Bones of the Past (Arhel) (26 page)

But the Wen dragged her and her friends over their branching roads carefully. They too knew a thousand tricks. They stayed wary. They didn’t make any mistakes. They led the outlanders and the outcasts into a tree-circle, full of drummers and dancers and hellish noise, and Medwind felt the last of her hope evaporate.

* * *

The Silk People were taking them all to the Keyu, along aerial walkways worn smooth by the passage of the uncounted sacrifices who’d preceded her.

Her hands were tied behind her back, but Seven-Fingered Fat Girl fought the Silk People with teeth and feet; butted her head into the stomach of one green-and-gold-swathed captor; screamed fury and terror into the noise that surrounded her. Once long ago she had trusted people and had walked quietly beside men like these—and once she was ripped from the arms of her parents, given a pack and a dartstick, and thrown to the jungle to be food for kellinks or roshu or dooru. In spite of the Silk People, she had lived. Knowing she went to her death, she would not go quietly again.

The three men of the Silk People dragged her along the treewalks, up and down the twisting braided branching paths, stumbling as she kicked and fought. She did everything she could to make them lose their balance. If they fell and took her with them, or even if they didn’t fall, but dropped her, she wouldn’t care. She would rather fall and die than feed the Keyu. She would rather do anything than become food for the Keyu.

She could hear her tagnu and the peknu behind her, struggling too. She didn’t have time to think about the others who shared her predicament—the best she could do was wish them luck, and a quick death.

Ahead, more of the Silk People waited, and beyond them—beyond them squatted the Keyu, as ugly and twisted and malevolent as she’d remembered. The tree-gods thundered their impatience—drummed
Feed us, feed us!
at terrible volume, so that the very jungle seemed to shake.

Seven-Fingered Fat Girl never quit fighting—but the men were used to resistance. They brought her safely down to the ground, between the rows of waiting Silk People, and into the cursed circle of the gods. Then they held her there, twisting one arm behind her back until she fell to her knees. They waited.

More men brought the rest of the group into the circle. They bound Dog Nose tightly—hands and feet.
He’d given them a fight,
she thought. His nose bled and his face was bruised and swollen, and his chest was scratched and cut and bleeding in two places. The men who carried him in looked equally battered. Dog Nose looked at her from across the clearing.

On her knees, but with her head unbowed, she met his eyes.
You were right
, she thought.
We should not have travelled with the peknu.
She regretted their anger with each other the last few days, and the time she had not spent with him. She regretted holding her position as the band’s fat over him. So many regrets.

“I’m sorry,” she mouthed.

He shook his head “no” and looked into her eyes. He formed the word “peknu” with his lips, then something Fat Girl couldn’t make out.

She moved her head in the tiniest of increments—”no”—and willed him to understand her.

She saw comprehension in his eyes, and he mouthed “in peknu.”

This time she understood.

He mouthed the words again. Slowly. “I—love—you.”

It was a peknu sentiment—their language had no such words. She nodded, feeling tears starting down her cheeks. “I love you,” she told him.

He nodded and looked satisfied. “Goodbye,” he mouthed, at the same time that the Silk People noticed the exchange. They dragged Dog Nose out of her line of sight.

She bit her lip and tasted the salt of her tears.
May we meet after death in a place with no gods,
she thought.

The Silk People dragged Nokar beside her, and she felt a moment of dismay. His head hung, and he shuffled when he walked. They had beaten him, too—welts and bleeding cuts stood out from the mud all over his naked body. Even without the bruises, however, there would have been something wrong with him. He looked older than before, though she would not have imagined that was possible. His skin was gray and tight over his bones—and so thin and fragile-looking she thought she could almost see the bones through it. He had not looked like that in the peknu town.

He’s dying,
she thought, then almost laughed at the stupidity of her concern. They were all dying.

She turned her eyes away from him, and saw Runs Slow, hands tied behind her back, still fighting with the man who restrained her. The man hit her—hard—and she fell forward and lay crying in the dirt.

The green-and-gold-silk man who held Kirtha stood beside the one who held Runs Slow. That man laughed and said something to Runs Slow’s keeper, then picked up Kirtha and swung her upside-down by one foot. Kirtha shrieked and her face went red. Immediately, Faia, Medwind, and even Nokar were fighting again. Fat Girl rammed her head into the groin of the man nearest her and broke free—surprising all of them. She was on her feet and charging the man who dangled Kirtha before he could put the child down. Fat Girl got in one head butt to his face before he dropped Kirtha and punched his fist into Fat Girl’s belly.

Fat Girl went down, gasping for air—and the first man she’d rammed with her head walked over while she lay there and kicked her in the side. She tried to find some satisfaction in the first man’s limp, and the gaping hole in the other man’s mouth where his front teeth had been, but pain swallowed that satisfaction far too quickly.

When the first man tired of kicking her, he grabbed her by one ankle and dragged her back to her place in line. She was too hurt to struggle.

She wished she could kill the stinking Silk People. She’d often wished them dead, but she’d never thought of herself as the weapon that would kill them. At that moment, she wished she were such a weapon.

The last of the spectators filed in. At a signal from the priest, the drums stilled. The chanting stopped.

The biggest of the Keyu spoke.

Give us our offerings,
it drummed.
We hunger
.

The Mu-Keyi, chief priest of the village, pranced and strutted like a puffing-krull seeking mates. He drummed boasts to his gods—boasts of the wonderful things he’d done for them, of the grand sacrifices he gave them. While he drummed, the green-and-gold silk men lined up in some prearranged order, with their victims held firmly between them. Her captors pulled Fat Girl back to her feet. In front of her, two men held a bald, tattooed girl who leaned from side to side, crying. The girl was pale. Blood ran down her legs and pooled at her feet. A sharsha, Fat Girl realized. She’d only seen one before, on her own terrible naming day—the day of her exile. That day, the sharsha had been the only food for the Keyu.

The drums started up again, and the first of the green-and-gold silk men moved forward. He held Kirtha aloft.

The Mu-Keyi drummed and danced and chanted, while Kirtha’s guard carried her to the base of the biggest tree and put her down in front of it.

“Kirtha, RUN!” Seven-Fingered Fat Girl screamed, and Kirtha stood and started to run toward her mother.

The Keyu’s thick white palps wrapped around the little girl, and the huge tree made a strange, crooning, creaking noise. The child screamed and struggled and kicked. The front of the tree split open from the base upward, and the palps brought the child forward to the mouth.

The Silk People drummed and prayed and chanted. Faia screamed. She kicked at her guards and fought to get free.

Kirtha stopped screaming and stared at the Keyu. The tree quit pulling the little girl toward its maw. The rest of the trees quit drumming for food. The priests fell silent. Everything stopped.

In the sudden silence, Fat Girl heard Kirtha say, “Bad tree.”

The Keyu’s palps burst into flames.

WHEN first the Wen guards forced Medwind into the tree-circle, she could find no cause for hope. But as the moments passed, and the Wen began their ritual, she sensed something that made her think she and her colleagues might have a chance to survive after all.

Energy filled the tree-circle—the same eerie, inaccessible energy that had dragged the exploratory team off course and made their airbox crash. The clearing was the heart of it—birthing place of a maelstrom of power. Medwind centered herself and reached out magically; she tried to touch it—and as before, the power slipped out of her reach.

She bit her lip, frustrated, and studied her two guards surreptitiously.
I’ll fight without magic, then,
she thought.
I’ve done that before.
But she knew she’d never fought magic without magic.

No sense worrying. Brooding about the things she couldn’t change would only waste her time and her energy, and keep her mind from more productive avenues of thought. She worked at the rope that bound her wrists until she was free of it—the trick of clasping her hands together when the Wen tied her worked well enough. She held onto the rope—she decided she’d better look the part of the helpless captive.

And then, free and disguising the fact, she studied her options. The Wen tagnu might consider dying bravely to be a virtue, but winning and living to fight again were the only virtues in the Hoos world of war.

So Medwind Song concentrated on tactics for the coming battle. The terrain in which she would have to fight was a flat, mud-floored basin, ringed on all sides by a circle formed of nine ramets of the largest baofar tree she had ever seen. Baofar genets, the whole of the organism, were usually comprised of hundreds of trunks and could fill an entire valley, but the trunks, the ramets, were quite slender, with thousands of delicate white strands of silk that hung from their bark to the ground and blew in the breeze. In the place of that silk, these ramets of the baofar were the width of row houses in Ariss, and in place of fine silk they grew heavy white limblike palps that writhed unnervingly. She eyed the bloated tree’s trunks and its engorged palps with distaste.

It’s done well,
she thought,
on a sacrificial diet
.

The only way out was the way they’d come in—through the single opening in the circle of trees. Beyond that point, the village became a maze of tree-branch walkways and under-branch paths—one of which would take them out of the accursed Wen village. Medwind had no idea how she could negotiate her way through that maze, but she would concern herself with that problem only when it presented itself.

Inside the circle, about sixty of the Wen observers in their gaudy silks clustered near the exit. She would have to go through them—if she could get past the gods-bedamned guards who held her and her friends—and past the priests.

The guards had knives. She knew how to deal with knives.

The priests carried no visible weapons—they were, no doubt, protected by magic. Therefore, even if she could kill her own guards quickly—and take out as many of the others as she could—she would still probably fall to the priests. She would probably die there, she thought—and the rest of the attack would be for nothing. She tried to think of another strategy.

Then the baofar spoke.
Give us our offerings,
it drummed.
We hunger
.

All Medwind’s plans shattered. She stared at the Keyu, horrified. In spite of everything the Wen kids had told her, she had not been able to think of the trees as her enemy. She’d kept believing her problems would come from the people.

She stared at the priests, for one wild instant hoping that somehow one of them had done that thunderous drumming.

But no. The tree had spoken.

The tree was alive with magic. Now that she knew where to look, she could sense the power of the monster baofar, locked into its multiple ramets and buried roots and intertwining, low-hanging, branches; coursing through its twitching, groping white palps; signaling its hunger into the air.

We have to fight that?
she thought.
Without weapons, and without magic?

Despair overwhelmed her.
She could win against humans—and even a hundred humans,
she thought,
could fall to a sufficiently angry Hoos. But a tree? A giant tree? What in the hells…?

Then one of the Wen carried Kirtha up to the biggest of the baofar’s ramets, and it didn’t matter anymore what she could or couldn’t do. She dropped the bonds on her wrists and snapped her arms out and up into the throats of her two guards. While they were still disoriented from the surprise attack, she pulled both into reverse headlocks. She snapped the neck of the first man—it didn’t break cleanly. He fell, convulsing, and Medwind’s stomach knotted. She hated to kill—she hated even worse to do it messily. She made sure the second man died quickly, with one clean snap.

One of the onlookers saw what she was doing and shrieked. Heads turned in her direction.

She caught the second man’s knife as he fell and started to run toward Kirtha—and suddenly the drumming stopped, and Kirtha said, “Bad tree,” and the palps of the baofar ramet that held her burst into greasy yellow flames.

Medwind stared at the little girl, tracing the path of the magic in her mind.
She’s touching the tree. Using its own magic against it.

Then the tree threw the child out of its grasp, and pandemonium erupted in the clearing. One of the Wen priests shouted “Demons! Demons! Throw them all to the Keyu!” The drums throbbed to life, and the guards ran at the trees, dragging the rest of the exploration party and the weird-looking green-striped girl with them.

Medwind ran at a tree herself. There was no time to give the rest of the group instructions. No time, in fact, for anything but running, being caught in the slimy hard embrace of the Keyu, and—

<
Yes-s-s-s you have come to us come must come to us come to me you are ours (MINE!) ours you will join with us love us you will *Fight them, fight them* love ME!
> said voices in her head—echoes and whispers—lovers half-remembered—something embracing her that felt both wonderful and terrible, a violation of her mind and the sweet embrace of a longed-for and only-just-found other part of herself and somehow, somehow, she woke herself a bit from the voices and—though she could still hear them, though she couldn’t escape them—she remembered her danger.