Tuesday, April 28, 2708

No glow lights Father Man's clearing at this hour--past midnight, I'm pretty sure.  I can hear his snores from his unlit hut, loud enough to compete with the ever-present mutter of the jungle's evening life.  We move like shadows under shadows to the cold coal bed, unkindled since Initiation Night.

Cigarettes light up in the dark, firefly glows as we pass them back and forth, stoking up on nicotine-energy for a long, long night.  Ah, what I'll do for Lovequest.  We kneel to the coal bed and rub its charcoal onto our skin till we can hardly see ourselves.

Lufti smudges around his eyes first of all.  He looks half comical, half disturbing--a little boy emulating a skull.  "It's sort of an eyeliner," he says. 

"Stop it!"  Kiril grabs the cinder from him.  "Boys don't wear eyeliner."

"Cyran does," he replies as he snatches it back.

"Cyran's not a boy," she tells him.

"He is, too!"

She rubs charcoal up and down her arms, streaking herself like the stalking tiger.  "E's not a boy, e's not a girl, e just is.  Sort of like the rocks."  Now she lifts up her skirt and darkens her legs.

"Rocks can have gender," Damien says as he rubs ashes between Kanarik's winglike shoulder blades, where her neckline drops down.  "I could tell you a thing or two about rock maidens."  We all fall silent, waiting for another story, but he says, "You don't want to hear about them right now, though."

"We don't have time for stories, anyway," says our leader, Lucinda, as she coils up hammocks into our packs.  We shall carry our loot slung into those hammocks between us on our return.  In a kindlier voice she asks, "Got any briefer words for us, bard?"

Damien pauses, then says, "Just that we aren't alone, especially not at night."  Kanarik pulls out a little packet from a wide skirt-pocket.  "Because the dead fight for us."  The veterans all nod, apparently knowing what Damien has to say.  Meanwhile Kanarik unfolds the cloth to reveal Mountainfolk luck dolls—ancestor-vessels.

"Do they, now," Imad says thoughtfully, as he picks up a doll—a thumb-sized little figurine with thin ribbons coming out of its back, made of twigs bound into a manikin shape by thread and bits of yarn.

"Yes,” Damien answers.  “When you feel a chill come on you, don't think of it as fear--my father told me that before he died.  Think of it as the dead who love you, who love what you fight for, coming to lend you strength."  And Kief smiles like a man in ecstatic prayer, his eyes closed and his head tipped back, his palms turned upward.

Damien stands and helps Kanarik to her feet.  She takes up the luck-dolls and passes them around.  "I made them myself," she says, her grinning teeth white in her sooty face.

"Next time make them from darker yarn," Lucinda growls.  "Wear the gaudy things inside your shirts or not at all, if you're coming with me."  I almost don't hear her when she murmurs to herself, "Not but I don't like gaudy now and then, in the right time and place..."  I tie the ribbons around my neck and let the doll fall down against my heart.

Damien helps Kanarik into her pack.  I shrug on my own and stub out my cigarette.  The night gets even darker as the others do the same.

Imad asks, "Tell us how the dead assist," as he adjusts the buckles on his straps.

"Oh, lots of ways,” says Damien.  “They add spirit-strength to our muscles just when we feel about to give out, they nudge knives and bullets into place, tug our attention toward what we need to see, comfort us in our dreams, remind us of what we fight for--different things."  He settles his canteen on one hip and his knife on the other.  "And they do things against the other side--blow their bullets off course, cloud their eyes and make them miss what we need them not to see, confuse them and help them do dumb things.  Most of all they freeze the hearts of our enemies with guilt and fear."

Miko stops, his pack halfway up his back.  "And the ghosts on the side of the enemy--what of them?"

Kief grins and answers for Damien.  "They aren't as strong as our ghosts."

Imad nods at that and straps on his machete, while Kief secures a hammer into a carpenter's holster, slung low like the sharpshooter he'd be if only we could give him something to shoot.  We haven't, in fact, got one gun between us--but we'll change that, hopefully.

Now we file out onto a different path from the one we usually tread on Sundays--no more than an animal-track, deep into the fragrant woods till the insects chatter all around us, closing in behind.  Lucinda will lead us till we reach the point where Miko walks his old territory; then he'll take over.  (They don't question me anymore--I don't question me anymore--not since I carried Aron over the coals, still dragging my chains--those same chains that they later clapped onto the Tilián woman on the same day that they sent me off to my Test of Blood.)

Very little light leaks down through the cloud-cover, through canopies over canopies of leaves; I only know the existence of moon and stars from memory.  I can make out each of us merely as a rumor of a shape, small or great; our leader hulking in the fore could be a bear for all my eyes can tell.  (Mom didn't think my face would matter in the dark—men don’t really care, she said, as she packed me off.  But Madame cared.  She tried, oh how she tried, with all her powder-puffs and curling-irons.)

The sense of sound dominates our perceptions now, filling out the space we move through.  I hear the hiss of a snake up above me to my right, and how his scales slide over bark in the torrid night.  I hear something else, small and furtive, crashing through the weeds at our approach.  I hear layers of many different kinds of insects stretching out in all directions--they go on for miles.

(After they captured me, I played dumb, too raw a recruit to know anything; I’d just had time to ditch the tokens of my rank before they saw.  So they set me to hoeing corn, day in and day out.  Corn became my life.  Funny, how I got to care about the corn, when I'd long since stopped--or tried to stop--caring about people.)

I push through long leaves on thick stalks that remind me of corn, as I try to remember all the botany lessons that I crammed on before coming here.  Ropeweed?  That must've been it--long, tough fibers in those leaves, with lots of uses.  Make a note of it.  Heaven knows what I'll need to know in the coming days.  What I'll need and what I'll have to be--I didn't sign on expecting to become a revolutionary.

(I had no idea what I'd wind up becoming, those first few days.  I remember how Madame laughed her head off at my strength, so young, when I finally fought off her fussing, breaking perfume bottles and cursing like a sailor.  For days the House reeked of scents splashed all together that should never mix.)

(One day I smelled something rank in the field, an animal odor, and I heard a rustling in the corn.  I thought that some beast had come to gnaw the life out of all those succulent, green stalks that I'd toiled so hard over--what else should I think?  So I rattled my chain and bellowed out a roar to scare the beast away.  But then I heard it wail like a child.)

When I hear running water Lucinda changes our direction.  Now we follow the brook's course, always chuckling to our right as we descend.  Now and then we climb up over tangles of old roots, but mostly we go down, we go down.

(Lucky for me, Madame had a merciful heart--she didn't get into the Business for a lark, anymore than me.  She kicked through all the broken glass, still laughing, and gave me the most delightful smirk, shaking her head.  That's when she decided to train me for the bouncer.  Four years in a brothel and I still got my own virginity safe between my legs.)

(Four years in the service, the last spent wearing that damned purple mantle, and I thought I could look at anything without it breaking through to me.  But I parted the cornstalks and saw that blood-crusted little boy dragging his footless stumps behind him, and you could've broken me right in half with just a breath.)

I feel a breath of moisture thickening the air.  At the point where the trail drops most quickly I listen to the waterfall roar, I feel the air sparkle with water-vapor against my skin, charged and wet and scented green.  I lose myself in the sensuality of the moment, so that I don't have to think any further than the now.  Fluid notes float up to me to warn of slippery footing ahead--funny, I'd never pictured Lucinda warbling like a bird.

(Oh, how I loved those pretty ladies, every one of them, who let me cry on their bruised little shoulders, who told me jokes that taught me how to smile, who used to sing in high, quavery voices to the lounging gentlemen.  If I couldn't have beauty, myself, I could defend it in others.  With a mug like mine, the only good, the only beautiful thing life left me is to smash in the face of anything or anybody who menaces whatever is lovely or worthwhile.)

(Sometimes something ugly can be beautiful.  I looked down on that bruised wreck of a child, and he scowled back up at me, with the fiercest look you ever saw on a wounded animal.  He told me, "Take me to Cyran; I've come looking for hir."  When I picked him up everything changed.  Everything.)

Something's changed in me already, something in the way I travel.  We move with no more sound than any other wild thing, yet I feel the rhythm of a martial drum in every footfall, in the sockets of my hips.  I feel the march.  I have hiked for pleasure since I could walk, in terrains as tough as this; this time feels different.  We march.  We journey from the safety of our lair into high risk--we may not live to see the dawn.  To this we go with resolution, to this we go with pride.

As many as we dared to take come with us, to carry as much loot as we can steal: me, Lucinda, Miko, Imad, Kief, Kiril and Lufti, Damien and Kanarik, and two weaslelike Mountainfolk girls, named Chulan and Fatima, whose hips sway like pros twice their age, the motion visible even in the dark--heaven (or hell) knows what they survived before they found their way to Cyran.  Chulan has wider facial bones and more epicanthal fold; Fatima has a beautiful, high-cheekboned face with hard, cynical eyes.  But from the neck down they’re identical, or at least interchangeable. 

(I’m really Chinese.  Fatima never believes me, though sometimes she pretends to.  I got dark from working in the sun.  My high-caste mother, doubtless unwed, couldn’t let anybody know the scandal; I know this must be true.  The people who raised me weren’t really kin—kin might give their daughters to others to raise, but they don’t sell their own.)

(I don’t know who I am, anymore.  I’m what I never thought I could be.  So what?  Nobody asks who you are, just what you do.  And by now I’d rather be the one who holds the gun than the one pistol-whipped.)

I hear the keen of a kestrel that normally never calls at night.  That tells us we've arrived.  Foliage opens up to a clearing gray with dew, reflecting a luminous, overcast sky.  Miko points silently to a house, barn, dairy, and silo up ahead.  I shiver in the night's damp heat.

Collecting myself, I breathe deep the freshness--freshness?  No odor of cattle?  I look more closely at the even lawn beneath my feet--mowed, not grazed.  I nod--you won't find cows in that barn, I'll wager, nor fodder in the silo--at least not fodder for anything alive.

At Lucinda's gesture we fan out along the periphery of forest.  Now we shall leave ten separate trails through the dew, no telling which one points in the right direction.  We shall trill to each other like night-birds in nearly normal rhythms, and pray that the men behind guns don't bird-watch as a hobby.  But so far we move as soundlessly, as weightlessly, as Damien's ghosts.  (I can feel them--Mother, Father, Nana, Isobel, Turil, Simon--a whole village hovering over us, protecting us.)  (I can feel you, dear, dear Mischa--guide my hand true, on the lock, on the machete, whatever happens.)  (I can feel you, all my mothers, all my fathers--I have no fear of death.)  (Oh God, Oh God, what if what that kid said about the dead is true?)

Grass gives way to bare dirt and now I crouch in touching-range of the first outbuilding.  I whistle my position, but only once--too many such signals and the enemy'll wonder why a whole flock of so many different kinds of birds have zoomed in on a habitation of man.  I seem to feel the others scurry into position by a prickling of the skin that tracks their motions, when neither sound nor sight betrays them.  As light as mist, I move in between the dairy and the house.

Click!  "Don't move," the guard behind me says.