Gorgeous had formed the herd into a ring. Facing outward, the cattle were a fence of horns around the calves and humans. Whenever a Headless approached, the cows bowed their heads, waving horns downward alongside the tribesmen's spears.
The predators slammed their forelegs in frustration. Celaise slid toward them as they turned to retreat. She wished to reach them before they left, to entrap them in her dress, but the strain of her magic dragged on her. She had to maintain her True Dress in the sights of all onlookers while her hunger towed her, inch by inch, toward the Void.
The Headless rumbled downhill into the night.
The spears of the tribesmen pumped in victory, and they knocked their cudgels together. Their whoops echoed over the mountain.
“Rock-Backs come, Rock-Backs run.”
“Their backs have gone soft.”
“The Greathearts!”
“Quiet, you.” A woman shushed the men. “Not right, not right at all, after those lost tonight.”
“Far more of the gods' children would be harmed,” the elderly woman said, looking to Celaise, “if not for this woman. Her magic is strong.”
As one, the tribe peered at Celaise. Children tugged on their mothers' sheet skirts. A man scratched between his braids. One woman could not stop blinking in surprise.
Celaise had not been pinned down by so many eyes since her own village had gathered to stone her. Every nerve in her tingled, warning her to flee, but running showed fear and weakness. She did not know how to kill the Headless by herself, and she doubted she could survive any more days on the savanna alone.
The elderly woman tugged on a cow's udder and sprayed milk onto her palm. She lifted it in offering to Celaise, saying, “The Greathearts honor you. Our shade is yours.”
So many stares…they made her nervous beyond thought, but she strained herself to focus. Think, Celaise. She would need to trick these people, to fool them into accepting her. Until my trial is done.
Milk trickled between the old woman's cupped hands. The silence of the tribe tore at Celaise. Even the cows seemed to moo softly in expectation. What do they want me to say? What am I to do?
The elder's eyes dipped to the milk remaining in her grasp. Celaise understood, reaching out to accept the milk. It poured into her airy grasp and was gone.
“This one is the Holy Woman of the Greathearts.” The elder licked her hands before lowering them. “Will you bless us with your name?”
“Celaise.” Her voice sounded wispy and frail in her own ears, hollowed by hunger.
“Were you sent by the Angry Mother?” The Holy Woman lifted her arms to the mountain behind her. “Or the Sky Bull?” She pointed higher, toward the stars.
Celaise considered. Those names sounded strange to her, but they must have been the titles of gods. I could say I'm a servant of their gods. They'd not be so quick to kill me then.
She did not know what they would expect from their goddess or her divine servant, and she dared not pretend to be either. One misstep and they might realize she was a Feaster. No, Celaise would hold to her safer lie.
“I am an Enchantress of the Mindvault Academy. I wanted to see your volcano.” The second part was true.
She knew little about the reclusive enchantresses, and she counted on these people to know even less. Indeed, no recognition lit their faces.
Telling the lie was necessary, but it still upset her. The three pillars of society were not to lie, not to steal, and not to be lazy. At least I never break the last two.
One of the tribesmen stepped forward between the cows. He cleared his throat, and his smile uplifted the hatch scars on his cheeks. Flashing perfect teeth, he beamed a smile at her.
Celaise was revolted. The kinder they are, the more they want from you. If not for her nerveless face, she would have flinched as he opened his mouth to speak.
When she had spoken her name, it had echoed off the mountainside. “Celaise. —aise. —aise.”
The Rock-Backs had disappeared down the side of the Angry Mother. Jerani held his sister within the warmth of the cow circle and the other Greathearts.
Jerani curled his toes in his sandals, watching Isafo saunter up to the sky woman. Isafo had already fathered two children at age nineteen, by different women, each with their own angry parents. He had stolen kisses from most every girl in the Greathearts, and Jerani dreaded to hear what he might say to her. What if he offends her?
“Your name suits you, Celaise,” Isafo said. “It is beautiful. Mine's Isafo, and I've more fire in me than any volcano.”
Jerani dug the handle of his war club into his thigh, furious beyond what he could explain. True, Celaise was a beautiful name. He could not fault Isafo for saying that. Jerani had heard the same purring tone make girls giggle and forget their milking tasks to kiss Isafo in the shade. Jerani did not think Celaise should be treated as other women.
Celaise's gaze turned distant. Jerani was glad to see she had not gone calf-eyed over him.
“Ignore Isafo,” the Holy Woman said. “When he was a baby, he ate cow pies. Could not stop stuffing the green stuff in his mouth. So disrespectful.”
At her words, Isafo turned a little green himself. He backed away amid the snickers of the other men. Jerani loved the Holy Woman for saying that.
“A kantress you may be,” the Holy Woman said, stumbling over the foreign word, “but the Angry Mother bore all the world's people, and I am thinking you were sent back to her side to save her first children.” She waved to the cows. “You may not know it but—aii!”
She had tried to rest a hand on Celaise'sshoulder only to have it pass through. The Holy Woman jerked her arm back, rubbing at her fingers.
Celaise's eyes shifted from the Holy Woman to the warriors watching. The sky woman's face stayed as serene as a matron cow chewing fresh grass, but something in those eyes made Jerani think she was uncomfortable. She said, “I must go.”
“You must not.” The Holy Woman reached halfway toward her but this time did not touch. “The gods didn't guide you here to spin you about and send you back. Not now. The grassland is thundering with Rock-Backs, and they're no longer afraid of the Angry Mother.”
To this, Celaise said nothing. Jerani's insides twisted at the thought of her going. What if another Skin-Back creeps onto Wedan while we sleep? Or onto Anza? His little sister was leaning against his thigh. He lifted her up to give her a better view of Celaise's dress.
“Look!” Anza pointed toward the cloudscape in the dress. “A bird!”
“Shhh,” Jerani said in her ear. “Let the Holy Woman speak.”
“The Greathearts must honor you,” she was saying to Celaise. “Stay to drink our milk. Listen to our songs.”
“I can't.” Her dress brightened to white from a passing cloud.
“Why can't she stay?” Anza shifted in his grasp.
“I don't know.” He could not imagine why anyone would wish to leave the Greatheart tribe. The cows they protected were the kindest and most surefooted on the grassland.
Celaise had helped Jerani kill his first Rock-Back. She had rescued his brother, had saved Gem and Gorgeous, and Jerani felt he owed her a great debt. If she left, he could never repay it.
His tribe might need her. They had built this village on the side of the volcano because the Rock-Backs feared the Angry Mother and her trembling rage, but tonight they had climbed up to attack regardless. Their hunger must have driven them to it. The monsters had eaten the wildebeests off the grassland.
“I can't stay,” Celaise said, “but I'll come again. At dusk, when the Headless attack.”
“But where can you go?” The Holy Woman's face crinkled in concern. “The grassland is no fit place to walk alone.”
“The Academy is my home,” she said. The long word meant nothing to Jerani, but he imagined some place in the shaded fields in the sky realm of the gods. “I can come back, if you hold something of mine.”
Celaise lifted her hand, but her bright fingers grasped nothing.
“I will hold it, but what is this thing?” The Holy Woman outstretched her palms, ready to accept whatever unseen object Celaise held.
The sky woman's eyes shifted past, toward the warriors.
Isafo stepped forward, reaching. His grin had returned, and Jerani wondered how he had shed all the embarrassment from the Holy Woman's shaming. Celaise had some token, something that couldn't be seen from this angle, and she would give it to Isafo. Jerani felt sure of it, and his insides prickled and burned at the thought. Not wanting to watch, he held Anza in front of him, blocking his own view.
He gritted his teeth and waited for Isafo's voice, smooth and pleasing as spring water, but Jerani heard only the mumbled moos of cows speaking to their calves. The people nearby turned to look at him. Anza squirmed in his hold and poked.
“Jerani,” Celaise said, her voice keen like wind whistling over uneven stone.
Setting down Anza, he saw everyone staring at him. Celaise was beckoning. Among all the warriors, she had chosen him. His heart sped as fast as it had when he had fought the Rock-Backs. He did not feel his feet walking, but he passed between the cows and found himself in front of her.
In a blink, the sky within her dress darkened into a different place with a floor of wood boards, with four-legged structures also carved of wood, and with stacks of leather squares bound together and arranged in piles. He wondered if he was seeing her home, the Academy.
A metal object fell from her transparent hands. Jerani caught it. Made of a wide band of a honey-colored metal, the curved thing reminded him of a bracer. Warriors wore bracers of horn to reinforce their wrists. He ran his finger over a raised pattern on the metal, a circle with flaring wings.
“Speak my name,” Celaise said, “when the Headless get close. I will hear and come.”
She lifted a short cape over her face. Then she vanished. The image of the distant wooden room folded in on itself until it shrank to a spark that drifted down to settle onto the bracer. Red light traced over the pattern of wings, and the circle lit up.
The bracer felt warm when he slipped it on, as if it had been worn recently. The heat spread up his arm and onto his face, and he realized this was the first thing a woman had ever given him. Why did she choose me? Other warriors were taller and more battle tried.
His throat dry, he turned around to face the stares of his tribe.
Celaise swam through the shadows. Once she had reached a safe distance between two huts—one splintered and collapsed from the night's attack—she turned to study the tribesmen.
They gathered around Jerani, ogling her glowing bracelet that he now wore. They talked while Jerani stayed silent. “She's a strange one, a right screw-horn.”
“Don't care. She can flip a Rock-Back.”
“Think she'd have chosen me? If I'd asked for as many warrior marks as Jerani?”
“This is copper, I think.”
“Did you see her when she turned?” One tribesman clicked his tongue. “Had a good flank to her.”
“Shut your face, Isafo. The gods must've sent her. That's why she won't have nothing to do with you.”
Jerani held the bracelet against his chest as if protecting it from the others. She had not been certain why she had chosen Jerani, but now she realized that he had been the only one not looking at her. The Holy Woman, the other tribesmen, they had all leaned toward her, grasping with their eyes, wanting her to trust them, to depend on them, to be fooled by them. Jerani had flashed no gummy smiles. Nothing repelled her so much as eagerness.
Neither would she trust him, though. The bracelet was a warning for times when people tried to fool her into believing in them, into relying on them.
A man had given the bracelet to her as a lure. He had left her with nothing but that trinket. Her blood had speckled it, red on copper. As she lay dying after her fall, a cutthroat had tried to take the bracelet. He probably would have melted down the damaged thing and sold it as scrap.
Among the shadows of rocks purple with dusk, her magic had come to her as a desperate wish at the end of all hope. The cutthroat was the first to fall into her True Dress.
Celaise allowed herself to smile, satisfied with her hard-won wisdom. Some flitted away their lives without caution, and she had gained it by age sixteen. How much I have learned.
The bracelet was a reminder of the perils of that and nothing more. Her magic glittered along it as she imagined it would if she were an enchantress. The bracelet had no true power, except to distract, to give the tribesmen a reason why she could soon reappear at their side.
No gods had sent her, only hunger and threat.
Leaving the village, she trudged downhill to a field of grass tufts. The first two trees she tried to climb were thorned and covered with ants. The third tree had no leaves but hundreds of upward-turned branches, green like a nest of snakes trying to pluck foolish birds from the sky. She had learned these trees leaked a poison that left sores.
Celaise would have to sleep under the sky, through the morning. The Headless were twilight hunters and would not bother her under the sun. She thought she might be safer out in the open than among people.
Her eyes did not close. Her insides felt like a churning mess of glass and ash. She was afraid some animal would find her alone and asleep in the field, afraid of the hundreds of Headless patrolling the savanna, the hundreds she must slay. Afraid of the tribes—several groups of families clustered about the volcano—any of which might decide to kill her. Afraid she would fail the Lord of the Feast and have her soul shredded in his fangs.
A calabash gourd balancing on Jerani's head tipped. He cricked his neck backward, trying to steady the vessel. Dropping the gourd would spill water collected drop by drop from reed mats thrown over steam vents. The cows would go thirsty, and that would be bad enough, but also his brother and sister would have to beg other families for water. Jerani would sooner pet a black mamba.
He leaned forward to rescue the gourd on his head, but the pole holding two more gourds swung toward the mountain's rocky slope. His arm pressed down on the shaft, digging it into his shoulder. He regained control of the pole. It still shook in his grip, and the sun-bleached gourds tied to either end sloshed. Jerani never had this much trouble with his balance.
A grey rock slid down the mossy ground, and he wondered. Either the dirt had shifted under his feet, or the volcano had shifted under the dirt. The Angry Mother may be waking.
Jerani pushed the thought away. He had too much to worry about without thinking where his tribe would go if the mountain began raining fire and rock shards. No, he blamed his weariness. His yawn stretched his jaw. He took care not to tilt his head.
Though carrying water was a woman's task, he also lugged it for the Masinji family. Their daughter milked the cows Jerani protected. His own calloused hands would damage the soft udders, and the gods frowned on men milking cows. His sister was too young for the sacred task.
The downhill trail offered a powerful view. The 'land below sang with its greenness, the whitish green of grass and a browner green from patches of acacia. The Small Rains had left the world crackling with life.
It looked peaceful during the day, when the Rock-Backs lazed amid boulders. The Greathearts had survived by guarding the herd at night on the Angry Mother. He guessed they would have to rebuild the village higher on the volcano. Can't go the other way. Traveling down to the grassland would surround them with hunting packs.
He blinked away sweat. He lay each foot with care on the grey dirt, stepping in dents in the soil left by the sandals of the woman who walked ahead of him.
Her name was Chiya. Her slender fingers rested against the side of the gourd she bore on top of her head. Despite its weight, her stride was graceful, her feet kissing the ground. Her calf muscles stood out as she walked, her legs with the perfect amount of inward bend below the knee. Too straight a leg led to an ugly, clomping stride in both people and cows, while those forced to waddle about on sickle-hocked legs could only b
e pitied. Jerani's father had told him over and over, It's the leg that makes a cow fine, the same for women.
Jerani swallowed, forcing his eyes down to watch his foot placement. He promised himself he would speak to Chiya. He had meant to for many days now, but she had a way of looking past him with her rich, dark eyes that locked words in his belly. Last night my spear killed a Rock-Back, he told himself. I shouldn't lose courage talking to her.
Between tending to the cows and his sister, he had not slept a moment last night. If he opened his mouth now he might whoop like an ostrich.
It would be so much easier if his father would speak to her father, offer a guardianship of seven cows. A good bridal price. But ever since his father had journeyed to the towns and back, he had wanted little to do with his children, and Jerani did not feel comfortable talking with him. Jerani was sure his father would not make a good impression on her family. Not that Jerani could marry anyway. He had proven himself as a warrior, but he already had all the family he could take care of.
No, it would be wrong to speak with Chiya, he thought. Besides, I don't even know what I'd say.
“Heya, Chiya!” The voice was Isafo's. He had draped the top half of his warrior robe over his belt to expose his muscled chest. “Did you hear? I killed a Rock-Back. It was bigger'n a bull.”
Chiya lowered her gourd to the ground so she could gaze up into his eyes. “Weren't you afraid?”
“Nothin' to it. Just put my spear in its mouth.” He looked away from her, perhaps to better display his strong chin. “Guess you'd say I'm good with my spear.”
Chiya tittered, and the sound burned Jerani. He could not believe Chiya would so much as glance at the warrior. Isafo had given only one cow each to the women who had born his children.
The muscles in Jerani's neck and stomach trembled from carrying the water. Careful to only move his jaw, he said, “Isafo had help. I bashed its leg, and the sky woman—”
Gown of Shadow and Flame Page 4