“How are you not dead of stupidity?” cried Gen, apparently irritated that Tess had thought of something she hadn’t. “The moss has taken root and grown into your brain. Get out!”
Still, the offer had been kind, and Tess intended to take her up on it. She trotted back out into the hot sun, lamenting the fact that she couldn’t take her shirt off like everyone else.
* * *
The detour was finished within two more days; they were to pack up the tents first thing in the morning and move on. Tess, clever as she was, had inadvertently hastened the crew away from the hole, and away from Pathka. Upon that final evening, she sneaked out to the meadow wall and called Pathka on her thnik again.
“I’ll stay here with you,” she said. “I’ll break my contract and slip down the hole and—”
“It’s no good staying here,” Pathka’s voice came back tinnily. “I don’t think she’s coming back. I’ll follow her scent underground while you travel with the road crew.”
“We’re on this journey together,” Tess cried.
“On parallel roads, for now. Stay topside. I’ll check back every few days, and when I find her, I’ll come get you, Teth.” He paused, then added, “I watched you working today. You looked happy. It will be better for you to stay with creatures of your own kind, in the sunshine.”
That sounded too much like goodbye. “Don’t do anything that could kill you,” said Tess, her voice thickening. “Otherwise I will find you in quigutl Heaven, if there is one, and I will bite you like you’ve never been bitten before.”
A clapping sound was Pathka’s laughter, and then the thnik buzzed, disconnected. Tess picked herself up, threw a rock at the moon, and stumbled back to camp.
* * *
She fell into routine, the daily rhythm of tamping, rolling, grinding, filling, chipping. Tess had never worked so hard in her life, but her blisters turned into calluses, her aches into smaller aches. Twinges, really. The heat grew almost unbearable as summer careened drunkenly toward fall; she wet her hat and drank water. Honestly, keeping her shirt on beat being sunburned. Her tentmates, even dark brown Mico, were crisped around the edges like roast beef. Their muscles rippled under the sun. She tried not to stare at them too obviously.
This labor was as much like digging into herself as digging into the roadbed. Every fiber of her body seemed connected to something else, an emotion, a memory, a snatch of song. This persistent ache was Will, and that one her mother; her sisters hid in unexpected twinges. Motion broke up chunks of anger and sorrow, and sweat washed them away. She felt empty and full at once, an odd condition. Labor silenced the gadfly voice better than wine. Wine muted it, but it also dulled her defenses and made that buzzing monster feel enormous; hard work made it shockingly clear that the fly was only fly-sized, and might be crushed.
Felix liked to sing a song that ran at the pace of roadbed-pounding. The rhyme scheme made it easy to improvise verses between thumps, even if one’s Ninysh was shaky:
Sweet Jessia’s so fair (thump, thump)
With golden flax for hair (thump)
I’d give away a whole year’s pay
To see her standing there (thump)
Most verses continued in the same tedious vein. Tess’s verses, which began as quiet rhyming exercises muttered under her breath, were noted by Mico, who spread them to the rest of the lads, and soon the flavor of the entire song had gone a shade darker:
This clod is like my heart (thump, thump)
I smash it all apart (thump)
I had one goal, to keep it whole
But that’s beyond my art (thump)
Felix, a little envious of Tess’s versifying, sometimes changed the last line to “But no one gives a fart,” which made everyone laugh and seemed to cheer him up.
Tess was liked well enough, but weeks passed and Aster didn’t warm to her. The others shortened her name to ’Puco, “stupid,” but Aster called her Penoio, which meant (to put it bluntly) “penis.” Tess hadn’t known the word, but when she figured it out she felt rightfully insulted. She took the matter up with Felix one day as they waited in the shade of a poplar tree for their turn at the water wagon. “Why does Aster call me that?” she fumed.
“Call you what?” said Felix pigheadedly.
“You know,” said Tess, elbowing him.
“On my mother’s grave, I do not,” said Felix, grinning in a way that showed he knew perfectly well but was determined to make her say it aloud.
Just as Tess had been when Jeanne asked about her wedding night. She deserved this, but she’d show that Felix. “Penis!” she cried, far louder than she meant to. Everyone fell silent and looked at Tess, who’d gone alarmingly crimson. A ripple of appreciative laughter rolled down the line, and they went back to talking as if nothing had happened.
Felix was laughing his ruddy head off. Tess glared at him. “Oh, you’re serious!” he said, throwing up his hands. “I don’t know. Why do you call yourself that?”
“I don’t call myself that,” she said tersely.
Felix sighed. “Tes’puco, who taught you Ninysh? Sometimes you speak like you suckled it at your mother’s teat, but other times you know nothing. Apparently I have to spell out what every five-year-old knows: here is your smart head.” He took off his hat and swatted Tess about the ears with it. “And there is your stupid head.” He mimed punching her in the crotch.
She dodged, then hit him in the stomach.
“Ow! I didn’t touch you!” he cried, and punched her in the bicep.
“Are you lads having trouble standing in line?” said Big Arnando, looming behind them.
“No,” they squeaked. Arnando walked on; Felix burst into giggles. Tess wasn’t so merry. She’d always assumed Kenneth called her Tes’puco because it started with Tess, but now she wasn’t sure. Had he known about this double meaning? Was this how he’d repaid her for making him stick his face in the fountain, or marry Jeanne, or twenty dozen other stupid ways she’d preyed on his compliant nature? It would be just like him to take revenge so subtly that she might’ve gone to her grave not realizing he’d done it.
The next time Aster called her Penoio in the middle of a card game, though, she took a jaunty little bow. She’d named herself, after all. She might as well claim it. The lads burst out laughing, and even Aster had the smallest arc of an unaccustomed smile on his narrow lips.
After cards, Tess sometimes sneaked off to call Pathka on the thnik. He was usually in some lightless tunnel that he couldn’t describe except through smell, but one evening he said, “Do you still have those scales from Big Thpooky?”
“I do,” said Tess warily. “You’re not thinking of doing that ritual again? I thought you couldn’t do it alone.”
She disliked the idea of him bleeding in the dark, far from help.
“I’m not alone, if you must know,” Pathka said. “At least, I hope I won’t be, if I can persuade ko to help me.” There was a long pause. “I’ve found Kikiu.”
“Oh?” said Tess cautiously, unsure whether to be alarmed or optimistic.
“I sensed ko up a side passage in an old iron mine,” said Pathka. “Ko was there, making more…unnatural enhancements. Anyway, since you were so critical, you should know that we had a very civil conversation. And I was right: Kikiu wasn’t called. Not like I was.
“But maybe you had a point. Maybe we could dream of Anathuthia together if we perform the kemthikemthlutl,” said Pathka. “I want you to understand that I’m making a good-faith effort to be nest to my hatchling. Since you were so critical.”
“That sounds reasonable,” said Tess, unsure whether any of this would work. Still, it was surely a good sign that he was trying. She did as he asked and left the scales in the field, under the wary eye of the moon.
In the morning they were gone.
* * *