Hills
There is a beauty, when nations meld. Like gold set against black silk, or a glaze applied to the curve of a clay pot, the people offset one another, melting together in great cities to form a larger empire. Tesiphon has long held its belief: all nations belong under its banner. Staked in sand, driven between rocks, hammered into ruins with smoke eating holes through its threads, the thin strip of silk flutters above each land it claims. Reclaims. Reclamation, say the priests, is the work of the gods, enfleshed in the deeds of their peoples.
We will make nations, say the gods. We will take wives. We will have children.
The children are dead.
Zahid knows they’re dead. There had been hope, when his legion first received the orders, read silently and then aloud by their captain. Anyosos had been stoic. The men rejoiced. Jehoda bought a round of wine for their selected team as they sat in the Kyfosian tavern that last night.
“Tomorrow, we take back Issada,” he said with his wide-mouthed grin, eyes glowing from more than drink. “Tomorrow, brothers! Tesiphon!” He slammed a fist on the table and the legion roared, drumming their own fists. Zahid felt the pounds vibrate through his feet, like hoofbeats, shaking him, shaking the building. Gefsut beside him slapped his shoulder and hoisted his drink, foam sloshing.
Gefsut is dead, too. Issada is a fortress set on a mountain, surrounded by red desert and rock. From a distance, the sun makes it look as if the stone is bleeding. Now, scaling the west side, clinging to the crevices like mountain sheep, Zahid knows it to be true. Gefsut lies somewhere below them, fallen during the initial climb. He’d broken both his legs. They left him behind with a dropped knife. If he can’t use the knife, the heat will take him quickly. And his is not the only body bleeding on these rocks.
The skeletons smashed on the rocks have been cleaned by scavengers. A few vultures peck them even now, squabbling over gristle dried to the small bones. Most are too small. Too small, too fragile. Splintered on rocks. Above them, spears jut out from the rock like spikes on a cactus, set by the guerrilla fighters to deter climbs like theirs. They’ll have to find another way around.
“Gods,” breathes Jehoda, paused beside Zahid. He’s perched on a small lipping of rock, hands wedged in cracks above him to keep him steady as he looks at the bones. Heavier than most of the legion, he’s at the bottom of the group, alongside Zahid, who still struggles to pull himself up each step.
“‘What manner of beasts have done this,’” murmurs Ihsan from Zahid’s right. It’s a line, half-quoted from the Acts of Hoppho. Zahid finishes it from memory.
“—That death should be unmerciful.”
Ihsan glances sideways at him, surprised, but the head of their legion is nearly out of sight. Zahid continues to climb. Like Gefsut, they leave the bones behind. If they are to reach Issada alive, they cannot look down.
It is strange to think such a place exists surrounded by nothing. The desert below is barren, a hot and burning ocean that churns its red sands like waves and stirs up the wind to spit in the eyes. The mountain itself is sharp, more willing to shake its climbers off like burrs than let them climb to its head. But on its head is a crown. The walls are bleached bone white by the sun, holding within a fortress of green and gold and white. An oasis, set as near the heavens as you can go.
Zahid, if he’s being honest, would have preferred it be set a little closer to the ground. But you can’t choose with heavens.
“I feel like a goat,” grunts Jehoda as he misses a handhold and presses himself against the rock. “Bloody moon and stars. Oh. Don’t look down.”
“Don’t look down,” Zahid repeats, out of breath. “I told you that already.”
“I wasn’t listening. Did I tell you I’m afraid of heights?”
He had, several times. Zahid has been listening, watching, as he always is. Jehoda is afraid of heights. Ihsan, the lion of their legion, writes poetry scraps and hides them in his clothing. The captain has a scar on his left shoulder, in the scoop of the shoulder blade, like a tiny white hook set on his dark skin.
“Do you think they’re alive in there?” Jehoda asks. He stretches up for a better handhold.
“In Issada?”
A huff of breath is his answer.
“Yes,” says Zahid, looking up to the bone-white walls. “I think they are.”
“Do you think it’s as beautiful as the stories?”
Zahid inches along a narrow lipping and then wedges his sandals into a crevice. “It’s being held by a potter and his rabble of farmers.”
“So then?”
“I don’t think it’s beautiful anymore.”
Jehoda heaves himself up two steps. “I think farmers would know better than soldiers how to keep a land alive.”
“They’re not farmers now,” Zahid reminds him, as if the skeletons could let them forget.
Their brothers disappear, one by one, as they reach the top of this section of the climb. When Ihsan disappears, they are the last two left on the rock face. Pebbles skitter down, dislodged by their shifting feet and careful hands. Jehoda grunts with the effort. When he swings himself up ahead of Zahid, hands reach out to bring him to safety. Zahid is left alone, clinging to the side of the mountain.
The wind sweeps past, knocking against his ribs, and he feels like an ant about to be blown away by the breath of some deity. Perhaps Ishto, the great giant whose belly is the sky, is breathing down upon him, trying to scatter him in the wind. Panic lodges in him. Seized by it, he reaches up for the hands. Pull him up, pull him over. Take him away from this giant’s breath. His brothers reach down for him, and he is dragged up and over the edge, onto flat ground. The rocks scrape against him.
“I thought,” he says, and then stops, for these are not his brothers’ hands.
___
Belit has felt Haker’s eyes following her all morning. As she drags the linen tunics across the rough stone, plunging them periodically into the small bit of water she’s been allotted for washing, she knows his eyes fall on her from his position on the wall. She knows what it means when he watches her. She will not sleep tonight. Cold dread ripples down her arms. She shoves the tunic into the water, splashing some of the precious liquid into the dust. The chalky ground consumes it.
“Careful,” snaps Antamnekht in Kyfosian.
Belit slows, biting her tongue to keep silent. Blood wells between her teeth. Antamnekht is distracted today. The men have gone out of Issada, and are yet to return, though Belit does not know their purpose. Antamnekht has kept her at the wash bowl all morning, watching for them under the pretext of supervising her servant. Sha-ki must be watched. Belit has heard it a dozen times over the last year, seen the way the word curdles on the tongues of the Hiksos. Even a child had spat it at her, once.
Sha-ki. Land-stealer.
Haker calls her so sometimes when he comes to her room. His tongue is never sharper than when his hands are on her, disgust welling in him even as he shakes with desire. He had choked her once, thumbs pressing down on her esophagus, and he hissed the word at her, crushing her under his weight into her threadbare cot so no one could hear his sin. She is his sin. She is sha-ki, land-stealer, made to be crushed into the earth. And his sin is to crush her there.
The wash water is warm, heated by the sun, bubbling with gossamer soap bubbles. Belit’s tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth as she sloshes it. The skies are knitted closed over Issada like barren wombs. It has not rained in weeks. Their water supplies have begun to dip, despite the rationing, and she is very low on the ration list. She supposes, if she grows desperate enough, she might drink the washing water. The soap is made from animal fats, melted and mixed with the oils pressed from plants and salt taken from the earth. It should not harm her to drink.
“Careful,” says Antamnekht again, as if sensing her thoughts.
“I am being careful,” Belit murmurs. She keeps her eyes down, hoping the Hiksos woman will forgive the rebuttal if she looks subservient.
When the washing can be dragged out no longer, the washbowl is taken away and Belit sets to laying out the laundry on wooden racks. The linen dries quickly in the same sun that soaks her with sweat. She feels it trickling down her back, mingling with Haker’s lingering glances. She keeps herself from looking back.
“When will the gods open the skies?” Antamnehkt mutters, fanning herself with a hand as she squints at the gates. “The spring is nearly dry.”
It will go dry, bone-dry, if the rains do not come. Belit remembers a summer two years past where it did so. The natural spring keeps Issada alive, plentiful and clear, but in times of drought, the levels recede, until it is only rock, as dead as the mountain stone beneath them. Her father had taken her to see it. She had laid a hand on the stone, felt the dust laying on it like the ashes of a dead thing, and thought it was dead, must be so. It had frightened her. But her father shook his head and smiled at her concern.
“It will come back, with the rains,” he said. “It always comes back. We must only survive until its return.”
“The gates are open,” says Antamnekht.
Belit continues to lay out the laundry, letting her mistress rise while she remains bent over. Her back is aching, but she does not want to see the men as they come in. The Hiksos do not wear armour when they go out, not like the Tesiphonians. Her father’s armour had always been kept bright, the leather cleaned and gleaming, the metal of his helmet stroked until it glowed. Nannar had kept his the same, even more so, for his was not dented and dulled like her father’s. Nannar was young. When he’d stood on the threshold of her father’s house that first time, there was leather grease sunk into his palms from preparing his new armour and the whole house smelled of it. His hands were stained. She held them while her father made a blessing sign over the promised union, and she laughed at the stains to tease him. His helmet sat on the table, the horsehair dripping down like a white river. He had been proud of his armour.
She wonders where it is now. The Hiksos don’t wear armour. But they don’t leave the dead in it, either. She’s seen helmets about, repurposed for mundane tasks. She wonders which is his.
The men come in to shouts. The women lift their heads, moving to see if their men return, if their brothers are alive. You can never know, when the men go out, which will come back. Sometimes all, sometimes only a handful, stained by the dead. But Belit has no brothers to look for, no husband to pray for safety or leave coins or bits of grain on the rocks as offerings, if she had such things to leave. She has the laundry. She lays it out.
Antamnkeht leaves her there when she sees her own husband. He does not often go out with the men, too valuable in his leadership, but when he does, Antamnekht is worse. She snaps more readily, cuts with words as well as blows. Belit knows the worry that skitters behind her anger. If her husband faces an enemy beyond the gates, then she will face one inside in the sha-ki. Perhaps she hopes her small battles will make the larger ones favourable. Or perhaps she is simply a woman afraid.
Khamon is not a tall man, nor fierce in appearance. When Belit had first seen him, standing on the steps of the garrison, chest splattered by blood and clay, head uncovered as he addressed his soldiers, she had been surprised by his face, his voice. It was soft in tone, though loud in volume, and his forehead and cheeks held creases that seemed better suited to smiling than a scowl. He wore neither. His face was always set as long as she’d known him, brows furrowed but eyes clear. His skin was turned dark by the desert sun. It made his scars more visible and melted the black ink of his tattoos into him.
He had been a potter. She has heard the men call him so. Khamon, the potter who slew snakes. Khamon, who brought garrisons to their knees. Khamon who took Issada. When he speaks, the Hiksos gaze at him with reverence, ready to follow this craftsman into blood and a dark violence. Belit understands it. It is something in him, more than muscle, more than sinew. Spirit. There is a spirit that resides in a leader that compels those who hear him to follow. Like the demons in the stories her father once read her, this potter spirit draws men with an ordinary form, all the more dangerous for its look. Men run from danger they can see. When they cannot, they wind themselves in its arms and call it passion.
Khamon, who is a spirit, who was a potter, opens his arms to his wife to embrace her. Antamnekht folds into him so that he rocks back on a foot, keeping her with him. He releases her as he rocks forward again. She speaks to him, words low. Belit smooths a linen skirt so it will not wrinkle.
A jingle draws her eyes up, and she sees what is so different in this return. The Hiksos have brought soldiers back with them. Nearly a dozen, bloodied and bruised, bound at the wrists and necks by a length of rope. There have not been Tesiphonian soldiers in Issada since Khamon ordered Nannar and the others thrown over the walls. The sight of their leather armour makes her throat close. For a moment, she wants to look for his face among them. But he is dead, and she is looking for a ghost among the living.
The man at the head of the line is young, enough that he should not be a captain, but she sees the cobalt loops of thread hanging from the left shoulder of his armour. There should be a matching set hanging from the right, but they have been torn away, perhaps caught on some thorny plant, leaving frayed strands behind. He’s tall, and not overly broad, with a long face and a nose that hooks like a hawk’s curved beak. His hands are cut. She sees the red streaks staining his thighs. He must have wiped his hands up them, leaving blood on the crumpled white tunic. He keeps his head slightly lowered, subservient, but his eyes are moving, measuring this new place. When they catch on Belit, he holds for a moment. She looks away first.
The rest of the soldiers are in equal condition to their captain. Dust-covered, tracks of sweat down their arms, they stumble in a line, gazing at the rusted walls of Issada.
When Belit had first come to the mountain fortress, the walls had been clean, scrubbed often of the dust of this land by low-ranking men of the garrison. Now they are a dirty red, caked with the reddish clay that the wind stirs up from the ground. There are faint streaks down the stones from previous rains. Hiksos soldiers keep watch from the walls, bows slung across shoulders, quivers hung with vulture-feather arrows fletched in honour of their pestilent god of death, Amennaanka, who wheels across the desert in the scavenger’s form. Belit had watched her step-mother sacrifice to him on her household altar when her youngest sister caught a fever. A white dove, taken from the dovecot that the old women tend, lay pierced through by a knife. The blood coated the vulture-headed deity’s image. Sanaz’s fever broke within hours.
Chio’s soft voice draws her attention away from the soldiers and back to the laundry. The Kyfosian woman is slight, body rounded by the last months of her pregnancy. Her linen dress is bound below the breasts instead of the waist, letting the fabric hang comfortably around the child she carries, and she keeps her long hair tucked away from the sun in a red turban, the fabric wound about her head and the ends secured by tucking them between the tight layers. Her facial tattoos crinkle when she speaks again to Belit.
“Water?” she offers. She carries a pail with her, two-handedly gripping the handle. A ladle slides around the rim of the pail, shifting with her awkward shuffling gait. She sets the pail down with a soft huff.
Belit knows not to take the water herself. She waits as Chio catches her breath, leaning in when the woman finally scoops a ladle-full of water and offers it to her. She cups her hands beneath the wooden scoop and drinks. The water is hot down her throat. It’s not enough. She could drain the entire pail, but Chio is already hoisting it again, flushed with the effort, and waddling to the walls where the soldiers walk, her husband among them. Aharon steps to the edge when he sees her, crouching as she climbs the bottom stairs until her head reaches his knees. He kisses the brown knuckles of her hand before he takes the ladle she offers him. Belit’s stomach twists.
The Hiksos tie the Tesiphonian prisoners to a post in the middle of the courtyard, just outside the gates of the garrison, looping the rope that links them through a ring at the top of the post and knotting it tightly. The pole stands as tall as a man, used to hitch horses and lash law-breakers. They leave the prisoners there to burn under the sun and enter the garrison alone. Antamnekht goes with them. The laundry is forgotten in her husband’s return, and Belit with it.
She continues to lay out the laundry regardless, though her pace is slower than before. The Tesiphonian soldiers stand for a time, eyes drifting around the courtyard. Then, in unison, they sit, following some order from their captain.
When Belit glances over at them, she finds their eyes on her. The captain lifts his bound hands and mimes drinking from them. Belit doesn’t move. She has no water for her own self, let alone them. He repeats the action.
Chio continues to move along the walls, giving water to the Hiksos soldiers. The courtyard is empty of all else save them, Belit, and the prisoners. Still, Belit does not move to answer their request. Her fingers pull the laundry taut across the slats. The sun drifts slowly from its peak, the heat settling deeper.
After a time, the smallest of the prisoners lays his head against the pole and closes his eyes. The captain says something to him, soft, and then sharper. He lifts his head sluggishly. There’s blood matting the left side of his head, stuck in the black ringlets that curl over his ears.
Belit’s hands still on the slats. She grips them, breathing in, and then glances over at the walls. The guards are turned to face over the desert, or else occupied with Chio and her pail. The rest have gone inside the garrison. In this heat, the women of Issada, Kyfosian or otherwise, remain indoors.
Before her courage fails her, Belit takes up the wash bowl and crosses the courtyard in quick, quiet steps. The prisoners raise their eyes to greet her. She kneels beside the smallest, and the captain who is speaking to him, and holds it out.
__
Zahid’s head pounds. He does not know he’s bleeding until his captain tells him so, tone sharpening as he orders him to sit upright. Obedience drags him through the muddlement. The sun is blinding, and he wants very much to lay his head against the pole and escape through closed eyelids, but Anyosos will not let him be. He continues to speak, keeping Zahid’s focus on him, on his words, though the meaning is mostly lost in the fog. His tongue is a rock scraping across a dry riverbed. It feels heavy in his mouth.
“Drink,” says a voice that is not his captain’s, and he opens his mouth and eyes.
The woman is not Kyfosian. Her face is round, chin small, lips curved like an archer’s bow. Her lashes are black and long, coated with grit, but she does not seem to notice. She tips the bowl to him. The clay lip bumps his lower one and then soapy water splashes over his teeth, awakening all his senses, washing away the dust of his mind like floodwaters. He lifts bound hands to tip the bowl further, sucking greedily. There is a bitter taste to it. The bubbles coat his mouth and throat like wax when he swallows.
“Thank you,” says Anyosos to the woman. “Do you have more?”
“No more,” she says. Her accent is Tesiphonian. Zahid leans his head against the pole—though this time, not in defeat—and studies her. Her dress is linen, like the Hiksos woman who carries the water pail, but the unspooling tassels that trim the edges are a style better suited to the streets of Tesiphon’s capital than a dusty Kyfosian fortress. Once, the dress must have been as beautiful as the wearer. Now, both woman and dress are coated in the grime of this place. There are dark patches, where the water has fallen on the linen, and the bottom hem is black with dirt. The dress is gathered at the waist with a bit of torn cloth. Remnants of a veil, perhaps. Now, her black head is bare, hair streaked with lines of ruddy gold from the sun.
“What’s your name?” Zahid asks in a croak.
The woman has kept her eyes on Zahid, though it is the captain who has been speaking to her. She takes the washbowl back, glancing over her shoulder at the walls. The Hiksos remain distracted.
“Belit,” she says quietly.
Anyosos shifts, sandals leaving furrows in the sand. “Were you here when the fortress was taken?”
“Aye. Are you part of a larger force?”
Several of the soldiers glance amongst themselves, including Ihsan, who exchanges a look with Jehoda beside him. Anyosos doesn’t turn from her. His low voice is solemn.
“There are more to come. Are there any soldiers left here?”
Belit’s lips press together. A quiver in the bottom one betrays her. “No,” she says. “There are none left.”
It is no surprise, and the soldiers take it in grim silence. They know the reputation of the Hiksos. The twenty-eighth legion—the entire legion, not only this small group, purposely selected—once cleared two garrisons slaughtered by Khamon and his army of farmers and day labourers. The heads of their brothers had been set on spikes, the bodies piled in a shared grave so their souls would travel to the afterlife in fragments instead of whole. A mocking of blood and split bone, laid out like the offerings of butchered goat and dove that priests give on temple altars. Barbaric.
Anyosos reaches with bound hands to touch Belit’s, still set around the washbowl, but she withdraws. He lets them drop. “Are you allowed to move freely?” he asks.
“I have a mistress.”
“You are not with her now.”
“There are always eyes,” says Belit.
Anyosos nods. “We are here by design, not accident. We have a task to accomplish. Belit—” He lifts his hands again, but he only touches the washbowl this time. “We need our bonds cut.”
Before the woman can reply, one of the men from the wall, stout, with a black beard and triangular tattoos, calls out sharply. Belit snaps back two steps, the washbowl coming to cover her chest like one of the round wooden shields borne by calvary, head lowering, and then the Hiksos man swings down, one hand on the stone walkway. His knees bend to absorb the impact of the drop. He catches her by the elbow with one hand and uses the other to bring up her chin.
“What were you saying to them?” he demands in Kyfosian. “Hm?” She shakes her head, and he shakes her, slightly, loosening her shoulders. She keeps her eyes down. “What were you saying just now? I saw your lips move.”
“The smaller one is hurt.” She speaks Kyfosian also, accent slight.
Haker’s eyes dip from her to the legion, scanning till he finds Zahid. He releases Belit as if he knows he does not need to hold her for her to stay. She doesn’t move. He crouches beside Zahid and jerks a sharp thumb under his chin to make him raise his head, the nail indenting skin. He turns his head from side to side, and then hooks a thumb in Zahid’s mouth, forcing it open as if he’s inspecting a horse’s teeth before purchasing. Zahid keeps his jaw slack, fighting back the urge to clamp down on the thumb and snap it at the joint.
“Have decency,” Anyosos says in Kyfosian. The Hiksos laughs.
“He’s a boy. You brought a boy to take Issada?”
“Decency,” Anyosos says again, like the word will release them. He meets Haker’s gaze with stoic steadiness. “There are rules to war.”
“Really,” says Haker coolly. “And who wrote them? The glorious empire, when it stood on our necks and pissed out a sacred fountain of wisdom? This isn’t Tesiphonian land. You’re in the godsdamned belly of Kyfos, now.” He reaches out with his free hand to flick the remaining tassel on Anyosos’ armour, doling out the title attached to it like a curse. “Captain.”
“I want to speak to your superior.” Anyosos doesn’t flinch under the man’s hand.
Haker laughs again. Belit remains motionless behind him, gripping the washbowl shield. She, unlike Anyosos, keeps her eyes down, even when Haker has his back to her.
“You will stay here until you’re useful.”
“I am captain of the twenty-eighth legion of the army of Tesiphon,” says Anyosos , and Zahid wants to stop up his mouth so no one can hear him, can see the target he has just named himself. Their mission has already failed. What does he hope to gain? “I want to speak to Khamon the potter.”
Haker releases Zahid’s mouth, slick finger withdrawing with a pop. The taste of him lingers, clay and sweat and salt.
“No,” he says, and Zahid can see in his face the delight he takes saying it.
Haker returns to the wall, taking Belit briefly by the arm again and murmuring something into her ear that makes her head tip left, as if trying to flee the words. He places a hand on the centre of the washbowl, flat-palmed, pushing it into her chest as he pushes her towards the garrison gate. She goes where he sends her. But she looks back before the gate closes and meets Zahid’s brown eyes.
