42: Thin River Thinking

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“Yes! Of course I am scared! The situation is scary! You should be scared of us, Tyk.”

“Well, I’m not. I think maybe you should be a little bit less scared of you.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed someday.”

“Uh-huh. Sure. Out of the two of us, I’m the one that keeps making decisions that nearly get myself killed. Listen, out of the four sky people here, you’ve said that none of you are life lorekeepers, but if you think this is critically dangerous and the other three think it’s fine, maybe you’re overreacting?”

“Oh, they know it’s dangerous. They’re not saying so, they say it’s fine, they say I’m overreacting. But they made me promise not to tell Saima and the others about the dangers. That’s not a promise you ask of someone if you’re not keeping secrets.”

And yet you’re telling me, and you didn’t tell me to keep this a secret, Tyk thinks. Were you hoping I’d be scared, and tell the Hiveless about it myself without breaking your promise? Aloud, she says, “Of course they didn’t want you to say anything that might frighten the Hiveless! These people can’t be expected to be reasonable about risks. They don’t understand how to be part of a community, and they’re dangerous and unpredictable murderers.”

Smon huffs a laugh. “Their little community seems to be doing just fine, and Tyk, you watched me kill two people on the river. Four, if you take into account that their truebrothers will commit suicide.”

“That’s different! That was self defense! Sakeya killed two men in her hive just for revenge! And eight scavengers banding together to avoid starving or getting murdered isn’t a community. It’s just barely a tiny caravan.”

“Eleven, if you count the sky people.”

“A pretty small caravan then.”

“What was the revenge for?”

“I don’t know. She broke off the conversation before I got a chance to ask. But does it matter? I can’t imagine any level of revenge that would justify that crime. Attacking men is dishonourable already, but killing your own hivemates? Unforgivable. Of course the other sky people don’t want you telling them your fears about their reservoir. The Hiveless would kill first and ask questions later.”

“They haven’t killed us.”

“They probably wanted your magic. And they thought I was one of them.”

“And wanted to help you, take you in.”

“As one of the Hiveless, yeah.”

“So you do think that they have community.”

Tyk clicks her mandibles in frustration. “Not the same as a hive.”

“Sweetroot isn’t the same as farmed moss, either. So Sakeya and Kekeya are out here because Sekeya’s a murderer. What about Sabin and Kebin? Or Saima?”

“They must have done something similar. People don’t get exiled over nothing.”

“And Samet and Kemet?”

“What about them?”

“You’ve seen Samet’s carapace. What hive do you think she was exiled from?”

“Impossible to know. She doesn’t have markings or gems from any hive, that I can see.”

“Which is strange, right? The only girls I’ve seen with totally unadorned carapaces are children, or quite young adults. So either she was unusually useless in her hive, was exiled incredibly young, or…”

“You think she hatched out here? Like Tama? I doubt it.”

“Why?”

“Tama’s too young to know better, but Samet and Kemet are adults. If they weren’t exiled, they could’ve approached every hive in the area years ago and petitioned to join. The only reasons for them to still be out here is if they’d been exiled from somewhere, or they’d done something out here so horrible and so well-known that none of the hives would take them in.”

“Or they didn’t want to join a hive.”

“What? Why would somebody not want to join a hive?”

“Samet probably doesn’t know how to dig for sweetroot. Kemet probably doesn’t know how to use the wingsong stream. The deep tunnels are probably dark and scary and the tower too high and noisy for such people. The hive itself, probably too crowded, with too much hard work and a confusing social structure. They – ”

“They’d learn! Sure, it’s better to learn as kids, but a couple of young adults can still learn. They might not be masters at anything, but they’d be safe, with productive work, and enough food, and – ”

“They seem safe here. I know they don’t have a lot of food, but wasn’t the Redstone River Hive also facing a possible food shortage when we left, if they can’t get enough seastone? It’s not like food is only a problem in the sleeplands.”

“Well, yes, because there’s hundreds of people to feed at Redstone River. Obviously food is going to be a problem sometimes when there’s so many people. But out here, food’s a problem for eight! Which means there’s clearly not nearly enough food.”

“If the place that can support hundreds has hundreds and the place that can support eight has eight, it seems pretty much the same to me. For each person, I mean.”

“To hang out here and scrape a living of the surface of the ground? To not even burrow or build anything or contribute to anything? It’s uncivilised!”

“Ah, a new word. We haven’t had one of those for a while.”

“Uncivilised? It means… not knowledgeable, and not behaving properly. Not knowing how to work and belong in a community.”

“A community, or a hive?”

“Same thing.”

Smon laughs again. “My people have a word for this thinking. We call it… small-tunnel-thinking. Thin-river-thinking.” The reflected glow of the back of her echo stone is just enough for Tyk to see her hold her claws flat and parallel to each other, indicating a narrow channel. “Having a view that is very thin and sees only on one line. To you, yes, a hive is home and special and important and a big piece of who you are. But to people who live without a hive, maybe it is not.”

“Because they don’t have the experience to know what they’re missing.”

“And you don’t have the experience to know what you’re missing.”

“What I’m missing?” She dips her horns indignantly. “Are you saying that being Hiveless is better?”

“No, no. Better for some people, worse for others. Not better or worse, in big view. Just different.”

“A strong statement by somebody risking so much for this journey. Isn’t the whole point of the Rayjo Tau getting your hive back together again?”

Smon chuckles. “I suppose you have defeated me there.”

Their language barrier is diminishing by the day, but Tyk is still sometimes unsure of whether Smon is making fun of her.

The next morning, Tyk awakens with a sore belly. This isn’t surprising; if anything, it’s surprising that it’s taken this many days of eating random things off the ground to find something to disagree with her. The pain isn’t too bad, and she’s only eating things that the Hiveless have deemed safe, so it’s probably not serious. She keeps it to herself.

Saima, though, gives her a long, searching look at breakfast, and suddenly declares that she ‘misread the weather’ and they should wait fifteen days instead of ten. Tyk considers arguing about this, but the way in which all of the Hiveless accept this judgement immediately tells her that protests will get her nowhere. She considers, once again, leaving alone with Smon, but the added speed of the others’ help pulling the cart will save them more than five days. There’s nothing to be gained by leaving, provided the leaving date doesn’t keep getting extended. Is that the play here? To just keep moving it and keep them here for a long time for… some… reason?

Smon doesn’t seem concerned, tied up in animated conversation with the other sky people. Their conversation isn’t as joyous and when she and Smon first arrived (the issue of the reservoir is probably standing between them, Tyk thinks,) but they’re not fighting. They seem enthralled in whatever they’re talking about, occasionally pausing to gesture or draw out a shape on the floor of the burrow. Yotoru, looking strangely plain without her baggy silks (she generally doesn’t wear much silk until she needs to go outside, unlike the other sky people, who all seem to want to obsessively protect their fragile skin and pulpy flesh with as much of it as possible), slips an echo stone over her eye to ask Kemet something. Tyk isn’t paying all that much attention to the question (something about the mountain ranges to the North), but is shocked to hear one word – ‘seastone’ – in her mother’s voice.

Huh. Tyk had noticed that some of Smon’s echo words were in the voices of these Hiveless, but had assumed that she’d just been learning new words from everyone she could, as usual. But if Yotoru has Tyk’s mother’s voice, then that can only mean that the sky people have shared all the voices in their echo stones with each other. Maybe that’s part of what they were doing at the sky boat?

That means that these sky people, who are allied with these Hiveless, could know quite a lot about the Redstone River Hive. Is that a problem? It hadn’t seemed like one, when Smon had explained that she was going to share information – they’re far from the hive, and what would the Hiveless even do, launch a fruitless eight-person war with a hive across the river for no reason based on some random facts about their moss farm situation? But that was before hearing her mother’s voice, here, in this place far from civilisation, spoken by a stranger.

That feels wrong.

Is there anything she can do about it? It’s not like it would be fair to ask them not to use her hive’s words. Those words had been given to Smon freely for the purpose of letting her communicate with the hive, and if her boat had landed out here and Yotoru had landed near the hive, they would’ve been given directly to Yotoru instead. It never bothered Tyk to hear her mother’s voice from Smon’s echo stone, though it had been disconcerting at first. If it bothers her to hear strangers doing it, then she needs to get over it, or make them something other than strangers.

‘Small tunnel thinking’, Smon had called her logic last night. Thinking along one line, like somebody walking through a narrow tunnel and not thinking to test the walls and find new directions to dig. A bit of a silly image, because who would do that in a tunnel unless the area was already well mined out or too unstable for further digging, but the sky people aren’t built for digging, so it probably makes more sense to them. And as much as they might disagree about the importance of having a hive, none of that mattered when it came to these sky people. They hadn’t been exiled, and they hadn’t chosen to stay Hiveless either; they’d simply landed out here. There’s no reason to think that they’re any more or less dangerous than Smon.

The conversation soon breaks up so that the sky people can help the women block up the burrow entrance against the coming storm. This alarms Tyk at first – at Redstone River, blocking up the entrance like this would only be done for a very serious storm, the kind that risks the bamboo forests and the communication tower – but Kebin, pershing on her back to hum for Ketyk, explains that they do this for most heavy rainfall. “We don’t want this place to collapse any faster than it needs to,” he explains. “For a hive, if you predict the rain wrong and get some flooding, you can clear it out; here, it could damage the walls.”

Tyk eyes the crumbling entrance ahead of her and hauls another stone into place. That makes sense.

There’s a strange sense of safety once the entrance is fully blocked. Even the ventilation holes are blocked for now (they can be easily reopened if the rain lasts longer than expected, but that’s unlikely), so there’s almost no sound from outside, just a very faint drumming of raindrops that sounds like a deep tunnel being ventilated far away. The burrow is well lit by the sky people’s magic stones, and there’s no tunnelling to be done. It’s quiet, and bright, and restful.

It’s been a long time since anything has felt restful.

The Hiveless aren’t even working, even though they could be. On the way here, Tyk and Smon would spend their time sheltering from the rain repairing things or making ropes. They could be doing that, getting ready for their journey in fifteen days; but nobody is. There’s a whole fifteen days left to do it, Tyk supposes.

The only thing close to work that’s happening is Yotoru braiding the long silk strands attached to Kana’s head into some sort of complicated pattern while the pair talk animatedly with Smon, pointing out areas on a map drawn on the floor that Tyk can’t understand. Dem sits off to the side, barely paying attention, so Tyk approaches her. Dem slips an echo stone over her eye as Tyk approaches.

“Hello,” Tyk says, trying not to sound nervous.

“Hello!” Dem contorts her face into a shape that Tyk knows, from watching Smon, is friendly. “Your name is Satyk, yes? I’m Dem.”

“Tyk,” she corrects her. “Just Tyk. It is an honour to meet you.”

“And you.”

“What are they talking about?”

“They’re trying to design traps.”

“… Traps?”

“For fire,” Dem explains. “To feed to the lightning rivers.”

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