It was right then that Monono choosed to speak up.
“Suppose I asked him to do the same to you, baa-baa-san? That would really put him on the spot, wouldn’t it? I wonder which of us he’d listen to.”
Ursala didn’t say nothing to that, but her eyes went narrow and she glared at the little silver box, sitting there in the ragged harness I had throwed together for it.
“Oh,” Monono said, “was this a private conversation? I am so embarrassed! Please, please pretend I’m not here. You were up to the part where you stick a pin in me to see if I bleed. I don’t, baa-baa-san. I bite.”
Ursala ignored all that and looked to me. “Think about what I said,” she told me. “Please, Koli. I won’t try to make the choice for you, but there’s going to come a time when you have to make it for yourself.”
She walked on, tapping on the mote controller to tell the drudge to follow her. Cup sneered at me as she walked by, tugged along at the drudge’s tail end. “The unrighteous has got to walk on stony ground,” she said.
“So has everyone else, Cup,” I muttered as I followed. “Unless they figure out how to fly, or something. Until then, stony ground is what we got.”
Anyway, after that day Monono and Ursala was not friends. I guess it was only natural for there to be some bad feeling between them, since Ursala had told me to kill Monono and had even showed me how to do it. Monono was not inclined to talk to me either for a while. She was angry that I turned the DreamSleeve over to Ursala, and I had got to let her forgive me for it in her own good time. I only told her I would never do what Ursala said I should do, nor let anyone else do it.
“Don’t let her get her hands on the DreamSleeve again, Koli,” Monono said. “Not for a second. And keep me charged to the max. If she tries to sneak up on me, I want to be awake for it.”
“I don’t think she would do that, Monono,” I said. “I think she’d ask me first.” But I promised her I would hold the DreamSleeve in the light every day so she would not run out of power and have to go to sleep. It was one thing me saying Ursala would not to go behind my back, and another for Monono to believe it and trust her weight to it, as they say. I was not the one who was like to bear the brunt of it if I was wrong.
3
Day followed day, and still we went right on walking. I could not really make the distances seem real, inside my head. We was passing through spaces that was so big, I got lost in looking at them. I had lived my whole life in a village of two hundred souls, and that had seemed big enough to me, but the world outside was big in a different way. Sometimes I would just stop, staring out over some valley or across the peaks of mountains that lay heaped up in our way, with mist down in between them like they was cupped hands dipped into churned-up water. Ursala would tell me not to dawdle, which means to wait for no reason, but I had got reason enough. I was waiting for the wonder to wear off and my mind to come back to me.
But even when I didn’t do no dawdling we was making heavy weather of it. Wild beasts was partly to blame. The ones that wanted to eat us was a particular problem, but even the ones that didn’t was troublesome. One time we come to a place where there was kind of a river of brown fur in front of us, about a hundred paces wide and so long we couldn’t see either end of it. When we looked close we seen that it was mice. They was about the size of my thumb’s top joint, with heads as big as their bodies, and there was so many of them they was running on each other’s backs as much as on the ground. We waited a whole hour for them all to go by us, and after they was gone, there was nothing but bare earth where they had passed. They had et up every green and growing thing. I think if we had stepped in their way they would of et us too, and not even noticed no difference.
But the beasts was only a small part of what was slowing us down. The trees was mostly to blame. They was pretty much everywhere, and they was greatly to be feared. You could not get too close to them, in case they moved in on you and crushed you. They would only do that when the sun was out, but if you was to wade into the thick of a forest and then the sky gun to clear, it was too late then to wish you’d gone another way. Also, some trees had other ways to kill you, with poison or spikes or strangling or something else that you wouldn’t think of until it was done to you. It was best not to have no truck with them unless you had to.
So we kept to the stony slopes of hills, to rivers and streams, and to the patches of dead ground we come on every now and then, where there was not even weeds growing – because of poison, Ursala said, throwed down in the Unfinished War and still hiding in the ground there. Or else we would look for hunters’ paths, like the ones I used to walk in Calder or the ones Cup’s people made across the valley floor, that was most carefully hid from sight.
If all them things failed, then we had got to make the best of it and go on into the woods. But we choosed our moments, when we come to that end. There had got to be a heavy overcast, so we was not likely to be surprised by the sun breaking through. The drudge went before us, both to clear a path and to measure how far it was to the next clearing. If it was too far, then we would turn ourselves around and find another way.
The signal was a vexation to us too. Sometimes it seemed to come from one direction but Ursala said we had got to go another, because the drudge’s map showed mountains or marshes in our way. And then we would have to go about to find the right line again, which we had lost. By this time, Monono and Ursala wasn’t speaking each to other any more, but had got to talk through me which took a lot longer.
And then there was Cup. Or rather, there was Ursala not trusting Cup enough to untie her hands. You might not think tied-up hands would make a difference to how fast someone can walk, but they did. We was mostly treading through waist-high weeds, with thick tangles of briar lying like ropes around our feet, so we could not go more than a dozen steps without stumbling. With her hands behind her back, there wasn’t no way for Cup to steady herself or to push the tangles out of her way, so she was being balked and blocked ever and again as she walked – and then we had got to wait for her to catch up or else go back and free her from some snarl of green stuff that had more teeth and claws to it than the usual ruck.
We had argued it a lot of times, but I could not get Ursala to change her mind. Nor Cup neither, for she wouldn’t make no promises for her good behaviour if we set her free. Ursala said we had got enough trouble already without adding some stupid girl and her revenging to the list.
“You still want to revenge Senlas?” I asked Cup. I was hoping she would say no, but she didn’t say nothing either way. She just hanged her head down like she was whelmed by tears, though no tears come. That was a raw wound to her, as they say, and she could not readily talk about it. Senlas had been her messianic, the onliest father of her soul, though he was also a liar and a killer and an eater of men. Until Ursala and I come along and set fire to the cave where Senlas lived, which was the end of him.
When Cup come after us in the first place, revenging was all she was thinking of. But thinking’s not the same as doing. She had got the better of me, in a running stream where she come on me unawares, and she could of cut my throat, only she didn’t do it. She had killed for food, and she had killed in the thoughtless heat of fighting. Killing someone cold, when they’re not offering you no harm, is something different again and she found it was not to her liking after all.