Ceravanne caught her breath, studied the woman’s face. “Yes, one of my clones came here, before I was renewed,” Ceravanne whispered low enough so that the others would not hear. “It was lost, and never returned. What happened to it?”
Tallea wet her lips, looked away, and closed her eyes. “Dead, I think. That one dead. I wanted to tell when I saw you, but I not want Inhuman to hear.” She coughed, then winced at the pain in her side.
Ceravanne bent low, brushed her lips over the woman’s forehead, and held her for a long time.
“I need rope, to use as belt,” Tallea whispered.
“You don’t have to bind yourself to me,” Ceravanne whispered. “I don’t want slaves.”
“I not slave,” Tallea wheezed. “I ally. I serve freely.”
“But the clone you served is dead. I am not that woman.”
“No, I not be bound to you—to Maggie.”
Ceravanne looked at Tallea, taken aback.
“She saved me,” Tallea said. “I promise live for her.”
“You promised wisely,” Ceravanne said. “Sleep now, and keep your promise. When you wake, I will have the belt for you.”
Ceravanne gently laid Tallea’s head back down, then went back to the fire. The others were still all wide awake. “I wish we had more blankets for her,” she said, nodding toward Tallea. Maggie had put a thick robe on the woman, but it was hardly enough, and the blankets had gotten wet in the bottom of the boat. They’d have to sleep without for the night.
“When my fur is dry, I’ll lie next to her,” Orick offered.
Ceravanne laughed. “And may I sleep on the other side of you?”
“If you do, you’ll do so at your own risk,” Orick said. “I tend to toss and turn in my sleep. I’d hate to squash you.”
“I’ll take the risk,” Ceravanne said.
No one spoke for a minute, and they all sat gazing into the fire. At last, Gallen said, “I’ll hike into town in the morning and buy a wagon, if we’ve got any money. We’ll need it to carry supplies—and to get her to a doctor.”
Ceravanne said, “Her fever is low. If she makes it through the night, she should do well. There’s nothing more that a doctor could do. Still, she will need a wagon. She won’t be walking much for a few days.”
The others spoke on for a while, but Ceravanne began to tire. She went and lay beside Tallea, and sometime later she woke. Orick was beside her, his fur all warm from the fire. The bear put one big paw over Tallea’s chest, and Ceravanne hugged him from the other side, lay for a moment, watching his chest rise and fall. He began to sing in his deep voice, a song she guessed that bear mothers would sing to their cubs on his home world:
“Little bear running,
little bear running,
with burrs in your hair,
and dirt on your paws.
May your spirit linger,
long may you wander
in woodlands hallow
with dirt on your paws.”
When he finished, Ceravanne realized that it was a song to comfort dying cubs, and her heart ached to think that anyone should have to compose such a verse. Yet she was glad to have Orick here, comforting the woman in his own way.
When Orick and Ceravanne went off to sleep, Gallen and Maggie rested together beside a small fire that flickered and twisted among a few sticks.
Gallen sat in the darkness far under the tree, and Maggie lay in the crook of his arm, holding the crushed Word, its white metal body limp in her fingers as she scrutinized it. Aside from Tallea, only Maggie knew that Gallen had been infected by the Inhuman, and she seemed greatly distressed, unable to sleep.
Gallen tuned his mantle, listening as far as its range would extend, calling upon its sensors to amplify the light until it seemed that he sat in daylight, beneath cloudy skies. Yet there was a surreal quality to his sight. He could see mice hunting for food among the leaves in the distance too clearly, their body heat glowing like soft flames. And small deer in the near hills shone brightly. The songs of ten thousand crickets and katydids filled the woods, and he could hear the rustling of mice under dead leaves. No people lurked nearby.
Yet despite his sensors, Gallen was worried. Even with ample warning, Gallen feared the servants of the Inhuman. The fear gnawed at him, kept him awake.
When battling on ship, he’d found the giants and the red-skinned sailors to be no great challenge, but he had come close to dying in the grasp of the Tekkar. The little man had been incredibly fast, incredibly strong, and he had the focus of one who does not fear death but only wishes to kill. While struggling with the creature on the deck of the ship, Gallen had watched the white spider tattooed on the Tekkar’s forehead. As the man grimaced and struggled, the legs of the spider had seemed to move as his skin stretched and tightened. And Gallen realized that the man had done it purposely, seeking to frighten him. The Tekkar had worked its hand slowly, inexorably toward Gallen’s esophagus, despite Gallen’s best efforts to fight the creature off. It had been playing with him, Gallen was sure, lengthening the seconds until it took Gallen’s esophagus in hand and crushed it.
Gallen did not want to frighten the others, but he worried, for it had only been their combined strength that let them defeat one Tekkar.
“How are you feeling?” Maggie said, still looking at the machine in her hand. She wore her own mantle. “Your head—is it all right?”
“I can’t feel anything moving in it anymore,” Gallen said, and even to himself his voice sounded stretched, hollow.
“What are you going to do?” Maggie whispered. “You can’t just ignore it. The Word isn’t going to go away.”
“What are our options?” Gallen asked. “What have you learned from the Word that Tallea found?”
“It’s a fairly simple device,” Maggie said. Maggie had on her own mantle, and she was studying the creature as a technologist would. “Its body has a few sensors—smell and sight only, as far as I can tell, and the main shell is built with invasion in mind. Its streamlined build helps it get under the flesh quickly. Beyond that …” She pried off its largest arm, with its spade-shaped blade, then pulled off the head. Something like a green-blue gel oozed out. “On the inside, it’s all nanoware interface. The Word is designed to burrow into your skull and create an electronic sensory interface.”
“So the Inhuman can send its messages?”
“Yes,” Maggie said.
“Can it control me?”
“It’s more primitive than a Guide,” Maggie said, referring to personal intelligences that were designed to enslave their wearers. “It’s not large enough to carry the machinery needed to take total control of your central nervous system. I believe it simply carries a message to you. The Word.”
“What if I resist it?”
Maggie considered. “It may punish you. The nanoware sends circuitry, strings of neural web, into your brain. It might activate pain and pleasure centers—cause fear, send hallucinations. But if Tallea is right, people can resist it. If you resist it enough, I suspect that the circuitry may just fry certain nerve sites, activating them over and over until they burn out. Once that happens—there’s probably nothing more that it can do.”
She tried to make it sound easy, as if freedom were only a thought away, but Gallen knew that it would be much tougher than that. He could resist it, but if neurons were getting fried, then he’d have some brain damage as an aftereffect. But it was better to die for his friends than to live for the Inhuman.
“I have to see if I can fight it,” Gallen said. “I have to test it. I’ve had my mantle knocked off in battle before. I can’t let myself get in a position where I’m fighting on two fronts at once.”
“I know,” Maggie said, and she threw the dead Word into the brush, turned to look up in his face. She kissed him slowly, and the reflected firelight flickered on her face. He breathed deeply, relishing the clean scent of her hair, the faintest hint of perfume.
“I’ll ask my mantle to shut down its si
gnal block for two minutes,” Gallen said, silently willing the mantle to stop. His ears went numb, as if all the sound in the world—the song of the katydids, the rush of the wind, the bark of a distant fox in the darkness—all disappeared. Then his legs buckled from under him, and Gallen tumbled to the ground, looking out, struggling to hear the sound of his own heartbeat, and he could not move, could not speak. He was vaguely aware of Maggie grabbing him, trying to lift him up, hold him in her arms.
And then the visions started, and Gallen remembered.…
He was in a beautiful village in Babel growing up in a home that was a work of art, a mansion formed of stone and wood. As a child he would watch the cornices of his bedroom, which were sculpted by hand, and he would imagine that the animals and people carved there would speak to him of their lives in wood. And he remembered his ancient grandmother, draped in robes of purple silk with black lace, the black feathers woven into the white mass of her hair. She was greatly venerated for the cloth she wove and dyed, but he loved her for her sweet voice as she sang him to sleep, and he loved her even more for the attentiveness with which she listened to the tales he would tell from the lives of the wooden creatures carved on the cornices of his room. Once, his grandmother had told his father, “He will be great among the Makers, for with him, the art is not something that he sees, it is something that he lives.”
He remembered the green fields of his childhood, where the yellow cows on his father’s farm drank from elaborately decorated brass containers shaped like moons and suns and stars and boats all set out on the green pastures.
He learned in time that his people were called “the Makers,” and in his village, creating things of beauty was the goal of every person. They did not seek to own beauty or horde it—only to create it. And not only were the things of their hands beautiful, but the thoughts of their hearts, the lives that they lived, also were shaped and molded into beautiful forms.
And so Gallen remembered that from the youngest age he desired to do nothing but shape stone, to release the people and animals and gods hidden under stone—whether he was carving walnut-shaped tubs from marble or forming statues of giant whales that seemed to be leaping out of lawns. As a child, he would seek the hills where cliff faces were exposed, and there he would chisel and smooth the granite, creating wondrous scenes of gods from his private pantheon, battling their demons.
By the age of twelve, he was given his name and his rank—Koti, a master craftsman. He was one of the youngest ever to become a master, and small, brown-skinned Makers from all across Babel came to study at his feet, learn his techniques.
By the time he was forty, sixteen thousand students he had, and great was their work—greater than that of any Makers who had ever lived.
At the Tower of Serat his pupils worked for seventeen years to carve scenes from the tales of the life of the hairy prophet Janek, and tell of his ascent into heaven on the back of a flaming swan from that very pinnacle. Though the tower was six hundred feet tall, the Makers worked every inch of the stone, until it became one of the great wonders of Babel, so that millions of people undertook pilgrimages’ to gaze upon Janek at the top of the tower, his long beard whipping in the tempest as he straddled the back of the giant flaming swan.
When he finished, Koti took his pupils to the edge of Andou, where the river Marn flowed in from the Whitefish Mountains. There a great sea of rounded boulders had lain for millions of years, deposited by glaciers.
Koti’s students worked diligently among the boulders for twenty years, carving each of them into great images from their tradition, showing the War of the Gods that would someday come, when Goddess Peace would finally put down the Dark Spirit of Strife, when Fertility with her many orifices overcame the sexless Barrenness, when all the ten thousand gods of virtue ascended to their rightful domain.
The place was renamed Valley of the Gods, and one could walk through it for weeks staring at marvel after marvel.
And Koti did not only create great works in stone, he married a wise woman who had a talent for shaping lives. They loved one another passionately, and well Gallen remembered the countless times they wrestled as one while making love in their garden bed, under the evening stars at their summer home. His sweet wife Aya gave birth to eleven talented children, so that together Koti and Aya became a great patriarch and matriarch, admired by all.
After sixty-two years, Koti’s body grew frail even though he was still young, for he had worn it out in the service of his art and of his family and of his people.
By then, Koti’s fame had grown so great that his own people built him a throne and begged him to slough off his mortal body so that he could reveal himself as a god, for the works that he had designed for his apprentices were not only apparently without number, they were also without equal.
But Koti convinced the crowds to stifle their acclaim, and he prepared for death.
And so it was that the Makers gathered fifty thousand men and women, and they bore Koti’s ravaged body upon a pallet carved of sandalwood, and they sailed with a thousand ships across the sea, as he lay dying.
Together they marched to the City of Life, where the great columns of crystal memory rose high and haughty and gray against the white mountains on the skyline.
His people came arrayed in their finest garments of scarlet, and they swung golden censers of incense before his pallet, filling the sky with sweet-smelling smoke of green. The drummers and flutists played before him, and women danced with bells on their feet and tambourines in their hands, their voices rising in haunting music.
At the City of Life, he had his memories recorded and gave the humans samples of his skin, and fifty thousand people wept upon the stairways to the Hall of Life and petitioned the human lords to prepare a new body for the greatest of Makers.
And there the memories of Koti ended, but the memories of his disciples were recorded thus:
And so the humans studied Koti’s works, studied his memories, and they judged him: “We know that Koti’s work is magnificent in form, but it is flawed in content. His work is filled with boundless passion, but we fear the images of the gods he has formed. We fear that his work will fuel a dangerous resurgence of idolatry. He has impeded the cause of mankind, and therefore will not be reborn.”
And so his disciples took Koti home and tried to nurse him back to health, but on the cruise home, Koti was so humiliated by his treatment at the hands of the humans that he swore to eat no more. Because of his poor health, he died within the week.
So all Makers swore a vow that none of them would ever go back to the human lands seeking rebirth, and none would sell their wares to humans. Since the greatest of them had been judged unworthy, the Makers knew that mankind esteemed them as dust.
Gallen felt the weight of Koti’s life in a great surge. He lived through the passion, the genius, the years of toil, the intense love he’d felt for his family, all in moments, gained the insights that Koti had had, then witnessed the final humiliation and death.
And Gallen knew, he knew surely, that mankind had judged Koti wrongly, that they had been blind to his greatness.
And suddenly, the colors swirled in his head, and Gallen began to recall the life of Doovenach, a humble woman of the Roamers, the hairy people of the plains.
She had been born under a weathered oak tree in a warm rain, and had lived her life on the open plains beneath the sky. As a child, she had learned the call of the thrush, the scent of the rabbit. And during the summer storms, when forks of lightning beat the earth, the tribe would huddle under wide trees, and Doovenach would huddle under her mother’s sagging breasts and watch the dark clouds, listen to them growling.
For countless days she had wandered the golden plains, under Tremonthin’s suns, harvesting handfuls of wild oats, rose apples, and black peas. She grew to hate the biting black flies that followed her herd, never realizing that they were so tormented only because her people had a law against bathing—for when one bathed in the infrequent pool
s of the grasslands, he dirtied water that others might drink.
But mostly, Doovenach remembered a sense of peace that flowed as wide as the prairie, and she remembered the good times hunting for mice to eat with her sisters, or the time that the tribe wandered east all summer until they reached the end of the world, where it dropped over cliffs to salty water, and together the whole tribe jumped off into the ocean and swam about every day until the weather turned cold, then they climbed out and headed west for another three years until they bumped into the mountains.
At times it would rain or snow, and Doovenach would huddle beneath a tree, her furry hide wet and cold, and she would curse her life on such miserable days.
Like others of her tribe, she had been born into a society that knew no possessions. Her people ate the wild grasses from the plain, hunted with sticks and rocks. When they brought down a deer or an antelope, they squatted and cut the fresh meat with knives, divided it equally among all.
Other races sometimes hated them, for the Roamers could not understand the concept of ownership. If they found a cow in the wild, they would eat it. If trees were filled with fruit, they fed. And afterward some person of another tribe would come and claim that they owned this cow or this tree.
And so Doovenach remembered times when other peoples would chase the Roamers and beat them. They once found a field of peas, and men with clubs came to chase them away, and when one of the men hit Doovenach’s mother, his long club also struck Doovenach’s baby brother, crushing his skull.
And she remembered a time when her people wandered into a town, hoping to drink from the troughs where horses drank, and people in hats and tunics and dresses laughed at her nakedness, and their children threw rocks at her. Doovenach found a beautiful dress as blue as her eyes drying on a bush, and she tried to put it on, but some people came out of a house, shouting, and their dogs bit her legs and drove her away.
And when she was eighteen and beautiful so that the males of other clans wanted to mate with her too much, Doovenach ran away and crossed through a great town, and while she was hungry, she went into an inn and began to feed from a table.
Beyond the Gate (The Golden Queen) (Volume 2) Page 22