The Warrior Who Carried Life (8 page)

Cara felt like a pile of stones that had suddenly come apart, and she rolled to the floor, and seemed to lie in pieces. Her fingers felt thick and numb, and they tingled as they did in winter when she plunged them into warm water. Her legs lay sprawled and leaden. She couldn’t move. She could move nothing at all. Even her eyes could not blink and the suddenly parching air stung them and made them fill with tears. Her lungs worked, like a trembling rabbit in her chest, and hopelessness spread over her like a stain of blood.

The Angel strutted. “I am going to enjoy this,” he said. “I am going to break each bone in you, one by one.” His braceleted foot rose over her legs, the heel pointed downward, like a spear.

The blow did not come. Cara’s vision was blurred, but she saw him wince, heard his hiss. She saw him rotate his head, as though his neck was stiff, and he stepped back, lowering the heel flat on the floor. Then he sank to his knees.

Through rainbow refractions of light, and the trembling of tears, Cara saw that it was Stefile astride him, with the sword burrowed deep into the back of his neck.

Stefile learned over him, and whispered into the Angel’s ear, “For all your kindnesses, Master,” she said in a voice that was chilling with hatred. “For all your gentle words.” She gave the sword a twist within his neck and Haliki shrieked, a shrill, high keening cry like an eagle. His hands fluttered like the wings of birds caught in a net, and his tongue lolled heavily out of his mouth. She would not let him fall.

“Know this before you die, Mister Hero,” Stefile said. “You were killed by little Dirty One Dress.” The Angel moaned in protest, unable to speak. “You were killed for all your bold talk and fancy dancing by a bondgirl of sixteen winters who has never held a sword in her life.” Then she ripped the sword out of him and pushed him, face forward, down onto the stone.

Stefile stood over Haliki for a moment, her breath rattling in and out of her, and she wiped her upper lip. Then, with a sudden expulsion of breath, she turned to Cara, dropped down beside her, and jammed the sword through the thick wool of her dress. Furiously, she jerked it across the bottom, cutting away a strip of cloth. Muttering peasant spells of healing, she tied the cloth across the wound in Cara’s arm. Cara was suddenly able to blink and clear her eyes.

“Can’t move!” Cara said, choking on her tongue.

“Oh my poor love. Where are you hurt?”

“Get me up!” Cara cried in terror, seized by the unreasoning conviction that if she did not stand up now, at once, she never would again. “Get me up, now!” Stefile quickly felt along her legs for breakages, then unbuckled the armour at the shoulders and lifted it away. Warmth returned to Cara’s arms, and she flailed them helplessly. Across her chest, over her heart, was an enormous bruise. Stefile’s fingers rippled across her ribcage. “Get me up!” bellowed Cara. “Now!”

“All right, all right. Sssssh!” Stefile stepped round behind Cara, and lifted her up by the arms, and dragged her back towards the wall. “Cal Cara, you’re always getting yourself cut up. And I’m always having to carry you.” She grunted with the weight and tried to pull Cara up, to prop her against the wall. Cara’s clumsy arms tried to reach round to climb up it; Stefile ducked underneath them and pushed up. There was a stinging and then an ache down Cara’s thighs, and then fire seemed to pour down all the nerves in her legs and along the bottom of her feet. Hesitantly, she made them accept some of the weight.

“How,” Cara asked, “did you
find
me?”

“The armour and the shield led me. They came back for me. The sword just came into my hand. Can you stand? Oh, Cara! I have killed the chief of the Angels! I must either be very wicked or a very powerful woman.”

“Both,” replied Cara, with a grateful, spasmodic smile.

“Did you kill yours?” Stefile’s face was bright and tense and expectant.

Cara’s smile stiffened. Horror and remembrance fell over her. Unable to describe or to account for what had happened, she could only nod, yes.

Stefile gave a little snarl of pleasure, and clenched her fists and shook her head and did a little dance, kicking with her feet. “Oh, Cara. Then we’re free! We’ve done it.”

Cara’s eyes were haunted, and she shook her head.

Stefile was stilled. “Why, what’s wrong?”

Cara tried to say, but found no words. She only pointed with the sword that was somehow back in her hand, towards the room of the Galu. Scowling, Stefile turned and climbed up the steps towards it.

“Don’t go in!” warned Cara.

Stefile pushed the door, and it swung back across the widening darkness. What was beyond it made a crackling noise, sharp and evil, like a rattlesnake. Stefile stepped back, hugging her stomach.

“What is it?” she asked quietly.

“I don’t know! But oh, Stefile, he knew who I was! He wanted it to happen, he made it happen, he loved the sword, he lay down for it, and that thing came out of him, and he called it the Secret Rose!”

Stefile took two steps towards her, and then stopped. “The name of your cult?”

Cara only nodded.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know!” wailed Cara, near tears.

Stefile looked at her, wide-eyed, solemn. “We have to get away.” She strode back to the body of Haliki. “At least we have only killed one man, then. That lessens the sin.” She rolled the Angel over, knelt beside him, and closed his staring eyes. There was no libation to pour, no offerings she could make to appease Haliki’s spirit. “Don’t follow me, Mister Hero,” she warned it. “Or I will do something this terrible to you again.”

Stefile thought very quickly of the life to which she could never return, and the life she had entered now. They had done something to the Son of the monstrous Family and killed the head of a Fighting School; the Angels knew their names and faces. Wherever they went, the fear of discovery would follow. They would have to travel to places where they were not known, where their families were not known. They would have to live any way that they could. They were outlaws. How could everything change so completely?

“This life is mad,” she said simply. Then she gathered up her one dirty dress, and stood, and took the outstretched arm of her lover, and together they ran out into the darkness.

They had to live wilder and faster. By the time they reached the Village by Long Water, they rode horses that they had stolen. Feeling themselves to be reckless and outside the law, they foolishly dressed like it. Instead of the plain dress of common folk, they had taken the rich garb that Stefile had dreamt of, plundered from the same caravan as the horses.

Stefile wore a fine sheath dress from Aegoptus, to the South, made from the bleached fibres from the stems of a plant. It was translucent. She had to wear it over men’s trousers to ride. She had a tiny gold flower inserted in a nostril, and a crown of gold, and a sword, and a long red cape. Cara was an even stranger sight: a massive, scarred warrior in armour, but with large hangings of jewellery from his ears and neck and arms, and great swathes of lace billowing out from his shoulders and tucked away into his belt.

Anyone would know that they were outlaws.

They rode up the great canyon, between walls of sheer rock that were a blazing white, moving in and out of cool shade, past rapids, where prickles of moisture in the air danced on their skin. They had to cross landscapes of wet fallen rock at the base of waterfalls, where everything was made dazzling by sunlight in mist, and they couldn’t hear each other speak for the roaring noise. They made up their minds to go to The Other Country, in the North. The library of Cara’s house had books that would tell them about the language spoken there. They made each other very excited, imagining the life they would have there and the things they would see.

Sometimes, though, in the heat of the day, away from the river, Stefile would go morose. “And this year, then. Is it true about this year?” she asked, her voice begging to hear that it was not.

“It is, Stef. True.”

Stefile could not really imagine it; she could not really believe that her handsome friend had once been a woman and would be one again. She gave the reins of her horse a sudden, uncalled for flick that meant bitterness. Either it was true, or Cara’s insistence meant that she was mad, and Stefile could accept neither. “Well, can you make yourself as you are now, again?”

“I can’t, no, the spell only works once.”

“So what happens to me then?”

“We can only decide what to do when it happens,” Cara said. “Only then.”

“How long is that? Until then?”

“Through this winter, to the end of next summer.”

“How will it happen?”

“I don’t know, Stef.”

“I have followed you, I have come with you. I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t believe it either, sometimes,” said Cara in a quiet voice.

It was nearly dark when they entered the Village by Long Water, passing the first house, Manu Norig’s. The air was full of the smells of cooking; low talk came out the windows through which candlelight flickered on warm-coloured walls. They came upon Mala, a girl Cara had known from childhood, carrying water from the river. Without thinking, Cara greeted her. “Mala! Hello!” The girl glanced up at the armoured man and his blazoned doxy, and looked down, her face closed tight, and began to walk very quickly. Cara remembered then, and clicked at the horse to move on. Mala heard the sound, and broke into a run, dropping the bucket. She slammed and barred the door of her house behind her.

As the darkness grew, so did the darkness of Cara’s thoughts. It was fine to talk of adventure in The Other Country; it was fine to see her village again, but inside her house, as enduring as death, awaited the ruins of her family, the desecrated bodies of her father and brother. They rode past the rocks where cloth was beaten clean by the river; they rode up a hard, gravelly track, to the base of the cliffs and around the corner of a giant wall of rock.

“My house,” said Cara in a far-away voice, yearning for the house of her past.

“That is where you live?” asked Stefile in wonder.

The Important House was hewn out of the rock, midway up the cliff face, a line of dark windows over an overhang of limestone. Beside it, a kind of ceilinged yard had been hollowed out, with pens and stables within it for the animals in winter. The yard was empty. Two ramps of stairs made a zigzag up the face of the rock to it. There were buckets on pulleys, down to the well that no one drank from now. Around the well, below the house, clustered the round stone huts of the bondmen, and spreading out below them in layers of grassy ruin were the rice paddies down to the river and up the other side.

It was a sad, slow ride up the steps, forward in one direction, back in another. The house seemed not so high off the ground as Cara remembered it, or so grand. Within the shelter of the rock it was already night, though the clouds above the opposite side of the canyon were still pink. They put the horses into the pens.

“Do you want me with you?” Stefile asked.

Cara thought, and answered honestly. “No, Stef. Stay here. I don’t know what I’m going to find.”

The candles were in the old place, with the flints, just inside the only door. Cara struck them and the old kitchen flickered in ghostly light. The great round cistern, the fireplace that filled the yard with smoke, the old grey table. By the door was a row of heavy shoes that had not been needed since . . . Cara broke off the thought in haste.

“Who’s there?” called out a voice, a strange voice, quavering in fear, that Cara at first did not recognise. She did not ever think of her father as being afraid.

“It’s me, Father. Cara.” Her male voice sounded deep and close by within the rock. A new misgiving came upon her. Had Aunt Liri told them what had happened? Had he believed her? Would he even know Cara for who she was? Steeling herself for that, and for what she would see, Cara went into the next room.

It was her father’s favourite room, the library, the only room in the house that had windows in two directions. She held the candle over her head.

Her father and brothers sat strapped, limbless, to chairs and their bandages were filthy and they were riddled with what looked like sores and their hair was matted, and their ribs and the sinews of their necks showed straggly through their skin, and the place stank of urine. On her father’s face was a long fat vein that looked like an abscess.

“Where is Liri? Where is she?” Cara wailed. “I told her to look after you! I told her to feed and wash you! Where is Liri?”

“Liri? Liri cannot come near us,” her father raged, with feverish eyes sunk in a hollow face. “No one can come near us, for what you have done!”

“Oh, Cara,” said Tikki, in a small sad voice.

“Abomination! Abomination! Man-woman! Witch! You brought this on us!”

“Brought what? Father, what is wrong?”

She moved towards him, to hold him, comfort him, untangle his knotted hair. “Get away!” he roared at her.

“Cara! Don’t come near!” Tikki wailed, and they writhed and twisted and shrugged their bonds, trying to rock the chairs backwards. “Don’t come near us!” Tikki whispered.

The vein in her father’s face seemed to throb; what looked at first like two rows of metal thorns emerged through the skin. They glinted in the candlelight, encircling flesh, closing. The flesh disappeared, and out of her father’s face another tiny face slid out. It grinned, befanged, a visage like a child might model of a human face in clay, with tiny eyes that blinked. From all the sores, across the once handsome shoulders and breasts and bellies of her family, from behind their ears, out of their nostrils slipped things as thick as a finger. Worms.

Cara’s male voice bellowed, harsh with horror, and she stepped back, moaning, shaking her head. “What is it? What is it?” Stefile called from outside. She ran into the room, and stopped, and fell utterly silent. Cara, shivering, found a chair. Stefile stood behind her, clasping the back of her neck.

The worms looked at them, blinking. The worms spoke.

“We do not want to do this,” said the worm in her father’s face, in a high, piping voice.

“Forgive us, mistress,” said another.

“The Galu make us do this,” said a third. “We were their enemies, and this is how they punish us.”

“But we must eat to live,” said the worm in her father’s face.

“Do not come too near us. Do not sleep in this house, or we will find you too. When your family dies, do not carry them out. Leave them, or we will slip into you as you bear them.”

“How . . . long do they have to live?” Cara found herself asking them.

The worms turned to each other, and then looked back. “Sometime yet, mistress.” Cara’s father groaned, and shook his head. “We try not to pierce the vital organs for as long as we can. We try to make it last.”

“We are sorry, mistress.”

“We are sorry, sister.”

“We were human too.”

“They came in the night, Cara,” said Tikki. “They covered the floor. We couldn’t escape.”

“How many nights ago?” Cara asked, and Tikki told her. The worms had come the night she had tried to kill the Galu. This was their revenge.

“What are the Galu?” Cara demanded. “What manner of thing?”

“They walk like men, mistress,” pleaded the worms, in fearful, squeaking voices.

“They look like men.”

“But they are not?” Cara demanded.

“Oh do not make us answer that! We must not answer that! If we do that, they will punish us again.”

“How could they punish you more horribly than this?” Cara asked, her voice controlled and even.

“The Galu can always think of something worse,” whined the worm in her father’s face.

“If you tell me,” Cara said, “I promise to set you free.”

The worms looked at each other, back and forth, and nodded their heads. “They walk like men, but they are not. Their love is different. To have sons, they must be murdered, out of hatred, by the children of God. If they tempt the fallen children so, then a blossom rises out of them, bearing three eggs, which grow into their children who are exactly like them. The Galu cannot change. They can only grow more numerous.”

“Which they are doing now.”

“You were not the first.”

“They love killing,” said the first worm.

“They love pillage,” said another.

“They yearn for the knife,” said a third.

“They will bring ruin.”

“Cara,” said Stefile, gripping her shoulder. “Cara, we must be away. You heard what they said. They will come for us.”

“Yes,” said Cara in the same, flat, damaged, weary voice. “Yes, yes, yes.”

Outside, in the yard, four of the Old Women stood, arms folded.

“So, Cara,” said Mother Danlupu, and tutted. “You return to see what your precipitous spells have done.”

“Casting yourself as a great sorceress,” said Hara. “You have caused a great disruption.”

It was Latch whose eyes were hardest and most steady with hatred. “What a fool you look,” she said, her smile arching with disgust at the earrings and the lace and, of course, at Stefile.

“Is there no pity?” Cara asked. “Then you are smaller than the worms. Even the worms have pity.” She drew her sword. “Get out of my house,” she said, calm, heavy.

“Abomination!” whispered Latch, smiling. “Abomination,” they all whispered together. “Abomination,” and made signs against her, to keep away the evil things that followed her path.

“Or would you rather sit in my father’s lap!” Cara suddenly roared, and grabbed hold of the nearest, old Danlupu, and pulled her backwards by both of her frail arms towards the house. Danlupu shrieked in terror at actually being seized, and bobbed, bird-like and helpless in Cara’s grasp, and began to weep. “Where is your Kasawa magic now? Where are your mighty spells?” Cara raged, and shook her, and the old woman began to beg.

“Cara, stop, please, she is old!” Stefile begged.

“In! In, and sit among the worms!” Cara held the old woman above the ground and her legs pumped in the air.

“Cara, please!” shouted Stefile.

Cara threw the old woman to the stone floor of the yard, and sat on her, and pressed a sword onto her throat. “What are you to the Galu?” she demanded.

“I don’t know what you mean!” the old woman wailed.

“Their full name means the Secret Rose, they become the Secret Rose, and Wensenara, your name means the same thing. What are you to the Galu?”

“I know nothing about the Galu!” the woman wept, wretched.

“When we came to offer help!” Hara’s voice shook with indignation.

“Brave warrior to strike at an old women!” hissed Latch.

“Hah!” cried Cara, and slapped her stingingly with the flat of her sword, and Latch shrieked and clutched her side, convinced she had been cut. Her sister gathered her in her arms and pulled her away.

“Out! Out! Out!” Cara raved and hauled the old woman to her feet and flung her after her friends, who were running now, down the steps, sobbing with fear.

Silence. The sound of wind up the valley and the distant sound of weeping. Very suddenly, Cara sat down on the stone.

“Cara?” whispered Stefile. “Cara, Cara, Dear One. We can only leave. Come on.” She tried to pull, but Cara was unmovable, and staring.

The wind in the reeds by the river made sounds like a sleeping child. All along the valley were lights in windows, as dim as fireflies, except around Cara’s house and the houses of her people, which were dark. There was no moon, only stars, but they were bright enough to show the river, winding as it always had, and to cast a line of silver along the top of the opposite cliffs, as large and familiar as the memories of her father. From somewhere, far away, someone began to sing in a high, unsteady voice.

Tears spilled suddenly out of Cara’s eyes. She had to gasp to get her breath back, and she stood up abruptly and strode to the corner of the yard, to the stables that still smelled of animals, and pressed her face into the corner, caressing the stone with her forehead, and she wept, helplessly.

“Oh, Cara,” said Stefile, and tried to comfort her, taking her arm, but the arm was as beyond comforting as the stone. “Cara, don’t weep. Weeping never does any good. It is bad to weep.”

Cara simply turned to her, eyes bulging and wet, and screamed. What else was there to do but weep? She tore the earrings from her ears, and the lace from her shoulders.