by J. V. Jones
The frost-eaten swordsman began leading Raif forward, but Stillborn put out a muscled forearm to halt him. “I’ll take it from here, Wex.” Without waiting for the man to agree, Stillborn guided Raif away from the stair and led him toward the cleared lane where a small body of men waited.
“Right,” Stillborn said as soon as he and Raif were out of earshot. “This ain’t gonna be pretty. Tanjo’s the best archer amongst us, but he’s arrogant and liable to underjudge an opponent. Play possum if you can, make him think he doesn’t have to try too hard to beat you.” Stillborn gave Raif a quick appraisal. “It’s probably your best chance.”
Raif could find little to be heartened by in this statement, but Stillborn was looking at him expectantly so he nodded.
“And another thing.” Stillborn lowered his voice as they approached the meet party. “You’ll be offered a choice of bows. Pick careful now, as that fat bastard Yustaffa laid them out. And the only thing you need to know about him is that he’d stick out a foot to trip his own mother if he thought he’d get away with it.” The Maimed Man began moving away from him. “Shoot true. And mayhap the touch of the Stone Gods’ll reach out across the Rift.”
Raif shivered. He did not welcome the touch of any god.
“Aah. Here he is, Raif Twelve Kill. Is he a white-winter warrior as he claims, or just an impostor with a quick tongue and no bow?” Yustaffa, newly resplendent in a tunic of bronzed leather inset with panels of saffron-dyed fleece, heralded Raif’s arrival to the crowd. “Only the test of arrows will tell. An arrow cannot lie. A bow will break if it’s bent too fast. If our visitor speaks true then the proof will be found in the distance between his arrows and the bull. If he speaks false may he go to the Rift.”
The crowd murmured restlessly as Raif walked through them. They were dressed in a strange motley of dressed skins, foreign-made armaments and city finery. The men wore mismatched pieces of armor: wooden knuckle-mitts, articulated steel greaves, hornmail, ringmail, pot-helms, spike-helms, metal plate, boiled leather, coats of shell and bone. One man wore a fantastic spiked and hooded greatcloak that clicked as it rose in the breeze. Some of the women were armored too, but most wore furs or skins over shabby woolen skirts. Trade in women’s dresses must be slow.
A low-breasted hag near the front hissed at him. Raif ignored her, but found his attention drawn to the young woman she was standing next to. The girl was heavily pregnant. A slab of slate had been strapped high on her belly, pressing upon the bulge that was her unborn child. Latening. Raif shivered. He’d heard of the practice of slowing an unborn child’s development by bringing weight to bear upon the fetus, but he’d never thought to see it until now. Clan had done it at one time, it was said, during the Great Settlement when no mother wanted to bring a child into the world whilst the Wars of Apportionment were being fought.
The woman cursed him as he passed. Raif accepted her words without reacting: he didn’t know what else to do.
Yustaffa smiled gaily as Raif approached the clearing. “Hope you like the name,” he confided. “I thought of it myself. More numbers than Tanjo—it’s sure to get him riled.”
Raif let Yustaffa’s words slide over him. Already something was changing within him, responding to the hostility of the crowd and the challenge that was to come. He would not let these people affect him.
Standing some way back, close to the crowd yet set apart, stood the small dark figure of Traggis Mole. In the light of day Raif could see the drill holes in his wooden nose. The Robber Chief watched the proceedings in silence, holding himself uncannily still, only moving what it took to breathe and see. All felt his presence, Raif was sure of it, for the Maimed Men seemed to turn around him like a wheel around its axis. Traggis was aware of Raif’s attention from the moment Raif’s gaze swung toward him, and his own gaze snapped back with such force that Raif almost flinched. For a moment he knew what it would be like to have Traggis Mole attack him, saw blood spraying from his nose and eyes at the blinding speed of the Robber Chief’s first strike.
Suddenly the crowd began to cheer, and the image fled. Raif hoped never to see it again.
“Here he comes!” Yustaffa proclaimed in a voice pitched to soar above the noise of the crowd. “The finest archer ever to loose an arrow in the Rift. Once shield to the Emperor of Sankang across the Unholy Sea, youngest man ever to send an arrow through the Eye of Mount Somi, slayer of two hundred on Blue Yak Field, archer-assassin of Isalora Mokko, the Glittering Whore, and taker of first blood from the Great Gray Wolf of the Rift: Tanjo Ten Arrow!”
Maimed Men roared. The crowd drew apart to let the archer pass, and Tanjo Ten Arrow walked into the clearing.
TWENTY
A Test of Arrows
Burned, was Raif’s first thought. Tanjo Ten Arrow’s face was mottled pink and tan, inhumanly smooth in parts and hideously seamed in others. The whole left side of his brow was stretched and shiny, the scalp oddly puckered and out of alignment. Patches of missing hair revealed ring scars where blood blisters had once formed.
Raif recalled the old Hailsman, Audie Stroon. Drunk one night in the greathearth and bickering with his wife, Audie had reached for a jug of ale on the mantle but had seized upon a pitcher of lamp oil instead. As he raised the pitcher to his mouth, a spark from the fire caught him and lamp oil ignited in his face. Clansmen had rushed to smother him with bear hides, and the flames were snuffed within seconds. But later, when time came to pull the hides away, Audie’s skin peeled right off with them. Heat had fused it to the hides. Audie lived for a year, but by all accounts it wasn’t a happy one, for when he wasn’t in pain from the burns, he was suffering the revulsion of the clan.
Revulsion. That had to be part of Tanjo Ten Arrow’s story, but not all of it. A master archer did not end up in a place like this unless he’d run out of choices.
Raif glanced quickly at Yustaffa, who was presenting Tanjo Ten Arrow to the crowd with the oily glee of a pimp displaying his whore. How much of what he said could be trusted? Raif had never heard of Sankang or Mount Somi. Clan had no knowledge of what lay beyond the Unholy Sea, and what little Raif knew had come from Angus Lok.
Tanjo Ten Arrow himself was slender and finely boned, with the spare muscle of a man who knew shooting sticks was as much about concentration as strength. The unburned portions of his skin were a color somewhere between copper and olive, and they gleamed from a combination of hairlessness and rubbed oil. His scalp hair was black and straight, and his eyes were the color of dark plums. They were striking, his eyes, elegant and elongated, with the cool and focused gaze of a bird of prey.
Coming to stand in the clearing he bowed low from the waist, never once taking his eyes off Raif. Ten arrows were inserted into the stiff silk sash that was bound high around his chest and ribcage, making it seem as if he had been shot in the back many times. Snow-goose feathers fletched all ten arrows, and the shafts had been expertly tapered toward the nock and then lacquered to a brilliant red. Grass cords dyed the same color bound Tanjo’s topknot into fat beads of hair. No effort had been taken to disguise the burned portions of his scalp, and strands of black hair lay taut over scalded flesh.
Raif bowed to him. For a moment they were alone: an island of unmoving calm in the noisy and restless sea of the crowd. Seconds earlier, Raif had doubted the claims Yustaffa had made on Tanjo Ten Arrow’s behalf, but now he wasn’t so sure. This man in front of him stood with the poise and self-assurance of someone who had achieved great things.
“Archers,” Yustaffa said, bowing his head first to Tanjo and then to Raif. “To your bows, and let the contest begin.”
Raif was the first to break eye contact. Tanjo Ten Arrow’s gaze was steady and piercing, and Raif recognized the man’s will to win even in the matter of outstaring his opponent. It should have been a small thing to concede, but it felt like more. First round to Tanjo Ten Arrow.
Yustaffa beckoned imperiously, signaling a young boy wheeling a cloth-covered cart to come forward. The crowd quieted
in anticipation as Yustaffa’s chubby fingers descended upon the stained yellow oilcloth. “Raif Twelve Kill comes to us with neither bow nor the means to beget one. Therefore, I have agreed to supply him with a choice of three.” There was a pause while Yustaffa accepted the gratitude of the crowd. Then, “Choose well, Orrlsman, for while a good bow cannot make an archer, a bad bow can destroy one.”
With great flourish, Yustaffa pulled back the cloth.
Three bows, already strung, lay side by side on oaken boards. A Far South recurve. A clan yew-wood. An elm flatbow. One built, and two self. The recurve was built, made of horn and sinew glued onto a wood frame. The other two were self bows, cut from single staves. The clan yew drew Raif’s gaze first. Drey had one similar; kiln-dried and hand-tillered, cut whip-thin to bend like a whalebone in the hand. The last time Raif could recall seeing it had been on the day Tem died. Abruptly, he switched his gaze to the elm flatbow. The elm was thick and sturdy, board-cut, and a few hands short of a true longbow. It was the weapon of cragsmen and herdsmen; reliable and unlikely to break, capable of firing an arrow with enough heft to stop a rushing wolf in its tracks. But it was not a bow made for distance. The Far South recurve was. Light and wickedly curved, its ox-horn belly was dimpled in the center to form the shape known as “two hills”. Raif recalled Ballic the Red once saying that such bows were used by the warrior hordes who’d invaded the vast grasslands of the Far South. Ballic had never been one for lauding foreigners, but he had respect for the men who drew two-hill recurves. “They know how to make an arrow fly,” he’d said once, grudgingly. For him it was high praise.
Which to choose? Flatbow, longbow, or recurve?
Raif glanced quickly at Yustaffa. The fat man was ready for him, his palms raised skyward in a showy pantomime of I can’t possibly give anything away.
A second glance at Tanjo Ten Arrow showed the burned man accepting charge of his own weapon from a small child who looked like his son. The boy bowed formally as he offered the six-foot longbow to his father on a cushion of tasseled and embroidered silk. He was beautiful, the child, smooth-skinned and somber-faced, with the large watchful eyes of someone eager to learn. His right earlobe had been expertly excised, leaving a half-moon scar in the place where jaw met skull. Raif recognized the scar for what it was: a mercy cut. If a father didn’t take a pound of flesh from his son, someone else might take more later. You couldn’t trust a Maimed Man around a whole child.
All thoughts fled Raif’s mind as he set eyes upon Tanjo Ten Arrow’s bow. The weapon was built, made of wafer-thin layers of wood and horn laid down in alternating strips. Thin as a reed and barely recurved, it had the slightest suggestion of ears where the tips flared outward to accept the string. Its belly was stained deep blue, and designs in a milky shade of silver had been stamped below the riser.
A Sull bow.
Raif felt an odd fluttering in his stomach. He wanted that bow. It was finer and more beautifully worked than the one Angus Lok had given him—the one he’d lost on the southern slopes of the Bitter Hills. Almost he knew how it would feel to draw it: the extreme tension in the string, the tick of wood and horn as the belly flexed within his grip. For a brief moment he imagined setting the arrow Divining Rod against its plate and releasing the string . . .
A dizzying sense of displacement made him stagger forward, and he had to thrust a hand against the cart yoke to stop himself from falling. Pain from his halved finger cut through his thoughts. Something, a sense of knowledge almost gained or a future almost glimpsed, fled from him like a small animal at night.
Behind him, Maimed Men were drawing breaths and murmuring softly. All had seen him falter, and Raif could not tell if this pleased or disgusted them, just that it excited them in the way that the first drop of blood excited a hunter.
The Orrlsman was on the run.
Ignoring them, he focused his attention on the three bows. Flatbow. Longbow. Recurve. The yew longbow was the obvious choice; Yustaffa had to know that as a clansman it would be the one Raif would be drawn to first. The recurve was the most valuable and showy, and would probably be the favorite of the crowd, but Raif didn’t like the look of the memory marks on the wood backing. Some looked deep enough to split. That left the elm flatbow. A workhorse, but nothing to excite a distance shooter. Reluctantly, Raif moved his hand toward it.
As he did so, he became aware of Yustaffa stilling at his side. The fat man’s dark eyes glittered as his breath hung, unexhaled, in his mouth.
He wants me to pick it, Raif knew with sudden certainty. He guessed how my mind would work, and bet that I’d reject the two superior bows.
Raif let his hand hover above the flatbow as he studied the wood. Smooth, well-oiled elm met his gaze. But there. A sunken knot on the back of the bow, partially concealed by the skin-wrapped grip. Ballic the Red called such knots doom holes and said any bow made with such flawed wood would break sooner or later. Looking at it, Raif thought he detected a series of tiny indents around the edge of the knot. Yustaffa had been busy with a needle.
Smoothly, Raif pushed his hand from the flatbow and let it fall upon the yew longbow instead. The slight shrinking of the fat man’s lips told Raif all he needed to know. Beat you, Yustaffa.
Now all he had to do was beat Tanjo Ten Arrow.
“The choice is made!” Yustaffa proclaimed, easily regaining his good humor as he motioned for the cart to be wheeled away. “Archers. Prepare to take practice shots.”
Tanjo Ten Arrow’s son moved behind his father, drawing back Tanjo’s short archer’s cape and fastening it so that it lay flat against his back like a beetle’s wings. Tanjo ran two fingers down the Sull bowstring, warming the twine and checking its tension. Two rabbits’ tails had been fastened to the twine to suppress recoil.
Raif unhooked his own cloak, noticing as he did so the brief flash of interest in Tanjo Ten Arrow’s cool, alien eyes. Always the Orrlsman’s cloak made men look. Thoughtful, Raif tested the bend of the yew longbow. He was relieved when a bow case containing five dozen arrows was placed at his feet by a tiny, ancient bowman who caused Yustaffa to frown. Good. That meant the fat man had not been given a chance to interfere with the arrows.
While Raif was making last-minute preparations, the meet party edged back, giving both contestants room to draw. Yustaffa was last to go, directing a young boy to snap the chalk line that would form the starting mark.
All was quiet except for the wind. Raif and Tanjo Ten Arrow stood eight feet apart, bow cases at their feet, bows rising like ship’s masts at their sides. The rising sun sent shadows slanting westward over the Rift. Light shone on the wooden beehives, illuminating the red bull’s-eyes painted at the height of human hearts. Yustaffa was addressing the crowd, explaining how the contest would proceed, but Raif had little patience for his words. Fear and anticipation mingled in his blood, making him quiver with nervous force. His stomach sucked against his spine as he filled his lungs with air. How am I going to do this?
“Archers. Take your practice shots.”
Even before Raif slid his first arrow from the case, Tanjo Ten Arrow was already firing. The burned man was a blur of movement, pulling the decorated arrows from his sash one by one and firing them high into the air. As Raif nocked his first arrow the count began:
“One!” chanted the crowd.
“Two!”
“Three!”
By the time the crowd called “Four!” Raif knew how Tanjo Ten Arrow had won his name. He meant to send all ten arrows into the air before the first one landed. And he was going to do it, too. Raif had never seen anyone shoot so fast. Tanjo’s arms dropped and pulled, dropped and pulled, with the speed and efficiency of a war engine. The arrows cut air, whistling softly as they shot toward the target. Tanjo had taken the headwind into account, and angled his arrows slightly northwest of the first beehive, letting the strong southern current correct their flights. The updraft from the Rift aided him, for he had chosen a moment when the thermals were rising and they buoyed e
ach arrow, keeping it in the air for precious seconds longer.
“Eight!”
“Nine!”
“Ten!”
Thunk. The first arrow hit the beehive as the tenth cleared the riser. The crowd erupted into a frenzy of cheering and stamping their feet. Thunk, thunk, thunk . . . it went on as each of the remaining arrows pierced wood.
Tanjo Ten Arrow stood very still, his bow edge resting against the rimrock, his burned head held high and his gaze upon the target. He heard the appreciation of the crowd but in no way responded to it. The only sign that he had pushed his body hard was the fierce flaring of his nostrils as he expelled air.
Raif watched as the last of the arrows struck the wooden beehive. None of them had hit the bull’s-eye or even the inner circle, but that wasn’t really the point. Undermining your opponent’s confidence was. No bowman could watch such a display of shooting and remain unaffected. There was true skill here. Tanjo Ten Arrow had been touched by a god.
Perhaps that was why he’d been burned.
As the crowd quieted and Yustaffa heaped ever more fantastic praises upon Tanjo Ten Arrow’s head, Raif drew the yew longbow. Pain in his little finger stabbed sharply as he braced the bow with his damaged left hand and pulled the string to his cheek with his right. It didn’t matter. It was as if he had never stopped firing arrows at all, so quickly did the discipline of eye and hand return to him. How long had it been? Half a winter ago? Yet it felt like no time at all. The muscles in his shoulders felt stiff, but it was a good stiffness, a reminder that they were the source of the bow’s power and though they hadn’t been used in many months they hadn’t forgotten their role.
Then everything fell away. Raif’s eye fixed on the target, the red bull’s-eye as big as an apple a hundred paces to the west. It was the heart. All archery targets were the heart. They might be circles or crosses or even cabbages lined up on a fence: to a bowman they were always the heart.