You Tell Me a Story, Broodmother-of-Mine
Broodmother of mine came before me in the wetness of the nest-cave and brought me before her to tell a story. She began like this.
The thing that looked at me was like a visitor. In the way a visitor to your home looks at an insect that crawls across the floor. In the way a visitor to your family lays eyes upon a fair unwed. In the way a visitor to your row looks at the food left hanging in the windows. Foreign hunger. An unwelcome hunger- one you can understand but cannot hope to feel. I never thought myself a food-thing until the night fell and I was still not return’d home. The living thing that saw me and looked so distinctly hungry for the moment before I made to hide in the brush was afoot in the wetness of the jungle, which had become a dark green hell in the moonlight. In a moment of clarity I rushed to make myself unpalateable- covering myself with sticks and mud and nastiness. In my hurry… I put out my eye with a thorn. A terrible pain it was. And that, lil-un, is why your Broodmother is a one-eyed, keel-scaled crone.
She laughed, a hearty, rasping sound from the syrinx. But she had begun and ended so bizarrely. What was the thing that had seen her? Driven her to such fear? Why was she days away in the wet-floored jungle?
Kak-Kak, she said. Another time will be the full telling of the story. Perhaps tomorrow.
I understood this- the lesson was present, as I had been out playing waist-deep in floodlet in the day, the remains of a gout of water which had pushed a mud full of sticks and thorny things into the river and made my young mind curious. Broodmother of mine wanted me not to lose sight of the danger, and endanger or lose my sight. And so, she made good on her earlier promise, and later, in a dry morning of the basking-season, she began the story in full.
Your broodmother was once a handsome thing. I was young too, before forty clutches and forty years-of-the-leader wore me down, body to leyline-seeker. I was not so fair when I came to this place, Kak-Kak. I was already of wilting age, feathers losing their shine. Where I was born was Letta Wadi, a place of sand and infrequent wetness of the earth. We made our homes from clays and bone. When I was in the egg, of course they called me not ‘Broodmother…’
But Vya u-Usi. Hot shell of Vya, lonely hill. Where my Broodmother had come from, and where she laid me. The mound I crawled from was wetter than the others. Bitter struggle for a little thing, fresh from the egg, shivering, eyes barely fired from the kiln of Khanaa… but I made it.
And before I called to my Broodmother, before even my moundguard, Giha, saw, I had bitten onto the sprouts in the soil of my nestmound. I had torn them to pieces and fed myself before Broodmother could arrive. When she did, she dug my kin out and took us inmouth to the rearing place. It was a great clay hut where I recall most of my smoothskin life. The walls were a wavy red, where histories of the place had been laid down by the wind and rain, over and over and over again. I was raised in a seabed older than the first of the Tzoh. My imagination was wild and free on those walls, Kak-Kak, shells trapped in desert sandstone and an odd tooth took me by the head and pointed me out into the world. From when I could walk and taste air, I sought travel. And fool I was, I took it at the first chance.
When the beaded ones came through Letta Wadi, I was a young unwed, fair, skinny, still quite smooth of skin. My quills had only begun to poke through my headscarf. The Puya-Ghita of the beaded ones… he was not so. A mane of feathers, petals of a wicked flower shot from neck to hip, and a thousand rings of gold were pushed through his lips and nose and brows and fenestrae. I was freshly away from the governance of my Broodmother. The first choice I made for myself was to pass my agency onto another. I joined the beaded ones. That night, they blooded me, dotting my ventral scutes with their blood and fluid, and gave me one of their beaded shawls. It was wrapped around an addertongue blade, curved and elegant with a deep groove down the middle. I wrapped myself in the shawl and slung the blade to my hip. All of us were gone by the time the sun touched the blood and wine we spilled as we made step from Letta Wadi.
First nights out of the clay-roofed shelter of home were bitter. The dry air of the desert stung the scales of your Broodmother. I was cut twenty times in the hip and arm by the given sword before we layed for the second night. The beads were light in the hands and on the shoulders of the Puva-Ghita, and death-heavy on my back. And yet I took breath.
The beastmen who walked alongside us gave me strange looks for the first months I spent in the company of the beaded ones. They would crawl to me, hopping along as they do, with gnarled hands and foot-thumbs and bodies covered with fine quills like downy feathers. It was a deep, muddy brown. Their faces were the color of clay, and flat-broad. Like a plate. I laughed to myself when I saw them first… thinking of this… I had heard of the beastmen from cousins and ilk, how they were hot and terrible things, warm to the touch. Excellent hiders and tricksters they were, even if they were devoid of true speech and spoke in hoots and ‘wuh’, ‘gah’, ‘loo’. Their eyes, I first learned as a child, and again now, from observation, were empty in the night. They did not shine like those of a person. That, my kin told me, was because they had not a spirit in them. Not a whisper of one, like the other beasts. Regardless, they made good help. Taught well, they could carry much, and feed themselves off the insects of the desert.
The beastmen had a terrible shriek. I heard it for the first time when we made warpath. We were on a hill, sparsely grassed. It was a thick plant that covered us, and crisscrossed the painted stripes and beads with blades. The beastmen were painted too, long jagged patches of white that had come from a bitter fruit. They panted in the darkness. Their eyes were empty, as they always were. Black as a starless sky. We crept to a precipice. Before the troupe was a town of tents and huts. Little fires hung in the windows. I smelled a breadloaf. A wedfeather ducked out of a doorway. He was young and skinny ‘round the waist but fat in the head, in the way a young thing is. He took a breadloaf from the windowsill. He turned. Shining eyes moved across the grass. The beastmen watched. Their lips began to part, all as one. Horrible teeth they had. No two were the same. They were more ill-conceived than the spears of crude flint they held, which they had beaten out of rocks we picked up on the walks we made, and fastened with the sinews of our kills. They took breath in a brutish way, not through the nostrils, but through a hanging, open mouth with thick and muscular lips. Their broodmothers did not feed them in the way ours did. They would hold a young beastman to their chest, and produce an organ… the beastman would bite down upon it and let its broodmother bleed a thick, white blood into its mouth. Without such powerful lips, the beastmen could not form a seal around the wound and ensure none was wasted.
Our troupe leader met the eyes of the wedfeather. She threw a straight-pathed bronze spear. It stooped upon the son-of-mothers, bread in hand… it took him silently, but not quickly. His fight was knocked from his body, and he threw himself there-and-there in the foamy sand. When the blood began to leave his sides, the beastmen decided for themselves that we would do violence proper. They began their shrieking as they galloped down the hill on four hands. It started quietly, barely more than breathing. It reached a climax at the foot of the hill, when they began to smell the wedfeather. The dull oof became a shriek like a great fox. Deeper. Angrier. I had no doubt in my mind that the beastmen were not like the other animals. They had capacity for love and thought, and because of this, hate. They stormed into the village, shrieking and hooting. They stood only the height of a smoothskin, but were fifty times as strong as a patriarch. They bore down upon the village people, tearing into homes and cutting through clothes and tissue with teeth. I only saw one of them use his spear a single time. He pointed it at me, to steer me away from his killing. I had come ‘round a corner, and he was crouched in the dirt, spear laid at his side, chewing the hands off a townsman. He saw me, and hooted and hissed and shrieked. He stood up and pointed his spear to me, shaking it. In those shrieks… I could convince myself I heard him say ‘go.’ I stepped away and he dropped the spear. He bit into the jaws of the townsman. Once his face was gone… he was not a person anymore. He had been objectified. It was easier for me to look wholly at what the beastman was doing to him.
The night crawled on. I pushed down doors and cut the air before me with undisciplined waves of a sword as I sacked the place. I took necklaces and rings and piercings from drawers and faces of the dead. The whole time I did, I heard the beastmen shriek. I saw the eyes of the beaded ones dart through the darkness as the fires reflected in them. Not so for the beastmen. They were quiet to the eyes and filthy loud to the ears.
We had our dinner as the sun rose. The beaded ones counted my cuts and celebrated me, knowing that my wounds had all come from my unsheathed sword bouncing at my side. They made a great glory of my first battle… I wouldn’t venture to call it that. I brought my sack before the Puva-Ghita and he looked inside. A little smile crept across his face… he reached in, examining what I had. It was mostly jewelry and that kind of thing. There was no king here, no noble’s den to sack. And yet we scraped the last of the wealth from this place.
For all the taking we did, very little selling was done. The beaded ones took most of the pretty things and wove them into their shawls, hanging them from the ends like tassels on the mouth of a shark, or pushing them through the skin of their face and fenestrae. The boldest among them wore jewelry in the fenestrae of their frills, teeth and jewels poked through the stretched, deep-red skin of their parietal. We ate well, at least.
I did not feel so terrible about what I had done. It was a bad thing, I will tell you now… but things were different of course. Judge me as you see fit. I did not have to kill to live. But it was an easier path to live by killing. The beaded ones fed me well. I cannot say the same for the beastmen. They watched us eat the guts of a slaughtered antelope with eyes of volcanic glass. The greatest among them stood and paced around the borders of our celebration, the warpaint still caked on her face. She had a great protruding brow bone… almost like the postorbital horns of a northerner… but short and blunt. The way her skin looked was bizarre. It was almost like mine, but rather than growing in overlapping or adjacent scutes and scales, it was as if it was one great scale, folded over itself and wrinkled into smaller scales. It was like the skin on the face of a crocodile. I realized that I had been staring at her for too long when she met my gaze. She parted her lips and wrinkled her nose. And she hissed. As she did, I could see her working her lips and tongue into sounds. Our sounds. Not a word came out, but I had never seen a beastman make a noise like this before. It spoke in the way that the birds almost spoke like us, a jumble of syllables uttered underbreath.
“Vya!” cried one of the beaded ones- I was brought back to the sitting-circle. A red-faced Tzoh beckoned me forth. She had a great ring of feathers behind her crest, but was bald in the face, and smooth. From her lips hung two golden chains that terminated in little pieces of blue cloth. “Come play. Game of chance, it’s good fun.” She was huddled with two others, both young. One had his beads wrapped ‘round his waist, with his back and chest out in the desert air. As he took breath, his scales shifted and slid across each other. They were high-keeled for his age. He turned his head, and behind a low frill, his feathers were pointed and tight, like quills. They were coated in resin and pulled back into points. The other moved aside to let me sit. He told me his name was Tdirah. The teeth in one side of his mouth were far shorter than the other, and his jaw shifted as he talked because of this. On the long-toothed side, his lips were always slightly parted, and his tongue snaked about, keeping his teeth wet.
The beaded ones were casting five four-pointed die. Each roll of the die, a player would cast something precious- a coin or a chain or a tooth- into the pile at the center. Each player had a side of the die, dictated by color. When all the die landed with the same color facing up, that player took the pile. We sat and played, sharing stories and ancestries. The red-faced one, I learned, was called Qanr; ‘burning.’ I looked across her chest, and I knew why… beneath her beaded shawl, a sprawling tattoo wove across her scutes. A young Tzoh was suspended and bound upside-down. Her face was covered in tar, and flames crept from her eyes to her chest. Beneath this, there was another piece, incomplete. The lines were faint, needing another inking, and I could make out only basic figures. A dark, central tzoh stood above the rest, who lay on the ground. The great figure in the middle was tarred, her face bald. Her hands and face were the most complete parts of the piece. Both were covered in oil and blood.
Qanr turned to me as she took the pile, dropping it into a sack.
“Before I tell them of what I have done, and what has been done to me, they call me Caskas, carrion-bird.” She looked to me in binocular, and pinned her pupils. “It is a better name than Quanr. I tell you, I am no longer burning. And yet my bald parts still see the insides of tzoh and beast before I eat. Kak-Kak.” I nodded quickly. Nervously. I unpinned my pupils and lowered my gaze. She received my gesture of respect well, and exhaled. I won a little gold, and connection, in the dawn after we sacked the village.
There was a time now, when we set ourselves at a more glorious target. One we could feel truly proud of sacking. A coastal city, Ghadil. Well-armed and traveled, it was… but the Puva-Ghita took it upon himself to gather bands of bladesfolk from many places. He sent walkers and riders wide across, to mountain and lake. And after a month of days, the first bladesfolk began to gather at the foot of our launching-hill. They rode in as we were building longboats… the Uag-Gutuul of the mount. Small in stature, all of them- their Ghita stood eye-to-eye with me, and she had scant jewelry. Her body was covered in feathers, some hers, some those of an animal. She rode on a great, two legged beast, like a flightless bird with hands, teeth, and a stiff tail. She called her people Gutuul na’Killi, “Riders of the Claw.” Our Puva-Ghita welcomed them with a fatty cut of meat that he had prepared, and they ate heartily. Their beasts of war cast a gaze unfamiliar on our beastmen… they were meeting another servant-thing for the first time, perhaps. The beastmen were not unsettled. They regarded the warbeasts curiously, but calmly, with their pit-black eyes.
The Gutuul na’Killi engaged us in games to pass time before the next bands began to arrive. They had brought with them spears- sharp on one end and flat on the other, like an oar. They took these spears and used them to hit a tight ball of animal sinews and fat bound in cord. They invited me to play, but I declined. I watched as they passed the ball from spear to spear… the stickiness of it allowed it to stay put on the flat end of the spear until some force was applied, and each player would try to hold onto the ball for as long as possible, shoving the others to the ground with their shoulders. The tips of the spears were wrapped in cloth before the game, and used to hit other players as well, particularly in the hands.
Tdirah came to sit next to me on the staging-hill. He brought with him a spiral-shelled animal, boiled in spices and salt. He broke it open and we ate. He tilted his head to the side as we did, to avoid spilling the juices out of his longtoothed lip. I did not ask, but I must have gestured absentmindedly… as he looked to me and gave a laugh.
“On warpath, we were. I was an unwed, older than you but still young. We had made rafts to cross a great lake. The water was calm but the winds above were wicked and sent us along at a great speed. I was tilling my troupe’s barge.” Tdirah made a gesture, with one hand to the sky and one in front of his face. “The mast and boom would twist against each other as the wind changed. I ducked low every time except one.” He clapped next to his shorttooth side. “Boom comes across, hits me in the jaw. My teeth come out. This was only some months ago… they have not grown in quite yet.” He pulled a chunk from the tentacles of the ammonoid. “For now… only soft things. I must let my teeth grow long for a while. No wear.” I nodded. Tdirah turned to look at the game the bladesfolk played. The Beaded Ones among them, brave as they were, spent most of their time in the dirt. Black and white paint on their chest and face was quickly replaced with wet sand and the roots of beach plants. Warrior after warrior hit the dirt at the strikes of the Gutuul na’Killi.
Then something remarkably bizarre happened. Shuffling into the wet sand of the ring, pushing aside waiting players… a fuzzy black shape emerged. It was shorter than the shortest of the Gutuul na’Kili, and it did not walk like them. It walked out diagonally, shuffling forward with knuckles low to the ground like a prey-animal. It picked a spear from the ground and twisted it around in a single hand. It looked around. It was one of the beastmen.
After a moment of shared whisper and silence, the beastman called. It was guttural, but yelping, in the way a rodent does it. Deeper obviously, as the beastmen are far larger than even the greatest of rodents… It was a long Ooouuuuuhhhh. You see now that I cannot quite make it myself. Our throats are folded differently. The way the beastman made it, it was loud and ear-catching. The beastman threw a hand up, parallel to the ground, gesturing to the ball. She shook it. The Gutuul holding the ball gave a gentle toss to the animal. Without much effort, the beastman swung the spear down, flat-end first, beneath the ball, catching it and raising it back up above her head. The Gutuul laughed, and swatted at the spear with her own. The beastman formed her lips into a circle and gave a laugh- it was not like ours. It was a repeated exhale from the mouth over the lips, a hoo-hoo-hoo. As she did this, she pounded one hand on the ground and held the other with the spear above her head, steady. Another Gutuul na’Kili joined, swatting and pushing towards our new player. She pushed two Tzoh off with ease, a coarse-quilled arm beating the grey-feathered and bead-wearing to the ground all the same. The laugh grew louder, the beastman hooting and shouting as she exerted her strength. A second laugh came from the gathering crowd. Louder, higher. Another beastman pushed his way to the front, shambling by on all fours. And like the hoot-laughing, another began, until there were five or six in the sand pit. They were no longer focused on the game, rather, they were bunched close to each other, looking across at one another and brushing hand to arm, as though feeling a piece of metal or clay for impurities. One of them, who was skinnier and walked with an arched back, made a deeper noise, and the beastmen hobbled away, dropping their sticks in the sand.
The Gutuul na’Kili spoke good of our beastmen around the war-altar. As the hairy things pulled wood from the beach’s trees to bring to our longboats, which were becoming sturdy, the grey-feathered bladesfolk talked with my troupe over baskets of fruit and mollusk we had gathered. They spoke with an airy accent, with much of the voice coming forward, rather than out, as one does when pretending to whisper but trying to be heard.
“Your hairy things are wonderful, Kak-Kak. They have a warming coat unlike ours, and that of our beasts. I felt it. It is not quite the same, it is like the wires you use for binding spears. Where did these… eh.- beastmen come from?” Quanr drank stew from a shell-bowl she kept slung around her neck.
“Many generations ago, the beaded ones were wanderers in the hot chaparral. We came down from high hills with little trees, to a forest valley. A great river flowed through it when we stopped. For the first time in centuries, the beaded ones stopped moving. We made village, not tent. We fished. In the forest ‘round the river, there were great hairy things. They stalked us in the night. Always alone. We lit a thousand torches to look for their eyeshine- but it never showed. We lost many a bladesman during that time, the first river-finding. When the river stopped yielding fish and fruit, we prepared to make tent once more and left.” Quanr raised a wrinkled, keel-scaled hand. Wiry feathers dangled from beneath her wrist. “We took a wanderance for forty or fifty years of births. This is the record. The chaparral dried, years of rainlessness turned jungle into grassland and grassland into savannah and savannah into desert. The Beaded Ones needed food, needed cold places, to raise our young, you see. Like you need warm places in the north. We listened to our elders careful-well, taking deep note of oral history- and found our way back to the great river. It was gone. The valley was a deep canyon, and the water had disappeared. On the canyon walls, however, there was a substantial grassland, which we followed for some time to a cratered clearing where water found itself during the rains. In the grassland there were the common grazing things, beaked and stiff-tailed. We did not see them for some days, but we heard their trumpeting all the while we stayed and wandered. We made our first kill of the place when we took an ovnorrta for prey. It was hard kill, hiding and running in the grass. It took ten or twenty spears to bring the animal down. The second kill was far easier, as we could blow into the skull of the first to attract others. This is where we learned to carve the fighting-heads.” Quanr shook her head. “I deviate. We were in this grassland for some time, when the stalkers returned. They were bigger now, and together. We saw two or three of them at once, at the fewest. And they were fast. They could stand above the grass, but ran at a height which obscured them in the blades. We slept poorly, until we made war on the grass-people. Our stalkers, we vowed, would not take us in the dark night with their soulless eyes anymore. We found the things which we called grass-people… we looked into their faces and understood what they were. Beasts. With nasty teeth and hand-feet and an awkward walk. We took them and bred them, bringing the hairy things with us as we wandered through the drying place. The wild beastmen were untamed and unhelpful. They spat and threw and beat and kicked and sometimes killed, but they were worth holding. Excellent trackers… they could find water, and each other, quite well. Especially notable is their smelling of the rain. Once we learned how they told each other rain was coming, with excited brushes of the face, we could plan our hunts, rests, travels… anything. It was as if we were oracles. That was perhaps a thousand years in the past, at least. Now, the beastmen are well-kept, painted, harnessed… they are like war-dogs. They almost hunt for us. This is how we came to have the leash of the hairy things of Gone-Great-River.” Quanr took a hearty drink from her bowl. Her voice was becoming thin from all of the talking. The Gutuul na’Killi stared. Some respectful, some curious. Many extended hands to the face of Quanr, a gesture of guest-gratitude, which she touched with her predentary.
A drum came from the beach. A great boat had landed, rowed from sixty-six pairs of three-seated oarslots. Pouring from the sides of the craft were a strange breed of warrior from a distant land. From the waist-down, they were nude, and atop a skinny belt of cordage they wore only a beaten-brass breastplate and gauntlets. Their feathers, like those of the bladesman I had played dice with, were tarred or sapped, and drawn back into quills. They were sparse in feather, too, with a low frill and short, sharp brow horns, and skin of a blue-black peppered with white flecks.
They moved as a cohesive group, jostling together and pulling their ship to the staging hill. When most were ashore, they produced from beneath the deck a great fish with many spears lodged in its side, and brought it before our Puva-Ghita. He approached them, and it was then that I realized he was not two-thirds the size of their warriors.
“Tzoh Nojo-ta-Fissa na’Qichiua.” Quanr said underbreath. She turned her face to mine. “Kind people. Strong, gentle. They come from a place of mangroves. Water never lower than the waist… they keep themselves dry this way. Letting the skin out in the air.” I understood. We gathered our bands, now three- Beaded Ones, Gutuul na’Killi, and Tzoh na’Qichiua, to continue our warmaking and waiting. Things were well. Quanr and the Puva-Ghita were making much talk with the mangrove people… It was every time I looked to them, they were touching faces or hands with a great, grey-white figure in the firelight. The mangrove people brought with them great hooked spears and spadeswords. They spent little time around the eating-mat. They had their fill of fish, I am sure. The great fish had a taste like urine. It was salty, bitter, and deeply spiced. Many of the Gutuul na’Killi showed their distaste in their eyes and lips. I was more restrained. The fish was rotund, like a carp or reef-fish, but with a thick-scaled head and asymmetric tail. It was a deep black all over, and had no teeth in its mouth, rather, the bones of the jaw poked through the skin. I do not know if this was because of the cooking or drying… but it was certainly a bizarre animal. I am glad I ate it once. I don’t crave it, certainly.
A group of mangrove-people and my troupe began to socialize, sharing stories and speaking of food and history and family. We made proper, tender contact. I found myself becoming well engaged with a great Tzoh na’Qichiua. Her name was Tofissi. She was broad and long-quilled. Her face was covered with white spots, concentrated around her nose and lips. I loved her nose. It sloped so nicely into her rostral scale, which then sloped nicely into her predentary. I offered to her my bowl of fish. I wouldn’t have finished it even if she took it. She declined, of course… but that was of little import as the evening crept on and the moon crawled across the beach-sky. In time, though we were poor at speaking in the tongues of the other, we found ourselves alone in the pale sands, with the noise of dinner eclipsed by the waves.
“Tell me, Vya. Why are you on the beach?” Her voice was deep, syringeal. It had a scratch in it, from smoking, maybe.
“because you led me here, Kak-Kak. Who am I to refuse a Tzoh like you?” Tofissi looked at me and flipped her head back and forth. She laughed. It was a sound that gave me a feeling like the first time I heard my broodsisters hum. A primal cooing- her laugh came from her fenestrae, not her throat. It lacked the scratch of her speech. It was beautiful.
“No, no. What brought you to this point? You didn’t make warpath because I told you to. What brought you here?”
Even now, I do not know. I did not speak back to the she-saurian that took me on this beach. I only felt her. Those last words, which she sent to me… what brought me here- Khanaa did not put a reason into my mind. I miss Tofissi.
The morning came. I layed with Tofissi on the beach, in the sand-like-broodmother’s-embrace. The waves had come in, and were licking at our feet. I moved to shake Tofissi awake- but she turned first, and looked to me with her face of gloam. Her eyes crept around in their sclerotic rings, but her lips stayed shut.
“Come.” I brought to her the body-wrappings she had worn the night before. I pulled her to her feet, and she rose in front of me- a greatest-of-shapes, she drew her head up like the High Azhdarch of myth as it is wrought from the mountain. We walked along the beach, chattering and gurgling to ourselves. I do not remember what we said, only that it felt warm in the mouth and the ears. We returned to the staging hill. I looked to Tofissi, and I saw her face twist in disgust, and then in fear. Her eyes sank, her jaw pulled in. She lowered herself, and underbreathed a string of sounds in an older language.
Tofissi looked to me now, confused… doubtful. She spoke in a restrained anger. “Fools you are… Beaded Ones, to bring the hairy people into your ranks. They are not the tool you make them into.” She spoke of the beastmen with fear and anger. I cast my eyes ‘round the staging hill. All of the Qichiua brought the same eyes onto the beastmen, fearful and angry.
“They are not like us, Tofissi… I cannot know what you have not given unto me, what I know is that they are shakey in the hands, and cannot craft fine tools, and that they are black in the eyes and without a soul.” I leaned onto her as I said this. Her breastplate was still cold from lying in the sand.
“They are not like us in the worst ways, Vya. I was a smoothskin in the mangroves- a troupe of the hairy people come to my tree. My family hides. They cannot see us, we think. Hours pass. Broodmother-of-mine goes outside to look if they are gone. They come down on her and turn the water beneath us red and thick. Brother-of-mine leaves the tree to check, more hours later. The sun is up. They come down upon him. It is me and my sister, two smoothskins in the roots of a mangrove. We wait. Two suns rise and fall. It is a long time through the third night when I hear the hairy people leave. Three days I spend smelling Broodmother-and-brother-of-mine. In Qichiua, they are greater in stature, and red of coat. But they have the same eyes, the same teeth. They will make a kill of us. Only time stops them. And numbers.”
Her eyes were frantic, white scales pushing them deep into their sockets. Her face was still, so motionless and focused on the beastmen and their awkward, shuffling walk that her piercings hung straight to the ground. I did not want to fight her. She looked back to me and brushed a wise hand across my rictus. Then she was gone, walking off to her tent. I did not follow.
In the tension between the beastmen of the Beaded Ones and the Tzoh-Nojo-ta-Fissa na’Quichiua, another war party arrived. They rode in, all together, on a single beast. They called her Thhukmisi Wichili, the city bearer. Forty warriors and forty pages clambered about with the skill of a clinging lizard, dangling from ropes fastened between the great scales of an animal of earth-shaking might. The thing cast a shadow as vast as a lone conifer as it walked… it moved with heavy steps at the base of the staging hill, and its shoulders rippled through pebbly skin at my eye level. Had I walked straight out on the air beneath me, I would be an arm and a half below the animal’s back. Its height did not stop there. The ropes and satchels and hammocks tied to the beast were slung around a seismic tail and midsection. The neck of the great warmaker was also wrung up with ropes and climbing gear, and tapered as it went. It was the shape of a skinny conifer tree, taller than any plant I had ever touched, and at the top sat a jet-black head only a little bigger than my own. I could not judge the color of the body, buried in fiber and warrior’s flesh as it was. I stood and made my way down the hill as the war party began to dismount from their shared steed. Our Puva-Ghita, as well as the Ghita of the Gutuul na’Killi, had brought forth date palm leaves for the bladesfolk. They passed them up the neck of Thhukmisi Wichili and she ate heartily.
Their Ghita came forth. He crawled deftly across rope and wood, and touched his spear-tip to the ground from his place on the shoulder of the beast. The shaft of the spear was curved, and easily as long as the foot-to-shoulder of six warriors. The Ghita slid down the spear’s shaft, which was made of a waxed wood with notches in it, and hit the coarse dirt with the noise of rock on driftwood.
“Nussufa Wichilli Nokkoli.” His voice was full and hoarse. He and the other Ghitas reached out hands and rubbed predentaries. They made private talk beneath the shadow of a mortal creature which could surely hear the gods.
The night came again. I found my way to Tofissi as we sat around the eating-mat. She was leaned back on a rolled-up bedcloth, dipping her tongue in and out of a drinking gourd. The she-saurian looked up at me, her sparse feathers pinned to the back of her neck. As she met my gaze, her piercings shook slightly. I inhaled, preparing to speak- but I did not. I only sat next to her, and let her lean into me. The sky matched the deep blue of the sea, and then the black of her scales. The night was far louder now than when the Beaded Ones first came to the staging hill, filled with the scraping of metal-on-stone as the bladesfolk honed their weapons, the hooting of the ever-agitated beastmen, the lapping of the waves on the sides of the longboats, the low cooing of the Gutuul na’Killi’s warbeasts, and now, the lonely cries of Thhukmisi Wichili.
The warmakers had assembled beneath the staging hill. By now, all the Tzoh na’Ghadil could surely hear us across the twisting waves. We were but eight hours’ ride from their home… and the eyes of four Ghita were alight with the moon and the avarice of a conqueror.