Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two

by David Gerrold

  The stampede hadn’t exactly ended, it was just sort of ebbing away. The herd moved steadily past. People were going up to the Crow’s Nest to look at the boffili. Da and I went up for a look, but we didn’t stay long. In the morning, it would be worse—when we saw the scale of the destruction we had wrought. But tonight at least, with the dead shielded by the dark, we could appreciate the hulking majesty of the distant moving mass. All I could do was stand there and feel ashamed of myself. So finally we went back down. We ended up sitting on the steps of the tractor-bus, not talking about anything at all, because we had nothing left to say.

  Finally, I got up and walked away, just to have something to do. I was still wearing my costume. I didn’t want to wear it anymore, but I didn’t feel like going anywhere back near the stage either. So I walked around the boulder and saw tired, hurting people everywhere. Some were crying. Some were at their stations. Most looked angry or sad. A couple waved to me, but others turned away as if embarrassed. There was dirt and dust everywhere. A line of commandos stood quietly at the door of Bus-Tractor Two. They were waiting to use the showers. Several technicians were conducting an inspection of the boulder, looking to see what repairs were needed and what they might implement right away.

  The northeast wall of the boulder was cracked and dented—worse than I’d have believed, but not as bad as I feared. Part of the upper section was sagging, but the techs had already braced it.

  A little farther and I came to . . . the cage. A metal box, clamped together to function as a makeshift . . . cell. Not much different than the cages our Scouts had been imprisoned in.

  There was an injured novice sitting in it. All he was wearing was a yellow kilt. Someone had splinted his arm and bandaged his head and chest. It looked like he’d broken his forearm, cracked a couple of ribs and possibly suffered a concussion. His makeup was half-smeared off; he had a wild look in his eyes. But there was something about him. I stepped closer curiously.

  His eyes widened when he saw me. I was still wearing my Angel costume. His fear was immediate, and he eyed me like an animal in the zoo. But he had no place to run to. His lips peeled back, revealing teeth that had been sharpened, and he made a growling sound in his throat.

  The boy wasn’t much older than me, he might have been my age, it was hard to tell he looked so disheveled, and he was bigger than me, of course. All the Linneans were. But he looked terrified. It doesn’t matter how big you are if everyone else is bigger or smarter or meaner. Or just different. He must have heard every scream of Magistrate Darron.

  I felt bad for everything that had happened. “Do you have pain?” I asked. “Do you need anything? Water? Food?”

  He shook his head.

  “Have you eaten anything at all?”

  He shook his head.

  “Can you understand me?”

  He nodded.

  “You can talk to me. Honest. I won’t hurt you.” And then, I added, “I’ve seen the Mother. She taught me how to make tea. Would you like some?”

  He shook his head.

  “You don’t trust us, do you? Well I don’t blame you. You’ve got people all around you telling you all kinds of stuff, and you don’t know what to believe, and nothing works out like anyone promises—” I smiled as I realized. I was describing my situation more than his. “We really don’t mean you any harm. We just want to get our people back.”

  He studied me with curious eyes. He was fighting his own terror.

  “Call me Kaer,” I said. He blinked. I must have been the first person to trust him with a name. “Go ahead. You can say it.”

  “. . . Kaer?”

  “Uh-huh. Do you have a name?”

  He licked his lips nervously. Behind his smeared makeup, all red and blue, it was hard to tell what he was thinking. But finally, he said, “Sefan.”

  “Sefan? Did I pronounce that right?”

  He nodded.

  “You have how many years, Sefan? How many years have you apprenticed to the church?”

  He hesitated, then told me. It took me a moment to translate Linnean years into Oerth years, but after a moment I had it. He was my age, plus two months. And he’d been apprenticed to the Magistrate Darron since he was six. I felt bad about that. Sort of. But not really.

  “Do you like your master?”

  He shrugged. He’d never known any other master. Like wasn’t a part of it.

  “He died,” I said.

  Sefan looked up with a startled expression.

  “But we brought him back to life.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Sometimes. Not me. But our doctors can. Sometimes.”

  “Why did you have to kill him?”

  “He wouldn’t tell us what we have to know. Your people captured some of our people. We want them back.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” I blinked. Why would someone even ask that question? “Because—because you do that. You rescue your friends.”

  He shook his head. “No. We don’t. If the Mother claims one for her own, we mustn’t anger the Mother. If someone falls prey or gets captured by cast-outs, then they deserved it because they offended the Mother somehow.”

  “You don’t rescue people?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” Well, that explained a lot. No wonder the Magistrate didn’t understand.

  “Will they kill him again?”

  “I don’t know. My friends had a big argument. They want to keep . . . asking him.”

  “I heard them . . . asking him.”

  “Yes, everybody did.”

  “You hurt him.”

  “Your people hurt our friends. And we want them back. We care about them very much.”

  “Your friends came from—” He stopped himself before he finished the thought.

  “—from the same place we did. Would your people hurt me if you captured me?”

  “Maiz-likka things cannot claim the protection of the Mother.”

  “I met the Mother. Here in the grass.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I did too. Why do you think I wear my hair like this—just like the Mother wears hers.” He didn’t answer that. I kept going. “She didn’t see me as maiz-likka. She served me tea, she told me how to make it—as salty as tears. And she washed away my sorrows. Would she do that if she didn’t recognize me as one of her children?”

  He remained silent. He was having a hard time with this. Finally: “You came from Oerth.” A statement, not a question.

  “Yes.”

  He stumbled over his next words. They must have been very hard to say. “Does the Mother live on Oerth too?”

  How to answer that? I composed and discarded several attempts. “The people of Oerth know the Mother. How could we know her if she did not make herself known to us?”

  “But the stories we’ve heard—?”

  “Yes, the stories you have heard. Whatever you’ve heard—you haven’t heard even the smallest part of the truth. Oerth has wonders you wouldn’t believe.” I realized I was quoting Byrne.

  “I would believe. Now.” He looked around the inside of the boulder. I couldn’t imagine what all this must look like to him. It looked pretty strange to me after living in the Dome for over a year. Abruptly, he said, “If I tell you something, will you stop hurting Magistrate Darron?”

  “Um . . . what?”

  “If I tell you where to find your people, will you leave him alone? If he dies, I will have no protector. They will have me cast out.”

  “Why? Can’t you have another protector?”

  “None will have me.”

  “Why not?”

  “It just doesn’t work that way. If he dies, I have to die.”

  “Oh.”

  He looked frantic now. “Please—let me save his life!”

  “Um, yeah. Sure. Uh—where did they take our people?”

  “The ones who came from the west. The ones who said the Mother’s son would bring a message. They took your f
riends.”

  “They did? Where? No, wait—wait here!” That was a stupid thing to say, he wasn’t going anywhere. “Let me get my friends. You’ll tell them, all right? Please?”

  He nodded and I dashed back to the Bus-Tractor shouting for Smiller and Jorge and Byrne and da and Alex—

  Chakla

  And then a lot of things began to happen very fast.

  We brought Sefan into the Bus-Tractor, wrapped him in a robe, and fed him corn-cakes and hot chocolate, and let him talk. Mostly he wanted to talk to me, but he didn’t mind the others listening and asking questions. I guess he felt he could trust me more than them—or maybe he felt I was the real leader here because I was the Angel and they were just ordinary folks.

  Sefan told us that our Scouts had been taken to the Mother Land by the Hale-Stones and their followers. He didn’t know how that had been arranged or how the Hale-Stones had managed to sneak the Scouts out of Callo undetected. Apparently it had been done during the sudden panicky evacuation of the town. The frightened crowds had provided excellent cover.

  How the Scouts had been removed from the wagons wasn’t much of a mystery after Sefan explained it. He’d been one of the people who’d done it. He said there were trick floors in the wagons, so the wagons could be parked over the entrance to an underground tunnel, and the people would climb right up into them. They’d been designed that way to keep prisoners from escaping. But people could be taken out of the wagons the same way. So the public performance that our spybirds had photographed, of the Magistrates loading our Scouts into the backs of the wagons, had been just that—a public performance. For our benefit.

  We still didn’t know how the Hale-Stones had managed to convince Magistrate Darron to run an empty caravan east. That was still a mystery; Sefan didn’t know anything about that part of the Magistrate’s business. But it was clear to Smiller and Jorge that the caravan had been sent out as a decoy for us. As Sefan talked, Alex and Jake and Byrne made notes—or exchanged worried glances. Da sat quietly to one side and listened. He seemed strangely withdrawn, as if reconsidering a lot of things.

  Sefan wasn’t sure, but he thought that Magistrate Darron was planning to claim that the Scouts had mysteriously disappeared during the journey, thus proving their maiz-likka character. Magistrate Darron would then demand that Mordren Enclave grant him leadership of a division of warriors to go after the maiz-likka Oerth people. Given the circumstances, they would hardly be able to refuse his demand for vengeance and the leadership of a division would be an effective promotion to the next circle of authority. And at the same time, he would have freed himself from the embarrassing questions that the actual physical presence of the Scouts would raise.

  After they’d gotten everything they could out of Sefan, Smiller and the others moved to the forward part of the van and began chattering at each other in English. Sefan used his good arm to hold out his mug to me. “May I have some more of this chakla, please? This tastes good. This comes from Oerth, yes?”

  “Yes, it does.” I started to get up to get him another mug, but da stopped me. In English, he said, “Kaer, he believes you are an angel. An Angel cannot be a servant.”

  “Yes, I can,” I said, taking the mug back from da. “The whole job is to serve, remember?”

  “He won’t understand.”

  “I don’t care anymore.” I didn’t mean it, but it felt good saying it. I refilled Sefan’s mug and put it in front of him. He thanked me enthusiastically, but his eyes followed me everywhere. It was a little spooky.

  Da nodded me forward and I followed him. “You need to understand the problem we’ve got, Kaer. We’ve got Sefan and we’ve got Magistrate Darron. What do we do with them now?”

  “Uh—” Abruptly, I realized why da had been so withdrawn during Sefan’s questioning.

  “That’s right. Frankly, I don’t care what happens to the Magistrate. Jorge wants to strip him naked, tattoo something maiz-likka on his forehead, and drop him in the center of Mordren. That’s fine with me. But what about Sefan? Whatever happens to Darron, happens to Sefan too. We can’t put him back into his own world—not after what he’s seen inside the boulder. And they won’t take him back anyway. You know that.”

  “I guess we have to take him back to Surprise Rock or North Mountain One. Or maybe even the Dome. He can teach us things we can’t find out any other way. And he likes chocolate.”

  “You’re talking about kidnapping, Kaer. Last I heard, stealing Linnean children is a charter violation.”

  “Da? Where can he go? Nowhere.”

  “You can’t just pick him up and take him home like a lost puppy.”

  “Why not? We have room.”

  “Kaer—!”

  “Let’s ask him what he wants.” Before he could argue about it, I turned back to Sefan. “Do you want to come with us—to a place where you can live safe? We’ll teach you about Oerth, and you can teach us about Linnea?”

  He dropped his eyes to his mug. “I promised my life to the service of the Mother. Do you understand promises?”

  “I think so,” I said. The old woman in the grass. She’d talked about promises too.

  “How can I break a promise to the Mother of the World?”

  “You wouldn’t have to break your promise. You could serve the Mother wherever you go, even with us. Especially with us. You could teach us to serve the Mother better. Some of us could well use the lessons, I think.” I glanced over to da. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling, but he wasn’t arguing. I turned back to Sefan. “You don’t have anything or anyone to go back to. I promise you—”

  He looked up sharply at that, waited for the rest of the sentence.

  “—I promise you a better chance to do the Mother’s work.”

  “Even on Oerth?”

  “Even on Oerth. Earth.”

  Sefan stared hard into my eyes. The gap between us was light years. Should he trust me . . . ? Finally, he spoke. He reached out and touched my hand tentatively—as if reassuring himself that I was real. “Angels don’t break promises . . . ?”

  “No, angels don’t break promises.” I turned back to da. “He’ll come with us. All the way back to Oerth. We need another boy in the family anyway.”

  “Kaer—? Don’t you think that the moms and the das should make that decision? Taking responsibility for another child—”

  “Are you planning to say no? Do you think the moms will say no? We owe him something, da. A life.” I went to him and picked up his hands in mine and looked up into his care-worn face. “Da. We have not done good things here. We have to do something to make it right. We owe it to the old woman in the grass. We owe it to Sefan.”

  “Kaer—!” And then he sighed. Loudly. I knew that sound. He looked at the ceiling, he looked past me at the opposite wall, he looked at the floor, but finally he came back to me. “I’ll talk to Smiller. Maybe we can arrange something—”

  “Thank you, da.” I put my arms around him and hugged him. He patted me on the back with a weary gesture of resignation.

  We went forward together. Smiller and Jorge were deep in the middle of their own very-private discussion; but Byrne looked up and said, “Oh, Lorrin, Kaer—good. Let me bring you up to speed. Smiller’s ordered an evac. We’ve got choppers coming in. We’ll have the boulder out of here before dawn. As scheduled. Once we get it back to the Hole, we’re going to redesign it and rebuild it as a termite mound. Boffili stay away from those.

  “We’ve started broadcasting a new message to the Hale-Stones, on all channels, in the clear. It says, ‘We know where to find you. Surrender now and we will grant you amnesty.’”

  “That won’t do any good,” said da.

  “We have to give them the chance. And if not, maybe it’ll worry them. Here’s the real problem. We’re almost certain that some of the soldiers escaped earlier tonight. Battlefield monitoring showed at least twenty of them heading west along the tracks until they passed out of range. They’ll go straight back to Callo—if the
y can steal horses from other refugees they encounter along the way, they could get there as early as tomorrow evening. They’ll report what happened out here—what they saw anyway. A great miracle. An Angel appeared. The Angel summoned spirits from the sky and spirits from the ground. The Magistrates were struck with lightning. The wagons blew up. The horses disappeared into the sky. Blah blah blah. That almost works for us. Nobody but Magistrate Darron and a couple others knew that the prisoners were not on the train, so we get credit for the rescue we planned, we can build on that. But here’s the problem—all that the Hale-Stones have to do is bring the Scouts back to Callo and they can say, ‘If that Angel was real, how come it didn’t know where to find its own people? We had them hidden away. Real Angels don’t make mistakes.’ Oops. And we end up with a great big emmo egg all over our face. So we have to get our Scouts tonight. That’s what Smiller and Jorge are working on. A raid on the Mother Land. The commandos are up for it. Even though it’s risky, they want to go for it.”

  “Good luck,” said da, in a very flat tone of voice. “Kaer and I will go back to the Hole with the boulder.”

  Byrne met his gaze. “You know we still need you.”

  “Not for the attack on the Mother Land.”

  “No. Not for the rescue of the Scouts,” Byrne corrected. “We have a different plan for that. But we still need Kaer to complete one thing. Mordren Enclave. The Ten Commandments. Kaer?” Byrne turned to me. “Will you do it?”

  I looked up to da. I knew he wanted me to say no, but I slipped my hand into his and said, “My da made a promise to you that we’d do this job. We’ll keep our promise.”

  “Thank you, Kaer.”

  The Sky Wagon

  First, the assault teams had to clean and check their equipment for the assault on the Mother Land, and then the boulder had to be broken down, so everybody was rushing every which way all at once.

  Smiller and Jorge charged back and forth, shouting into their headsets and snapping out orders. Everybody else was climbing up ladders, sliding down poles, carrying things hither and yon, slamming boxes around this way and that—until suddenly they were gone, on their way to the Mother Land, and then there wasn’t anything else to do except wait for the other choppers to come back.