The Black Road

 

Jaya followed the path, the dirt trampled smooth and hard by the passage of many.  It offended her to see it cut into the soil of this holy island.  She tried to harden her heart to it, knowing she would see many more such outrages before she was done.  She set her mind to eradicating the presence of the giants upon this land, and she swore she would water the earth with their blood in answer for their crimes.

The rains came, and she sheltered by night beneath the spreading leaves of a tamaka tree.  Soon the rains would come more heavily, and then the season of the monsoons.  She wondered if the giants could endure that, though if they had been here for years, they must know the way.  Part of her wished the islands themselves could drive out the invaders.  Then she thought that she was the answer to that – that the gods had called her because she was chosen to drive the enemy away.

Several days brought her to a place of wider fields, and she saw many of the Utani working in the long rows.  They cultivated rice and beans and breadfruit trees, and she watched them from a distance, laboring under the hot sun.  Here and there she saw giants moving among them, watchful and malignant, and she yearned to kill them, but she knew she could not become involved in a struggle here, so far from the seat of their power.  She must go to the sea, to the place called Jinan.

Twice, by night, she heard riders pass her in the dark, and she wondered if they were hunting her.  If word of her slaughter had spread with those who had fled.  They would be seeking her, and she would soon oblige them.  She dreamed of cities when she slept, though she did not know what she would see.  The stories told that her race had ruled from great places built of stone and filled with more people than she had ever seen, but it was not easy for her to imagine it.

On the fourth day the hard dirt path ended, and she saw it was paved over with black stone cut from the mountainsides.  Just the sight of it angered her, and she bent and dug at the stones until she could pry one up.  There were so many, and she clenched her teeth at the thought of these creatures defiling the mountain with their tools to cut away the rock.  She decided she would not walk on this, and instead she made her way alongside in the soft earth, wading through the grasses on the verge and using a stick to move away the rearing cobras that slumbered there in the morning sun.

The ground rose, and there were fewer trees.  She smelled the salt of the sea again, and then she also caught the scents of smoke coming more heavily and she thought she was close to her goal.  Now she moved more carefully, avoiding the knots of Utani bearing their burdens along the road.  She saw more riders, and she learned to avoid them by the sound of the hard feet upon the stone road.

The sky was overcast as she climbed the road to a peak, and the smells of smoke and human waste were powerful, blowing on a sea wind.  The rain was coming soon, and it blew wind across the grasses and fields, whipped the trees this way and then another.  Jaya came to the high place in the road and looked down toward the shore, and there she saw the place called Jinan, and she hated.

It clustered on the shore like a growth, dark and heavy with a pall of smoke.  There had been a shrine upon the shore, and she saw the pillars of it still stood, but it was surrounded by a mad ramble of the ugly wooden lodges the giants made.  So closed-off and so dark, shutting away wind and sun and sky.  They built half with stone, and then wood on top of it, so they all looked unfinished and haphazard.

The harbor was filled with ships, and it stunned her, for there were more than she had thought to see – more than had been clogging the harbor at Arwan.  Their tall masts stood like spears, dripping with ropes and crossed by spars so that they looked like nothing natural.  She saw smaller boats coming and going, in among the larger ones, back and forth to shore.  Like ants the giants never stopped, never sat still.

She heard riders and moved off into the undergrowth, stayed out of sight as a knot of armed men rode past her.  Again she ached to destroy them, but she wanted to find the heart of this place that she might rip it out.  Instinctively she looked up to the hillsides, where there stood larger, less repulsive lodges.  One of them was immense, surrounded by stone walls, and she thought she would find what she sought there.  She would find throats for her blade.

o0o

The evening rains came and passed, leaving the night alive with the songs of insects and the buzzing of frogs in the trees.  Jaya waited until it was well past dark before she entered the city, moving carefully through the shadows in the narrow streets.  She was sure the giants would notice one of her kind bearing weapons, and so she took pains not to be seen.  It was not easy because there were so many of them.  As in Arwan there were men and women both, all of towering height and outlandish appearance.  They wore their voluminous, bulky clothing and talked to one another in their loud, honking speech.

By night they gathered to drink and sing and shout, and that made it easy to avoid them.  She moved like a ghost through their city, seeing her own kind here and there.  The Utani poured waste into the streets, carried burdens, and she saw more than one place where women were kept as slaves for the giants to slake their lusts on, and it was bitter poison in her mouth.

She climbed the hill toward the greater lodges, following the winding streets that switched back as they climbed the slope.  She came to the wide plaza before the grandest house, and here was the smell of death.  She looked on a wide place paved with ancient stone laid down by her own kind long ago, now made into a place of killing.  She saw the wooden platforms stained by old blood, and where was a high scaffold from which hung iron cages, and in each cage was a corpse, rotting and haunted by flies.

She approached and saw that not all the dead were Utani, some of them were giants, their heavy clothes tattered and stained, their pale faces turned to sallow green with decay.  It was interesting to her that they rotted the same as real people.  She moved past the scaffold to the high iron fence that guarded the house, and she saw the heads of Utani impaled upon the spikes that topped it, eyes and lips eaten away by the carrion birds.  She bared her teeth and moved to the side, climbed the stone post that held up the gate, and dropped inside as silent as a ghost.

The grounds were thick with shrubs, and she heard water cascading somewhere to the side.  There were lamps at the door, and in the windows above.  She had never seen a house so large, and she could not imagine what even a giant would need one for.  She slipped through the dark, moving carefully but surely, sniffing the air, and she scented blood.

It was close, and she crouched low, tasting the night wind.  She crept forward and saw the front door of the house, and where there had doubtless been guards, now there were two crumpled forms and spreading pools of black blood.  She felt the hair on her neck rise, and she strained her ears, seeking some sign.  Something was happening here that she did not cause, and there was danger in the dark besides what she brought with her.

Closer, she saw that the men were giants, armed and armored, their throats cut savagely and left to bleed.  The heavy door behind them was open a sliver, and she saw light within.  She heard nothing – no sound of violence or death.  Cautious, she drew her sword and slipped to the open door, peered through the crack and saw an entry hall, two young Utani girls dead on the floor just within, their throats also slashed.

Anger seethed inside her.  Let the giants slay one another for whatever cause seemed good to them, but the casual butchery of her people made her hand clench on the hilt of her sword.  She drew the steel into her hand and held it ready as she slipped inside, the slaughterhouse smell rising up around her.  She saw the blood was still flowing and had not yet begun to thicken, so the killing had been done within a very short time, likely as she climbed the fence outside.

Now she heard a sudden clatter up the stairs, and the grunts and impacts of combat.  On silent feet she crossed to the wide staircase, marveling that anyone would want or need such a thing.  The polished wood was smooth under her bare feet, and she walked on the outside of the steps so they would be less eager to creak under her weight.

There was the sound of steel on steel, and then the heavy sound of a falling body, and Jaya saw a dark form fall onto the steps and roll down toward her.  She moved aside to let it pass, the gangly shape of a giant tumbling past her with a gaping wound across its chest.  When she looked up, there were three figures at the top of the stairs, looking down at her, light glittering in their eyes and on the edges of their daggers.

o0o

“This is no soft-handed slave,” one of them said, speaking in her own tongue, though the accents were harsh and grating.  “Who comes with a sword against the sons of the Tiger?”

“It does not matter,” another one said.  “None may see us and live.  That is the law.”

“And who are you?” Jaya said, pitching her voice to command.  “Who are you that speaks to a daughter of kings as though you are gifted with nobility?  Who contemplates raising steel against one of the Tau’ta?”

She expected her clan name to rouse them, and she saw them all hesitate, one of them stepping back.  They glanced at one another.  In the dark there was little to see, and she could barely make out that they had covered their faces in black paint, striped their arms and legs with the same substance to make them harder to see in the night.  They had rigid armor of leather strapped to their arms and carried heavy, curved knives that now dripped with blood.  The looked at her with their eyes gleaming more than they should, and the house was silent around them.

“One of the outcast,” the one on the left said.  “One of the unhallowed.”

“Here!  In this place!  A gift for the Sons of the Tiger.”  The one in the center lifted his blade.  “Spill her blood my kinsmen!”

Jaya reached for the pistol hooked on her belt just as they leaped for her.  The hammer snapped and sparked and then the roar of the weapon shattered the silence of the house.  The one almost upon her vanished in a gout of smoke and then pitched to the stairs at her feet, his head a bloody wreckage.  The other two cried out in rage and sprang like hunting beasts, and steel rang on steel in the dark.

They were quick, trained in the same ways of combat that she had learned as a child, and she recognized their rhythms as they struck at her, one two, one two, then three quick strikes with the left hand snapping out to slap her blade away.  Instead she turned the edge and cut one of them across the hand, circled left and pressed the other back against the rail.  She caught him off-guard and struck at his neck, only for the steel edge to rebound from his tattooed skin as though it were boiled hide.

He gagged and fell back, hand to his neck, and then he laughed.  “We are guarded against you, child of evil”  The shift of his eyes warned her, and she turned to meet the other one as he leaped.  She parried his stroke and he caught at her sword arm, trying to bear her over, instead she fell back and hooked her legs around his, twisted and tripped him, sent him pitching down the stairs.

Jaya rolled over and came up in time for the other one to fall upon her, the dagger opening a long cut down the outside of her thigh.  She grimaced and locked her legs around his midsection to control him and brought him down, pinning his blade under his body.  He grunted and laughed.  “Now the venom of the Dark One will paralyze your limbs.  Now you will know pain.”

She shoved the edge of her sword into his mouth and pushed him back, blood pouring out as she forced him back and pinned him to the stairs.  She braced her hand on the scrolled back edge of the blade and shoved, drawing the sword across so it cut deep.  He gagged and then his tongue was sliced through and blood sprayed out as she cut into his throat, twisting until his jaw separated and his eyes went dead.

Jaya stood quickly, looked down at the last man.  She felt a slight burning in the cut on her leg, but she did not concern herself with it.  In the old days her clan had poisoned their children a little over many years so they would not be vulnerable to the venoms of their enemies, and it seemed that protection still stood, shielding her.

She heard shouting outside, and she knew the sound of the shot would bring more giants seeking vengeance, and in this moment she did not care.  She came down the stairs, pointing her sword at the last man where he awaited her.  “You know the name of my clan, you speak as an enemy.  Tell me who you are, unless you fear to face me.”  There was blood on her hands and on her mouth, she could taste it.

“You are not one of the Tautai, they are all gone, they were driven to the sea and vanished from the world.”  He looked side to side, as if seeking an escape.  “You cannot be one of them.”

“You fear me,” she said.  “And you should fear me.  Tell me who you are, or I will cut it from you!”

“The Sons of the Tiger do not fear!” he hissed, and he sprang at her, using his leap to try to disguise shifting his blade to his left hand.  Jaya moved left and cut right, severing his arm just above the armored vambrace and sending him screaming to the floor.  She was on him in a moment, pressing her knee down on the gushing limb to keep him from dying too quickly.  He screamed and twisted and she held him down, sword to his neck.

“Do you serve Hamau the Tigress?  Is that your faith?  Speak!”  She gripped his hair and held him down.  “Speak or you will never find the shores of the sea of flowers!”  She found the tattoo on his neck resisted the edge of her sword, so she twisted the blade until it dug against unmarked skin, and then she saw blood well up.

“Hamau is a false god!” he screamed, fighting her.  “We have made the shrine over in the image of Kshatra!  We will cleanse the old ways!  We will destroy the old gods and the old names!  We will claim all in the name of the Tiger God!”

Disgusted, Jaya dragged her sword through his neck and ripped his head free, letting the black blood gush across the floor.  She lifted the head by the knotted hair and then threw it aside.  There were voices out the doors and in other parts of the house, and she would have to move quickly to get away.  It took her a moment to find the fallen pistol and reload it, working quickly in the dim light.  The smell of death was growing, and she heard someone just outside the door, saw lanternlight glimmer in the cut glass.

She stripped the leather vambraces from one of the dead men and put them on, liking the feel of them.  They were made from hardened leather and were light, but would protect from slashes and cuts unless they were especially vicious.

The door swung open and she saw light spill into the front hall, heard voices utter oaths at the sight of the dead slave girls and the fallen assassins.  Jaya aimed her pistol at the light and fired, enjoying the snap and the spark, and then the way it leaped in her hand as it fired.  There was the explosion and then a scream and then fire engulfed the doorway as her shot smashed open an oil lantern.

More voices came from a side hall, and Jaya hooked the pistol on her sash and then decided the fire was a good weapon.  She ran up the wide steps, leaping over the two dead men, and at the top she slashed out and cut down the lantern there.  It dropped to the steps and rolled down, bouncing, and then it smashed and burning oil poured out.

Jaya left the steps in flames and climbed to the second floor, finding several dead men and women strewn about the corridors, blood cooling into pools around them.  She wanted to know what had brought death down on this place, not least because she had meant to visit it upon this house herself.  She knocked down more lanterns and spread more fire, hearing shouts from below.  They would try to fight back the flames, and that would slow them down.  They would not have time to hunt for her.

She made her way through the rooms, amazed at the size and openness, at the clean walls and floors.  Not all the giants lived like animals, it seemed.  She found an open window and climbed out, made her way down the vines to the grass below.  She heard people moving in the dark, but they were not close to her.  She ran easily uphill and climbed the wall, crouched there to look north into the hills.  Under the stars the distant mountains were like shadows of waves frozen in time.

Jaya knew, from the old tales, that there in the central highlands was a great rock hill larger than anything built by man, and atop it was a palace made in the elder days of her people.  There stood a great shrine to Hamau, the Tiger Goddess.  The fire-sided, the claw-keeper.  The guardian of wisdom, the holder of the ways, the one who kept secrets.  Had these apostates dared to defile that ancient temple?  Now she knew she must go to that legendary place, and seek the wisdom of the tigress of the mountainsides.  She would follow the black road of the giants back to the birthplace of her clan, and she would find the power of the old gods.  Blood would show her the way.