Sign of the Dragonfly: Chapter IV

Slava hated her camel. She had named him Fjardin, after her least favorite uncle, owing to their shared love of spitting, their foul smell, and their bushy eyebrows. He in turn bore her no affection, attempting to bite her whenever she dismounted, kicking out at her with his huge padded feet whenever she passed too close behind him, stubbornly ignoring both reins and stick. Things only grew worse after the column left the ring of farms, quarries, clay pits, and fisheries surrounding Amnh and passed onto the forest road. Fjardin wandered off the path at will, much to the uproarious delight of Slava’s battle sisters, spooked at every other monkey call, and at every opportunity stripped the hanging branches of mulberry trees of their little red fruits, which gave him appalling wind. Several times Slava had considered butchering the camel and going the rest of the way on foot.

The wizard, on the other hand, seemed born to the saddle. His white she-camel answered the lightest touch of his sandaled foot against her neck, knelt with fluid ease to let him climb atop her hump, nuzzled him when he scratched her ears. He and Pravan i’Yham, whose snake still lay draped over his shoulders, rode at the head of the column now, Red Elka relegated to a spot behind them, the drumwife on one side and Elka’s shield-sister, Aglyff, on the other. It was a loss of face for their leader, to be so clearly spurned by this soft-handed man. At night Elka brooded like a thunderhead over their cookfire.

“I’d split his pretty skull,” said Kridel on their fourth day on the road. The forest was beginning to thin, the towering fig trees and jacarandas giving way to bunya pines and dwarf silkwoods, too far apart for the monkeys that had followed them in the treetops, stealing from their packs at night and throwing date pits and feces at them by day. Angra Ilwynsdotter had shot one of the screeching things, but even its rotting head atop her spear had failed to dissuade the rest.

“And then what?” Slava picked at a scabbed-over fly bite on her forearm. “He’s the only one who speaks the Amnh tongue, and the treasurers back in Virk won’t pay us what we’re owed without him there to sanction it.”

Kridel fell silent for a minute, looking up at the sky and tapping a finger against her chin. “Cut his hands off, then,” she said at last. “That’s a respectable compromise.” 

At the column’s head, Pravan said something that made the wizard laugh. He had a pretty laugh, clear and musical as a woman’s. “He’d call lightning down on us,” said Slava, jerking on Fjardin’s reins as he spotted a mulberry tree and started drifting toward the edge of the road. “Or send wolves to eat us while we sleep. No, whatever it is, it will have to wait until we’ve left this place.” She imagined the spires and ziggurats and domes of Amnh dwindling into the distance as she rowed. The thought made her strangely melancholy. 

“I don’t think they have wolves here,” Kridel replied. “I haven’t heard their song since we made port.”

It was wolfsong, the spinners told, that had guided the goddess Ilga to the mortal world in ages past. Wolfsong that had led her to the Troll-Killing Spear and taught her the nine runes of childbirth, war, and sailing. What kind of a place had no wolves? There was no wisdom in the chattering of monkeys. The jungle’s gaudy birds had little and less to teach. Perhaps the great slow serpents that hung from the boughs and slithered through the humus and leaf litter had taught the gods of Amnh, or the strange gangrel black bears with their white tufted breasts. She made a note to ask the boy Hama if there was a word for “dog” in Amnh. He delighted in her poor pronunciation, and the crude mummery she used to ask her questions.

That night they camped in the shade of a towering date palm, the fronds rustling softly overhead. Sveta and Angra roasted a haunch of venison from a strange tusked deer over the fire, Sveta spitting mouthfuls of herbed raka over the meat at intervals to flavor it and keep it moist, the company laughing at the spurts of flame as the liquor dripped onto the coals.

“Ce mati cira?” Hama asked, raising an eyebrow and pointing at the skin in Sveta’s hands. 

“Raka,” said Slava. She mimed drinking, then wiped her mouth and sighed in exaggerated satisfaction.

Hama’s forehead furrowed. “Ray-kuh,” he ventured.

Kridel snorted laughter. A few others joined her, and Hama laughed with them, guilelessly pleased to be part of something. Slava pulled the boy into a one-armed hug and ruffled his hair. “Raka,” she repeated, laughing as he played at fighting her off. “Raka, stone-for-brains.”

He had a funny smell to him, she noticed as he leaned against her, watching the fire with boyish contentment. Perhaps it was something in the food, which all seemed to be spicy beyond endurance and full of strange, vivid colors. Slava let him stay where he was. It was comforting to have a child around. There was a tenderness between mothers and sons that she, with her family’s honor weighing heavy on her shoulders, had always envied. Slava’s brothers had been the jewels of her mother’s eye, and her father had doted on them as well, teaching them all he knew of housekeeping and farming, tanning and sewing, and the dozen other skills a man needed to be a good husband. Sometimes she had wished that she could join them at their work.

“Cira?” Hama asked. 

Slava looked down. He had her axe halfway out of its loop at her belt. She slapped his hand away and seized the front of his shirt. “Never touch that,” she shouted. “You want to lose your fingers, fool?” She shook him, the way her mother had shaken her when a point needed driving home. “Steel is not for men!”

The boy fled amidst more laughter, nearly tripping over a bedroll before vanishing behind the palm’s serrated trunk. Slava’s heart hammered. She felt embarrassed, her face burning. “The little prick put his hands on my axe,” she grumbled. 

“Enough.” Red Elka’s voice cut through the chatter and merriment. The women around their fire, and the nearest of those standing watch, touched their ears to show that they were listening. Red Elka was not the tallest of them, nor the strongest, nor even the best sword, but she had led their band for seven seasons without a single serious challenge to her leadership. The reason for this was that no one was meaner than Red Elka. She was the worst kind of opponent, the kind who would never give up, not with her guts hanging around her thighs, not outnumbered ten to one, not if her foe were the Finger Witch herself. Slava had seen her kill a bear, once, an artless, hacking orgy of bloodshed that had ended only when Elka tore the poor beast’s throat out with her teeth. The scars covered her face and throat, her right shoulder, her arm. It had bitten her, shaken her, mauled her until her tabard was sodden with blood, and still she had gone on stabbing at it in a mindless frenzy.

“This wizard, Lune,” Red Elka continued, spitting the man’s name. “He has treated me like a war dog, called and then dismissed. You have all seen it. You wonder how I will answer his insult when he bears the All-Queen’s dispensation.” Quick as a flash, she leaned forward, snatched a coal from the fire’s edge, and held it up to light her pipe. Slava smelled burning meat. The party was silent, transfixed by the sight of Red Elka gripping the coal tight until finally, without haste, she tossed it back into the fire and settled back onto the fallen branch she’d been using as a seat. Sweat stood out on her brow, but her eyes were clear, her mouth set. “That’s my fucking business, and if any of you feels sore about it, you can take it up with me.”

Slava kept her head down, but risked a sidelong glance at the wizard’s fire on the far side of the road. He and Pravan were bent low in conversation over the pit of fading coals between them. Lune, she thought, mulling on the strange name. She’d never thought to ask it. Lune Not-dotter. Who are you, exactly? And why did you bring us here?

Gradually, conversation resumed. Vjirda began to play her little harp, Sveta and Angra dished out greasy hunks of venison, and for a moment the forest’s verge seemed not so different from any other land they’d raided in or visited to trade, their longship riding low with looted goods. Slava watched the fire burn down, her back against the tree trunk, her belly full. Hama came creeping back a little after first watch, shamefaced and wary. He laid out his little bedroll beside her, and after a while she reached down and began to stroke his hair. When she slept, she dreamed of her childhood home, her father milking the goats in the yard while her brothers worked the loom.

In the morning they found Sveta dead on her back in the underbrush, her face and throat grotesquely swollen, thumb-sized black wasps crawling in her open mouth.

On their sixth day on the road, they reached the desert known as the Yham. One moment they were toiling along a narrow hill track, the terrain around them rolling and sparse with only patches of witchgrass and dwarf cottonwoods growing in sporadic stands, and the next the land fell away before them, gray grass and crumbling soil giving way to hard-packed, barren earth stiff with salt, devoid of vegetation. It stretched away as far as Slava could see, an ocean of emptiness shimmering on the horizon. 

“Frala’s frozen cunt,” Kridel whispered, awestruck. “Where does it end? You could drop all of Virk in there and ride for a month without finding it. We’re meant to cross that?”

“The wizard says two months in the saddle,” said Red Elka, drifting back between them. Her sunburn had begun to peel, leaving her with the look of a half-shucked ear of corn. “Two weeks in the Yham to reach this cave of his, then two more to take the mountain road to a place called Danh Dang. It’s a shrine to one of their gods. The one with hammer and anvil both.”

“Umada,” Slava offered. “They pray to her in childbed.” Hama had drawn her little pictures of some of the more common Amnhese deities. She was starting to pick up a few words here and there, and with it a clearer picture of where she was. Amnh was the center of things in this part of the world, but it sat astride the confluence of a much larger coalition of princes, city-states, cults, religious traditions, and stories called the Gujirat. A kingdom of kingdoms, Slava thought. Or something like that. 

“I don’t care if they piss in her mouth and stick flowers in her ass,” said Elka. “When I teach that long-haired piglet his lesson, I want you close, watching the other one. You have a good head on your shoulders, Slava Grunesdotter.”

“Aye,” said Kridel, “but she doesn’t use it for much aside from breaking swords.”

Aglyff guided her camel into step on Slava’s other side. Slava had always found the chiefess’s shield-sister very beautiful with her long blond braid, crooked mouth, and heavy-lidded eyes. Aglyff reminded her of her first edra, Tare, of rolling in the thick emerald moss and jumping naked from the snow into the hot spring in the foothills of Mount Uthra. Tare had died at sixteen of the pox when it swept through their village. Slava still dreamed of her sometimes.

“As you wish,” said Slava, looking ahead to where the wizard rode with Pravan, the two of them deep in conversation, Hama trailing a little way behind. “He could use a beating, couldn’t he? These wizards forget, they’re still only men.”

They rode on into the desert, a narrow thread of beasts and riders under the punishing sun. Slava felt a very long way from her axe on the wall over the fireplace and a husband to work the stiffness from her back and calves after a long day herding and working their fields. She wondered, as they left the forest behind, if she would ever see Virk again.