Bones of the Past (Arhel) (2 page)

Runs Slow reached the top, puffing and sobbing, with Laughs Like A Roshi right behind her. “I want to go home,” she wailed. “I want my mommy! I want my daddy!” Tears rolled down her round, pink-flushed cheeks.

Seven-Fingered Fat Girl felt a long-festering wound reopen in her soul, but she refused to pay it any attention. “Tagnu don’t have mommies and daddies,” she said. She tucked her dartstick into the waistband of her myr and made a show of counting her remaining darts so she wouldn’t have to look at Runs Slow. If Fat Girl just didn’t have to look at the younger girl, her own tears would stay safely hidden. “You’re tagnu now,” she snapped.

“I don’t want to be tagnu! I want to go home!”

Don’t we all?
Seven-Fingered Fat Girl thought, feeling a swell of old bitterness.
If we just had a home to go to.

All the tagnu sat on the top of the rubble mound, breathing hard, looking like they were trying not to hear what Runs Slow had just said. The tagnu had an unspoken code that prevented anyone from talking about the days when they had been real children, before they became tagnu. Runs Slow had violated that code in the worst way, by reminding each of them of the best of all they had lost.

Seven-Fingered Fat Girl almost wished the rest of the band could feed the child to the kellinks. Instead, she looked more closely at the pile of stone on which she stood. She bent down and ran her finger along the straight, square shapes, still recognizable in spite of moss and obvious weathering. She looked along the top of the mound, which became less a pile of rubble and more of a stone causeway further back, and split in two directions. A few interesting white bulges showed over the line of what seemed to be a very high wall.

Dog Nose watched her, then nodded in the direction of the kellinks. “Wonder why they ran us right to a spot where we could escape.” Like Fat Girl, he’d been studying the scree, but with a different purpose. He took his cutter out of his pack and tried the various kinds of rock in the rubble against it. He found a bit of glossy brown stone that was to his liking and chipped at it carefully, working it into a stone head for a hurlstick.

She was surprised by the kellinks’ behavior herself, but she had an idea. “They probably run most of their prey against this wall to trap it. Not many herdbeasts can climb.”

Dog Nose put the unfinished hurlstick head into the rawhide bag at his waist and dug through the scree for more of the brown stone. The other, younger tagnu watched him, then imitated his actions.

“Ya,” he finally said, and pouched a few more bits of stone. “Good fat for us. You saved us again.”

Fat Girl shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe I have trapped us between kellinks and starvation. We need to see where this wall goes. We may be stuck here a while.”

At her signal, the band left off stone hunting and stood, brushing hands on skinny thighs or rough-woven myr—the ragged loincloths that were their only clothing. They waited and watched her. She turned without another word and paced cautiously along the top of the wall. Behind her, the tagnu followed single file.

Away from the rubble mound, the top of the wall became wide enough that her whole band could have walked side by side. Time or careful cutting had smoothed the whitestone blocks until they felt like frozen silk beneath Fat Girl’s bare feet. The gentle incline carried her slowly up, until with a start she realized she could see the tops of trees falling away to either side of her, and the ragged bones of the earth that broke free of the hated trees to soar toward the sky, and the sun, and Keyu’s Other Eye. It had never occurred to Seven-Fingered Fat Girl to wonder what the world might look like from above the tree tops.

She turned slowly, taking in the odd view. In the valley beneath her feet, the treetops falling away down the steep hill were as rumpled and mussed as her own thin blanket when she woke in the morning. Great Keyi’s blanket, she thought—then she shuddered. That was a bad image. It made the Keyu seem even bigger and more frightening. As she continued her turn to the left, she saw that the rest of the tagnu were as taken by the strangeness of the view as she was. They, too, stood and gaped. She saw them point, speechless, at the mighty stone mountains. She heard their whispers of, “Look at the trees,” and “Oh, look at the sky,” and she smiled. Her good fat had won them this view. They would be grateful—later.

She walked to the edge of the wall and peered down. Scattered piles of sun-whitened bones, some with shreds of flesh still attached, lay like drifts of snow at the point where the causeway joined the main wall. No doubt the kellinks had been herding the band of tagnu toward that same spot—their killing field. Lucky for her and her people she had seen the rubble mound first. She spared the boneyard another quick look, then shrugged. Most of the bones were of kree and hrod-haggu. A few bones looked human—but none of them were her people. So Four Winds Band could afford to be even more grateful. She wordlessly pointed out the evidence of past massacres to her followers; only when all of them had seen did she turn away.

Fat Girl walked onward. The stones beneath her feet were smooth and cool. They were far removed from the tree-walls and tree-walks of the Silk People—as far removed as Earth from heaven. Who made such a giant wall? she wondered. Marveling, she reached the intersection of the causeway with the main wall. She clambered up a step nearly as high as her waist, and then another, and stood at last atop the main wall. The other tagnu followed her lead.

Seven-Fingered Fat girl was vaguely aware that the tagnu had stopped whispering. The silence from her band echoed her own awe.

Beneath her, giant stone buildings and the broken remains of buildings sprawled like the bleached bones of monsters. Buried in vines, worn round and smooth by time and weather, they reminded her of the kellinks’ boneyard on an impossible scale—and each whitestone bone carried with it whispers of a long-dead past. Seven-Fingered Fat Girl crouched on the lip of the wall and stared.

Nearest her, tens of pairs of domes that curved like women’s breasts jutted from the grass, their roofs flat nipples. Beyond, higher up the side of the mountain, the remains of soaring arches and spires and towers stretched broken fingers to the sky. White roads traced patterns through grass and weeds and scrubby brush. There were no people, no animals except the birds and hovies that swooped and soared and fluttered through the clustered ruins. The silent city lay like the broken promise of something wonderful, and Seven-Fingered Fat Girl felt the pang of its breaking.

Toes Point In asked the question foremost in Fat Girl’s mind. “I wonder who lived there—and who sent them away.”

Dog Nose was more practical. “I wonder how we can get down there. I don’t see any way in.”

Fat Girl looked along the wall in both directions. “The people who lived here had to get in and out. We’ll walk along the wall until we find the place they used.”

“Which way?” Three Scars asked.

“That way.” Runs Slow pointed left and downslope.

Toes Point In glared at the younger girl and immediately pointed right and upslope. “That way would be better, I think.”

Fat Girl gave Toes Point In a hard look and led the tagnu left.

Seven-Fingered Fat Girl was sure that there would be some simple way to get down off the wall, but after a long hike, she began to believe she was wrong. When the party came to a broken spot where the stones formed another steep talus slope, she was willing to admit there probably were no easier entries. It would be the talus slope or nothing.

“Wait,” she told her comrades. “I’ll go first to make sure it’s safe.” She crept down the jumble of rock.

It was farther down than she had guessed—and the buildings were bigger than she had imagined. When she looked back at her band, they were nothing but specks at the top of the wall. They waited for her signal.

She turned once in a full circle to take in the grandeur of the city, and hugged herself to hold in her growing excitement.
There is no one here but us. This could all be ours,
she thought.
A base—a roof over us at nights, a safe place to keep the jungle beasts away. Maybe a home.
It had been a long time since she’d thought of anything in terms of “home.”

Keeping her excitement to herself, she waved her band down.

* * *

The water-drums and slit-gongs outside the temple prayed tree-prayers to the far reaches of the winds. Inside the temple, the Yekou, the attendant-clergy of the Keyu, donned their best and brightest silks. They raced from branch-room to branch-room, pulling out their best ribbons, readying their censers, finding drumsticks and headcloths and good slippers. To Choufa, now twelve cycles old, all this activity was worrisome, because this time, it involved her. Between spurts of finding their things, the priests readied Choufa’s group of temple children for the Tree-Naming ceremony.

Choufa had allowed the priests to strip her and paint her green and braid flowers in her hair, but only because Doff kept saying she must. This was an important night, Doff repeated—over and over. It was Choufa’s Tree-Naming, when she would cast her baby-name aside and become Keyunu, one of the Tree-People, if the Keyu so declared. Doff, the ancient, skinny Yekoi who was the only mother Choufa had ever known, insisted that this was the day when the Keyu would choose the fates of all their children “for the best.”

So Choufa, excited and impatient, fidgeted as the bright green paint dried on her skin and started to tighten and crack.

“It itches,” she whispered to Thasa, her temple-sister.

“Ya. Looks stupid, too.” Thasa ran her fingers nervously through the alloa blossoms she carried in her clay basket. “Doff told me I had to give this to Great Keyi. She give you something to give Great Keyi, too?”

“Beads.” Choufa unfurled her clenched fingers long enough for the other girl to get a quick glimpse of shiny reds and blues and yellows.

“You want to trade?” Thasa asked, eyeing the bright colors.

Choufa didn’t miss the undertone of envy in the other girl’s voice. Thasa loved pretty things. Like the rest of the temple children, she had so few of them. “Na. I like my—”

A crop cracked on the backs of Choufa’s legs. “Silence and reverence, ibbi,” snapped the slender priest who had appeared out of nowhere. She lashed Thasa once, too, before she swooped past the girls with her silks fluttering and her ribbons dancing behind her like butterflies in a high wind.

Choufa was a veteran of the crop across the back of the legs. After twelve cycles with the Yekou, nothing short of a solid beating fazed her anymore. She grinned as that particular Yekoi pranced down the branch to take her place beside the other silk-clad adults. Her Tree-Name was Woman Of Great Grace, but until two years ago, she had been a temple child just like Choufa. Choufa harbored visions of winning her own silk and coming back to this tree in honor—maybe with a name like Most Beautiful One—and thrashing the skin off the backs of Great Grace’s legs.

Then she glanced over at Thasa out of the corner of her eye. Thasa looked like she was envisioning revenge, too. Choufa nodded in Great Grace’s direction and whispered, “She’s just jealous of us because she has a face like a tree-frog.”

Thasa grinned. “And a voice like a screeching hovie.”

“And a temper like a tube-snake,” Choufa elaborated.

The other temple-child got into the spirit of the game. She whispered with a conspiratorial wink, “And breasts like big, rotten marshmelons.”

Choufa giggled. She’d just gotten her own breasts, and no one was going to compare them to anything as large as marshmelons. Scrub-apples, maybe. She started laughing and trying to cough to cover up her laughter at the same time.

Her struggle infected Thasa, who began to sputter and giggle, too. Then Choufa heard, overhead, the insults being quoted down a line of younger temple-children who sprawled along the arching branches, taking everything in. The giggles spread further.

A sharp command cut the good humor short.

The Yekou were all in line below, adorning the main branch like a flock of harlequin hovies. Suddenly the senior priest, the Mu-Keyu of the temple, brought his drumsticks high overhead with a loud crack and slammed them down onto his ceremonial drum. He rolled out the rhythms of the first prayer—”Oh, Keyu, We Come to the Naming.”

Choufa’s stomach churned, and she felt a little shiver of fear. She had seen the first part of this ceremony at regular intervals all her life, sprawled in the upper branches of the temple-tree like the children who watched her at that moment. But now the drum-prayer was for her. “Be serious,” Doff had told her. “Be brave and pure, because the Keyu punish all those who are not serious and brave and pure. Win a good name and a good silk from the Keyu, little Choufa—because after this night, nothing is ever the same again.”

I’m brave
, Choufa thought.
I’m not very serious, and I don’t think I’m very pure—but I’m brave.
She tried to think serious and pure thoughts as she and Thasa marched behind the Yekou, down the main branch and out into the darkness, onto the first of the connectways that led to the Keyu. She hoped that would be good enough.

She had never seen the Keyu before. No children saw them. That was the privilege of the Tree-Named, the grown-ups. Doff said they were very frightening; old and huge. Doff said they knew what everyone thought, always. Choufa wished that she could see them for the first time while she wore patterned silk and ribbons, instead of bare skin covered with dry, cracking green paint and garlands of stupid flowers.

She gripped her beads harder.
What would Keyu want with beads?
she wondered.
Or a basket of flower petals?
Then she reminded herself not to wonder. The Keyu were not to be questioned, Doff said. The Keyu knew what was best. Choufa concentrated on thinking pure thoughts—or at least what she felt the Keyu would think were pure thoughts, which mostly consisted of promising Great Keyi that she would never again commit the many pranks she routinely inflicted on her fellow temple-waifs. The connectways soared up, dipped down, crossed and meandered, and she concentrated for a while on thinking pure thoughts and not falling off the tree-branch paths. She was conscious of other silk-garbed adults taking places behind her and of other green-painted children walking with them.