Jo Clayton - Fire in the Sky

His face got redder and redder, his eyes glassy, his mouth hung open, working, working… until, abruptly his body spasmed, arced up from the ground, then went limp.

“He dead?”

She looked round. Danor was hunched over, his legs drawn up, his head buried in, his arms. Maorgan stood beside him. It was he who’d spoken. “I think so, but I’d better be sure. Bring me the kit, would you?”

Shadith keyed the locktights loose, rolled the comealongs up, and shoved them into a saddlebag. “You heard what he said. There’ll be dozens of others out there hungry for that gold. We’d better start pushing the caцpas as hard as we dare. We’re targets till we get over Medon Pass.”

13. Ploy and Counterploy

Ceam, Heruit, and his cousin Bothim squatted in the shadows under the trees at the edge of the Meklo Fen watching the Chav get off their floatcart and walk toward the swampie Porach who was sitting cross-legged on a thick mat woven from reeds, reed baskets placed around him, filled with fresh fish, herbs, nuts and the round red fruit of the bilim tree that grew deep inside the Marish.

The damp heavy breeze coming off the grass brought the snake-smell of the mesuch to Ceam. His stomach knotted and he felt himself getting hot; it didn’t seem to him he could take his eyes off that massive form with its oddly bobbly walk.

As if the mesuch could feel his gaze, the creature turned his head and stared at the group of men.

Ceam fought his eyes down and stared at the black muck he could see through the grass. After watching the techs up in the mountains, he hadn’t expected them to be so formidable and so quick to notice up close. And he hadn’t expected the smell and what it would do to him. The rage it would rouse in him. It was all he could manage to squat there with his eyes on the ground.

No more game. No more detachment. This was the Enemy. The things that had slaughtered his friends and burned the Eolt, who’d stolen his peace and his joy from him.

The smell got stronger as the mesuch inspected the fish, bit into one of the bilim fruits.

Eolt Kitsek had slid through the clouds last night to tell them the mesuch and their crawlers were back eating the hearts of the mountains. Fewer of them, though, and cautious. A roving tiogri paddling through the ash for roasted carrion set off an alarm, a squalling oogah and a firewand from the crawler singed the spots off the tiogri’s tail, though he got away alive, his only hurt a bare behind. That was briefly satisfying, making them waste supplies and their own peace on a danger that wasn’t there. No one was interested in the miners, the new target was their home fort.

Heruit moved slightly, dropped his hand on Ceam’s shoulder, squeezed. It was both a comfort and a warning. And it helped and did not help, it warmed Ceam with fellow feeling and it irritated him that the older man could read him so easily. I’m not meant to be a spy. At least, not this kind. This feels so useless, hanging about listening to that beast haggling over how many needles for needlefish.

The haggling went on and on. Ceam rocked restlessly on his heels, pulled a spear of grass, peeled it into fine strips, pulled another, then another and wondered if he could last much longer without leaping to his feet and running at the monster who was so absurdly acting like all the other merchants he’d seen from the time he was whelped. Obscene that the two of them out there should look so much alike, Porach and the mesuch. Both old. He didn’t know how he knew that, mesuch didn’t have hair to go gray and they all seemed wrinkled to him, with skin like tree bark. He was, though. Old. Temperish. Yellow cast to eyes that were still far too sharp for Ceam’s comfort.

Finally, though, the chaffering was done. Porach was tucking his goods in a c’hau cloth bag, needles and thread, a coil of cord, fine and colorless, some packets of dye. The mesuch snapped his fingers and the two younger ones came and loaded the reed baskets onto the floatwagon.

Porach got to his feet, swung the strap of the bag over his shoulder, caught up the mat, and stood rolling it into a tight cylinder as he watched the floatwagon go gliding off. When it disappeared into the trees, he pulled loose the long stick he’d thrust into the muck and came over to them, swinging the stick and moving with the peculiar long glide of a swampy, his bare feet barely bending the grass or so it seemed to Ceam.

Heruit cleared his throat.

Porach shook his head. “Not here.”

They followed him deeper into the Marish. He went back on a new path; Ceam had noticed that the two tendays he’d spent living in the Marish. Swampies almost never used the same path twice in the same day. It might have been to keep down any signs of wear, or perhaps some predator they didn’t discuss might be alerted and avoided by this. His curiosity was itching at him, but he knew better than to ask. Swampie wanted you to know something, he told you. Got snarked if you kept pushing at him and one day you’d turn around and he wasn’t there any more and you were out in the middle of the morass and didn’t know where you were and didn’t dare go anywhere because there were sofas and crogall burrows where if you stepped in them you were dead.

Porach moved swiftly along the edge of the water, jumped onto the kneed roots of the mekek trees that grew along here, ran across the knees with a curious, irregular, tied-in gait. Ceam followed more slowly. He wasn’t used to going about in his bare feet and his soles had picked up some parasites that itched like fury and hurt when his feet slapped down on the slippery, hard wood. Behind him he could hear the sound of Heruit’s feet, the muttered curses that got louder the longer they ran. And Bothim’s panting snicker as the smaller, more limber man trotted along behind them.

Porach jumped from the roots onto the dimpled sand of a long thin island like the scar from a knife wound. He flung up a hand to stop them, then dug the end of the stick into one of the dimples, inspected the result, and jumped back onto the root. He took a whistle from inside his tunic and began blowing into it. Though it produced no sound that Ceam could hear, it made a tightness behind his eyes.

He smothered an exclamation as he saw the sand shift and shiver as something ran along beneath the surface and vanished beneath the water without giving him the least glimpse of what it looked like.

Porach slipped the stick under his arm, jumped onto the sand and ran along it. The others followed.

He led them on a winding difficult route deep into the Marish, till they reached the twinned isles where they’d been living for the past tenday. The one with their hutches on it was round and barren, thick bug-ridden grass and lichen webs crawling everywhere, a single raintree at one end. Porach’s isle was a long pointed oval with a small spring of clean water welling up between two trees into a stone basin. Porach and Meisci his wife had brought stones from outside and cement powder and had built a neat cup with knee-high walls. The stream from the spring ran through it and kept it filled and a shell lid on the top kept it clean.

Porach blew into his whistle again, this time drawing a strange echo from inside the thicket at the end of the island. A moment later Meisci came out and brought for them a long narrow board with folding legs, the portable bridge between the islands.

He’d shown them what swam in that water and Ceam got the shivers each time he got his feet wet, no matter that Porach was along and knew what he was doing.

When the bridge was settled in place, Porach turned. “You are welcome to share a sip of tea and a word or two.”

Meisci was a thin, worn-looking woman with strands of gray in her long brown hair. She was shy and half-wild, uneasy with strangers about, though when they came to visit, she knelt behind Porach for the courtesy of it and listened to the talk with curiosity enough to forget herself from time to time. She brought out her china cups, no two of them alike, and filled them with hot strong tea, added slices of ullica fruit and small rounds of unleavened bread.