‘Get on with it!’ shouted Sellup, the words jumbled by the knuckle bones she was sucking clean. Spitting one out she popped another one in. Her eyes shone like candle flames awakened by a drunkard’s breath. ‘It was a stupid camp. That’s all. I want to know what’s going to happen! Now!’
Calap nodded. Never argue with a member of one’s audience.
Well, perhaps he believed that. For myself, and after much rumination on the matter, I would suggest the following qualifiers. If that member of the audience is obnoxious, uninformed, dim, insulting, a snob, or drunk, then as far as I am concerned, they are fair game and, by their willingness to engage the artist in said contest, should expect none other than surgical savaging by said artist. Don’t you think?
‘These Imass in this camp had suffered a terrible winter. Their hunters could find little game, and the great flocks of birds were still weeks away. Many of the elders had walked off into the white to save the lives of their children and grandchildren, for winter spoke to them in a secret language only the aged understand. “In life’s last days, the white and the cold will lie in the bed of the old.” So said the wise among them. Yet, even for this sacrifice, the others weakened with each day. The hunters could not range as far as once they could before exhaustion turned them back. Children had begun eating the hides that kept them warm at night, and now fevers raced among them.
‘She was out, upon the high ridge overlooking the camp, collecting the last autumn’s mosses where the winds had swept the snows away, and so was the first to see the approaching stranger. He came down from the north, thickly clad in tenag furs. The long bone-grip of a greatsword rose behind his left shoulder. His head was bared to the winds at his back, and she could see that he was dark, stone-skinned and black-haired. He dragged a sledge in his wake.
‘In the time before he drew closer, hard thoughts rattled in her mind. They could turn no stranger away in times of need. This was a law among her kind. Yet this warrior was a big man, taller than any Imass. His hunger would be a deep pit, and weakened as her clan’s warriors now were, the stranger could take all he wanted if he so chose. And more, she was troubled by that sledge, for bundled as it was, she knew it bore a body. If it lived it would need caring. If dead, the warrior was delivering a curse upon her people.’
‘A curse?’ Sellup asked. ‘What kind of curse?’
Calap blinked.
Seeing that he had no specific response to this question, I cleared my throat. ‘Death leaves such camps, Sellup, and that is well and as it should be. This is why the elders, when they decide it is time to die, walk out into the white. It is also why all kills are butchered well away from the camp itself, so that only meat, hide and bones intended to be made into tools – gifts to life one and all – enter the camp. Should death come into the camp, the hosts are cursed and must immediately make propitiations to the Reaver and his demon slaves, lest Death find the camp to his liking and so make it his home. When the Reaver finds a home, the living soon die, do you see?’
‘No.’
Sighing, I said, ‘It is one of those rules couched in spiritual guise that, in truth, has a more secular purpose. To bring someone dead or dying into a small camp is to invite contagion and disease. Among such a close-knit clan, any infection is likely to claim them all. Thus, the Imass had certain rules to prevent such a thing occurring, yet those rules, alas, conflicted with that of never turning a guest away in times of need. So the woman was with troubled thoughts, yes?’
‘But he’s evil – he has to be! He’s the Reaper himself!’
‘Reaver,’ I corrected, ‘or so the citizens of Aren so call the Lord of Death.’
Calap flinched and would not thereafter meet my eyes. ‘So she stood, trembling, as the stranger, who had clearly chosen her as his destination, now drew up to halt nine paces distant. She saw at once that he was not Imass. He was from the mountain heights. He was Fenn, a giant of Tartheno Toblakai blood. And too, she saw that he bore the marks of battle. Slash wounds that had cut through the woolly Tenag hide had encrusted the slices with the warrior’s own blood. His right hand and forearm were blackened with old gore, and so too was his face spattered in violent maps.
‘He was silent for a time, his heavy eyes held upon her, and then he spoke. He said—’
‘Finish this tomorrow night,’ Tiny Chanter said, cracking a wide yawn.
‘That’s not how it works,’ Tulgord Vise said in a growl. ‘We can’t very well vote if one of the tales remains incomplete.’
‘I want to hear more, don’t I?’ Tiny retorted. ‘But I’m falling asleep, right? So, we get the rest tomorrow night.’
I noticed that Nifty Gum was endeavouring to catch my eye. In response I raised my brows and shrugged.
Oggle Gush said then, ‘But I want to hear Nifty’s story!’
Nifty made to silence the girl, if the twitching of his hands and their spasmodic clutching (miming throttling a throat) was any indication, though who but Nifty could truly say?
‘Tomorrow during the day then! Same for the other one – we got time and since there ain’t nothing to see anyway and nothing to do but walk, let’s have ’em entertain us till sunset! No, it’s settled and all, ain’t it, Flea?’
‘Aye,’ said Flea. ‘Midge?’
‘Aye,’ said Midge.
‘But the night is still young,’ objected Arpo Relent, and one could tell from a host of details in his demeanour that the sudden dispatch of impending death-sentences had frustrated some pious repository of proper justice within his soul, and now in his face there was the blunt belligerence of a thwarted child.
Purse Snippet then surprised us all by saying, ‘I will tell a tale, then.’
‘My lady,’ gasped the host, ‘it was settled – there is no need—’
‘I would tell a tale, Sardic Thew, and so I shall.’ With this assertion muting us all she then hesitated, as if startled by her own boldness. ‘Words are not my talent, I admit, so forgive me if I stumble on occasion.’
Who could not but be forgiving?
‘This too belongs to a woman,’ she began, her eyes on the flames, her elegantly fingered hands encircling her clay vessel. ‘Loved and worshipped by so many—’ She sharply looked up. ‘No, she was no dancer, nor a poet, nor actress nor singer. Hers was a talent born to, yet not one that could be further honed. In truth, it was not a talent at all, but rather the gathering of chance – lines and curves, symmetries. She was, in short, beautiful, and from that beauty her life was shaped, her future preordained. She would marry well, above her station, and in that marriage she would be the subject of adoration, as if she was a precious object of art, until such time that age stole her beauty, whereupon her fine home would become a tomb of sorts, her bedroom rarely frequented at night by her husband, whose vision of beauty remained forever youthful.
‘There would be wealth. Fine foods. Silks and fetes. There would be children, perhaps, and there would be something … something wistful, there in her eyes at the very end.’