Dreams of the Eaten

by Arianne Thompson

  Her head felt like a shorn sheep. Sil felt like a huge fool. He couldn’t stay like this: every minute they delayed was a minute Día didn’t have. If she wouldn’t move, he’d have to go on alone.

  Alone, in the dark, up a mountain, with no tools and no torch and half a rotting body that might give out at any minute. Sil couldn’t see a foot in front of him – one wrong step and he’d be... no, Día would be done for. She’d freeze to death before morning.

  From somewhere to the north, an owl hooted.

  Sil glanced out at the sky – a black bowl pierced through with the light of a hundred thousand beautiful, useless little stars. Día probably had some grand theory about God’s will as revealed through observational astronomy.

  Well, if he was up there, he was a right prick.

  But he could probably still be trusted to let the moon rise sometime in the next hour or so. Then they might be able to make some progress without breaking their necks.

  So Sil reluctantly folded himself down to one knee as Día leaned into his touch – a frigid benediction given to a huddled supplicant, and paltry interest paid on a huge and looming debt.

  “– AND THE TIME he decided to play a trick on Tadai?” Vuchak said then.

  Echep grimaced in rueful delight. “How could I forget? Tadai had gone upstairs with... what’s her name? The pink one with the big tits. And I was sitting there at the bar – I swear, Vuchak, I was JUST taking my first sip, thinking about how strangely pleasant an evening it was, wondering why I was in such a fine mood –”

  Vuchak smiled. “– and then Weisei and I heard that chicken-scalding shriek, and when I stuck my head out to see, there was Tadai tearing down the hallway, wide-eyed and bloodless, his half-standing penis waving like a little white flag –”

  Echep snorted. “– and then the thump, and then the bang, and by the time I made it upstairs, there they were –”

  “– an angry naked white woman kicking the mischief out of Dulei with her shoes still on, yelling hell the whole time –”

  “– until I actually had to fish the little shit out from under the bed!” Echep finished, roaring with laughter.

  Vuchak winced at the sound, and cast a guilty glance over at the soft nonsense-noises coming from the right. Ylem was bent over with Hakai’s arm slung around his neck, trying to cajole the ihi’ghiva into bearing his own weight for the length of a piss. It was a sorry sight, and an uncomfortable reminder.

  I promise that we will keep him well, and return him safely to you. That was what Vuchak had said to Huitsak, the night they left Island Town.

  See that you do, the master of the Island Town a’Krah had replied, or I will break the other side of your face.

  No, this wasn’t the time or the place for such raucous merriment. They shouldn’t have stopped here at all.

  But by every god, it felt good to laugh again.

  Echep heaved a huge, cleansing sigh, and then threw a pebble at the coffin. It hit with a reproachful plick. “You always were an unbearable trial.”

  It was a crass thing to say, and yet Vuchak was glad to see Echep finally talking toDulei. There was a difference between knowing the person in the box was his marka, and actually believing it... and believing it would make tomorrow’s task that much easier.

  Vuchak leaned his head back against the cold stone, and drew his cloak tighter. “I wish we had some wine.”

  “Say it again!” Echep swore, glaring up at whatever crows might be roosting in the trees above. “Listen, Grandfather – if you’re going to throw a man’s life away, you could at least offer him a drink first.”

  That was a bit more than a joke. Vuchak sucked his teeth, choosing his next words carefully. “You won’t be thrown away,” he said after a moment. “You’ll be laid to rest in honor beside him –”

  “FUCK him!”

  Vuchak flinched. There was no teasing in Echep’s face now – just raw, righteous anger.

  Well, maybe he was just lancing a boil. “I know the feeling,” Vuchak said, and thought of how to get back to sound footing. “Remember the time he and Weisei decided to –”

  “Am I wrong?” the other atodak interrupted, his long plaits swaying as he sat up straighter. “Am I missing something? Why should I waste my life just because he couldn’t hold on to his? What good does that do anyone?”

  Oh, this was a bad road to go down. Vuchak took his time in answering: if he was going to have to defend the order of things, he’d better not do it sloppily. “It safeguards our work, and our oath,” he said at last. “We swore to defend them with our lives. What would that mean if we could just walk away? Who would ever take a bullet for someone when he could choose to save his own skin?”

  “Mothers,” Echep spat. “Fathers. Lovers. People make a gift of their lives all the time – and they do it willingly. Selflessly. They do it for love, not because To’taka Marhuk is standing behind them brandishing an axe. What’s a gift if you’re forced into giving it?”

  Vuchak frowned. He understood the sentiment, but this was blasphemy. “Echep, we took an oath, when we became men –”

  “We were TAKEN from our families when we were six years old! What choice did we ever have?” His eyes were rimmed with white, and his breath smelled of deer-fat. “They told us that it was for our own good – that we were the children of intemperate mothers – that we should be so lucky to spend our lives minding his black-feathered brats!”

  “Well, what else do you want?” Vuchak snapped. “He didn’t make your mother open her legs during the fallow-month. He didn’t tell her to wait until the Pue’Va to drop you out into the world. Blame her if you want to blame anyone – she’s the one who set you up for this.”

  That might not be strictly true, of course. Every a’Krah woman knew when to shut her husband out, so that her child would not be born during the five starless days of the year... but sometimes mothers fell sick or met with accidents, and sometimes children were born too soon. That was just the way of the world. You might as well complain about a club foot or a lazy eye.

  Maybe Echep had the same thought. He leaned forward, lacing his hands behind his head and contemplating the thin spots in the soles of his shoes. He’d need new ones for the winter.

  ... would have needed, rather.

  The wind blew. The fire popped. It would need feeding soon.

  Presently, Echep sat up. “Vuchak, come away with me.”

  Vuchak stared, waiting for an understanding that didn’t come. His friend’s eyes were wild, earnest, his face lit by some weird, precarious hope. “What?”

  Echep’s gaze flicked to the coffin; he lowered his voice, as if to keep Dulei and the West Wind from overhearing. “I’m serious. Let’s just go away and start over – be masters of our own lives.”

  He was mad. Just hopelessly, blasphemously mad. Vuchak’s mouth hung agape, unable to even begin to reply.

  “Don’t think like that,” Echep admonished. “It sounds bad, but you know I’m right. My marka is dead, and yours will be better off without you. What good are we doing here?”

  Vuchak could not have been more astonished if Echep had pulled a knife and stuck it in his eye. “That’s not – that isn’t true!”

  Echep’s answer came with a serious, penetrating stare. “Isn’t it? Dulei is seventeen, and already a man. I’ll be twenty this year, so you’re what, twenty-one? And your marka is older still. Men our age are building cradleboards, Vuchak. Teaching their sons to walk. Why, look at Otli – he’s younger than both of us, and already he has a fat wife and two children. And then there’s Weisei, still wearing his hair down like a bare-bottomed boy, even while it falls in his wine, even while it hangs in his sex-pleasured face –”

  “Shut up,” Vuchak snarled. “That’s none of your business or anyone else’s. He’ll take his vows when he’s ready. And when he does, he’ll be better than either of us – better than you, Dulei – because he’ll be old enough to understand what they mean.” After all, Weisei could easil
y live two hundred years – what should it matter if he spent an extra ten in childhood?

  If Echep took offense on his marka’s behalf, he didn’t show it. There was only cold, unpleasant rationality – the same look Vuchak had given Ylem when the time came to turn him away from his futile calling down the cliff. “How many years have you been telling yourself that, Vuchak? How many more will you cling to it? He doesn’t plait his hair. He doesn’t use men’s speech. He doesn’t have to become an adult, because he knows you’re there to do it all for him – and as long as you’re around, he never will. Now you have to decide: are you willing to make him wait the rest of your life to grow up?”

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Only hours ago, Vuchak’s imagination had made Echep the voice of patience and good-humored optimism. Now he was hearing all his own worst thoughts articulated with terrible precision, every sensible strike hitting with devastating accuracy. Echep hadn’t even said are you willing to wait – because then the answer could have been a noble and self-sacrificing yes.It was are you willing to make him wait – as if Weisei’s course was fixed and unchangeable, and Vuchak himself was the rut he had gotten stuck in.

  Vuchak pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, groping for some reason, any reason, why Echep was wrong.

  Beside him, the voice of temptation turned warm and honey-sweet. “Come on, brother – you’ve done your time. You’ve given him everything. Why, if I hadn’t come along just when I did, you would be lying dead under the Grandfather of Frogs back there, and Weisei would be already bereft. It works out to the same thing in the end.”

  Vuchak felt ill. He reached for the branch and poked the fire, urging it brighter so that Weisei would see it more clearly, and come back that much faster – before his fickle atodak’s heart failed him.

  “I don’t... what would be the point?” he said at last, his voice weak in his own ears. “Where would we go? What would we do? We’re still a’Pue. Our wives would be unfaithful to us. Our children would die. What other life is there?” Vuchak had envied the happiness of other men, but it was the same envy he would feel on watching a bird in flight. That fate wasn’t his.

  “How do you know?”

  Vuchak glanced over, as mystified as if Echep had asked him to count the stars. “What?”

  Echep tipped his head left and right. “I said, how do you know? I thought about this for days when I was lost out there in the desert. You know, the Eldest like to frighten us with those rotten stories about Madap and Ko’lit, but do you actually know anyone those things have happened to? Can you even name one atodak who’s tried?”

  Vuchak might have been able to conjure a name if he thought long enough. Echep didn’t give him the chance.

  “What if it’s not true? What if Marhuk has just been tricking us into minding his children by keeping us too frightened and superstitious to have any of our own? Really, Vuchak, what if all of this is just one big self-serving lie?”

  Vuchak couldn’t hear this. He just couldn’t. “No. It isn’t – you don’t get to question the dice just because you lost your throw. I’m sorry for you, and I’m sorry for you too, Dulei, but we’re not Eaten-people. We don’t just bumble through life satisfying ourselves like thoughtless fatted hogs. All of us have a place and a purpose and a duty, and they don’t change according to how we feel about them. We’re a’Krah, and if we aren’t that, then... well, then we aren’t anyone. I would rather spend the rest of my life being Weisei’s miserable atodak than run away and look for happiness as a nobody, and – and nothing else you say is going to change my mind, so you might as well save yourself the effort.”

  They were some of the hardest, truest words Vuchak had ever said. He had no idea where they’d come from.

  But they had an edge to them, and it cut Echep deeply. He stared at Vuchak for a long moment, and his eyes were open wounds. “Remember me, Vuchak,” he said at last. “When you’re lying in your bed, old and stiff and useless, listening to your fresh-faced marka drink and sing the night away in the next room... remember me, and what your life could have been.”

  Then Echep pulled his cloak more tightly around himself, turned his back, and lay down.

  Vuchak made no reply. He didn’t need to. Let Echep have the last word: by this time tomorrow, he would be dead or fled. He’d wanted one last night of company, and Vuchak had given it to him. There was no point in troubling himself any more about the sacrilegious delusions of a condemned man.

  But as the night passed and the fire dwindled, Vuchak had no one to confide in but his own murky thoughts, and freshly-unsettled recollections of the day he had been an uncle.

  THE SCREAMING HAD gone on for hours.

  It was awful, just soul-searingly unbearable, made all the worse for knowing that that was Vuchak’s sister in there, that she was in unutterable pain – and that he was powerless to help her. There was nothing he could do but draw and erase the spirit-lines outside the house, over and over, hour after hour, misdirecting evil things to keep them from finding their way to the laboring woman inside.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Vuchak wasn’t even supposed to be there. His place belonged to Suitak – the husband, the father – but he was halfway down the mountain, cutting wood for the cradleboard. The baby had come much, much too soon.

  But Yeh’ne was in there, trying with everything she had for the child’s life – and Vuchak had to try too.

  So he drew the sacred lines with the milk-blessed end of his spear, soaring arcs and swirls punctuated with the rhythmic stomp of his heels. He recited the graces until his mouth went numb, blending the words into endless, meaningless sounds. He prayed wordless prayers there in the gray light before dawn, asking Yeh’ne to finish her work quick and bravely, begging the Ripening Woman to see her safely through it. He willed his strength to her.

  Then the pulsing, contracting howl died down again, and did not return. There was a long silence. Vuchak drew and erased with feverish sweat-beading panic. What did that mean? Was it done? Had the baby survived? Had she?

  Then a woman’s sobbing – and underneath it, a tiny kitten cry.

  The bottom fell out of his stomach. His spear wobbled in the dirt. It was done. Yeh’ne had done it. She was a mother.

  Nobody had told Vuchak how long to keep going, but he wasn’t about to risk stopping too soon. He went on through the motions, dizzy, unfocused, thanking every god and spirit with ears to hear him, thanking his own starless, luckless birth. After all, who better to safeguard a confinement than a man who drew every nearby misfortune onto himself?

  Then the door-curtain parted, and the midwife came out – holding a swaddled bundle in her arms.

  Vuchak’s spear clattered to the ground. He backed away, a blistering oath on his lips. “What are you doing?!” The baby wasn’t supposed to be exposed to the outside air until its cord-wound had healed – and it certainly shouldn’t be anywhere near him!

  But the midwife’s age-lined face only crinkled a little at the corners of her eyes. “It’s all right. She can’t stay.”

  Vuchak scarcely dared to look, lest he ruin the baby with his gaze... but as the old woman unfolded the blanket and he caught his first glimpse, his fear dried up and fell away.

  Yeh’ne must have swallowed a grain of sand, or dreamed of needles. Maybe she had been cursed by a witch. Regardless, the cause was as mysterious as the result was final: she had made a tiny, beautiful daughter, fawn-colored, wrinkle-faced, and freshly dried all over... except for the glistening red-purple blossom at the back of her head, where her brain had flowered out of her skull.

  The baby didn’t seem to know that. She only squirmed and smacked her lips, as if idly wondering about breakfast.

  “Mother thought you might like to meet her.” And before Vuchak could begin to understand, the old woman came closer, and the blanket-creature shifted into his arms, and suddenly he was holding a freshly-made little person no bigger than his forearm – a perfect, tiny life.
r />   Vuchak’s breath deserted him.

  Somehow, in the face of all that pain and wonder and heart-crushing sadness, Yeh’ne had thought of him. In a handful of minutes, she had gone from agony to ecstasy and back to agony again. Then she had wrapped up her joyful, impending sorrow and made it a gift. She knew Vuchak would never have children of his own – that he would never dare touch a child who had any chance of life. She knew what this would mean.

  Vuchak couldn’t object. He couldn’t even see through the wet strangers in his eyes. He could only stand there, stunned to utter stillness by the wondrous tiny weight in his arms. What else was there?

  “This one is special,” the old woman said. “It’s rare that such children are born awake.”

  Special. Well, of course she was! But Vuchak had no idea how to honor that. What good was he to her? How could he better a life that would be measured in hours?

  He looked up, wet-faced and helpless. “What do I do?”

  The old woman smiled, patience incarnate. “You could start by saying hello.”

  “Hello,” Vuchak stupidly repeated to that sleepy, ruddy face. “Good morning,” he said to the intoxicating smell of her wispy black hair. They were silly, meaningless sentiments: a baby didn’t understand words, and even if she did, how would she know what morning was? She hadn’t been here long enough to even...

  Vuchak paused, seized by a sudden epiphany. No, she wouldn’t be here long – but she was here now. She was awake, outside, in the world. This wasn’t just his chance: it was hers, too. He looked up. “May I walk with her?”

  The old woman’s eyes softened in fondness, as if she had been waiting for him to ask that very thing. “I think Mother would be grateful if you did.”

  Yes. Yes, of course. Vuchak couldn’t keep her here among the living – but he could show her the joy of being alive. He could show her how wise she was to be born a’Krah.