The Warrior Who Carried Life

by Geoff Ryman

  Mother Danlupu told her the Spell for Fire, and Cara repeated it. It was childishly onomatopoeic, a sound like crackling wood. “Do not say it too much. The very stone will burn with it if you are not careful,” Danlupu warned. The Spell for Sitting in the Air, a humming noise, and the hissing Spell of Rain came next.

  “Now here is the last. Here is the most important. Without success in this, it is written that the Bud will never blossom into the Flower. This is the Spell of the Butterfly, who changes. You must spend a year in the wilderness as another kind of beast, to learn another way of living.”

  Cara listened and tried to remember. This was the one she had wanted. The spell was very long and repetitive, like a lilting song in a strange language. Cara stumbled over it, trying to remember. “Yes, dear daughter,” Mother Danlupu said, “it is difficult. So very difficult, these lessons, but try again.” Cara’s face was no longer able to express emotions as subtle as irritation. She repeated the spell again, perfectly.

  “Go out into the fields, child. Think over what you have learned here tonight. Remember that you have been accepted by the Wensenara. Let that give you strength. Practise, and when you feel you are ready, come to us, and flower.”

  That was all. Cara felt the women relax around her.

  “You feel different now, my daughter. You can feel strength inside you,” smiled the old woman, her hands doing a pleased little dance. She clasped them, to keep them still.

  “I always feel strength inside me,” replied Cara.

  “Will you become a bird, sister, and fly?” asked gentle Liri.

  “If I did, it would be a hawk,” said Cara. “But then hawks must spend all their time hunting for food.”

  “She could be a fish,” said Latch. “She could be as cold as her heart then. She could live in a well and dine off the flesh of my husband and son. As she did when they lived.”

  “Hate the Galu for their deaths,” replied Cara. “Sister,” she called Latch, and tried to smile, the aperture of her mouth widening only slightly over skull-like teeth. Even Latch shuddered and looked away. Cara’s face had become a weapon. “No,” Cara continued. “I want to be a beast of the field. I know what beast it is.”

  “A wolf,” said Hara, scornfully. “Of course.”

  “Oh, it is much more fierce than that,” Cara answered. “Though it hunts with dogs.” Then she added, “I will try now.”

  “I do not think that would be wise,” warned Mother Danlupu in a voice that was meant to be insinuating and unsettling.

  “Why, Mother, are you afraid that the spell doesn’t work?” Cara asked. She closed her eyes, and began to speak it. “Lalarolalaraleenalaralaralokilararolalaraleena . . .” Her voice became a drone that seemed to roll and surge like the movement of waves.

  “You are trying too much, daughter. You will disappoint yourself!” Danlupu warned, and looked around, helplessly, at the others. “You must first start with the Spell of Fire!”

  “Of course, she wants it all right away. Everything she ever wanted, she always had, right away,” said Latch, with relish, drawing her poor robe and shawl around her. “She only comes to us in misfortune. You see how she disdains us. She only wants her wealth back, to lady herself over us again.”

  “Let us hope she fails,” said Hara. “Then she will go away.”

  Their words seemed to fade into silence. Cara felt only a settling at first, a calming and soothing as the words spiralled round and round in her throat and mind. Then the circles seemed to spread and echo, like ripples in a pond, bound and rebound. Somewhere distant a voice was saying them correctly, but inside her head the words grew all confused and merged into one sound, a sound like thousands of people speaking at once. Cara felt herself grow dizzy. She felt herself sway from side to side as if the hollow in the rock were a ship at sea.

  She felt something heavy inside her as well, a gathering weight like water behind a dam. It was her hatred. With each turning of the words, the weight seemed to turn over on itself and grow. Suddenly in her mind there was an image of a rock that had begun to roll down a hill. The hill steepened, and it rolled faster and faster, picking up dust and debris as it tumbled, growing larger and gaining strength and speed. She became frightened. She tried to stop the stone, but she could not. She tried to stop the words, but the voice somewhere else kept saying them. Everything inside her pitched and lurched and shuddered, the ground fell away before her. Ahead was a precipice. The stone was the size of a temple and it spun out into empty air. Cara tried to scream, but found that nothing in her body obeyed her any longer. She could feel herself falling, everything in her rising up towards her mouth. The ground was suddenly before her, coming up insanely fast, like a fist. She hit, and felt herself shatter into shards and fragments, broken, splintered, sharp. Finally she was able to scream.

  The Old Women heard it, a thin, wheedling wail, and from nowhere there was a great wind deep inside the chambers of the cliff. Dust was whipped into their faces and their robes rose up and lashed them like whips. Hazily, they saw Clara stand up, steam issuing out of her gaping mouth.

  Then she exploded.

  She was torn apart as they watched: great jets of blood and splintering of bone, hair and scalp dancing freely, the teeth flying apart, the skin lifting up like wings. The mass of it hung in the air and swirled, heart opening out, lungs blossoming open like red flowers, ligaments and strands of muscle circling upwards like seagulls in the wind. Then suddenly it all began to collapse in on itself again, liver and intestines scurrying back as if for shelter, the rib cage closing like a trap, the skin wrapping itself back around again and healing, and finally, from nowhere, something that some of them thought for a moment might be the shell of a giant tortoise closed over the skin. The wind died, and there before them stood an armoured warrior.

  He was tall and broad, arms and legs weighted with muscle. He had a shield and a breastplate and a spear and a sword and a helmet cradled in one arm. His face was as regular and as handsome as Cara’s once had been, with a clipped brown beard and staring, startled eyes. The warrior stared at them, and the women silently gaped back at him.

  Cara’s thoughts settled back slowly, like dust. She was Cara. She was here. Her whole universe was a different shape. The movement of air on her arms, the feel of the sandal thongs on her calves, the light reaching her mind through eyes that were in different positions and that would not focus: all her information was received through channels that seemed distorted and swollen. She looked down dizzily on an impossibly broad chest. How did a chest like that work, what on earth could fill it? Her whole body felt heavier, yet quicker, more instant: great splayed feet and broad, veined hands. Yet somehow the great bulk was less stubborn or long lasting. Hanging nestled between her legs was something that felt like a small new animal. The thought and feel of it paradoxically excited her, and it began to swell.

  “It’s worked,” she whispered in a slow, rasping voice. “By all the stars, it’s worked.”

  She wanted a mirror. She wanted to see that weight of flesh that meant she could kill, the weight that would make her safe in the world outside the canyon. Her thick hand, with clumsy fingers like sausages, padded around her face. It was bearded and larger, but she knew also whole and smooth again. She chuckled to herself and the sound, rising deep out of that bloated chest, startled her and made her jump. She laughed at it again. “I am a man!”

  A man could walk the roads and not be kidnapped into bondage as a whore. A man could take up arms and fight, and if he knew better what needed to be done, other men would listen. He could get into the place that Cara needed to get into. A man could take revenge where she could not.

  She took a step forward. The whole world rocked and limped and twisted as she fought to make the limbs work in the way that she was used to. That worried her. She didn’t have time to learn how to walk all over again.

  “You didn’t expect that, did you?” Cara demanded of the Old Women, relishing now the booming of her voice. �
�Kasawa, you thought I’d fail as you did, didn’t you?” She took another step and found that she could make her unsteadiness look like a swagger.

  “Cara?” Aunt Liri called her, horrified, wondering, saddened.

  “Yes?” Cara answered, and turned to her with difficulty.

  “What are you going to do? Do you know?”

  “I know exactly,” Cara replied, and began to walk again with her ponderous, careful stride across the room. “Exactly.” The thrill of the idea made her smile even broader. “Take care of my family while I am gone, sister.” Without looking back, she walked into the darkness, which swallowed her.

  The Wensenara blinked at each other.

  “Well!” exclaimed Mother Danlupu.

  They gathered up their skirts and left in silence. To talk at all would be to admit that nothing remotely similar had ever happened to one of them.

  What sort of power was it that could turn flesh and blood into shield and sword?

  The Little Thing

  that Feels Large

  The Men who Live like Foxes sprang out from the rocks, from within the very face of the cliff it seemed, along the narrow track. Cara had no time to draw her sword or to retreat.

  She had wondered what she would do in her first fight. I wished myself to be a warrior, she had told herself, as she walked through the night and day towards the village of Deeper and Wider. If I am a warrior, I must know what to do.

  Her masculine arm did not hold her shield up in front of her like a wall. Unbidden, it swung the shield horizontally through the air.What am I doing? Cara thought in horror. Then she understood. The shield’s edge struck the first of the Foxes across the eyes and forehead. He staggered back; she had gained time to draw her sword. She spun around, for she had heard one of them land behind her, the shield righting itself in time to block a brutal blow from an axe, though her arm went numb and aching from the force of it. There were four of the Foxes, dressed in a mixture of armour and finery and furs; they surrounded her; her back seemed to tingle with its own vulnerability. She swung at the axeman, not knowing if her sword was even long enough to reach him, and missed.

  “He’s green! He’s green!” the axeman exalted.

  “Mine!”

  “Mine!”

  Cara felt a burning pain across the back of her legs. She swung at the head of the man beside her, but he rolled quickly out of her reach. Wounded, unbalanced, she fell. She saw the ground coming up for her; she saw her sword and tried to turn it away from herself so that she would not land on it; she felt skin scrape free from her wrist. She was sprawled, open, on the ground. Desperately, she tried to push herself back onto her feet, or drag herself to her knees, but her legs would not move. Then a heavy boot planted itself on the hand that held the sword, and the weight of a man landed on her back and put a blade along the side of her neck.

  Oh no. Not so soon. Not so quickly, she thought, sadly.

  “You’re much too fine and lovely a lad to be wearing such armour and not know how to fight,” the Fox on her back whispered in her ear. The Men who Live like Foxes dwelt in burrows and did not wash with water; they burned fungus and sat in the smoke to kill the lice. It was said that they did not live with women, preferring the company of men. She smelt damp earth and burrow smoke on him. “We just want your armour. Strange stuff it is too.” Whenever his weight shifted, Cara felt a grating pain across her calves.

  “My legs,” she whispered.

  “Well, if you tie them up you might stop the bleeding. You might even be able to walk to the bondhouse.”

  “Shouldn’t stay there, though,” another one of them said. “Better to live in a burrow, with us.”

  Quickly, neatly, they rolled her over, two swords at her throat. Her shield was plucked from her, and the sword; her breastplate was peeled away and her fine, thick-soled sandals. They left her barefoot in a shirt and loincloth, bleeding on the road.

  “It’s a shame,” said the tallest, slimmest of them, cradling up the armour. He wore fine traceries of gold as earrings and a scarf of lace around his throat. “He is lovely. But we couldn’t trust him with us, could we.”

  “Your scarf,” begged Cara, “For a tourniquet?”

  “Tourniquet, eh? Well, we rich sons do know some big words.” But the Fox stopped. “Well,” he said in a quiet voice. “As you are so beautiful.” He passed Cara the windings of lace. “A fair exchange.”

  They leapt over the edge of the cliff, and were gone.

  Cara sat up, and turned her legs to look at the wound. The flesh across both calves was purple and one was split open, but the cut was not clean and the bone had not been splintered. She understood the Fox’s kindness. He had used the blunt back of the axe.I will not weep, she told herself, as she tied up the wound. Blood seeped through the lace, tracing intricate patterns of fruit and flowers. Then, using her arms to climb up the rock behind her, she managed to stand. The pain was not as terrible as she had feared it might be, except when her feet moved from the ankle at the first step. She went dizzy and nearly fell again. She found, however, that if she kept her feet absolutely flat, lifting them up like plates of meat from the thigh, taking tiny steps, then she could bear it. Fortunately it was late afternoon, cooling with long shadows; she had slept through the worst heat of the day. A bondhouse they had said. A bondhouse would mean a large farm. All the land here was desert, gravel and rock. A farm would have to be on lower ground, by the river, nearer Deeper and Wider, from where the boats left. How far away, how far away was that? There were only six hours of light left. She began to walk.

  If the ground was even slightly uneven; if her feet dragged, or if she shuffled, then she could feel more flesh tear, and her nerve ends seethe with pain. Each time it had to be a clean lift, up and then down. Sometimes she had to stand still, to let the pain subside. She stood with her eyes closed and waited; she could not risk sitting down. “For my father, who is like the earth,” she whispered at each step. “For my brother who starves. For my brother who crawls.” The shadows lengthened, and the lace went black and caked; her feet blistered from the heat of the ground, then started to bleed as well. Finally as night came on—night that would be so terrifying because it would mask the road and the precipice beside it—the track dropped away in front of her in a zigzag down the rock, and she saw the ribbon of the river, a slate of grey reflection of the darkening sky, and the irrigation canals like patterned mirrors around the fields. She saw a long house with people in the yard drawing water and bringing in wood. She saw the house, and the steep slope and realised she could never walk down to it.

  “Hello! Hello!” she shouted with her new voice, and it cracked and went harsh. “Help! I cannot walk. Hello!”

  She listened to her own forlornness in the wind. Finally she fainted, and fell.

  Pain shot up from Cara’s legs and through her whole body, wakening her. “Ah. Ah. Ah,” she gasped, and sat up in the darkness.

  “Duhdo duhdo genzu,” whispered a slurry voice that smelled of stale breath, nonsense words that had come to mean an offhand apology. Whoever it was stumbled off in the darkness to a door that opened out onto a darkness which was only slightly less impenetrable. Cara saw the stars in the sky, before the door swung shut again.

  “Oh, no,” Cara groaned. Now she was awake with the pain. She lay on a blanket on a hard stone floor. Already her fingers had found holes in the cloth. She knew enough of bonded life to know that someone had probably died on it. From all around her came the serried noises of people sleeping. She had seen such bondhouses before. There would be she knew, two rows of partitions made probably of hanging blankets. Between them, whole families, exhausted, thin and ill-clothed, slept on the stone. There would be a small shed some distance away for people to die in, and a trough between the stable and the bondhouse for what were called in Cara’s language, Gifts to the Earth.

  A baby started to cry. Its mother did not wake. Someone groaned and turned over, but the infant still wailed, untended. How many
hours more of this did she have, Cara wondered, the pain in her leg like fire smouldering in embers, how many more hours of hunger, fierce thirst, and a need to pass water? Cara decided to move. She tried drawing up her knees, keeping her feet in the same position and pushing up with her arms, but beyond a certain point the pain was too great. She could feel the risk of further damage. Finally she twisted over on to her stomach and rose up onto her knees. She made a sudden lunge, bringing her feet up under her, accepted the stabbing pain, and then stood. With her new flat-footed walk, she carefully picked her way between the rows of sleepers, and out through the door of the bondhouse.

  There was silver in the east, above the cliffs. Very far away a dog was barking. The air seemed as sweet as flowers after the bondhouse and was deliciously cool and clean. It was going to be, however, another savagely hot day. The bottoms of Cara’s feet were now as badly damaged as her calves; yet she would have to walk. She knew better than to stay any time in a bondhouse.

  Across the pavement was the main house, and inside that, the kitchen. Cara could see the flickering of candles through a small low window, and smell the smoke, and hear the clatter of pots. Suddenly there was a shouting, loud, that was quickly subdued. Cara limped towards it, and ducked under the low desert door through walls as thick as her legs were long, into the steam and heat of the kitchen.

  A bondgirl was slapping two children as hard as she could across the face. “Damn you took it. Damn you took it,” she hissed at them in a frightened voice.

  “Our Ata told us to get in first,” said the boy, who was not crying. His face was small and hard and blotchy.

  “Your Ata can wait his turn,” the bondgirl said, glancing at Cara with embarrassment.

  “Morning, Sir,” she murmured. Bondpeople liked to give each other the treat of aristocratic address.