Sign of the Dragonfly: Chapter II

Captain Hathi i’Mati had served the emperor’s half-brother for almost four years now. The rajah Jahangir Eru Vandifatori, known to his inner circle as Jahan, did not often keep high-ranking retainers for so long. Indeed, Hathi had killed his own predecessor, Captain Indirat, just six months into the woman’s career. He could still see her looking up at him in shocked incomprehension as she knelt on the muddy West bank of the Gris where it cut through Hathi’s village, could still see her lips beginning to form words in the moment he struck her head from her shoulders with a sweep of his glaive.

To be a swordmaster, Hathi’s late and unlamented master had told him, one must never cease the act of cutting. Do you understand, idiot?

No, master. 

This is because of your incredible stupidity. 

Hathi thought he understood now. That slight kiss of resistance as his glaive’s long, heavy blade severed the spine of Captain Indirat was the beginning, and everything he had done since was part of that same cut. An edge parting day after day, week after week, a wake of blood fanning out forever behind it. Someday that edge would meet its end and shatter, and he would be free of this awful momentum. 

But it would not be today.

“They’ve blocked our progress, captain,” said the outrider, a stout young woman with Kudani tribal tattoos on her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose. She had ridden hard to reach him, and her devil’s flanks dripped black sweat as it paced beside the rajah’s sedan cart. “There’s an edict posted at the bridge, and a detachment of the rani Ula Se Barat’s elite soldiers guarding it. The crossing.”

“Come here, dog,” said Jahan, not looking up from where he lay draped across the lap of his current favorite plaything, Mikara, on the sedan’s half-moon inner bench. She was stroking his long black hair and giggling as he blew smoke in her scarred and twisted face.

Hathi went to his master and knelt beside him, his balance shifting easily with the motion of the cart. Each step seemed to take an eternity. Each step was the act of cutting. Jahan rolled his head toward him, eyes glassy but alive with a delighted malice Hathi had come to know well. “Remember,” he whispered in Hathi’s ear, “if you fail me, they all drown.”

Hathi rose, bowed, and took up his glaive. He jumped down from the cart, mud splashing his splinted greaves. Ahead, the column of Jahan’s entourage wound around the curve of the jungle road and out of sight, four hundred spearmen, twice as many archers, the rajah’s personal chapter of the Scorpion Guard with their demon helms and poisoned swords. The six white oxen pulling Jahan’s sedan were covered in flies, which swarmed everywhere in the thick, syrupy heat of the jungle at noon. More boiled over the pelt of the outrider’s devil, a spirit bound by one of Jahan’s sorcerers into the shape of a strange manlike beast the size of a pony, its limbs long and sinewy, pierced with nails of silver and bronze, its face a withered death mask, the sockets sealed with wax.

“Thank you,” said Hathi to the outrider. 

He broke into a run, sandals squelching in the half-dried mud of the road, underbrush whipping at his robe and leggings as he skirted the column’s edge. The men knew to stay out of his way. They shifted their march toward the far side of the beaten jungle track. Hathi flew past them, arms pumping, the haft of his glaive resting hard against his shoulder. He ran for an hour, outpacing the column, and then for another with only the flies the cries of the monkeys for company. Sometimes he dreamed of the jungle near his village, much deeper and wilder than this tame place, where dwarf elephants broke game trails through the choking undergrowth and birds of strange and wonderful beauty danced in empty clearings or wove little houses of grass.

A captain of the rani’s guard waited at the bridge, leaning against one of its framing posts and chewing the stem of a short rosewood pipe. Her earlobes, pierced by golden weights, drooped to her shoulders, and her head was freshly shaven. Behind her, across the river, were two hundred soldiers in uniforms of lilac and saffron and a gang of Tlonist warrior monks, perhaps thirty in number, with their brows shaven and marked with the burning wheel and their hair braided into heavy queues worn draped over their shoulders like a scarf. Hathi slowed his pace as he approached. Archers nocked arrows. The captain at the bridge watched him without expression, her single eye a pale gold like an  eagle’s. A patch hid the other, a scar emerging from it to dig a channel back into her hairline. There was indeed an edict nailed to the post above her head.

“Take heed, stranger,” said the captain. “This bridge is closed to travelers today.”

“I am Captain Hathi i’Mati,” said Hathi. He was no longer breathing hard. “Make way for my master the rajah of Xerat and of Lumbab, blood of divinity, son of Ngansar Ulat Eru Vandifatori, brother of the Most High, minister of the North and commander of the Middle Army.”

“Your master’s appetites are well-known here,” said the rani’s captain. Her right hand came to rest on the hilt of her sword. With her left, she produced a match and lit her pipe. “My mistress, Ula Se Barat, breaker of horses, keeper of the White Birch Forest, refuses his entry. She will not suffer a single one of his soldiers to cross her border. Since in delivering this message I have certainly brought about my own death, I will add that your master is lower than a beast and for the good of the empire and its people he should be cut into four pieces and the pieces burned, their ashes scattered to the wind.”

“This may be true,” said Hathi. He raised his glaive, pointing its blade at the captain’s heart. “But he will pass nonetheless. Will you yield the road?”

She was good. Hathi had to give her that. She was on him in the space of a single breath, her sword catching the light that fell through the canopy high above them, strangler figs, bunya trees, and pink trumpets fighting their own glacially slow duel to the death over sunlight and water. He parried her first cut, knocked her second aside with the haft of his glaive, and disembowled her with a quick, tight swipe as she tried to circle around and draw him into exposing his back to the archers on the far side of the bridge. She held her guts in for a few torturous heartbeats, the point of her sword dipping, jerking up, dipping again, before he chopped through her wrists and then took off her head. It spun through the air, struck the bridge post, and rolled down the embankment and into the dirty brown flow of the river, which was not the Gris, but made Hathi think of it. He flicked blood from his glaive’s blade. The soldiers across the river stared at him, mouths open, hands on their weapons.

Never cease the act of cutting.

“You have offered my master an insult,” Hathi said. He focused on his breathing, so that he would not look at the glassy eyes of the head now lying half-hidden in the reeds at the river’s edge. “I have given you his answer. Go back to your mistress, and tell her guest-right is expected of her house.”

The soldiers stood, not speaking. Somewhere in the branches above, a parrot screamed, “Guest-right, guest-right!” in its rusty, mechanical voice. Sweat dripped from the tip of Hathi’s nose. At last, one of the monks broke away from their lines and ambled out onto the bridge. He was a big man, a head taller than Hathi with a broad, scarred belly and arms like hams strapped into studded iron gauntlets. His face was battered by long years of scarring, his nose flattened and pushed to one side by repeated breakages, his right cheekbone higher than the left. He carried a carved oak cudgel with a head of polished granite.

When does a swordsman know he has lost? Hathi’s master had asked Hathi one morning. He had repeated the question many times over the years of Hathi’s training.

I don’t know, master.

When he draws his sword, weakling.

But master, you’re training me to—

A sharp, stinging blow across the face from his master’s bamboo switch. 

You’re fit for nothing else. Another slave to Lady Yuga, sure to bring misery into the world. Why don’t you stop me?

“Will you yield the road?” Hathi asked the monk. 

“No,” said the monk in a rich, gravelly voice. He unlimbered his cudgel, picking up his pace as he closed the distance between them. “I will split your skull.”

Hathi spun aside as the great cudgel came down, splashing them both with mud. The monk blocked his glaive with a raised gauntlet. Sparks flew. The parrots screamed. In the reeds at the edge of the river, the head of the rani’s captain watched them fight, and said nothing, for the dead have only one lesson to teach, and Hathi had already learned it.

The monk swung for Hathi’s legs. Hathi jumped back, sandals clattering over stones half-sunk into the road, and swung his glaive again. More sparks as the monk caught it on his other gauntlet. He was fast for a man of such height and girth, and even when Hathi cut him swift and vicious across his chest, splitting one of his nipples, he made no sound, only drove on harder, swinging and punching, catching blow after blow on his armored forearms. He landed a punch that cracked two of Hathi’s teeth and sent him reeling into the overgrown gutter at the roadside, filthy water soaking his leggings. The monk charged after him, fist cocked back for a second blow. Hathi watched him come.

When does a swordsman know he has lost?

Hathi feinted straight at the monk’s heart, then slipped left, spitting blood and tooth chips, and cut the monk’s legs out from under him in a single savage swing, severing one at the knee in an explosion of gore and leaving the other hanging from a two-inch flap of skin and muscle. The monk screamed then, crawling in the muck, trying to clay his way up out of the culvert. A groan rose up from the men across the river. Hathi climbed the muddy bank, not looking at his audience, and stabbed the monk between the shoulders.

By the time the rajah’s column arrived at the bridge, nine men were dead and three more lay wounded where their comrades had abandoned them. Captain Hathi squatted before the bridge’s left post, holding a strip torn from the sleeve of his robe and doubled up on itself pressed tight against a shallow cut across his ribs. He watched the soldiers marching, watched the flies crawl across their yellow and black uniforms and the white hides of the oxen drawing Jahan’s sedan cart, watched the elephants in the baggage train and the plain black oxen pulling wains behind them. He had a terrible thought as he watched them come, and the thought was: All of this is the act of cutting.