The Book of Koli

by M. R. Carey

  And now, all at once, we was in the dark. Not green dark like in a forest glade, but black dark like a moonless night. At the same time, the sound of Sky’s feet on the ground got big and hollow with echoes that come back to us on every hand.

  The suddenness of it unsettled me. I reached out with my hand to see if I could get some sense of the place we was in. My fingers’ tips brushed hard coldness. I got the sense then that the stone was piled up over us to some considerable height, and that we was going into the ground.

  Sky slowed down somewhat at this point. She had no choice, there being no light at all to see by. I could hear breathing from just by me that I thought must be Cup’s, for Mole’s breath was harsh and loud and could not be mistook.

  “Where are we?” I asked. I knowed it was not good sense to rile Sky up again, her hands being so heavy and her temper so short, but the dark cowed my spirit. I wanted to break the silence to prove it could be broke.

  “The crucible,” Cup said.

  “Shut your mouth, Cup,” says Sky. “Just because he asks, that don’t mean you got to answer.”

  A light was shining from a place that was in front of us and off to the right. It was faint and scattered, so I thought for a moment my eyes might be making it by theirselves, the way solid dark makes you do. But then Sky bent her steps in that direction. If she seen it too, it had got to be real.

  When the light was almost right in front of us, she stopped. It was no clearer this close up, but only a kind of a lighter stain splashed across the dark. Something moved in front of us, and I heard a sound like feet scuffing on stone.

  “What’s them that come?” said a gruff voice, none too clearly.

  “You was asleep, Egg,” says Sky.

  “No, I wasn’t. Give answer now. What’s them that come?”

  “You was fucking well asleep, and you’ll take an extra watch for it, you horse-faced bastard. It’s me, Sky, and hope to be saved.”

  “It’s me, Cup,” says Cup from behind me. “And hope to be saved.”

  “It’s Mole,” says Mole. “Hope to be saved.”

  “Plus this on my back,” says Sky, “that we found when we was hunting for something else. Now let us by.”

  Some curtain or fall of cloth was pulled aside, and the light was full in my eyes. I flinched from it a little, though it wasn’t bright. It was just a lit oil lamp, hanging in a kind of a doorway. There was a wall there that you could not see at all in the dark. It was wove from wicker, close-set and cross-plaited through big wooden stakes that went up into the dark. I was sore puzzled by it, for a wicker wall would not defend against anything. You might as well not have no wall at all.

  When we stepped through, we come among more lights, and then a lot more. We was in a wider space now. I would say a hallway, except there never was one this big. The ceiling was an arch way over our heads, the wall was the same stone I seen outside, and the ground was crossed by more of them metal bands that led the way before us. There was a reek in the air that was thick and sour and stuck in my throat.

  We walked on around a corner. Not a sharp corner, but a great big bend like the fall of a waterfall, if you can imagine that fall turned on its side. The light got brighter and brighter up ahead until we was all the way around the corner and it was a fierce blaze everywhere.

  Well, I had seen some wonders since I left Mythen Rood, but this was the strangest thing I seen in my whole life so far. It was a cave, but it was a made cave. A thousand squared-off stones was laid on top of each other to make the walls, and there was as many up in the ceilings that was curved all in a perfect arch. A hundred or more lanterns lit it up, and though it was one single space yet it was bigger than all the rooms in Rampart Hold and the Waiting House throwed together.

  I seen then what the wicker wall was for. It was not to defend this place, like a proper fence would do, but to hide the lights and make it seem, if you looked in, like there was nothing here to be seen. The cave was disguised, just like the trails was.

  There was people in the cave, and they turned to look at us as we come. Men, women and children was there, all with drawings on their faces like the ones I see on Sky and her hunt. Here was a little boy with a bird’s wing across his cheek. His mother standing behind him had what I think was meant to be the blade of a knife, though it could of been speargrass. On my other hand, a big skinny man leaned over to stare into my face. His face was marked with a leaf, and his breath stunk worse than an open latrine pit.

  “Hey, dog,” he said to me. “Here, dog. Come to.” He said it in a sweet voice, but the laugh he give right after was mean.

  The people was doing all kinds of things, some of them fetching and carrying, some talking, some sitting and eating. Several of them was sewing cloth, and several more was cooking on fires. The smoke from the fires was some of what I had been smelling. The rest of it was the people. It was the smell of everything people do, all shoved together in one place with no doors or windows to it.

  They lived here. All the whole lot of them, in this one great big room.

  Sky weaved her way in between them, saying hey here and yea there, but not stopping to talk to nobody. Mole clapped hands with some of the men, or took slaps to his back that was meant as salutes. Cup was mostly ignored, it seemed to me, and shrunk in against Sky’s side so as to be noticed even less.

  We walked a long way, and yet we was still in the same place. There was almost as many people here, it seemed to me, as there was in Mythen Rood. They sit or stood together in little groups, like as it might be families, since there was children all running or hiding in among the legs of the older ones or doing share-work like they was full growed theirselves.

  I kept thinking that we had got to come to the back wall of the cave soon, but we never did. We did come to the end of the lights though, and of the fires, and of the people. And now I seen two new things.

  On the right side of the cave, close to the wall, there was a big wagon. I guess I got to call it that, for it stood on wheels, but it had got windows and doors like a house. I couldn’t tell what it was made of, for it was painted all over in bright colours, but I thought for sure it had got to be metal and not wood. It was tech of the old times, like Elaine that stood by the river ford and tried to guard it but couldn’t any more. It didn’t have no gun though – just a whole lot of wheels and a whole lot of windows, and a door at either end of it standing open.

  And before I got done wondering at that, I seen what was up ahead of us. It was not so strange as the wagon-house was, but it struck on my mind just as much. It was a thing I knowed well and seen a thousand times, yet it stuck out strange by being in this strange place.

  It was a bed. A big, sturdy bed with a frame set over it, and sheets of cloth or sacking nailed or fixed onto the frame so whoever was in the bed could draw them closed and sleep the better. Only they was open and pulled back now, so I could see there was someone curled up on the bed like they was asleep.

  There was people watching over him while he slept. Four men and four women. They was all four naked, and yet they was armed for a hunt, the men with spears and the women with bows. All the hair was shaved off their heads, and off their bodies too, and they was all of them real tall and strong-looking. They scared me, to tell you the truth, and it wasn’t just the weapons they was carrying, nor the stern looks on their faces. It was something else that I didn’t realise until we was up close.

  Everyone I’d seen in the big cave had a different thing drawed on their face. These men and women had all got the same thing, which was a hand with the fingers all spread. I guess that doesn’t sound like such a frightening thing, yet it was to me. It made it seem like they was all of them the same person in some way, thinking the same thoughts. I was scared that when they opened their mouths, the same words would come out of all of them at the same time. I don’t think I could of stood that. But no words Sky said at all. They just stood there and watched us come.

  When we was maybe ten long strides awa
y from the bed, we stopped. Sky gripped my arms just under the shoulders and lifted me off her back like you would take off a bag that was slung there. She set me down on the ground and kind of nudged me in the back of my knees to tell me I was to kneel down. I couldn’t do that, with my leg still in the splint, so I sit down on the ground instead. I didn’t want to do nothing that would make her hit me again, or cause the hand people to notice me.

  “We got something for him,” Sky said. “An altar boy maybe.”

  “He spoke while you was away,” one of the hand men said. “He’s purposing to put the woman up on the altar.”

  “Still,” Sky come back, “I think he should take a look.”

  “He’s asleep,” said one of the women.

  “No,” come a voice from behind them. “He is not. I sleep only to talk to the sender, and even then I wake when there’s need. Lift me up now, and set me out. I’ll see the boy Sky brought. Didn’t Sky bring the woman too? Doesn’t Sky bring me all the good things there are?”

  The hand people stopped talking then. The women slung their bows across their backs. The men moved all at once to the four corners of the bed and stood by with their spears at the high carry.

  Then the women come in between them. They stepped right up onto the bed, leaned down and lifted up the man – for it was a man – who had been sleeping there. They took him by his shoulders and his knees, as gentle as if they was carrying a newborn baby. I was minded more of a funeral though, for they carried him between them, raised almost to their shoulders, off the bottom end of the bed and all the way to where I was knelt. As he got closer to me, I seen that his skin was all blue, like glastum woad, only darker.

  Then the men run after the women and done something stranger still. They made themselves into a chair for the blue man. One of them went down on hands and knees. Another one stood behind him, and one to either side. As the women lowered the blue man down, the men linked their arms and bowed their heads. They slid theirselves in around him so his back was against the man behind and his forearms resting on the ones to the two sides of him. He wriggled a little, getting himself comfortable.

  The women stood back, two to the left and two to the right. They took up their bows again. And all this was done without a word, or without the blue man seeming to notice at all that he was hefted like a sack and carried like a child.

  He was a sight to see, now he was right in front of me. He was naked too, I seen now, except that he had a cloth tied round his waist that hid his pizzle and his stones. He was as tall as any of the hand people, and wide across the shoulders. It was hard to say how old he was. His face looked like a man still in his strength, but the flesh of him was loose and hung about him. I thought that might of been on account of his being carried instead of walking, if that was a thing that happened oftentimes. The nails on his fingers and toes was long and curled around, and his hair hung down past his shoulders, all shiny black with grease.

  His skin was not all over blue, but was drawed on in blue inks. There was just the one thing that had been drawed on him, but it was everywhere, and not just on his face the way it was with everyone else in the cave. It was eyes. Human eyes, with lids and lashes to them, that looked real. All of them wide open, and they was looking different ways. They was of different sizes too, some of them bigger than your closed fist and some of them almost too small to see from where I was knelt. The ones on his face, though, was all the same size as his two regular eyes, which was kind of hid away as a result. It was like he was looking at you with his whole body.

  He held up his right hand and opened it. There was yet one more eye, drawed on his palm. He kept it stretched out towards me for a long time, then finally clenched his fist and rested his arm again on the man who was crouched at his right hand.

  “Senlas,” Sky said. Mole and Cup said it too, in a whisper that was full of worship. I seen Cup’s face, as she looked at the blue man. It was like Spinner’s face on the tabernac when she looked at Haijon.

  “You brung me something else besides this boy,” the blue man said. “Let’s start with that.”

  Mole and Cup stepped up and took the packs from off their backs. They undid the drawstrings and emptied out what was inside them on the floor in front of me.

  I don’t want to say this next part. It was the most terrible thing that happened to me since I was cast out faceless, and maybe the worst in my whole life. I don’t dream so very much any more, but instead of dreaming I get to see and feel things from the past as if they was happening right now. This moment here is one I never yet choosed to see or feel again, for the horror and the sadness of it and the weight of what it meant. But I got to tell it so you’ll know what I knowed then.

  What was in the two packs was just meat, rough hewed with a cleaver off some carcase. Some of it had been filleted, I guess because without the bones it was lighter to carry. But the butchering was done quick and clumsy, Sky and Mole no doubt being mindful of the long road that was ahead of them and not inclined to linger.

  They had left Mardew’s hand on the end of his arm.

  44

  I give a long, ragged kind of a cry with no real words in it, and after that I busted out in tears that hurt my chest.

  “Hush now,” Senlas says to me. “You got to be brave.”

  I cried just as hard. Brave or coward didn’t have nothing to do with it. Mourning the dead is a right thing, however it comes out of you, and I was mourning Mardew then – that he died a long way from his home and his family, and that he had this outrage done on him after.

  But it’s true I was scared, and any fear that comes on you sudden enough will unfit you for thinking straight or doing anything to the purpose. I was fallen among shunned men, and I was going to be their meat. Maybe you got to that conclusion before I did. Who else could it be that moved around the valley by their own secret ways and hid their village away inside a hill? It was not hard to guess. But I thought shunned men would look like monsters, and bark and howl like wild animals. Sky and Mole and Cup was not like that, but more like regular people, and I was fooled.

  “You knowed him,” Senlas said, nodding towards the butchered meat. “He wasn’t kin to you, I see that, but you did know him. You was there when he died. Did you kill him? I think you did, but the answer’s not all the way clear. Sender says for you to tell it.”

  When I didn’t answer, one of the hand women slung her bow again and grabbed hold of me by my hair and my chin, pushing and twisting so I was looking right up into the blue man’s eyes. They swum in my sight, hundreds and hundreds of them.

  “Tell it,” Senlas said.

  I wish I would of been brave enough to hold my silence, but all them eyes cowed me and pressed on me. “He… he was trying to kill me,” I said. “I broke his weapon, and fire burst out of it. It took his arm.”

  Senlas looked at Sky, then back at me. “That’s the truth of it,” he said. “And the truth washes you clean of all the sin that might of been. You didn’t witness to a falsehood, and you didn’t do a murder.” He smiled like this made him happy. Like as I was his child and had done a clever thing that give him to be proud. “Now let’s see about the other side of it,” he said. “For a soul’s got two faces, same as a coin has got. Your one face is pure, brown-skin boy, but I still got to flip you in the air and see what’s on the downside of you.”

  Brown-skin was a strange thing to call me, or it would of been in Mythen Rood, where skins was of every shade. But I seen how the people in the cave had most of them got skin that was pale like the flesh of an onion. I wondered then how long they lived down here in the dark, for the sun would of surely give them somewhat of darker colour if they spent much time standing under it.

  Another thought come to me then. If they had lived here that long, couldn’t these be the same shunned men that took my brother? I might of walked past Jud already when we come into the cave and not knowed him.

  Senlas seen my eyes go looking off in all directions, and a frown come
on his face. “Mind me, child,” he said. “These are important questions, and you got to give them proper heed. Has a man or a woman knowed you? In the sweat of love, I mean? Have you rutted, for your body’s hunger?”

  My thoughts was still on Jud, but the tattooed man’s voice had a cold warning in it. It was plain to see he didn’t like to be disregarded, even when he was asking about things that was nobody’s business but mine. The memory of that one time with Spinner rose up in my mind, and before I even knowed what I was doing I shaked my head. I was not going to share that remembering with nobody, least of all a shunned man and a king of shunned men that lived by making other people be his meat and bread.

  “Never? Not so much as a kiss?”

  I shaked my head again. Everyone in the world has been kissed, I thought, but he asked me the question so he had got to believe there was two answers to it. And that was the onliest one I felt like giving him.

  Senlas looked at me for a long time. A hard stare, out of all them eyes, with a lot of thought behind it. “Now that’s a half-truth,” he says at last. “I know you loved at least, howsoever you did or didn’t give your body rein to gallop. What was her name, brown-skin boy? Let me sieve it, and see the rest of it.”

  I was powerful reluctant to do that, but the eyes was pressing on me again. The woman still kept her hold on my head so I had got to look. I couldn’t fight that stare, but could only pull back from it a little way.

  “Demar,” I said. Demar being a name Spinner throwed off when she come out of the Waiting House. I give him a shell and kept the meat of the egg for myself, as they say.

  “Demar,” Senlas said. He moved his hand in the air as if there was some music only he could hear. “Yes. That’s who it was. And perhaps there was a boy who kissed you too. It’s not all the way clear. But whether there was or there wasn’t, him that sent me says you’re pure enough of heart to stand before him. Give me your name now. Not your old name, for that’s stale and bad like green bread. I mean the last name you got, that’s fresh and new and scarce even spoken.”