Shine-Catch peeled a snail away from the rocks, watching as its soft body retreated back into the spiral shell. It had all kinds’a colors in that shell. Peach and orange and other such things she’d never seen outside of the sunset.
“Bug-Eater woulda loved it-” The thought slipped through before she could stop it. But then she unthought it, very hard, scrunching up the skin between her eyes and hating the thought to death.
The snail didn’t understand any of this. Stupid snail. It just knew a big ol’ giant plucked it up and was maybe going to eat it.
She dropped it into her forage bag.
In the background there was the steady thunking drive of arrows into an old tree-trunk the stoneskins had marked for practice. Their children stood, legs set steady on the earth, feeling the wind before they let each shot leap from the bow in their arms. A huge cooking pot boiled full of the grains foraged from the oasis shores - there was a kind of tufted grass that curled all up into a spiral and if you peeled away the fuzz inside there were hairy little seeds. A man used a big wide bowl and a stone wheel with two little handles to grind them down, cracking the outer shell with all the hairs and tossing aside to get dark, rich little kernels that went into the pot.
Kahlin sat along the shore, threading a holed stone with a thin bit of string and a hook. “Y’ain’t gonna get any of them fish.” She said happily, squatting down alongside him and watching his fingers work. He was full of many mysteries, this stranger, with clever tricks and weird bits of cunning in his head. She tried to keep an eye on him. “Spent a whole day tryna spear onna ‘em an never got even one. An’ then the spirit went and made it so the fish could laugh at me when I even tried.”
The stranger made a deep, thundering sound she thought was maybe him laughing too. Her eyes narrowed.
“Well, ain’t say I never warned ya.” She left him feeding the weighted line down into the water, the hook gleaming beneath as the sun prickled over the oasis all gold’n’such.
Wading down, fish kicking away as her feet stirred up silt, she picked little shell-seeds off the watertop. They were weird things with white little frills that shot back inside the shell as soon as they were touched, but she filled her arms with them and hauled her dripping self onto a rock. One by one, bracing them between her knees, she split the outer green armor. The tip of her knife bit in at the edge of the little slit where the frills came out, and she pried it open until she could dig further, finding the stringy bits that held the whole thing closed and snapping them.
Inside was a mass of pale thick stuff like uncooked fat holding in rows of pink pips. She scraped them, shell by shell. In the background the caravaners were all happy and chattering and such. There was a kid off in the side, reading from a great old book as one of the magic-do’ers watched. They were weird kinds of shamans, these caravan-shamans. They didn’t wear bones or smoke foul smelling herbs or spend their day wandering around drunk trying to eat the dogs.
They were just people. Who did magic.
It was entirely suspicious.
Kahlin shouted from beside her and nearly startled the knife from her hands. Her glare turned to shock as he began to weave the line in over his fingers, lifting it over the back of a hand and bringing it over his other wrist, again and again. On the other end was a wriggling fat fish all in grey and silver scales, kicking the water up with its tail.
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The other fish weren’t laughing now.
Lifting it from the water, Kahlin looked at her with his weird stoney face. Not an expression to be found.
She made one for him, sticking out her tongue.
“The trick is to put a little bait on and wait. The fish will come to you.” He explained.
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There were herby smelling weeds that grew near the outer ring of stones marking the oasis’ end, with dry yellow leaves that curled up into tubes. She plucked the leaves and dropped them into the forage sack. The huge trees that lifted their branches to give the oasis shade dropped perfectly smooth nuts with bright white flesh. Those went in too. Finally she took some of the bright oily-skinned fruit from the smaller trees and carved off a slice of spicy-smelling bark. That’d be enough.
At her end of the oasis, amidst tall pillars of stone that gave a little shelter from the wind, she got a fire lit up and waited till all the wood was burned down to coals in a bed of ash. Setting out a thin, flat slab of rock she waited till it was hot to the touch and began to spoon on her creation.
The pithy innards of the shell-seeds got boiled down with a bit of water, melting into a loose, sticky jamstuff all sugary-sweet. She rolled fragmented bits of the tree nut and slices of fruit into the mess, getting them bound in the syrup and rolling them into spheres, drizzling on crumbs of sliced up bark before setting them aside.
The snails got seared when the rock was hottest, peeled out of their shells and flicked down to sizzle and burst with fatty goodness. The brittle leaves got crumbled over for their fragrance.
It was a good meal. She picked up a snail with the knife-tip and dropped it into her mouth, chewing, enjoying the earthy taste and the bitter spice that was more a smell then a taste.
In the distance she could see them spooning out bowls of grain, topped with fish and boiled leaves, thin slices of root, crumbled bits of fried meat. Her eyesight was painfully keen when food was involved.
So she noticed when Kahlin came lumbering over, making the earth all but shake with his big dumb feet. She feigned all ignorant like until he kneeled down, holding out a bowl. The smell was incredible. They had better stuff’n just leaves to put in, and all those perfumes came steaming off the top of the boiled grain porridge.
“I want you to know, you’re welcome to join us. You saved our lives the day we came here. You and your benefactor.” His voice was grinding and simple. Which made it annoying when he knew all the words she didn’t. Benefactor. “I’m sure you have some good stories to tell, too. Goblin-stories I’ve never heard, or Shiny-stories, ones nobody but you can tell.”
“Uh.” She choked on her words.
He just pressed the bowl into her hands, and stood up. “Whatever choice you make, will be the right choice for you.”
The bowl was warm in her fingers. As he left, she was just sitting there, sort of curling in under the sudden weight of the choice. A stupid, easy choice. Just one that got into her brain kind’a sideways and made itself near impossible.
She sniffed, and hoped the spirit wasn’t around to see this. Shiny had always thought the gods and the ancestors must be watching over her. That she’d got the attention of high’n’mighty things all planning a special future just for Shine-Catch, glory be. But now that one of them had decided to show up proper, she realized how much she’d rather to keep to herself.
Moments where she got awful close to tears for no reason at all.
Slowly, kicking her fire over and stomping it down, Shine-Catch crept into the caravan’s circle. She felt like a ghost. A thing in raggedy skin trying to look normal. But as she sat down, nobody said anything stupid, nobody looked at her like she was a joke.
She just sat down alongside them and had breakfast. Like normal.