by G. Howell
Her eyes narrowed. The cub came pelting back across the farmyard, both hands clasping a wooden scabbard fully three quarters his height. The farmer took it from him and he ducked around behind her. A tail flicked out one side and a fuzzy head peeped around the other to stare at me with huge eyes.
The farmer partially drew the sword, letting the few centimeters of polished steel that peeked from the sheath gleam in the rich light. I sighed. “I’m going. I’m going,” I said and turned away again.
“A moment,” her voice rumbled from behind me. “You’re as strong as you look?”
I stopped. “For the most part, yes.”
“Huhn,” she growled and paused for a bit. Then: “I might have some work for you. That and your story for a meal.”
My stomach growled . It wasn’t a good deal, but it was the only one I was likely to get. If I kept trying random homesteads, then somewhere someone would take a shot at me. “Deal,” I said.
------v------
The farmer had given me some bread. Not the meal she’d promised me; that would be payment for work done, after it’d been done. She’d given me a small piece from a fresh-baked loaf that resembled a discus: small, with a thick, almost black crust, hard kernels and grit, still warm. I was to consider it a down-payment. I’d devoured it ravenously, in one go. She’d blinked and asked how long it’d been since I’d last eaten, I had think for a while to recall when my last full meal had been. The berries and dried meat had barely been mouthfuls. It must’ve been about four days since I’d eaten properly.
Then all that morning I’d helped her with chores. It was a tiny farm, just a few acres of fields up the hill beyond the house. She was working the land, just herself and her young son. And she was struggling, even I could see that. It wasn’t that there was a lack of land, it was just that by herself and with the cheap, wooden, labor-intensive tools at hand she could barely work what she had. And she couldn’t afford to hire help.
So I worked for my food. She was wary, of course, but that was something I was accustomed to. She kept her distance and watched me carefully as she set me to carrying logs out to the back field. When I hefted a whole pine trunk onto my shoulders her expression looked decidedly uncertain, as I might if I were to be confronted with a three-hundred pound gorilla. Rris are strong for their size, but then they aren’t really that big. With a bit of effort I was able to manhandle a log she’d have had to seriously struggle to lift on her own. If I hadn’t been wearing those shackles, I might have been able to handle two at a time.
Those irons were a problem. They restricted my movement, they got in the way and they were beginning to become painful. When I asked her if she had a hacksaw or something, she professed that she didn’t have any tools that were capable of cutting them, but she said she knew someone who might be able to help. He was supposed to be showing up sometime later that day.
Hell, for all I knew she wanted to turn me in for the reward and was just trying to keep me there until Mediators showed up. Perhaps I should’ve just taken off, but there were the facts that I’d given my word, and I also really needed some help. Help to get out of those chains, to get food, clothes and directions. In some respects I’d lucked out: the reception I’d received could’ve been a lot worse. If I kept going I’d almost certainly run into Rris who’s reactions would be a lot less… restrained than her’s had been.
So I carted cut and trimmed logs from where they lay along the edges of the tree line where they’d been felled, up the hill past the pasture where bison grazed to where a field of hay was being fenced off. Easier to let the animals roam and enclose the crops. For a couple of hours while the muddy ground steamed and dried and warmed I went back and forth, carrying the four meter long rounds up the hill and trudging back down for another load. The logs were hard pine, still leaking pine gum that adhered to my skin in a tacky film that smelled absurdly like cheap car air freshener and the coarse bark scraped my shoulder. Normally, it wouldn’t have been such hard work, but it was made worse by my sore feet, the chains, and my stomach demanding more than the teaser it’d received.
Later in the morning I saw the cub coming back over the hill, headed back from the general direction of the river. He had a couple of rabbit carcasses and a few fish slung over his shoulder. His mother gave them a cursory inspection before sending him scurrying back down to the farmhouse. I couldn’t help staring. Food. Was that going to be lunch?
She didn’t miss my look.
When the last of the wood was delivered, I drove stakes. Back home fences would have been kilometers of wire stapled to posts, but here wire wasn’t cheap nor was it readily available. The fence under construction was mostly interlocking rails stacked one atop another, held in place by pairs of stakes driven into the ground. She’d laid out logs along the path the fence was to take. I worked my way along those logs, hammering vertical stakes in at the junctions where the rails overlapped.
The farmer was busy splitting the wood I’d carried. Wielding a wooden mallet and awl, she was working her way along the fence line splitting the logs into rails. She’d drive iron wedges into the log in strategic spots and hammer then in until the wood split lengthwise. At least, she was trying to do that. Quite often she was spitting and snarling oaths at fractured and splintered wood. Once she was wringing her hand and contributing quite nicely to my vocabulary of swear words.
And as we worked, we talked. I told her my story. Well, most of it. There were some details I left out, quite a lot of details actually: the exact nature of where I’d come from, the murder accusations in Westwater, the suicide attempt, the exact nature of the work I’d done for Land of Water, my relationships with a couple of females, the times I’d fought and the times I’d had to kill. Even excluding those there was quite enough to tell. More than a few times she paused in her tasks to blink amber eyes at me in surprise or outright disbelief, but she didn’t interrupt.
As the sun climbed the day got hotter and the maul seemed to get heavier. If I’d had clothes I’d have stripped down. As it was, I was streaming sweat and the Rris was panting like a dog. When Rothi, the cub, labored up the hill with a wooden pitcher of water she took a break to lap water for a long time. She raised her head, water dripping from her chops and watched me for a while, then brought the water over.
“Water?” she offered the bucket to me.
“Thank you,” I said, quite sincerely. I wasn’t sure how clean that water was, but that was something else I didn’t really care about at the time. She watched as I drank deeply, awkwardly, water dribbling down my chin.
“You’re… leaking,” she observed. She wasn’t talking about my sloppy drinking.
“It’s hot,” I said, wiping sweat away. “I do that instead of panting.”
“Huhn,” she rumbled, eyeing me dubiously. I handed the water back.
“Thank you, Ma’am,” I said.
“Ea’rest,” she returned.
“Ma’am?”
“Not ‘ma’am’, Ea’rest. My name.”
“Ah,” I waved acknowledgement. “Ea’rest. Thank you,” I said again, then ventured: “May I ask, do you have any spare clothing?”
“Huhn, clothing?” she rumbled thoughtfully and leaned on her axe, cocking her head. “So, you’re so innocent yet they felt it necessary to shave you?”
“Shave me?” I echoed moronically and automatically touched my scraggly beard before I realized what she meant. “Ah, no. They didn’t. I mean, I haven’t been shaved,” I looked down at myself and just made a helpless gesture. “This is normal for me.”
She stared, her jaw hanging agape. Then she chittered out loud. For quite a while, her jaw twitching uncontrollably. Eventually she settled but still looked considerably amused as she shifted, slouching a little more on the axe. “Normal? Like those feet? Like only two nipples?”
“Uh, yes,” I said, feelin
g more than a little embarrassed. “I suppose it’s relative.”
Her amber eyes blinked and she seemed a little taken aback. “Huhn, if nothing else your manner of speech is obviously educated. And that,” she pointed. “Those are your genitals? Something is wrong with them?”
I sighed. “Yes, they are. And, no, nothing wrong. Just different.”
“And those marks on your back?”
“No.” That was something else I hadn’t given specifics about. “Those aren’t normal.”
She waited for a few seconds, as if waiting for me to continue. Eventually she said, “They look newer than that wound on your shoulder. You said you got that when you… arrived here.”
“A.”
“Then, who flogged you? Why?”
I hesitated. She’d picked up on the scars even though they weren’t something I’d gone into details about. Those memories were… unpleasant. “I’d been abducted. I made… trouble. They didn’t like that.”
“A. And your finger?”
She’d noticed that as well. It was healing, but the scar tissue was obviously not old. “Same people, later.”
“You didn’t mention that.” I caught the undertones in that.
“Ma’am…Ea’rest,” I wiped sweat away again and squinted at the sun. Shadows were short, the sun a white haze too bright to look at. The golden field of the hay meadow stretched down the hill to the little house, a faint shimmer of heat rising. Insects, pollen, drifting seeds…tiny specks wafted and danced on the warm breeze that for a moment seemed quite chill, smelling of coal dust. “I’ve been amongst your kind for about two years. In that time I’ve been through quite a lot. Much of it… inconsequential. But some of it… there are things I would rather not remember.”
Ea’rest ruffled fingers through her chest fur, panting steadily as she regarded me. A tufted ear flicked as a fly buzzed too close. “Huhn, that’s an echo,” she said thoughtfully. “Hai, very well.”
And then she untied her belt and tossed her kilt over to me. I awkwardly snatched it, my chains clanking.
“Too hot anyway,” she yawned, scratched herself, then took up her axe and went back to work.
I stood there stupidly, the leather and rope article dangling from my hand. “Thank you,” I said belatedly, then awkwardly wrapped it around my waist. No buckle, just a knot through a leather strip. And it was too small. And it’s incredible how just a small piece of clothing can help you feel like a normal human being again.
------v------
Lunch was just after midday.
Ea’rest called the break and I laid my tools aside and followed her through the waves of grass down to the farm house. It was a small, built and used by people who spent most of their time outside and just needed a roof to sleep and shelter under. The walls were half-round logs, the roof split squares from some ancient trunk. From the eaves hung odds and ends: broken wooden tools, stocks for bison, buckets and a broken wagon wheel. A couple of pieces of rusty iron clanked gently in the breeze. Out front, in the shade of a rickety porch roof, there was a trio of three-legged stools, none of which looked sturdy enough to take my weight. So I just sat on the ground and leaned back against the wall, enjoying the shade after the heat.
Sun beat down, burning away the last of the puddles out in the yard. The air smelled of fading water, of hot dust and hay, of animals and wilderness and weather-bleached wood. Overhead the sky was a bottomless blue, the hidden sun washing out the zenith with a white glare that spilled past the silhouette of the roof. Drifting seeds glowed in the light. Cicadas rasped in the wilderness. Birds sang. The fact that I was a fugitive was almost forgotten.
And lunch was a surprise. I’d been expecting rabbit or fish. Instead Ea’rest produced strings of smoked sausage and a pie that she can’t possible have just had sitting in the fridge.
“I made it this morning,” she explained, looking a little taken aback. As if she were explaining the obvious to an idiot. “Rothi set it cooking earlier.”
“You were expecting me?”
She laughed at that. “Expecting company, yes. You picked a good day to show.”
And if I’d been expecting bland subsistence, I was surprised again. It was damned good. The sausage was fresh and spicy; the pie packed with meat that tasted like smoked venison, but marinated in something that did glorious things to my taste buds. There were yams, mushrooms, apple and a crust that was as good as the bread had been tough.
The Rris were watching me with expressions that verged somewhere between startled awe and open amusement.
“Oh,” I looked at the piece I was holding. My second. I was hardly aware of the first touching the sides. “I’m sorry.”
Ea’rest motioned a shrug. “You said you were hungry. I didn’t know it was that serious.”
I smiled sheepishly. “It has been a while. And this is very good.”
Rothi looked from her to me, his own jaws champing industriously. “She makes the best pies,” he pronounced through a spray of crumbs.
I nodded, “He’s right, you know.”
She looked taken aback, then amused. “Huhn, thank you.”
“She learned in the west,” Rothi said brightly. “Why do you eat so strangely?”
Ah… “I’m slightly different. My mouth is a different shape. Hadn’t you noticed?”
“Then that’s why you sound strange?” He cocked his head, ears pricked.
“Rothi!” Ea’rest cautioned.
“I’m used to it,” I smiled carefully. “It’s something I get a lot of.”
“Why?” Rothi asked, oblivious to his mother’s warning.
“Because a lot of the people like you I meet say the same thing.”
“And why don’t you have fur?”
“You always ask this many questions?”
“Yah,” he smirked.
“Truth,” Ea’rest added from the sidelines. “He’s always asking about things. Where does this come from? how does this work? He was asking what causes lightning.”
Interesting wording. Causes lightning. By its structure the sentence precluded an action by an individual or an entity and intimated that the action was self-initiated. I scratched my chin, pondering how to best reply. “A simple answer would be that some of it is caused by small droplets in clouds rubbing together. It’s like when you rub your fur on a dry day and then touch some metal, you feel a small bite? That’s a tiny spark. Lightning is like that spark, only much, much bigger. Very dangerous if you’re near something very tall or high. Lighting will prefer to go through that than just air to get to the ground.”
He looked thoughtful. “How can clouds rub together?”
“They’re just fog, only high up. You’ve been in fog? It’s uncountable tiny drops of water. Hey, I’ve got one for you: why were you flying your toy in the storm?”
His ears flagged at that, and he scratched at the dust with toe claws. “It keeps falling out of the sky. I thought more wind would make it stay up.”
I had to stifle a grin. “Good theory.”
“Didn’t work though,” he sighed and his tail lashed. “It kept falling to the ground. Kept breaking.”
“A suggestion: try putting a tail on it.”
“A tail?” There was bemusement there. “Like this?” He flicked his furry tufted limb around.
“Ah, sort of,” I conceded. “Your toy, it spins around and around like this and then hits the ground? A tail will help stop it spinning. Just don’t try flying it in a storm.”
Now his ears were pricked up. “Show me!”
“Perhaps later. After I’ve finished helping your mother… if it’s all right by her.”
“Mother?” Rothi turned to her, looking imploringly.
And Ea’rest had been watching the exchange with her ea
rs flagging a sort of bewildered
“Saaa,” he hissed.
“Rothi…” she cautioned.
“Saaa,” he hissed again and bobbed his head from side to side. “Alright, but later it can show me?”
“We’ll wait till then.”
“A,” he piped cheerfully, as if she’d given him an emphatic ‘yes’, and then took off in a blur of motion.
“It,” she observed, not looking at me.
I shrugged. “Again. I’m not concerned.”
“You know about that toy?” Ea’rest asked after a pause. I noticed there was something about that pause.
“A,” I waved a yes. “I played with the like when I was a child.”
“Huhn,” she rumbled and her amber eyes watched me. In a human I could have seen something in those eyes. Well, not in the eyes precisely. The human face has dozens of muscles, a huge number of which are only good for changing the contours of the facial features into thousands of different configurations. And the human brain devotes a considerable percentage of its processing capacity to interpreting those contours. What we call expressions.
Rris have fewer facial muscles and therefore a more limited repertoire of facial expressions, but they combine what they have with movements of ears and body language, so there’s not so much a loss of expression than a redistribution. The problem is that none of those expressions fit into the templates hard-wired into my brain. I can’t instinctively read their expressions, especially not subtle ones. It becomes an intellectual process, not an emotional one, so it’s very easy to miss subtle clues. And the fact that they’re lacking so many of those muscles around their orbital sockets can mean that those eyes can seem disturbingly inscrutable.
Looking at that alien female then I could tell she was thinking something, but beyond that… the waters were murky.
“So, how long have you been here?” I asked.