Exile's Return

by Gayle Greeno

  With gentle inexorability Mem‘now pinned the ghatten beneath his considerable bulk, crouching to hold her in place. Excited, she managed to roll onto her back, chew at Mem’now’s ruff. “I hope she Bonds soon, Wa’roo, or I’ll be so bedraggled Twylla won’t be able to repair me.” He sprang and the ghatten scooted to her mother. “But, Khar, you know how imperfect humans are. I swear they can’t remember what they ate the day before. Certainly Bondmates are a cut above regular humans, but even they may lack the capacity to understand. Besides, how can Doyce gain the knowledge she needs?”

  “Mem‘now, Mem’now,” Terl scolded as he worked worn teeth into a mat of fur on his side, the once-black coat rusty and faded with age. “You, one of the greatest Tale- Tellers of us all, have to ask that? We all have the knowledge; collectively as ghatti we know and pass it on to each succeeding generation. We all know different levels, different layerings of the Truth above all truth as we rise in the Spirals. But with our joint knowledge, ours and the Elders combined, we should be able to direct Doyce on a journey in her mind.” He coughed once, ignoring the rising apprehension on Mem’now’s broad face. “If we so choose to, of course.”

  Mem’now drew himself to his full height. “It’s not something to be taken lightly, you know. And is it wise, in her condition? What of the ghatten-child she carries?”

  Mr‘la heaved herself upright, glossy sides tight as a drum-head. “Pity sakes, Mem’now, she’s not some fragile little creature for all she’s a human. Females have managed to have babies without you worrying about it for eternity. Not that we don’t appreciate the thought.” Khar realized suddenly who had sired Mr‘la’s litter and caught the shamed twinkle in Mem’now’s eyes. “We have to decide amongst us all if this is the wisest course to take, but Khar’s right, the times are in an upheaval that’s near the match of the past with the Plumbs’ literal upheaval. I say we at least give her a taste of the past and decide what we should do in depth when we’ve all taken council.”

  “After all, she already has the diary, although she doesn’t realize what she’s stumbled upon,” Terl pointed out. “Her reaction will show us whether we should proceed. Remember, the gift we offer is not a small one.”

  Eyes further slanted by worry, Wa’roo protectively gathered her ghatten close. “Who knows whether in future days they may decide they don’t need us, that Resonants are enough. I would not have my ghatten go into a world like that, better they die! We know Truth; the Resonants, skilled as they may be, do not. We must not falter or fail, just as we never have before!” Pride, sorrow, exultation—the way of the ghatti, the way of Truth. And truth they could share—amongst themselves or with others.

  But now Khar drew back, afraid, “But to enter into her mind without her leave? We can’t do that, you know we can’t, not by all we hold sacred!”

  “And who said we would,” Mem’now groused. “Not when we have the perfect conduit here, my beauteous tale-telling ghatta. We’ll spin our tales with yours, and you, you just let her listen.”

  He fanny-skidded down the bank, digging in bare heels to keep from sliding too fast, the sickle held well to the side with his left hand, honed crescent and lethal point away from his body. Draping legs over the undercut bank edge, he dropped into waist-deep water, feet sinking into oozing muck that sucked at his ankles. Water churned dank by his footsteps, bits of rotting matter floating to the surface, rich, rotting smell strong in the beating sun, he swatted at a rising cloud of biter-flies with his free hand, tight-squinching eyes, nostrils, and mouth. Unfortunately, he couldn’t close his ears, and one fly began exploring the inner convolutions of an ear, its hum maddening but not as painful as the anticipated bite.

  “Damn all, Henryk! Come on, Ryk, you promised! Swore you’d tend the smudge if I let you tag along.” No response, but one squinted eye spotted a ghost movement hovering near the tilted trees with their twisted, gnarled roots dread-locking toward the water. Well, Granther had ordered him to watch Henryk, so watch he would. “Please, Uncle Henryk, dear Uncle Henryk,” he singsonged. “I won’t just be eaten alive here, I’ll be carried away!” and continued under his breath, “And if you don’t obey, do as you’re told, I’ll tell Granther, sure as sunrise, and you’ll be sorry!”

  A pale-skinned boy, alabaster white, almost bald-looking because of equally pale, close-cropped hair, skittered out of the shadows, pressing makeshift spectacles against the bridge of his nose. One lens glowed amber, the other green, their shapes different, giving him a lopsided look. Arms crossed, he rubbed hands up and down scrawny ribs, raised them to cup his shoulders protectively, as if he’d cape his back. “It’s too sunny, I’ll burn to death. My eyes hurt!” His childish reproaches whined over the stagnant water, eight-year-old uncle complaining to fifteen-year-old nephew. “Poppy’s gonna yell at you for going in with your pants on!”

  The older boy snarled over his shoulder, “I am not going to offer the leeches lunch, at least not there!” Aggravated, incautious where he stepped, he disappeared underwater with a choking glug, bubbles rising, ripples fanning across the slough.

  The younger boy hesitated, tiptoed closer to the bank, scrawny white body jittering with impatience. Taking his glasses off, he scanned the water, pink eyes tearing, blinking nearsightedly into the bright reflected light. “Matty? Matty?” He waited, kicking at the bank with a bare foot, faster and harder. At last, a drawn out wail. “Mat-ty!”

  Dark hair slicked back from his face, lying limp and dripping on his neck, Matty arose, breathless, amongst a tangle of water lilies, fighting aside the tough stems. Straight brows like two finger smears of ash emphasized narrow, dark blue eyes, the long, thin nose. “Damn it, Ryk-Ryk, you made me drop the sickle! Got to dive for it.” Suiting actions to words, he disappeared underwater again as the younger boy started to whimper.

  “Baa-wah! Ta-da!” The sickle flashed skyward-miniature replica of the crescent moons that seasonally waxed and waned around Canderis’s one unchanging moon—followed by a tanned arm and the rest of Matty’s body, mouth spewing water as he shouted. A lethal gesture with the sickle, far too distant to damage Henryk’s toes, convinced the younger boy to obediently gather his fire materials near the bank. “Now, Ryk, get that smudge going or I’ll bury one of your toes in the rushes for Granther to find. Think he’ll rethatch the roof with it or leave it as floor covering?”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” The younger boy seemed truly repentant, at least for the moment. Serious, he continued, “But, Matty, the sun’s awful bright and you know what’ll happen to me.” He thought further, cracking open his clamshell to expose the smoldering punk, shielding it against his bony chest. “And Poppy’ll be mad about the pants, too. We could rinse’m in the stream on the way back, turn the pockets inside out, wash the silt out.”

  Wading deeper into the reeds, Matty swung the sickle below the waterline, let his armful float free, piled the next load on top and coasted them to the bank, swung them up onto the overhang. The sun burned high and hot, Ryk’s marble-pale skin already pinking on his shoulders. “Spend a little time out here, then go back into the shade. Come out when you can, spread the reeds to dry. We’ll manage.” He frog-legged back to the reeds and lost himself in the rhythmic swish of the sickle, pretending he hacked his way into unknown, unexplored territory with each gathered armload.

  The light shone long across the water now, had shifted from its zenith, and he scrubbed at the runnels of sweat trickling down his face, let himself sink underwater, blinking as the silt rose and danced before his eyes like petals of soft ashes before it resettled. It permeated the fabric, dragging his pants down skinny hips, his rope belt stretching but the knot itself water-swollen, no hope of hitching them tighter or higher. Ryk was right, Granther’d have his hide if he ruined these new britches after all his efforts to trade for them. It was just that Matty hated them, despised them was more accurate. The material too heavy, the size too big, and worst of all, Granther’s insistence on cutting them short, above the knee for
summer, and hemming them. All the other boys, indeed, most of the men of the village, wore them below the knee and unraveling.

  Granther had stood him on the stool, pinning away, checking the hang, turning the raw edge into a protective double fold. “Can’t take’m in anymore or your hip pockets’d be on top of each other,” he’d muttered through a mouthful of pins. “And as for leaving them longer and unhemmed—absolutely not! Come winter we can sew the legs back on.” He indicated the cast-off, amputated pants legs tossed over his shoulder. “You’ll still have plenty of length and you won’t have wrecked the knees like everyone else. Waste of material.” Frowning, he’d slapped Matty’s bottom to send him off the stool. “Now shuck them, son, I’ve got sewing to do.”

  Matty sighed at the memory. And didn’t he want above all to be like everyone else? Not have a fey-footed father who wandered the world, unable to cope with what he found? Not have a granther sometimes disliked, sometimes revered, but forever in the public eye for his unstinting service as conciliator-mayor in their little hamlet of hovels? Not have a fey uncle half his age with skin bleached so colorless you could track his veins beneath it, watery pink-red eyes that made him stand out, and webbing between his two final fingers and two final toes? No wonder everyone thought Henryk was jinxed, hexed!

  And didn’t he, Matty, yearn to be like other boys his age, shooting up, chest broadening, voice deepening, instead of being humiliated by its insane swoops from high to low? He shifted the sickle to his left hand, fisted his right hand to flex his biceps, peered under his arm to determine if any hair had sprouted. Nothing. The only visible sign that something had sprouted—too often at times—was the real reason he’d be damned if he’d be caught reed gathering without his pants. After all, the girls sometimes came to swim and bathe beyond this sedge where the water flowed sweet and smooth and clean over a sandbar.

  The fire on the bank had just about smoldered out and he debated wading ashore to restart it. As usual, Henryk had vanished, probably asleep in the shade, safe, he hoped. The child tended to roam the night when the sun didn’t hurt his eyes, and sleep during the day. Fewer people were abroad after dark, fewer people to laugh at him, taunt him, toss stones, although luckily no one had ever threatened the child with bodily harm, though he’d caught their murmurings. “Cursed spawn of a cursed planet,” they called Ryk sometimes, but not to Matty’s or to his granther’s face.

  A flash of laughter skittered across the water, and he knew without looking who it was. Other tinkling laughter interwove it, but he separated that one voice as surely as if there were but one seductive sound. Taking a handful of reeds, he twisted them around the curve of the sickle, hanging it in place, and began to press his way through the reeds, gauging his motions to match the erratic breeze. Yes, yes! Just a little closer and he could part them, peer out, observe without being observed.

  Oh, by the Lady those strange, itinerant Shepherds worshiped, she was gorgeous! And wonder of wonders, she faced his way, thigh-deep in water, laughing back at her friends in the shallows. Lathering herself with a scrap of hoarded soap, delicate iridescent froth foaming across her body, so rounded, so curved, so pink and white. Two rosy nipples stared saucily at him, nothing like the pink of poor Henryk’s eyes; her round face, blue eyes shut and turned sunward, made him sink his hands into his pockets, fingers working.

  Oh! By the Lady above, she was so ... so, he groped for a word to describe his ecstasy, groped for something lower as well. So ... porcine! And to a child, nearly a young man, raised in scrimping want and poverty, hunger generally assuaged but rarely by food he liked, nothing more perfectly, transcendingly gorgeous came to mind than the plump young piglet he’d once been privileged to see, stroke, before it had been spitted and cooked into tender, succulent, mouthwatering goodness. Oh, Vatersnelle, light of his life! His Nelle!

  He inhaled through his mouth, didn’t realize the sound had carried until it was too late. Should have heard the rustling, should have known, realized, that where Nelle and the others went, the Killanins were sure to follow. Their hoarse, grating chant announced them: “Kill-kill-Killanin! Ya!” Hooting, whistling, and blatting sounds sundered the air as the eldest, Kuyper, flung himself into the river, belly flopping, sending up a wall of water at the nearby girls. Luckily his Nelle was too far away to be splashed. Nothing to do but grit his teeth.

  The Killanin boys made up their own little pack or tribe, rowdy, raucous, and utterly amoral. Most everyone in the hamlet and the surrounding areas not only disliked but feared them: Rommel, 13; Willem, 14; and Kuyper, 16. Swaggering, blustering, and big—even Rommel, the youngest, outweighed Matty by a good fifteen kilos. Their limited clothes hung ragged, rents and gashes unpatched, their identical sandy hair crept, dirty and matted, over low foreheads and deep-set suspicious dark eyes that glowed with enthusiasm at someone else’s pain. Even their parents had lost the will and stamina to impose any standards of decency on them, while the rest of the hamlet did its best to avoid them. Chastise or punish a Killanin today, and one or all three would lurk till the time was ripe for a payback that could never be proved. Granther had meted out justified punishments, but it was always little Ryk or Matty himself who paid.

  The question now was where were Rommel and Willem? Driving his nails into his palms, Matty eased farther through the reeds. The girls shouldn’t need his weak support: Nelle and five of her friends should be enough to withstand the bullies, though any fewer and the Killanins would prevail, whether with harmless indignities of lascivious, lip-smacking taunts, sly pokes and grabs, or worse—depending on their mood. Riveted, he watched Kuyper wading toward Nelle, his Nelle even if she didn’t realize it, naked but holding her ground. She shifted her feet as if in search of something, never removing her gaze from Kuyper, then abruptly dipped neck-deep in the water, rising with a dripping rock, hefting it in silent warning. Oh, Vatersnelle Houwaert, thou art bravest and noblest of all womankind! he breathed silently. “Bash him, Nelle!” he instructed in a whisper.

  But a taunting shout from the bank heralded Willem’s and Rommel’s arrival as they dragged a writhing captive, both boys leaning back on bare heels, stretching the small, pale. body between them. Henryk! May a Plumb open under their feet and swallow them! he prayed, frozen at the sight. A distant pop floated across the water as he not only saw but heard Henryk’s shoulder dislocate. Reaching blindly for the sickle, he realized he’d left it too far behind. No choice but to plow ahead. Taking a deep breath, Matty burst from the reeds. “Ya! Let him go, bastards!”

  Water up to his armpits he floundered shoreward, Kuyper angling to follow, intercept him. He didn’t know what Kuyper’d do to him if he caught up, didn’t care, couldn’t bother to worry. Had to get poor Ryk free. The younger boy spied him, a tremulous smile surfacing beneath silent tears at the sight of his hero, until Willem relinquished one arm to let Rommel jam Ryk’s head tight against his hip, thin neck squeezed in the nutcracker of his arm. Ryk’s face abruptly turned scarlet. The water shallower now, Matty drove his knees higher, pumping to gain speed. “Bite him, Ryk!” he yelled. He’d take any distraction he could get, even a momentary one that might temporarily disable or distract at least one of the taunting Killanin trio.

  “Drag’em into the woods, boys! Have our fun with him there!” Willem and Rommel greeted Kuyper’s snarled command with a certain reluctance, the naked bathers taking precedence over half-hearted torture. “Go on! Take Whitey and git!” A belated grab at a fast-moving Matty missed, and realizing they could draw him into a fruitless chase, Willem and Rommel bounded off, Henryk dragging between them.

  Bursting out of the water, Matty dashed after them, breathless with fear and anger. Stupid oafs they might be, but they were far stronger than he, and ignorant to boot. This might be the time Henryk truly got hurt—because of what he was and what he wasn’t. He spat the taste of fear aside and ran, Kuyper’s barking laugh chasing behind him, snapping at his heels. Kuyper was faster, stronger; it was just a matter of time before
he hauled Matty down from behind or charged ahead by a different route to join the others in torturing Ryk.

  His only advantage lay in knowing the trail nearly as well as they did; he checked it as often as he could to see what the Killanins had maimed or crippled each day with their crude traps or snares. Hunting was a necessity—he couldn’t argue with that, did it himself, had to to survive. But the Killanins set traps, forgot to check them for days, left birds and animals half-crazed with pain and fear, ripping off wings, gnawing their own feet to escape. Death was death, but a clean, quick one was preferable to a slow, lingering torment. Which his would be, which Henryk’s would be, he couldn’t judge, and the slap of forest shade, the breeze on his wet flesh made him shiver.

  Footsteps pounded behind him, closing in. He ran harder, steeling himself for the hand clenched in his hair or jerking at shoulder or neck, the unexpected foot snagging his, pitching him forward, defenseless. Gritting his teeth, he risked a look behind and saw Nelle galloping along, meaty, muscular thighs flashing beneath the short, damp tunic she’d donned. Round face pink, forehead furrowed, mouth tight, she pulled abreast, could have passed him without effort, her breathing easy.

  “Kuyper?” he managed to spare enough air for the question.

  A triumphant smile and she brandished the bloodstained rock clenched in her hand. It spoke more eloquently than any word she could utter. “Come on, then!” And for a moment sheer joy shivered up his spine; mayhap, just mayhap they’d free Henryk before Willem and Rommel tired of teasing their prey, left it broken and bloody.

  Almost to the giant oak now, massive hub in a small clearing ahead. Beyond that a barely discernible trail that the rolapin traveled to avoid the clearing, a perfect place for setting snares. He knew, had set them there himself, waited fruitlessly before he’d become wise to their ways.