44: Native Tongue

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The next day, Tyk’s stomach ache hasn’t gone away, and the day after that, when the rain stops, it’s sharp and insistent. She’s starting to worry that something serious is wrong with her as she climbs out into the tunnel in the morning to see the women clearing the entrance, letting the early morning sunlight pour in.

“That was close,” Saima remarks as she approaches. “I was worried that we’d be working in the heavy rain. It looks like you’ll have Tahku’s blessing, my dear. You seem almost ready, is that right?”

Ready? Tahku? What?

And then Tyk realises.

She’d been taught what to expect, taught what it would feel like. She’d thought she had more time. But the pain she feels isn’t to do with anything she ate; it’s Ketyk’s egg detaching itself from her body.

She’s ready to lay.

“I can’t do this here,” she says desperately. “I have to get to Glittergem first.”

“That’s absolutely not going to happen,” Sakeya says, and Tyk knows that she’s right. But it wasn’t supposed to be out here, in the middle of nowhere. If she couldn’t lay at home, she was at least supposed to lay in a hive somewhere. Not in the middle of the sleeplands.

But this is where they are, and by midmorning, Tyk has to head outside and look for a good sunny spot to lay. The women accompany her, guiding and helping and giving advice. (The sky people stay behind. Without meeting Tyk’s eyes, Smon haltingly explains that in her hive, this sort of thing is private. Which is baffling, but Tyk’s a bit too distracted to ask questions right now.)

They find a good spot atop a short rise, where a mostly flat stone sits slightly elevated from the muddy ground and already nearly dry in the sun, and after all the fuss and fiddlng, actually laying the egg is very easy. Within minutes, the fragile little sac containing Tyk’s truebrother lies drying in the sun. The flimsy shell is just transparent enough that she can see movement inside, as the light wakes him up and he begins trying to chew his way out.

She fights the urge to help him. She’s been warned not to do that. He needs to come into the world himself.

The men fly down to hum tones of encouragement and welcome to him, and Tyk chokes down a wave of homesickness. It should be Kesan and Kedahm and the other men of Redstone River doing this. It should be San standing protectively next to her, and Bette offering snippets of sage advice, and Dahm doing her best to look aloof and not excited by the hatching of her brother, not these strangers. Not out here.

But these strangers help. They hadn’t expected a random Redstone River girl to show up at their burrow ready to lay, but Saima touches her mandibles and murmurs gentle praise and Tama looks on with admiration and Sakeya makes humourously exaggerated predictions of Ketyk’s beauty and wit and might and Sabin and Samet reassure her that they’ll get her and Ketyk to Glittergem safely and Kemet and Kebin and Kekeya all sing for Ketyk as he slowly chews his way through the egg and it feels like no time at all before he’s dragging his way out, tiny and wet, and crawling up onto Tyk’s horns to spread his wings to dry in Tahku’s gentle warmth.

“Hello, truebrother,” Tyk says, very quietly, so quietly that only he is likely to hear. Ketyk doesn’t know any words yet, but the way he flutters his wings in the sunlight feels like a response.

They will make it to the Glittergem Hive, where Ketyk can start learning to weave and to sing histories and to use the communication tower. And they will help Smon to build Rayjo Tau. And they will go home, where Ketyk can meet his family. And everything will be well.

There is nothing that they cannot do together.

Once Ketyk is clean and his wings are dry, they head back to the old, collapsing hive. The men fuss over Ketyk the whole way, and the sky people, waiting at the entrance for them, do the same when they arrive, making high-pitched cooing sounds and smiling at him. They seem afraid to get close and touch him, like they’re worried about hurting him. Tyk is fine with this – she doesn’t want anyone accidentally hurting him, either.

Oh no, what if she hurts him? She’s so big and he’s so, so little. What if she moves too fast and he falls off her horns and she steps on him? The chances of that are low, almost all boys who actually hatch make it to adulthood (and, of course, if he dies so soon while she’s still so young then her body would make another, but she doesn’t want to think about that, think about losing him and replacing him with some hypothetical future truebrother), but she’s not the most mindful person, she’s stumbled and broke things before, what if she breaks him? As if sensing her panic, Ketyk shakes his wings and does his best to hum, though he doesn’t have the strength for it yet.

No, she MUST calm down. She mustn’t frighten him. Everyone else can get through this. Even Ayan managed to get through this. So can she.

Ketyk settles down on her horns and goes to sleep. He balances so naturally, even unconscious.

“Now what?” Smon asks.

“Now we wait fifteen days,” Saima says. “By then, the weather will have settled down some, and Ketyk will be strong enough to travel through rain on Tyk’s horns. We take our North migration a little early, and we part ways with you at the tip of it, which will put you a few days’ travel from Glittergem Hive.”

“Several days,” Sakeya corrects, eyeing Tyk and Smon. “Without Samet, dragging that cart of theirs will be a lot slower, and the road will be half mud by then, until they hit the stone.”

“You are certain you won’t come?” Smon asks the other sky people, using the echo stone for the benefit of everyone else.

Dem shakes her head. “You know that your farm can’t support all of us, and it’s not feasible to drag one that can. We’ll stay here and keep monitoring the rayjo for your signal. We can tend the reservoir and stockpile food, and our neima friends will look for other star sailors on their migration and send them to us, when practical. Once you’ve contacted the Northern survivors, let us know what you need; if you need more people and have the resources to support them, we’ll supply volunteers and send them up to you.”

Send volunteers, Tyk notes. Not come themselves. Dem’s little group seemed to have decided where their home was, and the Hiveless weren’t protesting. Tyk wonders how many little sky person settlements are developing, and how that’s going to affect the migration to start new hives in a few generations.

Something to keep in mind. Everyone’s going to need to know where each other is and agree on territories beforehand, or the migration could get messy on both sides. Between this, and the possible sharing of the sky people’s magic, it’s shaping up to be the most chaotic migration on the continent since the early days of shaping and settling it.

That night, when Tyk and Smon and Ketyk are alone in their little storeroom, Smon leans close and speaks through the echo stone very, very quietly. “Is Ketyk okay?”

“He’s fine. He should be. Is something wrong?” Was something so wrong that even Smon had noticed and Tyk couldn’t even –

“No, no! You just seemed upset earlier, when the men were talking to him.”

She’d seemed upset? Oh, that wasn’t good. Hopefully the Hiveless would take it for nervousness and overprotectiveness, and not be offended. “No, it’s fine. Men have to talk to him, to teach him how to speak and hear properly. It’s very kind of them to help, since we’re stuck all the way out here.”

“Nothing’s wrong?”

“No.”

In the reflected light of Smon’s echo stone, she can see Smon watching her in the dark, even though between Smon’s fairly poor low light vision and the light of the echo stone shining into her eyes there’s almost no chance that she can actually see Tyk. The expression on her face is, so far as Tyk can read it, doubtful.

“Men’s language is subtle,” Tyk explains. “They can hear things that we can’t. And anyone’s language changes over time depending on where they go and who they talk to, but some factors in how men speak are set very early on. There are things that they pick up in the egg and in their first days of life that they don’t ever shake. Some master singers claim that they can tell everywhere a man’s ever lived by listening to him sing; most men don’t claim that much, but they can usually predict where a man was born, if it’s somewhere that they’re familiar with. Ketyk is my truebrother; he’s of the Redstone River Hive. He’s supposed to be learning from the men of the Redstone River Hive; that’s supposed to be a part of him. And he will, when we get home, but this… I was hoping to at least make it to Glittergem. Him being born in Glittergem wouldn’t be too bad; people immigrate between hives sometimes. But I’ve forced him to be born out here, and that’s a mark he’ll carry for the rest of his life, obvious to any man the moment he spreads his wings. I was supposed to do better for him. And I didn’t.”

“Because you followed me out here.”

“It’s not your fault! You wanted me to go home, remember? I chose to come anyway.”

“To protect me. I would’ve frozen to death without you.”

“A risk that you chose to take, and I chose to come. You didn’t make that decision for me. I put him through this.”

“And now he’s going to sound Hiveless, and that bothers you.”

“It scares me,” Tyk confesses. “A lot. These people have been kind to us, but carrying that in a hive his whole life… well, to be honest, it’s probably not as bad as that.” She owed it to these people to at least be fair. “I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a Hiveless accent. The men here were born in hives before banding together out in the sleeplands; they might develop an accent of their own out here, or they might just sound like a mishmash of hive accents, like traders. If they have their own accent, it’s unlikely that most people would know what that even sounds like, so either way, most men will probably hear him and assume he was born in a long-route trade caravan.”

“And you… don’t want that?”

“No! He’s a Redstone River boy! He deserves to learn from our men, and to sound like it!” Oh, this will be just perfect for Ayan when they get home, won’t it. Another thing to show that she and Keyan belong in the hive more than Tyk and Ketyk ever will. ‘You might as well be a trader, Tyk; anyone would assume you grew up on the road, not staying in a hive long enough to even lay your truebrother’.

Smon still looked perplexed, but she nodded. “Then we’ll have to give that to him.”

“Ha! Oh, yes; let’s just rush back home overnight. We don’t have any Redstone River men here.”

“But we have their voices,” Smon says, echoing words captured from Kesan and Kedahm. She pauses a moment, changing something in the echo stone, then leans in close to Ketyk and starts speaking about random things in the voices of men from Tyk’s hive.

And for the first time in a while, Tyk falls asleep to the sound of her father’s wings.

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