by Angus Watson
“Spectacle?” Gunnhild spat. “You mean mass murder.”
“Oh, come come,” said Chapa Wangwa, “there are so many buffalo.”
“Is that a reason to kill them in such a cruel and wasteful manner? There are a lot of people. Would you do this to people?”
“I have done this to people.” His grin was chilling. “And much worse.”
“What?”
“Never mind that now. Enjoy the sight and the sounds.”
Across the marsh, buffalo screamed and struggled. Some tried to limp away on broken legs but collapsed. A couple had made the drop without injury and these ran. For a moment Sitsi thought the Badlanders were going to let them go as a reward for surviving the fall, but dagger-tooth riders galloped in and finished them with spears. It was wanton, disgusting slaughter.
“Even if you were killing the animals for food and materials, the ridge is simply not high enough for the task,” said Gunnhild, her voice not far off a whine.
“I think it is exactly the right height,” said Chapa Wangwa. “It’s so much more interesting when creatures die slowly.”
Sitsi couldn’t stop watching. At the height of the stampede, to her surprise, a Badlander rider on a dagger-tooth cat appeared at the top of the ridge and leapt off.
Tansy Burna lifted her head from the neck of her galloping mount. Ahead, buffalo were disappearing. She could hear the screams of the falling and fallen beasts. Beyond them was the sky. She’d seen this buffalo drive from the other side. She knew what was coming. The river of buffalo had reached its waterfall.
She had no idea why she was doing it. It was pure instinct. She felt a rush of joy. She screamed, took a breath and screamed some more.
Tansy’s cat reached the top. Time froze. She saw the marsh. She saw Badlanders and captives gawping up at her. She sat straight, drove the hard leather heels of her riding boots into her cat’s flanks and pulled its fur. The cat’s front paws were in the air. Its back legs bent for the spring.
They were flying for a moment, then they were falling. Her cat landed on the back of a tumbling buffalo, claws out. A paw slipped as claws tore through flesh and scraped bone. The cat fell, twisting slowly. Tansy felt herself lifting clear, towards the falling nightmare of flesh and flashing hooves. The cat managed to jab a pawful of claws into another buffalo and push herself upright, forcing Tansy back into her seat.
Cats always land on their feet.
Her mount sprung onto one buffalo’s back, then another, then they were down, leaping over the dying and the dead at the base of the ridge, and splashing into the marsh.
Tansy guided her cat out of the reeds to safe ground. She was panting, her face a mess of tears and snot. Her cat roared; whether to say “that was incredible” or ”if you ever do anything like that again I will eat you” Tansy didn’t know. She fell forwards into the beast’s hot fur and sobbed happy tears.
Sassa Lipchewer stood next to Wulf the Fat and watched the crazy Badlander on the dagger-tooth cat walk her mount clear of the thrashing, dying buffalo. Whatever one thought of the Badlanders, or the morals of killing so many animals purely for the sport of it, riding a cat down a cascade of buffalo had shown skill and courage.
Finally, the cascade of buffalo was over. More came to the edge, but they stopped and looked down at their dead and dying herd mates. Two small light brown calves appeared. One lifted its head in a long, sad moo. The other buffalo joined in one by one, looking down at their tragedy and lowing plaintively. It was the saddest music Sassa had ever heard. Tears spilled down her cheeks.
“On the bright side, it looks like it’ll be buffalo for dinner again,” said Wulf.
Sassa wiped a tear. She rubbed the shaved side of her head. More tears came. It was the calves, who’d presumably lost their mothers, that had got to her.
Wulf put an arm around her shoulder. She reached around his waist and gripped his sturdy torso.
She’d been sick again that morning, for the fourth morning in a row. She prayed to Fraya and Tor and Oaden once again that she lived long enough to have her baby. This time she added the plea that he or she wouldn’t see their mother die, at least until they were old enough to deal with it.
That night, next to a campfire, Erik tried to explain his talking to animals gift, or whatever it was. However, he didn’t have much to say about the nebulous skill, so he told his son about some of the animals he’d known. He’d only got as far as the first Red Fox Four, who’d been killed by the Lakchans after eating a sacred turkey called Fucks In The Rain, when Chapa Wangwa appeared, carrying a single arrow and followed by a bald child on a bighorn sheep.
“Don’t mind me, do carry on your conversation.” The Badlander sat and wiggled the tip of his arrow into the fire. The bighorn sheep stood behind him, munching vegetation. Flames flickered orange on the Empty Child’s expressionless face.
Erik didn’t want to go on about the animals he’d known in front of Chapa Wangwa, so instead he told Finnbogi about the time that Chief Kobosh of the Lakchans had tried to ban swearing.
“Excuse me, excuse me,” said Chapa Wangwa after a while, holding his arrow aloft.
“Yes?” asked Erik.
“The tip of this arrow is hot, hot hot. Do you know what would happen if I pressed it into your eye?”
“It would hurt?”
“Your eye would burst! Not just leak, like you might imagine, but pop, like squeezing a great spot. I’ve done it many times, but I never tire of it.”
“Who could?” asked Erik.
“Anyway, you’ll be wondering about the relevance.”
“I’m happy in my ignorance.”
“Ha ha. The relevance is, Erik the Angry, that if you try to communicate with the pigeons again, or the spiders, or the buffalo, or any Badlander animals, I will burst not just one, but both your eyes. For good measure, I will also burst the little girl Freydis’s eyes. Now, big Erik, do we have an understanding?”
Erik felt a rising urge to leap across, jam the hot arrow up the man’s arse and then throttle him. His spiders shifted, tickling his neck, and he supressed his rage. He looked at the bald kid, but he or she was as expressionless as ever.
“We have an understanding,” said Erik, holding the Badlander’s gaze.
“Oh dear,” sighed Chapa Wangwa, “I don’t think you believe I’ll do it. It is a problem of mine. Sometimes I have difficulty trusting people. I am sorry, but we’re going to have to do this.” He put the arrow back in the fire. “Now remember, the Empty Child controls your spiders. If either of you attacks me, or tries to stop me, you will die. Now, Erik, hold out your hand, please. No, palm upwards. That’s right. You can stay sitting there, I’ll move. I like to be accommodating.”
Chapa Wangwa plucked the arrow from the fire, squatted by Erik, took his wrist in one hand and pressed the arrow head into the pad of flesh below his thumb.
There’d been a period in Erik’s childhood when one of the older boys back in Hardwork had bullied him. Actually, it wasn’t so much bullying as experiments with pain, with Erik as the semi-willing test subject. As an upshot, given fair warning, Erik had learned to reduce pain in one part of his body by focusing on another. So, while Chapa Wangwa pressed the hot arrowhead into the flesh of Erik’s right palm, Erik caressed the grass with his left hand, focusing on the feel of the blades, their temperature, the way they slipped over each other and so on. It wasn’t particularly effective, especially after he could smell his own burning flesh, but he did manage not to scream.
“You are brave!” said Chapa Wangwa, lifting the arrow. “I am glad. I like breaking brave men. Now I must go. Tomorrow, if we make good miles, we will have the most marvellous entertainment. Even better than the buffalo!”
Sassa was sitting by another campfire next to Wulf, Bjarni and Keef. The men were discussing ways to be rid of the beeba spiders. They were all either terrible ideas, or methods that Sassa had already thought of herself and discounted, so she was silently going through baby names. She wa
s musing about Olaf for a boy or perhaps Gunnhild Pronghorn for a girl, when Thyri Treelegs appeared out of the darkness and squatted next to her.
“Sassa, can I have a word?”
“Of course.”
They walked off. There were campfires all along the ridge, so they headed eastwards, onto the dark prairie. The grass was shorter here, Sassa noticed, than it had been further east, not even reaching her knee.
Thyri walked in silence. When they’d gone about fifty paces, Sassa said, “I don’t think we should go much further. I don’t want test the spiders’ range.”
Thyri stopped. “I like your new hair,” she said.
“Thanks.” Sassa wasn’t sure about her new crest hairstyle. It needed more maintenance every day than her old hair had needed in a moon.
“What happened to Garth, Sassa?” Thyri was earnest. “I want you to tell me exactly what you know.”
Sassa remembered that afternoon. She pictured Garth holding Finnbogi above his head, about to throw him off the cliff.
“There’s nothing you don’t know, Thyri. After we were ambushed at the camp on the far side of the Water Mother and Garth saved us, Wulf asked me to follow him and Finnbogi when they chased after the four surviving Scraylings.”
“Why?”
“I guess he thought I could help. I had my bow. You were down, he was injured and Keef, Bjarni and Erik weren’t there.”
“All right, go on.”
“I arrived in a clearing as the last surviving Scrayling charged Garth, tackled him round the waist and sent them both flying off a cliff. Neither survived the fall.”
“What about the other three Scraylings?”
“Two were dead, one was fatally injured and dying. Garth and Finnbogi—actually, just Garth, I think—had already killed them.”
“And what was Finnbogi doing when Garth was knocked off the cliff?”
“I didn’t see that. Finnbogi told me afterwards that he’d been fighting one Scrayling and Garth another. As Garth dispatched his, the Scrayling that Finnbogi had been fighting broke off and charged Garth.”
“And this is what really happened?”
Sassa remembered aiming and shooting the arrow. She remembered the mix of satisfaction and shame as it had struck the back of Garth’s head. She remembered his face afterwards, cross-eyed, looking at the arrow sticking out of his mouth, like a grotesque carved frog.
“I’ve told you what I saw, Thyri. Garth died a hero.”
“Hmmm,” said Thyri.
Chapter 12
Wet Heads
As the Plains Strider resumed its westward journey the following day, Sitsi Kestrel decided it was time to break Sofi Tornado out of her bad mood. She walked on over.
“Hey, Sofi!” she chirped.
Sofi’s look was so dark that Sitsi scuttled back without a word to the other side of the deck, to resume her watch over the plains with Paloma Pronghorn, Sassa Lipchewer, Thyri Treelegs, Bodil Gooseface and Keef the Berserker.
A mother, father and bear cub lumbered clear of the Plains Strider’s path. Keef told a story about a girl in the woods stealing food from a family of bears.
They might be headed to their deaths, but the spider trap was so effective that they might as well enjoy it, thought Sitsi Kestrel. She wasn’t exactly carefree, and she’d devoted hours to trying to think of a way to defeat the spiders on her neck, but she simply couldn’t come up with anything. And she could hardly plot with Sofi if Sofi wouldn’t talk to her. So why not sit back and listen to a one-eared, one-eyed man tell a story from the far side of the Wild Salt Sea?
Yoki Choppa had reduced Keef’s bandages to a band that covered his missing eye and ear, split to allow him to see and hear from the remaining ones. Apparently the wounds were healing marvellously well. His blond hair, which he’d cut off to trick the Owlsa, had grown thin and spikey under his bandages, like the hair on a baby bird, and his scalp was an ill-looking white.
In spite of looking so awful, the Wootah man seemed to hold no resentment towards the Owsla for removing his eye and ear. Talisa White-tail had actually done the deed and she was gone, but Sofi Tornado had ordered it and the rest of them had been complicit. Sitsi guessed that Keef saw it for what it was—reasonable behaviour by a group of people against someone who was, at that time, their enemy. His lack of rancour showed, thought Sitsi, great strength of character. At first she’d thought the Wootah men were juvenile because they mucked about so much, but now she saw that they were tough and decent, and they liked to have fun. It seemed like a pretty happy way to go about things. A pity it would soon end.
The day passed with little new to note, other than the ongoing vastness and regularity of the Ocean of Grass. They crossed rivers with hardly a pause. The land wasn’t flat, but neither was it hilly. Feature-wise, it was about as interesting as a blanket laid over a slightly untidy floor. Sitsi decided the gods had given up building interesting landscape west of the Water Mother.
She tried to remain enthusiastic about the scenery, but she didn’t see anything that she hadn’t seen the day before and the day before that. At one point she saw a lion chasing two pronghorns, but the lion gave up almost as soon as it had started. There was nothing new to analyse. So she sat down next to Bodil Gooseface.
Morningstar sat on her own and watched Sitsi Kestrel listen to the blathering Mushroom Woman. Seeing polite little Sitsi trying to maintain an interested expression as Bodil went on and on and on about absolutely nothing was about the most entertaining thing Morningstar had seen since they’d been captured.
Chogolisa, Paloma and Sitsi all seemed happy to mingle with the Mushroom Men. Morningstar didn’t get it. To a degree, she envied their ability to talk to their inferiors, but not as much as she was amazed and a little disgusted by it. Calnians were so far above Mushroom Men, and Owsla were so far above Calnians. The social chasm was simply too wide for Morningstar to cross. On what subject could she possibly find common ground with the likes of that thick oaf Wulf the Fat or the fluffed-up fool Gunnhild Kristlover?
Yoki Choppa never talked to anyone and Sofi Tornado was in some boring sulk that nobody could break her out of. She felt the same about the four captives from the Popeye tribe as she did about the Mushroom Men—not even slightly interested. So Morningstar spent the day looking out across the dreary, dreary prairie and trying to think of a way of getting the fucking spiders off her neck.
When they screamed for food, it took all her self-control not to rip the box off and screw the consequences.
Late that afternoon, as the Plains Strider came to rest and the crowd pigeons settled to chew through their spider leashes, Morningstar heard a rumbling roar. She thought it might be animals for a moment—perhaps a herd of lions or some other new surprise—but it was too regular.
She followed the rest of them down the ladders off the deck, almost interested to see what was making the rumble. They all walked westward and uphill, following Chapa Wangwa towards the source of the ever louder roaring.
Coming towards them were half a dozen people riding buffalo, followed by a couple of bald children on bighorn sheep. Did nobody on the Ocean of Grass walk any more? Sitsi Kestrel fell back from hobnobbing with the Mushroom fools to join her.
“So who are these lot, then?” Morningstar asked.
“Going by that noise, they must be the Cuguai tribe.”
“And what is the noise, my clever friend?”
“It’s a waterfall. Or, more accurately, a series of falls.”
“Are you sure? It’s very loud. And a waterfall seems far too interesting a feature for the Ocean of Grass.”
“If it’s the one I think it is, it’s big enough to be a god.”
“In the middle of all this bloody grass, a small tree could be a god. What do you know about this lot?”
“The falls are called Cuguai, and the tribe are named after them. Their chief is a woman called Clembur, who’s been chief since she was eleven years old. The thing that’s confusing me is the buf
falo riding. I didn’t know they did that.”
“Maybe they only started recently?”
“Maybe. Perhaps the Badlanders are—”
“Greetings! Greetings!” shouted Chapa Wangwa. “Great Chief Clembur, these are our guests. Guests, this is Chief Clembur of the Cuguai tribe!”
Out of the corner of her eye, Morningstar saw Sitsi Kestrel nod and smile, congratulating herself on her knowledge.
Chief Clembur looked down at them from her mount. She was perhaps thirty-five years old with large eyes and a chin so prominent and heavy that it pulled her mouth open a little. Instead of speaking, she pulled a wooden flute from a pocket on her sleeveless leather jerkin, put it to her lips and played a complicated yet mournful tune. Although it was an entirely inappropriate way to greet people, Morningstar had to admit that she was a skilled player and it was a good tune. It was wonderful, in fact, harmonising with the thunder of the as yet unseen waterfall, and lifting that noise to the clouds, as if to explain the link between clouds and water and confirm the waterfall’s status as a god.
“Greetings, Chapa Wangwa,” said Clembur when the tune was done. She looked very pleased with herself, thought Morningstar. “Have you brought gifts for Cuguai?”
As she spoke, Morningstar noticed that Clembur had a spider box on her neck, as did the five buffalo riders surrounding her. Ah, there you go, thought Morningstar. This was a vassal tribe to the Badlanders. Chief Clembur’s flaunting of her musical ability was an attempt to show that she was more than a slave. Morningstar wasn’t fooled.
“How many gifts would Cuguai like?” Chapa Wangwa asked.
“Three?”
“I will give you two.”
“Cuguai may be appeased with such a—”
“Cuguai will get two. He will be pleased. I will give you one of these,” Chapa Wangwa pointed at the Popeye. They looked back at him, probably fearfully, it was hard to tell; those bulging eyes gave them a permanently skittish look. “And one of our valuable aliens.” He pointed at the Mushroom Men.
