49: Tolls and Trades

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Tyk comes away from the encounter with the nedorm with one particular worry on her mind, and she’d like to talk to Saima privately about it, but their pattern of movement makes that somewhat difficult. She isn’t willing to leave Smon to go foraging, and Smon isn’t willing to leave the farm, so the only one of the neima she can easily get alone is Samet, pulling the cart. Well, Samet will have to do. She waits for a moment when Kemet is high above scouting and the others are foraging, and sidles up to her.

“Hey, Samet?”

“What’s digging, kiddo?”

“W-well, I wanted to talk about that encounter with the nedorm.”

“Don’t worry about them. They’re gone, they can’t hurt you.”

“No, not that. I just… uh, you guys mentioned that they were here too long, stealing forage and, and traders from you.”

“Yeah?”

“So you do rob traders, then?”

“We take toll, from people moving through our territory.”

“You rob them.”

“Do we? I’m no expert on trading, but I’ve heard that the Green Hills Hive charges for people using their river crossing. Are they robbing them?”

“No! It’s their crossing over their section of the river. They maintain the crossing.”

“And we leave the trade road unforaged, even though it’s our food by right, and let traders pass through on our road. They’re not coming to trade with us, but we let them through and keep the area safe and abundant. And they pay us for that.”

“That’s not the same thing!”

“Why not?”

“Well… because…” Because they weren’t in any hive’s territory, so nobody could claim rights over travellers from other hives. It’d be like trying to say who could or couldn’t travel over the ocean. Except that wasn’t the case, was it? It might not be any hive’s territory, but it was the neima’s. The Hiveless had their own rules of territory and travel; why should the hives’ rules apply to the people and land that the hives had abandoned? Why should they care what the laws of hives were?

“The traders say that the road through the sleeplands is really dangerous,” is all Tyk can come up with. “That’s why their goods are so expensive, especially when a caravan gets robbed and they can’t get much through.”

“Then the traders are cheating you,” Samet says. “We take a fair share and the traders factor in the toll before leaving their hives.”

“Are you sure the nedorm take a fair share? If you’re just being fair to be good and kind, then – ”

“Kindness has nothing to do with it. If we charged too much, the traders would stop coming. They’d head East and move around the sleeplands. But they take the short cut through the sleeplands and they’re willing to pay to do it. It’s only the young brats who make ther own caravans and won’t listen to their elders that are a problem. There’s always some group of youngsters who think they’re better than the rules, who think they don’t owe us stupid Hiveless anything, and try to make trouble. They quickly learn that the number of guards they have to hire to keep us away is more expensive than just paying the toll, though.”

Tyk tries to remember which caravans, specifically, she’s heard complain about Hiveless thieves. It’s mostly just a known fact, that to travel through the sleeplands is to risk being robbed by roving bands of exiled criminals; it’s something her familya nd her hive warned her about over and over, expecting her t leave them someday and quite probably have to travel through sleeplands. The travellers do complain, do explain that their prices are high due to Hiveless thievery, but now that she thinks about it, the experienced caravans are usually fairly calm and matter-of-fact about the issue, dismissive of any admiration of their bravery. She’d always just assumed that they were experienced at avoiding and fighting off the Hiveless. The idea of agreed, planned-for fees is… well, obvious, now that she thinks about it. How would the Hiveless have any chance of surviving out here if they were just blindly wandering about and attacking any strangers they met for their resources? Why would the traders use the route when they’d be so easy to spot by such people, unable to take their heavy carts off the road to avoid them? Obviously there are rules, customs, understandings. Obviously.

Ridiculous that she’d ever assumed otherwise.

Ketyk grows as they travel. He’s far from having colour in his wings, but he learns to use them to jump farther than he can on legs alone, and even develops the strength to hum properly, to start to make the deep and subtle and varied tones that only men can hear. They discover this on their very last night with the neima, just as they’re preparing to settle down to sleep. Some of the neima are helping Smon replace the wheels on the farm and adjust the yoke so that she and Tyk can carry it, while Ketyk watches from Tyk’s horns, winging quietly to himself. All of the men pause their work at once, and flock over.

Ketyk attempts to hide from the attention on Tyk’s belly, but is quickly coaxed out with praise and encouragement, and before Tyk can really grasp what’s going on he’s off her and surrounded by a group of men all singing little tunes and phrases and encouraging him to copy them. Without a whole lot else to do, she goes to help Tyk with the wheels.

This goes on past sunset, after most of the women have gone to bed. Tyk, reluctant to leave Ketyk outside when it’s too dark for him or any of his companions to see well no matter how safe the women seem to think it is, lingers outside the burrow, watching them. It’s not long before Kekeya flits over to land on her horns.

“Worried about him?”

“No.”

“Of course you are. Every woman is at this stage. He’s got strong wings, that boy. He’ll be a good flyer. Probably a good singer, too, though it’s a bit early to tell.”

“That’s good.”

“Glittergem is a good hive for young boys, you know. Their tower’s built into the mountainside, so the tower itself doesn’t have to be nearly as tall as grassland towers in order to reach the wingsong stream. That means it can be heavier, with more resting places, and boys can climb it at a pretty young age. Ketyk will be able to get up there pretty much as soon as he can fly, and that means that if the wingsong stream is back up, he’ll be able to talk to Redstone River as soon as he knows how. He can be taught to sing by his father, on the wingsong stream itself.”

Tyk is surprised at how pleased she is to hear that. She doesn’t know a whole lot about the hive they’re travelling to, she realises. “Why did you leave Glittergem?”

Kekeya hums in amusement. “You know why.”

“I don’t believe you killed anyone.”

“You don’t think we’re capable of murder?”

“No. Sakeya blusters and threatens a lot, but she’s a good person.”

“Well, I hate to cave that tunnel, but she wasn’t lying. We were exiled because she killed two of our hive brothers.”

“Self-defence. A misunderstanding.”

“No. Revenge.”

“What could they have done to deserve something like that? Did they attack you?”

“Not me, no. There’s a hive to the West of Glittergem, down the coast – Seastone Bay hive, do you know it?”

“No.”

“Well, there’s a fair bit of trade between Seastone Bay and Glittergem. The trade route hugs the coast and avoids the sleeplands completely, and it’s a fairly easy road, so there’s a lot of back-and-forth. And among the traders were a couple of Seastone Bay people, Hada and Kehada. They were very good friends of ours. We’d been courting then for the past few matings, recurrently. I don’t know if you – ”

“No, I get it. My father and half-father are the same.”

“You understand, then. They were looking at immigrating to our hive. They were dithering on whether to give up trading or not, but they wanted to be based in Glittergem, either way. But there were a couple of Glittergem men who’d made a private trade with them some time back and it had been… messy. I won’t go into the details, but there was a misunderstanding and both sides felt like the other had cheated then really badly in the trade and it had festered for a while. Not a huge deal, everyone has enemies, but these men absolutely could not stand the idea of Hada and Kehada joining our hive. They’d petitioned against it, tried to sully their reputation and turn others against them, but the Hiveheart weren’t falling for it; they approved the immigration.

“So Hada and Kehada came in with their caravan, all ready to be accepted into our hive. And then those two lured Kehada away in the night and killed him.”

“So they murdered a hivema – ”

“No, no. They hadn’t formally immigrated yet. They were still our neighbours. The men claimed it had been an accident that had gotten him, that they were meeting up to make amends and put the past behind them so that they could peacefully interact as hive brothers in the future, and that it had been bad luck, he’d taken a bad turn flying and knocked himself against a cliff and died. An obvious lie. They weren’t the forgiving type, and only about a quarter of the hive believed them, but what were they going to do? Create a massive rift by expelling two men and their sisters over the maybe-accidental death of an outsider? Hada and Kehada’s joining the hive had been approved, but they didn’t have strong roots in our hive. They were just arriving. Their killers had friends and families and loved ones and a lifetime of history serving the hive. And nobody wanted the drama, the problems, the discord, of creating murderers over what could plausibly be called an accident. They didn’t want those problems within our hive and they didn’t want them with Seastone Bay. So the men were given disciplinary duty and had some honours struck for their irresponsibility, and everything was set to simply move on, to let them get away with it.”

“And Sakeya wasn’t about to let that happen.”

“By crumbling stone, she wasn’t. She delivered the justice that the hive was too cowardly to deliver, and when questioned, she didn’t lie about it.” Fondness creeps into his tone. “My Keya-ka has never hesitated to stand her ground.”

“And she got both of you exiled.”

“Which worked out for the best, I think. But you, thinking of that helpless little boy over there that you’re charged with protecting, are going to ask me, ‘who could put their truebrother in danger like that? Who could do something that would get themselves exiled if it meant tearing him away from safety too, for any reason? She didn’t know that the neima would be out here to take you in.’ To which I would say, there is a fundamental difference between a little baby boy and an adult. Sakeya trusts me to look after myself as much as I trust her to look after herself, as much as we trust each other to look after each other. I knew what she was going to do, I helped her lure those men to somewhere that she could do it, and not once did I even consider that she would lie about it to protect either of us. They took Hada and Kehada from us, and if our Hiveheart were too cowardly to protect the honour and integrity of our hive by dealing with the matter honestly, then we would have to. And so we did. It was that simple.”

“And now you’re out here.”

“Yes. Able to stand tall and fly high as people who made the right decision, rather than live lives of miserable resentment and regret, safe in our hive.”

Tyk isn’t sure that vengeful murder is the ‘right decision’, especially when it sounds like Glittergem Hive was attempting to maintain peace and protect its own people from danger by not inviting more trouble, but if someone murdered Kepol and was going to get away with it, would she fault Kesan for taking revenge? No.

She’d probably help him.

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