Sunday, May 24, 2708

            (I wake in the middle of the night.  Some deep horror jolts me up, but I find myself safe in the thick, old quilts and blankets of the Headmaster's quarters, comforting and warm and worn.

          I can't get back to sleep.  I have the oddest feeling that my distress was not my own.  With hardly a susurration I put on robe and slippers in the dark, and step out into the hall, still feeling a bit fuzzy from sleep.

          I don't know why my feet take me downstairs, to the student's dorms.  They seem to know exactly where to go, my feet.  Sometimes I wonder if I have one of those peculiar senses that some people say run rife in Novatierre.  Then I laugh at my own rubbish.  Still, I follow the instincts that forty years at my post have trained in me.  I find a cold doorknob by feel and enter a room with four bunk beds, for our youngest first years.  Three of them snore softly.  The fourth sniffles and weeps.

          I kneel by this lower bunk.  “Bad dreams?” I whisper.

          “N-no.”  The starlight in the window sparkles in his eyes.

          “Would you like to talk about it?  I can authorize hot chocolate for an emergency like this,” I try to whisper as jocularly as I can.

          A long pause.  In that pause I hear that somebody has stopped snoring.  “No sir,” he says at last.

"Very well,” I say, standing up.  “It can't be too terrible, then.  Buck up, young sir, before you disturb your roommates.”  And I leave, helpless to do anything else if I can't draw him out.  I wonder, despite all sense, if he knows something that I dearly need to know, myself.  I make it almost all the way up the stairs before I hear, behind me, a wail of absolute despair.)

* * *

Morning, sort of.  We dress in the dark in our laundered old clothes, scrubbing up and enjoying all the benefits of indoor plumbing.  Kief wears his sleeveless shirt over the new uniform, in deference to the weather, stripping off the black ribbon trim so that no one will know that it came from Tumblebugs.

(“Mornin’, Headmaster,” the dairyman says with a nod in my direction, his pails gurgling as he passes in the dim blue glow.  They’re used to my morning constitutional, and approve of a man in my position rising early to take a walk.  But they would not approve, had they known my secret heart.  Sometimes I just have to get out of the building, in the early hours before the day, just to breathe undusty air, just to feel the sky overhead, that indefinable sense of limitless freedom.

Oh God forbid the thought!  We need our limits, lest we live like pirates, rank and lawless!)

We pass bread between us as we hurry out, under the failing stars at zenith while all the horizon below takes flame.  Lucinda also hands out scarves from the gift shop—all the muted ones that don’t sell well, but knit of something light and fluffy and heavenly warm.

(Yet clouds impose some boundaries, surely.  They follow the hidden strata of the air, each sort of cloud staying to its level, flattening at the foot on the pressure beneath.  However disorderly in comparison to this institution of brick and polished wood, they do keep laws of their own.

There, just above the school walls, a sheer strand of sunrise-colored cloud stretches out, pale coral, like a scarf across the sky.  I haven’t seen that color in so long…)

I gaze out on the colors on the rim of the world.  They remind me of the Coral Gulf at home…and shame on you, Deirdre!  Agents don’t allow homesickness.  The world holds many beauties beyond the shores of Til.

(I used to love the scarves.  Oh, all the different colors, some shot with silver and some with threads of gold!  Some had beading, some embroidery, some had sequins that would catch the sun like sparks, and many had fringes that shivered with each move.

We used them to play pirate—swathed about the head, the waist, the throat, a gaudy wrap for stones and shells that passed for stolen swag.  No reason, anymore, why not, sh...someone said, since sh could never again…NO!  Don’t follow that thought!  For God’s mercy, man, for the salvation of soul and sanity, don’t follow that thought!)

We travel some ways in silence before the first engines start up--then Yan and Yaimis cry out as one, falling to the ground with hands clapped on their ears.

"Shhhh!" Aichi hisses and kicks Yaimis, but Fatima pulls her away.  Slowly, shaking, the boys climb back to their feet, shoulder their packs again, and move on.  Damien goes over to march beside them and softly whistles some of the tunes that he sang to the Tumblebug staff last night, and I can see the twins work hard to hear nothing else.

* * *

Sometimes it seems that I live from meal to meal, but this one hardly counts.  Lucinda passes around more stapleseed biscuits from the gardener's fare: rich, nutty, coarse and toothsome, but not nearly enough--they barely dent the hunger of hard marching on slopes in the cold.  Why?  Our backs ache with the weight of our supplies, food from both the gardeners and Tumblebugs.  We even have some bean cakes left from Chicamoq.  She must foresee hard times ahead for us, then.

On the plus side, feral tobacco grows abundantly around us, plants as tall as me, with unkempt skirts of dead leaves underneath the broad, pale-green ones full of life.  They give us a rough, uncultivated smoke, raw in the throat, much like ourselves, so that's all right.  We suck in smoke like breathing food, and tuck away more leaves for future use.

My father smoked.  I remember my disgust at the time, the smell of him, the yellow stains on his fingers.  I glance at my own fingers as I pass a hand-rolled cigar to Chulan.  Yep, stained.  And my breath smells just like his, no doubt.

Father...Jacob Keller.  I had my suspicions about that name right off, of course--it didn't sound at all like Mountainfolk.  Jacob--well, people take Bible names everywhere the missionaries go, and the mountain heights never stopped a determined soldier of God.  But that didn’t explain the surname.

I pass between boulders: raw, pale outcroppings of the planet’s granite bones.  I think of the rough stone chapels, erected up in the mountains for the saving of Mountainfolk souls that nobody else seems to want.  For a second I almost believe that I hear church-bells.  Then I shake my head--I’ve always been prone to imagining things like that.  I never did find out what religion my father belongs to.  If any.

When I eventually did track him down I found him as Jacob Kusma, of the Kusma Clan in Sunrise House.  Which didn't stop him from having a line of credit in Archives under the Keller name, kept secret from his family--the family that he never did let me meet.

Chulan hands the cigar back to me and I smoke thoughtfully, only half-regarding the landscape beyond the swirls that I breathe upon the air.  Blood will tell, they say.  Baptize a child under an alias and who should wonder if she grows up to be an agent?  A foreign provocateur, infiltrating the ranks of an organization that is, of itself, underground.  Sneak, child of Sneak.  And oh, Father, I have plenty enough secrets of my own to not pry too much into yours.

Except, on this mission, my name.  No secret there; I entered the country with no expectation of needing to conceal my identity, or my affiliation with the Tilián.  Everybody knows me by the name that I’ve borne from infancy: Deirdre Evelynne Keller, Jacob Kusma’s secret daughter.

As it turned out, though, he'd stolen the name "Keller" from the first sign that he came across when he hit the Lowlands: "Keller Pianos--Quality Sound at Makeshift Prices."  My heritage.  His family never even knew that he'd gone down to the Cities, nor that he'd fathered a child out of wedlock and left it for strangers to raise; they believed that he'd traveled from village to village on itinerant work for awhile.  Sounds like something I could do.  Maybe I got my love of hiking from him.

I look around me, at Kief, at Imad, at Teofilo.  So that's what’s nagging me.  Most male persons in this revolution remind me of my father--I’d never met that many Mountainfolk growing up.

He'd looked like a stranger to me, and he did not.  Jacob’s rangy proportions and his height spoke of some atavistic mix in the blood, but the dark skin, slant eyes, jutting nose, and craggy cheekbones defined his race clearly enough.  I take a lot more after him than I ever did my mother, God rest her soul; pale Little Bertha had hair as red as Kief's, back when she had any.  But Jacob’s hair gleamed as black as mine, coarse and wavy; it receded around a widow's peak over his gaunt and big-boned face with the earthtone skin stretched taut over angles, everything angles.  He had knobby joints and knuckles like mine, only more so, gnarled like roots, and all the scars and seams and sinews made him look tough, but his eyes pleaded for understanding, back then, on the day we met.

I draw deep on the tobacco before handing it on to Damien.  The man never told me whether he had ever married, or whether I have siblings.  He never said a thing about my Mountainfolk kin, and all I know of the culture comes from books.

He did tell me that it was better this way, that I wouldn't have liked the mountain life, he left me best off raised by Til.  I look at the steep landscape around me now, and laugh brief puffs of smoke.  I would've had far fewer opportunities had he claimed me—he’d said.  I give that a little thought.  I would never have had the opportunity to march up here in the middle of godforsaken nowhere, cold and hungry and footsore, but certainly different peaks than the ones my father knew, I’ll give him that.  I would never have had the opportunity to get shot at, the opportunity to...kill.

Damien hands the cigar back.  I suck the last bittersweetness from the butt and drop it to the stone underfoot to grind out the glow of it.  I expect I smell like Jacob Kusma, now.  Ah well, he meant well.  And Jonathan, the father I chose for myself, I suppose he meant well, too.  All of these men in my life who mean well.  I glance over at Kief, who smiles back.  Maybe I should try something other than fathers.

But even now those dark and pleading eyes haunt my memory, the way they made me feel like one great, big, walking shame who'd caught up with him as inexorably as a Fury.  I hated my reflection in those eyes and I almost hated him for it.  But when I saw the genuine concern for my mother as I reported her missing in the grips of her disease, when he agreed to do anything he could to help me find her, I had to forgive him everything.  Meant well.

But...no name.  I don't even have a real name.  And I only found out last year.