the warriors returned to the Nahas longhouse, the young boys raced toward them. “Where are our mothers?” they asked. “Where are our sisters?”
No answer came from the warriors; no need. The children saw their blood-stained hands. All that day, the comfort women and Donie, the Chief Studier’s wife, wept for their lost daughters, mothers, and sisters. Donie lay in her room with her husband and her sons, Seagen and Cyrt, and lamented long into the night that her beautiful daughters and daughter-in-law were dead. From that moment, the Wheel Clan called her Rain, because she wept, saying, “My tears will fall like rain forever.”
* * * *
Throughout the day, the studiers heard tower song after tower song with the same news. In a single day, under Tsbosso’s command, the loosely-aligned Peacock Clans had massacred the women of eight hundred and seventy-one Wheel Clan longhouses. Psal did not tell the number of the murdered, but historians say some seventy-five thousand had been slaughtered—nearly all Wheel Clan woman and girl children. Another has stated that half the Wheel Clan population lay murdered at the feet of the other half.
Nahas ordered his chiefs to keen their longhouses and their dead to the Wheel Clan burial region known as the Meadows. At sunrise, longhouses filled the land. Such spontaneous cities were often formed during times of celebration and grief, this dawn brought only the mournful wail of pipes. Atop the rampart, Psal stood with his father, Ephan, and Netophah and beheld all the devastation his friend’s treachery had caused. All about them, in all directions, the bodies of dead women and children awaiting burial littered the ground.
Nahas commanded a war council. The great chiefs stood at his side upon the royal rampart. Chief Ronen, Chief Ruan, Chief Ilbis too, and the great woman warrior Hayla who had inherited her father’s chiefdom. Many more. Retribution and warfare began the next day.
Inside his chamber, Nahas called Psal, Ephan, and Netophah to him. The king spoke, choking on his sobs. “Look to your brother, Netophah,” he said. “Guide him. Because he has no heart for his people. Look to your friend, Ephan. Guide him. Your friend knows only the workings of towers, not the working of evil in evil human hearts. Both of you, keep him safe from himself or he will destroy himself and his people.”
Psal bowed to his father and hurried out.
When they were in their bedchamber, Ephan spoke, his words slurred by Rangi. “If one had told me Tsbosso would allow Samat to usurp his reason, I would not have believed him.”
The Master of the Wintersea had taught his students about both wisdom and foolishness. As far as the Firstborn was concerned, evil came from within men’s hearts, not from some invisible spiritual entity, and at another time he would have challenged Ephan’s belief in Samat. But, on that day, Ephan’s words found an echo inside Psal.
He answered, “What is ‘reason?’ It fails us always. It failed me. For had I used heart-sense instead of reasoning, I would have seen the old man’s scheming from afar. It is my own fault that all these innocents across Odunao have lost their lives. I should have heard the girl’s heart and married her, should have.…” Self-recrimination and sobbing overwhelmed his words and he lay on the floor and wept.
“Are you entirely to blame?” Ephan asked. “He sent Tzaddi to me after we returned. The very one I had longed for. In the meadow, I lay with her, amazed that one so beautiful, so regal, would lie with me. And yet, as I think back, I see clearly that the old chief was trying to seduce me as well, and was planning to betray us and to kill our mothers. So I was as foolish, as unreasonable, as you.”
Psal walked to the window where Tsbosso’s staff leaned. Geometric engravings carved on it marked events in their friendship, oaths of loyalty, and even private jokes. Before that day, Psal had imagined the Peacock Clan his haven, and Tsbosso’s longhouse his true home. But now—tears blurred that memory. He pushed the thought away and raised the staff high. He tried to break the staff—his heart also—tried to push away all hope of escaping the Wheel Clan royal longhouse. Three times he tried to break it. But the thing was made of hard wood and even harder memories; it would not break. He unsheathed his dagger and tried to hack it in two.
But Ephan took the staff from him. “Better to break the owner of this staff than the staff itself. Put aside all tears.”
PART II
THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE IDEN Peacock Clan
CHAPTER 7
AN UNEXPECTED TOWER
During the next two years, the war waged on. Warfare, congenital illnesses, and Tomah had exacerbated the illness—and claimed the lives—of many studiers. Many, like Mion, were dispersed from their home sub-clans. Only Psal and Ephan remained in the royal longhouse. Fewer in number, the studiers’ duties narrowed to tending the wounded, tracking towers, and war communications. The Wintersea Master, too, had died, but not the wanderlust he had poured into the spirits of his charges. Those fires remained alive within Psal, along with his love for Cassia and his desire to prove himself worthy of becoming a chief.
When the war began, each Wheel Clan longhouse warred against the Peacock sub-clan that had devastated it. But as longhouse after longhouse became decimated or destroyed in battle, many Wheel Clan longhouses merged. Moreover, many Peacock sub-clans not part of the original treachery allied themselves with Tsbosso. War flourished and so plagued Odunao that the neutral Falconer, Macaw, Grassrope, and Waymaker clans continually attempted to effect a truce between the warring clans; but to no avail.
It happened then that one day, in the second month of the year, the Qerys longhouse was engaged in a battle with the powerful Full Blossom Peacock longhouse, the Peacock sub-clan Cassia had married into. Throughout that day and sleepless night, as the royal longhouse keened toward a home region, and as the studiers tended to warriors newly rescued from Chief Orian’s longhouse, Psal’s mind was set on these two towers. He sent more queries to Renan, the Qerys studier, than to all other battling longhouses. In the morning, when most of the Wheel Clan towers sang victory or rest, the Qerys tower was faint. Moreover, its tower song was undirected and the tower itself had missed its home port, docking instead in a nearby region.
Pacing, weary from sleeplessness, Psal climbed the tower staircase to the rampart to see if Renan or any warrior of the Qerys had sent a smoke signal but no smoke darkened the horizon. The Qerys has landed in a valley. The lack of smoke doesn’t necessarily mean all are dead. Caverns abound there. If they remained there, protected from the night—but they need pharma.
He looked out over the burial grounds in the far distance. The air was redolent with the aroma of orchard fruits, the scent of the lake, and the odor of burned flesh from pyre burnings. In the near orchards, nets swayed under the trees catching fruit windfall. The lovely Waterfall home region had become a place to bury chiefs and burn corpses.
Psal turned his face to the east, listened. The tower wails of itself; No one directs it. Does Renan yet live? Faint though the Qerys tower was, he heard it. Its tower music was fading fast. Perhaps Lan could reach them. He’s swift. Using the horses in the longhouse and in the home field corrals? Too far a journey, though. Even the fastest horse will not return before the third moon reaches its height. And, what do our warriors know of mixing pharma? Perhaps Ephan…but Ephan’s been working all night. And Cassia, Cassia. Your tower weeps.
Psal closed his eyes and listened. An unexpected tower song arose. He descended the stair again. Why do we not know how to keen in the daytime? We will have to wait for night to keen the Qerys to a home region.
“Daris!” he called.
The boy appeared at the door,
