Blade Kin (15 page)

Chapter 23: Stories and Poems

Fava crouched in the snow, blood pouring from her ear. She whisked out her long knife, waving it in order to ward off the Blade Kin.

“Don’t be afraid,” a female voice said, and Darrissea Frolic pulled off her mask.

“Darrissea!” Fava shouted, throwing her arms around the girl. They held each other for a long moment, and Fava heard a sniffle, realized Darrissea was crying.

“Is Tull here?” Darrissea asked.

“No,” Fava said. “Only me and Vo-olai and Wayan. How did you escape?”

“I was in the outhouse when they attacked,” she said. “I hid till this morning.”

“Didn’t they search it?” Fava asked, surprised.

“Not the part I hid in,” Darrissea apologized. “Do I smell all right?”

“You smell sweet,” Fava said and gazed into the human girl’s dark eyes. “But the poison smoke, didn’t it get you?”

“No,” Darrissea said. “It must rise into the air, instead of fall. Are you all right, and Wayan?” she asked, staring at Fava’s ear.

“I’m fine. So is Wayan. But I fear Vo-olai is not. Since Anorath got captured, she acts as if she has
owe taxa,
worms in the head.”

Darrissea pulled off her backpack, got out some bandages. “What happened to your ear?”

“I cut it off,” Fava said weakly. “I’m going to Bashevgo to free Tull, so I am disguising myself as a Blade Kin.”

Going to free Tull.
Fava heard her own words distantly as Darrissea bandaged her ear. What was it that her father had said? Tull could become more powerful than Chaa, if he could get free? Fava suddenly realized that something more important than her love for Tull was at stake. She had to get Tull free.

“Lean your head to the side so that it doesn’t bleed as much,” Darrissea said, pulling Fava’s head down so that her wound faced the sky. The human girl’s hands shook as she worked. “So, you are going to Bashevgo? What of Wayan and Vo-olai? Are you taking them?”

“I … I hadn’t thought of them,” Fava answered.

“How
crazy
is Vo-olai?” Darrissea asked. Though she was speaking Pwi, she used the human word for worms-in-head.

Fava shrugged, “I have a mountain of worry for her. Come in the house, get some food and rest.” Fava urged her into the kitchen, and Darrissea ate a little, then told Fava to sleep while she kept guard.

Fava reluctantly gave the human girl the long knife. She’d seen Darrissea practice, and the human girl, with her gawky arms and long thin legs, had good speed and reach, but no strength. She would not be much of a guard.

Fava slept soundly through the night, and woke at dawn to find Darrissea sitting in the half-light, peering out the window. Snow was falling.

“I’ve been thinking,” Darrissea said. “We should not go outside today. With snow on the ground, any Blade Kin left out there would find it easy to track us. Also, we should not build a fire. We can use the blankets and the cloaks of the Blade Kin for warmth. If we need to cook anything, we can light candles.”

“All right,” Fava said. Darrissea seemed to be thinking very clearly. “Do you think anyone else could help us? My father? Surely he can’t be far. The Blade Kin couldn’t have caught him.”

“They caught him,” Darrissea said. “I found a lot of dead Blade Kin up by the inn, so I didn’t have much difficulty getting a disguise. I dressed in the dark, then kept guard around the prisoners. I could do nothing to help them.

“I saw your father. He was unconscious when they dragged him from the house, weak from taking his Spirit Walk. Perhaps he saw that the Blade Kin were coming, but couldn’t rouse himself from his trance. Everyone from town got caught, along with a lot of people I haven’t seen before—people from out in the Rough. The Blade Kin have been everywhere. I don’t see how we can hope for anyone to rescue us.”

“What about Tull?”

“They took him on the ship,” Darrissea said. “They were angry with him for killing so many of their warriors. They knew about the men he’d killed in Denai.”

“What do you think will happen? Will they execute him?”

Darrissea stopped gazing out the window, turned her dark eyes to Fava. “I don’t know.”

They stayed in the house for the day, and Fava watched over the others. Vo-olai sat for most of the morning, rocking back and forth, or humming, and Fava feared that the girl’s mind was broken. She tried speaking comforting words to the girl, but nothing helped.

Wayan kept trying to sneak out to play in the snow, so Darrissea sang and told him a cruel story about hungry children whose poor parents were forced to send them into the woods to starve.

There they met a sorcerer who tried to eat them, and the children escaped only by shoving him in his own oven “until his guts boiled like soup.” When they pulled the sorcerer out, he’d turned into a great meat pie, and the children took it home and fed their parents, and none of them ever hungered again.

Wayan seemed to enjoy the tale, but Vo-olai frowned in horror as Darrissea told it.

Yet as Darrissea spoke, Fava noticed that Vo-olai quit rocking, and when the human was done, Vo-olai put Wayan on her lap and told him a Pwi story, one Fava had never heard before, and Vo-olai’s voice seemed strong, almost normal, as if she were telling the story to her own son.

“Long ago,” Vo-olai started, “there was a great hero among the Pwi, and he was so fierce that when he wanted to go somewhere he would jump on the back of a wild woolly rhino and drive it just as a child would ride a pig. I forget the man’s name,” Vo-olai said.

“Ananoi!” Wayan shouted. “It must be Ananoi!”

“Oh, yes, Ananoi, the Rhino Rider,” Vo-olai said. “That was his name. He lived with his beautiful wife, Shape-Changing Woman, in a place not far from here. Well, in those days the animals had many problems getting along, and often they would come to Ananoi seeking his wisdom and help.

“One day, a huge pack of dire wolves came to him along with the Lord of the Sabertooths. The dire wolves all hid their tails between the legs, and they howled as if in pain. The great Lord of the Sabertooths was very old and huge. He’d grown as large as a hill, and the poor old cat’s teeth had grown longer than a mammoth’s tusks, and they dragged the ground. He was weeping so hard that his tears filled the channel he had left behind. That is how we got the Smilodon River.

“Anyway, Ananoi took one look at the poor old cat’s red eyes and the river of tears, and he said, ‘Great Lord, how can I help?’ Ananoi thought at first that the Lord had wormy teeth, but could not understand why the wolves came with the cat, and why they too were so sad.

“The Lord of Sabertooths kept weeping, and he snarled, ‘I have just come from the south, and none of my people can sleep in that land. All of the Mammoth People have climbed up into the clouds, and they run among the clouds so much that the sky thunders. The whole earth trembles, and whenever they step on a cloud, they press water from it so that it falls on us. We cannot sleep!’

“As soon as he said these words the dire wolves howled in chorus, ‘Save us! Save us!’

“‘What must I do to save you?’ Ananoi asked, and a green light flashed in the sabertooth’s eyes.

“‘It would help if you would climb up the rainbow and ride the mammoths down out of the clouds,’ the sabertooth said, ‘so that we could sleep,’ and then he licked his lips.

“‘Perhaps you should climb the rainbow and chase the mammoths out of the sky yourselves,’ Ananoi said.

“‘Ooooo, we can’t climb,’ the poor dire wolves howled, and the Lord of Sabertooths snarled, ‘It’s too high for me, and the rainbow is always so wet and slippery.’

“‘Ayaah,’ Ananoi said, ‘If I chase the mammoth people out of the sky, will you promise not to eat them?’

“‘Yes, we promise,’ the wolves and the sabertooth all said in unison. And because Ananoi himself was an honest man, he believed them, and he went to chase the Mammoth People out of the sky.”

“The wolves and sabertooths were lying!” Wayan said. “I know it!”

“Yes,” Vo-olai said, “they were lying, but Ananoi did not know this, so he rubbed his body with pitch to make it sticky so he could climb the slippery rainbow, and he climbed up into the clouds to chase the mammoth people from the sky.

“Well, that evening, when he finally got to the top of a cloud, sure enough, he found hundreds of mammoths up there, grazing on the tall blue grass in the clouds, and flocks of meadowlarks flew across the sky like stars at night. There were no lions or sabertooths or wolves, and only the smallest of trees, and all the many lakes up there were filled with huge sturgeon. All in all, it was very beautiful, and Ananoi could see why the mammoth people liked it so well.

“Since it was almost dark, Ananoi searched for some dry mammoth dung to build a fire with. Although mammoth dung is plentiful up there, it is almost always wet, and it took him a long time, but he finally built himself a nice large fire. Then he went to the lake and caught a huge sturgeon in his hands and sat down to eat.

“It was a cold night, and soon Vozha, Lord of the Mammoth People, came to Ananoi’s fire to warm himself. Vozha is as large as a mountain, and the hairs on his back grow huge as redwoods, and the fleas on his back are big as coyotes, and when he blows water from his trunk, it rains on the far side of the earth. Not even the great Ananoi would want to pick a fight with such a monster, so Ananoi sought to reason with the great lord.

“‘You must force your people down out of these clouds,’ Ananoi told him. ‘Every day you stomp around in the clouds and trumpet, and below you the earth rumbles. You smash water out of the sky onto the people down below.’

“‘We like it up here,’ Vozha said. ‘The grass is tall and sweet; the sun always shines. What do we care if we smash water out of the clouds and make it rain on the people below?’

“‘You are just like all rich people,’ Ananoi said. ‘You care nothing for the people beneath you. If you do not mend your ways, I will be forced to throw you off the clouds.’

“‘I’m sorry if our behavior has bothered you,’ Vozha said. ‘We did not mean to dampen your people. We’ve been here a long time, and you are the first to complain.’

“Ananoi thought long about his words. The mammoth king was right. Ananoi had never been bothered by the thunder before, and in fact he liked it when the summer rains watered his crops. None of the other animals had ever complained—only the wolves and the sabertooths, and Ananoi wondered if perhaps the complaints had all been a ruse. So he said to the mammoth king, ‘Perhaps I have been tricked by the wolves and sabertooths who sent me to complain.’

“The mammoth lord became very angry, and he raised his great trunk up until it put the dent into the moon Freya, and he said, ‘You should not need a nose as long as mine to smell out this plot! They want you to throw us down so that they can eat our children!’

“Ananoi agreed that this had all been an evil scheme. So together they gathered mammoth dung and sculpted it to look like a young mammoth. They hardened it by the fire, then wove a mat of long dry grass and covered the effigy so it looked as if it were covered with hair.

The next morning as soon as the sun rose Ananoi carried the effigy of mammoth dung and tossed it off the cloud, shouting, ‘Stay off this cloud, you evil mammoth woman!’ and he watched below.

“As soon as the effigy hit the ground, sabertooths and dire wolves boiled from their hiding places in the brush and pounced on the thing.

They thought they were tearing into flesh, so all of them ripped away great mouthfuls of dung, and then the wolves and sabertooths all rolled in the grass and tried to spit the vile dung out of their jaws.

“But some of the dire wolves liked the taste of the dung, and that is why even today, though they like meat more, sometimes you will see them eat dung.

“Vozha and Ananoi watched the predators and laughed from above, and Vozha trumpeted and stomped the cloud, making water fall from it and making thunder roll across the heavens.

Then the two heroes each grabbed pieces of dry dung and set it on fire and tossed it down on the dire wolves and sabertooths.

“Now, even today, when summer dries the mammoth dung in the clouds, the mammoth people celebrate by running through the clouds, causing thunder and rain. Then they hurl burning dung to earth, forming lightning, and that is why the sabertooths all hide in the bushes during a storm, and that is why the dire wolves all howl in mourning the night after a storm.”

Vo-olai smiled down at Wayan, and his eyes shone. Sitting there, listening to the story, reminded Fava of the times she had spent on her mother’s lap as a child, listening to her mother spin tales. It all seemed so long ago and far away, but it lightened her mood.

That night, Fava dreamed it was summer, and Wayan sat on her lap as she told stories and fed him blackberry tarts; another child also sat on her lap, a girl with hair the color that the Neanderthals call “maple-leaf” red. In the dream the girl was Fava’s own daughter, a child with soft skin, and sweet, carefree smile.

When she got up the next morning, Fava saw Darrissea’s wisdom in keeping the door closed and forbidding fires. From their window they watched six Blade Kin march north up the street through town. Some had guns and others carried gas tubes. All of them wore masks and camouflaged robes in forest green and brown.

They had a slave with them. Fava recognized the boy, a human named Mylon Storm. The Blade Kin stopped halfway to the bridge, and their leader pointed back toward Fava’s house. Two Blade Kin broke off, followed the road to the trail, then disappeared into the brush.

Fava rushed everyone to Tull’s workroom, then hid behind the door with only a knife in her hand. Vo-olai became wide-eyed and shouted that the Blade Kin were going to torch the house, and Darrissea kept speaking to her softly, trying to calm the girl.

But after what seemed an eternity, Fava peeked out the window again. Through a crack in the curtain she could see all six Blade Kin poking around the ruined houses on the far side of town.

“They only came to look for footprints outside the door,” Darrissea said. “Look! You can see their tracks in the snow.” Fava watched as the Blade Kin searched the ruins in the human part of town, then headed inland on the dirt road that led to Finger Mountain.