Dreams of the Eaten

by Arianne Thompson

  Ah Che hunched over, hot tears running down his face, wild ideas flying through his mind. He would run away back home... but Wally Hen had gone back to find the village deserted, and there was no telling whether anyone was left alive to return.

  He would go to the Kaia who lived on the edge of camp, whose language was at least close enough to understand... but they had no reason to want a scrawny Maia boy who might still be sheltering disease.

  He would go back to the dream-world and beg Mama to keep him there... but in the deepest, most honest part of himself, he knew that if she’d left him here this long, it was because she either didn’t have the power to take him, or didn’t want him to go.

  Ah Che curled over onto himself, his back and shoulders heaving under the warmth of an unseen sun. He couldn’t be here. He couldn’t stand it – not for another minute. He pulled his hair and rocked on his heels and bit his tongue until it bled, but all that did was make him cry harder. And the parts of his body cried too – for food, for movement, for everything he’d denied and deprived them of through all these long, wasted days.

  It was no good. In spite of everything, his fever had long since abated, his tremors stopped, his blisters healed to fresh, puckered scars. The door to the Other Lands had closed, and he was stuck on this side, in this life.

  Ah Che sat there in the street, runny-nosed and wet-faced, as the world went by around him.

  He knew the word for ‘elder brother’. Ah Set had called him by it before he could even pronounce his given name. To repurpose it now, to give it to that clumsy half-white thief like a pair of cheap shoes, would be a heinous betrayal.

  But in a world full of closed doors, he couldn’t afford to pass by the one that would still open for him... even if it was a smelly tent flap.

  Ah Che rocked forward to a tiptoeing squat. He emptied his nose and wiped his eyes, and then gently scraped and patted the dirt until the earth covered all of what he had given it. He could not reclaim his old life, but his new one would still belong to the Maia. He swore it.

  Then he stood and reached out for the oilcloth fold.

  “What are your wants, Ah Che?”

  Even with broken words, the hard, suspicious voice from inside the tent was awful to bear. He’d never heard Wally Hen angry before.

  Ah Che let his hand fall away from the tent. He wrapped it around his opposite fist and held both together under his ribs, trying to force the word up and out of his throat before it choked him.

  It was Ah Set’s word. A family word. It didn’t belong to that gangly stranger in there. It wasn’t Ah Che’s to give.

  But maybe it could be loaned for a little while.

  “I’m – I’m sorry, emi,” he said. “May I please come in?”

  There was a small silence. Ah Che held his breath. Finally, mercifully, the answer came to him in the clump of heavy, ugly boots, and the opening swush of the tent flap.

  ELIM HAD NEVER had much of an opinion about mountains. They were pretty enough in pictures, seemed well-suited for handing down godly commandments, and they would have livened up the horizon back home. He could approve of mountains on principle, in much the same way as he would lend his endorsement to petticoats, libraries, and the moon.

  That was before he’d tried to climb one.

  Now, he’d decided, mountains were awful – just the most horrible, hateful, unnatural piles of shameless man-eating lies. This one here kept switch-backing and back-tracking on him, turning easy roads into thigh-slaughtering steep slopes, widening the trail right before washing it clean out, opening gaps in the rock just big enough for whatever midgety crow-men had carved it and leaving him to duck and squeeze and pray to God he didn’t put a foot clean through their old rotten bridge-boards. And about the only thing worse than the rocks – the ones in his shoes, the ones in his path, the ones hanging down overhead waiting to crush him like a lizard under a dropped brick – was the absence of rocks. Which was to say the absence of ground. Which was to say the appalling, nauseating drop mere inches from his feet, the yawning abyss of scrubby red earth just waiting for him to put a foot wrong, just waiting to receive his broken body like a window-pane whacked by a cross-eyed idiot pigeon.

  Elim didn’t look. He didn’t look to the side, where the long drop was waiting for him, or above, where the rock loomed over him, and he certainly didn’t look ahead, because about the only thing worse than noticing how high up he’d already come was thinking about how much farther he still had to go.

  So he kept his gaze on the one safe place – the ground just in front of him – and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. It was harder than he could have imagined. There was no way to use his right hand for balance, at least not while he was wearing Hawkeye like a dirty fur coat, and he couldn’t get any rhythm – couldn’t plan farther than his next three steps. His legs burned, his breath steamed, and the only thing keeping him going was the thought of how much pain his passenger would endure if Elim set him down for a rest.

  Elim didn’t want to think about what kind of miracle it would take for the a’Krah to fix Hawkeye. He especially didn’t want to think about how Sil was keeping up behind him – not wheezing, not panting, not even complaining. He might not have been breathing at all. Elim’s master-plan, such as it was, was to pour his brains into his legs, and not think about what might happen to either of his two desperately irregular friends before they got to the top – or what would happen to him after.

  Then he noticed the tracks.

  They came up from another trail, one that converged from the eastern side of the mountain, and carried on forward from there. It was hard to read anything in the hard, sullen earth, but as Elim’s big feet overlaid that other trailsign with his own, trudging on for minute after stooped, sweaty minute, he began to think that he knew those footprints.

  Or better to say, he knew the hoofprints.

  There probably weren’t too many horses out here to begin with. Fewer still with eastern-style shoeing. And Elim would lay down a virgin dollar that there was only one walking around with steel-shod back feet and bare-naked fronts... even if that horse shouldn’t be walking at all.

  Even if Elim had shot it himself.

  He’d seen Actor roll over and die, watched the blood trickle down his forehead and the life leave his big brown eyes. Nothing short of the hand of God Almighty could have brought that horse back up to his feet.

  But then again, Elim would have said the same thing about Sil.

  “Well, that’s something,” Sil rasped. God, he sounded like he still had that noose around his neck.

  “Yup,” Elim grunted. He didn’t want to see, hear, or smell his partner just then – but more than that, he didn’t want anybody else’s thinking encouraging his own.

  Because already he was thinking that there were two sets of footprints accompanying that horse, and that he knew who they belonged to. He was thinking – hoping – that that meant that they’d made it through that night at the river alive: that Bootjack had fought off the fishmen, that Way-Say was alive and well-ish, just as Hawkeye had promised he would be. Elim had less idea what to make of the long, continuous scrape-marks that followed them. They might have been poles or sticks of some kind, heavily weighted and dragging behind the horse. Elim couldn’t imagine Ax taking kindly to that. Really, he couldn’t imagine that he was imagining that Ax was still alive.

  “I’m not,” Hawkeye said.

  Elim just about shit a kitten. For one precarious second, his balance deserted him – which he rectified by positively throwing himself away from the abyss, against the sheer wall on his left. He would have smashed his shoulder right into it, if Hawkeye’s backside hadn’t kindly intervened.

  “Elim, what –” Sil began.

  “Hey, buddy,” Elim said, forcing some light into his tone. “That mean you’re awake now?”

  He looked down, to where Hawkeye’s head sloped off Elim’s left shoulder. He was staring almost philosophically at the gr
ound, filthy and half-blinded by his own hair, and yet as calm and sober as a clerk in church. “No,” he said, and commenced picking at Elim’s pants-leg.

  Elim was irrationally glad to hear Hawkeye’s voice again, and yet too nervous to laugh. “If you’re allotting on picking my pocket, you’re aiming on the low side. Here, how about we have us a little sit-down, let you see the world right-side up for a change?”

  “Elim,” Sil said again, now close enough that his stink preceded him, “we really don’t have –”

  Elim’s right hand was occupied in pinning Hawkeye’s arm to his good leg in a triangle-pattern centered around Elim’s head and shoulders. It kept Hawkeye’s rifle-splinted leg from bashing up against anything, prevented the rest of him from slipping, and left Elim one free hand to keep from falling to both their deaths. It was also exactly as uncomfortable as carrying a grown man ought to be, and had been for miles now.

  “Sil, he was a hundred thirty pounds before I strapped my gun on him, and listening to you don’t make him any lighter. I am going to set him down wherever I dang please, so you might as well...”

  Elim trailed off as Hawkeye turned his head, forcing his face into the meat of Elim’s upper arm. It was a peculiar, unnatural sensation, as if Hawkeye meant to look at something and didn’t even realize that he’d met resistance. He stayed like that, his neck twisted in stubborn, senseless rigidity, his pants-picking fingers carrying on perfectly undisturbed.

  Elim was disturbed enough for both of them. He set the Sundowner down as gingerly as he could, leaning him up against the wall and watching in vain for any sign of understanding of rationality – even a recognition of pain as his smashed leg touched the ground. “Hawkeye?” When he got no answer, Elim spit on the end of his poncho and stooped to see if he couldn’t at least clean some of the filth off the poor man’s face.

  Hawkeye just looked out over the edge, staring intently at nothing. Sil studied him the way a boy might consider a dead squirrel. “Well, look, he’s obviously not – ah!”

  Sil’s grousing ended in a rusty gasp, punctuated by a vast sandy whush. When Elim looked up, Sil was gone – and so was the trail he’d been standing on.

  “Sil?” Elim almost couldn’t bring himself to look – and then he couldn’t look away. “Sil! Holy God, Sil, are you all right?”

  From twenty feet down, a big black spot left by the minor avalanche of dirt and stones disappearing down the slope, Will Halfwick’s little brother looked up. He was clinging to something, a root or a rock so small that Elim couldn’t even make it out, and his frightened, earth-streaked face was almost indistinguishable from the mountain. “NO, damn you, I’m not! Pull me up! Pull me –” His voice broke down into a coughing gurgle, which only put the spurs to Elim’s panic.

  He had to help him, before Sil lost his grip. He had to save him – but with what?

  Elim had no rope, no tools. Hell, he didn’t even have a rag to spit on. He could tie his pants to his poncho and lower that down, maybe get Hawkeye’s shirt too – but that wasn’t going to do it. That wouldn’t even come close.

  Elim wheeled around, looking for anything, any root or shrub or stick he could rip out and put to use...

  ... but in the end, the only hint of help he could find were a few dusty footprints and the tracks of one half-shod, questionably-dead horse.

  That would have to do.

  “Hold on, buddy,” Elim called down. “I’m going for help, and I’ll be right back for you. Just dig in your heels and hold on!”

  He didn’t give Sil a choice, or Hawkeye either. He just turned and bolted up the trail, praying to God that the two of them would have the grip and good sense to stay put.

  DÍA’S COURAGE DIDN’T fail her. But it could be said to falter when she got to the crows.

  They were still perched there in the piñon trees, just as they had been yesterday evening – maybe a few more or less. It was hard to tell.

  But there was no mistaking the tufts of brown dog hair nestled like pieces of solstice popcorn in those piney green needles – nor the spots of blood on the ground before them. And there was no telling whether the viciousness of that second attack owed more to the Dog Lady’s desperate tenacity, or the crows’ anger at rebuffing her trespass a second time.

  Día approached very, very slowly. “Please excuse my return,” she said in Marín, pinning her hopes less on the words than the solicitous tone that shaped them.“I’m sorry to bother you a second time, but I have a very urgent errand. Would you please allow me to pass this way?”

  Too late, she realized that she ought to have asked that differently: Día trusted herself to interpret a bird’s objection much more reliably than its consent.

  Well, too late now.

  So she bowed from the waist, wrists upturned and outstretched, and repeated the words Weisei had taught her. “Kalei ne ei’ha.” Please see me kindly.

  Eighteen pairs of beady black eyes stared down at her with varying degrees of interest. Nothing else happened.

  Día straightened, willing to give her eyeteeth for a second a’Krah translation. By which I mean, please let me pass, and please, please, please don’t peck out my eyes or dive-bomb my face.

  One crow turned to preen its nearest neighbor.

  Día did not know much about crow behavior... but at this point, they could have blessed her eye with a warm white dropping, and she would have read it as a sign of God’s will for peace.

  So she bowed and turned out her wrists again, even more deeply than before. “Thank you very much, reverend crows. You have my deepest gratitude.” And she went walking on…very, very slowly.

  It was difficult to force herself not to keep watching them, not to look as if she mistrusted them. Día silently counted out twenty paces, until the cluster of piñon trees was well behind her. Then she let out a stomach-emptying breath.

  The Dog Lady had been right, then: Día might have been seen with her, but at least she wasn’t considered to belong to her. That was a distinction she was eager to keep.

  And having now passed those first ominous gatekeepers, Día would lose no time on her quest. She followed the fresh, faint footprints in the dirt – one light pair of eastern boots, and one big, heavy set of moccasins – and only barely kept her pace in check. It might be disrespectful to be seen running in this sacred place… even if it would be downright dangerous to be caught up here after dark.

  The cold air dried Día’s throat and sharpened her lungs, entreating her to consider how far she might have to go and where her next drink was going to come from. Día’s answer lay in those two sets of human footprints, which soon became four and a horse, which led her up a narrow rise and under an especially sinister-looking rocky overhang and around a steep, broken bend –

  – where a filthy, earth-covered man sat propped against the sheer sandstone face, slumped over as if drunk or dead.

  And was that a gun tied to his leg?

  “Hello?” Día approached cautiously, having never been promised that Marhuk did not harbor thieves or road-agents on his holy mountain. “Can you hear me? Are you hurt?”

  He didn’t answer – which wasn’t to say there was no reply.

  “Who’s there?”

  It was a nasty, guttural growl, coming from somewhere down below. Día crouched on the spot, mindful to keep an eye on the first stranger even as she glanced down in search of the second.

  He was about halfway down the slope, clinging to something Día couldn’t see – and though his voice was monstrous, almost unrecognizable, she knew that tone all too well.

  “Elim, are you there? Pull me up, damn you!”

  Día put a hand to her mouth. There, hanging twenty feet down, was the very same Sil Halfwick she had accidentally revived back in Island Town.

  Well, perhaps not quite the same: he sounded awful, and probably looked worse. From Día’s present perspective, he was the same black-clad blot he’d always been – a man-sized fly in the ointment of creation. The one who
had lied to her, tricked her, stolen her horse and abandoned her. The one who had left her to bake in the desert sun, wandering helplessly like a sun-touched vagrant. The one whose last words to her had been filthy scorched whore.

  The one Weisei had asked her to save.

  “Elim, what the devil are you playing at? Answer me!”

  Well, and how was she meant to save him? Día leaned a little further out, just in case she’d missed some hidden path, but no: that looked like a sixty-foot drop, and he was nearly halfway down. There was no going down for him – he’d have to be drawn up somehow.

  But Día had no rope or anything like it, and that poor fellow in the corner looked even more ill-equipped than she. She had her cassock, her belt, her knife, and a powerful disinclination to put herself out for a wretched, selfish, manipulative, hateful young man who had brought her nothing but grief.

  But Día didn’t live by her own wishes – and thank God for that. She closed her eyes, reaching down past her own pettiness, past everything that she would call herself, seeking the infinite wellspring at the bottom of her heart. Well, Master, she thought, if you want me to help him, show me how. Help me do the right thing. Give me a sign. Día held still until she had quieted everything inside her – until she knew she could hear any answer that came.

  When she opened her eyes again, there was just that same Sil Halfwick, clinging like a fatted tick to the mountain’s flank…that same mountain, sheer sandstone walls bottoming out into a dry, stunted forest down below… that same empty space stretching out between them, a lovely, fatal absence of anything but clean, sharp high-desert air.

  And in her periphery, curtaining the picture almost as an afterthought, were the swaying, ropy locks of Día’s own hair.

  Her insides froze.