Blood Ties (35 page)

Owl’s Story

I
COULDN’T STOP
them. I didn’t even realize the village was being attacked, until they burst the latch like it wasn’t there. There were three of them, tall like Acton’s people always are, redheaded. And the biggest going straight for my Sparrow, ripping her gown right off her breasts. Oh, Sparrow, I tried, I tried, but they were so many, so strong. All I had was my hands. They had swords, axes, clubs. I tried to get to you, beloved, but they were . . . They held me, made me watch as they violated you and then slit your throat. Then they beat me to death with their hands and feet. Enjoying it. The blood and the pain. Monsters.

I died cursing them, promising revenge, and after death I brooded on it, locked in the cold dark with nothing to warm me but rage and a thirst for their blood. I yearned to be reborn, but the gods betrayed me and kept me there, waiting . . .

I don’t know how long.

Then the enchanter came and set us free. So few of us, only nine: me, Marten, Squirrel, Hazel, Moth, Beech, Juniper, Cat and young Sage. Only nine of us had kept our anger strong enough to be called back from the dark. But not my Sparrow. Oh, that is the hardest thing, that Sparrow didn’t wait for me, didn’t cleave to me in the dark behind death. She has gone on and I have truly lost her. Forever. The killers took all the years we might have had together, and more, they took the rebirth together, which we had planned, had prayed for. They took our unborn children, and grandchildren, they took everything we could have had, should have had, but for them. I will never stop hungering for their deaths.

The enchanter was one of our blood, you could tell: dark and slight, though his eyes were lighter than ours. He spoke to us in the old tongue, but stiffly, as though he’d never spoken it before: “Take your revenge,” he said. He pointed out of the glade toward the village, and we went, the weapons in our hands that we’d died holding.

We were ghosts. White and silent. I thought that I should feel cold, or shaken, but I was already cold, as cold as endless time.

Then the enchanter reached out and touched my arm. Touched it! My arm was as solid as his. He said again, “Take your revenge. Then go to the river.”

As I realized what he was offering us, I was full of rage. And hope that my rage would be sated. I grabbed Sage’s scythe — I knew I could make better use of it — and headed for the village. The others followed.

“Kill them all!” the enchanter shouted behind us.

I would.

The village made me understand how long I had been curled in the dark. First, there were no trees — not for a mile or more around. The land had had its bones laid bare, had been raped as my Sparrow had. There were brick and stone houses where our earthen cottages had been. Many more of them. They had prospered on our blood, and they would pay.

At the first house, I reached out my hand and opened the door. It moved. It was true, I could touch. I could act. At last.

Inside were a man and a woman, sitting at a table. Acton’s people — pale-haired and blue-eyed. I swung the scythe before they realized what was happening. I made him watch her death as they had made me watch Sparrow’s . . . The blood spurted all over him: hot blood, their blood, blood of the invaders, the rapists, the marauders. I was filled with holy exultation. I tried to shout my joy, but the dead cannot speak. So I swung the scythe again.

He was kneeling by his woman, cradling her head. Yes! Mourn as I mourned. I brought the staff of the scythe down on his neck and heard it snap.

How wonderful a sound.

Saker

H
E WAS
still bleeding. Saker sat on the ground next to the bones and shook. Too much blood lost. He tried to bind the cut with a cloth he had laid ready, but his left hand trembled too much. In the end he put the cloth over his hand and clenched it between his knees until the bleeding stopped.

Part of him had never really believed it would work. His father, yes — that had worked — but that spell had been fueled by his deep grief, a need to hold his father again in his arms. Part of him had believed that his grief was the important ingredient in the spell. Part of him still believed it.

Then he remembered how he had lamented over the baby’s skull just before he had cast the spell. Perhaps sorrow at the waste, at the shocking disregard for life, was enough. Compassion for those cut down without mercy by the invaders. Perhaps his heart was bigger than he had known.

When the shaking had stopped and he no longer felt faint, he got up, picked up his pack and followed the track the ghosts had left. It made him laugh. A track left by ghosts! Who would believe it? He was light-headed with blood loss and a growing euphoria. He was the master of the dead! No one had done it before — not even the enchanter of Turvite, who brought the ghosts back but could not give them strength.

The door of the first house was open, but there was no sound. He looked in cautiously. It smelt bad, of offal and dung.

Then he saw the woman, her guts oozing over the wooden floor. That was the smell. The man lay beside her, seemingly without a wound, but dead.

They were dead.

He groped his way outside and along the wall until he came to the corner of the house, where he turned his face into a breeze. He felt sweat cooling on his forehead, and tried to stop himself from vomiting. The bile rose in his throat and he fought it. And lost. The breeze blew some of the vomit over his boots, and he grabbed a handful of grass and frantically tried to rub it off . . . so his father wouldn’t notice, wouldn’t despise him for a weakling.

It was the smell, he told himself. He wasn’t expecting that.

Enchanter training had taught him how to control errant thoughts and concentrate. He took the image of the dead couple and pushed it firmly to one side. Then he drew a deep breath.

“The first revenge,” he said sonorously, as though his father were listening. “There will be more.”

He skirted the village, in case someone had connected him with the ghosts’ rising, and came out the other side, near the river, and waited in the shade of a small juniper tree. It was appropriate, he thought. The smell took him back to his early childhood, before the warlord’s men had come . . .

There had been a juniper tree outside their house and his auntie used the berries for cooking. He had been forbidden to climb the tree because it was so old. “Older than Acton’s people, that one,” his father would say, patting the trunk fondly. “You stay away from it, boy.”

Saker couldn’t remember his father ever calling him by his real name. Saker was
boy,
or
you,
or, in a good mood,
young’un
. He hadn’t minded. He had liked being called boy. His father had not much time for girls. He barely noticed Saker’s three older sisters, or the baby.

He had tried hard to please his father. Everyone did, in the whole village. And not just because his father had been strong and liable to prove that strength on anyone who challenged him. He had been clever, too, known to be clever — known for his wit and guile. Saker had heard the other villagers say such things, usually when his father had got the better of one of Acton’s people in a bargain.

That juniper tree . . . Its branches were so inviting, its trunk just right for holding as you climbed. From the top, he had thought, you would be able to see out of the valley and all the way to Cliffhold, where the warlord lived. He battled with himself for weeks, but one day, when he had thought his father was out in the fields with the new ewe, he climbed it.

He had been right, you could see right out of the valley, although not down as far as Cliffhold, which was a day’s ride away. If he had looked the other way, if he had turned around to look at the sheer mountains behind, he might have seen them coming . . .

Over and over in the years since, he had played that scene in his mind, but this time he turned, this time he saw the warlord’s men coming over the rise behind the village, swords out. This time he yelled and yelled and yelled so that the women had time to hide and the men had time to pick up weapons, and the children had time to scramble away into the underbrush . . .

Would it have made any difference? As an adult, he told himself that it wouldn’t have. The warlord’s men were soldiers who had known their job, and their job that day had been to kill. Everyone. From eldest to youngest. Old Auntie Maize to Saker’s little sister, still at her mother’s breast.

Everyone, except him. Because when the screaming had started and he
had
turned around, finally, too late, he froze where he was, had been too scared to move, too scared to help his father fight the men who were chopping down at his sisters with short, efficient strokes of their swords. He had been too frightened to jump on the back of the captain of the troop, although he had sat on his horse right below him, and maybe, maybe, he could have pulled him off into the dirt . . .

And what would he have done then? He scolded himself. He had only been five summers old. Five. The warlord would have batted him away like a fly. And he’d have been dead, like all the others.

Saker began to tremble with the effort of pushing aside
that
memory, the worst one, the one that came after the warlord’s men had dragged the bodies away and the sun had gone down. He had stayed so long in the tree that he had wet himself, but he couldn’t stay there any longer. His hands had started shaking with fatigue and he nearly fell. So he had made his way down slowly, cautiously, looking both ways at every step to make sure.

He had walked through the village that he knew, even at night, like his own home, but there was no one left. Just empty houses. And him.

The bodies had been piled up down the slope a little way. He avoided them, blocking his mind to the smell rising already, glad they had been hidden from him by the darkness. It had been strange, the way dreams can be strange, to be the only person there, it had reminded him of something. Then he had remembered. The songs and the stories about the first invasion told how Acton had ordered his men to kill the people but not burn the houses, so they could be used again.

The invasion had gone on almost a thousand years, Acton’s people gradually pushing back farther and farther into the land, but that original order had always been followed. The last push from the fair-haired warriors had been less than two hundred years before. Saker’s grandparents had talked about it as though it had been yesterday. In that last wave of the invasion, they had herded most of the people of the villages into the forest and killed them there. The remnants of those original people had come to live here, in Cliffhaven, on the poorest land in the Domains, the land that no one else had wanted.

Up until that day.

And, alone in his father’s house, the young Saker had known they would come back. They would live in their houses and farm their land and milk their ewes and eat their food.

It had filled him with a vast, wavery anger that seemed larger than himself. It had gone beyond the shock of having seen his family killed. It had gone past the desolation of the empty village, to a mature, burning sense of injustice.

He would go to the gods.

He had seen his family dragged out and murdered in front of him. So he had found the house as it always was. There had been no corpses or blood awaiting him. The soldiers hadn’t taken anything. As an adult, he had wondered about that. It wasn’t usual. In every invasion song he’d heard, the villages had been preserved, by Acton’s order, to give shelter to the old people and children who would follow the warriors across the mountains, but the warriors had stolen any loose items they could find, as battle spoil. But not here. Twenty years later, he still didn’t understand why.

It had made it worse for the young Saker, to see every accustomed thing in its rightful place, without the people who used them. He had put his spare clothes and some food into his father’s pack, feeling a twinge of guilt as he had taken it (“put that down, boy, it’s not yours!”); but he had resolved to survive. He had taken his father’s money from the brick under the hearth, his auntie’s earrings and his biggest sister’s bracelet, and a blanket and a kitchen knife, which he clenched in his hand. It was a black rock knife that his father had made, chipped from the black stone near the altar stone, with the gods’ permission. His father had talked to the gods. He would talk to them, too.

He had slipped through the back window, just in case, and made his way by starlight to the gods’ place. He had always been able to find it, no matter where he was. It had always called to him, but he had been considered too young to talk to the gods directly. That was for adults. Now
they
would have to talk to
him
.

The stone in its clearing had seemed to drink the light in. He had gone to it and had placed his hand on the cool surface. He had known the words.

“Gods of field and stream, hear your son. Gods of sky and wind, hear your son. Gods of earth and stone, hear your son. Gods of fire and storm, hear your son.”

They had risen up in his mind, like pale shadows with dark eyes, whispering his name. He had ignored them, still angry.

“Why did you let this
happen?
How could you?”

The answer had come in a whisper through his mind, not his ears.

Human evil is outside our control. Accept. Live.

“NO!” he had screamed. “I will NOT! I WILL NOT!”

With relief he had erupted into a genuine tantrum, of the kind he hadn’t had for over a year, since his father had beaten him for it. He had thrown himself full length and beat his fists on the stone and his feet on the ground. The unfairness of the world had swept over him and he had howled and cried and sobbed, pushed beyond the point where he could stop.

The gods had let him cry, soothing him with whispers.

Little child, little child, there is nothing you can do.

Having exhausted his passion, he had lain bereft on the grass.

Sleep, little child,
the gods had whispered.
We will keep you safe tonight.

He had no reason to trust them, but they were all he had left.

“I won’t always be little,” he had said, and fell asleep.

Under the juniper tree, Saker shook his head free of memories. It had been a long wait, but the ghosts were finally coming down the road toward the ford. He picked up his pack. Before he had a chance to move, he saw two strangers approaching on the other side of the ford.

Even at this distance, he could see that they were dark-haired and walked with the ease of long practice. Travelers.

He hesitated.

Would the ghosts harm them? Surely not. They were of the old blood, too. The ghosts would recognize that and welcome them. He could not be found with the ghosts. He had to remain hidden.

The ghosts seemed to talk with the Travelers, but he knew that was impossible. Then, the leading ghost, the strong-looking man, turned his head to watch the sun going down below the mountains.

The ghosts faded.

Saker stood, astonished and dismayed. This hadn’t happened with his father. Although . . . he thought back. He had never raised his father’s ghost close to sunset. The spell had always finished well before then. What difference did the sun make?

He would have to go to another village and wait for news of what had happened at Spritford. Find out how many had died, how thorough the revenge had been. And then work on the spell. Night was a good time for killing, he thought, turning away from the ford and threading his way back through the trees. He couldn’t afford to lose the night . . . What if he started the spell at night . . . ?

And next time,
he thought, remembering his sister’s scream as the sword came down,
I will use a bigger massacre site
.