Speaking Bones, page 68
They had started their calls many hours ago, as soon as the Lyucu army had been sighted. They had led the Lyucu garinafins on a fruitless chase, hoping to see the results of their petition. They had continued their inaudible appeal upon return, their lift gas exhausted and their muscles and lungs aching from exertion.
There was no answer.
Before them, towering bone monsters stumbled and fell, unable to withstand the Lyucu garinafin assault. Columns of black smoke, like the tornadoes that plagued the scrublands in winter, surged from the collapsed ruins. Around them, Agon warriors shouted defiantly and waved their weapons, trying to draw the attention of the swooping garinafins in order to save their arucuro-tocua-bound comrades, heedless of their own safety.
Come on! Toof screamed inside. Fervently, he prayed to Péa, the god of garinafins. But what good was prayer from a man who had always preferred the company of garinafins to shamans, found singing to the flying beasts more soothing than dances honoring the gods?
“Yee-haw!” he shouted at Ga-al and the other garinafins again, his voice cracking.
Silently, the garinafins screamed into the smoke-filled, unrelenting sky.
A Lyucu garinafin swooped slowly overhead, surveying this voiceless choir with its cold, pupil-less eyes. The beast and its riders seemed to conclude that this band of mad rebels and frenzied beasts didn’t even deserve the courtesy of a strafing. It swerved away, intent on bringing down another walking arucuro tocua.
Toof laughed. He was mad. He was mad to have suggested this plan, and Pékyu Théra was mad to have trusted him. How could he think this was ever going to work? The battle was lost.
Vara was dead, Alkir was dead, Radia was dead—everyone he had ever loved had died because of his mad obsession with garinafins, because he thought he understood the beasts better than anyone.
He was neither Lyucu nor Agon; he was a man without a tribe. Tears of rage and regret spilled from his eyes. Impulsively, he wrapped his arms around Ga-al’s neck and began to sing.
Tents sprout across the scrublands like mushrooms after rain,
People roam the endless grass like stars through the cloud-sea.
Feel my arms around you, my eyes on you;
Feel my breath against you, my voice through you.
You’re never alone when you hear the tribe’s lungsong.
Ga-al and the other garinafins kept on howling inaudibly into the void, even as walking bone towers burned and toppled around them, even as the singing lungs of the arucuro tocua beasts emptied, even as warriors and actuators and singers exhausted their last reservoirs of hope.
It was their nature.
* * *
The Seven-Headed Garinafin’s remaining singing heads drooped. The long, serpentine necks had become entangled with one another, like the tails of a nest of moonfur rats.
Tovo felt giddy, as though his blood had transmuted into kyoffir. It was time to deal the final blow, to destroy this most redoubtable bone beast, the symbol of hope for the alliance.
He raised the antler-tipped signaling spear, ready to hurl it and end the battle.
The air darkened. Shadows loomed above him, blotting out the sun.
He looked up, and his heart stopped.
Hundreds, no, perhaps more than a thousand garinafins, had congregated from every direction, their wings a dense cloud that turned day into night. For a moment he wondered if the Dara witch did know real magic after all, and had conjured the cloud-garinafins as her allies.
The truth was both far stranger and less so.
The garinafins that had been freed by Thoryo, Toof, and Radia had spread the tale of their rebellion in Taten across Ukyu-Gondé. In the retelling, the tale had mutated, soared, grown from re-remembering into legend. But beneath the flapping wings of exaggeration and elaborate antlers of embellishment, an articulated skeleton of hard truth remained: It was possible to fight to be free.
The inaudible call of Ga-al and the others had carried across the flat scrublands and been passed on by those who heard it. The cry that had once rallied the enslaved garinafins of Taten to rise up now demanded aid.
And the call had been heeded. The wild and feral garinafins had come to fight not as enslaved war beasts for an unjust empire, but as free creatures making a stand.
Hot tears spilled from Toof’s eyes as he watched their arrival. His faith in the sentience of garinafins had been rewarded; his belief that they would make a choice had been justified.
As columns of smoke over the battlefield swirled in the wing-gusts of the new arrivals, he seemed to see the wispy form of a star-eyed cloud-garinafin, piloted by the insubstantial figure of the woman who had been his dearest companion through the years.
“Thank you, Radia,” he muttered, his vision blurred. “Thank you, my friends.”
The wild garinafins descended upon the stunned Lyucu garinafins like a pack of wolves upon a few frightened dogs. Tongues of fire filled the sky like lightning bolts; roars and trumpeting sundered the air like thunder. The scrublands had never seen such a large gathering of garinafins united by a single purpose, not under Pékyu Nobo Aragoz of the Agon, not under Pékyu Tenryo Roatan of the Lyucu, not under any god or hero known to the shamans.
The Lyucu fell from the sky, slisli flies swatted down by cattle tails.
Tovo’s own mount had lost all will to fight. Its only thought was to escape the carnage. Flapping its torn wings, the terrified garinafin screamed as it lurched out of the sky, skimming close to the ground, tumbling, rolling, threshing. Tovo, too stunned to even realize what was happening, found himself sliding off the saddle, and though he scrambled to hold on, lost his grip.
The last thing he remembered was watching two wild garinafins locking their claws around the neck of his mount. The scene receded, growing smaller in his field of vision. Then his body struck the earth, and everything blacked out.
* * *
Thoryo opened her eyes, shuddered as though awakening from a long nightmare, and looked out at the pandemonium.
The remaining arucuro tocua beasts, limping and staggering, had begun to march forward again.
To the west, the remnants of the Lyucu host were retreating as fast as possible toward Taten, while freed garinafins dove at them, roasting small groups of Lyucu warriors as payback for all the torment they had suffered at the hands of their enslavers.
The Agon rebels charged after them, shouting, cheering, celebrating. They had routed the dreaded Lyucu army from the field, and they imagined the devastation they would deliver to Taten and the cries of lamentation that would follow.
Behind the Seven-Headed Garinafin lay a muddy field strewn with bodies: human, cattle, and garinafin. The giant articulated-bone war engines stepped over the dead, crushing their bodies and pressing the bloody smears into the dirty snow and earth. Nothing stood in the way of these creatures powered by wind and gods’ breath. They were invincible.
The skull cockpit was filled with smoke. Straining to govern her unsteady limbs, Thoryo climbed out of one of the eye sockets to perch between the towering antlers. Looking upon the slaughter field, she didn’t feel the joy of triumph; she felt only weariness and despair.
When will the cycles of killing end? Why must we mortals be compelled to aid the cause of death when death is guaranteed to be the final victor?
She looked behind her, intending to remember the dead before climbing back down into the cockpit to rejoin Théra.
She froze.
* * *
Tovo opened his eyes and found himself in a nightmare.
In the distance, skeletal monsters from myth and legend strode across the scrublands. Garinafins fell out of the sky like sere leaves caught in a storm of fire. He was in the middle of a wasteland filled with carcasses and wreckage and charred remains.
Staggering to his feet, he realized that he was the only living being for a thousand paces in every direction. He must have lost consciousness when he fell from the back of his mount, and thinking his unmoving form merely another corpse, the Agon warriors had marched past him without sparing another glance.
The limping hulk of the Seven-Headed Garinafin was not as far away as it had seemed when he had been lying on the ground. Slowly, it labored forward, its burned wheel-feet and torn sail-wings impeding progress. The Agon foot warriors had run far ahead to chase down the routed Lyucu. He was alone behind enemy lines.
Hope flared up in his heart again. The gods had given him a chance for vengeance, to strike a last blow to redeem the dream of the Lyucu.
He ran after the lumbering tail of the straggling bone beast.
* * *
The crew of the Seven-Headed Garinafin banged on drums, danced, and chanted, taking turns at the pilot tube of the singing lung. Their victory song, thus amplified, reverberated across the field.
So absorbed were they in celebration that no lookouts were posted, and no one noticed the determined figure clambering up the spine of the bone beast, heading for the skull cockpit.
Thoryo screamed for help, but her voice was drowned out by the clamor of the victory choir. She scrambled to back away, to retreat into the safety of the skull cockpit, but the massive walking bone engine chose that moment to stumble, throwing her off balance.
She tumbled down the long central neck, scrabbling for purchase. Halfway down, she finally halted her fall. Only a few outsized vertebrae now separated her from the intruder.
She felt her limbs turn to ice. The man’s gore-drenched visage and the gleeful bloodlust in his eyes made him appear more demon than human. He was a hunter, a predator, the very embodiment of the forces of death.
And he was coming for Théra.
Strength and will fled from Thoryo. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even scream. What could she do in the face of this personification of death? She had never fought. She didn’t even carry a knife, as was the custom in both Dara and Ukyu-Gondé. She abhorred the very idea of fighting, of violence.
For an instant, Tovo tensed, thinking that his sneak attack had been discovered. But he relaxed and grinned wolfishly when he realized how weak and small his would-be opponent was. The dark complexion indicated that she was from Dara, and everybody knew that barbarians were helpless in single combat. They had no real strength.
He climbed up to the terrified girl clinging to her bone perch, as still as a corpse. Almost as an afterthought, he casually kicked her out of the way and continued his ascent up the spine.
As she rolled off the neck of the heaving beast, the instinct for survival kicked in, freeing Thoryo from her dazed state. Her fingers gripped onto the protruding knobs of a neck vertebra. Suspended above the dizzying, wobbling ground far below her, she clung to life by the thinnest of threads.
Gratefully, she sucked in lungfuls of air, savoring the sensation of her heart pounding in her chest. The frayed sail-wings swayed powerfully from side to side; the pillar-like wheel-feet deformed and pounded against the ground, ready to grind her into flesh-meal should she fall.
Suspended between life and death, dangling from a simulation of life crafted from the remnants of death, she allowed relief to wash over her, sinking into the pure joy of having survived.
How precious was life, how very irreplaceable. She could not conceive of anything more important than to live on. That had always been the spine and thread of her conscious life, the one constant bass note of her lungsong, from the first murky moments in the hold of Dissolver of Sorrows, where she had learned what it meant to be alive, to the traumatic day in the garinafin corrals of Taten, where she had witnessed unspeakable horrors unleashed by the best of intentions. She did not want to die; she did not want to kill.
She looked up and saw Tovo continue his climb toward the skull cockpit, his single arm pulling his body up and forward in an uninterrupted, fluid motion, vengeance incarnate.
How easy would it be to do nothing, to survive and to also let him survive.
But then Théra would die.
That frigid beach to the far north returned to her awareness, superimposed over the smoky, shimmering air above the battlefield, still burning with garinafin fire. Flowers of ice tumbled through the haze, achingly beautiful and fragile, ephemeral shards of the eternal Flow spoken of by Ano sages, holding a solidified pattern for the briefest of moments before shattering into oblivion.
“Then how do you know what is right?” asked Thoryo, tears frozen on her face. “Do you make an appeal to blood? But I am not Dara or Agon, whether by birth or marriage. Do you pray to the gods? But I neither fear nor trust the gods.”
“I can’t tell you the answer,” said Théra, “for conscience is the only scale that can tell truth apart from lies, separate gold from dross. But conscience belongs to you and you alone, and can be calibrated by no philosophy or religion, only experience.”
“I don’t know what to do,” muttered Thoryo. “I love you, I love Takval, I love the people who have become my tribe, though I know not my origins. But I also know that I will never kill.”
It was killing, more than dying, that she feared. Though she had lived among Dara, Lyucu, Agon, and the tribes of ice, she had also kept herself apart.
She had learned the philosophy of the Ano sages and memorized the storytelling dances of the scrubland shamans; she had tilled the fields next to Théra and flown on the back of a garinafin with Takval; she had succored the wounded and buried the dead; she had emulated flawlessly the accents of tribes at war and tasted cooking fused from divergent traditions. She had lived a life grander than most mortals. Yet, there was one thing she had never done.
Though she came of age among warriors, she had never killed, not since the instant she became aware of death.
Tovo was above the skull cockpit. Carefully, he positioned himself between the antlers, ready to leap down and swing through an eye socket. He pulled out his bone knife and examined it to be sure it was sharp, sharp enough to maim, to kill.
Thoryo pulled herself back onto the neck of the arucuro tocua. She began to climb after Tovo.
A sense of peace descended over her. She wondered if this was what Théra had felt, when she had been under the power of the silent roar of the tusked tiger. She wondered if this was what people meant by the presence of divinity. She wondered if this was what Adyulek felt as she contemplated ancestral spirit paintings, what Tipo Tho and Nméji Gon felt as they listened to stories of ancient heroes, what Théra felt as she tried to plant the memory of the Ano logograms in her children, what Takval felt as he offered his life to Théra so that a dream would not die.
She did not belong to any tribe or people; she was not a link in a chain of generations stretching backward into the mists of time and forward into the unknowable future; she had not the comfort of a greater cause that she believed in.
This was the mortal condition, she realized. She would never know with certainty the right path; she would never experience enough to act with absolute conviction; she would never be able to eliminate all suffering.
All she could do was to act in the here and now, to live and die for love, to fight and battle for friendship, to trust in a conscience that was never perfect but capable of being perfected, to scintillate in the bright light of winter on the frozen beach suspended between the eternal ocean and the inconstant land for the brief instant allotted to us all.
She climbed faster. She had reached the skull. She leapt at the figure of the crouching man, screaming and shouting and making as much noise as she could.
Tovo turned and snarled, plunging his knife into her belly and slicing it across. Steaming entrails spilled from the gash. Thoryo could feel the very essence of life slipping out of her.
Her instinct was to push the organs back in, to flee from this horror, to eke out a few more greedy drops of this fragile beauty called life.
She held her own intestines in her hands. It would be so easy to remain aloof, separate, alone. But that was a state reserved to the gods. To be human meant to be entangled with other humans, equally mortal and equally ignorant, stumbling about in love and hate. So instead, she threw herself forward, entangling Tovo’s lone arm with the loops of her intestines.
“I don’t hate you,” she croaked, bloody foam pooling between her lips. “I will never kill—”
Tovo cursed and tried to kick her away, but Thoryo embraced him, locking her arms and legs around his torso and refusing to let go even as she felt the vitality seep out of her wound with her blood, even as she felt life leaving her lungs with her last breath.
The victory song of the warriors drowned out all noise; blood and gore dripped down the top of the skull cockpit, through the eye sockets, falling onto the startled figure of Théra.
* * *
“O gods! O gods!” wailed Théra.
She was drenched in blood, her hands slick with gore. She cradled the cooling body of the dead girl, the girl who had given her life to save her.
Climbing up out of the cockpit, she had run to the crouching figure of Tovo and delivered a kick to the back of his head. The man had crumpled, dropped his knife, and then tumbled off the top of the skull cockpit. Wordlessly, she had watched as his body slammed into the ground. A giant wheel-foot had then rolled over him, pressing him into the earth, hiding his face from the Eye of Cudyufin forever.
It was the final blow of the battle.
Voices of the victorious Agon boomed around her.
Ten dyudyu cupéruna?
Agon kyo!
Ten dyudyu cupéruna?
Gondé kyo!
Sitting atop a monstrous engine of articulated bone that sang with the Divine Voice, Théra wept.
The Lyucu had been scattered to the winds. She had triumphed over them as Mapidéré had once triumphed over the Six States, as Tenryo Roatan had triumphed over all his foes. Overhead, wild garinafins wheeled in the air, screeching with the pleasure of vengeance. She had fulfilled her promise to Takval. But her heart felt like ashes.
