across its surface.

  Metal. Metal melted into a puddle, here on the valley floor. Something had scraped across it, cutting through the dulled surface, leaving that gleaming line.

  The fire was hot enough to melt armour. Melt weapons. There, and gone. Gods’ fire.

  I should be dead. Why aren’t I dead?
>
  The question had occurred to her more than once, but now, it had gained an extra weight.

  She rose, walked on. Her legs shook. Come on, Riven. She didn’t know why she was doing this but it felt necessary that she should stand where she had stood. The valley seemed endless, and then, at once, there she was, facing that same rock wall.

  Riven turned. Leaned her back against the stone. Looked down the valley. It was empty of everything but sunlight, birds, the breeze hissing in the grass.

  The tears came without warning, grabbing her up and shaking her as a dog shakes a rat. She sank to the ground and wept. And screamed. And raged. And wept again.

  When the sun was dying bloody behind the ridges, she got up, and began to walk. Her face was stiff, her limbs felt as though they belonged to someone else. She left the valley as it filled up with shadows.

  *

  She found the Braish house easily enough. The windows were draped with blue mourning silks, like a hundred others – though down in the town real silk was rare. There you’d see any cheap stuff, dyed blue, or a treasured dress or shirt, ripped up for grief and memory.

  Why are you here, Riven?

  The door opened. A servant, cold-eyed. “Yes?”

  “I’m here to see Lord Braish.”

  “And why would he want to see you?”

  “It’s about a ring.”

  “Wait here.”

  The house was big and cold, and echoed with silence.

  Lord Braish was waiting for her, standing against a high window that looked out over sweeping grounds.

  “You,” he said. His face was carved away, like hard stone from which all the softness had been worn by a scouring wind. “Why are you here?”

  “I was told I should leave,” Riven said.

  “You should have. Thief.”

  She ignored that. “See, that got me thinking. That, and other things. Because I should be dead. Everyone else is. But I’m not, and I think it was because of the ring. I didn’t steal it – he was wearing it on a cord around his neck, because he couldn’t use a sword right with it on. Did you know that? Damn thing was too big and clumsy. So he tied it around his neck, and the cord snapped, and I found it where it fell. I’d have given it back to him, if he’d survived the day. What with one thing and another, I forgot I even had it.”