Bones of the Past (Arhel) (12 page)

“Take… care of… Runs Slow.” His eyes pleaded for release.

I wish it were Runs Slow in the myed vine instead of you,
she thought. She stared at Roshi, doomed Roshi, and wanted to kill every living thing in the jungle.

He begged, “Promise… me… Fat Girl. Promise.”

I don’t want to,
she thought. “I will,” she told him, wishing he had asked anything else.

He screamed again, as the plant dug more of its rootlets into his flesh. The tentacles contracted and relaxed, contracted and relaxed. With each contraction, he screamed again. Finally, at the relaxation point in the cycle, he gasped, “Do it.”

She couldn’t save him. The myed had destroyed him the instant it caught him; impaled him with its tiny rootlets. Even if she could have destroyed the plant, Roshi would be dead. And this myed was huge, with hundreds of tentacles still waiting. Some were buried under the leaves, some sprawled around the ground near her. She could not save him. She could die with him—but that would not help him, nor her.

She could only do what he asked. If she just left him, he would not die for a day or two—and he would suffer while the plant slowly ate him. Her tagnu would not die like that. She held her breath, tried to steady her shaking fingers, tried to hold off the tears for just another moment. “Goodbye,” she said, or tried to say. The sounds strangled in her throat—Roshi couldn’t have heard them anyway. The myed tightened its coils again, and he was screaming.

She put the dartstick to her lips and blew. The little red-tufted missile shot out of the stick. It buried itself in Roshi’s belly. He twitched once, and stopped screaming. His body went limp. The horrible rictus of agony left his face.

“I would not have killed you on the bridge, Roshi,” she whispered. “I would have let you get your sister.”

Fat Girl turned away. She ran—west, then west and south, running by feel, her eyes blurred by tears, her feet stumbling as she sobbed.

She ran through the worst of the thicket—it tore ribbons of flesh from her arms and chest, and she didn’t even care. On the other side, the jungle ended. A rolling, treeless plain spread in front of her. On a hillock, Dog Nose and Runs Slow sat and waited.

“GODS, you look even more bored than I feel. What does he have you doing?”

Roba looked up from a dull, badly written treatise on Edrouss Delmuirie and sighed. “You don’t want to know,” she told Kirgen, who had finished the student papers a day ago and was hanging around her office grading tests.

“Sure I do. Maybe I can help.”

Roba snorted. “I don’t know if I should tell you. What I’m doing is supposed to be a deep secret. You see—” She got up and looked out into the hall to make sure Thirk wasn’t about to drop in on her. Then she closed her office door. “Thirk hinted that I’d get a raise if I joined the Delmuirie Society. So I joined.”

“Did you get the raise?”

“Yes.”

“Really?” Kirgen’s eyebrows and voice rose together. “Can I join?”

“Oh, I’m sure—” Roba laughed. “Not that you’ll get a raise. But I don’t think you’d want to. I’m doing something worse than counting grains of sand in a desert—at least I could find sand in the desert to count. But I have to come up with a theory on where Edrouss Delmuirie disappeared, and why. And I don’t really think there ever was a Delmuirie.”

Kirgen started to laugh. “That’s what he has you doing? You’re kidding.”

“I wish I were.”

“Well, in that case, I can help.” Kirgen launched himself onto her desk, where he sat, grinning down at her with cheerful camaraderie. “You can’t possibly prove that the theory you come up with is correct, right?”

“Obviously.”

“Sure.” Kirgen smiled. “It doesn’t even have to make sense so long as it’s different and you can cite sources. I happen to be great at this kind of stuff. I can turn cow flops into poetry—” He chuckled. “If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you some of my papers on speculation into the nature of fire elementals. They’re great reading.”

“So you’re saying not to bother trying to come up with something rational—”

Kirgen made chopping motions with his hands. “The whole premise is irrational. Just come up with something that sounds really big and impressive. And new. It ought to sound new.”

Roba smiled for what felt like the first time in days. “What a wonderful idea. I guess you can help.”

* * *

When the keyunu came for Choufa, they came singing. Women priests traded off lines with men priests, calling and responding; the hard, fast song they sang matched their movements. Hand over hand, the priests worked the ropes that lowered the sharsha in their baskets to the ground. Choufa, shivering in the raging downpour, listened to the words of the song they screamed over the howling of the winds. The words chilled her far more than the rain.

“Heyo, rains are falling,

Winds are rising, ho-heyo!

Ho! The sharsha

For the Keyu

To the river!

Ho! Heyo!

“Heyo, Keyu calling!

River rising, ho-heyo!

Ho! The sharsha

Feed the Keyu!

Holy river!

Ho! Heyo!

They came to her basket, and lowered her to the ground. One took a blackglass knife with white eyes and teeth on the sides of the blade and cut the withes that held the cage front shut. Another tipped the cage forward, and Choufa sprawled on the ground.

“Up, sharsha,” a gold-and-green-clad man yelled over the storm and the singing, and kicked her to make his point.

With all the other sharsha, Choufa wobbled to her feet. The cold, pouring rain soaked her skin and left her shivering, teeth-chattering, bone cold—but it washed the accumulated filth of days from her body, and she was grateful for that.

Above the jungle canopy, towering thunderheads rose, crackling with fire and growling with the voices of angry gods. The cloudgiants had nudged and jostled and fought until they pressed so close together the sky was blackened beneath them, and the sun and Keyu’s Eye vanished.

The season of rains had come—sacred season of the Keyu. Choufa knew all the holy songs of the rain festival and all the temple rituals going on at that very moment under the silk canopies. What she did not know and wished she did was what would happen to her. She could still feel the Keyu. They were no longer dreaming their slow tree-dreams. As the Festival of Rain began, they came fully awake, and their hunger grew.

The priests dumped the last of the sharsha on the ground, and got them all standing. Then they waited: nine sharsha, two hands of priests, and two hands of the big men who wore green and gold.

A thin old woman priest Choufa didn’t know clapped sharply. All the keyunu burst into an awful droning song, full of words about duty and sorrow and sanctification and pain. Choufa suspected that they were the ones who would get credit for the duty and the sanctification, but the sorrow and the pain would be hers.

Then the keyunu began a stately march in the direction of the river. Along with the rest of the sharsha, Choufa stood and watched them. She felt too weak to move—she hadn’t eaten in days, and her legs were so weak from being cramped in the tiny basket cage that she was having difficulty standing.

“March!” one of the green-and-gold men snarled.

The sharsha all looked at him stupidly. Choufa took a few tentative steps, lost her balance, and fell in a heap in front of the man who had kicked her before. He kicked her again, and when she could not stand, snarled, grabbed her by the back of the neck with one hand, and jerked her to her feet. He shoved her toward the other sharsha.

She stumbled into the huddle, and the other children caught her and held her up. As weak as she, they leaned on each other, and with difficulty, began the journey toward the river.

Choufa was no longer frightened—she found she didn’t care very much what happened to her anymore. She didn’t think there was anything else the keyunu could do to her that could frighten her. She wished all the pain and the awfulness would end, and she thought soon it probably would. That would be fine with her. Dying would solve a lot of problems.

She watched the other children as they tottered along together in the wake of the priests—ugly, nearly bald stick figures covered with green designs. The fuzz of their hair growing out made them look hideous as newly hatched birds. Choufa wondered if she looked as bad as they did.
Probably
, she decided. She discovered it no longer mattered. Once they fed her to a Keyi, who was going to notice?

That thought struck her as funny, and she giggled.

<
Laugh-laugh, oh yes-yesss laugh. We can-we can do much-much do much with one who-one who laughs,
> Keyu voices whispered into her head. The thoughts were cold and probing, horribly inhuman—laced with insatiable hunger. <
We will-yesss will love-love you. You will be-yesss beautiful-will be to us. (Mine! She’s mine!) You will come-come to us yes-yesss-come to be a part-be part of us forever. (No! She’s mine! All mine!) How pleasant-yesss how happy-you-we (MINE!) will be.
>

She felt them inside her, the Keyu—rummaging around in her self, poking and fondling with obscene delight. And she felt their hunger—their blinding, lusting hunger. For an instant, she was back at the Tree-Naming ceremony again. That awful Keyi’s gelid white palps wrapped around her, and it gleefully claimed her, screaming “Mine! Mine! Mine!” into the core of her mind.

She whimpered. All her courage and all her strength disappeared. The Keyu waited for her. They wanted her. And they were going to get her. She found that she could still be frightened after all.

After that, everything became a meaningless blur to her. The keyunu held a ceremony at the river, poured sickly sweet oils over the sharsha, and stood them in the muddy water in a slow back eddy. Choufa did what they told her to. She knelt, rubbed the sweet oil into her skin, then struggled back to her feet. Most of the other sharsha did the same. One of the boys, however, moved into deeper water, suddenly dove under the surface, and swam out into the main current. Choufa watched with detached curiosity as he was swept into the racing stream, smashed against boulders, and drowned.

How lucky for him
, she thought, and felt a dull stab of envy.

At his death the Keyu roared in frustrated rage. Their voices outboomed the thunder, and the keyunu blanched.
Deprived of one of their meals
, Choufa thought, and wished that she had been clever enough to drown herself. But the green-and-gold men were herding the sharsha out of the water, and the priests were separating the boys from the girls.

The green-and-gold men half-marched, half-dragged the boys away from the riverbank. Choufa felt the Keyu, wherever they were, begin clamoring for the treats that were coming to them.

My turn next
, she thought. She would have prayed as she’d been taught—prayed for deliverance, or at least peace. But how could she, when the gods she would have to pray to were the gods from whom she hoped to be delivered? So she did not pray. Instead, she wept.

The girl who stood next to her hugged her. Choufa put her arm around the stranger’s waist, and the two of them stood, crying in the pouring rain, waiting to be fed to the God trees.

The priests were singing another of their songs, this one about glorious gifts to the gods and what wonderful things the gods would do for them because they were so good and holy. When they finished, one of the Yekoi swaggered over and stood in front of the girls and lifted her arms.

“Consecrated are you now to the holy purposes of the Keyu, and though you are evil beyond measure, yet will your lives serve Keyu and keyunu for the good of all.”

She lowered her arms, the keyunu sang again, and then the Yekoi spoke.

“Sharsha girls, listen to me carefully. You have been consecrated to the God trees, and to them you will go like the boys who were consecrated with you, unless you leave your evilness behind you. Your are fortunate—we are giving you a chance to repent. We will take you to the sharsha-house, and there you will stay until the Keyu demand you.”

The priest wrapped her arms in front of her and glared at the little flock of girls.

“If you purify yourselves daily, however, and bring forth a child—which is the duty of every keyuni—the Keyu will refuse to swallow you when you are brought before them. And if they refuse to swallow you, you will rejoin the keyunu, and we will rejoice that one of our children has been reborn to us.”

One of the sharsha, braver than the rest, asked, “How do we purify ourselves?”

The priest glared at her. “Only you know why the Keyu would not permit you to have names. Repent of those evils, and the Keyu will forgive you. Otherwise, you will die.”

Then, in the distance, the slit drums rumbled, and the Keyu began to speak. Choufa heard, not only their sound-voices, which demanded sacrifice, but also their thought-voices, which rejoiced in the coming of new food. And she heard, by thought-voice only, the moment when each boy who had been marched away became one with a Keyi. She heard each individual scream of horror—for the briefest of instants, she felt the pain. Then the boys’ voices were—swallowed, perhaps, or drowned—and the larger swell of the Keyu overcame them.

Choufa looked around at her three fellow sharsha, to see if any of them shared her terror at what had happened. Their faces held only relief that they would not be sacrificed that instant. Choufa wondered if they had not felt the boys being sacrificed, or if they simply didn’t care.

Then the drums rumbled, “The Keyu are honored, praise the Keyu!” and the priests prodded the girls along the dirt track back to the village. They stopped again in front of a large, twisting tree grown all around with heavy thorns. The silks that draped the tree were dark and sad-looking. Choufa knew the place well enough—she’d walked past it on the days when it was her turn to get water. She had never known who lived there or why they draped their silks so tightly, and she had never found anyone who would tell her. “It doesn’t matter, little one,” the keyunu always said, and looked at the tree and shook their heads.