The Executioness

by Tobias S. Buckell

  Anezka crawled into the wagon as the sun left its place in the sky and woke me up. “Bojdan needs you.”

  “Thanks.” I crawled out of bed, and before I could leave the wagon, Anezka grabbed my shoulders.

  “Thank you for saving us,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure what to say, but I hugged her back. “You should carry a dagger, and practice how to stab someone,” I whispered to her. “All of you should.”

  “We’re just talliers and cooks and supply keepers, we’re not… you, Executioness.”

  I sighed. “I’m just like you. I’m in the middle of my life. A mother who helped in a butcher shop. There is nothing special about me, I swear to you.”

  But I could see Anezka didn’t believe me.

  I crawled out of the wagon and got to the road where lantern light showed a small group of muddy men in tattered peasant’s clothes, carrying crates of vegetables and dried meats, trudging quickly down the road. They intermixed with the caravan as they did so.

  They all carried simple swords. I saw a single crossbowman in blue cloth further down, surcoat slapping the backs of his knees.

  Their faces did look gaunt as they slipped off into the shadows just past the caravan’s edges.

  At the front of the stalled caravan, Bojdan stood with Jal by the Roadmaster’s wagon. They welcomed me into their discussion.

  “One of those scouts says there are Paikans coming down the road,” Bojdan told Jal. “They are a half hour away. We need to get moving again so that everything looks normal.”

  “Don’t fret, Bojdan. The Paikans have always respected the neutrality of the caravan. I’m more worried about Jiva’s men here. If a few hungry idiots rush our wagons for stores, or loot, and we fight back, this will be an expensive mess,” Jal snapped. He eyed the passing remnants of the scouts. “Is that the last of them?”

  “Yes,” Bojdan said.

  “Good. Send the command, we’re moving along. Relax Bojdan. Relax.”

  “I’ll relax when the Paikan party moves past us to their destination,” Bojdan said. “If they know about Jiva, we don’t want to get caught in the middle.”

  “Yes, yes,” Jal said quickly. “I know. So let’s get those command flags snapping, guardsman.”

  Bojdan ran forward, shouting orders. The fire wagon to the front lurched forward, and then Bojdan’s wagon of guards followed. A green flag with a triangle in the middle lurched up the pole with a swaying lantern at the top. All along the column the same flag raised, and the caravan began to move.

  I went to follow Bojdan, but Jal grabbed my shoulder.

  “We have a Paikan prisoner in a wagon and everyone in the caravan knows about it. I want you to guard him. Now that there are armed Paikans coming down the road, there are those in the caravan that might release him who are friendly to the Paikan cause. I don’t want to ransom him until we get to the city, we get more for him that way.”

  I lowered my voice. “I couldn’t raise my hand against someone from the caravan.”

  Jal laughed. “Oh, you won’t have to, Tana. If I let it be known the Executioness is guarding our prisoner then I doubt anyone in the caravan will be interested.”

  “I don’t like that name,” I protested, but Jal held up a hand.

  “That is too bad, it has stuck. Now take your axe and go,” Jal ordered. “What in all the damned halls are we doing moving so slowly! You said it was urgent we get out of here, Bojdan, not something to do in our damned spare time.”

  “You have come around to my way, I see,” Bojdan shouted back.

  Jal grumbled and climbed up on the Roadmaster’s wagon while I stalked back down the length of the caravan for guard duty.

  After I’d climbed into the wagon and sat on the bench against the wall, the Paikan stirred. He crawled to the bars that kept him prisoner and looked out into what he could see of the night from his prison.

  “I saw those scouts,” he said evenly. The dull red flicker of lanterns swaying in the wagon’s ceiling pulled the Paikan’s figure out of the dark.

  I said nothing.

  The man sat, his side against the bars. “Have it your way. They are angry at us, for what we did. And yet they still haven’t learned the lesson we strive to teach the world. They think they can take us in battle, but all they will do is throw away their lives.”

  I didn’t want to talk to the man. I felt like he would force that old me, the unskilled me, the unblooded me, to reemerge from where she’d been pushed over the last weeks. The me that would be scared of him.

  But I felt calm sitting here in the dark, the axe across my lap. I was a deep river, unhurried and powerful, not a frothy shallow stream. “And what lessons do you think you teach the world,” I asked. “Other than your barbarism.”

  He jumped back. “You’re a woman.”

  I smiled. I had control of this conversation, not him. There was no fear in my voice when I said, “Yes, so I’ve always been told.”

  He moved closer to the bars, and looked down at the axe on my lap.

  “Are you that woman? The one I hear them call the Executioness? From the far East?”

  “My name is Tana, of Lesser Khaim,” I told him. I saw his shadow relax. “I was once a butcher, and married to a husband called Jorda. My sons were Duram, and Set. And yes, some call me the Executioness.”

  I could hear him draw in his breath as I claimed the name for the first time. “Are you here to kill me?”

  I imagined him here in this cell, hearing that someone whose life he’d destroyed and children he’d stolen, was amongst the caravan. He must have had many sleepless nights.

  Which was good.

  “I am here to guard you, for now.” I placed the butt of the axe against the floor, and folded my hands around the top. “Killing you now would not help me understand where my family may be.”

  He remained quiet for a while, so I took the axe and hit the bars with it. He jumped back. “Your family is lost to you,” he snapped.

  “Why do you say that?” I demanded, getting off the bench I’d sat on. “I didn’t come this far to turn back!”

  He moved away from the bars.

  I moved closer. “I will not kill you, but I think maybe I will come to maim you before we reach Paika. I think an arm would be acceptable to me. You could still talk after that, right? I don’t know, because I’ve never tried anything like that before. But I think an arm is a fair thing, after all, what is an arm compared to a family? We can live both our lives incomplete.”

  The Paikan raider stepped forward to the bars. “You’d risk it all, for this quest?”

  I looked him in the eyes. “Yes.”

  “I have nothing good to tell you,” he said. “Because I doubt you’ll catch your children.”

  “You would have sold them by now?” I asked. “Is that what you do, you twisted creatures…”

  “No one young is sold,” the Paikan said, a note of outrage seeping into his voice. “Their minds are moldable, they can be taught. The young can be saved.”

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded.

  “Your sons will have been taken to the aftans of Paika. There they are taught the Way with hundreds, no thousands, of youths from all over these diseased lands, every day, until the moment their minds crack open, and the inherent truth of the Way falls upon them. It is then that they earn the right to go to the Southern Isles, far from these coasts.”

  “Why would they want to go there?”

  “A pilgrimage. To see the lands where the Way is all. To see where we came from, long before we took the city of Paika and made it our home. Your children will be closer to the end of their time at the aftan than at the beginning, now.”

  I wanted to hit him with the butt of the axe, but restrained myself. He was talking. Even if I didn’t want to hear it, he was talking about what was happening right now to Duram and Set.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why do your people do all this? Why steal my children?”

  The pr
isoner’s voice crackled with anger. “Because you don’t deserve them.” He grabbed the bars. “We have them heavily guarded and protected. And when the Way gives itself over to them, they will leave for their pilgrimage. And when they return, they will bring light to this darkened land you have created.”

  “What are you talking about?” I sat face to face with his fiery anger.

  “Look around you,” he whispered. “Your towns are fallen, bramble eats and chokes at all you do. And still you can’t release yourselves from the grip of the sickness that causes it.”

  “Magic?” I asked. “You’re talking about magic. It’s outlawed. That is why I was an executioner. We control it.”

  “You control nothing, or your greatest empire would not have fallen. You are all sick with magic’s use.”

  “And you are not?” I said.

  “No,” he insisted. “Your peoples try to use fear and death to stop magic but it will always continue. The individual will always have a use that seems to be needed, even when compared to the good of all. You have no true beliefs like the Way to guide you. Just heapings of gods that take you long after you destroy everything in this life. As long as your afterlives are pleasant, what reason do you have to ever stop the bramble?”

  “You are all missionaries, here to spread this thing you call the ‘Way’ by kidnapping our children? Is that what this madness is all about? Is that why you have destroyed my family and my town?” I wanted to kill him then.

  “It is to save you from yourselves,” he said sadly, as if I were a child who did not know any better. “You want to know why I came here, to this cursed land? Let me tell you. One morning, far off in the Southern Isles, I woke up and found a small, gray thorn growing in the wall around my yard. And over time it grew, its needles spreading. And chopping it back did nothing, its roots continued to spread. One day my wife, and my son took it upon themselves to pull up every root by hand, and slipped into the deepest sleep, and then from there to death. That is why I am here, Executioness.”

  He trembled, and I understood his rage. “I’m sorry to hear about your family.”

  The Paikan continued. “I’m here because my people forgot magic, and left it behind us when we settled the islands and left the Northern Coasts. I’m here because we believe Borzai judges all that we do, including what we do to this world that the gods love. I’m here because like the Jhandparan Empire, you can’t help yourselves, and we suffer all together as a result. So we try to stop you from killing us, as well as yourselves.”

  “This is all about magic. And bramble,” I said.

  “What else could it be about?” the man inside the cell asked.

  A trumpeting sound came from the distance.

  The Paikan sucked in his breath. “The cavalry is here,” he said. “That is no small Culling party, but an army. You should leave this place, and go back to where you came from. Start a new life.”

  “I am too old to start a new life, or family,” I said.

  “Then that is a shame,” he said. “But there is nothing for you in Paika.”

  “My children are in Paika,” I hissed. “There is everything for me there.”

  I could hear a distant thudding. “They’re not stopping, they’re not stopping,” someone screamed from up the caravan.

  I stepped away from the inside of the wagon and pulled myself up the side so I could look down the road.

  Forms lumbered out of the dark in front of the fire crew’s wagon. Elephants with armored tusks swinging from side to side as they charged forward.

  They ran. And they were, indeed, not stopping.

  The aurochs harnessed to the wagons up front screamed and threw themselves against their harnesses. The Roadmaster’s wagon toppled over as the beasts fought to get free.

  Bojdan’s men raised their arquebuses as one, and fired. The leading elephant shrieked and reared, then brought its massive feet down on the wagon, splintering and destroying it, throwing men from it like so much chaff in the wind.

  I jumped down and ran alongside the caravan toward them, seeing more elephants moving through the large cloud of smoke left by the fired arquebuses. The dominating creatures had slowed down in the smoke. They walked three abreast, and four rows deep.

  I saw Jal and Bojdan duck for cover behind the Roadmaster’s wagon as a sudden flurry of crossbow bolts thwacked into the wooden sides and clattered off the road.

  I joined them, slamming my shoulder next to Jal’s against the ruins of his wagon. “I don’t understand,” he repeated. “I don’t understand. They couldn’t have found out we sold those rebel scouts supplies so soon, could they, Bojdan?”

  The warrior shrugged. “There are many other sins they could have decided to call you on, Jal.”

  “But I bribed them all, Bojdan!” the Roadmaster spat. “We make them rich. I use none of the magics they despise.”

  “Can you guarantee that no one else in this caravan ever used any magic?” Bojdan asked.

  An elephant bellowed. Jal glanced over his shoulder and muttered, “Borzai be merciful when I meet you today.”

  Bojdan looked behind us. “We need to retreat,” he said. “They’re getting ready for another charge.”

  The remains of the guard wagon exploded and lit the entire night. The fireball blistered us with heat and roiled overhead, blunted by the now burning carcass of the Roadmaster’s wagon “Arquebus powder,” Bojdan explained, with a sudden smile. “That will give us cover, now run!”

  Elephants shrieked, and I could hear cursing.

  Several arrows clattered around as we stood and ran. Jal gurgled, then pitched back, looking like a pincushion: his ample body pierced from all angles by crossbow bolts. He was still alive, amazingly, crawling along the road and swearing.

  Paikan crossbowmen charged us from the side of the road where they’d walked around the burning debris. Bojdan ran at them as they reloaded their devices. He began slicing arms, throats, and bellies. I buried my axe into the chest of a startled man who pointed his sword at me.

  But before we could do more, the ground shook, and out from the smoke of that last great explosion, the war elephants charged once more. Crossbowmen fired down at us from wooden platforms on the elephants’ backs.

  A Paikan in purple robes stalked over to the Roadmaster, a crossbow in hand. “You have sinned against all,” he shouted. “You have failed to keep control of your people, and failed to keep them from using that which harms us all.”

  “Get away from the caravan,” Bojdan said, shoving me away from what was about to happen. “It’s all…” he didn’t finish his sentence: a bolt buried itself in his neck.

  He fell. I lunged forward, to go to him, but bolts struck the ground around me.

  The battle is won long before the fighting, I thought. And this was a lost battle.

  I spun and ran for the forest to the north of the road, where it looked thick and I thought I could lose myself.

  The trumpeting of the war elephants faded as I pushed deeper into the wild. There was some bramble here, I could feel the soft needles tugging my skirts as I brushed past. But I couldn’t slow down, despite the dark. I could hear the sounds of someone following me, the glow of their torch bobbing through the dark shadows far behind.

  With no light, I could only walk so fast without smacking into trees and branches.

  There were three torches now, I saw with a glance back. They gained on me, as they could see what was in front of them.

  Every step north away from the road, every minute bumping through the scrub, took me further from Paika, and my sons.

  I began to regret the time spent enjoying the slow wend of the caravan along the road. The sweet smell of the ocean. The comfort of food, and of Bojdan’s company.

  Yes, I missed him. It was a piece ripped away from me. Not like the piece missing inside me that was my family. But it was another cut that left me hardening up, like bramble when it wasn’t totally killed.

  As I ran, I hardened even furt
her than I had before. I pushed through tall grass and broke out into a clear area on the edge of a small lake. Pebbles crunched under my feet.

  How long had I kept moving through the woods? An hour?

  If I kept running, the Paikans with torches would exhaust me, then easily capture me.

  So I crouched low by the grass’s boundary, axe readied, to make my stand.

  The first man broke from the grass, his torch held high in one hand, spear in another. His spiked helmet glinted in the torchlight, as did the rest of the armor buckled to him.

  I slammed the axe point first, as if it were a spear, into the face of the helmet as it turned, suddenly suspicious, in my direction.

  Blood splattered the shaft of the axe, and the torch and spear clattered to the pebbles. I stepped back as the other two Paikans slowly parted the grasses on either side of me.

  They looked down at their dead comrade, and kept their distance, but moved along the grass boundary to cut me off from running away. They tossed their torches down to the pebbles and gripped their spears in both hands. “You’re a woman,” the one to my left said, surprise in his voice. “Why do you face us?”

  I backed up, my feet wetted now by the shallow water, trying to face both of them. “Because you attacked. Drop your spears and leave me be,” I said.

  “You killed Massiaka there,” the man said, faceless behind his mask of protective bronze. “We will not turn back now.”

  These were Paikans, practiced and deadly, in full armor. They were not the ragged rebels I’d bested this morning, which now seemed an eternity ago. These men wore armor and their spears gave them reach.

  I’d killed their friend by surprise. They, on the other hand, would not die quickly.

  I looked for some way to get out of this fight. “I was in the caravan. I did not ask to be attacked.”

  “It is too late,” the Paikan on the right said.

  My fingers loosened on the axe, getting ready for either man to attack me. The Paikans raised their spears, both of them out of reach of my axe, and they got ready to thrust them at me. But just as they stepped forward, crossbow bolts ripped out of the grass and smacked through their armor.