“I beg you,” he called hoarsely in the Wendish tongue, “let me serve you so that I may teach myself strength.”
She looked at him, then turned away to catch the horse and hobble it. To one side of the fire lay a basket and a quiver. She unearthed bow and arrows, and with some care she approached the furious warrior and plucked a griffin’s feather from the wooden frame which, like two shepherd’s crooks, arched over his head. Her fingers bled at once, and profusely, but she only licked her fingers and murmured words, like a prayer, under her breath.
“Nay, I beg you, let me do it.” Zacharias stumbled forward as Bulkezu cursed out loud. “Let me do it. For he has shamed me, and in this way I may return shame upon him threefold.”
She stepped back to regard him with narrowed eyes. He had never seen eyes of such green before, fathomless, as luminous as polished jade. Measuring him, she came to a decision. Before he could flinch back, she nicked his left ear with her obsidian knife, and when he yelped in surprise, she licked welling blood from his skin—and then handed him the knife and turned her back on him as she would on a trusted servant.
“Strike now!” cried Bulkezu, “and I will give you an honorable position among my slaves!”
“There is no honor among slaves. You are no longer my master!”
“Do you not recognize what she is? Ashioi, the tribe of gold. The ones who vanished from the bones of earth.”
A chill from the stones seeped into Zacharias’ skin and soaked through to his bones. It all made sense now. She had come from the spirit world. She was one of the Aoi, the Lost Ones.
Bulkezu grunted, still struggling. Only a man who never ceased striving could stalk and slay a griffin. “I will lay a blood-price on her. My riders will track you, and kill her, and bring you back to grovel at my feet.”
Zacharias laughed, and at once his fear sloughed off, a trifle compared to the prospect of victory over the man who had humiliated him. “You bargain and then threaten, Bulkezu, mightiest son of the Pechanek clan. But what you took from me is nothing to what I am about to take from you, because the flesh is given by the god to all men but your prowess and reputation can never be returned once they are taken from you. And by a dog, a piece-of-dung who was used as you use slave women!” He reached for a feather.
“I curse you! You will never be more than a slave, and always a worm! And I will kill you! I swear this on Tarkan’s bones!”
Like an echo of the threat, the iron-hard feathers sliced Zacharias’ skin with each least touch until his palms and fingers were a mass of seeping cuts. Blood smeared his hands and made them slick while Bulkezu struggled and cursed but could not free himself from his bindings as Zacharias denuded his wings.
He took everything, all but one, and when he was finished, his hands bled and his heart rejoiced. “Kill him now!” he cried.
“His blood will slow me down.” She said it without emotion, and by that he understood there was no possible argument. “Nor will you touch him,” she added. “If you will serve me, then you will serve my cause and not your own.”
She grasped Zacharias’ hands and licked them clean of blood, then let him go and indicated that he should stow most of the feathers in the quiver. She fletched several of her stone-tipped arrows with griffin feathers, afterward hefting them in her hand, testing their weight and balance. When she was satisfied, she went to the eastern portal and began to shoot, one by one, the riders who circled her sanctuary. At once they sprayed a killing rain of arrows back into the stones. She had downed four of them before they truly understood that although neither they nor their arrows could get into the circle, her arrows could come out. At last they retreated out of arrowshot with their wounded. As from a great distance Zacharias saw them examine the arrows and exclaim over them while one rider galloped away eastward.
“My tribe will come soon with more warriors,” said Bulkezu, even though he knew by now that the woman did not understand his words. He had recovered himself and spoke without malice but with the certainty of a man who has won many battles and knows he will win more. “Then you will be helpless, even with my feathers.”
“And you will be helpless without them!” cried Zacharias.
“I can kill another griffin. In your heart, crawling one, you will never be more than a worm.”
“No,” whispered Zacharias, but in his heart he knew it was true. Once he had been a man in the only way that truly counted: He had held to his vows. But he had forsaken his vows when God had forsaken him.
Bulkezu glanced toward the woman. He could move his neck and shoulders, wiggle a bit to ease the weight on his knees and hands, but he was otherwise pinned to earth, no matter how he tried to force or twist his way free of her spell. “I will raise an army, and when I have, I will burn every village in my path until I stand with your throat under my heel and her head in my hands.”
