She took the box from off the chair and laid it on the table between us. “I want to offer this to the village,” she said. She said it quick, to shut down the talk about Athen and Junnu.
“Mull loves birds,” she said. “Starlies, bluitts and yellowhats, mostly, but almost anything that flies and doesn’t bite. She coaxed them into coming to the house by throwing out goosefoot seed and linseed for them.”
“That’s nice,” I said, not knowing at all where this was going. “Little birds is bright, and cheers up a place.”
“That’s it,” Jemiu said, nodding her head hard. “That’s it, Rampart. Little birds is bright as anything.”
I put my hand on top of hers. “Jemiu,” I said, “you knowed me as a girl, when me and Koli and Jon would scuff and tip together all around the village. You don’t need to call me Rampart. Nor what Koli did don’t have to come between us ever.”
She took her hand away. Her face, that had been open and excited, shut down into a cold frown. “What Koli did isn’t even knowed yet,” she said. “Not properly. When it comes out, Spinner – when the truth of it comes out – there’ll be some that will abide it sorely.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. I had won my point in a way, for she gave me my own name, but what I said had not brought us closer but pushed us further apart. “What did you come for, Jemiu?” I asked as gently as I could.
“For this,” she said. She turned the box to face me. I saw it had a round hole cut into one face of it, near the top. There was a kind of a smaller, open box fixed over the hole, about as wide as my thumb and twice as deep.
“This is how yellowhats build their nests,” Jemiu said. “Halfway up in a tree or a little higher, with this tunnel to get inside that keeps out bigger birds. They face it into the setting sun, so the noon-day heat don’t hurt the eggs. This is one I made, but it was Mull that thought of it. To make a nest out of wood, and nail it to the wall of our house so yellowhats would come there. And they come in great store. Every box was filled as quick as I put it up.”
I still was slow to see where she was going. “It’s a clever thing,” I said, “but why would the village want it? For the gaiety and the colour, you think?”
“No, not that.” Jemiu waved those things away. “What do yellowhats do, Spinner, if something gets too close to their nest?”
“Well, they lie low, if it’s a small thing that comes. Chase it off maybe, if it’s a little bigger. But if it’s something they can’t fight, like a tree-cat or a needle, then they make a great noise and fly straight up to make the hunter look a different way and not go after the eggs or the fletchlings.”
Jemiu nodded again, and waited for me to put it together. “You think if we set boxes like this out in the forest,” I said, “it might give the needles and tree-cats easier meat so they don’t go after our hunters?”
“No,” said Jemiu. “I’m not thinking of needles and tree-cats. I’m thinking of Half-Ax.”
She laid it out for me, and I clapped my hands when I saw it. It was not a weapon Jemiu was bringing me, nor it wasn’t anything we could use to fend off an attack. But it would tell us when an attack was coming, and where from. Such things might make the difference between mend and mar.
I praised Jemiu’s cleverness to the skies, with her saying it was nothing much and refusing to be praised. When she got up to go, I rose too and embraced her again. “I’ve not forgot your kindness to me after my father died,” I told her. “I mean to pay it back. I’ll make sure everyone knows this was your idea, and I’ll vote a thanks in the Count and Seal.”
“I can’t eat thanks,” Jemiu said. “Get me some better catchers.”
I promised I would, and I meant to do it. But in the end, I paid her back a different way entirely.
14
The day after I had that talk with Jemiu, Catrin Vennastin sat up at last and looked about her. As soon as word was brought to me, I ran to be at her bedside. I hoped she might be well enough to rise, to take up the firethrower again and be our Rampart Fire, but she was still too weak.
“I’m mending… slow but sure,” she told me, her voice hoarse and breathless. “You just got to bear it… a while longer.”
She was propped up in her bed in the room she had once given to me and Jon before we were turned out of the Hold and went to live at the tannery. She was as pale as her sheets, and couldn’t say more than a dozen words without taking a rest.
“I’m not you,” I told her. “I won’t ever be you. You got twenty Summers on me, and you’ve been Rampart Fire for twelve of them. I been in exactly one fight, and only lived through that one because of blind luck. I got nothing to tell the Count and Seal.”
Catrin tried three times to catch a breath. When she did, she used it to tell me I was a fool.
“I know it,” I said.
“You been… in front of Half-Ax guns, and… you brung back… a victory. They look at you… and that’s… what they see. That victory.”
“But I didn’t—”
Catrin put a hand over my mouth. I guess it took less breath than telling me to shut up. “They don’t… need your doubts,” she wheezed. “The hope… is what they need. So look… you don’t tread on it.”
“They need a leader that knows what they’re doing.”
“Yeah, that’s… good too. So tell me… what you’re doing.”
I told her everything. She gave me back a few ideas of her own. Mostly about the fence and the stake-blind. She asked about Challenger too – if he had managed to make more bullets for his gun.
I had good news to share on that count at least. “They’re growing in him now,” I said. “They’re not ready yet to be used, and he can’t say when they will be. He said everything works slower for tech that’s as big as he is – and he said a lot of the different parts of him, that he calls systems, don’t work as well as they used to. But we can hope to have a batch of shells ready soon.”
“Shells?”
“That’s what bullets are called, once they get that big.”
“That’s good then,” Catrin said. “What about the tech… from the Underhold?”
“Nothing yet.”
“And the Half-Ax… guns?”
“Nothing there either.”
Catrin coughed, and it took a while. “You know,” she whispered when she could make shift to talk again, “there’s got to be ways… to use that battle wagon that… we didn’t figure out yet. You say you… was only in… the one fight. Challenger… must of been in… hundreds.”
It was a good thought, and one I should have had my own self. I said I would ask him. Then I left Catrin’s bedside quickly, for she was wearing herself out in talking to me. The coughing would only get worse if I stayed, and by and by there would be blood in what came up.
“Stand hard… against Fer,” was the last thing she said to me.