The Executioness

by Tobias S. Buckell

  I had to steady myself to banish these thoughts, so I wobbled a step forward.

  I raised the axe high, so that I would only need to let it fall to do its work, and as I did, the crowd quieted in anticipation.

  I let the axe fall.

  It swung toward the vulnerable nape of the man’s neck as if the blade knew what it was doing.

  And then the man shifted, ever so slightly.

  I twisted the handle to compensate, just a twitch to guide the blade, and the curving edge of the axe buried itself in the man’s back at an angle on the right. It sank into shoulder meat and fetched up against bone with a sickening crunch.

  It had all gone wrong.

  Blood flew back up the handle, across my hands, and splattered against my leather apron.

  The man screamed. He thrashed in the chains, a tortured animal, almost jerking the axe out of my blood-slippery hands.

  “Gods, gods, gods,” I said, terrified and sick. I yanked the axe free. Blood gushed down the man’s back and he screamed even louder.

  The crowd stared. Anonymous oval faces, hardly blinking.

  I raised the axe quickly, and brought it right back down on him. It bit deep into his upper left arm, and I had to push against his body with my foot to lever it free. He screamed like a dying animal, and I was crying as I raised the axe yet again.

  “Borzai will surely consider this before he sends you to your hall,” I said, my voice scratchy and loud inside the hood. I took a deep breath and counted to three.

  I would not miss again. I would not torture this dying man any more.

  I must imagine I am only chopping wood, I thought.

  I let the axe fall once again. I let it guide itself, looking at where it needed to be at the end of the stroke.

  The blade struck the man’s neck, cleaved right through it, and buried itself in the wooden platform below.

  The screaming stopped.

  My breath tasted of sick. I was panting, and terrified as the Mayor approached me. He leaned close, and I braced for some form of punishment for doing such a horrible thing.

  “Well done!” the Mayor said. “Well done indeed. What a show, what a piece of butchery! The point has well been made!”

  He shoved several hard-edged coins into my hand, and then walked over to the edge of the platform. The crowd cheered, and I yanked my axe free and escaped.

  But everywhere I turned the crowd shoved coppers into the pockets of my cape, and the guards smacked me on the back and smiled.

  When I turned the corner from the square I leaned over a gutter, pulled the hood up as far as I dared, and threw up until my stomach hurt.

  Afterwards, I looked down and opened the clenched fist without the axe in it. Four pieces of silver gleamed back at me from the blood-soaked hand.

  I wanted to toss them into the stinking gutter. But then, where would that leave my family?

  Guards ran past me, shouting orders. I didn’t pay attention to whatever it was that had stirred them. But whatever they had shouted was repeated through the crowd, which began to fade away, their interest in executions lost in favor of something else.

  I folded my fingers back over my payment, even though they shook, and began to walk back toward Lesser Khaim.

  The ferryman looked nervous and intent on his work as he poled me across the river. He had unloaded a full raft, and people had shoved past me with determination.

  He blanched when I offered him a bloody copper. “You keep it,” he murmured. Then he looked at me again. “Are you sure you want to cross over right now, Executioner?”

  I broke free of my daze. “What do you mean?”

  The ferryman pointed a callused finger at the air over Lesser Khaim. “Raiders have attacked. Haven’t you heard?”

  A tendril of smoke snaked up over the jagged roofs and clustered wooden buildings.

  “No. Whoever told you that must be mistaken,” I told him. I’d lived my entire life on the edge of Lesser Khaim. The raiders would never strike this far north. There was nothing here for them, on the edge of the bramblelands that were once Jhandpara’s great empire.

  “Believe what you will,” he said, as the raft struck the other side. A crowd rushed to the raft as I left it. I walked up the bank to Lesser Khaim, stepping around black tendrils of bramble scattered on the carved steps.

  A screaming man smacked into me at the top. His left arm dangled uselessly, crushed. We both fell to the ground, and he scrabbled up.

  “Damn you,” I grunted, “what are you doing…”

  “Raiders!” He shouted at me. “Raiders.”

  I sat up, pulling the axe close to me, and looked down the street. More smoke seeped into the tight alleyways between buildings.

  And I could hear screams in the distance.

  The streets were filling with people moving quickly for the river, their eyes darting about, expecting attackers in every shadow and around every alley.

  “They’re here to burn us to the ground,” the man said. He was originally from Turis, I could hear it in his accent. His eyes seemed to be looking far away, as if he were reliving the horrors of the raider attacks that forced him to walk barefoot all the way to Lesser Khaim.

  People jostled past us, a moving river of humanity headed for the riverbanks. “Where are they going?” I asked. They would drown in the river if the raiders got this far.

  “Away,” the man said, and ran off with them.

  I pushed through the oncoming crowds. They split apart for an executioner, and if they did not, I used the bronze-weighted butt of the axe to shove them aside.

  Five streets from the river, I had to turn away from my usual route home. Smoke choked the street, black and thick, and it spat people out who coughed and collapsed to the dirt, gasping for air.

  “They set fire to the slums! Don’t go down there,” a woman with a flour-covered apron shouted at me.

  I ignored her and ran through alleyways. I pushed through the doors of empty houses and climbed through windows to make my way around the burning sections of town, slowly getting closer to home.

  I ran past the burning wrecks of the small farms of the Lesser Estates, my boots raising dust with each step. I could see the gnarled trees behind my house writhing in flame, and as I scrambled painfully over the stone wall, I saw the timbers give way and the roof fall in on itself.

  The heat forced me back when I tried to run inside. I paced around the house like a confused animal. Stone cracked from the heat, and a screaming wail came from within. I ripped my hood off and shoved it into one of my pockets so I could breathe.

  “Duram?” I cried. “Set?”

  A blazing figure erupted from the front door, leaping onto the dusty ground and rolling around until the flames were extinguished.

  It was Anto. His blackened form lay by my feet, rasping in pain. “Tana?”

  I dropped to my knees. “Father?”

  “It hurts,” Anto whimpered. “It hurts. Please…” He looked up at me, eyes startlingly white against the blackened face.

  The smell of burnt flesh filled my lungs. “You can’t ask me…” I started to say.

  “Please…” he groaned.

  So I used the axe for the second time that day.

  When it was done, I crawled on the ground and sobbed my despair, waiting for the house to finish burning. It was just. I had taken a man’s life. Now mine was being taken from me.

  I found Jorda’s body while on my hands and knees. There was an arrow through his neck and a wineskin by his feet.

  Drunkard he may have been. A disappointment to Anto, this was true. But the dirt was scuffed with footmarks. Small footmarks. He’d tried to protect my sons.

  I kissed the three rings on my hand and prayed to Mara that my sons were alive, and as I did so, saw the scraped dirt of Set’s dragged foot next to the hoofmarks leading off down the dirt road.

  With an apology to Anto’s lifeless body, a whisper of thanks to Mara, I got up and began to follow the tracks, ax
e gripped tight in both hands.

  The burnt remains of Lesser Khaim's southern fringe faded away into the rocky hills of sparse grass and clumps of bramble as the day passed. Weariness spread through my knees, and the miles wore at me as I doggedly moved southward.

  I plowed on. I knew that the hairy tentacles of bramble along the road brushing me would probably not pierce my canvas leggings. I had to move faster, not pick my way around bramble if I hoped to catch the raiders. I had to hope the leather apron would also help protect me from the bramble’s malevolence.

  At the crest of a hill scattered with boulders I looked back at the pyre that was now Lesser Khaim. Tiny figures formed a line by the river, passing along buckets of water to try and douse denser areas of town. The outer sections had become a black mass of skeletal building frames.

  I turned from it all, walking down the other side of the hill, the axe weighing heavier and heavier.

  At the bottom of the hill, turning onto the old cobblestoned ruins of the Junpavati road, I caught up to the raiding party. The men rode massive, barrel-chested warhorses that looked like they could pull an oxen's plough. The raiders held their long spears in the air, like flagpoles, and their brass helmets glinted as they rode alongside a mass of humanity being herded south like sheep.

  Somewhere in that sad, roped-together crowd, were my sons.

  I wondered how many other townsmen had tried to fight the raiders? And how many lay dead on the dirt roads of Lesser Khaim with pitchforks or knives in hands.

  I stared at the raiders. Only four of them had been left to march their captives along. No doubt the rest had ridden on ahead.

  Four trained men.

  And me.

  I would die, I knew. But what choice did I have? They were ripping my family away. What person would run from their own blood?

  I had killed already today, I thought, hefting the executioner’s axe. I was dizzy from exhaustion, and the mild poison of the few bramble needles that had poked through my leggings threatened to drop me into bramble sleep. But I made my decision, and moved toward the raiders.

  As I did so, I pulled the executioner’s hood back over my face to protect myself from the taller clumps of bramble drooping off of the rocks.

  I used the rocks and boulders of the dead landscape to get close to the raider trailing the column of prisoners. I was stunned by how large the man’s warhorse was. When its hooves slammed into the ground, I could feel them from twenty feet behind.

  The hems of my cloak brushed bramble as I ran at the man’s back, and the horse whinnied as it sensed me. The raider spun in his saddle, spear swinging down in an arc as he looked for what had spooked the horse, and he spotted me.

  He realized I was inside the spear’s reach, and he leaped off his horse to avoid the first high swing of my axe at his thigh, putting the horse between us. I ran in front of the giant beast to get at him, but before I could even raise the axe again, he attacked.

  His red cloak flared out behind him, and the spear lashed out. I was slow, but I dodged the point. In response the man flicked it up and smacked the top of my head with the side of the shaft.

  “And what do you think you’re doing?” the raider demanded. He sounded unhurried and calm.

  “You stole my family,” I said as my knees buckled from the blow to the head. I fought to stand, and wobbled slightly. Hoofbeats thudded behind me.

  The raider used the spear to hit me on the side of my head before I could even raise the axe to try and block the movement. His movements would have been too fast for me even if I hadn’t been tired from chasing them, or my blood filled with bramble poison. The blow dropped me to the ground, blood running down over my eyes inside the hood, blinding me.

  “What do we have here?” a second raider voice asked, as feet hit the ground. My hood was ripped clear of my head.

  The two raiders bent over me, dark eyes shadowed by their bronze helmets, spears pinning my cloak, and me, to the ground.

  I blinked the blood out of my eyes and waited for death.

  “It’s a woman,” the raider I’d attacked said.

  “That’s quite plain,” said the other. “Should we kill her or take her with us?”

  “She’s too old to go to the camps or to sell.”

  The other raider nodded. “So we kill her?”

  “She doesn’t need to be part of the Culling,” the older-sounding raider said. He shook his head. “No, she’s too old to have children. She’s no threat. Cripple her so she can’t follow us, then leave.”

  The older raider remounted his horse and left.

  The remaining raider and I stared at each, and then he reversed his spear. “The Way of the Six says that we should…”

  I spat at him. The effort dizzied me. “I don’t care about your damned Way of the Six, slaver. Do what you came to do.”

  He shrugged and slammed the butt of his spear into my ankle, crushing it.

  As I screamed, he smacked my head. I fell back away, down into a patch of bramble the pierced my clothing. With so many bramble needles stuck to my skin calling me down to sleep, it was enough to easily throw me away from the world.

  Part Two

  I woke up with a grunt in the dark, something creaking and swaying beneath me. I’d been dreaming about a younger Set, his large brown eyes looking into mine as he struggled so hard to stumble about, learning to walk.

  He’d fallen, and I’d rushed out, shouting at him to be careful, and then I had woken up.

  I felt for my forehead, but there was no pain or bump as I expected.

  My ankle felt fine. I felt fine, except for the extreme slowness that remained with me from the bramble sleep. I’d fallen into it once before, as a child. My parents had found me in the field and pulled all the bramble needles from my skin: people fretted over me for nearly a week as I lay trapped in a world of dreams and darkness.

  I licked my dried lips and sat up.

  The world kept creaking back and forth.

  I heard wheels turning underneath me.

  I was inside a covered wagon of some sort. Daylight peeked through cracks in wooden walls and top. And I could taste fish and salt hanging in the air.

  A bird screeched outside, and I realized I must be near the coast.

  My axe lay near me, as did my leather hood. Which meant I was somewhere safe.

  In a daze I crawled toward a large flap, and as I reached it a hand flung it aside, blinding me with daylight.

  “Well, hello there,” someone said gently. “I was just coming to check on you.”

  My eyes watered, as if they hadn’t seen sunlight in weeks.

  Strong hands gripped my arm. “Careful, or you’ll fall off.”

  I sat on the back of a large wagon. A small deck ran around the rim of the vehicle. A woman my age, traces of gray in her hair, held my arm. Her trader tattoos, including a striking purple figure of the elephant god Sisinak holding the triple scales of commerce, ran up and down her forearms. “I’m Anezka,” she said. She squatted on the platform jutting off the back. “I was bringing you some soup. Everyone’s going to be excited to hear you woke up.”

  I moved out onto the platform with Anezka, still amazed that my ankle wasn’t hurting. Behind the wagon I was laid out in, another wagon followed.

  That wagon behind us was pulled by four massive aurochs. They looked like cattle, but far more muscular, and their long horns swooped well out before them like the prows of ships. Four aurochs also followed the back of the wagon I was on, resting from the strain of pulling, their flanks rippling and hooves thumping the ground as they plodded along.

  Behind the wagon following us, was another, and then another, and then another yet again. I counted ten before the long train of wagons curved around a bend in a fine mist of kicked up dust. Each wagon featured its own unique, mottled purples and greens painted in patterns on their wooden sides. Many had carvings: depictions of markets and roads and maps of the world, all expertly chipped into their sides.


  “This is a caravan,” I said out loud, realizing it at the same moment I spoke it.

  “This is the caravan,” Anezka said. “You’re traveling the spice road on the perpetual caravan. We move along the coast starting in Paika and go all the way to Mimastiva and even a little beyond, until the bramble of the east stops us with its wall. Then we turn back around again. There used to be many, all throughout the old Empire. Now: only us.”

  Mimastiva was on the coast, hundreds of miles south of Khaim. Paika lay on the coast as well, far to the west. I knew of a few who’d visited Mimastiva. Paika was said to have fallen to the raiders when I was still a child. These were cities that to me, were almost past the edge of the world.

  “You said that people would be excited I was awake,” I said.

  Anezka’s eyes widened. “Because you’re the lady executioner, who met four Paikans in mortal combat. Everyone’s been talking about you up and down the line.”

  “Paikans?” I asked.

  “You northerners call them raiders.”

  “I didn’t fight four raiders,” I said with a frown. “I only took on one, and he beat me badly. But yes, there were four of them.”

  I looked down at my ankle. “How long have I been asleep?”

  “You should see the Roadmaster,” Anezka said.

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Because this is his wagon, and you are his guest,” Anezka said, somewhat formally, but quite firmly.

  With her arm to steady me, I grabbed the ropes along the outside of the covered wagon’s rim, and walked toward the front.

  As we approached the raised platform from where the aurochs were controlled, I could see up the line of the caravan. We were near the front. Muscled men with brass arquebuses stood on a fifteen paces long war wagon in front of us, with hammered metal shieldwalls protecting them.

  Further ahead, a wagon with a large fire crew burned bramble away from the road edges, the roar of the flame carrying back over the air to us. The stench of the burned limbs wafted past.

  I was a long way from Lesser Khaim.

  The Roadmaster was a successful, rich, mountain of a man, robes draped across the heft of his belly.