A friend recently asked me how I write combat scenes in my fiction. My POTC universe has a lot of warfare, something with which I have no personal experience or training. But writing fiction means writing about all kinds of things I have no personal experience with. With combat scenes, that means I had to come up with a workaround. Generally, with some exceptions, I focus on the what versus the how, the effect versus the cause. I don’t know how to properly describe the techniques martial artists use to defeat their enemies, but I can imagine what the end result looks like. Like anyone, I like a good fight scene in my favorite movies or TV series, especially a “one-er” in which the hero single-handedly destroys legions of enemies with their devastatingly superior fighting ability.
This excerpt is an example. It is the action sequence of Yani’s first fight. She has special powers that enable her to perceive her environment through her connection to the Earth (usually with her eyes blinded to minimize distraction), and she is able to “jump,” or gain advantage over her opponents by disappearing and reappearing in another spot. The cause and effect of the action is not a one-way street. The things Yani does in the fight damage her. Her fight is a necessary act of anti-colonial resistance – she is putting down an attempted putsch by shadowy neo-colonial mercenaries – but one that should not be romanticized. Warfare has a traumatic impact on all who participate.
This excerpt is also a sequel to my previous post, Hike to the Gamnyie Valley. If that short story was lush and beautiful and meditative, be advised that this one is dark and brutal and ugly even as I try to retain the same voice. In the first, Yani is there for Dani as she confronts her wartime trauma. Here, years after their hike, Dani is there for Yani in the aftermath of her own traumatic event.
…I crouched down and placed my palm on the pavement as I waited for my enemies to walk into my ambush. There were five of them.
I stood in the shadows with my back against the wall as they emerged from the alley to my left.
“Where’d she go?” One said.
“What do you mean, dumbass? She was right in front of you!”
The men stood puzzled and cursing as I slowly stepped out, tying a handkerchief over my eyes. One laughed.
“Who the fuck does this chick think she is? Fighting blindfolded?” He laughed.
“She’s an MK [Medicine Keeper]. She doesn’t fight,” he said to his buddy. “Let’s get this over with and go home.”
“Yeah, sure. I got this.”
He raised the revolver to my face and fired. I was behind him by the time the pin hit the cartridge. I swung my arm around his throat and snapped his neck as the bullet buried itself in the brick wall. He crumpled in a heap at my feet as his four comrades jumped back in disbelief.
“What the fuck?!”
I wheeled on the speaker and attacked. He was dead by the time the other three jumped me. I took them apart collectively, playing them against each other, crushing joints and snapping bones, their punches, kicks, and grabs finding only air. One pulled a revolver and I swept the feet from under the other two and rolled onto my back with one of them face up in my arms. His buddy emptied his gun into the man’s chest. I kept rolling. Free of the dead body I attacked again, finishing one with a hail of blows to the groin, abdomen, ribs, sternum, and throat as he swung futilely back at me. He collapsed, asphyxiating on his crushed larynx. I had already snapped the last man’s neck with my thighs and tucked and rolled back to the ground before the choking man hit the ground. The entire fight had lasted 15-seconds.
I removed my blindfold and looked at what I had done. The man was still dying, choking, clutching at his throat. I put him out of his misery.
Oh my spirits, what have I done?
I had done all this on instinct, without thought. I began to go into shock, but then I remembered.
Auntie!
I snapped back to reality and ran. My lungs were on fire and my head spinning when I rushed into our apartment. My aunt wasn’t there. The place had been ransacked. I wracked my brain trying to think where to go next.
Where could they have taken her? Where is everyone?
The reality that another war had just begun both steadied me and infuriated me. If we were at war, I was going to battle. I would go as a Donlandan warrior. I removed my cloak and robes and donned the black leather I had chosen for battle. But unlike the camouflage I had worn earlier, the cut of my camisole revealed the tattoos on my arm, shoulders, and chest. A Donlandan warrior does not disguise herself as she faces her enemy in the old ways.
I covered my eyes as I stepped back out into the night. I walked towards the community center first. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because that was to be our gathering place. But of course there was nobody there.
Think, Yani. Think! Where are the MKs? Where are the captains?
I kneeled down again and put both palms on the earth. I began to cry in my desperation, the sense of futility overwhelming me because I had no clues and nowhere to begin. I bowed down and put my forehead into the cool grass that grew around the building.
Spirits please, don’t let this happen again! Help me defend your lands!
I felt a surge of love enter my heart and I curled my fingers into the grass and soil. When I sat back up the world was aglow with life. I felt all of Pakastyie, every blade of grass, every insect, every tree, every building, every person. The sensation rushed in on me. It was ecstasy. It was searing pain. I collapsed to my knees and ripped my blindfold away trying to make it stop. My body went into shock as the energy of land and water and air and fire coursed through me and I was swallowed up in the everything light.
The docks.
My awareness found them there, lined up, hands on heads, gunpoint, gangplanks, steamships. I ran, exasperated at another 10-minute sprint through the dark streets. But the spirits of the land had guided me true. I faced two armed guards as I entered the warehouse district.
“Stop right there!” One yelled as they walked towards me. Except I did not understand the language he spoke. I knew its meaning by the gun and the palm held out blocking my way. The gun was new. I felt its power: an automatic rifle.
“No. You stand aside,” I said, not stopping. I needed to close distance. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
The man shouted again and they raised their rifles. I wasn’t close enough. I sprinted and lunged and rolled as the bullets smacked into the cobbles around me. When I came upright I was under them. I shattered the knee of one and wheeled on the other from behind, seizing him by the throat and choking him out as his comrade writhed in pain. I returned to the first man and knocked him out.
The people on the docks would surely have heard the shots. I went around the opposite side of the nearest warehouse and ran. I met no opposition but I heard the shouts and the sounds of boots on cobbles. When I emerged from the alleyway I breathed a sigh of relief: all of my people were there. They were kneeling in one huddled mass, hands on their heads.
But there were at least two dozen armed fighters forming a perimeter around them, hoping to stop whatever threat was coming through the warehouses. I was the threat. When they saw me, their officers’ faces relaxed. It was just one woman with strange tattoos. My people kneeling on the ground looked at me with fear. I saw my aunt. She shot me a look of warning and shook her head.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” One of them shouted at me. He turned to two men and ordered them in the unknown language, presumably to arrest me. I took a breath and began striding towards my enemy. I was met with the same orders to stop, more raised rifles. I raised my hands in surrender and slowed. I needed to buy time. Close distance. I could not attack them from here, and I was vulnerable to their guns.
The two soldiers ran up to me. They put their hands on me and began lowering my arms, producing handcuffs. I defended myself. I disarmed and submitted them, twisting their arms up and forcing them to walk in front of me. I advanced, using their bodies as shields. The soldiers held their fire but kept shouting orders. I shouted at my comrades to run, to get off the docks. When I was close enough I crippled the two men and launched myself into the crowd of gunmen.
My power came unhinged within me. It was a blur of light and screaming and pain and death.
The battle was a single organism, a single system in a dance of motion and action and reaction, and I flowed with it, each contact leading to the next in a swirl of improvisation and invention. The torrent of enemies seemed never ending, but I turned their guns against them and kept flowing in the churning violent river rapids until it stopped and the last body fell from my hands with a splat onto the pavement at my feet. I stood over him, trembling. Then I fell to my knees as I looked and saw what I had wrought. The world spun. Gentle voices and hands on my shoulder. I looked up trembling. It was my dear auntie with tears in her eyes scooping me up. I fell into her arms and cried like the little baby I had been to her once.
I cried because I had seen them. The bodies. Two dozen dead. More dying. Screams of agony. I had done this with their weapons and my bare hands. I didn’t want it anymore.
That is how I earned my new Alganian name, Havnatiana Kio, the one who fights like vapor, the Smoke Warrior. I have accepted the name as a scar. Few remember Yanetsiam the Donlandan Medicine Keeper, daughter of Katya of Bear Clan, called Yani by her dearest ones. The world knows me by my new name, a name that inspires fear and awe and hope. But the emblem of healing is still tattooed between my breasts, indelible. I will always be who I am, and not who the world believes I am.
I went into shock as we fled the docks, my comrades fighting off more from the boats, bullets zipping around us. Aunt Akaya and two MKs pulled me out and the four of us began our journey back to the apartment. But I was trembling uncontrollably, disoriented, mute. My legs failed and we stopped, started again, and my body let go. So when I rested my aunt held me and cried for me and stroked my hair like my mother-aunt used to do. I believed I was back in Donland and my parents were both there and I could feel the savannah sun on my face and hear the wind swishing through the grass.
“Are we home, auntie? I can hear the grasses blowing. Are we home?”
“We are almost there, sweetheart. We will be there soon,” she whispered. Our fighters ran past as they took up defensive positions to protect our streets. I think the MKs who were with us were crying. They were afraid I was dying. I am not sure they were wrong. More power had moved through me and in me than should have gone though any human in multiple lifetimes. As far as my aunt and my comrades knew, I had expended my life. It became clear that I was too weak to walk any more. They sent for a stretcher and carried me the rest of the way through the dark streets.
To this day I have no memory of the next few days. I am told that I was catatonic. They say they said prayers and made offerings for me day and night and stood vigil outside our home. I am grateful. I remember none of it. When I came out of it I was at Salanyie Pais, and when I saw the familiar bedroom walls and heard the familiar sounds I cried for grief. I had never planned to come back here, love it though I did. I thought it was over, that I had failed, that I would never do the things I had hoped and promised to do.
My aunt’s face was the first face that I remember. She sat with me quietly and held my hand and we talked. She said that there were loved ones here to see me and asked me to tell her when I was ready to see them.
“Who is here?”
“Auntie Trish and Katyie and Matthias, of course. But your parents and Kennat have traveled here. And Dani.”
I didn’t want to face my parents or Auntie. Not yet. I feared their judgment, or maybe their fear, or their regret, or their guilt. I wasn’t ready to bear that with them. Dani. I wanted her. So when the door opened and her green eyes met mine and she was not afraid or full of judgment but just the affection of a friend, I smiled with relief and held out my arms to her. She leapt into them and we held each other tight for minutes while I cried. We talked about everything but Pakastyie. She told me everything about Cientatyie and I was so happy because it was going well for her.
I didn’t want her to leave my side when it was time to see the others. I needed the buffer. So she sat with me when my parents and Kennat came into the room and I was relieved because they did not give me any of the negativity that I feared. My mother-aunt smiled with compassion and kindness and hugged me, then my papa-uncle did the same.
“I am so proud of you, my daughter,” she said. And I laughed.
“That isn’t what I thought you were going to say,” I replied.
“We would never be anything but proud of you. What you did was brave. Foolish, but brave, and you saved Alganyie from another regime.”
When she said that some of the memories started coming to me and my hands and lips trembled. Dani took my hand.
“I’m sorry, Yani. We can talk about something else,” my mother-aunt said.
“Tell me about the grasses. I dreamed of them, the wind blowing through them. Tell me what they’re like now.”
So my parents told me how everything was with the land of my birth. They told me about last year’s harvest and the heat. They told me about the new babies and the elders who had passed and their picnics in the Lauba. They told me about these things until I fell asleep. When I woke hours later Dani was still with me and a tray of food and a cup of Salanyie moonshine sat by my bed.
“Oh spirits, thank you,” I said as I downed the fiery drink. Dani laughed and followed suit. “Can I see Auntie Trish now?” I asked. Dani smiled and nodded and left the room.
My aunt returned alone and I was okay with that. But the look on her face alternated between relief and worry and care. And yes, there was the guilt. Always guilt with this auntie.
“Don’t you dare be guilty,” I said. “You have always loved me well.”
“I’m not guilty,” she said.
“Yes, you are. I saw it on your face. I know you, Apharan.”
“Okay, fine, guilty as charged. Guilty of being guilty.”
“If you had not trained me… No, I can’t talk about it yet. I am grateful, is all I mean to say.”
She nodded and took my hand.
“Tell me about life here. I want to know everything I missed.”
So she talked for over an hour while I listened and laughed and asked questions. The sun set and the light dimmed outside my window and still we talked about nothing important. I was not ready to go out. Tomorrow. But I had to make it through the night. I was afraid of what was waiting for me when I closed my eyes. I asked if Dani could come back. I did not want to face the night alone.
“Sure, of course,” auntie said. She kissed me on the forehead and left. Minutes later Dani appeared bearing a plate of food for each of us.
“Trish said you asked for me?” She said.
“Can you stay here with me tonight?”
“Yes. Of course. Anything you need.”
“Thank you.”
We ate in silence. Later that evening she returned with a sleeping mat and a blanket and a pillow and laid them out on the floor next to me.
“Wake me up if you need anything, okay?”
“I will. Thank you, Dani.”
I was exhausted and must have fallen asleep quickly. The next thing I remember is the churning flow of death and the crunching of bones and screams of pain and a field of bodies as far as my eyes could see and sinking to my knees…
“Yani…Yani…wake up! It’s a dream. It’s just a dream. You’re okay. You’re here and now. You’re right here in Salanyie. I am with you.”
I was sitting upright, hyperventilating, Dani sitting on the edge of my bed with her arms around my shoulders. She lay me back down as I calmed. I pulled her close and she curled up against me and held me as I fell back asleep. I fell back into darkness and I was on the waterfront again and the pop pop of a double tap into a man’s chest from his own rifle in my hands and the terror surprise on his face as he fell into his dying. His blood. Drowning in the blood. So much making dead. I am death, the spirit of death come for the world to make die at my all consuming hand. The fire. The fire burning through me and all in all is fire and blood and death.
“Yani…Yani…shhh…shhh…it’s okay. It is just a dream. It is just a dream. I am here with you right now.”
I broke down and sobbed uncontrollably in Dani’s arms and told her I am a murderer and deserved to die because none of them could fight back and they were helpless when I killed them. And there were so many. Too many. I couldn’t count them. And if there had been more I would have kept going and going and going and I’m afraid of what I might do and what if I hurt someone I love?
She held me until I stopped talking and calmed down again. The night was proving to be too long for both of us. We decided to call it quits on sleep and we went out into the darkness and walked.
“Do you want to talk about it more, or just walk?” She asked.
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“Okay. Thank you for your letters, by the way. I feel like I was right there with you. I want to meet all the people you told me about. And I’ve never been to a city, either.”
“I’m sure you’ll have a chance one day.”
“Will you give me a tour?”
“I don’t know…”
“Right. You don’t know if you’re going back.”
“No. I don’t. I need time. Obviously I’m a mess,” I smiled.
“A fucking mess.”
“Yup. But Salanyie is the best place in Alganyie for cleaning up messes. I think I’m going to be okay, night terrors aside. Thanks to you.” I turned to her and she faced me.
“Of course, I’m always here for you, just like you were there for me when I faced my own horror. You and me both. We share this.”
“But you were a victim. I am a perpetrator.”
“No. They’re not the same and you know it. That voice of condemnation is a liar. Take it from someone who knows the difference.”
We stood face to face and my heart soaked up the assurance and absolution she held out. I’m not sure if I believed it or deserved it, but I was hungry for it. I remembered those days on the clifftops when she wanted to die and join her people and now I saw that there was a beauty in that, in the way the sun set her ablaze as she faced death in silence. And yet she had chosen to live and now she was here with me holding out a lifeline. Our faces leaned close and her hand touched my deaf right ear, that part of me that bore the scars of my first war.