Perhaps she was like this most of the time. He did not know her, and she was a topsider, after all. Maybe this was the way she made friends.
Trey had never seen the sky before yesterday. After Alishia’s fall he had returned to her, calmed his own panic, and then he sat and watched the sky all night. Darkness was his age-old companion, but he had never known it so deep. He had stared for hours, awed by the stars, amazed that so many dead could still show themselves as points of brilliant light. There must have been millions up there, and he scanned the sky from horizon to horizon many times, searching for his mother.
The life moon bathed the south, silvered like a smudge of hope forever promised by the sky. The death moon appeared as Trey sat watching, emerging from behind the mountains to the east as if raising itself on the souls of all those dead miners. Its pale yellow glow spilled across the landscape. He had heard about the moons so often down in the dark, where they were talked about in the same hushed tones as wide-open meadows, sunlight on skin, birds making the sky seem so high. Now that he was up here and he could see them, it all seemed so unfair. Why should he be the one who survived?
But guilt could not crush down his sense of wonder. He watched the skies change color as dawn came, bitterly awed, and when the sunlight finally touched her face, Alishia woke up.
HER HEAD ACHED. Blood had run from her scalp, caked her hair and dried on her face, and now that whole side of her head felt stiff and heavy. She flexed her jaw and turned gently, testing her neck. The skin of blood crackled as it broke.
Dawn was here, and the sunlight hurt her eyes. There were no clouds, but it was already cold, a cool breeze breathing down from the north. Alishia was in pain, yet she felt like laughing out loud.
“You came back,” she said. Trey was a silhouette against the rising sun, and she saw him nod. “Last thing I remember was the horse going mad.”
“It stumbled in the dark,” he said. “I saw the hole clear as light, but the horse either didn’t have such good eyesight, or it was more panicked than me. I thought the Nax were coming. I don’t know why the horse ran. Dumb creature.”
“They’re actually quite intelligent,” she said, trying to hold back a smile. “Where is it now?”
“Back where it fell. It’s leg is broken. The bone’s sticking out.”
“Oh damn,” Alishia said, feeling sorry for the animal. It had carried her this far this quickly, only to be left lying lame in the dark. She felt suddenly guilty, imagining what Erv would have said.
His name inspired thought. Where he lived, what he did, how he looked. Whether he spoke any strange words, knew languages she did not. Whether he could do things other people could not do.
She tried to forget the stable boy, shaking her head as if that would loosen the thought.
“We’ll have to put her down.”
Trey stood, turning slightly so that she could see his face at last. “Kill her?”
“Of course,” Alishia said. “She can’t walk. We can’t fix her leg. If we leave her where she is, she’ll be picked off by scavengers. That’s not fair. What happens in the mines if a pony is hurt?”
“We eat it,” Trey said.
He’s out of his environment, dislocated for some reason only he knows. He talks of Nax, but how do I know it’s true? He may be fleeing something else, or running toward something. Using me. Does he know the language of wind? Can he feel the land breathing beneath him?
“Oh,” Alishia said.
“They do taste very good with cave spice.”
“Not that,” Alishia said. “I must have banged my head harder than I thought. Feel a bit weird, that’s all.” Feel a bit…
She clasped one hand to her breast, squeezed tight, laughing inside.
Trey turned around, looking at the ground to prevent the sunlight touching his eyes. “I can’t do it,” he said.
“I will.” Alishia stood and took the knife from her boot, judging its length, wondering just how she was supposed to kill a horse with a six-inch blade. Through the ear? Slash its throat? Neither way would be quick, but it was a new experience, and it interested her.
She left Trey and walked down the hillside. She heard the horse before she saw it, breathing heavily and grunting as it tried in vain to gain its feet. It glared at her as she approached, eyes wide and terrified. It had been frothing at the mouth but it had dried now, brittle in the sun.
“Poor thing,” she said softly, hands held out, knife hidden along her wrist. “Poor thing, shhh.” The horse took some comfort from her tone, becoming still, panting. Alishia could feel the vibration as its heart beat frantically. Its front leg was broken and torn open, already attracting flies and a moving carpet of ants and small insects.
It took a long time for the horse to die. Alishia prevaricated long enough for the sun to rise and lift a thin mist across the plains, and when she finally decided that she should cut its throat it took her longer to work up the courage. In the end she jabbed once, hard, eyes closed, and the horse bucked and flung her away.
It screamed. She turned her back and walked away once she saw that it was bleeding to death. And although she felt sick and sad, she was also fascinated as well, enjoying this new experience of meting out death. It was as if the blow to the head had woken a part of her with little sense of squeamishness or pity, which reveled in the pure experience of slaughter.
I wonder if pain has a different sound, she thought. I wonder if death is a whole new language?
By the time she reached the fledge miner where he sat shading his eyes, the horse was dead.
“Breakfast?” she asked.
Trey looked around, glancing at her hands, evidently expecting to see her carrying chunks of fresh horse meat. “What is there?” he asked.
“I’m sure we can find something.” Alishia knew from her reading that there were grubs living beneath some of the layers of moss in these foothills, and the flesh of the pirate plant was sweet and full of nutrients, and that it was possible to lure in a flightless pheasant with a softly sung lullaby. She sent Trey to look for some grubs while she went in search of a copse of pirate plants, keeping her eyes open for pheasant all the time.
There was a cool breeze from the north, even though the sun was rising to warm her skin. Alishia kept glancing northward, not sure what she was expecting to see but conscious all the time that there was something there.
My master my queen my god.
She was still suffering from the bump to her head. Her scalp was a cool burn where the cut lay open to the air, and as she bent to slice the stem of a pirate plant she felt the cool trickle of fresh blood through her hair. And yet although it hurt, she enjoyed the pain. She had been hurt before but this time she analyzed the sensation dispassionately, relishing it, turning her head so that it ran across her scalp like water, prickling in and down to her neck where the bruising was already spreading.
So good to be alive!
“So good to be alive,” she whispered, and then wondered whether she had already said it. She had thought it, that was for sure, but speaking it gave her a sense of deja vu that refused to go away, even when she stood and turned and walked, looked down at a small beetle crossing her boot, glanced up at a circle of skull ravens drifting on thermals a mile high, went back to where she and Trey were planning on eating their breakfast…
Trey had found several fat grubs and was trying to stop them from crawling away. The sunlight had them agitated, as if they knew what was about to come. He glanced up as Alishia approached and offered her a smile. She had a sudden, shockingly intense image of kneeling on the ground, hands fisted around clumps of moss while he rutted at her from behind, pounding his pale yellow cock into her, feeding her fledge in tiny crumbs with one hand, and grasping her breasts, her hips with the other.