The Glass Mountains (35 page)

“It’s beginning,” he said. To my surprise, he began weeping silently. Strings of liquid poured out of his nose. “You must get back now. I wish you luck. Take good care of your friend. He is Soom Kali. The Soom Kali have my fate in their hands. If they should lose the upcoming war...”
 

“But where are you going?”
 

“I must get home to see my family.” He rushed off, crashing through the brush until he disappeared.
 

As I ministered to my mother and Moor, I could not understand that Hathatu-me man and his mild ways. The Formans might be about to take over his land, and he had no intention of fighting, no intention of trying to save his sector as the Soom Kali would soon need to fight to save theirs, and, indirectly, his as well. A great war lay before the planet. Moor and I must return to Soom Kali to persuade a jury not to kill him for the death of his soldier friend; then we could live there and fight there, for ourselves and for the child that I now felt growing inside me. I did not know who among my family had lived and who had died. I did not know whether the Glass Mountains still rose majestically above the sand or whether they now lay in ruins under the sun.
 

Two days later Moor opened his eyes. We didn’t speak, just smiled and touched. I lay next to him, and we slept together. A few hours later I awoke to see him cooking at a fire.
 

“You should rest,” I said.
 

“There is no rest for a Soom Kali man in war.”
 

“There is no war.”
 

He peered above, and we saw a fleet of Forman ships speed past. We hugged and watched the ships pass. Then Moor returned to his cooking.
 

“We must revive your mother and move on.”
 

I crouched beside my mother, whose eyes remained closed. But color had come into her cheeks.
 

“I don’t know what her life will be like without my father. She may not want to live.”
 

“She will have to make that decision herself.”
 

Two days later, as I lay beside her staring into her face, her eyelids fluttered and opened.
 

“Moor!” I said. Moor and I leaned over my mother.
 

She glared at us with eyes that held something I had never seen in them before. So strange was her expression that it took me a while to realize what her look meant.
 

“You hate me!” I said. But then the expression faded and she closed her eyes and slept fitfully.
 

Moor told me they had taken a different tunnel to the outside. In their tunnel, they’d been attacked repeatedly. In the end, Moor said, it was my mother who had saved him, by killing their last attacker with Moor’s own knife.
 

“Why does she hate me?” I said.
 

He was silent.
 

When my mother was strong enough, we traveled into a nearby town, where we easily found a Hathatu-me ship that would take us back to Soom Kali. In fact, the Hathatu-me were so mild and agreeable, I think we would have been able to find a ship to take us to one of the moons and back if only we had asked.
 

The driver of our ship was as agreeable as the man I’d met outside the caves. Nowhere did I find the guidance my grandfather had promised me. The time for predictions had passed, just as seasons passed in other sectors. And now the season of war had arrived.
 

At my request, we flew over my barren homeland. My heart soared as I saw the Glass Mountains shining, way in the distance. I was raised for peace, but found myself surprisingly impatient to defend those mountains and whatever was left of Bakshami.
 

When we reached Soom Kali, we found the entire populace preparing for war. Even Moor’s sickly father had been recruited to help manufacture weapons. All trials had been suspended—no Soom Kali would be put to death when every body was needed for the war.
 

The strip of barren land through which I’d once passed was now peopled with Bakshami refugees learning to fight. Among the students were Jobei and Leisha, who had left the Glass Mountains not long after I had. They had decided that the only way to save the great mountains was to leave them and learn to fight. Among their teachers was Moor’s friend Panyor, with whom Tarkahna had mated. And another couple I knew lived there: Ansmeea the Young and my former betrothed, Sennim. They were married now.
 

Every day I took classes on the art of soldiering. What I learned in my hand-to-hand battle classes was that falling was a type of magical enterprise for me. As I hurled through the air about to land it was almost as if I could calculate the movements of each of my muscles and project which combination of movements would cause which kind of landing. Strangely, those moments in the air, a time of fearful anticipation for most students, were a time of great joy for me. Sometimes I suspected that the teachers picked on me often—hurling me up and across and down, forward and backward and around—just so they could watch me fall. I felt my babies—twins—inside of me as I twirled through the air. And always I landed with grace. After watching my brilliant falls, the Soom Kali teachers would compliment me lavishly, the way they did with only their most prized students. Moor would flush with pride.
 

My brother Jobei could not keep up in class. He had aged astonishingly. His small rotted face shocked me, and he had begun to hunch his shoulders as if they burdened him. His legs were as thin as the sticks we’d once played together. And yet, in his stick-like legs, sloping back, and decimated face I saw an even greater nobility than I’d seen in him before. If I tried to judge him as someone still alive, he appeared ugly and small, but if I saw him as one half-dead, he appeared noble and great, a man who had given his life force to kindness and generosity. And I knew that, in honor of him, it was proper that I should look upon my own brother as half-dead.
 

Panyor contacted Maruk and Sian, now fully integrated, but they refused to move to our strip of land. Maruk and Sian had children, and both my brother and his wife had joined the army and received new promotions recently. They didn’t want to give up their thriving military careers to move to a forsaken strip of land to be with me. Apparently the generals made great favorites of them.
 

I spoke with Maruk only once, and he seemed as proud, daring, and kind as he had when we were children and I’d admired him so much. He looked like an adventurer, smaller than many Soom Kali but nevertheless large enough, and as handsome as any soldier in the sector. But pretending to be who he was not had made him a Soom Kali. His Bakshami childhood was forgotten. It was like with the romance ritual. He’d pretended to be Soom Kali, and to protect himself and his children, strove to make the pretense real. Being a man of great resources and determination, he’d succeeded. I couldn’t help respecting the way he’d invented himself. Very few could have accomplished what he had. But in the process he’d become more like a Soom Kali soldier than many of the real Soom Kali soldiers I met.
 

“I would hope that your family could join mine in this strip of land,” I said.
 

He looked at me with the old love in his eyes. “I would still die for you,” he said. “But if you could know how great was our struggle at first, to live here and worry constantly of not integrating successfully. If you could know that, you would also know with what relief I wake up every day now, when I realize that in truth I am Soom Kali. I have become Soom Kali. It would not be possible for me even to remember the rhythms I once knew by heart because I am no longer what I was.”
 

As he spoke these last words I was ever to hear him speak, I saw a flash of the old, kind Maruk, the Maruk who’d protected me all through my childhood and who I would have died for. I still would have died for him. But he would not have wanted it so. And so the brother I’d once venerated left my life forever. That night I played rhythms for him as if he had died. I had no brothers left.
 

In class the next day and every day thereafter I felt obsessed with my studies and oblivious to pain. Every evening when I got home from warrior classes, my body was covered in cuts, gashes, and bruises. Everyone thought I was insane to study thus when I was pregnant. But I was addicted to the joy of falling, just as a bird might be addicted to flying. In classes, I would think of my father, my brothers, my family—past, present and future—and my dogs, and I’d fight with a fury I hadn’t known I possessed. But one day in class the fury didn’t rise in me as it used to, and I realized that my worst memories had become scars rather than wounds. I remembered what my mother had told me long ago, and I knew that my soft heart had mended, rather than breaking like a hard one. My father was a part of the same dream that my past had become. He had formed me as much as anyone or anything in my childhood had, but now my childhood, like Maruk’s, was gone. I came to think of my father and Maruk as magical, like the wisest elders, or like the magical childhood I now saw I’d had.
 

As the days passed, Panyor helped many Bakshami build their houses. He told us about battles in which he’d fought, and about ships he’d flown. He gave classes and lectured to the Bakshami who’d moved into our new village. The Bakshami were surprisingly good at learning of war—after all, according to legend, the Bakshami had descended from a Soom Kali man and a beast. We grew confident in our ability to defend ourselves. We were such impressive students of war that a couple of the finest warriors in Soom Kali honored us by moving to our colony. Even Zem returned from Artroro and became one of the most flamboyant and lazy members of my new village.
 

On the day that Artroro officially declared war on Soom Kali, Moor and I decided to hold our mating ritual. The night before, I sat up by myself, thinking about the time long ago when I’d seen a wave of sand pounce upon a man. That stranger had appeared in our village like the first flea of summer, a harbinger of the scavengers and bloodsuckers who soon descended upon our quiet lives, scavenging for the remains of war.
 

I sat on the ground by a couple of lonely trees. Most of the landscape in our colony had a lonely quality. I felt eyes on my back. I turned smiling, certain it was my future husband. But it was my mother, staring at me with haunted eyes. She rarely talked to me since my father had died. I thought she blamed me for my father’s fate. His remains were trapped in Artekka’s hot center, never to become a part of the hallowed Glass Mountains. The hate flashed for a moment, then burned itself out, to be supplanted by an expression I had not seen in so long I could not quite place it.
 

“What are you thinking?” I said.
 

“I was thinking how proud I am of you,” she said simply.
 

We held each other and cried. When the sun rose, our relationship had changed in that way all parent-child relationships change eventually. Now I was the grown-up, taking care of someone more helpless than myself.
 

And in this state of mind I faced the great wars of my future.