on her pale skin, some red and fresh, others scabbed over with a dark crust. Her face was painted too, but it was just a line that went from under one eye, round her chin and up to the other eye. I guess it was meant to be a cup, kind of, the same way the sun and moon made Sky’s face be a kind of a picture of the real sky.
All three of them was pale, now I come to see them properly. It was what made me think they might be family, even when they all looked so different. Mole was slight, like Cup was, but stood real tall. His elbows and his knees – which I could see because he wore a kind of kirtle on his nethers instead of trousers – was big and white like you could see the bones through the skin. It seemed to me at first that he didn’t have no painting on his face, but he did: it was a spot on either side of his nose, and a line over the top. Judging by the other two, it might of been supposed to make his nose look like a mole’s snout, so his face matched his name the way theirs did.
I can remember all this pretty clear because I didn’t have nothing to do but look at the three of them while they was making a splint for my leg and tying it on. This was after they dragged me up on my feet a few times, and I just fell down again crying with the pain each time because my leg wouldn’t take no more weight than a feather before it folded.
“Okay then,” Sky said. “We got two choices. Either we kill him here, or we fix him good enough to walk.”
Mole give his opinion that I was faking that my leg was bad, so I could run away when their backs was turned.
“That’s really good faking,” Sky said. “His knee’s swole up like a gourd, and red as blood. Let’s see you fake that, Mole. Go ahead. Or else shut your stupid mouth and cut me some straight branches.”
She had a kind of a knife that was a sword, almost, with a curved blade that got thicker towards the end and bent back a little. It was a fearsome thing to look at. Mole and Cup brung her branches, and she cut them straight as a ruled line, her arm rising and falling almost too quick to see. Then she cut what was left of Catrin’s rope into five lengths that was about the same, and tied the branches to my leg to keep it straight.
“Okay, shit-brain,” she said to me. “You think you can walk? Try it so I can see.”
I made shift to do it, swinging my stiff leg out in front of me at each step like I was doing a cast in the stone game, then bringing the rest of me along after it. It still hurt somewhat, but I didn’t like the other idea, which was to kill me, so I thought I had got to make this work.
“I can zap them with the alarm any time you like, Koli,” Monono said. “Just say the word and I’ll mush their brains into jelly.” But I didn’t do it, for it wouldn’t of been no good. I couldn’t get away from Sky and them with my leg the way it was and my hands tied, and if I tried they was like as not to strike me down as I was running. There was nothing for it but to go along with them for now and to do what they said, hoping that a chance would come along later for me to slip away from them and hide.
Sky watched my stiff-leg walk with her lips all narrow. “We got five miles or more to go, runt,” she said. “You better tell me right now if you’re gonna be able to keep that up.”
“Runt,” Monono repeated with sourness in her voice. “What a nasty piece of work. You know something, Koli? I’m starting to wish I was a laser beam after all.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said to Sky. “It doesn’t hurt so much now.” I had got to say it, for Sky’s hand was on the handle of that sword thing when she asked. If I said I couldn’t do it, I don’t think she would of offered to carry me.
“Okay then,” she told me.