I had marked them, yes. Two crumpled, blackened chunks of land that appeared uninhabitable, in the middle of the cauldron. Rather like burned-down coals after a light rain, exuding faint drifts of smoke into the morning air.
Nihko nodded. 'They are the children of the Heart of the World.'
'The-what?'
'Heart of the World. It lies now beneath the sea. But the children have risen to see whether this place is worthy of their presence once again.'
I gazed at him steadily. 'You do realize none of this makes any sense at all.'
He grinned cheerfully, unoffended. 'It will.'
'Meanwhile?'
'Meanwhile, the island was turned into smoke again. The land bled. Burned. Became ash. The island shook and was split asunder. You see what remains.'
Not much, if what he said was true. But it seemed unlikely that such a calamity could really happen. I mean, land bleeding? Turning to ash and smoke? Shaking itself apart? More than unlikely: impossible.
Of course, I'd said a lot of things were impossible-and then witnessed them myself.
'We have maps,' he said quietly, seeing my skepticism. 'Old maps, and charts, and drawings. Histories. This island was once far more than it is.'
Rather like Nihko himself, if what Prima had said of his castration was true. I stared at the cliff again. 'I suppose we're going up that poor excuse for a trail?'
'But on four feet,' he replied.
'You want me to ride one of those? ' 'Those' being the danjaclike beasties that rather resembled something crossed with a small horse and a very large dog.
'It will save time,' the first mate explained, 'and keep our feet clean. Otherwise we will slip and slide in molah muck all the way up, like the lesser folk.' A tilt of his shaven head indicated men and women on foot toiling up and down the cliff.
'Molah muck?'
'They are molahs.' He waved at a string of the creatures waiting patiently at the bottom of the track. 'And they can carry four times their weight without complaint.'
'I'd just as soon carry my own weight, thanks. I'm kind of used to it.'
'Molah,' he said gently, and I thought again about how his grip had made my wrist weep, and my throat flesh burn. 'And if you are presenting yourself to the wealthiest metri on the island as a man who may be her heir, you shall ride.'
'Fine,' I said glumly, surveying the drooping animals tied to a rope beside the trail, 'we ride. But it looks to me like we'll be dragging our feet in the muck anyhow, all the way up.'
NINE
DID not actually drag our feet in molah muck all the way up, though it was a close call. Initially I yearned for stirrups, since dangling long legs athwart a narrow, bony back only barely padded by a thin blanket was not particularly comfortable, but I realized soon enough that stirrups would have made it worse. Riding with legs doubled up beneath my chin isn't a favored position for a man with recalcitrant knees.
For a sailor, Nihko Blue-head rode his molah with a grace I didn't expect; but I reflected that balancing atop the beastie wasn't so much different from maintaining balance aboard a wallowing ship, and therefore he had an advantage. I was more accustomed than he to riding an animal, perhaps, but horses and molahs have vastly different ways of going. Horses basically stride, planting large hooves squarely on the ground. Molahs-mince. On something that feels disturbingly like tiptoes. Very rapidly, so that one ascends at a pace that can only be called a jiggle.
I reflected that perhaps Nihko had no testicles because he'd ridden a molah up this cliff once too often.
As we climbed, tippytoeing our way around people on foot, I cast glances back the way we'd come. From increasing height it became very clear just how round the island had once been. Despite all of this silly talk about gods and smoke turning into stone (and back again), there was no question that once there had been more to the island. And it struck me as oddly familiar to Southron-raised eyes: what Nihko and I climbed was the vertical rim of a circle. The interior below, a brilliant greenish blue, was where two men would meet in the center for a sword- dance.
If they could walk on water.
Me, I couldn't, any more than I could magic weapons out of the air. What I could do was change the sand to grass.
Or so the legend went that others in the South viewed as prophecy. Of course, I put no stock in such nonsense. Even when a handful of deep Desert dwellers, led by a holy man who claimed he could see the future, claimed I was the jhihadi of the prophecy, the man meant to save the South from the devouring sands.
Horse piss, if you ask me.
And that's precisely what gave me the idea to dig channels in the desert and bring water from where it was to places it was not. Horse piss. Thanks to the stud.
Who would have been a lot more comfortable to ride up this gods-cursed track than a stumpy-legged, bony-backed, mincing little molah.
Hoolies, I wouldn't even mind getting bucked off if I only had the stud!
Then I shot a quick glance down the cliff. Well, maybe not.
It struck me then, as we climbed, that this was what I had come for. To see Skandi, this place I might be from, if indirectly; I'd been born in the South, but bred of bones shaped in a different land. Here? Possibly. As Del had remarked, as Prima Rhannet, as even I had noticed, Nihko and I were indeed similar in the ways our bodies were built, even in coloring, which seemed typical for Skandi.
And yet not everyone toiling up and down the track had green eyes and bronze-brown hair-or shaven heads decorated by blue tattoos, come to that. It was obvious, in fact, that not everyone walking the track was even Skandic, if Nihko and I were the prevailing body type; many were shorter, slighter, or tall and quite thin, with a wide variety in hair color and flesh tones. I'd grown accustomed to certain physical similarities in the South, where folk are predominantly shorter, slighter, darker, and in the North, where folk are as predictably taller, bigger, fairer. But here upon the cliff face walked a rainbow of living flesh.
And then I recalled that Skandi's economy depended on slave labor, from the sound of it, and I realized why the variety in size and coloring was so immense.
A chill tickled my spine. Here I'd come to a place that could well have bred my parents, and yet it was peopled as well by those unfortunates who had no choice but to service others who had the wealth, the power, the willingness to own men and women.
I'd been owned twice already. Once for all of my childhood and youth among the Salset, then again in the mines of the tanzeer Aladar, whom Del had killed to free me.
The South is a harsh and frequently cruel land. But it was what I knew. Skandi was nothing but a name to me-and now a rim of rock afloat in the ocean-and I realized with startling and unsettling clarity that I had, with indisputably childish hope, dreamed of a place that was perfection in all things. So that I would be born of a land and people far better to its children than the South had been to me.
A sobering realization, once I got beyond the initial pinch of self-castigation for succumbing to such morbid recollection. I knew better. Dreams never come true.
I shut my eyes at that. My dream had come true. The one I'd harbored in my soul for as long as I could recall: to be a free man. And I had won that freedom at last, had dreamed it out of despair and desperation into truth, at the cost of Salset children.
Guilt stirred, and unease. And then I thought again what I might have been had I remained with the Salset,
