Gama and Hest: An Ahsenthe Cycle companion novella (The Ahsenthe Cycle)
Read Gama and Hest: An Ahsenthe Cycle companion novella (The Ahsenthe Cycle) Online
Authors: Alexes Razevich
Gama and Hest
Alexes Razevich
Copyright © 2015 Alexes Razevich
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.
One
Outside, the air grumbled and growled. Hest shot Gama a quick look, his eyebrow ridges hiked up, making small dark furrows on his forehead. Gama shrugged and continued the chant. The old ones said it never rained on Emergence Day, and it hadn’t — not in her lifetime or the lifetimes of the oldest among them. Still, the rumble plucked at her nerves.
Steam filled the windowless room, condensing on Gama’s skin, making it glisten. Tiny transparent crystals formed in the heat, sliding down so infinitesimally slowly it was like the movement of stars. The steam was for the three hatchlings gathered there with the adults, to soften their outer skins and make shedding it easier. Once the skin was sloughed off, a new adult would stand before them, ready to join the community.
Hest’s skin was lighter than Gama’s. The droplets didn’t stand out against his face as brightly as those on her skin. He lifted a hand — his smaller one, meant for liberating the egg during mating — and wiped away the moisture that wet his face.
It was a nice face, Hest’s. Gama had liked it when she first saw it at their own Emergence, when their downy outer coatings had been stripped away and they had discovered themselves as adult soumyo. He had light orange-red skin that contrasted sharply with his black eyes, a thin but attractive chest, and one hand small and delicate — the one he was now using to wipe his face now — and the other sturdy, with a fine digger claw for routing out a nest at mating time. They were about the same height, but her skin was a darker and clearer red, her eyes yellow, and her female hands a perfect if opposite match.
Someone put more wood on the fire below two large cauldrons filled with water, aromatic leaves, barks, and roots. Gama heard the crack and sizzle of the new wood being fed to the flames. Scents sweet, woody, and savory filled the air. Standing at the back of the large room, she couldn’t see through her kin to know who had done it, though her guess would have been Prill, Reln’s apprentice.
Hest gently elbowed her side and mouthed the word,
male
. Gama shook her head. They’d played this game last year, too — predicting what gender each hatchling would be when it emerged. He was terrible at it, guessing male nearly every time — hoping for more of his own kind, she supposed. She was better at the game, and felt sure this one would be female. It pleased her to think she’d soon have a new sister.
When she was right, Hest slumped — exaggerated for effect, as usual — against the wall: plaster over stone and wood, the plaster mixed with pulverized green rocks to give it a bright color. He sent a thought her way, the thought-grains traveling silently across the short distance through the moist air:
You
cheat
,
Gama
. Anyone looking at them would see the thought-grains moving, but by convention anyone who didn’t receive the thought would ignore what they’d seen and not speculate on what was said.
She leaned next to him on the wall. It was impossible to cheat — no one could know a hatchling’s gender in advance, though there were those who claimed to recognize the tiny signs of difference. Gama was wondering what those telltale signs might be when the world outside exploded.
A tremendous bang shook the room, louder than in the lightning storms last year that had lit the skies for days and brought thunder that made her ear holes ring. The wall they leaned against quivered, fear running through the structure the same as it ran through her.
“Out!” Reln, their guide, shouted and the structure threw open the door. Gama lunged toward the three new adults, their hatchling-down still lying at their feet, anxiety bright on their emotion spots. Before she covered four steps, Prill had reached the new adults and was leading them toward the door. Reln hastily put out the fires beneath the large cauldrons, smothering them with sand from the buckets kept full for that purpose. Hest grabbed Gama’s hand, his digger claw a hard and comforting presence in her palm. She closed her fingers around it, holding tight.
Outside, everything looked the same — structures, dwellings, the commons, and the high wall around them, the parts of Reev she could see from where she stood. Nothing had collapsed or exploded. The sky was blue and cloudless. The heat on her emotion spots shifted as they changed from the blue-red of anxiety to the orange-yellow of confusion. The same colors showed on Hest’s neck and on the throats of their sisters and brothers. Usually a harmony of feelings among her kin was a soothing sight. Now it bothered her, like having a stone in her foot casing but finding nothing there when she shook it out.
Hest nudged her and pointed up, out beyond Wall, above where the orchards they’d been harvesting stood. “Do you see that?”
She strained her eyes but saw only treetops and sky.
Above
the
trees
, Hest thought-talked.
A
sort
of
shimmer
?
Gama shaded her eyes with her hand and looked hard where he’d pointed, but didn’t see anything unusual. Hest’s lips pushed together in a line.
It
was
there
, he sent.
She glanced at her sisters and brothers milling around them. They were nervous, disturbed, but none paid any attention to the sky.
It
must
have
gone
.
Hest looked away, as though he couldn’t bear it if she doubted him.
-=o=-
The second bang came in the night. Females and males poured from their dwellings, some hastily tying on hip wraps or throwing on cloaks, but most running without dressing, too panicked to even pull on foot casings to protect their feet.
Gama and Hest ran outside together, Home sending behind them,
What’s
happening
?
What’s
happening
? Gama shook her head, though she never knew how much structures could read gestures.
Their brothers and sisters filled the commons, everyone as confused as they were, some talking to the kin next to them, but most standing open-mouthed, glancing wildly in every direction, their necks aflame in the gray-red of shock or the muddy-brown of fear.
Another huge boom cut the air. Hest grabbed Gama’s arm with his soft hand and pointed into the night sky with the other. Above them, off to the left, the air shimmered like sunlight on still water. Gama’s heart beat fast. The frightened structures called to each other, all talking at once in their own speech that sounded like a long blow of wind. She leaned close to Hest, for the comfort of his skin.
“Look!” a sister called, her eyes on the sky.
A disk-shaped swath of stars went out — not one by one, but all at once, as though the sky had swallowed them whole.
We
should
go
.
We
should
go
, the structures sent in words Gama could understand. Wall flapped its five wooden gates open and shut, open and shut, as if desperate to get Reln’s attention, since only he could make the decision for the corenta to move.
Gama grabbed Hest’s hand and pulled him with her as she ran through the crowd toward their guide, ducking around their sisters and brothers. Reln stood transfixed, his head tilted back, his mouth hanging open. Gama grabbed his shoulders and shook them.
“You see that?” Reln stared hard at the sky.
Above their heads, burning blue flames filled a starless circle in the night sky. Gama stared as the circle grew, the licking flames filling in where stars had been. She stared so long and hard her eyes watered. She tightened her hold on Hest’s hand.
Another boom rang out.
Behind it, low and deep — a hum.
And then the flames were gone, flicked out like covering a candle, the black circle of sky once again filled with stars.
Reln shut his mouth and dropped his chin, his gaze moving from face to face. Everyone waited for him to speak.
“Return to your dwellings,” he said, raising his voice to be heard. “It’s over now.”
They turned slowly, the two hundred and fourteen sisters and brothers of Reev corenta, some confused, some frightened — everyone grabbing onto Reln’s words and the calm, sure way he’d said them, as if he had a secret knowledge and they could trust those words completely.
Gama let loose of Hest and rubbed her hands over her thighs. It didn’t feel over to her. It felt dangerous.
Two
The hatchling pair carried one bucket between them, the silver-gray pail swinging from their hands like a broken gate. The pair followed Hest toward the river as though he led them on a string. Gama brought up the rear. Three days had passed since the shimmering sky and the swallowed stars. Nothing odd had happened since, but still she half-listened for the hum.
Reln and his apprentice, Prill, had walked out of Reev with her and Hest, but had gone the other direction in search of healing plants and soils. Prill came from the same mating grounds as she did. Gama felt sympathy for her, knowing Prill didn’t like being outside of Reev’s protective wall, but didn’t truly understand her feeling. She loved Reev and the open spaces both.
Gama smiled, watching the hatchlings mimic Hest’s every move. These two hatchlings were off-Resonance young, not hatched the year their egg was laid, but developing more slowly. She and Hest had been off-Resonance hatchlings themselves, and she felt a special kinship with them.
An image formed in her mind — two happy hatchlings sitting with their feet dangling in the water. Hatchlings didn’t get full language abilities until they emerged and they could be a bit like plants at times, sending thought-pictures that needed deciphering, but this one was easy enough to figure out.
Gama laughed. “It has been a long walk. This is a good spot. Set down your bucket and we’ll show you how to find nokifs. You like nokifs, don’t you?”
The hatchlings nodded their enthusiasm for the fist-sized purple-red bulbs that while bitter-tasting fresh from the plant were soft and delicious boiled. The stiff stems with feathery fronds weren’t good for eating, but the bulbs were worth the work it took to harvest and prepare them.
Gama and Hest waded into the shallow water at the river’s bank, their knives pulled from the tools belts at their waists and ready in their hands. A few small black-and-tan nibblers banged at Gama’s ankles. She shook her foot to shoo them away.
“Nibblers?” Hest said.
“Greedy little beastlets. Always looking for an easy meal and not concerned about what gets in their way — especially when it’s me. I don’t see them banging around your legs.”
Nokif stems and fronds were a favorite food of the nibblers, often gnawed down to the mud line by their sharp teeth. Nokif bulbs were easier to harvest if the stems were long. They could pull them up instead of having to dig them out. She’d had the idea to build woven walls in the river at the top and bottom of the stretch their corenta harvested. The wall would let water move freely, but keep new nibblers out and the trapped ones could be moved elsewhere. Over time, the nibblers would be less and the nokif more — at least it seemed that way to her. Reln was still thinking her idea over. Sometimes their guide thought a suggestion over a very long time before reaching a decision.
And sometimes — like with the disappearing stars — Reln decided a bit too quickly for Gama’s liking that things were fine.
“Listen,” Gama told the hatchlings. “We sing this request for permission before any harvest begins.”
She sang
The
Song
of
Sharing
to the nokif, acknowledging how intertwined they were and how they helped each other to survive. Hest hummed a harmony. Reln often said that she was the structure and Hest the embellishment, and between them they made a strong beauty. It was true that she and Hest seemed to bring out the best in the other. Prill had once remarked that Gama and Hest were so close they might as well have been hatched from the same egg. Gama liked the idea that she and Hest were each other’s completing half. What better friendship could there be than that?
When she finished singing, she sent the nokif a quick picture of the woven wall that could spare them being eaten by nibblers — it never hurt to let food know you appreciated it and watched out for its welfare.
Gama and Hest held up their knives for the hatchlings to see, then beckoned them to come closer. The young ones sat on their heels at the riverbank’s edge and watched Gama and Hest dig into the mud, twisting their knife blades to loosen and lift the bulbs, exaggerating their motions so the hatchlings could understand. They sent the hatchlings thought-pictures of what was happening beneath the mud — showing how the blade knocked a little when it hit the side of the bulb, how they twisted the blade down to find the bottom and then slid it underneath to work the bulb free.
The hatchlings watched intently as Gama and Hest dug dozens of bulbs, until one stood up and loudly said, “Us.”
Hest smiled and handed his blade to the bold one. Gama gave her knife to its shyer nest-mate. They jumped into the river, their yellow down fluffing in the cold water to keep them warm, and began digging furiously. Hest sent Gama a look and she knew they were thinking the same thought — that teaching hatchlings was a particular joy. The two of them were almost always in harmony of thought and feeling, not something she could say about her and the rest of their kin. She reached out and stroked his wet neck in appreciation.
By day’s end, they’d filled the three buckets to the top with nokif bulbs. The hatchlings’ bucket was too heavy for them now, so Gama or Hest would carry it back to Reev. First though, all that hard work deserved immediate reward.
Hest took the bold hatchling by the hand. “I’ll show you how to float in deep water.”
Gama turned and gently splashed the shyer one. “You don’t want to miss out on this.” She sent a thought-picture of floating on her back, and grinned. “Come on. It’s fun.”
-=o=-
The sun had nearly set, the sky already turning gray when they hauled their happy, tired selves back onto the bank. The hatchlings wriggled all over, giggling as drops flew from their down. Hest sluiced water off his body with his digger hand and took up his bucket. Gama took up hers and looked for the hatchlings’ bucket, but it wasn’t there. She shot Hest a puzzled glance.
It
has
to
be
here
, he sent.
No
thief
-
beast
came
while
we
were
in
the
water
.
I
know
. Gama poked among the reeds that grew on the bank, though she was sure she’d left the bucket in plain sight next to her own.
Maybe
Reln
and
Prill
came
by
and
took
it
?
I
doubt
it
, Hest sent.
They
had
a
long
way
to
go
in
the
opposite
direction
.
Why
walk
all
the
way
here
just
to
take
one
bucket
without
telling
someone
?
Then
it
has
to
be
here
. Gama rubbed the side of her mouth.
But
it
isn’t
.
The shy hatchling sat down and mewled. Gama put her hand on its shoulder. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t lose the bucket. It’s just misplaced. Let’s walk down the bank a bit, see if it’s there.”
It was full dark when they gave up and headed back to Reev with two buckets of bulbs and a weight of confusion between them.
-=o=-
The flying beast flapped its big triangular red and brown wings in the bright sun outside their window. The sight cheered her. It was good to see both the beast and the sun after several days when cloud cover had kept the days unusually cool and gloomy for the season. Gama nudged Hest and pointed with her chin so he’d see.
“A flying beast alongside a corenta is good luck,” Hest said.
Gama didn’t believe much in luck. Thorough preparation and hard work made good things happen. There was something cheerful about beasts scudding along next to Reev, though — sharing the same sky for that brief moment, or for as long as it rode the currents Reev set up in its flight.
“How far do you think it is to the next landing spot?”
“Far enough that I wouldn’t want to have to walk it,” Hest said.
Gama rolled her eyes. “There must have been a time when soumyo did walk. Corentas are built. So sometime in the way long ago, before the soumyo made the first corenta and it learned to fly, they must have walked from orchard to river to field to get what they needed.”
Hest made a great show of examining the soles of his foot casings. “Good thing there are corentas now, then.”
She laughed under her breath, glad for the diversion of conversation and for the pleasure of Hest’s company. Being stuck inside a dwelling during travel let her mind wander to things it was probably better not to think about — like the bangs and the burning sky. Like a bucket of nokif that couldn’t be found.
Hest
.
Do
you
think
the
bucket
is
still
there
,
by
the
river
?
“I asked around,” he said aloud. “After we came back to Reev. No one had come by the river and taken a bucket, so I suppose it has to still be there.”
She was sure she’d set that bucket down next to her own. How could she be so wrong?
“I feel bad that we lost it,” she said. “The hatchlings blamed themselves, but it wasn’t their work to keep track of it — it was ours.”
Reev slowed its flight, preparing to land. She got up and went to the window to watch their descent. The flying beast weaved away to wherever it was going.
“You’re thinking too much again,” Hest said. “Probably the bucket fell in the river and the current carried it off.”
She looked at him over her shoulder. “Do you really think that happened?”
“It could have. You might have left the bucket too close to the water. A beast came along and knocked it into the stream while we were floating in the water with the hatchlings. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
She turned back to the window and thought that over, trying to remember exactly where she’d left the third bucket. She could have left it close to the water. She didn’t think she had, but maybe.
There was a slight jolt as Reev bumped lightly against the soil, and then settled gently on the plain. Wall and the structures started speaking among each other in their own language. Gama looked out the window and waited for Home to get around to translating.
Impatience got the better of her.
What’s
going
on
?
Someone
has
taken
the
grain
, Home sent.
A nervous chill raced up her breastbone.
What
do
you
mean
?
Wall
says
the
plain
is
empty
.
Already
harvested
.
Gama pressed up against the window, trying to see, but Wall was in the way. An empty plain wasn’t possible. Corentas traveled freely over the world, but each had claimed areas, sections of plains where wild grains grew, or a copse of trees with edible fruits, bark, or leaves, or a section of river, from which no other corenta would harvest. That way each community had what it needed with no need to argue over access. Claimed areas were clearly marked. Gama couldn’t imagine another corenta taking grain from a field not their own.
Oh
!
Oh
!
Oh
! Home sent.
Go
see
!
Gama cleared the door first, Hest following. All the soumyo of Reev seemed to be rushing through the meandering paths toward the gates as though carried on a swift current. Someone ran by, knocking into Gama. She stumbled but Hest steadied her. More of their kin pushed by. Those who’d gotten through the main gate first stood only a little ways into the field. Gama and Hest could see them up ahead — all of them motionless. Hest angled through the standing soumyo to the front of the pack, clearing a path for her. A bead of sweat slid down the side of Gama’s face.
No beasts or bugs had done this. No soumyo either. The grain hadn’t been harvested or eaten. It was simply gone — the dry, brown soil bare of the slightest sign that anything had ever grown there, not just in their area, but across the entire valley. At least five other corentas would find their fields stripped.
Gama rubbed her hands on her thighs. This couldn’t happen, but it had.
The corenta kin murmured among themselves.
Prill, who stood on the other side of Hest, said to no one in particular, “Wind? Could a wind blow hard enough to pull up every plant from its roots and scatter it someplace else?”