LIFE, Sil replied, plumbing his memories for some sacred precedent, some justification in that old book of holy case law. I have another one, a second life. It’s promised to us all, explicitly written right there in the contract... and I want mine now.
Yes. That was it. He knew he was right about that much: there was no guarantee how much his would be worth – that was determined by what one did with the initial loan – but it was the right of every human being, and Sil would cash his in for whatever it might still be worth, clean out his divine trust for just one more spin of the wheel. Please, he said, in what might legally constitute prayer, let me have that much. Let me live, and I will profit you more than any man ever has. Or if I haven’t the chips for that, give me whatever I’m still worth – give me life enough just to finish this, and I’ll ask for nothing more.
There was no answer, of course. There was nobody there. God was imaginary or indifferent, and the earthly spirits of the Northmen were all dead or left behind in the old world, and the new one was fast paving over its pagan remainders, blasting through ancient ways, jackhammering its way to futurity. Any half-intelligent creator had long since since given up answering the screams of the willfully deaf.
So Sil, who had never been much for listening, who had spent his life waiting to reply, was finally left begging to hear any voice but his own. He was nothing now but a madman trapped in a ruined house, waiting for some ancient pagan caretaker to come clean up his mess, passing the time by raving at phantoms in the dark.
And in the world beyond his frost-glazed eyes, life was going on without him, the sky already brightening with the promise of dawn.
DON’T BE SAD, Water-Dog. We’ll fix her.
Shea said nothing. She did nothing, because there was nothing left to do. She sat on the ground, unmoving, unshivering, and waited for the cold to take whatever was left of her mind.
And the Dog Lady went back to work, arguing with the crow all the while. Shea couldn’t hear the other half of the conversation – to her, Marhuk’s child spoke only in vague impressions – but it hardly mattered.
Because this one is mine, the Dog Lady said. She knelt on the path, having reduced herself to nearly human size, and gave Día’s arm a hard, bone-setting wrench.
The crow perched on a nearby stone. Doubt.
Mine by choice – her choice. U’ru turned Día over and did something to her side.
Shea could have snapped off a hard reply to that: what choice had U’ru ever given her? Instead she sat still, Porté’s sack of stones hanging heavy around her neck, and counted her slowing breaths.
The crow shook itself. Irrelevance. Haste. Urgency.
I don’t care, U’ru was saying. This one is mine too, and I won’t leave her. It will go faster if you help.
Perplexity.
Yes, you can. Make a hole here, at the back. Crack the bone – the blood needs to come out.
Disbelief.
Shea privately agreed with the crow: U’ru had been a peerless healer, famous for her ability to rekindle even the tiniest spark of life. But that was at the height of her power, with potency flowing into her through the lineages of hundreds of Ara-Naure. Now she had no descendants left, no source save for an ignorant mixed child – an Eaten boy too stupid to even know her name. What could she possibly do now?
I will try.
U’ru might have been talking to Shea. Or it could have been a promise made to Marhuk’s messenger.
Regardless, the crow fluttered down to alight on Día’s shoulder – and began pecking at the back of her denuded skull.
Shea half wanted to stand up and swat it away, to shout, to ask whether the girl hadn’t already suffered enough for one lifetime – to rage and scream at these alien resurrectionists quibbling over a broken human doll.
Instead, she closed her eyes, and wished she could do likewise for her ears. She flinched once as the cascade of tiny wet tappings turned hard and grim – as that pitiless black beak pecked down through hair and flesh, and started on bone.
What else was there to do? After all, Shea had never gone out of her way for Día before. It seemed a bit silly to start now.
But perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to say something spiritual and reverent, or at least to think it. God didn’t exist – at least, not the benevolent source of order that Día so cherished – but Shea had certainly put up with Him long enough. She might as well wring some use out of all those ass-taxing hours in the pew. How did that one go?
We move as You have moved us,
We love as You have loved us,
We live as You live in us,
And die in...
Wait – damn. Nevermind. Nothing about death. Something nice and uplifting.
God is my one Master; I will for nothing want.
No, not that – Shea had a list of wants long enough to hang herself with.
The one about waking to an unpromised day... except that it wasn’t day, and Día hadn’t woken, and the only tragedy more galling than the possibility of her death was the reality of her life: she’d lasted not even twenty years, and spent all of them cloistered in a sweet, meaningless fantasy – swaddled in sanctimonious horseshit.
Shea splayed out her toe-stumps, huddling down into herself like a ruffled hen. Oh, bless us, you pompous old prick.
And having exhausted her supply of piety, Shea hunkered down to weather the ghastly cornucopia of noises that heralded the surgery in progress: morbid, meaty pecking, bone-setting pops and wrenches, and a whole slurping surfeit of dog-kisses.
Which ended – miraculously, or perhaps inevitably – in a great groundswell of joy. Look, Water-Dog! U’ru enthused. See how she nurses!
Shea did not care to look. Even if she did, her poor eyes wouldn’t be able to see. But the anxious knot inside her loosened its hold, leaving the cold, numb thing that might have been her soul free to awaken again, like a foot too long sat on, with sharp little pinpricks of anger. “Splendid,” she said, her torpid wits groping to justify her efforts to heave her stiff old bones up to a stand. Where were they going again? What was the rush?
U’ru answered with equal confusion. Why aren’t you happy? Día was alive! She had been saved!
Shea eyed the great lady: a wondrous vision, a majestic, godly silhouette rising up to blot out the stars – and yet also a dog circling expectantly after its trick, waiting for some promised morsel.
Well, to hell with that.
“Because I have nothing to be happy about,” Shea snapped. “She’s alive? Yes? Well, forgive my indifference, but she was alive when I saw her this morning, and every time before that. It’s not much of a novelty.”
U’ru’s reply brimmed with hurt. But I fixed her!
The crow croaked from its place on her shoulder, anxious to be off – but it was damned well going to have to wait.
“No, you didn’t,” Shea retorted. “You healed her wounds, but have you even asked yourself how she got them? Did it even occur to you that someone DIDthat? Do you realize that she was assaulted and beaten, probably raped, mutilated” – and that was exactly the word to describe what they had done to her hair – “and then left out here to freeze? You can’t fix that! You can’t – someone tore out her innocence, and you can’t put it back!”
It seemed not to occur to U’ru that she could squash Shea like an insolent snail. She just shrank back, perhaps clutching Día more tightly to her breast, her mind overflowing with hurt. I didn’t do it, she whimpered. It’s not my fault.
She might as well have been seeping rage into the water. “No, of course not,” Shea sneered. “It’s NEVER your fault. It wasn’t your fault that you dragged her halfway across the god-damned desert while you were hunting for Yashu-Diiwa. Not your fault that you made her a murderer, that you left her to drown, that you resisted every effort she made to apologize on your behalf, that you sent her up here after I TOLD you she was in no shape to go. And don’t think about telling me that that was her choice, either: you asked, and she answ
ered. You’ve used her every step of the way, and she’s paid the price. So go ahead and congratulate yourself for having just managed not to add one more death to all your hundreds and thousands of others, but don’t expect me to stand here and applaud.”
It was a vile, exquisite monologue, an absolute masterstroke of cruelty. Really, the only thing missing was a haughty flourish and a stormy exit.
But Shea was here, halfway up Marhuk’s freezing sphincter, as blind as a cave-newt and twice as helpless.
Well, let it be: it wasn’t as if she was any use to this lot. U’ru could rage and kill her or storm off and leave her here to dry out and die, and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. Shea had done what she set out to do: she’d brought the Dog Lady back into the world, and now she was done.
There was no telling what the Dog Lady herself was thinking just then. Her thoughts disappeared as cleanly as if she’d drawn a curtain around them, leaving Shea with nothing but her own weary fatalism.
But apparently U’ru wasn’t done with her. The great lady bent and grabbed her up with one arm, as briskly as if Shea were a toddler throwing an embarrassingly public tantrum. Then she set off again for who-knew-where, following the flight of the crow.
Still, perhaps Shea could guess: by the looks of things, the Dog Lady was gathering up her toys and going home – more specifically, to Marhuk’s home – and the gods only knew what sort of tea party they were in for.
AH CHE, A child of twelve winters, awoke to find himself lying on wet rock. For a moment, he thought he was back in the galena chamber. But the air was not dusty, and the rock was not flat, and as he pulled his aching body up to sit, he began to think that the wetness was not water.
There was water, though, rushing all around him. Ah Che had never heard such a mighty river. He reached out to either side, feeling for the edges of this little bit of land. But he was as earth-blind as before, and all his fingers could tell him was that the rocks were sharp, broken, and covered in something sticky.
Ah Che sat still, punchy and lightheaded, waiting to see what this peculiar dream would bring him. He watched the water rushing past, making sparkling fluid patterns in his periphery. He sniffed at the thick slipperiness on his fingers. And then, as much to clean himself as for idle curiosity’s sake, he tasted it.
It was sweet – wonderfully rich and sweet. He took another taste, marveling at the sublime flavor. He would have called it corn syrup, but under that delectable sweetness was a rich, meaty zest, a savory tang unlike anything he had ever known. Ah Che licked between his fingers, over his palms, up his left arm and was starting to suck it out of his sleeve before it even occurred to him to wonder where this wonderful substance had come from.
Then it began to burn.
It started at his lips, seared his mouth, scorched a path down his throat and into his stomach. Ah Che’s eyes watered; he lunged for water, desperate to drown the pain –
– and hit a human body.
No, not a human body. Ten-Maia’s body. Ah Che’s trembling hands found a sodden corn-silk dress plastered over sprawled, still limbs – a head bobbing face-down in the water, limp whorls of hair trailing in the current – a shapely maiden’s figure impaled on the rocks, lying in a pool of seeping, sticky sweetness.
Ah Che threw himself into the river. He drank until he vomited, and then drank more. It didn’t help. Her blood was in him, part of him, boiling up through him as if he were a stoppered glass pipe about to burst. His earth sense flooded out in every direction, assaulting him as a million gallons of rushing water crashed over his jagged edges, as a hundred thousand animals crawled and burrowed and rooted through his flesh, as human hands pounded fenceposts into his bones and ripped his hair out by its helpless tuberous roots – as his mind dissolved into a woman’s keening, endless scream.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE WRECK OF HEAVEN
IRABEI, A CHILD of ten winters, crouched in the underbrush and nocked her first arrow.
It was stupid. The whole thing was stupid. There was no good reason for a proper young lady to be squatting in a clump of onions at daybreak, freezing her toenails off.
No reason except that her brother was hopelessly lazy, and every time Mama sent him out for a turkey, he came back with some empty-handed excuse. There aren’t any, he would say. I saw one, but it ran away. I shot one, but then it fell in a ravine. I caught one, but then a cougar stole it.
You must have eaten it all yourself, Irabei had replied. Because everything that comes out of your mouth is a pile of its droppings.
But when Mama grew tired of scolding him, Irabei was left with the obvious conclusion: if she wanted turkey feathers for her new dress, she was just going to have to get them herself.
So she laced up her best winter boots, donned her heavy wool dress and serape, and marched down the Mother of Mountains’ eastern face to make good on her threat, warming herself in the frigid crystal stillness with the thought of carrying her prize back to Atali’Krah, equal parts smugness and triumph. Then she would have the pleasure of plucking the feathers all out, and sorting them into neat piles, and choosing the best ones to lay along the collarline. Then Mama would make Otatak clean the carcass – women’s work – as punishment for his laziness. Then –
Something rustled in the trees. Irabei held her breath.
It came closer – the sound of a fleeing feathery ground-bird, with heavy, lopsided footsteps lumbering close behind it.
One of the men must have flushed it out. Well, if Irabei killed it, he would have to share it with her. She drew back the arrow and sighted down the shaft as the turkey burst out of the brush in a running, flapping, wattle-quivering panic –
– and then she saw what came after it.
That wasn’t a man. It wasn’t even human. It was HUGE – a hideous mangy giant, its rag-draped flesh a grotesque mix of brown hair and naked white patches, its arms crushing a bloodied, writhing man to its chest... its left eye gleaming green with reflected dawn-light as it spotted her.
Irabei dropped her bow and fled.
WHEN DÍA WOKE, it was to the most marvelous, pleasant confusion. It was like waking in her own bed in Fours’ house, with the window open and a cool spring breeze refreshing the room, and wondering what was so uncommonly pleasant about that – and then remembering that she’d gone to bed still miserably sick, and now woken to find that her nose was clear and her throat was sound and her appetite was already wondering about breakfast.
Yes. That’s what it was. This was the first day of health after a long illness, and every ordinary sensation was the most exquisite pleasure.
... even if there was nothing terribly ordinary about finding that her bed was crooked, furry, and moving.
Día opened her eyes and looked up, as awed to find the Dog Lady’s half-canine features above her as she was to see the ground so remarkably far below her.
It was a strange, sacred world, one Día’s river-valley sensibilities could never have imagined. The Dog Lady walked between spindling pine trees, their green needles glittering with a hint of frost, their slender shadows just beginning to appear in the gray light behind them. The air was cold and clean and almost supernaturally quiet, its stillness broken only by the great lady’s soft, gliding footsteps. It was nearly dawn.
“Mother Dog?”
U’ru looked down at her and smiled. Hello, puppy.
“Well, it’s about time,” a familiar voice interrupted – and it was only then that Día realized that U’ru had taken on other passengers too. Miss du Chenne was hunched up in the crook of her other arm, bedraggled and dried-out and somehow even less cheerful than before... and above her, perched on the Dog Lady’s shoulder, was the biggest crow Día had ever seen.
“And what happened to you, girl? Who did that to you?”
Día heard the anxiety in Miss du Chenne’s voice, felt a second pang of sadness on touching the faintly tender spot at the back of her head and finding that no, her dreadlocks had not miraculously
regrown... and yet she couldn’t look away from the crow. It favored her with a one-eyed avian stare.
Kalei ne ei’ha, Grandfather, she thought – about half a second before the significance hit her.
Grandfather Marhuk was here. The Dog Lady was here. Which meant that the hand of God had to be here too: what else could have brought two immortal enemies together to save her?
Yes, Día realized with newborn gratitude. She had been saved. She had done the right things, and the great forces of creation had converged to reward her for it. She had...
“Halfwick,” she said, almost absently. She’d left him there on the trail, helpless and frozen. She looked up to the Dog Lady, and the crow on her shoulder. “Mother Dog – Grandfather – I need you to go back with me. There’s someone who needs our help.”
She was answered with an indignant flap of the crow’s wings, and a faint, foreign pang of disapproval.
Can’t, U’ru said, and lifted her chin up at the mountain’s nearing peak. Loves-Me waits.
Oh, of course: she had to find Elim. Thank God it wasn’t yet too late!
“Halfwick?” Miss du Chenne repeated, incredulous. “HE took advantage of you?”
Día belatedly returned her attention to the old mereau, and mirrored her confusion. Who had taken advantage of anyone? “No, no,” she said, flushing as she caught Miss du Chenne staring at her baldness. “I – I did it to myself. It was a gift. Nobody hurt me.” At least not while they were in their right minds.
And as she saw that sharp-toothed mouth open for a more thorough interrogation, Día forestalled it. “Please, I’ll tell you all about it later, but I need to get down – I have to go.” And she tried to picture it for U’ru’s sake: how she urgently needed to go down and help Halfwick, just as she’d once gone up to try and help Elim, and how important it was to bring him to Grandfather Marhuk so that he could finish his life, and how eager she was to do that and then go straight on to be reunited with U’ru and Miss du Chenne.
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