Storm Bride (24 page)

You must go to meet him. The cloud-lord must forget
his boiling rage, put aside his spears,
consent again to wed. His bride has cast away
her mourning shroud and readies for the dawn;
yet even now the groom may falter, and peace betray.
The mortal son of thunder, tasting sorrow,
might turn again to wrath, but let him not.
Go now. I bless your tongue with salt,
to speak in unknown tongues, to fight the kraken
beneath the skies, as I do in the deeps.
Take courage, Daughter. Arise.

Chapter 30

Keshlik

G
olgoyat roared in the sky
as Keshlik pounded across the bridge into Prasa. Raindrops stung Keshlik’s face, hurled by the wind. The sky was striped with lines of tattered gray cloud. To the east and north, the clouds were a roiling black, lit from within by pink-tinted lightning. The horizon was tinted a sickly green.

If he had waited any longer to leave the battle, he would have been caught in the heart of the storm. Not even for Tuulo would he have risked riding into the very center of Golgoyat’s wrath.

The mare he had borrowed from Juyut whinnied and whined, shaking her mane against the rain and flicking her ears. The sentries at the bridge were huddled under lashed-together spruce branches, and they merely saluted him as he passed. Ferocious wind whistled and howled around the ruined buildings. The driven rain formed a gray mist on the cedar roofs, haloing the tops of the ancestor totems in ash. There was no one in the streets. He rode, prodding and kicking his recalcitrant mare, until they reached the central square.

He drove her to the door of the warehouse where the horses were stabled and beat against the wooden frame. A startled old woman peered at him out of the gloom.

“Get my mare into shelter!” He dismounted and hurried through the door, casting aside the soggy leather cloak that he had carried over his shoulders. “I’m going to Tuulo.”

“Wait!” the woman said, putting her hand on his arm. “You shouldn’t. Not yet.”

He shook her off. “I’m going.”

Keshlik took off running through the streets. The rain had thickened into a downpour. The routes between the lodges were muddy sloughs, their puddles dancing with the rain. The thrum of rain beat the ground, and the lodges waxed and waned with the gusts of the gale. Mud pulled at his feet. The beach thundered with wind-lashed waves. The sky overhead pulsed with lightning.

He came to the little clearing on the north side of the city, which had a circle of burnt earth in its center. The rain had turned the blessed ring to mud.

He paused at the edge of the circle. If the child had been born, he was allowed to enter. Khou’s blessing would have been given, and the sacred circle used up. But he hesitated, nonetheless, to cross the line that had split him from his wife for so long. Breaching it now felt like sacrilege.

“Tuulo!” he shouted. “Tuulo! Come and show me my son!”

The slit of the yurt door widened, and a woman emerged. Dhuja, not Tuulo. She looked at Keshlik with her face gnarled and hard, like an old, wind-bent tree.

“You’ve come,” she said. “It’s probably for the best that you came no sooner.”

“What are you talking about? Where’s my wife?”

She did not answer. Her face was blackened, and the rain ran in dark rivulets off her chin. The color stirred dread in Keshlik’s chest. The last time he had seen a midwife so darkened…

“Come into the yurt. You’ll see.” She ducked through the door.

Keshlik drew a heavy breath, stepped across the line of sacred earth, and followed her in.

A single butter lamp burned inside the yurt, giving off a dim, soft-edged light. On the bed in the center of the yurt lay Tuulo, unmoving, her eyes closed as if sleeping.

A red cloth was wound around her middle, covering her from her knees to her belly. The cloth was mottled with dark brown stains. She had no other covering. Her legs were bare below the knees, dark and stout. Her heavy mother’s breasts rested against her belly, round, black-nippled, beautiful. Her hands lay palms-up on the ground.

She hadn’t flinched or twitched when Keshlik entered the yurt.

“Tuulo,” he said quietly. “Tuulo!”

Her chest was motionless and empty of breath.

His legs grew weak. Horror curdled in his belly. “Dhuja. Tell me what happened here.”

The old midwife’s voice rattled like blades of dry grass in the wind. “She brought the boy near to birth, but at the threshold of delivery, her womb was torn. She bled too much and too fast.”

“What is… What did you do to her?” He sank to the ground.

“I waited until every drop of strength had been wrung from her, Keshlik. When I unwound the red sash, she had already sunk two-thirds of the way into death.”

He briefly touched Tuulo’s hand. It was cold. “You killed her.”

“I did what every midwife must sometimes do. We do not bind the knife against our bellies unless we’re prepared to use it.”

“What are you talking about? I don’t care about your midwife’s traditions. Why did you kill her?”

“To save the child.”

“But you failed at that, too!”

“What makes you think I failed?”

He stopped. “What? I don’t see any child here.”

Dhuja pointed into the shadow at the edge of the yurt. Something moved. In the darkness, a shape that he had taken for a mound of cloth looked up. The captive woman.

“Come here.” Dhuja beckoned the woman.

The captive shook her head and pushed herself deeper into the darkness. She looked at Keshlik with terror and said something in her incomprehensible tongue. Dhuja sighed and walked over. She gave the woman a half-hearted scold and scooped something out of her arms.

The swaddled bundle in Dhuja’s arms gave a brief squeal of protest. The midwife rocked him gently and brought him to Keshlik. “Your son.”

A gift of impossible lightness was placed into Keshlik’s hands. He weighed no more than a falcon in the hand. His squeal was like a mouse’s. His hand formed a fist and beat at the air, then he tucked it into his chest to punctuate a tiny, quavering cry. Wisps of black hair stuck to his forehead. His beautiful brown lips parted to reveal a bright red mouth like a sparrow chick’s.

Keshlik began to quake. Horror and wonder mixed in his chest, blocking out thought. Adrenaline and weariness mixed in his veins. He might crush the boy in his hands on accident in this state. “Take him,” he barked at Dhuja. “Take him!” He held out the babe at arm’s length.

Dhuja took the child back from Keshlik and laid him in the nurse-mother’s arms. Keshlik turned away from them and buried his face in his arms. The baby’s wails punctuated Keshlik’s voiceless sobs. He heard the captive woman shush the child.

He gathered enough composure to speak. “How did the captive woman come to take him to breast?”

“I don’t know. I cut him free from the womb, and the woman took him and fled. We found her on the seashore, drenched with water, nursing the child. No one saw what happened.” Dhuja hesitated. “It is fortunate that she was here. Otherwise there would have been no one to nurse him.”

“Fortunate,” Keshlik muttered. He looked at Tuulo, wrapped in the midwife’s death girdle, the yellow lamplight staining her brown, beautiful face. Fierce, kind Tuulo, the only woman he had ever knelt to. Strong enough to rebuke him, gentle enough to shame him. “Fortunate.”

A gust of wind burst the door of the yurt and filled the space with chill air and the echo of rain. Dhuja pinched the flap shut.

“If I had come more quickly…”

“What would you have done?” Dhuja asked. “You couldn’t have entered Khou’s circle anyway.”

“No, but…” A surge of anger passed through him. “Khou’s blessing did nothing to save my wife.”

Dhuja was silent.

He began to quake again. “I can’t stay here.” He pushed through the yurt door and into the storm. Rain blinded him as soon as he stepped outside. He slipped in the mud and fell. A curse burst from his lips. He rubbed the icy water from his eyes and struggled to his knees.

The sun was dying beyond the clouds in the west, and the storm whirled and crashed around him. Lightning flashed. Keshlik glimpsed towers of boiling clouds lancing the earth with rain, trees bent over and thrashing in the wind. Another spearpoint of lightning flashed on the horizon, again lighting up the storm-battered landscape in splinters of white.

“Golgoyat,” he whispered. He rose to his feet. “Golgoyat! Do you hear me? Speak to me now, as you spoke to my father!”

Thunder shook the sky. Keshlik’s cloak thrashed like a banner in the wind. “You gave us victory on the battlefield, but there was no blessing for my wife? Have I carried your spear across the mountains so that my son could be nursed by a slave woman? Has your power dried up? Has Khou’s?”

His breath ran out, and he fell to a knee, gasping. “Help me, lord of sky and storm. Help me. Show me where to go.”

Again thunder rumbled, rolling across the sky from the east to the west. Keshlik looked up into the darkness of the storm.

Lightning smote the shore. Thunder crashed. Through the trees between the yurt and the sea, he glimpsed the waves lifted like shields against the fury of the wind, and just above them was a shelf of rock that stood above the sea. Lightning flashed again, touching the stone, then struck the place a third time. The thunder sounded constantly, like the oncoming gallop of horses.

Keshlik stared out toward the sea, though the landscape had faded into blackness. He rose to his feet. “I see your sign, Golgoyat, my lord.”

He didn’t know what paths, if any, led from his position down to the sea, and he couldn’t see them in the dark. He charged under the spruces anyway. The trees bent and groaned, and water sprayed from their branches. The muddy ground was treacherous. His hands were soon bloody from the stones and stumps that stopped his falls, and he himself was slick with mud up to his waist. Lightning flashed shards of white light through the wind-whipped spruces.

Keshlik stumbled out onto a grassy hillock above the beach. Lightning arced across the sky again, turning the sea a glaring white. The stone was a few hundred paces ahead on the beach.

He slid down the rain-slicked slope that descended from the pines to the beach. His feet crunched in the pebbles. “Golgoyat, I’m coming. I’m coming.”

He cast aside his waterlogged riding cloak and ran up the beach. The surf roared next to him. He fell headfirst into a storm-swollen brook that cut through the sands, kicked, and emerged spitting mud from his mouth.

The rhythm of the storm drove him onward. The wind seemed to be his heartbeat. The thunder was his breath. When next a bolt painted the sky white, he saw the stone ahead of him, standing above the surf in defiance of the storm.

The stone formed a little table, twenty paces wide, and rose just above the surf. The tide was in and had left a strip of seawater frothing between the beach and his goal.

Keshlik hesitated. He did not fear lightning, but he couldn’t swim. “Golgoyat save me,” he muttered. He stripped off his pants and shirt and plunged into the water.

The shock of cold water rushed over his legs. He pushed forward. The water rose to his knees, to his waist, to his belly, even as the rain pelted his back. Waves pulled at his feet, battered his chest, and splashed salt into his eyes.

The water reached his shoulders. Just a little farther to the stone. A wave roared over his head, filling his mouth and eyes with sea foam, lifting his feet from the rocky sea floor. He thrashed in panic until his toes found the ground again.

He spit the seawater from his mouth and lunged to the stone, digging his fingers into the slime-covered rock just in time to weather another wave.

The rock cut into his fingers. He found toeholds and heaved himself up onto his belly. He kicked and scrabbled madly, pulling himself forward inch by inch, until he rested atop the stone.

He waited there with his cheek against the rock, breathing heavily. His fingers, toes, and stomach bled.

The sounds of the storm began to abate.
No more time to rest.
He gathered his strength and heaved himself to his feet. The clouds had begun to break apart to the east, and brilliant moonlight leaked through.

He took a few steps forward. The moon lit something ahead of him, a dark shape rising out of the stone. He approached it, crushing shells under his bare feet.

Three yards from the shape, he stopped.

It was an old woman, silver-haired, wrapped in a white sheet. He bent and picked up a sharp stone—it was only an old woman, but he could not be too cautious—and crept forward.

“Who are you?” He raised the stone to strike.

She lifted her head, and he saw her face and her milk-colored eyes. He nearly dropped the stone.

The witch.

“Son of Golgoyat. You came.” She spoke Yakhat. Her voice creaked and groaned.

He gripped the stone tighter and took a step closer. “What are you doing here? How did you get here?”

“I should ask you the same thing. Do you often plunge into the ocean at night during a storm?”

“Golgoyat called me here. Perhaps he called me to kill you.”

“Perhaps he did.” She remained seated, as if waiting for him to act. Her eyes did not follow him. The moonlight reflected off the milky cataracts in their center.

He stepped closer, cautious. She might split open the stone beneath him and swallow him up. But a quick blow to the head would bring her down, and he could crush her throat with a second blow. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”

She cocked her head, as if listening to a voice he couldn’t perceive. “Because I am here. Because they were not human hands that pulled me from the water and clothed me in white.”

“What do you mean? And where did you learn to speak our language?”

“The answer to your questions are one and the same: Oarsa, of the deepness of the sea.”

“I have never heard that name.”

“But he knows you, and he knows the patrons of your people, Golgoyat of the storm cloud and… and Khou.” She paused, fingering the edge of the white cloth that swaddled her. “Yes, her name is Khou. I called her Sorrow before.”

Keshlik clenched the rock in his hand. Whether she knew the names of Golgoyat and Khou through spies or sorcery, she was here and in his power. In a moment, he could avenge the deaths of the Yakhat the witch had killed, and his people could be free of the only thing that could hold them back from final victory. He bolted forward, stone raised to strike.

“Stop.”

She had not moved, but her word struck him like an arrow.

“Son of Golgoyat, remember your wife,” she said. “If you kill me here, war will not leave your people for the rest of your life.”