Chapter 1:
Two Peoples, One Tale
What is one man, balanced against the weight of winter? My winters are no different from your own, I suspect. They bend us all. Summer comes and if we have survived we find that we are another stalk of grass, and as far as we can see are spread other stalks of grass, on and on into the horizon without measure.
This is not to say that life is not worth living. To live is holy in its own right. Holy for the wings of the Blue Sky and the scales of the deep, holy for the two legs and the four legs both upon the dirt, holy even for the green things on which they tread. All are children born of one Spirit.
No doubt you come to me seeking tale of a great hunter or of a great warrior. Would even a great wanderer do? Well, the great hunters are chasing their prey still across the green sea into the grey hills. The great warriors have died where their spears were lifted. The great wanderers would not be here, talking with you—it is more like they would be you, gentle traveler.
I have made meat in my time. I have fought for my people both as girl and woman, and seen much of this curious Sattar. Many have done more and seen more than I. Yet I can remember only what I have seen, and if that seeing is not enough for you, I welcome you back out into night.
But you will not see it yet, will you?
Neither did I. My people—we call ourselves Sattar, though with none of the loathing you call us Aswari—long thought themselves of great vision. Vision, I have found, most often blinds itself. It comes to us, mighty in its scope, but we are mere men, too weak to use it.
Put another way, there was a tree, once, which flourished in a people’s heart. In our sight, we hacked at the weeds which choked it, carved out the bugs which feasted upon it, but we spent so long hunting for rot we forgot to feed it. It has withered now, this tree, and it has died with our vision in the bloody snow.
The vision may yet be true and mighty, gentle traveler, but we are lost, and when the dark has taken us no others shall see even that sliver of the divine. At least, that is what we say. It is my hope that by taking my words into your ink, you might pass some seed of our tree through the eyes of the world yet living.
What is left to the old, after all, but pretty tales? What is history but half-remembered speculations and earnest lies? Take all that I say with your salt, but temper also your thoughts upon it with the same. The Spirits watch us both.
Hear me, oh Spirits, take us and guide us now, that my words might stay true. Accept this gift of smoke and fire, from whence all words are born, and may we drink deep of its—
It is rude to cough, you know, when one is speaking beyond oneself. I warned you it would be strong. Say what you will of us, the Sattar know their herbs.
Very well, do you see these ribbons? At a time, we strung streams of bells from our tents and our trees, through the veils we wrapped ourselves in at night. For every year they jingled, the People would add another. For themselves. For the tribe. This was before your people took our gift of metal away.
Still, they have their purpose, these ribbons. The black is the setting sun. It hangs in the west and brings rain with it. The white one is the rising sun, whence springs light from the wise morning star. The green hangs in the north, as a reminder of what the snow will claim, while the red hangs in the south, to remind us of the warmth which allows us to grow and the blood which offered room.
Four directions, one spirit. Not so different from your own god, save that we know ours has one form alone. We tread upon it every day. The hides with which we cover our tents and bind even this pipe are testament to that covenant. All sup from the Great Spirit’s bosom and for this reason we call it Sattar, for it is us and we are it.
Ah, but how you flush! Such simple things we are, to think one stands so high above another, when all are boots upon dirt. Only the hands of the good shall take care of this dirt, little man. The bad shall never even see it. How your nation can ride the scope of the horizon and not know this…
Well. It is not my place to judge, purely to tell. So do I light this pipe and speak my prayer.
Show to us mercy, oh Great Spirit! You who hold the power of the sun in your hand, you where the summer lives and the currents of the sky. Hear me, for I am of you, and I ask that you remember the tenderness with which all living things rise up from you—and for you to help me remember that among all your children without number, there is no weakness. Help me be true, in spite of my frail voice. Help me be true, that we might all be stronger.
So it is spoken.
My name as it was given is Odina. I have not passed this name to my daughter, as was my mother’s tradition. Yet I am of the Kaori band. Not the wisest woman. Not the greatest warrior. Merely what is left. I have hung up the bow you see beside the door. You may breathe easy. Long ago did I pluck its string and settle here to rest. Let the young have their wars.
My mother’s name was Odina, and her mother before her, making me the third to bear it. My father’s name was Txanton. It means “flourishing.” He was the only one to bear the name and he did not deserve it. He was a warrior and a spirit man, but neither his magic nor his belligerence led this band to any great appointment. He and his brothers, it was said, had the eyes of hawks, and could take a heiselbuj—forgive me, it means iron bucket, and it is what we call your riders, your…knights? Yes, knights—with an arrow, vertically, at a hundred yards. I remember how tender his hands were in the gardens of our youth.
Battle did not take him. He drank himself to death three nights after your people broke my leg at the Battle of the Hundred Marshes. I still limp from the battle. He remains swallowed somewhere in the bog.
Flourishing. The spirits can be strange.
The battle? Why is it men so often ask of these? If you insist, I will tell you it was like most such things: chaotic, a frenzied massacre that to this day comes like a fearful dread in a fog. I remember killing. It is why I strung that bow, bent its curves threefold. All laminate wood and sinew, with a hemp string to stretch it. I have always loved a good weapon. A warrior must learn early to depend upon them as a brother.
I can tell you more about that bow than most of your kind could tell about their husbands or their wives, little man. Have you ever seen one of our bows drawn? Sixty pounds of pressure stretched taut, enough to put an arrow through a man a hundred paces away in a heartbeat. Pass right through, if he were unarmored. Those bows are why you may keep your sticks of belching fire.
But as I said, I have given that up. I lack the strength for the bow these days. Besides, I have always preferred the spear.
No, friend, so long as the smoke burns in this house, you are as safe as in your own bed. I am not rabid. Have some respect.
Where were we? My father, yes, my father…youth.
From my youngest days, I knew of the antersohn—you, your people, or what you will. Not as what you are, but what you promised.
I remember once that my father took me to town at Mausche, on the north banks of the River Klein. Beautiful place. I had never seen its like. No stone walls to speak of, which is unusual for your people, but everything there was built of the most colorful brick. It smelled of salt and smoke and the lush flowering of summer. Whole tribes’ worth of people had been condensed, it seemed, into one paltry square, scrabbling for trinkets. My father and I dismounted near the market. He gave me coins to buy something, whilst he went to trade pelts.
I loved the thought of going to market. It seemed so…grand.
And the people! How different you seemed. Your skin was soft and pink. So brittle. Not this rough coat we bear. But you were condensed better than we—I thought we must look like gangly things of string to you all. Such tiny hands, too…How, I wondered, how could these be the creatures my playmates told me would come to kill us? The folk that were taking our forests?
A boy asked me to play. All bright hair and earnest teeth. I thought he looked like a spirit.
I followed that spirit down an alley. Others circled me before I realized what was happening. Fear then, too. They did not move when asked. One of the older boys hit me; others tried to grab me, all wolfish. I gave as good as I could. Broke one’s nose. The others beat me. Robbed me. “They’ll never even find your body,” they told me. I thought I would surely die.
My father’s voice was soft, but it had resonance. Few listened when he beckoned from the street. At best, they gaped at him, offended he had broken their game. One of the boys kept kicking me. I heard my father’s bare feet on stone.
All at once it seemed the land was cracking. Boy shouted, scrambled off. Rocks split at the seams, boiled red, but without heat. I remember that clearly. So cold and yet…it was a trick. The only magic he ever worked. But on middling youths, it was enough.
“Freaks! Freaks!” I heard my last tormentor shouting. “You and your dirty little—”
My father, sweating his hair into strings of salt, his skin flecking as it often did in the hard light, struck the boy across the face in one, untampered motion. Brought him low. Then he took my hand, his own shaking like some mad puppeteer pulled their strings, and told me we were going. Soldiers stopped him on the road out of town. They took his pelts, his trinkets, and only then did they let us go.
I was bloodied. I was more scared than I ever had been in my life up until that moment. But do you know what I remember most of all? The whole trip back to our camp, my father said nothing. Nothing.
I remember I asked my mother about this. I said, “When we play games, the children split between Sattar and Antersohn, and they pretend they come to kill us. When I went into town, the Antersohn beat me and they stole from papa. What does it mean?”
And she said: “That they are many and we are few, and that for all the books which bind them, they see nothing of those other things which share Sattar.”
When I was older, I found out why things were so bad that summer. In our village, we kept a herd of the great white birds—gryphons, as you say. The gryphons were once born of the sky. They are meant to roam. Long had your people limited our movements, told us this was our land, and no further. We listened, as Sattar near and far listened, staying in their homes and their tents, minding their dwindling lands as best they could. To us, you see, there is nothing of the land to own, so what did it matter to us that you said this piece and that piece were yours? We could cope. Our gryphons, our horses, our livestock—these could not. The grass disappeared beneath their feet and we could not roam farther to let it grow.
Up and down the rivers, your people strung up their farms. Where once we planted trees that bore fruit for months on end, you planted golden stalks that fell so swiftly to scythes. These people worshiped the soil, but not in the same way as we. They wanted more. They even dug a road through this eaten land, making it easier for more of their own to come. Even then, we could see what they wanted.
For all that we had been pushed to, we had no interest in another of the old wars. Too much had they already sapped. Instead, we adapted. For all that we were meant to bear, we were seldom hungry. You Antersohn had plenty, yet you wanted more. Lies and greed pressed further your own herds, chewing up the goodwill you had set between us.
I aged quickly, weaving together the bells of my life, but the soldiers came and that meant little. Other Sattar came in that summer, back and forth, a little stream trickling out of the edges of our narrow pond. My father gathered his brothers. Other bands left their grounds.
Houses burned in the night. A Sattar child was killed and left for four legs along the river. Soldiers from Mausche said we would have to go, but our warriors coaxed them out, away from our village, onto the dunes of the northern coast.
Under the horse moon, they made as if to attack one of the antersohn villages. When the soldiers rode after them, they split amongst the crags and waited. The soldiers came on horseback, waving their foolish flatbows that take two hands to load and two hands to fire. When they came slipping to the bottom of the dunes, the fighting began all at once—they trying to fight their way back up, our people fighting to keep them there.
Your iron, you know—its true gain is in the fear its bucket shirts spawn. We have long since become accustomed to its trick and it has long since ceased to frighten. On equal footing? The Sattar massacred you. There are, after all, many arrows, and every shirt of iron has its holes.
I have been among such killing fields many times. It is like a swarm of locusts all above and around. Horses get loose. Men on both sides fall. By the time they might have gotten to the top of that hill, there would not have been many left. There would have been no place to hide. I am told they fought hard. They fought until not one of them was left alive.
My mother took me up there, afterward. Dead men and horses and wounded Sattar were everywhere. We wove our way through them, collecting those dead who were not too badly mangled, lest the sun rot them. Folk from the village would take them, work their fat into soap—not, as your people have often claimed, for soup to feed our young.
“If you stray,” I remember my mother telling me, “the antersohn will take you.”
Some of the bands rode west after that, intending to take the fight to your people. My father was among them. My mother and the majority of our band headed north, for we knew retribution would be swift.
I remember lying wrapped up in her arms, and we were as two pieces of the same whole, two tiny heads poking from a swathe of deer pelts and fur. The days were warm, but the wind off the ocean in the evenings—it bit. Deep.
The wounded went with us. I remember one of my uncles going amongst them. His name was Raimus. He would cup his hands into the salty ocean water and wipe it on their eyes, and though it burned, he would sing a certain song and they would see again, no matter if the fire had scorched their sight, or they were senseless from the pain. Sand, too, he would press into their wounds, and the flesh would become as bark again, though Raimus himself diminished with every undertaking. Scars remained, but in the bargain, so too did the people.
I asked him, once, if I could do as he had done. The man would pat my head and call me sweet apple, and tell me, “Magic, little one…it is not for all.” I suspect it was more that he did not like women, dear Raimus. I had to suffice on little vengeances, thus.
Do you know just how many uses there are for cow urine? He learned.
Meanwhile, we raided the antersohn where we could, but most fled behind stone walls and we had nothing with which to assail them. Gryphons have long since lost their flight, and though they could claw up those walls surer than any goat of the mountain, our numbers would be few, and yours were many, and ready, and many would die for nothing.
As the season turned toward the Cantaloupe Moon, my father returned. Bloody, but alive. Not all of his brothers were so fortunate. The bands had grown restless as they rode. Some split away, hungry more for blood than for the cause, and your people fell on them with the fury of the ironborn.
We did not win those battles. The wounded attested to this, for many came with our warriors, and we wept bloody tears over their broken souls.
The antersohn may believe in this…this cycle, this resurrection, but the Sattar are a people of the present. We live one life. We die one death. What is seen in one life shall never be seen again.
Many souls fled, in those grey days.
Mother and father argued a great deal about where to go. About whether it was right to flee. But the thing you must know of the Sattar, little one, is that we do not abandon one another. Your people believe in the fierceness of one, in rebellion against the many. We are few, and for that, we stand as one.
They caught us soon after that, crossing the wide plains between the dunes. They shot so fast we thought a storm had overtaken us, and the roaring was so loud, so terrible loud. Fires raged in the night. Men and women screamed, scattered and tangled in the tents. Warriors tried to catch the gryphons, but the beasts were maddened, fighting the ropes, fighting the men, fighting each other. Fire will do that to a creature.
Yet they did not press the fight. I do not know why.
Come the morning, instead, a messenger came to us alongside a train of iron shirts, all but silver in the finery of their shirts. Had there been sun, I suspect I should have been blinded, for the wealth they put on display. Awe, I am told, is as powerful a weapon as any. I have seen many forms of it. That was no different.
They came with a treaty. At least, that was what they called it. Big paper. Long words. Seemed such a bother, for so little a thing. When on Sattar did folk ever find themselves too good for simple speech?
Regardless, they said that all of this was wrong. A misunderstanding. That their Speaker had decreed an end to the madness, that there should be peace between the peoples of the realm, for blood was a price too great for any to pay, and long ago his ancestors had given us our land.
Of course, that is not entirely true. If we were being accurate, it was all our land once, and the Orjuks’ after us, and yours, last of all…
But they let us back to our land, after our elders made their peace with this papered man. He took their scratchings as though he were binding souls and he went away. Soldiers guided us home, but they left us alone after that. Their towns remained, or were rebuilt, and our own were restored, piece by piece, until it seemed as though that whole summer had been a dream.
The treaty’s words, as my father read them: “So long as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so long as the grass grows and the snow falls, we shall remember the things our peoples once worked together, and in that remembrance, shall honor the land you have been given.” As you can see, the sun is setting still in the west. What, then, has changed?