Shelter in the Tempest

Could a delta gale snap cedar thwarts faster than the river could swallow twenty drowned coastal warriors? Rozsa Iron-Tooth tasted peat grit and cold ozone on the wind, driving her heels into the liquefying mud of the hummock as rain crashed through the cypress canopy in blinding sheets. She wanted the lead war-canoe anchored to the submerged cypress knees before the rising backwash swept their flint and weapons into the abyss, and she wanted her captive river-priest pinned where her hand could find his throat in the pitch black.

The sky tore open with a sound like splitting hide.

Wind screamed through the black willows, flattening the reeds into gray scum. Mooring vines, braided from tough river-hemp, snapped with sharp cracks like breaking bones.

"Csente!" Rozsa roared into the gale, her voice shredded by the deluge. "Drop the stern stones! Lash the dugouts to the root-hollows!"

Downstream, a muffled shout vanished beneath the roar of water. The two supply rafts, piled with dried carp and reserve paddles, caught the swollen main current. A tumbling drift-log struck the first raft, rolling it upside down in a frothing eddy; the second buckled an instant later, sucked beneath the brown froth before a paddler could throw a line.

Rozsa lunged into the roiling flood.

Water slammed against her chest, thick with churned silt and dead branches. The current dragged at her knees, trying to sweep her feet off the submerged mud-shelf. She reached out, reading the vibration of the surge against the cypress bark. She threw a thick hide painter around a twisted knee-root, bracing her shoulder against the cedar prow to hold the hull straight before a backwash could twist it sideways and smash it to splinters.

Above her head, a drowned tamarack limb cracked.

Ten paces away on the sloping bank, Menyhért struggled against the mud, his bound hands raised to shield his face. The sodden branch, thick as a bull's thigh, fell like a deadfall club.

Rozsa shoved off the canoe, dove across the shallows, and caught the collar of his otter tunic. She dragged him backward into the mud with all her weight. The limb slammed into the peat three inches from Menyhért's ribs, burying itself two feet into the silt and throwing up a shower of black muck.

"On your feet!" Rozsa dragged him upright by the tunic, shoving him toward the narrow hummock ridge. "Move!"

Beneath the root-arch of an ancient, hollow cypress, a low shelter of greased sealskin remained pegged against the bank. Rozsa shoved Menyhért through the low opening, hauled herself in behind him, and pulled the drenched flap tight. She dropped two heavy ballast stones against the hem, shutting out the driving gale.

Darkness fell over them, immediate and suffocating.

The space smelled of old seal fat, sour peat mud, and the sharp brine of Rozsa's soaked skin. Above their heads, rain hammered the tight skin like thousands of small flint chisels.

Rozsa knelt on the sedge, her chest heaving in ragged drafts. Water streamed down her jaw, dripping onto her bare collarbone.

Menyhért lay braced against the hollow root wall, his dark hair plastered across his cheeks. His chest rose and fell in fast, shallow rhythm, his ribs trembling against the cold. His wrists, crossed before him, were locked in the rawhide thong she had loosened the night before. The skin beneath the wet cord was swollen, purplish and raw, bleeding from the rough bark of the tamarack bough.

Rozsa caught his wrists in one hand.

Menyhért stiffened, his fingers curling, but he did not pull away.

"Still eager to strip my hide, Warlady?" he rasped. His voice held a sharp, shuddering edge, though a ghost of his usual mockery clung to the words. "The river was doing a thorough job of it."

Rozsa ignored him. She reached to her belt, unsheathed her stingray dagger, and worked the flat, dull side of the bone spine under the wet cord. With two quick turns of her wrist, she loosened the sodden knots, freeing his hands from the strangling friction without cutting the rawhide entirely.

She took a pinch of tallow grease from her small hip-horn and rubbed it across his abraded skin. Her callused thumbs pressed hard into the tendon grooves, working the blood back into his stiff fingers.

Menyhért drew in a sharp breath through his teeth. "You handle a man like you gut a sturgeon."

"Be grateful I do not salt you first," she muttered.

Her own left shoulder flared with white-hot fire. A jagged splinter from the tamarack limb had ripped through her otter tunic, tearing a three-inch gash across the muscle above her collarbone. Fresh blood seeped down her breast, hot and slick against her cold skin.

Menyhért shifted on the sedge. His freed hands reached into the wet folds of his reed satchel. He pulled out a clump of dark, fibrous bog-moss, damp with astringent river-wash.

"Sit still," he said softly.

Rozsa's hand dropped to the hilt of her dagger. "Touch me with a poisoned reed and I slit your throat from ear to ear."

"If I had venom on me, I would have fed it to your steersman yesterday," Menyhért murmured.

He leaned close. The scent of sweet water-chestnut and cold silt rolled off him, cutting through the heavy grease of the shelter. He pressed the wet moss into the torn flesh of her shoulder.

A sharp sting tore through her muscle. Rozsa did not flinch, but her jaw clenched until the bone ached. His fingers were surprisingly steady, gentle despite the dirt beneath his nails, pressing the cool plant fibers against the wound to staunch the flow. His knuckles brushed the curve of her throat, grazing the bare skin where her pulse hammered against his palm.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The shelter was barely four paces across. Every breath he took brushed against her damp cheek.

"My mother bled like this," Rozsa said. The words slipped past her lips before her discipline could choke them off. Her voice was flat, hard as knapped flint, yet hollowed out by ancient salt. "On the shell-mounds. Farkas Red-Mud's raiders pinned her to the drying racks with gar-bone spears. They left my three brothers in the shallows for the crabs."

Menyhért did not pull his hands away. His thumb rested against the edge of the moss packing, holding it firm against her flesh.

"The priests at the stilt-temple did not use spears," he said quietly. His eyes reflected the faint gray gleam seeping through the pelt seam. "When the great wels catfish rose in the spring flood, the elders threw five temple boys into the whirlpool to buy quiet waters. I took my bone pipe, swam into the deep eddy, and played the sleeping drone until the beast turned belly-up and drifted back to the silt."

Rozsa stared at the dark hollow of his throat, where the shallow cut from her dagger had begun to scab over. "They exiled you for saving them?"

"They exiled me for proving their gods could be sung to sleep like tired infants," Menyhért said. A bitter, crooked smile touched the corner of his mouth. "Priests do not forgive a boy who proves their terror is a lie."

He pulled his hands back, leaving the moss plastered to her torn shoulder. The bleeding had slowed to a sluggish crawl.

"Between cannibal javelins, your venomous daggers, and your aggressive nursing, Warlady," Menyhért added, his eyes meeting hers with that infuriating, lazy insolence, "the river's monsters seem almost polite by comparison."

Rozsa did not strike him. She leaned back against the curved root, watching his chest rise and fall in the dim hollow. The rawhide cords lay loose around his wrists, useless as dead sedge. She did not rebind them. A strange, heavy quiet settled between them, a fragile truce forged out of cold blood and shared survival.

Then the earth beneath the cypress roots shuddered.

A deep, subterranean thrum vibrated through the mud floor, rattling the bones in Rozsa's legs. Outside, the howling rain ceased for a single heartbeat, swallowed by a massive displacement of water in the channel below.

A violent blue-white flash of lightning ripped across the bayou, burning through the seam of the sealskin shelter.

Rozsa shoved the pelt flap aside with her forearm.

Fifty paces downstream, in the boiling, foam-streaked black water, a colossal pale ridge broke the surface. The scarred, slate-gray crest rose six spans above the flood, fringed with sweeping whiskers as thick as pine trunks, turning slowly toward the scent of blood drifting from the battered dugouts.