Abandoning my dream-lover I diffused into the night, holding onto myself with only the lightest touch lest the dhurga sense my presence. I drew a crude shani, a wooden throwing-stick, from a fold in my shirt where I kept such things. Then I did a forbidden thing. As the old witch-tales say:
I drew a deeper, darker breath,
I breathed a prayer to darkest Eth,
And when I danced, I danced their death.
I pulled the essences of my self back in, slowly, like drawing the noose tight on a snare. I pulled in my awareness of the night, and its awareness of me. I pulled in the scent of the dhurga, and the feel of them, the whisper of their calls and the rasp-rasp of their tongues against rock, the sheen of moonlight on their dappled hides. I drew this down to the pit of my belly and let my heart consider it, let my blood dance to the music until I understood it to my bones.
And I danced.
I fed the music up, up to my heart, let it travel in a shock of energy through my arms, my legs, my hips. I moved to the huh-huhhh of their breathing, the click-clack of their tiny feet. I swayed to the tha-rum tha-rum tha-rum of my own hideous, empty heart. As I danced, shadows rose in a fine mist about my feet, shielding me from the dhurga’s senses and allowing me to draw close, so close I might have reached out and touched one. So close I heard their small hearts beating with mine, thud-thud-thud, saw them swaying to the movement of my feet, my hands. It was as my teacher had said, back when the world was kind and I believed such soft words: these creatures and I were one.
I drew back and released the shani with my blessing. My blessing of death. Shadows, which had been drawn to the dark song in my heart, poured across the seared earth like dark blood. They seized my weapon up and carried it in their fell hearts, and the dhurga screamed as their doom fell upon them.
The backlash of forbidden magic hit me hard, as it always did, and knocked me flat. I scrambled to my feet, shaking and lightheaded, so tired I wanted to curl up and fall asleep right there in the dirt. But must not, not until I had retrieved my shani and my meat and run far from the killing ground. The scent of hot blood would attract the notice of greater predators, and I was in danger. But there would be food tonight, precious meat for my sister.
Unless Hadl claimed it all for himself.
Well, I thought, his wound festers—maybe he is dead already. That cheerful thought gave me the energy to jog along the shallow crack after the dhurga.
The path down which the animals had fled was not much deeper than I was tall, and it ended in a pit of broken stones. My heart leaped to see not one but two animals down. One of them was dead, the other broke-back, and I murmured a quick apology as I ended his life. The rich scent of blood seduced me, and I gave in to the temptation to take a taste. The dhurga’s death was life to me, rich and clotted and thick with salt, and I felt it humming all through my body to the very tips of my toes and fingers as I gave thanks for this gift.
A whole dhurga for Hadl, and one for us, I thought resentfully, if only he would share. But I knew better. And if I tried to hold meat back, he would—
He would what? I asked myself then, and the poisonous thought rippled through me stronger than the shadow-magic moments before. He would what, exactly? Hadl would be unable to catch me if I chose to run. Would I stand still for him, again, and let him beat me at his leisure?
I thought . . . not. I should, instead, take a dhurga—both dhurga—and run. Run for the edge of the Edge, run over the Jehannim and all the way to Min Yaarif, where the land was cool and green and water ran aboveground, dripping from every surface. Where a girl might walk in the sunlight without dying, and belong only to herself. It was a three-day run, but I was young, and strong. If I could find a shadowmancer to cover me with three days’ worth of shadow, I might pay for his magic with this fresh meat. I could—
Abandon my sister and her child to Hadl, and he would beat them to death, or let them be taken by others, who would beat them to death, or starve them, or use them for bait.
I could not.
My heart lost its wings and sank back down through the sky, past the cool blue moons, down down into my chest where it turned back to burnt, dead stone.
I brought the meat to Hadl. He beat me anyway, because I was fit to hunt and he was not, because I was young and he was not, because I was girl and he was man. I stood still and let him, I who was the daughter of queens, and the choice was bitter in my mouth as old blood. In the end, the beating bought us a skinny foreleg from one dhurga and a handful of half-digested mosses from its second stomach. I had planned to give the whole of it to Haviva, but the meat sent up such a redolence, as the fat crackled and crisped and dripped into the fire, that I gave her only a greater share, and fell asleep with a belly full of guilt and fury.
The men returned to our territory two nights later, two thin lean nights with nothing but dhurga-moss and prickweed in the pot, two nights of threats and curses and the stench of rotten meat boiling from Hadl’s putrefying wound, two nights watching my sister’s belly swell even as her face hollowed and darkened.
The child sucks the life from her, I thought, even as Hadl sucks it from us.
I was expecting a raid on our miserable home, now that others knew where we lived, and so in my hunting had not danced far. We were like a dying animal that snaps at the carnivores rather than lets them make a swift end to it, scrabbling in the dirt and our own blood and filth, struggling to draw one more useless breath. For what? I asked myself. What do we have that is worth fighting for? But still I kept breathing, and still I kept watch.
They came, they poured down our ropes like so much dust, stinking and ragged as we were, but better fed. They ignored Hadl as he cursed them and struggled to rise; he had not left his pallet for a day and the stench of him was our best weapon. They took from us girls what men always take, given the opportunity. They also took our cooking-pot, old and mended as it was, and Haviva’s bone-handled knife. They took Hadl’s heavy spear (it was of no use to us anyway) and the dust-tent, the small hoard of coins and dried meat and pleasure herbs that were the last of Hadl’s treasures. Worst of all, as they left they took our ropes and our precious iron pegs; now I would be the only one fit to climb to the surface. They laughed as they left us to die, left us with nothing to cook in, nothing to eat and nothing to climb, and the stink of them on our skin. I closed my eyes and memorized their voices, their hateful laughter, and their eyes, though there was no chance I would ever find them again.
This much, I had learned long ago: it is never too early to begin planning one’s revenge.
The men did not even bother to drive us from our dwelling, and that more than anything spoke of our end.
Hadl cussed us to sleep that morning, and Haviva wept.
I, I curled around the pain and dreamt it was my mother singing.
Two nights after the raid, the last of our sabra water ran dry.
I pried the tap from Haviva’s grip, chided her for wasting tears, and climbed up to the surface. It was twilight, too early to be aboveground, and the scorched earth blistered my feet as I ran for cover. I ran, I ran, imagining that smoke rose from my skin and rags, that my hair would burst into flame at any moment. I would end as had so many others of my kind: one more nameless, faceless, burnt-up corpse littering the face of Quarabala.
I did not die that night. Perhaps my agonies amused Akari Sun Dragon so that he wished to prolong them, for I found a deeper cleft than we had lived in for months, thick with sabra roots and hidden within folds of the earth. I marked the way back subtly, and when I returned, Hadl was on his feet, hobbling about and ranting in rotting delirium, but upright. Getting him and Haviva up to the surface and down again into our new home took the entire night, and more strength than I thought I had left, but we slept that next day with our bellies full to bursting with sabra water and lichens and a handful of bitter manna roots.
I lay pressed against my sister’s back, as if we were children again and safe in our parents’ rooms, one hand
draped over her great drum of a belly. Beneath my fingers the child stirred and rolled and stretched.
Stay where you are, little one, I thought. Sleep in the dark, dream sweet, dream deep. To live as we do here, dancing on the Edge, is to die.
It did not take us long to learn why such a promising homesite, protected from the sun and with ready sources of food and water, had lain so long unclaimed. Our fire had scarce darkened a path up one wall, and I had yet to discover the local game trails, when the bintshi came calling.
The first notes of her wicked canticle trembled out across the land at midsun, in the midst of a windless calm, when all the rest of the world was still and we slept pressed against the cool stone. It stole into my mind as an old dream—my mother, singing to me—but a spider crawled across my face, startling me, and I woke to the harsh truth. The lyric which tugged at my heart was not my mother’s voice at all, but the song of a greater predator, and at the end of this lullaby lay death.
To me, the bintshi’s voice seemed sweet and light as the notes of a finger-bone flute, dancing and sparkling through the heated air. To the others, who knows? Haviva stirred and murmured in her sleep, smiling, mouth moving like a suckling babe’s, and Hadl . . . well. It is known what wicked and lustful effect the song of the bintshi has upon human men. He roused from his sleep with a great roar, thrashing about and bellowing in a fit of lechery, and knocked me flat three times before I was able to get the wax-and-hide plugs into his ears.
Once deafened, Hadl lay panting and gasping and stinking of fear, and I turned to my sister, who lay curled around the child in her belly, hands pressed to her ears. Her skin had gone pale, her eyes so wide and dark they might have been cursed like mine, and I watched the mound of her belly straining and twisting in a grotesque dance as the child within responded to the bintshi’s fell music. But as I would go to her, Hadl clamped his hand about my wrist and dragged me down to him, to slake and sate his daemon-roused hungers. I was no more able to fight him than he was able to fight the daemon’s lure, and as he clutched and tore at me, my hatred and rage and shame coupled perfectly with the bintshi’s evil song.
Love, lust, love, she crooned. A great shadow fell upon us as Hadl bit my flesh. Love, lust, love. The hot air boiled with the beat of her wings; her music was an exquisite agony and I screamed back at her: Hate. Hate. HATE.
Love lust love me, she sang. Come come love me.
Hate him hate him hate you, I cried, deep in the pit of my blackened heart. Hate you hate him hate me.
Hadl rolled away from me, groaning, and in my wretchedness I scraped together every crumb of power within myself, sa and ka and those beautiful, forbidden magics granted to those who bear the eyes of Pelang. Like a fist full of shit I flung this all up toward her, the filth and pain and abomination of my very existence, the stench of Hadl’s mouth and the knowledge of my own death and a fury so old and so deep my bones cracked with it.
The bintshi wailed, a thin high note of rage kin to my own, and slapped her wings down upon the ground with such force that we three humans were sent deaf and rolling. With that final assault her shadow lifted and I felt her rising, rising up toward her brother the sun, trumpeting frustrated hunger to the world.
I rolled finally to my hands and knees, retching, bleeding miserably from nose and ears. My sister had begun a thin, trembling wail, and for one sharp instant I wanted to beat her for her terror. I watched Hadl struggling to rise and as he did so I saw him clearly. I saw how he truly was, wasted and thin and ill unto death, stinking with the rot of a wound because he was too cheap and too stupid to pay for a healer. He was weaker than I had known.
He was weaker than I.
“If you ever touch me again.” My voice was low and ragged; a woman’s voice. “I will kill you.”
He was still laughing when the sun went down.
The bintshi did not come often; she must have had a large territory. She came frequently enough, however, that the three of us slept with plugs in our ears, and I with my shani to hand, as if a sharpened stick would be of any use against a greater predator.
Hadl ignored my existence. The threat I had made hung in the air between us like a bug in a spider’s web. Neither of us knew whether the strength in my arms might carry such heavy words, and I guess he did not care to find out. I had not often been the target of Hadl’s lust anyway, not back when he had a nag of twelve nubile wives, and no more now that he was down to the two most worthless. I was too small, too skinny, and cursed from birth with the eyes of Pelang.
Bintshi or no bintshi, we needed to eat. So I danced upon the seared earth at night, as I always had, and I returned before morning as I always had, sometimes with meat or an edible plant, usually with hands as empty as my soul. Often I thought that Hadl had been at my sister—the song of the bintshi had wakened in him what his illness had killed—but she said nothing to me, and I never asked.
One night, in a shallow cleft near a tangle of blackthorn with spikes as long and black as my hand, I found a hive of bees. Bees are beloved of Atuim and very, very rare. I dared the fierce little beasts’ wrath and broke off a small section of honeycomb and was well stung for my efforts.
I licked honey from my hand and laughed, jumped half out of my skin at the sound of my own voice, and laughed again. It had been so long! And the honey was sweet, so sweet, the kindest thing I had tasted since my mother was killed.
I wrapped my golden treasure tenderly in a leathery black leaf and hid it well. When the sun came up that day and Hadl began to snore, I woke my sister and almost laughed again at her delight when I gave it to her.
Sometimes, I told myself, you can find a little sweet between the bitterest of days.
It happened one night that I returned early, carrying half a dhurga, and with all the hair on the back of my neck standing stiff. I had barely escaped the attentions of a taarek. Fortunately the big cat had decided that the meat I threw at it was a better meal than my stinking scrawny self would be, and it had allowed me to go. I was caught up in thoughts of my narrow escape, so soon after finding honey that it felt like a turn of luck, which was always suspicious. “Blessings from Atuim always come in threes,” my tutor had warned me, back when there were books and candles and I was a princess, “and the third pays for all.” My people said only, “Beware the third gift.” Never do the dragons bless us without purpose, or without expecting something in return.
As I neared the place where I kept my pegs and bit of shabby sabra-root rope for climbing back down to our pitiful shelter, there at the edge of the Edge, I saw that the dragons had sent me the thing I needed most in the world and wanted least: they had sent me a man.
He was clad in the night sky and burned against it like a black flame, bright to my cursed eyes. So still that the thin air stirred not a fold of his cloak, and the moonslight never noticed him. But I saw him, standing at the very entrance to my home, and my gut turned to water.
He lifted his face, as if he had scented something, turned his head slowly toward me, and dropped the shadows he had gathered about himself as a lesser man might wear clothing. Beneath the cloak he was clad in scraps of red—a priest’s color—and his night-black skin was scarred all over in imitation of the Web of Illindra, set with bright gems and dark spells.
Shadowmancer.
When his gaze met mine, I dropped my weapon and my meat in the dirt, and swayed where I stood, lightheaded and sick. The man’s eyes were as wide and pale as the moons and shone a pale blue in the dying night.
Eyes of Pelang.
He made no threatening gesture or word, just stood in the dark, daemon-eyes so like my own drinking in the night. Then he smiled, and I wondered why I had been so afraid. What could he do to me, after all, that the bintshi could not, or a swarm of soldier beetles, or even our own sweet Hadl?
I shook off the last of my fear as if it were dust, and inclined my head in a graceful nod, as I had been taught from infancy. He raised his eyebrows, perhaps surprised that I did not bow; h
is night skin, nearly as dark as my own, marked him as high caste. Doubtless he expected some show of obeisance. He would receive nothing of the kind from me, on this night or any other. The man was certainly a shadowmancer, and worthy of respect, but I . . .
I was a queen.
And then, laughing silently as the weird wretchedness of it all, I picked my weapon and meat up out of the dirt and retrieved my climbing gear, so that I might offer our honored guest all the mean hospitality at the edge of the Edge of the Seared Lands.
In all my life, no person besides my mother and my sister had ever met my stare without turning away. That this stranger would do so was unsettling. I was unsure whether to feel angry or excited, and so I was both.
His name was Aasah, and he was a man of wonder. He had the true-black skin of a high caste man, and his eyes were as blue and as deadly as a midsun sky. Cat-slit eyes, eyes of Pelang, like mine. Though he worked not a whit of magic, I knew him for a shadowmancer, for he had the ritual spider’s web-and-jewels scarring and of one who has earned his place among the stars.
He shared our meager food, our salt and sabra water. One of the Usil had come calling, and we offered goat-meat and bitter sap. I had thought my own well of misery had long since run dry, but tears stung my eyes, and I wanted to crawl under my verminous blankets and die of shame. Such a man as this might well have once sat below my mother’s table and hoped to catch her favor; now I all but trembled in his presence, a beggar-slave chasing scraps.
He jerked his chin up toward the lower ledge, above which a slice of hot sky could be seen. “I see you have a problem with a bintshi.”
“Problem?” Hadl puffed himself up and displayed his remaining teeth. “Yah, problem. But my little Yaela run that beast off good, she a killer that one. And young. Good, strong. You want her tonight, she is yours. Unless you want the other one, she a beauty and ripe too.”
Unfettered III Page 22