Resbit reached out for the coin and bit at it. The metal refused to yield to her teeth.
'Yen Olass, this isn't gold. It's flash of some sort, that's all.’
'Flash?
'Pretty metal. Besides, what're you going to spend it on?’
'Don't be like that. Come and help me dig.' 'Yen Olass, I'm all clean.’
Saying that was a mistake, for the next moment Yen Olass was dumping handfuls of stone and shell onto Resbit's back, then following it with grit she found deeper down. Resbit surrendered, dived into the lake briefly to clean her body, then followed Yen Olass back to the clearing. She walked naked, her bare feet leaving damp prints in the earth, and picking up a brown coating. By the time she reached the clearing, she was beginning to dry out; she unrolled the clothes she had been carrying, and put them on, feeling how coarse and dirty they felt. Everything would have to be washed.
Yen Olass, working with furious energy, had excavated a considerable hole. Looking down into it, Resbit saw the mouth of a leather bag. It was full of coins. She admitted to a little bit of rising excitement, but:
'I still don't see what we can spend the money on.’
'Goose,' said Yen Olass, T don't want money. Think some. The pirates didn't drag treasure all the way over the Razorwind Pass just to bury it here. They found it here. They took it from the Galish. So… this is just the beginning.’
Yen Olass was right. By evening, they had uncovered enough to know that the pirates had buried a considerable amount of Galish loot. There were tools, weapons, bolts of cloth, jars of olive oil, sacks of rice, plates of keflo shell and leather bottles full of wine.
Resbit and Yen Olass got drunk that night, celebrating. The next day, they were far too sick to do any digging, but they guessed their cornucopia held everything they needed. A few more days of excavation proved this supposition correct. Yen Olass thought this just as well, for she grew more and more certain that she was pregnant.
'You will bear Khmar's son,' said Resbit, with a hint of something close to reverence in her voice. 'The son of an emperor!’
'Khmar belonged to a different world,' said Yen Olass firmly. T will bear the child of my own body. A child born to Penvash – to a land without emperors and kings.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Resbit and Yen Olass built a house by the lakeside. They put up a woodshed and a storehouse. They designed and built traps for rats, not to secure skins for making clothes, but to protect their store of food. They were rich, and did not hesitate to deny their wealth to the bushrats of Penvash.
The days eased out into a long, leisurely rhythm, unlike anything they had ever before experienced. Rising with the dawn chorus of forest birds, they hauled in longlines from the lake, then gutted and scaled fresh fish which they cooked for breakfast.
With breakfast over, they tidied the house, checked the rat traps, disposed of any vermin, then made the rounds of the bird snares, pits and deadfalls which they had built in the forest. On these long, cool walks through the early morning forest, they were silent, feeling no need to speak.
Later in the morning, they worked on House Two. Unlike their present shack of sticks and branches, this was to be a proper log house with a fireplace and chimney, so they could winter over by the lake without suffering undue hardship.
In the afternoon, when the forest was suffused with lazy heat, they went swimming, and afterwards generally slept for an hour or two on the beach. Each evening, they massaged each other with a little warm olive oil, and made love to each other tenderly, teaching each other their own pleasures.
When they caught a sow and a piglet in one of their traps, they killed the sow but kept the piglet; Resbit planned to teach it how to hunt truffles. By the time the full heat of summer was upon them, House Two was finished, and they moved into it, leaving House One to the pig, who now carried the name Pelaki; however, Pelaki, by now thoroughly socialized, refused to be excluded from their company, so House One became the exclusive preserve of spiders and woodlice.
With housebuilding over, the days were slow, lazy, idle. They studied their own bodies, observing the changes. Flesh slowly thickening, casting a heavier shadow. A leisured, inescapable uneasiness surfaced in dreams which sometimes became nightmares. They were both aware, though they did not speak of it, that they were very much on their own, with nobody to help them if anything went wrong. And so many things can go wrong.
Then Yen Olass had a nightmare. First she was trapped in the darkness, with jaws locked tight around her. She knew where she was: inside the metal flower in the strange castle in the Valley of Forgotten Dreams. Voices spoke. Silken light smoked from her hands. Knots of time unravelled. She plucked a flower from an underwater branch, inserting it into her womb.
And then-
'Don't be scared,' said Lefrey.
But the voices hurt her. Lacerating pain struck through her pelvis. Fetid breath grinned down at her, crushing her body beneath groping weight. She saw a Collosnon soldier, a ceramic amulet gleaming at his throat, hacking away her mother's breasts. The voices swore, ripped away her fingernails.
Then General Chonjara was pulling her child out. His fingers were made of splintered wood. The child was jammed. He tugged. It ripped its way out. Its head was a wedge of steel. A spear blade. Slashed open, she stared aghast at the white gash-wound flesh into which blood suddenly welled, and suddenly-
The pain struck home.
Waking with a scream which startled Pelaki and shocked Resbit into instant wakefulness, Yen Olass started to cry. She sobbed helplessly while Resbit comforted her. She was convinced that the dream was a warning. She was convinced that the child in her womb was damaged. A monster. Or a dead thing, swelling there like a fungus. A bag of blood.
Resbit held her and kissed her, soothed her and stroked her. Pelaki snuffled into her armpit. And, eventually, her fears eased by this comfort, Yen Olass slept again.
But now the two women did talk, sharing their fears and pooling what knowledge they had. Yen Olass found Resbit knew much more than she did. Yen Olass had always distanced herself from women things, hating the life of the Woman Sanctuary which stank of servitude, and, in some secret part of her heart, despising herself for being a woman – and, in a much less secret part of her heart, despising the sewn and mutilated body which had marked her as a slave. She had never cared to follow gossip about distant concerns such as pregnancy and childbirth. But Resbit was well versed in both subjects.
There were more nightmares after that, but, talking through her fears with Resbit, Yen Olass found the courage to face them, even if she could not entirely subdue them. She could not forget how the metal flower had killed the pirate Toyd, turning him loose with his skull ready to melt into liquid and a sick wet embryonic growth forcing out from between his ribs in a vicious parody of pregnancy.
Resbit, for her part, had her own worries, though these were less severe. She wished she had the help of an experienced midwife who would know how to cope if the baby was born buttocks-first, or if the cord started to strangle the baby as it was born, or if the afterbirth failed to follow the child, or if she started to bleed afterwards… she had heard that eating the afterbirth would, in an emergency, help stop bleeding, but she did not know if that was true. Besides, she had seen two births, and was of the opinion that an afterbirth was hardly the most attractive thing in the world, and surely only marginally edible.
In fact, in an emergency, eating a chunk of the raw afterbirth will tend to stop bleeding; many animals eat the afterbirth as a matter of course, gaining the benefit of its food value and the chemical intelligence it carries. But Resbit had no way to confirm this. So she discussed it with Yen Olass, and they argued it out.
'It's not meant to be eaten,' said Yen Olass. 'It's meant to be kept all in one piece so people can look at it. That's very important. Even I know that.’
'That's only so the wise woman can look at it to see that it's all come out,' said Resbit. 'If you get a piece left stuck inside, you can die. But there won't be any wise woman here.’
