24: Backup Plans

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Tyk wakes the next morning early and restless. Everyone’s still asleep. The pale stars visible through the burrow opening wake her properly, although she’d rather doze back off – there’s something disconcerting about sleeping so close to the surface, without several tunnels and chambers between her and any potential predator.

A stupid thought; there aren’t any large predators capable of taking on a healthy girl, not on this continent, not any more. And myriad tunnels don’t protect from mites and bugs who could be desperate enough to go for a sleeping girl’s joints; she’s in no more danger here than she would be at home (less, in fact, since such bugs are less likely to be in a vast unpopulated area like this, whereas clearing the tunnels of them is a never-ending task). The men could, in theory, be in danger if something gets in, but that something would have to sneak carefully around Mir in the entrance and the instant it was stupid enough to take a nip at someone, he’d shriek an alarm that would have the whole group awake and on the predator in an instant.

They’re safe, and the stars don’t indicate otherwise. And Tyk, in her frequent wanderings, has taken naps under sunlight and starlight both; what is she nervous about now?

Maybe it’s because those naps were within easy walking distance of the hive. They’re out of that zone of safety, now.

Listening to her companions and looking about as best she can in the extremely dim lighting, Tyk realises that not everybody is asleep. Ayan and Keyan are missing. She carefully extricates herself from her place half-under her mother’s legs (her father is sleeping on her mother tonight, not on her, which means she can avoid waking him) and makes for the entrance. Mir’s eyes half-open as she moves through the entrance, but she makes no move to get up or stop her.

The missing pair are within sight of the burrow, gazing in the general direction of home. They look fine, so Tyk makes to retreat silently back into the burrow, but Keyan must hear her, as he flicks his wings in a greeting, which alerts Ayan. With the pair looking at her, it’d be weird not to go over, so she does.

“Doing some stargazing?” she asks.

“Something like that.” Ayan looks away and back over the land towards home. Keyan repeats his greeting wing-flick, and Tyk responds with a horn-flick of her own. She’s not yet sure whether Keyan will inherit his truesister’s dislike of her. He’s barely old enough to hold a conversation, and doesn’t seem to dislike anybody yet.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” Tyk says, after a moment of awkward silence.

“Yes. Well.” Ayan doesn’t look at her. “I know it’s probably not a big deal to someone like you, who’s always been ready to abandon your family and home at a moment’s notice, but – ”

“You volunteered for this trip as fast as I did, star-destined or not,” Tyk snaps. She manages not to say anything cruel about how Ayan’s parents, being so old for first-time parents, were bound to leave her and Keyan alone too soon. She manages not to directly mention Bette’s presumably imminent death. But even though Ayan’s not looking at her, Tyk can still see the smug tilt of her mandibles, pleased at having gotten under her carapace.

“The hive needs what the hive needs,” Ayan says. “But as for you, well, this is good practice for you, isn’t it?”

Tyk considers biting her. Keyan’s old enough to take care of himself now; there’s nothing stopping her from doing so, except the knowledge that limping back from a meeting with Tyk with a scratched up carapace for the adults to fawn over is exactly what Ayan wants.

She doesn’t bite. Watching Ayan away from the hive for the past few days has given her a new perspective.

“Jealousy’s not a good look on you, you know,” Tyk says.

“What?”

“You clearly wanted to get picked by a wandering star, but that’s got nothing to do with me. If you want to travel, travel – most traders and travellers aren’t star-marked wanderers, you know. Don’t make your insecurities into my problem.”

“My insecurities? Some of us take pride in our hive, you know. Some of us are honoured to be able to build a strong home for our loved ones and the people who will come after us. Of course everyone would love to be able to go gallivanting around the continent their whole lives, but there’s a reason that of all the girls in our hive right now, the stars figured that you were the one that Redstone River could afford to lose. You might get to have the most fun, but some things are more important than a life of frivolous fun, you know.”

“Yeah, I… don’t think that’s right.”

“You don’t think looking after the hive is more important than just having fun all the time? Typical.”

“Not that part. I don’t think that everyone does want to go ‘gallivanting around the continent their whole lives’. Everyone doesn’t clench their claws and force themselves to stay at home and bury their dreams of travel for the good of the hive. I’m pretty sure people stay with the hive because they want to.”

“As someone who gets to do whatever they want, you would say something like that. But no, Tyk; most of us have a sense of responsibility and discipline. I’m marked for leadership, and since I can actually help my hive, I – ”

“Pyrrah’s chosen don’t have to be leaders. They’re often teachers, or artisans, or just… good to be around. Or negotiators or entertainers; plenty of traders are entertainers, and negotiating is pretty importa – ”

“Yes, Pyrrah’s chosen can indeed fail like anyone else, and I’m sure that’d delight you to see, wouldn’t it. I’m not surprised that it’s more important to you to watch me fail than thinking about what that would cost the hive. You should stop trying to run my life and go check on your sky traveller friend; she’s your best chance of ever doing anything meaningful with yours.”

Tyk reconsiders the biting option. Just a quick nip. A quick nip wouldn’t hurt.

But the sun is rising, and the burrow behind them is stirring. So, hating the fact that it looks like she’s obeying Ayan (which was probably Ayan’s intention), she does go back to coordinate with everyone else. Including Smon.

They make it about halfway through the day before it becomes obvious that Smon is faltering. She stops moving ahead of the carts to clear the path, then starts to lag behind, and seems to be leaning more and more heavily on her bamboo branch. She insists that she’s fine, but during one of their cart shift changes she takes advantage of the pause to sit down and take the protective coverings off her soft, uncarapaced feet for a moment, and Keyan spots blood on her feet, and Ohta immediately orders her to rest in the heaviest cart and let San pull her.

“I’m fine, I can walk,” Smon says, but nobody backs down.

“How would our hive look if we deliver you to your hivemates unable to walk?” Mir asks, only half-joking. “You’re only going to get worse if you keep walking. Rest, to protect the honour of Redstone River.”

“And if you can’t walk, you can’t help set up at night,” San adds. “Pulling your weight now is no problem, if it means we still have your help foraging and organising at night.”

“And if you keep pushing until you can’t walk, you’re going to end up needing to rest and heal for longer than if you rest and heal now,” Tyk points out. “Wearing yourself down makes no sense. I’m sure you want to be in top condition when we meet up with Myn and Haidn.”

So Smon reluctantly lets San pull her on the cart, and instead turns her attention to other matters. Specifically, to using a small knife of shiny, flawless metal to cut holes in a very small, thin piece of bamboo. “Hey, Tyk!”

“Yeah?”

Then she wraps the flesh of her mouth around one end and blows air through it.

Oh! It’s an instrument! Like the song tunnels deep in the hive, where women gather on special occasions to ventilate the tunnels with their wings to create deep, resonant melodies that seem to come from everywhere at once. Smon’s little tube has neither the size nor the range for that kind of performance, and produces a thin sequence of flat tones as she covers or uncovers various holes with her claws.

“Nice! Is that music from your Earth?”

Smon screws her face up at the instrument. “No. Well, yes, sort of; we do use things like this to make music. But I’m trying to figure out how to speak your words.”

“You already can. With the echo stone.”

“For now, yes. But what about when it breaks? I not have forever spares. I not know how to fix any of my magic stones, and even if I did know, I not know if the right things are even on this Earth to do it, or where to find them.”

“That’s why your boat has ways to open back up that don’t need the echo stone?”

“Yes. We need to be prepared for not having them.”

Tyk briefly imagines travelling with her hive to a new continent, only to arrive to find no bamboo, and that everybody who knew the secrets of building communication towers strong enough to hold up their own weight and stand against the winds had died on the journey. Terrifying.

“I can’t even hear most of your words properly, so is not going well.”

“You can’t – you understand us, though. You have to be able to hear us.”

She shakes her head. “Echo stone can hear you. It can hear much more than me. It – I might be able to show you, let me discover.” She goes still for a moment, in the way she often does when focusing on the echo stone, then jumps off the cart. “Look.” She takes the stone off and holds it over Tyk’s eye instead.

The echo stone shines a bunch of confusing lights into Tyk’s eye. She backs away.

Smon puts it back on. “What did you see?”

“Just a lot of random light. Like…” well, not like anything. Like a cavern roof covered in gemstones? No; there was no definition, no focal point, no gemstones that shone beyond the others. It had all been so flat.

Smon makes a frustrated little noise. “Yes, I thought that maybe would happen. We see different too, I think, and also hear different. I see Redstone River Hive in the echo stone.”

“You have a sculpture of Redstone River Hive in there? It steals more than sounds?”

“Not a sculpture, but… yes. It takes the sounds and remembers what they mean, even if I not hear them. And it shows me what it hears with…” she scrawls something on the ground with the end of her stick. From context, Tyk assumes that it must be a map, but she has no idea what it could be a map of. Maybe it’s a decorative design? No; no symmetry or balance. “A… map… of sound,” Smon explains. “This says ‘Smon’.” She makes another one. “This says ‘Tyk’.”

“Oh! It’s writing!” Tyk is familiar with writing. Supply tallies notched into record-sticks in warehouses or warnings notched into the walls of dangerous tunnels are commonplace in the hive. Names are rarer – generally, if one has business being in an area, one knows who to report issues with that area to, or at least knows who to ask, and recording a name is not necessary – but Tyk knows how to write them. She finds a bamboo stalk (the bamboo is becoming rarer and rarer with every day of travel, but there’s still some about) and notches into it the six of her lineage colours that are known (three from Kesan, three from Kepol). For the seventh colour, unknown until Ketyk’s wing colours come in, she puts a placeholder ‘blank’ notch, and finishes the name with a ‘horn’ notch to indicate that she’s a girl (Ketyk’s name, when he’s born, will have a ‘wing’ notch instead). She passes the stalk to Smon. “I don’t know how to write your name,” she says, “but this is mine.”

Smon inspects the grooves with the ends of her claws, showing them far more interest than they really deserve, in Tyk’s opinion. “Can I keep this?”

“Of course.”

She tucks it away carefully into a fold of her silks. Tyk inspects the names that Smon has ‘written’ on the ground. She knows Kesan and Kepol, she’s seen their wings on multiple occasions, so of course she’d be able to deduce Tyk’s lineage colours and write her name (Tyk has no idea where Smon’s people even display their own lineage colours), but Tyk can’t see any obvious order to the pattern that suggests how the pieces should be read. She has no idea how to deduce which part has which meaning. A series of notches is simple to understand, but Smon’s writing sprawls out in a complex two-dimensional pattern, like a drawn map. Names that are mapped out, and mouths that pronounce every word like a name. What a strange people.

“Echo stone hears your words,” Smon explains, “and tells them to me in writing. I tell the echo stone what new words mean when I learn them and it remembers them for me. But when echo stone breaks, I not be able to hear or say or remember your people’s words.”

“That’s… a problem.”

Smon shrugs. “Maybe. That is why I find other ways now. Then when it breaks, it is a smaller problem.”

“That’s why your boat has other ways to open it.”

“Yes. How bad, if echo stones all break and we can not get in our boats! My hive’s big problem right now is finding ways to live here after all of our stones break.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Tyk says. “We don’t have any magic stones, and we live here just fine.”

Smon laughs. “That is very true.”

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