"I'm sorry, I don't speak--" Rivka stopped talking, realizing how futile the words were. She pointed to her ear, and then her mouth, and then shook her head. The woman looked troubled, so Rivka added, "Riv," and pointed to herself. "Riv."
"Stella."
Rivka bowed her head again in acknowledgment.
"Ma, pensavo che il tuo nome fosse Isaac?" Then Stella's distress flickered for a moment as she let out a half-chuckle as if laughing at herself for trying again talk to the warrior who clearly couldn't understand.
Rivka caught the name in her question, didn't know how to mime an explanation for using the other name during the contest, and simply nodded. Fine, then -- she would be both of them.
From the look in Stella's eyes, she was intensely thinking. "Isaac -- Abraham, Isaac, Jacob?" she recited.
That was a familiar litany -- the three names of the patriarchs! Rivka's heart quickened.
"Sarah--"
"--Rivka, Rachel, Leah," Rivka finished the names of the four matriarchs with her, heat flooding into her cheeks. Stella worshipped as she did! This was a starting place, because now she knew that even if the languages of their everyday lives weren't the same, they prayed in the same tongue.
Not that this instantly cleared up all difficulties. It didn't do a great deal of good to be able to praise God together a thousand different ways if she couldn't actually communicate about mortal life and its dangers.
Stella stepped closer, took her hand, and motioned for her to stand again. When she spoke again, it was in the language of prayer. "Hear, my people, the Lord is our God; the Lord is one." She wasn't praying -- it was a test.
"Blessed is God's glorious majesty for ever and ever," Rivka answered by rote. She'd certainly never expected to be using the Sh'ma as a password, and this moment had far more to do with the urgencies of the mortal world than any spiritual place. But life on the road was all about using all the weapons in your quiver, even the ones you forgot you had, or didn't think would ever serve.
She pointed at Stella.
"Stella," said Stella, nodding.
Rivka shook her head and pointed to her again.
"Il mio..." Stella replied, seeming to comprehend finally that Rivka meant to talk about something of hers, rather than her specifically.
Next, Rivka referenced the prayer that ushered in the hours of Shabbat, which starts with Come, beloved. "Beloved."
Stella furrowed her brow and shook her head.
Rivka cocked her head in question, but Stella dropped her hand and held both of her own up in the air, shaking her head harder.
No beloved? "Bride?" she tried, which was another word from the Sabbath prayer.
Stella shook her head again.
"Beloved," said Rivka again, then showed Stella her purse, then pointed to herself. Your beloved paid me.
For a third time, Stella shook her head. She pointed to herself, smiled as she shook her head as she repeated, "Beloved." She had no beloved, and she was happy to have none. Then she shrugged, her hands in the air again, and shook her head. She was happy if she would never have one.
Rivka pointed to her purse again, and Stella's face grew questioning. Rivka looked around the tent for a moment, then realized Stella's dress had plenty of blue in it. She pointed to one of her eyes, then to the dress. Then she pointed to her other eye. She didn't even have to finish pointing to her own brown clothing before a change came over Stella that startled even a seasoned warrior like Rivka.
Fear pulsing through her face, Stella jumped back, shaking. "Vetro colorato! Il diavolo di vetro colorato!" She stepped closer to Rivka again and seized both of her hands, shaking her head violently.
"Okay, so not your fiancé, then," Rivka muttered to herself in her own language.
Stella looked deeply into her eyes and chose from their legends the one name they'd all been trained since childhood to fear, the villain who'd wanted them all dead, whose name the children blotted out with noisemakers every time the legend was told. "Haman."
Rivka needed a moment. The food in her purse felt like poison, and she suddenly wanted to set it all on fire and kick it off the side of the cliff.
Well, that wouldn't do anybody any good. She needed to tell Stella that everything was going to be okay. In her mind, she grasped at the legends.
Rivka knew she couldn't say Esther while preserving the fiction of her maleness. Besides, there was a better match, even though he was from a different story -- a figure who had led his people to freedom. She pointed to herself and said, "Moses."
***
Stella visibly relaxed when Rivka had gotten her away from her abductors on the cliff. "Leah? Leah, Rachel, Joseph," Stella said as they began the hike back down the cliff to Port Saltspray. She was pointing to herself at "Joseph." Then she pointed back down the cliff at the scurrying inhabitants of the port. "Leah." She was using the relationships of people in the old stories to explain who was waiting for her in the city.
"Your aunt is down there," Rivka interpreted to herself in her own tongue. Clearly, Stella was a niece and not a nephew, but Rivka couldn't think of any aunt-and-niece pairs in their common legends, and she surmised that Stella probably couldn't, either, especially on demand.
Next, Stella pointed to herself, then pointed over to the ocean. No -- not to the ocean, her pointing finger was arched upward, as if she meant "across the sea."
"Zembluss?"
Stella nodded vigorously.
Rivka pointed at herself and then to the far north.
Stella nodded again in understanding.
Stella was keeping pace with her pretty well, but she was breathing heavily even over easy ground. Rivka found a flattish rock and patted it, indicating that Stella could sit down and rest for a little. Stella practically collapsed onto it, and Rivka realized she didn't know the last time Stella had eaten.
Rivka took another bread roll out of her purse and offered it over. Stella accepted it gratefully and inhaled it in two bites, almost choking in her eagerness. Next, Rivka gave her a swig from her canteen.
Soon, Stella was feeling well enough to continue, and she hopped back on her feet and started back down the trail.
Rivka made sure to let Stella rest more now that it had clicked in her mind that she needed it. She also kept her eyes peeled for native plants that looked edible, although so close to the sea there wasn't much. The only thing she found were the salty green stems that crunched like a vegetable, but Stella wasn't choosy and nibbled at them as they walked.
The women also passed the time teaching each other their culture's word for bird, tree, and whatever else was easy to indicate by pointing. Rivka concentrated on committing the newfound language to memory, since she was trying to travel to Zembluss for her next career move.
As the walk unfolded, she was preoccupied with how different it was to carry on an everyday conversation in a language she'd previously only used for prayer. A lifetime of weekly religious services had given her no way to ask questions about Stella's life or to entertain her with stories of her own adventures on the road.
There were people far away, even farther south than Zembluss, who spoke this language every day -- they used it to buy fruit at the marketplace and have arguments over the weather and ask their sweethearts to marry them. Rivka thought about them now and wondered if she'd make it that far south in her journeys.
Still, there were some conversations that could be cobbled together from prayer words. "Beloved?" Stella asked, looking at Rivka curiously and pointing to her as she spoke. "Bride?"
Coming from some women, Rivka felt a special weight in questions like that, since she was posing as a man. Not so from Stella. Her questions and her presence felt simply like friendship.
Part of the services for the yearly Day of Atonement, just after New Year's, contained a line about "those who perish in fire." That would have been a perfect explanation, but when Rivka scraped around in her mind for the words, she could only remember them in her own language. Inst
ead, Rivka answered about Isaac by reciting the beginning of the mourning prayer. "Exalted and hallowed be God's great name in the world which God created, according to plan."
Stella looked a little bit shocked, but reached her hand over and squeezed Rivka's in comfort.
***
"I can't thank you enough. You wouldn't believe how much I've given this town's useless police in bribes, but of course it didn't do any good. I didn't know where next to turn!" Stella's aunt had a heavy accent, but at least she could speak the local language. She and Rivka were standing in the back garden of a small but expensive inn that overlooked the water.
"Tell me about the war in Zembluss," said Rivka. "I was hoping to get passage there with my horse -- I hear both sides are looking for mercenaries."
"It's a terrible thing, terrible." The older woman's face darkened. "Theaters turned into garrisons, women no longer safe in the streets -- I've lost so many friends. Some have died, but others -- monsters for one side or for the other. It was all I could do to get away with Stella and start over."
"I promise I won't be the kind of soldier who makes the land unsafe for its own women." Sometimes Rivka's heart hurt.
"Yes, I know that." Stella's aunt took both Rivka's hands in hers. "If Stella wanted a husband, I'd want for her someone like you."
"Thank you, of course," said Rivka with a tone of extreme deference. "So I understood her correctly that she doesn't want marriage? We spoke on the cliffs, but we weren't always communicating."
"No, she really doesn't ever want to get married!" said the aunt. "I even thought, you know, maybe she doesn't like a man, then she can have a female companion. I had someone like that once. But no, not even that... she says she's complete with family and friends."
"There's all kinds of people in the world," Rivka agreed. "Will she be safe now?"
"She needs to learn the language; this much, it is certain. But maybe she will learn another language instead. This is not a good place to settle." The woman picked idly at a stray rose petal, which was spoiling on a nearby bush and about to fall off its flower anyway. "We will move on, to a safer town, with better police."
"I think that's the best decision," said Rivka. "It will take a lot to clean this place up."
"It's not all terrible," said Stella's aunt. She cupped one of the roses on the bush in her hand and dragged it, still growing on its stem, closer to Rivka. "Smell this."
Rivka bent down and filled her nose with fragrance. She allowed herself this moment of luxury, then stood up straight once again. The job wasn't done yet.
"Tell me about the man who hired me."
***
Half past midnight, a masked figure astride a dragon flew to the top floor of Port Saltspray's most exclusive hotel. Seizing the fancy molded windows, on which sculpted representations of dolphins cavorted through the town's eponymous salt spray, Rivka easily swung herself inside. She left the dragon -- ransomed tonight with money from Stella's grateful aunt -- plastered against the side of the building like a gargantuan moth, and crept with practiced silence toward the man sleeping on his back in the bed before her.
With calculating suddenness, she seized his right arm and pinned it to the mattress.
He awoke instantly and reached for something under his pillow with his left hand. But she'd anticipated this and flipped the dagger from his hand just as quickly as he wielded it. He glared up at her with one blue eye and one brown as she squatted on his chest.
"Thank you for confirming for me that you can use your left arm," Rivka growled. "So can I." Still holding him down with her right arm, she socked him hard with her left fist.
"What's the matter with you? You missed our rendezvous." He looked up at her dispassionately, trying to trick her with a disarming tone. "What do you care about my arm? I would have paid you handsomely."
"To help you kidnap an innocent woman, you mean!" Rivka shook him and dug her heel into his gut. "I am nobody's pawn. She wasn't your fiancée at all, you chazzer. She was an innocent woman you tried to use me to help kidnap, to ransom or to rape -- or both. You recognized her and her aunt as Zembluss nobility who came here to get away from the civil war, and figured she'd be easy pickings, especially when someone else had already done the hard part."
"Ooh, it knows how to talk," the man taunted.
"Is that all you think I am -- hired brawn with no head?" Rivka shouted. "Maybe you should be the one with no head."
"Maybe you should be the one with no tongue," the man retorted in a threatening whisper, struggling against her.
"But then you had to find a patsy, someone to do the work for you. You wore that fancy coat two sizes too big, knowing it would make you look like a weakling if it didn't fit, and you approached the first desperate thug you could find -- or so you thought. You couldn't go up into the mountains yourself and enter the fight because everyone in the mountain clan has a price on your head. Just like both sides of the war in Zembluss do." Rivka snorted. "I don't know why -- I wouldn't pay for something that ugly."
"You're no prize yourself, barbarian."
"Exactly." Her voice was bearlike; she had claws to match. "But you made a big mistake when you drew attention to yourself with me. I want that bounty. I need money far too badly to be scared of your reputation, Stained-Glass Devil."
The man chuckled. "Oh, they told you about me?"
"Stella's aunt told me everything -- your crimes back in Zembluss, what you've been up to since you came here... I made her stop. I only have time to hear about so much rape and murder in one day."
"Then the old bitch should have warned you to stay on your guard!" At that, the man sprang up like an arrow launched from a bowstring.
Rivka was on her guard, but he was a fierce adversary. She'd come in here expecting a fight, but she'd never fought someone so terrifyingly cavalier about his own safety before. He'd rather he get hurt as long as it enabled him to hurt her. She was gladder than ever that she'd made sure to ask Stella's opinion first before simply bringing her down to him like a butcher's boy with a sack of lamb chops.
She unsheathed her sword, but he kicked it away, and it landed on the other side of the room with a dull clang. She glanced out at the window as best she could, but the dragon had vanished. Most likely, her mysteriously waning powers had necessitated a trip back down to the ground so that she could collapse back into her horse form without plummeting to her death. Not that she could have been much help even as a dragon -- there was no way she could have fit inside the window anyway.
Rivka poured all her best techniques into fighting the Stained-Glass Devil, but somehow he got the better of her and both his hands wound up around her throat. She kicked at him and tried to pull his hands away, but he was evidently used to this. Blood thundered in her head, and a wave of naked panic ripped through her.
But she had come into this room expecting to fight, whereas he'd been asleep, and she was still one step ahead of him. Out from where she'd stashed it came the dagger he'd kept under his pillow, the one he'd tried to use on her when she'd first roused him. She drove it into the side of his throat.
He let out a horrid little noise and released her, clutching at the wound.
In his final seconds, she grabbed her cloth mask and ripped it from her face in anger. "Here's the woman I promised you."
The Stained-Glass Devil fell to the floor, dead. Rivka stood at his body, breathing heavily and pawing at her mauled windpipe. She was unmasked, and she was thoroughly spattered with the blood of the man she'd killed. This was how the dragon found Rivka when she returned to the window, her strength renewed.
"Oh, there you are, you big goof," said Rivka. It was hard to talk. "Hey, I need your help with him."
***
Rivka lounged in the beer garden, dressed in the finest set of leather armor she could find. She had made herself another mask and even treated herself to new underthings. In front of her was the world's biggest pile of chicken livers, some carrot sticks providing a hilariously
ineffective protest against decadence, and a tankard of something dark and sweet and strong.
Nearby, the fiddle player from the other day was sitting on the curb eagerly eating chicken wings. Rivka had bought them for her in appreciation of the inspiration she'd provided on the night before the fight. Before the many fights.
And, best of all, the horse-dragon-something Rivka called her best friend was standing just outside the beer garden, swishing her tail at the flies and watching Rivka eat.
She leaned her chair backward precariously and fed the horse a carrot stick. The beast deserved as many carrots as Rivka deserved chicken livers; this morning after flying Rivka back up the mountain to claim the bounty on her midnight capture, she'd stood guard in her dragon form as the exhausted warrior slept for hours on a secluded area of the beach. But even if she hadn't, Rivka was gladder than anything to have won her freedom.
And Rivka made quite the impression up there on the cliff face too! Yesterday, she'd trudged in on foot, in dusty clothing, one of over half a dozen warriors who all looked as fearsome as she. Today, she'd ridden in just before dawn, blood-spattered, confident, and otherworldly, on the back of a dragon. Many of the mountain folk had only seen dragons before in the distance, out over the sea as the more marine-oriented of the beasts hunted dolphins. Now the people hid behind the trees, peering at her, their voices a rumble of fascination as they chattered about her and gawked at her great black-green beast. Dragon was large enough to carry three people on her back, and Rivka heard more than one of them compare her wings to the fins of a swordfish.
This time, as she handed over the body of the man who had come all the way from Zembluss to cause them so much grief, she gave them her real name, Riv. They would be talking for years of the mysterious masked warrior with two names, who had arrived one morning to win a combat tournament and came back when it was barely the next to deliver their most-wanted criminal.
Tales from Outer Lands Page 3