“They won’t start without me,” Roh said. “We’ll arrive with plenty of time to spare.” He rubbed the lingering ache in his chest. It wasn’t so bad now, but the memory of it still smarted. Pain was a constant companion. He spent many warm nights on the porch with a glass of strong liquor and a book, speaking softly with Luna and their spouses, or his little granddaughters or the family next door who grazed their sheep on the common land between them.
“Hasao will want time to show you about,” Luna said, smoothing back Roh’s hair. “I have heard they made Dhai Sorai a place of wonders.”
“Is it her ascending to Kai?” Roh asked. Some muddled part of his mind twisted; he grappled for the correct memory, because that didn’t sound right. He had never counted on getting old. Sometimes it wasn’t very agreeable. Kadaan had passed on nearly three decades before. Roh had not been prepared for that, either, but the Saiduan did not live as long as the Dhai. Kadaan, too, had not been prepared to die old.
Luna’s fingers hesitated. Ze glanced at Roh, and Roh saw the concern there; more concern every day about the state of his memory. “Kai Hasao is abdicating to her granddaughter, Roh. Noritau Hasao Badu will be Kai of the Dhai Sorai. It is Noritau who is ascending the seat, there. And you will miss the ship if you linger.”
“Of course, yes,” Roh said. “Where is Matasa? I need breakfast, a bath.”
Luna called down to their granddaughter Matasa, one of the twelve children and grandchildren still living in the big family home.
Roh limped over to the great open shutters, slower every day. He rested against the windowsill and gazed out at the rolling yellow grass of their family farm. The golden fields met the bluish cast of the foothills and great misty shape of the mountains that protected them to the north, east, and west. He had chosen a settlement far inland, as far from the wine-dark ocean as he and Luna could manage. The great double-helix of the suns kissed the horizon, setting the mountains ablaze and turning the fields into a great ocean of yellow ochre. The moons were setting, swallowed by the light. But the suns were alone in the sky, now, as they had been for over a century, a very long century of strife, famine, joy, heartache, and rebuilding. The Dhai who followed Meyna had founded this new country without help from the satellites. To Roh, the sky still seemed empty, even after all this time. The memory of Para lingered beneath his skin, an old ache, like a wound that had never quite healed, like the knees he would never get rebuilt, because Tira would never grace the sky again.
Roh had many jumbled memories. His, or some other version of him? It had gotten more confusing as he aged. Some had gone mad in the aftermath of the unity of the world. But Lilia had halted the cycles. Whatever came next would be something new. Whoever he was, whatever version of himself that inhabited this body, had been experiencing something new.
“How long is this voyage?” Roh grumbled.
“Five days,” Luna said.
“Wasn’t it twice that?”
“There have been many improvements in sailing, since the Broken Heavens,” Matasa said.
Roh and Matasa traveled in the clan’s dog-pulled cart across the family’s acres of farmland and the common land that separated their land from the next family’s. The Dhai had, upon landing, created provinces instead of clan groups. Meyna had thought that would cause less strife, less infighting, but still ensure a smaller, more manageable form of government. Without the satellites to help them grow homes and move stones, the squares he passed were modest, the orchards full but not towering. The small harbor was carved into a natural sandy landing. Aaldia had been badly routed by one of the foreign armies, and with Anavha’s help, the small group of Dhai was not only tolerated, but welcomed. Dhai had welcomed Aaldians, too, among their number. Many of the families working in the fields had Aaldian parents and grandparents. Roh often wondered if someday the Dhai Nora and the Aaldians would become one people.
The ship that waited at the pier for them was from their own small fleet, a large festively painted ship. Roh had not been to the harbor in some time, and the sights there had changed much over the last century. When they first arrived there had been nothing here but barren rocks and sand and a few old, abandoned shepherds’ rests.
A nice ship, he thought, if a little too much of a spectacle for his taste. Matasa helped him to his quarters inside the ship. For five days they sailed, and for five days, Roh suffered terrible seasickness that put him off his appetite completely.
When they arrived, he was first to limp down the gangplank, holding tight to his cane with one hand and Matasa with the other. She stared, wide-eyed, at the bustling harbor of old Dhai. Old Dhai was what Roh still called it in his mind, though to everyone else it was Dhai Sorai, or Dhai Ascendant, the sister country of his own, Dhai Nora, New Dhai.
Roh caught sight of a tall, dark Saiduan figure standing on the pier, staring at them as they descended. The hair was long, leaning to white, and the eyes bore crinkles at the edges; the long mouth was made more severe by the grooves on either side. Roh did not recognize the face so much as he recognized the expression of bemused disdain.
“Good afternoon, cannibal,” Taigan said.
“Thought you’d be dead by now,” Roh said.
“As you see, age has come for me,” Taigan said, patting at her hair. “But not quite won yet. Hope springs eternal.”
“I’m amazed you haven’t accidently dispatched yourself,” Roh said. “I heard you could be killed, now.”
“Indeed. It turns out that even at this disagreeable age, I am faster and smarter than many who would seek to dispatch me. I admit I thought often of dying, but the truth is, in all these centuries, I have never experienced aging. It’s quite novel.”
“I’m not fond of it,” Roh said.
“I keep waiting for it to get better,” Taigan said.
Roh introduced his granddaughter to Taigan. Matasa had heard of Taigan so often that she fairly fell over herself in awe of the figure who had survived the Reckoning. Roh snorted and continued on down the bustling pier.
“Were you invited to the ascension?” Roh asked.
“Indeed,” Taigan said. “I thought we might go together when I saw your ship on the register yesterday. You’re one of the last to survive from those times. We can get drunk and make fun of these soft people.”
“Meyna died last year,” Roh said. “I always thought she would return to Dhai, but Aaldia suited her. Luna still lives with me in Dhai Nora. Certainly, hailer and healthier than I.”
“That little ataisa always was a survivor.”
They stayed the night at a way house just outside the harbor. His room, as requested, was on the main floor, so he did not worry about managing his way there on his own. Roh found himself assailed by unfamiliar sights and sounds, and they disagreed with him. The people here were very loud, and they did not respect his personal space. While they did not thump and grab one another the way he had feared, they still pressed too close along the harbor walks and in queues at the tavern. He had been anxious about whom he let near him, after his years as a captive, and being here in this crush of loud people brought back memories of those days. He had terrible nightmares and woke sweating and tangled in his sheets. His knees ached and his vision in the mornings seemed clouded. Too much noise. Too many people. He wanted to go back to the sprawling open space of the plains.
At breakfast with Taigan, Roh chose a table at the back of the common room. Matasa still slept, snoring so loudly that Roh had given up on sleep before sunrise.
He and Taigan did not talk about their shared past over their tea and seared bread, but the present, and how they had spent the years since they parted.
Taigan was cagey, speaking in broad terms. He had sailed to Hrollief sixty years before and visited Maralah and the little collection of Saiduan refugees that had established themselves on a knotted island just off the coast, there. Last he heard of them, Maralah had already passed on, dead of old age, a body that had simply stopped going.
�
�I always knew I would outlast her,” Taigan said smugly.
When Matasa woke, the three of them took a new conveyance from the harbor, a great cart suspended above the country on a cable, like the Line system from back before the world broke. This one ran using gears and waterpower, harnessing the Fire River. Roh sat in the gondola and got a bird’s eye view of how the country he had once called home had changed in the last century.
The great clan squares had been rebuilt, and the structures there improved upon. The roads that wound through Dhai were all cobbled, and the dangerous flora had been burned back and back; he did not see even one walking tree during their whole six-hour journey across the country.
Matasa talked to Taigan for most of the trip, for which Roh was grateful, because he found the sight of his country engrossing. How had they built so much so quickly? There had been so much to repair. They came over a large mound planted with red willowren trees, which from this height, Roh could see were planted in the shape of a great red eye. Oma.
Taigan saw him looking and said, “That’s one of their monuments to the dead. As they dug out here, they found more bodies, Dhai bodies, left to rot and bake. They burned what was left and spread the ashes here.”
The great ark still jutted up from the center of the country where Kuallina had once been, repaired and reskinned many times, but its upper levels were gradually being worn away by wind and rain. Their gondola stopped briefly there, swinging through a new addition to the ark built for just such a purpose. He peered in at those they passed, the Dhai here looking no different than the ones at the harbor. The ark itself had ground outward at the base, repaired and expanded. He had not expected that, because as he understood it, Dhai Sorai stretched now all the way across what was once Dorinah and into southern Saiduan. Gian’s people could have chosen to settle elsewhere, but they still clung to the ark. Roh knew few had been inside it but her people; he considered what wonders might still be inside, relics from another world.
While they had begun no true wars, there had certainly been disagreements and endless political maneuvering to ensure that local governments treated their people well. He had closed his eyes to much of the news, content to farm his little slice of land in his little slice of a country. He preferred their remoteness, and the flexibility they were afforded by being such a small country. The larger Dhai Sorai became, the more unwieldy it would become. He had seen that in a hundred history books. It was the history of Dorinah, of Saiduan, of the Tai Mora, and of course, of the Dhai nation before them.
As the gondola sped past the ark and a few hours later, broke through the trees, the great plateau outside Oma’s Temple came into view, and there behind it, the grasping claw and shining dome. The sight was at once familiar and foreign, like so much Roh had seen. He was beginning to regret making this journey, because some part of him wanted to remember Dhai as it was in those first few days after the Tai Mora had been pushed back and there were so many possibilities for the future.
The old Tai Mora camp on the plateau had been transformed into a proper bustling village. Below the plateau, all along the Fire River, the woods had been cut and burned out and the village continued, moving outward and butting against the tree line that separated the city from Clan Garika, itself a spiral of houses and warehouses and shops of all sorts that moved ever westward, to the woodland.
“Where did all of these people come from?” Roh asked.
Taigan said, “A century is enough time for it. All that death made people venerate life, I suppose. I have seen it before. The surge of babies after some terrible calamity.”
“We didn’t in Dhai Nora,” Roh said. “We understood that we had to limit ourselves. Our country can’t support more than we have. They are Dhai. They know that.”
“Perhaps,” Taigan said, “but they can expand, here, in a way you cannot in Aaldia. Saiduan, Dorinah… there are no restrictions to how far they can settle. When all those worlds came together, enough went mad or simply ceased to exist that those are still sparsely populated areas. Imagine just… winking out, your entire existence erased. How exciting.”
Roh frowned.
“Ah, I see you,” Taigan said. “I have seen that look of worry before.”
“It’s not the home I remember,” Roh said.
“And thank the stars for that,” Taigan said. “This place was a shithole after the war. I half-thought the forest was going to eat it and this whole place would be some refuge for walking trees.”
“I think it’s lovely,” Matasa said.
The gondola swung them up to the top of the temple, where they were met by two women in gold robes. As there were no more jistas, these must have been Oras of a different sort, purely religious, but Roh didn’t recognize the symbols on their collars. Both were about Matasa’s age.
“We are so pleased you have arrived!” the taller gushed, and the younger offered to help with their things. They had not packed much, but Roh allowed them to take his one bag.
“I have heard so much about you,” the younger said. “Does the temple still respond to you? Can you talk to it?”
Roh shook his head. “It’s been a very long time,” he said. “We’ve no need to commiserate.”
After dropping off their things in the quarters provided on the fifth floor, the women guided Roh and Taigan through the temple and up to the sixth floor, which was in a flurry of construction and renovation. Roh was thankful for the single flight of steps instead of the whole temple’s worth because he wasn’t certain he could manage it, even with Matasa’s help.
There was new art on the walls, much of it seeming to depict the days of the breaking. Unsurprisingly, Roh noted Yisaoh’s face on more than a few of them, and Hasao’s. It was not until he was led up to the Kai quarters and the great Assembly Chamber, though, that he was struck dumb by what he saw. The ceiling was the same as he remembered it from his youth, the dance of the satellites in the sky. But the walls here bore a massive mosaic that wound from one side of the entryway all the way around the room to the other side, a beautiful stele that drew his eye and then his feet, as he moved to follow the story it told.
It showed the breaking of the world, and figures falling from the sky. Features were difficult to master in this medium, and the woman meant to be the Kai, Yisaoh, certainly, could have been any woman; the difference was she bore the red robes of Oma. He found himself faced with an interpretation of the breaking, the war, and the great orrery, there, at the very end of the stele, with the white-robed woman at the center, and another figure reaching out to her while an army threatened to destroy them. He stared at the little grasping figure, and though he knew Yisaoh had certainly not put him here on purpose – it could have represented anyone – he felt himself brought back to that moment, when Lilia left them, dressed all in martyr’s white, and the broken heavens closed. The cycle of destruction and renewal. The coming together.
“Rohinmey?”
He turned to see Yisaoh… no, Yisaoh was dead, so this must be Hasao in the entrance to the Kai study.
She held out her arms, and they embraced. “Look at you,” he said. “You’re old as I am.”
“Not nearly,” she said. “But old enough that I’m ready to turn this mantle over to my granddaughter. Come in. And you must be Taigan.”
Roh introduced Matasa. They had tea, and talked of the journey, trivial things, and of course, the ascension ceremony. Hasao’s daughters had both died in their fifties, struck down by yellow pox, and so it was her granddaughter who would take the seat in a few days.
Taigan seemed to tire of the conversation quickly and got up and peered out the window.
A young woman in a gold robe entered and told Hasao there was an urgent issue downstairs regarding an old contract claim between two clans.
“One moment,” Hasao said, and left them.
Roh sipped his tea. The cups and saucers were, strangely, just the same. A century with the same tea service seemed absurd, but he suspected they were simply r
eproductions in the same design he remembered.
“I dream often that I died here,” Taigan said. “Do you?”
“You’ll die an old man,” Roh said.
“Maybe not a man,” Taigan said, “but old, perhaps. Older.” She smiled her grim little smile. That, too, was the same.
“You know I wrote a book about it,” Taigan said, “the breaking. The coming together. The little story they tell themselves with Yisaoh’s face on everything. You should see downstairs. She has some massive portrait up of herself and all those children she took in after the war and her brothers’ new wives. In the banquet hall.”
“What is your book called?”
“Pretty Little Cannibals: My Life Among the Dhai,” Taigan said. She showed her teeth.
Roh choked on his tea, burst out laughing. Matasa did not seem to understand what was so funny. She patted his back.
“You aren’t serious!” Roh said.
“I am always very serious,” Taigan said.
Matasa held her hand to her chest, flustered. “Have you written some esoteric romance, Taigan?” she asked. “That is not a proper guide to the Reckoning. It’s important to remember our history clearly and plainly, exactly as it happened. You can’t make things up for romance.”
Roh used to be secretly pleased when the young spouted off some core message he had helped create for the Dhai Nora schooling program, but Matasa’s little outburst made him weary. There were always Dhai who questioned what they were taught; there had been in the old Dhai, and there were those here, too. Each went out into the world to serve in exile and determine whether or not they wanted to come home. Many never went. They enjoyed life and believed what they were told about life outside. While much of what he told them was true, it still rankled, some days, to see a granddaughter of his so content with her fate. But wasn’t that what he and the other founders had hoped for? To create a world without war, without violence, and to keep suffering to an absolute minimum. He had seen too much horror, and he understood why Faith Ahya and Hahko had created the insular and often frustratingly cloistered country they had, though he had wanted to run from it and go off on an adventure the moment he was presented the opportunity. He didn’t want anyone else to go through what he had. When he was gone, though, it would be up to women like Matasa to continue to guide the country, and he feared that without the outside perspective that he and Luna and Meyna and the other elders had brought with them, they would fail. He feared they would turn into sycophants, or worse, tyrants and extremists, colonizing the world like self-righteous insects.
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