CW: death, ritual dismemberment, (alternate) Columbian encounter, royalty, religion, theocracy
I couldn't have it.
I scrabbled against the beryl, against the concrete. I couldn't gain the height! Will you not find me, will you not crash down to me? My eyes, my eyes so weak! I was crying in a dream. My tears were bubbling in the sun, the cold sun, the sea where the sun rose out of at every birth. Oh, God!
Kali, Kali, Kali! My art, my hope, my love? I have been here before, peeked under the threshold and felt light on my face. I remember, I remember it, I was in the boys' dorms and... I was on an ocean beach, I... I had studied, once, those dreams of heaven, the drills, the keen prayers and precise ablutions of the mind, the waterbaths Keinoy of Dolmen would give to his eyes. Yes, I was losing my form. I wasn't even dreaming, I was awake...
And forced my mind black again, punched it from my prostrated body. Out! Out, and in. In –
Palace, pillars. Star-traffic. Gears. Songs. Shows heard from the basil. Pillars, high pillars, strung with vines. Golden gates, eyelets, perhaps wide enough for an arm...
And heat. Immense, suppurating heat. It was a furnace, it was impossible. I let my hands go, I stopped trying to spatially place myself, and only prayed, hoping that the magnetism would be enough. But I wanted Kali, not God. I wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted, like a child, like a dog, certain of nothing but want. Magnetism - my ribs were being magnetized from my body, away from the Heart, away from where my beloved had gone, and where my skill was too poor to go myself.
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I crawled out of it eventually.
Consoling myself: my life outpaced my years. I was two places in time. Today, from my inherited quarters, I walked to speak with the citizens.
No more river dreams, now. I could sleep unaided. In the warrens, in the carved preemptive nests of the kings. Rootwork ceilings, the smell of featherdust and rack, and paper, and candle, and computer hum.
My series was good. The messiah of two worlds, Sofia of the Meeting. A good theme, the only theme, the only time I had built a theme outside of those little gatherings around the kitchen and library of the Umihotaru, where we would sit, and discourse, and eat scripture together, feed it to each other, dive deeper into that shallow surface. And the water parting for a submarine.
"Now Sofia was all obsession, with Christ. Between their two moons of fate, the old world and the new, why this? Why was it he that she named as her only fellow in the succession, the single one she called brother? Coyote's time was closer to her; his wars and his famines were merely Northern rather than Eastern, and they certainly resembled her own conditions better than the complex civilizational layers heaped on Zero. Perhaps it was the role she wanted, the role that made one sea's separation feel so slight! To march on capitals, to tear down and rebuild - this is what she wanted, Christ's fire, not Coyote's whispers.
See the heaviness of Change. Plague, fat in the flower cities. Death, starving and pursued. Chaos in the chains. And word of another world, which woke and found itself saved, reclaimed and acclaimed by the tower human source. The Kingdom of Heaven was fracturing. The Plate was breaking, and thus whence sails and hands. And the Triumvirate was dying, flagging, unmaintainable, its unsteady name already outpaced by its constituents' asymmetries. The northern states were clean, walled and immune, and was willing to pick up southern slack to a point. It was all dying of political old age; its new things elderly rather than young. This is what she knew most clearly.
And what of Coyote? A trick to the tricksters; even as a king he was a taiga king, a joke. He twisted. He slipped away. He dodged the cracks, had no business with them! Word of his deaths spread everywhere his life went - he delighted in potstirring the scar tissue!
Could he even be called rabbi? He was - but a passive one, a shadow. His, she must have thought, was a worthy life but one concerned with the immaterial, allergic to the concrete - something her radialist circles of critique would have been strikingly opposed to. A third of the planet had been conquered by Christ, the xylem of our Ecumene, the Kingdom we still enshrine. The light to and solution for all ages! Law, knowledge - from whence she took her name, as Christ had borrowed the dew of Dawn. She wrote ravenously of his death, his first death - so like the Triumvirate's punishments of catharsis, painted on the rocks - and how it was the weight of his life. But what of Coyote's flaying? And flaying again? Totalizing, fullbody, as she know her own stake would be when it found her. Coyote accomplished little in the warring states. But Sofia went north and not east, to Rainbow River, when everything was over…”
Listen, listen. Blend, blend. A king is a train. A king is rocket calculus. I would never move by my own volition again. But the tengmu world, my world, was mourning, and could only mourn when looking at my face.
I stood. Wings beat, bones swung. When I stood, the thousand lanterns of the grave tree - the palace, the necropolis, the library, the home, the shrine, my personal jail of spiritual impotence - waved and swung for me. Shimmer and shadow, from so many lights cast overlapping. How kind a space. And in the branches, the people I had been entrusted hackled, all ablue.
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"Would you climb up already?" I snapped. I often enough knew how to get under her skin, but today's wise and faraway smiles were consternating. She was so able to separate her own life far away from where it was. "Pride-deference, your walking. I insist, insist and insist. She would hurt herself by that trudge if she persisted in it, so I reined by litter into a forward jog and then turned to block the trail.
She didn't even break pace, but simply continued walking until she could casually cross her arms and lean on the litter railing. Audacious! And yet how could I fume and bristle when she was still further than I had demanded when saying, 'sit with me'? "Former Lieutenant," she said, "I promise that your issue is perspective. I don't need an assistive device for walking around, and won't need a vehicle til you bring me home. You're fine. I'm happy to walk and talk besides you. They should give you some kind of species sensitivity briefing about this... I'm a hiker yet! Please, lets continue."
This old woman in the powerplay! We could have trotted into town minutely, and here she was humbling me! So she had slept, musclebound, feeling nothing? Here she was, smiling and huffing the basil!
I raised my arm, and in ten seconds of wingbeats Minak - in eir soft-slippered socks crashed from the sky to light on my arm like a petal. "Sweet errant," I said, realigning the litter to the path's progress, and setting a brisker pace. Tell, tell, you whose tale…”
“Alright looking, tenfold. Seen stilled the plaza with all cleared away. Some arrived to aid with the panels, and done now.”
“Oh? Good timing, then. Glad we napped forth these past weeks, and kept prized work for them. Have they settled?”
“Most still parked where they arrived. With her.”
“Yes,” I said, feeling Razina’s feet tap at the road dust. “I’ll there next. Not there - have them move to their district, and Rain Flower to begin the colorwork. We’ll see how far they are by audience,” and e took flight.
The doctor had hitched a ride with our first successes, the defectors that Rain had won by his speeches. To console me, or to gain my permission while I was softminded - reflexively; instinct not malice - he had begged permission to open communications again after the funeral. Pride and caution, he said, had kept me from speaking; pride caution and shame in one. How could I argue? He was right, that Emelry had ran and scrambled for such reasons, and even now I had a decent claim to all three. Self-justifying pride – the long oath of caution – a lost child’s shame. I needed no part but let him, let him ride, and now weekly I was chained to looking over his missives and cutting out anything ridiculous from them.
But can you imagine? That brave and flashy silver boy, challenging the safeties of his own color, going bold and shining - the young man most famous for his adoration and esteem of Cote, at last having enough with the old stagnate, asking better of his own work. In that great tradition of old habitats, whose architecture must be reevaluated and reclaimed by its citizens, he had won an image most serious and attractive.
The first wave of arrivals - some from his old circles - was now here, and with access to his face was now waiting for mine. And Razina had
What could she possibly expect here? She, so smug and so cruel, was she now here to convince me that she had been my gateway? That she had laid the road for me here, rather than dancing in fear?
And now she itched to talk. Simple creature. Power-sickened and unbearable. I tried to steady myself, to think of her knowledge, her expertise - but how could I respect in in a true way when she was trying to hock it at me!
“Do you think anything new? Being here, and seeing life in an unwritten course, overflowing. What,” I asked, to jar her, “is a nymph to you now?
And now she flushed, now the brightness was sapped from her. "You must know I just want to disavow responsibility. Want me to flatter? To say what a healthy environment this seems?"
"Part of confession, I think."
"But it really wasn't my phase. Their ecosystem, the sheaf around them was. Won't you praise the productivity I've left? Will you blame me that no one starves?" she smiled.
"You, life-studier," I said, "cannot distinguish it from death." I marched quicker.
"I've been in a smaller scale of your position," the Doctor lied, raising her voice as if reciting as to a difficult child as she matched pace. "What you need now is friends."
"Ka," I laughed, "I have a friend. They are the god of suns. What friendship can you give me but antidote to this poisonland?"
"Alright! No need for the lashing out! Come, lieutenant, I won't have you speak like that without Rain Flower here. He will back me up; he is able to see it. Not just convince you, but be able to see it himself. You know there is something worth saving here. Won't you consider there's more? A world is in the palm of your hand. When they were Cote's hands I did nothing, because he gave me what I had wanted my whole life. That broke fast, and left me here. Where can I go but you? You'll be judged a representative when the hearing is here, all your humiliations set up and knocked down - if things go the way they will."
Far off, from the river, the whirr of janitorial thrusters extended into a chorus of droning roars, hitching and starting in the low air. It was over with in just a minute or so, for them all to hop from the upriver clearing, where the landing was made.
Razina. "We are inside a new type of machine. A generator of life built, built to the designs of a new theory. There's power, an unroyal power, wherever that ends up. Hunting. Striving. Beginning. Parallels. I can tell, Sainshand, that you're using different epithets - I know that barely having met you. How many times have we spoken? Our main contact. And now you have subjects, advisors, goals..."
The basil was flowering again. In the pale daylight a luminous cloud of pollen drifted over the span of the field, gnats dancing within it, dust in dust. Its stalks of flowers and heavy seeds, like cargo splines in meaty, inky purple. Rattling with fecundity, buzzing like pylons. Hamsters, fat and lanky and wild, shuddering through the undergrowth. Far away, the cypress.
"You'll have me kept outside the city," she smiled. "I understand. You must see your status games recorded as played."
"Of course. You expect different?"
"Oh, not from royalty!" she laughed, tense.
My litter trotted a touch closer to her side. "Will you believe what I tell next? Will you list me a friend's faith and confidence? You're welcome to my city. Nothing is barred. Walk and explore - I am telling my janitor boys this daily - and without droneyes it will be gainful. Instructive! You may and will speak, and teach, and ask or challenge what you please. Who is lining up? And I'll give no courtyard, no guard - but to sleep, it will be here. Tell me why."
"Forcing me to take tengmu life seriously. Not a lesson I need. This is my life, you lead me to my own life. If you mean to punish me, to make me think, you’re rewarding me by letting me. I’m going, o king, to take this as your favorable response to my offers."
"You, Doctor Doctor, will sleep here. In the churn. And you will contemplate my love's world, my master's condition."
“And you’ll think of my words. I don’t expect to get through to you, not this moment.”
We walked by the little road, or rather red-brown soil beaten and packed into road. Wingbeats still followed us, a shy little crowd. Checkered red and black suits perched in the trees, some with cameras, some taking notes.
Harka once said it was a shame to perch in a tree. Like being barefoot, like touching the world that your species' sheath was meant to separate you from. Perching and reperching on the scraggly peach trees growing along the road in patchy strands, perhaps they were simply young, eager.
"Doctor. A request."
"Fire," she said, amiable.
"Would you take a deep breath for me?"
She cautiously complied.
"Would you say..." I hazarded," that the scent of the air resembles Heath? No, I imagine that's idiotic question. What I mean is this: do regions of Heath, the continents and biomes, do they have different scents? Or is the planetary air simply too mixed to allow it? Clouds and rain, they must move scent, no? It smells like the End here, aside from the basil."
"No, it will be as varied as anywhere you've lived. Its all locality; the scale anchors it. Without soil, maybe the planet would smell the same - but think of what lives where - think of bioregions as palettes of scent - and think how slow air moves."
"But can't Heath storms cross the planet in a week?"
She outright laughed. "If they kept going! Disastrously! Storms like that are local too, and rare. Nothing mixes, not really."
"Hm. I wondered how the scale of it worked."
"Well, think about it here. Air is very well-circulated; the gravity border above the river forms this beautiful thermal circuit. I could tell you about how it moves."
"Airway tracking is a fundamental part of Quay's trade."
"Okay, yes. I understand that." She smiled. "But, well, you've been all over here by now. Doesn't the air feel different here than Quarry and your other visits?"
"Yes, with the local influence. The basil has a range. And everywhere, the same underscent of life - the quickburn rot you pride."
She was still smiling, lips tight. "Well, localities like that are simply bigger, stickier on Heath. Its regions are more defined, and more fluid in their borders. More reliant on geography - every puzzlepiece on your map of Savannah will in time melt and bleed, over centuries our initial ecology will follow the landlines in the same way. Think of it as bubbles of influence, each offgassing the products of the land - and on Heath, maybe there is an atmosphere of that underscent you mention - different, wetter, stonier, older."
"Interesting. So its all scale and ratios."
"Exactly, all molecules in the end. You're really asking about that underscent that develops in open spaces. It must be new," she said. Smiling, finally more pleased than tense.
Blood was the scent of Savannah. This is the woman who had made it so. Blood and rot, life and death, accelerated to extreme. My first reaction to this had been "stagnancy"; my own wheel-world's bias of enclosed spaces, and how cleanliness was a thing lost by leaks. Living Ilian, there is no real network, only gardens and stone, outside of the greatest edifices, the primary stations. And now, unbound by homeostatic concerns, real ecosystem arced all around me. Not stagnancy. Savannah was hot. Combusting. Number of iterations.
"The god of suns," Razina must be thinking to herself, "but not this".
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I left her, and attempted again when I returned. Even less: luck, focus, will. The material was a fist around my brain; I could opportunistically squeeze through the fingers in one direction before the pressure calmly, even gently reasserted itself, but I was never free. Impeded in this direction, and now that, but I headed nowhere.
The cypress were living in the morning. Heliced with squirrels which ran, heavy and ravening, through the branches they made sway. In the riot there was sometimes a thud; despite their supernaturally keen balance and claws, they occasioanlly would plummet from the trees and into the hopefully-soft ground. Sometimes this was due to the owl divebombs, young ones adventurously braving the day, but sometimes simply from the numbers.
There was simply so much to eat that the squirrels, fat and happy, had transitioned to a new type of sociality - clumping up in great locusty heaps, easily picked off by the coordinated owls, and the overeaters the first among the slain. Eating was answered. What do we do? There was no existential pressure. Was the Doctor seeing this; was this a morality play fit to win her to me, or was this as she dreamt of? Was this her dream of the plentiful?
A few scrawny and squawking nymphs watched from a tree free from the squirrel king - and those owls, despite being of similar size, knew well enough to leave them alone. Nymphs fought back and called for help. Squirrels died. They had nothing else to do, of course they died recreationally! Their rituals, immortal, now went arcane in courtship and rivalry and rest.
A beautiful rain was coming down heavy slow and slight. On the flagstones of the grave tree, pale as goldenrod, fat little circles were still visible. These damp rainshadows, in their array of spots, were too few yet to run slick and sheening, but they were one by one joining hands as I watched. Near to eyes and far from wings, rumbling stormclouds snaked down the walls of the landscape, closing on us.
So clouds carried scent, between wells of forest? Forest-equivalent ecosystems, stains. I wanted to fetch the Doctor and demand an account of when she had engineered that cloud, yes that storm, right there. How, Doctor, could you tell if this one would peter out, or downpour, or continue its catspawing the whole night. Can you read the pattern, those dark bands of cloud in the bluelight? Doctor, Doctor.
The nesting city knew, muscle-deep, how the rains came. Kali would have known. Kali would have sung me the storm's butterfly.
The river was high, blushing and swollen. I needed air and stone to drink. I had to eat the ingredients of my master's thoughts and hopes. Heath, Heath, Lunelight - a false sun of concentrated sunlight, glinting in the mirror, almost the thing itself. This gardened and irrigated city, wet city, between time, false and beautiful, moonlit.
No one accosted me in the street any more. Harka would have warned them away, dogging me and my mind. Oh Harka, how can you worry of these things? My reputation? E was the sweetest thing alive, my old old errant. It still shocked and strained my belief that I had been accepted here, that the people's mourning was lensed to and drawn from my own, none even questioning the humanity of their new leader - shocked me until I read eir letters.
E had yearned for it - yearned for the empty space I would fill. Eir years of notes, journals, missives, and secrets eagerly confessed to me by Harka, eir hopes and dreams for the city, bold and shy; now they were mine. Upon assuming, Kali had demolished a whole stretch of neglected villas and showhouses, and each month e presided past that had had prime land reserved for humans.
E had swayed the populace to rapture, and with no resistance, the people kept that energy for me.
I worried false. The city held its breath and prayed for its goals. They strained, to catch each promise dripping from my lips, and yet never needed to crowd. Was the city a religious process for them; was this a religious esteem? It was becoming so to me.
Ten clockwork movements, ten incarnations per star, ten chapters in a species' story. Flashpoint. Ten conversations between pinhole God and we little things wrenched between the gearteeth and begging for an answer.
The rain came down. Downpour, then, slowly building itself. Rain hammered, splash-fresh and warm. I let my litter walk, creaking and whirring in those tightly engineered phrases, the thock-pssh-cht of each step on the water layer. I leaned back to see the sky.
How heavy my hair was with henna, how fine it felt to rest my neck! It was not wet through yet, but water trickled down my neck, and soon the reds of my coat would be stained a deep roan. How grey Kali's body had been, how stiff those wings. I clutched eir skull again to my chest.
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Weeks ago:
I held the body until it was sick and Minak demanded I yield. As soon as it was out of my hands I was following it, dying. After e died, back to the city, it was a step, a second from the river there, fresh with blood of our kill, full and happy and so close to death, and then it was the river here, the river I had slept in, and the entire city massed around me.
Every soul watched from the banks. Every heart of the city but those that couldn't bear it. I looked to the trees, and began counting.
Harka gave me the knife. Minak, into the water, for the punishing task of collecting loose bones.
Eir body was sick. Eir blood was black. I cut open eir proud ribs, to the keel; the blade slipped and caught a fingertip to the nail - a surge of anger filled me at that, that living blood should touch dead, the sheer disrespect - but it was gone, and I continued. I lowered the cavity into the water, the running water, from the dam, like eir body was a bowl. The water ran black. Little toy-organs.
I cut and scoured until e was bones.
They were, at first, on my litter in such numbers it would not walk.
I sat at the tree. I sat at the plaza where a bold youth had cut with the same knife. I would have toppled over into tears again there, I should have, to remember that the skinning knife I held, that I had butchered eir body and freed eir soul with, was the one that had cut beaks here. Four tiny little blues, barely out of nymph, dragged henna through my hair with their comb-carved beaks, preening, persistent, until each hair was coated.
Would "coronation" work? "Anointment" was literally closer to the meaning, but gave an inappropriate theocratic tone to it all. "Painting" was correct, coloration. It was a redbird detail, the torch-carrier, signifying that a king was a puller, not a pusher. A horse for the chariot of the city: viscerally alive.
How much kinder it would be to have claws. Deft and hard and little. Perhaps it would have felt more like dissection than butchery, to dismantle and erase the flesh of my beloved. To slough flesh into water, bloody to the elbows, dripping back down whenever the water rushed away another organ, another muscle, another morsel that my huge body recognized as...
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The rain came, and a roan.
"King, king," the little thing chirped. "Give, give a word to me?" E ruffled eir feathers in excitement. Who was this? E balanced on one foot and then the other, restless.
I roused myself, drying my brow. "Your beak is carved - a little. I'm sorry, are you an attendant?"
"Chaki, almost." E took this as permission to hop into the bed of my litter. Two and a half? Three years, maybe. A clear-eyed and sensitive youth with a pronounced keel, in white wingsleeves and tassels. I smiled - yes, eir clothes could only have been woven by the Lunic boys on their intentionally thoughtless campaign of random giving, more trinkets and more laughing off of thanks.
I smiled. "A word reversed: flier, tell me, since so you came - what is it to fly into the rain? Sog-abog, lucid, dark? Fishlike, it seems. Do you know?"
E shook eir head, jotting a droplet from their beaktip. "Fish, shark? Kakaka. What's a walk then, only tapping I? Heavy feet and a pull, nothing special, no bridge."
"Hm. Why alone, you wondering? Some cohort around, come to see me?
"Just me, currying and dare.” Eir claws skittered, slightly, as e paced and found eir clawtips a bit engaged in my sheets. “All eyes on you awall, and only I dare follow what they say, 'grief, grief, light up the river vein'. But I want that. I was born to Kali, so fast. I'm greedy for a saying. So, tell me a good thing? I hope for a red thing, the red I've sensed you. I want to move, move, move this city and its hour, here! King, king, too strange, too tall?"
"Would be, hadt I the fear. Where is it now? Chaki Chaki, when sailed my blood each inch was white, was living fear, and now none. Kali, maybe, ate the fear and the sight, feasted there. Now it is washed away, and nothing's strange."
The sentries' lamps on the wall; the glow of the petty city lights against the clouds looming close. That was where my song failed. Clouds, spine, direction. Maybe I had sacrificed that, cut it from my life, and my mind could no longer do it.
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In the morning everything damp was flushed out of the city in a ripping cold-sweat wind. Torrents of air came down, not hurricane in their force but heavy, heavy and sustained in an unending sigh. No wavering or turbulence, only the press of a palm-handed wind.
Breeze perched on the thatched gables of the residential district. The acacia thrummed, reaching and reaching with myriad fingers, frozen and yearning - in the wind.
A little place was strewn across the water. Razina - what a mystery, what to do with her visit. She thought me young and egotistical by choice.
Thatch and shingle. Bulb and brazier. Wrought-iron flowers. Wooden idols, wheels, and wings.
"Little bird," I said gently, "err me?"
"Run for a runner. On," e spoke. How nervous, I turned my face away, looking at em askance from my peripheral limits. When your eye squirmed and strained at the edge of its socket, that was when you intimidated a bird least. Younger tengmu quailed at direct looks - the Throwing-Monkey is calculating their aim at me! - and hard hunter panicked. Incidental but avian-ancestral was that reflex, and sour.
"Go call that Doctor. Tell mer would list tomorrow and to build it. Ask her, 'land, land? Is clay in the land, are gardens of land?' Tell her this."
"And?"
"And sleep, heal. May we pray for healing."
E was away.
No room now, no room indeed. No operating layers but the two; Truth and Secret. Two of me, not many, and how many are people each! Child and guardian, apex realization and a base nadir, a whole chorus jostled for primacy of your thoughts, your words, your fuel. Not so! Outer and inner only I had, stage and council. Any thought without a place in these two realms could not be. Up above and down below.
The Lamprin was Rain's, I learned, after all these weeks of taking it for granted that the vessel was unnamed. A statue of the thing, printed from its own glue, now stood outside the tree thanks to Harka's miscellaneous efforts. New paints from Quarry had come in on the last glider, and it was now done in their diamine blues.
Seven more, now, of the double-exiled things. Seven! How auspicious, and no mean percentage of the garrison full.
One green and gold, another drab and pearl, and Rain's blue on blue. Each marked with a patchwork of honors, heraldries and certifications that would now be left meaningless, or painted over, or archived. 'Good resumes, no pedigree' - if I said that, would it land with them, or offend? They were Rain's men, in Rain's service, not the city's.
But that was the best. 'Friend, friend,' the Doctor said, like pooling bets. Better than any materiel and any pre-scramble allegiance was the human housing being occupied. Temporary was not an issue; the presence was what was crucial, that the city acclimate, build memory. Even if for a day, a generation. What did the city dream, what did it cry out for? It was this. Business, then.
Thirty souls - largely men, largely silver, the little colony. Who knew. "Pilots?" I asked, and twelve of the thirty stepped forward. Twelve? They caught my frown; the seconds stepped back. Seven actives. "We'll go down the line. Names, activities, post in the staff and before. Alright?" I was surprised they didn't salute me.
One by one they answered, rattling off where they had plied, interior or exterior work, construction or maintenance. Two had been on for the tail end of construction for the habitat; the others were arrivals in Rain's wave or before. Only one was a landscaper, a girl slightly my senior who had a bit of changeling hornwork done on her brow. Universally they were specialists of the artisanal work that the hull of Savannah had required - and how easy it was to forget that, all around us, those coils of bone arched, inverted, comparable in scale to the sky.
Had I spoken to Kali of it? Had we discoursed on the design, or seen flyby footage? No, but e had to have known. Surely there was some quip I could remember that betrayed eir familiarity? E must have called it a bone, a bone-world... Surely in those records of the kings a set of schematics, surely Quarry was sallying drones out? Its whorls, its birdcage arcs, the woven shell of the world. Birdcage. Who was I welcoming first? Not my own people, who I'd preemptively betrayed, and neither the inmost solars, to whom the city's hopes surged. Cagekeeps instead.
I thanked them for their time and presence. I memorized the pilots' names and no more.
"Should I win your signature, you will be subject to the duties and privileges of any citizen. Should you keep your options open, you will be welcome forever. Support, supply, commerce, and shelter are yours and will remain. I've invested in neither paper. Rain Flower cal Quay -" they stirred at that. The name made it real - "will be your commander. Who knows Redname?"
"I," the landscaper girl said. Salt Rhyme. "But only by the staff gossip. Most hold she's a deep insider to Cote, and has his ear most."
"Telephone. All will come up in the hearing. Redname, if you listen to her, lives this moment in terror of glorification - perhaps because she lives in hope of conflict. Here is her argument: mechanics, can you see your world from the inside? You stand here at attention. You work on order and manual. You hope for pride and accolade, awarded to accomplishment. You are a coordinated force which can dissect a habitat into parts, and thus are the closest this world has to a solider - one who cuts, and touches the walls of cities. Now, do you fear war?"
The oldest of the pilots scoffed at that. "You're describing basic principles of organization. Hardly a return to bond and barbarism."
"The basic principles of organization were invented for war. Are we so distant? We are, and any citizen of the Ecumene, or scholar of the sequence can understand so. Can Kuryo, from her origins? Kuryo, whose home was lost for its brawls, its battles in the streets, the seething back and forth of demand and holding - all the bits of friction that can only exist under rocks. Away from the sun. No battle is coming - but if it comes anywhere, it will be here, and if anyone wants to blame or fear, they will look to you."
Rhyme. "You said welcome and I believe it. Are you saying that Quay proper will be bristling against us being here? I don't want to be in that, and if it is only a matter of time..."
"The city loves you. The city will bury you in flower garlands and fine things. Wreck half of it and the crater will be made a monument to the joy of your sight. Stop that now," I said, tensely, gently. And then back to speech: "Redname is as enemy to Cote as I. I hate her. She is nonexistent politically, and the coming caravel may reassure you that the Sun will not annihilate its child's destination. This is why I ask nothing of you, no swearing or signs. War is dead, and will not incarnate again until the last day.
"But a battle is here. A battle boils, and blood is shed, in the river, daily. My master is dead. The city hurtles towards death, each day is a limit closer by what should have been weeks. I beg you for friendship and participation. Talk, play, learn with the people living here, for their sake and yours. Rain will have you dayjobbing as he likes, so build him a palace then, but I ask your nights. Have you come for Rain or what he loves, the place he has chosen? Stretch your legs and find out. I hope that this small city will be blessed by your presence, that your spiders ensconce and strengthen it.
"When we see sunlight, the political will fall into place, a rightful position along the great wheel of this world. All authority save the central light of revelation is transient. But the dream of Quay cannot be transient: the right and necessity of human and tengmunnin living together. The enemies of this city - my only enemies - are those who say, 'that cannot be, for we are separate lights' - perhaps that all lights are separate. Fear the proving of that true.
"My errant, my sibling, will you speak with me at one stair?" And "Ka," Harka said.
Harka surmounted. Eir great wings were like a mantle when e hunched eir shoulders, as when cold or in thought. A black shape, separate from the Harka it laid on, in one mass rather than two. Deft, leathery claws on the railing, grey on white.
Eir voice filled the sky. "My blood is a stolen blood. My heart is a wooden heart," and mine was breaking, my blood seethed, my breath slugged. "But my eye is a keen and lovely eye, and my love has died, remade. We are of the communion of all stars, the sphere beyond the wheel. Why are you here? Generation one of our dream team, a lost little king for a lost little city, and proud silver Flower sharpening a plough. Immortal love. Quay? Quay is a 'let it happen,' let see how ape and crow fellow. The See will want formats, sides of species. But Quay is a 'let it be everywhere', not a region but an all-partsnership. Love, love! I want to be there, everywhere, to alight on shoulders in the world my makers and your masters deny. My blood is not even my own. Prove nothing and dance with me, live city and prove nothing to me, take words and share with me.
"You are heroes. So get away! Get away from we impoverished kingly. Your man is Rain. Won't vacate with him? Sing, drink, discourse, for here are the people who have prayed and prayed and prayed to live long enough to love you. The prime virtue, the one commandment: live together! We ask and watch nothing. Go free! This city was built for you. We have longed to give it."
It went well. They took it well. I stepped back for Harka, and soon for Rain. It was hopeless, hopeless as war, as wolfteeth against some bright and impenetrable soft plastic: the old guard of the staff, Cote, Cote! was sitting smug and halfway gone.
Bloody-minded Emelry! All I could think of, all I could cling to, was the one thought I had: a knife, at Coteshinoeleon's wristbone.
------------
An eye on them couldn't hurt, but we were no eavesdroppers. Rain was masterful with them; he raised and arm and their eyes chased him. The silvers respected him, the golds trusted him, and of course! Everywhere was the sense not of rapid but of certain movement, of things clicking into place, and his dramatist's flair hinged on it. They all, through his hints and dropped details, came to the conclusion that their own senses had led them here, their own insight and virtue, and Rain merely an innocent exemplar who showed them the way.
He was so young. He showed it better than I. He ran and danced. His arms were river-wide, his feet on the grass and sandy soils poised and sure despite the wait.
From the bridge, far away, I watched him breathe in where he stood. He stayed with his original cabin, accepting a few acquaintances, but where were his friends? I saw him smile, and pause on the porch, watching people move below him.
They paired up and settled in, they chose houses and amenities, and slowly the cityfolk were coming to investigate, strafing the river and perching, chatting, on the outskirt roofs of the little neighborhood with too-wide streets.
"Harka, how can we do it?" I stopped the litter midway cross the bridge, away from the stilts and the basil, towards the plaza and the tree. "Adaptivity alone? Have you ever been able to live in eternity?"
"A priest asks."
"At times its felt so! When studying, when..." Kings cannot truly plan. In the sense we mean with the word, the forecast and the project are foreign things, exterior forces to the constant readiness of a king. The power of a king is one of choices, of better or worse courses to pour the already extant fluids into. Kings can do nothing, and they fail their station when they try - they can only welcome or reject what comes for them. That is the unchallengeable power, the immortal power, the Yes, the No. Paint and blood. A helmsman who the wind erases. 'Live with us, be our own,' I had said, and truly, but how could I? It could change in a day. A king, too, cannot hope.
"Minak!" Harka chirped, and my friend came down to me from eir circle of warning.
"Twinned Hand," Minak said, "has called for you. Riding now, stop?"
"No, that's well. Tell him we may tree meet."
Minak blinked. "Ah - but he calls."
"You mean he means to catch us in the bridgemiddle?" I scoffed. "Worth the eye?"
Minak could only shrug and neck-ruffle. "Well," I said, "love love, go fly ahead. I'll see."
And soon, even as Minak was black in the sky, green-wheeled cart rattled past us, drivers as loud as the wheels. A Lunic boy sat on the folded back ramp, earnestly gesticulating to two skeptical roans the particulars of some dish? I heard something about honey and then he noticed us, scrambled and jumped from the back, waving to his new fellows.
He stood in the street, grinning at us and panting, and then stiffened, made serious. He waited, and walked beside my litter when it was upon him.
"Twinned Hand," said Harka, "irregular. Pitman for the Colché - green and gold."
"My name! I'm impressed, impressed, I didn't think you caught it! Hello."
Casual. I stopped and stared, forcing myself into a straighter posture, and saw him almost at eye level. He seemed to have not decided on the basics. Was he going to confront me boldly? Sidle up with a keen idea? Burst with words? Overcome with deferential silence? Each move he made seemed to leap between any of these options, each good as the other, sliding across his meaty face. He stammered something out, held his tongue, smoothed himself, and caught my eye.
"I hold with Weylbloom," he said, to my face. "I trained for the Hildas to follow the smoke, and I haven't been disappointed. You talk about blood and tragedy, and how urgent a new course is, a rescue from this enforced death. Is there a eugenetic solution? I've heard crazy tales of Quarry. You know that not a second, not a month can be lost. Will you talk with me?"
A dread shuffled up my arms like loose rope.
Where were my words? The Sun had promised me words.
I could see the shape of the words, coming from Kali's mouth, eir sharp spade tongue. How e would tweeze that foolishness from the boy's throat, fleeced him of it - where was that spell, that heavy stormshadow that fell on all faces that listened to em? Atheater, it must be me. Before I made my plans, words fell from my lips, slipped out silently. "You fear death."
"No," he protested, following my path but not thoughts, and "Yes," I said, "you fear it like a child. You would kiss death if it whispered you an answer to itself."
"No - you misunderstand me. Sorry - sorry, I assumed that with the records you have access to, you would see the parallel. King Sainshand, you must see the condition of these people as just the next step in that trend, that curtailing of life!"
I stopped and spoke to his face. "I hate death. Walk with me."
And he did, until we were at the tree and into the grave.
---
Public was correct. Only my closest would to the crypt. But we were close, hovering over it.
I remembered Kali's memories, of the center of the center, circling, perching next to the dead, craning. Catching words like flies. I had Hand sit cross-legged at that central clearing, across from where my litter splayed into a throne.
He had no changeability now. He was nervous, unsure where this moment was between lesson and harsh lesson. But he, off-balance, obeyed.
This hour - early afternoon, past what he must have seen as beachday squalor - was usually quiet at the tree: my own busiest hours, and only the library and clerical functions at activity. Now the branches were heavy. The chamber, the whole woven pot of wood curling around us, perforated and strung with light, was now black with bodies.
I stood, unfastened the babygate of my litter's railing, and walked over to him. My legs were strong, filled with knots, and no longer in that constant, gripping ache of catchup exercise. Slowly I picked through the roots, and handed him my lie detector. I sat again, and we stared.
Thin skein: the world tellure. This fragile spiral of ashes and embers. They said that the stars were young, as if it would still be the world when it began to die. They said the sky was empty! Vacuum - a medium, an air, a mesh of cloth utterly saturated with sunlights. It was a sea of photons so dense you could bite it.
The Sun of Suns. This living wall of flesh, and fire, that our umbilicals were hooked to. Font of fruit and sight. Pupil-drupelet livid. Us, we little pinned treasureboxes, flecks of dead skin, dancing, suspended.
The wall loomed. Motherfather. Heaven. Life. Blood, roaring, singing, laughing. Do you picture screams, organs? No, song, song and wings, and light, and honey, and swords, swords of shame and longing, swords of yearning and fear, dancing, lustful and contemplative, bonecarved, like a crayoned sunmane. A gaping maw - a billion lips, unhurt by their joining, soft and eating nothing. Blood without sweat. Life without filth. World without end. Fate without death. And, deep behind the eyes, in the secret place, the centerpoint of the skull - something jolted, and reflexed away from becoming itself. He broke connection.
"Do you see?" I shouted in his sobbing face. "Do you see what I hate? Vanish! The blood leaving your body, and nothing to save it! Clinging to nothing! Vanish, vanish, vanish! What a joke!"
And those broad, bladed, black wings curled down for me, from the flying Spirit Sun.