Rift (57 page)
Authors: Kay Kenyon
Nerys paused to think.
Vikal had set the bridge to rocking back and forth, and sat, legs dangling from the edge, making Nerys nervous she might fall.
The pup was now sitting, making it harder for her to answer, but she signed,
Nerys stood looking up at the pup, Vikal’s brilliant white coat catching flashes of sunlight as the bridge rocked in and out of the light. They had a bond. It startled and thrilled her. Then she heard a noise behind her and whirled. To her chagrin, three orthong stood at the edge of the clearing. Worse, one of them was Hamirinan.
At a rustle in the upper story, Nerys glanced there to find that Vikal had vanished. But it was too late—Hamirinan had seen them together. She was certain he wouldn’t be pleased.
As he strode toward her, she knew she guessed right. In an instant, Hamirinan grabbed hold of her hair and yanked it so hard she thought her neck would snap. She fell to her knees, gasping. One of the other orthong came forward and, surprisingly, helped her to her feet. The second orthong looked eye to eye with Hamirinan, and Hamirinan deliberately and slowly pushed him aside. Grabbing Nerys again by the hair,
he propelled her out of the small glade and finally onto the path, where he began walking with such long strides that Nerys had to scramble to keep from having her head ripped off.
She despised Hamirinan, but she also feared him. He was huge, and when a creature that large got angry—as Hamirinan often seemed—his movements could be terrifying. The other orthong did not hinder him from his rough treatment this time, and Nerys began to fear he meant some bodily harm to her.
she managed to sign.
Hamirinan spun around to face her, releasing her hair and pointing at her face with a very long extended claw. The message was not in sign, but its meaning was clear:
Shut up or I will cut you
.
When they burst into the women’s compound, the women were dumbfounded. Hamirinan still had Nerys by the hair and now propelled her forward into the middle of the yard. Women were backing away in alarm.
Haval emerged onto the steps from the berm and stood, frozen. Meanwhile Hamirinan pushed Nerys to her knees and released her hair, while, behind him, the other three orthong stood like pillars of salt.
Her eyes flicked at Galen, who fled into the berm to do Hamirinan’s bidding.
No one moved. Kneeling beside Hamirinan, Nerys saw that his claws were fully extruded. They were translucent, with tiny yellow cracks lacing through them. Nerys wondered if he dared use them on her, pregnant as she was. The other orthong standing here wouldn’t let him maul her, she told herself. One of them had actually touched her, helping her rise to her feet back in the clearing. No, they would certainly protect her. But who had ever seen an orthong in a rage?
Might all custom be set aside in deference to the rampage of an orthong lord?
“Nerys, what happened?” Odel stood nearby, and whispered this.
Hamirinan turned to look at her, and Odel raised her chin in defiance. Nerys whispered, “Don’t interfere, Odel; what happened is my fault.”
But Odel glared at Hamirinan, a very dangerous thing to do. The freewomen had judged that the orthong respected Odel for her age, and therefore treated her with courtesy. Nerys, however, knew that the orthong merely wished to prove to the women that when old, they would be cared for, so that they would be content on that score. Odel must not press too far, Nerys thought.
Now Haval plucked up her courage and moved down the stairs.
Hamirinan told Nerys,
Galen emerged from the house carrying a small stack of items, all that Nerys called her own in this place. For a moment she thought she was to be banished, packed off into the wilderness.
When Galen had done so, Hamirinan took up the mug that Salidifor had given Nerys and dropped it to the ground, cracking off the handle. Then he lifted her few garments, and one at a time, methodically rent them into strips with his claws. The ripping noise was the only sound in the clearing.
Nerys was not surprised when he ordered her to undress. He would be as mean as possible and still get credit with the women for his restraint in not striking her.
As she stripped she handed him her items of clothing
rather than letting them fall to the ground. This forced him to interact somewhat with her and gave her some semblance of dignity. If he noticed this, he affected not to, but calmly tore each item to shreds. While he did this, she stood, her belly protruding enough to shame him, she hoped. But she did not look him in the eyes. She knew enough to keep her life. Perhaps he wished to goad her into some act of punishable rudeness, but she denied him this.
When her clothes were a pile of rags on the ground, Hamirinan ordered her to bring his breeder Mave some tea. Nerys went into the berm and prepared the tea, feeling dazed but defiant. Then she brought a small pot and a mug to Mave where, at Hamirinan’s order, she sat in the middle of the yard. When Nerys approached her she saw that the woman was trembling, and for a brief moment she forgot her anger and felt pity for Mave and for all these women, forced to accept the orthong charity and to suffer their outrages. If Mave had showed the slightest satisfaction with this situation, Nerys might have lost her composure and dropped the teapot, perhaps in the woman’s lap. Ever afterward, she credited Mave for the grace to be terrified. She poured the tea, and Mave accepted the cup, rigidly holding it, unable to drink.
When Nerys looked up again the orthong were disappearing down the path into the outfold. It was over.
Odel was placing a cloak around Nerys’ shoulders. At that moment, her belly contracted sharply, and she bent over in surprise. And then it happened again. The pup was stirring inside her, distressed by her distress. If she believed she had weathered this event without emotion, she wasn’t fooling the babe within her. With a sudden horror, Nerys thought she might miscarry. But she knew she mustn’t lose this pup; then Hamirinan’s anger might not stop with tearing clothes. Her pregnancy was her best protection, and her best link to Salidifor.
Salidifor. He was higher in rank than Hamirinan. She had a moment to hope for revenge before another contraction swept her and the women rushed to help her inside and to her bed.
“Salidifor,” she gasped. “Send for Salidifor.”
Waves of nausea coursed through her for the next few hours. The women brought teas and blankets and held her hands, genuinely kind. Odel rubbed her feet and murmured reassuringly.
“Salidifor,” Nerys whispered over and over. If he would come, he would set everything to rights.
Finally Haval knelt by her side and answered her. “We’ve sent for him, Nerys. But we can’t find him. He’ll come, I’m sure.”
The pup kicked violently.
Exactly my reaction
, Nerys thought miserably.
3The valley lay before them, its vastness dwarfing their progress. Reeve set a goal each day of reaching a certain distant hill, a side canyon, or a copse of trees, but often by the time they made camp, their goal was still far off. He couldn’t judge distance on this wide plain of wind-whipped trees and stubby grasses. They were like Spar’s ants—toiling on, calling their inches good progress. In the back of Reeve’s mind he heard Spar’s voice:
That’s right, you just like ants, boy, don’t be thinkin’ you something more.…
But Reeve and Loon didn’t speak of Spar. Loon had all but given up on speech, and there was no breath left in Reeve, anyway. He gasped for each lungful of air, yet with every inhalation he sickened himself more. Coughing, fatigue, and headaches were constant, but the worst of it was a ballooning mental confusion that made even simple tasks challenging. One of the simple tasks was to avoid low-lying areas, ghost holes of carbon dioxide or chlorine. Loon charted their
course to avoid gullies and depressions, and Reeve never left her side. She had become his eyes, his caretaker. Loon’s own sustenance was the primal soil that she nibbled and against which she sometimes firmly pressed the palms of her hands.
Every night as they huddled together in front of a smoldering fire, he thought he might not wake to another day. But Loon was dragging him onward, building them nests to sleep in at night, and bearing his weight by day as they walked with one of his arms wrapped over her shoulders. She filtered his water and ground his food between two rocks to feed him as his gums turned clayey like the soil beneath his feet and he could no longer chew.
He had feared for Loon after Spar’s death. She had given up everything for Spar … spurned the advances of the orthong when she might have gone with them, indulging in a moment of anger that sealed her fortunes for the worse. Sometimes she wept openly for Spar, and Reeve hoped it gave her some release. Her tears were a reassurance to him of all they still shared, despite his debilitation and her vitality, separate sentences handed down by the valley itself.
But for Reeve, Spar’s death hit harder than he could have expected. He had died so suddenly. One moment he was just going to look around the grounds at the hotel, the next he lay dying. It was the way the world killed clavers. It reached out through disease or violence and snatched people up in ways that he had seldom seen on Station. It was the way they would learn to die once more, if humans stayed on Lithia. They would live with the elements and bow to their demands, and maybe people would become tougher and deeper because of it. For now, all Reeve knew was that the two clavers he met on the Forever Plains were the best people he’d ever known. Better than he’d been when he first looked up to find a dirty girl and a scrawny warrior bent over him as he lay in the grass.
He hoped Spar summed it up right when he said,
You gonna do OK in the world, Reeve. It took all my teachin’, but you gonna do OK
. He held on to those words.
And so he and Loon plodded along, always heading north, the days slipping by, the air growing colder and more foul, and Loon’s silences deepening.
The night of the fifth day, Reeve was too weak to eat. He lay on his back covered with the two blankets they carried in their packs, and watched shooting stars tracing their final seconds in the sky. Each breath was a desperate gasp that brought him little more than a ragged throat. Chlorine was the worst of it, he knew, even at these low levels. As they approached the deep plume vents it would get worse, far worse—if he lasted that long. But if he was dying, he was too exhausted to care. In fact, it seemed a very good thing to shut his eyes and be done with it. But someone had to go on. He tugged on Loon’s arm to get her attention, and she moved close to him.
“Go to them, Loon. Tomorrow, climb out of the valley and find their camp. The orthong camp. Tell them about Bonhert. Stop him.” He was having great difficulty sorting it all out. Telling the orthong was a betrayal of his own people. Except now he had a new clave … didn’t he?
Beside the fire, her face remained impassive. He wasn’t sure she was listening.
“I can’t go on, Loon. My body … is all used up.” He managed to pull on her sleeve until he brought her closer, but all he saw was the firelight reflected in her eyes.
They huddled together in silence then as a frigid wind pulled the last heat from his body. He wanted to say,
I love you, Loon, forever
. He hoped he did say it, but he was sinking into sleep or death, and his time had run out.