by Segoy Sands
“A man who lacks wisdom,” Kunnok went on, “is poor no matter how much gold is in his pockets. He makes foolish trades. He makes no friends. He is desolate. He sleeps with viaisa.” He made a small disgusted sound. “Now you can buy nothing from me. Did they pleasure your pale worms?”
The shopkeeper stood up, undid his pants, and waved his hand at Dillan. “You. Show me.” Hog and Bu went pale. They were about to stand, ready to fight, but Kunnok put away his flaccid organ as casually as he’d whipped it out. His sons laughed and made obscene gestures.
“They’re spent!”
“Penniless.”
The shopkeeper poured tea and indicated his sons. “Powa and Lodok.”
Hog and Bu kept their attention on the father. The pipe came out and was passed around. Three rounds they had to smoke, like the night before. The redolent, curling smoke soothed Dillan’s nerves; the black tea was spicy, bitter, and good.
“Cnuch the girls of the nighthouse, if you want,” Kunnok said, philosophically. “But when someone brings disease here, the itch, the clap, the green piss, we cut off the balls.” He waved away an objection he seemed to read in Hog’s eyes. “Some of you orc say we bring the sea sickness to your land. You are afraid. We have told you the truth, but you don’t believe that it comes from the metallum.” He read their skepticism. “We know things. No one asks. Not yet. That’s a mistake. Even the Bedes, they want to know, but your yemes say we are demon-thralls. You come to cnuch our cailín, but you know nothing of the viaisa, the fire-purified. Maybe they cnuch demons, yes?” he smiled. “Maybe you cnuch them and the demons see you?”
Powa and Ladok found this hilarious.
“They see your likpa going in!” Powa giggled.
“Maybe it burns!” his brother agreed, miming something lewd. “Itchy, itchy.”
“Or maybe it feels gooood,” Powa said.
“Maybe you don’t know all of our customs, yes?” Kunnok grimaced. “This should be explained, yes? Zodo will not explain. He has business to consider. It’s not only money,” he shrugged. “People have feelings. The girls, they have feelings. If a cailín feels for you, she tells the chimney keeper, in this specific case, Zodo, and,” he clapped his hands, “deal is made. Husband. Wife. Finished. Be careful. Yes?” He took a sip of tea. “Say their mouth stinks. Complain they have a small ass. You should know this.”
“Small ass?” Bu blurted.
“Zodo, Zodo,” Kunnok shook his head, ruefully. “For orc like you, I’m sure he brought out his smallest ass girls. If I go there, he will wake up Zeze.” He shaped generous curves in the air with his hands. The ample lines seemed to widen at the bottom. “She is like a butterfly.”
“Is Zeze a viaisa?” Bu asked, confused.
“No,” the man wagged a finger. “A viaisa is a viaisa, big ass, small ass. But a rich man has to stay rich, yes? You did not see Zodo’s viaisa?” He grinned. “The most beautiful?” Kunnok nodded. “It’s alright, as long as she did not come into your dreams. Why are you nervous?” he scolded Dillan, who’d spilled half his tea. “In a Nesso house, relax. Smoke, drink k’tsa. Let women worry. Right now, in Zodo’s, they’re sitting, gossiping. The size of the candle. The length of the wick. Maybe one is giggling, and the others are picturing the wedding.”
Drawing on the pipe, Ladok remarked, “Our father can see.” The father, a compact man, sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor. Powa added, “He is known for qatosh.”
Ladok nodded confirmation. “He is Kunnok.”
With black, piercing eyes that had crossed the deep, Kunnok studied Dillan. The number patterns on his seamed face crowded and shifted. They couldn’t actually be moving. It must have been an effect of the smoke in the air. For the second time, the feeling came over Dillan that he was both and not in Aina Livia here. On those cool dark floors, amid stacks of musty ornate rugs smuggled from Neverre, the man and his sons sat without a trace of unease.
Kunnok looked at Dillan. “Close your eyes.”
When they needed wisdom, the Orroch went to the forest springs. He had gone, once, with his father, before he left him with his uncle. He had felt the high, clean energy, the lifeforce. But the Orroch did not seek wisdom in the dark abstraction of the mind. Now, in darkness, eyes closed, Dillan watched the patterns shift. He let them emerge, letters in a foreign script, ink dancers, weird wraiths, so many, an army of enameled ants. He was flying in the buzzing swarm, in the seething of billions of dark infinitesimals, where an indwelling presence abided, inscrutable, unnameable. He opened his eyes.
The shopkeeper said, “Az’i, the secret fire.”
8 THE MACCHA
Rain drenched them, hair, clothes, boots, skin. They tramped in silence, the clouds so low and marsh mist so high they couldn’t see the ocean green and vast a few hundred meters to the east, just over the edge of the cliffs that climbed to the old watch tower. On a clear day, the sun would have sparkled on waves, far as the eye could see, and there’d have been vessels, Nesso and Orroch, fishing boats, traders, and galleons. They should have stepped under a tree or overhang and let the spring torrent run itself out, but this barren stretch sloping down from Tor Cael offered no shelter. In this season of flash floods, the runnels scored into the sides of the road from prior seasons rushed with brown currents. The moving world impelled them. Their mood was nothing like what it had been the night before, or this morning.
Dillan knew Bu and Hog blamed themselves. He had little energy left to worry about their feelings. He could not go back to his uncle’s farm in Wisp. He could try, maybe, if he could swear his friends to secrecy, but how long before the truth came out? How long could he keep the ciphers hidden? Kunnok had done something to make them fade from his face and torso – but they could not be made to fade from his arms and from his inner palms. He had already made up his mind not to go home, but where did that leave him? Bu and Hog must be brooding over the same things.
“Come back,” Kunnok had said. “We’ll talk. You, me, La’mo.”
“La’mo?”
“You didn’t ask her name?” the Nesso shopkeeper had made one of those indulgent but mocking faces again, the kind that said there was no knowing the depth of Orroch ignorance. Bu and Hog had made it sound like it was no big thing, going to the nighthouse, but thinking back on their behavior the previous night, how drunk they’d had to get beforehand, how antsy they’d been once they entered the town, how quickly they’d wanted to leave, he realized that maybe they’d used him, as a relatively boneheaded third party in a crazy stunt. That might explain how pale their faces had gone when Kunnok approached them in the street. But what had they really gotten him into, and why did Kunnok want to sit down with him and La’mo?
A rain-loosened rock caught on his boot heel, sending him windmilling forward. Catching himself, he leaned over his thighs and cursed. He’d nearly twisted something. Glancing back over his shoulder, he caught the grins on his friends’ faces.
“Almost had us a mud face,” Bu told Hog.
Before he knew it, he was face down in a murky pool, kicking like hell to get free. They had him by the arms and were forcing him to eat mud. He knew their strength well, from years of training with potbelly Frye, and so he knew it was pointless to struggle too much. There was a way to break the hold, maybe, but it would be too violent. He went limp, to lull them into a moment’s unwariness. But, even as he relaxed, he felt a strange glee in his limbs, a buzz of bare life. Hog, who mistook his trembling for violent rage, got him in a hold, forcing his knees down, prying back his arms. Panting and mud-splattered, Bu leaned close and eyed their work.
“Oh, yeah, that’s swyving art, Hog. It’s ddrwg.”
“Really?” Hog said casually, yanking up on Dillan’s arms even more. “Caked good in his nose and eyes? ‘Cuz I don’t want to do this half-assed. He ate his quota? I can dunk him again.”
“No, no, no. Don’t gooo a’spoilin’ a claffing face ooonly a mudder could looove.”
Dillan spat mud between his t
eeth. He realized he was glaring bloody murder at Hog. He spat some more, theatrically, hoping they hadn’t noticed the look in his eyes.
“Ok, Hog,” Bu nodded, doubtfully. “You can let him go, I think. All in fun, right Dill?” He clapped him on the back. “Just a bit fluthered, right?”
He spat again, but gave no answer. Hog let him go anyway.
“What was that, wyneb cach pen pidyn cnuchers!” he poked his finger at them. “Mae dy fam yn llyfu cociau mul!”
“Well, you can’t come to the bund looking like a clean face,” Hog explained rationally, as if to a simpleton. “Do you even know what they’d do to you then?”
Dillan turned so he could stare at his friends.
“You’re taking me?” he asked. “Really?”
“You’ve got a thing about gloves,” Bu said, ticking off a list of provisos. “They’re your lucky charm. You never take them off.” He gestured vaguely toward what he knew lay under those muddied clothes – self-manifesting ciphers. “You’re going to have to hide all that. And,” he stopped Dillan from wiping at his face, “don’t touch that beautiful mud! Let it cake on the way it should. You got to enter the klaast a proper mud face.”
“First match is tonight,” Hog elbowed him hard in the ribs.
Dillan looked at him, incredulous. His neck and shoulders ached from the arm lock, and now his ribs howled. “Proper mud face. You think I’m dim, you pig-pizzle-pippers.” Hog and Bu bent double laughing. He flung his muddy wet hair out of his eyes and rolled up his sodden sleeves. “Ok. Take me to the klaast house. We’ll settle this then.” That only made them howl more.
All the rest of the way, as the clouds brewed dark as love betrayed, and the rain turned chill as love unrequited, they were telling him about the extreme likelihood of getting his skull cracked in that very night, and, arguably even more ominous, the imminent likelihood (a minor detail they’d forgotten to mention) of discovering “down there” some rather unpleasant aftereffects of his wild night. Green fire out your piss hole, groin itch that literally drove you mad over a period of years. Oozing, scabacious sores. Holes in your face.
“Ah, but those Nesso girls,” Hog winked. “Especially that one.”
Bu shook his head. “And she sits down next to him, lucky bómán.”
“You see the purple birthmark on her arse?”
Dillan started. “How’d you see that?”
“How’d I not?” Bu blinked. “She came walking this morning down the hall naked as the day she was born.”
“If you call that walking.”
“Parading?”
“No, no. Too fine for parading.”
“Ri, ri, ri, ri, ri, ri,” he emphatically agreed, making big slow nods. “Everything you’d expect from a viaisa.”
“From a what?” Dillan’s voice cracked.
“Vi-ai-sa,” Hog said, almost spelling out the words.
“Right,” Dillan said. “Good one.”
“I hope so,” Hog pushed up his lower lip, “you’ve got a big tab with Zodo.”
“Tab for what,” he protested. “I didn’t…”
“Didn’t what?” Hog cocked an eye at him. “You didn’t flaing her?”
“No, I…” Dillan began.
“Oh, then you did. Pogued the hone? Played the hornpipe?”
“No, I…”
“Course not,” Bu said. “Ok, Hog? Ain’t a man’s testes-moany enuf for ya?”
“Alright,” Hog pushed out his lower lip, judiciously, “if Dill’s saying she didn’t make a man of him, we’ll credit him. And I’ve the evidence of my own eyes, besides.”
“Shit eating grin or no shit eating grin,” Bu added.
“Zodo’ll credit him, too.”
“Oh, he’s got credit now.”
“Let’s get one cnuching thing straight,” Dillan said, red-faced. “She definitely made a man of me.”
“A lucky man,” Hog clapped him on the back.
“She said you guys paid Zodo in gold.”
“We did.”
“Just not very much gold.”
Well, anything was better than silence, even their pranks. They must have set the whole thing up, he realized. Maybe he should mind, but he didn’t. He didn’t even mind their continual banter about whether the godless miserable rain was spoiling the whole effect of his mud-face, clearly implying a need to mud-dunk him again for good measure.
The stream that cut the bottom of the road was rain swollen. Bu strode in without so much as rolling up his breeches. Within seconds, his feet shot out from under him and the roiling current dragged him a few meters downstream before he got his legs again. Hog waded in, slightly more cautiously, but down he went too. Out there, waist deep, they looked ludicrous.
Safe on the bank, Dillan called, “On with the butter!”
“Suck my hairy onions,” Bu shouted back over the current, with a lewd gesture, as he hopped from one jagged crowned river rock to another.
If they got across ahead of him, he knew he was in trouble, so he studied the far bank and told himself what the hell. The current was colder and nastier than he expected, but he got across with a single dunk and no more than a modest bump on his knee. Both of those imbeciles were there, strong arms hauling him, their grips on him a bit too deliberate to be merely helpful. And, lo and behold, they were dragging him like a sack of grain, handling him with purpose. Face first again in a mud puddle, he managed to turn his head enough to breath.
“Now this time don’t go washing off all that pretty face paint!” Hog looked genuinely irate.
*
The Maccha frowned at the ruckus outside. Two of the lads he knew. Hog was almost as brawny as he was himself. Bu was tall, with beady little eyes that missed very little. Both of them had brains and reflexes. Not nearly as disciplined as he’d make them be, but good pig iron. He could hammer them into the weapons he needed. The third was neither as big as Hog nor as tall as Bu, but with a reticence that said talent. For some reason, thick mud caked the third one’s face and hair. He placed him, mud and all: Cogan’s nephew. Rufe Dunlan’s boy. Hell. Last time he’d seen him he’d been a bit closer to the ground and not so big in the arms. What was his name? Doyle? Cogan might not be pleased to see him here, not judging by those biceps and shoulders. The boy was clearly a work horse. Still, it didn’t take him half a second to make up his mind. Three boys of that sort, no accident. And this lad surely had no land coming to him, nothing at all. He’d heard Rufus wanted him in the bund, and could guess why, though the bad feeling about Cole hadn’t totally died down. How long since the singer left? Time went too fast. He stepped out of the roundhouse door.
“I thought I heard some pretty little girls,” he said, mildly. “You boys seen some pretty little girls around here? Squealing and laughing? Sounded like cuties.”
They’d gone pale, but a glint in the tall, skinny one’s eye – Bu, Ailil’s boy – spoke defiance. He’d straightened his back and was trying to look mean, still too green to know a rigid back meant rigid reflexes, dead meat.
“What kind of pig is this?” he pointed to the new kid. “Is this mud or shit?
“Shit, I think, Maccha,” Hog, the big one, said.
Angry little piping sounds were trying to vent themselves from the newcomer.
“He’s here to join the bund,” Bu added, casually. “Wants to fight tonight.”
“Friend of yours?” the Maccha barked, circling them.
“Son of the Redwolf. Dillan Dunlan,” Bu talked fast. “He was in the Frye. Cracked three of my ribs, but still ain’t done apologizing.”
“And where’ve you been? What’s that straw in your hair? Up in some Nesso thatch?”
Bu shot Hog a look that made it plain as day.
“Up the road toward Nesso, sure,” Bu hedged. “But closer by, in Wisp. T’was Dillan here’s birthday, and we went to fetch him from his farm. His uncle Cogan’s, y’see. Work, work, work’s all he does besides sleeping and shitting, and, well, you know what lo
nely lads do, but that’s a dirty self-polluting habit, and then no land to inherit, bad business. That’s the extent of it. And, to make things worse,” he seemed to be struggling for breath, “misfortune with a herd of swine, Maccha, just this afternoon.”
“A herd of swine, you say?”
“Some big ones,” Hog cupped his hands and jugged them up and down.
“And you fetched him all night?”
“Bit of a leg stretch. We thought we’d best head back in the morning.”
“Cogan’s farm? All the way out there? That’s quite a long walk for tender footed little lasses.” The drenched lads were gazing down at the ground. Dillan’s face was crimson, and Bu was fighting back a smile. “But that’s natural, enough. You were with some girls. Fine and pretty lads like you. I heard them a minute ago. Laughing and giggling.”
Hog looked up, stone serious. “Followed us all the way down the quarry road. Tall, handsome, and dark they call us. I’m the handsome one, and you can tell by the mud which one’s dark. Unfortunately, when they got close to that place,” he nodded toward the Maccha’s shack attached to the roundhouse, “smell of shite scared them off.”
“Smell of shite, you say?” the Maccha asked. “It does get on my hands.” He gave Hog a staggering slap on the back. “Lucky for me, I know how to swat it off. You boys know anything about clap?” He eyed them sternly.
“No, sir, we surely don’t,” Bu answered quickly.
“Zodo take you for brainless and send you his poxied pixies?” The boys were dead silent. “Well, you get the raw eyes or the bone ache or the palmer’s rash, you let me know. Zodo knows we want none of that here. Go wash yourselves clean as you can hope to get.” He watched them head toward the lodges.
Maccha was just his title. His name was Walder, and he wasn’t head of the bund, just a discipliner of sorts. His own place, when no one was training, was in the shack at the back of the roundhouse. He was doing a bit of woodwork back there. Well, he liked to make animal figurines, bears, owls, wolves, hawks, elk, trout. But he felt restless this evening. Every day, the Great Klaast match with the Nesso came closer. The stakes were higher than anyone admitted, and the odds as long as the autumnal shadows on Fhadthrath Hill. It was history marching on them. Doom. No one talked about it, but they were all afraid to face the Nesso again. The Grael had defeated the Orroch with numbers and with guile. Orroch pride hadn’t truly died, and no one truly accepted either the Ten Rivers Truce or the common era of the king’s charter in their hearts. But the day of their rebellion against the Grael might never come, if the Nesso defeated their spirit. The illusion of peace had been to carefully cultivated. The Court knew too well how to rule with words.
