THREE
A Shoulder for the Mocking Priestess
Cappie dove under the water. When she surfaced, her face was cleaner and she once again held my spear. She laid it on the shore and clambered out beside it, water pattering off her clothes onto the soft mud bank.
Men's clothes or not, she was clearly a woman now: her nipples pressed tautly against the wet fabric of her shirt. I thought of the feel of them, in my fingers, my mouth, and was suddenly more hungry for her than I'd been in months. With Master Disease banished, I was keen to celebrate my triumph.
"Cappie…" I started.
"No."
"You don't know what I was going to say."
"You're so obvious," she said, walking over to the Neut's knife and picking it up. I liked the way she walked — bold as a man, but with a woman's hips. "When you want to grope and fumble," she continued, "you always get the same tone in your voice and put on a moronic expression. Is that your idea of a sly grin?"
"What is this?" I cried. "Half an hour ago, you were singing "Our Love Will Fill Us," and now you're made of ice. Not to mention that you're dressed like your father. Have you been smoking dizzy-weed with the Mocking Priestess?"
"We have to go home and warn people," she said, jamming her shirttails back into her pants. There was a swipe of mud on her nose; I was furious with her, but I badly wanted to dab that nose clean with kisses.
"It's Commitment Eve," I reminded her. "We can't go back to the cove tonight. We're in isolation."
"Check your priorities, Fullin," she snapped. "A Neut and a scientist show up in the marsh, and you don't want to tell people?"
"We can tell people," I said. "Later. After. Come lie down."
"Do it with the damned violin," she replied. "You aren't doing it with me."
Tossing me an angry glare, she picked up the spear and ran. A sleek and easy run. A warrior's run. I opened my mouth to demand that she wait for me, but stopped myself in time. She wouldn't wait, no matter what I said, and a man loses face when his woman doesn't obey orders. Finally, I called, "You better not break my spear!" but not loud enough for her to hear.
Now I had no choice but to go back to the cove, Commitment Eve or not. If Cappie showed up and I didn't, the Elders would say I'd sent a woman to deliver a message I was too timid to deliver myself. Not to mention that she'd surely give a distorted version of what happened. She was, after all, possessed by a devil. I kept forgetting that.
But I knew how to take care of devils. I tucked the Neut's violin under my arm and started for home.
Soon I regretted letting Cappie get away with the spear — every stone in my path looked like a snapping turtle. I thought of rapping those rocks with the violin bow, but I couldn't bring myself to do it: I kept thinking of the crunch a snapper would make biting off a mouthful of wood and horsehair. Just imagining the sound gave me the shakes. I told myself it wasn't my bow, but that didn't lessen my queasiness. Musicians are sensitive people.
I took to veering away from every rock that could possibly be a snapper in disguise, with the result that I strayed off the paths that led directly to the cove. No one could claim I was lost — I retained my bearings by keeping an eye on the dead tree rising high above the reeds in the center of the marsh — but when I finally reached the turtle-free safety of the forest, I was far from the frequented trails.
You can measure the distance from town to any part of the forest by the age of the people who use that area as a hiding place. The youngest children make their forts just deep enough into the trees to be out of sight of the Council Hall steeple. As they grow older they venture beyond, in search of OldTech dumps and collapsed buildings they believe have never been seen by Tober eyes. Teen-aged couples steal out even farther, past the haunts of tattletale siblings, to beds of scratchy pine needles where they share love poems and ghost stories. (Ghost stories are the best aphrodisiac a fourteen-year-old knows.) Past the nesting areas of new lovers are the glower-bowers of the jilted, the solitary clearings where older teens brood over the unfairness of life and tell themselves how sorry everyone would be if they were found dangling from an oak. Soon, most of the brooders return to the coupling grounds, but a few proceed to higher degrees of restlessness, ranging farther and farther until their connection to Tober Cove snaps and they are propelled down-peninsula to the cities of the south.
Avoiding turtles had brought me to those outermost regions, a part of the forest seen only by solitaries and the occasional hunter. It was still Tober land, however, and a clear trail led back in the direction of the cove. No doubt the trail would reach more familiar regions soon enough.
I had barely walked twenty paces when I caught sight of a yellow-orange campfire in the forest on my left. Common sense said to avoid it — no honest traveler wandered so far from the main road. More likely, it was some fugitive from Feliss City. Each year, a handful of thieves and murderers came up-peninsula to hide in our woods; each year, the Warriors Society tracked them down and turned them in for bounty at the Feliss army outpost in Ohna Sound. It was a lucrative business: for fifteen years, the bounty money had completely paid for Tober Cove's "Fish-on-a-Bun" booth at the Wiretown Fall Fair. (We used to call the booth "Perch-on-a-Bun"… but cityfolk who didn't know perch were a type of fish got the strangest ideas.)
The thought of tangling with a criminal so soon after the last fight turned my stomach. On the other hand, Cappie would have reached the village already and given her version of our battle. She'd likely paint me in a bad light… and people in the cove envied my success so much, they'd love an excuse to look down on me. I could use something to counteract Cappie's spite, to explain why I was late getting home. Reporting the whereabouts of a big-bounty outlaw was perfect for redeeming myself.
As quietly as I could, I laid the violin under a bush and stole through the forest toward the fire. Soon I heard the sound of wood burning, popping and snapping loud enough to cover any noise I made. I managed to get very close, down on my stomach behind a fallen spruce where I could peer through the cover of dead branches toward the lighted clearing.
The fire burned high and bright, set on the edge of one of the many limestone shelves layered throughout our woods. By its light I could see old Leeta, the Mocking Priestess, huddled on a rusty wrought-iron bench. (The woods are full of such things — the whole area was once an OldTech nature park, but the OldTechs liked to see nature made presentable with benches and signs.)
Leeta was dressed in green, with daisies threaded through her loose gray hair and crusty-dry milkweed pods dangling from a fringed band at her waist. Her face was hidden in her hands; I couldn't hear over the crackling of the fire, but from the way her shoulders shook, I knew she was crying.
No man in the world likes to ask a tearful woman, "What's wrong?" You tell yourself, "She hasn't seen me yet; I can get away before she notices." But a true man, a gentleman, shows compassion no matter how hard it is to pretend you care. Taking a deep breath to nerve myself, I stood and said, "Hi Leeta, how's it going?"
She screamed. Not much, just a little shriek, and she cut it off so quickly I couldn't have startled her badly. Still, she made a big show of it, putting her hand to her heart and sagging as if she were going to faint. "It's only me," I said, not hiding my annoyance at her histrionics.
"Fullin," she groaned. "You scared me half to death."
"You're fine," I said. To calm her down, I added, "That's a nice dress."
She looked like she was going to snap at me; but then she put on a dithery smile and said, "It's my solstice robe. Do you like it?"
"The milkweed is a good touch," I told her. "Very earthy." I nodded sagely, trying to think of something else to say. There was no way I'd ask why she was crying; I didn't have the patience to listen to some tale of woe. "Nice night, isn't it?" I said. "Not as crushing hot as last week."