Storm Bride (18 page)

Tlaqyali led her out of the
kenda
’s pavilion across a stretch of grass through the smoke-rancid air and into another, cooler tent that smelled of pine and cedar. “Here,” she said. “There is a cushion that you may lie on.”

With the woman holding her hand Saotse lowered herself to the ground and rested against a silk-covered cushion. She reached out and touched a table in front of her, then groped across it for food. The Hiksilipsi woman closed Saotse’s hand around a metal cup.

“Wine.” She took Saotse’s other hand and briefly touched her fingers to cornbread, smoked fish, and apples that were laid out in clay bowls. “Eat all that you’d like. Do you mind if I ask you questions while you eat?”

“No,” Saotse said. She raised the cup of wine to her lips. The taste was sweet, heady, and fragrant. In Prasa, the
enna
rarely drank wine, and this was of a higher grade than she had ever tasted. She took two greedy swallows before setting the cup down with a twinge of embarrassment. She must not be seen to gorge herself. She had to maintain even more dignity than usual.

Behind her, Tlaqyali withdrew a whispering sheet of birch-bark paper and cut the nib of a feather quill. She knelt on the grass a pace away from Saotse. “So you have communed with the Powers.”

“Yes.” Saotse nibbled at a flake of smoked fish.

“When did this begin?”

“When I was a young woman.” Saotse recounted how Oarsa had called her across the ocean to Prasa, and then how she had felt the touch of Sorrow during the sack of Prasa. Tliqyali’s pen scratched over the paper. When she explained why she had given the name Sorrow to the unknown Power, the woman stopped.

“So you’re certain that the Power who Keeps you is a woman?”

“Of course I’m certain.”

“How do you know?”

Saotse paused. It wasn’t as if the Powers had bodies, yet she had never felt the slightest doubt that Sorrow was a woman. “I don’t know that I can explain,” she said quietly. “I know in the same way that I know that you are a woman. She has a woman’s voice, I might say.”

“So she speaks to you in a voice that you can hear.”

Saotse shook her head. “No. There is no voice, not in that way. But she has a
presence
, and her presence is female. I have no doubt about it.”

“Interesting.” Tlaqyali wrote again on her page. “Among the Yivri, the Kept are always of the opposite sex of the Power that Keeps them.”

“I have heard something of the sort,” Saotse said.
What did this woman mean to imply?

“So I wonder why you appear to be an exception.”

“Are you saying there is something wrong with me? With Sorrow?”

The woman hesitated. “I am merely asking questions.”

“And why are you asking
these
questions?”

“Because I am Hiksilipsi. Knowing the names and the habits of the Powers is my duty. And that’s why the
kenda
asked me to visit you.”

“Perhaps the Powers from beyond the Gap follow different customs from your own,” Saotse said, more acidly than she meant to, and regretted it.

But Tliqyali just laughed. “I suppose they might.” The whisper of pages suggested that the woman had put away her writing. “There is a shaman in Vanavar that you should speak to. He is not Kept, but he’s the nearest we had before you.”

“After the battle.” Saotse yawned, feeling sluggish with wine and food. “I came here to give the
kenda
victory over the Yakhat, not to debate the nature of the Powers.” She paused, then added, “May I ask you a question, though?”

“Of course.”

“How did you pluck me out of Sorrow’s power? I didn’t know that such a thing was possible.”

Tliqyali’s voice brightened, and she began to talk quickly. “It is very hard, especially with one of the Kept. But we Hiksilipsi are trained to sense and speak to the Powers from our mothers’ breasts, and we learn how to touch them and to withdraw from their touch as needed. So when I saw that you were too deep to quickly emerge, and that you had amply answered the
kenda
’s question, I pulled you out.”

“But you aren’t Kept.”

The woman laughed. “Nothing like it. You were born hearing the Powers, while the Hiksilipsi are trained into it. I will never do anything like what you do, but when what is needed is restraint, sometimes training is better than the gift. So I am happy to help you.”

“Ah,” Saotse said. She would have liked to speak more with the woman, but she was exhausted from travel and from Sorrow. “Maybe when this is done I’ll come to Vanavar, like you said. But for now, I’d like to sleep.”

“Of course,” the woman said. “I’ll take you back to your people. Rest well.”

Chapter 20

Uya

T
he night was hot and
clear, and the interior of the yurt was muggy. Tuulo lay on her side near one of the walls, talking quietly with Dhuja in the light of a butter lamp. Uya sat near the door, alone. She didn’t understand their conversation. She wouldn’t have spoken with them anyway. There were no words left in her mouth, no hope left in her heart.

She rose to her feet, slowly, painfully. The rags between her legs still showed blood every morning. The bruises along her face and body had mellowed, fading from crow black to yellow, but the torn flesh still throbbed. She limped to the door of the yurt and pulled aside the flap.

Dhuja barked a command from the rear of the tent. Her glare forbade Uya to leave. But Tuulo said something in return and rested her hand on Dhuja’s, then waved Uya out the door. Uya shook her head and ducked outside. She wouldn’t have listened to them anyway. What more could they possibly do to her? She wanted to go outside. To see again the ruin they had returned to.

Prasa.

When she had first realized that they were returning to Prasa, dread began to grow on her like a mold. The emptiness and desolation of the city were evidence that the Yakhat had won and that she would never have a home again. Watching the Yakhat set up their camp in the ruins was the final proof of that. The city was as scarred and dead as her womb. The Yakhat trampled the ravaged city, leaking blood from their boots and leaving her alone with her ruined body.

Her breasts were hard with milk. The pain kept her awake at night. Dhuja offered her herbs to ease it, but she refused to take them.

At least she could leave the filthy yurt, reeking of milk and blood. Her whole body was bent with pain. It was a quiet echo of the agony of birth, but it endured. It lay down with her every night and lashed her with its thorns. Sometimes she welcomed it, since it took her mind off the emptiness where her son should be. Other times she just wanted it to stop.

She straightened and looked over the ghosts of the city. The Yakhat were encamped on the north side of the city, largely, with most of the warriors bunking in the plundered lodges, and only a few yurts set up here and there in the empty spaces. More and more Yakhat kept coming, far more than she had seen in the encampment where they originally held her. They were rallying for some purpose. She didn’t much care.

She limped to the edge of the burnt circle and stepped over the line. At least she was no longer bound by
that
superstition. Was the circle supposed to protect her pregnancy? It had certainly failed at that. She started walking to the south.

White moonlight lit the city’s bones. Toppled ancestor totems lay helter-skelter like driftwood logs next to the path. The lodges seemed grim and ghastly in the moonlight. Some of them glowed with fires lit inside them, where Yakhat warriors lodged like worms burrowing into a corpse. She soon reached the old market square before the Prasada’s lodge. It was strewn with the wreckage of plundered casks and muddy with horse manure. A few warriors and young women gathered in groups around the edges of the square. No one even spared her a glance. Perhaps they couldn’t even see her. She was the ghost of the dead city, invisible to them, the living, the murderers.

She was close to the river, now, and the smell of reeds and water reached her on a breath of night air. It occurred to her that she could go visit the
enna’s
lodge. It was not much further, just across the bridge and a little ways down the path. A throb of homesickness pierced her. The
enna
, her home. She thought of the little path from the door down to the shore, the canoes that the men used for fishing, the hammock on the moon face of the lodge where she slept. Longing to see her home overwhelmed her, even if it was empty now, even if the
enna
was dead. She laughed bitterly.
She
was the Eldest of the
enna
now, which meant that by Prasei law the lodge was hers. Now she just had to convince the Yakhat to give it to her.

At the bridge, however, she paused. There were sentries here, two at each end of the bridge, lazing against the posts with spears on their knees, spitting over the side into the water. She paused in the shadow of a cedar, gathering her courage. Then she walked to the bridge and, without hesitating, started across. “I’m going to my lodge,” she said boldly.

They shouted at her in Yakhat, and the nearest one ran forward and grabbed her arm. Upon seeing her face, he started and backed away, as if he only now recognized that she was not Yakhat. She continued across the bridge. They followed a pace behind her, shouting, but they seemed reluctant to touch her. Maybe they thought she was one of the city’s dead. Maybe they were afraid of ghosts.

The two at the far end of the bridge tried to bar her way with their spears. She swatted their weapons aside and limped past them. They did not try to stop her. This surprised her, but she didn’t linger on the surprise. She considered it a blessing from the Powers.

She followed the path to the lodge as the moon rose into the heights of the spruces. Her eyes searched the moonlit night for the outline of the lodge’s peak. She should have seen it by now.

With a gasp of horror, she stopped. She had found it.

All that remained were the charred corner posts, the ancestor totem, and a few cedar planks of the rear wall. The rest had been eaten by fire. She had forgotten the fire, somehow, had forgotten that the smell of smoke was what had driven them out of the lodge and to their doom. She had imagined that the lodge still stood, empty but whole. The charcoaled posts gleamed like the wings of beetles in the moonlight. She walked slowly up to the cinders of the lodge and placed her hand on one of the posts.

A hoot haunted the night air. Wings whispered from the shadows of the lodge to the peak of the ancestor totem. Wide white feathers beat the air, and an owl settled onto the moonlit pole.

“You’re late,” Uya whispered. Then, louder, “You’ve missed them, Father Owl.”

The bird turned its head and looked at her. It adjusted its wings.

“Did you come to warn us of our deaths?” she said. “Too late. Or were you thinking of warning me before my baby was stillborn? Because you missed that, too. What kind of omen are you, if you only appear weeks after death has eaten its fill of us? Did you just come to remind me?”

The owl hooted again. Soundlessly he leapt from the totem, beating the air once, twice, and flew off to the north. He passed in front of the moon, and Uya lost him in the brightness. She watched the place where the bird had disappeared, but she saw no further sign of him. She sighed. Not even death’s owl would stop for her.

She stepped over the threshold into the ruins of the lodge. Burnt scraps of wood crunched under her feet, perfuming her steps with the smell of old woodsmoke. She walked up to the base of the ancestor totem and laid a reverent hand on it. A burnt, broken board, the remnants of the Eldest’s chair, rested against the lowest totem. It was a bear, placed in memory of an ancestor whose name she couldn’t even remember. Nei had known. Nei’s own totem was nine levels above it, a sea otter, still showing a little of its red and white paint between the scars of soot. Since Uya was now the Eldest, she would have to commission totems for Oire and herself, and place them atop the pole. Nei would uphold them in her death as she had in her life.

But it would never happen. Instead, the totems would fall, and all their names would be forgotten, and their memory would be snuffed out forever.

She rested her head against her ancestors’ totem and began to cry.

She cried for several minutes, her sobs beating against the bruises on her ribs. She fell to a knee, then cried out at the sudden pain in her bruised legs. Slowly, she lowered herself to the sooty ground and laid her head on her arms.

She had never been a girl who spoke to spirits. Saotse heard the Powers, and Nei dealt with the Hiksilipsi. But now, in the ashes of her home, she mustered up the first prayer of her own that she had ever spoken.

“Oarsa,” she said. “Why? Lord of the ocean, why did you forsake us? Did we anger you? Were our offerings insufficient? I’m sorry.” She sniffed and wiped her tears on her sleeve. “I don’t know why this has happened, but please… listen. Hear me now, if you’ve never heard me before. The Yakhat took my
enna
and took my child. All I want now is a chance to repay them in kind.”

A chilly wind from the sea stirred the ashes of the lodge. Uya’s resolve faltered, but she hardened herself and went on. “This is my oath: I swear that if you give me a chance, I will kill Tuulo’s child. It will not erase the pain they’ve dealt to me, but it will be enough.”

Then she added as an afterthought, “And Keshlik will kill me afterward. But to die is all I can hope for anyway.”

Her words echoed off the scorched wood of the ancestor pole and dissipated into the night. If the Powers had heard her, they gave no sign. But in the end, it didn’t matter. She had made her oath, and she would keep it.

She returned to the bridge. She was blackened with soot, now, and when the sentries saw her, they made signs over their eyes and looked away, clutching at fetishes on their necks. Perhaps they mistook her for a vengeful spirit. Perhaps they were right to do so. She walked through the city in silence, not even glancing aside at the few Yakhat she saw, until she paused outside the circle protecting the yurt. She heard another hoot.

In a pine above the yurt, the owl moved again. The same owl? She caught a glimpse of it in the branches. It took to the air as a flurry of gray feathers and silently passed over the yurt where Dhuja and Tuulo slept. Then it dove into the grasses beyond and was gone.