57: Red River Ramble

First —- Previous —- Glossary —- Archive —- Next

The hiveheart announce Smon’s true nature and the Rayjo Tau plan that very afternoon. Smon helps them frame the situation as better than playing temporary host to some baby stars, as them being the hive that will shape the entire future of the continent, possibly the Earth, the origin point for an eternal partnership between their two kinds of people. They do a big speech and have a big welcoming celebration where Smon and Tyk and Ketyk are swarmed with strangers who are now apparently allowed to interact freely with them, and everyone eats rare and impressive foods that cement Tyk’s suspicions that Glittergem have been stockpiling all of their fanciest ingredients since they heard that they’d be hosting the fallen gods.

Things pick up quite quickly. The people of Glittergem, eager to free up the trader burrow before traders can be expected to start travelling again, immediately begin work on on a new burrow for Smon. It’s situated against a cliffside, and at Smon’s request is not dug into the ground but made of mortar blocks stacked on top of it, making a little mound that leaves her burrow floor level with – slightly higher that, in fact – the ground outside. They redirect a tiny stream from one of the small mountain springs that supplies the hive with water to fill a small tank built above her home, sort of like the channel she’d run from the river back at her boat near the Redstone River Hive, and build a large mortar basin inside that she can fill and drain into a waste tank. One of the first things Smon herself does, in between her forays down into the tunnels to look for metal, is build a horizontal frame of bamboo and stretch some silk over it, creating a shelf longer and wider than her body sitting a little way above the ground. When she’s done, she lies down on it and grins up at Tyk.

“My days of sleeping on the ground are over!” she exclaims, stretching all of her limbs out. “This is going to be so much more comfortable.”

Tyk herself, after some dithering, decides to move into the hive rather than Smon’s burrow. Smon clearly isn’t in danger (or at least, proximity to Tyk won’t put her in any less danger), and Tyk sorely misses sleeping in a real residential burrow, in a real hive. Besides, she has Ketyk to think about, and he should be living in a hive. (Tyk also suspects, although Smon never says it, that Smon might be looking forward to having some space to herself like she did back at the Redstone River Hive. They’ve been travelling together for a long time, barely out of each others’ sight.)

Of course, they give Tyk and Ketyk the large, impressive residential burrow that they’d set aside for Smon and her entourage initially. Ketyk settles right in, too inexperienced to understand the luxury granted to them, and eats the tastiest of mosses and richest of pollens as if they were everyday fare. Tyk has been worrying about him being born in the middle of nowhere with no hive to guide him at all, and now she suddenly has the opposite problem, making sure that he doesn’t grow up spoiled.

As soon as Ketyk’s wings are strong enough to make the journey, she asks Kemia to show him the communication tower. “Put him to work, if you can,” she tells him in a brief moment while Ketyk is out of earshot. “Get him spinning and singing and farming, no special treatment. All of this ‘honoured guest’ nonsense is going to make him soft.”

She puts herself to work, too. With Ketyk off her horns, she can venture into the deep tunnels, and begs Yar, who turns out to be the hive’s most prominent mining coordinator, for a job. “We’re taking advantage of your hospitality,” she says, “and I’m not going to sit about like an empty shell the whole time. I’ve spent far, far too long out of the tunnels as it is.”

Tyk doesn’t know anything about digging through stone, but thanks to all of Bette’s lessons she is very, very good at digging for sweetroot, and quickly finds a regular job in the deep tunnels hunting new tubers. The Glittergem Hive is much younger than Redstone River (the tunnels of previous hives in the stone notwithstanding), and with that youth comes a subtle difference in the taste of the soil; their sweetroot rhizomes do no possess that slightly tangy edge that Tyk has always thought of as indicative of sweetroot and now realises is simply the taste of the end of its life cycle. Long ago, she’d been shocked to taste a trace of true sweetness in the soil, and Bette had told her that that was the taste of rot, the first indication that the hive’s life would soon come to an end – she’d never mentioned the subtler taste of old root that had been there for all of Tyk’s life. Had it been there for all of Bette’s life, too? Had any living person on the other side of the river except for long-distance traders tasted young, fresh sweetroot?

There’s little that Tyk, Ketyk and Smon can’t get, if they want it. Mia and Kemia, expecting to act as liaisons to a veritable horde of baby gods, had massively overprepared for their role and are more than eager to be given something, anything, to do. Tyk wonders what that must feel like, to be hyped up and prepared for such an important and prestigious job for a season only to find out that you’re barely needed and can mostly go back to doing regular work. Tyk tries to give them occasional, simple requests to keep them happy, and Smon politely uses them as a go-between for her non-urgent needs even though she could ask the tunnel supervisors or the hiveheart directly, but there is simply not all that much liaisoning to do, and more than once Tyk has to have a serious conversation with the pair about their tendency to indulge too many of Ketyk’s whims. “I don’t want him growing up assuming that he’s better than everyone else and can get whatever he wants,” she says firmly. “He’s going to get fawned over enough by Smon’s hivemates when they start to gather at Rayjo Tau.” Ketyk is, after all, the cutest thing in the world, and if a hive of his own people who have seen young boys their whole lives can’t resist him, Smon’s people will have no defences against his charms.

It’s not very long before Tyk comes up from the tunnels one night to find that Ketyk isn’t home yet. Recalling her own adventurous youth, she grumbles a little to herself and wonders if she’s going to have to spend half the night searching the countryside for him. Oh, and if he’s off somewhere that she can’t easily walk, and she has to ask the men to help her search… how embarrassing. She has no father or brothers here at Glittergem to discretely ask.

But as she ambles out of their residential burrow, down the short tunnel and into the entrance burrow, she realises that it’s not a problem for her alone. The public areas of the burrow are strangely devoid of men. There are a few particularly old or young ones about, but not nearly as many as there should be in the late evening, when truesiblings and their young children tend to gather to eat and socialise and sleep.

She panics for a moment, recalling the field of sick men surrounding the Redstone River tower after the pollen storm, but no; if something like that had happened again, there would be men everywhere, being carried about and cleaned and tended to. But the opposite… could it be…?

She rushes outside. It’s late, but in the fading light she can make out the shape of the communication tower, shifting and distorted under the moving mass of men clinging to its every surface. She’s not alone; plenty of other women and children are out watching, too.

“Is the wingsong stream functioning again?” she asks the woman next to her, a woman called Had who Tyk works with in the tunnels.

“Partly,” Had explains. “They got a clear stream from Seastone Bay early this morning, and things have been improving ever since. They’ve got a basic, fuzzy stream to the nearest three towers now, only one or two levels on each, but those towers have a basic connection to some further towers, so most of the continent has at least some connection now.”

“They can’t all be talking,” Tyk says, looking at the sheer mass of men. “Nobody would be able to hear anything! Besides, most of them aren’t high enough.”

“There’s very little actual talking yet, I’m told. The elders and the masters are only allowing half of the channels to be used at a time, because the streams are still so unstable and a lot of the singing is getting lost. They’re just trading critical information about hive supplies and important news for now; none of those men that we can see are going to get a chance to catch up with their friends down South or whatever they’re waiting for for a good few days yet. And I’m not sure it’s a good idea to put the weight of that many bodies on the tower.”

“Can’t blame them for being excited, though,” Tyk says.

“No, we cannot.”

Most of the men and boys do eventually come down from the tower, the youngest like Ketyk being among the first. He instead spends the next few days waiting to use the wingsong stream asking her endless questions about the people he’ll be talking too – about their family, about their peers back home, about the Redstone River Hive itself.

“So there aren’t any mountains?” he asks, not quite seeming to understand the concept.

“No,” Tyk explains. “Our hive is built in the plains near the river. There are some very low hills, which are like very very small mountains made out of dirt, but that’s it. The hive’s just built into the ground and there’s no upper tunnels dug above the entrance level; it only goes down.”

“That’s weird.”

“It means that you can see the communication tower and sing on the wingsong in every direction. It’s a bit like… to you remember on the way here, when we were out in the sleeplands? There was the ruin to an old tunnel entrance out there.”

“I… think so?” Ketyk says uncertainly, in the tone of someone who definitely doesn’t. “And the Redstone River, is like, a really big muddy red puddle?”

“No, you’re thinking of a lake. I’ve never seen a lake, but a river is a long channel of moving water. Sort of like a flooded tunnel, but up on the surface.”

Ketyk flickers his wings uncertainly. He’s never seen a flooded tunnel, either. “Oh!” he says, with sudden comprehension. “Like the springs in the mountain!”

The springs that supply water to Glittergem are just little trickles of water leaking through cracks in the stone. “Well, sort of. Imagine a really, really big mountain spring.”

“Big enough to put my whole body in?”

“Bigger. So, so much bigger. Big enough that if you stood on one side of it, you’d have to look really really hard to make out somebody on the other side. Big enough that things live in it, things that can’t breathe air at all; long strange plants and soft-bodied animals. Big enough that if you looked down into the water you couldn’t see even a tenth of the way to the bottom. And the water flows not down a mountain but flat along the ground, in a channel dug into the soil by previous water.”

“That’s so, so weird,” he says, and flitters off to play on the much more familiar rocky cliffside with his friends. Tyk watches him go, not quite able to understand the wistful pain that rises inside her.

But he’ll understand soon, when he can finally talk to their family, finally talk to their home.

Somebody at the Redstone River Hive will be able to explain to him what a river is.

First —- Previous —- Glossary —- Archive —- Next