The Storm of Blood

 

Down from the hills the land was a pattern of green fields and darker gatherings of orchards and forest flowing to the sea, where the city of Jinan hunched like a barnacle clinging to the shore.  It looked ugly to her, and Jaya took pleasure in thinking she would soon wipe if from the face of this sacred island.  The afternoon sun slanted down across the water, setting the clouds on fire, and the whole sea was the color of blood.

The southern horizon, over the water, was all a black frontier of churning cloud and lances of violet lightning.  The monsoon had begun, though it had yet to come ashore.  For days she had watched ships scuttle in from the sea to take shelter in the harbor here, anchoring themsleves securely, ready to hold out through the torrents of rain and wind they knew would come.  Even the outlanders had learned the ways of the great storms that came when the seasons turned.  She would use that to grind them into pieces.

It was good to look on the sea again, to watch the waves roll and swell and fall in on themselves, the crests growing higher and higher as the storm out to sea gained intensity.  The thunder was distant, but that would change.  She felt the winds shifting as she closed her eyes, feeling the breath of the sea on her face, smelling the salt and blood and the seaweed and dead fish rotting on the beaches.  As familiar as her own voice.  The gods were close to her now, and she remembered all they had laid upon her.  The favor shown by Arang who had saved her life, of Ularu who had spared it, of the blessing of Sa-Hantu who lit the deep with his fire, and of Hamau the tigress, who haunted her wake like a promise of vengeance.

Dhatun stood by her, and she was glad of his presence.  He frowned down at the town spread along the shore.  It had not been made for defense, and the walls were low and old, but it was plain measures had been taken since the battle at the Basu, and from here they could see barricades raised to block the streets inside the gate, and logs used to raise the walls higher and reinforce them.  The two cannons she had captured would not breach a hole easily.

The Red Sun

 

Smoke turned the sky dark at midday, and it turned the sun red as blood.  Jaya looked out from her hillside vantage and saw the line of fire stretched across the countryside, and she tasted the smoke of the ruined farms and the slain Utani.  The Mordani, the giants, were on the move, and they came with fire and steel.

She had expected they would react to the destruction of the manor house and the slaying of their elder, but their wrath was greater than she had foreseen.  She had not thought them foolish enough to raze the very farms and plantations that made them lords.  That their rage would cause them to scourge the land itself in the hopes of driving her out of her forested sanctuary.  Now they beat the bush and the scrublands, driving all before them, and by tomorrow morning they would reach the edges of the forest itself.

Her one-eyed messenger came through her assassins and bowed low.  “One has come who says he is known to you.  He has the marks of an Ekwa raider.”

Jaya felt her heart leap, and she smiled.  “Bring him, bring him quickly.”  She had not dared to hope that Dhatun had survived the wreck, all those years gone.  She wondered if it would be him, or another of his kind come to seek her out.

It was him.  He towered above the smaller Utani, lean and hard and marked by the intricate tattoos of his people.  He wore his long hair in a nest of braids, but they were no longer limed white and stiff.  She realized he must have been here since they wrecked, and not returned home to his people.  Yet he still carried himself stiff and proud as he walked, and smiled his tight-lipped smile when he saw her.

“My chief,” he said, and gave his small tilt of the head that was all the bow an Ekwa would grant.  “I never doubted that you lived, and when I heard the tales of this uprising, I knew it must be you.”

She smiled and then embraced him, glad of the feel of his solid, sinewy muscle.  “I am glad to find you alive as well.  There is no other I would rather see today.”  She looked at him.  “You have not returned home.”

He shrugged.  “My people are much feared here, I have lived on the wild coasts, spear-fishing and stealing from the dirt-grubbers.  It is a long voyage home, over uncertain seas, almost impossible alone, in a hide boat.  I awaited a sign, and now I have one.”

Children of the Bones

 

Smoke lay over the hills and forests of Tarakan, and the roads were emptied when the night came, for death had come to live in the night, and no man dared venture forth under the sign of the moon.  The smoke was from the burning of the fields and the lodges of those the Mordani judged to be rebels, and the roads were marked by the bodies of the executed, hung by their wrists until they ceased to cry out, and the birds came to devour their eyes and tongues.

By day the Mordani lords roamed the paths in armed companies, horses breathing hard as they rode with drawn swords and smoking matches in their guns.  The country they had once held as their own was now dangerous for them, and any man who went alone would not return.  Those lost vanished in the dark and the jungle and their heads were found when morning came, hanging from tree limbs, or at the crossroads where they executed those who rebelled against them.  By night the slain Utani were taken down and replaced by Mordani taken from their beds in the night, by women who vanished in the dark.  All knew the fear of the rebellion, and all feared the mark of the serpent and the tiger.

The Utani in the fields bent their necks and endured, working their crops by day, seeking to give no offense to their masters, but by night many of them covered their faces and crept out into the forest.  They slipped up on manor houses and set them afire, or they stole and slaughtered cattle and horses.  They poisoned wells, stole children, and took the heads of any man who fell into their grasp.

So by day the land simmered under the late-summer heat, the skies to the west dark with gathering storms, though the first real monsoon of the season had not yet some striding ashore.  Thunder often rumbled distantly while the sun yet shone and the rains fell through the afternoon light in scintillant color.  The Mordani warlords traveled the roads with swords bared and struck down any who so much as looked them in the face, striving to use terror to subdue.

By night the land belonged to the Tigress, and though none knew her name, some claimed to have seen her.  They said she was a witch out of the high country, tattooed as in the old ways and with the magic of the Old Gods.  They said she could vanish at will, that she transformed under the crescent moon into a tigress the size of a horse, and that no blade could touch her.  The young men and women, driven to rage by the cruelty of their overlords, had become her disciples, and it was she who nurtured the flame of revolt in Tarakan, and who had sworn to drive the Mordani out with fire and steel.