Storm Bride

by J. S. Bangs

  She crawled forward on her belly. Her hands found a dead human face.

  She swallowed a scream and shoved it away. She scrambled back a pace, heart beating wildly, bile rising in her throat. Her hands were sticky with blood.

  She had to wait, to think. She had felt silk and silver beneath her hands when she scrambled away from the body. Cautiously she crept forward and felt again, finding the edges of the dead man’s garment, the fine stitching on the edges, the silver chains around his cold neck. The circlet and the sword had been looted, but she was sure.

  The kenda.

  She lay her head against the ground and shivered. They had lost. They were doomed.

  How much time had passed? Enough for the kenda’s body to grow cold. The battle had moved on. Far away, the last shouts of fighting still sounded, but she lay in a glade of silence. The day’s heat clung to the ground, but a chilly wind stirred the grass. Evening approached.

  She would have to crawl to safety—if there were such thing as safety for her. The Yakhat would kill her as soon as they saw her, and now she was uncovered to any passing eye. She needed to hide.

  She wiped the blood off her hands in the grass and began to inch forward, away from the sounds of men. As her fingers dug in the soil, she realized the echoing absence of what she did not feel.

  Sorrow was gone.

  At the start of the battle, she could barely touch the ground, lest the Power swallow her immediately. Now she pressed her hands and knees into the grass and felt nothing, not the yawning loneliness of Sorrow, nor her fury or vengeance.

  Saotse opened herself, broad and yearning, and listened for any whisper of the Power. Nothing.

  “Sorrow,” she said. “Sorrow, my mother, my sister. Where are you?”

  She scrambled forward, searching for a plot of bare earth. Crisp yellow grass crackled beneath her hands. Sorrow had to be here. Saotse couldn’t be left alone again.

  “Don’t leave me. My sister, don’t leave me! I need you now, more than ever.”

  Just like Oarsa had left her. To be alone, a burden, a fool who had trusted one of the Powers and been abandoned. Not again. Not scrambling blind and alone across a field littered with the dead, with the Power that she had served silent and far away.

  “My enemies—our enemies—will overrun us. Sorrow, can you hear me?”

  Her hands found the corpses of men bent over broken spears, and the bodies of horses slick with sweat and blood. She pushed her fists into the soil and pressed her cheek against the ground.

  “Answer me,” she whispered.

  There was someone, but it was not Sorrow. Other Powers babbled in the wind. Putting aside the danger, she rose slowly to her feet. Her bones creaked in protest, but she swallowed their pain.

  The storm wind buffeted her, icy with anger and whistling with revenge. This was not Sorrow—this was the storm cloud, and he was not her friend. She dropped back to her knees. She feared the attention of this Power more than she did the Yakhat warriors.

  But the stormy Power was not all she felt. Another Power moved at the edges of the battlefield. Someone familiar. She would find him.

  She crawled forward with renewed purpose, parting the grasses before her like a snake. Bodies were everywhere. Yivrian soldiers with shirts of linen and cloaks of rough canvas. The Yakhat, clad in leather, their faces greasy with paint. And horses, legs bent and broken, sides scored by spears. She crept over and around them, dirtying her hands with mud and blood.

  The bodies grew fewer as she fled the sounds of fighting and the epicenter of the battle. She clambered up a short, rocky rise where the grass did not grow and emerged into the exhalations of the stormy Power. Rain stung her face. Thunder growled in the distant north. The cloud lanced her with sleet.

  Onward. The ground tumbled downward after the rise, turning into gravel and scrub. The rain thickened into a downpour, and the ground turned muddy. A loose rock sent her sliding and scrabbling down the muddy slope, until the mudslide cast her into a patch of ferns.

  She stopped. There were trees above her. The rain struck their branches like beads in a rattle. There was a stream nearby, too, just audible above the rain, and its gurgle was rising into a roar. Thunder cracked the sky.

  She rose to her feet, stumbled forward, and fell into the trunk of a moss-covered pine. Her fingers bloodied against the bark, but her pain didn’t matter: the Power was here. It was calling to her. It was waiting for her. She slogged forward through the mud, soggy ferns swiping at her waist, until she reached the riverbank.

  She stopped where she felt the grasses give way and heard the rush of water by her feet. She was at the very lip of the riverbank. Windbeaten grasses lashed her legs. Rain pelted her. Thunder boomed.

  The Power greeted her. It was a little thing, the Power of the stream, drinking rainwater off the hills and running full of song down to River Prasa, which received its blessings and carried them out to the sea. Saotse would not have noticed it at all, except that it was awake and alert and shouting her name in the wordless tongue of the Powers.

  “What do you want?” Rain poured down her face. “Why did you call me here?”

  The answer was a burst of joy, mingled with expectation. Warning. Terror. Desire.

  Someone was coming.

  She didn’t care whom the little river Power expected. “Where is Sorrow? Where is the Power who Kept me?”

  Coming. He is coming.

  But Sorrow was not—

  He came. She fell to her knees.

  The sandy-bottomed stream seemed to deepen and widen to hold the enormity of the Power that strode in its water. A cataract of ancient waters surged up the channel, which bowed to receive him, trembling with pleasure and torment.

  He was vast. He was bottomless. His heartbeat was the pounding of waves against the shore. Mussels and anemones encrusted his hands, numberless salmon swarmed in his eyes, and the great whales sang in his wake.

  “Oarsa.” Saotse had never felt him this close, not even when he had first beckoned to her from the sea. Opening her mouth felt like swallowing the tide. She struggled to breathe. “Why are you here? Now you come to me? You left me for fifty years. When every ally I had has been slaughtered on the battlefield, you come?”

  The storm wind slapped her hair against her face. The icy sting of the rain spurred her anger. “Where were you when Prasa fell? Where were you when the kenda died? Now that everything is lost, now you come to me?”

  Come to me, the waters said.

  And the Power withdrew.

  Thunder shattered the air. The roar of the flood grew more insistent, and the mud began to crumble away beneath her feet. She scrabbled at the grasses, but they were sliding and falling with her.

  The river water swallowed her. She thrashed and got a breath half of air and half of water. The torrent tumbled her. She flailed for the surface but could not find it. There was only water and formless mud. Her nose and mouth filled.

  She sank.

  She descended in the muddy water. Down, down, down.

  Little minnows swarmed like sparks. They spoke with voices like crickets, so she asked them, “Where is the Power of the great waters?”

  “Further down and further out,” they answered, then they scattered with the sound of laughter into the arms of the little river Power who was their shepherd.

  She kept descending, and the current carried her to the bay where the water grew colder and wilder. She reached the place where the orcas played. They greeted her as a long-lost sister, pressing their noses to her face and clicking their tongues in greeting, and they thrashed the great flukes of their tails.

  But she could not join them in their celebration. “Where is the Power of the great waters?”

  “Further down and further out.” They touched her with their fins and swam toward the surface, trilling and singing.
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br />   So she continued downward to the place where the water was cold and still and there was no sound.

  The great whale, the steed of the Power, approached her. She felt the pressure of his gaze. He allowed her hands to brush against his old and knobby skin, scarred and rehealed countless times by his battles with the kraken in the darkness. The stroke of his tail was a whirlwind, but he made no other sound.

  She asked him, “Where is the Power of the great waters?”

  “Near.” His voice was barely a whisper in the deep, but it made Saotse shiver. “Why will you go to him?”

  “Because he brought me across the sea then left me. Because he was cruel. Because I want to accuse him.”

  “Then you are the one,” the whale replied. “Come with me.”

  She put a hand on his battle-scarred fin, and they descended into the deepest place of the ocean, where there was silence and stillness. And out of the stillness the waters stirred, and a voice that had no sound spoke.

  Accuse me now, my precious daughter. For did you think that I forgot, when once I sang to you upon the ocean shore— you, whose name I blessed, who rode on whaleback across my foamy skin?

  “Yes, I accuse you,” she said. “Because you carried me across the sea, and left me among strangers, and did not hear my prayers.”

  Do not believe your weeping went unseen. As raindrops beat the weary earth, the tears of mortals run like torrents to the sea. My silence was neither careless nor forgetful, but I am thrice constrained—for in the deeps, I wage a war. The kraken stirs, and on your shores old horrors would arise if ever I forsook my watch. Brief leave I took to kiss your feet, to carry you to where your gifts were sought; and having laid you at the foreign shore, I fled. Little time had I, and little now I have to speak before my battle resumes. Forgive me.

  She raised her voice, but the sound seemed to dissolve in the deep darkness, and she heard herself whisper. “Why? Why now?”

  The water stirred.

  Ponder, daughter, distant marshy banks where first was born the cold divorce 'twixt earthy bride and thundering, wrathful son. The wedding broke, and strife poured out from wounds unkindly torn. Already then I plotted peace to make for fragile human hearts, but I was stopped by distance, and by the stony ears of men, who seldom hear what ageless phantoms say. For we are bound by deeds of flesh, we bodiless Powers, unchanging save when men our names invoke, while we in turn bestir with soundless whispers mortal hands to move. I sought to cut the chain of wrath, to salve the wounds the earthy bride had borne, so she might bless again the sacred circle, which when forgotten cursed her daughters' birth. But flesh is healed by flesh, and only mortal hands can mortal wounds repair. So thrice did I rejoice when first your feet were touched by surf—for you, bright daughter, are of the few who hear what Powers beg, and having borne you to this shore, I watched your years. Your cries I could not answer, for in the deeps the war does not abate; but never did my care forget that when the sire of storms and grief-rent mother came, your tongue might be the bridge of peace. But not alone. For blessed by sorrow is the breast which suckles peace and purges war. Behold, had not the laboring womb been split, had not the war-wracked mother dared forgive and take to breast her captor's child, the earthy bride would not be healed. Behold! The curse is broken, and peace is born from sorrow; now let it perish not. Yours is the tongue and hers is the breast, and only the hand remains.

  A torrent of water churned through her, and the flood was a revelation. She knew at once why Sorrow had left her, and to whom Sorrow had returned. A memory or a prophecy—she couldn’t tell which one—bloomed in her mind: her hands were waves and lifted up a newborn child to the hands of flesh which had cast him in. A captive Praseo woman, bereaved by the death of her own child, but with enough pity to save her captor’s son. Saotse sank deeper into the water, as if weighed down by knowledge, and she said, “Sorrow and mercy. I understand. But who is the hand, and what am I to say to him?”

  You must go to meet him. The cloud-lord must forget his boiling rage, put aside his spears, consent again to wed. His bride has cast away her mourning shroud and readies for the dawn; yet even now the groom may falter, and peace betray. The mortal son of thunder, tasting sorrow, might turn again to wrath, but let him not. Go now. I bless your tongue with salt, to speak in unknown tongues, to fight the kraken beneath the skies, as I do in the deeps. Take courage, Daughter. Arise.

  Chapter 30

  Keshlik

  Golgoyat roared in the sky as Keshlik pounded across the bridge into Prasa. Raindrops stung Keshlik’s face, hurled by the wind. The sky was striped with lines of tattered gray cloud. To the east and north, the clouds were a roiling black, lit from within by pink-tinted lightning. The horizon was tinted a sickly green.

  If he had waited any longer to leave the battle, he would have been caught in the heart of the storm. Not even for Tuulo would he have risked riding into the very center of Golgoyat’s wrath.

  The mare he had borrowed from Juyut whinnied and whined, shaking her mane against the rain and flicking her ears. The sentries at the bridge were huddled under lashed-together spruce branches, and they merely saluted him as he passed. Ferocious wind whistled and howled around the ruined buildings. The driven rain formed a gray mist on the cedar roofs, haloing the tops of the ancestor totems in ash. There was no one in the streets. He rode, prodding and kicking his recalcitrant mare, until they reached the central square.

  He drove her to the door of the warehouse where the horses were stabled and beat against the wooden frame. A startled old woman peered at him out of the gloom.

  “Get my mare into shelter!” He dismounted and hurried through the door, casting aside the soggy leather cloak that he had carried over his shoulders. “I’m going to Tuulo.”

  “Wait!” the woman said, putting her hand on his arm. “You shouldn’t. Not yet.”

  He shook her off. “I’m going.”

  Keshlik took off running through the streets. The rain had thickened into a downpour. The routes between the lodges were muddy sloughs, their puddles dancing with the rain. The thrum of rain beat the ground, and the lodges waxed and waned with the gusts of the gale. Mud pulled at his feet. The beach thundered with wind-lashed waves. The sky overhead pulsed with lightning.

  He came to the little clearing on the north side of the city, which had a circle of burnt earth in its center. The rain had turned the blessed ring to mud.

  He paused at the edge of the circle. If the child had been born, he was allowed to enter. Khou’s blessing would have been given, and the sacred circle used up. But he hesitated, nonetheless, to cross the line that had split him from his wife for so long. Breaching it now felt like sacrilege.

  “Tuulo!” he shouted. “Tuulo! Come and show me my son!”

  The slit of the yurt door widened, and a woman emerged. Dhuja, not Tuulo. She looked at Keshlik with her face gnarled and hard, like an old, wind-bent tree.

  “You’ve come,” she said. “It’s probably for the best that you came no sooner.”

  “What are you talking about? Where’s my wife?”

  She did not answer. Her face was blackened, and the rain ran in dark rivulets off her chin. The color stirred dread in Keshlik’s chest. The last time he had seen a midwife so darkened…

  “Come into the yurt. You’ll see.” She ducked through the door.

  Keshlik drew a heavy breath, stepped across the line of sacred earth, and followed her in.

  A single butter lamp burned inside the yurt, giving off a dim, soft-edged light. On the bed in the center of the yurt lay Tuulo, unmoving, her eyes closed as if sleeping.

  A red cloth was wound around her middle, covering her from her knees to her belly. The cloth was mottled with dark brown stains. She had no other covering. Her legs were bare below the knees, dark and stout. Her heavy mother’s breasts rested against her belly, round, black-nippled, beautiful. Her hands lay palms-up o
n the ground.

  She hadn’t flinched or twitched when Keshlik entered the yurt.

  “Tuulo,” he said quietly. “Tuulo!”

  Her chest was motionless and empty of breath.

  His legs grew weak. Horror curdled in his belly. “Dhuja. Tell me what happened here.”

  The old midwife’s voice rattled like blades of dry grass in the wind. “She brought the boy near to birth, but at the threshold of delivery, her womb was torn. She bled too much and too fast.”

  “What is… What did you do to her?” He sank to the ground.

  “I waited until every drop of strength had been wrung from her, Keshlik. When I unwound the red sash, she had already sunk two-thirds of the way into death.”

  He briefly touched Tuulo’s hand. It was cold. “You killed her.”

  “I did what every midwife must sometimes do. We do not bind the knife against our bellies unless we’re prepared to use it.”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t care about your midwife’s traditions. Why did you kill her?”

  “To save the child.”

  “But you failed at that, too!”

  “What makes you think I failed?”

  He stopped. “What? I don’t see any child here.”

  Dhuja pointed into the shadow at the edge of the yurt. Something moved. In the darkness, a shape that he had taken for a mound of cloth looked up. The captive woman.

  “Come here.” Dhuja beckoned the woman.

  The captive shook her head and pushed herself deeper into the darkness. She looked at Keshlik with terror and said something in her incomprehensible tongue. Dhuja sighed and walked over. She gave the woman a half-hearted scold and scooped something out of her arms.

  The swaddled bundle in Dhuja’s arms gave a brief squeal of protest. The midwife rocked him gently and brought him to Keshlik. “Your son.”

  A gift of impossible lightness was placed into Keshlik’s hands. He weighed no more than a falcon in the hand. His squeal was like a mouse’s. His hand formed a fist and beat at the air, then he tucked it into his chest to punctuate a tiny, quavering cry. Wisps of black hair stuck to his forehead. His beautiful brown lips parted to reveal a bright red mouth like a sparrow chick’s.