by J. D. Lakey
“How much did you hear?” Cheobawn asked. And more importantly how much did the stones behind Mora sync with her own and rebroadcast the other side of her conversation with Bohea?
“What comes at us from the Waste?” Mora asked.
“What?” Cheobawn said, not sure of the context of her question.
“You warned the First Prime of a threat coming at us from the Waste,” Mora said slowly, each word pronounced with surgical precision. “Were you referring to the smoke leopard when you said that?”
“Oh, that,” Cheobawn said. “I had forgotten I told him that.”
“Oh that? Is it a lie, then?” her Truemother asked, only the slight rise of her brows betraying her annoyance.
“No, no,” Cheobawn said, the memory of her emotional outburst bringing an embarrassed grimace to her face. “It was true when I said it.”
“But now it is not? What has changed?”
“I took care of it,” Cheobawn said with an insolent shrug.
“Did you?” Mora said, her eyes narrowing. “By what right?”
“Right?” Cheobawn asked, half to herself. She suddenly remembered the hot words exchanged between Connor and Hayrald only a few hours earlier. “By right of omission, I guess. You and all the other Elders look the other way when it comes to Blackwind’s business. Can you blame us if we have become self-directed?”
Mora considered her silently, a hard glint behind her eyes. Cheobawn waited for the anger and the harsh words but they did not come.
“I know of these Spiders you talk of,” Mora said after a long moment, again startling Cheobawn with her sudden redirection of the conversation.
“Do you?” Cheobawn asked carefully, wishing for just a moment that she might peek into Mora’s mind and scry out the secrets she kept there. “Do you know that they have opened up a doorway into this world so that they might seed the earth with their young? Bohea knows now. He will put a stop to it for us. You can thank him next time you talk to him.”
“Be careful who you side with in this conflict. All is not as it first seems. Spider’s story is written in the books of the Chronicles of the World,” Mora said, resting her head on the back of her chair, her eyes half closed. “It is required reading for every First Mother. I had forgotten about them until that day you came back from Meetpoint Camp filled with words and thoughts only foreign minds could know.”
“What?” The word was no more than a sigh from between her lips. Why was her Truemother taking this moment to reveal the secrets of her office? What was the point? Nothing Mora said was without purpose. “What does it say in your forbidden books, First Mother?” Cheobawn asked.
“Dare I tell you?” her Truemother mused. “As you said, you have learned to be self reliant, without need of the counsel of those of us with more years and more experience. But I will tell you this freely so that you might see the foreigners for what they are. Men like your Colonel Bohea and your Sam, they burned this world with fire and poison, sterilizing the earth of all life except that which offered no threat so that their kind might light and take root. The Spiders wanted just a bit of hot sand to birth their young from time to time but there was no profit to be had from it so they died by the millions leaving an empty and barren sea.”
“If this is true then where were the domes?” Cheobawn asked, her mind barely able to grasp the scope of such destruction. “Why didn’t we stop them? We think we are better than the Lowlanders yet we sit in silent judgment while they stumble about in their madness.”
“I bless the sacrifice of so many creatures every day for without them the Mothers would still be in bondage and the Domes above the Escarpment would not exist,” Mora held up her hand to heaven. “Blessed is the will of the goddess,” she intoned.
“I don’t understand,” Cheobawn pleaded, irritated that her Truemother would hide behind her religious faith.
“The very first Mothers, they heard the screams of the dying in the ambient and it woke them to their purpose.”
“Purpose, Mother?” Cheobawn dared asked, hoping against hope that Mora would forget herself and keep talking.
“Ah,” Mora moaned softly “There are words expunged from the tongues of the tribes. I will not repeat them, for they are vile. I will not taint your innocence. In the end it will be your only weapon.”
Cheobawn choked on her outrage. Did other Mothers do this to their daughters; leave them naked in the dark with no direction and no way to find what was true? It took Cheobawn a few moments before she had her emotions under control enough to speak.
“Dare you not?” Cheobawn seethed, “I have killed Brathum and his men and Star lies in the belly of a starving smoke leopard. How much more monstrous could my burden become by knowing the truth?”
“Hubris, my dear child,” Mora snorted, “makes for swollen heads. You are not the center of the world. Your emotions have subverted your logic. Did you think that a dome full of Mothers could not tell Brathum that what he did was not without risks? He knew, as did we all, that the dome would not survive the long winter without the herds. It was decided his life would be a fair exchange for the possibility of saving even a few more animals. Nothing you could have said would have changed Brathum’s fate. He gave his life so others could live just as Sigrid’s mount did. Ask your bennelk friends if they resent Star’s death. Perhaps you will listen to their counsel since you refuse to hear mine.”
Cheobawn looked away, appalled and confused. Had the decision to send the patrol out been made in such cold blood, then? She shuddered at that thought.
“But you cannot deny that I sent Old Father Bhotta’s bloodstones down into the Lowlands. Bohea delivered one to the Spiders. It is their machine that has turned the weather bitter, causing so much damage not just to us but to every dome. How is Brathum’s death not tangled with that act?”
“Do we curse the knife after it has flown, because it found the target at which it was aimed?” Mora said with a small shrug.
“What?” Cheobawn asked, confused. Why was Mora quoting a teaching parable about not using stinger nests for target practice? She shook her head, having no patience for its paradoxical lessons.
“Never mind,” Mora said. “Get it out of your head that you have caused any of this. Ten thousand years of human appetites have brought us to this shore and your one tiny life will not appease their monstrous hungers. There is no shame in being who you are nor should there be guilt for doing what comes to you as natural as breathing.”
Cheobawn looked up and met her Truemother’s eyes. It was so odd, hearing that affirmation from Mora’s lips for the first time in her life. Was Mora becoming sentimental and soft-hearted all of a sudden?
“You are not angry with me,” Cheobawn asked, “for using the bloodstone?”
“I am angry that you did not ask and I am hurt that you have seen fit to keep me in the dark about affairs that concern all of us. Have you sworn half the dome to secrecy? Am I the last to know?”
“It is my secret, mine to keep from those who would be harmed in the knowing,” Cheobawn said, choosing every word with utmost care, knowing Mora would use them as weapons against her if she could.
“Am I a mewling infant, in your mind?” Mora snorted in amusement. “You like your secrets. They make you feel special. It is Tam’s only complaint about you.”
“He never …” Cheobawn said, choking on the image of Tam talking about her to Mora without her knowledge. True or not, it hurt her to the center of her being. In their battle of words, Mora had scored a fatal hit. Cheobawn clenched her teeth and shook her head, refusing to betray her pain. “I will not believe that he said that.”
“You forget,” Mora said with a cruel smile, “that the Fathers are a closed rank when it comes to dealing with the peculiarities of their Ears. You would be surprised what is said in the privacy of the Fathers House.”
“And Hayrald comes running to your side to tell you everything, I suppose,” said Cheobawn sullenly. “Does it make you feel pow
erful, knowing you have made him your toady?”
Cheobawn regretted saying it the minute the words fell out of her mouth. Mora’s reaction was instantaneous and violent. The First Mother stood up so fast her chair tipped and crashed to the floor.
“Be silent, you ignorant child!” Mora shouted, slamming her fists down upon the top of her desk. Cheobawn jumped and then backed away as the air in the room turned cold with Mora’s displeasure. “You are a fool if you think any of my Husbands are less than honorable. Do not ever say that again. If you hurt Hayrald with your cruel words I will exile you to the ends of the world and you can figure out who loves you amongst strangers. Get out of my sight!”
An abyss of knowing opened up at Cheobawn’s feet. Mora meant this. Every word. Cheobawn turned and fled, truly terrified of her Truemother’s anger for the first time in her life.
She ran down the hall, across the foyer, out the door, and down the staircase to the garden path that led to the plaza, barely aware of where her feet were taking her. What had possessed her to say that to Mora? It was as if the air between them filled with insanity whenever they were in the same room and both of them breathed in its toxic vapors making them say terrible, hurtful things to each other. She needed to put distance between herself and that insanity.
As Cheobawn raced towards the central fountain, she let slip her ties to her home. The room at the top of Mora’s house was no longer her safe haven now though she had lived there all her life. It had always been the place to go where she might hide from the world and lick her wounds because she could trust that Mora stood guard; her own personal fire-breathing dragon standing sentinel at the gate of the keep. No more. The dragon had turned her fire inward and seared the small and fragile things that lived there. She could feel the connections to her younger self breaking one by one. It came into her mind all of a sudden that she wished never to see that room again, nor wished to touch any of the detritus that had accumulated there. The girl who cherished the boxes, baskets, and bins of toys and puzzles and pebbles and insect wings that lined the shelves, the girl who had covered her walls with drawings of flowers and mountains and animals, that girl was gone, burned away, burned to ash in a fire of Mora’s making.
Cheobawn stumbled to a halt in the shadows of a battalion of warriors, the blank faced game pieces staring back at her, stern in their disapproval. Mora had won, at long last, she realized. She had become something hard edged and strange, just as Mora intended and the little girl who loved without reservation was dead. That thought tore something inside her. She sank to the chalk covered stones, shoved her fist into her mouth, and wept hard, silent tears.
Cheobawn’s grief raged like a grimstorm through her heart. She could not stop the sobs or the tears or the pain that seemed to want to rip her in two. She wanted to blast her pain out into the ambient and burn the minds of everyone around her so that they might taste a bit of what they had done to her. She resisted this insanity. Instead she buried her psi in the stones under her feet, reaching down past the roots of the mountains to the core the earth. When Bear Under the Mountain moaned in protest, Cheobawn threw her head back and buried the chaos of her heart in the star studded darkness of Star Woman’s skirt, snuffing her pain out in the cold aloof comfort of infinite life.
The tears stopped. The storm died, spent. Cheobawn sniffed and pulled the hem of her silk undershirt out from under her leather riding jacket. She used it to clean her face and dry her eyes as she considered her next move. There were few options. Well, only one, really. She would have to move into Blackwind’s dorm room. She would use Megan’s bunk until the rest of the Pack returned from the Temple in a month’s time. Mora could protest all she wanted but short of locking her in that third story room and removing any means of making a rope, the Coven could not keep her there.
To be honest, Cheobawn doubted Mora would call her home. She shuddered as she imagined how unpleasant the Coven’s private dinners and high teas would be with Mora and her glowering at each other over the tops of their teacups. If Mora were wise she would spare all of them that ordeal, and Mora was no fool.
Cheobawn stood up, wondering where Connor had gotten to, when a flicker in the corner of her eye pulled her attention to the game pieces around her. It was the impression of motion where there should have been stillness that drew her eye. The plaza was empty. Wait. There. It came again. A flare of light, an undulation in the spectrum, causing the battalions of blank faced warriors to blanch, their blind masks taking on expressions of doom. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.
Cheobawn was afraid to look. But babies hid their eyes from the consequences of their own actions. She was Tam’s Ear. She forced herself to be brave. Turning, she peered past the shoulder of the Temple, beyond the low roof-line of the infirmary, out through the clear panels of the dome, to the line where the stars ended and the Dragon’s Spine began. Above the peak called White Dragon, light flared, the aurora of the planet flashing brilliant and green, its tentacles reaching towards her. As she watched, it flared again, green, then blue, then yellow, snaking across the sky as if it meant to entomb the world inside its convulsing coils.
Cheobawn moaned and began to shiver as she waited for it to stop. Somewhere over her head, Bohea, safe inside the metal tomb of his battle cruiser, did what he had said he would do, what his kind did best; the sum total of the Spacers’ weaponry now rained down upon her planet, prying the Spiders’ hooks from the fabric of the world, blow by blow beating them back and collapsing a doorway that defied understanding, the turmoil of that inferno now lashing the fragile forces that kept them all safe from harm in a universe of cold vacuum and hard radiation.
Hayrald found her like that, arms wrapped tight around her body, teeth chattering, her body shuddered in sympathy with each flare of light.
“Ch’che? Where have you been?” he asked, peering at her through the dim light of the lamps on the edge of the great plaza. “Connor said you went to the infirmary but nobody there remembered seeing you.”
She flinched at his voice but could not take her eyes from the sky. He touched her shoulder and felt the tremors in her body.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you cold?”
“It is like dragon’s fire,” Cheobawn said.
Hayrald followed her eyes and paused to watch.
“I used to think the same thing when I was your age,” he said softly, “but then I learned that it is just the by-product of solar flares interacting with the magnetic field of the planet. It is a good thing, this. It means we are still alive.”
“No,” Cheobawn said as the sky above the Spine turned golden for just a moment. “I think there really are dragons. Big. Hungry. Dragons. The only way to stay safe is to stay small and invisible.” That was a truth, she thought sadly, that she never seemed to realize until it was too late.
Hayrald hugged her close, his arm around her shoulders. She could not bring herself to relax into that hug when so much violence raged over her head. He touched her cheek and gently turned her face away from the lights.
“It has been a long day, Little Mother,” he said firmly. “You are tired. Exhaustion can play tricks with your head if you let it. Let’s go home.”
Hayrald took her hand and tugged her into motion, taking her back towards Mora. Cheobawn jerked her hand out of Hayrald’s fist and hid it behind her back. He paused and looked back.
“What is it, Ch’che?” he asked gently.
“I said things to you this afternoon, mean things, hurtful things …“Cheobawn said, stumbling over the words, hoping desperately not to offend again. She shook her head and started over. “I am sorry, Da. I was upset. I would never hate you. No matter what. Words are like knives that cut and wound. I forget that sometimes.”
“It’s alright. I understand,” Hayrald said, amused about something. “Children hating the ones who love them most is as natural as the rain. It is how you learn to stand alone. I expect it will get worse before it gets better, with you.
” He said the last with a hint of resignation in his voice.
“I don’t want to hate,” she whispered. “It makes me all brittle inside. I said things to Mora just now that I did not mean but they cannot be called back. I am moving into the Pack Hall. I do not have Mora’s permission but I do not think she will say no.”
Hayrald looked up, towards the Coven House, a worried frown on his face. When he turned back, his face was in shadow.
“This is not unexpected,” he said gently. “I am just surprised you tolerated her unreasonable restrictions for this long. She does love you, you know, though she tries to shield her heart from it. Someday you will forgive her for what she has done to you. We hold you closest who expect you to go the furthest.”
Cheobawn stared into the shadows where his eyes lay concealed from her questions and tried to breath around the ball of emotions that was once again clawing its way up out of her guts. It was hard to know what they were, there were so many, all of them painful. Did love hurt this much for everyone else? Was this how love was supposed to work? Did everyone get what was good for them instead of what you needed, like asking for berry pie and getting stewed bitter greens instead?
Cheobawn choked on the words when she could find her voice once more. “What? You are not going to tell me what that means, are you?”
“No. No, I don’t suppose that I am,” the First Prime said evenly, taking her hand again. “Come along. Your name needs to put on the rosters if you expect to sleep in Pack Hall tonight.”