Tuesday, May 19, 2708

We head out before dawn, wary lest the savor of yesterday's cooking draw curious troops.  I have to get used to this, how every sight and sound and scent of normal life could get me killed.

It won't be so bad in the urban areas, I tell myself, when we can mingle with the crowds and draw no more attention to ourselves than any other citizen.  Yet that has its own dangers: the whisper and the wink of the traitor--which could mean anyone hungry or scared, jealous, blackmailed, vengeful, patriotic, seduced, careless, coerced, tortured, kin to a prisoner, or in any kind of need.

Aichi doesn’t march; she dances.  She flits from vine to flower to rock, making soft clucks and coos of pleasure.  At a squeal of delight over a parrot, Lucinda clears her throat; then Aichi freezes, a finger pressed to her lips, and moves in utter silence.  But nothing can stop her savoring all that she sees.  For Aichi, I gather, every leaf is the first leaf that she has ever seen, every flower, every bird; if we could suffuse the entire world with her awe we’d have no need for wits.  Maybe we all resembled Aichi before the Fall, before we evolved, before we grew clever enough to work by the sweat of our brows, living off the fruit of our own knowledge.

It’s a dangerous world for innocents like her.

Damien hums faintly to himself, stopping mid-tune, then trying a change in the melody, marching along in silence, then starting up again.  At last he declares, "I have it!"  He smiles to himself and makes not another sound.

"Have what?"  Teofilo asks, sotto voce, after waiting in vain for an explanation.

"My song.  I've written a song called ‘The Bullet Dance,’ about Kanarik's brave deeds," then he nods to us, "together with Deirdre and Chulan, in getting us the arms we need."  I smile at the thought of being Kanarik's sidekick.

"Well, then," Teo says,  "Let's have..."

"Nope!"  Lucinda cuts in.  "Later, when you can belt it out safely, full-throat to an appreciative audience.  But for now, keep that tune in your head, bard."

Somberly Kief adds, "Keep it to sing to other rebels, to pass it on--so that our deeds will outlive us."

We walk more quietly after that.  Every darkness under leaf or bough seems to hide a rifle barrel, and the singing birds call too much attention to themselves.

 

Wednesday, May 20, 2708

          No sign of either an enemy or a friend.  Just the cathedral-tall reach of the trees overhead, inhabited from tip to root in all their fluttering, chattering length, with birds and monkeys, snakes and spiders, butterflies and bees, gliding lizards and pocket-squirrels.  I think I caught a glimpse of a honey-bear, but not clearly enough for a good shot.  Beams of sunlight shimmer through the green shadows like benisons from God, and the soft ground underfoot feels kindest here, unpaved.  It feels, right this moment, as though the entire world has forgotten all about war, and though my mind remembers that every step brings me closer to the roar of guns and the screams of pain ahead, my heart forgets, my heart forgets completely.

 

Thursday, May 21, 2708

The food goes surprisingly fast.  I'd have sworn we had enough for a month of marching, but these teenagers...!

I stand from my lunch, licking the grease from my fingers with my back turned to the others, still edgy with hunger.  I think the others do likewise; nobody wants anyone to see them making inadvertent obscene gestures, but nobody wants to waste so much as a smear of taste.

On impulse I glance down to where I feel my skirt's hem brush my shins--higher than it used to?  People have been known to grow into their twenties, I remind myself.  My father said that he did, much to his family’s surprise, after he’d already reached the height normal to his people.  (And that’s the only time he ever directly mentioned his family to me.)  But like all folks raised by Til Institute, I have no idea of my own age.  Maybe Cyran does nothing worse than what the Tilián do in who e sends to fight hir battles.

Who would I be if Til Institute hadn't raised me, tenderly inculcating all the proper range of socially-beneficial neuroses, the complex net of compulsions to serve?  It almost came to that, I remember.  I almost became a different person...

I don't know what had prompted me to unlock the folds of that balled-up crumple of paper that I had found in Mom's stuff, like a bit of trash that had just fallen in there.  But I had discovered it inside a chest--a locked chest, not a basket or an open box, where rubbish might easily have gotten in on her travels.  It intrigued me--something that she'd wanted to throw away but couldn't make herself, quite?

I had smoothed it out, rough/soft under my hand, the ink still dark (except around the edges and exposed parts, where it had faded a bit towards brown) the paper turned yellow-beige and frail.  The letters had that gracefully angular quality of someone more used to writing Mountainfolk characters by brush than standard-script by pen, while the language struggled with the awkwardness of an intelligent person trying to communicate in a strange tongue.

 

 

Slowly it had dawned on me that my father had written this.  Jacob Keller.  He would've supported me, if he'd known.  But she had not written to the Sunrise House of Puebla Karakulya, on the road that winds upward from Station #14 of the Altraus Rail. to disappear into the ancient conifers.  She had left him alone in his clean mountain village when she discovered her pregnancy.  She turned to Til Institute for help, instead, and I grew up very, very differently.