Bones of the Past (Arhel)

by Holly Lisle

  “Quiet,” someone whispered. A boy’s voice.

  There aren’t any boys here, she thought. She swung her legs up at him and kicked him in the face. He grunted, then pressed harder on her mouth. She bit him, and he yelped and swore and jerked his hand away.

  “Damn, damn, damn-all! That hurt. I didn’t hurt you. I just told you to be quiet.” He managed to bring his voice down to a whisper. “You new ones are always the same—and now the rest of them are awake. I hate it when they’re awake.”

  His hand was away from her mouth, and he hadn’t actually hurt her. She whispered, “What do you want? Who are you?”

  “I’m Leth. I live here.”

  She could make out few details about him in the darkness. He was a tall boy, very thin, with hair as long as hers had been before the keyunu cut it off. So he had been sharsha a long time.

  A female voice asked, “What’s going on?”

  A much younger voice said, “Someone’s here.”

  “It’s only me,” Leth said. “Go back to sleep.”

  The darkness rustled with girls shifting, the new sharsha asking questions, the older girls reassuring them. “Leth is sharsha,” one said. “Just like us. He’s supposed to be here, so you can go back to sleep. Everything is fine.”

  The sharsha nest settled down. When it was quiet again, Choufa asked Leth, “Why did you wake me up?”

  He was silent a long time. Finally he told her, “I had to. I have—um, things I have to do—or, um, the Silk People will feed me to the Keyu. I don’t want to die.”

  “No,” Choufa said. “Me neither.” She sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. “What kind of things?”

  She could see the boy lower his head. “Bad things,” he whispered. He fell silent again, but Choufa waited. After long, uncomfortable minutes, he added, “I have to put babies in the girls’ bellies.”

  Choufa didn’t like the sound of that. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want babies in their belly, and she was certain she didn’t want one in hers. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “Um—” He crouched and rocked back and forth, slowly. “No… not really. Well,” he amended, “maybe the first time, a little. But after the first time, the girls seem to like it—and it feels good to me. I guess the babies are really little. They get bigger after they’re in there a while.”

  “You have to put a baby in my belly?” Choufa eyed him warily. “How will it get out?”

  “I have to. The boy who was here before me stopped doing what the keyunu told him to do. They fed him to the Keyu and made me watch.” Leth shrugged. “I don’t know how the babies get out, though. The keyunu know when they’re ready. I guess the trees tell them. The keyunu come and get the girls, and most of the time the girls don’t come back. After the babies come out, the keyunu say the girls get to be keyunu. The Keyu forgive them and give them names.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Do you believe anything the keyunu say?” The boy snorted softly. “But I know they come and get the girls who are here a long time and don’t get babies in their bellies. They feed them to the trees on Naming Days. They always tell us about it.”

  “Oh.” Choufa thought about that. She looked at Leth, who crouched beside her. “I guess you’d better put a baby in my belly.”

  Leth seemed uncertain. “Are you going to bite me again?”

  “No.”

  “Not even if it hurts?”

  “Will it hurt as bad as when the keyunu stuck their needles in me?”

  Leth hissed, a quick intake of breath through his teeth. “Nothing like that.”

  “Then I won’t bite you.”

  Afterwards, Choufa stretched out on her stomach on the mat, eyes searching the shapes of the darkness. She was sore, but not terribly so. She felt odd, but thought the feeling would pass. She wondered, laying there in the darkness, if she had a baby in her belly. She wondered about a lot of things.

  * * *

  Roba and Kirgen put the finishing touches on their report only a few minutes before Thirk arrived. When he came bounding into Roba’s office, gold bands in his beard and hair clacking against each other, the two of them were on opposite sides of the room, innocently rummaging through manuscripts.

  “Well?” Thirk asked, looking from Roba to Kirgen and back. “What did you need me for? I just got your message.”

  Roba grinned. “I’ve got your paper, and your theory.”

  Thirk looked startled. “You’re early. I wasn’t expecting that paper for several days—” He took the stack of dull green drypress she offered and flipped quickly through the pages. “This is original research? Not just a rehash of somebody else’s work.”

  “It’s a completely new theory,” Roba assured him. “I guarantee it. I enlisted my assistant, and the two of us have spent every free minute putting this together.” She laughed. “I’m so far behind on my classwork right now, my students are going to start rioting. But you’ll have plenty of time to go over this and verify our work before the next Society meeting.”

  Thirk’s face went gray. His eyes darted to Kirgen, then fixed on Roba. “That’s a secret,” he hissed.

  “He wants to join,” Roba said. “He believes in the cause.”

  Thirk looked dumbfounded. He stared at the graduate student, and his expression indicated he wouldn’t have been more surprised if Kirgen had sprouted wings and flown out of the office. “You’re joking.”

  “I want to join,” Kirgen seconded from his place in the corner of the office. “I want to be a part of the great things I think will be happening in Ariss. I think the Delmuirie Society has important things to do and say. I believe there are changes that must be made, and I believe the Delmuirie Society is the group to make those changes.”

  “Funny, but I don’t remember you having any great love for Delmuirie back in your undergrad days,” Thirk said. He watched Kirgen suspiciously. “As a matter of fact, I remember you being deeply involved in a few incidents in my classroom—”

  “I’ve grown up since then,” Kirgen assured him. He stroked the downy fuzz of his saje beard with contemplative seriousness.

  Roba would have laughed had she dared. Instead, she dropped her gaze to the clutter of junk on her desk top and pretended to be looking at something important.

  “Well and good, then, young Kirgen,” Thirk said at last. “If Roba Morgasdotte will vouch for your behavior, I’ll see that you become a member.”

  Roba kept her eyes fixed on her desk and said, “He’s as dedicated to the cause as I am, Thirk. I promise and swear it.”

  Thirk smiled then, a broad, happy smile. “I’m going to go to my office and look over this. In the meantime—Roba, do you feel that you still need an assistant?”

  “Desperately,” Roba said, looking up into Thirk’s eyes and attempting to project heartfelt sincerity.

  Thirk was still thumbing through the presentation. “Hmmm. I suppose so. It looks like the two of you have put a great deal of time into this. I see things in here I’ve never seen before.” He looked up and nodded. “Kirgen, you want a permanent position as Roba’s assistant?—it would help fund your graduate classes.”

  Kirgen studied the ceiling with a thoughtful expression. “Well, yes, sir. A job like this would mean a great deal to me. Especially once I get to my independent study.”

  “Then it’s yours.” He smiled a fatherly smile at Kirgen, bowed slightly to Roba, and swept out of the office at a stately pace, with the new Delmuirie Disappearance theory clutched in his hands.

  Kirgen kept silent only an instant. Then he said, “I’ll bet he started to run as soon as he stepped out the door.”

  “No—”

  “Let’s look.”

  Both of them peeked out the doorway. Roba stared down the hall, then started to chuckle. Thirk was indeed running, the skirts of his robe flying, braids swinging wildly—he was the antithesis of dignity.

  “You owe me,” Kirgen said, as Thirk vanished into his off
ice like a snake down a hole.

  “I never bet you.”

  Kirgen slipped up behind her and nibbled gently at the base of her neck. “Yes you did. And I want to collect.”

  Roba shivered, then gently pushed Kirgen away. “I don’t doubt it. But I have a class on mage/saje comparative history, and after that the Evolution of Magical Practices lab. Then I have all those tests and reports to grade—” She waved glumly at three giant stacks of drypress. “And I’m sure there’s something you’re supposed to be doing, too.”

  He laughed. “I’m sure there is, but I’d rather be with you. If you don’t want to stay and play, though, I suppose I could make an appearance at all those classes I’ve been skipping.”

  Roba sighed and picked up her notes. “Come over to my apartment tonight—will that be soon enough?”

  “I suppose it will have to be.”

  * * *

  The Wen kids had, after considerable debate among themselves, accepted sleeping mats—which they had then unrolled under the eaves in the central garden. They would not sleep in the house, no matter how Nokar and Medwind tried to reason with them. They ignored the rain, and refused to come inside. When Medwind checked on them early the next morning, the rain had stopped again, and they were pacing around the enclosed courtyard, pointing at various plants and flowers—and Medwind’s b’dabba—making quiet comments in their odd, musical language. Kirtha had joined them and was trying diligently to communicate with the little blonde Wen child.

  “You gots no shirt,” Kirtha announced in her high, piping voice.

  The Wen child said something to the bigger girl, who, in Hraddo said, “She no speak you words. You speak Hraddo, I tell she what you say.”

  Medwind watched without calling attention to herself. Kirtha, at two, didn’t know Hraddo any more than she knew whatever language the Wen kids used among themselves. The Hoos woman was interested in seeing how Kirtha would solve the dilemma of not being understood.

  “You gots no shirt,” Kirtha said to the older girl, in loud, firm Arissonese.

  “Talk Hraddo,” the older girl said. “I no talk you words.”

  “I gots shirt.” Kirtha lifted the skirt of her tunic and showed it to both girls. “I gots nice shirt.”

  All three Wen kids conversed, and the older girl shrugged. “I no understand you talk,” she told the child patiently. “You no talk Hraddo, I no talk you talk.”

  “You take my’s shirt,” Kirtha said, and pulled her tunic off over her head and handed it to the older Wen girl. “I gots lots.”

  The Wen girl took the tunic, her eyes wide with surprise. Medwind shared her amazement. Kirtha had never shown any inclination to share—was, in fact, territorial about her possessions to the point of bloodthirstiness.

  The girl looked at the tunic, and after a moment’s thought, put it on the little Wen kid, saying something vehemently at the same time. The blonde girl looked like she might resist, but, after a glare from the older girl, allowed the foreign clothing to be pulled over her head.

  The arms and skirt of the tunic were too short, but the Wen child was terribly thin. It was no tighter on her than it had been on Kirtha, who surveyed the results with evident delight.

  “Pretty. Good shirt,” she announced, and smiled broadly, and hugged the smallest Wen child, who was still a head and a half taller than her, vigorously. Then, without another word, she strode across the garden—her baggy peasant pants tucked into her little boots; her fiery red hair swinging; bare as the day she was born from the waist up.

  Medwind smiled. Kirtha was a constant source of surprises.

  She waited until the little girl had banged through the garden door and stomped down the breezeway to the room she shared with her mother. She waited yet another moment until she heard Faia exclaim, “Kirtha, what did you do with your shirt?!”

  Then Medwind walked out into the garden.

  The Wen kids were instantly on the defensive.

  “She no steal that,” the older girl said, pointing to the little one. “Red-hair girl give her. You want back?”

  “We have more clothes,” Medwind said. “You want for you? I give you shirt, pants.”

  The kids looked at her warily. “Why?” the boy asked.

  “You need. I give you.”

  The two older kids exchanged suspicious glances, and the girl asked, “Why you give?”

  Medwind looked at the three scrawny, half-starved kids and said slowly, “Because you need. You want?”

  “This is trade? You say give, you mean trade, yes? We no trade beck for shirt. We trade food only. Many many food.” The girl crossed her arms over her chest and glared fiercely. The boy, with the First Folk tablet still strapped to his back, hooked his thumbs into the thong that held up his loincloth and nodded his agreement.

  Medwind sighed. “Give. I say give, I mean give,” you suspicious little brats, she added silently. “Come,” she told them, and went into her b’dabba. The kids followed her inside. She knelt and rummaged around in her kit bag, and pulled out two old staarnes and two worn pairs of blue-dyed leather breeches—clothes that had seen better days. “Take these,” she said, and turned.

  The kids weren’t looking at her. They were looking, instead, at the huge assortment of drums hanging from the b’dabba’s bone struts. They took the clothes she offered, but their eyes never left the dangling instruments. All three of them exchanged whispers, and at last the older girl turned to Medwind. “We touch?” she asked.

  So they like drums. “Yes,” the Hoos woman said, and watched as they carefully pulled down several of the smaller drums. They exchanged excited comments, pointing out structural details, trying riffs with their fingers, and cocking their heads to listen to the varied sounds. They finally settled on a shopo, a tunable drum with a musical, carrying sound. Each of them took turns pattering away on it—irregular Wen drumming exactly like the noises that kept Medwind awake at night.

  Let me strike a blow for cultural harmony, she thought. She took the drum away from them, sat cross-legged on a pillow, and said, “No. Play drum this way.” She set up an easy four-beat rhythm with her right hand, then added a six-beat rhythm with her left. The drum sang, and the shifting, melding patterns filled the goat-felt hut. When she finished, she handed the drum to the older girl. “You try like that.”

  The girl stared at her, baffled. “Why? You say nothing. You just make lot noise.”

  It was Medwind’s turn to be bewildered. “What you mean—’say.’ I make music.”

  The older girl made a deprecating noise through pursed lips and sat with the drum. “This drum talk,” she said. “Like this.”

  “Tagnu fnaffigglotim—fnaffigchekta hekpeknu.” She said the words slowly, and drummed an irregular riff.

  Medwind caught her breath. She noted similarities in the pattern of the girl’s speech and her drumming and formed a theory about the Wen drumming. “Do again,” she said.

  “Tagnu fnaffigglotim—fnaffigchekta hekpeknu,” the girl repeated, pronouncing each syllable precisely. Then she drummed again. Each drumbeat mimicked a syllable of the girl’s speech.

  Medwind was stunned. She could hear it clearly—things the girl did with her fingers made the drum seem to talk. The mystery of the rhythmless Wen drum concerts was solved. Medwind had been eavesdropping on long-distance conversations and hadn’t even known.

  “What those words mean?” she asked.

  The girl grinned. “I drum-talk—trade drum with you.”

  “You want drum?”

  The skinny kid nodded vigorously. “I want. I trade. It good drum—loud.”

  “What you trade?” Medwind would have given the kid that drum—it held no particular meaning for her. But she was curious what the kids thought the drum was worth. They had nothing, at least that she had seen, but their First Folk tablet.

  And they had already made it clear they weren’t taking anything but food—and lots of it—for that.

  “I give you shirt,” the
girl said, offering back the staarne Medwind had just given her.

  Medwind just barely kept herself from laughing. The situation was both funny and pitiful. The kids had nothing—absolutely nothing. But they wanted that drum.

  Medwind pretended to consider the offer. “Why you want drum?” she asked.

  “Other tagnu, he have us drum. He fall in river. Dead. Drum gone—we need.”

  Medwind wanted to ask them more about their friend with the drum, but Hraddo simply didn’t allow the complexity of real communication. It was a trade tongue, nothing more.

  She had an idea. “I trade for drum,” she told them. “I make good trade. You teach me drum-talk, I give you drum.”

  The Wen kids stared at her as if she had started frothing at the mouth and howling at the Tide Mother. They huddled, muttering in their rapid-fire speech, looking up at her from time to time. Finally the girl said, “You trade drum for drum-talk. That right?”

  “That right,” Medwind agreed.

  “What you get for drum?”

  Medwind tried to figure out how to explain the value of knowledge in Hraddo and gave up. “I get words,” she told them.

  “That trade you want?”

  “Yes.”

  “We take—you no change trade, understand?”

  Medwind nodded solemnly. “I understand.”

  “We take.” The girl took the drum and handed it to the boy, then shook her head and stared at the Hoos warrior with a worried expression. “You no smart. We get drum. You get nothing.”

  “I get words,” Medwind said. “I need lot words.”

  Both Wen kids were busy putting on the hand-me-down Hoos garb. They didn’t say anything out loud, but their eyes told the Hoos warrior they thought she was out of her mind.

  She smiled at them—a reassuring smile. Let them think she was crazy as long as they would. The words were good—understanding the Wen drum speech would be a wonderful asset. But that was nothing compared to the time she’d bought—time for Nokar or her to find out where that tablet came from.

  That was even better.

  * * *

  Seven-Fingered Fat Girl, swathed in her peknu clothes, fingered the drum the peknu woman had traded her. It didn’t make sense to her that the woman would give her the drum in exchange for words. Nothing that had happened since she walked into the market made sense to her, though.