So now here she was, walking with us but not really one of us, and between her sorrowing and Ursala’s anger I could not think how to make a mend.
“She almost blinded me,” Ursala would say whenever I come round to Cup’s tied hands and how we might do better to loose them.
“She did that in a fight,” I said. “And your eye’s getting better. She didn’t put it all the way out.”
“Wonderful. That’s a great consolation, Koli. But what do you think she’s going to do next time? She’s damaged, and she’s wild. We shouldn’t have taken her out of Calder in the first place, but since we did she’s our problem now. I’m going to treat her like what she is, which is an unsprung trap.”
I didn’t argue it no further. In some ways, Ursala was not wrong. Cup had worshipped Senlas something fierce, and went by the name he give her when she first come to him. She beared his mark on her face too, a great long line that started on her right cheek, went down in a curve to her chin and then come up again on the other side. It was meant to be a cup, to signify that he would pour his wisdom into her. More than that, it was meant to say she belonged to him.
And it was true that Cup could still hurt us if she choosed to. I just did not believe that she would do it. If she was damaged and wild, like Ursala said, it was the damage I give most thought to. How Cup’s own people wouldn’t let her be what she knowed she was, which was a girl-child and then a woman, so she had got to leave them. And how Senlas, who was mad but fearsome clever, played on her hopes and dreams with promises he could not keep – promises of an angel’s body, that was man and woman both, or neither – to make her stand by him and fight for him. Of course she took harm in all of that, and it sunk deep into her. You could tell it from how she cursed or cried out in her sleep, most nights, and how she was as quick to anger as a whip is quick to crack. I did not want to be the next one to close a door on her, or bend her to a plan that wasn’t hers.
“You should let her go then, Koli-bou,” Monono said to me, one night when we was camped up. We had found a good spot, in under an overhang of rock where the soil was too thin for much to grow, and with a big wide slope below us. Ursala had not set out the tent, the ground being too uneven and too hard, but with the drudge to guard us that open space was like a closed door. The drudge could see anything coming a long ways off, and take it down before it got too close. “If you want her to be free, keeping her with you seems like a weird way to go about it, neh.”
I was lying on one side of our fire, with Ursala on the other. Cup was a way off, her tied hands looped around a metal bracket on the drudge’s back. We had et what we had to eat, which was some nuts and oat mash with the good parts of six or seven apples cut up into it. The other parts of the apples had been wormy or melt-marked, and back home in Mythen Rood we would of throwed them all away rather than risk a bite, but Ursala had ways of telling what was safe and what was not.
“I wanted to do that from the start, Monono. But Ursala would of killed her to keep her from leading her people on our track.” I kept my voice down low as I said this. Nobody could hear Monono’s voice, for she talked to me on something she called an induction field, which carried the words to my ears without them going through the open air. So when I talked back to her, Ursala and Cup would oftentimes look at me like I was crazed. I had got used to whispering. “And now it’s too late. She’s miles away from any place she knows, and I doubt she would make it back to Calder. Even if she did, where would she go? The shunned men must of moved on, after their cave got burned out and Senlas died. If Cup was to go to any of the villages, they’d know where she come from by the markings on her face, and most likely kill her as soon as they seen her. Letting her go would not be doing her no favours.”
“Is that why she’s here? Because you think you owe her a favour?”
I was not used to hearing such hardness in Monono’s voice. Before she got what Ursala called the autonomy, she was only ever happy and funny and singing and making jokes with me. She still did that sometimes, but now it was like a game we played between the two of us, with each one knowing that the other could see behind it and around the sides of it. Monono could be cruel now, or at least she could talk as though she was. I did not think she was changed at the rock bottom as they say, but then I had not knowed her for so very long, either before or after she changed. I could only go by what I felt, which is not something that oftentimes leads you all the way to a truth.
“We took her home away from her,” I said. “I thought she would be better off with us than on her own.”
“You thought she needed a family, dopey boy,” Monono come back. “Because you were missing your own so much.” And maybe that was a part of it, though it had not felt like that inside my thoughts. And anyway, I had not had no good choices to make.
Monono was quiet for a little while, and so was I. We was on opposite sides of the path, kind of, and talking to each other across it. It did not make me happy to be that way. “Do you want me to play you to sleep?” she asked me by and by.
I cast around in my mind for a song or a tune that would fit in with my mood. There was many of them, but they was not of a kind that would help me sleep. “No,” I said. “I’m good, Monono. Thank you. But maybe you could wake me tomorrow with ‘Up and Atom’.”
“Okay, Koli. I’ll do that.” She didn’t ask me when I was fixing to wake. One of the things Monono could do was to listen to my breathing and tell from it how deep asleep I was. If I asked for a wake-up call, I knowed it would come when I was just about to wake up my own self, so it was like being lifted up and out into the day that was just come.
Only that’s not how it turned out this time. I closed my eyes, and was soon asleep, like always. The hard marching left all of us tired to death.
The next thing I heard was a shrill ringing sound, with a throb in it like the note of a bullroarer at the end of its string. That was followed by Ursala swearing a whole mouthful of oaths, and by the clicking, clanking, bucket-gone-down-the-well sound of the drudge climbing up on its four feet.
“Get under cover, Koli,” Monono said, her volume at maximum to whip me up to it. “Now. You’re under attack!”
Well, there was two choices for cover: the drudge and a big rock. I picked the rock, and started crawling over to it. I heard Ursala still shouting, and the drone firing – a soft, popping sound with a sigh of air after each pop.
My hand touched something in the dark. Something that seemed to be growing out of the ground. I run my hand up it and felt the softness of feathers at the topmost tip.
It was an arrow.
4
The fighting, if that’s what you would call it, was over very quickly.
Another arrow bit down into the dust and stones near me, and a third one bounced off the drudge’s side and clattered to the ground.
The arrows was not coming from the bottom of the slope, but from off to one side of us. Whoever was firing, they had most likely hoped to get in close enough so they could use knives or spears instead. But the drudge was on guard, the same as it was every night. It must of heard their footsteps, or a whispered word, or smelled their sweat in the air. Anyway, it had knowed by some means that they was coming. So it had sounded its tocsin to wake its mistress, and then it had gone about to defend us.