hazelnuts. ‘I make rope.’ His accent was thick.
‘You are a man, not just a rope-maker. Are you a father, a husband? What is your name?’
He didn’t reply.
Kirike plucked her sleeve. ‘Dolphin-’
The man’s sullenness irritated her, and that reaction disturbed her. Unsure where she was going with this, she said now, ‘Stand up.’
‘I am working.’
She glanced around. The nearest Pretani was a fat brute of a man down at the sea’s edge, squatting to shit into the sea. ‘Do as I say or I’ll call him over.’
Slowly, with evident reluctance, the man put down his hide and stood before her. He was shorter than she was. He had a tattoo coiled around one bare thigh, an eel with a gaping mouth. Dark, slim, not tall, he wasn’t much older than she was, she realised.
The women and children bent over their work, not looking at Dolphin or Kirike.
‘Tell me your name.’
‘Wise,’ he said at last. ‘My name is Wise.’
She nodded. ‘My name is Dolphin Gift. This is Kirike.’
He stared at her, and Kirike. ‘What do you want?’
‘Yes, what?’ Kirike muttered in their own tongue.
‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘I never spoke to a slave before. Wise. You call yourself the People of the Great Eel.’
He was cautious in his replies. ‘That is what we were.’
‘Are these your children? Which of these women is their mother?’
Wise glared at her.
Kirike murmured in the Etxelur tongue, ‘The Pretani ask questions like this. If they know which kid is yours they can make you work harder by threatening her.’
That shocked her. ‘I won’t hurt you,’ she said. ‘Really – I’m just curious. Please, tell me about your family.’
Again he hesitated. But in the end he pointed to one of the women. ‘She, my wife. The two older children, ours. And she, wife’s sister. The two little ones, hers. Her husband died. We took her and her children in. She had four children; two of them died…’
It was a story that you could have heard all over Etxelur, of broken families joined together for support. All very ordinary. And yet her relationship with this Wise wasn’t ordinary at all.
‘Sit down,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Do what I tell you. Sit down.’
Kirike murmured, ‘What are you doing, Dolphin?’
Wise stood still for a long heartbeat. Then, slowly, with a kind of unspoken insolence, he sat.
‘Now stand up.’
Again he drew the moment out. But then he stood, unwinding his thin legs.
She said to Kirike, ‘I control him in everything he does, as I control the fingers of my own hand. It’s not even like a trained dog, for he is human, as we are, and can understand exactly what is asked of him. I can make him do anything. I wonder how far I could go. If I told you to take that stone knife and to start slicing away at your own flesh, would you do it, Wise?’
‘Stop it, Dolphin.’
‘Just imagine if everyone was your slave. You could do anything you wanted. You could rebuild the whole world! You could tear down the hills, and banish the sea.’
Kirike muttered, ‘Ana seems to think she can do that already. How would you know if you gave the right commands? We aren’t the little mothers. Even if we had the power, we wouldn’t have their wisdom.’
‘You could always ask the priest,’ she said, but she giggled. ‘But if he was a slave, how could you trust his answers? And besides-’
‘What?’
She looked down at the children. ‘Having slaves around is probably all right as long as you aren’t one. Look, that little one has cut her hand.’ She knelt down and reached out to take the child’s arm. The girl flinched away, and the women tensed. Dolphin murmured, ‘It’s all right. I won’t hurt you. I just want to help. Oh, get your nose out, Thunder, she doesn’t want you licking her!’
The wound was small but deep; the blood had smeared all down the girl’s arm and over the bark she had been working. The girl was evidently terrified, and now she started to cry, though the women tried to hush her.
Dolphin said, ‘This will get infected if it’s not treated. The little one will get sick.’ The women were scared to respond, she could see, and she wasn’t sure how much they understood. She looked up at Kirike. ‘Go find the priest. Bring some moss, and ask him for healing herbs – he’ll know what’s best – and bring cloth soaked in sea water.’
Kirike hesitated, then he nodded and jogged away.
Dolphin smiled at the girl. ‘It will be all right. You’ll see. I’ll clean out the wound and wrap it up.’
‘We have healing,’ one of the women said unexpectedly. ‘In home, in land of Great Eel. Not bring. Pretani. Not let us bring.’
‘Well, it’s stupid to stop you keeping yourselves healthy, for if you get sick you can’t work, can you?’
Wise shrugged. ‘Always more Eel folk. Always more children. Why are you helping us?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Because I’m an outsider here too, and so is Kirike. Because I made you stand up and sit down, and I don’t like the fact that I enjoyed it.’ She probed at that bit of guilt, like a tongue exploring a broken tooth. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Don’t say sorry to me.’
‘I’m sorry anyhow. When Kirike comes back we’ll fix up her hand. Later I’ll bring you more healing stuff.’
‘The Pretani will take it away. Punish us for having it.’
‘Then we’d better make sure they don’t find out, hadn’t we?’ She grinned. But the women looked wary, and Dolphin was reminded that this wasn’t a game to these people, but a question of the lives and deaths of their children.
So she sat quietly and held the little girl’s hand until Kirike came back with a satchel of medicines.
76
The Seventeenth Year After the Great Sea: Late Summer. In the cold dawn light, Acorn and Knot approached the Leafy Boys tethered at the foot of the great old oak. Shapeless in her tunic of stiff hide, Acorn was carrying a skin food satchel. Knot, close beside her, bore a long, stout stick.
Knot felt Acorn’s hand creep into his. He could feel her trembling, her small fingers clutching his. His own heart was thumping, for he had a deep gut fear of the Leafy Boys.
And he was always nervous in this place anyway. On their way to Northland, the Pretani party, led by Acorn’s father, had come to the very edge of the world-forest, where there were no more trees and the skies were open. He was a forest boy who tried to hide his fundamental terror at the emptiness above.
And on top of all that the touch of Acorn’s skin gave him a very complicated feeling.
He was ten years old, she was nine. Not for the first time he wished he was older, when he might understand the hot, confusing sensations that swarmed through his body when she was close. But Acorn was Shade’s daughter, his only child, and the Root surely had some more suitable boy lined up to marry her when the time came – more suitable than Knot anyhow, with his slim, scrawny frame, his dead mother, and a father, Alder, who the men sneered at as more interested in mixing medicines than fighting, even when they came to him to get their wounds dressed. He had this morning with her, at least. It had been him she’d asked to come with her on this secret dawn jaunt – whatever it was about, and he didn’t know yet.
He just wished it didn’t have to involve Leafy Boys.
The Leafies lay on the ground under a weighted net, their naked bodies wrapped around each other. In the
