“I amdead,” she rasped, in a voice harsh with smoke and blood.
“So are we all. Here.” He tilted a gourd cup to her mouth. She drank. He said, “You breathed too much smoke, and you have some burns and bruises, but your head is your worst injury. A horse trampled you, I think.”
“How did you find me?”
“You found me,” he said. “I was looking for you, and you came out of the burning village.”
“What happened to our people?”
“When they heard my warning, they left their belongings and followed me and the other katrimto the cliff path. Sainnites lay in wait at the top of the path. We fought them. But they were many, and they have strange weapons that explode with fire.”
“Names of the gods!” Zanja groaned.
“We fought them a long time,” Ransel continued quietly. “What was accomplished I do not know. Did even one of our people escape? I wish I knew the answer, but I do not know. I and some other katrimfled when the Sainnites came up the path behind us. The cliff path is now choked with bodies. The village is a smoking ruin. I walked through the valley hunting for you, and everywhere I went, I saw our people slain: elders and children, warriors and farmers. The only people alive are those you see here.“
Zanja saw that other katrimwere gathered in this hollow, and that many had drawn close to hear the conversation. Her vision was blurred and she could not count them, but it seemed there were fewer than twenty.
“I was pinned under a fallen horse,” one of them said. “I lay there all night, watching the butchery. The Samnites did not rest until no one was left alive. Finally, I pulled myself free and escaped in the smoke, as you did, Speaker.”
Others also told their stones, in voices as harsh and lifeless as the voices of ghosts are said to be. Zanja listened, thinking that surely she also had witnessed the horrors they described, but she only remembered a sensation of chaos and then of stillness. To have forgotten so much surely was a mercy, but it also was dreadful to gaze at these shattered tribesmen and feel confusion rather than sharing their horror.
“The Sainnites must have taken the long path through the mountains,” one of them said. “For they have wagons and horses that could not have surmounted the steep passes.”
“They must have killed the watchers before they could spread the alarm,” said another. “Though the watchers were hidden and it should have been impossible …”
“No, they knew exactly where the watchers were,” said Zanja. “Tarin must have told them–told his friend in the woods, in payment for smoke. He betrayed his entire people.”
They were silent then, for this was something they had not known, and could scarcely begin to understand. But Zanja understood that if she had only taken action immediately to find out what exactly had happened to Tarin, rather than delaying to let her anger cool, she might have discovered his betrayal immediately and been able to forewarn her people of their danger. Not for the last time, Zanja wished that the war horse’s kick to her head had been harder.
Ransel did not know of how she had failed the Ashawala’i, and she was too stunned by shame to tell him. He gently tended her wound and gave her more water to drink. She could not resist sleeping again, and in her sleep she dreamed of Sainnites. She dreamed that they sat around a fire where they roasted a slaughtered goat. In their own language, they talked about the hard work they had done and about the dreary journey home that lay before them.
When she opened her eyes, she saw stars burning. The katrimroasted river trout over a small fire, and talked about revenge. Ransel hovered nearby, and drew close when she stirred.
“The Sainnites will march out at first light,” said Zanja.
The other katrimabandoned their meal to come over and hear what she had said. “Speaker, how do you know?”
“They told me in my dreams.”
“Then we will follow them, to haunt them like ghosts, to kill as many as we can.”
“If we do this, we all will die.” She could see them more clearly now: some fine warriors and some she had long considered fools, but with the foolishness burned out of them now.
“What does it matter, so long as we can die in honor?” said Ransel.
They all murmured agreement, their voices empty and bitter with loss.
“Then we shall follow them,” Zanja said. She did not understand how she had become their leader, or why they listened to her, when her certainty might be nothing more than the delirium of a broken head.
She shut her eyes and slept the night through. At dawn, they began hunting Sainnites. Zanja went with them, leaning on one or another shoulder, carried sometimes, as they ran lightly across the mountaintops while the Sainnites, burdened by armor and horses and wagonloads of supplies, trudged below. The Sainnites did not realize what haunted their journey until that night, after the katrimslipped into their camp like the ghosts they were, and used the hay the Sainnites carried for the horses as tinder to set fire to all the supply wagons. Zanja could not make that raid with them, but despite her blinding headache, she told them where to find the hay wagons and how to avoid the pickets, and only two katrimwere killed. Fifteen remained, including herself, but they bore the weapons of dozens more dead companions, and they knew how to survive in these ungenerous mountains. They waited a few days to let the Sainnites lower their guard, and they struck again, once or twice a night, night after night, and during the day made it impossible for the weary Sainnites to safely forage for food, or use the latrines, or even take off their armor. While the katrimate roots and greens and berries and trout, the Sainnites began butchering and eating their starving horses.
Zanja and her companions lived ghost lives. They did not speak of the past, or of the dead, or of their own deaths. They watched the Sainnites, and slipped through the mountains like shadows, and from time to time let fly a precious arrow, or cut the throat of a straying soldier. One by one, Zanja’s companions disappeared. Like the Sainnites, the katrimwere leaving behind them a trail of abandoned bodies that they dared not try to find and had no time to burn. The mountain vultures and ravens followed them. Zanja could walk on her own feet now, but was often disabled by dizziness or blinding pain. The Sainnite soldiers continued to speak in her dreams, telling her all their secret plans and terrors and blood lusts.
The fifteen katrimbecame twelve, and then seven. The seven became five. With more warriors and more time, they might have eventually destroyed the entire Sainnite battalion. But now, with only five of them remaining, and only one more pass to climb before the Sainnites could safely exit the mountains, they knew their time for vengeance would soon come to an end. None of them wished to survive. They camped among stones, high above the miserable Sainnites and their disgusting horsemeat. They ate sweet trout flesh and sucked on the transparent bones. They ate tart berries and crunched the seeds with their teeth. They tallied the Sainnite dead and were satisfied.
Only Zanja had ever traveled so far east of the Asha Valley. She told about a treacherous canyon they soon would pass, and suggested that one of them might lure the Sainnites into the canyon, while the others dislodged stones to fall down on their heads. They drew lots, and Zanja chose the longest stick. That night, Ransel put his arms around her and said, “Wait for me in the Land of the Sun, my sister. I will not be far behind you.” She fell asleep with her head in the hollow of his shoulder.
She would always remember the moment when the mountain fell on her. It was her second death, and far more satisfying than the first. She would remember the Sainnites gleefully chasing her up the canyon, the four katrimlevering the rocks overhead, and the canyon wall collapsing onto the people below. Mercifully, she would not remember much else: She would not remember when the surviving Sainnites dragged her out from under a boulder with her back broken. She would not remember how they tortured her, when they realized she was still alive. She would not remember when they killed Ransel, who might have been trying to either rescue her or deliver her with a merciful blow of the dagger. She would not remember that she mistakenly thought she was already dead, and he was coming to join her. She would not realize for a long time that in fact he had left her behind among the living.