“Arrah,” I said, feeling something approaching relief. “Yes, Honourable Sisters.”
“You will be taken from the Kingdom in the manner that you were brought here. Does this suit you?”
I nodded. It didn’t suit me. Trapped in a box they might throw me off a tall building. Or into deep water far from land. They could burn it. Pierce it with lances. I tried not to think about it.
One of the lance holders looked apologetic. “You’ll have to get back into the box,” she said. “We’ll try to move you quickly.”
“Don’t latch it,” I said.
“We won’t.”
They covered me and closed the lid. I cringed as they latched it anyway. As the box was carted I heard the rising sound of voices arguing in the strange language.
The box moved and shook. I couldn’t make out much. I felt it being dragged up and over. Then outdoors. There were a series of irregular bumps and jolts that suggested I was being dragged on a sledge outdoors. My muscles began to cramp up.
The box stopped.
“All right,” a voice outside said, “I’ve dragged you far enough. I reckon you can walk the rest of the way yourself.”
The lid opened. I pulled away the hide covering me and struggled out. We were in a small clearing in wooded glade, the ground sloped steeply upwards. I could see why they’d tired of carrying me. There was a clear path, but I saw no sign of buildings.
“You thought we’d take you out the front door,” a woman said. “Back of the Kingdom, down the goat trails. You can circle your way back to the city once you’re far enough. Get you past the trees, to the edge of the bush.”
The bright sun was in my face. I crouched away from it groaning. I walked a slow circle, stretching and cracking my joints. I took great heaving breaths of fresh air.
The Dwarf woman, dressed in soldier’s leather and light armour sat on the box watching me. Another stood nervously, a few feet away, holding a Kra-lance. How had she carried that I wondered? It looked unwieldy.
I glared at the woman on the box.
“I brought a lunch,” she said. “Pemmican.”
I knew it: boiled meat, dried, ground to pieces and mixed with animal fat and crushed roots. Barely edible.
“And beer.”
I stared at her.
“On top of the basket,” she explained. “Gods knows, you’re heavy enough. I didn’t need the extra weight. But we didn’t want you busting out inconveniently, before we’d decided. So we tied it down and thought to put some weight on it.”
I was tired and frustrated and aching. I desperately wanted to grab something and beat it to a pulp.
“You may as well sit and eat. There’s no way you can walk out of here without me. Sit and eat, then we’ll go.”
She smiled at me and held out a meat cake wrapped in succulent leaves. I grunted.
She shook the cake, offering it.
I grabbed it.
“Move,” I said, and sat on the box next to her.
“You can go now,” the first woman told her companion. The second hesitated for a second before trotting swiftly away.
We nibbled at the cakes in silence. The hateful sun beat down at me. I squinted and faced away from it, hunching forward.
“I’m glad of the way things went back there,” she announced, as her companion turned a corner. “It could have been messy. Inner city women most of them. No contact with the lesser races. Half of them had never seen an Arukh before. They had no idea how dangerous your kind can be. Or how fast. Rylli wasn’t even holding her panther lance proper.”
“I noticed,” I said dryly. Rylli must have been the nervous little female on my left. “Panther lance?”
“Proper name for it. Out in the city they call it a Kra Lance, because it’s mainly used for your kind. Same use though; stick the animal hard and then keep it away on the other end of the lance while it dies. Panthers, they’re nasty. They’ll work their way right up the lance and tear you up before they die. Just like Hags. Cross bar keeps them from you.”
I nodded.
“I was watching you. If you moved, I figured you’d go after Rylli as the weakest.”
“What would you have done?”
She shrugged.
“Rylli’s dead, no question. The others move in, I figure you take her lance, stick one of the others. I move back to defend the Elders. No one can fault me for that. Once you’re committed, can’t use the lance because it’s stuck in someone, I come at you.”
“Good plan,” I said.
She nodded.
“Thanks,” she said. “Just to see how the drifts blow, how would you have done it?”
I clicked my tongue thoughtfully.
“Go for the one who didn’t know how to hold her lance,” I said. “As you said. Kill her, take her lance. Look for the strongest fighter, kill that one fast with the Lance. Go at the Elders, kill some and then hold the weakest hostage. See what happens...”
“Aah...”
There was a long uncomfortable silence as we chewed and reflected on all the possible ways the battle might have gone, pondering moves and countermoves, neither one of us much liking the outcomes.
“Just as well nothing happened,” she said abruptly. “Rylli’s a good youth, brave and clever. Shame to see her killed.”
I nodded.
“You are warrior then?”
She laughed.
“I know which end of spear to hold if that’s what you’re asking, but I’m not a warrior.”
“Only a fool goes into battle when there’s any other choice. It’s men’s foolishness. But women should mind their cooking, lest it boil over, so I keep watch for the true people. Best not to let the men get too far out of hand.”
“Ever been in a battle?” I asked.
“Once,” she replied. “Too easy to get killed in something like that. Best to keep an eye on it from a safe vantage point.”
I laughed.
I decided that I liked her alive.
I wanted to tell her that, but there seemed no easy way to express it. What could I say? That I would not kill her? I thought of the archer and how I’d killed him. That I would not kill her if I had the chance? That I would not kill her if I could avoid it? That I would not kill her and enjoy it? That I would kill her and feel bad?
There seemed no way to put it into words she would not take as a threat.
At least, I decided, she did not kill me when she had her chances. I followed that thought.
They’d brought the lance with them, after all, and tied the box.
“Easier,” I said reflectively, “to try and kill me in the box.”
She was silent for a moment.
“In my experience,” she said finally, “and from what I have been told, killing an Arukh is no easy thing, and a clever Arukh is harder still. Not that the others would understand that.”
She pursed her lip, trying to decide how best to form the words.
“What someone tells you to do, and what they might want you to do,” she said, “that might be different than what you want to do, or the best thing to do. You see?”
I shrugged.
“Nanhama,” she said.
I looked blank.
“The bitch with the horns,” she explained, “Nanhama’tighak.”
I nodded.
“She said to me in the true speech, ‘Take this creature somewhere out of the sight of our eyes and kill it.’”
She was watching me levelly.
“Of course, if you really are a Mystery Beast, you know what she said... If you were a Mystery Beast, you’d hear that. What are you going to do, what choices? You’d get in the box, knowing what you know, and you’d be ready. An Arukh, damned hard to kill. Especially when they know it’s coming.”
I grunted softl
y, no trace of expression passed my face.
“And so?” I asked her.
“You go through life doing every single thing that Elders tell you,” she said, “odds are, you won’t get very old.”
I laughed at that. Dwarves were a cantankerous lot. It seemed to relax her.
“So,” I asked, “why?”
She thought about it.
“Bad magic to kill a Mystery Beast. Very, very bad magic. And,” she shrugged, “even if you aren’t a Mystery Beast... “
“If I’m not?”
She grunted.
“You held yourself well, back there. You could have made blood run, women die, but you didn’t. If you spoke true, you’d done nothing to merit killing. You’d even done old Nanhama a service. She wasn’t fond of Meg Alam. The two were always going at it. Poor reward to put a stick through you just because you were... faithful and true.”
“I thought and thought,” she said, “finally I figured I couldn’t make a decision on an empty stomach. Best to eat and talk about these things.”
I grunted.
“Killing should never be done lightly,” I said, “it generally amounts to a great deal of effort.”
She nodded.
“Aye,” she said, “and there’s always consequences. Blood starts to flow, never know where it will go or how it will stop.”
I frowned for a moment. I’d heard that before.
“What happens to you?” I asked suddenly. It occurred to me that there might well be repercussions from failing to murder me. She might fear the consequences more than the act itself. I should be wary.
She laughed.
“I didn’t kill a Mystery Beast. I dare them to punish me for that.”
She had decided to have me live. Or had she really? I wondered. Perhaps she was just selecting her time.
“It might be hard to explain a dead Arukh in a box,” I said softly, thinking aloud. “The Dwarf men might wonder how an Arukh came to be in the box. Might wonder if this was the same Arukh that killed all those people in the tower. Might wonder if this was the shit monster all cleaned up, and how it got clean. They might wonder at how long the Arukh was missing and who it might have been talking to. Perhaps women might not want men asking these things.”
“Perhaps,” she frowned.
“Better then,” I suggested, “for the Arukh to die out in the open. So you’d have to let it out of the box. Perhaps, it would be better to lead it somewhere. Somewhere it might be killed without arousing questions.”
“That is a thought.”
“Now if I were looking for a good place to kill an Arukh,” I pointed. “It might be in a grove, like that place over there.”
She looked, squinting.
“These are interesting notions that you have.”
“I am Arukh.”
She glanced at me, wary again, perhaps afraid.
“It seems to me,” she said after thinking on the matter for a while, “that whoever led an Arukh into that sort of place might be in considerable danger from the Arukh.”
“Arrah. The Arukh would most certainly kill them.”
“And not just the Arukh. Arrows, knives flying around...” she continued, “bad place to be in the middle of. A woman might be liable to be killed right alongside the Arukh, no matter what happened.”
“Seems certain,” I offered.
“It stands to reason,” she said carefully, “that someone wanted to get an Arukh killed and had to put a woman in that position, they might not tell the woman.”
“That seems likely.”
We sat quietly.
No storm of arrows fell from the sky. No screaming furies burst from the bushes.
“Just as well we aren’t going that way,” she said after a while.
I agreed.
“You should be an elder, thinking like you do, head all twisty like that,” she said. “You’d get along right well with Nanhama.”
“That story,” I said, “about the death of the world. I’ve never heard a Dwarf tale like that.”
She laughed.
“That’s the true story, told among true people,” she said, “Men’s legends: steaming piles of shit. All that stuff about warring totems creating the world from ice. Makes no sense if you think about it for even a minute. It’s complete superstition. It’s such obvious nonsense. I don’t know how they swallow it. The true stories are only told between women.”
She coughed, abruptly changing topics.
“No one expected a Mystery Beast to be an ...Arukh. More likely a goat or a bear perhaps. A dog. But an Arukh. I’d have been less surprised to hear a cockroach speak.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I mean no offence,” she said, “it’s just that an abomination...”
She fell silent.
“Protect this beast,” she said.
“What?”
“That’s what you said, ‘protect this beast’, in the broadest hill country accent I’ve ever heard, and with the whistle through missing teeth that Meg Alam had.”
“Arrah,” I said. But I was interested. I waited to hear more.
“I mean, you didn’t say it very well, but you said it. No one could deny it.”
She took a swig of beer and handed the bladder to me. It was still half full. I drank.
“Nanhama,” she continued, “she and Meg Alam hated each other. She even tried to get you to say ‘destroy the beast,’ but you wouldn’t say it. That impressed the sisters more than anything.”
She paused and uttered words in that strange language.
“Preserve and destroy,” she said thoughtfully. “They’re almost the same word, no? But you wouldn’t say it.”
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“You spoke true speech, everyone thought you might be a Mystery Beast. A great coven was called.”
“I’ve never heard a tongue like that before,” I said.
“It’s the language of women. The first language, once spoken by all living things.”
“It’s nothing like the Dwarf tongue.”
“Men’s tongue, you mean,” she said, “an animal speech of mock words. We do not speak the true tongue in the presence of animals.”
Which was why, I realized, the conversation in that room had shifted back and forth between Dwarf speech and their own language. They couldn’t decide whether I was an animal or not.
I glanced at her.
“No offence,” she said.
“None taken.”
“Pass the beer back. These things are salty.”
“Arrah,” I replied, passing back the skin.
“What happens now?” I asked.
She seemed to think about it.
“Now,” she said, “they’re going to argue. They’re going to argue for years about this.”
“Dwarves argue a lot,” I said.
She shrugged.
“We’re mountain folk, nothing to do up there but starve and argue. That’s why we come here, where we can eat and argue.”
She paused reflectively.
“They’re going to be taking a long hard look at the Snow Leopard Totem,” she said. “There’ll be argument, but sooner or later every Snow Leopard man with his hands in the Horsemen is going to be dead.”
“What about Snow Leopard women?”
“They’ll argue against it, to preserve their men. Not supposed to. Not supposed to hold to Totems against other women, but it happens. They’ll make peace with it.”
“And the women who had their hand in it?”
“Women wouldn’t do that,” she said it with automatic certainty.
“What about the Prince?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“May as well curse the Mountains,” she said.<
br />
She must have read the look on my face.
“Someone lets a bear into camp, it hurts people. Whose fault is that? The bear, doing what bears do? Or the man who lets it into the camp?”
“I’d kill that bear,” I said softly.
“Men’s work,” she replied easily. “We have to keep them around for something.”
“You should kill the Prince,” I urged.
She shook her head.
“Why kill the Snow Leopard men and let the Prince go free?”
“The humans, they’re not really people, they’re like a kind of animal. People don’t kill people,” she said, “or allow people to be killed. That is the law. The men must be held responsible. They’ll pay. Maybe the Prince later, someday. But he’s not important. We have to look to the important things.”
“What are people? I asked, “and what are animals?”
She thought about that.
“Women are people,” she said finally, and stopped. She glared at me defiantly.
And Dwarf men? I wondered. Were they people for being born from Dwarf women? And what of Kobolds, male and female, also born from women? Would they be people? I sensed there was more of a discussion here than she wanted to enter.
“I hear Vampires do birth rituals,” she said interrupting my thoughts.
I shrugged.
“Do they do them for Arukh?”
“No.”
“Who does rituals for your death?”
“There are none.”
“No birth, no death.” she said wonderingly. “The only proof that you ever existed is the fact that you’re sitting before me.”
I glanced uncertainly at her, remembering my strange conversation with the Vampires.
“As we count these things, you are less than a ghost.”
I rumbled low in my throat.
“And yet, you spoke the death ritual for Meg Alam. Or that’s what you told us. She told it to you, though I’ll grant you said the words with that funny whistle through her teeth. How can it be that a non-creature spoke the death ritual? Perhaps you lied, learned the words, but did not give her. They say Arukh are cruel, and that would be cruel. But that makes no sense: too many of the words you spoke were true, or sounded like true words imperfectly spoke. Meg Allam’s death is accepted as consecrated. They all agreed on that. How can this be?
The Mermaid's Tale Page 32
