Heart Rot

①Ⓞ - TEN

By one month later, though, both cataract and fear had almost been forgotten. The paths were beginning to dry up, and the fields were blooming and pushing up strong shoots in the growing heat of the weather.

Comalpo always loved being able to travel to the plateau - to look out and see the whole forest pressing green up against its foot like a ruched knot-rug, see the mists rising up from the canopy beneath it. The plants up at that altitude grew small and scrubby, but rich, and there were many that could be used for medicine or for crafting that could be found nowhere else. For once, they were ahead of their chores, and now that the ground was almost fully dried out it would be an ideal time to go, to replace Lotlixya's stores after the past wet season.

It took a whole day's journey up, and a whole day's journey back, so anyone making the trip would be required to make camp up there on the plateau. Seeking her permission, Comalpo had found Lotlixya crouching over a charcoal fire in the pit at the side of the house, stirring a fetid-smelling basin half-buried in the ground. Dyeing was not a good-smelling process, particularly with anil: it had to be done outdoors. "Absolutely," Lotlixya had said, transferring another rock from the embers into her solution. Leaves had floated to the surface and back down again with a stir of her paddle. "Fetch me some heart-lichen while you're up there, would you?"

"Of course," he had answered her, and there was now a bladder crammed absolutely full of the stuff sitting at his side. They had made their camp in no time, and retrieved all the flora they needed, so now he could simply lean against a chunk of log and gaze out over the beauty of the forest.

Most of the top of the plateau was covered in scrub-bushes growing so thickly they could not be navigated mounted, so where the path widened out there was a clearing paved with grass and rock-lichens underneath a bent tree. Its branches had been rubbed smooth by years of ropes placed around them; their own two asses had been hitched to the lower, firmer ones, and were placidly grazing, the tearing of grass in loud harmony with the crackle of the fire.

Tliichpil poked absently with his knife at one of the wild squash they had picked, rolled in mud, and set in the embers of the fire to bake slowly. Apparently finding it done, he pulled it carefully out and rubbed off the muddy shell with the corner of his apron.

A rustle down by his hip distracted Comalpo. He looked and saw a branch swaying behind him and, pressed against the log he sat on, a small orange-and-viridescent frog, its toes splayed and throat pumping. "Hello, wise one," he greeted it. The frog blinked at them with its wide eyes and sprang away again.

"Do you have any new stories?" he asked, for something to say.

"For you? Always." Tliichpil stretched out his legs with a contented groan. He sliced open the squash he had retrieved neatly, the juice running down his wrist.

"Are you going to tell me one?"

"I was getting to that!" He took a bite and swallowed. "Mm. Listen," he said, "and you shall hear a story. Once there was a poor woman who lived alone with her children, for since her first husband had died none had been willing to take her for many years. And her land was very poor, for it was dry and rocky and fed only by a stream that passed far from her homestead, and they were often hungry." He pinched his amulet - a catfish carved in turquoise, for abundance - and twisted it on its cord. Pinch. Twist. Pinch. Twist. "One day, as she was walking in the forest gathering mushrooms, there appeared to her one of Olin's wraiths, that had cloaked itself in a fair appearance. And the wraith made this offer to her: it would enrich the soil of the woman's land for one year, and ensure that her stream was always fed and that the winds did not blow away the dust from her fields, but at the end of that year she had to give it in exchange all that she had grown above the ground. And if she did not do this then it had leave to take her and her children both to Tlazocpalli, fast as the wind." Tlazocpalli - Olin's realm, outside the dome of the sky, where there was no light and the walls were of rotting flesh and poisonous worms burrowed into the souls that he claimed.