More than that, how had she been allowed to sleep so long?
Shea looked up and squinted. There were gnats dancing in the shade of the acacia bush nearby, and she could just make out little hungry pupfish hovering in the water underneath. The rest of the world was a blur of bright blue, dry brown, and algal green... but there was no movement to it. There was nobody in sight anywhere. “Hello?”
The only answer was the wind.
Nervous, she dove back down to the middle of the stream. A couple of trout swam past, and there was something crawling over a piece of driftwood at the edge of her vision. But nothing of any consequence – nothing person-sized at all.
She waited patiently for her water-sense to make out some shape, some telltale bigness that would accost her and tell her what she should be doing.
Then she paled, whitening to make a fearful, needy beacon of her body.
And finally she began to seep, to sharpen the water with the smell of her distress. The House of Losange was gone. Island Town was miles and miles away. And Shea was alone.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DEBTS
WHEN DAWN CAME, Elim was sure he hadn’t slept a wink. Mental discomforts kept piling up on top of all his physical ones, abetted through the night by evil dreams. He saw Merry boxed up and bleeding from the gunshot through her forehead, and the dead Crow boy sprawled out in Molly’s stall. He heard the black singers, and Leslie Fields’ drunken ramblings, and the sound the lead slugs made when he knocked them off the table with his wooden soldiers. He smelled bacon, roasted by hellfire.
But when he awoke, he felt more human than he had in days. The rest of his breakfast was still safe and waiting for him. His new moccasins were still fast on his feet. And Merry Calvert was still alive and well in Calder City, hundreds of miles away.
Even the soft, intermittent grunting noises coming from the other side of the wagon were wholesome somehow – though of course Elim was obliged to roll over and chuck a rock at Ax anyway. “Quit it,” he mumbled. He was not surprised that the horse had taken to cribbing again, anxious and lonesome as he was out here. But even though you couldn’t go on letting your critter set his teeth in the wagon-wood and suck air, such a small, innocent, horsey kind of vice was a comfort to both of them.
Best of all – and he couldn’t have said when the thought occurred to him – Elim reckoned that he didn’t have to decide anything about the Crow people, or Sundowners in general. He was far too small and ignorant to have any business judging them, or the Eadan soldiers, or wars that had been fought and finished before he was ever born. The only time that mattered was right now and today, and the only job that counted was understanding these people, the ones alive and freshly-dead in front of him, and figuring out how to do right by them.
He would not fail on that front.
So as he slowly, stiffly put himself back to work cleaning up Actor and getting set for the day, Elim hitched up his thinking right along with the horse. “Mister Hawkeye,” he said, when the man was close and the moment seemed right. “Could you help me talk to W – to the prince, sometime today?”
The blindfolded fellow paused in coiling the picket-rope beside him, and Elim had a notion that he might have gotten in trouble for answering questions last night. “What about?”
Now how would you mention Do-Lay, if you weren’t angling for trouble? Elim nodded at the coffin. “About the, uh, the prince’s nephew.”
Hawkeye resumed winding the rope. “Yes,” he said, as if signing on for an especially unpleasant chore, “but everything will have to be said within the knight’s hearing. And he may silence you if he objects to the conversation. I’ll let you know when the time is right... but in the meantime, I would advise you to think carefully about what you want to say.”
Well, you couldn’t say fairer than that. “Sure,” Elim said as he tightened Actor’s cinch. “Sure, I can do that.” And for the first time in a while, he felt confident of that – that in spite of his new heathen clothes and that peculiar handprint mark and every other uncomfortable novelty, Elim was at last enough of himself to start getting things right.
THEY GOT A slow start that morning. Way-Say disappeared for a long time, but today, Bootjack didn’t go with him. He just packed and re-packed their supplies, and gave terse orders to Hawkeye, and when all three of them were thoroughly out of things to do, he stood there glowering at Elim, who made it his business to keep one hand on Actor’s reins and both eyes on the ground.
But eventually, Way-Say returned – though by the looks of it, he hadn’t slept well either – and they got their sad, strange show back on the road.
It got better after that. After awhile, some of the soreness worked itself out of Elim’s legs, and the walking got easier. More than that, it was downright pleasant to be leading a horse again – hearing the reliable clop of his hooves and feeling the occasional hot blast of his breath – looking out at the rumpled red landscape and pretending that they were just out for a peculiar country walk. With his new frontward view of the world, Elim began to notice the slow, sloping incline of the terrain, and to think that maybe there’d been a good bit of ‘upward’ mixed in with all the ‘forward’ of the past couple of days. That might explain why it wasn’t so all-fired hot today. He was thankful for it, regardless.
He didn’t forget where his mind was supposed to be, though. And by the time he heard Hawkeye’s voice venture some subject in their strange native language, he was ready for what came after.
There was a little more conversation after that, something between all three of them. Elim wished he had the guts to turn around and get a picture to help translate the words, but he wasn’t going to mess up now by accidentally looking Bootjack in the eye.
Still, it wasn’t long at all before Way-Say hopped down from the wagon, inviting a backwards turn of Actor’s ear. He caught up with Elim in a few long strides, and Elim was privately thankful he wasn’t wearing that morbid feather cloak of his. Without it, it was easy to see his tired face and disheveled sand-colored clothes and scuffed yellow moccasins and see someone who was different, yes, but still somehow regular and ordinary. He didn’t smile, but the long angles of his face matched the soft edges of his voice. “Ihn ene tenku nikvi ne?” he asked.
“‘What did you want to say to me?’”
Elim turned: that was Hawkeye talking as he trudged along a few paces behind. “Uh, so should I tell you what I wanna say to him, or...”
Hawkeye sighed. “Just speak as if you were talking directly to him.”
Elim could not help resenting that tone, though he tried not to let it show. Instead, he faced forward again, and reminded himself that Hawkeye was still doing him a crucial favor. “Well,” he started, “I wanted to thank you for my shoes, and, you know, everything else you’ve done for me.”
“Aishe ne nampeh tse tlai tsaa’ ene nahini-tsu ne,” Hawkeye said. And even though this was exactly what he’d asked for, it was still powerfully strange to hear Elim’s words rendered unrecognizable to his own ears.
Way-Say’s brows furrowed; he looked almost hurt. He spoke, and there was an unbearable delay while Elim waited for Hawkeye to make sense of it. “’They are not gifts, or special kindnesses. The things we have provided for you are ones that no person should live without, and you are not indebted to us for any of them.’”
Tell that to your buddy there, Elim thought. “I, uh – I’m glad you think so,” he said, careful not to let Bootjack become anything more than a vague shape walking beside the wagon in Elim’s periphery. “But I also wanted to say that I’m... I’m just awfully sorry about your nephew.” And it was the hardest thing in the world to look Way-Say in the eye as he said it.
But there was recognition in his eyes, even before Hawkeye translated, and sincerity in his voice that Elim understood long before the Ardish words followed through. “‘Thank you. We are too. Will you tell me how he died?’”
Elim had thought about this part too, but it didn’t make
saying it much easier. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember any of it. But I think I must’ve misunderstood him. I think – I know I was scared, when me and my partner came into town, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there, and I tried to tell him it wasn’t right, that I wasn’t wanted there, but he wouldn’t – he didn’t understand, and after he left –”
“Wait, please.” And Way-Say’s mouth hadn’t moved, so that could only be Hawkeye.
It was perplexing, this stop-and-go conversation, maddening in a way that Elim never would have imagined. He’d been all but silent for days and days, and now that he finally had a worthwhile thought in his head, it was beyond frustrating not to be able to share it directly, man to man, without having everything chopped to pieces and sent through some plodding, put-upon stranger who couldn’t care less about it.
“Go on,” Hawkeye said, once he’d finished with the first part.
Elim struggled to find the thread again. “I just – all I mean to say is, I never set out to hurt anybody, and if I’d... if I’da had one sensible thought in my head, I know I wouldn’t have done it. I would never want this for anybody.”
He kept his attention on Way-Say as Hawkeye started to translate – but he didn’t get even halfway through it.
“Te-chinga!” Bootjack swore, jabbing an accusatory finger in Elim’s direction. “Ka ene ke tenku-tsu tlat hakat –”
Way-Say whipped around like a trod-on snake. “Veh’ne eihei, vichi!”
Ax didn’t care much for the sudden outburst. He brought his head up high, ears flattening in fear, and Elim was suddenly afraid they might be fixing to have a repeat of yesterday after all.
“Naw, c’mon, buddy,” he soothed. “Ain’t anybody going to hurt you – we’re just having a cuss. Come on, keep showing me how good you are, all brave and barefoot...”
And as if they had all privately conspired to prove that today was going to be a better day, everyone quit all at once. Bootjack shut up. Way-Say left off scolding him. After a moment, Ax lifted his ears and slackened his neck. And for a long minute, nobody said anything.
When it seemed like the new order of things was strong enough to stand it, Way-Say reached out and patted Elim’s shoulder. It took a minute more for his words to catch up, but his eyes were kindly all the while. “‘Please excuse our rudeness. We are sometimes scared now, perhaps in the way that you were scared before. And we miss him very much.’”
Elim risked a glance back at Bootjack. He didn’t look like any of the people back home. But if you got past his high cheeks and eagle nose and the braids book-ending his face, could peek around behind them somehow... that look of his might not be all so different from the one Mrs. Macready got the time she’d spied Elim grabbing her daughter away from the horse’s backside, or the one strangers to Hell’s Acre always wore whenever he startled them somehow. It was the look of somebody who was only seeing your ability to do hurt. And there in the back of the wagon was a constant, ripening reminder of how much hurt he could do.
Elim steered his thoughts back in that direction, and his gaze back to Way-Say. What would be useful to him now? What kind of un-hurt could Elim possibly do?
Well, he’d be wanting his blindfold back, for starters. Elim had inspected it enough now to understand that those things didn’t actually blind them: they were just folded pieces of cheap black cheesecloth, which Bootjack and Way-Say wore to blunt the sun’s light in the afternoons. He still didn’t understand why Hawkeye kept his on around the clock. At any rate, Elim untied the one around his wrist and handed it over, and when they were both satisfied that the flesh underneath had scabbed up properly, Way-Say consented to take it.
What else? “I believe you,” Elim said at last. And then, with the hesitation of an idea only just pipping its way out of the egg: “Would it be all right for you to tell me about him?”
Way-Say did smile then, once the meaning made it over to him. “‘I would like that very much.’”
He went talking on – but this time, Elim didn’t mind waiting for the translation. After all, they’d found this much understanding in only a sliver of a morning, and with days and miles still to go. There would be plenty of time to discover the rest.
“HE IS MY sister’s son,” Weisei said, “though I didn’t see him much when we were growing. We are – it’s more usual for us to be raised with our mothers, who may live very far apart. So I didn’t really know Dulei until last year, when he was sent to join us in Island Town.”
He paused to let Hakai translate, which gave Vuchak room to think his own thoughts.
It was strange, this conversation – and stranger still to see the sudden change in the half’s manner. He wasn’t behaving correctly... or rather, he wasn’t behaving as he had yesterday, or the day before. He was acting civilized now. And it was hard to know how to understand that.
“It shames me to say that I wasn’t as close to him as I should have been,” Weisei went on – and Vuchak, walking five paces behind, did not need to be able to see his face to imagine the expression it wore. “We had... Hakai, what was his tsi’Gwei?”
On the other side of the wagon, Hakai wiped his brow. “I’m not sure he had one, sir. From what I’ve seen, his people sometimes celebrate the beginning of a young woman’s marriage-eligibility, but this seems to relate only to her age. I don’t know of a formal occasion for marking a child’s decision to assume adult responsibilities – though of course I’ve made only a limited study of their faith.”
And if anyone still needed proof that the Eaten were a strange, empty people, there it was. Vuchak was too astonished even to spit. Of course different people had different ways: the Set-Seti celebrated their children’s first blood or first semen, and the Ikwei sent theirs off in search of a vision, and the Ohoti tribes had rituals to mark a child’s decision to live as a man, a woman, or an oh-shuk. But no sane, wholesome people could fail to distinguish between children and adults... or ask each other what they should use to mark the changing of a life, and answer with ‘nothing’.
Weisei sounded equally taken aback. “Well... well, try to tell him about how we do things. And then tell him that it was – that Dulei was very young when he became an adult, and that he wasn’t – that we took separate paths.”
That was understating it. Tell him that Dulei was an arrogant, self-regarding lout who had no time for a child-uncle six years his senior, and treated him as an embarrassing fool. Vuchak stopped there, hearing too much of his own behavior.
“But I was beginning to know him better... and it pleased me to see the person he was becoming. Yes, that is what I want to say: we are sad that he has died, and more sad that we will not get to meet the man he would have been.”
Vuchak could not argue with that. Dulei had been so busy testing everyone, proving himself, trying much too hard to be seen and respected – but those were tasks of youth. Over the summer, he had begun to do the work of maturity, as when he had consoled Otli, on receiving news of his mother’s death... and helped Tadai prepare for his own tsi’Gwei, difficult as that was to do so far from home... and sat up for days and nights with Echep, when he had been so ill with lung fever that nobody else wanted to go near him.
Perhaps that last was not very unusual: certainly Weisei would have done the same for Vuchak, selflessly and without hesitation. But it had been affecting to overhear Dulei weeping in fear during that worst night, having perhaps only just then realized that his atodak – a young, healthy soul his own age – was mortal too.
Echep was going to do more than weep, when he found out about Dulei.
“‘I believe you,’” Hakai translated for the half. “‘My partner was the same way – he could be a true she-dog’s son. It was difficult to be patient with him sometimes, and more difficult for him to be patient with anyone. But it was easy to see the best of him in his siblings, and to look forward to the things we knew he would do later, when he was not in such a fiery hurry to grow up.’”
Vuchak hadn’t yet decided
whether Hakai was translating too poorly or too well, but Weisei gave him little time to consider it. “Oh, yes!” he said, with a gesture that might have been the sign of a provident god. “I knew Afvik only for a night, but he was already so splendid – so clever and friendly and...”
He trailed off, long enough for Vuchak to look up. Surely he wasn’t getting upset about Halfwick again.
But Weisei only shook his head and continued. “... and I was so impressed at how capable he was for someone so young, and I know...” He paused again, and reached into the wagon with an unsettled expression. “Hakai, make him stop – I have a debt to pay.”
“What?” Vuchak interrupted. “You just spent half an hour –”
Weisei cut him off with a look halfway between pain and irritation. “Leave me alone, Vichi – I have a debt to pay!” And he had no sooner fished out the digging-stick from the baggage than run off in an unwholesome hurry.
Which was as good as throwing a cup of hot fat on the fire of anxiety that had been burning in Vuchak’s gut since yesterday. It was the prickle poppy tea – it had to be. Vuchak must have mashed in some of the seed pod by mistake, and everyone knew how quickly prickle poppy seeds would have you hunched over and counting the ants...
... but that didn’t explain the heat in Weisei’s skin last night, or his headache, or his convenient insistence that he was ‘fasting’, when clearly he couldn’t have been less interested in eating anything this morning.
In fact, the only thing that would explain all of those together was standing before Vuchak’s very eyes, having stopped the horse on his own initiative, and turned in endless stupid vulgar surprise to see where Weisei had gone.
The half was diseased. Vuchak had been saying it from the beginning. And it was no coincidence that the person who’d been talking to him, touching him, insistently interacting with him for two days now was the first to get sick.
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