It was Dinesh. It was always Dinesh. He’d diminished since he stopped taking bliss. The skin of his face had tightened over its bones and his eyes were no longer tranquil. Now they were too bright and never still. They darted across Krish’s face to his ears and down to his chest and bare feet before restlessly circling back up again.
‘You can’t come back here,’ Krish said, less patiently than he had the first ten times. ‘You don’t live here now. I gave you your own home.’ When he realised the slaves would no longer be allowed to remain in their former masters’ homes, Krish had ordered the Rah to gift them a portion of the newly drained land. And when he’d realised the slaves were incapable of building their own houses, he’d ordered that done too.
Now everywhere he walked, he felt hostile eyes on him. The same people who’d cheered his arrival muttered behind his back and the slaves had sat in their new homes, weak and sweating. But Olufemi had told him how to grow the plant she needed to make the powder she’d devised for her lover, Vordanna, to keep her healthy without bliss. They’d harvested one small crop already and another, far larger, was on the way. Krish hated that the slaves needed drugging at all, but the mage said that without her yellow powder they would die in agony. And on it – well, if they weren’t the people they’d been before enslavement, at least they were free. Many of them were well enough to work in their new fields themselves.
Many of them, but not Dinesh, the son Uin had fed bliss to from the moment he was born – from before it, even, while he was still in his mother’s womb. He came to Krish every day and begged to be allowed to take it again.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Krish told him hopelessly. ‘The others have. It’s … it’s better this way. You can’t live here – you’re not a slave any more.’
‘No no no no no no,’ the boy said. ‘No no no. Not that. No.’
He pulled at Krish’s arm, his grip weak but his ragged nails like claws.
Krish tried to gently prise his fingers free. ‘You can’t stay here.’
‘No, no. No. Not that. Look!’ He grabbed Krish’s shoulders and spun him until he was facing away from Uin’s house towards the sea and the slaves’ new fields.
There was a churning cloud of black smoke above them.
By the time he got to the field, it was too late. The smell was vile, choking and over-sweet, and the entire crop was gone. A line of slaves stood and watched the destruction. They might have tried to quench the fire, bringing buckets from the nearby sea, but none of them had thought to. Some had tried to smother the flames with their own hands. Krish could see the burns bubbled on their skin and their incredulous expressions as they screamed or wept. When they’d lived on bliss, they’d never known what pain was.
Some of the Rah had gathered to see the conflagration, but not Uin and not any of his friends. Instead, after a short while, Krish saw Olufemi half-running, half-hobbling over the wooden walkway towards him.
‘It’s all gone,’ he told her needlessly.
She stared in silence at the ashes, panting. There were strange black smears over the field, patches where the flames still burned even though there seemed to be nothing left for them to consume. He knew this was no accident. The fire had been set.
‘We’ll have to plant more,’ he said. ‘It’s fast-growing.’
She shook her head. ‘We planted at the right time, and with seed from the first crop. That’s all used up now and there’s no point planting the little we have left, not this late in the season. By the time it grows, if it grows, it will be too late.’
‘Then what can we do?’
She turned her back on the burnt field and the wounded people. ‘Tell them to go back to their masters.’
‘But Uin did this, or one of his friends! I don’t want to let him win.’
‘That is the nature of defeat. It’s seldom voluntary.’
‘No, I won’t do it. We’ll ration what’s left and plant again. This time we’ll put guards on it.’
‘We?’
He glared at her, suddenly furious. ‘Yes, you’ll plant the crop.’
‘That’s your command, is it? And I’m to obey it?’
‘I’m a god – you told me that!’
‘A god.’ She laughed, a crackling sound like thin ice breaking. ‘Well, I’ll do as you say. It’s probably best not to let Uin believe you’re too easily cowed.’
He oversaw the planting the next day, and the day after that. On the third day, only half the slaves came to tend the fields, and on the fourth day none. Krish spent the morning studying the Rah alphabet, trying to pretend he didn’t care. He ate a lunch of roasted lizards and rice, and when afterwards Uin invited him to view more of the Rah lands, Krish agreed. He wouldn’t allow the other man to believe he’d won.
Their party rode north, until they reached the place where the marsh began its slow mutation into the badlands Krish had been told separated the tribe’s lands from the Moon Forest. The trees were stunted, branches reaching out along the ground rather than up, and heavy with ragged cloaks of moss. The decayed stench was stronger and the birds and insects drabber. Everything was greenish grey or a faded bluish green so that his eye constantly wandered, searching in vain for something interesting to light on.
He rode in a silence that Uin and his cronies were happy to fill. Krish heard their laughter, saw their smiles and knew they were triumphing in the failure of his orders. It was almost unbearable, but he refused to let them see his anger.
‘There,’ Uin said, still with that gloating grin twitching on his lips. ‘Can you see – the smoke on the horizon.’
The day was grey and overcast anyway and at first it looked like little more than a bank of clouds. But as they drew nearer Krish could see flecks of ash within it. It reminded him unpleasantly of the funeral pyre of Smiler’s Fair. Their lizard mounts plodded over the ground, leaving no imprint behind now that marsh had turned to earth, dry and cracked into a thousand mismatched pieces. The air, which had been thick with moisture, was now almost desert-dry. Krish swigged from his waterskin, but it couldn’t get rid of the acrid taste of whatever was burning far ahead.
Then the trees parted and a lake lay before them. Krish shielded his eyes from the sudden glare of the flames dancing above the water. No, not above, on it. The lake itself was aflame. Its water wasn’t blue but a dull black, sluggish ripples crawling over its surface.
‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Uin said. ‘It doesn’t burn all the time. The rock-juice seeps up through the water and when enough has gathered and the sun catches it right, up it goes.’
Krish tried to look unmoved. ‘It’s interesting. You could spread the black stuff over some of the waterways at the borders and light it if invaders come. Although that might kill the crocodiles.’
‘Yes, we’d considered that. But Yejun is sure it must have other uses and we’ll discover them in time. We’re good at that, we Rah. You don’t know us yet, great lord, not in the short time you’ve been here, but you’ll find there’s a reason we do things as we do.’
Krish understood exactly what he was being told. He needed to accept the Rah way of doing things; that was Uin’s message. But there was another crueller one hidden inside it, because he recognised the rock-juice now. He’d seen it splashed over the burning fields four days ago. Anything he tried to build that wasn’t Rah, Uin and his kind would burn down.
As soon as he was back in sight of Uin’s home, he flung himself from his mount and ran towards the freed slaves’ quarters. He felt Uin’s eyes on him. He felt the other man’s scorn and knew he deserved it, though not for the reasons Uin thought.
The sun was near setting, sinking over the water and staining it orange-pink. He poled a boat to Dinesh’s reed-born hut first, but the boy wasn’t in it. There was only the stench of vomit and sweat-soaked sheets tangled on the floor.
Uin’s son was in the next hut. He looked like he’d shed half his weight in a few days; his cheeks curved in beneath their bones and the outline
of his ribs was visible under his thin shirt. The stench of him was worse up close, but he wasn’t the sickest person there. That was the woman on the cot, full Ashane and glaze-eyed with pain. Her suffering was so fierce it was difficult to read anything else in her face, but Krish thought she might be Dinesh’s mother.
She was almost certainly the baby’s mother too. Dinesh held it cradled against his thin chest, though he must know the futility of the gesture. The babe wasn’t recently dead. Its flesh had softened a little, sagging from the bones, and even from the doorway Krish could smell the putrefaction. The flies swarmed around it while others clustered at the lips and eyes of the woman on the bed. She would be next and the vermin knew it.
When Dinesh turned to look at Krish, his gaze was the clearest it had ever been. ‘Please,’ he whispered, ‘we need bliss. Please.’
Krish turned his back on the boy and the dying woman and the decaying baby and fled.
He found Dae Hyo surrounded by empty bottles and the harsh smell of what had been in them. The warrior had stripped to his trousers and his bare chest was a red mess of insect bites. His face was little better, one eye half closed from an oozing lump on his brow.
He raised the one full bottle in greeting when he saw Krish. ‘Lovely place you’ve found for us to live, brother.’
Krish sank to the ground beside him, beneath the broad leaves of a marsh palm. The tree offered shelter from the sun but no respite from the humid warmth.
The warrior took two more long swallows and then lay back, the bottle resting against his chest and his eyes closed.
‘The slaves are dying,’ Krish told him.
‘Are they?’
‘It’s my fault.’
Dae Hyo’s eyes cracked open at that. He squinted at Krish. ‘Don’t concern yourself, brother. You tried to help them.’
‘Yes, and I just made it worse.’
The warrior shrugged. ‘The Rah will do what the Rah will do – I told you that. And the slaves aren’t our people.’
‘They’re Ashane.’
With obvious effort, Dae Hyo pushed himself into a sitting position. ‘Some of them. And what are you, brother? You once told me you were Dae.’
‘I am. That doesn’t mean I can’t care about anyone who isn’t.’
‘I tell you what, that’s exactly what it means.’
His eyes when they locked with Krish’s were bleary but fierce. And there was a temptation to nod and remain beside Dae Hyo and accept that this wasn’t his concern. But behind Dae Hyo’s eyes he saw Dinesh’s. He felt the accusation and knew that it was just.
‘Keep drinking,’ he told the warrior bitterly. ‘I’ll sort this out.’ He knew he needed to talk to Uin, but he couldn’t bear to do it yet. He turned his back on the houses and on Dae Hyo and headed west.
The ocean had no clear beginning. The tangle of streams broadened imperceptibly as they flowed and the earth paths shrank until after a while you realised that all the walkways were floating and there was no land left.
Krish stared at the horizon where the grey sea met the grey sky. He thought it might be raining, there in the distance. The wind blew towards him and the rain would arrive soon, but what did it matter? The air could hardly be any more full of water.
He heard the footsteps clattering on the wooden planks behind him. They were too light to be Dae Hyo’s and too swift for Olufemi. When they stopped beside him he saw that it was Ensee, Uin’s other daughter.
‘There’s a storm coming,’ she said.
He nodded.
‘We should go back. It’ll come fast, they always do.’
‘I don’t mind getting wet.’
She laughed, a surprisingly joyful sound. Her face was gentle with youth, unmarked by any care or woe. Even her hair had the wispy fineness of a baby’s, untidy above soft brown eyes and strong black brows, the only definite part of her.
He felt suddenly furious with her. ‘Go back in if it bothers you.’
‘It should bother you. It’s not just a little rain. There – did you see the lightning?’
He had, a flash of blue that seemed to fill the whole sky.
‘A storm like that can kill you.’
He shrugged again, a sullen gesture he couldn’t seem to restrain. ‘I’m sure your father wouldn’t mind.’
‘I would.’
He turned to face her fully, surprised. ‘Why?’
She blushed and looked down.
‘Oh. Oh, I … Oh.’ He’d hardly spoken to her. Uin had seemed to lose interest in matchmaking when Krish wasn’t hooked by Asook and this girl was so silent at the family dinners, barely a presence at all.
The leading edge of the storm saved him from finding a reply. She was right: it had moved far more quickly than he’d anticipated and was far more powerful than he’d guessed. The wind plucked at his clothes and the rain began to fall in big fat drops. He shivered, startled to be so cold when moments before he’d been far too hot.
It startled him again when she took his hand. His palm where it touched hers was the only warm part of him. ‘This way,’ she said. ‘There’s a house – a friend’s house. We can shelter there.’
They ran through the storm together, hand in hand. The rain was so heavy he could see nothing through it, and he feared moment by moment that they’d plunge off the edge of the bucking wooden platform and into the sea. The sudden violence of the waves terrified him. He’d had no idea, looking out over the untroubled water of the last few days, that it was capable of such wildness. It rose in white-capped peaks and profound troughs that seemed to be waiting for him to stumble into them.
She knew where she was going, though. By the end they were holding each other upright against the wind’s force as she banged on the door of a wooden hut whose raft had been roped to the side of the boardwalk. ‘We’re coming in!’ she yelled. ‘It’s Ensee!’
The storm tore the door out of her hand as she opened it. It slammed against the wooden wall of the hut and cracked, a jagged black line running all the way through it. Krish tumbled inside after Ensee and tried to pull the door shut behind him, unable to overcome the wind’s grip until another pair of hands joined his and they forced it into place.
The inside was little calmer than the outside. The storm churned the waters beneath the hut and the sides of the building seemed to bulge and contract, as if the house itself was breathing in time with the wind. The wood creaked and there was another, more rhythmic thumping. It was a device, a big wooden thing that rose and fell, pounding out a deep bass beat as it did. Krish didn’t think it was another singing spinner.
The man who’d helped him close the door was a little older than Ensee, but thin-faced where hers was rounded, and far more solemn. His expression lightened when he looked at Krish. ‘You brought him!’ he said.
‘Lord Krish,’ Ensee said, ‘this is Dongun.’
Krish’s hair had grown long enough for him to wring out the ends, dripping water onto the wooden floor. ‘Thank you for sheltering us, Dongun.’
‘Of course, I – a cloth. A cloth for Lord Krish to dry himself!’
Another man shuffled out of the shadows, three times Dongun’s age and half his height. He was mumbling as he walked and he mumbled still as he held out a black-splotched rag.
Krish smiled his thanks, but the old man had already begun to shuffle back to his device, stumbling when the floor lurched on the waves.
‘Please excuse him,’ Dongun said. ‘He’s a little … Yes, but we’re all so glad to see you, Lord Krish. That you came here, it’s …’ He seemed bewildered that his words were failing him.
In his time with Uin, Krish had almost forgotten that he was a god to these people, his arrival long awaited. Ensee’s father had never treated him as more than a useful ally. Not even that: a totem. The way these people looked at him was something else. It made him feel awkward in his own skin, and terribly false.
‘My father’s been showing you things, hasn’t he?’ Ensee said. There was friendlin
ess but much less deference in her voice than in Dongun’s.
It was a relief and he relaxed as he turned back to her. ‘The flood defences, the burning lake. It’s impressive.’
‘Yes, he likes impressive things. But he never showed you this.’ She took his hand again to draw him closer to the noisy device. She had to shout to be heard over its clattering. ‘This is an automated quill – a word-maker. My father doesn’t see the value of it.’
Krish watched, fascinated, as a sheet of parchment slid through the machine and the old man pulled a lever, bringing down a wooden block to thump against it. When he lifted it again, it had left behind black writing, covering the whole page. And then another sheet came through and was marked in turn. Krish looked closer and realised there was more than writing on the sheet: there was a picture too. It was crudely done, but not so crude that he couldn’t recognise his own gaunt face.
‘What is this?’ he asked Ensee.
‘Of course, you can’t read it, can you? I thought among your people it might be different.’
‘Among the Dae, reading is a woman’s right,’ he said stiffly.
‘Even the Rah remember that much of the old ways. Writing is a woman’s skill. But we read for the men, the rich men. No one else has the coin for books. Until now.’ She smiled and gestured at the device.
‘But words are no use to those who can’t read them,’ Krish said.
‘That’s why I’m teaching the poorer men and women, and they’ve been teaching the rest.’ He realised she was shaking, but her expression was determined.
‘Uin doesn’t know,’ he guessed.
‘You won’t tell him,’ she said uncertainly.
‘No. But why are you doing this?’
‘Because words, written words, they’re everything. Knowledge dies in the mouth but lives on the page, that’s an old saying of the mages and they know more than anyone. For years here the rich have grown richer and the poor poorer. The rich have all the knowledge. They’re using it to push back the sea and they’ll keep the new land that’s born of it. They use it to buy slaves the poor can’t afford. They buy people to make their food while the poor starve because they don’t have enough of it. The poor will farm for the rich on land the rich own and they’ll never make their lives better. Not unless they know better. That’s why some of us are teaching them to read. They can learn and they can talk to other poor people all over Rah lands.’
The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods Page 15