Plague of Angels 03: Fish Tails by Tepper Sheri S

Author:Tepper, Sheri S. [Tepper, Sheri S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, Novel
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-10-01T03:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Cultural Confrontations

THE DARKNESS IN THE CLEARING WHERE XULAI AND Precious Wind were waiting was full of murmurings, rustling, fluttering, a myriad of moth and bat sounds.

“The fork in the road is several miles east,” Precious Wind said, her own voice a mere whisper. “They should be getting close about now.”

Xulai murmured, “Ever since his adventure with the men who were going to rob Saltgosh, Willum has been defining travelers on the road as ‘Friend or foe: we just don’ know.’ ”

“Willum sounds like a terror,” Precious Wind murmured in return. There was no need for their extreme caution. No one could hear them from the vicinity of the Artemisian camp. The atmosphere of the almost silent mountain seemed to require it, but surely the actual situation didn’t . . . Of course, she had just arrived. Did she know what the actual situation really was?

Xulai mused, “I’m sure he likes to think he’s a terror, but there’s something gallant about him. The care he takes of Needly is surprising!”

“Nothing prevents small boys from having large ideals, once they know such things are possible. It’s alerting them to the possibility that’s sometimes difficult. Tell me about this place he was reared. What did you call it? Gravy . . . ?”

“Gravysuck.” Xulai went on to describe the town, Willum’s ma, the uncle called Lorp.

“A Lorpist!” Precious Wind exclaimed loudly, immediately clapping a hand over her mouth. “That almost made me forget we’re supposed to be hiding out. Lorpists! Ooh, yes. We’ve met Lorpists along the coast and in several places on our way cross-country toward Artemisia. The last group of them we met—five of them, men, I suppose, though they looked rather more like pictures I have seen of prehistoric apes—saw the rings in my ears and decided they needed to examine the whole group of us for what they were pleased to call ‘wholeness.’ We would, of course, strip in order to allow them access.”

“I trust you escaped them?”

Precious Wind had a very mobile, expressive face. Xulai could often interpret whole orations without hearing them. Or, at least, know what was coming, as now, when her friend’s lips curved into her recently-very-well-fed-tiger smile: “Well, since I had ul xaolat it wasn’t a fair fight, I admit. I told the group that my god insisted that all men are complete only when they have no hair and nothing resembling a testicle. They cried heresy. I declared a battle of the gods, Lorp and his deity against me and ul xaolat, which had already painlessly removed all the features mentioned from each of them. Cries of dismay degenerated into violent argument. Some thought ritual suicide was the answer. We left them still arguing.”

“The Lorp we knew was destined for the ‘cata-pull-it.’ ” Xulai went on to repeat Willum’s description of the process, concluding: “He had died before being launched, but it was all more than a little strange. Many of the small villages we’ve traveled through have been strange . . .”

Precious

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.