The Executioness

Part Two

I woke up with a grunt in the dark, something creaking and swaying beneath me. I’d been dreaming about a younger Set, his large brown eyes looking into mine as he struggled so hard to stumble about, learning to walk.

He’d fallen, and I’d rushed out, shouting at him to be careful, and then I had woken up.

I felt for my forehead, but there was no pain or bump as I expected.

My ankle felt fine. I felt fine, except for the extreme slowness that remained with me from the bramble sleep. I’d fallen into it once before, as a child. My parents had found me in the field and pulled all the bramble needles from my skin: people fretted over me for nearly a week as I lay trapped in a world of dreams and darkness.

I licked my dried lips and sat up.

The world kept creaking back and forth.

I heard wheels turning underneath me.

I was inside a covered wagon of some sort. Daylight peeked through cracks in wooden walls and top. And I could taste fish and salt hanging in the air.

A bird screeched outside, and I realized I must be near the coast.

My axe lay near me, as did my leather hood. Which meant I was somewhere safe.

In a daze I crawled toward a large flap, and as I reached it a hand flung it aside, blinding me with daylight.

“Well, hello there,” someone said gently. “I was just coming to check on you.”

My eyes watered, as if they hadn’t seen sunlight in weeks.

Strong hands gripped my arm. “Careful, or you’ll fall off.”

I sat on the back of a large wagon. A small deck ran around the rim of the vehicle. A woman my age, traces of gray in her hair, held my arm. Her trader tattoos, including a striking purple figure of the elephant god Sisinak holding the triple scales of commerce, ran up and down her forearms. “I’m Anezka,” she said. She squatted on the platform jutting off the back. “I was bringing you some soup. Everyone’s going to be excited to hear you woke up.”

I moved out onto the platform with Anezka, still amazed that my ankle wasn’t hurting. Behind the wagon I was laid out in, another wagon followed.

That wagon behind us was pulled by four massive aurochs. They looked like cattle, but far more muscular, and their long horns swooped well out before them like the prows of ships. Four aurochs also followed the back of the wagon I was on, resting from the strain of pulling, their flanks rippling and hooves thumping the ground as they plodded along.

Behind the wagon following us, was another, and then another, and then another yet again. I counted ten before the long train of wagons curved around a bend in a fine mist of kicked up dust. Each wagon featured its own unique, mottled purples and greens painted in patterns on their wooden sides. Many had carvings: depictions of markets and roads and maps of the world, all expertly chipped into their sides.

“This is a caravan,” I said out loud, realizing it at the same moment I spoke it.

“This is the caravan,” Anezka said. “You’re traveling the spice road on the perpetual caravan. We move along the coast starting in Paika and go all the way to Mimastiva and even a little beyond, until the bramble of the east stops us with its wall. Then we turn back around again. There used to be many, all throughout the old Empire. Now: only us.”

Mimastiva was on the coast, hundreds of miles south of Khaim. Paika lay on the coast as well, far to the west. I knew of a few who’d visited Mimastiva. Paika was said to have fallen to the raiders when I was still a child. These were cities that to me, were almost past the edge of the world.

“You said that people would be excited I was awake,” I said.

Anezka’s eyes widened. “Because you’re the lady executioner, who met four Paikans in mortal combat. Everyone’s been talking about you up and down the line.”

“Paikans?” I asked.

“You northerners call them raiders.”

“I didn’t fight four raiders,” I said with a frown. “I only took on one, and he beat me badly. But yes, there were four of them.”

I looked down at my ankle. “How long have I been asleep?”

“You should see the Roadmaster,” Anezka said.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because this is his wagon, and you are his guest,” Anezka said, somewhat formally, but quite firmly.

With her arm to steady me, I grabbed the ropes along the outside of the covered wagon’s rim, and walked toward the front.

As we approached the raised platform from where the aurochs were controlled, I could see up the line of the caravan. We were near the front. Muscled men with brass arquebuses stood on a fifteen paces long war wagon in front of us, with hammered metal shieldwalls protecting them.

Further ahead, a wagon with a large fire crew burned bramble away from the road edges, the roar of the flame carrying back over the air to us. The stench of the burned limbs wafted past.

I was a long way from Lesser Khaim.

The Roadmaster was a successful, rich, mountain of a man, robes draped across the heft of his belly.

But if I thought him jolly, that was a mistake. His smile was tight, controlled, and his eyes shrewd. This man saw more miles pass under the wheels of his home in a year than most ever traveled in a life.

And judging by the lines in his face, he’d had a long life doing this. Like Anezka, trader tattoos ran up and down his forearms, and his ears dangled with earrings.

He had no mustaches, his lips were shaved clean, like a refugee from Alacan.

I’d heard tales of the caravan, and the coastal spice route. Townsmen who travelled south to markets were told tales of the great market of Mimastiva by other townsmen who ventured that far south, and here I was, sitting on a wagon with the Roadmaster of the caravan himself.

“Welcome to the spice road,” the Roadmaster said with a twitch in the corner of his lips. He did not hold the reins himself: that was a job for a young man in a loincloth with massive arms who sat next to him, the thick leather straps leading to the aurochs draped across his lap. He watched the road like an owl, his eyes never blinking.

“Thank you,” I said, and brushed my skirts up to sit by him. Sitting higher than the bramble along the road meant that a soft sea breeze cooled my skin.

From this perch, I could see the road stretching out along the rocky coastline before us. The ocean, hundreds of feet below us, slammed and boomed against the wall of brown rock. And out beyond the spray, the green waves surged around pinnacles of rock shaped like the spires of castles. And beyond the spray and foam, the ocean stretched out forever: flat, unbreaking, the color of winter-green leaves.

“It is a beautiful sight,” the Roadmaster said, noticing my gaze.

“I never thought I’d see it in my life,” I whispered. I wondered if Duram or Set had seen this, as they were being marched west.

I leaned forward and hid my face in my grief, and the Roadmaster leaned close and touched my shoulder. “What is your name, lady executioner?”

“Tana.” I swallowed. “Tana the lost. Tana the homeless. Tana the abandoned. But not Tana the lady executioner. I’m not that thing.”

“I am Jal,” he said softly. “Where are you from Tana?”

“Khaim,” I told him, and then I corrected myself. “Lesser Khaim.”

“Ah, Khaim.” He nodded. “I think I remember Khaim when I was just a boy. I was still sitting on my father’s lap when he led the last caravan through. Sometimes I think I remember the start of that journey, or the greater cities of the Jhandparan Empire. I know I remember seeing a great palace that had fallen to earth, tilted, its foundational plane shattered like a plate! And the bramble, it gripped the city like a giant’s fist, it did.”

My grief broke a little, hearing his memories. “You are that old?”

Jal laughed at me. “I am that old. Yes. Hopefully old enough that I’ll die before I lose the title of Roadmaster to the title of Bushmaster, which is what they will call me when even the spice road on this coast becomes choked by damned bramble.”

I looked out on the road, and thought about what came next. “Where do you head?”

“Paika,” the Roadmaster said. “And you will too.”

He said this so firmly, I jerked to stare at him. “What do you mean?”

“The men who delivered you here said you attacked four Paikans on your own. They said you demanded your family back, and fought to the near death. So I have to imagine that a person who did that, would not then turn around and head back where she came from.”

As he spoke, he turned and looked at me with a larger smile.

“I will not be going back to Lesser Khaim,” I agreed.

“The men who brought you to me thought so. Paika is the greatest city in the west, and where your family most probably will be taken. And Paika is a carefully guarded city. You cannot enter without an examination, and papers, and a writ, unless you are like me and have dispensation. The Paikans fear people like you coming in to try and find their families. Yes, a person who attacks four of them would go to Paika with someone like me, who could get you inside, I think.”

I shook my head in frustration. “I didn’t attack all four of the raid… I mean Paikans. The stories are wrong.”

“Of course they are. They’re always wrong. Stories are for the listener, Tana. And it is what the listener makes of them that truly matters. The men who saw you attack the Paikans, they told us they found their courage. If one woman could attack four horsemen, then they could do the same. For two days and two nights they plotted, and then finally… attacked!”

I couldn’t believe what I heard. But it had to be true, didn’t it? Or I wouldn’t be here. “And they succeeded?”

“They killed three of the Paikans and took their gold, their weapons, and their horses. Then one of them rode back to find you, where you were deep in the clutches of bramble sleep.”

“How long,” I asked. Jal waved a hand at me and ignored the question.

“When I saw them outside Mimastiva, they had you on a travois pulled behind a horse. They wanted to ride to Paika as fast as they could, so they gave me gold and a captive Paikan horseman. We will ransom him back to Paika for good coin.”

Up ahead the aurochs plodded forward. The wagon groaned and creaked along.

“How long have I slept?” I asked again, fearing the worst.

“Three weeks, I think. Maybe a month. It could have been far, far worse. You are lucky to be alive.”

I rubbed my arms. Would it be possible to find my family then, after a month? Or would they be scattered to even stranger lands? I bit my lip and looked at Jal. “The stories I have heard say the caravan is an expensive place to ride. Wherever I am, you can’t carry any goods for trade, right? What are you asking for the price of my passage?”

I asked that, while fearing the worse.

“I’m not after your body,” Jal muttered. “The coin and the prisoner your inspired friends gave me is enough. Or we would have left you asleep by the side of the road weeks ago. But you are right: no one in the caravan lies around. Well, unless they’re in a bramble sleep. I will move you to another wagon, and you will work. Everyone in the caravan helps the caravan. That is our way.”

I was relieved. “In Lesser Khaim I…”

Jal held up a hand to stop me. “Our needs are different than a town’s. I don’t care what you used to do. The caravan is a new life for you, until we reach Paika. Anezka says we need cooks in the lagging wagons to the rear. Or firewood scroungers. We need hagglers and movers with the trading teams, inventory managers to make sure nothing is being stolen…”

Now it was my time to interrupt. I thought about my fight with the raiders, and about the future I was reaching for. I was in a strange new land, and as Jal said, starting a new life.

I pointed at the wagon ahead of the fire crew. “Those men, with the arquebuses. Let me join them. I want to learn how to use those weapons. In Khaim there are just a handful of those old weapons, left over from the lords that once vacationed there, before the fall of Jhandpara. And here you have a team armed with them, it is very impressive.”

Jal made a face. “Impressive? The magisters of Jhandpara would call down rocks from the skies and fly over their enemies to rain fire on them. That was impressive. These things are just loud tubes.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No, no, I suppose you are right. The arquebus would be an interesting weapon for a lady…” and I could see the word ‘executioner’ lurk behind his lips, but then falter as I stared coolly at him. “Tana, to wield,” he finished saying.

I looked at the road curving off into my future, filled with ruts and ropes of bramble. “Jal. The caravan goes all the way to Paika, then back to Mimastiva. You trade with them?”

“Of course. I am a man of trade,” the Roadmaster said. “I work with anyone willing to pay a fair price for my goods, and leave me to the spice road. But my allegiance is to no one city. Most of us abandon such loyalties after years on the road, as cities rise and fall, come and go. Many of the families on the caravan have always been in the caravan, and will never rest until they reach the halls of Sisinak, if Borzai wills it and your life’s trades have been judged honest. It is only there they will rest in the oasis markets, where the goods are never scarce, and the gold in your purse refills every night.” Jal chuckled.

“So you are no friend of the… Paikans.” I still had to hunt to use the right word. They had always just been known as ‘raiders’ to us in the north.

“I am no one’s friend, I am a trader,” Jal said. “If you doubt me, go see the Paikan chained away in our wagon. He will remain there until we get to Paika, and I negotiate a good price for his freedom.”

“I may well do that,” I said.

Jal raised his hands and clapped them together. “So. You want to use an arquebus. I will humor you. Bojdan!

Come here.”

One of the warriors looked back at us, set his arquebus down, then swung over the shields to drop to the road. He waited for the Roadmaster’s wagon to approach, then climbed easily up onto the deck and walked up to us. “Yes?”

He was tall, with curled hair and a thick mustache. A massive scimitar hung on his left hip.

“This is Tana, the lady executioner. She will work with you to protect the caravan.”

Bojdan looked me up, then down. “She is a woman,” he said.

“Your powers of observation are astounding, Bojdan. It’s a damned shame you aren’t in charge of accounts, or haggling. Yes, she’s a woman, it is plain for you and me to see. She is the woman who took on four Paikan soldiers by herself. Can you say the same?”

Again Bojdan regarded me. “Whatever you want, Roadmaster.”

“You’re correct, Bojdan. It is whatever I want. Take her back to a wagon with space to sleep, and teach her what she needs to know. And get out of my sight, by all the damned halls, get out of my sight.”

Bojdan smiled. This was banter for them, the bluster that men exchanged. He turned around. “Let’s go, Tana.”

Jal cleared his throat. “Oh, and tell Anezka that Tana will not be joining them at the rear of the caravan to help out. She will be disappointed, I’m sure, but she is a capable manager, and will carry on.”

I looked back at Jal. “Thank you.”

“Good luck…” and he seemed to think about something, then smiled and said, “Executioness.”

I shook my head and went back to fetch my things.

When Bojdan saw the axe, with the black stains in the handle, he nodded.

The muscular warrior and I stood, our backs to scrub, rock, and bramble, and waited for the caravan to pass us by.

“Do you know anything about the raiders?” I asked.

“The Paikans? Dogs. All of them,” Bojdan spat.

I liked the large man better for the reaction. “They took my family.”

“They all but own the coast and more ever north. Ask Jal sometime, he’ll piss himself complaining about the extortions they rip from him to ‘allow’ him to keep trafficking the spice road.”

“They burned Lesser Khaim,” I told him. “And my home.”

“They have reached that far north? They call what they do the Culling. They believe it is their holy duty. You’re lucky to live: they go after young women and children. Eliminate the breed cows, they say.”

I stared at him. “How do you know all this?”

“Their preachers are all over Mimastiva, these days,” Bojdan said. “Things will get worse in the East, now.”

“Why do they do it?” I asked. What bizarre blasphemy did they preach?

“They blame us for the bramble,” Bojdan said, and pointed at a small wagon with a single auroch pulling it. “The surviving Paikan of the four you faced is in that wagon…”

I cut him off. “I keep saying, I didn’t face all four of them. It was just one, and he knocked me to the ground easily. They hobbled me and left me.”

Bojdan nodded as we watched the wagon pass. For a moment, I thought about swinging aboard, and using my axe to kill the man inside. But Bojdan saw the thought crossing my face, and he smiled. “Don’t think about sneaking off in the night to come and kill him. Jal will know it was you, and you wouldn’t want to experience his anger if he were to lose his ransom.”

It was better not to endanger my chance of getting to Paika, I thought. As the wagon passed on, I saw a glimpse of a figure sitting behind iron bars, his back to the world. I didn’t recognize him as one of the two Paikans I’d fought.

“How long until we get to Paika?” I asked.

“Five weeks. Maybe six. The caravan is slow.” Bojdan folded his arms. “We’ll find you a place to sleep, and get your axe sharpened up. And then I guess I’m the one stuck training you so that the next time you decide to take on a group of Paikans, you might at least kill one of them.”

For the first two days Bojdan set me to walking alongside the caravan to get my feet back under me. We passed through more scrub and rock on the cliffs, but even in those two days, we began to move downhill, toward the ocean. We passed coves of sand, nestled in between the scallops of coast. My ankle was somewhat tender, and at night, I’d walk back to the wagon near the very end of the caravan and curse the pain.

But by the third day it was a dull ache, and Bojdan let me up into the guard wagon as we eased past a tiny fishing village perched over the ocean. Fishermen in rags raced up foothills, loudly hawking dried fish hanging from poles on their backs.

I noticed none of the other men on the guard wagon would look me in the eye. I could feel that they resented my being there.

We stood higher than all the caravan here, and I could see the five other guard wagons scattered throughout the snake-like convoy behind us.

“We used to have scouts running out ahead, beside, and lagging behind,” Bojdan told me. “But Jal cannot afford it anymore. So we must be more vigilant than ever.”

As he said that, he looked around at the villagers to our side, pressing close to the wagons, shouting and trying to barter as the caravan stolidly moved on.

I pointed at the gilded, brassworked arquebus Bojdan had over his shoulder. “But what about that? Isn’t it a good weapon?”

“All weapons are good, if used properly,” Bojdan said. He handed me the device. “It is loud, and almost anyone can use it, with some training. It sends bandits scurrying well enough.”

It was heavy, and clumsy in my hands. I looked down the long barrel, its surface etched with thin, serpentine dragons. “I want to learn how to use this properly…”

He smiled.

I learned how to pour the powder, light the matchlock, and raise the arquebus to the side of the shieldwall to balance the ever-heavy barrel.

Powder was expensive, so Bojdan drilled me for the day without it. Over and over again I mimed putting in powder, putting in shot, tamping, then setting the gun on the ledge and aiming. I did it until my shoulders were sore.

“Look past the barrel,” Bojdan urged, “to your target. That tree right over there. They are not accurate like a crossbow, or arrows, but you should still make the effort to aim.”

This time the gun was loaded. The acrid burning match, pinched between the serpentine lock, had been pulled back and was ready to strike. All I had to do was pull the trigger, and the burning fuse would descend into the pan.

“Okay, fire it,” Bojdan said.

I did, and the world exploded in light and smoke. “Sons of whores,” I shouted, startled, and when the smoke cleared I saw a mess of shredded leaves and some broken branches far to the right of where I had aimed. And my shoulder hurt.

Bojdan’s men laughed at me. “It’s got a kick, yeah?”

But Bojdan didn’t laugh. “Clean it, get a new one in, try again. Same tree!”

I reloaded rapidly, but not quick enough. The tree was almost obscured by the Roadmaster’s wagon by the time I set the barrel on the shieldwall.

Bojdan grabbed it. “That was not bad, but not quick enough. So let’s not shoot our employer with stray shot today. Shoot that tree.”

I aimed at our sides again, and this time I was expecting the unholy roar of the weapon. Smoke burnt my face, and tears stung my eyes, but pieces of shot had fanned out and hit the tree I’d aimed at.

“Good,” Bojdan said.

And then it was back to walking alongside the caravan for me.

In the second week, after more drills, Bojdan decided I could handle the arquebus well enough. We had left the coastal cliffs long behind us, and wound our way through soft plains near the ocean’s edge. Trees, and further inland, woods, began to hem the road we traveled on, not just bramble and brush. “You know as much as us about the arquebus,” he said. “Now it’s time to think about close quarters. I will teach you to use your axe.”

For this we left the caravan, once I’d retrieved the executioner’s axe. We walked out into the woods as the wagons slowly rumbled past. Bojdan came with his scimitar, which was always at his side, and a small round shield he’d taken from the wagon’s wall.

He looked me up and down. “You may think that because you are a woman that you are not a match for my men in the caravan. But if a one hundred pound warrior came to me, I would not turn him away merely because my men weigh twice what he does. I would, however, have to understand how best to use him. He is a tool. Some tools are large and heavy, useful for clubbing and smashing things. Some are thin daggers, useful for stabbing quickly.”

This was the longest thing I’d heard him say, and it sounded carefully thought out, like a speech. “Did you think of how you would say this all last night, as you sat sentry?” I asked him.

“Shut up. There are hard lands we will pass through, and we will be attacked, and you will protect the caravan.” He pulled his shirt apart to show scars on his chest, then pushed his sleeves up to show a wicked scar that cut deep into his upper arm, biting into the muscle there. “Whether you be a trained warrior, or an old lady, the skill of fighting lies not in what you can pick up, but in how much flesh you carve, and how well you will carve it, Tana. No one cares whether the person who does this is large, small, woman, or man. Even the best die suddenly on the battlefield. Death is death.”

That was a true thing. But I held the axe out in my two hands. “You want me to use this axe, not a sword? Or a scimitar like you?”

Bojdan tapped the hilt of his blade. “Do you have a sword? Have you suddenly come into money, and can afford to buy one from someone here in the caravan?”

“No,” I muttered.

“Then,” he said, “it will be the axe, because it is what you have. I have held it, while you were sleeping. It is well balanced. It is light, and easy to wield. Hold it two handed, just like when chopping wood. And remember, you hold a unique weapon.”

He moved my hand up a little, and then the other down. “A unique weapon?” I asked.

“Most men hold their shield with the left hand. With your axe, it is easy to switch it to a left handed strike, easier than learning to use a sword with your left. And you have a swing that comes easy to their unprotected side.” He held his shield up to demonstrate. “Swing slowly.”

Like chopping at a tree from the left, I did, and I could see what he meant. He had to move aside to get the shield in front of him. “I’m making you move around,” I said.

“You’re controlling the fight. From the first swing. There are other things you can do with the axe. For example, you can swing it past them and yank back, getting their neck with the downward facing edge of the axe’s point. You can stab at them with the upward point of the blade. Spike them with the side away from the blade shaped so conveniently just like a spearpoint. Use the axe as a hook, to sweep them off their feet.”

There was more. And halfway through the slowly shown moves, I stopped. “You know a great deal about fighting with axes.”

Bojdan paused. “It’s a peasant’s weapon… and my first.”

“Why do so few use it then?” I asked. “Everyone has one.”

Bojdan thought about it, as if for the first time. “It’s not the weapon of a warrior, but of the low peoples. It’s for chopping trees and bramble, not flesh. That is what fighters say. Did the guards in Khaim work for their meals, or do nothing but soldier?”

“No,” I shook my head. “They only soldiered.”

He grinned, and warmed to subject. “So whether mercenaries or trained soldiers, it’s the people who hold weapons who choose what they use the most. And they are not the same people who farm. So the axe isn’t seen as a battle weapon.”

I understood. “And that is good for me.”

“Maybe,” Bojdan shrugged. “There are many unusual weapons on the field. People who spend their lives loving weapons bring their preferred lover to the field of play. But it is not those small things that determine a battle. That is decided by things that take place long before foes meet.”

I perked up. Bojdan commanded the fighting men of the caravan. It sounded like he had seen more combat than just scaring off bandits. “Like what?”

“It is how many soldiers are raised,” he said. “Your axe will do you no good against a well aimed arrow. But an archer would have trouble escaping the jab of a sword. And so on. It is the mix of weapons and people, and how many you wield. It is how fresh they are. How healthy. Valor and intention are good for the heat of a battle, but if you are vastly outnumbered, there is only so much bravery can do.”

I hefted the axe and thought about it. Bravery while charging the four Paikans had only gotten me beaten and left on the ground. “You need to win the battle before your first stroke.”

Bojdan grinned. “Yes. And speaking of strokes, right there is a sapling we can take back for firewood for the cooks. Remember, chop from your left, the tree’s right, to get past its shield.”

“What shield?” I asked.

Bojdan walked past me even as I said that and strapped his shield to a branch that jutted out enough to be used as a temporary arm.

“Get to it!” he ordered.

And I took on the small tree as if it were a raider, or as I now thought of them, a Paikan, swinging past the shield and biting the axe into the meat of the sapling’s bark over and over again, until it toppled forward and Bojdan yanked me out of the way.

“Never get so focused that you forget what else is around you,” he said, as the tree struck the ground beside us.

For four weeks we continued. Slow moving practices against each other, and fast ones when I faced more trees. Bojdan carved a blunt axe out of wood for me, swaddled with cloth, and a light wooden scimitar padded just the same for himself.

With these we dueled in the ever thickening woods beside the caravan. The road began to slowly move back away from the coast, into the foothills. The ever-present smell of salt faded away, and we stopped passing seaside villages.

Few towns existed here in the thick overgrowth, due to bramble. Only a few solitary homesteads fought back, alone, becoming trapped by the increasing thicket and bramble just miles north of the road.

Occasionally we saw dim figures watching us go past, and the guards fingered their arquebuses, but nothing ever happened.

For a big man Bojdan moved damnably fast, constantly bruising my ribs and shoulders as we practiced, even slamming the padded scimitar down on my neck with swipes of his practice weapon.

Every time he hit me he’d mutter ‘dead,’ in a toneless voice.

But by the fourth week, he stopped saying that and moved on to ‘maimed.’

After we fought, we’d run to catch back up to the caravan, sitting on the most rearward defense wagon, panting and catching our breath.

I slept in a bunking wagon, filled with slat beds mounted on the walls. Ten women shared the tiny space, but I hardly knew them, even after four weeks. Except for Anezka, who’d been there as I woke up from my bramble sleep.

I came to the wagon always tired after Bojdan’s training.

I would crawl right into my bunk and fall sleep.

Bojdan and his men never saw me weaken. I’d worked among men in the butcher shops enough to know their minds. To know that to show weakness, tears, or anything other than humor and rage was to invite judgment.

But alone in the bunks, when sleep failed me, and I was alone with nothing more than the sounds of snoring women and the darkness that pressed against me, then

I would sometimes surrender to tears as I thought about Set and Duram.

Because of that, I feared being alone with my mind. So I trained every moment I could, worked every second I could bear.

At first the women in the bunking wagon did not speak to me, or even meet my eyes, until the oldest, a lady with a leathery weathered face called Alka, asked if maybe I was fighting with Bojdan because I was not really a woman.

“I bore two children the Paikans took,” I told her. “Torn from me like the old healer tore them from my body when they both refused to come easily. Would you have me expose myself to everyone in here to prove you wrong?”

I grabbed the hems of my skirts as if to raise them.

Alka shook her head quickly, scandalized, and the younger girls in the wagon laughed at her. “Of course she’s a woman,” the one called Anezka said. “She is the Executioness, remember? Not the Executioner!”

I shook my head at Jal’s name for me. “Don’t call me that,” I asked. “I am just Tana.”

The women settled at Anezka’s berating. Anezka was, I had found out, a Quartermaster. The large mass of caravaners in the trailing edge provided the needs of the whole human train. Anezka and others like her handled accounting for supplies, and kept the trade goods under lock and key.

“There’s the Roadmaster,” she had explained once over a stewpot hanging from the balcony of the bunking wagon as we ate, “and then there’s the Quartermasters. We really run it all.”

The more I listened to the women chat in the wagon, the more I realized they were the grease that kept the caravan’s wheels from seizing.

There were questions and pieces of information constantly bandied around me between the bunks: whose aurochs needed better feed? How fast was the caravan going? By the way, Anezka had noted a couple days ago, the flour was getting low, if they didn’t get some barrels refilled, they’d run out in a week.

All these things and more these women knew.

Jal directed the caravan, but my bunkmates made the caravan a living creature.

And I was not one of them, though with the exception of Alka, they all treated me with careful politeness.

At the start of the fifth week, Bojdan sent me out with Anezka and three other women for water, as one of the casks had sprung a leak.

“We are near a small river that runs beside the road,” he said. “Keep a guard. It’s a safe area, but be careful.”

Up and down the caravan flags whipped up onto small wooden masts at the rear of the wagons, giving the order to slow their pace.

Anezka and her three companions pulled along a two wheeled cart with them, which had three empty barrels on it. They laughed and joked as we moved down a narrow dirt path through the trees out of sight of the caravan, to the babble of the tiny stream.

“I like to oversee where the water comes from,” Anezka said. “Sometimes these three get timid and don’t want to wade clear out to the center where it’s freshest.”

“It was just once,” one of them protested.

“We all suffered for it for a week,” Anezka said. She looked over at me. “Will you leave us, when we get to Paika?”

“Yes.” I walked beside her, and I looked around the forest as she talked.

“That’s a shame. You could spend forever in that strange city, and never find someone,” she said.

“You’ve seen it?” I asked.

“Right after I joined the caravan to see the world, and Jal was negotiating the rights to travel in their territory,” Anezka said. “Building on building crammed into mazes of leaning streets. It’s on a hill, and everything looks ready to fall over on top over everything else. And it goes on and on, from the foothills and up.”

We reached the river, and I helped her pull a barrel from the wagon and roll it into the river with a splash. Anezka guided it to the center, her skirts knee-deep in the strong current. “Well, if they are there to be found, I will find them. And if they are not to be found…”

“Then what?” Anezka asked.

“I will kill the bastards that killed them,” I said quietly.

“That is good,” said one of the other women. “You do what few of us can. Most of us lost families to the Paikans, or our husbands. That’s why we joined the caravan. What else were we to do?”

Anezka nodded. “They cull us. Or they take our youngest to large camps on some of the islands in their harbors, and off the coasts where we can never get to them. It’s there that they teach them the Paikan ways and thoughts.”

Everyone nodded. “Paikan ways: they’re growing and growing.”

Anezka then stopped the barrel back up. I moved to help her roll it, but she pointed.

Five men had slipped out of the shadows of the trees on the opposite bank, hardly twenty feet from us, and I hadn’t noticed them. They had old, rusty swords, and were dressed in little more than rags.

Realizing they had been seen, they splashed awkwardly across the hip-deep water at us, swords in hand.

I picked up my axe. “Run for the caravan, but if they catch you, resist them any way you can,” I shouted. I saw the grins on the men’s faces as their splashing steps soaked their torn clothes. “Go!”

So much for vengeance, I thought, my heart pounding. I would die slowing these attackers down enough so that Anezka and her friends could get to safety.

Well, there were worse things to spend a life on.

I only hoped my sons would forgive me.

The men did not realize I’d picked up an axe, and I let my body shield it from their view.

Until they got close. Then I drew it from behind me and swung at the nearest man. He had his sword up already, as his compatriots ran past, leaving him to deal with just me.

After blocking his swing, I slid the axe down the blade, then shoved it forward, puncturing his stomach with the spike at the top of the axe’s curve.

We both looked surprised that it had worked, and then I shoved him free to lie in the river, crying and groaning as his stomach spilled into the formerly clean river water.

The four men had caught themselves four struggling women and were laughing.

I ran, almost tripping over my skirts, and raised my axe up into the air and buried it into the lower spine of the first man I caught up to. Anezka, pinned underneath, screamed loudly enough the three remaining men paused. They looked over as the man on top of her rolled off. He began to spasm and gush blood now that the axe had been yanked free.

The three others shoved the women away, and began to move at me.

Bojdan hadn’t taught me how to take on three opponents at once.

But he had taught me that a fight was won before the fight began. Digging deep inside I calmed myself and met their gazes with a grin.

It was an anticipatory grin. As if the first two men I had just killed were no more than an appetizer, and this was about to be a course I was looking forward to.

Never mind that I had killed one half because he expected no real resistance, and the other because his back was turned.

“Who are you, lady?” one bandit asked.

And Anezka stepped behind me. “Can’t you tell by the damned blade!” she cried out indignantly. “This is the Executioness!”

They looked at the axe, and I wiped the blood from its edge with my thumb and tested the sharpness.

When I looked back up at them, I saw I had won this battle, for there was fear there now. “The one who faced an entire party of Paikans,” one of them asked.

“Yes, that one,” Anezka said.

I walked forward, axe in hand, and the nearest man threw his sword at my feet. “I surrender my weapon,” he said.

After a moment, the others did too.

“Pick up the swords,” I ordered Anezka. She did, and handed them to the other women. “Run for the caravan,” I whispered to her. “Get Bojdan and some of his men, quick!”

“Yes,” Anezka replied, wide-eyed. And she spun and ran.

I turned back. Were there more men out in the woods? If I let these three go, would they come back for their revenge? “You three, see those barrels?” I asked.

They nodded.

“Get them aboard that cart, and pull it over here,” I ordered. They did so, quickly and with some grunting, and once the cart was in front of me, I hopped on. “Now follow those women back to the road. Do not give me any excuses to take your heads.”

They again nodded.

Sitting on top of a barrel, I watched them closely as they pulled the cart through the forest to the road. I remained calm outwardly, but inside my heart raced, my breath came short, and I was terrified of every shadow in the trees.

When we broke out onto the road, the caravan was still slowly passing us by.

Bojdan and three of his men rushed up to us. They looked at my prisoners with some shock.

I leapt down from the cart, my bloodied axe over my shoulder, and grabbed Bojdan by the arm. “I would talk to you over here,” I said, and lead him around to the other side of a wagon, dodging the aurochs.

Then I let my legs fold, and my breath come in staggered gasps. “Piss on them,” I spat, my voice breaking with fear. “There were five of them and one of me. Five!”

Bojdan held me up. “Come, you need to go lie down,” he said gently. “You’ve done enough.”

He walked me back down the road to a bunk wagon, empty of occupants. “What are you…” I asked.

But he shoved me up onto the platform. “Go inside, rest for a moment, gather your thoughts. I will deal with these remaining men.”

My hands shook, and I watched him pace along the wagon for a moment, then dart through the caravan and disappear.

I crept into the darkness and curled up on someone’s unfamiliar smelling bunk. I kept curling up until my body could bear being squeezed by itself no more.

When Bojdan finally came back, it might have been after an hour, or five. All I’d done was stare at a chipped piece of wood on the wall. I’d felt that the wagon had stopped. Maybe the whole caravan had. I knew dimly something was going on, but until that moment, hadn’t cared about finding out.

Bojdan said nothing, but sat in the back of the wagon and waited until I rolled over to look at him.

“It was different,” I finally said. “Not like the execution, or when I went for the raider in anger.”

Bojdan just sat there.

I continued. “I had to stay in control, and calm. I had to win the fight first.”

“You did well,” said Bojdan. “Never doubt it. You are a good fighter.”

“Why did the caravan stop?” I asked. “It’s not supposed to stop, right?”

Bojdan grimaced. “Our way is blocked by a scouting party. Somewhere out in the woods, north of us, a man called Jiva has been raising the discontented to fight against the Paikans. You met five of their number earlier. They’re all from culled villages and towns out there.”

“What do they want?”

“Food, weapons, anything we have that we can trade. Their stores ran low in the march south through bramble and forest. They look hungry enough to attack us for our stores. And Jal is reluctant to trade with them, as the Paikans will be upset. So… negotiation continues.”

“Ah.” I turned back over.

After many long moments I twisted around and found Bojdan still there.

“I will be fine,” I said.

But the warrior shook his head. “Few are ever truly ‘fine’ after what you just did, after what we do. We can get back to being a reflection of our former self, but it’s somehow not quite the same. And only another like us understands what we mean.”

“I know, but I want to be left to myself for now,” I told him. “Just for now.”

“I will send for you when it is time for the night watch,” he said. “I will need all the warriors I can fetch by my side. Particularly if Jal and the scouts can’t come to an agreement.”

I felt the wagon shake as he stepped out onto the road.