Wow, I almost forgot I had this.
Mar. 6th, 2004 01:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynThose of y'all who've noted my megaloceros obsession in the past? You have no idea how great my love for antlered critters is. I've got an entire Neolithic-to-Bronze-Age civilisation based on the concept of 'primary food animals are domesticated variants of cervid species' and 'primary riding animals are domesticated female Megaloceros giganteus or possibly castrated males'.
And I'd all but forgotten I'd started on a story about these fine folk. They call themselves the Àfthêraí; it means 'herd people'.
It was grey and misty, and it was quiet. The sun had crept a finger or two over the horizon, and its light was beginning to flow cautiously through the trees. The easternmost houses were touched already, people and their beasts stretching awake in answer to the light; but in the open place that formed the Àfthêraí village-heart there were already two women, and one of them was less than pleased.
“This?” said the grey-clad figure, shaking her head in disbelief. One hand reached up to retrieve her felt cap before it slid away. “You people actually bring your entire herds here? This is ridiculous.”
The other woman sighed faintly, easing herself up onto the topmost rail of a hastily erected wooden barricade. “Only the third-years, Chathá. I told you this already, remember? Whoever has beasts in their herd that’ve reached their third year of life, brings them here today for the Choosing.”
“I’ve seen your herds, Tallaí. If the others have anywhere near as many as you do-”
“They don’t.”
“-then the sun won’t be more than halfway up the sky before this place reeks to the tops of the mountains. There’s no way you’re going to be able to get everyone’s animals in here at once.”
Privately Tallaí agreed. For all that the grazing got poorer every year, the village herds still grew as if all were well. The èppeneí seemed as content with bushes and tree-leaves as grass, but … “That’s the point of the Choosing,” she patiently pointed out. “We bring the herds here. The elders look them over. They mark them out, or they don’t. And three days from now there’s a whole lot fewer deer to worry about.”
Chathá grunted. “And you’ve been doing this how long?”
“Since before I was born. Almost ten hands of winters.”
The other woman whistled loudly, scanning the open place once more. Here and there morning light picked out scraps of color, deeply dyed bits of leather tied to this fence or that in anticipation of the day. “How come you’re here, then?” she asked Tallaí, eyes narrowing shrewdly. “Shouldn’t you be with the elders, at your time of life?” She leaned back casually against the barricade. It sagged heavily; reflexively, Tallaí grabbed at the topmost rail.
Inwardly cursing at the momentary display of uncertainty, Tallaí nevertheless gathered enough presence to answer smoothly, easily. “I still bleed,” she said simply. “Not so many as ten times from winter to winter, but they say blood is blood, so-”
Chathá’s nose wrinkled up, and she made a rude noise. “You don’t hear tútsâ like that among Rasàlaraí,” she muttered. “Who’d you bite?”
“Excuse me?”
“It sounds like an excuse. A bad one. Whose skin did you get under?”
Tallaí resisted the urge to glare at the grey-clad woman. “I thought we were talking meat and milk, not politics.”
Chathá grinned, an unnerving sight. Everyone knew Rasàlaraí had healthier teeth than most Àfthêraí - it was something about the life they led, following their beasts - but their habit of chewing stuff to blanch them white made Chathá’s toothy smile look unnatural. “One for your side, then… All right. You’re still after the milk?”
“Right. The fawns with the scours get healthy much faster on rasálaí milk than their own mothers’.” Inwardly she smiled, feeling herself on more certain ground.
“I don’t know, Tallaí. Milk doesn’t travel well. Even on the river, your townsfolk tell me it’s half sour by the time it gets here…” Chathá scratched at her scalp, dark eyes clearly dubious at the prospect. “We’d have to ship you an awful lot, just to get you enough when you needed it. And, you know, it’s not like I can take that kind of a loss without compensation-“
Tallaí had her suspicions about that. “One of your females, then,” she said bluntly.
“She’ll roam-”
“I’ve talked to other Rasàlaraí. She can be kept in the fattening ring behind my lodge. It’s big enough.”
“The fodder up here-”
“Doesn’t agree with rasálaí, I know. Ship me dried fodder up the Ketínni River twice a moon and I’ll make it worth your while.”
Despite the uncomfortable look on her face, the offer sparked a gleam in Chathá’s eye. “How worth my while?” she inquired, not quite able to hide her enthusiasm.
“Enough.” Tallaí pretended to consider the prospect; she knew what she was going to say. “I’m already tanning and dyeing your raw hides, and you’re sending cheese and butter… How about this. I know some of the folk who make their homes up in the Tahaída, and one of the women up there swears up and down she knows where to find mountain greenroot. That’d be something for your Midsummer Feast, wouldn’t it?”
Chathá’s eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head to one side, peering suspiciously at the other woman. “I don’t know that I like basing a trade on someone who only swears…”
For answer, Tallaí undid the twisted bit of cord that held a small leather pouch to her belt. She shook the pouch’s contents out into the palm of her hand: two lumpy bits of rhizome, covered in thick dark stuff. As Chathá leaned in to inspect them, Tallaí drew her flint knife and offered it to the woman. The first slice revealed a slightly stringy, pale green interior, still moist from good storage. The pungent odor was inescapable, unmistakable; it burned at nose and eyes, sending the grey-clad woman back a few steps, holding her nose. “Good enough proof for you?” Tallaí asked pleasantly.
Chathá nodded furiously, waving her free hand in front of her eyes. After a moment, she regained her composure. “Good enough. Yes. Get me some of that from your friend in the mountains and I’ll throw in a covering from one of my stags each year - fair?”
“Fair.” Tallaí dropped the nuggets of root back into the pouch, twisting the cord around its narrow neck once more. With only the faintest hint of hesitation she curled her right hand into a fist and spit onto it; she then held her hand out to the other woman, who covered it with her own. “All right, then, the deal’s settled. Here - your first payment…”
Chathá accepted the bag of root nuggets, holding it as carefully as a freshly laid egg. “Thank you,” she murmured. “Now, when’s this Choosing of yours supposed to start? Isn’t your boy supposed to bring your own herd in for you?”
Tallaí scanned the two paths between lodges that led from the village grazing-grounds. “There they are,” she said, indicating the dusty blur growing more visible in the brightening light. “Pélusiô’s neck and neck with Lannaí this year, looks like.”
“Lannaí?”
“Woodcutter’s daughter. She’s got the all-black herd, remember?”
Chathá shook her head, tanned face looking bemused at the prospect. “How many colors do your deer come in, anyway?”
“Four. Black, white, deep brown, and spotted. Mostly spotted…” She leaned forward as far as she dared, not wanting to lose her place on the barricade now. It was always a race to see whose beasts reached the village-heart first. She could hear Lannaí’s hounds baying - Pélusiô’s light tenor indistinctly shouting - the muzzy cheering of the youngsters who turned out along the route with the dawn, wanting to see…
In a bare handful of moments the cheering rose to a roar as the first young stags shot into the village-heart. Black stags - Lannaí’s herd! Two fine beasts, to be true - well rounded with rump and belly fat, young antlers in their velvet spreading like open hands towards the sky - but not hers. Well, there went her wager… They careened around the suddenly too-tiny open space, great grey hounds fit to wrestle wolves at their heels. The black does were there a heartbeat later, neck-and-neck with the five white-spotted youngsters of Tallaí’s own herd. At least, Tallaí noted, her own animals looked less affrighted. Whether the elders chose them out or not, her beasts took such chaos in their stride.
And chaos it was, too, as the people started pouring in. A sharp whistle pricked the hounds’ ears up, and the black èppeneí were herded off almost instantly to gather around the form of the tall young woodcutter’s daughter. Tallaí’s younglings pressed uncertainly closer together a moment, eyes rolling nervously; then came that tenor shout again, and Pélusiô pressed through the suddenly milling crowd of Àfthêraí. He grinned, waving to the two women before turning to calm the beasts. Without so much as looking, Tallaí could feel Chathá’s gaze growing speculative. Pélusiô surely cut a fine figure today, and it’d been a long dry journey north. He stood a hand taller than Tallaí herself, and his hair was as dark a brown as oak bark soaked with a good storm’s rain. His tunic was Tallaí’s make, short-sleeved and red as ochre. Made of fine supple hide, it flowed over him like his own skin. There was no idle fat to him, only good solid muscle - trunk as stout as the village cistern - nearly as long-legged as the great-horn deer on the plains… “You can’t have him, Chathá,” she murmured.
“Aw!”
“He’s my apprentice. He’s almost good enough to be village tanner himself. I’m not letting him go off to the Southlands with you. Sorry. Besides, you’re old enough to be his mother.”
“That makes a difference?” There was real alarm in the southerner’s voice; Tallaí relented.
“No, not really. It makes the younger women grumble if it lasts long, though.”
“Maybe just tonight, then?”
Tallaí caught the Rasàlaraí woman’s hopeful sidelong look, and smiled. “Well, maybe,” she conceded. “It’s up to him, though. Like as not he’ll have plenty of work this afternoon.”
Chathá cracked several of her knuckles, nodding thoughtfully. “I’ll manage.”
***
They'd never chosen so many from her herd before. Never. There'd been a nasty light in Rasá's eyes, a glimmer of something just a bit too pleased... the woman knew Tallaí's herd browsed as far from the village as the edge of the Plain, there was no call for so many third-years to be slaughtered...
... oh, and her knees were hurting her, again, the chôno bark tea had been too bitter to drink more than a few swallows and the joint-ill was catching up with her once more...
... and Pélusiô was complaining.
"I had my reasons, Pélusiô," she said firmly, cutting through his protestations with an irritated voice. "There'll be plenty of time for you to have your fun tonight."
"Not if there's actually something in the pit! Tallaí, please! I don't want to spend the whole day skinning and gutting -"
"That's enough, Pelli!" The tanner turned to face her apprentice, scowling more angrily than she'd really intended. Stupid knees... "They'll be slaughtering the younglings and counting out the meat and hides all afternoon. Koró's promised me a great deal of her best brew for the meat, and you know how it gets during the summer when we don't have beer. All I ask is that we check the trap now, and that you help me haul anything in the pit back to the lodge. I'll take it to the butchering myself if that's a problem."
The young man backed up a step, hands rising in an unconsciously defensive gesture. "I'm sorry, Tallaí," he murmured, ducking his head like a pup about to be smacked. "It's just-"
"I know." Another twinge from her knees, and a new one from somewhere down in her toes. "But I'm not staying there for that pôssouná who calls herself Youngest Elder to smirk at-"
"And you don't want to have to lean on your spear, either?"
She glared at him, but her heart wasn't in it. "I'm doing that now."
"Yes, but there's only me."
A long, quiet sigh. "Let's just get to the pit." She ignored her apprentice's sympathetic smile. She didn't need that.
The Àfthêraí had several villages in this part of the land, but there had once been more. Winters and winters ago, in the time of Tallaí's mother, there had been Àfthêraí who lived on the plain to the south of the village. They'd herded their beasts and carried their tents, as the Rasàlaraí did, but their herds were of èppeneí, and that was good enough to call them Àfthêraí proper. But there had come a plague among their herds, no one knew from where. The beasts had been listless, and then their sides had swollen. There'd been rashes on the skins of the dead deer, and the living ones had been hot to the touch. At first they'd hunted, rather than eat the sick, but then the same signs had started carrying off the people as well. By the time of Tallaí's birth, the people of the southern plain had fled to the eight directions, leaving the place of that sickness to the wild things.
It had been a long while before the Rasàlaraí would willingly come north across territory like that, but they'd finally started coming again. So far as Tallaí knew, they hadn't had a single rasála or woman fall sick from that crossing, and the trade had been going on for hands of winters now. It still wasn't anywhere the Àfthêraí of her village wanted to live, but it seemed to her that there'd be no harm in hunting there. Assuming, of course, you could hunt. Tallaí'd never been a hunter, but those who tan hides learn to get them one way or another, and there were enough people who ate at her fire and slept in her lodge for her to dragoon a few of them into digging a pit trap for the unwary beasts that roamed the plain.
The plains Àfthêraí hadn't built much, but they'd left behind a few signs of their passing. Not far from the Ketínni, which flowed down from her village and across the plains on its journey south, they'd sunk two great wooden poles into the ground. Tallaí had no idea what they were for - border-markers, probably, or an annual meeting place. They'd been something special; once, they'd been painted with the brightest colors the plainsfolk could coax from rock and plant. These days, only the ruddy ochre color remained, clinging to the weathered wood like bloodstains. Tallaí had found bits of great-horn hair clinging to them, and scrape marks from the stags' impossibly huge antlers. Obviously, the poles didn't bother the beasts. They'd serve her purpose well enough.
Several strides ahead of her, Pélusiô paused, peering over the landscape with one hand shading his eyes. "I don't see anything from here..." He sounded hopeful.
"It is a pit, Pélusiô."
"Yes, but how deep is it? Shouldn't something be thrashing around?"
"It's deeper than you are tall, and it won't be thrashing if it's already dead. Come on."
... Alas, that's as far as I got. I have the outline for the rest, though it's very sketchy just now.
And I'd all but forgotten I'd started on a story about these fine folk. They call themselves the Àfthêraí; it means 'herd people'.
It was grey and misty, and it was quiet. The sun had crept a finger or two over the horizon, and its light was beginning to flow cautiously through the trees. The easternmost houses were touched already, people and their beasts stretching awake in answer to the light; but in the open place that formed the Àfthêraí village-heart there were already two women, and one of them was less than pleased.
“This?” said the grey-clad figure, shaking her head in disbelief. One hand reached up to retrieve her felt cap before it slid away. “You people actually bring your entire herds here? This is ridiculous.”
The other woman sighed faintly, easing herself up onto the topmost rail of a hastily erected wooden barricade. “Only the third-years, Chathá. I told you this already, remember? Whoever has beasts in their herd that’ve reached their third year of life, brings them here today for the Choosing.”
“I’ve seen your herds, Tallaí. If the others have anywhere near as many as you do-”
“They don’t.”
“-then the sun won’t be more than halfway up the sky before this place reeks to the tops of the mountains. There’s no way you’re going to be able to get everyone’s animals in here at once.”
Privately Tallaí agreed. For all that the grazing got poorer every year, the village herds still grew as if all were well. The èppeneí seemed as content with bushes and tree-leaves as grass, but … “That’s the point of the Choosing,” she patiently pointed out. “We bring the herds here. The elders look them over. They mark them out, or they don’t. And three days from now there’s a whole lot fewer deer to worry about.”
Chathá grunted. “And you’ve been doing this how long?”
“Since before I was born. Almost ten hands of winters.”
The other woman whistled loudly, scanning the open place once more. Here and there morning light picked out scraps of color, deeply dyed bits of leather tied to this fence or that in anticipation of the day. “How come you’re here, then?” she asked Tallaí, eyes narrowing shrewdly. “Shouldn’t you be with the elders, at your time of life?” She leaned back casually against the barricade. It sagged heavily; reflexively, Tallaí grabbed at the topmost rail.
Inwardly cursing at the momentary display of uncertainty, Tallaí nevertheless gathered enough presence to answer smoothly, easily. “I still bleed,” she said simply. “Not so many as ten times from winter to winter, but they say blood is blood, so-”
Chathá’s nose wrinkled up, and she made a rude noise. “You don’t hear tútsâ like that among Rasàlaraí,” she muttered. “Who’d you bite?”
“Excuse me?”
“It sounds like an excuse. A bad one. Whose skin did you get under?”
Tallaí resisted the urge to glare at the grey-clad woman. “I thought we were talking meat and milk, not politics.”
Chathá grinned, an unnerving sight. Everyone knew Rasàlaraí had healthier teeth than most Àfthêraí - it was something about the life they led, following their beasts - but their habit of chewing stuff to blanch them white made Chathá’s toothy smile look unnatural. “One for your side, then… All right. You’re still after the milk?”
“Right. The fawns with the scours get healthy much faster on rasálaí milk than their own mothers’.” Inwardly she smiled, feeling herself on more certain ground.
“I don’t know, Tallaí. Milk doesn’t travel well. Even on the river, your townsfolk tell me it’s half sour by the time it gets here…” Chathá scratched at her scalp, dark eyes clearly dubious at the prospect. “We’d have to ship you an awful lot, just to get you enough when you needed it. And, you know, it’s not like I can take that kind of a loss without compensation-“
Tallaí had her suspicions about that. “One of your females, then,” she said bluntly.
“She’ll roam-”
“I’ve talked to other Rasàlaraí. She can be kept in the fattening ring behind my lodge. It’s big enough.”
“The fodder up here-”
“Doesn’t agree with rasálaí, I know. Ship me dried fodder up the Ketínni River twice a moon and I’ll make it worth your while.”
Despite the uncomfortable look on her face, the offer sparked a gleam in Chathá’s eye. “How worth my while?” she inquired, not quite able to hide her enthusiasm.
“Enough.” Tallaí pretended to consider the prospect; she knew what she was going to say. “I’m already tanning and dyeing your raw hides, and you’re sending cheese and butter… How about this. I know some of the folk who make their homes up in the Tahaída, and one of the women up there swears up and down she knows where to find mountain greenroot. That’d be something for your Midsummer Feast, wouldn’t it?”
Chathá’s eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head to one side, peering suspiciously at the other woman. “I don’t know that I like basing a trade on someone who only swears…”
For answer, Tallaí undid the twisted bit of cord that held a small leather pouch to her belt. She shook the pouch’s contents out into the palm of her hand: two lumpy bits of rhizome, covered in thick dark stuff. As Chathá leaned in to inspect them, Tallaí drew her flint knife and offered it to the woman. The first slice revealed a slightly stringy, pale green interior, still moist from good storage. The pungent odor was inescapable, unmistakable; it burned at nose and eyes, sending the grey-clad woman back a few steps, holding her nose. “Good enough proof for you?” Tallaí asked pleasantly.
Chathá nodded furiously, waving her free hand in front of her eyes. After a moment, she regained her composure. “Good enough. Yes. Get me some of that from your friend in the mountains and I’ll throw in a covering from one of my stags each year - fair?”
“Fair.” Tallaí dropped the nuggets of root back into the pouch, twisting the cord around its narrow neck once more. With only the faintest hint of hesitation she curled her right hand into a fist and spit onto it; she then held her hand out to the other woman, who covered it with her own. “All right, then, the deal’s settled. Here - your first payment…”
Chathá accepted the bag of root nuggets, holding it as carefully as a freshly laid egg. “Thank you,” she murmured. “Now, when’s this Choosing of yours supposed to start? Isn’t your boy supposed to bring your own herd in for you?”
Tallaí scanned the two paths between lodges that led from the village grazing-grounds. “There they are,” she said, indicating the dusty blur growing more visible in the brightening light. “Pélusiô’s neck and neck with Lannaí this year, looks like.”
“Lannaí?”
“Woodcutter’s daughter. She’s got the all-black herd, remember?”
Chathá shook her head, tanned face looking bemused at the prospect. “How many colors do your deer come in, anyway?”
“Four. Black, white, deep brown, and spotted. Mostly spotted…” She leaned forward as far as she dared, not wanting to lose her place on the barricade now. It was always a race to see whose beasts reached the village-heart first. She could hear Lannaí’s hounds baying - Pélusiô’s light tenor indistinctly shouting - the muzzy cheering of the youngsters who turned out along the route with the dawn, wanting to see…
In a bare handful of moments the cheering rose to a roar as the first young stags shot into the village-heart. Black stags - Lannaí’s herd! Two fine beasts, to be true - well rounded with rump and belly fat, young antlers in their velvet spreading like open hands towards the sky - but not hers. Well, there went her wager… They careened around the suddenly too-tiny open space, great grey hounds fit to wrestle wolves at their heels. The black does were there a heartbeat later, neck-and-neck with the five white-spotted youngsters of Tallaí’s own herd. At least, Tallaí noted, her own animals looked less affrighted. Whether the elders chose them out or not, her beasts took such chaos in their stride.
And chaos it was, too, as the people started pouring in. A sharp whistle pricked the hounds’ ears up, and the black èppeneí were herded off almost instantly to gather around the form of the tall young woodcutter’s daughter. Tallaí’s younglings pressed uncertainly closer together a moment, eyes rolling nervously; then came that tenor shout again, and Pélusiô pressed through the suddenly milling crowd of Àfthêraí. He grinned, waving to the two women before turning to calm the beasts. Without so much as looking, Tallaí could feel Chathá’s gaze growing speculative. Pélusiô surely cut a fine figure today, and it’d been a long dry journey north. He stood a hand taller than Tallaí herself, and his hair was as dark a brown as oak bark soaked with a good storm’s rain. His tunic was Tallaí’s make, short-sleeved and red as ochre. Made of fine supple hide, it flowed over him like his own skin. There was no idle fat to him, only good solid muscle - trunk as stout as the village cistern - nearly as long-legged as the great-horn deer on the plains… “You can’t have him, Chathá,” she murmured.
“Aw!”
“He’s my apprentice. He’s almost good enough to be village tanner himself. I’m not letting him go off to the Southlands with you. Sorry. Besides, you’re old enough to be his mother.”
“That makes a difference?” There was real alarm in the southerner’s voice; Tallaí relented.
“No, not really. It makes the younger women grumble if it lasts long, though.”
“Maybe just tonight, then?”
Tallaí caught the Rasàlaraí woman’s hopeful sidelong look, and smiled. “Well, maybe,” she conceded. “It’s up to him, though. Like as not he’ll have plenty of work this afternoon.”
Chathá cracked several of her knuckles, nodding thoughtfully. “I’ll manage.”
***
They'd never chosen so many from her herd before. Never. There'd been a nasty light in Rasá's eyes, a glimmer of something just a bit too pleased... the woman knew Tallaí's herd browsed as far from the village as the edge of the Plain, there was no call for so many third-years to be slaughtered...
... oh, and her knees were hurting her, again, the chôno bark tea had been too bitter to drink more than a few swallows and the joint-ill was catching up with her once more...
... and Pélusiô was complaining.
"I had my reasons, Pélusiô," she said firmly, cutting through his protestations with an irritated voice. "There'll be plenty of time for you to have your fun tonight."
"Not if there's actually something in the pit! Tallaí, please! I don't want to spend the whole day skinning and gutting -"
"That's enough, Pelli!" The tanner turned to face her apprentice, scowling more angrily than she'd really intended. Stupid knees... "They'll be slaughtering the younglings and counting out the meat and hides all afternoon. Koró's promised me a great deal of her best brew for the meat, and you know how it gets during the summer when we don't have beer. All I ask is that we check the trap now, and that you help me haul anything in the pit back to the lodge. I'll take it to the butchering myself if that's a problem."
The young man backed up a step, hands rising in an unconsciously defensive gesture. "I'm sorry, Tallaí," he murmured, ducking his head like a pup about to be smacked. "It's just-"
"I know." Another twinge from her knees, and a new one from somewhere down in her toes. "But I'm not staying there for that pôssouná who calls herself Youngest Elder to smirk at-"
"And you don't want to have to lean on your spear, either?"
She glared at him, but her heart wasn't in it. "I'm doing that now."
"Yes, but there's only me."
A long, quiet sigh. "Let's just get to the pit." She ignored her apprentice's sympathetic smile. She didn't need that.
The Àfthêraí had several villages in this part of the land, but there had once been more. Winters and winters ago, in the time of Tallaí's mother, there had been Àfthêraí who lived on the plain to the south of the village. They'd herded their beasts and carried their tents, as the Rasàlaraí did, but their herds were of èppeneí, and that was good enough to call them Àfthêraí proper. But there had come a plague among their herds, no one knew from where. The beasts had been listless, and then their sides had swollen. There'd been rashes on the skins of the dead deer, and the living ones had been hot to the touch. At first they'd hunted, rather than eat the sick, but then the same signs had started carrying off the people as well. By the time of Tallaí's birth, the people of the southern plain had fled to the eight directions, leaving the place of that sickness to the wild things.
It had been a long while before the Rasàlaraí would willingly come north across territory like that, but they'd finally started coming again. So far as Tallaí knew, they hadn't had a single rasála or woman fall sick from that crossing, and the trade had been going on for hands of winters now. It still wasn't anywhere the Àfthêraí of her village wanted to live, but it seemed to her that there'd be no harm in hunting there. Assuming, of course, you could hunt. Tallaí'd never been a hunter, but those who tan hides learn to get them one way or another, and there were enough people who ate at her fire and slept in her lodge for her to dragoon a few of them into digging a pit trap for the unwary beasts that roamed the plain.
The plains Àfthêraí hadn't built much, but they'd left behind a few signs of their passing. Not far from the Ketínni, which flowed down from her village and across the plains on its journey south, they'd sunk two great wooden poles into the ground. Tallaí had no idea what they were for - border-markers, probably, or an annual meeting place. They'd been something special; once, they'd been painted with the brightest colors the plainsfolk could coax from rock and plant. These days, only the ruddy ochre color remained, clinging to the weathered wood like bloodstains. Tallaí had found bits of great-horn hair clinging to them, and scrape marks from the stags' impossibly huge antlers. Obviously, the poles didn't bother the beasts. They'd serve her purpose well enough.
Several strides ahead of her, Pélusiô paused, peering over the landscape with one hand shading his eyes. "I don't see anything from here..." He sounded hopeful.
"It is a pit, Pélusiô."
"Yes, but how deep is it? Shouldn't something be thrashing around?"
"It's deeper than you are tall, and it won't be thrashing if it's already dead. Come on."
... Alas, that's as far as I got. I have the outline for the rest, though it's very sketchy just now.
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Date: 2004-03-05 11:44 pm (UTC)I like!
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Date: 2004-03-06 02:53 am (UTC)