Fearsome Journeys (The New Solaris Book of Fantasy)

FOREVER PEOPLE

ROBERT V S REDICK

WHEN MAJKA STEPPED out through the kitchen door at dusk she found a huge white weasel in the garden. Brazen, it locked eyes with her: a rare chelu, a ghost weasel, halfway between the garden wall and the little ramp by which the chickens entered the barn. Majka hissed. The chelu answered with a growl. The animal was nearly the size of a wolverine.

The door stood open behind her. From within came the eager thok thok of her mother-in-law’s knife as she battled a turnip, then a chord from the mandolin her son was learning to play. They had borrowed the instrument from a neighbor; it was scratched and worn, and the neck felt slightly loose, but the family treated it like the relic of a saint. It had changed their evenings, brought life to those shadow-swamped rooms.

Majka closed the door. She would face the chelu with the axe from the wood-splitting stump. Never taking her eyes from the creature, she backed along the side of the whitewashed house. A fierce wind was rising. The warmth of the day was ebbing fast.

She had guessed that a predator was about. The chickens had gone early to roost, and Bishkin, the family’s smoke-gray cat, had slipped upstairs after his plate of buttermilk instead of rambling through the village or the ravine. Of course what they needed was a dog. Just days ago she had worked the village, opening her lean little purse. Sell me that mongrel, that runt in the corner, that toothless bitch. Any goddamned dog. She’d come back with nothing. They’d wanted twice what she could pay.

And now the axe was gone. Beside the stump lay only the small spade they used to bury ashes from the stove. Majka snatched it up and advanced on the chelu. The weasel only narrowed its eyes.

Suddenly furious, Majka charged, brandishing the spade like a madwoman.

“You want this, thief? You want me to split you in half?”

The creature bared its perfect fangs—and then thought better of the confrontation, and dashed away across the yard. In a white blur it flowed to the top of the garden wall. Looking back over its shoulder, it favored her with a different sort of noise: an odd, almost sympathetic keening. Then it sprang away towards the ravine.

Majka glanced quickly over her shoulder: the kitchen door remained closed. That was something. No one else knew the animal had appeared.

A gust of wind blasted the garden; the leaves of the withered sunflowers rasped together, gossiping women in a bread line. Feel that cold, now. Look at that sky full of bruises and rage. She knew this sort of weather: it had roared in from the northeast every autumn of her thirty-three years, scouring the last whiff of summer from the high country, sealing the villagers in their shacks.

Majka stomped into the barn. Chelus were horribly unlucky. Even to glimpse one in the forest could prompt certain old hunters to call it a day. She couldn’t imagine what they’d make of a chelu in the garden. There were stories—

But damn the stories; it was after her birds. She counted quickly: fourteen laying hens drowsing in the rafters, three speckled geese. These and nine rabbits were all the life remaining in that barn that had once boasted hogs, goats, dairy cows, a draft horse with a braided mane. They were not enough for the coming winter, but she would make do, make them last, along with the tubers in the cellar and the beans and amaranth she would buy at week’s end. No one under her roof would starve. But what if she hadn’t stepped outside? If she had stayed in the kitchen for pleasure’s sake, listening to her son’s lovely tune?

She looked around for the axe but did not find it. She crouched before the chickens’ nesting crates and found an egg. Beside the crates, the grimy rug where her husband’s dog had slept for years. After his death the big animal had spent a fortnight whining and watching the road, then descended purposefully into the ravine and not returned.

“Pussy Willow.”

Majka leaped up, nearly stumbling as she did so. “God damn you,” she said.

Pankolo, the horse breeder, stood laughing in the doorway, his beefy shoulders twitching up and down. The wind tossed his stringy hair forward to tangle in his beard. He pointed at Majka’s hand.

“There’s a waste.”

She had cracked the egg in her fist. She wanted to hurl it at Pankolo, but that would only make him laugh the louder. The big man stepped into the barn and placed a small package on the chicken crates. Majka threw the egg into the yard.

“What in the stinking Pits do you want?”

“Ain’t you nice,” he said. “I brought you a sugar loaf.”

Majka sniffed. “Baked it yourself, did you? Or was it another present from Slager’s girl?”

Pankolo just stood there grinning, and Majka realized that he thought she was jealous. They had been lovers once. Her husband had caught them in this very barn, not even undressed yet, not even touching. After a moment when no one could think of what to say, Pankolo had stepped over to her husband and lifted him from the ground by his shirt. He slept with Majka, he declared, and would go on sleeping with her whenever he liked. “And you, my little scholar: just keep to them rocks.”

Dangling like a sad marionette, her husband had looked down at Majka. He was a scholar; the fact marked him indelibly, as did the fact that he had come here from the lowlands: two unpardonable sins. Majka had stepped forward and touched Pankolo’s elbow, and the big man had shrugged and dropped her husband on his feet. Yet that calming touch had nonetheless ended her marriage. Her husband might have forgiven her for sleeping with Pankolo—he knew his own shortcomings—but that gesture of intimacy burned like a brand.

“If you came for rabbits, you’re a month early; they’re too small to skin.”

Pankolo chuckled. “Ain’t that a shame.”

He liked to pretend it wasn’t over. He brought food, too, sometimes; food he could well afford. He sold twenty or more foals a year, and the occasional full-grown stallion. He was the only man in the village with something to sell.

Which meant that it was not over, entirely. He entered the barn and pulled her near. Majka sighed, put her egg-sticky hand into his trousers, closing her mind to the smell of horse dander and beer. She moved quickly, before he could object, although it meant the brute would only leave her gasping, unsatisfied, not well fucking served like him. Majka’s son never asked for second helpings, but he cleaned his plate like a cat. Sometimes, if the boy stepped away from the table, Majka or his grandmother would scrape their food onto his plate.

“Get them shucks off,” said Pankolo. “Get ’em down to your knees.”

“It’s too cold.”

She worked faster still. He groaned and groped and then was finished, and Majka bit her lips in frustration. She had sworn to herself never to ask the least favor of this man. She had never liked him. It was a very small town.

“Pussy Willow—”

“Don’t fucking call me that.”

Pankolo glared. “You got nothing but snarls for me today. Ain’t we friends at least?”

Majka closed her eyes. They were not friends. “I saw a chelu,” she said.

The man froze, then took his hand from beneath her shirt. When he spoke his voice had changed. “What were you doing in the woods, then?”

“Not in the woods. It was here, in the garden. It was after the birds, I expect.”

Pankolo rubbed his hands together. “That’s bad, ain’t it? You ought to hire one of them Shyram witches, Majka. Get yourself a house cleansing.”

“A cleansing. You believe in that old fluff?”

“Not... for certain.” But he was retreating, buttoning his pants. Majka smirked, guided his hand back to her breast.

“Thought you wanted to do it properly. Or is once all you’re good for these days?”

“Too cold. You were right.”

“Not if we’re quick about it.”

“Let go, Majka.”

She put her head back and laughed. “You’re scared. Of a weasel. If only the lads could see you now. Better yet, Slager’s girl—”

Pankolo snatched his hand away and slapped her. Majka staggered, astonished. The birds screeched; the rabbits slammed against the walls of their cages. Pankolo hovered in the doorway.

“Slager’s girl,” he said, hovering there. “Tabitha. That’s right. I don’t need your old cunt no more, do I?”

“Get off my land.”

“It’s you who need me. To keep your brat from starving. Does he know how you pay for them cakes?”

Majka wiped blood from her lip. “No,” she said, “but you do, don’t you? You know how I take care of my boy.”

Pankolo’s face froze; then he turned on his heel and fled. A moment later she heard the gate slam shut. Majka stood in the dark, staunching her lip on the sleeve of her blouse. She put a hand on the sugar loaf; it was still vaguely warm.

THE MANDOLIN HAD fallen silent. Majka swept into the kitchen, already shouting at her son, “You go find that splitting axe! I’ve told you fifty times, never leave things—”

She broke off. Her son and mother-in-law were staring at the open front door. A tall man, a stranger, stood on the threshold, one hand raised as if to knock.

“Forgive me,” he said, “the door opened at a touch.”

It was true that the latch was failing; for some weeks they had relied on a sliding bolt to keep the door closed in windstorms. The stranger removed his hat. Then he bowed and pressed fingertips to forehead: an old and very humble gesture of greeting, rarely seen in those hills. He was middle-aged but very strongly built. And his skin: so pale. The villagers had skin like dark olives; this man was clotted cream.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Majka demanded.

The stranger turned his eyes in her direction: ice-blue eyes, unblinking.

“I’ve walked all day,” he said simply.

The thing to do was to invite him in. The only thing. He bore no weapon, unless a knife were stashed somewhere in that coat of tattered wool. He looked prepared to stand there forever, icicle-straight, the fierce wind gusting about his ankles. Majka couldn’t breathe. The other two might as well have been stone.

“Why are you standing there?” she cried at last. “Come in, sit down. Udi, God’s love, why don’t you bolt that door?”

The man stepped into the parlor—that was what they called it, the parlor, although it was the only room on the first floor beside the kitchen. It had a table, three wretched chairs, a woodstove shaped like a fat man sitting cross-legged, a coat rack, a butter churn rendered useless when the last cow was sold.

The room seemed to shrink around the newcomer. Majka’s son moved towards him sidelong, on unwilling feet. At last he darted around the man and shot the bolt home.

Majka felt ashamed of their behavior. “Pour him some wine, tata,” she shouted at her mother-in-law. “Udi, bring logs, if you’ve split any that is.” To the stranger, Majka said, “We’ll build a fire in no time. You’ll be wanting some bread and soup. They didn’t feed you in Shyram, then? Of course not, they don’t help anyone; if Saint Jal herself came and asked for a sip of water—”

She was babbling. She stopped. With a lurch she dragged a chair to face the lifeless woodstove. “Come and sit.” Brisk now; what had she been thinking? She’d be dead before she turn a man away into a storm.

But he was too pale. Majka had seen his like only three or four times in her life. He was from the capital, or some distant country. No one ever came from such lands to the village, this place of wind and nothing, this clutch of sixty houses strung out along a gorge.

Unless they came for the ruins. The thought made Majka break a precious match.

The man crossed the room slowly. He held his hat against his chest like a peasant in the house of a lord, but there was nothing of the peasant in his bearing. He lowered himself into the chair.

“Don’t go to any trouble,” he said.

Majka was crouched almost at his knees, trying to light the tinder at the back of the stove. The man smelled of earth and moss and wind-dried sweat; there were small brown burrs on his trousers. From the corner of her eye she saw the hand he rested on his knee: a powerful hand, tough and sinewy, a harness-leather hand.

He moved his chair to give her room. There was nothing wrong with him. She was losing her dignity, and without it everything else would slip through her fingers.

The tinder caught. Majka blew gently, added twigs as though feeding a baby. The blue eyes studied her. She closed the iron door and stood.

“This is Chamsarat Spire?” asked the newcomer.

“Chamsarat Village,” said Majka. “The Spire’s just a heap of rubble, further up the hill. There’s nothing but ruins here. The fortress was destroyed four hundred years ago they say. The tower survived, but twenty years ago it collapsed as well—”

“There was an earthquake,” cried her son from where he stood by the cellar door, so excited he was all but dancing in place. His grandmother, suddenly restored to life, turned on him and shouted “Logs!”

“It’s true,” said Majka, as Udi fled. “There’s nothing left here but stones. I hope you didn’t come all this way to see the tower.”

She put the soup kettle on the stove: it would have to stretch to four tonight, and this man looked as though he could empty the kettle at a draught. Once more, accidentally no doubt, she found herself meeting his gaze.

“I didn’t come for the tower,” he said.

“That’s good.” Majka considered laughing at her own remark, but what if her mother-in-law joined in, with her raven’s cackle? The man was still looking at her; Majka felt her composure about to dissolve.

“You’re welcome to ride out this storm with us,” she said, astonishing herself. “We’ve a spare bolster. You can sleep here right here by the stove.”

Her mother-in-law was gaping. The man looked down at the hat on his knee. After a long pause, he said, “I might just. You’re very kind. It’s a long road I’m on.”

Majka stared hard at her mother-in-law, who bethought herself and fetched the wine. Majka poured him a generous measure. “Where are you bound, then?” she asked.

“Where God wills.”

And mind your own business, woman. She was about to turn away when the man glanced at her sidelong.

“God, or the Proconsul, whoever remembers us first. Isn’t that what they say in these hills?”

This time Majka didn’t meet his eye. They did indeed have such a saying. Neither the Prince of Heaven nor the leader of the Republic was much loved in Chamsarat.

But why had he mentioned the Proconsul? They were six hundred miles from the capital. The village stood in a distant corner of a neglected province on a road like a long bad dream. Even the local ministers rarely bothered with the climb.

“We say the same as everyone,” she answered lamely. “A republic is a fine and fragile thing.”

“Yes,” said the stranger, lifting the wine to his lips.

“We have the vote here,” said her mother-in-law, as though confessing some shame.

The man turned in his chair to look at her. Majka tried to smile and achieved a grimace.

“The vote. She means that every few years they send a soldier and a mule, and an iron box with a padlock. He shows up unannounced and sets the box on a chair in the tavern.”

And drinks all day. And notes the color of the ballot slip in every hand. And bears the box away in the morning with a smirk, and a coin or two for the girl whose favors he’s enjoyed.

“And you vote your conscience.”

It was not a question, or an order, or even a jibe. It was merely a statement. The man spoke as though saddened by his own remark. And for some reason his words sparked a terrible idea in Majka’s mind: that she stank. The room was close and the man could smell her unwashed skin, smell the barn and the broken egg, smell Pankolo.

She excused herself, reddening. She snatched up the wash pail and a cake of soap and fled through the back door again.

Crouched by the rain barrel, she scrubbed to her elbows. The cold was agony, but also a relief, like putting her head back to scream. Udi, laden with firewood, staggered out of the barn.

“I can’t find the axe, mama.”

“Well what in the Nine Pits did you do with it?”

“Nothing, I think.”

“Nothing you think! Take the wood inside. Then go back with a lamp and search properly. And wear your coat, you little fool! If you catch a chill I’ll slap you.”

Udi looked at her in horror.

“Oh stop that, boy. I wouldn’t really.”

“I don’t want him to be here, mama.”

“Saints above! What’s the matter with us all? Can’t we be decent to a soul in need? What in the Pits are you afraid of? I’ve told you about white men.”

“In the capital. Is he from the capital?”

“Maybe. They come from other places, too.”

“What’s he here for?”

The soap leaped like a fish from Majka’s hands. “That’s his business,” she snapped. “Yours is to be gracious. Only peasants lose their heads at the sight of a foreigner. We’re not peasants, Udi.”

He blinked at her over his armful of logs.

THE SOUP WAS delicious. The man sipped his portion slowly, making it last. The room warmed. Majka all but shoved her mother-in-law into a chair beside the stranger. Udi stood behind his grandmother’s chair, spellbound. Majka herself could not dream of sitting still, invented tasks to take her endlessly from parlor to kitchen and back again. Dusting under the table. A small rug tossed over the crack in the floorboards. The lamp in the window for a husband dead not quite a year.

Suddenly the man, wonder of wonders, spoke to them unprompted. “I thought I might go and see the Thrandaal, beyond the mountains. They say the valleys there are lush, and the rivers clean.”

That was it: he was running. Majka could have laughed with relief. The man needed to get out of the country, and you could do that here, you could climb from these hills into the mountains, cross the border into the Thrandaal, and pass unchallenged into that empty land. That was why he had looked at her so oddly when he mentioned the Proconsul.

“But I’ve waited too long, you see,” the man continued. “Down here you’ve had rains; up in the peaks it will be snow. I don’t mind a little snow, but I do mind dying in it. I’ve waited too long.”

He looked again at his hat. Majka felt dizzied: what in the Pits was he trying to tell them? Could he possibly mean to spend the winter in Chamsarat? To spend it under her roof?

The thought was rending. She couldn’t feed this man. Did he have money, would he offer to pay? And who would she be harboring? Would his enemies track him here? No, he couldn’t stay. Not in this household, twenty feet from her son. Not if he filled the barn with cattle and their pockets with gold. Not even if he fancied her, if there was kindness in those hands.

“What’s your name?” her son asked quietly.

“Wren.”

“Like the bird?”

The stranger glanced at the boy. Ever so slightly, he smiled. “They teased me when I was your age. Flap your wings, Wrenny Boy. Fly away home.”

Udi glanced at Majka, seeking permission to grin. Majka felt herself blushing once more and rose to stir the soup.

She cleared her throat. “Well, Mr. Wren—”

Sudden terror. Broken glass, her mother-in-law screaming, a dark object landing on the rug. The storm suddenly loud through the shattered window. Udi clung to her, his nails biting her wrist.

“It’s a horseshoe, mama. Someone threw a horseshoe at our house.”

But Majka was gazing at the stranger. He was flat against the wall of the parlor, twelve feet from the woodstove. This man named for a bird had moved like a snake, faster than the eye could follow. He had slipped one hand into his coat, reaching for something beneath his left underarm.

He had a knife after all.

Through the broken window, a man’s voice, loud and derisive: “Majka! What’ll you do in a month’s time, eh? When the snow lies deep and you’re hungry?”

“That’s Pankolo,” said her son, his voice trembling. The stranger shot a hard glance at Udi.

“You can come to the back door,” shouted Pankolo. “There’s a little dish Tabitha puts out for the cats. You can bend down and lick, you hear me? You and your boy.”

The stranger moved to the window, looked out through the shattered pane.

“Never mind him,” said Majka. “He’s a drunken fool. Get the broom, Udi.”

Her son did not seem to hear her. “Pankolo,” said Wren. “Is that short for Panarikolos? Is your drunken fool Panarikolos Rabak?”

Majka froze. Wren turned from the window and studied her, waiting.

“Yes, that’s him,” said her mother-in-law.

Majka winced; the old woman’s voice was caustic. She had never said a word about Pankolo, but she knew.

“Tata—”

“It’s a large family, the Rabaks, though most of them have ended up in Shyram. They were respectable once.”

Majka couldn’t look at her. “I’ll make him pay for that window,” she said.

“Will you?” muttered the old woman, nudging the horseshoe with a slipper. “I’m sure I don’t want to know how.”

The stranger walked to the front door and opened it wide. Cold wind flooded the parlor; the rain lashed him in the face. There he paused, and Majka took a step towards him, not knowing why. The man glanced up at her fiercely, then closed the door behind him and was gone.

SHE CUT A square of canvas and nailed it over the broken pane. They rebolted the front door and fastened the chain lock on the door in the kitchen. Udi asked if the man was going to fight Pankolo, and she told him yes, probably. When he asked if one of them would be killed she sent him upstairs to pray.

The wind grew fiercer. Majka took a lamp into her bedroom and gazed mutely at a trio of crude earthenware saints on her dresser. Behind them stood a little congregation of lead and glass bottles: half-empty salves, rancid skin creams, a bottle the size of her little finger that contained the ghost of a perfume and the memory of the night Udi was conceived. No one would ever hurt him. There was no logic left to her but that.

Her fingers crept to the bottle with the tooth. As always the little lead vessel was extremely hot. She lifted it gingerly. No reason to open it, now or ever. There was nothing inside but sesame oil and a fragment of bone.

“A finger bone, I think,” her husband had said. “You keep it, Majka; remember that it’s something to be proud of. And perhaps it will bring good luck.”

She walked to the window overlooking the ravine. Four years since she’d made the descent. Four years since that river stopped giving and decided to take. She held the bottle in her fist until she could no longer stand the heat, then wrestled open the window and hurled the bottle into the night. She let the rain cool her throbbing hand. She was done with luck.

Returning to the dresser, she opened the bottom drawer, slid a hand beneath her petticoats and drew out a machete. She removed its sheath and ran her fingers up the blade until they met with a dry spot of blood. Something else to be proud of. She tested the weight of the machete in her hand.

Then she heard it: the clop of hooves on the muddy street. She left the sheath in the dresser and hurried downstairs, where she looked around the empty rooms in desperation. At last she rushed to the cellar door. With great care she propped the machete on the first stair, handle against the wall. There came a knock on the door of the kitchen.

Majka closed the cellar door. She had to compose herself. When the knock was repeated she walked to the kitchen door and opened it as far as the chain would allow.

Wren stood there, drenched. He’d gone out without his hat. One of Pankolo’s better horses stood steaming behind him.

“He subtracted six cockles from the price of the stallion. For your window, of course.”

The stranger reached through the gap, and Majka let him pour the heavy coins into her hand. Six gold cockles. Twenty times what she needed for the window. “You bought a horse from Pankolo? Just like that?”

She might have been asking if he had walked on water. But what was odd about it? He needed a horse, he bought one. And if his hand was shaking a little, what did that mean?

“Your friend said you might have room in the barn.”

“He’s not my friend. And you. You looked like something drowned.”

He brought his face close to the gap. “The prospect grows more likely by the minute,” he said.

No smile, but a wryness to his look. Majka found herself laughing. She grabbed her overcoat and unchained the door and stepped out into the rain.

PAST MIDNIGHT. THE mandolin sang softly in her son’s gifted hands. Udi smiled as he played; Majka rarely let him stay up late. The room was dark: she had lowered the flame on the oil lamp as far as she could without snuffing it altogether.

Her mother-in-law had retired. Bishkin purred at Udi’s feet. Wren had changed into her husband’s clothes, although the dead man’s shirt would scarcely button across his chest. He still had his cup of wine; she had never seen a man drink so slowly. Majka herself had taken a cup, her first in several years.

The music affected Wren. The line of his mouth softened, and the wariness left his eyes. He paced the house, listening with great intensity and turning often to glance at Udi, and sometimes at Majka herself. They had spoken no more of what was to come.

Majka tensed each time he drew close. She felt him pause behind her chair. In her bedroom she had rummaged through her old crates and foot-lockers, at last finding a warm shirt and pair of trousers. She had turned, and there he was in her room, watching her, glistening with rain.

“I’ll undress now, if you don’t mind.”

She had placed the folded clothes on the bed and stepped into the hall. When she returned a moment later with a towel he was already removing his shirt. He grew still, noticing her gaze. She put down the towel and turned quickly away.

I was only looking for his knife.

Udi finished his tune. Wren stopped his pacing and nodded his approval.

“You’re a fine player already,” he said. “Do you have a profession in mind, boy?”

Her son averted his eyes. “Stone,” he mumbled.

“Stone?”

“Walls and such. My mother’s teaching me; she’s better than anyone. She built our garden wall.”

“There’s no demand for it,” said Majka. “He can’t make a living from stonework in Chamsarat. But then what could he make a living from?”

She wished she hadn’t spoken, for she knew the answer too well. He could have made a living from horse breeding. Pankolo had offered, several times, that spring when she first let him bed her. Majka had never raised the issue since.

“You must keep up with the music, come what may,” said Wren, seating himself again by the stove. “Will you play us one more tonight?”

Udi shrugged. Then, shyly, he began the first tune the mandolin’s owner had taught him. The melody was simple, haunting. Majka glanced at Wren and found him sitting oddly still.

When he finished, Udi rested the mandolin on his knees. “There’s words, but I never learned them,” he said.

“Many words,” said Wren. “It is a balladeer’s standard, known all across the Republic. I have heard the tale of Niseta the Beautiful set to that music. Niseta, who waited years for her lover’s return, knowing he still lived because he entered her dreams every new moon, and lay with her to sunrise, and she woke drenched with love.”

Udi squirmed in his chair. “The one I heard was about a goat.”

Majka lifted the wine jug, reached casually to take Wren’s cup from his hand. Casually! There was nothing casual about it. She let her fingers graze his own and the breath went out of her. She was not a selfish person; no one could accuse her of that. She filled the cup and pressed it back into his hand. Give me this night, God of mine. One night only. Let him stay.

“I have heard a much longer lyric as well,” said Wren. “It tells of an ancient clan who called themselves Ve’saqra, which means the Forever People.”

Majka froze.

“They were few in number but very proud,” the man continued. “Absurdly proud, one might say. They told themselves that their clan would never perish from the earth. But they failed to notice the earth changing around them. They were a woodland folk—warriors, hunters, trappers. They did not understand cities, or that a man could build armies from the peasants who came to cities like moths to a blaze. And they laughed when a certain warlord decreed that he was God’s will incarnate, and would rule over them.”

“Time you slept, Udi,” said Majka.

“Incarnate?” said her son.

“God’s will made flesh,” said Wren. “And it is true that heaven seemed to favor his soldiers. They conquered all the lowlands, from the Ilidron Coves to the pine barrens of the north. But the Forever People would not yield. They had strong men and swift horses, and above all they did not fear him. We are conquered first through fear, boy. I hope you will never forget that.”

“Did they fight?” asked Udi.

“Oh, yes.”

“And beat him in the end?”

Wren shook his head. “They lost their land, village by village. Half their men were slain, and the whole clan driven into exile. But even in exile they resisted. They seized an old castle and began to repair it, stone by stone. And the warlord ignored them. ‘Let them rot in those hills,’ he declared. And so within their rebuilt walls the Ve’saqra knew some years of peace. It was doomed from the start, however. The warlord had turned his back on them, yes, but only because he had developed a new fascination.”

Majka brought the jug down on the stove with a smack; droplets of wine flew and hissed. Udi did not even glance at her. “What fascination?” he asked.

“Sorcery,” said Wren. “He became the patron of conjurors, necromancers, priests of the Night Gods. He gathered them to his court, plied them with gifts, granted them titles and estates. Year by year they claimed more of his attention, and more of his gold.

“One day he found the royal coffers empty. Having already squeezed his own people dry, he sent a messenger to the hills where the Ve’saqra lived, demanding a tribute of men and gold. The man was met with jeers. If the wolf in his prime had not killed them, they said, why should they tremble if he crawls from his cave a last time, toothless and feeble, to howl at the moon? And to underscore the point they took the scroll case with the royal demands away from the messenger and stuffed it with horse dung, then sealed it and sent it back to the king.”

Udi’s jaw hung open. For a moment he struggled with himself; then he collapsed in laughter, shrill boyish peals. Majka gripped her chair. Horror had pounced on her again.

“Udi, to bed. We’re done with stories for tonight.”

“But the story’s not done,” cried Udi, instantly contained. “Let him finish, Mama. Then I’ll go.”

They bickered. Majka started counting to three. Udi whined as though his life depended on hearing the end of the tale, and in her fear Majka found herself imagining that it might be so. That, or the reverse.

“Get marching!”

“No!”

She pointed at the mandolin, “I’ll send your plaything back tomorrow. Just try me, you little runt.”

Tears sprang to Udi’s eyes. Majka swore, crossed her arms, turned away from the man and child. She was trembling; they would notice. She surrendered with a wave.

Wren looked down into his cup. “I’ve done wrong,” he said. “Forgive me.”

“Not fucking likely.”

“It’s just a story, Mama,” said Udi. “What happened? What did the king say to the people?”

The stranger shook his head. “Nothing.”

“You’re lying,” said Udi, forgetting himself entirely.

“No, I’m not,” said Wren. “The king sent no word to the Forever People. He called instead for his sorcerers, and told them it was time to prove their loyalty. And the sorcerers locked themselves in a tower for five days and nights, and a blood-red glow lit the tower windows. When it was done a great shriek went up from the tower, and half the sorcerers went mad and never recovered. But the curse was cast, and it fell upon the Ve’saqra and heated their bones like irons in the forge, and all eight thousand were scalded to death from within.”

Silence. Udi looked at Majka. She could find no face for him but rage.

“Is it true, Mama?”

She couldn’t speak. The man looked at Udi with a strange intensity.

“It is a legend, boy. Legends are never simply true or false. The Ve’saqra were real; there are ruins to prove it. And the warlord: he was very real. His descendants are men of power in our Republic today.”

Udi frowned. “But the curse wasn’t real.”

The stranger cocked his head slightly to one side.

“I misspoke in one regard. There were survivors. It seems the curse glanced off certain houses, just as a whirlwind may tear fifty homes to pieces and leave the fifty-first untouched. In the case of the Ve’saqra, about a hundred souls were spared.”

“Why?”

“I’ve just said I don’t know, Udi. No one does. It was four hundred years ago.”

“What did they do with the bodies?”

Majka looked at her son, appalled. The fascination in his voice.

“What indeed?” said Wren. “The bones went on burning, like white-hot coals. What does one do with such relics? And what if they go on blazing for centuries, reminders of infamy, proofs of an unthinkable crime?”

Majka seized Udi’s chin and turned it. Udi winced at her brutal grip, but one glance ended his whining: Majka’s face left him terrified. He rose and whispered goodnight.

A log cracked in the woodstove. The stranger sat like a statue, or a corpse. Majka listened to Udi’s feet ascending the stairs, the groan of the top step, the squeak of his bedroom door. Finally the latch clicked shut.

“I was sent here to kill you.”

Her mind seized. Don’t look towards the cellar. Don’t leap up or he’ll move like a snake again. Don’t laugh or scream or weep. Stay alive, stay alive.

“You can spare us,” she whispered. “Just take what you want, and go.”

“Take your name? Your ancestry?”

“But there’s some mistake,” she said. “We haven’t done anything. What could Udi have done?”

The man shook his head. “Not this household. This village. First the people, then the crops, then the ancient bones you’ve scattered or concealed. And in the springtime, the very ruins of Chamsarat, stone by stone. By next summer it will all be gone.”

“You knew Pankolo’s name.”

“From traders in Shyram. He’s the big man in town, they said. The one with all the horses. I had to see to those horses.”

Majka shuddered, recalling the tremor in his hand.

“They gave me your name as well. Majka, the savage one. You’re a little bit famous.”

“They don’t know anything, they’re dullards like Pankolo.”

“They know that you chopped a man to bits with a machete.”

“He climbed in Udi’s window,” she said. “A baby, not old enough to walk. You make it sound as though I liked it.”

“Did you?”

“He was touching Udi. He was drooling.”

The stranger closed his eyes. What if she just walked to the cellar and took out the machete? Or screamed? Udi could jump from that same window, run away into the night.

“You’re not alone, are you?”

“Of course I’m not alone.”

“You don’t have to do this. You’re a human being.”

“Oh no,” he said, “not for ages.”

She should get up now. Stand up, walk to the cellar. She felt as if her legs were missing. As if by some nightmare procedure they had been removed.

“You starvelings,” said Wren. “You beggars with your rags and rotten teeth: you’re what’s left of the Forever People. A sad end to the story, isn’t it? But you’re still an inconvenience to my master. This is an election year, after all.”

He sighed and leaned forward, resting elbows on knees. “He’s quite the ambitious man. He would make a modern country of us, do away with old factions and beliefs. But he can do nothing without votes. Tell me, Majka: who would vote for a man whose forefathers scalded eight thousand peasants to death? No one, in fact. So the legend must be disproved, the evidence effaced. The work began years ago: my master’s grandfather arranged for the disappearance of certain history books, and their authors. That was good enough for a time. But a would-be Proconsul attracts far closer scrutiny. It was his wife who put her foot down. Rub out the stain, she said.”

“The stain.”

“Chamsarat Village. You.”

He drew a weary hand across his face. Something in the gesture freed Majka to rise and move towards the cellar. Weak with fear, dragging her feet like a whore at sunrise. She had wanted him to fuck her. She had prayed for it. Her first prayer in ever so long.

“They also told me you were kind-hearted,” said Wren.

She turned away from him, leaned her cheek against the cellar door. “Anything else?” she asked.

“Well, yes,” he said. “Drunks talk.”

He was approaching. She rested her hand on the doorknob, exhaled, tried to make her face serene. Udi would get away somehow. Others would die but not her son. He would cross the ravine and flee into the Thrandaal and become a prince of the forest, wed some Thrandaal girl, found a new clan, die surrounded by family in a mansion of logs.

All at once she felt the warmth of him, the clothes that still smelled of her husband, his breath in her ear. The cellar stairs would be in shadow, black as pitch. She would just lean forward a little, as though groping for the wall. A reverse grip on the weapon. A backwards thrust.

Her left hand felt the touch of his fingers.

“They told me you were beautiful.”

“And wanton?”

His fingers released her. “Yes, but they lied. That was their envy speaking. I’m a good judge of such things.”

She turned the doorknob.

“Take me first.”

“Nonsense,” he said.

“In the cellar, where Udi won’t hear. I want it once more before I die.”

“You want no such thing. And I, even less.”

She reached back to fondle him: there was proof of his lie. Then she bit down on the wailing in her soul and pushed open the door and slid her hand along the wall.

Nothing.

She lurched down a step, groping wildly. “Your machete is at the bottom of the stairs,” he said. “Don’t go for it, please.”

She whirled, snarling. Time to kill, she was the savage one, she still had hands and teeth.

And then her legs simply buckled and she dropped on the stairs. To fight this man was to die and save no one. Tear-blinded, she pawed at his feet. Babbling, apologizing, begging him to let Udi go.

“It was a fine idea, the machete,” he said. “I hid your axe, of course, but I could do nothing about a weapon already in the house. And when you went to fetch these clothes I had only a moment. I might have overlooked the cellar, distracted as I was by your charms.”

Mockery. She couldn’t care less. She pressed her head against his leg. Fighting not to howl, scared witless at the thought of Udi waking and rushing from his bedroom.

He crouched down, placed a rough hand on her cheek.

“You must try to understand.”

“Go rot in the Pits.”

“One day, no doubt,” he said. “But tonight there’s still work to be done. And you must help me.”

“Help you kill us?”

“No, Majka. Help me stop that man, and his long line of bloodsuckers. Help me ruin them for good. I’ve thought about it for years. Now at last it can be done.”

He was a lunatic and no more. This was all much simpler than she’d supposed. “You should rest a little,” she said. “Sit down, there’s still soup in the kitchen, or I could bring you some—”

He pulled her roughly to her feet. “You’ll bring me those bones.”

“Bones?”

“The bones of the Ve’saqra, woman. Haven’t you been listening? My master is a beast and the descendant of beasts, but he could win. The family has been washing out stains for generations, now, and their work is almost done. Only proof of the massacre will stop him. Can you give it to me?”

She felt her own words doom her, but she spoke them all the same: “I can’t. I never would anyway. You’re his—dog.”

Once again the man grew still.

“It’s worse than that. I’m one of his bastard sons. My mother washed linens on his estate: she probably washed her own blood from the sheets, after he dragged her to his room. His spymaster took me from her when I was half Udi’s age, and when that old killer died I inherited the job. And I’ve done my share of killing. Three senators. Four heads of rival families. Never fear, I’ll spend eternity in the Pits.”

He was sweating, his gaze naked at last.

“There was a time before it started. A few mornings in our shack in the servants’ ghetto. My mother brought apple cores back from his kitchen. They were delicious, if you chopped them fine.”

She couldn’t help him, or kill him. She did not know which of the two she should want. Perhaps they were one and the same.

“The bones are the only proof,” he said. “Where are they, Majka? You can’t have lived here your whole life and not know.”

She couldn’t speak. Udi’s life, the lives of all the villagers, caught in her throat.

“Where?”he demanded.

“They’re lost,” she said at last. “Graverobbers. It’s been four hundred years.”

“Graverobbers made off with bones that scald at a touch?”

“People will buy anything,” she said. “And there are ways of carrying them—”

Wren’s eyes narrowed. Majka stammered: “I mean, couldn’t you? If there were any? In pails of water, or—”

“Across the hayfield,” he interrupted, “in that ruin of a barn, six men await my signal, Majka. Chewing mutton, sharpening their spears.”

“Just six?”

“Six is quite enough. You have no fighters here to resist them. And they are terrible, terrible men.”

“Send them away!” Majka forced herself to lean against him, touch his face with her fingertips. “Do it, please do it, send them off, just make up a story—”

“They would never dare return to our master with the job undone.”

“The job! Killing us, slaughtering us like a village of pigs.”

He broke away from her, walked back to the stove. Crouching, he opened the iron door and warmed his hands.

“They will not be turned,” he said, “and if I do not return by daybreak they will strike without me. They are too strong for Chamsarat, even if you faced them together. But with Shyram’s aid things might be different. There I saw at least twenty young men.”

“Yes,” she said. “Half of them are Pankolo’s cousins.”

“That is why I sent him there.”

“You what?”

“On his fastest horse. I told him the village would be dead by morning, if he did not bring aid. When he returns I shall fight beside them, and we will win.”

A lunatic. Majka put her face in her hands. “Pankolo,” she said, “will never show his face in Chamsarat again.”

“You don’t know that. For all of us there is a path beyond fear. Majka, where are the bones of your ancestors?”

He waited, still crouching, one side of his face gold in the firelight, the other a featureless shadow. For a long moment she stood leaning against the wall by the cellar door. Then she stood straight and crossed the parlour and lifted her coat.

THE DESCENT INTO the ravine was slippery and black. Wren carried the ash bucket and a pair of iron tongs, Majka the oil lamp. When the storm defeated the little flame she crept forward like a blind woman, trusting feet and fingertips. She had used this trail all her life, until four years ago.

The bottom of the ravine was a maze of boulders and underbrush and gnarled pines. They crept upstream until the gorge narrowed and the river lapped the feet of the cliffs. Majka told him to remove his boots. “From here we wade upstream.”

“Good God.”

“Never mind the cold,” she said. “You won’t be feeling it long.”

They wallowed and stumbled among the high black stones. While it lasted the cold was a torture, animals gnawing their flesh. But soon she felt the familiar weakening of those teeth. The river became chilly, then merely cool. “I hear a waterfall,” said Wren.

She could see now, just barely: the clouds were unbroken, but had thinned enough to glaze the river’s surface with an eggwash of moonlight. There were the falls, broad and snaggletoothed. And there were the three squat boulders, hunkering together by the cliffside. Majka flailed across the river. She squeezed into a narrow gap between the two nearest boulders, and sighed. Before her stretched a narrow, crescent-shaped pool. The water flowing from it was almost hot.

She clawed her way onto the ledge she remembered, then reached back and took the bucket and tongs from Wren. He floundered onto the ledge. Majka could barely see the man; he was a breathing blackness at her side.

“Gods of death,” he said. “It’s all true. It happened. Eight thousand souls.”

“My husband found the pool,” she said. “He was a very clever man. Grave robbers still waste time in the ruins, but they were picked clean before I was born. My husband knew better. He guessed what our ancestors did with the bones.”

“Into the river, eh? Where they’d draw no more attention.”

“And start no more fires,” said Majka. “They were thrown from the old battlements, miles upstream. Of course they were mostly smashed to bits and washed away. But not here. The pool’s too deep. Whatever washes in here sinks to the bottom and stays.”

“You’ve been back since he died?”

She nodded. “This end’s a bit shallower. I used to sink straight down and dig with my toes and find coins—gold coins; they washed down here too. But they’re gone now.”

“Why don’t you try the deep end?”

“Because I can’t swim, that’s why. And it’s a death trap. The current tries to suck you down under those rocks. If it does, you’re finished. Horses couldn’t pull you out.”

A weird sound came from above them. Feral, pitiful, pliant: it was the chelu, somewhere in the brush atop the cliff. Wren’s shadow moved. He was kneeling, removing her husband’s shirt.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m a very good swimmer.”

“So was he.”

In the darkness she felt him study her once more. Then his wet lips brushed her forehead: not an accident, nor quite a kiss. She placed a hand on his thigh, but he drew it away and took up the iron tongs. She saw him stand and begin to creep along the ledge.

A minor miracle, then, the gray veil of the clouds torn away, and there he was in the moonlight, naked, pale gold, and Majka scrambled to her feet as he dived. For a moment he vanished, but then she had him once more, pulling for the depths, a trick of the water making him look small and fragile-limbed and anxious as a child.