Staré: Shikari Book Two

by Alma T. C. Boykin

  “And look where the round lake is, Rigi.” She found Stela Site again, then hunted around until she found one of the largest rings, this with lots of little shapes inside. “There had been a city there.”

  Had been a city there, Rigi repeated silently. She went cold, as if someone had just dropped ice down the back of her dress. “Lt. Prananda, what happened to the city to leave a crater-like lake?”

  “The stories are true,” the Elder stated before Tomás could answer. “You are a wise one and a hunter in truth. And your protector is here, searching for you.” He flicked his ears and the young Staré removed the table and the painted hide before the humans could protest. “Go now, and we, the Elders, will discuss matters and send for you if it is warranted.”

  Tomás turned pink and trembled as if he had an overpressure. Rigi wondered if she should pat his back so he could outgas but then considered how much he might release compared to Paul. Probably not a good idea, and she stopped a giggle before it started. She did not want to try to explain to him what amused her.

  Instead they bowed to the Elder and followed a young first Stamm female to the forecourt. There Rigi saw Makana talking to the guard, and she and Martinus hurried to meet him. He turned and saw them, and his ears flopped forward, then upright once more. As she drew closer, Rigi smelled //relief/confusion.// The guard said something and puffed a strong blend with that odd undertone she’d come to associate with authority, or at least had only smelled from Staré in authority. The stone and tile felt warm under her feet and soothed her sore arches. They didn’t help her pulled muscle, though, and Tomás took her arm for the last few steps. She hand-bowed to the guard, who full bowed to her, backing clear of the gateway.

  “Well, that didn’t answer any of my questions but gave me about a dozen more,” Tomás grumbled, but under his breath in Common.

  “Isn’t that always what happens when we ask elders something, be they human or Staré?” She crouched down and pulled her socks and shoes back on, wincing a little as her pulled muscle fussed.

  She caught whiffs of //amused/sympathy.// Tomás did as well, and gave her a rueful smile, then helped her stand again. “How badly do you hurt?”

  “I can walk, Lieutenant, thank you, but I do not believe I will be running from crowds for at least a day.” She wanted to go home and hide, truth be told.

  “Miss Rigi, why flee?” Makana’s ears tipped to the sides.

  Why indeed? She rested a hand on Martinus and tried to find a good but still honest answer. None existed, so she told the truth. “I was afraid, Makana. I saw the humans and Staré running toward us, heard the shouts, smelled anger, and panicked. I ran away because I was afraid.” She’d failed, had not taken care of her mother and Paul.

  “How many, Miss Bernardi?” Tomás sounded puzzled.

  “Um, three dozen, maybe less.”

  Tomás and the guard both boggled at her. “Three dozen? I’d run too, Miss Bernardi.”

  “And with all the market locked because of sickness, you could not stop until you found a place to hide,” Makana stated. “Good. All hoplings should act so well.”

  The guard’s ears flopped fore and aft. “If all hoplings did so, there’d be no space for Staré to sit.” He sounded and smelled more amused than serious. Was that part of a Staré proverb of some kind?

  “The cart waits, Miss Rigi,” Makana pointed with one forefoot.

  “Go, Miss Bernardi,” Tomás ordered. “I fear the holo-reporters will see my transport and come looking.”

  And neither of them cared to explain either what had happened, or what the reporters would assume had happened. Her mother likely did not consider Martinus a proper chaperone. Cy certainly did not, and oh, she’d never have a moment to herself again. “Good day to you, Lt. Prananda, and success in your endeavors.”

  He hand bowed. “Likewise, Miss Bernardi.” She followed Makana out of the gate and to the waiting wombow cart. The placid cream wombow looked as excited as he ever did, flicking his tail. This cart, however, had the Staré seat in front for the driver, and an enclosed passenger space. Makana opened the little door and lowered a step. Rigi climbed into the back and found a nice cushion that bore a close resemblance to the one that normally resided on her father’s reading chair. Martinus climbed in as well, taking up over half the space. The door closed and after a moment Rigi heard a small transport rumble off, followed by the cart jerking into motion. Rigi decided that she’d just close her eyes and rest. But she kept seeing the hide map, and the city that had been where the lake now lay.

  Uncle Eb would turn colors from envy. So would the xenoarchaeologists, and Mr. De Groet, and then they would fuss at her for not making a drawing or taking an image for them. Rigi wiggled a little, shifting so she could extend her leg. That felt a little better. Where was Uncle Eb, and who had he gone to pester? He always told Aunt Kay where he’d gone. Rigi tried to imagine what her mother would do if her father disappeared. Probably fuss, quietly, politely, then serve him the tail bits of the next fish, and that slice or two of roast that always seemed to get tough first. Or perhaps have an attack of the vapors? No, because that might make Paul cry and no one wanted Paul to cry. He had very good lungs for such a small baby.

  Rigi’s comm chirped. She felt in her bag without opening her eyes, pushed the button and unlocked it. “Hello.”

  “Auriga Maris Regina Bernardi where are you?”

  “In the back of a covered wombow cart, Aunt Kay. Going home after a bit of excitement in the market. Can I help you?”

  “You can comm your father before he does something dramatic. Like turn on the broadcast feature in Martinus’s vocal transmitter and make the cart yell wooeef wooeef.” Aunt Kay sounded annoyed. “And if you see Lexi, tell him that his mate is looking for him. I can’t scare him enough.”

  Rigi sighed. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I swear of all the times for the males in this family to go racing off in unknown directions, just as I need work done.” Aunt Kay terminated the call. Rigi wondered if she should ask Makana and Shona to alert the thumping network to tell Lexi that he’d better bring a nice gift to his mate when he came home, and be ready to duck whatever Aunt Kay threw at him.

  Instead she commed her father at the office. “Auriga Maris Regina where are you?”

  “In the back of the covered wombow cart that Makana is driving, sir. I have not looked out in case the reporters saw him leaving the Place of Refuge.” And the dark and warm felt restful, unlike the trouble waiting at home.

  “I see. Tell Makana—no, don’t bother him. I’ll tell your mother where you are. She is rather concerned about you.”

  “Yes, sir. Are she and Paul safe?”

  “Yes. And supper is minced something. Apparently Shona is irked at having missed the morning’s events.”

  Oh dear. “Yes, sir.”

  “Bernardi clear.”

  “Bernardi clear,” she repeated. The comm call ended and she put the little device back into her bag. “I wonder if we could get out early and go hide somewhere?”

  He heard the quiet tick tick tick as Martinus’s tail rod tapped the wood. He must be wagging, Rigi thought. “You are not aiding the clarity of the situation.” She enunciated the way Uncle Eb did when he was irritated.

  “Wooeef.”

  That night Rigi lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to forget the map. And trying to forget Tomás changing colors when he couldn’t ask questions. She’d told her parents about going to the Place of Refuge and being granted permission to stay in the courtyard until Makana came, but nothing more. Cy had exploded, almost yelling at her for leaving their mother in danger. Then her father exploded back, in a cold, quiet, precise to the point of laser-focused way that left her big brother shaking and Rigi wishing that she could crawl in between the floor boards and ooze out of sight for the next month or so.

  “Auriga and Martinus knew that they could not help your mother by trying to take on over thirty angry people, Cyril Arktu
r,” their father had stated. “She has said that. So she took Martinus and fled, distracting the mob. Your mother and brother are far less well known than is your sister, and the mob continued on, trying to catch Auriga. They failed because they knew nothing about the markets, or so it appears. After they left, Lonka and Makana were able to bring your mother, Paul, and Siare home in the two carts without being stopped or harassed, once they gave statements to security.” He’d shaken his finger at Cy. “And your sister and her m-dog went to a place where they would be safe and where the media would be less likely to harass them. No one who killed a Staré would dare flee to the Staré for shelter, something Company Security knows quite well. So she did protect your mother and brother the best way she could.”

  Rigi didn’t agree, but hadn’t dared argue.

  “What made the female go crazy, sir,” Cy had asked fifteen minutes later, after he seemed to recover a little from the scolding.

  “Scent sickness. It’s not something humans can suffer from or catch, so we just do our best to avoid the poor souls who develop it.” He’d picked up his e-reader, the signal that discussion had ended.

  Neither Rigi’s mother or father had punished her. Probably because with her mother having a strained ankle, and Siare with a broken hind-foot and pulled muscles, that left Rigi to do all the lifting and carrying and baby care, aside from things Mrs. deStella-Bernardi could do from a chair or on crutches. She refused to go to the medical center to have rapid repairs done because that would interfere with certain things that she informed Cy, “are not matters for family discussion.” Siare now had a servant of her own to care for her until she could walk, and Rigi’s father refused to hear otherwise. Rigi suspected that all the staff would get raises and bonuses without anything being said. A donation would also be made to the Place of Refuge, if the Elders would accept it. So Rigi lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and contemplating a month of running up and down stairs and of washing dirty nappies and sleepers and filling and emptying the baby bath.

  She really should have jumped out of the cart.

  And where were Lexi and Uncle Eb?

  14

  Strange Sightings

  In the six weeks it took for her mother’s ankle to heal enough to bear weight and walk without crutches, and for Siare to be able to walk and to care for Paul, Rigi learned all about baby care and decided that Paul would be a batsman on the cricket team when he was old enough. That or a professional cliff climber—once he had a grip on something, he never let go. That included any loose locks of Rigi’s hair. Her mind also refused to let go of what she’d seen, and Tomás did not help matters. Rigi folded yet another stack of now-clean nappies, wondering as she did if media stinks were milder or worse than Paul’s nappies after he tried purple potato. She wished that her mother had succumbed to temptation and had bought the fabricating recycler that could deal with baby wipes and nappies. Rigi added disposable/recyclable diapers to her list of “things I will insist on having in the house after I marry.”

  Yesterday Tomás had sent her a map. “I do not care for the pattern I think I am seeing,” he’d written in the message. With some trepidation, in part because Cy was due to return from work in half an hour and she did not care to have him seeing her files, Rigi opened the image document. Tomás had taken what he’d remembered of the hide map, which seemed to be quite a lot, and had overlain it onto a current map of the continents. Rigi noted the matches, and blanched when she saw four more lakes or cavern systems where cities were supposed to have been. What would destroy a city and leave a round lake? And then she saw something odd off to the corner, under the Bataria Archipelago, the enormous collection of islands and shallow waterways near the planetary equator. Rigi knew it as a place of spectacular birds, crimson split-tails and indigo crackers, and other fascinating creatures. The map Tomás had created had an outline of a large island around the Archipelago. Was he suggesting that the island had sunk, or that the collection of thousands of small islands had once been a single block of land? If so, what had happened?

  Rigi did not like the possibilities her imagination devised. And every archaeological anything she’d read or heard as a lecture said that disasters never destroyed societies. Individual locations, yes—that had happened in the past on several occasions, but a single volcanic eruption or tsunami or earthquake or plague could not destroy society. Weakened cultures did experience rapid declines in a few cases, but they had been weak before the incident. And what caused crater lakes, or round lakes? Impact craters, volcanoes, and sink-holes caused by erosion of sub-surface features, like the Sapphire Lakeway on LimWorld, the chain of twelve deep-blue, circular lakes that followed the course of an ancient arm of a sea. And no one knowingly built cities on those sorts of things. Well, Rigi allowed as she closed the file and logged out, people couldn’t have known about future meteor impact points back then, since they couldn’t track meteors. But the statistics of crater-forming meteors hitting multiple cities simultaneously? Rigi shook her head as she stretched her arms and shoulders, twisting her wrists and wiggling her fingers. As improbable as Uncle Eb turning into a scarlet screamer bird, or Paul sprouting wings and flying before he walked.

  Rigi decided that she wouldn’t tell Tomás that he was seeing things. He’d done a lot of work on the map, and he meant well, and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings if she could avoid it. No, she thought as she went downstairs, she would put together her arguments against his idea, but logically, and with some background. And it could very well be, now that she thought about it, that the map the Elder had shown them was not what either they or the Staré thought it was. The Elder had said that the knowledge of the map’s meaning had been lost, and that the current Elders had decided that it showed the spirit villages. They could well be mis-reading the artifact, just like humans and a few others had over the centuries. What was the fancy word for that? After the thing but not because of the thing, but there was a fancier way of saying it. Rigi began setting the supper table and tidied Paul’s new high chair and straightened the mat beneath it. Post hoc something propter hoc, that was it, but what was the something? She’d ask her father.

  She didn’t get to ask, because over supper Cy announced, “I’ve been told to bring Rigi to a dance next week.” He poked at the white peas on his plate. Rigi liked white peas and wondered if Cy planned to eat them or just chase them until they wore out. If the latter, she would ask for his share.

  “Young man, that was uncalled for,” her mother sighed at Paul. Paul shared his brother’s attitude toward mashed peas in milk, but in a rather more direct fashion, all over his tray and the mat under his chair. Rigi closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, her four remaining peas had multiplied by a considerable number. Rigi ate before her mother noticed the change or her father commented. If only Cy liked tam as much as she disliked it.

  “Which dance is that, Cyril?” their father inquired once the wayward pea-mush had been removed from the floor.

  “It is an open dance at Brown’s, sir. The younger Miss Brown is coming of age, and those of us with sisters were asked to bring them, as well as young ladies we might be courting.”

  Was Cy courting? Rigi had no idea. It wasn’t one of those things you asked an older brother, at least in her opinion.

  “You sound less than excited about this prospect,” their father observed.

  Cyril used a bit of bread to sop up the sauce from the meat. “It was the phrasing of the invitation, sir. A formal invitation will be coming tomorrow, but Mr. Brown came in, pointed at me, and said, ‘You need to bring your famous sister to the dance next week,’ then left.”

  “That does seem to be a bit less than welcoming,” their mother stated. She slipped Paul a spoon of pea-milk-mush while he was distracted. It seemed to stay inside him, at least for the moment. “Will there be other young ladies present?”

  “Yes, ma’am, several dozen I believe. Miss Brown has a number of cousins and friends who will be attending, or so
I have been told.”

  Their father set down his fork. “If a proper invitation comes and there are no complications, I see no reason why Rigi should not go, if she wishes to attend.”

  Cy blinked several times and looked as if he’d been hit in the head with a stick. “Do you want to go, Rigi?”

  “I will certainly think about it, Cy.” She’d only been to one social event since the return of the expedition, and getting out of the house without Makana or Martinus lurking behind her had some appeal. Was he assuming that of course she would attend, since he had been ordered to bring her? Probably, if his expression told the truth. Rigi did not roll her eyes or sigh. Really, brother, what were you thinking? She was not an accessory like a satchel or evening wrap.

  A formal invitation arrived the next day. Mrs. deStella-Bernardi inspected it, looked up the sponsors and matrons hosting the event, and nodded once. “I believe it would be good for you to attend, Auriga. You have been absent from society more than is healthy for a young lady of your age and attainments.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Rigi finished putting away Paul’s now-clean laundry. “Ma’am, does Cyril have control over my choice of dresses?”

  “Of course not. You are old enough and have good judgment. Why?”

  Rigi did sigh this time. “Because he gave me a list this morning of what to wear. Not the red-trimmed dress with the blue scarf, not the maroon, and not the dark green with brown and gold trim, because he says they are improper for a young lady not currently seeking a husband.”

  Her mother pursed her lips and went so far as to put her hands on her hips. “I fear your brother’s time in the Stellar Navy has colored his thoughts on what is proper for young ladies. Wear what is appropriate for the occasion, and remember that comportment speaks more loudly than clothes do.”