The Unfinished Song: Taboo (2 page)

At a signal from their leader, all fifty roared at Kavio and attacked.

Since the day of his exile, when the mob had almost killed him, he’d given thought to what strategy one man could take against overwhelming odds.
The bedrock of his strategy was to pit the mob against itself, so their greater numbers became their downfall.

Bows or slings would have changed the picture, but the Bear Shields all tried to engage Kavio at arm’s length. They vied with one another for the privilege of landing the blow to bring him down, with the result that they interfered with one another. Meanwhile, Kavio rolled under the feet of the first wave, slung
himself
around a post in the wall of the kraal, and jumped from shoulder to shoulder across the mob of angry men.
On his trip over the heads of his foes, he snitched a short spear and an ax. He dropped and rolled in th
e dust on the far side of them.

This brought him into
arm’s reach
of both Hertio and the war leader of the Bear Shields. Kavio extended the weapons either side, a finger’s width shy of the throats of the two men.

“Put down your weapons or I’ll slay your leaders!” he shouted to the Bear Shields, who were just now wheeling around to face the direction he had gone.

Hertio did not look afraid. He glanced dryly at the war leader.  “
Satisfied, Thrano?
Or do you still believe the description of his prowess during the battle at the Stone Hedge was exaggerated?”

“All right, he’s good,”
Thrano
said grudgingly. He shrugged to Kavio, half in apology, half explanation. “How could I be sure? For all I know, they made you a Zavaedi just because your father was one. Rainbow Labyrinth isn’t like Yellow Bear. Who knows how they do things there?”

“We haven’t rotted as far as that,” said Kavio. “I earned my Shining Name, same as every man here. And I earned it in combat as well as in the kiva.”

“You saw for yourself, Thrano. So will you serve him, despite his youth?” Hertio asked.

“I serve only you, War Chief,” said Thrano. “But I will work with the Rain Dancer if you command it.”

“War Chief Hertio?” Kavio didn’t lower his weapons yet. “What is going on here?”

“Forgive my seeming lack of hospitality, nephew. You helped us save the Initiates and I’m grateful. I know you’ve been exiled. I’d like to offer you a home. A purpose. And…” Hertio gestured to the Bear Shields. “…
an
army.”

Hertio had not changed much in the ten years since Kavio had met him as a child. The man sweated garlic. His belly spread like a drunk’s grin. It was simple politeness to address any elder male as “uncle” but Kavio still recalled his conversations with Hertio from ten years ago with fondness befitting real kin. Never, however, would Kavio underestimate the wily War Chief.

“You are too generous, uncle.”

“I am, aren’t I?” Hertio clapped Kavio’s back. “Today we must collect and count the deathdebts. We will blood the spear with our vengeance before the moon waxes.”

“No, I mean you are
too
generous. If you give me a place here as a war leader, it will drag Rainbow Labyrinth disputes into Yellow Bear.”

“The cub wants to teach the bear to catch fish.” Hertio punched Kavio in the arm, not quite playfully.

“I must decline.” The dust from the kraal felt hot in Kavio’s mouth. He was aware of the shuffling of the armed warriors, could hear some of them still panting from the fight. Hertio had ordered Kavio thrown in the bear pit before making this offer, an indignity that surely had been no oversight.

Rather than argue, Hertio gave orders to the men to fetch death jars, and invited Kavio to accompany them to the Tor of the Stone Hedge to collect the fallen. During the tramp to the other hillock, Hertio discussed the doings of his family since Kavio had last seen them.

“You remember, Lulla, my oldest daughter? She went through her Initiation three years ago, but I won’t let her marry until she’s finished her seven years as a Tavaedi. She’s a goldsmith. As I recall, the smelting ovens used to fascinate you.”

The stench reached their nostrils long before they topped the hill. The bodies had been dragged out of the three circles of stones and left lined up in two rows, friend and foe. Their skin oozed black. Kavio puzzled why until the Yellow Bear warriors approached, and a swarm of flies lifted away.
One young warrior vomitted.
The others whooped and taunted him, breaking the silence and the tension. After that, the men exchanged crude banter as they curled the corpses up into the death jars, though they took care not to mock their own dead. No one entered the circles of stone.

Kavio noted the clan marks on the faces of the enemy warriors. For a raid this size, he expected to find no more than a dozen different marks, but men culled from twice that number of clans had participated, just one or two men from each clan. Add in that many of the clans represented belonged to clan klatches, meaning more allied clans must have agreed tacitly to the venture, and he concluded Nargono the Blue Waters War Chief must be a charismatic man. Kavio had never met him.

The spears of the martyrs piled up. Twenty-eight warriors and three Tavaedies had died, including one woman.
A deathdebt tally of thirty-one called for more than firing arrows at random fishing boats from the shore.
Vengeance demanded a major raid.

Hertio pointed to the spears. Soon, perhaps this evening or the next, while Rthan and the other war captives were tortured, the spears would be dipped in blood to acknowledge the deathdebts.

“You fought shoulder to shoulder with those heroes,” said Hertio. “Can you ignore the call of their blood?”

“Where will you attack?” Kavio asked. He knew what his father would answer.
Sharkshead, the Blue Waters tribehold.
A snake which bites once will bite twice
, his father always said.
Unless you cut off its head
.

“Jumping Rock clanhold.”

“Uncle, no Jumping Rock warriors took part in the raid.”

“Not surprising,” said Hertio. “During a flood a few years back, most of the men died trying to save their boats.  The survivors are elders, mothers and children. They have no powerful Tavaedies. It will be easy to kill thirty-one of them without any injuries of our own. We may even wipe out the whole clan.”

“Women and elders seem a poor offering to the courage of the dead.”

“
Do you call me a coward?”

“No, uncle. I worry if you wipe out a whole clan, it will mean all out war
between your tribe and theirs.”

“Is that why you walked away from your tribehold without a fight? I wondered if the
Imorvae
had grown so weak you had no allies.”

“I don’t want the blooded spear, for my tribe or yours.”

Hertio swatted away the buzzing flies. “You can’t escape war, Kavio, any more than you can s
top pissing when you’re drunk. But s
ome things outlast spilled blood. The Aelfae built this hill, but humans built
all
the
others
. Do you hear me?
We built mountains!
Long after you and I are dead, these mountains will still stand. How many humans come that close to immortality? Look at that!” He jabbed a finger against the morning fog, toward the dim shadow of the Unfinished Tor. “I’ll probably be curled up in some jar before I see that finished. After me, some chief with fire for blood will take the men away from building to attack the Blue Waters tribehold, and where a mountain might have stood to challenge eternity, there will only be muck and blood. Do things my way. Wipe out a clan of old
women,
do you think Nargono will care? They’ll have no relatives left to demand their deathdebts be paid, and Nargono won’t fight on behalf of a clan
that
sent him no warriors. After the raid, my men will return to working on the tor.”

A fly crawled on Kavio’s cheek. He flicked it away.

“You know I’m right,” said Hertio. “Take my offer. Or leave. Decide by the night of the victory feast.”

By now the men had arranged the death
jars
in a circle just inside the outer ring of menhirs, so, duty done, Hertio and his men left. After sundown, the Deathsworn would creep in to take the jars. Until daylight failed, Kavio had the tor to himself.

The battle had not allowed him time to examine the menhirs, but he did now. Just as he remembered, the stone had been scored with rows of odd, yet familiar marks. Squiggles, hashes, arrows, waves. Just like the designs painted up so many houses, and upon the inner walls of the labyrinth back home. Excitement tingled down his spine. He could continue his exploration of the mystery here in Yellow Bear.
If
he stayed.

To make big decisions, he had a trick, though he hadn’t used it since the night before his trial, the night he fought with his mother. Searching the ground, he found it easy to collect the right kind of stone, silky, thumb-sized, like slingshot stones, which these probably had been. Once he amassed a pile, he sat well outside the megaliths, away from the jars and flies, and flattened two patches of turf. He began to set some stones on the left patch, others on the right. He ended with two even piles, a useless outcome.

That’s when he saw her—the girl he had rescued from the river. As with the first time he had seen her, he felt like a man who had been drinking sand all his life tasting water. She walked up the grassy hill and kept going, until she stood in the center of the three rings of sacred stones. Astonished at her brazenness, Kavio wondered if he should call out to her or wait to see what further sacrilege she would commit. She just stood there, turning slow circles, looking forlorn.

He crossed into the stone hedge to chide her. “
We’re violating thr
ee taboos just by standing here.
”

Like a sunflower, Dindi tilted her face
to
him, displaying relief, joy and confusion, the same way she’d looked when he rescued her from drowning. He’d forgotten how fully her emotions infused her expressions, reminding him of a tent lit from within by candles. She
must
have
earned her
windwhee
l during last night’s ceremony.

He wondered what Chromas she had, and if she
danced Many-Banded or One-Banded
.
Many-Banded
, definitely, he decided first, but then he wasn’t sure. He could not sense her aura at all. Not a glimmer.

“I never expected to see you again,” she said.

“I apologize,” he said.
To her, he was just a mangy rover, an exile.
“I know I pledged not to seek you out, but I thought I would be alone up here. Why
are
you
here?”

“I have things to think about.”

“I hope they’re profound thoughts.
In
all the
world, t
here are
only
seven sacred places
that
belong equally to the Fae, the Humans and the Deathsworn. You stand in one of them.”

“If it belongs to everyone, why can’t I stand here?”

“I can only tell you what I was told
the first time I came here
.
It’s taboo.
”

“So you’ve been to Yellow Bear tribehold before?”

“As a child. My father had a friend here—an enemy, actually, but Father brought me here to make amends.” That was as long a description of the tense peace negotiations between the Rainbow Labyrinth and Yellow Bear as he cared go into. No need to elaborate his own role as treaty hostage. “One night my father’s friend took me to this place and told me something interesting. These rings of stone look the same, but
each one was built by a different people
. Look.” He swept his arm to indicate the inner ring of megaliths. The morning sun chose the perfect moment to show itself and cast dramatic rectangular shadows across the circle. “The Aelfae erected the tor and the first ring of stones. Humans built the second. This was long ago, before the war between the humans and the Aelfae, and in those days intermarriages between mortals and faeries were common. It is said that if a mortal can dance here for three days and three nights without stopping, he can look into the Circle of Eternity and survive.”