by J L Forrest
Yw Sabi leaned back, hands on her knees. “Don’t seek my sympathies. Don’t seek to master Sojourn, either, even to cure every disease you ever suffered or to pile food on your tables. You would lose far more than you would gain, not that any human can so much as enter a Citadel and live.”
Nyahri’s heart clenched at those words, Suhto never far from her mind. Yet she tried her best to hide her feelings, to project herself as unmoved as the Atreianii.
Dhaos gave a mirthless laugh. “It is said a man gone into the Citadel is one not seen again, but we would enter by hundreds if it could bring the old magics back. I know I would.”
This evening the sky remained clear, absent the clouds and threats of weather which had followed from the plains. As the darkness deepened, Lwn crested the trees, full and bright, adding its glow to the clearing. Yw Sabi looked down on Dhaos, her face calm, her black eyes glittering with firelight.
Nyahri realized, The Atreiani has seen a thousand things worse than a few dying children, has she not? What hells has she witnessed?
The Atreiani’s voice held neither malice nor warmth. “Then you’d be just another dead boy,” she said.
“I mean no offense,” Dhaos said, “but these are the things my father will speak of with you, Atreiani. He hoped much for a day like this.”
“A day like this?”
“When an Atreiani might wake, reopen the Citadels, teach us better ways. My father will hang his hope on you.”
“With enough hope he’ll hang himself.” She said this with a cold simper, amused by a turn of phrase which failed in translation.
Dhaos glanced at Nyahri, but she mimicked the Atreiani, giving him no cues. Yet she read his earnestness, his belief in the words he spoke, and her heart warmed for him.
He is not so much older than me, she thought, just a chieftain-son. He wants something good for his people. How can I fault him?
“Is there some reason,” said yw Sabi, “you loiter at our fireside, other than as your father’s lackey, speaking for him before we see the man himself? Or do you have a thought to share that’s all your own?”
“I and the men,” Dhaos said, “think it right to present a gift of our good will.” He laid the fine magiswood bow near her feet, the tooled quiver with it, its arrows’ fletching gray and red. “To make up for this afternoon’s—” Dhaos hunted for the right word. “—unpleasantness.”
Yw Sabi gazed on him, and upon his offering, as if on dross. “Leave it.”
He nodded.
He hastened away. Nyahri’s gaze lingered on his boot print in the dirt, on a long unusual notch in the heel, some maker’s mark. Raising her eyes, she noted the strength and straightness of Dhaos’s walk, the square of his back.
Nyahri whispered, “Atreiani, you push them too much. Their arrows would injure you, nay?”
Yw Sabi kept her silence, her gaze drawn to the archers’ campfire. The moonslight lingered on her face.
“Could they hurt you?” Nyahri pressed. “If I know, I can serve you better, Atreiani.”
“It’s possible,” yw Sabi said at last. We’re in some danger, no mistake, but best they not know it. When you were ready to battle down that cave bear, did you show it fear?”
“Nay.”
“So it is now with these striplings, and I’ll not comfort them into asking me favors. Whatever I am, I’m not their friend.”
“Are you my friend, Atreiani?”
With a quick laugh, Yw Sabi’s attention returned to Nyahri. “Do I look as if I have friends?”
Nyahri waited for more, some explanation, some kinder acknowledgment. Disappointed, she sighed.
“Should I put the bow with your belongings?” she asked.
“I shoot a bow,” yw Sabi said, “worse than I ride a horse. Best you keep it.”
Nyahri strapped the longbow to the stallion’s harness and fixed the new quiver beside her own. The E’cwn bow was designed to shoot from horseback, closer to the target; the Oudwn bow, on foot and at a distance. Nyahri had never worked much with a longbow, but she intended to learn it better. As she cinched the harness, she looked over to the chieftain’s son, sitting among his men. Her heart warned of trouble there but she drank an eyeful all the same.
◆◆◆
The next morning brought renewed clouds and a cold north breeze. The archers gathered their effects and, as they departed, a dozen noisy crows picked the breakfast crumbs left beside the dead fires. On horseback, Nyahri and yw Sabi followed for hours, while the woodsmen jogged ahead. Watching them, Nyahri gave thanks for her stallion, wondering how men could endure so long.
They climbed above the cedars into blue spruce and ponderosa, and by midday the forest opened into sub-alpine meadows. Along these heights, Dhaos led them past mended fences and post rows. Old split stumps hinted where, through the generations, the Oudwnii had cleared the forests to expand their terraced mountainside farms.
Dirty-faced men and women worked plots sewn with maize, potatoes, and barley, looking up from their labors at the passing company. Nyahri sensed their reverence for Dhaos and his men, but the fieldworkers gaped with awe and horror at yw Sabi, many falling in obeisance.
Dhaos slowed his pace, walking alongside Nyahri’s horse. “Welcome to Aukensis,” he said, “and Orÿs Lodge.”
Above them the high lodge rested in fissures carved from the mountain’s living rock, standing against the alpine cliffs. Above its broad gabled roof, smoke cooled and thickened, carried from a dozen stone chimneys. Nyahri had never imagined such a thing, never experienced more than the long wooden lodges of the river peoples at the plains’ easternmost frontier. Her father had told her of such gargantuan buildings, but to see a house of stone, a shelter large enough for a thousand men, assaulted her sense of the possible, and it gave her a new respect for the Oudwnii.
Nyahri drew her stallion nearer yw Sabi. “How does it stand, this lodge?”
Yw Sabi only shrugged. “This is nothing, nothing but a pile of sticks and rocks.”
Wooden huts leaned against the lodge’s heavy retention walls, against fitted stones larger than any four horses could move. Posts and lintels of rough-planed redwood framed timbers wider across than Nyahri was tall.
Above the compound’s defensible gates, two human heads decorated the barbican, their rotting mouths open in silent screams, bone exposed through the crow-eaten flesh.
Nyahri and the Atreiani trailed the Oudwnii past these gates, into the village, and the gates closed behind them.
{12}
"What was their crime?” the Atreiani asked Dhaos, glancing back to the spiked heads.
“Stealing from my father’s larder,” the archer replied. “Not a sack or two, mind you. They had been pinching for months.”
“What were they doing with the food?”
“Eating it.”
The Atreiani returned her attention to the hall itself. Nyahri followed yw Sabi’s gaze: at the lodge’s high open windows, a man signed to Dhaos, then retreated from sight. Along the walls, guardsmen watched from raised stands, their bows strung and their hands resting on their quivers.
Dhaos’s men stopped at a cistern pump and washed themselves, scrubbing their faces and hands. Nyahri tethered the horses outside the lodge doors, surveying the settlement from beside her stallion. She noted two bony bays, a few heavy workhorses, and donkeys. The stink of pigs and chickens wafted from pens downhill, and a trip of goats bleated in a meadow farther downslope.
A high wall of vertical timbers, stone, and iron surrounded the lodge. Near one corner stood the kennels, a box-shaped stonework with a gabled roof. Dogs tussled inside, their barks deep and persistent, excited by the archers’ arrival. Two stood inside slatted iron doors, massive beasts with broad heads and barrel chests, their fur black and golden.
Dogs bred to hunt, to kill.
An archer reached casually to take Kwlko’s reins, but Nyahri caught his wrist.
“Not if you would keep your hand,” she said to him. He l
ooked to Dhaos, who shook his head. Nyahri said to the chieftain’s son, “I would no one touch the horses.”
“I will tend them myself,” he said with a smile, “but you cannot ride them into the lodge—we allow no animals inside.” His gaze wandered over her from her feet to the crown of her head. “Not sure if that would include you or not?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I have heard Equii sometimes take their horses as lovers?”
“You try to fluster me?”
“Is it true?”
“I have heard Oudwnii are idiots who believe every stupid tale they are told.”
Dhaos shrugged. “It is what we hear.”
“Then you listen to idiots.” She led Kwlko to him, reins in hand. “In the death-cold, in the heart of winter, we sometimes build shelters over our horses, share the warmth with them—we do not lie with them.”
He nodded appreciatively, though whether in mockery or sincerity, she couldn’t tell.
“If you will look after the horses,” she said, “and let no one else near them, I will leave them with you.”
“I promise,” he said without hesitation, and she gave him the reins.
Nyahri tucked her longknife along the front of her belt, then took the Atreiani’s bags from the gelding, balancing them on her shoulder. The Atreiani dismounted. An archer inclined his head to them, gesturing toward the doors, offering to guide them.
“This way,” he said.
“After you,” yw Sabi replied.
The three entered the lodge and, crossing its threshold, Nyahri felt as if entering the earth itself, all dust and gloom and fetor. Never had she wished more for wide-open plains. Yet yw Sabi pressed on, and Nyahri followed her.
◆◆◆
They climbed worn wooden stairs to a narrow landing, and the passage constricted. On the left, a rhythm of doors matched shadowed alcoves to the right. Overhead, perforations gridded the ceiling. Through them, Nyahri glimpsed movement, and she paused to investigate.
Yw Sabi whispered to her, “Those are murder holes for archers—keep moving.”
Mold-blackened beams crossed above the lintels of two green-stained copper doors. One stood open. The other had long fused with effervescent lime, bled for an age over its white-crusted hinges.
Yw Sabi and Nyahri followed their guide up another stair, where banners decorated the soot-smeared walls. Along a higher passage, the archer led them to a vacuous hall, the largest enclosed space in which Nyahri had ever stood. A wide flagstone floor spread beneath a trussed ceiling, and pigeons roosted and cooed and shat from the timbers.
“I take my leave,” the archer said. His footfalls receded the way they’d come.
Above, warped shutters admitted a dirty light. Four parallel tables stretched the chamber’s length and, at the other end of the room, a hearth fire raged, drawing a breeze through the flue. Within it a heavy iron spit bowed from a generation’s feasting.
Despite the fire, Nyahri shivered, the walls at once too large and yet closing in on her with every breath. A ring of balconies encircled them—archers’ stands above a killing floor. A rat crossed the floorboards, water dripped in a corner, and a woman coughed in some other chamber, her spasms hollow and persistent.
Through a far door entered a corpulent man, his face weathered and gray, wrinkles creasing his swollen face. Three leather-armored men flanked him, carrying spears and knives. The man peered at yw Sabi from beneath reddened eyelids. Bearskins wrapped his shoulders, and a gold-handled knife adorned his belt, his oversized fist resting on it.
He settled on a fireside bench, its planks creaking under his mass. “I am Shwn Jhon Oudwn,” he said. “Forgive me if I must sit—the knees are old and not what they used to be. Please join me at the table?”
From another doorway entered a barefooted girl, her budding breasts and rounding hips wrapped in a simple dress. As she set wooden cups and a blown-glass carafe onto the table, her hair brushed against a wide bruise across her left cheek. She lowered her head, her shoulders hunched, and retreated, closing the door behind her.
The carafe pulled at Nyahri’s focus. She had seldom encountered crafted glass, nothing more than trade beads. The vessel represented a fortune.
The guardsmen stood at attention, hiding their trembling as well as they were able, intent on yw Sabi alone.
His orbed fist as large as the carafe, Shwn Jhon poured two drinks, then leaned back, hooking one thumb in his belt, his thick fingers spread over his waist. With his other hand, he indicated the seat across from him.
“After your ride, you must be exhausted.”
Yw Sabi slid a chair from the table and settled into it. Nyahri stood behind her, setting the bags on the floor, letting her hand hang beside her longknife’s hilt.
Shwn Jhon continued, “Your kind are legend, my guest, long awaited and much appreciated. I have told you my name, will you not tell me yours?”
“Sultah yw Sabi.”
His jaw slackened. “We have heard your name.”
“From where?”
“Inscribed at Abswyn.”
“Where else?”
“The Templarii have spoken of you.”
“Probably not kindly.”
“They spoke of you historically,” he said. “You were something of the past.”
“Yet here I am today.”
“Why have you awakened first? The histories say you were a—” His voice trailed into silence.
“Prisoner?” Yw Sabi leaned forward, her elbows against the table’s edge.
Shwn Jhon drank from his cup, emptying it. She paused only a moment before tipping the contents of hers into her mouth.
Nyahri wrinkled her nose at the stink of whiskey. Though close to the Atreiani, she kept the hall doors and guardsmen in sight.
“These histories,” Shwn Jhon said, “say you were out of favor.”
“There’re none here but I, chieftain, to judge who is in favor or out of it.”
A scowl of reproach tugged down his cheeks. “If it is you who judge us,” he said, “I pray you will be proud of what we have achieved since the Eventide, and certainly of the progress made since my grandfather’s time.”
The Atreiani rolled her cup between her hands and pushed it forward. Shwn Jhon refilled it. The guards shifted from foot to foot, one suppressing a hollow cough, deep phlegm in his chest.
“This hall, for example,” Shwn Jhon said, gesturing widely to the room, “among many things—the re-mastery of iron, geometry, husbandry, and increasingly developed agriculture. A few of us know the old letters, at least an alphabet or two, and I can read some Englisce.”
Yw Sabi sipped the liquor, set the cup down, and drew her fingertip around its rim. Tapping his fingers together, Shwn Jhon tried to outlast yw Sabi’s silence.
He yielded. “Atreiani, we stand ready to rebuild the world, if only you will guide us. Surely you return to lead us out of the darkness?”
Another sip, and she looked him in the eye, a cold serpent’s gaze.
“Atreiani?” he ventured.
“This hall,” she said, “is two hundred years old or more and rotting from the inside out. The dagger you wear so proudly must be older yet, maybe steel from before the Eventide, as you call it, and probably brittle enough to snap underfoot. This place reeks of disease, infection, the dying.”
He sat back, eyes wide, then nodded.
“It is true,” he said. “For three years we have had waves of pestilence, and now at first freeze it looks to be a fourth.”
“I smell it,” she said. “At least one victim in this building has streptococcus, and it’ll be scarlet fever soon enough.”
“You can smell this?” he asked incredulously.
“Coming up the hill I noted malnutrition, polluted water, poor hygiene. Given your age, your health, I’d say you’re at risk, Shwn Jhon.”
He loosened his shirt collar. “These are Nature’s doings, not ours. We fight Her just as you did.”
/>
“It wasn’t our goal to fight nature. If you think so, then you misunderstand the Atreianii entirely.”
“Our agriculture!” he exclaimed with pride. “Did you see our terraces, crop rotations, new hybrids, distribution systems, mills, pumps, and storage facilities? We build housing for every Oudwni—”
“Mouse-infested.”
“Give food to everyone—”
“Yet everyone’s hollow-ribbed,” she said. “You’ve the fundamentals of agriculture, you instigate basic rotations, but you’ve no understanding of microbiology or nutrition. So far to go, Shwn Jhon.”
“We have remade order. We have introduced law to men who would otherwise be barbarians.”
“Perhaps you’ve gone further than the Magna Carta, but you’re feudal. You’re not much above barbarians yourselves.”
He understands Magna Carta, Nyahri thought, no better than I do.
“Can you not appreciate,” Shwn Jhon said, “what we have done since your departure?”
“I really don’t care.” She sighed. “I haven’t come to lead you out of whatever Dark Age you think you’re in. Your predicaments are your own.”
“Why have you awakened then?” His eyebrows turned upward.
“To take an accounting, Shwn Jhon Oudwn, but not of you or of the E’cwnii—” She gestured to Nyahri. “—or of any men. I need information on the Citadels, all of them. I need to know if any other Atreianii are on the surface. That’s what I need. In exchange for such information, which I know the Templarii can provide, maybe I can help you.”
“An accounting? Of your own kind, is that what you mean? Are you a vanguard? Are other Atreianii to wake?”
“No.”
“I do not understand.” Shwn Jhon scowled, shaking his head. “We struggle and we need your help. We know the world was once better, not how to make it better again.”