Six Moon Dance (44 page)

Dyre gaped. “Why’ja wait so long?”

“Too much trouble to get them earlier. Our system is, women are for breeding, and that’s it. You gotta keep ‘em locked, you gotta keep ‘em private. Letting other men see your women, that’d be shameful. So, before we brought women in, we had to make places to keep ‘em, places they could stay out of the way, do their own work without being seen. Courtyards, like. Like there in House Genevois. That wharf behind there, we shipped furs and stuff down river from there. When the courtyard was empty, the Timmys used to come out into it, and I used to sit up there under the tower watching them dance.”

“Timmys? You saw Timmys? Our teacher said they didn’t come till after the second settlement!”

“They were here almost as soon as we were, but I’m not talking about that….” He paused, as though he’d lost track of his tale.

“So?” muttered Bane. “So, you brought women.”

“We were getting ready to, getting the ship ready, deciding who’d go and who’d stay, and then one night, the Timmys came out of the walls in packs, like ants. It wasn’t just Timmys, either; they had other kinds of bigger critters with ‘em, and there we were, all of us, wrapped up like so many packages, being hauled off into these woods here. They hauled us partway and they floated us partway, and they swallowed us partway, and we ended up down in caves, over there, some days west, beyond the far side of this valley! They took us out of the caves and down into a kind of pond. And they threw us in the pond. And after a while, we crawled out again.”

“So,” muttered Bane again, yawning.

Ashes said angrily, “So, some of us came out pretty much like we was before and some of us didn’t.”

The boys stared at him, waiting, but he seemed to find no words to go on with his story. Finally, Dyre ventured, “What do you mean, not like before?”

Ashes chewed at his lip, eventually saying, “Some of us was changed, that’s what I mean. And some went on changing. When we go down there, where the camp is, you’ll see some of us who don’t look … well, who don’t look like we do, but you’ll know they’re Wilderneers by the smell. Since that pond, we all smell the same. But you won’t know by the shape, so be careful who you smart off to.”

Bane’s forehead was creased. “So what did you do about the women?”

“We never got any women,” said Ashes. “When we came out of that damned pond, there weren’t enough of us left in shape to man the ship, and in the meantime a trader ship had set down and taken all the slaves away, not that there was many left. We came roarin’ down on ‘em, and when they saw us, they killed a good many of us, then they took off in both ships, theirs and ours! Left a notice on the door of the fortress saying they’d salvaged our ship, taken it as a prize!

“So, after that we had no way to get women. Not until the other settlers came. Then we took some women, but they weren’t our women, so it wasn’t any good.”

“Settlers let you get away with that?”

“The settlers didn’t know it was us. The settlers don’t even know we’re here. Some of us, we go to town when we like, we wander around, we know what’s goin’ on, they don’t know who we are. The rest of us, well, the rest of us learned to stay hid. There’s caves … caves that go on forever. After they took our ship, we stayed in caves for a long, long time.”

“So it was you, doing the women raids,” said Bane.

“Well, it was us to start with. Some of us looked … normal, so we dressed up like them, let them think it was one family going after women from another family. Before you knew it, it was one family going against another family, like we’d given ‘em the idea. They never did know it was us started it.”

“So, you took some women….”

“Just enough to find out it wouldn’t work anyhow. We couldn’t breed ‘em.”

“Whattaya mean, you couldn’t breed ‘em?”

“They died. We’d get close to ‘em, and they’d die. Every time.”

“But there’s us,” Bane complained. “We had a mother!”

“That was later, and I tricked her,” Ashes said. “It was something we planned, to get some daughters born to us who could be our kind of women, women of our own. But … she didn’t have daughters. She had you two.”

A long silence, during which Bane and Dyre thought their way through the implications of this.

“You mean we’re the only ones?” Bane asked. “The only kids you’ve had in hundreds of years?”

“The only ones the Wilderneers ever had,” said Ashes.

“But … if all that happened hundreds of years ago. How come … how come you’re still here?”

“We don’t die,” said Ashes, staring at the sky. “Way we figure it, critters that come from that pond, we can get killed—like that trader ship killed some of us, but we don’t just die.”

“We? You mean us, too?”

Ashes shrugged. “I don’t know. You had a regular woman as a mother. Maybe it only works if you’ve been in the pond. Maybe it doesn’t work for sons, or daughters. We don’t know. We want to find out.”

Bane raised his voice. “So what are we-, huh? Some kinda experiment? You gonna see if you can kill us?”

Ashes shrugged again. “You’re my sons. For now. And when you go down there, you’re their kinfolk. For now. So long as you don’t do anything or say anything stupid.”

“Like what?” demanded Bane

“Like anything but ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ and ‘kind of you to say so sir,’ “ Ashes growled.

The boys got wordlessly back on their horses and rode along the edge of the caldera until they reached a break in the rimwall, a path leading down. Ashes’s lead horse took to the trail as though he knew it well, and after a moment’s hesitation, the others followed. Clouds settled and they rode for a time in glowing, clinging mist. Clouds rose and they found themselves almost at the bottom, the lakes away to their right, glittering with moon trails.

Something tall, massive, and darker than the sky reared into being at the edge of the trail. Though the horses took no notice at first, both Bane and Dyre started in fright, pulling up on the reins, causing their mounts to rear. At this, there came a titter from between the stones at the side of the path where something poured out of one declivity into another.

“Hush,” said Ashes, “it’s only Bone and Boneless.” He glanced upward toward the slow clap, clap of leathern wings. In a moment the winged one dropped onto the trail beside him, eyes glowing, sharp fangs glittering. A lean, gray-furred body leaned toward the boys, almost hungrily.

“Ashes and Thunder,” the thing said from a fanged mouth. “Welcome home. You brought me dinner?”

“They’re not for your dinner, Webwings.” Ashes nodded. “These’re my boys. This here’s Bane, that’s Dyre.”

Barely able to speak, the brothers managed jerky nods in the newcomer’s direction. He stared at them for a time with glowing eyes, then grasped Ashes’s arm and swung himself onto the horse behind him, wings falling to either side of the mount, the ragged tips trailing along the ground. When Ashes clucked the horse into a trot, Bane and Dyre did likewise, though reluctantly. Having seen this little, they were not eager to see more. The trail led toward cook fires that burned on hearths of stone in what seemed to be a permanent encampment, a sprawling community of stone-and-wattle shacks, of roofless enclosures, of pits and holes, all set well apart, with firewood piled nearby, and everything concealed from above by copses of large trees.

Ashes drew up at the edge of the encampment. His winged acquaintance slipped off the horse and walked away behind a high earthen wall. Bane and Dyre shared a glance between themselves and at their father who watched the wall, waiting. From behind that concealment a huge, bony hook slashed down, flailing in a forceful arc that slammed it into the shivering soil, fragments of sod flying. Then came another hook at the end of a stout cable or a thick rope, flailing down, piercing deep. The cables tightened; there was a sound like a gasp or grunt, not quite organic, and a monstrous mound of flesh tugged itself into view, something like an elephantine caterpillar, a thing the size of a large carriage or small river boat, though longer than that, for it kept coming as the huge grapples at its front were set again and again so the body could heave itself forward. The immense, immobile weight hauling along the ground, accompanied by a barrage of grunts and gargles, thrust up the earth at either side, leaving a groove like a ditch.

Terrible as the thing was, it was not the size or the sound that horrified the boys so much as the sight of the almost human face between the hooks, a face with wide, slobbery lips and a hole for a nose and eyes that peered from deep pits of gray, granular flesh under a ruff of large, oval scales, like those Bane had seen along the way.

The horses jittered as the thing came nearer: hook, heave, hump, hook, heave, hump, gargling and spewing, stopping at last a hook’s length away.

“Crawly, I’d like you to meet my boys,” said Ashes, rather too loudly.

The thing wheezed in a breathless, bubbling voice, straining against the buried hooks. The cables had elbows, even a kind of wrists, being otherwise twisted sinew. Closer to, Bane could see that the hooks were hands that had become enlarged with the fingers fused into sharply angled, bone-tipped grapples.

“So here’s the offspring,” wheezed the monster. “Well, well. Very human-looking, aren’t they? How do you do, young sprouts. Doing well, are you?”

“Say yessir, when someone speaks to you,” snarled Ashes, striking Bane on the back.

“Yessir,” bleated Bane and Dyre, as with one voice.

The creature grinned and drooled, raising the large, oval scales around its neck into a hideous ruff. Greenish goo oozed from between the erected scales, emitting a greatly amplified wave of the family stink.

Webwings came around the side of his monstrous friend, smiling maliciously at Bane and Dyre. “Not what you expected, eh, boys?”

Bane swallowed, trying to moisten a dry mouth. “Didn’t … didn’t expect anything.” In the light of the fire he could see what looked like spiders moving about on the creature’s wings, spinning back and forth, thread by thread, repairing the holes and tatters. When the spiders had finished, they scuttled into holes in what would have been armpits if Webwings had had arms. Bane felt an irresistible urge to scratch under his own arms, and only a glare from his father held him motionless. Dyre was not so fortunate. He scratched and was thunked across the back of the head for it.

“This is Strike,” said Ashes, turning to the other side, where someone else had approached without their notice, a creature knobbed and heavy at the top, thin as a rail below, bearing a long bony beak like a curved pike, with opaque bloody beads of eyes peering from either side. It had arms like boneless vines twisting at its sides, and it tottered on clublike legs as it struggled to hold its great bony haft aloft.

And behind it came something tentacled and horned, moving on a carpet of fibers, and behind that came something squatty with a mouth like a furnace. “Mosslegs,” said Ashes. “And Gobblemaw. Say howdy.”

“How do you do, sirs,” said Bane, shaking his brother with one hand. “Tell the sirs how do you do, brother.”

Dyre managed a nod and a gush of wordless air.

There was also Foot (a tiny person with one huge extremity that flexed endlessly upon a separate patch of soil), and, each on its own plot, Ear (a tiny person with huge ear that quivered), and Tongue (a tiny person with huge tongue that wagged). There was Belly, too, wide as a swamp, legs and arms flung out like those on a skin rug, with a wide mouth at one end where some many-handed being called Shoveler was busy pushing the carcass of a very dead goat into it.

All had faces, though some were very small. Not all had mouths and tongues capable of speech. All had arms and legs, though some were rudimentary. Not all had means of locomotion. Among the speaking and walking were a dozen or so who appeared mankindly enough to pass in a crowd, creatures with names like Blade and Shatter and Brigand, Machinist and Mooly, and some of the mankindly ones wore clothes as Ashes did, though more were clad in thick hair or bristles or scales or feathers, or had skin that was warty or horned or embossed or folded. No two were enough alike to mistake one for the other, not even the manlike ones.

Soon Bane and Dyre were at the center of a gathering, a score of creatures all talking at once, producing a windy gibberish that babbled on until the one called Shatter thrust through the mob and drowned them out with a stentorian cry: “Good-looking girls there, Ash. So these’re the daughters, eh?”

Ashes’s lips thinned, his jaw tightened. “So, what you got, Shatter? You got some girls hid we don’t know about?”

Bane shut his eyes, reminded of Dutter’s farm, where the animals had made similar noises and the supernume farmhands had joshed at him in similar phrases, until they had learned not to. He had never suffered insults without retaliation. Here, the life around him was itself an insult, past retaliation, and the inability to voice or display his outrage left him feeling weak, as though from loss of blood. He would feel better later, he told himself, and then he would do whatever he had to do, and when he did it, this mockery, yes, mockery would be remembered, for Ashes had no right to do … whatever it was he had done.

“Boys’re bettern nothin’, I suppose!” Shatter brayed.

“That’s right, Shat. Can’t blame a man for trying.”

The one called Mooly bent himself in laughter. “No, we can’t blame old Ash for tryin’! Or us for watchin’ him try!”

The gathering split asunder. Ashes rode out of it, the boys staying close behind him as he pointed his horse toward a shack under a towering tree at the far side of the camp. There they turned the horses into a corral made of dead branches with bits of vine twisted around them, and while Ashes busied himself with unsaddling the mounts, the boys went inside. There was little in the way of furniture. A table and a chair. A low dirt mound cushioned with boughs and sheepskins to make a couch or sleeping place. They settled themselves on this, leaning forward toward the coals of the fire, piling on a stick or two as though this tending of the fire were necessary and demanding, choosing an appearance of gravity rather than acknowledge to one another the depth of their confusion and disappointment. They had not sorted out how they felt, certainly they had not sorted out what, if anything, they would do about how they felt.