The Warrior Who Carried Life (10 page)

The fire spread across the broad chests of her kinsmen and trickled down the legs of the chairs. Cara could only cover one ear. She could hear behind her the squeals of the worms as they were consumed and set free. She heard no other sound. For her sake, her family would not cry out as, behind her, all her childhood burned.

Cara spent each night along the way hunched over a book, near the fire that she had set alight by words alone. Three Sleeps, Stefile, looked over her shoulder, scowling slightly. “How can those chicken tracks mean anything?” she demanded

“Some of them are pictures. This one here is the sign for peace. It shows a woman under a roof.”

“Doesn’t look like that to me,” complained Stefile.

“It was first made long ago. It has changed with much writing. These marks here are signs for sounds. You can write the word for peace with them too, only the writing then is different for each language.”

“What good does it do you, this reading, then?”

“This book is teaching me the language of the Other Country. The sound signs will tell me how to make the right noises. That is of use, surely.”

Stefile shrugged with resentment, and huddled into her furs. “You will teach me how?” she asked in a small, angry voice.

“When there is time,” Cara promised her. “When there is time.”

They had to travel along the foothills of the Dragon’s Back. The Northern People lived there. They were smaller and more pale than their conquerors to the South, and they moved deftly in smelly goatskins along the narrow paths. The Northern People were unfriendly, and spoke Our Language in a strange way. Cara and Stefile could not understand what they said; the directions they gave to the trails were sullen and short and misleading. The gates to their fortified houses were not opened when Cara and Stefile called; the travellers were not given food. This was a mistake. Cara and Stefile killed their goats, and stole their mules to carry the packs, and rode through the night to escape, beyond reach. They rode west, towards the lowering sun, slanting orange light through the needle-leafed trees. They rode over squelching boglands and back up on to rocks. Bells rang across great distances, from the necks of the grazing sheep, and there were sudden wafts of billy goat scent as they wormed their way along the paths.

They came at last to the Unwanted Way, that led through the mountains. It was held by the Unwanted People, who guarded gates and demanded payment for passage. The lace and the jewellery Cara and Three Sleeps offered was more rare to the Unwanted than they pretended. They also demanded some of the dried goat meat that Stefile had made. “Eat your horses,” they told Cara. “Eat them when they die of cold, but sleep inside their bodies first. They will give you one more night.”

“What about thieves?” Cara asked.

“Hmm. No thieves. We keep it clear. That’s why you will pay.”

The Unwanted People attacked Cara and Stefile as they slept that first night by the Lonely River. A sword and a suit of armour, uninhabited by a man, drove them back. Word spread upstream that the warrior and his woman were protected by sorcery. Cara and Stefile were left alone after that, with the seasonal chill.

It was getting late in the year, into autumn, and the nights in the narrow mountain pass came early and stayed long. Cara and Stefile awoke the first morning in darkness, and lay uncomfortably on the sloping rocks for a very long time before deciding, finally, to move, still in darkness. They travelled after that through the night. The Unwanted People watching from their high shelters saw them take turns sleeping on a horse’s back while the other led, walking with the reins. Before them, to light the way, was a flickering tongue of flame. It burned alone, in mid-air.

By day, the stone was grey and cold and bare. In the shadows were patches of unmelted snow. On the lower peaks, snow was a grey and white speckled film, and beyond those on the great single mountains, snow was a thick, flawless, creamy coating.

“When the Dragon wakes, the mountains will stir,” Cara recited from the One Book. “The snow in his icy, sleeping breath.”

“The mountains here look like clouds,” Stefile said.

They ran out of food before they were through the pass. They did not want to eat the little mule that carried their tent and furs; the horses would have to carry the things then, and they would have to walk all the time. They spent three miserable days and two nights without food, wondering if the Unwanted Way led anywhere; if perhaps they had not strayed into some sorcerous trap, a pathway without end, in winter.

When they finally came upon the Unwanted House, suddenly around a bend in the river, they did not feel any leaping of joy within them. They were too tired. They saw a wall across the pass, a dull grey snaking of stone down one steep slope and up another, and in its midst a small house, a mere heap of stones itself, and a gate. Cara and Stefile did not expect the Unwanted House to feed them; they did not even ask. Cara drew her sword, but did not need it. The gate was open. The gatekeeper watched them pass, his face resting like a wrinkled pouch on his hands. He had been told to let these two go through.

Cara and Stefile paused on the trail, and looked down. As far as they could see, falling away in layers of hill and valley, was forest, more needle trees, and nestled everywhere among them, like pieces of broken mirror, lakes with rocky islands.

“Is this the Other Country?” Stefile asked, in disappoint-ment. It did not look in any way extraordinary. Perhaps the forest was thicker and a darker shade of green. She looked behind her, twisting on the blanket that served as a saddle. “And that was the Dragon’s Back.” She blinked, stupid with fatigue and dirt and hunger. “We didn’t even see the Wordy Beast.” The Wordy Beast was the name that common folk gave to Asu Kweetar, because it was said to whisper stories to children in the night.

An hour later, beside the road, a large rodent stood up as tall as a man’s waist, on its hind legs, to look at them. It had a round face with whiskers and long squirrel teeth and was unafraid because humans did not hunt it, usually. Cara threw her sword at it, and it sped fast as an arrow, but more true, and lodged itself in the beast. Cara and Stefile built a fire with trembling hands, and roasted it. Its flesh was string and tasted metallic, like old dirty pots.

The first person they came upon was a fisherman, a young boy by a lake. He wore a long, black, heavy coat, fringed with goat hair and embroidered with brightly coloured yarns. His hide boots were also embroidered, fur turned inwards, and had pointed toes that curled upwards. He had a trumpet made of horn and a black hood that came to a high peak, but that was pulled back from his blond head. Fishing nets were about his feet. His skin was as pale as milk.

“Ugh. They are all Northern People here,” Stefile said with displeasure. “You think the Galu came from here? They are pale enough.”

Cara tried to speak to the boy in the Other Tongue. She asked him where the city of the Wensenara was. The boy looked back at her, his face absolutely still. Frightened, his mouth taut, the boy replied. The way he said Wensenara was very different, and none of the other words as he sounded them made sense to Cara. He pointed down the road, however, and Cara followed that.

“Did you understand? Did you understand?” Stefile deman-ded, and Cara admitted that she hadn’t.

Huge creatures prowled in the woods at sunset, great fearless loping things, that walked on four legs with lumberings of fatty flesh but could also walk upright, like men. The beasts gathered by the river; Cara and Stefile saw them fishing, salmon impaled on their claws.

“Is that a wonder enough for you?” Cara asked.

“Hmmm. It is different, but not wonderful.”

“What were you expecting?” Cara chuckled.

“Oh, I don’t know. Something like the songs. The songs are lies.”

“There will be marvels,” Cara promised. “If I succeed.”

They came to a village. The houses were made of wood and were very ornate, a line of patterned carvings along the crest of each roof. The wood was varnished or whitewashed, then overlaid with stylised paintings, silhouettes in red or black of the Serpent, or the Whale or simply of men in log boats fishing with spears. On the side of one of the buildings was an enormous pictograph for the word Inn.

It was an ordinary house that took lodgers, when there were any. The widow who ran it flung up her hands in excitement when she heard Cara’s speech, and bustled them into the house, and sat them down with bowls of rich stew, wiping her hands on her apron. She clattered about on her wooden floor, in wooden shoes, and her cheeks were plump and very pink—Cara wondered if that was because she ate salmon. She sat down with them, bursting with interest and asked them many questions, repeatedly, until they understood her. She could hardly believe the Unwanted had not robbed them. No one went through the pass now, she made them understand. No one wanted to go to the Desert, which was what she called Cara’s country. It was a place full of evil and discontent. When Cara asked her how many bandits there were on this road, the woman flung up her hands again. Bandits, here, north of the hills? Oh, no, there were not bandits here. When Cara and Stefile made plain they had no money to pay her, the woman simply shrugged and replied that she had expected that. The cutting down of a tree and its dismemberment into logs would be payment enough.

As Cara worked at the logs with wedge and hammer the next morning, she asked the widow the way to the city of the Wensenara. The woman’s happy face went more solemn then. It was not a city, she said, but a mountain fastness. It was called the Wensenari, which simply meant Place of the Wensenara, or the Yahstranavski, which meant the Fortress that Needs No Defending. She drew it for them with a piece of charcoal, on a log, a tall strangely elongated building with many towers. A person could only enter it by being pulled up in a basket, she said. Then she asked cautiously, why they wanted to visit the powerful sisters.

“Because,” Cara was able to answer her, “we want our land to be as peaceful and hospitable as yours.”

This pleased the widow, but did not entirely untrouble her. “I hope you do not bring disruption,” she said. “I also hope you do not find it. The Wensenara are not evil, but neither are they good.” She drew a map to it on the inside of Cara’s book, and gave them warm cakes to eat on the way, and stood on her porch, waving, as they rode away.

There were many Inns on the road that ran along the base of the foothills, and a gathering number of pilgrims travelling on it to the fastness of the Secret Rose. There were women in black riding side-saddle on donkeys led by their families. There were farmers with entourages, and beggars who limped alone on crutches. There were sick people, with rotting feet and simple toothache. There were fear-haunted men who had lost their holdings to a scheming cousin. There were so many of them that Cara and Stefile, who had no money, had to sleep in the fields beside the Inns and work for what was left over in the great cauldrons of the kitchens. In the morning, with the first light, all the pilgrims would leave together in a stream. They told jokes and stories, and sang songs that Cara and Stefile could not follow. The road was never empty.

On a day when the first real bite of winter was in the air, they first saw the fortress. Their breath came out of them as vapour. Stefile tried to blow it in rings, like smoke from her pipe. Through the steam of her own breath, Cara suddenly saw it, a blur of shadow on a cleft of rock, blue and grey, impossibly high on a distant cliff. “That’s it,” said Cara, quietly. She thought it would take an hour to reach it. It took the rest of the day.

The road wound through a thick forest. From time to time Cara glimpsed the Wensenari through the trees. She saw wooden walkways and ramshackle rooms perched out from the walls on stilts, rows of windows, and golden domes in segments like oranges on towers, with sunlight streaming over them in rays.

The pace of the caravan quickened. The songs died. The pilgrims walked with longer strides, and kept track of each other out of the corners of their eyes. Ahead, Cara could see the end of the forest, as if it were a tunnel. “Hee-yah!” cried a man in a wooden chariot further up the path, and his mules started forward with spurts of dust under their hooves, and began to trot.

“This is it,” grunted a man, and flung his bag over his shoulder, and ran. The caravan broke apart. Donkeys were whipped and their riders clung, rolling, to their backs. The plump young woodspeople broke into an intent, stumbling run over the uneven ground. An old woman called out a name, peevishly, over and over.

Leaning over, murmuring to their beasts, patting them, Cara and Stefile kept their beasts to a skittish trot, as people pushed past them. Then someone slapped Cara’s horse, hard, from behind, and it bolted forward, and she hauled back the reins, seeing ahead of her the naked legs of the people it would trample, and it tossed its head, and snorted, and danced sideways. “Leave the horse alone!” Cara roared, and looked behind to see who had done it. When she looked around she was out of the forest. She saw the Wensenari, as tall and thin and stretched in its narrow cleft as the widow had drawn it. She saw something else as well.

In the afternoon chill and shadow, all the way up a gentle slope of broken rock, was a vast encampment. There was row on row of tents and lean-tos made of blankets. Listless smoke from many fires hung in the air. People sat unmoving around them. Beyond the tents was a solid unmoving mass of people in dark Northern dress, thousands of them, waiting for the Wensenara, each one of them ill or old or in some way desperate.

“Oh, God!” cried a man with a bag, and flung it angrily to the ground. All heart gone, some of the pilgrims simply stared at it. Some wept and held their heads, who had been singing just that morning. Others slowed to a despondent, trudging walk.

The people of the encampment rose to their feet.

“Stay there. You stay there. You wait your turn!” they shouted, wild-eyed. They picked up rocks from the ground to throw. The man in the wooden chariot rode on, up the path, as if to plough through the camp. People leapt out of his way, and shouting curses, hurled stones after him. The mules turned, the chariot swerved, skidding sideways into a fire, knocking over pots of water, and riding over the corner of a tent, pulled it down. One of the mules stumbled, its legs collapsing under it, and it was dragged, until its brethren resolutely stopped. The driver lashed them furiously and shouted. Too late to realise his danger, he looked behind him. The people in black closed over him, and pulled him from the chariot, and snatched at his goods. He disappeared under their hands, which rose and fell, and rose and fell, rocks clenched in them.