Dreams of the Eaten

by Arianne Thompson

  It was also an exhausting way to live.

  Said the salmon to the bear. Vuchak could all but see Echep’s smile. He would say something like that, something clever and funny that would either make Vuchak forget what he was sour about or else think about it differently.

  And maybe it wasn’t so bad. After all, Weiseiwasn’t curled up dead in a box. Vuchak wasn’t going to have to empty his own veins. Far from it: in defiance of all odds and his own rotten luck, he’d managed to retrieve Hakai, Dulei, and Ylem. He would go home in honor, have the pleasure of enjoying a real rest in a real bed, of eating hot seed-babies and fresh kohai’Lei, of sequestering himself in his own land, amidst his own people – at least for a little while. Who could ask for more than that?

  Vuchak breathed deep, comforting himself with the familiar, sinus-drying thin air. This was still his place, his heritage, even if he hadn’t seen it from quite this angle before. The piñon trees were still giving way to oak and pine, just as they did on the western side, and the jays and woodpeckers were still going noisily about their business, and the fronts of his thighs were still throbbing consolation – reassuring him with every laborious upward step that he was on the right path.

  Yes, that was it. He’d collected his companions and done his duty and now they were going home again – and the rest of his troubles would look so much smaller from up there.

  So Vuchak pinned his hopes on the hidden place just above and beyond the pine-furred crags overhead, and set his mind to finding it. He went quickly as the trail ambled up into the stunted trees, then more carefully as it swung back out to skirt the edge of the cliff again. Then the wide track narrowed to an overgrown deer-path, scarcely wider than a poor buck’s antlers, and he stopped.

  “Weisei, wait.” Vuchak needed to find some crack or hollow he could duck into to let the horse pass, and then pick up the travois poles from behind. He trusted Weisei to put the horse’s feet right – and praised the gods that they didn’t belong to a spooky, balking, still-living animal – but the poles were shoddily secured at best, and if the right one slipped over the edge... well, Dulei had suffered enough indignities for one lifetime.

  Weisei stopped on the little wooden bridge that filled in the eroded gap in the trail, humming the remembering-song all the while. He stood there, gaunt and concentrating, keeping his head down and his hand cupped around the horse’s mouth as if he were feeding it.

  Good. Vuchak scouted ahead in the deepening twilight, searching for a safe passing-place. There would be a way through here – he just had to find it.

  “Mister,” Ylem called forward in his abysmal Marín. His accent was atrocious as always, his voice warbling nervous. “Mister, please to see...”

  Damn it, what now? Vuchak turned, straining to see back past the horse. “What do you want?”

  The answer came as a low, rumbling FRRROAAAAAAAAK.

  CHAPTER NINE

  AMNESTY FOR THE DAMNED

  AH CHE, A child of eleven winters, jostled his partner and laughed. “You will not!”

  Wally Hen, who had just declared his intention to father eighteen children and name each of them after one of Ah Che’s sins, replied with perfect aplomb. “Well, when Snores-Like-A-Hog-Fart is old enough to understand, I’ll tell him you said so.”

  It took a moment to work out the Ardish words – Wally Hen sounded even more like a gobbling turkey in his own language than he did in Maia – but Ah Che’s answer sprang instantly to mind. “And I tell – I’ll tell him the story how you” – What was the word for ‘sired’? – “how you made him with only your right hand.”

  Ah Che didn’t understand why that was funny, but he’d heard enough variations to be confident that it was. And he wasn’t wrong: the aforementioned hand, the one that Ah Che held as the two of them walked down the street, curled into a fist, leaving only one finger to stand out straight. “Oh, we’ll see about that. You better learn to duck, buddy: I’m gonna have so many woman throwing their petties at me, you’ll think you got caught in a cunny cave-in.”

  And that was how they went: Ah Che holding on to Wally Hen with one hand and carrying their dinner-pail with the other, and Wally Hen leading the way through the bustling streets to work.

  It was a wonderful thing. Ah Che had only been hired three months ago, but already he was the best in the sorting-house, better than any of the sighted people: all he had to do was pick up a piece of ore and know, as surely as he knew his own fingers, whether it was pure or mixed or worthless gangue. He wasn’t the only one gifted with earth-sense, but his was easily the keenest: the Kaia workers were old, their gifts so worn down by blasphemy and alcohol that they could scarcely tell manganite from lead. Ah Che would not become like them. He would keep the ways of the Maia – well, as much as he could out here – and save his money, and in three more months, when he had worked half a year without a seizure, Mr. Burrell had promised to recommend him for work in the mine proper.

  Ah Che was counting the days. It was more dangerous down there, and the work was far harder, but it also paid more. That would be good. The war had helped wages, but it was also driving up prices, especially imported things from back east: the tarré was already taking half of everything Ah Che made, and he didn’t dare try cutting back. Life now was too good to risk it.

  So he and Wally Hen kept their money safe and their paces quick, and played the teasing-game along the way. “– will have you know that I am EXTREMELY handsome,” Wally Hen was saying. “Really, you’re lucky to be seen with me.”

  “Elmer Wells doesn’t say so,” Ah Che retorted. “He says if I get tired from you, I just shave dog’s ass and teach it to walk backwards, and it will be the same thing. He says –”

  “Ah Che?” A man’s voice called out from ahead and to the right. “Is that you?”

  The voice was old and familiar and speaking Maia, but Ah Che had no time to wonder about it: there were soft-shod footsteps pounding the dirt, sprinting right for him, and a rush of motion before he was accosted and grappled off his feet.

  “Hey!” Wally Hen cried. “Let go of him!”

  Teetering between panic and shock, it took Ah Che a long, astonished moment to realize that he was being embraced. Then another to remember to breathe. And when he did, his first whiff of the stranger’s yucca-scented hair conjured a memory older than words. “Father?”

  “I thought I wouldn’t see you again,” the man said, his voice thick with feeling. “I thought you were gone.”

  Ah Che could have said the same: Father had been away when the sickness came, called back to his own village to attend his mother’s death and witness the sharing of her wealth. Ah Che had hoped he was still alive – he’d never seen him in his deeper dreams – but hadn’t known enough to tell Wally Hen where to look for him. And now he was here. By every god, he was HERE.

  Ah Che’s hands closed over handfuls of his father’s shirt, his face and voice sinking into the earthy-linen smell of homespun cloth, and the warm, strong body underneath. “How did you find me?” Ah Che had very little sense of distance – he hadn’t left town since Wally Hen had brought him here – but he knew that the lands of the Maia were two days away on horseback, on the other side of an increasingly volatile border. He couldn’t imagine how Father had braved all that.

  “Ten-Maia told me. She came to me in a dream. She’s calling everyone back home, and she...”

  As he spoke, the hand stroking Ah Che’s hair became a gentle pressure, beckoning him to look up – to meet his father’s gaze.

  “... Ah Che? Don’t you see me?”

  Ten-Maia must not have told him about that. It was a cruel omission: the flowering fear in Father’s voice was awful to hear. Ah Che felt warm, work-hardened hands close over the sides of his head, tilting his face upwards, as if his eyes only needed the correct alignment to remember their purpose.

  Well, they still knew how to do one thing. Ah Che blinked back the first tears and swallowed the remainder, overwhelmed by a voice he
had long since forgotten. “Yes, Father. I see you very well.”

  And he did. In his mind’s eye, he saw big feet – strong arms – a face that had always delighted in his, and a lap that Ah Che had never outgrown. He saw the ground vanishing away whenever he was tossed into the air, Mama’s scolding drowned out by his own infant squeals of delight. He felt, more than saw, the chest that he had so often fallen asleep on, its heart beating faster now than he remembered. But as soon as he touched it, those strong hands arrested his wrists, as if ashamed of what he had found there. “My boy. My son. I’m so sorry. It should have been me. I should have...”

  There was a cough, a swallow, and then a metallic rustle and clank: Father picking up the dinner pail. “Come show me where you’ve kept your things – we’re going home.”

  Ah Che’s spirit flickered. Home, yes... but home was a distant, half-forgotten memory, and here he was standing in the middle of Market Street, embroiled in the pervasive stink of the tannery and the creak and saw of the lumbermen working on the new hotel, thinking about how he was going to be late for work. It was all terribly surreal. “Wait, Father, just for a minute.” Ah Che reached out into empty space, groping for someone he had thoughtlessly forgotten. “Emi? Where are you?”

  Two stomps of a heavy boot answered his earth-sense even more precisely than his ears: Wally Hen was standing five paces behind and three to his left, probably in the shade of the Magnolia. “Right here, buddy.”

  He answered in Ardish, maybe so that Father wouldn’t suspect him of eavesdropping... but the strain in Wally Hen’s voice promised that he had overheard everything.

  Ah Che longed to reassure him. “You go ahead,” he said. “I come after you.” He would find out where Father was staying and promise to meet him there after work, and hopefully Mr. Burrell would understand the delay.

  “Sure thing,” Wally Hen said – but his boots stayed silent and still.

  So Ah Che switched tactics. “Don’t worry,” he said to his father. “I just need time to talk with him separately, and then we can make plans to leave.”

  But the word he’d used was ke’dzii, ‘we-three’, and for a long moment it went unanswered.

  “Ah Che,” Father said at last, “I have to tell you something that you will not want to hear. The truth is, I came only for you.”

  It took Ah Che a moment to hear the meaning between the words – and when he did, it jolted him like a rotten floorboard breaking under his weight. Wally Hen wasn’t welcome.

  “No,” he said, struggling to control his upset. “He has to come with us, Father. He’s Maia too. His mother – she was one of us, and they took her away, and when she died, his father didn’t want him, and he came to live with us, to find his clan and learn how to belong with us. If – if Ten-Maia is calling everyone back, she has to take him too.”

  A hand clasped itself gently at the back of Ah Che’s neck, but what had been a comforting touch now came as a jarring shock – one that retreated guiltily when he flinched. “I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have upset you. Let’s find a better place to talk, and I’ll –”

  “No.” Ten minutes ago, Ah Che couldn’t have imagined ever seeing his father again – and now he was interrupting him. “I’m going to work. He’s going with me. I’m not going anywhere without him.”

  “Ah Che.” Father’s voice was stern, prodding half-buried memories of childhood petulance and greed. “I’m listening to what you say. But I need you to hear me too. It’s very dangerous for me to be here, and even more dangerous for him to go back with us. The world is bigger than you know, and more complex than we can understand. I’ll be glad to share my reasons and answer your questions, but the truth is this: if you care for him, you will leave him here.”

  “No.” Ah Che had no thought beyond that single, defiant word. “No, I won’t. He’s my brother and my friend and I don’t care about anyone else. If he can’t go, then neither will I.”

  Father paused. He laid a hand on Ah Che’s shoulder, and this time did not withdraw. “That is a very selfish thing to say.”

  His voice was soft, gentle as always, but it hit Ah Che like a slap. He was four years removed from his old life, but even as a small child, he had learned that first, most basic truth: ‘selfish’ was the worst thing a person could be.

  “No!” he said again, loudly enough for the other street-people to hear, and defiantly enough to assure them that he didn’t care. “YOU’RE selfish. You left us. You didn’t come when we got sick. You didn’t come when Mama was dying. You didn’t come on any of the days I lay in bed and begged for you to find me. And if you think you can come here now and take me away from everything, just because Ten-Maia told you to, then... then you’re selfish and so is she.”

  With that, Ah Che grabbed the dinner-pail out of his father’s hand and stormed up the street with brash, bullish indifference: anything that didn’t want to get hit had better get out of his way.

  “I’ll wait for you here,” Father called after him. “I’ll stay until sunset.”

  But in that moment, with heavy bootsteps running up after him and the steel handle of the old minnow-bucket biting into his clenched fingers and his eyes squeezed shut to hold back hot wells of anger, Ah Che didn’t care if he ever saw him again.

  VUCHAK DIDN’T EVEN have time to swear.

  In the space of a flinch, something huge rustled in the shadowy brush above.

  For the length of a blink, everyone hesitated.

  Then there was a ground-jarring thud as the frog-monster dropped down to land between the half-man and the horse – a dry swush as he turned his vast bulk – and a gut-busting meaty WHAM as he kicked, catching Ylem right under the ribs with enough force to hurl his overburdened bulk ten feet back into the wall. He and Hakai slammed into the rock and dropped, the stunned, airless silence of the one pierced by the bone-jarring shriek of the other.

  Weisei’s concentration snapped. He gasped, whirled, and just barely managed to get out of the way as the horse collapsed, a muscular powerhouse of an animal crumpling into a half-ton rotting roadblock right in the middle of the bridge... rolling over onto the shield and spear strapped to its side.

  And just like that, in less than three panicked heartbeats, Vuchak found himself trapped and weaponless on the wrong side of a fight.

  His spear. He had to get his spear. “Weisei, move it! Move the horse!”

  To his credit, Marhuk’s son wasted no time. He dropped to kneel beside the carcass, his hand darting to the horse’s neck.

  The king of the fishmen wasted no time either. He leaped, landing just behind the twisted coffin-bearing travois in the middle of the bridge.

  It was a good bridge, as far as Vuchak could tell. Scarcely ten feet long, soundly built – a day’s labor for some upstanding a’Krah carpenter.

  It was not made to withstand a six-hundred-pound impact. A wood-splintering CRACK jolted the frame; the fish-king tensed to leap again before it gave out.

  And then the horse kicked him. It was an ingenious move on Weisei’s part: he inspired the fallen carcass to strike, twin steel-shod hooves punching into the frog-monster’s chest and shoulder with stall-splintering force.

  “HROOOOOOOO!” Bellowing in pain, the king of the fishmen reared up, lashed out –

  – and with a single angry sweep of his arm, he hurled Weisei over the edge.

  Vuchak’s heart stopped. For one breathless second, the color drained from the world. He watched in slow motion as Weisei pitched forward – three, four, six feet out into empty space, his entranced expression just beginning to awaken to pain and surprise. And then he fell.

  “WEISEI!” Vuchak was at the edge in an instant, staring out into the cold and empty void...

  ... watching the crow-god’s sondrift down as gently as a falling cinder, his arms outstretched, his holy black-feathered cloak stiff and billowing around them. “I’m sorry, Vichi!” he called up. “I tried!”

  Then the rumpled rusty darkness of the mountain
’s eastern face swallowed him, and he was gone.

  Vuchak was dimly aware of a second CRACK as the fish-king leapfrogged over him. He felt the impact through his boot-soles as the monster landed short of his mark and leapt away again. He heard the tortured wooden creak as the sagging bridge swung outwards, its broken maw half-swallowing the coffin. Some distant, still-rational part of him understood that Marhuk’s other son was tied between the poles by a few repurposed harness-parts and a great pile of wishful thinking – that Dulei was curled up in his resting-box, with no room to spread his makeshift wings. If he fell, he would not float gracefully to the ground. He would smash like a dropped egg.

  And that would serve the frog-monster’s interests perfectly. From ten yards ahead, he was turning back again, readying himself for one more devastating leap – and this time, Vuchak saw him clearly.

  The king of the fishmen had paid a heavy price to make it this far: he was less a monster now than a maimed, mottled heap. He favored his left front leg, either from the horse-kick or some earlier injury, and dehydration had shriveled him until his scarlet rage was almost lost under flakes of dried mud and vast black patches of dead skin. But there was murder in his clouded amber eyes, and cold-blooded lucidity: Hakai and Ylem had played their part in the fight at the river, but Vuchak had done the killing. The fish-king had come to see that those deaths were paid for.

  And if Vuchak were alone and unarmed – if he were anyone but himself – that might have come to pass.

  But he was a’Krah – a mediator of life and death – a warrior – a man who fought with every means at his disposal – an atodak – a guardian of the children of Marhuk... and there was one such child still left in the fight.

  So Vuchak whipped out his boot-knife, hurled it at the monster, and whirled back to the horse. “Dulei, help me!”

  Under the wounded roar came a coffin-jolting BANG. Then another. Then another. It was a dangerous game, every jerk of the box pulling it another precarious inch further down into the bridge’s broken mouth, promising a terrible result if even one of the straps gave out.