Song of Ashes

6: Fragile Hope

Sarka vaguely remembered the taste of the water: cold, gritty with dirt. She had lain on the ground, weak and exhausted, and had lapped it from the dust like a dog.

Then came the darkness: a sleep that was a breath away from oblivion.

But someone found her. Of this she was only dimly aware. She saw roof-beams, a blurry human face. Rough linen surrounded her, enveloping her, stifling her. There were voices.

Sarka lay there for days, floating down a river that curved first toward waking, then toward dream. She dreamed, in that in-between place, of a life beyond the godforsaken shores of Kogoren. The vision came to her in fragments, in the moments when she was more asleep than awake and grasping through a haze of fever and pain.

It was an achingly beautiful dream.

...

"How many lands are there beyond ours?"

Sarka leaned against a pair of lumpy pillows, the blankets kicked back. Tey had stripped Sarka's dress off to treat her wounds, so she was wrapped in an old sheet for modesty's sake. The scratches on her arm and her thigh were on the way to healing, but her mangled shoulder still ached fiercely.

As for her face, it was swathed in bandages. Tey refused to let her have a looking-glass. All she would say for certain was that Sarka had lost the vision in her right eye.

"How many what, Sarka?"

"Lands," Sarka repeated, emphasizing the word. "How many lands are there, other than Kogoren."

Tey looked up from her work. She was chopping the last of her herbs for another poultice. Now, she knit her brow in question. "That's a strange question to ask."

"Tell me. Do you know?"

The woman sighed, moving her hand across the table to scrape the fragments of leaves into a pile again. She resumed her chopping. "Galdren. They were our closest neighbors in the time before. They don't come near us now. There is another place. I remember hearing stories of them...war-like, I think they were. Are. What was the name of that country...Yhva? I think that sounds right. And another land...maybe more. I can't remember. I never traveled, dear. Never made much of a study of it."

"My mother never told me about the world beyond our shores." Sarka closed her eye-the one that was not covered in bandages-and let her head fall back against the wall. She still grew tired easily, but she was past the worst of the danger. She thought she might live, and she meant to. If for nothing else, she'd do it out of spite for the cat that had wanted to eat her.

"For Kogoren's sons and daughters, there is no world beyond our shores," Tey said. She swept the herbs into her hand and turned to sprinkle them into a boiling kettle.

"Don't be cryptic."

Jakor, the boy who had found Sarka out by her well, spoke up from his post in the corner, where he was stacking firewood. "She's talking about the Beloved."

Sarka glanced his way. She knew the word; he was referring to the husbands of Kogoren, the goddess who had given their country its name. During the first month of every year in the old days, a young man had been sacrificed to serve her. Then, he would move aside and fade into her endless train of lovers, there to remain for the rest of time.

The goddess had been betrayed by one of them. For the first time in history, one of the Beloved had refused the call and had run away with a human lover. In exchange for a single man's treachery and the failure of her priests to find him, Kogoren had punished her people. She had left the world that fateful day, seemingly forever, and had left their land bereft of divine leadership and any kind of fortune, destroying everything in her wake.

Certainly Kogoren's abdication meant...what? What had become of the Beloved when Kogoren quit the mortal realm?

Jakor was looking at Sarka now. He seemed to see the questions on her face. "Surely you've heard what happens when we try to leave?"

"Jak," Tey said, "No one leaves our shores."

"Because they fear the Beloved. But some have," Jakor said. "I heard it from Aneir, the old ash-walker. She told of some sea people and their ships. They've taken people away, or have tried."

"What happened?" Sarka struggled to sit up straighter; her lower back was cramped and sore from long days of immobility, but her shoulder ached as if the starving wildcat's fangs were still lodged deep within it. There was little in the way of remedies for pain in Kogoren's forgotten land. Sarka could still feel the creature's hot, rasping tongue tasting her blood. The memory of death passed over her, casting a chilly shadow under its wings.

She pushed the shade away with an almost physical effort. She had survived, and never again would she be afraid.

Tey was stirring the thin broth at the fire. She took a bowl and began to strain out the herbs with her wooden spoon. "The day Our Lady left us, she cursed us," she said.

"The Beloved will chase you," Jakor said. His face was alight with a morbid excitement; he relished the story. "They'll chase you and drive you mad for daring to abandon the continent. The man the pirates took away? He cut his own throat. They had to throw his bones to the fishes." He made an irreverent gesture as if to illustrate, as if the dead man's bones were no more significant than grain he might spread for a chicken.

Tey was combining the boiled herbs with some clay. She shook her head. "Not sure I can credit that story."

"Ask Aneir. Ask her," Jakor insisted. "The truth was in her face."

Sarka could not credit the story either. A legion of dead men chasing the living? "You don't believe that, do you, Jakor?"

Jakor's enjoyment of the story had faded. He looked pale as he cast a glance into one shadowed corner of the room. "They pass beyond the veil, even still, to keep us in our place," he said. "I believe it. I think we'd be foolish not to. There's no world beyond Kogoren for us."