Bones of the Past (Arhel) (30 page)

Medwind leaned forward and rested her hands on her bare, dirt-coated knees. She sighed. “This is your world, Fat Girl. You’re in charge.”

Fat Girl nodded, satisfied. That was the natural order of things, after all. She led and others followed.

* * *

Choufa focused on the yellow metal bar in front of her and pulled in the power the dying Keyu released. It became more difficult the farther she got from the burning Wen village. Only some of the other sharsha could help—only some of them could feel the power that flowed from the earth and sky—and from the slaughtered Godtrees. Those who could not help sat with their hands clasped, waiting. Their eyes told Choufa they were waiting for the Keyu to reclaim them all.

It wouldn’t happen. No matter how tired she got, she wouldn’t let it.

The airbox passed over other Silk People places, and briefly, as they flew over, she could hear the frightened voices of the Keyu.

<—
not food we do not want I/we/I do not hunger for that lifefire do not catch do not bring them pass let them pass don’t let them hurt us
—>

And Choufa smiled, and whispered in the mindspeech of the Keyu, <
Pay us with your strength. If you don’t, we will come and take it, and we will burn you. We burned the other Godtrees, and now those gods are dead
. >

She heard the panic in the Keyu voices and felt them scrabbling after power to send—then energy flowed into her and into the other working sharsha as well. Their eyes went wide with surprise. A few of the children whispered cheers.

The sharsha who couldn’t feel the Keyu-strength enter the airbox didn’t know what had happened. For all of them, stocky, dark-haired Maari asked, “Why do you smile, Choufa?”

Choufa bared her teeth in a wicked grin and hissed, “The Godtrees fear us. They cry out when we pass and beg for their lives. They gift us with their power, so that we will go away and leave them alone.”

Maari grinned in return. “We should burn them anyway,” she said.

Choufa shook her head. “We will take their power and fly to places with no gods. And none of us will be food for the Keyu.”

“Yah,” Maari said after an instant. “That is good enough.”

* * *

The airbox settled in a meadow at the mouth of a deeply cut valley; the valley angled back into the high ridge and vanished between the bulky shoulders of sister peaks.

Medwind and Kirgen pulled out the few provisions the roshu hadn’t gotten. They distributed clothes from the packs and set up shelters for everyone. The tattooed Wen kids refused to sleep in tents—they insisted that when the time came, they would sleep on the floor of the airbox. They gave Medwind bitter little smiles when she offered them help and said that sharsha didn’t need help. She noticed that they and the tagnu kept as far from each other as work and the confines of the clearing allowed. She wondered at that, but didn’t ask.

When camp was set up and the walking injured were being treated for their wounds, Medwind knelt by the bed she’d made for Nokar. He was protected by a felt tarp and wrapped in blankets and spare clothes to ward off the mountain cold. He lay, breathing shallowly, his face pale and waxy. His eyes were closed. He hadn’t responded to anything since she pulled him out of the baofar ramet.

“You saved my life once, old man,” she whispered. She traced his soot-grimed, age-crinkled eyelids with a finger. “Are you going to let me return the favor?”

Nokar didn’t respond.

Faia came up and squatted beside her. “I have been doing what I can to heal the burns and tree-wounds, Medwind.” The girl picked a stem of grass from the meadow and absently chewed on its base. “Most of the damage will heal on its own. Only some of the wounds will require the intervention of magic—herbs and roots took care of the simple things.”

“That’s good news. Who will need the healer-magic?”

“Kirgen has some damage to one hand; I have the hole in my leg from the knife; Roba is terribly injured; and Nokar… well…” Faia looked away, back over the endless expanse of greenery that rolled to the west “Well…” she said again.

The hill-girl tore the remainder of the grass stem into long strings. Her fidgeting was making Medwind nervous.

Faia put down the shreds of grass and sighed. “There are things I have to take care of very soon. Right now Roba is caught between waking and sleeping—trapped in the world of feverdreams. I have done what I can for that. Tomorrow, perhaps she will recognize people. We will see. However, she cannot move her arms or legs, either. The baofar bored its rootlets straight into the whitecord that runs through the spine. Something ripped the rootlets out of her. That destroyed most of her whitecord. It is because of the whitecord damage that her breathing is very weak, and she cannot move, and she has so many bad burns. She could not escape the magefires.”

“Can you heal her?”

Faia closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. “I do not know. I have several problems. First, the whitecord is complex—every bit of it has to be restored exactly right or the result will be a disaster. Second, I have not repaired whitecord damage on people before—only on sheep. Third, I will not be able to heal her from outside. To fix the cord, I will have to become part of it.”

Medwind raised an eyebrow. “That’s dangerous.”

Faia looked down at her hands. “I know. If one of the sajes were in any shape to transport, he could go get someone with experience. If we could wait a day or two, Kirgen might be able to go. But I am afraid she will die before then. And…” The hill-girl faltered and stared into Medwind’s eyes with a worried expression.

“What’s bothering you?”

“She does not like me. She is jealous because of Kirgen and Kirtha. If everything does not go well, I am afraid she will blame me—and that Kirgen will blame me, also.”

“You will be risking your life to save her.”

Faia’s mouth twisted into a half-smile. “People seem to only remember that when the results are good.”

The Hoos warrior nodded slowly. “You are right, of course.” She stroked her fingers along her husband’s face and waited for the hill-girl to continue. When she said nothing, Medwind sighed and asked, “And what of Nokar?”

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence. “His condition is worse than Roba’s, although the baofar damaged him only a little,” Faia said. “From the injuries the tree caused, he might have some weakness in his legs—especially his left leg—but that is all.”

Medwind’s stomach twisted. “Then why do you say his condition is worse than Roba’s?”

“Because magic seems to be the cause of his injuries.” The hill-girl stared down at the old man and slowly shook her head. “None of his worst symptoms were caused by the baofar. The problem is, I think, that he is so old. There are spells on top of spells to keep him from aging—all of them buried very deep. You knew of this?”

Medwind was startled. “No,” she said. “He did a lot of his work alone at night. So did I. There were things both of us did that we simply didn’t talk about. We gave each other that privacy.”

She thought of her vha’attaye, with their skulls still stored in the back of the airbox. All Nokar knew of the vha’attaye were those things non-Hoos could rightfully know. And he knew nothing of the rituals to Etyt and Thiena. It unnerved her to realize she didn’t know all of his secrets, either.

So Nokar was older than he looked.
That
was hard to imagine.

Faia said, “From the spell-shards and echoes, I would guess he had an entire set of spells set one inside another to ward off aging. They seem to have invoked each other to respond to changing situations.”

Medwind frowned and stared at the old man. “Those are called nested subroutines—they’re very elegant when done well, but they’re
hrun
ing complicated to set up, and they eat enormous amounts of power.” She glanced down at the old man, surprised. “He might have earned the
Eye of the Infinite
with real magic after all.”

Faia reached out and touched Nokar’s unmoving hand. Medwind saw tenderness and worry in the girl’s gesture.

The hill-girl said, “When we went into the magicless areas, his spells collapsed in on each other. He got much older, very fast. Without any magic, he would have caught up to his real age and died in just a day or two. I think the baofar actually saved his life—at least for a while.”

“But not for very long.”

“Not now. Nothing can reverse his age—”

Medwind cut Faia off. “The Time River—”

Faia shook her head. “You barely survived that, from what you told me, even though you were young and strong. You went back, what—four hundred years? But you only seem to have gotten fifteen or twenty years younger in the process. I do not think fifteen or twenty years would do anything for him—even if he could survive the Time River.”

Medwind stared down at her hands, turning them over and over. Finally she clasped them together and looked back up at the hill-girl. “How much time do you think he would need?”

“I can’t tell. Not at all.”

Nokar turned his head and opened his eyes. “I’d need at least a—hundred years, Med,” he croaked. “I’m well past—two hundred by this time.”

Medwind’s shoulders sagged. “There’s no way, then.”

“No.” Nokar stared into her eyes. “I’m going to die. But if you can—buy me some time—I want to see the—City of the First Folk. I can die happy then.”

Medwind looked at Faia. “Is there anything you can do?”

“I do not think so. His are not injuries sheer magical strength can repair. His spells within spells need to be reformed—and I do not have the art for that.” The girl’s voice cracked.

Medwind saw the brightness of unshed tears in Faia’s eyes. Her own throat was tight. “Kyadda, Faia. You take care of Roba. I’ll do what I can for Nokar.”

The girl nodded and got up and walked away, head down and shoulders slumped.

As soon as Faia was out of earshot, Medwind turned her attention back to Nokar. “I can give you almost forever, old man,” she whispered.

He smiled weakly. “Dear love of mine.” He reached out with difficulty and patted her hand. “I wish that were true.”

She leaned closer and stared earnestly into his eyes. “It is true, Nokar. The vha’attaye don’t die.”

“They don’t live, either. If I were vha’attaye, I couldn’t smell—the sweet smell of your hair—or taste your salty kisses—or roll over in the bed at night and—squeeze your very fine breasts.” He gave her another gentle smile. “I’ve lived long, Medwind. Those are—my principle pleasures now.”

“But I don’t want to lose you.”

“Life is like that, Medwind. Eventually, we lose—everything we love. What you must do is—love many things—so the process takes longer.” The old man attempted a wheezy chuckle that became an ugly cough.

She leaned over and kissed him firmly on the lips. Her tears mingled with her kisses. “Get some sleep, old man,” she said. “I don’t want to find someone else to love today.”

* * *

Choufa curled with her back against the airbox wall, and stared over the lumped forms of sleeping sharsha. The look-holes framed a lonely, star-filled sky. Her burns ached, but the tall, red-haired peknu woman had smeared a sweet-smelling mash of plant-leaves on them. That took the worst of the pain away.

It was not pain that kept her awake. It was fear.

She wriggled upright, and crawled cautiously over the oblivious sleepers. She peered out the opening.

The air was bitterly cold, and thin. Gusts eddied around the airbox and blew through her coarse, tattered robe, raising bumps on her skin and causing her nose to run. Her teeth chattered. She wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed them against each other. For the chance to view the weird landscape in front of her, she had suffered far more than cold.

To one side of her, huge black walls of stone, bigger than the biggest Keyu, crawled up to the sky. They were so tall and mighty, even trees were afraid to climb to their peaks. She could make out, in the darkness, the silhouette of the line beyond which the trees would not go. That was the place Choufa thought she would like to reach.

How wonderful it would be to live in a world without trees. Without trees, nothing would scare me
.

In front of her, dark lumps clustered close to the airbox. The peknu had such ugly little cloth houses; but Choufa recalled the beautiful silk hangings that had always surrounded her before and decided there was much to be said for some kinds of ugliness.

Beside the folds of one of those little houses, a tiny fire glowed. The peknu woman she’d saved sat by it, awake as Choufa, staring back the way they had come. The fire cast the sharp planes of her face in ruddy hues and gave some color to her star-white hair. The woman looked worried and sad. Suddenly she appeared to realize someone was watching her. She looked over at the airbox. Her pale eyes gleamed in the firelight. She smiled and said, in soft, oddly accented Folk-Speech, “If you already awake, you can come and company me.”

Choufa climbed out of the airbox and walked over.

The woman handed her a heavy blanket. “Here. Take. Is Keyu-ugly cold this night. Sit by the fire. You can tell me your name and tell a story.”

Keyu-ugly cold
. Funny words, but Choufa liked them. “Keyu-ugly cold,” she agreed, and took the blanket, and took a seat near the woman, out of the wind. “My name is Choufa. What story do you want?” she asked.

“Hai, Choufa. I called Medwind Song. Sometimes just Medwind. You save me, save all of us.” The woman grinned at her. “Tell me why
you
need us save you.”

Choufa laughed bitterly. “Not a big story there. I’m sharsha.”

Medwind Song wrinkled her forehead, and shrugged. “Sharsha. You say that before. What that mean?”

“We are the people the keyunu kept to feed the Keyu. The Silk People kept us until we had babies—to make new sharsha—and then they fed us to the Godtrees.” Choufa looked out into the darkness, into the place that was so far from her destroyed home, and pulled the blanket tighter around herself. “If we did not come with you, where would we go? After the Keyu were dead, the Silk People would have killed all of us, I think. They hated us.”