Tobias Buckell - The Executioness

I could hear the threat implicit. If I didn’t agree, Jal would be killed. Ixilon seemed to think that would weigh heavy on me. Let him think it. I didn’t care.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Do not kill the priests. Make them leave, but do not kill them. They teach the Way. They are not responsible for the culling. That lies on me, and the others who serve with me. The moral weight of the culling lies only with me and my soldiers. Would you agree?”

I looked back at Jal in the shadows of the room, then at Ixilon. “I will say yes. But only because I do not want to draw the judgment of Borzai for killing holy men, no matter what gods they serve. As we must all walk the halls of the gods someday.”

Ixilon nodded. “I’m sorry we could not come to a peace.”

“You forsook it the moment you rode with soldiers against children,” I told him.

We left him still standing, looking out over his city.

Back in the fold of the army I rode to Jiva. “He has nothing for us,” I told the warlord.

He looked up at the city and winced. He’d been hoping for a surrender. Somehow. But now he nodded and rode off to make preparations.

I raised up on the stirrups of the horse, and looked down the slope of the plains, off to the soft valley and the distant, sun glittered ocean.

Ixilon could have been lying that my children were there. It was definitely a distraction to get me away from the battle.

Yet, I would hate myself if I didn’t try to see for myself.

I turned my horse’s head to ride for the harbor.

But Anezka saw the move and grabbed my horse’s reins. “You can’t go,” she said, firmly.

“My children might be getting on boats to leave,” I said to her. “What would you have me do? It is the reason I came. Not to be in some great army. I came for them.”

Anezka yanked on the reins to pull me alongside her. The horses huffed and sidled flank to flank. “If you leave, everyone will watch you flee for the valley. Many are here because they follow the Executioness. Your name, your reputation, has spread far and wide. If you leave, it will confuse their spirit.”

“Their spirit? They are fighters. They are ready to avenge their families’ deaths.”

“Many of them will hear you’re leaving to find your children, and run with you, hoping to find theirs,” Anezka said.

I looked back at her. “As they should.”

“No!” She grabbed my arm. “No. They shouldn’t. Here we all stand, ready to end the Culling. Ready to stop the stealing of children, the destruction of our towns. You would throw away the chance to end all that for just your needs? You are the mother to all these fighters, you created them. You are the mother to a new generation of people who will not live under the thumb of the Paikans.”

I slumped in the saddle. “I did not ask for all that. I am just Tana.”

“You are not just Tana, you haven’t been for months. And no one asks for the things that happen to them. You didn’t ask for Lesser Khaim to be burned, any more than I asked for the caravan to be destroyed. But it has happened. And now you can stop it from all happening again.”

I thought about Ixilon and his cycles of destruction, then straightened. I looked out beyond the mountain toward the slope of the land, where it carried on toward the coast, where Paikan ships would be leaving.

“I think you broke the last piece of me,” I told Anezka.

“You and I were already broken,” she said, and then she led me deeper into the camp, her arm still holding mine.

The sun was orange and fat over the plains in its midmorning bloat when the Paikans burst from their clanking gates. War elephants roared, the sound racing out across the fields to us as we formed up.

“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.