New Lands (THE CHRONICLES OF EGG) (24 page)

Worse, whenever Guts quickened his pace or leaped over
something, the trunk would jerk the rest of us forward, and we’d all topple to the ground face-first.

Even after he got it through his head that he had to keep a steady pace, Guts didn’t seem to understand that if he veered to one side, the trunk swung around and pushed me in the opposite direction, which usually meant I caught a branch to the face.

And whenever I yelled to Guts to be more careful, the Moku bringing up the rear would smash a rifle butt against my back as a warning not to talk.

We were on the hill for a miserable hour or two, and the whole time, it took every bit of my concentration just to keep moving forward. When we finally reached the valley floor, it got easier.

A while after that, we met up with the stone-paved road that we’d avoided back on the pass.

Once we were on the road, it was no trick to keep moving, although the Moku forced us to double our pace, and it was hot and muggy on the valley floor, so it wasn’t exactly pleasant. Even so, now that I wasn’t preoccupied with just staying on my feet, I had a chance to think things over for the first time since I’d fallen ill with the Clutch.

The situation was bleak. These Moku were different from any other Natives I’d encountered, either in Pella or the wilderness. They were harsh and humorless, both with us and each other—even watching them talk amongst themselves, I hadn’t seen any of them so much as crack a smile or speak in a warm tone of voice. They doled out violence casually and with no warning, in a way that made me think it came as naturally to them as haggling did to the Flut.

I found myself thinking back to what the crew of the
Thrush
had told us on our first night at sea—that there were Natives who’d cut our hearts out and eat them while they were still beating. With all the other tribes I’d encountered, the idea seemed laughable. But with this bunch, it was all too easy to imagine. Kira’s comment about not getting her heart cut out just confirmed it—and I was terrified that although they’d spared her for the moment, sooner or later that’d be her fate.

It might be true of the rest of us as well.

Even if it wasn’t, I knew enough about the Moku’s recent history to be pretty sure the rifles they were carrying—identical to the flintlocks used by the Rovian soldiers who’d marched on my plantation—had come from Roger Pembroke, or someone connected to him.

The men who were marching us down this road were allies of my enemy.

How often did they speak to him? How much did they know about who we were?

Did they have anything to do with the invasion Millicent said was coming?

And what would be worse—if they knew how valuable the map in my head was, or if they didn’t?

Either way, it wasn’t good.

If I’d only listened to Millicent and hadn’t drunk that water, we wouldn’t have gotten stuck in one place for so long, and the Moku never would have found us. I’d doomed us all by being an idiot.

The afternoon sun was brutal, and the thick air on the valley floor was as stifling as a bad day back on Deadweather. I watched my friends stagger along in front of me, wilting from the heat and the lack of food and water. Tied up like animals.

Or slaves.

I got a sick feeling in my stomach that had nothing to do with the Clutch, or even the lack of food and water.

I got them into this. It’s my fault we got captured.

I’ve got to make it right. I’ve got to get us out of this.

Maybe I can bargain with the Moku. Offer them the map for our lives.

But who knows if they even care about the Fist of Ka?

More likely, they’ll just pass it on to the man who buys slaves from them.

Millicent stumbled and fell, bringing us all down. I hit the stone paving with my elbow, and a burst of pain shot up my arm.

The Moku leader barked something at his men. Two of them opened up our water skins and forced us to drink. The one who fed me did it so roughly that half of what came out of the skin wound up dribbling down my neck. Then they shoved pieces of cured meat in our mouths, raised the log to force us to our feet, and prodded us to get moving again.

The road snaked through a pair of hills. On the far side, the forest gave way to cropland. Most of the fields were untended and overgrown with weeds, except for a few orchards of skinny trees heavy with a kind of yellow-brown gourd I’d never seen before. In one orchard, we passed a group of Moku women and children picking the gourds and stacking them by the side of the road in big, messy piles.

Then we rounded another hill and got a view of the valley ahead. In the distance was an anvil-shaped hill, and above its thick cover of trees rose the upper reaches of what Kira called Mata Kalun, the Temple of the Sunset. It was the shape of a cropped
pyramid, its smooth sides tapering up to end at a perfectly flat platform with a big square box perched on top of it.

Even from miles away, it was awesome. I couldn’t believe human beings had built something that enormous.

The road was headed straight for the temple. We continued on through the wasted cropland for several miles, until we approached the base of the temple hill and another forest swallowed us. We were seeing more and more Moku on the road now, mostly older women bent at the waist from the weight of large woven containers strapped across their backs, or clusters of male warriors carrying dead game strapped to poles, just like we were.

The road wound up the hillside in a series of switchbacks. When we turned one corner, we came upon a group of young boys shouting skyward at two of their friends who seemed to be in a race to the top of a pair of tall trees by the side of the road. The lead warrior called out to them, and several of the boys split off from their friends to run full speed up the road, quickly disappearing around a turn.

At the top of the hill, we came upon a wide, six-foot wall of stone that at one point must have been gated to keep out intruders. But there was no gate now, and for several feet on the right side of the road, the wall had been reduced to a pile of rubble. It was still intact on the left side, and a lone sentry stood atop that section of wall with a rifle. When we appeared, he turned, cupped his hands to his mouth, and shouted an announcement to the settlement behind him.

We crossed the ruined wall and entered the town. Ancient-looking trees lined both sides of the paved road. Between the trees and down the cross streets were low stone buildings of varying
sizes. A lot of them had collapsed, many more were scorched black from fire damage, and the handful of undamaged ones all looked abandoned.

I had the eerie feeling that we weren’t walking through a city, but a graveyard.

After a hundred yards or so, people began to appear, and the buildings started to look more lived in. But as often as not, the low stone structures had been used as a platform on which the Moku had built little thatched huts like the ones we’d seen in the Flut villages, leaving the original stone buildings to their snuffling pigs and rib-skinny dogs.

It no longer felt like a graveyard, but it didn’t quite seem like a city, either. It was as if the Moku, having driven off the Okalu, weren’t living in their enemies’ city so much as camping out there.

We neared the city center, and up ahead I got a glimpse of a giant, open square, with the massive base of the temple visible on the left. Then our captors stopped us, and when I craned my neck to look past the others, I saw why.

A group of ten Moku was striding down the avenue toward us. Up in front were two men who couldn’t have looked more different from each other.

One was the size of an ox—the Moku who captured us were all a good six feet tall, and the two Moku who’d kidnapped us in Pella were even bigger than that. But the ox made them all look puny. He wore a jaguar cape like the other warriors, and underneath it his bare chest looked like it was made from slabs of rock the size of the ones that paved the road.

The man next to him was old and shriveled, and while he had longish limbs, age had made them sort of fold in on themselves, so the effect was like looking at a wrinkled grasshopper. He wore a chest piece made of bleached-out bones strung together, and atop his head was a teetering headdress of feathers in such bright reds, blues, and greens that they almost glowed with color.

The other Moku treated him like royalty. As he spoke to the lead warrior, even the ox hung on the old grasshopper’s every word.

The warrior gave the grasshopper the firebird necklace, and the old man held it up to the late afternoon sun for a better look.

Then the whole group made a slow circle around us, squinting at our faces and bodies like we were livestock for sale.

On his way back around, the grasshopper stopped in front of Kira and asked her a question. She answered in her flat, emotionless voice. As he asked a second question, he raised a bony finger and jabbed it at the sky overhead.

Kira nodded.
“Ke. Ka mol.”

He snorted, like she was a trader who’d just quoted him a ridiculous price on something.

He took a few steps back and took us all in with his watery eyes.

Then he looked again at the firebird necklace in his hand. He gave a curt order, turned, and started back toward the city center. The ox and the rest of their party followed him, along with the warrior leader and one of his men.

Four warriors stayed with us. One of them took hold of the front end of the tree trunk and yanked it sharply around, forcing
us to stagger backward and sideways as he reversed course and started back down the road in the direction we’d come.

Three-fourths of the way back to the ruined wall, the warriors led us off the main road, down an unpaved side street with just a couple of scattered buildings. When we turned down the street, I heard Kira sigh, like she knew where we were going and wasn’t happy about it.

We followed the road past the last of the buildings, to a wide patch of rocky dirt surrounded by trees. In the middle of it was a gaping, twenty-foot-wide hole in the ground. At the near edge of the patch, a bored-looking Moku warrior lounged on a rock. One of the warriors called out to him, and he stood up.

The five of them guided us over to the open pit, past several lengths of knotted rope that lay in sloppy coils on the ground. A couple of the ropes had big woven baskets tied to them.

They stopped Guts right at the edge of the pit. I was the farthest from it, and from that angle I couldn’t see anything in the pit but a dark chasm.

One of the warriors pulled a black stone knife from its sheath, and with a few quick sawing motions, he cut Guts free from the trunk.

Then he shoved him into the pit.

It wasn’t as deep as it looked—right away, I heard Guts hit bottom with a
thud
and an
oof.
Then there were muffled voices of surprise from inside the pit, but I couldn’t focus on them because I was getting jerked nearly off my feet as the warriors pulled Kira up to the edge.

They cut her free and shoved her in.

Millicent was next.

Then me.

MY FEET CAME DOWN
partly on Millicent’s back, and she yelled as we tumbled together onto the smooth-worn rock of the pit. It stank of human waste and sweat down there, and it was so dark and gloomy that at first I could barely see anything. There was a confused jumble of voices, not just the four of us but a man bellowing in Moku.

“Fola batakay! Fola batakay!”

“Sorry! You all right?”

“I think—”

“Fola batakay!”

“Tuma pa!”
That was Kira, warning off the Moku.

“Back off!” That came from Guts.

Then there was another voice, so familiar I felt an instant jolt of recognition.

“Watch ’im! Got a shank, he’ll stick ye!”

I knew that voice.

But it was impossible—

“Fola batakay!”

“Back off!”

“Ay! AY! Yer Rovian?! So’s me!”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I blinked hard, trying to get a look at him through the gloom. He was big and hulking, I could see that much.

“Wot ye—
EGBERT?! Wot the deuce…?!
”

He stepped over to me, and I finally saw his face. He’d lost a
fair bit of weight, making him look hollow and drawn. A ragged beard was growing in patches around his jaw.

We stared at each other, dumbfounded. A thick lump of emotion started to swell up in my throat.

Which was strange, because I hated him.

The others went quiet. Even the skinny, crazed-looking Moku quieted down—he kept growling
“fola batakay,”
but with much less energy.

Guts finally spoke. “Who are you?”

When Adonis didn’t answer, I spoke up for him.

“He’s my brother.”