Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1986

by Cahena (v3. 1)

  “Only that once, with Madghis, and that was more than enough. What can I be but the Cahena? Before I cut off Madghis’s head and became the Cahena, the prophetess, the queen, my name was only Daia.” She looked at him, breathing. “Did you know that my name was Daia?”

  “They said that anyone who dares speak your name will be killed.”

  “Are you afraid to speak my name and be killed?”

  “Not greatly.”

  “Daia,” she said the name again. “How does it sound?”

  “Like the Latin word dea, for goddess. And like our Saxon word doian, for death. No, I don’t fear death, but life isn’t such a burden that I go looking for death.”

  She drew herself straight as she sat. The robe sank from her firmly rounded left shoulder, softly shining as if polished.

  “But you’re afraid of my name because it’s like your word for death.” She laughed, so softly that he barely heard. “Maybe Wulf is too brave and strong a name for you.”

  “You think you can sit there and laugh at me, Daia.”

  Her lips opened, then closed again without speaking.

  “I’ve called you Daia,” said Wulf. “Now you can stop laughing and call somebody in to try to kill me with his javelin. Maybe that’s why you told me to put aside my sword.”

  She smiled, but she did not laugh.

  “Call me Daia,” she said, “and live.”

  “Daia,” he repeated. He reached and took her hand. It was soft and slender in his.

  “Will you kiss my shadow, here on these cushions?” she asked him.

  “No. Not your shadow.”

  Her fingers stirred. He bowed his head and kissed them.

  “Wulf,” she whispered above him. “Brave Wulf, strong Wulf. Call me Daia. Tell me what you think of me.”

  “Daia,” he called her. “Not the moon in the sky nor its light on earth is more beautiful than you.”

  “You’re a poet.”

  “I say what I think. But why do you show me this favor?”

  “Because you were sent to me. My spirits told me of you before you came. As soon as I saw you, I knew that this would happen. That it was destiny for us both.”

  She leaned forward and laid her other hand on his that clasped hers. The movement made the robe slide farther down. He saw her slenderly curved body and her full round breasts that swung like gently tolling bells. Her hands shifted to pull at the lacing of his tunic. He helped her unfasten it and cast it to the carpet behind him. His head sang with the perfume from the brazier.

  “Your skin’s so smooth, Wulf,” she murmured, stroking his chest with her palm. “Not all grown over with hair.”

  His heart drummed. He put out his arms to take her, but she slipped away from him.

  “Not like that yet, Wulf. Here.”

  Her hands took his head between them and drew it to her. He tried not to tremble. She shifted her bare body against his face. The rondure of a breast drew along his cheek to his mouth.

  “I make you a son of the Djerwa,” she was saying. “I nourish you at my breast. I suckle you. You’re my man. Mine.”

  Her nipple throbbed between his lips. It tasted as sweet as honey; she must have put honey on it. She caught her breath as though she were sinking underwater.

  “The other,” she whispered in his ear.

  He took the other in his mouth. She hugged his head against her, more strongly than he had dreamed she could hug. Then she sank back and down of her own accord and her thighs moved apart to receive him and he mounted her and his face came to her face and his mouth to her mouth and their tongues twined together more eloquently than speech, than any vow or prayer, and they mingled and somehow she was within him as he was within her with their breaths as one breath and their hearts beating as one beat, and their union was forever and ever with the triumphant torrent and thunder of the climax like the coming of Judgment Day when the mountains and islands shall be moved from their places and never never never had it been like this before, and he forgot utterly how it had been with any other woman all his life long in the countries where he had lived but never had known this or dreamed this or imagined this.

  Afterward they lay side by side recovering, his left arm under her head and her left arm across his chest.

  “Was that how you thought it would be, Wulf?”

  “I hadn’t thought how it would be. There can never have been a woman like you, Daia.”

  “There can never have been a man like you, either. Never anyone like either of us. Call me Daia, always call me Daia when we’re like this.”

  “Like this, Daia?”

  “Like this, Wulf, like this again. Wulf, Wulf, in beauty like this again, this again, like this again.”

  * * *

  X

  Late, late at night, Wulf came back to the clay-and-wattle bachelor home of Bhakrann and Cham and Zeoui and Tifan. Bhakrann was still awake but said nothing, only pointed to a bed of hay under the eaves. Wulf lay down but did not sleep for hours. He thought of the Cahena until it seemed almost as though she lay beside him, said soft praise in his ear.

  At dawn they ate barley cake and drank goat’s milk, and Wulf stepped out in the misty morning. He looked at the house’s sun-browned mud walls and its strongly thatched roof and thought, That’s how my father’s house was made, of earth and thatch.

  And he gazed along the sprawl of the street, where merchants dickered with robed women and men in tunics, and he thought, The market town in England where I was a boy was like that.

  Mud for his father’s house had been kneaded and then spread like plaster upon a framework of upright poles with withes twisted horizontally between them, with openings for a door and two windows curtained with tanned leather. Inside, the hearth where his mother slung a spit and dangled a pot. And there were pallet beds, woven cloths spread over crammed coarse grass that was taken out and burned every summer and replaced with fresh coarse grass. On the wall hung a wooden crucifix, with upon it the tortured figure of Christ in another sort of wood, showing the scrapes and fumbles of the knife that carved it.

  The home farm was thought prosperous, with two gaunt little horses and a cow and a calf, a penful of pigs behind the house. Grain and hay grew in the fields around. It was a mile’s tramp on a ruined road to the market town.

  Nowhere near as big a town as Tiergal, but Wulf’s neighbors had traded there, grain for cloth, pigs for calves, calves for pigs, hens for clay dishes, baskets of berries for strings of beads. A busy town at market time. Once it had seemed to Wulf the center of everything.

  Girls had been there, with black hair and brown and yellow, smiling at Wulf, giggling at him, nudging him. Merchants greeted him as the sun of a good farmer and customer. And Father Thomas the priest, who taught him his letters and said Wulf should be a priest, too, helped him off on the long trudge to where stern, understanding Bishop Hadrian waited to say that Wulf would do better as a soldier than as a priest.

  Remembering, Wulf forgot the sword he wore. Again he was the boy with a bag at his side and a staff in his hand, with a sheepskin mantle and cross-garterings on his legs, starting away into the world. His father and mother — did they still live, did they wonder what had become of their son?

  “You frown,” said Cham at his side. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Just a place I knew once,” said Wulf. “A long way from here.”

  “Want to walk out? I’ll show you things.”

  They passed people working in their yards. Women ground barley in hand mills or wove fabrics. The younger women were comely, several even beautiful. Men whittled shafts for javelins. “There’s Wulf,” they told each other. “He showed us how to whip the Moslems.”

  Shops sold meal and fruits and cuts of meat, necklaces of bright stones, and clothes. Wulf stopped to find a zigzag-patterned tunic to fit him and paid for it with one of his few remaining coins. Handsome children played everywhere, black-haired, brown-haired, one or two red-haired. “Wulf, Wulf!” they
shrilled at him.

  Cham led him to a sturdy, smooth-shaven metalworker in a leather apron, and Wulf ordered a coat of mail. The man’s name was Jonas. He said he was a Greek, a Christian, and that just then he was busy making javelin heads. He measured Wulf’s chest and shoulders with a knotted cord. Jonas’s daughter watched from inside the shop. She had sun-bright hair and a round face with a wide, happy mouth. Her body curved ripely. Her name was Daphne.

  At the edge of town, men practiced with javelins. Their targets were outworn sandals, set upright. These men were highly accurate at various ranges. They invited Wulf to try, but he knew he did not have their skill and declined politely.

  Boys herded goats and sheep and long-horned cattle in pastures among the slopes and hollows. Axmen chopped down gnarled trees. There were fields where reapers gathered grain into sheaves.

  Many people wore patched or darned clothes, but were clean. Wulf commented on that to Cham.

  “We always wash,” said Cham. “There are two ponds past those ridges. Men swim in one, women in the other — swim naked.”

  “The women swim naked?” asked Wulf.

  “I’ve often watched them,” said Cham with relish.

  Djalout joined them, leaning on his polished staff. Wulf asked him about religion in Tiergal. There were many beliefs, said Djalout. Christians like Jonas, others who professed Judaism — though very few could read and understand — and many who bowed to images of animal gods — lions, wild boars, snakes.

  “How about Khro?” asked Wulf, but Cham flinched and Djalout shook his fine gray head.

  “They say it’s bad luck to say his name, and who am I to go against popular opinion?” said Djalout. “Ask me about other gods of wisdom and love and war and such things — most likely gods who were here from the first Imazighen.”

  Wulf looked at great scrawls on houses, crescent moons and coarse-toothed combs and, in one place, a huge spread-fingered hand.

  “What about those designs?” he inquired. “Are they some kind of writing?”

  “If the Djerwa ever had writing, it’s been forgotten,” said Djalout.

  Wulf paid attention to men called doctors, caring for the wounded brought back from the fight at the pass. These doctors chanted spells and were diligent to keep their patients clean. They dosed against fevers with pungent brews of herbs.

  A chatter of voices in the street proclaimed that the Cahena was there in her blue robe, attended by a single guardsman. The people thronged to her and talked quietly, gently, not at all as they had cheered her when she rode back from battle. Wulf and Djalout followed her.

  Wulf saw her bend above a languid little child in its mother’s arms. The Cahena’s hands touched it, stroked it, she said something. The child laughed, stirred, was well again. An old woman hobbled up on a staff. The Cahena put hands on the woman’s eyes and the woman shrilled out, “I can see, I can see!” She flung her staff down and scuttled away, stridently rejoicing.

  “She heals her people,” said Djalout.

  “Like a saint,” said Wulf.

  “Or like a sorceress.”

  Back at the house of Bhakrann and his friends, Wulf was handed a leather pouch full of gold and silver Arabian coins.

  “She sent it,” said Bhakrann. “Your share of what we took from those reckless people the other day.”

  Wulf took the purse gladly. “I must thank her.”

  “Thank yourself,” Bhakrann bade him. “You won for us. She’s ordering a home made for you, in a cave near hers.”

  Wulf went to see it next morning. The cave was the size of a big room. Two plump women busily swept its stone floor. At the rear, a latticed screen set off a sleeping chamber. A small spring bubbled outside. More women fetched in a wooden bed, cross-woven with tough vines, and quilts for it. They smiled at Wulf. One, brown-haired and buxom, brushed against him and smiled to show that it was no accident.

  Outside, two men put up poles for a stable yard. One was Susi, burly and short. The other, javelin-lean, was Gharna. They said they were honored to serve him. As they talked, a warrior came to say that the Cahena would give Wulf audience.

  Wulf went to her home, along the passage to the council room. Entering, he saw light through the rear curtain, and went there.

  She met him inside. She wore nothing but a gem-studded bracelet and two gold earrings. She was like the image of a slender, round-breasted goddess in a secret temple. “Love me,” she whispered. “Love me, Wulf.” And sank down on the cushions.

  Undressing hurriedly, he lay down with her and thoroughly loved her. Afterward, they talked.

  “If there should be a child —” Wulf started to say.

  “I know how to prevent that.”

  They made love again, then dressed and went out into the council room. Wulf heard her tell a guardsman to call Bhakrann.

  Business followed. The Cahena put Bhakrann at the head of a score of skilled scouts to ride eastward and spy on the Moslems. They would be gone for many days. Meanwhile, the Cahena sent for her other chieftains.

  They rode in, Yaunis and Ketriazar and Daris. Wulf and Djalout and Mallul attended the council. The seven sat in lamplight and drank sweet wine brewed from dates. The Cahena told them to listen to Wulf’s plan of battle.

  He took charcoal and drew on the inside of a tanned sheepskin, a diagram of a dismounted open-order formation, four deep, like the teeth of a harrow. This, he lectured, would allow repeated flights of javelins against a charge. He sketched in a strong second line, which he said was cavalry to countercharge at the right moment. The chiefs asked questions.

  “All this is new,” commented Daris gravely.

  “Hardly new,” said Wulf. “Alexander’s phalanx and Caesar’s legion had elements of it. But extra javelins are important. Yes, and one spear bigger than a javelin. Say twelve feet long, on a heavy haft.”

  Daris stared. “What for?”

  “When the enemy riders get close, plant those spears and let the horses stab themselves on the points.”

  “Good,” applauded Djalout, and the others seemed convinced.

  “I’ll train my men to form and fight like that,” vowed Ketriazar.

  “I’ll do likewise,” promised Daris. “Speaking of javelins, why don’t we go hunting when we’re through talking here?”

  The Cahena and the chiefs and Mallul and Wulf rode on, along a great grassy slope of the mountain. Near a trickling stream they chased a little herd of antelope. Ketriazar galloped to strike down a quarry. Expertly the Cahena transfixed another. Supper that night was of grilled venison. A choice cut went to Djalout, another to Jonas the smith.

  “How many can we muster?” asked the Cahena as they ate. “I can speak for six thousand Djerwa.”

  “I’ll raise five thousand,” said Yaunis.

  “Five thousand more,” volunteered Ketriazar.

  “The same, give or take a few,” said Daris.

  “We’ll need more,” declared the Cahena. “Yaunis, tomorrow I’ll go with you as far as your place, then on to Cirta. Lartius is chief there. He’s said he’d raise every man in his coastal towns if we need help. You come with me, Wulf.”

  That evening, Wulf walked out with Djalout to visit wounded warriors under the care of doctors. “Help nature heal,” Djalout said, praising the treatment. “Nature heals better than science.”

  They talked of the nature of the earth, speculating on its great unknown reaches. Djalout remembered the raid of Okba to the very western sea.

  “He swore that, if the ocean did not stop him, he’d carry the Moslem faith to lands beyond,” said Djalout, stroking his beard. “I wonder if he knew how Ptolemy said the world was round, and if he believed that there were lands and peoples in the west.”

  “Are there?” asked Wulf.

  “Someday someone will find out,” said Djalout, “when they make a ship good enough to carry him.”

  “In Constantinople, wise men said that the world was flat, and if you sailed out far enough, you�
�d fall off.”

  “No wise man knows everything,” said Djalout. “I don’t, for one.”

  At Jonas’s lamplit shop Wulf tried on the mailed jacket he had ordered. It was of stout leather, with lengths of chain sewed to the sleeves and overlapping iron plates on shoulders and chest. Daphne watched, bright-haired, bright-eyed.

  “Well made,” commented Djalout. “It will turn an arrow or sword.”

  Wulf bore the jacket to his cave. His horses whinnied to him from the stable enclosure.

  Next morning, he mounted his spotted horse to join the Cahena and Yaunis. The Cahena joined four of her guards to the half dozen of Yaunis’s escort. They followed a trampled trail down the northern slopes of Arwa.

  Some miles along, they went through a village where people cheered them. Beyond, the slope became a strew of rocks. Scatterings of green grass grew here and there, and occasional hardy trees. There were evidences of humanity, too, old humanity. At one point stood three battered stone columns, supporting nothing. At another, back from the road, a conical structure of masonry.

  “That’s a tomb,” said Yaunis to Wulf. “Maybe old Roman. I think there’s something like writing on it.”

  More ruinous traces of building after that. At sundown they camped at a spring with fringes of palms. Yaunis grimaced, as though he did not like the place. Wulf saw scraps of white, scattered here and there on the sward. A guardsman built a fire and began to cook a brass basinful of couscous and smoked meat. Yaunis peered into the gloom.

  “This is a good campsite,” offered Wulf. “Wood, water —”

  “A place of the dead,” said Yaunis. “The water’s all right, but a night here can be unpleasant.”

  Supper was dished up. “Place of the dead,” Wulf echoed Yaunis. He looked at the scattered white things and saw that they were bones.

  “Spirits come here,” said Yaunis. “Many must have died here long ago — died violently. I’ve never heard when or why. But when it’s dark, they walk. Let’s pick up more wood, keep the fire going.”

  Wulf went to gather dead branches and paused to look at a scatter of pallid bones. They had belonged to a great wild boar, a beast that must have weighed four hundred pounds, with tusks like curved daggers. Even a lion might pause before attacking such a foe. What had killed it? High in the evening sky, vultures plied back and forth, their motionless wings spread wide.