The Unfinished Song: Taboo (10 page)

Rage, warm and familiar ever since the day he’d found the bodies of his wife and children, suffused him. He told her in two words what she could do with herself. And added, “It doesn’t matter whether I escape or not. Do you really think this is over? Do you really think my people won’t unleash another typhoon of smack-your-face after all the back-stabbing muck we’ve put up with from you people?”

He clamped his mouth shut, before, in his anger, he revealed too much.
Go on
, he willed her.
Dare me again. Threaten me. Try me. I can take it and give it back twice as hard
.

Anger as scarlet as his own flooded her cheeks and fired her eyes. He knew she was about to snap out some furious insult or command, and welcomed it. Anything that helped him
remember
she was the enemy.

Before she could say whatever she intended, a voice called from outside the hut, “Mama?”

An adolescent girl, carrying a squirrel, of all things, shoved aside the reed hanging that served the hut as a door. “First of all, I’m still not talking to you,” the girl began, speaking so fast, that, between her odd prattle and Yellow Bear accent, Rthan wasn’t sure he caught but half her words, “So don’t think I’ve forgiven you.
But
I need some of that leaf paste you made for that boy who burned his knee, because this squirrel got trapped in the lodge and
the girls were chasing it and the poor thing was scarred and then the boys heard the girls screaming, so they came into our lodge, and when they saw the squirrel, they chased it too, and it ran through a fire pit and
I think
the poor thing
might have been burned, see?”

She thrust out the squirrel into her mother’s face.

“Gwenika, this is not a good time…” Brena said, repositioning herself to block Rthan
from Gwenika’s line of sight.

Gwenika noticed Rthan in recesses of the dimly lit hut for the first time. She tried to peek around her mother. “Oh! Is that your slave?”

“No! Yes.” Brena frowned. “Gwenika, you must leave. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I’ll be teaching.”

“But I need the burn paste—”

“
Now
, Gwenika.”

“Fine. I don’t care. I’m not talking to you anyway.” The girl rushed out of the hut.

Brena covered her face with her hands. When she removed them, terror remained frozen into her expression, aging her with lines he hadn’t noticed before. She threw this bleakness back on Rthan.

“You win,” she said flatly. “You’re right. I can’t tame you. I can’t keep you. I know your kind, because my husband was one. All you care about is glory and honor, you don’t care who gets hurt or abandoned while you rush off to prove your manhood by goring out some other man’s belly. I’m sure you
will
try to escape, maybe take a hostage,
maybe
kill a few people before you’re killed in turn. Well, you can have your wish and your glorious death, but I’m not going to let you
near
my daughters on your way to Obsidian Mountain. I’ll give you back to Hertio first thing in the morning.”

She threw herself on her bed, back to him. “By the sun, I hate men.”

The domestic vignette had killed his desire, but awakened in him a longing subtler and more painful. He cursed her silently for making him hear his daughter’s voice again, in the echoes of Gwenika’s innocent babble.
Meira would be Gwenika’s age, if she had lived
. Encouraged by the faery
who
had taken Meira’s place in his life, he had unthinkingly accepted his daughter as eternally eight. But mortals grew and changed. His fae doppelganger of a daughter could never grow into an Initiate, a bride or the mother of his grandchildren. In Gwenika, he had a glimpse of what might have been, and the knife wound of grief twisted afresh.

The fire popped and grumbled. The roasting tubers were beginning to smell delicious, tormenting his empty stomach. Neither of them spoke. Rthan twisted against the ropes to watch Brena’s back. Her tunic fell loosely, revealing the raw scars where he had whipped her.

“Brena.” He had never called her by name before. She didn’t turn around, but he knew from the tension in her back she heard him. “I would never hurt you or your children. Not even to escape.”

“Ha,” she said dully, not moving. “Once you tried to escape, your good intentions would wash away downstream.”

“I can promise not to attempt escape when you or your daughters are around,” he said. “Then you could not be in danger of being hostages or mortalities.”

She snorted.

The crackling fire filled another pause. “But I can’t give my allegiance to your people or your fae. I can’t.”

Brena sat up. She met his eyes with a question and he nodded.

“Then I will hold you to that,” she said. She rose from the bed and untied him, shoving the legwals at him. “For mercy’s sake, dress yourself.”

She pointed to the
tubers
she’d placed in the fire earlier. Their skins now crackled toasty and crisp. “Your dinner.” She pointed to a reed mat on the floor on the far side of the hut from her bed. “Your bed.”

Rthan picked the tubers out of the fire, tossed them from palm to palm until they cooled, then crunched into his meal with the gusto of a starved man. He didn’t thank her for her decency, which he hardly deserved. She went back to bed without wishing him good night.

Despite his exhaustion, he lay awake on his mat, watching the shadows cast on the domed ceiling by the dying embers. His people would attack again.

And when Yellow Bear fell, what would happen to Brena and her daughters?

Gold clinked on Kavio’s costume for the ritual.

The day a man rema
de
himself deserved this perfect sky, bluer than a faery’s eye, scented with cut grass and loam. The song of women past the rise, winnowing the riverbed for gold, gave melody and harmony to match the song he kept inside. Stamping feet of lithe young men, bent each beneath his pack of dirt and rock, drummed the hill, up and down, as far as the quarry and back.

Kavio knelt, drank air like wine, and said his oath before Hertio, his new War Chief. That was all; when done, Kavio rose again. He stood side by side with the older man and watched men work, hundreds of ants on the Unfinished Tor.

Hertio clapped him on the back. “Each clan
pledged to me
sends
me ten men but no more,
sometimes two
but not less
, for one moon only, once a year. With these paltry few I must make do. Imagine if I had twice as many for twice as long, or every man in every clan for every moon, every season. What mountains could I not raise then! Instead of taking twenty years to build, they’d soar before your eyes! But clans are
more stingy
with their men than with their virgins. I have often envied your leader his bone flute, which, so it was said, drew men to him like swill drew rats.”

“He was no leader of mine,” Kavio said. The river women ended their song.

“The
re—
the megalith.” Hertio pointed.

Black basalt, quarried and captured like a whale from a stone sea, rode trunks of trees, heaved and pushed by men. Forty men pulled the ropes. Ten men ran each final log back around to let the rock, on sled runners, glide over it again, a feat these men had done for countless miles.

“That stone will stand in the pit here.” Hertio pointed. “Next to the stone where you killed a man.”

“Strange honor.”

“We never moved his skull. It’s crushed beneath the stone still.”

“It might have been mine.”

Hertio had the grace to stay silent. Kavio stared into the pit, aware that the strands of magic unleashed that day still tangled this hilltop. He had been trying all morning not to trip them, but they hissed around him now, snakes whose poison bite brought a Vision of the past, and pain. He wanted to howl out but could only croak before he collapsed forward into the cavity.

“Look at the Dwarf Tavaedi!” The children working beside their parents in the fields pointed at him and snickered into their hands. “Dwarf! Dwarf!”

Kavio ignored the taunts. Back home, ten-year old Tavaedies were common as acorns under an oak, but here he was a third thumb. He crossed the fields until he came to the pyramid of soil, which looked to him like a big wood-ant mound. Climbing the dirt was fun, but the top was the best. It was a checkerboard of pits. Some of these hole
s
were just depressions in the clay shored up by logs, but others already had been lined with huge, flat boulders. This is what kivas looked like before they were buried and hidden.

Best of all, Kavio had the hilltop to himself. No other children played up here. The men who would have been working on the hill had abandoned their ropes, logs and
backbaskets,
to take up arms and stand guard against Father’s army camped in the surrounding woods.
Father thought Kavio was back at the camp doing chores
.

Busy slaying imaginary foes, Kavio never saw the men until one grabbed him from behind. Sour milk breath tickled his ear; a dirty hand covered his mouth. They hog-tied him before he could fight. At first he was less afraid than he should have been because he didn’t understand who they were. He took this for another of Father’s tests, or, at worst, a prank by the local children. Only when the men wedged him into a ditch at the bottom edge of the pit, and he looked up into the crazed face of the man who had chased him once before around the Tor of the Sun, did he realize he was going to die.
Crabs of fear pinched inside his throat and stomach.

“Your father was a murderer.” The man’s teeth were too yellow, his eyes too white. Rotten Tooth, Kavio dubbed him. “How many deathdebts has he left unpaid, with none to collect them? Your father took my son from me, I will take his son from him.”

“My father never murdered anyone!” Kavio screamed. “He’s a hero. He’s the one who fought the murderers!”

“You’re all murderers,” said Rotten Tooth. “Your whole tribe is guilty. You’ll die here and no one will ever even find your body, no one will take your bones to be buried on Obsidian Mountain, no one will avenge your death.”

Kavio squirmed at the bottom of the hole. When finished, the kiva would be encased in rock, megastones forming the floor, walls and ceiling. Two rectangular rocks already stood against the wall of the pit, upper halves above dirt level. He could see the space where the other obelisks would fit—he lay in one empty trough, a deep furrow against the wall of the pit—but he didn’t understand what the men meant to do until he heard them groan to move great weight, beyond the lisp of the pit.

The men placed wooden blocks near the pit’s edge. There was also a large, cubish boulder. Though smaller than the megalith, the cube shaped rock was almost as tall as a man and also extremely heavy.

“We’re going to use the smaller rock to move the bigger one,” Rotten Tooth said. “Just as we’re going to use you to move your father. Your death will leverage his.”

Beneath his back, Kavio’s wrists burned from his struggle against the ropes. He dared not take his gaze from the rocks over his head. A single megalith weighed more than fifty horses. It would certainly crush one small boy. First, the men rolled the megalith off the logs and onto the wooden blocks. Next, they lifted a notched log, and leaned it like a ladder against the megalith. They knocked the boulder from step to step up the ladder. It wobbled like a fat aunt shimmying up a tree,
then
landed, with a thunder boom, atop the megalith. The ground beneath Kavio trembled.

He panted. Yanked his wrists spastically. He couldn’t roll himself out of the trough. All his squirming wedged him deeper in the mire.