The Warrior Who Carried Life (11 page)

“I dealt with the fool who struck your horse,” said Stefile, drawing up beside Cara. The men from the camp advanced towards them.

“You go no further,” one of them, bearded and dirty, told them. Cara understood most of what he said. “If you got a tent, pitch it here.”

“How many days do you wait,” she asked him.

“Weeks,” replied the man. “There’s a line of sorts ahead, but those are the people who have been here longest.”

“How many a day do they let up?”

“No one. They take names, help some, maybe ten a day. There is no food here, and no one to sell any. You’d best go back.”

Ahead of them, the crowd was withdrawing from the broken chariot. Its driver lay bloody on the stones, half naked.

“I do not come for myself,” said Cara, clucking her tongue at the horse for it to move. “I come for my people.”

“And I come for my son!” exclaimed the man, and grabbed the reins of Cara’s horse. Cara sliced through the air with her sword, just in front of the man’s eyes. He gave an involuntary yelp and leapt back.

“Stef,” she said, “there is going be a fight. Be ready.” The shield and the spear rolled slowly through the air towards Stefile. One of the men jumped and caught the spear instead, to chuckles and small cheers from the jealous, gathering crowd.

Without Cara even looking around, quite calmly it seemed, the spear began to ascend. It rose up through the air, the man still clinging to it. He gave a laugh of mingled panic and amazement, and started to kick as if to jog the spear from whatever held it up. It went from twice the height of a man, to three, then four, five, six times, until it was too high for him to let go. From all around them came a stirring of the crowd. The dispirited people who waited, squatting on the stone, stood up and craned their necks. The man stopped kicking.

“Let me down! Let me down!” he called, his voice already far away, but people could see how wild and wide was his stare. Someone stupidly gave a cry of rage before trying to pull Stefile off her horse from behind. With a snarl, Stefile spun around using the sharp edge of the shield to slash across his arm. He gave a cry and fell back, a great fat man in tatters. He looked at the fleshy gash, and the welling of blood on his arm and tried again. With a dull ringing like metal, the shield struck him full across the forehead, and blood quickly drenched his face. He settled back into the arms of his companions.

“I have killed an Angel,” Stefile warned them, though they did not understand Our Language.

“I can’t hold. Let me down!” the man on the spear wailed in terror, as high now as if he stood on the mountain. Suddenly the spear plummeted towards the earth. The pilgrims screamed, and beat each other back to get out of its way. Just before hitting, the spear pulled up, and shook the man off, and he fell free, tumbling onto the stones, collapsing on his own legs which were folded under him, and he gave a cry of pain.

“We do not want to hurt people!” Cara shouted at them. “We do not come for ourselves.” She added to Stefile in Our Language. “We’ll try to ride around them all.” The spear floated tamely into Stefile’s hand. “We are Wensenara!” Cara shouted again. “Wensenara!”

The word seemed to spread all around them, like the wind. Cara tapped the side of her horse with her heel, and began to move forward. The men gaped, and drew back, and then parted for her. They had seen the magic. “Lady? Lady?” asked a woman walking quickly beside Stefile. “If you are Wensenara, Lady, help me!” She had no teeth and encrustations around her mouth.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. No. Nothing,” Stefile replied, shaking her head.

“Take a message for me, Sir!” someone else called, to Cara. “My village. There is a plague!”

People followed them, calling them. Cara led many people around the tents, to the winding rows of waiting people. “Wait to your turn. You wait. You wait!” people in the line shouted at the newcomers.

“We have been here as long as you!”

There was a sudden general rush. All the crowd surged forward. The fragile order of precedence was broken; the lines mingled and dissolved; people pushed back; there were screams. “There is a baby here!” a woman shouted, outraged. Girls with swollen bellies who had waited weeks, wailed in dismay, and gave up hope, and shook their heads. A fight erupted, a furious flurry of fists. A hen, escaped from somewhere, ran over the surface of the crowd, over many heads and shoulders, its wings beating wildly. No one could move. Cara’s heart sank at the disruption she had caused, and at what it might cost her. She stood up in the saddle and saw, over all the heads, a wooden table and two women in black behind it. They made sharp, angry gestures with their hands. Those who heard what they said, held up their hands beseechingly, and implored them. The women gave their heads short, quick shakes, and gathering up their skirts, strode back away from the table to hangings of thick rope and pulled savagely. High overhead, and faint, a bell sounded.

Cara repeated to herself, over and over, the Spell of Sitting in Air, imagining it as a net holding her and Stefile and their animals. Indeed, very suddenly, her horse was lifted up, and then dropped, with a wobbly, see-saw motion. Its weight was too great. Cara narrowed the focus of the spell, clenched it like a fist around the things that had to be carried.

Like divers in a slow arc, Stefile and Cara rose up from the horses, followed by a clatter of their plates and weapons, and a stream of furs. For Cara, all sound was dead, all movement floating and dreamlike. She saw the people below reach up in anger, a slow, stifled grasping. She pulled her feet up under herself, and glided over the top of the table. She stretched her legs out again towards the ground, and landed gently beside the sisters, and all the harsh noise and speed of the world started up again.

“You! You caused this! Go away!” one of the Wensenara ordered her.

“I am Wensenara. I must talk to the Great Mother.”

“You will talk to no one.” The woman, furious, frightened, turned to the crowd. “None of you will talk to anyone. Accept your fates!” Behind her, the ropes were sliding upwards. She glanced nervously overhead; a kind of wooden carriage, not a basket at all, was being lowered towards them.

“I am Wensenara,” Cara said to the other sister.

“You are a man!”

“I look like a man. Spell of the Butterfly. Lalarolalalara . . .” Cara began to speak the spell.

“Ssst! All right you are a Bud.”

“Blossom.”

“Blossom, Blossom, does it matter?” The woman strode forward to join her sister. “We will be back. We will be back tomorrow, but there must be order, or we will stay away. And we will see only the sick, no one else!”

The carriage was now nearly down. As suddenly as if wiped by a giant hand, the crowd was swept back, their feet skittering over the stones. Those who fell were held up, and carried along. The Wensenara silently moved their lips.

“We’re going to jump into it,” Cara murmured to Stefile in Our Language.

Ropes whined through pulleys in the van; it seemed to swing to a halt and then hover, just above the ground. The Wensenara did not wait for it to settle. Pressing their robes down between their legs, they swung their feet over the sides of the carriage, and nimbly stepped into it.

Stefile knelt to gather up their furs. “Leave them!” hissed Cara.

With a creak and a crackling of rope that rose like lightning all along the distance above their heads, the van began to rise again. The people wailed and pleaded. Hard eyes were upon Cara and Stefile, promising revenge. The carriage rose chest high from the ground.

“Now!” said Cara.

They leapt forward, grabbing hold of the thick, smooth, varnished edge. As one, the crowd and the Wensenara cried “No!” Released from the magic that held them back, the people poured forward, and grabbed Cara and Stefile by their hanging legs. The carriage tipped to one side; its bottom edge scraped along the cliff face, and the two sisters were thrown from their feet.

Cara’s mind felt like a whip, lashing out, and she felt the sword and the shield and the spear cut and slice and gouge. The weapons made sounds through the air like sudden gusts of wind, and the flock of people below shrieked. Hands let go of Cara’s legs, and the carriage seemed to leap free. Cara made to pull herself into the carriage, and met something as solid and real as the cliff. It pushed her back. It seeped under her fingers and began to prize them off. Stefile squealed in fear, “I can’t hold!” Across from them, faces hard, eyes staring, the Wensenara mouthed spells in unison.

Stefile fell. Cara caught her in the Spell of Sitting in Air, held them both. Magic reached out of her, and caught hold of something, and grappled with it, pushing it back, out from under her fingers, away from Stefile. She felt it give. One of the Wensenara gasped, as if in pain or surprise, Cara wrested something free, and with a little cry, Stefile sailed smoothly into the carriage.

Cara felt power rear out of her in rage, like a dragon’s head, and the Wensenara were driven back. She shouted in rage, and it was like breathing fire, and the Wensenara turned their heads away, and they were miserably crushed, pushed deep into the cushions that padded the benches of the van.

“Stop it! Stop it! All right!” one of the sisters yelled.

Cara swung up into the carriage and settled, sitting next to Stefile, and she smiled with power. She felt thunderous and channelled, like a torrent. “I don’t know what spells you have, my sisters,” she said, “but I am beginning to realise that I am a very great sorceress indeed, and that I can probably beat you.”

One sister was helping the other to sit up. “Threats will not get you in to see the Great Mother.”

“Then tell me something that will,” replied Cara. “I am Wensenara. I shouldn’t have to do these things. I don’t want to. But how else was I to get this far? I could have waited down there for weeks—you would have left me down there. Here is a letter. It explains why I have come. Please. Give it to the Great Mother.”

The two sisters stared back glumly at her. One of them sniffed. “Well. We will have to tell her you are here, certainly.” With a flick, she took the letter out of Cara’s hand.

For the rest of the long way up, they sat across from each other in discomforted silence. The two sisters held hands, backs erect, very nearly indistinguishable from each other, their heads covered, their finely lined faces as colourless as dumplings.

“Poor horses,” said Stefile, looking over the edge of the van, wind stirring in her hair. The blue shadow of the mountain cut across the valley and the woods. She was thinking of the animals she and Cara had left below. “Those people will eat them, I think.” The furs that had followed them into the van wrapped themselves around her, to stop her shivering in the wind.

The carriage hung from two great leaning wooden towers that creaked and groaned and made snapping noises. It was hoisted to the level of a windswept courtyard, teams of Wensenara grinding two large cranks. The women jammed wooden pegs into the cogs of the device, dashed to two other giant cranks, and turning these, wound the arms upright so that the carriage swung in over the pavement. They ran to catch and steady it, saw Cara, squealed, covered their faces and ran away again, their feet making fluttering noises on the stone like light applause.

“It’s only a man!” sighed one of their more world-hardened sisters in the van. She shook her head and stepped neatly out of the carriage.

“And he says he used to be a woman,” added her sister. She turned to Cara, looking almost unfriendly. “We’ll deliver your letter. Wait here.” The two sisters walked off together, very precisely, as though plucking a musical instrument with their feet.

The Yahstranavski was sandwiched between two walls of damp rock. The carriage sat, Cara saw, on what used to be the roof. Other buildings, grey, mottled with lichen, had been built on it, with towers of their own. Alleyways of steps ran between them, leading to other buildings higher up the slope. Beyond all of them, clinging to the sides of the rock, was a maze of small huts and stairways and vegetable gardens under nets.

Stefile wandered to the edge of the roof and sat down. She peered at her feet that dangled over the bulk of the fortress below them, the sheer wall of windows and the bark tile roofs of the extensions. She spat, to watch it fall. Patterns of forest and open ground stretched out to the horizon, lost in haze, and above where the horizon should have been, more mountains rose up, clear, above the clouds.

“Are you really a great sorcerer?” Stefile asked.

Cara sat behind her, hands on her shoulders. “I think so.”

“Will you be in songs and stories, then?”

Cara smiled. “If the Great Mother lets me in,” she answered. “Yes.”

To Cara’s surprise, the Great Mother did.

Cara and Stefile were led down, not up, into the fortress. The interior was caked with gold, on the pillars and walls and across the high ceilings; gold in the shape of the clothes that icons of the great sisters wore, gold as in rays about their varnished faces. Gold lamps hung on gold chains; candles blazed all around them. High warbling voices gargled out strange noises, spells in chants that scented the air, that kept Cara and Stefile on the right path, and that prevented them from touching the gold.

They came to a corridor, lit by windows. The thin light of day seemed suddenly wan and pale. A row of women sat on stools, shelling peas. The sister who led Cara and Stefile nodded, and without a word, one of the women stood and strode with a light step to a door. She insinuated herself through it, sideways, so that the strangers could not see what was beyond it. The woman did not come out again, but the door opened by itself, and smiling, the Great Mother stood within it, hands clasped in front of her. Her name was Epesu, which meant simply Work.

“Come in, come in!” she said, sounding genuinely pleased to see them. She was very young, ruddy-cheeked with fine-grained skin. Her sleeves were rolled up and she wore homely slippers made of string, and a black apron with embroidered flowers. “This is my day room,” she said. “I’m weaving.” There were many windows in the room, but almost no furniture. There was a loom in the corner and a mat of parchment, and ink and a brush, and piles of paper pressed between blocks of wood. Otherwise the floor was bare, polished wood. The room was icy cold.