Oathblood (2 page)

The dancer ended his performance in a calculated sprawl, as though exhausted. His audience shouted their approval, and he rose from the carpeted tent floor, beaming and dripping with sweat. He flung himself down among his family, accepting with a nod of thanks the damp towel handed to him by his youngest son. The plaudits faded gradually into chattering; as last to perform he would pick the next.

After a long draft of wine he finally spoke, and his choice was no surprise to anyone. “Sing, Tarma,” he said.

His choice was applauded on all sides as Tarma rose, brushed back her long ebony hair, and picked her way through the crowded bodies of her Clansfolk to take her place in the center.

Tarma was no kind of beauty; her features were too sharp and hawklike, her body too boyishly slender ; and well she knew it. Dharin had often joked when they lay together that he never knew whether he was bedding her or her sword. But the Goddess of the Four Winds had granted her a voice that was more than compensation, a voice that was unmatched among the Clans. The Shin‘a'in, whose history was mainly contained in song and story, valued such a voice more than precious metals. Such was her value that the shaman had taught her the arts of reading and writing, that she might the more easily learn the ancient lays of other peoples as well as her own.

Impishly, she had decided to pay Dharin back for making her blush by singing a tale of totally faithless lovers, one that was a Clan favorite. She had only just begun it, the musicians picking up the key and beginning to follow her, when unlooked-for disaster struck.

Audible even over the singing came the sound of tearing cloth; and armored men, seemingly dozens of them, poured howling through the ruined tent walls to fall upon the stunned nomads. Most of the Clan were all but weaponless—but the Shin‘a'in were warriors by tradition as well as horsebreeders. There was not one of them above the age of nine that had not had at least some training. They shook off their shock quickly, and every member of the Clan that could seized whatever was nearest and fought back with the fierceness of any cornered wild thing.

Tarma had her paired daggers and a throwing spike in a wrist sheath—the last was quickly lost as she hurled it with deadly accuracy through the visor of the nearest bandit. He screeched, dropped his sword, and clutched his face, blood pouring between his fingers. One of her cousins snatched up the forgotten blade and gutted him with it. Tarma had no time to see what other use he made of it; another of the bandits was bearing down on her and she had barely enough time to draw her daggers before he closed with her.

A dagger, even two of them, rarely makes a good defense against a longer blade, but fighting in the tent was cramped, and the bandit found himself at a disadvantage in the close quarters. Though Tarma's hands were shaking with excitement and fear, her mind stayed cool and she managed to get him to trap his own blade long enough for her to plant one of those daggers in his throat. He gurgled hoarsely, then fell, narrowly missing imprisoning her beneath him. She wrenched the sword from his still-clutching hands and turned to find another foe.

She saw with fear that the invaders were easily winning the unequal battle; that despite a gallant defense with such improvised weapons as rugs and hair ornaments, despite the fact that more than one of the bandits was wounded or dead, her people were rapidly falling before their enemies. The bandits were armored; the Shin‘a'in were not. That was making a telling difference. Out of the comer of one eye she could see a pair of them dropping their weapons and seizing women—and around her she could hear the shrieks of children, the harsher cries of adults—

But there was another fighter facing her now, his face blood- and sweat-streaked, and she forced herself not to hear, to think only of the moment and her opponent as she'd been taught.

She parried his thrust with the dagger she still held and made a slash at his neck. The fighting had thinned now, and she couldn't hope to use the same tactics that had worked before. He countered it in a leisurely fashion and turned the counter into a return stroke with careless ease that sent her writhing out of the way of the blade's edge. She wasn't quite fast enough—he left a long score on her ribs. The cut wasn't deep or dangerous, but it hurt and bled freely. She stumbled over a body—friend or foe, she didn't notice, and only barely evaded his blade a second time. He toyed with her, his face splitting in an ugly grin as he saw how tired she was becoming. Her hands were shaking now, not with fear, but with exhaustion. She was so weary she failed to notice the little circle of three or four bandits that had formed around her, and that she was the only Shin‘a'in still fighting. He made a pass; before she had time to realize it was merely a feint, he'd gotten inside her guard and swatted her to the ground as the flat of his blade connected with the side of her head, the edges cutting into her scalp, searing like hot irons. He'd swung the blade full-force—she fought off unconsciousness as her hands reflexively let her weapons fall and she collapsed. Half-stunned, she tried to punch, kick, and bite (in spite of nausea and a dizziness that kept threatening to overwhelm her): he began battering at her face and head with heavy, massive fists.

He connected one time too many, and she felt her legs give out, her arms fall helplessly to her sides. He laughed, then threw her to the floor of the tent, inches away from the body of one of her brothers. She felt his hands tearing off her breeches; she tried to get her knee into his groin, but the last of her strength was long gone. He laughed again and settled his hands almost lovingly around her neck and began to squeeze. She clawed at the hands, but he was too strong; nothing she did made him release that ever-tightening grip. She began to thrash as her chest tightened and her lungs cried out for air. Her head seemed about to explode, and reality narrowed to the desperate struggle for a single breath. At last, mercifully, blackness claimed her even as he began to thrust himself brutally into her.

 

The only sound in the violated tent was the steady droning of flies. Tarma opened her right eye—the left one was swollen shut—and stared dazedly at the ceiling. When she tried to swallow, her throat howled in protest, she gagged, and nearly choked. Whimpering, she rolled onto one side. She found she was staring into the sightless eyes of her baby sister, as flies fed greedily at the pool of blood congealing beneath the child's head.

She vomited up what little there was in her stomach, and nearly choked to death in the process. Her throat was swollen almost completely shut.

She dragged herself to her knees, her head spinning dizzily, her stomach threatening to empty itself again of what it didn't contain. As she looked around her, and her mind took in the magnitude of disaster, something within her parted with a nearly audible snap.

Every member of the Clan, from the oldest gray-hair to the youngest infant, had been brutally and methodically slaughtered. The sight was more than her dazed mind could bear. Most of her ran screaming to hide in a safe, dark, mental corner; what was left coaxed her body to its feet.

A few rags of her vest hung from her shoulders; there was blood running down her thighs and her loins ached sharply, echoing the pounding pain in her head. More blood had dried all down one side, some of it from the cut along her ribs, some that of her foes or her Clansfolk. Her hand rose of its own accord to her temple and found her long hair sticky and hard with dried blood matting it into clumps. The pain of her head and the nausea that seemed linked with it overwhelmed any other hurt, but as her hand drifted absently over her face, it felt strange, swollen and puffy. Had she been able to see it, she would not have recognized even her own reflection, her face was so battered. The part of her that was still thinking sent her body to search for something to cover her nakedness. She found a pair of breeches—not her own, they were much too big—and a vest, both flung into corners as worthless. Her eyes slid unseeing over the huddled, nude bodies that might have been the previous wearers. Then the thread of direction sent her to retrieve the clan banner from where it still hung on the centerpole.

Clutching it in one hand, she found herself outside the gathering-tent. She stood dumbly in the sun for several long moments, then moved trancelike toward the nearest of the family tents. They, too, had been ransacked, but at least there were no bodies in them. The raiders had found little to their taste there, other than the odd bit of jewelry. Only a Shin‘a'in would be interested in the kinds of tack and personal gear of a Shin‘a'in—and anyone not of the Clans found trying to sell such would find himself with several inches of Shin‘a'in steel in his gut. Apparently the bandits knew this.

She found a halter and saddlepad in one of the nearer tents. The rest of her crouched in its mind-corner and gibbered. She wept soundlessly when it recognized the tack by its tooling as having been Dharin's.

The brigands had not been able to steal the horses—the Shin‘a'in let them run free and the horses were trained nearly from birth to come only to their riders. The sheep and goats had been scattered, but the goats were guardian enough to reunite the herds and protect them in the absence of shepherds—and in any case, it was the horses that concerned her now, not the other animals. Tarma managed a semblance of her whistle with her swollen, cracked lips; Kessira came trotting up eagerly, snorting with distaste at the smell of blood on her mistress. Her hands, swollen, stiff, and painful, were clumsy with the harness, but Kessira was patient while Tarma struggled with the straps, not even tossing her gray head in an effort to avoid the hackamore as she usually did.

Tarma somehow dragged herself into the saddle; there was another Clan camped less than a day's ride away. She lumped the banner in front of her, pointed Kessira in the right direction, and gave her the set of signals that meant that her mistress was hurt and needed help. That accomplished, the dregs of directing intelligence receded into hiding with the rest of her, and the ghastly ride was endured in a complete state of blankness.

 

 

She never knew when Kessira walked into the camp with her broken, bleeding mistress slumped over the Clan banner. No one there recognized her—they only knew she was Shin‘a'in by her coloring and costume. She never realized that she led a would-be rescue party all the way back to the ruined camp before collapsing over Kessira's neck. The shaman and Healers eased her off the back of her mare, and she never felt it, nor did she feel their ministrations. For seven days and nights she lay silent, never moving, eyes either closed or staring fixedly into space. The Healers feared for her life and sanity, for a Shin‘a'in Clanless was one without purpose.

But on the morning of the eighth day, when the Healer entered the tent in which she lay, her head turned and the eyes that met his were once again bright with intelligence.

Her lips parted. “Where—?” she croaked, her voice uglier than a raven's cry.

“Liha‘irden,” he said, setting down his burden of broth and medicine. “Your name? We could not recognize you, only the banner—” he hesitated, unsure of what to tell her.

“Tarma,” she replied. “What of—my Clan—Deer's Son?”

“Gone.” It would be best to tell it shortly. “We gave them the rites as soon as we found them, and brought the herds and goods back here. You are the last of the Hawk's Children.”

So her memory was correct. She stared at him wordlessly.

At this time of year the entire Clan traveled together, leaving none at the grazing-grounds. There was no doubt she was the sole survivor.

She was taking the news calmly—too calmly. He did not like it that she did not weep. There was madness lurking within her; he could feel it with his Healer's senses. She walked a thin thread of sanity, and it would take very little to cause the thread to break. He dreaded her next question.

It was not the one he had expected. “My voice—what ails it?”

“Something broken past mending,” he replied regretfully—for he had heard her sing less than a month ago.

“So.” She turned her head to stare again at the ceiling. For a moment he feared she had retreated into madness, but after a pause she spoke again.

“I cry blood-feud,” she said tonelessly.

 

When the Healer's attempts at dissuading her failed, he brought the Clan Elders. They reiterated all his arguments, but she remained silent and seemingly deaf to their words.

“You are only one—how can you hope to accomplish anything?” the Clanmother said finally. “They are many, seasoned fighters, and crafty. What you wish to do is hopeless before it begins.”

Tarma stared at them with stony eyes, eyes that did not quite conceal the fact that her sanity was questionable.

“Most importantly,” said a voice from the tent door, “You have called what you have no right to call.”

The shaman of the Clan, a vigorous woman of late middle age, stepped into the healer's tent and dropped gracefully beside Tarma's pallet to sit cross-legged.

“You know well only one Sword Sworn to the Warrior can cry blood-feud,” she said calmly and evenly.

“I know,” Tarma replied, breaking her silence. “And I wish to take Oath.”

It was a Shin‘a'in tenet that no person was any holier than any other, that each was a priest in his own right. The shaman might have the power of magic, might also be more learned than the average Clansman had time to be, but when the time came that a Shin‘a'in wished to petition the God or Goddess, he simply entered the appropriate tent-shrine and did so, with or without consulting the shaman beforehand.

So it happened that Tarma was standing within the shrine on legs that trembled with weakness.