Jo Clayton: Shadowkill

It was a nameless little world, a pretty world with nothing more than its looks to recommend it, the usual range of metals, no large deposits. No moons. There were a lot of lakes but no great, uninterrupted stretches of water. In an area with hundreds of other worlds much like it, it had been scanned a few times but mostly ignored. And it was close by-only a day off.

Autumn Rose set the ship down in the middle of a temperate long-grass prairie in the northern hemisphere, choosing a flat barren area near a large lake and one of the streams feeding into it.

Kikun wandered aimlessly about the ship as Autumn Rose settled to work. He stood behind her, watching her play with the kephalos until she swung around and snarled at him. “I loathe people looking over my shoulder. Haven’t you got SOMETHING you can do?”

Kikun shrugged his narrow shoulders, ambled to the co-seat, turned on the scanners so he could look out over the land around the ship.

Tall grass stretched to the horizon, nodding in the wind, green and silver moire silk, fading to a washed-out blue in the distance. There were scattered interruptions of a darker, stiffer green where trees grew along a stream or deep in a wash. A few kilometers off, an immense herd of horned beasts grazed, leaving a strip of shorn land half a kay wide as they passed on. Overhead, a number of feathered fliers were black specks against the ice-blue of the sky.

Kikun was hatched on a tall-grass prairie much like this one, so much like it he might almost be looking across his sept’s home range. He sat gazing at the scene and aching with a separation anguish he’d been too busy to feel since Lissorn rescued him from the stake and brought him away. Strange places, strange peoples, nothing to remind him until now.

“Kikun, do you mind…” The image vanished, the screen went gray. “I need the kephalos’ full attention for this.” She scowled at the console, then at him. “It’s going to take forever as it is. Barakaly Lak Dar, that’s the PO of our chariot, he had a mind like a snake with hiccups. Why don’t you take some lunch and a stunner and go for a walk or something?”

Kikun rode the lift to the ground and stepped onto patchy grass. The lightness of his body startled him. Autumn Rose hadn’t warned him about the lower g. Moving was a little like walking in water without, the resistance of water. A very peculiar feeling.

He held tightly to the rail of the lift and sucked in a long breath as he listened to the faint susurrus of the grass. That sound, ah that sound, it was an ache in the heart. A wound.

The morning sun was warm on his face, but the air was nippy; it smelled of pollen and grass, of fish and weed, mud and decay. Something dead a long way off added a faint pungency to the mix. It wasn’t exactly his homesmell, but near enough to evoke a stream of memories.

He closed his eyes and let them flow over him, the good and the bad.

For the past three years he’d been caught up in Ginny Seyirshi’s plots. No time to stop and think, no urge to let go and drown in memory.

Now there WAS time.

Too much time.

He panted and his fringed ears trembled, his eyes flooded with tear gel. He leaned against the railing, head down, remembering, remembering, remembering… until the spasm was finished, then he sighed and scrubbed away the gel.

After shrugging out of the backpack, he left it on the lift floor and walked cautiously across cream-colored sand to water blue as shattered sapphire.

He squatted beside the tender wavelets that lapped at the sand and scooped up a handful of the water. Lissorn would have scolded him until his ears rang: one does not eat and drink promiscuously on strange worlds; bad things can happen to one’s insides. He smiled at the memory, tasted the water. It was fresh and cold, with a clean green flavor. He spread his fingers and let the rest of the liquid run away. There was a spiky weed growing a short way out in the lake. Balancing on one hand he stretched over, broke off a branch, sniffed at it, bit into it. Not much taste but a good crunchy texture. He squatted and chewed until all he had left was a wad of strings which he spat out. He scooped up more water, swished it around to clean his mouth, spat that out also.

He knew well enough what he was risking, but a certain recklessness drove him on, a recklessness that was his by godright and a plague on his comfort more than once.

He got to his feet, ran along the beach, restless, nervous, while the day got colder instead of warmer.

The wind rose. The sky was a pale pale blue, almost white, empty now except for a few, high rat-tails of cloud that merely emphasized the blankness of the blue.

His bare foot touched a length of driftwood bleached almost white by water, wind, and sun. Wood. He stared down at the section of branch for a long moment, then bent and picked it up. Yes. Fire. I’ll build me a fire. Four fires. Fires to send a tocebai home. Yes.

Driven by a new urgency, he strode along the sand gathering pieces of wood small enough to carry. As soon as he had an armload, he took it to a long narrow spit where the feeder creek entered the lake, dumped it, and went back to hunt for more.

When he had the wood he needed, he went into the prairie and gathered grasses.

He settled on the sand and began smoothing and knotting the grasses into a sacred mat, his fingers twisting and pulling in a pattern so familiar he didn’t have to think what he was doing. On DunyaDzi he would have whistled an ancient sin-di while he worked, the music gathering his forces and feeding power into the grass. Here, he was empty, there was no music in him and the grass felt dead in dead fingers. He went on knotting anyway.

Not so long ago, when Shadow had hinted for a reading-she wanted reassurance before they hit Koulsnakko’s Hole and went for Ginny-he couldn’t answer her, Gaagi wouldn’t come. He told her he wasn’t worried. It had happened before, his gods going off somewhere and leaving him to himself. They’d always come back.

This time felt different. Voices had come to him in the Hole, but they were chilly whispers as alien as this alien wind.

He was bereft. Yes. Good word. The right word. His gods were his tie to his home-earth and the personification of his several Talents. He needed those god images and they had to be REAL. Ghosts conjured by his imagination were worthless as guides.

He knotted and wove and wondered if he’d been too long away from DunyaDzi, if he’d worn his gods thin and finally to nothing at all. If that was true, he didn’t know what he’d do, what he’d be. The thought frightened him.

He wove the ends into the mat, spread it on the sand, and went to stand at the lake’s edge, watching the waves leap and sparkle in the wind. Nothing came to him. The water was alien, it rejected him. The sand beneath his feet rejected him, the wind would not speak to him.

He went back into the ship, collected food offerings, brought them to the mat.

Using the gathered driftwood, he built four small fires, east, west, north, south. He put the mat at the mid-point between them and sat on it, his shadow going out before him to touch the western fire.

He used the play of flames to ease himself into the god-trance where he could call them. Gaagi the Raven. Ellas-Xe the Lynx. Jadii-Gevas the Antelope-deer. Xumady the Otter. Spash’ats the Bear. Lael-Lenox, the Grandmother Ghost. ’Gemla, the Mask that was himself. He called them urgently, his need for them in every syllable of those potent Names. Especially he called to Gaagi Raven-who-flies-before, Raven who had marked his path for him over and over since he was hatched, Raven who spoke with a clarity and brevity that could be more deceptive and more confusing than the deliberate smokiness of Lael-Lenox, the Grandmother who delighted in leading him her grandson into situations that made him scramble to stay alive, who always said: See what you learned you wouldn’t ’ve,Kiki. Listen to your Gramma and you’ll never be sorry. That wasn’t true. It wasn’t even close to true. Gramma’s advice. It’d taught him how miserable he was when he was having his tail twisted by someone stronger or smarter than him. She told him that WAS the lesson, but he figured there were easier ways of learning it. Xumady scolded him each time he fell for her so-convincing arguments, but Otter wasn’t much better; he was the comic grumbler, the joker who took nothing too seriously; he was also sneaky and murderous, with no limits to what he’d do to survive, what he’d tweak and trick Kikun into doing. Spash’ats was the dreamer, the ethicist, big and black and powerful, never seen quite clearly, the Bear who smacked Xumady down when Otter got too outrageous.