The Book of Koli

by M. R. Carey

  My mother wrung Ursala’s hand and thanked her many times. Ursala bore this patiently, but I could see she didn’t like any of it – not the touching, nor the gratefulness. She had done what she had come to do, and now she wanted to go on her way.

  My mother offered payment in cured wood or food or the valley scrip that we sometimes – though less and less often – used for trade with the other villages along the Calder. Ursala bore this as long as she could, then took her hand away with some brusque word. “It’s my calling, Dam Woodsmith, and it’s also part of my contract with the village. The Ramparts pay me well. There’s no need for you to pay me too.” When Jemiu still insisted, Ursala finally took some jars of preserves and a string of beads my mother had from my father the one time they were together. She done it with reluctance, and afterwards she went away with her back bent and her shoulders hunched, like our thanks was a burden to her.

  Athen lived. She slept for a day and a night, and when she woke up she was her own self again, with all that pain and weakness nowhere to be seen.

  Haijon told me Catrin tried to buy the dagnostic off of Ursala more than once, offering her all kinds of treasure in return. She even offered the bolt gun or the cutter, Haijon said, though not the firethrower. Ursala give her the same word each time, and the word was no. That may of been the reason Catrin was so far from liking Ursala, despite her being of so much service to us all.

  Which I begun to tell but got pulled aside by what I had to tell you about Athen’s sickness. It wasn’t only doctoring that Ursala did, though doctoring was a big part of it. She carried messages from other villages too, and brung warnings of things we needed to be ware of. Like a great pack of wild dogs on one occasion, and the creep-blight on another. If Catrin hadn’t burned the blight at Burley Carr and turned it aside, it might of been inside the fence before we knowed it threatened.

  And there was one other thing Ursala did, which was that she told which marriages would be fruitful and which wouldn’t ever. She used the dagnostic for this, and also she used a knife she kept on her belt in a sheath of white leather, cutting the hands of the man and the woman who wanted to pair-pledge and letting the dagnostic taste the blood off the blade.

  You would think these questions would be asked and answered in private, but in fact this was done on the gather-ground. It was done there for two reasons, I think. The first was that – except in emergencies, such as that time with Athen – the drudge was not an inside-of-doors kind of thing. If it walked down the steps of the Count and Seal, there wouldn’t be no steps left when it got to the bottom. And the second was that Catrin, along with most other people in Mythen Rood, believed the issue of children being born or not being born or being born wrong was a problem for the village as a whole. After all, the children would belong to the village when they come, and with each year that passed there was fewer and fewer being born alive. It mattered to everyone to roll that particular stone up the hill instead of down, as they say.

  If the news was bad, Ursala give her verdict as gentle as she could. “It doesn’t mean you won’t have any children,” I heard her say to one couple – I think it was Vuru Cooper and Werian Strong, if you remember them names. “It just means they’re that much less likely to be born alive and healthy. The probabilities are against you. But the probabilities can’t take away your choice.”

  Maybe that was true. The probabilities, whoever they were, didn’t have no say in the matter. Catrin stood firm on the yes or no of it, and if the dagnostic said no then that pair-pledge was set aside. Catrin said Mythen Rood couldn’t afford no barren ground.

  On this occasion when Ursala come, there was three pledges she had to decide on. Haijon and Spinner’s come first, and she pronounced that there was no problem with their pairing. I told myself I was happy for them, but a part of me had been hoping for a different outcome and was cast down when the answer come. For now there was nothing in the way of it. Spinner would marry Haijon and go into Rampart Hold. I had losed any chance of being with her, and it seemed to me then that there wasn’t any way of being happy without her. So I did what fools always have done since time was time, which is I pissed in my own milk and then complained about the taste of it.

  Not that I spoke aloud, of course. Most people in the village was in a joyful frame of mind. Them other two couples I spoke of got good outcomes too, so there was going to be three weddings coming soon and nobody grieving on account of their hopes being dashed down. Everyone was most especially happy for Spinner, who had lost her father but now was getting a new family just pat when she needed one.

  So my sullenness was inward, and for the rest I put a brave face on it. And maybe in time I would of swallowed my disappointment and done what most everyone else does in such a case, which is get on with living and with forgetting what can’t be mended.

  Maybe not though. For I had got an idea rooted in my deepest heart that give me torment. It was that Spinner loved me as much as I loved her, and had only gone pair-pledge with Haijon because he was a Rampart and her eyes was dazzled. It speaks ill of me, I know, to think such disrespect of her, but that was what my hurt and pride had fixed on.

  It’s a curious thing, when I think on it now, that I felt so trapped and so despairing of my station. The burden of my fears was that this place and these feelings I was stuck in wouldn’t ever change as long as I lived. Yet it was but three weeks later that the gates of Mythen Rood closed behind me for the last time as I walked into exile.

  But I am running out in front of my own story again, and this is a time when I have got to be most careful to get it right, since what happened next was to matter so much both to the boy I was and to the man I am.

  I remember there was a day, maybe two or three days after Ursala sampled Haijon and Spinner and spoke them sound, that I went out of gates by myself. This was not exactly a thing forbid, but only because there wasn’t no need for it to be. You wouldn’t forbid someone to hold their hand in a fire, or to catch a choker seed as it fell. The woods just wasn’t anywhere to be by yourself if you meant on the whole to stay alive.

  This was Falling Time though, which was a safer season than most, and I didn’t go beyond the stake-blind, only into the half-outside. I walked up to the high lookout that I had a hand in building up on top of Cloughfoot. The building was mostly finished now, with only the armouring still to be done. And the track up there was wide and clear on account of all the coming and going that had been done when we was putting up the walls.

  I just went up there to be alone for a while. I was going to say I wanted a quiet place to think in, but the truth is that my thoughts had soured in my head and I wanted as little to do with them as I could manage.

  So I sit there for about an hour, on the wall at the top of the lookout, with my feet dangling over the drop. The forest was close at hand, like an army that was creeping up to the gates of the village but had been seen doing it and now was pretending to be still. For some of that time I thought about leaning forward until I fell, but I only thought it idly. Unhappy though I might be, yet I hadn’t come to the point where my life felt like a burden to me. I was just catched in a snare, is all, and running in tight circles, but since I made the snare myself there wasn’t none but me could get me out of it.

  When the sun come close to touching the tops of the trees, I thought it best to go. Night was still a ways off, but there are plenty of things that like to hunt in the cool that comes around lock-tide, and the shadows would just go on getting darker and more numerous from here on.

  I had not come out by the gate and I didn’t go back by it. There would of been questions to answer both ways. Instead I went by what we called the grass-grail. This was a place on the fence where it had been cut ever so careful to be like a ladder you could climb if you was cut off from the gate. Nobody was supposed to use the grass-grail unless they was pressed hard and close and didn’t have no other choice – for shunned men or faceless might see you do it, and use our secret way for their own purp
oses.

  And shunned men was rampant that year. Three hunting parties was attacked over the Summer, and one man struck dead – though them that was with him saved him from being took away by the shunned men and et. It had got so bad that Catrin was talking about making up a red tally, which is a war party, to find where they lived and burn them out once for all.

  So it was a wrong thing I was doing, climbing the grass-grail with light still in the sky and nothing threatening. I guess I done it with somewhat of bitterness and defiance in my heart.

  Then dropping down on the inside of the fence I found myself almost face-to-face with Ursala. I had forgot that this was where she put up her tent when she was with us. She done her doctoring in the gather-ground, but she retired to this much quieter place to sleep.

  Right now, she was sitting out in front of her tent, which was all different greens and browns so you thought you was looking at part of a forest. She was boiling a stew over a little fire. It was just starting to steam, and it had a good, spicy smell to it. She didn’t lift up her head to look at me as I jumped down, and I had hope for a second she never seen or heard me, though my feet hit the earth with a loud thump and raised up some dust.

  I was making up my mind to walk right by her, pretending I was just taking myself for a stroll around the inside of the fence, when she spoke up.

  “Well now,” she said, still stirring the pot. “That’s a strange thing to see. When a man comes into his own house he usually chooses to enter by the door. It’s thieves and cut-throats, by and large, who climb over the wall.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t done nothing that was so wrong, really – except to use the grass-grail in front of someone that was not one of ours, which was meant to be forbid. Being out alone, like I said, would not be favourably looked on but it wasn’t any crime.

  I opened my mouth at last to say some of these things, though I didn’t know for sure what words would come out. But before I said anything at all, the tocsin bell over on the gather-ground gun to sound. It wasn’t the slow peal that meant a death, but the quick, shapeless jangle of an alarum.

  And just as soon as it sounded, I seen what it was sounded for. A dark shape shot over us, high up in the sky but very clear to see with the brightness of sunset behind it. Then it come back on a big, wide loop, and swung right down towards the part of the fence where we was. As it dropped, it stopped being one thing and broke up into three. It was three things all moving tight together at first but now spreading out wide. They was drones. And they was lit up underneath with red light, which meant they was armed and ready to kill.

  One of the three shot away towards the gather-ground and Rampart Hold. The second done much the same, except it stayed closer to the line of the fence so it would pass by the well-head.

  The third come down right between me and Ursala, floating about ten feet above us.

  “Disperse,” it said. It sounded like someone had nailed together a voice out of the sounds a bunch of stones made when they fell into a bucket.

  “Disperse, or you will be fired upon. You have thirty seconds to comply.”

  15

  Maybe I should of told you more about the drones when I was numbering the things that hated us. I mentioned them in some kind, when I said there was weapons left over from the Unfinished War that was still dangerous, but I didn’t take it any further than that saying.

  The drones was a fear that was ever on our minds when we walked abroad, though they come but seldom and they give us warning before they attacked. It’s hard to describe what they was like. When they was in the air they looked like insects, almost, if you can imagine an insect that’s as big as a man’s head and shoulders. They was dark and quick and dreadful, with an angry buzz like a hornet whether they moved or was still. And a tail like a hornet too, which was what they killed you with. But I seen a few of them after they fell to the ground, and on the ground they looked like nothing much at all. Some wires, metal rods, a sprinkle of broken glass.

  The way you knowed a drone was coming was that it told you. It would drop down from out of the sky, fast as a stone, but stop dead ten or twenty feet above the ground. And it would speak a word. “Disperse.” Then you knowed you just had got a few seconds to dive under cover and hope it didn’t follow you or fire on you, for if it did you would most likely be dead.

  If the drones didn’t give their warning, they would of killed most every time. The warning, which was always the same, give us a chance to raise the alarum. Ramparts would come running then from wherever they was and whatever they was doing, carrying their name-tech with them.

  They all knowed their places and their parts. Rampart Arrow would stand in the middle, with Fire on one side and Knife on the other. She would let fly with a bolt. She didn’t need to aim, for that was not how the bolt gun worked, but she did point the gun at the drone for a second or two so it knowed what its target was. Then she pulled the trigger and off went the bolt.

  Sometimes it hit the drone on the first pass, and that was a great good fortune. Most often, though, the drone would see the bolt coming and swing away, nearly too fast to see. Then there would be a kind of a skirmishing and snaking around in the sky, with the bolt chasing the drone and the drone flying every which way so as not to be hit, and once that was happening both Rampart Fire and Rampart Knife come into the picture. Rampart Fire would cut loose with the firethrower, making a kind of roof of fire over the village, or at least the part where the drone was. The fire was to keep it from coming down low and attacking.

  If it did come down through the fire and didn’t melt or fall apart, then it would be close enough for Rampart Knife to have at least a chance of hitting it. The last chance, so to speak, for if he missed then that day would be someone’s funeral day. But most often the sheet of flame kept the drone high up in the sky until the bolt done its work. One or two drones come down on us every year in the times I’m speaking of, and there was only two times in all them years that they killed anyone.

  But then, there had never been a time when three drones attacked us at once.

  Some things come on you too fast for you to understand them when they’re happening. And when you try to understand them afterwards you put them together any way you can, but you get it wrong. In your mind there’s a moment here and a moment there, but no sensing what went with what. That’s how it was for me right then.

  There was a drone standing in the air in front of me, close enough for me to touch. It had already spoke, so I ought to be running, except there wasn’t nowhere I could run to. Nothing was close by except Ursala’s tent, and that wouldn’t offer no help at all when the drone struck.

  I heard the handclap sound of the bolt gun being fired, and another sound that was like a hammer hitting a nail – the quick little taps you give when the nail is almost all the way in and you want to seat it solid without bruising the wood. The sky turned orange-yellow-white, sheets of fire rolling out like flags far away over us.

  Our drone tilted in the air a little, then steadied itself. The tiny little cylinder that was its stinger flicked from Ursala to me and back again, and there was some sounds from inside it like someone was humming in there while they worked.

  Ursala hadn’t moved until then, but now she did. She bent down slowly and picked up a stick from the fire, one that was burning good. Then she took up a rock in her other hand. She had builded up a circle of biggish stones around her firepit, and it was one of them she grabbed a hold of now. It must of been hot to the touch but she didn’t flinch or make a sound.

  She walked right towards the drone.

  I give a yell like I was warning her. Like she was sleep-walking or something and I had got to wake her to the danger. “Get away from there!” or some such.

  She answered me without turning around. The words come out kind of in a growl, so though they was low I could make them out even over the shouts and screams that was coming from the gather-ground.

  “Stand in the fire, boy.”<
br />
  I thought I must of misheard. The whole thing was like a dream, but that was the strangest of all. Anyway my feet weren’t likely to move right then even if I told them to.

  Ursala took one step after another. She was turning her hands slowly, the hand with the burning branch and the hand with the rock. The drone shifted in the air. I would of swore it was turning tight little circles too, following the movements of Ursala’s hands.

  I had heard stories about witches. I thought I was looking at a witching right then. The time must of run out for us and yet the drone didn’t fire. What it did was come down to meet Ursala as she come, like as if she’d whistled it to her. She was holding the burning branch out in front of her now, still circling and circling. The hand with the rock was drawed back, and I seen the muscles in her arm bunch up.

  That part I got pretty much straight in my mind, as you can probably tell. But after that my remembering is all tangled up again. Mardew Vennastin come running right by me, his shoulder hitting me hard and making me stagger. I seen his hand was up and the cutter was in it. I seen the bar of the cutter was shining silver, so the blade was ready to be sent out to cut something.

  He was resting the cutter hand on his other hand to steady it. His head was tilted to one side, so he could sight along the line of his arm. And Ursala was stood in front of him, right between him and the drone.

  I don’t remember deciding to move. I almost don’t remember moving at all, but my hands was around Mardew’s arm, most sudden, and I was pulling it down towards the ground. Mardew sweared a terrible oath and snatched his hand free again, which didn’t cost him no effort at all for I was not what you would call strong.

  Then there was a sound like a bushel of eggs all cracking at once.