They chose fire, because they were beginning a greater burning. They set the outbuildings alight, and then the cabin itself, but not before they brought out Meshag upon his pallet and laid him down in the yard. They dragged out the two men Tai had killed, the guard and the shaman, and finally they brought forth the two who were still alive. They were drinking by then, the Bogu: there had been kumiss in the cabin.
The shaman's bells chimed as they pulled his body across the trampled grass. His mirrors glinted, splintering sunlight. Tai had wondered if he'd transgressed in killing this man. It was not so, he understood now. He had done something, in the nomads' eyes, that marked him as a hero. He was to be honoured, it seemed.
They invited him to join in what was now to follow, with the two dead men and the two left deliberately alive. He declined. Stayed with his men, his own people, from a civilized place.
He was physically sick, wrackingly so, when he saw what came next. What he had been invited to share. Many of the Kitan cavalry became violently ill, stumbling or riding away, retching into the grass.
The empire of Kitai had not been shaped through nine dynasties by a placid, pacifist people. Theirs was a violent, conquering grandeur, built upon slaughter through nearly a thousand years, in their own civil wars, or carrying warfare beyond shifting borders, or defending those borders. Such was their history: fires such as these, or greater burnings by far, blood and blades.
There were texts and teachings as far back as the First Dynasty about the tactical utility of massacre, killing children, mutilation, rape. The useful fear all these could spread in foes, the overcrowding of besieged cities as terrified refugees fled before advancing armies. These things were a part of what men did in warfare, and warfare was a part of what men did in life.
But the Kitan did not roast dead enemies over fires and eat their flesh with invocations to the sky. Or cut off slices from men still living, staked out naked upon the ground, and let them watch, screaming, as their own body parts were consumed, cooked or raw.
There was a great deal of smoke, spilling thickly upwards, hiding the sun. A stench of burning in a once-serene space beside a northern lake. The crackling of several fires, howls (humans, not wolves), ritual chants, and someone's desperate, slowly fading plea for death replaced the sound of birds and wind in leaves. The ugliness of men erasing solitude and autumnal beauty.
It went on for some time.
One of the nomads eventually approached the Kitan where they waited, gentling their nervous horses a distance apart. He was bare-chested, grinning widely, and he was waving the severed forearm of a man. Blood dripped from it, and from his chin.
Unsteady on his feet, he extended the human flesh towards Tai, as to a hero worthy to partake of this great bounty. Giving the Kitan, the stranger, one more chance.
He took an arrow in the chest as he stood before them. He died instantly.
Tai could not, for a moment, believe what had happened. It was entirely wrong, shockingly so. He stood in numbed disbelief. Which was, however brief, too long an interval for a commander of men in a place such as this one had become.
His soldiers, as if released by that single arrow to their own demons, their frenzied response to the horror they were being made to witness, mounted up suddenly, all of them, with smooth, trained efficiency, as if an order had been given.
Seizing bows and swords from saddles, they swept forward—avenging spirits, in and of themselves—into the fires and smoke, infused with a clawing fury, with the sense that this hideous savagery could only be expunged, erased, with savagery of their own.
This understanding of events came to Tai only afterwards. He wasn't thinking clearly at the time.
His cavalry knifed into and among the outnumbered, on-foot, drunk-on-kumiss nomads, the stumbling, blood-soaked men they'd come north to aid—and they slaughtered them between the fires.
And when it was done, when none of the Bogu were left alive amid the black smoke and the red burning, the blurred sun setting west now, the lake a dark, cold blue, the next thing happened.
Meshag, son of Hurok, stood up.
He looked around the unholy scene created by men in that place. He had been a graceful man. He wasn't any more. He had changed, had been changed. He moved awkwardly now, as if oddly jointed, had to shift his whole body to turn his gaze, moving stiffly through a full circle. Black smoke drifted between him and where Tai stood rooted to the ground with a gaping horror. He was seeing this, and refusing to believe what he saw.
Meshag stared towards the Kitan riders for a long moment. The last men alive here. Then, shifting his shoulders as if trying to throw back his head, he laughed. A low, distorted sound.
He had not moved or opened his eyes since falling unconscious by another fire to the south weeks before.
It was not his remembered laughter. The way he stood and moved was appallingly different, this shambling, slack-limbed, unnatural posture. The Kitan soldiers, in an alien place among burning and the dead, stopped wheeling their horses about, stopped shouting. They clustered together, close to Tai again as if for protection, keeping their distance from Meshag.
Looking at this man—if he was still a man—Tai understood that the evils of this day had not ended.
He heard sounds beside him, arrows clicking from sheaths, nocked to strings. He stirred, he rasped an order—and was not sure if what he did was right. He might die not knowing, he would decide on the ride back south.
"Hold!" he cried. "No man shoots an arrow!"
What was left of Meshag, or what had become of him, turned, cumbersome and slow, to look at Tai, tracking the sound of his voice.
Their gazes locked through smoke. Tai shivered. He saw a blankness in those eyes, something unfathomable. Cold as the end of all life. It occurred to him, in that same moment, that his task, his duty to what had once been a man, might be to grant him the arrows' release.
He did not. He knew—he could not deny knowing—that something evil had been happening in that cabin (still burning, a red, roaring chaos) before he burst in and killed the shaman. It might have been interrupted, incomplete, but what that meant, what it implied for the figure standing stiffly before him, holding his gaze, as if committing Tai to memory, he couldn't hope to grasp.
"Like the swans," he said loudly to his cavalry. "Killing it might curse us all. This is not our affair. Let it... let him go. He will find his fate without us."
He said that last as clearly as he could, staring at the soul-wracking figure of Meshag. If the creature moved towards them the soldiers would panic, Tai knew. He'd have to allow the arrows to fly, and live with that.
He didn't believe his own swan comparison. He hadn't even believed killing a swan would curse them... that was Bogu fear. The Kitan had their own animal legends and fears. But the words might offer something to his men, a reason to listen to him. They didn't normally need reasons: soldiers followed orders, as simple as that. But this northward journey and today's ending to it were so remote in all ways from their normal lives and world that it seemed necessary to offer one.
As for why, in his own mind, it felt proper to give this dead-eyed, impossibly reawakened figure the chance to leave this place and live—if living was what it was—Tai could only call it pity, then and after.
He wondered if that came through in his voice, in the look they exchanged. He wouldn't have said it was an entirely human gaze, Meshag's, but neither would he have said it wasn't, that there was some demon in there. Meshag was altered, and it seemed to Tai he might well be lost, but he didn't know.