The women and the warlords coaaod-3

by Hugh Cook

  She felt very much alone.

  She looked along the lakeside, wondering if they had done it yet. Yes. Half a league away, smoke was rising. House Two was burning, so that nothing would be left for the Collosnon marauders. Yen Olass closed her eyes, feeling the sharp prick of tears. Poor House Two. They had been so happy there, at least for a while.

  Yen Olass wept, quietly.

  She remembered… the first step Monogail ever took, and the triumph on the child's face. The first word Monogail ever spoke: 'Mam'. A lot had been forgiven on the strength of that one word: Yen Olass, failing to adore her baby, nevertheless liked her child more and more as she grew. Now House Two was burning, and with it were burning so many bright hopes…

  Yen Olass thought of her own people, slaughtered or enslaved by the Yarglat, their homeland laid waste. At least she was still alive. And where there was life, there was hope: or so it was said.

  ***

  Monogail made no protest when told they were going away. She was too young to understand what it meant.

  Yen Olass had said her goodbyes to the lake, to the ruins of House Two and to her tears. Now she said her parting words to Hor-hor-hurulg-murg:

  'Till we meet again,' said the Melski gravely. 'Though that will not be in this lifetime.’

  Hearing his voice, she realized he was afraid. This time, the Collosnon were coming north in force. Perhaps even the depths of Penvash would not prove a sufficient refuge in the face of such strength – and the Melski had nowhere else to run to.

  Yen Olass bowed.

  'Be strong,' she said.

  'And you, Bear-Fond-Of-Climbing,' said Hor-hor-hurulg-murg.

  And he in his turn bowed, and they turned away from each other, and went their own ways.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  'Bears!' said Yen Olass.

  Monogail threw herself flat in the sand dunes. She hugged the ground for a little while, then lifted her head to look around.

  'Down!' said Yen Olass. 'The bears are very close. I can see them. Big ones. The kind that eat Monogaiis.’

  'But you're not down, mam,' said Monogail.

  'Today I'm a bear too,' said Yen Olass, 'so I'm safe.’

  A little while later, Monogail lifted her head again.

  'Maybe the bears are gone now,' said Monogail hopefully.

  'No!' said Yen Olass. 'They still want to eat you.’

  'Maybe they've eaten a seagull instead.’

  'All right,' said Yen Olass, relenting. 'They've eaten a seagull.’

  'Ya!' screamed Monogail. 'Seagulls!’

  And she went bounding over the sand dunes and down to the beach, giving war whoops and bird screeches. Yen Olass followed sedately, with Quelaquix padding along behind her.

  The tide was in, so Yen Olass could not work. Nevertheless, as she walked along the beach she kept her eyes open. She did not feel like lugging great loads of driftwood and seaweed down the beach, but, where she found these valuables – the wood bleached by long days in the ocean currents, the seaweed hulking in great blackening masses – she piled them up above the high tide mark so she could retrieve them later.

  Monogail, at the age of five, was spared from work. Not because she was too young to work – elsewhere, children of her age laboured daily to help their families – but because Yen Olass did not choose to impose such obligations upon her daughter. As Yen Olass walked along the beach, with her lyre-cat Quelaquix at her heels, Monogail ran ahead of them, chasing seagulls.

  The walk was almost at an end. They were drawing near Skyhaven, their home, a small stone cottage crouching in amongst sand dunes which were stabilized by marram grass and wind-gnarled saltwater pines.

  'Come along, Monogail,' said Yen Olass.

  But Monogail went larking down the beach after the sunwhite windscrawn gulls, which went wheeling into the air, tilling the sky with their lonely scree-scraw of disaffection.

  'Monogail!’

  Yen Olass watched as her daughter kicked round in a big circle then started to return, skidding now and then and wheeling into mock falls from which she always recovered, grinning broadly.

  'Clean yourself up,' said Yen Olass, 'and go inside.’

  Monogail did another circle.

  'Come on!' said Yen Olass, clapping her hands. 'Let's horse horse!’

  'Let's bear bear,' said Monogail, sprinting for the door. 'Brush the sand off before you go inside!' shouted Yen Olass.

  'Let's cat cat!' screamed Monogail, still running. 'Let's gull gull.’

  Quelaquix followed, but Yen Olass paused for a moment, and stood looking out to sea. Low, grey cloud concealed the further distances of the ocean. Somewhere out there, almost lost in the cloud, she thought she saw a sail. Was it friendly or hostile? It hardly mattered, either way. There was no need to fear pirates here: for three leagues out from the coast, the sea was a maze of shoals and sandbanks, lethal to any ship foolish enough to venture inshore.

  Yen Olass fetched the wooden bucket from the woodshed, where driftwood was heaped up high, then she went to the well. This was protected by three weatherbeaten boards. Yen Olass removed one of them and laid it aside. A little sand fell into the water and lay floating on the surface. She reached down – the well was Qnly elbow-deep – and stirred the water so the sand sank to the bottom.

  When Yen Olass stirred the water, she did so very gently, not wanting to disturb the inhabitants. One was Monogail's pet fish Straff, a fingerlength freshwater kel-ling. The other, sitting on top of a rock which poked out of the water, was a yellow harbucker dune frog. Her name – or his, with a frog that small it was hard to tell – was Alamanda. Early in life she had lost a leg to a seagull or a cripple beetle. Finding her under a lenis bush at the edge of the sward pond, Monogail had insisted on keeping her, and Yen Olass had been unable to resist.

  Despite these indulgences, Yen Olass had at various times refused house room to a big hairy mottle spider, a rabbit snake, a baby rat and a stink lizard. Fortunately, baby sharks, flatfish, stingrays and jellyfish could not live away from the sea, otherwise Yen Olass would have had other battles on her hands. The last time they had visited Uncle Hearst, he had come into Brennan Harbour on a boat with a dead lynch shark on board; when it was cut open, there had been a dozen live and viable baby sharks inside, almost ready to be born.

  Observed intensely by Alamanda, Yen Olass dipped a cup into the well and filled the bucket bit by bit. Straff settled on the bottom, waiting till this procedure was over.

  Yen Olass filled the cup one last time, and drank from it. The cold water hurt her mouth, reminding her of the trip she had made to Vinyard the day before, where old Martha had pulled two of her teeth. The pain reminded Yen Olass that in a few more years she would be forty.

  She was no longer tempted to pretend she was young. She was definitely middle-aged, and very definitely settled; it seemed that she was destined to grow old here on Carawell, the largest island of the Lesser Teeth, that minor archipelago lying west of Lorp, south of the Ravlish Lands and a little more than a hundred leagues north of the Greater Teeth.

  Well, as a place to grow old in, Carawell, otherwise known as Mainland, did have its advantages. Grey, windy and wet, it was nevertheless spared the hardships of snow and ice, thanks to the moderating influence of the surrounding sea. The island communities were small, stable and friendly, and the islands were at peace; the Orfus pirates, who had once seemed to have positively imperial ambitions, had reverted to their old habits of casual raiding, for their present leader, Bluewater Draven (not to be confused with Draven the leper or Battleaxe Draven or the late and unlamented Draven the Womanrider) was a pirate of the old school.

  Lying within easy reach of Lorp, the Lesser Teeth traded fish and shark liver oil for wool, mutton and boatbuilding timber; with easy access to the Ravlish Lands, they traded amber and ambergris for knives, fishhooks, nails and soapstone, for Tamarian honey, Dulloway beer and the occasional cask of Renaven wine. Amongst themselves, they traded boats and land,
the titles to land being based on traditional family holdings. When Yen Olass had come to Carawell, she had purchased title to Skyhaven from old Gezeldux, paying with her gold, her amber beads and her stone globe filled with stars.

  Yen Olass lived free of rates and taxes, for there was no government in the Lesser Teeth. The people were poor, but they were free – they maintained their lives and their dignity without making any compromises whatsoever with any throne, kingdom, power or outer authority.

  This is not to say they had built themselves a paradise, for they had not; like people everywhere, they still yielded on occasion to their lesser nature, and, apart from this, living as they did where they did meant that many came to grief while fishing or sailing, so there was an uncommonly high number of widows and orphaned children on the islands.

  It also needs to be said that anyone planning to live on the Lesser Teeth would have to get used to the idea of living mainly on fish. Or shellfish.

  In the case of the household at Skyhaven, shellfish was the staple which kept life and limb together. However, Yen Olass also gathered edible seaweeds, speared flounder during nightstalks in the shallows with spear and burning brand, raised chickens, and, nourishing the sandy soil with dead seaweed and chicken manure, was endeavouring to grow vegetables – an enterprise best described as optimistic.

  Taking her first bucket of water to the vegetable patch, which was currently lying fallow as everything had died, she poured the water into the soil. She theorized that the vegetables had died because the substratum of seaweed buried down below had failed to rot down into fertile earth.

  All over Carawell, seaweed was widely touted as the best of all possible fertilizers, but the greater part of this batch had been buried underground for rather more than a year without showing any inclination to convert itself to anything other than seaweed. On her last trip to Brennan – when she had bought a coat of coney-fur for Monogail, and had bested old Gezeldux first at wrist-wrestling and then in a drinking match – she had been led to understand that a liberal application of fresh water, repeated some two or three hundred times, would produce amazing results.

  She was now on day seventy-six of her watering schedule, but, digging down to inspect the seaweed, she found the sample she uncovered was still a slightly resilient mass of lubbery fronds, stout stalks and durable bobbles. Not for the first time, Yen Olass wondered if she had been had.

  With this depressing thought in mind, she stopped at one bucket, and went inside, to find that Monogail had tracked sand all though the house.

  'Monogail!’

  The problem with sand is its high mobility – upwards, downwards and sideways. Among other things, it gets in clothes, hair, food and the bed. Living on a beach, Yen Olass was in some respects in a state of siege, with sand the constant and unrelenting enemy. 'Monogail, come here!’

  Monogail came. Yen Olass gripped her by the shoulder and looked at her. Hard. Monogail grinned a big toothy grin. She had a scratch on her cheek where Quelaquix must have tagged her, probably after getting his tail pulled, or after getting chosen as the target in a one-on-one game of whales and boats. There were tiny, tiny beads of blood oozing from the scratch.

  'What did you do?’

  T didn't touch him!’

  'Then don't do it again. Do you hear me?' 'Yes, mam.’

  'Otherwise you'll get your eyes torn out. And then what will you do?’

  Monogail had no anwser to that. 'Mam, is it teatime yet?’

  'Almost,' said Yen Olass. 'We need two eggs. You can go and get us some eggs.' 'And say hello to Straff.' 'Yes, and say hello to Straff.' 'And Alamanda.' 'Yes, and Alamanda.' 'And feed her an egg.' 'No!’

  'Not really, though. Just an onzy one.' 'Fifty onzy ones, if you like. Go along now – it'll be dark soon.' 'Not for ages.’

  'But I have to have light to cook with.' 'Cook with light? You don't cook with light, mam.' 'You're so quick you'll step on yourself. Now go outside. And check the chiz trap while you're at it.' 'If there's a chiz-’

  'You can't have it because it'll eat the chickens. Besides, it'll be dead.’

  'Like my father,' said Monogail.

  'Yes, like your father.’

  'Did he fall in a trap?’

  'No,' said Yen Olass. 'He got old.’

  'Very very very old?’

  'No,' said Yen Olass. 'A little bit old but a very much sick. Now off you go, mam's got to sweep up this sand. And don't bring any back when you-’

  But Monogail was gone, running out of the door. Yen Olass sighed. Were all children so curious, so energetic, so full of questions? She swept up the sand, wondering if there really might be a chiz in the trap. She had never seen this curious weasel-like animal, and would have thought it a mythical invention – the islanders were good at inventions – if she had not at times seen its delicate tracks in the sand. Usually the morning after a raid on the hen coop.

  Monogail came back with three eggs and a ghost which, she said, had been caught in the chiz trap; Monogail talked earnestly with the ghost while Yen Olass cooked their evening meal. Then, when they sat down to eat, Yen Olass had to shift one place to make room for the ghost.

  'Hadn't you better introduce us?' said Yen Olass. 'That's polite, you know.’

  'Even among pirates?’

  'Especially among pirates,' said Yen Olass firmly.

  'Can we be pirates, mam?’

  'No.’

  'Why not?' 'Because.' 'But why?’

  'Because first you have to cut off your nose.’

  'Really?’

  'Yes, really.’

  'Doubt it,' said Monogail.

  'All right, doubt it then,' said Yen Olass. 'So who's your ghost? Tell us her name.' 'It isn't a she, it's a he.' 'Why?' said Yen Olass. 'Because,' said Monogail.

  'Because what?’

  'Because that's how, that's why. His name's Vex. He's a ghost because he got killed. He's a dragon, that's what. Uncle Hearst killed him.’

  'Now that's a story,' said Yen Olass.

  'No it isn't!' said Monogail. 'Uncle Hearst told me. He killed lots and lots and lots of dragons. That's why.’

  'Dragons don't exist,' said Yen Olass. 'Uncle Hearst tells lots of stories, most of them aren't true.’

  'This dragon-’

  'When Uncle Hearst-’

  'You're not listening!' said Monogail impatiently. 'You have to listen. Now? All right. Vex was a good dragon. He had two wings. He had sharp teeth. Like this. Gnaaar! Teeth to bite you with.’

  'Eat your egg,' said Yen Olass absently.

  'All right,' said Monogail, killing the egg then mutilating it. 'Gnaar! Dragons. Biting.’

  Vaguely, Yen Olass wondered how long they would have to share the house with the ghost of a dragon. Chewing a stalk of sendigraz, she wondered, equally vaguely, if dragons really did exist. Raging through the skies and burning things. Long ago, in a different life, Resbit claimed to have seen one, but Yen Olass doubted it. One dragon, burning… yes… burning, that was a thought…

  All that seaweed…

  She had plenty of driftwood, cached in the dunes up and down the beach…

  Dig up the topsoil, so called, and expose the seaweed. Then a big, big fire. Burning for two days, if necessary. Or three. A mountainous pyre. A real volcano… a fire-mountain, like the ones Uncle Hearst talked about. More stories, yes…

  After such a fire, what wisdom?

  After such a fire, wood ash, and what was better, the ashes of all that slightly resilient seaweed, which of late had taken to writhing in her dreams. Pour fresh water on it! What was that going to do? If anything, the water seemed to be nourishing it, keeping it in tone, so to speak. She could imagine them laughing about it in Hagi's Bar in Brennan. Well, she'd show them. Ashes this year, vegetables next. She'd get the better of them.

  Yen Olass recalled her first days on Carawell, when she'd been renovating Skyhaven. Strangers had dropped by, and, after watching her work for some time – in the beginning, their studied si
lence had unnerved her – they had ventured to introduce themselves and to assist with a little tactful advice, advice which was always given in that dry, sage, wisdom-of-generations manner which they had brought to such perfection.

  Which was how Yen Olass had come to dig forty-seven earthing holes to protect against crawling lightning, to rig up a net over her door at night to entangle any invasive land octopuses, and to crowd the roof with sharpened hnials to ward against garret hawks. All these fortifications had long since disappeared, but on every trip to Brennan, someone was always sure to remind her about them – old Gezeldux would always rise to the occasion, even if nobody else did.

  'Mam?’

  'What?' said Yen Olass.

  'Mam, Quelaquix wants to go out.’

  'Then you get up and let him out.’

  'I can't.’

  'Why not?’

  'Can't you see? Vex is sitting on my lap.’

  Why did I askt thought Yen Olass.

  'Sitting is all right,' said Yen Olass. 'But rumpaging isn't. Especially not in bed.’

  'What's rumpaging?’

  'What dragons do that they shouldn't.’

  'But dragons don't exist,' said Monogail. 'Mam said so.’

  'Did she now?' said Yen Olass, skilled by now at extricating herself from these predicaments without getting too deeply entangled in advanced metaphysics. 'Maybe that's so, but cats do exist, so I've got to let Quelaquix out.’

  'To go hunting.’

  'Yes,' said Yen Olass, 'Hunting a chiz,’

  The cat was eager, alert, poised for a big adventure in the dark. That suggested it would be a fine night, and probably a good day tomorrow. If it was going to rain during the night, Quelaquix became an altogether different animal: a profoundly recumbent heap of fur sagging over the floor in a prime spot enjoying the full benefit of the fire.

  Yen Olass opened the door, and Quelaquix slipped outside. Looking out into the starlight, Yen Olass saw a dark figure standing watching. She reached up to the lintel and fetched down a gollock, a thick-bladed machete nicely weighted for demolishing a man's face. Sliding outside, she closed the door behind her, slipped sideways and lost herself in amongst the saltwater pines. There she went to ground.