by Kate Elliott
With two clean shots, Mariya brought down two deer, but her third arrow missed and a gust of wind caught her fourth and sent it spinning. The gar-deer were already through the gap, the injured buck staggering at the back of the group.
Kirya waved at Mariya as she rode in pursuit.
It was a strong beast, young and healthy, and had the fierce will to preserve itself that animals must have to survive. At first it managed to keep up with the tail end of the herd, but step by halting step it slipped behind. Kirya closed the gap as they raced up one long slope and descended another on the trail of the fleeing herd.
The pair of vultures, which she had thought marked the position of the herd, were now almost above her, circling. A third glided into view from the east and joined the vigil.
The buck stumbled and collapsed. Kirya brought the gelding up beside it and dismounted, flipping the reins over the horse’s head. She drew her knife, unhooked her leather bowl from her belt, and knelt by the young deer’s head. It struggled briefly, but she caught its head in her arm, holding it down. She sang the brief prayer to Uncle Grass, thanking him for this offering, and cut its throat. Most of the blood poured into the bowl; the rest blessed the soil. The deer jerked a few times in its death throes. She unhooked her mirror and studied the reflection of the animal in the polished surface, seeing no mark of demon corruption.
With a sigh of relief, she drank the hot blood, emptying the bowl. They hadn’t eaten since yesterday. Mariya would be enjoying the same feast from her own kills. It was a good kill, a strong spirit, fat and prosperous. A portent, she hoped, for the coming prosperity to be hoped for by their tribe. Maybe her aunt would negotiate a marriage settlement with the mother of that Vidrini boy. Sometimes prosperous tribes had such an excess of boys that they were willing to marry some into lesser tribes. The youth would have a chance to prove himself as something more than the least man in a large war-band. It might work out.
One of the vultures dropped out of sight. She wiped her blade dry on the grass, tied a blue string on the dead buck’s ear to mark her kill, then rose. The gelding grazed, ignoring the smell of freshly spilled blood. He’d seen worse than a slain deer. She walked up the slope with an arrow loose against the string, cautious as she edged to the crest. Beyond, the land flattened as it stretched into the eastern drylands. Grass had dried to a golden pallor under the summer’s heat. The sky whitened at the zenith.
A vulture perched on the ground, staring at a stubborn knot of mist pooled within another of the sinks where spring’s rains had collected and slowly were drying out. A second landed a short distance from the first. Both fixed their gaze on that insubstantial clot.
At first she thought it might be an animal, shifting as it struggled. But it was not. The misty silver substance was cloth so fine it appeared as light as air, and rippled in the wind that blew out of the east. She crept closer, pausing at intervals to scan the horizon and the heavens for threat. The vultures, seeing her, kept their distance. She kept her bow held ready, arrow taut against the string. Grass crackled under her steps, but as she moved into the sink the crackling faded to a softer sound where the grass had enough moisture to bend without breaking. At a stone’s throw out, she halted.
It was cloth of a fine silken weave, precious fabric trapped by a weight wrapped within it. A body, but whether living or dead Kirya was not sure. By the behavior of the vultures, they were unsure as well, and she trusted them to know better than she the presence of the breath of life in any creature left lying on earth. Demons haunted the shadows that bridged the gap between the living and the dead; it was dangerous to pass too close to the edge.
But such fabric, shimmering and rich, was worth the risk. Anyone must fear demons; it was only prudent, especially here so close to the eastern drylands where demons haunted the night, and where their more human enemies, the dreaded Qin, hunted in summer and autumn. But the daughter of a poor tribe must brave dangers that would chase away the less desperate daughter of a more prosperous tribe.
She slipped the arrow into the quiver and unhooked her mirror. The reflection showed her nothing different than what she saw with her eyes. She drew her knife. With her bow in her bracing hand and the knife in her strong hand, she approached. She hesitated a body’s length from the body, seeing coarse black hair fluttering at one end and the fabric twisted so tightly around the rest that only a single bare foot could be seen. Brown-skinned. This was no tribal woman, but a stranger.
The vultures watched as she knelt beside the body. The unstained heavens cast no cloud shadow. Perhaps this was a demon pretending to be a dead woman, hoping to snare her. Perhaps the vultures were its cousins, in bird form, luring her in.
Her iron knife, blessed by a Singer, would protect her.
She studied the wrapped body, the layers of finely woven cloth. Its color was magnificently subtle, more silver than gray, shot through with the delicate light that is mist rising off the earth at dawn. She touched the cloth with the blade.
Death can overtake life between one breath and the next. A man may blink, and find a sword in his gut. The deer may leap, and be dead before it falls.
The wind on the plains is a constant. A violent gust tore the cloth free. It billowed into her, choking her as it wrapped her body, pressing into her face until she could not breathe.
Theirs is not just a poor tribe but a dying tribe. No one will say so out loud, but the end will come soon. Estifio and Yara will ride off on their own with their boy; the Tomanyi cousins will eat their oath-bound words and seek the shelter once offered them by distant cousins in the west, hoping to make marriages for their young daughters. That will leave the cripple, the old uncle, and the orphan boy as their war band, the four young children, and three adult women, one of them gravely ill and one slow of mind . . .
The Vidrini boy will never be allowed to marry Mariya. Never. Their tribe is already dead, just twitching as animals sometimes do after the spirit has fled.
Gasping, she clawed herself free from the horrible thoughts. Her hands stung. Her lips smarted, and when she licked them, motes of skin flaked loose to dust her tongue. She slapped the cloth down with the knife, got it fixed under her knees. The wind died as suddenly as it had come up. With the mantle torn loose, the body lay uncovered.
The woman wore foreign clothing, spun from flimsy cloth that could not withstand winter’s piercing winds. One sleeve had torn and been mended with a darker thread. Her face was brown and her hair was black. Her hands, lying lifeless on her belly, were scarred with many tiny white lines as though repeatedly cut by a stone scraper. She looked as if she were sleeping, not dead, but her chest did not rise or fall, and when Kirya held her mirror in front of those lips, no breath misted the mirror’s surface.
Those without breath are without life. Yet she smelled no decay, nothing putrid. No bugs crawled. No vermin had begun to feast. And the vultures had vanished.
Air pulled in her lungs as she sucked in, then exhaled. Her own breath made mist smear the mirror’s surface. She was still living, then. She had not been devoured.
She scanned the heavens, but saw no birds, no messengers of any kind from the gods. The sun had shifted higher. Somehow it had become midmorning.
The cloth rippled under her knees as wind pressed through the grass. Both her hands hurt: Blisters bubbled on her skin. This was demon’s cloth, dangerous to mortal kind, and thus doubly valuable. They could actually hope to trade it for what they needed most: life for their tribe. Husbands. A tribe without women cannot be called a tribe: It loses its name and its heart and must be cast to the winds in the manner of a lost spirit. But likewise, in different manner, a tribe without brothers and uncles and sons and husbands cannot hang together; it will unravel, fabric that cannot keep its binding.
“Kiri!” Mariya stood at the crest of a hill, holding the reins of both horses.
Kirya gave the hand signal for her cousin to keep back.
The mantle clasped just below the hollow of the throat. The
brooch had a complicated design, a set of interlocking circles molded of silver, and it radiated heat. She dared not touch it with her bare skin. She cut away the sleeves of the dead woman’s tunic and wrapped her hands in the cloth. When she touched the clasp with wrapped hands, it did not burn her. Simple cloth, it seemed, was proof against demonic sorcery. She unhooked the clasp and pushed the halved parts to either side, revealing a throat deeply bruised at the hollow.
A drop of blood beaded on the skin. The body shifted. She started back, but it was only the movement of limbs slipping as the lifeless hands that had been resting on the belly of the corpse fell to either side. It was only a stray drop of blood that had been confined by the pressure of the broach.
Her hands still wrapped, she tugged the cloth free, then folded it in lengths and rolled it up, tying it with a strip of cloth. The blisters on her skin rubbed painfully, and her hands, lips, and face stung with the pressure one might feel when she steps too close to fire. Sweat ran cold and hot in waves. But she had captured the demon in the cloth. She had taken a treasure so precious that it could alter the destiny of her tribe.
There was nothing else worth taking. The dead woman wore a belt of mere hempen rope, a poor woman’s garment and in any case very worn, and no rings, no necklace or armband, no anklet. She didn’t even carry a mirror, as all proper women did.
Kirya paced a spiral around the corpse, opening the path out sunwise until she found a spot where grass had been trampled. A horse had stood here, hooves leaving their print, grass torn where the animal had grazed. But the hoofprints vanished as abruptly as the vultures had, as though it had taken flight. There was no trail she could follow to pursue so valuable a prize as a stray horse. No doubt the woman’s other belongings had been slung on the horse as well. Somehow, she had fallen, and the horse had run away. Perhaps she’d been overtaken by a demon and her breath devoured out of her while she struggled. It was too bad they’d lost the horse.
“Kiri!” Mariya was not patient. Daughter of the tribe’s leader, she expected to sit in authority over the tribe in time. This knowledge had made her impulsive and anxious rather than persevering and pragmatic.
Kirya bound the mantle with strips of plain cloth until no part of it could touch skin. She fashioned a loop out of the ends. She whistled—wheet wheet whoo—and Mariya released the gelding. He trotted up and nuzzled her. Hands still smarting, she grabbed the saddle and swung on. With the bundle slung from her quiver, she rode back to her waiting cousin.
22
Kontas was a good boy but absent-minded for all his eleven years. When Kirya had done the morning milking, she had to call for him. He was playing dice with his cousins Stanyo and Danya.
“You should be helping with the chores, not playing. You two boys take the herd off away from the tents to graze.” He grinned at her, never one to take a scolding to heart; she gave him an affectionate clout on the head. “Pest! Go on! Danya, go help Feder with the turning. I’ll send Asya over to help you.”
Danya ran off. The boys chivvied the bleating sheep and goats farther into the grass. Four of the six dray beasts followed with placid amiability, while Nimwit and None-in-the-Skull kept ripping up the grass where they stood, oblivious of the movement around them.
She hooked the stool under her arm. With the leather sack sloshing with warm milk over a shoulder, she trudged through the scatter of tents that marked their tribe. Her cousin Estifio sat cross-legged on a threadbare rug outside his wife’s tent, embroidering the sleeve of a man’s shirt. He grinned as she paused to admire the intricate line of vines wound around dainty flowers.
“A wedding shirt,” she said. “For Mari?”
“I was thinking for trade. But I’m down to my last needle.”
They looked at each other. Thread they could spin, and plants collect for dye, but they had no blacksmith nor any tribe obliged to offer them the services of a blacksmith.
“Uncle Olig can make you a bone needle,” she said.
He shrugged, his way of passing off disappointment. “His bone needles are very fine, but not fine enough for this delicate work.”
“If you finish it before the confluence ends, you can trade for needles and the best dyestuffs.”
“Yes, I suppose.”
Estifio’s wife Yara, together with Uliya Tomanyi, knelt on a mat, pressing felt into the distinctive linked-circles pattern passed down through their tribe for generations. They were talking intently, heads bent together. Yara’s son slept in a sling on her back. Uliya’s two little girls tied knots beside Asya, Uncle Olig’s granddaughter, who was concentrating so hard that she was biting her tongue. Kirya sighed. They were good girls, very serious, but she could not imagine how Uliya would ever get husbands for her girls, or what Asya could expect as the last descendant of her tent, with no aunts or mother to bargain for her.
Yara and Uliya glanced up to see her, and started as if they’d been caught whispering secrets. What were they plotting?
With a grimace, she hitched the heavy sack a little higher, walking on. Uncle Olig sat on a rug under the awning of what had been his sister’s tent, she who had been cousin once removed to Kirya’s aunt and mother. Wood shavings littered the rug as he planed the inside length of a shaft of wood.
“Kiri, that gelding kicked Manig again.”
“I don’t know why Manig keeps going near him. Is he hurt?”
Not far away, Manig Tomanyi was stewing glue from the deer she and Mariya had killed.
“It was just a warning kick. If that bad-tempered beast had meant to cripple him, he’d have done so. Here, little one, come try this now.”
She set down her burden. Grasping the wood at the center, she set one tip on the ground and leaned into it as the old man examined the way the lower limb bent.
“Would you take off more wood?” he asked her.
She flipped the bow and leaned on the other end. “This end is stiffer. Who is the bow for?”
“Asya is ready for a bow with more draw. That one there—” He pointed toward a composite bow braced into shape and curing.
“Yes, I know,” she said with a laugh. “Mine will be ready in a few months.”
He smiled. “A good bow demands patience.”
“Let me get this to the churn and I’ll come back,” she said to the old man, handing back the stave.
Little Danya was twisting the rope that turned the drill, and Feder the Cripple bent over the wood he was shaping into a bowl, whistling in time to the rhythmic whoosh whoosh of the turning. He could sing, too, and his ancient winged kur with its horse head, stylized wings along the neck, and two strings sat in its place of honor in the small wheeled cart on which he got around. He had been a fighter before the incident that had crippled him; his saber rode in a sling alongside the precious kur.
He didn’t look up as she passed. He didn’t need to. “Ei, ei, Kiri! Here’s a tune for you today. I can hear it coming out of your ears!” He swung into a new tune. With a smirk far too knowing for her tender age, Danya altered the pace of her twisting to match the words. “ ‘Who is that handsome youth walking through camp? His sister is looking at me, but he pretends not to see me.’ ”
Her ears burned.
Orphan was scraping the last hide, stripped to the waist, skin gleaming. He was a very good-looking youth, a few years older than Kirya and Mariya, but of course to even think of an orphaned lad who did servant’s work was impossible.
“ ‘Why is that handsome youth hanging around camp? His sister brings cheese and boiled meat, but he pretends not to see me.’ ”
Orphan had showed up at the edge of camp about two years ago, silent and empty-handed, and at first they hadn’t been sure if he was a demon because although he was black-haired and dark-complexioned like Mari, he had twisty eyes, pulled at the ends as though drawn like a bow, a sure sign of demon blood. But he spoke their language in the same way they did, and he asked what work he could do in exchange for a bit of food and worked so hard day after day and
month after month that eventually they simply accepted that he belonged to them now. After all, what other tribe was desperate enough to take in an orphan?
“ ‘Why do the flowers bloom so, everywhere around camp? If I offer the flowers at the entrance to his sister’s tent, will he pretend not to see me?’ ”
Orphan glanced at her, and away at once, since it wasn’t proper for any man not related by blood to stare at a woman. She forced her gaze away from the rippling muscles of his back and swung around behind her aunt’s big tent. Feder’s song faded to whistling.
Her aunt was weaving in the shade of the awning. Seeing Kirya, she set down her shuttle. “There you are, Kiri. Take that milk to Edina. Then you and Mari take an offering to the holy Singer’s tent and get his blessing for the marriage. Then go round to see if the Oliski tribe has come in. I want to talk to Mother Oliski as soon as she is ready to negotiate.”
“Yes, Aunt. Can I take the little ones? They’d like to see all the different people.”
“There’ll be time for that later.”
“What about just Kontas, then? He’s old enough to—”
“No. I don’t want them underfoot to get in your way or say the wrong thing. We need the blessing of the Singer if we hope for a marriage.”
Mariya had her head down, polishing the silver necklaces, bracelets, and headpieces that made up the riches of the tent.
“The cloth I found might be a powerful gift, Aunt. We can expect something better than the Oliski tribe’s castoffs.”
“Did I ask for your opinion, Kirya?”
“No, Aunt, you did not.”
“Then do as I say.”
“Yes, Aunt.”
Beyond the shelter of the awning, her youngest aunt, Edina, was hanging strips of meat to dry in the sun, singing the first verse of a child’s counting song over and over because it was the only verse she knew. The churn had already been set up for the sheep’s milk. Kirya poured the milk into the churn, savoring the rich aroma. She unhooked the ladle from the churn and dipped out a portion for herself. After drinking it down, she licked her lips. Wind sighed in the canvas of the tent, inhaling and exhaling. She carried a ladleful of milk into the tent.