“Handry.”
“Sharskin.” He jabbed himself in the chest. “You come here to work?”
“Work?” I was slow to speak, partly because I was licking the bowl clean, partly because talking to another human being was a rusty old skill that was slow to come back to me.
At around that time the ghost-bearer woman, Iblis, came up and leant on the fence, waving to catch our attention. Sharskin leant in to me.
“Most of us have heard this three, four times now. You’ll hear it every evening, but this time just listen. This meal isn’t a gift, it’s a trade. You don’t pull your weight tomorrow, they’ll drive you away before dinner and nobody will lift a finger to stop them.”
Iblis stood before us without really looking at any of us as individuals. I think what she mostly saw was her plan, which was part hers and part the ghost’s. “Welcome to Orovo,” she told us. “See here: we have food for you. My doctor brews it specially for your stomachs. Smells weird, doesn’t it? Or perhaps to you it smells good.” And she was right at that, it certainly did. Seeing our reactions she smiled lopsidedly, because some of her mouth had been trapped closed by the ghost when it came to her, and because, I suspect, she was not very good at smiling. “You came here to work,” she told us. “You didn’t know that. Now you do. Work, and we feed you as long as we need the work. Better than starving? Of course. For the new ones, we’ll take you out into the woods tomorrow. You’ll get some sticks and stones. You’ll kill some animals for us. Work and get fed. You understand?”
She spoke very loud, as though we were deaf or stupid. Looking on us, there was a part of her brain trying to recognise the mob in front of her as people and not finding what it sought in us. The Severance blinded her to us as human beings, but she was someone who could think around things like that, hence this whole plan.
“What work? What animals? Why?” I asked Sharskin, because he was still at my shoulder. His smile suggested most of my fellows hadn’t even thought to ask.
That night, gathered around a fire that Iblis’s people had lit for us, belly full for the first time in an age, I lay beside Sharskin and listened to him explain the grand plan for Orovo as we looked up at the stars.
“Village like this, it gets too big, there’s a procedure,” he told me. “Architect ghost hears from lawgiver they’ve got too many mouths to feed, sets it in motion.”
I’d started to wonder how Orovo had got that way and asked if maybe their ghosts had gone wrong. He gave me that sharp grin again, as though the whole business had been a test I’d passed.
“I reckon you’re right,” he said. “So now they’re following the procedure while everyone here starves. Lucky they’ve got this Iblis who can think around the ghost. Ghosts aren’t good at the unexpected.”
“I thought the ghosts knew everything,” I said, and then I told him about Doctor Corto, which was the only time I knew where the ghost had failed, and that was its bearer’s fault, not its own.
“Happens more than you’d think,” Sharskin told me darkly. “Carrying a ghost, it’s not good for you. Most of them don’t get that old. But here, the ghost wasn’t up to sorting out the mess, so Iblis had to work round it. You listen to them talk sometime, it and her. She fights it.” He sounded mightily approving.
“So what’s the procedure?” I asked him.
“Birth a new village, of course.”
I half sat up and stared at him. “That can happen?”
“How’d you think villages got there in the first place?”
I had never thought about it, and it must have showed on my face because he shook his head wryly.
“They’ve found a tree, and the hive here will send a bunch of special wasps to start up a new one. I reckon they’ll take some of the spare doctors and a lawgiver from Orovo, and whoever has to move will get to work as hard as we will tomorrow, to clear the land, build it and plant it. Difference is, they get to keep what they work for.”
“And what’s our part in this?”
“Our part is where Iblis comes in. That tree they’ve found isn’t just free for the grabbing, and she’s worked out that animals don’t like us—not the way we smell, not the way we taste. We get to go raise a stink at the new tree to drive out the neighbours. That way, Orovo’s precious settlers don’t get got. You’d think they wouldn’t care so much. Not like they’re short of folk, is it?”
I laughed nervously and agreed with him. Sharskin was someone you wanted to agree with.
Iblis and her ghost had just about taken over Orovo and she was ruthless in making the plan work. She had in her head a complete list of every single inhabitant of her community and what they could do, and she had worked out who needed to stay and who must go, to leave them with two whole communities. Families were going to get cut in half, friends parted from friends, people dragged from their homes, all on her word. I saw her talking to her own people, later on, and there wasn’t much more warmth in it than when she spoke to us. But she was who they needed; the Electors had chosen well. In some other season perhaps she would have been an outcast herself, someone who just wouldn’t fit with the people around her until they drove her out. Right now she was Orovo’s saviour.
Sharskin told me all of this, in the pleasant warmth of the fire, and then he pointed up, past the scraps of cloud scudding across the sky. “You see out there?”
“The stars?”
“Stars, right. You ever wonder what they’re for, boy?”
It didn’t seem a meaningful question. I could only stare at him, and his look in return was faintly disappointed.
* * *
We set out the next morning before full light, a ragged, emaciated band of animal-killers. A few of Iblis’s people went with us, mostly hunters tasked with showing us the way. The fighting would be our task.
I was amazed anyone would expect us to do it, weak and spindly as we were, but there was a hot meal waiting for the survivors and that lent strength to us. More, we had a purpose. For a fleeting moment we were part of something, like we all had been once. I can’t speak for all the rest, and certainly not for Sharskin, but there was pride in what I was about. For all I was raising my hand for a village not my own, and a village that would disown me the moment we had done, I felt good about myself. I took my staff and my pouch of stones and I used them with a will.
Most of the beasts had been chased from the tree already. The forest there had its herds and its big predators, but enough humans will drive away most things. We had a couple of Arraclids turn up while I was there, but one just ran off the moment it got a look at what was going on, and the other one, a bit smaller and obviously far less intelligent, got caught stalking one of us and we beat it to death. But if it had just been Arraclids, Iblis wouldn’t have needed us.
This tree was the one she had to have, apparently—according to the ghost and the hive back at Orovo, this was the optimum heart of their new community. However, it was already claimed by a clan of Harboons and they weren’t giving it up just because a bunch of people wanted it.
I’d never met Harboons before, though one of the other outcasts said they’re so common southaways that people can barely live there without being at war with them. They’re a little smaller than a man, and the top and bottom pairs of their legs are for clinging to branches. Instead of just the two toes most everything else has, they’ve kind of got a third one made from part of their hands or feet or whatever they are, so they’re quick as anything in the trees, though they’re slow and clumsy if you get them on the ground. They’ve got a bendy neck and a head where the top and bottom eyes face front but the side ones wave about on stalks, so you can’t creep up on them easily, and their mouth-hands are short and dexterous. They had this trick where they could spit thorns they’d gathered from the briars they’d trained to climb up their tree—poison thorns. Iblis’s people got sick when they got stuck with them, but we outcasts barely felt them, and our stones hurt them a whole lot more.