Bones of the Past (Arhel) (32 page)

Under his breath, Dog Nose muttered the three most terrible swear words Medwind Song had taught him, and Fat Girl laughed again.

The two of them followed Faia back to the airbox, holding hands and trying to act as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. They took their places in the front of the airbox. Everyone else joined them.

Fat Girl was pleased to see that Nokar was up and walking, though he leaned heavily on a staff and moved slowly. He looked very sick, but Fat Girl decided that, since he was moving around, he would get better with time. Medwind, who got into the airbox behind him, looked exhausted—her skin seemed almost gray. But when she looked at the old man, she smiled. Both of them wore the brightest, gaudiest clothing Seven-Fingered Fat Girl had ever seen. They acted like they were celebrating—and she supposed they were. They were going to get to the city, and get to look at all the rest of those books.

Roba and Kirgen climbed into the airbox together. Roba moved with some difficulty and leaned on Kirgen when she walked, but both of them also looked happy. They whispered with their heads close together and laughed frequently. Thirk, who entered after the two of them, glanced in their direction and scowled.

All of the older sharsha kids poured in through the doorway in one mass, their voices high and excited. They crammed into the extra places on the benches, chattering about how wonderful it was to run and be someplace with no trees. Fat Girl nodded to herself. She could certainly sympathize with that.

The little kids were playing in the aisle. They had been even before she and Faia and the rest had climbed in.

Runs Slow had made little people and beasts out of twisted stems of the long grass, and she and Kirtha were busily running those playthings in the aisle of the airbox with several of the youngest sharsha children. The kids squealed with delight and mock terror as several of the grass monsters attacked one of the grass people. The other grass people fought off the attack, and Fat Girl grinned. Runs Slow was directing a repeat of the kellink attack that had brought Four Winds Band to the city in the first place.

Then one of the sharsha kids decided her grass monster was a doori and flew it down and snatched Kirtha’s little grass person and flew off with it. Runs Slow yelled, “You can’t do that!” at the same time that Kirtha shrieked and the little grass doori burst into flames. Suddenly all the kids were yelling and fighting. Faia waded into the middle of the altercation, pulled Kirtha out, and said, firmly, “No more fires! Not with your friends!” She made the little girl sit with her nose to the airbox wall.

Fat Girl put her hand over her mouth and turned away. It wouldn’t do for Kirtha to see her laughing—but it was funny.

Kirgen settled in his seat, and some of the sharsha sat in a line in the aisle again. They all held still and cupped their hands as if they were holding water, and the next instant the airbox lifted off the ground.

“Now where?” Kirgen asked her.

Dog Nose and Fat Girl had conferred at length on that point. They knew the meadow didn’t lead into the right valley. They’d tried to decide whether the right valley was to the north or the south. It was so difficult to tell—there hadn’t been all that many landmarks as they got closer to the city, and the few landmarks they’d chosen turned out from the air, to be common features of many of the mountains. So an approach from the valley wouldn’t be very helpful.

But if they flew along the ridge, they decided they would be able to pick up the trail they’d followed out At least the tall, carved standing stones should show up from their vantage point in the sky.

“We have to fly along very top-top of mountain. Rock backbone. There road we can follow,” Dog Nose said in the peknu tongue.

“It’s hard to fly that high for very long,” Kirgen said. “The air is thin and it takes more magic to keep the airbox up.”

“Fly fast, then,” Fat Girl suggested.

Kirgen grinned and shook his head. “That won’t help. But we’ll do what we can.”

The airbox described a smooth curve and headed straight at the mountain ridge. Beneath them the ground rose into huge, rough folds, and the bare rock jutted out like a sleeping giant pushing through his blanket of trees. Fat Girl saw movement beneath them and, after an instant realized what she was seeing. A pack of kellinks was herding some big running beast into a cut-off. They streamed across the ground like a river running backwards, splitting into bunches at every obstacle, then reforming. From the air, they were incredibly beautiful. She pointed out the monsters to Kirgen and Dog Nose, and Kirgen dropped the airbox low enough for an instant that everyone could see them. The beasts looked up, then fled down the valley.

The airbox looks like a big hunting doori to them
, Fat Girl realized. She grinned. It would be wonderful to hunt kellinks from an airbox—to shoot them from the open door, without having to take a chance at being their prey. If she could, she would kill them all. She knew at firsthand that they weren’t nearly as pretty on the ground.

The airbox reached the mountain ridge. Below, Fat Girl could see a thin white line that traced along the mountain’s spine. “There,” she shouted. “See it.”

Kirgen nodded, and screamed, “There it is! Look! Look, everyone. A First Folk artifact! The road!”

Dog Nose pointed out something Fat Girl hadn’t noticed. In the long shadows of morning, three standing stones, their heads topped with monsters, clustered together around a flat circle of stone. “We passed that!” he yelled.

Nokar wanted to land the airbox on the ridge and take a look at the standing stones, but Medwind cut him off vehemently. “On to the city!” she shouted.

The air that blew in through the door-hole was incredibly cold. Fat Girl wished for a moment that she’d taken the Hoos clothing Medwind had offered her that morning, but, even as she rubbed the chill-bumps off her arms, she decided she was glad she hadn’t. The city was going to be a tagnu city. She wanted to claim it as a tagnu.

Besides, she decided as pragmatism fought with imagined glory in her mind, she could take some of the Hoos warrior’s clothes later, when the cold became unbearable.

A cliff edge along the path beneath them looked very familiar. A huge flat stone created a shelf that jutted out over a cliff; the sheer face of the cliff fell away to a stream far, far below. Fat Girl pointed the place out to Dog Nose, and he stared, then howled with laughter. “That’s the place where Roshi stood and peed over the edge,” he yelled. “Remember? He said, ‘I’m a waterfall!’—” Dog Nose stopped laughing. His face grew somber and he stared down at the cliff and shelf again. “I wish he could be here.”

Fat Girl watched the mountains rolling under her, and the thin, worn white ribbon of the First Folk path.
I wish he could be here, too. I miss him—I miss all of them.

The mountain ridge curved down, then up. “I think the city will be on the other side,” Fat Girl yelled to Kirgen.

The young saje nodded. The airbox went over the ridge, and a valley opened beneath them. The city unfolded in front of them, built onto the side of the mountain. The inside of the airbox erupted with shouts and cheers and screams in three languages.

Seven-Fingered Fat Girl screamed with the rest of them. “Home!” she yelled. “Home! Oh, Dog Nose, we’re home!”

“Yes!” Dog Nose roared.

“HA!” Kirgen shouted.

“So
land
the damned thing already!” Nokar called from the back.

Kirgen laughed and circled once. The interior of the airbox became silent except for the sound of rushing wind. Everyone held still, and watched out the windows while Kirgen picked out a flat spot for the landing. He finally chose a point high in the city, near the top of the mountain but still inside the massive walls. He dipped the airbox lower, circled tighter and slowed, until finally he could hover. Then he eased the crowded airbox onto the narrow patch of browned grass between two sets of four-spined arches. Nearby, a huge, two-storied domed whitestone building sat, the carved face of a monster watching alertly from its side.

The silence broke as the airbox’s passengers began to applaud. Then, like hovies out of a cage, the youngest sharsha kids and Runs Slow and Kirtha shot out the airbox door and bolted across the narrow green. They were halfway up the arches by the time the first adult, Faia, made it out of the airbox. And by the time the rest of the older kids and adults joined them, they crouched atop the twin arches like multiple heads on two giant spiders.

Fat Girl and Dog Nose dropped lightly to the grass and walked across the clearing to the overlook. From there, the rest of the city spread out beneath them, as beautiful as when they left it.

Medwind stood next to Nokar. “Where is the library?” she asked.”

“Library?” Fat Girl puzzled over the word.

“Place with books in it,” Nokar explained.

“Oh.” Fat Girl pointed down over the cliff, to the enormous whitestone building below and almost directly in front of them. She could see the giant carved monsters, still sitting on their stone perches, still waiting by the doors as if they might come to life at any moment and eat any intruders. She pointed. “That one,” she said.

“
That
one.” Nokar’s smile was rapturous. “Is it full of books?”

Fat Girl laughed. “From the floor clear to the top in every room.”

“Look, Medwind.” The old man pointed at the lines of stone monsters in front of the library and then at others visible through the city. “There has been evidence in other finds that the First Folk had an active cult of saurid worshipers...”

Thirk pushed his way through the mob and stood a little apart. He glared at the noisy children, then closed his eyes and inhaled. “He’s here,” the man said loudly. “Delmuirie’s here.”

Fat Girl didn’t understand that. And she didn’t understand Nokar, who droned on in words equally dull and incomprehensible. She turned away, and wrapped her arms around Dog Nose. They were home!
Home!
In
their
city—their beautiful, giant,
safe
city. And if they worked things right, she and Dog Nose and Runs Slow would never have to leave the safety of those walls again.

Dog Nose hugged her back, and smiled down at her. “We have time to talk to the peknu about bringing our food later,” he said. “But we’re back in our city now. Let’s find someplace nice, and—” He grinned suggestively.

Fat Girl grinned back. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s.”

Faia waved to the two of them as they started away from the group, and impatiently, Seven-Fingered Fat Girl trotted over to her to see what she wanted.

“Drink this,” Faia said and handed her an animal-skin flask.

“What is it?”

“Alsinthe tea. I told you about it before. You do not need any babies when you’re just getting started.” The tall girl grinned down at her and nodded toward the several round-bellied sharsha girls with one eyebrow arched. “Believe me, you do not.”

Fat Girl chuckled, and drank the tea. “Is that all?”

“Drink a little every day. Then you will have no worries.” Faia winked at her. “And have fun.”

Seven-Fingered Fat Girl glanced over her shoulder at Dog Nose, who was shifting impatiently from foot to foot, his thumbs stuck into the band of his myr. “We will,” she said.

She ran to Dog Nose’s side, and the two of them charged down the hill hand in hand.

* * *

Roba went over and stood by Medwind while she set up her tent. The majority of the expedition was setting up camp—and she supposed she should be helping Kirgen, too. The shadows were already long—soon it would be dark and cold, and she and Kirgen would need food to eat and a place to sleep. There was something she wanted to talk to the Hoos about, though.

“She risked her life for me,” Roba told her friend.

Medwind looked up from pounding a tent stake into the dirt, and nodded. “I know.”

Roba sighed. Medwind saw the obvious, but never seemed to look any deeper.
It was that barbarian mind-set,
she decided.
Once the outside of a problem was dealt with, they seemed to think the inside would be fine, too.

“She could have just left me the way I was—and then she could have had Kirgen. I couldn’t have done anything to keep him.”

Medwind brushed the dirt off her hands and rested them on her thighs. She looked up at Roba and her face wore an irritating expression that suggested she thought Roba was missing something obvious. Roba had seen that expression before—and she hated it.

“Roba.” Medwind started using that
voice
, too—the one she’d always used when Roba was particularly obtuse regarding some obvious point in one of their lessons. “This is important. Please pay attention. Faia doesn’t want Kirgen. I believe she likes him. I truly do. She slept with him once—just once—and Kirtha was the purely accidental result. But Faia doesn’t love Kirgen and never did.” The Hoos woman stood, and shoved her hands into the pockets of her staarne. “She likes him enough that she wants him to be happy—and if you are what will make him happy, she’ll like you too. Unless you keep treating her like your enemy.”

“But she had his child. How can she not want
him
?”

Medwind said, “You’re mistaking your people with hers. She’s Kareen. To the Kareen, a woman has her own child. If the father wants to be involved, that’s wonderful. If he doesn’t, the mother doesn’t worry about it.”

Roba was appalled. “That’s terrible.”

“No.” Medwind shook her head and gave her friend a wry grin. “That’s Kareen. In my tribe, you have to prove you can get pregnant before you can get a husband from the tribe. Which is why I ended up catching all of mine from the ranks of the enemy during battles. Kirgen is Arissonese and in the first generation of academic sajes who will be permitted to marry and still keep full ties to the University. I’m sure his views of fatherhood aren’t what you’re expecting, either. Before the Second Mage/Saje War, sajes fathered children by women they hired for the night and never knew who their children were—or even if they had them.”

“You’re saying that I’m being prudish again.”