The God Eaters

by Jesse Hajicek

  Ash didn't demand a translation; he seemed lost in his own thoughts. Kieran told him a few of the things that seemed to matter most: that Miyan's village had been composed of Tallgrass people, mostly a clan called Dogtooth that Kieran had never heard of, with a few families that were Valley Blue-Eye. That latter name referred to a flower, not the coloring of the inhabitants; Highland Blue-Eye came from south of Canyon, and had been moved into town after the Assimilation to work the mines. There was a silver mine in that area called Dogtooth, so maybe that was the other clan's original turf. It was a little odd to find a village of Tallgrass down here, when Tallgrass were mostly sheep-farming hill people, but Miyan lost interest before explaining it, and went on to talk about how she wanted a dress made out of a yellow calico she'd seen on a trip to Trestre. The priest didn't like that idea; he considered bright colors immodest. Kieran laughed at him, then had a coughing fit and brought up something so nasty he expected it to wilt the sawgrass where he spit it.

  He was feeling pretty foul when they reached their destination. Nevertheless a sense of homecoming eased his mood a little when he saw it. He'd been here before.

  At the end of a shallow-sloped canyon, a slab of yellow sandstone made a porch in front of a natural cave mouth that had been widened at the bottom by human hands. It was a sort of bottle shape, maybe twenty feet high.

  "I camped out here once," Kieran said, ignoring the gurgle in his voice. "Maybe five, six years ago? I don't remember any auanit, though."

  "It's in the floor," Miyan answered. "I found it when I swept out the dirt. I bet you didn't clean it at all, even though it's a shrine. Boys are so dirty."

  The priest leapt in, speaking Iavaian as well. "I'm not comfortable with this. Evil gods were worshipped here, and I won't have you treating it as a holy place, Miyan. Remember, Dalan is the True God."

  "Okay," she agreed easily, and hopped down off the horse before Ilder reined in. "I'll make it all nice for us. Be good to the horses!" She dashed into the cave.

  Ash, left out of the conversation, said, "I take it this is the place she mentioned."

  "Yeah. It's an okay place to camp, I guess, but --" Kieran broke off to clamp his teeth together against a cry of pain as he dismounted. It felt like a red-hot awl was being jammed into his right lung. Ash held him upright while he took short breaths through his nose until the feeling subsided. Then he did his best to resume as if nothing had happened, though his voice was weaker. "I'm not sure why you wanted to come here. You know something I don't?"

  "Just a hunch. Father Ilder, would you please see to the horses? I'll be back shortly to help you carry things inside." Supporting Kieran with one arm, he picked apart knots behind the mare's saddle, letting everything fall on the ground except the blanket he was trying to get. "I'm going to let you set your pace. Take your time. I've got you."

  Inside the shrine, the cool, still air smelled of water. That was why Kieran had camped here when he'd come this way, years ago, and he supposed why the shrine was here at all. Springs in caves tended to end up being revered as holy places. This one was just a tiny drip, barely enough to make a puddle in the basin that had been carved out around it. Lime deposits on the floor below the basin's lip testified to the times when the spring ran faster than evaporation, but at the moment its flow was nearly lost among the clots of minerals it had coated the basin with.

  Miyan was using a handful of weeds to sweep the floor. There wasn't enough dust to hide the mosaic, though. Rounded stones ranging in color from dark jade to pale sage were set into channels cut in the floor, making a mottled green wind knot the length of a man. It was on one side of the spring; on the other was a scooped out area of floor, as if another symbol had been there and someone had tried to erase it.

  Kieran wanted to go look at the scoured floor, try to see what had been there, but couldn't even stand up on his own. He had to let Ash lay him down on the blanket, had to lie there helpless and wait.

  When Ash went outside, Miyan glanced out the door and then gave Kieran a conspiratorial smile. "Don't tell them, okay?" She dipped her bundle of weeds in the spring and scattered water across the wind knot. "Don't be angry with us, Ka'an. We're only little, and we're not hurting anything." Then she dipped it again and spattered Kieran. "Watch over this man, your heriye, and send misfortune to his enemies."

  At her ritual, a strange feeling rose in Kieran, a pressure behind his eyes, a charge over his skin.

  There was power here. Yet he felt no awe; instead, he almost laughed at the futility of her action.

  If Ka'an really existed, he was weak, beaten back by the Dalanists. And what a silly thing she was, to call Kieran a heriye, when that term was supposed to apply only to the noblest and most upright warriors of the people. Kieran wasn't even a warrior of the people at all, just a criminal.

  And -- "Since when does Ka'an have heriye, Miyan? You're gonna piss him off, getting him confused with Viha and Urotu and those guys."

  "I wasn't," she said indignantly. "Anyway, Sun and Bear are dead. Ka'an's the only one who's still alive."

  He decided to humor her instead of arguing with her. "How do you know that? Priestess, are you?"

  "I have to be, since the rest of my folks are dead. Somebody has to do the rites here. But don't tell Father Ilder, please, he'd make me stop. Anyway, I know it because the good gods couldn't stand the way things are now. They must have died in battle, or they would be helping us. The only one who helps us is the Dreamer, because he doesn't care who has power, only who has guts. I bet he likes you a lot, Kieran."

  Smiling, he didn't answer. He liked the idea she'd come up with, and wondered if it were her own invention, or something she'd heard from her people before they'd died. Kieran had heard old folks bemoaning the fact that there were no heriye left, but it would sure be interesting if the term could be applied to a different kind of person. It wasn't that Iavaians had lost their fighting spirit. They'd just been soiled by circumstance, gone hard and bitter, used their strength however they could to survive. And if any god was going to give power to that sort of coyote soul, it would be the Prince of Pain.

  Maybe that was why he kept dreaming he was Ka'an. A little message to tell him the road he was on had a patron. That there was a power in tune with him.

  What the hell good that would do, he had no idea.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Worry was wearing Ash down. He didn't think he'd ever been this tired before in his life. Tired in quite this way, at least. He wasn't as physically worn out as when he'd brought Kieran to the mission, but resting his body didn't seem to be erasing the weariness in his mind. He was tired of running, tired of fear, tired of hunger and saddle sores and thinking about horses and water. Tired of Kieran being hurt. Tired of the priest's sourness and Miyan's mindless cheer.

  He didn't listen to the talk in Iavaian between Ilder and Miyan while he stowed their belongings with the military neatness that could no longer soothe him. When Miyan wanted to take over the food-related chores, he let her. He changed Kieran's bandage, sniffing at it for a hint of rot as he'd seen doctors do, trying to be relieved that he didn't smell any despite the fact that the wound was leaking pale fluid and looked angrily red. Kept his temper when Kieran grumbled at him about having to eat, about having to drink water, reminded himself that it was easy to be angry about everything when you were in constant pain. Maybe Kieran's anger was infecting him; maybe if he stayed calm it would ease the pain a little; but it was getting harder. There was a feeling within the cave like a thunderstorm building, which made the hairs on his arms stand up.

  Maybe that was why he'd wanted to come here. He didn't know, and hoped no one demanded an explanation.

  At last, when the light began to fade and the air's heat to dissipate, he couldn't stand it anymore.

  Kieran was sleeping and there was no work left to do. He took the priest's book and one of the rifles and walked out. Father Ilder watched him go and didn't say anything about the book.

  Scare
d of him, now that he was armed again.

  Outside, the sky was still bright, but everything down in the little valley was in shadow. Sunlight yellow as beer still poured across the high ground, and his impulse was to go up there and open his mouth, let it pour into him. Half-walking and half-climbing, he scrambled up the easiest part of the slope.

  A view opened before him, a view of such hugeness that it seemed to snatch him away from himself, spread him out so thin he was intangible. To the north, beyond the gullied land they'd traveled today, featureless yellow-gray plain spread out to the limits of distance. East, it curved around farther out, then swallowed the hills as it did to the north. South, the eroded squareness of these hills smoothed out into rounder, higher land, each progressively more enormous mound identically bald on top. A few sported twisted trees on their flanks. And to the west, the workings of time grew more apparent, the land redder, until the horizon was made up of chops and slices that he supposed were buttes and canyonland, but which in the low-slanting sun looked just like the cracked mud plates of the flat where he'd awakened the morning after their escape.

  He counted back. That had been only nine days ago. Only nine days. It was inconceivable how much had happened in nine days. No wonder he was exhausted.

  From below, he could still hear the priest's voice, faintly. He walked south until he couldn't hear it anymore, and then a little farther, until he couldn't have heard anyone from camp even if they yelled. It was irresponsible of him, he knew. And part of him cried out against leaving Kieran with those people, who didn't care enough. But it was a small part, drowned out by the need to be alone, just for a few minutes, to have no one looking at him or judging him. He found a knob of reddish clay earth about his own height, climbed it, and sat down facing north, toward the most open of his views.

  Feeling a little self-conscious, he looked the rifle over, thinking about the dead man from whom it had come. Had that man left some trace of his nature on his weapon? It didn't feel charged in any way; didn't even feel like a weapon, just some metal and wood that happened to be made in this shape. He worked the bolt, and his hands wanted to follow that by firing. Instead, he set it across his knees. Opened Ilder's journal. Read a little, but it made that trapped-irritated-weary feeling start to rise up again; Ilder's tone was so condescending, so convinced that the people he studied were misguided, backwards and wrong. So Ash left the book alone and just stared at the place where the sky met the world.

  Homesickness crept up on him. It was too dry here, far too open, the trees were sick and the grass angry, the animals hostile and the people lost. He wanted to water the whole desert and make green spring up with a wave of his hand. He wondered what Kieran would think of Ladygate, where the passage of a million feet couldn't keep moss out of the sidewalks, where the drainpipe of every tenement had a wisp of ivy climbing it, and rain was a lullaby all summer.

  And in the winter, snow, turning the night sky yellow with the reflection of streetlights, smothering sound, making every conversation an exchange of secrets; had Kieran ever seen snow? Ash wanted to take him north, show it to him. Show him the Shale River gray as its namesake under a sky clotted with cloud; show him Tenkist Park in the spring, a blizzard of pink petals from the cherry trees swirling through burgeoning green; take him to the top floor of the South Bank Library, to the little corner window at the back of the science section, that looked down on a landscape of moss-splotched roof tiles and haphazard chimney pots almost as strange as the desert. Feed him the library's thick silence, the smell of leather and dust there. Lie with him among the sound of bees up on the bluffs at midsummer, when the air was wet enough that you drank it instead of breathing it.

  And after that, why not farther north? All the way to Yelorre, to fogbound shores Ash barely remembered. He wasn't even certain whether the views he recalled were real, or whether he'd invented them. He could never see his parents' faces, though sometimes a voice would flood him with a memory of wonder and a warm sweetish smell and the color blue, so that he thought his mother's must have sounded similar. Of the house where he'd been born, and where his parents had died, all he recalled was a flash here and there: a brick-edged step where a hole in the mortar contained an anthill, brown carpet on a shiny wooden floor, a green caterpillar hanging from a thread in spring rain. The only really clear image he retained was of a stretch of jagged shore, red-black granite standing against a heaving sea, the wet beach sharply dark at his feet and graduating into soft paleness with distance. It was so clear a picture that he felt he must have constructed it in later life, because a four-year-old's mind could not have been so observant, could it?

  But now he wanted to find that beach. He wanted that coolness in his throat, that fine mist against his skin. His soul felt parched. The beauty of Iavaiah was one that battered and scoured.

  He couldn't rest here.

  What tired him was the sense that every single thing he touched was hostile. Nothing accepted him; land, people, air, everything abraded him. Everything but Kieran, and even he, being as precious and endangered as he was, caused an anxiety Ash had no idea how to work past. He'd never been so lonely in his life as he was now, not even after his arrest when he'd occupied a solitary disinfectant-smelling cell beneath the courthouse wondering whether his aunt would be arrested as well. Then, he hadn't had any options. Now he had too many, and they all looked bad.

  He wanted to go home.

  And he knew that if he had to leave Kieran behind to do it, he'd never see Aunt Isobel or Ladygate again.

  I'm going to die here in the dust and heat, it's foolish to think there's any other possible outcome.

  Kieran will die and then I'll die. Because I can't take care of him, because there's no one to help me help him, no one to save him. How can this be happening to us? We're not even old enough to join the army! So unfair...

  He let his self-pity run that far, and no farther. His own illogical whining was starting to make him angry; he certainly wasn't going to give those pointless thoughts any more time.

  I should be thinking about staying alive. The Watch isn't going to give up on us, not if they sent three men after us on the Canyon road. Unless we have a serious storm or come up with some other way to hide our trail, we're going to have more of them to deal with. And they'll be readier this time, and we won't know their movements to ambush them. With Kieran basically useless, I'm the only one here who can shoot, and I can't shoot that well.

  So think, Ashleigh. What washes out the kind of trail Watch trackers follow? Lots of other people -- should we be heading for a city? Rails; don't know where any are, from here. Water --hah. Weather; no control. Time. That's about it, as far as I know. My hunch that something in a place like this might help, well, there's kind of a power feeling inside the cave, but how the hell would I know if it was doing anything? And this is a damn bad place for them to find us, we'd be cornered.

  We should never have come out here. We should have laid low in Burn River until we could get on a train going to the coast, Gevarne or somewhere big like that, and then we should have left the country.

  He turned his head to look wistfully at the mountains, beyond which Prandhar declined to comply with the extradition treaty. Realized that he'd heard no news for so long that for all he knew the Commonwealth was at war with Prandhar now. Saw a flicker of movement and froze, tightening his grip on the rifle.

  Just a dozen yards away, a small hoofed animal was picking its way along the shoulder of another mound of dirt. He thought at first it was a goat, from the size, but as it came into better light he saw that it was a deer. It stopped every few feet to nose at the ground, but didn't seem to be actually eating what it found. He didn't blame it; nothing here looked really edible. All dry and thorny. That something as rounded and graceful as that little deer could live here was strange, beautiful and wrong.

  He set the rifle against his shoulder. There wasn't much in the way of decision behind the action.

  Regret warred with what he
could only think of as the spirit of the desert seeping into him. He didn't really try to put the deer's neck in the notch of the sight, it just ended up there.

  The gun cracked and punched his shoulder, and the deer half-leapt and fell.

  When he came skidding down into the valley with the deer across his back, Miyan and the priest were waiting for him. The priest looked anxious, but the girl was smiling broadly. She had a kitchen knife in one hand and a folded oilcloth tarp in the other.

  Ash dumped the dead animal before her. He looked pointedly at the knife. "How'd you know?"

  She darted a wary glance at Ilder, then smiled and shrugged, and didn't answer.

  "Okay. You butcher it. I'm done." He went from evening blue to the grainy almost-black of the cave. When his eyes had adjusted enough that he could find Kieran without stepping on him, he knelt down beside him. Tested the temperature of Kieran's face -- still too hot. Listened to the thick sound of Kieran's breathing.

  Bent over his knees until his forehead rested on the blanket over Kieran's stomach, and gave in to silent weeping.

  When Kieran moved, Ash froze. He was about to sit up when Kieran's hand landed on the back of his neck.