The Land You Never Leave Page 6

  “And if the beeba spiders bite you, oh! It’s so so bad.” The Badlander shook his head. “They are, of course, under our control. When you all cried out like babies just now, that was the Empty Child waking them.” He pointed to the bald kid on the bighorn sheep. “Now, here is the fun part. If you misbehave—if you attack me or any other Badlander, if you stray more than a short way from the nearest Empty Child, if you try to undo the leather strap around your neck—both the spiders will bite you. One would be enough, but each of you has two spiders in case one of them dies. Clever, no?”

  Morningstar shivered again.

  “How bad can the bite be? you’re wondering. Is it perhaps like a bee sting? That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Hardly makes you break a sweat, a bee sting. It would not impede escape at all. But, I am sorry my new friends, it’s worse than a bee sting. It’s worse than a million bees’ stings. Even though I’m sure you’re all very clever people, it’s worse than anything you can imagine. I will show you. Well, I won’t show you. Maybe you will show us, masochist. Would you like to?”

  He cocked his head, his eyes boring into Morningstar’s, his jaw rolling and pulsing as if his grin were a separate creature performing its own sultry dance.

  Morningstar held his gaze. The creatures strapped to her neck bristled against her skin.

  “Just say no thank you, Chapa Wangwa, if you don’t want the beeba spiders to bite you. And, believe me, you don’t want them to bite you.”

  He beckoned with one hand, and the child on the sheep trotted forward. “It would be a shame to lose such a beautiful captive, but if your arrogance prevents you from speaking to me …”

  Morningstar was fucked if she was going to do what she was told by this ugly lowlife, even if she was afraid. Fuck him and fuck fear.

  “I will count to three, then the spiders will bite you. One. Two.”

  Morningstar may have blanked him, but only Finnbogi’s most vindictive and blindly curious depths wanted to see her bitten by the beeba spiders.

  It looked a lot like her pride was going make it happen, though.

  “Often the better yields when the worse strikes!” blurted Gunnhild.

  “Thr—” said Chapa Wangwa.

  “No thank you, Chapa Wangwa,” Morningstar interrupted, in a voice that could have frozen Olaf’s Fresh Sea.

  “What wise words from the crone. Although she did call me worse than you, which I do not like.” He grinned malevolently at Gunnhild.

  “Insulting words only gain meaning when the recipient opens his door and welcomes them in,” she said.

  Finnbogi braced himself. What was Gunnhild thinking? This unhinged horror was not a man to goad.

  “Insulting words …” Chapa Wangwa looked confused, although still grinning. Slowly his eyes widened with happy realisation. “Oh, I see! that’s marvellous! I like that. A person can make you feel bad about yourself only if you allow it! If you’re upset by mockery, it’s your fault! That’s good. I wish I’d known that as a child, but from now I will keep your words with me as a shield. And I will keep you for now. Later, you will tell me more wise words.”

  Finnbogi almost felt sorry for the man.

  Chapa Wangwa turned to the four people with boxes on their necks that he’d brought with him. “We’ll use … you.” He pointed to a medium-sized fellow, about Erik’s age, balding and with an unusually large head.

  “Not me!” the man fell to his knees. “I’ll do anything! And you need me to identify animals!”

  Chapa Wangwa smiled at the Wootah and the Owsla. “We picked this one up near the start of this hunt. He had no obvious value and we don’t keep creatures who have no value, so I was going to open up that big head to see what’s inside, but he convinced Rappa Hoga that he was an expert on animals and would be helpful on our round of collections.”

  Chapa Wangwa shook his head. “He wasn’t helpful! He lied! He knew no more about animals than I do. So this is going to happen.”

  He nodded at the bald child on the sheep.

  “Noooo! I—” The big-headed man jerked. He reached one clawed hand to the box on his neck, and shook the other hand as if he were reaching the climax of an elaborate dance. He screamed so horribly and loudly that Finnbogi’s very insides vibrated, then drew in a horrendous sucking breath. His face went red, then purple. There was a loud snap.

  Chapa Wangwa was bouncing on his toes, rubbing his palms together. “That was his jaw breaking! Amazing, isn’t it?”

  The man’s broken jaw fell lose and his eyes bulged with agonised terror. He jerked and twisted as a series of cracks wracked his body, then collapsed like dropped laundry. One leg was straight out behind him at a nasty angle, the other was broken in several places, coiled like a fat rope.

  Chapa Wangwa was ecstatic. “And that was his back! His spine actually breaking! It always happens, but I love it every time as if it were the first.”

  The spider-bitten man was now curled in a weird ball, legs, arms and head twitching. Chapa Wangwa squatted next to him. He eyed the line of Wootah and Owsla like a rug hawker about to demonstrate his wares, then rolled the stricken man over, straightened him out, gripped his hair and lifted his head.

  “See his eyes?” Finnbogi could see his eyes. He had to look away. “We cannot imagine his agonies but his eyes tell the story. He will stay like this for a long time, then he will die. He cannot move, of course; his spine is broken all the way up and down. It’s a tightening, I think, of muscles and the cords that link them that snap the bones. I don’t know, I’m no medicine man. But I have seen the insides of a lot of people!”

  He dropped the man’s head and stood. “In a moment, we’ll untie your bonds. You’ll follow me to the Plains Strider—that’s the big wooden wonder you’ve all been wondering about.”

  “Where are you taking us?” asked Sofi.

  Chapa Wangwa’s eyes rolled around in his ugly face. “Let’s keep that as a surprise, shall we? Try to enjoy the journey. I will tell you that it will take a few days to get there, because when we arrive … well, let’s just say you should try your best to enjoy the journey.

  “And, just to be clear,” he continued, grinning, “if you attack me or any other Badlander, if you disobey any Badlander, if you try to escape, if you try to remove your box, the spiders will bite and this,” he gestured to the shivering wreck of a man at his feet, “will be you.”

  Chapter 6

  The Plains Strider

  Chapa Wangwa’s henchpeople untied Sofi Tornado’s wrists and ankles from the wooden frame. She could have killed them both. A man rode by on a dagger-tooth cat. She could have killed him, too, and ridden away on the creature.

  Instead she stood meekly, then followed with the rest of them through the Badlander camp, towards the Plains Strider. The spiders were a clever trap. Perhaps she might be able to rip the box off her neck before they bit her. Perhaps the changes in her physiology brought about by Owsla training and power-animal conditioning might make her resistant to their venom. Or perhaps, if she tried anything, she’d end up on the ground with her jaw, legs and back broken.

  The Badlander warriors, cooks, servants and others hardly gave any of them, even Chogolisa Earthquake, a second glance. Up ahead, in the Plains Strider, Sofi could see a caged white bear and other large animals she didn’t recognise.

  You didn’t have to be a genius to piece it together. The Badlanders, or at least this group of them, toured the Ocean of Grass and perhaps further, looking for interesting people and animals to take back to the Badlands. They’d caught the Owsla and the Wootah tribe not because they’d been after them specifically, but because they’d come across them and they were interesting. It was as if the Badlanders were on a deer hunt and the Owsla were any old group of deer. It was belittling.

  She would show them that they weren’t deer. She’d show them that the Owsla weren’t to be captured and transported against their will. But how? She caught Yoki Choppa’s eye, raised her eyebrows and cocked her head as if
to say, “should I rip the trap off and risk the spider bite?”

  He shook his head, just a little, very slowly, about as expressive as he ever was. She trusted his judgement. She would bide her time.

  “Come here! You at the back, come here!” called Chapa Wangwa when they reached the side of the Plains Strider. “You’re the one who fought Rappa Hoga, or at least tried to. Ha! Ha! Oh, it was funny!” He raised his voice so that anyone within a hundred paces could hear. “Most of you missed it! Rappa Hoga beat her as if she were a little child. Come to the front, child-warrior. What’s your name?”

  Owsla and Wootah parted to give her passage, but Sofi Tornado wasn’t going to follow the orders of a grinning psychopath, unless, of course, he was her emperor (and Zaltan may have been a psychopath, but he’d never grinned). She stood, holding his eye.

  Chapa Wangwa’s smile only widened. “Oh, you look angry, poor little girl. You!” he pointed at Gunnhild Kristlover. “You must have something to say about anger?”

  “Anger is the mother of bravery,” said Gunnhild, loud and clear.

  “No! Not what I was after. Give me a phrase that says anger is bad, not good.”

  Gunnhild shrugged. “Sorry, that’s all I’ve got.”

  “Never mind. You—fighting child woman—come here.”

  “Sofi,” whispered Sitsi Kestrel. “Please do as he asks. Our time will come and we’ll need you when it does. Anger is a snake. If you hold onto it, it will bite you.”

  Sofi walked to Chapa Wangwa, almost smiling because competitive Sitsi just had to show the Mushroom Woman that she wasn’t the only one who could trot out a relevant maxim.

  “Good, good! Now, what is your name?”

  “Sofi Tornado.”

  “Sofi Tornado. Wonderful. Now, Sofi Tornado, you can be the first to climb onto the Plains Strider.”

  Sofi sighed and leapt onto the ladder. With the spiders on her neck, what else could she do?

  Sassa Lipchewer followed the Owsla and Wootah, including Ottar’s racoons, up the side of the Plains Strider. Wulf the Fat came last. The captain of the Owsla had been first up, so it was the role of the chief Wootah to take the rear. It wasn’t a big thing or particularly important. It was just another example of Wulf knowing what to do and doing it.

  She was proud and pleased that she’d be having his baby. Or so she hoped. She’d vomited that morning, and the morning before. The first time she’d put it down to dodgy fish; Bjarni had caught a very odd-looking thing which Sitsi Kestrel had insisted was good eating. However, nobody else had been ill and then Sassa had been sick again that morning.

  So, she was pregnant.

  She was elated and terrified. It had been bad enough when they were only heading into the unknown, but now they had been captured by these frightening people and she had a pair of deadly spiders strapped to her neck that might bite her at any moment … what was the future for the tiny person fighting to grow inside her? One thing was for sure. She was going to do her very best to stay alive until she’d given birth to him or her.

  She followed Thyri Treelegs’ stocky bottom up the ladder. The first level was cages of animals—bears and lions and various others. She stopped when she spotted a white bear, an animal she’d never seen before but which popped up a lot in the story of her ancestors’ journey from the old world.

  “Hurry on there!” shouted Chapa Wangwa from below. “We’re about to leave!”

  The ladder led onto a broad wooden platform as high as the highest roof in Hardwork. She climbed through a gap in the side rail and stopped again, amazed.

  Sassa had never seen a ship, but she’d seen boats and knew enough from tales that this was a similar construction to a large boat—or ship—and that she was on its upper deck. It was a plank-floored, tapered rectangle, over seventy paces long, fifteen paces broad at its wide end, three paces across at the point. A navel-high rail ran around the outer edge, and Badlanders were encouraging Calnians and Wootah to find places to sit along it.

  Sitting cross-legged at the pointy end, facing away from her, were six of the bald children. Nearer were four other people, all looking wide-eyed at the newcomers. Wide-eyed and bug-eyed, now that she looked at them. They all had protruding irises. They looked weird, but neither they nor the bald children were the weirdest thing on the top deck of the Plains Strider.

  Sitting against the rail at the blunt end was a new monster. It was the shape of a person, but covered entirely in reddish-black fur and larger even than Chogolisa Earthquake. Picking at its toes, its brow furrowed, it seemed oblivious to everything around it.

  “Hurry, sit down by the rail!” shouted a Badlander. “We’re about to leave!”

  Did he really mean that this vast structure was going to move? Surely not.

  “Come on! Sit! Anywhere but near the squatch!”

  “The squatch?” asked Wulf.

  “Hairy giant at the end. Stay out of the reach of those long arms unless you’re looking for a swift death.”

  Wulf guided Sassa to a space next to the four strangers, three men and a woman, who nodded greetings as they sat. They didn’t look too happy, as well they might not. They also had spider boxes on their necks.

  “So,” said Sassa, trying not to stare at their bulging, fishy eyes, “where are you lot—”

  She was interrupted by Wulf placing a hand on her arm and nodding westwards.

  A vast flock of crowd pigeons was rising and blocking out a good portion of the sky. She remembered when a crowd pigeon flock had flown over Hardwork and left the whole place coated in pigeon shit. She guessed that this lot must be clearing out of the way, if the Plains Strider really was going to move.

  Then the deck lurched. Sassa grabbed the rail. She felt a wave of nausea and visceral fear as, creaking like a forest in a storm, the whole deck of the Plains Strider lifted. She looked at Wulf.

  He winked. “Here we go, I guess.”

  More creaking, more raising of the nose, another lurch and it felt like they were moving along. She looked down to the plain. The whole structure had set off across the grassland, following the flock of crowd pigeons.

  “How …?” she wondered

  “Amazing, isn’t it!” said one of the strangers, his eyes bulging all the more. “It’s a big sledge, nothing more, but still amazing.”

  “Are the pigeons …?”

  “They’re towing us, that’s right. Every one of them is attached to the Plains Strider by a strand of silk from a beeba spider, the same nasty little bastards we’ve got attached to out necks. Every evening, the pigeons bite through their threads and head out to feed. When they come back, a shitload of beeba spiders spend the night reattaching the pigeons to the Plains Strider.”

  “They’re very compliant spiders,” said Wulf.

  “It’s the Empty Children, those bald kids,” said the stranger. “They control the animals. I don’t know how. It’s not just the spiders and the pigeons. The back end’s supported by a load of buffalo. I’m no fan of the Badlanders, but it really is an extraordinary creation.”

  “How does it cross rivers?” asked Sassa, looking out over the plain. They were clipping along now at about, she guessed, the pace of a running buffalo. In spite of Chapa Wangwa’s threats, this already seemed like a far better way of crossing the Ocean of Grass than walking.

  “Inflated bladders, attached to the buffalo and the base of the craft,” continued the stranger. “Buffalo swim, pigeons fly and the whole thing floats across. But that’s enough about the Plains Strider. Who are you lot and where were you headed when these bastards caught you?”

  “I was about to ask the same of you,” said Wulf.

  “I asked first!” the man smiled affably.

  “Okay, tell me your names and I’ll tell you our story.”

  “You’ve got a deal. I’m Ovets. He’s Walex, she’s Sandea and that’s Clogan.” Each of his bulge-eyed friends smiled and nodded as they were introduced. “We’re all from the Popeye tribe.”

&nb
sp; “Of course you are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Popeye, because of …” Sassa was enjoying Wulf’s discomfort.

  “We’re named after a god. What else would it be?”

  “I …”

  “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to get our story before you tell us yours!” Ovets chuckled. “Come on, your story first. Deal’s a deal.”

  “You can see right through me.” Wulf chuckled, too. “Around a hundred years ago, our ancestors arrived from across the Wild Salt Sea …”

  Wulf and Sassa told the Popeyes the tale of the Hardworkers and how they’d become Wootah. When they got to the part about The Meadows, Ovets interrupted.

  “The Meadows in the Desert You Don’t Walk Out Of?”

  “Yes, across the Shining Mountains, apparently, and—”

  “Don’t go there.” For the first time Ovets looked serious, afraid even. His tribesmates looked the same.

  “Why?” asked Sassa.

  “Popeye tribe territory was west of the Shining Mountains, in the Desert You Don’t Walk Out Of,” said Ovets.

  “Was?” asked Sassa, feeling a wave of dread.

  “We’re the only four Popeyes left. The rest are dead.”

  “How?”

  “It began with a flash flood in winter before the snow melted, when you don’t get flash floods. Then there was a rockslide, several tornadoes, another rockslide, more flash floods,” he shook his head and his protruding eyes filled with tears. “We learnt to live with the disasters, to avoid dangerous locations and find shelter. Then the monsters came.”

  “Monsters?”

  “Giant wasps and screaming, flying beasts with claws like dagger-tooth cats. They’re everywhere on the far side of the Shining Mountains, and I’ve heard of much worse—bigger, wilder monsters, greater disasters and more. We were in the lee of the mountains, a long, long way from The Meadows. The nearer The Meadows you go, they say, the worse it is.”