Gaia’s Children, Book One, Riven, part 4

Katya drew her coat around her as the damp bitterness pried icy fingers into her small shelter. Her path from Belgrade had been long and hard, hiding in the blasted ruins of Kosovar homes, venturing from cover only in the depth of night to avoid snipers and wandering bands of murderous Serbs intent on genocide. At first Belgrade had seemed so much better than Mereshor but the Russians had come there too and just like at home in Ukraine, they had slaughtered any who spoke against them.

The trek through Kosovo and Macedonia had been a little less dangerous in some ways since she was no longer in an active war zone but the route through untamed parkland avoiding contact with other humans and hunting for food when she could had been brutal in its own way and the strain showed in her face and body. She knew she had lost easily 15 kilos since leaving her home in Ukraine but in many ways that made her feel better as the bulk was a legacy of her teen years when she had tried so hard to be one of the boys.

It wasn’t the loss of muscle mass that made her grimace at her body, it was the fact that along with that had gone the nascent breasts and the added padding on hips and butt that had reinforced her tattered self-image. Now she just looked like a half starved human with no real cues as to her gender. Even her hair had been sacrificed to the exigencies of survival, hacked off to add a layer of camouflage as she sought anonymity and safety in ugliness. She took a quiet pride in the fact that it didn’t do much good, that even through the grime and deliberately unkempt appearance she could not manage to look male. If anything starvation made her features stand out even more but she hadn’t been close to or spoken with another human being for nearly a month and there was no such thing as a mirror in her very limited and survival focused world.

The faint beginnings of light showed her the lake below and for a moment made her think how beautiful the world could be, took attention away from the cold and from her gnawing hunger. Just 3 more kilometers before she crossed into Greece but still she would not be free. Her looks would mark her apart from the locals and if they found out the rest… she might not survive. She would need to make her way much further south before she pressed her claim for refuge as a citizen of Greater Europe to have any sort of decent chance and even then…

Even then she wasn’t really properly European but they were apparently making Ukrainians welcome now as long as they joined the military if between the ages of 18 and 55. The European military was inclusive so her transgender status wouldn’t be an issue and she had a major grudge against the people who had destroyed her home, killed her father and brothers and destroyed everything she knew growing up. Signing up to stand and possibly fight against them was not just a way to find refuge, it was a need, a hunger felt more keenly than mere physical rumblings. She was incapable of lying to herself, telling herself that she had no need for vengeance but that was not all of it. She truly wanted to stand for a better place, for freedom in a world where the former bastion of freedom had become a frightening monster.

For her, that meant becoming a soldier for “Fortress Europe”. The opportunity had not been available when she and hundreds of thousands of others had fled through Romania and Hungary or up into Poland and even if it had been she had only been 17, too young to join. They had been forcibly moved along into non EU territory which in her and many other’s case had meant Serbia. At the time it had at least seemed like a kindness. There was no help offered but at least they had not been forced back into the slaughter their homeland had become.

The lake below was larger than the one she could see from her window as a child, far below her bedroom window with the evening mist just beginning to obscure the shoreline. Still, she was able to allow her mind to wander a little, to those days when she had finally told her father about herself and he pulled her into a gentle embrace while they both cried over the loss of her mother so long ago, a chasm of grief unbridged for so long by two people trying to be strong for the other.

The months after had been the best times she could remember since her mother died. Her father was overjoyed at learning he had a daughter. He had been quite worried as he watched her sink further into depression, to withdraw from the little social contact she had. He knew the signs, he had seen comrades just shut down that way and they very rarely came out of it except in a box. He himself had trod that path and the only reason he pulled out of it was his child.

The next week he took her to a doctor in Lviv who tested her and interrogated her for hours before providing an implant which would bring her hormonal levels into normal female range. She was to return every 6 months for the first 2 years for testing and every year after that for the next 8. There had been 2 return visits before the war came to Lviv and any sort of normal life came to an end.

She had been insulated from the war in many ways even though she could not remember a time when it wasn’t going on. It had always been far away, beyond Kiev… practically Russia anyway. The war was over there, no concern of hers.

Until it became her concern. Until she couldn’t go to her doctor’s appointment because he was missing along with half a city of people. Until the men in masks with no insignia on their uniforms killed her father and most of the men in town for making a stand when they stole everything in town. Until she held Sergei while he bled out his life and told her he loved her with his last breath.

Then there was nothing left to do but flee. She did not even return home but lost herself in the mountains and began making her way south. It had taken her a full week to make her way 100 kilometers to the Tisa river and into Romania. For nearly another week she kept to the forest although she felt able to move during the daytime instead of having to stick to darkness. She had been able to hunt a little along the way and foraged as she could so she wasn’t exactly starving but the overpowering smell of food cooking finally drew her from the forest.

Hunger and loneliness made her a little reckless and anyway, she had a few hryvnia in her pocket, surely enough to pay for a modest meal. She took a critical look at herself and decided there wasn’t much she could do short of a bath and laundry then casually strode out of the forest, across the road to sit at one of the covered tables outdoors. A girl not much older than herself approached.

“Bine ați venit la Cabana Bradet. Ce ai vrea?” she waited expectantly while Katya decided she should order something.

“Cyn?” she looked up at the girl and saw the subtle change in her expression before she switched to English.

“I bring you better than soup, wait.” She disappeared inside and a moment later came out with a steaming plate and a large mug topped with froth. Katya took a cautious bite of the wrapped leaf dish and was surprised by the sourness and spice. A questioning look brought an explanation. “Sarmale, mamaliga, beer. Tourist like.”

She sat down and leaned across the table, lowering her voice. “It is not safe for you here. Many people do not like refugees, think you are dirty criminals who steal and commit crimes. My uncle can help you get to Belgrade but the men he works with… they will use you.”

The expression of terror must have been clear on Katya’s face as she tensed to escape. The other girl touched her arm gently. “Not that way. They will use you to carry drugs across the border. You look young and innocent and half starved, the guards will not even ask for papers. You deliver where you are told, payment in Euros. The money is good and you will have better life than hiding in forest like rabbit.”

The girl had been truthful and the men who worked with her uncle were simple smugglers, nothing more. Mostly they were family men and abhorred the flesh trade so she wasn’t really exposed to that side of things, although she did find ways to obtain her meds and began to fill out again. She also used a good deal of the money she made to prepare for what she knew would be the next stage of her journey. Warm clothing, a good hunting bow and tools to make repairs and arrows, extra boots and socks, knives, fishing gear and snare wire, a small tent designed to blend with the woodland, firestarter… all the things she knew she would need when the Russians came

When they did come it was fast and hard and she found herself watching from the hills as the city was overrun with shocking suddenness and brutality. Her habit of nesting in the hills outside the city in a shelter she had made warm and comfortable was her saving grace that day and gave her a place to hide until darkness when she forsook her refuge and struck out southward, bound for Greece. Now, 3 months later, she was only another 200 kilometers away from the recruiting office in Athens, could literally see over the border into Greece and she was afraid.

Until now she had run, hidden, avoided conflict whenever possible and here she was, terrified but marching toward a destiny as a fighter, one she could no more run from than she could run from the horrors that played in her dreams at night. Through her terror though… there shone a note of pride. She had made this journey on her own, had proven herself and she would never let anyone take that away from her.

It was fully dar now and time for her to move. She slipped carefully over a ridgeline and then crept across what seemed like a barren open valley before making her way back into a treeline, now free in Greece. Simply having crossed the border did not decrease her level of stealth though. She knew what it could mean to be caught be the locals, being who she was and coming from where she had. It would take at least another week, possibly 2 before she could simply walk into the depot in Athens and sign her name on a recruitment form.

She eased on through the terrain, remaining invisible until an hour or so before dawn when she found a hide for herself and settled down to get some sleep.

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Malala had been fleeing in terror for as long as she could remember. At first she thought the Chinese soldiers would be different to the Bengalis she had learned to hate and fear and in some ways they were. They showed no interest in raping her, did not care if she was not completely covered and seemed to want to be kind.

All the same, they saw the countless starving and mangled innocents and forced themselves to look away. She felt somehow that she should have been angry at them, should have hated them for the devastation they had wrought upon her home, her village, her family. Sometimes late at night she wondered if she had entirely lost the ability to hate.

What then was left of her, emotionally? Was she only part of a human being, half a soul? Had this war shattered her so utterly?

Whatever the answers to her existential questions, she had found part of her journey to freedom quite comfortable thanks to an old merchant seaman who had taken pity on her, perceiving her to be an ordinary young teen girl rather than the transgender(but no less ordinary) girl she actually was. The broken language they shared made her think that she reminded him of his daughter.

Once they grew near to the Suez Canal things changed for the worse in a drastic way. The merchant was killed and his ship taken. She barely managed to slip over the side and clamber down a mooring line, hiding in the shadows beneath the pier until darkness mercifully covered the scenes of chaos.

With the concealment offered she was able to slip over the side of a small boat and hide herself until it stopped outside of a town she learned was Zafrana. She half swam, half floated to shore and spent 2 days creeping through the desert with no food(by no means a new experience for her), drinking her own urine, employing every trick she knew to simply appear as a part of the blowing sand and now she saw her goal, her escape.

Malala watched the faint images of 2 boats making their way to shore and silently made her way to the edge of the water, slipping in as stealthily as she could manage. It took everything she had to make her way to the large yacht and clamber up into the launch as the others returned and made their way into the boat. She found a small piece of tarp and covered herself, starting when she felt the engines thrum after some hours and then being lulled to sleep by the constant note vibrating in her bones.

Malala did not know what to expect when she awoke, rivulets of sweat running down her body under the airless shelter of her piece of tarpaulin. She was afraid of being treated roughly, maybe of being used by the men in the crew for their pleasure… but the last thing she expected was to find a pair of comforting arms helping her up and into a dimly lit and blessedly cool air conditioned space.

It was a moment before she could focus and realize that those arms belonged to a tall woman who might possibly have been the best model of female physical fitness she had ever seen. Oh she was undeniably sensual and every inch female but those same curves bespoke power and grace far beyond any sort of human norm.

It was clear in her every movement and posture that here was violence incarnate, held on a hair trigger.

After Malala had wet her mouth and managed small sips of blessedly cool water she finally found the words her mind had formulated moments before but which taken time to reach her tongue. “You are her?”

“I suppose that depends on exactly what you mean. I was born a boy, became a woman, freed myself and other women. I was given the name Laila by my slave-masters. Little did they know the power they bestowed upon me with that name. Now I am the scourge of the world. Allah has set it upon my head to see that his true message of love and tolerance is spread, as will be the true messages of Jesus and Buddha and so many others before.”

“No one belief is right or wrong, they all hold seeds of truth… and they all tell us to treat each other as we would wish to be treated. This is my message, the thing I fight for. I am no great one, any more than you or anyone else is a great one. We are all simply beings who can choose to make our time on this earth better or worse. Can choose to make others time on this earth better or worse.”

Malala considered the words of the older woman for a moment before she felt ready to reply. “I want to fight by your side. I too believe as you. I have risked my life, given up everything to find a way to follow my conscience, do the things my soul demands of me. I do not wish to kill but if Allah wills it and I cannot find another way I will do so.”

Laila held her in her arms for a long time and let her cry herself back to sleep after swallowing a full glass of oral rehydrate solution disguised with fruity flavor before she picked up the girl’s slight form and carried her to the spare bunk in her own quarters. She gently undressed her and bathed her wounds as carefully as possible, resolving to have the doctor take a closer look at her feet which were in very bad shape.

With that taken care of she fell into her own bunk and a fitful slumber, as close to real sleep as she had gotten for many years now. Laila had to check her own reaction when she heard Malala stir and groan as she tried to stretch, glad that her knife was still hidden under the covers.

The girl was sharp eyed though and didn’t miss a trick. She saw Laila easing her knife back into its sheath and apologized for waking her before jokingly thanking the red-faced woman for not killing her.

Laila tried to apologize and it was waved off. “You sleep with no guard?”

“Never trust.”

“You trusted me?”

“I know who you are. You are like me, a girl born with boy parts. I know at least a part of the hell you lived. And…” Laila could not keep a tear from escaping her eye, “I need a little sister in the same way that you need a big sister. I need someone who always has my back no matter what, someone who is the other half of my soul, the conscience I no longer have. Someone I would willingly give my life for, without a second thought.”

“I am not a lesbian.” Her expression was determined and Laila saw so much of herself reflected in the young woman that it brought a genuine laugh bubbling out of her and somehow began to heal a part of her she had never realized was broken.

“Neither am I, dear girl. Not even vaguely bisexual. Even if I were there is no time for that. Not for me, and now, not for you. Perhaps Allah will gift us with love and happiness someday, perhaps even in this world.”

“How can you still believe?”

“How can I do anything else? If it were not Allah it would be Yahweh or Buddha or Kali or Zoroaster or maybe even Pele…” Laila held the girl’s eyes with her own until she saw her begin to understand.

“You must be of service, no matter what name that takes?” The younger woman saw the glint in Laila’s eye, the recognition of her understanding. “I am the same.”

She said it with a sense of wonder, the realization of her inner drives and feelings brought to words for the first time. Without a word she produced a small blade and carefully slashed her palm, enough to bleed but not to damage. She wordlessly proffered her hand, its scarlet burden slowly streaking desert roughened skin.

“My people have a custom, of sharing blood to bind our souls together as warriors. I freely offer my blood and my bond to you as my sister.”

Laila produced her own blade, a rather impressive but totally unadorned Nepalese Kukri knife with a wicked edge on the inner side and tip of the bulbous downward curving blade. She followed suit and then reached out, clasping their hands together so that the blood mingled and dripped onto the pristine decksole.

“My people have this custom as well. Now and forever we are sisters, bound to each other as warriors in blood. Together we will battle the darkness that wishes to cover the world. Until the day I no longer draw breath and even beyond I will fight by your side.”

Both women were openly sobbing now, the sheer physical force of their oath having pierced them to their souls, cracked shields they had both thought impregnable. Eventually both became quiet, simply sharing the moment before Malala broke the tableaux.

“I do not know how to fight. Can you teach me?”

Laila looked into her eyes for a moment before shaking her head. Sorrow passed over her features, a brief shadow of pain.

“No my sister, I cannot teach you to fight. What I can teach you is to kill, to maim, to make men wish they had never drawn breath. I can teach you to be the incarnation of death and vengeance… but I cannot teach you to fight. I do not know how.”

Laila looked down at the blood slowly clotting on the deck. “Blood and horror are the only gifts I have for the world now. Perhaps one day… but those are thoughts for a different time.”

The two women sat that way, each in her own world of heartbreak and loneliness… knowing that there was one other they each could trust to the depths of their souls. Something both beautiful and terrible was born in that moment, something that would shake the world to its very foundations. There was no foreshadowing of this in either woman’s mind and had there been they would each have dismissed it as fantasy.

Finally Laila moved, picking up and carrying Malala into a passageway and through another hatch into a well-stocked and very modern sickbay. The attendant on duty took one look at Malala and instantly had her lie down on a comfortable examination couch. He took a moment to call the ship’s doctor and proceeded to start an IV for fluids.

The doctor was a very short and broad Sikh with a truly impressive beard and a perfect Oxford accent.

He examined Malala with brusque efficiency, making sucking noises through his teeth as he saw her feet. He quickly compounded an ointment and smeared them with it before wrapping them in layers of bandaging. After making sure that she understood she was not to walk until he allowed it he continued with his examination.

He made no comment other than a fractional rise of an eyebrow almost as extravagant as his beard when he examined her groin area. Once he had her covered again and sat up he asked her questions about what medications she had taken, how long since she had them, any illnesses she had as a child. It was a very thorough medical examination and at the end he offered her some options.

She chose to have the implants he offered, ones that would be good for 10 years and ensure that her hormonal balance remained that of a healthy young woman. She winced as he placed them under her skin but the smile on her face when he was done could have lit the world with its bright joy.

“Thank you so much Doctor…?”

“I am called Hitpal Singh. It is a difficult name to live up to but I do my best. You both have heavy names to bear also… she who fought for freedom amidst slavery and she who defended the Prophet Himself with her own body.”

He sighed and looked down at his own squat frame. “My people are warriors of great renown but my battlefield is the illness and injury that destroys just as surely as a weapon. The more physical aspects of fighting I must leave to those such as yourselves.”

“We each have our own way of trying to make the world a better place doctor. I envy you your ability to save lives when it seems that all I ever do is end them.” Laila let out a gusty sigh. “Sometimes I just want to lie down, to give up and let the world around me spin into death and madness without my contributions to the suffering.”

Silence hung between the three of them for what seemed an eternity.

“Do you kill the innocent?”

It took a moment for Laila’s mind to process his perfect English diction into something she could comprehend and even then she could not grasp what he meant. She had to think about it, really examine her own memories and she sat in silence again as she saw in her mind every single death she had caused.

She did not realize tears were streaming down her cheeks until her attempt at speech broke into sobbing. This time it was Malala who held her until she cried herself out and could manage to reply. In her voice was all the heartbreak in the world.

“I have, yes. I thought it was only the men, gathered to plot war against me… I did not know that there were women and children there… I used a gasoline bomb because it was all I had and when I saw children screaming and running, engulfed in fire… I shot them. The women, the children, I shot them so they would not suffer…” She was gasping with great shuddering sobs again and she took a few minutes to get her breathing under control.

When she spoke again her voice was thick with hatred. “The men I left to burn. It was better than they deserved.”

She looked up at the other two expecting to see shock or disapproval and saw only understanding.

Just at the edge of her perception she heard a very faint whisper and the barest waft of a moustache. “Eggs and omelets, my dear…”

She almost laughed at the incongruity.

“How are you with the Sea Brothers Hitpal? Have the ancient divisions disappeared so completely?”

“Disappeared? I do not think that is possible, not in this lifetime. Someone very wise once made a half true statement and it is as true now as it was then.”

Malala broke in quietly, almost to herself. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend…”

“Unless they are simply another enemy.” Laila finished her version of the saying. She fell silent for another long moment and the only sound in the sickbay was that of machinery and the thrum of powerful engines.

“I am sick to death of killing. If Allah or some other merciful god took this burden from me I would happily give my life. The gods will not let me die until my work is done, it seems. Maybe one day I will simply drown in the blood of those I have killed and it will be an end to the demon I have become.”

Hitpal gently pulled her chin up with is forefinger, forcing her eyes to meet his. “You are no demon, Lady Death. You are an angel sent by the gods to take their vengeance upon those who would rule with hatred and torture. You are justice in all her terrible glory. Any who meet you know this and those who have reason fear and hate you for it.”

She tried to pull her gaze away and he held her eyes with sheer force of will.

“You are no demon. You are a Goddess of old, made flesh. You are an incarnation of Kali. You are who you need to be, here and now.”

She found herself unable to reply, unable to accept the truth she knew lay in his words and shone in his eyes. He drew her into a gentle embrace, offering the simple comfort of human touch to a woman who needed comfort more than anyone he had ever encountered. Malala held onto both of them and they stayed that way for a very long time.