Brutal Women (20 page)

“There was a time when women were
necessary as fighters. Only a woman can walk without fear across the red
desert. But, there have always been the others. The private and public ladies,
and they are good for the care of children, the weaving and baking, the
necessities of the city and -” he pressed two fingers to his lips. “I don’t
believe the distinction is necessary any longer. The world is changing. Women,
too, can remain safe within these walls, walls that keep the sand at bay. The
men here will protect you, comfort you. It is the peace I promised.”

“What? You’re saying you want me
and the desert women to become -” she almost choked on the word, and it came
out harsh, biting, a curse, “ladies.”

“Perhaps not you, Nalah. No, not
while you can train men to fight without bleeding on the sand. But look at this
vision; see it as I see it. Women able to live in peace, to stay within the
home and see their children grow strong and healthy.” A thin smile settled
across Hanife’s face. “I must admit, women like you are... unpredictable.”

You know nothing of me, she
thought, but she remembered the other things he had done, collecting nomads
into the cities, imposing law, order on a people who fought with their fists
and teeth on a desert sea that fed on their blood. I am no one’s slave, she
thought. No one’s but Hanife’s. He has these walls. This power.

And I helped give it to him. I
brought it on myself.

“What is my task?” she said.

“You know it,” he said. “Your boy
left the city just hours ago with a handful of others. Kesi’s friends. They’re
moving south. I want the boys finished.”

“I bore one child. Women don’t bear
children outside the walls, but I chose not to kill him in the womb or feed him
to the sand.”

“And I made it possible for you to
keep him. If not for me, you would have fallen out of training, become a public
lady. Eshe was my ward and my son’s playmate. Do you think I have no heart?”

No, she thought, but you don’t
carry your son’s blood beneath your fingernails. She nodded. “We leave in three
days, then.”

“No.”

“My fighters need rest and water.”

Hanife smiled. “You leave tomorrow,
woman, after your fighters are fed. I want you to find these ones sooner than
the last. I can’t afford to lose your force for another three months.”

Nalah sucked in a small, slow
breath. “Tomorrow, then,” she said.

Shani waited for her in the cool
room, her naked form stretched out on the covered bench at the back of chamber,
green tunic tossed over her narrow hips. Her eyes were closed, and she breathed
softly, black braids falling across her brown shoulders. Nalah stood in the
door a moment, appreciating the softness of her face, the innocence of sleep.

But Shani had grown up in the
desert, and woke before Nalah had time to sear her image into memory. Shani
pulled a blade from beneath the tunic, narrowed her eyes at the doorway.

“We leave tomorrow,” Nalah said.

“Who are we after?”

“Kesi’s followers.”

Shani sat up. “Eshe. Nalah--”

“Shush. I’m sick of men and words.”

Nalah undressed. She curled up next
to Shani, wrapped her arms around the woman’s slender form. Took comfort in her
warmth. Did not sleep.

Her dreams would be full of dead
boys.

An hour before dawn, Nalah listened
to Tarik and his ladies begin again. Nalah pulled away from Shani, dressed, and
went out into the hall. She pushed through the curtain and into Tarik’s room to
find a big-breasted lady astride Tarik, her mouth open, fingers digging into
his torso. Another lady, smaller, paler than the first, watched from her
position on the floor, naked form glistening in the low light of the last lit
brazier. The lady on the floor looked back at Nalah.

“Finish,” Nalah said.

Tarik, hands gripping the lady’s
thighs, looked over at her. He swore. “Nalah-”

“Finish. I need you to get the
fighters ready. We move at dawn.”

Tarik groaned, pushed the lady off
him.

The lady obeyed, shot Nalah a
vicious stare. “Who are you to interrupt, woman?”

“Far more than you,
lady,
”
Nalah said. “Move, Tarik.”

“Where are we going?” he said. He
sat up and searched for his clothes. The lady on the floor offered him his
tunic.

“Traitors,” Nalah said.

“More babies?” He pulled his tunic
away from the lady on the floor.

“Eshe,” Nalah said.

“Fuck.” Tarik pulled away from the
lady on the bed. Both ladies were looking at Nalah now. Nalah saw the cosmetics
on their faces, smeared and garish in the low light.

The one on the bed looked to the
one on the floor. “She’s just a woman,” said the lady on the bed. “Good for
nothing but blood and sand.”

Nalah would have spit at her, but
Tarik was dressed now and moving to the door. Nalah looked back, once, at the
ladies searching for their clothes, their hair long and unbraided across
smooth, dark shoulders.

Tarik swore at her again in the
hallway.

They moved out through the gates, a
ragged, dirty band of warriors, underfed and battle-weary. Full morning found
the tattered group of fighters following tracks in the sand, clear tracks that
no one had bothered trying to cover up. They trekked across the desert for
three days, one step behind the boys.

Nalah swore beneath her breath.
Eshe knew better than this. She had taught him better.

Tarik pulled the green hood of his
burnous up to keep the sun off. She saw him toy with the sharp blade strapped
across his chest.

They were nearing the Jafari
holdfast, the last stronghold before a nine-day trek across the sand that led
to the next source of water.

She told Tarik to send out a fast
runner.

Shani came back with news that
Jafari Holdfast was indeed just ahead, a small holdfast built up between two
jutting pillars of stone. The patron of the holdfast was loyal to Hanife. Nalah
had never known him to refuse her entrance. Eshe would have known better than
to seek refuge there. Yet when they arrived at the hold at dawn, the tracks
they followed ended at the gate.

Nalah told little Heru to take a
force out around the back and guard the rear escape. Nalah took the bulk of her
force to the gates. The hold was carved from the stone pillars and filled in
with mud-brick. Nalah requested entrance. The watchers at the walls swung open
the gates.

Nalah kept Tarik at her left, told
Shani to keep the rest of the force outside, brought a dozen fighters into the
courtyard behind her.

A thin man walked across the stone
of the yard to meet her. He was old, older than Gahiji, his hair gone to white.

“What event heralds this pleasure?”
he asked.

“I’m looking for a group of young
people,” Nalah said. “A boy named Eshe, and friends of Kesi, the king’s
youngest son.”

The man looked behind him to one of
the towers of stone. He sighed. “They arrived yesterday. This way.”

Nalah was numb. She gestured to
Tarik.

Tarik motioned a group of three to
come up behind them. The others stayed in the yard to keep watch at the gate.

Nalah followed the old man up a
flight of stone steps, up and up into one of the pillars that flanked his hold.

The man came to the top of the
steps and gestured to a circular room carved into the gray stone. The room
smelled of sweat and dust and leather. A rectangular window cast early morning
light across the smoke-gray room. A table of stone stood at the center of the
chamber. Eight low stools of polished wood and leather surrounded the table,
and sitting upon them were a handful of boys, no older than her son, their dark
hair braided back from their faces. They dressed in robes the color of sand.

Eshe stood at the window, and
turned his thin body to face her.

“These are the boys?” the old man
asked.

Nalah did not trust her voice. She
nodded.

“Yes,” the man murmured. “Yes,
well...” He looked at Eshe, then back at Nalah. “You tell Hanife I’m a king’s
man.”

Eshe spit at him. The hold owner
pushed past Tarik and the three fighters, scurried back down the stairwell.

Nalah stood very still.

“He sent you after us,” Eshe said.
His voice was low.

She wanted to chastise him, to
scream at him, to weep. Instead she looked at his boyish face and saw more
boys’ faces; saw gray eyes and dark hair, saw a face scarred in rotten wounds,
saw the sand swallow them all.

The only words she could think of
were, “I didn’t want you to be part of this.”

Eshe shrugged, but she saw a slight
tremor in his jaw. “You took them all with you, taught them to fight. But you
left me in the hold.”

His face now, she saw his face
mutilated, the blistered flesh peeling off his arms. She felt her fingers grip
his hair, jerk back his head.

“That isn’t what you want,” she
said.

The other boys looked from her to
Eshe with wide eyes. The younger boys fidgeted, watched the fighters standing
in the doorway, the only exit.

“I know what I am,” Eshe said. “I
know what I want. Gahiji’s taught me so much, and Kesi’s ideas... There’s a
whole world out there, beyond the desert, toward the sea. Don’t you understand
what the world could be? Hanife’s blind.”

She heard another voice as he
spoke, a voice that had promised her a better world, a richer life, a world of
free women and an end to death and blood and sand. Hanife had been young and fiery
then, his passion contagious, his visions vivid. Nalah had slaughtered hundreds
for him, for the vision; slaughtered hundreds and then a hundred more. She gave
her body, her life, her husband, to the vision, and found only more blood and
death and sand. She was a free woman - free to do whatever Hanife told her to
do.

“I wish things were different,” she
said.

Eshe’s shoulders slumped. “I wish
you weren’t blind.”

Nalah glanced over at Tarik.

“Finish it,” he said.

She pulled the dull blade from the
sheath at her chest, took the cold hilt into her palm.

“Mama,” Eshe said. He reached out
his hand to her.

She remembered what the boy had
said, then, the boy she buried in the sand.

“Tell my mama,” he had said, “Tell
my mama how I died.”

“Leave me with my boy,” she said.

Tarik raised a brow. “Nalah?”

“You take care of the others. This
is my boy. Leave me with him. Burn the others.”

Tarik gestured to the three
fighters at his back. They herded the boys to the stairs, and the boys started
to cry out, their shrill voices echoing in the stairwell. Tarik went to the
stair, turned back to look at her.

“I trust your judgment,” he said.

“You always have.”

He gave a curt nod and padded down
the steps.

Her boy took a deep breath, stood
outlined in the hazy sunlight streaming through the window. “I’m sorry,” he
said. “Mama, I didn’t want -”

“You didn’t cover your tracks.”

“We were moving fast.”

Nalah strode to the window, faced
her boy. She gazed out behind him, over the ragged stone that made up the
pillar. Her eyes moved back to her boy.

Eshe tugged at the collar of his
robe, loosened it around the neck. “Just be quick,” he said.

She held out the knife. She saw
Kesi’s blood there, still stained beneath her fingernails, and she stared at
her boy, this squalling child she’d birthed at the edge of the Warrior’s Road,
the road that led east, to the sea. She had wrapped him in a green robe and
walked four miles, staying a step ahead of the hissing sand that smelled her
blood and mistook it for his. When she told the boy to shush, he quieted, and
remained so until she stepped into Hanife’s walled camp. The wave of hissing
gray sand at her back had broken around the walls, howled in fury and lashed
back across the red sea of the dunes.

“I taught you to cover your
tracks,” she said. “I taught you how to fight. Now you bare your throat at me.”

“You’re my mother.”

She gazed out the window and
thought, yes, I’m you’re mother, less a woman than some, more a lady than most.
Hanife couldn’t kill his own son. He charged her with that, blooded her hands.
She obeyed him without question, obeyed all those men who believed they knew
her place. She did their dirty work, and her reward was a lifetime of slavery.

She tossed up the knife, caught it
by the blade, thrust the hilt toward Eshe. “I also taught you how to climb.”
She gestured to the window, the rocky pillar of stone outside it. “Can you
climb that without getting blooded?”

Nalah descended the steps. Tarik
waited at the bottom, a bulging leather sack in his hand, drops of blood
spattered across his face.

“Here’s the one that looked most
like Eshe,” he said. “After four days across the sand, Hanife won’t know any
different.”

She wet her fingers and wiped the
blood from Tarik’s brow. She took the sack from him and moved out into the
courtyard, ordered the fighters back outside.

She gestured to Shani, and Shani
grabbed up a pack and two full pouches of water, sprinted out across the sand
to the other side of the hold, to the sandy soil at the base of the stone
pillar.

They had already set the bodies on
fire. Oily smoke stained the sky. The old man watched from the top of the
walls.

“You expressed our appreciation?”
she asked Tarik.

“He’s happy enough to get Hanife’s
favor. And happy we didn’t stake them out and leave them for the sand to gnaw
on after dark.”

The sun was rising, high and hot in
the hazy red sky. “Back to Hanife, then,” she said.

“You’re a dead woman, you know,” he
said. “Hanife’ll find out. Eshe’ll come back, bring those wet people here to
quell and conquer.”