195 - I'll carve it on your lungs

Oh kyash kyash Kahara kyash... I grabbed the chamir. It was as if I was in dream, time blessedly slowing down. We should abort the boarding assignment—fly through and back into the brandilmoy, then get her to... where? But we were a bare man-length over the water, too low to get to above the fires, I was sure; at least not with me flying. We’d end up in the sea, with her unconscious. If she was just unconscious. I had to land us on the fikken ship.

Remember all you learned today about landing. Push the bar out to the length of your arms, stretching... no, I have a better idea. It wasn’t going to be graceful anyway, and this would make it certain I wouldn’t overshoot the rail on the other side. An edged weapon is an edged weapon.

I wanted more than the two I saw I might hit, in case they dodged, so I yelled “Prepare to be boarded, you fikkers!” with everything in me. Another two scrambled out, leveling spears. I and they lined each other up. Lower, pull in just a bit... I wanted the wire to be below the spears when it hit, even if it meant we got scrapes. One of Niku’s arms jolted back slightly, as her hanging fingers glanced the rail. I let go the bar with my shield hand to lift up her head and wrap my arm around it, felt a crunch on the bone and a sizzle of pain as an arrow went into my upper arm, dropped the nose just enough to get the wire under the one spear left—the other man had flung himself down flat on the deck—and crashed into two of them, the wire finding the flesh and the blood of one. I landed spinning, half kneeling, half-hanging from the harness.

Get up get up don’t release yet get up out of the way of the next boarders—I got my feet under me and the wing with Niku’s weight on it up onto my shoulders, drew sword and ran for where weapon-sense told me there were no Arkans, between mast and side-stays. Change of assignment; I’m not going to leave her. I yanked on the loop to release myself—this had better work—and felt the harness give. Just then an Arkan jumped on the wing from behind, perhaps trying to pin me under it; I put the sword through the wing and into his face as he came down. I scrambled out, drawing one axe as well.

Me alone against a shen-load of Arkans; when has that happened before? They closed in around us, as two other wings came streaking down, landing and releasing at once with perfect grace. “Niku’s down, second!” I yelled; Baska should be on one of them. “Foa-een Vaimoy!” she yelled back.

An Arkan came in from my shield-side, jabbing with a spear, perhaps thinking I couldn’t or wouldn’t use the arm; I parried coming in and backhanded him in the temple with the axe. Whatever wood they are made of hits as hard as steel. In the moment of freezing his fall caused the rest, I flipped up my goggles with the knuckle of my shield-hand, trying not to touch the arrow with my forearm, to show them my eyes. “Mezem fans?” I said in one-down Arkan. “Know me?”

“Oh fikken shen, Karas Raikas!” one of them said. This will help all through the war, I thought. “He’s wounded and shieldless, we can take him!” another yelled. While they argued was a good time to lay into them, so I did, clearing all around Niku, who still hung motionless as the dead. The sword was no Chirel, but sharp and well-balanced enough.

The Niah war-cries were growing thicker, the Arkans downed more plentiful. I remembered my assignment; in a lull, I looked all around, and spotted an Arkan with the admiral’s plume atop a cabin, with about ten solas ranged around him. He yelled commands in an Aitzas accent, mostly, “Get them, get them!” since he wasn’t sure what else to order. We had windboarders climbing over the sides from everywhere, now, too.

Go after him or stay and guard Niku? Baska wasn’t giving me orders, so I yelled “Sijurai guard her I’m going after the Aitzas as she ordered me!”

“Foa-een Vaimoy, go!”

“Hayel demon! Hayel deeeeeemon!” An Arkan marine threw a barbed javelin at me, point-blank; I wrist-parried it, half-took off his head as he had his sword half-drawn, and scrambled up a gangway to the higher deck the Aitzas stood on, with several A-niah close behind me. I introduced myself to his defenders again; easy to know the Mezem fans by the looks on their faces. “Want my autograph?” I said as I went in. “I’ll carve it on your lungs.”

It was the same perfect freedom that I’d felt on Haiu Menshir—no, more perfect, since I was not staining the soil of an island of healers. We slashed our way through them to the Aitzas, who drew his typical over-jewelled pigsticker. The tip trembled, but he didn’t surrender. “Autograph them, then, Shefen-kas,” he said, his blue eyes narrowing.

I laughed; I couldn’t help it. “No such luck for you. My orders are capture. You want it with a whanging headache or without?”

His only answer was to set his lips tight. He was nothing as a warrior, of course, so I faked him sword-side and took him shield-side in the side of the head with the flat of the sword. I yelled to Baska that I’d done it.

No more were coming at me and I was high, a good time to take stock. The deck was all but overrun by A-niah, the red-stained planks strewn with corpses, most Arkan, the odd Niah, among the downed wings. One of us had the tiller, a windboarder, I could tell, by the lack of a flying-harness. They’d aimed to seize that very fast, so as to ensure the ship we were capturing stayed well away from those that burned. I learned later that their markspeople had shot the first pilot and another six Arkan sailors, each of whom had seized the tiller to replace the man shot down before him, picking them off one after the other.

Were we still being rowed? No; whether due to windboarders fouling the oars somehow, or the rowers having stopped from the coxswain coming up to look or fight; we were cutting through the water still, but not with the surges forward you feel from oar-strokes. What I should do next was find the next-highest ranker, but I could barely spot an Arkan standing, and Baska had things well in hand; the A-niah were starting to head below. What I wanted to do was go to Niku, so I said, “Truss him up and guard him,” to those with me, and went. I wasn’t commanding.

She was still senseless. They’d got her freed from the wing, and the helmet off. I saw the swelling, paling the skin of her brow on the shield-side, half under her hairline. Sijurai was sitting beside her, her wrist in his fingers, so I assumed he’d already found out she was still breathing, and was probably whack-weeding her. I knelt beside her, wanting to take her head onto my lap, but not daring to do it before I knew someone had checked her spine. Her face was blank and lax as the dead.

I checked her eyes even as Sijurai told me he’d seen the same as I was seeing, one pupil wider than the other, but moving to the light. Those beautiful eyes, so full of life… I tried to tell myself, as a warrior must, perhaps she will wake, perhaps not, and that’s as it goes. He parted her lips tenderly to give her drops. “Bust… weed,” he said. “Do Yeolis use it?” Different peoples have different words.

Come back to us, love... come back to me. “Her neck is not broken and nor is her skull, by my feeling it,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “You take her head on your lap and let me dig that arrow out of your arm.”

I’d forgotten about it. I did as he said, while other people helped me get the armour off so I could hold her without hurting her. “It hit the bone,” I said. I wanted it out of me, as you do, but it was probably best that Kaninjer did that. “Break it off and field-dress it.” I had a touch of the shock-shivers, I realized, so I gave myself some whack-weed and shook them off before Sijurai could tell me to lie down. He offered me a bite-strap but I said, “Just do it, I’m all right.” If you’ve had Mahid’s Obedience, you can take an arrow-shaft being broken without a blink. Still, it hurt enough to make me want to throw up, and I realized worry was making it worse. I took some more drops, and stroked Niku’s hair and face with my sword-hand. The longer she was gone, the less likely she was to come back.

I leaned over her and spoke my heart. “We love you, Niku. Come back to us. All is well, we’ve won, come back. We love you.” If she died, would her blood be on my hands, for having talked her into bringing me? Would someone more skilled with the a-seeshur have shot the slinger first, or would it have happened anyway? Some questions are never answered, in war. And yet maybe I’m being too kind to myself, thinking that.

Someone unstrapped and pulled off my helmet—I’d forgotten it was there—and gave me a draught of water out of a skin. I was distantly aware of muffled screams from below; the A-niah were killing the rowers. There was no hiding the wing from anyone here, with so many of them standing on the deck, and more still circling above, like square-winged vultures. I just wondered when we would move again. Niku needed Kaninjer.

“Vaimoy!?” The yell was startled and angry at once, and followed by a string of Niah words. I thought I caught “Niku” in them. Breicia; she had just landed on the deck. “She’s asking if Niku gave you permission to be here,” Sijurai translated.

How she imagined I could be here without Niku’s permission, I couldn’t know. I beckoned him to bring his head close to mine, so I could whisper; you cannot know what a person who is senseless will hear. “Tell her—quietly—yes, she did, and she might pay for that foolishness with her life, so perhaps we can hold off the recriminations until that’s settled.”

His touch on my shoulder was tender. Since I’d been made family, I’d noticed, they’d started touching me as much as they touched each other. He got up to speak to her, and did at length, and she saw my point, apparently, as she went away to concern herself with other things.

Now it was clean-up, and I paid little attention, only glances. Enemy bodies were heaved overboard, wings rolled up or fished out of the water, people pulled up over the sides. The smoke was fading now, turning from black to the hissing white of steam as burning hulks sank; between them the windboarders criss-crossed, stabbing like spear-fishers to finish off Arkans they found alive in the water. Having lost their means of height here, many of the flyers brought wings to the ship for transport and themselves rode back with windboarders. The decks were soon piled with stacks of neat rolls.

When Breicia gave the signal, the A-niah now working sails and oars finally headed us back to Niah-lur-ana. Niku had not so much as twitched. I felt the pulse in her throat, to see if it seemed weaker. It didn’t, but I wondered if I was deluding myself, in love. She needed someone to whom she was not all the world, to be her healer. I could only talk to her and keep giving her whack-weed. Sijurai’s vial ran out, then mine, and we replenished them both with water from someone’s skin.

“We love you, Vriah and I,” I told her, cradling her head in my hands. “Our Mezem child waits; she’ll be hungry by the time we’re back on the island. I want to fly with you again. Don’t fly away from us, love. Always and forever, as long as we have...” At a distance, it seemed, A-niah who were not close to her sang their victory song, axes raised.

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