Bones of the Past (Arhel)

by Holly Lisle

  The woman took the cup away from her when the last drop of liquid was gone, and stood. She stared at the child with hatred glittering in her eyes.

  The child stared back from her propped position until, unaccountably, she began to feel weary. She let her arm slide from under her and lay in the dirt. She continued to stare back at the woman.

  Abruptly, the keyunu said, “On your feet, sharsha, and come with me.”

  The sharsha tried to push herself to a standing position but the air seemed to have turned to water. It pushed down on her, holding her to the ground as if she were pinned to the bottom of the river by invisible rocks. She whimpered. She could not talk. Her mouth tried to form words, but it got tired from the effort and wouldn’t go on.

  The woman smiled. “Good. Holds Flame! Leaf Wisdom! This one is ready now.”

  Two of the green-and-gold men came in with a strip of rough cloth stretched between two poles. They put their litter on the ground, tossed the sharsha on it as if she were a bag of rotted fruit, and hoisted her into the air between them.

  “We have only two more of these to take to the circle before we’re done for the day,” the woman commented as the group trotted along the aerial connectways. “Let’s drop this one off the connectway and save ourselves some time.”

  The men laughed, and the one in the back, whom the child could see, said, “That’s a good idea.” He dropped the poles he held. He caught them again immediately, and the three keyunu laughed, but in that split second when the poles were in the air and she thought she was going to die, Choufa, the sharsha, tried anything she could think of to get her traitorous body to respond—and failed. She was awake, she knew and understood everything that was happening, but she realized that she was completely helpless—completely at the mercy of the keyunu. And as she had already seen, the keyunu had no mercy.

  She was afraid—as afraid as she had been when she knelt in front of the Great Keyi, as afraid as she had been when the Keyi had pulled her into its slimy embrace and claimed her as its own.

  The keyunu took her to the tree-circle. The sun glared through the opening in the canopy of leaves; down at drummers who talked anger and righteousness on their drums; down at priests who chanted and danced and burned their incense; down at men and women who crouched around the bodies of small naked children, jabbing needles into them. The Keyu squatted in all their ugliness, muttering along with the drums. The very air in the circle was skin-prickling, charged with wrath and driven energy.

  The sharsha saw all of that for an instant and heard the hungry thoughts of the Keyu as she was brought into their presence again. Then the green-and-gold men dumped her into a vat of liquid, and someone else pulled her out by her hair. She gasped and choked on the bitter stuff, which burned her eyes and her tongue and filled her nose with its pungent scent. No one seemed to care whether she could breathe or not. The stranger who pulled her out of the fluid laid her on a table, took a brush and scrubbed the last remnants of itchy green paint from her hide—scrubbed so hard Choufa was sure her skin was peeling off. Then another stranger took a long blade and shaved away her long, soft hair. He cut her several times with his shaving blade, so that she would have screamed if she could. He didn’t even seem to notice. When he finished with her and her hair and eyebrows were gone, he passed her to yet another stranger.

  Tears ran from the corners of the child’s eyes, but she could not cry. I must really be bad, she thought. I must. No one would do these things to a good child.

  A burly, ruined-faced nightmare of a woman slung her over one shoulder and trotted to a bare patch of earth. The woman flopped Choufa on a coarse, reed-woven mat that covered the dirt and squatted beside her. A priest joined them.

  The woman asked him, “What do you want the legend on this one to be?”

  The priest thought a moment, templing his fingers in front of him and staring off into the distance above them.

  “Yes…” he said at last, and a cold smile crossed his face. “This one was one of the temple children. She was destined to be a Song of Keyu before she desecrated the sacred places. On her, put, ‘This is excrement not worthy to feed the least tree. This is the broken song, and the spirit that covets corruption.’”

  The ugly woman nodded. “Partial mashoru? Or more?”

  “Dear artist, please!” The priest looked scandalized. “Full mashoru. Even the eyelids and the soles of the feet. Those who are raised in the heart of Keyu and who still choose the ways of malignancy must suffer most of all.”

  The woman nodded. “As you will.”

  The woman picked up a fine brush, cocked her head to one side and studied the sharsha for a moment, then began painting lines on the child’s body. She chewed on her lower lip as she worked, hummed absently and far off-key, and occasionally stepped back and squinted at her results. Choufa felt the damp lines the woman’s brush left on every finger’s breadth of her body.

  The longer the artist worked, the more the child began to fear. They’d cut her hair off, and the woman was decorating her like the saggy bald girl who’d been sacrificed to the trees. They were going to feed her to the trees as soon as the painter was done—Choufa knew it. Tears streamed down her cheeks again, and the woman, when she looked up from one of the sharsha’s legs and noticed, slapped Choufa across the face.

  “Stop crying. You’re making my paint run, and they’ll do a bad job on you that way.”

  Do a bad job of what? she wondered. Nevertheless, Choufa made herself calm down.

  Finally, the ugly woman was done. She called the priest over, and he stared down at Choufa. With one toe, he rolled her from her back to her stomach, so he could look at the painting the woman had done on her back. He left Choufa lying face-down on the mat. She heard him say, “Good work. Call them, and let’s get her done today. That will give us two days for purification before we go to the river.”

  Choufa could make no sense of that. The woman was calling for “tabbers” though, and the sharsha didn’t have time to puzzle it out. Suddenly she was surrounded by men and women in short, pale blue silks. The painter, like the priest, pointed out parts of the designs drawn on her, and again like the priest, rolled her over with one point-toed shove.

  She looked up at them. She counted nine, all grim-faced, who stared at various parts of her body.

  “I’ll take the left leg,” one said finally.

  Another nodded. “Well enough. I shall do the legend and the belly.”

  “I’ll finish off the head,” a third volunteered.

  Choufa lay and listened while the keyunu divided her up like bits of a roasted hovie. She tried to move her arms and legs, or even to turn her head or force her lips to form words. The drug the first woman had given her still held her in thrall. Whatever these people were going to do to her, she was helpless to prevent it.

  They crouched, and a drummer came and stood beside them. The priest lit a bowl of incense, and a group of chanters formed behind the drummer, singing the drumwords in steady cadence—building power. The tabbers each picked up a pot and a needle—the needles were thorns of the giant thorn-tree, half an arm long and shaved to deadly sharpness.

  The chanters and drummer increased their pace until they pulsed their way through a fast, hypnotic song with a dark, edgy, frightening beat.

  On the beat, at some predetermined signal, the tabbers knelt.

  On the beat, the dipped their huge needles into their pots.

  On the beat, they pulled their green-dripping needles out of their pots and aimed them at the sharsha.

  On the beat, they drove their needles into the sharsha skin.

  The inside of Choufa screamed and begged mercy. The outside lay like one dead. And as the pain and fear overwhelmed her, Choufa dropped into the painless nothingness of unconsciousness.

  She dreamed of fire—and drifted on the beat of the drums. In her dreams, the Keyu danced and beckoned to her, and their mouths gaped in horrid invitation. The ugly fat girl with no hair leaned out fr
om one of the mouths, struggling to escape. Choufa noticed suddenly that the fat girl had no head—and as soon as she realized that, strangers in green-and-gold robes came and cut her own head off and carried it to the Keyu. Terrified, she struggled to wakefulness and felt her body respond. She screamed and flailed around—and immediately, a hand clamped over her nose and another cup of the burning liquid poured down her throat. Strong arms held her down. After a moment, her body went limp in spite of her, and after another moment, the searing pain of the needles returned.

  The stabbing started on the palms of her hands and along the crease of her eyelids, and she fell back into welcome darkness.

  When she woke again, her body ached and throbbed.

  She was alone, and the long, hot day was past. Keyu’s Eye rode high in the sky, throwing pink light into the deep shadows of the jungle around her new, tiny prison. Her face was pressed into a mesh of woven twigs, while her knees jammed into her chest and her back crowded another woven wall. She lifted her head, and it throbbed and pounded as if the drummers of the day had moved inside her skull. Carefully, she moved one arm and then the other forward to pull herself straight—she thought perhaps she could get up.

  But the sight of those arms—stranger’s arms—stopped her. They bore hideous designs, black against her pale skin in the light of Keyu’s Eye. She stared at the designs. Keyudakkau spiraled around each arm, their wings wrapping over her shoulders and their heads biting at her neck. Their tails entwined with the symbol of Keyu’s Eye on the back of her hands. On her palms, the keyunu had drawn the bleeding mark of sharsha.

  She couldn’t see the rest of her body—and she didn’t want to. Without looking, she knew that she looked like the sharsha she’d seen fed to the tree. Every ache on her body indicated another mark. No place on her body didn’t ache.

  Hopelessly, she licked the palm of one hand. The marks did not come off. She lowered her face to the dirt and sobbed.

  I’m bad. I’m evil, and I’m bad, and now I’m ugly, too. No one will ever want me.

  * * *

  A day and another and yet a third, Seven-Fingered Fat Girl and her band of tagnu scavenged through the ruins of the giant city, searching for food. They listened to the warbles and howls of the kellinks that fought and ate their own dead outside the city walls. At night, huddled in one or another of the huge, domed buildings, they told stories to cover the groans of the wind through the abandoned streets and the growls of then-empty stomachs. The city was dry-bone bare, foodless. Only birds, hovies, and a few small rodents inhabited it—only grass grew in the spaces between the stones. No one could live forever on grass and rodents and hovies.

  “We will have to leave,” Seven-Fingered Fat Girl told them on the dawn of the fourth day. “We must get past the kellinks and return to the paths of the Silk People. If we stay here, we will starve.”

  Dog Nose, gaunt and weary, said softly, “We were starving on the paths of the Silk People. That is why we left.” He fingered the arrow points he’d chipped from the local stone and looked thoughtful.

  “We are starving faster here.”

  “Dead is dead.” Dog Nose straightened and walked to the entryway of the round-walled building and looked out. With his back to the rest of the tagnu, he said, “Sooner or later, the kellinks will finish eating their own dead and go off hunting for new meat. When they do, we can go over the wall and bring down beasts for ourselves. We can make good arrows in this place, and you can find enough thorns and feathers and raouda poison to make your darts.”

  He turned and faced them. “It is not a good place, but it is better than the paths of the Silk People. Here we do not sleep in the rain. And no Keyu grow here.”

  “A city with walls to keep out the gods—it is a beautiful dream, and I must rip my heart in half to let it go.” Fat Girl stood, and, eyes almost on a level with Dog Nose’s, said, “Do you think I haven’t seen the good stone? Do you think I haven’t thought of a roof over our heads when the great rains fall? But hard cold comes to the high stone mountains, and when it does, the birds and hovies will all fly to the lowlands. All the squirrels and chervies will hide away. Ice will fall from the skies like rain and bury the ground. And what will we eat then? Each other?”

  “Maybe we could steal the trade goods of the Silk People,” Toes Point In offered.

  Seven-Fingered Fat Girl nodded. “Yes. And the Keyu would send monsters from the jungle to eat us. The Keyu love the Silk People.”

  “I won’t go back down there,” Laughs Like A Roshi said. He tightened his arms over his thin chest and glowered. “I won’t let Runs Slow go there either. This is a better place.”

  Fat Girl sighed. “Your remmi is going to be your death, Roshi. You might survive on your own—but not with her.”

  Roshi lunged toward Fat Girl as if he would strike her, then stopped himself. He face was flushed. “She’s not my remmi!”

  “No? Then what would you call her?”

  “My sister.”

  Fat Girl froze. She looked from the tall, long-haired blond boy to the little girl with the short yellow curls. Then she hung her head. She’d often wondered what had happened to her own sister, who had become tagnu, and therefore unspeakable, two cycles before her. And she wondered about the house full of children she’d left behind. She had not been as lucky as Roshi and Runs Slow. She had never found any of her own family.

  “Oh,” she whispered.

  She looked at her comrades. Around the room, she saw her own thoughts mirrored on tagnu faces. Wistfulness and pain and envy mixed in all the other eyes.

  If she could, she would give them this place. Nothing had hunted them since they crawled up the wall. They had slept warm, and dry. The Keyu couldn’t see them—she felt sure of that. Hidden from the sight of the gods, they could become real people again.

  If only there were food.

  “The keyunu dig in the dirt and food grows out of it.

  I remember,” she said, looking around at the rest of Four Winds Band. “Could we make food grow out of the dirt?”

  “The Keyu make the food grow,” Dog Nose said. “They wouldn’t do that for us.”

  “That’s right,” some of the others agreed.

  “Maybe. But I’ve visited the places of the peknu, and food grew out of the dirt for them. The Keyu hate the peknu.”

  Roshi looked intent “Could the peknu show us how to grow food from dirt?”

  Fat Girl became excited. “If we could pay them—they’ll trade anything. We could tell them they have to trade us the gods’ dirt-trick.” Her smile faded as she realized the flaw in her plan. “But we have nothing to trade.”

  “What do they want?” Toes Point In asked.

  Spotted Face snapped, “What does it matter what they want? We have nothing!”

  Runs Slow looked up at Spotted Face and shook her head until her curls bounced. “There are things here. I saw some.”

  Fat Girl nodded slowly. “You’re right,” she told the little girl. “There might be things here we could take.” She squatted and thought. “We carried little pot drums and silk and incense from Five Dots Silk to the peknu sea village. We carried back beads in lots of colors and fine skins for special drumheads—some strange things, too.”

  Roshi asked, “What should we look for?”

  “Anything we can carry.” Three Scars broke his silence and grinned. “I went to the peknu village the very last time Fat Girl made the run. I walked through their trading place—those peknu are strange.”

  “Good plan.” Seven-Fingered Fat Girl rose and assumed her stance as leader. She led them down the passage and outside.

  The tagnu stood at the very pinnacle of the city, looking at the sprawl of white buildings below. Fat Girl pointed out sections. “Roshi and Runs Slow, start with the buildings below us and work to the big lake. Three Scars, Toes Point In, and Spotted Face—hunt from that stone pit over to the big tit-houses along the far wall. Dog Nose and I will take the little bowl-houses right below
us and all the buildings with the monsters watching the doors.”

  Along the cliff-wall to her back, the dark opening of a cave mouth with carved stone at the entry beckoned. She could hear the tinkle of water from somewhere inside of it. The city was pocked with similar openings. She had looked inside of one and had been confronted by wide, dark tunnels that twisted off in all directions.

  She gave her tagnu a hard look. “Don’t go into the caves. We will find something in the places on top of the ground, or we won’t. But don’t go under the ground.”

  “But what if they left all their good things in the caves?” Spotted Face asked.

  “Then we won’t ever find them.” Seven-Fingered Fat Girl crossed her arms so that her mangled left hand lay clearly in view. “Those caves are danger, and I say nobody dies today.”

  She uncrossed her arms and hooked her thumbs into the strap of her loincloth. She smiled and saw her tagnu relax. “Besides,” she told them, “we’ll find something we can trade above the ground. I’m sure we will. Meet back here at high-sun, and bring what you find.”

  The others smiled and laughed. Their faces bore expressions of excitement and hope. Even Fat Girl herself found she could not suppress the hope stirring inside. She didn’t believe their search would do them any good. After all, she felt certain that when the people had left their city, they had taken all their good things with them. But the hope would not die.

  The three teams split off. She and Dog Nose worked their way down the mountainside toward the nearest of a mass of small round white half-spheres.

  Up close, the buildings towered over the two tagnu—but they were smaller in scale than anything else in the city. The lacked the curved tunnel entrance that the larger, double-domed buildings all possessed. Instead, Fat Girl and Dog Nose entered through an open arch. Inside, the building was disappointing. The floor was lowest at the edges and rose toward the center, and at the very center, had the same circular depression as the buildings the tagnu had slept in. But where the floors of the larger buildings were pieced together in complex patterns of brightly colored stone, this floor was gray, smooth, and ugly. On the insides of the big domes, stone-chip murals of imaginary beasts flew or charged or swam. These walls were plain white.