Bones of the Past (Arhel) (3 page)

Abruptly the path dropped steeply, all the way to the ground. The drumming grew louder, and the Yekou began to sing. The procession marched across grass, the tree-priests’ closed clay lanterns flickering in the darkness like a necklace of tiny suns; they filed into a huge circle of bare earth surrounded by the ugliest trees Choufa had ever seen.

The trees squatted like fat old men, glowering in at the Tree-Named who gathered there, and at the ibbiu—the postulants—who came to earn their Tree-Names. In the shadows cast by the lanterns, the hideous trees seemed to shrink, then swell, moving back and forth in their places around the circle. Their leaves were yellow and stunted and sickly looking. Their gnarled branches dipped near the ground and twisted and spread into little fans of diseased-looking twigs, covered by growths and funguses. Thick, shiny white growths spread out from high on the sides of the trunks and trailed down into the grass, glowing faintly.

Those white things look like whole nests of keyudakkau,
Choufa thought, and shuddered, remembering her one sight of the blind white flying serpent the Tree-People held sacred. She had once—only once—spied on the Yekou as they prayed and had seen the snake then. The Yekou were kneeling and chanting in the hollow of the temple tree. The air was white with incense, and the drums throbbed. Choufa had lain on her belly, squeezed under two supporting branches high above them, and watched through a tiny space where the wood of the temple tree had split. The chief priest, the Mu-Keyi, had danced and drummed and shouted in the center of the circle of Yekou. He threw his head back and screeched, spinning and stamping his feet in a manner totally unlike the stuffy behavior he displayed to the rest of the world. The ceremony had fascinated Choufa. When the drums stopped, a streak of white shot through the temple from out of the darkness, and settled on the shoulders of the Mu-Keyi. All the Yekou sighed as this miracle occurred. They whispered that the God trees heard their prayers; that this was a sign. Choufa’s skin had prickled and her stomach had begun to churn. She had not liked the greasy white keyudakkai that coiled over the shoulders of the priest as he drummed and prayed—and she did not like the trees. She shuddered again. The trees felt evil. They felt
hungry
.

The drums rumbled away into silence, and the procession halted in the exact center of the tree-circle. Choufa peeked over her shoulder and gasped. Behind her, a long line of people trailed back dear to the connectway. There were, she guessed, at least fifty adults, and perhaps fifteen or twenty more children. She had not had any idea so many others would share her Tree-Naming with her.

A single drum began again, this one whispering, “Oh, Keyu, we are here—we are here—we are here—oh, Keyu.” To the soft pittering, the Mu-Keyi walked back along the line and separated out the children from the adults. Choufa was finding it much easier to be serious in this grim and frightening place. She did not share any secret smiles with Thasa now. She could not find anything to smile about. In her mind, the conviction that the trees were hungry grew stronger.

The Mu-Keyi led all the naked, green children to one side of the circle, while the adults spread out along the other side. Choufa wanted, suddenly and completely, to skip the Tree-Naming and go home.

“Ibbiu—who will from this night forward be ibbiu no more”—the Mu-Keyi intoned—”You are in the presence of the Keyu.
Show honor
!”

Doff had drilled her in this part of the ceremony. Along with every other child, she threw herself facedown onto the hard-packed earth. Then she lay there, frozen motionless—too scared even to take a deep breath.

The chief priest raised his voice and chanted over the heads of the ibbiu at the adults. “You have raised them, you who are named and who know honor in the branches of the God trees. But only Great Keyi knows the worth of the seedlings you bring. If they are strong seedlings who will grow to be a glory to the forest, all will know today. If they are weak, Great Keyi will show us. If they have filled their souls with hidden rot, Great Keyi will make us see it.”

The chief priest fell silent and let the silence build. The ground felt hard and cold and unforgiving under Choufa’s hands and belly. It pressed against her nose and bent her toes back at an uncomfortable angle.
Pure thoughts,
she reminded herself frantically.
Think pure, brave thoughts
.

In the silence, the creaking of the branches of the ugly trees sounded like the crunching of dried bones. A deeper rumble started, and Choufa realized with horror that it came from one of the trees. “Begin,” the rumble commanded in the Drum-Tongue.

“Stand, ibbiu!” roared the Mu-Keyi.

The ibbiu leapt to their feet and huddled together, round-eyed and breathing hard. The adults across the clearing shifted and fidgeted.

I want out of here
, Choufa thought frantically.

The chief priest knelt facing the largest of the trees, a colossus so broad twenty men could have knelt side by side in the circle in front of it with room left over. His ribbons hung limply, and his glorious silks spread out in a fan over the hard-packed dirt He drummed back, “We are your servants, Great Keyi. Make these, our children, your servants too.”

The drum echoed into silence. No one moved.

“Give me first my gift,” the tree thrummed.

Immediately, the chief priest responded, “We obey.”

All the drums pounded into life, thundering, “Blessed be your gift, Great Keyi, and your people who gift you.”

Four men in matching green-and-gold silks marched forward, carrying something between them. That something struggled, then screamed, “No! No! I did what you told me to do! You promised! You promised! Let me go-o-o-o!”

The voice belonged to a girl.

The girl struggled violently, and one of the men carrying her stumbled. Choufa got a brief look at her. She was as naked and green as the ibbiu, but striped and decorated with hideous pictures and words that formed patterns on her skin. She was bald and soft and pudgy-looking, with big sagging breasts and a round, shapeless belly. She was ugly beyond anything Choufa could have ever imagined. Each man held onto her by ropes wrapped around her wrists and ankles. They carried her a few inches above the ground and made a great show of never looking at her.

Choufa self-consciously fingered her long brown hair and tried to imagine what force could have created the ugly creature that the men carried to the greatest of the God trees. The other ibbiu were obviously having some of the same thoughts—they stared at the girl with frightened loathing or disbelief written on their faces.

I wonder,
Choufa thought, suddenly distracted by a minor detail,
why we’re all the same color green she is.

The drums pounded louder and faster, “Bless this gift, bless this gift, bless-this-gift-bless-this-gift—” and all the while the men hauled the girl closer to Great Keyi. The girl screamed and pled, but most of her pleading was buried in the pounding of the drums. The men dumped her at the very roots of the Keyi, and backed off—fast.

For a moment, all the world seemed poised on the point of a very fine needle. The girl lay shaking at the foot of the giant tree, the drums crashed and roared, the ibbiu stared with indrawn breath, and Choufa clutched her beads and prayed,
I am brave, I am pure, I am brave, I am pure.
The sense of waiting for something to happen—to really happen—filled the grove.

There was no warning when it did. One minute, everything hung in that horrible state of anticipation. The next, the white palps that grew in profusion from the sides of the tree whipped out and around the crumpled, sobbing girl. Great Keyi split his bark open from the roots to the base of the first branch, and his slimy-looking white tentacles flung the ugly girl into his black maw.

As fast as it came, the horror ended.

The drums stopped. In the hush, Choufa realized that all around her children were crying. It took her a moment longer, however, to realize that she cried, too.

“Send them to me now,” the tree drummed.

The Mu-Keyi bowed and drummed his brief “We obey” again; then he and the green-and-gold-silk men briskly grabbed the children and pushed them into a line. Choufa occupied the fourth place. Thasa was somewhere behind her, unseeable. Tears streamed down Choufa’s cheeks. “Nothing will ever be the same again,” Doff had told her, and she knew now that Doff had been right. These were the Keyu, the almighty Keyu, the ones to whom she had said prayers morning and night all her life. These hulking, lurking, awful trees were the gods she had asked to help her with her recitations from the Sacred Songs, and to make Massio stop bothering her, and to watch over Doff. In her prayers, she had imagined the Keyu as bigger versions of the friendly orchard trees, that gave fruit in season and let the temple children climb them. Nothing like these trees had ever entered her prayers.

The men in gold-and-green silks stood on either side of the long line of children. Choufa stared up at them, and knew that she and all the children with her would be thrown to Great Keyi. When the Mu-Keyi said to the first child in line, “Go forward and take your Tree-Name,” Choufa saw the boy’s knees sag. Then one man on either side of him took an arm and propelled him forward.

The boy knelt—rather, he stumbled and landed on his knees—and his offering fell out of his hand to land at the base of Great Keyi. One man placed the boy’s hand on the bark of God tree, where the giant tree-mouth had split open to swallow the striped girl. Choufa pressed her clenched fist into her teeth to keep herself from screaming. Now Great Keyi would eat him.

But the tree stayed motionless. A single drum began a count. One—two—three—four, and the two men moved forward and lifted the boy and walked him away from the tree, toward the line of waiting adults. The oldest of the Yekou, the priest-woman Fine Fingers, bowed in greeting him, and draped a simple red silk robe over him—the robe of the new initiate, of the newly Tree-Named. “Welcome, keyunu, brother of the People of the Three Flames Silk, Tree-Named,” she intoned.

She then addressed the waiting adults. “Give him his name.”

The boy’s father stepped out of the crowd wearing a big smile, his eyes still wet with tears. “We name him First With Courage.”

“You are so named. Go.” The Yekoi made shooing motions with her hands, and First With Courage, newly minted, raced into the arms of his father and mother.

“Go forward and take your Tree-Name,” the chief priest commanded to the next ibbi in line. The girl walked forward under her own power, though two of the gold-and-green silk men walked by her sides. She held her head up and carried her gift as if it were the most valuable thing in the world. Choufa watched her kneel and place her offering on the ground and her hand on Great Keyi’s mouth. The drum beat. One, two, three—four. Then the men tapped her and she rose, brave and graceful, and walked over to the waiting adults. She got her silk and her name; Heart Of Fire.

The boy in front of Choufa, a cycle or two younger than the first two, walked forward as bravely as Heart Of Fire. He knelt and placed his gift with the others and the drum began to beat. One, two, three—

On the third beat, one of Great Keyi’s shiny white palps whipped out and lifted the boy’s gift from the ground, and threw it far into the jungle. From the middle of the crowd of waiting adults, someone sobbed in despair. The men lifted the boy, whose eyes were white-rimmed with fear, and dragged him to the Yekoi. They dropped him on the ground in front of her.

The Yekoi clenched her hands into fists, and her mouth tightened into a thin line. She stared down at him, and Choufa, who knew Fine Fingers’ rages, saw one coming. “You shame us,” the thin old woman hissed. “You—who would dare pretend to be worthy of our kinship—have shown your unworthiness. Great Keyi has seen the blemish in your soul, and has declared you not one of ours. You will never be keyuni, a person of the Godtrees. You are tagni, not human. You have no Tree-Name. You have
no
name.” She spit that out like a curse.

Choufa thought the Yekoi grew taller as she snarled down at the boy. She lifted one skinny old arm and pointed at the pack a green-and-gold silk man held in his hands. “Because we are kind, we will give you parting gifts—food and a weapon and a blanket, that you may find life elsewhere. But you will never enter the ground made sacred by the presence of Keyu and keyunu again, on promise of death. Take our gifts, tagni, and leave.”

The boy stood uncertainly, then stumbled toward his parents, who clung to each other in the crowd. “Mommy?” he asked, voice high and pleading. “Daddy—please, Daddy?” The man who held the pack grabbed the boy and shoved the pack in his hand. “Please, Mommy—Daddy, please don’t let them make me go.” The boy’s mother, crying harder, squeezed her eyes shut and held her hands over her ears. Her shoulders shook from her silent cries. The father, his face streaked with tears, gave his son an agonized look, then took his partner and led her from the Tree-Naming ceremony. He hung his head as he walked away.

“Mommy!” the child shrieked. “Daddy! Please don’t go. I love you—”

Fine Fingers slashed one hand down, a sharp, chopping motion. The man who held the boy, now struggling to get away and run after his parents, nodded and picked the child up. He carried the kicking, screaming boy down the path—taking him away from the village.

They eat people, and take children from their parents,
Choufa thought.
These cannot be the same gods Doff told me about—the ones who loved us so much.

“Go forward and take your Tree-Name,” the Mu-Keyi intoned, and Choufa snapped back to attention. It was her turn.
At least
, she thought with a bitterness that surprised her,
Great Keyi can’t take me away from my parents. I don’t have any
.

She walked forward, shaking inside but on her own power. She knelt and put her beads with the other gifts, and with trepidation rested one hand on Great Keyi’s rough bark. She heard the first beat of the drum, but not the second. A sudden alien whisper inside her head drowned it out—an exultant voice that murmured, <
You! I want we want you are ours I want you!
> Great Keyi’s tentacles wrapped around her, cold and moist and slippery and incredibly strong, and pressed her hard against the rough, scratchy bark of the trunk. Choufa screamed, a wordless howl of pure terror, curled into a limp ball, and closed her eyes tightly. Inside her head, the hungry, nasty, awful other voice kept crooning, <
Mine you are mine I love we love you MINE!
>