Speaking Bones, page 61
Tovo knew he must not fail. A victory would cement his stature as the pékyu-maker of the scrublands, but a defeat would plunge the Lyucu into internecine warfare from which they might never recover.
The scouting reports brought him some comfort. Repeated flyovers of the Boneyard showed that despite the intervening seven months, during which the chaos among the Lyucu should have rekindled the Agon dream of overthrowing their conquerors, Théra’s rebels were still outnumbered and outmatched.
The absence of a large rebel garinafin force showed that Théra’s claim to be Pékyu of the Agon had by no means been acknowledged by all the scattered Agon chiefs. Still cowed by the memory of Tenryo and Cudyu’s harsh reprisals and as suspicious of one another as the Lyucu thanes, most of the Agon chiefs had decided to wait and see how Théra’s rebellion would play out before taking a stand. The Boneyard held only a ragtag collection of freed Dara slaves, young Agon fighters with nothing to lose, and their ice tribe allies.
Tovo vowed to add the bones of the rebels to the famed white scree heaped at the bases of many mesas in the Boneyard. He would become a second Tenryo, a unifier and savior of the Lyucu people.
“Ten dyudyu cupéruna?” he shouted again.
* * *
On the twentieth day after Tovo set out from Taten, the Lyucu host arrived at the edge of the Boneyard.
A dusting of snow covered the ground like a fresh piece of garinafin skin stretched atop the cactus drums for the storytelling dance. It was the perfect setting for a new voice painting in the re-rememberings of Ukyu-Gondé.
A thick wall of smoke barred their way, rising high into the sky like a curtain. Though wildfires sometimes swept across the scrublands in the dry heat of high summer, here and now in deep winter, the smoke was obviously artificial. A long line of heaps of dung and bone had been set alight, generating the thick smog that obscured what lay behind. It was no easy matter to maintain so much smoke in the presence of the constant winds.
The flames were being tended by the rebel army, about a thousand strong. Compared to the ten thousand Lyucu warriors under his command, the rebels, some too young, some too old, all poorly equipped, appeared as a bunch of ill-prepared tanto-lyu-naro huddling around campfires, not much of a threat at all.
What are they doing? wondered Tovo. Are they hoping to create the illusion that they have many more fighters than they actually do?
“Ten dyudyu cupéruna?” Tovo shouted.
“Lyucu kyo! Lyucu kyo!” The response was powerful, united, full of bloodlust. Warriors pounded their weapons against the ground; the din was deafening, bone-shaking.
Tovo grinned, reassured. Nothing boosted morale like seeing the sorry state of their enemies. The unified war cry should strike fear into the hearts of the rebels, and perhaps they would surrender without even a fight.
Oddly, the rebels didn’t show any sign of being intimidated by the sight and sound of the Lyucu host, despite their clear disadvantage in numbers, fighting readiness, and garinafins. They continued to attend to the fires: shoveling fuel, fanning smoke, raking ashes. They acted as if maintaining the smoke was the most important thing in the world and ignored the Lyucu completely.
Gusts of wind blew across the field, stirring up eddies of snow. The smoke wall swirled, churned, thickened.
What lies behind that wall?
Briefly, Tovo wondered if he should have sent up the garinafins earlier so he would now have a better sense of what was going on. But for the last few days, he had deliberately kept the garinafins earthbound and marched them alongside the foot soldiers in order not to give away his position to the rebels.
The Lyucu host, realizing their attempt at demoralizing the rebels had failed, began to murmur in confusion.
Tovo would have liked to have more time to investigate, to probe and test. But he knew that morale was like the tides, rising and ebbing in accordance with forces far more powerful than the will of an individual commander. He had to act now.
He gritted his teeth and waved his signaling spear to launch the garinafin force. The best way he knew of confronting the unknown was to hold to the tried and tested. He knew he had air superiority; he would use it.
Instead of piloting one of the garinafins himself, he decided to remain on the ground. The loss of his left arm made him less effective as a pilot. Besides, he had done enough already for the cause of the Lyucu, hadn’t he? It was time for others to take risks.
Nonetheless, he ordered that one garinafin be held back.
Just in case.
Thirty garinafins took off from behind the Lyucu lines. These were the entirety of the garinafin force, remnants of the thousand-plus that had once been corralled at Taten. The fearless riders guided their mounts toward the billowing wall of smoke, heedless of any peril. They were the masters of the sky.
Something stirred behind the wall. The smoke thinned, curled, parted.
Five rebel garinafins burst through, heading straight for the Lyucu aerial assault.
The Lyucu stared at this sight in disbelief. They knew that the rebels had few garinafins. But to counter thirty with five… that was surely suicide.
The rebel garinafins fought with a ferocity that the Lyucu were unprepared for. Toof piloted Ga-al, the aged garinafin that had once served the Lyucu. Théra’s rebels had augmented his claws with sharpened metal sheaths, and the veteran garinafin wielded them like the swords of Cocru dancers, slicing and stabbing like a bestial version of the Hegemon reincarnate. The other rebel garinafins, roused by Ga-al’s example, fought just as fiercely.
Yet, five garinafins, no matter how skilled and ferocious, could not overcome thirty. It was a simple matter of mathematics. Claw marks soon scarred the mottled hide of the rebel war beasts, and thick blood oozed from their wounds, precipitating upon the snowy ground far below like crimson rain.
Ga-al gave a long, loud moan, defiant as well as desperate. The bone-chilling cold affected the garinafins even more than humans, making them sluggish and reducing their supply of lift gas.
Apparently deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, Toof guided Ga-al into an abrupt turning dive. Once free of the throng of attacking Lyucu garinafins, Ga-al winged away from the battlefield, heading straight north. The other rebel garinafins, seeing their leader flee, followed.
The Lyucu garinafins, scenting victory, gave chase. Tovo had instructed the riders that it was vital that all remaining rebel garinafins be destroyed as quickly as possible to guarantee victory on the ground.
Besides, the rebel garinafins were flying erratically, a couple favoring one wing. They were injured, scared, on the verge of falling out of the air. It would not take long for the Lyucu garinafin force to dispatch them before returning to support the ground assault.
Soon, all the garinafins had departed from the battlefield, leaving the sky eerily empty.
Once again, the Lyucu host roared and pounded the ground.
Tovo, even in his wildest dreams, couldn’t have anticipated such a quick aerial victory. He was almost sorry that the battle was over so soon; how could his courage and strength be properly celebrated in future voice paintings with so little material?
He looked over at the rebels at the base of the wall of smoke, and the wolfish grin on his face faded. As if sensing his mood, the celebratory cheers around him subsided as well.
Instead of clustering together in preparation for a desperate last stand, the rebels were rushing about to douse the fires that they had so carefully tended until now.
Tall, imposing figures gradually materialized behind the dissipating smoke.
Tovo sucked in a deep breath and shivered, not purely from the cold.
Behind the ragtag rebels stood a row of towering skeletons, creatures of nightmare, monsters revived from the legends of the end of the Fifth Age.
There was a gigantic garinafin, easily twenty times the size of a regular garinafin. Seven massive skulls armed with ferocious canines menaced the Lyucu host from the ends of seven columns of vertebrae. The wings, each as large as the entrance flap of the Great Tent, shimmered like the wings of some oversized insect in the bright sun, and through the translucent material one could glimpse the bones, flexing—though the Lyucu would not have made this comparison—like the frame of a silk airship. It squatted on six bony feet, each the size of ten cattle, tipped with craggy stone claws.
There was a monumental eight-legged tusked tiger, whose head was pieced together from hundreds of real tusked tiger skulls, its two tusks as long as the hundred-year-old trees in Kiri Valley. The eight thick legs, shaped like the waterwheels of Dara, were each composed from hundreds of interlocking bones.
There was a gargantuan shark, whose jaws seemed wide enough to swallow hundreds of warriors in one bite. Instead of fins, the shark had dozens of walking appendages shaped like the legs of wolves and tigers. The tail fluke, as large as the wings of garinafins, glinted with a metallic sheen.
Numerous other monstrosities defying description joined their ranks, and all of them had huge sails that undulated gently on their backs, as though city-ships had been transformed and sailed onto land. Rebels clustered around the giant skeletal beasts, holding on to thick cables attached to the bones as though they were restraining the monsters, who, at any moment, might explode into motion.
The creatures were clearly arucuro tocua, but no living bone construction of this scale had ever been seen in the scrublands.
Around Tovo, the Lyucu warriors whispered in terror and awe.
“What manner of sorcery is this?”
“Do the gods favor the Agon and Dara slaves?”
“Is this the end of the Sixth Age?”
Tovo was not a superstitious man. However these bone statues came to be, he was certain they were the work of human hands, not divine in origin. The alternative was simply inconceivable to his stunted imagination.
Yet, could he count on such steadfastness in all his warriors? How were they supposed to fight monsters they had never thought were real?
The rebel warriors let go of the ropes tethering the arucuro tocua beasts. As the wintry wind filled the sails at the top, the giant statues swayed in place, their articulated bones creaking, grinding, groaning, scraping.
The Lyucu raised their weapons uncertainly.
Smoke swirled; the ground quaked; the gods of the scrublands began their dance.
MONTHS EARLIER.
After the death of Takval, Théra spent much of the winter studying the myths of the scrublands and consulting with her advisers: Dara, Agon, as well as the tribes of the ice.
Using Takval’s body to assassinate Cudyu had only been the first step in the plan. The demise of Cudyu would plunge the Lyucu into temporary chaos and put a stop to any plans for a reinforcement fleet to Dara.
The second part of the plan involved Thoryo, who would infiltrate the Lyucu and attempt to free as many of the garinafins as possible.
But even if both of those plots worked, the Lyucu would remain masters of the scrublands. It was only a matter of time before a new leader emerged among the Lyucu thanes and rallied Cudyu’s army. To truly free the scrublands, it was necessary to deal the Lyucu army a decisive defeat, one that would convince the scattered Agon tribes to rise up en masse.
The third and final part of Théra’s plan, also inspired by the visions she had experienced in the moments before taking Takval’s spirit portrait, was perhaps the boldest step of all. It involved fusing the native engineering tradition of the scrublands, arucuro tocua, with Dara art and craft. It would embody ancient myths in modern machinery, combine the knowledge of two peoples in a new language of living bones to tell a story that neither could tell on their own.
Çami, the most creative of Théra’s Dara engineers, and Gozofin, the most skilled of Théra’s Agon arucuro tocua practitioners, were assigned the duty of making Théra’s vision come true.
After weeks of debate, they settled on the Boneyard as the site.
* * *
The Boneyard was so named because it was a rich source of that most useful construction material on the scrublands: bone.
Eons ago, perhaps during the mythical previous Ages of Mankind, the region had been inhabited by monstrous creatures who no longer walked the earth. Their bones, turned to stone, would sometimes emerge from an eroded cliffside after a spring flood or poke out of a pile of scree after a summer landslide. Shamans of the scrublands had long prized these as signs confirming the truth of the ancient sagas.
The treacherous terrain, full of sheer precipices and steep ravines, also made the region the favorite hunting ground for packs of horrid wolves and ambushes of tusked tigers. By strategically chasing and corralling, predators could stampede entire herds of mouflon or aurochs over a long drop, leaving a meal to be feasted on for days. Sometimes wounded garinafins met their ends here as well, often taking down wolves or tigers with them in their death struggles.
Human hunting bands later on imitated this practice, and it wasn’t uncommon to have hundreds or even thousands of game animals fall to their deaths at once.
After the meat and skin were eaten, carried away, or picked clean by scavengers, the bones remained. Year after year, scoured by insects, washed by the rain, bleached by the sun, the white bones piled up in thick layers at the foot of the cliffs. Tribes that needed more bones than their own herds could provide came here to obtain what they needed, much as prospectors and miners in Dara sought glints of gold or rich veins of useful ores.
After the Lyucu came to be the lords of the scrublands, the Boneyard fell into disuse. The Lyucu at Taten had all the bones they needed from tribute, and the scattered Agon tribes were forbidden to come into the heart of the scrublands.
* * *
And so, at the end of last winter, unbeknownst to Cudyu, Théra’s little band traveled to the Boneyard and established a new secret base. In the aftermath of Cudyu’s death, while Tovo busied himself with subduing ambitious Lyucu thanes, the rebels continued to recruit and grow. While the larger Agon tribes hesitated, unwilling to accept the authority of this foreign woman who claimed to be the pékyu, some of the smaller Agon tribes, made more desperate by Lyucu oppression, decided to take a chance and join her.
Théra sent them to raid Lyucu tribes all around Ukyu-Gondé. Since the Agon possessed few garinafins, these strikes had to be extremely limited in their objectives and be concluded quickly so as not to invite a Lyucu reprisal or give away the location of the rebel base. The raiders focused on freeing skilled Dara artisans who had been taken prisoner at Kiri Valley and then enslaved, as well as acquiring as much metal and silk—spoils from Admiral Krita’s expedition and Kiri Valley—as possible.
Meanwhile, back at the base, Théra selected Agon warriors and shamans skilled in the art of arucuro tocua and put them under the guidance of Gozofin and Çami.
Adyulek, serving as artistic director, sketched portraits of the ancient monsters at the end of the Fifth Age. Théra made copies of some of the sketches, thinking that Kunilu-tika and Jian-tika would enjoy them—should she see them again someday.
Gozofin and Çami then translated these images into practical designs that could be realized with bone, sinew, and hide. Where bone offered insufficient strength or flexibility, metal would be added for reinforcement. The two then directed teams of expert arucuro tocua crafters and freed Dara artisans to gather the necessary materials and to begin work on the oversized sculptures.
The project was fraught with difficulty. No arucuro tocua construction of such scale had ever been attempted in living memory, and there were numerous challenges to be overcome, technical as well as cultural. Gozofin and Çami, as practitioners of two very different engineering traditions, had to learn to trust each other. Whereas Çami drew on knowledge gained by centuries of mechanical and civil engineers in Dara, Gozofin called upon generations of experience with bone as a material and inventions unique to arucuro tocua, such as socket joints, wheel-feet, sail-wings, tooth-gears, spine-racks, rib-trains, and so on. They often came at the same problem from two entirely different perspectives, and it took time for them to learn to appreciate each other’s expertise.
The abundant piles of bone around the badlands provided the raw material; the strong but shifting winds, more prevalent than elsewhere in Ukyu-Gondé, supplied ample energy. The gods themselves seemed to have picked this place as the roaming grounds for walking fortresses of articulated bone.
After practicing with a variety of scale models and prototypes, Théra’s people finally began to construct art that could imitate life.
But a new obstacle arose. Many of the Agon harbored doubt whether it was sacrilege to reconstitute monsters that had been created by the gods to punish humankind for their arrogance. No matter how much Théra assured them of the propriety of their actions, they could not entirely put their faith in a woman who was not by blood an Agon and spoke their language with an accent.
Adyulek then came to Théra’s rescue. Again and again, she recounted the last moments of Takval’s life, and held up the pékyu-votan’s spirit portrait as proof of Théra’s favor in the eyes of the gods.
“She fears and trusts our gods,” the old shaman said.
“But nothing like this has ever been done!” the warriors fretted.
“When Afir and Kikisavo strode into the wilderness to demand answers from the gods, they also did many things that had never been done,” said Adyulek. “Our ancestors didn’t know how to herd long-haired cattle or how to ride garinafins, yet here we are.”
The shaman who had once thwarted all of Théra’s attempts at reform now became her fiercest advocate, and the Agon were convinced. Side by side with their Dara comrades, they threw themselves into the work with gusto.
