Staré: Shikari Book Two

by Alma T. C. Boykin

  He just called Mr. De Groet nosy and old, Rigi giggled inside. She couldn’t really dispute the first adjective, and so she nodded. Uncle Eb nodded as well, and Tomás said, “We agree, sir.”

  “Thank you. This way.” Tortuh walked beside the mats, Rigi noticed. She felt the mats’ texture even through the sturdy soles of her wet-weather shoes, and guessed that Staré hind-claws and thick, looped weaves didn’t work well together. Lexi also walked on the side, next to Uncle Eb, while Makana came along behind Rigi. The stones of the courtyard had been laid in a swirl centered on the middle of the square, with darker and lighter leaf-brown and gold bands alternating into a red-brown core that glistened in the light rain a bit like fresh hunter lizard blood. The dark brown mats cut directly across the center of the pattern, hiding whatever design might be there. No one spoke, and Rigi heard a few bird chirps and whistles, Staré claws on stone, something that reminded her of a piping-lizard’s call, and the not-sound of the light drizzling rain. She soaked in the sounds and the muted palate of the misty morning, grey, blue, dark green, and brown. Makana, normally positively allergic to being damp, made no protest about the walk.

  A pair of metal rimmed doors ahead of them opened. Uncle Eb asked Lexi something, Lexi made what Rigi took to be a shrug of some sort, and they slowed their steps before following Tortuh through the door. Each human paused to wipe their shoes, and the Staré tidied their hind feet on a built-in mat to the side of the doorway. Uncle Eb strode forward two paces, then stopped dead, jaw agape as he took in the room. Rigi caught up with him and stared, while Tomás whistled under his breath. Tomás hissed, “Was this what the temple looked like, once upon a time?”

  Rigi whispered, “If not, it must have been close.” Her fingers twitched, longing to draw the parades of animals, plants, Staré, and odd Staré-leaper hybrids. The colors! She coveted the deep blues and brilliant crimsons, and wondered just how they had gotten that shade of green. But their guide did not stop, and Rigi and Tomás gently bumped Uncle Eb, reminding him to breathe and encouraging him to move. Rigi glanced at Makana. He seemed distressed, almost weeping. “Are you well?”

  “One is told of such places, Wise One, but one never sees them, and comes to believe them perhaps hopling tales,” he murmured, surrounded by //awe/fear.//

  “Would that we remembered the meanings,” Lexi said, so quietly that Rigi was not certain he’d truly spoken.

  But if this place existed, and the first Stamm knew of it, why had no one spoken when the word of the discovery of the Stela Site broke? Why had they claimed ignorance of the site? Then Rigi wanted to hit herself on the forehead for not thinking before asking. The Elders said nothing because they literally did not know, and the Staré from lower third Stamm and below could not extrapolate in that way. The Elders had not personally known of the sites, and so had been completely honest, but neither had they volunteered information. And she could easily imagine someone like Mr. De Groet or the late Dr. Sanchez pestering the Staré for information if the Elders had spoken, and someone like a Mrs. D trying to force her way inside Staré places to record and preserve them.

  Another door opened and the group walked into a well-lit, plainly furnished room with a number of long tables, some covered in what seemed to be leather or thick cloth pads. Rough-finished pottery jars sat in the corners, beside small boxes that gave off heat. The room felt drier than the painted chamber, and Rigi ventured to peer into the jar closest to her. Empty, but she saw a little flame inside the box built into the wall. Did the jars hold water to put out the fires if something went wrong, or at the end of the day?

  “That is the most ingenious humidity control system I’ve seen,” Uncle Eb said, answering Tomás, or so Rigi guessed. “Water evaporates from the jars during the dry, while the small fires dry the air during the wet.”

  “And it requires no outside power, and makes no mark for anyone running a scan,” Kor’s voice said. They turned and watched as he pushed a small cart with rolls of something in it. “The line between curious and stupid can be thinner than a pouchling’s birth fur.”

  “Indeed.” Uncle Eb stayed back, watching as Kor selected one of the rolls and spread it across the table. He used four polished stones to hold the ends down.

  Kor gestured. “Wise One, Hunter, you have seen this.”

  Rigi and Tomás took one glance and nodded. Tomás spoke. “Yes, sir, we have. The map of some of the spirit villages.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?” Uncle Eb pouted, then looked offended. “I’m crushed.”

  “We couldn’t find you to tell you, sir,” Rigi reminded him. “You’d gone off to pester a friend.”

  Lexi nudged Uncle Eb, adding, “We were a touch busy, as you might recall, and such old materials likely do not fare well when exposed to atmospheres composed of concentrated stupidity.”

  “Indeed. Some people can leach the accumulated wisdom of millennia out of the galaxy without absorbing the least micro-molecule themselves,” Uncle Eb stated. Makana looked from Staré to human and back. Kor’s ears twitched and Rigi caught a faint whiff of //amusement. //

  Rigi passed behind Tomás and made the Staré gesture for pointing. “Sir, is that where the Bataria Archipelago is?”

  “We now believe it to be so,” a new, female voice stated in heavily accented Common. Lexi, Kor, and the humans full-bowed to a very old female, her ears almost pure white. Two younger Staré walked on either side of her, helping steady and half-carry her, and she wore a brilliantly decorated crimson and emerald apron and vest set that made the other Staré’s aprons look positively drab. Makana appeared about to faint or otherwise fall over onto his nose, swaying a little in the deepest full bow Rigi had seen and almost gusting //awe/fear/respect.// “Please stand, young one. I am old and I no longer eat hoplings for the sun-peak meal.” Rigi translated that to mean she no longer ate children for lunch. Makana snapped upright so fast he almost fell over backwards. Lexi and Uncle Eb made the gesture that served Staré for rolled eyes.

  Behind them, they heard Tortuh say, “In truth, the Elders could not see the pattern until the Wise Eye revealed it to us.”

  Rigi blushed. The female peered at her. “You shift colors?” The Elder sniffed, then sniffed again, as if confused. “Yet you smell of both human and Staré.”

  “Human faces shift colors when we feel strong emotion, or when we feel unworthy of praise,” Rigi said, picking her words with care. “And I make scents, Honored Elder, not as a Staré does but to show respect.”

  The female released a trickle of //curious/interested.// She waited while Kor rolled the hide drawing and selected another. “This is, we now believe, the Place of Many Islands.” Kor and his twin spread the hide, this one less well preserved, and the humans drew near. “Is it?”

  Rigi and the others studied the patterns and shapes. “The general outline is correct, allowing for erosion,” Tomás ventured.

  Uncle Eb had extended his hand without looking. Rigi opened the top of her bag and pulled a hand-held magnifier out, the ancient single-lens on a handle kind. She wondered what would happen if she gave him one of the sticks of oil-pastels that she had forgotten to take out of the bag after the last time she’d done plein-air sketches? She could guess, and so she handed him the magnifier without complaint. He peered at something on the eastern edge of the image, if the directions on the drawing were the same as how humans thought of them. “Hmm, that’s… right, if that’s the track of a river, and the central channel has not shifted, meaning that the underlying geology controls…” His voice trailed off. Lexi joined him, brown nose almost touching the old hide, head tipped sideways so one eye had a better view.

  “Rigi, what do you know about the Bataria?” Tomás asked.

  “The entire group is off-limits, even more so than the Indria Plateau, because of the bird-life.” She thought for a moment. “Ah, it has over ten thousand islands or less than fifty, depending on how you count them, there are some odd pockets of fresh water that bubble up betwee
n the islands, um, the storms can be quite spectacular because of the warm waters and the lack of a landmass, the bird-life is considered the finest on Shikhari and possibly on any of the later colony worlds, and, there was that mammal thing.” She ought to remember. “Something about the mammals.”

  “It has them.” Uncle Eb straightened up, as did Lexi. When he stood straight instead of his usual stoop, Uncle Eb didn’t look quite the like the eccentric academic-type Rigi had thought she knew. “The naturalists have at least a dozen theories as to why the archipelago is so rich in mammals, including placentals. And genetic tests suggest that many of the mammals are dwarf-versions of things like leapers and the spotted not-a-cat.”

  “Grigson’s marmoline,” Lexi supplied in Common. He flipped back to Staré, “Or the not-dead eater.”

  “That one, yes.”

  Rigi rubbed under her nose. “Under stress, mammals on Home shrank and the reptiles got bigger. Ah, could that happen here, sir?”

  “Over what period of time?”

  Tomás spoke. “A few thousand years at most, let’s say two, and assume that this is a copy of a copy of a copy. An excellent copy, but still a copy. That would explain some of the differences, as would tectonic subsidence.” The last four words came slowly, reluctantly. “I do not like the pattern.”

  “Nor do I,” Uncle Eb said. His shoulders rose and fell. “We, as of the last briefing, have only now developed systems capable of generating the amount of power necessary for an energy strike able to punch holes in rock, and I do not know how deep those go. Need to know.”

  “Kinetic, sir, not energy. Think of the lake south of us,” Tomás corrected. “What if someone were to drill for cores in the archipelago, at the places with the greatest gaps between major islands? Shock residue?”

  The Elder gestured with her left forefoot and ears. “The oldest of old accounts of the end of the First World, the ones that make little pattern, are of a storm of stones and lightning that crossed the land, destroying the cities and leaving everything else untouched.” She rustled a little and rubbed the base of one ear with her right forefoot. “One, called ‘Stamme Dreaming’ speaks of a red and white and yellow storm on the western sky, over the sea, and a wind from the west that broke trees and blew the First Ones away from the water, rolling and tumbling them and all creatures far inland.”

  As the Elder spoke, Tomás and Uncle Eb grew pale. Rigi shivered, scared because they were scared. Tomás reached over and put his arm on her shoulders as he had once before, five years ago. It wasn’t exactly proper, but she didn’t mind. They were cousins, after all. The men exchanged a look over her head. At last Uncle Eb licked his lips. “And you say that you, the Staré Elders, are concerned about a return of the birds of warning?”

  Kor answered. “Yes. The Staré of Indria, for all that they lack civilization and manners, hold to a version of the story of the First World that describes the birds as spirits, and that includes a figure who warned them to flee the evil and corrupt cities, never to return, lest the spirits strike once more.” That sounded familiar to Rigi, and she nodded. Kor continued, “They also state that the spirits would know that Staré have forgotten the lessons of the First World’s destruction when voices and faces appear in distant lands, passing through the very air.”

  “When technology reached a point that you reinvented wireless communications and radio,” Uncle Eb’s voice sounded flat. “And we’ve been broadcasting only the Hunter knows what, practically screaming ‘Hello, we’re here.’ Oh—” Rigi put her hands over her ears so he could say something appropriate. So did Lexi, who winked.

  When Uncle Eb’s lips stopped moving, Rigi lowered her hands. Tomás took his arm off her shoulder. “That assumes that someone or something out there,” he waved toward the ceiling, “actually launched an attack on Shikhari, and that it was not a natural occurrence like an asteroid swarm. And that a hunter-lizard would stay still long enough for you to paint that many words on its flank.”

  “An experiment I shall observe with great interest and from a greater distance away,” Lexi said. Kor had crossed his forelegs and he twitched his ears with amusement.

  The Elder twitched her ears as well. “How many languages do you speak, Warder Trent?”

  Uncle Eb glanced at Tomás and Rigi, hesitating. “Only ten fluently, ma’am. One collects phrases and choice terms from others over time, if one travels to new places.” Rigi guessed that those choice terms and phrases did not describe food or art techniques, if the care with which Uncle Eb selected his words told the truth. And the way he scuffed the floor with one foot, like the boys at school had when they got caught being naughty. “But to answer you first question, yes, ma’am, I believe that this is the place we humans now call the Bataria Archipelago, which means a place of many islands.”

  “Which makes it, perhaps honored Elder, the lost land of the scent-song,” Tortuh said. He sounded a bit, was it smug?

  “Perhaps.” She seemed reluctant to grant more than the possibility. Had the two been disagreeing over the possibility? “And it is time to discuss other matters.” She backed away, with the help of her aids, and Kor rolled the map and put it back in with the rolls in the cart. “And I am weary.” With that she turned and left, the others bowing as she departed.

  “It is rare that Theesahkahmala leaves the Place of Healing,” Tortuh observed after the doors closed behind the Elder. “She counts over a hundred-ten wet seasons to her time. Her sire first greeted the human you call De Haan.” Before any of the humans spoke, he continued in Staré, “Almost as rare as my brother visiting civilization.”

  Kor drew himself upright, then rose onto the fronts of his forefeet so that his ears almost brushed the ceiling. “Not all of us are prepared to endure the gut-clawing and pelt-gnawing of the Council in exchange for clear scents. I am called to hunt and watch.”

  //Peace/calm//and perhaps a touch of //humor// wafted from Tortuh and he said, “Be at ease.”

  “And if Kor had not taught Tomás how to see with the hunter’s eye, he could not have found the first of the spirit villages, and Mr. Trent and I would not have seen them either.” Rigi defended Kor. “And he taught me how to follow the animals and to see them truly, as hunter and artist both.”

  “In truth?” Tortuh smelled surprised.

  “In truth,” Rigi averred. Kor settled back onto his haunches.

  “This was not known.”

  The tip of Kor’s tongue flipped out, then disappeared. Have the Staré picked up sibling spats from humans, or is it a universal mammalian trait, Rigi wondered. And how could Kor be both first Stamm and outStamm? Rigi kept her question to herself. It didn’t seem like one of those things one asked of friends and associates—a bit like asking a woman at a social function if she knew how wide a garment made her posterior look.

  The rest of the visit seemed almost dull compared to the painted room and the maps, at least to Rigi. Kor showed them a garden with several flowers that Rigi had not seen before, and granted permission for her to sketch them. This fascinated the Staré, who watched closely as the flowers appeared on her pad, complete with water drops and shadings for lighter or darker. On a whim, after she finished one of the flowers, she did a quick drawing of Tortuh’s ears. He studied the page, reached up and felt the tip of one ear, then looked again. “I see but do not understand.”

  “You see the Wise Eye,” Kor reminded him.

  “And much work and practice, honored Elder,” Rigi admitted.

  That generated a great deal of discussion and puffing of scents that forced Rigi and the other humans to move upwind. She was glad she hadn’t sketched indoors! One of the scents burned her sinuses just like that icky rotten-meat plant did, the one that had a gooey sap that stuck to everything and refused to wash off.

  Uncle Eb appeared as interested in the plants as she was, and he and Lexi wandered off into the bushes—literally for once—identifying things. Kor and Tomás seemed deep in conversation, and Rigi followed the littl
e grassy path to a beautiful white and cream trumpet-like flowering vine that had been trained up a narrow pillar of stone. Rigi drew quickly because the rain seemed to be increasing again. Makana came and stood beside her, silent and scentless, watching. She didn’t mind his presence and shut him out of her awareness, concentrating on the tiny ribs on the flower and how they blended into the rounded lobes of the base and stem. The leaves reminded her of fronds rather than the usual leaves and she leaned forward and blew a little air onto one set. The fluttered open, as she’d suspected, a bit like gills, and she corrected her drawing, making a note to the side about how they grew paler toward the stem. Then she did a drawing of the stone pillar. As before, she let her hand and eye work without trying to process too much, and a faint, age-worn set of carvings appeared in the sketch, perhaps a bit like those on the name stone at the Stela Site, but not exactly.

  She smelled //satisfaction.// “Now I understand.” Makana hand-bowed and left her to her work. She kept drawing until the rain chased her under a shade roof of some kind, and the others joined her.

  “I will show you to the gate,” Tortuh informed them. No one argued, and after a quick exchange, Kor left Tomás and went back inside the building. Tortuh led them through a different courtyard, this one with a fountain on the wall and tiles in brilliant yellow-orange and purple colors that made Rigi wince. She hoped they didn’t look as bad to the Staré as they did to her.

  Once outside the main gates, Tomás took his leave. “My commander was willing to let me come, but I have a great deal of work waiting for me. I’ve been temporarily assigned to work with Corporate Security on the report about the incidents.” He wrinkled his nose. “I wish someone had caught Smargad killing the farm workers. It would have saved so much paperwork.”

  “He killed them?” Rigi had not heard.

  “No, not directly. One of his activists murdered them when the trio refused to cooperate after they caught the young fool tampering with a crop-packing building.” Uncle Eb snarled. “The gullible git confessed to Corporate Security after Smargad’s death. He still can’t believe that Smargad used him and the others.”