“It’s our stop, Daddy,” Hawktalon reminded him. “Don’t forget the luggage.” Hawktalon had become very grown up all of a sudden. She and Sunflower took the travels in stride, from jumpship to shuttle to continental transit, swinging Fruitbat and Wolfcub beside them.
He shook himself and got up from the seat, accepting the luggage which Hawktalon hoisted down. They stepped out of the mirror-smooth car and took the elevator up to ground level.
The horizon all around was rimmed with murky red, seeping into bronze yellow overhead. The scent of burning pine welcomed him more than anything else could; indeed, on the distant mountainside a patch of black smoke confirmed that the Dark One was not done with summer yet.
“Blackbear!” Nightstorm jumped down from her horse and gave him a big hug. “Three Deer is at the longhouse, and—oh Goddess, I just can’t believe what happened…” There were hugs all round as Hawktalon and Sunflower greeted their beloved aunt, and Blackbear swung her daughter up to his shoulders.
“I can ‘walk through’ you,” Sunflower insisted, for the insubstantial quality of holo images fascinated him. “See?” He tried, but the best he could manage was to burrow through between his aunt’s legs.
“You’ll stay with us,” Nightstorm assured him. “Then afterward, Aunt Ashcloud insisted she wants the children for a few days.”
Blackbear managed a smile, for he knew she meant to help him. He was now a Windclan, after all. But the family he was born into—he could not begin to comprehend what had happened to them.
“Falcon Soaring wants you to look at her baby,” Nightstorm added. “Of course the new doctor is fine, but she really wants you to see her. And you know how it is this time of year; my daughter was up all night with asthma again, and Lynxtail’s boy just won’t stop coughing.”
“I’ll take a look at them,” he said automatically. Mother and father…sisters and brothers…
They all mounted the horses Nightstorm had brought round, Sunflower sitting up behind his father. Hawktalon flipped the reins as if she had never left, but Blackbear felt a bit stiff, not having ridden for over a year. “Y-yap!” yelled Nightstorm’s daughter on her shaggy pony. Needing no more encouragement, Hawktalon galloped after.
The horses soon slowed, stepping with care up the winding path with its treacherous stones. Terraced fields of beans traversed the mountainside. A familiar whiff of sulfur reached his nostrils; soon, they came upon the plateau of hot springs, where huge cratered pools of mud were dotted by geyser-powered generators. The horses skirted the plateau, of course; no need to get their hooves cooked.
The noonday sun had baked the sky a lemon color when Blackbear’s familiar neighborhood landmarks started to appear: an old spruce, gnarled and bent by the wind; around the bend, a pile of rocks that the children used to play on. Then abruptly, the landscape changed. The ground was charred black, brightened by an occasional patch of fireweed whose seeds took root quickly in sterile soil. Where there had been forest, the trees were leveled, or stood only as dark skeletons. Blackbear’s hair stood on end as he remembered that their old longhouse no longer existed. He had forgotten to warn the children.
He whistled after Hawktalon to call her back, but she galloped ahead. At last he caught up to her, sitting on her horse and contemplating the ruins.
A little chin nudged his back. “Dad?” Sunflower asked in a small voice. “Is that my house?”
Blackbear swung himself down from the horse, then gathered Sunflower in his arms. “We have a new house,” he promised, his voice unsteady. “We’re just saying good-bye to this place, okay?” They ought to have gone by another road, he told himself, although he knew well enough there was no other.
Hawktalon nodded sagely. “We’re just saying good-bye.”
Nightstorm trotted her horse over to his side, her daughter smiling cheerily behind her. “You’ll be pleased to see the new longhouse,” she promised. “We rebuilt on the north end of our land. For some reason the northeast corner didn’t burn; you know how the Goddess always leaves one place untouched.”
But not Crater Lake, he thought silently.
The new wooden longhouse of the Windclan was a welcome sight, although white drapes of mourning for the dead hung from the windows. A tumult of people spilled out of the house: Fieldmouse, Raincloud’s brother in his white turban, with a toddler swung under one arm; Lynxtail, with another one on her shoulders; Clanmother Windrising, her gray braids redone in pearl beads; the older children clamoring, with younger ones on their backs or dolls over their shoulders. It was good to hear so many voices “clicking” again.
As Blackbear greeted them a torrent of conflicting emotions surged through him. He loved them all, almost madly, his people, all the children whose navels he had tied and whose earaches he had cleared. And yet he was angry too—why had these survived, and not his own sisters and brothers? Then guilt overwhelmed him, for half wishing them dead, if only his own…
“Blackbear!” It was his brother Three Deer. They fell into each other’s arms, sobbing. At least he could let out something at last. “They were all just—asleep in their beds,” Three Deer began haltingly. “A few tried to escape, but the gas caught them by the throat. Most of them were just there, dead where they lay, without a mark on them…” He started to sob again for a while. His goddess from the Full Moon Clan folded her arms around him, and his little boy put his head in his father’s lap, sucking his thumb like Sunflower. As he calmed down, he began to speak again. “I still can’t believe it,” he said, stroking the head of his child. “I can understand the fire, with its dark hunger. But this silent death, like a thief in the night—I can’t make any sense of it.”
Blackbear said nothing, but he agreed. He could not understand it, and nothing the High Priestess could say would make it any better.
From the kitchen, Fieldmouse called, “We’re serving up the goat stew. Send in the children—they’ll need to eat.”
The smell was inviting, and Hawktalon broke away to get her share. They would all need to eat well, to face the ordeal to come. But Blackbear could not face food.
He broke away, heading off to the sheep barn behind the longhouse. There was quiet. The earth was cool and fragrant, and the soft nasal bleating of the ewes calmed him. The sheep are lucky, he thought; they never have to know…He frowned, as something stirred in his memory. Kal had said something like that once.
“Blackbear,” someone whispered. He startled a moment, thinking of his own sister who used to play tricks on him; a bat in his bedroom, a spider down his back.
But it was only Nightstorm, who had followed him out to the barn. “I thought you’d want to know…about the arrangements,” she whispered.
He roused himself. “All right,” he said thickly.
“The survivors want to try for a natural cremation,” she explained, “to honor the Dark One. The High Priestess agreed. So we’ve laid out the bodies in an area that the fire is projected to consume by morning. If the wind shifts, of course, we’ll take care of it.”
Blackbear nodded. It was a good plan; why start fire, when the Goddess made so much of Her own? Quail would have thought so.
Quail…the two boys…the two baby girls.
“Blackbear, we have to be going soon. The High Priestess is ready; and of course, the fire’s advancing.”
In a daze he followed her directions. There was a special carriage for him and the children, with Three Deer and his family. Sunflower sat in his lap, while Hawktalon kept patting his arm as if to comfort him.
After what seemed an interminable ride they came to a stop in the forest where the pines had been freshly cleared, their scent clinging to the air. Gusts of wind brought acrid whiffs of smoke; the fire was advancing all right. Across the valley hung the black smoke cloud of the Goddess in Her most fearsome aspect. Occasional bright flashes appeared as a dry tree exploded into flame, shooting fiery branches a hundred meters outward; the “hands of the Dark One,” uplifted in Her fearsome dance.
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“It’s been a rich year for fire, don’t you think?” muttered Lynxtail to Fieldmouse several paces off, each rocking a child to sleep. They exchanged anxious looks, as if seeking encouragement from each other.
“Good for the soil,” Fieldmouse agreed, coughing heavily. “Our crops will flourish on all the ash.”
“What a feast the bears will have in the spring…”
Blackbear forced himself to turn his gaze to something more terrible than the distant fire. The bodies of the dead, over two thousand of them, were laid out upon the scaffolding of pine, as far as his eye could see. His eyes filled over, and for a moment he could not see. Then he blinked and wiped his eyes. Huddled with Three Deer and the children, he let Nightstorm lead them down the rows. The bodies were perfect, just as Three Deer had said; there must have been little need for the priestess assistants to touch them up. All the neighbors he had grown up with, they lay there in their best clothes, their hands neatly crossed, children ranged along with their parents, their favorite animals and dolls tucked under their arms. They might have been asleep, except for the horrible silent whiteness of every face.
Suddenly Three Deer squeezed Blackbear’s hand. Blackbear forced himself to take the next step, and look farther.
There was his mother. A glacial statue. His father beside her; the two looked oddly like their old faded wedding portrait, except that someone had painted the eyes closed. A sense of terror sparked inside him, and the portrait shook before his eyes, until someone caught his arm. He stayed there a long while.
Next to them was his eldest sister. She was long grown-up now, but he recalled her vividly as the adolescent who used to tease him whenever she got the chance. “Oh-oh…you’ve got a spider down your back!” His mind focused confusedly, first seeing his live elder sister as a young goddess, then the adult laid out before him.
Someone nudged him gently. He had a long way to go, after all.
His eyes rested on his sister’s consort next to her. He remembered their wedding well, the first wedding in his immediate family. Next to them, their daughters; the middle one had been a great friend of Hawktalon’s.
Hawktalon broke down, shaking, covering her head in his arm. “It’s too awful, Daddy,” she sobbed. “I don’t like being grown-up.” Sunflower began crying too.
Fieldmouse and another man hurried up to bundle the children away; it was enough for them. The clearing was filling with mourners now.
As he went on Blackbear found himself looking without seeing, as if his eyes could only hold so much. They must have passed his other sisters, his brothers; he could barely name them to himself. Time passed without ending, and yet it was as if time stood still. Then at last he reached the youngest.
Quail. Still a giant of a young man, he lay there almost as if it had to be a joke; he might get up at any moment and laugh at everyone. Blackbear actually felt a laugh welling up, strangled in his throat.
But Quail slept on, joining forever the original younger brother lost to the swollen river long ago. Together they floated away, along with Quail’s twin boys and his little twin girls with their look of mischievous queens. Each girl had a stuffed black teddy bear tucked into one hand. When Quail was barely older than the girls, Blackbear used to put him to bed at night with his own toy bear, which he himself had sewn together. “’Night, Ba-Ba,” the toddler would say, already a husky kid off-scale for his age.
From the west side of the clearing the bells began to toll, a carillon of deep tones that echoed across the valley. Then came the chanting of the priestess assistants. The sky had filled with the swirling gold and blood-red of Bronze Skyan sunset.
“It’s time,” Nightstorm whispered in his ear.
The mourners gathered to the west of the dead. Across the valley, the black clouds rolled ever closer.
“Hear me, people of the Caldera Hills!” The High Priestess called out from where she stood on top of a platform of freshly cut pines. Her braids, dyed orange, spiraled up into a forbidding headdress. Between her hands she held aloft a blacksnake two meters long, writhing in her grasp. “Hear me, and see the devastation wrought upon our sisters and brothers.” She paused, then gestured with the snake toward the fire in the west. “And see the devastation wrought upon our sister trees.” She paused again, her fearsome gaze searching the crowd. “And yet, remember that even the forest fire, even the Dark One in Her form of greatest fury, spares as much woodland as She consumes. And those who survive will flourish on the ashes.”
A squirrel scampered up a tree, its tail rippling behind like an Elysian train. Squirrels would survive the worst fires, and bears would thrive, and the fireweed would burst into color in the spring. But none of those was Blackbear’s sister or brother. “…spider down your back.”
“Can we humans say the same?” the High Priestess demanded. “When have we humans alone ever restrained our will to consume lives? Was our own birthworld not swallowed up by the instruments of our own hands? The Dark One spares Her creatures, and renews their life tenfold. We mourn our own loss; yet how often have we looked out on the world and failed to recognize our true sisters and brothers?”
The smoke from the advancing fire was becoming oppressive. They could not stay much longer; besides, the village downwind might need to be evacuated. “’Night, Ba-Ba.”
“We long for the Goddess to spare us; yet how often do we, in our willful blindness, set alight that which remains? Has this not happened, time and time again? Let this be our lesson: Never shall humans dare to choose those powers of destruction which belong to the Goddess alone. Leave death to the Dark One—humans, be humane.”
Chapter 16
AFTER SENDING RAINCLOUD BACK UP TO THE SHIP FOR treatment, Verid collapsed in the Urulite guesthouse, her thoughts in turmoil. The morning had gone so well—and suddenly, this attack had turned everything upside down. How could Zheron have let such a thing happen?
“We ought to have known better, with these primitives,” Lem exclaimed.
“Those ‘primitives’, were sharp enough to burn our octopods,” Verid answered grimly. “It could have been a lot worse.”
“But our mission’s finished,” Lem said. “How can we possibly go through with it? You know what our citizens will say.”
She could imagine what Flors would have said. Elysians were paranoid about personal safety. “Let’s not be hasty,” she said. “You have to remember that none of the worlds we deal with are as safe as Elysium. The first thing is to find out exactly what happened, and how it affects our mission.”
After an interminable hour, Zheron at last returned. His look was grim and haggard. “I must speak to you alone,” he told Verid. Lem departed, and Verid obligingly turned on the voice isolation field.
“We have captured the attackers,” Zheron told her. “They could not possibly have escaped our security. They intended to take two of your party as hostages, then use them to embarrass the Imperator and force us to break off talks.”
“So they…attacked us in the street.”
“Fortunately their stunners were not fully charged; a common occurrence, as our equipment is rarely functional,” Zheron admitted with startling frankness. “Nevertheless, we owe a great debt to Raincloud and the…Elysian female who so bravely fought them off, preventing their use as hostages.”
“But Lord Dhesra was not so fortunate.”
Zheron took in a breath and exhaled slowly. “Lord Dhesra is an incalculable loss to us.”
The attackers meant to kill Dhesra. It was a serious strike against Imperial rule. “These attackers—who are they?”
“They appear to be followers of a deceased prince.”
“One of those your Rhaghlan murdered,” Verid added coldly, allowing some of her anger to show.
“Rhaghlan had no choice. He dispatched them in the midst of their plans to murder him.”
“Well, you all seem to be murderers one way or another,” she exclaimed in exasperation. “How can we possibly deal with you?”<
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“You’re murderers too.” Crossing his arms, Zheron faced her down. “You murder simian infants in your test tubes every day. What do you take us for? Sim blood is our blood; hardly one of us has not a sim for a great-grandparent, somewhere back. How shall I explain you to our people? How shall I then explain that your Free Fold expects us all to give up the art of warriors, the very thing that makes life worth living?”
For some minutes Verid was silent. Life was a cruel joke at times, she thought bitterly. We cannot all eat iron or sulfur. “I don’t envy you, Zheron.”
“Nor do I envy you.” He half smiled. “But I respect you a hell of a lot, Barbarian.”
RAINCLOUD RESTED ON THE JUMPSHIP, GRATEFUL enough for Elysian comforts again. The gash on her back had turned out to be superficial, and the ship medic had patched it up without difficulty.
But the wound in her mind would take longer to heal. The sight of a man killed by a man, close enough to touch; it violated her senses. Men were supposed to be wholesome, nurturing creatures, not predators. Fighting and posturing were one thing, at worst an element of immaturity, but actual bloodletting was something else. To experience it herself came as a shock. It made her angry at the Urulites, and at herself and the Elysians for trusting them.
Iras stood nearby, bouncing Blueskywind, who had fed again on mashed pickles and peaches to supplement her milk, and was now in a very perky mood. She opened her mouth to crow, and Iras made a face back at her. “I’m so glad you came, Raincloud,” Iras said. “You’re an inspiration; I don’t know how I would have managed without you.”
Raincloud sighed and turned over on the couch. What would Rhun have said—“Diplomacy means dancing with vipers.” She asked Iras, “Are we going back soon?” She could not wait to see Blackbear again; she felt a pang of guilt for leaving Sunflower for three weeks.
“We’re running one more check through the ship, to make sure it’s repaired itself well enough to make it through the station.”
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