3: A Simple Walk

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The hum of dozens of wings wakes Tyk. It takes her a moment to remember why she’s outside and why the sky is full of men. Right; the tremor. Ayan.

Most of the men flock, of course, to Ayan, fussing over the new layer and assuring her that her mother and her friends are on their way, but three peel off to land on Tyk. With Kedahm are Kesan and Kepol, her father and half-father.

“Your mother’s on her way,” Kesan says, checking over his daughter carefully. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine.” She brushes him away. “It was just a little cave-in. What happened? Why didn’t the stars predict something as big as an earthquake?”

The men shift uneasily. “It wasn’t an earthquake,” Kepol says. “We still didn’t predict it, but…”

“It’s worse that we didn’t predict it,” Kesan says. “But then, some wanderers…”

“Wanderers? What?”

“A star fell out of the sky,” Kesan says.

“A star fell out of the sky?!”

“It happens sometimes. Rarely. But they don’t usually hit with this kind of impact. We sent some scouts out to look, and it’s…”

“Odd,” Kedahm says.

“Odd?”

“Metal. And… things the scouts don’t recognise. The old records say that this happens very, very rarely, and can leave a pit dug into the earth, sometimes with a stone in it. They say nothing about this. Everyone’s very confused.”

“The hive?”

“Some parts of it collapsed. Parts of the tower have fallen as well. Nothing that can’t be fixed. Nobody was killed. Some hurt, but they’ll heal.”

“We were about to organise a rescue party for you two, once the critical channels had been cleared,” Kesan says. “But it looks like you saved us the trouble. Well done.”

“We were on a time limit.” Tyk indicates Ayan, preparing to lay. “Will the women make it in time?”

“Here they are now,” Kesan says, as the first women come into sight at the top of the riverbank. He doesn’t take flight or turn around to notice this; presumably the men were communicating their movements with the high-pitched wing chatter that Tyk, and the other women, can’t hear. Tyk’s mother and sister make their way over to her; the rest head for Ayan.

“Tyk!” San nuzzled mandibles with her daughter briefly. “You’re okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Good,” Dahm says. “I wasn’t worried, for the record. I know you can take care of yourself. Don’t freak our parents out like that again, huh?”

“You’re just jealous that you don’t get to go on cool adventures like me.”

“Brat.” Dahm taps one claw against Tyk’s affectionately and heads for Ayan, Kedahm settling on her horns. Kepol departs, too, heading for his truesister, while Tyk’s mother and father stay with her.

“Your throat,” Kesan says.

Oh, right. Ayan had bitten her under there, hadn’t she? It isn’t deep enough to do more than ache a bit. “It’s fine.”

“Hmm.”

“She started it!”

“Hmm,” San says. Tyk is sharply aware of how obvious it is that the wound in question could only exist if Tyk was on top of Ayan, or Ayan on top of Tyk. And Tyk is too big and strong to be easily taken down by Ayan. When the pair see her first bite on Ayan’s carapace, it’s only going to be more obvious who attacked first, and who was in a defensive position.

“Tyk,” San continues. “Laying a truebrother is a normal part of growing up. In half a season or so, you’ll be doing this, too. There’s no need to be jealous of – ”

“I’m not jealous of Ayan!” She glances over at Ayan. Some men are on her back, humming to the egg inside her, like Desan and Kepol do for Tyk sometimes. Boys need to hear the humming of wings while they’re developing to learn how to distinguish different wing sounds properly, so they can learn to sing properly. Soon, Ayan will lay the egg, and it will dry out in the sun, and then Keyan will chew his way out and climb onto her horns and spread his wings out to dry them, and the Redstone River Hive will have one more member in its community.

And in a half-season or so, Ketyk will be born the same way. And Tyk won’t be a little girl any more. She’ll be an adolescent, and people will start watching Ketyk grow, waiting, just waiting, until he’s old enough where it’s reasonable for the pair to leave the hive, like Tyk’s star says they will.

Tyk isn’t jealous of Ayan. Not for this, anyway. She hadn’t even known that Ayan was about to lay when they’d fought. But there’s no easy way to explain that to her parents.

“I’m going for a walk,” she says. “Please give Keyan my blessings.” And she takes off down the bank.

Tyk doesn’t have anywhere to go, really. She’d rather just lie down and go back to sleep. But she doesn’t want to be here, and her parents have always been pretty lax with her when it comes to her wanderings. It wasn’t like that for Dahm, she knows; Dahm, if her stories are to be believed, wasn’t allowed out of visual range of the hive until Kedahm was born, and then her range was limited by Kedahm’s ability to fly back to the nest in an emergency, until he was fully grown and their parents couldn’t tell them what to do any more. Most children have similar rules. But Tyk has been allowed to go where she pleases from a young age, encouraged to learn to explore, to swim, to forage, to treat minor wounds and find her own way home. Skills that someone would need, if they were going to leave home.

She expects them to call her back this time. A new member of her hive is being born. The hive itself is in disrepair after the earthquake, and it’s her responsibility as much as anyone else’s to help rebuild it. She doesn’t have time to go wandering off, she has duties to her home.

They don’t stop her.

Sometimes, Tyk wonders if the stars are misread, and maybe it’s not being marked by a wandering star that gives people like her the desire to head off to other places. Maybe it’s the hives themselves that drive them away.

Most of the hive are presumably still back at, well, the hive, working to repair it, but there are still some women trickling in to tend to Ayan. Tyk climbs to the top of the riverbank and notes their direction of approach; that’s the direction the hive is in. She marks her position with a small cairn of pebbles and sets off, following the river away from the hive. Now, so long as she keeps the river in sight, she can’t get lost.

The sun continues to rise to her right, the warm rays drying her off and leaving her crusted in red powdery dust from the river. She takes a moment to brush off all the dust she can reach. In the wet season, when the river is high, she could wash it off in the water, but the low, sluggish water down there right now is as dirty as she is. The leafy groundcover brushes it off her belly and sides as she walks, and when she comes across sporadic patches of tall stands of river bamboo, she knocks herself against them to shake the dirt on top of her carapace loose. It’s as she’s doing that that she notices a light in the sky.

A wanderer? Another one? Now?

It’s not impossible. The stars are usually obscured by the glare of the sun during the day, but sometimes wandering stars burn bright enough to be visible regardless. And unexpected wanderers can come in clusters; if one graced the sky last night, one could grace it again in the morning. But one fell last night… is this one…

It is! It’s falling!

Tyk knows that the star that fell last night was some distance away and in a completely different direction, but this is absolutely another falling star. She’d thought it was off on the horizon, but it’s close, and close to the ground. She just hadn’t seen it until now; had it been hiding somehow? No, that’s impossible. It had been hidden by the brightness of the sun, surely. The men must have seen it, with their keener eyes. The hive must know about it.

Unless they’re all distracted with repairs, and with the hatching on the riverbank. But they’ll have someone watching the sky, right? The callers up in the watchtower, sharing the wingsong with faraway hives… right?

How many more of these are there? Will they all hit the ground as hard as the first? There might not be a hive left by the end of the day!

Tyk hesitates, torn between walking toward the star and away from it. She should go and report it to the hive, but surely it will hit the ground before she gets back and they’ll know about it then, if they don’t already. Still, going back would be the sensible thing to do; once it hits, she doesn’t want people wasting time looking for her. Again. But once she goes back, she’ll be put to work repairing the hive. She won’t get a chance to come all the way out here again any time soon.

She won’t get a chance to actually see the star.

She speeds up, heading towards the star. Is it dangerous to be this close, up on the surface? The impact would just affect the ground under her, right? So long as she’s not actually hit by the star, she just needs to keep her footing.

The star is falling slowly, and it’s closer than the horizon, much closer. It’s between her and the mountains, a bright light with no sky behind it. Then… it disappears.

It’s just gone.

No, not gone! It’s just… not bright, somehow. That shouldn’t surprise her; some of the brightest wanderers do that, streak across the sky for awhile and then vanish. But it’s close enough hat she can see it without the brilliant starlight. It glows a little still, shiny against the sun, dragging something huge and white behind it as it falls. Then it glows again, briefly, and… stops. The earth below Tyk jolts a little. Not much; not nearly as violently as the last time. She’ll be surprised if anyone at the hive even feels it.

Tyk forgets her weariness, forgets her anger, forgets caution. She makes her way towards the star as fast as she can.

Like Kedahm had said, it is odd. It’s certainly no stone. For one thing, it’s bigger than Tyk; a lot bigger. Bigger than her family’s chamber in the hive.

It’s an egg.

It’s unmistakably an egg. Not a boy egg, with its thin, yielding, practically transparent shell, but a girl egg, round and hard and shining in the sun. It has debris stuck to it; large, shiny things on the bottom, like nodules of metal but perfectly even and shiny. A huge sheet of something white and yielding trailing from the top, like a sheet of building silk. The egg itself is yellow-white, or at least the parts of it visible under the black soot are. Tyk supposes that a star must produce a lot of soot as it burns.

It’s been some time since the star egg dropped from the sky; long enough for Tyk to make it all the way here. It hasn’t hatched yet, and Tyk isn’t surprised. Boys are born quickly, chewing through their eggs as soon as they’re dry, but the tough shell of a full egg takes a lot longer to dry out and to get through, which is why girls are born under the stars. Tyk probably has until nighttime to report this, to alert the hive so they can all come out here and… do something about it. Somehow.

What is there to even do about this?

Tyk turns for home, but immediately turns back at a sound from the egg. A crack? It’s cracking already? Oh, that can’t be good. It’s too early. That’s bad, right?

But the egg has no concern for what Tyk thinks is good timing. It does, indeed, crack open; on one side, a neat, perfectly symmetrical hole appears.

And a baby god crawls out.

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