Shannivar (11 page)

Shannivar had expected to bid her friend farewell at the
khural
, but she could not imagine the world without her.

First Grandmother and now Mirrimal. Who next, O Tabilit, must I lose?

“I never told you . . .” Mirrimal's words came haltingly, “what happened . . . that night . . . with Alsanobal.”

“You do not need to explain. What do I care that you found joy in his arms?”

With a gasp of effort, Mirrimal lifted one hand and touched a finger to Shannivar's lips. For a long moment, neither woman spoke. Death-pale lips moved. “I could not . . .”

Mirrimal's eyelids fluttered half-closed. The pressure of her finger against Shannivar's mouth fell away. Shannivar grasped her friend's hand, feeling the flesh already growing cold.

“Shannu . . .” A breath, a whisper, drew Shannivar close. Her lips brushed Mirrimal's.

“It was you I thought of, that night.” Mirrimal breathed the words into Shannivar's mouth. “You I wanted.”

Shannivar sat back, too numb to know what she felt. Her heart ached. Mirrimal's confession hung in the air between them. There was nothing to say, nothing to do, only to hold steadfast and watch the last fading of the light in Mirrimal's eyes.

When the light was gone, Shannivar dared to breathe again.
So that is your secret, my friend, my dear friend, and now it ends with you.

What was her own secret? When would she know it, and who would she tell with her own dying breath?

* * *

The Isarrans, it turned out, had some skill in medicine. Phannus had clearly seen battle injuries before. They helped the
enaree
straighten Alsanobal's leg and strap it between two lengths of wood from the fort. Bennorakh had dosed Alsanobal with poppy syrup, so for the moment, he was quiet.

If only, Shannivar thought, there were a poppy syrup for the spirit. She would drink a river of it for a night's forgetfulness.

One of Mirrimal's brothers was dead, along with his horse. For all her experience harrying the Gelon and beating back their incursions, Shannivar could not entirely overcome the numbing sense of shock. Shock and anger. And, for the first time, fear.

In her mind, Shannivar went over the battle. In retrospect, she was far more terrified than she had been at the time. It could so easily have ended with all of them dead. The attack on the fort had been badly executed, without cunning or plan. The Gelon had used the terrain, the lure of the gap in the palisade, and their own superior numbers to force the riders into disadvantage.

Alsanobal had paid for his rashness. But Mirrimal, her brother, and two fine horses had paid as well. Surely, Tabilit must weep.

Shannivar told herself that Mirrimal was now beyond pain, beyond fear, beyond disappointment. She was galloping free and wild over the endless Pastures of the Sky with Grandmother and Saramark. With Tabilit herself.

Bennorakh seemed to have no such recriminations, no thoughts about how the riders had died. After a brief period of solitary meditation, far shorter than for Grandmother's death, he began directing the disposal of the bodies. They had not the time for burials, but it was a common practice to burn those fallen in battle. Under the
enaree's
direction, the surviving riders erected a funeral pyre inside the ruins of the Gelonian fort. The wooden stakes of the palisade were dry enough to burn hot and clean.

The afternoon wore on. Shadows stretched like wavering, elongated ghosts across the battle ground. Shannivar studied what remained of the palisade, the huts and half-constructed strong house. She knew little of building with stone and wood, yet it seemed to her the Gelon had intended this fort to stand for many years. This was their way, even as the way of Azkhantia was to follow the herds, to wander from one moon to the next, drifting from summer
dharlak
to the shelter of winter
kishlak
. Only there and at the ancient gathering place did they leave any trace of their passing.

The surviving riders laid out the bodies of the slain enemy, along with their belongings. These Gelon were soldiers, accustomed to traveling light and hard. Besides their weapons, they carried military necessities, tiny boxes of salt, cakes of dried opium juice, packets of steel needles, bone fishing hooks and silk thread, and small, slender knives. Shannivar also noticed more personal items: a chain bearing a small copper medallion, so worn that its image could not be deciphered; a ring, silver set with a small, poor-quality ruby, too small for a man's finger; a scroll covered with close writing that Leanthos identified as a collection of prayers to the Gelonian god known as The Protector of Soldiers.

As she handled and sorted these possessions, Shannivar felt a kinship that bordered on intimacy with the dead Gelon. What would one of them make of her life from the examination of her own effects? Her bow, her bag of women's contraceptive herbs, the wooden chest from Grandmother, carved with horses dancing beneath the moon?
That I was a warrior, a woman, a rider.
Nothing more.

As he straightened the last Gelonian corpse, Rhuzenjin muttered that the entire fort should be burned to the ground. Mud and ash, he said, would be a fitting memorial for the invaders.

Shannivar considered his words. Certainly, this was as safe a place as any for such a blaze. Between the earthworks and the river bank, there was little chance of the fire spreading.

A idea crept into her thoughts—to give the Gelonian soldiers and these tokens of their lives, as well as her comrades, to the fire. And why not the fort as well, the symbol of Gelonian arrogance? All would be erased in Tabilit's cleansing fire.

Dharvarath, Mirrimal's surviving brother and the most conservative of the party, was horrified when she proposed it. “You cannot mean to accord these—these
dwellers-in-stone
such an honor? To send them in glory to the Kingdom of the Sky? Who knows what they will do there? Pile stones on Tabilit's sacred earth?”

Ythrae, standing nearby, flinched under the strength of his outburst. Shannivar held her ground. “What else are we to do with them?” Shannivar countered. “Throw them into the river and foul the water? They were warriors, not beasts.”

“Beasts! Yes, evil beasts! Not to be treated as men!”

Rhuzenjin looked as if he were about to intervene on Shannivar's behalf, to defend her. Impatiently, she gestured for him to stay out of the quarrel. If she allowed a man to rescue her, she would lose all hope of setting her own terms in marriage. She would arrive at the
khural
as just an ordinary woman rider, when she most needed to be a Saramark.

“The Gelon were most certainly wrong. Wrong to desecrate the land with stone and wrong to violate our territory. But they fought bravely and with cunning. No one can deny them that. I will not send them without honor to whatever lies beyond their lives.”

“
You
will not? Did the battle so addle your wits that you have forgotten it is Alsanobal son of Esdarash who leads this party?” He narrowed his eyes. “Or do the deaths of Mirrimal and my brother mean nothing to you?”

Heat shot through Shannivar's veins. Even as her hands curled into fists, she held herself firm. More lay at stake here than her own grief. Dharvarath was challenging her, deliberately provoking her to a fight he was sure he would win. When they were children, she could have wrestled him to the ground, but now she could not prevail against his greater height, his weight, his raw muscular power. She must use her own strength to advantage.

Until now, she had not realized that she had indeed stepped into Alsanobal's place. Unless she faced Dharvarath down, she would lose all hope of control. She moved toward him, feeling her pulse speed up and her muscles tense for action.

Levelly, without flinching, she met his eyes. Despite his taunts, Dharvarath took a step back.

“Treating the dead of a noble foe with respect will not bring our friends back to us,” she said, her voice low and tight. “It will not restore your kin. But
not
doing so will diminish the meaning of their deaths. Should we do the enemy's work for him and destroy the best of who we are, simply because we are angry and stricken with grief?”

Ythrae gasped and Rhuzenjin murmured something to her. Without waiting for Dharvarath's answer, Shannivar turned and walked away. Dharvarath made no attempt to follow her. He had already lost.

In the few moments it took to locate Bennorakh, Shannivar had time to assume the appearance of being reasonable and calm. She found the
enaree
in conference with the Isarran emissary.

“We must make provision for the bodies of the Gelon, as well as our own,” she told him. “They were outlanders, true, and dwellers-in-stone, but they died under Tabilit's Sky, and we—it is our duty—” She drew in a breath, then went on in a rush. “We should make one big funeral pyre and burn them all.”

Leanthos turned to her with an astounded look. She could not tell if his reaction were due to a woman speaking so forthrightly or to a difference in funeral customs. Or was he, like Dharvarath, disgusted at according such dignity to an enemy?

Bennorakh considered her gravely. “You speak what is in my own mind, Eagle Daughter.”

Silently Shannivar sent up a prayer of thanks.

“In ancient times,” the
enaree
went on, shifting into a high-pitched sing-song voice, “enemy captives were slain and burned with a fallen hero, and their horses and weapons as well. The mightier the warrior, the more sacrifices would be sent to the Sky Kingdom as tribute to Onjhol, to stand with the gods against the coming of Olash-giyn-Olash, the Shadow of Shadows.”

Shannivar knew the legends. Tabilit and her consort would not reign forever. The time would come when the fate of the worlds, the one above and the one below, would depend upon a mighty battle. Then the people of the steppe would rise up, the dead as well as the living, to fight against the Shadow of Shadows. It was an honorable fate for a vanquished foe, to have the hope of fighting in that final, cataclysmic battle.

“The Gelon fought well,” she nodded. “Therefore, they will serve Tabilit well.”

* * *

They built the funeral pyre inside the ruins of the Gelonian fort. When all the preparations were complete and the fires lit, the Azkhantian warriors withdrew to the heights to watch. The
enaree
burned incense and chanted the ancient invocations. The Isarrans offered prayers according to their own ways.

The pyres burned brightly at first, then fitfully. Shannivar feared the wood was either too wet or there was too little of it to consume so many bodies. Bennorakh took a torch and went down to the fort, his path marked only by that single bobbing light. It winked out, then reappeared as he moved about the burning ground. A wind sprang up, fanning the sputtering flames.

Shannivar caught snatches of chant in the quavering falsetto of the
enarees
, although she could not make out any words. The wind beat about her ears, muffling the ordinary sounds of the hilltop camp. She could not even hear the voices of the other riders, although they were only a short distance away.

The chanting of the
enaree
grew louder and louder. Insistent, demanding. The darkness seemed to pick out the phrases, to lift them to the heights and swirl them around her . . .
through
her.

Shannivar had walked through snowstorms in the long steppe winters. Each mote of sound reminded her of an ice-edged flake. She opened her mouth to cry out, only to inhale an eddy of sound-flakes. She could not breathe, could not move, could not cry out. The whirlwind intensified, flaying skin, shredding flesh from both the outside and inside. Bone lay bare and then blew away into dust.

Tabilit, help me!

Her vision went white in the pummeling storm, or perhaps she no longer had eyes. Yet through that raging vortex, a shape emerged. A woman of snow, of ice, mounted on a mare whose coat shimmered like polished steel. Slowly the woman rode toward Shannivar, sitting as firm and supple as if she and the horse were one being. The mare's head swung from side to side, revealing that she bore no bridle, only ribbons of silver braided into her mane.

Tabilit, Mother of Horses?

Terrified yet ecstatic, Shannivar waited as the rider grew even closer. Then she saw the rider's face.
Grandmother
.

She was no longer the withered crone, the tyrannical matriarch, but a woman young and strong, a warrior such as Shannivar had never seen. A Saramark.

Then the winds howled once more. The voice of the
enaree
returned with renewed strength. The young-old woman who was Grandmother smiled at Shannivar. The shimmering-steel mare turned and disappeared into the storm. A moment later, a heartbeat, an eon, a second figure took shape. Again, it was a woman, a warrior. She sat astride a big horse whose colorless flanks were tinged with red-bronze, laughing as if her heart were the cradle of all joy.
Mirrimal.

Am I dead, too? Is that why I can see them?

The white-against-white figure of Mirrimal shook her head gently. The red stallion dipped his head. Then they were gone.

Shannivar peered into the fast-flowing currents of white and wind. There was something else, something she could not quite see. Mirrimal's brother and his horse. The Gelon. Shannivar could
feel
them moving with deliberate grace. In the same way, she could
feel
a lineage of women riders, their features engraved upon her own—her own mother, whom she had never known, and Aimellina, and the first Shannivar.

And behind them, infusing them with her courage, Saramark.

Without warning, Shannivar came back to herself. A sound like thunder, only sharper, resounded through her skull. She blinked, and the next moment, the fires in the fort below surged skyward. They erupted into volcanic brightness, spewing forth glowing, garnet-red cinders. The flames burned white over the pyres. Around Shannivar, the others cried out and pointed.