The Burning Ground

3. Yseyl’s homecoming

Yseyl flew the disruptor out to the Fence-out beyond the Prophet’s Finger, that stony barren headland where no one bothered to come, not even smugglers.

In the end, Cerex had been more generous than he contracted, giving her a stunner and the skip along with a medkit and several packs of emergency rations when he dropped her off in her home mountains.

“The Lady watch over you, and if you survive this, give me a call.” He handed her a small gray square. “My drop box on Helvetia. Get to a Splitcom and shove the flake in the code slot. Leave a message, and I’ll come fetch you.”

He touched her cheek, his fingertips silky and delicate, then turned away and busied himself with the sensor board, doing things she suspected were essentially unnecessary. They’d gotten to know each other rather well on those long insplit journeys when there was nothing else to do. Different species, oddly alike despite that.

We’re sports born to be pinched off and thrown away, she thought. Nobody loves us. We should go eat worms.

She smiled as she opened the case and took out the disruptor. Worms and wormholes. Maybe I’m even making sense. She pointed the business end of the thing at the Fence, a round patch that was blacker than any night she’d ever known, touched the trigger sensor.

For the longest time nothing seemed to be happening. Maybe Cerex had lied after all. She stared at the Fence and tried to ignore the coldness in her stomachs.

The flickers developed paired waves, one dipping and the other rising. The waves turned into a swirl about a circle of emptiness, a circle that grew and grew until the bottom edge dipped below the water and the emptiness was big enough to run a steamer through. The growing stopped, but the hole stayed.

She camped on the Finger and watched it, waiting for the Ptaks to notice, wondering how long it would last.

At the end of the third night it flowed together until there was no sign anything had happened. No visitors either. The disruptor was all Cerex had claimed.

Yseyl’s mouth tightened into a grim line as she checked the alignment of the peaks. When she was sure she’d reached the Wendlu Round, she eased the miniskip below the treeline, maneuvered it into a thicket of young mutha saplings, and let it settle to the ground near the decayed giant whose fall had made room for them.

With a groan of relief, she left the saddle, stood rubbing her mistreated buttocks, and muttered to the birds and the air, “Why do offworlders who know so much about everything, make something so miserably uncomfortable?”

Air and birds having no answers for her, she removed the packs strapped to the skip’s carry grid and set them on the crumbling trunk. She settled beside them and pulled off her boots, then sat wiggling her toes and enjoying the feel of the earth against her feet. It was good to be back where all the tugs on her body were familiar, where the smells and colors and textures felt right.

The Wendlu Round.

The next peak over marked the camp where she was hatched. “By Minyarna Stream I first saw light/Dancing waters blue and bright,” she sang as she kicked her heels against the trunk, her voice a breath on the breeze that rustled through the pale green mutha leaves. “By

Minyama Stream I first knew pain/My love is gone, won’t come again…”

The memories were hard ones. She forgot them when she was away from here, but when she set her feet on the Round, they were back again. Always back again.

Her Mam and Baba were killed in a rockslide while she was still in egg. Her anya went into howling grief and was kept tied to the ixis wagon after xe tried to fling xeself over a cliff. A week after Yseyl hatched, a vein burst in the pouch and nearly drowned her as the anya’s body emptied itself of blood. The Heka saved her life and ordered the anya Delelan to pouch her. Crazy Delelan whom nobody would bond with. The ixis fed xe and looked after xe, but otherwise stayed as far from xe as they could. And as far from Yseyl as they could when she emerged from the pouch.

Delelan didn’t care. Xe had xe’s voices and the ghosts that xe saw with such conviction that sometimes Yseyl thought she could see them, too. As she grew older, there were moments when she hated Crazy Delelan, blaming xe for the weirdness in her that made the other children afraid of her; they tormented her because they were afraid. They called her Crazy Yseyl. They yelled at her that she’d killed her anya. They pinched her and bit her and fought with her and stole her food and broke her things. Delelan protected her as much as xe could and loved her in xe’s odd way, comforted her when the dark closed round her, when she wondered if the taunters were right, if she were a death-dealer from the egg.

It didn’t help when her God-Gifts began manifesting themselves. When she discovered she could make people see whatever she wanted them to see, even if there was nothing there. That she could pull the shadow of shape around her and be anyone. That she could make radios play even when the batteries were dead. She didn’t say much about these Gifts, but people saw her using them and that was enough to make her seem odder, more frightening to the others. And so more isolated.

In the eighth year after her hatching, she found the caves that twisted through this mountain, hugged the secret of them to her heart, and spent hours exploring them, crawling recklessly through convoluted, cramped spaces barely larger than she was, a handlamp she’d stolen from a peddler at the Yubikha Meeting Ground shoved out ahead of her, batteries long dead but still glowing at her touch.

When the shadows from the saplings crawled across her toes, she clicked her tongue and got to her feet. “You can loll around watching grass grow when this is over, Crazy Yseyl.” She stretched, yawned, set to work organizing the packs she was going to carry up the mountain, getting them balanced properly on her back so she’d have the mobility she needed to reach where she meant to go.

Sketchily concealed by the leaves on the crooked red branches of a silha bush growing from the weathered stone, Yseyl dropped to a squat beside the boulder she used as a marker and contemplated the triangular aperture in the side of the mountain that she knew better than the lines in her own palms.

She sat very still, waiting for the web of small lives to quiet and scanning the gravel and coarse sand in front of her for sign of intruders. When she was satisfied that no one had been interfering in her business, she dropped onto her belly and wriggled into the mouth of the cave.

For a moment she thought she was going to get stuck in the right angle bend that came just before the tube widened suddenly into a large chamber, but a twist of her body and a shove of bare feet against a fold of stone pushed her around and she burst free of the tube with scraping sounds from the packs and a loud rip. She wrinkled her nose. “What I get for being lazy.”

She slipped out of the straps, eased the packs onto the floor, and got to her feet.

Sunrays dancing with dust motes poured through the cracks in the stone, painted fluttering leaf shapes on the thick gray dust that covered the floor, playing shadow games with the tracks in the dust, the three-clawed mayornayo prints, the larger sasemayo spoor, and the scuffs of her bare feet from the last time she’d been here.

On the inner side of the chamber were half a dozen holes, some hardly large enough to admit a sasemayo, the rest of varying heights. One of them was low and broad, rather like a partly open mouth.

Yseyl stretched, yawned. “Hoy-ha, ol’ fem, get your body moving. Have to get away from here by sundown.”

Her way lit by a handglow she’d bought at Marrat’s Market, she inched into the mouth hole, pushing the disruptor case.ahead of her this time. The case kept getting hung up on bulges and cracks in the floor, and several of the turns required a lot of wriggling and shoving, but she managed and some ten minutes later emerged into a second chamber.

Lumpy and echoing, a stream hardly wider than the span of a mal’s hand meandering along the back wall, it was considerably larger than the first and filled with a velvet darkness that seemed reluctant to yield to the light from the handglow. The flattest surface was that next to the entrance hole and there Yseyl had built a knee-high platform from mutha branches, binding and knotting them together with grass rope saturated in nivula sap. On this platform she’d built herself a small hutch with a three-sided storage shed. The front of the shed was closed off by a piece of heavy canvas.

Setting the disruptor case on the platform, she climbed up beside it. She untied the canvas, fetched out a box of candles from the half-a-hundred she had stored in the shed, a candelabra that had taken her fancy once in Icisel, and a blanket which she shook out and dropped beside the box. She twisted the candles into the holes and lit them, smiling as the gentle wavering light woke the shadows she called Delelan’s Ghosts.

She watched a moment, then went back for the rest of her gear.

For a while she played with her treasures, all sense of time lost in counting and caressing them, the hand-hammered gold and silver coins of the Pixa, the machine-struck coins of the Impix, a long necklace of polished turquoise and jasper beads, a bronze statue of a running boyal, a soaring celekesh carved from jet, a Fieka’s ring broach, a mosaic prayer icon that had belonged to a group of Bond Sisters, all the bits and pieces that had stuck to her fingers from the years when she’d been only a thief, before her calling came to her and she began hunting arms dealers.

Finally she sighed, put most of her treasures away, and slid the disruptor case into the slot she’d left for it. She kept back one sack of coins and a few pieces of jewelry for living costs in Linojin, then tied the canvas into place and left.

Yseyl came to the Outlook where the Pilgrim Road began mid-morning of the next day, a hot, still summer day, so quiet and filled with peace that the War could have been a nightmare she was waking from.

Beyond the patchwork fields of the farms and the nubbly green of the fruit orchards, there was the city-white marble lace on an emerald green ground, the streets like darker threads winding through it, the ponds and fountains jewels on those threads. And the radio tower, rising above them. And the fishing village to the south, a dull, ugly blot that only emphasized the beauty of the rest.

And out where the sky met the sea, was the Fence. Yseyl stared at it. You aren’t so great. Not any more. I put a hole in your gut, and you didn’t even know it.

The first time she’d seen the Fence, there was an agony in her head as if someone pounded a nail from temple to temple. That was gone. I put a hole in your gut. I watched it ooze shut, but I can do it again, any time I want.

She turned away because she couldn’t think while she was looking at that THING, sat down on the half-moon of polished stone, and pulled off her boots. She added the boots to her pack and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. Slow, she thought. Be careful. You don’t know who you can trust. Be the proper little Pilgrim. Be like all the rest. Have your story ready. Who am I? Yes. I’ll take my mother’s name. Lankya of Wendlu iris. Visit the Prophet’s Grave. Gahh, just the thought makes me sick… I have to do it. I have to find someone who can lead people. I can escape, but I can’t lead. I knew that. I didn’t think it through. Someone HAS to know how to use that thing. Drive holes through the Fence, let the people out who want to go, let the killers keep on killing. God! I wish I could still believe… I wish…

She shook off the sudden malaise and rose; feet dragging at first, she stepped onto the Pilgrim Road and started for Linojin.

The Road was paved with yellow brick, hollows worn in it by thousands of bare pilgrim feet over centuries of use. The bricks were warm from the sun and gritty from the dust the summer breeze blew across them. How strange to walk here. Yseyl felt old ghosts rising in and around her-warm and slightly stale ghosts like threeday-old bread in greasy sandwiches, shoved into a back pocket for lunch that never got to happen.

She began to pass the outlying farms.

Short-legged, with curly horns and flickering tails that continually showed their white undersides, herds of lowland maphiks grazed in fenced pastures.

Farmers plowed fields behind teams of ska77, the iron plowshares turning over rich black earth. The smell of that earth was pleasant in her nostrils, though as Pixa, she should be appalled by such slashing at the body of God.

The iron plowshares roused a memory that chased the other ghosts away.

When she was six, already on her way to being the target of all the malice in the ixis, a Prophet Mal came to Wendlu his and spent tedious time at Night Praise inveighing against Impix sins, particularly their mines and mills.

In the morning he gathered the ixis children and quizzed them about their learning, asking them to recite the Sayings of the Prophet and giving out wrapped candies to those who had the answers he wanted. After a while he noticed Yseyl squatting at the back, scowling and silent. She knew she wasn’t going to get any candy, and even if she did, Shung and Huddla would jump her and take it away. They were the oldest and the strongest and they knew from long experience that anything they did to her would not be punished. If she complained, it was she who’d get the whack.

He beckoned to her.

She tried to pretend she didn’t see him.

“You, femlit,” he said. “Yes, I mean you. Come here.”

She trudged through pinches and hisses of “don’t disgrace us,”

“crazy Yseyl,”

“you mess up, we gonna get you.” When she reached the Prophet Mal, she stopped and stood staring at the ground, not daring to look at him.

“You have not tried to answer.” He caught hold of her chin and lifted her head so she was forced to gaze at his stern, lined face. “Have you no answers?”

He smelled sweaty and something else she didn’t know but didn’t like, and his hands felt wrong, like polished leather, not skin. She wanted to pull away, but his hold was too strong; all she could do was drop her eyes again and stare at his chest rather than his face. The loose thing he wore that wasn’t quite a shirt-it was made from Impix cloth. Silk. She knew that because just a month ago at the Yubikha Gather Thombe and Busa and Anya Bilin had a yelling, slapping argument over Busa taking her lace money and spending it on a piece of silk. And he had an Impix knife on the leather strap that belted it to his body.

“What is the Path of the Child? Tell me the first Saying.”

Despite her fear and her nervousness, the Whys had got hold of her. Crazy Delelan said Why was the first word she spoke when she crawled from the pouch. Without thinking, Yseyl lifted her hand and pointed at the shirt. “If Impix are so bad,” she said with regrettable clarity, “if the things they make are hated by God and the Prophet, why are you wearing Impix silk and how come you use an Impix knife?”

Yseyl shook her head at the memory. Bad timing, she thought, but the truth, for all the whipping I got. It was a question no one had ever answered for her. The Pixa couldn’t live without the things they fulminated against. No mines, no iron, no mills, no steel. And no fine cloth or thread. No ax heads or axle bolts, no needles or knives or chains. Not the first time nor the last she’d experienced the twisty logic of adults.

Except for a few soaring spires and the openwork steel radio tower, now that she was down on the plain, the city was hidden from view by the ancient thile groves, huge trees with curving triple trunks that arced over and out with smaller limbs growing straight up from the arches, limbs thick with hand-shaped leaves of dark green.

A number of walkers were ahead of her, a few Impix pilgrims in their bright yellow robes, two or three Pixa in dark green; the rest were refugees from both branches of the Impixol family, dressed in whatever they wore when they turned hohekil and ran from their kin and their homes.

Much more of this and half the people left alive will be coming here. God, I hope there is someone behind those walls who can whip up enough heat and light to organize this escape. Funny, or maybe not, now that I have the disruptor, there’s nothing I can do with it. Not alone. I should be steamed at Cerex because he must have known it was just a stupid gadget and no use at all to what I want. She wasn’t angry, not really. After all, she’d started out by trying to kill him. Which he’d accepted with remarkable equanimity. And she liked him. I just have to figure it out, she thought. Find some way to make it useful.

Up close, the walls of the city were more like lace than she’d expected, the white marble facing carved and pierced in an intricate flow of images and words, Sayings of the Prophet, Songs from the Book of God. And all of it was exquisitely clean. As she waited in the line of those seeking entrance to the city, she saw a group of ferns and anyas in coarse unbleached robes carry buckets and brushes to a section of wall. They chanted a Song as they scrubbed delicately at the stone.

The line of folk ahead of her curved round a screen and vanished inside the gate. Step by step she moved forward, weary and bored but putting on a face of patience. She wanted no one looking at her and remembering her.

When she rounded the screen, the stench of Pilgrim sweat and dirt hit her in the face, no breeze to dilute that consequence of days of walking and privation. She took shallow breaths, let her eyelids droop while she examined what lay ahead of her and listened intently to the questions so she’d be prepared to answer them when her time came.

Long table. Four Brothers of God seated with pen, ink, bound registers, writing down the responses.

Two doors in the far wall. Those with money for their keep went through the righthand door, those who cast themselves on the Mercy of God passed through the left.

“Pixa or Impix?”

“Pixa.”

“Name.”

“Lankya of Ixis Wendlu Clan Enzak.”

“Reason for visit.”

“Sanctuary. I am hohekil.”

“Have you coin to keep yourself, or will you be a Guest of God?”

“I have coin to keep me for a while.”

“You understand, it is not likely that there will be paid labor you can do.”

“I understand.”

“This is a place of peace. Weapons are not allowed within the walls. If you have any such, they will be sealed and returned to you when you leave.”

“I have this.” She took her belt knife from the sheath and laid it on the table. “No more.”

It was a lie, of course, but she wasn’t about to let herself be wholly disarmed. Besides, even if they searched her and found Cerex’s stunrod taped to her back, they wouldn’t know what it was.

He took the knife, wrote on a strip of paper, and sealed the paper to the knife with a bit of heated wax. He set the knife in a box by his feet. When he straightened, he said, “If you are found with a weapon inside the walls, you