Storm Bride (9 page)

Chapter 9

Saotse

S
aotse awoke to damp and
chilly silence. The ground beneath her fingers was cold and wet. The leaves overhead shook ominously. So she had slept, but for how long? The sun must have set; the air was cool with the touch of evening. Obviously no one had found her. That was probably a good thing. But now she was awake, and it was night, and she had to decide what to do and where to go.
   
Far above her, a breeze whispered in the crown of the trees, and the branches muttered and moaned. Chaoare’s voice rippled in the wind, but the Power herself was far away, and the spirits of the trees barely quivered. Water lapped against the shore not too far away, and its slosh carried the faintest echo of the sea’s thunder and the terrible roaring of Oarsa. Saotse could feel it even now, and it made her bones ache. “Oarsa, help us,” she whispered again, but even as she said it, her hope receded like the tide from the shore. Oarsa had not answered her once in the past fifty years. If the Powers of this place had not intervened to save the city, then her prayers wouldn’t rouse them now.

A moan of despair spilled from her mouth. She was alone, entirely alone. Uya and Oire had not come. She knew that Nei had been dead from the moment that the first charge broke through their line. But Uya? Oire? Chrasu? The rest of the
enna
? Were they dead, or had they forgotten her? Had they fled to safety alone?

She heard no human voices. The battle must have been long gone, then. She lay her head against the ground. Pine needles pricked at her forehead, and loamy soil pressed against her temples.

The smell of moss, earthworms, and mushrooms flooded her with loneliness and heartbreak. She whimpered and curled into a ball. The vastness of her abandonment oppressed her. In her solitude, she remembered every footstep from there to her home, across the high plains, the passes and the cold deserts and the steppes, the plains and the marshes. Every step drenched in blood and soaked in strife. She was endlessly longing, endlessly seeking the place of her marriage—

With a gasp, Saotse returned to herself. That was not her memory.
Whose, then?

As soon as she asked, she knew. She felt the strange Power keening just below the surface of the earth, alone and far from home. Saotse had fallen from her own sadness into the chasm of the Power’s. The Power was one of the invaders, but she was
not
one of
them
, not with the warriors.
Their
voices roiled with a different strength, darker and windy and flashing with rage. The loneliness of the earth was not theirs. But the earth one wielded tremendous power, though it was unfocused, scattered, as fine as dust.

She touched her forehead again to the earth, breathing deep the dark earthiness of the soil. She opened herself to the touch of the Power, inviting the spirit to speak. Unlike Chaoare and Oarsa and the others whose names she knew, this one did not shy away, did not hover just beyond the crying of her lonely soul. As if sinking into a pool of mud, Saotse slipped slowly into the Power’s sorrow.

The spirit soaked her. Her mouth and her nostrils felt as if they filled with dirt, and her fingers reached into the soil like roots. Down, down, down, burrowing with the blind, fertile things of the earth, a sister to moles and earthworms, a mother to ants. She bore trees on her shoulders and grew mushrooms from her hands. She exhaled grass. Her thighs were hills; her feet, an outcropping of stone.

We are lonely
. Saotse spoke for herself, but her voice was of the Power that embraced her. She was crushed with a memory: a husband who flashed like lightning, strong and fierce as the whirlwind, now distant and estranged, still receding from her with the children that they had borne.

Saotse added her own thoughts, of the
enna
that was kind to her but was not her family, of the girl who had been like her sister but who bloomed into womanhood just as Saotse faded into age, of loneliness, of abandonment.

This is not our home.
Home was a marsh that stretched from horizon to horizon, soft wet earth covered with reeds, thick with birds, pregnant with fish, garbed in swampy mist. Little dry hillocks rose above the murk, where men lived and tended herds of dirty white cattle, where women wove clothes from reeds and sang songs.

Saotse added her home from the depth of her memories: a line of wooden cottages above the sea, clinging to the walls of a fjord. Blue mountains rising overhead like knives. The sky white and icy in winter. A hearth of stone, yellow flames kindled by wrinkled brown hands, a haven against the screaming winds.

They have destroyed it.
Blood watered the earth. The soil turned black, the water red. Men groaned and gurgled as they were hacked to pieces, gutted, torn. Women wept and begged for mercy. The Power was torn from her husband. She was torn from her family. This hour of destruction bestrode time like a mountain over the plains. It did not pass. She was raped every dawn; her husband was killed every evening. The horror and the sorrow bloomed like the grass, renewed every day in perpetual memory.

Saotse added the sound of hooves, the screams of the
enna
, and the smoke of Prasa. Wails of despair went up from both of them.

“Did you hear that?”

Saotse woke as if from a dream. She was a woman again. She was alone, beneath a shrub, hidden in a stand of spruce. The Power had left her.
No, not again. I can’t bear it!
—but in the moment that she thought she was alone, she smelled again the humid breath of the broken-hearted earth. Saotse relaxed. The Power, whatever her name, did not seem eager to abandon her.

And now, present in herself, feeling only the dirt beneath her hands, she heard a second voice reply, “Be quiet, or they’ll hear you.”

There were two of them, both men. They were Prasei, not invaders, judging by their voices and the furtive way they shuffled through the wood. The invaders did not speak Praseo. And if these were Prasei, then they might be able to help her.

Saotse raised her voice just above a whisper. “Hello?”

Their movement stopped. “Who’s there?” someone replied, with a suspicious edge to their voice.

“I’m from Prasa,” she said. “Of Nei’s
enna
. I hid here, but I can’t see you—”

“Quiet,” he scolded. “There are still riders in the city. Where are you?”

“Beneath a bush of some kind. Here, let me come.” She began to crawl toward the sound of their talking.

“Can you see me waving?”

“I’m blind.”

“Blind?” The man grunted in annoyance. The other muttered something just below her hearing, but she could guess what it was.

“Don’t leave me,” she said. “My
enna
is gone. I’ve been hiding here all day. Please, I’ll just—”

“Quiet! I think I can hear you moving.” Their steps rustled closer to her. “Can you wave? Are you standing up?”

“I can stand.” Her knees creaked with cold stiffness as she bent them to rise. A little gasp of pain escaped her mouth.

“I see her,” said the second man, the one who had muttered. “Just behind that spruce.”

“Stay there. We’ll come to you.”

Footsteps crunched through the thicket. A heavy hand touched her shoulder. “Over here, auntie. Quiet.”

She turned toward the voice, and the man’s hand took hers. His skin was rough and callused, a worker’s hand.

“We have a canoe at the water’s edge, but we have to stick to the woods. Can you follow?”

“You might need to carry her,” the other said.

“No, I can walk,” she insisted. “I’m not a cripple.”

“Good. What’s your name, auntie?”

“Saotse.”

“Really? I’ve never heard that name before.”

“I’m not from here.” A twinge of shame tightened her belly. “I am a swift woman.”

“What?” asked the other man. His voice was rougher, thicker, suggesting he was much older than the one holding her hand. “She’s not even Prasei?”

“I’ve lived here for many years,” she said. “In Nei’s
enna
, as I said.”

“Never mind,” said the younger one beside her. “I am Tagoa, and my brother is Bera.”

“May the Powers remember your names.”

Bera snorted. “Better than they remembered the names of Prasa. Now, let’s go.”

Tagoa pulled her forward, and she kept up, feeling ahead with her toes to find the roots and the stones that she had to step over, ducking wherever the man warned her of spruce branches. The lapping of the seashore grew closer. The scent of the wood mingled with the cool smell of the water, and the ground under her feet changed from moss and fallen needles into bristly shore grass.

“So what now,” Bera said. “Do we leave her here and go back?”

“We can’t leave her here,” Tagoa replied. “Anyone who rode by the shore would see her, and then they’d find the canoe, and then we’d be done for.”

“But we didn’t come for an old woman!”

“Well, we’ve got what we’ve got.”

“We could have her lie down in the canoe and wait.”

“I would do that,” she said. Hiding in the strangers’ canoe was humiliating, but at that moment, she was happy to trade her pride for her life.

Bera growled. “Fine, but we’ll have to find what we can quickly. Hurry up and get her in the canoe.”

With a sigh, Tagoa tugged on her hand. “You’ll have to follow me. We hid the canoe in the brush. If you lie down in the bottom, you should be safe. We’ll be back before long.”

They hurried along the shore. A thorny shore brush scratched at her legs, then her knee knocked against the wooden side of a canoe.

“Up, now.” Tagoa grabbed her elbow and helped her up. The canoe rocked in the mud as Saotse knelt in the bottom. “Just wait a little while. We won’t be long.”

They sloshed up the shore until their steps padded into the grass and disappeared. Saotse knelt with her head between her knees, trying not to shake and set the canoe splashing in the shallow water. A chill had started in her feet, wet and exposed to the cool night air. But at least someone had found her. If she had stayed in the copse, with the city full of raiders, it might have been days before someone found her, and… She would not think about it.

Her misery descended like a mist. She briefly felt the keening of the earthy Power. But the water touching the canoe stirred. A distant presence, vast and deep, thrummed in her chest with a painful sweetness. It was
him
, and even this attenuated echo nearly overwhelmed her. It brought forth a memory of splashing in the surf as a girl, of the water rising up to kiss her, of the whales ascending to proudly bear their master’s maid.

Oarsa.
The faint footfall was as close as she had heard him since she had first descended onto the shores of the Prasei, and he was drawing closer. He passed by
now
? Now, when the city was already ruined? Now, when she had wept for him for decades? Anger welled.

The waters around the canoe sang. Her mouth filled with the smell of seawater and sand, and she felt the Power’s tug like a current swallowing a canoe. No. Her toes dug into the floor of the canoe, and she braced herself against the sides as if the sea’s Power would lift her bodily into the water.
No.

And like letting out a breath pent up under the water, he passed. The water ceased leaping. The winds moved. She was alone again.

She shook for a moment in the floor of the canoe, then realized that she could hear her rescuers approaching.

“—Most of it,” Tagoa said.

“But we found the cask, and that’s what’s important. Auntie, are you still there?”

Saotse raised herself to her knees. The canoe wobbled beneath her. “I’m here.”

“Good, but get back down!” A moment later, they splashed into the shallows and dropped something into the bottom of the boat. The canoe tipped to one side as someone climbed in next to Saotse, then the other began to push the craft free of the sucking mud. A moment later he, too, leapt over the prow and nudged the canoe away from shore with an oar.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Saotse asked.

Bera laughed from the front of the canoe. “Most of the city is burned already. The raiders have been through most of the lodges. But we got the things we wanted from our lodge.”

“And where are we going now?”

“Ruhasu.”

Ruhasu was a fishing village on the shores of the bay a few miles north of Prasa. In the fall, after the salmon run, the Ruhasei would bring the surplus of the fish they had smoked and sell it to the traders. Saotse had spent many an hour assisting Nei in that barter.

“Have many other Prasei fled that way?” she asked.
Maybe Uya, Oire, Chrasu, and others will be waiting for me there.

“My father’s
enna
is in Ruhasu, so we moved most of ours up that way. My brother and I turned back only to see if we could find anything in the city of use to us.”

“Ah.” So they were from the poor regions just south of the river. And they were cowards and looters. But they were also alive, in the same pitiable state as Saotse.

“I expect you’re right, though, auntie. Ruhasu will grow in the next few days,” Tagoa said quietly. “We’re not the only ones who got away. We’ll see who else drifts in.”

The water around the raft gurgled with their oar strokes. Saotse heard a muttered word in its movement, and she felt Oarsa’s whisper. She put her hands over her ears and hid her head in the bottom of the canoe until the Power’s presence abated, and she heard no more save the rippling of their oars.

Chapter 10

Uya

U
ya had learned exactly two
of their names: Keshlik and Juyut. She practiced turning Keshlik’s name into a curse, spitting it violently from her lips ask if she were expelling a fish bone. Their language had just the sound for swearing, too. It was full of short, rough sounds, like stones on the seashore grinding together.

She lay in a storeroom, just long enough for her to stretch out. Her hands were bound in leather thongs and tied to a post. The fibers chafed her wrists, red and raw from her four days of captivity. It would have been worse, except that Keshlik came four times a day to bring her food, unbind her ropes, and massage her wrists. Sometimes this seemed like kindness. Sometimes she stopped hating him. But the muscles of her back ached from the way the child sat inside her, and her feet continued to swell, and she remembered her hatred.

A Yakhat face appeared in the doorway. It was Juyut, the younger one, whom she guessed was Keshlik’s brother or nephew. He glanced in at her then left, shouting a response to someone unseen.

Keshlik appeared a moment later. He spoke a few soft words, then knelt and began to undo the ropes binding her hands.

“What’s this?” she asked. He had no tray of food, and it was too early to eat.

He grunted. In a moment, her hands were free, and she began rubbing her wrists. Keshlik stood and offered her his hand.

She looked at it and continued massaging her chafed skin. She wasn’t about to accompany him anywhere if she could help it.

He bent and grabbed her arm just below the elbow, then pulled her roughly upright. An arrow of pain stabbed through her feet, and her legs folded like reeds, unable to uphold her body. Keshlik caught her under her shoulder before she hit the ground. He propped her up so her feeble legs barely touched the ground, and he helped her limp forward from the storeroom.

Her body had discovered all sorts of new pains in her four days tied up. Her legs shrieked with the effort of holding up her pregnant body, and her spine burned and creaked as Keshlik guided her forward. The baby squirmed in her belly, protesting the movement. Uya winced at the light as the warehouse’s shadow slipped behind them, then opened her eyes.

The old market square was full of men on horses, packs brimming with plunder, clouds of yellow dust, carts creaking under their loads. The carts were pulled by stout Prasei ponies, looking dwarfish next to the tall, slender Yakhat breeds. Keshlik pulled her to a cart half-filled with furs and hemp sacks and motioned for her to sit. Were they all leaving, or just her? She heaved herself and her belly up onto the cart and took up a position she hoped she could hold for a few hours. Keshlik tied her hands to the rail of the cart.

He grunted and said something in their abrasive dialect. She spat at him and tugged at the rope. She had plenty of slack to move, but the knots themselves were tight.

She laid back against the hemp sacks of plunder that filled up the rest of the cart. Something sharp and brittle dug into her back. She shifted once or twice, unable to find a comfortable position, and heard the sack’s contents scrape together. The bag shifted in a new direction, and something clattered against the boards of the cart.

She glanced over her shoulder. It was a mussel shell, the sort used for jewelry. Her breath stopped.

The savages had no idea how sharp a broken shell could be. She quickly closed her hand over the shell and tucked it into the waist of her skirt. She folded her hands in front of her and shifted so that the shell was hidden between her and the other loot.

Her heart pounded. Keshlik rode back and forth across the square, talking to one group of men and then another, while carts and laden horses began to leave in batches.

No one had seen her grab the shell.

Finally Keshlik’s brother came out of the warehouse they’d slept in, carrying the orange and blue banner that had hung above the door, and a group of men converged around him, shouting and chanting. Keshlik said a few words, and the whole group moved out in a line, with Uya’s cart in the middle of the train.

The dogs had had their run of the city. Filth, filth everywhere. Perhaps a third of the lodges that Uya saw were burned down, leaving skeletons of charred wood over rotten beds of ash. Others had brutal trails of splintered wood, trampled rags, and broken pottery weeping from their entrances. Ancestor totems had been toppled, their painted faces defaced with mud and urine. Charnel heaps of bones blackened the ground where bodies had been piled and burned.

She chuckled in black mirth as they rode past the useless heap that remained of the earthworks. So much effort to defend the city, and they hadn’t saved anyone.

Keshlik and his brother rode in front of her at the head of the procession, a straggling line of horsemen and carts behind them. She sighed and leaned herself into the side rails of the cart. They entered the forest beyond the city, and the scar of the earthworks receded.

Despair tightened her throat. She had never been north of Prasa. She had never been far from her
enna
and their lodge, had never traveled with the men even as far as the little villages on the north shore of the bay. And now she was leaving, tied like an animal to a cart, with the city in ruins.

She fingered the hidden shell, then tugged it from its place and pressed it against the wood of the cart’s bed. The wheel hit a rock, the cart lurched, and her weight snapped the shell in half. She ran her finger over the edge, as sharp as a knife, then hid it in her fist.

They traveled without pause until after sunset. Keshlik left Uya tied to the cart while he and the warriors around him made camp, with small fires and bedrolls on the ground. The horses wandered into the forest in search of grass. Keshlik came to Uya with an old bedroll under one arm and loosed one end of the tie, leading her to a place a little ways from the main encampment. So he intended to give her privacy. Well, he would regret that.

He did not untie her, nor did he check what she clenched in her fist. He tied the other end of the rope binding her wrists to a nearby pine. A few moments later, he brought food and set it on her woolen bedroll: jerky, dry cheese with a strange smell, and a few leaves of pressed kelp looted from Prasa. He left without a word.

She ate only a few bites, despite her piercing hunger. She had to save something for her flight, regardless of the insistence of her stomach. The warriors gathered around the fire, talking in their gravelly tongue, while she sat atop her bedroll. Keshlik glanced her way every few minutes, but the rest of them ignored her.

Darkness fell. She lay down on the matted wool. She could look down the trade road and see a long line of glittering yellow fires trailing back toward Prasa. She would have to avoid them all. She stayed awake, determination firing her mind, as one by one, the warriors around the closest fire fell asleep.

Finally, only Keshlik and Juyut remained awake. After a last glance into the woods, Keshlik lay down, and his brother stood, stretching. Loosening his belt, he walked into the woods on the far side of the road.

Now
. She took the shard of shell and sliced at the leather binding her hands. It bit and cut back a piece as long as a thumbnail. She kept cutting until the leather was ragged. Juyut returned from the shadows and stood over the fire. She tore at the leather with the shell one more time then pulled the ties apart with a snap.

Juyut looked her way. She froze.

For a long moment, the only sound was the beating of her heart. Then the warrior relaxed and resumed watching the heart of the fire.

Uya scooped up the remaining food and folded it into the corner of her blouse. She slipped off the bedroll and into the ferns with only a ghostly rustling, and she padded away into the forest.

The Powers smiled on her. The night was clear, and the moon half full. She could see just well enough to avoid the largest sticks and stones in her path as she scrambled through the ferny undergrowth away from the fire.

There was no commotion behind her. Had Juyut not heard her leave? She dared not believe that the Powers had blessed her as much as that.

The night grew chilly, and wisps of mist rose into the air. Her pace slowed. Her breath came hard, and her feet ached. The moon slipped beneath the peaks of the spruces in the west, and with its passing, the forest floor became as dark as ink. Only the cold, white stars lit her path. She could not stop until she had put enough distance between herself and the warriors.

She went on, feeling with hands and toes for the obstacles in her path, until her foot slipped on a mossy stone. She tumbled to the ground.

She twisted to land on her back rather than her stomach, and the blow knocked the breath from her lungs. She struggled to breathe and watched the stars swim. Her back throbbed, and nausea rose from her stomach. Was the baby okay? Had they heard her? Had she fled far enough?

She tried to rise but collapsed back to the earth with a groan. It would have to be far enough, because she could go no further tonight. A little ways away, some low-hanging spruce boughs offered some shelter. She crawled to them then collapsed into the bed of needles. In an instant, she was asleep.

Uya awoke to rain dripping on her face. She sat up and shook a shower of water loose from a low-hanging pine branch. A quick glance at the sky brought a twist of fear to her stomach.

The sky was swaddled in clouds, and mist hovered over the tops of the spruces. In the murky gray light, she had no idea which way was east, and she was bereft of any landmark. She had only been this far from Prasa once, when her father had taken her with the men to the edge of the valley, to see where the pines grew short and let out onto the great yellow sea of grass. There were few villages near here, and she might wander for days before finding one. She didn’t even know which way to flee.

Downhill
. The sea was downhill, and her only option was to follow the water to it.

She rose. The pain in her back had subsided, and her feet had grown numb with cold. But the worrying twitches in her stomach from the night before had stopped, and at least she wouldn’t feel the sharp twigs underfoot anymore. After checking her feet and finding them bloody and blue, she decided not to look again. She untied the corner of her blouse and ate a strip of jerky and a cube of cheese, then stumbled forward out of her shelter.

The forest sloped down gently to her right. She followed it, ferns soaking her skirt as she swished past them. Misty rain dripped down from the fog overhead, soaking her clothes in a few minutes and plastering her hair to her head. She began to shiver.

A fire. She would need a fire tonight—except that she had no dry wood, and nothing with which to light it. She didn’t even have a blanket. She had to keep walking. The heat of her movement was the only heat she had. She shivered again and fought the urge to weep.

The gray gradually brightened. Somewhere above the clouds, the sun was rising toward noonday, though the drizzle showed no signs of stopping. Hunger began to gnaw at her throat, but she denied it. She needed food, for herself and for the child, but she still needed to wait.

Then she heard the crackle of a footstep behind her.

Uya froze. In the distance, a man, his face the color of red clay, loped swiftly through the forest, looking toward the ground. In the next moment, he raised his eyes and saw her.

His shout splintered the peace of the forest.

Uya tried to run, but even as she turned, she knew it was hopeless. Her feet slipped on the mossy ground, and her belly shortened her stride.

The man was beside her, grabbing at her wrists and shoulders. She squirmed away and slid to the ground. The man jumped to where she had fallen and pinned her shoulders down.

She jerked and swatted at him once, twice, but it was futile. Her escape had lasted less than a day.