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The clan was smaller now than that which had first come to Hodel in the spring of 1898, but that was to be expected. It is an easy thing to die in a new place, particularly when there are monsters in your dark, safe tu
And they grew well. The tu
They lived for the most part in the mid-levels of the mine, where the temperature stayed cooled year-round but never so cold that water turned hard. There were a few vent shafts here, if one traveled far enough, but most of the clan stayed close to the old track line, the great crossways of the Hodel mine, their hub of community. It was a good place, a strong place, nearly sixty feet by forty and adjoined by two other rooms half that impressive size. In 1898, the rough dome of the chamber was thirty-seven feet above the floor, but now it was scarcely half that and the many criss-crossing rails that had once brought Richard Hodel a half-ton of galena each day had been long buried under layers of animal hides. There was room enough for all of them in this place and they all used it, not only to sleep, but to hold whatever objects occupied their fleeting interests.
In 1898, the mine had been nearly a settlement in its own right; now its many chambers provided treasure to the many generations of the clan who had usurped it. Even if much of this stuff had been ultimately covered by the steady growth of rotting furs, much yet remained—old carts, picks, winches and pullies, rust-frozen links of chain, all tumbled together in a great heap at one end of the track line—and occasionally some forgotten piece would be unearthed and marveled at once more. Boredom was unknown to the clan. Even the most familiar passageway could bring something new at any time and anyway, familiarity was reassuring. To change, to evolve, was no great ambition of their kind. Even Pool, who enjoyed his distractions in ways few of his clan could understand, wanted nothing more than to come home to his particular piece of the sleeping place and bed down among those he knew, hear their same speech and feel their same touches, knowing that tomorrow would pass just as yesterday had.
There were nearly forty of them now, and another coming, if White Belly’s swelling stomach meant a baby and not belly-bloat or worms or some other trouble. Pool was fairly certain it would be the baby. White Belly was good at growing them, if not so good at rearing them, and in all of his memories, she had either the round swell of her stomach out before her or a baby keening for her slack breast. Pool thought it was a baby, and more importantly, Edges, who slept his angry, muttering sleep at White Belly’s side, also seemed to think it was a baby and would not let anyone else close enough either to feed her or give the concerning bulge a testing slap.
Pool actually could count. Not as high as forty, but to five easily, to ten with difficulty, and with time and effort as far as twenty. Nevertheless, he had an intuitive understanding of his clan; he knew at a glance who was there and who missing, just as he could look at meat and know at once how many it would feed and how well. Numbers he found difficult (and most of his people found them impossible), but many mouths and small fish he understood very well.
Still, it was not the leader’s responsibility to feed others. That Pool had made it his responsibility upon occasion might have been an indication of his essential strangeness or perhaps nobility (which was itself a strangeness), but then, his motives were frequently suspect. Pool had often fed Flicker, for example, simply because he knew she was far too quick to grab when the soft root of a man’s body turned hard and insistent. That Flicker had been caught now and then only made her that much quicker and more wary around the men in the small clan, and yet, with the steady offering of food over enough days, Pool had managed, quietly and without fighting, to feed her from his hand first and then to mount her and finally to coax her into the crossways to sleep beside him so that he could mount her without the bother of having to find her first.
It was the same reason, essentially, that Edges fed White Belly, not because she was difficult to ease onto her back, but because she would do so for anyone, at any time, for any reason. An unexpected hiss or sudden movement would send her rolling over to expose that soft, white belly (and strangely bloodless woman-wound that made a man’s root so demanding), and send Edges into a howling, slapping rage if he happened to be near enough to see it. The paradox was, that in order to make sure White Belly did not take food from other men (or let them rub their roots in her while she ate it), Edges alone fed her, which meant that he had to leave her in order to find food, which meant that he often returned to find Splinter or Broken Tooth huffing hurriedly away on top of her. There had been blood over it already, and that someone might be killed was a definite possibility, but it wasn’t a leader’s responsibility to stop that. Maybe he would have made it his responsibility if Pool wanted White Belly for himself, but he didn’t.
Pool wanted Echo.
They had been children together—he had some hazy memory of her as a suckling, but was not quite old enough to remember her being born—but they were not close. Echo wasn’t close to anyone. She was clan in that she was the same as them, and was known to have been born to Fur and so was unquestionably accepted, but she had not come to the crossways where the others slept, choosing instead to flit through the tu
But she was beautiful, healthy and strong, and more, she was clever, far too clever to be caught even by the quickest lunge or the fattest and most tempting frog. Pool had tamed Flicker to his side with food and patience, but not Echo. Never Echo. He had tried to woo her several times with fire, and thought for a time he had been making some progress; the little red flame had proved as mesmerizing to her as to any of the others, and he could draw her in close enough to see by its light, but at his first movement, at even the gentlest purr, she was gone.
But she was clever, and sometimes Pool found her little caches of brush which she dragged from the light places to dry in the tu
Now Pool crouched in the rain, slapping himself where the fat drops fell until it registered that this was water, only water. It fell sometimes in other places. Now it was falling here, where it had never fallen before, and there was light above him, which had never shown light before, and these were things that needed thinking about.
The corpse earned none of his attention. Bloated and blackened by early rot, it had been at once identified and disregarded. Not as a dead man, but as a dead something—spoiled meat unfit for eating. Something that would need to be dealt with, in other words, but not a man. It was too different for Pool’s eyes to see as a person, so it was just a thing, not-same.
Looking at the two together, the forty-day corpse and the living man, it was not immediately clear which looked the most human. Their shapes shared enough—two arms, two legs, five fingers to each hand, two eyes that looked curiously out from a thinking mind—but no one would have ever believed they were looking at a man if they had glimpsed Pool at a distance in the dark. Uncounted eons breeding in the deep tu
Although he could and sometimes did go upon two legs, he was more apt to prowl about on his belly, his powerful fingers and grasping toes made to pull him through narrow cha