Shadowkill sq-3, page 7
part #3 of Shadith's quest Series
She glared at Tinoopa. People who were too adept at adapting themselves to circumstances got annoying very fast.
Jassy was awake and talking. “Eh, Eeda, y’ getta look at what Missus was wearing? Homespun or I’m a three leg kumis. Dewi Baik, y’ know what that means. An’ looka this truck. No ottolooms where we goin.” The skinny little woman’s voice rumbled loud enough to drown the other women talking together and the three girls giggling in a corner near the back.
“ Eh-ya, Jass, “ her sister shrilled back at her. “But’s better’n hoein rocks.”
“Betcha we do that, too, huh. Evathin, Eed. Wan’ it, y’ make it. Djauk! ’Tis worse’n Overbite.”
“‘N Overbite were worse’n Kacsa Kypsa.”
“‘N Kacsa Kypsa were worse’n Maoustie. -
They stopped their chant and giggled, then dropped into silence, bored with games they must have played over and over again.
Kizra stared into the dusty twilight and brooded over the bits and fragments she was dredging from her ravaged memory. She got feelings about things and those feelings had to come out of past experience. The experience was no longer there, but it’d left something like a ghost behind. And she knew things. She knew what a world was and that she’d come from another one than this. She could recognize and name a truck, a pellet rifle, all kinds of things. She knew about pregnancy and contract labor, and… gods knew what else. It was confusing and hope-giving, because there was the implicit promise that more and more would come back to her, though she knew enough about mindwipe to understand that absolutely shouldn’t happen. But then something must have gone at least a little wrong in the process because she shouldn’t have known anything at all about mindwipe.
4
The truck slowed, turned onto an even worse road; clouds of dust came up around them.
The sound of the tires changed. The dust fell away. They were on stone.
The truck stopped.
When the back flaps clashed open, the sun glared in; it was low in the west, maybe an hour from setting. The guards standing in the gap were dark pillars with melting outlines.
One of them banged against the side of the truck. “Out,” he bellowed. “Night stop.” He banged some more and kept on yelling. “Houp houp houp, out you napanapas. On your feet. Shithouse round back, got a hole waiting for your dirty asses.”
A limber stick slapped against his arm.
He yelped and swung around.
“The Matja Allina does not permit.” It was a rough, ruined voice, but pleasant despite that, calm and mild. The speaker was a long lean man with a badly scarred face.
“What you on at?”
“Go home, Knarkin, you and your cadre. We are all the guard that Matja Allina alka Pepiyadad needs.”
The guard glowered up at him, hating his need to bend his neck. Standing in the opening at the back of the truck, Kizra cringed as the man’s spite and petty fury came blasting at her. “Wasn’t you hired us, P’murr, was the Artwa.”
“Then you can go lick his boots until your time is up, tirghe. You leave now, you can make the aynti 1pirra before midnight. This aynti is hired to the Matja exclusive. Your choice. Under a bush or 1pirra.”
The guard glanced around. He had his four, but there were at least a dozen men standing relaxed and casual between him and the main house. Three of them started for the truck. He shrugged, hitched up his pants and walked off, his men trailing after him.
His long thick plaits slapping against his back, scarface P’murr swung around, waiting for his men before he spoke. These were very different from the city guards; except for P’murr they were a stockier, hardier breed; only one of them was blond, the rest were a mixed lot of browns and brunets. They wore thick gray homespun trousers stuffed into heavy handmade boots and elaborately smocked shirts. They all carried pellet rifles, ammunition in crossed bandoliers, handguns in holsters on leather belts.
Kizra and the locals stared at each other a moment, then P’murr brushed loose hair from his eyes and smiled at her. “Come on out,” he said, “we’ll be spending the night here.”
##
When the women were standing in a shivery clot beside the truck, he held up a hand. “One thing you need to know right now, nights are dangerous, there are walkers in the dark who’d cut your throat for a pair of boots. This is the only warning I’m going to give you, do what you want about it. For washing and like that, there are facilities around the back. Ilip here, he’ll show you.” He dropped a hand on the young blond’s shoulder. “Do what he tells you. Supper in half an hour.”
5
They were finishing a meal of stew and crusty bread when P’murr came into the barracks room where Ilip had brought them.
“Any of you know aught about birthing?”
Tinoopa looked up. “I do. She comin early?”
“You will address the Irrkuy as Matja Allina, chapa. No, it is only a little over five months, but it is a boy and boys come hard on women here. Anyone else? No? Come with me.”
Tinoopa pulled Kizra up with her. “Might need another pair of hands,” she said. “All right?”
He jerked his thumb at the door, then went out.
##
Matja Allina was sweating, in pain, listening with barely concealed impatience to a long-necked stringed instrument being tortured by a delicately pretty blonde girl sitting on a stool beside the bed.
Tinoopa pushed past P’murr and strode across the room. “Shut up that noise,” she told the girl. “Enough to turn a cat sick. Make yourself useful, scat to the kitchen and have them boil some water, eh? For hot bottles. You got them?”
The girl gaped at her, too startled to say anything.
Tinoopa snorted. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, get some empty bottles, fill ’em and cork ’em and wrap ’em in towels and get ’em up here like five minutes ago. And have the cook heat up some broth. If the Matja don’t need it, cook can drink it herself.”
Before the girl could get out any of the words crowding in her throat, Matja Allina lifted a weary hand. “Do it, Kulyari. Please.”
When Kulyari had flounced out the room, Tinoopa bent over Matja Allina, touched and prodded her, took her pulse, inspected her eyes and her fingernails, talking all the time in a comfortable flow, asking questions, hardly waiting for the answers-as if she knew them before they came.
“… should be examinin your head, comin on a trek like this, ’specially since you’ve lost ’em before. You have, haven’t you, lost ’em this late before?”
“It is woman’s lot,” Matja Mina said. Her words came out with the patness of a lesson long learned, but there was nothing pat or submissive about her face or the rigid set of her body.
Kizra went as pale as the Matja and sweated with her as another spasm of pain seized her.
Tinoopa was feeling nothing but placid interest and cool calculation and the handmaids-there was nothing in them but a pale sympathy. They all seemed opaque, stone figures, while she and the Matja were filled with light, red light, shining pain.
She moved closer to the bed, drawn against her will deeper into that flood of pain.
Matja Allina’s eyes opened wide. They were beautiful eyes, an odd, pale blue-green only slightly darker than polished aquamarine, exotic in her stern lean face. She stretched out her hand and Kizra took it, smiling uncertainly. If this is a two-way link… She thought: peace, calm, accept.
Quiet flowed like cool water through her arm and into Matja Allina, her stiffness and her anger washing away on that flood. Though Kizra couldn’t do anything about the pain, the Matja found it easier to bear now.
Tinoopa looked from one to the other. “A weel a weel, I’d say the trouble’s over this while. Where’s that silly girl with the water? And the soup. Have you eaten, Matja Allina?”
The woman smiled a little, moved her head from side to side. “I didn’t think I could keep anything down. Better to go hungry than start something I couldn’t stop.”
“True enough.” Tinoopa clicked her tongue. “Send someone for that ooba-onk or she’ll take all night. What you need now is warming inside and out.”
“Yes.” Allina turned her head on the pillow, freed her hand gently and beckoned to a short, stocky middle-aged woman standing in the shadows by the door. “Aghilo, you go. See that the soup and the water bottles are brought immediately.” After the woman had bobbed a curtsy and left, Allina folded her hands over the bulge in her middle and looked up at Tinoopa. “She’s a fosterling, Kulyari, youngest daughter of my brother-by-law Utilas ampa Cagharadad. If you don’t know the practice, chapa… what is your name?”
“Tinoopa, Matja
Kizra waited for her to add the rest of it, but Tinoopa said nothing more.
Right. Lesson for the lesser folk, don’t irritate your betters with more than they need to know.
She moved as inconspicuously as she could manage over to the bed table, finishing up with her back against the wall; she had a feeling this wasn’t a great time to attract attention; besides, she wanted a closer look at the instrument lying on the bedtable. Her fingers itched to get at it.
“If you don’t know the practice, chapa Tinoopa, it’s a game of lessening your responsibilities by passing them off to your kin. And you, child, who are you?”
Well, that didn’t work. “Kizra, Matja Allina.” Nervously she ran her fingers along the dark polished wood of the musical instrument, touched the strings with her nails. The wood seemed to caress her fingers, comfort her.
“How did you learn to ease like that?”
“I don’t know, Matja Allina. I have no memories before I woke this morning.”
“I see. May your life be happier here, Kizra Shaman. You touch that arranga as if your fingers remember it though your mind may not. No, no, don’t move away. Try it, see what you can do. I have a fondness for music.” Her mouth twisted. “Though you might not think so from what you heard when you walked in. Sit there.” She pointed at the stool where the blonde girl had been sitting.
Kizra lifted the arranga, held it as she remembered Kulyari holding it. Tentatively she touched the strings, sounding each of them. Yes. Her hands did remember. She closed her eyes, let her fingers walk through a simple tune that quickly grew more complex. Forgetting weariness and fear, she let the music come out of her-until the door banged open, there was a hiss of rage, and Kulyari snatched the arranga from her.
Matja Allina clicked her tongue; her face twisted with anger, then smoothed to a calm mask. “Alka Cagharadad, come here.”
Clutching the arranga to her breasts, the girl went to the bed and stood beside it, sulky and unreceptive.
“Does the arranga belong to you or to me, alka Cagharadad?”
“To the Arring Pirs, Matja Allina.” Kulyari looked smug, her pale blue eyes were hard as stones. “A woman owns nothing but her virtue.”
She hates her, Kizra thought, startled. REALLY hates her.
“Put it on the bedstand, alka Cagharadad.”
Lips compressed in a straight line, Kulyari laid the arranga on the stand. “Don’t expect me to touch it again if that dirt smears her filth on it.”
“That is as it is. Go to bed, alka Cagharadad.”
When she was gone, Matja Allina sighed. “Watch your back, young Kizra; she’ll sink her fangs in you if she can. She’s tried it with me,” a quick smile, rueful, self-deprecating, meant to reduce the force in her words to a proper femininity, “and lost a tooth in the process.” She closed her eyes, sighed wearily, “But she grew it back. So, be careful, Kizra Shaman.” She moved restlessly as Tinoopa drew the covers back, took the flannel-covered stone bottles from Aghilo, and began placing them where the heat would do the most good.
“I have to have this baby,” Matja Allina said; she was talking as much to herself as to them. “I HAVE to. He MUST live.”
Aghilo murmured soothing syllables at her, helped her to sit up and tucked pillows behind her.
“I have two daughters now, but no sons. If this boy dies…” She sighed again, closed her eyes, let Aghilo begin spooning the savory brown broth into her. Between mouthfuls she said, “Play for me some more, please. You were a musician once and will be again, Kizra Shaman. Play.”
6
The convoy moved steadily along a narrow black-topped road, an armored six-wheeled landrover at point with a gatlin fixed to the top and the heavy shields laid flat for the moment to cut wind drag. P’murr and his guards were in this car with a sentry up top under a tarpaulin, long-glasses sweeping the rolling brushland around them.
The second armored landrover followed; it was a bedroom on wheels, air-conditioned and marginally more comfortable than the other vehicles. Matja Allina rode here, protected from the worst of the jolts by a gimbaled bed, plagued mostly by boredom, which Kulyari exacerbated by her sulks and snits. Aghilo and her handmaids were silent women, they had nothing to say (at least, nothing they wanted Kulyari to hear), so they said nothing.
The boxtruck was the last of the vehicles, it rumbled along with numbing steadiness. The women inside slept as they could, the urge to talk dulled by fatigue and the difficulty of making themselves heard above the motor.
Kizra knew them all now, their names, the worlds they came from. Why some of them were here. That some wouldn’t talk about why they were here.
Jassy chattered endlessly, Eeda nodded, laughed, added a word here and there. They were third generation contract labor and knew half a dozen worlds from the ground down and told Kizra interminable tales about them whenever she looked halfway receptive.
Bertem, Luacha, Sabato. They were convicts like Tinoopa, with wild stories about the places they’d been and the scams they’d pulled. Kizra was skeptical, but she enjoyed the stories anyway. They were facile in half a dozen langues and impossibly deft with their tiny three-fingered hands.
Tictoc, Evalee, and Dorrit were cousins from Connafallen, fourteen, fifteen; and sixteen-they’d signed up to get away from neighborhood wars and bride fairs, figuring anything was better than that. So far it was, ah yes it was, or so they told anyone who’d listen.
Anitra was small and so extravagantly fair she, was nearly translucent, silent as the ghost she resembled, expressionless.
Beba Mahl was short, stubby, with faded brown eyes that blinked continually and teared in bright light. Another silent one, she hadn’t uttered a word the whole trip, just sat in the corner by the backflaps looking grim-she was from a forest world and seminocturnal, most comfortable in half-light like that in the truck.
Zhya Arru took the other corner, curled herself up and slept with a determination that Kizra found depressing; she was another blonde, a streaky one with freckles and limber as a snake.
Lyousa va Vogl had braids long enough to sit on and square, busy hands; she sat playing with strings, knotting them into a bag of sorts, doing it for her joy in the complex pattern of bumps rather than the completed object. Kizra watched her with amazement-the woman’s fingers went so fast and so surely it was wonderful to see-and she felt a nudging at her mind as if the knots brought out a memory ghost.
Ommla, Jhapuki, Fraji, Rafiki-friends or cousins or lovers, they sang and chatted in their rapid staccato langue, played finger games and laughed a lot and paid almost no attention to anyone else, four tiny women with the palest of gray-brown hair like ancient dead leaves. Beast handlers, Tinoopa said. She’d come across them before, not this particular tetrad, but their kind. Nomads from a hot dry world called Jinasu.
Ekkurrekah and Yerryayin were tall and bony, with mops of hair like year-old straw-as slow in speech as they were fast in hand, picking flies from the air with a casual ease that amused Tinoopa and amazed Kizra who’d been after a pest buzzing about her eyelashes. She kept slapping her own face without appreciable effect on the fly. Ekkurrekah and Yerryayin were amiable creatures without much to say for themselves. The calluses on their big hands spoke their history for them.
Tamburra the Kiv’kerrinite was the one with hair like burnished copper which she wore twisted into a complex knot on top of her head; she had green eyes, the color deep and clear, cream velvet skin, slowly eroding under the grind of the dust and the thin dry air. She was a woman at the noon of her beauty and so obviously in the wrong place that Kizra ached to ask her what she was doing in this lot. She didn’t ask. Tamburra’s innate dignity and self-containment made questions seem an intrusion and after the woman came awake screaming on the third night of the trip, Kizra decided she really didn’t want to know.
Tsipor pa Prool was a listener. Secretive. Kizra shivered when she caught Tsipor looking at her. She wasn’t sure why, there was nothing but a mild interest radiating from the woman, but it was rather like being watched by a snake.
Vuodee and Vassikka were twin dumplings, plump fair gigglers, a year or two older than the Connafallen cousins. Ordinary girls, neither intelligent nor gifted, just surplus. They giggled together and chattered in an incomprehensible argot but had little to say to anyone else, flushing red and fidgeting if they were directly addressed.
Day after day, same faces, same voices.
They were ground into her like the dust that never settled.
Dyslaera 4: Vivisection
SCENE: Operating theater; the captive Dyslaera as audience in two lines of cages raised head-high above the floor; techs in masks, white robes, white gloves, working at stations about the room, some waiting, some already collecting information from sensors sealed to shaved areas on the heads and bodies of the captives.
The older captives are in the cages on the wall opposite the single entrance.
Rohant: Though his nincs-othran has been drug-diminished, he is detached, sitting like a lump; his health seems good, his bodyfur is sleek, his mane thick and springy.
