Dreams of the Eaten

by Arianne Thompson

  An ear flicked. Weisei kept his eyes closed, but he slowly lifted his hand, bringing the horse’s head up as if that blood-crusted black face were bound to him by magnetic attraction. Then one forehoof braced itself in the dust, as stiff and clumsy as that of a day-old foal. Then the other. And then –

  A distant cry rang out.

  Vuchak startled, but saw nothing. “Weisei, stop.”

  Brows drawn with effort, Weisei was just then inspiring the horse to push itself up by its forelegs. There again, almost smothered under his song, was the faint sound of someone’s fear.

  Vuchak patted urgently at his marka’s arm. “Weisei, stop!”

  That was enough to break his concentration. The horse collapsed with a rancid whud. “Vichi, what –”

  The cry came again, and this time there was no mistaking it: that was a man’s muffled scream – and it was coming from the river.

  Vuchak’s weariness evaporated in a second. He snatched up his spear and bolted, seized by the single-minded need to...

  ... fall right into a fishman’s trap?

  No, no – what kind of idiot was he? If someone was in trouble in the river, then it was almost certainly because someone else had arranged for it to happen.

  Vuchak dropped and crawled forward on his stomach, making a man-sized worm-track in the dirt as he inched through dry nettles and angry patches of blister-root, eating up distance even as he excreted time. Then – finally! – the ground rolled away before him, and from the little rise, he glimpsed the nearest bend of the All-Year River.

  The sun-blunting black mesh over his eyes muddied the details, but he would have to have worn ten yuye to miss the scene in front of him: there was the fast-flowing gray stripe of the river, and there was the unnatural disturbance in the current, and THERE – gagged, bound, and thrashing in a panic – was the reason for it.

  Hakai! Vuchak nearly said it aloud. They’d tied him face-down to some driftwood or piece of furniture, binding his hands around it and tying a sack over his head to stop his eyes and mouth... all but daring Vuchak to come and take him.

  It was a trap. It could only be a trap. Vuchak’s gaze scoured the shorelines, the current, the horizon, but even on a full-moon night, he did not trust himself to spot a fishman. Their camouflage was second to none – a fatal fact just waiting for him to venture into that water.

  Vuchak glanced back at his marka, still holding frozen to the spot, his wide eyes pleading for instruction.

  He was Weisei’s atodak, sworn to guard his life before all others.

  He would not leave his frail prince alone out here.

  He couldn’t risk it for a slave.

  Another muffled cry echoed off the hills. Vuchak had just time to catch a glimpse of Hakai as he kicked, rolled – and went under.

  Vuchak dropped his spear. “Weisei, take the horse and get out of here!”

  Duty went forgotten as he pulled the knife from his boot. Reason deserted him as he tore down the hill. And if his life was shortly to end as he plunged into the viciously cold current, at least Vuchak would die as he had lived: doing something poorly-considered, mostly useless, and embarrassingly preventable.

  THAT WAS HIM. Porté drew themself further up out of the water, careful to stay river-colored and invisible as they watched the earthling man dive into the current.

  That was him – the terrible death-eyed archer from the House of the Crow, whose arrows had ended all happiness.

  But as the man threw himself into the water to rescue his drowning kinsman, the part of Porté that longed to pull him down to his death grew strangely silent.

  The archer didn’t understand what he had done. He couldn’t. He knew only that he had shot some ‘fish-men’ two nights ago. How could he understand that the body he’d left crumpled in the mud had been little Flamant-Rose, the smallest and brightest of the Many? How could he know that his arrow had killed a brilliant young geologist – a shy, delighted smile – a look of manic triumph whenever they managed to steal a rice-cake from their bigger siblings at the dinner-fight – an endless, boundless wonder at every turn of this grand expedition?

  He couldn’t. He just couldn’t. Porté could grab the man and wrestle him down to the bottom of the river, pin him down and watch as the bubbles escaped his mouth and the light left his eyes, and he would understand only that he had been murdered by the same unfathomable monsters who had attacked him before.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Porté wished they knew enough earth-words to say so. Nobody was supposed to get hurt.

  But the man wouldn’t understand them, and Fuseau wouldn’t hear them, and Prince Jeté wouldn’t listen to them. Nobody had room for those feelings anymore.

  Someone’s elbow jabbed Porté in the ribs, prompting a painful twinge from that half-healed arrow wound. They looked over to see Tournant’s angry black eyes – the only part that couldn’t camouflage – beckoning Porté to put themself out of sight.

  Porté obediently sank back down into the shallows, treading water with the rest of the Many as they all watched the earthling man take the bait.

  No, there were no words in any language that could make him understand what he’d done. But if Porté had had the means, they would have apologized for what was going to happen next.

  VUCHAK SHOULD HAVE been dead by now. He should have been stabbed, strangled, drowned four times over. In throwing himself into the river, he had offered his life – but no invisible webbed hand had reached up to take it.

  Maybe they were busy with Hakai instead. As Vuchak closed in on him, adding his strength to the river’s to catch up with the drifting, spinning human wreckage caught in its flow, Hakai’s head emerged just long enough for a sodden gasp of air through the linen sack – and then he was down again, trapped in a deadly embrace with the flotsam pressed to his bare chest.

  So maybe the World That Is didn’t actually want to kill Vuchak. Maybe it just wanted to watch him abandon his marka and his duty, and come back with nothing but a waterlogged corpse to show for it. Historically, Vuchak had gratified the universe’s latent sadism with active humiliation as much as passive misery.

  That thought lent him new strength as he plowed through the water, all power and no grace, preparing to feed his knife rope instead of flesh. He was fifty yards away, then twenty, then ten, and then –

  – and then the heinous, familiar stench hit him full in the face, and he belatedly recognized the contours of that boxy coffin.

  Dulei! By every still-living god – they’d tied Hakai to Dulei, and now he could rescue both together!

  Or rather: they’d tied Hakai to Dulei, and now he was going to have to figure out how to rescue both together.

  There was no cutting Hakai loose – the coffin would be long gone by the time Vuchak made it to shore and back. Still, towing two grown men, one actively panicking and the other a literal dead weight, was going to take everything Vuchak had left.

  Time to start giving. With a deep breath and a quick prayer, Vuchak set the knife between his teeth and lunged forward. He grabbed Hakai’s left arm and pulled to flip him back to the air-breathing world –

  – and was rewarded with a blind kick to the gut. “STOP!” Vuchak hissed between clenched teeth, glad that he didn’t have time to meditate on how easily a boot to the knife in his mouth would widen his smile.

  But Hakai either didn’t hear or couldn’t understand him. He answered with a choking gasp and a renewed struggle: the damned fishmen had tied the sack – his shirt – over his whole head, and his every intaken breath sucked in more water from the sodden gray cloth. The poor bastard probably thought he was still drowning, and with no easy way to get that gag out of his mouth, or to talk around the blade in his own, Vuchak was just going to have to haul him back kicking and screaming.

  Well, it would make a pleasant change from doing it to Weisei. Be calm, Vuchak willed him as he took hold of the rope lashing the ihi’ghiva’s arm to the coffin’s side and started the hard swim
back to shore. Breathe slowly. Lie quiet and still.

  Hakai did not do any of those things. Soon, Vuchak didn’t care. The river only understood one direction, and as he fought to cut sideways through its current, Vuchak began to fear that he’d badly overestimated himself – that this might take more strength than he had left to give.

  Before he’d made it even halfway there, his legs ached, his lungs burned, and his spirit faltered. One more, he told himself, and managed another feeble kick. One more¸ though that one was even weaker than the last. One more, but his eyes told his legs how they were being lied to: the ten yards between him and dry land might as well have been ten oceans, and his courage sank as doubts poured in from a thousand cowardly crevices.

  After all, he was a’Pue – born under no star, possessed of no luck. What made him think he would be allowed to succeed here, now, after a lifetime of failure? In just the last week alone, he’d already made a mess of Halfwick’s death… brought shame to the Island Town a’Krah... lost Pipat’s affections, gotten Weisei robbed and nearly killed when he’d fallen asleep on watch, defied Grandfather Marhuk himself and ignorantly ruined whatever great miracle he’d intended at Yaga Chini, and that wasn’t even counting all the terrible things that had followed after.

  Vuchak’s teeth parted as he heaved for breath; the knife slipped from his mouth. He caught it by the hilt before it became an offering to the All-Year River, and leaned forward to resume his shoreward swim.

  Nothing happened.

  When they left Island Town, he had been all youth and health. But he’d spent so much of it on that arduous march through the desert, wrung himself out so hard and thoroughly just to make it here to the river, and now he could no more swim to land than fly up and put out the sun. Now the trap became apparent: he would drown here after all, by no hand but his own. Hakai would drown with him, doomed by his service to a well-intentioned weakling...

  ... well, wait a minute.

  Vuchak looked behind him. Hakai was still tied to the coffin, but it was no longer a morbid embrace: now he was using it like a child learning to swim with a plank of wood, letting it support him as he kicked – not a panicked thrashing anymore, but a soft, thudding, productive rhythm in the water.

  He wanted to live. Vuchak ought to help.

  He deserved to live. Vuchak had to help.

  And as it turned out, Vuchak still had a little more left to give.

  BY THE TIME he dragged himself ashore, the world was rich with miracles. Vuchak let the knife drop from his mouth into the grass, gasping gratefully as he crawled over the sedge, pausing at each step to haul Hakai and Dulei another eight inches behind him. When he felt the coffin firmly beached at last, he collapsed onto his side and lay there, endlessly delighted by stillness and firmness and the euphoric rush of air into his lungs. Hakai seemed content to do likewise, his knees resting slack in the weeds as he remained prostrated over Dulei’s box. Even the death-stench was a welcome comfort – how pleasant it was to breathe!

  It was so pleasant, in fact, that for long, bottomless moments, Vuchak forgot who he was. Consumed with the joy of having rescued Hakai, and recovered Dulei – of having done a vital thing deliberately and with unqualified success – he let whole minutes slip by before remembering the order of his life: if he had succeeded at one thing, he was already failing at something else. But what?

  Weisei. The realization hit him like a fishman’s slap. If they had allowed him to rescue these two, it was because they wanted him distracted while they ambushed his marka.

  Vuchak staggered up to his feet. There wasn’t a second to lose. “Hakai, get ready to run,” he said, picking up his knife and bending to cut the rope. “We have to...”

  Vuchak paused in spite of his fear. He had never seen the ihi’ghiva in any state of undress – but now, as he contemplated the honey-colored flesh of Huitsak’s shirtless slave, it was impossible not to notice the strange, spotty pits under Hakai’s nearer arm.

  Surely not. Surely not.

  With fingers shaking from exhaustion and cold, Vuchak sawed through the rope, took Hakai by the wrist, flipped him over to lie on his back – and took a horrified step backwards.

  “Don’t touch her,” Vuchak’s father said, keeping firm hold of his hand as they walked past the dead woman, her mouth hanging open and her chest a scarred, pitted wasteland. “Don’t even look at her.”

  Vuchak had obeyed then. Even at four, he had understood that the diseases of the Eaten spread through every sense: by touching, by smelling, even by seeing the afflicted, you invited the sickness into yourself.

  So it was more than a bit foolish to stand here now, a grown man past twenty, gaping at that flabby wall of white, puckered divots, meditating on the pox-ravaged flesh of the very same slave he had just...

  ... or was it? What proof did he have that this was Hakai? As the mutilated man on the ground curled up to cover himself, Vuchak reached down to yank away the shirt wound around his head.

  It was and it wasn’t. That was Hakai’s gray-streaked black hair, all right, and his soft, fortyish features, and that was almost certainly his yuye that they’d gagged him with, but his eyes...

  Vuchak had never seen his eyes before. He wasn’t supposed to. Hakai was an ihi’ghiva – a sacred scribe. He could not be bought or sold or beaten, could not be deprived of his possessions or forced into any service that ran contrary to the interests of Aso’ta Marhuk, the one true master of all ihi’ghiva’a. He was untouchable, incorruptible, and to symbolize his removal from worldly temptations, he wore the yuye, not just in sunlight, but always.

  But now the black cloth was trapped between his teeth, and there was nothing between the world and his eyes. Soft brown eyes, worried eyes, middle-aged eyes just beginning to show Marhuk’s marks at their corners...

  ... eyes that did not squint in the harsh daylight, or find any purchase in their surroundings.

  Vuchak tore off his own yuye, not trusting what he saw beyond the fine black mesh, but there was no mistaking it: that was Hakai, and he was blind.

  And he was even now calmly reaching up to get the blindfold out of his mouth, to pick out the knot around his left wrist, to unfold his shirt and slip it on as if nothing had happened – as if he were a clean, wholesome person.

  “Sir, I understand –”

  “Shut up.” Vuchak buried his fear like a cat covering its waste, careful not to leave anything that might smell of weakness. Weisei. He had to think of his marka, not this infectious plague-blinded slave. He had to decide whether to go slowly, burdened by Dulei’s weight, or make a run for it, and chance leaving him behind. He had to guess how far downstream the river had carried them, and how long it would take to make up the distance. He had to think of everything, anything besides those horrible puckered scars.

  “If I could just –”

  Vuchak turned on him in an instant. “I said SHUT UP. I don’t have time to think about you or talk to you – I don’t have one more minute to spend on you. I left Weisei behind, gibbering idiot that I am, and now I’m who-knows-how-far away with you, poxy liar that you are, and by the time we...”

  Hakai pointed.

  It was a crass, obscene gesture, making a vulgar weapon of one’s finger. Yes, there were rare moments when an uplifted chin just wouldn’t do... but for Hakai to do it unprompted and in full view of his superior was as brazen and shocking as a maiden’s fart.

  As a result, it took Vuchak a long beat to recover his wits enough to wonder what Hakai was pointing at.

  He turned, squinting in the sunlight, but his beleaguered eyes found nothing of interest in the rumpled red-gray landscape. He was facing upstream, to the north, with the Mother of Mountains a little to the left, her soft, weathered crags majestically silhouetted against the blue bowl of the sky. The trees and grasses nearby all sang a green song of gratitude for their nearness to the life-giving water of the All-Year River, while the shrubs and cacti on the hills weathered the drought with rust-colored stoici
sm. That was as it should be. This was the Eiya’Krah, the ancient home of the a’Krah people, gifted to them on the fourth day of the World That Is, loved and honored every day for the thousands of years since – and it was beautiful.

  Beautiful, and yet utterly unhelpful.

  Vuchak glanced again at Hakai’s crude finger, and back out at the place it seemed to be aiming at – and just there, as if by magic, a tiny figure appeared over the nearest hill. It grew quickly, too large and too fast to be a person on foot. As Vuchak replaced his yuye and shielded his eyes, he was delighted to see the dark, unmistakable shape of a man on horseback – well, almost a man – coming for them at a gallop.

  Vuchak squelched the temptation to call out and make a spectacle of himself, lest he break his marka’s concentration. Instead, he reveled in the stomach-slackening relief of knowing that Weisei was well and within sight – that everyone who had been made a part of Vuchak’s responsibility at the beginning of this godforsaken expedition had now returned to it alive, or at least no more dead than before.

  Well, except for Ylem... but that was more than the wrung-out twitching of Vuchak’s muscles could contemplate. “You can stop now,” he said, his voice as drained as the rest of him.

  Hakai put his arm down and resumed reassembling himself. He said nothing, as Vuchak had ordered, but now the silence between them had a stiffness to it, and Vuchak had no idea what to fill it with. A week ago, his old, automatic anger would have burst forth with furious zeal, blaming Hakai for lying by omission, for endangering everyone by disguising himself as a sighted person, for drinking and eating and sleeping and breathing alongside wholesome, unblemished people without ever once disclosing the pestilential ghosts he had bottled up inside him.

  But the greater part of Vuchak’s anger had burned up in the fire, and the rest had washed out in the water, and there was nothing left now but wet, ashen rationality: Hakai had done everything anyone had asked of him, as well or better than expected, and any fault in his service or danger in his person existed only as an unsubstantiated what-if. He hadn’t made anyone sick. He hadn’t failed in his duty. He’d even spotted Weisei, by whatever divine gifts he used to supplant his eyes – which reminded Vuchak that he still had no idea what god or nation had authored this strange, inscrutable servant.