by Geoff Ryman
“Is that a wonder enough for you?” Cara asked.
“Hmmm. It is different, but not wonderful.”
“What were you expecting?” Cara chuckled.
“Oh, I don’t know. Something like the songs. The songs are lies.”
“There will be marvels,” Cara promised. “If I succeed.”
They came to a village. The houses were made of wood and were very ornate, a line of patterned carvings along the crest of each roof. The wood was varnished or whitewashed, then overlaid with stylised paintings, silhouettes in red or black of the Serpent, or the Whale or simply of men in log boats fishing with spears. On the side of one of the buildings was an enormous pictograph for the word Inn.
It was an ordinary house that took lodgers, when there were any. The widow who ran it flung up her hands in excitement when she heard Cara’s speech, and bustled them into the house, and sat them down with bowls of rich stew, wiping her hands on her apron. She clattered about on her wooden floor, in wooden shoes, and her cheeks were plump and very pink—Cara wondered if that was because she ate salmon. She sat down with them, bursting with interest and asked them many questions, repeatedly, until they understood her. She could hardly believe the Unwanted had not robbed them. No one went through the pass now, she made them understand. No one wanted to go to the Desert, which was what she called Cara’s country. It was a place full of evil and discontent. When Cara asked her how many bandits there were on this road, the woman flung up her hands again. Bandits, here, north of the hills? Oh, no, there were not bandits here. When Cara and Stefile made plain they had no money to pay her, the woman simply shrugged and replied that she had expected that. The cutting down of a tree and its dismemberment into logs would be payment enough.
As Cara worked at the logs with wedge and hammer the next morning, she asked the widow the way to the city of the Wensenara. The woman’s happy face went more solemn then. It was not a city, she said, but a mountain fastness. It was called the Wensenari, which simply meant Place of the Wensenara, or the Yahstranavski, which meant the Fortress that Needs No Defending. She drew it for them with a piece of charcoal, on a log, a tall strangely elongated building with many towers. A person could only enter it by being pulled up in a basket, she said. Then she asked cautiously, why they wanted to visit the powerful sisters.
“Because,” Cara was able to answer her, “we want our land to be as peaceful and hospitable as yours.”
This pleased the widow, but did not entirely untrouble her. “I hope you do not bring disruption,” she said. “I also hope you do not find it. The Wensenara are not evil, but neither are they good.” She drew a map to it on the inside of Cara’s book, and gave them warm cakes to eat on the way, and stood on her porch, waving, as they rode away.
There were many Inns on the road that ran along the base of the foothills, and a gathering number of pilgrims travelling on it to the fastness of the Secret Rose. There were women in black riding side-saddle on donkeys led by their families. There were farmers with entourages, and beggars who limped alone on crutches. There were sick people, with rotting feet and simple toothache. There were fear-haunted men who had lost their holdings to a scheming cousin. There were so many of them that Cara and Stefile, who had no money, had to sleep in the fields beside the Inns and work for what was left over in the great cauldrons of the kitchens. In the morning, with the first light, all the pilgrims would leave together in a stream. They told jokes and stories, and sang songs that Cara and Stefile could not follow. The road was never empty.
On a day when the first real bite of winter was in the air, they first saw the fortress. Their breath came out of them as vapour. Stefile tried to blow it in rings, like smoke from her pipe. Through the steam of her own breath, Cara suddenly saw it, a blur of shadow on a cleft of rock, blue and grey, impossibly high on a distant cliff. “That’s it,” said Cara, quietly. She thought it would take an hour to reach it. It took the rest of the day.
The road wound through a thick forest. From time to time Cara glimpsed the Wensenari through the trees. She saw wooden walkways and ramshackle rooms perched out from the walls on stilts, rows of windows, and golden domes in segments like oranges on towers, with sunlight streaming over them in rays.
The pace of the caravan quickened. The songs died. The pilgrims walked with longer strides, and kept track of each other out of the corners of their eyes. Ahead, Cara could see the end of the forest, as if it were a tunnel. “Hee-yah!” cried a man in a wooden chariot further up the path, and his mules started forward with spurts of dust under their hooves, and began to trot.
“This is it,” grunted a man, and flung his bag over his shoulder, and ran. The caravan broke apart. Donkeys were whipped and their riders clung, rolling, to their backs. The plump young woodspeople broke into an intent, stumbling run over the uneven ground. An old woman called out a name, peevishly, over and over.
Leaning over, murmuring to their beasts, patting them, Cara and Stefile kept their beasts to a skittish trot, as people pushed past them. Then someone slapped Cara’s horse, hard, from behind, and it bolted forward, and she hauled back the reins, seeing ahead of her the naked legs of the people it would trample, and it tossed its head, and snorted, and danced sideways. “Leave the horse alone!” Cara roared, and looked behind to see who had done it. When she looked around she was out of the forest. She saw the Wensenari, as tall and thin and stretched in its narrow cleft as the widow had drawn it. She saw something else as well.
In the afternoon chill and shadow, all the way up a gentle slope of broken rock, was a vast encampment. There was row on row of tents and lean-tos made of blankets. Listless smoke from many fires hung in the air. People sat unmoving around them. Beyond the tents was a solid unmoving mass of people in dark Northern dress, thousands of them, waiting for the Wensenara, each one of them ill or old or in some way desperate.
“Oh, God!” cried a man with a bag, and flung it angrily to the ground. All heart gone, some of the pilgrims simply stared at it. Some wept and held their heads, who had been singing just that morning. Others slowed to a despondent, trudging walk.
The people of the encampment rose to their feet.
“Stay there. You stay there. You wait your turn!” they shouted, wild-eyed. They picked up rocks from the ground to throw. The man in the wooden chariot rode on, up the path, as if to plough through the camp. People leapt out of his way, and shouting curses, hurled stones after him. The mules turned, the chariot swerved, skidding sideways into a fire, knocking over pots of water, and riding over the corner of a tent, pulled it down. One of the mules stumbled, its legs collapsing under it, and it was dragged, until its brethren resolutely stopped. The driver lashed them furiously and shouted. Too late to realise his danger, he looked behind him. The people in black closed over him, and pulled him from the chariot, and snatched at his goods. He disappeared under their hands, which rose and fell, and rose and fell, rocks clenched in them.
“I dealt with the fool who struck your horse,” said Stefile, drawing up beside Cara. The men from the camp advanced towards them.
“You go no further,” one of them, bearded and dirty, told them. Cara understood most of what he said. “If you got a tent, pitch it here.”
“How many days do you wait,” she asked him.
“Weeks,” replied the man. “There’s a line of sorts ahead, but those are the people who have been here longest.”
“How many a day do they let up?”
“No one. They take names, help some, maybe ten a day. There is no food here, and no one to sell any. You’d best go back.”
Ahead of them, the crowd was withdrawing from the broken chariot. Its driver lay bloody on the stones, half naked.
“I do not come for myself,” said Cara, clucking her tongue at the horse for it to move. “I come for my people.”
“And I come for my son!” exclaimed the man, and grabbed the reins of Cara’s horse. Cara sliced through the air with her sword, just in front of the man’s ey
es. He gave an involuntary yelp and leapt back.
“Stef,” she said, “there is going be a fight. Be ready.” The shield and the spear rolled slowly through the air towards Stefile. One of the men jumped and caught the spear instead, to chuckles and small cheers from the jealous, gathering crowd.
Without Cara even looking around, quite calmly it seemed, the spear began to ascend. It rose up through the air, the man still clinging to it. He gave a laugh of mingled panic and amazement, and started to kick as if to jog the spear from whatever held it up. It went from twice the height of a man, to three, then four, five, six times, until it was too high for him to let go. From all around them came a stirring of the crowd. The dispirited people who waited, squatting on the stone, stood up and craned their necks. The man stopped kicking.
“Let me down! Let me down!” he called, his voice already far away, but people could see how wild and wide was his stare. Someone stupidly gave a cry of rage before trying to pull Stefile off her horse from behind. With a snarl, Stefile spun around using the sharp edge of the shield to slash across his arm. He gave a cry and fell back, a great fat man in tatters. He looked at the fleshy gash, and the welling of blood on his arm and tried again. With a dull ringing like metal, the shield struck him full across the forehead, and blood quickly drenched his face. He settled back into the arms of his companions.
“I have killed an Angel,” Stefile warned them, though they did not understand Our Language.
“I can’t hold. Let me down!” the man on the spear wailed in terror, as high now as if he stood on the mountain. Suddenly the spear plummeted towards the earth. The pilgrims screamed, and beat each other back to get out of its way. Just before hitting, the spear pulled up, and shook the man off, and he fell free, tumbling onto the stones, collapsing on his own legs which were folded under him, and he gave a cry of pain.
“We do not want to hurt people!” Cara shouted at them. “We do not come for ourselves.” She added to Stefile in Our Language. “We’ll try to ride around them all.” The spear floated tamely into Stefile’s hand. “We are Wensenara!” Cara shouted again. “Wensenara!”
The word seemed to spread all around them, like the wind. Cara tapped the side of her horse with her heel, and began to move forward. The men gaped, and drew back, and then parted for her. They had seen the magic. “Lady? Lady?” asked a woman walking quickly beside Stefile. “If you are Wensenara, Lady, help me!” She had no teeth and encrustations around her mouth.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. No. Nothing,” Stefile replied, shaking her head.
“Take a message for me, Sir!” someone else called, to Cara. “My village. There is a plague!”
People followed them, calling them. Cara led many people around the tents, to the winding rows of waiting people. “Wait to your turn. You wait. You wait!” people in the line shouted at the newcomers.
“We have been here as long as you!”
There was a sudden general rush. All the crowd surged forward. The fragile order of precedence was broken; the lines mingled and dissolved; people pushed back; there were screams. “There is a baby here!” a woman shouted, outraged. Girls with swollen bellies who had waited weeks, wailed in dismay, and gave up hope, and shook their heads. A fight erupted, a furious flurry of fists. A hen, escaped from somewhere, ran over the surface of the crowd, over many heads and shoulders, its wings beating wildly. No one could move. Cara’s heart sank at the disruption she had caused, and at what it might cost her. She stood up in the saddle and saw, over all the heads, a wooden table and two women in black behind it. They made sharp, angry gestures with their hands. Those who heard what they said, held up their hands beseechingly, and implored them. The women gave their heads short, quick shakes, and gathering up their skirts, strode back away from the table to hangings of thick rope and pulled savagely. High overhead, and faint, a bell sounded.
Cara repeated to herself, over and over, the Spell of Sitting in Air, imagining it as a net holding her and Stefile and their animals. Indeed, very suddenly, her horse was lifted up, and then dropped, with a wobbly, see-saw motion. Its weight was too great. Cara narrowed the focus of the spell, clenched it like a fist around the things that had to be carried.
Like divers in a slow arc, Stefile and Cara rose up from the horses, followed by a clatter of their plates and weapons, and a stream of furs. For Cara, all sound was dead, all movement floating and dreamlike. She saw the people below reach up in anger, a slow, stifled grasping. She pulled her feet up under herself, and glided over the top of the table. She stretched her legs out again towards the ground, and landed gently beside the sisters, and all the harsh noise and speed of the world started up again.
“You! You caused this! Go away!” one of the Wensenara ordered her.
“I am Wensenara. I must talk to the Great Mother.”
“You will talk to no one.” The woman, furious, frightened, turned to the crowd. “None of you will talk to anyone. Accept your fates!” Behind her, the ropes were sliding upwards. She glanced nervously overhead; a kind of wooden carriage, not a basket at all, was being lowered towards them.
“I am Wensenara,” Cara said to the other sister.
“You are a man!”
“I look like a man. Spell of the Butterfly. Lalarolalalara . . .” Cara began to speak the spell.
“Ssst! All right you are a Bud.”
“Blossom.”
“Blossom, Blossom, does it matter?” The woman strode forward to join her sister. “We will be back. We will be back tomorrow, but there must be order, or we will stay away. And we will see only the sick, no one else!”
The carriage was now nearly down. As suddenly as if wiped by a giant hand, the crowd was swept back, their feet skittering over the stones. Those who fell were held up, and carried along. The Wensenara silently moved their lips.
“We’re going to jump into it,” Cara murmured to Stefile in Our Language.
Ropes whined through pulleys in the van; it seemed to swing to a halt and then hover, just above the ground. The Wensenara did not wait for it to settle. Pressing their robes down between their legs, they swung their feet over the sides of the carriage, and nimbly stepped into it.
Stefile knelt to gather up their furs. “Leave them!” hissed Cara.
With a creak and a crackling of rope that rose like lightning all along the distance above their heads, the van began to rise again. The people wailed and pleaded. Hard eyes were upon Cara and Stefile, promising revenge. The carriage rose chest high from the ground.
“Now!” said Cara.
They leapt forward, grabbing hold of the thick, smooth, varnished edge. As one, the crowd and the Wensenara cried “No!” Released from the magic that held them back, the people poured forward, and grabbed Cara and Stefile by their hanging legs. The carriage tipped to one side; its bottom edge scraped along the cliff face, and the two sisters were thrown from their feet.
Cara’s mind felt like a whip, lashing out, and she felt the sword and the shield and the spear cut and slice and gouge. The weapons made sounds through the air like sudden gusts of wind, and the flock of people below shrieked. Hands let go of Cara’s legs, and the carriage seemed to leap free. Cara made to pull herself into the carriage, and met something as solid and real as the cliff. It pushed her back. It seeped under her fingers and began to prize them off. Stefile squealed in fear, “I can’t hold!” Across from them, faces hard, eyes staring, the Wensenara mouthed spells in unison.
Stefile fell. Cara caught her in the Spell of Sitting in Air, held them both. Magic reached out of her, and caught hold of something, and grappled with it, pushing it back, out from under her fingers, away from Stefile. She felt it give. One of the Wensenara gasped, as if in pain or surprise, Cara wrested something free, and with a little cry, Stefile sailed smoothly into the carriage.
Cara felt power rear out of her in rage, like a dragon’s head, and the Wensenara were driven back. She shouted in rage, and it was like breathing fire, and the Wensenara turned t
heir heads away, and they were miserably crushed, pushed deep into the cushions that padded the benches of the van.
“Stop it! Stop it! All right!” one of the sisters yelled.
Cara swung up into the carriage and settled, sitting next to Stefile, and she smiled with power. She felt thunderous and channelled, like a torrent. “I don’t know what spells you have, my sisters,” she said, “but I am beginning to realise that I am a very great sorceress indeed, and that I can probably beat you.”
One sister was helping the other to sit up. “Threats will not get you in to see the Great Mother.”
“Then tell me something that will,” replied Cara. “I am Wensenara. I shouldn’t have to do these things. I don’t want to. But how else was I to get this far? I could have waited down there for weeks—you would have left me down there. Here is a letter. It explains why I have come. Please. Give it to the Great Mother.”
The two sisters stared back glumly at her. One of them sniffed. “Well. We will have to tell her you are here, certainly.” With a flick, she took the letter out of Cara’s hand.
For the rest of the long way up, they sat across from each other in discomforted silence. The two sisters held hands, backs erect, very nearly indistinguishable from each other, their heads covered, their finely lined faces as colourless as dumplings.
“Poor horses,” said Stefile, looking over the edge of the van, wind stirring in her hair. The blue shadow of the mountain cut across the valley and the woods. She was thinking of the animals she and Cara had left below. “Those people will eat them, I think.” The furs that had followed them into the van wrapped themselves around her, to stop her shivering in the wind.
The carriage hung from two great leaning wooden towers that creaked and groaned and made snapping noises. It was hoisted to the level of a windswept courtyard, teams of Wensenara grinding two large cranks. The women jammed wooden pegs into the cogs of the device, dashed to two other giant cranks, and turning these, wound the arms upright so that the carriage swung in over the pavement. They ran to catch and steady it, saw Cara, squealed, covered their faces and ran away again, their feet making fluttering noises on the stone like light applause.