The enaree fell to the ground, his arms and legs jerking as if pulled in a dozen directions at once. She plucked his staff from his twitching fingers and swung it over her head like the long pikestaff called inata, which the Gelon used.
“Tabilit’s Demon Daughter! Aieee, she’s come to seize us all!” a man screamed and rushed from the camp.
Not even the chief’s son stood for more than a heartbeat. They bolted — some for their tents, others into the night. Ponies squealed and hoofbeats disappeared into the darkness.
“Cowards!” Tenoshinakh’s voice sounded weedy and hoarse. She rushed in, sliced through the strips of camel-hide binding him.
“Escape now, talk later!” She caught him as he staggered against her. “Pray they’ve left us a pony or two.”
Two docile-looking beasts stood, tethers hanging loose from their rope halters, lipping the last of the sheaf of wild plains barley. By some miracle, Ythrae was able to half-drag, half-hoist Tenoshinakh on to the unsaddled back of the shorter beast. The second pony lifted its head with a grunt of resignation when she vaulted onboard. Pulling on the lead line of Tenoshinakh’s pony, she booted hers into a rolling lope.
Beyond the circle of the encampment, the night took on a strange, iridescent brilliance. She saw every stone, every clump of curlgrass and starflowers. Every beating heart, of hare or lizard or far-off sleeping hawk. Every spring, bubbling over with delight. Behind her, scattered men fought their way through drunken confusion.
At her side, Tenoshinakh sat easily on his pony, a good man, an ordinary man.
Nothing lay between them but days of easy travel, living on what she could shoot, basking in the summer’s warmth. She thought of Tenoshinakh taking her into his arms, imagined pledging themselves with body and whispered words.
Thought of the children that would come, the raids and heroic deeds he would ride away to, thought of endless circles of seasons blending together into a blur of babies, camel’s-milk, weaving, the songs of men.
She pulled her pony to a walk.
“What is it?” Tenoshinakh said.
In a few hours, it would be light enough for him to make his own way. She handed him the bow and arrow case.
“I can’t take that! What are you doing?”
“You need it more than I do,” she said, turning her pony’s head north instead of southwest, toward their own clan.
“What — Ythrae! Where are you going?” Tenoshinakh’s pony pranced, eager to run.
“Go home. Don’t follow me. Tell my father it has nothing to do with him.” Tell the enaree — what? That she would learn the songs of the stars without him? It wasn’t worth the breath.
He went on without her, wise enough to know that he must leave her to her own journey. He truly believed, after the manner of men, that once this madness had passed, she would come back to him.
Within a few minutes, the sound of his pony’s hooves died to stillness. A bat flew overhead, diving and swooping, a tiny mote of warmth. She wanted to laugh, to throw her arms wide to the wonder of the night.
The days ahead of her would shorten and plainsgrass turn first golden, then brown, then gray. The pony would grow hard and lean. Perhaps she would meet families whose clan-tokens she had never seen before and bargain with them for another bow and a winter jacket of thick soft camel’s-hair felt. One of the bright-cheeked girls might sell her a polished amber chip of the kind called Tabilit’s Golden Tears, and she’d wear it on a thong around her neck because it made her think of the way her own heart had pulsated with the honey-gold color when she purified the spring.
At night, she would lie out under these very stars. Sometimes she would listen to the noises of the earth, feel the slow rotation of the skies, the air shifting along with its heat, the movement of plants, the quick percussive deaths of mice.
And sometimes the stars would sing to her their stories, so filled with beauty that her heart would ache, even as it did now.
It came to her as she rode through the luminous night that perhaps she was not becoming an enaree, but something entirely else. Something the wide world had never known before, a woman who sang with the stars.
A Single Soul
On the night of the summer solstice, a breeze rippled through the plainsgrass and whispered to the Azkhantian nomads as they lay dreaming in their tents. To the east, mountains rose stark and silent, only the highest peaks still touched with snow. Below them, on a solitary hill, a bonfire set within a circle of ancient stones sent billows of smoke to the heavens.
An aged enaree, his robes stitched with mystical symbols in threads of gold and blood-saffron from far-off Meklavar, labored to the top of the hill.
Two girls barely into womanhood waited for him, so alike they seemed like a doubled image. The flickering orange light burnished their brown skin to bronze. They wore sleeveless jackets of camel-wool stitched with their tribal emblem, the lioness, and both carried short, curved bows.
Seylana, the younger by ten minutes, stepped forward. “We have prepared everything, even as you asked.” With a tilt of her head, she indicated the fire, the pots of nightskull and orienna root, the young man poised over his drums.
“It is you, my daughters, who have asked,” the enaree replied in his quavering, sing-song voice. He raised his hands, accompanying his words with intricate gestures. “Not asked to be born as you were, one soul split between two bodies, but asked to be reunited, to be made one. The risk of such a Change is great, the risk of death, the risk of madness. The risk of the shadows that lurk in the dark of the eclipse.”
Meriadess shivered at her sister’s side. “Qr . . .” She whispered the single syllable.
“That’s just an old legend.” Seylana bit her lip. “It must be. What clan would follow the totem of a scorpion?”
The enaree shook his head. “At the solstice, in the time of the eclipse, the walls between the worlds grow thin. Power flows freely. Power to bring you through the Change. Power to give flesh to your fears. Think again if you truly wish to do this thing.”
“We are Azkhantian.” Seylana tossed back her bronze-gilded hair. “We fear nothing.” She had always been the bolder of the two, the first to tame a pony to her hand or ride out to hunt the savage plains boar.
Her sister said nothing, only gazed into the brilliance of the fire.
The enaree took a handful of orienna and one of nightskull and threw them into the fire. As the flames shot up, filling the air with pungent smoke, the boy began drumming. Seylana listened for a moment before laying aside her bow and unfastening her jacket. She knew all the rhythms of war and dance, but this was different, like an echo of her own heartbeat.
The enaree drew his cloak tighter around his bony shoulders despite the mildness of the summer night and the heat of the fire. Eyes grown far-sighted with age searched the heavens.
Naked, Seylana faced her sister before the fire. The drums were louder now, the sound filling her head and resonating through her bones. She raised her hands, palms outward, pressed against an invisible barrier that separated her from her sister.
Seylana closed her eyes and hummed in their secret language. Meriadess merged her voice with her sister’s into a single pure note. Music, like spirit, strained against the boundaries of flesh. Vision blurred as the two glimpsed the world from each other’s eyes.
Their heartbeats pounded close and closer to the rhythm of the drums. They began moving as one, dancing to a single rhythm.
Darkness crept across the rim of the moon.
One fire-gilded woman reached for the other, a mirrored gesture in the honey-dense light. Twin bodies glistened like yellow marble, eyes locked on one another, arms reaching, fingertips spread and touching.
Touching.
The web glowed between their hands like a veil of molten gold. Their bodies bent and swayed, supple young willows tossed by a single wind. Linked by the glowing web, flesh churned out incandescent heat. The Change spread over their arms and legs, flaring brighter than t
he sun, dwarfing the bonfire in brilliance. Minds and bodies burned as one. Separate thoughts melted in that inferno, dissolving.
Abruptly, the drumming stopped.
Seylana’s eyes jerked open. Breath seared her lungs. In the flickering shadows, a shape began to gather. Out of the corner of her vision, she caught the flash of silver in the amber light.
During those few moments, the radiant web had thickened into a sticky membrane. Shadows flowed beyond the ring of stones, gaining substance. The night air crackled with unspent lightning.
Dark shapes seeped between the standing stones to fuse into solid form. One figure loomed larger than the rest, the scorpion badge of Qr glimmering on its brow. A curved blade lifted into strike position.
Soul thief!
Seylana glimpsed the sword. Despair lanced through her, because she saw it not with the double vision of accelerating Change but from a single view point. She and her twin were at their most vulnerable, neither completely separate nor rejoined.
The enaree rose from the darkness, his face laced with blood. With an inarticulate cry, he threw himself upon the shadowed agent of Qr. The figure whirled, blade slashing in a sweeping horizontal cut.
Seylana screamed as the blade touched her twin. Shock chilled her to the core. The web between her and Meriadess flared and died, falling away as powdery ash. She threw all her strength into one last chance for wholeness, grasping through exploding chasms of darkness for her twin, her soul, her self . . .
o0o
Brightness seared her eyes like a molten brand. A breeze fluttered over her bare skin. Her fingers tightened around stalks of tallgrass that felt limp and oddly sticky. Her back burned as if she had lain in the sun all day. As she stirred, a dozen cuts on her back and thighs broke open, stinging. But worst of all was the feeling of loss beyond words, of utter emptiness.
I have lost half my soul.
She lifted her head, immediately dizzy. Even focusing on the ancient sacred stones brought little comfort. Squinting, she made out other shapes, the remains of the fire, contorted lumps that might have been bodies, tatters of colored cloth. She lowered her head and slept again.
Voices, murmuring, woke her a second time. She did not know them, although she knew she ought to. She could hear the sorrow in their words. Hands lifted her, wrapped her in a blanket that prickled her skin. She felt herself being carried, rocked like a baby. As if in a dream, she saw the familiar stitched felt of a tent overhead, the stylized lioness she knew like the beating of her own heart.
For days, they told her afterwards, she lay in a fever. She ate the food that was placed in her mouth, she rose and walked at the healer-woman’s command.
The camp moved on as the summer faded. At first, she was carried in a travois behind a sedate old camel. Later, she walked, drawing strength from the endless sky above and the smell of the plainsgrass sweet in her lungs.
The healer-woman had to explain the simplest things to her — her name, how to dress and eat and wash, how to draw a bow and sit a pony.
Why do I feel so alone? she would ask, sitting over her bowl of camel’s curd-cheese.
You have lost your sister, said the woman who was her father’s mother. And we have all lost our enaree. There is no one to guide you, my poor lost calf.
What was her name? Tell me again.
Meri, she would repeat as she lay awake in the milky hours of the night, holding herself as if she could enclose the emptiness there. Meriadess. With each repeating of the name, pain would rush up inside her, a wound beyond healing.
Summer burnt the tallgrass into tinder. Storm clouds swept across the endless skies, bringing lightning and downpours. Nights turned chill. The Azkhantians turned their fattened herds of camels south, toward the winter pastures. Here the tribes gathered and traders from Gelon and far Meklavar brought their wares, salt and silver, amber, myrrh, and dried fruits from the Spice Lands. Here the young men and women entered into contests of strength and bow-skill, danced and drank k’th into the long nights, played their harps, and found warmth in each other’s tents.
Here Seylana heard once more the whispered name of Qr.
Signs of the scorpion god had been sighted along Gelon’s northern forest border, the Meklavaran trader said as he bent over his wares, knife blades, arrow heads, and sewing needles. Once or twice last summer, he added, and then again at the autumn Turning.
No, his partner said, the Gelon didn’t admit to the existence of such things. They built temples of stone, didn’t they? and studied the stars with map and compass.
But they were good customers when it came to sword steel, the first insisted. Then a youth, a chieftain’s son from the eagle tribe, paused to examine a set of bridle buckles, and there was no more talk of Qr.
Gelon, Seylana turned the name over in her mind. Gelon invaded Azkhantian territory when her mother was a child and had been thrown back at great loss of life on both sides. Such hurts were not soon forgotten. They might kill her outright, or think her a spy like the legendary Aimellina.
I am dead already, she thought, and went to pack her few possessions, some clothing, a small brazier of finely worked bronze that had been her mother’s, her pony. She left her bow behind and went into the land of her enemies.
o0o
Seylana bartered her pony and one of her three knives for Gelonian clothing, an onager trained for riding, and a handful of coins. The inn host took her money with a suspicious glance, but once she had left the border behind, everyone assumed she was Pithic. Azkhantia had never been known to travel peaceably through Gelonian lands.
When her purse grew thin, she got a job as a livestock handler for a caravan heading east, into the heart of Gelon. Traders picked up all sorts of useful information, anything having to do with the safety of the roads. Many rumors came to her ears, that the Ar-King was recruiting for a campaign against Meklavar, that the border to Azkhantia was open, that it was closed, that the wells at Borrenth were poisoned, that the scorpion emblem had been sighted in some isolated place. Late at night, with the onagers fed and tethered, she pored over the master’s maps.
Here and then, here . . . A pattern?
Emptiness throbbed, a constant companion.
She had to know more, to be able to move without suspicion about this land. Traders weren’t the answer. Their motto was to keep as far away from trouble as possible. She wanted trouble to come to her.
The next morning, she headed for the nearest large town. She had to smash her way past two local bullies to enlist in the Ar-King’s army.
The Meklavaran campaign soon ended in another stalemate, and Seylana inched up in rank. Soon her sword and onager felt as familiar to her as her bow and pony once had. She drank, but not too much, and dreamed, but not enough.
Sometimes she would awaken in her barracks bunk, sweating and trembling, her fingers closed around the hilt of her sword. Her eyes would dart from one shadowed corner to the other, searching for something she had forgotten. Not even the taste of wine or the warmth of a lover’s arms could fill the inner emptiness.
And every so often, she would hear the whispered name of Qr, and something inside of her would tremble like a bowstring.
o0o
From her place near the door, her back to the wall, Seylana could see both the public room of the inn and a slice of the dusty street outside. This late in the day, off-duty soldiers rubbed elbows with cattle drovers, traders, and crafters in iron and leather. She took a sip from her tankard, swirled it over her tongue. Gelonian wine still tasted too sweet after the raw pungency of k’th. A low murmur flowed around her, from which her ears picked out an occasional word or phrase.
A thin, tall shape dimmed the slanting afternoon light. Her muscles knotted. Her knife slipped into her hand. She held it hidden and ready.
“We stand before you in peace,” the man said, his voice soft. “There is no need for fear.”
Seylana let her breath out. She had seen Gelonian priests from a distance, but had neve
r spoken to one before. Now it surprised her how much this one was like the enaree of her youth.
“How may I serve you?” she said politely.
He sat at her invitation, taking a backless stool from a nearby table. “The question is how we may serve you.” Like all Gelonian priests, he spoke of himself as a multitude. They believed all souls were one limitless sharing. They did not even have individual names. “You seek word of the forces of Qr.”
Dry-throated, she nodded.
“Of such, we have gathered knowledge across the centuries,” he said. “The true danger lies in ignorance. You have been asking questions.”
“Will you answer them?”
“The path of knowledge is open to all who truly seek, and through that knowledge, the ultimate freedom, release from the tyranny of desires. We battle for good when we must, but we do not make a home for hatred, no matter how righteous, in our hearts.”
She brushed away the suggestion that she could set aside all memory of what she had lost, of who she was and what she might have been, without the unspeakable evil of Qr.
“Most of what we once knew of Qr was legend,” he said, “stories told to frighten disobedient children.”
“More than frighten.” They have stolen half my soul.
The priest met her eyes with a steady gaze, as if measuring her courage. “Of late, we have witnessed bodies found disfigured, wells poisoned, animals wandering witless.”
Things glimpsed in shadows . . . She shuddered against her will.
The priest pressed his seamed lips together. “When we clear our minds, we can sense how the fabric of the All has been torn.”
Seylana had heard this before, spoken by herbal women at the Mherivar markets. Some said the rent grew wider with every passing moon.
“Through the ages, we have preserved our ancient writings,” the priest said, “and in them, knowledge of the worlds beyond our own, of the nature of death and the soul. Do you thirst for such? Will you come to us and drink?”
Azkhantian Tales Page 4