The King's Horse (Shioni of Sheba Book 2)
Read The King's Horse (Shioni of Sheba Book 2) Online
Authors: Marc Secchia
The King’s Horse
By Marc Secchia
Text and images copyright © 2013 Marc Secchia
Illustrated by Senait Worku from Addis Ababa
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher and author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Chapter 5: Prayers for the King
Chapter 8: A Surprising Conference
Chapter 11: Into the Mountains
Chapter 13: Beasts and Caverns
Chapter 15: The Villagers are Worried
Chapter 16: The Legend of Belshalar
Chapter 20: Sold to the Wasabi
Chapter 26: Sitting in Sunshine
: Dreams and Signs
T
he sheer side of
a tall, black silk tent rippled like oily water in the bright sunlight. Shioni was parched. Her throat felt as though a ball of dry thistle were lodged behind her tongue, and any attempt to speak would result only in croaky frog speech. A sharp stone crushed her cheek against her teeth. Her nose itched with fierce insistence, but her hands were inexplicably prevented from moving up for a good scratch. When she sneezed it seemed a whole handful of dust blasted forth.
What?
Where was she? What was holding her hands? These thoughts seemed to trickle through Shioni’s overheated brain as sluggishly as sweet honey seeping from a honeycomb. Her eyelid was stuck to the eyeball. The mere act of opening it demanded a gruelling effort.
Her eye cracked open a slit. She saw a long-legged soldier ant scuttling past her nose, crossing a field of cracked red clay, its huge mandibles waving about like a river crab’s claws searching for food to scavenge.
Shioni realised she was lying on her left side, with her hands chained in front of her to an iron stake hammered deep into the ground. Her eye grew round. That stake could have held an elephant. It was more than enough for her.
“Wake her up!”
Icy-cold river water dashed against her head like the full force of the Jinbar waterfall. Shioni groaned as a dozen hurts yammered their pain all at once. That woman’s voice… she knew her… Kalcha! Witch-leader of the Wasabi! Her eyes snapped open. But the sunlight was so intense that she had to squint in order to see anything.
“Get up, slave!”
Kalcha’s voice was as cold and angry as the day she first spied on her at the Wasabi camp up in the high mountains. Shioni recalled her shock at seeing the strength of the Wasabi forces, and the sheer, unnatural bulk of her pet hyenas. Kalcha’s exact words that day drummed through her mind: ‘Then will I hold in my hands the power to change you all, to make you men, men such as this world has never seen! We will build our kingdom of death and destruction, and you will become kings and enslave all mankind!’ Hyenas being changed into men? Ruling over men? Kalcha’s ambitions had been thwarted only by an arrow shot into the brain of her pet python by Shioni herself.
And
only Azurelle’s golden blood had allowed the arrow to pierce her enchantment.
A
cruel kick to her stomach lifted Shioni off the ground. She crashed against the iron pole and lay stunned, slumped like a child’s blanket dropped carelessly on the ground. She caught herself sobbing at the pain, and bit her lip until she tasted blood. No tears for the witch! She’d hold her tears, whatever the cost.
“Kneel before Kalcha, worthless slave!”
Two pairs of hands set her roughly upright. Supporting her body against the hot metal, Shioni opened her eyes again. She found Kalcha’s beautiful face just inches from her own, staring at her with eyes as grey as storm clouds. But her beauty was like cold marble, and her smile, which on another woman might have dazzled and delighted, was so loaded with malice that it became a statement of disturbing ugliness. The hatred and cruelty in her heart was chiselled upon her features, giving her an air of wild, deadly splendour.
Kalcha
seemed pleased. “You fiendish child of the snows!” she declared. “At last I have you within my grasp. You stole my Fiuri! You destroyed my python! Now, I swear you will pay for ruining the hour of my greatest triumph. ”
Shioni should have been overawed.
But her mind seemed half-asleep, functioning at the speed of a hurrying snail. She blurted out the first thing that came to her mind: “Why aren’t your eyes red anymore?”
The witch gave a howl of fury!
She shrieked, “Because you broke my curse! It was my castle, all mine, until you spoiled everything! Now I have to start again.” With hateful glee, she added, “So many more sacrifices are needed. I must have blood. Buckets, of blood, yes,
rivers
of it. My power is increasing every day.”
Shioni had no answer for the witch but to shudder.
Kalcha snapped her fingers. “Have you met my pets?”
A huge, scarred muzzle pressed against Shioni’s head.
Black, scabby lips parted to reveal fangs as long as her thumb. “Give us this youngling for a snack, mistress,” growled the hyena. “She will never bother you again.”
Shioni tried to pull away from hyena’s putrid muzzle, but
the chains prevented her from moving far. The beast rammed its head into her shoulder, shoving this way and that, playing with her like a cat amusing itself with a field mouse. The other massive, stoop-shouldered hyenas were nosing about her too, now, yapping and whining in excitement. She had nowhere to go. Grinning fangs encircled her.
Shioni, Shioni…
Kalcha, sinking her bony fingers into Shioni’s cheeks, said, “My spies are already inside your castle. Soon I will know all your secrets–especially yours, you annoying little cockroach. No mere slave will stand in Kalcha’s path! And I am already in your mind and in your dreams. Be afraid, little slave. I will teach you the meaning of fear.”
Shioni!
Something pinched her earlobe.
“Now, my pets, know your enemy!
Taste her flesh, crush her bones. Teach her the power of Kalcha!”
“We hear, o great Mistress!”
Slavering jaws rubbed drool down her leg.
“I’ll choke you!”
Shioni’s voice quavered. Teeth clamped upon her leg. “No, nooooo–!”
: Dawn at the River
“S
hioni! Wake up!”
“Help me!”
Shioni sat bolt-upright on her pallet, bathed in a cold sweat. “Oh, what…?”
Amazed
not to find herself chained outside Kalcha’s tent, nor surrounded by hyenas the size of small ponies, she shot suspicious glances around the room. Safe! Familiar things! Her heart could beat again, which it set off to do at a ridiculous gallop. She remembered to check her leg, but it had not apparently suffered from any gnawing.
She slumped back on the roll of cloth she used to pillow her head.
That had to be the worst nightmare she had ever experienced.
A tugging on her hair made her reach up.
“Oh, Zi, it’s you!”
Zi, to her annoyance, looked as
pretty and fresh as a dew-dappled wildflower. Shioni smothered a jealous remark. Nobody, not even a four-inch-tall Fiuri, had a right to look so darned perky and cheerful first thing!
But
Azurelle affected a lazy pose on the palm of Shioni’s hand and batted her ridiculously elongated eyelashes as though she had a speck of dirt in her eye. “Have we woken up now?”
“I’m more awake than I’ve been in a long time.
My life, Zi, it was like Kalcha was right here in this room–”
“Shh!
The royal snorer is still asleep in her featherbed. Why don’t we go for a walk?”
“Why don’t I walk you, you mean?”
Zi bowed deeply. “Would you be my carriage, friend to a Fiuri who is no longer able to fly?”
How to answer that?
How to answer a sorrow as plain and present as the harsh rays of a noon sun, a tragedy of Kalcha’s manufacture; which denied her friend not only the chance to return to her world and her people, but even the chance to function in her natural way? Not, Shioni chuckled, that there was a great deal normal or natural about having befriended one of the delicate, magical butterfly-people–but then, what counted for normal or natural in her life these days?
Unable to face
that
reality just yet, she forced it to the back of her mind.
Shioni picked up her shawl
–an old one of Annakiya’s–with trembling fingers and drew it about her shoulders as she padded out of the Princess’ room. She slipped across the shadowed courtyard, through the unfinished main gate of the keep, and down the cobbled road towards the outer defensive wall. The gate towers were taking shape now, but they were still only the height of her head.
She waved at a shadow.
“Good sleep, Kifle?”
“Sleep?” he snorted.
“What’s that? How did you know where I was?”
“You always stand there.”
“Oh. A little early for the river, isn’t it?”
“I
woke early,” said Shioni, feeling as sheepish as she thought she must sound. “I had a nightmare about Kalcha.”
“Hmm,” said the voice
, apparently sinking deeper into the shadows. “Maybe you should tell General Getu.”
“I-I couldn’t.
But… but keep your eyes, open, alright?”
Kifle sounded amused.
“Nothing but goats out here, Shioni. Seriously–it’s important.” His smile vanished. “That witch has barely been gone a month. And I, for one, was very happy to see the back of that murdering barbarian and her hyenas. If Kalcha has begun to stir again, God help us all. Oh, and have a nice walk.”
A
t least he hadn’t hurt his stomach having hysterics, or made some smarmy comment about girls and their dreams.
As
she ambled down to the river, lost in her thoughts, Shioni appreciated the first blush of dawn firing the eastern skies like a furnace glowing orange. The dawn chorus was raucous, given the huge variety of birds resting and nesting in the reed beds and thick vegetation along the river’s course. The yellow-backed weavers chattered with especial zest as they zipped back and forth to their nests, which hung low over the river. The contrast between their jet-black faces and bright yellow plumage made them look comical, she thought. But what clever builders! She had once sat the better part of a day watching a weaver build its nest, from grass-blades and a handy twig to the finished product complete with a front porch for preening on.
Either side of Castle Asmat, now Princess Annakiya of West Sheba’s home–and therefore her slave Shioni’s home too–basalt cliffs towered over the castle and the long, narrow valley that stabbed deep into the
underbelly of the Simien Mountains. The cliffs absorbed the early hints of light into their forbidding black turrets, giving nothing but beetling frowns in return. Shioni shivered. The King’s choice of fortress–a castle whose name meant ‘black magic’ castle–had caused more than a mutter and a stir amongst his Elite Warriors. Several hundred of them were patrolling that jagged volcanic wilderness even as she thought upon it, searching for spoor of Kalcha’s brutal Wasabi warriors.
But
Azurelle, holding her thumb with a surprisingly firm grip, was peppering her with question after question about her nightmare, until Shioni sighed and said:
“
It’s different now, Zi–in the light of day. I feel so silly, that–”
“It is perfectly clear to me,”
Zi interrupted, in a no-nonsense voice that even Hakim Isoke, Princess Annakiya’s stern tutor, would have approved of. “We have been warned. You
must
speak to the General–oh look, somebody’s already at the river.”
The gleam over the
cliffs had by now intensified enough to highlight a shadow moving alongside the river. As they watched, the person approached along the near bank, moving erratically, as though they had lost something. “It’s Talaku,” Shioni realised. Only one person in all of West Sheba had a shadow that large. Even his name meant ‘the biggest one’. And that was no joke!
“What’s he doing?” whispered Zi.
The chorus of birdsong and frogs croaking was so deafening that they had come within a few steps of Talaku without being noticed. He was doing a peculiar, shuffling dance around a small boulder in the shallows, and humming a tune–over and over again. Every so often he would stop, or add a little hop. Then the dance would start again. To Shioni it seemed the tune was controlling his body, like a puppet dancing on strings.
“He’s… singing,” Shioni
whispered back. “That’s a lullaby Annakiya used to sing all the time when we were small. It’s about a hippopotamus searching for his bride, who was turned into a human by a wicked witch.”
“
Turned into a human? Ew, disgusting!”
“Hey, we’re not all that
–”
“No, look at his clothes!
They’re covered in blood.”
Her gut twisted itself into a dreadful knot as she realised
Azurelle was right. Talaku’s mouth and arms were smeared with blood, and his shirt was plastered with a vomit-trail of blood and gobs of flesh and other unidentifiable bits right down the front of it.
“And we were having a beautiful dawn walk by the river,” said Zi, sadly.
“He’s sick,” said Shioni.
“What do you mean
–mad? Sick in the head? How do you know, anyway?”
“The General
–ah, I wasn’t supposed to say.” Shioni wrung her hands. “Sorry, Zi.”
“
Forget it.” But the Fiuri was jumping ahead. Her hazelnut-sized brain was more like a leaping mountain stream than a broad, lazy flow. “We have to help him. It’s not right, leaving him like this. We need help–Mama knows human herb lore. She’ll know something for people with monkey nuts for brains.”
Shioni nodded
, wondering why it was that people liked to lumber her with secrets that she then had to keep from her friends. She felt awkward and stupid about not telling Zi the whole story. But she could never do that to the General.
In the early light,
Zi’s eyes gleamed like pools of polished jade. She had no pupils, Shioni noticed for about the hundredth time, feeling awkward and crass. Why could she not learn to treat her friend like anyone else? Just because she was a rare, amazing, slender, beautiful, tiny, magical, be-winged butterfly-person? Was it the curly antennae on her forehead and or the gorgeous wings sprouting from between her shoulder blades that made her feel this way? Shioni cleared her throat, wishing she could swallow her jealousy as easily as a bite of bread. Zi
had
saved her life–all of their lives.
“Mama knows already, doesn’t she?
” said the Fiuri, looking so pleased with herself that Shioni’s guilt multiplied instantly. “Your face is an open scroll. Oh, dearest friend–don’t look so wretched.”
“I wasn’t supposed to tell!”
“You didn’t, really.” Zi patted her thumb. “You could pretend I have mysterious Fiuri mind-reading skills, or some such nonsense. Now listen. I don’t think he’s dangerous. Go speak to him. Take his hand.”
Shioni
wanted to bite her wretched, wretched tongue right off! Next she’d be blabbing General Getu’s story like the worst of village gossips! Azurelle had read her effortlessly. Annakiya had recently accused her of the same failing–over a forbidden scroll the Princess had ‘borrowed’ from her tutor and accidentally damaged. So it was true. Her face was her own worst enemy. She could not be trusted by others with secrets, and worse, she couldn’t even trust herself!
She wished she could just lay it all out in the open,
like the women laying out spice pods to dry in the sun before they were ground into powder and blended for cooking. After all, if there were no secrets, then she wouldn’t have anything to fear, would she? They’d lose their power and weight. Or was she being naïve? Surely there would always be secrets she couldn’t share with others: sweet treasures, or terrors so deep and dark…
Shioni
had to swallow hard. First, before those fears ate her alive like the hyenas had been intending to, she should deal with the problem in front of her nose–the giant, pathetic figure of Talaku.
“Talaku?” she greeted him hesitantly.
“How was your night?”
Though he raised his head and looked directly at her, his eyes were blank and haunted.
Not only did he fail to recognise Shioni, he hardly seemed aware of her presence.
“Talaku!” she repeated.
“What are you doing down here by the river?”
Hi
s voice, when it came, was deep, slow, and slurred. “River?”
A great shudder wracked his body, moving from his head through his torso and into his feet, which
splashed a tattoo in the water. And then he was still. He squared his shoulders, and looked at her again. Shioni had a distinct sense that whatever it was that had ailed him, had departed during that shudder, and he was somehow restored to himself.
“River?” he
repeated, more clearly now. “Must wash in the river.”
“Yes, wash
yourself,” said Shioni, looking at Zi for support. The Fiuri made a shooing gesture. “Here, let me rinse your shirt out for you. Wash your face and your hair, Talaku.”
While
the huge man washed his shaggy mane and cleaned the gore off his face, Shioni placed Azurelle on a nearby rock and then worked the outsized piece of cloth between her fingers and used the fine river sand to scrub it as she had done a thousand times before. Laundry was a slave’s life. Soon, the other slaves would be coming down to the river to wash, scrub and bathe, and fetch water up to the kitchens for cooking or for the warriors to use for their ablutions. She wrung out the shirt and handed it to Talaku.
His deep-set
, dark-ringed eyes regarded her again. “I’m so tired,” he said.
Shioni took his massive paw in her hand and patted it, as she had sometimes seen Mama Nomuula do to comfort someone.
Talaku cocked his head to one side and smiled. “Look, pretty butterfly.”
Zi simpered in return,
“Thank you, sir! I’m a Fiuri.”
Shioni, fighting off an urge to slap her
vain little friend, said, “Maybe you should go and sleep now.”
“Nighty night,
pretty Fiuri.”
Tugging
his shirt over his head, the King’s Champion shambled off toward the castle.
She cast her mind back to her extraordinary interview with General Getu. Tough, one-armed Getu,
he of the burned face and no left arm from the elbow down–the King’s right-hand man, leader of Sheba’s Elite Warriors, whose bellow could carry across a battlefield and whose growl was rumoured to have turned aside an attacking lion… Getu and his hatred of a ferengi slave called Shioni; Getu, who had deliberately humiliated Captain Dabir and taught Prince Bekele a lesson involving coffee and lice; Getu, who had told her the astonishing story of his life.
Getu
’s arm had been bitten off by a dragon, he had told her, and the dragon-venom left in his body had surely affected his son Talaku, born years later. Talaku was stronger and bigger than other men. She looked at her hands. Her fingers had looked like a newborn baby’s, lost in the palm of his hand. She stood only a little taller than his bellybutton. He truly was a giant–didn’t other people see something strange in that? And he was still growing!