by Jo Clayton
"About and about, I'll talk about that later." She whipped the frond fan back and forth, taking out her irritation on the bugs and air. "It's your turn, professor." She dropped the fan in her lap. "Give us your lecture, historian, tell us what's going on here."
Asteplikota moved the stirstick round and round the pot and frowned at the fire. "So. Lecture as requested."
Five thousand years ago the People came here to escape the chaos of dissolution, a thousand worlds pulling and tearing apart. The Omniskaal Empire. We were out on the edge, fair game to any warlord with the power to take and hold us. Those who could, left. There were three ships in our lot. Do I need to tell you their names? Right. Nataminaho. Opalekis-Mimo. Nikamo-Oskinin. We came here, not by choice,, we came trusting to fate which. almost killed us. We were flying on fumes when we landed.
We fled and found and thought we were safe.
It was a cold world, harsh everywhere except around the equator. We landed where we had to and marched south. It was a terrible march and only a tenth survived it. Myth tells us that Nataminaho hunted for us, OpalekisMimo found the path and led us along it, Nikamo-Oskinin sang strength and endurance into us, sang the worst of the evils away from us. It is possible this is sign for the captains of the ships, I don't know, there's very little written from that time.
For a thousand years we lived there in those high-walled fertile valleys and fiords. We prospered and spread out. And we exiled into the icy northlands anyone who disturbed the peace of the wealthy and the powerful. We sent our criminals and rebels to that high plateau with its monster glaciers. We sent them to die off where we wouldn't see them suffer. And we shot them if they came back. We lost a lot on the hard trek south, books, technology, history; sometimes I think we lost our souls.
At the end of a thousand years, everything changed. The sun kicked into a new phase, it was suddenly much brighter, much hotter. The ice began to melt off the northlands, the lowlands became unlivable even before they flooded. The powerful claimed the mountain slopes, then the mountain tops, fighting to keep their hold on the riches they saw as their right. They were not given to flexibility. As far as they were concerned, what had always been would always be.
Bit by bit the rest traveled north and tried to claim land there. The difficulty was, the northland wasn't empty any longer, the exiles were there. The Pliciks they called themselves. Yes, our present day landlords and rulers. They were nomads, hunters, trappers, herdsmen. The melting of the ice nearly destroyed them before they figured out how to change with the changing land. At first they killed the people coming north; they had centuries of hate to purge. Then some Plicik had a bright idea and-made slaves of the newcomers, used them to help him and his clan not only survive but prosper.
That first wave became the Maka caste. They were mostly landless workers whose only value was the strength of their backs and arms, kept ignorant and unlettered because they were more tractable that way and thus more valuable-until the floodtime when there was no more room for them and they were stripped of value and discarded. They are still ignorant and unlettered. The powerful may change their faces, but never their natures.
Fifty years passed. A second wave went north. These became the Tanak caste. Farmers and fishermen, miners and smiths. Skilled laborers. Like the Maka they were men who worked more with their hands than their minds; they could read and write and cipher but had little interest in book learning beyond that bare minimum. They lost their value like the Maka had, but reclaimed it in the North as slaves. The Pliciks had learned not to waste good sturdy workstock.
There were two other waves before the southland was finally abandoned to heat and flood-which happened several centuries after the change began. The third wave were the merchants, the Tawa caste, they were not made slaves, they negotiated their way in. In the fourth wave were the priests, officers, administrators, landowners, the rich and influential, the Kisar; they bought their way in.
This is how our world wags, Shadow. No slaves now, but Kisar sits on Tawa, Tawa on Tanak and Tanak on Maka, with Pliciks atop them all.
With one exception, the Islanders. The exiles created exiles of their own, banishing folk to island chains off the coasts, the remnants from the parts of the northlands that got drowned. The Islanders do not permit castes and they take in fugitives from the Pliciks and the Priests, rebels, the disappointed, the disaffected, whoever wants to come. Naturally they don't do this out of altruism, they are not saints or holymen, they do it out of a profound hatred. for the mainlanders and for profit's sake. They tolerate no one who cannot earn his way either with a skill or as a weapon against the Pliciks and the Priests. I would not say it to them because they could not hear or understand it, but in their way they are nearly as rigid and oppressive as the Pliciks and the caste system.
Don't worry, Shadow, there isn't much more, I am winding my way to the explaining of the Pakoseo Year. Rigidity has its strengths and its breaking points. Near the end of the first millennium after the Flood, a Prophet arose among the people. He called himself Oplanikamon, God's singer, and he cried out against the evils he saw around him. It was a time of famine and terrible storms and great corruption among the Pliciks and the Priests. He sang his visions so powerfully that those who heard him saw them also. Nataminaho, Opalekis-Mimo and Nikamo-Oskinin stood behind him and guarded him and set their seal on him. The people saw Visions and believed him. He sang of returning to the holy time, the first-flight time, returning to the beginning and recreating virtue. With the Three striding before him, he led the first Pakoseo to the landing place, walking across the land, going from nation to nation and gathering in the people, taking them with him to the place where the ships came down. They tended the place and made it beautiful; they sang and saw visions and went home again, and-who knows why-life was better for a while.-No more slaves, for one thing.
I'm skipping over a lot, all you need is the outline and the understanding that what happened was wholly beyond the control of either the Priests or the Pliciks. They took bitter bloody measures to stop it and they could not. The Question and the Secret Police in each of the five nations tried to stop the Pakoseo and they could not. People left their villages, their farms, their businesses, their jobs; they traveled in a great river across the land. They were shot, axed, hung, imprisoned, beaten, tortured. They suffered hunger, thirst, exhaustion. Thousands died, but more thousands, came and finally there were not enough soldiers or prisons to hold them. The Prophet walked with the Three through the five nations and brought the people to the landing place and no one could stop him.
Five nations. Wapaskwen, where you are now; we here have control, of the landing site, the Mistiko Otcha Cicip. There are also Kwamitaskwen in, the central plains, Kwamaskwen, north plains, Swamiskwen, south plains, south coast and Nakiskwen on the west coast. Except for small differences in dialect, they are much the same. The Nistams loathe each other, they're bitter rivals, but they stand together against internal and external threats. It's why the Islanders never try invading the Main. It's also why rebellions have never succeeded before now.
Let's see. What else is there?
The Pakoseo Year happens when it happens.
The Priests and the Pliciks always try to suppress it. They never succeed.
Then they try running in front of the swell and turning it to their advantage. That generally does work. Eventually. It happens in times of anger and suffering.
Three years ago there was a plague in Aina'iril and a dozen other cities. Outbreaks in all five Nations at approximately the same time. And in all five Nations, the Pliciks and their sycophants ran for the country and left the city to the dying. Which spread rage and despair among the people who couldn't get out and among the factory workers and farmers when the Priests and Pliciks brought the plague with them. Thousands died before the sickness went away as mysteriously as it came.
The signs and portents arrive with the rising rage of the people.
Prophets appear and call for aton
ement, poets sing subversive rhymes.
Students rebel and children go wild, destroying and killing.
People dream of the Three. Some see Them walking.
The whisper starts: Pakoseo Pakoseo Pakoseo.
Last Harvest Festival the Gospah Ayawit proclaimed the Pakoseo Year. He didn't want to, but he had no choice.
It's been three generations since the last, but our souls remember and when the time comes we know it and we walk.
The insect horde grew quieter as the night got darker and older, they weren't flying about so much; instead, they crawled into every crevice and ran on any bit of exposed skin. Out in the murk around the islet there were coughing grunts, howls, peeping cries, hoots, splashes, and other less identifiable noises. Shadith sipped at the broth from Asteplikota's pot and frowned at Rohant's back.
The Dyslaeror was standing at the edge of the islet, sniffing and hawking to clear his head and staring down the stream where Kikun had gone-not that he could see anything except the occasional glimmer of moonlight reflecting off the leaden, viscid water. He felt her watching him, coughed, spat into the water, and came back to the fire. "He's probably in the belly of some crawler." He shook his head vigorously to drive off the crawling biters. "Dio! Asteplikota! There any kind of bugoff in your gear?"
Asteplikota looked up, startled out of the unhappy memories his minilecture had provoked. "What?"
"Never mind, we couldn't be that lucky." He dug out another blanket, scrubbed it over his face and arms, snapped it through the air to shake off smashed and clinging bugs, pulled it around his shoudlers as he dropped to the ground. "Shadow, that Talent of yours, how far can you stretch it?"
"You're that worried about him?"
"He should have been back an hour ago. All he meant to do was ditch the boat soon's he found a good spot, sink hole or something like it."
"Maybe he got lost, you can't see-much of the sky and one muddy tree looks a lot like another muddy tree even in the daylight"
"He doesn't get lost, Lissorn says it's one of his Talents." He shook his head again, violently, not in negation but to send his dreadlocks flying and drive away the biters that were crawling after the moisture in his nose, eyes, mouth. "Can you find him?"
"Keep the flies off me and I'll try. I think we'd better not talk about limits, the air has ears, remember?"
"Dio." He got to his feet. "Stretch out and give me that fan."
She lay for a moment doing nothing, just enjoying the freedom from buglegs and the coolness of the dirt, then she began considering the mechanics of this operation. She was fairly sure her Talent wouldn't operate much beyond the local horizon-unless she had a mount she was specially tuned to. Sasso? He's handy and he has a raptor's eyesight…
She felt around for the hawk. Comfortably filled with fish, lizards and hairy fliers, he was asleep in the tree that arched its fronds over the fire and concealed its glow. No. He doesn't know the terrain-if you could call it terrain, being it's mostly water and muck. Horizon, hmm, I doubt Kikun went that far anyway, once he ditched the boat he'd have to walk the glop back here. He's not lazy… he's not stupid either. Local forms will have to do the job. For lagniappe, get more data about this gunge we got to travel through.
She reached without trying to touch down, just setting the direction in her mind, getting a feel for the envelope of life about her; all that practice in the ship had honed her skills until she was sharper than she'd been any time since she acquired this body and its Talent. Ginny monster's good for something. Funny, it's hard to think about him as a monster. He's so, I don't know, so commonplace. There's nothing GRAND about him, just a little man… yeah… with some weird twists in his psyche. Forget that, Shadow, you got work to do.
She touched one of the furwings, a female. Her cheekpouches were stuffed with the bodies of insects; if archetypal patterns held true here, she was taking her catch to her nest so she could feed her offspring. It was the time of year for births… or hatchings… no, births; as far as Shadith could tell, the local warmbloods weren't mammalian, but did birth live offspring. Undeveloped. Not quite marsupials, but close. She slid deeper into the brain and looked out through furry's eyes; she didn't try to control the little creature, it was going in the right direction, that was enough for the moment. Ahlahlah, I was right, one gloppy tree is just like the next. No sign of people. Aste didn't say anything about people living in here. Hmm. Plague in the cities. I know what that means, Ginny's fingers twiddling in the stew. Plague, tsoukbaraim, it hadn't got to me, not really, what he plans for this world. Rohant said. I believed him. In my head, not my gut. Gods, it's sick-making. He's using us to make it worse. We've GOT to get away from here. Lee, do I wish you were here! You and Gray and Swardheld and anyone I could dig up. If we can just get away, maybe it'll scare him off. We've got got GOT to get away.
The furry dipped toward one of the pulpy trees; she was heading for her nest. With a mindsigh Shadith slid out of her and probed about for another mount.
She brushed past a number of wispy animal souls but nothing she cared to seize on until she sniffed out a grumbling hunger sliding along beneath her. She dropped and nudged inside the slither's brain. The beast was mostly mouth with row on row of snag teeth like a slowly revolving saw, as one set wore out another marched into place. He was sinew and gristle, six tentacles rippling powerfully, driving him through the water faster than the boat had gone. His eyes were as primitive as his teeth, but his nose was extraordinarily subtle, reading scent streams as easily as she read print. She slid more firmly into that section of the brain and for the first time began picking up traces of Kikun, scent traces lingering on the surface of the water; her excitement made the slither nervous, he jerked about briefly, then sank into the mud and sulked.
Shadith swore, calmed herself, and began soothing him. Because he was hungry and hunting and anyway had the attention span of a gnat, he forgot his pique and went back to his cruising. He darted his head to one side, caught a fish, chewed it once or twice and swallowed without a pause in the beat of his tentacles.
He kept on, snatching, chewing, swallowing; the rambling stream was a soup seething with life. Kikun's scent traces were fresher with every beat of his tentacles. Fresher and fresher-and then gone.
With some difficulty Shadith disengaged from the slither, hovered until she felt her reach melting on her, the pointthrust of her mind getting set to snap back into her body. She groped about for another mind, a land mind, nothing, nothing, then a flat warty hopper like a cowpat with legs. She slipped into him, it was like trying to squeeze into a too-tight dress; that brain barely qualified as more than a switching station. The hopper had almost no long-term memory and no more than a few concepts which were on the level of this-hurts-keep-away and thistastes-bad-leave-alone. Sense data flowed through him without lingering, his very efficient because very simple instinct-sieve separating out the few elements that meant danger or food or sex and allowing the rest to drift away unacknowledged. As she was settling in, the hopper flipped out his tongue, gathered in a lacewing, crushed it against the horny roof of his mouth and gulped it down. When the tongue was out, she quivered to a doubling in the breadth and intensity of the sense data; like many reptiloids he had scent receptors in his tongue, receptors that drew in faint traces of Kikun. . While the hopper speared and crunched more insects, she left the pointthrust in him and retreated to her own brain to sort through what she'd found and decide what to do next. Kikun walked by there. When? Can't be less than an hour. More like two. When we were starting supper. Even if he crawled it wouldn't take more than twenty minutes to run the boat this far. How long does scent linger on land after the maker passes? Wonder if Rohant knows? Should I surface and ask? No. It doesn't really matter, you don't need to know. He went past there all right. Why? He's going the wrong direction. Lost? Rohant says no. Hmp. I need another mount, I can't do anything with this creature. Looks like I come back to Sassa after all.
She snapped the pointthrust loose, re
organized herself, and slid into the hawk's brain. This wasn't just a matter of riding, she had to take control and force the bird into doing something against his will and his nature. There was another distraction that made her task doubly difficult. The Ciocan was tightly linked to his hawk, he knew where Sassa was at all times, shared his tactile sensations-rode the air with him-shared his emotions, though he couldn't look through his eyes as she did. He could feel her easing into Sassa's brain and was jealous of her Talent, that came through strongly, it was rather like being whipped with nettles-though not all that unpleasant even with the scratchiness because he liked her and seemed to want to see her as a Dyslaerin (he'd said something like that once, that she reminded him of his toerfeles, Miralys), probably because he felt himself, challenged by her and had no other way of dealing with what he felt. (Courtesy of that bastard Ginny? Oh, gods.) He was managing well enough before this touching/rubbing thing, handling the (artificially imposed?) relationship by seeing her as an out-season Dyslaerin. Trouble was, she wasn't seasonal-that screwed everything up for poor old Rohant. Dyslaera females were essentially asexual when not in heat, insatiable when in; they were sleek and powerful, tough as hard rubber and apt to vent both annoyance and passion with claws that were smaller but sharper than the males'; sex among the Dyslaera tended to be a noisy combination of wrestling match and knife duel. Shadith knew enough about them to make her wary of getting involved with a male capable of satisfying a Dyslaerin, especially an alpha…
But he was a hot pressure in the hawk, powerfully sexual-in fact, the hawk acted as an amplifier as well as a transmitter of emotion and even that short time they'd rubbed against each other left them both aroused and wanting, at the same time wary of doing anything about it; their branches of the Cousin tree had diverged too far from the trunk.
And all of that was beside the point. She tried ignoring him; it wasn't, easy. Even with her attention focused on Sassa, she was intensely aware of Rohant bending over her, waving the fan across her face to keep the flies off, she could feel his heat, she could smell him, smell the rich musk rolling off him, sending her barely post-pubescent body into an uproar that made thinking the hardest thing she'd ever done; much more and she was going to forget all about size differences and the bloody habits of mating Dyslaera…