Fire in the Sky

2

Aslan clicked the Ridaar off. “That’s enough for now. I’ll show you more when you’ve talked a bit.” She settled back in her chair and smiled at the four youngsters, two Meloach and two Fior boys, all of them around eight or nine years old.

I want children who are good friends, she’d told Teagasa and Oskual. They’ll be shy at first, but having friends with them will help them relax and loosen their tongues.

Why children? Oskual asked. If you’re gathering history…

There’s an official truth and a folk truth in every culture and often they don’t coincide. Children pick up on folk truth, sometimes it seems from the air itself, and they aren’t driven by politics and adult shame to conceal these things. I’m not a historian, Aslan finished. I record cultures. All facets of them.

She leaned forward, moved her eyes from face to face, a gesture meant to collect them and make them feel part of a whole that included her. “What do you do when you want to decide who goes first? Say in a game you’re playing.” She watched the scrubbed, sober faces, suppressing a sigh. So obviously on their best behavior, spines stiffened by parental admonitions. “No, don’t tell me. Show me.”

An eight-year Meloach named Likel had already proved to be the most talkative of the four, the leader insofar as this small group had a leader. Xe had bright red mossflowers blooming on xe’s head and shoulders and already a beginning of the Denchok lichen web threading across xe’s torso. Xe fidgeted in xe’s chair, twisted xe’s narrow pointed face into a comic grimace. “If it’s just us,” xe said, “and ev’one wants to go first, we do the Digger Count.”

Xe turned to Colain, a short Fior boy with shiny black hair and eyes bluer than a summer sky. “Le’s dig.” Xe and Colain made fists, pumped them together through the air. “One. Two. Three. Diggit!”

Colain grinned. He’d kept his fist while Likel had flipped out his middle finger. “Stone b break knife.”

Likel did the hand flutter that served Keteng for a shrug.

Sobechel, a younger Meloach with most of xe’s mossflowers still in bud, though showing bright orange tips, played a knife to cut Colain’s paper. Brecin, a gangly Fior boy with hair close to the orange of Sobechel’s flowers, wrapped Sobechel’s stone in paper. Then, with a nervously engaging grin, Brecin extended his fist to Aslan.

She raised her brows, grinned back at him. “Phra phra, why not.”

“One two three,” they chanted together. “Diggit!” Aslan kept the fist, saw herself breaking Brecin’s knife.

His grin threatened his ears. “You win, Scholar. You go first.”

“Mm. I think I’ve been framed.” She chuckled. “All right. What do you want to know?”

Likel scooted his chair closer. “You got any pictures in there of where you come from?”

Brecin pulled up his long bony legs and sat on his feet with his knees pointing out, his shoulders up, his arms hooked over the back of the chair. “And what’s your family like?”

“And why d d do those mesuch want to c c come here and mess up everything?” Colain pushed at the lank black hair that kept falling into his eyes. There was an edge of anger in his voice that embarrassed him when his eyes met Aslan’s; he went almost purple, looked quickly away.

“And what it’s like riding between the stars.” Sobechel had a dreamy look on xe’s face, pale eyes the color of dust glistening with visions of distant places and strange things.

“Hm, that covers a lot of ground. Let’s start with my family. My mother is a businesswoman, she runs her own company… um which makes things sort of like locks only fancier with a lot of bells and whistles to discourage thieves. She lives on a world called Droom which is so far away you couldn’t see its sun if you went out at night and looked at all the stars. Even from University I can’t see Droom’s sun, though it is a bit closer. My father is a poet. I don’t see him much. He’s always somewhere else.”

“Like Glois’ dad,” Sobechel said. “He an Ard and he never comes back.”

“Maorgan?”

“Uh-uh, another one. I think Glois’ Da, he stays mostly on Melton. Maybe he’s dead. Those mesuchs over there are crazy they say.”

“How c c come you live on… um… University and your Mum is way away somewhere else? D d do lots of people do like that?”

“University is a whole world that’s a school where people go to study things, write books, teach classes. They come from a thousand and a thousand worlds. Some stay and some go home. I stayed.”

“Ah.” Colain nodded. “Like Chuta M m meredel. Our teachers went there to study. But they c come b back.”

Sobechel clicked his tongue against xe’s chewing ridge. “So it’s different out there. And everyone don’t come back. Your cousin Timag for one. He went for a bargeman and hasn’t showed face here since Teagasa was beating the letters into you head. Scholar, you said you’d show us pictures. Can I see a starship? Ol’ Barriall, he use to deal with Free Traders and he said he’d bring me a picture of a ship, but he never did. Yours will be better anyway, his woulda been just flat and black and white.”

She smiled. “Oh I might have a thing or two to interest you, Sobechel. If you’ll all turn your chairs to face the wall, we’ll have ourselves a show. Then it’s my turn to ask questions.”

Aslan switched the settings on the Ridaar and gathered her subjects into a circle around her. “Now. Give your name, then tell us a little about your family, whatever you’re comfortable saying. Just to let your great great many greats grandchildren…” she smiled at the giggles this started in them, “know a little bit about you.”

“Cha oy, my name is Likel, Budline Kel-Poradd. My Parent has the Everything Shop, you know, you walk past it coming here from the blai. That’s where Sobey got with ol’ Barriall, he come here every month or so, down from the mountain lakes and the fac’tries there. ‘Cept in winter, a course.” Likel fidgeted in xe’s chair, stared at the shell panels in the ceiling. “I’ve got three older sibs, I’m youngest. Um. There’s Himtel, xe’s Denchok now, got a bud growing, so I’m about to have a nexter. Then there’s Mal and Wen, xes were same-summer buds. Xes finished school last year, looks like xes will be going into slough… um… that’s turn Denchok… soon’s the olle bushes bud out. Himtel works at the store, xe going in partners with the Parent in a couple more years. The twins, xes work at looms in Sobey’s Parent’s weaving mill. Both of xes say xes going to go look for land when xes get enough money saved to put down a payment. Won’t be in any Ordumels round here, though, land is family kept and don’t change hands often. They thinking maybe Tatamodh down south. Me, I don’t know what

I’m going to do, maybe I’ll find out come my Mengerak.”

“My name is Sobechel, Budline Chel-arriod. Like Likel says, my Parent has the fiber mill. It weaves four kinds of cloth. The barges bring xe shearings from cabrag and cabhisha runs up in the hills, the swampers haul in loads of c’hau bark out of the four Marishes, farmers sell xe the tatirou they grow and the finest of all are the threads from the cocoons of the deng-angi that only live on Tatamodh Island way down south. That’s really really expensive and my Parent only lets young Fior women weave with it, they have the nimblest fingers.

“I was the fourth my Parent budded. Two of my older sibs died of the Withers. My only living sib is the first dropped and xe’s twelve years older than me. Xe’s been Denchok most of the time I remember. I never saw xe much, xe was always busy in the mill. Xe’s going to run it when our Parent goes Eolt. I’m glad xe likes it because if it wasn’t for xe, it’d be me and I want to go for a scholar in Chuta Meredel.”

Colain turned red again when Aslan glanced his way. “My name is C c olain THU. My D da is the shoemaker. My M ma, she m makes things like saddles and harnesses. Mostly folk come to our shop for anything that gets made outta leather. My uncle Bort, he’s the t tanner. I’m g g gonna to work with him when I finish school. He’s already t teching me stuff. I g got one sister, Mevva. She’s the oldest. M ma’s teaching her to take over. I had a b b brother, but he got in trouble and run off; he was with the swampies for a while, but now we think he’s either dead or g gone chorek.” He bent his head so a wedge of straight black hair hid his face.

“My name is Brecin Gabba. Me, I’m with Colain. I like working with my hands. Besides, I’m my Da’s only kid, Ma couldn’t have more after me. He’s the smith. The Forge, that’s round the grove from the

Blai, handy there case travelers they want new shoes on a caцpa, harness rings or something like that. I been working in the Forge since I was old enough to know I sh’d stay ‘way from the fire. I figure Da and me, we’ll keep on working till we both drop. I mean, I LIKE making things. I like the feeling a good knife blade gives you, or an ax head or even mending a copper pot so folks can cook their supper.”

“Hm.” Aslan glanced at her notes. “Tell me about the swampies. Who are they, where do they come from, how do they live?”

Sobechel ran a finger across the moss growing like green velvet on the outside of his arm; it gave under the pressure, changed color slightly so a darker mark followed his fingertip. “I s’pose I seen them most. The biggest lot of them are Fior, but there’s some Denchok, too. Some of ‘em are stupid chieks who land up to their necks in trouble in Ordumels and get chuffed out. Some of ‘em are people who just don’t like having lots of other people around. And there’s some I dunno why they went there. They live in the Marishes and collect stuff that grows wild there and bring it out and sell it. Like the c’hau bark I said, and melidai which is stuff we use on the bark and bibrek which makes a real bright yellow dye and bung which makes a dark red and lots of coloring stuff like that and medicines and stuff like that. The Fior swampies, they don’t shave or nothing, weren’t for the colors you couldn’t tell them from Keteng, ‘cause the Denchoks, they get all kinds of stuff growing in the lichen and they don’t clean it out like our Parents make us do.” He sighed, a trace of envy in the sound.

Aslan tapped a finger on the chair, asked, “But they’re not chorek, not predators, I mean they don’t attack people?”

“Not the ones I seen anyway. They just weird, that’s all.”

“Him I keep hearing about the Shape Wars, way back, a thousand and a thousand years ago. Tell me what people say about that time.”

Likel glanced at the others, saw they weren’t going to say anything, so he started the story. “Well, there were these people who call themselves Angermans, they had to leave where they were ‘cause a bad people were oppressing them.”

Brecin nodded. “And the old Keteng, it wasn’t like now, they din’t have Ordumels and stuff, they live in grass beцcs and eat wild stuff.”

“And the Angermans, their ship went blooey some way and they were ‘bout dead when they got to Bйluchad and their ship went bust all the way and it land kinda hard up round Rager Point, least that what the songs say. They get it part unloaded and Chel Dй hiccups.” Xe put a hand over xe’s mouth to mask xe’s giggles.

Sobechel punched Likel’s arm. “Snerp, how’d Scholar know what you mean?” He turned serious gray-brown eyes on Aslan. “That’s what we say when there’s a quake. Anyway, the ship it rolled into the Bakuhl Sea, right where there’s a big deep hole. Some folks say the hole go all the way through the world, it that deep.”

“And K k keteng they never seen anything b big like that, or people like that. And they were scared and run away. Then some of ‘em get mad ‘cause they figure these folk were messing up their • fishing p places. And they g go to tell them go ‘way.”

“And the Angermans they start acting just like the bad folk that chase them out of their old home and start doing things to Ketengs when they catch them.”

“And it was a bad bad time.”

“And it went on for a hundred and a hundred years.”

“P people k killing p people.”

“Till Ard Bracoпn and Eolt Lekall sang the first Chorale of Peace. And the Angermans took the name

Fior because they were freed of the angers of the past.”