Bones of the Past (Arhel) (6 page)

The assistant professor considered her job, and the raise Thirk had hinted might be forthcoming if she were to become “one of the
farsighted
scholars of Ariss.” The raise was more than a luxury at the moment—it was something she had to get, one way or another. And if joining up with flakes who were sure to keep her presence secret was the price of that raise, she was willing to pay.

She met his eyes and put on her most sincere face. “I’m with you,” she said.

“Good. I have to warn you—well, you saw for yourself this morning—we’re very subversive. But, Roba, this city needs to be shaken to its roots—and the Del—” he glanced around again, just to be sure no one was spying on him. Satisfied, he nodded and continued, “—The Delmuirie Society is set to make its statement. Edrouss Delmuirie will get the honor he deserves, and his followers will change the face of all Arhel.”

You can bet your last dari on that,
Roba thought.
Ariss will stand up and salute Delmuirie when the sajes’ Seven Ugly Gods walk from the hells to bring me birthday presents.
Inside her, mirth bubbled like the racing water of a mountain stream.

“I’ll do everything I can to make sure he gets exactly the honor he deserves,” she told him gravely.

He reached out and clasped her shoulder in the Arissonese gesture of warm affection.

“Then welcome, friend and fellow.”

* * *

The sharsha, who had been named Choufa, wished she could beg passing keyunu for water or food as she had done the first two days of her captivity. But her mouth was too dry. She lay on the packed-earth floor of the thorn-tree cage, eyes closed, listening but no longer waiting for rescue. She knew, finally, why she had never seen a sharsha when she was a temple child. The keyunu let them all die.

The morning dew, which she had licked off the leaves and bigger spines of the wall of thorn-trees, had long since evaporated. The sun was directly overhead, and in her cage there was no longer any shade. The sun burned into her skin, made her tongue a dry, swollen rag, and caused the sky to spin dizzily above her. She watched the heat mirages rising from the cage floor. They looked like water. She wished with all her forsaken soul that they were.

I must have been very bad,
she thought.
I don’t know what I did, but I’m sorry. I’ll do anything they want if they won’t be mad at me anymore.
She would have sworn her apologies to anyone who would listen if she could have—

She heard clacking and scraping from the far side of the cage. She moved her head a little, enough to see one section of the thorn-spiked cage wall being pulled away. A keyunu entered—a young woman with lovely long red hair and an expression of disgust on her face. The woman carried a cup.

“Water,” she said, shoving the cup at the sharsha.

The child propped herself on one arm with difficulty and clutched the cup. She took one deep draught and realized instantly that she’d been lied to. Whatever the bitter, horrible stuff in the cup was, it wasn’t water. But it was wet, and she was so thirsty—she drank it anyway. If it was poison and the keyunu wanted her dead, that would be fine with her.

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 from 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.”