When the fire grew hungry, she pulled out her knife and cut off little pinched bits of her remaining hair, evening out yesterday’s crude, futile handiwork. She threw each one into the flames, breathing deep from the acrid stink. When it was done, she was left with a more-or-less even quarter-inch cut: not much for warmth or protection or a spiritual connection to the cosmos, but at least she would look presentable for tomorrow’s interview.
Then she got up, eased herself, washed, and went to bed, reciting her usual prayers about gratitude and blessings as she did – even if they were recitations only. Even if the only blessing ready to hand was the absence of a mirror.
IT WAS A sick bit of irony.
Here was Elim, who had probably spent his whole life striving to be treated like a full human being, and who was probably going to have to try even harder to square that with himself, now that it had turned out to be only half true...
And here was Sil, who was now treating him like a mule – like an actual, four-legged mule.
And it worked.
“There we are – mind that step, now. Good! Here, d’you want some more nuts?”
Of course he did. He always did. Sil could feed him every five minutes from now until doomsday, and Elim would never not be hungry. And thank god for that!
Because Sil could see the brutal exhaustion in the man’s spotted face, noticed the wide white roll of his eyes every time he caught a glimpse down a drop or gap, or even just took a sideways look at the sprawling, scorched desert vista beyond. And Sil, no horseman himself, had partnered with this one at least long enough to have learned a little about how to keep a spent, spooky animal moving.
“No, nevermind that – look here, you can hold on to the root while you step down. Steady on... there! Well done!”
Needless it say, it was awful. Sil was the absolute worst fellow in the world for this work: to have to treat a more-than-grown man like a toddling infant or a dumb brute was a day-long exercise in humiliation. Elim should have had someone like himself for this part, someone gentle and patient and understanding.
Too bad they’d left her with the a’Krah.
So Sil kept doling out carrots and kindness all day long, an endless stream of encouragement and little feedings designed to keep Elim from seizing up on the narrow bits, slipping up on the steep ones, or sitting down and giving up altogether. That was the one rule: they could stand and catch their breath for a bit, take a drink or eat a handful of something while leaning up against a tree, but nobody was to do any sitting until they got to the bottom. Those were the terms. That was the bargain.
And it still might not be enough. Elim held up his end admirably – steadfastly soaking up every one of Sil’s awkward, ham-fisted efforts to coax him along – but their progress down the less-ruined side of the mountain was still horrendously slow. As the sun sank behind the mountain, Sil found himself hurrying them along with redoubled vigor: he didn’t really believe that a mob of crows would magically appear at sunset to peck their eyes out – but he also didn’t need to be proven wrong about that.
And honestly, Sil was beginning to tire too.
“Come on,” he said, for the hundred thousandth time that day. He’d never been so weary of the sound of his own voice. “Not much farther now. Let’s just get to that big rock down there and then we’ll –”
Elim took him up on it much too quickly. His first step down was fine, but the second failed to clear: his toe caught on a gnarled root, pitching him to the ground with a grunt and a whump as he tumbled and slid down the steep trail – thirty feet in three seconds – to land in a dusty heap at the bottom.
“Elim!”
Sil dropped his pack and leapt down with an agility scarcely twelve hours old, skidding down after him, just waiting to find out that the lumbering ox had crippled himself somehow. “Elim, are you all right? Can you hear me?”
But though Calvert’s mule lay exactly as he’d fallen – on his side, pack still shouldered, with one arm crooked over his filthy serape and the other outflung beside him – his only difficulty seemed to be in keeping his eyes open.
“Yep,” he mumbled with a conspicuously long blink, as if even that was an effort. “’m fine.”
“Here, get up,” Sil said, grabbing his hand and giving it a hard pull. “Get up, come on – no time for lying about.”
“Sure,” Elim said, making no move to rise. “Sure, I can do that.” Another, even longer blink.
“Do it, then! We have to go!” Sil pulled and tugged, but it was like hauling a side of beef. He shook his shoulder hard enough to earn one more blink – but there was no reason left in those aimless brown eyes, and soon they closed.
Sil glanced up at the darkening twilight sky, and back down at Elim. He felt over his head and limbs, just to be sure the poor clod hadn’t broken or cracked anything. He watched his breathing, until the rise and fall of his chest grew slow and deep and regular.
Then Sil gave up. “Right. Well. Perfect place to camp, wouldn’t you say?”
It wasn’t. It wasn’t watered or sheltered or even flat, and more importantly, it wasn’t safe: they had made it to the mountain’s root, or something like it... but was that close enough to count? Did the a’Krah really mean to kill them if they stayed here?
Well, probably not. They had their own concerns. Regardless, there wasn’t much Sil could do about it now.
So he collected their things, pulled off Elim’s pack, and spread a blanket over him and another one underneath. It was a poor job, but Sil didn’t have it in him to fix a fire just then.
In fact, he began to think he didn’t have much left at all. Sitting here alone in the still evening air left him with nothing to distract him from the deepening stillness in himself – nothing to do but listen to the burring of the crickets, the hooting of an owl, and the rhythm of his own heart.
One-two one-two one-two...
He wouldn’t mind having company right about then. As usual, all he had was Elim.
He snorted. “Some help you are.”
With Día, though – now there would have been a conversation worth having. There was so much he wanted to tell her… but by the time Sil had something worth saying, he’d had no voice left, and now it was too late.
One-two... one-two... one-two...
The slackening beat inside him was unnerving, and he couldn’t resist another glance at that red glow on the horizon. The dark contours of the mountain gave the light an irregular edge, as if Sil and Elim were ants sheltering in the shadow of a great pile of smoldering coals.
What if this was it? He’d begun at dawn – what if he were going to end at dusk?
He’d asked for enough time to do this one thing, to see Elim safely delivered. Sil would have thought that meant getting him back to Hell’s Acre... but that was the trouble with those dark-night-of-the-soul bargains: never any fine print.
One... two... one... two...
Sil pushed himself over to sit with his back against a flat stone, frightened and yet resolved. He didn’t want to think of it – didn’t want it to be over – but then, he’d spent his life as a sickly, impatient boy, coughing and wheezing as he clawed at greatness, hedging his bets against an end that he’d always known could come at any time.
And if now was the time, and this was the end... well, what was left to say?
Sil looked over at Elim, wrapped up like a fish supper and already beginning to snore, and smiled in spite of everything. “Not bad for a day’s work, eh?”
No, not exactly splendid – certainly not how Sil had imagined it – but not bad.
One...
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A MAN OF THE A’KRAH
THE CHILD, AH Che, faded away again – a ghost twenty-four years departed.
The goddess, Ten-Maia, toppled back into the abyss of chemical sleep.
The man, Hakai, began the long climb back to the world.
AND AFTER ALL that, there was finally time to rest. Shea took her cue from the
a’Krah, drawing the curtains on the morning and sleeping the day away. It was just a bit awkward, turning to the people who were practically still sifting through the rubble for their aunties and grandmothers and saying, pardon me, but could I trouble you to draw me a bath?
But the water was clean and wonderfully warm, at least to start with, and by the time it wasn’t anymore, the sun was setting, and it was time to get back to work. U’ru was anxious to go, sad not to be following Yashu-Diiwa as he and his little death-friend made their way down the northern side of the mountain. But the a’Krah had Día, at least for the time being, and of course there was no leaving without her.
So as night fell and the great lady grew magnificent once more, Shea found other things for her to do.
They picked up the largest of the fallen pieces of Atali’Krah, first of all. They helped prepare for the mass funeral that would be held at dawn. Then they climbed down into the great sinkhole and lifted out bodies, a sad work unexpectedly lightened after Shea’s blind fumbling found a missed survivor lying under a broken roof.
It was hard to guess how much U’ru remembered of the heinous violence she’d done to their elders in the years before. Certainly Shea had been horrified to hear of the Ara-Naure slaughter of the a’Krah delegation, of the hostages meticulously executed and profanely buried, one by one, in a futile attempt to win the return of her missing child. Regardless, it seemed appropriate now to be digging out their counterparts, lifting them out of the ground and giving them over to their surviving kin – readying them to enjoy their own preferred ending, the one that waited for them at the top of those sky-reaching wooden platforms above. Shea didn’t pretend that this would singlehandedly atone for all that had happened before... but U’ru seemed happier for finally having a fence to mend.
And when that was done, the great lady very graciously walked down the mountain to help Shea finish her own mending.
It didn’t take long to find Jeté. The body of a six-hundred-pound mereau prince was a hard thing to miss – even if the desiccating mountain air had reduced him to a gaunt husk of his former self. But Shea couldn’t help but feel a little sad in spite of it all, having privately held out hope that the great fool would have come to his senses and quit while he still could.
Which wasn’t to say that there was no-one left alive.
Shea felt it after she had waded in to help U’ru ease the body into the river, swimming far enough out to be sure that the course was deep enough to keep Jeté from catching on the rocks. She couldn’t see worth a damn, even with the moon, but her water-sense told her of a kindred shape hiding in the shallows, not even a dozen yards downstream.
No, she realized with astonishment – she hadn’t imagined it. One of the Many had survived.
“Hello?” she called out in Fraichais. “Who’s there? Are you hurt?”
The answer was yes, albeit not spoken aloud: as the survivor swam tentatively closer, Shea sensed its arcing, lopsided rhythm, as conspicuously wrong as a sea-turtle missing a flipper.
What’s wrong? U’ru stood there in the current, her great arms holding Jeté’s dried body as if preparing to baptize an infant.
There was one left behind, Shea thought in answer – not wrong, per se, but a different kind of sad.
The two of them held still, waiting amidst the churning lap of the frigid moonlit water, until a plumed head broke the surface, and spoke in a small, quavering voice.
“... what happened?”
By now, the survivor would have seen the other bodies they had dragged to the river. It might even have been watching from afar. There was no need to tell it that the rest of its cohort was gone – but that didn’t make it any easier to explain.
Shea glanced back at Jeté, half a dozen replies jostling for preference. He’d been run through, his life ended on the point of an earth-person’s spear. He’d crawled out of the landslide that had consumed his siblings, and refused to return to the river. He’d decided vengeance was more important than survival.
“He made the wrong choice,” she said at last. And then, after a suitably respectful silence: “Would you like to show me your wound? The great lady here can heal you.”
That might or might not be true. But U’ru took that as her cue to make herself available: she set Jeté gently down in the water, and held out her arms to encourage her newest prospective puppy to swim to her.
The survivor held still, laboriously treading water. It made no move to pursue Jeté’s body as it sank and began to tumble gracefully through the current, nor to come any closer to the Dog Lady.
If Shea were further downstream, she would surely have smelled the survivor’s distress. If she were here during the day, she could have read its mournful, angry colors. Instead, its pain came through only in its voice.
“Why did you do this to us?”
That hurt. It’s not my fault, Shea mentally protested – except for the parts that were. They’d kidnapped her. She’d manipulated them. They’d abandoned her. She’d caught up and lied to them. They’d used her to bait their trap. She’d used them to spoil it. Somehow or other, her need to bring back the Dog Lady and their wish to secure a courting-gift for their prince – two well-intentioned, poorly-pursued ends – had left the two of them here at this sad crossroads.
The least Shea could do was own that. “For her,” she said, gesturing up to the great lady behind her. “All of it was for her.”
U’ru didn’t move, but Shea could feel the corners of her mind crumpling. Water-Dog...
“You can come with us, if you want,” Shea added. “We can bring you back to the Etascado, and the current will take you home.”
The survivor was tiring, the river pushing it farther downstream. Its reply was labored and small, almost lost amidst the churn of the waves. “But what then? What will I say? What will I do?”
They were hard, bleak questions. Shea would have liked to tell that other mereau to count its blessings: after all, it still had its tail and toes and youth – its whole life ahead of it. It still had a house to go back to, a mother, other relations that would fold it back into the family and soothe its grief. It should take Shea up on her offer and go back, grateful that it still had somewhere to go back to.
But to return as the sole survivor of its cohort, what earth-persons would call an only child, bearing the news that the House of Losange had just lost an entire generation... oh, there was no wealth in the world that would have convinced Shea to trade places with this sad, maimed remainder.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I don’t know.”
She could feel U’ru longing to wade further in, vexed by that irrepressible mammalian urge to scoop the other mereau out of the water and press the sorrow right out of it. To her credit, she held still, her mind overflowing with stifled wants.
Say that for me too. Say that I’m sorry too.
Shea could do that much. And she did. But the current kept running tirelessly on, widening the distance between her and her audience, and any answer Shea received was lost as the water’s endless roar finally swallowed the last of the Many.
THE FIRST KNOCK startled Día.
For a strange, half-woken moment, she was at home – her first home, or at least the first one she could remember: the tiny one-room cabin she’d shared with her father, just outside the Sixes churchyard. It was still night outside – no good hour for anyone to be knocking at the door – which usually meant that someone had died. Her father would get up and shuffle on his shoes, leaving her to roll over and settle back in to the warm pocket his big body had left in the bed, enjoying the exquisitely human pleasure of sinking back into an unfinished sleep, and trusting that he would be back by morning.
No, her waking mind said. This was not their cabin, that was not her bed, and he was not coming back.
Now she was the adult, and that knock was hers to answer.
So Día reluctantly evicted herself from the warm folds of the blankets, shuddering as her bare feet touch
ed the cold stone floor. She didn’t fear the caller – the door had no lock, and anyone with ill will could have walked right in – but it was hard to imagine what anyone would want with her at this hour. “Just a moment,” she said, pinching the dried sleep from the corners of her eyes, taking a bite of bread and a drink of water to freshen her mouth. Then, hygiene and beauty answered for, she opened the door.
And as it admitted a fresh yellow-orange wedge of lantern-light into the room, she was amazed at how thoroughly Penten had put Día’s ten-second ablutions to shame. None of yesterday’s dirt and dishevelment was any more in evidence – far from it. He – she, she – was now the very avatar of style, grace, and composure: her hair pulled back into a sleek, glossy blue-black braid, her strong features highlighted with perfectly geometric yellow and white marks, her smooth black skin and tall, athletic figure complemented by a white dress and a few light touches of silver. In short, she was a beauty, albeit one of a kind Día hadn’t met before.
And the finishing touch was the soft white flash of a smile as she greeted her guest. “Ambassador, I’m terribly sorry to have disturbed your rest: I had meant to call on you later, but it seems we’re to begin our funeral ceremonies earlier than I’d thought. Would you be willing to walk with me?”
Well, there was only one answer to that – even if Día didn’t especially relish the idea of taking a stroll in the freezing dark. “Of course, Eldest – I’d be honored.” It couldn’t be any less pleasant than her last one, anyway.
But her thoughtful host had brought more than a lantern, and presented Día with some kind of brightly woven outer-garment – a fuller version of the serape Elim had worn, and one she was glad to fold herself into. Shoes would have been even better, but Día could at least warm her own feet.
“I wanted to apologize for the, eh – that unexpected sadness yesterday,” Penten said as they made their way up the little path. “It wasn’t something we wanted to happen, especially not in front of visitors. It must have been terribly distressing to watch.”
Dreams of the Eaten Page 38
