The Warrior Who Carried Life Read Free Page A

her. People in the village still remembered what her family had been. The Kasawa would imagine Cara’s interest showed that important people valued their knowledge. Cara valued their knowledge. She would try it, and it if didn’t work her hatred would carry her on to something else. Her hands were taken again, and then there was a crackling as a screen of dried branches was lifted up. Cara knew she was supposed to duck under them, but she felt a twist of anger and broke her way through them instead, with her hands and covered head. She felt herself enclosed in a small space. Many hands guided her and made her sit on a block of stone.
    “We have a new daughter,” Danlupu said, sounding pleased. “She is yet only a Bud, but she will be nourished by the first three spells. She will be warmed by the Spell of Fire, and watered by the Spell of Rain, and coaxed upwards by the Spell of Sitting in Air. Then will come the fourth spell. She will learn the Spell of the Butterfly, who changes. She must transform herself into a beast of the air, or water, or field. She will spend one year in that form, learning how the animals live. Then she will return to us as a Rose, a Blossom.”
    This was worth less than the muck cleared out of the stables, Cara thought. At least muck fed the ground. This fed only silliness. How could they really expect anyone to believe they had all spent a year as an animal. It amused Cara to try to imagine what sort of creature Danlupu had become. A very tall, tottering sort of marsh bird, perhaps, with untidy feathers. But no, Cara thought, any bird inhabited by Danlupu would surely be eaten long before a year was out.
    Her hands were on her face again.
    Following the lines of hard, swollen, scar tissue across cheeks and chin, she picked at the extraordinary peaks of skin, like budding horns, where her lips had been. Enraged at herself, she pulled her hands away, and pressed them between her knees. She did not want to remind the Old Women why she was here. People had stopped calling her Cal Cara, which meant Dear Daughter. They had begun to call her Cal Clicki. That meant the Destroyed Woman.
    And how was she destroyed? Her family were as broken as her face, and she could not forgive, and she could not forget, but as long as she could think or feel or move a limb, she was not Destroyed. The very name Clicki provoked a rage in her. The very name Galu made her go still and cold.
    Galu , she told herself, as the Old Women chanted. Galu , she repeated, to give herself heart. Galu, this was for the Galu, not for her. Anything that had the slightest chance of working she would bear with, for their sake, for what they had done.
    The Galu had come and sliced her face, yes, with knives. The knives were blue with a tinge of yellow along the edges. They must have been coated with an irritant. Nothing else could explain the stinging and the scarring. Yes, but that was the least of it. They had poured bitter oil on the rice in the granary, and set it alight. They fed human blood to the pigs so that no one could eat them, and they chopped at the udders of the goats so that the poor beasts would never again give milk. The youngest and strongest of the bondmen were killed, and their bodies stuffed into the well, or left to bloat in the paddies, so that even her father’s fields were tainted.
    “We will give you curse enough, old man,” the First Son of the Galu had said. “We will give you a daughter whom no one will wed, and sons who cannot work.” Then the arms and legs of her two brothers were cut away.
    The Old Women were still speaking in a chorus, about flowers. In the dark, under the hood, Cara remembered, though she did not want to.
    She remembered the baby brother she had tended in her mother’s place, Soriyo, whom she had called Tikki. She had also called him Proud Sailor, or Mast Climber, because he would scramble up the high fir trees on the cliffs. Tikki now sat swathed like a baby again, his face still