The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls

by Anissa Gray

  The island widened, and the ground became more rugged. They all recognized it as being the same kind of terrain as the Valley of Fires—the continuation of that valley that Issib had predicted. But it was quieter—they never found a place where gases from inside the earth burned on the surface—and the water was more likely to be pure. It was also drier and drier the farther south they went, though they were rising up into mountain country.

  “These mountains have a name,” Issib told them, from the Index. “Dalatoi. People lived here before the island split away from the mainland. In fact, the greatest and most ancient of the Cities of Fire was here.”

  “Skudnooy?” asked Luet, remembering the story of the city of misers who withdrew from the world and supposedly held most of the gold of Harmony in hidden vaults beneath their hidden city.

  “No, Raspyatny,” said Issib. And they all remembered the stories of the city of stone and moss, where streams flowed through every room in a city the size of a mountain, so high that the upper rooms would freeze, and those who lived there had to burn fires to melt the rivers so that the lower rooms would have water all year.

  “Will we see it?” they asked.

  “What’s left of it,” said Issib. “It was abandoned ten million years ago, but it was made out of stone. The ancient road we’re following led there.”

  Only then did they realize that they were indeed following an ancient road. There was no trace of pavement, and the road was sometimes cut by ravines or eroded away. But they kept returning to the path of least resistance, and now and then they could see that hills had been cut into to make a place for the road to go, and the occasional valley had been partly filled in with stone which had not yet worn down to nothing. “If there had been more rain here,” said Issib, “there’d be nothing left. But the island has moved south so that this land is now in the latitudes of the Great Southern Desert, and so the air is drier and there’s less erosion. Some of the works of humankind leave traces, even after all this time.”

  “Someone must have used this road in the past ten million years,” said Elemak.

  “No,” said Issib. “No human being has set foot on this island since it fully split off from the mainland.”

  “How can you know that!” Mebbekew scoffed.

  “Because the Oversoul has kept humans from coming here. No one even remembers that this island exists. That’s how the Oversoul wanted it. To keep things safe and ready … for us, I guess.”

  They saw Raspyatny for a whole day before they reached it. At first it simply looked like an oddly textured mountain, but the closer they got, the more they realized that what they were seeing were windows carved into the stone. It was a high mountain, too, so that the city carved into the face of it must be vast.

  They camped northeast of the city, where a small stream flowed. They followed the stream and found that it flowed right out of the city itself. Inside, it made cascades and the walls near it were thick with moss; it was much colder than the desert air outside.

  They took turns exploring, in large groups, leaving some in charge of the children and animals while the others clambered through the remnants of the city. Away from the stream, the city had not been so badly eroded inside, though nowhere was the interior as well preserved as the outer wall. They realized why when they found a few traces of an aqueduct system that had, just as the legend said, carried water into every room of the city. What surprised them, though, was the lack of internal corridors. Rooms simply led into each other. “How did they have any privacy?” asked Hushidh. “How did they ever have any time to themselves, if every room was an avenue for people to walk right through?”

  No one had an answer.

  “More than two hundred thousand people lived here, in the old days,” said Issib. “Back when this whole area was farther north, and much better watered—all the land outside was farmed, for kilometers to the north, and yet their enemies could never attack them successfully because they kept ten years’ worth of food inside these walls, and they never lacked for water. Their enemies could burn their fields and besiege them, but then they’d starve long before anyone in Raspyatny ever felt the slightest want. Only nature itself could depopulate this place.”

  “Why wasn’t all of this destroyed in the earthquakes of the Valley of Fires?” asked Nafai.

  “We haven’t seen the eastern slope. The Index says that half the city was wiped out in two great earthquakes when the rift first opened and the sea poured through.”

  “It would have been glorious to see a flood like that,” said Zdorab. “From a safe place, of course.”

  “The whole eastern side of the city collapsed,” said Issib. “Now it’s just a mountainside. But this side stayed. Ten million years. You never know. Of course, the streams are eroding it away from the inside, making the outside more and more of a hollow shell. Eventually it’ll cave in. Maybe all at once. One part will break, and that’ll put too much stress on what is left, and the whole thing will come down like a sandcastle on the beach.”

  “We have seen one of the cities of the heroes,” said Luet.

  “And the stories were true,” said Obring. “Which leads me to wonder whether the city of Skudnooy might be around here somewhere, too.”

  “The Index says not,” said Issib. “I asked.”

  “Too bad,” said Obring. “All that gold!”

  “Oh, right,” said Elemak. “And where would you sell it? Or did you think you’d eat it? Or wear it?”

  “Oh, I’m not allowed even to dream of tremendous wealth, is that it?” said Obring defiantly. “Only practical dreams allowed?”

  Elemak shrugged and let the matter drop.

  After leaving the vicinity of Raspyatny—and it took them another whole day to pass around the western side of the city, which really seemed to have covered the whole face of the mountain—they made their way through a high pass, which once again seemed to have been made almost uniform in width in order to accommodate a heavily trafficked road. “Once this was the highway between the Cities of Fire and the Cities of the Stars,” said Issib. “Now it leads only to desert.”

  They came out of the pass and a vast, dry savanna spread out below them; they could see that the island narrowed here, with the Sea of Stars to the east and, far to the west, the blue shimmer of the southern reaches of the Scour Sea. As they descended, they lost sight of the western sea; instead, at the urging of the Oversoul, they hugged the eastern shore, because more rain fell there, and they could fish in the sea.

  It was a hard passage—dry, so that three times they had to dig wells, and hot, with the tropical sun beating down on them. But this was exactly the sort of terrain that Elemak and Volemak had both learned to deal with from their youth, and they made good time. Ten days after they came down from the pass through the Dalatoi Mountains, the Oversoul had them strike south when the coastline turned southeast, and as they climbed through gently rolling hills, the grass grew thicker, and here and there more trees dotted the landscape. They passed through low and well-weathered mountains, down through a river valley, up over more hills, and then down through the most beautiful land they had ever seen.

  Strands of forest were evenly balanced with broad meadows; bees hummed over fields of wildflowers, promising honey easily found. There were streams with clear water, all leading to a wide, meandering river. Shedemei dismounted from her camel and probed into the soil. “It isn’t like desert grassland,” she said. “Not just roots. There’s true topsoil here. We can farm these meadows without destroying them.”

  For the first time in their journey, Elemak didn’t bother riding ahead to confer with Volemak about a campsite. There was no place that they passed through where they could not have stopped and spent the night.

  “This land could hold the population of Seggidugu and they could all live in wealth,” said Elemak. “Don’t you think so, Father?”

  “And we’re the only humans here,” he answered. “The Oversoul prepared this place for us. Ten mi
llion years, it waited here for us.”

  “Then we stay here? This is where we were coming?”

  “We stay here for now,” said Volemak. “For several years at least. The Oversoul isn’t ready yet to take us out into the stars, back to Earth. So for now this is our home.”

  “How many years?” asked Elemak.

  “Long enough that we should build houses of wood, and let our poor old tents become awnings and curtains,” said Volemak. “There’ll be no more journeying by land or sea from this place. Only when we rise up into the stars will we leave here. So let us call this place Dostatok, because it has plenty for our needs. The river we will name Rasa, because it is strong and full of life and it will never cease to supply us with all we need.”

  Rasa nodded her head gently to acknowledge the honor of the naming; as she did, she had the tiniest smile, which Luet, at least, recognized as a sign that Rasa knew her husband was trying to be conciliatory in his naming.

  They made their settlement on a low promontory overlooking the mouth of the River Rasa, where it poured into the Southern Ocean—for that was how far south they had come, leaving the Scour Sea and the Sea of Stars behind them. Within a month they all had houses of wood, with thatched roofs, and in this latitude they had a growing season almost all the year, so it hardly mattered when they planted; there were some rains almost every day, and heavy storms swept over quickly, doing no damage.

  The animals were so tame they had no fear of man; they soon domesticated the wild goats, which clearly were descended from the same animals that were herded in the hills near Basilica—camel’s milk at last became a liquid that only baby camels had to drink, and the term “camel’s cheese” became a euphemism for what well-fed babies left in their diapers. In the next six years, more babies were born, until there were thirty-five young ones, ranging in age from nearly eight years to several newborns. They farmed their fields together, and shared equally from the produce; from time to time the men would leave and hunt together, bringing home meat for drying and salting and skins for tanning. Rasa, Issib, and Shedemei undertook the education of the children by starting a school.

  Not that their lives were one unrelenting tale of joy and peace. There were quarrels—for an entire year Kokor would not speak to Sevet over some trivial slight; there was another quarrel between Meb and Obring that led to Obring building a house farther from the rest of the group. There were resentments—some felt that others weren’t working hard enough; some felt that their kind of work was of greater value than the labor of others. And there was a constant undercurrent of tension between the women, who looked to Rasa for leadership, and the men, who seemed to assume that no decision was final unless Volemak or Elemak had approved it. But they weathered all these crises, all these tensions, finding some balance of leadership between Volemak’s loyalty to the purposes of the Oversoul, Rasa’s clear-sighted compassion, and Elemak’s hardheaded assessments of what they needed to survive. Any unhappiness that they might harbor in their hearts was kept in check, buried under the hard work that marked the rhythms of their lives, and then dissolved in the moments when joy was bountiful and love unstinted.

  Life was good enough over the years that there was not a one of them who did not wish, when they thought of it at all, that the Oversoul would forget that they were there, and leave them in peace and happiness in Dostatok.

  NINE

  PERIMETER

  When Chveya was seven years old she had understood perfectly how the world worked. Now she was eight, and there were some questions.

  Like all the children of Dostatok, she grew up understanding the pure and simple relationships among families. For instance, Dazya and her younger brothers and sisters belonged to Hushidh and Issib. Krassya and Nokya and their younger brothers and sisters belonged to Kokor and Obring. Vasnya and her brother and sister belonged to Sevet and Vas. And so on, each set of children belonging to a mother and father.

  The only oddity in this clear picture of the universe, at least until Chveya was eight, had been Grandfather and Grandmother, Volemak and Rasa, who not only had two children of their own—the brothers Okya and Yaya, who might as well be twins because, as Vasnya had said once, they had but one brain between them—but also were, in some vague way, the parents of all the other parents. She knew this because, in odd moments, she had heard adults call Grandmother not only “Lady Rasa” or “Grandmother ” but also “Mother,” and she heard her own father and Proya’s father Elemak and Skiya’s father Mebbekew call Grandfather “Father” more often than not.

  In Chveya’s mind this meant that Volemak and Rasa were the First Parents, having given rise to all of humanity. Now, she knew in the forepart of her mind that this was not accurate, for Shedemei had made it plain in school that there were millions of other humans living in faraway places, and clearly Grandfather and Grandmother had not given life to all of them. But those places were legendary. They were never seen. The whole world was the safe and beautiful land of Dostatok, and in that place there was no one, or so it seemed, who had not come from the marriage of Volemak and Rasa.

  To Chveya, in fact, the world of the adults was remote enough to satisfy any need she had for strangeness; she had no need to wonder about mythical lands like Basilica and Potokgavan and Gorayni and Earth and Harmony, some of which were planets and some of which were cities and some of which were nations, though Chveya had never grasped the rules for which term went with each name. No, Chveya’s world was dominated by the continual power struggle between Dazya and Proya for ascendancy among the children.

  Dazya was Oldest Child, which conferred on her enormous authority which she cheerfully misused by exploiting the younger children whenever possible, converting it to personal service and “favors” which were received without gratitude. If any of the younger ones failed to obey, she would freeze them out of all games simply by letting it be known that if “that child” were part of a game or contest, she would not participate. Dazya’s attitude toward the girls more near her own age was much the same, though it was more subtle—she didn’t insist on humiliating personal services, but she did expect that when she decided things would be done a certain way, all the other girls would go along, and anyone who resisted was politely ostracized. Since Chveya was Second Child, and only three days younger, she saw no reason to accept a subservient role. The result was that she had a lot of time to herself, for Dazya would brook no equals, and none of the other girls had the spine to stand up to her.

  At the same time that Dazya had forged her kingdom among the younger children and the older girls, Proya—Elemak’s eldest son, and Second Boy—had made himself prince among princes. He was the only person who could ridicule Dazya and laugh at her rules, and all the older boys would follow him. Dazya would, of course, immediately ostracize the older boys, but this meant nothing to them since the games they wanted to join and the approval they craved were Proya’s. The worst humiliation to Dazya was that her own brother Xodhya would join with Proya and use Proya’s power as a shield for his own independence from his older sister’s rule. Chveya’s own younger brother Zhyat, and sometimes even Motya, a year younger than Zhyat and not really one of the older boys, joined with Proya regularly, but she didn’t mind at all, for that meant even more humiliation for Dazya.

  Of course, at times of struggle Chveya would join with the older girls in alternately sneering at and snubbing the rebel boys, but in her heart Chveya longed to be part of Proya’s kingdom. They were the ones who played rough and wonderful games involving hunting and death. She would even act the deer if they would only invite her to play, letting them hunt her and shoot at her with their blunt-tipped arrows, if only she could be part of them instead of being miserably trapped in Dazya’s demesne. But when she hinted at this desire to her brother Zhyat, he made a great show of gagging and retching and she gave up the idea.

  Her greatest envy was reserved for Okya and Yaya, the two sons of Grandmother and Grandfather. Okya was First Boy and Yaya was Fourth
Boy. They could easily have dislodged Proya from his position of seniority among the boys, especially because the two brothers did everything together and could have thrashed all the other boys into submission. But they never bothered, only joining in Proya’s games when they felt like it, and giving no concern at all to who was in charge. For they fancied themselves to be adults, not children at all. “We are of the same generation as your parents,” Yaya had once said to her, quite haughtily. Chveya had thereupon pointed out that Yaya was considerably shorter than her and still had a teeny-weeny hooy like a hare, which caused the other children to laugh in spite of their awe for Yaya. Yaya, for his part, only looked at her with withering disdain and walked away. But Chveya noticed that he also stopped peeing in front of the other children.

  When Chveya was brutally honest with herself, she had to admit that the reason she was so often completely isolated from the other children was because she simply could not keep her mouth shut. If she saw someone being a bully or unfair or selfish, she said so. Never mind that she also spoke up when somebody was noble or good or kind—praise was quickly forgotten, while offenses were treasured forever. Thus Chveya had no real friends among the other children—they were all too busy making sweet with Dazya or Proya to give real friendship to Chveya, except Okya and Yaya, of course, who were even more aloof and involved with each other in their supposed adultness.

  It was when Chveya turned eight years old and saw how little heed anyone but her own parents paid to her birthday, after the enormous fuss made over Dazya’s birthday, that she entirely despaired of ever being a person of significance in the world. Wasn’t it bad enough that Dazya lorded it over everybody so outrageously as it was—why did the adults have to make a festival out of Dazya’s birthday? Father explained, of course, that the festival wasn’t about Dza herself, but rather because her birthday marked the beginning of their whole generation of children—but what did it matter if the adults thought of it that way or not? The fact remained that with this festival they had affirmed Dazya’s iron rule over the other children, and in fact had even given her a temporary ascendancy over Proya himself, and Okya and Yaya had sulked through the whole party when they were snubbed and lumped in among the children, which they felt was wrong since they were not part of the younger generation. How could the adults so heedlessly and destructively have intervened in the children’s hierarchy? It was as if the adults did not think of the children’s lives as real.