Young Warriors by Tamora Pierce

the rigors of the day, radiated tense, fierce energy.
    The Kushite guards let Tari pass when they recognized her and her companion, and soon the two were slipping like shadows through the day’s gruesome battlefield toward the celebrating Roman camp. From her higher ground, Tari scanned the fort’s buildings, the surrounding campfires, and the torchlit wharf area. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she prayed that Apedemek would let her know when she had found it.
    It was the river wharf that drew her, and she veered that way. Fewer sentries were posted there than around the fort, and praying for her god’s hunting stealth, she managed to evade them. A number of Roman boats were drawn up to the pilings, where crates and bales of supplies had been unloaded onto the dock. But some things were now being loaded onto boats as well. What, she wondered, could those be at an hour when every Roman should have been sleeping or drunkenly celebrating victory? She saw a tall cloaked man overseeing the loading, a man as pale and hawk-nosed as most Romans. She recognized him as the man Netak had pointed out to her— the hated Roman prefect governor, Petronius. Clearly he was taking great pains to ship some things away before tomorrow, when negotiating Kushites might see them.
    Then torchlight gleamed off a patch of bronze where a bundle’s wrapping gaped open, and Tari knew.
    The statues. These were the statues of Roman gods and emperors that the Kushites had captured in last year’s victories, the ones taken to the great temple as divine offerings. The statues Kinidad had died defending. Petronius was trying to spirit them away before the fact that the Romans were stealing them back could inflame the Kushites. But in that he would fail.
    Tari crouched as low and tense as a hunting lion. Slowly she and Naga inched forward. Petronius, it was said, spoke Egyptian, and as an educated Kushite she did as well. But now he spoke to the workmen in his own barbarous language. Tari didn’t need a translator to understand his orders to unwrap the statue and redo the bundle.
    In the torchlight, Tari saw the life-sized statue of a man. These pathetic Romans, she’d been told, had mere human forms for gods, unlike Egyptians and Kushites, whose gods shared the power of animals. This creature was a weakling compared to her own lion-headed warrior god, Apedemek.
    Tari smiled, and before the workmen could move, she leaped among them. With a fierce swing of her steel sword, she sliced off the statue’s hollow head. It bounced nearly to the feet of the astonished Petronius. Tari lunged for it, wrapped it in her shawl, and fled into the night.
    Yelling erupted behind her, and a startled horse whinnied somewhere ahead. Tari swerved that way, hacked at a surprised guard, and, wrenching the horse’s tether from a picket, leaped onto its bare back. The animal bolted off, spurred on as much by fear of the lion running beside it as by the rider’s urging.
    Soon Tari heard mounted pursuit. She first thought to take her trophy back to camp, but she couldn’t bring angry mounted Romans down on her sleeping people. Instead, she directed her mount into the desert.
    The waning half-moon had risen in the east, and in the clear, dry air its light washed the rocks and gravelly ground with liquid silver. She looked over her shoulder. Three mounted figures pursued her. Laughing joyfully, she knew she didn’t care. This was her land—the desert, the abode of lions, the realm of Apedemek. She felt his closeness as she never had before. He would guide her in life and in death.
    The chase wore on until Tari noticed there was only one rider behind her. Had the others fallen, or had they gone back for reinforcements? She didn’t care, but rode on and on until the clouds mounded along the eastern horizon blushed with dawn. Then, as the sun god reared above the cloud bank, her horse, blinded or exhausted,