Moonscatter

by Jo Clayton

  Time passed—and distance—faster than they knew. Tuli looked up, gasped. The trax was directly overhead, drifting ominously on the wind. It was huge. She gaped at it. Far huger than she’d thought even when Teras relayed what Hars had told him. Vast and shadowy in the starless sky. Vast and terrifying. She couldn’t look away. She tried to swallow but there was a huge lump shutting her throat.

  “Tuli.” Rane shook her loose from her paralysis. “Don’t look at it, just keep riding.” She smiled tightly. “Not that I blame you. That one’s twenty times the size of most traxim.”

  Tuli nodded. Though she still couldn’t speak, Teras asked the question plaguing her. “How much longer?” he whispered.

  “We’ll see. Watch the roadside, twins. The trax came back to look at us, but it’s been doing most of its circling about a quarter of a mile ahead.” She loosened the reins a bit and her macai scratched into a slow canter, pulling ahead of them. Tuli rode closer to Teras, shivering and unhappy.

  They cantered past an oval clearing, another campsite. Near the trees was a small herd of grazing macain, hobbled and enclosed within a wide circle of rope tied from tree to tree, from spear to spear, the short stabbing spears of the guards, by them a guard sitting cross-legged on the grass. In the center of the clearing there were more guards moving about a fire. Tuli held back her excitement until the guards were out of sight behind the fringe of trees, then she leaned over and dropped her hand on her brother’s arm. “Did you see? Wasn’t that Patch?”

  “I saw him,” Teras muttered. A muscle was jumping beside his mouth. Under Tuli’s hand his arm was rock-hard with tension.

  She took her hand away, struggling to control a growing fear and the surge of rage that threatened to burn away all reason from her brain. Her father’s favorite mount, the one he’d ridden when he left three—no—four nights ago, she was sure of it, that big splash of ocher on his flank like a distorted handprint. He’s there, she thought, he has to be. Just because I didn’t see him … they wouldn’t have.… “No!” She kicked her heels into her mount’s sides, sending him into a scrambling trot until she was riding beside Rane again. “He’s there,” she said in an urgent whisper. “We saw his macai.”

  Rane said nothing but after a few more strides of her mount she pointed to the trees and edged the macai down the embankment, Teras and Tuli following close behind. Still silent, the three of them rode into the thick shadows under the trees. When the road was out of sight, Rane stopped beside a large spikul and slid from the saddle. Holding the reins loosely in her left hand she settled herself on one of the larger airroots and waited for the twins to dismount and drop their reins, ground-hitching their more placid beasts. “You’re sure?”

  Teras nodded. Tuli beat her fist against her thigh. “Patch,” she said, her voice cracking.

  “You didn’t see your father?” When they shook their heads, she sighed, stood and knotted the macai’s reins to the airroot. “Then we better take a look at that camp. Those guards, hunh! Town-bred and easy meat for experienced night creepers like the two of you.” She tousled Tuli’s short mop with a quick pass of her hand. “Thing to remember, though, twins, is they could get lucky. So you’re going to be very, very careful. For your father’s sake. And you, Tuli, you keep that temper hitched. You hear me?”

  Tuli stiffened. “I’m not stupid.”

  “Easy to say. I’ll see.” She reached out and caught Tuli’s arm as she started off. “Listen, both of you. Think before you do. Saves a lot of doing over. Now, I counted five macain in that herd. You say one was your father’s. Which means that’s a guard tercet. We’ll wait till they bed down, cut down the odds that way. Two on, two off, that’s the usual watch pattern. One will stay with the macain, the other should rove, but probably won’t, lazy bastard.” Her hands lowered onto her thighs, fingers trembling. She stared at the ground, kicked back against the springing arching airroots. “It’s wrong, dammit.” She lifted her head. “When we hit, go for the kill if you can.”

  Tuli nodded, feeling fierce. “We can do what we have to.”

  Rane’s mouth twitched into a quick half-smile. “You might find that a bit harder than you think.” She stopped Tuli’s protest with an upraised hand. “Argue later if you want to.” Her eyes flicked from Tuli to Teras and back. “If you get shaky, think of what they’re going to do to your father. Come on, we’ll go take a look—and I mean just a look, you hear?” Without waiting for an answer, she slipped into the shadow, moving like a shadow herself, fading through the tangled underbrush as if she had no feet.

  Three guards sat by their fire, sipping at mugs of cha, their faces fire-red and shadow black. The clouds were thick over the moons now, very little light trickling through their boiling dust. Tuli crouched behind a thin screen of brush, her eyes sweeping the shadows. At first she couldn’t see any sign of her father. She strained forward. Teras’s hand was hard and hot on her shoulder.

  Near the back of the clearing beyond the edge of the firelight there was a moonglow sapling. A man was tied to the slim trunk. A broad, sturdy man. The slowly rising wind stirred through the fire and momentarily brightened it, the light lifting to the man’s face. Tuli sucked in a breath. Teras dropped his head, his mouth against her ear. “Da?” he breathed. She nodded. Tesc’s hands were pulled around behind the trunk. Dark rope lines crossed and recrossed his torso. Several windings around his throat held his head tight against the tree. His eyes were open and there was a grim hard look on his round face.

  Tuli touched her brother’s hand. When Teras took it away, she stood and faded back into the shadow under the trees until she was far enough from the clearing to speak without the men hearing her whispered words. Rane drifted up to join them.

  “He’s there,” Tuli whispered. “Tied to a tree.”

  “I saw,” Rane murmured.

  “You found the fourth guard?” Teras asked.

  “Watching the macain. Half-asleep.” Rane looked down at her hands. “I was tempted to take him out. Would’ve been easy.”

  “What do we do now? Just wait?” Tuli moved impatiently.

  “Right. Just wait.” Rane tapped Tula’s cheek with a long forefinger. “Can you?”

  Tuli sniffed. “As easy as either of you.”

  In the clearing two of the guards were rolled up in their blankets, one of them snoring like a whistle. The guard on duty moved restlessly about, stamping around the sleepers. Now and then he tossed a chunk of wood on the fire, now and then he kicked wood chips into the darkness under the trees. He ignored the prisoner, glanced repeatedly and with a sullen resentment at the blanket-wrapped form of his Tercel. Now and then he stared up at the black shape still drifting overhead, riding the rising wind with no effort, stared up and muttered about stinking demons, then went on slumping about the clearing, blind to everything he was supposed to be watching, sunk in a thorough bad temper.

  Tuli dipped her hand into her jacket pocket, smoothed her fingertips over the stones that made it bulge. Now that the time to act was on her, she felt cold inside at the thought of killing a man, even such a loser as that guard. It had seemed easy when she wasn’t looking at him. She worked her mouth, remembering what Hars said, that she’d know it wasn’t a game when she had to kill someone. Her fingers slipped over the stones, feeling their cool roundness, hearing the tiny clinks as they knocked together. She fixed her eyes on the dark skin under the sweep of the thin stringy hair, sought to convince herself that it was the same thing as the lappets and scutters she’d used as targets to hone her skill. She shut out the moving man, the sullen animal face, focused on that curve of the temple.

  Rane came drifting back, warned them of her presence with a brief breathy hiss. She dropped onto her knees beside Teras. “Time to go. I’ve taken out the fourth guard.”

  Tuli drew her sling through her fingers, trying to keep them from shaking. “Say when,” she growled, almost forgetting to keep her voice low.

  Rane bent back, bracing herself on one arm. She ho
oked to her the crossbow she’d left leaning against an airroot, rested it on her knees while she straightened, wobbled, caught her balance. Patting the stock, she said, “When I skewer the trax.” She got to her feet with a quick smooth unfolding. “Start around to your father now, Teras. Wait till Tuli drops the walking guard before you begin cutting him loose.”

  Teras nodded, jumped to his feet and disappeared into the thick, steamy darkness. Tuli fumbled through the stones in her pocket, shaking with a cold that had nothing to do with the air around her. For a minute she had no feeling in her fingers. She went still, breathed deeply. And a stone was cool against her fingers, fit like an egg against the curve of her palm. She brought it out and set it against the pocket of the sling, held it there pinched between thumb and forefinger, got slowly to her feet.

  Rane laid the back of her hand gently against Tuli’s cheek. “If you can’t, don’t fret about it.” Then she was gone, heading for the road side of the clearing where she’d have open space for her bow.

  The trax was a triangular shape against the cloud blanket, growing in size when it dipped lower, shrinking again as it climbed. Tuli didn’t see the bolt fly, only saw the trax flounder suddenly, the great wings losing their grip on the wind, starting to beat irregularly. With a harsh cry that reverberated like high-pitched thunder across the treetops, the demon fell, tumbling over and over, sweeping toward the east as the wind caught at the lifeless, now clumsy wings.

  At the first flutter Tuli swung the sling over her head, her eyes fixed on the hollow curve of the guard’s temple. He was gaping up at the falling dead thing, making a perfect target of himself. With the trees whispering loudly around her, she forced everything else from her mind and swung the sling faster and faster until it sang over her head.

  She released the stone, waited, bent forward tautly, her eyes on the guard.

  His eyes rolled back, the stone bounced away in eerie silence, the sound when it crunched into flesh and bone swallowed by the wind. His knees bent. With a slow awkward grace his body folded, melted in on itself and hit the ground without a sound, the sounds of his abrupt dying lost in louder noises, the ordinary noises of the windy night.

  Tuli straightened, numb again. It seemed rather terrible to her that she felt nothing. She looked away and saw the sleepers thrashing about, tangled in their blankets, startled from sleep by the dying cry of the demon, the crash of its body through the trees. With stiff fingers she fumbled for another stone.

  Rane came flying across the clearing. One guard was dead before he was fully awake, his throat cut with an almost careless flick of her knife. The other managed to kick away the encumbering blanket, scoop up his sword and leap back. Be fore he was set, Rane had the dead man’s sword and was attacking.

  Tuli came slowly into the clearing, the sling dangling from her fingers. All her life she’d heard tales of fighting meien, but hadn’t believed that much of what she heard because she’d met dozens of meien pairs stopping the night at her father’s Tar or spending a fest in Cymbank and couldn’t imagine any of them hurting anyone. What she saw happening in front of her was therefore unreal, she saw it but couldn’t really take it in.

  Tesc came from under the trees, rubbing at his wrists where the ropes had left deep red marks, Teras grinning at his side, eyes shining. Tesc stopped beside Tuli, touched her on the shoulder but said nothing. She glanced at him, moved closer until she was leaning against him, then went back to watching the contest in front of her.

  Rane’s cowl was pushed back. Her face was serene. She seemed to look past and through the guard. Their swords floated before them, flickering into shimmering dances without contact, dance, dance, contact, a soft slither of steel against steel over almost before it started, recoil, return. She was long and lean and fast enough to blur sight when she needed to be, apparently tireless, shifted out of ordinary time into a state that let her see and react without need for thought. The guard was a big dark man with long arms and a rangy, well-muscled body. He fought grimly, knowing he was the stronger, trying to overbear the blade that seemed like smoke when he came against it. A cut opened on his arm, another high on his thigh. He began breathing harder. Sweat glistened on his face. Rane was unmarked, unhurried, her breathing as even as if she were out for a stroll under the scatter of moons.

  “Zhagbitch!” the guard spat at her; he attacked furiously, filling the clearing with the tink-hiss of sword clashing with sword, driving Rane back and back, expending his strength recklessly, gambling that he could batter her into brush or against a tree where her greater speed and skill would be negated. She slipped from one trap to another, turning and twisting like an eel in a net, baiting him with possibility, running him off his feet, watching, always watching, no expression in her face, her eyes calm, remote, infuriating beyond sense.

  His blade faltered. There was fear in his eyes, a realization that his gamble was lost. He backed away as her point, adder swift, flicked at face and body, backed again, stumbled as his feet tangled in one of the abandoned blankets. As if her arm were somehow connected with his feet, her blade darted past his faltering guard and slipped effortlessly between his ribs, out his back. She dropped the hilt and leaped away, stood watching as he folded quietly down, his dark eyes bulging, his mouth stretched wide in a silent scream. The point of the sword caught on the grass and tipped him onto his side so he curled up like a sleeper on the blanket that had betrayed him. When he was still, she knelt beside him, closed his staring eyes. “Maiden give you rest,” she murmured. Then she stood, crossed the clearing and stopped in front of Tesc. “Good to see you again, tarom.”

  “Rane.” Tesc studied her face. “How goes it with you?”

  “Well enough.”

  Tuli stared at Rane. The serenity was gone from her face. She looked old and tired and deeply melancholic as if the sadness and pain of the world sat on her shoulders. She glanced up at the breathing clouds, sighed, looked down, smiled at Tuli, her face warming briefly, then she turned more briskly to Tesc. “Ready to ride, tarom? I think we’d best be far from here when more traxim come to investigate the death of that one.”

  CHAPTER VIII:

  THE QUEST

  The valley stretched out below them, long and sinuous like a sleeping dragon tamed by a patchwork coat of field and farm. Clean and rested, her stomach comfortably full, Serroi followed Hern along the flint trace and onto a stingy path that wound past the edges of the higher terraces, a hard stony track barely wide enough to accommodate macai pads. Fifty terraces and a scatter of farms below, riverMinar swung lazily between a double line of trees, dots of chrysophrase and peridot, olivine and emerald, and clumps of giant reeds, strokes of saffron and jade against the water’s azure, under the narrow wooden bridges lovely even from this height, and—far in dusty blue distance, it slipped without fuss into a terraced city packed behind shimmering sapphire walls. She gazed a while at the palaces of Skup wavering like mirages against the sky, at a few stray glitters beyond them from the Sinadeen.

  The sun rose higher, a normal sun this side of the Vachhorns. There were minarka working already on the lower terraces, loosening soil about the plants, pulling weeds, some few emptying bulbous waterbags into the small areas within the earthen-dams raised about each plant, hoarding the water with such care not a drop was wasted. The minarka looked up as Hern and Serroi passed, blinked dark eyes at them without much interest and even less welcome, then went back to their work. They were small and slender, even the men, with long limbs and short torsos, all shades of brown from deep amber to burnt honey, with darker brown hair and umber eyes. Both men and women wore short wrap-around skirts and sleeveless shirts tucked behind broad sashes wound round and round before they were knotted at the side. Some of the older men and women wore sandals of braided straw, many of the younger went barefoot.

  Serroi began to envy them their cool clothing as she followed Hern lower and lower down the mountains, dropping into the dry heat of the Vale. The long narrow valley lay between two mou
ntain ranges, getting little rain but enjoying a vastly extended growing season, its fertility a gift of riverMinar. The minarka on the terraces were most likely tending the third planting of the year.

  As the track flattened, its nature changed. It broadened until it was cart-wide and the surface was no longer hard mud or stone but sun-baked brick painted with soft pastels like colored dust and set in patterns of delicate symmetry. Listening to macai claws clicking on the brick, Serroi rubbed her nose and contemplated Hern’s back. The black tunic was hanging straighter. The fat was melting off his sturdy frame though he never stopped grumbling about the meagerness of trail rations. The pavement flowing past was neat as a house floor as if someone weeded around it and swept it every day. The verges bloomed with fall flowers or had miniature trees and mosses arranged in exquisite landscapes. Serroi stroked her lips, swallowing a chuckle (Hern was in no mood for laughter of any kind, especially that directed at him), wondering which he’d head for first once they reached Skupport—a brothel or a cookshop? The fields beyond the verges were enclosed in low stone walls, fieldstone carefully fitted together without the aid of mortar. She thought of riding beside him and coaxing him out of his sullens, then shook her head. Not yet. Within the walls the minarka farmed on three levels, fruit trees in neat rows, between them taller plants of various sorts strapped to strung wire supports, between these, ground-hugging plants—berries, tubers, bulbvines, root vegetables. I wonder what he saw in the deadland’s dust? she thought for the hundredth time and for the hundredth time recoiled from the thought, exceedingly reluctant to remember her own visions, and wondered again, unable to leave the image alone. Whole families were working in their plots, from the tiniest who could barely toddle but who could carry away the debris of other minarks’ work to ancients who moved with inching deliberation but handled the plants with great love and greater skill. When Hern came through the Viper’s Gullet he looked subdued, withdrawn. Even when he splashed vigorously, noisily in the cold, clean water in the Cisterns, he kept some of that brooding melancholy. He came to her, clean and sleek and fed, seeking another kind of comfort—and was turned down hard (perhaps harder than she’d really intended; she was fighting her own ghosts and had nothing left for him but anger). All of the minarka, even the youngest, straightened as Serroi and Hern rode past and stared at them from dark, hating, hostile eyes. Once when she looked back, she saw young children industriously sweeping the bricks as if to brush away any sign or taint of the strangers’ passage. Her anger fired Hern’s. Their hard-won accord shattered about them and they flung unforgivable words at each other, yet they couldn’t leave each other, there was no place to go, the land bound them to each other. The heat, natural here even this late in the year, was unbearable. She wiped at the sweat on her forehead and eased out of the blue wool jacket. She pulled loose the neckties of Beyl’s shirt, sighing with pleasure as the gentlest of breezes caressed her sweaty skin. Just as well I’m not wearing the leathers, she thought. They’d rot right off me.