The Last Lagharis Pt. 03

Life on the road was different with Chaarumathi. Alone, it had been plodding, methodical and predictable. Life had offered no surprises, because Misha chased them all away, because she knew that surprises could kill.

When Chaaru entered Misha's life, she brought all kinds of chaos with her.

It started with a strangely shaped piece of wood Misha found in the refuse pile of an abandoned campsite. "This looks like a temperance charm," she said.

"A what?" said Misha.

Chaaru started talking so quickly that she was barely intelligible: "A temperance charm! Strap this over someone's chest, and if a priestess blesses it with a kiss, then it makes her resist the temptations of drinking and things like that."

"So it's meant to protect the priestess?"

"What? No, I mean the girl who wears it gets protected. Or boy. Either one. Anyway, this isn't really a charm, because those have to be carved out of acacia wood, but still, it looks almost like it."

Misha nodded and committed that information to memory purely as a curiosity. But then, while Misha was refilling their waterskins, she overheard Chaaru talking to a couple of pilgrims, saying, "I got this from the ruins of a temple ten years ago. The workmen were cleaning it out, and they were about to throw this into a fire..."

The pilgrims gasped.

"...but I begged them to save it. I know, I know, it's blasphemous for me to have it, because I'm not a believer, but you two sisters, you are, are you not?"

The two pilgrims nodded eagerly.

"Now," said Chaaru, "I can never let something go without a price, so how about... a quarter silver for this charm?"

They made the deal, the pilgrims left, and Misha came back with the full waterskins. "You sold them a fake charm."

"I did!" Chaaru crowed. "And now we have a quarter silver!"

"You deceived them. You acted dishonorably." She said the words, but they lacked conviction. A quarter silver was a lot of money to pull from thin air as Chaaru had. And when Misha saw Chaaru giddy with pride, her heart melted. Maybe a little fun and profit, she decided, were not wrong. And if they bent the rules again sometime, what harm could come of it?

After that came the dancing girl incident. Chaaru bought something from a dancing girl and offered silver sixteenths in return, and the girl erupted, "Silver is thieves' money! I won't accept this! Give me that back!"

Chaaru chose that moment to grow a stubborn streak and refuse, and just when the dancing girl looked as if she was about to scream and get them all in trouble, Chaaru offered to work off the debt instead.

That was how, that evening, Misha found herself in the audience in a shabby theater, watching as Chaaru appeared on the stage.

Misha had only ever seen Chaaru wrapped in plump layers of leather and fur, swaddled in dun that matched her skin. Now she saw Chaaru wearing almost nothing.

It struck her how thin Chaaru was. It was no wonder she was always cold. She was not pure muscle--there was some fat on her, as there should have been--but for some reason the gods had built her to be tall and slight.

Chaaru wore two things. One was a see-through top that wrapped around her small bust, the hazy blue cloth emphasizing, rather than hiding, her large, dark nipples. Her other garment was a short skirt, folded with a few more layers than her top but still showing she shape of her hips.

Chaaru began to dance. She threw herself into it, stretching and gyrating like a young lover at a dance, grinning like an idiot the whole time. The audience, which was half female, cheered and whistled with appreciation. Misha couldn't bring herself to cheer with them, purely because she felt embarrassed for Chaaru, even though Chaaru clearly did not feel embarrassed herself.

At the end of the night, the woman who ran the theater offered to hire on Chaaru as a member of the troupe. Part of Misha was surprised that Chaaru did not consider it. But another part of her was not surprised at all; the dance was just another turn in the road, something Chaaru tried and loved, but then left behind.

Chaaru started to apologize to Misha for the distraction, and Misha stopped her. "With these little sideshows," she said, "you and I are just starting to resemble some of the lesser legends of the Laghari ancestresses." That, more than anything, convinced Misha that she was on the right track. Misha wouldn't go as far as imitating her forbears' proclivity for warfare, of course--she was more civilized than that.

That was in the lowlands, where the matriarchal ways of the mountain women held sway. As they went farther north, into flatter and rockier land, they started seeing fewer women traveling without men, and men started looking at them differently. Instead of deference, these men looked at them with desire, or worry or, a boyish eagerness to help.

In a town on the side of a swamp, Misha and Chaaru passed a group of sweaty, muscled men in loincloths milling around behind an adobe house, and Misha thought it was a roadside brothel until she realized the men were ignoring her. She looked a little closer and saw them feeding something into furnaces. They were workmen.

Finally, one of them noticed her and roughly demanded to know what she wanted. Misha suppressed the urge to snap at him, to demand respect from him or even to slap him on the cheek, but she restrained herself. Those were the customs of her native land, which she had left behind.

Instead, she asked him why the men were working so hard in the hottest part of the day, the hour when they should have been resting. "Ask the baron!" one of grumbled.

Misha took the hint and left them alone.

"What baron are they talking about?" Chaaru asked Misha.

"How should I know?" said Misha.

In front of them, a young man's voice spoke up: "The Golden Baron."

The two women looked ahead and saw the first athletic-looking man they'd seen in this village, with dark hair just long enough to twitch in the breeze and sad, guarded eyes. He stood in the middle of the path as if he expected something.

"Do you want something, son?" asked Misha. Then she silently chastised herself for calling him 'son.' Back home, it was a word of reassurance and endearment, but who knew what it meant here?

The young man turned and started walking with them as if he'd known them for years. "The Golden Baron," he said again. "Once, we served a lord descended from the prodigies and heroes of our own history. Then the Golden Baron came in. He was a barbarian who knew nothing of the rectitude of our laws. Before him, life was difficult, but we managed to live. Now the Golden Baron demands more grain and cattle from us than we've ever had to give up before."

"Ooh, hard luck," said Chaaru.

The young man glared at her, and Misha knew why. Chaaru's singsong voice and strange accent had sounded sarcastic.

"She means it sincerely," said Misha. "And I pity you too." And she thanked the goddesses that she was not a lowland peasant.

"It's not only that," the man went on, becoming a little breathless. "They demand something else as tribute too." He hesitated, but then let it out in a husky whisper: "They take our youngest and prettiest."

That made Misha start. But then again, it shouldn't have. In a world run by unfettered men, girls were vulnerable, and outrages like this were the inevitable result. She looked into the young man's eyes and saw a deep, bleeding pain, and she knew without having to ask that he had lost a sister. "Oh," was all she could say.

Misha's mind started working. This man wanted to join her party. It was written all over him. But there was something about him he wasn't telling. No common peasant boy would have known the words 'prodigies' and 'rectitude.' After thinking it over for a moment, the answer struck her--he was a monk. That meant that if they were to invite him to join their party, they would have to be careful of-

"Maybe you could join our party!" said Chaaru.

Misha smiled. 'So much for subtlety,' she thought.

The young man looked shocked. "Oh, no, that would be quite impossible."

Misha was surprised in turn. Hesitancy, she had expected, but not refusal. Apparently, she had misread him completely.

Chaaru moped, and her tone was lovesick. Misha patted her back. She understood that feeling perfectly.

The young man fell out of step with the women. "If you're leaving, you should go around the swamp," he said. "It's dangerous for women to travel through it alone." The words 'if you're leaving' were soaked with disappointment that hurt Misha more than it should have.

But they did not heed his advice. Perhaps the swamp was dangerous for the submissive, ignorant women who peopled these parts, but Misha and Chaaru had been hardened against danger by years in the wild. They would be fine.

Even with the route more direct, it was hard to believe this way was shorter. Mud caked onto their boots. On hard ground, the caked mud squished and slipped. On soft ground, it glued their feet down. Flies harassed them, teasing their eyes and noses and mouths. Once, the ground gave way and sent Misha tumbling, only for her to catch her footing a heartbeat later. She looked down and saw that the hard ground on which she had set her foot had actually been a scummed-over pond. Chaaru laughed at her, and Misha was shocked at how difficult it was to tolerate that, even though, normally, she would have laughed with her. The heat must have been souring her mood, she decided.

Misha couldn't see far in the claustrophobic swamp. At the edge of her vision, a few dark figures snuck away as she spotted them. A few others approached. "We're not alone," she said.

Chaaru twitched and made a show of looking around. "What? Where are they?"

"Bandits, I think."

Chaaru drew her bow.

"If I was a bandit, I would wait until the prey is in a low place." Misha jerked her chin forward. "They must be hoping we will walk down that gulley. Let's climb the ridge instead. And if they attack us, they attack us."

They stalkers did not attack them. But like hungry wolves, they gathered behind the women and trailed them, and in her mind Misha started deciding where she would most want to stop and make her stand against them. She counted a half-dozen of them, at least, and two against six were bad odds. She drew her crossbow and wished it was already loaded.

But they did not fight. Ahead of them, a lone man, dark, short-haired and musclebound, sauntered up the other side of the ridge, grinning fiercely. A scimitar hung from one hip, and a brilliant red scarf, mysteriously unmuddied, hung from the other.

"Who's that?" said Chaaru.

"Their leader," said Misha, "Maybe." It wasn't obvious. Back home, no gang of bandits ever would have followed a man. But this, as the heat and the wet and the flies kept reminding her, was not home.

"Well, ladies of good caste," said the man, in the common lowland tongue but with an accent she'd never heard before. "I can't believe the good luck. You're out here alone, and before anything unspeakable could happen, we found you!"

His men laughed brusquely.

Misha looked around. She had never seen men acting like this--all humor and big words--except when they were trying to impress a woman, and that was emphatically not what this man was doing.

Or was it?

The man gave an exaggerated bow and gestured off to the side. "Come with us, ladies of good caste, and we will show you a welcome that befits your station."

While he talked, Misha had time to finish loading her crossbow. "Such false words show fear. You men are afraid of what will happen to you if you dare to attack us."

The man's face darkened, but the grin did not go away. "Are you sure about that?" He shook his head. "You see that, men? I was going to offer them seats at the banquet, but now that they say that, I see what they really are. These are not ladies of good caste after all. They're trade road robbers. And we all know what we do to those..."

Misha did not like where this was going. So she did what travelers had always suggested she do in front of aggressive, entitled men. She attacked his pride. "You're less of a man than I am."

That got the whole gang laughing. Even Chaaru looked confused.

Misha plowed ahead: "You hide behind insults because, underneath your bluster, you are afraid. But luckily for you, we have no quarrel with you, so stand aside, and we will pretend we never saw you." As soon as she finished talking, she realized her mistake. Now the man could not let them go without admitting to fear.

"A challenge!" he blustered. He looked around, and Misha did not like the cunning she saw in his eyes. "Child's play. I'll make you a bet. The first of us to climb to the top of this tree..." He pointed at two trees that twined together into one. "...wins."

Misha felt a burst of confidence and tried to hide it.

The bandit aimed his meaty arm at Chaaru. "And if I win, I get to have your tasty little sidekick for myself."

Misha should've been expecting that. She looked at Chaaru, got a trusting nod, and said back to the man, "Fine. But when I win, I want more than safe passage. I want..." She tried to think of something extravagant. "I want your position. You leave this swamp forever, and I take your place as head of the gang."

Some of the man's followers whooped with delight. Misha had been expecting hostility but chose to interpret their reaction as a good sign.

"I take that bet," said the man. "Are you ready?"

Misha took the moment to dump her crossbow and pull on gloves that would protect her hands from any thorns.

In the time it took, the man smarmed, "Start getting wet, girl. When I own you, I'm going to have you polish my cock, but then I'm taking you in your pussy."

"Go!" said Misha, and she scrambled to the twisted trees. Once she reached it and got her hands around a low branch, her body instantly remembered what to do. She pushed with her legs and crunched with the muscles around her stomach, swinging her legs up, then her arms. Each time she got a good grip, every muscle in her body helped her up to the next handhold. She stole a glance at her opponent, saw him lagging behind and felt a renewed burst of strength. In no time, she scrambled up the highest branch, so flimsy that it swayed. It felt as if there should have been a flag for her to wave, or at least something for her to say to signify her victory. Improvising, she snatched a muddy bird's nest that hung within reach. "I claim the competition!" she yelled, and she threw the nest at the ground. It struck a rock and dashed into twigs.

When she slid down the trunk to the ground, she found the bandit leader--the former bandit leader--looking equally dashed. She held out a hand. "My offer still stands. You may leave unmolested. But first I'll have your scarlet cloth."

Misha guessed that the cloth was some sign of favor or authority. Her guest must have been at least partially right, because his scowl deepened as he handed it over.

A man, probably around Chaaru's age, walked up to her. "You're the new captain now?"

It felt indescribably good to be called that. "Say it louder, so everyone can hear!"

He stepped back. "Everyone, this is the new captain!"

Misha sucked in a big breath and puffed out her chest. Six months ago, she had not dared to imagine she would ever achieve this. The rush of power she felt as all eyes turned to her made her feel like a goddess. It felt better than any orgasm Ruhab had ever given her.

Now that she counted them, there were a lot more than six men in the gang. She had counted up to eighteen and was not close to finishing when the young man said, "Do you want to see your camp?"

Misha couldn't resist: "You mean my camp."

"Yes, Captain. Er, Captain-ess." The lowland common tongue had no proper word for a female captain.

The young one led the way, and the gang clustered around Misha like worshippers. With a little discipline, she mused, they could look more like a royal entourage.

"Wow," puffed Chaaru, "That guy didn't have a chance!"

"I used to climb trees all the time when I was young. It seems I haven't lost the skill."

"It's lucky he picked tree climbing."

"Yes. I can't express how relieved I was."

The gang led them onto firmer ground, then between some suspiciously square patches of dirt that were, on closer look, gardens. A hill had been hollowed out and filled with rafters--or perhaps a hall been built and covered in mud--that served the gang as a hideout.

Inside, more people waited for them, at least twice as many as came with Misha, and they sat around tables and dormant cook-fires. A few of them were female. One sat in the corner, naked.

Misha did a double-take. The woman, probably twenty-and-some years old, sat against the wall of the hovel, picking disinterestedly at a wooden thing with a sharpened rock. Her single braid of black hair shifted behind her as her shoulders moved. When she turned her head to look up at Misha, her forehead creased. She tried to get up but couldn't. Her ankles were tied to stakes and the stakes were hammered into the ground far apart, forcing her legs open. Though Misha tried not to stare, she could not help noticing that many men had forced themselves into her and finished inside her.

"Oh," said Chaarumathi, following her gaze. "Oh no." She knelt, took off her outer layer of clothes and draped it over the unfortunate woman. "This must be what that nasty captain wanted to do to me."

"No more," said Misha. And seeing that that move had drawn everyone's attention, she stood up on a table. "Listen, all of you!" she said, in her most commanding voice. "I am Misha Laghari, last of the Laghari line, and I have defeated your captain and thereby become the new captain. I am a daughter of the mountains, where women hold power, and I guarantee that, as long as I lead, no woman will be forced to endure such barbarism as that." She pointed at the staked-down victim. "No more."

The men looked apprehensive. The women looked elated. Soon, Misha was at the center of a swarm of men and women introducing themselves and politely demanding her name, all while three or four others poured out their history and skills, or their needs and problems, at once. She listened as best she could.

Finally, there was a quiet moment, and she and Chaaru were able to abscond outside for a little quiet.

"It's amazing," said Chaaru. "Just like that, we're bandit queens!"

"No! We're not bandits." Misha softened a little. "But we really are like queens. And we have our own little army to show for it." She laughed. "Oh, what would Ayani say if she saw me now? I'd give anything to tell her of this!" She stood up, full of new energy. "Our own little army! I'm starting to look like a proper Laghari after all!" She looked out over the swamp, a dreary place that so poorly matched her mood. An idea struck her. "How many warriors does the Golden Baron have?"

"Who? Oh, the baron who- yes, right." Chaaru shrugged. "I don't know."

"Perhaps he has fewer warriors than I have now."

"I don't know."

"He holds young women, enslaved and dehumanized just like the one we liberated here. Perhaps we can topple him, free those unfortunates and claim all his riches for ourselves."

"I don't know. Maybe." Chaaru was uncharacteristically mild. "I thought we weren't supposed to do war?"

"Those women will be slaves forever if we don't save them." She marched back to the hovel entrance. "Let's find out if we have enough, shall we?"

It took some to gather the gang and make them understand it was time to move. It took some more time for them to leave, especially since they insisted on dinner first. But it did not take long to find the castle of the Golden Baron. It lay beyond the swamp, on the plains were one could see for days' march in any direction.