“Dingle. She used it when she was a girl. Ruined her sense of smell.”
“Well, then, we’ll find us some other women used Dingle. She couldn’ta been the only one.”
Ashes sat down in the only chair the tent afforded, a folding affair of rawhide and curved sticks. “Well, not the only one, no, but women who use Dingle are mostly the ones too ugly to dowry for. Or they’re sterile. Or they’re crazy. Or all three. Once in a great while there’s one like Marool, but it’s rare.”
“There was our mama,” said Bane, watching his father narrowly. “Could she smell you?”
Ashes was momentarily silent. “Well, no. But her and Marool were the only ones I ever found.”
“But it just happened Marool was the one stole us away from you?”
“Right,” said Ashes, busying himself with his bootlaces. “We all three knew each other, me and Marool and your mama. And Marool was jealous of your mama having my babies. So, when your mama died, she stole you away. And she was goin’ to have a daughter for me, but she didn’t. But I found you, so it all turned out all right.”
“Maybe,” muttered Bane. “Maybe it did.”
“So what’s the family business?” asked Dyre.
“Why, boys, this whole world is our family business! It belongs to us! We was here first, and we’re going to take it back!” Ashes lay back in the chair and stared at his sons through the smoke of the fire. “We’re going to take it back, kill off all the timrats, kill off all the settler men, all those g’family men. We’ll keep the women. Some of them, anyhow. Whichever ones we can fix like we did Marool. We’re going to build a race of giants!”
“Is this all of you?” Bane asked, gesturing to indicate the camp. “All that’s left?”
Ashes stared into the fire. “No. There’s others. Bigger. Meaner. Sometimes they come to the edge of the light and we talk. They’re with us.”
“How come they don’t live here?”
Ashes made a peculiar face, a kind of chewing, as though trying to swallow something that wouldn’t go down. “They … they got changed in the pond. Really changed. They’re too big for camp, for one thing, and there’s nothing … nothing much we can talk to them about now. They’re like … only set on one thing.” He got up, started to speak, then thought better of whatever he’d been going to say. “Later,” he admonished. “We’ll get into all that stuff later.”
Bane shook his head, showing his teeth. He wasn’t going to let go. “So, how come you’ve waited all this time? It’d a been easier when there wasn’t so many settlers, wouldn’t it? It’d a been easier when they just first arrived. You shoulda done it then, killed the men, took the women, got your own daughters, like you planned. I mean, those, out there, they say you planned daughters, right?”
“We wanted daughters, sure, but I told you we couldn’t do it back then!” snarled Ashes. “We tried that. Grabbed a few girls outa their houses, took ‘em back in the hills, did ‘em there. We’d just get half done with ‘em, and they’d die! They’d turn blue, try to breathe, then they’d die. I told you, it’s the smell of that pond! Like it smothered ‘em. Took us a long time to figure out how to get around that. Mooly figured out about Dingle. You get on Dingle, it builds up a kind of … resistance to the smell. Dingle grows easy, but back then it only grew far back in the hills. We had to bring it near the cities, plant it there so we could get plenty of it, easy. Then we had to teach people to use it, Wasters and rebels and like that.
“But you get a woman on Dingle, she’ll abort, sure as anything. So, then Mooly had to find some other drug to counteract that effect. That took a long time, boys. That took a long, long time. We tried this and we tried that, over the years. Got to be legendary, we did, for stealing women, but we kept at it.