There was a long and ringing silence as Naida and Yalenda
faced each other. Scaliana put her hand
on Yal’s arm.
Naida
looked around at the faces of the people who had raised her, said that she was
family. Deno wasn’t in his own head yet,
if he ever would be. Isocratis, no
longer the Younger, but the only one, stared at his bare feet. Doris didn’t
look up from rolling up her burned and barely usable rug. The closed and
grieving faces, confused and lost in a world where the sea and land conspired
to destroy them all. A long, long wail
from the crags above the pass made everyone flinch. It sounded like a mourning ululation.
Irilla
handed her second baby to Icarus and stood up abruptly. “That’s enough Yalenda. You might be new pregnant but you don’t spew
such nonsense to anyone else.”
She marched
over to Yal who was still glaring at Naida, seized her by one shoulder and
shook her, sending dust flying as her hair came loose from her headcloth. “Enough!
You’ve always hated Naida. We all
know it, however much you try to butter it over. Now is not the time to scream this nonsense
to the sky. The Gods might hear you. You
saw the water dry up… the earth-shake closed it up. We need to take what we can and get through
the pass before it snows.”
Yal opened
her mouth, closed it again, twitched her arm out of Irilla’s grip and flounced
over to Deno to start getting him to his feet. Scali looked at Naida, then
Irilla, then over to Yal who was whispering to Doris, shook her head and
followed after.
“You have
the goats following you, girl,” Irilla said.
“There’s nothing for you to carry but what you’ve got. And that poisonous tongue of hers is going to
make your life miserable no matter what I say.
Sorry.”
Naida
wanted to just sit down and howl but could just hear Zeno in her head saying “Whatever
good would that do? Go on. Keep moving, Nai.” She hitched Asteri up on
her shoulders, checked her belt pouch where her bangle had lived since Zeno had
given it to her, and began picking her way across the pumice-covered meadow,
goats streaming around her.
“I don’t
know the way to the pass,” she called to Isocratis. “Did your da tell you?”
He shrugged
and picked up a broken stick, pulling rough ends and leaves off it, thumped it
on the ground once. “Nope. Not
really. Just keep going up. I think the next village is called Kuvat or
Kuvatal or something like that.”
“Kuvatala,”
Doris snapped picking up her rug. She peered up at the grey sky and Naida could
hear her. “I suppose that sometimes we
eat them and sometimes they eat us.” She’s talking about gorgons. Grey wings, spreading mantel, tentacles with
suckers and hooks, just like calamari, though they are white, not grey.
At first it was hard walking
because they all kicked up enough ash to envelope them in a fog that forced
them to draw their tunics over their faces, coughing, but the wind kept up and
eventually blew it away from them, when they got out of the meadows and onto the bare and rocky ground higher up.
The goats
didn’t want to go away from the grass, even as gritty as it was and Naida had
to stop and get Icarus to yank on Bruiser’s lead when he wasn’t helping Irilla
and Irikraska. Scalia helped Uri with
Deno and Yalenda, as new pregnant, carried nothing but her basket.
She
muttered under her breath the whole way up the mountain, not loud enough for
Naida to hear anything specific but she could feel Yalenda’s plaints oozing
down her back like glistening snails dropping off onto the stoney ground.
They found
a small divot in the trail that let them all huddle in together in the shadow
of the cliff, calling the goats around them for warmth. Doris’s rug barely covered her and
Irikraska. Uri called Yal and Scaliana
to look after Deno who kept trying to get up and wander off in the dark.
Uri and
Icarus had been gathering sticks all the way up, and made everyone else gather
up at least two or three sticks of their own and they had enough for a little
fire. “I’ll stay up first. Lots of things will be out hunting and we
need to scare them off.”
Asteri
groaned and squirmed around to cuddle against Naida’s front and she was so
tired, so exhausted, that she was asleep before the fire had really caught.
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