Shadowkill sq-3, page 25
part #3 of Shadith's quest Series
Shadith made the rodent creep forward until she could see what was happening.
Pirs was on his feet. “Father,” he said. “Mingas.” He turned and walked out.
##
Shadith knew she should stay and listen to Mingas and the Artwa, but she was tired of these men and their problems. She loosed the rodent and let him go scooting back to his nest. She stretched out on the bed and stared at the candle shadow shivering on the ceiling.
One damn thing after another… well, maybe it’ll be over soon.
##
The Artwa and Mingas left next morning, going without ceremony.
Shadith leaned on her windowsill and watched the skimmer disappear into the clouds. One opportunity gone. How many more would she see before she managed to kick loose?
##
Five days later the weapons came. Mingas brought them in the skimmer, offloaded them, and left immediately.
4
Arring Pirs came into Allina’s sitting room. He stood behind her, watching her work on her tapestry, then crossed the room to look into his son’s cradle. He bent, touched the sleeping baby’s cheek, then came back to her.
She looked up, managed a smile. “Are the guns what you wanted?”
“Wanted.” He poured heavy irony into the word, rested the tips of his fingers on her shoulder. “Not new,” he said, “but they work. P’murr’s finishing the inspection.”
“When will you be leaving, you and P’murr?”
“I’m not taking P’murr.”
She stabbed the needle into the canvas, left it hanging there, caught hold of his hand and held it against her face. “You will,” she said. “You must.”
“No.”
“Amurra. Amurra. Amurra,” she whispered. “Please, please, kiya-mi, kaltji-mi. If you’re worried about us here, what happens to us if you die?”
“You have Paji now. Father will take care of you.”
She was silent. She couldn’t agree and he wouldn’t hear her if she tried to argue.
In her corner Shadith continued to play softly, shivering at the anger and helplessness in the Matja. She knew what Allina was thinking. It wasn’t just the war that was waiting for Pirs; it was Mingas’ spite, Utilas’ jealousy, Angakirs’ stupidity. Allina was sick with fear that Pirs wasn’t going to come home from this, especially if he left P’murr behind.
“I have Tinoopa and Kizra, Wuraj for the men, the chal and chapa,” Allina said after several moments of silence. “Don’t you trust them, mi-Arring? Take P’murr, please? For my peace of mind, if nothing else.”
“No.” He pulled away, angry. “I have said, Matja.”
“I hear, Arring.”
5
Two days later, Pirs left with fifty chal in three trucks, a fourth truck loaded with supplies.
Matja Allina stood on the steps for the Ceremony of Leavetaking, calm, smiling, pride stiffening her spine. When the last truck vanished through the gate, she signaled the young Amur-drummer.
He played a quick roll, then blew into the convoluted shell of a land snail.
Matja Allina looked down into the faces of her people. “You know what this means,” she said. She spoke slowly, her voice carrying to the farthest corners of the court. “Chal, explain to chapa. Chal and chapa, take great care of your lives, you are dear to us and you are needed. There will be tumaks come to burn and kill. Don’t go beyond the walls alone, don’t go without a guard. I will see you have them when you need them. P’murr, bring the herders to the Great Hall in one hour. I will have arms for them. And ammunition.” One by one she named the leaders of the men, those left at the Kuysstead after Pirs’ winnowing, setting a time for each to bring his men to the Hall. “We must go on,” she finished. “Shearing waits for no man’s war to end, planting has its seasons.” She signaled the drummer, turned, and went inside to the rattle of his sticks.
##
For three days she worked to tighten down the Kuysstead, then she took Aghilo and her baby into her suite, pulled the shades down, and grieved. She was in agony.
That agony filled the house and Shadith was sick with it; she struggled to shut it out, but could not.
Everyone but her was hard at work. P’murr and Tinoopa were running the Kuysstead; the place was busy as a termite mound with the top kicked out, but she had nothing to do but brood.
She was tired of that, so she took the arranga and went to play for whoever would have her.
6
Aghilo came into the kitchen, stood shaking her head, her hands on her hips.
Housemaids were clustered around Shadith, trading turns singing verses of the joke song she was playing.
Gilli chal looked up, saw Aghilo, hissed a warning. The rest of the maids stopped their giggling, scattered guiltily, ashamed of being caught enjoying themselves in a house of grief.
The Cook stilled the hand that had been slapping vigorously at the table, composed her face into dignified sobriety. “Yes?”
“Chapa Tinoopa, is she around?”
“She went across to the dye shed. Should be back in about ten minutes.”
“Oh.” Aghilo went out again.
Cook got heavily to her feet. “Looks like you’ll be back on the job, Kiz. Scamper.”
##
Matja Allina emerged from her grieftime.
She was pale and gaunt, but composed.
She carried Baby Paji in a sling that kept him nestled warm against her hip, an innovation she’d gotten from Tinoopa. Irrkuyon custom said the baby was given to a wet nurse after Name Day, but Allina refused to be separated from him. Polyapo protested, the chal stared, but the Matja ignored them.
She summoned the chal leaders to the Great Hall, informed them she was going to the Brushies to get replacements for the men Pirs took with him.
They protested.
She shouted them down. The cool controlled Matja they’d known was gone. What was left was a wild creature who filled the hall with her passion, seemed to suck up all the air until the rest were about to smother.
She lowered her voice and went back to telling how things were going to be.
7
Left behind, Shadith wandered through the House. She got into the study, found her papers, sat looking at them for a long time.
I ought to go now. They wouldn’t miss me.
Her hands shook.
Come on, Shadow. It’s just a long hard ride, that’s all.
A bead of sweat dropped on the parchment. She blotted it up with her sleeve, careful not to smudge the writing.
This is freedom, Shadow. All you have to do is go.
I can’t go. I’m not ready. I don’t know which horses I can take without being chased for them. Polyapo’s in charge while the Matja’s away, she’d send men after me, Tinoopa couldn’t stop her. I can’t go until Allina gets back.
She stared at the papers a moment longer, then locked them away again; they were safest here until she was ready to go.
##
The days slid away; she used the braincrystal knife to cut lines in the wall. Each mark was another day in prison; she was building her own locks and walls, building them higher every day. Each morning when she rolled out of bed, she thought:
I should go today. The chance might not come again. I should go today.
Each night she lay down in fury at herself, at the lethargy she couldn’t seem to throw off.
##
On the tenth day of the Matja’s absence, Shadith slipped into the Family Garden, climbed into one of the wall towers and leaned on a window sill, looking west across the heat hammered plain.
What’s happening out there? Could I get to Nirtajai without getting killed? Where the HELL is Caghar Rinta? All right, all right, let’s get ourselves together, Shadow. This is a volcano about to pop. You get caught in it, you’re going to get the shit kicked out of you.
She dropped to her knees, folded her arms on the sill, rested her chin on her forearms. Sweat gathered in her hair and dripped down her face, her neck. She was in the shade up here, there was a strong wind blowing down off the mountains behind her, but the heat was punishing.
I can’t ride in this. I can’t. There’s no use even dreaming I could. What’s that?
The blotch out in the brush came gradually closer, spreading into a ragged line of vans pulled by large creatures rather like stub-tailed lizards. Their daughters beside them holding any infants in the family, women in bright dresses-reds and blues and greens with patches of yellow and orange, and yellow kerchiefs knotted into turbans-drove the vans. Men in patchwork smocks rode horses, spread in a wide arc enclosing the vans. Boys brought up the rear with extra horses.
Another blotch to the right of the first and several kays behind. Another and another.
Brushies, coming in for the Shearing.
She got to her feet. All around the Kuysstead the herds were coming in, woollies pouring through the brush, heading for the Shearing Ground.
She sighed with despair and relief.
The decision was taken from her; the Matja was back and the Shearing was about to begin.
8
Noise. Dust. Heat.
The cutters whirred with scarcely a stop. Two men threw a woolly blatting on the shed floor, while a third ran the cutter along the beast’s sides in half a dozen long smooth sweeps that cut away the matted fleece intact. The throwers swung the woolly on its other flank and held it while the shearer took off the rest of the fleece. As another woolly came wide eyed and blatting from the chute, floorboys grabbed the fleece and ran to the bins with it, the beastmistress and the women drove the denuded beast into the hold pen where they went over it for pests and disease, then chased it into one of the grazing paddocks. Or into the butcheryard. Later it would be slaughtered and the meat sun-cured or smoked or ground into sausage or stowed away in barrels of brine against the winter need.
The throwers threw and shifted, the shearers sheared, the boys ran, the women inspected. Twenty sheds, twenty teams, twenty paddocks waiting; in an ordinary year it would have been thirty-five or forty, but even with the Brushies’ help Ghanar Rinta was short-handed this year.
Short in everything but food, drink, and exuberance.
The Matja provided generously.
There were Shear Dances each night, bonfires and torches lighting the shearfloors where the dancing was, barrels of skatbeer hauled up from the cellars, woolly carcasses barbequed over vast beds of coals, Brushie singers and musicians taking turns with Ghanar players and singers. Round dances and slow dances, kick up your heels, rub against your partners, generating a heat greater than the fires. More than one set of dancers left the floor for the prickly pleasures of the brush. Ingva was out there dancing with Brushie and chal, enjoying herself enormously, running wild, ignoring all she’d been taught about the proper manners of Irrkuyon daughters. Shadith saw her, but said nothing. She was too busy, playing till her fingers bled, drinking skatbeer until she was sodden. Each night she went to bed exhausted.
Day melted into day, distinctions lost in a haze of heat, dust and exhaustion.
The paddock herds grew and grew, the bins were full of fleeces, ready for winter’s combing and spinning, the culls were finished and butchering done. The Brushies collected their pay in woollies, meat, cloth and sugar and prepared to leave.
It was over.
##
Matja Allina stood on an upended fleece bin and spread her hands as if she blessed the wrung-out workers looking up at her.
“It is done,” she said. “Well done.”
A patter of hand against hand.
“You have worked hard and played hard.” She smiled at them, letting her eyes wander across the faces of chal and chapa and the harder, darker faces of the Brushies. “I have no doubt there’s a crop been planted that will come to light nine months from now, a lusty squalling crop of sons and daughters.”
Laughter and some long smoldering looks exchanged between Brushies and certain of the chal and chapa.
“This is a happy day for all of us.” She spread her hands again. “It is a great sadness for me to blacken these good feelings, but I need to warn you all, especially those of you going back to the Brush. Procagharadad is in Kirtaa with two Families. You know that. Know this. The Arring Pirs called me last night to warn me. Kamaachadad has hired a hundred tumaks to hit at Ghanar Rinta. I said a while ago that Shearing waits for no man’s war to end, but, Amurra bless, the war has waited for the end of Shearing. It won’t wait much longer. The tumaks will be here before the month is out. You know them, you know what they’ll do. If they catch you in the Brush, they’ll play with you until you wish for death and send you home to be a warning. They’ll fire the Brush; yes, they’re fools enough to do that. They’ll kill whatever they can’t catch. We’ve had tumaks before, but never so well armed and supplied. So take care, people of the Brush. If the time comes when you want shelter behind Ghanar walls, if I still have the say…” she broke off, her composure momentarily shattered.
A sigh passed through the crowd. They knew what she was not saying; if Pirs was killed, someone else would be ruling on who was let inside Ghanar walls.
“If I have the say still,” she went on, her voice hoarse but, determined, “you will be welcome here. Go, then, our friends, and take care, take very good care of yourselves.”
9
“You let her run wild, Matja. Wild. Out all times of the night, by herself, no one watching her. The Jili should be whipped for neglect, hasn’t the girl learned anything? What if she’s not virgin? What if your own daughter has got herself a Brush bastard? Who’s going to marry her then?”
Matja Allina was nursing Paji and staring out the window, her shoulder turned to Polyapo. She twitched like a horse trying to shoo off a troublesome fly. But this fly wouldn’t be twitched away and wouldn’t stop its buzzing. She sighed, shifted around so she was facing Polyapo, moving carefully so she wouldn’t disturb her baby. “Ingva’s no fool.”
“Any girl’s a fool when her blood is up.”
“No. You don’t understand her. She’s got a cool head, my girl has. She knows what she wants, and she’ll get it.”
“Not if word of how she behaves gets out. Even if she is still virgin, who’ll believe it?”
“What’s so wonderful about being wed to some grizzler three times her age? That’s what she’s got to look forward to and you know it, Polyapo Ulyinik. With my history of stillborn sons and daughters, a second wife or a third is all she can hope to be. Hope!”
“What else is there? Poor relation in some other woman’s house? No, running to the Brush. That’s it, isn’t it. That’s what you want for her. Running to the Brush. You didn’t have the nerve to do it yourself, so you want her to.”
“I want her to have what she wants.”
“She’s a child. She doesn’t know what she wants.”
“You’ve said your say, Polyapo Ulyinik. I don’t want to hear any more on this subject.”
“If the Arring knew what you’re doing, he’d be furious.”
“Arring Pirs and I know each other’s thinking quite well. And if I find you bothering him with this when he needs all his mind set on staying alive, you’ll see such anger you’ve never seen before, Polyapo Ulyinik. Must I remind you, it’s only by my forbearance you are not-chal. Hear me, Polyapo, continue to annoy me and you’ll find yourself swearing the oath. Now, get out of here and consider your future carefully.”
Polyapo pinched her lips together and left the room.
Paji whimpered, his milk supply interrupted by the knotting tension in his mother. “That woman, AH! that woman…” Allina rubbed the baby’s back. “Oooh, baby, ooo aaah, lovey yum yum. She drives me wild sometimes. Yes, baba-lirri, Paji-ji, yes my lovey. Kizra, come play me that funny little song, um, that stepchild song, I need something to wash that bitch from my blood.”
Shadith brought the arranga and a cushion across the room, settled herself and began picking out the song. “Step easy, Stepchild,” she sang…
Step easy, Stepchild
Watch where you walkin
It’s wolfdays, Stepchild
Bourghies in your garden
10
As the days grew longer and hotter, Matja Allina napped through the middle of the afternoon, leaving Shadith on her own.
The Grays closed around her.
What is this?
She threw the question at the grayness and got no answer, but she didn’t really need one. Her memories were back, the good and the bad. The Grays were closing round her. When she allowed herself to think, she told herself:
I will die here, still dithering.
It wasn’t as bad as the time in Ginny’s ship when she saw no way out and just started to die.
She knew the way out. She just couldn’t scrape up the energy to take it. She couldn’t plan, she couldn’t go on preparing for the run to Nirtajai, the escape she kept putting off and putting off-all the reasons she found for not leaving were good reasons, logical reasons, but fake.
She slept as much as she could, spent what waking energy she had not-thinking, waiting for the Grays to pass. They would, she knew that, with interference or without, the Grays would go away. Until then, all she could do was stay alive and wait.
Then the tumaks hit them.
##
The Herbmistress had Eeda and Jassy and the rest of the garden chals out before dawn, working in the home gardens, harvesting the first planting of tubers. After the Shearing and the departure of the herds, Matja Mina had, set chal and chapa to getting in all produce mature enough for preserving; she wanted the storage bins and shelves filled as much as possible before the tumaks made working outside the walls too dangerous.
