The Executioness (7 page)

When we broke out onto the road, the caravan was still slowly passing us by.

Bojdan and three of his men rushed up to us. They looked at my prisoners with some shock.

I leapt down from the cart, my bloodied axe over my shoulder, and grabbed Bojdan by the arm. “I would talk to you over here,” I said, and lead him around to the other side of a wagon, dodging the aurochs.

Then I let my legs fold, and my breath come in staggered gasps. “Piss on them,” I spat, my voice breaking with fear. “There were five of them and one of me. Five!”

Bojdan held me up. “Come, you need to go lie down,” he said gently. “You’ve done enough.”

He walked me back down the road to a bunk wagon, empty of occupants. “What are you…” I asked.

But he shoved me up onto the platform. “Go inside, rest for a moment, gather your thoughts. I will deal with these remaining men.”

My hands shook, and I watched him pace along the wagon for a moment, then dart through the caravan and disappear.

I crept into the darkness and curled up on someone’s unfamiliar smelling bunk. I kept curling up until my body could bear being squeezed by itself no more.

When Bojdan finally came back, it might have been after an hour, or five. All I’d done was stare at a chipped piece of wood on the wall. I’d felt that the wagon had stopped. Maybe the whole caravan had. I knew dimly something was going on, but until that moment, hadn’t cared about finding out.

Bojdan said nothing, but sat in the back of the wagon and waited until I rolled over to look at him.

“It was different,” I finally said. “Not like the execution, or when I went for the raider in anger.”

Bojdan just sat there.

I continued. “I had to stay in control, and calm. I had to win the fight first.”

“You did well,” said Bojdan. “Never doubt it. You are a good fighter.”

“Why did the caravan stop?” I asked. “It’s not supposed to stop, right?”

Bojdan grimaced. “Our way is blocked by a scouting party. Somewhere out in the woods, north of us, a man called Jiva has been raising the discontented to fight against the Paikans. You met five of their number earlier. They’re all from culled villages and towns out there.”

“What do they want?”

“Food, weapons, anything we have that we can trade. Their stores ran low in the march south through bramble and forest. They look hungry enough to attack us for our stores. And Jal is reluctant to trade with them, as the Paikans will be upset. So… negotiation continues.”

“Ah.” I turned back over.

After many long moments I twisted around and found Bojdan still there.

“I will be fine,” I said.

But the warrior shook his head. “Few are ever truly ‘fine’ after what you just did, after what we do. We can get back to being a reflection of our former self, but it’s somehow not quite the same. And only another like us understands what we mean.”

“I know, but I want to be left to myself for now,” I told him. “Just for now.”

“I will send for you when it is time for the night watch,” he said. “I will need all the warriors I can fetch by my side. Particularly if Jal and the scouts can’t come to an agreement.”

I felt the wagon shake as he stepped out onto the road.

Part Three

Anezka crawled into the wagon as the sun left its place in the sky and woke me up. “Bojdan needs you.”

“Thanks.” I crawled out of bed, and before I could leave the wagon, Anezka grabbed my shoulders.

“Thank
you
for saving us,” she said.

I wasn’t sure what to say, but I hugged her back. “You should carry a dagger, and practice how to stab someone,” I whispered to her. “All of you should.”

“We’re just talliers and cooks and supply keepers, we’re not… you, Executioness.”

I sighed. “I’m just like you. I’m in the middle of my life. A mother who helped in a butcher shop. There is nothing special about me, I swear to you.”

But I could see Anezka didn’t believe me.

I crawled out of the wagon and got to the road where lantern light showed a small group of muddy men in tattered peasant’s clothes, carrying crates of vegetables and dried meats, trudging quickly down the road. They intermixed with the caravan as they did so.

They all carried simple swords. I saw a single crossbowman in blue cloth further down, surcoat slapping the backs of his knees.

Their faces did look gaunt as they slipped off into the shadows just past the caravan’s edges.

At the front of the stalled caravan, Bojdan stood with Jal by the Roadmaster’s wagon. They welcomed me into their discussion.

“One of those scouts says there are Paikans coming down the road,” Bojdan told Jal. “They are a half hour away. We need to get moving again so that everything looks normal.”

“Don’t fret, Bojdan. The Paikans have always respected the neutrality of the caravan. I’m more worried about Jiva’s men here. If a few hungry idiots rush our wagons for stores, or loot, and we fight back, this will be an expensive mess,” Jal snapped. He eyed the passing remnants of the scouts. “Is that the last of them?”

“Yes,” Bojdan said.

“Good. Send the command, we’re moving along. Relax Bojdan. Relax.”

“I’ll relax when the Paikan party moves past us to their destination,” Bojdan said. “If they know about Jiva, we don’t want to get caught in the middle.”

“Yes, yes,” Jal said quickly. “I know. So let’s get those command flags snapping, guardsman.”

Bojdan ran forward, shouting orders. The fire wagon to the front lurched forward, and then Bojdan’s wagon of guards followed. A green flag with a triangle in the middle lurched up the pole with a swaying lantern at the top. All along the column the same flag raised, and the caravan began to move.

I went to follow Bojdan, but Jal grabbed my shoulder.

“We have a Paikan prisoner in a wagon and everyone in the caravan knows about it. I want you to guard him. Now that there are armed Paikans coming down the road, there are those in the caravan that might release him who are friendly to the Paikan cause. I don’t want to ransom him until we get to the city, we get more for him that way.”

I lowered my voice. “I couldn’t raise my hand against someone from the caravan.”

Jal laughed. “Oh, you won’t have to, Tana. If I let it be known the Executioness is guarding our prisoner then I doubt anyone in the caravan will be interested.”

“I don’t like that name,” I protested, but Jal held up a hand.

“That is too bad, it has stuck. Now take your axe and go,” Jal ordered. “What in all the damned halls are we doing moving so slowly! You said it was
urgent
we get out of here, Bojdan, not something to do in our damned spare time.”

“You have come around to my way, I see,” Bojdan shouted back.

Jal grumbled and climbed up on the Roadmaster’s wagon while I stalked back down the length of the caravan for guard duty.

After I’d climbed into the wagon and sat on the bench against the wall, the Paikan stirred. He crawled to the bars that kept him prisoner and looked out into what he could see of the night from his prison.

“I saw those scouts,” he said evenly. The dull red flicker of lanterns swaying in the wagon’s ceiling pulled the Paikan’s figure out of the dark.

I said nothing.

The man sat, his side against the bars. “Have it your way. They are angry at us, for what we did. And yet they still haven’t learned the lesson we strive to teach the world. They think they can take us in battle, but all they will do is throw away their lives.”

I didn’t want to talk to the man. I felt like he would force that old me, the unskilled me, the unblooded me, to reemerge from where she’d been pushed over the last weeks. The me that would be scared of him.

But I felt calm sitting here in the dark, the axe across my lap. I was a deep river, unhurried and powerful, not a frothy shallow stream. “And what lessons do you think you teach the world,” I asked. “Other than your barbarism.”

He jumped back. “You’re a woman.”

I smiled. I had control of this conversation, not him. There was no fear in my voice when I said, “Yes, so I’ve always been told.”

He moved closer to the bars, and looked down at the axe on my lap.

“Are you
that
woman? The one I hear them call the Executioness? From the far East?”

“My name is Tana, of Lesser Khaim,” I told him. I saw his shadow relax. “I was once a butcher, and married to a husband called Jorda. My sons were Duram, and Set. And yes, some call me the Executioness.”

I could hear him draw in his breath as I claimed the name for the first time. “Are you here to kill me?”

I imagined him here in this cell, hearing that someone whose life he’d destroyed and children he’d stolen, was amongst the caravan. He must have had many sleepless nights.

Which was good.

“I am here to guard you, for now.” I placed the butt of the axe against the floor, and folded my hands around the top. “Killing you now would not help me understand where my family may be.”

He remained quiet for a while, so I took the axe and hit the bars with it. He jumped back. “Your family is lost to you,” he snapped.

“Why do you say that?” I demanded, getting off the bench I’d sat on. “I didn’t come this far to turn back!”

He moved away from the bars.

I moved closer. “I will not kill you, but I think maybe I will come to maim you before we reach Paika. I think an arm would be acceptable to me. You could still talk after that, right? I don’t know, because I’ve never tried anything like that before. But I think an arm is a fair thing, after all, what is an arm compared to a family? We can live both our lives incomplete.”

The Paikan raider stepped forward to the bars. “You’d risk it all, for this quest?”

I looked him in the eyes. “Yes.”

“I have nothing good to tell you,” he said. “Because I doubt you’ll catch your children.”

“You would have sold them by now?” I asked. “Is that what you do, you twisted creatures…”

“No one young is sold,” the Paikan said, a note of outrage seeping into his voice. “Their minds are moldable, they can be taught. The young can be saved.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded.

“Your sons will have been taken to the aftans of Paika. There they are taught the Way with hundreds, no thousands, of youths from all over these diseased lands, every day, until the moment their minds crack open, and the inherent truth of the Way falls upon them. It is then that they earn the right to go to the Southern Isles, far from these coasts.”

“Why would they want to go there?”

“A pilgrimage. To see the lands where the Way is all. To see where we came from, long before we took the city of Paika and made it our home. Your children will be closer to the end of their time at the aftan than at the beginning, now.”

I wanted to hit him with the butt of the axe, but restrained myself. He was talking. Even if I didn’t want to hear it, he was talking about what was happening right now to Duram and Set.

“Why?” I asked. “Why do your people do all this? Why steal my children?”

The prisoner’s voice crackled with anger. “Because you don’t deserve them.” He grabbed the bars. “We have them heavily guarded and protected. And when the Way gives itself over to them, they will leave for their pilgrimage. And when they return, they will bring light to this darkened land you have created.”

“What are you talking about?” I sat face to face with his fiery anger.

“Look around you,” he whispered. “Your towns are fallen, bramble eats and chokes at all you do. And still you can’t release yourselves from the grip of the sickness that causes it.”

“Magic?” I asked. “You’re talking about magic. It’s outlawed. That is why I was an executioner. We control it.”

“You control nothing, or your greatest empire would not have fallen. You are all sick with magic’s use.”

“And you are not?” I said.

“No,” he insisted. “Your peoples try to use fear and death to stop magic but it will always continue. The individual will always have a use that seems to be needed, even when compared to the good of all. You have no true beliefs like the Way to guide you. Just heapings of gods that take you long after you destroy everything in
this
life. As long as your afterlives are pleasant, what reason do you have to ever stop the bramble?”