The Executioness
Tobias S. Buckell
The Executioness
Tobias S Buckell
The Executioness
Tobias S. Buckell
Part One
Let me you tell about the first time I killed a man.
On the morning of that day my father, Anto, lay on the simple, straw-stuffed mattress that I’d dragged out to the kitchen fire, choking on his own life as a wasting sickness ate at him from the inside.
He had been like this for days now. I had watched him grow thin, watched him cough blood, and listened to him swear at the gods in a steady mumble which I struggled to hear over the crackle of the kitchen fire.
I burned the fire to keep him warm, even though winters in Lesser Khaim were not the kind that kill men, like the ones far to the North. Winter was a cool kiss here, in Lesser Khaim, and the fire kept him comfortable and happy in his last days.
“Why haven’t you fetched the healer yet, you useless creature,” Anto hissed at me.
“Because there are none to fetch,” I said firmly, gathering my skirts around my knees to crouch by his side. I put a scarred hand, the sign of my long years of slaughtering animals at the back of the butcher’s shop, to his forehead. It felt hot to my old, callused palms.
There had been a healer, once. A wrinkled old man who lanced boils and prescribed poultices. But he’d been chased away by the Jolly Mayor and his city guards, accused of using magic. The old man had been lucky to flee into the forest with his life.
“Then bring someone who can cure me,” Anto begged. “Even if they are of the deadly art. I’m in so much pain.”
His pleading tore at me. I leaned closer to him and to the crackle of the fire that burned wood we could barely afford in these times, when refugees from Alacan crammed themselves into Lesser Khaim, eating and using everything they could get their hands on.
I sighed as I stood, my knees cracking with the pain of the movement. “Would you have me look for someone who can cast a spell for you, and then condemn us all to death if that’s found out? It would be a heavy irony for anyone in this family to die at the blade of an executioner’s axe, don’t you think?”
I thought, for a moment, that he considered this. But when I looked closely at his face for a reaction, I realized he’d sunk back into his fever.
He was back to muttering imprecations at the gods in his sleep. A husk of a blasphemer, who took so much joy in seeing the pious void their bowels at the sight of his executioner’s axe. This was the man who would lean close and whisper at the condemned through his mask, “Do you not believe you will visit the halls of the gods soon? Don’t you burn favors for a god, perhaps one like Tuva, so that you will eat honey and milk from bowls that never empty, and watch and laugh at the struggles of mortals shown on the mirrors all throughout Tuva’s hall? Or do you fear that this is truly your last moment of life?”
That was my father, the profane.
Unlike his outwardly pious victims, Anto believed. He had to believe. He was an executioner. If there were no gods, then what horrible thing was it that he did?
Now he was going to find out.
It angered him that it was taking so long to slowly waste away into death. So he cursed the gods. Especially the six-armed Borzai, who would choose which hall Anto would spend eternity in.
He swore at Borzai, even though he would soon meet the god. And even though that god would decide my father’s afterlife. Anto was not the sort of man who cared. He had no thoughts for the future, and he dwelled little on the past.
I always had admired that about my father.
My oldest son, Duram, peeked around a post to look into the kitchen, his dark curly hair falling down over his brown eyes. “Is he sleeping?”
I nodded. “Are you hungry?”
“I am,” Duram said. “So is Set, but he doesn’t want to come down the stairs. He says it hurts.”
Set had been born with a twisted foot.
“Stay quiet,” I cautioned as I picked up a wooden platter. I spooned olives from a jar, tore off several large pieces of bread, cut some goat’s cheese, and then lined the edges with figs.
Duram dutifully snuck back up the crude wooden stairs, and I heard the planks overhead creak as he took food to his brother. Soon he would need to work for the family. He’d need to become a man early, to help replace Anto’s earnings.
But for now, I sheltered him in the attic with his brother and their toys. I wanted them both to have some peace before their worlds got harder. Particularly Set’s.
I opened a window and looked outside. My husband Jorda was supposed to be working the field. Instead he was sprawled under a gnarled tree, a wineskin lying over a blistered forearm.
There was always a wineskin. I never passed him a single copper earned from my butchering, but he still found wine. He usually begged them from his friends among the Alacan refugees. He’d sit with them and loudly damn the collapse of Alacan, and they’d cheer him and buy him cheap wine.
With a sigh, I shut the wooden window.
Anto groaned and swore in his sleep, disturbed by the cold air. I would have liked to have had a healer here. Someone who could give us bitter medicine, and hope. A kind ear for the betrayals of the body.
But for all that I may have hated the Jolly Mayor for banishing the healer, my family’s lives had depended on the mayor over the years. My life, my two sons, my husband, and my father. For Anto, skinny, frail, over-tempered bastard and profaner that he was, was an executioner for Khaim and the mayor.
We would have starved a long time ago without that money. The coin tossed in the executioner’s cup by the soon-to-be-beheaded in hopes of buying a good cut. The coppers tossed into the bucket by the crowd. The mayor’s retainer.
So when the tiny bell by the door rang, it was with the authority of a thunderclap. The tiny note floated around the old stone house, dripping into the kitchen, and wrapping itself around me as its quivering tones faded.
This was the first time it had rung since Anto had fallen sick.
He was being summoned, as executioner, to bring his axe to the square by the highest of noon.
Somewhere, across the inky, shoving waters of the Sulong river, which split Lesser Khaim and Khaim, up on Malvia Hill and in Mayors House, someone had rung the executioner’s bell.
The bell was magic, of course. The Mayor swore that the spells that had been cast to create the bells had been formed a long time ago, and that the bells were safe. I wondered if that was true, as I could smell magic softly in the air by the doorway whenever the bell rang. It tasted of ancient inks, herbs, and spices, and it settled deep in the back of my throat.
Once the executioner’s bell was rung in Mayor House, the goddess of a thousand multiple roads and choices, Deka, dictated which executioner’s bell rang back in sympathy. And Deka had chosen ours.
Deka was well known for her tricks. The goddess of dice throwers was playing one last little one on Anto.
I looked back over my thick, wooden kitchen table toward Anto. His brown eyes were wide, his brows crinkled in intense thought.
He rubbed his anemic mustache, which was a sign of his failure: that he had only ever had one child, and a daughter at that.
“The call…” he said, voice breaking. “Tana. Did you hear it?”
I moved to him. “You can’t go. You know that.”
I wondered, as I said it, where the gentleness in my voice had come from. It had never been offered to me in my life by this old man. Not in all the years I’d cooked and chopped wood, or the long years I’d worked as a butcher.
“I know I can’t go you stupid girl,” Anto spat. “It is well beyond me.”
The bell here needed to be rung if an executioner were here. In five minutes, if there was no reply, the call would
go to someone else.
In a way, that dying ring would signal the death of our family. Without Anto’s occasional income, we would have to sell the small house and the land. And then we would become little better than the refugees around us.
I watched him lie back down into the bed, gazing up at the thick ceiling beams. “Where is Jorda?” Anto asked.
“Sleeping,” I said.
“Drunk,” Anto spat. “Useless. Addled.”
I had nothing to say to that.
Anto’s jaw set, and he said, “I have always answered the call. Always come back with the Mayor’s coin to keep us alive as the bramble creeps into our useless field. I’ll slit my own throat right here and now before I hand over the executioner’s bell. It is all that keeps my miserable bloodline flowing.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
Anto coughed. “The gods hate me. Had I a son, he’d be on his way right now instead of bothering me with this.”
My voice jumped in anger. “Well, I’m not your son. I’m your daughter. You must live with that.” And then I added, “with what little life you do have left.”
Anto nodded. “This is true. This is true.”
And then he crawled out of his bed. The blankets slipped off to reveal his liver-spotted arms.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He stumbled out of the kitchen to the door, stick-like legs quivering from the effort.
I realized what he was about to do and moved to stop it, but with a last wily burst of energy, Anto staggered forward and rang the executioner’s bell before I grabbed his arm.
As the single, clear note rang out and filled the back of my throat with the faint taste of old magic, he crumpled to the floor in a heap of bones and skin, laughing at me.
“Now you have to go in my place, little daughter of mine. Now you have no choice.” He panted where he lay, staring up at me with eyes sunk deep into wasted, skeletal sockets. “The Mayor would execute both of us if you try to tell him what we just did. He is not a forgiving man.”
“When you face Borzai in the Hall of Judgment, he will banish you to Zakia’s torture cells for eternity,” I told him. “When I hear your spirit groan in the night, tortured by dark gods, I will laugh and pretend I didn’t hear it.”
He flinched at that. “Do you hate me so?”
I trembled with outrage. “You bring me nothing but pain and drudgery and burden.”
He thought on that for a long while. Longer than I’d seen him consider anything. “You must go just this once, then. After this, you can turn the bell in. I’ll be dead soon, I can’t stop you, yet you must at least cover the expense of my funeral. I’ll not have my appearance in Borzai’s Hall of Judgment delayed because the rites were not pleasing to him. And after that if you wish it, it could be your trade. It is a good living, daughter. And with me gone, there will be one less body to care for, one less mouth to feed. You have no field, and butchering people will give you more than butchering pigs.”
Then he sighed and crawled toward his bed. I said nothing. I helped him back to it, his body surprisingly light as I slung his arm over my neck.
“How can I kill someone who has done nothing to me?” I asked.
Anto grunted. “Don’t look into their eyes. Consider that the Mayor has a reason for their death. Remember that if they have led a proper life, they will be sent to the right hall for eternity.”
“Won’t the Mayor’s guards be able to tell I’m not you?”
“No,” Anto murmured. “I’ve been wasting away long enough. I’m a small figure, so are you. Wear my hood, carry my axe, none will be able to tell the difference. It is no different than chopping wood. Raise the axe, let it fall, don’t swing it, and aim the edge for the neck. You’ve killed enough pigs, you can do this.”
And with that, he slipped away to his sleep, exhausted by all his recent efforts.
I understood he’d always wanted a son. That he’d wanted the farm to produce the crops it had when he was little, before the bramble grew to choke it. I understood that he never wanted me to marry Jorda.
I understood that maybe, he’d wanted to give me the bell a long time ago, but had been too scared to do it. Why else would he have begged and called in so many favors from old friends to make sure I worked as a butcher?
I walked through Lesser Khaim dressed as an executioner.
Inside I was still me, Tana, weary and tired, struggling to see through the small slits in the leather hood over my face.
I’d called Duram down, and kissed him on his forehead before I had left.
“What was that for?” he’d asked, puzzled.
“Just know that I love you and your brother. I have to leave for an errand. But I will be back home soon.”
After I sent him back upstairs, I’d opened the cedar chest in Anto’s room and pulled out both his hood and heavy cape. They fit me well as I pulled them on, as Anto said they would. His canvas leggings slid off my waist, but a length of rope fixed that.
The axe lay in the bottom of the chest, the edged curve of the blade gleaming in the light.
It weighed less than it looked, and was well balanced in my hand. Heavier than the axe I used to chop wood with, but not anywhere as heavy as I had somehow imagined.
Now I rested the axe on my shoulder and walked down the banks of the Sulong.
I followed a fire crew down the stone steps. They wore masks and thick, double-canvas clothing. As they walked they pumped the primers on the back of their tanks, then lit the fires on the brass-tipped ends of their hoses.
When they flicked the levers, fresh flame licked out across the bramble threatening to creep over the stairs. Clumps of the thorny, thick creep withered under the assault.
Clearers followed close behind, chopping at the bramble, careful not to touch any of it lest they get pricked. Children scampered around with burlap sacks to pick up bramble seeds.
They stopped the burn when they saw me and stepped aside to let me down the path.
“If it’s Alacan magic users you’re sending to Borzai’s judgment today,” one of them called out from behind a mask as fearsome as mine, “then I salute you.”
Others agreed in wordless grunts as they hacked at bramble with axes.
The ferry across the river dipped low to the water when I stepped aboard. The ferryman dug his pole deep into the muck and shoved us along the guide ropes that kept the raft from drifting downstream.
“Ain’t the Alacan refugees causing the bramble creep,” he muttered, and jutted his chin upriver.
I knew that. I could both see and smell the problem as the raft cleared a tall thicket of ossified bramble. When it wasn’t cleared, the roots thickened, and hardened to become a singular and impenetrable mass.
And appearing behind that mass, far over the river Sulong, a half completed bridge soared from Khaim’s side of the riverbanks. The unfinished structure hung in the air with no visible means of support, floating over the river as men worked on extending it toward Lesser Khaim day and night.
The stench of the magic holding the half-completed structure in the air wafted down over the river’s surface: strong, tangy, and dangerous.
All that magic caused bramble to spring up all throughout Khaim and Lesser Khaim. People scraped it from their windowsills and fought it throughout their fields.
“Mark me,” the man said with a final push to get us to the other side. “We’ll end up like Alacan: choked with bramble and fleeing our city if we keep building that unholy thing.”
I paid the ferryman his copper and stepped off onto the pier. He said those things only because he was bitter about losing his livelihood. There would be no place for him when people could simply walk the bridge.
I walked through Khaim, enjoying the taller marble and stone buildings and fluted columns. Lesser Khaim grew too quick: its buildings were cramped and close together, made of any materials that could be found. It was chaotic, and the Alacaner slums added the stench of coo
king fires and sewage to what had once been lemon trees and pomegranates in bloom.
But my relaxation faded as I realized people scuttled away before me in nervousness. And it fled when I turned to the public square and the raised platform at the center where the executions were held.
Early crowds had already gathered. Vendors walked around selling flatbreads and fruits, and city guards waited by the steps.
They waved me on impatiently, and I saw the figure in chains between them. He turned, saw me, and his knees buckled. The guards held him up under his arms and laughed.
The Jolly Mayor himself came to the square and puffed his way up the stairs. His beady eyes regarded me for only the briefest of seconds, then fixed on the blade.
He smiled and moved closer. “Make this a good one, eh, Executioner?” He chuckled before I could even think to ask what he meant. Which was a good thing, as I wasn’t sure I could reach for a deeper voice. I was far too nervous.
The guards dragged the prisoner up the stairs, sobbing and retching. They shackled him to the four iron rings on the floor of the platform, half bowed to the Mayor, and then retreated.
Chains tinkled as the prisoner moved, trying to look over his shoulder. “Please, please, have you no mercy? My sheep were dying of mouth rot, my family would have starved…”
The Mayor did not look at the man, but instead at the crowd. He cried out, for all to hear, “Khaim will not fall to the bramble, like the cities of the Empire of Jhandpara. Their failures guide us, and we call for the gods to forgive us for what we must do: which is to punish those who use forbidden magic, for they threaten every last one of us.”
Then the Mayor turned to me and waved his hand.
A sound like a babbling brook came from the crowd. The murmur of a hundred or so voices at once. Behind that I heard the shifting of chains, and the sobbing of a doomed man.
I imagined either of my two sons laid out like this, begging for forgiveness. I imagined my Jorda’s scrawny body there, his burn-marked fire crew arms pulled to either side by the chains.
