by Col Buchanan
Once we too used to live as a free people, her parents had often told Shard and her sisters around the fire on the darkest nights of the Starving Fox, their eyes shining with emotion, surrounded by the walls of their urban home. Once we lived without money and greed and the need to sell our labour to survive, for we had our land, and the land supported us as it supports all living things, and we were content.
Then why don’t you go back there? Shard had sometimes scoffed at them, for their sentimental nostalgia had often angered her. Always they talked as though life had once been better than this, as though all the things that dazzled Shard in her youth – the skyships and sea galleons, the fireworks and festivals, the street plays and bazaars selling a thousand colourful things – all were somehow inherently bad.
We did not always live this way, her father had often insisted, as though it meant the world to him that she and her sisters understood. Once we lived in the forests simple and carefree, where all living things were our kin.
Shard had barely been able to imagine it, living rough in the forest like a half-naked savage, living like a wild animal amongst all the others. How banal such a life must have been back then. How terrifying in its ignorance.
Still, she had always allowed her father the last word in these things, for despite his backwards ways she loved him deeply, and in the end his tired shining eyes had usually quelled her temper, so that she would nod along with her sisters, pretending to comprehend.
In her memories of those times, and despite all his talk of the Contrarès’ relaxed old ways, her father had always seemed a busy man, rarely resting. Back then in Sheaf he had made a living as an independent street crier, plodding the streets of the city calling out the day’s news in exchange for random coin, banging hollow sticks of cane grass together in the Contrarè fashion while most other criers used bells. Every day he ranged across the city like that, shouting his voice raw.
Mostly he had told as much good news as he did bad, for the citizens tipped him better that way, and so he was able to feed his family. Besides, he would say, who really wanted to hear endless bad news in their ears day after day and nothing else? Such a life would drive people insane with fear and negativity.
With the fall of Pathia, however, to forces of the Mannian Empire, all of that was to change. Under their new rulers, independent criers were hounded from the streets one by one until all of them were gone. Her father was the very last to go underground.
Soon everything seemed to be changing. Beliefs became ever more uniform. Only the creed of Mann was permissible, there is no god but thine own self: a form of self-worship which glorified human beings alone, or certain humans anyway, and gave them dominion over all living things to do as they wished with. Beliefs which ran entirely opposite to those of the urban Contrarè, who continued to worship the world around them in awe, who considered all living things as reflections of the sacred.
Helplessly, the people of the city watched on as the world they had known was dismantled around them by the occupation forces of Mann, their lives essentially looted.
Tolls became the norm for everything, for the drinking water in the city, for the roads they walked on, for the very roofs over their heads, as though their taxes hadn’t already been high enough. The people were squeezed for all they were worth, so that they had to work ever harder just to stay in the same place as before.
Worse still was the change of atmosphere in the city, the slow shift in the attitudes of people towards others, promoted by the news-sheets and the official creed, which criticized the voiceless and extolled the powerful. Crimes by those of a certain ethnicity were highlighted over others. The poor and disabled became figures of public mockery, as though their circumstances were all of their own making; as though anyone’s ever was in life. In particular, the Contrarè found themselves singled out once again, labelled dangerous extremists whenever their wild cousins in the remaining forests made some kind of stand.
Divide and conquer, her father had explained to Shard and her sisters in their huddles around the evening fire. Driving wedges into cracks that already existed between people. The poor pitted against the lesser poor. The believers against the non-believers. Man against woman and dog against dog. Everything split apart and isolated and individualized so as to be easier to control. Nothing new in this, he had said, except how good the Empire was at it.
When the first purges had begun, word reached her father that he was on the list. As a family, they had fled to the neighbouring Free Ports.
Shard exhaled her memories in a plume of steam and stopped banging the trees on her way past, for her hand had grown sore from it, and still no Longalla had shown themselves.
The Dreamer swayed in her saddle and washed down her thirst with another pull from her flask, swallowing the bitterly cold tannis tea and wondering what her father would make of her now, travelling through the legendary Windrush forest, a place he had spoken of visiting for many years.
She should bring him here, she thought now. Once the war was over, she should coax her father and mother from their peaceful home in the eastern ports and bring them here to meet their Longalla cousins. He would like that. They both would.
That was, if this war ever did end.
And if they somehow managed to win it.
*
Three days of riding through the forest in the bitter cold had sapped the talk from all of them. No one spoke save for when it was necessary, not even the usually talkative Coya.
The Dreamer’s mind swayed and soared while the cramps in her belly grew even worse. Seeing the pain in her eyes, Coya offered her some of the cakes of hazii weed which he carried with him everywhere, a mixture of oatmeal and honey and strong Minosian bud, a comforting and clear-headed relief that soon soothed the pains in her abdomen and lifted her spirits too.
Onwards they rode in silence, the rangers leading the way.
Shard had taken the measure of the rangers over the previous days, dressed in buckskins personalized with colourful braids and tassels beneath grey cloaks of wool, and sporting hats of all kinds and dark snow-goggles over their eyes.
They were veterans all of them, young and old alike. The oldest was the crop-headed captain known as Gamorre, a woman at ease commanding the men of her squad; the youngest a man called Xeno, armed with a sniper’s longrifle, his shaven scalp tattooed with the legend, This Boy Kills.
Each of the rangers wore an iron picket pin like a brooch on their cloaks, which could be driven into the ground to tether zels in open country, though she knew they represented much more than that. When facing the enemy in times of action, some of the famed rangers of the Volunteers were known to drive the pins into the ground where they stood, to which they would tether their own selves with a cord of leather, refusing to move from the spot no matter the odds, until killed or relieved by one of their companions. Such was the spirit of these fighting men and women, these highly trained defenders of the democras.
Also assigned to the squad were the two medicos, who cut a different appearance entirely in the black leathers of the Specials, or Special Operations, Khos’s own elite volunteers. The older of the pair, Kris, was prone to shooting dark looks in Shard’s direction, as though the woman distrusted her very appearance. Her medico apprentice, though, the younger, smaller woman, was more open in Shard’s company, more curious about what she was.
Often, whenever they stopped to water and rest the zels, the young woman would share a few words with Shard, a few breathless questions about what she did and how she did it, marvelling at the very notion of a Dreamer or a rook.
Curl was her name, and it seemed that she was a refugee just as Shard was, escaped from the wasteland that was now the island of Lagos. She was also a survivor of the battle of Chey-Wes.
Curl happened to be strikingly beautiful, so much so that the men often watched her from the corners of their eyes as though entirely unable to stop themselves. Marsh stared openly with longing. She was a woman worthy of envy,
just as Shard had once been before her features had been scarred in the deep desert, and she had been forced to wear the half-mask on her face.
‘Can’t you use your powers to heal your scars?’ the young woman asked her now by the side of a rushing stream, where they had stopped once more to refill their canteens, and where Shard poked at an itch beneath her silvered mask. In the daylight Curl’s dark hair stood in a crest on her head like a travelling Tuchoni, or indeed like certain Contrarè. She was as small as Shard was tall, a tiny beautiful perfection.
‘Believe me, I’ve tried,’ Shard offered in reply, readjusting the mask on her face. ‘But flesh is hard to manipulate. Almost as hard as thought. I might just have to live with the scarring for the rest of my life.’
‘Maybe we all have to,’ replied Curl with feeling.
It was snowing today, and the fat white flakes were tumbling in a flurry through the bare limbs overhead. The snow dusted the cloaks and beards of the men and the striped backs of the zels standing along the bank of the stream, causing Coya beside her to squint from the deep folds of his hood, turning his head round to gaze back at the rare mammoth chimino tree a few hundred feet behind them now, the windchimes of cane grass hanging limp from its boughs. He shielded his eyes, trying to make out the platform at its very top through the tree’s huge diamond leaves, hoping perhaps for a sight of the Sky Hermit who Shard had told him would be living up there.
It was dangerous, to be lingering this close to a Sky Hermit. The Contrarè would not take it lightly. But then, as Coya had reminded her, they were hoping to make contact with the people here after all.
Shard was just about to fill her canteen from the stream when the first shot rang out. She froze, seeing Curl dive for cover and Coya’s bodyguard bundling him to the snowy ground, everyone else squatting down as more shots rang out. For those first brief moments Shard remained standing, too bewildered to move.
A flock of crows had risen from a nearby tree, squawking and flapping. In their wake, silence fell slowly upon the scene.
‘What was that?’ the captain called out.
‘Man down!’ came a voice from behind a tree, where the huge ranger known as the Loaf had plodded off to relieve himself moments before. As a group they hurried to the sound of the voice still calling out.
The Loaf was lying on his back with another ranger kneeling over him, black blood seeping from the front of the big man’s buckskins. In a calm rush the two medicos went to work on him, cutting away the skins of his torso with small knives as though they’d done this a hundred times before. The older medico, Kris, slapped his face with a bloody hand and snapped at him to stay awake, to keep his eyes open. Still alive then, still breathing.
‘Damn it!’ Sergeant Sansun swore as he tugged the ammunition belt clear of the prone man. A handful of rifle cartridges were blackened and smoking in the belt.
‘Defective cartridges,’ Sansun rasped, and the disgust in his voice suggested that this had happened all too often before. Shard had heard how soldiers hated using guns whenever conditions were damp, for black powder ignited at the merest hint of moisture. ‘Must have gotten wet.’ And he tossed the belt to one side then pushed himself to his feet.
‘Save your efforts,’ he said down to the medicos, taking one glance at his companion’s wounds. ‘He’s done for.’
They ignored him, of course, in their professional way. Stunned and with her senses reeling, Shard could only watch as Curl wiped the blood clear to see the wounds better, two dark little holes amidst the hairs of his heaving chest, instantly overflowing again with blood. The young medico wiped once more and sprinkled a bag of powdered coagulants onto them, and then Kris pressed hard with pressure dressings, slapping his face again. ‘Stay with us now, you big lug. Stay with us, Loaf!’
But the Loaf had stopped breathing. They thumped his mountain of a chest to restart his heart but to no avail. The Loaf was dead.
*
Sweating in the falling snow, the men hacked away at the frozen ground with sharpened stakes and their single shovel, cutting a grave big enough to take the Loaf’s great size.
Shard hung back from the scene, sipping from her flask of cold tannis tea to calm her mind, not wanting to intrude upon this silent ritual of the close-knit rangers. A few birds rose from a distant tree, drawing her attention in their direction.
‘Company,’ announced the young man Xeno suddenly, squinting through his sniper scope in the same direction.
Heads swung round to see three Contrarè men walking towards them through the undergrowth. Shard’s heart skipped with sudden excitement. She found herself taking a step out from beneath the shelter of a tree towards them.
Up close, the Longalla men looked fierce enough in their red and black war paint and their dark hair cast in outlandish styles, each one different from the others. They sported buckskins blackened by fire, bone piercings and tattoos, blankets tied around their torsos; belts holding machetes, hands carrying bows.
Their movements were as graceful as any other animal of the forest.
‘Ah, at last,’ said Coya with a sparkle in his voice, and he rose and shambled over to greet the approaching figures with Marsh by his side, the bodyguard resting one hand on the hilt of his knife. Shard supposed she should make herself useful and so followed behind, catching the widening eyes of the men as she came nearer.
Solemnly, the oldest of the Contrarè men bent down to scrape away a section of snow, and pinched some of the forest’s humus between finger and thumb. Straightening again, he dabbed a little of it onto the end of his tongue, tasting the life and death of the forest, then flicked the rest of the earth into the air above their heads. Worshippers of the earth and the sky and all the vitality in between.
Shard had seen her parents perform the same ritual many times with the dust of the ground, and had even feigned it herself when it seemed expected of her, never truly feeling its meaning. Now, with these wild Contrarè men singling her out for attention, Shard knew they would sense the fakery in her gesture if she tried the same thing in response, and so instead she simply nodded her head in greeting.
Some disappointment in their eyes, though it was hidden quickly. While the other two studied Shard with interest, taking in her own Contrarè features and the pica feathers sprouting from her collar, the older fellow spoke out in loose Trade, introducing himself and his companions. He blinked his surprise when Coya introduced himself and Shard, for even here they had heard of the famous descendant of Zeziké.
Famed or not, though, the man demanded to know what they were doing here in their forest.
‘We must speak with your council of elders,’ Coya explained in earnest. ‘On a matter of the utmost importance.’
‘Hah, then you will need to hurry, Broken Wing. The council is already being attended by other outsiders this full moon.’
‘Other outsiders? Who?’
The man shrugged. ‘Your enemies. Some people of the Empire. They have asked for a truce while they speak with our tribe. They travel now to Council Grove. There they will speak to the gathering.’
Coya glanced at Shard, shifting uneasily over his cane. ‘How long do we have?’ growled his voice to the Longalla.
‘As I said, until the fullness of the moons.’
‘That’s only a handful of days away,’ observed Shard.
‘You will guide us there?’ asked Coya in hope.
‘No. We must stay here. We must protect the Sky Hermit. Head north-west for the Moth river. Follow it west. It will take you to Council Grove where the elders are gathering. We will send news ahead so you will be safe in your travels there.’
While they talked the other two Contrarè continued to stare at Shard. One of them stepped closer now, and held something out in his hand by way of an offering. It was a black and white pica feather, just like the many others fixed to her collar.
‘My young brother, Seldom Speaks, says he dreamed of you last night,’ explained the speaker of Trade. ‘When he aw
oke, this feather was lying upon his chest. He says he would like you to have it.’
She accepted it with a nod of thanks. Her delirium was starting to return, for she could feel her head slowly spinning.
‘Good hunting,’ said the Contrarè man, and for a moment he studied Shard with a certain puzzlement in his gaze, and then together the three men turned and jogged off through the trees until she could see them no more.
Frantic now, Coya snapped at the rangers to hurry. He cursed and snarled under his breath while they rolled the Loaf into the hole and covered him with earth.
‘A bloody Mannian delegation,’ he spat into the air. ‘I should have known it. I should have known the Empire would try to buy out the tribe.’
‘Relax,’ Shard said, and her tongue felt numb in her mouth. She wanted to lie down just then to still her head, yet here was Coya spurring them to get moving again. ‘The Longalla will likely chase them from the forest after they’ve listened to what they have to say.’
‘I hope you’re right, Shard. I have a bad feeling about this. A sincerely bad feeling!’
It wasn’t like him to express his doubts in this way. As Coya’s words echoed in her head, Shard glimpsed the briefest of images flash before her in the untrodden snow, a possible future perhaps: what seemed to be Coya lying in this very forest in the darkness of night, felled by a crossbow bolt poking from his skull.
‘Shard?’
It was nothing, she told herself. Just another product of her fevered imagination.
‘I’m fine,’ said the Dreamer, motioning Coya away, and she glanced once more after the departed Contrarè, and then at the back of Coya.