CW: death threat, criminal justice, alcohol, death
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Record XI
of the last days' events on the scenic return from Quarry
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Ugly, still, to say "she". She was not the single designated leader, nor a councilmember of a ruling coalition, but rather one of many courtiers of the inner chamber that milled about, exchanging oversight roles in the warehouse complexes. At the height of the settlement was built a hangar-lodge of tall fragrant pine trunk logs, and among all the comings and goings of porters and accountants was Minak's mother.
Minarets rose from up on Cliff Hill, watchtower platforms heavy with pulley-belts overseeing the industry of the town. Not so different from the markets of Quay, or the assemblies of Quarry in its attitude of bustling and boiling business. Focused like an orchestra with an ultimatum, whose every next move is known and urgent to each of its members. Things were, here and there and there, on the move.
It was trite to look at a tengmunnin settlement and decide its distinguishing feature from human towns like Fisher Valley was scale, but it was true that these were a smaller people, with half the strength and twice the dexterity of even my own kind. Every motion accounted for this scale, but some things did not shrink. Carts and sledges, construction equipment, large public works could not diminish in size and rather demanded a different sort of cooperation.
I watched that packed-earth plaza of commerce as we passed through it, loud with the straining of rope and chain, back and forth, swoop of glider craft, everywhere the incredible coordination of wings in motions. Like the air dances that enchanted Quay, they operated on what may have been an ability as instinctual as the human sense of balance: flocking, to flank and relay. Wherever work was done it was done in twos at minimum, and fluidly as synchronized hands. Labor on Savannah must be vast, and what a wall it was in the way of city-building! Tireless and high-detail was the cooperative work required for tasks that a single human could accomplish, and hoists and hooks necessary for moving what a human could lift unaided. An engineered freedom and weakness, and the freedom stolen by the unbroken skyland arc.
This level of need, for scale of manipulation, was ultimately why the janitor agreement was made from our side. The awe of it had been stripped, all the Hightower pomp and power they represented as an arm of control, those machines of cutting and pasting through habitats on their long maintenance patrol.
Should those spidery constructs spread across the interior, around the arc of land that spread over us in so many directions, it would be for their base mechanics. Too many locations, in the current fervor of construction and entrenchment that seemingly every settlement was engaged in to some degree, required that aid. In a political negotiation between two habitats, where janitor access was in dispute, standard haruspex allocation guidelines treated them as a currency resource to divvy up, units correlating to material control of a settlement - the janitor count of a given faction was peacetime's answer to the statistics of standing armies. But such a valuation of the janitor would be a scar and a sap here, and even Rain could not help but agree. He knew in his heart that the gift was necessary, and necessary that it was unconditional, for the real question was no longer borderkeeping but proliferation of the ability to affect the environment. If Quarry provided plenty of these machines, and they made to increase the potential of Savannah’s people to human-equivalent, who could complain of a monopoly? Quarry's factories would churn, and the institution of the janitor would be filamented into new uses, everyday duties and high ambition alike.
"You will leave the thing with us and continue unaided,” she snapped, sharp beak turned down.
I spread my hands. "That I cannot do, Scribier Meliflor. It is the only one under our heading, and is necessary for the long way to my king's city. To make Quay apace, it is how we must travel. We come, Scribier, as visitors rather than guests. I will make my requests, but our engagement is the king's outing."
"My son is with you?"
"Minak of Quay is my companion."
"You go tell that stingy Kali, high traveller, that we treat for updrafts too. Old and rickety here! Time and time was promised for repairs, and now you beg for more and give no gifts while here, while faces by faces can treat." She mumbled a stream of song, and anxiously preened a wingtip.
"As I've said, we are a small party. Here is the heading: we return from Quarry, and behind us another glider is set to launch. Three days, and a janitor Quarrymarked to survey the need. Updrafts aboard. We ask no business done here. But when the glider passes, updrafts will fall for you. Do your business then; I let you know the schedule, and only to remember that this is the first wave of many.”
"Six days' proof then."
I was, alike to Kali’s well-founded prejudices, beginning to develop an aversion to the claims at sex. What was the object? Linguistic accuracy? Refusing the designations of blue and roan in favor of something more familiar to the disdained and emulated humanity? Something sour – like a high-strung mother is when too precious about her role – too eager to put on a show of long-suffering virtue. Two or three generations ago, Minak had told me, Cliff Hill had been swarmed by a mimicry of human clothes and cosmetics. Now there was a development into something more local, but still human-fixated.
She was who they sent. A tawny, slim roan with tense eyes - highly attentive. Rickety, rough-feathered. Ten, at least.
“Yes,” I said. “Six days’ trust, too. We must leave with rope. I cannot make the exchange you ask, and I must ask for the supplies. We need several coils yet. The Quarriers are very particular about ropework and wards, it is their one true superstition, and what have we at Quay? Not enough for their next landing. Most of your current production of holy rope will go to them, when they arrive, but I ask again: seven coils, so we can prepare their arrival for them, and complete that long handshake reaching from their city to mine, and touching yours on the way. Do you see that you are of the circuit likewise?”
“In what! Commerce without commerce? ‘La!’ – you say – ‘is not the greatest gift the one ungiven?’ and thus dodge and stake. We’ll listen. We’ll give and take. And oh, we’ll remember what happens next! Shy flight, like my unwilling child, unwilling to stride the pride of his childhood. Next, next, you say, and when will there be time?”
“The era is turning. The current will continue. Quay asks you to adapt. You can jostle and divert, and try to stand tall, and win that way, but nothing will slow down from here.”
It wouldn’t. This little town, once a mere contemplative retreat, was now among the largest settlements of the Third. This meant a small fraction of Quarry’s stature, and perhaps a neighborhood among Quay’s many, but still an impressive and singular stop. A ropetown ascended to a real production hub, struggling to find its feet, but on a path perfectly positioned to intersect with the political volcanism to come. These footholds were the most important; the map was being drawn. Ynewy’s terrible sentimentality depended on places like this - the textiles that he had decided were a staple to his wards and hopes - and Cliff Hill likewise depended on Quay
Quay, likewise, depended on the Quarry allegiance. And all depended on the hearing, and the Sun.
“Yes. You know it. You hear my rush, no? I want all of this to be done already. Yes, to stand tall, and not half-sworn. You will get your price, and we will wait for ours. But you will return. If I do not see you, you Sainshand, here, then I know you dodge. Return the circuit and I will sign.”
Nymphs flitted over the flagstones of the paved roads used only for carts between buildings, chittering in simple song and being answered by adults who considered themselves male and female. Was this practice, this integration of life stages, merely mimicry? Or parcel to the same spirituality that weaves here cordage dyed in graveyard water - the same immersion in death that the great cities revered.
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"You left me out to dry."
"I gave you trust and responsibility. Crier."
My face twisted and I looked away, hiding my near-laugh. "Kali! How am I meant to deal?" I told em of the agreement I had come to with Meliflor, "and what would you do if I had made some impossible promise? Almost impossible, this one. Next time Cliff does business with Quay, she demanded me as a representative. What could I say, without you?"
"But your decision was aright. I said, 'Emelry Emelry, I grant license to speak on behalf', and so you did. Better for me aloof, and Minak away - the trouble of it dictates. A small stop, to say that. And so we work with your plan."
"You cannot assign this kind of speech however you like. You must not give that authority on whims, teacher."
"Whim ka, no delegate? Who have I given it to you? Some stranger or attendant. No, to you, and as I mean. And now the errand is over and you achieved my goal of it, only to come crying and crying of your success! All secure!"
“Fine.” I walked my litter up the janitor’s gangway, and pushed the last burlap bag off into the cargo hold. I gave up; Rain’s poor hollow bones would have to handle the last scraps he had left out. “I know my real complaint: that Meliflor is so like Bettany. So cajolable. I dislike that type, who puts emotion into a project, who blinds themselves. Unworkable talent!”
“Alas, alas, true impetus of our affair, now! Escape from a trite boss to a brave one.”
“I do need a leader. I thrive there, at best, but at worst cannot abide it and must seize reins myself, and then be rash. You know that my judgement is quick and urgent, is it so much to ask for the channeling that I know I need? I flow well when allowed to – but authority like Bettany’s, or like this one’s, stifles me and busies me with turbulence. And you are the opposite - reinforcing my reckless foundations.”
“You think of yourself always a subject?”
“No, it is… let me explain. Here – do we have time?”
The janitor was all packed. Soon Harka and Rain would return from washing out the glue valves by the river, and we would be off. Our little encampment under the hill was done and vanished, and Minak would be back shortly from where e was ranging in a meditative little goodbye through the outskirts of eir youth. This stop had seen em quiet.
“Do you know I once strongly admired her? Up Academy, and early, before we knew we would crew together, and before even our courses intersected. She was a faculty favorite. Easy to be aware of. She hailed from the dust zones, have we talked of this? The most distant and diverged of the Ilians, insular regions with a totally different way of life than the mining complexes or the wheel stations; few came out of them into wider society, much less its higher echelons. But she was so cheerful, so urbane and serious. A hometown idol, a scholarship success story, engaged in that most esteemed and miserable project of trying to digest the other crew roles even outside of your own.
“But that was all conjecture, all hypothesizing on what she could eventually grow into. It wasn’t about her, and I scoffed jealously at the attention paid to her for it. What really drew, me in was the cohesive purity of her ethics. In practical debate – which is most of the exposure the different courses have to each other in the initial years of study – she was relatively strong on dissident proofs, but absolutely… blossomed, when asked to defend school or company policy. One begins to believe in her. It was not enough for her to expound textbook on core-virtuous topics, rather she spent long minutes attacking the simplistic and childish arguments common to her own very positions. First excoriating those voices and enumerating their flaws, she was able to swing.
“And on the journey, with this new proximity to her, all of that vanished. No clarity, and yet still she acted as if she were in Academy. Her theory, her society remained there, and week by week I found her practice more shakily founded. I tried to hold her to a certain standard – what she was capable of – but she pouted at it. I tried to connect as professional rather than classmates, and she looked at me like I was a stranger. And once the arguments began, it was always offense with her, never solution…”
“Picky,” Kali said. Again I laughed, to the threshold of tears.
Was I naive for thinking that that world would disappear? That after our training we would emerge, as if reborn, into true haruspices from the start? Maybe only idealistic, thinking that it would be a calling rather than a career - a life rather than a lifestyle. People made such noise about my family, which always to me had seemed humble and straightforward – as if I was some scion of a clan-project, when it was only a matter of growing up in a larger house. I hated it. Hated the ways in which it was true. Hated how Bettany looked at me as a conspirator, a friend, and a fellow young bright thing. “Let us be peers!” I remember thinking, at hearing her gossip and scoff, “stop playing and enjoying, take this grindstone!”
And so I had fled to the interior, and forced her into that peerage at last.
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Off. Kali again nestled at my side as my litter swayed. Down the slope from the village, little attention fell upon our encampent, what little was required to be unloaded from the janitor - Kali's red and white awnings marked us clearly, and blocked sight from above, and so prying eyes would have to come to eye level to peer in on us. None attempted, likely warned away by Meliflor and her fellow talliers straying not too far from town while outsiders were afoot. We were on the tack of the road easily, but made it only six sights before stopping.
We aimed, per Rain's course, to take a game trail through the riverside ramble for some miles before coming to where the creek-thick woods met the drier cattail plains. The janitor was fully recharged from a spinelink and could walk for some time, and it was ideal to make a ways away from Cliff Hill for politeness' sake before taking off, due to the noise. But those few miles would be slow ones walking such a large vessel. We started slow and ended quickly, for a blue youth stood in our way.
A calm and poised thing perched aground in the center of the game trail, eir long and lithe body poised as the curves of a tall vase, or a singing frog. E raised eir beak in the air, glancing at us peripheral, and eir plume was not only an uncommon and fine teal shade of iridescent, but moreover made up in a pollen pomade that gave the effect of a healthful springtime sheen of gold. Clear-eyed, eir beak was carved lightly and purely decoratively, though it took cues from the more functional styles of Quay. E waited in the path's clearing light, stretching tall to ensure e was seen as we passed. We were immediately outside the town.
From the elevated detachment of the litter, perhaps I could have missed one little blue on the ground. Unmissable was the accompanying host.
Twenty birds perched in the trees' high branches and low shadows, watching and intent. Nearer the young blue, further along on the road and on the nearer branches, were attendants meant to be seen - valets and porters, evident attendants to a Thirder lord. But above, in the shadows, the greater numbers of our welcome party sat cold and quiet, and in no disguise, fidgeting in the upper branches, and in more practical attire than the others’ bright fabrics..
Harka grumbled. "We go, then."
"What is this?" Rain was demanding of em, who quieted him. "We go, and goes along Rain Flower. No question about it, now. Smooth, steady."
Rain and I fell quiet.
"Named, as, along," the blue trilled, and sang clear-water-joy-green-left-fang-low-water. "I am walking, long way up north. Oh, how alone I am, in need of help and aid! Oh, the mountains, my ruined home! Poor as I am on this road, how many riches wait on the doorstep I long for!"
Harka spoke without hesitation; "Beggar! All our resource and power is yours, forever and for your journey. What customs you have, we will keep faith of them with you, except for one of our party who cannot. Who are you to ask such favor, though it is granted?"
"You have faced me with candor and leading fangs. I am only a stranded few. I am a small creature of means. I am utter red; you know this,” the blue said, neck curled and one eye fixed on Harka, whose backfeathers were still ardently raised.
Like the scent that rushes over the plains both before and after a lightning strike, the air was sour and still. With only a few more words, we were led away, leaving the janitor entirely on the side of the road. We followed these new acquaintances, all of us alike in silence, with our birds in a straight-gazed surety. Rain and myself were trapped in a tense bemusement. With the lone blue walking the poorly kept road, and our party following alitter, we were flanked from above by the rustling onlookers who ominously neglected to be anything but onlookers. And through the thickets, when the rocky banks met the river, waited for us a ship made of silk.
It was plain that the vessel was too delicate - bamboo and woven core - to hold a heavy litter. Rain looked on in worry, bordering on theatrical horror, as I disembarked and he rushed over to support me. He might as well have carried me. Kali, still aboard, told the blue as e climbed into the silken boat, "This walking machine, I am giving it instructions to return to the larger vessel, its fellow in construction. It will stow the provisions we have not changed house of. Thus, our party is short a member." The blue assented, but Kali in fact had given it instructions to follow our own location marker, and pick through the riverbanks after us as we sailed, unseen but steadily coming behind us. The glowering birds from the trees' heights alighted on the boat at the same elevation, quickly finding places in the sails' rigging and preparing to set off, but even as they worked their eyes remained on us.
All was acceptable. We boarded; Rain helped me aboard as sat protectively besides me, and Kali cradled in my lap with eir royal shawl folded as a cushion between us; the tassels draped down my legs. Two black-clad roans in the rigging began humming, in a soothing but non-melodic tune. The valets laid before each of us peeled tangerines on small plates of white wood, and candied nuts, and fine smoked meat in banana leaves. Kali and Harka accepted this food, which indeed was fine and sweet, as if it was distasteful and poor though they made no complaint in eating.
"Quite wrong," said the blue, now seated on a carpeted wooden dais at the ship's prow. E spoke idly, carelessly, soft-voiced as if thinking of other things. "Quite wrong, to treat a host so, to eat of their food in snaps."
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It was so warm here - why? It felt like today’s spinelight was stronger than usual, but I remembered that at Quay the air was always cooler when on the water, and brisk. Here it was lazy and thick, and I welcomed the beautiful dyed-canvas parasols that the attendants stretched over where we sat. I was able to relax onto the ring of green cushions that centered the deck, under the shade’s relief, but Rain was stiff and likewise Minak. Kali sunned emself on the boat's railing, Harka at eir back. I drank my sweet drink, a fruit I could not place, and was able to seem lounged out in the comfortable human-sized robes our hosts had given me. But I was out of my litter.
A servant with bleached feathers, brittle and a fine tan-blue, daintily pried loose another section of tangerine and offered it to Rain with well-practiced movements. Unhesitatingly he accepted, with a little hand gesture which was his approximation of the little wing waver etiquette standard in the riverboat cultures.
All along this section of the river, on the spinwise side (the same bank that housed the industrial plazas of Quay, miles and miles yet away) the land was dominated by the same crags and highlands as the village Cliff was built on. Dense red earth in tall hummocks, and cliffs of crumbling clay backed by solid granite. Heightening the questions this raised, along the river, little gulleys or oases - well, literally small quays - were either worn or carved into that rolling elevation. Each was so uniform. Each time, a "clearing" was connected by water to the main river artery; a channel wide enough to flow but narrow enough to never become turbulent would connect the river to a small shady pool, sheltered at least by the high walls of the banks, and often by overgrown trees, mangroves and bamboos. Yes, the spinelight must have been somehow harsher here, to accentuate the shade of these pools. Their water was clear except for the duckweed that often found a nursery in those shady cells, periodically washed or trickled down the river like a green puff of dandelion seeds, bursting to colonize pools further downstream.
Built with the habitat, or by its people? No one seemed particularly interested in which it was. When I asked Harka, e simply barked off the terms used for them in song (green-water-low-scent - not very inspiring) and returned to matters e felt more pressing. Rain likewise rambled about habitat construction in an amateur layman's excitement, clearly aware of some of the artistic principles of finished and long-inhabited habitats, but not their construction itself. He told me of their ecosystemic function of refugia, how light and elevation can make an idyll out of otherwise tiresome landscape, and how they both guided and followed the river, defining its flow.
But when had they arisen? Were they laid down like so many stepping stones by Cote and the Master, according to grand design? Or had this been one long and low cliff face cut into by many birds over the years? I saw cause for both. If Rain was right about his theoretics, then the line the cliffs traced made sense, and the pools were likewise sensible sinks for both erosion and biodiversity, counterintuitively shoring up those banks with pressure-release and muddy silt deposits. But there were signs of a more recent intentionality; irregular channels that did not seem laid down but rather chiseled in, or curious formations in the exposed rock faces - carvings, geometric, which sometimes rhymed with the piled stones one saw in every fifth pool or so.
We had passed plenty of them by now. It seemed impossible how many there were, as if we were sailing in circles. The blues of the boat, employed equally as riggers and attendants, were always trying to distract us with spreads of their well-tended wings, the reflective topside, catching our eyes. No offense was given or taken despite the tension of the air pulled taut - they simply wanted to make sure I was paying attention, participating, not drifting off. But the pools kept catching my eye, because, when the boat slowed, they seemed the same color.
Where the pools lay still, and where their surface was empty, a sheen formed over them, made from the ruddy skyland colors combined with the dappled greens of the trees often making a roof for the waters. A gradient of deep muddy green, a white flash of spinelight transforming across the surface, and the indistinct red-yellow rash of the habitat's arc. It was a beautiful combination. And every inch of the boat, from the hull touching the water, to the wrap of the rigging, to the floor and benches we sat on, was covered in a padded silk of exactly this gradient in color.
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Lapping splashes, and the small snappy thrum of the sails. The blue youth, the captain lord, had relaxed some. "You, you birds aquarry," e said, "I am sure many tales of your home and candle city can be passed over these waters. I am so sure that of Quarry there are many terrors you dare not speak of."
"I dare all," Harka rejoined. During these few hours of sailing the broad river in silence of plans or courses, Harka was the one aboard who spoke most readily, "and with no shame badfixing my words. You have heard, 'the Quarry garden'."
"Of course, by the course."
"Then you know that on the River Tower grows a shaggy field vines, tended crops braided as humans braid hair. Many hanging vines, bundled growing. And on vinesfruits grow not from a flower, but from the leaf curling enclosing itself. They upfurl round, to catch the water, envelop it to bilious fruitflesh. Curled fruits, notlike, and a staple. And when eaten, are they digested?"
The blue lord only listened. E was intent now, absorbed in the tall tale. Harka continued: "No. The leaves reform in the body curled once the cold flesh is absorbed in beak. Now they curl blood like they do water, and are drawn like a power pump to the heart. Closed in leaf, the heart grows woody and sour, noblemost, and which grants best in sight. Cold and stony. Does this make a ghost or a goer?"
"Yes. Vampires, doubtless. Now I tremble to travel with you. You will leave my ship instantaneously," the blue said with no upset in eir voice, as neither em nor eir attendants made one move to modify course.
A small silence that Kali broke. "Because it is your personage," e ventured, and I could almost hear a human smile on eir face, a sly and confident one, "thus such fine and freely given accompt. We would regret to leave a treasure ship. We each see your enviable and esteemed lifesign in this vessel. We beg, allow us longer passage, to stay and accompany your mission. Where wind these sails?"
"On to the End," the blue said. Nervous. Eir eyes flashed to me, and e changed the subject. "All the way on, as you, girl creature. You've arrived by the end to end?"
Eir eyes were fixed on me, reflecting the long bar of the spine in a white reflection line. "I was born here," I said, "deep in the Third, in the dark rainstands. There." I pointed straight upwards. My finger aimed at a distant patch of dark misty greenery, and patiently corrected the blue's gaze to find it. "Two sisters and three mothers I had, eating sequoia fruit and hunting from where we picked it, spearing boars above. Only recently were we drawn from the redwoods, with my ally here."
Rain was frustrated. Begrudging, but at last catching on. Terse in the charade, he said, "I rescued her as a poor poor sad orphan and raised her myself. Taught her how to find yams and stuff. With the human nutrients." He ate a tangerine whole and checked out, an arm languid over the railing and watching the trees pass.
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The waters and the hollows flowed, and over the next hour or so the mood changed. Without any ceremony, a roan dropped from the rigging and barked song at the blue lordling who had brought us aboard, who visibly deflated, ruffling and unruffling eir feathers, pacing. Soon there was movement up and down the masts, a flurry of indistinct chattering and cutting things loose. They angled the sail towards shore and one by one began taking off.
“Hey! Hey!” Rain was jumping up at the boat trended too far into the shallows, the sails left slack and dropped where they were. “What is this? Are you guys crazy, where are you going?” but Harka settled him, and quickly we were bracing to run aground. The strange birds flew off without looking back, hopping the waiting canopy tops on to wherever they were going next. They left the boat to lurch to a stop, run aground. Within minutes of the commotion we were alone.
Song carried away from us, and the boat crumpled in its silks. Thin, pitiful wood. Built in days, hours, and discarded. The wood split, and we splashed through the shallows ashore.
"What!" Rain continued blustered when we had "disembarked", and he had successfully helped me find my feet. "Do we go after them? What is this, an ambush? Nonsense! What possessed us to go along with this! Am I finally allowed to talk? My janitor, we've left it, agh!" He was disheveled. Shaken from the ordeal, away from his comforts.
Harka: "Right right. Minak and I will back for what we left. We will pick it up,detour. We'll fly; if we pass the homing litter we will gallop back. One way or another, and then fly back to meet you three. Kali King, you'll make the time you can. I say we will back by dark, we've ten hours until."
"Well." Kali caught Rain's desperate face and answered his confusion, "Look, there. The direction they went, highest up. Do you see that black soaring shape?"
It was hard to pick out against the shadows of the skyland. But a polygonal speck did in fact circle high, high over the river. A wide, wide glider arc, and even as we watched it pulled off in the direction of our freshly-departed hosts. "It would have been a rain of rocks from that if we had failed the witch trial. That poor blue, we will never know eir name now. If any truth, any non-conceit was shown onboard, e would have been judged a liar when not aboard, and guilty of whatever they were chasing em for."
"That's ugly. That's terrible. And you played along?"
"Gunpoint, Rain. The sentence would have targeted that only one, but collate. A lavish thing meant to be destroyed. Ugly in fact."
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Naps feel different as a child. The half-light of lamps or sun dancing on your eyelids creates a womblike kind of waking sleep, enabled by childhood activity and proximity, sleep without time and only rest. So much was familiar again; little habits came back to me that I had not seen in years. My ears functioned, my body was awake, but my eyes and mind rested like a curled cat.
But when I woke from such dozing, I'd always startle. The world that seemed so present when in respite was revealed to be simplified. Without sight or significance a part of me must atrophy as it rests, some faculty meant to process all the minutiae of the world as one moves through it. So as that distributed-awareness sense snapped back into focus there would be a sea of light and texture that left you heartspinningly stunned.
Flight response, like to a malfunction echo, and all strange sounds in the night. Immobile for long seconds before your senses adapt, and your blood stills.
A monkey must have entreated too close, its screams - so funny, so vocally familiar, so simple - directly above us in the blue banyans. I grumbled awake; my lips itched. Sun and shadow hit my eyes. I rubbed my whole face over with my knuckles. The day's light was beginning to go grey, but I flexed the muscles of my core and shoulders, finding them recovered. The pain of weight was becoming more manageable as my body snapped, week by stuttering week, into a practical baseline of strength. My muscles felt brittle, like eggshell and the gauzy film that holds it together.
Kali still slept, frayed feathertips rustling in the gentle breeze. Little small-winged butterflies flitted, like white darts, through the miniscule red violets that pushed up through the litter of pine needles. It had been a long and challenging day for eir fatigue to postpone itself, and now it no longer could. E sat in a palatial sleeping bag, a lacquered square stool atop which rests a nest of insulated blankets, complete with writing space and built-in storage of necessities. E could write here all night without needing to move much at all while settling into deep bundled-up sleep. And all the while nesting within a crown, of eir white and red.
Mammals - even my scrawny faction of the team - are furnaces. Incarnated candle flames. Slightly strange-seeming to all life but itself, those most heated and volatile creatures. Earthy and muddled. Birds for their part are cold, quick, a spark of lightning stuttering in the center of a reactive cloud. Birds have little iron crucible hearts to our fat-fuel ones.
The nights of Savannah were precisely set at its coldest season into just low enough temperatures to put significant strain on elderly, convalescent tengmu’s rates of hypothermia. This little ornamental sleeping bag, set with gentle heating pads and luxury-house pillows, was some omen, avatar, or symbol of a war declaration.
Old Deluge Winter. When they mapped hell, 50% of it was a frozen lake, up to 80% when the masscry view is updated today. Cote had chosen his skin to be the color of romantically blue snow, glowing in the cobalt sky and distant lamplight. Everything in the world was falling apart, crumbling already but held together until the momentum runs out.
Rain left his standard-issue and quite cushy indeed janitor field tent, tramping on the leaf litter. “You know I feel like I’ve fallen out of it, Emelry?”
“Out of it? Drunk? Did I wake you? I'm taking the rest where I can” I smirked. I nodded over to the pebbly river beach where Harka and Minak had set up an array of fishcatchers for tonight's dinner, when the squad returned with our lifeline. They had messaged us when Kali fell asleep that they were held up on the outskirts of Cliff Hill with “urgent” distribution minutiae, but would be flying back in hours. Flip a coin.
“E should sleep,” I said, raising my arm for Rain, who obligingly helped me to my feet, scooping up a wooden recliner from this current of many minor campsites. “So let’s away to the shore some, and not to disturb. Do you know, I’ve been feeling how I imagine a Lunic firstgen must feel. Onboard their new oneill and divvying it up, and investigating all its features just to see for themselves what the choicest steads are. Such nice classics about that.”
He retorted instead. “You should sleep. Hey, I come to you for advice and you’re talking all on your own things! Stress, that’s stress signs. I’m serious, I still think - manual says! - that you should rest as much as you can until we can get up to micro cruising height. And then you’ll be able to focus enough to listen to me.”
“Say it, then? This is what it is to travel with a king. And for my part I’m stronger, a better walker by the day. Here, I have it, I’ll just sit there.” I batted the chair out of his hands, to where I preferred, and gathered my furs around me (a gift gained while stopping in a small merchant village outside Saltflat that had been bringing me much delight in these misty pines), huffing into my seat. Perhaps I did push it a little too close to the wet stones. The river smacked its lips at us.
Across the water, a little school of longfrogs skipped across the shallow bend of the river, consistently a few inches deep and choked with freshwater fernkelp. Running not on water but on a flabby soup of thin swamp, constantly being rinsed clean by the current.
In many places along Savannah’s three continent-scale major rivers, there exist whether by direct massline pumping, or targeted rain patterns, that serve as infusions of pure molecular water into the stream. A bit of an upwelling, often forming “fountain-lakes” whose center is a constant swell of water from the massive twenty-meter grade pipes along the lake’s bottom, creating these freshwater, inland deltas. Quay was built to exploit one of these upswell lakes, turning the delta into a rich, fertile, and teeming dam-bay. And one was closeby here, upstream miles. A small one, more a spring than a deep fountain. Good, good water, with the strongly distilled taste I still missed from unweighted life.
We watched the frogs skip like stones, their mossy hides quickly disappearing again into the undergrowth of the opposite banks. Splash splash splash splash.
“Apologies for the venom,” I said, half-mock. “Please, sit with me.”
“Thank you. Yay. Amicable. What’s with the firstgen stuff? You have the downtime to be watching soap operas?”
“Well, isn't it relevant? I'm thinking of the hearing. I think I have a good idea of the staff's aims. It's talk for chamber rooms, not here. Tell me what you were telling me.”
He watched attentively, as I settled down and caught my breath. “Do you think I could give you memories? Could we swing it?”
“Hmm, will you acolyte? Shall I take a student peer? I don’t know. It’s hard for non-neotenes, and non-tengmu really, as in it requires more study for the same competency ceiling. The courses begin at childhood, and largely focus on longterm memory work, dream diaries of increasing detail. You could work up to it. Why ask?”
“It's fine then. It would just be cope.”
“For?”
He looked straight at me again, trying to judge how much he could say. “I feel like I've fallen out of the world. Not homesickness, but… I haven't gone away from where I live; it went away from me. The wheel turned and I stayed where I was, yeah? I wish I was trained to show you. The parades, the clashes, the summer theater and my glass skies. I yelled at the world and forced it away, and now time is real again, and I live nowhere. It was a quick tourist's tour though the material before rejoining the fire, but now there is time. Fast days. Nothing wasted.”
I couldn't help but laugh. “No, it's true, isn't it? The calendar has reset. The geological era is over. The world is moving away from everyone now, they just don't know it. It isn't your affair, we were simple close when it happened.”
“Its hard to think of different worlds, I mean theres so many parts of the same wide world. Even heaven and hell have borders. Savannah feels like something else.”
Water splashed, and the stars were far away.
We stayed another few hours before the janitor returned to us, roaring in an arc down through the sky. Rain had the chance to sleep, and I watched the sparkle on the water. Over dinner of fish and fat-footed snail, Rain declared he needed time for quick maintenance repairs, and Kali agreed we should hunker down a day or two before continuing the flight home.
“We’ll camp,” Kali said, still groggy. “Let us self-donate some time.” Eir eyes were crusty, blinking stiffly.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Emelry Emelry," Kali said. Eir voice was hoarse, a true breath-flagging croak. At each breath, the next one was a touch more shallow. No more could I endure my self-deception. E knew, and I knew, that these were the last days and hours of eir lifelong reign.
How does an ape die? How do we fade from all the trouble? Stillness and fatigue. We find somewhere to lay down, and end the motions we are most adapted to. No more running, no more throwing. We take to our straw beds and list for our loves, towards them or further away; our den accepts the social circuit and finalizes it. It comes organ by fat organ, death, creeping through the integument and setting its fingers in their places before pulling away your soul.
A bird paces. scratches, down from the sky. Their wings fail but the legs stay strong. The instinct is towards thicket and foliage, a hiding place rather than our shelters. Somewhere green and low, unseen. People rot. Bloating, swelling, melting. Tengmu snap into desiccation. The body dies, salt snaps through the tissue, muscles turn to paper, the hollowness of the bones expands to all cavities.
Kali paced, feet still quick. But no more did eir black eyes rake across the skyland when e was idle, plotting administration and bondsmaking. E saw stones now, and neither the flagstones of Quay. E knew, and I.
"Emelry Emelry. I can eat no more ancient fare oxidized. No more storables. Steal me away, colleague, to a mystical hunt! To read and touch the grass. Do me the kindness of mealstay. Call me caprice! I have stomached, all my life, my flightlessness without complain, for it is my state, and how could I know like others what was missed, from the soar-span sight? Nonsense, but ka ka and ka have I longed to hunt! A nymph dream. You will take me there, lifted above the plains? Become with me a daring outlaw, a termite!"
I sat on the tall stone on the edge of our camp. A plume of smoke rose from behind the hunched janitor, where Harka and Rain were making a flaxmeal. My knees felt flexible, and I held them to my chest. I had given up on shearing my hair since we embarked to Quarry, for so mobile and occupied the city had seen us become, and now it was inches longer. I was accustomed to its weight, now, and how it softened the harsh spinelight as it fell on my head. I ran a hand back through it, thick and oily, and I spoke.
"When Heaven was mapped, the Fountainhead poets among that project's scholars began to assign a new connotation to the word 'love'. Perhaps, though, it was an old connotation, that had fallen out of favor when poetry moved from being sung to being written. Love, not as a sentiment or stance but rather a motive. A magnetism one is subject to; and each soul 'loves' that which it is drawn towards; where their own nature impels them to chase and dwell. I was always awed at how clean that was. How straight it flowed in reason.
"You are the sum of all my loves. Every value and virtue that I hunger for, and every personal weakness that still confounds me, in you I find my answers for. Kali, my Lord, I can follow only you now. This, and more, and all of it, I will do for you."
So e, continuing with eir time, told me of the hunger e was angling. The plattoron.
Savannah, how strange Savannah was, what an odd mix of life and place. Even in my growing adversarial relationship to everything I had walked away from, I was still confounded with curiosity at their work. This bountiful and variegated biosphere was the culmination of many lives' great works, an epochal scale of edifice. I felt that I had solved entirely the prison-aspect of such a place, but not so the other statements found in the design of its creatures and environments. From the calm river oases to the daybats crucial to the salt flats staying stable, and the matter of the colorful, marketable animals which lived to be symbols for petty human spectators promised but never intended to arrive. I could find no throughline, to unified ethos that would speak to the sensibilities of Savelyevna or Sever, the thesis that Rain insisted all habitats were built upon. He swore that Sever had an aim with all of this, but shrugged and evaded when pressed, so he could save face by pretending surety of it. He was trying and failing to put it together, too, into one image that satisfied his standards.
Whence, the, the plattoron? Was it a pet project of an eccentric animal designer of the Doctor's circle? A basal and gracile loxodont, neither pre- nor even proto-elephantine, it was instead a gangly and swift beast that outran enemies with long, loping strides. Seeing one run, there was an impression of a recorded walk at double playback speed. And those ruddy grey rovers, both male and female, were equipped most distinctively with their spearlike bottom-jaw tusks which, as if out of a primordial bestiary, really were used to gore enemies and scythe grass. Like forgotten, therian unicorns. Warlike animals. Ominous and beautiful.
"I will," Kali said, "kill one by flechette, the healthy noodlelegs. We will roar for it, healthy, Emelry Emelry, A hard hunt, windows open, and the wind. We climb over it, fair, you and I, for the slippery sheer."
E spoke rousingly. E spoke like I remembered from eir youth, from those memories that were once eirs alone but were now too mine, and soon would be mine alone. E spoke like that far-off young orator who had possessed my urges of high love. No – e was still young, and orating as we spoke, e was sixteen years old and flagging, fading, and coming to the jealous thread's end. Inside my ribcage, just barely tied down to my vestigial keel, was a howling ocean of ink and smog and viral load that could have no outlet, for criminal one and victim million were, all, walking away from this world. I smiled, a wall and a soldier. E knew, and I.
Together we went into the air. The lift was steady, and our skill just sufficient. Over the weeks of travel, one way or another we had each learned to maneuver the janitor, or a part of it, and though Rain was a natural and I had a respectable expertise in the handling of vessels in a much different context, the birds had taken to it as well. Harka and Minak could together perch and act as two hands at the controls, and with Kali and I e served to dictate my moves and strategy so I could focus on control. E my eyes and I eir hands. Perhaps it was the half-feigned posture of kingly confidence, and perhaps it was a lack of fear and awe at being inside a machine like this. But I was letting go of the weight of the world as well. No more was this locust a symbol to me but a tool. No more did it hum with purpose and the thrill of the lonesome void, no more did I picture it cutting apart and sewing together entire cylinders as if it was a major fraction of their size. It was not a dragon deity but a shuttle, a repair construct.
I wondered how Rain saw them. I imagined it was both ends at once; the high archetype of the lancing janitor brilliant in his mind, combined with an intimate knowledge of the thing's guts, the unglamorous and quite material coils and pistons that made it move by their symphony.
We boarded, operation now second-nature. We rose, Kali's claws in my shawl. How insulated. Outside would be deafening with the rush of air; how we could sneak up on anything was beyond me, a screaming metal insect stalking in the sky. But only a washing-machine hum came through the chassis, as fortified and resistant as it was to its intended conditions. A little whisper. I felt like I was flying a kite, or moving the bodies of many birds in a formation.
We scanned the plains, feeling the drops of weight, pushed in different directions as the hulking deft thing maneuvered. Kali was right, absolutely right. It was hard to miss. Likely fifty of the animals had congregated in one wide clearing. A clearing out of a story. Plush grass that was almost blue, a fairy-ring of birches that was almost circular. A thin mist that clung to the ground, their legs almost disappearing from it.
We hardly needed to talk. We hardly needed the communication, now, it was flow state. Runner's high. We let drop a hammer charge to startle them out from their meeting - were they breeding, exchanging scent, reorienting a migration? They scattered at its thud, and we were already ahead of the crowd as a fraction of it rushed into the tall green flatlands, the grass that loved them like fog.
We swooped low. The trees rustled in a V-wake where we passed. The air battered the chassis as if it was my skin. We found a target, a male who was startled away from the thickets that the smaller individuals were angling for. I imagined how the animal would look at eye level, if I was lying in the grass and it was charging at me. The sweat of its eyes, the flabby pachyderm lip that I had always thought seemed reptilian in the creases of grey flesh. Like Kaitei's map of the wheel, I imagined its skin and fat and muscle peeling off like citrus, lost in more and more detail, the glistening of nerves unfurling like ferns. The plattoron was as large as an ocean.
Kali, staring, released a button and dropped a perfect flechette through the runner's head. The projectile passed through, hitting the ground immediately before the skull it shattered hit the ground in turn. One of the tusks broke - excellent omen. We, laughing, and wild at the demands of the speed, wheeled around the sky and fell out of it down besides our prize, a rough landing that the system did most of the work for via corrections.
A dead, glassy eye. Together, we sat, and with our thin muscles cut a filet - a strip of meat, pulled like an anaconda from the beast's side. We left the rest of the carcass for what, for the ravens to pick out? Vultures and pygmy jackals. I took the broken tusk, too, a fine prize. It was bone, it was still tooth rather than ivory, minus the elephantine adaptive pressure to have beautiful display tusks. This was a long nail of bone, nothing white or fine in it, a narwhal's horn.
E wanted somewhere green and by the water. We lifted up again, meat wrapped in spare, sterile blueprint paper from the janitor's planning stores. Holding the king, eir body warm on my skin, we found a broad clearing of basil which the river curved around during a point in its run between two stretches of rockier land. The plants grew tall, a great meadow of them, and we touched down the water. I took my long tooth and beat down a span of basil, and the air exploded with the fragrance, and pinning it back down I threw a royal awning on the ground like a picnic blanket, and found us plenty of cushions. Kali with careful claw clicked a fire into existence in the sandy banks just by the water, and methodically I roasted the three feet worth of meat.
Blood under my fingernails. Tall basil plants, the spinelight white and gold through their leaves as we saw them from below. Looming up like trees. I shaved off bits of the tenderest meat, seasoned in sumac and salt-flat salt, and bowls and bowls of basil mashed into tinned garlic paste, and I fed my king by hand. E snapped them up, sighing and laughing, beak still clacking with hunger. Slowly, slowly, as the light sparkled in steady bands off of the sandy water, e died in my arms.