Storm Bride

by J. S. Bangs

  He rode to his spear and plucked it from the ground and turned Lashkat. The man he had just leapt past had found his feet and struggled to bring his spearhead around, but not quickly enough. Keshlik planted the point of his spear in the man’s throat.

  A quick glance around showed that the Yakhat had broken through the rear line in several places and were engaged in melee with the rear defenders. The front line, where Juyut attacked, had begun to buckle. Cries of dismay rang from both fronts.

  Keshlik shouted, “To the chief!” He charged toward the silver chariot and its shell of guards.

  He was unsurprised to hear the earth rumble angrily once again. But anything she did now would harm her own as much as it did the Yakhat.

  Far ahead of him, on the front line, the turf warped and belched. The Yakhat were already pressing through, and the soil buried the Yivrian foot soldiers as rapidly as it did the Yakhat horsemen. More horses poured through.

  The earth rumbled behind Keshlik, and a rift split the ground, cutting off any escape back to the forest. But he had no intention of retreating: the kenda’s guard was before him, and he was two breaths away from celebrating his enemy’s death.

  He turned Lashkat and charged into the gap between two men. They brought their spears together. Wood crunched. His horse screamed, and Keshlik pitched forward over her head.

  The world spun. He landed on his back with a grunt. Behind him, Lashkat battered the defenders with her hooves, half a spear sticking out of her chest. More defenders were rushing at him. His own spear was still in his hand.

  Keshlik roared and leapt to his feet. He parried an incoming blow and planted the head of his spear in someone’s gut. Horses screamed and ran past him. Yakhat and Yivrian men traded spear thrusts.

  The chief’s chariot was pulling away. Keshlik shoved two of the panting rabbits aside and made chase.

  The chariot’s ponies reared, and a Yakhat horse appeared on the other side. The horse’s rider carried a spearhead dripping with blood. One of the ponies collapsed, the other bolted, and the imbalance caused the chariot to rise up on one wheel.

  Keshlik threw himself against the high side of the chariot. The wheel broke. The chariot collapsed onto its side.

  The earth around them moaned and shuddered. Keshlik leapt atop the chariot and blindly thrust his spear downward. A flash of metal deflected his spearhead. The kenda tumbled out of the wrecked chariot, his ancient sword flashing in his hand. He stepped back and raised his sword to parry Keshlik’s strike.

  A spear took the kenda in the back.

  Blood gushed from his mouth. He fell to the ground atop his precious blade, revealing Juyut standing triumphantly behind him. Juyut screamed in celebration and leapt off his mount to plant his feet on the dead man’s back, then raised his spear in salute. “Yakhat, the victory is ours! The kenda is dead! Golgoyat fights among us!”

  Keshlik raised his spear to match, even as the ground coughed and buckled again. The shout of victory leapt from mouth to mouth among the Yakhat, while a wail of dismay arose from the Yivriindi. Their defensive lines started to buckle and flee even where they had still been strong. It was turning into a rout.

  After a final violent heave, the ground stilled and did not move again.

  Keshlik glanced around. “Where is the witch?”

  “I haven’t seen her,” Juyut said.

  The kenda’s guard was strewn in bloody heaps on the ground around them, but he saw no sign of a small old woman among them. But neither did he see any sign of her bringing up her Power. Perhaps she had been taken by a stray arrow. It would be irony for her to fall so accidentally—but he would take her death any way he could get it.

  He considered staying to direct the battle until the witch’s body was found and he could bring her eyes back to Tuulo. But his heart betrayed him. “Juyut, I need to return to Prasa. But Lashkat is fallen.”

  Dismay flashed across Juyut’s face. “Lashkat? I’ll ensure that she is burned with a warrior’s honor. Take mine, and fly to your wife.”

  Keshlik nodded. He swept aside the pang of sorrow at the loss of his mare. “Lead the battle to its conclusion. The victory is yours.”

  Juyut reddened with pride. “Send my greetings to my sister-in-law and my nephew.” He saluted Keshlik with his spear and slid off his mare.

  Keshlik leapt atop Juyut’s mare, and they sped off the battlefield toward Prasa, toward Tuulo, and toward his son.

  Chapter 28

  Uya

  Tuulo leaned into Uya’s chest. Her arms wrapped around Uya’s shoulders, and her head lay pressed against her cheek. Sweat and water dripped down both of their faces. Her breath came hot and fast, and then with a gasp, she squeezed Uya’s shoulders and clenched her teeth on a scream.

  Beside them, Dhuja muttered a chant, resting her palm in the small of Tuulo’s back. Between verses of the chant, she whispered to the mother. Tuulo’s grip relaxed, and she let out an exhausted sigh. Dhuja asked something, and Tuulo merely nodded, her hair tickling Uya’s cheek.

  Tuulo had barely caught her breath when she crushed Uya’s hand again. Uya listened to the grinding of her teeth and the gasping of her breath.

  Time seemed to both leap and crawl, the waves of Tuulo’s labor galloping one after another, but the pain of delivery stretched before and after them as endless as the plains.

  After a long, immeasurable time, a new urgency seized Tuulo’s face, and Dhuja, seeing the change, began to jabber. She gestured impatiently at Uya with her knobby fingers.

  “What?” Uya asked.

  Dhuja waved with her palms and scolded, sounding frustrated. Uya moved to the position that Dhuja indicated with her gestures, supporting Tuulo from behind with her legs alongside her on the seat, and she let the midwife take her seat in front. Just as Uya sat down, Tuulo dug her fingers into Uya’s thighs and let out a throaty groan.

  Dhuja put her hand on Tuulo’s stomach and felt for the baby’s head. She muttered something to Tuulo, who seemed not even to notice. Tuulo pushed. Uya lost track of how many times.

  Tuulo’s breath grew shallow, as if her strength waned, but then her teeth would clench and her muscles would tighten, and with a ferocious grunt, she would drive the child further.

  Dhuja checked the child’s position again, and her expression darkened. She did not show Tuulo how far she had yet to go.

  Did the child face the wrong way? Was there another obstruction? Uya didn’t know how to ask.

  Tuulo braced herself against Uya for another push. But her groan ended with a scream, and she spasmed in Uya’s arms. Dhuja shouted in alarm.

  Tuulo was bleeding. Not the little trickle of blood that had leaked from her since the beginning, but a gush of hot red blood pouring out like water from a broken pot.

  She screamed again, from terror or pain, and shook in Uya’s grip, her hands scrabbling over Uya’s legs. Dhuja began to babble, pressing her hand against Tuulo’s belly and searching in the torrent for some clue as to what had given way.

  Tuulo fought in Uya’s grip. Her shouting might have been words, but Uya couldn’t understand a bit of it. Dhuja attempted to calm the mother, then she drew herself to her feet and looked down at Tuulo and Uya with an expression of dreadful pity. She ducked outside the yurt.

  “Wait!” Uya shouted. “Where are you going? Are you leaving me here?”

  Tuulo twisted to the side and fell from the seat, her hands grabbing at her belly. Blood drenched her hips to her ankles. Uya bent and attempted to get her arms under Tuulo’s armpits to lift her back into the chair, but Tuulo twisted and swatted Uya’s away hands. Sobbing, she looked into Uya’s eyes. Her face seemed sad, haggard, wearied, as if she had aged two centuries in the last minutes. A tiny, barely audible whimper slipped between her lips.

  “I don’t think I can help you,” Uya said. “I’m sorry.”

  The pity sh
e had been beating back rose in her chest again. No. She gritted her teeth and repeated her oath.

  The door of the yurt rustled, and Dhuja reappeared. Uya stepped back in surprise. Dhuja had blackened her face with dirt from the sacred circle, and she had stripped down to nothing but the red sash around her waist. She knelt next to Tuulo and put her hand on Tuulo’s cheek. Tuulo had gone pale, and her eyes were closed. At Dhuja’s touch, they fluttered open, but her eyes darted back and forth, without comprehension. She whispered a word that Uya could not understand.

  Dhuja nodded. She crouched between Tuulo’s ankles, her hands kneading the mother’s thighs. She let out a low, mournful cry and began to unwind the sash at her waist. When the last fold of red cloth dropped into the pool of Tuulo’s blood, a knife with a bone handle dropped with it. Dhuja bent and picked up the knife.

  “No,” Uya said. “Dhuja, what are you doing?”

  Dhuja looked at Uya and shook her head. She kissed the blade of the knife, then leant forward and kissed Tuulo’s belly.

  Uya bolted for the door to escape the horror. Her heart battered against her ribs, and bile threatened to erupt from her mouth. As she passed through the slit of the yurt’s entrance her feet betrayed her, and she fell into the yellow grass. The weight of her oath fought with the pity in her throat as the muggy, blood-scented air of the yurt leached away from her. The ground smelled of crushed grass and prairie mint and earthworms. Wind stirred the grasses and hushed her in the heads of the wildflowers.

  Tuulo was going to die.

  But Uya had sworn an oath. Why should she pity the savage woman?

  She struggled to her feet. A stiff breeze blew out of the east, and on the horizon, she saw a line of boiling white clouds, with darkness at their feet. The sun was falling into the west, and it lit the crowns of the thunderheads with luminescent gold.

  “Chaoare,” Uya asked, “is this how you answer me? You steal the breath from my enemy?”

  The wind hissed through the empty houses of Prasa. To her left and right were broken shells of lodges where ennas had dwelt. Their ancestor poles were broken, their totems defaced. Grass had grown up around them, and it bowed and fled from the coming storm.

  Uya remembered Nei. Her mother. Saotse. Rada. Her dead son, whom the Yakhat monsters had cast away on the plain.

  Tuulo had cradled her head and sopped up her tears then, just as Uya had held Tuulo’s hands now.

  But—no. Tuulo could not pay for all the murders of her people with a few hours of kindness and a few hours of pain.

  “I remember my oath,” she whispered.

  A cry escaped from the yurt. It was soaked in weariness, wrung out with pain. It ended almost as soon as it started.

  The only sound was the rustle of grasses in the wind.

  And then a baby cried.

  Uya returned to the yurt in a heartbeat. For a moment, she saw only darkness and smelled blood and death. Her eyes began to readjust to the dim lamplight, and she made out the outline of the mother’s ruined body, slashed open in a final desperate effort to save the child. No, she would not look. Dhuja was kneeling, holding the knife that had opened Tuulo to find the child. And beside her—a boy, lain on a bolt of new white wool, screaming and shaking tiny fists.

  He was wet with blood and mucus. The cord distending from his purple belly was uncut. He howled, mouth open like a frog’s, eyes clenched shut. Dhuja looked up at Uya. Her face was wet with tears, but she shouted at Uya and pointed at the baby.

  Uya picked him up. He weighed less than a quail hen. Dhuja severed the cord with her knife and pinched the end shut with a strip of leather. She muttered another incomprehensible command at Uya.

  Tuulo’s son. A boy, like her own child. Like her own dead son.

  And like a cloud rising up from the sea, the darkness rose from her memory. Tuulo’s son was Keshlik’s son. The murderer’s son. The monster’s son. A boy sure to grow into another murderer.

  Her heart blackened and hardened. She did not forget her oath.

  She clutched the child to her chest and walked out of yurt.

  Dhuja’s shouts followed her. She willed herself not to hear, not to think. She began to run.

  The ruins of Prasa flew by her. Her feet found familiar paths, old paths, routes she had walked in the city back when it was alive. The ways wound down to the sea. A few Yakhat women saw her and shouted after her. She ignored them. There was nothing left in her, nothing but the beating of her own heart and the squirming and yelling of the infant pressed against her breast.

  Down, down, down to the seaside. Through the wall of grasses at the edge. Over the pebbled beach. The storm wind was at her back, pushing her, lashing her hair forward toward the sea. She ran into the gentle surf and stopped where the water reached her knees.

  The boy screamed in the blanket. She raised it above her head. The wind howled around her.

  “Oarsa!” she screamed. “Chaoare! I did not forget my oath!”

  She threw him into the surf.

  The body hit the water and disappeared.

  The quiet accused her where the baby’s cry should have been. The waves drew back, declaring her guilt.

  Black horror chilled her. Uya whispered, “Great Oarsa, what have I done?”

  She lunged forward into the surf. He was tiny. He had just barely gone under. Would he float? A wave surged forward and gave her a mouthful of saltwater. She spat and stood, frantically scanning the water.

  “No, no, no! No. Oarsa, hear me.” She dove headfirst into the next wave, searching the surf with her arms. Her knees beat against the stones of the sea floor.

  A wave cast her back against the shore. “Help me,” she sobbed. “Powers of the ocean, help me. Oarsa, forgive me.”

  A new wave battered her thighs.

  “Help me. Forgive me.” She regained her feet.

  And in the next wave, she saw a bolt of white cloth.

  She bloodied her toes against the stones, but in three strides she reached it. The waterlogged blanket pressed against her chest. The water drained out of it, leaving nothing. It’s empty.

  She unwrapped it and saw the blue body.

  It was too late. The boy was cold, his fragile limbs the temperature of the seawater. She pressed the body between her breasts. It was like holding a fish—tiny, cold, and motionless.

  “I’m sorry.” Tears mingled with the seawater running down her face. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  The sea foam swirled around her knees. The storm wind beat at her back, colder than the merciless water. She began to shiver.

  She set the infant against her shoulder and began to tap his back as if he had just nursed. “I’m sorry, little one. Forgive me.”

  The body spasmed.

  The boy vomited seawater down her back. His limbs squirmed. He spit again and shivered. And his tiny mouth opened and let out a quavery cry.

  Uya began to shake with relief, and her anger and hatred drifted away like feathers from a molting bird. She gently wrapped her arms around him and rocked, holding him as tightly as she dared against the warmth of her stomach. She cast the soaked blankets away.

  Fumbling with one hand, she tore open the front of the Yakhat blouse and found her breast, still bursting with unused milk. Her nipple was rough and dry, but the boy found it and greedily closed his mouth over it. His gums pulled, and she winced in pain.

  He suckled like a colt. As he ate, his squirming stilled, and his color warmed from blue to summery red. Uya waded out of the water, climbed up the shore, and set herself down in the grass. The northern horizon pulsed with lightning. Thunder split the air. The earth seemed to shake in response, but the rumble passed away.

  Uya cooed at the child and sang a lullaby, and drew it to her chest to keep it warm against the storm.

  Chapter 29

  Saotse

  She was
alive.

  The air smelled like wet earth, and a weight pinned her legs to the ground. Her hands were full of mud, and her face was pressed into soft, sandy soil. Her breath echoed in a small, enclosed space. The feet of men and horses beat against the ground somewhere nearby, though none seemed to find her. Blood and earth mingled in her nostrils.

  She lifted her head and gasped for air. The footsteps were far from her—she was feeling the thunder of their movements through the ground.

  Something heavy pinned her legs, and another weight pressed against her shoulders. She pushed herself up to her elbows and felt the weight above her buckle and loosen. Loose dirt trickled down her arms and legs, and the smell of bruised grass filled the air. She kicked her legs free of the soil and shook dirt from her shoulders, and she realized with a late-blooming horror that she had been buried.

  Heavy, wet earth fell away on either side of her. She was covered up to her neck with soil.

  Had Sorrow engulfed her? She fought to remember. She had touched the Power briefly, then the kenda had seized her and taken her back into the chariot. The Yakhat were attacking from the rear, and they needed to find a safe place where she could touch the soil and call up Sorrow. She had heard horses, shouting, the chariot had tipped, and Sorrow had swallowed her up with just enough air to keep her alive.

  She pulled herself forward like a worm emerging from the ground. Her hands were grimy with clay, and her hair was matted down with earth. Something heavy pinned her ankles to the ground. She wrenched herself forward another inch and twisted her legs out from beneath it. Metal and wood creaked, and with a gasp, she wrangled free.

  She stopped to massage her feet and felt to see what had lain atop her. Her hands confirmed that it was the kenda’s chariot. The chariot’s cover and the soil’s embrace were what had saved her from the Yakhat spears. Is the battle over? She heard nothing nearby, but further up the valley, horses and men still moved. Yivriindi or Yakhat? She couldn’t tell.