Requies Dawn

by J L Forrest

  The riders gathered at the communal fire. An old man, the tribal Ahtros, stepped from a tent, naked save for a blanket cinched around his hips. Dark feathers adorned his white hair, fluttering against his engraved face as he sat with the riders.

  They passed a water skin from man to man, quenching their thirst, eating their fill of roasted violet maize. The old man played a flute, the others listening.

  “Mournful,” one hunter said, his head bowed by the music.

  When the old man finished his tune, he said, “The spirits of your fathers. I am grateful to have you home.”

  “The spirit of your father,” the hunters said. Each cast dust into the fire.

  “What have you seen?” the old man asked.

  A wiry man sat forward, taller and stronger than the rest. “We met Inwn spearmen in the north,” he said, “at the wide bend of the Heron, where the gray cranes nest in the short grasses. It is the first time in two summers any of us have spoken with the Inwnii. They were peaceful, trading water-bone ivory and beads for our foals. The Inwnii spoke honestly with us. When we left them, we scouted west. Our tribe has come faster than we thought—Abswyn is only two more days, following the sunset.”

  A young woman brought boiling water in a clay pot, and she sprinkled herbs into it before passing earthenware cups to the men. They let the tea steep, poured it, and sipped it, nodding to her in gratitude.

  The speaker continued, “At the forest’s edge, near the boar-back ridges, we spotted Oudwn archers afoot along the riverbank. We followed them to the mouth of the Red Valley, and they slipped into the foothills. They saw nothing of us.”

  “Abswyn is untouched?” the old man asked.

  “Yea, Ahtros. Our ancestors’ bodies rest on their palanquins. The devil’s pillar, the hell-spire, stands as tall as ever. The House of Hell never ceases its ghost-fire.”

  “A place of death and dying, you see?”

  “So everyone says.”

  “I do not wish to insult you, Suhto,” the old man said, “but you still insist on doing this thing?”

  “Your daughter demanded her bridal challenge.”

  “I might speak with Nyahri, change her mind.”

  “It is not how I would have it with her, her father speaking for me.”

  The old man frowned. “I might speak with you, change your mind.”

  “Nay, Ahtros, my resolve doubles every day.”

  They drank, emptying their cups, and a young hunter refilled them. The frowning old man closed his eyes.

  “She is undoubtedly foolish,” he said. “You are foolish too. You are foolish twice.”

  “Twice?” Suhto asked.

  “Once because my obstinate daughter is a safi—everyone seems to know this but you and she—and if you accepted this fact, you would not be going to die for her. And twice because you are actually going to die for her.”

  “You are so certain?”

  “That Nyahri is one of the safii? Yea. About your death? Nay, but your odds are poor.”

  “She is no safi and I can win through. I am not afraid.”

  “I am afraid, Suhto. I have a right to be afraid for you.”

  Suhto studied the old man’s eyes, their color the rare jade of high mountain water. The Ahtros already grieved Suhto’s death, though the young man sat alive at the campfire, teacup in hand, kinsmen around him. Suhto tipped his spear into the blaze, which scorched away its beaded black feathers.

  “I do not believe in the Atreianii,” Suhto said. “I have never seen one. Neither have you. Neither did your grandfather or his grandfather. If there ever were any Atreianii, they are long dead, and we have no reason to fear them.”

  The old man’s eyes glittered in the amber dusk. He turned to the sun, his shadow lengthening behind him.

  “Would you are right, Suhto.”

  Tribal life went on. Two women stretched antelope skins on racks, mothers looked after newborns and toddlers, and three young huntresses returned from a morning’s work with a brace of rabbits. Seated on a log, a bowyer wound sinew into strings. At the grasses’ edge, tethered horses grazed, flicking their ears. Bright beads and feathers decorated their manes, declaring one horse’s owner from another’s.

  ◆◆◆

  Nyahri rode, her stallion’s hooves drumming the sward. His mane flew, and he flew, and she flew upon him. His lungs filled and emptied as she worked her knees against his flanks, no stirrups or reins, her hands clenching his russet hair. At a high crest she shortened her grip and Kwlko lowered his haunches, kicking dust.

  Stroking his neck, she clicked her tongue by his ear.

  A tempered longknife rested at Nyahri’s hip, its blade carefully oiled within its beaded sheath. A trade-coral necklace hung around her throat above a turquoise-embroidered serape, its silver-worked edges across her shoulders. A long leather riding skirt draped her waist and thighs, her figure as much a girl’s as a woman’s.

  She dismounted, only a short distance from the encampment, and let Kwlko wander. Thought the scent of evening campfires lingered, the swelling hills hid the firelight from her.

  Good, Nyahri thought.

  She wanted the darkness, as she lay in the grass, her hands clasped behind her head. The stars glittered, the White River overarching the dome like salt spilled on slate.

  The heavens filled her wide eyes, reflected in irises green as her father’s, tapered like pawpaw leaves. Freckles peppered Nyahri’s nose and cheeks, patterned like the constellations, a decoration of dark stars on her cinnamon skin.

  Lwn hovered overhead, a late crescent moon with its obscured face decorated like dew on a spider web, a thousand-thousand twinkling lights upon it. In Lwn’s wake followed Stashwn, the lesser orb a meager silvered disc. At the edge of the sky hovered the smallest, Trwl, the dark-gray maiden. Stashwn never journeyed distantly from Lwn but, over the course of years, Trwl wandered wide from her sisters.

  Nyahri meditated on these celestials.

  The Atreianii taught the three sisters to soar, she thought. The devils did terrible things, but they are also gods of beauty.

  She thanked those sleeping devils for the blessing of the moons, watching the sisters until Lwn chased the sun past the horizon. Then Nyahri stood, calling the stallion with soft coos, and she cantered back to the encampment, where most everyone already slept.

  Nyahri scrubbed her horse, then tethered him on the herd line, where he contented himself on fresh grass. As she crossed the camp, Suhto gazed at her from the men’s fire, where his brothers and cousins laughed at each other’s ghost stories.

  At her tent, Nyahri swept open the door and crawled inside. Soft lamplight greeted her, along with acrid bison-fat smoke, which hung in the shadow.

  Her younger sister lay on their shared sheepskins, gazing at the roof, the corners of her mouth notched downward. Nyahri attempted a smile before setting her knife aside. The long ride’s ache remained with her, obscuring deeper pains, though she tried to stretch her muscles. On her stomach, Nyahri folded her arms beneath her cheek, staring at her sister until the girl met her gaze.

  “Cirje,” Nyahri began.

  “You stink like horse,” her sister said.

  “Angry?”

  “You are a prideful hag and everyone knows it.”

  “Cirje—”

  “A hag, I say.” Cirje huffed. “You will be a lonely old crow someday.”

  “What are you saying?” Nyahri grimaced. “I will be an old crow if I do not marry Suhto?”

  “You will be an old crow because Suhto is going to die, and no other man will ever dare being with you. That will be two men dead because of you—Suhto and our uncle.”

  Nyahri winced.

  “To think,” Cirje added, “every other girl in the nine tribes wants to share Suhto’s tent.”

  “Let some other girl have him.”

  “He wants you. Think you are too good to bear his children?”

  “I do not want children, his or anyone else’s.”


  “You really are a safi. It is true.”

  “Am not and, even if I was, that has nothing to do with children.” Nyahri shook her head. “I had the right to set my challenge for him.”

  “Such a stupid challenge! My heart breaks for you.” Cirje laid her hand on Nyahri’s shoulder. “Whatever were you thinking?”

  “Thinking?” Nyahri’s shoulders fell. “The words simply poured from me—there was no thought in them.”

  Cirje sighed. “Poor sister! There is a way to end this, to save Suhto’s life, and you know it.”

  “Nay.”

  “Accept his proposal and bed him.”

  Nyahri raised her voice. “I have offered to release him from this challenge many times these weeks!” She clenched her jaw. “Every time, he persists. Which is easier? For me to marry my good friend, no matter my guilt for leading him on, for too many thoughtless kisses? No matter that I do not wish him as husband? Or for him to simply let it go?”

  “You had to challenge him, on tribal ground, in front of everyone? The dishonor of it! He cannot back down.” Cirje rose to her knees, hugging her sister.

  “Mayhap I will end up his wife after all? Men have gone into Houses of Hell before and come out again.”

  “Only in legends, and you know it. No one truly survives where the ghost-fires burn, and at Abswyn they burn. It is a house of the gods, not meant for men.”

  Nyahri closed her eyes. “Our brother’s remains rest there,” she said, “as do our grandfather’s and his father’s, and all the healers of generations past. Their spirits will look after Suhto.”

  Growing quiet, Cirje turned onto her side.

  Nyahri stripped away her own garments, wetted a cloth in a bowl of water, and washed the sweat from her skin. A short while later, with the blankets over her, she listened to the camp.

  Perhaps forty paces away, a man and woman moaned together in their tent, their whispers and gasps indistinct. The woman crescendoed and, with the rise of her voice and a few shouted words, Nyahri recognized her. The man peaked soon after.

  Is that Cahlia’s usual lover? Nyahri wondered, the detail irrelevant but blessedly distracting.

  Every day, a thousand such details presented themselves to her, endless familiarities. Since Suhto proposed marriage, since she set her challenge, she noticed these details all the more, and she bristled at them. Of course, a third choice occurred to her, many times. Perhaps Suhto could never have refused, a dishonor too great for him to bear. Perhaps Nyahri could never marry him, not so willingly, so contrary to herself.

  Yet she could flee, put Suhto and all the rest of them behind her.

  Would that not also be a dishonor?

  The fire crackled. The hunters recited their stories. Suhto’s restrained voice sometimes rose above the conversation.

  Her childhood friend.

  It is not my fault he fell in love with me.

  Thoughts of him circled with dreams of flight, of another life, of some escape. On these, she drifted to sleep.

  ◆◆◆

  At dawn the tribe awakened, broke fast, and packed. The E’cwnii disassembled tents and loaded gear. Like the others, Nyahri bundled her litter for the packhorses and, before the chill fled the morning air, scarce sign remained of camp.

  The tribe loped westward, huntsmen and archers at the fore, unsaddled horses and watchmen at the rear. Foothills now crowned the western horizon, upturned ridges and their valleys blanketed by violet-green woodlands of bitter-pine and magiswood.

  Close to the mountains, with tall grasses touching the horses’ bellies, Nyahri rode beside her father. Cirje trailed behind them. Two years younger than Nyahri, Cirje still preferred her pony, though she rode like a chieftess upon it.

  Throughout the day, Nyahri spotted Suhto a half-dozen times. Always wary, he appeared on hilltops or in vales, he and other hunters scouting ahead. The tribe’s danger grew with each pace, each step closer to the forests of Oudwn archers. Despite this danger, despite herself, Nyahri smiled when she glimpsed Suhto.

  The vulture god, she thought, the lord of death, could not catch Suhto unaware. If anyone could enter a House of Hell and live—

  She too kept a keen eye for Oudwn archers or for borderland reavers like the Bk’ferii, remembering what her beloved brother, Erhde, once taught her: Watch the horizon for death afar, the ground for death below, the sky for death above.

  Of course, his own death had come unlooked for.

  Nyahri’s chalk-haired father sat straight in his saddle, but he had moved slower in recent months, and each new day settled on him like a pebble. Each added to the weight of his years, and one day would crush him. Nyahri pressed her lips together.

  His time nears, she thought, her heart aching.

  The tribe reached a stream, scarcely enough drink for the horses. Escaping the sweltering midday, the E’cwnii shaded beneath a sparse copse. The Ahtros sat on blankets, near the water, and Nyahri joined him. She picked a grass blade, stripped it, and chewed it, rolling it between her teeth.

  Her father gazed at the horizon, his eyes glistening. With embers, he lit his pipe, inhaled a few puffs, and handed it to Nyahri. She drew on it and passed it back. Their smoke rings drifted over the water.

  “Father—”

  “Nyahri, my son—”

  “Your daughter.”

  “You act like a son.”

  “Father,” she said again, exasperated.

  “Your father without sons or grandsons. Thus you are my son.”

  She understood.

  Women do not ride warriors’ stallions, she thought, or learn so well the bow and spear and longknife. They do not take the pipe. Women marry, lay aside childish interests. Even young huntresses eventually take a husband.

  “Could you not dissuade Suhto?” she asked. “Any other woman would have him.”

  “That is not the way of it.”

  “He would listen to you.”

  “I tried. Shall I ask for his cowardice? His wishes are clear.”

  “I was sure he would refuse the challenge.”

  The Ahtros’s eyes widened, his jaw clenching. Seldom had her father berated her, but now he verged on it. She readied herself, waited for his command: Marry!

  What will he do if I deny such a decree? Banish me?

  Yet he sighed and curled another line of smoke into his mouth.

  “You must become a better judge of men’s hearts,” he said, “before I die.”

  “I will do my best.”

  “Tell me, are you one of the safii, daughter?”

  She grimaced at him. “Everyone should stop asking me that.”

  “They will stop if you will answer.”

  “I do not know.”

  “Might change things if you did.”

  “I do not know.”

  Upstream, playful children hollered and the horses raised their heads, listening for trouble. Finding none, they returned to grazing. A colt pranced and nudged its mother for milk.

  “When Suhto departs for the House of Hell,” she said, “I want to ride out with him. To witness.”

  The Ahtros’s thin lips stretched, neither a smile nor a frown. “When you send a man to die, it is polite to see him off.”

  Nyahri gritted her teeth, stood, and walked to the arroyo bank. There she gathered flat stones to skip across the water.

  {03}

  By early afternoon the scouts returned and the troop moved once more. The terrain undulated nearer the foothills, though the stark peaks remained distant, their lengthening shadows filling the valleys. Within a wide hollow, a scalloped lake reflected the few clouds which still dared the sun.

  Nyahri wiped her brow, shielding her eyes from the west, heeling her horse to her father’s side. From a knoll at the lake’s far edge, Suhto galloped to them until he rode abreast the Ahtros.

  “Nyahri,” he said, “will you be my wife?”

  “You know my mind,” she replied for the hundredth time, “enter the House of Hell, come b
ack with proof of the Atreianii, whether they are alive or dead or nothing at all, as you think they are. Do that, and I will be your wife.”

  He smiled. “That I will do.”

  “You know I would release you from this duty?” She said this as a matter of course. “Go find another woman, Suhto.”

  “My mind is set.”

  “A brave man,” the Ahtros interrupted, “might enter the ghost-fires and return.”

  “Yea,” Suhto said.

  “Might.”

  “Yea, Ahtros. When Nyahri and I come back from the Red Valley, we will find you at the old camp, and we will feast.”

  “Would we will, Suhto.”

  Suhto gave his stallion rein and kicked. The horse leapt, opening his gait through the grasses. Nyahri quelled an urge to ride after him, her dear friend, to go upon the hunt, to cross the plain with him as equal hunters, as they had many times before—

  Eager for distraction she looked over her shoulder. Cirje gloomed at her, the girl’s brown irises smoldering in the sunlight. Nyahri held her sister’s gaze for a long moment but, as she turned away, her heart fell.

  As a matter of tradition, the whole of the tribe never entered the Red Valley. As it had hundreds of times before, the tribe camped short of the forested mountains. The old campground nestled in a floodplain of sweet grass, cottonwoods embracing it by the thousands. Cherry and crabapple trees grew nearby. The women raised shelters and picked fruit. Dogs chased each other. Hunters established a perimeter.

  Cirje pouted, refusing to emerge from the tent.

  At dark, the vigilant hunters traded their watch. Other men sang death songs, told tales, and made obeisance to their ancestors—and to the Atreianii in whom Suhto refused to believe.

  Many matrons glowered at Nyahri, their thoughts easy to guess: What kind of woman sends a good man to die? Why not make children, the Ahtros’s grandchildren, which he might hold before he dies?

  She sighed, leading her horse into the open grasses. The stallion carried full saddlebags, a bedroll, and a blanket. Nyahri brought her weapons. Her best serape adorned her, pale silver-set turquoise and amber sewn with fine whispering wool. Hunter’s breeches replaced her skirt, matched by thick-soled sandals. Charcoal spirals whorled across the horse’s ribs and haunches, emblems to protect against the devils of Abswyn.