The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls

by Anissa Gray

  “Some deaths by starvation, primarily among the children,” said Shedemei.

  “That’s awful!” wailed Kokor. “You’ve practically killed my baby!”

  Her cry set off a chorus of whining. In the din, Nafai silently spoke to the Oversoul: Is there some other way?

  〈Do you have a suggestion?〉

  Nafai tried to think of a hunting weapon that could be made from materials at hand. He remembered that the Gorayni soldiers had been armed with spears, with bows and arrows. Would either of those do for hunting, or were they only useful in war?

  The thought came into his head: 〈Anything that will kill a man will probably kill any other animal. To hunt with a spear requires a group of hunters to drive the prey—otherwise it’s rare to get close enough for the kill, even with an atlatl to extend your throw.〉

  Then what about the bow and arrow?

  〈A good bow has a range four times that of the pulse. But they’re very hard to make.〉

  What about a second-rate bow, with a range only about the same as a pulse? Could you teach me how to make one of those?

  〈Yes.〉

  And do you think I could find prey with it, or does it take too long to learn the skill?

  〈It takes as long as it takes.〉

  That was probably as good an answer as he was likely to get from the Oversoul, and it wasn’t a bad answer at that. There was a hope, at least.

  When Nafai’s attention returned to the others, they had apparently goaded Volemak beyond his patience. “Do you think I planned all this?” he asked. “Do you think I asked the Oversoul to lead us to this hideous place, to have babies in the desert and wander aimlessly through wilderness without enough to eat? Do you think I wouldn’t rather be in a house? With a bed?”

  Nafai could see that Volemak had surprised everyone by joining his own complaints to theirs. But it hardly reassured them—some looked frightened indeed, to have their pillar of strength show a crack. And Elemak’s face barely concealed his contempt for Father. It was not Volemak’s proudest moment, Nafai could see that—and it was so unnecessary. If he had only asked the Oversoul the questions Nafai had asked, he would have been reassured. There was a way.

  Vas spoke up again. “I tell you, all of this is completely unnecessary. Nafai and I found a fairly easy way down the mountain. We may not be able to bring the camels, but then, if we’re simply walking around the bay to get to Dorova, all we need to carry is a day’s provisions and water.”

  “Abandon the camels?” said Elemak. “The tents?”

  “The coldboxes and dryboxes?” asked Shedemei.

  “Some of you stay here then,” said Mebbekew, “and lead the camels around the long way. Without the women and babies, it won’t take more than a week, and in the meantime the rest of us will be in the city. Give us a couple of months and we’ll be back in Basilica. Or wherever the rest of you decide to go.”

  There was a murmur of assent.

  “No,” said Nafai. “This isn’t about us, this is about Harmony, about the Oversoul.”

  “Nobody asked if I wanted to volunteer for this noble cause,” said Obring, “and I for one am sick of hearing about it.”

  “The city’s right over there,” said Sevet. “We could be there so quickly.”

  “Fools,” said Elemak. “Just because you can see the city, just because you can see the beach you’d walk along to reach it, that doesn’t mean you could walk it easily. In a single day? Laughable. You’ve got stronger in the past year, yes, but none of you are in fit condition to walk that far carrying a baby, let alone the liters of water you’d need, and the food. Walking in sand is hard work, and slow, and the more heavily burdened you are, the more slowly you go, which means that you have to carry more provisions to last you through the longer journey, which means you’ll be more heavily burdened and travel even more sluggishly.”

  “Then we’re trapped here till we die?” wailed Kokor.

  “Oh, shut up,” said Sevet.

  “We’re not trapped here,” said Nafai, “and we don’t have to abandon the expedition. Before there were ever pulses, human beings were able to kill meat. There are other weapons.”

  “What, will you strangle them?” asked Mebbekew. “Or use that wire of Gaballufix’s, to cut off their heads?”

  Nafai steeled himself to resist his own anger at Mebbekew’s taunting. “A bow. Arrows. The Oversoul knows how they’re made.”

  “Then let the Oversoul make them,” said Obring. “That doesn’t mean that any of us know how to use them.”

  “For once Obring is right,” said Elemak. “It takes years of training to become a good bowman. Why do you think I brought pulses? Bows are better—they have a longer range, they never run out of power, and they do less damage to the meat. But I don’t know how to use one, let alone make one.”

  “Neither do I,” said Nafai. “But the Oversoul can teach me.”

  “In a month, perhaps,” said Elemak. “But we don’t have a month.”

  “In a day,” said Nafai. “Give me until sundown tomorrow. If I haven’t brought back meat, then I’ll agree with Vas and Meb that we have to go to Dorova, at least for a while.”

  “If we go to Dorova, it’s the end of this foolish expedition,” said Meb. “I’ll never get back on a camel for any reason except to go home.”

  Several agreed with him.

  “Give me a day, and I’ll agree with you,” said Nafai. “We’re not running out of provisions yet, and this is a good place to wait. A day.”

  “A waste of time,” said Elemak. “You can’t possibly do it.”

  “Then what harm will it do to let me prove it to you? But I say I can do it, with the Oversoul to help me. The knowledge is all there in its memory. And the game is easy to find here.”

  “I’ll track for you,” said Vas.

  “No!” said Luet. Nafai looked at her, startled—she had said nothing till now. “Nafai will do this alone. He and the Oversoul. That’s how it has to be.” Then she looked up at him, steadily and intently.

  She knows something, thought Nafai. Then he remembered again the thoughts that came to him on the mountain this morning—that Vas had been trying to kill him. That Vas caused his fall. Did the Oversoul speak clearly to her? Were my fears justified? Is that why she’d rather send me out alone?

  “So you’ll leave in the morning?” asked Volemak.

  “No,” said Nafai. “Today. I hope to make a bow today, so I can have tomorrow for the hunt. After all, my first few targets may get away.”

  “This is stupid,” said Meb. “What does Nafai think he is, one of the Heroes of Pyiretsiss?”

  “I’m not going to let this expedition fail!” shouted Nafai. “That’s who I am. And if I won’t let a broken pulse stop us, you can bet all the snot in your nose that I won’t let you get in the way.”

  Meb looked at him and laughed. “You’ve got a bet, Nyef, my sweet little brother. All the snot in my nose says you’ll fail.”

  “Done.”

  “Except we haven’t specified what you give me when you fail.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Nafai. “I won’t fail.”

  “But if you do . . . then you’re my personal servant.”

  Meb’s words were greeted with derision by many around the circle. “Snot against servitude,” said Eiadh contemptuously. “Just what I’d expect of you, Meb.”

  “He doesn’t have to take the bet,” said Meb.

  “Set a time limit on it,” said Nafai. “Say—a month.”

  “A year. A year in which you do whatever I command.”

  “This is sickening,” said Volemak. “I forbid it.”

  “You already agreed to it, Nafai,” said Mebbekew. “If you back out of it now, you’ll stand before us all as an oathbreaker.”

  “When I lay the meat down at your feet, Meb, you’ll decide then what I am, and it won’t be an oathbreaker, that’s certain.”

  And so it was agreed. They’d wait until sundo
wn tomorrow for Nafai to return.

  He left them, hurried to the kitchen tent, and gathered what he’d need—biscuit and dried melon and jerky. Then he headed for the spring to refill his flagon. With his knife at his side, he’d need no more.

  Luet met him there, as he knelt beside the pool, immersing the flagon to fill it.

  “Where’s Chveya?” he asked.

  “With Shuya,” she answered. “I needed to talk to you. Instead we had that . . . meeting.”

  “And I needed to talk to you, too,” he said. “But things got out of hand, and now there’s no time.”

  “I hope there’s time for you to take this,” she said.

  In her hand was a spool of twine.

  “I hear that bows don’t work without a string,” she said. “And the Oversoul said that this kind would be best.”

  “You asked?”

  “She seemed to think you were about to rush off without it, and that you’d regret the lack of it by and by.”

  “I would have, yes.” He took it, put it in his pouch. Then he bent to her and kissed her. “You always look out for me.”

  “When I can,” she said. “Nafai, while you were gone, the Oversoul spoke to me. Very clearly.”

  “Yes?”

  “Was Vas near you when you fell?”

  “He was.”

  “Near enough that he could have caused it? By, for instance, pushing your foot?”

  Nafai instantly recalled that terrible moment on the face of the rock, when his right foot first slipped. It had slid inward, toward his left foot. If it had just been friction giving way, wouldn’t the foot have slid straight down?

  “Yes,” said Nafai. “The Oversoul tried to warn me, but …”

  “But you thought it was your own fear and ignored it.”

  Nafai nodded. She knew how the Oversoul’s voice felt—like your own thoughts, like your own fears.

  “You mean,” she said. “Always afraid of being afraid. Don’t you know that fear is the most fundamental tool that evolution uses to keep a species alive? Yet you ignore it as if you hoped to die.”

  “Yes, well, I can’t help what testosterone does to me. You’d enjoy being married to me a lot less if I didn’t have any.”

  She smiled. But the smile didn’t last long. “Something else the Oversoul told me,” said Luet. “Vas is planning . . .”

  But at that moment Obring and Kokor sauntered over. “Having second thoughts, little brother?” asked Kokor.

  “My thoughts often come in threes and fours,” said Nafai. “Not one at a time, like yours.”

  “I just wanted to wish you well,” said Kokor. “I really hope you bring home some scruffy little hare for us to eat. Because if you don’t then we’ll have to go to a city and eat cooked food, and that would be just awful, don’t you think?”

  “Somehow I think your heart isn’t in your kind words,” said Nafai.

  “If I thought you had a chance of succeeding,” said Obring, “I’d break your arm.”

  “If a man like you could break my arm,” said Nafai, “I really wouldn’t have a chance.”

  “Please,” said Luet. “Don’t we have trouble enough?”

  “Sweet little peacemaker,” said Kokor. “Not much for looks, are you, but maybe you’ll grow old gracefully.”

  Nafai couldn’t help it. Kokor’s insults were so childish, so much like what passed for cleverness among schoolchildren, that he had to laugh.

  Kokor didn’t like it “Laugh all you want,” said Kokor. “But I can sing my way back to wealth, and Mother still has a household in Basilica that I can inherit. What does your father have for you? And what kind of household will your little orphan wife establish for you in Basilica?”

  Luet stepped forward and faced Kokor; Nafai noticed for the first time that they were almost the same height, which meant Luet had been growing this past year. She really is still a child, he thought.

  “Koya,” said Luet. “You forget whom you’re speaking to. You may think that Nafai is just your younger brother. In the future, though, I hope you’ll remember that he is the husband of the waterseer.”

  Kokor answered with defiance. “And what does that matter here?”

  “It doesn’t matter at all . . . here. But if we were to return to Basilica, dear Koya, I wonder how far your career will go if you’re known to be the enemy of the waterseer.”

  Kokor blanched. “You wouldn’t.”

  “No,” said Luet, “I wouldn’t. I never used my influence that way. And besides—we’re not going back to Basilica.”

  Nafai had never seen Luet act so imperious before. He was enough of a Basilican to feel somewhat overawed at the tide of waterseer; it was easy to forget sometimes that the woman he took to bed every night was the same woman whose dreams, whose words, were whispered house to house in Basilica. Once she had come to him at great risk, leaving the city in the middle of the night to wake him and warn him of danger to his father—and on that night she did not show any sign that she was aware of her lofty role in the city. Once she had taken him, when he was being chased by Gaballufix’s men, and led him down into the waters of the Lake of Women, where no man was allowed to go and return alive—and even then, as she faced down those who would have killed him, she had not taken this tone, but rather had spoken calmly, quietly.

  And then it dawned on Nafai—Luet wasn’t putting on this air of haughty majesty because it was any part of her. She was acting this way because this is how Kokor would have acted, if she had even the tinest shred of power. Luet was speaking to Nafai’s half-sister in language that she could understand. And the message was received. Kokor plucked at Obring’s sleeve and the two of them left.

  “You’re very good at that,” said Nafai. “I can’t wait to hear you use that voice on Chveya, the first time she sasses you.”

  “I intend to raise Chveya to be the kind of woman with whom that voice would never need to be used.”

  “I didn’t even know you had that voice.”

  Luet smiled. “Neither did I.” She kissed him again.

  “You were telling me something about Vas.”

  “Something Hushidh saw but didn’t understand; the Oversoul explained it to me. Vas hasn’t forgotten that Sevet betrayed him with Obring and brought public humiliation to him.”

  “No?”

  “The Oversoul says he plans to murder them.”

  Nafai hooted once in derision. “Vas? He was the picture of calm. Mother said that she’d never seen anybody take a bad situation so well.”

  “He saves up his revenge for later, I guess,” said Luet. “We have plenty of evidence now to suggest that Vas isn’t quite as calm and cooperative as he seems.”

  “No,” said Nafai, “he’s not, is he? Meb and Dol, Obring and Kokor, they whine and moan about wanting to go back to the city. But not Vas. He takes it silently, seems to go along, and then sets out to destroy the pulses so we have to go back.”

  “You’ve got to admit, it was a clever plan.”

  “And if he happens to kill me in the process, well, that’s the way it goes. It makes me think—if Gaballufix had been as subtle as Vas, he would be king of Basilica by now.”

  “No, Nafai. He’d be dead.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Oversoul would have told you to kill him in order to get the Index.”

  Nafai looked at her, uncomprehending. “You throw this up to me?”

  She shook her head firmly. “I remind you of it so you don’t forget how strong you are. You are more ruthless and more clever than Vas, when you know you’re serving the Oversoul’s plan. Now go, Nafai. You have a few hours of daylight left. You will succeed.”

  With the touch of her hand on his cheek still alive in the memory of his skin, with her voice still in his ear, with her trust and honor still hot inside his heart, he did indeed feel like one of the Heroes of Pyiretsiss. Most particularly like Velikodushnu, who ate the living heart of the god Zaveest, so that the people of Pyirets
iss could live in peace instead of constantly conspiring to get the advantage over each other and tear down those who succeeded. The illustration in the version of the tale that Nafai had read showed Velikodushnu with his head jammed into the gaping chest cavity of the god, even as Zaveest flayed the hero’s back with his long fingernails. It was one of the most powerful images of his childhood, that picture of a man who ignored his own inextinguishable agony in order to consume the evil that was destroying his people.

  That’s what a hero was, to Nafai, what a good man was, and if he could only think of Gaballufix as Zaveest, then it was good and right to have killed him.

  But that idea only helped him for a moment; then, once again, the horror of having murdered Gaballufix as he lay drunk and helpless on the street returned to him. And he realized that perhaps that memory, that guilt, that shame, that horror—perhaps that was his own version of having his back flayed open by Zaveest even as he consumed the heart of the most vicious of the gods.

  Never mind. Put it back where it belongs, in memory, not in the forefront of thought. I am the man who killed Gaballufix, yes, but I’m also the man who must make a bow, kill an animal, and bring it home by nightfall tomorrow or the Oversoul will have to begin again.

  Obring ducked through the door of Vas’s and Sevet’s tent. It was the first time he had been with Sevet with any kind of privacy since Kokor caught the two of them bouncing away back in Basilica. Not that it was really privacy, with Vas there. But in a way the fact that he sanctioned this meeting meant that, perhaps, the long freeze-out was over.

  “Thanks for stopping by,” said Vas.

  There was enough irony in Vas’s tone that Obring realized he must have done something wrong, and Vas was reproving him. Oh—maybe he had taken too long getting here. “You said to come without Kokor, and I can’t always just walk away. She always asks where I’m going, you know. And then watches to make sure I go there.”

  From the curl of Sevet’s lip, Obring knew that she was enjoying the idea of him in such bondage to Kokor. Though if anyone should understand his predicament, Sevet should—wasn’t she, too, in Vas’s relentless custody? Or perhaps not—Vas wasn’t vindictive like Kokor. Vas didn’t even get angry that night more than a year ago. So maybe Sevet hadn’t been suffering the way Obring had.