Farseed, page 16
She would have to hunt soon. They still had some of their meat left, but she did not want to wait until it was all eaten. She had hoped that they would be farther north by now, where it might be safer to build a fire.
Nuy halted. “We should stop for a while,” she said. “I can hardly see where to put one foot in front of another.” She squatted and sat on her heels while the dark forms of her companions sank to the ground. It came to her then that she could not be that far from the place where she had first seen Bonnie and Tonio. She had seen the cliff that loomed over the river against the sky, a black pillar in the distance, before the clouds had begun to thicken. She thought of how much had changed for her since she had hidden there.
“Is a storm coming?” Bonnie asked, sounding worried.
Nuy looked up at the sky as she sniffed the air, which smelled of grass and reeds and water and mud. The wind was picking up a little, but she could not smell even a trace of salt on the air, as she would have at this distance from the sea if a storm were approaching from the south.
“Those aren’t storm clouds,” she replied. “It might rain later on, but even that’s not likely.”
They sat in silence for a while, and then Tonio said, “It’s good that we left the place you found for us, Nuy, but I don’t know if I’m strong enough to make it all the way back.”
Nuy shook her head. “You think too far ahead,” she said. “Don’t think further ahead than the next day. Then, when that day comes, think only of the one after that. String enough days together like that, and you’ll find yourself back at your settlement.”
“I don’t know if I can do it. You and Bonnie would have a better chance if you went on by yourselves.”
“You said that when I first found you,” Nuy said, “and here you are, so don’t say it again.”
“I was just about to tell him the same thing,” Bonnie said.
“You chances would be better if—” he began.
“We’re sticking together.” Bonnie interrupted.
Nuy stared into the darkness. A distant light flickered for an instant. At first she thought that her eyes might be deceiving her, and then she glimpsed the tiny speck of light once more. A fire, she thought; someone else was up ahead, perhaps her father and his people. She did not dare to hope that people from the north might be there.
“Keep still,” Nuy said in a low voice. “I think I saw a fire upriver just now.” She heard Bonnie suck in her breath. “If my father is there, we’re in danger.”
“Our people,” Bonnie whispered. “It might be our people. They might have come looking for us after all.”
“Perhaps,” Nuy hissed, “but if so, they’re in danger, too, sitting there as they are. If I can see their fire, so can others.”
“What should we do?” Tonio said softly.
She thought for a moment. “I want both of you to creep toward the river and into the water, then hide among the reeds,” she said at last. “They’re thick enough to conceal you, but keep still, and with only your heads above the water. I’ll find out who made that fire and then come back for you.”
“I don’t like it,” Tonio whispered.
“Listen to me. If that fire was made by my people, my father might be ready to welcome me again. I’ll do everything I can to keep him from spotting me, but if he does, it’s likely to go better for me with him than it would for either of you. There’s a chance he’ll take me back. He’d kill you.” She untied the sack from her back that held meat and thrust it at Tonio. Another thought came to her. “I’m leaving my weapon with you.” She pulled her stun gun from the belt of her loincloth and pressed it into Bonnie’s hands. “You may need it, and if my father sees it, he’ll know that someone else gave it to me, that more of your people might have come south.”
“Now I really don’t like this,” Tonio said.
She knew what he meant. If anything happened to her, he and Bonnie would have to fend for themselves.
“I’m going,” she said. “If I’m not back by morning, keep yourselves hidden. If I’m not back by evening, you’ll have to decide what to do by yourselves.” She could do no more for them. Knowing that made her ache with weariness and despair.
She crept away from the river, moving east and then north. The darkness that concealed her was also making it nearly impossible to see what lay in front of her. Her other senses would have to guide her.
She moved through the grass slowly, keeping low, feeling her way with her bare feet and sniffing the air and stopping from time to time to listen. Once she heard a distant sound like that of a human voice, but maybe it was only the wind, which was picking up. Good, she thought; the wind would mask the sound of her movements.
She came to a gentle slope in the ground. She kept moving until the gentle incline had grown into a steep hill and she could sense the presence of someone not far away. She would spy on whoever was camped by the river from above, from the side of the cliff. The ground underfoot was growing harder, the grass more sparse, telling her that she was nearing the cliff. The night was so dark that she was almost upon the wall of rock before she saw it looming above her.
She had climbed this face before, and this side of the cliff was not as steep as the side that overlooked the river. She climbed slowly, feeling for the handholds in the rock that she remembered, halting every so often to rest. Her shoulders and arms ached by the time she was near the top.
Someone was there, just above her on top of the cliff. She heard a soft sound then, a sound between a breath and a gasp, and flattened herself against the rock, willing herself to keep still. Someone was keeping watch from up here.
Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness. She looked up and saw the hazy faint light of one of the moons through the clouds; the darkness might not conceal her for too much longer. She could smell something now, something familiar; the odors of dust and sweat mingled with a faint scent of reeds.
Nuy held her breath, pulled herself slowly up to the edge of the rocky surface, and peered over the top.
Two people were there, sitting near the opposite edge of the cliff, their backs to her. The small human shapes were barely visible. Her body tensed painfully as her fingers clawed rock. The two were as naked as she was, and one of them held a spear.
Belen and Carin, she thought, and yet they seemed unaware of her presence. Her heart beat so hard inside her that she was sure the two must hear it. Nuy pulled into herself, afraid to breathe, knowing that the slightest movement might give her away.
“Go to sleep,” Belen’s voice said, and Nuy stiffened. He had said the same words to her many times in the same contemptuous way. Go to sleep. Fetch the water. Get me some meat. Be quiet even if I hurt you when I do it. She had been unable to fight against him, knowing that he would read her intentions in her face or smell them on her body before she could act. He always seemed able to sense her rage against him even before her anger broke into her own thoughts. The only way she had been able to escape him was to go off by herself until loneliness and the need for others like herself finally drove her back to her people.
“I don’t know if I can sleep.” That was Carin, and Nuy heard a quaver in her voice. Perhaps Belen was doing the same things to Carin that he had once done to her. Nuy’s rage caught like a stone in her throat, but she calmed herself, afraid that Belen would smell her anger.
“Go to sleep.” She saw Belen raise his arm then, and the other shadowy shape shrank back.
They might be up here to keep watch while her father and the rest of the band stayed below, but somehow she did not think so. Her father would have no reason to send someone up here to keep watch to the east, the west, or the south. A fire would keep any predators away, and anyone coming downriver would be in sight long before he came to the camp. So the people at the base of the cliff had to be more people from the north.
Nuy pulled herself up slowly until the shelf of the rocky surface met her belly, then lay there with her feet poking over the edge. If Belen and Carin were here, then where were the rest of her father’s people? Until she found out, she could not risk making her way back down the cliff and going back to fetch Bonnie and Tonio. She might reunite them with their people only to see them attacked by her father. Whatever weapons those camped below might have, Ho would have the advantage if he could surprise them.
One of the dark forms slumped toward the surface. Carin, it seemed, was obeying Belen and going to sleep.
“I wish he hadn’t—” Carin’s soft voice trailed off.
“I wish he hadn’t, either,” Belen said, “but if he was going to do it, he should have made sure he got all of them. I told him there was a third one there, I could feel it, I could smell it, but he wouldn’t listen.”
“Maybe you were wrong. I didn’t sense anyone else there.”
“I wasn’t wrong, and maybe you were too far back.” In spite of his words, Belen sounded uncertain. Maybe his senses were failing him. That would account for why he had not picked up on her presence.
“Will he—” Carin paused.
“Will he what?” Belen responded.
“Will he do the same thing to them he did to those others?” There was fear in her voice.
“Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. He and Owen didn’t leave me much to do except poke them with my spear and make sure they were dead.”
Carin said, “I wish Ho hadn’t killed them.”
Who had her father killed? Other members of his own band? No, that was impossible. Nuy lay there, unable to move as her thoughts raced.
“He had no choice,” Belen said.
“He did.” Nuy was surprised at the tone of defiance in Carin’s voice. “Ho can say all he wants to about those people bringing death with them, but I don’t believe it and I don’t think you do, either. We’re the ones who bring death, not the people from the north.”
“You shouldn’t say that,” Belen murmured, and now Nuy heard the fear inside him.
“I wouldn’t say it to Ho. I can’t do anything about what he thinks or does anyway. But I can say it to you. Those people were no real danger to him, and I think you know that as well as I do. They didn’t have to die. It was horrible, what he did. The one Nuy was bringing to us didn’t have to die, either.”
Carin was talking about strangers, not her own people. Ho had attacked and killed more people from the north.
“He shouldn’t have sent Nuy away,” Carin went on. “We should have gone looking for her ourselves and brought her back with us. He couldn’t have refused to welcome her back, and maybe she could have kept him from—”
“Be quiet.”
“It’s almost like she’s here,” Carin said. “Don’t you feel it?”
“She’s dead, she has to be dead. She couldn’t still be alive, she would have come back to us if she were, or found some way to let you and me and Sarojin know she was still alive.”
“Then maybe it’s her ghost, haunting us.”
“Shut up,” Belen whispered.
Carin had sensed her presence after all. Nuy forced herself to keep still. Carin and Belen’s senses had not failed them; all that was shielding Nuy from discovery now was that they believed her to be dead.
“Maybe she could have stopped her father from killing them,” Carin said.
“And maybe they’re better off dead. Without what we took from them, they wouldn’t have lasted that long anyway. You saw how feeble a fight they put up, why, it was no fight at all.”
Confused as she was, Nuy was beginning to put together what must have happened. A group of northerners had come downriver, perhaps looking for Bonnie and Tonio, and her father had killed them. Now she did not know what to do.
“Killing the people down there might not be so easy,” Carin said. “For one thing, there are more of them.”
Nuy tensed. Then those camped down below at the base of the cliff were indeed Bonnie’s and Tonio’s people, not her own.
“We’ve got two more of their weapons,” Belen replied, “and if they’re as meek and unprepared as the other ones were, we won’t have any trouble with them.”
“So you mean to go to Ho and tell him more of those people have come here?”
“Of course. What did you expect? He didn’t leave us here just to watch them for a while and then do nothing.”
“He’ll come here and try to kill them, too,” Carin said, and then she suddenly sat up. “What’s the point of that? Are you going to let Ho tell you what to do forever?” She did not sound like herself, or all that intimidated by Belen. Nuy realized then that she had made a mistake by leaving the stun weapon with Bonnie and Tonio. By now, she could have immobilized both of them.
“What would you do instead?” Belen asked.
“I’d go down there and take the chance that they wouldn’t harm us. The other ones weren’t ready to fight, were they? These strangers probably aren’t, either. So what I’d do is go down there and find out why they came here and eat some of their food while I was talking to them, and maybe I could even convince them to give us one of their weapons.”
“And what good would that do?”
“Think about it,” Carin said. “You’d be more than a match for Ho with one of those weapons. He wouldn’t have the advantage anymore, and you’d know when his guard is down, when he’d be most vulnerable. You could be our leader.”
Belen drew in his breath. “The others might be willing to follow me after that,” he said, “but Owen wouldn’t.”
“With the weapon,” Carin said, “you could get rid of Owen, too.”
This was what Carin had come to, Nuy thought, plotting murder with Belen, planning for the death of Nuy’s father, and Belen was listening to her, and yet there was some justice and rightness in her words.
“And then,” Carin continued, “you’d lead and we could trade with the northerners the way we once did. Maybe we could even live among them. Life would go a lot easier for us after that.”
“You’re forgetting one thing,” Belen said. “Two of the northerners are dead. Sooner or later the others will find out about that. They might not want to trade with us afterwards. They might even decide to come after us.”
Carin was silent for a few moments. “We can say that it was only Ho and Owen who did it,” she said at last. “It was their idea, after all, and they were the ones who did the killing. We could say whatever we like, and no one in our band would say anything else.”
Was this the Carin she had known? Nuy asked herself. Something had changed her. Maybe it was being with Belen; perhaps it was because Nuy had not been with her to look out for her and Sarojin. She could even understand why Carin would wish for Ho’s death. Nuy thought of all the times she had longed for the father she dimly recalled from her childhood, the one who would tell her stories and show her kindness, if only intermittently. Now it seemed that her longing for that past father who no longer existed was only a way of hiding her own desire to be rid of the man he was now.
“We could wait until morning,” Carin went on, “and then we can make our way down there and talk to them. They’ve got food, Belen, more food than we’ve had in a long time. And they’ve got those weapons. All you need is one of them and—”
“No,” he said in a raspy voice, “it’s too risky. They might not give us anything, they might want nothing to do with us. I say we leave at dawn and report to Ho and let him decide what to do, and if he decides to attack, we can take everything, including all of their weapons. It won’t be just Ho and Owen holding on to all of the stunners after that and deciding who gets one, I’ll make sure I get one of my own. And then we can start thinking about how to put Ho out of the way.”
Carin said nothing to that, but Nuy could see her reluctance to give in to him in her rigid back and hunched shoulders.
“You know that makes more sense,” he went on. “It might be better to lead them into a trap, too, instead of attacking. Maybe I’ll suggest that to Ho.”
The sky was growing lighter. Nuy could now make out the braid hanging down Belen’s back. She would have to move now, try to disable Belen and hope that Carin would either come to her aid or at least stay out of it.
She raised herself on her arms, preparing to sneak up on Belen, and then he said, “Somebody’s here, behind us.” He jumped to his feet, spun around before she could get to her feet, covered the space between them before she could take another breath, then leaped at her. Her arms flew up, catching him as he fell on her. She tried to pinch the hard muscular flesh under one of his arms; he knocked her hand away. She could see his face now, looking pale in the dim light of the larger moon.
“Nuy,” he said, “so you are alive, you’re not a ghost.” She wondered how she had given herself away; he might have heard her move, or smelled her in the air. He grabbed her braid, yanking her head back painfully. “Thought you were dead, I was sure you were dead. What are you doing here, Nuy?” She tried to think of what to say. “Think Ho’s ready to take you back? Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. He’s so crazy now nobody knows what he’ll do.” He let go of her braid and pinned her, pressing her shoulders hard against the rock. She brought up one leg; her knee caught him in the back. He let out a moan and let go of her for a moment.
“Carin,” Nuy gasped, “help me.”
Belen grabbed at her legs. She rolled away from him; her hands clutched air. The realization that she was near the edge of the cliff came to her an instant before a kick caught her in the ribs and sent her over the side.
She was falling. She was about to scream when a flat surface slammed against her, knocking the air out of her. She lay there against the rock, afraid to move and unable to breathe. There was a buzzing sound in her ears. She swallowed hard and the buzzing grew more muted. She managed to take a breath.
