Sing Up the Dark

Vanka shaves her head in the early shadows of dusk, beside her sister's slumbering shape. She shaves away long lank locks of glossy black; she shaves away her husband's touch, her half-remembered mother's fingertips; she shaves away a lifetime's children who will never quicken, and when the first sob threatens she chokes it out into song, her rasping voice rising with the darkness to the stars' lonely eyes, singing, singing, singing up the darkness – not in the high tongue of the dark lords on their black horses, but in Orsi, her people's language, a tattered shroud of a tongue that refused to accept its own death.

She is fourteen, she thinks; she remembers the winters, mostly, the cold bright moons. She remembers the first time, a year and a half ago, she and her husband lay together, outside under the stars. Both of them shy, they took refuge in the cold, the better to enjoy one another's warmth. Even then she must have had some idea of what she would do; she'd swallowed the little white starbane flowers, to prevent conception.

She is fourteen, maybe, and she sings one of her people's last surviving songs; a lonely thing, in minor key, well-suited to her rasping voice, of lost caverns where clean water sang sweetly through the darkness; of the Dead Marshes, when they were alive, their profound waters bright with gleaming fishes great and small, their tall reeds a-thrum with the clacking music of frogs. They had had homes, once. Now they barely even have songs.

She will give them songs, she thinks, humming wordlessly to the portions of the tune whose lyrics time has worn away, her hands steady now, one upon her scalp and the other on the bone hilt of her obsidian knife. Even if they are just ribald camp songs, of the damn fool young woman who shore off all her hair long before she had a child (she would never have a child, now; she'd take the starbane until her dying day,) she would give them songs, she and Ivanna. She pauses for a moment, her head nearly shortn, to lay a hand on her sister's shoulder; a glimpse of gold eyes, slat-pupilled, glancing back at her, tell her Ivanna has woken.

She does not join the song, of course. Ivanna makes no sound, since she came back from the humans' camp with shackles on her wrists and wounds where none should be. But she smiles at her sister, and Vanka's voice rises, anticipated triumph riding the thin edge of terror nudging the bittersweet further towards sweetness.

It is not unheard-of, of course, for orc women to join battle with the men. But they wear their hair long, until they have born a child; long and loose, not in dreads, as the men do, shorn save down the centre, to show the scarification each male warrior wears on the sides of his head, reeds and lapping waves, stars and fishes in white scar tissue and red against grey or green or copper skin, a scar for each battle survived. The women do not scarify. They bear their scars, for six months each, and bring them screaming hoarsely into the world.

Vanka has fought before, of course, though not so much as her two-years-elder sister; she has seen the men die for their stripe of long locks. Hair is a handle, to snap the neck, choke the air, sever the head. She knows she might die, but she doesn't intend to die stupidly. And she will her wear her scars, not bear them.

When she has finished, she passes the razor to her sister, and lets the song dwindle into silence. Ivanna's silence, mourning whatever horrors happened to her in that too-brightly-lit camp with its reek of unwashed human. Shivering in cold, in anticipation, Vanka runs her callused hands, with their strong fingers and delicate webbing, over the newly smooth, ridged dome of her head, and listens to the night awaking; in this black rock desert, the world lives at in darkness. The obsidian knife – they have iron, of course, but obsidian takes a sharper edge – rasps across Ivanna's scalp. Vanka breathes in deeply, the cold air vibrant and intoxicating, and she holds it in her like a lover, gold eyes scanning across the living nighttime to the dirty little galaxy of human encampment.

When she lets it out, her silent laughter puffs small clouds into the night. The sisters are going to war.