Spider Wars: Book Three of the Black Bead Chronicles (29 page)

Cheobawn found herself
curled up in a ball on the sand, weeping uncontrollably. The grief
was nearly unbearable and pushed at the edges of her sanity. But
those were Nnursht’s thoughts. She shook a semblance of reason back
into her mind. She stood, wiped her wet face, and looked around. The
beach was clear, the lone ship still perched on the promontory, a
ramp now disgorging its occupants.

“
But now you are back,”
Cheobawn said. “Your eggs rain down upon this place like seeds
blown on the wind. Soon you will hold the sea as your kingdom once
more. Surely it is a time for rejoicing?”

It is not in our nature
to leave a thing to chance when a little industry can turn the tide,
Spider said.
The last of my kind, knowing they were about to die,
crawled out of the sea every night to circle your encampments and
sing
the songs of our people into your dreams, though we knew
you to be deaf to our plight. It was not the songs of star
longing
that we sang, but the simple songs about eggs growing hot under the
sands and the earth turning under our feet as the cycles of birth and
death ebbed and flowed. Most of all, we sang of our grief and of the
eggs that would never hatch. We lis
tened to the minds inside
your sleeping places and we heard a few, a precious few of
the
egg bearers of your kind grow restless and uneasy, disturbed by the
carnage, haunted by the destruction of a planet. We had hope, then,
that a species who might feel sympathy for our passing might also
help us return.

Cheobawn shook her head to
clear it of the craziness behind those thoughts. “But, they did
nothing. You died to the last spider. What was the point of that?”

How long did Nnursht wait
to see the stars?
Spider asked.

“
He never did!” Cheobawn
shouted. “He died frustrated.”

There is not a spider
alive who does not carry the song of his life inside the matrix of
their minds,
Spider said patiently.
We were willing to wait.
Now, here you are. You cannot say our efforts fell upon barren
ground.

“
I am not the solution to
your problem,” Cheobawn said, stamping her feet in the sand as her
own frustration boiled over inside her. “Get that idea out of your
head.”

Nnursht sang the song of the
stars until an egg hatched that held a child that could do nothing
else but travel to the stars. So too did your Mothers.

“
That was not your doing,”
Cheobawn said stubbornly. “The Makers of the Living Thread are
meddlesome old biddies who cannot leave life to chance. If they could
bottle Good Luck and dose us all with it every day, they would.”

The seeds of that idea
were planted in the dark, in the dreams of your grandmothers’
grandmothers. It was our solution to a problem that seemed
unsolvable. We sang the song of healing into your minds, hoping that
you would remember, though you are a species who forgets everything
eventually. It was with great surprise, then, when your egg bearers
enticed a handful of your seed givers to follow them. We sang the
song of the egg laying madness into the ambient and it took hold of
their minds, driving them out and away. They went seeking safe haven
from those who could conceive of killing a planet so that they might
hold it for their own. It was not accident or happenstance that the
first dome of the high lands was
built under the shadow of
Nnursht’s high place and the ruins of his spire
.”

Cheobawn’s head was
reeling. So this was the secret history that Mora kept locked away
from the minds of the tribes. Or was this a secret not even Mora
knew? Did the First Mother realize that the domes were conceived in
the minds of things so monstrously alien they could not claim the
remotest kinship with human kind?

“
So many minds, so much
clever plotting,” she said, looking away from the Spacer ship, its
metal hulk perched atop its roost like a sky hunter conceived in
tinkerer’s shop. The sea seemed more real, the sound of the
rhythmic tumble of the waves against the sand hypnotic and oddly
soothing. Over and over, the waves tried to climb the beach, each
time a little bit different than the last. She could imagine herself
sitting here for hours, mind open to the patterns of all the worlds
while the waves explained the purpose of it all to her. The message
found in the random pattern of waves could not have been any more
nonsensical than what Spider told her.

“
What was the endgame in
your clever strategy? Did you think to defeat us by making yourself
War Master? I will not help you do any such thing.”

Our need is simple,
Spider said.
We wish to lay our eggs once more upon the beaches of
our birth. We can no
longer count on the forces of wind and
water to take the hatchlings past the jaws of the toothed lizards and
the predations of humans. You must help them find their way to the
sea.

“
How am I supposed to do
that?” Cheobawn asked.

You carry the song of
Nnursht in your mind,
Spider said with utter confidence.
You
will find a way just as he did.

“
You will forgive me if I
do not have the confidence in myself that you seem to have.”
Cheobawn said in exasperation. “I am one small hatchling. The force
of every adult in the dome stands against any kind of action to aid
you. On top of that, there are thousands of Spacers roaming the
Wastes, hunting out your young as we speak.”

Find a way, child of our
longing,
Spider said serenely,
or we will be forced to
contrive a more direct and lasting solution.

A
cold nose touched her chin followed by the touch of a warm, wet kiss.
Cheobawn frowned and opened one eye. A small gray puppy with enormous
feet sat on the pillow next to her head. She pulled her arm out from
underneath her covers and scratched its ears. It wagged its tail in
happiness. Sleep tugged at her eyelids. She closed them but the puppy
would have none of it. It tried to eat her chin with its sharp baby
teeth.

“
Ow, you little monster,”
she said, picking it up by its round puppy belly and setting it on
her own belly. Her voice was rough and hoarse, as if she had not used
it in days. A patch of skin seal up her inner arm tugged
uncomfortably at the surrounding skin. She studied it, puzzled. A
half healed wound was barely visible under the translucent bandage. A
crazy image of Hayrald kneeling over her with a knife flashed in her
mind. Curiosity chased the thought of sleep from her mind. She turned
her head to study the room.

She was in the long term
care wing of the infirmary. She could tell by the green paint and the
bright tapestries on the walls. Their themes weighted heavy on the
floral side, full of reds and yellows and oranges. Their cheerfulness
made her want to break something.

The puppy was not to be
dissuaded quite so easily. It pushed its head under her hand and
demanded to be scratched again. She obliged it.

Zeff opened the door and
walked in, the boarhound, Lady at his heels, a brindle puppy in his
arms.

“
Well, look who is awake,”
the oldpa said with a smile. “I told them you were just taking a
nap. So much worry for nothing.”

Zeff set the other puppy on
the bed. It leaped over her leg and tackled its sister, grabbing her
ear in its teeth. The gray one yelped and snapped back, the two of
them tumbling together towards the end of the bed. Zeff caught them
before they fell to the floor and deposited them at their mother’s
feet. Lady was not so gentle. She grabbed the brindle pup in her
teeth and tumbled him roughly onto his back to nip at his throat
until he squeaked in protest. She relented and let him up. He tried
to tackle his sister again but Lady pinned him with one great paw and
began to give him a bath with her enormous pink tongue.

Cheobawn watched, a smile on
her face. Zeff pulled up a chair and sat down beside her.

“
Amabel will yell if she
knows you have brought animals into her infirmary,” Cheobawn said
hoarsely.

“
It was the Maker who
suggested it,” Zeff said as he filled a glass with water and handed
it to her. She took it carefully, allowing him to shove a handful of
pillows behind her back so she could sit without too much exertion.
She was grateful. To be honest, her muscles were as watery as if she
had run the outer track of the dome a couple of times. “She thinks
you have lingered long enough, her being a witch who cannot abide
laziness.”

“
Where is Connor?”
Cheobawn asked around sips of water. She was very thirsty but the
water sat uneasily on her stomach.

“
I am taking his shift
while he gets some well deserved sleep. He’s been by your side
pretty much every moment for the last week. Breyden had to drag him
away to the dining hall otherwise he would have never eaten. He will
be disappointed that he was not here to greet you.”

“
A week?” She shook her
head, trying to sort out the bits of memory that tumbled around
there. “Did Hayrald try to cut my arm off?”

“
Eh?” Zeff lifted a
worried brow.

Cheobawn raised her arm to
show him the skinseal.

“
Oh, that.” Zeff sighed
in relief. “He was a little hasty, trying to get your arm free of
your leathers so’s your hand wouldn’t turn blacker than it
already was. You gave him something of a turn.”

Cheobawn remembered
something else. She held her palm up to the light. Beside the small
white scar in the center of her palm, her hand and arm were perfectly
normal. Memories returned.

“
I dreamed my hand had
turned to crystal,” she said touching the scar with one tentative
finger. “The bennelk would not let me ride them because I had
turned into a spider.”

“
Did they, now?” Zeff
said. “Who can ever tell with them? They get funny ideas in their
heads, animals.”

Cheobawn did not find that
reassuring in the least. She frowned uncertainly.

“
The Spiders think I am
part spider, too,” she said, biting her lower lip as she caressed
the white scar. Zeff’s face betrayed nothing, being too polite to
show concern for her strange statement nor ask for explanations. He
had too many years handling the eccentricities of Ears to make that
mistake.

“
Lady thinks you are fine,
else she would not let you near her pups.”

Cheobawn looked up at Lady,
hope blooming in her heart. She held out her hand for Lady to
inspect. Lady let her puppy go and came over to sniff her hand before
she licked the scarred palm, her tail wagging in a great lazy arc.

So many people had opinions
about who she was. Why did it seem that they were all wrong? “Who
am I, really?” Cheobawn wondered out loud. “I have ceased to
know.”

“
Ach,” Zeff said with a
rueful shake of his head. “A question much pondered by wiser men
than I, I am afraid. Who do you think you are?”

“
Black bead, Bad Luck,
genetic accident, made in Amabel’s labs with no more thought than
Finn puts into the making of his carts, I think,” Cheobawn said.
Much to her own surprise, it was not sadness that bubbled up out of
her heart, but something akin to anger.

Zeff looked away,
uncomfortable. He scooped up the gray puppy and put it back on her
bed to cover his intentional silence. Cheobawn grabbed the little dog
by the scruff of its neck as it tried to launch itself off the bed
towards its brother. Zeff picked up the brindle pup and caressed its
ears.

“
I have to send this one
on in the spring with the first caravan east,” he said sadly. “The
Mothers do not like too many dogs in one dome and the Redrock Tribe
needs a new sire to keep their bloodlines fresh. I hate to part with
him so young but it would be worse if I kept him 'til he grew to love
me. You take an old dog away from their hearth and home and they tend
to pine and die.”

Cheobawn watched his large
hands, sure and gentle in their touch and felt oddly jealous of the
puppy. She sighed in resignation. Zeff had something he wanted to
tell her. She had no idea where this was headed but she thought she
knew its source.

“
Fathers are the worst
gossips. You have heard about the things I have said to Hayrald and
the fight I had with Mora,” she said accusingly.

“
Funny about dome life,”
Zeff said with a depreciating lift of his brow. “Nothing is
private. You share everything with your Pack. Even Mora, holder of
all the Sacred Secrets, has the Coven to help if she needs to
unburden her heart. From the outside, the Coven and all their
Husbands seem like a closed circle but circles nest inside other
circles or intersect with the whole of dome life in some way.
Information bleeds from circle to circle. If you want something to be
kept secret, I have found, it is best to keep it hidden in your own
heart. But no one does that. A wise man knows that secrets untold are
walls that isolate. Who would want that but the truly anti-social?”