The Compass Rose

Stone took advantage of their absence to speak frankly, half shouting over the cannon noise. “This is the way it is, Fox. We were born Warrior caste. We are the King’s Fist. His Sword and Shield. Where our king sends, we go. It’s no use wishing it was some other way, because it’s not, and it won’t ever be. You’ll shatter your soul trying to fight it.”

“You’re right. I know you’re right.” Fox pulled his musket from the stack and sat down to clean it once more. “I think too much.” He grinned at his partner. “The curse of a brilliant mind.”

Stone grinned back, relief flooding him. “Crazy and stupid. That’s what a good warrior ought to be. You should work on that.”

“I will. Damn me! The flint’s cracked already. I just replaced it this morning.” Grumbling, Fox set to putting the finicky firearm back into working order.

Stone pulled out a whetstone and his bayonet. In a charge like the one facing them, they’d only get one chance to fire their muskets. A sharp bayonet seemed more useful.

The boom of cannon fire set the walls of the women’s tents to trembling. All night the bombardment had continued, a constant underpinning to the activity within the tents. The activity had ceased with the departure of the men. The women slept haphazardly wherever they found a comfortable spot, twitching when the cannon roared, but sleeping nonetheless. All save one.

Aisse vo’Haav, assigned to the Warrior caste, crept carefully from the communal areas to the tiny partitioned section where the women washed, dressed and kept their few personal belongings. If anyone woke, she would have questions, and though Aisse had answers, she couldn’t afford the delay.

She took the moments necessary to stop at the shrine to Ulilianeth, healer, seductress, protector of women, the only goddess in a heaven full of gods. Aisse felt the need for her blessing before embarking on her path.

Ulilianeth had spoken to Aisse in this place, had shown her that things could be different, that she could live a life of her own choosing, free of everything that had made her existence into hell. In this place, women could say no. And Aisse intended to be one of them.

She pressed a kiss to Ulilianeth’s stone skirt, then scurried to her corner where she ripped off the hated gauzy dress. She scrubbed herself until her skin felt raw, but still she didn’t feel clean. Aisse pulled the brown linen tunic from beneath her box, where she’d hidden it the day she bought it from the local boy selling bread in the camp. She put it on, smoothing it down over her thighs. It left her legs bare from the knees down. Studying her exposed legs critically, Aisse decided they did not look much like boys’ legs, too round and golden. She had to disguise them.

A short while later, she’d made her coverlet into a fair approximation of the leggings she’d seen Adaran soldiers wearing. Hers were lumpy and threatened to slip down because she couldn’t tie the bindings tight enough, but they would have to do. She got out the scissors she’d “borrowed” from Piheko. She’d listened to Piheko bemoan their loss for days. Aisse would be sure to leave them where they could be easily found. In seconds, her waist-length mane of gold hair lay on the ground.

Her neck felt cool, tingly, strange. But she didn’t have time to marvel at it or the way her head threatened to float away. Aisse gathered up the shorn hair and shoved it in with the straw of a spare pallet, scuffed the remaining strands into the dirt, and laid the scissors in a gap beside Piheko’s box.

From her own, she retrieved the bag of supplies she’d been collecting—dried meat, hard cheese, biscuit, a cup, extra shoes—and knelt to peer beneath the tent wall. No one passed by. After endless hours, the cannonade was at last rising to its crescendo. The warriors would be mustering on the field before the city, preparing for the attack. No one would notice a boy slipping from the camp.

She made it past the cannon, past the endless stacks of stores, past the officers’ mounts and the cattle waiting their turn to be slaughtered for rations. She could see the line of trees that marked the southern edge of the Tibran camp.

“Here! You—boy!”

Aisse froze, hesitating seconds too long before realizing she should run. Her face would never pass for a boy’s at second glance. But the Farmer caste tending the beasts already had hold of her arm.

“What are you doing here, boy?” He yanked, snapping her arm painfully upward. “Spying? Off to tell your witches all our plans?”

She kept her face turned away, hoping her hacked-off hair would provide sufficient disguise.

“Look at me, boy!” He jerked her arm again.

Aisse shook her head, trying to pull away from him. He swore and backhanded her across the face. She couldn’t stop the reflexive high-pitched cry. A girl’s sound, not a boy’s.

The farmer grabbed her face with the hand not gripping her arm and forced it upward, until he could see her. “Achz and Arilo!” He called on the Farmer caste’s twin gods in his shock. “You’re female.”

He shook her, violently. “What in seven hells have you done? By all that’s holy…” His voice trembled with horror.

And it was true horror to a Tibran male to think anyone might wish to escape his caste, to think a woman might wish to live some other life. Women lived in the women’s quarters of whatever caste they were assigned, doing women’s work, available to any man of any caste who might wish to use her. Most Tibran women didn’t mind. It was the way life was. Aisse hated it.

She couldn’t lose her chance at freedom now, not when she was so close. “Let me go!”

Her elbow punched into the farmer’s stomach as she struggled. He grunted with the blow, so she did it again, kicking, scratching and biting in desperate silence.

“Witch.” He shook her hard enough to rattle her eyes in their sockets. The first blow of his fist stunned her and she collapsed, held upright only by his grip. He waited till she regained her senses before he hit her again, to be sure she felt every least bit of the punishment he had in store for her. He told her so.

Torchay pressed his naitan closer into the angle between wall and walkway, his body covering hers. Not that mere flesh and blood were much defense against the cannon’s iron balls, but at least if he failed her this time, he would surely die first. He put his lips next to her ear and shouted so he could be heard. “We should pull back. They’re targeting the walls now.”

“And the town.”

Since the bombardment started, she had argued against leaving the walls because the Tibran missiles sailed over their heads to crash into the shops and houses of Ukiny. Then, she had been right. They were safer on the walls. But no longer.

The captain turned her head. Torchay pulled back, allowing her to find his ear.

“It’s too late to pull back.” Her lips brushed his skin as she spoke. “Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t do it now. We’re safer staying put.”

Torchay gave up. She was likely right, as usual. And even if she wasn’t, she was the captain.

A cannonball smacked into the crenellations behind them, sending stones tumbling to the walkway. Hands molded to his captain’s head, he waited till the biggest debris settled, then lifted his head just enough to peer behind him. The other guards lay over their naitani in the space beyond his feet.

“Hamonn!” Torchay bellowed the man’s name, but doubted he could be heard over the cannon’s roar. He propped himself on elbows to see better, and thought something moved past the South naitan’s guard.

“Status?” his captain asked.

“Checking.” He nudged Hamonn with his foot. Rubble spilled from the man’s back, but the man himself did not move.

“Casualties, Sergeant?”

“Hamonn isn’t moving. Don’t think he’s dead, but I don’t know. Don’t know about Beltis either. Someone’s moving beyond them, so I assume Kadrey and his naitan are unhurt.” He didn’t like reporting incomplete information, but his captain needed something and that was the best he had.

“Go check on Hamonn. See if Beltis is hurt. I need her with me.”

Torchay flattened himself over her as another ball hit close by. “When it’s safe.”

“Go now. By the time it’s safe, the battle will be over. That’s an order, Sergeant.”

When she said that, it meant she was beyond reasoning with. He had no choice but to obey, or risk her doing almost anything. Torchay rose onto hands and knees, but remained in place, his body still shielding hers. “Do not move from this spot.”

They’d fought this battle out their first year or so together, but he still held his breath every time he went on one of her errands, until he returned and found her again where he’d left her.

“I won’t. Now go.” Her shove sent him scooting on hands and feet to the pair under the debris behind them.

Torchay moved the worst of the stones off the older man and checked for a pulse. He found it, strong and steady. “Trooper? Beltis, are you injured?” He leaned close to hear any response over the cannon fire.

“I’m fine.” Her voice came muffled from beneath her guard. “Is Hamonn—”

“Breathing and well enough, given that he has a lump the size of my fist on the back of his head.” Torchay probed the injury and was rewarded with reaction.

Hamonn tried to shove him away. He might have groaned but no one could hear it in the crash of a cannonball nearby. So close that bits of rock blasted from the wall spun into Torchay’s face, making tiny cuts on his forehead and cheeks. Too close.

He looked up to see where it had hit in time to see the parapet above his captain begin to crumble. “Kallista!”

Torchay bellowed her name and scrambled to reach her. She was moving, getting out of the way, but not fast enough.