The Warrior Who Carried Life Read Free Page B

young and beautiful, his belly growing fat, his brown eyes staring. When she went through the village, bartering their rich carpets or polished tools for food, she would come back to find that Tikki had rolled out of bed onto his back, and, like a turtle, could not right himself. Wandering at night, because she could not sleep with hatred, she would stumble over him, crawling on his belly across the floor to pass water outside the house so that she would not have to empty his pot in the morning. He heard the jingling bells of Unwanted People as they passed on their way to market. Their wives in brazen, coloured dresses, would sell themselves along the road. She saw him shift with impatience then. He had never had a woman. When she tried to stroke his hair he tossed his head to escape her gentle, woman’s touch.
    “Kill me, Cara,” he asked her. “It’s the only way to deny them what they wanted.” Part of her, like a dark undertow, agreed with him. Her other, elder brother Caro, who had her name but whom she had never really known, now lived with his wife’s family—the last shame. They shut him away in a shed far from their house. At night, Cara could hear him bellowing in wordless rage, even from her far end of the long canyon. And Ata, Father, who had carried her on his broad shoulders, she remembered him too. He sat up now, not in bed, but tied to his old chair, so that he would not fall out of it. He glared ahead, never moving. “I am the earth,” he told her once. “I cannot be moved.” She fed him soup, or porridge, and wiped his white and iron-grey beard. She heard the wind wuthering at night in their empty sheep folds.
    Now, in the chamber, while the women murmured prayers, her anger came again, with nothing under the hood to block it out. It was sick and old and weary, this anger. She had known what would happen; she had seen it coming; and she had told them it was coming, her brave and handsome, foolish kinsmen. Farmers, they were farmers. Despite the family history, what did they know of fighting? Woman, they had called her, girl, what do you know of war, and the answer was more than they did. In the library that was her inheritance from the days when the Village by Long Water was a fortress, Cara had read about what they faced.
    The Galu had succeeded as Family to the Gar han Gara, whose name meant Even Pressure over the Land. No one knew what Galu gro Galo meant. They had appeared as if from nowhere, promising an end to the drought. It had seemed even then to Cara’s father, that if they had the power to end the drought, they had the power to cause it as well. Year by year the tribute they demanded increased. For fifteen years, the villagers paid it. Finally Cara’s father, and others after him, had refused.
    Cara remembered the gathering in the library of their house. It was a meeting for the men, but Cara had come.
    “The Galu are the ruling Family of the City,” she had toldthem. “They have all the Fighting Schools of the Family under them—the Men who Swim like Eels, the Men who are Baked . . .”
    There was a murmur of amused tolerance. “A woman’s words,” said Hasepi, her uncle and her father’s rival. “Do you counsel that we leave the village, Cara?”
    “Yes! Or pay the tax, even if it seems impossible, if you are not willing to take the great steps that are necessary to defend us!”
    “Cara, this is not your province,” warned her father.
    “If you are not going to pay, then make defence.”
    “The river is barricaded, and watched,” said Hesepi.
    “A wooden barricade? They have boats with iron prows. And how many men walk the barricade at night? Five? Six? How many of them show up? How many of them are asleep? If you want to blockade the valley, you must use stone, like the old walls.”
    “And flood the lower fields? This is my land, not yours, you are talking of.”
    “And it is my father who leads this rebellion, and the Galu know that.”
    “You have a wilful