by Judith Tarr
While that went on, the rest of the expedition could finally start setting up the next round of digging. Some of the Blackroot men came straggling in to help, hung with amulets and smelling of the smoke they’d bathed in to keep the curses off. There would be more later; Aurochs and Far Passes weren’t hopelessly afraid of the ruined city, either, and they had a great liking for the bolts of cloth and the copper ingots they got in return for digging in the dirt.
There was no way Aisha could get away to visit Blackroot camp until everything was set up for the season. She was supposed to be studying patience.
It helped that she was terribly busy. That morning she was running back from the staff cabins with a load of laundry for washing in the main house when she heard a squawk from inside the barn. It sounded as if someone was getting strangled.
She dropped her basket with no regret at all and went to investigate. What she found was about what she had expected.
Rama had been cleaning stalls: the cart and the fork were in the aisle. He had the invader by the throat. There wasn’t much to see of that one but black robes and veils and a pair of amber-yellow eyes glaring out of them.
Aisha was careful not to laugh. “Rama,” she said. “It’s all right. This is Malia. She’s a friend.”
Rama’s glare was as baleful as Malia’s. He moved so fast that Aisha could barely follow, and stripped out every knife, sword, throwing star, mace, knout, rope, cord, and chain that Malia carried. He even found the coil of copper wire that could be either a garrote or a set of shackles, depending.
“Now she is a friend,” he said.
Malia spoke perfectly decent PanTerran, but she was so mad at him, she spat words in her own language.
He spat back without missing a beat. He had all the tones exactly right, and an intonation that said he was so far superior to her, she didn’t even deserve to slit her own throat in front of him. It was too fast for Aisha to catch more than a handful of words, but it reduced Malia to wide-eyed silence.
Then, sweetly and in Panterran, he said, “That’s better. Next time you try an ambush, make sure the quarry hasn’t heard you coming since you came over the wall.”
“I was practicing,” Malia said.
“Clearly,” he said. “You’re by no means perfect.”
Aisha moved in before they went to war all over again. “Malia, this is Rama. He’s usually much more polite. Rama, please give her back her weapons. I promise she won’t use them against anyone here.”
“Won’t she?” Rama said, but he stood back and let Malia put everything back where it belonged. She never took her eyes off him, even when she had to bend down and slip the smaller armaments into their various pockets.
He never took his eyes off her, either. When she was all put back together he said, “The truly great warrior walks in through the front gate, and no one thinks to question him.”
“I’m a long way from greatness,” she said. “I have to learn how to get there.”
He burst out laughing. Not at her—even Malia could tell that, by the way she stood. He saluted her with a flourish. “Oh, well played! And well met. Someday you’ll be a credit to your upbringing.”
“I don’t think I can say the same about you,” Malia said darkly.
“That’s what everyone always said.” He picked up his fork and went back to his cart.
They were dismissed. He was good at it. Malia kept shooting glances back at him, but when Aisha had her out of there and in the house, helping with the laundry, she wouldn’t talk about him at all.
Aisha didn’t try to push her. When she was ready, she would talk. Meanwhile there was a whole season’s worth of news to catch up on, how Vayel was married and Jana had had her baby and Malia had earned her second sword. Which Aisha had seen. Rama had taken it off her with everything else.
Most of Aisha’s news had Rama in it, which was a problem, but Malia had more than enough to keep them going through the day. Then they had the new crew to talk about, and the tourists, who were about as awful as they usually were. Aisha did not mention the fact that this might be the last season. It wasn’t time for that, yet.
She got permission to eat her dinner with Malia instead of with everybody else. They took it up to the roof, which was empty tonight. There were clouds coming in, promising rain by morning, but the sky to the west was clear.
Malia took off her veils and let the wind blow through her hair. It was cropped into curls, and it was the same color as her eyes. Her face was a much lighter shade of gold.
Before she put on the veils, the sun used to dye her all one color, except for the spray of freckles across her nose. Now she was her natural ivory, with a thin white line of a scar running straight down her cheek: her first rank-mark. The higher she went, the more she would get. She was determined to win all nine.
She looked completely human except for the eyes. There were no whites to them unless she opened them wide. The xenobiologist who came through a few seasons ago had said the natives checked out human to some vanishingly tiny degree—which disappointed him terribly. He had so wanted them to be an example of parallel evolution and not just another interstellar remnant.
Not that anybody had traced the original stock to its source yet, or figured out how it got scattered across several hundred similar worlds. That was an even bigger mystery than the emptying of Nevermore, and much, much older.
Now here was Malia, sitting on the parapet with her legs hanging over, watching the sun go down. “You’ll get more people for your digging this winter,” she said. “That thing you did, blowing the top off the Sleeper’s Rock? The shamans are saying you let the evil out. Some think the whole world is cursed now, but the rest want to make you a goddess for breaking the curse.”
“I don’t want to be a goddess,” Aisha said, “or Pandora, either.”
Malia knew what she meant by that. Malia had as much Earth-style education as Aisha did, what with spending so much time around the house and being there when Jamal hacked the schoolbot so they could jump ahead with assignments. “Grandmother says whatever was in there is out now, and it’s up to the gods which way it will go.”
“Do you believe that?” Aisha asked. “That there was a demon in there?”
“I know what the stories say. That something very old and very dangerous slept inside the Rock. The old ones tried to destroy it before they left, but all they managed to do was knock the spires off the top.”
“They didn’t have nuplastique,” Aisha said. She shivered, and not because the air was cold. “I thought I saw something inside, but whatever it was, it’s buried now. There’s nothing left alive down there.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Malia. “I don’t like the thought of some thing stalking the earth.”
“Do you have an idea what it’s supposed to be?” Aisha asked. “Like a dragon or a demon? Or some kind of prehistoric monster?”
Malia spread her hands. “Nobody ever really says. Just that it’s terribly powerful and terribly dangerous, and it’s supposed to wake and either destroy the world or save it.”
“Maybe it already did,” said Aisha. “Maybe that’s what caused the Disappearance.”
“Grandmother says no,” Malia said. “That’s why we stayed behind. Waiting for it.”
“What will you do if it comes?”
Malia swung her legs over and stood up on the roof. “That’s a Mystery. I’m not even supposed to know as much as I do, while I’m still barely a fledgling, and only one rank-mark to fly with. If anybody finds out I told you…”
Aisha nodded and set her lips together. That was their signal. Silence till death, it meant. “Stay here tonight,” she said. “We’ll help mark out the new dig in the morning. Mother wants to see if she can find where the ordinary people used to live. That’s more interesting than temples and palaces, she says.”
“Your mother is odd,” Malia said, but she smiled. Malia was very fond of Aisha’s mother.
She stayed the night, cur
ling up in Aisha’s bed and sleeping soundly all night long. Aisha kept waking up. She had dreams of monsters stalking the city, and a dragon flaming from the top of the broken cliff.
They were just dreams. Even in the middle of them she knew there were no dragons on Nevermore—though there might be demons. Demons were everywhere.
The last time she woke up, she remembered what Rama had told her. She filled her mind with the sun. Then finally she could sleep until morning.
12
The day before the tourists finally left to torment some other helpless planet, they went to visit Blackroot camp. It was a village really, with stone houses that people lived in from year to year, and fields and orchards where they planted winter crops and harvested fruit. They hunted for the meat they ate, but they had a kind of oxen to pull their wagons, and something like sheep that gave them wool and milk.
It always disappointed offworlders to discover that the simple primitives lived very well, and weren’t totally ignorant, either. Still, they were exotic, especially the blackrobes who moved around the edges and kept watch over everybody else. They were entertaining enough to keep the tourists satisfied.
Vikram led the tour this year. They rode on horses as always, which got rid of the worst idiots right there. Some of the staff went along with the pack string, taking gifts and trade goods to the tribe and riding herd on tourists.
One of them was Rama. He rode Lilith, and for the most part he kept to the rear. Aisha had seen how totally he could charm anybody he had a mind to, but today his mood was strange. He hardly talked to anyone, and he didn’t smile. That wasn’t like him at all.
Aisha went because she wanted to visit her friends in the village, and because Vikram needed all the help he could get. Blackroot people were used to tourists; they weren’t likely to take offense at anything any of them said or tried to do. But it made sense to have plenty of backup, just in case.
Rama might be backup, or he might be trouble. Aisha wasn’t sure which. He and Malia hadn’t met again, and that felt deliberate on both sides. If anyone had asked Aisha, she would have said he shouldn’t be here.
But he was, and so far he hadn’t said or done anything difficult. He kept the stragglers from getting lost, made sure girths and bridles were adjusted properly, and glared down the idiots who wanted to race off after a herd of antelope. They were on the slowest and pluggiest horses, but that wouldn’t have stopped them. Rama’s look of ice-cold murder did.
The straight route to the camp only took about an hour. They took the long way, which used up most of the morning. By then the tourists who weren’t saddle-sore were tired enough to be mostly quiet. In that condition, they were as ready as possible to be guests of Blackroot tribe.
The plain only looked flat from a distance. Up close, it was a landscape of long rolling hills and sudden hollows, crisscrossed with streams. Some of the hills had been towns and cities; the grass covered them now, and their walls had tumbled down.
Blackroot camp filled one of the hollows. A stream ran through it. The hill that rose up over it had a tower at the top, which was not nearly as broken as the rest of the things that people had built in this country. The tribe used it for a sentry post, and for keeping track of sun and stars.
When the caravan came into view, all the children came out, singing a welcome. Aisha sang back, and called to people she knew. That was almost everybody; they clapped and danced and swirled around her.
For a while she lost sight of Rama. When she found him again, they were all in the square in the middle of the camp, and he was helping herd horses into the pens at the far end. Aisha had her own herding to do, getting humans to sit down and be quiet.
There was a feast for them, and singing and dancing and mock warfare. The sword dance would come at the end, when all the blackrobes came out of the shadows and showed off their art.
Rama might have preferred to stay with the horses, but Vikram needed him to keep the troublemakers from wandering off. He had to lift one of them bodily and drop him in between Vikram and Sera Lopakhina. Then, one way and another in the crush of people, he ended up beside Aisha.
Food came out in its usual profusion; that concentrated the mind of even the flightiest offworlder. Aisha snared a bowl of bread filled with stewed antelope, but before she could eat more than a bite, Malia slid in beside her.
She opened her mouth for a greeting. Malia said, “Grandmother says come. Bring him.” She tipped her head toward Rama.
Now that was interesting. It was also an honor. Most people, including people who came to study the tribes, thought the chief of the blackrobes was the chief of the tribe. They never paid much attention to the Wisewoman, but she was the real power behind the people.
Blackroot’s Wisewoman was Malia’s twice-great grandmother, though nobody counted the greats; they just called her Grandmother. She was very old, and she had been blind for most of her life. But that meant she saw the important things more clearly.
Usually when Aisha visited her, she was in her house by the stream. Today Malia led Aisha and Rama clear up to the top of the hill.
The grandmother sat at the foot of the tower on the side away from the camp, warming her bones in the sun. She wore no veils, nor had Aisha ever seen her in them, but even through the many wrinkles on her face, one could see the nine thin rank-scars.
She tilted her head at the sound of feet scrambling on the steep slope. Her blank blind eyes turned toward them. Aisha felt the warmth of her smile as it passed over her.
It only lasted an instant, before her whole self fixed on Rama.
She could see him. When Aisha looked in the same way the grandmother looked, he wasn’t a shortish dark man in boots and breeches and a worn red shirt. He was a shape of fire, towering up to heaven.
Aisha blinked hard to make the vision go away. Rama had his alarming moments, but this was terrifying. She made herself see the person she knew, with his long black braid and his white smile.
“So,” the grandmother said to him in Old Language. “It is you.”
He answered in the same language. “You know me?”
“We stayed for you.”
He dropped to one knee in front of her. Half of it was respect. Half, Aisha thought, was that his legs had given way. “You know? You remember? Where did they go? What happened to them?”
She held up her hands to stop his rush of words. He caught hold of them. “Please,” he said.
Rama never pleaded. Hearing him do it now made Aisha’s throat hurt, as if she were holding back tears.
The grandmother’s head shook. Her face was sad. “I can’t tell you. I only know what came down from the first who waited, who stood at the gates of the dark. ‘If you are what we hoped for, you will know how to find us.’”
“If I am…” His breath caught. It sounded like a sob. “And if I am not?”
“Then they are safe from you.”
“It wasn’t fear of me that drove them away.”
“No,” she said. “You were all the hope they had left in this world.”
“Then I’ve failed them,” he said. “I’m several thousand years too late.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe there was a reason it took so long.”
“They’re all gone now. All dead. How could they not be?”
“We still live,” she said.
He had no answer for that. She slipped her hands free of his and ran them over his face.
He held still. There were tears on his cheeks. She paused at that. “Demons don’t weep,” she said.
“I’m a very human monster,” he said.
“We all have that in us,” the grandmother said.
He bowed his head. Her hands came to rest on his hair. “I don’t know where to begin,” he said.
“You will,” said the grandmother.
She seemed sure of that. Rama was not, at all, but for once he had found someone who could face him down.
Aisha didn’t often remember that this wasn’t
really her world. Just then, the feeling was so strong it made her dizzy.
The others were all born here. Rama, too.
Aunt Khalida and Vikram had spent so much time looking for him around the worlds, and trying to track him as if he came from Earth or a world settled by Earth. They hadn’t found anything because there was nothing to find.
Where he came from on Nevermore, or how, Aisha wasn’t ready to think about yet. Because the right word, the one that nobody had thought of because it was impossible, might be when.
She’d gone looking for treasure, and after all she’d found it. But whether it could help her or the expedition, or whether it would, she didn’t know. All she could do was wait and hope.
~~~
Aisha didn’t remember much about the rest of the day. When everybody came back to the city, so late the last of the light was dying from the sky, she went straight to her room.
She was almost too tired to keep her eyes open, but before she went to sleep, she linked in to the house computer. She and Jamal had made a back door for the two of them, with a password that let them in.
There were the files Aunt Khalida had saved because they were so outstandingly useless: the genetic analysis of the person called Rama, and various data related to it. Aisha stared at them for a long time, till she stopped trying to make them make sense. Then she knew what they meant.
Her world had tipped over. Malia had grown up with stories that her grandmother thought were finally coming true. Aisha hadn’t even known they existed.
And it was her fault.
In the end she made the only decision she could make: to carry on the way she had been doing. Rama was still Rama, or whatever his name really was. He hadn’t changed just because she knew more about him.
She was going to learn the rest of it. She promised herself that as she slipped out of the link. It might not solve Nevermore’s greatest mystery, but there was a whole world’s worth of stories apart from that. Those were the ones she would find. Then the expedition would have to stay, because it finally had something to show Centrum.
