28: A Map of a Prayer

First —- Previous —- Glossary —- Archive —- Next

Bette and her children spend their first night in the Green Hills Hive inside the hive itself, in one of the spare residential burrows, but the rest of the group decide to stay in the trader burrow, with their goods. Smon is reluctant to leave her little farm, her one way of making food, for longer than she has to, and Tyk wants to make the most of her remaining time with Smon. The others, she supposes, all have their own reasons – maybe they’re regretting all agreeing to stay to see Smon off instead of going home immediately.

Despite having spent many nights in makeshift burrows by this point, Tyk finds it difficult to sleep in the unfamiliar trader burrow. It’s almost identical to the Redstone River trader burrow, where she’s spent the occasional night when she didn’t want to go home for one reason or another, and that similarity makes the slight differences in shape and smell and airflow feel wrong. The fired mortar bricks of the burrow, having stood solidly for many generations, are showing some small cracks between them due to the general movement of dirt and moisture that have simply been mortared over in repairing the great dome’s map – the Redstone River burrow has its own cracks, similarly covered, but they’re in different locations, and pressed against the wall of the burrow, Tyk can feel the moisture behind the mortar in the soil filling a particularly large crack that her memory tells her shouldn’t be there.

This sort of thing wouldn’t happen if hives bothered to reseat shifting bricks in their trader burrows. Entrance halls never have these issues.

Smon is awake too, Tyk notices. She’s lying still, but the way her body noticeably expands and deflates with every breath makes it pretty easy to tell when she’s asleep, once someone knows what to look for. She’s also wearing her echo stone, which is a dead giveaway. She’s explained to Tyk before that she controls the echo stone by moving the muscles in her eyes, so she’s probably doing that.

“Can’t sleep?” Smon asks, startling her.

“Yeah. You neither?”

“I already did. Your Earth has days and nights longer than my Earth. I sleep shorter than you.”

“That must mean that you’re awake a lot longer than you should be in the day, too.”

“Yes, I get tired. But I have nice long nights to recover. Is this the furthest you’ve ever been from your hive?”

“Yes. Most of my people don’t travel much. I guess you travel a lot, huh.”

“Only now. On my Earth, I didn’t travel. And on the way here, I was asleep.”

“You didn’t travel much, and you decided to travel to a whole new Earth? Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Is your Earth okay?”

“What?”

“When our hives run out of food in a place, when the sweetroot is all eaten or rotted away, we go and find somewhere else to build a hive to let the land recover. Is that what you did? People couldn’t live on your Earth any more and you had to find somewhere else?”

“No, my Earth is doing fine. It had to be, to build the javlyns for us. We just wanted to go and live on other planets.”

“Why?”

“That’s… a good question. Because we saw them, I suppose. We built magic stones that could see very very far away, and we saw other planets that we could live on, so we did.”

“Even though it was very far and very dangerous and took very very many resources?”

“Yeah. My people feel stuck, I think, if there is somewhere we can not go. We have to go over big seas and under deep oceans and up big mountains and to sentinel stars and now to other Earths. We saw them and so we had to go to them, because otherwise we were stuck away from them. And then we found you, which makes it all worth it, to know that we’re not the only people in the sky.”

“Your people are very strange.”

“Ha! So are yours. You’re on this continent.”

“So?”

“So, the hiveheart said that your people are also on a continent very far North. You’re on multiple continents.”

“There are a lot of continents.”

“That have hives?”

“Yes.”

“So your people go to new places too. Is it strange that we go to new Earths? You go to new continents. Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess that that’s just what you do when the hive ends? You go and find somewhere to build a new one. Maybe people ran out of places to build hives on a continent, so went looking for other ones. Or maybe lorekeepers or messengers moving between continents got lost and ended up on new continents, and had to build hives there.”

“Hmm. Maybe.”

“A more important question is why you’re going in this Starspire journey. What’s this Rayjo Tau mission? You’ve never mentioned it before.”

“I didn’t think to build one. I couldn’t on my own even if I had thought to; I was focused on finding food. But I have a farm now, and it is a very good idea. We will need it to make a sky person hive.”

“Why? What does it do?”

Smon hesitates briefly before answering. “It’s complicated.”

Tyk gets the impression that that part is a lie. Myn and Haidn traded something valuable for the Green Hills Hive’s help in building this Rayjo Tau, they said or did something that made the hiveheart think that it would be worth them risking their own people and giving their own resources. And Smon thinks it’s critically important, too.

And Smon won’t tell her what it’s for.

“Did your boat caravan leaders fall down, too? They must know each other very well.”

“No. We were going very fast. There was only time for some drop boats to fall. There were big debates, how many people? Who? The drop boats are supposed to have more people in them, supposed to have twenty five people, but if we put in twenty five people then there is no room for food and goods and magic stones. So we put in three, so that they can bring more food and things, so they can live. And the drop boats were supposed to land close to each other, but the javlyn didn’t slow down enough, so they were all spread out, means more things needed in each boat so that the people can survive alone until find each other. There were so many people on the javlyn, and only a small number of people had time to land. So the leaders stayed. It is… honour, for our people, for sky boat leaders to stay with boat until all other people are safe.”

“They’re dead, then?”

“Probably not yet. But they go so fast, and big engines are gone, and they will not be able to come back or reach another Earth. Too fast and too much distance between all things in the sky. Not dead yet, maybe not dead for years, but. Dead. With all boat.”

“I’m sorry.”

Smon shrugs, the first big movement she’s made since Tyk woke up. “Their honour is to stay with ship. Our honour is to do mission. Use chance they gave us to survive.”

Eventually, everyone else wakes up and gets to work – or at least they would, if there was all that much to do. With Toi and Ketoi handling the trade of the small amount of goods the hive has brought in their meagre caravan, and nobody else having any duties in a foreign hive, they’re all in the odd position of having a lot of free time and not any familiar people or places to spend it in. The men head to the tower, Mir sort of hangs about the trader’s burrow restlessly, alternately studying the map and checking the condition of their carts, and the other women all drift off to find places to explore or to find locals to talk to. Tyk sticks with Smon, in case she needs anything translated or explained.

And Smon goes to Myn and Haidn’s sky boat.

Half of the hiveheart guide her there, which strikes Tyk as an odd job for the hiveheart. In the Redstone River Hive, the members of the hiveheart are usually very busy doing whatever jobs earned them their positions on the hiveheart in the first place, and meet up for administrative or ceremonial purposes. Having so many of them band together for a task as mundane as showing a visitor where something is seems odd. But then, this is a foreign hive; it’s hard to know what is and isn’t odd. Maybe this is normal here.

Unlikely. A hiveheart that shepherd random visitors around is certainly impractical. Tyk thinks of Myn and Haidn, living in the hive itself, handled directly by the hiveheart and barely interacting with by the locals who still call them godlings. She notes the distant respect with which the hiveheart treat Smon, like someone powerful and important but with whom great care must be taken. As the approach the boat, there’s an eagerness in the movement of their guides that none of them can quite conceal.

The sky boat looks pretty much like Smon’s; same basic shape, same protrusions on the bottom. The land around it hasn’t been stripped if greenery, however, and there’s no signs of external structures ever having been put up, no pipes and no water tank. The ground around the door is pretty well-worn, like a lot of reasonably heavy things have been carried or dragged from the boat, but that’s about it. It’s a lot cleaner than Smon’s – it’s covered in a thin sheen of dust now, but it’s clear that the dirt and soot from its fall was previously scrubbed away, as best as could be managed. Quite a lot of it couldn’t be removed, burned as it was into the surface of the boat, but even removing what they could must have been a fairly big task, given how far away the boat is from the river. The hive, then the communication tower, stand between the boat and the river itself; this isn’t like Smon’s boat, which landed within easy reach of water.

Furthermore, decorations have been added to the surface of the boat; not carved, but coloured, some kind of pigment smeared on it. The bright blue lines and loops match no decorative style that Tyk is familiar with, though she can’t shake the feeling that they’re similar to something she’s seen recently. Smon walks over and studies them intently.

“The outsiders created that before leaving,” Hahn says. “What does it mean?”

“It is a… thinking map… to ask the stars for fortune on a journey,” Smon says. “I will open the boat now, stay back from the door.” She steps back, resettles the echo stone over her eye, and is still for a long moment. Then shakes her head. “They have sealed the door. Only they can open it.”

“You’ll need supplies from there for the journey,” Kegalt says. “Can you try another way?”

She shakes her head again. “No other way. We will have to go on without. It is fine, I have my farm. I am sure that Myn and Haidn will come back for it once Rayjo Tau is ready.”

“Well, that’s unfortunate,” Hahn sighs. “They said that there’s outsider food and medicine and magic in there.”

“I will be fine. I have gone this far with what I have.” Smon shrugs her shoulders and walks away from the boat with surprising nonchalance.

A prayer to the stars? Smon’s people know nothing of star-gods. Do they? Why would they draw a prayer to them on their sky boat?

What’s going on?

First —- Previous —- Glossary —- Archive —- Next