Mirror Space - Marianne de Pierres [66]
He’d waited for her, roaming the edge of the coastal brush-line, trying to decipher what was making him so uneasy about the place. Now that she was back, he felt an almost uncontrollable urge to move on.
‘Weed?’ he asked.
‘Edible weed, from beneath the reefs. The seeds are fleshy. I’ve been using them for energy, Principe, but I wasn’t sure if there’d be ill effects. Some weeds are poisonous. It’s been days now and I’ve found no problems. I think it’s safe for everyone.’
Trin stared at her. She looked tired and thin but not sick. Somehow she’d survived the extreme rigours of their flight better than most.
He took the seed from her and bit into it. A sweet and salty taste exploded in his mouth and he felt a surge of energy, as if he’d taken stimulants or drunk thick, strong mocha. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘It could’ve been dangerous. I had to be sure.’
Trin took another bite and experienced the same rush of energy. ‘That was my decision to make. Not yours.’
Her smile vanished, and she frowned.
Trin bit back a further remonstration as Vespa staggered through the brush-line dragging something larger then himself.
‘A xoc?’ Trin’s anger turned to incredulousness. ‘You bested a xoc?’
‘A gift from the ocean. It was dying in the shallows from reef cuts; bleeding to death. The storm must’ve brought it in too close to land.’ Her voice remained steady and level, but Trin sensed her unhappiness.
She walked over to the boulders and sank down next to the korm. It chittered loudly with pleasure.
Trin did not follow her. He called Juno over. ‘Make sure everyone gets some of the xoc and the pipis. Let them have it in their caves. But do not distribute the weed yet. I will speak to you again when Leah has set.’
Juno raised his eyebrows but did not question the instruction.
Trin peeled off several of the weed pods and stalked around the boulders to the small soak of fresh water that bled out from under the rocks. He drank his fill and then carried a shell of water across to the brush-line closer to the beach. Soon the sun would preclude any movement that was not under shade, but he didn’t wish to return to his own shallow cave with Jilda and Tina Galiotto. The miners and Cass Mulravey wouldn’t welcome him to theirs, and his Carabinere had found women to lie with. In the daybreak light he’d seen Juno Genarro stroking the hair of the young woman Josephia as she cried silently into the sand. With even the slightest return of energies, so did emotions spill forth.
Trin stayed the rest of the day under the shade of the brush, sipping from the shell and slowly consuming the weed pods. With each pod his senses seemed to sharpen. He used the time to examine the surrounds of the boulders. At a glance, they were merely a fallen jumble of large rocks that had tumbled down from the hill to rest in a flat open space. The vegetation around them appeared to be a scant, sand-crawling creeper that flowered at night and exuded a perfume when trampled. And they had trampled it, in their trips to and from the brush-line. The creeper grew strongly near the water, but gradually thinned out as the open space stretched across to the base of the hill and sand met clay there.
The bare earth was a pale red and compacted enough that there were irregular-shaped cracks across it. Trin wondered why nothing grew on it.
He also wondered how many places on the island had fresh water leaking from the ground. He knew precious little about ecology and even less about fauna - the mining belt on Araldis was home to nothing more than checclia and lig beetles - but here, amongst real vegetation there was room for other creatures. Animals that would need to drink fresh water.
And yet they had seen no sign of their presence - no droppings or scrapings of anything other than a few small, timid checclia flicking their tongues into the fresh water. Perhaps his unease was merely a reflex. Or perhaps he sought a way to prove himself against Djeserit in