The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,132
it be that moved around the valley by their own secret ways and hid their village away inside a hill? It was not hard to guess. But I thought shunned men would look like monsters, and bark and howl like wild animals. Sky and Mole and Cup was not like that, but more like regular people, and I was fooled.
“You knowed him,” Senlas said, nodding towards the butchered meat. “He wasn’t kin to you, I see that, but you did know him. You was there when he died. Did you kill him? I think you did, but the answer’s not all the way clear. Sender says for you to tell it.”
When I didn’t answer, one of the hand women slung her bow again and grabbed hold of me by my hair and my chin, pushing and twisting so I was looking right up into the blue man’s eyes. They swum in my sight, hundreds and hundreds of them.
“Tell it,” Senlas said.
I wish I would of been brave enough to hold my silence, but all them eyes cowed me and pressed on me. “He… he was trying to kill me,” I said. “I broke his weapon, and fire burst out of it. It took his arm.”
Senlas looked at Sky, then back at me. “That’s the truth of it,” he said. “And the truth washes you clean of all the sin that might of been. You didn’t witness to a falsehood, and you didn’t do a murder.” He smiled like this made him happy. Like as I was his child and had done a clever thing that give him to be proud. “Now let’s see about the other side of it,” he said. “For a soul’s got two faces, same as a coin has got. Your one face is pure, brown-skin boy, but I still got to flip you in the air and see what’s on the downside of you.”
Brown-skin was a strange thing to call me, or it would of been in Mythen Rood, where skins was of every shade. But I seen how the people in the cave had most of them got skin that was pale like the flesh of an onion. I wondered then how long they lived down here in the dark, for the sun would of surely give them somewhat of darker colour if they spent much time standing under it.
Another thought come to me then. If they had lived here that long, couldn’t these be the same shunned men that took my brother? I might of walked past Jud already when we come into the cave and not knowed him.
Senlas seen my eyes go looking off in all directions, and a frown come on his face. “Mind me, child,” he said. “These are important questions, and you got to give them proper heed. Has a man or a woman knowed you? In the sweat of love, I mean? Have you rutted, for your body’s hunger?”
My thoughts was still on Jud, but the tattooed man’s voice had a cold warning in it. It was plain to see he didn’t like to be disregarded, even when he was asking about things that was nobody’s business but mine. The memory of that one time with Spinner rose up in my mind, and before I even knowed what I was doing I shaked my head. I was not going to share that remembering with nobody, least of all a shunned man and a king of shunned men that lived by making other people be his meat and bread.
“Never? Not so much as a kiss?”
I shaked my head again. Everyone in the world has been kissed, I thought, but he asked me the question so he had got to believe there was two answers to it. And that was the onliest one I felt like giving him.
Senlas looked at me for a long time. A hard stare, out of all them eyes, with a lot of thought behind it. “Now that’s a half-truth,” he says at last. “I know you loved at least, howsoever you did or didn’t give your body rein to gallop. What was her name, brown-skin boy? Let me sieve it, and see the rest of it.”
I was powerful reluctant to do that, but the eyes was pressing on me again. The woman still kept her hold on my head so I had got to look. I couldn’t fight that stare, but could only pull back from it a little way.