The first of the Hundred Hillers walked onto the lawn when Dumani was halfway through his cider. Nomvula watched him sniff at every morsel and hand it to one of his guards to taste before he ate it. He chewed slowly, hunched over the table, the sunrise cutting his sweat-slicked shoulders in gold. Someone had brought him a clear pitcher of water too, more bread and, upon Nomvula's request, a bowl of mutton. Knowing what fatty meat could do to a fighter, he turned the meat aside and took his time with bread and water.
Nomvula sat cross-legged on the lawn, the fireglass spear laid on the damp grass before her. Her lower positioning might have annoyed her, if Anathi wasn't sitting on the library's roof, looking down on it all with the indifference only a golem could muster. Dumani didn't speak, not even when there was a good handful of Hundred Hillers standing on the lawn throwing curious glances at each other. Not even when the two hundred or so members of Third Hill were all assembled in a wide circle on the lawn. Not even when children were sent running down to the village to call more witnesses.
Only when the whispers broke out to full conversations and then clipped arguments did he raise his head, then he lowered it again, chewing and drinking, chewing and drinking. What guards were here, Nomvula ordered them to keep the circle as wide as possible and beat back anyone who had anything resembling an opinion about what she was about to do.
Eventually, the numbers on the lawn were closer to half a thousand, and the drunker onlookers had broken out into chants and bloodsongs. Then the Inner Plainers started chants of their own, more martial than anything the shepherds and builders of the village could muster. When the air was thick with song and the rising sun had burned all moisture from the grass, Dumani lifted his head again. The eyes that met Nomvula's were clearer, and a touch of menace had returned to the General's movements now. He rose and the noise bowed.
"I hope there are enough voices here today," he said, "to turn you away from stupidity, Queen."
"I've heard enough of voices that aren't my own, trying to govern things that are mine, thank you." Nomvula laid one hand on her knee, palm up in invitation. "Let's be done here."
Dumani came to stand at the edge of the patio, wiping crumbs from his stubble. "Ah, but this isn't yours, either. This is your son's fight."
"Ndoda isn't here."
"And that would make this the second time he's ducked my challenge."
"Ndoda does not duck. As a prince, he has more important duties than petty squabbles."
"There's nothing petty about breaking the leg of the King's older brother." Dumani leapt down to the lawn. "To imprison the King's General is not a minor offence, and for you, a so-called pacifist who is twenty years past her best reputation, to bring a challenge of blood to me is--"
"An insult?"
Dumani took a spear from the nearest guard. "Of epic nature."
"Then go tell your King," Nomvula said. "Run to Kani."
When Dumani strode into the circle, Anathi stood but didn't drop from her perch. Nomvula stayed seated, her hand still laid open on her knee, her spear still glittering just within reach. Her own guards cast glances to each other when Dumani walked over the head of her long shadow, then the heart. He sat cross-legged on her womb and rested his spear across his knees. Iron, Nomvula noted, not the bronze one she had given him. The Sunspear twitched.
"You're serious, aren't you?" Dumani's voice was for her alone now, brow creased as he searched her face. "If I moved to strike you, you wouldn't think it a bluff. You would actually fight back."
"I would have to."
"And what of all your talk of peace?"
"To preserve this land's peace, I would fight back viciously. To preserve my own, regretfully. All the same, something must bleed."
"Something must always bleed." Dumani leaned forward. "But why does it have to be either of us? You know my quarrel isn't with you. Destroy Ndlovu to protect your resources, lend your ships to my aid, and you and I can have that cup of coffee as friends."
"General, I feed your armies, I don't fight their battles."
"And what a waste that is."
"Lost life is a waste."
"The Spears would disagree," he said. "Imagine being born into the most legendary line of war chiefs the South has ever known, only to die a breadmaker."
Nomvula sighed. "The dead all feed something, but bread is sweeter than carrion."
"How do you know what vultures taste?"
"Are we vultures, Dumani?"
He threw his weight forward and pushed off his feet, every muscle in his shoulders and back bunching and twisting as he ate up the distance between them in one long stride. In one moment, the iron spearhead glinted as it arced down towards Nomvula's arm. In the next, the fireglass tip of her own cracked through the haft of Dumani's spear, just above his thumb. Nomvula found herself on one knee, eye to eye with the General as the iron head thunked onto the grass and a rain of splinters floated between them.
"To our bones," Dumani said, stepping back. "Someone hand me another spear, heavier wood this time. The bronze one will do."
Nomvula rose halfway before the muscles along her spine tied a knot and yanked. A pulse of warmth rocked her and expelled the pain through the closest source, just as a guard touched her shoulder and tried to help her up. She waved him away as the Sunspear settled back into its half-sleep, and she was grateful enough that all eyes were on her and Dumani, or someone might have wondered why the guard walking back to the edge of the circle was rubbing his lower back. Or why four of the closest onlookers rubbed their temples all at once.
Dumani had both spear and shield now, and his stance paid a great deal more respect to the spear in her hand than it had a moment before.
"You missed my hand," he said.
"You haven't accepted the challenge yet. A skirmish before consent is just open violence."
"You're not playing it as smart as your daughter," he said, licking the edge of his sneer. "She took a tap to the face and got me jailed on the testimony of one guard -- how much more if I personally made the Queen bleed?"
If I bleed, it will be the land that grows a scab. "Accept the challenge, General."
"To the victor first blood," he said.
Nomvula's glass spear cut the sunlight to ribbons of red, gold, and indigo as she tucked it defensively. "Be it a drop or a river."
"So long as it is the first and the last." The humour burned itself from his visage. "If any of you heartless farmers brought a horn, now's the time to sound it."
**
Asanda froze at the foot of Third Hill as the blare of a horn rolled down the slope.
"No." She took a step back and bumped into a solid body. "Not now, not today."
"Well," Khaya said. "That's ominous."
Ndoda sprinted past her, though his limp had worsened. "Hurry up."
It was a long climb to the manse crowning the hill, and halfway up, Asanda felt a light pressure at the base of her skull. In her mind, she rolled the shard of bone that Ndlovu had given her between trembling fingers. She reigned that part of her spirit in before it could hide itself in the ancestral plane again. Right now, she needed every drop of her consciousness here, in the physical plane, where gravel bit into her heels and a horn rode the breeze like a lament.
Something caught her eye at the top of the hill, a flash of white linen against the dark walls. Anket, standing with his hands behind his back. Even at this distance, she saw the slackness of his mouth mirroring her own, and the sharp edge of resignation that cut through the shadows under his brow.
**
The Sunspear awoke in fits and starts as Nomvula parried here and pressed there. When the point of Dumani's spearhead passed too her skin, the world slowed and the blood in her veins thickened to magma, even as her eyes flittered from detail to detail. It was the long, restless sleep of a woman after her first kill, played out in the breathless seconds of combat.
Dumani let her bat away his spear before he blocked off her line of site with his shield. Some part of her applauded the slyness, but most of her focus went to scrambling sideways as a bronze edge swiped past her shin. She grabbed his shield and ripped it clean out his grip, though he was far too experienced to hold on with any real conviction.
"They say the women of the Sunlands only grow stronger with each child," Dumani said, his breaths deep and controlled. "At least you're used to bleeding too."
She hurled the shield at him with enough force to crack its wooden spine over the arm he raised. Instinct alone saved him from a broken nose, but when that arm lowered he wore the smile of genuine enjoyment.
"You've been waiting to do that for a while, haven't you?"
Nomvula pressed slowly, angling her approach to push him closer to the edge of the circle. Dumani obliged with a fluid retreat, and he slipped her advance almost lazily.
"I don't know what you do to keep your strength up," he said, "but consider putting a little more time into your footwork."
She didn't rise to the bait, but instead pivoted as Dumani moved to close her up against the edge of the crowd. Unlike hers, his press was sharp, precise. Nomvula gave up a step and backed into a line of guards holding back the onlookers. Dumani tried to rush her and she disappeared into the crowd. There was silence as she ghosted through them, or as much silence as five hundred bodies breathing in unison could mutter. Only the Inner Plainers made their voices heard, those on the patio trying to spot her from above.
"Out you come, Queen." Dumani was smart enough to retreat from the crowd's edge, lest she actually surprise him, but his eyes were searching. "You'll solve no problem hiding behind the heartless."
Nomvula watched him through gaps between arms and torsos as she circled slowly. She nudged one of the guards as she passed. Dumani caught the movement and followed her with his eyes while keeping her in the periphery. The respite bought her a moment to breathe, and the aches in her underused muscles leaked out with every hand that brushed her hair, and every thigh she bumped into. The Hundred Hillers kept their eyes on Dumani to keep from giving her position away, but as the Sunspear expelled her pain through contact, she left a trail of breathlessness and mild cramp in her wake. Dumani had his back to her, but he was backtracking to a point in the circle that would cut her off.
"If you have eyes in the Hundred Hill, see how your Queen hides! If you have ears, hear her sons whimper as they stay far from the fighting."
The Inner Plainers beat their hide shields with knot-headed clubs, giving the silent morning a heartbeat.
"If you have voices, answer for all this cowardice."
Nomvula stilled. She focused on the tightness in her calf, willed it into the tip of her fingers, and pushed it into the heel of a child still smaller than her crouched form. He yelped. Dumani turned and thrust a hand past the boy. Nomvula caught it in an iron grip, twisted the wrist just shy of breaking point, and emerged from the crowd at full height.
"Yield," she said, pushing her thumb between the tendons in Dumani's wrist to make him kneel.
"Yield?" His laugh had a pained edge. "Do you know what this is?"
Nomvula tipped her spear, holding the point just under his right eye -- exactly where he had cut Ndlovu's boy guard after breaking his neck. "Far longer than you ever did."
Dumani struck with the spear in his free hand, a vicious jab with enough power behind it to sever tendon from bone. It glanced harmlessly off the Wayfarer clay on her calf.
She brought her glass speartip close enough to snip the end of his eyelash. "Yield, and go home."
"It's true then," he said. "The Sunspear. You didn't lose it."
"I lost enough to show you mercy now." Nomvula stomped on the haft of his spear, but she may as well have ripped a stick out of limp fingers. She kicked it aside.
"You think I'm scared of a nick on the chin? Go ahead, what will it do for you? If you want your problems dead by nightfall, put a shard of fireglass through my heart and throw me in the river. But then you'll have ten new problems by sunrise."
"You've seen how I deal with persistent problems."
With a hint of a smirk, Dumani blinked. "And for the first time, I see why you'd rather buy away problems with grain and gold. It's messy business, giving into your lesser nature. For you, at least."
The blood behind Nomvula's face bubbled, but the Sunspear held the glass point steady.
"So what will it be?" Dumani asked. "Blood later, or blood now and later?"
"Why not never?"
Where he found pity to knot around his mocking chuckle, Nomvula did not know.
"And you wonder why we couldn't trust you to take care of your border problem with Ndlovu."
"You'd die to prove a point?"
"Why, when it's perched on the tip of your spear? Do what you want, Nomvula, so I can do what I must."
She found the Sunspear half-stirred, ears twitching to Dumani's words, and coaxed it back to sleep with a technique refined over two decades. It left her so drained that her spear arm fell to her side of its own accord, though she fought to keep some pressure in Dumani's wrist.
"I suppose that this was a good reminder," she said. "Sometimes, we need something to shake us loose of ourselves."
Though he knelt, he held his head high. "Indeed."
"No, General, you don't understand. Loose of our lesser selves."
Nomvula was on her way to easing her hold; she felt her muscles on the verge of relaxing.
"Ma, no!"
The scream came from deep within the manse, but the Sunspear picked it up as though it had been shouted in her face. Then her actual ears picked it up as a whisper fighting against the wind. Asanda.
Shock turned Nomvula's hold to water, and the fireglass spear fell from her other hand. She realised, a moment or so after it happened, that Dumani struck. He had hooked her ankle and dropped her onto the grass, flat on her back to push all the wind out of her body. There was nothing to expel the pain. The Sunspear was in a deep sleep. Her eyes were fixed on the sky, too tired to even blink at the sun's glare.
"Your Queen thinks it is mercy to forgive an enemy that does not fear her," he said, dropping his knee into the point where her arm joined her shoulder.
Any other body, and the joint would have popped. As it was, Nomvula only felt it as a dull thud against the muscle there. She squirmed under Dumani's weight, but her arms refused to rise further than her chest.
"Mercy," Dumani said, rainbow colours dancing along the side of his face, "is what you show when the battle is won, and utter victory is more mess than it's worth."
The fireglass spear was in his hand, then the tip was resting against her cheek.
"No," she said, her whisper barely climbing to his ears. "Don't."
"We'll have a drink after this," he said, "and for the price of this mercy, I'll demand your aid in full."
Anathi. Anathi stop him. For all our lives, stop him. Nomvula's gaze rose to the library roof, but there was no shadow there. She closed her eyes. A tear pricked through an eyelid as Dumani dipped the spear beneath her skin and drew a single bead of blood.