The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4)
Page 34
Iyapeti shoveled more dried ox dung onto the flames, and warmed his hands. The others hovered closer to the melancholy heat, except for their father, who shivered under his blankets in Lumekki’s old wheeled chair.
“So, the time has come,” the Ancient said. “As Atum-Ra and Ish’Hakka were driven from Paru’Ainu and the Treasure Cave by wurms at the beginning, we too must move away from the remnants that bind us to our past—not to mention the stored engines we had hoped would help us harness this world. We should be thankful none of us were hurt or killed.”
Everybody stared for a moment at the Old Man’s bandaged feet in grim stillness—the only real injury meted out by the volcano’s wrath.
Khumi spoke, breaking the mountain’s brooding rumble. “We needn’t worry too much about the engines, or the telescope, once it’s buried with the rest. The new Treasure Cave hill is opposite Anchor Mount, well above possible lava flows. The containers are hermetically sealed, and I personally inspected and re-greased all the engine fittings just last year.”
Iyapeti said, “Hopefully that’ll be enough.”
Khumi eyed him with a crooked half-smile. “What we brought was built to last, especially in storage. We can return for them any time. As for the drones, three of the four are still airworthy. The one that blew its valves last year has been dismantled, and stowed with my tents for spare parts.”
“What’s our grain spirit reserve?” A’Nu-Ahki asked. “Can we spare the beasts and carting space to carry it?”
“We’ve got the beasts, and fuel’s not too big a problem yet. It’s machine lubricant I’m more concerned about. The old stores of glakka oil are gone, except for five jars. The substitute I rendered from ox tallow is only good for short flights. It smells awful, and smokes, though the temperature probes don’t show it burning much hotter. The drones will make it if we baby them.”
“Why not stow two of the drones with the big engines?” Iyapeti asked. “We only need one to scout. We can return for the others when we’re established—it’s not like we have to worry about anybody stealing them.”
U’Sumi scratched his thick black beard. “Good point.”
Khumi scowled. “They need regular maintenance! Cold, heat, and heavy rains corrode the machinery—we never had that kind of dragon scat in the old world! We can’t replace any of this stuff! Just making enough tallow to oil three drones for the next year has cut hard into our herds—thus our capacity to cart things. We’ve taken a huge risk just to preserve them. It would all go to waste if we left them here to rust and mildew. It’s not just the engines and shafts, there’s wing webbing, delicate quickfire instruments—you can’t just slop grease over it all, even if we had the grease left to slop!”
A’Nu-Ahki said, “Khumi’s right. We have a charge to fulfill, and those drones must go a long way yet when we expand mapping operations. It may be generations before we build an industrial base for new mechanized equipment. We haven’t even found metal ores in usable quantities, and now it looks as though we may have to abandon the agricultural base we’ve worked so hard to establish for an existence of hunter-gathering.”
Everybody hung their heads as their hopes for a comfortable, prosperous old age flew away in the volcano’s smoke.
“Oh, cheer up!” their father said. “We’ve had bumper crops each year since we arrived, and we still have the herds. Nobody’s going to starve, or die of exposure. We just need to find shelter out of the mountain’s shadow before winter.”
Tiva poked the coals with a reed. “Can we do that in time?”
“We’ll go west, through the wide valley, and follow the course of New Ufratsi River,” A’Nu-Ahki said. “Once we get clear of the murk, there should be another few weeks before the worst of winter sets in.”
The season’s first snow had already fallen last week, though only in the foothills. Everybody knew the timing would be tight, especially for the children and animals.
U’Sumi fought the controls of his aerodrone, while the machine sputtered to maintain altitude. According to the atmospheric instruments in the flying chariot’s open sedan console, the air pressure at valley floor in the Anchor Mount region averaged a little more than half that of sea level in the old world. Consequently, the engine did not perform nearly as well as it would have in the pre-Deluge environment. It used far more fuel to eke out even this reduced capacity.
U’Sumi’s body also felt the difference—breathlessness and fatigue came much quicker at a time when much more work was required. Twenty-two years had allowed him and the others to adjust somewhat, but not fully. The blue sky, strikingly beautiful on the rare occasions they saw it, reminded them that even such common necessities as air came now in shorter supply.
U’Sumi had escaped the southwest edge of the volcano’s cloud a half-hour ago—five days out from A’Nu-Ahki’s homestead for the ground caravan. The higher skies were tinged brown even beyond the canopy—the Sky-Darkening that had begun two years ago. Anchor Mountain apparently was not the only erupting volcano. He looked at the grasslands below.
The Great Bitter Lake of the West stretched off to the southern horizon, beyond the ridges on his left. West of the lake’s south shore, another volcano smoked ominously, but not so violently. On U’Sumi’s right, continued the highlands and peaks leading back toward Anchor Mountain. Ahead, two ranges met in ribbons of water-etched gullies where the river turned south to cut through a gorge, into a series of small lakes in a new valley that arced northwest, away from the lands flowing in liquid fire.
U’Sumi scanned the small lakes region, and found the land good for winter grazing—assuming the winter was not much colder than the last.
He adjusted his oracle to inform the others. “Gryphon and Eagle, Sun Phoenix speaks, I think I’ve got a good place west.”
The speaker cracked, and Khumi answered, “Let’s head back then—the West Bitter Lake area’s too close to erupting volcanoes for my taste.”
Iyapeti also responded, “All we’ve got to the north are more mountains, and growing ice fields, until you hit the Big Lake of the North.”
“I’ll see you both back at camp then.”
U’Sumi banked his drone starboard, and started back to the caravan.
Tiva saw him in the cave’s shadows, and knew.
The Boy’s eyes reflected orange torch light from the interior, as he peeked between goatskin curtains that divided the small cavern. A cunning smile creased his lips at the multi-hued panoply of moving legs and narrow curves. His mother knew how the noisy giggle-echoes must have danced through his ears, like running volcano fire deep inside his chest. His older sisters and girl cousins undressed to bathe by the heated water jars, inviting, but not inviting him to watch.
Tiva had brought up more water from the fire, and caught him there.
Even faced by her fiercest scowl, the Boy almost took no notice of her. Tiva’s rage mounted when his impudent head bobbed back around, eyes hungrily seeking the girls. Familiar gleams animated his pupils in the darkness—a little boy face with cutout eyes replaced by those of a man much older, much harder.
Tiva choked back her scream, as anger turned into terror. Nausea gripped her stomach, and her limbs went limp. She dropped the clay jar and heard it shatter, but she could not even feel its steaming contents scald her legs. Those eyes reduced her to a plaything inside another cave, behind another shroud, in another world, dead beneath layers of stone.
As Tiva watched him return his stare quietly to his bathing sisters between tent flaps, she no longer saw the face of her youngest son—not the eyes, not the mouth. Yargat licked his lips, while the girls—only briefly distracted by the sound of the breaking jug—went back to giggling and splashing, unaware.
Tiva snatched the Boy up and held him by his tunic, unsure of what to do. His cool unnerved her, as it always did. The little imp seemed to delight in flaunting himself in her face, and it did not help that Khumi had practically made a project out of spoiling him and his twin sister.
Khana’Ani knew how to wear his mother down.
Sunlight blasted through her smoky haze. Those octopus eyes gazed out from a tiny head! It was not like before! Panic gave way to a thrilling new experience: Power!
Tiva got a grip on herself. Not this time! This time I’m bigger! This time I control the rules of the game!
Khana’Ani must not have known what hit him when his mother’s terrible grip wrenched his shoulders practically out of socket, and dragged him from the cave. Kicking and screaming were new things to him. Tiva bent his arm back behind him with the same wrestling hold she had once used to slam long-dead Farsa’s face into an extinct tree, on the night of her escape from Grove Hollow. Then she shoved him out in front of her into a dark little ravine, away from the caravan fires.
“If you think I’m going to let you grow again, guess again!” Tiva screamed, as she boxed the boy across his head with a closed fist.
Her son wailed as he rolled to the ground with incoherent tears. Not a little boy, Khana’Ani writhed like a scalded snake.
Tiva bent over him, and pulled him back to his feet by a shock of long black hair. “Don’t you dare try to do to them what you did to me!” she shrieked into his sobbing, uncomprehending face.
When he failed to answer, she backhanded him across the mouth.
Khana’Ani tried to scramble to his feet and escape, but his mother caught him. The night took on shades of crimson, as the sight of her throttling hands around his scrawny neck became distant and unreal.
Tiva would have strangled her own son to death if T’Qinna, U’Sumi, and Khumi had not burst into the ravine and tackled her.
Sutara watched the silhouette of her husband approach their tent from the center fire. Troubled voices murmured through the tents like earth tremors building for a major quake. When Iyapeti reached the smaller fire that Suta had made to warm her feet, his eyes were hollow, and his jaw hung.
“What’s the matter, ‘Peti?”
He sat down next to her, and stared into the flame. “Tiva tried to kill Khana’Ani just a short time ago.”
“What?” Sutara almost leapt to her feet.
“In the little ravine, by the cave.”
“Tiva?”
“U’Sumi, T’Qinna, and Khumi caught her in the act.”
Suta closed her eyes. The scenario was so unbelievable that the shock of her husband’s words could not produce the outrage she knew should be there. “Did the others get things right?”
Iyapeti shrugged. “T’Qinna was there. I don’t think either she or U’Sumi would make a snap judgment on such a thing.”
Sutara rolled her eyes at the mention of T’Qinna. “People make mistakes, ‘Peti. Khana’Ani and his sister are such slinking brats! Maybe Tiva just got carried away in disciplining him.”
“By strangulation?”
She averted her eyes. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. Things are not always what they seem. I know how easy it is to see something and then assume stuff about people. It feels right, and seems to fit. Then you find out later that you got it all wrong. The next thing you know, you’ve gone and said too much. Believe me, I know!”
The enormity of what Tiva had almost done only struck the next morning, after a night in which she had cried herself to sleep in fits of disorientation.
She had dreamed that the wildly bucking deck of Barque of Aeons still tossed under her, while she uselessly tried to sew together tiny scraps of linen. The fragments each had small red ideographs with the names and emblems of her lineage, and that of her children. She awoke when a tremor screeched through the ground beneath her. It took her a moment to realize that she had almost made herself the first to shed human blood under the new pact—and that of her own child. How? Why?
“Are you able to stand before the Ancient?”
Tiva’s eyes focused on the thin silhouette at her tent flap. Khumi’s voice was stern and unyielding—as if ready to give her over to execution without a second thought. How and when did I lose him so completely?
“I can stand,” she whispered.
“Then come,” he said, and left her to unravel herself from her furs.
Tiva only noticed she had slept in her clothes when she crawled from her tent. The clouds frowned, while nearby rapids roared a young and endless rage. Brown grasslands stretched toward peaks on either side of the wide valley. The cold wind bit her tear-blasted cheeks and unkempt curls.
It had been many years since Tiva had thought of her personal quest for Aeden—first in her escape from reality, then in her seemingly futile efforts to embrace it. Self-loathing soaked her in its grim revelation: Aeden is dead beneath hundreds of cubits of hardening stone, and I might as well be!
“Are you feeling more yourself?”
Tiva had not seen T’Qinna pull alongside of her in the slow, trance-like walk toward the center fire.
“As well as can be expected for a mother who just tried to kill her own son,” Tiva answered without looking at her.
“Is that what you were trying to do—kill your son?” that silky voice pressed with the same clarity that had first drawn Tiva away from fatal follies long ago. How can she possibly believe me—how can any of them?
With what happened last night, the thought of them knowing about Yargat—even what he had done with her in the Shrine—did not seem so humiliating or frightening as before.
Tiva answered, “I didn’t see my son last night. I saw my brother.”
“The acolyte?”
“Yes.”
“I used to notice the way he watched you, whenever we passed the Shrine, on the way to the shipyard. He molested you, didn’t he?”
T’Qinna made it so easy—all Tiva had to do was answer yes or no.
“Ever since I was a toddler, until I ran away to Grove Hollow.”
“Just like me. I got it from my mother’s girlfriend. I was only ten.”
Tiva knew she was only trying to help, but for once she doubted even T’Qinna really grasped of the enormity of it all.
“And what would have happened to you if your mother, or your friends, or the Temple authorities had found out?”
“They probably all knew,” T’Qinna said. “It was a tolerated thing at Temple—at least in Aztlan. That’s what made it so horrible.”
“I don’t think you really understand, then.”
T’Qinna took in a breath to respond, but Tiva cut her off. “I’m sure you were trapped as bad as I was—worse, as far as society went -- it’s just different. Don’t take me wrong—I understand what you’re doing, and I appreciate it—really, I do! But what made it so horrible for me was just the opposite. You see, where I grew up such things were not done. And when people found out that it ‘was done,’ the girl always got blamed—especially if the man had some big spiritual office, like my brother.”
“Wasn’t he just a weaselly acolyte?”
“That don’t matter scat—I’m still the vulpin’ succubus! I lured him away from both his wives and his ‘holy calling’ just by being there! He… he used to take me into the Shrine… Atum’s Sarcophagus and the Holy Treasures would watch! Great E’Yahavah, is there no end? Is restoration—is Aeden—just a vulpin’ mirage?”
T’Qinna stopped walking, and pulled Tiva into a hug. “You’re right. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for you. It is different for you —and more terrible. But what set you against Khana’Ani?”
“He was peeking at the girls through the curtain while they bathed. I saw my brother in his eyes—in his mouth. I wanted to break the cycle before it got too strong. It just got out of control. I lost track of where I was! I don’t know how—I just did. I’m so sorry!”
They embraced in silence for several seconds.
T’Qinna said, “Let me speak for you. The boy’s going to be fine. He’s a little bruised up and scared. The others are mighty upset.”
Tiva pulled away, and trudged on. “Maybe I should let you do that. I’ll only mess it up worse.”
What disturbed Nu most—after the bruises on Khana’Ani—was how Khumi seemed to act as a prosecutor, as if he wanted his wife convicted and punished. Doesn’t he know he’s cutting out his own entrails? Who does the bulk of the child-rearing in his tents but Tiva? The only thing I’ve ever seen him take charge of is teaching his boys to hunt. Is it any wonder the poor girl snapped? Still, I can’t leave her unpunished. I must protect the weak.
“…My son was guilty of boyish curiosity—nothing more!” Khumi concluded. “Had my wife told me about the crimes of her brother—as she should have—I might have handled the situation long ago. Either way, that viper got his at World-end. Her excuses for trying to kill my son—a boy she’s never had any real motherly warmth for—are a mockery!”
“What do you recommend we do to Tiva?” A’Nu-Ahki asked him, hoping his son would think about his own words, and shut up.
Khumi glared at his wife and hesitated. “I don’t know. I leave that to you!” He turned, sat down, and warmed his hands by the fire.
Na’Amiha stood to address the assembly. Her husband nodded for her to give her testimony.
“I’ve long suspected that Tiva struggled with a past wound deeply hidden. I see now why she hovered so near the relics while on board ship, and afterward. Her words to T’Qinna this morning show that she was trying to ‘break the cycle’ before it grew too large. I don’t know what value my words have, but I recall using similar words to her once, back on the ship—in the Hold of Relics, if memory serves.”