Which left Sil crashing into her, knocking her off-balance, pitching them both bodily down the trail-bend – and over the edge.
And as he plummeted down alongside her choking, abortive scream, Sil had just enough time to close his eyes and hope that this time would be different – that this fall would finally finish him.
VUCHAK COULD NOT have said what he’d been expecting to find – but an earth-crusted, half-dead Hakai wasn’t it.
The traitorous ihi’ghiva was lying propped up in a little wind-sheltered sandstone pocket just past the big bend in the trail. He looked like a man beaten to death, buried, and dug up three days later: his whole body caked with dirt and dried blood, his leg splinted with the half’s rifle and torn strips of his own yuye, his only human color the wet gap where his mouth hung open. And he was snoring, as soft and modestly as if he had only fallen asleep on watch.
And apparently this was not even a point of interest. The half was pacing back and forth at the edge of the trail, clutching the crumpled harness in his arms, and bellowing like a mother cow bereft of its calf. “Zil! ZIL! Kañuhírmi? ZIL!”
Vuchak understood none of it. Nothing in there sounded like an Ardish word for ‘mother’, which gave him some slender hope that whatever-this-was didn’t involve the Dog Lady. Marhuk would have never let her trespass here anyhow.
Vuchak studied the confused mess of tracks, already hopelessly marred by Ylem’s clumsy tread. He noticed the fresh, broken stone at the outermost edge, a big triangular gap where the rock must have crumbled away just in the past hour or two: he would have remembered trying to edge the travois past it.
And he certainly wouldn’t have missed that sour, lingering stink.
Vuchak leaned over and looked down the sheer drop, at the stark sandstone cliff and the valley of drought-stricken juniper at the bottom. Anyone who had fallen down there was dead, or would be soon, and there was no rope or harness long enough to reach them. They belonged to the crows now.
Which meant that all this, this standing about and shouting, no longer had any purpose. Now his job was to figure out how to get this bellowing barbarian to give up and come peacefully away with him.
He, Vuchak, who had nothing left but stubbornness and anger – who had just been fighting his own marka over half a steak.
Vuchak sighed, and made the sign of a sadistic god. This was going to end so badly.
Then he eyed the bigger man up and down, taking in his bloodless, shaken face, and the death-grip in which he held that harness, and the darting of his eyes as they struggled to gaze into the abyss. He had gone stupid with fear – for whoever had gone missing down there, certainly, and maybe even from the height of the drop itself. He was not rational.
Well, and what had they done to make him go quietly before?
They had assigned him the care of the horse, that was what – given him a useful place to put his energies, a living creature to dote on. What was left of the horse belonged in Weisei’s care now... but perhaps Vuchak could enlist a substitute.
He knelt down beside Hakai, and prodded the treacherous slave at the shoulder. “You bastard – wake up.”
Hakai groaned, and slumped forward.
Vuchak pushed him roughly back up. “You dirty, shirking old wastrel – I said wake up!” And he slapped him – just hard enough.
“Hei!” The half turned at the sound, all full of glowering indignation. “Donchuhiddim!”
Vuchak didn’t have to know those words to understand them perfectly. He might be a rotten diplomat – but he was also a professional target. He made a shooing gesture at the half-man, and went right on back to excising his frustrations with Hakai. He grabbed him by the shirt and shook him, and Vuchak’s growing fear for the ihi’ghiva’s wounds was easily quashed by his readiness to pay him back for turning traitor with the fishmen. “What did you think you were doing, you gutless coward? What did they give you? What did you tell them? How dare you even –”
That was as far as he got before Ylem stormed up and shoved Vuchak aside. “Ahzéd donHIDDIM,” he snarled, before reaching down and hefting Hakai up over his shoulders. The slave moaned, but Ylem’s glower never wavered as he backed up, staring down Vuchak even as he held his prize out of reach. “Mine,” he said in Marín, with a defiant up-jerk of his chin. “Him mine.”
If Vuchak could feel even mean-spirited pleasure, he would have smiled. As it was, he registered only the satisfaction of seeing things happen in the orderly, sensible fashion in which he’d planned them – for once. He answered with his own lifted chin, picking up the harness with one hand and pointing up the trail with the other. “Go. Take him to Weisei.”
But there was no satisfaction from the realization reflected in the half’s eyes, from the despair with which he looked over the edge one last time, and the pang of bottomless sadness that crumpled the edges of his expression: whoever he’d lost down there was truly gone, and there was no sensible choice left but to take his remaining friend away for whatever care could be given to him – and to hope that that would be enough. That was the only thing left in his power to affect. That was all he could do.
To his credit, Ylem did not stall or protest. He answered with no words. He only swallowed, wearing the look of a man who didn’t even have a hand free to pull the knife out of his own gut, and stooped to begin the climb again.
And Vuchak, the soul-weary avatar of hard truths, pitiless pragmatism and needful unkindness, picked up his spear and followed him.
SIL HIT WITH his shoulder first.
Then his right leg. Then his head. Then there was a tumbling barrel-roll that seemed to go on forever, then branches snapping and scratching at his face, and then a hard, final impact as he hit the ground with rib-cracking force.
Still awake. Still aware. Still completely, unendingly present.
He surged up to his feet, screaming in frustration and absolute bottomless fear – but his right knee buckled, and his left arm hung limp, and all that came out of his mouth were chunky, liquefying pieces of his own throat.
Spitting, gagging, eyes locked forward to keep from having to look at what he brought up, Sil crawled through the bristling brown underbrush with single-minded purpose.
A stone. A good fist-sized stone, if he could get one – or better yet, a big giant boulder, a rock that he could sit up against and just slam his head into, over and over until there was nothing left of his brain, until he was just a smear on a slab in a valley in the desert in the godforsaken middle of nowhere, pulverized and anonymous and ended. Anything. Anything to stop this. Anything to keep from having to...
Sil scrabbled heedlessly over anthills and nettles, clumps of blisterthorn and the clawing branches of dead sagebrush – but he stopped still at the sight of the juniper tree.
It was a little bigger than its neighbors, all sun-bleached needles and twisted, gnarly branches. But its nearer side was festooned like a morbid yule tree by a knotted length of thick black rope – by a garland of human hair, dangling like a hangman’s noose in the dry, silent breeze.
Día.
Sil forgot the hunt for a stone. He stood up – carefully this time, keeping his weight on his sound leg – and limped forward, struggling to ignore the disjointed sway of his arm and the grinding in his knee and the thick wetness trickling from his stomach and down his inner thigh – to shut out everything to do with himself, just for a little while.
He couldn’t call out to her. He had no voice left. So he moved as quietly as he could through the drought-strangled underbrush, sifting the high desert air for a moan, a cry, the softest possibility of life – hope – forgiveness.
As it turned out, Día had found the stone for him.
She was lying on her side in a grove of piñon trees, facing away. Her feet crossed almost daintily at the ankles, the dusty folds of her cassock draped over her still figure, and under the place where her bare head rested on the broken mass of granite, a sprouting creosote bush was fed by a dripping ribbon of blood, it
s source dark and serene and utterly, utterly still.
Sil took a step back.
He hadn’t meant to. He really, honestly hadn’t meant to. He wouldn’t – not to anyone, especially not to a woman – especially not one who had made the fatal mistake of trying to help him one more time...
Except that he had. This time he really had. This wasn’t like the business with Elim at the crossroads – there was no ambiguity this time, no question of intent. He’d lunged with nothing but an urgent need to hurt her, and now she was ruined and he was too, except that she was over and ended and he wasn’t – he couldn’t be – and in the space between the tragedy and the travesty there was no life, no hope, and no forgiveness – only himself – his infernal, eternal self – a shambling inhuman horror that turned and fled into the trees.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CARRIED
AH CHE, A child of ten winters, pinched the needle and drew it through two layers of heavy canvas.
The cloth was coarse and thick, its sweat-starched grain rough under his fingers. This was a simple patch job – the knees always wore out first – and would not take long to finish. But he lingered on the work, half to give himself something to do and half to be seen doing something.
Tomorrow, he would go down the road and ask Mrs. Jameson if she had any clothes for wash. Even if she didn’t, she would talk to him, ask him what he wanted from the drygrocer’s, and perhaps let him play with the baby. For tonight, he was on his own.
It wasn’t a bad life. He was glad to be friendly with the Jamesons, and grateful for their help. For one thing, the afternoons at their house were handsomely improving his Ardish: he understood that ‘Wally Hen’ was short for ‘Wall-Eyed Henry’, and that the big boy’s name was made differently from most of the others Ah Che had learned. He knew the difference between ‘Miss’ and ‘Missus’, and how to order and pay for the things he bought from the street-men. He could ask for directions and sometimes even understand the answers.
But he could not get work – not real work, anyway. There were plenty of jobs a blind boy could do, but nobody wanted a boy who might sit down and begin convulsing on the spot, and then spend half the day asleep. It didn’t matter that the fits only came once or twice a month: they ruined him for all reliable employment, and made Wally Hen reluctant to take any chances on him. Ah Che was not to go farther than he could walk in five minutes, unless he had someone with him. He was not to do any cooking – nothing with fire at all. He could not even go wading in the creek by himself, even though it was presently so shallow that he had to lie down flat just to wash his hair.
It was not a bad life, but sometimes it felt terribly small.
So Ah Che took his time with the needle, lining up each meticulous stitch, until he heard his reward come clumping through the tent flap. Then he had no more thought for sewing. “Welcome back, emi!”
“Hey, Ah Che.” The voice that answered him was bone-weary, and judging by the smell it carried, just shy of drunk.
That was all right. That was fine. Wally Hen worked brutally hard in the mines, pushing barrows full of broken rock through tunnels too small for him to stand up in. But he was part of a crew now, had friends good enough to go drinking with, and Ah Che was happy for him. “Who did they put up tonight?”
Wally Hen did not like to talk about work. It was hard and dull and sometimes there were accidents. But he loved to see the prize-fights, and often Ah Che could get him to talk for the better part of an hour about this round or that one. He would be glad to have him talk about anything, really – anything for the chance to converse in his own language.
But there was no rustling of the tinder-box, no kerosene smell. Which meant that there was no light... which meant that Wally Hen didn’t plan on staying awake long enough to need it. “Fischl and Fields. The same.” There was a heavy, linen-muffled creak as he flopped down into bed. “I tell you tomorrow.”
And that was it. No notice of the diligent work in Ah Che’s lap. No appreciation for the freshly-washed sheet smoothed over his cot. No awareness at all.
Ah Che swallowed. He couldn’t have a fight with Wally Hen – he owed the bigger boy far, far too much for that – but he couldn’t bear another night of silence either. “I patched the hole in your trousers,” he said.
Wally Hen mumbled something into his pillow. It might have been a thank you.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t. He worked hard, and Ah Che was grateful for that, but Wally Hen couldn’t keep him at home all day like a cooped turkey and then not bother with him.
But if there was ever a time to say that, this was not it. “I, ah... I have something to ask you,” Ah Che said, racking his mind for some half-reasonable question.
There was a cloth-muffled grunt.
But all Ah Che could think of were mundane things, chores and laundry and... well, perhaps that would do. “Will you give me the ones you’re wearing now, so I can wash them tomorrow?”
There was no answer. Ah Che feared the bigger boy had already fallen asleep.
Then there was a sigh. Then the sound of a heavy boot dropping to the floor, and then another. By the time he registered the sound of a body shifting in bed, Ah Che had already set aside his mending and held out his hands.
A dirty pair of work-pants flew into them with a heavy cloth whump. They stank of smoke and burnt powder. “Thanks.” Ah Che turned the legs right way out and began sifting through the pockets, his hands working automatically even as his mind groped for another subject. The coins came out; the dirty handkerchief went back in. The scrap of paper might be important, and the bread-crumbs certainly weren’t. And at the bottom of the left back pocket, still warm from being sat on...
Ah Che felt the strange, waxy bullet. He sniffed it, brows furrowing at its faint spicy-sweet aroma. “Emi, what is this? This plug thing in your pocket?”
Wally Hen turned over. Then it sounded like he sat up. “Oh. I forgot. Listen, Ah Che – I have things to tell you.”
Ah Che did listen. He heard the tinderbox rattle and smelled the kerosene, and his worry about what might be said was all but drowned out by the promise of a conversation long enough to be worth lighting a lamp for.
“That’s a present,” Wally Hen said. “Butch Gracie told me to give that for you.”
Ah Che dropped the plug. Butch Gracie was one of the alley boys, who made their money on prize fights and alcohol and what Mr. Jameson called ‘sporting women’. Nothing good would come from that quarter.
“No, no,” Wally Hen said. “It isn’t bad. Look at it.”
Ah Che felt a distant warmth at his right cheek, accompanied by shadowy movement at the corner of his right eye: Wally Hen was holding up the lamp.
Most people thought Ah Che had been blinded by the pox. That was almost true. The truth was that he could still see a little, but only at the edges of his periphery, and only light and shapes – no colors – and only when they moved. As soon as the thing stayed still, it vanished.
Which meant that his eyes rarely told him anything his fingers didn’t already know – which meant that Ah Che rarely bothered consulting them.
But sight was important to sighted people, and Wally Hen clearly wanted him to see this... whatever it was.
So Ah Che picked the plug out of his lap and passed it slowly back and forth beside his right eye. It was dark and faintly shiny, like well-polished wood.
“That’s made from a special plant,” Wally Hen said, “which the fishmen call it ‘tarré’. Butch says it will stop your seizures.”
A cold needle pricked Ah Che’s heart. He had tried everything the doctor asked, without improvement, and long since given up. But in his most secret thoughts, he had been a little bit glad: his seizure-dreams felt real in a way that ordinary ones didn’t. He saw his family there. He could see there – not just moving shapes, but everything. Just last week, he had seen Ten-Maia herself: radiant, beautiful, beckoning to him with a smile and a graceful maidenly hand. She was everything that t
he stories had said and more: corn-silk dress, squash-blossom hair, sweetcorn jewels of every sacred color – black and white, yellow and red – and real, more real than the waking world, more real than anything Ah Che had ever known. How could he surrender that?
But the only word that came out was “How?”
The warmth of the lamp went away, taking the last of his vision with it. “You shave off a very little piece,” Wally Hen said, “and hide it in your cheek, and hold it there until it goes away. That’s all.”
Ah Che could hear the hope in the bigger boy’s voice. It made a terrible weight on his soul. “How much does it cost?”
The reply was fast and eager. “I told you: it was a present. Butch feels bad for you, and wants you to get better.”
Well, that was stupid. Butch Gracie didn’t want anything for Ah Che: he wanted to make money. It was Wally Hen who wanted him to get better. He was the one who felt bad. And though he didn’t say it, he was the one who was grinding down his bones in that mine shaft, doing the work of two men while Ah Che scarcely managed half of one.
Ah Che liked to tell himself that he was filling in for the wife that Wally Hen would someday have. He kept the floor swept and the beds made and the clothes mended, and did all those things diligently and well. But it wasn’t enough. Nobody would choose a wife who couldn’t be trusted to cook or go out shopping or mind a child. Nobody even wanted to pay a laundry-boy who couldn’t see well enough to tell whether he had gotten the stains out. Ah Che was doing everything he could, but it wasn’t enough.
It would never be enough.
“Ah Che? What’s wrong, oyami?”
Ah Che fingered the fragrant, waxy plug. It probably wouldn’t work anyway. Nothing else had. And on the off chance that it did...
... well, someday he would join his family in the Other Lands. Someday he might even see Ten-Maia again. It would be selfish to ask for more than that.
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