59: To the Tower

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Time moves on. Smon gets her metal purified and then forged, expands her farm, and starts stockpiling food. Ketyk grows very quickly into a surprisingly strong flyer, soon able to make it up and down the communication tower without needing to rest on the way (a good skill, Tyk notes to herself with dry amusement, for the truebrother of someone Wanderer-marked; had they become traders, he’d have made an excellent scout in a few years). One morning, as they sit in the sun together on a day with little work to be done, she notices something special; shards of colour, like dusty pale gems, in his wings up near the joints.

His great grandfather-colours. Only five of the eight coming through so far, barely distinguishable, but recognisable to Tyk as (for now) immature versions of the grandfather-colours she used to see every day in Kesan’s wings, and fairly regularly in Kepol’s.

Ketyk is growing up.

He’s far from full grown, of course. Great grandfather-colours start to appear fairly young. It’ll take time for the others to come through and for all eight to deepen into their final hues, even more time for his grandfather-colours and then his father-colours, the unique colourations on the ends of the wings of Kesan and Kepol, to come through, and he’ll have the full body and mind of an adult before Tyk and Ketyk’s own unique colour reveals itself in the ends of his wings, giving them their full identity and written name and marking them as adults, and when that happens, then…

Then what, exactly?

Tyk knows what being an adult means. Adults move out of their parents’ burrows and get to live by themselves, just a truesibling pair, in charge of their own business. Adults are no longer beholden to their parents – while most of the young adults that Tyk knows do respect and mind their parents, they are free to make their own decisions about their own lives, and their parents have no recourse to force their own will upon them any more. Adults do more work, harder work, for the hive, and their voices are counted in deciding hive matters. Adults…

Tyk and Ketyk have had their own residential burrow since they moved out of the trader burrow. And Tyk has been listened to, due to her connection with Smon, since they arrived. Even back in the Redstone River Hive, since Smon landed, Tyk spoke a lot to the hiveheart directly, a level of influence that most adults don’t get. And Tyk, with little else to do, already pulls quite long shifts in the tunnels. Adults…

Adults are members of a hive. Children are members of their parents’ hive.

Tyk is a member of the Redstone River Hive, though she happens to be staying elsewhere at the moment. But Ketyk, of Redstone River by way of being San and Kesan’s son, has never seen his hive. He’s only ever grown up in one place, one place where he knows the public tunnels, one place where he plays with his friends, one place where he strengthens his wings by flying between secret caves and cracks in the mountainside, learning the secrets of his home.

Well. There’s still a very long time before they’re adults.

“Tyk! Ketyk! I wanted to talk to you two.” Smon is jogging over. She drops down onto the ground next do them, checks that they’re reasonably out of earshot of anyone else, and turns the volume of her echo stone right down to say, “What do you think of Kesal?”

“I don’t really know him,” Ketyk admits. “He’s the hiveheart guy, right?”

“He is,” Tyk says. “Mia says he’s sneaky and always out for himself.”

“And do we trust Mia’s assessment?” Smon asks.

“… Should we not trust Mia?”

“Trusting someone isn’t the same as trusting their assessment. Mia and Kemia seem great. But remember, they got the liaison job very young, probably because some relative on the hiveheart or something got it for them.”

“So you think they’re, what, secretly on a mission to turn you against parts of the hiveheart to gain power for whoever put them in their position?”

Smon laughs. “No, they haven’t tried anything like that. They seem nice and honest, so far as I can tell. But if they’re close to this relative, and they’d have to be to be given the liaison job, and if this relative happens to dislike Kesal and complain about him a lot and that’s the only impression they get, then it doesn’t really matter how honest they are.”

“… Yeah, I see your point. So, what do you think about Kesal?”

Smon lays back on the ground and stares up at the sky. “I think he’s sneaky and always out for himself.”

“Well. Fair enough. Is there any reason we’re talking about him right now, or…?”

“He says his scouts have found a good location for the Rayjo Tau. He wants me to go out and inspect and approve the site.”

“That’s great! Do you think he’s up to anything sneaky, or…?”

“No. He’s never bothered to hide his nefarious plans for me and my kind. He wants us to built Rayjo Tau; he wants it to work. He wants us to settle nearby because not only is Glittergem being the access point to the rest of the Earth via Rayjo Tau very attractive, but he thinks that he can convince others of my kind to trade magic to him. I’m too stubborn to do it, but he’s hoping to persuade someone else.”

“But you think he’s wrong?”

“It’s… a danger, I won’t lie. I mean, I think nobody would do such a thing, but I also didn’t think anybody would build that reservoir that’s out in the sleeplands. I can’t predict the behaviour of my kind perfectly. But I think that if we get together and make actual policies on what we can and can’t trade… I mean, this is going to be a risk no matter where we gather. If we settle near a different hive, there’ll be someone there with the same plan. I just wanted to run it by you and see if there’s anything that you think he’s up to that I, not being one of your kind, wouldn’t be able to guess.”

“Uh… no, I don’t think so. I mean, the whole hiveheart is behind this, right? They all would’ve approved the site before he brought it to you. I guess there’s a chance that he’s trying to go behind their backs and hoping you’ll approve it before they notice, but given that they’d have to set up a whole expedition to take you out there to approve it, that’d be impossible.”

“Good point. I’ll mention it to other hiveheart members before I agree to go and look. Do you want to come? Apparently it’s a three day journey, but since I don’t know how well I can climb mountains compared to how well the others in the group can, I have no idea if I’ll slow everyone down and make it longer or not.”

“I’d love to,” Tyk says immediately, then stops to think. “But taking Ketyk away from the hive…”

“Of course I want to go,” Ketyk says. “The hive and the tower and everyone will still be here when we get back. This is Rayjo Tau we’re talking about! I don’t want to miss that, and I wouldn’t want to make you miss it either!”

“It’ll just be going to look at and approve a site,” Tyk points out. “Nothing dramatic.”

“We can send our first message out over the ocean, too, if the site’s good,” Smon says. “We can start gathering people. We don’t need the tower to do that.”

“Already?”

“Why wait? The sooner we gather, the safer we are. The more of my people here, with all of their different kinds of knowledge and all working on a project together, the faster and safer we can get things built. It takes a hive to build a tower.”

“It sure does,” Tyk says, glancing at the communication tower. “When do we leave?”

“I’ll let you know after I talk to the hiveheart and the organisers. At least a few days, because it’ll take me that long to extract and dry enough food from my farm. I can’t drag a farm up a mountain, so I’ll need to make travel supplies.”

In the end, it’s five days before they’re ready to travel. Carts can’t be used in the mountains, so the four women (including Tyk) who are going on the journey tie things over their backs, like the neima. Smon straps a large pouch over her back too, which she calls a ‘back pack’, full of food and her various necessities. It’s as large as her torso, but she carries it without hesitation or complaint.

Two of the hiveheart are going on the journey; Kesal and Yar. (Mia and Kemia, lacking the travel experience of their elders and not doing enough heavy work in their lives to maintain the stamina necessary for a long mountain climb, are not.) As the crew head off, they find that Smon doesn’t slow them down; in fact, her long legs and nimble claws seem perfect for climbing up and down large rocks and pressing through narrow passages, and she’s significantly faster than the older, slower women. She uses her increased speed to help forage for food for the others in the rocks as they go, relying on the men to spot sparse vines and grass patches scattered across the mostly bare stones and harvesting what the men are too weak to uproot and the women can’t reach.

“A partnership with these people from the sky should have some advantages in travel, at least,” Yar notes with approval.

“You still don’t like the Rayjo Tau plan, do you?” Tyk asks. It’s somewhat rude and presumptuous for someone like her to ask something so directly and confrontationally of a member of the hiveheart, but Yar always prefers straightforward honesty.

“I’m not entirely happy with the idea,” she says. “This is unprecedented, and potentially dangerous. We don’t know Smon’s people, we don’t know what effect adding something like this to the continent will have, and nobody’s even considered whether this promised communication with other continents is a good thing. But I seem to be the only one worried about any of that; I’ve been very soundly outvoted by the rest of the hiveheart on every relevant issue, so we’re off to build this thing, I suppose.”

There’s no road, and their path through the mountains is winding due to trying to stay on the most favourable terrain and having to move between water sources that were noted by Kesal’s scouts when they were scouting the area, but the lack of carts and the lack of a tight time frame and the pleasant weather as they cycle back into the dry season makes the journey easier, so far as Tyk is concerned, than the long journey to Glittergem had been. As they travel, she can’t help but envision a future where this path is smoothed and widened into a road, where regular pits are dug into the stone to catch rainwater for travellers moving between Glittergem and the Rayjo Tau. Perhaps Smon’s little home near the hive won’t be abandoned when she moves up here to make the tower, but expanded, turned into a place for sky people to rest and recuperate on their way to Rayjo Tau before beginning the final climb. Perhaps there will be things on this road that sky people use, like the raised sleeping platform that Smon built in her new home instead of sleeping on the ground, mixed with the usual resting burrows and water sources. Perhaps they could even find some way to cultivate food along the road, though that might be a bit too difficult.

However things work out, they are quite rapidly moving into a new world.

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