Dreams of the Eaten

by Arianne Thompson

  Struggling to find the boundaries of her own mind, Día had no answer but her own confusion: what good would it do to go back up there?

  “Absolutely not!”

  Both U’ru and Día stopped. Miss du Chenne had risen to her feet, staring down at the one even as she gestured over at the other. “You can’t send her up there after him – I don’t care how near he is!”

  U’ru growled, and Día’s mind filled with wordless, angry certainty. The crows had only attacked her yesterday because she was escorting an unwelcome god: by herself, Día was a plain human, scarcely distinguishable from those that lived on the mountain, and Marhuk would take no notice of her.

  “Nevermind that,” Miss du Chenne snapped. “Look at her! She has nothing – no hat, no coat, not even a pair of shoes, and she doesn’t know the first thing about this mountain or any other. She’s got no business being HERE, nevermind up there, and I won’t –”

  U’ru bared her teeth, unleashing an onslaught of ideas. Día running up the trail – Día finding Elim and leading him back down again – Día and Elim back within the hour, safe and secure.

  “You can’t possibly guarantee that,” Miss du Chenne said. “For all you know, the a’Krah already have him.”

  U’ru radiated confusion; her hackles lost their edge. Why would the children of Marhuk take her son?

  Miss du Chenne did not reply in words, but she must have communicated something. Día received U’ru’s growing comprehension in vague, primitive images. A spotted puppy, alone in a strange place. A crow, startled into flight. A leap, a bite, a black-feathered body on the ground. A long shadow spilling over both of them. Tail-tucking. Understanding. Fear.

  A reciprocal-understanding burst out from the Dog Lady then, like steam erupting from water slopped over a molten stone. Another time. Another dead crow. Another terrible, indelible mistake.

  Día swallowed, nauseated by a crippling, bone-deep dread. She had ordered the death of Marhuk’s daughter – had killed some of the others herself – and now her own son had followed her down the same fatal path. There was a faint flicker of something from Miss du Chenne – some mention of confession, some possibility of understanding – but it died like a candle-flame under glass, extinguished by U’ru’s heavy, leaden certainty. There was no chance for forgiveness, no hope for mercy. If Marhuk’s talons closed over her child, he would die.

  Día closed her eyes, fighting not to be sick on the spot. Her shaking hand found the tips of her dreadlocks, holding fast to her father’s handiwork to distance herself from that terrible grief-in-waiting. She was not a mother, she reminded herself. That was not her child. This was not her life.

  But that was her friend: head bowed, ears back, and shoulders hunched in anticipation of an unsurvivable blow.

  Día let out a breath. Miss du Chenne wouldn’t allow it. Fours would tell her to go straight home. So would the Azahi, though he’d phrase it more practically: she didn’t have the knowledge or the resources to do this responsibly, safely, or perhaps at all.

  But when she reached past the clamorous voices of the living, to the one she had to be still and quiet and empty to hear... then it was easier to know the right thing, and to accept what might happen if she tried.

  Día opened her eyes. “I’ll go.”

  Strangely enough, there was no reaction from U’ru. The dog sat staring at Día with perplexed golden eyes, as if mystified by what she saw.

  Miss du Chenne suffered no such difficulty. “Absolutely not!” she repeated. “You don’t have any – you can’t just up and – do you know what Fours is going to do to me if something happens to you?”

  Día’s first, decidedly unkind thought was that Miss du Chenne had never demonstrated any such regard for Fours’ feelings or Día’s welfare, busy as ‘Shea’ was enjoying her new life in that house of ill repute.

  But there must have been some spirit of fire in the sky overhead, some angel of inspiration nudging her to think of the name that her teacher had abandoned, and to wonder if du Chenne might have been originally rendered as du Chienne – literally ‘of the dog’ – and to realize, years after the fact, that this business here was far, far older than Día could have imagined.

  She looked down into the old mereau’s fathomless black eyes, wondering how many lifetimes she had quietly accreted, each layer of living sediment passively burying the one below. “I know,” Día said, pushing hard against the limits of her ignorance. “But you said... earlier this morning, you said that Fours resented you for spending so much time on this – on her, on looking for her son. And if that’s true – if you left him and me for the sake of, of her and him...”

  Día tried to reconcile that and hit a wall. No, it wasn’t all right, and she wouldn’t pretend otherwise. You couldn’t just abandon people who were counting on you for the sake of someone else’s unfinished business.

  Even though that was exactly what Día was proposing to do now. She rubbed her face, struggling to draw some distinction, articulate some even half-reasonable rebuttal that would justify this present decision without validating that past one. What Miss du Chenne had done wasn’t right, but it was done. And two wrongs didn’t make a right – but squaring a negative did make a positive.

  Día dropped her hands. “... well, it had better not be for nothing. Yes, that’s what I mean: you spent yourself all on them, and I don’t have to forgive you for that, but I’m not going to let it go to waste. Maybe we can’t fix it, but it’s my turn to try.”

  Miss du Chenne’s hairless brow furrowed. Her river-colored skin shifted, the pale blue and stark white blending to a much more familiar shade – to the ordinary Eadan peach-color that she had been back when Día’s dark hand was small enough to disappear in that wet, bony grip. “You know I can’t go with you,” she said. “If anything happens, I won’t be able to come get you.”

  Día didn’t have to ask why. She was grown now, tall enough to look down and see Miss du Chenne’s withered gill-plumes, and the frail slump of her shoulders, and to understand that the old mereau could no more climb a mountain than Día could swim to the bottom of the sea.

  Still, it was comforting to hear the unspoken sentiment folded inside that. “I know,” Día said. “I’ll do my best to stay safe.”

  U’ru’s ears lifted. Going?

  Miss du Chenne’s expression hardened. She stood straighter, as if drawn up by invisible corset-strings. “Well, if you’re going to do it, you’d better do it right. Now listen here, young lady: when you find that boy, you bring him straight here. Do whatever it takes, do you understand? As far as we know, he’s the last of U’ru’s line, and if he dies...”

  Día glanced down at the Dog Lady, who only last week had been an almost-ordinary dog, and needed no further explanation. The earthly gods lived only as long as their people – which meant that U’ru’s life, or at least her mind, was hanging by a single two-colored thread. “I understand.”

  Miss du Chenne nodded. “Good. And if the a’Krah have him, then... then tell them that his name is Yashu-Diiwa, son of U’ru the Dog Lady – youngest of the Moon Singers, eternal mother of the Ara-Naure – and she expects... and she would appreciate an opportunity to bargain for his life.”

  Día repeated it twice to herself, and didn’t reply until she could do it with confidence. “I will.”

  Down. Come down.

  Día saw herself kneeling – in heaven’s name, she was never going to get used to speaking in ideas – and drew up her hem to make it so.

  She planted her knees in the dry earth and received the Dog Lady’s wet blessing: a crown of kisses, meticulously licked in an arc all along Día’s hairline. There was love in them, warmth and strength and gratitude, and something else, too.

  Sorry.

  Día looked up into those mysterious golden eyes, the ones that had watched over her through more days and nights than she could ever have survived alone. But she found no clarification there, no picture-thought to accompany the feeling. There w
as no telling whether U’ru meant to express regret to Día for what she was about to attempt, or to the a’Krah for what U’ru herself had already done, or whether the queen simply wished to endow her knight-errant with the right to apologize on her behalf – to make amends for wrongs that her own damaged mind could not even grasp, let alone correct.

  Well, whatever the intention, it would suffice. “Don’t worry, Mother Dog. We’ve come this far, haven’t we? We’ll be all right.” And Día broadened that thought, that we, to include everyone she knew: herself and U’ru and Miss du Chenne, Elim and that godforsaken Halfwick, Vuchak and Weisei and anyone else she could find or meet – anyone living or incompletely dead out here on this old, cold mountain. She would help and solicit help in return, and keep faith throughout.

  But after she’d traded embraces and said her goodbyes, Día was left to start up the precarious ruined road with no company but herself and the Almighty – and to trust that that would be enough.

  SHEA WATCHED HER go, her thoughts sinking even as Día climbed.

  She shouldn’t have allowed it. She should have made her take the rest of the fruit. She should have bitten her during that last awkward hug, given her a love-flaw to keep her safe from the Amateur’s roving eye. It was superstitious nonsense, but she should have done it anyway. Fours would have.

  Be safe, puppy, came the thought from beside her. Come back soon.

  Shea stared dully up at the lip of the landslide, blinking to clear the dust as Día crested the top. It had been a hard thing to keep from correcting her – to let the girl go on with her innocence intact. Yes, there was U’ru and the boy and that had been part of it... but the cold, ugly truth was that Shea didn’t want to be anyone’s mother. She never had. She wasn’t made to parent earth-people and their sad, strange little families. It was all right to help out with the younger cohort, wiping sticky faces and separating squabblers and keeping the smallest ones from making a mess. That was what she’d done for U’ru, what she’d done for Mother Melisant before that. But to be a mother, the architect of a family, half of some helpless creature’s entire world... who could ever bear it?

  Thank you.

  Much easier to let Día go on believing her own homemade explanation. Easier to maintain a generous silence than to tell the truth: I don’t want you and I never did, and if I’d had my way, Fours never would have taken you up in the first place. Shea sighed, watching the black blur disappear over the hill. Well, she’d give herself some credit: whatever her other sins, she’d never said that out loud.

  Water-Dog?

  Shea glanced down at U’ru, a parent who was now half a child herself, and idly wondered when they’d gotten back on speaking terms again. “I’m sorry, Mother – what were you saying?”

  The dog sat attentive and still. Thank you.

  Shea stared at her. “God, whatever for?”

  It was a terrible tone to take, and yet the rude contrarianism of the past twenty minutes had apparently succeeded where all her prior pleading failed: U’ru was calm and sensible, her tail swishing just that tiny bit. You let her go.

  No, I didn’t, Shea could have said. She was never mine to ‘let’ do anything. But she had known U’ru a long time – long enough to have learned how to keep her thoughts to herself. Regardless, Día was out of her reach now, and Shea had other concerns.

  “That was her own choice,” Shea said, and began running her hands over the less rocky parts of the earth-heap next to her, searching for any telltale damp spots. There had been twelve in the cohort, and so far, Shea had found only three. “I know she made it gladly.”

  Just as she’d hoped, all that patting and feeling about elicited a bloom of curiosity. What are you doing?

  Shea smiled in spite of everything. “Well, while we’re waiting, I thought we might play a game to pass the time. It’s one I’ve just now invented – a delightful combination of find-the-smell, dig-the-hole, and fetch-and-carry...”

  As luck would have it, U’ru turned out to be a stellar player. She still didn’t care much for the House of Losange – not their stealing of her son, and certainly not their recent attempts to kill her – but pitied them enough to help dig them out and drag them to the river. Shea kept her mind on the work, and tried to ignore the guilty little voice in the back of her mind: if the cohort hadn’t met her, if she hadn’t sold them on the idea of ‘wizard-hunting’ for that damned boy, they would be off clearing a dam somewhere on the Calentito River, alive and oblivious a hundred miles away.

  Well, and if that vast fool Jeté hadn’t kidnapped, manhandled, and threatened to kill her, they might have still gotten their silt-shoveling happily-ever-after. Too late now. They were dead and so was he – god, Shea didn’t even want to think about what it would take to haul his ungainly carcass out from this muddy midden – and now they were nothing but a mess to be cleaned up and disposed of.

  But Shea and U’ru did their grim penance all that afternoon, and the work was good for both of them. It was only later in the day, when they finally climbed to the top of the landslide, that Shea noticed the strange crater near the slope of the hill.

  She splayed out her stubby toes, treading carefully on the loose ground, until she was so close that even her poor eyes couldn’t be mistaken. There was a pit there, a hole as big and conspicuous as if someone had taken a spoon to a wheel of soft cheese... as if something huge had crawled out of its own grave.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE MOST ODIOUS OF SINS

  AH CHE, A child of nine winters, lay still and waited.

  It was a hard thing to do. The cot was coarse and itchy, the thin blanket grimy with his sweat, and his muscles ached for want of use. They wanted to get up and run, play, do anything but lie there.

  They didn’t seem to know about the rest of him.

  So he lay on his left side, facing the wall – not even a wall, but a cheap, oil-stinking tarp – and squelched the urge to roll over. It was well that he did: soon enough, the stomp of heavy, ugly boots told him that Wally Hen had come back.

  “Hey, Ah Che!” the big boy called as he threw back the tent flap. “Sit up and food with me!”

  Ah Che pretended to be asleep. No ordinary sleep could last through Wally Hen’s ruckus, but Ah Che breathed slow and silently, as if he had gone to the deep place that welcomed him after his seizures, and wished, wished, wished to return there now.

  But he couldn’t suppress a flinch as Wally Hen knocked him roughly on the shoulder. “Get up, oyami,” he said in his clumsy, babyish Maia. “Now is our time for the meal!”

  Oyami. Little brother. That was what Ah Che had called Ah Set, back before the world shrank. It was not a word that this hulking, stinking, turkey-warbling half-boy had any right to use.

  If he and his kind hadn’t come to the village last year, there would have been no sickness. If he hadn’t found Ah Che, he could have finished dying and joined his family in the Other Lands. If he didn’t keep stuffing him with bad food and worse medicine, Ah Che might still be able to get there.

  “Up, up!” Wally Hen said. “You won’t want to eat cold.”

  But Wally Hen had done all those things – had stolen Ah Che away from the village and ridden him all the way to this muddy, smoky, miserable tent city and paid some white doctor far too much to hold him here in this world.

  Not enough to make the world whole again.

  Not enough to bring back Mama and the baby and Ah Set.

  Not enough to revive his eyes.

  Ah Che’s body had long since turned traitor, his stomach growling at the smell of cheap meat and beans, his limbs aching to move and his bladder conspiring to give them an excuse. But he knew how to trick them. He breathed faster, as fast as if he were running full-sprint away from this awful half-life.

  Wally Hen must have seen the quickening rhythm of his chest. “Hey!” he said, rolling Ah Che roughly onto his back – a cruel child flipping a helpless sand-beetle. “Don’t do that! You stop!”

  Ah
Che didn’t stop. He breathed faster and faster still, struggling not to notice the smell of sweat and soot and smoke that told of Wally Hen’s day-long backbreaking labor in the silver mine, striving not to feel the fatigue tremor in the older boy’s iron grip. He went right on gorging his lungs with air, desperate to trigger that giddy strangeness, that aura of loose, dizzy motion that promised another seizure, another trip to the dream-world, another visit with his family. This time, he would remember his waking-life. This time, he would beg to stay.

  But the only motion was a dim, colorless shifting in his periphery as Wally Hen bent down and grabbed him.

  “Let go!” Ah Che cried, feeling himself hoisted bodily into the air. “Stop, put me down!”

  He pushed and fought against that lanky, rough-shirted body, his struggle punctuated by booted footsteps and the tent-flap dragging over Ah Che’s face – just before he caught a whiff of fresh air.

  Then he was sinking, a great gray flatness surging up at the edges of what remained of his vision, and he was set down on cold, dry ground.

  “You are my brother, oyami,” Wally Hen said, his voice sounding near to tears. “My family. My friend. But if you won’t try to eat with me or talk with me, then you can’t come in my house.”

  Hot words boiled up in Ah Che’s throat. I’m not your oyami, they said. A brother isn’t turned away because he doesn’t do what you want. A brother isn’t someone you throw out when you get tired of him. But they were lost in the retreating stomp of heavy boots and the oil-cloth swush of the tent-flap.

  So Ah Che sat there in the middle of the camp street, as shirtless and exposed as when Turtle had been tricked out of his shell. He smelled cooking-fires and latrine pits and the ever-present sulfurous stink of the mine, heard shouts and talking in the language of rough white men, and through his earth-sense he could faintly feel their rude, clumping footsteps.

  He didn’t belong here. He didn’t belong anywhere. And the only thing more terrifying than the thought that these barbarian strangers might be staring at him right now was the fear that they weren’t and wouldn’t – that they would step around the poxy blind native boy as if he were a lump of dung in the street, and go right on about their business.