Jo Clayton - Drinker of Souls

Gray. Even during daylight everything was gray. Gray skies, gray water, gray mud dried on sedges and trees, on low hanging branches, gray fungus, gray insects, gray everything. The stench of damp closed around her, of rotting everything, flesh, fish, vegetation. Three gray nights she rode, three gray days she rested on mounds of mud and rotting reeds, where she fed Coier from the too rapidly diminishing supply of corn, rubbed him down, touching to death the leeches on his legs, draining their small bits of life, feeding it back into him; once the leeches were drained they were easy enough to brush off, falling like withered lengths of gutta-percha. By accident she discovered another attribute of her changed body as she fed that life into the weary trembling beast; her hand was close to one of the oozing leech-bites and she saw the bite seal over and heal with the feed.

By the end of the fourth night, she was ready to chance the causeway rather than continue this draining slog. As dawn spread a pale uncertain light over the water, Jaril led her deeper into the Marish to an eye-shaped island considerably larger than the others with a small clump of vigorous, sharp-scented flerpines at one end, a dry graveled mound at the center with some straggly clumps of grass, a bit of stream running by it with water that looked clear and dean and tempting. She resisted temptation and began going over Coier, her probing deadly touch killing gnats and borers, chiggers and bloodworms and the ever-present leeches, feeding the weary beast those bits of life. It was a handy thing, that deadly touch of hers, and she was learning from far too much practice how to use it. By now she could kill a mite on a mosquito’s back and leave the mosquito unharmed. After spreading a double handful of corn on his saddlepad, she plunged into a stream and used a twist of grass to scrub the sweat and muck off her body and hair. While she washed, Yaril thrust a hand into the pile of wood Jaril collected and flew back to the island, got a fire going and set a pot on to heat water for tea, then took Brann’s clothing to the stream and began scrubbing the shirts and trousers with sand from the mound. When Brann was clean inside and out, when the water was boiled and the tea made, when Yaril had hung the sopping shirts and trousers on ragged branches of the pines, Brann sat naked on a bit of grass, cool and comfortable for the first time in days, watching Coier standing in the water drinking, sipping at her own drinking bowl, the tea made from the scrapings of her supply but the more appreciated for that. She set the bowl on her knee, sighed. “I don’t care how many Temuengs are shuttling along the causeway, come the night, I’m getting Coier and me out of this.”

Jaril looked at Yaril, nodded. “Traffic’s been light the last few nights, and…” he hesitated, “we’ve used more energy than I expected. Yaril and me, we’re getting hungry.”

“Think I’d like being the hunter for a change. Instead of the hunted.” She gulped at the tea, holding it in her mouth, letting the hot liquid slide down her throat to warm her all over. “Coier’s sick or something, the water’s got him, or those bites. He needs graze and rest, more than anything, rest. Me too. Maybe we could find a place to lay up once we’re past this mess.” She looked over her shoulder at the hazy sun rising above the pines. “Could one of you do something about drying my clothes? I don’t feel right lying down with nothing on. Anything could happen to make us light out with no time to stop for dressing.”

“Right.” While Jaril doused the fire, Yaril changed, went shimmering through Brann’s wet clothing, drying a set of shirt and trousers for her. When she thought they were ready, she brought them to Brann. “Get some sleep,” she said. “We’ll watch.”

BRANN WOKE tangled in tough netting made from cords twisted out of reed fiber and impregnated with fish stink. She woke to the whisper of a drum, to the suddenly silenced scream from Coier as his throat was cut. She woke to see little gray men swarming over the island, little gray men with coarse yellow cloth wound in little shrouds about their groins, little gray men with rough dry skin, a dusty gray mottled in darker streaks and splotches like the skin of lizards she’d watched sunning on her sunning rock, little gray men butchering Coier, cutting his flesh from his big white hones. She wept from weakness and sorrow and fury, wept for the beast as she hadn’t wept for her murdered sister, her murdered people, wept and fir a while thought of nothing else. Then she remembered the children.

She could move her head a little, a very little. It was late, the shadows were long across the water. No sign of the children anywhere. Another gray man sat beside a small crackling fire, net cording woven about him and knotted in intricate patterns she guessed were intended to describe his power and importance; a fringe of knotted cords dangled from a thick rope looped loosely about a small hard potbelly. In an oddly beautiful, long-fingered reptilian hand he held a strange and frightening drum, a snake’s patterned skin stretched over the skull of a huge serpent with a high-domed braincase and eyeholes facing forward. Smiling, he drew from the taut skin a soft insistent rustle barely louder than the whisper of the wind through the reeds, a sound that jarred her when she thought about it but nonetheless crept inside her until it commanded the beat of her heart, the in-out of her breathing. She jerked her body loose from the-spell and shivered with fear. Magic. He looked at her and she shivered again. He sat before that tiny hot fire of twigs and grass, his eyes fixed on her with a hungry satisfaction that chilled her to the bone. She thought about the children and was furious at them for deserting her until the drummer reached out and ran a hand over two large stones beside his bony knee, gray-webbed crystals each large as a man’s head, crystals gathering the fire into them, little broken fires repeated endlessly within. His hand moving possessively over them, he grinned at her, baring the hard ridge of black gum that took the place of teeth in these folk, enjoying her helpless rage until a commotion at the other end of the island caught his gaze.

She strained to see, froze as a Temueng walked into her arc of vision, leading his mount and a pack pony with a large canvas-wrapped load. Gray men crowded around him, hissing or whistling, snapping fingers, stamping their broad clawed feet, jostling him, giving off clouds of a hate and fury barely held in check. His nostrils flaring with disgust, he looked over their heads and kept walking until he stood stiffly across the fire from the magic man, not-looking at Brann with such intensity she knew at once the Marishmen had sold her. She lay very still, grinding her teeth, with a rage greater than the gray men’s.

“You sent saying you had the witch.” The Temueng’s voice was deep and booming, deliberately so, Brann thought, meant to overpower the twitter and squeak of the gray men. “I brought the payment you required.”

The drummer convulsed with silent laughter, drew whispery laughs from his drum. “Yellow man, scourge a thee dryfoots.” He laughed some more. “Sit, scourge.”

Gray men trotted busily about building up the small fire into a snapping, crackly, pine-smelling blaze. The magic man played with his drum, its faint sounds merging with the noise of the fire. The Temueng sat in firmly dignified silence, waiting for all this mummery to be done, looking occasionally around to Brann. She glared hate at him, and lay simmering when he looked away, taking what satisfaction she could in his rapidly cracking patience.

The drum sound grew abruptly louder, added a clickclick-clack as the drummer tapped the nails of two fingers against the bone of the skull. “I, Ganumomo speak,” the drummer chanted, garbling the Plainspeak so badly she could barely understand what he was saying. “Hah! I, Ganumomo daah beah mos’ strong dreamer in ahhh Mawiwamo.” Continuing to scratch at the drumhead with two fingers of the hand that held the skull, he scooped up one of the crystals, held it at arm’s length above his head.