Chapter Twenty-Two: Hepthys
The village was mostly hidden behind a wall built out of tree trunks, sharpened on the ends poking skyward. A few lookout towers peeked over them. The most impressive sight, though, were the four warjunks off the coast. Two had already made their home in the harbor, while a third plodded out among the wreckage of the battle. The last one, probably the first she’d seen, was limping back to the bay, heavily damaged in the fighting. The sea was filthy with bits of flotsam and black carpets of guttered flame. Here and there, webbed fins sloshed over the water, or a sinuous tail flicked as some large fish hunted amongst the debris.
Hepthys tried to touch her temple, where the ache throbbed in time with her pulse. But she couldn’t move her arms.
“The sailed one’s awake,” said a voice.
Hepthys turned her head and regretted the sudden movement, as the hurt stabbed her again. The speaker was a pirate. A smallish man with a disgusting, leering grin, a face carved up by scarring, filthy clothes, and a bronze dagger on his belt. Hepthys was on the deck with four of them, as well as the sorcerer wearing a rainbow.
“Keep still if you know what’s good for you,” said another pirate, this one’s patchy beard streaked with white.
“Hey, she hurt, leave her alone,” Kono said. The big Waiolan’s arms were bound at the wrists. He looked relatively unhurt, his skin glistening with water. She realized then she was soaking wet as well.
“Shut your mouth, tribal!” the pirate snarled, raising a fist.
“Don’t hit him,” the ma’hanu said. The voice was female, and carried with it a powerful authority. Hepthys calmed slightly, grateful that as bad as the situation was, she was at least a prisoner of a rational woman and not a bunch of savage men. “The slaves ain’t to be touched.”
“What do we need the sail-girl for?” the pirate graybeard asked.
“The warchief will want to talk to her, I suspect. She wears the sun on her body. The object the warchief found was forged from sunlight.”
The pirates gasped and muttered to one another. Hepthys heard the world “skyborn” whispered among them.
“You say she’s skyborn?” asked the graybeard.
“I don’t say she’s anything,” the ma’hanu said. “I don’t know what she is. Maybe she a curiosity. Maybe she a future concubine we sell to the warlord of Song-Lao. One thing I know is I’ve never set eyes on her like, and we keep her intact until Warchief Anhchoi tells us different.”
The murmuring of the pirates carried the sound of agreement.
Hepthys didn’t like the sound of any of this. She was used to differing titles. Fire Worlds were hardly homogenous in how they recognized authority. But most of the words had the connotation of nobility, of wisdom. These people used titles like “warchief.” Whatever comfort she’d gotten from the ma’hanu’s gender was rapidly bleeding away. She would not show weakness in front of them, though. She was a daughter of Atum-Ra. She would be Kheremun and follow in the great Nawaret’s wingbeats.
It was a lie, though, and she knew it. Nawaret never would have let herself be captured by Ash Worlders. Nawaret never would have allowed her ship to get away. Never would have allowed the Chitters—scavengers and pirates as venal and low as these—to scuttle her trip. No, Hepthys was a pretender and she knew it. So at least she would pretend against these.
Kono sidled a little closer to her. The big man was shivering , though it was warm in the sunlight. “You okay? Had me worried.”
“How long was I out?” she whispered back.
“Not too long. We only just started movin’ when you did too.”
Hepthys nodded, then winced. The headache was splitting, but it was likely nothing worse than that. She had the medical equipment on the ship to fix herself up as good as new, but out here she was at the mercy of their savage medicine. At least it sounded like she hadn’t been unconscious long enough to worry about anything too serious.
“The ma’hanu.” A moment later, her overheated brain gave up the memory. “The pirates on the island mentioned they had one.”
“The Rainbow Ma’hanu,” Kono whispered, the whites of his eyes vast with terror.
“What are we going to do?”
“Keep quiet!” the graybeard hissed, raising his hatchet.
Kono flinched, and Hepthys wanted to, but she faked courage. Still, the two of them fell silent.
The boat caught what wind it could, the pirates supplementing with a few oars. They guided the small vessel into the bay, among the warjunks and headed for Mele’s beach. As the boat weaved among the massive vessels, Hepthys couldn’t help but gape at them. These things were dreadnoughts. Though they were undeniably primitive, the engineering feats it must have taken to make them into the ultimate engines of war on this place were impressive. And unarmed, bound, and injured, they hammered home the idea that she was well and truly at their mercy.
Four warjunks. Even Hepthys knew this was not usual. She had seen the reaction the tribes had to a single warjunk, but this was . How had the slavers assembled a fleet? What was happening here? She wanted to ask Kono, but she wouldn’t risk provoking the pirate further. Fear coiled around her heart like a serpent, and it was all she could do to keep it from constricting.
The boat pulled into the shallows, and the pirates jumped off into the frothing surf. They roughly hauled Hepthys out of the boat, setting her knee-deep in the water. As for Kono, they merely threatened him with their bronze weapons and he went quietly. She could hardly blame him. He was man, and a young one at that, and he would embrace the meekness of his gender as long as he was under threat. Men were only brave when they were in a position of strength or their children were in danger.
Lastly, the Rainbow Ma’hanu stepped off, her cloak of ribbons billowing out beneath the water. The pirates hustled Hepthys and Kono up the beach and onto the short path to the town. Hepthys could imagine what Mele looked like before the pirates came: nearly identical to Kamo’loa. The buildings, made of mud, thatched with palm, would have been the same. Most would have sat on the back of a colossal statue of coral.
But where there had been buildings now were scorched patches and a few architectural skeletons. The structures that still stood were filthy, the walls fractured, broken. Once the pirates moved in, they’d treated the village as they treated the inhabitants. The statue was almost entirely gone, a mere hill covered in bursts of soot and dried sea fire.
Hepthys, though, barely spared a thought for them. Her ship hung just before the statue began, suspended in a contraption of wooden posts and ropes of woven vines. She couldn’t imagine how something so rickety could hold a -class vessel, forged as it was from alchemist’s gold, but it did, not swaying even in the ragged remnants of the wind that had been fueling the battle on the seas.
The ship was the stylized image of a golden hawk, caught mid-stoop. She’d hoped that the sight of her ship would fill her with relief, with the comfort of home. Instead, it was her failure. Still a prisoner of the Ash Worlders, just as she was.
“Kneel,” said the Rainbow Ma’hanu.
Kono dropped as instructed. Hepthys had to be forced, one of the pirates kicking her in the back of the knee.
“Not you,” she said, hauling Kono to his feet. “You got a different jail.”
She shoved Kono in the center of the back, and the big man stumbled forward a few steps before regaining his balance. He looked back at Hepthys once, his eyes wide and pleading. She didn’t want to be split up either. Since her crash landing, Kono had been her one constant companion. Not the perfect one, but loyal nonetheless. And, maybe most importantly, a symbol of comfort on this alien world. The Rainbow Ma’hanu shoved him again, and Kono fell, white sand spraying up around him. She hauled him to his feet and forced him onto a boat, and soon they were headed to the warjunks.
Hepthys was alone.
The wind continued to carry the sounds of the joyous pirates, most coming from the other warjunks. A short distance from the ship, Hepthys caught sight of a wooden grate set into the earth. It didn’t take much imagination to know what it was—a makeshift jail for the captured islanders.
Over her right shoulder, she watched the crippled warjunk arriving in the bay. A massive hole was opened in the side, the borders blacked and jagged with scorched wood. The hole’s canvas bandage rippled in the wind. One of the boats that had pursued Hepthys and Kono went out to meet the ship, then a single man was lowered over the side in the crane, one foot in a cradle of rope, holding on with one hand. He jumped off easily onto the deck of the smaller boat, and returned to the shore.
Even though he was a savage, Hepthys could see the authority in him. He was as small as the others, barely taller than she. His long black hair and beard were both streaked in copious silver. He too was scarred, but from the look of him, he’d given many more than he received. He was dressed in the simple clothing of most of the crew: breeches cut just past the knee, shirt, vest, belt. His feet were wrapped in leather sandals. He added a wealth of bronze jewelry to his body. Bracers glittered on his wrists and earrings in his ears. A shortsword, the biggest blade Hepthys had seen on this world, hung on his hip. There was more bronze on this one man than on any three of the others.
“Warchief. I have prisoners. A ma’hanu and—”
"And this one.” Warchief Anhchoi’s eyes glittered like bronze as he beheld Hepthys. “You, what is your name?”
“Hepthys,” she said, vowing he wouldn’t get any more information than that.
“Hepthys.” His accent dropped the , much as Kono’s did. “Been in more ports than I can remember. Never heard a name like that one.”
Hepthys remained silent.
A smile spread over the warchief’s face like oil. “Yes. Because you don’t come from the other side of the sea, do you? You’re one of the skyborn.”
A frown rippled over her forehead, though she quickly understood what he meant. He was right, of course. From the perspective of those on Waiola, she was born in the sky. Atum-Ra orbited one of the glittering holes in the night.
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“Yes,” said Anhchoi, hunkering down to look her in the face. “You are skyborn. I see it in your eyes. You could be born to no tribe. You could be part of no nation. And then there are these.” The warchief touched her wing, just after the joint, before the metal strut gave way to her feathers. Hepthys winced at the sudden loose feeling of the touch, the signal that something was very wrong with her alchemical attachments.
“What these?” Anhchoi asked.
“Wings,” she said through gritted teeth.
“They look like sails.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know this word, ‘wings.’ They are beautiful, but they are clumsy, and they obviously hurt you to touch. They don’t look alive. They’re...metal.” Anhchoi didn’t wait for any kind of response. He was talking to himself. “The metal, though, looks familiar.”
The warchief moved over to where the ship hung in its primitive cradle. He caressed the flank, his hand rough against the smooth golden surface. The ship’s amethyst eyes glittered down on the people beneath.
“I’ve only seen the sun metal one place before. And now you appear, dripping with the same metal on your body.” He returned, and put a filthy hand on her headdress. His skin stank with a burning, chemical odor. Hepthys knew it as phlogiston, a compound the savage alchemists here called “sea fire.” Back home, it was only ever made for industrial alchemy. She pulled her head away.
“This object belongs to you, skyborn,” Anhchoi said.
Hepthys refused to speak.
“You don’t have to say a thing, skyborn. I know it. Easy to figure when you trust your eyes. I’ve been…wondering…what it . Since I pulled it from the sea floor, it been a vexin’ riddle to be sure. An idol, I thought. A monument to some god whose home is in the clouds. I thought to pray to it. The faith of the skyborn is still alive on Waiola, though not here. Not with the tribals.” Anhchoi laughed, his cruel face crinkling up. “No! The barbarians worship monsters of the deep. Monsters they . The foolishness knows no bounds down here. None at all.”
Hepthys reveled in the anger, blazing hot inside her. She had some of the same ungenerous thoughts, of course. The faith of the Kamo’loa —and she imagined the other tribes—was bizarre and foolish to her. Yet she had also been accepted by them, treated as, yes, a curiosity, but also a friend and ally.
This pirate had no right to talk that way. She lunged to her feet, thinking she might be able to hurt the warchief by using her headdress and greaves as makeshift weapons.
Anhchoi laughed, his hand going instinctively to the pommel of his shortsword. The quick movement brought a stab of pain from her injured head, and so Hepthys changed her plan at the last moment. No longer attempting to headbutt the warchief, she instead went for a clumsy kick. Her balance was all wrong, and her shin slid off of him. Worst of all, he was at her. Her act of defiance was little more than an amusement to the pirate.
He never bothered drawing his sword, instead keeping one hand glued to the hilt. With the other he swung, too high to hit Hepthys, but that was never his intent. He impacted her injured wing, and Hepthys lost her footing, crying out as the loose sensation exploded into fiery pain. The strut continued to wobble as she fell to her knees in the sand. Two more pirates rushed her, one planting a foot in her ribs, then howling when his toes rebounded off the harness made of alchemist’s gold. The other was more successful, striking her once in the face, then wrenching her bound hands until more fire burned in her shoulders.
She fell to her knees in the sand once more. One pirate held her fast. The other limped over on what she imagined was a freshly-broken toe, and did his best to hold her as well.
Anhchoi laughed again. “You thought that would do something? The skyborn are an arrogant people. With good cause, with good cause. Perhaps you don’t understand who I am.” Anhchoi nodded to himself. Hepthys wanted to pull the smirk off his face. “I am Warchief Anhchoi, my crew and I hail from Zhao-Chi, the finest of the nations. But recently, our homeland was taken by an illegitimate usurper. A cruel tyrant who seeks only to enrich himself and punish the captains who secure his borders and fill his coffers. A great man, the Warlord Chuichan, rose up against the usurper, and united the right-thinking warchiefs behind him. I was blessed enough to be one of these men. We sailed to battle, to take our home back, but treachery brought us low. Our fleet was destroyed, the few remaining ships scattered to the winds.”
Anhchoi paused, searching her face. Hepthys gave him nothing.
“We want to take our homeland back. Take it from the tyrant who stole from us.”
“Then why are you here?”
Anhchoi gave a small smile. He’d been expecting the question. “I thought I was here to flee the wrath of the usurper and his lickspittle fleet. My crew are loyal men.” He paused. “And one woman. They deserve to be embraced as the heroes they are. Another nation would not take us. Not when we made war on so many. The crew of the are known for what we have done to the others. The ships we’ve burned, the ports we’ve plundered, the slaves we’ve taken.”
The nearby pirates, including the ones holding Hepthys all made sounds of proud agreement.
“If we came with a hold full of slaves, one of the other nations might look upon us fondly and give us a home. But that was only why I thought I was here. The truth is that I was called down here to find this.” He patted the ship. “And to find .”
She couldn’t help herself: “Find me?”
Anhchoi nodded. “You alone can help me solve the riddle of this object. You alone are skyborn.”
“Then you’ll never solve it. I’ll tell you nothing.”
Anhchoi sighed. “Release her,” he said to his men. They did it without a single protest. Whatever else she could say about the pirate, it was obvious his men respected him. “Look around you. What do you see?”
“I see a peaceful village put to the torch by slaver scum.”
“Is that all?” He shook his head sadly. “I would have thought the skyborn would have more enlightened views. The legends all speak of the wonders the skyborn made. Devices we could never imagine here. I suspect this object is one of those. But you must see that the tribals do nothing but live in indolence and ignorance. They choose to be savages because they know no better way.”
“This is your better way?”
“They are being taken as slaves, where they can be looked after. They will be fed, clothed. Some might even be educated. Taught a real faith. Valued. Here they live in squalor. In the nations, they will live better lives.”
“You’re enslaving them!” Hepthys exploded in horror. Slavery was an atrocity that existed in the distant parts of the galaxy, but no civilized Fire World would countenance it.
“They don’t go willingly. Foolishness. Savagery.” Anhchoi shrugged. “I wish they would listen to reason. They don’t. You met my quartermaster? She is a slave. She is slave.” Anhchoi held up his wrist, displaying a small bronze chit secured to his bracers with a leather thong. Hepthys couldn’t read the symbols etched into the surface, but she didn’t have to. This was a bill of ownership.
“Makani was a barbarian tribal the same as these others. We civilized her, and now she is quartermaster on a mighty warjunk. You see? You see what we can give?”
“She’s still a slave.”
“Of course she is. The tribals aren’t like we are. They don’t have the heart of a national. Give a tribal freedom and what does he do? Lay out in the sun. You are an outsider. You don’t truly understand.”
A commotion sounded from the beach. Hepthys and Anhchoi both turned their heads. Boats were arriving on the shore, and the men getting out of them looked much like Anhchoi. Their bodies dripped with bronze and their hair was streaked in silver. All sported scars. One man was nearly unrecognizable, his face little more than a thatched web of yellow-brown scar tissue. Another was down an eye. A third man was missing his hand, a bronze blade in its place.
Hepthys knew without any doubt: these were the other warchiefs.
They made their way up the beach toward Hepthys and Anhchoi. The one-eyed man gaped at the ship, while the one with the crisscrossed scars resolutely refused to acknowledge it. The last one with the blade-hand was staring at Hepthys with intense interest.
She stared back at him, refusing to be cowed.
“Anhchoi,” said the crisscrossed man.
“Mingwor,” he said. Then to one-eye: “Feizhu.” To blade-hand: “Randun. Thank you all for heeding my summons.”
“Summons?” Randun asked, peeling his attention from Hepthys to focus on Anhchoi. “I came to a request for aid, and none too soon.”
“This is the object?” Feizhu said. “It’s...glorious.”
“I knew those who were loyal to Warlord Chuichan would not leave one of their brothers in his hour of need,” Anhchoi said. “Yes. This is the skyborn relic.”
“What is it?” Mingwor asked.
“That is what I’ve been trying to determine,” Anhchoi said, glancing at Hepthys. The other three warchiefs followed the look.
“Who, and what, is she?” Randun asked.
“Skyborn,” Anhchoi said triumphantly. “And the only one who can unlock the secrets of the relic.”
“What kind of secrets are there?” Mingwor said, his tone suggesting he didn’t think very many.
“More questions. If you would like rest or refreshment, my quartermaster Makani can help you. I’ll send a runner as soon as this girl tells me what she knows.”
Feizhu, the eldest of them, was on the verge of nodding, but Mingwor cut him off. “No, I think we’ll stay. Your message said we would be resurrecting the dreams of Chuichan. I want to be there.”
“Very well,” Anhchoi said. His posture was stiffer with his equals. He faced Hepthys, his former affability gone. Now he was implacable, performing for the other three warchiefs. “Now, girl. Tell me what you know of this object.”
Hepthys kept her mouth shut.
This time Anhchoi struck her. The back of his hand, across her mouth. The taste of copper exploded over her tongue. Her head stabbed her once again. She kept stoic, but all she could think about was home. She thought of her father. She wished she could jump into his arms and let him soothe the fear and pain away. But he was far, far away.
Anhchoi went to the ship and traced the outline of the ship’s ramp on the belly. “This is a door, isn’t it? This object can be entered, can’t it?”
He took the three steps back to her, quickly, his hands up. Hepthys flinched. She hated herself for it, and too late did she realize she was doing it. A Kheremun never would have flinched. They accepted death with stoic serenity. This man wasn’t even threatening to kill her. Hepthys was only afraid of pain and humiliation.
Anhchoi saw it too. Something deep in his eyes glittered. His expression softened, but only to display the smirk once again. “Yes. This be opened. There is a key!”
Hepthys said nothing, but she didn’t have to. Anhchoi saw it. He couldn’t miss it. It had been right in front of him the whole time, waiting to be seen. The tiniest ripple in her expression had been enough to betray it, to allow Anhchoi’s savage mind to make the connection. Make it he did.
“Lift her! Bring her to the object!”
The two pirates guarding her put their hands under her armpits. Hepthys flinched again. She was ticklish, something that had endlessly amused Shabunet, and in this moment, it was as though her body was betraying her. She wanted to giggle helplessly, like a little girl. She tensed, borne between the two pirates.
“Bring her here!” Anhchoi said, standing by the ship.
The two pirates stopped in front of it. Anhchoi walked to her, only inches away. Hepthys kicked, but Anhchoi was ready, and he struck her again. This time, he hit her on the side of the head, which had only just moved its ache to the back of her attention. The agony was white hot, and she circled in it, spiraling downward into the depths that wanted to swallow her. She held onto consciousness resolutely. She wouldn’t drown.
She wished she had, though, when she felt Anhchoi’s hands on her wing struts. She smelled his breath: decay and old seafood. He moved her wings, spreading them as wide as he could manage. Now the fire from the strut bolted through her body, flowering first there, then in the wound on the side of her head, then in her chest, her limbs. She screamed then.
And the ramp in the belly of the ship opened up. The pirates dropped Hepthys into the sand. Her vision swam. She could only see the white of the sand in front of her eyes, blobbing up with crimson. Dimly, past the pounding of her many hurts, she heard Anhchoi chattering excitedly. Hepthys remained there, her head almost to the floor, on her knees. She wanted to cradle her wings, or the cut on her head, but couldn’t. Her hands were still resolutely bound behind her back.
She watched rubies tumble into the bowl of white sand one after another. It wasn’t until her vision stopped swimming that she realized it was her blood, bright and gleaming under the sun. She forced herself upright, though her stomach threatened to turn itself inside out.
Above her, the ship was open, having responded to the locking mechanism only a daughter of Atum-Ra could have used. The two pirates who had held her were in front, peering up into the black square, alongside the warchiefs. They quailed from the entrance, but from the sound of things, Anhchoi was cavorting about inside.
Hepthys bubbled with anger at the violation of the pirate being in ship. Her living space. Her things. Absurdly, she thought the mnemothyst filled with images of Shabunet, secreted in her quarters. If Anhchoi found it he could somehow sully Shabunet with his attention. He’d be finding wonders in there too, things his mind couldn’t begin to understand. Hepthys prayed that she hadn’t just handed these pirates the tools they needed to subjugate an entire world.
Her heart sank when Anhchoi reappeared in the doorway. He picked his way down the ramp and finished with an agile leap into the sand. What had caught her in a whirlpool of despair was the item Anhchoi now carried in his hand. It was her staff. Forged of alchemist’s gold, the headpiece a hawk’s stern visage wearing the headdress of a pharaoh. The ruby eyes glittered. If Anhchoi learned how to work the device, if he even learned what it was, he would have something that could help him rule as much of this planet as he desired.
“The object is mine,” Anhchoi said to the others, flush with this success. “Strip her of the gold, then put her in the slave pens.”
Hepthys was limp as the pirates grabbed her once again. Even the ticklish sensation was gone. There was only pain and despair. They tore her greaves from her, the webbing on her hands, the headdress, gorget, and belt. All that remained was her wings, and the bodice wrapped tightly around her middle, from hips to breasts. They tried to pull that from her body as well, but gave up once they saw it was attached. They reverently placed the golden items at Anhchoi’s feet.
Then they dragged Hepthys across the village to the wooden grating over the hole. The pirates on guard there opened it, and they cast her into the pit at the bottom. She was caught by strong hands.
“Shh, it’s all right, little one,” Mailani whispered. “You be all right.”
But Hepthys knew she wouldn’t be. She had proven herself as everything she feared. She would never be Kheremun.