The youth settled on one hip, grinning. “Yes?”
“Right over there is the back of their enclosure, where they’ve put their horses. It’s very close to the woods. If I could get some tinder and start some dry weeds burning, I could heave them inside — I know horses, Qualt. They don’t like fire. And if they bolted, those railings wouldn’t hold five minutes… now if there were only something we could do about the prisoners. I think that’s the corral where they’ve got them, way across there. But I don’t believe I could get that far without being spotted. There was all this activity there, just about twenty minutes back — ”
The young garbage collector nodded, dappled light behind one ear making it luminously red — Qualt had tied his long hair back. “They took many of them back into town — to put them in the council building.”
“In the council building?” Naä asked.
“It looked to me as if they took everyone between fifteen and fifty years old and decided to put them in the cellar of the strong building. Only the old ones — and the little children — are left out there, in the hot sun.”
“You saw them?” she said. “I was here twenty minutes ago, and I couldn’t… But you saw them — take the prisoners from here, all the way into town and put them in the council building…?”
Qualt pursed his lips a moment, blinking. Then he said: “Come. Thou knowest where my hut is, by the dump?”
“I’ve never been there. But Rimgia once pointed out the path to it.”
Qualt snuffled, grinning; she realized it was a joke when he said: “There — thy nose will tell thee where it is if thou comest anywhere close. Go on — and meet me there.”
He turned, grabbed a branch of the tree he’d been perched in and started to climb.
“Won’t you come with me, Qualt?” she asked, surprised.
“Go on.” He looked back over his shoulder. “Go there. And I’ll meet thee.” He vaulted up to the next branch. A moment later his outsized feet pulled up among the leaves. “Go on. Don’t worry. I’ll be there!”
It wasn’t a time for questioning. And besides, she couldn’t see him any longer, even when she squinted — though she could still hear the leaves and the branches gnashing against one another. Naä started through the trees again.
She couldn’t imagine she’d taken much time. When, not half an hour later, she came around the corner of his house, she was as surprised to see him standing in the yard, among his odd and leaning collection of junk, as she had been when she’d turned to see him in the woods.
“Here,” he said, with no explanation as to how he’d gotten from one place to the other so much ahead of her. “This is for their water.” He picked up the old basket sitting on the moss by his foot. On both the basket edge and the handle, bits of wicker had come loose.
“What is — ” Then she wrinkled her face. In the general stink from the proximity of the dump, this stench cut through with distressing putrescence. Leaves lined the wicker. In among them nested something odorous and black — no, a wet green so dark it might as well be black.
“Where in the world did you get that?” she asked.
Qualt nodded to the side. “Down in the ravine. There’s lots of stuff I know about in there. Likely thou mayest get this on thy hands. Thou must wash them well with both soap and salt, before thou touchest thy face or mouth — otherwise, thy guts shall soon run loose as the Myetrans’ when this stuff goes in their drink.” Qualt handed her the foul basket. “Under the leaves are iron and flint for fire. The cattail fluff that you can get down this side of the quarry lake will give thee lots and lots of smoke — if smoke is what thou wishest.”
Behind Qualt stood a much larger basket, brim full, that Naä glanced down at now: millet cobs, some half-eaten yams, a chicken head —
“And any of the dried stuffs from the side of the hill beside the big rocks near their camp will flame up nicely.”
“All right,” she said. “This should do, I think — at least I hope it will.”
There were no thanks. But both grinned at each other. Then, the little basket at her thigh, she was moving off through the woods, making again for the Myetran camp.
Naä was astonished how easily the carrying out of the plan went. Behind one wagon, a handful of slop, up and over the edge — splash — then on behind the next — splash, again; and behind the next. Back under the cover of the trees, she tried out the flint and metal on a bit of the bale of dried brush she’d gathered, repeating to herself as she crouched in the shadow, “It’s the idea and not the doing — and having the stuff to do the doing with!”
At the horse enclosure, she thrust five big bales of dried kindling one after the other through the back fence. With crossed spears, way on the far side the two guards looked resolutely in the opposite direction.
She was back in the woods, starting to bring down another bale, when an officer rode up to return a horse to the enclosure — so she waited. Minutes later, she was down on her knees, behind the last bale, beating and beating the iron against the stone, till the oiled rag suddenly caught. A moment later, there was a rush of heat, of crackling, of orange flame — and she was running off again, into the woods. She turned back once, as two horses trotted over to examine the fire, then suddenly reared, whinnied, and galloped away — and do you know, the spear guards still had not looked!
She ran faster up the forested hill. Only twenty steps later, when more horses began to whinny behind her, did she hear the first man shout.
A moment later, she was again on her knees, laughing.
She laughed again, about an hour on, when, as she walked among the houses nearer the common, chubby Jallet, Mantice’s boy with the cast in his right eye, stopped to tell her what had happened to the soldiers, returning to camp under the trees behind the council building:
“When those bad men went under the stand of trees that are so thick in their branches that they make noon look near night, an old cabbage hit one of them on the shoulder — then eggs and goat offal and chicken heads and other nasty things began to pelt them from up in the leaves — from someone who could aim, too. For one got a splat of shit in his visor and another with his helmet off got cut on the face with a broken pot!”
Still laughing, Naä managed to say: “But it must have been — ” Then she caught herself. “It must have been quite a little rain of slop and garbage!”
“It wasn’t Qualt,” Jallet said.
Naä was surprised that the child’s thoughts had gone like hers to the dump. But then, what else would a town person have thought?
“It wasn’t anybody at all,” Jallet explained, “because the Myetrans got real angry, and began to climb the trees and look about, and there wasn’t anybody in them. Nobody had gone up them. And nobody — except the Myetrans — ever came down!”
“I see,” Naä said. “So it just… happened!”
Jallet nodded, with his unsettling glance that, because of the cast, you never knew where it was fixed. But while Naä laughed, she wondered.
Later that evening, though, when she was passing through the common, she saw four Çironians bound before a group of bewildered villagers. As she stopped to watch, the bored officer in his black hood and immobile cloak announced their crime was “mischief against Myetra! For the crime of which, ten lashes each!” Their hands thonged together before them, their clothes torn from their backs, the woman and the three men shuffled from side to side, blinked, and looked frightened. Were they, she wondered suddenly, being lashed for her misdoings? Or Qualt’s? It was the first moment of circumspection she’d had in the heady rush of her mischief. When the first lash fell, little Kenisa, standing next to her and looking very serious, reached up quietly to take Naä’s hand — Naä flinched a moment, so that Kenisa glanced up at her. But then, Naä had already gotten the soap and salt and done the obligatory hand-washing earlier at Hara’s house.