Bones of the Past (Arhel) (7 page)

Dog Nose, gaunt and weary, said softly, “We were starving on the paths of the Silk People. That is why we left.” He fingered the arrow points he’d chipped from the local stone and looked thoughtful.

“We are starving faster here.”

“Dead is dead.” Dog Nose straightened and walked to the entryway of the round-walled building and looked out. With his back to the rest of the tagnu, he said, “Sooner or later, the kellinks will finish eating their own dead and go off hunting for new meat. When they do, we can go over the wall and bring down beasts for ourselves. We can make good arrows in this place, and you can find enough thorns and feathers and raouda poison to make your darts.”

He turned and faced them. “It is not a good place, but it is better than the paths of the Silk People. Here we do not sleep in the rain. And no Keyu grow here.”

“A city with walls to keep out the gods—it is a beautiful dream, and I must rip my heart in half to let it go.” Fat Girl stood, and, eyes almost on a level with Dog Nose’s, said, “Do you think I haven’t seen the good stone? Do you think I haven’t thought of a roof over our heads when the great rains fall? But hard cold comes to the high stone mountains, and when it does, the birds and hovies will all fly to the lowlands. All the squirrels and chervies will hide away. Ice will fall from the skies like rain and bury the ground. And what will we eat then? Each other?”

“Maybe we could steal the trade goods of the Silk People,” Toes Point In offered.

Seven-Fingered Fat Girl nodded. “Yes. And the Keyu would send monsters from the jungle to eat us. The Keyu love the Silk People.”

“I won’t go back down there,” Laughs Like A Roshi said. He tightened his arms over his thin chest and glowered. “I won’t let Runs Slow go there either. This is a better place.”

Fat Girl sighed. “Your remmi is going to be your death, Roshi. You might survive on your own—but not with her.”

Roshi lunged toward Fat Girl as if he would strike her, then stopped himself. He face was flushed. “She’s not my remmi!”

“No? Then what would you call her?”

“My sister.”

Fat Girl froze. She looked from the tall, long-haired blond boy to the little girl with the short yellow curls. Then she hung her head. She’d often wondered what had happened to her own sister, who had become tagnu, and therefore unspeakable, two cycles before her. And she wondered about the house full of children she’d left behind. She had not been as lucky as Roshi and Runs Slow. She had never found any of her own family.

“Oh,” she whispered.

She looked at her comrades. Around the room, she saw her own thoughts mirrored on tagnu faces. Wistfulness and pain and envy mixed in all the other eyes.

If she could, she would give them this place. Nothing had hunted them since they crawled up the wall. They had slept warm, and dry. The Keyu couldn’t see them—she felt sure of that. Hidden from the sight of the gods, they could become real people again.

If only there were food.

“The keyunu dig in the dirt and food grows out of it.

I remember,” she said, looking around at the rest of Four Winds Band. “Could we make food grow out of the dirt?”

“The Keyu make the food grow,” Dog Nose said. “They wouldn’t do that for us.”

“That’s right,” some of the others agreed.

“Maybe. But I’ve visited the places of the peknu, and food grew out of the dirt for them. The Keyu hate the peknu.”

Roshi looked intent “Could the peknu show us how to grow food from dirt?”

Fat Girl became excited. “If we could pay them—they’ll trade anything. We could tell them they have to trade us the gods’ dirt-trick.” Her smile faded as she realized the flaw in her plan. “But we have nothing to trade.”

“What do they want?” Toes Point In asked.

Spotted Face snapped, “What does it matter what they want? We have nothing!”

Runs Slow looked up at Spotted Face and shook her head until her curls bounced. “There are things here. I saw some.”

Fat Girl nodded slowly. “You’re right,” she told the little girl. “There might be things here we could take.” She squatted and thought. “We carried little pot drums and silk and incense from Five Dots Silk to the peknu sea village. We carried back beads in lots of colors and fine skins for special drumheads—some strange things, too.”

Roshi asked, “What should we look for?”

“Anything we can carry.” Three Scars broke his silence and grinned. “I went to the peknu village the very last time Fat Girl made the run. I walked through their trading place—those peknu are strange.”

“Good plan.” Seven-Fingered Fat Girl rose and assumed her stance as leader. She led them down the passage and outside.

The tagnu stood at the very pinnacle of the city, looking at the sprawl of white buildings below. Fat Girl pointed out sections. “Roshi and Runs Slow, start with the buildings below us and work to the big lake. Three Scars, Toes Point In, and Spotted Face—hunt from that stone pit over to the big tit-houses along the far wall. Dog Nose and I will take the little bowl-houses right below us and all the buildings with the monsters watching the doors.”

Along the cliff-wall to her back, the dark opening of a cave mouth with carved stone at the entry beckoned. She could hear the tinkle of water from somewhere inside of it. The city was pocked with similar openings. She had looked inside of one and had been confronted by wide, dark tunnels that twisted off in all directions.

She gave her tagnu a hard look. “Don’t go into the caves. We will find something in the places on top of the ground, or we won’t. But don’t go under the ground.”

“But what if they left all their good things in the caves?” Spotted Face asked.

“Then we won’t ever find them.” Seven-Fingered Fat Girl crossed her arms so that her mangled left hand lay clearly in view. “Those caves are danger, and I say nobody dies today.”

She uncrossed her arms and hooked her thumbs into the strap of her loincloth. She smiled and saw her tagnu relax. “Besides,” she told them, “we’ll find something we can trade above the ground. I’m sure we will. Meet back here at high-sun, and bring what you find.”

The others smiled and laughed. Their faces bore expressions of excitement and hope. Even Fat Girl herself found she could not suppress the hope stirring inside. She didn’t believe their search would do them any good. After all, she felt certain that when the people had left their city, they had taken all their good things with them. But the hope would not die.

The three teams split off. She and Dog Nose worked their way down the mountainside toward the nearest of a mass of small round white half-spheres.

Up close, the buildings towered over the two tagnu—but they were smaller in scale than anything else in the city. The lacked the curved tunnel entrance that the larger, double-domed buildings all possessed. Instead, Fat Girl and Dog Nose entered through an open arch. Inside, the building was disappointing. The floor was lowest at the edges and rose toward the center, and at the very center, had the same circular depression as the buildings the tagnu had slept in. But where the floors of the larger buildings were pieced together in complex patterns of brightly colored stone, this floor was gray, smooth, and ugly. On the insides of the big domes, stone-chip murals of imaginary beasts flew or charged or swam. These walls were plain white.

The building was empty.

“These places may not have anything good in them,” Dog Nose said.

“But there are so many of them. Maybe this is the only bad one.”

Fat Girl had assigned herself the little buildings because there were more of them than of any other type of construction in the city, and they were all clustered together. She was sure there would be something worth trading in many, if not most, of them.

“Let’s go on to the next, then.” Dog Nose was already at the entryway. He cast one disgusted look around the inside of the building, and snorted. “I don’t think you should have picked these places, though. I’ll bet the good things are in the buildings you gave to everyone else.”

Fat Girl shrugged. A dozen buildings later, however, she was ready to admit he was probably right. Every one of the little buildings was plain, and ugly, and empty.

After the twelfth disappointment, Dog Nose sighed. “We’re wasting our time.”

Seven-Fingered Fat Girl leaned against the cool, curving outside wall and nodded. “I know. Dog Nose, I don’t think there is anything here to find. Not just
here
, in these little places, but anywhere in the whole city. No one would leave trade things behind.”

Dog Nose came over and leaned beside her on the wall. His arm felt warm and comforting against hers, and she pressed closer to his side.

“You were right to make everyone look,” he said. “We have to at least try to get away from the Silk People. The peknu were kind to us when we carried the Silk People’s trade-packs to them. They gave us a lot of food. I think you had a good idea.”

He rested his arm lightly across her shoulders, and in spite of his warmth, she shivered. “Even if we find nothing?” She looked up into his face.

He was staring at her with an expression on his face she didn’t understand. Or perhaps, she thought, she was afraid to understand. He pulled her to his chest and held her and stroked her hair. No one had held her like that her since her mother, on that long-ago Tree-Naming Day. Then, her mother had looked at her so seriously, and hugged her, and stroked her hair—and her mother had cried. Fat Girl, at that time still Aredne, had been confused and a little frightened; her mother, wordless and inexplicably sad. Her father had taken her to the ceremony. She’d never seen her mother again.

Remembering, Seven-Fingered Fat Girl cried, too.

Dog Nose backed away and looked worried. “What’s wrong?”

Fat Girl shrugged and moved back against him and wrapped her arms tightly around his waist. She saw him smile and felt his body go hard against hers. He shivered and whispered, “Want me to be your remmi?”

Her breath quickened, and she felt her pulse pound in the veins of her neck. She nodded her head “yes,” but said, “Not yet. We have to go through the jungle to get to the peknu village. The jungle kills remmu tagnu. You’ve seen it.”

“Maybe. Maybe the remmu just got careless.”

Fat Girl pulled away from him. “You may be right—but what if we get careless, too? We can be remmu when we’re safe back here and we have the gods’ dirt-trick. With that, we’ll never have to go back to the jungle again. Then if we’re careless, it won’t matter.”

He looked disappointed, but nodded agreement. “Let’s look through the rest of the buildings, then. If I have to wait until we’re back here for us to be remmu, that means we have to find something to trade.”

Fat Girl grinned. “Yes. It does. So let’s go.”

They continued their search—silent with each other in a suddenly awkward way. She watched him when she thought he wasn’t looking, and he turned to catch her eyes on him. Her face burned; she glanced quickly away. She searched the small buildings; felt him watching her; caught him staring. The excitement of being near him, of knowing that she could touch him, even though she didn’t, made the constant swings of hope and frustration as they searched building after empty building bearable.

Finally, though, Dog Nose threw up his hands in disgust.

“There’s nothing here. Why don’t we go back to the meeting place and wait for the rest of them? Maybe they found something.”

“We still have both monster buildings to go through.” Fat Girl twisted the braided rope of her dart pouch between nervous fingers and looked down the hill at the two giant buildings just beneath them. Huge carved-stone monsters crouched in rows on either side of the entryways to both buildings—gape-jawed and many-fanged, with half-furled wings and glaring eyes. From where she stood, the entryways were hidden; both buildings faced away—downhill and north. But the worn, moss-patched monsters were plain to see from where she stood—as they were from almost anywhere in the city.

When the tagnu had hunted for food, they had crossed the paths of those big stone beasts—once. Once only. By unspoken accord, they had, after that time, always chosen another way to walk from one place to the next, a way that did not carry them in front of the glittering black eyes set into the white stone heads. Those eyes had watched every move the tagnu made—and Seven-Fingered Fat Girl put no stock in the fact that those eyes rested in the bodies of stone beasts. If trees could eat people, so could stone monsters.

Dog Nose stood beside her and stared down the hill at the monsters, too.

“There’s probably not anything to trade in either of those buildings,” he said finally.

“I know,” Fat Girl agreed.

“The rest of the tagnu have probably had more luck than we had,” he added.

“I know.” Fat Girl twisted harder at the rope that held her dart pouch. The big winged monsters waited on their stone pillars. They looked very hungry. She wondered if the reason the city was empty was that they had eaten everyone in it.

“We could say we looked inside,” Dog Nose whispered.

“I know.”

They studied each other in long, painful silence.

Fat Girl took a deep breath. If she wanted Dog Nose, she braved the monsters. There was no other way.

She wanted Dog Nose.

She started down the hill. He’d evidently reached the same conclusion an instant before her. He was already working his way down the steep grade. She eased her way down the slope after him.

The monsters waited. When Fat Girl and Dog Nose reached the the point where the stone path branched off to both the monster buildings, they faced a hundred black, watching eyes—patient, wily, crafty eyes set high on lean, long-muzzled faces that bore a variety of toothy grins.

Fat Girl swallowed hard. Her mouth was suddenly dry, but the palms of her hands sweated.

“We could each take one building,” Fat Girl said. “That way we could get done faster.”

Dog Nose looked at her as if she had eaten white fern and was babbling in the throes of fern-madness. “I don’t think so,” he finally answered.

She felt relieved. “Which building first, then?”

He held out a closed fist “Rocks, bones, and roots—winner picks.”