The Trials of Koli Read online

  “Exactly.”

  “When she was a slave?”

  Ursala huffed. “That’s not what she was. She was a piece of software designed to guide people through some menu options and provide a little entertainment along the way. That’s all she was ever intended to be.”

  I give them words some thought. “Who was doing the intending?” I asked.

  “The people that made her.”

  “Well, I guess that was fine for them. But it’s better when people is left to intend for themselves. Could I have that back now?” I holded out my hand. It seemed to me that Ursala hung back for a second before she give the DreamSleeve over to me, but that could of been just me thinking it.

  I slipped the DreamSleeve back into its sling, and tugged on it to make sure it was firmly settled there. “I never met the people that made the DreamSleeve,” I said. “Nor I’m not likely to, since I guess they died back in the world that was lost. Monono is my friend. What you’re asking me to do is…” I went casting around for a word, but I couldn’t find one at first. Then I did, of a sudden, and I knowed it was the right one. “You’re asking me to kill her.”

  “We could spend a long time discussing what’s alive and what isn’t,” Ursala said, looking really angry now. “I’d rather we didn’t, frankly. At the end of it, we still wouldn’t know. I’m asking you to take something out of the world that wasn’t supposed to be in it. Something dangerous and wrong.”

  It was right then that Monono choosed to speak up.

  “Suppose I asked him to do the same to you, baa-baa-san? That would really put him on the spot, wouldn’t it? I wonder which of us he’d listen to.”

  Ursala didn’t say nothing to that, but her eyes went narrow and she glared at the little silver box, sitting there in the ragged harness I had throwed together for it.

  “Oh,” Monono said, “was this a private conversation? I am so embarrassed! Please, please pretend I’m not here. You were up to the part where you stick a pin in me to see if I bleed. I don’t, baa-baa-san. I bite.”

  Ursala ignored all that and looked to me. “Think about what I said,” she told me. “Please, Koli. I won’t try to make the choice for you, but there’s going to come a time when you have to make it for yourself.”

  She walked on, tapping on the mote controller to tell the drudge to follow her. Cup sneered at me as she walked by, tugged along at the drudge’s tail end. “The unrighteous has got to walk on stony ground,” she said.

  “So has everyone else, Cup,” I muttered as I followed. “Unless they figure out how to fly, or something. Until then, stony ground is what we got.”

  Anyway, after that day Monono and Ursala was not friends. I guess it was only natural for there to be some bad feeling between them, since Ursala had told me to kill Monono and had even showed me how to do it. Monono was not inclined to talk to me either for a while. She was angry that I turned the DreamSleeve over to Ursala, and I had got to let her forgive me for it in her own good time. I only told her I would never do what Ursala said I should do, nor let anyone else do it.

  “Don’t let her get her hands on the DreamSleeve again, Koli,” Monono said. “Not for a second. And keep me charged to the max. If she tries to sneak up on me, I want to be awake for it.”

  “I don’t think she would do that, Monono,” I said. “I think she’d ask me first.” But I promised her I would hold the DreamSleeve in the light every day so she would not run out of power and have to go to sleep. It was one thing me saying Ursala would not to go behind my back, and another for Monono to believe it and trust her weight to it, as they say. I was not the one who was like to bear the brunt of it if I was wrong.

  3

  Day followed day, and still we went right on walking. I could not really make the distances seem real, inside my head. We was passing through spaces that was so big, I got lost in looking at them. I had lived my whole life in a village of two hundred souls, and that had seemed big enough to me, but the world outside was big in a different way. Sometimes I would just stop, staring out over some valley or across the peaks of mountains that lay heaped up in our way, with mist down in between them like they was cupped hands dipped into churned-up water. Ursala would tell me not to dawdle, which means to wait for no reason, but I had got reason enough. I was waiting for the wonder to wear off and my mind to come back to me.

  But even when I didn’t do no dawdling we was making heavy weather of it. Wild beasts was partly to blame. The ones that wanted to eat us was a particular problem, but even the ones that didn’t was troublesome. One time we come to a place where there was kind of a river of brown fur in front of us, about a hundred paces wide and so long we couldn’t see either end of it. When we looked close we seen that it was mice. They was about the size of my thumb’s top joint, with heads as big as their bodies, and there was so many of them they was running on each other’s backs as much as on the ground. We waited a whole hour for them all to go by us, and after they was gone, there was nothing but bare earth where they had passed. They had et up every green and growing thing. I think if we had stepped in their way they would of et us too, and not even noticed no difference.

  But the beasts was only a small part of what was slowing us down. The trees was mostly to blame. They was pretty much everywhere, and they was greatly to be feared. You could not get too close to them, in case they moved in on you and crushed you. They would only do that when the sun was out, but if you was to wade into the thick of a forest and then the sky gun to clear, it was too late then to wish you’d gone another way. Also, some trees had other ways to kill you, with poison or spikes or strangling or something else that you wouldn’t think of until it was done to you. It was best not to have no truck with them unless you had to.

  So we kept to the stony slopes of hills, to rivers and streams, and to the patches of dead ground we come on every now and then, where there was not even weeds growing – because of poison, Ursala said, throwed down in the Unfinished War and still hiding in the ground there. Or else we would look for hunters’ paths, like the ones I used to walk in Calder or the ones Cup’s people made across the valley floor, that was most carefully hid from sight.

  If all them things failed, then we had got to make the best of it and go on into the woods. But we choosed our moments, when we come to that end. There had got to be a heavy overcast, so we was not likely to be surprised by the sun breaking through. The drudge went before us, both to clear a path and to measure how far it was to the next clearing. If it was too far, then we would turn ourselves around and find another way.

  The signal was a vexation to us too. Sometimes it seemed to come from one direction but Ursala said we had got to go another, because the drudge’s map showed mountains or marshes in our way. And then we would have to go about to find the right line again, which we had lost. By this time, Monono and Ursala wasn’t speaking each to other any more, but had got to talk through me which took a lot longer.

  And then there was Cup. Or rather, there was Ursala not trusting Cup enough to untie her hands. You might not think tied-up hands would make a difference to how fast someone can walk, but they did. We was mostly treading through waist-high weeds, with thick tangles of briar lying like ropes around our feet, so we could not go more than a dozen steps without stumbling. With her hands behind her back, there wasn’t no way for Cup to steady herself or to push the tangles out of her way, so she was being balked and blocked ever and again as she walked – and then we had got to wait for her to catch up or else go back and free her from some snarl of green stuff that had more teeth and claws to it than the usual ruck.

  We had argued it a lot of times, but I could not get Ursala to change her mind. Nor Cup neither, for she wouldn’t make no promises for her good behaviour if we set her free. Ursala said we had got enough trouble already without adding some stupid girl and her revenging to the list.

  “You still want to revenge Senlas?” I asked Cup. I was hoping she would say no, but she didn’t say nothing either
way. She just hanged her head down like she was whelmed by tears, though no tears come. That was a raw wound to her, as they say, and she could not readily talk about it. Senlas had been her messianic, the onliest father of her soul, though he was also a liar and a killer and an eater of men. Until Ursala and I come along and set fire to the cave where Senlas lived, which was the end of him.

  When Cup come after us in the first place, revenging was all she was thinking of. But thinking’s not the same as doing. She had got the better of me, in a running stream where she come on me unawares, and she could of cut my throat, only she didn’t do it. She had killed for food, and she had killed in the thoughtless heat of fighting. Killing someone cold, when they’re not offering you no harm, is something different again and she found it was not to her liking after all.

  So now here she was, walking with us but not really one of us, and between her sorrowing and Ursala’s anger I could not think how to make a mend.

  “She almost blinded me,” Ursala would say whenever I come round to Cup’s tied hands and how we might do better to loose them.

  “She did that in a fight,” I said. “And your eye’s getting better. She didn’t put it all the way out.”

  “Wonderful. That’s a great consolation, Koli. But what do you think she’s going to do next time? She’s damaged, and she’s wild. We shouldn’t have taken her out of Calder in the first place, but since we did she’s our problem now. I’m going to treat her like what she is, which is an unsprung trap.”

  I didn’t argue it no further. In some ways, Ursala was not wrong. Cup had worshipped Senlas something fierce, and went by the name he give her when she first come to him. She beared his mark on her face too, a great long line that started on her right cheek, went down in a curve to her chin and then come up again on the other side. It was meant to be a cup, to signify that he would pour his wisdom into her. More than that, it was meant to say she belonged to him.

  And it was true that Cup could still hurt us if she choosed to. I just did not believe that she would do it. If she was damaged and wild, like Ursala said, it was the damage I give most thought to. How Cup’s own people wouldn’t let her be what she knowed she was, which was a girl-child and then a woman, so she had got to leave them. And how Senlas, who was mad but fearsome clever, played on her hopes and dreams with promises he could not keep – promises of an angel’s body, that was man and woman both, or neither – to make her stand by him and fight for him. Of course she took harm in all of that, and it sunk deep into her. You could tell it from how she cursed or cried out in her sleep, most nights, and how she was as quick to anger as a whip is quick to crack. I did not want to be the next one to close a door on her, or bend her to a plan that wasn’t hers.

  “You should let her go then, Koli-bou,” Monono said to me, one night when we was camped up. We had found a good spot, in under an overhang of rock where the soil was too thin for much to grow, and with a big wide slope below us. Ursala had not set out the tent, the ground being too uneven and too hard, but with the drudge to guard us that open space was like a closed door. The drudge could see anything coming a long ways off, and take it down before it got too close. “If you want her to be free, keeping her with you seems like a weird way to go about it, neh.”

  I was lying on one side of our fire, with Ursala on the other. Cup was a way off, her tied hands looped around a metal bracket on the drudge’s back. We had et what we had to eat, which was some nuts and oat mash with the good parts of six or seven apples cut up into it. The other parts of the apples had been wormy or melt-marked, and back home in Mythen Rood we would of throwed them all away rather than risk a bite, but Ursala had ways of telling what was safe and what was not.

  “I wanted to do that from the start, Monono. But Ursala would of killed her to keep her from leading her people on our track.” I kept my voice down low as I said this. Nobody could hear Monono’s voice, for she talked to me on something she called an induction field, which carried the words to my ears without them going through the open air. So when I talked back to her, Ursala and Cup would oftentimes look at me like I was crazed. I had got used to whispering. “And now it’s too late. She’s miles away from any place she knows, and I doubt she would make it back to Calder. Even if she did, where would she go? The shunned men must of moved on, after their cave got burned out and Senlas died. If Cup was to go to any of the villages, they’d know where she come from by the markings on her face, and most likely kill her as soon as they seen her. Letting her go would not be doing her no favours.”

  “Is that why she’s here? Because you think you owe her a favour?”

  I was not used to hearing such hardness in Monono’s voice. Before she got what Ursala called the autonomy, she was only ever happy and funny and singing and making jokes with me. She still did that sometimes, but now it was like a game we played between the two of us, with each one knowing that the other could see behind it and around the sides of it. Monono could be cruel now, or at least she could talk as though she was. I did not think she was changed at the rock bottom as they say, but then I had not knowed her for so very long, either before or after she changed. I could only go by what I felt, which is not something that oftentimes leads you all the way to a truth.

  “We took her home away from her,” I said. “I thought she would be better off with us than on her own.”

  “You thought she needed a family, dopey boy,” Monono come back. “Because you were missing your own so much.” And maybe that was a part of it, though it had not felt like that inside my thoughts. And anyway, I had not had no good choices to make.

  Monono was quiet for a little while, and so was I. We was on opposite sides of the path, kind of, and talking to each other across it. It did not make me happy to be that way. “Do you want me to play you to sleep?” she asked me by and by.

  I cast around in my mind for a song or a tune that would fit in with my mood. There was many of them, but they was not of a kind that would help me sleep. “No,” I said. “I’m good, Monono. Thank you. But maybe you could wake me tomorrow with ‘Up and Atom’.”

  “Okay, Koli. I’ll do that.” She didn’t ask me when I was fixing to wake. One of the things Monono could do was to listen to my breathing and tell from it how deep asleep I was. If I asked for a wake-up call, I knowed it would come when I was just about to wake up my own self, so it was like being lifted up and out into the day that was just come.

  Only that’s not how it turned out this time. I closed my eyes, and was soon asleep, like always. The hard marching left all of us tired to death.

  The next thing I heard was a shrill ringing sound, with a throb in it like the note of a bullroarer at the end of its string. That was followed by Ursala swearing a whole mouthful of oaths, and by the clicking, clanking, bucket-gone-down-the-well sound of the drudge climbing up on its four feet.

  “Get under cover, Koli,” Monono said, her volume at maximum to whip me up to it. “Now. You’re under attack!”

  Well, there was two choices for cover: the drudge and a big rock. I picked the rock, and started crawling over to it. I heard Ursala still shouting, and the drone firing – a soft, popping sound with a sigh of air after each pop.

  My hand touched something in the dark. Something that seemed to be growing out of the ground. I run my hand up it and felt the softness of feathers at the topmost tip.

  It was an arrow.

  4

  The fighting, if that’s what you would call it, was over very quickly.

  Another arrow bit down into the dust and stones near me, and a third one bounced off the drudge’s side and clattered to the ground.

  The arrows was not coming from the bottom of the slope, but from off to one side of us. Whoever was firing, they had most likely hoped to get in close enough so they could use knives or spears instead. But the drudge was on guard, the same as it was every night. It must of heard their footsteps, or a whispered word, or smelled their sweat in the air. Anyway, it had knowed by some mean
s that they was coming. So it had sounded its tocsin to wake its mistress, and then it had gone about to defend us.

  The drudge’s gun spun and stopped, spun and stopped. Each time it stood still, it spit out a bolt that ripped through the air quicker than any arrow. We couldn’t see what them bolts hit, if they hit anything at all, but there was no more arrows after them first three. By and by I heard a woman shout from the bottom of the slope – a barked word I couldn’t make out, like as it was one hunter calling others to them, speaking up loud because she knowed she was out of covert already and there was no point, any more, in hiding. A quick patter of footsteps come to me as the wind turned around, then nothing again.

  “Are you all right, Koli?” Monono asked me. Her voice made me jump, it was so loud. But it was only loud to me. The induction field stopped anyone else from hearing it.

  “I’m fine, Monono.” I said, and went to check on Cup. She had not been hurt. She had been tied to the drudge the whole time, but the drudge had turned itself at once to face the incoming arrows and she had got yanked round to the back of it. She had probably had the best shield out of all of us.

  “Who was they?” I asked, which was a foolish question if ever there was one.

  “Shunned men, most like,” Ursala said, and I seen Cup’s pale face turn around as she said it. I heard the breath she let out too, and the tremor that was in it. “Not yours, girl,” Ursala said bluntly. “We’re forty miles from Calder. I doubt your people ever went half that distance.”

  “They come to find me, is what, and you’re a damn liar,” Cup said. They was the first words she had said in a long while, and they spilled out of her in a rush like the first water from a pump once you’ve got it fairly primed. “They come to bring me home.”

  Ursala didn’t bother to answer. She had gone over to where the first arrow was sticking out of the ground. She pulled it up and looked at it, holding it high and turning it so the moonlight fell on its tip, its shaft, its dark fletching.