THE ANCESTORS SAY THAT war was once a thing people did to each other. Whole villages would go and fight other villages. When I heard that, I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine why. Now, having met Amorket, I have a bad feeling that such things could happen after all. Jalaino has gone wrong; it fears and, in its fear, its hive is building a pressure that must be bled off. Or else explode.
But war, to us, is not people against people. It is when people fight animals, but not hunting. War was what Orovo was recruiting outcasts for, all those years ago. They needed to clear a new tree of beasts, and there was a village of harboons there that wouldn’t move. Not a real village, of course, but they had their little houses in the branches, and probably the harboons thought of it as their village. And then we outcasts came, who didn’t get poisoned by their darts, and who were unnatural and strange, and we broke their houses and drove them away. And that was the end of the war, and Iblis could claim the new tree, and now that’s where Orovillo stands.
In the Little House, Graf told me all he knew. He hadn’t got to Tsuno himself. Tsuno had actually sent people to the nearest villages looking for the Order. What they’d told Graf was that they didn’t want to go make war on some animals. Instead, some animals had come to make war on them.
Graf was a big man, Severed for killing someone in an argument. A bad man, but he took to the Order and the travelling life. “Brackers,” he told me. Nothing I’d seen or met, but he’d seen some, once. “Big things, twice the size of us. Their places are past Tsuno and Farro, off beyond where people live. Or they were. And if you ask me, people don’t live there because the brackers do.”
We made arrangements then: Ledan to take three or four and continue on our route, visiting the villages and doing what needed to be done. I and the rest of our band to go with Graf and his people and see what was happening at Tsuno.
Which left Jalaino as a thorn in my mind I couldn’t pluck out, and my heart told me it’d be a bigger problem than any number of animals.
However, when I explained all this to Melory, I found my problems weren’t going to separate themselves out so neatly after all.
“Amorket says she’ll travel with you.”
The Champion of Jalaino sat outside the Lawgiver’s house, cloak over her bulky armour. With one knee drawn up to her sharp chin, she looked almost childlike.
“She thinks it will help her work out what to do,” Melory told me.
“And if she decides she has to kill me?”
“Then you’ll be surrounded by your own people, at least. And you’re going to help a village. If she goes back to Jalaino and tells them . . .” But her words petered out.
“You don’t believe that,” I decided.
“I don’t think it can work like that, no,” she agreed reluctantly. “Because we’re not just dealing with some villagers who don’t like you. We’re dealing with a hive that has set itself against you. It’s producing these Champions to fight you. If I could go there, then perhaps I could open a channel to it, but . . .”
“But it might kill you. She said one of the other Champions already ran mad.” Right then, all the pressures of being priest of the Order seemed too much. It’s hard at the best of times, with the world poison and all the rest looking to you. And now a village wanted to destroy us, and who knew how that idea might spread.
“Let her come with us. Either that or she follows us anyway, and better we have her where we can see her.”
“And I’ll be there,” Melory put in. I eyed her, but of course she’d come. She’d been looking out for me since before I was Severed; she wouldn’t stop now.
* * *
The next morning, Iblis saw us off with her crooked smile. She cast a wry glance at Amorket, standing apart from us like a shadow.
“Probably there’ll be three more like her waiting, when you come back.” Said mostly to see how I’d react. The prospect seemed all too likely. From what Amorket said, the hive at Jalaino wouldn’t stop until it felt safe from us.
I hoped Amorket wouldn’t be able to keep up with us. I’ve seen strong-seeming new recruits falter, after a few days in the wilds. Villagers work hard at their farms and crafts, but travelling needs a different kind of strength.
And yet, when we set camp the first dusk, Amorket was still with us. She walked our trail all the way, ten, twenty feet behind us, never out of sight. Perhaps she told herself she was hunting us, and thus appeased the ghost within her. She didn’t share our fire, but made her own within our view. In the morning, she was awake and ready to go by the time we rose. No predator appeared to rid us of her, and reaching Orovo without an escort showed she was more than capable of defending herself.
“She doesn’t eat.” Graf had barely taken his eyes off her since she joined us.
“I think the wasps eat,” was Melory’s best guess. “And then they go back into their house, and they feed her even as they feed on her. She doesn’t get tired, because they won’t let her.”
“Lucky her,” Graf decided, but Melory shook her head at that.
“No, because you need to get tired. It’s your body’s way of telling you to rest. Only she doesn’t have that. She’s burning herself up, just being who she is.”
Good, I thought, but Melory felt sorry for this Amorket; this Champion who’d sworn to destroy me. Melory was the doctor ghost’s bearer, after all. She couldn’t help wanting to make people whole.
So it went all the way to Tsuno: long days of tramping between the trees following the paths we of the Order worked out. Landmark to landmark, rivers and rises. Here and there a marker left by past travellers: distances and directions carved into stones in the simple code we taught each other, boiled down from the sigils the ancestors used to preserve their knowledge. Because the call was urgent, we pushed harder than normal, and at night there was less talk because everyone was tired. And always Amorket followed like a worry that would not go away. Until I realised she was becoming for me what I was to the villages: a personification of what there was in the world to fear. She is what I would warn my children about.
That made me think of Illon, because she was as close to a child as any of the Order would ever have. I had not sent her away with Ledan; there was a rebellious streak in her, not unusual for the newly Severed. She was cast out because she would not live within the rules of a village. She must learn to live within the rules of the Order, or she would be cast out twice over. So I took her to war instead.
Here was a secret I would not tell Amorket, because it would be giving a knife to my enemy. We had no children. Sharskin’s iron rule that no man of his followers lie with a woman remained in force. The child sickened, the mother sickened. Both died as the world rejected them. Melory was working with all the lore of the ancestors to overcome it, but until she succeeded, people like Illon were the only new blood the Order ever saw.
* * *
And then we came to Tsuno.
There were too many people crammed into a small village. People and ertibeests and shrovers and a host of little two-legged beasts Graf called moxies. And there was a wall, about two-thirds built. The architect ghost of Tsuno had found a pattern for something previously unnecessary.
We came out past the stumps of all the trees that got cut for that wall. It was going on for dusk, but we could see people still digging footings and driving logs in, lashing each to its neighbour. Brackers were big, Graf said, and the wall was made of massive trunks, set next to one another so you could barely get a knifeblade in between them. The sight made me nervous, and I understood a little about Amorket and Jalaino, seeing change in the world and not liking it at all.
Still, they were pleased to see us. Not just the stand-offish pleased we get when we turn up with our wild music and our bandages. Word spread so that all of Tsuno was looking at us when we stepped over the most recent postholes and into the village.
Tsuno was small, but with everyone pulled in from the fields and the herds, with all their animals jostling and complaining and stinking, it felt big and crowded, almost like Orovo did back before they split. All those people looked at us with an expression I’m not used to: desperate hope. We outcasts were what they’d fixed on, to save them from these brackers.
And they stared at Amorket, stalking in our footsteps. They could see she wasn’t one of us, but she wasn’t one of them, either. The thought hit me with a stab of sympathy I didn’t really want. As a professional outsider, I couldn’t help being sorry for someone who had even less a place in the world than me.
Soon after that, with only the briefest nod at all the ritual greeting we were used to, Graf and Melory and I were hustled up before Tsuno’s Lawgiver.
* * *
He looked like he wasn’t older than fourteen years, and that couldn’t be helping matters. At first, I assumed this was bad luck; that their last Lawgiver just died of being old at precisely the wrong time. But no, as the story came out. Their last Lawgiver went to drive away the brackers, and the brackers did for him. The child I saw before me had been Lawgiver for no more than twenty days, and he was terrified. The ghost had to fight to speak through him. And the ghost wasn’t much help because this hadn’t happened before, and there was no law for the Lawgiver to give. The one thing they knew was that, if you have an animal problem, you ask the Order.
This wouldn’t be like driving arraclids from the herds, though. From what they were saying, it wouldn’t even be like driving harboons out for Orovo.
“We first saw them a hundred days ago,” the Lawgiver told us. His voice trembled so much I felt he was still at his mother’s teat a hundred days ago. “Brackers live north and east, always. We don’t go to their lands, they don’t come to ours. That’s how it always was, before. A hundred days ago, hunters started to see bracker trails in our hunting grounds.” And I understood his hundred days didn’t mean that. I was too used to the ancestors who were precise in everything they measure. His hundred days meant long ago but not that long.
“Then we started to find their houses, where they’d built. They brought their herds to where our herds were. They stole from our fields before the harvest was ready. We tried to drive them off, but then there were more of them than anyone had ever seen, and they just took what they wanted. Then the Lawgiver killed one. Then more came and killed him. In sight of the village.”
“They eat your flesh?” Graf asked right out.
The Lawgiver paled. “They eat no flesh, not even their herd beasts. But they are not shy of killing. I’ll send for our best hunter. She has seen more than I have.” And that I didn’t doubt, because I suspected this boy had seen next to nothing.
“Bring her in, if she’ll sit with us,” I invited. His eyes flicked between us, over and over to Melory because he couldn’t work out where she fitted. I was too tired with the story to tell him.
The hunter was a hard woman, older than anyone else there, her short hair grey but her body still strong. Erma, the Lawgiver called her, and she looked me and Graf up and down. She looked me right in the Eyes of the Ancestors and didn’t flinch. She’d seen worse than me, that look said.
“I know brackers,” she said. “This isn’t what they do, never before. Keep to their own places.”
“You went hunting them with the other Lawgiver?” Melory asked her.
“No. I told them not to.” Erma scowled. “Leave it to the hunters. But the Lawgiver wouldn’t have it.” And it’s not often you find a villager who’ll argue with a lawgiver. This old woman might have been one of us, if she’d gone only a little off her path. And the boy glowered at her for questioning his predecessor, even after what happened.
“What has the Lawgiver said?” The way I said it made clear what I meant.
The boy wouldn’t look at me. “The hunters and herders are to train more of their trades, more spears and slings. Everyone who can. So we can fight.”
It was a reasonable response from the ghost: gather in more of the most needed resource, in this case hands that could defend the village. Perhaps that and the wall would be enough. Without seeing the brackers, I couldn’t know.
“Erma,” I said. “Can you tell me of the land the brackers have seized?”
She nodded, watching me carefully. She was of the villages and I was of the Order, but right then there was a bridge across that gap; she and I understood one another.
“Lawgiver, we will scout tomorrow. May Erma come to our fire tonight, and tell us what we need to know?” Specifically, tell us whatever might not get said in the Lawgiver’s earshot.
* * *
We camped hard up against the wall, close to the ragged edge where they were still building. There was no room for us inside, everyone so crammed in and frightened that having the Severed at their elbow would be inviting trouble. Erma’s visit was brief. She could be as hardy as she liked, but sitting with us made her profoundly edgy.
“I know these brackers,” she told us. “I know them all—there’s five, six villages of them over in their lands. They paint themselves, coloured mud and stuff squeezed from plants. Looks a bit like this, even.” She flicked a finger at the red stain down one side of my face, where I’d loosened my bandages. “So this village used to live days away, other side of Portruno. That’s a place right on the edge of the wilds, you know it?”
None of us had been there. The Order had come to Tsuno twice in ten years, but no further.
“I tried to make the Lawgiver see, but he says other villages aren’t our business,” Erma told us. “But to come here, they came through Portruno. I want to go see what happened there.”
The Lawgiver wouldn’t let her. But the Lawgiver would let her guide us, and didn’t decide where we went.