8: Men, Women, Stars

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Such a journey, with such company, is not a quick or easy thing to arrange. The hive isn’t going to simply send two children off towards the Northeast and pray for the best. There’s a whole caravan to arrange, of escorts and guards and scouts and doctors and haulers for the supplies to feed them all. There’s a question of weather; if they leave too soon, they’ll be racing the wet season, pushing to cross all the major rivers and plains before the rains swell them with mud and water. If they wait until after the wet season, they lose most of a year, and they don’t know how much time they have. There’s the matter of politics, of crossing the territories of other hives (smoothed, in this case, by the nature of their mission; it should not be hard to arrange help from the hives they pass by) and the dangers of passing through sleeplands and other wild areas. There’s the potential for coordination with other parties bringing stars from other hives.

And there is, of course, the question of Smon herself. Of learning how to care for her, what they will need. Of figuring out some way to explain the journey to her. And that, by astral decree, is Tyk’s job.

Tyk gets a full night’s sleep and eats her fill before heading back out to the egg. Word of the mission must have spread, because nobody bothers her; they give her a wide berth and even her parents, after ensuring she’s eaten a good meal, make no move to follow her. That’s for the best. Crowding Smon hadn’t gone so well the last time.

Keyat notices her approach from some distance away and drops out of the sky, presumably to tell Yat. When Tyk arrives, she finds the two guards perched on a small rise some distance from the egg, close enough to keep a clear eye on it without interfering. They both greet her warmly, with mandible touches and gentle hums.

“How is she doing?” Tyk asks.

“She seems fine,” Yat says with an uncertain claw tilt. “Far too mobile to be injured. I think that’s just what they look like.”

Tyk flicks a mandible in assent. The descriptions of the star larvae from the other hives match Smon, as did her dead sisters. Apparently they just don’t have a back half of their bodies. Which is horrifying in its own way, but at least she’s not actively dying.

“She spends most of her time inside the egg,”Yat says. “She keeps coming out and gathering rocks and dirt and grass and things and taking them back into the egg.”

“Why?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“Has she spoken to you at all?”

“We’ve been keeping our distance. Did you see what she did to Keyarna?”

Knocked him a good few measures away, is what she’d done. It was a miracle he hadn’t broken his wings. “She’s several times his size,” Tyk points out. “You’re bigger than her; she just looks bigger because her whole body is upright. What could she possibly do to you?”

“She could get hurt. If I had to defend myself from you, I could pin you easily without any serious injury. If I had to defend myself from her, I’m not sure how I’d avoid wounding her.”

Tyk mulls this over. It is a good point. Smon isn’t aggressive, she knows this, but that hadn’t stopped a physical altercation from breaking out the first time. Yat and Keyat are being wiser than the men who’d leapt in to help Smon. This is probably why the hive had been happy to send her alone; they’re confident that she, at least, will be safe with Smon.

The egg has changed shape since yesterday. The large silk square from the top has been removed, and a ramp added outside the opening to make it easier to get in and out. The ramp looks to be made of some sort of metal, grown into a broad flat shape instead of the nodule or fragmented root structures that Tyk has seen in stones washed down the Redstone River. It must have come from inside the egg. Presumably, so had the large rectangular prism affixed to one edge of the egg.

Tyk has no idea what Smon is doing. But Smon apparently does. So that’s something.

There’s a tunnel leading from the new addition to the side of the egg, down towards the river. Not a dug tunnel, but a premade one laid over the ground. A pipe. It’s made of something ridged and thin and flexible, not the fired mortar pipes that the hive uses to combat flooding in the tunnels or collect water for their pools. Tyk follows it to confirm that yes, Smon is collecting river water; the new addition is a water tank. But Tyk can’t see any levers or wheels for pumping the water. Perhaps the pump is inside the egg.

Smon comes out of the egg and catches sight of her. “Tyk!” She rushes over; Yat and Keyat retreat.

Smon looks a little different. There’s a new, clean patch of silk over the wound on her head, and she’s removed the bulky, shiny birth silks… mostly. A lighter layer of silks still cling to her body, dry and light and in a red-brown colour that’s not quite the colour of a woman’s carapace, but close. She closes most of the distance between them, then stops abruptly, sits on the ground, and waits for Tyk to approach her.

Tyk does. She touches her mandibles affectionately to Smon’s. “How are you doing?” she asks, even though she knows that Smon doesn’t understand her.

Smon says something rapid and high volume in her language of names, then fiddles with her echo stone. She points to herself. “Smon.” To Tyk. “Tyk.” Then to Yat and Keyat.

Did the pair not even introduce themselves? “Yat. Keyat.”

Smon repeats the names, using her mouth instead of the stone. She can mostly get the sounds right. Then she points to Yat and Tyk, and waits expectantly.

Huh?

Smon gathers four small stones and names them. “Tyk. Yat. Keyat. Smon.” She puts Tyk and Yat next to each other, Keyat separate, and Smon separate as well. She points to the group of two.

Tyk and Yat as a group… is she asking for the word for ‘woman’?

There are easier ways to clarify this. Tyk shovels some soil into her mouth and chews it into mortar, churning it up with her building saliva. She spits it out and quickly fashions it into a crude representation of a woman, then repeats the task to make a man. The sculptures aren’t detailed; they don’t need to be. Besides, she’s not making the likenesses of specific people. That would confuse the issue.

She indicates the woman. “Tyk. Yat.” Indicates it again. “Woman.” Then the other sculpture. “Keyat. Man.”

Smon stares with fascination at the little sculptures. Tyk isn’t even sure if she remembered to catch the words with her echo stone. She reaches towards them, watching Tyk; when Tyk doesn’t stop her, she picks up the man, careful not to crush the still-wet sculpture, and looks over it carefully. She makes some sort of repetitive, gasping vocalisation that panics Tyk for a second – is she choking? – but she doesn’t seem to be in distress. What little Tyk has deduced of Smon’s body language suggests that this is a positive reaction. It reminds her a little of the wing-hum of her father when he’s pleased to see her after a long absence. She looks over the sculpture carefully, then puts it down and inspects the other one. She handles them with great respect, even though they’re just crude lumps of chewed mud; Tyk suddenly can’t wait to introduce her to the vast glittering caverns of the upper hive. If she’s impressed by a child’s rushed artwork, she’ll be awe-crushed by the grand gems and carvings of the hive itself.

She requests the words again, and Tyk gives them to her for the echo stone: “Man” and “Woman”. Then she sculpts a tiny, undetailed Smon, and tells her what she is. “Smon. Star.”

She probably could’ve gotten the point across without another sculpture, but she thinks that Smon might like the sculpture. And she’s correct. Smon makes the gasping shrieking sound again and looks the sculpture over carefully. She scoops up all three, stands, takes several steps towards her egg. Pauses, looks to Tyk, who flicks a mandible in assent. Dashes to the egg to put them inside.

Tyk follows her in. The interior has changed slightly; most notably, it’s no longer full of corpses. The debris of the accident has been removed, and some of the things inside the egg moved around, although the space within is far too limited to do very much. Still, Smon has constructed shallow ledges of some kind, and on top of those ledges are what look like very small bowls made not of stone or wood or mortar, not even of metal, but of a flawless, transparent crystal, incredibly thin and smooth. Like enormous hailstones shaped into bowls. Inside them sit liquids, mostly clear or pale coloured, some with minced up grass or mud or ash in them, some without. Strange cordage leads from some of the bowls into the wall of the egg; others have no such cords in them. On one shelf sits the evidence of their preparation; grinding stones and perfect blades made of some sort of flawless metal, and scraps of bamboo and wood.

There’s a clear space on one of the ledges, and on this, Tyk carefully sets the three sculptures.

Tyk doesn’t bother trying to reason out what, precisely, Smon is up to. Smon’s main interest with her right now seems to be language acquisition, and once they can talk to each other, Tyk can simply ask her. Tyk, too, is very interest in teaching her as many words as possible; she need to explain the Starspire.

So she follows Smon back outside to share the names of more things. Egg, water, sky. Foot, leg, back, head. She raises the protective wing shields on her back to show her wings and give Smon the word for them and Smon is careful not to touch, which is a relief; with perfectly good legs and far too heavy to fly, Tyk’s wings aren’t nearly as critical to her survival as a man’s, but a strong set of wings is a real asset in tunnel ventilation, cooling and drying things, and other important life tasks, and easy to injure when exposed.

Smon fetches the little model of a man and confirms the parts on its body, too; legs, wings, mandibles, eyes, everything. Tyk isn’t really sure how the parts being the same is anything other than obvious, but it’s good to have another point of confirmation. Tyk considers trying to get Keyat to come over to act as a model, but one look at the two guards eyeing the lesson warily from a safe distance tells her what an exercise in futility that would be.

Carapace goes in the echo stone, though Smon has no equivalent. Horns go in the echo stone, though Smon has no equivalent. Mandibles go in the echo stone; and Smon has those, so Tyk indicated them on Smon’s body. “Mandibles.”

Smon adopts a posture that Tyk has come to recognise as one of confusion. “No,” she says with the echo stone. “Smon no mandibles.”

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