by Various
Thor-Att rose to his full height and turned sharply to Synthe. The priestess seemed to have fallen asleep. Her mouth sagged, and she drooled. “Honored one.” The voice of Thor-Att was ragged, and the solid red of anger flashed on his skin. “What say you to this? I will stop the spawning if there is a chance we will survive, yet I must act swiftly. You can hear the moans of the faithful. They are near to frenzy.”
Yothe wanted to rush to Synthe and pull on her tentacles to make her speak, lest the great Thor-Att fling her against the wall. But Synthe showed no fear. She sat still, all eight tentacles unfurled.
The earth roared. The floor lurched beneath them, and, with a sharp crack, a fissure cleaved the stone of the far wall. Yothe let out a high-pitched shriek and raised her short tentacles above her head.
Then, the floor was still again. Only the orb and the shadows swung back and forth in the silence. Yothe gasped for breath, amazed that Thor-Att did not hear her cry and strike her or squeeze the life from her with his strong tentacles.
“The winds blow south, into the barren ice fields.” Thor-Att, although he trembled, spoke with measured control, as if to a child. “If our colony is to be destroyed, we must launch our spores at once. But if the eruption is not total, then we might flee down the slopes onto the ice and then return after the volcano has calmed.”
One of the lesser priests gasped. “It is a sacrilege to die upon the ice.”
At this, Synthe roused herself from her stone, a new strength and a hint of sarcasm in her voice. “Does the great Att not recall the scriptures? All living things yield up their spores at the Time of Shaking. It matters not whether we live or burn if our spores have been set into the wind.
“I will not send our spores to certain death, nor will I stand by and simply wait to fall into the caldera,” Thor-Att said. “My plan could save at least a part of the colony and half our spores.”
“It is by obedience that we have survived since the freezing of the world.”
“Honorable one, help me. You who advised the Att before I was born, will the volcano erupt?”
Synthe closed her sightless eyes, inhaled, and sang from the scripture-song:
Life floats from mound to mound
Carried by the wind…
“Honored one, there are no mounds to the south. The scripture-songs to not apply. Don’t you see that if we launch our spores they will be lost on the plains of ice, their souls never to return to our mound? But I can still stop the Spawning if you give me any hope at all!”
Synthe drew her tentacles about her and shriveled, her head sinking into her body. “I cannot advise you.”
Thor-Att stared for a moment, colors flashing across his body too quickly for Yothe to understand. Then he swiftly turned and left the chamber.
One of the lesser priestesses, scurrying to follow Thor-Att, paused and extended a tentacle so that Yothe could climb up. “Come, youngling, you do not belong here.” Yothe, grateful for the touch of another Kree, clung to the priestess who gently carried her through the dark tunnel to the surface.
When they emerged onto the slope of the volcano, Yothe thought at first that the sky had disappeared. A low, roiling cloud, twisted above them. Then she saw the spores. The air was thick with them, delicate puffs of plants and even some of the floating bladders of higher creatures. Every living thing, it seemed to her, had sent up their spores. It was a wondrous sight, but she knew enough now to be afraid.
The young priestess placed her on a short column—one on which she had sat many times to learn the songs of the Kree—and then glided toward the choral platform.
“Are we going to fall into the volcano and die?” Yothe asked in her piping, small voice.
The priestess paused and turned back. Yothe could not help but see that the Nautus shell above her head was inflamed.
“Do not be afraid, youngling,” she said. “If the slopes give way, we shall all go together into the caldera. You will not be alone.”
“Will everyone die?”
“Our spores will live on, even if we, ourselves, return to the mound.”
“But why don’t we keep our spores? I want to play with the younglings.”
“If the volcano takes us back, and all our spores are still with us, then there will be no more Kree from our mound to live into the next generation.”
“But…”
“This is your learning column. It is for you and the other younglings to watch and remember.” And then she retreated to the wide platform where the adult Kree gathered.
Yothe did not want to be left alone. Looking about, she saw other younglings perched on their columns, just as she, gripping their stones and flashing the jagged pattern of fear.
On the solo platform, high above the others, Thor-Att raised himself on his two standing tentacles and spread his body wide though, to Yothe, he looked smaller against the black cloud of the volcano than he did in the temple. The Kree below him milled about on the choral platform, the Nautus shells of the females pulsing with color. Thor-Att moaned a great moan. The Kree looked up, and Thor-Att moaned again, this time, with words. “Hear me, Kree of Mondermount. The volcano does not reveal itself to us, and I will not send all our spores to their deaths in the south. Therefore, it is my decree that half of our colony shall remain here and release their spores as is the tradition for the Time of Shaking. The other half, those who can resist the Spawning, shall proceed down the slopes, and those females keep their spores. If it is the will of the Mother Mount to take us all, then half our spores will have been released though all of us fall into the caldera. If it is Her will to spare us, then only half our spores will be lost. We shall…”
Something touched Yothe, startling her, but it was only blind Synthe who had emerged from the tunnel behind her. “It’s me,” Yothe said, and retreated from her learning column to snuggle back into the soft embrace of the high priestess. “What are they doing?” Yothe asked, as if the priestess could see.
“Thor-Att should be leading the ritual spawn, and then standing at our head upon the slopes waiting for the will of the Mother Mount,” spoke Synthe, and then a hiss crept into her voice. “But Thor-Att did not grow up on our mound, or any civilized mound, and so has not learned our songs. This peculiar strategy he commands is blasphemy.”
“Look, someone is coming,” said Yothe, who spotted a Kree slithering over the rocks up from the lower slopes and flashing red waves of alarm.
“Thor-Att!” cried the frantic newcomer. Thor-Att looked down, and the moaning of the other Kree ceased. When she had gotten closer she cried out again. “The south bridge has collapsed. It cracked during the last shake and fell into the fissure. We are cut off from slopes below.”
In the babble of voices that followed, Yothe heard Synthe, whose voice smoothed again as she stroked Yothe’s head. “You see, youngling? The Mother, Herself, has put an end to this bizarre experiment. Once again, the Kree shall survive by the songs of their ancestors. Listen and learn.”
Thor-Att spread his great body and quieted the Kree once more. He flashed no emotion, but to Yothe, he looked pained.
“It is decided,” came his sonorous voice, tinged with resignation. “Let us begin the Spawn. May the Mother receive us, and may the wind change so that our spores find other slopes and our colony endure. Beloved spores,” he sang, “forget not the mound of your creation!”
Moans of songs rose from the Kree, a chorus of fear and hope soon overwhelmed by another, harsher sound from the earth. Ash rained down upon Yothe. A burst of fire from the volcano leapt into the sky, and the Kree began their final song:
Great Mound that giveth warmth,
That taketh life with fire,
Receive our bodies,
But lift our spores.
Fly, spores, fly!
In the currents of the sky,
Forgetting not Mondermount,
Mondermount whence you came.
Thor-Att, who appeared to be gasping for breath, threw his body into the
mass of writhing tentacles. Already, some of the females lifted their Nautus shells high, and rising from their ruptured surface, gas bladders of the spores expanded, blossoming into round translucent balls, larger even than the Nautus shells that bore them.
“Mondermount, Mondermount,” the Kree chanted, and one by one the bladders rose into the dark sky, some large and heavy, some small and barely formed. Below each there hung a single spore that fluttered its tiny fan-like tail, helping to lift the globe. Slowly, they cleared the rim of the platform. Yothe watched mournfully, seeing them rise into the sky, their float bladders already dotted with ash.
“There won’t be any more younglings, will there?” Yothe whispered.
“Thor-Att was right about that,” said Synthe. “Our spores drift south. It is said that an ocean lies beneath those barren fields of ice, but whether it does or not, no volcanoes are there to warm our younglings. If there is no change in the wind, they will freeze.”
Eventually, the Kree sank exhausted onto the stones of the choral platform, near unconscious, the heads of the females crowned by their ruptured Nautus shells.
With unblinking eyes, Yothe followed the spores across the sky, each joining, in turn, the long, procession to the south. Some of the Kree stretched their tentacles upward as if reaching for the tiny life forms, now and forever beyond their protection. Yothe reached up her short tentacles, too.
“They don’t want to go,” said Yothe, salt tears running from her round eyes. “They want to stay.”
The sun broke through, and rays of light struck the globes, pure and white but for the dark ash that lay upon them. Slowly, the procession drifted before the cloud of death.
”Turn the wind, great Mound,” she heard the Kree on the platform chant. “Turn the wind.”
But the wind did not turn. The black cloud grew thin and began to dissipate. The ground shook no more, and in a dreadful silence the Kree watched their spores vanish into the south.
• • •
Yothe ascended the frigid tunnel that lead to the west observation chamber. Carrying a warm rock gingerly in her two fore-tentacles, she avoided touching the cold walls as much as possible. Little heat from the volcano found its way into the slopes this high up.
She needed no light. She had passed through the tunnels of Mondermount countless times since she was a youngling in the arms of blind Synthe, but she did keep her head low to avoid striking her Nautus shell. The shell now bore streaks of amber, brown and gold, and a number of Kree males had begun to show an interest in her. She had, so far, resisted the ritual clasping. In another year, however, when she reached her twelfth mark and carried an undeveloped spore, such resistance would seem obstinate.
Before passing through the portal to the observatory, she folded her secondary tentacles in front of her stomach, and with a long inhale, raised her head to display her spiraled Nautus shell. Thor-Att, it was said, no longer clasped, but Yothe was not so sure.
The great Kree, raised on his standing tentacles, braced himself on both sides of the seeing crack and clasped the far-sight tube. He did not turn when she entered the chamber. As she expected, he was the only one who remained. On her way to the observatory tunnel she had passed several elders in the heated pools, reclining in the posture of exhaustion.
The tall figure remained bent, holding the far-sight tube. Another seeing crack stood open, and was the source of much of the icy wind. The rest came from the opening into which Thor-Att poured his concentration. The lantern, resting in a niche in the wall, was about to flicker out.
“You’ll freeze your eyes if you stay there all night,” she said and slithered across the room to pick up a crack cover on the floor.
Thor-Att grunted, turning the far-sight tube.
Carefully, she replaced the fur cover in the open crack and pounded it with a fore-tentacle. Then, turning, she allowed herself one long glance at Thor-Att before she approached. Sable brown fur covered the backs of his tentacles all the way up to the flare of his head in one magnificent swoop. The Nautus shell, on the back of his head, although narrow, as was the case for males, was still enormous.
“I’ve brought you a warm rock,” she said, uncovering her gift.
“There is no doubt,” came the resonant voice of Thor-Att. “Magd-Mont has erupted.”
“Is the wind…”
“Yes. For the first time in over twenty years a Great Mound has erupted directly upwind of us.”
Three years ago they had watched the sky when Nord-Mont erupted, but the wind was wrong. And before that, Muska-Mont, far to the northeast.
“We must prepare to receive the spores.” His eyes glittered as he turned to her, and the color of excitement traveled back and forth the length of his body.
Yothe wrinkled the skin below her shell. “How long before we see them?”
“Tomorrow, I’m afraid. The wind is not strong.”
“Well, it’s quite strong enough for me,” she said, giving the crack cover another perfunctory pound.
“That’s only because we are so high. Come, look.” He gestured with his foretentacle.
“Then take this,” she said, gliding close to him and proffering her gift.
“Ah, thank you,” said Thor-Att, accepting the stone and pressing it to his body. “I didn’t realize how cold I was.”
She took the far-sight tube. Mounted at each end were incredibly valuable lenses ground from transparent crystal. She, herself, had polished on one of the lenses for days.
Shorter than Thor-Att, she didn’t have to bend to see out the crack. In the south, a low moon cast a straight, silvery line in the snow. Above, stars glittered in the black sky, and, to the west, vast stretches of barren ice ended at the sky. Using the tube, she followed the horizon. Directly west of them rose a peak that glowed with a definite arc of red.
“Oh, my. I see what you mean.”
“The lesser spores are doubtless aloft. We should see them by morning and the floats of higher animals after the sun is high. But as for Kree, there is no knowing.”
She nodded, but she didn’t voice her thoughts. Thor-Att was obsessed with the loss of the colony’s spores ten years before. Stripped of their younglings, the Mondermount colony endured with almost no offspring for five long years, the time it took the female’s Nautus shells to rebuild and to shelter new spores.
Their songs, since that time, told of the volcano falling quiet once the last spore had disappeared into the south. Yothe felt Thor-Att’s agony when the choruses mourned the “barren years.”
Fervently, she hoped never to face an eruption. She would keep her spoor, cutting away the float bladder like a civilized Kree and nurturing it in the songs of their own mound, not launching it into the wind like a common animal or a plant. Their songs reflected on how other colonies might have received their orphan spores and taught them their own songs. They only hinted at the more likely fate: that their spores had fed an entire generation of chitins, scavengers that were the only living things to move upon the ice.
At last, Thor-Att abandoned his post, and Yothe accompanied him to his chamber entrance.
“Abide with me,” he said, his voice rough from the ice-cold wind.
She had never passed through the portal of the Att’s chamber. Surprised, she could not help the tinge of sexual excitement that flashed briefly across her body. Once inside, she gratefully sank to the warm floor of the room, but her delight was at once forgotten, driven from her mind by the unexpected sight before her: on the walls of the chamber were scratched the marks that had recently caused so much strife in the colony. Thor-Att, leader of Mondermount by the counting of the Kree, had recently been called before the elders. Never had his wisdom been questioned—even after the Great Spawning—except for the time those marks appeared.
Thor-Att followed her gaze. “Ah, you are shocked.”
She flashed embarrassment and deprecation. “It is not for me to question the wisdom of the Att.”
“Wisdom?” he said with som
e amusement. “You will be an adult soon. Your Nautus shell is very nearly fleshed out. Speak your mind.”
So, she was not an adult yet. His words brought a flash of anger to her skin, but they also stiffened her resolve to speak directly.
“I thought you promised the elders you would never again make such marks. They undermine the mystery of the Mother Mound. They distract us from our songs.”
“You are quite right. I threw away the piece of basalt with which I scratched the marks, and I never again defaced the walls, but the elders neglected to say that I had to rub out the ones I had already made. I have left these, just to irritate the wrinkled ones.”
She hooted in amusement, her anger forgotten. Gliding to the wall she examined the marks more closely. “They say each one is a thing.”
“That’s what I intended at first, but now, I believe it’s a word for a thing.”
Yothe flashed confusion. “I’m not sure I understand the difference.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Thor-At, with a wave of a tentacle. “There, that mark is our mound. Don’t you see it? With the smoke coming out the top?”
“Oh,” she exclaimed. “It could be the word, and then you would think about our mound.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“But do you worship them?”
Thor-Att flashed irritation. “Of course not. That’s a rumor the priests started. The marks are quite ordinary, nothing mystical. See here? That one stands for us, the two four-tentacles, the four secondary tentacles and the two walking tentacles.”
Yothe struggled with the strangeness of the marks. “But why would you want to make marks for words when you can simply speak? It makes no sense, if you’ll forgive my presumption.”
“I wonder,” Thor-Att said, “if there might be an advantage in being able to send one’s words farther than the sound of one’s voice. Where now, our loudest words barely reach the plains of ice, perhaps they could, one day, reach as far as another mound.”
“But how would you know what to say if you couldn’t see who you were talking to?”