The Feverbird's Claw (13 page)

Figt stiffened, and Moralin thought the other girl would speak, but she said nothing, so Moralin went on, using words and gestures.

The shadows rarely left their assigned buildings. Never after dark. But then everyone stayed inside most nights, especially those that were eerie silver with moonlight. She paused. No sense trying to explain priests, who studied the stars, or priestesses, who did the work of the dead.

The rest of that night Figt pushed them hard. She seemed distant and angry. Moralin found herself wondering again about what was happening at the village. What were the survivors eating now? Was Ooden well? She tried asking Figt questions, but the other girl answered only in short bursts. No, they had never before captured a skulkuk. No, they had never had this kind of disaster.

“Does thee ever wonder about … back there?”

Figt only answered with a mocking question. “Does this Kadu worry about walking by the moon's light?”

Moralin glanced up. The moon's eye was almost open. This must be—she counted—the fifth or sixth time since her capture. Sometimes she still longed for warm, comforting blackness. But there were whole nights where she hardly noticed. Could a person get used to anything? “My name is Moralin” was all she said.

Figt glared with warrior eyes and stalked ahead.

They slept a few hours, but at dawn Figt shook her awake, indicating that they should walk. She kept looking around with uneasy glances. Moralin couldn't help glancing around, too. Soon hot dust thickened the air. Moralin scratched at the insect bites and sand on her arms. The plant designs had disappeared.

Finally Figt pointed with her chin. Moralin squinted. A small bluff? When they reached it, they crawled up, slipping in the sand until they could grab on to bushes at the top. Figt whispered into the beastie's ear, and it squirmed silently through the bushes.

Moralin imitated the beastie. Her legs scraped the ground. When Figt plucked a small leaf from the bush and chewed on it, she did, too. The leaf had hardly any moisture and left her mouth feeling drier than ever. Figt raised herself to her hands and knees.

“Ssssst.” Figt made the soft, hushing sound between her teeth. She eased herself through the bushes almost without noise. Moralin followed until Figt hesitated, putting one hand on the beastie, which leaned against her. For a while the three of them lay motionless.

Moralin heard nothing except a soft whirring sound and the rustle of a slight breeze in the bushes. Then the sound of a human voice blew toward them. Figt eased forward—and stopped. Moralin wiggled up beside her and peered over.

Short, squat men, perhaps twenty of them, with powerful-looking arms were making a slow circle on the plain below them. They were wearing only loincloths. Moralin tried to make out the faces. They had deformed noses. No. Their noses were pierced. Each nose had a yellow stick or bone jutting out from either side. A streak of brown paint ran from the top of each man's forehead, down his nose. The men carried curved knives made of some kind of metal.

The beastie gave a low growl. “Mud-ugly,” Moralin whispered in Delagua. “Doing what?” she added in Arkera.

Figt said nothing.

After a while the circle shifted, and Moralin saw that they had surrounded a garrag. It swung its massive head. Several of the men leaped forward to wedge a stick in the animal's jaws. The garrag clamped down. Shouts echoed as the men tightened in a coil. A few moments later they scattered. They had used the stick to flip the garrag onto its back, where its powerful legs rowed helplessly.

She watched the men stab the animal. Without ceremony, they carried it off. Moralin turned. Figt had an ill and stricken look on her face. And why not? Praise the Great Ones that the men had a garrag to focus on. “How can thee make …” She paused and started over, this time using a Delagua word. “How can thee make
revenge
on such as that?” The other girl curled in the sand and moaned.

By now heat had seized the day, and they stayed on the bluff in the slight shade of the bushes. At dusk Moralin opened her eyes and saw that Figt was sitting up, gazing at nothing. “What is it?”

“Strawhopper eaters.” Figt spit in the grass. “They also want to eat garrag and other unclean things.” She put her head down on her arm.

“They are the sand dwellers … the ones who killed thy family?”

“Yes.” The whisper shimmered in the air as if it were something alive. “I made those who survived tell me everything. They said these strawhopper eaters cut the leg of Nazet, my baby brother.” Figt pointed to the curved scar by her ankle. “So I cut my own leg.” With one finger, she made the gesture of a tear, showing her mourning. “If only I had gone with them.”

“Shall we walk?” Moralin asked after a while.

“No.” Figt's voice was harsh and final.

This was the end of their journey then. They both would die here in some kind of attempt at revenge. Moralin whispered the death prayer and sat in silence. Did the messengers for judgment and pity venture into the sand waste?

As night wore on, she watched the way the moon shadows folded themselves over rocks and bushes, turning everything strange, and she longed for swallowing darkness. She offered Figt a few last berries from her pouch, and Figt held out a precious piece of dried meat in return.

After a while Moralin half slept, her fingers twined in the beastie's fur.

In the early morning Figt found a fleshy fruit covered with spines and showed Moralin how to scrape off the prickles and suck out the juices. As they ate, Moralin suddenly wished she could tell the other girl that she herself sometimes wondered about that terrible day she'd been dangled over the wall. If she hadn't run away from Mother and Grandmother after that fish, would the rough hands have grabbed her? Such small things could change a whole life—a decision not to go with family one day. A fish.

Her thoughts hissed and burned as if some legless creeper had been let loose in her head. If not for the fish, she might have grown up small and sweet, loving the leap of the thread rather than the leap and spin of bodies. The thud of the heddle rather than the thud of a body hitting the ground. She might have become wonderfully skilled at cloth work, and when it came her time to enter the secret temple chambers—Figt bumped her arm, interrupting her thoughts.

For a moment they were looking boldly at each other. Moralin wondered if her own face was anything like Figt's, full of desperation and despair. “What can thee do against them?” she asked. “Forget them.” She made her voice soft and coaxing. “Why should you and I not find a way out of this sand place?”

The huge, colorless sky stretched above them was so vast she thought she could drown in it. Figt appeared to be thinking. “Where would we go?”

“I will try to find the city. As for thee—” She tried to think if there was any place the girl could hide until the rains came.

“All right,” Figt finally said with no emotion. “But give thy word. Help me get inside thy city.”

“Inside?” In Delagua she said, “What craziness is this?”

“Give it.” Figt grabbed Moralin's arm roughly.

“But—”

She spoke in a tumble of words. “Here is my story. The strawhopper eaters sold my brother and sister to the Delagua. My sister escaped and reached the camp in the forest.”

“No one escapes from the city,” Moralin said firmly.

Figt gave her a baleful look. “Thee did.” She rushed on. “My sister died in the night from the wounds of her journey. I have decided I will go to my brother.”

A distant shout made them both fall silent. In a few quick moments they crossed the bluff. Sand blew up in Moralin's face. She could feel grit between her teeth. In a low voice she said, “Thee cannot call what happened to me—”

“Ssst.”

Figt crept to the edge. She gave a tiny grunt. Moralin wriggled to see. Below were the people who had captured the garrag the day before, whooping and running in a place where coarse, dried grass poked through the sand.

She lay beside Figt on her stomach to watch. “What are they doing?”

“Catching strawhoppers.”

“Ugh. Too close.” Moralin scooted and then crawled backward. Figt started to follow, but with a whooshing noise, the ground under her broke. She let out a short, scared burst of sound and disappeared.

The beastie barked. “Back.” Moralin grabbed for him. “And shut up.” She hugged him around the neck and held on.

M
ORALIN LAY SALT-STILL AND BURIED HER
head in the beastie's fur. The beastie smelled of sweat and dust, but it was alive and the nearest thing she had to an ally in this place. “Oh, Cora Linga,” she whispered. “How I wish you could hear me.” Please don't let the strawhopper eaters look up here. I'll forgive this beastie and take care of it. I'll do anything.

Don't be rock-stupid. These people apparently were allies of the Delagua. But she felt ill, thinking of their pierced noses and menacing faces.

They were shouting, “Hai, hai.” Their whoops echoed in the silence and then dissolved.

“We're going to be all right,” Moralin whispered into the beastie's ear.

Behind her on the bluff, the bushes rustled. “Hai!”

Moralin whirled. A man was running toward her. The painted bone quivered in his nose, and he had black teeth. She scrambled frantically for anything—a rock, a stick—and then he leaped onto her. She let herself go limp and felt his heavy body relax slightly. Then, with a quick twist, she was out from under him and on her feet. Another man tossed a net over the beastie, which growled and snapped. Three more approached and others behind them. In a moment, Moralin, too, was tangled in a net, swinging in the air. She squealed and struggled.

Shhhh-shhhh.
Calm. Be strong. The sun glinted off the sand as the men began to trot.

She turned her breathing from rapids to a meandering river. Horrible though these people were, she might not die in the hands of strawhopper eaters if she could let them know she was Delagua. Since they had metal knives, some of them must be traders.

Delagua soldiers never came this far from home anymore. But what if she could make these people believe someone was coming to rescue her? Maybe such barbarians even knew the way to the city. Maybe they were her salvation.

She imagined herself kneeling at the foot of Cora Linga's altar to give thanks. Now Lan was running from the house to leap into her arms. And then? Better not to think beyond the altar and the house.

The men halted, talking in low, ominous murmurs. She twisted to see. A man stuck a reed into the sand and slurped noisily. If Old Tamlin were here, he'd find some way to ask questions, to get the lore and desert wisdom of these strawhopper eaters. She could almost feel the water on her cracked tongue, but when they were finished, they picked her up and rushed on.

Once she thought she heard the beastie whimper, and she wiggled and squirmed, trying to see it, until someone hit her. Eventually she could tell they were climbing a hill. A thick smell of meat made her stomach grumble. The men stopped and dumped her out.

She was in the middle of a camp even more uncivilized than that of the Arkera. These strawhopper eaters lived in upside-down bird nests. Moralin saw a skinny child crawl out of one. Wearing only a string of small bones around its waist, it ran off, squealing.

Just beyond the houses, strange humped animals were tethered. They stared ahead with haughty expressions and chewed. Their faces said they would gladly bite the arm of anyone who came near.

Where was Figt? Ah. Standing, tied, at the side of the camp. She had her eyes closed, and her face was wax and salt. “My father's body, my mother's body,” she had said. Perhaps Figt would be glad to die in a place where her parents had died.

Three men grabbed Moralin and looped rope around her wrists and ankles. “I am Delagua,” she said loudly, but no one seemed to understand. She watched them secure the beastie in its net, squat around a gourd, and begin to scoop food into their mouths. A group of giggling children surrounded Moralin. One poked her arm. The others laughed.

A woman walked over and stood leaning on a polished walking stick, watching Moralin thoughtfully, chewing on something. Moralin kept her face impassive. The woman did not wear a bone through her nose, but her hair stood out in stiff clay-red spikes. She called to two women who appeared to be grinding grain.

The women put down their grinding stones and sauntered over. They wore strands of seeds and bones around their necks and waists. “I am Delagua,” Moralin said loudly. She knew this was probably babble to them. They made hissing sounds as they watched her. Moralin raised her tied wrists and thumped her chest. “Delagua.” Very slowly. She pointed with her chin at Figt. “Arkera.”

“Delagua … Delagua …” Now they seemed to catch the word. Other women pushed and shoved to see her. In a few moments men's faces, too, gaped at her.

“Delagua,” she said again, making her mouth broad and wide. The group stood murmuring, watching her. One of the men growled a short word.