Bones of the Past (Arhel) (16 page)

But Nokar was shaking his head and grinning like a lunatic. “The kids aren’t what I found—well, they are, but look, Med. Look what the boy has on his back.” In Hraddo, he told the kid to turn around. The boy did, and Medwind got a good look at the tablet he’d strapped there.

She stared, then moved closer and looked harder. It was a rectangular tablet of something stonelike, luminous off-white, slightly translucent, glossy, and covered by some achingly familiar script that she couldn’t, at that moment, place. She knew that she had never seen anything similar. “What is it?” she asked, fascinated by the odd white material and by the long rows of dots and slashes impressed into the surface. “I know I’ve seen the script before, but where?”

Nokar cackled and rubbed his hands together. “Think bigger.”

He was excited—Medwind couldn’t really remember seeing him so obviously thrilled about anything before. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes shone, he seemed to dance without moving.

Bigger
, she thought.
Bigger? Bigger what? Bigger tablets, or bigger script?—

And suddenly she knew. The slashes and dots… carved on stone pillars topped with the carved heads of monsters, left in strangely inaccessible places—it was the same script. “Oh, by the gods,” she whispered. “By the kranjakken gods, that’s a First Folk artifact. Oh, sweet Etyt, Nokar, that’s a
hrun
ing First Folk artifact.”

Everyone knew no portable First Folk artifacts existed. None. The First Folk left the giant carved pillars, a few broken stone domes built high in the mountains, occasional carvings on the sides of rocks—when they vanished into the murky mists of prehistory, they carried everything that could be carried with them. So said conventional wisdom.

Now here was something that made conventional wisdom appear wrong. “Do you think the tablet is genuine? Is it old—or new? Are these kids First Folk?” Medwind frowned, concentrating. “Did the First Folk become the Wen?”

Nokar laughed. “I don’t know—and right now it doesn’t matter. There’s more. One of the Tethjan sajes was chasing these kids through the marketplace when they ran into me. He grabbed the tablet the older girl had strapped to her back, and vanished with it. I expect he went to the University—gods know, a find like this would make a scholar’s reputation forever.”

“Then, if he’s going to claim the find before you, why are you laughing?”

“Because he may have a tablet, but I have the kids who brought it.”

Medwind sensed that she wasn’t going to like the direction the conversation was taking. “And… ?” she asked.

“And with these kids, we can go into the jungle and find the source—maybe a living First Folk village, Med. Maybe a ruin that still has artifacts in it to show us how the First Folk lived.” His voice dropped, became a whisper. “Whatever we find, it will be a link to our real past, to the history we lost in the Purges.”

“Well, where do they say they found it?”

Nokar grinned at her. “They won’t say—yet. But I’m going to find a way to get them to tell me.”

In Hraddo, the girl interrupted. “Where food? Old man say you got food.”

Medwind arched an eyebrow at Nokar. “You told them we’d keep them?”

“I told them we’d feed them. I want them around at least long enough to find out where they found the tablets. What if there are more of them, Medwind? What if we could decipher more than the few numbers and symbols we know—if we could truly
read
the language of the First Folk, think of all we could learn.”

Medwind felt herself becoming caught up in his excitement. She’d always loved the past. At Daane, history had been a minor subject, overridden by such practical things as research and development, agricultural and livestock sciences, and other current concerns. Medwind’s tendency to bury herself in history books had earned her some derogatory nicknames and had probably been partly responsible for the difficulty she’d found being accepted. In Nokar, she’d discovered a kindred soul—someone else who saw that past as other than dead and dusty.

“Don’t dig up the bones of the past, old man,” she’d said more than once, repeating an old Hoos proverb, “—for the past is not dead, and it resents being buried.” That proverb was a joke between them. The living bones of the past called to her as seductively as they did to him.

“First Folk,” she whispered, and smiled carefully at the three Wen kids. In Hraddo, she told them, “You come-follow. I feed. Later-later we talk trade.”

Excitement pushed her worry about her missing vha’attaye temporarily to the back of her mind.

* * *

Choufa curled on a palmetto mat and looked up at the dark arch of the tree above her. The rain had stopped, and the night echoed with the throb of message drums—nearby, tagnu traders negotiated their right to approach a village for trade goods. Farther off, a village passed along the word that no one had found the rogue band of tagnu who desecrated a sacred path of the Keyu, then vanished into the peknu lands.

Choufa listened, only mildly interested. Her stomach was full, and she was dry and warm—clothed in coarse ragweave, but clothed, and that seemed good to her. The Keyu were silent, somnolent. Her friends slept around her. The gentle rocking of the tree’s branches lulled her.

She dozed, only to snap awake, aware that something had changed. Her heart pounded and she froze, eyes still shut, listening. She heard nothing out of the ordinary—the creak of the tree’s branches, the wind through the leaves, drums and animal sounds from the jungle, the steady breathing of the other sharsha near-by-

—And quicker breathing, very close. A faint, slight shuffle right beside her—her eyes opened as a hand clamped over her mouth.

“Quiet,” someone whispered. A boy’s voice.

There aren’t any boys here
, she thought. She swung her legs up at him and kicked him in the face. He grunted, then pressed harder on her mouth. She bit him, and he yelped and swore and jerked his hand away.

“Damn, damn, damn-all! That hurt. I didn’t hurt you. I just told you to be quiet.” He managed to bring his voice down to a whisper. “You new ones are always the same—and now the rest of them are awake. I hate it when they’re awake.”

His hand was away from her mouth, and he hadn’t actually hurt her. She whispered, “What do you want? Who are you?”

“I’m Leth. I live here.”

She could make out few details about him in the darkness. He was a tall boy, very thin, with hair as long as hers had been before the keyunu cut it off. So he had been sharsha a long time.

A female voice asked, “What’s going on?”

A much younger voice said, “Someone’s here.”

“It’s only me,” Leth said. “Go back to sleep.”

The darkness rustled with girls shifting, the new sharsha asking questions, the older girls reassuring them. “Leth is sharsha,” one said. “Just like us. He’s supposed to be here, so you can go back to sleep. Everything is fine.”

The sharsha nest settled down. When it was quiet again, Choufa asked Leth, “Why did you wake me up?”

He was silent a long time. Finally he told her, “I had to. I have—um, things I have to do—or, um, the Silk People will feed me to the Keyu. I don’t want to die.”

“No,” Choufa said. “Me neither.” She sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. “What kind of things?”

She could see the boy lower his head. “Bad things,” he whispered. He fell silent again, but Choufa waited. After long, uncomfortable minutes, he added, “I have to put babies in the girls’ bellies.”

Choufa didn’t like the sound of that. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want babies in their belly, and she was certain she didn’t want one in hers. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Um—” He crouched and rocked back and forth, slowly. “No… not really. Well,” he amended, “maybe the first time, a little. But after the first time, the girls seem to like it—and it feels good to me. I guess the babies are really little. They get bigger after they’re in there a while.”

“You have to put a baby in
my
belly?” Choufa eyed him warily. “How will it get out?”

“I have to. The boy who was here before me stopped doing what the keyunu told him to do. They fed him to the Keyu and made me watch.” Leth shrugged. “I don’t know how the babies get out, though. The keyunu know when they’re ready. I guess the trees tell them. The keyunu come and get the girls, and most of the time the girls don’t come back. After the babies come out, the keyunu say the girls get to be keyunu. The Keyu forgive them and give them names.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Do you believe anything the keyunu say?” The boy snorted softly. “But I know they come and get the girls who are here a long time and don’t get babies in their bellies. They feed them to the trees on Naming Days. They always tell us about it.”

“Oh.” Choufa thought about that. She looked at Leth, who crouched beside her. “I guess you’d better put a baby in my belly.”

Leth seemed uncertain. “Are you going to bite me again?”

“No.”

“Not even if it hurts?”

“Will it hurt as bad as when the keyunu stuck their needles in me?”

Leth hissed, a quick intake of breath through his teeth. “Nothing like that.”

“Then I won’t bite you.”

Afterwards, Choufa stretched out on her stomach on the mat, eyes searching the shapes of the darkness. She was sore, but not terribly so. She felt odd, but thought the feeling would pass. She wondered, laying there in the darkness, if she had a baby in her belly. She wondered about a lot of things.

* * *

Roba and Kirgen put the finishing touches on their report only a few minutes before Thirk arrived. When he came bounding into Roba’s office, gold bands in his beard and hair clacking against each other, the two of them were on opposite sides of the room, innocently rummaging through manuscripts.

“Well?” Thirk asked, looking from Roba to Kirgen and back. “What did you need me for? I just got your message.”

Roba grinned. “I’ve got your paper, and your theory.”

Thirk looked startled. “You’re early. I wasn’t expecting that paper for several days—” He took the stack of dull green drypress she offered and flipped quickly through the pages. “This is
original
research? Not just a rehash of somebody else’s work.”

“It’s a completely new theory,” Roba assured him. “I guarantee it. I enlisted my assistant, and the two of us have spent every free minute putting this together.” She laughed. “I’m so far behind on my classwork right now, my students are going to start rioting. But you’ll have plenty of time to go over this and verify our work before the next Society meeting.”

Thirk’s face went gray. His eyes darted to Kirgen, then fixed on Roba. “That’s a secret,” he hissed.

“He wants to join,” Roba said. “He believes in the cause.”

Thirk looked dumbfounded. He stared at the graduate student, and his expression indicated he wouldn’t have been more surprised if Kirgen had sprouted wings and flown out of the office. “You’re joking.”

“I want to join,” Kirgen seconded from his place in the corner of the office. “I want to be a part of the great things I think will be happening in Ariss. I think the Delmuirie Society has important things to do and say. I believe there are changes that must be made, and I believe the Delmuirie Society is the group to make those changes.”

“Funny, but I don’t remember you having any great love for Delmuirie back in your undergrad days,” Thirk said. He watched Kirgen suspiciously. “As a matter of fact, I remember you being deeply involved in a few incidents in my classroom—”

“I’ve grown up since then,” Kirgen assured him. He stroked the downy fuzz of his saje beard with contemplative seriousness.

Roba would have laughed had she dared. Instead, she dropped her gaze to the clutter of junk on her desk top and pretended to be looking at something important.

“Well and good, then, young Kirgen,” Thirk said at last. “If Roba Morgasdotte will vouch for your behavior, I’ll see that you become a member.”

Roba kept her eyes fixed on her desk and said, “He’s as dedicated to the cause as I am, Thirk. I promise and swear it.”

Thirk smiled then, a broad, happy smile. “I’m going to go to my office and look over this. In the meantime—Roba, do you feel that you still need an assistant?”

“Desperately,” Roba said, looking up into Thirk’s eyes and attempting to project heartfelt sincerity.

Thirk was still thumbing through the presentation. “Hmmm. I suppose so. It looks like the two of you have put a great deal of time into this. I see things in here I’ve never seen before.” He looked up and nodded. “Kirgen, you want a permanent position as Roba’s assistant?—it would help fund your graduate classes.”

Kirgen studied the ceiling with a thoughtful expression. “Well, yes, sir. A job like this would mean a great deal to me. Especially once I get to my independent study.”

“Then it’s yours.” He smiled a fatherly smile at Kirgen, bowed slightly to Roba, and swept out of the office at a stately pace, with the new Delmuirie Disappearance theory clutched in his hands.

Kirgen kept silent only an instant. Then he said, “I’ll bet he started to run as soon as he stepped out the door.”

“No—”

“Let’s look.”

Both of them peeked out the doorway. Roba stared down the hall, then started to chuckle. Thirk was indeed running, the skirts of his robe flying, braids swinging wildly—he was the antithesis of dignity.

“You owe me,” Kirgen said, as Thirk vanished into his office like a snake down a hole.

“I never bet you.”

Kirgen slipped up behind her and nibbled gently at the base of her neck. “Yes you did. And I want to collect.”

Roba shivered, then gently pushed Kirgen away. “I don’t doubt it. But I have a class on mage/saje comparative history, and after that the Evolution of Magical Practices lab. Then I have all those tests and reports to grade—” She waved glumly at three giant stacks of drypress. “And I’m sure there’s
something
you’re supposed to be doing, too.”

He laughed. “I’m sure there is, but I’d rather be with you. If you don’t want to stay and play, though, I suppose I could make an appearance at all those classes I’ve been skipping.”