| VENGEANCE by Frej Wasastjerna In the season when the fruits ripen in the orchards of the west but the grass on the Great Steppe in the east stands brown and sere, a nomad raiding party entered the High Etcheveré mountains. # Alina was basking in the morning sun on the Eastern Meadow. She kept an eye on her herd, though occasionally her vision blurred with tears as she looked at the place where she had sat with her sweetheart Kalik three months ago.
Three months ago--in another era. This was the era in which Kalik no longer existed. He had been killed in a nomad incursion. That still felt as if something had taken a big bite out of her, leaving a void that she felt could never really be filled.
Mostly she ignored the path nearby. Three steppe ponies with their squat riders had already come into view before she noticed them.
She jumped up with the help of her staff and began running for the northern edge of the meadow. The horses would find it difficult to pursue her on the scree slopes. Having to dodge the sheep slowed her down, and two of the riders curved around her to cut her off from the slope. She turned west, away from the place where more and more nomads were emerging behind a hill. The third rider passed south of her herd and quickly caught up with her.
She stopped, grasped one end of her staff with both hands and swung the other with all her strength. She hoped that the nomad was the one who had killed Kalik and that she would crush his skull. But he ducked and her staff merely glanced off his helmet. He grabbed her right arm, and his forward momentum pulled her off balance. Pulled along by her arm and with her heels dragging on the ground, she flailed at him with the staff held in her left hand. That had little effect against his iron backplate. The other two nomads joined her captor, and soon they had her lying on her belly with her wrists bound behind her back. Then they sat her up.
She barely noticed the pain of her bruises, the fear knotting her belly was worse. But behind that fear, giving her strength, lurked hate. These nomads might be the same who had killed Kalik.
The nomad who had caught her spoke to her in bad Veradéni. Only now did she notice his ornate helmet and breastplate, which suggested that he was some kind of a chief.
"Apologies for you's rough treatment," he said, his gaze sliding up and down her seventeen-year-old body. "We needs a guide to lead us through mountains, and wills gives you a big taxes if you leads us safe past forts of Hallanni."
She supposed he meant a reward. In Mangéni, the language of the nearest nomad tribe, the word for treasure was the same as the Veradéni word for taxes. But what he was trying to say didn't really matter. The way he looked at her revealed what he actually intended to do with her once they had come through the mountains, and Alina knew better than to trust promises made by a nomad to anyone not of his own tribe. Even the question of whether the fate awaiting her was literally worse than death wasn't all that important. She didn't seriously doubt that she would be killed when they were through with her, so there was only one thing to do.
This was, then, one of the consequences for her people of the recent unification of Hallann, the kingdom on the western border of the Veradau tribe's territory. After generations of internal strife, it had now been united under an energetic king. Detrik VIII had ordered all passes through the mountains to be fortified. Alina herself had seen the construction of the wall blocking the Harfal pass, when she had ventured into the northwestern corner of the tribal lands. The elders said they had heard that even the great Branding pass, traditionally the favorite route for nomad raids, was now blocked by a wall.
Now the nomads had to find some other route through the mountains. Presumably that had been the reason for the incursion last spring, in which a small party of nomads had come as far as the Jumble and killed Kalik before they turned back.
Here they were again. They must have concluded that this looked like a promising route, so they had returned, either for a reconnaissance in force right through the mountains or for an actual raid.
Most likely it was the latter, as far as she could judge by the number of nomads emerging onto the meadow. And now they wanted her to be their guide. Well, so be it. She knew what to do. This might at last give her an opportunity to avenge Kalik. Standing up, she waited while the nomads attached another rope to the one around her wrists. Then she went to stand beside the chief's horse, making sure that she stood on its left side, while the chief grasped the new rope, to use it as a leash.
The chief showed no sign of wanting to shift her to the other side. With the rough rope rubbing her wrists, she silently thanked the gods for delivering the nomads into her hands and prayed that they would neither detect nor break the spells Old Tithwin had cast to protect her village.
There was, in fact, a thin thread of smoke rising above her village right now from the cooking fires. At this distance, it was hard to see unless one knew exactly where to look. However, if they came closer, the nomads might notice it and decide to plunder the village, even though it was hardly worth the bother, compared with the towns of Hallann. # As the day wore on, she led the raiders through the maze of hills and ravines that her people called the Jumble. Of the two roads leading through the mountains and down to the plains, she knew very well which one she wanted the nomads to take.
True, whenever they rode through a defile where they would have been vulnerable to attack from above, the chief first sent out scouts to check that no such ambush was forthcoming. However, that was only to be expected. And her people had laid their plans taking that into account.
She had considered trying to lure the nomads into detours, wasting their time and tiring them, but she had dismissed the idea. If the path she chose was excessively convoluted, they would soon notice that and get suspicious. That might have unpleasant consequences for her or, even worse, it might make the nomads choose the wrong path. Besides, she would tire sooner than the nomad ponies. Best to pretend she believed the chief's promises.
As it was, Alina was already rather tired when the party emerged from the Jumble after hours of marching with only a couple of brief rests. But she almost forgot her tiredness when she looked at the vista in front of her.
She had seen it thousands of times before. But the knowledge that she now saw it for the last time made her view it almost as if it were new to her.
Behind her, to the east, lay the forested hills and gulches of the Jumble. In front the ground dropped steeply for hundreds of paces to the waters of the Eagle's Mirror, glittering blue and silver in the sunlight. The lake was fed from the right by the Stairwater and from the left by numerous smaller waterfalls and drained, far ahead, by the Lizard River, winding towards the horizon. On the right, beyond the Stairwater, rose the low gray and green peaks of the Cat's Molars. On the left loomed the scarp the tribe called the Giant's Wall, topped by the High Flats, and beyond that towered the Icefang, extending far into the Eagle's Mirror, where only the Brawler's Gap separated it from the Cat's Molars.
Rather than trying to cross the canyon of the Stairwater, an impossible challenge for bridgebuilders, the path swung left, crossing some of the small streams on that side on bridges, in other cases chipped into the rock wall under the waterfalls. Then it turned west, running along the Giant's Wall, halfway up. From there it continued northward along the flanks of the Icefang, where it sloped gently down toward the plains beyond, ultimately curving out of sight beyond the mountain. Partly it followed natural ledges, but much of it had been excavated from the rock by human labor in some long-forgotten era.
Alina stood for a while, drinking in the beauty of the scene on this last day of her life. She admired the vast granite bulk of the Icefang, the way its peak, snow-covered even now in late summer, shone brilliant white against the azure of the sky, and the reflection of it all in the Eagle's Mirror.
She noted with satisfaction that the smoke she had seen in the west was now gone. Apparently the lookouts had sighted the nomads and alerted her village, beyond the High Flats, so that the cooking fires had been doused. She also noticed a vulture soaring in the updrafts beyond the Cat's Molars and thought, "Brother, whatever way this goes, you are in for a feast today!" # The nomad chief nudged her to continue. The sun was already sinking behind the Icefang when they reached the Giant's Wall. The chief sent several men to climb the Wall and check that nobody was lying in ambush above it.
Alina did her best to conceal her tension, and also her satisfaction when one of the men fell down the vertical scarp, ending up as a bloody pulp. Now Old Tithwin's magic would be tested. It was a pity that she couldn't see the scouts weave back and forth on the Flats without noticing it themselves, avoiding the boulders and men their eyes saw but their consciousness refused to acknowledge. But if she could have seen it, so could the nomads down here with her, and they might have become suspicious.
After a while one of the scouts poked his head out above the cliffs and shouted in Mangéni, "All clear, khan! We'll cross the plateau up here and rejoin you somewhere ahead."
Alina tried not to show that she understood. Mangéni wasn't all that different from Veradéni, and her parents had taught her some Mangéni.
Her parents. She tried not to think of the grief they would feel.
Better to think about something else. So the leader of this party was a khan? It had to be a full-blown raid, then.
Just as they were about to start moving again, an elderly-looking nomad managed to make his way to the khan from a few places back in the line. Judging by the leather helmet and cuirass he wore instead of the iron of the others, he had to be a wizard. He spoke to the khan in a low voice, but Alina was close enough to overhear him.
"Khan, I sense magic."
Alina's muscles tightened at this, though she tried not to show any reaction. Would the nomads manage to avoid the trap after all?
"What kind?" the khan asked.
"I don't know. It's mountain magic, so I can't identify the spell. I can only tell that there's magic abroad somewhere up there, on top of that cliff."
The khan pondered for a while. Then he said, "Sounds as if there might be some trap for us up there, if we choose to avoid this path with its obvious risk of being attacked from above. I don't know how we could get the horses up there, but somebody apparently wanted to make sure that we would be stopped if we somehow got up there.
"Better to stay down here, now that we know there's no one in ambush up there. And, if we're attacked anyway, we have this girl as a hostage."
Alina could barely suppress her glee. Instead of the detection of magic alerting the nomads to the ambush, it actually strengthened their resolve to continue along the path! This was even better than what she had prayed for, and she sent heartfelt, though silent, thanks to the gods.
As for using her as a hostage? Well, we'll see about that, she thought. # They went on, moving cautiously in single file along the narrow path with a precipitous drop on the right and an equally precipitous rise on the left. The khan had sent two riders ahead as scouts but rode at the front of the main body himself, with Alina on the left of his mount's head. The pony, apparently sensing her helplessness, bit her painfully a couple of times, but desisted when the khan yanked harshly at its reins. It was ironic that he saved her from the pony, she thought, but of course he had still worse things in store for her.
Otherwise everything went peacefully for a while, so peacefully that Alina's resolve began to waver. Might there be some way for her to get out of this alive?
On the other hand, this khan had to be responsible for Kalik's death. The Mang-tsau were the only nomads whose territory adjoined the Veradau lands, and it was hardly conceivable that any nomads had raided those lands without the Mang-tsau khan's permission. He probably hadn't killed Kalik personally, but the guilt was his.
Alina and the khan had already passed the Giant's Wall proper and started traversing the slopes of the Icefang, initially equally steep, when one of the scouts came galloping back, bleeding profusely from several arrow wounds. "An ambush!" he tried to shout, though it came out more like a groan. "The road is blocked up ahead!"
Once more the gods were on her side, Alina thought. Now she had to act, and it was fortunate that it happened before they got to the gentler slopes farther on.
She took a step backward, turned left and braced her left leg against the rock wall. Then, just as the khan passed her and before he had time to sense what was going on, she shoved.
All three went tumbling into the air: Alina, the khan and the pony.
Mingled with her panic at falling, even overshadowing it, was a deep satisfaction that she had personally killed the khan. She didn't even pity the pony; that vicious brute also deserved its fate. "This is what you get for killing Kalik!" she shouted in Mangéni.
Finally, after several seconds of falling, they hit the ground. # None of the nomads ever saw the steppe again. When the men sitting immobile on the High Flats, warded by Tithwin's invisibility spell, finally stirred, the spell was broken and the scouts could see them, but by then it was too late. Those few scouts were quickly killed, and the nomads on the path were helpless against the rain of boulders and arrows from above.
No Mang-tsau ever learned what had happened to the raiders. When they asked Veradau traders, they were told about a fearsome demon that tore intruders to pieces. None of them ever dared check that, so since then they have left the Veradau lands alone. # At the foot of the Icefang is an inscription. It is written in Hallanni, since there is no written Veradéni language. Nonetheless, every Veradau knows the words by heart: "Here died Alina, daughter of Kahdai and Vulede, savior of her people."
The inscription doesn't say how she saved them. That is something that outsiders are not to know. However, every child in the tribe is taught the story of how Alina led the invaders away from the path to her village and onto the one that led into the trap. |
