Bones of the Past (Arhel) Read online

  Seven-Fingered Fat girl was vaguely aware that the tagnu had stopped whispering. The silence from her band echoed her own awe.

  Beneath her, giant stone buildings and the broken remains of buildings sprawled like the bleached bones of monsters. Buried in vines, worn round and smooth by time and weather, they reminded her of the kellinks’ boneyard on an impossible scale—and each whitestone bone carried with it whispers of a long-dead past. Seven-Fingered Fat Girl crouched on the lip of the wall and stared.

  Nearest her, tens of pairs of domes that curved like women’s breasts jutted from the grass, their roofs flat nipples. Beyond, higher up the side of the mountain, the remains of soaring arches and spires and towers stretched broken fingers to the sky. White roads traced patterns through grass and weeds and scrubby brush. There were no people, no animals except the birds and hovies that swooped and soared and fluttered through the clustered ruins. The silent city lay like the broken promise of something wonderful, and Seven-Fingered Fat Girl felt the pang of its breaking.

  Toes Point In asked the question foremost in Fat Girl’s mind. “I wonder who lived there—and who sent them away.”

  Dog Nose was more practical. “I wonder how we can get down there. I don’t see any way in.”

  Fat Girl looked along the wall in both directions. “The people who lived here had to get in and out. We’ll walk along the wall until we find the place they used.”

  “Which way?” Three Scars asked.

  “That way.” Runs Slow pointed left and downslope.

  Toes Point In glared at the younger girl and immediately pointed right and upslope. “That way would be better, I think.”

  Fat Girl gave Toes Point In a hard look and led the tagnu left.

  Seven-Fingered Fat Girl was sure that there would be some simple way to get down off the wall, but after a long hike, she began to believe she was wrong. When the party came to a broken spot where the stones formed another steep talus slope, she was willing to admit there probably were no easier entries. It would be the talus slope or nothing.

  “Wait,” she told her comrades. “I’ll go first to make sure it’s safe.” She crept down the jumble of rock.

  It was farther down than she had guessed—and the buildings were bigger than she had imagined. When she looked back at her band, they were nothing but specks at the top of the wall. They waited for her signal.

  She turned once in a full circle to take in the grandeur of the city, and hugged herself to hold in her growing excitement. There is no one here but us. This could all be ours, she thought. A base—a roof over us at nights, a safe place to keep the jungle beasts away. Maybe a home. It had been a long time since she’d thought of anything in terms of “home.”

  Keeping her excitement to herself, she waved her band down.

  * * *

  The water-drums and slit-gongs outside the temple prayed tree-prayers to the far reaches of the winds. Inside the temple, the Yekou, the attendant-clergy of the Keyu, donned their best and brightest silks. They raced from branch-room to branch-room, pulling out their best ribbons, readying their censers, finding drumsticks and headcloths and good slippers. To Choufa, now twelve cycles old, all this activity was worrisome, because this time, it involved her. Between spurts of finding their things, the priests readied Choufa’s group of temple children for the Tree-Naming ceremony.

  Choufa had allowed the priests to strip her and paint her green and braid flowers in her hair, but only because Doff kept saying she must. This was an important night, Doff repeated—over and over. It was Choufa’s Tree-Naming, when she would cast her baby-name aside and become Keyunu, one of the Tree-People, if the Keyu so declared. Doff, the ancient, skinny Yekoi who was the only mother Choufa had ever known, insisted that this was the day when the Keyu would choose the fates of all their children “for the best.”

  So Choufa, excited and impatient, fidgeted as the bright green paint dried on her skin and started to tighten and crack.

  “It itches,” she whispered to Thasa, her temple-sister.

  “Ya. Looks stupid, too.” Thasa ran her fingers nervously through the alloa blossoms she carried in her clay basket. “Doff told me I had to give this to Great Keyi. She give you something to give Great Keyi, too?”

  “Beads.” Choufa unfurled her clenched fingers long enough for the other girl to get a quick glimpse of shiny reds and blues and yellows.

  “You want to trade?” Thasa asked, eyeing the bright colors.

  Choufa didn’t miss the undertone of envy in the other girl’s voice. Thasa loved pretty things. Like the rest of the temple children, she had so few of them. “Na. I like my—”

  A crop cracked on the backs of Choufa’s legs. “Silence and reverence, ibbi,” snapped the slender priest who had appeared out of nowhere. She lashed Thasa once, too, before she swooped past the girls with her silks fluttering and her ribbons dancing behind her like butterflies in a high wind.

  Choufa was a veteran of the crop across the back of the legs. After twelve cycles with the Yekou, nothing short of a solid beating fazed her anymore. She grinned as that particular Yekoi pranced down the branch to take her place beside the other silk-clad adults. Her Tree-Name was Woman Of Great Grace, but until two years ago, she had been a temple child just like Choufa. Choufa harbored visions of winning her own silk and coming back to this tree in honor—maybe with a name like Most Beautiful One—and thrashing the skin off the backs of Great Grace’s legs.

  Then she glanced over at Thasa out of the corner of her eye. Thasa looked like she was envisioning revenge, too. Choufa nodded in Great Grace’s direction and whispered, “She’s just jealous of us because she has a face like a tree-frog.”

  Thasa grinned. “And a voice like a screeching hovie.”

  “And a temper like a tube-snake,” Choufa elaborated.

  The other temple-child got into the spirit of the game. She whispered with a conspiratorial wink, “And breasts like big, rotten marshmelons.”

  Choufa giggled. She’d just gotten her own breasts, and no one was going to compare them to anything as large as marshmelons. Scrub-apples, maybe. She started laughing and trying to cough to cover up her laughter at the same time.

  Her struggle infected Thasa, who began to sputter and giggle, too. Then Choufa heard, overhead, the insults being quoted down a line of younger temple-children who sprawled along the arching branches, taking everything in. The giggles spread further.

  A sharp command cut the good humor short.

  The Yekou were all in line below, adorning the main branch like a flock of harlequin hovies. Suddenly the senior priest, the Mu-Keyu of the temple, brought his drumsticks high overhead with a loud crack and slammed them down onto his ceremonial drum. He rolled out the rhythms of the first prayer—”Oh, Keyu, We Come to the Naming.”

  Choufa’s stomach churned, and she felt a little shiver of fear. She had seen the first part of this ceremony at regular intervals all her life, sprawled in the upper branches of the temple-tree like the children who watched her at that moment. But now the drum-prayer was for her. “Be serious,” Doff had told her. “Be brave and pure, because the Keyu punish all those who are not serious and brave and pure. Win a good name and a good silk from the Keyu, little Choufa—because after this night, nothing is ever the same again.”

  I’m brave, Choufa thought. I’m not very serious, and I don’t think I’m very pure—but I’m brave. She tried to think serious and pure thoughts as she and Thasa marched behind the Yekou, down the main branch and out into the darkness, onto the first of the connectways that led to the Keyu. She hoped that would be good enough.

  She had never seen the Keyu before. No children saw them. That was the privilege of the Tree-Named, the grown-ups. Doff said they were very frightening; old and huge. Doff said they knew what everyone thought, always. Choufa wished that she could see them for the first time while she wore patterned silk and ribbons, instead of bare skin covered with dry, cracking green paint and garlands of stupid flowers.<
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  She gripped her beads harder. What would Keyu want with beads? she wondered. Or a basket of flower petals? Then she reminded herself not to wonder. The Keyu were not to be questioned, Doff said. The Keyu knew what was best. Choufa concentrated on thinking pure thoughts—or at least what she felt the Keyu would think were pure thoughts, which mostly consisted of promising Great Keyi that she would never again commit the many pranks she routinely inflicted on her fellow temple-waifs. The connectways soared up, dipped down, crossed and meandered, and she concentrated for a while on thinking pure thoughts and not falling off the tree-branch paths. She was conscious of other silk-garbed adults taking places behind her and of other green-painted children walking with them.

  Abruptly the path dropped steeply, all the way to the ground. The drumming grew louder, and the Yekou began to sing. The procession marched across grass, the tree-priests’ closed clay lanterns flickering in the darkness like a necklace of tiny suns; they filed into a huge circle of bare earth surrounded by the ugliest trees Choufa had ever seen.

  The trees squatted like fat old men, glowering in at the Tree-Named who gathered there, and at the ibbiu—the postulants—who came to earn their Tree-Names. In the shadows cast by the lanterns, the hideous trees seemed to shrink, then swell, moving back and forth in their places around the circle. Their leaves were yellow and stunted and sickly looking. Their gnarled branches dipped near the ground and twisted and spread into little fans of diseased-looking twigs, covered by growths and funguses. Thick, shiny white growths spread out from high on the sides of the trunks and trailed down into the grass, glowing faintly.

  Those white things look like whole nests of keyudakkau, Choufa thought, and shuddered, remembering her one sight of the blind white flying serpent the Tree-People held sacred. She had once—only once—spied on the Yekou as they prayed and had seen the snake then. The Yekou were kneeling and chanting in the hollow of the temple tree. The air was white with incense, and the drums throbbed. Choufa had lain on her belly, squeezed under two supporting branches high above them, and watched through a tiny space where the wood of the temple tree had split. The chief priest, the Mu-Keyi, had danced and drummed and shouted in the center of the circle of Yekou. He threw his head back and screeched, spinning and stamping his feet in a manner totally unlike the stuffy behavior he displayed to the rest of the world. The ceremony had fascinated Choufa. When the drums stopped, a streak of white shot through the temple from out of the darkness, and settled on the shoulders of the Mu-Keyi. All the Yekou sighed as this miracle occurred. They whispered that the God trees heard their prayers; that this was a sign. Choufa’s skin had prickled and her stomach had begun to churn. She had not liked the greasy white keyudakkai that coiled over the shoulders of the priest as he drummed and prayed—and she did not like the trees. She shuddered again. The trees felt evil. They felt hungry.

  The drums rumbled away into silence, and the procession halted in the exact center of the tree-circle. Choufa peeked over her shoulder and gasped. Behind her, a long line of people trailed back dear to the connectway. There were, she guessed, at least fifty adults, and perhaps fifteen or twenty more children. She had not had any idea so many others would share her Tree-Naming with her.

  A single drum began again, this one whispering, “Oh, Keyu, we are here—we are here—we are here—oh, Keyu.” To the soft pittering, the Mu-Keyi walked back along the line and separated out the children from the adults. Choufa was finding it much easier to be serious in this grim and frightening place. She did not share any secret smiles with Thasa now. She could not find anything to smile about. In her mind, the conviction that the trees were hungry grew stronger.

  The Mu-Keyi led all the naked, green children to one side of the circle, while the adults spread out along the other side. Choufa wanted, suddenly and completely, to skip the Tree-Naming and go home.

  “Ibbiu—who will from this night forward be ibbiu no more”—the Mu-Keyi intoned—”You are in the presence of the Keyu. Show honor!”

  Doff had drilled her in this part of the ceremony. Along with every other child, she threw herself facedown onto the hard-packed earth. Then she lay there, frozen motionless—too scared even to take a deep breath.

  The chief priest raised his voice and chanted over the heads of the ibbiu at the adults. “You have raised them, you who are named and who know honor in the branches of the God trees. But only Great Keyi knows the worth of the seedlings you bring. If they are strong seedlings who will grow to be a glory to the forest, all will know today. If they are weak, Great Keyi will show us. If they have filled their souls with hidden rot, Great Keyi will make us see it.”

  The chief priest fell silent and let the silence build. The ground felt hard and cold and unforgiving under Choufa’s hands and belly. It pressed against her nose and bent her toes back at an uncomfortable angle. Pure thoughts, she reminded herself frantically. Think pure, brave thoughts.

  In the silence, the creaking of the branches of the ugly trees sounded like the crunching of dried bones. A deeper rumble started, and Choufa realized with horror that it came from one of the trees. “Begin,” the rumble commanded in the Drum-Tongue.

  “Stand, ibbiu!” roared the Mu-Keyi.

  The ibbiu leapt to their feet and huddled together, round-eyed and breathing hard. The adults across the clearing shifted and fidgeted.

  I want out of here, Choufa thought frantically.

  The chief priest knelt facing the largest of the trees, a colossus so broad twenty men could have knelt side by side in the circle in front of it with room left over. His ribbons hung limply, and his glorious silks spread out in a fan over the hard-packed dirt He drummed back, “We are your servants, Great Keyi. Make these, our children, your servants too.”

  The drum echoed into silence. No one moved.

  “Give me first my gift,” the tree thrummed.

  Immediately, the chief priest responded, “We obey.”

  All the drums pounded into life, thundering, “Blessed be your gift, Great Keyi, and your people who gift you.”

  Four men in matching green-and-gold silks marched forward, carrying something between them. That something struggled, then screamed, “No! No! I did what you told me to do! You promised! You promised! Let me go-o-o-o!”

  The voice belonged to a girl.

  The girl struggled violently, and one of the men carrying her stumbled. Choufa got a brief look at her. She was as naked and green as the ibbiu, but striped and decorated with hideous pictures and words that formed patterns on her skin. She was bald and soft and pudgy-looking, with big sagging breasts and a round, shapeless belly. She was ugly beyond anything Choufa could have ever imagined. Each man held onto her by ropes wrapped around her wrists and ankles. They carried her a few inches above the ground and made a great show of never looking at her.

  Choufa self-consciously fingered her long brown hair and tried to imagine what force could have created the ugly creature that the men carried to the greatest of the God trees. The other ibbiu were obviously having some of the same thoughts—they stared at the girl with frightened loathing or disbelief written on their faces.

  I wonder, Choufa thought, suddenly distracted by a minor detail, why we’re all the same color green she is.

  The drums pounded louder and faster, “Bless this gift, bless this gift, bless-this-gift-bless-this-gift—” and all the while the men hauled the girl closer to Great Keyi. The girl screamed and pled, but most of her pleading was buried in the pounding of the drums. The men dumped her at the very roots of the Keyi, and backed off—fast.

  For a moment, all the world seemed poised on the point of a very fine needle. The girl lay shaking at the foot of the giant tree, the drums crashed and roared, the ibbiu stared with indrawn breath, and Choufa clutched her beads and prayed, I am brave, I am pure, I am brave, I am pure. The sense of waiting for something to happen—to really happen—filled the grove.

  There was no warning when it did. One minute, everything hung in that hor
rible state of anticipation. The next, the white palps that grew in profusion from the sides of the tree whipped out and around the crumpled, sobbing girl. Great Keyi split his bark open from the roots to the base of the first branch, and his slimy-looking white tentacles flung the ugly girl into his black maw.

  As fast as it came, the horror ended.

  The drums stopped. In the hush, Choufa realized that all around her children were crying. It took her a moment longer, however, to realize that she cried, too.

  “Send them to me now,” the tree drummed.

  The Mu-Keyi bowed and drummed his brief “We obey” again; then he and the green-and-gold-silk men briskly grabbed the children and pushed them into a line. Choufa occupied the fourth place. Thasa was somewhere behind her, unseeable. Tears streamed down Choufa’s cheeks. “Nothing will ever be the same again,” Doff had told her, and she knew now that Doff had been right. These were the Keyu, the almighty Keyu, the ones to whom she had said prayers morning and night all her life. These hulking, lurking, awful trees were the gods she had asked to help her with her recitations from the Sacred Songs, and to make Massio stop bothering her, and to watch over Doff. In her prayers, she had imagined the Keyu as bigger versions of the friendly orchard trees, that gave fruit in season and let the temple children climb them. Nothing like these trees had ever entered her prayers.

  The men in gold-and-green silks stood on either side of the long line of children. Choufa stared up at them, and knew that she and all the children with her would be thrown to Great Keyi. When the Mu-Keyi said to the first child in line, “Go forward and take your Tree-Name,” Choufa saw the boy’s knees sag. Then one man on either side of him took an arm and propelled him forward.

  The boy knelt—rather, he stumbled and landed on his knees—and his offering fell out of his hand to land at the base of Great Keyi. One man placed the boy’s hand on the bark of God tree, where the giant tree-mouth had split open to swallow the striped girl. Choufa pressed her clenched fist into her teeth to keep herself from screaming. Now Great Keyi would eat him.