IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume
II: Tests of Fire and Blood
Chapter 28 The Wild and the Civilized
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.
Still growing up, apparently.
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