The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,170
Sky?” I asked her.
“No!”
I was fixing to say: you don’t want that to happen to you. But if she didn’t see, there was no use in me threatening. And there wasn’t no words that would make her understand the danger she was in. I had got to go about it a different way.
“Cup, you got to listen to me,” I says. “I don’t see you as being someone cruel, or that hurts for hurt’s sake. I know I done insult to your people, but I was forced to it. I didn’t want to get burned up on that bonfire. But now I’m out of there I won’t do you no more harm.”
“It don’t matter what you do. And it don’t matter what I do.” She wrapped her arm around my forehead now, holding me still like as it was for the killing. Her grip was fierce tight.
“Yeah, it does. Of course it does.”
“He’s dead. You killed him. You killed the last one sent, and there won’t be no more. He was gonna give me an angel body to be in, and now I’m stuck like this. Like I am now, for aye and fucking ever!” She gun to cry, the tears falling down on my neck all hot.
“You’re still your own self, Cup.”
“That’s what I just said, shit-brain!”
“Inside and out. And if the one doesn’t match the other, inside wins every time. You know who you are. What others think, and what they say about it – well, that’s because they don’t see. There’s only you that knows the both sides of your own skin.”
“I seen them scars on your wrists,” I says. “Dandrake marks. My friend, Veso Shepherd, he was crossed too. The other way though. He was called girl when he was born, but knowed he was a boy. And his mother believed in Dandrake, so she cut the marks into him to uncross him. That’s what they done to you, isn’t it? Tried to pray you the other way round, and scarred you to make the prayers stay in you.”
Cup was shaking, and the shaking made the knife blade slide across my windpipe, sawing at it just a little.
“Koli, please!” Monono said, louder than before. “Just duck or roll sideways. She won’t hurt you. She won’t get the chance!”
“And when that didn’t work,” I says to Cup, “they made you faceless. They thought it better to put you on the road than have you be the way you was. I’m guessing that’s what happened.”
“I wasn’t made faceless,” Cup said in a kind of a growl. “I run away. The day after my father cut them marks into me. The same day he pair-pledged me to the Peacemaker’s cousin – a woman that was older than my ma, and the onliest one that would take me, crossed as I was, and call me husband. I run away, and kept on running until I come to him. To Senlas. He was the first that ever seen me true. He looked in my eyes and he named me, what I was.”
“Yeah,” I says. “He’s clever. That don’t make him god though.”
“He was better than you, Koli lying bastard. Koli that fucking… murders, and cheats, and… and…”
She run out of words, and it seemed she run out of being angry too, so all that was left was the sorrowing. The tears that had been coming silent till then broke out loud and ragged. The knife slipped down out of her hand into the water.
Then she screamed like someone that was scalded as Monono hit her with a hundred and forty bells.
56
“Every time I reach a decision, Koli,” Ursala said, “you turn it upside down.”
I told her I was sorry, and that was not my intention.
“He could have died, baa-baa-san,” Monono added. “While you were sulking in your tent.”
Ursala didn’t have no patience with that argument. “Keeping him alive isn’t my job. And as for her…” She give a wave of her hand towards Cup, who was sitting by the drudge with her hands tied behind her back. The drudge’s gun was pointing right at her in case she done something reckless. But she was not like to. She was half-froze, just like I was. In fact, I felt like I was going to die if I didn’t get warm soon.
After she dropped the knife and got hit with Monono’s alarm, Cup and me sit in the river and talked a while.