The Tangled Lands

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “We have little in the way of supplies,” Jiva said. “And, judging by the force that attacked your caravan, which is two hundred or so strong, with twelve war elephants you say, we are outmanned. Fighting men are in short supply throughout the lands, thanks to the Culling. We don’t have many horses for cavalry. The fight is over.”

  I shook my head. “The fight isn’t over; you are just not able to see how best to bring it to them.”

  “You think you are a better commander than me?”

  “No,” I said. “I know nothing about armies or supply trains. But I do see the things that men do not.”

  Jiva, at first furious, now snapped his fingers. “Then, tell me what you see that I do not, woman, and I’ll judge your words.”

  I had caught him, like a fish, and had his interest. “You think about their numbers, and whether you can compare yours to theirs, like two boys seeing who can piss the farthest.”

  As I had intended, the warlord jerked back from my words as if slapped. “Listen, axe bitch . . .”

  I spoke with a low voice, completely forcing him to stop in order to hear what I was saying. His commanders leaned forward. “The Paikans control the road. You can skulk in the woods like this, avoiding confrontation. Or you get an army so vast there is no hope for the Paikans at all.”

  “Since we have no vast army, but a couple hundred men, you think we should remain here, starving and hidden?” Jiva asked.

  “No, starving accomplishes nothing,” I said. “But with only two hundred men, you are not of much use. No, what I propose is you let me help you build an army so vast, so large, the Paikans will have no choice but to fold. They might not even choose to fight.”

  And, I thought, we would win the battle before even setting foot on the field.

  Jiva folded his arms and laughed at me. “And where shall I find that army, Executioness? Shall I pull it out of my ass? Will you magic all the trees in this forest to suddenly take up my cause?”

  I did not say anything, or change my expression, but waited, until one of the commanders repeated Jiva’s question, “Where will you find this army?”

  “The lands are short of young men, due to the Culling. But they are not short of angry, venomous mothers like me, whose families have been destroyed, and their towns scattered. And yet they live. They were the backbone of the caravan, before it was destroyed today. They haggle and trade in towns all up and down the coast. No doubt they even helped supply your army at times. There is your army, Jiva: an army of Executionesses, ready to throw themselves at the walls of Paika, like I am. No less thirsty for blood, no less able to be led into battle. No less able to kill when armed well.”

  Jiva unfolded his arms. “They will not fight as well as a man.”

  “Face me with your sword then, and find out how well a woman can fight,” I said, using all my strength to banish fear from my voice.

  Jiva eyed my axe. Then he pointed at one of his commanders.

  The man stepped forward, and his sword flashed out, faster than I had expected, but I shoved it aside with the axe clumsily.

  On the second swing I caught the blade in the curve of the axe’s blade, and then spun the axe handle about to crack the man under the chin while his sword was still held away. I leaped back from his next slice, and smiled to see the blood and cracked teeth in his mouth.

  He growled then, and began slashing quickly at me. I backed up farther and farther into the water as I kept the long blade away, almost tripping over my skirts in the mud that oozed under me.

  We grunted, striking and clanging steel together. He was stronger, he was faster, and he would take me down.

  But I refused him an easy kill.

  By the end, when we both stood in hip-deep water, panting, sizing each other up, Jiva finally stood up from where he’d been squatting to watch us. “Good enough,” he said. “Good enough. What will we arm this new army with?”

  “Arquebuses where you can afford it,” I said over my shoulder, still eyeing the commander before me. “Axes where you cannot.”

  “An arquebus is an expensive weapon for vain lords and the rich caravan. Do I look made of gold?” But I could hear in his voice that I had won. That he was taking me seriously.

  “It took me a week to learn to shoot the arquebus. You’d have an army in that time.”

  “Anything else you want of me, besides what little fortune my army has amassed, then?”

  With my axe still in front of me, I looked over at him. “Yes, I have another demand. We need a woman, called Anezka, from the caravan, if your scouts can find her among the survivors who are fleeing. She will be our link to getting us the supplies we need, and a new army.”

  I needed a quartermaster.

  Jiva clapped his hands. “It will be done, if she is alive and can be found. Now both of you, come in from the water, we need to return to camp and rest. Tomorrow we need to get farther into the woods.”

  I held my axe in one hand, and held out my other to my opponent.

  He spat a tooth out, then grinned and took the offered hand.

  4

  IT DID NOT HAPPEN AS quickly as I wanted. But it happened nonetheless.

  First, with Anezka by my side, we recruited tallywomen from the remains of the caravan and hagglers from the nearby villages. They melted off into the chill of the northern forests with us, where the Paikans had to get off their horses and brave the bramble and tight brush.

  Forges in half-destroyed towns built arquebus barrels, and woodsmen in the remains of once-great cities crafted stocks for us. Women all over began to carry axes, no matter where they went or what hour of day it was.

  And the Paikans did not know that all throughout their lands women taught other women how to fight with an axe, or reload their arquebuses, and that those women taught others. For what men paid close attention to what women did together?

  Too few.

  And those few that paid too much attention, found an axe buried in their skull.

  Anezka’s old caravan contacts kept food and supplies moving throughout old forest trails to us. Decimated by the lack of trade and Cullings, many were all too happy to help us in revenge for the caravan’s destruction and antipathy to Paika.

  Jiva slunk into a gloom after the first months. “An army of widows,” he complained. “We will be laughed at and destroyed.”

  “So take us on raids,” I told him. “Kill anyone friendly to Paikans, burn their temples. But we will keep the women in hoods, so that we don’t reveal ourselves just yet. You will see how strong they are in real battle.”

  Jiva resisted at first, but eventually took women armed with axes. Fifty men and fifty women fell upon one of the larger towns near Paika, overwhelming the thirty or so Paikans guarding the temples there. I watched the turrets of their temple topple into the flames with grim satisfaction, and then galloped with my sisters and brothers back into the protection of the northern forests.

  And that was the last time Jiva spoke of weakness. His men stopped huddling off in the corner of the camp, feeling outnumbered. They passed among the women, and ate and joked with us.

  “And now we have an army,” Anezka muttered to me when she saw that happen. I’d started to forget my previous life. My new life was weeks and weeks of drills, transporting the parts of arquebuses, and walking through dangerous forests.

  “But do we have enough?” I wondered out loud.

  “We have as many as we dare recruit,” Anezka said. “Any more, my supply routes fail, or we go broke. We have a month of supplies, money, and goodwill left.”

  She had a long scar on her cheek, given to her when the caravan was destroyed.

  It had been easy to recruit her. She’d gone from smiling caravaner to bloodthirsty soldier. Anything that would destroy Paika, or end with a Paikan’s death, she enjoyed. Whenever I questioned why she stood by my side, she would once again tap her forearms and reply, “I still owe you the greatest debt.” Though with all the danger we had faced together
I couldn’t imagine that to be true anymore.

  She carried a dagger now. Along with her axe and a heavy blunderbuss on her back, carved with images of death and destruction along the stock and barrel. She even wore a silvered image of Tankan holding a spear; it hung around her neck on a leather thong. It was not the halls of the merchantmen that Anezka hoped to spend eternity in now, but the halls of a warrior god.

  “Then I guess we’re going to have to convince Jiva it’s time to march,” I said, and grabbed Anezka’s forearm. “And that it’s time to tear Paika down.”

  We swept south at first, and then westward. Jiva’s men took the frontguard and fought any resistance. But there was little of that as we quickly advanced along the same spice road I’d traveled some six months ago. Just Paikan scouting parties, who usually galloped back up the road to take their reports to the city.

  The road, I noticed, was more overgrown, more thick with bramble along the sides. But even that began to lessen. The woods and trees faded into hilly grasses and small farmsteads, recently abandoned.

  We trudged like a normal army for the plains of Paika.

  When we turned the last curve of the spice road, I gasped. The fields of Paika spread out before us, but they’d been shorn of what crops the laborers could harvest. The rest burned so that our army could not have it. Everyone had moved back behind the protective walls of the city. The sloping valley sprawled for miles on its way out to the ocean, which was a distant glimmer. To the north were hills and mountains.

  It was against the foothills to the north that the stone walls of Paika made a giant U before the mountain. Behind those were several smaller rings of walls higher up the slope of the city.

  What a city it was!

  Rows and rows of streets and houses and windows and parapets that clung to the slope seemed to go on and on, only petering out when the hillside became so steep as to make building impossible.

  Jiva laughed as he watched me from a horse that walked slowly along with us. “Do you think it still so possible to take the city now?” he asked.

  “The battle was already won before we arrived,” I said. Those walls would not fall easily, though.

  “Maybe, maybe,” Jiva said, and spurred his horse on.

  “He’s a bit excited,” Anezka observed.

  “A boy before battle,” I replied.

  We trickled through the empty farms and markets until we came to a stop on the edge of the fields just outside the thick walls.

  An armored Paikan with a flag of negotiation flapping from a pole held in his saddle waited for us.

  One of Jiva’s commanders rode out to meet him.

  When he came back, the commanders waved me over. Jiva threw a piece of parchment my way.

  I looked down at it. I couldn’t read: the words made no sense to a butcher from Lesser Khaim. So I looked back up at Jiva. “What is it?”

  “The hierarch of Paika wants to talk to you,” Jiva said.

  “Me?”

  The bitterness on Jiva’s face deepened. “I think he believes the Executioness to be the mind behind the army. The word has spread before us that the great Executioness marches with us. The lady who destroyed an entire Paikan army herself, after they razed Lesser Khaim.”

  I ignored the sarcasm in his voice. “I know nothing about tactics or negotiations,” I said. “How can I speak for us?”

  “Oh, but it does make sense,” Jiva said. “That this army is yours as well as mine, there is a grain of truth to that. So go. Talk to their great leader, see what he demands or wants, then come back to us. If they keep you in there, have no fear, we will come soon after to rescue you.”

  I pulled Anezka over to me. “You have been in the city once before, will you come with me?”

  She looked at the flag over the Paikan. “Will they honor the flag?”

  “I can’t promise it,” I told her.

  She mulled it over. “I’ll come. I want to see their leader’s face, I want to see if he realizes that he’ll see his city taken by us.”

  I smiled at her. “We’ll each have our victories soon, Anezka. Come.”

  We borrowed horses and rode out across the field behind the Paikan negotiator toward the gates of Paika, where even more soldiers waited for us.

  The steel doors shut once we were through, startling the horses with a loud rattle of chain as a giant weight fell down along the wall, the chains holding it yanking at pulleys and more chains that slammed the inch-thick steel doors shut. The Paikans led us through the cobbled streets, past fearful farmers camped with their livestock in what had once been markets, but were now shelters as they waited for the battle to begin.

  We followed the Paikans up the steep, cramped streets, where we could hardly see the sky due to the two- and three-story buildings leaning in over us.

  It reminded me slightly of Lesser Khaim, and I shivered as the horse’s shoes echoed loudly around us.

  At the top of Paika a final set of walls ringed an interior castle. Again, chains and weights rattled to shut the doors behind us.

  The hierarch of Paika waited for us by the battlements, the wind whipping at his robes.

  “The Keeper of the Way, the enforcer of the Culling, and the ruler of Paika, Hierarch Ixilon, will speak with you,” the negotiator told us, and waved his hand in a bow toward the hierarch.

  From up here I could look out over the city, out into the fields where our armies gathered in loose clumps around the patchwork quilts of farmland and irrigation.

  “I called you here to ask what it would take for you to surrender,” Ixilon said.

  I folded my arms. “You could have sent a message.”

  “I wanted you to see I was serious.” Ixilon held his hands out. “And I wanted to see this legendary Executioness with my own eyes. I wanted to know what it would take to get you to stop this suicidal attack.”

  “You can give me back my children,” I said simply. “Their names are Set and Duram. I have traveled from Khaim past Mimastiva, and all along the spice road on the coast to your lands. I survived the unprovoked attack on the great caravan by your people, and now I have finally arrived.”

  Ixilon looked down at the ground. “I did not know the names of your children. But I know that the children from Khaim, where you hailed from, have all left. They are on their way to the Southern Isles. They have chosen the Way. Their pilgrimage has begun. There is no calling them back until they are done. They have chosen the paths their lives will take them on.”

  “When did they leave?” I demanded.

  “You will not catch them—”

  “When?” I shouted at him.

  The hierarch smiled. “If you were to leave now, on horseback, you might catch the last of the ships that are leaving.”

  I ran to the edge of the wall, looking at the roads down to the gates and out of the city. Anezka touched my arm. I turned and looked into her wide eyes.

  “Will you go?” she asked me.

  Would I go?

  All I’d ever wanted was my family back. Could I have it by running for the harbor, far at the end of the valley?

  Or was it a trick? Was it just a way for Ixilon to get me out of the way before the battle?

  “You should surrender,” I said, turning back to Ixilon, “if you want to offer things like guarantees that families will no longer be pulled apart. That the Cullings will stop. That you will reign peacefully over the coast. Then maybe we can discuss your future.”

  “I can only offer those things if you promise me that the bramble will cease appearing, or deliver me a way the bramble can be defeated through alchemical means, which my spies say the Blue City has,” Ixilon said. “The Southern Isles my people hail from are small and carefully maintained. The sickness your people create from these lands floats to ours.”

  “Bramble cannot be destroyed, it can only be burned and hacked back,” I snapped. “It is a curse we must all suffer. If you think Khaim knows otherwise, you should ask Majister Scacz.”


  “I have. Those envoys he returns to me in a box, missing the rest of their bodies.”

  “Then you have as much influence over Scacz as I have.”

  “So the Culling must continue, and magic use must be checked to save ourselves,” Ixilon said. “And we are at an impasse. Your people have to realize that there are consequences for your actions.”

  “Consequences? You speak of consequences,” I spat at the raider. “Come stand at your walls here and look out at the consequences of your actions. Out there is an army that you have created with your actions.”

  Ixilon did look out. Then he looked back at me. “It is hardly an army. You want me to surrender by giving me a great show of numbers. But there are barely four hundred men out there. The rest of your army is made of women. Old maids. They call it the Widow’s Army, and you’ve only had months to train them. I will plow through them, and my elephants will scatter your old women before us like dogs.”

  “Indeed,” I said. “I’ve seen the remains of wars. And the men never seem to remember the women running from the sword as they guided the army’s packhorses to the frontline, and they always forget who bandaged the wounded through every skirmish. When the songs are sung about great battles, the women who helped sustain, feed, and build the army, who donated their husbands to the cause: they are always somehow forgotten. You forget that they are just as good at war as men. They fade in your memory only because they didn’t share the glory of the front line, even though they often shared the losses and deaths.

  “Now, these women at your walls—you’ve ripped their lives from them. They have nothing to live for but vengeance. Their daughters, their sons, and their husbands are gone. Their farms are burned, their means of living are nothing but rubble. They are the walking dead, and are animated for one thing only, and that is revenge.”

  I walked over to Ixilon and stared into the calm eyes. “These women fear death little. Far less than the men you’ve paid to man these walls, or the ones who fight for some distant philosophy imported from your distant islands. Will your arrows stop the walking dead? Will your walls? Remember, this army welcomes death, because at least then it means they will find some sort of peace that has been taken from them! Can you fight an army created out of the pain of all who’ve lost their families, Ixilon?”