Dreams of the Eaten

by Arianne Thompson

  So they drank in the rich, thickening rage until nothing else was left – until Porté, one of Many, finally became One.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE GLASS KEY

  THE EARTHLY GODS had no tongues – that was what Weisei had said. They could speak only through the hearts of those who sought to listen.

  So as Día walked higher and farther into the high desert sunlight, she listened... but not too much.

  Puppy, the voice echoed, for perhaps the ten thousandth time. Big puppy. Strange puppy. Sad.

  Día was not about to answer back. She let the voice pull her toward it, mindful to hold her own thoughts high and apart, as if she were carrying a bowl of corn porridge with a lunging dog circling around her.

  That was the easy part. It was harder to know what path to take: the Dog Lady could not have been more than a few miles away, as the crow flew – but Día was no crow, not even an a’Krah, and finding her way through the strange, alien foothills of Marhuk’s domain was a slow and laborious task. Weisei’s directions were as well-meant as they were impractical: the tree he had cited must have been cut down or blown to flinders by lightning, and the fresh wildcat droppings dissuaded her from trying the footpath she found, and even a lifetime of going barefoot had not made her soles tough enough for the razor-edged scree that littered the nearer slope of the great red hill. By the time Día finished backtracking and picked her way around to the other side, half the afternoon was gone, and she was footsore and famished.

  So she sat in a shady hollow and ate from the cold venison steak, squelching the temptation to loiter in the dry bluestem: she would not like to find herself still out here alone when night fell.

  Then again, did she really want to see what the Dog Lady would become at sunset?

  Loves-Me. He-Loves-Me.

  The waxy deer-grease lingered on her tongue as she brushed herself off to resume her meticulous course – an unpleasant reminder of the soap Miss du Chenne had been so fond of applying to the mouths of impertinent children. Día could not have said why she had appeared in that strange nightmare, though she was as unwelcome there as anywhere else: Miss du Chenne had been a bad teacher and an even worse foster-mother, and Día would not forgive her for running off and leaving poor Foursto try and parent a human child alone.

  Child. Human child. Earth child. Mine. Mine. Mine.

  Día stopped with one foot on an out-jutting rock. That was too close for coincidence. Could the Dog Lady hear her? Was she listening, even now? Or was Día beginning to lose her reason again? It was a warmer day than yesterday, but nothing like the heat of Island Town’s river valley.

  The wind picked up, a strong gust pushing Día forward, and she couldn’t resist glancing up at the afternoon sun. God had made human beings with earth and fire – that was what the Verses said. Mereaux were born of earth and water. And above them were the angels: bodiless beings of air and fire, spirits of divine inspiration. Día did not dare stare at the sun looking for a telltale shimmer in the air – that was how her mother had been caught, all those years ago – but she quickened her pace, willingly pushed along by the wind at her back, and her thoughts picked up in tandem.

  A child – a half-human child. The Dog Lady’s child. The whole cause of that bloody disaster in Weisei’s story, the reason the Dog Lady had apparently dragged Día through half the entire loveless desert, the source of her strange, awful transformation that night after the fire, as she tore someone apart looking for him...

  ... or having already found him?

  Lost puppy. Stolen puppy. Mine.

  Día remembered clinging to that huge, furry back as she – they – plunged into the water. She remembered tearing apart a living, thrashing body. And she remembered that last, desperate echo in her own mind, pleading for rescue as the great lady’s jaws closed around some other drowning soul, pulling him from the water even as she abandoned Día to the mercy of the current. The Dog Lady wasn’t looking for her baby anymore. She had already found him.

  So then why such sadness? Had she been mistaken? Had he died?

  Día’s foot slipped, sending loose stones spilling down the little rise as she hurried on. Her thoughts flashed to the a’Krah’s missing manservant, but Vuchak had described him with gray hair. Not him. Not their slain prince, either – that was Marhuk’s child.

  No, the Dog Lady had been lying with settlers, Weisei said. Eadans. White people. And the only white person she’d seen out here had stolen the horse right out from underneath her and vanished.

  Half white, she belatedly realized. The Dog Lady’s child must have been half white.

  Now see here, she’d said to the Halfwick boy, in the hour before his betrayal. I’ve brought his horse, his shirt, and his dog –

  He’d cut her off there. He doesn’t have a dog.

  But maybe the dog had had him.

  Surely not, though. Surely, surely not. Yes, Elim was mixed, and yes, he was of a plausible age – but he didn’t have any marks, and he was too big to belong to anyone but the Washchaw, and besides which, he already had a family back home across the border. Even if he weren’t technically theirs –

  MINE. The voice in her head hit her like a gunshot. MINE!

  Día instinctively dropped, flattening herself to the ground and clapping her hands to her ears.

  Not yours, she thought back. Not you!

  But she still felt it – someone else’s anger bubbling up in her chest – someone else’s grief rending her mind. God is my one master, she countered. I will for nothing want. He holds me fast. I shall not waver. He lifts me up. I shall not fall.

  She went on like that, repeating the words until they were nothing but meaningless sounds – until the wild, foreign thing inside her finally went quiet.

  When she finally opened her eyes and uncovered her ears, the sun was still shining, but the wind had died away. The angel of inspiration, if there had been one, was gone.

  And in its place was just a voice – an ordinary mortal voice, speaking in Ardish and echoing faintly off the hills.

  “... THAT for your stupid useless hide! As if I’ve got nothing better to do...”

  Día picked herself up by inches, absently brushing the first exploratory ants from the shoulder of her cassock as she climbed up the little rise and peered over.

  There was Elim, lying beside a little pool – but not the Elim she had known. This one was monstrous, massive, well past seven feet tall. His nearer hand had swollen and hardened to something twice its natural size, like a vast mottled gauntlet, and his farther foot was gone, replaced by a huge hard-walled hoof, and all over him, from his bare chest to his naked left eye, his every spot and patch glistened with a coat of fine brown hair.

  And there beside him, almost as an afterthought, was Miss du Chenne.

  “–ROTTEN, UNGRATEFUL CHILD – I should have drowned you when I had the chance! And after everything I’ve done for you –”

  A stone tumbled down the slope. Someone was there. Shea shut her mouth and camouflaged in an instant, blanching to a rocky dappled gray... but there was no hiding the boy.

  She squinted, her ruined eyes just able to discern a dark shape peering over the southern lip of this pocket-sized little valley – an a’Krah?

  “Miss du Chenne?”

  No, not an a’Krah. A familiar voice, and a name she hadn’t heard in years – used by someone who absolutely should not, should NOT be here.

  “Día?” Shea dropped her camouflage and stood, closing the distance as fast as her foreshortened feet would take her. Yes, that was her – black face, black hair, black robe, black everything – standing there as dumb and incredulously as a child watching a road accident. God, what a sight!

  “What is this?” Día asked weakly, her gaze riveted on the boy. “What –”

  Shea didn’t let her finish: she accosted her just above the elbows and shook her, her grip damp and kitten-weak. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “You stupid, stupid girl – you’re goin
g to get yourself killed!”

  Día’s gaze lingered on the boy – Yashu-Diiwa, or ‘Elim’, as she probably knew him – and only belatedly looked down to register Shea’s presence.

  Then, of course, Día remembered herself. She jerked out of Shea’s grasp and stared down at her, all incense and indignation. “I am not your pupil or your property,” she said, “and I’ll thank you not to touch me again.”

  Ugh. Insolent child. “Well, thank heavens for small favors,” Shea snapped. “Any pupil of mine would have more sense than to wander about in the middle of the godforsaken wilderness.”

  They glared at each other for a moment, Shea trying hard not to look as wizened and pitiful as she felt. There was Día, who’d once been small and timid enough to pick up and carry, now looming tall and grown and fearless over her... and there was Shea, who’d once had her every instruction instantly and unquestioningly obeyed, now bald and nude and stripped of every human artifice. Easy enough to keep a classroom in line in those hard shoes, that god-awful corset, that pitiless itchy wig... but now there was nothing to hide her amputated toes, her tailless backside, her withered gill-plumes and scarred, squinting eyes. This impertinent girl had gone and turned herself into a grown woman while Shea wasn’t looking, and there was no turning her back again.

  How extremely tedious.

  But there was still something girlish in her, or else some other reason for her hesitation. “Well,” Día said presently. “Be that as it may...” Her gaze flicked again to Yashu-Diiwa’s huge, useless bulk, and even Shea’s poor vision could see curiosity burning through her.

  That would do for a start. “You want to know about him? Answer me first: how did you get here? What did you think you were doing?” Día didn’t look terribly worse for the wear – Shea could see that much – but her cassock was weathered and stained, and her prayer beads were gone, and if she had any supplies at all, they weren’t on her person. “Tell me you didn’t come all the way out here by yourself, and without even a pair of shoes. Tell me you aren’t that stupid.”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything,” Día retorted, hands disappearing inside her pockets. “If you can’t even –”

  “Then tell it to Fours,” Shea broke in. “Or better yet, give me the message, since you’ve apparently taken it into your empty god-bothering head to die out here!”

  Día recoiled, stiff as a board, and some trick of the wind made her dreadlocks move like a nest of waist-length black snakes. “Since when did you ever care about Fours?”

  Shea stared at her for a moment, breathless with astonishment. Then she slapped her.

  And Día slapped her right back.

  But she was a woman now, a full-grown earth-person, and she didn’t know her own strength. Frail and unprepared, with no proper toes for balance, Shea toppled back to land with spine-jarring, ass-lacerating indignity on the sharp stones behind her. She camouflaged automatically, pain radiating up through her hips as she broke out in a predator-deterring, pointless bitter sweat.

  Then, of course, Día was all shame and remorse. “Oh – I’m sorry, Miss du Chenne, I didn’t mean –”

  “Go to hell,” Shea snarled as she righted herself, “and take him with you!”

  To hell with her, and him too. To hell with all of them. She clambered over the rocks on hands and knees until she got to the little placid pool at the edge of the mountain’s root, and slipped into it like a hatchling turtle going out to sea. The whole blighted world could go take a good fuck to itself – see if she cared!

  THAT WAS BAD. That was a terrible, stupid, awful thing to do. Día held still as Miss du Chenne crawled away and disappeared into the little pond, fighting the urge to call out again. There went her best chance of... well, of anything, and Día had all but spit in her eye.

  Why did that woman have to make everything so endlessly difficult? Día curled her fists inside her pockets. Forget compassion and empathy – if she could just be civil for a moment...!

  Well, let her sit and stew. That pond was far too small to keep a mereau breathing: it wouldn’t be even five minutes before Miss du Chenne would have to surface again, and then they’d see what her little sulking spell had done for her attitude.

  Ugh. And now Día was starting to sound like her. This was all wrong.

  She sat down beside Elim, mindful not to touch him, and leaned forward to pull her hair across her face. This was usually the part where she would take out her prayer beads, but they were all gone – lost or smashed or thrown away in a fit of blasphemy – and now she had nothing to comfort herself but herself. She breathed deep, relaxing into the faint, familiar smell of smoke and oil, and gathered the ends of her dreadlocks – the parts her father had backcombed and waxed himself. It had been twelve years since she’d felt his touch, but six inches of her remembered it still.

  So she sat there, head down, elbows resting on her butterflied knees, holding the tips of her hair in two horizontal fists – holding her father’s hands as she sought to center herself between them.

  She had come this far. She had followed a dog and an angel and the directions of a holy man of the a’Krah to get here. She was right where she was supposed to be, even if she didn’t yet know what to do. That was all right. She would put away anger, and guilt, and fear. She would be still and quiet. She would listen.

  She let down her guard, readying herself to receive more of the Dog Lady’s anxious cries. But in the still, arid afternoon, there was nothing but the sound of Elim’s breathing – deep, even, and almost supernaturally slow.

  Día did not look up. It would be rude to stare more than she already had, and dangerous to touch him.

  But it might be all right to have a soft word.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to the rumpled black fabric in her lap. “I wish I had helped you down when I had the chance. I wish I had asked better questions. I wish...” I wish none of this had happened.

  But that seemed a petty, shortsighted thing to say when the Dog Lady was newly awakened and Elim had been transformed and Halfwick was stuck in the crevice between life and death – when so many unknowable celestial gears seemed to be turning on this one time and place. “I wish I understood.”

  “Well,” said that ageless, sexless alto, “that we might be able to arrange.”

  Día dropped her hair and straightened. Miss du Chenne was crouching – squatting, really – at the edge of the pool, her skin its natural blue-white color and her expression unreadable.

  If this was her chance at a fresh start, Día would take it. “I’d be tremendously grateful for that,” she said.

  The old mereau eyed her. “Does ‘grateful’ include ‘mannerly’?”

  “Yes ma’am,” Día said, and stood up to curtsey. It was a funny thing to do in a cassock. “I don’t have an apple, and you don’t have a desk, but I’m sure we can make do.” And she stepped forward to put a handful of Weisei’s jerky strips on a flat rock halfway between the two of them.

  For a moment, Miss du Chenne darkened in suspicion, as if she were being patronized or humored. Then she squinted at the rock. “What foolishness is this? What are you...”

  Día watched her old teacher crawl out to satisfy herself, and felt an irrational pang of remorse. She had been so fierce, so frightening back then – all spine and stride and iron-tight bun. It was hard to reconcile that memory with the wet, half-blind creature now ravenously stuffing herself with dried meat.

  “Now that’s more like it,” Miss du Chenne said around her first mouthful. “Your papá must have taught you some respect after all. Now you sit right there and mind the lesson, because I don’t intend to repeat myself – and when I’m finished, I will be the one asking questions. Is that clear?”

  “Yes ma’am,” Día said again, and folded her hem to sit in an uncharacteristically ladylike style, knees and ankles together and hands in her lap. It wasn’t the most comfortable posture, and the rocky ground didn’t make for a particularly fine seat – but if this was
the price of enlightenment, she might yet call it a bargain.

  “NOW THEN,” SHEA said, when her errant student had composed herself. “Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess... and not technically a princess, but an immortal queen, the youngest of all the earthly gods. And she wasn’t exactly beautiful, either. I suppose you might call her classically handsome.” Actually, she was downright homely – too much dog in her face, even in human form. Nevermind. Shea splayed her toe-stumps out over the rocks and went on.

  “And her name was U’ru, the Dog Lady, and her people were the Ara-Naure. Her domain was healing, and earthly pleasures, and the love that grew between human beings and all the tame creatures of the world. She lived with her people in the Etascado river valley, in and around the place we call Island Town, and they were all very happy together. The end.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Día’s voice was calm and unapologetic.

  Shea decided to let this bit of juvenile contrarianism slide, and paused to help herself to more of the jerky. “Yes, it was,” she said. “The rest is all tedium – history and misery, names and dates. Nothing worthwhile in any of that. What do you care who did what, and who killed who? They’re all dead now anyway.”

  That was not true, of course. But every time the story was told, people summarized and selected, and a little more of it got lost. Shea might be the only one left alive who knew or cared that Osho-Dacha, her favorite of all U’ru’s many children, had been a wild-minded boy of eight – that she had taught him how to fish, that he had stained his face with blackberries every chance he got and once made her a wig of cottonwood fluff. Soon, all that would matter was that he had been trampled to death when the Winter Wolves came – his body lying in the street just one more grisly tragedy. And then he would not even have a name anymore – he would be one of forty-five, or of fifty-eight, or whatever number some cloistered page-molester decided had died in that one of a thousand unnamed, unimportant little clashes. He would be a statistic, which would then become a footnote, which would then be shelved and forgotten. And why should Shea abet that? Why should she be complicit in that damned summary, in that genocide by abridgement, just to satisfy this squirming larva here?