Storm Bride (23 page)

Chapter 28

Uya

T
uulo 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 she 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

S
he 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.

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.

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?”