Work Text:
Up in the rafters crept Frog. Not a difficult business for one as small as he; he had calloused but mobile feet, from running on them bare, and his hands seemed as sticky and pliant as his namesake's, when he went clambering.
Though only a few would have believed it, Frog understood nearly every word he heard. He kept his mouth shut so that the flies would not get in it and the squeaks would not get out, when there were no Safe Ones nearby.
Sticks knew him to be clever, and told him so, in the hours they hid and hunted together, for ants and berries and corners where no one would come seeking. Sticks knew him to be a good one, and Frog knew Sticks.
Now, in the night’s sooty silence, Sticks herself was asleep. One lantern hung from a hook on the wall; beneath it, Sticks was rolled up like a small beetle without any shine but that with which the firelight gilded her hair.
Frog's parentage was a curious thing. His mother was a woman who had been treated like an animal, for all the cruel years during which she was separated from her desert tribe. His father was an animal who was treated as a man. Frog did not know any of this.
Sticks knew more about mothers than he did, and tried to tell him a little about his own, when she was in a kindly mood. Whether Sticks had known his mother or only heard tell from Belle, Frog did not think to ask. Sticks said that any mother of Frog's would be sure to have dark hair and eyes and warm skin quite like his own. But on such occasions Sticks became quickly overtaken by the weight of her own lost ma, and the stories were a little choked and short accordingly.
Sticks told stories; Belle sometimes tried, but Frog did not spend much time with Belle when she could speak. He kept away from her during the day. He knew her to be a Safe One, and on colder nights he slipped under the straw with her, but he did not like the other women. Belle had only one eye, which was one less than many other people. It was a good eye.
Both Sticks and Frog believed that Russandol, as Sticks now called him, had stories to tell, but he would not do it and Frog had grown tired of waiting. Thus, when Russandol drifted off to sleep again, and Sticks returned to her own little straw heap—which she massed up with a few extra handfuls stolen from the horses’ stalls—Frog set himself about climbing.
The women and Sticks and some of the younger boys slept here, in the half of the hall where the tables did not stand. The straw reeked, because it was not turned fresh. Frog sprang from one rafter to another. There was Russandol, breathing fast and panting as if he were running in his sleep. Frog did not like to see such dreams. He crawled a little farther, until he reached the eaves. Then he scrambled down the wall, and out into the darkness, where he roamed the whole abandoned camp.
He did not see bodies going out, or bodies returning.
I will fucking tear his teeth out and feed ‘em down that skinny throat of his.
Hold still, says Belle.
Waste of good whiskey, Lem mutters, and then sets up a howl again.
Quiet, man, Gwindor growls. He hands Lem a scrap of kerchief to fit between his teeth, while Belle begins anew to salve his seeping bruises.
The moon is rising. Gwindor watches it with the hunched shoulders of a waiting raptor. He is thinking the cordoned grey thoughts he has trained himself to hold—ones that are neatly separated, even in anger and pain.
Lem spits the kerchief out. Good enough, wench.
Don’t speak to her that way, Gwindor tells him, flat and hard.
Lem sits up. He does not take offense. He sits beside Gwindor; shoulder to shoulder, they share the rest of the stolen whiskey. Belle leans back on her heels, the wet rag twisting in her clever hands. A moment’s security reigns: the overseers have not come to the outer barracks to see about the noise—no doubt they are sleeping soundly, sated with drink and bloodshed.
When Gwindor thinks of Lem laughing, striping his cheeks red—
He was trained to fight. This, for Gwindor, is better than saying something else. Better than remembering.
Who trains their slut to fight? Lem scoffs. Belle does not move a muscle, but he scoffs at her, too. What, you ain’t think that’s all he is?
He was taken, Belle says, her one eye on Gwindor. Same as the rest of us. You’ve seen the mark on his neck.
Gwindor can still taste alcohol on his tongue. That doesn’t decide one way or t’other.
Why did you choose those terms? Belle asks Lem. Death?
Lem is angry. Gwindor feels it sizzling in the air. When Lem was angry hours since, the world shifted. Lem says, Because Bauglir’s spent whore deserves to die.
Enough talk. Gwindor has to keep turning his mind away, before he does something foolish. Whether the newcomer was used for pleasure or information or violence does not matter. He curls his lip against the past—all pain. It does not matter.
His shoulder twinges something fierce, though he did not fight tonight.
Frog made neither head nor tail of this talk. He knew that sometimes, the Soldier and Lem and the others went away to beat each other for enjoyment, and that they did it after dark. That must be why Lem’s legs were sore, why Belle tended to them with the burning water.
Belle did not like Lem, but they were often together. With the Soldier, they talked of dark things, sad things, hurts and hunger.
Sometimes they talked of him.
The Snake Man, Frog thought, slipping away in the shadows. He hated to visit the Snake Man, and some part of him was quite certain that Sticks and Belle and yes, even the Soldier, would be angered and afeared if they knew he ever did.
But just as the moths must flock to the candle, and just as the fishes do love the wriggling baits (Sticks showed him this, days and days ago), Frog must find the Snake Man and learn from him.
Round the long low wall, building and building as the days ambled by, out of sight but not out of purpose, Frog crept.
In the mind’s eye, a memory—astride a horse and hanging back, gun in hand and hanging back.
There is one window in the guardhouse that is properly glazed; the rest are a fool’s work.
What makes a man like that hanker to lead?
A fist would take out the thick rutted glass of each offending pane.
The eaves of the guardhouse were left partly open for ventilation on one side, latticed with a screen of narrow slats on the inside wall. If one could climb the wall (which Frog could), one could lie flat on the broad edge of the log wall, body-length against the lattice, and peep down.
The guardhouse was the only one of all the houses that was made of logs.
Inside the guardhouse, the men played cards. Red and black flashed in their hands. They drank stuff that smelled even stronger than Belle’s burning water, and they ate salted pork and beans and bread.
Frog inched his way along, keeping very quiet. He must be no larger than a mouse, to do this. A wall sliced him in half (not truly) and he kept going. Here was another room. The Snake Man’s room. In it, the Snake Man.
You think ol’ Mog is playing at us? Lem asks. No meaning to it?
No way to know. Gwindor shrugs. But frost over hell, why can Lem not see? It is not a game unless one plays it. That is Gwindor’s trouble with the redhead who bears Mairon’s eye on the back of his slim neck.
The redhead is playing at something, and Gwindor cannot know quite what it is.
Go an’ sleep, Belle says. Her slur is heavier when she is tired, as if it is too much effort to move her lips in a forced parody of their old set. Moon’s high.
Gwindor looks up; the moon is pearl, opal, out of reach.
The Snake Man tapped his fingers against the table at which he sat. His fingers were like the legs of a great insect, if the walking of such legs made a sound. His whole face was cut cruel as stone, as the sharpest granite of the hills.
Snake Man is called so in Frog’s mind because of the snake he carries at his belt. He hurts the men—even the Soldier—with its wily body, and Belle has marks like it on her face and arms and even her back.
But if Snake Man did not have that wily body curled up at his belt, ready in his hand, Frog would call him the Mountain.
The Mountain is the darkest place Frog knows.