“Which one?” Día asked again, without a glance to spare for the manservant. The mereaux were almost ruthlessly uniform to her eyes, naked and indistinguishable save for their weapons.
“I don’t know,” the man called back, his voice taut with controlled fear. “I’m – I can’t tell them apart.”
Well, he’d probably have more luck if he took off that blindfold of his, but there was no time to quibble. Día’s roving gaze fell on a big mereau near the back, holding a net and wearing a weighted bag around its neck. What did that signify? I love you, she repeated, her brown eyes fixating on the mereau’s black ones, her fingertips moving from her lips towards theirs specifically. It was literally a feeding-gesture, Fours had told her once, the act of giving food from one’s own mouth, and she mimed chewing just in case that might make it more real. I love you. I feed you. I love you.
The big mereau blinked. Their colors wavered, that ruthless, thoughtless crimson-black lightening towards a beautiful cobalt blue, and Día dared to hope that she had chosen right – that this was their translator. I love you, the mereau repeated, the net still tangled in their fingers, the glaze slowly fading from their eyes.
Día could have jumped for joy. “Help me,” she said, as slowly and clearly as her trembling voice could manage. “Help me talk to him. We’re here to apologize – we didn’t mean to hurt you. Can you tell him that? Will you help us?”
Please, she thought as hard as she could, petitioning God and the Dog Lady and all the mereaux massed before her, praying to anyone who would listen that this might still be saved – that somewhere in this grievous angry jumble of signing and thought-sharing and hopelessly crude mouth-languages, a spark of understanding might still catch. Please, please help us.
But the big mereau’s brow furrowed in confusion or sadness, and when they spoke, it was in a fearful whisper. “J’ne comprends pas.”
That was all it took. The prince whipped around to hunt for the traitor in his ranks. The big mereau panicked, instantly camouflaging to match their kin. And when the prince didn’t find the guilty party, it took him no time at all to rear back, pick up a child-sized piece of jagged granite, and hurl it at his enemies.
Día dodged. U’ru did not. It hit her full in the chest, slamming her back into the rocky overhang with a sickening wet yelp.
“Run!” the blindfolded man called, pointing away up a trail between the twin hills.
Día staggered, dizzied by U’ru’s pain – but there was no time to lose. The prince’s bellowing war-cry spearheaded the charge: in an instant, the whole crimson-black cohort came boiling up the slope, bearing down with blades and edges.
The rock had crushed U’ru’s foot. She clutched her robe to her chest and stared at the onrushing horde, breathless with shock. With one superhuman shove, Día rolled the stone away, grabbed U’ru’s hand, and tore off running.
There was no telling where the trail went – but it wasn’t going to get them there fast enough. Día tried to conjure that divine swiftness she had felt the night of the fire, when she was nothing but surety and alacrity and cinder-kindling grace. But her surety had come from the mother dog at her side, and the dog was now a helpless woman, and the woman was limping on a broken foot, gasping with broken ribs, threatening with every agonized uphill step to collapse in the dust.
Come on, Día thought, irrationally doubling down on her own breathing to compensate. Come on come on come on –
A thrown rake narrowly missed, clattering to the ground inches away. The net didn’t. The latticed ropes slapped over Día and U’ru, bringing them down in a tangled heap of pain and confusion. Día writhed and turned, fighting to free her knife, fantasizing about cutting their way out, stepping on the dry fibers and setting them alight before she hurled the whole burning mass right back at her attackers –
– but as her fur-clad companion froze in terror and the red-streaked raging horde closed in, Día’s last prayer was that it would all be over quickly.
THE MAN, HAKAI, did not join in the frenzied blood-rush. He staggered a few steps behind them, slow and sick and safely forgotten, until he stood at the base of the vast craggy hill overlooking the west side of the trail.
Then he planted his feet and bowed his head.
The cohort rushed up the trail.
He began to breathe faster, his fingers picking nervously at nothing.
The two women fell, ensnared by the flying net.
He turned his sweat-stained face to the sky, his small earthy figure weak and trembling.
The cohort swarmed forward for the kill, their prince croaking encouragement as he trundled along behind, their dark bodies all but swallowed by the shadow of the mountain’s foot.
Then the man, Hakai, said a word to the hill.
And the hill collapsed.
CHAPTER FIVE
MEAT
>AH CHE, A child of seven winters, peered out from behind his mother at the strangers standing in the street.
They were peculiar people, tall and badly-dressed, with mixed faces and heavy, ugly boots. They were supposed to become Maia – that was what his father had said – but Ah Che didn’t see how. The strangers didn’t know any real words, or any manners, either. They didn’t know anything. Just that morning, their older child – Ah Che couldn’t tell whether it was a boy or a girl or both – had tried to climb down into the kiva, where only men could go.
Mama must have seen him staring at the other children: she looked down at him and clicked. “Go on,” she said, nodding out to where Ah Set had already gone to greet the younger child, to see whether they would understand the circle game. “Be friendly. Teach them how to play.”
Ah Che clutched his hoop and stick tighter. It was unthinkable not to share – he knew that – and yet his feet didn’t want to move. He had none of his brother’s bravery. “What if they break it?”
Mama shifted the baby in her arms and smiled. “Then you’ll teach them how to make a new one.”
“– FAITHLESS, EYELESS, POXY son of a milk-drinking Eaten whore!”
Vuchak finished with another bone-jarring strike of the stone in his hand. His wrath had all but powdered the jerky on the flat rock below... for all the good that did.
Weisei stood a few paces off, arms folded in disgust. “Are you done yet?”
“No.” Vuchak switched hands and put a fresh meat-strip on the stone, willing it to become Hakai’s insufferable face. “He’s a tribeless, traitorous, godforsaking bastard – a shit-picking goat-fucker – a rat I should have left to drown!”
He had to stop then, as much to catch his breath as to craft a suitable Marín expression for ‘mangy-balled childless masturbator’. Even if ei’Krah had words to do it justice, Vuchak wouldn’t use them here.
But that gave the aching weariness in his bones enough time to seep back out into the rest of him, and his free-soul enough time to remind him of how deeply unproductive this was, and by the time Vuchak had enough wind to resume his venison-vengeance, he’d lost his appetite for it. He sat back and glowered at the stones. “I never trusted him anyway.”
Weisei rolled his eyes. “We’re wasting time.”
Wasn’t that the truth. Hakai had turned traitor, which meant that they couldn’t afford to stay here and wait for him to lead the fishmen back to their camp. They had to move. That meant packing up, and THAT meant breaking down the makeshift drying rack... figuring out how to turn it into a travois for Dulei... mixing the pemmican... cleaning and stowing the dishes... finding some way to pack the remains of the deer, since half their bags had burned up in the fire. It was an ant-hill of a list – individually simple, collectively impossible – and just thinking about it all was enough to make Vuchak nauseous. He rubbed his face. He could count his sleep-hours on the fingers of one hand, and with no wholesome source for energy, he had nothing to draw from but anger.
“Whose fault is that?” he snapped, striving to re-kindle the dwindling fire inside him.
“Yours.” Wei
sei might have been deliberately feeding Vuchak’s efforts, or simply running out of patience.
Regardless, Vuchak would take it. “Mine?” he retorted. “Am I the one who abandoned the people who saved my miserable skin? Am I the one who walked off in the middle of the day, after making you grand elaborate promises about staying? Am I the one who betrayed us?”
“You don’t know that,” Weisei replied. “We don’t know what they did to him, or why –”
It was a wretched thing, running on anger – an endless cycle as self-sustaining and counterproductive as licking one’s lips in a blizzard.
Still, it did work. Vuchak found the strength to haul himself up to his feet, rising to the argument. “We know there are only one set of footsteps leading down to the river,” he interrupted, “and that no shoeless people could come inside our camp-circle without getting a footful of cactus-hairs. So the only way that belly-crawling eggsucker could have –”
The ground shook. It was faint, just a tremor – but that was enough. Vuchak held still and waited to see whether it would happen again. “Weisei, did you feel –”
“Vichi, look!”
Vuchak followed his marka’s upturned chin to the north, where a flock of crows had just taken flight. One of the Red Brothers was collapsing.
He stood there, dumbstruck, watching the western slope of the hill disintegrate like a pile of dry beans. It wasn’t a rockslide, not anything that started from the top. Rather, it was as if someone had scooped away part of the hill’s foot, leaving everything above it to slide down like so much corn flour.
Vuchak and Weisei stared, watching a giant dust cloud waft languidly up into the air. Silence stretched out between them.
“... I think we should take the eastern trail,” Weisei said at last.
Vuchak could not have agreed more. Whatever had just happened on the southern side of the mountain was entirely beyond their feeble power. Marhuk would have to sort that one out himself.
Vuchak made the sign of an unfathomable god, and wearily turned his attention to the packing. “Let’s get started.”
BY THE TIME the terror in Shea’s mind finally ebbed, she was ready to lie down and let the heart attack claim her. U’ru’s contagious panic – so like what she’d felt thirty years ago, when the Winter Wolves had first trampled and burned their way through the Ara-Naure camp – had Shea running and skidding and scrambling over sharp rocks and treacherous gaps until she was gasping like a hooked trout.
Then, as now, Shea was too late to do anything… but maybe this time she wasn’t needed. She halted as the earth shook, rooted to the spot by a fear all her own – and then felt U’ru’s panic lift and dissipate in tandem with the dust cloud rising before her. She was alive, albeit in pain, and Día was safe.
Thank the gods for that, Shea thought.
The answer was quick and cold: Not the gods. Not you. Black puppy.
So U’ru was still angry with her, then.
Her name is Día, Shea thought, dropping into an exhausted squat. Come back.
There was a moment of hesitation, some kind of impediment to going back the way they’d come, but it was swiftly blotted out by suspicion. Did you find my son?
Shea was panting too hard to sigh. She had the boy, yes... but not one who would acknowledge U’ru as his mother. Not one she would recognize as her son.
Don’t come to me without him. Don’t speak to me again.
Then the lingering presence in Shea’s mind withdrew, leaving just the cavernous echoes of her own ugly thoughts. She slumped forward, head between her knees, and waited to catch her breath.
The boy would wake soon. He would have to: that whopping monstrous body of his was healing, burning through his reserves at a fantastic rate. He was already leaner today than he had been yesterday. Soon he’d have to wake up and eat – and god only knew what Shea had to feed him. God only knew how she was going to feed herself.
She ought to work on that. She ought to have some food on hand to bribe him with, some way to make him sit still and listen this time.
Well, she had no chance of catching anything here on land, and there was nothing growing in enough quantity to satisfy a gut like his. She might not be too far from the river, though, and if she got there before dark, she could...
Shea lifted her head, astonished at how easily she’d forgotten to wonder about the other mereaux – and appalled to realize she’d already found them.
The dust was clearing, helped by a light western breeze. The sun was sinking behind the remains of a half-crumbled red hill whose lengthening shadow stretched out over a hundred tons of outspilled earth. And here and there amidst the rubble were bodies.
Shea blanched – a slow, stupefied camouflage as she faded into the landscape. She held perfectly still for a long minute, frightened more by the possibility that the rockslide had killed them all than the danger that it hadn’t. The House of Losange would want her dead – she knew that – but as her ruined eyes raked the scene before her, hunting in vain for any slight movement, the least little sound of someone stirring, it seemed increasingly likely that none of them had been left alive.
And apparently the children of Marhuk were coming to the same conclusion: even as Shea watched, a crow fluttered down to alight on a half-buried corpse.
“Hey!” she snapped, breaking camouflage and limping forward with righteous indignation. “Who do you think you are? Go away! Shoo! Go eat your own – these aren’t yours!”
The crow flew off, leaving Shea alone with the body.
It was unrecognizable, caked from head to toe in coarse red earth, which was already turning to mud as the death-seep began. Left alone, it would lose half its water in the next few hours, which would make it far easier to excavate... but when had Shea ever done anything the easy way?
She sighed, glancing up at the late afternoon sky. Yes, she really ought to head back and see to the boy... but maybe she’d done enough fussing about him for one lifetime. Maybe the humans and their benighted gods could get along without her for a few hours. Maybe it was time to be a mereau again – just for a little while.
So Shea bent down, ignoring the cantankerous ache in her back, and set her scarred, webless fingers to digging up some company.
IN THE DREAM, Elim was four years old and squatting in front of the wash-bucket as he starved.
Behind him, the grace was already starting. “Come, good Master, be our guest. By your bounty, we are blessed.”
He scrubbed harder, biting his tongue as he attacked his right hand again with the nail-brush – even though he’d already scoured it to bleeding, even though he already knew it wasn’t going to work.
“For this bread, your will be done...”
The aroma of beans and bacon made a pain in his stomach to rival the one in his hand. He glanced back over his shoulder, hoping against hope that Ma’am might relent, but she had her head bowed and her eyes closed. The other children did likewise, their legs swinging under the table in anticipation of the meal.
Elim plunged his hand into the bucket, tears springing to his eyes as the soapy water stung his raw flesh, praying as hard as he ever had this time would be different – that this time he had scrubbed all the way down past the dirty part, past the bleeding part, to the clean white part that he was sure had to be in him somewhere.
“… we thank you, Master, every one.”
But when he pulled his hand up, the only white part was the soap running down his wrist. Everything else was bastard brown and raw, runny red… just like it always was.
And the clatter of cutlery started up behind him, just like it always did, and Ma’am conducted the supper without him, just like she always had, and as Elim leaned forward to cry, as he only did when he was sure he could do it quietly enough to keep out of a switching, the drops ran down his face, salting the pink-tinged soap-water in the bucket as they disappeared.
ELIM GROANED, HOVERING somewhere between two nightmares. Something urged him to keep tacking
towards the old one, the twenty-years-finished one, the one he’d long since mastered and outgrown.
But the new one had a hold of his body, and parts of it were waking up without him, each one adding its peculiar complaint until their combined clamor forced him up out of sleep like a crowbar ripping a rotted stump out of the ground.
Too late, Elim understood his mistake. Too late, he wished to have the old nightmare back again. Here in the waking world, the dog-monster had witched him somehow, and then the treacherous lying fishman had tricked him somehow, and now he was... he was...
... he was starving, that was what.
Elim sat up, doubling over on a full bladder and a ruinously empty stomach. The world clashed and blurred and shifted around him – something was god-awfully wrong with his eyes – but there was no sign of the monster OR the fishman. There didn’t look to be anybody anywhere.
So he spent his next minutes negotiating between the ordinary and the indescribably strange. It was odd to stand up to relieve that old familiar crick in his back, and find himself a foot taller than when he’d laid down. It was unsettling to unbutton his fall-fronts for a good hearty piss and have to manage it with just his left hand, as certainly he wasn’t letting his witch-twisted right one anywhere near his Goodman Thomas. And it was peculiar, just powerfully, overwhelmingly peculiar, to walk a half-dozen paces to the little pond for a drink, and feel himself clopping along on one bare foot and one big hoof.
It was a damn good one, though. Unshod, of course, but clean as a whistle. Straight, solid walls. Tight, white line. Firm frog – so strange to actually feel the pressure of his own thumb! Soft sole, too soft for this hard ground, but considering he’d literally never walked on it before...
Elim stopped as he realized what he was doing – sitting there hunched over the abomination on the end of his own leg, investigating it as idly as if he were peeling dead skin off his feet. He put a hand to the hairier side of his face, marveling first at his own lightheaded stupidity, and then at the sudden clarity in his vision. The blurry greenish-yellow-grey dropped away as soon as he covered his left eye, leaving just the world as it ought to be: green plants, reddish-brown dirt and stones, blue afternoon sky warming to orange in announcement of suppertime.
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