Dave Duncan - West of January

“How do you know about my knees?” I asked warily.

Just when I had decided that he would not reply, he uttered a curious little gasping sigh and said, “The lady told me she was buying a wetlander, but his knees were damaged.”

“How many wetlanders are there here?”

“Just me. And now you.”

My heart sank at the news. I had hoped for more company. But conversely this stranger must be very glad to have me join him.

“I am Quetti.” His voice was muffled by the hood, but there was also an odd quality to it that I could not place.

“Knobil.”

“That is not a wetlander name.”

“My father was a wetlander, I think. My mother was of the herdfolk.”

“That explains…” He paused again, this time for longer. Again he sighed. “That explains your size.”

“What about my size?”

“You are too big for a wetlander. We are slighter.”

I thought of Orange-brown-white, the ants’ captive and the only wetlander I had ever met. He had been a slim small man. “My mother was little, though.”

“Herdwomen bear large sons.” The curious quality in my companion’s voice was a jumpiness, a quaver. “You’re as big as Shisisannis!” He sounded annoyed at that.

I had believed myself a dwarf in my youth, but now I knew I was as tall as the men of most races. Swimming, and then slavery, had given me fair bulk, so what he said was perhaps true, but why did it matter?

“Who are those people, the ones dressed like us?”

“Snakemen. Swampmen. A couple of treefolk.”

“But why are they being kept covered?”

“It is better to be out of doors than shut up in the pens.”

“She just sent Ing-aa to the pens. What—”

“I saw. But he will be of little use at pasture. The lady has told me often: Small as I am, to her I am worth fifty like Ing-aa.”

“And me also?” I asked cautiously.

“More, I suppose,” he agreed grumpily, his tone showing a trace of the jealousy I had expected in Shisisannis and Ing-aa. “There is more of you.”

My questions were not bringing me much wisdom. How much time did I have to cross-examine this cryptic Quetti? Could I trust whatever he might tell me? I glanced out at the spinster. She was near the end of the row, embracing one of the snakemen. “How does she do that?” I asked. “Can she really reward so many men with her favors?”

Quetti chuckled dryly under his hood. “She rewards them mostly with promises. And pretty ribbons. Shisisannis, sometimes…” Again a long pause, another sigh. “The rest of us rarely get more than words. Even me! Um-oao and Ah-uhu do better, I think.”

So Ayasseshas was largely a tease? That made the men’s ensorcellment even more incomprehensible. Or did it? “I don’t understand!”

“You will.”

“And no one has ever told me what a spinster wants with wetlanders.”

He grunted. “Do you know why they are called spinsters?”

“Not even that.”

“Then you—” He choked. “Wait!” I heard a foot tapping, and he seemed to shrink slightly. He was breathing hard.

“What’s wrong?” I asked as the silence lengthened. “Are you ill?”

He shook his head but did not speak, and he was curiously hunched. I rolled over on my belly and levered myself upright. I took a couple of rolling steps toward him, but he held up a hand, draped in its too-long sleeve. He made his curious heavy breathing noise again, and relaxed.

“You’re in pain!” I said.

“Of course.” He seemed proud that I had not realized sooner.

I shook my hands free from my sleeves, reached out to unfasten his hood and push it back so I could see what he looked like. He did not resist, but he stared up at me resentfully.

He was barely more than a boy, his mustache downy, his beard too faint to hide the dimple in his chin. A mop of golden waves framed a thin, rather sulky face. His eyes were a pale, pale blue, like the far end of the sky.

I had thought I was light-colored after my long confinement in Misi’s cab, but Quetti’s skin was as white as raw fish, marked with a single tattoo, a red snake as wide as my finger, running from his hairline, down between his eyes, and then curving off across his cheek to vanish under one ear. It stood out starkly on his pallor, uglier even than the tattoos on the dark snakemen.

I offered my hand. He hesitated, then pulled back a sleeve to respond, but he did not return my smile. His fingers were long and delicate—and white—but I felt the remains of fading calluses.

“How did you come here?” I asked.

“I was a pilgrim. I was caught by—uhhhh!”

He hunched his shoulders, screwed up his eyes, and twisted back his lips to show clenched teeth. I saw sweat break out on his face, and this time he could not suppress groans. Not just pain—the kid was in agony. His white skin seemed to go even whiter, and I wondered if he was about to faint. My own heart began to pound, but whether from sympathy for him or rising terror for myself, I was not sure. Then Quetti released his breath in one of those long gasps I had heard earlier and opened his eyes.

I reached out to steady him.

“Don’t touch me!” His pallor had turned to pink under my stare, and he scowled. “That was a bad one!” He was defensive, ashamed of displaying weakness.

“Then…sit down,” I said, gesturing at one of the chairs.

“I can’t. Not just at the moment.”

“Why not, for Heaven’s sake?”

“Because I have other, more important uses for…” He closed his eyes again, but the fit was briefer and less severe. By now I was sweating also.

“What happened to your face?” The, wide red band was not a tattoo. It was a raw, weeping sore, as if a long strip of skin had been ripped right off. Where it reached his scalp, the hair had gone also, leaving a narrow canyon only partly concealed by his golden waves.

He raised his cotton-fluff eyebrows, showing ironic amusement at my ignorance. “A graze.”

“God!” What was hidden under that robe? “You’ve been flogged?”

“Flogged?” He laughed. “I wish I had. So what happened to your knees, herdman?”

“An ant held them on an anvil, and a blacksmith smashed them with a sledgehammer.”

“You don’t have much luck, do you?”

“It got me out of the ants’ nest.”

“You should have stayed.”

I was about to ask why when Quetti turned his head. I followed his gaze and saw that the inspection was over. Ayasseshas was approaching across the gravel with her two bodyguards at her heels. The men who had brought me were running off across the muddy compound, dismissed.

“Those two with her…”

“Ah-uhu and Um-oao,” Quetti said. “The pride of my lady’s herd.”

I had thought Ing-aa to be a giant, but these two snakemen could have made three of him. Their black skins shone in the sun, oiled to show the ripple of their muscles, while their high red feather headdresses emphasized their height. Heavy gold chains around their waists supported brief pagnes of shimmering, translucent water silk, and they had gold bands on their arms and legs. Wide-bladed swords flashed at their sides. A woman who collected men could have found no more impressive specimens, nor have displayed them more outrageously.

And the spinster herself… I had been avoiding looking at this terror, but as she mounted the steps to the porch, I forced my eyes to their duty. She was a snakewoman, dark skinned and stocky. Her shiny black hair was tightly braided and piled on top of her head, pinned tight and decorated with yellow butterflies. From neck to golden sandals, her robe of many-hued water silk iridesced and flickered, but it did not mask the snake tattoos in blue and red that writhed over her belly, squirming up from between her thighs in coils and curves, ending in fanged jaws poised to engorge her nipples. More red and blue serpents wriggled upon her neck and face.