It was incredible, unconscionable. He’d have them all sacked, that was what: the instant Father came home, he’d have their very heads. Sil hurried to promise her that he would have it remedied at once, to seek her assurance that she would come around all right in spite of it... and to realize with his first glimpse that he couldn’t and she wouldn’t, not at all.
She looked like the princess in the story, whose uncle had bricked her up in the tower and left her to starve. Her delicate face was positively gaunt, her ice blue eyes sunken and staring half-lidded at nothing, and her poor body all twisted and tangled in the sheets, doubled over if to contain an agony in her stomach. Her fine platinum hair, which he had never even seen unbraided, much less unbrushed, snaked over the pillow like so many beached wet seaweed tangles. And the unwholesome sheen of perspiration over her hollow cheeks and forehead suggested that this wetness was occasioned by nothing so nice as a bath, nor even the folded damp cloth that had fallen to one side of the pillow.
He reached forward to put the cloth to rights – the first of three dozen things he would do for her. Then his misunderstandings began to reverse themselves with sickening swiftness. The odor was stronger nearer her – and it issued not from the window but from that bucket – and its contents were not for her but from her – and the same held true for that foul basin on the side-table – and there in an instant he found all her mysteriously missing substance.
Into perfectly ordinary receptacles, she had somehow contrived to empty herself. In the space of a morning and half an afternoon, she had poured out her life.
And it was a strange thing, an unthinkably terrible thing, to meet Father at his homecoming that evening and have to report the results of his twelve-hour tenure as master of the house. To stand straight and accountable and confirm that she was gone, yes, actually quite dead, and to wait with as much manful composure as he could muster to find out how and to what unforgivable extent he had so failed in his duties.
IT WAS PROBABLY a stupid thing to worry about now – every bit as pointless as all the hours he’d spent meditating on that last, uneaten fish on Mother’s plate.
Still, that mad, filthy Afriti woman had had her lips to his very mouth, and the Sibyl only knew where else. And he wasn’t feeling himself just now. And Sil had learned firsthand about sickness, and every evil that followed it. The bells that began to go unanswered. The chores that piled up, undone, as the servants died or deserted. Scavenging through spoiled food in the kitchen. Nillie writing to Will at school, warning him not to come home. Mother’s funeral on Sunday, and Father’s five days later. Debt. Auction. Eviction. And if there was one good lesson to take from all that, it was that one simply couldn’t expect to be formally advised of one’s own imminent end – that affairs had to be kept in order for a reckoning that could come at any time.
Sil would apologize for that, if he saw Elim again. He hadn’t meant for any of this business with pearls and horses and border-crossing to get so out of hand. It was just monstrously difficult to be patient and wait for tomorrow, when he’d already learned not to count on anything but today. More difficult still to accept compromise or failure or delays of any kind, when he’d spent his whole life fighting to breathe, to live, to achieve something that would justify the survival of one sickly, superfluous boy – something that would prove that he hadn’t been a waste of milk and napkins from the get-go.
And if it wasn’t only idle-minded silliness that had Sil imagining his mother’s gaunt, sweat-streaked arms reaching out to embrace him now... if it was true that he was shortly to be stricken and to die alone out here, his death unobserved by any living person... why, then there was nothing left but to decide what he meant to accomplish in the meantime.
He had wanted to be someone successful and important. There didn’t seem to be much chance of that now.
But he’d also wanted to be someone exceptional, someone who had achieved something. And he might still manage that – even if he were known only as the Northman who had contrived to die further west than anyone else ever had.
But that required that he still be recognizable as a Northman when he was found, and his bones were probably no whiter than anyone else’s.
Presently, Sil picked up a roundish flat stone, of the kind that made for good skipping, when there was anything like water to be found. Then he procured his pocket-knife, and let his feet keep their own pace as he began scratching out a legible postscript of his life.
This proved occupying enough that he took no notice when the faint impressions of wagon-tracks veered away from the road.
CHAPTER TEN
THE QUEEN OF DOGS
BY THE TIME they stopped for the day, Shea was utterly spent. She had long since given up even trying to swim, and let herself be pulled along like so much dead weight.
This did not make her any friends among the House of Losange. After awhile, even cheerful, well-muscled Porté began to flag, and passed her off to its siblings. They traded her between themselves frequently thereafter, often stopping to argue about whose turn it was. Ultimately, they were forced into resolution only by a warning croak from Prince Jeté, who still trudged along the river bottoms with his own burden, stoic and uncomplaining.
But she was tolerated – and better yet, she was fed. At sunset, when the Many finally surfaced to make their camp, Shea dragged her sore and weary bones back to shore to sit in a patch of wet sand, and watch the imminent feeding frenzy. She was nothing less than amazed when Porté emerged from the crowd gathering around the picnic supplies, holding a platter in its hands... and heading her direction.
Shea could not speak for other mereau cultures, but among the Emboucheaux, a disgraced or outcast person like her would, if its presence were to be tolerated for any length of time, be allowed to beg for whatever scraps were left after a meal. A welcome or familiar visitor would be invited to compete for food alongside its host-family. But to be served, to be given one’s own personal helping and excused from competition altogether... that was an honor reserved for guests of the Few.
Granted, given how Princess Ondine had grabbed her up and declared ownership, perhaps that technically included Shea. Yet it lessened her astonishment not at all.
“Thank you,” she said as she reached up to accept the plate.
“No trouble,” Porté said, its colors warming with sincerity. “Dépêchez!”
And it hurried back to its siblings with the knee-lifting finny trot of someone with a sense of urgency and a pair of eighteen-inch feet.
Shea needed no reminder. She tore into her meal with wild abandon – because she was hungry and because she was eager to get it in her before it could be taken away, but also because of the pickled duck eggs. And the chou-aigre, and the salted herring, and oh, the eel in aspic – her very flesh quivered right along with the delicate jellied meat sliding down her throat – and all of it, all of it hers to devour without one thought given to whether some obnoxious earth-person would catch a passing whiff of her tomorrow, and demand to inspect her feet. She had eaten only that morning, and yet this, now, was her first meal in years.
Shea kept one weak eye on the thick, jostling huddle all the while, just in case anyone decided to stake a claim on her supper. They crowded together like so many amphibious vultures over a kill, their meal wholly invisible behind a wall of wet, color-shifting flesh. One turned its head and spat something at its neighbor’s ear-hole – a bone, maybe – and was promptly rewarded with a slap. But that left an opening for another sibling to reach across and seize some tender morsel, its victory announced by a brief upcurling of its muddy tail, and the aggrieved darkening of the loser’s skin.
Shea was lucky not to have to wade into that scrum to fight for her share. Still, it was impossible not to feel a pang of nostalgia at the sight. What fun it had been! Cooking was a sacred art, yes, but eating was a sport, its strategies and alliances shifting by the minute. Grab an egg and stuff it in your mouth – throw another to Pate-a-Choux, whom you w
ere trying to sweet-talk into helping you clean out the storeroom – snatch a rice cake from Mille-Feuille, who had tattled on you in front of Mother, and give it to Petit-Four, because the poor runty thing would never get enough otherwise...
By and by, Shea realized that the stationary object in her periphery was not a rock, but another mereau, camouflaged to match the ground. She squinted, hard-pressed to make out the details, but it did not seem to be doing anything at all – just sitting there, huddled and staring at the dirt.
Shea swallowed the last leaf of fermented cabbage, profoundly perplexed. The other mereau had not even tried to join the scrum, and its siblings were making no effort to feed it. Was this one being punished for something? Or was it like Shea, an untrustworthy outcast from some other house?
That would have been a good question to ask before she ate everything on her plate. Undaunted, Shea coughed, as much to announce her presence as to clear her lung, and crawled forward to put herself within easy speaking-distance of the stranger.
“Can I sit?” she said.
“Do you have to?” the stranger replied.
“No,” she said, and did anyway.
This provoked no reaction. They sat there for a minute or so, Shea feeling especially well-fed and content to enjoy the sunset reflecting on the water, the cool, wet earth under her backside, and the diminishing sounds of the dinner-fight nearby.
“So what did you do?” she said, when she was sure she’d remembered the words correctly.
The stranger darkened. “I didn’t ‘do’ anything!” it snapped.
But this was useful all the same: it had to drop camouflage in order to deepen its colors, and that gave Shea her first good look at its face.
Well, it was clearly no outcast: this one was tall and thin where Porté was broad and dense, but they shared the same low cheekbones, the same short-frilled gill-plumes, the same soft, submissive nose. Nobody with an eye in their head could mistake them for anything but the closest of kin.
Except that Porté was in there muscling its way to a full stomach, and this one was just sitting here like a spawn-exhausted salmon waiting to die, wet-backed and smelling unpleasantly of distress.
How ridiculous!
Shea’s curiosity began to bleed over into self-interest, and to consider how this self-segregated straggler might be useful. She had already baited Porté, of course, but it would be much better to hedge her bets by converting a second messenger to her cause... even if this one did not look like it would be much excited at the prospect of wizard-hunting. Perhaps a more personal connection –
A disturbance in the water caught her attention. One of the Many was slogging its way up and out of the river, prompting Shea to count again and realize that no, there were only ten at the meal, plus this miserable loner here. One was missing.
Or had been. There to finish the count, hard-faced and suspicious as ever, was the voice. “You, Champagne,” it said, its eyes narrowing at the sight of her. “Come with me. Prince Jeté is waiting.”
“Now what did you do?” the stranger whispered as Shea climbed to her feet. She had no time to waste in crafting a reply, nor any remedy for the queasy feeling in her over-full stomach. There was nothing to do but follow the voice back down into the river, and pray to the Artisan that she hadn’t just eaten her last meal.
THE ETASCADO RIVER was not a splendid one by anyone’s standards. Broad and slow and withered by the drought, its greenish-brown waters redolent of copper and salt, even its southern reaches were scarcely deep enough to sink a twenty-foot line.
But the light was always worst at the bottom of a river – and that was doubly true when said light was fading with the sunset, and said bottom was as soft and fine-grained as this one. The voice led Shea down and further down, until Jeté was no more than ten feet in front of her: a looming dark shape in the murky haze. Her eyes agreed with her water-sense that he had been stripped of his baggage, leaving him free and unburdened now, but it was harder to see the movements of his hands. There were signs for EAT and GIVE, and what Shea thought she recognized as the name-sign for the princess, Ondine.
Then the voice left, and Shea was alone with the shadowy giant in the water.
His hands said something, but she couldn’t make out their meaning. Shea paled, blanching in submission. This one apologizes, she replied. It doesn’t see well. Will you allow it closer?
Jeté’s hands likewise whitened – though this was for visibility’s sake only, as the rest of him remained regally dark. It comes forward, he signed, more slowly this time, and tells what it knows about the wizard.
So Porté had gossiped after all. That was as Shea had intended – albeit a great deal faster than she’d expected – and as she swam forward to the edge of Jeté’s reach, she worked to polish the case she’d been preparing all afternoon. He is going west, she signed. He is being taken to the home of the a’Krah, a name best approximated as BIRD GOD PEOPLE. And he commands horses with his magic.
The ghostly white hands crossed at the wrists and curled open – the blooming of a single idea. How?
Shea was prepared for this part. She could still feel Yashu-Diiwa’s huge hand on her shoulder – still smell his sweaty marbled flesh – still see the big brown spot over his eye which proved that she’d been right along: that the corn-fed clueless rube who now called himself ‘Elim’ was the last living son of U’ru, the Dog Lady... and had inherited her peculiar talents. His mother is the Queen of Dogs, she signed. Her offspring are gifted in sharing the minds of animals. She could not bring herself to add the PAST sign, even though U’ru’s other children were long gone. She would have more, though. Shea would make sure of it.
She could not see Jeté’s face, and his colors changed not at all. Why should I believe anything this one says?
Shea had prepared for this part too. Because I was the one who stole him from his mother.
It was all there in that one sentence. Free admission of evil. The impertinent, familiar ‘I’. Implied expertise, through a monstrous betrayal of trust. This was confession without remorse, honesty without explanation, and an open invitation to accept an informant too shameless to lie – in short, a perfect, poisoned apple.
Jeté’s colors faltered as it stuck in his craw. You – it is a disgusting, wicked creature.
Yes, Shea agreed. But can it be useful?
One huge hand shot forward, grabbing her by the throat. Shea camouflaged in a heartbeat – a useless reflex – as the prince hauled her forward, his free hand crafting a sign just inches from her face. Why?
She copied his colors in a fervent, instinctive pledge of loyalty, and replied as quickly as her weary arms would allow. This one is tired, Prince. It is old and broken and unloved, and sick from all the bad things it’s done. Please – and here Shea faltered, swamped and drowning in the truth, struggling to right herself enough to tell the necessary lie. Please help it to do one good thing. Let it help you catch the wizard, and let your courting-gift for Mother Opéra be its apology to her.
If they were on land, Shea would be choking. Down here, the gill-plumes behind her head fluttered freely in the current as she waited for him to decide whether to let go or snap her neck. And the hateful, self-loathing thing inside her already knew which one she deserved.
Not because she’d stolen that wretched boy, of course. Not because the Ara-Naure had then gone to war for him – had been destroyed because of him – or because she’d had to leave Fours and Día behind to look for him. Not even because she was manipulating this cohort into taking all the risk of finding and capturing their ‘wizard’, just so that she could steal him out from under their noses. No, those were all justifiable, necessary things. The Dog Lady had to be brought back. The Ara-Naure had to live again, no matter who was used, cheated, or hurt along the way. But if Shea were a good person, she would have been at least a little sorry about that.
The hand let go of her... for half a second. Then it grabbed her arm, and Shea had just time to s
ense Jeté tensing his whole body, like a six-hundred-pound watch-spring winding tight. Then he leaped, a tidal-force upward surge, and it was only the resistance of the water that kept the force of it from dislocating her arm.
For a moment, everything was darkness, pressure, and pain. By the time she recovered her senses, Shea was being dragged up to shore, shoved forward into a patch of wet sand. She coughed, heaved, and pushed herself laboriously up to hands and knees, fearfully aware of the moist, heavy breathing behind her. When Shea looked back to see what he had in mind, she was met by three sharp signs.
It makes the map.
Not for the first time, her mouth was quicker than her mind. “Yes, prince,” she said. She did not dare hesitate long enough to look for a stick, or to meet the stares of the Many on the opposite shore. Instead, she put one finger to work drawing lines in the sand, and her voice to use stammering out directions in her rusty Fraichais.
“He will go west, like this, using an old land-road. We – we will still follow our river north to the Winter Village, but then go west across this little land here. Then we join the – the Limestone River, which is the daughter-in-law of the one the a’Krah call the All-Year River, which they have to cross so that... in order to get to the place that is their home. We follow it south, past the Two-River Town, and wait for them here, which is where the road and the river join together with a bridge, and then...”
Shea kept talking, the voice in her mouth doing its utmost to drown out the one in her head. One more wicked act – just one – and then everything would be all right.
IN THE MORNING, Shea woke from vague, uncomfortable dreams. Her bad lung had filled with fluid in the night, and her muscles were aching, and swimming up to the surface to empty the one prompted fierce complaints from the other. By the time she finished coughing up that vile pink water, it occurred to her that the sun was already halfway up its morning track. How had she slept so long?
Medicine for the Dead Page 17
