Brutal Women (19 page)

Nalah wondered if she had ever been
as young as Shani.

Tarik dragged a howling, sinewy
male toward Nalah. The boy had smoke-gray eyes and a hawkish nose like his
father. Tarik had stripped the clothing from him, or found him that way - Nalah
never asked.

Behind Tarik, two fighters, Heru
and Akila, stood over a huddle of four thin ladies dressed in red, all no older
than thirteen or fourteen. Their painted eyes and faces were garish in the
flickering light of the strewn fires. They wore silver collars with the king’s
seal stamped into the metal.

“You’re Kesi,” Nalah said to the
naked boy. He was young, younger than she remembered, sixteen or seventeen, no
older than her own boy. She did not remember the last time she saw her own boy
on the open sand.

“Nalah, you know me,” Kesi said,
struggling to his knees. “Eshe and I played together. Upon the desert wind,
Nalah, we played together!”

Those fighters Shani had not taken
with her stood watching, their bodies merely shadows. Nalah felt their eyes.
Somewhere, far-off, she heard the hiss of the sand. It smelled the blood. Nalah
remembered the boy, the runner, the death-stink of his living body.

“Let him up, Tarik,” she said.

Tarik released his hold.

The captive scrambled across the
sand on his hands and knees, prostrated himself before her, and raised only his
head.

“Thank you,” he said, “Thank you.”
She saw moisture in his eyes that threatened to spill down his dusty cheeks.

Nalah pulled out her dull blade.
She saw Tarik move to give her his instead, but she shook her head. The bone
hilt felt good in her hand.

Kesi understood. The water escaped
from the corners of his smoky eyes, carving lazy tear trails down the sides of
his face.

This was not the war I agreed to
fight.

The sand howled.

Nalah and her fighters arrived at
King Hanife’s hold four days later. The hold lay at the edge of an oasis, a
square of deep green grass and tall, three-tiered palm trees with serrated
leaves. The city’s mud-brick watchtower had a view that stretched out across
the hilly desert to the horizon, and when Nalah and her fighters came into
their line of sight, the gates opened and a handful of white-robed king’s
guards strode out across the sand to escort Nalah into the city.

“Success?” one of the robed men
asked Nalah.

She nodded to Tarik. He pulled
Kesi’s severed head from a leather satchel at his hip.

The speaker, Gahiji, gave a curt
nod. Gahiji was a silver-haired fighter with a desert-hewn face. He and Hanife
were brothers.

Gahiji escorted her and her
fighters back toward the hold through a maze of mud-brick shops and private
residences enclosed in an immense defensive wall, thirty feet high. Nalah
remembered scaling those walls a decade ago. Hanife had added another ten feet
to them.

The press of noise and bodies
created their own heat and stir in the walled city. Nalah heard the chatter of
public ladies from the balconies that stretched out over the streets, and the
loud calls of the men in the market stalls, their tattooed faces soaked in
sweat and sun. Small boys ran alongside her column of fighters. They had their
hair braided back like fighters, and the bolder ones picked up handfuls of sand
and threw it at the collared ladies. The less bold boys clutched at one another
and giggled.

Nalah got her fighters settled in
the garrison. Gahiji called up her and Tarik into the heart of the hold, to
Hanife’s keep.

As they wound through the low, cool
mud-brick halls of the keep, robed men moved past them. Their gazes were long
and open, displaying the usual curiosity of city men. City men did not often
see real women inside the walls. Women were the stuff of blood and sand. Men
didn’t need women inside the walls: the walls kept out the sand.

“Hanife asks to see you tonight,”
Gahiji said.

“My son?” Nalah asked at the door
of her room.

“In the training yard. You’ll be
assigned servants. I have other duties.”

He inclined his head and left them.
Gahiji had never much cared for Nalah.

Nalah nodded to Tarik before he
could enter his room. “Bring the head to Hanife’s second.”

“You don’t want to do it?”

“Not today.”

“This wasn’t the sort of battle we
said we’d fight,” Tarik said.

She looked back at him, heard the
thoughts she could not speak. Ah, Tarik - my conscious, my reason, my second.
We have spent too long together.

“We’re fighting rebels who disagree
with Hanife’s vision,” she said. “We’ve done that since the beginning.”

“I never agreed to slaughter
children.”

“Nor did I. The battle changed,
that’s all.”

Nalah wiped her left hand on her
tunic, noted the brown bloodstains beneath her fingernails. She needed a good
steam bath and scraping.

Tarik gritted his teeth and pushed
through the heavy curtain into his room.

Nalah walked down to the steam
room. She scraped the dirt and the last of the dried blood from her skin. Blood
and grit stayed locked under her nails. Her body ached.

She walked back to her room just in
time to meet her servant, a thin, dusty-skinned boy with liquid dark eyes and
shaggy black hair covering his ears. She asked for food and clothes. She
dressed in clean brown leggings and a short brown tunic. He cleaned her
sandals.

She slept fitfully on one of the
rug-covered mud-brick benches in the room. She awoke to the boy shaking her,
dark eyes rolled back in his head, fingers bony thin, his face emaciated, and
the smell... No. She rubbed at her face. The vision passed. Her servant gazed
down at her, dipped his head.

“Your son-”

“Leave us alone.” Her son’s voice
carried from the doorway.

The servant ducked his head again
and slipped out into the hall.

Nalah sat up, swung her feet to the
dusty floor. Her boy stood in the doorway.

Her boy.

His short, sinewy body was clothed
in a too-short gray robe with a green belt. He wore a length of steel at his
hip, a sharp sword that had yet to be blooded and dulled. The features of his
face were hers; the snub nose, dark, deep set eyes and high brow, but the
height and form were his father’s, the ghostly remnants of a dead man eaten by
the sand. Here in the city, her boy’s hair had grown long and wild and hung
into his face.

Nalah felt a knot of worry ease in
her body, the twisting fear that rode with her every time she left him, the
fear that when she returned, she would return to a dead boy.

“You’ve been well?” she asked.

“He sent you to murder Kesi.”

“He sends me to murder a lot of
people,” she said.

“It’s true then.”

She wanted to tell him: Yes, boy, I
slaughtered your crib mate. Yes, boy, I slaughtered a baby. Yes, boy, but you
know all this as you know hunger, as you know fear, as you know sand, as you
know me.

“You’ve seen me fight,” she said.
“You understand it.”

But he had only seen her fight in
closed circles inside city walls. He had not seen her on the sand. “I wish it
were different,” she said.

“No you don’t,” he said. “Look at
you, sleeping here in your clean clothes, with good food and a servant who bows
his head to you.

And where’s Kesi? His head’s in
Tarik’s bag and you’re here, giving your loyalty to a fat city king.”

Nalah gazed down at her son’s feet.
He wore new sandals. His feet were soft. No calluses. Her gaze went back to his
clean face.

“You have not killed a man,” she
said.

He puffed up his thin chest,
gripped the hilt of his sword with his right hand. “Kesi was going to change
everything.”

Nalah stood, and saw him take a
step back as she did. She was a woman, and she stood like one, a stance she had
perfected in her two decades of fighting.

“Don’t ever say that boy’s name
again,” she said. “Ever. Hear that, boy?”

“Why?” Eshe screwed up his face
into a semblance of courage. “Why should I be quiet? Hanife’s government has
flaws. Kesi and I had solutions, and Hanife had him killed for it. Kesi-”

She had left him here too long,
left him here with city men and frail ladies and court politics.

“Kesi wanted to fuck his father’s
ladies and take over his father’s holds,” she said.

“Hanife’s vision was always one of
keeping peace. I remember it. I saw it. You see nothing. You’re just a boy.”

The wrong words. She knew they were
wrong as soon as she said them.

“You’re just a woman,” Eshe
blurted. “You should have been brought up a lady. You’re turning into one.” He
pushed back the heavy curtain and fled from the room.

Nalah fell back down onto the
bench. She looked at the fruit platter at the center of the room, realized she
was not hungry.

My boy… My boy… what about my boy?

She curled back up onto the bench.
Closed her eyes.

Dreamed of dead boys in the sand.

Nalah’s servant woke her for the
banquet, but she did not follow after him. In the room next to hers, she heard
Tarik and a couple of ladies in the throes of something other than battle.

She stood and walked out to find
her servant. She asked him to summon Shani from the garrison. He padded off
down the hall.

Before she could turn back into her
room, she saw Gahiji coming down the hall toward her, wearing a stern frown on
his dark face. “You were summoned to the banquet,” he said.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“Hanife wants to see you. Now.”

Gahiji led her to the throne room,
a wide rectangular room covered in colorful throw rugs. The air stank of sweat
and dust and heavy pomade. A dozen merchants and councilors and tax agents -
dressed in red and green and too-bright yellow - milled about, holding rolled
parchments and waving their fleshy hands to emphasize their flowery words. They
turned at the motion from the doors and stared.

Nalah stared back. They looked
away. From their speech and clothing, she guessed that they were from Khairi,
outside the southernmost edge of the desert wall - new officials, new men of
words and water. They were young. Everyone seemed to be getting younger but her
and Hanife and Tarik.

Hanife stood just to the left of
his throne, a carved slab of gray rock pressed up against the far end of the
room. He had gained more weight in her absence. The flesh of his face was paler
than she remembered, dusty brown instead of dark onyx. His brows made one clean
line above his eyes, and he left his hair unbraided, let it grow long and
thick. He dressed in a silver robe tied with gold and blue tassels.

Hanife gestured at her, and the
murmuring officials ceased.

“We need to speak,” he said. He
waved away the group of men and moved toward Nalah.

Gahiji came up behind her. A
half-dozen members of Hanife’s white-robed honor guard, with steel swords at
their hips, moved from their places at the back of the room to follow.

“It has been some time,” Hanife
said as he walked beside her down the corridor. His walk remained the same; a
strong, purposeful stride that spoke of a body used to physical power.

“It has,” she agreed. They stepped
into a low doorway, down a cool hallway.

“You were successful with the
traitor, then,” Hanife said.

She did not answer him. It didn’t
sound like a question.

Gahiji opened up the door to the
king’s chambers. He searched the room, returned, and nodded to Hanife.

“Come, woman,” Hanife said.

Nalah strode through the door,
ducked to enter, and settled onto one of the benches along the wall. Thick rugs
lined the floor and the benches. A rectangular patch of dusky light streamed in
from the opening at the center of the ceiling. A second door led off into his
sleeping chambers. Here, a silver tray of grapes, oranges, dates, and figs sat
on a low wooden table at the center of the room next to a flagon of wine and
two silver cups.

Hanife offered her refreshments.
She shook her head.

“You were never one for words,” he
said.

No, she thought, you were always
the one for words.

“Was the head delivered to you?”
she asked.

“Yes, just after you arrived. Are
you certain you don’t want something to drink?”

She shook her head, and he poured
himself a glass of wine. He settled onto the bench next to her, robe trailing
across the floor, and she caught the familiar scent of him above the reek of
pomade: fermented wine and stale sweat.

“You have another assignment for my
fighters?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I request two weeks of city
leave.”

Hanife touched a soft finger to the
edge of his glass. “Have you seen your son?”

“We spoke when I arrived,” she
said.

“Did he speak of my son?”

Nalah saw pale gray eyes leaking
warm tears. She felt her fingers tangled in soft black hair that stank of
desert and ladies.

“They were close friends,” she
said.

The wrong words. Again.

“You still kill with the dull
blade?” he asked.

“Only traitors, as I’ve done from
the beginning. The dull blade for traitors, sharp steel for kin, and the sand
for those who have always been enemies.”

“You sound as if you’ve grown
weary.” His dark eyes were expressionless, the face softer than she remembered,
but this was the same man she fought and sworn her life to, the man who brought
the nomads into the cities, the man who wanted to bring the world to heel.

“No,” Nalah said. “I’m a woman. I
was born to this.”

He sipped his wine. “Not all women
remain so. I have known women who become ladies.”

“I’m not a breeder. Or a slave.”

Hanife took a lazy breath through
his nose. “You’ve been away from the cities for some time, Nalah. I’ve been
thinking about what I promised you, in the beginning. I promised you peace. A
haven from blood and sand. Now I look around at the cities I’ve created, at the
safety they provide to those within.