Jo Clayton - Shadowkill

She was tired of that, so she took the arranga and went to play for whoever would have her.

Aghilo came into the kitchen, stood shaking her head, her hands on her hips.

Housemaids were clustered around Shadith, trading turns singing verses of the joke song she was playing.

Gilli chal looked up, saw Aghilo, hissed a warning. The rest of the maids stopped their giggling, scattered guiltily, ashamed of being caught enjoying themselves in a house of grief.

The Cook stilled the hand that had been slapping vigorously at the table, composed her face into dignified sobriety. “Yes?”

“Chapa Tinoopa, is she around?”

“She went across to the dye shed. Should be back in about ten minutes.”

“Oh.” Aghilo went out again.

Cook got heavily to her feet. “Looks like you’ll be back on the job, Kiz. Scamper.”

Matja Allina emerged from her grieftime.

She was pale and gaunt, but composed.

She carried Baby Paji in a sling that kept him nestled warm against her hip, an innovation she’d gotten from Tinoopa. Irrkuyon custom said the baby was given to a wet nurse after Name Day, but Allina refused to be separated from him. Polyapo protested, the chal stared, but the Matja ignored them.

She summoned the chal leaders to the Great Hall, informed them she was going to the Brushies to get replacements for the men Pirs took with him.

They protested.

She shouted them down. The cool controlled Matja they’d known was gone. What was left was a wild creature who filled the hall with her passion, seemed to suck up all the air until the rest were about to smother.

She lowered her voice and went back to telling how things were going to be.

Left behind, Shadith wandered through the House. She got into the study, found her papers, sat looking at them for a long time.

I ought to go now. They wouldn’t miss me.

Her hands shook.

Come on, Shadow. It’s just a long hard ride, that’s all.

A bead of sweat dropped on the parchment. She blotted it up with her sleeve, careful not to smudge the writing.

This is freedom, Shadow. All you have to do is go.

I can’t go. I’m not ready. I don’t know which horses I can take without being chased for them. Polyapo’s in charge while the Matja’s away, she’d send men after me, Tinoopa couldn’t stop her. I can’t go until Allina gets back.

She stared at the papers a moment longer, then locked them away again; they were safest here until she was ready to go.

The days slid away; she used the braincrystal knife to cut lines in the wall. Each mark was another day in prison; she was building her own locks and walls, building them higher every day. Each morning when she rolled out of bed, she thought:

I should go today. The chance might not come again. I should go today.

Each night she lay down in fury at herself, at the lethargy she couldn’t seem to throw off.

On the tenth day of the Matja’s absence, Shadith slipped into the Family Garden, climbed into one of the wall towers and leaned on a window sill, looking west across the heat hammered plain.

What’s happening out there? Could I get to Nirtajai without getting killed? Where the HELL is Caghar Rinta? All right, all right, let’s get ourselves together, Shadow. This is a volcano about to pop. You get caught in it, you’re going to get the shit kicked out of you.

She dropped to her knees, folded her arms on the sill, rested her chin on her forearms. Sweat gathered in her hair and dripped down her face, her neck. She was in the shade up here, there was a strong wind blowing down off the mountains behind her, but the heat was punishing.

I can’t ride in this. I can’t. There’s no use even dreaming I could. What’s that?

The blotch out in the brush came gradually closer, spreading into a ragged line of vans pulled by large creatures rather like stub-tailed lizards. Their daughters beside them holding any infants in the family, women in bright dresses-reds and blues and greens with patches of yellow and orange, and yellow kerchiefs knotted into turbans-drove the vans. Men in patchwork smocks rode horses, spread in a wide arc enclosing the vans. Boys brought up the rear with extra horses.

Another blotch to the right of the first and several kays behind. Another and another.

Brushies, coming in for the Shearing.

She got to her feet. All around the Kuysstead the herds were coming in, woollies pouring through the brush, heading for the Shearing Ground.

She sighed with despair and relief.

The decision was taken from her; the Matja was back and the Shearing was about to begin.

Noise. Dust. Heat.

The cutters whirred with scarcely a stop. Two men threw a woolly blatting on the shed floor, while a third ran the cutter along the beast’s sides in half a dozen long smooth sweeps that cut away the matted fleece intact. The throwers swung the woolly on its other flank and held it while the shearer took off the rest of the fleece. As another woolly came wide eyed and blatting from the chute, floorboys grabbed the fleece and ran to the bins with it, the beastmistress and the women drove the denuded beast into the hold pen where they went over it for pests and disease, then chased it into one of the grazing paddocks. Or into the butcheryard. Later it would be slaughtered and the meat sun-cured or smoked or ground into sausage or stowed away in barrels of brine against the winter need.

The throwers threw and shifted, the shearers sheared, the boys ran, the women inspected. Twenty sheds, twenty teams, twenty paddocks waiting; in an ordinary year it would have been thirty-five or forty, but even with the Brushies’ help Ghanar Rinta was short-handed this year.

Short in everything but food, drink, and exuberance.

The Matja provided generously.

There were Shear Dances each night, bonfires and torches lighting the shearfloors where the dancing was, barrels of skatbeer hauled up from the cellars, woolly carcasses barbequed over vast beds of coals, Brushie singers and musicians taking turns with Ghanar players and singers. Round dances and slow dances, kick up your heels, rub against your partners, generating a heat greater than the fires. More than one set of dancers left the floor for the prickly pleasures of the brush. Ingva was out there dancing with Brushie and chal, enjoying herself enormously, running wild, ignoring all she’d been taught about the proper manners of Irrkuyon daughters. Shadith saw her, but said nothing. She was too busy, playing till her fingers bled, drinking skatbeer until she was sodden. Each night she went to bed exhausted.

Day melted into day, distinctions lost in a haze of heat, dust and exhaustion.

The paddock herds grew and grew, the bins were full of fleeces, ready for winter’s combing and spinning, the culls were finished and butchering done. The Brushies collected their pay in woollies, meat, cloth and sugar and prepared to leave.

It was over.

Matja Allina stood on an upended fleece bin and spread her hands as if she blessed the wrung-out workers looking up at her.

“It is done,” she said. “Well done.”

A patter of hand against hand.

“You have worked hard and played hard.” She smiled at them, letting her eyes wander across the faces of chal and chapa and the harder, darker faces of the Brushies. “I have no doubt there’s a crop been planted that will come to light nine months from now, a lusty squalling crop of sons and daughters.”

Laughter and some long smoldering looks exchanged between Brushies and certain of the chal and chapa.