31: River Run

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Tyk doesn’t think. She just jumps into the water.

This is a mistake.

She’s significantly lighter than the object she’s looking for, and the current drags at her body, pulling her against the long sharp fronds growing up from the riverbed (pulling with the current, of course, so they don’t hurt her, but it would be dangerous to try to swim back). She fights against it as best she can as she dives down, down, hoping to… do something, if she can catch up with Smon. Cut her free of the farm and carry her to the surface where she can breathe, probably. Of course, without the farm, Smon has no food and will starve to death, but they’ll do… something. Sneak back to the Green Hills Hive to get the food that Myn and Haidn left there. Or, or get back to the Redstone River Hive really, really quickly. Maybe Smon can live a while without food – didn’t she say that her people hibernated to get here?

Tyk will think of something. If she can just find Smon and stop her from drowning.

But the river water is murky and red, and getting murkier and redder the further down she dives. She can barely see her own mandibles, let alone –

And then something big and disruptive blows past slightly upriver, rising rapidly through the water and sending a shower of broken river fronds downriver and over Tyk.

And if there’s one thing that Tyk’s learned, it’s that something loud, unexpected and disruptive is probably Smon.

She shoots for the surface and, unbelievably, yes! Smon’s farm sits on the river surface, buoyed up by big balloons of silk, and Smon sits on top, coughing violently. Smears of bright red blood mark her body, her silks are torn. The echo stone on her face is shattered; she pulls it off and tosses it into the water. The flesh beneath it is cut and bruised.

Tyk feels sort of silly about jumping into the water now. How exactly is she supposed to help Smon from –

There. In the water. An interruption in the flow.

Tyk dives.

As she suspected – someone swimming for Smon. Tyk can’t make out who it is, but that ceases to matter when the swimmer’s objective becomes clear; she opens her mandibles wide and goes to rupture the balloons keeping the farm afloat.

Oh, no, no. There’ll be none of that.

The attacker doesn’t seem to notice Tyk in the water, so there’s no guarding to stop Tyk from coming up underneath her and tearing into the vulnerable joint of her mandible from below. She pulls back in pain, Tyk’s mandible still lodged in the joint of hers, and the current buffets the pair and rolls them over and over in the water, all sense of direction lost as the two fight for survival.

The pair lock legs, belly to belly, in a posture only made possible by being in water, holding each other close to each prevent the other from biting anything vulnerable. Their mandibles are locked, each not daring to let go for fear of giving the other a chance to bite, so it’s a battle of brute strength, mandible against mandible, as each tries to tear the other’s out. Tyk has never fought like this, and it’s clear that her opponent isn’t an experienced fighter either, but her opponent is a full grown woman, and Tyk knows that being big for her age isn’t going to be enough. It’s a question of when, not if, she loses.

Caught in their deadlock, the pair manage to steady themselves in the river so that both of their heads are in the air. The Green Hills Hive boat is far away now, and getting farther. Smon is watching the battle, the killing tool in her claw, but she isn’t using it, and it takes a moment for Tyk to realise why – she’s worried about getting Tyk.

In one swift movement, Tyk relaxes her hold on her opponent and uses every bit of strength that she can muster to shove her away with all of her limbs. Pain shoots through one of her mandibles as it’s very nearly torn from her face, but her opponent’s grip fails at the last moment, and both people remain fully intact as they fly away from each other.

Temporarily.

A moment later, there’s that crack again, and then the louder crack, and Tyk’s opponent is very much not intact.

“Are you okay?” Tyk calls to Smon. But Smon can’t understand her without the echo stone, and just shouts something back in her strange sky language. She looks fine, upright and conscious and safe(ish) on the floating farm, and Tyk takes a quick look underwater to confirm that nobody else is around – either they’re wary of Smon’s killing tool, or don’t want to move that far from the boat. Maybe both.

And the distance of the boat is a problem. The current is strong and only sweeping Tyk and Smon further and further downriver; if Tyk doesn’t head for the boat now, she has no chance of making it back on board, of getting back to her family, her caravan, her hive. Instead of… wherever Smon is going to wash up.

Smon, who has no way to steer. Smon, who’s adrift on an incredibly fragile raft brushing over sharp river fronts that could tear her flotation balloons apart and drop her to the bottom of the river at any moment. Alone, the chances of her ever making it to shore are almost nothing; and even if she does cut herself free from the farm and brave the waters and somehow, miraculously, does not drown, that would leave her stranded alone with no food source to slowly starve on an unfamiliar shore.

Tyk turns her back on the boat and dives again. She finds a strong, secure-looking tether amongst the collection of containers that makes up Smon’s farm, grabs hold, and pulls.

They’re much closer to the Glittergem side of the river than the Green Hills side now, and Tyk immediately abandons the idea of pulling Smon safely to the Green Hills side and making South for the Redstone River Hive. Trying to pull the farm over that expanse of river, over the thick forest of spines that Tyk knows gets thicker and more dangerous closer to the centre, is a surefire way to sink it. The only realistic option is to pull it to the other side, and pull slowly, moving mostly with the current to avoid the flotation balloons getting torn apart. From underneath, Tyk can see the sharp spines growing in the water, and carefully weaves around the worst of them as she tugs the farm closer, closer to the shore.

Distracted by her task and with the light dimmed by water, it’s impossible for Tyk to track how long the task takes. She doesn’t even want to think about how far downriver they are. When the river spines thin and vanish and riverbed sand appears in Tyk’s vision and then, finally, under her feet, she pulls herself up onto a riverbank that she does not recognise at all.

Which isn’t surprising in the least, since she’s never been on this side of the river. The boat is well out of sight, so there are no possible recognisable landmarks. She doesn’t know how far away the Green Hills Hive is, or the Redstone River Hive; they’re both on the other side of the river. But she also has no idea how far downriver they are from the trade route to Glittergem Hive.

Smon helps her drag the farm high enough onto the riverbank that it won’t wash away and then drops down onto the red sand next to her. Both of them are shaking with exhaustion. And probably fear. It’s just past midday, according to the sunlight filtering feebly through the heavy clouds above. It seems that the wet season really is starting early.

The riverbank is unfamiliar, but it looks pretty much the same as the riverbank that the Redstone River caravan spent so many days walking in close proximity to. More Green Hills than Redstone River; patches of green grass dominate the landscape (although it’s flatter than Green Hills territory), and bamboo is fairly rare, sitting in scraggly clumps. Spiders shelter in the seedy heads of the grass, and two small crabs on the riverbank notice Tyk’s attention and rush for the safety of the water.

For some reason, Tyk had expected the sleeplands to be a barren wasteland.

Which doesn’t make any sense, when she thinks on it. Most of the rejuvenation and regrowth being done in the sleeplands is far underground, where fungus breaks down and sweetroots grow thick over decades or centuries. Surface plants recover much faster. This riverbank suffers from a serious lack of cultivation – that struggling bamboo would be fairly easy to coax into a thriving crop with a few years of proper cutting, and tilling up the soil to seed some redgrass on the higher parts of the riverbank would really help the crab population and provide a more consistent source of protein to foragers – but there are plenty of uncultivated areas on Tyk’s side of the river too, all still teeming with life. Of course the surface would look the same. She shouldn’t have expected any different.

Smon is digging in her bag of belongings, sopping wet but still affixed securely to the farm. She pulls out a very small, strong-looking box, which she opens to reveal a new echo stone. She settles it in place over her eye.

“Are you alright?” Smon asks.

“Me? I’m fine.”

“You are shaking.”

“So are you.”

Smon laughs weakly. “I not know you could shake like this,” she says. “It says interesting things about your meat.”

“We have got to find you less creepy ways to say things like that.”

She laughs again.

“Are you a soldier?”

“What do you think?”

“Are you?”

She shakes her head. “I do not know what the word ‘soldier’ means. But that woman said that we came to attack you, and that is not true. What I’ve told you about what I am is true – I am a rock lorekeeper and a traveller who went to a new Earth with no people on it, to build new hives there. And there was an accident and we had to come here instead. But you have no reason to believe me.”

“I believe you,” Tyk says immediately.

“You trust easily.”

“No, I have a memory. I remember meeting you for the first time. You say that you had no idea there were people down here, and I believe that. It’s a bit hard to send soldiers to attack hives that you don’t even know about, isn’t it? Now, the thing with the wingsong stream, I agree that that probably was from your boats falling, maybe they heated up the sky strangely or something, I don’t know; but those Green Hills people seem to think it was an attack, and that doesn’t sound right to me, because you had no idea there was anyone to attack down here, and after you met us, you’ve had no communication with any other sky people. I believe that, too; there’s stuff that you didn’t know that you would have known if you were secretly communicating with them. You wouldn’t have been so surprised about Myn and Haidn not being there, for example. So there’s just no point in time where you guys could’ve been organising an attack.”

“Ah. Not trust, just clever.”

“I can be both! What is Rayjo Tau? You’ve been dodging telling me about it since it first came up, and I think I have a right to know.”

“Not no telling you. Not telling Green Hills Hive. I could never big know if they were listening or not. I trust you, I did not trust them. I thought if they knew, they might think…” She gestures upriver with one claw. “But it seems like Myn and Haidn told them, so, waste of a not telling, I suppose.”

“They said you’re taking control of the wingsong stream.”

“No. Rayjo Tau not use wingsong stream. We not know about wingsong stream when we fall, remember? It is a communication tower, yes, but not for wingsong. For Rayjo.”

“Rayjo?”

She taps the echo stone on her face. “Echo stones have Rayjo. Our boats have Rayjo. It is a way for magic things to talk to each other far away. But, this Rayjo cannot talk very far. A communication tower for Rayjo would be able to talk much further.”

“How far?”

“I don’t know. Haidn would know… would have known, I mean.”

“They might still be alive. The whole trader thing might indeed be a miscommunication; they – ”

“No. There is no point in killing me if they are already going to the Starspire. They would only try to kill me if Myn and Haidn are dead. Besides, they would have been so easy to kill! If they did something so complicated to kill me, of course they would do something easy to kill them. They are dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

Smon just shakes her head.

“Why build the Rayjo Tau out at the Starspire, though? If it’s just a communication tower, that makes no sense. There are only fourt – twelve of you still alive. Isn’t it better to stay safe with the hives and rely on the wingsong stream?”

“Now that is a Tyk-people thing to say. Twelve of us! That is what the Green Hills Hive thought, too; that if they can just kill our small number, then problem is gone. But Tyk. Whoever said that there is only twelve of us?”

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