The Broken Land(130)

Deru wiped his face on his sleeve. “How many are well enough to fight?”

Gonda looked around. He counted perhaps thirty warriors on their feet. Thirty. Thirty out of five hundred. The rest … the rest would never fight again. “Enough to hurt them.”

Deru gave him a grim smile, and the gesture made his crushed cheek twitch. He called, “Gather as many dropped arrows as you can. Fill your quivers! We’re heading back into the fight.”

Warriors gave each other empty looks and slowly turned to collect arrows, war clubs, axes. They moved like dead men still on their feet, but just barely.

Gonda said, “What’s your plan?”

Deru squinted at the thousands of Hills warriors rushing toward the villages. Though Atotarho had taken heavy losses, there had to be four thousand warriors still in the fight. Four thousand Gonda could see, which didn’t count whatever the chief had in reserve waiting in the forest to the south. Deru didn’t seem able to speak. He kept shaking his head, swallowing.

Gonda cast a glance at the men and women beginning to crowd around them, waiting for orders. He moved closer to Deru and whispered, “I say we swing around the western edge of the marsh. Come up from the south using the cornfields as cover. Then decide what to do. What do you think, War Chief?”

Deru stared at the marsh for a long time, as though trying to see it in his souls. “Yes. Yes, let’s do that.” He turned to his warriors. “Follow me. We’re going around the marsh!”

He lifted a hand, waved his warriors forward, and took off at a slow trot, heading for the dense stand of cattails wavering through the mist.





Fifty-six

Zateri watched the battle with her arms folded tightly beneath her white cape. Each time she shifted, the blue wolf paw prints that encircled the bottom of the cape seemed to be running, trying to escape. She felt sick. The people standing around the fire with her seemed as stunned as she was at the swiftness of their progress. The worst part of the battle remained ahead, however. Laying siege to fortified villages was usually a waste of lives, not that her father cared. All he wanted was to destroy the Standing Stone nation.

As War Chief Sindak re-formed the Hills lines around Yellowtail and Bur Oak Villages, there was a brief respite in the fighting. The shouts and war cries yielded to the low moans of the injured and dying still on the battlefield.

Zateri studied her comrades’ faces. Kwahseti, Gwinodje, Hiyawento, and Chief Canassatego stood quietly, warming their hands before the flames or sipping cups of rosehip tea while they waited for the next assault to begin. Hiyawento’s dark eyes had a glazed look, as though he was seeing through the battle to something far beyond, and she wondered if perhaps he was not living in the past with his daughters. Just behind Zateri’s eyes, their sweet faces were always there, their arms lifted, begging to be held. Their bubbling laughter filled her ears. Hiyawento had always been able to smile Zateri out of her fears, to comfort her. She longed for the feel of her cheek against his broad chest and his strong arms around her. But when she looked at him, she knew this man was not going to smile, or offer comfort, for his own unbearable pain had swallowed his world.

Zateri turned to see her father. He rode upon his litter with a regal tilt to his gray head. Carried by four warriors, the litter jostled and rocked as the men maneuvered it into place three hundred paces from Bur Oak Village. When he slid his crooked body off the litter, his black cape looked stark against the snow. A log bench was immediately constructed so he could sit down. From there, Atotarho would observe the final collapse of his enemies. He must be gloating, laughing. As she watched the chief’s personal guards setting up his war lodge—little more than tented poles covered with deer hides—hatred seeped through Zateri’s grief.

Kwahseti gestured with her chin. “There’s a runner coming.”

The runner slowed thirty paces away and walked the last distance to reach her fire, where he bowed deeply. “Matrons, the chief wishes you to move your forces into position south of the villages. When the cowards try to flee, he wants the leaders captured and held.”

Zateri nodded. “Very well.”

The runner looked around nervously. He’d seen eighteen or nineteen summers. Irregularly chopped-off black hair hung around his narrow face, which made his nose look abnormally long. “There is one other thing, Matron Zateri.”

“Yes?”

He wet his lips. “The chief wishes me to inform you that he has received word that the high matron is walking the Path of Souls.”

The ground seemed to fall away beneath her feet. After her mother’s death, Grandmother had been the only person in the world who’d cared enough to help her heal after Gannajero. She’d nursed Zateri when she’d been sick, taught her everything about clan politics, and held her when her heart had been broken. The loss, along with that of her daughters, seemed to open a gaping black chasm in her souls. She had the uneasy sensation that she was teetering on the edge, about to fall in where she would lose herself in the icy darkness. She said, “When?”