by J. D. Lakey
The precise details of the local map ended at that line. Below the Escarpment, the pre-history map showed only the general lay of the land, as if someone had laid the dirt bare and recorded the image from above. Thousands of streams like Badnite Creek gathered together into wide rivers that continued their journeys to the shallow sea far to the south. Orson’s Sea, the label said.
But the rivers, in their empty valleys, had no labels and the land they ran through was remarkably lacking in names and effectively anonymous.
Since going out on her first foray, geography had become one of her favorite subjects. She was the best mapmaker in her class. To her mind, there was something wrong with this map if big things like rivers had no names.
She ran her finger down the rivers to where they unwound themselves again as they crossed the flat plain at the verge of Orson’s Sea. Cheobawn, an avid student of the natural world, recognized the shapes of the river. At the delta, she knew, the marshes and swamps sucked the last of the nutrients out of the water before merging with the mineral laden waters beyond.
Through some sort of mapper’s magic, the image of Orson’s Sea showed the underwater landscape as if the sea had been drained for the mapper’s convenience. Cheobawn studied the shallow reefs and puzzled over the ridges and valleys that seemed almost identical to those of the dry land.
She wondered if there existed a pre-history technology that could see under water, then shook her head at her fanciful imagination. Why go to all that trouble? More likely the mappers in the Temples merely dreamwalked to the sea under the influence of the hallucinogenic dreamsmoke so that they could draw the reefs in a guided trance.
Cheobawn laid her palm on the sea. Such a small thing, her hand, to be able to cover a whole sea, that surely must have been thousands of clicks long. Her hand nearly covered all the little dots of land at the southern edges of Orson’s Sea. The islands were so abundant it seemed no one had been inclined to name them individually. They were simply labeled Ten Thousand Islands.
This band of undersea mountains marked the edge of the deep ocean. The image showed nothing but water from there until it disappeared under the cap of ice on the bottom of the world. The label said South Ocean. The mapmakers had not bothered draining all of the world, apparently, for there was no indication of what lay below its surface.
Studying the map, one thing became abundantly apparent. The mapmakers had used absolutely no creativity when it came to naming things. It was as if they had grown tired of inventing names and settled upon the most boring and obvious of labels.
Cheobawn snorted. Elders. Was she going to be as boring when she grew up?
It suddenly occurred to her that she could use this flaw to her advantage. If mappers made this image then the same mapmakers would have been unable to resist the overwhelming urge to label everything. Perhaps the names were there but were just turned off. It shouldn’t be hard to guess what they were.
Thinking herself immensely clever, she studied the land between the Escarpment and Orson’s Sea as if she were the mapper who first created it, then she pretended it was her job to name things. She keyed in the names as she thought of them. Flatland, Orsonland, Southland, Riverland, Greenland. Nothing. She even tried Land of the Thousand Rivers. Nope. But the word Lowland got a reaction. An article bloomed under her fingers. It was a single sentence. The Lowlands is a term used to refer to all those lands situated between Orson’s Sea and the Escarpment, it read. No related articles were suggested.
Cheobawn stared at the offending blankness. This was impossible, of course. All things were connected. One fact led to thousands more. She rephrased her query using variations of Lowland and ran the search again and then again. The data base claimed no knowledge.
A cold, unformed premonition washed through her causing the hairs on the back of her neck to stand on end. What if there was something down below the Escarpment so hideously lethal, so terrifying, that the Mothers hid it from more fragile minds? Cheobawn shook the feeling off, refusing to let her imagination destroy her logic.
There had to an explanation for this lack of information. Was the Escarpment so impassible, the cliffs so high that no one had ever ventured down it to discover what lay under the clouds? Was there a vast and empty land out there just waiting to be explored? Or did the world truly end at the base of the great cliffs? Cheobawn’s mind filled with an image of The Dragons Spine, floating, adrift and rudderless, on an endless sea of clouds. She shuddered, suddenly unable to breath as vertigo washed through her.
“By all that is holy, you are doing it again,” she hissed at herself. She shook the ramblings of her overactive imagination out of her head and thought of the things she had learned from her lessons, things she knew to be true. She knew about planets. Planets had gravity-wells that warped space/time, said gravity wells caught up moons, said moons having more of the same, as did the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe on into infinity. She understood infinity. She even knew the math to calculate gravity based on a location in the gravity-well but she did not understand how a large chunk of the world could be unlabeled and unnamed.
There had to be a word or a code that would make the crystalline hub-brain give her what she wanted.
A memory whispered at her from the back of her mind. She closed her eyes and tried to see what it was. A smell came with the memory. The cloying sweetness of dreamweed overlaid on the sour smell of fermented cider and stale sweat. Oldpa’s house. She had gone there with Mora once, long ago. It had not been pleasant. The oldpas had stared at her, whispering behind their hands only to howl in mirth at their private jokes. Afterward, Mora had told her this was why the oldpas had their own house with only the oldmas to see to their needs, since it seemed that extreme age stripped away good sense and common courtesy.
What had the oldpas said? Lowlander, they had whispered, out of Mora’s hearing. Did your mother mate with a Lowlander, Little Black Bead?
Lowlander.
The word seemed half curse and half insult, judging by the reaction of the oldma who had overheard it, her sensibilities so offended that the ambient had flashed red with her outrage.
She may be Bad Luck but that doesn’t make her unnatural, the oldma had hissed back in fury, trying to hush them. Cheobawn never returned to the oldpas house after that day.
Lowlander. Her young brain had thought the word a curse. The word had been laden with the revulsion tied to mating and the idea of an unsanctioned and unvetted live birth. The tone of the insult had implied that Mora mated with animals.
Were Lowlanders some sort of animal, then? Cheobawn shook her head. Surely she had misunderstood. No, if the oldpas thought it was possible to mate with such a thing then that thing must be people, right?
People. There were people living in the Lowlands. How could that be? The map showed a land devoid of domes. Was the map a lie?
Her heart started to beat hard in her chest again.
If the map was a lie, then that made everything she knew suspect.
She closed her eyes as the world tilted under her feet. Just to be sure things were still real and solid out outside the dome she sent her Ear out into the mountains and forests. Bear Under the Mountain snorted in derision at her strange mood, rolled over, and went back to sleep. Life continued. Things were as she had left them the last time she checked the mountain’s ambient.
Cheobawn opened her eyes and laughed. What had gotten her so spooked that she was seeing monsters where there were none?
Pre-history was just a word for old, right? The domes had no records of the history of the tribes before two thousand years ago. Why would they? All that data took up space. Nobody cared about old harvest counts or the fecundity of ancient herds, surely? She didn’t, anyway, and she could not imagine the need for old, dusty records.
No. Cheobawn shook her head. She had to trust that everything she had been told was true. To do otherwise was unthinkable.
Right?
The Elders would never betray th
e trust their children put in them. Telling lies must surely be the worst offense ever. How would anyone know what was real?
She stared down at the map. Then why could she not shake the conviction that there were great chunks of information missing from the database? Was Mora, as High Mother, using her office to hide something? But what?
“Stop it,” Cheobawn growled at herself. She expected the worst from her truemother and it was starting to taint their day-to-day relationship. “Mora is not the boogeyman under the bed. Be nice.”
She returned her focus to the problem at hand: Lowlanders. She decided she would grant the mapmakers the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the mappers were merely reluctant to invade the Lowlander’s privacy, the naming of a thing being a very intimate act. If that were so, Cheobawn wondered if there existed more complete maps that only Menolly, as High Priestess, or Mora, as First Mother, knew about.
It occurred to her suddenly that a search using the word Lowlands should have brought up the word Lowlander as an alternate search path. Perhaps the search program was being particularly obtuse. Cheobawn keyed in the word, taking extra care with the spelling.
The words Restricted: Gender Inappropriate flashed in big red letters across the table top. A request for a second pass code blinked at her, solemn and expectant.
“Oops,” her automated voice said as the table top went blank.
Cheobawn jerked her hand away, her heart thumping in her chest. Oops. The code word was part of one of Alain’s additions to her new program. It was a loop that kept checking the security programs that monitored the central data bank’s crystalline brain activity. Alain said it would automatically shut things down when it sensed a security program being triggered.
She stared at the offending table, her mind a whirr of facts that made no sense. Not only was the word lowlander blocked, it was flagged. Now Brigit was in trouble and Cheobawn’s night table was about to be hunted down across the dome’s brain network by Raddoc’s security team. Raddoc, as Hayrald’s Second and Mora’s husband, could make her life very miserable indeed.
“You must be at the North Gate in 48 minutes,” the emotionless voice reminded her.
“Oh, shut up, will you?” she snapped distractedly.
Possibilities arrayed themselves in her mind’s eye. Alain claimed his disconnect switch was almost instantaneous and that the security protocols would probably ignore the alert. Almost. Probably. Suddenly, his certainty did not seem very reassuring. Cheobawn realized her only defense would be ignorance, a hard thing to claim if she got caught standing next to the offending table. She grabbed some clothes and ducked out the door, heading for the shower down the hall. It was time to make herself scarce.
Chapter Two
Brigit was in the kitchen when Cheobawn came downstairs. Mora’s wife stood, hands on her plump hips, watching something in the oven. Wisps of bronze curls escaped from her coronet of braids and her round cheeks were flushed with the heat of the oven. She glanced briefly in Cheobawn’s direction as she donned the oven mitts.
Cheobawn smiled fondly at her favorite Mother. She thought about warning Brigit about the security infraction but the sight of the gentle Mother reaching to take a pan of nut buns out of the oven drove the warning from her mind. She was famished, a constant thing of late.
“Buns! I knew you loved me best,” crowed Cheobawn with a grin as she snagged a hot pastry off the pan. Brigit shooed Cheobawn away with a wave of her spatula. Cheobawn retreated, grinning, as she juggled her pilfered treat from hand to hand to ease the pain in her fingertips.
“Go sit down,” Brigit said in exasperation, making a plate appear as if by magic and then pushing it and her towards the kitchen table. Cheobawn put the plate down on the corner of the table, the only spot in the room not covered in flour, and dropped her bun on it. “These are not for you,” Brigit said, sliding another bun onto Cheobawn’s plate. “Your mother and Sybille have been up for hours and they need these to keep up their strength.”
Cheobawn smiled. Brigit thought everyone in the Coven was too skinny, especially Mora. She was forever creating tasty tidbits to temp Mora’s appetite, not trusting the task to the Mothers in the communal kitchens.
“What happened? Someone miscount the melon harvest again?” Cheobawn asked around a mouthful of bun.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Brigit scolded automatically, barely looking up from the bun she was patting into shape. “You know Mora. She likes to set a good example and be up before everyone during harvest season. Thinks it spurs on the troops, having a general that works as hard as they do. Get yourself a glass of cider. Harvesting is thirsty work,” Brigit said, looking up at the clock. “You’ve got fifteen minutes before your shift. Drink it fast. You still have to get over to the changing room. North Gate, remember?”
Cheobawn rolled her eyes at the third reminder. Honestly. Brigit, who spent most of her waking hours in the nursery with all the village babies under the age of three, took her vocation to heart. She wanted to mother everyone regardless of how old they were. This was a good thing if one needed an advocate when arguing with the Coven but sometimes it grated. Cheobawn was seven, now. She was too old for coddling.
Cheobawn crossed to the small coolbox in search of cider. It was melon season, a time when it seemed all the melon, squash, and gourd crops in the world decided to ripen in the fields on the same day. All the adults would be in a dither until every edible orb was brought in out of the heat and stored in the beds of straw in the cool earthen bunkers. That meant the name of every able bodied villager that wasn’t on essential duty was put on the harvesting rosters.
Cheobawn sighed. The only good thing about harvest duty was you got out of the dome. Otherwise, it was dirty, dusty, and backbreaking labor.
She shoved the last of the bun into her mouth and washed it down with the cold juice. As she put her dishes in the washer, she remembered her dream again. Cheobawn tried to imagine the very worst thing that could come up over the lip of the Escarpment. In her minds eye, she saw a bhotta as large as a dome scrabble up the vertical cliff. She shuddered in horror, having had her own intimate run-in with a bhotta and not wishing to repeat it.
“Brigit?”
“Hmmm?” Brigit said, not looking up, busy with her buns.
“If a thing got it into its mind to climb the Escarpment, it couldn’t. Right?”
Brigit made an odd little sound. Cheobawn looked up. The Mother stood frozen, the half-formed bun in her hands forgotten. This made Cheobawn a little nervous. She tried to distract Brigit with innocent chatter.
“I mean, there would be no way to climb all that way. Why would it want to, right? But if it could, would it be a bad thing? Do monsters live in the Lowlands?” Cheobawn pressed her lips together to get herself to shut up, convinced she had just made the whole thing worse.
Brigit’s gray eyes had gone all strange. Cheobawn knew that look. She was listening hard to the ambient, her face gone pale.
“Brigit?” Cheobawn asked softly, starting to get really worried.
Brigit blinked and looked around, her eyes looking everywhere but at Cheobawn. They settled on the chronometer set in the security console by the door.
“Look at the time!” Brigit said. “Get now. You are late.”
Cheobawn found herself being shoved out the kitchen door, through the vestibule, and out onto the landing. She turned to yell at Brigit but the door had already slammed closed.
Elders. A kid never got a straight answer and then they yelled at you for trying to find things out on your own. Cheobawn snorted in disgust and left, taking the stairs down to the dome floor two at a time. If Brigit did not want to talk to her, she knew someone who would.
Cheobawn went hunting for her Pack. They were not hard to find. Tam had gotten permission to use the main practice room before classes. Most mornings she could count on them being there, working up a sweat, practicing the newest forms, and working through the movements of the old forms to keep them
fresh. She poked her head in the main door but the sparring floor was empty. She went around the side and opened the door into the locker rooms. A cloud of steam and the chatter of happy children greeted her. She grinned and dived into the haze.
“Ch’che!” crowed Megan, spotting her from under the spray of the shower head. “You should have seen it. I put Tam down hard.”
“Yeah,” Alain added, laughing as he dried himself off, “laid him flat. You should have seen his face.”
“She surprised him,” Connor growled from under a large fluffy towel, trying valiantly to defend his truebrother’s bruised honor.
“Can’t blame me. Girls have a lower center of gravity. Hard to get under all that weight and tip them over,” Tam said, grinning at Megan as he ran his fingers through his dark, soapy hair.
Megan squealed and threw a sodden wash cloth at his head. Tam dodged it. Unfortunately that put his head under the stinging spray of his own shower head. Megan used the opportunity to launch herself at him and get him in a head lock.
“Did you just call me fat?” she growled, a look of mock outrage on her face. Tam pretended to struggle.
Cheobawn laughed. Tam was right. Megan wasn’t fat exactly. It was just that, being almost eleven, whatever baby fat she might have had was rearranging itself. In the past year Megan’s long thin body had grown more sleek, yet somehow more curvy. Cheobawn was fascinated by the change and so, it seemed, were the boys. She had caught Tam and Alain staring at the golden haired girl as she walked away on more than a few occasions. Add all that to the fact that she hadn’t been cursed with an affliction of freckles or hair that turned colorless under the onslaught of the sun, like Cheobawn’s, and the result was beautiful to look at. Only Connor was unfazed by Megan’s change. Maybe eleven-year-old boys knew something ten-year-old boys did not. She would have to ask Da about that.
