Sign of the Dragonfly Chapter VII

It was on their tenth day in the desert that Slava spotted the horseman. The sun was past its zenith and the column was strung out across the shifting sands, their shadows stretching for what seemed like miles. Slava, half-dazed by the heat, turned to follow the progress of a vulture circling in the distance, shading her eyes against the light, and saw a figure on horseback standing in silhouette atop a dune perhaps a mile off. He was head to toe in faded blue, and his mount was slender and sleek, nothing like the shaggy ponies ridden in Virk. Slava thumped her heels against Fjardin’s flanks until the camel, groaning irritably, broke into a loping canter and made his way up the column to Red Elka.

“We’re being watched,” Slava said, her voice hoarse. “One rider on horseback, maybe a mile southwest of here.”

Red Elka looked, grimacing into the red light of dusk glaring over the dunes. She looked like all the rest of them, salt crusted on her chapped and scabbing lips, skin sunburned and peeling even beneath the protection of her sweat-stained hood. “I see him,” she rasped. 

They watched the horseman for a time. After a little while, a second rider joined him. They appeared to confer, and then both men turned their mounts and vanished into the dunes. “Men carrying steel,” Slava muttered to herself. “Ilga will string their eyes on her necklace.”

Aglyff, riding on Red Elka’s other side, took her ram’s horn from her belt and blew a long, strident blast before turning back to their battle sisters, and to Hama bringing up the column’s rear. “Riders to the southwest!” she thundered. “Form up on the chief!”

Wearily, the drumwife unslung her hide drum and set it between her pelvis and the horn of her saddle. She inhaled, then raised her palm and brought it down hard on the stretched goat hide. The band tightened its formation as she found her rhythm. Hama came bouncing up the line to ride at Slava’s side. “A men has nearing?” he asked in his broken Virkish, shouting over the thunder of the drum and the running camels. “Men is come?”

“Stay close to me,” Slava shouted back. She reached down for her shield and loosed it from her saddle, easing her arm into its straps as she scanned the horizon. Dust rose from beyond a distant dune. She fumbled for her clumsy Amnhese as the boy stared back at her uncomprehending. “Ul… goyotl. Xoxi.”

“They’re coming!” Kridel cried, pointing.

Pravan i’Yham and the wizard, Lune, dropped back through the column’s vanguard to ride in its middle. Lune had his spear in one hand. In the other, he held three arrows flat across his palm. His blond hair flew as he bent low to whisper to the shafts. Blue sparks flew from his lips as he spoke. 

A ghostly ululation rose up in the distance, a chorus of trilling screams like scores of raptors diving one after another on their prey, their cries overlapping and echoing across the empty sands. Slava took a long draught of unpleasantly hot water from the skin at her belt and wiped her mouth. She took up her ax. No time to don her armor, even if she were confident in her ability to fight in it without succumbing to the heat. She looked back at Hama, who stared at her in wide-eyed terror. All along the column, swords whispered from their sheaths and bowstrings creaked, held at full draw by sunburned arms.

A line of horsemen thundered out of the shimmering heat haze ahead and to the column’s right, their blue robes flying, the dying sunlight flashing from the blades of their scimitars and the crowns of their helms. The wizard murmured again to his arrows and one by one they streaked from his palm as though loosed from a hunter’s bow. Slava’s eye could hardly follow them, but three riders toppled from their saddles and a horse stumbled and fell, hooves lashing at the air, an arrow in its neck. The drumwife beat the charge, tempo increasing, and the line spread out. Slava raised her broken voice in a harsh cry. For once, Fjardin did not fight her as she pulled his reins. 

The riders drew closer. Slava counted perhaps forty, their dark faces tattooed with looping script, their helmets topped with horsehair tails. Arrows flew. Slava raised her shield and caught a shaft, though its point cut the back of her arm as it punched through the wood. Fjardin let out a bellowing groan. The woman on Slava’s left slumped in the saddle and fell from her mount, an arrow in her belly. Slava heard her neck break. 

Another breathless moment, the two lines rushing toward each other, Slava’s tailbone aching as she bounced in the saddle with each loping step, and then the impact came. A sword clanged against her shield’s metal boss, the strike nearly numbing her shield arm even as her ax caught the next rider square in the neck. He almost dragged it from her hand in falling, and then she was through and wheeling about, glancing sidelong back at Hama, who rode close behind her, bent nearly double over his camel’s neck. She saw Red Elka trading blows in the saddle with a tall swordsman armored in bronze scales. She saw Kridel on the sand locked in a wrestler’s embrace with a robed rider in the shadow of their dying mounts, whose tack had gotten tangled. 

Back in. That eerie scream pouring from another horseman’s mouth. Pravan i’Yham running on foot through the crash of battle, his snake peering out from beneath his turban’s salt-stained black scarf. Fjardin threw himself against the rider’s horse. The other beast screamed, forced down mid-stride, one leg snapping with a blast like black powder touched by fire, and went over onto its rider, crushing him. “Oh, you’re a fine man,” Slava roared, holding on with her thighs as best she could as they regained their pace and headed for the next man. “I’ll buy you a chiefess’s ransom in those wretched berries if we live!”

The lines were in chaos, riders locked in a dozen little pitched battles, others clashing on foot. The wizard’s white camel ran across Slava’s path, an arrow in his hump. She saw no sign of his rider. Then she caught sight of Hama. He was on foot, one arm held against his chest, face bloodied. His camel lay dead behind him. A blue-robed rider bore down on him. Slava’s breath caught in her throat. She urged Fjardin onward, raising her ax, struggling to find her calm. Fear is death, she told herself in her mother’s voice. Fear breaks steel. Fear shatters shields, splits helms, tears flesh. Fear bars the gates of Alholl.

Fear is the only enemy.

They flashed past Hama, who dropped to the ground with a cry, and Slava saw that she would miss her swing. The rider was too close, moving too fast. She gave herself no time to think, simply gathered her legs and launched herself out of the saddle. A moment of heart-stopping speed, the earth rushing beneath her, and then she crashed into the rider and they both went over, dragging the horse’s saddle after them. They hit the ground and rolled, Slava taking the worst of it. The horse went down with a wild scream. Its thrashing hooves kicked sand over them. She sputtered, one hand locked on the rider’s wrist as he strained to push a dagger into her throat, the other clawing for her ax, lost in the fall. “Ilga,” she snarled. The rider punched her in the face. The angle was bad, but the knife jerked a few inches closer to her neck as she lost her focus. 

Send your ulkyria to this barren place, that I might fly to Alholl with my enemy’s steel in my heart.

The rider stared down at her, his tattooed face livid. He was old, his hair and beard gray, his cheeks hollowed and lined. Slava felt the handle of her ax. Her fingernails scraped against it. She strained with all her might. The rider said something in his sibilant tongue. That was when Hama grabbed him around the neck from behind. Slava seized the rider’s knife arm in both hands, broke his grip with a savage strike, and stabbed him in the chest. He let out a heavy sigh and Hama dragged him off of her as he went limp. Slava rose, coughing. She retrieved her ax and shield, her whole body aching, and pushed Hama behind her as another rider turned and heeled his mount toward them. She beat her ax against the boss of her shield, the clang of metal on metal strangely flat in the vast emptiness of the Yham. “Come on, you beardless infant,” she shouted as the horseman bore down on her. “Come on, come on you weakling! You kitten!”

His curved sword flashed in the firelight. She ducked, shield held high, and stepped out of his path, turning as she did to keep Hama behind her and cleave his horse’s shin, her swing meeting its momentum. The animal screamed and went over, hindquarters lashing at empty air, its rider staring in confusion in the moment before its bulk bore down on him and crushed his chest. Slava backed away from the thrashing horse, breathing hard. She glimpsed Fjardin trotting away in the distance. Sveta’s headless body rode past, still bouncing atop her camel. A dozen yards away, Angra faced down three unhorsed riders, an arrow protruding from her ribs. 

Fear is the only enemy. 

A pair of riders jumped their horses over a fallen camel and turned toward Slava’s position. She shifted her grip on her ax. Her hand was bleeding and the wood was slick with it. Behind her, Hama crouched beside the dead man, hands over his ears. “Mami,” he whimpered, rocking in place. Slava knew what he said, if not the word itself. “Mami… mami…”

She charged the riders, bellowing a war cry as she ran. You will not have him, she thought, her lungs burning, her legs heavy as molten lead. You will not touch him.

The wizard’s song reached her a moment before the riders did, a song in the twinned voice of the throat-singer — the hugnir, the mortal voice, high and keening, and the tugnir, the spirit’s voice, deep as a peal of thunder that rolled on and on without end. She looked up and saw him flying through the air, his robe and hair streaming behind him. He skidded to a halt perhaps thirty feet above her, the air rippling around his bare feet, and raised his spear. He threw it. It left his hand with a thundering boom that sent waves through the sand, and struck the leftmost of the two riders converging on Slava, punching through his skull. His horse turned in a tight circle, bucking and leaping in terror as the corpse swayed on its back. The wizard hauled as though on an invisible line. The spear tore free of the rider’s lolling skull in a spray of blood. The wizard caught it and flung it again, overhand, his whole lean body poured into the motion. It took the second rider’s horse in the chest. The beast erupted in flames, its rider shrieking as his robes caught fire. 

Slava slowed her pace, staggering over the bloodstained sand, and turned to look back over the battle. The last of the riders were fleeing. Perhaps a dozen lay dead, and nearly as many of her battle sisters. A few riderless horses raced away into the desert. Slowly, still chanting, the wizard sank to the earth. He leaned on his spear, recalled again, bloodied halfway up its haft, and sagged as his song faltered. Slava gave him her arm. Hama stood staring at them. Nearby, Kridel crowed in triumph, banging her sword against the boss of her shield, and the rest of the company took up the cry.

“Remount!” Red Elka thundered, riding down the line. She had a cut across her cheek and three arrows in her shield. “Remount, you dogs! The Finger Witch won’t have your bones until I’m done with them!”

***

They marched by the light of the moon, some sleeping in the saddle, others pushing themselves on foot. Slava walked with Hama near the rear of the column. Her wounded arm ached. Her feet hurt. Her left eye was swelling shut and her ax and shield seemed to weigh as much as anchors. They had left Sveta, Angra, and the rest of their dead to the vultures. 

“You fought like a devil.”

It was Pravan i’Yham, walking beside her. He offered her his smoldering pipe. Slava took it and inhaled, letting the smoke trickle from between her lips. It tasted like lemon and pine pitch. “Thank you,” she said at last, returning the pipe. Pravan’s long, slender fingers brushed hers.

“Your camel died?” Pravan asked her. He had a deep, gravelly voice, heavily accented, but his Virkish was good.

“Ran off,” said Slava. 

“The boy tells me you’re learning our tongue.”

“A little,” said Slava. “Ce… iti xiol?”

Pravan laughed. “Close,” he rasped. “You’ve just asked for smaller shoes.”

Slava laughed, too. She threw her arm around Hama’s shoulders. “A great teacher you are,” she teased him. He smiled back at her. 

***

They made camp in the shadow of a dune, the wind blowing sand from its crest over their tents, which they slept in head to foot. Hama dozed curled against Slava’s chest, his face slack and innocent in the moonlight. She had walked straight at death for this boy she hardly knew, a foreigner from a degenerate culture where his kind could hold a sword, ride a horse, even rule over women. What had made her do it?

She thought for some reason of the wise, gentle stare of the elephant they had seen in Amnh. She thought of the market’s crush and the hundred different skin colors and native garbs she’d seen there. Slowly, sleep crept in from the margins of her mind. She dreamed of her father carrying her on his shoulders, of the taste of fresh blueberries picked in the hills outside their village, of the little wooden icons of Ilga and Auni he’d carved for her on her eleventh birthday. She dreamed that wolves tore him apart and ate his flesh in a place without a sun.

Slava woke at first light to the sound of heavy footsteps outside her tent. Slowly, she pushed herself up onto her elbow and slid out from between the still-sleeping Hama and Kridel and into the gray cool of dawn. Outside the tent, Fjardin stood chewing his cud, still saddled, his bags still intact. Slava rose to her feet with a groan of gratitude and went at once to retrieve her waterskin, drinking greedily. “Ah, you brute,” she croaked, patting the camel’s neck. “I’m glad to see you.”

“I found him wandering not far from here,” said Pravan. He sat on the dune’s steep slope, his snake sunning itself across his shoulders. “They’re cleverer than they appear, camels. They can navigate across places where maps are meaningless within a week, and go for months without food.”

“Thank you,” Slava said. She felt unsettled at the foreigner’s generosity. “You come from here, don’t you? i’Yham, that means ‘of the Yham’, I think.”

“Yes,” he answered. His gaze was on the horizon. He seemed to be watching for something. “I was raised by the Kuadeg. My father was one of them. My mother was a slave they took in a raid. I never knew her.”

“Those men we fought yesterday, they were Kuadeg?”
“The Rukat Kuadeg,” said Pravan. “The tribe of the deep desert, where even other nomads do not go. We call them the Blue Devils. They kill any who trespass here.”

The rising sun flashed near the horizon. Slava, squinting in the wind, caught a glimpse of time-worn metal. Gold, perhaps? Or tarnished bronze? Beside her, Pravan slapped his knee and grinned, showing rotten teeth.  “Close, now,” he said quietly. “Very close.”