Forgotten Suns (9 page)

She dropped her basket with no regret at all and went to
investigate. What she found was about what she had expected.

Rama had been cleaning stalls: the cart and the fork were in
the aisle. He had the invader by the throat. There wasn’t much to see of that
one but black robes and veils and a pair of amber-yellow eyes glaring out of
them.

Aisha was careful not to laugh. “Rama,” she said. “It’s all
right. This is Malia. She’s a friend.”

Rama’s glare was as baleful as Malia’s. He moved so fast
that Aisha could barely follow, and stripped out every knife, sword, throwing
star, mace, knout, rope, cord, and chain that Malia carried. He even found the
coil of copper wire that could be either a garrote or a set of shackles,
depending.

“
Now
she is a
friend,” he said.

Malia spoke perfectly decent PanTerran, but she was so mad
at him, she spat words in her own language.

He spat back without missing a beat. He had all the tones exactly
right, and an intonation that said he was so far superior to her, she didn’t
even deserve to slit her own throat in front of him. It was too fast for Aisha
to catch more than a handful of words, but it reduced Malia to wide-eyed
silence.

Then, sweetly and in Panterran, he said, “That’s better.
Next time you try an ambush, make sure the quarry hasn’t heard you coming since
you came over the wall.”

“I was practicing,” Malia said.

“Clearly,” he said. “You’re by no means perfect.”

Aisha moved in before they went to war all over again. “Malia,
this is Rama. He’s usually much more polite. Rama, please give her back her
weapons. I promise she won’t use them against anyone here.”

“Won’t she?” Rama said, but he stood back and let Malia put
everything back where it belonged. She never took her eyes off him, even when
she had to bend down and slip the smaller armaments into their various pockets.

He never took his eyes off her, either. When she was all put
back together he said, “The truly great warrior walks in through the front
gate, and no one thinks to question him.”

“I’m a long way from greatness,” she said. “I have to learn
how to get there.”

He burst out laughing. Not at her—even Malia could tell
that, by the way she stood. He saluted her with a flourish. “Oh, well played!
And well met. Someday you’ll be a credit to your upbringing.”

“I don’t think I can say the same about you,” Malia said
darkly.

“That’s what everyone always said.” He picked up his fork
and went back to his cart.

They were dismissed. He was good at it. Malia kept shooting
glances back at him, but when Aisha had her out of there and in the house,
helping with the laundry, she wouldn’t talk about him at all.

Aisha didn’t try to push her. When she was ready, she would
talk. Meanwhile there was a whole season’s worth of news to catch up on, how
Vayel was married and Jana had had her baby and Malia had earned her second
sword. Which Aisha had seen. Rama had taken it off her with everything else.

Most of Aisha’s news had Rama in it, which was a problem,
but Malia had more than enough to keep them going through the day. Then they
had the new crew to talk about, and the tourists, who were about as awful as
they usually were. Aisha did not mention the fact that this might be the last
season. It wasn’t time for that, yet.

She got permission to eat her dinner with Malia instead of
with everybody else. They took it up to the roof, which was empty tonight.
There were clouds coming in, promising rain by morning, but the sky to the west
was clear.

Malia took off her veils and let the wind blow through her
hair. It was cropped into curls, and it was the same color as her eyes. Her
face was a much lighter shade of gold.

Before she put on the veils, the sun used to dye her all one
color, except for the spray of freckles across her nose. Now she was her
natural ivory, with a thin white line of a scar running straight down her
cheek: her first rank-mark. The higher she went, the more she would get. She
was determined to win all nine.

She looked completely human except for the eyes. There were
no whites to them unless she opened them wide. The xenobiologist who came
through a few seasons ago had said the natives checked out human to some
vanishingly tiny degree—which disappointed him terribly. He had so wanted them
to be an example of parallel evolution and not just another interstellar
remnant.

Not that anybody had traced the original stock to its source
yet, or figured out how it got scattered across several hundred similar worlds.
That was an even bigger mystery than the emptying of Nevermore, and much, much
older.

Now here was Malia, sitting on the parapet with her legs
hanging over, watching the sun go down. “You’ll get more people for your
digging this winter,” she said. “That thing you did, blowing the top off the
Sleeper’s Rock? The shamans are saying you let the evil out. Some think the
whole world is cursed now, but the rest want to make you a goddess for breaking
the curse.”

“I don’t want to be a goddess,” Aisha said, “or Pandora,
either.”

Malia knew what she meant by that. Malia had as much
Earth-style education as Aisha did, what with spending so much time around the
house and being there when Jamal hacked the schoolbot so they could jump ahead
with assignments. “Grandmother says whatever was in there is out now, and it’s
up to the gods which way it will go.”

“Do you believe that?” Aisha asked. “That there was a demon
in there?”

“I know what the stories say. That something very old and
very dangerous slept inside the Rock. The old ones tried to destroy it before
they left, but all they managed to do was knock the spires off the top.”

“They didn’t have nuplastique,” Aisha said. She shivered,
and not because the air was cold. “I thought I saw something inside, but
whatever it was, it’s buried now. There’s nothing left alive down there.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Malia. “I don’t like the thought
of some
thing
stalking the earth.”

“Do you have an idea what it’s supposed to be?” Aisha asked.
“Like a dragon or a demon? Or some kind of prehistoric monster?”

Malia spread her hands. “Nobody ever really says. Just that
it’s terribly powerful and terribly dangerous, and it’s supposed to wake and
either destroy the world or save it.”

“Maybe it already did,” said Aisha. “Maybe that’s what
caused the Disappearance.”

“Grandmother says no,” Malia said. “That’s why we stayed
behind. Waiting for it.”

“What will you do if it comes?”

Malia swung her legs over and stood up on the roof. “That’s
a Mystery. I’m not even supposed to know as much as I do, while I’m still
barely a fledgling, and only one rank-mark to fly with. If anybody finds out I
told you…”

Aisha nodded and set her lips together. That was their
signal. Silence till death, it meant. “Stay here tonight,” she said. “We’ll
help mark out the new dig in the morning. Mother wants to see if she can find
where the ordinary people used to live. That’s more interesting than temples
and palaces, she says.”

“Your mother is odd,” Malia said, but she smiled. Malia was
very fond of Aisha’s mother.

She stayed the night, curling up in Aisha’s bed and sleeping
soundly all night long. Aisha kept waking up. She had dreams of monsters
stalking the city, and a dragon flaming from the top of the broken cliff.

They were just dreams. Even in the middle of them she knew
there were no dragons on Nevermore—though there might be demons. Demons were
everywhere.

The last time she woke up, she remembered what Rama had told
her. She filled her mind with the sun. Then finally she could sleep until
morning.

The day before the tourists finally left to torment some
other helpless planet, they went to visit Blackroot camp. It was a village
really, with stone houses that people lived in from year to year, and fields
and orchards where they planted winter crops and harvested fruit. They hunted
for the meat they ate, but they had a kind of oxen to pull their wagons, and
something like sheep that gave them wool and milk.

It always disappointed offworlders to discover that the
simple primitives lived very well, and weren’t totally ignorant, either. Still,
they were exotic, especially the blackrobes who moved around the edges and kept
watch over everybody else. They were entertaining enough to keep the tourists
satisfied.

Vikram led the tour this year. They rode on horses as
always, which got rid of the worst idiots right there. Some of the staff went
along with the pack string, taking gifts and trade goods to the tribe and
riding herd on tourists.

One of them was Rama. He rode Lilith, and for the most part
he kept to the rear. Aisha had seen how totally he could charm anybody he had a
mind to, but today his mood was strange. He hardly talked to anyone, and he
didn’t smile. That wasn’t like him at all.

Aisha went because she wanted to visit her friends in the
village, and because Vikram needed all the help he could get. Blackroot people
were used to tourists; they weren’t likely to take offense at anything any of
them said or tried to do. But it made sense to have plenty of backup, just in
case.

Rama might be backup, or he might be trouble. Aisha wasn’t
sure which. He and Malia hadn’t met again, and that felt deliberate on both
sides. If anyone had asked Aisha, she would have said he shouldn’t be here.

But he was, and so far he hadn’t said or done anything
difficult. He kept the stragglers from getting lost, made sure girths and
bridles were adjusted properly, and glared down the idiots who wanted to race
off after a herd of antelope. They were on the slowest and pluggiest horses,
but that wouldn’t have stopped them. Rama’s look of ice-cold murder did.

The straight route to the camp only took about an hour. They
took the long way, which used up most of the morning. By then the tourists who
weren’t saddle-sore were tired enough to be mostly quiet. In that condition,
they were as ready as possible to be guests of Blackroot tribe.

The plain only looked flat from a distance. Up close, it was
a landscape of long rolling hills and sudden hollows, crisscrossed with
streams. Some of the hills had been towns and cities; the grass covered them
now, and their walls had tumbled down.

Blackroot camp filled one of the hollows. A stream ran
through it. The hill that rose up over it had a tower at the top, which was not
nearly as broken as the rest of the things that people had built in this
country. The tribe used it for a sentry post, and for keeping track of sun and
stars.

When the caravan came into view, all the children came out, singing
a welcome. Aisha sang back, and called to people she knew. That was almost
everybody; they clapped and danced and swirled around her.

For a while she lost sight of Rama. When she found him
again, they were all in the square in the middle of the camp, and he was
helping herd horses into the pens at the far end. Aisha had her own herding to
do, getting humans to sit down and be quiet.

There was a feast for them, and singing and dancing and mock
warfare. The sword dance would come at the end, when all the blackrobes came
out of the shadows and showed off their art.

Rama might have preferred to stay with the horses, but
Vikram needed him to keep the troublemakers from wandering off. He had to lift
one of them bodily and drop him in between Vikram and Sera Lopakhina. Then, one
way and another in the crush of people, he ended up beside Aisha.

Food came out in its usual profusion; that concentrated the
mind of even the flightiest offworlder. Aisha snared a bowl of bread filled
with stewed antelope, but before she could eat more than a bite, Malia slid in
beside her.

She opened her mouth for a greeting. Malia said, “Grandmother
says come. Bring him.” She tipped her head toward Rama.

Now that was interesting. It was also an honor. Most people,
including people who came to study the tribes, thought the chief of the
blackrobes was the chief of the tribe. They never paid much attention to the
Wisewoman, but she was the real power behind the people.

Blackroot’s Wisewoman was Malia’s twice-great grandmother,
though nobody counted the greats; they just called her Grandmother. She was
very old, and she had been blind for most of her life. But that meant she saw
the important things more clearly.

Usually when Aisha visited her, she was in her house by the
stream. Today Malia led Aisha and Rama clear up to the top of the hill.

The grandmother sat at the foot of the tower on the side
away from the camp, warming her bones in the sun. She wore no veils, nor had
Aisha ever seen her in them, but even through the many wrinkles on her face,
one could see the nine thin rank-scars.

She tilted her head at the sound of feet scrambling on the
steep slope. Her blank blind eyes turned toward them. Aisha felt the warmth of
her smile as it passed over her.

It only lasted an instant, before her whole self fixed on
Rama.

She could see him. When Aisha looked in the same way the
grandmother looked, he wasn’t a shortish dark man in boots and breeches and a
worn red shirt. He was a shape of fire, towering up to heaven.

Aisha blinked hard to make the vision go away. Rama had his
alarming moments, but this was terrifying. She made herself see the person she
knew, with his long black braid and his white smile.

“So,” the grandmother said to him in Old Language. “It is
you.”

He answered in the same language. “You know me?”

“We stayed for you.”

He dropped to one knee in front of her. Half of it was
respect. Half, Aisha thought, was that his legs had given way. “You know? You
remember? Where did they go? What happened to them?”