The Executioness (11 page)

“He should hold behind his walls,” Anezka said as twenty elephants moved out onto the field, followed by a hundred Paikans on horseback. Four hundred soldiers followed the riders, each in a square group of fifty, those long spears bristling like ship’s masts from each person. We could see lines of archers up on the walls, tiny faces looking back at us. “It would take us a year to breach them.”

“Ixilon knows he will eventually need to fight,” I told her. “That’s what Jiva says. Better to do it upfront when the men are healthy and not starving, when they still believe they are invincible and eager, instead of demoralized.”

We stood on foot in a cluster of eight hundred women in the field, the ones who were all armed with both arquebuses and axes. “He still thinks one of his men is better than four of us,” Anezka noted, looking at the numbers.

Two thousand total armed women had come to the field. Those not in my square of eight hundred with arquebuses carried just simple axes. Jiva’s men were on their horses and ready to break for the gates from the side, preventing Ixilon from retreating back into the city.

“We’ll soon find out,” I said to Anezka. “I’m just grateful he’s keeping his archers on the walls where they can’t reach us just yet.”

The ground shook as the war elephants began their charge. I turned back around to look at my own army. They shifted, nervous at the sight of the armored elephants thundering toward them. 

Someone raised an arquebus, and Anezka spotted the movement and screamed, “keep your weapons pointed down, do not fire until the order flags go up!”

But I understood the impulse.

There were five lines of women, our most untrained recruits, that we stood with. It was quickest to teach them how to aim and shoot the arquebus. They had all been the last to join.

And breaking the Paikans depended on them more than the axe fighters.

The elephants loomed larger, their armor clanking, the ground shaking. Paikans followed behind, the charge moving quicker as they closed.

I could see the closest elephant’s eyes now. The wrinkles in its long trunk that slapped back and forth as it ran.

The order flags whipped into the air, something Anezka had copied from the caravan to simplify ordering our untrained army around, and the first row of a hundred women raised their arquebuses. The entire row of newly hammered metal tubes gleamed. Slow burning fuses sparked down the line as they were lit.

The second row, the moment the first row raised, also began preparing to fire.

An elephant screamed rage, and in answer, the first line of arquebuses answered. The thunder of fire matched the earthquake of giant’s hooves. Smoke rose and filled, and then came the second line of thunder.

Shrieks of inhuman pain pierced the smoke, and the first of the elephants stumbled through the powder haze, crashing into the first line and tumbling to the ground. Then another stumbled through.

Women dropped their arquebuses, and though untrained with their axes, fell upon the elephants like they were firewood, hacking both their riders and the beasts as they writhed and screamed on the ground.

“We told them to leave the elephants once they fell,” I snapped, frustrated.

“They’re caught up in it all,” Anezka said. “There are lines behind them. It is not a problem yet.”

Some were reloading though, even as the square formations of Paikans bristling long spears came quickly through the curtain of smoke. But they were expecting to find
us scattered.

Instead, they met three more rows of thunder, and then scattered pops from those in the remains of the first and second lines who had managed to reload their arquebuses.

Paikans stumbled and fell, and the impenetrable wall of spears faltered.

The axe women came from deep behind the lines and ran at the corners of the Paikan formations. They hit the spears in a bloody mangle of bodies and blades. The squares deformed, split down their centers as the fighting degenerated into one-on-one combat.

I still stood in the second line, no more than a hundred feet away from the stalled spearmen and fighting. A wounded elephant groaned just fifty feet off to my right, a large grey hill that prevented me from seeing Paika.

I moved forward with Anezka, bringing my arquebus up once to sight on a raider that charged us and firing.

He dropped, and we stepped over him to climb the dying elephant and gain a better view of the hell that we had helped design.

The clumped Paikans were slowly being overwhelmed all around me, but the well-armored soldiers on horses still milled about the gates of Paika.

I raised my axe into the air and pointed at Paika, and saw the faces of hundreds of women finish reloading their guns to look at me.

“Paika!” I screamed and waved the axe. We had stalled their spears, broken them apart, now I wanted us to run through the open field and into the city. “Paika!”

“Paika!” they screamed back.

As I crawled down from the elephant I could hear the sound of Jiva’s horsemen moving now, moving full tilt towards the raider horsemen.

They galloped ahead of us, their way clear, and we ran after them.

Horse crashed into horse and the screams of the dying began. With the horsemen countered, the horde behind me swept through the Paikans as a rain of whispering arrows struck the ground all around us.

Then we poured into the city itself, arquebuses firing. We threw the long, ungainly weapons aside for axes as we met archers, and a few Paikan soldiers who had been left inside. And my words to Ixilon came true, as the axe-wielding women threw themselves with grim revenge against any armed Paikan they encountered.

I ran up the streets, gasping for breath and dizzy from exertion, almost ready to pass out by the time we reached the last battlements.

Anezka had run up the hills well ahead of me.

“They never even had time to close the gate,” she said.

“Then we’ve won!” I hadn’t even bloodied my axe, and it was over. We had torn the Paikans down. “We’ve done it.”

From up here, as I looked around, I could see smoke beginning to billow up from the city. And the field was empty of living soldiers. Only the dead and injured, lying in the mud made by our feet, lay out there like small dolls or figures in a painting regarded from a distance.

When I looked back at Anezka I did not see the same happiness. “There’s something you should see,” she said.

She took me into that turret I’d been in the day before, and my mouth dried even before the door opened and I looked inside.

An ashen-faced Ixilon looked back up at me, then quickly down at the table he sat at, his wrists bound with rope. Behind him, Jal slumped, a long spear run through the whole of his chest stuck out of both sides of the man.

“You killed him anyway?” I asked.

Ixilon licked his lips, and did not look up at me. “A guard, not me.”

A badly beaten guard in the corner of the room croaked, “Payback, for the whore who dared take the city.”

The fury that lived inside me exploded. I grabbed my axe and crossed to where Ixilon lay with his head in his hands, and swung the axe deep, easily, and precisely toward the back of his neck.

I swerved at the last second, and buried it into the wood of the table just short of his ear.

“You failed,” I told Ixilon. “You failed as a man to keep just a simple promise to me, and you failed in your attempt to foist your Way upon this land: there will be no more cullings now. And the land will be better for it.”

I had done my duty for all the other mothers in these lands. But now it was time to do something I’d yearned to do since I’d met Ixilon. I ran from the room and into Anezka. “Get me a horse. Now!”

“Please, listen to me first. Jiva’s dead, you need to talk to the commanders,” she said. “They need to hear from you…”

“A damned horse! Now!” I shoved past her and ran down the cobblestones with a tired limp until I saw a horseman. “Give me your horse,” I demanded.

“Who are you to…” he started to say, but then he saw the axe, and my face, and realized who I was, and slid off.

“Tana!” Anezka called.

“You are as much one of this army’s leaders as I am,” I shouted at her. “You take care of it. In my name if you must. But you take care of it.”

I galloped off as fast as the horse could manage down the hill, around the curves, and then out the gates. I pushed the horse as hard as I dared, until foam flecked its mouth and it ignored my demands.

Getting down from the horse I stumbled along the empty roads of the small town that had sprung up to serve the Paikan harbor.

Eyes looked at me from behind shuttered windows.

I staggered out to the end of one of the piers and looked out at the gray sea, and in the far distance, watched a single sail slowly disappear over the edge of the ocean, headed South.

It was doubtful my sons were on that last boat. But standing there, it felt like it.

They had left me and moved on.

I crumpled to the wooden planks. I could not find tears, but my body shook as if I were trying to remember how to cry.

Anezka found me still on the edge of the pier hours later.

She said nothing, but waited at the start of the stones of the waterfront until I decided myself to turn my back to the ocean.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her.

“It was truly as much your army as it was Jiva’s,” she said. “We’ve won. And now we need to plan what comes next.”

I let myself get recaptured by her, and returned to the city.

I think of philosophers as drug-addled dreamers who see only the reflections cast on their blackboards. The shadows of the world as it really exists around them. They say there is no such thing as good and evil. They talk about choice and flux, intersections and perspectives and situations.

They may well be correct. Who am I, an old peasant mother, to question those who spend their lives poring over these questions? And since I decree it, any philosopher or religion that forsakes weapons at my city’s gate can come to Paika. My city. And they do so flock, like hungry sheep, to my markets.

I did this for my sons, against counsel, so that they would have a city on the coast to return to if they choose. They follow the Way, now, and I cannot bring myself to chase those who follow the same beliefs as my sons from these coasts.

I will be here, when they get back from the Southern Isles. I will be here for them, even if we might hardly recognize each other.

The thinkers say it is the way of the world for things to change. That includes people, I gather.

So even though we grow unrecognizable to each other I am still their mother, and this is still their land.

I hold back the bramble as best I know how. At first,
I did not care to hunt people in the city. But those who did not follow the Way, my own people, began using magic, and bramble began to choke our streets.

I fought the Paikans to get my children back. To stop the culling. I had no wish to return to forcing the Way on people. And so I am forced to find the magic users, as I must, and hang them from the city’s walls. On my worst days, I think
I have become no better than the Jolly Mayor. And to my chagrin, the Way’s priests point to the people I execute as proof that only the Way can save these lands.

I do all these things because even though I am a mother, I am also now a new person. I am the queen of Paika, the lady of the lands in its shadow.

I am the Executioness.

And I am waiting for my children to come home.

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Executioness