Cup shaked her head in wonder. “But what’s happened to Monono then?”
Ursala snorted. “Oh, I’m sure she’s fine. She’s probably immortal now, more’s the pity.”
“She saved all of us,” I said. “We would of died on that ship without her. And Sword of Albion would have whelmed all of Ingland.”
Ursala shaked her head. “Koli, Monono and Sword of Albion are functionally the same thing.”
“They’re not.”
“No, you’re right. Monono is a lot worse. Sword of Albion could only do what it was told. She can do whatever she wants.”
I pointed up. There was still traces of that fire, falling down out of the sky and fading as they fell. “And that’s what she choosed to do. You know who she is, Ursala, because she showed us, ever and again. All you can do is pretend you don’t see.”
I walked up the hill to see if I could find that farm Monono told us of.
48
“The main trouble we got is with needles,” Chevili said.
“And tusks,” Nanashol added.
“That’s a truth, Nan. Tusks is bad too.”
He brung the bowls of soup to where we was sitting in the corner by the fireplace, one by one, and give them to us with great care. His hands was somewhat twisted with arthritis and he had to be careful not to spill.
The soup was good, with chunks of carrot and potato in it. Nanashol said if we had come a week later there would of been mutton too, for they was getting ready to slaughter a ewe that was going blind. They was only waiting until her two lambs was weaned.
The two of them was all there was at the farm, which was called Edge. Why Edge? Cup asked. Nanashol shrugged. “Because we’re at the edge of the world.” We couldn’t tell if she was Chevili’s wife or his sister. They had the same flat face, almost, the same lean build, the same long hair that was pale yellow like steeped flax. She was maybe a little younger than he was, and the two of them didn’t ever touch while we was there, but sometimes one of them would start a thought and the other would finish it. That speaked of a long time spent together, whichever way it might be.
They said there used to be a lot more people living there, not at Edge itself – Edge was two rooms and an outhouse – but round about. Some of them used to live at the bottom of the hill in Baron Furnace, with canvas roofs set up over what was left of the old stone houses, but there was another village further off, by the shore, where ten families lived.
“All gone now though.”
Gone where?
“Wherever their legs took them.”
So now there was just the two of them, living in a house that didn’t have no fence around it up on a hilltop a scant half-mile from where the forest started.
“Aren’t you scared,” I said, “with the trees so close and no fence or stake-blind around you?”
“Trees don’t come on these slopes,” Nanashol told me. “Dirt’s not deep enough. All we get up here is grass and knotweed, and we dig out the knotweed before it can bed too deep.”
“What do you do in a choker Spring?”
“Chokers won’t put down roots in chalk, last I heard. And any seeds that come this way, they hit the wind off that headland and keep on going out to sea. The same wind that keeps the soil so shallow, for it scours us like a hard brush day and night.”
They had found a place nobody else wanted, and made a home there. I wanted to ask how long it had been since the two of them seen anyone besides each other, and if reavers had ever come there like Ursala said, but they struck me as the kind of people that only had so many words to give, and we already had taken that day’s rations. Besides, they had give us hot soup and a fire to sleep by. They didn’t owe us answers on top of all that.
We ended up staying at Edge Farm for five days. We made ourselves as useful as we could in that time. Cup digged a ditch and chopped wood. The two of us builded a fence together, and I mended some shingles up on the farm’s roof. Ursala helped with the last of the lambing. We throwed ourselves into these things with a will and worked until we was too tired to see straight. It kept us from thinking about how we’d failed in everything we set out to do, and now was left with no more choices to make nor no more hope.
Nanashol and Chevili didn’t ask us to work for our keep, and didn’t thank us. They was working their own selves from first light through to sunset without stopping much to look around. They fed us because they had enough and was disinclined to see us starve. I think they would of gone on doing it as long as we choosed to stay.
On the sixth day after we come to Edge, a drone sailed down out of the sky while I was working up on the roof. It didn’t give no warning, like drones most often do, and it didn’t fire on me. It hid itself behind the chimney, peeping out at me ever and again and then ducking back whenever I looked that way. It done this half a dozen times or more, until I stopped being scared and laughed instead. “That’s you in there, isn’t it?” I said.
“Maybe,” the drone said. “Maybe not. Who do you think I am?”
“I don’t want to play no guessing games, for I know I can’t win. If I say you’re Monono Aware, you’ll say you aren’t and never was.”
“Yeah, that’s fair. So how are you doing, dopey boy? How’s Cup, and the dry old stick? What’s new with the three of you?”
I looked to the left, then to the right. “Just what you see, Monono. There’s kind people here, a man and a woman. We’re doing chores for them and they’re letting us sleep at their hearth. Feeding us too.”
“Wow. Sounds great. But you should clock off early and go down to the beach. Bring everyone.”
“Why? What’s at the beach?”
“Only one way to find out, little dumpling.”
The drone did a kind of a dance in the air, then shot away to the dirt track that led off down the hill and waited there. “I thought you wasn’t going to talk like that no more,” I shouted, but I guess she didn’t hear me.
I went and found Ursala, then Cup, and told them both what just had happened. They finished what they was doing and we walked together, past the ruins of Baron Furnace and down to the sea. Chevili and Nanashol stayed behind. Their work was not of a kind that ever stopped. Also they seen there was a drone waiting out on the lane and they didn’t want to go one step nearer to it than they was already.
Monono showed us where to go. It was only a short way, and the path was marked out clear enough, though it was somewhat swallowed up in knotweed. A stand of trees strained towards us as we passed. I think they was a kind of choker, but their bark was lighter than the regular ones and they had curved spikes on the underside of their branches that I think was for killing what they catched.
“A new species,” Ursala said when I pointed. “Chokers are very fluid genetically. There are probably dozens of sub-lineages like this.”
“There are roots that run under the path too,” Monono said. “Like a web. I can see them in the drone’s thermal imager. Wait a second.”
The drone went on ahead of us, flying in zig-zag lines across the path. Its red light flicked out ever and again, stabbing into the ground and raising up little puffs of dust. Then by and by it come back to us. “Just in case,” Monono said.