Behind her, Rottu watched. Very carefully. She had never witnessed it before personally, but she had listened to reports from the Pilgrims who had spent time among the ummun. She knew she was seeing the ummun equivalent of brown grief. Dark brown, she judged. Very dark brown.
Satisfied, Rottu turned away. She had learned much, this day. Her report to Ushulubang would be long and full. And even the old sage would admit that some questions have answers. Answers, at least, which are good enough for the perils of the present.
The answer to one question was obvious. The Mother of Demons was, indeed, as Ushulubang had suspected, the mistress of the art of war. Rottu had thought the sage was probably correct, in this as in most things. But she had not been certain—until she watched triple-eighty ummun warriors destroy half an Utuku army.
But that was a small question. Now, she would be able to answer Ushulubang’s big question as well.
She gazed down at the plain. Below her, the massacre was already underway. The Kiktu and the Pilgrims were methodically butchering the mass of the enemy, milling in stunned confusion, while the fleet warriors of the ummun apalatunush relentlessly brought down those Utuku who tried to flee.
She looked away—not from horror, but from the indifference of long experience. She was an old gukuy. Not as old as Ushulubang, but old enough. Old enough to have seen more cruelty and brutality than she could remember. The world had always been so. She had thought it always would, until she met Ushulubang.
I have your answer, Ushulubang. A good enough answer, at least, to lead us forward to the questions of the future. And the Way is no longer a narrow path. It has suddenly broadened into a wide road. Full of pain, as ever. But also, I think, a glory beyond description.
She looked up at the gray canopy of the sky, trying to imagine the things which the demons said lay beyond. Trying to imagine the splendor of that Great Coil of Beauty.
* * *
Indira might have found some small comfort, then, in that terrible moment, had she turned back. For she would have seen Rottu, for the first time in years, relax her shoroku. And allow rich shades of green—in all of that color’s many hues—to wash across her mantle, like great waves in the sea.
Chapter 24
When it became obvious that they were nearing their destination, Kopporu approached Guo.
“I believe we are almost there now, Guo. The place where the Mother of Demons waits for us.”
“I hope so,” replied the infanta. She was breathing heavily. For any gukuy, much less a mother, the long climb up the canyon to the top of the Chiton was tiring. Since they reached the plateau above, the way had become easier. But it was still an arduous march, even for an army hardened by many eightweeks in the Swamp.
At least we are done with that, thought Kopporu.
Yet, in some strange way, she felt a regret.
The swamp had been horrible, even beyond her worst dreams. They had lost many warriors there. Lost in mudholes; lost to predators, big and small; lost to hideous parasitic infections; and some, lost in ways they would never know. Warriors who simply—disappeared.
The worst time had come crossing the river. Gukuy generally avoided large bodies of fresh water—and almost never ventured upon the ocean. Terrible predators lurked in water. Small predators in any body of water beyond the size of a stream or little pool. In larger bodies—certainly in big rivers—the predators were huge and fierce.
They had lost almost double-eight warriors crossing the river. Most of them to poisonous water-slugs.
We would have lost many more, had it not been for Guo.
Of the many legends which would emerge from that incredible trek across the swamp, Kopporu knew, none would be chanted so often as the day the battlemother Guo slew the great kraken of the river. Kopporu herself had been paralyzed with fear, for a moment, when she first saw the monstrous form of the kraken plowing up the river toward the Kiktu army. Twice the size of the biggest mother who ever lived—the biggest owoc mother who ever lived—with palps as big as a gana and a beak like a cave.