by Angus Watson
Merciless time marched towards the point that a human couldn’t possibly have survived underwater, then marched on past it.
Still no Keef.
“No!” wailed Bodil Gooseface.
Sassa put an arm around the girl, tears streaming down her own face below the stupid haircut that Paloma had given her.
Sofi blinked. She didn’t like the Mushroom Men, not at all, she was going to kill the lot of them when this was done, but still she didn’t like to see someone die like this. She shook her head. The sooner the Owsla started eating their rattlesnake and tarantula hawk wasp the better. That would stop all this pally-pally shit. She couldn’t believe she’d almost become misty eyed over the fate of a one-eyed, one-eared freak.
She turned to head to the Plains Strider and sword practice. She couldn’t face watching her women commiserate with the enemy. They might even all hug each other. If she saw that, she’d have to kill the lot of them.
“There he is!” shouted Sitsi Kestrel.
Sofi spun round.
“Where?” said Sassa, “I can’t—”
Sofi could. He’d surfaced a hundred paces downstream, but there was something odd. It looked like there were two people rushing along in the current.
“Wooooooo-taaaah!” Keef shouted, as he was swept out of sight around a tree-lined bend.
Rappa Hoga leapt onto his dagger-tooth and galloped off to retrieve his captive. Wulf the Fat and the rest of the Mushroom Men followed at a run, but Chapa Wangwa shouted: “Your spiders will bite! Come back to me and the Empty Children!”
Wulf marshalled his people and they returned reluctantly. They didn’t have long to wait. Keef the Berserker came back at a run, followed by Rappa Hoga on his cat, carrying a bundle.
Keef’s bandage had gone, his missing eye and ear were puckered pink holes, but apart from that he looked as hale and chipper as you’d expect from a man who’d cheated certain death. The Mushroom Men crowded round while Rappa Hoga dismounted and took the burden from his cat. It was the drowned Clogan. For a moment Sofi thought he might be alive. Could he have been trapped in an underwater air pocket? But, no, he was paler than a Mushroom Man and quite dead.
Rappa Hoga laid the corpse on bare red rock and the Popeye crowded round.
“He’d come through so much,” said Ovets. “Thank you for bringing his body back, Keef.”
“No bother at all!” cried the Mushroom Man. “Sorry it took me so long to find him under there.” He broke free from the circle of his congratulating tribesmates and strode up to Chief Clembur. Her attempts to hide her amazement and disappointment amused Sofi.
“Interesting course you have here,” said Keef, eyeing the river, serious as a wall engineer talking walls. “But I misjudged that second big fall a little. Can I go again?”
They stayed by the falls that night. Finnbogi the Boggy sat at the fire with Sitsi Kestrel, Paloma Pronghorn and most of the Wootah, listening to Keef the Berserker’s tale for the fifth or possibly sixth time. Finnbogi was glad, of course, that Keef had survived, but he had kicked himself several times for letting Keef take his place. He was a good swimmer, he could have done what Keef did and it could have been him retelling the story and being worshipped by everyone.
“But how did you know you’d found his body, and not an animal or something?” asked Bodil.
Keef, sitting on a log, leant forward, put his elbows on his knees. “You go over the falls, and you’re only thinking about getting out of there and getting out of there quick.” For reasons Finnbogi couldn’t fathom, Keef thought his waterfall story needed to be told in the second person. “You don’t know which way is up to begin with and you—oh hi, Treelegs, you’re joining us at a good bit. Take a seat.”
Thyri had appeared at the edge of the group. Even after this relatively short time away from Hardwork, she’d become a good deal less tree-legged. Her jaw was leaner and the muscles that had burned through their fatty coating on her arms and legs were cleanly defined. She’d always dressed like one of the Owsla, minus the knee-high Owsla leggings. Now she was beginning to look like one. Finnbogi thought that it was rather noble, perhaps heroic, that, even surrounded by the aggressively sexy women of the Owsla, he still fancied Thyri the most.
“I came to get Finn,” she said.
Finnbogi started. Finn! “What? I mean … what’s up?”
“You’ve been very slack with your training recently. You start again tonight.”
“But it wasn’t me. I would have trained. You—”
“Are you coming?”
If Finnbogi had expected Thyri to collapse and declare her undying love for him, he was mistaken. She remained subdued, a much quieter version of her previously sassy self. But the training hadn’t changed. She made him exercise, while doing the same exercises herself, until he thought he’d vomit, then she pushed him some more.
At the end she said, “See you later” and headed off Loakie knew where, leaving Finnbogi to walk back alone to the others and his sleeping sack mate Bjarni.
The Wootah lot had moved from the fire where he’d left them, and had been replaced by Sofi Tornado and Morningstar.
Finnbogi swallowed and stepped into the light.
“Um. Morningstar?” he said.
She looked up. Her plump cheeks, flawless skin and full mouth were all the more pronounced in the golden glow of the campfire.
“Yes?”
“Thanks.”
“What for?”
“For trying to step in and save me today.”
Morningstar sighed. “Don’t for a heartbeat think that I was trying to save you. I wanted the spiders off my neck, nothing more. I’d watch you drown as easily as I’d watch a turd sink in that river.”
“I see. Do you spend a lot of time watching turds sink?”
The beautiful warrior goddess looked at him as if he was one of said turds. The glare went on long enough for Finnbogi to get a serious sweat going.
“Perhaps you’d like to fuck off?” she suggested eventually.
Finnbogi walked away, grinning. Not only had his watching turds sink comeback been a corker, but Morningstar had actually spoken to him.
Chapter 14
Drugs Are Bad
The Plains Strider stayed put with the Cuguai the next day. Apparently there was a tornado storm in their path to the west, even though it was a glorious sunny but breezy day where they were. Sassa Lipchewer asked a passing Badlander how they knew about the tornado storm.
“We just do.”
“I see. What’s a tornado storm?”
“Sorry, bighorn sheep need feeding, got to go!”
And he skedaddled.
Sassa had been sick again that morning and was sure that her stomach was beginning to bulge. She wanted to talk to someone about it; get some advice from Gunnhild Kristlover, perhaps, listen to some whooping and open-mouthed wonder from Bodil Gooseface, or even put up with sarcasm and disgusting jokes from Paloma Pronghorn. Most of all, she was itching to see the look on Wulf’s face when she told him.
But Chapa Wangwa had promised them that death awaited at the Badlands, and they couldn’t be far off now. Did he mean it? Was it a joke? They’d tried to drown Keef, and were certainly capable of horrible cruelty. But Rappa Hoga seemed decent, and their spider neck pieces, although weird, annoying and horrific, did allow them to feel so free that it was nigh impossible to believe that they were being transported to their deaths.
There was no point in worrying about it, anyway. You do, after all, die when you die. However, the notion of a little human growing inside her made her almost burst with excitement, love and fear and she wanted to ensure its survival. But all she could do to protect it—as well as looking for opportunities to escape—was to eat well and avoid falling off anything.
And they did eat well with the Cuguai. Apparently Keef the Berserker was the first person who’d ever survived a trip down the falls. The Cuguai were sulky about it at first, and Keef had not helped by running around yelling at everyone th
at he’d defeated their god. The previous evening had been a subdued one and the Cuguai had kept clear.
However, the following morning Rappa Hoga had persuaded Clembur and the Cuguai tribe that Keef’s survival must be the will of the god Cuguai, and therefore something to celebrate.
The Cuguai were happy to be convinced by this cheerier take on events and had sacrificed a bear and several dogs to honour Keef’s achievement. Now, in the mid-afternoon, Cuguai, captives and captors were gathered by the falls, eating a bear and grass dish that was vomit-inducingly repulsive, and dog served hot in tubes of fluffy bread with a spicy paste. The dog was pretty delicious.
“I think Rappa Hoga might be Tor!” said Bodil, walking up to where Sassa was looking over the falls.
“Physically, maybe.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tor is not a clever god. Rappa Hoga persuaded these people who seem to hate us to throw us a party, without using violence. Tor would have bopped the lot of them on the head with his hammer then called for ale.”
“I suppose! They are nice, aren’t they, the Badlanders?”
“You think Chapa Wangwa’s nice?”
“He’s so smiley.”
“He hurt Erik. And he killed that captive in front of us, in a really nasty way, then left him to die slowly. He smiled through all of it.”
Bodil’s brow knitted. “I suppose … But he does smile a lot. And Rappa Hoga’s nice.”
“When we get to their town, or city or whatever it is, they are going to kill us. I don’t know how, but it probably won’t be nice.”
“Oh no, they’re not going to do that.”
“Then why have they captured us?”
“Have they really captured us, though?”
“Yes.”
“But we want to go west, don’t we?” Bodil’s eyes were wide.
“We do.”
“And they’re carrying us west faster than we could walk. Erik said we go more than ten times as far in a day on the Plains Strider than we would on foot. So they’re doing us a favour, aren’t they?”
“I suppose so, but—”
“I told you they were good. Now, if you weren’t with Wulf and you had to sleep with Keef or Rappa Hoga, which one would you sleep with?”
Sassa thought Rappa Hoga, every time, but said: “Is killing myself an option?”
“It is not,” said Bodil. “Not until afterwards anyway.”
“Which you’d have to do if you chose Keef.”
The two women looked over to where Keef was demonstrating axe moves to a throng of Cuguai, and laughed.
Sofi Tornado sat on a rock with the Cuguai falls on one side and the Badlander camp on the other, stretching her legs and rolling the ache out of her shoulders. She’d exercised the Owsla all morning, as hard a training session as they’d ever had, and she was pleasantly weary. All around her was a bizarre festival atmosphere as Badlanders, Cuguai, Calnians, Mushroom Men and Popeye japed about and chatted away as if the Badlanders weren’t evil bastards who’d captured half of them and subjugated the rest.
Yoki Choppa ambled up, sat on the rock next to her and proffered a bowl of lumpy brown meat. It smelled rich and slightly rotten, like human flesh that had been hung too long.
“I’ve had bear before,” she said. “Once was enough.”
“You’ll like this bear.”
She looked at him. He was nearly smiling.
“What have you found?” she asked.
“Tarantula hawk wasp and burrowing owl.”
Sofi could not remember ever spontaneously hugging anyone, and Yoki Choppa was possibly the least huggable person she knew, but she actually had to stop herself from hugging him. She’d get her hearing back, and all the Owsla would become stronger, tougher and braver from eating the wasp. They were still missing the diamondback rattlesnake that they all needed for ruthlessness, and Sitsi’s chuckwalla, but the wasp and the owl were more than Sofi had hoped for.
“Where did you get these?”
Yoki Choppa tilted his head, as if that was an answer.
“Sitsi said we were approaching the owl’s territory, so you managed to trap one,” she guessed. “We shouldn’t find the wasp until we’re further west, so you wouldn’t have found a live one, but it’s the sort of thing a warlock would have. You stole it, didn’t you, from the Cuguai warlock?”
Yoki Choppa’s head dropped a little in his version of nodding.
“So their warlock has a venomous beast in her store.” Sofi narrowed her eyes. “I’ve never met a warlock who wasn’t a hoarder. If she has one poison animal that’s commonly used in alchemy, then she has all the others, too. So she’d have diamondback rattlesnake, wouldn’t she?”
Yoki Choppa began to stand but Sofi grabbed his arm. “Did she have diamondback rattlesnake?”
He nodded.
“And you didn’t take any?”
“I did not.”
“Because it makes us cruel and pitiless and you don’t want us like that. You want us to be kind to your pet Mushroom Men.”
He looked at his feet.
“Enough of this bullshit enigmatic silence, Yoki Choppa. Your meddling has already killed one of my women and I will not have it happen again. Either give me a good, clear reason for why you didn’t take the rattlesnake, or go and get it right now, prepare it and feed it to me and my women.”
The warlock’s lower lip protruded a little further than normal and his skin darkened.
“Don’t you fucking sulk at me.”
Still he didn’t answer. “I will kill Ottar the Moaner if you don’t tell me this instant.”
“The rattlesnake makes you cruel,” he said.
Sofi was too surprised to speak for a moment. “Cruel? Since when does a Calnian warlock, any warlock, worry about cruelty? Surely it increases our reaction speed? We need that.”
“The reaction speed increase is negligible. The reason you were conditioned to rattlesnake was to make you enjoy killing.” For once, he looked her in the eye. “It was Pakanda and Zaltan’s doing. It was unnecessary. You would have killed Calnia’s enemies without it. The rattlesnake’s sole purpose was to make you perform horrific murders in the Plaza of Innowak for the entertainment of the masses. You don’t need to do that any more.”
Sofi Tornado opened her mouth so say something, but Yoki Choppa spoke over her. “It was bad enough that we took girls from their families and made them our killers. We did not need to make you evil as well. You do not need rattlesnake to take the Wootah to The Meadows and save us all. You do not need to kill the Wootah when it is done, and you never need murder for others’ entertainment again.”
“Empress Ayanna disagrees, or she would have let you drop the rattlesnake from our diet back in Calnia. Who are you to go against her wishes? Who are you to change us?”
Yoki Choppa looked at his hands. “I helped to make you.”
With that, the warlock stood to go. She didn’t stop him. He’d just said more than he had in one go in the all years that she’d known him put together. She was also a little shaken by being described as “evil.” She’d been called a lot worse, but only ever by people who didn’t matter. And what had made him and everyone else so soppy all of a sudden?
The warlock shambled back towards the Calnians, Wootah, Popeye, Badlanders and Cuguai. They were shouting and capering even more loudly. Most of the noise was coming from a group led by Wulf and Chogolisa Earthquake. They were playing a lacrosse-like game, but each of the adults was carrying a child to catch and throw the ball instead of the traditional stick. Paloma Pronghorn and Sitsi Kestrel ran to join in.
“Wheeee! Whoooo—peee!” shouted Ottar, holding the lacrosse ball, riding on Paloma Pronghorn’s shoulders as she snaked through the other players like a greased weasel. Sofi could hear Pronghorn’s feet striking firm earth. Just heartbeats after eating burrowing owl again, her hearing was already improving.
She thought about Rappa Hoga’s offer for the Owsla to join the Badla
nders. Despite Yoki Choppa’s patronising lecture, she was a long way from discarding that option. If anything, it had nudged her a little closer. The Badlanders would have warlocks capable of preparing rattlesnake.
There was a great cheer as someone scored a goal. Bjarni Chickenhead and Keef the Berserker pulled their trousers down and waggled their white arses at the other team. Wulf steamed in at a tiptoeing sprint and slapped their bare arse cheeks.
Sofi shook her head.
The game finished and Bjarni wandered away. They’d won, which was good. His arse still smarted a little from Wulf’s slap, which had hurt so much that it almost wasn’t funny. It had also left him feeling confused and in need of a smoke or something more.
Checking that the others were well out of earshot, and even though he saw Sassa Lipchewer watching him and knew that she knew what he was doing, he canvassed a few likely looking Cuguai for mushrooms. Wait and see, all of them said, annoyingly.
He ate some delicious bear meat and bided his time. Towards sunset he saw some Cuguai carrying a long pole decorated with carvings. He walked on over to see what they were up to.
By the time he reached them, they were hefting the pole into a hole. Sturdy supports were pegged into the ground to hold it upright.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Climbing pole.”
Other Cuguai were carrying bundles towards the now erect mast. Intrigued, Bjarni loitered.
The larger bundles contained thin, stripped twigs with pointed ends.
A woman sat down cross-legged on the flattened grass and opened a white deer-skin bundle. Using the skin as a mat, she laid out a large pestle and mortar, three pink stone pipes with reed mouthpieces, some brown lumps that looked like dried roots or perhaps tree burls, some seeds and a dried plant that had to be tobacco.
“Hello!” said Bjarni. “What’s all this?”
The woman was perhaps forty years old. She had a pinched face, sharp nose, small eyes and she blinked constantly, putting Bjarni in mind of an opossum. Like all the Cuguai, she had a spider box strapped to her neck.
“Sit down, darling, and I’ll show you. My name’s Tuffbur.” Her voice was deep with the underlying rattle of a dedicated tobacco smoker.