First Chapter
|
Pelufer danced. With a hop and a skip-turn she had cleared two sprawled waysiders and switched direction to eel through a clutch of gawpers at the opposite stall. Why did hungry people with nothing to work at spend all day ogling food they couldn't afford? Why did waysiders even come here, stuffing the longstreets with their skinny bodies and their need? All right, the maur had risen, the mountains had quaked--but flooded banks brought sea-things you could eat, and she'd rather be crushed than starve. Waysiders all had the same arch in their necks and slump in their shoulders. Their bodies were shaped into an appeal. They came here looking like somebody should take care of them. She rounded a stall piled with bulbs and tubers, evaded the blur of a kick from the stallholder, chewed the candied sedgeroot she'd had off Jiondor. He was still thundering. She swallowed, and belched up a grin. Too late, she sang in silence, too late. The treat was in her belly now. She shot back across Hunger Long, a quick deft weave through the sluggish current of people. A keeper loomed between her and escape, the little alley between Jifadry's soups and Toudin's stews. His arm was bent into a crook, his mouth a slice of smile that meant I've got you. Her grin widened. She picked up speed. She hurtled toward him. His body set for impact. Then a skidding whirl in the dust, a dip, a twist, and she was away. He was braced too firm to turn in time. She was through Scarves Short, out the other side, and to the middle of Tin Long before nine breaths had passed. A good dance: the pouches at her belt bulged with loaves, her pockets sagged with plums and nuts, her belly was full of treats. Hunger Long was still Harvest Long, for her--its old name, from before the floods and quakes and waysiders, from before the poisoned rivers. She was small, and she knew how to move in a crowd, keep tall folk between her and her target until the moment came to snake a hand out and pluck her choice from fryspit or hangline. She looked like every other ragged child in this Strong Leg tradertown, neither boy nor girl, hair neither blond nor brown, face and arms so dirty that her skin had no color of its own. The town keepers never bothered to learn the children one from another, wouldn't know her when they saw her again. Tomorrow she'd dance down Copper Long, then Bronze Long, and shortstreets thereafter, and in a sixday Hunger Long would have forgotten her, and she would dance there again. If they left here, as they had to, had to, soon, no matter what Elora said, she would need quick and practiced steps. No one else would feed them. No one else would take what they couldn't charm or barter. No one else would see Caille safe and sheltered by night, fed and watered by day. Elora's shoulds-and-shouldn'ts would be the end of them if Pelufer's steps faltered. Elora's rights-and-wrongs came straight from Father's mouth, and they'd been lies when he said them. Elora believed them; Elora believed in honesty, and fair trading, and Elora believed in Father. But belief and honesty didn't fill a rumbling belly. And anyway, Father was dead. Tin Long was not as thronged as Hunger Long. Waysiders stayed clear till nightfall or were swept aside or trampled. Copper Long was buffed and rounded, pliable; Bronze Long was muscular, shining; Tin Long was sharp and brittle, all glints and angles, sheets of metal hammered so thin that they'd cut you just for thinking of them. It stretched from its Bronze Long point to its Copper Long end through sticky air hazed with dust: a muted sparkle of pots and spoons and plates glinting in the humid sunshine, a rattle of tin and tinsmiths' calls and here and there a tinkers' wagon creaking back from some long overland journey only to restock, turn around, go out again. Horse sweat and the drone of flies thickened vapors of mold and rot. The shacks and houses climbing the upleg hills in jumbled wedges would not block the sun until well after noon. Noxious mists rolled through the streets like tumbleweeds, never higher than a man's head, never climbing the hills. Heat off the tin roofs made a lazy shimmer in air almost too dense to breathe. All the water in the world hung suspended in that air, absorbing grit and dull-baked sunlight until you'd think it would just go solid and all movement would grind to a halt. No rain since harvestmid last; just this laden air, and dewmongers to harvest it, and drip pits with their tarps and stones, and whatever they could import across Maur Lengra, from the Weak Leg, where folk had marshes to drain, or from the Girdle, where the rain never stopped. Pelufer slipped into the gutter behind the stalls, to pass close by the shortstreets that opened on the long every dozen threfts. Safe from roadway traffic, she would blend with the tinkers' children, though most her age slaved at bending brake or jennie. A band of young ones surrounded her in some ring-a-lo game. She lunged with a hard stamp of foot and a jut of jaw too overacted to be serious. The ring burst and the children flew giggling and tumbling away through billows of mist. Conversation drifted back on the settling vapor, the gossip and byplay of experienced customers and traders. "We're losing this town," she heard, and "We've lost it already, all the waysiders to feed," and "I've patched and rehammered all I can, it's new tin we need." You hear that, Elora? River waters had fed Gir Doegre even when they could no longer slake its thirst, and there were still the roads: maur-to-Knee, Boot-to-Girdle, Heel-to- Highlands. A good place for traders, an easy pitch. But you had to have something to trade, and if you made things out of other things, you had to bring something here from somewhere else, or send someone to fetch it. That would be good work for us, Elora. If there was tin out there, and copper, and the miners and sifters weren't all dead of flood or plague or the dozen other disasters invented or garbled by too many tellings... She might as well speak to the dead. Elora clung to this place like a haunt. Far above, in the sickly haze that was the sky, thunder rumbled. Gawpers sighed in anticipation. From away, they were; Pelufer ignored the sky. It was helpless thunder. It rolled across them all the time, on its way Heartward. Never gave a drop of rain. Only lightning, now and then, to stitch the sky, or strike what houses had stood firm against rot and mites and borers. At the next stall, the same conversation, repeated up and down both shorts and longs: This town is rotting, it's starved for metals, it's as good as dead, just look around you. "The Khinish will wake before you see the end of this place, it's always been here and always will," she heard, a trader's optimism, and then something else, something she must have heard wrong, except she heard it again, a low sound-shape of promise and menace: The Khinish are waking. Her heart leaped, part fear and part exhilaration. If it was true...if they came...there would be an end on the dancing then, the Khinish wouldn't abide that, but there would be work, too, real work for her, for them, no more mooning at tinkers' get with their useful chores or being turned away from harvests so poor that not even cottars were needed to bring them in. The Khinish were strong. The Khinish were capable. The Khinish could put the world to rights. If they woke. If they came. But rumors were hardly ever true. And if this one was, it would give Elora enough to beat her at stay-or-go. And then she would never be free of them. She kept moving. Pewter Short, Brass Short, Stone Short, each with stalls crowded right up to the end. The longstreet side of any stall was its weak side-- accessible but not closely watched. Custom passed in front, and no one expected trouble from the backs of Tin Long traders watching their own wares. Most end stalls had baffles to shield them against quick-fingered children. And traders knew better than to let their wares spill over the front of the stall onto crates and shelves beyond the reach of their arms. But times were hard. They had to display all the stock they could. The smallest items, the least likely to be missed, the most eye-catching but least valuable, migrated out and down and away from the protection of the stall like waysiders seeking something better for themselves. That was how two glittering stones made their way from Mireille's stall into Pelufer's pocket. Too late, she sang in silence, too late, as Mireille's snub nose came up and her head turned as if pulled on a string. Quick as a cat she was out from behind her planks. Her little mouth was a round dark opening. In another breath, curses would fly out of it like bats. Her narrow-eyed gaze speared the hand that had dropped near Pelufer's pocket. So she hadn't seen the stones go in. She wouldn't call the keepers unless she was sure. Pelufer had tricked her too many times. With lazy ease, Pelufer unlooped her water ladle from where it hung next to her left tunic pocket. She didn't have to look back at Mireille as she slid into the queue by the public barrels. She could feel the spite through the misty air. Mireille would be counting stones for the rest of the day, then recounting them to make sure the mistake wasn't her own. It was so hard not to burst out laughing that tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. The woman who had been last in line, stiff with impatience or the effort of waiting, went soft in the spine and shoulders and expansively gestured Pelufer ahead of her. A generous hostess welcoming a guest into space that was not hers to offer. The motion jostled the man before them. He turned, puffing up in preparation to take affront. "The child's crying with thirst!" the woman said. His stance relaxed into something lazy, hipshot, but still balanced, still ready for...what? Best not rile this one, Pelufer thought, beginning to regret her choice of ruse. "Bit inefficient, wouldn't you say?" he remarked. "Cry less, drink less." Pelufer sniffled and rubbed a bare toe in the sticky dirt, eyes downcast. She needn't see the man's face to know that he'd dismissed her with wry amusement and returned to contemplating the wait. The way he moved spoke louder than any word or smile. People were shapes and subtle shifts of weight, angles of shoulder and cant of legs. Eyes and voices could hide a nonned things. The language of limbs could not. "Are you hungry?" the woman said. "Does anyone look after you?" She was standing too close. Pelufer smelled travel sweat and the moldflowers keepers washed with after hauling the dead away. She shouldn't smell like a keeper. This wasn't right. "Water's free," Pelufer said vaguely, glancing over her left shoulder. She could run, now; she could leave Mireille counting, forget the ruse. But Mireille was talking to a keeper. Mists shifted, and brief dilute sunlight rounded the pommel of his sheathed longblade to a muted shine. Mireille's hands danced a pattern over her planks, then fluttered at Pelufer. The keeper turned to look. Pelufer was staring to the left, as if watching a mange-ridden dog forage in the midden behind a shack, but she had them clear in her side vision. A pattern, she thought. Poxy Mireille. She didn't need to count. She'd laid them out some way that she knew when the shape had changed. It was what Pelufer would have done. She'd never expect it of Mireille, always so quick to pounce on sacrilege. "I'm sure you wouldn't say no to a treat," the not-right woman behind her said. Her hands fell on Pelufer's shoulders. A protective gesture. People were always trying to mother her. She hated it. But this was something more. There was something wrong with those hands. Her insides felt strange. "I don't take handouts," Pelufer said, harsher than she should. This too-kind woman might keep the keeper off her. But there was something bubbling inside. The not-rightness was growing, radiating from the woman into her and forming into a thing inside her, connected with the light hands flat on her shoulders. The keeper was heading over. Mireille's complaints goaded him like little missiles. Pelufer had to watch him without watching, had to gauge sternness or exasperation from the way he moved, to tell if he was on Mireille's side or not. "Not a handout. Something in trade. Perhaps you'd tell me a little about this place, I've only just come and I'd be grateful for a local guide and you could earn yourself a treat, even a meal, perhaps your mother and father and sisters and brothers..." Be quiet! Pelufer needed to sense the movements, the dance around her. She could tell the keeper she was with this woman. She might use this. But too much was happening too fast. The woman wasn't right. She offered work, a day's work, that was all Pelufer had ever wanted, that was all Father had ever wanted, a day's work to feed his family, but Pelufer knew a ruse when she heard one, she felt the lie running tense down the woman's fingers, don't try to use someone who would use you, it twists on you-- They were only four from the barrels now. The water keeper was bladed, too, but water keepers didn't handle the dead. "Three more," he said, the customary warning as the barrels ran low, "the rest of you try down the long," and the customary moans slid along the queue as obedient folk moved on to the next station, there were three for every long, they never all went empty at once. Her own ruse had run out with the water. It was the woman, or the keeper, or the dance now. She couldn't use the woman against the keeper or the keeper against the woman. She wanted to. She wanted to be clever and do that. But adults had a nasty habit of siding with each other. She felt as though she'd swallowed a cup of freezing bubbles. "It's all right," said the dangerous man ahead of her, beginning to turn, "I'll be the last, you'll both share mine." She wouldn't. Too much was wrong here. She couldn't sort it. Time to dance. She tensed to spring. The woman sensed it. Her hands closed reflexively on Pelufer's shoulders. The thing inside her burst out like a rotten center: "Ardis." No, no, not now-- "Traig." She could not stop it. "Areil." She bit her tongue, tasted rust. "Bendik." The woman jerked stiff but did not release her. The man's body betrayed nothing, but his face drained of blood, sometimes you could tell things from faces-- Names vomited out of her, a gush of names right here in the middle of Tin Long, this was disaster, she had to run-- Fingers arched into claws dug into nerves between the bones of her shoulders. Her arms went tingly-numb. Names poured from her mouth. Impressions not her own poured through her head. She cut them off, an old vicious reflex: she made an axe fall in her mind and cut off the limb of a tree of names. But still they battered at her. Never so many in one place since the bilechoke fever had run through Highhill. Except for the spirit wood. She couldn't control her mouth or her throat, couldn't strangle it. Glittering black tar oozed around the edges of her vision. "It's some kind of fit," the dangerous man said. The stalls keeper stopped next to them. Traders and customers turned curious heads. The water keeper left the spent barrels and joined them with the same wary slow movements as his bladed brother. Fear cleared her mind but couldn't shut her mouth. The dangerous man, the flowery woman--Pelufer felt their connection through the closing of their bodies, they meant to keep her from the keepers, too late, too late, they steal lone children like you to give the bonefolk, nonsense spouted by angry stallholders but if it was nonsense why did the bladeless woman wash with flowers why was everything funneling in not right this was not right-- Back was stopped by the woman's body, sidewise by her hands, forward by the man, but down was clear. She was a child having a fit. People having fits fainted. That wasn't so hard. She'd been close enough a breath ago. She melted her legs. The pinching fingers could not support her dangling weight. She hit the ground like a full sack. The fingers came with her, closed on her shirt. She spun hard in the dirt-- outward, away from the approaching stalls keeper. Old linen gave but did not tear. The woman would not let go. Her arms were numb. She had only her legs. Her teeth, if she had to. The stalls keeper was bending down to her. She drove herself upward into the woman's clinging fingers. The woman swore and snatched them back. The man said, "We must get her out of the sun, it's a heat palsy, I'm a healer, let me take her," but the keepers weren't having it, maybe sometimes keepers could help you, and she was whirling, spinning into the dangerous man, and the keeper reaching for her blundered into him, and their grabbing arms muddled, and she was away, across the long, through the jagged teeth of tin stalls, up the reeking midden path behind rows of hovels and then between the hovels, still small enough to fit though soon she wouldn't be, old limewashed clay scraped her, she lost a loaf-stuffed pouch in the tight squeeze and she'd left another behind on the ground when she dropped and spun, that food had been for Elora and Caille, they'd have to leave here before she was too big to get through the boltholes, they'd have to leave here sooner than that if claw- fingered strangers were stealing children, how would she explain this, a fit right in Tin Long in front of everyone, Elora would kill her, she had to get back... Up a steep short, down again, up again, over, hurdling dogs, ducking clotheslines, ducking the paddles clothesbeaters turned on her for the disruption, barking apology. She never danced where folk lived, she never ventured up this hill, too many had died here. She shut her ears, tried not to shut her eyes. It wouldn't help. She felt the whispering tickle of names in her throat. She concentrated on material shapes, objects to avoid, elude, slip between in a calculation of speed and angles. She ran out of breath halfway along the remaining stretch of Tin Long. She realized she was falling. She forced her steps wide. Just another few threfts. A manger beckoned. She went down, rolled under. Stifled a sneeze. Ignored the curious snuffling of soft donkey muzzles until it stopped. Her head was pounding. Her heart was pounding. She was patient. She let the pounding slow. She didn't think about what happened. In a few slowbreaths, then she would think. When her breaths were coming slow enough, she'd count nine of them and then she'd think. Ardis. A baker who loved the sweet smell of fresh flour. A... She conjured the axe in her mind, raised it high, cut the Ardis limb off hard. Traig. He made beds. The sheets were soft in his hands, silky, not crisp like linen or downy like flannel. Who'd think to make sheets out of silk? She cut the Traig limb off. Then the Areil limb--some kind of teacher, showing patterning to young people. Then Bendik, before he came clear. She swallowed a whimper. It was too much. One was too much. She couldn't count how many this had been. I'm Pelufer, she thought very clearly at herself. I'm getting up now. I'm going back to my sisters. She elbowed out from under the manger, got to shaky feet, peered around to get her bearings. She'd come mostway up the hill. Down behind her, the long was a tin-spiked river of mist. What had those strangers been, how were they linked, what had they wanted, why was the world a twistedness around them, where had all those names come from? The treats in her belly had curdled, and she was, perversely, thirsty. On a renewed burst of fear, she broke into a trot, then made herself walk. Damp air came hard into her lungs; she swore on every outbreath. Better to swear than to say names. She cursed Mireille and keepers and dangerous, flowery strangers. She tried on a laugh. It didn't work. Another name burped out at the end of it, and a woman near her looked up stricken from a butter churn. She quickened her step and held a soiled kerchief over her mouth to muffle the sounds. She never came here, into the tangle of shortstreets at the upland end of town. She never came past the hovels at the front, all tin sheets and sod, never went beyond, to where the rot had not taken so many of the original structures, to the shantytown where people crammed in under any roofs they could find and camped under precarious tinsheet or tarp lean-tos, sleeping chocked against the decline. She never ventured back to where one-family cottages now hosted three, or six, beds bunked and the occupants sleeping--and dying--in shifts. She never came to Highhill. This was why. She picked her way around the fetid knots of shelters, through alleys and byways, down toward the head of Copper Long. The lightning-slashed clouds moved Girdleward and the watery sun moved Khineward. Angling light changed the shape of the vapors that haunted Gir Doegre. All shapes had changed; that brief shock in Tin Long had twisted the fabric of her world, and now everything seemed a wrongness, off kilter, out of place. She sensed threats lurking in byways that had been avenues of escape. Understanding none of it, drained and frayed and knowing her own dogged bravery for a ruse tried in vain on herself, she crossed Tin Long as furtive as a cat hearing wagons rumble. She dodged and twisted and turned with the twisting, turning shorts, deep inside the triangle of Tin and Copper and Bronze Longs, the center of Gir Doegre town. Hunger Long bisected the triangle, from point to base, another furtive crossing, wedge to wedge. On instinct she avoided the cold places where the names would come. She knew them all, knew every fingerspan of the traders' wedges. There was no thought now of filching untended wares. Just the drive to return to where she had begun at sunup, the debris-strewn lot inside the intersection of Copper Long and Bronze Long, where the rot had crumbled all the shacks and now the junkmongers displayed their pitiful offerings on ragged blankets or raveled silk or stained linen, or no more than a little space cleared on the ground. Elora sat at the lot's edge, a slim silk-haired beacon among the drab huddles of fallen wrights and traders, by a linen cloth smoothed neat on the scrap of ground they had fought hard to defend for the last two years. Their pitch. Caille, absorbed in some complex arrangement of mounds and pebbles in the dirt nearby, felt Pelufer's approach and raised her head without turning, spoke a word to their older sister. There was anger in Elora's body as she twisted to see. Normal, Pelufer thought. Act normal. People are all around. "Here," she said before Elora could ask her where in the raving spirits she'd been, and deposited on a corner of their cloth the contents of one pouch-- glazed buns, no longer square, with a cluster of berries crushed into them. Elora screeched, plucking at the sticky mass. "You'll stain it, Pel--oh, look, you idiot--" "I'll clean it, I always do." She kept her voice reasonable. Normal. Elora went dead stubborn when she was cranky. Say, Pack up, we have to go, we have to go home and stay there for the rest of the day, and Elora would set her jaw and sit tight until she'd had the whole story. It wasn't safe to tell it here. "And all those cleanings will add up and it will fray and look dingy and be no good to us at all--it's our last linen, you know that, why do you do these things?" "I don't." "You do." "Do not." "Do too." "All right I do. Don't you like what I brought? Caille likes it. Look, there's dourberries, and bannock, we hardly ever get that--" "It's all squished together." "So? It'll still taste good." "It's disgusting." "It all goes together in your stomach!" Real annoyance ground in her. Elora was such a pest, and this was important, they couldn't afford to be cranky right now. "Berrybread," Caille pronounced, with a beatific smile. She separated one sticky bun from another, rotated it so that the berry-smeared side was toward her, opened her mouth wide, and shoved the whole thing into her pudgy face. Elora should have softened, sharing a smile with Pelufer at their cute little sister. Caille was cute on purpose, to effect just such a softening. But neither had a smile to share. "Not a thing we can set out on the pitch," Elora said. "You haven't brought us a single new thing in a nineday." "I'm feeding us, Elora, that's more than I can say for you. Did you shift any of this lot today?" The paltry selection of junk on the linen didn't look any smaller, only rearranged to make it seem that there were new wares. It was artfully done; Elora was good. But it was not enough. "Custom isn't moving as it should. Something's wrong today." You don't know the third of it. "Come on, then," she said. "Let's close up. Let's eat at home. We never eat at home anymore, like a proper family." A calculated appeal: Elora, the oldest at nine-and-four, was always trying to make them the proper family they could never be again. Elora squinted at her, then shook her head. "We'll eat here, while we work. We can't lose even part of a day, not when custom is thin." Panic edging in, Pelufer cast about for inspiration, and found it in the wary, envious eyes of the downtrodden traders around them. Folk who'd be waysiders themselves soon enough. Most of them had no shack to go to, no remnant of shelter left. They slept on the blankets they laid their wares on during the day. Come winter, they would freeze. They were always hungry. "Look," she said, tension giving the word a nasty bite. "Look at what else I brought." She tossed two more pouches on the cloth, shook out the contents of one, and began to empty her pockets. A blatant display. A keeper's tithe of bounty. "Pelufer, stop it!" Elora scooped bruised peppers and squashed loaves back into pouches, glancing quickly around from under her lashes. It was too much, she signed in the secret way, hands held low. The others would know she'd stolen it. And they'd be wanting it for themselves, Pelufer signed back, merciless. "So let's go home and eat." Elora hissed in frustration. But she acquiesced. She pressed the filled pouches back into Pelufer's hands, then cleared Caille off the edge of the cloth so she could bundle it into a sack, which she then slung over her shoulder. They rose as one, from long habit. All their wares, a hodgepodge of nails and ribbons, tapers and tacks, buckles without belts and laces without shoes, jumbled into a sack that a slim young girl could sling with ease. "I don't know what's got into you," Elora growled low, for Pelufer's ears only, "but you'll pay for it later, you mark me." They looked at no one as they walked. They did not have to negotiate the lot's patchwork of pitches when they closed up; they crossed the tail end of Copper Long and disappeared into what seemed a tangle of thickets and thorn bramble, up a track that only they remembered and no waysiders had yet found. At the end of that track, half a mile on, was a shed that had once stored a crafter's tools. A cozy place tucked away in the thick brush that separated town and forest, far enough above the Heel Road to work in isolated peace. The rot had not touched the shed, though mites and borers were eating it now. It had been their mother's workplace. They had bartered the tools away four years ago, and come home sobbing after, to a cottage whose contents went for the drink that killed their father two years past. A year ago, in winter, they had bartered the cottage itself for clothing and footgear and blankets; now they lived in the shed, a ninefoot-by-ninefoot space where they slept on mite- pocked boards, one of them always tucked up against the boltless, out-of-plumb door to keep it closed. If Caille did not relent-- and Pelufer knew she would not, she could best Elora to get her way but never Caille, not on something like this--the shed would fall to the mites and borers, and they would have only the pitch left then. The space of their world had decreased in a slow agony of subtraction, season by season, since Pelufer was five. Caille's age. They would leave this town. They would. And then the world would open to them, instead of closing down, year by year, foot by foot, person by person, until only one of them was left, or none. As they made their way along the faint trail, escorted by clouds of midges, careful not to let the only clothes they owned snag or tear on thorns, Pelufer was already in the shed in her mind. She would sit, cross-legged against the door, while Elora and Caille ate. The only light in the shed came in filtered shafts through the holes where their chinking had crumbled. They had not yet traded their battered old broom, but no amount of sweeping kept the molds at bay, and the close air was choking. But it was their place. They would be safe there while she told her sisters what had happened, while they figured out what to do. Elora would eat slowly, pretending to savor every bite, to be sure that Caille was full before she finished what was left. Caille, Pelufer knew, always stopped before she was full, pretending to an attack of pickiness after the edge of hunger was off, and Elora always believed her. She'd long ago ceased trying to get Pelufer to eat. Pelufer ate what she could cadge when she cadged it, and if she didn't cadge enough for all of them, she went hungry, and that was that. She would not partake of the keepers' tithe. That was for waysiders. Refugees. Beggars. She saw to it that her sisters were fed well enough to disdain it, too. "Tell me now," Elora said, moving sidewise through a place where brush had grown nearly across the track. "While we walk. We're far enough." Pelufer smiled. She knew Elora had been dying to ask. She told her--all but the fit. "For spirits' sake!" Elora cried. "Is that it? That's why all your antics today? Gossip and a run-in with smelly strangers? When does a day pass that we're not up to our necks in both?" Elora thought she was so bloody hardheaded and practical. "You better listen to me, Elora! You said yourself something's wrong today. I can feel it! Everything's wrong!" "You had a scare, that's all. You don't want to admit it because you don't like to admit you get scared. You're making it into more than it is so you won't seem a fool. But we all get scared. Don't we, Caille." Caille was having none of the argument. She returned Elora's gaze, blinked impassively, and said nothing. Pelufer burst out, "I had a fit of names. In the middle of Tin Long. That flowery woman put her hands on me and names came out." Elora stopped dead in the track, but didn't turn. "That's never happened before." "No. It was her. She was wrong somehow. They came off her. And the way she smelled...she..." It came together in her mind, the horrible thought. "But it can't be," she breathed, refusing the idea. "The man said he was a healer. Maybe that was it. Maybe they were the names of the ones they couldn't save." "So maybe they're not wrong. Maybe they're right, and good, and have never hurt anyone, and you were just upset because you've never been touched by someone who touched death." Their eyes met, both minds spinning. "They weren't wearing white," Pelufer said. "And that man's no healer--he's a fighter if I ever saw one, he wore a blade even though he didn't." "And the keepers don't feel wrong like that, do they," Elora said, "and they haul the dead to the bonefolk, and they touch you sometimes when they're trying to catch you, and names don't come out. Nolfi doesn't feel like that, and his brother died in his arms. Everyone in this town has touched death. They don't feel wrong." "Father never felt wrong like that," Pelufer added softly. She didn't look at Caille, but Elora understood. Mother had died in birthing Caille. Caille herself had come from death. Names didn't come off people who had touched death. They could only have come off people who caused it. "We'll have to hide you till the keepers forget what they saw. And the gawpers." Elora's shoulders slumped. "Oh, Pel, how could you?" "I didn't mean to. I never mean to. It just happens." "Yes. I know that. I'm sorry. But if we have to go...spirits, Pel, Mireille saw you, she'll never forget something like that...I can't go, Pel...I can't leave Mamma and Padda..." "They left us!" Elora stared. "I can't believe you said that." "Well, they did." "They did? Then why did we have to trade the cottage? Why did we have to give our home away for the price of a winter's warmth?" Pelufer clamped her teeth. That wasn't what she'd meant. She knew they were still here. Mother had died in that cottage. Father had died in that cottage. That was why she couldn't stay here. She couldn't bear it, having them so close yet not really there. And that was why Elora couldn't leave. She had lost her advantage. It was always like that, with Elora. She could force her, sometimes, but on even ground she could never outnegotiate her. Elora was their father's daughter, their father the trader, who'd tended a copper stall his life long, who'd pledged a woman who'd made copper sing in her hands. A fair man, but canny. You'd come in sure you had the stones to outplay Elora on any table, and she'd turn the game upside down. She wanted Elora to decide. But she wanted Elora to decide the way she wanted her to. The rest of the argument unrolled in her head like a carpet whose weave never changed. Then let's find somewhere else to live, she'd say. We can't afford anywhere else to live, Elora would say. Then I'll go to the spirit wood, Pelufer would say. You will not, Elora would say. You will not steal from the dead. But they were dead, they didn't care anymore about whatever had been in their pockets and around their necks, the things the bonefolk left behind. It's stealing from the living if it's anything at all, and I do that all the time, she'd say, and Elora would say, This would be worse. This would be things with sentimental value. Things people would recognize. They'd know where you'd been. That ground is sacred. She'd say, Then I'll travel to another town and trade them there and come back, I'll hitch a ride with carters, and Elora would say they must never split up, and she'd say Then we'll go together, and Elora would say We'd lose the pitch, we have to be there every day or squatters will have it,, around and around, for every solution an obstacle. She felt suddenly, deeply, desperately tired. "I wish Mamma was here," she said. She knew she shouldn't say such things in front of Caille. It just came out. She was so tired. "So do I, Pelufer. But she's not. And I'm the oldest." "Only by two years, that's not so much." "I'm the oldest, and I'll decide." Her face was grim, pained. It was as hard for Elora to walk through the dying brush as it was for Pelufer to walk through the places where people died. "We'll lay low for a few days. You're not to go out anywhere, for any reason. That man and woman were traveling through. They'll be on their way and then we just have to hope that nobody understood what they saw on Tin Long today and they'll forget about it." "Mireille will tell." "Mireille won't know what happened. She wasn't close enough to hear you say the names, right? And she wouldn't understand what that meant anyway." "The woman understood. And the man. They went dead pale." "And if--" Elora glanced at Caille, who was listening patiently, but continued, because there was never any point in trying to keep things from her, there was only one thing they had ever successfully kept from her and it was the only thing worth worrying about. "If that woman did kill those people, and that's why the names came off her, then she won't be announcing it, will she? She won't be going to the keepers and saying, 'I must find that child, she knows the names of everyone I've killed.'" "The keepers wouldn't know me anyway." "Maybe not. But some trader would." "Traders don't tell tales about their own to strangers." "No? Not even hungry ones? Or threatened ones? Or the ones you steal from? And it's not the point anyway. The point is that the woman will probably leave here as fast as she can. You scared her. She's probably already gone." "Or she's asking about us. Searching for us. Telling people she's worried about the little girl who had a fit in Tin Long today, and does anyone know where she lives?" This frightened them both into silence. Then Pelufer whispered, looking down the track, "No one knows where we live now." Elora followed her gaze, but neither of them moved to continue onward. "Can we be sure?" Caille squeezed between them, pressed close, eyes wide. Sensing their fear? Or something else? Pelufer twisted to look behind them. This path was the only way to the shed. The dangerous man and the flowery woman would have gone to their pitch first. That location would have been easy enough to get out of people if Elora was right. It would take them longer to find out about the shed. If someone knew to tell them. "Come on," Pelufer said. "We can still get there ahead of them." Elora stopped her. "And what? Hide? They'll knock that door down with a breath." "Get our things," Pelufer replied, struggling past her. Elora took her by the shoulders as if to shake sense into her. "What things, Pel? We haven't got any things left." Pelufer went still, searching Elora's face, amazed that Elora might not know that she knew about the faces under the floorboards, more amazed that she would be willing to leave them behind. She put a hand slowly into her left tunic pocket, felt down past seeds and nuts and the remains of a season's stolen food, brought out the two stones she'd nicked from Mireille's stall, displayed them on soiled fingertips. Even grotty with crumbs and lint, they sparked with green fire. "Eyes," she told her sister. "I brought you eyes." Elora's mouth worked, but nothing came out. Then she said, "You stole these." "Well, yes," Pelufer said. Didn't Elora care that she knew about the workings? "But only from Mireille." "And that's supposed to make it all right? Because no one likes that poor lonely woman, it's all right to steal from her? She hates us already, Pel, you're only making things harder for us. Have you done anything today that wouldn't make things harder for us?" "She's not a woman. She has only a fouryear on you." "I'm nearly a woman." "You're not." "I am. Oh, this is stupid, Pel, we've got to run, we can't go home now..." "We can. We have time. We're going back for your things." She paused. "I'll go, if you're afraid." Elora went first. She quickened the pace, took less care about skin and clothes. They kept Caille close between them, Pelufer's arms out to shield her face from sharp branches, and the old dead tough vines that could cut you just as deep. Pelufer tried not to shy at the dry rustle of startled birds, the quick start-stop-start of startled rodents. There was a rise at the end, to the shed on higher ground. They came sweaty and breathless into the fly-haunted clearing. Pelufer knew the man and woman could not possibly have headed them off, but she gave a quick glance to either side as they emerged, checking the periphery of brown grass. She blundered hard into Elora, who had stopped cold, and Caille, between them, cried out in protest. Then Pelufer and Caille looked, too, and none of them moved for many short breaths. The shed had fallen. The rot had not touched it because Elora had strengthened the old wood. That was something she could do, though she'd been exhausted for a day after. But the mites had tunneled deeply, gorged themselves. All they needed was warmth and moisture and wood, and there was plenty of that in the musty shed. The woodworms were slower, you could collect them and put them out, but that only enlarged the holes and the moths only laid more eggs, and there'd been nothing to trade for the camphor that would ward the place against them. They'd chinked the holes with earth and twigs and ivy and prayed to Eiden the shed would stand through winter. It was only sowmid. Eiden had not obliged them. "Oh, why now?" Elora breathed, shutting her eyes tight, clutching Caille to her side with one hand, the other reaching out toward the jumble of boards that had been their home. "It was the mites or us," Pelufer said. She was trembling with rage, while her mind sang in silence, Too late, too late. She couldn't yell at Caille, but she could yell at Elora about her. "Why did she have to be so bleeding stubborn?" "Don't be cruel," Elora snapped, whipping around. Caille eeled free, of Elora and the inevitable row, and started across the clearing. "She didn't have to kill them!" Pelufer cried. "She could have just made them itchy or ill or something so they'd go chew on dead trees instead!" "That's not something she would do." Elora's words were calm. But she dropped slowly to her knees, staring at the end of her world. Caille had come to within a threft of the collapsed shed. With an oath, Pelufer ran to pull her back. "Leave her, Pel. She only wants to look." Pelufer grimaced. She had seen the kind of looking Caille did. Late in the winter of the six fevers, when droplimb had afflicted all who'd partaken of the flour tithe, the keepers made holes for the fallen arms and feet and hands and legs and buried them, but the first hole wasn't deep enough and starving dogs dug it up during the night. They'd happened by the scene at dawn, before the keepers found it. Elora had been off protecting the pitch. Caille had watched the dogs gnaw the human limbs without emotion. Pelufer, unable to chase the dogs off, had doubled over retching, and come up to find Caille fascinated by the teeming white lives that had grown in the decaying flesh of a man's arm. She had dragged Caille away and said nothing of it to Elora. Now, at Pelufer's feet, with Pelufer poised to snatch her away should the pile of boards shift, Caille squatted down and looked intently at the insects scrambling around the ruined shed. It was their home, too, Pelufer thought, randomly, strangely, watching her unfathomable sister. They had only been doing what mites and grubs do. "Broken," Caille said, and pointed. Pelufer followed the angle of gesture and saw it right away. The round impressions of a hammer on one of the boards. "We'll build it up again," Elora said, rising. "We have some nails. We'll get more somehow. And a hammer." Pelufer snorted. A whole box of nails wouldn't be enough to put this right. "Maybe whoever knocked it down will let us borrow the hammer they used." Elora came over and looked. When she closed her eyes, tears leaked out. "I won't run away," she said. "Gir Doegre is our home. Mother and Father's home." She whirled on Pelufer, her eyes flying open. "We'll ask the keepers for help." Help. It always came down to help. Pelufer would not ask for help! Then you got beholden. Get beholden to too many people and your life wasn't your own anymore. "No." "Why not? Because of your stupid pride? Someone did this to us! That's what keepers are for, to stop people doing things like this!" "We can't trust anyone. Not traders, not keepers. Only us." Elora grit her teeth. "Then we'll stack the wood up and hide it and sleep on the pitch till it gets cold and then we'll trade it as firewood for lodgings and..." Her own attempts to find trader solutions failed, as they had failed so many before her. They had bargained away everything of value but their bodies, and those were no use to anyone either. "We're waysiders," Pelufer said. "Don't you see? We're waysiders in our own home now." "We've already been that, Pel. We've been that since Padda died." "Stop calling him that! You sound like a baby. He was a sodden old snock and a liar too, and 'Father' was too much respect for him!" The flat sting of Elora's slap opened into a throbbing oval ache. Pelufer stood firm. Elora's body recoiled. Hitting Pelufer had made her instantly smaller, pulled into herself, but she would not let Pelufer see that on her face. Elora always thought that faces were the only thing about people that you could gauge. Caille cried out, just after the crack of palm on cheek. It always took her the split of a breath to feel things. She drew breath to wail. Elora pulled Caille's face against her stomach to muffle the sound and said, "You get my workings. Obviously you know where I keep them. You get them, and then we'll go and hide and figure out what's next." Pelufer moved. This was something she could do. Mother would have told her to wear gloves, but she had no gloves. So she shifted the boards one by one, mindful of protruding nails, until she'd cleared a space over the back right corner of the shed. She didn't have to pull up the two loose floor planks; they'd bounced askew when the rest fell. Three small bundles wrapped in oiled cloth looked up at her from under wood dust. She replaced the oatbread in one of her pouches with them, drawing the string tight and double-knotting the end around her belt. The woven belt sagged. Each of them had a blanket. She fished them out of the wreckage and tied them in a bundle at the end of a fallen branch from the edge of the clearing. She picked the stoutest branch she could find. She'd coveted the keepers' blades for as long as she could remember. But she'd settle, now, for a club. Her sisters needn't know of its double purpose. The brush lengthened into shadow and then contracted as the sun sank. They returned the way they had come. Dusk would help them. Anyone searching would have to bring a lamp that would betray them. They would probably not see three girls squeezed between thornbushes where no bodies could fit. If Caille could stay quiet... But it didn't come to that. They crossed the point of Copper and Bronze Longs and went over the maurbridge into Lowhill. The longs were quiet, stalls empty and battened. Dim lights burned along the row of public houses by the river. Nothing seemed amiss. Smelling an inn's cookfire, Pelufer wondered how long it would be before whoever had knocked their shed down returned for the fuel. She knew it must have been Mireille, but she was too scared to summon more than cursory anger at her. She was always angry at Mireille. Mireille had tormented Elora as a child--some old feud between their mother and her mother that Pelufer never understood. That alone made Pelufer hate her. But then she had persuaded the alderfolk that Elora's workings were sacrilege. It was a whole group of them, but she was the worst, the loudest, with the most convincing words. Elora didn't think Pelufer knew about that. It had happened before Father died, when Elora was trying even harder to be Mother, when she tried to trade her workings to keep them going, when everything they had or earned went for Father's drink. Elora said to be forgiving, she said to pity Mireille. Pelufer pitied no one. Pelufer trusted no one. Pelufer relied on no one. "Only to hide," Elora whispered to Caille. They stood in front of a locked byre. Animals rustled within. "Only to hide, not to frighten, not to steal their food." Caille squinted at Pelufer to be sure Elora wasn't speaking only for herself. Then she accepted the rusty hairpin Elora held out. She slid it into the lock. She moved it up and down and sidewise, feeling around. Then she pulled it out, rolled it in her fingers, reinserted it, and turned the lock. They went in. A dog rose up snarling, then snuffled at Caille and flopped back down as if it were their own dog, only startled out of sleep. The stock shifted, nervous, but Caille touched each one in turn and they calmed. "Donkey, ox, ox, donkey, donkey, donkey," she said to her sisters. Letting them know what they shared the space with. They'd eaten most of Pelufer's crushed takings on the trail. They finished the rest now in silence, and the water in the gourd Elora carried. Faint misty light fell in bars through ventilation slats high in the back wall of the byre when the moon rose. "They're beautiful eyes," Elora said suddenly. A peace offering. Embarrassed, Pelufer shrugged and said, "It smells like Father after a bad night in here. But you picked a good one, Elora." "Donkey farts," Caille said with relish. Pelufer heard her lips pull back from her baby teeth in a grin. She felt Caille drag the dog out of sleep into a hug, heard its halfhearted protesting whine become a contented whuffle, felt both little sister and big, warm dog settle in for sleep between her and Elora. "You were his favorite, Pel, you know you were," Elora said. "You know you're only angry at him for leaving us. He loved you so much." Pelufer hated it when they talked about this. But Elora was trying. She would try, too. "No, it was you." She had to make herself say it, but it wasn't that hard, because it was true. "You were his girl." She paused. "You looked like Mamma." "You don't know that." "Do too." "Do not. You don't remember her face." "Do too!" But not the way Elora meant. She remembered a shape, a softness. Defensive, hopeless, she said, "It was kind." "Ah," Elora said, softly, if Pelufer had proved her wrong. But in the last sweep of cloud- free moonlight they both saw Caille, cuddled in between them, thumb on her cheek and chubby fingers curled against her mouth, the whole assemblage buried in the dog's ruff. Caille had only one glimpse of Mother, when all life and kindness had already gone from her, and had never felt the gentle touch of her living hand. If something happened to them, what would Caille remember? "It won't," Elora said. "We won't let it." "You don't know what I was thinking." "Do too." "All right you do." Pelufer picked in vain at splinters she hadn't felt enter palms and finger pads, slivers of what had been foursquare shelter, and thought, It already did, and we let it. "You can't go into the wood," Elora said. "I have to now." "You don't." "I do. We'll need things to barter in other towns. Awayfolk won't recognize any of it. It'll be safe to trade." "You can't go into that place." "Yes I can. I went through Highhill today. It wasn't so bad." "But that was just the ones who died in Highhill." The spirit wood was where they brought all the dead, from every part of Gir Doegre. A clearing, a gentle place that had been sacred once, a place where people of light had done their work. In other towns and other times, the tellers said, the dead were left where they'd died, for the bonefolk to collect. But here they delivered them, the last act the living could do in respect for the lost. In other times, passage would have been provided for the dying; there'd be nothing in the clearing for Pelufer to fear. But those times were gone. Pelufer could barely remember them. Elora could, but she rarely spoke of them; it was like talking about food you couldn't have or things you missed about living with Mamma and Padda, it was a torment and it wasn't fair to Caille. That clearing in the woods was where all the dead went, and wherever the dead had been, Pelufer felt them, and named them. "I came back from there before all right." "You weren't all right." "I'm older now. I'm strong." "You're not." "Am too." Sigh. "All right you are. But I'm coming with you." "You can't, Elora. You know you can't. You really know you can't. And if you came, we'd have to bring Caille." "No," said Caille, but there was no telling what she meant, and she might have spoken from dreams, the word was so slurred. The woods had been dying for a long time. The edges of them, that they could see, were sere and brown and drooping. The drought had done it, mostly, but Gir Doegre's river came from the Druilor Mountains, and Druilor runoff was poison to trees the same as it was to people. Dewmongers had worked for years to provide enough water to save them, and in the end had given up. Dowsers had searched in vain for underground springs. No one would use wood from the bonefolk's forest--at least, no one had yet, though next winter would tell--and so the dying trees stood uncut. None would harvest them, and none could save them. Elora could not go into that place. "I can barter my workings in other towns," Elora said. "I'd rather that, than have you go there." "You have only three." Pelufer untied the heavy pouch from her belt and passed it to Elora in the dark. "And I've seen them. You can't trade these." "I will if I have to." "They might get just as angry in other towns as they did here. They might take these, too, and burn them." She could feel Elora flinch. "It's the only way. You know it and I know it." She whispered, "Is she really asleep?" "No," Caille murmured from deep in dreams, and "No" again, but Pelufer slipped from her side without rousing her, and though the dog woke--she heard its breathing change--it took no interest in her movements. She started for the door. In her mind she was already in the woods, already approaching the place of her nightmares, already putting one foot in front of the other to force herself there, to root in humus and bracken and haunts. She jumped when a hand gripped hers hard in the dark. Elora, catching her as she passed. "I'm glad you'll get to leave here," Elora said. "I know it's what you wanted. I'm glad you'll get what you wanted, Pel, really. Please come back so we can leave together." "I know it's my fault," Pelufer said. She made herself grip the hand in return. "I didn't mean for this to come of it. I didn't work it out this way." "I know you didn't." "I only want to go home, Elora." "I know. I know." A ragged breath. "But home's gone." "I know. I'll be back. At Nolfi's barrow, if you have to leave here." She tried to pull her hand free, but couldn't. "Please, Pel." Elora's grip became painful. Pelufer knew that she had her eyes squeezed shut just as tight, as she sent a prayer to whatever spirits still listened to frightened children. "Please, please come back." |
Copyright © 2003 Terry McGarry.
Go back and read the prologues
Order The Binder's Road from Booksamillion
Order The Binder's Road from Powell's
Order The Binder's Road from Barnes & Noble
About the book