The Battle Lord's Lady (6 page)

They gained entry by breaking in the door.
Atty managed to recognize the building as the place that sold
candles and soap. The room smelled of lye and old smoke. She was
laid upon a back table and several candles were lit to provide
adequate light. The physician began by poking and prodding around
her temple and jawline. Atty flinched whenever his touch brought
additional pain. At one point she cried out when his fingers ran up
her throat underneath her chin.

“Well, your jaw’s not broken but it could be
cracked. You won’t be able to have any solid foods for at least a
week or so, unless you’re one of those Mutah who heal more rapidly
than normal. You,” he ordered one of the guards, “this one has to
survive long enough to make it back to camp where I can wrap her up
properly. See if you can find something soft that she can swallow
whole, like oatmeal.” The man turned back to give her a knowing
look. “I can hear your stomach rumbling. How long has it been since
you’ve eaten? A day? Two days?”

She nodded.

“Ah. And another question. Why does the
Battle Lord want you taken back to camp? You’re female. That
doesn’t surprise me. But I can’t see him bedding a Mutah, much less
you. So it can’t be for that reason.”

Atty glanced over at her bow and empty quiver
that were propped against the far wall of the shop. The physician
followed her gaze and immediately understood. “You’re the one with
the deadly aim. Well, that makes a hell of a lot more sense.”

He carried a satchel over his shoulder. The
bag was of plain tanned leather with an intricate pattern of
porcupine quills adorning the front flap. Setting the satchel on
the table beside her, he rummaged inside. He spoke to her as he was
looking. “You’ve lost some skin around that eye but it shouldn’t
scar. Hope you haven’t lost any vision in the eye, though. Who did
this to you? Karv?”

Atty pointed to her eye and shook her head.
Pointing to her jaw, she nodded.

“Why am I not surprised?”

Pulling out a small brown pouch, he
double-checked the contents and measured out an amount of grayish
powder in the palm of his hand. He dumped the powder into an empty
bowl he found nearby, then added some water from a skin he also
carried. Stirring the mixture with his finger, he handed her the
bowl and helped her to raise her head in order to drink it.

“This’ll dull the pain somewhat. I don’t have
anything to stabilize that jaw except bandages, and it’s gonna hurt
like the devil when I wrap you. You’ll be glad you drank this.
Yeah, I know it tastes shitty, but it’s not meant to be vintage
wine.” He urged her to drain the bowl, then helped her to lie back
down.

“My name’s MaGrath.”

“Atty.”

“Atty,” he echoed. “Short for anything? Or
just Atty?”

“Why do you care? I thought you hated Mutah
as much as the others.”

“What makes you think I hate Mutah?”

“Didn’t you object to treating me earlier
because I was one?”

“Are you one?”

“Yes. I’m not ashamed of it. My family loved
me. I had friends. I won the respect of the other hunters so that
they initiated me into their caste.”

“With a skill like yours they’d be crazy not
to. Grit your teeth. This is gonna hurt.”

He’d made a paste of something from his
pouch. He applied it to the side of her face with his fingers. It
did hurt. It also stank to high heaven. He saw her wrinkle her nose
but didn’t comment. When he was done he pulled a roll of cloth from
his pouch and used it to form a quick bandage around her face to
help hold her jaw steady.

“Did I make it too tight?”

Atty replied no. She could still manage to
communicate somewhat with just the use of her lips and tongue. “You
haven’t answered my question,” she reminded him.

“Regarding...”

“Why do you hate Mutah?”

“I don’t actually hate them. Ah!” He
held up a hand to halt her protest. “I never told the Battle Lord I
wouldn’t heal one, either. I just reminded him that I’d been
ordered
not to do it.” Wrapping his
roll of bandages back into a neat ball, he stuffed it into his
pouch.

“Why do you call him the Battle Lord?”
Talking was difficult, but Atty had to admit that the snug bandage
and the medicants were helping with the pain.

MaGrath gave her an odd look. “Because he’s
the Battle Lord. Haven’t you heard of him?”

Again she managed to shake her head
gently.

“What do you call him, then?”

“Cleaners.”

“Cleaners? Oh, that’s right. I’ve heard that
term before. Because they cleanse the earth of the unnaturals, the
ones made abhorrent by nature. The human beings made inhuman when
the Great Concussion changed everything. And you think I’m a
Cleaner?”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m a physician. I heal the sick. I help
those dying to die more easily. I also make a mean rabbit
Tetrazzini. But I won’t lie to you. If you had four eyes or a big,
bulbous something-or-other protruding from your chest, or anything
like that, I don’t care if Yulen ordered me with a lance at my
throat. Mutah give me nightmares, and I’m not ashamed to admit
that. Now, speaking of admitting, as your doctor I order you to
keep your mouth shut for the next day or so. At least until we get
back to camp. What? What’s the matter? Are you in pain?” The sudden
welling of tears had taken the physician off-guard.

Instead of answering, Atty pulled her knees
up to her chest and buried her face in her arms. She was exhausted
beyond all endurance, she’d lost her family only two days before,
she was starving, and now she was going to lose whatever friends
and home life she’d ever known. Things looked worse than
miserable.

Deep in her grief, she never heard the man
leave the shop, nor was she aware that he had signaled to the other
Cleaners to leave her alone as well. Least of all she never saw the
tall, helmeted figure staring at her through the window wondering
why this particular Mutah both fascinated and surprised him.

When all his life he’d lived the code that no
Mutah was worth an effort or a second look, why did he care that
this one remained with him?

Chapter
Six

Decision

“What’s going on with you, Yulen?” the voice
harshly asked.

Yulen looked up to see a shallow bowl of meat
and vegetables shoved into his face. He stopped his cleaning and
set his sword down beside him before taking the proffered food.
Karv flopped down on the ground a few feet away and dove into his
own meal.

“Not bad. But you haven’t answered my
question,” the man reminded him.

Yulen tried the badger. Amazingly the meat
that should have been tough and too gamey was as good as anything
he could remember. After so many days of dried rations, the meal
was welcome. He continued to eat, blowing on his fingers when it
was too hot to handle, when he saw MaGrath walking toward him. The
expression on the man’s face was hard to read.

“Have some, Liam,” he half-ordered,
half-invited.

“Don’t mind if I do. First, though, I want to
let you know about your little Robin Hood. She’s eaten and she’s
asleep. No thanks to Karv, but I think she’ll heal with minimal
scarring. Are you really taking her back with us?”

“She killed sixteen of us in practically no
light from nearly a hundred yards with just a bow and arrow.
Imagine the damage she could do in broad daylight. I want to know
how she’s able to do it. If there’s some trick she does. Or is it
just skill? Either way, I want her to teach it to us.”

“What if she refuses?” the physician
asked.

“Then we flay her,” was Yulen’s flat answer.
“If she doesn’t work with us, I can’t have her against us. She
teaches us to kill, or she becomes target practice.” He stared at
burn marks on the tips of his fingers. Too late, he remembered the
dagger sheathed at his hip. Pulling it out, he first wiped it on
the thigh of his pants then stabbed another piece of meat and began
gnawing on it.

“And the compound?” This question came from
Karv.

“Leave a small squad behind to make sure
there’s no uprisings. I don’t want any surprises before we leave.
If we convince the Mutah-”

“Her name is Atty,” MaGrath interrupted.

Yulen gave him a disapproving glance. “If we
convince her we’re not going to kill everyone in the compound,
she’ll be a lot easier to handle. If we need to, we can use them as
leverage to keep her in line.”

“And once she’s safely away from this place
we can go ahead and raze it,” Karv finished.

MaGrath shook his head. “I don’t like the
plan. I agree with you, she’s a formidable foe. But what if she
gets wind this place has been torched? Then what are you going to
do? And something else I’m wondering if you’ve thought of... sure
she’s a miracle with a bow and arrow, but what about other weapons?
How is she with a sword? Heaven forbid, what about a crossbow?”

“Liam, I want her examined. Is she Mutah, or
is she a Natural being raised by them?”

“All right, I will, but what if she is a
Mutah? What if her deformities are inherent and not visible? What
if her ability is because of what she is? Then taking her back with
us will be useless.”

Yulen didn’t answer. Instead he shoved a
piece of potato in his mouth.

Karv snorted. “Guess you hadn’t thought that
far ahead.”

The physician turned to get his due from the
feast but not before the Battle Lord answered, “Maybe we need to
start re-thinking our methods. Maybe this time it would be better
to leave the compound alone and take only what we need.”

Karv jumped to his feet, dropping his plate
of food to the ground. His face was flushed with indignation, his
nostrils flared. Without saying a word, he strode off toward where
the rest of the men were sitting and having their fill.

Yulen watched his second in command stalk off
but didn’t follow him. He didn’t have to explain his actions, least
of all to subordinates. Although he considered Karv a friend of
sorts, there was still too much he couldn’t trust him with. It was
beginning to look as though the Mutah-

Her name is Atty.

-was going to be one of them.

Yulen tossed his platter onto the ground and
licked his fingers before wiping them on the thighs of his pants.
Striding over to where his horse had been tethered, he reached into
a saddle bag and pulled out a small, battered tin. Inside it was a
leather pouch containing a whitish powder. Dipping his finger into
the powder, he sucked on the finger, then reached for his skin of
water to wash down the foul-tasting stuff. He grimaced from the
medicine’s bitterness, yet the taste was forgivable in light of the
fact that it often was the only thing that kept him standing
between sanity and indescribable pain.

He restored the tin of powder back to the
saddle bag and walked over to the small row of shops where a couple
of his men were keeping guard. They were crouched over a small
flame, eating their own portions of food from the pit.

“Mastin, when you’re finished, I want you to
make arrangements for the villagers to eat.”

The soldier gave his superior a surprised
look but repeated his orders as he’d been taught to do. “Yes, sir.
Let the villagers eat.”

Yulen spent the next hour checking on his
men, seeing that they were taken care of and given their allotment
of food. He gave orders for the bodies of their fallen comrades to
be wrapped in their own bedding and tied over their horses for
transportation back to their home compound.

Having made sure the area was secured and his
men were settled in for the night, Yulen headed back to the small
row of shops where the Mutah was being held apart from her
people.

Despite the proof that she was skilled with
the bow, a skill he couldn’t deny came from the fact that she was a
Mutah, and that her mutant strengths and abilities far outpaced
those of regular men, he couldn’t get over the fact that she bore
no signs of deformity.

All Mutah had “the mark”. It was the easiest
way to discern the naturals from the unnaturals. In his nearly
thirty years behind a sword, Yulen believed he had seen almost
every conceivable type of deformity there could be in a Mutah. Some
manifested themselves in the most obvious way. An extra appendage
was the most common. After that, an extra “something else” may be
present—a third or fourth eye, or having more than ten fingers.

Many had disruptions in their skin. Spots or
stripes were common, as was the “melting wax” effect. There were
also those with severely diseased-looking appearances, those who
looked like animals, and many who were just different colors.

In some cases, the extra could be hidden from
view. He’d seen mouths appear in areas usually covered by clothing
like extra penises on the males. Or more than two nipples or
breasts on females. Those Mutah were in high demand back at
compounds where they could parlay their sexual atrocities into
high-paying livelihoods.

In other mutants, the signs were less
obvious. Sometimes they were completely overlooked or missed, or
ignored. Yulen knew there were Mutah who never bore a mark or
stigma. He’d heard of such people, yet until now he’d never come
across one. There were scholars who claimed that the disruption to
mankind which had caused the Mutah to appear in the first place was
fading away. They said that the initial shock of the catastrophe
which had spawned the crossbreeds was settling, much in the same
way kicked-up dust on the road eventually settles back to
earth.