The Uplander Lord’s son went afoot among his men, crouching at this fire to talk a moment, laughing with that solider the next, standing with the guard a moment in silence, eyes seeming to see more than just the darkness. ‘Well fought,’ he said. ‘How is that sword cut healing? See the quartermaster for more rice.’
This second chance at Lord Ryuu’s son Cam also gave away, slipping through the net of Uplander guards and soliders-at-arms and camp-followers and ragged, hungry infantry back to his own side.
False. The word beat in his head. ‘Ryuu and his son are said to be moving south again. Towards Dorn-Lannet.’ Ever since Bailey had been done for, it was Cam who passed on the news and rumours.
‘What are the odds we will be called to muster there,’ said Layne.
Da Mansto held up three fingers. ‘Brae, Oda, Bailey.’ He folded them with each name. ‘If we are to muster at Dorn-Lannet, then this will be the make-it or break-it battle for the South.’ He was quiet a moment. ‘I wonder who of us will come out of it.’
‘How different this war would be, was the Lord of Dorn-Lannet more like to our enemy, for Lord Ryuu and his son are so clearly the better leaders.’ Cam did not think of what he said, until the words were out.
Layne, in his sudden way, grabbed Cam by the collar. ‘Do not you say that.’
‘Leave be,’ said Da Mansto. ‘The fighting will come to us soon enough, without we starting it among ourselves.’
Cam fingered Brae’s bow. ‘If Ryuu’s son died, maybe this war would be done.’
No one said anything.
‘And we could go home.’
‘Don’t you speak of it,’ said Layne. Later, Cam had wondered if Layne had some presentiment, for he died the next day.
More gently, Da Mansto said, ‘Nothing will stop Lord Ryuu.’
Cam thought, I could have.
That was why he hesitated now, his sword ready to strike at the base of the bandit’s neck, where the stolen tunic that was too big for him gaped over his hollow collarbones. That was why, on a riverbed somewhere far from home, he had put an arrow in one man. Both because he had been unable to put one in another.
Though he had thrown away the stick, he knew the number of his dead. It was the highest he had learned to count to. What was one more to the tally?
Cam raised his sword but, his mind changing tack, turned the blow at the last moment. The bandit fell upon the roadway, scrabbling about in the dust in a frenzy of fear. Cam spat aside. ‘Get out of here.’ He sheathed the sword.
If he rode steadily, he would make Dorn-Lannet before the month was done.
The yearning tore him, from the inside out.
DIIDO’S REVENGE
Diido felt . . . ‘Squashed,’ she said. ‘I’m being squashed. Bleuch.’
She twisted her head around, trying to look up to the village on the ridge, but Gaida kept her hand screwed in Diido’s collar all the way across the camp. The sky hung low and grey, pushing the damp grey mist into the grey smoke from the camp fires, so that the air held a drab mystery, tents and shanties coming up out of the muck, their colours all muted.
‘Don’t they know what the sun is, here?’
‘Enough of your talk.’ Gaida rapped her knuckles on Diido’s skull. ‘I’ve had it with your wet ways and blather.’
She dragged Diido to Selena’s humpy, which was splat in the middle of the camp. The branches of the tree it was built against were woven together, part of the walls, and the front was open to the camp. Gaida loosed her hold on Diido and pushed her forward.
Selena stayed sat on a cushion, her bung foot stuck out in front of her. She looked at Diido from the top of her head to her bare, grubby feet. Diido looked down at the ground. Selena was the nearest thing to a wise-woman the camp had, which made it dangerous to meet her gaze.
‘Selena.’ Gaida made her voice special. ‘It’s my husband. She rubs him up wrong and he her.’
‘Is that so?’ Selena’s voice was deep as a man’s, hoarse as if she pipe-smoked.
Gaida was silent; Selena was silent. Diido felt Gaida’s grip tighten and tighten on her collar, loosening only when Selena spoke again. ‘Ya, ya. You can leave her here.’
And that’s what Gaida did – just like that, she bowed and ran back across the camp, ran from Diido.
‘Huh.’ Diido watched her. ‘She’s happy to see the back of me.’ She kicked and kicked at the base of the tree, hard, so the stinging in her toes was bigger in her mind than Gaida leaving her.
‘Here.’ Selena thumped at the ground with her stick. ‘Help me up.’
Diido knelt by the cushion. Selena put one hand on her shoulder and Diido stood them both up.
‘You’re strong!’
Of course. ‘Yes.’
‘Yes, Ma’am.’
‘Yes, Ma’am.’ Diido rashly added, ‘Maybe, she feels bad; that’s why she runs.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Yes, Ma’am.’
‘What are you to her, that she needs to feel bad? Are you kin?’ Selena’s tone was matter-of-fact, but her questions hurt, and the hurt got in the way of the right words.
‘Nothing,’ said Diido. ‘I’m nothing but trouble, especially to her.’
Selena’s loom was burnt and broken, somewhere back home, back north, in the City. A weaver was a prince or princess among workers, and Selena had been a princess among weavers. Not a princess like the lords and ladies, but a princess because of the magic in her hands. All she had left of her royalty now were the rolls of fabric she had fled with from the North. They stood stacked against the wall of the humpy, travel-dusted, fading.
As night came on, guitars sounded in the camp, and song. ‘It’ll be getting lively out there.’
Diido grinned. By lively, Selena meant wild. It always got wild when the guitars and songs and spirits came out, and they came out every night. Diido spread out her sleeping rug, and Selena’s, too, when the wise-woman rapped her with her cane.
She lay down in the doorway, waiting until Selena was asleep before creeping out to the camp fires.
‘Here she is,’ they said, the drinkers, the guitar players. ‘What will it be?’
‘Tell me what you want to hear,’ said Diido.
‘Let’s have the one about the river god.’
So Diido sang the river-god song. As she sang, she saw the yellow roiling river of the City, the City that had been home. People came to the doorways of their huts and tents and sat, drawn by her voice. Diido sang ‘The Lament of the Pearl Diver’, the song of the fisherfolk of the river, who plied their round boats back and forth across the current. She sang a new song next, from the village up on the ridge, which she had heard being sung in the fields, and then she took herself back to the humpy and curled up in the doorway, Selena not stirring at all.
‘You’re useful, I can see that.’
Diido sat up with a start. Selena was standing outside. She would have had to step over Diido to get out of the door, and Diido had not woken. By the doorway was a bowl with raw yams in it. Someone had put it there and Diido had slept through that too.
‘I hate Gaida,’ said Diido. Selena had her scouring the skin and dirt off the yams with sand.
‘Save it for someone who’s earned it.’
‘It’s not Giitan – he’s my brother! But she never liked me, no.’
‘Giitan?’
‘Gaida’s husband.’ Not that they’d had more wedding than the march south from the City.
‘Brother, is he?’ Selena poked with her stick at the ground. ‘That’s not what I heard. Ah, Gaida’s all right. And now she’s a child on the way.’
‘I could’ve helped them.’
‘Maybe you could have. Maybe you’d want to, but you wouldn’t have. Talk’s not enough.’
Diido didn’t have a single word to throw back at Selena. She sat with the yams hanging in her hands until Selena cuffed her. ‘You going to nurse them or cook them?’
They ate the yams for breakfast. ‘Yo
u like how I cook them? I was put to work at a great house and they learned me how to cook. We wore silk aprons in the kitchen.’ Diido hung their sleeping rugs, at Selena’s direction, to air on the roof of the humpy. ‘I helped the housemaids, too, with these exact tasks.’ She swept the floor in a great choking of dust. ‘Here, I can make it so comfortable.’ She bade Selena get to her feet so she could plump up the cushion she sat on; polished her stick with spit and rubbing; filled up the water crock—
You talk enough to break my head,’ said Selena. ‘Be off and talk yourself out somewhere else. Come back when you can be quiet.’
Diido stood on the road on the ridge. Without the shelter of the woods, the wind bit at her. She tucked her arms into her sleeves and spun a slow circle, looking. On her left the land fell away to foothills, woods, and finally the sea. The camp was clear to see, a mess of shacks under a grey film of woodsmoke. On the other side of the ridge from the camp, beyond the buildings that hedged the high street, fields stepped down the hill.
Diido liked it up here, closer to the sky. She liked the town, pretty and clean as the City had never been. She liked the curtains at the windows, all white; the pine trees by every front door, pruned so that the needles formed great green pompoms, sprouting on the ends of the branches. She liked the cloths the women and girls wore over their hair with only a neat, pale-haired part showing. She wanted one for herself. She liked being among people: not angry, hungry people, like in the camp, but smiling people. Plump, smiling people. She liked it for that, but it could never be home. Home was the yellow river, the teeming, dirty, noisy City.
She reached the village common, and leaned on a wall clucking at the chickens on the other side until a woman came out shaking her headscarf at her. Sighing, Diido moved on.
Two boys followed her down the length of the street. One shouted something, and laughed. Diido turned. He said it again: ‘Scrull.’
Diido looked him up and down. He was puddingy and pale and very ugly. ‘Huh.’ She flicked her fingers at him.
‘Scru-ull.’ That was the other one.
‘Scurruul!’ Diido tried the word out. ‘Yah! I seen worse than you, Pie-belly.’ She turned so that she walked past them, going in the opposite direction. She came to the house with the chickens again and stopped a moment to look. She remembered chickens in the yard at home—
Whap! Something hit the back of her head. Something sticky and smelly. Shit.
‘Shit!’ Selena whacked Diido about the ankles with her stick. ‘Go swim and wash it off before I let you in here.’
‘But they threw it at me.’
‘What you expect? Kisses?’
Diido went, not to the river but to the stream that ran off it, to her private place, and found it invaded. A small girl, not from the camp but from the village, was standing by the water. Used as she had become to Downlanders, Diido stared, for the little girl was as dark of hair and eye as Diido herself. Watching her, Diido hurt: for the little girl she herself had been before the soldiers had come; for the angry grieving look on the child’s face. Even here, in this place of peace and plenty, so far, far from the soldiers, why that look?
When the little girl jumped into the stream, Diido laughed aloud. ‘That’s more like it, you should play’
But the child looked at Diido as at a monster, and bolted.
Slowly, Diido stripped; slowly, she sank to a crouch in the yabbering stream, breathless at the chill of it. ‘K-kisses,’ she said to the weeds, her teeth chattering. ‘Kisses,’ to the green-brown water. ‘Kiss my t-tup they will.’
She was almost back at the camp when she thought of Selena saying that talk wasn’t enough, and of Gaida, tiring of her enough to get rid of her, and she backtracked and caught a fish for Selena.
‘Fisherfolk? Is that what you were?’
‘Yep.’
‘Tell me – don’t go looking so comfortable. You can talk while you cook that fish.’
Diido told her. She had dived for abalone. Every morning she and Ma and the other divers of their crew swam out to the Piske, moored in the harbour. Philot sailed her – Philot owned her and sailed her. All her divers were girls and women. The boat crew were men. Philot would not let a diver touch sails or tiller or ropes, and she would not take on male divers.
Out of the bay and on the ocean, Philot would order the men to spread the net, and the women would climb out onto it. From here they dived. Diido swam naked but for gloves, worn against the sharpness of the shells, and the basket belted to her waist, to take her catch. She swam with Ma, learning from her.
Philot paid well. People paid her well for abalone. Rich people. Diido’s ma could never understand that. ‘Was I rich,’ she’d often said, ‘I’d not buy stinking abalone.’
Ma dived for the good money that Captain Philot paid. Diido dived because she was Ma’s daughter, but she loved it for another reason. On land she was too tall, too thin; she banged her head, tripped over her own feet. In the water, though, her body answered her mind, turned sure and swift. Philot always said she was half fish. Diido had half believed her.
‘Is that so?’ said Selena. ‘Is that so. You are . . . fourteen? Fifteen?’
‘Don’t know. I don’t remember when the soldiers came, or what they did, and I don’t know how long it’s been.’
‘Ya, ya, I won’t ask no more.’
Outside, the sound of guitars began. Diido wanted to sing, but could not creep out to the fires until Selena was asleep. ‘Ma’am, show me what you made.’ She pointed to the rolls of material, which Selena had carried with a club foot, all those weeks of walking.
Selena pointed with her stick, and Diido brought her the roll. ‘This one, I made this for a wedding.’ Selena caressed it, like it was a live thing. ‘Not just any wedding, neither, but for Lady Ay to one of Lord Manui’s sons.’
Ay and Manui were gone, both houses done away by the Ryuus, though they had been older and Higher than Ryuu.
Diido fingered the rolls of fabric. ‘I could never wear something like this. Even if I get married, it won’t be in this!’
‘I never worn any of it, though I made it.’
‘And Ay and Manui are dead, and us alive. Being old and High-born didn’t help them any, huh!’ Diido snapped her fingers.
‘Girl, you really have no manners.’
Diido did not know what Selena meant. ‘Ma’am, will you teach me to weave?’
‘Maybe one day there’ll be a town here, and there’ll be shops and workshops and employment for weavers of cloth, but not yet.’
That night, Diido could not sleep. It was not true, what she had told Selena: Diido remembered the soldiers. She remembered Ma and Pap and her brother. She remembered the Lord Ryuu’s army overrunning the City, and all that came with them and after them. Yet, the City was home.
The days ran one into the other, all alike, yet each a little different. Diido found it difficult to figure how many had passed. But they brought with them at last a softer air; a green fuzz on the trees; a patchy blue to the sky.
Diido ambled along the main street of the village, in and out of the shade of great spreading trees. Her pockets bulged with stones, and her jacket dragged at her neck, weighed down with them. As she walked, she looked, to left and right and around corners, and finally she found him. Down in one of the paddocks, the puddingy boy was shying stones at birds. Diido patted her pockets and grinned.
On the long road from the City, there had been soldiers and bandits and people who had lost their sense of right or wrong, and Diido had dodged them all. Working her way down to Pie-belly without him seeing her was far, far easier. All the fields were terraced, with raised walls of earth, shrubs dotting the tops of them. Diido made it to the paddock by darting from one clump of scrub to the next.
Through the gaps in the bushes she could see him, but the trees pushed up against the slope of the earth wall, and the morning sun was bright on them, so no one could see her hiding in their cover. Piling the stones on the ground, she fo
lded her arms on her upraised knees, pulled her trouser cuffs over her toes and waited.
The morning had half passed before Pie-belly tired of murdering starlings and slouched and scuffed his way past Diido. Standing up under the shadow of the trees, Diido hurled her first missile.
‘Scurul!’ Her voice tore her throat. ‘I’ll scuruul you.’ She flung the stones. Here’s for Selena – pom! Here’s for the camp – pom! Here’s for Ma!
He bent his head into his arms, this big pudgy boy, one leg up, and howled. Diido laughed and threw stones, and with each little bloody bite she laughed louder.
‘Kiss my tup!’ She turned her back on him and slapped her rump, laughing and blowing noisy rough kisses into the air – then she looked up. Through the screen of trees, a pair of eyes met hers. A little girl stood there, the same little girl who had jumped into the stream. Her black eyes were taking it all in, both hands over her mouth, squashing back horrified laughter. Diido winked at her, then took off, feeling the little girl’s eyes on her back all the way up to the road.
Why she stopped to look at the chickens she did not know. She did not lean on the wall this time; she just stood a moment and watched them. There were still a few stones in her pocket. She took one and threw it, without knowing she would do it, and a chicken fell down where it was. The others set up a squawking and fuss enough to bring the whole village over. Diido went on down the road, turning east and heading downhill, faster and faster, running for the camp.
‘You not well?’ Selena tapped at Diido with her stick. ‘Hmm. Not singing tonight? Ya, I know about it, got ears you know and the whole camp talks of it anyways.’
From outside came shouting.
‘Never known you so quiet.’
‘Ma’am? What . . . what is that out there?’
They both paused and listened. The shouting was growing louder.
‘Go see, girl. Be careful.’
Halfway through the door, Diido turned. She went back to Selena, helped her up and sat her in the doorway. ‘You want to . . .?’
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