The Legend of Ki Kura

Part II ~

The plains of Ezgutashina punished their wayward son.

Storm clouds darkened the skies, and winds whipped through like angry gods. Nakisu Tae felt cold and hunger as he’d never felt in his life, clinging to the shelter of a rock as a babe to his mother.

In the howling winds he heard his own mother calling, begging him to return. In the tall and ebbing grass he saw his father, spitting on the ground at his son’s foolishness.

He knew not where he was going. He could hardly remember why he had left. He knew only that he could not turn back.

He walked for nineteen days before he fell to his knees, too tired and hungry and hopeless to put one foot past the other. A small formation of rock stood before him, a shallow mountain, charcoal grey against the bright and overcast sky.

A woman stepped out from between the rocks. Tae thought her a trick of the light, a cruel joke told by his famished body and his exhausted mind. But she became solid as she stepped closer, boots crunching on the dead grass, eyes dark and curious and trained on the lost man, the desperate boy.

She was like no woman he’d seen. She wore a tunic to her knees, a dark and faded scarlet, and over that a long vest lined with rabbit fur and tied down with a well-worn, embroidered belt. Her hand rested on the hilt of a long, curved sword at her hip, and a mud-colored bandana held her silk hair, black as ink, away from her face.

Tae’s vision wavered. A sharp whistle sounded from the woman’s lips, and Tae became aware of other shapes emerging from behind the rocks around him. But the earth called to him like a dream, and pulled at his eyelids like heavy rain on a dying flower.

The shadows merged before him as he fell to the grass and his vision went black.

_____

He woke to the sound of a crackling fire. It was night, and in the glow of flame around him he could see young men, their eyes dancing, and he could hear their voices laughing. The sound was like a songbird from the gardens of his youth, but tinged with a heaviness and a warmth he did not know.

Across the fire, and through its blinding flames his eyes caught the black eyes of the woman. She stared, and the men around her quieted and turned their eyes also to Tae, the lost man, waking.

“Katsau,” she said, and he recognized the strange sound of the Wild Tongue.

When he was a boy, he sat on the steps of his father’s throne and learned to hear the people of his father’s lands. He remembered the grassland tribes, their words as they rumbled from their throats, and meant nothing to him. He remembered the sneer on his father’s face as they turned away, their pleas discounted, their offerings thrown to the side like sodden hay for the horse.

“Welcome,” said the woman, in the Ezgutashinshi tongue. Nakisu Tae pushed himself from the earth and looked to all the waiting faces. Their skin was tanned and marked by years of wind and dust. Their eyes were black, like hers, and glowed in the fire’s light like demons from the stories of his childhood.

He did not speak. His throat was cracked as a desert floor, and he had no words to says besides.

“What brings you to our land of grass and rocks, jae dá?” She asked. The last word curled her lips. Rich man.

Nakisu Tae stared at the earth in silence, for there was little he could say.

“I am Bimi,” said the woman. “Of Tehema clan, and these are my brothers. This land you travel belongs to the Burasha. So I will ask again: what brings you here?”

Nakisu Tae looked to the faces of her brothers.

“Please,” he said, his voice full of grit, and his words tired. “I will pass through this land and take nothing from it. I will cross the sea at the Hanan strait and die in the swamps of Kapartaga, if that is what you ask of me. Only do not send me back the way I came. I have no home in this kingdom.”

The woman considered Tae for a long, quiet moment. Her gaze trailed over him in the sputtering dark, like a mountain lion watching its prey, poised to strike. Instead, her eyebrow lifted and she begged a question from the lost jae dá.

“How do you feel about rattlesnake?” She asked, jutting her chin to the fire, where a handful of serpents impaled on thin sticks sizzled in its heat. Nakisu Tae looked back at her, eyes blank.

“I’ve never eaten them,” he said, with the slightest shame in the shake of his head.

The woman called Bimi smiled, her lips pulling up to one side, her eyes dancing.

“Then we shall have to acquaint you with the taste,” she said. She stood, her face both bright and shadowed by the flickering flames as she looked down upon her prisoner with something akin to amusement.

In that moment, for all Nakisu Tae knew, and for the warmth in his gut and the calm in his mind, Bimi of Tehema Clan might well have been the goddess of night and fire made into woman.