Warrior Women Read online

  “It’s open.” The lockpick stood back.

  Her heel skidded in blood. She cursed and regained her balance. Darkness cloaked them. She led the way to the cellars.

  Above, the house slept. Rax hummed under her breath.

  “It’s a fine revenge on Vanathri,” Garad said as his men searched the stacked chests. Silver glinted in the lantern’s light.

  “It’s only a joke,” Rax corrected him. “Try that one there—yes, and there. Good.”

  After a few skirmishes in the Cold Lands, I’ll come and pay back what I’ve taken. I wonder if he'll see the joke? she thought.

  The flare of the lanterns took her totally by surprise.

  The war-axe slid into her right hand, the throwing-axe into her left. One man yelled. Dazzled, she struck by instinct. Garad heaved up a chest and threw it at the advancing men. She let fly with the throwing-axe, heard a scream as it found a target.

  Garad screeched—

  New lights from five or six bright lanterns blinded her. Something struck a paralyzing blow to her arm. The men, out of her striking reach, held crossbows. Fear sobered her. Even mail could not stop the crossbow bolts pointing at her breast.

  A familiar voice shouted, and no one fired.

  Garad bubbled out his life at her feet. The lockpick breathed harshly in the sudden silence. Her other men, and several guards, lay dead. Kel Vanathri stood at the head of the steps, in night robes, carrying an unsheathed sword.

  He cried out.

  Devenil slumped against the wall. Blood matted his hair and soaked his shirt; his flesh was laid open, and white bone showed in the redness. The throwing axe’s blade was buried under his ribs. He was dead.

  “He was always a light sleeper.” Kel sounded stunned. “He said he’d see what the disturbance was. By the time I could follow—”

  “I'm sorry,” Rax said. “I liked Devenil.”

  “I loved him!” Kel’s agony flared. “He was the best. The Island will never see another like him. That you could kill him . . . ”

  “His rescuer in Bazuruk is his killer in Shabelit,” Rax said, rubbing her face wearily. Chains clinked. “He’d appreciate the irony.”

  It was less complex in Bazuruk, she thought. That is what comes of charity. I’d never have hurt him if I’d seen it was Devenil.

  “You’re nothing more than a butcher. I thought you were different because of what you did in Anukazi, but you’re just another Bazuruki killer.”

  “Of course I’m Bazuruki.” She was bewildered. “I was born in Keshanu. I spent ten years defending the borders of the Crystal Mountains. What else would I be?”

  It took time for the anger to leave him. Almost to himself, he said, “That’s the tragedy. I know you have compassion, but it doesn’t matter, does it? The Bazuruki training is what matters.”

  “I am what I am,” Rax said, “and so are you. And so was he. We can’t change.”

  “I can’t believe that.” He stood, pacing the cell. The guard looked in and went away again. They wouldn’t stop him from visiting his own justice on her, she guessed. Not on Shabelit, Sephir's island. She knew how a mother felt for a dead son.

  “What will you do?”

  “Nothing. You will answer to the law for theft, murder, Devenil.”

  “Not a cell. Not caged. You owe me that.”

  “I owe you nothing!” Leaving, he stopped. “He—loved you, Devenil did, for fighting to be what you were. He would have given you a lord’s inheritance if you’d asked. You were his friend.”

  She watched him with Bazuruki eyes, Rax Keshanu, Anukazi’s daughter.

  “Tarik—Kel, I mean—”

  “Better we’d died in Bazuruk.”

  “I’m a long way from home,” Rax said. “I’m tired, Kel.”

  “I won’t cage you,” he said from the doorway. “But I won’t let them free you, not after what you’ve done. If you leave, there’s only one other way from here.”

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  After a time, she knew he had left.

  She stood looking down through fine rain into the prison courtyard, where soon they would raise a block, and Rax Keshanu would for the last time behold the clean stroke of an axe.

  Revenge is a literary theme that often proves, in lesser hands, trite. Jane Yolen’s story, however, provides insight into the power of vengeance to shape a girl’s psyche and map a pathway she follows resolutely.

  Become a Warrior

  Jane Yolen

  Both the hunted and the hunter pray to God.

  The moon hung like a bloody red ball over the silent battlefield. Only the shadows seemed to move. The men on the ground would never move again. And their women, sick with weeping, did not dare the field in the dark. It would be morning before they would come like crows to count their losses.

  But on the edge of the field there was a sudden tiny movement, and it was no shadow. Something small was creeping to the muddy hem of the battleground.

  Something knelt there, face shining with grief. A child, a girl, the youngest daughter of the king who had died that evening surrounded by all his sons.

  The girl looked across the dark field and, like her mother, like her sisters, like her aunts, did not dare put foot on to the bloody ground. But then she looked up at the moon and thought she saw her father’s face there. Not the father who lay with his innards spilled out into contorted hands. Not the one who had braided firesticks in his beard and charged into battle screaming. She thought she saw the father who had always sung her to sleep against the night terrors. The one who sat up with her when Great Graxyx haunted her dreams.

  “I will do for you, Father, as you did for me,” she whispered to the moon. She prayed to the goddess for the strength to accomplish what she had just promised.

  Then foot by slow foot, she crept onto the field, searching in the red moon’s light for the father who had fallen. She made slits of her eyes so she would not see the full horror around her. She breathed through her mouth so that she would not smell all the deaths. She never once thought of the Great Graxyx who lived—so she truly believed—in the black cave of her dressing room. Or any of the hundred and six gibbering children Graxyx had sired. She crept across the landscape made into a horror by the enemy hordes. All the dead men looked alike. She found her father by his boots.

  She made her way up from the boots, past the gaping wound that had taken him from her, to his face which looked peaceful and familiar enough, except for the staring eyes. He had never stared like that. Rather his eyes had always been slitted, against the hot sun of the gods, against the lies of men. She closed his lids with trembling fingers and put her head down on his chest, where the stillness of the heart told her what she already knew.

  And then she began to sing to him.

  She sang of life, not death, and the small gods of new things. Of bees in the hive and birds on the summer wind. She sang of foxes denning and bears shrugging off winter. She sang of fish in the sparkling rivers and the first green uncurlings of fern in spring. She did not mention dying, blood, or wounds, or the awful stench of death. Her father already knew this well and did not need to be recalled to it.

  And when she was done with her song, it was as if his corpse gave a great sigh, one last breath, though of course he was dead already half the night and made no sound at all. But she heard what she needed to hear.

  By then it was morning and the crows came. The human crows as well as the black birds, poking and prying and feeding on the dead.

  So she turned and went home and everyone wondered why she did not weep. But she had left her tears out on the battlefield.

  She was seven years old.

  Dogs bark, but the caravan goes on.

  Before the men who had killed her father and who had killed her brothers could come to take all the women away to serve them, she had her maid cut her black hair as short as a boy’s. The maid was a trembling sort, and the haircut was ragged. But it would do.

  She waited until
the maid had turned around and leaned down to put away the shears. Then she put her arm around the woman and, with a quick knife’s cut across her throat, killed her, before the woman could tell on her. It was a mercy, really, for she was old and ugly and would be used brutally by the soldiers before being slaughtered, probably in a slow and terrible manner. So her father had warned before he left for battle.

  Then she went into the room of her youngest brother, dead in the field and lying by her father’s right hand. In his great wooden chest she found a pair of trews that had probably been too small for him, but were nonetheless too long for her. With the still-bloody knife she sheared the legs of the trews a hand’s width, rolled and sewed them with a quick seam. All the women of her house could sew well, even when it had to be done quickly. Even when it had to be done through half-closed eyes. Even when the hem was wet with blood. Even then.

  When she put on the trews, they fit, though she had to pull the drawstring around the waist quite tight and tie the ribbands twice around her. She shrugged into one of her brother’s shirts as well, tucking it down into the waistband. Then she slipped her bloody knife into the shirtsleeve. She wore her own riding boots, which could not be told from a boy’s, for her brother’s boots were many times too big for her.

  Then she went out through the window her brother always used when he set out to court one of the young and pretty maids. She had watched him often enough through he had never known she was there, hiding beside the bed, a dark little figure as still as the night.

  Climbing down the vine, hand over hand, was no great trouble either. She had done it before, following after him. Really, what a man and a maid did together was most interesting, if a bit odd. And certainly noisier than it needed to be.

  She reached the ground in moments, crossed the garden, climbed over the outside wall by using a twisted tree as her ladder. When she dropped to the ground, she twisted her ankle a bit, but she made not the slightest whimper. She was a boy now. And she knew they did not cry.

  In the west a cone of dark dust was rising up and advancing on the fortress, blotting out the sky. She knew it for the storm that many hooves make as horses race across the plains. The earth trembled beneath her feet. Behind her, in their rooms, the women had begun to wail. The sound was thin, like a gold filament thrust into her breast. She plugged her ears that their cries could not recall her to her old life, for such was not her plan.

  Circling around the stone skirting of the fortress, in the shadow so no one could see her, she started around toward the east. It was not a direction she knew. All she knew was that it was away from the horses of the enemy.

  Once she glanced back at the fortress that had been the only home she had ever known. Her mother, her sisters, the other women stood on the battlements looking toward the west and the storm of riders. She could hear their wailing, could see the movement of their arms as they beat upon their breasts. She did not know if that were a plea or an invitation.

  She did not turn to look again.

  To become a warrior, forget the past.

  Three years she worked as a serving lad in a fortress not unlike her own but many days’ travel away. She learned to clean and to carry, she learned to work after a night of little sleep. Her arms and legs grew strong. Three years she worked as the cook’s boy. She learned to prepare geese and rabbit and bear for the pot, and learned which parts were salty, which sweet. She could tell good mushrooms from bad and which greens might make the toughest meat palatable.

  And then she knew she could no longer disguise the fact that she was a girl for her body had begun to change in ways that would give her away. So she left the fortress, starting east once more, taking only her knife and a long loop of rope which she wound around her waist seven times.

  She was many days hungry, many days cold, but she did not turn back. Fear is a great incentive.

  She taught herself to throw the knife and hit what she aimed at. Hunger is a great teacher.

  She climbed trees when she found them in order to sleep safe at night. The rope made such passages easier.

  She was so long by herself, she almost forgot how to speak. But she never forgot how to sing. In her dreams she sang to her father on the battlefield. Her songs made him live again. Awake she knew the truth was otherwise. He was dead. The worms had taken him. His spirit was with the goddess, drinking milk from her great pap, milk that tasted like honey wine.

  She did not dream of her mother or of her sisters or of any of the women in her father’s fortress. If they died, it had been with little honor. If they still lived, it was with less.

  So she came at last to a huge forest with oaks thick as a goddess’ waist. Over all was a green canopy of leaves that scarcely let in the sun. Here were many streams, rivulets that ran cold and clear, torrents that crashed against rocks, and pools that were full of silver trout whose meat was sweet. She taught herself to fish and to swim, and it would be hard to say which gave her the greater pleasure. Here, too, were nests of birds, and that meant eggs. Ferns curled and then opened, and she knew how to steam them, using a basket made of willow strips and a fire from rubbing sticks against one another. She followed bees to their hives, squirrels to their hidden nuts, ducks to their watered beds.

  She grew strong, and brown, and—though she did not know it—very beautiful.

  Beauty is a danger, to women as well as to men. To warriors most of all. It steers them away from the path of killing. It softens the soul.

  When you are in a tree, be a tree.

  She was three years alone in the forest and grew to trust the sky, the earth, the river, the trees, the way she trusted her knife. They did not lie to her. They did not kill wantonly. They gave her shelter, food, courage. She did not remember her father except as some sort of warrior god, with staring eyes, looking as she had seen him last. She did not remember her mother or sisters or aunts at all.

  It had been so long since she had spoken to anyone, it was as if she could not speak at all. She knew words, they were in her head, but not in her mouth, on her tongue, in her throat. Instead she made the sounds she heard every day—the grunt of boar, the whistle of duck, the trilling of thrush, the settled cooing of the wood pigeon on its nest.

  If anyone had asked her if she was content, she would have nodded.

  Content.

  Not happy. Not satisfied. Not done with her life’s work.

  Content.

  And then one early evening a new sound entered her domain. A drumming on the ground, from many miles away. A strange halloing, thin, insistent, whining.

  The voices of some new animal, packed like wolves, singing out together.

  She trembled. She did not know why. She did not remember why. But to be safe from the thing that made her tremble, she climbed a tree, the great oak that was in the very center of her world.

  She used the rope ladder she had made, and pulled the ladder up after. Then she shrank back against the trunk of the tree to wait. She tried to be the brown of the bark, the green of the leaves, and in this she almost succeeded.

  It was in the first soft moments of dark, with the woods outlined in muzzy black, that the pack ran yapping, howling, belling into the clearing around the oak.

  In that instant she remembered dogs.

  There were twenty of them, some large, lanky grays; some stumpy browns with long muzzles; some stiff-legged spotted with pushed-in noses; some thick-coated; some smooth. Her father, the god of war, had had such a motley pack. He had hunted boar and stag and hare with such. They had found him bear and fox and wolf with ease.

  Still, she did not know why the dog pack was here, circling her tree. Their jaws were raised so that she could see their iron teeth, could hear the tolling of her death with their long tongues.

  She used the single word she could remember. She said it with great authority, with trembling.

  “Avaunt!”

  At the sound of her voice, the animals all sat down on their haunches to stare up at her, their own
tongues silenced. Except for one, a rat terrier, small and springy and unable to be still. He raced back up the path toward the west like some small spy going to report to his master.

  Love comes like a thief, stealing the heart’s gold away.

  It was in the deeper dark that the dogs’ master came, with his men behind him, their horses’ hooves thrumming the forest paths. They trampled the grass, the foxglove’s pink bells and the purple florets of selfheal, the wine-colored burdock flowers and the sprays of yellow goldenrod equally under the horses’ heavy feet. The woods were wounded by their passage. The grass did not spring back nor the flowers rise up again.

  She heard them and began trembling anew as they thrashed their way across her green haven and into the very heart of the wood.

  Ahead of them raced the little terrier, his tail flagging them on, till he led them right to the circle of dogs waiting patiently beneath her tree.

  “Look, my lord, they have found something,” said one man.

  “Odd they should be so quiet,” said another.

  But the one they called lord dismounted, waded through the sea of dogs, and stood at the very foot of the oak, his feet crunching on the fallen acorns. He stared up, and up, and up through the green leaves and at first saw nothing but brown and green.

  One of the large gray dogs stood, walked over to his side, raised its great muzzle to the tree, and howled.

  The sound made her shiver anew.

  “See, my lord, see—high up. There is a trembling in the foliage,” one of the men cried.

  “You fool,” the lord cried, “that is no trembling of leaves. It is a girl. She is dressed all in brown and green. See how she makes the very tree shimmer.” Though how he could see her so well in the dark, she was never to understand. “Come down, child, we will not harm you.”

  She did not come down. Not then. Not until the morning fully revealed her. And then, if she was to eat, if she was to relieve herself, she had to come down. So she did, dropping the rope ladder, and skinning down it quickly. She kept her knife tucked in her waist, out where they could see it and be afraid.