just as much. It was a thing I knowed well and seen a thousand times, yet it stuck out strange by being in this strange place.
It was a bed. A big, sturdy bed with a frame set over it, and sheets of cloth or sacking nailed or fixed onto the frame so whoever was in the bed could draw them closed and sleep the better. Only they was open and pulled back now, so I could see there was someone curled up on the bed like they was asleep.
There was people watching over him while he slept. Four men and four women. They was all four naked, and yet they was armed for a hunt, the men with spears and the women with bows. All the hair was shaved off their heads, and off their bodies too, and they was all of them real tall and strong-looking. They scared me, to tell you the truth, and it wasn’t just the weapons they was carrying, nor the stern looks on their faces. It was something else that I didn’t realise until we was up close.
Everyone I’d seen in the big cave had a different thing drawed on their face. These men and women had all got the same thing, which was a hand with the fingers all spread. I guess that doesn’t sound like such a frightening thing, yet it was to me. It made it seem like they was all of them the same person in some way, thinking the same thoughts. I was scared that when they opened their mouths, the same words would come out of all of them at the same time. I don’t think I could of stood that. But no words Sky said at all. They just stood there and watched us come.
When we was maybe ten long strides away from the bed, we stopped. Sky gripped my arms just under the shoulders and lifted me off her back like you would take off a bag that was slung there. She set me down on the ground and kind of nudged me in the back of my knees to tell me I was to kneel down. I couldn’t do that, with my leg still in the splint, so I sit down on the ground instead. I didn’t want to do nothing that would make her hit me again, or cause the hand people to notice me.
“We got something for him,” Sky said. “An altar boy maybe.”
“He spoke while you was away,” one of the hand men said. “He’s purposing to put the woman up on the altar.”
“Still,” Sky come back, “I think he should take a look.”
“He’s asleep,” said one of the women.
“No,” come a voice from behind them. “He is not. I sleep only to talk to the sender, and even then I wake when there’s need. Lift me up now, and set me out. I’ll see the boy Sky brought. Didn’t Sky bring the woman too? Doesn’t Sky bring me all the good things there are?”
The hand people stopped talking then. The women slung their bows across their backs. The men moved all at once to the four corners of the bed and stood by with their spears at the high carry.
Then the women come in between them. They stepped right up onto the bed, leaned down and lifted up the man – for it was a man – who had been sleeping there. They took him by his shoulders and his knees, as gentle as if they was carrying a newborn baby. I was minded more of a funeral though, for they carried him between them, raised almost to their shoulders, off the bottom end of the bed and all the way to where I was knelt. As he got closer to me, I seen that his skin was all blue, like glastum woad, only darker.
Then the men run after the women and done something stranger still. They made themselves into a chair for the blue man. One of them went down on hands and knees. Another one stood behind him, and one to either side. As the women lowered the blue man down, the men linked their arms and bowed their heads. They slid theirselves in around him so his back was against the man behind and his forearms resting on the ones to the two sides of him. He wriggled a little, getting himself comfortable.
The women stood back, two to the left and two to the right. They took up