The Warrior Who Carried Life (15 page)

The Flower was Life itself. Everything that lived wanted it. They followed Cara too.

The rats from the kitchens of the Wensenara, plump and brown, waddled after the Flower, and clambered up the steep stone steps. In the light of the Flower, worms rose out of the soil of the vegetable gardens. They were made translucent in the light, and were driven wild, thrashing. They reared up on each other, into a wave of pale flesh. Cara and Stefile waded through it, kicking. The wave slipped sideways on itself, tumbling away from them.

They climbed out of the crevice in the cliff. As they pulled themselves over rocks, into the plateau forest, something white shot straight at them. Cara had time to glimpse its heavy-headed shape, two dark eyes in front, before she turned and ducked, hunching over the Flower. Claws scrabbled briefly against her armoured back, before the white shape soared away, over the valley, veering helplessly in the wind. It was an owl. Overhead, in the light of the Flower, great spirals of predatory birds—hawks and falcons and a single eagle—turned on the columns of air that rose up from the cliffs. Cara and Stefile ran for the shelter of the trees.

The wind in the forest blasted between the trees swirling dust and needles up from the forest floor. The wind made a sound in the branches like the sea. The branches whisked Cara’s and Stefile’s faces like brooms. Insects, driven like the rain pelted into them. Suddenly, screeching, a flock of starlings, caught in a funnel of air, whirled around Cara and Stefile, slamming into the trunks of trees and through the branches. Beating their wings, they entangled themselves in Stefile’s hair; she tried to haul them free, shouting something to Cara that she couldn’t hear. They fought their way into a clearing, and there was a sudden drop in the wind.

The starlings settled over Cara in a blanket. “Stef, get them off!” she shouted, trying to cover the Flower in her hands. The birds pecked at her hands, at the Flower that shone so clearly through them. Birds covered Cara’s wrists, swarming over each other’s downy backs.

The light of the Flower could not be dimmed. Its light pierced Cara’s back and armour, showed clearly through all the layers of dust and branches. In the sky overhead, the birds of prey folded their wings behind their backs, and plummeted out of the sky as if they were spears. They tore through the tender upper branches and broke apart on the larger ones, explosions of blood and feathers against the trunks. The single eagle, larger than any, crashed through all, eyes blazing with the light of the Flower. The branches raked its feathers out, and cracked its sides, and it slammed into Cara’s back with all its weight, at blinding speed. Cara was thrown on the ground, with a cry. The birds covered her, seething. Beetles worked their way up from the ground, and squirrels, too anxious until now, bounded forward onto her back. “Get off!” shouted Stefile, and tried to beat them back. The silence, had she noticed it, might have seemed ominous.

Then from behind them came a rumbling and a crashing, and low rising moan. A wall of dust seemed to advance across the forest. Suddenly, like a breaking wave, it swept through the clearing. Stefile howled as it hit them. The wind tore a strip of her heavy hem loose from her skirt. It pulled the beasts away from Cara, sent them rolling over the ground. Cara and Stefile huddled, low to the ground, covering their faces from the dust and needles.

They waited until the wind was merely strong and steady before standing again. When they did, Stefile hissed “Cara!” and clenched her hand.

Crouched at the base of each tree, sheltering, were wolves. Their fur blown in the wrong directions, their faces screwed shut at it, the wolves smiled, either with the wind or aggression, unsheathing yellow-rimmed fangs. Their thin, slit eyes seemed to burn with the light of the Flower. Stefile gasped and looked behind them. She saw a wolf, as silent as a shadow, dart from one tree to another. They were being encircled. She heard Cara’s sword being drawn.

She also saw, through the trees, a giant elk, gambolling like a fawn, tossing its great antlers, dancing. Stefile could see every hair along its back. The conifers swayed in the wind, and it was as though everything in the forest was marching towards them.

Stefile felt herself lifted up, the torn flap of her dress lashing. As if caught in a vortex, she and Cara were rising. The wolves closed in under them, like water. They sprang up into the air on powerful hind legs. One of them caught the loose strip of cloth and tore it free. The rough bark of a tree crept slowly past them as they rose. In the light of the Flower, it looked like continents, with valleys and mountains. On the ground, out of the blowing dust, as though part of it, came the Dead.

Halfway up, the tree had split with its own weight. Humming with the spell, Cara lifted them both up into the crevice, and left them leaning against the raw wood and sticky sap. The shield clamped itself over Cara’s chest, over the Flower, like a tortoise’s shell. Her mind and body felt like lead. Circling, circling, the magic would keep circling inside her head, even as she slept. Fatigue that even the Flower could not heal lay like a metal bar across her eyes. Cara discovered she yearned to be free of the magic, yearned for her year to be over. She listened to the wind, and cradled Stefile under her arm.

“What manner of thing?” Stefile wondered aloud. Her eyes too had been burned with the light of the Flower.

It was the silence that woke Cara. Silence, and the sudden, sickening knowledge that the Flower was gone. She leapt forward with a start that nearly pitched her out of the tree.

“Stef!” she cried out in panic. Stefile was not beside her. Cara pulled herself to the edge of the crevice, her feet wedged into it, to lean out.

The wound Cara had rent between the worlds had healed. Everything was still and radiant with light though there was no sun or moon. All around her, covering the branches of the trees were birds, silent and calm. On the wide, heavy branch that had pulled the tree open, Stefile sat.

“I’ve got it,” she said. Her face was mournful, baggy and her hands were stained with sap gone black with dust. “Don’t worry.” Listlessly, she swept away the insects that crawled towards her and the Flower.

“I ate some of it,” she added.

“Oh, Stef,” groaned Cara, feeling only sadness for her.

“All these birds came, and the insects. You were asleep. I thought to keep it safe, the shield let me take it. And I ate. Just one petal.”

“Poor Stef,” said Cara, knowing how the Flower pulled. “I’m sorry. It’s all right.”

“I didn’t do it for me!” said Stefile, quick anger in her voice, and then went still, hanging her head, and picking the bark.

“For who, then?”

“For the child,” she replied in a pale, bitter voice. “Our child.”

It was a moment or two before Cara said, “Oh, no.”

“For the last time, Cara, is it true what you tell me about yourself?”

“Yes,” admitted Cara.

“That you go back? After a year?”

“Yes! Yes it is.”

“Then what happens to the child? A child that you fathered, after a year? Does it live? Does it die?”

Cara shook her head, helpless with guilt.

“Then you shouldn’t have stuck yourself up me if you didn’t know, should you?”

“No,” replied Cara, so softly that even she could not hear it.

“Anyway, that’s why. I thought the Flower could save it. No other reason.”

“How long have you known?”

“Oh! Since the Unwanted Way. I knew in the pass, in the mountains. When the witch held me, I kept hoping it was the spell that was stopping the blood. But it hasn’t come, Cara, and it won’t. I can feel the thing move.”

“I’m sorry, Stef.”

“So am I. How can I be a mother, living the way I am, like a vagabond, thieving. With the Galu, and all of this! Where am I going to live? What am I going to do with it? Take it home? I don’t know my grandparents’ names, and my Ata wouldn’t have me. If I can still find him, after we killed the bondmaster. Tell me what I can do! You’ve eaten from Hawwah’s apple, you’re the great sorceress who turned herself into a man, you’re its father. Tell me! What can I do?”

Cara could not answer.

“Tell me what I can do, or I’ll throw this thing to the wolves!” She held the Flower out over the air.

“We’ll send you to my Aunt at Long Water.”

“Oh!” sobbed Stefile in outrage. “Oh that is good. Home again, to some woman I don’t know, patient little wife to be. And what will I get at the end of that? A husband? A life? I’ll get a squealing brat, like all the others, and maybe not even that. Nothing! Not even you!”

“Would you rather have the child in the middle of a battlefield, with all the Galu about it?”

“I don’t know about the Galu. It’s you who hate the Galu, I don’t care about the Galu, it’s you who want to bring them down and be Sir Hero, Haliki. Cara Haliki. Sir Dear Daughter Hero.”

“I am very, very sorry this happened,” Cara said, her voice clear and calm, but darkening.

“So am I. By the Gods, I’m sorry. I wish you’d left me at home.”

“Whose child would you be having, then?” asked Cara, “How much time would the bondmaster let you have with it, before he made you give it over to the crones, or made you work with it tied to your back, or even sold it. I told you what I was. You chose not to believe it.”

Stefile’s eyes were narrow. “That does not leave me with much, Cara.”

“I’ll help you all I can. It’s all I can do.” Cara looked at her, trying to draw softness and surrender out of Stefile’s eyes. Stefile picked at the bark, and did not look up.

“You want to be rid of it,” stated Cara.

“Yes.”

“You ate the Flower for it.”

“Fool of me.”

Cara thought of the Destroyed Woman, Cara with the broken face, who would never marry. “I’d want it,” she said.

“Then you can have it,” replied Stefile with an angry sputter of a chuckle. “What will it do for me, the Flower?”

“You’re going to live forever,” said Cara, as if by stating it as flatly and as baldly as possible, she could somehow make it comprehensible. “You’re never going to die. You’re never going to age.”

Stefile gave a chortle of amused fear. “What am I going to do with forever? Sixteen years has seemed long enough in this life for me. Cara? I’m alone, Cara. I’m frightened and I’m more alone than I ever thought it was possible to be. Look at me!” She gave another shivering laugh. “Stuck up a rotting tree, with a baby inside me, and a man for its father who is really a woman, telling me I am going to live forever, because I have just eaten part of the living God. Me?” She began to sway back and forth with laughter, shaking her head. “I want to go home . . .” she began, and couldn’t finish, couldn’t speak with laughter. Finally she was able to gasp out, as if it were a joke, “
And there isn’t any home
!” She was crying too.

“Stef,” said Cara quietly. “Give me the Flower.”

“Why,” she replied, wiping her cheeks. “Are you frightened I’ll drop it?” Then she saw why.

“Just give it to me, Stef.”

“Oh no,” said Stefile. “No. I don’t want the role of Hawwah. I don’t want to be blamed.”

“No one will blame you.”

“Really? Not you? Tell me that you are not doing this for my sake, or I really will throw it to the wolves. May the wolves live forever!”

“It is true. I am doing this for my sake.” She was. Desire for the Flower flooded over her. “But I think I do love you anyway. And I will love the child.”

“Oh! They all say that. I’ve seen what comes next. Here.” She stretched across the space between them, and gave Cara the Flower. A thrill of expectation shivered through Cara as she took it. She really was going to do it.

“Maybe,” said Stefile in a weary, hopeful voice, “Maybe it will stop you going back.”

“Maybe,” replied Cara, without much hope. The Flower, like warm, clear water was in her hand. She slipped her thumbnail under one of the petals, and ran it up to the top and tried to prize it free. She pricked herself on the thorn, shook her thumb, sucked it. The petal she had chosen clouded over, suffused with blood. She tried again, more carefully, and with a slightly moist sound of breakage, the petal came free. She put it in her mouth. It sat on her tongue, heavy, cool, and soft, without fragrance, tasting of nothing at all. Then very suddenly it melted, even the thorn. Without Cara swallowing, the Flower became part of her.

Nothing changed. There was no thunder or rising wind. Cara felt as she had felt before. She held out her hand to Stefile. “Come on, come on, love, sleep at least.”

Stefile looked at her, across the space between them, exhausted, emotionally cold. Cara was suddenly frightened that their love had run its course. The fear made her go very still and patient and accepting. “I want to stay here and think, Cara,” Stefile answered her. “You sleep.”

Feeling somehow defeated, Cara pulled herself back into the crevice, hugging the Flower to her. She would just have to see, just have to see about everything, everything was in balance. She could lose to the Galu, Stefile could leave. She settled back against the wood, and swirling in her, kept in abeyance only, was every emotion.

Fear of loss, fear of loneliness, fear of having sinned. Pride in the power of her loins, jealousy. Cal Cara Kerig could have no children. Guilt and concern: it was Stefile who would have to bear the pain and pressure. And love, love for the child, love for Stefile, Stefile who might not want a woman with a ruined face; child, child with no name yet who might yet die. Life everlasting. Knowledge. And the mystery, Hawwah’s mystery, that still did not feel solved, as if the womb were a cavern that extended all the way back to God, a portal through which each human being climbed into life. Women were closer to life. Cara was glad, after all, that she was not really a man. Magic. Magic and fear and something that was sweet and clean and wholesome, the life that people yearn for and which never quite comes, even to immortals.

Sleep.

Stefile was shaking Cara awake. “Cara, Cara get up. Get up!”

Cara lurched awake. “What? What is it?”

It was day now, almost afternoon, with a high sun, and a light breeze. The crevice in the tree seemed deeper and wider, and the whole tree seemed to lean backwards. Cara thought, in the confusion of half-sleep, that it was she who was lopsided.

“Cara,” said Stefile, her face tense and expectant. “Cara. The Wordy Beast.” She grabbed Cara’s hand and pulled her. Cara’s back was covered in sap, strands of it followed her, as she stood up, wondering what Stefile meant.

The Wordy Beast, that she had seen defaced on the walls of the palace of the Galu; the Wordy Beast that Stefile yearned to see, Asu Kweetar, the Most Noble Beast, that Cara had never quite believed in, until now.

There, on their wide branch, weighing down the entire tree, sat the Most Noble Beast, on white haunches, four or five times the height of a man. It was all white and beautifully muscled like a lion. It had a mane of white feathers, and enormous white wings that were held outstretched for balance. Its eagle face was fierce, its beak was hooked, and its eyes were silver, like metal, with a vertical iris like a cat’s. Over one of its lion shoulders a bow was slung, with a quiver of arrows behind it. Around its neck, it wore a necklace of purple amethysts. It sat, unmoved and unblinking.

“Are you Kweetar?” Cara asked, still unsure. “Can you speak?”

“Yes,” the beast said, like a knife in Cara’s mind. Its beak did not move. Its mind spoke, with the clarity of a blade.

“When I was a girl, I dreamed I’d see you, Wordy Beast,” said Stefile, beaming with delight. “And I have. Is it true that you whisper stories to children, in the night?”

“Only if they are very young, and tender, and have made no choices. They are enough like my cubs then.”

“Oh!” breathed out Stefile in wonder. Transfixed, she stepped around the trunk, and on to the branch, hand outstretched to touch the beast.

“Stef, come back,” said Cara in fear.

“Do not touch my beak,” warned Asu Kweetar. “I snap.” His beak was much longer than a man’s forearm. Stefile withdrew her hand, but her face still glazed at the beast, with a half-smile. She sat on the branch, legs around it, to see it better. “I would not mean harm,” Asu Kweetar continued. “But I am a beast.”

“Why are you here?” asked Cara, pressing the shield closer, unable to hide the Flower, even in daylight.

“I am here to carry you, over the mountains, to the City. The Dead are below. The Dead, and all the animals of these mountains. They spread out from this tree, all along the Dragon’s Back. The Flower shines. It is seen for miles all around, like a star. There are caravans of gypsies coming here, and all the people of the hills, and the farmers who first saw the Flower at the base of the Wensenari. You will never carry the Flower through them. That is why I am here. To carry you over, and to hold and protect the Flower, until you decide how it should be used.”

“Is that the only reason?” Cara asked. The beast was silent. His massive tail twitched. “How can we be sure that you won’t take the Flower for yourself?”

“AS YOU HAVE?” roared Asu Kweetar, in silence, booming only in their heads, and covered the distance between them in one forward lunge, tearing off a shower of needles and small branches with its wings, his back legs staying in place. The entire tree dipped and swayed; Stefile gave an involuntary cry, and grabbed the branch. The head of the beast was just in front of her, longer than a man was tall, his eyes depths in which to fall. “Do you not think that if I wanted the Flower, I could not take it?”

The tree still rocked. “Do you not?” Asu Kweetar demanded again.

“Yes,” replied Cara, only whispering. “Yes, I think you could.”

“The Flower is nothing to me,” said the beast, settling back on its haunches. “I already have what it can give. I am the beast that talks to God.”

“It was a question that had to be asked.”

“And it has been answered.” The beast began to preen its neck feathers with his beak.

“If . . . if you speak to God,” began Cara, faltering, “can you tell me, Asu Kweetar, if the Galu are as terrible as I think?”

“They are. I hear their minds at work. They are rigid like clocks, regular with hatred. I do not think they are quite alive.”

“Was I right to take the Flower?”

For some reason the beast was suddenly possessed by a sneeze. It made him toss his head, and hiss through holes in his beak. As he sneezed, his unspoken voice replied, “You are a human being. Your race has taken the fruit of Knowledge; only you know about right and wrong. I am a beast. I cannot make choices. I am very glad of that.” The beast’s eyes were suddenly full on Cara, like lamps.

Cara found she could not look him in the face. “Carry us then, Asu Kweetar,” she said. “Carry our thanks as well.”

“Sit on my neck, not my back,” said the beast, “or my tail will lash and brush you away. Hold on to my necklace. Not to my feathers, or you will pull them out, and I will turn and bite off your legs.” Then he lowered his head towards them, on the branch.

Stefile and Cara looked at each other, and Cara nodded for Stefile to go on ahead of her. Stefile stepped over its beak, holding up her skirt, and crawled up the flat of his head. The feathers were stiff and clean, like fresh sheets, and as Cara climbed round behind her, the light of the Flower glinted on the fibres, refracting for the first time, as if in a waterfall, arches and swirls of rainbow.

“Cara,” said Stefile, her head bowed, glancing over her shoulder, speaking while there was still time. “I never knew my mother. Can you understand? She was killed just after I was born; she left me to run away. I don’t know what a mother is supposed to be like. I don’t know what a mother is supposed to do.”

“Neither do I,” Cara smiled gratefully, relieved, kindly. “We’ll each learn, Stef, eh?” Stefile did not look sure. Cara hugged her from behind, pressed her face up against the side of her neck, and breathed in the smell of her hair.

“Duck low,” the beast advised them. “Hold on to the necklace. Do not look up until I tell you.” Carefully, he turned on the branch, one white paw crossing over the other. He stood still for a moment, and shrugged his wings.

Then he began to run.

The giant branch plunged down and sprang back with each ponderous stride of the beast, flinging even it up into the air. Cara and Stefile felt the smooth surge of muscle; their stomachs dipped and rose; they buried their faces in the feathers of the beast’s neck, and felt branches scrape over them and the showers of bark thrown up by the beast’s claws. There was a sudden crackling, a series of loud retorts behind them. The branch dropped away beneath them. It and half the broken tree had peeled away from the trunk and, held by wrist-thick strands of wood, had swung back into the main body of the tree, crashing through all the foliage around it. The beast was in the air.

Cara and Stefile felt Asu Kweetar droop in the air, sag with their extra weight lower and lower, felt the fierce beating of its wings, and his breath rippling down its throat, under their legs, and heard his lungs like bellows. “Now,” the beast told them, and they sat up, felt the wind slam into their faces and slice through their layers of fur, and saw themselves soar between the ragged tops of the trees. The beast’s beak opened wide and he let out a piercing shriek of triumph.

He turned in the air, leaning, and Cara and Stefile saw below them, covering the land, clinging to the trunks of the trees, all the animals together: the mountain goats and mountain lions; bears and fawns; worms and birds; eels and even fish that had crawled out of the streams on their fins, silver and half dead on the land. There were tortoises, necks straining out of their shells, and squirrels moving in brisk little flickers of alertness. Standing among them, still like morning mist, were the Dead. All of them, beast and spirit, craned their necks and turned their heads, following the Flower as it departed. All of them together moaned or bellowed or roared or chattered or bleated or lowed in dismay. A cloud of birds, roused at last from the calm the Flower had spread among them, rose up. Bees and flies and butterflies; geese; and two large swans, mated for life, their long necks held straight out and their wings whistling; squirrels leaping from tree to tree; they followed Asu Kweetar. Asu Kweetar was faster. The beasts of the land tried to follow, loping along the forest floor, or running with long, hungry, elegant strides. The Dead opened their mouths to cry out, but no sound came. They took each other’s hands, and gazed into the shadowed pockets of each other’s eyes. When the Flower, like a star, dipped below the horizon, the last of its power was cut off from them. Its light no longer held them in the Land of the Living. It was as if they were burned away by the sun.

The wolves saw the goats and remembered their empty bellies, and ripped life out of the herbivores’ throats until blood drenched the needles that carpeted the ground. The order of this life, such as it was, had returned.

Cara and Stefile passed over mountains so high that there was only rock and ice beneath them. They howled with the cold and clutched each other, as Asu Kweetar’s breath billowed over them like thick smoke. “We will drop lower soon,” the beast promised them, “unless the Dragon wakes.”

“Drop low, soon, then, Most Noble Beast,” said Cara.

“When I can, little brother. I am cold too. You will learn to believe that cold can no longer damage you. You are immortals.” The feathers of his neck were puffed out, soft white down underneath. Put your hands there. Do not pull them out by mistake. If you find a tick, oblige me by exposing it to the cold. They let go, then.”

“Do—do you really talk to God?” Stefile stammered with the cold.

“Yes,” replied the beast.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I can hear God, all around me, in the high air, when I fly. I am a thinking beast, and next to humankind, I am most beloved by God. I ease God’s pain.”

“God’s pain?”

“God loves. Could you love this world and not feel pain?”

“What—what does God say?”

There was a long silence, full only of the roaring of air in their ears. “I cannot tell you,” said the beast. “Do not misunderstand. It is not given to me to be able to tell you. Besides, I am only a beast of the air, as you are of the land. I do not understand myself. It is like music that you cannot remember.”

They passed over the mountains, and swooped low, as Asu Kweetar had promised, over marshy bogland.

“We are extremely hungry, Most Noble Beast,” said Cara after a time. Without speaking, Asu Kweetar grabbed his bow with his front paw, and pulled it over his own and his passenger’s heads. He reached behind and slipped an arrow from its quiver. “I am a beast of the air. I do not like the ground. I cannot eat what is of the ground,” he said.

Asu Kweetar swung low over the reeds, and mallards hidden in them. He chased the birds over the surface of the marsh until they rose up high into the air, flying as if in migration. Then, in the air, he pulled back the string of his bow, and loosed an arrow. Its shaft was curved. It swooped low, coming up below the fowl, driving up through its stomach. The arrow arched up and over in the air, carrying the mallard with it, back towards Asu Kweetar. He caught it in his beak, mumbled it in his mouth, and spat out the arrow. The arrow flared into flame in mid-air, carried on as a sheet of fire for just a moment, then disappeared, dribbling away through the air as ash. The beast passed the bird back to Cara and Stefile. It was black with burn, and hot and cooked inside.

“I am brother to the Dragon, who is the Earth, rock and fire,” Asu Kweetar explained. “I will be there when he awakes, and rears up, the Earth uncoiling.”

Cara and Stefile ate, as the beast hunted for himself. Stefile noticed, as Cara pressed against her, that the armour, pink and flecked with white, was warm and seemed to throb very slightly. It occurred to her that Cara’s armour was always warm.

They passed into Cara’s country, along the river, over the watery lands of decayed irrigation, to the heart of the state, and it was all in ruins.