D’Jevier set down her cup. “About these two boys who supposedly killed her … “
Madame said, “Bane and Dyre. I believe they were her sons. I can’t say whether they knew she was their mother, though I rather think not. Mismothering was probably the least of her sins.”
The two Hags were shocked into silence. Madame sipped, staring at them over the rim of her glass, thinking that she, too, might have been shocked if she had not had the opportunity of knowing Bane and Dyre and the man she thought was their father. “Whether she was or was not their mother, I believe their father is a man known to me as Thor Ashburn. Not a Family Man, no g’ to his name, but not a supernume, either. He offered my investors a very large fee if I would take these two boys and train them. Left to my own decision, I would not have done so for any sum, but as you know, we cannot always do what we would prefer.”
“Indeed,” D’Jevier said thoughtfully.
Madame went on, “Over the years I’ve heard this and that about Marool. Consorts talk among themselves at the Temple and in the park. The talk comes back, and the Houses hear what’s said. What was said about Mantelby identified her as a sadist, an accomplished torturer, a gloating killer. She’s been seen in public every day or so for eighteen years, however, so if she bore these boys, it was while she was away, supposedly at Nehbe.”
“Interesting,” murmured Onsofruct. “Our Haggers tell us the man who made the terrible machines also lives near Nehbe.”
Madame set down her glass. “The thing I can’t figure out is that Thor Ashburn seems unconnected to any known family. Also, he and his sons share a family stink.”
“Skunk-lung?”
“That’s what it’s called,” Madame confirmed. “Though it doesn’t come from the lung.”
“But none of the settlers could have had it,” D’Jevier remarked. “It would have been a disqualifying attribute for a colonial.”
“I have a suspicion,” murmured Madame, “that those who had it weren’t settlers. At least, not from the second settlement.”
“First settlement survivors?” breathed D’Jevier. “There were no survivors!”
“How do we know, for sure?” Madame raised her eyebrows as she refilled their glasses. “I’ve been puzzling over this a good deal since meeting Thor Ashburn. I hated the man instinctively, the way we hate snakes, without thinking about it, knowing they have not enough brain to be swayed by pity or reason. And yet, he is man-kindly looking, not unhandsome, not badly built. He had to come from somewhere. So, I asked myself, how do we know there were no survivors? Our ancestors didn’t see any, quite true, but then, our ancestors arrived over a period of twelve years, in ten large shiploads, a thousand to the ship. None of them knew all the others, not even the ones on their own ship.
“If someone from the first settlement had shown up in a bustling neighborhood and said he was from upriver or downriver, who would have known?”
Onsofruct mused, “According to the servants at Mantelby Mansion, the boys claimed to be sons of thunder.”
“Thor was a god of thunder back on Old Earth,” said Madame. “That’s what Thor means, thunder. Thor is also the supremacist planet from which the schismatic group departed to become the first settlers here.”
“You’re forgetting something,” said D’Jevier. “The first settlement had no women, and the second settlement was almost a hundred years later! They couldn’t have lived that long.”
Madame nodded. “They weren’t supposed to have had women, no. But perhaps they did. Stolen women. Enslaved women. They simply didn’t want it known.”
Onsofruct cried, “So why haven’t we ever seen them? Why didn’t they make themselves known?”
“We haven’t seen them because they didn’t wish to be seen,” said Madame. “They know what the Hags would do about enslaved women, and they do not want us to know they are here. They must have maintained a hidden community, somewhere. This planet is certainly rife with enough wilderness to hide a whole population if it wanted to stay hidden!”
After a long pause, Onsofruct said, “In addition to the two sons of thunder, there’s a sailor lad missing, who seemingly went off with the Questioner herself, plus another of your young men. His name was Mouche.”