54: The Echoes In Stone

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After they eat, Mia and Kemia offer to give them a tour of the hive. Smon politely declines, claiming that she must rest. Tyk knows that Smon must be burning with curiosity about the hive, but also understands her dilemma; Smon doesn’t want to get caught up in any conversations in a language she hardly speaks with people whose mores and manners she barely understands, who think she’s a god. She’s worried about being put in a position where she’d have to either lie about her identity or potentially embarrass the hiveheart by explaining who she is to someone who might not know to keep it to themselves.

Tyk, on the other hand, is confident that she can navigate such conversations, and the more information they have about the hive before the next morning, the better. She and Ketyk accept the invitation.

“Your hive is very beautiful,” Tyk says as they leave Smon behind in the trader burrow. “I don’t think I’ve seen as many jewels in my entire life as you have in your entrance hall.”

“We certainly do have a lot of gems,” Mia says. “But if you want beauty, wait until you see the coastal caverns.”

“So the hive does have access to the coast?” Good to know. Smon will be happy to hear that her reasoning was right.

“Oh, yes. The thing about digging through stone is that it’s very hard work and it takes a very long time, but the tunnels, once established, stay forever. Three previous hives have been established in this area, digging through the mountains in search of metals and jewels; every hive must dig further and look in places that the previous ones have not. Many of our hive tunnels are among the oldest on the continent, having been established cycles ago and surviving through sleep periods to await a new hive.”

Tyk has never thought about that. In her experience, a hive was built and took the sweetroot from the land, and then the land went to sleep and replaced the tunnels full of nutritious debris with soil and more sweetroot. Sleep rejuvenated and remade the land, and nothing of the old hives was left except for perhaps some crumbling chambers of fired mortar, like those that the neima sheltered in. But digging through stone would of course be different, and gemstones, unlike sweetroot, do not regrow when the land sleeps. The idea of tunnels surviving many cycles, of ancient hives carving their marks into the shapes of new ones like the carvings on Mia’s shell, is a new one. How many design decisions in Glittergem’s layout had been made by early hives whose names were long forgotten?

“So the tunnel network is very large, then,” Tyk says.

“Oh, yes. And there may be more of it not yet discovered. When my mother was young, the hive found a whole new stretch of tunnels that nobody knew about, dug deep into the mountain by the claws of some previous hive. There’s no way to be certain how old it is. The tunnel junctions are marked by supervisors with colours in their names that aren’t found in the Glittergem Hive. I’ll show you those later, if you like.”

“And I can show Ketyk our communication tower,” Kemia chips in.

Ketyk, apparently emboldened by Tyk’s lack of fear, has stopped hiding behind her horns and is watching Kemia, chirping curiously. Tyk herself looks where Kemia is indicating, and noticed the hive’s communication tower for the first time.

Usually, a communication tower dominates the landscape, and if it happens to be close enough to the hive entrance then it’s the first thing that an approaching visitor will see. But Glittergem, with its entrance a glittering jewel-ringed mouth in the cliffside at the bottom of a mountain, is a little different. The communication tower juts out from the mountain itself, a construct of wood clinging to the stone, not easy to make out against the various colours and shapes of the plant-covered rock face unless one knows exactly where to look. It’s hard to tell, but it appears to jut away from the mountain at a slight angle, not completely straight up and down like most towers; even taking that into consideration, the shorter height (given how high off the ground it starts) and the shelter from the wind that the mountain provides on one side clearly allows the tower to be heavier, since it’s stacked with many more landings than Redstone River’s, including a much larger silk farm and weaving stations laden with long dangling sheets of bright silk. As Kekeya had told her, it looks like an easy climb even for a very young boy. Smon could probably make it to the top without help. Tyk is half-convinced that she could make it to the top, although probably not without help.

For now, it’s very unlikely that Ketyk will leave Tyk, but when he’s a little more comfortable with the men of Glittergem, maybe she can convince him to go and have a look and start learning the men’s arts, and she can go and look at the deep tunnels and find the easiest way to get Smon where she needs to go to send her message.

“And what about you?” Mia asks. “Chosen to be her escort! Did you really take this whole journey by yourselves?”

“We had help,” Tyk says. “There was supposed to be a whole caravan, but things became… complicated.”

“I’m so sorry.” Mia touches her horns to Tyk’s in solidarity and grief; it’s not until the gesture’s over that Tyk realises the misunderstanding. The obvious conclusion from what Tyk has said is that they set off with a full caravan and were attacked by the Hiveless on the road. But before Tyk can correct her, Mia moves the conversation on. “To get her here safely all by yourself, no wonder you were chosen to guide her. Are you marked by Pyrrah, too?”

“N-no, I’m…” Tyk hesitates. Never, in her life, has anybody asked her what star guides her. Among her own hive, and Green Hills, people knew she was a Wanderer long before they ever got a chance to know her, and the neima had not been inclined to ask personal questions. (A politeness which, she now realises in hindsight, she didn’t return. Was she rude, by their standards?)

But Mia doesn’t know. None of these people know.

“I’m Erlin’s,” Tyk finds herself saying before she can think about it. The children of Erlin are known to be unusual thinkers, often missing things obvious to most but devastatingly insightful in areas where most people have blind spots. They’re often characterised as unusually smart but naturally socially deficient. It’s a good cover, Tyk thinks; it explains her hesitation in answering (it’s certainly a less prestigious star than Pyrrah), and at the same time ensures that the locals will give her (and by association Smon) more leeway and grace when it comes to social faux pas. The Erlin-marked usually have their opinions and arguments taken a little more seriously than most, due to their presumed intelligence and talent for seeing what others don’t. It’s a good star for a stranger trying to convince a hive to do something new and radical.

That’s why she lies. For strategy.

“Oh, of course,” Mia says, like that explains everything. “I should’ve guessed, Erlin’s eye is all over you. Of course, escorting Smon would obviously be the destiny of one of Erlin’s children.”

“A second ago you thought I must be Pyrrah’s,” Tyk can’t help pointing out.

“Yeah, I think I was caught up in my own situation a bit there. Someone destined for my job, helping Smon at our hive, should obviously by Pyrrah-marked, but now that I think about it, your job is different and much more suited for someone Erlin-marked. I bet you can think like a god much more easily than someone like me can.”

“Our visitors are strange,” Tyk says, “but I don’t think it’s a matter of having to think like others, so much as accept that there are many different valid ways of thinking.”

“See? Like that! Only one of Erlin’s would realise something like that.”

“Ha, maybe.” They have arrived back at the entrance hall, and Tyk can feel the curious stares of the Glittergem locals. She tries to keep an eye out for things that would be useful to Smon, but there’s not a lot to see. Mia and Kemia show her and Ketyk around; everything is new and exciting to Ketyk and very mundane and expected to Tyk. The storage rooms, the residential burrows, the tunnels leading off to the work areas… oh, there are minor differences; about half of the Glittergem Hive main areas are built into stone instead of constructed from mud and mortar, and there are minor differences in shape and size and layout that Tyk supposes must be for that reason, and there are tunnels leading upward into the mountain as well as down into the ground, but on the whole, a hive is a hive. The liaisons show her a particularly large, empty residential burrow, all recently cleaned and lined with fresh fragrant grasses; the place they’d prepared for Smon and her entourage, should they choose to stay in the residential burrows. Tyk reaffirms that the trader burrow is perfectly fine accommodation, thank you.

The only thing of obvious note is something that Smon had already realised back in the trader burrow; the guest-facing parts of the Glittergem Hive are incredibly ornate and crusted with jewels, and the internal parts are sparse and utilitarian. Tyk tries to examine the decorations, but she isn’t a rock lorekeeper, and they tell her nothing.

Well, except for one thing.

“That stone in the trader burrow,” she says, examining a wall in the entrance hall. “The one marking Glittergem, all dark and full of shards of rainbow. There aren’t any like it in here.”

“Ah yes, the opal,” Kemia says. “It’s not from here. I’ve always thought that it’s a bit ironic that we mark our place on the map with the one stone we don’t have.”

“A lorekeeper pair from over the ocean brought it in our great-grandmother’s time,” Mia explains. “They knew, from a previous travelling lorekeeper, what gemstones we have, and brought us something that is mined on their continent.”

“A pair? Brother and sister?”

“Yes. Most of the lorekeepers who come from far away are, at least the ones that come here. They have to travel a long way and usually spend the rest of their lives here, learning and recording, so it’s only really a journey that people make if both siblings are really, really interested. We get a lot of them here; one every three or four generations.”

“So we’re due another one soon,” Kemia says. “Though maybe we got Smon instead.”

“If anything, she’ll bring more of them,” Mia says, “she and her kind. Who wouldn’t want to come and learn from them?”

When Tyk gets back to the trader burrow, the floor has been covered in mats of fragrant herbs and grasses, and spare food and clean water sits in neat packages in one corner. Smon is asleep, laying propped up against her farm, one hand still curled possessively around one of its bindings, breathing slowly and deeply in that strange way her people have that distorts the shape of their body with every breath.

A nap, Tyk thinks, sounds like a good idea.

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