by Kate Elliott
Nipper went on ahead. Ilyana winced as the khaja woman almost stepped on the threshold, the inch-high seal-ring that circled the port tube entrance. But her heel passed over it without touching it, and she walked away down the tube. An alien scent wafted out from the tube, like the current of a freshwater river mingling with the saltwater sea. Ilyana took in a deep breath. It was different, weird, but not unpleasant. Coming out of his stupor, Valentin grabbed her hand, and together they passed over the threshold and entered the domain of the Chapalii.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the Tent of Stone
TESS ARRIVED AT ARINA Veselov’s tent out of breath and anxious. Irena Orzhekov stopped her. “You can’t go in.”
Tess’s stomach twisted into a knot of fear, “I don’t hear the drums. Did she already have the baby?”
Irena turned the comment away with a flick of her wrist. “She has fallen into the gods’ sleep. The child has not yet come. Varia Telyegin says she has bled too much, and she no longer has the strength to push the child out.”
“She can’t die!” Irena put an arm around her, comforting her. Tess wept onto her shoulder. She heard voices from inside the tent, but they were indistinct, smothered by the felt walls between them. “What about the baby?” she asked finally. “If only Cara were here! Wait. Let me speak with Varia. Perhaps…” If she could record Varia’s account of the labor, then perhaps she could transmit it to Cara via console hidden in the library and receive in turn at least some advice, whether they might save Arina and the unborn child. “Perhaps I could find some answers in one of the texts in the library.”
“Juli Danov and Niko Sibirin are also attending,” said Irena.
“Ah, Niko, then. He can give me a detailed account.”
Quickly enough, by sending a Veselov girl into the tent, Niko was brought forth. He looked tired, and when Tess set off at once toward the library, she had to stop and wait for him. He smiled wryly at her and took her arm to support himself. His halting pace depressed Tess even further.
Finally, blinking on her implant and locking off the visual, she asked him to describe the labor. As he spoke, she recorded, asking a clarifying question now and again. Niko’s mind suffered from no infirmities; his account was comprehensive. Because he walked so slowly, they were only to the edge of the plaza when he finished.
“I’ll run ahead and search out some texts,” Tess said, impatient to be off. “If you can—”
“I can manage.” Under other circumstances, he would have looked amused. Now he simply let go of her. She blinked the implant off and ran.
At the library she took the steps two at a time and cut around to the outside entrance built specially for the ke, the Chapalii exile who now lived permanently in Sarai. There were several ways to override the privacy lock that kept these rooms off limits to everyone but the ke, Tess, and the rare visitor from Earth. Tess spoke her name out loud and heard an audible click, the override signal.
As she tugged the door open, a wave of warm air spilled out from the corridor and anteroom. She had to stop for a second inside the door to adjust. The corridor was about twelve strides long, whitewashed, paved with brick. At opposite corners of the corridor wall a design grew out, engulfing the blank white of the walls with bright colors, odd shapes, and interesting textures. It had manifested soon after the ke had arrived here and now it expanded according to some unknown principle. Tess could not tell whether the ke was in the process of creating it or whether it was an organic construct that blossomed at an excruciatingly slow pace. It smelled different here, too, as if through an unseen portal the Empire touched these lands that were nominally free of it.
Tess caught her breath and advanced to the anteroom. The ke waited for her there. The ke wore gloves and long robes. Here in the private suite the ke had thrown back the hood and face-covering to reveal the slate-gray epidermis and lank tail of hair. The ke was by now so familiar to Tess that she could not help but wonder if she would find the white-skinned Chapalii males strange-looking, although in her other life they were the only ones she had ever seen.
“Assistance is necessary,” said Tess at once in the form of Chapalii that the ke termed “the deeper tongue.”
“What is necessary?” responded the ke, perhaps rhetorically.
Tess shifted restlessly. To her surprise and annoyance, she was finding the idiom that the ke was teaching her particularly difficult to learn. “Anna Veselov, a female unnamed also fertile, suffers with a difficult—” She struggled to find the right word. The closest match she could find was: “—flowering. Niko Sibirin, a male unnamed also learned in the art of healing, comes to consult the texts which teach of this.”
The ke made no movement with head or shoulders to show agreement or negation but only said, with no inflection, “The texts will be laid out on the scribe’s table as necessary.”
“Yes.”
The ke lifted the hood to cover its hair and masked its alien face with a veil. Once, Tess had expected all Chapalii to show her deference, because she was a Duke’s sister and heir. The ke, with no further words or gestures, simply left.
Although this was ostensibly the ke’s suite, built so that the ke could isolate herself according to the precepts Tess put forward for the Chapalii religion, one of the rooms was set aside for Tess’s use. As soon as the ke had gone out through the interior door that led into a side room of the central library, Tess went to this chamber, a starkly furnished room with a single spot of color: a plush couch upholstered in a gorgeous red and gold fabric patterned with affronted birds wreathed by vines. Woven in Habakar, the cloth had been a gift to Tess from Mitya’s wife, Princess Melatina.
“I want a call through to Cara Hierakis in Jeds,” Tess said aloud as soon she shut the door.
“What level?” the console responded in its alto voice.
“Urgent. I’m uploading a file.”
The implant was embedded in the hinge of her jaw. An interface melded with the exterior of the bone, accessible through a permeable membrane grown through the skin. Tess triggered the implant, pressed a node from the console against her skin, and loaded Niko’s description into the console. Moments later, Cara’s head and shoulders appeared above the console. Tess could see through her to the wall beyond.
“I’m in luck,” breathed Tess. “I was hoping you would be in the lab.”
Cara did not look up at her. She was reading the transferred account on a screen which sat out of Tess’s sight. After a bit, she shook her head, and her gaze, lifting, was painfully compassionate. “If I was there,” she said, and closed her lips on the thought. “But I’m not. How in hell did she get pregnant?”
“I suppose the usual way! What can you do?”
“I can’t do anything, except to advise you to find the commentary by Sister Matthia of Maros Cloister and the treatise on the womb attributed to Shakir al’Quriq. They’re both obstetrics texts and one of them discusses a primitive version of a cesarean section. I gave you copies myself for your library. There’s nothing else I can tell you. I spent many evenings discussing midwifery with Varia Telyegin and Juli Danov, and I think they taught me more than I taught them. Except for technological intervention, there frankly isn’t anything I can do that they won’t already have thought of. You know how sorry I am to hear this.”
“I’ll go. Niko is in the library already.”
“Let me know—”
“Yes. And off.” Cara vanished, her black hair and white blouse replaced by the ivory surface of the console desk. Tess took in a shuddering breath and hurried out of the room.
Even with these side trips, she arrived at the inclined table where the ke had propped up four leatherbound volumes of varying sizes before Niko did. Tess hurried outside and found him contemplating the steps. She gave him her arm, and together they climbed to the top. Inside, she found him a stool. He sank onto it gratefully and without preamble pulled the commentary by Sister Matthia toward himself and opened it reverentially. He read slow
ly, negotiating a crabbed script, and his lips moved as he read although no sound emerged. Tess shifted from one foot to the other.
After a bit, he glanced up at her. “Go on. You’ll be happier waiting impatiently there. Send one of the children to help me back when I’m done, or better yet, Svetlana. It will do her good to learn some of these things.”
Torn, Tess hesitated, then went. The ke hovered in the background, robed and veiled so that no part of her skin was visible. What did the ke think of these human visitors and of her strange and sometimes trivial duties as librarian? Tess did not know. She took the steps three at a time, leaping down, and broke into a loping run when she reached the plaza. Her mind skipped to Niko’s request to have Svetlana Tagansky attend him. Aleksi’s wife was almost as old as Tess; she was a practical, competent woman with a growing reputation as a good attendant at births. Tess rubbed at a pain in her side. What if Niko knew perfectly well that he was not going to live all that much longer? What if he saw every birth now, especially the difficult ones, the unusual ones, as a means to pass on the vital knowledge to the younger healer who would take his place?
Such thoughts, more than the running, made her breath come ragged. Losing Niko would be like losing her father all over again.
When she came up, panting, to the awning of Mother Veselov’s tent, she found Irena Orzhekov holding a bundle: an infant with vivid blue eyes.
“I brought her outside while they prepare Arina for the pyre.”
At first, the words did not register. “I have to send for Svetlana Tagansky to escort Niko back from the library,” she said, staring at the infant, whose stare was fixed on Irena. “Then they can—” It hit like a shock wave. “Arina is dead?”
“She stopped breathing. Varia and Juli chose to attempt this cutting open that Dokhtor Hierakis has taught them, to see if the child still lived, although I am not sure the gods will approve of a child coming into the world in such an unnatural way.”
Tess could not find words to reply. Without asking permission, she simply pushed aside the entrance flap and went in. The sheer weight of smell overwhelmed her, blood and excreta, all the leftover products of childbirth swamped by the iron stench of blood. Tess sank down onto an empty pillow and watched, stunned, while Varia Telyegin and Juli Danov cleaned up the blood and composed the body, while Varia and Anna’s adopted sister Yeliana wrapped Arina in a shroud until only her face, pale, lax, and her cloud of dark hair remained unshrouded.
Then Mira was led in with her little brother Lavrenti. Lavrenti was allowed to kiss his mother, but to Mira fell the duty of braiding her mother’s hair for the final time. Dry-eyed, the eleven-year-old set about this task with horrifying calm. Lavrenti huddled beside her, shivering although it was hot and stuffy inside the tent. Tess shook herself out of her stupor and moved forward to coax the boy back next to her, but he wouldn’t budge. At last, Mira finished. Arina’s brother and father and uncles were all long since dead. Her husband was far away, so there was no man to pull the shroud across her face in order to shield her eyes from the living world. Numb, Tess listened to women whispering in the outer chamber. Meanwhile, the two children stared. Suddenly little Lavrenti took the last corner of the shroud in his right hand, covered his mother’s face, and tucked the cloth down to seal her in. He burst into tears.
“Here,” said Juli Danov, her voice so close to Tess’s ear that Tess jumped, startled. “You may light these.”
Obediently, Tess lit and hung four sticks of incense in burners at each corner of the chamber. But there was nothing else she could do. Already, from outside, she heard women discussing where to find a wet nurse for the baby, and how they ought to go about naming it since its mother and aunts and grandmother were all dead and its only sister not yet a woman. Tess went forward and kissed both children, but they did not acknowledge her nor did they really seem to realize that she was there. Nor did Tess truly belong here, in the tent of death, a woman who was no blood relation to the deceased.
Wrung out and feeling utterly useless, she touched the top of the shroud with her right hand, as a last farewell, and left the tent that no longer belonged to Anna Veselov.
The ke, the one who is nameless, grows and lives, in the tent of stone. Like organic creatures which have ceased to grow, stone is cold to the sight. The tent of stone, a temporary shelter which may only last a thousand orbits around the sun, grows in a primitive fashion, by the work of hands. This cold growth is strange to observe, awkward, tensile. A true building grows organically and never ceases to grow, just as it reflects the exposition of the universe. But one mark of the half-tamed animal called early cognition is that in building, the act of finishing also occurs, although the civilized know that nothing is ever finished. Living things are warm. Unliving things are cold. Thus primitives grow buildings which are dead even as flowering occurs.
The ke perceives that the heat of the daiga—the half-tamed animals who name themselves human—has left the chamber labeled the reading room. Soon all traces of daiga presence dissipate into the air. The daiga, being primitive, have the impulse to name and to label in the same way that bacteria have the impulse to divide. By these markers, the web that structures the universe is constructed, although like bacteria the daiga web is shallow, shorn of depth by the indiscriminate quality of their desire.
Under the central dome of the library, placed on a carbon table, sits a building by definition dead and also never living, a tiny simulation of a building that once lived. The daiga like to look at it for reasons impossible to fathom. The daiga name the building Morava and the simulation a model. Once the great palace sheltered the Mushai, but the great palace, the actual palace, has ceased living because of the rite of extinction; it has also become a tent of stone. Yet the Mushai is imprisoned within its walls and within the still growing walls of the great towers named Sorrowing, Reckless, and Shame, caught without means of escape, because the act of remembering has imprisoned the name of Mushai in the universe’s binding architecture. Only the nameless are not bound by the web whose filaments secure the patterns of heat and death. Without a name there is no true existence, and yet, without a name, existence is boundless.
Existence, measured by heat, by a net of turbulence, enters the reading room. The one who is nameless but who also has brought namelessness onto the daiga called Tess Soerensen hesitates, a stab of time halting movement. Except in size the daiga appear alike. Nothing distinguishes one from the next, although slightly different patterns of turbulence flow through and around the females and the males, and the small ones called children are different again, hotter, brighter, lucency diffused across the diminutive bodies rather than focused in certain spots. At first, the ke believed that the diminutive ones were a third kind of daiga, the ones who cannot flower, but instead the daiga Tess showed how over time the children flower as buildings flower, to become daiga. In this way, as the civilized grow buildings, the daiga grow themselves. In this way the potential to become civilized manifests.
But the daiga who is nameless but brought namelessness bears a peculiar tincture of heat and lucency that leaves an indelible mark. By this tincture, the ke can recognize this daiga apart from other daiga. Tess names the daiga Ilya, but with the promiscuity so evident in daiga behavior, this daiga wears other names as well.
The hesitation ends. Ilya moves forward into the chamber. A flare of heat reveals that the daiga has registered the ke’s presence. The warmth subsides into the usual reticulation of turbulence patching the daiga’s surface. An inclination of the head, now given by the daiga, signifies notice of the ke, perhaps. Daiga are promiscuous with gestures as well, shifting legs and arms and torsos and heads in a chaotic and restless dance. This daiga Ilya knows something of the art of stillness, perhaps learned from the nameless one Tess; perhaps not. But the ke has seen only one daiga who truly understands it: the Tai-en Charles Soerensen. The Tai-en could not have passed across the threshold of rank without the knowledge of the great dance, where movement and still
ness each signify particular messages. Notice is given. The daiga crosses the chamber and passes into a separate room. The tincture of heat lingers and fades, swirling into the air’s ever-present taste.
Quiet reigns.
The ke picks up the four bound collections of parchment leaves. Here, also, the daiga confuse the living and the unliving. Knowledge is a growing thing, not a thing sewn into thin dead surfaces marked with scratches. Nevertheless, the books must be returned to specific and arbitrary places. By such means do the daiga order the world. As the ke circles back to examine the empty chamber, the door opens and on the wings of the air swirling in from outside, the daiga Tess arrives.
Of all daiga, only the nameless one called Tess can speak any of the civilized tongues. Thus, although the aura of turbulence patterning. Tess is in no fundamental way different from that of other daiga, the ke can recognize the presence of a civilized being.
There is no hesitation. Tess crosses the room to a carbon table and sinks onto a carbon stool, which is also dead. All the furniture worn by daiga is dead. Head dropping to arms, legs drawn up, the daiga Tess forms a seamless maze to the ke’s sight, hot mostly, but with the tint of cold death chasing living warmth like an echo through the pattern of the daiga’s lifewarmth.
As if sight or some daiga smell has raised a signal in farther rooms, the daiga Ilya enters. There is no hesitation. Time quickens with swift footsteps. The daiga male places a hand on the daiga female, and the ke is allowed to observe the strange and disorderly communication which goes on between the two. Some of the communication occurs through the vocal boxes. The ke cannot interpret the primitive speech without aid. Nor can the ke interpret the coils of heat and cold, brightness and shadow, that flow wildly from one to the other and back again. Heat blazes and subsides on different portions of the body.
The ke has learned to distinguish male daiga from female daiga because certain patterns of heat recur more frequently and more obviously with the males, while the female daiga manifest subtler patterns. And with these two, best known, most observed, the ke recognizes iterations in the conversation of heat and cold, as if the body of the one is familiar with the complex web of the body of the other, and back again. Although how two might interweave patterns in such a fashion, the ke is not certain.
