“Sorry, Gran, but you know that I only want to run free as a war maid.”
“But you don’t like to fight or to shed blood, even on the hunt. Moreover, ask your great-aunt Anku what she and the other so-called free women do day by day. Theirs is a job like any other, not an excuse never to grow up.”
Prid muttered something.
“What, child?”
“I said, grown-ups die.”
“So do we all, eventually; yes, like your mother.”
The door opened a crack.
“We see him!” someone hissed through it.
The animals stirred, then subsided. On the hearth the Earth Wife groaned and tossed.
Gran Cyd swept from the room with her candle, followed by Jame and Prid.
Outside, everyone was pointing uphill, toward the sparkle of torches that seemed to hover just above the tree line. The queen raised her light, a solitary beacon. One torch above waved in response. The others formed an inverted “V” that swayed back and forth. The clouds cleared. By starlight, Jame saw two lines of men tugging on thick ropes. Between them, a raw spire rose, dipped, and fell.
“Ah,” breathed the women.
“They’ve been a fortnight cutting and trimming that tree,” Prid whispered to Jame. “I hear that this year’s is three feet across and fifty feet long. Chingetai has made something special to make it go faster than usual.”
Upslope, the lines disintegrated and re-formed on either side of the tree trunk. Down the mountainside it came, bucking, gathering speed, to the sound of distant cheers.
“They’re riding it?” Jame asked.
“Yes! Isn’t it exciting?”
The word for it was stupid, Jame thought, but oddly stirring.
The log picked up speed. Flecks of light began to tumble off of it.
The women fell silent.
“Should it be coming straight toward the village?” Jame asked.
“No.” Gran Cyd peered uphill, shading her eyes from her candle’s light. “It looks as if they’ve lost the pilot rope to the skid.”
“And that’s not good.”
“Thirteen tons of lumber aimed straight down our throats? No.”
The erstwhile riders had grabbed the trailing lead ropes and were trying to slow the monstrous log’s descent, without success.
“Maybe the hill will turn it,” said Prid, beginning to sound nervous.
“You want to bet?” Jame stirred restlessly. It wasn’t in her nature to watch disasters unfold without lending a hand, yet what could she do?
“Damn,” she said, and took off at a run down through the village, calling for the rathorn colt as she went.
He answered her outside the gate, below the hill. Starlight shone on the cold white of his ivory, on his cresting mane and flowing tail. The ride north had been long and he was out of temper, not eager to be ridden again. Twin horns slashed at her, daring her to step into them. He wouldn’t hurt her on purpose, but accidents didn’t count. She lunged, caught the saddle horn, and pulled herself half onto his back. He took off at a gallop with her clinging to his side.
“You damn fool,” she hissed at him as she pulled herself upright. His ears flicked derisively and he bounded over a snowdrift, nearly dislodging her.
By now, the log was halfway down the mountain, a battering ram aimed straight for the front gate, with Merikit chasing it and Chingetai still grimly astride. It dipped and plowed up sheets of snow. As they came alongside, Jame saw that the butt was mounted on a metal skid with an attachment not unlike the prow of a boat but hinged to allow it to swing back and forth. Chingetai hadn’t lost the pilot rope after all, but neither could he lean out far enough to turn the log. That flaw apparently hadn’t occurred to him before.
“Throw it to me!” Jame shouted to him.
He snarled back at her through a mass of flying braids, right side for children sired, left for men killed. She would have to ask what a braided beard meant.
“Everything is under control. Go away!”
The colt would have liked nothing better. Flying snow hit him in the face, and the log yawed ominously. The stumps of lopped off branches glistened with an effusion of resin and perhaps with blood. How many hillmen had it crushed? Death’s-head squealed and bucked in protest. Jame scrambled back from his neck where he had tossed her.
“Throw it, now!”
The Merikit chief darted a chagrined glance at the rapidly approaching village.
“Here, dammit!”
Jame grabbed the rope as it whipped past, wrapped it around the saddle horn, and let Death’s-head plunge away to the left. Hooves skidded and the saddle girth groaned. It was like trying to shift the foundations of the world. The prow creaked over. It was turning, not much but hopefully enough. The hill loomed, then the ruins of the maidens’ lodge yawned before them. Jame cast off the rope. The log shot into the cavity headfirst and rammed into the far wall with an earth-shaking boom. Chingetai flew off and tumbled end over end into the adjacent ruins of the boys’ lodge.
Jame and the colt hurtled past. Now they were sliding on ice. The rathorn sat down, clearing a great swathe of snow with his rump. Jame fell off. Beneath her, something huge moved under the ice, dimly seen as giant scales sliding past. It bumped its frozen roof. Cracks radiated out under Jame’s hands. River Snake or Eaten One? Not waiting to find out, she scrambled to one shore, the colt to the other.
Before her was the log, jutting out of the pit but mostly in it. Again she smelled pitch. A moment later it ignited, wrapping the log in flames. Dazzled by the light, Jame thought she saw a gigantic form loom over it, over her.
“You,” it said, in a voice seared clean of all emotion except recognition.
Then it lowered itself limb by limb into the blazing trench, the Burnt Man reluctantly joining his effigy in the earth
The Burning Ones lined the far side of the pit, baying flame-mouthed after their master.
One stood among them, taller than they, silent. His gaze met Jame’s across the fiery abyss, and he smiled.
Vant.
They never found his body, Jame thought, trying to catch her breath.
He looked as she remembered him, except for the red light reflected in his eyes. Surely, though, he was dead. Well, so were his companions. But a Kencyr in such company? How could that be?
The Burnt Man and the Dark Judge.
The Earth Wife and her unlikely Favorite.
Rathillien and the Kencyrath.
It could happen, as it had before. Bonds were being forged, despite both. But Sweet Trinity . . . !
He raised his hands. The blunt, charred faces of the Burning Ones rose with the gesture, their cry cut short. All stared at her, crimson-eyed, as if taking note as they had been bidden. Then the fire flared and they were gone. With their lord in the ground, did they now follow a new master?
Voices called to her, making her start, and dark figures rushed out of the night to throw their arms around her. One was Prid, another Gran Cyd, and half a dozen other women besides.
“Well done,” said the queen, helping her to her feet. “We could do without our chief, but not without the father of our unborn children.”
Jame gazed in dismay at the assembled throng, who smiled back at her. Gran Cyd had promised that as the Earth Wife’s supposedly male Favorite, she would be credited with any babies conceived on Winter’s Eve, and here was the proof.
“Oh no,” she said. “Oh, Cyd, not you too.”
III
Pyres and the Pit
Jame half woke, tangled in sleeping furs.
Where am I? she thought.
The white-washed wall beside her danced with murals given life by the low fire sulking beneath the great bronze basin while rain tapped on the copper smoke hood above. Rue snored softly in her own mound of blankets by the door. Of course. She was back in her quarters at Tentir, almost too tired from the long ride south from the Merikit village to sleep.
But she had slept, and dreamed of dark things. Fire and ash, furious blue eyes in a charred face, a seared finger encircled by a ring, jutting out of a pile of corpses . . .