Smiler's Fair: Book I of The Hollow Gods Read online

  He shouted suddenly to scare the herd and then turned in the other direction from their panicked stampede. Instinct told him to run, but he fought it. He’d once seen a blue warbler lead a falcon away from its nestlings by feigning a broken wing. He forced his own left leg to drag as if it was injured and looked back at the lion to see if it had taken the bait, a terrified part of him hoping it wouldn’t.

  But the ruse worked. The lion’s burning eyes fixed on him, its tail twitched and it slunk towards him as the goats bleated and made their escape. Rain froze as it fell, into darts of ice that struck them both, and Krish was sure he must be as sorry a sight as the lion, its fur lank and dripping and its thin body racked with shivers.

  Limping was hard, almost as hard as running, and after a score of paces he was panting for breath and the lion had eased itself ten feet nearer. Soon, he knew, it would decide that it had him and substitute lethal speed for its cautious creeping. He’d seen great cats hunting before. He had only a few moments more, and he wasn’t sure they were enough.

  His whole body shook with the desire to hasten his pace, but he knew he couldn’t. Only the belief that he was injured was slowing the lion, convinced it had as much time as it needed to take down its prey. He limped as fast as he could and turned a little left, his breath rasping and a sweat of fear on his skin despite the damp chill.

  And then the lion leapt. Krish gasped and leapt too, forcing speed from his aching legs. The ravine was only twenty paces away. If he could just make it, if he could just take twelve more strides – but suddenly the lion was on him. Its great clawed paws reached out to grab and rend him and he flung himself desperately to one side, scraping his side raw on the rocks.

  The lion missed him by inches and was already turning to try again. But in its hurry it missed its footing and Krish felt a hot rush of relief as the hunter skidded on to its side and growled in anger and pain.

  In the seconds its fall had bought him he gathered the last of his strength and pushed himself to his feet. Only a dozen paces now and his heart pounded out every one of them. He heard the scrabble of the lion’s claws as it righted itself and then its roar as it leapt for a second time and he flung himself to the ground, tucked his head beneath his arms and hoped.

  Claws raked his shoulders, teeth snapped so near his head he heard their sharp clack, and then the lion was past him and it gave a desperate yowl as it realised there was nothing beneath it but air. Krish craned his neck over the lip of the ravine to watch the beast as it plummeted fifty feet to the jagged bottom. There was a splash of red as it landed and, though he saw its body move a little, he knew that it was finished.

  He felt a sudden sorrow for the dying creature. It had only wanted to eat and Krish knew what it was to be hungry. Triumph quickly banished his pity, though. He peered at the distant body and wondered if he could climb down the rocks to strip the lion of its hide. He could take it to sell next time he went to market, and no thief who saw that clawed pelt on his donkey’s back would dare to attack him.

  He was just planning how to climb the cliff when he heard the plaintive bleating behind him and remembered Snowy. His mind on the immediate threat, he’d forgotten the nanny was so near to her time. He groaned as he forced himself to his feet; the cuts in his shoulder stung, but he could see that he didn’t have the leisure to tend to them. Snowy was panting her distress and her eyes were wild with pain.

  He walked to her and gently stroked her neck, then led her back towards a half-cave in the mountainside that he sometimes used when the weather was bad. The danger past, the scattered herd began to gather round as if they felt the need to witness the birth of their latest member. Their warm flanks pressed against him and the smell of the billies was almost choking in the confinement of the rock.

  Krish bent over his own knees as a racking cough shook him. There was an ominous rattle to it, the sound of water building in his lungs. The winter always brought it on, and last year a fever came with it that had melted the flesh from his bones until he looked little more than a skeleton. Running through the cold and wet hadn’t helped, but what choice had he had?

  When the cough passed, he turned his attention back to the goats. He’d helped to birth enough kids before: Snowy’s own mother, and her dam too. He’d looked after the herd since he was seven. But this was going to be a bad one, he could already tell. He felt the shape of the kid against Snowy’s sides and it seemed twisted.

  He pushed her into a corner, away from the other animals, and started to build a fire from the branches he’d left on another visit. He set water to boil in a clay pot above the fire and then drew out the parchment from its hiding place at the bottom of his pack.

  The scroll showed a family tree of the whole herd going back nine years, as far as he’d been able to remember. He’d scratched little sketches of the goats, then made a careful note of their coat colour, their eye colour, their size and horns, everything about them that marked them out. He’d never been taught the proper way to turn words into marks on a page, so he’d made up his own: an empty circle for a white coat and a filled one for brown. It was easy enough. He wondered if the true writing the shipborn learned was as simple.

  Snowy was white, of course. Her horns were short and her eyes were a very pale yellow, almost as strange as his own. At the moment they were wide with fear as her flanks heaved and sweated. Krish remembered when his cousin had given birth and how she’d screamed and begged her mother to make it end; how she had cursed her husband for planting his seed in her.

  He wondered if Snowy guessed the risk of her labour. Did those pale eyes see things not yet come to pass, or did she live only in the present? He did what he could to ease her, rubbing her sides with a dry cloth to stop the cooling sweat from chilling her.

  ‘Good girl,’ he crooned. ‘It will all be over soon, you’ll see.’ He ran his hand over her stomach, felt the misplaced shape of her kid, and knew that it was a lie. His hand fell to the knife at his belt, thinking to cut the kid free, but when he drew it and saw the wicked edge of the flint he hesitated. Snowy was still watching him, and what if she really could sense death coming? What if she knew what he intended for her?

  He sheathed the blade, shrugged off his woollen coat and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, shivering as the frigid air tore at his lungs and raised goosebumps on his arms. There was a trickle of blood seeping from Snowy already, a bad sign but useful for him. It would smooth his way in. The passage was tight and her strong muscles clamped down painfully on his fingers as he eased them inside her.

  He’d seen other men attempt this, but had never done it himself. It was far harder than he’d imagined. Snowy was moaning her pain now, a distressingly human sound. He could feel nothing inside but wetness and tight muscle and he was afraid that if he moved he’d hurt her more.

  He gritted his teeth and did it anyway, pressing his arm forward and feeling with his fingers. He almost jerked back when they met something hard, then realised it must be the kid’s head. He probed it gently and felt the bud of its horns. And he’d been right. Its legs weren’t there, where they needed to be.

  Snowy had stopped making any sound at all except a desperate panting. Even that was slowing and he knew that she was weakening. If the kid didn’t come out soon, it would kill her. Krish slid his fingers from the baby’s head and felt along the shape of its jaw and then down its neck to its chest. After that his fingers traced a bony shoulder and he followed it down until he felt a tiny hoof. He hooked a finger beneath the kid’s knee and raised it.

  Snowy’s head jerked up and she moaned again, but he kept moving, lifting her baby’s leg to where it needed to be. He gave her a moment, then did the same with the other leg. They were as thin as twigs and he worried they’d break, but there was a deceptive strength in them. And in Snowy too, who was still breathing, her yellow eyes watching him almost as if she understood what he was doing for her.

  He pulled the legs and Snowy jerked and bleated but nothing else happened.
It wasn’t working – the legs were too fragile a handhold. He shifted his fingers again until he felt the little animal’s shoulder, took a breath, and then yanked with all his strength.

  Snowy screeched and the herd shifted and stamped around him. Outside, the wind howled through the rocks. He almost gave up. He could still use the knife. But her eye was on him and they were so close. ‘You need to help me, then,’ he told her. ‘Do what mothers do.’

  She couldn’t have understood him, but she had a mother’s nature all the same and he felt all the muscles inside her clench and push. He gasped and tightened his grip, pulling when she pushed and stopping when she stopped. When it finished, it finished suddenly, in a slither of mucus and blood and delicate limbs.

  Krish fell back, sitting on the hard rock as he watched Snowy lift an exhausted head to lick her son clean. The little creature staggered to his feet, seeming to gain strength as he moved. His head turned towards his mother, nuzzling at her flank until he found what he was looking for and started to suck hungrily on her udder.

  The fire was beginning to burn down to embers and the sky too was losing its brightness. Hidden behind churning clouds, the sun must be close to setting and he needed to head home. The herd could shelter here for the night. He’d tether Dapple, their leader, and the other goats wouldn’t wander far. He looked back at the kid, feeding at his mother’s tit, and for the first time took real note of the colour of his coat: not white, like both his sire and dam, but a pure brown almost the same colour as Krish’s own skin.

  He smiled as he noted it down on his scroll. He was right. He was definitely right. It wasn’t just chance now; his idea had held true for four generations. This was better even than the lion’s skin to take back as a trophy. When he got home he’d tell his father and it would change everything.

  It was twilight by the time he neared his family’s encampment at the edge of the village circle. The distant mountains were lost to sight, but he could see their shapes in his memory: the jagged saw of the Teeth, and the twin peaks that the adults called The Sisters and the children The Breasts. He’d sit sometimes when he was tending the herd and think of walking the long miles over rock and scrubby grass to reach them, walking to them and not walking back. But things here would get better now and there’d be no need to leave.

  The village fires lighted the way as he approached, more tightly clustered than they would be in summer. The cold drew people in, and on the last day of every ten, when tradition dictated that the tents were moved, they weren’t moved very far.

  The grass on the slope leading to the village was more brown than green. He reached the gnarled tree that marked the edge of habitation and brushed his fingers against a knot in its trunk. It was a ritual he’d performed since he could first walk, a confirmation that he’d reached safety, and he had to stoop to do it now. He’d grown but the tree never did. Like all old things, it had lost the energy to change.

  He passed Isuru’s large tent, which seemed to shine silver under the rising moon. The headman had demanded the skins of his neighbours’ white goats in tribute for his wife to stitch it. The menfolk had grumbled and done it anyway, afraid Isuru would increase their taxes if they didn’t. Krish didn’t see that it mattered. It was better to be like his own family’s mottled tent, almost invisible in the shadows. The mountains were full of predators and standing out was never wise. He knew that better than most.

  His mother smiled at him as he ducked through the goatskin flap. Her skin sagged with age and her lips were cracked with the winter chill. His father said that she’d never been beautiful, but Krish didn’t believe it. He could see the shadow of fairness in her high cheekbones and the long hair that must once have been dark and glossy.

  His father was working at the far side of the tent, chipping a new flint blade. He didn’t look up as Krish entered.

  ‘A good day?’ his mother asked.

  Krish grinned and she frowned in surprise. He didn’t smile very often. ‘A very good day, Ma. Snowy gave birth to a little billy.’

  ‘Curse her,’ his father said without turning. ‘More useless meat.’

  Krish thought about explaining his idea then, but the tone of his father’s voice was harsh. Food in his belly would soften his mood. Krish went to the hearth instead and bent to kiss his mother’s cheek. ‘The kid was twisted. I put him right.’

  She smiled and ruffled his hair, dropping both smile and hand when his father said, ‘Just as well. I could afford to lose you more easily than another dam in her prime. The herd’s thin enough already.’

  ‘Enough of them to put food on our plates, and that’s what matters,’ his mother said.

  His father grunted, looking through her rather than at her, the way he often did.

  ‘Dinner smells good,’ Krish said, though in truth the meat was too rank and the herbs too few to make an appetising meal.

  His mother ladled out a large bowl for his father and smaller ones for herself and Krish. They settled at the hearthfire, pots and half-finished shoes and sides of cured meat hanging around their heads. The rough stone forms of their prow gods watched them from beside the flames: the Thunderer with the zigzag lightning bolt across his chest, who warded against ill weather, and the fertile Goat God with two little horns on his head.

  When his fifteenth spring had come and he’d become a man, Krish should have brought his own god to add to the hearth. His father had denied him that. He often wondered what it meant to be without a god, to be unwatched and unprotected. He prayed to the Fierce Child sometimes to spare the goats, but he wasn’t sure the shiplords’ gods, kept so far away in distant Ashfall, would have a care for a landborn herder on the outer edge of the realm.

  The meal was silent as usual. Krish felt confined in the tent, hemmed in by the musty-smelling skin. It was different in summer. He could sleep under the stars and away from the judging eyes of his father. They were on him now and he realised that he was shaking. He wasn’t sure if it was fear or anticipation. What he’d discovered would change things, and for the seventeen years of his life, nothing else ever had.

  ‘Speak then,’ his father said. ‘I know you’re able.’

  ‘Snowy’s kid, he was brown.’

  His father frowned, not understanding.

  ‘His sire was Woody,’ Krish said. ‘Woody is white like her. And Woody doesn’t have the double horns, nor Snowy neither, but the kid’s got them.’

  ‘Then you’re wrong. The sire must be Dapple.’

  ‘No, I saw the mating myself. Woody mounted her. I’ve been keeping –’ he drew out his parchment, spreading it on the rug between them ‘– I’ve been keeping records of all the herd, all the births and matings.’ He pointed out Snowy’s place on the chart and her unnamed kid beneath her. ‘The circles show what colour they were and there’s lines for the horns and I’ve put their eyes, too. Hatched means blue like Titch had. You remember, Ma. You always liked her.’

  His mother’s brow creased with worry. ‘What’s this about, Krishanjit? These aren’t the King’s carrion mounts we have here. There’s no need to keep track of their breeding.’

  ‘But look here. See.’ Krish pointed along the lines of the chart, to Snowy’s sire and dam and their sires and dams before them. ‘Two generations back and the brown colour is there. I’ve thought a lot and I have an idea of why it could be.’

  ‘Then you’ve too much time on your hands and not enough work to fill them.’ His da was using his forbidding tone, which meant the conversation was over, but Krish was too caught up in his excitement to care.

  ‘It’s the mother, she gives a bit of herself to her child, and the father gives something too. And these gifts, they can be weak or strong. The white coat is strong. If sire or dam gives the white gift, that’s the colour of the kid. The strong gift overpowers the weak. But it isn’t thrown away. And when that kid has kids of its own, it chooses: will I pass on my strong gift or my weak gift? And sometimes it passes on the weak. Do you see?’

&nbs
p; ‘I see that you’ve gone crazed,’ his father said.

  ‘I understand,’ his mother said. She seemed to have caught some of Krish’s excitement. ‘It’s how a white dam and a white sire have a brown kid. The weak brown gift was passed on, and passed on, until it met a weak gift from the other side.’

  ‘That’s it!’ Krish said. ‘And it shows, Da, that even though my eyes are different, even though they’re nothing like yours or Ma’s, I am your son. It’s just a weak gift passed down from your granddad, or your great-granddad. Ma was never unfaithful to you. Never. I’ve proved it.’

  He smiled at her, triumphant. All these years, his father must have looked at Krish’s moon-coloured eyes and thought himself a cuckold, but it wasn’t true. Krish had known his mother wasn’t a harlot, and now his father could stop hating her, and him.

  For a moment, his father looked stunned. His jaw clenched beneath his grizzled stubble and his eyes widened. Then they narrowed again and he let out a bark of laughter. ‘You’re a fool, boy! And you’re none of my get. Wherever you got those freakish eyes of yours, it wasn’t my bloodline, nor your mother’s neither. Tell him,’ he ordered his wife. ‘I’ve kept your secret long enough.’

  Krish’s mother seemed to shrink in on herself. He looked at her, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  ‘Coward,’ his father said, and for once Krish agreed with him. ‘I’ll tell him then, will I? How you were heading down to Lord Lust’s shrine at Starfall to pray for your womb to bear fruit, and instead of getting a child in the proper fashion you found this one thrown away by some stream, and brought him home without asking leave. Five years I’d been wed to you and no child of my seed, but you brought that mewling thing home as if it would do instead. As if I’d be pleased. Now that was a weak gift!’