by J. D. Lakey
“It is not like that,“Menolly protested, a hurt look on her face. Cheobawn felt guilty. She did not like offending Menolly but it could not be helped in this company.
“Menolly,” Mora said, warning in her voice. Cheobawn glanced back at her truemother. This game of question and answer, it seemed, had very specific rules.
The priestess blinked and looked elsewhere for a moment. Then she looked back, her black eyes unfocused.
“What we mean when we say discourage is this,” she said serenely as if she were reciting a passage from The Book of Mysteries. “We trade with the Lowlanders. Nothing special. Nothing that strains the resources of the tribes. Nothing that we cannot do without. They come to trade but only under our terms. It has been made very clear that the trade stops if our rules are broken. As a result, they help us by guarding the base of the cliffs to ensure no one climbs them from below.”
So many questions popped into Cheobawn’s mind. She spoke the first one that occurred to her.
“Why would they agree to that? For worthless objects?” Cheobawn wondered curiously.
Menolly looked confused.
“They covet the things we bring down the cliffs,” Sybille said, her tone making it very clear that she thought little of the intelligence of Lowland traders. “It is worth more to them to stay away and take what we are willing to give than to risk stopping the flow of goods altogether.”
Cheobawn could not imagine anything in the domes worth so much that she would allow it to curb her own natural sense of adventure and curiosity. But then Elders’ brains seemed to work differently, getting all tangled up and emotional about the strangest of things.
“If I lived under the Escarpment, I would probably climb it, no matter what the Elders agreed to,” Cheobawn mused out loud, having just gotten off restriction for a very similar offense. “Patrols cannot be everywhere at once. Surely Packs intent on adventure have tried to climb the cliffs just to see if it were possible.” She looked up at her mothers. “Are the cliffs so deadly, then, that none make it to the top?”
“The magic of the mountain takes care of us,” Brigit said. Amabel snorted, her opinions about magic were well known, the heated arguments between Amabel’s unforgiving logic and Brigit’s vague mysticism a favorite topic in the gossip circles around the village. Brigit ignored her wife and continued. “The forest and all its creatures guard the lip of the Escarpment. In their ignorance, the young and the foolish among the Lowlanders venture into the forest unprepared. Very few come out again.”
Cheobawn thought about what they were telling her and then tried to place it in the context of her dream.
“What do I know so far? You have told me this.” Cheobawn said, thinking out loud. “Lowlanders have come up the Escarpment. Those who are clever enough to evade the patrols and strong enough to survive the climb must then be wise enough not to get eaten. Do you think the truly wise know when to turn around and go home? I think these survivors would be your biggest allies. They would tell frightening tales that would keep the weak-of-heart at bay. It is very clever, your ploy, ruthless but clever. That leaves one question. How many Lowlander Packs have made it as far as the Domes?”
“What makes you think any have succeeded?” Menolly asked curiously.
“With a good Ear, an experienced Pack might go anywhere.”
“They do not …” Brigit said.
“Brigit!” Mora snapped, her voice brittle. Brigit bowed her head, her face flushed. The Mothers exchanged looks. Finally Sybille spoke.
“It has been over a generation since a Lowlander has actually reached the domes,” she said.
“One Pack? What happened to them after that? Did you make them clean sewer filters before you sent them home again?”
“One male. He was given to the Maker of the Living Thread. What remained afterward was given to the mountain,” Amabel said, her eyes glittering with a strangely righteous fire.
Cheobawn felt like she had been punched in the stomach. Trust Amabel to suck all the fun out of a game. She closed her eyes but she did not like the images floating about in her imagination. She did not doubt for a minute the truth behind Amabel’s words. She knew only one Maker but assumed all Makers were the same. Amabel could end a life just as easily as she could create one. The office of the Maker of the Living Thread required a certain level of bloody pragmatism.
Cheobawn looked up into Amabel’s eyes trying not to be sick.
“Male. The Maker took his seed.” Cheobawn said faintly. It was not a question.
“Among other things, yes,” Amabel nodded, pleased that Cheobawn had figured it out.
“So. Do his children live amongst us, then?”
“Ha!” Amabel’s laugh was a harsh bark, as if Cheobawn had told a droll joke. “You know better. Bits and pieces of code, perhaps, to shore up the weak places, to fill in the gaps, and to spice things up. Two thousand years of selective breeding made us good for dome living but not for …”
“Amabel, enough,” Mora’s said, her hard voice crushing whatever Amabel was about to say. “I think this meeting is over. We will send you back to Tam’s Pack, daughter, but first you must return the courtesy. We have answered all your questions. Now answer one for us. What is coming up the Escarpment?”
Cheobawn looked at the faces of the Mothers around her. All she could think to ask was why? Why the secrecy? Why the elaborate ruse that made Fathers lie to Mothers and Mothers lie to Fathers?
They feared something more than an odd Lowlander or two. Cheobawn pressed her lips together, closed her eyes and tried to remember the dream. She remembered so little of it. Just a flash of an image and a feeling. What had she felt there, standing on the lip of the Escarpment?
“There is a great beast, ruthless and hungry, under the clouds. Is it one thing, like the bhotta? Is it a swarm with one mind like the fuzzies? I cannot tell. Once it was restless and without focus.” Cheobawn opened her eyes and looked into Mora’s porcelain-smooth face. The ambient was silent. The Mothers betrayed nothing behind the walls of their minds. “No more. It has its eyes fixed upon the high places. It comes. When? I cannot say. Soon, else I would not have gotten the warning.”
Without access to the ambient she had no way to gauge their reactions to her news. Cheobawn turned her head and met Menolly’s black eyes. The Priestess knew. She could see everything.
Cheobawn did the unthinkable. She dropped all the barriers around her mind and stepped into Menolly’s dark pool, reaching for understanding. A thought formed in her empty mind.
“But you knew this already,” Cheobawn said with curious wonder. “You have been observing it in the ambient for years, watching it grow, feeling its hunger as it tests the limits of your walls. It is the darkness and the shadow that hangs just off the edge of knowing, sucking the color from the world like some great carrion lizard waiting to pick our bones. I wonder that you do not go mad, knowing it is there and being unable to do anything about it.”
Another thought came to her.
“Oh,” Cheobawn said in surprise as the truth suddenly hit her “Wait. I know something else. I have discovered your secret.”
Brigit squeaked and covered her mouth with her hands. Mora ignored her and all else in the room except for Cheobawn. Her eyes glittered as she watched her truedaughter intently.
“What secret might that be?” she asked, her face betraying nothing.
“I know a thing or two about having a psi gift. A gift goes where your mind takes it. Focus is everything. You know about the Lowlanders but you dare not tell anyone. It is a danger that would surpass all other dangers. The other Mothers would go blind, their psi abilities co-opted by the ultimate danger, unable to deal with the mundane threats of ordinary life. Death would once more begin to take us and the Ears would be helpless to stop it. That is why the maps are empty. That is why the words are forbidden. You dare not utter them for fear of making the vague and distant threat concrete, real, and immediate.”
Cheobawn wa
tched their faces as she spoke. The muscles around Mora’s eyes relaxed just a fraction. She had hit a mark but this was not the secret they feared most. The game was not yet over.
“Yes?” Mora said coldly. “If that were true, then you will not be able repeat any of what we say outside of this room for fear that you will doom the other Mothers to this horrible fate you so succinctly describe. Therefore, because you love Tam’s Pack and terrible secrets have a way of destroying their keepers, you will not repeat it even to them. Especially to them. Death has a way of finding those who threaten the safety of the domes.”
Cheobawn stared at the First Mother. Was that a threat or a warning? Would she? Could Mora kill tribe members deemed dangerous to the common good? She would be well within her rights as First Mother. There was precedence set down in the early teaching tales. Cheobawn glanced at Sybille and Amabel. Here too, their faces revealed nothing. Cheobawn could very well imagine them as willing conspirators in any cleansing.
Whether fantasy or real, it did not matter. She could not force her mind away from the image of Tam lying passively upon an altar, Sybille’s knife at his throat.
Her mind raced. She had already told her Pack too much. She was such a fool. Why could she not have kept her worries to herself? How did you take back knowledge? How could you erase a memory? Panic made her want to leap up and do something against this threat to her Pack. Her heart began to pound as her brain turned fuzzy. Cheobawn fought for control. Forcing herself to breath deep and slow, it still took her a few moments to regain her calm.
There were so many more questions. One in particular. Why? Why the elaborate game? Were they testing her for some reason? Again, why? Nothing about this meeting made sense. Frustration and rage threatened the fragile construct of knowledge taking shape in her mind. The Mothers had tied her up with ropes made of half truths. There was something she was missing, something that taunted her just off the edge her understanding that the Mothers did not want her to know. If she kept swimming in Menolly’s ambient would she stumble on the secret they most wanted to keep from her?
The ominous feeling in the pit of her stomach came back stronger than ever. Her dream needed an answer. Cheobawn looked up to ask another question but the room was empty, the door open. The game was over.
“But wait,” she called softly, to ears that could not hear her any longer. “Why tell me any of this? Would it not have been better to keep your silence and keep me ignorant? What purpose did it serve, handing me the key to the puzzle and then telling me I cannot use it?” The room did not answer her. “I mean, really,” she protested, outraged, “how hard would it have been to tell me to shut up and mind my own business?”
Chapter Eight
A dull ache settled behind her eyes. Talking to the Coven caused that. She needed to find her Pack.
Cheobawn tried to go outside the way she had come. The door to the lab was locked. She turned and found her way down the maze of corridors until she found the reception area. The apprentice behind the desk looked up in surprise.
“I didn’t know you were here. Were you looking for someone?”
“No,” Cheobawn said grumpily but then she thought of something. “Well, yes. Did you see which way Mora went?”
“Huh? Why would the First Mother come here? She has been closeted with the Council since late morning. You should go over to the Temple to wait. Maybe you will catch her on her way down to evening meal.”
Secrets. Cheobawn felt as if she was drowning, in over her head, in a pool of Mora’s lies. Was reality so malleable? Could her Mothers make the meeting in the birthing room as if it had never happened?
Her confusion now total and complete, Cheobawn left, to trudge across the compound towards the North Gate. By the time she reached the equipment shed, she still did not know what to think.
Her Pack was right where she left them. Megan had assembled a second wing and attached them both to a central pivot joint. The boys had their heads stuck inside the workings of a dismantled electric cart speaking a strange language made up of words that seemed like white noise to her brain.
Cheobawn felt as if she was looking at them through a wall. It was a wall the Mothers had built to keep her out of the Pack, to keep her alone and isolated. Suddenly exhaustion overtook her mind. She could not find the heart nor the strength to scale all the obstacles the Mothers had thrown in her way. She tried to speak but only found silence, so she said nothing. Instead, she crouched down where she stood, wrapped her arms around her knees, and tried to not to think.
She let her eyes wander out over the melon fields. The afternoon shift was on their way in. The evening shift met them on the edge of the fields, claiming carts and cutting knives from the dust-coated Packs. There was an exchange of greetings and broad smiles that broke the crusted shell of dust and sweat around the eyes and mouths of the workers made anonymous by their uniform of dirt. Laughter drifted to her over the fields.
The scene of communal solidarity comforted her. It was all so familiar and ordinary. Mora loathed the mundane and made it very clear that normal and ordinary was never going to be down any path she chose for her own daughter. Was the world full of walls like this for the other children? Or was it just Cheobawn’s burden? Was Amabel right? Did she go out hunting trouble just to annoy Mora?
Cheobawn looked up at the blue sky. The sun was out of zenith and on its way towards sunset. There was no breeze yet. That would come more towards dusk. A skyhunter circled off in the distance, a dark speck against the brilliant whiteness of the snow-covered Dragons Spine. Idyllic, until you realize the skyhunter waited for the bhottas to wake and start their run down the mountain, setting the wildlife in motion as it caught up all the little unwary things who - after evading a mountain full of minor predators all day - fell victim to the largest, seduced out of hiding by the promise of safety.
Cheobawn felt like one of those little den dwelling creatures; minding the details of its ordinary life only to get caught up, its mind ensnared in the bhotta’s psychic web, drawn out and swallowed by a juggernaut eating machine.
She crawled towards a particularly inviting dust puddle and sat down in the warm dirt. Lying back, she closed her eyes and thought about being caught in the guts of a thing so big it did not even know it had eaten her.
“What the …” Megan exclaimed in surprise. “When did you get back? Why didn’t you say something? We have been waiting for you.” Megan sounded annoyed. Cheobawn did not open her eyes. “What are you doing?” Megan asked, exasperated with her friend’s silence.
“Waiting to get pooped out,” Cheobawn said from behind her lids.
“Most people visit the flusher to do that,” Connor observed acidly.
“I am not the poop-er. I am the poop-ee.” Cheobawn said serenely.
Perhaps she betrayed too much from around the wall of silence she was building inside her head. Or perhaps Megan knew her too well.
“Ch’che?”
“Hmmm?”
“What happened? Did you have a fight with Amabel?”
“I do not want to talk about it right now, thank you.” Cheobawn said.
“Talk about what?” Tam asked.
“She and Amabel don’t get along,” Megan said.
“Does Amabel get along with anyone?” Alain asked.
“Sybille loves her and Sybille only loves her knives,” Cheobawn said, remembering the tribunal.
“Well, there you go. I always said Amabel’s tongue was as sharp as a knife. Oops, sorry Megan,” Alain said, remembering, too late, who her truemother was.
“No offense taken,” Megan said with a shrug. Her relationship with her truemother was only marginally better than Cheobawn’s with Mora. At least Megan had a natalmother and a nestmother, Cheobawn thought resentfully. She sucked that uncharitable thought back down from where it came. Megan did not deserve her anger.
“You know what I hate?” Cheobawn said randomly, opening her eyes and glaring at the blue sky, as if she had taken of
fense at its intense color. “I hate games with rules that make no sense. They make me angry. They make me not want to play.”
“Does anyone know what she is talking about?” Tam asked casually.
“Not a clue,” Alain said. Tam squatted down to better consider his littlest Ear.
“You know what I do when I don’t like the rules? I change them,” Tam said.
Cheobawn brought her focus out of the infinite sky, blinking hard. She looked into her Alpha’s eyes.
“How?” she asked simply.
“Just because somebody makes up rules doesn’t mean you have to play by them. Figure out where the endgame is then move yourself into position to play it out using your strengths. Everything else will sort itself out without you having to worry about what other people want you to do.”
Cheobawn considered that.
“What if you don’t know what the endgame is yet?” she asked doubtfully.
“Do you go running around the sparring floor looking for opponents?”
“No, you wait, in the center, until they move against you and reveal themselves.”
“I would imagine that strategy works for most things, don’t you?” Tam observed.
Cheobawn sat up and brushed the dust out of her hair.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Not a problem. Are you going to tell us what this is all about now?”
Cheobawn got to her feet and brushed the dust off the seat of her pants.
“We are not going to say the word Lowlander ever again. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to see it in fingersign. I don’t want it to ever pop up on anyone’s study station or comscreen. If we need to refer to Lowlanders or the lowlands or the Escarpment or Meetpoint we will have code words. Something ordinary like melon buzzer or bumbly grub or stalker. Stalker. Orphid’s weasel. I like that.”
“OK, sure. But are you going to tell us why?” Tam asked.
Cheobawn nearly said no. She looked up into Tam’s eyes and opened her mouth, set on denying him the truth. She could not bring herself to hurt him as the Mothers had hurt her.
