Starfire Saga, page 37
And slowly, still nervous about it for reasons I could not then entirely understand, I began to use my sting, not as a device for control, but as I had in the hospital room long ago, when Lanya Ver Lenghy had therios fever. I began to help.
Numima’s daughter had a prolonged labor, which she could not herself speed for fear of harming the baby, and I was able to ride out the final two hours with her, helping her to conserve her strength and not exhaust herself holding the pain at bay. Pepali slipped on some hidden ice coating a rail of the tivong pen and shattered his arm. I heard his cry for help almost by accident and ran to the pens, helping him control the pain long enough to begin diagnosing and assessing his injury. I discovered, to my astonishment, that he had never been formally taught how to splice bone and knit muscle cells. We worked together all the rest of the afternoon, beginning the slow process of healing he would need to continue on his own over the period of days that followed. It seemed that the Boru had always regarded self-healing as an idiosyncratic thing, rather than something scientifically structured in physiology.
I had been tempted to ask Jemeret to take me with him when he went to test Gannelel, but something made me cautious, and instead I went out running with Tynnanna, who had indeed returned after the Severance Storm. Once again he seemed to have gotten bigger, but he was more affectionate to me than he had ever been before.
After our run, we climbed a little in the steep slopes at the western side of Zuglith, and while we were sitting on an outcrop of rock with a view of the entire valley—I was catching my breath, and Tynnanna was stalking a sket that was trying to scratch out a winter living—I cast a scout back down into the village to see if I could find out how Jemeret was faring.
Instead I encountered a stab of sadness which was almost staggering. I must have reacted to it in an overt way, for Tynnanna’s head jerked up, his fiery eyes burning at me. I scrambled to my feet, gathered, and started back down the slope as quickly as I could. Tynnanna abandoned the sket and followed me.
Gannelel had left the wagon sheds and walked across the frozen surface of the river to the circle canyon in Kerlith’s flanks that sheltered the Boru graveyard. I wondered that Jemeret had just let him go, but he had. The old man was alone, kneeling in the snow brushing flakes and dead leaves from the small cairn that marked one of the graves. Unlike the Com, where death was postponed indefinitely and the remains of a body disposed of hygienically, almost like an embarrassment to science, the tribes of the Samothen believed in remembering that the dead were a part of them. The Boru customs honored the nomadic origins of the tribes, separating from the settled Honish as their power became apparent. Now that they had a home, they still marked their graves as they would have had they buried a lost member by the roadside, with cairns of stones. These cairns were, however, of Boru manufacture, not haphazard, and each contained a compartment in which something beloved by the lost person could be placed. Those who knew they were to die would choose the things they wanted in their cairns, but if someone died unexpectedly, without making such a stipulation, all those who loved him or her made the choices in a mourning group.
Gannelel heard me approaching, looked up, saw Tynnanna at my side, and started to shuffle to his feet. I went forward quickly and caught his shoulders to keep him in place as I sank down beside him.
“My lady,” he protested, and I overrode him.
“I felt your sadness, Gannelel, and I wanted to see if I could help to ease it.”
He laid his hand on the cairn beside him. “This wash my Lishanie.”
“I can feel your love for her,” I said, grateful beyond measure that the sting was back in such strength that I could use it subtly. “Finding that love in life is an incredible blessing.”
He bobbed his head and said shrewdly, “You have found it.” I didn’t deny it. “Why are you so sad now?”
He sighed once, caressing the cairn absently. “I’ve grown old,” he said. “I knew I would, but I never pictured myshelf not going to the wagon sheds. Ever shinsh Lishanie died, it wash my life.”
I found myself hoping I’d say the right things, and touched him lightly with the sting to assess the effect of what I was saying. “You built a second life once, which is a hard thing, and most people can’t do it at all. Now you have a chance to build a third life. You’ll have two more than other people do.”
“What kind of life can I have now? I cannot do my work any longer.” He looked at me, blinking. I felt a stirring of interest in him, not resignation or despair. He had not given up; he was willing to listen.
“You can have a good and full life, I think.” I let myself sound a little tentative, though not as tentative as I felt. “What did my lord say to you when he tested you?”
He sighed again, not as deeply. “He shaid I had reashed that point when we need to let the tribe give me back shome of what I’ve given. But I don’t want to take.” He spat out the last word with a vehemence I hadn’t thought him capable of. Then he seemed to talk to himself. “I wash never meant to be ushless. Harentig ish a good man, but there’sh shtill a great deal he needsh to learn about wagoncraft.”
“Could you still teach him?”
He shook his head. “He’sh wagonmashter now. It would be very rude of me to interfere.”
I understood the etiquette, and then inspiration struck. “Gannelel, I think you should write a book.”
He stared at me.
“You have a wealth of knowledge to share about the wagons, and Sejineth’s apprentice Lutamo is an excellent sketch artist. He could provide illustrations.” I gauged his hesitation and added quickly that Lutamo could probably do the writing down of the information as well, and that “then Harentig could choose to benefit from your knowledge and experience without feeling unworthy of his fax.”
He was considering it, I knew. The idea was an alien one, but it drew him, flattering and challenging at the same time. Some of his sadness was beginning to dissolve. He talked to me for a while, a little ramblingly, about Lishanie. He missed her, but in the years since her death, he’d never stopped carrying her with him. He had been thinking that he could not carry the wagons with him in the same way, but now he saw a way in which it might be possible. I sat and listened, damping out the cold he seemed not to feel, until the sun was almost gone. Then we got to our feet and walked back to the village, Tynnanna pacing us to the house of men, then roaring once at me and darting off to hunt.
I remember thinking, as I went home, that I was building a second life, too, and wondering if it was something many more people did than I expected.
There were a few more incidents before Midwinter Song which seem meaningful to me now.
Coney was fitting in well with the tribe—better than I had at first—and he seemed to enjoy what he was learning about us. He saw Shenefta occasionally, but he did not appear to feel more for her than the kind of affection she inspired in everyone. Coney was preoccupied. I sensed it in him, and it bewildered me. He had always been so open, so uncomplicated before.
One afternoon, while Jemeret was occupied elsewhere, Coney and I left the practice field together and took tivongs from the pens. Rocky was recovering from a split pad and wasn’t available for me to ride, so I was mounted on a spirited little female who seemed to delight in trying to make me think she was in charge.
We went up the road to the pass into the valley. Coney had expressed a desire to see the view of the outside world. When I asked him if he didn’t remember it from his initial arrival at Stronghome, he hesitated a moment and then said, “I didn’t notice much of anything when I first got here, Ronnie. It was all a kind of a muddle.”
I accepted that, even though I sensed something not quite right about it. Coney was entitled, after all, to his privacy. It didn’t occur to me then that that was not an attitude I would have recognized as valid in the Com, where I was the one entitled to everything, where the universe was mine to plunder—all for the greater good, of course.
The day was breathtakingly clear, and after we passed the guards, we tethered the tivongs to one of the bare, wind-blasted trees that twisted its way upward from scattered patches of dirt on the slopes along the road. We sat at the roadside, looking out over the long stretches of forest and plain to the south.
“It’s beautiful here,” Coney said softly.
“Did they tell you it wouldn’t be?” I tried to keep the question casual, as if it had no real meaning for me at all.
“They don’t define beauty in this way.” He answered almost without thinking about it. “I mean, Epicyclism does, but the government doesn’t.”
We had brought water bottles and squares of the heavy winter grainbread with us. I broke a slab of mine into tiny pieces in its wrapper and popped one into my mouth. “They were wrong, then, the government.” It was, for a probing statement, unobtrusive.
Coney kept studying the vista, drinking it in. “About some things,” he admitted. “You don’t see it when you’re in training. You don’t think to question the values or the methods.” Something in his voice on the last word made me look at him. There was a judgment there, a maturity, a hardness I had not seen in him before. Even if he had not told me time had passed, vanished from my recollection, even then I would have known. Coney had changed.
I looked out over the land and swallowed hard. “I know you won’t tell me what you did to get sent here, Coney. But will you tell me why you did it?”
And then we sat in silence for a long time, not looking at each other. I might have reached out and stung him to persuade him to tell me. Had I been the Com’s Class A, I would have done it. But I knew now that persuading him to do something against his will before had caused both of us grief—and me rather more than him. I knew that he needed to be able to make his own choices without my influencing him; I would not deliberately hurt him again.
Before he spoke, the sun had changed position enough so that there were long shadows accompanying us, and we’d eaten all our grainbread. Still, I was content to wait, not knowing why he felt the need to hesitate for such a long time, but crediting him with good reasons.
At long last he stirred and turned toward me. I met his gaze neutrally. “I don’t want to lie to you, Ronnie. I don’t think I’ve ever lied to you, and not because you could read me and tell.”
“I’m not reading you now,” I said.
“I know that. It’s one of the reasons I want to be especially honest.” He might have smiled, but he did not. “Everything I did, I did because I thought it was right. Now there’s one thing I’m not so certain about. You’re happy here, aren’t you?”
The question seemed like a complete non sequitur to me, but I knew that, to Coney, it followed directly. “I haven’t thought about happiness, really. We were brought up to duty, you and I, not to happiness.” I folded up my bread wrapper and stuffed it into the pouch of my cloak. “But yes, I’m happy. Except now that I’ve got my sting back, I sometimes feel very guilty.”
“About being happy?”
I half smiled at him, then looked overhead at the sweeping circle of a pair of hunting lattels. “You see, the Com needs Class A talent, and Jemeret and I are both here, hidden away. It’s like I owe them something, and I never got to provide it.”
He studied me, a closer, tighter scrutiny than I was used to from anyone but Jemeret. “Do you think you’re being wasted here? Not doing things important enough for you?”
It was a very pointed question, and I smiled at it, unoffended. “When I first got here, yes, I did feel that way. But I haven’t since Convalee.”
“Why not?”
Even without using the sting, I sensed more tension in him. “Because Jemeret’s convinced me that people are as important as tribes, and tribes are as important as nations, and nations are as important as worlds.” I looked back up at the lattels. “A person is a world, Coney. I don’t know why they never told us that in the School for Talent.”
He said slowly, “I don’t think they know—or if they knew, they’ve forgotten. Hey!”
I followed his gaze and realized Tynnanna was sitting on the road near the tivongs. I hadn’t realized he’d come with us, and clearly, neither had Coney. “It’s just Tynnanna.” And the moment I said it, I realized it wasn’t just Tynnanna. Behind him stood another klawit, bigger, darker, its expression predatory, its tautly muscled body motionless in the stalk.
With the sting, I was fearless. It also didn’t hurt that Tynnanna was between us and the strange cat, even though both of them were facing us. Behind us the tivongs shifted nervously and pulled at their reins. But instead of lashing out at the klawit, which might have been my instinct had Tynnanna not been in the way, I just waited, laying a hand on Coney’s arm as if to reassure him.
Tynnanna gave a small growl, directed over his shoulder. The strange cat jerked its head toward him, the stalk broken. Tynnanna growled again, more menacingly this time, but still did not turn in the direction of the other cat. The unknown klawit took one step backward, turned its back on us, and darted away down the steep slope below the road. Tynnanna waited until it was out of sight, and then purred at us.
Coney was a little paler than usual. “What the hell was that all about?” he asked, his voice unsteadier than I’d heard it before.
“I don’t know, unless the bigger klawit was a female, and Tynnanna was introducing us to his prospective bride. Come on, it’s getting late. We should start back.” I rose, and Tynnanna butted me once with his head so that I had to pet him above the ears and at the base of his horns. Then he turned and raced off back toward the village.
“That is the weirdest thing!” Coney said in a rush of outgoing breath.
“Not in context,” I said, not caring if he understood. We remounted our tivongs and went home.
Less than a tenday later, another incident stands out. A number of the men—Jemeret and Coney among them—had left the valley to hunt a large but relatively elusive creature of the high ice plateau in latitudes behind and above the peaks around Stronghome. The meat was needed to supplement the dralg meat stored in the sheds, not only because no one would hunt around the time of Midwinter Song, but because it contained certain mineral-rich oils that dralg meat did not supply.
The practice field was, therefore, peopled largely by women and some of the oldest warriors. Urichen waved as I crossed the edge of the flat area, which had been cleared again that morning to give us secure footing. Before I had much of a chance to look around, Shantiah saw me, excused herself from a woman I knew only casually, and came across the field toward me. I read a low level of hostility and some apprehension as she approached, but they were overlain with a strong sense of bravado.
“Have you an opposite?” she asked truculently.
“No,” I answered, not about to lie to her.
“I offer myself,” she said, the formula sounding like a direct order.
In a split second I remade the decision about fourteen times. Part of me wanted to beat her face in, and part of me wanted to show her how much better at this I could be than her, and both feelings made me certain I should decline. I didn’t want her to think that I was afraid of her, and I didn’t want her walking around saying I wouldn’t practice with her, and that made me certain that I should accept. She had been Jemeret’s lover and I didn’t want to be around her, and that meant refusing. But I would welcome a good match, and if she had been Jemeret’s lover she would be no slouch, and that meant accepting. In the end, I accepted because I just didn’t see how I could refuse.
“It would be an honor,” I said in the formula of acceptance, carefully keeping my voice neutral.
Shantiah immediately swirled her cloak away and dropped into a crouch. I hadn’t expected the abruptness, but I was prepared. I ignored my own cloak long enough to deflect one fast chop, then tossed it aside before she could try to tangle me in it.
I carefully kept my Class C skills at exactly the level of hers, which were not at all bad, and I made certain I kept the sting out of it. As a result, I took as good as I gave. When the match had gone on long enough so that she would have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of, I added a little power, took one quick sidestep, and gave her two rapid-fire body chops to overcome her talent long enough to pin her decisively. She gave the gesture, and I held out my hand to pull her up to her feet. I thought she might reject it, but she grasped it firmly and accepted my help.
“It was a good match,” I said.
She leaned in closer to me. “All right,” she said, “so your power is adequate. Well and good.” She looked at me narrowly. “But if you don’t love him, I swear I’ll do everything I can to get him back. He deserves the best.” She turned away from me, gathering up her cloak before I could reply, but there was no hostility left in her.
I almost smiled. It was as if her anger had burned itself out in the match, and she was more willing to accept my relationship with Jemeret. I found myself thinking that if I had beaten her badly, as I could have, the anger might have fed and concentrated.
As I picked up my cloak to go on to the part of the field where I could practice the Ladder, I was struck by a thought. The Com largely operated by overwhelming intimidation on the world level—the Drenalion saw to that, crushing small stirrings of rebellion with sufficient force to hold fast to the planet. Now I was wondering if the government had lost far more than it retained. If I thought crushing Shantiah would have stoked her anger, how could I think—truly believing people were worlds—that a planet could be won by war, rather than completely repelled by it? The Com wanted member worlds who were docile and obedient; it put no value in their being happy to be part of the relationship.
I was still thinking about that when I began the Ladder, so I was already somewhat removed from the extreme level of concentration a climb usually required. Thus I saw Tynnanna sitting on a crate against the wall of one of the storage sheds, watching me. I almost stumbled, paused, took a step backward in space and on the Ladder to begin Climb 1 over, and then realized that Shantiah and the other woman warriors were standing at the edge of my working area on the field side. I let my concentration fail completely and straightened, waiting.
