Sky City, Malel, Tokoban
19th day of the grand absence of the Great Star
Ilandeh stared down on the Sky City from above. The march around the base of the hill and then up the northern flank had been brutal – mudslides and flash floods had barred their route between the rolling hills, forcing them up and over each one until they were exhausted and mud-splattered to the thighs.
They’d had to get there by the tenth day, though, or risk leaving the High Feather and his Talons vulnerable, and so the mixed force of macaws, eagles, slaves, and dogs had pushed on relentlessly despite the weather and the slick mud and rock beneath their feet. They’d done it, just, reaching their position in the afternoon of the tenth day. Feather Calan had allowed a two-hour rest around the curve of the hill out of sight of the city so the warriors could regain some strength, and then they traversed the slope and filtered out to take control of the ground between the Sky City and Malel’s womb.
It was the first time any of the warriors except Ilandeh had seen the city up close, its location and defences and walls and fields. The murmuring had been quiet and disciplined as they analysed what it was they were going to take, and then just a little lighter with relief when they spotted High Feather Pilos’s Talons marching up out of the jungle below. Everything – everyone – was in place and on time.
Below the expanse of limestone walls enclosing the city were thick orchards and terraced fields green with crops and the double loop of the Swift Water that bent back on itself as it rushed downhill. Each formed a series of obstacles difficult to navigate – defences that prevented a straight uphill assault. Instead, and at Ilandeh’s recommendation, Pilos would attack the western wall and curve his warriors up to meet Ilandeh’s above the city. Feather Calan’s forces would filter down to give battle at the eastern walls.
A three-pronged attack that would drive the defenders down through the city and into their orchards, fields and to the river – their own defences becoming a series of traps to hold them still so the Melody could round them up. Eventually.
The arrival above and around the sides of the city had caused chaos among the hundreds of refugees camped outside the walls and tall, barred gates. A trampled track leading up northwest told of many who’d already fled, while the rest screamed and begged and beat at the gates. Northwest would lead to nothing but the salt pans marking the border between Ixachipan and Barazal. They could be chased down and roped once the city fell. There was nowhere for any of them to go except into the Empire and under the song.
It seemed Ilandeh had done her work in the Sky City a little too well. Her fostering of bad blood between Tokob, Yaloh, and Xentib seemed to have blossomed into something bigger than she had anticipated, causing the Sky City to refuse entry to desperate civilians fleeing the Melody. She wondered whether any of them had come from the towns below, and whether that meant her Whispers had been discovered and executed. She breathed a swift prayer that they were safe. Either way, divisions in the defenders was work well done, as it was always easier to knap a flint that already had a crack in it.
And if there were any Whispers among those pleading for entry, she knew some at least would have scaled the walls during the night. By now they’d be ready to act, disguised as Yaloh and clad in a dead person’s clothes.
The Melody had slept out on the slope, hundreds of small fires lighting the hill around the city, double watches to prevent a night attack that hadn’t come. Ilandeh had been surprised by that – the Tokob and Yaloh facility with ambush and trap had convinced her they’d be fighting from the moment they emerged into sight of the city.
Still, it would be over soon. She and Calan had crept down to Pilos’s position once night had fallen to co-ordinate their attack, and now they just had to wait and see how the defenders would fight – whether they’d march out to try and break the forces arrayed against them, or whether slave warriors and dog warriors would take the walls and hold them for macaws and then eagles to wash the streets with blood.
Pilos’s order was to give the defenders until halfway to highsun; if they hadn’t surrendered or come out to fight by then, the Talons would assault the walls. All around Ilandeh stood the rest of the macaws, fierce and bright in their war paint and their salt-cotton armour, feathers and spears and glass blades winking in the morning light.
As they watched, the gates opened and warriors flooded out to both east and west. And then the upper gate opened too. They were making a stand of it.
Ilandeh glanced downhill and saw Calan hold her spear and small shield crossed above her head; she returned the gesture. ‘Let them come!’ the Flight shouted as the lines around her shifted. ‘Do them that honour, for though they fight for the wrong reasons, they are brave.’
The Tokob began their war chant and the Yaloh wove theirs through it, and as it rose into the sky it sent a warning shudder down the length of her back. It wasn’t full of fire and vengeance and promises of retribution; it was a quiet defiance, eerie, and hauntingly beautiful. If the sacred song of the Empire could be given human voice, it might sound something like this. She shuddered again at such blasphemy and whispered a soft, fervent prayer for forgiveness to the holy Setatmeh.
The Melody’s own chant rose sporadically along the lines and grew in strength and vigour and Ilandeh added her voice to it, feeling it lift her and fill her with righteousness. Their chant too was beautiful, and it drove them all, speeding their hearts and their blood. When they reached the moment within the song that called for movement, for passion and fire, they began to flow downhill towards the enemies who would one day be happy, productive members of the Empire.
‘Range,’ called voices up and down the line as they ran, and the front ranks loosed their arrows. They thrummed through the morning and the Melody flowed behind them, three volleys and others coming back to meet them, and then they reached the second range and their throwers launched their big, heavy javelins.
An arrow buzzed past, close enough to make Ilandeh flinch. It punched into the macaw behind, stealing his legs from beneath him. Downhill, Calan’s slave warriors and dog warriors were falling too, ragged holes opening up in the front line. The eagles would go in last.
Slingers now, almost more dangerous than the archers, for an arrow in the arm could be removed and bandaged, but a stone in the same place would shatter bone. The storm of missiles got heavier and more macaws fell. Unlike Calan’s eagles, they didn’t have a screen of slave warriors to take the brunt of the initial fight. The small wooden shield in Ilandeh’s off hand was to bat away spear thrusts, but she angled it over her head as best she could and kept on running. The faster she got in with the enemy, the better.
The lines came together and shattered, the Tokob breaking up into their Paw formations, six groups of five fighting as a unit and supporting each other. The Yaloh split too, both tribes accustomed to fighting within the close confines of the jungle, where lines and large groups were impossible and battles were normally only a couple of hundred warriors fighting short, intense duels. It was easy to flow through the gaps they left in their own lines and so engage the rear fighters as well as those at the front. The defenders’ second wave was immediately engulfed, leaving them no reinforcements.
Ilandeh ducked under the swing of a club that would have taken off her head and punched out with her spear; the woman batted it away, stepped inside Ilandeh’s reach and swung again. The Flight dropped to her belly, rolled onto her back and stabbed up, raking open the woman’s leg. Her opponent screamed and smashed the club down, but she rolled again, made it to one knee and punched the flint tip of her spear through her enemy’s stomach.
There were still snatches of the war chant echoing across the hill, but mostly the sounds were grunts, curses, and shrieks of pain, the clack and clash of weapons, and the meaty tear of flesh and gristle.
Two Tokob came for her, one from each side, their paint bright and their faces hateful. Ilandeh took a hatchet on the small shield tied to her forearm, then wrapped her hand around one warrior’s elbow and yanked hard, pulling him onto her spear and spinning them both so the second man’s thrust killed him instead of her. He stopped in horror, screaming a name, and she wrenched her spear free and used it to steal his voice and the name both, punching into his neck and tearing back out.
Something hit Ilandeh in the back and she went down hard, attacker on top of her and the side of her face slapping mud. They rolled together a few strides down the slope with Ilandeh pinned inside arms and legs thick with muscle and her spear flailing as they tumbled. They came to a dizzy stop and the Whisper dragged her knife out of her belt; the fall had broken off part of the obsidian blade and the remnant was shorter than her little finger, but with two jagged, wicked points. She rammed it into the leg that was pressing on hers and dragged upwards towards the hip.
The scream set Ilandeh’s ear ringing but he let go and she let momentum carry her over, rolling until she faced him again. There was a lot of blood but not enough to indicate she’d hit the killing place, and he had a knife too. It hit her in the chest, punching into – through – her salt-cotton so she felt it slide, hot and agonising, across her collarbone. That was a killing place too, but her knife was already in his armpit, slicing muscles and nerves and taking the strength from his hand.
It fell away and she reared up, trapped his hand under her knee and slammed her broken knife down into the side of his neck. She paused over the dying man and then pulled away the top of her armour. It was staining red already, redder than the feather in her hair, hot and throbbing and hurting to breathe. Ilandeh put the wood-and-cotton handle of her knife in her mouth and bit down; then she drew the Tokob blade out of her chest. Only the tip was red, perhaps the length of her thumb-joint; her armour had stolen most of the force. Still, the wound bled freely.
She breathed experimentally, but couldn’t hear or feel any bubbling. She ripped a wad of cotton from the medicine pouch on her belt and stuffed it against the wound, tightened the strap on her armour to hold it in place, and checked her surroundings again.
More were coming.
The sun told her two hours had passed. Corpses littered the hillside, all the tribes gathered to fight for or against the Empire adding their blood and life to Malel’s sides until the thin skin of soil on her flank was a red slurry and fighters slipped and skidded and fell and died.
A distant roar as Calan finally committed her eagles, reinforcing the dog warriors who’d pushed the defenders back along the eastern line. The enemy had seen them too and shouts of alarm rose up. There was a collective shuffling together, a searching for orders, longing gazes cast towards the city. She scanned her own section of the battle and found it disciplined and holding firm. Below, some of the Tokob facing the eagles ran for safety.
‘Cut them off!’ she shouted, gesturing to the pod around her and then whistling. Second Flight Beyt, restored to her proper place as Ilandeh’s subordinate, looked up and Ilandeh pointed at herself and then downhill. The other woman nodded and waved her on.
Ilandeh ran on burning, shaking legs, the shield on her left arm long since splintered into nothing and the flesh beneath pummelled black. She’d lost her spear and found another, lost that and stolen an axe from a dying Yalotl. Her pod formed the arrow shape with her at the tip, and they plunged down through the panicking, fighting roil of defenders. Cut them off cut them off cut them off.
A few more Tokob broke for the city, then a knot of Yaloh. Ilandeh forced more speed into her legs, teeth gritted against pain and the uneven, slippery ground and the desire to stop. She was macaw, the half-blood warrior daughter of a Pechaqueh noble, she was Flight, she was Whisper, and she would not let down the Empire of Songs or the High Feather. She would not.
Even so, it was mostly Calan’s dog warriors who got there first. Ilandeh knew they would be the ones only a few moons or a few actions away from freedom, that tantalising taste like honey on the lips that was a future armed with digging sticks and cooking pots rather than spears or knives. A future with their freed families around them, land to call their own, and the glory of the song forever in their hearts.
Perhaps a hundred of them got between those fleeing and the Sky City’s eastern gate, fighting viciously to keep the Tokob and Yaloh away from safety. Ilandeh sped up some more, ignoring the fierce battles all around her, intent only on supporting those dog warriors at bay before the walls.
Calan’s spear-throwers opened up on the Yaloh flank, and more of the enemy broke and ran. The dogs were badly outnumbered now and overseers were cracking whips and forcing the slave warriors forward through the enemy while the eagles followed, taking apart Paw after Paw with lethal efficiency. The slaves wouldn’t be in time to save the dogs. Ilandeh might be – as long as the gates didn’t open and reserves pour out to take them in the rear.
‘Setatmeh!’ she screamed and the dogs saw her, took heart, and pulled into one long impenetrable line in front of the gate that neither Tokob nor Yaloh knew how to counter. Ilandeh’s arrow formation punched into the biggest knot of Tokob and cleaved it in half. They spun to face the new threat and the dogs responded, curling the edges of their line inward to trap them in the scorpion’s pincer. Between them, none survived. It was wasteful, but the first day’s battle always was. They could begin taking slaves once the defenders’ will had been broken.
Above on the walls, arrows began to flicker down and the Melody warriors pushed forward, pressing Tokob and Yaloh away from their city and towards the slave warriors and eagles. Another pincer, bigger but still lethal.
Out of arrow range, Ilandeh paused to breathe, her battered left hand pressed to her sodden salt-cotton. The blood had soaked through the stiff layers and rendered them useless. She was wearing nothing more than a padded tunic. Someone barged into her from her left, slamming her into the ground with a roar of animal rage. The back of her head hit mud hard and stars burst in her vision. When they cleared, there was a woman snarling in her face, a woman both familiar and armed.
‘Lutek of the Tokob,’ Ilandeh croaked and smiled a death smile as her hand scrabbled for her axe.
Lutek’s lips peeled back from her teeth and the knife flashed as it began its downward arc. Ilandeh grabbed with her right hand and pushed; she jerked her left knee up and Lutek’s weight shifted to the side; Ilandeh threw herself in the same direction. She lost her grip on the warrior’s wrist and Lutek punched her in the face and slipped her arm free, her knife scoring through the base of Ilandeh’s thumb. She stabbed again, but a warrior’s sandalled foot connected with her ribs and tumbled her over. A hand dragged Ilandeh to her feet and by the time she’d found her balance in their grip, Lutek was gone, swept away by the swirl of the battle.
The Whisper fought for air. She’d known what would happen when her old friends, all those she’d betrayed, saw her, she just hadn’t expected the flicker of guilt that had made her hesitate, a tiny fraction of a heartbeat only, but enough. If the dog warrior who’d dragged her to her feet hadn’t intervened with a well-placed kick, she would have died. It could never – would never – happen again.
The Tokob had rallied once more and were again fighting a retreat towards the eastern gate while archers and darters on the walls shot over their heads, forcing the Melody back. The Yaloh streamed uphill towards the northern entrance. Splitting up, forcing the attackers to split too if they wanted to chase them down. Her macaws were still at the northern wall under Beyt’s command, supposing the Second Flight was still alive, but if they had archers there, too, it would make it difficult to close with the Yaloh without being cut to pieces. More defenders appeared on the city walls with arrows, slings, and spears.
Ilandeh looked for Feather Calan, to see whether she’d order the slave warriors to storm the walls regardless, but then drums began echoing from above and behind. The retreat. Pilos must have decided they’d bled the city enough for the first day.
Ilandeh jogged away from the wall, out of arrow range, beginning to let herself feel her exhaustion, her hurts and aches. This battle was over, but she’d been tasked with one final conquest on this first day. Grim and tight-lipped, she paused to haul air into her lungs and stared north. Uphill. Towards the womb.