“Timmys? You saw Timmys? Our teacher said they didn’t come till after the second settlement!”
“They were here almost as soon as we were, but I’m not talking about that … “ He paused, as though he’d lost track of his tale.
“So?” muttered Bane. “So, you brought women.”
“We were getting ready to, getting the ship ready, deciding who’d go and who’d stay, and then one night, the Timmys came out of the walls in packs, like ants. It wasn’t just Timmys, either; they had other kinds of bigger critters with ‘em, and there we were, all of us, wrapped up like so many packages, being hauled off into these woods here. They hauled us partway and they floated us partway, and they swallowed us partway, and we ended up down in caves, over there, some days west, beyond the far side of this valley! They took us out of the caves and down into a kind of pond. And they threw us in the pond. And after a while, we crawled out again.”
“So,” muttered Bane again, yawning.
Ashes said angrily, “So, some of us came out pretty much like we was before and some of us didn’t.”
The boys stared at him, waiting, but he seemed to find no words to go on with his story. Finally, Dyre ventured, “What do you mean, not like before?”
Ashes chewed at his lip, eventually saying, “Some of us was changed, that’s what I mean. And some went on changing. When we go down there, where the camp is, you’ll see some of us who don’t look … well, who don’t look like we do, but you’ll know they’re Wilderneers by the smell. Since that pond, we all smell the same. But you won’t know by the shape, so be careful who you smart off to.”
Bane’s forehead was creased. “So what did you do about the women?”
“We never got any women,” said Ashes. “When we came out of that damned pond, there weren’t enough of us left in shape to man the ship, and in the meantime a trader ship had set down and taken all the slaves away, not that there was many left. We came roarin’ down on ‘em, and when they saw us, they killed a good many of us, then they took off in both ships, theirs and ours! Left a notice on the door of the fortress saying they’d salvaged our ship, taken it as a prize!
“So, after that we had no way to get women. Not until the other settlers came. Then we took some women, but they weren’t our women, so it wasn’t any good.”
“Settlers let you get away with that?”
“The settlers didn’t know it was us. The settlers don’t even know we’re here. Some of us, we go to town when we like, we wander around, we know what’s goin’ on, they don’t know who we are. The rest of us, well, the rest of learned to stay hid. There’s caves … caves that go on forever. After they took our ship, we stayed in caves for a long, long time.”
“So it was you, doing the women raids,” said Bane.
“Well, it was us to start with. Some of us looked … normal, so we dressed up like them, let them think it was one family going after women from another family. Before you knew it, it was one family going against another family, like we’d given ‘em the idea. They never did know it was us started it.”
“So, you took some women … “
“Just enough to find out it wouldn’t work anyhow. We couldn’t breed ‘em.”
“Whattaya mean, you couldn’t breed ‘em?”
“They died. We’d get close to ‘em, and they’d die. Every time.”
“But there’s us,” Bane complained. “We had a mother!”
“That was later, and I tricked her,” Ashes said. “It was something we planned, to get some daughters born to us who could be our kind of women, women of our own. But … she didn’t have daughters. She had you two.”
A long silence, during which Bane and Dyre thought their way through the implications of this.
“You mean we’re the only ones?” Bane asked. “The only kids you’ve had in hundreds of years?”