Need (Sister Lashan) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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lukeoutbelow2022-06-10 02:56 pm
hasapoint) wrote in lukeoutbelow2022-06-10 02:56 pm
Do not be afraid of light
They smelled the battlefield long before they saw it. The apprentices and little Sisters who hadn't been on this kind of excursion before covered their noses and exclaimed. Vena didn't. As the child of a camp follower she would know to expect this, but her tread slowed and she looked repeatedly at Sister Lashan, especially as the sound of incredible numbers of crows cawing grew louder.
"Nasty, isn't it? Decay is part of death which is part of life," Lashan said firmly, if not totally without sympathy. How young had she been, the last time she was upset by the aftermath of battle? "There's armies that immediately turn around and sort the living from the dying from the dead and take care of that then and there. Not here, they're leaving it for the locals to handle or not and we're local enough. If you fight, you may well fight for people who'll leave you if you fall and move on. Make sure you at least have friends who'll look for you." They pressed on with their wagon. The donkey put its ears back but did not balk.
It wasn't as bad as it would get over the next few days. The bodies - it was now academic who had belonged to which side of whichever meaningless conflict this was - were not much bloated and decayed yet. Flies were not yet overwhelming. Right now the field of bodies was mostly attended by carrion birds, and various other birds that were willing to take advantage of the bounty before them. Finches among them, tiny beaks dipped red. A few other people could be seen picking their way across what had been a perfectly useable pasture. They kept clear. Lashan tasked girls to keep watch for them anyway, pretended not to see the ones who were being sick, and oversaw as dead men were loaded onto the donkeycart. They'd take them away a distance, say the rites, strip them of useful things, get them buried, and come back.
She paused. Something... like a sound. Not a sound. Lashan was hearing something with her mind, closer than the pickers. A threat? She stood like a sentinel and paid attention.
"Nasty, isn't it? Decay is part of death which is part of life," Lashan said firmly, if not totally without sympathy. How young had she been, the last time she was upset by the aftermath of battle? "There's armies that immediately turn around and sort the living from the dying from the dead and take care of that then and there. Not here, they're leaving it for the locals to handle or not and we're local enough. If you fight, you may well fight for people who'll leave you if you fall and move on. Make sure you at least have friends who'll look for you." They pressed on with their wagon. The donkey put its ears back but did not balk.
It wasn't as bad as it would get over the next few days. The bodies - it was now academic who had belonged to which side of whichever meaningless conflict this was - were not much bloated and decayed yet. Flies were not yet overwhelming. Right now the field of bodies was mostly attended by carrion birds, and various other birds that were willing to take advantage of the bounty before them. Finches among them, tiny beaks dipped red. A few other people could be seen picking their way across what had been a perfectly useable pasture. They kept clear. Lashan tasked girls to keep watch for them anyway, pretended not to see the ones who were being sick, and oversaw as dead men were loaded onto the donkeycart. They'd take them away a distance, say the rites, strip them of useful things, get them buried, and come back.
She paused. Something... like a sound. Not a sound. Lashan was hearing something with her mind, closer than the pickers. A threat? She stood like a sentinel and paid attention.
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“A sword’s never failed me before,” he replies with a shrug, indifferent towards the thought of his own survival, ”I’ll be more useful with one.”
The village was so quiet that he’d never shown that side of him, the self-destructive excitement of throwing himself near the edge of death. He couldn’t explain why he did it, just that he did it without thinking, and it made his job far less anxiety-inducing than it should be.
Then again, he doesn’t suspect any bandits marauding around this village to be particularly deadly. If they were, they’d go for richer prey. He gets a glance of Lashan’s reaction out of the corner of his eye, and almost feels a grain of guilt for the public spectacle. He could’ve just asked for weapons when they’d set out and avoided all the scandalized gasps.
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The Healer-priest Vyush - they are identical in face and body, but the one who proposed arming him has her dark hair gathered up off her neck and descending in a single braid - frowns at both of them in a way that seriously accentuates her resemblance to the old woman. She's become accustomed to largely ignoring the shy, baffled, irritable-but-not-malicious youth Guts has been in her presence. "The aim here is to find Galli and return with her or with news of her death. That's the most important thing."
"We were scared, Lashan. We still need you, and not just as - as a strong body," her twin Pretah says, having finished concealing alarm enough to resume that united front. "If giving Guts" - there's just the slightest pause before she says his name -"your sword, yes, fine, for the evening means you don't engage directly than you should do it. For our sakes if not your own. You've sworn, you know."
Vena doesn't say anything out loud but she does stare rather intently at her teacher at that.
Lashan glances between several faces and growls, "Demons' teeth, I hate children" in an undertone before more evenly and loudly saying, "Fine. Boy! Can you work a belt scabbard?" Scabbard and swordbelt are not set up to draw from over the shoulder across the back. The longsword is big enough that it can't hang straight down.
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"Wouldn't be the first time." he replies, full of a pithy bluntness.
Guts isn't picky with where and how he gets his blade, he just feels more at ease with one in hand than without. His relationship with the twins hadn't developed into anything more than a begrudging tolerance of each other, but the change wasn't unwelcome. Now he supposes he owes them a thanks, even if it had more to do with putting a body between Lashan and danger than his own comfort.
That was fine, it was not like he had any particular investment in the girl beyond getting an excuse for an outing. People died all the time, after all, and he was loathe to form any attachments. So they'll use each other to their own benefits.
With a better grasp of the horse beneath him, he turns Safflower away from the healer-priests and positions her parallel to Lashan's big geldling. She can hand it over and they can start heading out once he ties the belt snugly around his waist. He'd have to rearrange his dagger out of the way of the blade, but otherwise he was good to go. They're losing light making a more of a fuss of this than it needs to be.
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The whole sword, tip to pommel, is about as long as the blade of Guts' own sword and markedly lighter. It's considerably larger and its hilt less elegant than the ones she sells, clearly not new, though scabbard and swordbelt are less worn. Probably it will stick out awkwardly at first.
While he's getting the belt she gets into Thistle's saddle. Lashan had been about to use the mounting block set up near the gate, but with her pride stung and these children talking about her as if her bones are spun glass she just uses the stirrup. Her hip screams at her for it and it's not quite as smooth as Guts managed, but she's been a horsewoman all her life. Thistle tosses his head and paws the ground as she settles. He does not understand that his rider's been told not to fight. The prospect rouses him up.
Pretah's eyes widen and she starts to say, "You don't ha-" but it's too late, Lashan's clucking to her gelding. She tells him something in her native tongue and Thistle, head and tail raised, takes off from a trot moving to a canter, through the open gates and out into the fields. His herdmate is going to be inclined to follow, even if Guts hasn't figured out an alternate way to motivate her.
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Safflower seemed to have read his thoughts and started to pace after Thistle as soon as he slips past the gate. Lashan's pride was wounded by the whole affair, that much was obvious, but he doesn't consider it any of his business to pry or try to soothe her.
"Didn't expect a stubborn old woman like you listen to what some priest had to say." he says instead.
The remark comes once they were out of earshot and alone with the trees and the dirt path. It had only been a week, but he missed this already. The freedom of venturing into the world with almost nothing but a weapon and his clothes. He keeps his visor up for visibility - bandits in the woods would likely set up an ambush, and he'd need his eyes to be sharp.
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The two horses take them at a ground-eating lope out past the carefully tended fields, through the weedier cleared area with its saplings trying to become trees, and beyond to a trail the hunters favor, half overgrown now from weeks of little use. Lashan leans back, cueing Thistle to take it slower. She watches the path - while she's an excellent tracker she'd only need to be a middling one to be able to determine that someone's disturbed the foliage traversing it - and spreads out her other senses, dropping most of her shielding. No contact yet, but also no sense of strong distress.
Then the boy decides to run his mouth. Lashan laughs harshly. "It's a wonderful thing I thought I would never know, to have willful children who care if I live or die." With a certain amount of amused malice, she adds, "May you come to know that binding yourself, one day."
She turns in the saddle - Thistle flicks his ears but continues - to open a bag and take out, yes, one of her short swords with scabbard and swordbelt. Exactly what Pretah had suddenly intuited was there. Yes, she's going to strap that on to lie over her thigh rather than trading.
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He is irreverent to the suggestion. The thought of ever having the patience for kids was laughable enough.
Occupied as he was with the tasks of merely living, the idea of being remembered or loved almost never crossed his mind. If he were to be remembered for anything, it would be his sword. It helps that thoughts about those things simply hurt less if he avoided them and never expected anything of the sort.
Deep down he yearned for it, as humans yearned for warmth, but the desire was thickly encased in a wish to be alone that repelled anything else. The latter was far less frightening.
He looks ahead, finding the trail of evergreen trunks forming the bars of an infinitely expansive fence on either side. The trail hadn’t been used much recently, if the overgrowth of ferns and ivy were any indication.
He relies on his senses - the mundane ones - looking for anything that might be awry. Beyond birdsong and the rustle of rodents in the bushes, he couldn’t hear anything particularly notable.
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Of course, they're not really the same. She'd known and taken for granted the embrace of the clan around her. Lashan had been loved, even if she hadn't entirely been understood, from birth until their bloody end. This boy lost that almost as soon as he was physically capable of surviving without being entirely dependent on someone caring for his needs.
Considering that, Guts is better at people than she'd expected. He certainly gets on well enough with Vena, but that doesn't mean all that much, most people do and the girl is accommodating in the extreme. If he'd taken to the gentle, rarefied environment of the enclave his life could have turned in its tracks. He hasn't, of course. He doesn't want to adapt to it, he wants to return to what he knows and is good at. As she'd known, and she's not the sort who'd decide it was for his own good and stop him from leaving. ...Ideally he won't split here and now with a good horse and her own personal longsword.
Lashan spots a broken arrow off the path, chicken-feather fletching still clean and white, and tsks under her breath. If she was still that level of limber she'd swoop in the saddle to pick it up - there'd been a time when she could do just about everything ahorse that she could do on foot. "This is the way she went, all right."
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There was a problem with the plan. He'd done enough horse-riding to know forcing the animal into the thick of a dense forest would be a good way to break its legs or scratch out its eyes. Then he'd be out of a horse to sell. Then he'd be stuck with the longsword, short on money to feed himself and make a new weapon. He would have to make do.
Not that it was a bad weapon, but he had a rather strong attachment to his lump of metal. And maybe he rather liked the food they were giving him on top of that. It was richer than the salty dried meats and nuts and fruit. So the thought is dismissed with the enticement of a good dinner after all this. He gives Safflower a few little pats to the neck. She seemed to have snorted in response to his devilish thoughts.
"Should we bring it with us?" he asks, bringing the mare to an easy stop next to it. He wasn't about to ask a rickety elder to go get it, so he offers. He's done more outlandish things than swoop down on a horse's saddle.
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"Sure. Give her shoulder a slap on that side, that'll let her know not to turn sharply or do something creative when you lean down." Lashan looks back over her shoulder. "I suppose I should tell you the commands for fighting with her. She'll rear or kick on command. Hasn't actually seen combat like Thistle here, but we've got her trained not to bolt when things get lively."
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Some minor relief that the horse had some training. Not as bad as attempting to drag a farmer's workhorse out in to battle, then. He cues for Safflower to stay still before swooping down to give the half-buried arrow a swift tug out of the dirt. He could be limber despite the cobbled together armor plating.
The wooden shaft is spun in his fingers to present the arrow to Lashan fletching-first. Once could dare say it was a playful gesture despite himself. The arrowhead clinked against the metal of his gauntlet.
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She opens up the gap between them and tests her stability in the saddle, starting to call on Fighter's blessing to reinforce her fading strength. Her armor stops being so heavy. Picking up on some otherwise imperceptible shift in her posture and attitude, Thistle tosses his head vigorously, making his tack click. Lashan clucks to him and tells Guts, "Here, watch this."
Leaning forwards she gives the gray gelding a word in her native tongue and he stops to rise up on his hind hooves and paw at the air, snorting with excitement. When he comes down she gives him another cue and he rocks forwards to lash out behind him with his rear hooves in a very fast motion. It's likely to dislodge any sticks and dirt stuck to his hooves and send them flying at Safflower and her rider.
"That's my good boy," Lashan says, and similar, rubbing Thistle's neck and generally getting him to calm back down. She has an advantage in both training horses and getting them to fight for her, in that her gifts work on animals. Compared to people they're uncomplicated creatures, brimming with fear but willing to trust her when she's calm and steady.
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"Hey - " A small protest in annoyance as some twigs land on his helmet. Safflower seems largely undisturbed, huffing and shaking her head to get the dirt out of her mane. Dissatisfied with leaving the interaction end like that, a noise of indignance rises up from somewhere deep in his boy chest as he brushes the detritus off him. He gives the horse's chest a gentle squeeze of the knees to get the mare to trot ahead.
"All right. Is there secret word to get 'em to bite, or...?" He decides to take point, because what good would he be wielding a sword behind the archer? "And what was that word you said?"
He pronounces it about as well as your average Midlander - which is to say, terribly. It was almost as if he was emphasizing all the wrong syllables on purpose. It earns him a puzzled tilt of the ears.
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Instead she grins at the affront to the boy's dignity and lets him pull ahead. Tactical consideration aside he's clearly hoping to shower her with trail debris.
"Oh, she'll decide on that herself if you're both agitated and there's enough targets. She trusts her rider, boy, unless given reason not to. If you're calm, she'll be inclined to calmness. If you want someone dead, well, she won't get it but she'll figure you're on the same side and have a good reason." There's absolutely a couple of specific commands to tell the horse to bite but she doesn't want to tell them to him because right now there's just the two riders and two horses.
The mangling of her language makes her wince. "Break it down into three parts separated like the two parts of 'isn't', first of all." It's going to take some coaching, and Safflower's still not going to do the trick yet. "It's not just the word, it's your posture. You've got to have your weight shifted and your legs clamped enough that she won't throw you and you won't upset her balance and topple her over on top of you. That is not fun, believe me."
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Guts frowns at the trees, reacting in what must be a rather typical fashion to suddenly finding himself in the middle of a language lesson. He'd never learned much language beyond what was necessary to survive, never touched a pen to paper, and finds himself lacking the curiosity of a more scholarly type. At least, he thinks so. He can never see himself piled over books and scriptures. Too boring. Maybe he'll ask again when they aren't in the middle of tracking some lost hunter girl, and a horse-riding lesson might be more tolerable.
Safflower's hooves are muffled by the dirt as they continue onward, his eyes scanning the trail ahead for any signs of a fight or a hunt. The earth and the twigs held nothing for him.
"What about that other word? Bayot? Does that come from the same place?"
Clearly the village had a touch of the foreign to it. There was plenty of syncretism between the quarreling kingdoms he was frequently hired by, but influence from the plainsfolk was less commonly seen. Beyond the nest of six kingdoms, your average inhabitant of Tudor or Wallatoria or Midland was vaguely aware of the Kushan Empire to the east, and that was about it. The knowledge got more specific depending on who was neighboring who. Merchants of Vritannis seemed to have a bit more worldly knowledge, but those were rare to come by.
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Guts mispronounces 'bayot' too, in a way she won't bother correcting. Most of the plains words used day-to-day in the enclave are housefolk-ized, adapted to use the syllables of the region. "That's right. They're words from some ways south and east of here, where we don't pretend men and women are two different clans without a treaty between them. Swing left ahead - she went where the trail forks. Down towards the river. Can you hear it?" He'll have sharper ears than she does. In more ways than one.
She's not best happy about the girl going to the river. It's wide enough to get boats coming through now and then, and potentially is a supply line and source of transport for the peoples she's concerned about. At the moment Lashan still senses nothing, but she hasn't exactly stopped to let her awareness flow out to its furthest extent.
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Safflower is cued to the left with a light pressure from his thigh.
“What do you mean by that?” He asks, not entirely understanding the metaphor. “Most women around here are pretty different from you. Don’t see many of ‘em pick up a sword.”
It wasn’t impossible, of course, but a woman warrior was rare enough to be notable. Maybe there were some that had good disguises. He’d heard stories like that - girls dressed up as boys to travel unbothered.
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She purses her lips for a moment. Lashan's explained variations on this to many young people but Guts, if she takes a charitable read, just doesn't have the imagination or attention span of many of the others. How can she keep this simple enough without being too reductive and without seeming to talk down to him? "Around here many of the women most like me think they're men. Believe me, you've seen some, looking like men, acting like men, and thought so too. If they were born to the Plains they'd know they could be womanly and no one would hate them for it. Since they're here, they just wish, except the luckiest ones."
'Womanly' means something quite different on the Plains than here, too, which would make the whole topic more fraught here even if the housefolk cultures welcomed men-who-became-women and women-who-became-men. The 'clans' of Man and Woman are kept so strictly apart here in the north.
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He mulls it in his head, making an attempt to process, at least. Guts was well-traveled enough to have passed by a traveling troupe here and there. Slender bodied men with long hair applying make-up for their feminine roles to act. Some tournaments held similar events, but he was never one for participating in festivals or enjoying theater.
It was all an act of course, just pretend - or in the case of the women, a disguse - but he'd seen a little transgression nonetheless. People found a way. Some of the actors looked quite dazzling, he recalls, even if too much attention tossed his way elicited the same cagey bristling anyone else did. The only emotion that can really be pinned to such a thing was that it all seemed quite frivolous to him.
The tributary's whitewater roar mellows down to a weak gurgle, having yet to spot the glitter of water of the main river between the gray trunks. He presses on, the mare trotting over the thick roots of the tree that had spilled over onto the dirt path.
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Players like those Guts is thinking of come into the enclave sometimes. Most don't stay, not if they're young and healthy. Sisters live like reasonably comfortable if isolated common villagers, without a great deal of excitement, with plenty of dull work. A beautiful performer can aspire to a much better life, especially if they have a high tolerance for buttering up wealthy patrons.
"But there are also ones who aren't small and pretty and don't think they can even play as women. Especially if they're in some backwater and never even hear it could be an option." She ruminates for a second and uses her 'man voice', a good octave deeper and with slightly different inflections. These days she only puts it on when selling her work to brokers, so they won't haggle or draw things out as painfully. "Here, if I talk like this you wouldn't even know, huh? Not when I'm in armor especially. There's not always a way of knowing who someone is by looking at them."
Thistle, not liking the shift in his rider's tone, blows air and stamps. Lashan shifts her voice back and chuckles at the gelding. "Anxious child, aren't you? There there."
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"You tellin' me you were some kinda performer a century ago or somethin'?"
This is the first explanation that tumbles clumsily into his brain. Clearly, if some men could learn play women's roles, then the opposite must be true. Even if he'd never seen it, Lashan was from some far away place. Anything was possible. And it made sense in his head that's how this old ox made it all the way from her home to here.
She was so ancient, he wouldn't be surprised if she fit in some soldiering and sword training somewhere between now and then.
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"I'm not that old, fledgling," she says after a moment, amusement still in her tone. "I'm still a callow stripling in this, only my seventy-first summer." She can't be the oldest person the very young Guts has ever seen, but most her age and older aren't still putting on armor and taking up swords.
She might just have to be crude about it. Fine, Lashan's not squeamish. "I'm trying to tell you everyone expected I was a boy-child because I came out of the womb with a pizzle. I grew up big and inclined to fighting and if you'd met me when I was your age you would have thought I was a boy." Especially with the local paucity of women warriors. "But I'm not a man. My inner self is female even if my outer self isn't. Not every bayot is little and pretty."
It's on the tip of her tongue to say that not every lakinon is big and muscular either, but he hasn't actually voiced that thought. Sometimes Lashan thinks that if she'd been born different she might have been lakinon anyway. Not all of them are quite men, just as not every bayot is quite a woman.
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The crude explanation, on the other hand, seems to finally hammer the idea of a bayot in. He blinks a few times in puzzlement. Guts realizes he can't imagine what a baby Lashan would look like. She could have emerged fully formed and seventy-one, riding around on horses with her throaty voice, and that seemed to sit right in his head.
"Huh." Is his immediate response. He finds the peculiar tale rather easy to accept, even if he didn't relate. Lashan had shown him an undeserved amount of kindness, which weighed heavier than whatever it is she had under her clothes. Mercenaries weren't supposed to pry into each other's pasts, anyway.
"Sounds like a rough way to grow up."
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The world of being outside of the simple coin-flip that's how so many housefolk think of gender can get a lot more complicated than she's letting on but she should stick to one revelation at a time. She'll give Guts this, he doesn't get derailed into thinking a whole lot about what's in Lashan's pants, which is just one of those perils of reading minds that she's learned to live with.
Lashan shrugs and tries offering an opportunity to change the subject. "Aah, I had a good youth all in all. Harder than my little Sisters in the enclave, I think. We were nomads always moving our herds and flocks about. If she was a Plains girl Vena would've trained a horse already and be working on her sling and spear, so she could keep wolves off. There's a bit more excitement in that than in a remote compound, even without the inter-Clan raiding."
She can sense... some of the wildlife ahead is cautious, just as the birds and beasts near the two riders are made more cautious by the presence of humans and horses. Her immediate thought is another Mind-seeker who can shield themselves, but it might not be so, Lashan's not close enough to be sure without closing her eyes and focusing on the world. There's nothing to see or hear yet, but she straightens in the saddle and takes her strung bow from its leather holster.
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The question his caught in his throat when he sees her reaching for her bow, and he silently takes the hint to focus ahead. Body tensed, senses alert, his eyes dart back up the dirt trail, seeing nothing in the trees but hearing the weak gurgle of slow river water. He could see the twinkle of the moving water catching rays of light. It appears they were practically at their destination, but something was off. All the birds had gone quiet.
He scours the underbrush for hints of any human movement, left hand at Lashan's scabbard in case he needed to draw.
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