The Warrior Who Carried Life

by Geoff Ryman

  “Oh! One of them became a tortoise, and lived in the mud. The other saw himself as a huge peach, that was eaten.”

  “It sounds like a kind of truth.”

  “The kind of truth in dreams and children’s stories.”

  “There’s truth in those,” Cara’s face was mild, almost smiling. “I’m going, Stef.”

  “I know,” replied Stefile, rueful, with misgivings.

  They led the horses back down the steps, with hesitant cloppings of hooves against the stone, the beasts snorting with unease in the dark. They rode most of the night, up the valley, along the cliffs, to the wells of vision, where the sons of the Village by Long Water went to become men.

  They slept at the bottom of a well, a shaft cut deep into the rock, to avoid the attention of prowling beasts. In the morning, they built a fire in the pit and covered it with stones, and when these were blue-black with heat they poured water on them from buckets, lowered from above. With a hissing like a thousand serpents, the steam rose. “You will be very sick, and I will have to carry you again,” Stefile said, and climbed the ancient rope ladder out of the well, leaving Cara below to await her vision.

  Cara could hear the air move across the mouth of the well, and through the fir trees around the rock. The sun moved overhead, filling the well with hot light, and hot steam wafted over her skin, bringing forth pimples of moisture, as if from the skin of an orange that has been squeezed. It began to trickle down her in streams. All my skin is weeping, she thought blearily. She had had no food since the morning of the previous day. Stefile had rice balls to eat. Cara could almost feel them in her mouth, plump and moist and chewy. The hunger would bring the vision more quickly. She poured more water on the stone, and watched the droplets dance with heat.

  In the centre of Cara’s head was a slow, sluggish dullness. She was tired, deeply exhausted by hatred and suspense and mourning, and violence and too many wounds, and by magic, the will it took to stay in the warrior shape of a man. Fatigue was a coiled lump within her. She wanted tranquility. She wanted safety and solace and a chance to mend. She wanted light.

  She saw light in the steam. It seemed to be dazzling, more bright than the sunlight in it. She was drifting in and out of sleep, on the surface of sleep, where there are dreams.

  And suddenly it seemed as if she was on the river. A loud, cheerful, piping little voice was calling out her name. She was hidden in a boat, behind reeds, and it was hot sluggish summer, slow clear water, not roaring spring. “Ssh,” warned a smiling voice above her head, and Cara laughed, giggled a hearty, girlish chuckle. A dragonfly buzzed near her head, and two great white warm hands enfolded her. Cara turned and looked up at the sheltering, kindly, pale presence, the face dim and undefined, that she could never quite see.

  “Ama,” she whispered. “Ama.”

  Suddenly there was a shriek of joy and release, and Cara started awake, and in the blazing mist, rising out of it on its hind legs, a white horse reared up, and tossed its white mane, and shrieked again. It spun about itself in excitement, and trotted around the perimeter of the well, white tail lashing, and it halted in front of Cara, blinking with dark, kindly eyes. Cara held out her hand to it, and it shyly advanced, head down. Cara felt its gentle muzzle in her palm, flinching and soft and warm. She felt the surge of its breath, in and out. Summer wind. The sound of reeds.

  And a high unsteady voice began to read to her. “Find the seventh cavern,” it began, and Cara knew at once what it was reading. “Find the seventh cavern, with the door of carved stone.” Cara saw herself, slim and naked and pubescent as she once had been, climb onto the white horse’s back.

  Suddenly she was riding the horse, flying on its back, through the steam of clouds. “Go through the door, the carved door, and through the doors, the seven doors, beyond it, the doors in the hall of stone.” Cara heard her own adolescent voice read them too, as she read them to her brother Tikki.

  The horse plunged down through rock, brown stone that seemed to part for them like the bead curtains in Cara’s room. “Find the seventh chamber and the casket made of lapis lazuli, and in the casket you will find the story of Keekamis Haliki, hero, and the things he did in the Better Times.”

  Cara saw the casket, and her heart caught. It was blue as the sky, with hints of green, glimmering with light reflected on its carvings. Her heart rose to her mouth as the lid of the casket rose. In a row, like bricks, were the seven tablets of the Book, the One book, the truest copy of it, long lost, made by Keekamis Haliki himself in clay.

  She read it again, and it seemed that she understood the story for the first time, understood the loss and confusion Keekamis Haliki felt when his friend died, how he mourned not just for him, but for all of Humankind doomed by the Serpent to die, and how he rode—rode a white horse—down into the underworld, and met the Serpent, and learned how life and death and love came into being, and how the Serpent hated all three, even death which was its only creation. She read about Hadam and Hawwah, the Father and the Mother of Humankind and how the Serpent deceived them, in the Garden that had been the world. She read how Keekamis wrested the Flower from the Serpent, the White Flower that was Life, and would return life to humankind and all the beasts, that was all that remained of the Tree of Life. She read how he had fought the Serpent, and won the Flower, and then lost it again when he slept. She read very quickly, knowing the words.

  Suddenly Cara was pulled through chilling mist, as icy as the breath of winter, and the white horse’s breath caked its muzzle with a frozen, opaque sheath.

  And Cara approached the coils of the Serpent, saw them clenched around its prize, and she saw the Flower through all of the Serpent’s folds, like the sun through light cloud, clearly defined and bright. The layers of coil were rendered clear by its light, like jelly. The light reflected from the jewel-like scales in many colours.

  Cara’s heart cried out for it, for the Flower was beautiful, the Flower was peace and kindness and flowing talk and music and good harvests. It was flocks of birds rising into the air, and clouds of blossoms on apple trees, and women’s breasts, and the bursting forth of water and life; the light tread of feet, the mouth ready to smile, the eyes dilating with interest and response. It was the gambolling of calves in fields when released in the spring, the eagle sheltering its young under its wings. It was the love of wolves and the smile on the face of the dolphin, inexplicably loving humankind. It was the gift of words, the gift of fire, the gift of mind. It was life, eternal life, obdurate, unworried, steadfast, always blossoming outward, never closing, always bearing fruit.

  The lid of the casket closed.

  Cara was back in the pit, bereft of the Flower, and the sun had moved, and everything seemed dark and shrivelled and sour, like fruit that was rotting.

  The white horse was walking backward, into the stream, a tear on its veined, fleshy neck.

  “Don’t go,” murmured Cara. “Please don’t go yet.” The horse shook its silent head, eyes on Cara, and was lost in the mist.

  Cara screamed. She screamed for water and for what the world had become, screamed for what had been lost and for humankind, who died, and for herself who was primitive and deadly.

  Stefile came down for her, calling her name with worry, and Cara collapsed against her and wept.

  “I told you it was folly! Was it terrible?”

  “No, no,” Cara wept.

  “It looks like it. Moon-faced! Look at you! Here.” She passed Cara a waterbag. The water in it was hot from the sun, and poured out of Cara’s mouth as she guzzled it. “I don’t suppose you got your answer.”

  Cara broke off drinking suddenly and wiped her mouth, and forehead. Panting for breath, she scowled in thought. “Yes,” she said, warily at first, and then with more certainty. “Yes, Stef, I did. I did.” She let water slop out of the bag, over her head.

  “Then why the weeping?”

  Cara let the water run off her. She turned to Stefile, with haunted eyes, and opened her mouth to try
to explain. “I can’t tell you, Stef,” she said. “Come on. Help me up.”

  “Up? You’re staying there to rest!”

  “I’ll sleep on the horse.” Cara struggled to her feet.

  “On a horse? You haven’t eaten!”

  “On the way, too.”

  “Where? Where are we going?”

  “To the Other Country. To the Wensenara. But I have a promise to keep first.” So saying, Cara turned and began, shakily, to climb.

  They returned to the Important House. Cara wandered through each of its rooms. She had a tender, dazed look to her that Stefile found annoying. She wanted this horrible business to be brisk, but Cara seemed to be saying goodbye to everything. “Sister!” Sister!” the worms joyfully cried out when Cara entered the library. She went through each of the books, stroking the pages as she turned them. Stefile did not understand books. They frightened her and made her feel angry that other people should know how they worked. “Hurry up!” she said. “It’s the dregs of the day already, and I’m not sleeping here!” Cara silently passed her three books. Stefile left the room, trying not to look at Cara’s family and packed bedding and clothes in a fury.

  Cara laid out bowls of food and jugs of beer on the library table, and her father’s favourite books. She stabbed the books with a knife, to kill them, and stabbed her father’s heavy boots and his most handsome coat. “You will walk again, Ata,” she promised him. He did not reply. “If hungry people come and eat the food before you can, try to forgive them. Don’t haunt them. I will come back with more.”

  Her father, stone-faced, turned his head, knowing what was to come, unable to look at what had once been his daughter. Caro, who no longer spoke at all, sent back by his wife’s family in a cart like night soil, glared at his sister balefully. Tikki’s eyes, tortured and dim, looked into Cara’s, and he nodded silently that, yes, this was right, this was the only thing to be done.

  “How old do you want to be?” Cara asked him.

  “Ten,” he replied. “When we were children and father was young. Meet me beside the river. We will play a game then, in the reeds.”

  “Yes. Yes,” she agreed. “Perhaps that will be soon, eh? I hope so. Father. Caro. I can’t kiss any of you. I’m sorry.”

  She poured pitch over them, arms extended away from her body in case the worms could leap. “Yes, Sister, yes!” they cried out, gleefully. Cara lit a torch that had also been soaked in pitch. She did not look at the faces of her family as she touched them with it, tenderly, like a flower, until the flames caught. Then she turned and ran out of the house, stumbling out of the doorway, fumbling for the horse’s reins. “Away, away,” she ordered the beast, and pulled it, laden with bundles down the steps.

  The fire spread across the broad chests of her kinsmen and trickled down the legs of the chairs. Cara could only cover one ear. She could hear behind her the squeals of the worms as they were consumed and set free. She heard no other sound. For her sake, her family would not cry out as, behind her, all her childhood burned.

  The Other Country

  Cara spent each night along the way hunched over a book, near the fire that she had set alight by words alone. Three Sleeps, Stefile, looked over her shoulder, scowling slightly. “How can those chicken tracks mean anything?” she demanded

  “Some of them are pictures. This one here is the sign for peace. It shows a woman under a roof.”

  “Doesn’t look like that to me,” complained Stefile.

  “It was first made long ago. It has changed with much writing. These marks here are signs for sounds. You can write the word for peace with them too, only the writing then is different for each language.”

  “What good does it do you, this reading, then?”

  “This book is teaching me the language of the Other Country. The sound signs will tell me how to make the right noises. That is of use, surely.”

  Stefile shrugged with resentment, and huddled into her furs. “You will teach me how?” she asked in a small, angry voice.

  “When there is time,” Cara promised her. “When there is time.”

  They had to travel along the foothills of the Dragon’s Back. The Northern People lived there. They were smaller and more pale than their conquerors to the South, and they moved deftly in smelly goatskins along the narrow paths. The Northern People were unfriendly, and spoke Our Language in a strange way. Cara and Stefile could not understand what they said; the directions they gave to the trails were sullen and short and misleading. The gates to their fortified houses were not opened when Cara and Stefile called; the travellers were not given food. This was a mistake. Cara and Stefile killed their goats, and stole their mules to carry the packs, and rode through the night to escape, beyond reach. They rode west, towards the lowering sun, slanting orange light through the needle-leafed trees. They rode over squelching boglands and back up on to rocks. Bells rang across great distances, from the necks of the grazing sheep, and there were sudden wafts of billy goat scent as they wormed their way along the paths.

  They came at last to the Unwanted Way, that led through the mountains. It was held by the Unwanted People, who guarded gates and demanded payment for passage. The lace and the jewellery Cara and Three Sleeps offered was more rare to the Unwanted than they pretended. They also demanded some of the dried goat meat that Stefile had made. “Eat your horses,” they told Cara. “Eat them when they die of cold, but sleep inside their bodies first. They will give you one more night.”

  “What about thieves?” Cara asked.

  “Hmm. No thieves. We keep it clear. That’s why you will pay.”

  The Unwanted People attacked Cara and Stefile as they slept that first night by the Lonely River. A sword and a suit of armour, uninhabited by a man, drove them back. Word spread upstream that the warrior and his woman were protected by sorcery. Cara and Stefile were left alone after that, with the seasonal chill.

  It was getting late in the year, into autumn, and the nights in the narrow mountain pass came early and stayed long. Cara and Stefile awoke the first morning in darkness, and lay uncomfortably on the sloping rocks for a very long time before deciding, finally, to move, still in darkness. They travelled after that through the night. The Unwanted People watching from their high shelters saw them take turns sleeping on a horse’s back while the other led, walking with the reins. Before them, to light the way, was a flickering tongue of flame. It burned alone, in mid-air.

  By day, the stone was grey and cold and bare. In the shadows were patches of unmelted snow. On the lower peaks, snow was a grey and white speckled film, and beyond those on the great single mountains, snow was a thick, flawless, creamy coating.

  “When the Dragon wakes, the mountains will stir,” Cara recited from the One Book. “The snow in his icy, sleeping breath.”

  “The mountains here look like clouds,” Stefile said.

  They ran out of food before they were through the pass. They did not want to eat the little mule that carried their tent and furs; the horses would have to carry the things then, and they would have to walk all the time. They spent three miserable days and two nights without food, wondering if the Unwanted Way led anywhere; if perhaps they had not strayed into some sorcerous trap, a pathway without end, in winter.

  When they finally came upon the Unwanted House, suddenly around a bend in the river, they did not feel any leaping of joy within them. They were too tired. They saw a wall across the pass, a dull grey snaking of stone down one steep slope and up another, and in its midst a small house, a mere heap of stones itself, and a gate. Cara and Stefile did not expect the Unwanted House to feed them; they did not even ask. Cara drew her sword, but did not need it. The gate was open. The gatekeeper watched them pass, his face resting like a wrinkled pouch on his hands. He had been told to let these two go through.

  Cara and Stefile paused on the trail, and looked down. As far as they could see, falling away in layers of hill and valley, was forest, more needle trees, and nestled everywhere among them, lik
e pieces of broken mirror, lakes with rocky islands.

  “Is this the Other Country?” Stefile asked, in disappoint-ment. It did not look in any way extraordinary. Perhaps the forest was thicker and a darker shade of green. She looked behind her, twisting on the blanket that served as a saddle. “And that was the Dragon’s Back.” She blinked, stupid with fatigue and dirt and hunger. “We didn’t even see the Wordy Beast.” The Wordy Beast was the name that common folk gave to Asu Kweetar, because it was said to whisper stories to children in the night.

  An hour later, beside the road, a large rodent stood up as tall as a man’s waist, on its hind legs, to look at them. It had a round face with whiskers and long squirrel teeth and was unafraid because humans did not hunt it, usually. Cara threw her sword at it, and it sped fast as an arrow, but more true, and lodged itself in the beast. Cara and Stefile built a fire with trembling hands, and roasted it. Its flesh was string and tasted metallic, like old dirty pots.

  The first person they came upon was a fisherman, a young boy by a lake. He wore a long, black, heavy coat, fringed with goat hair and embroidered with brightly coloured yarns. His hide boots were also embroidered, fur turned inwards, and had pointed toes that curled upwards. He had a trumpet made of horn and a black hood that came to a high peak, but that was pulled back from his blond head. Fishing nets were about his feet. His skin was as pale as milk.

  “Ugh. They are all Northern People here,” Stefile said with displeasure. “You think the Galu came from here? They are pale enough.”

  Cara tried to speak to the boy in the Other Tongue. She asked him where the city of the Wensenara was. The boy looked back at her, his face absolutely still. Frightened, his mouth taut, the boy replied. The way he said Wensenara was very different, and none of the other words as he sounded them made sense to Cara. He pointed down the road, however, and Cara followed that.

  “Did you understand? Did you understand?” Stefile deman-ded, and Cara admitted that she hadn’t.

  Huge creatures prowled in the woods at sunset, great fearless loping things, that walked on four legs with lumberings of fatty flesh but could also walk upright, like men. The beasts gathered by the river; Cara and Stefile saw them fishing, salmon impaled on their claws.