Speaking Bones, page 7
His fingers found the stash under the soft soil.
Tanto’s heart leapt like a prancing hare. He had done it! By dispatching the rest of the camp on an egg hunt that would take them most of the day, he had hopefully bought himself enough time to carry out his plan.
Wrapping all his supplies in the deerskin blanket, he tied the neat bundle to his back. Then, with his slingshot tucked into his belt, he set off northward, the direction of the barrows.
* * *
He jogged and ran, knowing that the pace was unsustainable. But he wanted to put as much distance between himself and the camp as possible. Only after he had entered the copse in the valley between two barrows that stood like the posts of a massive gate did he slow down. This was as far as Sataari ever let anyone go into the City of Ghosts.
Innumerable restless spirits were condemned to roam the barrows for eternity because they had destroyed paradise and couldn’t ascend to the realm beyond on cloud-garinafins.
He knelt down and prayed to the All-Father and the Every-Mother.
“I am Tanto Aragoz, son of Takval, son of Nobo, Pékyu-taasa of the Agon. I know that this is forbidden ground, but I come not to taunt the trapped ghosts or to challenge the gods. I wish… to beg for a favor.”
He had been composing this prayer in his mind for months, trying to imitate the rhythm of Sataari’s and Adyulek’s dance-stories as well as the tone of the ancient sages in his mother’s bedtime stories. The words now flowed out of him in an unstoppable torrent.
“The Lyucu are following the path of wickedness first trod by the arrogant people of the Fifth Age. They have not moved the site of Taten in a generation, relying on the labor of slaves for sustenance and pleasure. They have driven the Agon into the remotest corners of Gondé, hoarding good grazing for themselves. They have become infatuated with the city-ships, monstrous machines brought here by evil-hearted strangers contemptuous of the people of the scrublands.” Here, the boy paused, wondering if the gods might reject him for his blood ties to those strangers from beyond the seas. But… surely the gods could see that Admiral Krita was nothing like his mother, and his mother’s people were victims of the Lyucu too, weren’t they? He shook off his doubts and pressed on. “The Lyucu are so powerful that most good people dare not rise up to oppose them, and the few who do are mercilessly slaughtered. In short, the Lyucu have begun to enslave the land, to exploit it rather than to roam over it freely, living a life of luxury and corruption, abandoning the ever-renewing spirit of the scrublands embodied in the deeds of Afir and Kikisavo.
“The Lyucu have taken away my parents, my grandmother, my grandfather in Dara, my mother’s family there that I never even knew, my friends, my teachers, my elders—and I do not know if any of them are still alive.”
He paused again, choking back tears. Taking deep breaths to calm himself, he went on.
“They must be confronted lest the darkness marking the end of the Fifth Age once again descend upon the scrublands, and you be forced to destroy humanity once more for forgetting your lessons. Therefore, I have come to this forbidden place in search of those mighty weapons once wielded by the haughty chiefs of the last age.
“The shamans say that the weapons of the Fifth Age were unnatural and wicked, but I do not agree. My mother always told me that there is nothing inherently good or wicked in the nature of tools, for they only serve to amplify what is already present in the hearts of humankind. The Lyucu are wicked and seek to enslave, and in their hands the city-ships of Dara further evil. My parents are good and seek to free the Agon, and in their hands the weapons of Dara bolster good. We show our character not by the weapons we choose, but through the purpose for which we fight and manner in which we wield them.
“I speak not of a new wisdom, but lessons taught by Afir and Kikisavo. The people were cast out of paradise, but the heroes defied the gods by seeking weapons and skills that would allow the people to return to paradise. Though you disapproved of their quest, in the end you were moved by their courage and pure hearts, and you gifted them valuable tools so that the people would have warmth in their tents, light in their pits, weapons to defeat predators, food to sustain their strength, garinafins to serve as their allies, and babies in mothers’ bellies. Surely similar tools had been available to those living during the Fifth Age, but in their hands the tools only spurred pride and boosted immorality. You took paradise away, but you handed back Afir and Kikisavo the tools to construct new bubbles of paradise in the harsh landscape.”
Tanto paused once more, hoping that the gods would be convinced by his unorthodox interpretation of the shamans’ dance-stories. In truth, he had drawn this line of argument from the stories of Dara told by his mother: In the hands of the Hegemon, Na-aroénna drank the blood of innocents and laid waste to the Islands; in the hands of the Marshal, the Doubt-Ender became an instrument of peace, the dam that held back the Lyucu killing tide.
It’s really too bad that the gods of Gondé don’t know about the heroes of Dara, he reflected. It would be so much easier to persuade them if they did.
“I am a pékyu-taasa of the Agon, and if my father has already ridden the cloud-garinafins, then I am the pékyu in his stead. I am not strong enough to defeat the Lyucu on my own, but if my strength can be multiplied by the weapons hidden here, I will have a chance.
“If you agree with my quest, then allow me passage into the City of Ghosts. Test me as you once tested Afir and Kikisavo, and judge me with the same fairness you judged them. My heart is pure, and once the Lyucu have been defeated, I will return and lay the borrowed weapons to rest.”
He listened hard for the gods’ response. The thick shade in the copse was like twilight, save for occasional shafts of sun that penetrated the canopy to paint a mottled pattern on the ground. He watched the shifting shadows, listened to the rustling of the wind among the leaves, and hoped to catch a glimpse of the divine will, a sign to guide him.
No answer came, which was also a kind of answer.
He pressed on.
* * *
It took him most of the day to hike through the dense wood in the valley. When he emerged, he saw barrows looming all around him, each grander than the last. Between the mounds were valleys filled with trees or grass, with marshy rivers winding through.
The sun was sinking in the west; he decided to climb the mound on the left before it got dark to get a better sense of the geography of the barrows. The mound wasn’t tall, really not much more than a knoll by the standards of the World’s Edge Mountains. But after the journey through the salt flats and the shoreside plain on which he had spent the winter, he felt as though he were ascending toward heaven.
By the time he reached the top, panting from the exertion, the first stars were emerging in the sky. He stood still and looked around.
To the south, he could see the dark forest he had just traversed. Beyond it was the tiny settlement, where he hoped his little brother was getting ready for bed and not giving away his secret. Already, he felt the first pangs of fear, loneliness, and yearning for the safety of friends and tribe. He pushed those feelings away. He was only at the beginning of a journey that was likely to grow much harder.
He turned to the west and saw the shimmering waves of the Sea of Tears beyond a few more low knolls. The sun was just setting over the great salt lake, a bare sliver of reddish-gold on the horizon.
He looked to the northeast, and the sight took his breath away.
Earthen tumuli stood in neat rows and columns, as far as the eyes could see. Though covered by vegetation, it was impossible to mistake them for the work of nature. For one thing, they were all carefully shaped and positioned: Roughly oval at the base, with the major and minor axes aligned perfectly in the cardinal directions, the artificial hills gradually grew more angular with increasing height, until the round sides turned into steep, flat faces that converged to sharp apexes. For another thing, the barrows were arranged in a grid, though some of them were many times larger than others. The smaller mounds could perhaps be circled by a running herd of cattle in a few hours, while the larger ones would take days.
Is this what a city in Dara looks like? he wondered. His mother had told him and his brother about the marvelous cities of her homeland and drawn sketches for them, but he had never been able to really envision a city, a landscape filled with outsized artificial constructions, with buildings, until now.
Since he had never seen a Dara city, a more apt comparison came to his mind: how a fly might see a herd of resting cattle. The slumbering, monumental, man-made hill-beasts stretched into the distance, ready to settle down for the night.
And then he saw something else in the fading twilight: In the far distance, at the very center of the City of Ghosts, there rose a mound so gargantuan that it was like seeing a garinafin at rest, guarding the long-haired cattle all around. A true mountain in a tribe of hills, it seemed scarcely possible that it had been constructed by human hands. Surely a shaman standing at the very top would be able to reach out and pluck down a star.
The gods decided to punish their mortal kin for daring to reach for the stars.
He shivered as he recalled the hypnotic words of Sataari.
That’s where I must go.
* * *
The journey through the barrows was neither easy nor fast.
From east to west, the Ghost River branched out among the artificial hills like a spider’s web, gradually ramifying into marshes indistinguishable from grassland. And where the river did not flow, thick forests filled the flat regions between the mounds. Tanto was constantly trudging through mud, wading through water, fighting his way through thick brambles, or climbing up the side of one of the mounds when the vegetation below proved too thick.
Mosquitoes swarmed around his face and arms, and soon his skin was covered by itchy red bumps. Though the landscape was filled with strange fruits that gave off tempting sweet odors, so rich that they verged on rotten, he dared not eat them lest they prove poisonous. Because he wanted to conserve the supplies he had brought for as long as possible, he stuck to foraging for the few tubers and wild greens that he knew were safe to eat, and he dug for grubs and insects to supplement his diet. Once in a while, if he was lucky, he managed to use his slingshot to kill a bird or hare, and he roasted these over fire pits, grateful for the rich nourishment.
Day after day, he drew closer to the gigantic mound at the center of the City of Ghosts.
Many sights along the way puzzled him. There were stone steps built into the sides of some of the barrows, indicating that they had once been climbed, perhaps often. He passed by wide-open plazas of packed earth and gravel, empty except for a few large broken rocks, making him wonder if massive engines, now decayed, had once occupied such spaces. The number of steep, planar faces at the tops of the mounds varied: three, four, five, six, seven… and some remained ovalish from bottom to top, looking more like natural hills.
Most barrows had sides honeycombed with caves, with stone-lined walls and floors. He thought they might have served as dwellings, based on faint traces of pictures left on some of the walls. Some of the caves seemed to wind deep into the earthen interior, but he didn’t follow them to the end, fearful of getting lost.
The best weapons must be secreted deeper in the city.
Sataari had said that the barrows were burial mounds, graves that kept the bodies of the deceased away from their natural fate as food for scavengers and robbed their souls of the uplifting light of the Eye of Cudyufin. But now Tanto wondered if Sataari was entirely right; he couldn’t imagine people would live on top of such horrific structures.
In the shadow of one large tumulus, he passed through a field filled with stone heaps, miniature versions of the barrows. The stone piles were of varying heights, though none much taller than he was. Most had become overgrown with weeds and vines, and the harsh winters had reduced many to mere rubble. He imagined himself as a vole scurrying through a patch of mushrooms.
As he wound his way between them, he experienced the strange sensation of being watched. He whipped about, but there was nothing: no bird, beast, nor man. Goose bumps appeared on his arms, though it was a hot afternoon, and a chill tingled along his spine. He began to run.
It was similar to the sensation he had felt when he visited the small graveyard at the end of Kiri Valley, where Admiral Mitu Roso and the other deceased of Dara had been interred after the custom of their homeland. Théra always took the boys there on the day of the Grave-Mending Festival to clear off weeds and repair the logograms on the tablets marking the tombs. Both Tanto and Rokiri had hated it.
He collapsed to the ground when he finally escaped that field of stone piles. It was a long time before he caught his breath and found enough strength to get up.
He pressed on and did not look back.
In other places, he found signs that the ground had been flattened and shaped. The vegetation in these plots grew in rows, reminding him of the crops that his mother and the people of Dara had worked so hard to cultivate back in Kiri Valley.
Curious, he went into the straight-edged plots to investigate, and he found that the earth had been divided into long, narrow rows with low banks of stone. Soil had covered the stones, and because of the difference in elevation and water accumulation, different kinds of plants grew on the peaks and in the troughs.
What had happened here? He shuddered, wondering if he was seeing signs of the enslavement of the land by the wicked people of the Fifth Age.
Occasionally, he came across human skeletons on the side of a mound or by the shore of a stream. The lack of pelts or other clothing indicated that they had been dead a long time, and the unfamiliar bone and stone implements near the remains showed that they were likely not members of the scrubland tribes, or at least not Agon. Were they people of the Fifth Age who had died when the gods cleansed this city of pride? Were they brave adventurers who later dared to defy the wrath of the gods to explore this forbidden ground? Were they also refugees who tried to escape their pursuers by hiding in the City of Ghosts? There was no way to know.
Being a child of the scrublands, Tanto was not afraid of bones. He took the skeletons apart, picked out pieces that he thought could be useful as tools, and broke the rest into smaller fragments. These he assembled into arucuro tocua creations—playing with them soothed his spirit, and it was a way to honor the spirit of the dead. Into each bone beast he incorporated a Dara logogram made of bone fragments: “father,” “mother,” “mouth,” “heart,” “faith,” “fish,” “bird,” and so on. Back in Kiri Valley, he had hated the logogram lessons, but now making them felt like a way to speak to his mother.
As he got up to continue his journey, he left behind his arucuro tocua, unique constructions melding the wisdom of the Ano sages and the craft of the people of the scrublands. The wind and the rain would propel them to explore the barrows on their own.
Once, confused by the fog that hung in the valleys between the mounds and refused to lift even after sunrise, he climbed a tall barrow to get his bearings. At the top, he found a circular stone platform with marks incised into the edge. Lines from these marks converged to a single point at the center of the circle. He guessed that the marks showed the positions of stars or landmarks seen from the platform, but he could not guess what they were for.
At night, he always tried to sleep up the side of a barrow, preferably sheltered in one of the stone-lined caves. It allowed him to stay out of the chill of the wet marshes, and he also hoped that the elevation provided some protection from predators. He hadn’t run into anything as dangerous as a horrid wolf or a tusked tiger, but he slept lightly, his hand always on his slingshot or child-sized bone axe.
He developed a rash along the inside of his thighs that refused to go away; he fell sick from a skull cup of water that he hadn’t filtered as well as he should have and lay in a delirium until he recovered; he lost count of the number of days he had been in Taten-ryo-alvovo; he cried at night, missing his brother, Nalu, Razutana, Sataari, and the others; he realized he had gone too far now to turn back; he had no choice but to press on.
The fog in the valleys grew thicker. Like Afir and Kikisavo when they approached the gods, much of the time Tanto was just trudging forward without knowing where he was going.
Finally, after another night of aimless hiking, he was ready to give up from exhaustion and despair, ready to lie down and never get up again, yielding his body to the scavengers.
In the morning, I’ll climb up the nearest barrow and die in the gaze of the Eye of Cudyufin.
It took all his strength to struggle up the mound the next dawn. He waited for the last sunrise of his short life. “Papa, Mama, I’m sorry,” he whispered, and couldn’t stop the tears that spilled from his eyes.
The sun jumped above the horizon to the east, and the fog dissipated in the golden heat. He looked in the direction of the sun, and a cry of joy was torn from his throat.
The artificial structure was so close he thought he could reach it just by stretching out his hands.
He had arrived at the largest mound of them all, standing like a mountain in the center of the City of Ghosts.
* * *
He was certain that the most powerful weapons of the Fifth Age, if they existed at all, would be hidden inside this central barrow. It dominated the City of Ghosts like the Great Tent of the Lyucu pékyu dominated Taten, and was surely the site of honor for the arrogant chiefs of a sinful age.
Energized, he spent the next few days hiking and climbing the massive mound, hoping to discover a way in. But, unlike most of the other barrows he had passed, he found no caves or hidden entrances, no stairs or paths, no platform at the top or retaining walls on the sides. It was perfectly symmetrical, oval from bottom to top, the curves smooth and graceful, like a tortoise shell. If one ignored the perfect symmetry, the giant barrow could almost be mistaken for a natural hill, covered by lush grass and wildflowers of every hue.
