R K Duncan - [BCS285 S02] - The Sweetest Fruit of Summer (html) Read online

  She might have argued. She could have said that she was weak and there was no way she could master the flood of fire and twist of shadows that came out of those seeds now. She should have demanded training, or at least an explanation of all he knew about these visions and how to read them.

  She had never refused Hadi or argued with him. She did not want to try now, when she was tired and frightened of the power in his hands and she could not tell the difference between love and pride and hunger in his face.

  She took the seeds he counted out, five this time, into her hand and ate them all together.

  The fire did not know words, so she did not use them. She tried to fix in her mind with the same flashes it had shown her last time. She thought of arrows flying, leaping wolves, a hand pulling Hadi from the saddle, the tent around them burning.

  The vision burst on her tongue, sweet, tart, and peppered. She stood among the tent town, Hadi’s city. Sword clanged against sword, and men shouted over the screams of horses, but that was distant, far and faded out of the sight’s pull. The people went about their business, carrying water, gathering dung to burn, spinning and weaving and mending harness. Little men, old and shriveled in the face, only as tall as her knee, stood up out of the grass, out of the ground. They had needle swords, and they cut ankles until people fell, and they stabbed and stabbed each one into a bloody ruin. The people did not see them until they were cut down. They did nothing, and they did not turn at the screams when their neighbors died. Three bearded vultures flew overhead as Corra fell onto her back.

  This time, she woke enough to guide her own tongue a little, Hadi did not have to question her. He still pet her like a favored dog while she reported on the vision. When she was finished, he nodded and smiled again.

  “You have seen what I needed. The people of the vulture banner have been restless under my tribute before. They will try to fight when we come to their range, but we will be ready for their tricks now.”

  Corra dreamed of needles that night, of corpses being stitched to her skin to make twins on either side of her, of dancing round the evening fire sewn to the seven henna-headed girls in a circle of stolen flesh.

  She did not recover from the seeing enough to stand or ride for three days. She was carried on a litter strung between two placid horses and shielded from the curious by curtains. Dati brought Corra rumors of her own death, from discontents who said Hadi relied too much on her; that he was only a strong king because his green-land wife could see the future by witchery. He was still a young king, new in the saddle, and he had won two grand victories in a month, but both had been at her word, and some of the raiders were not happy to see a green-land girl in a place of honor beside their masked king.

  Two days after she joined Hadi again on his black horse, they came to the ranges of the vulture banner, and Hadi made his warriors ready. He sent out scouts, and they returned with word of the vulture riders gathered for war and coming toward the king’s caravan.

  At dawn the next day, Hadi sent his warriors to meet the rebels, but he held back his best, the companions who had fought around him at the raid her first sight had dispatched, and he put his bone-faced mask onto another man’s face and set him to lead the charge.

  Hadi and his picked fighters, and all who did not fight, shut themselves in their tents and waited at his order. Corra watched out of the entryway of their tent beside him, pressed against his side. She felt him stern, holding himself still. He was tense and eager for something to come.

  They heard the battle joined in the distance, the grate of steel on steel, the murmur of so many horses running, the high whoops of the champions as they outpaced the rest. Hadi shivered, just a little, at the sound of a battle he was not fighting.

  She wanted to ask what they were waiting for, what he had found in the nonsense of her vision, but he had commanded silence, and she did not want to see how he would make her obey.

  The grass rustled at the edge of the tent city. Men came out, slight and swaggering even while they stepped quietly.

  “They have sent their young men to burn our tents while the real warriors fight.” Hadi whispered in her ear, watching the youths creep past the sheep pens and among the tents like a cat waiting for a bird to land. “It is good trick, when no one expects it. They think my men will break when they see smoke rising behind them, and they will ride us down.”

  The young men looked tentative when they saw no one going about the day’s work. They halted for a moment to look around. The tall one in the lead pointed the way straight toward the great tent, right at Corra hidden in the darkness of the entryway.

  Some knelt to kindle torches, and all advanced with no more hesitation. They had come to burn, and they would do it, even if the bone-faced king had turned his people into ghosts to hide them. They came right to the royal tent.

  Hadi slid his sword out slow and silent and a long knife in his left hand. When the tall vulture boy reached out to pull the tent flap aside, Hadi leapt out and opened his throat in one bright flash. He didn’t squeal like a calf did going down, only fell choking while she watched him; slow and awkward among the bright dance of blades all around. Hadi’s battle cry was solid as a fist boxing her ears. Three more young men were down before they started shouting. Hadi’s men leapt out and cut the youths apart. Hadi laughed and slashed and danced among the dying.

  Very soon the fight was over, and women trickled from the tents to cut the throats of those left alive and take anything of worth the fools had brought with them. Corra had not looked away.

  The green-flecked eyes of the tall youth stared back at her. Her hands went to her throat, where he was opened. She choked and doubled over, screaming into retching until her stomach spilled over and her throat was etched with bile and her cheeks were soaked with tears.

  Hadi came back smiling. “Another good seeing, Wife. We’ve broken them here and in the battle.” He saw her face and her sick on the grass, and he patted her head as if she were a child. “That is why you green-land people need us. You live rich, but you have no steel in you. You will always be better bowing.”

  That was all the comfort Hadi ever gave her; that he understood her weakness, and his strength left her free to be so weak.

  For all his scorn of her, Hadi was easy with praise, and she sat beside him while he passed judgment on what was left of the people of the vulture banner, and he gave her gifts of jewels and silks taken from women he sent south to be sold. She tried to wear them with a smile, to look the part of a rider’s princess.

  She had time to learn the rhythm of life in the barren places then, and to harden herself to what she had been taken into. Hadi had shown that he was stronger, not weaker, after taking a green-land wife, and he did not need new victories to show his strength or increase his wealth, so he spared her from the desert’s prize for months. After the first weeks of relief, Corra began thinking how to keep his eyes on her. She needed his regard even when he was not hungry for the future she could dream.

  The taste of their food changed as they traveled east, growing hotter and leaner, then rich with cream again as they turned north, and the treasures that each village offered changed in their seasons: silver and jade, silk and spice, bright swords, and hunting eagles. She learned to meet each new thing with resolve and to eat all that she was given. It made Hadi happy to see her fed and fattened, and she made sure to put on bangles and silks that Hadi’s eyes had fixed on. She could not afford to grow stale in his regard; to be packed away until he had a need for prophecy again. At night, she sent Dati away, so that they slept alone as much like wife and husband as kidnapper and prize.

  She taught herself to imagine little prophecies for the old men and women who still asked for them, the ones who remembered Aunt Fallo and her visions for Hadi’s uncle. Rada smiled when she rode beside and heard Corra prophesying success in love and gentle weather for the questioners, and the young women began to come with their own questions. They called her princess, sometimes even queen,
and bowed as low to her as to Hadi.

  In winter, when the settled places had no wealth for a bone-faced king, Hadi ceased his wandering and made his camp in the middle of the great plain, with all the bounty that had filled his wains through the long march from harvest to harvest. His subject tribes attended him in the ancient place among the standing stones that was called the city of the horselords, and they paid him gold and steel and service for food to keep their children through the cold.

  Corra stayed with Hadi in his great tent and made sure he and all his subjects remembered that she was his queen, not only one half of a magic that kept him on the saddle-throne. She wore the silks he had given her that left her belly bare, so that he would put his warm hands on her and hold her tight and jealous. She listened to his quiet mutterings as he debated politics to himself and let him rest his head on her soft shoulder and let go the iron strength that he had to show outside the tent. He trusted her, and her green-land weakness, to make it safe when they were two alone.

  It was spring, and they were beginning the year’s slow progress at the northeast edge of Hadi’s kingdom, eating lambs slaughtered for their tenderness and winter roots baked in the coals, when he asked her to see again.

  He put the unopened fruit into her hands. “The corner of the sun was bitten off yesterday, and there have been shooting stars and shadows on the moon. They are omens of treachery. You must see which of my subjects will rise, so that I can crush them. If one rises up and stays free even for a month, a dozen more will hear and break away.”

  It would be the end of his rule. Any sign that the scourge would not come down on them was an excuse to ignore the overseer. Who would be bold enough to dare it first, though? All the towns that bowed knew what the king’s riders would do to their fields and green orchards and their children if they rebelled.

  She knew the answer she should give before she opened the fruit and counted four seeds into her hand. She wouldn’t need more to find what she already knew, and she needed to be in control when she woke to tell her vision to Hadi. If he would not have objected, she would only have taken one.

  The taste was familiar. Her first two seeings had never faded into dusty memory. They came back fresh as the sugared flesh on her tongue.

  She saw wheat stalks sharpening to spear-points in the field. She saw riders drinking wine at the feast fire and falling dead, and women with dark ringlet curls devouring live horses, and a silver serpent slither from a bed of furs and cushions. She would not tell him of that last vision.

  She woke in Hadi’s arms.

  “I won’t need your interpretation this time, Husband. It is my mother. I saw the green valley, and her face. She always kept back the best of our harvest from the tribute. I know where she has hidden weapons and the money to pay for spearmen out of the west.”

  Hadi smiled his fierce smile. “Then you will ride before me and show me your mother’s treachery, so I can punish it and teach the new queen the price of dreaming freedom.”

  He never questioned that she would give up her mother and her old home so easily. Why would he? They had sold her to be used, and he had made her a queen.

  The warriors rode light, not waiting for the wains or the pack horses. Corra was jounced and bruised against the black horse’s neck, and she ate salted meat and drank mare’s milk and slept under the stars beside her king. She was almost as tired after three days of riding as she had been after her second seeing, and she began to understand what Hadi meant by the steel the riders had.

  They rode into the green valley with only crows to herald them. Men and women were in the fields planting. The gates of the town were open, and no one raised a spear to defend them until it was too late. The riders trampled the slow and the foolish under their horses’ hooves, and they caught every woman and man who wore fine cloth enough to be a landholder and dragged them behind to her mother’s great house, its whitewashed walls adorned with blue and red tiles. Mother stood in the doorway to meet them and prayed forgiveness for whatever confusion had made the great king angry with her.

  Corra smiled when Hadi struck Mother across the face hard enough to make her fall. He dragged her by her long black hair, and Corra led the warriors through the house. She showed them the secret storerooms where the best of each year’s grain and cheese and wine was hidden, and the others where bronze spearheads and arrows and shields were kept against the day of rebellion, and the chest where her mother hoarded silver coins.

  Hadi cut off Mother’s head himself, in the square in front of the great house and granary, where the wedding arch had been set up when he had come before. Corra let him see her smiling; let him see how the watching people, held back by his riders, hated her.

  He let his captains do the rest, cutting until the square flowed with blood. Corra could not save Fallo. She could not even try without drawing suspicion, but the old woman did not weep when she was taken to the block. They killed Corra’s first sister as well, who would have been queen after Mother, but the rest of the queen’s household they only took to sell or to keep for themselves. Perhaps the captains wanted green-land wives like their king.

  They killed every landholder who had sat in council with Mother, and their first sons and daughters, and penned what remained of the Fifteen Families to carry off as slaves. The blood and killing was as easy and as swift as the slaughter of the young warriors of the vulture banner, and Corra felt the hilt jar in her hands each time a blade swept down, as if she made the stroke herself. This was her killing; her design. This time she did not flinch or wretch. This pain she understood as well as her hardened husband: a tree must be pruned to make it grow as ordered. The rich who followed her mother had grown beyond the bounds of their submission, and so they were cut off. Corra could never have done so much with her own hands.

  When it was done, Hadi declared a feast, and he shared the bounty taken from the granary among his riders and the girls and women of the town who they had taken for sport while they remained here.

  She told Hadi that she would go among the women and tell him who would be the best to make the new queen; who would keep the peace and pay without demur. She talked with girls who remembered her departure while he nodded and drank wine and watched his captains dancing with their newest concubines.

  He fell into a drunken sleep in her mother’s great bed as soon as he had spent himself, but he woke and looked into her eyes when she put the dagger he had given her into his gut.

  “Green-land girls have steel enough, Husband, before we grow old and choose comfort.” She cut his throat before he could answer. Mother had not had the steel to keep her eldest from the tribute, but the other green-land girls had not balked at Corra’s plan when she had gone among them, and she heard the soft sound of their knives from the other rooms of the great house that the riders had taken for their own.

  In the morning, she put on her mother’s crown, and Hadi’s leather mask, and she ordered the slaughter of the horses. They would set the heads as mile posts to show what waited if raiders came into the green valley again. They would not be ruled by a queen and council who bought comfort and security with the labor of subjects in the field and the terror of daughters sold for raiders’ wives. They would build high walls and keep their small gates watched against clever raiders, and if she quickened with a straight-haired daughter whose eyes were like a hunting bird’s, Corra would not sell her for peace and safety.

  © Copyright 2019 R.K. Duncan

 

 

 
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