Page 49 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

“You can’t burn a riverbed, piggy!” I said and howled with laughter, at least until I saw the ground beneath me start to smolder and then catch in green patches of fire. “The fuck!” I said. “Ahhhhh!” And just like that, we both climbed up and out of the bed and onto the grass. I lay down on the grass now, and I loved the cool of it against my cheek. “You’ll never burn, my darling-of-the-day,” I said to the grass, for which I now felt great affection. I tried to hug it all close and into me, for its texture was like fur, the fur of a faithful animal that would never let harm come to me. I became aware of my hips moving, just a little, just gently, and that it felt good in the front of my pants.

“Are you fucking the ground now?” she said and then coughed an awkward laugh.

“Yes!” I said. “I am making it chodadu.”

“Bolnu!” she said. “Chodilu cu’orgela, fis de Galtia!” “I will watch the stars and make certain they do not disturb your love.” She lay on her back now and rolled her head back and forth. “I have never seen so many stars, Kinch Na Shannack, nor of such … of so many … different intentions. I think these here are benevolent,” she said, pointing at I suppose a kind quadrant of the sky. “With their hats of silver and their baskets of…”

“What’s in their baskets, Spanth?” I said, for I had to know.

“Fucking. Fruit,” she said, then snorted with laughter, sounding like the girl she might have been before they shipped her off to Gallardia to watch near everyone she cared for die bad deaths. No, I couldn’t remember her making such a frankly cute noise before this lovely snort, and it got me laughing. I realized I had stopped fucking the ground and shouldn’t have been doing that in the first place, and that I was somehow on my back now, so I stood up.

“I see what you mean about the stars,” I said. “I can see what they’re feeling, and I can tell things about their character. These here are plague stars, black and rotten inside despite their bright, false jackets. I think your shyte king’s up there with them, with his mustache on fire, brighter and worse than any. I see why you hate that cunt. Oh, get away from those bad stars, you better stars. You gold and lovely mayflies. Faith and they’ll cough poison on you. Would you tell them, Galva?” I said and noticed she’d stripped off naked and was fanning at herself.

I understood that she wanted the star-air on her skin with no impediment, and before I’d even formed that thought into words, I had my pants off, then the rest of it. The cool star-air felt so good on my skin, I had to run. As I ran, the ground rose up to beat the bare balls of my feet, but this was not unpleasant. Galva was running now, too, here and there, reversing directions. I did the same. At one point, we ran at each other, then were both horrified at the thought of touching each other naked and ran the other way twice as fast. Now some kind of doggish thing was running next to me. A jackal? I thought. I’d seen one in a cage in a market, they had them in Axa and South Ispanthia.

“Are you a jackal?” I asked it as we both ran.

Its tongue lolled, and it said, “None of your fucking business what I am.”

“Fair play,” I said to it and kept my eyes forward until I didn’t. When I tried to steal another glance at it, it was gone.

Berry-drunk or not, soon my lack of spit and water slowed my steps, and I fell on the dry, grass-furred earth. I saw what looked like lightning over the Thralls, and I wanted to pray for it to rain. But I had no ken who to pray to here. Even if Fothannon Foxfoot had power in these lands, he hated to be asked for things. Was that some yellow-eyed jackally cousin of his I’d just been running near?

“Jothannon Jackalfoot,” I said, laughing and crying at once, “save me and the Spanth. Just a half bucket of rain and a dollop of good luck. Were we really sent so far so strangely just to die of thirst on cool grass?”

I slept, or did something like sleeping.

I became aware that I was on a vast plain, like the one the Spanth and I were thirsting to death on, but not exactly that one. It was colder here, and the wind blew, and I stood and hugged myself against it. The wind moaned as well, though I had no idea what trees or rocks it played through to make such a din, as I had never seen a place more empty. Even the Thralls had gone, and I oddly missed their bulk, the way I suppose one only misses certain people when they’re dead. The idea that a mountain could be dead undid something in me, and a sadness leaked through me as seawater into a bad boat.

“Am I dead now?” I asked nobody, or meant it for nobody, but somebody heard. I then realized another figure had drawn near. I saw its silhouette against the greeny, grainy near-darkness that passed for a sky and sat above the full-darkness that was the ground.

“No,” she said, for both her voice and the shadow’s shape declared her female. And the voice if not the form was one I thought I knew.

“Norrigal?”

I saw now that the shadow’s eyes glowed green, like fire with copper in it.

“No,” she said, “not exactly. But a bit yes.”

“Well, that’s good and clear.”

“As it is with magic, you fond thing.”

Her voice was mostly Norrigal’s, but as she’d said, not purely so. It was cut with something else. As the shape drew nearer I saw it was infirm, older.

It swayed.

“Are you sure I’m not … deceased?” I said.

“You’re not. But you’re close. Close enough I can use this dead callack to talk to you.”

“Does she not mind?”

“What the fuck else has she got to do? She’s fucking dead, isn’t she?”

“As I soon will be?”

“Looks that way.”