He straightened up, shuddering, hearing the movement in the darkness all about him. It was time, then. The tribe was preparing to move.
He got up quickly and went to the comer of the square of brick and stone in which he slept and relieved himself. Then he came back and packed up his few possessions: a blanket, a flint shard, the small bundles containing his treasures, lastly a square of cloth—a scarf of sorts—that had been his mother's.
The one he had known as mother was long dead. He had been taken with her from the carriage and had watched while they held her down by the roadside, feeling a vague disquiet at their actions, not understanding the naked jutting of their buttocks, the squeals from the woman beneath them. But then they had begun to beat her and he had cried out and tried to get to her, desperate to save her from them. And that was all he knew, for one of them had turned and struck him hard with the back of his hand, sending him crashing into the stone of a low wall.
So he had joined the tribe.
Most days he did as they did, thoughtlessly. Yet sometimes a strange, dissociated pain would grip him—something not of the body, but like his glimpse of the light: something intangible yet teal. Disturbingly real. And he would know it had to do with her. With a vague sense of comfort and safety. The only comfort, the only safety, he had ever known. But mainly he shut it out. He needed his wits to survive, not to remember.
Kim stood at the edge of the group while Baxi spoke. They were going to raid a small settlement farther down the valley, counting upon surprise to win the encounter. They would kill all the men and boys. Women, girls, and babies they would capture and bring back alive.
Kim listened, then nodded with the rest. It would be his first raid. He clutched his flint anxiously, excitement and fear alternating in him; hot and cold currents in his blood. There would be killing. And afterward there would be meat, meat and women. The hunters laughed and grunted among themselves. Kim felt his mouth water, thinking of the meat.
They left eight men behind to guard the settlement. The rest followed Baxi down the stream in single file, keeping low and moving silently. Four bands of men, running swiftly, lithely, down the stream path, their bare feet washed by the greasy,
sluggish flow. Kim was last of them and smallest. He ran behind them like a monkey, hands touching the ground for balance as he crouched forward, the flint shard between his teeth.
There was a tumble of rocks, a small stretch of flat, exposed land, and then the other settlement. There was no chance of subtlety, only of surprise. Baxi sprang from the rocks and sprinted silently across the open space, the knife raised high. Rotfbot and Ebor were after him at once, running as fast as their legs could carry them, followed a moment later by others of the tribe.
It nearly worked. Baxi was almost on the guard when he turned and called out. His cry rose, then changed in tone. He went down, the knife buried to the hilt in his chest, its tip jutting from a point low in his back.
Kim squatted on the highest of the rocks, watching as the fight developed. He saw Baxi scream and curse as he tried to free the knife from the dead man's rib cage, then turn to fend off a defender's blow. Others of the tribe were struggling with the strangers, some of them rolling on the ground, some exchanging vicious swinging blows with flints and cudgels. The air was alive with grunts and screams. Kim could smell the stink of fear and excitement in the darkness.
He watched, afraid to go down, repulsion battling with the fascination he felt. His tribe was winning. Slowly the defenders left off trying to fight their attackers and, one by one, began to run away. Already his side were dragging away the unconscious women and girls and squabbling over the corpses. But still small pockets of the fight went on. Kim saw and realized where he was, what he had been doing. Quickly he scrambled across the rocks and dropped down onto the ground, fearing what Baxi would do if he saw.
He had held back. Shown fear. He had let down his tribe.
Kim hurried across the uneven ground, stumbling, then hurled himself onto the back of one of the escaping defenders. His weight brought the man down, but the stranger was twice Kim's size and in an instant Kim found himself on his back, pinned down, the scarred, one-eyed stranger staring down at him. That single eye held death. The stranger's right hand clutched a rock. He raised the rock. ...
Kim had only an instant in which to act. As if he saw someone beyond and above the stranger, he called out anxiously, looking past the stranger's face.
"Nyns!" he screamed. No! "Ny mynnes ef yn-few!" We want him olive!
It was enough to make the stranger hesitate and shift his weight, half turning to see who it was behind him. It was also enough to allow Kim to turn sideways and tip the stranger from him.
One-eye rolled and turned, facing Kim, angry at being tricked, but conscious that each moment's delay brought his own death closer. He swung wildly with the rock and misjudged. Kim lunged in with his sharply pointed flint, aiming for the softest, most vulnerable place, and felt his whole arm shudder as he connected. There was a moment of sickening contact, then Kim saw the man's face change into a mask of naked pain. One-eye had been castrated, his testicles crushed.
One-eye fell at Kim's side, vomiting, his hands clutching at his ruined manhood. Kim jerked his hand away, leaving the flint embedded where it was, then looked about anxiously.
Baxi was watching him, smiling ferociously.
Kim looked back, appalled, hearing the wretch heaving up each painful breath. Then, as he watched, Baxi came close, the knife in his hand, and pushed its point deep into the base of One-eye's neck.
One-eye spasmed and then lay still.
"Da," said the chief and turned away. Good. Kim watched him strut, triumphant, self-satisfied, then throw back his head and whoop into the air.
A web... a web of sticky darkness. Kim felt a warmth, a kind of numbness, spread outward from the core of him, a hand of eight fingers closing on him slowly like a cage, drawing him down beneath the surface of the dark. Darkness congealed above him like a lid, tar in his open mouth. And then he fainted.
THEY HAD NEVER heard him say a word. Baxi thought him dumb or just simple, and others took their lead from that.
They called him "Lagasek," or Starer, for his habit of looking so intently at an object. That, too, they saw as a sign of his simplicity.
For an age, it seemed, he had been as if asleep among them. Their hideous shapes and forms had become as familiar as the darkness. He had watched them without understanding, seeing their scars and deformities as natural things, not departures from some given norm. But now he was awake. He stared at them through newly opened eyes, a bright thread of thought connecting what he saw to the sharp-lit center of awareness at the. back of his skull.
He looked about the flickering fire at their missing hands and eyes, their weeping sores and infected scabs; saw them cough and wheeze for breath, aged well beyond their years, and wondered what he was doing there among them.
Sitting there in the dust, the thick and greasy soup warm in his belly, he felt like weeping. As he looked about the small circle of men and boys he saw, for the first time, their gauntness, their strange furtiveness. They twitched and scratched. They stretched and stood to urinate, their eyes never still, never settling for long, like the blind white flies that were everywhere in the Clay.
Yes, he understood it now. It had begun there with that glimpse of otherness—that vision of glass and silver, of kings and brightness. He felt like speaking out—telling them what he had seen at the Gate, what he had done to scare off the intruders—but habit stilled his tongue. He looked down at his tiny, narrow hands, his long thin arms. There were no scars but there were sores at the elbows and the bone could be seen clear beneath the flesh.