Free Bones of the Past (Arhel) by Holly Lisle Page A

She gave in then to her delight and flung her arms around Dog Nose, and pressed her nose against his scarred one. “We can trade two or three of these for enough food to feed us for a whole winter. And look—there are enough here to last forever. We won’t even need the gods’ dirt-trick.”
    Dog Nose pulled away and stared at her. “Why? Why would anyone give us food for these?”
    She laughed. “I don’t know. But in the market in the peknu village, I saw an old man with a long beard and braids almost down to his feet, who gave a man three bags of grain and a goat for a little square with symbols on it. I asked him what he got and he said it was—” she paused, fishing through her memory, for the right words, “—beck… bhak…” She sighed. “I don’t remember now. But he said it was a thing of great power to those who knew how to use it. He showed the thing to me. It had little marks in rows all over it just like these.” She laughed again. “But it was very small. These are much bigger. We will take some of these to him, and we will make him give us so much food we could feed a whole city full of tagnu.”
    Dog Nose looked at the white slab doubtfully. Then he looked at Fat Girl, and his expression of doubt was replaced by one of trust. “We will carry these things to him, then. Your good fat will make us all fat.” He hugged her, and pressed his nose to hers.
    Her pulse picked up again, but her excitement was no longer because of their wonderful find. She gave in to the urgings of her body, and pressed herself against the boy, and ran her hands over his warm, smooth skin.
    “Let me be your remmi now,” he whispered in her ear.
    She wanted so much to say yes, but she shook her head “no” instead. “When we get back here. When we never have to go near the Keyu again.” She pressed her body hard against him, and added, “Soon.”

Chapter 3
     
    MEDWIND shivered and shook herself out of the trance. The vha’attaye were once again nothing but gleaming, lifeless bones. She put down the sho, and carefully blew out the altar candles.
    Noises of cattle and vendors and laughing, shrieking children from outside the compound told Medwind she had been in the b’dabba too long. She felt drained, bled dry—almost as if she would crumble to dust in the first slight breeze. The vha’attaye always left her tired—but this time was worse than usual. She felt they’d tried to suck her life away.
    The Hoos part of her life was falling into ruin—dying. She’d failed her people; the vha’attaye; even her gods, Etyt and Thiena. She’d failed to keep the promises she’d made.
    For a moment, she was twelve again, standing in the darkened sacred place, at the moment of the choosing of her gods. She stood, head high and shoulders thrust back, and to the pale and ghostly presences of the vha’attaye who questioned her, she demanded to present herself to the service of the gods of warriors. And the vha’attaye had accepted her choice and had given her their burden. The onus of Etyt and Thiena, gods of war, whispered by the waking dead, echoed again in the corridors of her memory:
     
So say the gods, your gods—
‘You, who ask our bounty,
Wear our mark on you.
In all things, live large.
Not one child, but five;
Not one lover, but ten;
Not one enemy, but a hundred.
In battle, wear bones at your waist,
Drum on the skins of your defeated foes,
Drink from the skulls of your slain.
Fuck merrily,
Fight heartily,
Never die in bed.
     
    She thought it more than she could endure, to be abandoned by such jovial gods as those.
    Barren. She looked with loathing at her flat, empty belly. She had to face the fact that she would never have a child. She’d had ten husbands, countless lovers—and never even the hope of a pregnancy. It was time to find another way to satisfy the gods and the vha’attaye, before she lost them both.
    She might be able to pacify the vha’attaye with an alternative. Perhaps Faia would let