InsaneJournal

Chapter One
This is the beginning of Fortune Favors the Bold.



Fortune Favors the Bold

Chapter One

They left the bay on a morning as bright as a fox’s eye, when the sun had not yet turned the corner towards winter’s darkness. As always, the Honulith tried to persuade them to stay longer, promising fine skins if they did so, a vibrating instrument strung with caribou tendons, the sight of a spotted seal. And, as always, Laiskaiss was the one assigned by her mother to refuse them.

“You will miss the best hunting.” Ulnocwa spoke with her hands braced on the spear sunk in the tundra’s soft earth, her face turned towards the sea. Even this far inland, with several small hummocks intervening between them and the spray, Laiskaiss could hear the Barking Ocean dashing in, crying to the sun that it was beautiful in this season without ice. “There will be long days and long days for the journey south. You can stay.”

Laiskaiss brushed her dark brown hand gently against the slightly paler one that held the spear near its top. Summer was the only time of year when a Honulith hunter like Ulnocwa went without gloves of some kind, and even then only the sharpest hours of daylight were likely to find her fingers bare. “We can,” she said. “But my mother delights in the sights and sounds of the Called Forest. It is longing to reach them, not fear of the winter, which hurries her away.”

That, of course, was a polite lie. But one thing Honulith understood better than any other rock-and-moss people Laiskaiss had ever met was the necessity for polite lies. Truth was like icicles. It did not grow best in all weathers and was only beautiful with the sun behind it.

Ulnocwa took a breath that released like the sound of a crying skua. “Ah. A mother’s tastes are not to be argued with.”

“Not when she produces beautiful children.” Laiskaiss completed the proverb, pleased. She did not know where the words had first come from, the People or the Honulith. But they flowed back and forth between them now like a shared stream, and linked them together. For that alone they were beyond measure.

“You have been beautiful to me.”

Laiskaiss caught her breath in surprise—it was rare that Ulnocwa said anything so direct—but stifled it as the other woman turned and drew her into an embrace. Laiskaiss stepped around the spear and leaned against her, feeling the soft press of clothes lined with rabbit and polar bear fur give way to taut skin, rounded breasts, bones like a gull’s. She had held that body many times, but never stroked the neck or the resting places of the shoulders as carefully as she did now, when she would not touch them again.

“And you to me,” she whispered back.

Ulnocwa held her for three heartbeats, four, and then let her go. Her eyes were bent at the corners as they often were when she shielded them from sun or tears. “The Called Forest is not the Barking Ocean,” she said. “There are no seals there. But this, there may be.” And she drew forth a small black pendant which she handed to Laiskaiss.

Laiskaiss took it with an exclamation. She knew what it was: the paw of a fox in her summer fur, black with the faintest edging of silver, like tundra earth with stubborn snow on it. She rubbed it against her face and blew out her lips at the feeling. “You did not tell me you had captured the slaughterer,” she said. Ulnocwa had spent parts of the summer stalking a fox which laid waste to geese without eating them.

“Run her down at last,” said Ulnocwa. “Danced with her, dug her out, danced with her again. She has kin running in the Called Forest, I think, who can teach her to be a person again. Take her with you.”

“I will.” Laiskaiss had no gift she could afford to give away in that manner; the Honulith were very rich, all of them, in furs and feathers and guts and dogs. But she could say, and did say, “I will sing your name to the stars.”

“They will have joy of it.” Ulnocwa bowed her head once, then turned away. The boat that left to hunt seals today had waited long enough for her—or, rather, for the proper farewell to be granted to her and, through her, to the Honulith themselves, since Laiskaiss and Ulnocwa had formed the closest ties this summer. Now they separated, and ran in their own currents again, rivers met and parted in courtesy.

Laiskaiss turned on her heel and ran after the wagons. Already they were far away on the curving trail that would take them south to the Called Forest, and then further south still, to the forests and trails where they could survive the winter.

Around her bloomed the frantic green of the tundra summer, her favorite of all colors. The dark green of trees, though life-giving amid the snow, was something different. Laiskaiss breathed in this green and took it with her as she ran.

She caught the last wagon, Inosskith’s, and swung onto the short balcony that extended from the back. The donkeys dragging the wagon responded with laboring haws. Laiskaiss fastened the fox paw around her neck on its slender leather thong and watched over her shoulder for a moment, but of course Ulnocwa did not look back. The Honulith had too many stories of what happened to those who did.

Laiskaiss tilted back her head and beat out a sound rhythm with her hands on the woven wood strips of the balcony, weaving Ulnocwa’s name among the chant she had already planned to sing that morning.

“Into the green,
From the green of the north,
From Ulnocwa we go,
Never stopping, unresting,
From Ulnocwa the hunter,
With donkeys we go,
By the goddess’s palm
And the odd ways she favors,
Into the green,
From the green of the north,
Ulnocwa behind and light ahead,
While summer still sings on the tundra…”

*

Corissith knew they did not think him very clever. And, at the moment, they also did not think him awake.

But he was more awake than they thought at all, and he had always been cleverer than they thought him. He knew what Inosskith had come about. He knew that his mother Molisstath would listen to her the way she did, never stopping the steady motion of her comb along the polar bear fur that the Honulith had given them in exchange for some help with cleaning it. He knew what Inosskith had chosen his sister for, because he had seen her watching Laiskaiss when she thought no one was looking, but especially not boys only ten years old who were not supposed to even know about the sister.

He pretended to be asleep still, his hands braced behind his neck, cushioning him slightly from the swaying jolts of the wagon. He listened to the voices around the creaks and the stamps of the donkeys and the slight rattle of the box under the bed that contained his brother.

“Laiskaiss has been a gift to me in these last few changes of seasons,” Inosskith said. Corissith opened his eyes to peer at her, but he did not need to. He was clever enough to remember. Inosskith was a tall woman with long white-streaked auburn hair that she wore to her ankles, paler of skin than any other among the People; sometimes people said that her father had been from the Honulith. She had intent brown eyes and a face that never moved, like a mask. But that was fine, because Corissith could read her moods from her eyes. Laiskaiss had taught him the trick of it, as she had taught him to be interested in the sister.

“And she has been that to you without being less of a gift to me.” Molisstath paused in her combing for a moment to toss her own hair back over her shoulder. It was not as long as Inosskith’s, only to the small of her back, but it was the color of iron and interwoven with smoky glass beads that everyone had agreed she should keep. Above her eyes, which were hazel like Laiskaiss’s, there hung the feather of an eagle. Corissith was proud of her, when he was not afraid of her.

“She is fit in that way, then.” Inosskith leaned against the wall as the donkeys dragged the wagon over some half-rotten log, not because she had to, but to show her words. “She can balance.”

“She can.” Molisstath paused and glanced up at the old woman. “But she is very young, still, and she laughs so much. You have told me before that someone should go into the presence of our sister with a raised mood and a solemn heart.”

“That is the way I have kept our sister,” said Inosskith. And then Corissith saw a strange sight, because she was smiling. “But she tires of me.”

Molisstath swept her comb down the fur in a deliberate stroke, and shifted it so that the loose strands fell into a basket.

“And she will bring us new sisters soon,” said Inosskith. “New sisters who will, I think, need laughter.”

“Ah,” said Molisstath. Corissith shivered, and then hoped they would not notice. It was a significant day when his mother made that sound. “That changes things. Well. Laiskaiss passed beyond my saving when she chose to love a woman for the first time. She remains in my wagon because she is a good child and believes herself improved by the reminder of her mother.”

“And because she will find no one to settle with,” said Inosskith, her tone as sharp as a pepper that Corissith had tasted a few months ago, before they went north to visit the Honulith. His mouth stung at the remembrance, and he almost missed the next words. That was the reason that he lost so many dares which Laiskaiss had made him: he remembered tastes better than words, and he would think of rainwater instead of thinking how many drops he was supposed to catch in his mouth.

“She need settle with no one.” Molisstath ripped the comb through the edge of the fur.

“I did not say that she needed to.” Inosskith was being milder than Corissith had ever heard her. Of course, Molisstath was close to her own age. That might have something to do with it.

It has everything to do with it, he thought, as he peered again at the lack of expression on his mother’s face.

Yes, indeed, he was very clever.

Molisstath tilted her head at last, and her hair slid over her face. Corissith breathed a little more softly. It was always easier when Molisstath had not set fire to some other woman’s temper among the People, and that sliding of hair was her signal that she did not intend to set the tinder alight this time.

“In fact,” Inosskith said, “it is long since someone so like the goddess served our sister. I think it would be wise. We have been old and childless women, her servants, or speakers to the other people, or mothers. There is nothing wrong with such things. But we need a woman who has at least the chance of experiencing the same wonder our goddess did, because she loves women.”

Molisstath said, “Ah.”

Corissith nearly gave himself away with a choked, gasping breath. He had not even thought about the chances of that, even though he had known from the time he was a child that Laiskaiss flirted with girls and just stared at rock-and-moss boys when they tried to attract her attention.

Their goddess had become their mother when she loved another woman—maybe a woman of the Honulith or a woman of the Charanrai or maybe even another woman of another human group back across the Barking Ocean—and then found herself carrying a child. It had happened a few other times in the history of their People, but not for long and long and long. Mostly, the People needed men and women both to have children.

Laiskaiss was—

Well, Laiskaiss was amazing in many ways, but she was not someone Corissith bound together with wonders in his head.

Molisstath brushed a few more times at the fur, then laid it down and picked up the basket of hairs clipped loose from the hide. She began to weave these between her fingers, peering closely at them. Corissith knew she would select the best to make braided bracelets, charms of good luck and charms for calling other people to them, which would sell well in the rock-and-moss villages.

“For what worth and gift her mother’s permission holds,” she said, “I grant it.”

“I am glad,” said Inosskith, and stood for a few more turns of the wagon’s wheels, demonstrating that she was not eager to be gone, before she walked past Corissith, opened the back door, and dropped down off the balcony. Corissith listened to hear the sounds of her creaking knees, but Laiskaiss was scolding the donkeys now and she always covered the air with the sound of her voice when she did that.

“Will Laiskaiss become the servant of our sister?” Zhossith’s voice asked from beneath the bed, hollow with the distance of the Void that had poured into him since his death. “Will she consent?”

“She has no reason not to, not when she hears that she can still laugh,” Molisstath said. “And, Corissith, you may stop pretending to be asleep. Ordinary ten-year-old boys snore more often.”

*

They were in the depths of the Called Forest when Laiskaiss made her decision. To be asked to become the servant of their sister was a beautiful and honorable notion, a gift, but dangerous as all gifts were. No child was born without a cost in blood to the mother; no decoration was given a new lover without the possibility of occurring jealousy in an old one.

So Laiskaiss thought, and stood on balconies, and took her turns at driving the donkeys and repairing broken wheel axles and drying the meat that the Honulith had given them, and by the time they were deep beneath the pointed green branches of the Called Forest, she thought enough time had passed.

The donkeys were plodding by then, reduced in speed by the necessity of rolling over logs, stones, roots, and frost, and beneath the pines that closed out the sight of the sun. The most frequent cries were ravens’, though sometimes a flight of sparrows would pass overhead like a wave of the sound and motion Laiskaiss imagined a seal would create beneath the Barking Ocean. (Ulnocwa had more than once invited her into the water to see how a seal would swim, but Laiskaiss had refused. The Honulith could easily survive immersion in water that cold. One of the People could not). Darkness was all around them, with only a few beams of the sudden sunlight that made her hair flame with a tinge of red or her skin with the faint brown-gold that all the People showed.

Laiskaiss sat on the balcony of Inosskith’s wagon, admiring her arm. They had passed through an unusually broad clearing where some disaster had brought down several pines. The wheels warbled and crunched in the soft ground beneath them, torn needles and shredded bark. Laiskaiss closed her eyes, savoring the last bursts of intense heat before they again passed into the twilight the trees maintained even at noon.

She opened her eyes to find Inosskith beside her. She held out her hands, without speaking. Someone like her mother Molisstath could talk fearlessly to Inosskith—but her mother spoke fearlessly to everyone, People or rock-and-moss. Laiskaiss was very young and knew that Inosskith thought she laughed too much.

Still. Inosskith understood the gesture. It was time.

Together, they helped each other from the wagon and then close along beside it, bracing themselves with a hand on the woven wooden walls when the ground shifted, uneasy and uneven, beneath their feet. Laiskaiss thought she heard the whoop of a loon for a moment, and was comforted. Her name for the goddess was Loon, because she had never seen her even when she went to dream on a name, but she had heard her. She laughed very much, not always as wildly as the waterbird did, but with so much variation in her voice that the name compelled itself.

And now she would serve Loon’s sister.

Laiskaiss tried to ignore her own shivering as they passed up the wagon train, past Jenezhari carving a new wheel by touch alone, past Yulass and Shelitasskith who were just learning how to touch each other and laugh at the same time, past deaf Gwenaiss who kept her eyes open always so that she might still understand the beauty of the world. In the center of the train was the wagon of the sister, with no donkeys to draw it; it was chained before and after to the vehicles surrounding it. It was made of even lighter and paler wood than the rest, and smaller, too.

Of course, the sister did not need a large dwelling.

Her hands trembling, Laiskaiss knelt on the tiny balcony fitted to the side of the wagon for a moment. Then she reached out and opened the door, ducking as she came inside. No one should have to remember to bow to their sister all the time, even her servant, so the wagon was simply built to make bowing the natural course of things.

The inside of the wagon was softly, stiflingly hot. Fire flickered up the walls here and there, long tongues of twitching flame raised from freely burned gifts. They would not harm the wood as long as the gift had been given with an open hand and a willing mind by someone who had also given the goddess a name, and they were necessary to keep the People’s sister warm.

Laiskaiss stayed bowed for some moments, her eyes on her hands. The fires flickered in the corners of her vision. The wagon continued to roll beneath her, more smoothly than the others traveled thanks to its lack of donkeys. The impulse to laugh welled up in her, but this time it had no reason. Maybe it was Loon’s doing; perhaps it was not.

Then a soft hiss alerted her to the fact that she could raise her head.

The sister had slithered out of her central dwelling, a small pointed-roof house carved of carefully worked stone. Most of the People had no such skill in rock-and-moss work, but they had learned how, because the sister had wanted such a house. She lay coiled now full on the saxifrage her servants’ hands had plucked and spread on the front of her platform as gifts over the years. Now and then she turned her head in sonorous movements, accented by the tiny mounds of bell-like scales that clung beneath her chin.

Laiskaiss had been told several times, by others of the People who had served the sister, that she was the most beautiful snake in the world. She had never believed it. No reptile person, for her, could match the swift purple-and-green glimpses that Ulnocwa had shown her from the Barking shore one summer day unparalleled in its brightness, the glory of sea serpents mating with their necks.

But the sister was beautiful.

She shone blue, a cloudy, subdued shade of blue that Laiskaiss was rarely permitted to see in sky or water. Her blunt-nosed, small, fanned head, with the back opening into an array of cloudy spikes that pointed towards the bells on her chin, swayed back and forth. Her tongue darted. It was blue-black with a purple stripe down the center. Laiskaiss’s heart bounded up in a silent shout; here was a triumph of color.

And then she turned and coiled herself up, bowing the front part of her body inquisitively to see the newcomer, and Laiskaiss made out shadows against her belly. The largest shiver yet started in her bones and worked its way out.

The sister was producing, as all of them did. She had had a mother, and her mother had had a mother, and that mother had had a mother—but only mothers, no fathers. She brought forth her young alive and alone, as they all did, as the goddess did. She was Loon’s perfect creature.

And her eyes were yellow. Laiskaiss was very partial to people with yellow eyes.

“Welcome, sister,” she said. “Do you have a name?”

The brilliant eyes studied her in silence. Then the sister slithered to the edge of her platform, and down onto the warm wooden floor, and across it until she swayed in front of Laiskaiss’s knees. Her neck flared, and the spikes contracted and crossed one another, protecting the vulnerable back of her head.

“You could be Gwen, perhaps,” Laiskaiss whispered. It came to her suddenly, that she would name this silent sister for Gwenaiss who was always so silent. But she could not give a name that was already a gift to one of the People, of course, only a form of it. “Would that do?”

Gwen appeared to consider the matter closed. She tilted her head back further and opened her jaws, the bells rattling harder than they had so far. Her bottom jaw unhinged hopefully.

Laiskaiss glanced about the room for a moment, and made out the cage fastened to the wall in the center, where live squirrels were kept on their own bed of pine needles and fed on water and gathered nuts. She opened the top of the cage, and hesitated a moment.

But though she had never served the sister before, she had certainly hunted squirrels that she knew would vanish into this wagon. She scooped one up with a running motion of her hand across the cage, the way she would try to gather a handful of fast water in salmon-time, and wrapped the tail around the mouth before it could bite. Then she brought it out, a clenched mound of fur and struggling, kicking feet, and tossed it to the sister.

The sister scooped it into her wide jaws and swallowed it whole. Her mouth shut fast an instant later, and Laiskaiss saw the squirrel’s shadow against her throat like the shadow of children against her belly, insubstantial—and still. Already the sister had swollen the muscles of her neck, contracting and releasing them. She killed from the inside, unlike other snakes. The squirrel would fall limp and bloody, and she would swallow it down when it was mangled.

It did not take her long. Laiskaiss knelt watching in fascination, and then Gwen, apparently on the strength of her still being next to the squirrel cage, parted her jaws once more.

“Greedy one,” said Laiskaiss. “You are only to have one a day. I do know that.” It was not a very hurtful truth, and therefore Inosskith had let all the girls of the People know. “Back to bed with you now.”

Gwen swayed, and then locked her mouth and her spikes together, as much to say that she was not, in any case, hungry. With slow, regal motions she slithered past Laiskaiss and back towards her house. On impulse, Laiskaiss touched the blunt tail, wanting to feel the skin that some of the girls had whispered was soft and jelly-like.

Gwen lashed madly across the floor at the touch, climbed the platform with a single wave-like motion, and then hurried into her house. Laiskaiss laughed aloud. Indignant yellow eyes glared at her from the house. She laughed harder.

In her head, the goddess laughed with her.

Thank you, Loon, Laiskaiss thought. I will do my best to serve her, and you, well. She has been reared too long by matrons cautious of her dignity, perhaps. But her daughters should know joy from the emergence.

Everyone should know such joy.