‘After we’ve eaten, I’ll pounce on you and you’ll be my prey!’
Dellin bit his shoulder lovingly and he grinned at her. He felt along the rounded edge of the horse’s back leg, and scored with his flint knife an arc along the line of the joint, again and again until the tough hide gradually split and he cut through to the muscle beneath. He dug his fingernails under the hide and slowly tore it back, using his knife to slice it away from the clinging meat.
Tiny flakes broke off his knife edge and remained in the flesh as glittering dust, the sharp new stone shining cleanly where they had detached. Dellin yelped in disapproval and pushed his hand away. ‘Let me do that. I don’t want to eat steak full of flint spalls again. You know my favourite - get the stomach.’
‘All right.’ He pushed back his sleeves, then drew his knife down the middle of the stallion’s belly from breastbone to between its back legs. The skin began to part. He was careful not to pierce the intestines, the pungent reek would attract wolves, but he neatly cut the tubes at top and bottom, took the stomach out and presented it to her.
She cut the hard ball of muscle in half and greedily bit out a mouthful of the mashed grass inside. It was so piquant! She chewed the acidic fibres slowly and passed the other half to Laochan, who looked like he needed some nourishment.
He cut out the liver; purple, smooth and gleaming, and slopped it into his rucksack, then pulled the slippery mess of intestines forward and reached his arm over it into the body cavity to pluck out the kidneys. He stripped them of valuable white fat and tossed them in his pack.
‘Ay!’ he said. ‘Try some of this fat. There’s four times as much as on a deer!’
His tempting musk tingled Dellin’s nose. But first things first: with fast, economical movements she peeled the skin down no further than the hock because the lower leg bore no meat, and began filling her bag with thick steaks from its haunch.
A shout made them look up. Featherback men were running out of the opening in the wall, waving their arms and shouting madly. More men behind them turned to beckon to yet more dashing from their shacks. Dellin gasped. She had never seen so many! Their clothes were - colourful! - too bright - and they actually had wings folded at their backs. They really grew
feathers
. The stiff tips of one man’s wings protruded from his coat. Their hair was short and many shades of brown, even yellow, like dry grass. They were stocky and bulky and moved too slowly - comically slowly. Some held wood staffs and they yelled with fury. A hail of stones was bound to follow. She grabbed her spear.
Laochan was elbow-deep in the horse’s ribcage, feeling about for its heart. The featherback men stopped at the barrier, aghast expressions contorting their faces. They raised their staffs in front of their eyes.
‘Run! Run!’
Laochan sprang up - and cried out. A stick had appeared projecting from his hip. He clutched both hands around it, turned in wonder to the featherbacks - and another stick with feathers on the end appeared exactly in the middle of his chest.
He dropped to his knees, staring at Dellin. His eyes were full of terror and confusion. Then they set and he fell.
She tentatively touched him. He’s dead. Laochan’s
dead
. Feathered sticks were appearing all around her, embedding in the ground, in the horse’s carcass and in her husband’s body.
She wrenched herself away from him and instinct told her to crawl. The forest edge seemed impossibly far. Something whooshed by - a stick hit the stones in front of her, jamming between them at an angle. It had a sharp metal tip. Then she was up and sprinting her fastest. The thin pines with a few bushes between them, the unnatural cut stumps much too white, the strip of dark boughs over trunks and undergrowth jumped and bounded, never getting any nearer.
Sticks were cracking against the rocks all around. She sped past them and kept going straight, aiming for the darkness between the trunks. She vaulted the barrier, landed atop a boulder, sprang off and across the track.
At last, the forest! She caught her breath in a bound over the brambles at its edge and landed, both feet, both hands, on the pine litter.
She heard no pursuit. She dashed deeper in, skidded to her knees behind the rowan bush, pulled herself into the smallest possible area and peered out between its leaves. Four featherback men were climbing into the enclosure. The horses were mad with panic, stampeding round and round inside the fence as far as they could get from the kills. The strangers seemed cautious of them and walked instead to Laochan, who lay on his side with his legs crooked. One bent down, obscured by the tussocks, straightened up with Laochan’s knife in his hand and inspected it.
Tears were pouring down Dellin’s face but she kept watching. She started sobbing, catching each breath short and sharp.
The tallest Awian crouched beside the stallion and pressed his hand to its neck. The second turned Laochan’s body over with his foot. Dellin saw in a flash his white skin and trailing black hair. She cried out and all four men looked in her direction.
She shrank back and clamped her hand over her mouth. The man stroking the dead stallion said something and the others began to walk towards her. They left her husband lying face down and drew new feather-ended sticks, fitted them to the strings on their wooden staves.
Dellin glanced uphill, towards the familiar screes. She fled.
LIGHTNING
November, 1890
I ran up the spiral staircase as fast as I could, beside myself with excitement. I couldn’t wait to tell him. Three hundred and thirty steps later I came to a little bare landing and the arched door of his apartment. I reached out a hand and rapped on it. There was no answer. Of course there was no answer; the Messenger was rarely seen before ten o’clock in the morning, when he leaves his tower with his girl of the previous night and goes in search of breakfast.
On the other hand, he is keen to be accessible and usually leaves his door unlocked. That was well known. I pushed down the catch and swung it wide. ‘Jant?’
He wasn’t in this half of the circular room, but bedclothes were rustling on the other side of the velvet curtain drawn across it. I stepped through the doorway and waited for a reply. ‘Jant?
Jant
?’
‘Just a minute!’ came from behind the curtain.
This is the fastest person in the world and it is always ‘just a minute’ with him. The room was half in impenetrable gloom but a little light leaked in from the shutters, and with the odour of stale coffee, the air was quite a fug. I picked my way across the semicircular study to the window, between a trio of smeared wine glasses on the floor, plates sticky with the remains of what seemed to be cherry gateau, big curled feathers from the tops of someone’s wings, and a pair of women’s shoes with pointed toes, kicked off in a hurry. I opened the shutters. One of them was broken, and as I propped it wide I thought, it’s extraordinary. Jant does look very much like her. Broader, of course; but she could be his sister. Watch me shock him out of bed.
‘Jant!’ I called. ‘There’s a Rhydanne in the Castle!’
The bedclothes crinkled with increased asperity, then with a jingle of brass rings on the rail the curtain twitched apart in the middle and Jant’s face appeared, looking somewhat hungover. ‘What?’
‘A Rhydanne!’
‘Where?’
‘Down by Carillon.’
He blinked in surprise. I continued, satisfied, ‘Called Shira. Standing by Serein’s fishpond. So I thought I should—’
Jant interrupted me, ‘He’s called Shira?’
I smiled and something in my smile informed him he should alter the question.
‘
She’s
called Shira?’
‘Yes. That much I understood.’
He poked his upper body through and drew the drapes about his waist, so I was no longer speaking to a disembodied head but also to a hairless torso. ‘Is she speaking Scree?’
‘I assume so. You can speak it, surely?’
‘Well, it’s been a long time but . . . yes, yes, of course . . .’
‘Well, come on then! If she harpoons any of Serein’s prize koi, he’ll run her through.’
‘Ha! Serein and his bloody fish.’
‘You and your bloody women.’
Jant shrugged, withdrew behind the curtains and tweaked them into place. A few seconds later he slipped through and descended the three steps to the lower half of the room, buttoning his shirt cuffs.
‘She’s standing on the wall of the pond,’ I said, ‘with a
spear
- some kind of harpoon - watching the carp.’ I raised my arm and struck the pose. ‘I was going to the hall when I saw her. A grounds-man tried to talk to her as well, but he couldn’t. I mean, she talks but we couldn’t fathom a word she said. It’s all V’s and K’s.’
‘Bh’s and Ich’s.’
‘Exactly!’
He picked a corset from the back of the chair, gathered its dangling laces, scooped up the shoes and disappeared behind the curtain.
Typical, I thought. Apart from the clutter on the floor, his room was cluttered on every wall, the top of his desk and dresser, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if the clutter had extended across the ceiling as well. The desk was covered in coach route maps, folded in zigzag fashion, and other necessities of his job: pens, paper, a walnut box of seals and stubs of sealing wax - crimson for the Castle’s correspondence, black for his own.
On his travels he had collected such a vast miscellany of articles that his room resembled the den of an undiscerning buccaneer. There was a little cup and saucer with gold rims compulsively lifted from the Rachiswater Royal Café. There were books of matches pinched from various hotels; a scallop shell (‘A Souvenir From Cobalt’); horse racing spurs from Eske; a glazed green roof ornament of a sea serpent from Ghallain; a bunch of silk sky-blue roses of Awia given him in secret by a Lady Governor, stuffed into a Litanee knotwork vase; a series of small gouache paintings of local scenes popular in my own manor; a pack of cards I know to be false, with extra aces; and several half-dried bottles of eyeliner, which I believe was all the rage in Hacilith and the sort of thing that Jant latched onto rapidly.
Clay animal figurines from past Shatterings crowded the mantelpiece and in the grate were a very blackened kettle and toasting fork. Rather than descend the three hundred steps to the hall, he sat up here of a night and made his own toast and black coffee, from a great coffee tin embossed with baroque scrollwork and a dense little cylinder of dark chocolate, which he grated into it.
On a stand, pride of place, stood a black and scarlet chessboard, with ebony and red maple pieces inlaid with jet and carnelian. It had cost Jant so much he never stopped flaunting it, but it was no more than a pose because he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to play. The bric-a-brac and interesting junk picked up in flea markets around the world gave off a mothy smell of dust, but the more subtle smell of wood polish underlay everything, with old newspaper and the peppery scent of ink.
Beside the door, the wall was taken up by pigeonholes, each compartment labelled with the name of one of the Eszai or the Castle’s staff. Bundles of letters and slips of paper projected from most of them.
The curtain was pushed aside and a half-dressed woman emerged, apologetically bowed over a bundle of her clothes. She backed to the door and disappeared down the spiral stairs as fast as she could go. Jant came out on the other side and began preening in the mirror.
I said, ‘A Rhydanne, right here in the Castle! What do you think she wants?’
‘I have a landslide of a hangover . . .’
More rustling, and another pale and interesting girl crept out of the bedroom - all dishevelled hair and white shift - and departed as quickly as her flip-flops would let her. Jant didn’t spare her a glance.
‘Who was that?’
‘I’m not really sure . . .’ He pulled on his boots and searched around. ‘Where’s my sword? I can’t go down there looking like a Zascai. Oh, here we are.’ He unhooked his jacket from the back of the door and a Wrought sword was hanging underneath, on a belt with the Castle’s sun as its buckle. He put it on then sailed out of the room, leaving the door open. He took the stairs two at a time, leaning around the tight curve. ‘What a time to come knocking. There I was, lying in the sunlight with a sleeping beauty on either side. The blonde’s leg
there
, hidden in the duvet; the brunette’s plump tits
there
. I was enjoying wondering how to wake them and you rush in, shouting.’