But the coffin was tied to the travois, and the travois was tied to the horse, and each kick and shake from Dulei’s morbid counterweight shuddered through the poles, pulling the creature’s soft, spoiling shoulders just that little bit further upright – giving Vuchak just that little bit more of a chance to retrieve his weapon.
He grabbed his spear-haft and heaved for all he was worth, feeling the edges of the ground bone head tearing through horseflesh like a fishhook pulled backwards through a carp’s gasping mouth.
And then he stayed there. Vuchak did not turn or look, did not wait to see where the knife had hit, but feigned ongoing struggle with the spear. He relied on his ears to drink in the fish-king’s grunt, let his boot-soles tell him about that last almighty leap. Then he spun, planting the butt of the spear in the ground, bracing it with the instep of his right foot, and angling its head up to occupy the space where his had been only a moment before.
And the monster’s chest swallowed it.
WHEN VUCHAK FOUND himself again, he was dying.
Well, perhaps not yet – but he wasn’t breathing, and that was soon going to amount to the same thing. There was a horse-carcass underneath him, a broken spear-haft digging into his ribs, and a frog-monster on top of him – and even if his lungs weren’t being crushed by that spastic, dying titan, there was nothing to breathe in that grotesque flesh-heap, no room to live. Vuchak kicked and struggled valiantly – but they were feeble, futile human efforts sandwiched between two dead behemoths, and soon he resigned himself to joining them. He was going to die. Starless, luckless Vuchak would end his life as a monument to irony, smothered by his own success.
He could be content with that.
So he dwindled like a candle-flame under glass, panic and guilt ebbing away. Yes, it would be a bit selfish to die here with so much undone... and yet there was something profoundly restful about this warm, airless pocket, a peaceful stillness he’d never found within himself.
And of course he couldn’t be allowed that. As soon as he found succor in his imminent death, creation conspired to take it from him: there was a man’s voice somewhere out there, meat-muted and indecipherable, and then a pair of strong hands pulling on Vuchak’s ankle.
No, don’t trouble yourself, he thought. Really, I’m fine.
But the universe had traditionally met Vuchak’s wishes with something between casual indifference and active contempt, and the present was no exception. Just like that, he was yanked out into the world like a breech-birthed baby: bloody, bewildered, and gasping.
Vuchak wiped the slime from his eyes and looked up, groggily preparing to decipher Ylem’s endless gabbling...
“Ohei, friend – don’t you look a mess!”
... and found himself staring up in open-mouthed astonishment at Echep’s lopsided grin.
The other atodak’s smile fell even as his eyes widened. “Vuchak? By every god, is that you?”
Vuchak had no chance to reply: in one smooth movement, Echep reached down and hauled him up to his feet like a hawk dipping a fish from the All-Year River. He clapped him on the back, drew his head in to make their foreheads kiss, and then pushed him back by the shoulders, looking him up and down with appalled delight. “By great-grandmother’s toothless second-mouth, you are a sorry sight! What are you doing here? And what is that atrocious smell?”
A low, gurgling groan leaked out from behind them. In that moment, Vuchak could have matched it: Dulei had recognized his atodak’s voice.
Echep looked out at the mess in growing astonishment: at Ylem hauling Hakai over a great pile of spilled stone; at the smashed bridge and the dead horse and the fish-king’s corpse on top of it; at the gore-streaked tip of Vuchak’s broken spear peeking out from the monster’s shoulder. But when he saw the coffin, he stopped still.
He glanced from it to Vuchak and back again, levity draining from his face as a grievous understanding bloomed in his eyes.
Vuchak closed his mouth, swallowing obsolete words, groping for fresh ones. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I never wanted you to see this.
Echep found his voice first. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice a strangled whisper. “I’m so sorry. Oh, poor Weisei– how did it happen?”
Vuchak blanched.
It was an old custom, so venerable that it verged on law: the guardians of Marhuk’s children were almost universally a’Pue: born under no star, possessed of no luck. Vuchak had spent his whole life laboring under the curse. But it was only here, in this moment, that he finally understood the depth of the world’s cruelty.
Vuchak looked up at the misdirected pity in Echep’s eyes, savoring the last moments of his friend’s innocence. Then he took a breath and steeled himself to speak the words that would ruin him.
IT TOOK ELIM a little while to recollect how to breathe. A little while more to muster enough air and wherewithal to get back up. Not long at all to amend his list of life-goals: if he never got kicked by a horse, a mule, or a man-eating frog ever again, he would call that a square deal.
Still, that last one might have accidentally done Elim a favor. He looked ahead, to where a good half-ton of rock had tumbled down over the trail – over the exact spot where he’d been standing before those ungodly huge feet had thrown him clear.
He stooped, grimacing at the protest from his aching gut, and bent to collect Hawkeye, who had since excused himself back into a stupor. Elim wished he could do likewise. Not for the first time, he wondered what it would be like to be small and delicate – to get to be carried sometimes, to go through life with options beyond ‘walk or get left’.
But as he heaved his rusty, aching bigness back into motion, kicking and nudging at the debris in his path, Elim began to suspect a more dangerous connection between the rocks at his feet and the feverish fellow slung over his back. Somehow the man and the mountain had taken to convulsing in tandem – and worsening every time.
Hawkeye had been getting fidgety again, right before all that happened. Then he’d stiffened, just like those times before. But then he’d started to jerk, curling and clenching in strange, aimless rigors. Elim had called out to Bootjack to try to warn him, and then...
Well, Elim had probably ought to find out what-all had happened after he got walloped by ‘and then’.
Fortunately, if you wanted to call it that, the rocks had come from up high, hit where the trail narrowed, and mostly kept tumbling on down the slope. It didn’t take too much to knock the remainder down to a pile small enough for Elim to step over. By the time he’d done that and set Hawkeye down to start working on a way over that busted bridge, Way-Say was helping Bootjack up to his feet, talking boisterously in their hardscrabble ak-ak-ak language.
Only that didn’t sound like Way-Say. Elim squinted in the last of the twilight, and belatedly realized that no, that was some other crow-man – one Elim had never seen before.
He was a textbook specimen, though: tall like Way-Say, pigtailed like Bootjack, with a lean, athletic build all his own. The stranger wore ragged copies of Bootjack’s shirt and leggings, and a smile that flashed white in the deepening gloom.
It withered when he caught sight of the coffin. Elim watched, struck by the powerful resemblance between Bootjack and the stranger, as the silence of the one made space for an expression of sad amazement from the other. Maybe they were brothers. Maybe they were friends.
But when Bootjack finally found his voice – strained, hesitant, and smaller than Elim had ever heard it – and the stranger drank in his words, his expression said everything. He gaped, his face aging years as he stared at the battered, tilting wooden box. He smothered his mouth as if he would be sick; his shoulders slackened in helpless astonishment; his strong posture dissolved into a mortally wounded, weak-kneed shudder. And when he spoke, all that came out was a hoarse, hopeless croak. “Kwenin?”
Elim needed no translation. It was a question whose answer came in Bootjack’s hard swallow… in the big out-spilling explanation as he helped his grief-stricken
friend to sit down… in the upturned jerk of his chin – from Do-Lay, the boy in the box, to Elim, the man who had put him there.
And as the stranger’s gaze locked on him, Elim felt those watery dark eyes searing themselves into his memory: burning through his conscience, eating through his heart, branding him clean down to his bones. He would remember them for the rest of his life. He would see them again at the moment of his death.
And here, now, he matched that look with one of his own – one that he hoped would convey even a tenth of the remorse that had haunted him through grueling days and sleepless nights, chasing him a hundred hard miles to this place, to the ends of the earth and probably soon to the end of his life. “I’m sorry,” Elim said, because the words were pitiful and useless and still couldn’t go unspoken. “O-sento. Me mucho o-sento. I’m just awfully sorry.”
A flicker of recognition lit the stranger’s face. His expression wavered, as if he couldn’t decide whether to yell at him or cry. In the end, he just slumped forward and buried his face in his hands, his shiny black plaits shivering as he let out a long, wrecked breath.
No one said anything else. Bootjack favored Elim with a baleful stare, and then bent forward to start hauling the coffin back up to solid ground. Elim sat down and began feeling for a way to get Hawkeye across the bridge before the light failed completely. After that, he didn’t think any more about sorcerous seizures or falling rocks: there was no telling about the rest of the mountain, but here at least, everything breakable was already broken.
DÍA’S FATHER HAD always frowned on people who wrote their own epitaphs. He believed the Verses were all anyone needed.
But if she were to break with tradition – and in the increasingly unlikely event that her final resting place was even found, much less marked – her headstone would have to read, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
That was the truth. She had been so sure that she could find the trail by simply following the contour of the mountain, as if she were solving a labyrinth by keeping her right hand on the wall. Maybe she could. Maybe she was. Maybe the path was right around the corner.
But it didn’t feel like it. It felt like she’d been wandering for hours in the freezing chill of a high desert night, stumbling through patches of hem-ripping scrub and over fields of foot-biting scree, clambering up rocks and squeezing through gaps as best she could with a broken arm and a fickle torch, which kept burning up and needing to be replaced, preferably without setting the whole drought-stricken landscape on fire – again – until finally she turned some corner or wedged herself through some little pass, only to find herself face-to-granite with a hopeless dead-end slope.
There was no time to waste on crying or cursing. They would only worsen her headache anyway. There was nothing to do but backtrack, forcing her abused body to reverse all those labored paces until she found the next possible route. And the next one, and the one after that.
There was a way. There would be a way. She just had to find it.
Something rustled in the darkness far ahead of her. Día kept moving, unwilling to lose precious momentum for the sake of a coyote’s evening stroll.
Then it came closer.
Día stopped to listen. Not a coyote. A two-legged pace, asymmetrical but steady, moving straight toward her. “Who’s there?” she called out.
A reedy groan seeped through the trees.
Oh, no. Día turned left, her hand abandoning the imaginary labyrinth wall, her feet sluggish in spite of her urgency. “Go away!” she cried. “I don’t have anything for you!”
But he had never listened to her, not once in the entirety of their short, disastrous acquaintance, and this was no exception: the footsteps picked up speed and followed her, one quicker than the other, both relentless in their pursuit.
Día couldn’t match it. Her arm ached monstrously every time she jostled it, lightning-sharp agonies seized her chest with every full breath, and the only thing running was her nose. “Leave me alone!” she called again. “I can’t help you and I’m sick of trying. Go find someone else!”
She’d spent ages looking for the way up, and yet it took less than a minute to find a way down: opening out in front of her was another steeply rolling slope, one whose bottom her pitiful smoking brand couldn’t begin to illuminate. She halted and turned as that unholy foul smell washed back over her, roiling her stomach and hardening her resolve: if push came to shove again, Día would do the pushing. She would not give him another chance to hurt her. She would not go through this again. “God Almighty, what do you want from me?!”
But as the horror that had once been Sil Halfwick dragged itself to the edges of the firelight, the only answer was a piteous, broken wheeze.
He was a ghastly sight – shocking even to Día, who’d seen him just hours before. He was the color of a sick bird’s droppings, a horrible blotchy grayish-greenish-white, his hair matted with dirt and trickles of some sinister fluid where the left side of his skull had been flattened by the fall. One arm hung limp, his opposite knee hitched with every shambling step, and dribbling down his chin and over his chest and soaked all through the front of his shirt were dark patches of stiff, dried gore.
And Día cared not one whit for any of it. “Well?”
Halfwick didn’t answer. Perhaps he couldn’t. He came three steps closer, his expression unreadable, his stench overwhelming. And just before Día would have hurled the torch at him and run, he dropped to his knees, silently beseeching her with pleading, mismatched eyes.
“You’re sorry?” Día said, her queasiness undercut with naked incredulity.
Frantic nodding. Fearful eyebrows.
“You’re sorry,” she repeated, stupid with astonishment. “Not before, when I met you outside Island Town, and you treated me like an idiot child. Not after, when I turned myself inside out trying to help you, and you betrayed me. Not today, when I – when I mutilated myself to get you out of a bind, and you tried to kill me. NOW you’re sorry. NOW you feel badly.”
Bowed head. Slumped shoulders.
Righteous indifference. “Well, that’s a terrible shame for you, Sil Halfwick, because I’ve got nothing left. I don’t know how to fix you. I don’t know how to get out of here. I can’t even feel sorry for you anymore. You’re just a selfish, thoughtless, stupid boy who only bothered to realize that when your outsides finally turned as rotten as your insides always have been. And now you’re ugly and broken and helpless, and it’s too late to do anything about it. You can’t even...”
It was a wicked, exhilarating sermon, full of everything Día had spent her life schooling herself not to think, let alone say. But as the wind picked up and a cold breeze knifed through her, her spiteful passion fizzled into a dizzy haze.
Día swayed, fighting fog and nausea and a terrible, lightheaded malaise. After a concerted effort, she scraped together enough presence of mind to take a step forward, away from the edge.
Halfwick was watching her with yellowed eyes, his gross features knotted in perplexity or concern.
She’d been in the middle of a thought. What was it?
“... and... and I think that speaks for itself.” Día paused, struggling to find a point and make it. Nevermind the proofs – what was the conclusion?
She needed help. Yes, that was it: she’d been going for help, and time and steps were precious, and her task was to do everything she could to make it out of this alive.
And here as proof of God’s peculiar providence was the principal cause of all her miseries: the one who had brought her nothing but grief, who had been the very antithesis of help and succor, who always seemed to be exactly as ill-equipped to render assistance as she was obliged to require it...
... the one who owed her, and knew it.
Día closed her eyes, feeling the flickering heat on her cheek as the burning branch in her hand dwindled toward extinction. She’d need to replace it soon. “So that’s why you’re coming with me,” she said. “Not because you deserve it. N
ot because I forgive you. Becaush... because you’re the reason I’m out here, and my papá is worried sick, and God help me, you’re my best chance of getting home. You keep me alive until we find help. That’s why you’re here. That’s your job now. Do you understand?”
Halfwick answered by using his good hand to pick up his limp one, clasping both together at his chest.
Well, it wasn’t much of a promise, but it would have to do. Día held her breath, steeled her nerve and walked forward to help him to his feet, all but wincing in anticipation of his cold, slimy grip.
She was not expecting him to kiss her hand.
As it turned out, his lips were no more pleasant than the rest of him – even if that was far and away the best use he’d put them to. But as the two of them started off into the dark, Día tried to find her better nature under the roiling unrest in her stomach, and the growing ache in her skull.
After all, it was easy to love the loving, a simple thing to be good to the good. And so damned difficult to find compassion for the damned and the difficult.
VUCHAK HAD NO idea what to do next. He couldn’t begin to imagine what to say.
“It’s not my fault,” Echep repeated. He sat and stared out at nothing, as hollow and purposeless as a broken drum. “I did everything right. I didn’t... I wasn’t careless. I didn’t travel by night. I didn’t make a fire. I just – they shot me. They stole my horse and shot me!”
His hand went again to the aging wound at his neck, where the bullet had plowed up his flesh as it passed through him, probably missing his jugular by a feather-width. Vuchak didn’t doubt that it had taken him weeks to make it here. It was a wonder he’d survived at all.
“I believe you,” he said. “The broken men robbed us too.”
But Echep might as well not have heard. “All those nights I spent crawling through the desert... all those days I spent fighting vultures over carrion... didn’t he even miss me?”
Dreams of the Eaten Page 23