Dreams of the Eaten Read online

  Damn it.

  He waded ashore, snatching up his spear and wet clothes as he did, and retreated until he was far enough up on weedy bank to watch the woman and the river simultaneously. They had the advantage this time: his bow was broken now, and they knew it. At the first sign of an attack, he would have no choice but to run for camp, and hope that Weisei could revive the horse in time to make their escape. “Who sent you?”

  She was smart, then, or at least smart enough not to come any closer... though she could have had the courtesy to look him in the eye. “I don’t – nobody. I’m alone.”

  So she was stupid, then, or at least stupid enough to think he’d believe that. “Don’t lie to me,” he said. “You’re not carrying any supplies, no weapons or water-skins or even any shoes, which means that either you’ve left them with your friends, or hidden them somewhere to fool me into giving you some of mine. I won’t do it. Tell your friends that I want MY friends returned to me, alive and unhurt,” well, except for Dulei, obviously, “because if I have to go looking for them, I’m going to –”

  “I don’t have any friends!” she cried, in a voice startlingly near to tears. “I’m lost. I live in Island Town, and I got lost, and I’m trying to go home.”

  At the mention of Island Town, Vuchak wiped his eyes and looked again.

  Yes – yes, actually, this was the same woman. The grave woman, the one who lived in the Burnt Quarter and buried the bodies of unlucky foreigners. A little spot of gold glinted at her neck: that was the holy sign she wore, and there in her arms was the black robe he always saw her in, and those were a firm promise that she was who she claimed to be.

  Vuchak slicked back a soapy strand of hair. “What’s your name?”

  She met his gaze for half a second, but obviously didn’t recognize him. He didn’t expect her to – they’d never spoken – but that was no reason for her to so rudely hold her gaze away from his face. “Día. I serve the First Man of Island Town.”

  That was true. But she also served a more powerful master, one whose hand Vuchak could see clearly now. The grave woman stood there in her white smock – the color of death, their holy color – with her hair falling like a nest of black matted snakes from her head, and the golden glint at her throat making her loyalties perfectly clear: she was a citizen of Island Town, yes – but first and before anything, she was a servant of the Starving God.

  “Please,” she said, as if reading his hesitation, “I can help look for your friends, if you would – if I could just have something to eat.” But still she kept her eyes away from him, as if he were a dog, a menial to receive her words as the garbage pit would receive her waste.

  Well, she might be a witch, but Vuchak wasn’t going to be spoken to like a thrall. “Look at me when you ask me favors!” he snapped.

  She seized his anger and lobbed it straight back at him. “Put your clothes on and I will!”

  Vuchak looked from her stubbornly-turned face down to his undecorated body. Why would he do an idiotic thing like that? His clothes were still wet from washing, he still had the deer’s gut-stink under his fingernails, and soap was still dripping down his back. And why should she care anyway?

  For a moment, he thought she feared what his immodesty might tempt him to do – even though she was strikingly ugly, even though anyone could see that his penis wanted nothing more than to continue hiding from the cold. Then he realized the awful truth. She was one of the Eaten, after all, a servant of the Starving God – the great devourer of wealth, of land, of people, who instilled in his followers a desperate, insatiable appetite for bodies and souls alike. She wasn’t afraid of his lust. She was battling hers.

  Vuchak recoiled. Of all the vile, filthy...

  “Go away,” he said. Better yet: “Go that way.” He lifted his chin to the northeast, and took care to see that she followed the gesture. “Walk until you see the smoke, and follow it until you find a man at the fire. You can explain your business and beg for his charity, but don’t let me find you taking advantage of him, or I will make your god sorry he ever sent you here.”

  She did look at him then, her thick brows and full lips compressed in perplexity. “... Thank you,” she said at last. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.” And she went walking away.

  Vuchak watched her until she was nearly out of sight. This was the safest course, he told himself: if there was even the slightest chance that the grave-woman was working with the fishmen, he had to question her – somewhere out of their sight and hearing.

  So the smoke from the fire would draw her to their camp. The traps he’d set around it would keep her there. And though Vuchak’s teeth itched at the thought of letting this infidel stranger anywhere near his sick, soft-hearted marka, Weisei was still a holy son of Marhuk: she wouldn’t be able to bewitch him or steal his soul, and he had no interest in women. Besides, he had already met her back in Island Town, back when the two of them had worked together to...

  Vuchak stopped still, chilled by a thought that had nothing to do with the cool mountain air.

  She and Weisei had prepared Halfwick’s body, after the hanging.

  The very same Halfwick who had been wandering around yesterday, as clueless and ghastly-looking as one of the unburied dead.

  So that wicked power had not only worked foul magic on Halfwick, but also sent this she-snake after him – and she’d already crossed the river. The Starving God had already infiltrated Marhuk’s domain... and there was no telling what he meant to devour next.

  Vuchak resumed his washing with renewed urgency, trusting the traps to hold her until he got there. If her god was as all-knowing and all-powerful as his followers claimed, it might not work – but if he wasn’t, Vuchak would be pleased to give the Starving God something to choke on.

  WELL, THAT COULD have gone better.

  Día had no idea what that strange, irritable fellow had been thinking of – but if he was as honest as he was peculiar, she would be grateful for him.

  Truly, she was already grateful for him. It had been an awful thing to wake up beside the river, soggy and freezing and alone. More terrible still to realize that she had nothing, literally nothing to her name but her smock and her robe and her knife, and no idea how to use any of those to feed herself. She was so far from home now, the plants strangers to her and the animals keeping their distance. And as for the dog...

  Sobbing, the voice whispered in her head. Snarling. Biting.

  Día shook her head, unable to dispel the echo of that faint, foreign grief, and plunged on through the shrubs. The rusty grasses nipped and tickled at her shins; clouds of crickets blossomed around her bare feet, their panic punctuated by the occasional crispy squish of those she crushed thoughtlessly underfoot. Día had no time for disgust or remorse: after uncounted days spent lost and hallucinating in the desert, she was nothing now but a wisp, a strand torn and dangling from the thin, tenuous web of human civilization.

  She should not have taken such a tone with that other strand back there, naked and angry as he was. Modesty was a virtue, but so was discretion. So was patience. So was –

  – food.

  Día smelled it first: the most heavenly, savory scent. Then she saw the promised sign: a shimmering column of smoke. Then she broke into a run.

  But not a run, she chastised herself, not unless she meant to be shot for an intruder. A walk – a very, very purposeful walk – even as the air promised her roasting meat and hot fat, even as her stomach threatened to cave in on itself. Please pardon my intrusion, she mentally rehearsed, plowing heedlessly through rabbitbrush and sedge, but your very-kind companion at the river said that perhaps you would allow me to earn a share of your meal. Her heel sank into a granular softness that might have been an ants’ nest; she hurried on. I would be glad to help you look for your friends, or to explain my business to your satisfaction, or to sit quietly and say nothing at all. The sodden black cassock over her arm caught on a mesquite branch; she tore it from the thorny wooden finger
s without changing her course or her fixation on that tantalizing little camp on the hill, and you have my most potent promise that I will keep my attention on whatever part of you politeness demands, taking absolutely no notice of your clothing or lack thereof –

  That thought ended in tandem with her next step: in sudden, searing sharp pain. Día jerked her foot up with a half-strangled gasp – bringing a six-inch cactus arm with it.

  “Vichi?” From the campfire up ahead, a blanket-wrapped figure stood up. He was tall, with black hair spilling down his back, and so beautiful that Día might have mistaken him for a her if she hadn’t been told otherwise.

  The needles in her flesh were enough to rip the prepared words from Día’s throat like the cry of a woman in childbed. “Please pardon my –”

  “Don’t move!”

  They spoke at the same time, and stopped at the same time, and as he rushed toward her, Día gathered her wits enough to look down and understand his frantic gesturing – even if she couldn’t fathom what sadistic trickster would break off dozens of cactus branches and hide them in the dirt.

  Then again, thinking back to her encounter at the river, maybe she could.

  It hurt like the very devil, too. Struggling to balance herself on just the toes of her wounded foot, Día glanced down and winced. Some kind of cholla, with spines as thin and abundant as razor-fine cat-hair.

  “Fire child? Is that you?”

  Día glanced up at the strange name. She had been called that once by someone-or-other, a lifetime ago in Island Town.

  “Weisei!” It started as a question, and finished as a declaration of perfect astonishment – just before he closed the last of the distance between them.

  Weisei cupped his hands behind her neck and drew her forward until their foreheads touched. “By every god, what are you doing out here?” he said, looking her up and down with an expression knee-deep in shock and alarm. “How did you – no, nevermind. Come here, come right here and let me have your arm – we’ll have three legs to get us to the fire just there, and then see to your poor lady foot.” He hissed in surprise as she laid her arm across his shoulder. “Tsa! And your dress is all wet, and your hair! What’s been done to you? Wait, hold on – don’t step there...”

  He went on like that as he helped her hobble towards the fire, demanding answers and then cutting himself off before she could begin to give them. It was endearing and faintly odd – but the camp before them was strange beyond imagining.

  There was a stone-lined fire pit, and a grate set over it to roast the meat – so much meat! – but that was where Día’s understanding of woodcraft ended. Three gnarled branches made a huge tripod over the fire, and halfway up its length, resembling nothing so much as a thick, haphazard flesh-web stretched wide above the fire, was the most improbable array of rope and buckled leather, every inch of it drooping with strips of raw meat. Little offal-filled pans perched precariously here and there, like pie-tins set out under a leaky roof, while a kettle sat half-buried in the ashes. The small bloodied carcass off to the left suggested that a deer had contributed the meat... and the huge, still-intact one on the right implied that the drying rack had been rigged from the harness of a dead horse.

  Día stared at the shapely half-ton black corpse, working hard to assure herself that no living animal would lie like that. Then she belatedly drew her attention back to Weisei, who had apparently reached the end of his verbal chain reaction.

  “... what in the World That Is happened to you?”

  She could have asked him the same. He was still tall and handsome and as dark as she was, with the same high cheeks and large eyes and prominent eagle nose she remembered. But if he had been thin when she’d met him back in town, he was positively gaunt now, with dark hollows under his eyes and collarbones protruding like the inside of a chicken’s ribs. Día could feel frail skin sliding over his thin shoulders, even through his clothes. He strained under a fraction of her weight.

  And selfish as she was, that was not even her first question. “I’ll be glad to tell you everything, all of it, if I could just – if you would be so kind as to let me eat with you.” Her voice thickened uncontrollably as she said it, not from the prickling fire lancing her foot, but because even acknowledging the possibility of a ‘no’ frightened her to tears.

  But the answer assured her of what she should have already known: God was good, and Weisei was kind. “Of course, of course – oh, and you’re so cold! Come here, come right over here and lay your dress by the fire. We don’t have any hot tea – it’s tallow in the kettle – but there’s a warm space for sitting just here, and by the time Vichi comes back, the food will be ready and we’ll all eat together, and I promise we won’t let you leave until your foot is mended and your stomach has had everything she wants.”

  As he talked, he helped her to that strange rickety flesh-tent of theirs, lay her cassock at the downwind edge of it, and brought her to sit on the opposite side. It took a bit of ducking and scooting to get her back to the fire without disturbing the meat hanging above her head, and a moment more to find her self-control amidst that enchanting, intoxicating food-smell. She was a civilized person, she told the ravenous want inside her, and a guest besides: she would eat what she was served and when, and entertain nothing but gratitude in the meantime.

  She was grateful for his hospitality. She was grateful for the sharpened clamshell he produced, and for the exquisite gentleness with which he tweezed out each one of those thin, vicious cactus spines. And when he was done, he offered his hand to help her stand again, to satisfy himself that he’d gotten them all and that she could walk well again, and when THAT was done, there was nothing left to prevent her from satisfying his curiosity.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to let go of Weisei’s hand – and he didn’t ask her to. He sat with her under the meat-heavy makeshift tripod, sharing a kindly silence, letting her drink in the warmth of his palm and the feel of his fingers and the reassuring closeness of her chestnut skin to his mahogany, and did not press her for anything.

  And that was a feast in itself.

  Here at last was someone who was not a mereau or an animal or a corpse – not an amphibious foster-parent or a dangerous furry god-creature or a body needing to be cleaned or buried or pulled from a festering pond. He was alive. He was human. And here, with pieces of the unliving and the inhuman literally hanging over their heads, the space they occupied together made a warm, living oasis – a comforting human microcosm taking shelter under death and all the empty heavens.

  AND THAT WAS how he found them. Just sitting there holding hands, backs to the fire, silent and still as the meat burned on the grill behind them.

  “I told you to watch it!” Vuchak snapped, momentarily more aggrieved at the neglect of the meal than the possibility that the woman actually had managed to bewitch Weisei.

  They startled at his voice, jostling the tripod overhead – and then steadying it by Weisei’s quick intervention. “I WAS watching it! I just...” He looked Vuchak up and down. “... why are you wearing wet clothes?”

  Vuchak shot a glance at the woman, and went to rescue the food.

  She blanched and looked down, and Weisei took that as his cue to switch to Marín and make the introductions. “Anyway,” he said, “this is... oh, forgive me...”

  Well, it wasn’t really burnt, anyway – just a bit on the well-fired side. “Día,” Vuchak supplied as he turned the meat, his irritation abating. “And yes, we’ll feed her, but don’t tell her our business – yet,” he added, on seeing Weisei open his mouth to protest.

  And as the woman sat there confused and anxious amidst ambient dinner-smells and a language she couldn’t understand, Vuchak made himself the source of all remedies. “I’m sorry for being rude to you earlier,” he said, and managed to mean it. He had thought about this on the walk back: she was strange and untrustworthy, but that was all the more reason for the two of them to be gracious. For one thing, it would dispose her to speak op
enly, and for another, this was Marhuk’s land, and Vuchak and Weisei were his people: if their god had deliberately invited hers into his domain, then they had better be good hosts.

  “Not at all,” she assured him – and if she resented him for not warning her about the cactus traps, it was nowhere on her face. “The fault was mine. Thank you for your kindness, Vichi.”

  Vuchak stared death at Weisei, who had just enough sense to hide his face in chagrin. That infantile nickname should have died on the day that Vuchak became a man – and yet Weisei kept it alive like an incontinent housepet, too full of childish sentimentality to let go of the embarrassing old thing.

  The woman saw that she had made a mistake, and began to stammer an apology. So Vuchak smoothly took the pan with the deer-brain from where it had been kept warm above the fire, and held it out to her with a nice smile.

  “You might find ‘Vuchak’ easier to pronounce – and you’re very welcome. I’m afraid we don’t have any intestine to offer you,” he said, and declined to mention that this was because he’d stolen the deer carcass from a pack of coyotes, who had eaten the best of it already. “Would you like the brain instead?”

  She wouldn’t, of course – the Eaten never did. But now she was too busy avoiding new rudeness to worry any more about the old one, which Vuchak would count as first-rate hospitality on his part. And she did a surprisingly good job of keeping her face straight as she demurred. “I wouldn’t like to deprive you of the best fruits of your labor,” she said. “Please, keep what you intended for yourself, and I’ll be content with whatever is to spare.”

  So she did have some manners after all. Vuchak passed the brain to Weisei, who knew better than to complain about receiving such a treat, and speared the most handsome of the steaks with a kindling-stick for their guest’s better pleasure. When she took it, he could see her struggling with the ravening, unholy hunger inside her – fighting to keep herself from wolfing it down on the spot.