The thought pained Drut more than she would have thought possible. ‘Eric is where he was meant to be,’ she said heatedly.
The Hunter said nothing, only turned to Rii, crouching on the cliffs, and clicked her fingers to summon her. The beast flew down, wafting a rank, spicy smell ahead of her.
‘Come,’ the Hunter said. ‘We must bring our sisters the weapons they fear to use. Perhaps when they see the steel they will remember that they too were once made for a purpose.’
It was difficult work, loading the crates on to the beast, and the Hunter made no allowance for Drut’s pregnancy. Rii assisted, grasping the wood of the crates with her long, sharp claws. The sight of them made Drut think of the scars on Bachur’s face and she looked away from the beast’s small, half-blind eyes towards the Hunter. White flecks of snow had settled in her sister’s golden hair and lashes. She shone in the sunlight, far brighter than any of the other Servants. Drut felt dull and weak by comparison.
‘Eric is very handsome,’ Bachur said. ‘He is very charming and he is very dangerous.’
‘Dangerous?’ Drut paused in her loading to stare in astonishment at her sister. Of all the things she might have expected her to say – that Drut was betraying Mizhara, that she must cease her secret trysts with her husband, that she would feel differently when the child was born – this was the very last.
‘What do you know of him?’ the Hunter asked. ‘Of who he was before he came to you?’
‘It doesn’t matter – our husbands are reborn here. We never ask them about the time before.’
‘Perhaps you should.’ Bachur rested her hand against Rii’s flank, her fingers curled in the grubby fur. ‘They change us, these darklanders. My hawks have altered me in ways that I never intended. But this Eric means to change you; I have seen his intent in his eyes and its result in your face. Be very sure, my sister, that you know what he wishes you to become.’
When Drut returned to Salvation, she should have taken her place in the sun-pear orchards, helping to tend the trees. But there were many things she should have done these last few months and hadn’t, and many more she shouldn’t have done and had. She sat cross-legged on the floor of her room, facing the sun symbol on its wall, and prayed.
No answer came to her, perhaps because she wasn’t sure what question she was asking. Did she want to be forgiven or permitted? She feared it was the latter and that could never be. Mizhara told those who broke her laws not to regret but to make amends. And if that couldn’t be done …
After long hours when the only voice within her head was her own, she sought out Eric. He was wandering the outer reaches of Salvation as he often did. Though she’d once believed it was due to restlessness because of her absence, now she doubted that.
‘Hello, lovely,’ he said when he saw her.
He was smiling in a way that made it look like there were too many teeth in his mouth. She’d meant to approach the subject gradually, but she found herself blurting, ‘Eric, where are you from?’
She wasn’t sure if his expression showed alarm or surprise. ‘The Moon Forest – I told you that before.’
‘But you told me nothing about the Moon Forest. Nothing about your family.’
‘There ain’t nothing to say – they weren’t no different from anyone else.’
Yet she knew he found the Servants’ denial of difference strange. She was suddenly sure he didn’t mean what he was saying. And then she knew what question to ask him. It was the question she should have asked long ago. ‘Then why did you come to Salvation?’
‘What do you mean?’ He reached out for her as if he meant to take her in his arms, but she stepped away from him.
‘Why did you choose to come here? To leave your family and your home behind?’
‘Well, it was an honour to be asked, weren’t it? Being a husband to you lot’s about the highest honour there is.’
He was lying. She regretted that she’d come to know him well enough to see it. He’d tried to run away from Salvation and his life here. They’d never discussed it but she knew why he’d walked out into the snow and nearly died. So how could what he said be true? And if it wasn’t, what did it mean? What did his attentions to her mean? A horrible coldness took hold of her as she remembered that he’d only confessed his love to her after his attempt to escape failed. He hadn’t been able to get away on his own; had he thought he could persuade her to help him?
‘Tell me the truth,’ she begged him.
‘That is the truth or Eric ain’t my name. What’s come over you today, Drut? I know a woman sometimes gets to feeling moody with a baby inside her. It’s all right – you know I love you.’
But she didn’t know it. She didn’t know it at all, and so she turned her back on him and walked away.
She returned to her cell, where prayer seemed more impossible than ever. In front of her, blocking her imagine of divine Mizhara, stood Eric and all the things she’d done for his sake. When she’d believed he loved her, she’d justified them all. But even if he had loved her, they wouldn’t have been justifiable. And now that she feared he didn’t, they appeared as abhorrent as they’d always been. She was abhorrent and her continued existence unbearable.
If you have fallen into irredeemable error … She knew what her sisters would say; what the sister who might also be her mother had said. She must take the long walk into the ice from which there would be no return. It would kill the child inside her too, and that was unforgiveable, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. If Eric didn’t love her, because Eric didn’t love her, there was only one path left open to her.
27
Cwen had grown used to this feeling, the morning before a battle. It was a little like the feeling she’d known as the Hunt prepared to track down its prey. Back then, what seemed years ago but was really only months, her gut had churned with the fear of what might happen: the prey escaped, a hawk hurt. These days it was heavy with the knowledge of what would happen. Hawks would die – the only question was how many. On this day, with this battle, she knew it would be hundreds.
She looked over her shoulder, expecting to see Wingard and Wine, and saw Hilda instead. She’d sent the twins to captain other wings of the attack. It wasn’t a natural way for a hawk to think – commanders and soldiers, orders of battle – but she’d had to learn it, or see even more of her people die.
Some way behind her a big horse stood uneasily, Sang Ki on its back. The shiplord had a good head for tactics and she trusted him to command the battle if she fell. He watched her intently, waiting for the signal that it was all to begin.
The terrain here favoured her tactics. The tangled, browning grass, the scattered rocks that ranged from mammothto hand-sized, the low, bent trees: it was all good cover for a force that planned a sneak attack. The colours were dustier than those of the forest, but the greens and browns the hawks wore to hide them among the trees would serve well enough here.
She missed the trees, though. She wasn’t used to so much sky. It stretched from horizon to horizon looking as dusty as the plants. It made her feel watched, though she didn’t think the Brotherband knew they were coming.
There’d been no spies and no scouts captured from their enemy in the last day. She couldn’t see many of the warriors now, even from her position so close to their encampment; just a few guards and no visible pickets. Maybe they thought no force would be strong or bold enough to attack them. That seemed like their kind of arrogance.
They’d certainly made no effort to defend their camp or disguise it. It sat to one side of a sluggish river, an untidy jumble of tents and other lumpy shapes that were hard to make out at this distance. Probably men sleeping on ground trampled to mud by the thousands of warriors who’d spent more than a week stopped here, for a reason Cwen had yet to fathom. The force they seemed to be following was only one valley over and was far weaker than they were. And yet they hadn’t attacked. She wished she knew why.
But there was no easy way to find out and nothing to be ga
ined by continuing to watch. Besides, with so many living off such barren land, the forage was nearly all gone. Cwen had to attack now, or her people would starve.
She took one last look back at her own force, ranged behind her in untidy ranks. The archers stood forward, arrows in the ground before them like the spines of a hedgehog. There, at least, they bettered the Brotherband. The tribesmen didn’t favour the longbow and their range was far lower than the hawks’. The signalman was behind her, different flags in hand. That was something else Sang Ki had worked out, a way to communicate between their forces. He said that he’d read it in a history book. She nodded, and the blue flag was raised: bowmen attack.
Her people knew their business. They waited a count of three, until the signal had time to pass all round the perimeter. Then they all reached forward to grasp their first arrow, the yew bent and the arrows flew.
She watched the lethal arc of them. The distance was great but not too great for the longbow. The arrows fell where they were intended – into the heart of the camp – and as they fell another flight was loosed, and then another.
She had her own spears ready and loosened her knife in its sheath. Her back prickled with sweat and every muscle in her body was taut, waiting for the Brotherband to scream in pain and rouse themselves, and then scream in anger and charge.
But the charge never came. There were a few screams, more groans. She could see the distant silhouettes of men rising, spilling out of tents. But no counter-attack came and her people kept bending their bows and the Brotherband kept dying.
It was a trap or a trick; it had to be. But what kind of idiot wasted so many lives on a ruse? Her people must have loosed a thousand arrows, ten thousand. There could hardly be a man left unharmed in the Brotherband camp.
She let the lethal wooden rain continue all the same, until it began to thin and she knew her people were running out of arrows. She gestured to her signalman and the green and yellow flag was raised: stop.
It wasn’t silent afterwards. There was a murmur among her own people, getting slowly louder, and moans of pain from the camp they surrounded. She strode forward, but Hilda mumbled a protest round her mutilated tongue and Cwen gestured for her clutch to follow as a guard. She’d had to grow used to treating her own life as if it was more valuable than other people’s.
When she was at the outskirts of the Brotherband camp, she saw another group approaching. The grossly fat form at its centre was easy to recognise and she paused, waiting for him to join her.
‘Not quite the way I expected this day’s events to unfold,’ Sang Ki said when he huffed to a stop beside her.
‘It isn’t over yet,’ she warned him. Her muscles were twitchy with unease and she could see that her hawks felt it too. Their eyes darted around and their weapons shifted, pointing first one way, then another.
‘Well,’ the Ashaneman said, ‘onward?’
The first corpse was at the borders of the camp. There were three arrows in him, two in his legs and the one in his chest that must have killed him. The ground beyond was thick with the shafts of more arrows – and another half-dozen bodies. Not one of them had a weapon in hand.
A few more paces in they found their first survivor. He’d taken an arrow in the shoulder; it quivered with every laboured breath as he sat on the ground and wept. When she stopped in front of him, his eyes crawled up her body to her face, as if they found the journey wearying.
There didn’t seem to be anything worth saying, so she took her knife and slit his throat. She wasn’t sure these men deserved the mercy but she’d have done the same for any animal, no matter how savage.
The whole camp looked like that: full of corpses and living people waiting for her to turn them into corpses. She carried out the task grimly and after a while her hawks gave up their guard duty to sweep through the camp and do the same. Only Sang Ki stayed beside her, forehead wrinkled above his clever eyes. He didn’t say anything. What was there to say? The only people who might have answered her questions were dead or dying.
After a while, though, she realised that some of the Brotherband weren’t injured at all. She knelt beside one warrior who sat cross-legged between the corpses of two other tribesmen. He seemed indifferent to the flies gathering to lay their eggs inside his dead brothers.
There was a knife in his hand. He was using it to score long, bleeding lines in his own palm.
‘You,’ she said and he looked up, blinking incuriously. ‘Why didn’t you fight? Why didn’t you fucking fight?’
He looked back down again, cutting another oozing wound in his own flesh. ‘It’s hopeless. It’s all hopeless. I’m nothing. Just a failed experiment.’ He lifted the knife and ran it across his own throat, drawing a thin red line that gaped like a second mouth to spew blood all over her.
Cwen scrambled back, horrified.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Sang Ki said. ‘The battle’s won.’
‘Won?’ she asked incredulously.
He sighed, eyes scanning the carnage. ‘Well, over at least.’
‘Poison?’ Sang Ki said that afternoon, to the burnt woman.
She watched him pace her tent, ten strides one way and ten another. He wasn’t sure why he’d given her a home so big, second in size only to his mother’s. He was even less sure why he’d come to speak to her. He would far rather have lain down, perhaps with a mug of sorghum tea to soothe his agonised back. But if he took the drug for the pain once, he would take it for ever. Far better not to begin.
‘It doesn’t sound like poison,’ she said. He thought her face was now as healed as it would ever be, and still hideous. The skin had frozen as it had melted, in red rivulets and deep fissures. Her eyebrows were gone and half her hair, never to grow back. The burns extended over most of her body, and the pain was clearly still with her. He’d thought once she was healed it would be easier to see who she truly was, but the fire had transformed her into a new person, nothing like either of the two women she might have been before.
‘And how would you know what poison does?’ he asked. Nethmi’s father had died of snake venom, an ‘accident’ arranged by his own brother Puneet, if the rumours were to believed. There was a good reason Nethmi might have made a study of the subject.
‘The Queen’s Men sold poisons,’ she said. ‘If you knew the right people to ask. I heard of some that drove men crazy – made them kill, or think they could fly. Thora of the Drovers threw herself out of a window after she drank a tea Su Bin gave her. She’d slept with Su Bin’s husband, right? She was smiling as she jumped. Everyone in the Drovers was talking about it for weeks.’
This was the way it was. Every question he asked, she had an answer. And her replies were growing more elaborate the longer they travelled together. It might have been that her memory was clearing as her wounds healed. Or it might have been all the time she’d spent with the other survivors of Smiler’s Fair on their journey. Their travels into the Moon Forest had brought them close enough to Eom lands for Min Soo to leave his patient behind with a last few stern words to Sang Ki about her care. Since then, and despite his mother’s frown, he’d left her free to wander and speak with whom she chose. Soon enough that freedom would end – her pregnancy was very obvious now: a ripe bulge of her belly.
‘But you didn’t use poisons yourself,’ he said. ‘It could be one you haven’t heard of.’
‘If it is,’ she said, ‘who poisoned them?’
‘An army must drink. A few droplets in the waterskins or wells …’
She shook her head. ‘An army knows its food and water is its life. Any good general sets guards on his supplies.’
And there she went again. Nethmi had travelled with her father’s forces in her youth. She would know such things. But there was no point pressing the issue. On some earlier occasion, she’d claimed her mother was a camp-follower of that same army, making her a whore’s daughter rather than the commander’s, but in a position to imbibe the same knowledge.
‘If it wasn’
t poison, what was it?’
‘Maybe they realised the evil of their ways. Does it matter why they’re dead?’
‘I would prefer to understand what overthrew them so that my own forces don’t, at some future point, suffer the same fate. There are too many mysteries here: the fate of the Brotherband, the monsters of the Moon Forest. Did you hear what the smith Alfreda said? Someone has begun to armour them, but who would do such a thing? Who could?’
‘The Brotherband.’
‘Had never been in the forest before their attack.’
‘Other enemies of the Moon Forest folk, then – their problem, not yours. Your battle is over. You don’t need to stay. You’ve won – you can go back to Ashanesland and bring the news to the King.’ She looked down at her hands and added quietly, ‘We can go back.’
Go back for the birth, and then her death. He found it hard to imagine now, the moment when he would hang her. He made himself think of his father’s body, so still on the floor, his neck bruised and his eyes a network of broken veins.
‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘Krishanjit’s force is defeated, and of the boy himself there is no sign. Those are both things our king should be informed of and I can hardly quarter the entire plains in search of the errant heir.’
‘But it’s still a victory you’re carrying back. That’s good, isn’t it?’
She was right. She was right. The sight of the despairing Brotherband dead had not been one that was easy to celebrate, but a true pitched battle would have left much the same carnage in its wake, and far more of it on their side. There was every reason to be joyful, and yet his heart wasn’t as glad as he told it to be. His life in Winter’s Hammer had been so confined. He’d seldom been anywhere but his room or the library. It was hard to imagine returning to it.
‘It is good,’ he said firmly.
But it wasn’t, it seemed, entirely over. The hawk who came into the tent was panting and exasperated. ‘Oh there you are,’ he said, with the utter lack of courtesy they all seemed to have learned from Cwen.
The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods Page 29