Jo Clayton: Moongather

Heads lined the top of the wall and thrust out from window slits in the gate towers. Three fisher bodies were sprawled outside, one bristling with a dozen crossbow bolts, the other two slashed to bloodied rags. A little farther out, two smaller darker bodies lay in pools of drying blood, skewered by fish spears.

The setting sun gilded the shouting, milling groups of macai riders gathered on a rocky knob just out of bowshot from the village. They were small dark men, their bodies wrapped in leather straps, boiled leather shields on their backs, sabers brandished high or swinging along their thighs. Kapperim. Ser roi sucked in a long breath, exploded it out. A raid at Moongather? Here? Something was wrong. They were too far north, too far from their burrows in the mountains behind Sankoy, something was stirring them up. She licked her lips, uneasily aware that this could fit in all too well with what had happened in Oras. That could mean the Nearga-Nor’s reach was a good deal longer than she’d suspected, something she didn’t want to think about. She searched the knob for the Shaman but saw only the Warleader, a bearded man whose leathers were set with thousands of tiny mirrors that caught the sun and clothed him in a web of golden light.

Five raiders broke away from the others and rode at top speed down the slope. When they reached the flat ground in front of the village wall, they reined the macain back on their haunches, swung slings over their heads and lobbed smoking globes into the village. Wheeling their mounts, they raced away, shouts and shrill curses following them.

The globes sailed back outside to burst on the ground, sputtering, fuming and finally subsiding. Out on the tappata, Serroi wrinkled her nose as wisps of the stinking smoke reached her.

A flight of arrows and a few fish spears streamed after the Kapperim. Though most of them glanced off the shields on their backs, two raiders fell from their saddles, one with an arrow through his leg, the other skewered just above the waist by one of the fish spears. The wounded Kappra dragged himself onto his knees and started crawling uphill, but another spear took him in almost the same place as the other, the lower back. He sprawled on the grass, twitched a few times, then was still.

Serroi’s boat emerged from the cliff shadow, slowing even further as the tide-drive lessened. Several raiders yelled and pointed at her. The Warleader waved an arm glittering with light, sending three men plunging to the edge of the tappata. They waited for her to come within range, ignoring the fisher arrows that skittered around and off them. When she was close enough, they raised their bows and sent quarrels skimming at her.

Serroi slipped the tether over the tiller and sank behind the boat’s side, watching the bolts hiss past. One clunked into the mast and bounced back onto the deck; one cut the air two feet behind the stern, hit the water, skipped twice, slowly sank as the heavy point pulled it down. The third hit the side of the boat close to the waterline, slid along it, sank. Serroi snorted with contempt and sat up.

The Kapperim saw her head and loosed another flight. She ducked again, scornful of their marksmanship but not ready to tempt their luck. Sitting crouched on the deck she strung her bow, worked the weaponbelt around until the long case rested in her lap. She flipped it open and counted the arrows. Twelve shafts left. Not enough. Have to pick my targets. She lifted her head above the rail and frowned at the men on the knob.

They were backing away, forming a ragged half-circle about a fire. Four Kapperim rode forward and one by one thrust torches into the fire. As soon as they were blazing, the men whirled them about their heads, howled their war challenge, jerked their macain around, raced down toward the walls. One rider fell when an arrow from the village caught his mount in an eye. As he tumbled from the saddle, another arrow socked into his chest. Two of the Kapperim reached the walls and flung their torches against the planks of the great double gate. The third stopped a little way out, whirled the torch over his head and flung it in a high wheeling arc over the wall. As it swung through the air, the flame raced the whole length of the handle. The moment it cleared the wall, a fisher sprang up, caught the torch, shrieked as the fire ate into his hands. Refusing to let go, screaming obscenities, he hurled it into the tappata where it rocked up and down on the water, burning furiously. The fisher stared at white bone coming through charred flesh, moaned and dropped from sight The other torches flared up with unnatural swiftness, the wood of the gate already beginning to smoke and blacken.

A small man, naked except for a greasy leather apron, stood hunched over a replica of the village. A tiny fire licked slowly higher and higher at a miniature gate. Body strained, the Shaman was chanting sonorously, his voice in its lowest register. Eye-spot throbbing, Serroi knelt on the deck, nocked an arrow, then was on her feet, feeling for her target, feeling the flow of the wind, breathing slowly, deeply, centering herself. Ignoring the shouts from the bank, the quarrels flitting past her, she loosed the shaft. The arrow sang through the air, swung through a high arc, sliced into the greasy naked back of the Shaman. He fell over his model, extinguishing the tiny fire.

The fire eating at the gate chuffed out and the torch in the water sizzled to blackness and sank.

On the bank the Kapperim howled with rage and spurred their macain until they came up with the boat. This time two of their bolts flicked by less than an inch from her head and the third skinned her arm. She ignored them and loosed a second arrow at the Warleader. The light-gilded figure on the knob went rigid. His head dipped down as if he stared at the shaft protruding from his chest, then he toppled off his mount, his fall like the sun suddenly going out for the raiders. She heard screams and curses from the bank, then the quarrels were thick above her as if the shooters were too blind with fury and grief to notice that she was no longer standing, too blind to do more than shove the bolts in and shoot them out. Then the bombardment stopped.

She rose to her knees. On the knob the Kapperim milled about, wailing the death chant for their leaders. On the village wall fishers were cheering, a small boy had climbed the bell tower and was swinging on the broken rope, the successive peals of the huge bell a roll of triumph booming out over the meadow, nearly drowning out the sorrowing yips of the raiders. The charred gate split in the middle and the village men swarmed out, shooting a rain of arrows from their longbows, hurling spears at the wailing, disorganized raiders. Serroi dropped the anchor overside and sat watching the melee, her part in the raider’s rout completed.

The confusion out on the grass increased. Demoralized by the death of their leaders, a death coming so suddenly it was like evil magic to them, under attack by the reheartened villagers, the Kapperim scooped up their dead Shaman and Warleader and fled into the band of trees hugging the mountains’ feet. Left behind, dead and dying raiders lay on the grass and abandoned macain were snuffling around, tearing up tufts of grass, chewing placidly now that their riders no longer prodded them into irritated rebellion.

Serroi ran a bit of leather along the bowstave, smoothing a few roughened spots in the wax as she watched the fishers move among the downed Kapperim, cutting the throats of those who still lived. After a few minutes of this, she set the bow aside, worked the anchor loose and drew it back in the boat. When the boat had enough way on, she swung it around, raised the sail, and began tacking back toward the line of boats drawn up on the bank of the tappata in the shadow of the village walls. It was near full dark, the shadows long on the grass, the western sky filled with rags of crimson and amber as clouds gathered for another storm. The tappata was quieter, the tidal surge leveling off. She angled the boat into a last tack, drove its nose up onto the mud slope.