The Warrior Who Carried Life (9 page)

“Oh Cara,” whispered Stefile, and softly held her. “Peace.” Cara writhed in her arms, to fight off easy comfort, then succumbed to the pain and implacable reality, and rested against Stefile. They stood together a long time, in silence, as darkness progressed.

Finally Cara was able to speak. “She saw it.”

“Who?”

“Ama,” replied Cara, and staggered away from the wall, pulling Stefile with her to the edge of the courtyard. “All of it,” she said in a far-away voice. “The Galu, the murders, and that in there. None of us understood, none of us knew what she meant. We thought she was mad.” Trembling, as if with weakness, Cara sat, slumping clumsily, legs dangling over the edge of the cliff, as she had when she was a child. “The harvest of blood, she said. The drought of womankind. The City is going to be destroyed, Stefile. We didn’t understand. I don’t think she wanted us to, then.”

She stared ahead, unblinking. “They make us bestial, Stefile. They drive us. They make us as bad as them. They are not born of women, there are no women among them, they do not know of family and love and mothering. They only know the knife, and ruin and silence. They will grow and grow and grow, and we can’t fight them. If we fight them, we make them grow.”

“Cara. My hand. You’re crushing it,” said Stefile, carefully, for Cara was beginning to unnerve her. Cara loosed her grip, and moved the hand to her lips, to kiss it. Instead, distracted, she began to mumble it in her mouth, taste its living saltiness. Fraught with wizardry and grief, she was seeing a picture in her mind.

She saw a field, a wheat field she somehow knew, far away and it had been burnt black, and an army marched across it, an army of Galu, in perfect grinning ranks, each with a fixed, identical smile. Humankind was in danger of being replaced.

“It’s not a question of revenge, Stef. It’s not a question of escape. There is no escape. We have to stop them, now, while they are still small.”

“We can’t do that,” Stefile said, dreading another mission, and let a light blow from her clenched fist fall on Cara’s shoulder.

“We have to. We’re the only ones who know.”

“How, Cal? How can you fight something you can’t allow yourself to hit?”

“We could tie them up. Lure them, trick them, into a cage.” She looked up at Stefile, blinking, confused, but no longer distraught and staring. The look reassured Stefile enough for her to become cross.

“Oh, yes, and who will have to help you? How many times will they be fooled? How will you stop their brothers coming to untie them? Threaten them with a sword? And what about Haliki? He knew. What if all the Fighting Schools know, and are with them?”

“It will . . . have to be a new answer. The answer is there. It already exists. My mother said there would be an answer. I think she said I would find it.” Cara tried to clear her mind, but it kept coming back to violence and entrapment. She felt a need to dissolve all her old ways of thinking. She said simply, “I need a vision.” She stood up.

“Oh,
Cara
,” said Stefile in sudden fury. “Yes, you are a man, I suppose, to go down the wells.”

“My mother went to the wells. She had a vision.” Unaccountably, Cara began to feel almost cheerful.

“The vision,” said Stefile in weary scorn. “It is stupidity. The men march off into the hills, and starve themselves and drink nothing, and boil themselves in steam until they give themselves a fever, and then they say that they have seen things. To no one’s surprise but their own. The vision means nothing. It is babble. Even my brothers have had a vision.”

“What did they see?” Cara asked, suddenly amused.

“Oh! One of them became a tortoise, and lived in the mud. The other saw himself as a huge peach, that was eaten.”

“It sounds like a kind of truth.”

“The kind of truth in dreams and children’s stories.”

“There’s truth in those,” Cara’s face was mild, almost smiling. “I’m going, Stef.”

“I know,” replied Stefile, rueful, with misgivings.

They led the horses back down the steps, with hesitant cloppings of hooves against the stone, the beasts snorting with unease in the dark. They rode most of the night, up the valley, along the cliffs, to the wells of vision, where the sons of the Village by Long Water went to become men.

They slept at the bottom of a well, a shaft cut deep into the rock, to avoid the attention of prowling beasts. In the morning, they built a fire in the pit and covered it with stones, and when these were blue-black with heat they poured water on them from buckets, lowered from above. With a hissing like a thousand serpents, the steam rose. “You will be very sick, and I will have to carry you again,” Stefile said, and climbed the ancient rope ladder out of the well, leaving Cara below to await her vision.

Cara could hear the air move across the mouth of the well, and through the fir trees around the rock. The sun moved overhead, filling the well with hot light, and hot steam wafted over her skin, bringing forth pimples of moisture, as if from the skin of an orange that has been squeezed. It began to trickle down her in streams.
All my skin is weeping
, she thought blearily. She had had no food since the morning of the previous day. Stefile had rice balls to eat. Cara could almost feel them in her mouth, plump and moist and chewy. The hunger would bring the vision more quickly. She poured more water on the stone, and watched the droplets dance with heat.

In the centre of Cara’s head was a slow, sluggish dullness. She was tired, deeply exhausted by hatred and suspense and mourning, and violence and too many wounds, and by magic, the will it took to stay in the warrior shape of a man. Fatigue was a coiled lump within her. She wanted tranquility. She wanted safety and solace and a chance to mend. She wanted light.

She saw light in the steam. It seemed to be dazzling, more bright than the sunlight in it. She was drifting in and out of sleep, on the surface of sleep, where there are dreams.

And suddenly it seemed as if she was on the river. A loud, cheerful, piping little voice was calling out her name. She was hidden in a boat, behind reeds, and it was hot sluggish summer, slow clear water, not roaring spring. “Ssh,” warned a smiling voice above her head, and Cara laughed, giggled a hearty, girlish chuckle. A dragonfly buzzed near her head, and two great white warm hands enfolded her. Cara turned and looked up at the sheltering, kindly, pale presence, the face dim and undefined, that she could never quite see.

“Ama,” she whispered. “Ama.”

Suddenly there was a shriek of joy and release, and Cara started awake, and in the blazing mist, rising out of it on its hind legs, a white horse reared up, and tossed its white mane, and shrieked again. It spun about itself in excitement, and trotted around the perimeter of the well, white tail lashing, and it halted in front of Cara, blinking with dark, kindly eyes. Cara held out her hand to it, and it shyly advanced, head down. Cara felt its gentle muzzle in her palm, flinching and soft and warm. She felt the surge of its breath, in and out. Summer wind. The sound of reeds.

And a high unsteady voice began to read to her. “Find the seventh cavern,” it began, and Cara knew at once what it was reading. “Find the seventh cavern, with the door of carved stone.” Cara saw herself, slim and naked and pubescent as she once had been, climb onto the white horse’s back.

Suddenly she was riding the horse, flying on its back, through the steam of clouds. “Go through the door, the carved door, and through the doors, the seven doors, beyond it, the doors in the hall of stone.” Cara heard her own adolescent voice read them too, as she read them to her brother Tikki.

The horse plunged down through rock, brown stone that seemed to part for them like the bead curtains in Cara’s room. “Find the seventh chamber and the casket made of lapis lazuli, and in the casket you will find the story of Keekamis Haliki, hero, and the things he did in the Better Times.”

Cara saw the casket, and her heart caught. It was blue as the sky, with hints of green, glimmering with light reflected on its carvings. Her heart rose to her mouth as the lid of the casket rose. In a row, like bricks, were the seven tablets of the Book, the One book, the truest copy of it, long lost, made by Keekamis Haliki himself in clay.

She read it again, and it seemed that she understood the story for the first time, understood the loss and confusion Keekamis Haliki felt when his friend died, how he mourned not just for him, but for all of Humankind doomed by the Serpent to die, and how he rode—rode a white horse—down into the underworld, and met the Serpent, and learned how life and death and love came into being, and how the Serpent hated all three, even death which was its only creation. She read about Hadam and Hawwah, the Father and the Mother of Humankind and how the Serpent deceived them, in the Garden that had been the world. She read how Keekamis wrested the Flower from the Serpent, the White Flower that was Life, and would return life to humankind and all the beasts, that was all that remained of the Tree of Life. She read how he had fought the Serpent, and won the Flower, and then lost it again when he slept. She read very quickly, knowing the words.

Suddenly Cara was pulled through chilling mist, as icy as the breath of winter, and the white horse’s breath caked its muzzle with a frozen, opaque sheath.

And Cara approached the coils of the Serpent, saw them clenched around its prize, and she saw the Flower through all of the Serpent’s folds, like the sun through light cloud, clearly defined and bright. The layers of coil were rendered clear by its light, like jelly. The light reflected from the jewel-like scales in many colours.

Cara’s heart cried out for it, for the Flower was beautiful, the Flower was peace and kindness and flowing talk and music and good harvests. It was flocks of birds rising into the air, and clouds of blossoms on apple trees, and women’s breasts, and the bursting forth of water and life; the light tread of feet, the mouth ready to smile, the eyes dilating with interest and response. It was the gambolling of calves in fields when released in the spring, the eagle sheltering its young under its wings. It was the love of wolves and the smile on the face of the dolphin, inexplicably loving humankind. It was the gift of words, the gift of fire, the gift of mind. It was life, eternal life, obdurate, unworried, steadfast, always blossoming outward, never closing, always bearing fruit.

The lid of the casket closed.

Cara was back in the pit, bereft of the Flower, and the sun had moved, and everything seemed dark and shrivelled and sour, like fruit that was rotting.

The white horse was walking backward, into the stream, a tear on its veined, fleshy neck.

“Don’t go,” murmured Cara. “Please don’t go yet.” The horse shook its silent head, eyes on Cara, and was lost in the mist.

Cara screamed. She screamed for water and for what the world had become, screamed for what had been lost and for humankind, who died, and for herself who was primitive and deadly.

Stefile came down for her, calling her name with worry, and Cara collapsed against her and wept.

“I told you it was folly! Was it terrible?”

“No, no,” Cara wept.

“It looks like it. Moon-faced! Look at you! Here.” She passed Cara a waterbag. The water in it was hot from the sun, and poured out of Cara’s mouth as she guzzled it. “I don’t suppose you got your answer.”

Cara broke off drinking suddenly and wiped her mouth, and forehead. Panting for breath, she scowled in thought. “Yes,” she said, warily at first, and then with more certainty. “Yes, Stef, I did. I did.” She let water slop out of the bag, over her head.

“Then why the weeping?”

Cara let the water run off her. She turned to Stefile, with haunted eyes, and opened her mouth to try to explain. “I can’t tell you, Stef,” she said. “Come on. Help me up.”

“Up? You’re staying there to rest!”

“I’ll sleep on the horse.” Cara struggled to her feet.

“On a horse? You haven’t eaten!”

“On the way, too.”

“Where? Where are we going?”

“To the Other Country. To the Wensenara. But I have a promise to keep first.” So saying, Cara turned and began, shakily, to climb.

They returned to the Important House. Cara wandered through each of its rooms. She had a tender, dazed look to her that Stefile found annoying. She wanted this horrible business to be brisk, but Cara seemed to be saying goodbye to everything. “Sister!” Sister!” the worms joyfully cried out when Cara entered the library. She went through each of the books, stroking the pages as she turned them. Stefile did not understand books. They frightened her and made her feel angry that other people should know how they worked. “Hurry up!” she said. “It’s the dregs of the day already, and I’m not sleeping here!” Cara silently passed her three books. Stefile left the room, trying not to look at Cara’s family and packed bedding and clothes in a fury.

Cara laid out bowls of food and jugs of beer on the library table, and her father’s favourite books. She stabbed the books with a knife, to kill them, and stabbed her father’s heavy boots and his most handsome coat. “You will walk again, Ata,” she promised him. He did not reply. “If hungry people come and eat the food before you can, try to forgive them. Don’t haunt them. I will come back with more.”

Her father, stone-faced, turned his head, knowing what was to come, unable to look at what had once been his daughter. Caro, who no longer spoke at all, sent back by his wife’s family in a cart like night soil, glared at his sister balefully. Tikki’s eyes, tortured and dim, looked into Cara’s, and he nodded silently that, yes, this was right, this was the only thing to be done.

“How old do you want to be?” Cara asked him.

“Ten,” he replied. “When we were children and father was young. Meet me beside the river. We will play a game then, in the reeds.”

“Yes. Yes,” she agreed. “Perhaps that will be soon, eh? I hope so. Father. Caro. I can’t kiss any of you. I’m sorry.”

She poured pitch over them, arms extended away from her body in case the worms could leap. “Yes, Sister, yes!” they cried out, gleefully. Cara lit a torch that had also been soaked in pitch. She did not look at the faces of her family as she touched them with it, tenderly, like a flower, until the flames caught. Then she turned and ran out of the house, stumbling out of the doorway, fumbling for the horse’s reins. “Away, away,” she ordered the beast, and pulled it, laden with bundles down the steps.