Blade Kin (13 page)

Chapter 21: An Ear for Battle

Fava slid on her belly through the brush, wiped some spider webs from her face, and looked up carefully. She was in a patch of tall ferns near the hilltop, in a V formed by two fallen trees. She could not see uphill, but as long as she kept her head down, she would stay in the shadows.

She heard a Blade Kin cough in the dark nearby—just beyond a fallen redwood, and dared not move. Instead, Fava held her hands over Wayan’s mouth, and just hugged him in the deep ferns. From the direction of town, she heard screams and gunshots, and a house seemed to be burning. She could see leaping flames even here in the woods.

Uphill she heard branches cracking, feet shuffling through ferns. The Blade Kin were everywhere, and they had the town surrounded.

She waited, heart pumping, while fear made sweat dimple her forehead. She thought hard.

There was nowhere to run. No escape. The Blade Kin were everywhere in the dark.

She heard a dull crack nearby, muffled gunfire coming from a cabin downhill. That would be Big Theth’s house, a Pwi freedom fighter with a wife and four children.

There were shouts from the house, Theth’s wife crying out in fear. The sound of sword’s rang out as Theth charged a Blade Kin.

A dozen Blade Kin rushed past her toward the cabin, tightening their circle on the town.

For an instant, Fava dared hope that they had tightened the noose on town enough so that she could escape.

She waited twenty seconds, till she heard no more footsteps coming, then leapt over a redwood log and ran.

Her feet were light, her moccasins soft. She knew the winding pig trail here well, and veered through it with precision, though the faint fire lit smoke overhead showed little of the way. Still, she kept fairly silent.

The screams of battle, of Theth’s death and his wife’s mourning, filled the woods behind her.

At the lip of the hill, she stopped beside a standing tree, fearing to cross into the valley beyond. The valley was dark and filled with shadows. The firelight from town would not guide her, and she feared that Blade Kin might be hiding there in the dark.

She glanced back. On the hill on the far side of the bay, the Blade Kin began shouting, their voices a soft roar, and the city exploded in a cloud of fire.

Something in Fava’s mind seemed to break.

She scooped up Wayan and ran blindly, heedless of whether Blade Kin might be chasing her, unsure of any destination, and minutes later she found herself tired and aching in the shadows of the great fallen redwood.

She found a twisted root where she had once hidden while playing hide-and-seek as a child. The game had lasted for hours. She crawled back into the old crevice—trying to force herself into an opening that had fit her as a ten-year-old, and lay still, her heart thumping so wildly she feared she would die.

Then she heard the Blade Kin nearby cracking redwood needles under heavy boots, their sheathed swords softly clacking against their leather armor.

Fava held still and silently berated herself. All her plans at stealth she had thrown away, and in the end she had lunged, running blind with fear, just as a stupid cottontail, when cornered, will leap into the jaws of hunting dogs.

She held still, waited for an hour, till the Blade Kin all seemed to be gone. She suddenly realized that she still had her hand locked over Wayan’s mouth. He was rigid in her arms, so frightened he would not move. She took her hand away, stroked his forehead.

A twig cracked nearby, and someone came to the log, placed a hand on top of it. For one wild moment, Fava thought Tull had come, for suddenly she recalled that it was Tull who had found her here all those years ago, and she hoped deliriously that he had found her again.

Someone stood quietly, not more than five feet away from her, panting. Fava froze.

It could be a Blade Kin hunting me by scent,
she realized. Some Pwi could hunt that way.
Or someone from town trying to escape.

Whoever it was, the person moved off. Two minutes later, she heard screams nearby and the sound of a scuffle as some woman was dragged back toward Smilodon Bay.

All through this, Wayan lay clutching Fava, not daring to speak, hardly daring to breathe. The small boy just hugged her and trembled in fear.

Toward dawn Fava almost slept, when she heard another scuffling sound nearby, someone walking on top of the log above her, using the fallen redwood as a bridge through the ferns. She heard the snuffling of some Neanderthal Blade Kin.

Fava remained still, stifled the urge to scream, or to flee. The odor of mildewing redwood was strong, and she prayed that the turbines would be powerful enough to cover her.

The man paced up and down the length of the tree, testing the air and sniffing loudly, and then he sat, waiting.

Fava felt sure the Blade Kin had caught her scent, was waiting, hoping that she would bolt from her hiding place.

She heard him quietly unsheathe his sword. Wayan nuzzled close, burying his head between her breasts, and cleared his throat.

Fava froze.

Someone shouted nearby, not more than a hundred yards away, and swords rang. The prowler leapt from the tree and bounded off through the ferns and deep brush, crashing as he went, and Fava lay still, sweat pouring from her.

An hour later, the sun rose, and faint outlines of light shone through woods. Fava had crushed some ferns while backing into her hiding place. She straightened them now, scooped detritus in front of her cubbyhole to conceal herself.

Thousands of Blade Kin began to pass through the woods just after sunrise, marching south toward Muskrat Creek, loping through the woods so softly that Fava hardly heard them, and only saw them as shadows in green capes.

It made her wonder,
Could it be that fifty of them passed by during the night for every one that I heard in the darkness?

She dared not move. There might be scouts or outliers about. There might be guards watching over the town. It would be better to wait, even if it meant that she didn’t move all day.

Two hours later, no one else had passed, and Wayan whispered, “I have to pee.”

She let him up. He walked a short distance, peed. When he finished, he ambled back, then fell asleep in her arms. No one else moved through the woods all day long. Near dusk, she saw one lone person creeping through the woods toward town, a woman that she recognized: Anorath’s wife, Vo-olai.

Fava stood, waved for Vo-olai to come hide, but Vo-olai stopped and stared at Fava as if she were some strange animal.

Vo-olai’s eyes were rimmed with red, and her pants and tunic covered with mud. She looked like a wild creature, something that had spent the week crawling through brush.

“No,” she said.

“Come, please!” Fava hissed, but Vo-olai kept walking. Then she turned and spoke as casually as if they had just met on the street. “Have you seen Anorath today? Or Tchula? I can’t find them.”

Fava knew then that Vo-olai had worms in her head. A night of running from the Blade Kin had damaged her mind.

Fava hissed, “Why don’t you come here and wait for them with me.”

“No, I really think, I really think, they need me,” Vo-olai said. “I must find them.”

“Where do you think they are?” Fava asked.

“I’m not sure,” Vo-olai said, and she began ambling back toward town.

Fava wanted to call her, but dared not raise her voice. She climbed back under the log, planning to wait, but little Wayan looked at her with such fear and accusation in his eyes that she said, “Should we go save her?”

Wayan nodded his head.

He doesn’t know what he’s asking,
Fava thought.
He doesn’t understand the risk.
Yet she couldn’t just leave the woman to her own devices.

Fava picked up Wayan, and shot out from under the log, chasing after Vo-olai.

When Vo-olai heard the pursuit, she took off sprinting, blindly racing toward town, and Fava knew she could not catch her, not while carrying Wayan.

They fell behind.

Fava and Wayan crept to town slowly; the sun was fading in a bloody sky. She studied the road ahead. Everything was so open here: fields ran back to the trees, and you could see for half a mile. She stopped, fought the creeping sensation that she was being watched.

In many ways the town looked the same. Two cats ran across the road in front of her, twitching their tails. Pigs rooted in the field behind Oolan’s house. Yet the houses were smoking ruins, charred walls.

Blackened brick chimneys pointed to the sky. Fava looked at the little squares of ash and debris where houses had been, amazed at how small the homes appeared. The height, the wooden cross-beams, all had given them a blocky solidness, a sense of permanence that had evaporated like dew in the morning sun.

Down the street a quarter of a mile, an old sow cave bear dug among the ashes of a home, looking for fruit or vegetables or grain, and Fava decided that the bear would not have stayed if other people were around.

The Blade Kin must be gone for good. Tentatively, she walked the road.

As she passed her parents’ home, Fava stopped. The hunting trophies that had sat for so many years in her father’s house lay in the ashes, just bits of whitened bone and cracked teeth. The great mastodon tusks that he kept in his hallway were split by heat.

The blade of his sword lay in the ashes. She walked through the rooms, surprised to find that the ashes were cold already. In the kitchen, in a hole in the floor where vegetables were stored, she found some potatoes and apples and onions. She sat with Wayan and tried to eat a potato that had cooked on one side, but her stomach objected, and she could not force it down.

She didn’t know if she was too frightened to eat, or if the grief-that-kills had come upon her. She knew only that she could not eat.

So she fed Wayan a bit, pocketed some apples, then they headed up the trail to their own home.

Fava was surprised to find it still standing. Four dead Blade Kin were laid out on the front doorstep, the way that a cat will leave dead mice by the door as a present.

Wayan turned away, buried his face in Fava’s chest, afraid to look at them. All of the dead Blade Kin wore the strange masked hoods with glass eyes, but their weapons had been taken. So Tull had killed at least four of them.

Fava walked into the house, found it ransacked. Few clothes, no weapons. But the bedding and blankets remained, along with dishes and cooking pots, the winter food. Wayan leapt down from her arms immediately, ran to the beds and picked up a carved mammoth behind a mattress and began to play.

Fava wondered if Tull could still be near. Perhaps he was moving the items to a safer place?

But, no. Whoever had ransacked the house was not a person bent on survival. The blankets had been left, the food. Tull must have been captured, along with their valuables. Perhaps he had been caught while trying to empty the house. Yet even that made no sense.

Fava sat on the floor a moment, peered outside. She felt suddenly weak with grief, dizzy. She fingered two empty bullet casings on the floor. Tull had killed at least four Blade Kin, and he had been caught.

She went to search for Vo-olai. She didn’t have to go far. Just where the road dipped, the redwood bridge spanned the Smilodon River. Vo-olai stood in the middle of the bridge, holding her hands over her face and weeping.

Fava stopped, stared down at the docks. The old people of town lay in the street by the docks, twisted in odd shapes, ragged bloody holes in their throats. At least thirty lay there, including Vo-olai’s grandparents.

Fava’s heart pounded. She picked up Wayan, ran down to the docks, searched for Tull among the dead. After several minutes, Vo-olai came to sit and hold her grandmother’s hand in the dusk.

Everything was so quiet; the sun had set. Clouds were coming in, soft white clouds that smelled of snow. Up the street, in the human part of town, another bear had come to feed on burned garbage.

It paced back and forth up by the inn, between the bodies of dead Blade Kin, afraid to come any closer to Fava and Vo-olai.

“We better leave,” Fava whispered, tugging at Vo-olai. “All this blood, it might bring wolves or sabertooths.” She did not say it, but she was even more afraid that the Blade Kin might return.

Vo-olai said, “At least, let’s give our dead to the river.”

So Fava helped drag the old people to the docks, and gently laid them in the water, watched them drift to sea.

“Come,” Fava said when they were done, “let’s go back to my house. It isn’t burned.”

Vo-olai turned and collapsed into Fava’s arms, sobbing. Until that moment, Fava had tried to be strong, knowing that if she showed her fear, her utter desolation, it would only hurt Wayan. But now darkness took her, and she cried for her husband, and wailed for her family. Grief filled the hollow of her chest.

“I want to die! I want to die!” Vo-olai shouted, and Fava held her and said, “No! Don’t say that!”

“What do I have to live for? My husband is gone! My family is gone! How can I ever find them? We don’t even know where they went! The Blade Kin could have carried them anywhere.”

“I saw a ship in the harbor,” Fava said. “They were carried away in a ship. That means they’ve gone to Bashevgo. They aren’t dead.”

“But they’re slaves.”

Fava licked her lips. “Maybe they will escape. They might come looking for us.”

Vo-olai nodded doubtfully, scanning the streets of town as if at any moment a whole crowd of refugees would come rushing out of the forest.

Fava studied her, realized that this was good. At least if Vo-olai had some hope, the killing grief would not come upon her.

“Let’s go back to my house,” Fava offered. “We can sleep there for the night.” She took Vo-olai’s hand then, and the girl followed automatically, almost unaware of her surroundings. “When did you sleep last?”

Vo-olai watched the fallen houses as she went by, as if still stunned. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“It’s not important,” Fava said.

When they got off the dirt road onto the trail that led to Fava’s, her fear subsided. The short twisted pines and wild rhododendron along the trail hid them somewhat, and Fava no longer had the prickly sensation that she was being watched.