“We will ride for Bajadek after newsun sacrifice,” he told Hanochek. “Leave me now. I would sit in silence with the god.”
Hanochek nodded and withdrew. Raklion pulled out his snakeblade, he cut his forearm and gave the god his blood.
By lowsun tomorrow Bajadek will be smitten, your wrath shall lay him on the ground. I am your knife, god. I am your arrow and your spear. Use me. Let the warlords of Mijak know that Raklion warlord sits in your eye.
Newsun came swiftly, staining the sky scarlet. With sober anticipation the warriors gathered to witness sacrifice. The white lamb died with grace, in silence. Wyngra godspeaker, appointed to the warhost by Nagarak himself, captured its blood in a golden chalice and gave it to Raklion to drink. Then he scooped out the lamb’s eyes and burned them to ash with a purple godstone. The ash he sifted through his fingers, drifted it onto the silver omen-plate. Naked and squatting, amulets the size of fists dangling from thongs around his neck, his wrists, his waist, he lowered his eyelids and read the ashes’ drifted patterns.
“ Here is the sign of the scorpion ,” said Wyngra, rasping. His gnarled fingers traced the omens in the air. “ Here is its raised tail, here are its pincers. Here lie the bodies of the vanquished, woe to the misguided and the tricked. Ride triumphant to battle, Raklion warlord. The god sees you in its eye, it hungers for the blood of the disobedient and the greedy .”
Raklion raised his snakeblade high, it flashed in the first light, red as blood. His belly churned with fresh hot lamb’s blood. Blood stained his lips and smeared the snake on his leather breastplate.
“The omens favor us! We ride for the god!”
“We ride for the god!” his warriors shouted. “We ride for Raklion, warlord of Et-Raklion, city of cities in the god’s land of Mijak!”
As Wyngra wrapped the lamb’s body for later eating, Raklion turned to Hanochek. “Gather the skill-leaders. I will speak to them before we ride.”
They stood before him grim and glorious, the skill-leaders of his warhost: Zapotar, Antokoi, Bodrik and Dokoy. He praised them for their training and their leadership, he thanked them for their service and the blood they would spill. He promised to honor their bodies if they should fall.
“The god sees you,” he told them, fist pressed against his heart. “The god sees you in its eye, and I see you also.”
They departed to rally their warriors, and in private he took his leave of Hanochek. They would fight together in the battle but that was no time for thanks or farewell.
Hano embraced him. “You are my warlord, you are my brother and my friend,” he whispered. “If I fall today, believe I fall willingly for you and the god.”
“No warlord was served as I am served by you, Hano,” he replied, and held him so hard he heard ribs creak. His voice was soft, and almost lost in the rabbling noise of the warhost gathering itself for war. Tears pricked his eyes, he let them fall. “The god see you in its eye, my friend, my brother. I will see you when the war is won.”
After that the talking was over. Raklion mounted his stallion, he rode it to the head of his warhost and led them to war.
The warhosts of Et-Raklion and Et-Bajadek faced each other on the Plain of Drokar. Raklion rode out alone, to meet with Bajadek in solitary council halfway between their gathered warriors. It was an honored custom, no danger attached to such a meeting. A warlord who killed in solitary council was demonstruck and sent to hell, his sons put to death by his own people, his bloodline washed from history in blood.
“Kneel to me, Bajadek warlord,” said Raklion curtly. “Confess your wickedness and accept the god’s smiting of your flesh alone. Your obedient warriors should not die for their warlord’s sin.”
Bajadek sneered. He had only one eye, the other lost in a skirmish with Takona warlord when he inherited his father’s lands. He was squat and brutal, he wielded his two unloved sons like a double-bladed knife, to cut and wound and maim the warlord who sired no living sons to follow him.
“What sin? What wickedness? I am a warlord, what I want, I take. That is the way of things, do you deny it?”
“Not even a warlord can take what the god has given to another. Nogolor warlord received my mercy. You can receive it also, for your warriors’ sakes.”
“Nogolor warlord is old,” replied Bajadek, scornful. “Old men are like wheat, they bend in the wind. I am stone, I am timber, my bones grow in the ground. You cannot bend me, Raklion warlord. I will kill you before highsun and take your lands and your people. Your water seed has sired no offspring, your spear is blunt. Your day is done.”
Raklion kept his face cold. In Et-Raklion his son was ripening. “The god turned away from Grakilon high godspeaker, the scorpions killed him for defying its desire. Nogolor warlord was spared, he gave to me his godpromised Daughter. Even now my son grows in her belly, the god sees me, Bajadek. I live in its eye. Repent, warlord. We will make a treaty. I would not spill your blood for the pleasure of watching you bleed.”
“Then you are a fool, Raklion,” Bajadek whispered. “Bleeding you is a pleasure long longed for. Look not for mercy from Bajadek warlord. It is a word he never was taught.”
Raklion sat for a moment, watching Bajadek gallop back to his warhost. If the warlord had bowed his head, had kneeled on the ground, had admitted his mischief, he would have asked the god to let battle end before it began.
Clearly, god, that is not your desire. Blood you desire, and blood you shall have.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Bajadek sent out his chariots first, a foolish move of arrogant bravado. He hoped to terrify his enemy’s warhost, to break their ranks and send them fleeing. His hope was wasted. Not even Bajadek’s thundering chariots could break the will of Raklion’s warhost. Raklion countered with mounted archers and slingshotters on foot, and with running spearmen who could strike a charioteer and his horses before they reached their enemy’s front line. Not all were struck down, some of Bajadek’s chariots breached his defenses. He heard his warriors and their horses screaming, he heard the crunch of bone and the tearing of flesh, smelled the first rank flooding of their blood.
He closed his ears and hardened his heart, he was fighting for the god and his own smirched honor. They died for him willingly, they died for the god.
I will honor your bodies, I will burn them to ash, I will sing your names in the godhouse of Et-Raklion.
His own chariots, Raklion held back at each flank. Hanochek led them, he would know the right time to set them free and drive Bajadek’s warriors into disarray and death.
With Bajadek’s charioteers destroyed or driven off, the battle began in savage earnest. Raklion led his warriors forward at a gallop, leaping Bajadek’s smashed chariots and the bodies of the slain. With a short spear in one hand and his snakeblade in the other he slashed, he stabbed, he punched holes in throats and bellies, severed heads and arms and sliced bodies wide open to spill their stinking entrails on the ground. The Plain of Drokar churned to bloody mud, his eyes were full of blood, his ears were full of screaming, the sky was red, the earth was red, his arms were red up to his shoulders.
A spear thrust took his stallion through its throat, it plunged to the sloppy ground and sent him flying. He struck, he rolled, and found his feet. The dead and dying clogged the plain beneath him, he had no choice but to tread upon them as he fought for his life. A glancing knife slash opened his cheek, he felt the blow but not its pain. An arrow struck him in the thigh; he snapped it off and kept on fighting. He knew the faces of the warriors beside him, but he couldn’t remember their names. They lived, they died, they fell or they fought on. Names no longer mattered. All that mattered was victory for Et-Raklion.
Thrust—slash—stab—scream—over and over and over again. Breath seared and tearing, lungs in flames, muscles over-reached and burning, blood from his breached body slicking flesh, pumping hot. Kill. Kill. Kill.
He caught a glimpse of Bajadek through the madness, painted in blood and wielding a broad axe. The warlord looked
demonstruck, he was weeping, laughing. Four arrows jutted from his leather breastplate and two from his arm; if he felt them his pain did not show.
Raklion shouted as a Bajadek warrior rose before him. Half her face was cut away, peeled from the skull like the skin of a peach. As he lifted his spear to skewer her like goat-meat her head was shattered by an Et-Raklion slingshotter’s stone. He leapt her body and stabbed a warrior striking for Dokoy Spear-leader’s back.
“Praise you, warlord!” Dokoy wheezed.
“Praise you, Dokoy,” he wheezed in reply, and then they were separated, forced apart by a fresh wave of Et-Bajadek warriors, fighting to their gruesome deaths.
A ragged cry went up behind him.
“ The chariots! The chariots come! God see the warleader! God see him in its eye!”
With a roar like a landslide Hanochek and his chariots galloped into the battle. Raklion saw Hano flashing by, godbraids flying in the wind of his passing, his face alight with the promise of death.
Does that mean we are winning? Does that mean we have won ?
He did not know, he could not tell, he could see no further than the next enemy warrior, his next savage kill. Sobbing for air he raised his stone-heavy arm and sliced through a bared throat, then sundered a heart in an unprotected breast. Blood spurted, he tasted iron on his lips, heard a shrill scream, a grunt of pain. Wet thuds as two bodies hit the ground.
More screaming in front of him. Hanochek and his glorious chariots smiting Bajadek’s warriors, herding them and crushing them and slaughtering them like sheep.
A second glimpse of Bajadek showed the warlord howling, showed him cleaving bodies with sword and axe. Blood sprayed, arms flung high in surrender, in defeat, godsparks fleeing to the sunbright sky.
Raklion sucked air into his starving lungs, forced his mind to ignore his body’s agony, and willed himself through the press of flailing slashing dying bodies towards Bajadek, his enemy, god’s enemy, who was killing his precious warriors. A desperate Et-Bajadek warrior’s knife caught him across the back; without looking he spun, swung, and was pressing forward again before her body hit the tumbled corpses around them. On the edges of his scarlet vision he could still see Hano’s chariots, chivvying and killing Et-Raklion’s enemies. He laughed aloud, a breathless gasp, and kept on pushing.
A second knife-thrust opened his arm; he severed the wrist of the man who attacked him and tasted more hot blood in his gaping mouth. Bajadek was just four paces away, his back was turned, he did not see god’s wrath approaching . . .
A wild swinging sword cut across Raklion’s right hamstring. He stumbled, shouting, and as his tired feet tangled in a dead horse’s entrails he fell forward, down across the spotted horse’s slit-apart belly. The stinking air was driven from his lungs, his blurring vision showed him horsehide and arrow shafts and three severed fingers abandoned in the mud.
Bajadek turned. “Raklion warlord!” he shouted, joyful. “On his knees before me, among his dead. The god has delivered you, Bajadek is in its eye! Hold !” he commanded his war-lusty warrior. “This is a warlord, his short life is mine !”
Gleeful and bloodsoaked, the sinning warlord approached. Raklion grunted and tried to stand but his body was spent, his strength all gone. His slashed leg would not hold him, he had no choice but to sprawl on the hulk of dead horse and repent his sins. Not one of his warriors was close by to aid him, Hano was not here, he tried to shout but he was speechless, like a rock.
Aieee, Et-Raklion! I have failed you, I have failed the god. Will it desert me? Will my godspark go to hell?
Death came towards him, and he was afraid.
Why did you say I was godblessed, Nagarak? Why did you tell me I was safe in the god’s eye? Are you not my high godspeaker, do you not know the god’s true will? You said I would live, how can you be wrong?
Above the faltering sounds of battle, a lilting, laughing, challenging cry.
“ Bajadek warlord! Bajadek warlord !”
Raklion lifted his dizzy pounding head to look where Bajadek looked. He saw puzzled disbelief in his enemy’s face, felt his weary heart leap as he recognized who it was calling Bajadek’s name.
“ Bajadek warlord, it is time for you to die !”
The challenging warrior danced across the charnel plain, danced towards Bajadek, a scarlet snakeblade in her scarlet hand. She was lithe, she was beautiful, bathed in blood like sacrificial milk.
Hekat.
Beneath his blood, Bajadek warlord was an ugly man. Hekat danced towards him, repulsed by his ugliness. He was all brute force, no grace, no lightness. His one good eye was wide and blue like the sky, his crimsoned skin as dark as night. He wore many godbells in his braided hair, but they were clogged with gore and could not sing.
She took this as an omen.
The air she danced through was soaked in death. The ground she danced over was littered with warriors and horses, their emptied bowels and bladders sludging the earth and the soaked, crushed brown grasses. Their eyes were dead, they stared at nothing.
Bajadek warlord’s living eye saw her. He held an axe in one hand and a sword in the other, they were smeared crimson from blade-point to hilt. He was wounded, his own blood mingled with the blood he had spilled from Raklion’s warhost. He stood up straight and laughed to see her.
She challenged him again, dancing like sunlight across the crowded plain. So many warriors she had killed already, she could not count them. He would be one more.
“ Bajadek warlord! You must face me !”
“Face you ? A child ?” jeered Bajadek. He hefted his axe and brandished his sword. He stood there waiting, he was unafraid. An ugly man, and stupid, also.
Hekat smiled and opened herself to the god. The god’s power filled her, it set her on fire, if Bajadek cut her she would bleed out its fury. Every one of his warriors she had danced with was left weeping scarlet tears as they died. A few of them had kissed her, she was cut in this place, bruised in that. Pain was a sacrifice to the god, she gloried in it, how else could she worship but with her blood?
She danced with Bajadek, whose godbells were silenced.
The warlord was a mighty man, and with his sword and axe was mightier still. He swung at her, he slashed at her, he roared his rage and screamed his hate. He could not touch her, she was in the god’s eye, and its grim power was her blood, her heart, it was her solace and her strength.
Where Bajadek reached for her she was gone, twisting sideways or upwards or around him like smoke. Where he was, her snakeblade kissed him, it bled him like a black lamb on the god’s altar. She danced on sand, on a clean-swept street, he stumbled through entrails and staggered over splintered bones. Her hotas flowed like honey, sweet in her fingers, sweet in her toes. She was the sandcat, the lizard, the falcon dancing over the meadow. Her snakeblade was keen as mercy from the god. Inside her was stillness, death whispered in her ear.
Lost in the knife-dance, feeling Raklion’s hot gaze on her, she smote Bajadek for him and for the god, a terrible ecstasy welling inside.
I am Hekat, I know what I am. I am the god’s snakeblade, dancing in its eye.
Bajadek warlord was ugly, and dying. His axe was fallen from his hand and Hekat had severed his wrist’s taut tendons so his fingers could no longer make a fist. His own great sword was shattered, his stolen sword not long enough to reach her. She had cut off his breastplate with two swift knife-strokes and laid him open to the bone. His arms were slashed like lamb for roasting, his legs were shredded scarlet ribbons. His heart’s blood pumped with each shuddering beat, there was more outside him than within. He breathed like a camel at the end of endurance.
She stood before him on the balls of her feet, looking up into his blood-slicked face. “Bajadek warlord, it is over. You displeased the god, the god has punished you.”
Pain and fear dulled his bright blue eye. “Who are you? What are you?”
“She is Hekat,” said Raklion’s pale, satisfied voice. “She is a warrior, godtouched
and mine.”
Bajadek’s fading gaze shifted to look past her. His slack face twisted with hate. “Raklion warlord. With seed like water, and a blunted spear.”
Hekat killed him. Drew her snakeblade across his throat and watched without comment as the last of his red blood spurted from the wound. Bajadek stayed standing one moment, two moments. Then his dead knees buckled and he crashed to the ground.
“Hekat,” said Raklion, and put his hand on her shoulder.
She turned to him slowly, emptied of the god, emptied of power. Raklion, standing now, was hurt and bloody, he favored one leg and breathed as though the air was poisoned.
She smiled at him, though she was hurting. “You watched me, warlord. You saw me dance.”
“I watched you, Hekat.” He smiled back at her, a grimacing effort. “I saw you dance. You have slain my enemy. I am pleased with you.”
Her hollowed heart lifted. The warlord of Et-Raklion had seen her, and was pleased. She is Hekat. Godtouched and mine . She was precious to him now, she had slain his enemy, she had saved his life. Her home was the barracks, for ever and ever. “I danced for you, warlord. I danced for the god.”
“I know,” he whispered, and bent to kiss her brow. “The god thanks you, Hekat, and so do I.”
“The battle is over?”
His gaze swept across the almost silent plain. “It is over. We have won.”
“No, warlord,” she told him, even as the sun was blotted from the sky and a dark veil fell before her face. “The god has won. It gives us the victory. Kill a bull-calf and drink in its honor.”
“Hekat!” he shouted.
She barely heard him. The last thing she felt was his strong hand, reaching for her, as she crumpled witless at his feet.
Standing in the midst of carnage Raklion grunted as Wyngra godspeaker healed his sluggishly bleeding wounds. He had resisted godspeaker attentions as long as he could, his hurts were not mortal. Other warriors needed Wyngra’s godstone far more urgently than he.