‘We’ll be quick,’ Cwen said, with her usual brash certainty, but Alfreda knew her well enough now to see that she felt the unease too. These were the moon’s creatures and this was the moon’s place.
As they grew nearer the stench hit them – pungent and acrid, so thick it felt like it might silt up their lungs.
‘We’ll be very quick,’ Cwen said, but despite her words she hesitated on the rock-strewn borders of the cave. The hawks hung back with her and so Alfreda drew a deep breath through her mouth, lit her lantern and strode forward into the darkness.
Inside, the smell was a hundred times worse. The floor was mounded with dried white droppings that cracked beneath her boots and let the fresher shit leak out. And now she could hear the bats, hidden somewhere high above in the vaulted roof of the cave. First one squeak and then a thousand as the creatures sensed the intrusion into their world. She heard the flutter of their wings and felt the wind of them. She was grateful for it, for anything that brushed away the choking smell, even for a moment. She turned to flee only to see Cwen behind her, a lantern held high and the shadowy forms of the bats darting away from the light.
The other hawks were behind, hefting the crates they’d brought to collect the excrement. They’d brought shovels too and Wingard dug his into the filth beneath him and then staggered back as the stench grew ten times worse. He fell backward into the shit, shaking his head and moaning.
Alfreda realised for the first time that the smell was more than just a discomfort. The same substance that made the shit so valuable might make it lethal too. She waded through the filth and stench to Cwen and whispered, ‘We have to hurry.’
Cwen’s expression was dazed, as if she too was in danger of being overpowered by the toxic vapours, but she repeated ‘Hurry!’ to all the hawks and one by one they dug their spades into the muck and began filling the first crate.
When it was piled high with the vile white stuff, Alfreda grabbed its handles and began to drag it out, taking in short gasping breaths through her mouth. It skidded over the slick ground and the bats fluttered and squawked all around, their tiny claws sometimes catching at her cheek.
Outside felt like a haven: the high blue sky and the clean wind. She would have liked to rest and ready herself for returning but she was afraid she might never find the nerve, so she took another deep breath and went back.
The work wore on with the day. One moment blended into the next while Alfreda focused on the movements: stand, shovel, stoop, lift, drag, return. The lanterns seemed to lose their power as the time passed. Or perhaps it was her eyes. After a while the white seemed grey, the black absolute and the noise of the bats no different from the nervous chattering of the hawks. And then she felt a hand on her arm, drawing her out. She looked at it, not understanding, until she stumbled out into the light of the afternoon and blinked in shock to realise that it was over.
‘Thought you’d fallen asleep standing,’ Cwen said, releasing her arm. She gestured over at the crates, all now full and being loaded on to the wagons behind their draft horses. The animals shied away and flicked their heads, but their harnesses held them and the smell was tolerable out here, where the wind was waiting to whisk it away.
Alfreda turned to look at Cwen and the sight surprised a laugh from her. The other woman was coated in shit, white from head to toe with smears of brown and green.
‘What?’ Cwen said, but Alfreda couldn’t seem to stop laughing long enough to reply.
Cwen looked down at herself and then laughed too. ‘You’re not exactly smelling of roses yourself, you know.’
But looking at her own hand, as white and shit-smeared as Cwen’s, just made Alfreda laugh harder.
‘I’m going to the lake to get clean.’ Cwen studied Alfreda intently for a moment and then turned to her hawks and said, ‘Stay here and get the horses ready. You’ll have your turn when we’re done. Come on then, Freda – what would King Nayan say if we came back to him smelling like a mammoth’s privy?’
They walked towards the lake through the summer-wilted grass in a silence that Alfreda was surprised to find companionable. With Algar … with Algar there’d always been chatter, but Cwen was a little more sparing with her words. Alfreda glanced at the hawk and found Cwen’s eyes staring back beneath a shit-smeared mop of ginger hair.
‘What did you think of Nayan then?’ Cwen asked.
Alfreda shrugged.
‘Nothing? But you must have had a picture in your mind before you saw him. I did: I saw a brutal man, a hard one. A little like Gest, I think. I hadn’t imagined I’d like him.’
They’d reached the lake, the lapping of its waves against the pebbly shore a soothing sound. Cwen didn’t hesitate before stripping off her outer clothes, throwing them into the water ahead of her and leaving her underthings on the shore. She sat to remove her boots and then waded in, feet a little tentative on the pebbles.
‘Fuck me, that’s cold!’ she said when she was only up to her knees.
Alfreda could see the goosebumps already forming on her bark-brown skin. She could see the scars too. There were a score of them or more, from a narrow white line across one thigh to a deep gouge of flesh missing from Cwen’s left biceps.
‘You’ve had a hard life,’ Alfreda said.
Cwen shrugged. ‘Less hard than it could have been. My parents didn’t want me – that’s why I was born with the hawk mark. Imagine if I’d had to stay with them instead, with people who hated me so much they prayed for me to be taken away from them. Better to be where I was wanted. And besides, I like the work – I’m good at it. Well don’t just stand there. You won’t get clean by looking at the water.’
The shit had worked its way beneath her clothes and then dried. They pulled at her skin when she pulled them off but it was good to be rid of them. She followed Cwen’s example and threw them into the water, then waded after Cwen as she moved deeper still, until she was covered to her neck and the water tickled against Alfreda’s breasts.
She realised that Cwen was studying her in turn, her eyes running over the powerful muscles of her right arm, disproportionate to her left, and the white freckled scars given her by her forge.
‘I amn’t a pretty sight.’ Alfreda crossed her arms over her chest self-consciously.
‘Who cares about pretty? You’re strong. I was just thinking what a hawk you’d have made. Maybe if you’d been born with the mark you’d have been leader now and not me.’
Alfreda ducked her head, blushing, and only looked up when a splash of water soaked her hair. Cwen laughed and went back to rubbing the filth from her own body. Alfreda did the same. It felt good to see it all float away from them in a white and brown cloud, though the water was every bit as freezing as Cwen had said.
‘I can’t imagine being a hawk,’ she said after a while. ‘Taken away from your family to live among strangers. Me and Algar – and Mum and Dad when they were still alive – we were all our world. We travelled to far places, but we always had each other.’ It surprised her to find that talk of her brother brought a little less pain now. It felt a betrayal, but she couldn’t be sorry. Maybe it was better to be able to remember him and smile. Algar had been full of joy.
‘The hawks are my family,’ Cwen said.
‘But you and them, you—’ Alfreda blushed and couldn’t go on. She concentrated on scrubbing a dark stain from behind her knee.
‘We what?’ Cwen smiled. ‘Oh, you mean we fuck. Of course – a clutch must be as close as can be, to hunt well together, and how else to be closer? To touch skin, to hold each other. From when I was born I was told I was filthy, never to be touched. Bachur showed me different and my clutch-mates and me, why shouldn’t we enjoy what was denied us for so long?’
‘But aren’t you afraid of making bairns? You couldn’t hunt with one growing in you. And who’d care for it once it was born?’
‘Oh, we can’t have babies. Bachur said it’s something to do with her rune that she puts on us.’ Cwen touched her fingers
to her left cheek where the brown stain of the hawk mark lay. ‘It’s why she must mark more bairns every year, else hawks would just make more hawks.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘For what? I’m mother enough to the young hawks when they join us – twelve years old and green as the forest. What need have I for an infant sucking at my tits? There’s more pleasure to be had from Wine and Wingard there. You know how it is – once you’ve eaten that fruit and got the taste of it, all you want to do is gorge.’ She narrowed her eyes, studying Alfreda. ‘Or have you not eaten the fruit? I know how it is among the rest of the folk – men waving their pricks around like weapons and women guarding their cunts like forts. But I thought you Wanderers were a little more free.’
Alfreda picked water up and let it trickle through her hand. ‘My brother was free, and look where that got him.’
‘Aye, my mother too. Have I never told you? I was a bastard, and she didn’t even have the sense Bachur gave her to lie with a man who looked like my father. The moment I popped out, the whole world knew I wasn’t his. But if you lie with a hawk, there’ll be nothing like that for you. The seeds that come out of them won’t sprout. Wingard and Wine would be willing, I’m sure. I’ve seen the way they look at you.’
Alfreda couldn’t keep the blush from her cheeks. ‘I don’t … I don’t want …’
‘So maybe not them. Wine’s an ugly fucker, I’ll grant you. But there’s others in my clutch handsome enough to moisten a grandmother. When the war’s over, we’ll find what’s to your taste.’
Alfreda had no reply to that and they washed without talking for a while, the only noise the splash of the water and the cries of the delicate red-and-white birds that danced along the water’s edge.
When she was finished cleaning herself Cwen looked at Alfreda and moved to rub her knuckles along her cheek. It seemed a casual gesture but there was a betraying tightness in Cwen’s eyes and Alfreda understood that this was a test, although maybe Cwen didn’t realise it. But it was easy to pass – she reached out and pressed Cwen’s fingers against her own cheek.
‘Mud,’ Cwen said, smiling. ‘It’s no use if you replace one kind of shit with another.’
‘I don’t like this war,’ Alfreda blurted as Cwen began to wade back towards the shore.
‘Don’t you?’ Cwen looked back over her shoulder, eyebrow raised. ‘You’re a weapon maker. Isn’t war your business?’
‘I make whatever people want, aye. That’s how a smith lives – but I wish people wanted something else. If Algar was alive, I wouldn’t let him anywhere near this war.’ She followed Cwen, walking on her toes to avoid the prick of the pebbles.
Cwen picked up her undershirt and rubbed it over her body to dry it. ‘Do you think that’s why Hana spoke against me? To keep her son from the war?’
‘She wasn’t keen for him to head into the Silent Sands, that’s certain. And when he said she couldn’t join him … That was an angry woman.’
Cwen nodded, though she didn’t seem entirely convinced. ‘It’s not as clean as the fighting I’m used to. The moon beasts will eat a person if they can – what woman would judge you for killing them? The Brotherband were piss-poor men, it’s true, but then so was Uin. And for all his good cheer and smiles, Nayan’s a man who was willing to kill his own newborn son just to save his own life. Why must one die and another live?’
‘I don’t know,’ Alfreda said. ‘I’ve never been one for causes. I left Algar to do the big thinking. I just took an idea and made it work.’
Cwen looked down at her boots as she laced them, her bottom lip trapped beneath her teeth. When the bow was tied she nodded sharply and looked up. ‘I’m the same – I listen to what Bachur asks of me and make it happen. And Bachur says the moon must die. But listen, Alfreda, there’s no need for you to fight. If you make us more of your weapons you can take Jinn and head far away, back to the Moon Forest where you’ll both be safe. You’ve done enough.’
‘And leave you to face this alone after what you did for me?’
‘I have my hawks and all the thousands of Ashane. I won’t be alone.’
‘No, you won’t. You’ll have me.’ She folded her arms and set her chin. Algar would have known what that meant: the decision was forged and the point of argument passed.
Cwen seemed to realise it too because she smiled, a more gentle expression than her usual fierce grin, and clasped Alfreda’s shoulder. ‘Well then, you’ll be like a hawk to me – like a clutch-mate. I’ll see you safe, I promise you that, and my word’s worth more than gold in a hovel. We have your weapon and we’ll have the black powder for it soon. We know where Krishanjit is and we’ve the army to master him. We’ll win this war together, you and I.’
34
Olufemi was surprised to see her hand shake as she drew the figure of the rune on the parchment. She squinted, noticing for the first time how hard it was to make out. It had grown dark while she worked. Perhaps it had grown dark more than once; she couldn’t remember when she’d last slept.
‘You need to eat,’ Vordanna said, and Olufemi had forgotten about her too. Her lover sat opposite her at the scarred wooden workbench, holding herself with that peculiar stillness that had always drawn Olufemi, though it must have been the years on bliss that had taught it to her.
Olufemi shook her head. ‘I’ll eat later.’
‘You said that two hours ago. You can’t work if you’re hungry. You can’t concentrate.’
She was unaccustomed to that forcefulness from Vordanna, the certainty of her own opinions. ‘I’m concentrating perfectly well,’ Olufemi snapped.
‘You’ve written the same rune three times. You just can’t see it.’ Vordanna set flame to the lantern, and Olufemi saw that it was true. She’d scrawled the same symbol thrice and not even the correct one.
‘Food then,’ Olufemi agreed, and Vordanna placed a plate of steaming breadfruit and arrowfish beside her parchment. She ate while she studied her own work, using one hand to spoon the food into her mouth and the other to turn the pages, splashing grease and smearing the ink.
It was hard, so very hard, to make the glyphs into the runes with only the moon’s power behind them. She imagined it might be how a warrior felt, having lost his sword hand, to be forced to learn to fight with the other. Every instinct she had was wrong, every impulse misguided. But it was possible. The moon had an existence independent of the sun’s, as well as in opposition to it. It could be defined as a singularity, a whole.
She finished reading through her notes and then flipped back to the beginning and began again as the food she’d gobbled congealed into an unpleasant lump in her stomach. It didn’t matter. Nothing so trivial did, because the more she read, the more certain she became that she’d found the answer.
Vordanna, who knew her better than anyone ever had, smiled when Olufemi looked at her. It was the first truly happy expression she’d turned Olufemi’s way since her return and Olufemi felt a lightness beyond the light-headedness of exhaustion. Perhaps she was forgiven, though truly she’d committed no crime. Sexual abstinence was as needlessly self-depriving as deliberate starvation.
‘You’ve done it,’ Vordanna said.
‘Yes. Yes, I think I have.’ She hesitated. She would never have bothered to explain her reasoning to Vordanna before. The former slave’s intellect was unequal to the challenge of understanding it. But this was a new Vordanna, changed by the drug Jinn had bought for her from the Eom to replace Olufemi’s own, and which Olufemi had asked her cousin Mayowa to reproduce.
Or perhaps it was the presence of Krish himself that had so altered her, through the rune she wore every moment round her neck. ‘It’s the glyphs of becoming,’ Olufemi told her. ‘These align with the moon as the glyphs of being are in the sun’s orbit. It’s been customary to use both in the construction of each rune, to mark what is, and what must alter to turn it into what is desired. But if the glyphs of becoming alone are used …’
‘Then won’t what you’r
e making constantly change?’
‘Yes, but that’s no problem. Living things change constantly – and so the moon wills it. It was only Mizhara who sought to freeze us into a cold perfection. And I’ve been –’ she flicked back to her second page, when her mind had still been sharp and her writing comprehensible ‘– I’ve been looking at those works I never studied before. It was my mistake: in my study of the runes I focused on the earliest writings from before the war, when Mizhara and Yron loved each other as brother and sister should. All was in balance then and so were the runes, which were built on the joint foundations of their power. I should have studied writings from the time of the war itself. Then each side disdained to use the other’s power, or was denied it.’
‘So you can use those runes, from the time of war? Those runes will work and save Yron?’ Vordanna leaned forward, every line in her body eager.
Olufemi felt that eagerness like a blow. The smiles and the pleasure weren’t for her. They were only for the hope she could offer Krishanjit. ‘No,’ she said. ‘The runes are meaningless scribbles unless they tell the truth, and the truth now is different from what it was then. If Krishanjit is correct, if, then Mizhara is gone from the world and the runes must reflect it. They must be rewritten – but I believe I can see how. It’s not really so big a change. These later runes, the ones made during the war, they acknowledged as little of Mizhara’s influence as they could. If I just remove it entirely—’
‘They’ll work? Have you tested it? Lord Krishanjit must know!’
Olufemi looked at Vordanna through bloodshot eyes, but there was no caring for her there, only for the god that Olufemi had taught her to love. She could test the magic now. She knew how the rune she wanted must be formed: of Ya, the glyph of increase married to Yag, the glyph of growth, with the glyph of water Yah to bind and slow them, so that the increase and the growth were constrained by Yaw, the glyph of joining, to unite them all in life.
The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods Page 37