Chapter 7 #2
“Fine,” muttered the Dervish, retreating back down the hillside. Edmund followed him, until they were hopefully out of range of the camp. “What’s a moiety?”
“A group that practices what’s known as fictive kinship.
Basically, everyone in the group is your close family, regardless of your actual relationship.
Some moieties only allow you to marry within the group, but others require you to marry outside of it.
The Netweavers and the Half-Sleeve exclusively married one another.
The Netweavers are mostly farmers, the Half-Sleeve are hunters and shepherds and travel during the warm seasons.
” The firelight from the camp had dazzled the Dervish’s eyes, so he couldn’t see Edmund’s face in the dimness, but suspected that he knew what the other man’s expression would be anyway.
Excited, intent, delighted to share what he knows with someone else …
It almost made up for the fact that the Dervish was being given a sociology lesson while dangerously close to an armed enemy camp.
“About seven years ago, there was a terrible winter that made trade between them almost impossible for months. The Netweavers had stored crops, but the Half-Sleeve did not. But the Half-Sleeve came through better in the end, because the Netweavers developed a dreadful winter sickness. No matter how much they ate, it didn’t help.
‘Starving while surrounded by rice’ is how they described it.
They had only just started to recover from that the following spring when an …
illness … cropped up.” Edmund’s enthusiasm seemed to dry up suddenly, between one word and the next.
“What kind of illness?”
The other man sighed. “Blight,” he said.
“They call it werkblight in Anuket City. It’s, um, not a disease, exactly.
It’s complicated. But the people who’d suffered the winter sickness seemed to be extremely susceptible to it.
As if their bodies had turned on them. The mortality rate was much higher than it usually is.
By the time the cure got to them, they’d lost nearly a third of their population.
The young and the old were especially hard hit. ”
“Oof,” said the Dervish.
“Indeed. And when the Half-Sleeve men were looking to marry women from the Netweavers, as they’d done for centuries—well, there simply weren’t enough women. A few hundred Half-Sleeve men had no wives and no hope of wives, and got … um … fractious.”
“Fractious,” repeated the Dervish, who had been a mercenary and had a pretty good idea of what such men might turn to.
“Anyway, since the Half-Sleeve women had fewer men to marry as well, some of the men proposed that they marry each other. Which was viewed as incest and absolutely intolerable by the rest of Half-Sleeve. The women, for the most part, said they would rather share a husband than marry their own brothers.”
“I suppose sharing a wife didn’t occur to any of them?”
“A few did, I think. And lots more just left and presumably found someone else a few valleys over. But there were still enough angry young men to cause problems, and eventually Half-Sleeve exiled the troublemakers. So they started calling themselves the Sleeveless and started raiding both moieties for livestock and…”
“Women,” the Dervish finished. “What a lovely bunch they must be.”
“We were always warned to be careful traveling through this valley,” Edmund said. “But generally they didn’t bother single men, unless you had livestock with you.”
“And yet you brought the mule.”
“Do mules count as livestock?” He could hear the frown in Edmund’s voice. “I didn’t think they did.”
“Mules,” said a new voice, “may not be livestock, but there’s good eating on one if you’re hungry enough.”
The Dervish froze. His night vision had adjusted enough to make out a shadow that had just stepped out of the trees, and more importantly, the crossbow that the shadow was holding.
Shit, shit, shit. We didn’t get far enough away, and instead of checking for sentries, I sit and listen to Edmund lecture me about historical marriage customs. And no matter how fast I move, I can’t get between Edmund and a crossbow bolt. Shit.
“Hands where I can see them,” the shadow behind the crossbow said. “Throw down your weapons.”
The Dervish thought briefly about resisting. If they killed Edmund, his next wielder was probably going to be one of the Sleeveless. On the other hand, he could probably take one man, if the bolt didn’t hit anything vital.
He tensed, shifting his weight to lunge … and then the sentry shouted, “Over here! Caught some fellas looking for their mule!”
Shit.
Edmund gulped and dropped his belt knife onto the carpet of pine needles at his feet, then began to shrug out of the makeshift harness holding the sword. The Dervish sighed. Maybe we’ll be lucky and we can talk our way out of it?
Two minutes later, as they were pushed into the circle of firelight, the Dervish looked from face to face and thought he’d never seen a bunch that looked less interested in talking.
“Well, well, well.” The man he’d seen carrying the staff before pushed his way forward. “I thought I told you that was our mule.”
“You did,” said the Dervish. “We were coming to … err … ask directions.”
“By spying on us?”
“We weren’t sure what to ask yet.”
Edmund cleared his throat. “If you spare our lives, I can promise that a significant ransom would be offered for both of us.”
Possibly for him, anyway. Still, it was nice of the man not to throw the Dervish to the wolves.
“Ransom, eh?” The speaker this time was an older man with thinning hair and a badly trimmed beard. “Always a lot of work, that.”
“The reward will be more than worth it,” Edmund promised. “I am a temple dedicate.”
This seemed to give the Sleeveless pause. Mutters ran through the crowd. “It’s bad luck to kill a priest,” someone said.
“Bah.” The bearded man spat on the ground. “Ransom’s a fool’s game, but I don’t want a priest’s blood on my blade. Throw ’em down to the crawly.”
“The crawly!” someone else cried, and other voices took it up.
Hands grabbed the Dervish’s elbows and lifted him nearly off his feet, shoving him toward the far end of the hall.
Someone must have grabbed Edmund as well, because the Dervish thrashed involuntarily, driven to protect his wielder, but unable to get free.
One of his captors clouted him over the ear, and his head rang as they dragged him.
“It’s okay!” Edmund called somewhere behind him. “I’m all right!”
“Not for long,” said someone else, and chuckled. The magic tried to latch on to the Dervish again, and he snarled at it inside his head. Stop! If I fight back, they’ll kill us both!
The compulsion faded slightly, like a querulous voice vanishing into the distance.
The Dervish’s feet skidded over stones gone uneven with age.
It occurred to him that he did not know the name or even the location of the scholar who might be able to break his curse, and if Edmund died, he’d never find out.
And this is why I don’t hope for things.
A man with a grin made more menacing by his lack of teeth pulled back a hatch that only partly covered a hole in the floor. Darkness yawned underneath.
“Down you go,” said one of the men holding the Dervish, and shoved him into the hole.