Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

He heaved up, gasping for a breath in sheets of spray – slid down the line with the river, and struck a softer thing than stone.

A narrow hand… wiry arms came round to grapple, and Baj felt the girl's lean smallness buckle to him – saw as they both rose riding a spume of water, her face contorted with terror, and called "I have you, sweetheart…" By which he meant nothing personal.

They spun and rode together, and Baj kicked to try to turn them so she struck no rocks. He saw a flashing in the surf, and was surprised to see the knife still in his right hand. It reminded him what it was for, and as they whirled along, Baj steadied with that motion, didn't fight against it – and in the spinning through foam and noise, reached quite easily behind the girl, found the whip end of the line tugging… tugging them along, and sliced the bundle free.

… Then, much easier, the taut leather stretching from distant Richard by a distant tree, they slowly struggled swinging nearer and nearer to that bank, until Baj got to his feet – bare feet with no feeling – stood battered by crashing water… and step by step, the girl clinging, aiding, marched through shallower clear streaming water to pebbles and the sand.

… They found the pack-bundle by nearly night, stranded on a stony bar two miles downstream, only a fairly dangerous swim from the north bank. Errol went and roped it for hauling over.

All was there, Nancy'd knotted it together so tight and well. All there – though soaked as the arrows' fletching – and needing a drying fire, the steel blades wiped and tallowed.

That night, aching and bruised in exhausted sleep, Baj dreamed not of water, but of his First-mother, though he'd never known her, though she'd been murdered when he was a baby – murdered as it was now intended for other mothers to be murdered. The details, in his dream, were vaporous as smoke, but the sorrow hard as iron.

The Lady Ladu… He'd seen no portrait of her, had – as he grew – met no older Kipchak merchant or mercenary officer who'd been so privileged at Caravanserai as to have met the wife of the Khan Toghrul. Only the old librarian, Lord Peter, had been able to describe her to him, and that when he was already a young man… So, for all his childhood in the court of the Achieving King, Baj had imagined his First-mother as lithe and beautiful, a black-haired slant-eyed queen, ferocious… but tender toward him, and loving.

He had still been a little boy, when he was first shown a man's severed head – its pigtailed hair floating, its ruined eyes half-open, bobbing in the vodka filling a large blown-glass jar. It had been his first sight of such a thing, and the only time King Sam had burdened a child with such.

"It was necessary, Bajazet, that this was brought for you to see. It is what is left of the man Manu Ek-Tam, who betrayed your First-father's memory, murdered your mother and your father's friends, then threatened the peace of the Rule."

The king had tossed a cloth over the thing.

"- Now, you need not waste an hour of your days on vengeance… but only reflect on your First-father's intelligence, courage, and competence in command… and the love your mother and your father's friends certainly felt for you." The king had gripped Baj's shoulder so hard it hurt. "The love we, your Second-family, also feel."

The child Baj had dreamed that night – though instead of his imagined superb First-mother, only a plump, plain woman, seeming to him a nanny or nurse, appeared hovering over, smiling, in the faintest of baby memories.

The old librarian, in description so many years later, had confirmed that dear one as his mother, at last.

Someone was gently tapping the tip of her nose, and Patience slowly woke to it. Woke to hear someone calling, in the distance… chicken-birds clucking nearer…

"So fortunate, at least for the now." A high, chuckling woman's voice.

Patience opened her eyes to see a low ceiling of clay and wattle-stick… then a hugely fat woman sitting half-naked beside her in a heap of marbled flesh, great bare breasts, and the tufted red plumage of a feathered kilt. The woman had pleasant brown eyes, a button nose… a small pursed mouth with a drift of down across her upper lip.

"How… am I fortunate?" Patience wouldn't have recognized her voice; it sounded thin as string.

"Fortunate that handsome Pete Aiken, spared by you, is Chad's sister's only son." The woman's small mouth hardly moved as she spoke.

"All right," Patience said, though she knew none of them. "My… shoulder."

"I fitted it more perfectly into place while you slept, then souped, and slept again." Fat hands and huge, white, bare arms mimed the adjustment, then bandaging. "- I strapped it tight, though not too tight. Gave it its best chance… but…"

"But?" It seemed to Patience her voice now began to sound like hers.

"But damage done. In-and-out of joint, tears matters."

Patience lay still on what felt like stacked sheepskins. The hut held very little light. "Damage…"

"The arm is breathing blood, but is a little cool; its message-strings are hurt."

"How hurt?" Certainly now her voice.

"Unlikely hurt to withering. Perhaps hurt to a little weakness forever."

Patience stopped breathing, as if that might stop time for a moment. A left-handed woman – with a weak left hand. A crippled woman, crippled Person, with work still to do. "How certain are you?" The Shrikes killed their cripples…

"Certain as I can be," the fat woman said. "And I am a Catanianite, a scientific doctor." She leaned forward, lifted Patience like a child, and presented a clay bowl to her lips.

"I knew her son."

"Whose?"

"Catania Olsen's son. She was his Second-mother."

The fat woman set the bowl carefully down, leaned forward, and hit Patience hard on her left shoulder.

… When she'd come fully conscious again, and could listen, the woman said to her, "Fatuous lies that claim acquaintance with Greats-from-God are unwise lies to tell."

"That," Patience managed, "- is certainly true."

"You know copybook fatuous?"

"… I know the word very well."

"Here," the woman lifted the bowl again. "Broth from an unfortunate sheep."

Patience drank fat-thick saltiness – wondered for a moment where these tribespeople traded for their salt – and felt hot strength flowing down into her. When she'd swallowed several times, she said, "How long?"

"Two days – now three," the fat woman said. "And surprised me it wasn't more. You have Moonriser blood in you."

"Yes."

"I smelled it on your breath, but of what part-fathering beast I'm not sure. An animal, or perhaps selected men – certainly more than one – groaned seed for the Talents to mix in your mother." The fat woman took the bowl away. "My name is Charlotte. Called Charlotte-doctor."

"Thank you for your care," Patience said, and tried to ease her aching shoulder.

The fat woman chuckled again, apparently very good-natured. "My care would have been to peg you to the ground, then slice you into pieces before the children – little pieces, one by one – and kept you shouting all the while. That would have been my care, except that Chad Budnarik fears his sister's tongue, if nothing else. And spared Pete Aiken is her son."

"Isn't it remarkable," Patience said, "- remarkable that a woman's scolding may confound a brute?"

"Said," Charlotte-doctor smiled, "as if you'd met War-leader Chad Budnarik. No better word for him than brute, though I love him dearly, and have since I was a child."

Patience waited for another blow to her shoulder, but none came while she decided to guard her mouth. "Apologies," she said. That seemed safe enough.