Faery Worlds - Six Complete Novels (5 page)

“I’m sorry, Mama,” said Dindi. Her jaw hurt, so hard did she clench it. “I think I’m more like Gramma Maba than like you.”

Mama touched her cheek.

“Eat,” she said. “Eat, already.”

That night, Dindi was kidnapped.

You never forget the night they come for you.

Shuffling in the dark, followed by silence. You wake up with your heart already racing. Intrusive smells, chalk paste and feathers. Sweat. Beer. Heavy male breathing.

Their aim is to terrify you, disorient you, and they succeed. Grotesque heads loom over you, claw-like hands grasp you, yank you to the hay-strewn dirt in the goat pen under the loft. More hands smother your scream.

Their aim is to strip you of dignity, of comfort, and they do this literally. Horrible things, uglier and taller than men, surround you. They shove you from one to another, casual but brutal, tear off your clothes, smack your bare flesh, gag you and snag your wrists behind your back with scratchy twine. Beside you, your clan sister Jensi suffers the same abuse. Tibi cowers in a corner of the goat pen, but the kidnappers ignore her.

They herd you into the courtyard. Whitewashed adobe reflects the moonlight like bone. Night leeches color from the intricate designs painted on the houses, so the buildings look strangled by black nooses.

Firelight winks on a dozen naked captives, all in a line, a snake winding around the houses, preyed on by monsters. For a moment, you think the monsters are fae, some hideous sort, trolls or harpies, but fae do not carry torches or cast shadows. Fae glow with their own light. The kidnappers must be men in masks and mantas. As the enemy Tavaedi warriors shuffle and cavort, deformed shadows spring up to dance beneath and between them.

Their aim is to crush you, to grind you down like corn meal. They steal your senses one by one. You’ve already been gagged so tightly you find it hard to breath. Now they blindfold you. Have you ever had black cloth wrapped so tightly you can’t see a torch held right next to your face? No, you’ve only played at it, in children’s games. Real blindness, forced blindness, petrifies you. They shove a hollowed tree drum over your head, then pound it, assaulting your ears. Your hearing and balance, gone. A heavy basket, a mountain of stones, is forced onto your back. Your knees buckle under you, you want to collapse and cry, but you can’t afford weakness. A switch against your thighs drives you forward.

You hate the switch, the ropes, their rough hands, yet, in your helplessness, you crave even the touch of these things to guide you, assure you the rest of the world is there, that you aren’t lost alone blind and deaf in the dark.

Their aim is to keep you so exhausted, so helpless, you can’t think beyond surviving the next step, and the next after that. They never let you rest, they hit and curse and threaten you. They force-march you down a narrow trail through bushes and trees that slap you. Occasionally, you trip, slip, bump against another captive tied in the line, and this brief rub of flesh on flesh reassures you that you aren’t alone, but also makes you want to rage and weep because it reminds you the enemy has captured your cousins, your friends.

A strange thing happens. You’re terrified, disoriented, humiliated, helpless, panting with exhaustion, focused on trying to place one foot at a time while avoiding the switch. You’re also angry. As your hearing and sense of balance returns, your anger creeps up on you, growing fiercer, until it strangles your fear.

Despite the enemy’s precautions, your woodcraft whispers certain secrets. The brush of the air on your skin, the texture and tilt of the ground, these tell you you’re heading west, toward the ocean. You know you will be sold as a sacrificial slave, a mariah, as soon as they leave the borders of your clan and tribe, too far away for your kin to find or avenge you. Obedience doesn’t bake well in your oven; you’re certain you wouldn’t last long as a slave. They warn you they will kill you if you don’t do what they want, that your life is worth less to them than a fistful of seed. They call you wormbait, carrion.

Their aim is to make you think you are going to die, and they succeed.

So you have nothing left to lose.

Chapter Two

Rover

Kavio

Kavio stood on the balcony of his father’s house, back in the shadows, and the mob hadn’t seen him yet. That couldn’t last.

The mob filled the dusty streets between the blocks of adobe houses. Torches waved like luminous war banners. The throng had been gathering every evening for days before the trial, shouting for blood. Wild fae whirled around them, vicious little Red and Orange imps, unseen by most of the people in the crowd.

“Death to Kavio! Death to Kavio!” the people shouted.

Kavio inhaled the dry summer night. The decree of the Society of Societies might have been commuted to exile, but he still had to get out of the tribehold alive. Now that he faced a mob ready to rend him limb from limb, he found he preferred life in exile to death after all.

Father, still in his face paint and dance regalia, went to the edge of the balcony. Like the kiva, the adobe house had been painted white and the mud walls of the balcony rose organically out of the lower story of the house. For defensive purposes, none of the houses in the tribehold had doors on the first story. Ladders allowed access between the balcony and the street.

Father held up his arms to silence the crowd. It took some time to still their chanting.

“Your cries have been heard. Justice is served!” he shouted. “Kavio has been judged guilty. He will be exiled!”

This appeased few in the mob.

“In the Bone Whistler’s day he would have been stoned!” someone shouted.

Thunderous rage contorted Father’s face, but he never lost his self-control. “The Bone Whistler is dead and so are his ways. The judgment is exile.”

“Of course the mighty Imorvae War Chief spares his own son!” someone else shouted.

Father’s knuckles whitened on the ledge of the balcony, but his pride would not let him stoop to correct the accusation.

“Let Kavio begin his exile, here, now!” cried another voice. “We’ll see how long it lasts!”

Ugly laughter rippled through the crowd.

“Lower the ladder,” Father said to the Tavaedi warriors who still guarded Kavio.

Even the guards looked dubious. “The crowd will rip him apart as soon as he’s down the ladder.”

“Lower the ladder,” repeated Father.

Kavio might have expected Mother to object to this, but she had not accompanied Kavio and Father back to their house from the kiva. In her typical way, she had disappeared without a word of goodbye.
I guess she hasn’t forgiven me for turning down her offer.

The warriors lowered the ladder to the street. The crowd began to cheer. Someone took up the chant again.

“Death to Kavio! Death to Kavio!”

He knew his cue when he heard it, Kavio thought sardonically. He stepped forward into the torchlight and the sight of the mob. Another roar went up in the mob, and so many people tried to press close to the ladder that it almost fell into the street. One of the men pushed back the others, shouting, “Let him come down first, if he dares!”

“That’s my invitation, I believe,” he said to Father, grasping the ladder.

“If new evidence or new witnesses step forward to exonerate you,” Father said, “You could resume all your duties as a Zavaedi in the Labyrinth. Is there anything you want to tell me, Kavio, which you didn’t want to say at the trial?”

Kavio thought of Zumo, and what he might have said, did his cousin not share Auntie Ugly’s unreasoning hatred of everything Kavio was. The chances that Zumo would change his testimony seemed slight. To say the least.

“Goodbye, Father.”

He swung his legs around and descended the ladder into the waiting crowd.

They didn’t even let him climb down the ladder, but shook it and pushed it over. He flipped in the air as he fell and landed on his feet, but at once, enraged men and women assaulted him from all sides, some with their hands and feet, some with rocks and sticks. The sheer volume of kicks, sticks, punches, pinches and pummels drove him to the dust in a heap of bruised flesh.

And he thought he had been ready to die. He fought for every last breath, made them pay for every blow with two blows back of his own, but still they were winning, they were going to beat him to death right under his own balcony, as Father watched impassively from above.

A strong arm clasped and dragged Kavio back to his feet. He could breathe again.

“The judgment was exile!” his helper shouted at the crowd. “You will not commit murder tonight!”

Blood dribbled into his eyes, so it took Kavio several blinks to realize who had saved him.

“Zumo,” he said hoarsely. His mouth tasted of blood and dust.

“I’ll escort you out of the tribehold, cousin,” Zumo said evenly. He snapped his fingers. Several other Tavaedis, all Zumo’s hangers-on, formed a defensive square around Kavio and Zumo.

The crowd jeered at Kavio as they passed, and a few of the braver ones hurled rocks or mud at him. He felt the shame of his nakedness strongly, not because of the attire itself, but because of the ashes smeared over his chest and thighs. He tried to hold his head up proudly rather than hunch over and shield himself from the taunting mob. He wondered which was worse, to need the protection of his enemy to walk the streets of the tribehold, or to wonder at its price.

“I thought you cast your stone on the black mat. Why are you suddenly so eager to keep me alive now when you wanted me dead this afternoon?”

“Ah, the stone. Mother suggested it would look more believable. But the fact is, I’ve got what I wanted,” Zumo said.

Kavio pressed his lips together.

“This doesn’t have to be forever, Kavio.”

“What?”

Zumo gestured to Kavio’s bloody, ash-smeared body. “This. Your exile.”

“That’s not the judgment I heard.”

“There is a way that an exile may be allowed to return—if he is pardoned by a War Chief or a Vaedi. Your father can never pardon you, because his impartiality would be called into question. But I could.”

“You?”

“After your father steps down, a new War Chief will have to be appointed,” Zumo went on. “It would have been you before. Now it will be me.”

Kavio felt sick. “Congratulations.”

They had arrived at the large wooden gates at the entrance of the tribehold. There were too many warriors on guard at the gate for the mob to follow. Muttering, the crowd dispersed.

“If you would agree to serve me loyally, I would let you back into the Labyrinth as a Zavaedi again,” Zumo said. He sounded as though he thought he was truly doing Kavio a favor. “I mean it.”

Kavio laughed. He looked his cousin up and down in contempt. “Never forget, I know what you really are, Zumo.”

Hatred boiled in Zumo’s face. And fear. “No one would believe you.”

“Don’t worry.” Kavio’s lips twitched in a self-mocking smile. “I know that. That’s not the point. The point is, I know what you are. And I would rather live in exile the rest of my days than serve a man who lives a lie every day of his life.”

“Be careful, Kavio. Death might still find you.”

“It finds us all in the end, doesn’t it? Goodbye Zumo.”

Outside the Rainbow Labyrinth tribehold, no mobs harassed him and no enemies taunted him. Fields that smelled of sweet maize surrounded him. The tribehold stood on a mesa in a large box canyon cut by a river. Irrigation ditches and low stone walls divvied up the fields. The sparkle of willawisps blinked on and off against the night sky. He decided he would walk as far as he could by dawn before he stopped to consider camping. He had no sleeping roll, no pack, no water gourd, not even a weapon.

When the moon rose, he started to scan the valley for the journey omen. He admitted he was vain enough to hope for something noble, a nighthawk or a cougar, but no living creature crossed his path. All he found was the shed skin of a snow snake, luminous white, perfectly intact and as long as his arm. Snow snakes were rare creatures, which lived high in the mountains, but once a year they shed their white skins for jet black scales and descended by the hundreds to mate in the hot desert valleys. A poor omen, he decided. Even after he found the skin, he kept an eye out for a cougar.

He had walked most of the night when he heard footsteps paralleling his. He tensed.

Mother stepped out from the rows of maize. She seemed to glow white in the moonlight. He felt absurdly glad to see her, surprised yet not surprised to find her out here, just where the tilled fields gave way to wild forest. He quickened his step to join her, but when he saw her face, full of pain, he stopped short of embracing her.

She had not forgiven him. Aching inside, he mulled her painful words to him during their fight. You can’t even do this one thing for me.

He remembered reaching toddler-chubby arms up to her, commanding, “Fly with me!” She would sweep him up, as her wings spread behind her, until they rode the wind. Father hated those flights; Mother and Father always fought about it afterward. To stop the yelling, Kavio had learned to stop asking her to fly.

When he’d been seven years old, she’d sewn him his first dance costume, the most wondrous thing he’d ever seen, of spider silk and parrot feathers, cowrie shells and rainbow stitches. He’d ripped it up in front of her. She’d never sewn him another one.

Little by little, over the years, he had pushed her further from him. It was the price he’d paid to please his father.

He wanted to say:
I’m sorry.
To say:
I love you.

He wanted to say:
Fly with me.

Instead, his words tumbled out like stones on a slippery mountain trail, hard and impatient. “Just before the trial, you said you wanted me to look for the Vaedi, that humankind would perish if I didn’t. I can go now.”

Mother’s chalcedony bracelets chimed when she shrugged. “I don’t remember saying that.”