Storm Bride (5 page)

“What are you talking about?”

Nei sighed. “The raiders are coming. The Prasada has ordered all of the
ennas
to help build earthworks around the perimeter of the city to defend it. Yesterday the Eldest of every
enna
assembled to determine the contributions of food and labor for the next ten days.”

Uya had overheard fragments of talk about raiders destroying farms and plundering caravans on the high roads, and hadn’t Saotse said something about strange Powers? But she had amalgamated these into an image of demons devouring the caravan and tearing apart the unlucky that crossed their paths. It had not occurred to her that they might move with a purpose, that they might threaten the city. She wanted to ask Nei if they were men and not spirits, but Nei would just berate her for being superstitious, the way she always berated Chrasu. Instead she said, “Then I will go see the earthworks.”

“Why would you want to see the earthworks?”

“So that when the raiders are driven back, I will know where to stand so I can spit on the bodies of the men who killed my husband.”

“That’s not a seemly attitude for a woman with child.”

“Should I scrub my face with ash and mourn for another month? Oarsa hear me, I’m going into the city, and I am going to see the earthworks.”

With a strike like a heron, Nei slapped Uya’s cheek. “You be careful with your oaths. One day you’re going to wake up and find that your words are a thorn in your heel.”

Uya’s cheek stung, and her hand drifted up to cover it. “Yes, Eldest.” She hesitated a moment before adding, “But may I go?”

“Go. Your mother is at the Prasada’s lodge taking inventory for the construction, but she can rouge you. And take Saotse with you.”

Saotse stirred. Her song faltered. “Why are you sending me away?”

“I’m not sending you away. You, too, have mourned more than your share. Go. I’ll maintain the song.” She pulled the drum from Saotse’s hands.

Saotse rose to her feet with a groan. “Uya? Give me your hand. You can tell me what it looks like when we arrive, I suppose.”

Uya stretched her hand out, Saotse took it, and they set out for the center of Prasa.

The
enna’s
lodge hid in a pocket of firs with the sea to their west, part of a district of well-spaced, stately lodges on the south shore of the river. Bands of piny woodland separated each of the lodges in their district, though a footpath ran through the woods and past the doors of their nearest neighbors before joining the south road into the city. Uya walked quickly, but Saotse’s hesitant gait held her back. Saotse was so confident on the paths around the lodge itself, but the moment anyone took her past the
enna’s
holdings, she became as shy and cautious as a rabbit. Uya nearly scolded her, but seeing the pained look on Saotse’s face, she held her tongue.

Half an hour later, they had left the grand, private lodges on the southern fringe of the city and come to the crowded, muddy district that crouched on the south shore of the River Prasa. These were the fishing
ennas
, and they built their lodges close to the river and lined up long rows of unpainted canoes on the shore. Their ancestor totems were grubby and ill painted. Uya usually pinched her nose at the miasma of humans and horses and fish guts that muddled the streets here, though today the paths between the greasy lodges were nearly deserted. “There’s no one here,” she muttered, just loud enough for Saotse to hear.

“I hear two old women gossiping and a girl addressing her doll,” Saotse said. “There are no ponies or men anywhere. They’ve all gone up to the earthworks.”

Uya couldn’t hear anything other than their footsteps in the mud, but she could see the lack of animals. “Really?” she said. “All of them, just for a little mound of dirt?”

“From what I hear, the mound of dirt is anything but
little
.”

They came to the bridge, the only passage over the River Prasa, built where the main trade road running north from Kendilar met the river. It was practical and unlovely, long cedar slats tied together with bronze, lying across stone piles built up on the river bed. Most of the city proper was on the north side of the river, and Uya much preferred the clean, tidy lodges that ringed the city’s core to the grubby south shore. The lodges here were spaced farther apart and left a few spruces between them, and their ancestor totems were tall and painted turquoise, carmine, and white. Nei always told her not to be so judgmental, but she didn’t see any excuse for the mess that the fishing
ennas
made of the south shore.

They approached the center of the city where the Prasada’s lodge lay. This was the market district, where women traded bales of dried kelp, casks of salted salmon, mother-of-pearl, polished turquoise, whale ivory, vast buffalo hides from beyond the Gap, the hammered silver of Kendilar, and boxes of dried lemons and spices from Tsingris. The streets should have been noisy with travel. But Uya saw only a few women hurrying along with their heads down. The stone pavement before the Prasada’s lodge was nearly bare. The Prasada’s raccoon and heron totems seemed to look down on the space with menace.

In all her life, Una had never seen the market when it was anything but brimming with buyers and sellers, and the sight of it still and dead portended doom.

A small crowd of women sat in the shadows of the Prasada’s lodge. Oire was among them, a plank of cedar balanced on her lap and a reed pen in her hand. Her face was smudged with white ash. Uya called quietly, “Mother!”

Oire looked up. “Uya, what are you doing here? And Saotse with you…”

“I came into the city.”

“Why aren’t you rouged? You left Nei alone with the drum, and you—”

“Mother! Nei told me to come and for you to mark us. Besides, it’s not as if there’s any doubt about my condition.”

Oire pursed her lips in disapproval and looked at Uya’s belly, but Uya thought she saw a shadow of pleasure in it. “Fine.” She set the plank of cedar aside with her birch-bark page, then she bent and withdrew two small clay jars from the basket behind her. “And what if I hadn’t brought the colors with me?” she muttered.

“I suppose you’ll have to take that up with the Eldest.”

Oire looked at Saotse. “And you? Why did you come?”

“I have not been to the earthworks,” she said in a small voice.

“Well, I suppose if Nei let you.” She opened the jar of white ash, dipped her first three fingers in it, and drew matching white stripes down both cheeks on both Uya and Saotse. Then she dipped her thumb in the jar of oily carmine and drew twin red suns on Uya’s cheeks.

“There. I hope I don’t hear anything about my daughter’s disrespect for the dead.”

“If I disrespected the dead,” Uya said, “then why haven’t I left the
enna
for a month?”

Oire wiped her fingers clean on the edge of her skirt. “If you want to see the earthworks, take any of the north paths. The battlements encompass the whole north side of town.”

“Thank you,” Uya said. She grabbed Saotse’s hand and began walking north.

The cold, empty feeling of the city gradually thawed as Uya and Saotse began to encounter people on the path. There were men carrying shovels and spades and canteens of mare’s milk, and clusters of young men holding hands. A young woman led a pair of ponies ahead of them, and she glanced back at Uya’s white-and-red cheeks and pumpkin-shaped belly and shook her head in pity. Uya felt a twinge of self-consciousness. The white of mourning and the red of childbearing were not meant to mingle on the same cheek, though she had managed to forget that since she had left the lodge.

“I smell dirt that’s been overturned by a spade,” Saotse said. “And I hear—”

“Oarsa’s foam.” Uya finally spotted the earthworks and dropped Saotse’s hand in awe.

She had imagined something reasonable, something small, something
else
. Something like the little dike that separated some of the riverside
enna
lodges from the overflow of the river. But this was a
wall
. The construction was incomplete but already impressive: a stack of four earthen terraces, each the height of a man, reinforced with stone and retained by walls of pine logs, with more earth dug out from inside the city to raise the height of the ravine. One could hide an entire lodge in the interior of the mound and pass a river through the ditch that had been dug inside the city. The structure crawled with men, from boys to gray-headed Eldest, with young women scampering along the outside to carry baskets and relay instructions and pack clay into the crevices between logs.

So
this
was why the entire city seemed to be deserted. Nei had said that the Prasada had called up help from the
ennas
, and Uya realized that this meant
every
man from
every
enna, and a good portion of the women, besides. The city felt empty because every hand in it was hard at work.

Saotse squeezed her hand. “What do you see?”

“Something amazing. And terrible, and troubling. I don’t understand what’s going on. Why didn’t anyone tell me? Can you—”

“Uya, tell me what you see.”

She described as best she could, in broken sentences pitted with gasps and omissions and forgotten asides, how the ditch was being excavated and the wide earthen wall raised above it. “And it’s new,” she added. “Somehow—though I suppose it makes sense if every hand in the city has helped—somehow they’ve gotten this almost done. I can see the completed wall to the north, curving away just past the lodges like a levee, topped already with little huts of thatch like bird nests, and guarded by archers, as if they were frightening back the sea. It’s as if they built it overnight. I don’t see how…”

“It’s been a month, Uya.”

“But do we really need something so big? I don’t—”

Saotse dropped Uya’s hand and knelt on the ground.

“Saotse? Saotse, what’s wrong?” Uya lowered herself carefully to her knees.

Saotse pressed her palms against the dirt as if kneading dough. A febrile moan dribbled from her lips. Her forehead bent and brushed the dirt, then she cocked her head as if listening. Her back arched. “Oh, no. Oh, no. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Saotse!”

Saotse’s head jerked to the side. She collapsed to the ground and twitched.

“Saotse!” Uya clasped Saotse’s hands in her own and blew into her face. Saotse’s eyes were closed, but her tongue moved as if mouthing strange words.

Uya pleaded, “Are you awake? Can you hear me? Saotse! Someone help me!”

Saotse screamed. Her eyes opened wide, as though she saw clean through the milk of her cataracts, and she clawed at Uya’s face. “No. No! They have ruined us. There’s too much. I can’t—”

“Saotse, talk to me—”

Saotse screamed again then went limp. A moment later, she convulsed and gasped as if she had nearly drowned. Her fingers clawed at the ground. She grabbed Uya’s face with both hands. “Uya? Yes, Uya. Oh, at last.”

“Are you well? What happened?”

“The earth weeps! Ruined! I hate all of them. Lonely, so lonely.” She curled up into a ball and began to shake.

“Saotse, Saotse!”

Two nearby men came running. One of them bent to grab Saotse’s mad hands. The other asked Uya, “What happened here? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. She just started shaking. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

The man looked at Uya’s belly and cheeks and shook his head. “Are you of the same
enna
?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll carry her back to the lodge with you. You should not be out.”

Her irritation at being scolded melted from her worry. “Hurry,” she said. “I’ll show you the way.”

“So Saotse’s affinity with the Powers waxes once more.” Nei sat with her legs crossed at the foot of the bed where they had laid Saotse out to sleep. One of her hands rested on Saotse’s knee. Oire had returned to the lodge with them and maintained the drum’s heartbeat, singing the dead into the west.

“I’ve never seen such a dramatic reaction in her, Grandmother,” Uya said. Fear for Saotse mingled in her gut with the grim knowledge that the raiders waited somewhere beyond the horizon.

“You helped us pull her out of the sea.”

“That was nothing like this! She was weak then only because she had been at sea so many days, but she had all her wits about her.”

“But she came from the sea, then. This time she touched the earth.”

“What? What does that have to do with anything?”

Nei sighed. “I should send you to the Hiksilipsi, you ignorant, superstitious girl. Perhaps you could sit still long enough to learn the lore of the Powers from them. Since you don’t seem to have noticed, I must point out to you that Saotse’s affinity has always been for Oarsa. She knew him by a different name, but once she learned our language she recognized our description of him, and she knew that it was he who called her across the sea and sent the whales to carry her.

“This only matters because the Power who touched Saotse today is not Oarsa. You said yourself that she pressed her head to the ground and that she spoke of the earth weeping. And a few weeks ago, she mentioned the presence of a new Power in the earth, and of its loneliness.”