Fallen (12 page)

Nomi went around the group with another wine bottle, refilling mugs where they were empty. Then she sat on her saddle, glancing to her left at Ramus.

She felt Beko's presence to her right, ten steps away yet still almost touching.
This could be awkward,
she thought. But when she looked at him she caught him looking away, and the campfire seemed to reach out and seed itself in her belly.

“I’ LL TELL YOU
about the first voyage I went on,” Konrad began, “and a woman I met on that voyage, and how Mancoseria has never been a safe place to live.” He paced around the fire, finishing his wine and looking down at his feet as he mused upon his tale.

Nomi loved the way Serians told stories. She'd never heard anything quite like it; they combined personal tales with Mancoserian history, sometimes so seamlessly that she could not tell whether they were talking about themselves or their entire race. Their stories were always quite short, but they packed in enough to occupy her dreams and thoughts for days.

Nomi leaned sideways. “You should be writing this down,” she whispered to Ramus, but he acknowledged her with a blank smile and glittering eyes. He seemed to be enjoying the wine.

“I'm thirty-seven,” Konrad said, “and I went on my first voyage when I was twenty-two. Two years before that, I had killed my seethe-gator and risen to adulthood, and I left Mancoseria with my ’gator carving, my weapons and the clothes I walked in. My parents told me that Noreela was a safer place to be, and that I would find work in Marrakash at the Guild. My travels from my homeland to Long Marrakash . . . that's a telling for another night. A night when, perhaps, you'll want to hear about slave thieves and the wildcat herds in Cantrassa's less accessible parts.

“Raiders are something Mancoseria is used to. They've been invading our western shores almost as long as the seethe-gatorshave been crawling onto the beaches in the east, but fighting them has never been a rite of passage. It's a necessity for our survival. No significant battles for over a hundred years, though even now there are occasional attacks from raiders hanging on to their past. But in the Founding Days of Mancoseria there was a constant trail of children traveling to the west, and adults coming back. Fighting knocks the childhood out of you—a youngster will be interested in combing beaches for strange creatures, shells and driftwood from which he can build elaborate stories. A Mancoserian adult back then would look at a beach and try to see where a raider may be hiding; behind that sandbank, beneath that convenient drift of seaweed, ready to leap from a beached boat? There's something devastating in the idea that a beach, home to waves and birds and patterns in the sand, is something other than beautiful. But back then, the raiders cut all the beauty away. And they sliced beauty from Mancoserian women's faces with their knives.

“My first voyage was with a Voyager called Jeriglia, long dead now, a good man with a poor heart and a body not made for journeying. He took us to the northern tip of Long Marrakash. Many scoffed at his choice of voyage, but he insisted that so many wished to go far afield that what lay close had still not been fully explored. And he was right. We went through the mountains north of Long Marrakash, where we found settlements of people who had fled the city decades before and never returned. We traded with them, though they were suspicious, and their food was good, though their wine was inferior. Their women, though . . .” Konrad closed his eyes, and by the light of the campfire his heavily scarred face looked suddenly serene. Nomi coveted such a look of delight. “Their women were beautiful. Both men and women farmed the slopes, but it was the women who truly connected with the land. The men worried about mountain wolves coming down and stealing their livestock, but the woman went into the mountains to feed the wolves and keep them away from the farms. The men concerned themselves that the goodness had gone from the ground, and the women planted each spring, moving fields across the slopes and giving the ground time to find life again.”

“More of their beauty, Konrad!” Ramin said, obviously having heard the story before.

“Beauty, cousin? I need a better word. Language can't reach them, but perhaps art could. If only I could paint, or charcoal with shred seed. If only I could re-create their image from this fire's smoke, this twilight's generous palette.”

“Get on with it!” Beko called, and Nomi felt an instant of annoyance at him for breaking the spell.

“Beautiful women,” Konrad said, looking down at his feet again. “The raiders did not appreciate beauty because of the salt of the sea, the wind, the rains and snowstorms, the flying fish with their razor beaks . . . all raiders had their beauty stripped and scarred by the time they reached adulthood. So when they discovered beauty, they sought to tear it away. They would go at it with knives, or files made from urchins dried in the sun. Take out an eye, and a face is made imperfect. Take off a nose, and there's only ruin. But they went further than that. Physically, they could wreak havoc on us Mancoserians, but with each raid they left more of our men without their balls, and more of our women damaged inside. We fought hard and well, but the raiders were not seethe-gators. At least the ’gators come at you one-on-one, their intentions merely to kill and eat. The raiders were more brutal. They killed on every raid. And sometimes they ate too, tearing flesh away with their bare teeth. There are Mancoserians, now very old, who still remember the day a raider took a chunk of flesh from their breast, leg or face.

“But back to the voyage. So, north of the mountains, Jeriglia took us to the coast. We found a small village there on the shores of the Bay of Cantrassa, and in the small natural harbor were the remains of five boats. The masts still stood high, but the hulls were rotting, and sea creatures and birds had made them their home. Some of the village was built from wood harvested from the wrecks. Other buildings had been hacked into the soft cliffs, and still others were made from stone blocks, carved carefully over years. The people there feared us at first, especially the Serians among us. They looked at our swords, and my scars terrified them most of all. When they asked where I got them, and I told them about the seethe-gators, that seemed to relax them. A little. But it was only when we met their elders— saw their scarred faces and skin scored by decades at sea—that we knew for sure these were raiders.”

Konrad paused for a while and refilled his mug. This time there were no calls, no shouts to continue. He had cast his spell, and Nomi's attention was fully focused on the story.
Is this a tale of love or of loss?
she thought.
Perhaps both . . .

Konrad drank some wine, sighed appreciatively and continued. “We wanted to kill them all. Though the frequency of raider attacks had dropped off drastically, we still knew them for what they were. Yet the younger ones among them did not have the look of raiders, and they mostly spent their days farming the fertile lands around the village, or fishing out in the bay from boats that looked barely seaworthy. The older ones, still bearing the scars, were friendly toward us, offering us food and shelter. Though they seemed confused as to why we were there, they opened their village to our presence.

“And then I met Neria. One of the few true raiders left among them. A lover.”

Konrad stopped pacing and stared down into his mug. “I need more wine,” he said. Lowkie stood and poured, and worked his way around the group refilling mugs. There was no talk, no banter, because nobody wanted to interrupt Konrad's tale. It hung in the air unfinished, like a rock about to fall or a horse set to leap. Nomi sensed that the heart of the story was yet to be told, and everything up to now had been the preamble.

“Neria,” Konrad said. “She looked a little like Lulah. Small, strong, rarely a smile on her face. She came to meet us down at the beach, and she arrived armed with all her raider weaponry. They used swords like us, and bows and arrows sometimes, but their favorite weapons were their throwing knives and stars. She had a belt of knives around her waist, straps of stars around each shoulder and down across her breasts, and more strapped to her thighs. As she came along the beach, the youngsters of the village ran to her, shouting in a language we had not yet heard them speaking. But I'd heard those words before. They sounded like waves hitting rocks, and it was the sea-banter of the raiders.

“We prepared to fight, though we knew this would not be much of a battle.

“The raiders were incredible warriors. We Mancoserians know how to fight, but our enemy is normally a seethe-gator. Strong enemies, cunning and vicious and powerful, yet they are animals, and they're all similar in how they fight. You could learn to fight seethe-gators by listening to elders and their experiences. Raiders were different, because each raiding party had its own methods, and sometimes even its own aims. Some came just to kill because they liked killing. Others came to steal Mancoserians for slaves, or to take women to rape, or men to work repairing their boats.

“One time, seventy years before I was born, a raider party landed and drove quickly inland, hitting a settlement that no longer exists today. But it was not the raiders who wiped it from the map, it was us. We fought back, so the telling goes, and when the raiders threatened to slaughter everyone in the settlement, we attacked, killing everything that moved—raiders and Mancoserians alike—chasing the last of the raiders back to the coast and pinning them to their boat with iron spars before sinking it. Some say that boat still sails, crewed by wraiths. It was one battle won, at terrible cost, but it led to three more lost, because the raiders grew more vicious with each attack that followed.

“How do you fight such an enemy? How can you hope to defeat people like that?” He drank, and Nomi could see that his eyes were glistening. It could have been the root wine, but she thought it more likely to be the story still to tell.

Konrad walked around the fire, turned and went the other way, as if trying to warm both sides.

“Neria stopped a dozen steps from us and stared us down. She didn't go for any of her weapons—she knew that she'd be killed before she could draw them—but she was defiant, and angry, and when she and I first locked gazes, something in the world changed.” He shook his head. “I don't know how else to describe it. Even now, I don't think of what we had as love. It was more basic than that. I think it was more like respect. Two warriors, face-to-face, and if it had been fifty years earlier, our instincts would have driven us to fight until one or both of us were dead. But now there was something else happening, and I think we both felt a powerful sense of having moved on. I had left Mancoseria to find my way in the world, carrying these scars as a badge of my adulthood. And Neria, armed like the fiercest raider I had ever heard of, lived in a place where the raiders seemed to have found peace. Even their boats were sunk in the bay, like monuments to past crimes.

“Neria took out a knife, slowly, and cast it down into the sand. I drew my sword and lobbed it, and it landed a handbreadth from the knife. And that ended the brief sense of doubt any of us had for being there.

“Our time in the village was short. My time with Neria was shorter. Though both of us had found peace, our visions were still vastly different. As the days passed, she became more determined to defend her village from anyone who came, and she was terrified that our arrival would herald more explorers in the future. I could not allay those fears, because Jeriglia was already talking of further voyages. And I had left Mancoseria to travel, because I had seen what staying in one place did to people. There were horizons to meet and cross, and I hated the idea of waking to the same view every morning. The life moon gave us legs for a reason.”

He knelt, his knees clicking, and Nomi wondered how far Konrad had already walked on those legs.
A long way,
she thought.
Farther than I have ever ventured.

“What happened?” Ramus asked. Nomi could see how serious his gaze had become, and she was trying to remember where she had heard of Jeriglia.

“It all went bad,” Konrad said. “And it was my fault. Mine and Neria's, at least. I schemed to take her back to Long Marrakash with us. And she had spent much of our time there conceiving an ambush in the hills to stop us from leaving. There were still a few raiders there with their ancestors' hot blood. And so our respect was . . . shattered. False. Even from that first moment when we locked eyes . . . false.”

“You can't be criticized for trying to help,” Nomi said.

Konrad looked at her as though he'd forgotten she was there. “Help? What right had I? No right. She was proud and I was proud. We feigned friendship, but there was something rotten there from the start.

“The raiders had all but stopped striking at Mancoseria. No one knew why. Some thought they had moved farther along The Spine, that our increasing willingness to defend ourselves had driven them off. Others believed they had simply faded away as time went on. But now I knew what had happened to them. They settled; or at least some of them did. But there were always those still proud of their history, ready to honor the raider blood in their veins.

“Neria and I fought. This scar you see here—my seethe-gatorscar—has another knife trail through it. And she scarred me here.” He lifted the right sleeve on his tunic to show the ugly pink welt across his forearm. “And here.” A knife wound on his shoulder. “And when I killed her, it hurt me here most of all.” His heart.

“Jeriglia never came back,” Ramus said.

“Dead, along with three Serians and the dozen raiders Neria had taken to her side. The survivors returned to Long Marrakash. Told the Guild we were attacked by cloud-creatures in the mountains. As far as I know, no voyage has gone to the northern shore of Marrakash since.”