by Jo Clayton
When the push lets up she kicks her feet through the matted grass until she is standing with her feet partly buried in the gritty dirt. The roots break through, drive into earth’s cool heart. She touches a cold so intense it is a terrible pain. The cold gushes up through her body. She cannot pull away, not without tearing loose from those roots and she is afraid of doing that. The cold bursts forth and flows over her feet. She looks down. Crystalline liquid is gushing from beneath her feet, the flow increasing until it is bubbling up past her ankles.
She stepped out of the water, wiped her feet on a patch of grass, wrinkled her nose at the clammy feel of the sodden last inches of her trouser legs. She looked at the water, laughed, an uncertain rather frightened sound, stopped when she heard that fear. “Hern,” she called. “Here’s water.”
Hern wiped his greasy hands on a patch of limp, dry grass, broke the improvised spit into bits and dropped them into the small hot fire. Serroi sighed, peeled another tulpa stalk and bit off a piece of the crisp white flesh, the smell of the roasted meat making head and stomach ache.
Hern dug his boot heel into the dirt, inspected the groove. “You think this so-called quest is worth all the trouble it’s giving us?” He turned his head, his grey eyes considered her gravely. “Or something Yael-mri cooked up to get us out of her hair.”
Serroi shook her head. “If it was anyone but Yael-mri—no.” She yawned, surprising herself, covering the gape with a sluggish hand. The warmth of the sun and her exertions were making her sleepy. “It’s a real chance.” She yawned again, blinked. “Chance. Win or lose, what else is there?”
CHAPTER XI:
THE MIJLOC (IN THE EARTH’S TEETH)
Stretched out on her stomach on a narrow flat high up the mountain, Tuli dragged the twig through the stony earth, gouging out a line beside others scratched at random in front of her, using the control she imposed on her hand and wrist to help her tighten what little hold she had on the turmoil in her head. She slanted a glance at Rane. The lanky ex-meie was sitting cross-legged beside her, perched on a hummock of grass, fingers stroking continually along and along the smooth old wood of her flute, her face controlled, serene. “You think I’m crazy?”
Rane turned her head slowly, smiled slowly. “No,” she said.
“They do.” Tuli stared down the slope dropping away close by her left shoulder at the turmoil below, the miniature black figures of busy mijlockers, some scurrying about without apparent destinations, others trotting in double lines from the quarry below to the semi-circle of stone backed against the near vertical cliff on the far side of the long narrow valley, or in double lines carrying blocks of roughly dressed stone to the quickly rising wall that was beginning to block off the valley between two crumbling cliffs near the point where it opened out onto gently rolling hills. Below her, stone cutters worried granite from the hillside using what makeshift tools they had with them, worked the quarried stone into blocks, the steady ring of iron hammer against iron chisel, chisel against stone making bright singing sounds that rebounded from the face of the mountain across the way. A creek wriggled along the valley floor, making a demanding unresonant music. Shouts and laughter bounded up to her ears. The air so high was thin and cold and carried sound with the clarity of cracking ice.
“Teras went scouting with Hars,” Tuli said. “Five days ago. Without me.”
Tuli dumped the water from the canvas bucket into the big pot backed up against the fire and stretched hands blue with cold to the blaze. The heat reddened her face, made her skin itch, but she didn’t draw back, the warmth felt especially good after the splashing of the icy stream. She closed her eyes, sniffed with pleasure at the fish frying in the pan, abandoned for the moment while her mother beat at batter in a thick-sided crockery bowl. Tuli sat back on her heels, yawned idly, watching her father as he came up the streambank toward them, stopping a few minutes at each of the nearer camps to talk a bit with the other outlaw taroms that had settled in the valley. Sanoni was a little farther up the mountain, fussing with her oadats, a half dozen of the grey-furred ground-runners kept for the moment in rough wicker cages. They weren’t adapting too well to the higher altitude though they still produced an egg or two, Annic’s batter testified to that. They tended to droop and forget to eat except when Sanoni teased and caressed them into a happier state. Teras didn’t seem to be anywhere about. Da must’ve sent him to get something, she thought, then tried to dismiss him from her mind. He’d been restless and irritable, snapping at her with no excuse at all, hanging around with the boys when he wasn’t working. As her father came up the slope to their camp, red-faced and vigorous, oddly content for a man who’d lost everything, Tuli got to her feet, stood rubbing her hands down along her sides. “Where’s Teras? He better hurry back, breakfast’s almost ready.”
Tesc lost his smile. He bent over the fish in the frying pan, picked up Annic’s spatula, prodded at them, flipped them over neatly with a quick twist of his wrist, surprising Tuli who’d never before seen him try anything connected with work of a house, though, of course, this rough camp was far from being a house.
Tuli started to repeat the question. “Where …?”
“He left early,” Tesc said reluctantly. He frowned down at the fish, tapped them with the spatula. “With Hars,” he said. “We need to know when the next tithe wagons are loaded and ready to roll.”
“Left? No. He wouldn’t go without me.” Tuli tightened her hands into fists, knives in her head and belly, a surge of heat up her body. She wrestled with the newborn rage, tried to shove it down. “He wouldn’t, Da. He knows I want to go.”
Tesc came around the fire and took hold of her shoulders with gentle strength, stood looking gravely down into her face. “Try to understand, Tuli. I don’t want you riding with them. It’s too dangerous.”
Mouth working without making words, Tuli stared up into her father’s round blue eyes, saw anxiety in them and something else she didn’t understand—unless it might be pity and she shied away from that because she couldn’t endure the idea that her father might pity her. “No.” She folded her arms tight across her tender breasts to damp the waves of anger surging in her. “No. I don’t believe you.” Her voice was not quite shrill and broke on the words. The pity she refused was stronger in her father’s face. “It was him, wasn’t it? He doesn’t want me.” With a hoarse scream as her fury burst on her, she flung herself onto her father’s chest, fists beating on him, a voice hers and not hers shouting things she couldn’t bear to remember later. Annic came around behind her, pulled her away from Tesc, turned her, slapped her hard first right cheek then left, shocking her from her fit, holding her close after, patting her shoulders, murmuring soothing, meaningless sounds until her shuddering passed away and she was limp and exhausted in her mother’s arms.
“It’s time you let him go,” Rane said.
Tuli gouged repeatedly at the soil with her bit of twig, brushed the broken earth away. “I don’t see why.”
“You aren’t children any more.”
“He wasn’t just my brother, he was my friend.”
“Was, Tuli?”
“Is.”
“You don’t have many friends, do you?”
“That’s not my fault. Can I help it if they’re too stupid to care about real things, not just gossip and giggling? There’s no one I can talk to, not really, not like Teras. No one understands.” She looked at the twig. “They’re boring. Besides, they don’t want me around, they laugh at me.” She broke the twig in half with a quick vicious twist of her hands and flung the pieces away from her. “Fayd came up from the mijloc a couple days after Teras left.”
“Fayd?”
“A friend, at least I thought he was; he used to run around with Teras and me, we had a lot of fun then.…”
“Eh-Tutu.”
Tuli dropped the stone block she was carrying and wheeled at the sound of the familiar voice, a grin threatening to split her face in half. “Eh-Fada,” she cried and held out
her hands.
Fayd slid from his weary macai and caught hold of her hands. His brows rose—very bushy and so blond they looked like small straw stacks sitting over his dark blue eyes. “What’ve you been doing to yourself?” He drew his thumbs over rough, abraded palms grey-white with stone dust.
“Working, you nit.” She pulled her hands free and stooped for the stone, straightened, cradling the awkward mass in the curve of her arm. “You just wait, you’ll be hauling too once the council knows you’re here.” She began to stroll not too quickly toward the wall. “What happened? And how’d you find us?”
He walked beside her, leading the macai. “Saw Teras—well, he saw me, told me where to come.”
Tuli glanced at him, saw he was waiting for her to ask about Teras. She looked away from him and walked stiffly along without saying anything.
“What happened? Eh-Tutu, you know my father, what he’s like. He caught me.…” He stopped. His brilliant blue eyes narrowed a little, slid slyly toward her. He wore the too cultivated look of rueful deviltry that gave him the air of a naughty sprite, a look that had too often helped him to slide unscathed out of trouble. Tuli didn’t like it much. “Anyway,” he said, “he disowned me, foaming at the mouth with righteous rage over my iniquities as he called them, was going to have me hauled off to the House of Repentance. I didn’t wait around for that. Adin’s heir now.”
“I’m sorry, Fayd. I knew you and your Da didn’t get along too good but I didn’t think he’d do something like that.”
“Eh-Tutu, it’s not so bad, just Soäreh junk, folks getting tired of their ranting already, it can’t last that much longer. I admit it sent Father off his head but he never was any too.…” He broke off when he saw the distaste in Tuli’s face. “What’s Teras doing below?”
“Looking around.” She started to explain but found herself oddly reluctant to say anything more about it to Fayd. “Look, Fayd, you’d better go check in with Da. He’s up along there somewhere.” She waved her hand toward the creek. “He don’t like folks wandering about without him or the council knowing.”
“Council? That’s the second time.…”
“Da ’ull tell you.” She grinned at him. “I know you, lazy, you want to lie around in the sun all day. Hah! You’ll be groaning louder than the creek tomorrow. We got lots and lots of work to do to get ready for winter.”
“Work,” he moaned. Though he still smiled, there was strong dislike in the glance he gave the stone she hugged to her side. With a laugh and a wave he swung into the saddle and rode off.
Tuli looked thoughtfully at her hands, then at the stone; with a discontented sigh she straightened her back and started for the wall.
Rane lifted her flute, looked at it briefly, raised it to her lips and blew a few experimental notes. She lowered it again, a question in her eyes. “There’s more, isn’t there.”
Tuli nodded. Her lips were pressed so hard together they disappeared; a hectic flush reddened her cheeks.
“You don’t have to tell me.” Rane started playing very softly, coaxing a breathy, near inaudible tune from the lowest notes of the flute, a strange soothing rise and fall that blended with the brisk rustle of the stiff grey-green leaves of the vachbrush. Tuli relaxed gradually. She pressed her thighs together, moved her hips restlessly back and forth across the crusted earth. She was embarrassed, ashamed, afraid, most of all afraid and unsure. She listened to the flute music, glanced at Rane’s long gaunt face, envied the tranquility she saw in both face and body. She rocked her pelvis against the ground, scrubbed her thumb hard against the grooves she’d scratched in front of her. She closed her hands into fists, rubbed the back of her fist across her mouth. “I … I missed Teras a lot,” she said suddenly. Panic rushed her into speech again when Rane stopped playing and turned to look at her. “Don’t look at me or I can’t.”
Rane nodded, shook saliva from the flute, began playing again, the same slow drifting melody, the same low singing notes.
Tuli slipped from her blankets late on the second night after Fayd showed up. She wriggled under the heavy canvas, dragging boots, jacket, tunic and trousers with her. Gibbous TheDom was hanging low in the west almost sitting on the points of the Teeth and the night air was dry ice against her skin. She ran shivering to a clump of brush, pulled off her sleeping smock and dressed as quickly and quietly as she could, suppressing the chattering of her teeth, hampered by the cold-induced clumsiness of her hands. She pulled on her old jacket, thrust a hand into her pocket, felt the leather straps of her sling coiled in the bottom and began to relax for the first time in days, all those people around, people she didn’t know, people who didn’t want to know her, she couldn’t get away from them. She stamped her feet down in her boots and prowled off along the creek crossing to the far side on the stepping stones, taking care not to wake any of the sleepers in the camps, flitting like a shadow along the valley toward the wall, shedding as she moved more of her tensions and constraints until she was having a hard time keeping her laughter inside. It was like old times, all she lacked was Teras at her side but she wouldn’t think about that, at least there was Fayd. She grinned at the moon. Good ol’ Fayd. She swung her arms vigorously, hopped a few steps every few strides, her soul expanding with the night her eyes soothed by the familiar black and white and multiple greys. There were no kankas up here to fill the night with their flutings and their wavering kill-cries, but another sort of passar occupied the same niche, a slimmer flier with long pointed wings, smaller gasbags and a piping song almost too high to hear. Small furry predators, long and lithe with a humping, bounding run, flitted from shadow to shadow, pounced on smaller rodents and fled with their prey as Tuli ran past them. There was no guard on the half-finished wall, not yet, no point to it; she circled around through the gap where the gate would be and came back to the creek bank, trotted along it until she came to the lone brellim growing among the scattered conifers, an aged gnarled tree whose lower limbs were so heavy with years that their outer ends rested on the ground creating a cavern of darkness even in the daylight. Fayd had promised to meet her there.
She put her hand on one of the low limbs, felt it creak under her palm. There was a knot in her stomach suddenly, a vague foreboding that rather spoiled her pleasure in the icy beautiful night. Angrily she flung out a hand as if she pushed the feeling away from her. “Fayd,” she called. “You here?”
“Eh-Tuli.” The answering whisper came from the shadow under the brellim.
“Come on, I brought my sling, let’s go.” She was impatient, refusing to share the nonsense of whispers out here where there was no one to hear them.
“Come in here first, got something to show you.”
“Fayd?” Still impatient, still refusing to acknowledge the coldness inside her that had nothing to do with the bite in the night air, she pushed into darkness that even her nightsight was unable to penetrate. “Where in zhag are you?”
He laughed, a nervous kind of sound almost like a giggle but too excited and too something else she had no name for to be a giggle. He bumped against her. His arms went around her. She began to feel trapped. His breathing was hoarse and ragged as he rubbed his body hard against hers. She was horribly uncomfortable, but she didn’t move, sensing that if she pushed him away as she wanted, she’d lose him too and she couldn’t bear that. She stood stiff and unresponsive, waiting for him to finish whatever it was he thought he was doing. “Relax, relax,” he whispered, “you want to do it, you know you do, you came, didn’t you.” He moved a little away so he could slide a hand between them and knead at her breasts. It hurt. She tried easing herself back from him, but he wouldn’t let her go. “Don’t be like that, Tutu, you want it, I saw you looking at me, you want it, relax, I’m not going to hurt you.” He hooked his foot behind hers and pulled them out from under her, catching her as she toppled and lowering her to the ground, doing it gently enough that she wasn’t shocked into a panic. There was a blanket on the ground. He planned this, she thought, he knew
all the time what he was going to do, Ay Maiden help me.
“Fayd,” she said, her voice breaking over the lump in her throat. “I don’t want to do this.”
In the darkness she could hear the slide of cloth then he was down beside her. He laughed, that same strained breathy laugh that had disturbed her before. “You haven’t done it before, that’s all, Tutu, you’ll like it.” He kept talking in that husky coaxing whisper as he eased her tunic up until it was rucked up under her arms, leaving her breasts exposed.
“Fada,” she said, pleading with him, using his pet name to try to remind him of old times not now. “Fada, don’t.”
“You’re being silly, Tutu,” he whispered, he bent over her and took her nipple in his mouth. She gasped and wriggled on the blanket as heat very unlike her anger heat shot through her body. “See, see, you like it.” His breath was hot against her skin. He kept on and on until all she felt was a growing pain and a feeling of nausea at his touch and the knowledge that he wasn’t going to stop, he was going to do what he wanted no matter what she wanted.
“Fayd, stop,” she said sharply. “I won’t.…”
He didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to hear her, was too busy with the lacings on her trousers to pay attention to anything she said. He got up on his knees to ease her trousers down over her hips then he was on top of her. It hurts, oh Maiden help me, it hurts, I don’t want this, I’m not ready for this, oh let it end, let it end, please let it end. She bucked and writhed under him trying to throw him off her, but he was too heavy, too much bigger, she was helpless, she screamed and cursed and clawed at him, it meant nothing to him, made no difference to what he was doing. He groaned and shuddered on her, then rolled off, got to his feet and laughed, he laughed at her.
