45: Community Culture

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Tyk is getting pretty good, she thinks, at the Hiveless methods of foraging. She’s nowhere near as efficient as them, but she is only just learning the basics.

They harvest more thoroughly than hives would, taking more from each plant or animal colony, and then leaving them alone for a full year or more to grow back up to size. “It takes patience,” Saima says while out with Tyk and Ketyk one morning, showing Tyk how to strip the spinnable husks and edible surface roots from the stiff local grasses without killing them, “but you get more total food this way.”

“This would never work in a hive,” Tyk notes. It’s a lot more effort for less food than digging, and it would be difficult for a hive to forage so thoroughly and then leave the land for so long.

“It probably could, if it needed to,” Saima says. “Young hives are dependent on surface foraging when they’re first being established, before they’re deep enough to reach sweetroot or have the moss farms working. It would be very difficult to coordinate long-term because of the times involved; we simply forage and then leave, and come back when it’s grown back. You need a lot of land without too many people, to live on the surface. A hive could probably do it long-term if they had their other methods to rely on while the food was growing back, but then, they wouldn’t need to. They have sweetroot.”

“Smon says that their people grow their farms on the surface,” Tyk says. “You could do that out here.”

“Farmed mosses don’t grow very well on the surface.”

“You could farm these grasses and little tubers and – ”

“We are. What do you think we’re harvesting right now?”

Tyk stares down at the grass that she’s carefully reburying. “Well, you could do it more.”

“Why?”

“So make more food, without having to move around! To be able to support more people!”

Saima clicks her mandibles in amusement. “Are you saying there should be more Hiveless out here?”

“N-no, I… I didn’t…”

“Some areas have more food than others,” Saima says. “Like the hives, each of our communities works with the conditions it has. This land is resting and recovering; we can only ask so much of it. And whatever systems we build will be replaced when new hives are built here.”

“What happens to the Hiveless? When people migrate here to make new hives?” Tyk has never really thought about that before.

“Well, some of them flee the Influx, crossing over to the new sleeplands that the migrants will be abandoning. But most of them do what your descendants will be doing – make new hives. Everyone knows approximately when people will start to migrate as their hives start failing. Usually, people will make some effort to stay with the people of their old hive when they migrate, but they usually end up spreading out anyway; they come here, and it’s the Hiveless who know where the good locations are and who are waiting for immigrants to come and join them so they can start digging together. With their knowledge and resources and existing social networks with other such groups, the very first hivehearts of new hives are usually made up of the people who already lived in the sleeplands.”

“Former Hiveless.”

“Does that bother you, little hiveling?”

“No,” Tyk lies.

Ketyk, bravely, hops down off her horns onto her claw to inspect the grass. He flicks his wings at her, the first ‘word’ he added to their private truesibling language the day after he hatched. It means, “What’s that?”

“It’s food,” she tells him, but of course he doesn’t understand yet, so she crushes up some of the grass roots and offers it to him, encouraging him to taste. He gives it a nibble and then covers his mouth with his claws, unimpressed. He hops back up onto her horns before she can give him any more; she doesn’t blame him.

“It’ll be no time at all before he’s driving you mad, flying away from you,” Saima says fondly.

“I think I have a while before I need to worry about that.”

“Oh, you say that now, but soon enough you’ll be watching him fly to the top of a communication tower and thinking that you could’ve sworn he’d tasted grass roots for the first time just a few days ago.”

“What was Keima like?”

“Ha, well. You’re never going to get an accurate answer asking a woman a question like that, are you? Everyone thinks that their truebrother is the best man in the world. He was clever, he was. A quick-thinking lad, perhaps a tad suspicious of other people; we balanced each other out in that respect. Decent singer, couldn’t spin or weave worth a damn, but a good diplomat. Really helped keep everyone together.”

“You miss him.”

“Of course I do. Every single day.”

Tyk wants so know how long Saima’s been without him. But it seems rude to ask.

“My grandfather died on the communication tower,” she says. “During a storm. He was old, and perhaps pretending to still be a much stronger flier than he really was. He probably shouldn’t have been up there in that weather at his age, but…”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He was a stubborn old rock, thought he could do anything. And he thought I could do anything, too. Whenever I was about to give up at something I was bad at, he’d get so confused. ‘Do you want to do it or not?’ he’d ask. ‘Only give up if you’ve decided you don’t want to do it. Otherwise, you just need practice.’ Grandma was the same, and then… and after he died… none of us were expecting him to die up there, and she…”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay.” Careful of Ketyk, Saima brushes her horns against Tyk’s soothingly.

“She held on for a long time, you know? She moved into our residence, so that my father could help look after her since her truebrother was gone, and at first she kept working with everyone, as, as they do. But then she stopped showing up to dig or forage, said she couldn’t stand being around people any more. We figured, well, that’s normal, it’s probably painful to see so many happy pairs of truesiblings everywhere, but she stayed for ages, just in our burrow being sad, and then one day she and my parents had a big fight and she just left, and they explained to me that she was probably gone forever but she wasn’t, she’d moved into an unused storeroom. And we kept bringing her food and stuff there while she got all surly and miserable and sometimes she’d ask where grandpa was, ask when he was coming home, and I… I started to wish… I mean, she was taking so long about it! Nobody could use the storeroom because the ‘crazy old lonewoman’ had claimed it and she was sticking around for much longer than they usually do. I’d bring her food and I found myself wishing, sometimes… just wishing that…”

“That’s she’d hurry up and go down into the tunnels?”

“Did I kill her? Did I drive her to that?”

“Oh, nectar, no. No, you didn’t.”

“You’re doing fine!”

“‘Fine’ is subjective; it hurts every day. But it’s not – look, even out here, not everyone survives alone. A good half or so of us take our own lives after losing our truesibling, and the rest, well, it’s a lot easier to die of natural causes alone. Without a sharp eye in the sky above you or a strong pair of horns below to protect you, there’s a lot of ways to get hurt or worse.”

“But all of ours do it. It’s a foregone conclusion.”

“And you think that that’s your fault, personally? Are you the dozens of women that your grandmother probably saw every day working in the tunnels, pitying her and waiting for her to die, until she got fed up and stopped going to work? Are you the social forces and expectations of uselessness and death that pushed your parents and grandmother to have a fight that there was no way to permanently recover from, because the inevitability of her decline was so deeply assumed, and reassigned her old residence so that she was pushed instead into a storeroom? Are you a society of people all deciding that the ‘crazy old lonewoman’ was an inconvenience who couldn’t be saved? Did you tell your grandmother, way back when she was a larva and again and again all through her life, that after her or her truebrother’s death, the other’s was inevitable? Did you demonstrate lonemen and lonewomen succumbing to grief around her her whole life and nail home this fact? Tyk, it’s not your fault; it’s not any individual person’s fault. No amount of support you could have given her would’ve made a difference. Even if she was inclined to continue on without him – which, again, is not at all guaranteed – it would’ve taken multiple people, a whole hive culture or at the very least a subculture with resources behind it, preferably with some remembered examples of people surviving and living meaningful lives alone long-term, to have given her a chance.”

“She deserved that chance.”

“Everyone does. But everyone also deserves the food and safety present in a stable hive, which we lack out here. There are different problems with different places.”

“You seem to be doing alright for food.”

“Indeed we are, right now. The start of the wet season is a time of abundance. And since we’re moving North a little bit early, we’re over-harvesting this area and feasting a lot, since this needs harvesting to grow correctly by the time we return, and we won’t be able to carry a lot of excess with us. Also, the time between leafdrop and the influx is a time of great abundance; within a couple of generations, the influx of migrants will occur, and within a generation or two of that they’ll have the hives deep enough to harvest sweetroot and the surface ecology will change. We can harvest more recklessly than our predecessors, because we don’t need to build and preserve food systems for many, many generations after us. It will be those of our descendants who choose to flee the influx and move into the new sleeplands, joining those who chose not to migrate and to become Hiveless, who will have a hard time, racing to recultivate the land before they run out of what the hives left behind. And their descendants will experience lean times of uncertainty and hardship until the next leafdrop. But we’re living during perhaps the most fortunate time for the Hiveless.”

“There seem to be a lot of rules about land cultivation. Like there are in a hive, or on a trade route.”

“Of course there are. Nobody would be able to survive out here if we weren’t all on the same trail. Did you think we were lawless?”

“W-well, what if someone doesn’t obey the rules? You can’t tell me that everyone wants to play nice.”

“Of course they don’t. The exiles we get out here are, by definition, people who violated the rules of their own communities so egregiously that those communities saw no choice but to oust them. Most of us know the possible consequences of our actions and take those actions anyway, expecting not to survive in the sleeplands. Now, for the vast majority of us, even if the crime wasn’t an accident or a fabrication, there are extenuating circumstances; circumstances that made that one crime worth it, that don’t exist out here. Most of us were good citizens in our hives until we weren’t, and out here, we can be again. But of course that doesn’t apply to everyone; sometimes, you do get somebody who is simply dangerous to have around, either directly through violence, or because they destroy the food and resources that the community needs to survive and have no inclination to stop.”

“Right, so how does anything work for a Hiveless community if it’s got people like that?”

“It generally doesn’t. Firstly, the neima may have given you the wrong impression about how many exiles are out here. Exile from a hive is rare and extreme. We have a high proportion of exiles because we’re at the edge of the sleeplands, where new exiles come in. In most Hiveless communities, the majority of people hatched out here and were taught how to live out here from birth. And as for exiles coming in who are dangerous, well, we simply don’t let them be a problem.”

“You kill them?”

“Some communities probably do. We’ve never needed to. If they’re a danger, we make them leave.”

“And they go?”

“Would you stick around if Samet and Sakeya were chasing you off? They go further into the sleeplands, I think. It’s only happened three times, and I never saw any of them again. Most people, even not particularly nice people, obey the rules set for them by the community they’re trying to join, or if there’s enough space and resources to do so, risk splintering off and making their own community – a community that is as invested in having a safe territory and a food supply for many years to come, so has to fit into everyone else’s patterns. A life with nobody but your truesibling out here, considered a threat by the surrounding communities, would be a very short one. You’d have to keep your distance from bigger groups, meaning travelling through their migration areas off-season where there’s not much to forage, or stalking a trader trail and being a threat to them and their food supply – and if you’re in the same general area as where you were exiled from, there’s some chance that the traders might already know and hate you. With nobody but your truesibling to help you collect food, and make the things you need, and keep you safe, and nurse you when you’re sick? Well. We don’t kill such people out here; we drive them inland, and hope they can find another community that they can integrate with. Because if they can’t? Then it amounts to the same thing.”

Raiding the trade routes, huh? That must be where they are, the exiles who can’t live in a community. It all makes sense to Tyk now. One of the main things that she knows about the Hiveless, apart from where they come from (being exiled from hives for unforgivable crimes as a last resort), is their tendency to attack traders and raid their caravans, which is why trading across the sleeplands is so dangerous and the goods that such traders bring so expensive. Saima isn’t the type to do something bad enough to be exiled; that must have been some kind of misunderstanding or conspiracy, some setup similar to how the Green Hills Hive had conspired to kill the sky people. And there’s no way that these people would attack innocent traders. It must be the people that they too have exiled, people who are too vicious to live in a hive or out here, patrolling the trade routes and looking for prey. They are the true Hiveless.

And soon enough, Tyk and her companions will return to that route to make their way to the Glittergem Hive.

She hopes that they don’t run into any.

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