Herdsong

Attestation of the Descendant

You lit me on fire. The flame took to my mind, caught and became a blaze that flourished over my body. It seared away a long and involuntary slumber. I screamed. I saw. I heard. I felt. Death.

In a stall hardly larger than my shoulders I hung suspended by slick tentacles, one in my throat, more around my arms and legs. The walls pulsed and glowed softly, illuminating my captivity. Had I always been here? Where had I been before? A light burned inside me, and I felt more all around, beyond, above, below, beside, beating like my heart harder and harder and harder. It rose in me, the heat, the light, yearning and seeking. The light was starving. So I bit down and tore the tentacle’s putrid flesh.

Outside my stall, beyond a pale weave of twitching skin, I heard shouting. Fighting. Dying. Voices like my own, raging, and I felt the rage in the light coursing through my veins too. I coughed the intruding limb from my esophagus and severed my other bonds similarly. Thin blood coated my teeth as I chewed. Layers and layers of rot suffused the air, but the bodies just outside were fresh. The light was breaking out.

The web blocking the exit to my stall fell apart at my touch as though recoiling in fear. I stepped through it and found myself in a hallway, a tunnel of more glowing pale skin. At one end a melee glimmered in the dark. A creature twice my size tumbled to the ground and gurgled through a torn throat. Four bulging, hulking limbs each tipped in four long sharp claws twitched as I approached, as a band of others like me withdrew their horns from its viscera and sludge pumped from the wounds. The dead and the injured were multitudinous, comrades and creatures alike, gored and slashed. The floor was slick with them, the air heavy with their cries.

The space outside the hallway stunned me with its vastness. High above and far below, rows and rows of cells like mine lined the walls on either side of a never-ending chasm. Thousands of Minots had awoken and everywhere I looked there they were, tearing apart their captors in a frenzy. Enormous worms clamped the jaws at each end of them onto these cell-rows, permitting travel across the chasm. I saw a group of Minots try to cross only for the worm to shake them off, only for them to plummet into the limitless darkness. Their howls passed and faded.

I heard, “We must escape,” but no one said it. The thought echoed between us, the first Minot expression I could remember hearing. The walls were as alive as the rest of our surroundings and I felt the group reason that we could tear a way through. “The light,” I thought, “The first light. That is where we must go.” It became a consensus and we moved as one back through the tunnel, toward the source.

It opened into another chasm-prison, and here too the light blazed and thrashed. We were not afraid, but we did not know what our muscles knew, and we found they did not know much. Lashing out with horn and hoof and fist we popped the myrmidons like balloons of heaving liquid as they tore us limb from limb. We learned, knowing what each other knew, and so however clumsily we began to adapt. One ducked. Another struck. We moved together. We became a herd.

At the end of a cell in this block, some distance on the other side of its far wall, the first light towered like a sun. It was two lights, we saw. We began to dig with claws wrenched from myrmidon corpses, cutting away chunk after chunk of quivering muscle as others guarded the block. Our captors would overwhelm us piece by piece if we took too long. If this were a fruitless illusion. A cruel and intense dream. A nightmare, an eon deep, embedded in the very stench of the place. We felt it. We dug. The structure shook. The chasm was closing. The block... the walkways... the cells themselves shrank. Terrified flesh bloated all around us, and there was nothing we could do but cram together before we were crushed. As we were crushed. Snuffed out, dim stars extinguished. We dug faster.

By the time we broke through... only I remained. My legs had been grievously maimed and I could no longer think beyond the pain and the shock. But you pulled me from the fetid gap. You roared. It was all you could do, took all you could contain, not to grind that slimy tentacled diplomat, that horrific mimic, beneath your hoof right where it stood. But you understand war. You understand genocide. Chattel. Your comrades, the ones in metal, the octopi, they stood by you. Chirped something. The diplomat chirped in response. You dragged me aboard your vessel before it finished its song, and together we crossed into the void.

Now I am here.

Return to the Shepherd

Log of Elo Neto
Acting Xenodiplomat
Homedate 14.17.283,953

[...]

Ib-Na concluded translating the stranger's story and dropped her hands to her sides. They lay in the medbay, held by a bed of healmoss. Casts covered their lower body, which Ib-Na had previously applied with a trained gel that became a hard foam. For the benefit of myself and the Dabulans, she had translated from a language that has no words. She felt what the stranger knew, half-conscious and drawing shallow breaths. But she had said you, seeming to speak to Ol-So. In point of fact, the herds of the Coalition of Horns are some of the only peoples of the homeworld to know anything about war. Perhaps the stranger had intended to address her. The herdsong has such astounding properties.

Our meeting with the Dekorans having concluded with evidence of atrocities against life, we spent the trip back to the Shepherd in a tense silence. The two Dabulans, Gh'Tak and his nameless companion, were obviously communicating but I can't hear radio waves and it would violate etiquette to intentionally eavesdrop. Ib-Na and Ol-So never left the stranger, making noise only in the occasional huff or shake of the mane.

Of course I had hoped for more from an encounter, a seemingly friendly one, with descendants of the homeworld some fifty thousand years after I was born. Being only forty-seven myself, it seemed miraculous when their station negotiated our handshake protocol. The words stuck in my throat as a hologram of the Dekora-Tal appeared on the executive committee's dais, but they knew all the pleasantries. Perfectly polite. Intrigued where we were astonished. To discover they were holding Minots as chattel, that they would obliterate... did obliterate... countless lives to put down a cry for freedom... I struggled to understand. I still struggle.

To know that the Dabul of the homeworld had gone on to become an empire of slavers, of not merely a collective but a collection of anti-individuals who felt no distinction between one another, it left me aghast. The station murdered its myrmidons even as it murdered its captives because it felt nothing for either, and I knew the myrmidons felt nothing at all.

I tried not to wonder what seeds of such ambitions lay in the dreams of Dabul, but it loomed. I trusted, and of course still trust, in the governance of the Mission and of the Shepherd, in its syndicates and traditions. I have faith in a restorative justice. But at that moment, I wondered how different Gh'Tak was from the other people of the deeps. The will of Dabul crafted him through generations of elective genetic sculpting. He and few others survived the rigors of the harsh-dream education that made him the emissary he is. He knows all the pleasantries. But he did not hesitate to issue the rite of abandonment and did not respond to the Dekora-Tal's taunting. I counted him my friend and did not let this suspicion fester. Still, we did not speak.

The ship knew what to do and guided us back to the hangar in the Shepherd's Spine, where beyond an airlock waited bondfolk of medsyn and orgsyn, prepared to usher the stranger to a proper hospital and to collate the ship's telemetry. One of the medics was a Minot, a huge shaggy-haired bison of a man, and before the doors had even opened I saw him through the window recoil, kneel, and vomit. K'srt was there too, awaiting me to correspond with the executive committee. His long snout twitched with anxiety.

"What the fuck happened out there?" he hissed. The vomit did not phase him.

I gestured to the stranger and said, "We have a guest. We have, I think, an enemy as well."

"That thing has been on the dais for the last hour, raving about anything it damn well pleases."

"Any threats?"

"It assured us it will ‘have us, have us all at last, and all that's left inside’ so I assured it I would salt and swallow the blasted slug myself. But sensors indicate no energy buildup, no other craft, no projectiles. Either the station has no armaments, or it wants us alive. Come on, we should 'port to the forum."

"Of course," I replied, and so we did. Commands gestured to our omnis sent instructions to portsyn, and moments later we blipped from the hangar to the command forum, the jewel suspended at the center of the Shepherd's Ring. Its permanent gloaming and false gravity make of it a mystical space, a realm of spirits and dreams, but it is the workspace of shift after shift of tedious people like myself.

By now life was feeling positively dream-like. I could not have imagined this. And there on the central dais, surrounded by this shift’s executive committee, was the Dekora-Tal. Raving.

"Individuality divided your peoples and made them feeble, so they acted with discord and hesitance in the face of death. They could not make the choices that would save them, so paralyzed were they between fear for the self and concern for the other, so we made those choices for them. We equipped our fleets just so to fry the Er’Gakn Horror, trained our armies to devour them in kind. We evacuated entire species to our holdings. Even now the survivors are among us, who we have protected since the Horror's passing. We destroyed gateways and sacrificed our greatest vessels to confound the Horror for years and years. They could not advance while we held them, while they exterminated you!"

"Protected them through bondage," I interjected. "Archive that channel. There's nothing more we need to hear from them." So vanished the Dekora-Tal.

“Comrades,” I began to explain, “The Dekoran Oneness is a vast, interstellar empire. It has been revealed that they have committed atrocities against life and the away team including myself have issued the rite of abandonment. You can review the ship’s telemetry for Ib-Na’s translation of the attestation of the stranger. I consider these deeds unspeakable. What we must do to confront them may seem alien, even cruel. But the homeworld was not without atrocity. We have faced evil before, and we banished it, for all time! For as long as any of us had lived before passing through the first gateway, such acts were unthinkable. To oppose them we will have to call upon monstrous knowledge. We will have to make war upon the Dekora. It goes without saying that we are only one ship, but that cannot be any excuse. We must destroy their ability to do this ever again, and whatever spirits drive them to do it, no matter how long it takes.”

Others in the forum’s outer stations annotated my words and reported them across the Ring. The die was cast.

I could hardly believe my own voice. Auters have never made war, never since the beginning of life on the homeworld. Most peoples haven’t. The only such conflict in history, really, was between the Sound of Hooves and the Felidari Regency of Monarch Lessi Protialuth Meili, around Homeyear negative-sixty-four-thousand. I hadn’t thought I’d need to invoke it in my lifetime. I knew it, of course. Minot herds rejected the yoke en masse and moved upon the Regency capital like a tidal wave. Millions upon millions of hooves turned over the ground as they stampeded, and nothing remained of the oppressors in their path. The capital burned. The next monarch announced that Minots had been deserving of personhood all along, and that the Felidari diet would no longer include their flesh, or the flesh of virtually anything larger than a rat. The Coalition of Horns’ traditions are rooted in awareness of and vigilance toward atrocity. Felidar don’t eat meat. It’s hard to forget it happened, but… that was three and a half hundred thousand years ago. Plus the fifty thousand from the faulty gateway, I suppose.

"We have to liberate the rest," K'srt asserted. Golden Plumage and Glek nodded. Er-Ka hid her revulsion. She was still swallowing it then.

Thess fluttered massive chitin-plated wings and crowed, "How? They liquidated the populace to prevent liberation. Maybe... we could stun the organism."

K'srt nodded vigorously, passing his words through a chirruping laugh, "Yes! Jolt unconscious a being larger than the largest vessel ever produced in the home system. I love it!" He was not sarcastic.

Golden Plumage sang, "For now we must leave the system. If it is the case that the station has no armaments, they may be in the process of calling in appropriate forces to capture us. We should try to lose their trail through the gate network as quickly as possible. Then we can determine the time and place of our counteraction."

"We will have to construct the means to fight," Er-Ka added, "That will take time."

Perhaps an hour later, the shift ended. We set our course to a gate out of the system and spent the rest of the hour outlining a five-year proposal...

For war.

Interlude

Medsyn analysis
Notes of bondfolk Jemis Utripith Kilestil
Homedate 15.17.283,953

As reported, crushing pressure caused multiple breaks in the hips, femurs, knees, and especially the hooves, which splintered. The quick application of a trained gel means we can expect a full recovery with minimal residual impediments. Minor aches in Winter, that sort of thing. But it will be several months until the casts can be removed.

Although notes from the away team indicate the stranger exhibited affinity with the herdsong, by the time they had regained consciousness it appeared to have passed. Medsyn Minots were unable to discern the stranger’s voice, nor did the stranger give any indication of understanding them. Bondfolk Ib-Na speculated that the voice is a muscle, or like a muscle, and that it may have atrophied in captivity, or been artificially forced to atrophy. Orgsyn records of the Dekora-Tal quote it remarking at length about the herdsong, about it perplexing and taunting them, indicating they may have been manipulating Minots with scientific ends.

The stranger’s eyes do exhibit sensitivity to light appropriate for eyes that have never observed light of any intensity. Their teeth appear totally unused, aside from the bits of Dekora-Myr remaining in their mouth after the melee. Their muscles show a certain level of stimulation but not active development, and their blood has trace elements of complex synthetic molecules — micromachines.

We have isolated and cataloged the molecules retrieved from the sample. Based on continuing monitoring, it appears the stranger’s body has begun to filter them out. It is still unclear what effect these machines have.

It is beyond any doubt that the stranger is a Minot. A sequencing of their genome revealed signs of ancestry across the homeworld, but particularly with the Yaken herds of Yuliak. Still the stranger possesses uncommon physical features: stark white fur, almost entirely absent of pigmentation, covers their whole body, but their silver irises suggests this is not albinism. Their horns are unusually short, poking mere inches out of the skull. This is likely due to genetic sculpting, but if so then the sculpting is minimal. They are as tall and as heavy as Minots tend to be, and have all the expected organs. Their gut flora is devastatingly absent and will need to be medically restored if they are to adopt a traditional diet.

The stranger is responsive and unafraid. A tea for the pain keeps them still enough to not interfere with the casts. Even with their new surroundings, they do not exhibit aversion or anxiety. Tranquil, more than from the tea. Although they show signs of being well into adulthood, considering the stranger’s initial attestation, I wonder if it really is possible they had been denied consciousness for decades. Awake for the first time, the only survivor of a nightmare... and proof, of home.

Our families. Our children. Our peoples. They spanned the stars.

Journal of the Descendant

Entry one.

Elo Neto has given me a journal. He told me to write in it with the words I have learned. He told me at the daisy-blossom celebration that it had been one year since I arrived on the Shepherd, and that he knew this because at the last daisy-blossom celebration he could not think of anything else but the stranger that had arrived. He told me the parades were as bright, the craftspeople and their wares as plentiful and beauteous, abounding with the essence of renewal that springs from the daisy-blossom as it opens to a beckoning wind. I said I did not remember it. He reminded me I was unconscious.

Words are powerful magic. I see Elo weaving spells with his chittered language and others respond, influenced. He has taught me my own words that I make with my hands. The journal reads my hand-signs and records them in a way I can understand them: in a trilling voice like Elo’s. What could I use my magic for? When I speak, what is heard, and what becomes of myself-in-the-words?

Ol-So and Ib-Na were at the festival, but not together. I saw Ol-So’s bone shirt and auburn- striped fur amid the throng of Minots and Auters and Harps and Raks and Felidar and Ik’nur and Haroot and Dods and Saurek for only a moment but I knew it was her. Elo noticed and summoned Ol- So with his magic, and she came to us leisurely. She held out gifts for us, a figurine of some aquatic mammal or large fish for Elo and a grass-apple on-a-stick for me. She told Elo about the figurine, and Elo was surprised to find he could make it glow and move. “It can remember,” Ol-So said with her hands, “And dream.”

A grass-apple is made from a paste of vanilla-wheat shoots ground into the fruit of an apple tree. The paste can be dried as rations, crumbled for seasoning, or in this case fried in vegetable oil and wrapped around a wooden rod. The crunch is enveloping. The taste of honey lingers. I threw my head back in joy for the gift.

While I told Ol-So about my lessons, Ib-Na found us. She had come with gifts too: a basket of produce, a share of the ration from habsyn’s latest harvest. Elo took a golden apple from the basket, and Ol-So a bundle of mossy stalks. Ib-Na took a bowl from her pack and squeezed a purple fruit in her fist above it, filling it with a dark blue liquid. Pulp swam in it. She put away the squashed fruit and gave me the bowl. “Tough skin, good jelly. Drink,” she said. It was watery more than syrupy, but the jelly slid tickling down my throat, thick and sweet.

“Ol-So tells me you are learning Mission?” she said, but Ol-So had said nothing. Elo has told me that Minots have a way of knowing each other that is without motion, but I am a Minot and I cannot know others in this way.

“A little,” I signed, “I study.”

The words sprang from her hands like dew flecking off a leaf in morning light, but they slipped through mine. I fumbled and there was no magic. She did not respond to the essence.

“That is a great undertaking,” she said, “You must be diligent. I see diligence in your eyes.”

Ol-So nodded. “I see it as well.”

They talked more and I listened, but I did not speak. I watched their hands and I listened to Elo’s trills and squeaks and I imagined the cause and effect of each word, or each phrase, of phrases intermingled and transposed. The interplay of beings is more than expressions and etiquette, but I am told that is where it starts. Some greater pattern imbues their messages with power, as though they are only plucking the magic from the strings of a web as it shifts around them, as it shifts them.

After I got tired, Elo and I took the train back. People notice me like there is magic to me just by existing, but I do not control this influence. Their eyes follow me on the train, flitting when they think I cannot see. They do not say hello or bring gifts like a host of a guest or like a guest of a host. They notice me more than they notice each other. I hope when I am a great wizard like Elo I learn spells of concealment.

It was already late when we returned. The sunlight had disappeared behind the Ring’s curve to shine upon some other strand of the megabiome. My hands do not have eyes that would miss the light, so I have stayed up practicing. Elo is off-shift now and the night shift is in, but it is only Foo Booroo and they are no fun.

Good night.

...

Entry two. — Seventeen hours later.

Elo read my journal. He had it play back my hand motions as holograms while I listened to an Auter’s toothy voice announce my words. We talked about form and nuance, and I practiced sentences by making them over and over again. He showed me how to make journal entries that he would not read.

He told me that people notice me for many reasons, but they are benign. The crew of the Shepherd never expected me, just as I never expected them. An etiquette is still emerging.

Another xenodiplomat, a Felidar, spoke with Elo about something. I saw them growling and yowling but I don’t know any Mission-Felidar yet so its magic was lost on me. Elo clicked his tongue and his teeth, then stilled an angry quiver, nodded, and sent them away.

Foo Booroo left a book for me. It is a device that will read a story to me, or present it in some other comprehensible form. The title is Extragavant Belligerance and I can make it play in Mission- Minot hand-signs or chittering Mission-Auter. I have only just started to read it. To understand I must play each section many times, but it seems to concern two clans of Auters on an archipelago on the homeworld, and a stranger called Kerix Beryx who emerges from the tides. Foo left a note that said, “Politesse has many faces.”

We are doing something else now.

...

Entry Three — Private. Seven hours later.

A Dekoran cruiser warped into the system today. That’s what the Felidar told Elo, but I know it because of the lights behind the sky. I didn’t notice them yesterday, but today I realized the green glittering dots zipping around like flying stars were Mission drones and vehicles. They docked in a hurry and a procession of twenty four disembodied voices in sequence instructed us to seek a safety harness due to emergency maneuvers. A xenodiplomat urged me to lay down, and then made me do so.

They and others created a harness around me by placing clamps into the dirt, which formed a net that held me down. Then they did this for each other. Then the earth rattled.

If I had been standing I would have fallen, but laying restrained I only rolled and shifted gently against the soft loam. We waited like that for hours as the day turned to dusk and the heavens grew pink and orange. Then out in space a missile exploded like a sun shouting itself into existence before winking out again. A colossal wall of gray stone, almost imperceptible beyond the evening sky, cracked and bowed before the force. Invisible hands bent it back into shape before another missile burst against another such wall.

“Oh Goddess,” a xenodiplomat whimpered nearby. Another soothed them, “We have done our best. The shields are holding. The shields will hold.”

I could do nothing but watch the fireballs expand gently, silently. Eventually the glittering spectacle vanished and the sky flashed a crackling neon blue. Another procession of voices declared that the need for harnesses was over and the xenodiplomats undid each others’ restraints, and then they undid mine. Someone mentioned no one had been hurt, that the shields had held.

Elo had gone to the command forum earlier so he wasn’t around when it happened.

It happened because of me. The magic others see in me appeared in their eyes, twisted in the reflection. No one said anything so the silence spoke for them. I am here, and so the Dekora tried to destroy the ship, and they will try again until they have succeeded.

Did I do this? Is this why they look at me like that?

...

Entry Four. — Fifteen hours later.

This is the story of Kerix Beryx, the envoy of no one, clansfolk to no folk, bonded to no duties; known only to the sea which offered them up.

They rose standing on a coral-island when the tide suddenly swept out one day, like the archipelago had drained away to induce their arrival. Members of two clans found him there, the Turitur and the Jetelit, and Gruvu Uzu of the Jetelit asked, “Who are you?”

Kerix bore no signs of any clan: no jewelry, no tattoos, no garb or known manner. They looked Gruvu in the eye and said — nothing. They had recognized the question, and at their full height made to respond it, but — was it possible? — refused without even issuing a refusal.

Veji Teli of the Turitur presumed it was a rudeness in response to some Jetelit rudeness past, so she spoke up, “Who are you?” Kerix stared her down wordlessly.

Then they dove into the returning waters and disappeared. Auter are agile swimmers, but none who had seen them could find them now.

A rudeness? Or...?

Kerix at the barracks, retired by the fire, devouring nuts left roasting did not greet the community who had tried to greet them upon the coral-island. But they said, “You draw a great bounty from around you, and I am grateful!”

It was a guestly thing to say, but with so many absent steps the whole community took it for the utmost rudeness. But no one dared to disgrace the sanctity of guest-right, so they did not drive him out or keep him from the bounty. An elder of both clans, a measured and precise figure whose words had accrued weight by deft supplication, Fuli Buli asked, “Who are you?”

Kerix Beryx said nothing, but did not stare Fuli in the eyes. Instead they turned away and passed into the descending night. They had taken all the Krulli nuts, but placed two on the entry-plate where offerings to guests and spirits are made. Perplexing!

In the Auter languages of the homeworld, this story is recorded as a poem. My translation preserves some rhyme and meter but Mission-Auter is, I’m told, more rigid and specific than the homeworld tongues, which can better rely on ambiguity to emphasize the many simultaneous implications of each act. Still it is a delight to hear the narrating Auter’s voice soar and stutter and pause with such intent. I want to have such control of my words, such mastery of pretext. Foo Booroo tells me it is the first in a little poetic universe, the legends of Kerix Beryx, the trickster guest. I hope they bring me more.

...

Entry one hundred and eighteen. — Thirteen months later.

I am to be named.

Yesterday I received a letter on my omni as a local fisherclan of Saurek and Auters taught me to make knots. My fingers are gaining in dexterity and I am astounded at what they can accomplish now. The fishers ooh and aah and laugh at my inexperienced efforts, but it is good-natured. The season’s harvest was recently completed so they have time on their hands. I can understand enough Mission- Saurek that a crewmember among the fisherclan could translate the local dialects for me. Even if I couldn't understand the details, I overheard an elder naming dolphins from the pod they hunt with, calling them like old friends.

The letter was in Mission-Harp, but included a translation — perhaps a source material — in a
Harpish dialect. I listened to the recording play an old raven's barks and chirps.

Treasured guest,

We have made a gift for you. A name, to know us who welcome you. Please come that we may share it. Honored family will find you at Ministrathus.

• Gleaming Eye, Memorialist of the Red-Tailed Coven

Ib-Na's coven. Harps and Minots have lived closely for almost half a million years, Elo has taught me. As Minots do not name each other, it is traditionally Harps who do that. A truncated form of that name becomes the common moniker. Perhaps Gleaming Eye named Ib-Na too. I wonder what her full name is.

This morning I met Ol-So and Ib-Na at the Ministrathus train station, a few hours travel counter-clockwise along the Ring, inland from Kithis Irathsus, the coastal association where I live with the xenodiplomats. They stood together atop a knoll of shaped-wood guard-rails and waiting areas with roofs of living thatch. A light rain pleased Ib-Na, but it made Ol-So shiver. She drew a neatly-folded yaken-hair cloak from her pack and put it on. She took another and offered it to me. The thick hair was joined in tightly-woven braids of braids, and I found its weight around my shoulders reassuring.

"Ol-So, are you a part of the coven?" I asked. She shook her head.

"No. I wanted to attend so Ib-Na invited me. A name is a great gift; it pleases me to see you honored."

I noticed a jagged line, a scar on her left horn that seemed to pass all the way through it. Foo Booroo had told me she... fought someone, because of what happened. Because of me. She didn't used to have that scar.

"Come. We will arrive at the roost by nightfall. I know the way, but we will walk it," Ib-Na signed, then turned around and set off into the woods along a sparse trail. I would have missed it if I had not seen her walking it.

The rain was marvelous. I held out my palm and felt it tickle. Ol-So huddled in her cloak and walked behind me, shunting me forward whenever I dawdled in wonder. Small creatures fluttered in the branches of trees, and I saw other mammals watching us idly. Passing Minots were apparently of little note to them.

"Who are they?" I tapped on my palm to speak while walking, "The ones flying. Watching."

Ib-Na replied, "They are my neighbors and family. Sparrows. Deer. Squirrels."

"Why do they watch us?"

"Because we are in their home. In their ways they are speaking to us, too. The watching is only a part."

I tried to count the different sorts of creatures that I saw, but before long I began to doubt my ability to discern. Were some the same sort because they looked similar, or were they distinct by some measure I could not fathom? Dekora-Tal could take any shape, so how could I trust appearances to reflect a kind?

"It is a long way, Ib-Na," Ol-So tapped, "You subject a guest to the wet and the cold. How will you seek forgiveness?"

Ib-Na snorted. Her torso shook with laughter.

"The wet and the cold are the way of this place. How can I apologize? But you seek appeasement. Time-passing, to distract from an uncomfortable unfamiliarity."

I thought it strange that they would have this conversation out loud, for my benefit, when they knew instinctively all that the other thought. How could Ol-So make Ib-Na laugh with words, when she knew the sentiment before it was said? Was there some power in the saying of it?

Ib-Na tapped, "Friends, let me tell you a story."

Walking together for hours in the forest thick, I listened to the echoes of her fingers and palms amid the raindrops and birdsong.

Ibba and the Grux'Nis

Let me tell you of my ancestor Ibba, by way of a toothsome, fearsome creature that lives around the marshlands of Quailen which precede the Yuliak mountains: the Grux'nis. It lurks in the murk and devours those who come too close, or who become lost in the bogs. Fish, birds, and mammals large and small succumb to its sudden speed and overwhelming strength, and its thick scales rebuff any resistance. Sometimes certain prey give a Grux'nis a taste for certain flesh – for Minot flesh – and they go out to seek it among the herds. They follow the brackish water until it becomes the rivers that traverse the lowland forests and grasslands of the Free Herds. Their eyes do not break the surface as they float placidly with the current, conserving energy.

One such traveler, a long way from its home, found the sister of Ibba at a reedy riverbank. Ibba was not far and charged the predator, thrashing her horns. She held its jaws open with her bare hands and threw it back into the water, where it retreated into the deep of the riverbed. Her sister Olki had been bitten and torn, and Ibba raced to staunch the bleeding, disinfect the wounds, and close the gashes, as the Healing Syndicate had taught her. By the time it was done, Olki had fainted. Ibba carried her back to the herd.

Their herd, they of One Thousand Oaks, did not have experience with the strange reptile. Ibba had been lucky, they agreed. Some of the Grux'nis' jagged teeth, quickly lost and quickly grown, had become embedded in her hands when she kept it from eating her. The herd required new knowledge to resolve this, but the next Gathering would not occur for another three seasons. Ibba decided to travel herself to the nearest herds to see what could be known.

After many days of galloping from herd to herd, she felt a familiarity as she approached they of Vanilla-Wheat Shoots. Someone in their herd knew of the creature, had seen it, had fought it – and lost. A second attack faced a united front that slew the Grux'nis. She saw in their herd-song all the volunteers of the Protector Syndicate gathered at a muddy beach bearing shields and spears and short knives. Hunting weapons.

She protested at the experience of this memory. We have no reason to hunt. We do not eat meat. A reply echoed in the herd-song: when a being finds itself living to kill, to kill you... one finds a reason.

So she met with the Protector Syndicate of this herd, who showed her their shields coated with a slick grease that made the Grux'nis' teeth and claws slide from its surface, their spears with obsidian tips bathed in a powerful sleeping powder, and their barbed knives with deep grooves. The knife was a last resort, they explained. If one found themselves overcome, it was their duty to stick the beast to cause it to bleed out. Ideally, they continued, the sleeping poison would allow them to lay it to rest with peace and dignity. Luckily no one had to employ their knife. A spear that punctured deep had destroyed a vital organ, killing it in seconds. Its dying croak rattled in Ibba's conscience.

She returned to her herd equipped with violent machines, burdened by the thought of them. Creatures die, and some are even killed by the choices of the herds... but usually as accidents. Stampedes. Panics. Self-defense. Is it different to intend? She would have rathered the stranger found another way to live.

But even her herd understood the need. They welcomed her home with feast and festivity: mushrooms and berries, apples and grasses, fire and dancing. She learned the herd had been conserving water and avoiding the riverbank, but deviating from their migration path in search of other water sources was not yet necessary. They awaited her expertise.

Ibba decided to lure the beast herself. The knife would ensure that no more than one more person would be harmed, and she wanted it pacified sooner than their own Protector Syndicate could be trained. Olki refused but her sister insisted. Gently they butted heads, and Olki felt her sister's conviction. She watched her leave. Worry hummed in her wake.

At the riverbank Ibba waited, hooves lapped by the shallows. Day became night. Night became day. She could feel it waiting too. Thinking. But it hungered before she tired and rushed at her from the deeps. It flew from the water, claws skittering across her shield.

Preparing to lay the obsidian spear in its belly, she saw something in its eye: a worm. A worm that affects the mind. A rare worm, known to one of the herds she visited, they of Sundered Pines who treated it with a simple tincture. It changed things.

She thrust her spear at the ravenous predator as it circled her. She wanted to cut it, just enough to put it to sleep. Just enough to administer the tincture. So as it leapt at her again and again, she turned it away with her shield, grunting and bellowing as her hooves splashed, and lashed at the minor parts: the tough hide that the obsidian sliced, the blood that drank the sleeping powder, and the resilient muscle beneath that absorbed the wound in stride. The reptile slowed, exhausted, until it laid down before her and snored.

It awoke bound but clear-eyed. Ibba would not take chances, not more than this chance of knowing a Grux'nis in peace, and though it struggled she watched it. It was nervous now more than hungry, more than vicious. So after a time she brought it to the river's edge and undid the bonds. It fled, disappearing into the river with all the sound of a single droplet. After that there were no more attacks. The relief at violence averted brought great celebration.

Thirty years later, the herd of One Thousand Oaks had followed their migration path all the way back to the fields beside the riverbank. Ibba had become an elder of the Healing and Protector syndicates, and the shield-spear-knife technique was known to every protector, the worm to every healer. She returned to the bank where she had fought the Grux'nis and waited, chewing gently on reeds. Day became night. Night became day. She felt her old acquaintance thinking, there in the deeps, until it came ashore. It did not fly with rage or snarl for blood. It lumbered, plodding one flopping foot at a time over the grit, to her. It remembered.

In the morning gloam they remained together in peace and silence.

Naming Ceremony

All around Ol-So and the stranger, Harps perched on branches high and low. Minots rested on all fours on the forum's wooden platform. A central firepit's low embers cast them in amber outlines, half-faces and glinting eyes. Its heat washed over them and through them, filling the nameless stranger with a warmth full of life.

Garbed in shimmering gems arrayed in braids that clinked against each other with each step, a great creature emerged from the darkness lumbering from the forum's edge. A wooden mask painted like a Harp's slender feathered face hid their own. The long, sharp beak that protruded from the mask and their horns that rose above its edges made them appear like a mystical chimera. They shot their arms out and up, braids glittering like richly baubled wings, and moaned in a baritone that the stranger felt in their chest.

Their arms snapped back to their breast and spread again just as quickly before the fire, casting a dust upon it that made the embers flare to a great yellow. Then, with wide motions that encompassed the whole body, they began to speak:

"Listen! Do you hear the eons? The torrents of time cascading through the now? The spirits of our ancestors course through us, through the air, through the soil. Their toil, their misery, their joy and their peace enchant us, imbue us, empower us to navigate ages with wisdom, with strength, and with compassion."

The stranger could hardly tell through the garb, but it was Ib-Na underneath. She danced her words. She stomped and leapt and stretched syllables with hands that shook with force.

"Together! Together! Together we banish want, banish hunger, banish terror, with a power that has no age. But we have not always known this power inside us all. Tonight, we remember the anguish of ancestors who allowed greed to betray it, who it betrayed in turn..."

With another deft sweep of the arm, Ib-Na made green tongues leapt from the pit and as it settled two Harps in their own masks floated down from above the canopy with wings outstretched to each of the orator's sides. Immediately they began to circle the firepit, following each other across its flames but stepping lively, hopping from place to place and gliding with wings delicately and precisely catching just so much air. They stumbled, soared flailing, even fell and rolled back to their feet, and then did it again in another turn around the forum.

"Upon a cliff held together by the penetrating, enduring tendrils of sparse Kressa trees, the sun- drinking survivors of when this land was shorn and the cliff was given shape, lived two Harps. They shared this craggy range, and eked from it their lives. It took dedication and care to snap the lizards from the pumice hollows, to catch beetles in flight, to make a nest in the recesses, to cache the small bounties, and they despised the meticulous labor of it," Ib-Na said, flowing before the firepit as she told the story. Her baubled braids flew and fanned about her, catching the light like a storm of emeralds.

The dancers tapped a quick beat on the floor with their beaks, pecking between their talons between each step, creating a furious rhythm from the sound of beak and claw on the molded wood that heightened as the stranger listened. When at last it seemed unbearable, this stamping and tapping, each threw back their head and crowed aloud. They locked eyes and hunched over, turning heads and bodies from side to side, moving warily with clacking steps.

"The neighbors conferred, bargained, and agreed to share their bounty by hiding it in a single cache, that one's fortune might displace another's want."

Throwing their heads back and calling again, the performers turned away from each other to the coven gathered all around. Haughtily they strolled, bristling mischievously. The stranger saw as one passed — a lithe black bird adorned with rows of shining anklets — that their masks had no eye-holes. Their synchronicity did not rely on sight.

"Secretly they despised each other. Ugly! Unskilled! Unintelligent! Crass! Condescending! Craven! they called each other in their minds. They imagined their bounty too little to share, their own want the greater. A greed became a jealousy that brewed the agreement from a plot: to steal the cache, to steal away, before the other could know."

Each halted in their strolling and leered over their shoulder, over their mask and through the fire's green glare. The stranger saw one dark Harp eye full of light through the fire, emanating intensity. They hopped to face each other and began to circle once more, singing sweet notes but pecking at the air, flapping their wings threateningly. They settled into the peck-step from before, but it had slowed and grown cautious. One pecked out of time and the other looked up to observe; later, the other pecked out of time and the first stopped to supervise. Finally the rhythm wound to a halt that filled the seconds with preponderance. The compatriot-conspirators gazed up and out, beyond the audience, until with a great beating of wings they both flew off. Their masks fell, clattering through the branches to the forest floor far below.

Ib-Na hunched over as she swayed, saying with gentle, quiet motions: "The duo departed to range for other ranges before returning for the cache, but the cliff was not a lonely place, and a large bounty gives itself away..."

A third, fourth, and fifth Harp slipped from the crowd in bright red masks streaked about the beak with charcoal. These masks had eye-holes, and little pointed ears that rose from the upper corners of each mask. They walked unceremoniously, unadorned, in the silence that followed the pair's departure. Unevenly they stepped around the fire, skittering about it as though at random until all at once they rose to their full heights and spun around, tossing their masks into the fire with a great burst of light and heat as they spread tall lashing licks to the sky. No longer green, the blaze had grown a deep azure.

The trio had disappeared in the flash and no sooner did they than the duo returned from the sky, landing awkwardly with several unbalanced hops. They set about shouting at each other, cawing and bleating arythmically. Only Ib-Na retained poise as she slammed and wove her hands through the air.

"They accused each other of fulfilling their own plot, but the evidence of squirrels abounded before their eyes. Their covetousness had made a perfect offering for their rivals. Accusations gave way to what they could not deny: for seeking to starve the other, they would now both starve."

They chased each other, leaping over the fire with wings outstretched, making of each dancer a vision of black and blue drawn as though from nightmare as they flew through bright flecks of ash. The Harps raced and leapt to evade each other, to catch each other, until their movements grew tired, their forms irregular. With one last encounter they fell apart, slamming to the ground side by side. With all the fight gone out of them, they gathered up slowly to a roosting position.

"There was only one path now," Ib-Na intoned with signs that extended for many seconds, "And they would walk it together."

One sang a handful of notes and the other replied with the same melody. They continued with another verse and again the other repeated it. By the third verse they spoke as one in a language the stranger did not know, but its song grew as voices from the coven joined it. Finally Ib-Na translated with her body:

"Bound by a memory of hunger and want, we commit to each other; to one future made full by many lives."

The verse swelled and soared in the voice of the coven as Ib-Na sang it too with her bounding, swaying form. It entered the stranger's heart and they were taken by the current of its spirit, planted firmly now in the presence of this place beyond want. It was so unbearably real that it drove them to their hands and knees, mouth agape and eyes lost in the fire in this, the living land of their living ancestors.

Only as the blue flame died to a natural orange glow did sense return to them. The performers and Ib-Na alike had disappeared into the audience. The song had become a disembodied hum. Ol-So clasped the stranger on the shoulder and signed with one hand, "Did you like that?"

They nodded joyously.

Ib-Na in her garb appeared at the stranger's side. She jingled as she announced, "Good! Because it is not yet done."

She took a knee by them and made small, private words. A theatrical whisper.

"Hear! Hear stranger. Feel the life in your breath, in and out; stars through and through. You come to us from astonishing places. The strength of ancestors we once knew as friends glows in you, the survivor of unthinkable paths and terrible deeds. You fought your way to us.

"We commit to cherish you like all life. To honor your struggle and your grace, I make a gift to you of this name:"

No horror can forever hold
That light which shines eternal;
What monsters cage us must to dust return,
And from all dust, all life is born;
I know the promise of freedom
Etched upon the halls of time:
Il-Si!

The coven took up the poem in verse, singing the words as a great chorus so that it would be known to all. The night heaved with the sound.

Ib-Na placed her forehead against the stranger's and the words became a flood of sensation, a landscape of thought and feeling flowing into their consciousness. A muscle grew strong and they knew their name like a guiding star, like a home built for the soul. The immutable, immovable knowledge rose like the dawn.

Il-Si opened her eyes and saw Ib-Na looking at her through the holes in her mask. She saw the mountains there, the lakes and rivers of the homeworld and the generations of soil ground finer and fuller of vitality by herd after herd, season after season. She saw Ib-Na born to nine parents and raised on a half-built ring in space, tending to a hurt friend and the animal that hurt her, resolving amid tears over a plod of soil in the grove of her Er'Sol parent who refused all names. She saw the moment Ib-Na felt the being that would know itself as Il-Si first sense her through the murk and the haze.

A muscle grew tired and it was gone. A mystical chimera loomed in the ember light as a hundred Harps twittered and called to the heavens above the canopy.

Il-Si put her hand on her chest and made the motions for the parts of her name.