Bones of the Past (Arhel) Read online

  But the tree stayed motionless. A single drum began a count. One—two—three—four, and the two men moved forward and lifted the boy and walked him away from the tree, toward the line of waiting adults. The oldest of the Yekou, the priest-woman Fine Fingers, bowed in greeting him, and draped a simple red silk robe over him—the robe of the new initiate, of the newly Tree-Named. “Welcome, keyunu, brother of the People of the Three Flames Silk, Tree-Named,” she intoned.

  She then addressed the waiting adults. “Give him his name.”

  The boy’s father stepped out of the crowd wearing a big smile, his eyes still wet with tears. “We name him First With Courage.”

  “You are so named. Go.” The Yekoi made shooing motions with her hands, and First With Courage, newly minted, raced into the arms of his father and mother.

  “Go forward and take your Tree-Name,” the chief priest commanded to the next ibbi in line. The girl walked forward under her own power, though two of the gold-and-green silk men walked by her sides. She held her head up and carried her gift as if it were the most valuable thing in the world. Choufa watched her kneel and place her offering on the ground and her hand on Great Keyi’s mouth. The drum beat. One, two, three—four. Then the men tapped her and she rose, brave and graceful, and walked over to the waiting adults. She got her silk and her name; Heart Of Fire.

  The boy in front of Choufa, a cycle or two younger than the first two, walked forward as bravely as Heart Of Fire. He knelt and placed his gift with the others and the drum began to beat. One, two, three—

  On the third beat, one of Great Keyi’s shiny white palps whipped out and lifted the boy’s gift from the ground, and threw it far into the jungle. From the middle of the crowd of waiting adults, someone sobbed in despair. The men lifted the boy, whose eyes were white-rimmed with fear, and dragged him to the Yekoi. They dropped him on the ground in front of her.

  The Yekoi clenched her hands into fists, and her mouth tightened into a thin line. She stared down at him, and Choufa, who knew Fine Fingers’ rages, saw one coming. “You shame us,” the thin old woman hissed. “You—who would dare pretend to be worthy of our kinship—have shown your unworthiness. Great Keyi has seen the blemish in your soul, and has declared you not one of ours. You will never be keyuni, a person of the Godtrees. You are tagni, not human. You have no Tree-Name. You have no name.” She spit that out like a curse.

  Choufa thought the Yekoi grew taller as she snarled down at the boy. She lifted one skinny old arm and pointed at the pack a green-and-gold silk man held in his hands. “Because we are kind, we will give you parting gifts—food and a weapon and a blanket, that you may find life elsewhere. But you will never enter the ground made sacred by the presence of Keyu and keyunu again, on promise of death. Take our gifts, tagni, and leave.”

  The boy stood uncertainly, then stumbled toward his parents, who clung to each other in the crowd. “Mommy?” he asked, voice high and pleading. “Daddy—please, Daddy?” The man who held the pack grabbed the boy and shoved the pack in his hand. “Please, Mommy—Daddy, please don’t let them make me go.” The boy’s mother, crying harder, squeezed her eyes shut and held her hands over her ears. Her shoulders shook from her silent cries. The father, his face streaked with tears, gave his son an agonized look, then took his partner and led her from the Tree-Naming ceremony. He hung his head as he walked away.

  “Mommy!” the child shrieked. “Daddy! Please don’t go. I love you—”

  Fine Fingers slashed one hand down, a sharp, chopping motion. The man who held the boy, now struggling to get away and run after his parents, nodded and picked the child up. He carried the kicking, screaming boy down the path—taking him away from the village.

  They eat people, and take children from their parents, Choufa thought. These cannot be the same gods Doff told me about—the ones who loved us so much.

  “Go forward and take your Tree-Name,” the Mu-Keyi intoned, and Choufa snapped back to attention. It was her turn. At least, she thought with a bitterness that surprised her, Great Keyi can’t take me away from my parents. I don’t have any.

  She walked forward, shaking inside but on her own power. She knelt and put her beads with the other gifts, and with trepidation rested one hand on Great Keyi’s rough bark. She heard the first beat of the drum, but not the second. A sudden alien whisper inside her head drowned it out—an exultant voice that murmured, Great Keyi’s tentacles wrapped around her, cold and moist and slippery and incredibly strong, and pressed her hard against the rough, scratchy bark of the trunk. Choufa screamed, a wordless howl of pure terror, curled into a limp ball, and closed her eyes tightly. Inside her head, the hungry, nasty, awful other voice kept crooning,

  Rough hands pulled her away from the tentacles. Choufa looked up and found that the men in green and gold had saved her. She tried to smile at them, but they carried her as if she were something disgusting and dirty. Both of them averted their faces from her. She sprawled in front of the Yekoi when they dropped her—threw her—down.

  The Yekoi shook her head in disbelief. Choufa looked up at the towering, silk-clad figure and found the woman’s eyes hard with a hatred Choufa had done nothing to earn.

  “We raised you,” Fine Fingers said. “We taught you the goodness of life in the branches of Keyu, protected you from the evilness of your parents—and yet you have taken our goodness and made wickedness of it. You are the worm at the heart of good fruit, rot in the core of the strong tree. Yours will be a life of penitence and punishment—the keyunu do not leave the rot in the heart of the tree.”

  I didn’t do anything wicked, Choufa thought. I didn’t. This is all a lie!

  The Yekoi seemed to sense her defiance. “Your mother was sharsha. Your father was sharsha. And now, in spite of all we have done for you, you are sharsha—sharsha you shall be called, and nothing more.” The Yekoi threw her hands in the air. “So be it. The keyunu prune you from our branches.” Fine Fingers directed her attention at the burly men in gold and green silk. “Take her.” The same men who had saved her from Great Keyi now looped a rope over either of her wrists and used those ropes to pull her down the path between the trees. As she stumbled along between them, she looked back at the adults. No one, not even Doff, wept for her.

  Sharsha, she thought. My mother and my father, two people I never met—never even heard anyone mention before—were sharsha. Now I am sharsha. She shuddered, remembering the screaming green-striped girl the Keyunu threw to Great Keyi. Sharsha. It was an ugly word. It meant “sacrifice.”

  * * *

  Medwind Song woke to arrhythmic, head-throbbing pounding that rolled down over her from the jungle to the north. She hid her head under Nokar’s pillow, but the pillow didn’t help much. After a few moments of allowing herself to realize just how much it didn’t help, she sat up and sighed.

  Damn, damn, damn! What time is it this time? she wondered.

  She crawled out of bed, careful not to wake Nokar, pushed open the shuttered window, and looked out. It was still dark. Of course. And the racket was the Wen—again. She’d always thought the Stone Teeth Hoos were pain-in-the-ass neighbors—which just went to show how little people appreciated life when they had it good. She decided she’d rather have Stone Teeth Hoos trying to steal her goats any day than listen to another early-morning all-drum no-rhythm concert by the goddamned Wen. It was a regional hazard nobody had mentioned when she and Nokar and Faia packed up shop and fled Ariss for the politically safe wilds of Omwimmee Trade.

  She wished some brave soul would venture into the forbidden jungle long enough to introduce the Wen to rede-flutes or violettos, or something else with a bit less carrying power. Or even the simple concept that days were for being noisy and nights were for sleeping.

  Three cheers for the mysterious Wen, Medwind thought May they all roast in the sajes’ hottest hell. Behind her, Nokar rolled over on the mat, wrapping the blankets completely
around himself. Medwind grinned and watched him sleep. As if the sajes could agree which one that was.

  Nokar, ex-librarian, history fanatic and dirty-old-man extraordinaire, was her most recent husband. He was also superbly talented at sleeping through anything. Medwind didn’t think that was fair, but she didn’t see where waking him up to complain would get her back to sleep. The drums thundered and rumbled on, and she groaned.

  Then she snapped her shoulders back and nodded sharply, once. There were things that could use doing, even in the middle of the night. Due to the press of deadlines and production schedules, it had been several weeks since the last time she’d called up her vha’attaye. The spirits grew restless and bored when they didn’t get the homage they required from the living. If not paid sufficient attention, sometimes they became capricious, lying when called upon. Sometimes they became angry and cursed their attendant with ill fortune. Worst of all, sometimes they got the spirit wanderlust and simply drifted away. Medwind imagined herself calling up her vha’attaye—and getting no response. She shivered.

  She pulled the shutter closed and slipped out of the room. She didn’t bother with clothing, just padded down the breezeway and out into the central garden. She’d pitched her b’dabba against the back wall, where it crouched, looking a great deal like a small, dark, hairy animal in the garden—thoroughly disreputable next to the big, rambling, breezy house she and Nokar had bought when they’d arrived in Omwimmee Trade. It was hard to remember that not only she, but at one point all her husbands, had occupied that cramped b’dabba—and sometimes, when it was cold, the human occupants had shared their space with the most valuable of the livestock, as well.

  No, she amended silently, as she ducked into the waxed-felt tent and inhaled, it isn’t all that hard to remember that once nine sweaty young men, two horses and a few goats shared this space with me. One deep breath brings it all back.

  She took her bag of quicklights down from the hook high overhead—(gods forbid Faia’s cat-from-the-hells should get hold of them, and incinerate the compound)—and lit the pots of incense that sat on either side of her altar.

  The goat-and-boy reek died down a bit. Medwind, her nose pampered by twelve years of keeping company with people who used soap, decided this was an improvement. She bent over the low altar and lit both fat, herb-scented candles. The b’dabba began to smell even better.

  I’m spoiled by too much clean living, she thought. I’d have a hell of a time going back to the Hoos Plains now. How odd, that when I left, I intended to change the world. The world is still pretty much the same, but I’m so different I don’t know that I could ever go home.

  She shrugged that melancholy thought away. Life is change. If you want things to stay the same, Medwind, die.

  Faia’s cat Hrogner—one of the progeny of Flynn, the Mottemage’s handed cat—sat watching her light the candles, ears pricked forward and tail twitching. He had that smug air about him that always annoyed Medwind—the air of knowing something she didn’t know. She didn’t appreciate the attitude in humans and despised it in small furry animals. She gave him a hard look, and realized he held something gold and gleaming in his stubby furry fist. It was her favorite sslis, which had gone missing three days earlier.

  Medwind lunged at the cat. “Give me that, you schkavak!” she yelled.

  The cat darted out of reach and scurried into the forest of drums, still clutching her sslis. “I hate cats,” Medwind growled.

  She glared into the drums after Hrogner, then plopped herself on the thick cushion in front of the altar. She touched the heads of her sho, the two-headed drum that was reserved for calling the vha’attaye.

  The candles cast a yellow sheen over the bone and sinew candleholders and the Ancestors and Advisors who sat on the altar. Medwind took a handful of incense cones out of an apothecary jar and reverently placed and lit one on each of the tiny bowls that rested inside the skulls’ jaws. Smoke began to issue from between the skulls’ teeth—more from between the filed teeth of Troggar Raveneye, best enemy and advisor. She moved slowly down the line; she touched the skulls of her grandmother’s grandmother, her enemy, her comrade, her father’s grandfather. Her heart raced; blood throbbed in her fingertips. “May the incense and honor please you, fearsome dead,” she whispered, “so that you will not hunger for my life.”

  When she got to the last, she rested her hand for a moment on the cool, smooth bone and closed her eyes. She traced the bright patterns on sharp cheekbones and empty eyesockets with one finger. “Have you forgiven me yet, Rakell? Will you ever?”

  Her stomach tightened, and she took a deep breath. The vha’attaye waited—always waited. She had her duty, as Huong Hoos, to honor the spirits of those who lived and died honorably.

  Medwind inhaled the tendrils of incense that swirled around her and began a five-beat rhythm with her left hand. With her right, she overlaid seven beats to the five and felt the magic build in a spiral, patterns chasing each other around, meeting suddenly, then darting in different directions. The soft, intricate rhythm washed away the Wen pandemonium and drew her deeper and deeper into its complexities. She hummed and breathed, steadying herself, settling into the comfortable shadows of the b’dabba, letting herself drift with the soothing flight of the drumbeat and the nasal tickle of her humming, until her body felt it had become another shadow. Her eyes drooped, heavy-lidded, and the twin flickers of candle flame smeared into huge, blurred balls of light.

  She called up the song easily then, the old Huong Hoos song to revive the vha’attaye. Husky-voiced, deeply entranced, she sang:

  “Mehaals-koth dla-aavuaba ‘kea

  Terirthoma etrebbo’kea baayayi?

  Kea’aakashall dre-kashe-keo

  Eihaydroomee-keo hoosando-ni!

  Kea fa’oatado-thoma.

  Koth’po-shompo!

  Koth’po-tyampo!

  Koth’dardvaapo-kea-di—

  Kea ‘dli-nerado po!

  Keo’vha’attaye byefdo tro!”

  (For what shall I have let you die

  When life ran hot and full in you?

  You had not fought your best battle

  Nor loved your last lover.

  You are not done with life.

  I declare it! I demand it!

  I announce this to you

  So you may be sure of it!

  Your spirit is still needed!)

  She sang the song through a second time and then a third, increasing pace of song and drumming. Between the hazy twin lights from the candles, a pale, glowing fog grew, drawing form from the smoke of the incense and the damp of the night. The fog descended, separated, shaped itself into little balls of woolly light, and settled into the skulls of Inndra Song, matriarch; of Troggar Raveneye, enemy; of Rasher the Hunter, comrade in battle; of Haron River, grandfather’s father; of the Mottemage Rakell Ingasdotte, friend. And the mist smoothed hazy impressions of flesh over the sculpted bones. Foggy eyelids opened, and beneath them, green lights brighter than the candles gleamed. Ghostly lips formed shapes, the very real bones of jaws creaked, hard-edged whispers scuttled forth like spiders from their drybone lairs. Medwind ceased her drumming and waited.

  From behind her, the cat Hrogner hissed and snarled, and when the ghost-figures remained, vacated the b’dabba. “Wakened…” the skulls whispered. “Wakened… alive…” The row of glowing green eyes fixed on her, and Medwind, who had first met some of these same vha’attaye as a small child brought before her mother’s altar to honor them, still felt ice down her spine. Her hair stood on her arms and the back of her neck, and her mouth went dry.

  Inndra Song asked, in a voice that was every night-creak, bone-scrape, gooseflesh sound in the dark, “What would you have of us, distant daughter’s daughter?”

  “I come to honor you, revered ancient mother’s mother,” Medwind said, pressing her forehead to the floor in ritual greeting.

  “We acknowledge that,” the bonevoice whispered. The rustles of other vha’attaye blended wit
h Inndra Song’s words, a general agreement, temporary appeasement of the dangerous dead.

  “This is no honor,” whispered one skull. Medwind rose from her deep bow and stared along the line of bodiless heads that watched her unblinking from the altar. The bones beneath the ghostflesh gleamed along the line; ivory teeth, empty eyesockets, painted bones softened and obscured by the faint fur-sheen of light, but not gone. “I am dead,” the bonevoice of the Mottemage Rakell Ingasdotte whispered from her place in the far corner, “Let me die.”

  Tears damped Medwind’s cheeks, and she said, “I cannot. You are my best friend. I need you.”

  “If you are my friend, let me go,” the bones said, and the ghostlids shuttered down over the green-lit eyes, and the eyes guttered out and went dark.

  “Rakell!” Medwind cried, and clenched her fists so tightly her nails dug into the flesh of her palms. She hung her head.

  When Rakell was gone, Rasher the Hunter spoke. “That one is weak, Hoos-warrior. She fears the things that hunt between the worlds. She cowers in the cold darkness and does not bear the suffering of the vha’attaye bravely. She cries out—she begs for the light, and for life, and sometimes for release.”

  “She shames herself, and shames us,” Troggar Raveneye whispered. “Not even I begged for the soul-death, I who am your enemy, and not your people.”

  Inndra Song said, “You profane vha’atta. You give this gift to a coward, a weakling. We do not welcome her. We do not want her. Take her away.”