The Warrior Who Carried Life Read Online Free

daughter, Eskigal. Rely on those who have experience, girl, not words in their heads from books.”
    “The only experience you have of war,” said Cara, tears welling up in her eyes and anger blocking her throat, “is setting dogs on women!”
    So the Village by Long Water had waited in its widening of the canyon, pastures and orchards on the higher slopes, paddies on the lower, and rows of houses cut into the rock of the sheer white cliffs.
    The Galu descended from above, at night, carried on the backs of the Men who Advance like Spiders. With them had also come the Men who Cut Horses, and the Men who have been Baked, and the Men with Wrists of Steel, and they were led by the Son of the Galu. His name was Galo gro Galu, and no one knew what that name meant.
    No one, that is, except Cara.
    She could see his face now. She would never be able to forget it, a smiling face, as white as the underbelly of fishes, with blue veins visible under the skin, white hair in oiled waves, beardless. He had smiled, smiled with dead, grey teeth, and wore long brown robes, like a woman shut away for menstruation. He wore no armour, no armour on a raid.
    When they came, Cara was sleeping in her bed. She still remembered the warmth of her room, in its last moment of security. She heard a noise, like the hissing of cats. Very suddenly, she was wide awake, listening. There was a slight clattering of metal on stone. Arrows , thought Cara, and a bondman dropping his sword . She was surprised at how quickly she moved. She threw off the quilt and stumbled through the lightless corridor to her brother’s room. “Up, Tikki, up,” she said, shaking him. “It’s come.” She grabbed his sleep-warmed arm; he stooped to pick up something; and she pulled him into the corridor to run to the last room where there was a secret cellar. Then, as suddenly as if there had been an explosion, the only door in or out of the Important House burst open and warriors and torchlight spilled into it.
    Tikki lunged forward, armed only with a sickle. A man coated in armour that should have weighed him down spun lightly around Tikki, and coming from behind hugged his throat and grabbed his sword arm.
    “Into that room, dear daughter, or he dies,” the warrior said, with a smile in his voice.
    There was a loud shout from farther down the corridor. Father! Cara thought. She thought they had simply struck him down. Then she heard him shout again. “Get out of my house! Villains! Men without souls!” They pulled him along the corridor in his nightshirt, a broad shouldered, bearded oak of a man. His great brown legs had little lines of wrinkles just under the swelling of the muscles of his thighs.
    They were herded into the room, Cara’s own room, with its ancient fresco of a feast, and its reed mats, the dried grasses she had put in a vase that morning. Beyond her windows, in the night, there was already fire, and unearthly shrieks from the animals. In her room stood the Men with Wrists of Steel, their armour in ringed segments that made them look like worms. There were the Men who are Baked, as she had read of them. Their skin was a caked, yellow scarring that felt no pain and resisted the slashing of swords. Their skin was cracked around the joints and their faces were like loaves of bread, with only wisps of hair and little eyes like currants. Her elder brother, Caro, and his shivering child wife were pushed into the room last of all, and then the soldiers parted into ranks and the Son of the Family, as silver as early morning, strode into Cara’s room with his dead grey smile.
    “We are not here to kill you,” he said. The smile was fixed and was turned towards each of them in turn. “If we kill you, the village would benefit. It would inherit your lands and this house. We are not here to benefit this village. We are here to make it work for us. You will help us do that. You will always be with them to remind them what happens to rebels. You will horrify them