Dead? Then Aoife would be leader, Aoife who was staring at the grass between her mount’s legs.
Lift that head, Aoife, look at me.
“You seek death, and I say to you: it comes. I am its herald and its shepherd. But you are my tribe, you will die as and when I decree, in the way I shall set down. And I tell you now: this is not the way. For this throwing of yourselves upon strangers is merely seeking death of the flesh.” She waved her hand dismissively. “A small thing, an easy thing.”
The energy that had been building inside her climbed to the back of her throat, so that she could barely contain it. She rose in the saddle and lifted both hands, palms out. A peremptory gesture demanding attention. “It is not the death I have traveled the void to witness!” She slammed the sentence home with a double palm strike to the air. The Echraidhe jerked.
“My journey was hard beyond belief!” All the rage she felt at having been held captive and treated as something inhuman came pouring forth, making her words twist and roar. “The death I demand of you will be harder still! It means nothing to me that you prepare to die one by one in blood and heat. Nothing. I demand of you something more, much, much more. I demand of you the Great Death. The death of change.“
She saw a small movement, so tiny she almost missed it: Aoife, lifting her head.
Yes, Aoife. Look at me, listen to what you would not hear before, The sun was warm on her back now, and the smell of olla overpowering, but she did not care, she was carried away on a tide of her own power and her words were hammer blows.
“The death of change,” she said again, “the death of your way of life, the death that is not just an ending but a great and terrible new beginning. This is what I ask of you!”
Oh, she had them now. They breathed with her, blinked with her, sat their horses as still as rocks.
“This, then, is my demand.” And now her words were implacable. “That you lay aside this crusade, that you move your grazing grounds south and west, that you leave Tehuantepec to the snow scuttlers and creeping plants.” She softened slightly.
“You are not stones to endure the wind and the ice, you are people. You need light, warmth, food for your children. You need others of your own kind from whom to choose lovers and friends. Ah, but the finding of them will change you.”
She surveyed the silent women. Uaithne’s eyes glittered.
“You,say ‘Tribe before self,’ and mean ‘Tribe before anything’, because deep inside your selves you have a barren place that wails, ‘Nothing is real but the tribe, there is no one here but us.’ You are wrong.” She spoke directly to Aoife now, who was studying her intently. “Lift your eyes from the barren place and open your ears, see and hear the world I have made ready for you. You will find a place where your herds will grow sleek and fat, where your children’s hair will be glossy and their eyes bright, where you will not have to listen at night for the breath of the ice wind and the coming of the goth.”
Silence.
“It waits for you, if you but have the courage to face this greatest death of all.
This death of change.”
Aoife frowned, and for one moment Marghe thought she had gotten through, that the tribeswoman had heard, but then Uaithne’s laughter splashed over them all like cold, bright water.
“Death,” she said lightly, “is no thing of doubt and struggle, but a thing of heat and bright and red glory.”
The wind rose again as Uaithne spoke, and stirred the hair on the back of Marghe’s neck. The air seemed to hum with it.
Uaithne laughed again and pointed behind Marghe. “And there is our death, come to greet us. We must ride to meet it.”
Marghe twisted quickly in her saddle. The hum was not the wind.
Forty or more Mirrors, visors glittering and black armor dusted with pollen like the exoskeletons of alien insects, crested the rise in a lazy, bunched swarm. Sleds hummed, one on each side of the closely packed Mirrors, one behind. In front of them, her back to Marghe, was a single rider. Thenike. When the Mirrors started forward, Thenike did not move. The Mirrors shifted direction; Thenike shifted to meet them. One woman facing down forty.
Thenike. Later.
“No,” Marghe said to Uaithne, “not this time.”
“Oh, yes,” Uaithne said, and couched her spear.
Marghe pulled the reins out from under her thigh and wrapped them around the pommel. The humming changed behind her but she did not dare turn. She breathed deeply, slowly, and sent oxygen fizzing through her arteries into her long muscles.
This was not Tehuantepec. She would be ready this time. This time she would fight.
She would never give in again.
But Uaithne was not charging. She lowered her spear, slid it into its sheath. For one dizzying moment, Marghe thought she had won after all. But then Uaithne laughed again, snatched out her knife, and in what seemed like one movement pulled White Moon’s horse toward her and slit the Mirror’s throat.
Blood gushed shockingly red. The Mirror’s mount whickered and sidled; blood pattered on the grass.
Uaithne clamped her red, red knife between her teeth and took up her spear in one hand, her reins in the other. Then she thumped her heels into her horse’s ribs and was charging across the grass, the tip of her spear coming up, up, pointing straight for Marghe’s throat.
Behind Uaithne, the tribal line rippled and tightened. Marghe could not spare a glance for the answering tightening she expected from the Mirrors.
She did not move. She had put everything into her words, and now all that was left were her hands, and it was all going to end in blood.
But then she saw movement behind Uaithne: Aoife, whirling something around her head, straightening her arm with a snap. For a moment nothing happened, and Marghe thought that Aoife, accurate to nine nines of paces with her sling, had missed.
Then Uaithne oofed as though someone had hit her in the back, and the creamy line of scalp showing through the part in her hair bloomed red, redder than her braids. But she managed to hang on and was still coming, and behind Marghe, muffled by the growing hiss of the wind, no doubt the Mirrors were readying their weapons; Aoife had left it too late. Nothing could stop the blood now.
Marghe watched as Uaithne’s horse came on, hooves thundering, foam flying from its muzzle. She tightened her thighs, ready to lean, to kick; felt capillaries opening in.her shoulders, ready for the strike and twist that would send the spear spinning.
But Uaithne’s knuckles were white, and she was slipping, slipping.
Two lengths from where Marghe sat her mount, Uaithne slid sideways and fell in a jumble of weapons and limbs. The riderless horse swerved, passing close enough to spatter Marghe with warm saliva. Uaithne tumbled loosely over the turf to the feet of Marghe’s mount.
Marghe jumped from her saddle, panting, trembling with the adrenaline and the effort of not smashing her heel into Uaithne’s unprotected throat. She knelt. Uaithne tried to lift her head.
“No. Shh. Keep still.”
But Uaithne blew a red bubble of laughter at Marghe’s concern, and died.
The grass was making Marghe’s knees itch, but she did not move. She did not know what to do. She had been ready and Uaithne had… She looked at the body before her. Uaithne had died. The woman who had been about to try to kill her could not hurt her anymore. She did not know how to feel. Everything seemed a long way off.
Something nudged her shoulder: Uaithne’s mount, come back for its rider. The grass hissed in the soft morning breeze, then stiffened as the breeze blew hotter and harder. The storm was coming.
Marghe blinked. Everything was quiet, too quiet. Was this shock? She climbed slowly to her feet, expecting the world to burst in on her with sound and fury and mayhem. Nothing happened. She looked around. The Mirrors were still bunched tightly, like a straining muscle. Thenike sat before them, as immovable as rock. The line of tribeswomen was stirring, the horses tossing their heads restlessly; some spears were couched, stone heads catching the sun, and some were held loosely.