Raptor (105 page)

“Tried stop her… fráujin stuck me… took horse… rode east…
east…”

I nodded, knowing why he stressed that word.

“Ja,” I said. “She has heard the stories of those vicious viragines. She knows she has much in common with them. So that is where she is going.”

I could not believe that such a
delicate
creature as Genovefa would commit herself permanently to the kind of rigorous life led by any nomad forest tribe. But it did seem likely that she would join those women just to hide among them for a while, and that she would expect to be safe there.

I said, “Your wound appears not to be mortal, Maghib, and here is the physician. Let him dress the injury and start your healing. When you are strong enough, continue on toward the Amber Coast. You have only to go to the river Buk and follow it downstream. I will join you after I have settled accounts with our betrayer.”

I left Maghib to the ministrations of the lékar, and went to give the hospitium keeper ample money for his keep and care. Then I packed and mounted Velox, and I too rode away eastward, toward Sarmatia and the women to beware of.

The vast and only vaguely defined region called Sarmatia constitutes the westward extremity of Asia, and eastward beyond it lies
all
of Asia, a continent so immeasurably immense that its bounds are unknown even to chorographers. But I did not expect to have to explore the whole of it in pursuit of Genovefa. If she really had fled to hide among the Amazons—or the baga-qinons or viramne or pozorzheni or whatever was their own name for themselves—then I should find those women living not impossibly far from Lviv, since they annually sent emissaries there to trade. And I believed I might even locate them before Genovefa did, because I knew one thing that she likely did not. I had been informed that the Amazons traded in otter pelts and mussel pearls, meaning that they had to live somewhere near a clear running stream.

Two days’ ride beyond the last outskirt habitations of Lviv and the farmsteads around it, when I was deep in the woods of pine and fir, I ceased to be Thorn. I stowed away the masculine garb and armor I had been wearing, and put on some of my Veleda clothing, so I could approach the Amazons as a woman and perhaps not be instantly repulsed. I even made myself look
flagrantly
female, because I had learned another thing about the Amazons that Genovefa probably had not. On my upper body I put no tunic or blouse, only a strophion band under my breasts to make them higher and fuller. I rode thus naked from the waist up, and I was thankful that the early autumn weather was still warm enough to make that not uncomfortable.

I was here traversing an almost unbroken evergreen forest, but I did come upon bodies of water here and there. At a brook, I might pause to drink or to fill my flask, but I did not look for the Amazons anywhere about there, because a brook is not big enough for otters to play in or for mussels to bed in. Nor did I look for the Amazons around the occasional marsh or stagnant pond or other sluggish water. But at last, five or six days out from Lviv, I came to a fairly broad, beautifully limpid, briskly flowing stream, ideal otter water. I decided to follow it downstream for a day or two, and then, if I found no trace of habitants, to cross it and try casting upstream. There was soft sod and moss lining the bank, so Velox walked almost as quietly as a wolf, and I kept a wary lookout as we moved along beneath the pines that overhung the water. As it turned out, though, I was not being wary enough.

Something silently flicked down past my face and front, and then something tightened hurtfully around me, just under my breasts, clamping my arms to my sides. Before I could grasp what was happening, I was yanked right off my saddle. I did not fall, but dangled in midair while Velox placidly walked out from under me. When he felt my weight leave him, he stopped and turned and gave a look of quite comic astonishment at the sight of his rider swinging in a rope noose horse-high from the ground. Only now did I remember having been told about the sliuthr, that silent weapon of the old-time Goths.

My pinioned arms could not draw sword or knife, so there was nothing for me to do but hang helpless there. I heard branches rustling as someone clambered down the tree, evidently having snubbed the rope’s other end somewhere up there as soon as it took my weight. I was hardly surprised to see that it was a woman who dropped from a limb to stand on the ground and scowl up at me.

Now, I know that all the legends of the Amazons, from Homer and Herodotus to recent times, have described them as beautiful. I myself had been curious to learn if they really were. Well, I regret having to disillusion those who treasure such legends, but the Amazons are decidedly not. Even Homer should have known better, if he had given the matter any thought. Obviously, women living all their lives in the wild, living winter and summer in the open, surviving by their own might and main, without menfolk to do the harder labors for them, are far more likely to resemble brute beasts than lithe and lovely huntress Dianas. This first one I encountered was certainly beastly enough, and no more so than her sisters that I was soon to meet.

She had not slipped down from that tree limb with the grace of a nymph alighting; she had flumped heavily and squatly down like a dropped toad. It was scarcely to be wondered at; anyone dwelling outdoors the year around has to accrete a considerable layer of fat as insulation, but her coating was excessive. Although her arms were as brawnily muscular as a woodcutter’s, and her legs as trunklike as a chariot-driver’s, her torso, hips and buttocks were billows of bloat. Her skirt, the one garment she wore, was of some kind of hide, hence nearly indistinguishable from her own, which was as coarse, grainy and weather-tanned as that of an úrus. She was, like me, unclothed from the waist up, showing that, contrary to the stories and the statues, the Amazons do not hack off one breast for ease in drawing the bow. She had both of hers, and they were nothing to inspire a statue-sculptor: leathery dugs with barklike areolae and nipples. What the Amazons do hack off is their hair, and evidently do nothing else to it, even combing. This one’s cap of dark hair was a nappy mat, like felt, and she had similar mats in her armpits. Her eyes, from a lifetime of peering into sun and wind and distance, were red and squinty. Her bare feet were long-toed, splayed and prehensile for tree climbing. Her hands were as broad and callused and horny-nailed as those of a blacksmith, and she now reached one of them up to snatch away the belt holding my sheathed sword and knife.

As she did that, she opened her bone-cruncher jaws to speak, disclosing a mouth full of snaggled yellow teeth. I could make out that she asked a question, partly in the Old Language but so mixed with alien words that I could not understand. Unable even to shrug, I tried to make a face of bafflement. So she asked again, choosing the words more carefully, all of them Gothic but more barbarously spoken than in any Old Language dialect I had ever previously heard. Anyway, I could comprehend that she was inquiring, and not warmly, who I was and what I was doing here. I did my best to indicate, with face and hands, that the rope had me squeezed too breathless to reply.

Besides having my weapons, she had a belt knife of her own and a bow and quiver slung on her back. But she studied me and pondered until evidently she decided that she was also superior in strength. She may well have been, because she now stepped close, clasped my legs and lifted me aloft until I could work the noose over my head, then lowered me to the ground. She twitched the dangling rope in a manner that somehow loosed it from its attachment above and let it all fall. Then she coiled the rope without looking at it, keeping her little red eyes fixed on me while I answered her query with the fiction I had concocted.

I said, and earnestly, that I was the wretched wife of an evil and violent husband, and after years of his curses and abuse—especially his vile lustfulness—I had determined to tolerate him no longer. So I had escaped his bondage and ridden hither to seek succor and shelter from my sisters of the forest.

Then I waited, apprehensive lest she remark that I was the second such fugitive to arrive here in the past few days. But she only flicked a glance at my Velox and said suspiciously, “Your cruel husband, svistar, affords you a fine horse.”

“Akh, ne! Him? Ni allis. I stole it. That husband is no poor peasant, but a Lviv merchant, with a stable of steeds. I took his best Kehailan to be mine.”

“Not yours,” she grunted. “Ours now.”

“Then you could acquire yet another,” I said, smiling wickedly and indicating her sliuthr rope, “if he comes following me.”

She pondered on that, and finally said, “Ja.” She even brightened a bit. “And enjoy some diversion, besides.”

I had a fair idea of what she meant, and I smiled more wickedly yet. “I should like to watch that. And participate.”

She had seemed to accept my pretense of distaste for “lustfulness,” and she seemed to approve my pretense of eagerness to join in other kinds of “diversion,” but my captor now looked me critically up and down, then said, “You are not sturdy enough to become a Walis-kari.”

So that was what they called themselves: the Walis-karja, after those pagan angels of the battlefield, the carers and bearers of the chosen slain. Could these women perhaps be descendants of them? If so, it was another grievous disillusionment, for the Walis-karja, too, were said to have been beautiful.

I lied some more. “Vái, svistar, I used to be as handsomely sturdy as you are. But that pitiless husband
starved
me. Still, I am stronger than I appear, and I know how to hunt and fish and trap for food. Let me but be allowed to feed myself and I promise to eat swinishly. I will soon get fat—obese—gross. I swear it. Do let me stay.”

“It is not for me to decide.”

“Then let me appeal to your queen. Or your headwoman. Or your chief Walis-kari. Or whatever is her title.”

“Unsar modar. Our mother.” She pondered again, and deeply. “Very well. Come.”

Still carrying my weapons and her own coiled sliuthr, she also took Velox’s reins, and stumped off downstream along the riverbank. I walked beside her, very glad to know that I
had
got here ahead of Genovefa.

I said, “Surely your headwoman is not the actual birth mother of every Walis-kari. Does she rule as the tribal mother by right of succession? By popular election? Acclamation? How? And how do I address her?”

My captor pondered once more, then said, “She rules because she is the oldest. She became the oldest by surviving longest. She survives by being the fiercest, most bloodthirsty, most merciless of us, capable of killing any or all of the rest of us. You will address her as we do, reverently, adoringly, as Modar Lubo. Mother Love.”

I almost laughed aloud, because the name so belied the description—or the other way about—but I said only, “And what is your name, svistar?”

She had to ponder that one, too, but finally said that it was Ghashang. I remarked that I had never before heard such a name, so she told me it meant Pretty, and again I managed not to laugh.

Now we began to be joined by other women who came out from behind riverside trees or climbed down from them or came riding from the deeper woods, sitting bareback on small, shaggy, despondent-looking horses. They shouted raucously at sight of me and Velox, and screeched questions at Ghashang. But she, proudly possessive of her captives, refused to reply and only gestured for them to make way for us. Every one of those women, even the youngest of them, looked very much like Pretty, which is to say very much like the massive wild cow called the úrus.

Ghashang and I were leading a procession of eight or ten women when we got to their living place. I do not call it a village or even an encampment, because it was only a wide glade in the forest, scattered with cooking-fire rings of blackened stones carelessly tossed together, and with sleeping furs spread over pallets stuffed with fir sprigs, and with various cookery implements and skins stretched on drying hoops and bits of harness, and with saying knives and brittling knives, and with the gnawed bones and other remains of past meals. From two or three trees’ lower limbs hung the blue-red carcasses of future meals, humming with flies. The women had obviously no need for shelter, or not enterprise enough to erect any, because there was nowhere a tent or lean-to, much less anything as elaborate as even a crude kryk house. I had never seen so squalid a community as this. Why, the Huns were of civilized refinement by comparison.

There were ten or twelve more women here, and several girls young enough to be still breastless, and half a dozen infants toddling or crawling about. The children being totally unclothed, except with dirt, I could see that every one of them was female. The girls and infants were not yet coarse of skin or bulging of musculature, but they were already sadly bulbous of body. Vái, the
Hun
females had been comely by comparison to these. And I, Veleda, most certainly shone here like a gold piece thrown among barnyard tords.

It could reasonably have been expected that such a herd of Gorgons would have stared agape—and with envy—at the sudden spectacle of my fair face and form. However, had I been the most vain and immodest of females, my reception by the Walis-karja would have humbled me. They did stare, yes, and admiringly, but at my Kehailan steed. At me, they threw only infrequent glances of disapproval, almost of revulsion, and otherwise kept their eyes averted from me, as if I had been a creature of such ghastly deformity as to cause nausea in normal folk. Well, by their standards of normality, I
was.
By their standards, the woman named Pretty had not been ludicrously misnamed.

Anyone hearing of the Amazons’ unshakable abhorrence of men might suppose them to be a society of sorores stuprae, taking sexual pleasure only in each other. I soon learned that they were not. Although they possessed all the usual female organs, they were utterly sexless, not only uninterested in sexual intercourse but repulsed by the very notion of it. Small wonder that their concept of the ideal Walis-kari was a woman so ill-favored, shapeless and graceless as to be repugnant to men and socially acceptable only by women equally ugly. At this moment of my first arrival among the Walis-karja, I did not know the reasons for their being the way they were, but I did instantly comprehend that the one and only oddity in this crowd was Veleda. What would be the women’s response if they discovered what I
really
was, I did not care to imagine.