Snare

‘It was also supposed to keep everyone from killing off the Chof, and the Chof from killing off us. Neither of those parts of it have worked so well.’

  Behind the wall a blue and purple meadow stretched out to a stream, the same river that they had camped beside the night before. Midas trees grew along it, tangled here with pink bamboid and tall maroon ferns. Neither Ammadin nor Loy wanted to wait to look at the wall until after they made camp. They did tend the horses first, and out of prudence wrapped the dead yap-packer with fresh leaves, then sank it in the cold river with stones. They left the rest of their gear in a heap and headed for the flexstone.

  Ammadin felt her heart pounding. Here there could be answers, here there could be truth. The first panel, at the end of the wall on the side facing the road, displayed just that, not that she could grasp it at that moment. The carving showed the Herd as she had always seen it, but near the spiral floated a lone dot with an arrow connecting it to a square. Inside the square was a big dot with circles around it. Another arrow pointed to the small dot on the fourth circle.

  Ammadin shrugged and moved on to the next panel, which told her even less. A round ball, marked with a row of little squares and some wavy lines, supported a long cluster of what might have been tubes wound round with ropes and decorated with dots and arrowheads. At the far end of the tubes dangled another ball, much smaller, decorated with three arrowheads, point to point to form a circular symbol. At the third picture, however, she felt her breath catch in her throat. Flying things were sailing over the plains, flying things were landing among hills, long sleek tubular machines with pointed noses and swept-back wings.

  ‘Merde!’ Loy muttered. ‘Well, so much for that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ammadin said.

  ‘So much for the Landfall Treaty and you. The Tribes aren’t supposed to know all this.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because your ancestors didn’t want you to know.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense. Why the lies?’ Ammadin turned to look at her. ‘I’m sick to death of hearing one lie after another.’

  Loy took a frightened step back. Ammadin followed.

  ‘Why tell the Kazraks they came from over the seas, why tell us we’ve always been here? Water Woman told me that the Tribes came with the rest of you, in those ships.’ Ammadin pointed to the carvings. ‘She was right, wasn’t she? Why have you people been lying to us?’

  ‘Because that’s what we promised to do. It’s all in the Landfall Treaty.’

  ‘Oh is it? How come I’ve never heard all of it, then?’

  ‘Hey!’ Loy snarled right back. ‘Do you think I like to lie? My business is finding out the truth of things.’

  Ammadin took a deep breath and spoke more calmly. ‘No, I don’t suppose you do like it. Sorry. I’m just so sick of being frustrated by half-told stories.’

  ‘So am I. Look, I’ve studied the Landfall Treaty for years. I’ve picked it clean of every scrap of historical information I could, and I’ve spent more years hunting down surviving letters and other records from that period. Even so, I can’t tell you everything because I don’t know everything. But I’ll tell you what I know. Fair?’

  ‘Fair. After all, it’s the only bargain we can strike.’

  ‘That’s true, isn’t it? Unfortunately.’ Loy paused for a smile. ‘But anyway, your ancestors left their home planet to live an entirely new way. Now, I don’t know what they left behind. That’s an answer that’s eluded me for my entire career. We know the Kazraks wanted a place where they could be pure and live simple religious lives without a lot of machines around. No secrets there. But your people – they’re the mystery, because after that first generation, no one knew the truth.’

  ‘Wait! You mean my ancestors lied to their own children.’

  ‘As far as I know they did, yes. Let’s see if I can remember how the clause in the Treaty goes. Something like, the people of the Tribes shall belong to the grass and believe they have always belonged to the grass.’

  ‘But who wrote that in?’

  ‘A woman named Lisa Barlamew. You may have heard of her under her comnee name. Lisa adin Bar, Mother of Horses.’

  ‘Yes, yes of course I have.’

  ‘She’s one of the signatories to the Treaty. So is Dallas ador Jenz, Father of Arrows.’

  ‘Gods!’ Ammadin shook her head as if she could physically throw off her confusion. ‘I don’t even know what to say to that. It’s the opposite of what I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘That you Cantonneurs were lying for reasons of your own, of course. Why do you think I got so angry?’

  ‘Huh, wait till I tell you the big truths.’ Loy grinned at her. ‘Things are very very different, Ammi, than you were taught.’

  ‘I’m beginning to see that, all right. Go on.’

  Loy moved back to the first panel. ‘See that spiral? That’s the galaxy, the Herd. It’s made up of suns just like the one hanging in the sky over there. A lot of them have planets just like the one we’re standing on circling around them. This is the world, Ammi.’ Loy pointed to the dot on the fourth circle. ‘It’s round.’

  ‘Everyone knows that. The world’s round, it circles the sun, that’s what makes the seasons.’

  ‘Oh.’ Loy glanced away and blushed. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been thinking that the Tribes know a lot less than they do.’

  ‘A lot of people seem to think that. Go on.’

  ‘All right. We H’mai started life on one planet near the edge of the Herd, but we invented ships to take us to other worlds, and we settled those, too. Do you believe me?’

  ‘I don’t see any reason why you’d lie.’

  ‘That’ll do to get on with, yes. We’ll come back to the galaxy later. This next panel –’ She stopped in front of the balls and tubes. ‘What in hell is this thing? Something else I don’t know. Okay, we move on to panel three. You’ve heard legends of flying ships, right? They’re all true. Look at the next one. There are the Settlers getting out of the ships, our ancestors, bless ’em. There’s Chursavva the King –’

  ‘Not a king. Chursavva Great Mother. She. A true Chiri Michi.’

  ‘She was female? Then Chiri Michi must mean –’

  ‘That she’s a mother, that she lays fertile eggs. We’re finally getting somewhere.’ Ammadin crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Keep talking.’

  In the golden light of a summer day they moved along the wall, while Loy talked and pointed, laughed even, at the pleasure of explaining what she knew. Ammadin realized that her students back at the Loremasters Guild were learning from a true master indeed. Her story swept Ammadin into a grander world than any she could possibly have imagined: ancestors who sailed between the stars, who had settled many planets with many forms of sapient life, who had evolved a society to deal with all these peoples as equals and without endless wars.

  But their starships, those marvels in themselves, did make at times, somehow or other, enormous mistakes. No one alive now knew how or why the mistake had happened, but these particular ships ended up so far from the settled planets that they could find no way back.

  ‘But my ancestors were a lucky bunch of bastards,’ Loy said at last. ‘The odds against finding a habitable planet out here, so far beyond the central cluster of the galaxy – God in Heaven, they must have been enormous! The Chof were the ones with the bad luck. The planet belonged to them, and all of a sudden they were sharing it with another sapient species, one that had the weapons to wipe out every last one of them.’

  ‘I’m surprised the Ancestors didn’t,’ Ammadin said. ‘I’m glad, but I’m surprised.’

  ‘That’s why the Treaty exists. H’mai history is full of ugly things, such as our ancient habit of exterminating whole nations of people we didn’t like. We all fear the Kazraks now, but as H’mai go, they’re not really that bad. Other groups of H’mai did much worse in the past. So we knew better than to trust our own kind here.’

  ‘There’s so
mething I still don’t understand. You say they kept knowledge from us, but they didn’t hide it all. You have that gun. Spirit riders and sorcerers have crystals. They left flexstone buildings behind them and all kinds of other things.’

  ‘I don’t understand that, either. The Treaty pretty much forbids anything technological. One thing that’s pretty clear, though, from some other records, is that my ancestors weren’t thinking real clearly. They were panicked, actually, when you come right down to it.’

  ‘That play we saw in Sarla – the man in black talked about this, right?’

  ‘Yes. “By the waters of the Rift we sat down and wept, because we remembered the stars of home.” That line always gets me, because the “we” are my people, the Cantonneurs. They didn’t want to settle here or anywhere. They were running a ferry service. They were supposed to take the religious fanatics and the comnees to two different planets, but somehow or other they failed. That’s why they panicked. We know that the fleet was huge, and that the ships were huge, too, so there were thousands of crew members, enough to found colonies. When they were stranded here against their will, they named the planet Snare.’

  ‘Snare? This language we’re speaking, the spirit language. Is that what they spoke on the ships?’

  ‘Yes. It was a kind of common tongue, called Tekspeak.’ Loy stared at the tubular ships for a long moment. ‘They’re way too small. I guess if they showed them as large as they were, it wouldn’t fit onto the panel.’ She glanced at the next. ‘Here, look! They’re unloading the horses.’

  Down a ramp from the side of one of the flying ships horses were walking in a long line. Assorted people stood around, Chof as well as human. Loy peered at letters written above the carving.

  ‘Chursavva and Lisa adin Bar watch the creation of horses,’ she read. ‘What? That’s not true! What do they think they mean, creation of horses? They had horses back on the home planet.’

  ‘Are you saying that these pictures are false, then?’

  ‘Only this one so far. The rest agree with what we know from other sources.’

  By the time they had worked their way along both sides of the wall, the sun hovered on the horizon. In the fading twilight they culled firewood from the stand of trees bordering the river, and Loy put the pieces of her rifle together. With the rifle in her lap Loy ate her dinner, then sat with a notebook and wrote a description of what they’d seen, a very detailed one, Ammadin figured, because it took her a very long time to write down. Ammadin brought the horses in, hobbled them twixt fire and stream, and gave them each a nosebag of grain. Out in the fields the wild wheatian would be getting ripe. She could let the horses graze it when their stock of grain ran out.

  Loy was still writing, stopping occasionally to stare into space and chew on her pencil. Ammadin stood near the fire and kept watch, waiting for the first smell of yap-packers. Across the meadow she could see the wall, glimmering in the light from the rising Herd. From the galaxy, she thought. From the stars of home. Yet the phrase lacked for her the magic Loy seemed to feel. Snare’s my home, she thought, and the comnees are my people.

  The horses turned restless, stamping, flinging up their heads. The night wind brought the sour smell of beasts.

  ‘Loy?’ Ammadin said. ‘Here they come.’

  Loy tossed notebook and pencil onto her bedroll, then stood up, rifle at the ready. Distantly the hunting pack yapped. Loy muttered something under her breath; Ammadin put another golden log on the fire, which leapt up high and smoky. The yaps sounded louder, then louder still, until they could hear the pack rustling through the grass. Once again, at the edge of the firelight eyes gleamed. A bold creature stepped forward, raised its head, sniffed the air, and squealed. It wrenched itself back, howling, then turned and raced off. The rest of the pack followed, shrieking and yapping as they ran. In a few minutes the sound faded, merging with the wind in the grass.

  ‘They have memories,’ Loy said. ‘Merde! I hope I didn’t kill a pair of sapients!’

  ‘Horses have memories, too,’ Ammadin said. ‘And as much as I love them, I’d never call them smart.’

  ‘That’s a comfort. You know, I think we’d better sleep in shifts anyway. I don’t trust those blue bastards, and you know how to use this gun now.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ammadin paused for a laugh. ‘You’ve taught me a lot of things, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Well, the wall did most of the teaching. God damn, Ammi! I can’t believe how calm you are. What I’ve told you must have blown your worldview apart, but you can laugh about it.’

  ‘I might be in shock.’ Ammadin paused, thinking. ‘I doubt it, though. But the thing is, I’ve had doubts for years about a lot of things we – the spirit riders, I mean – take for granted. Talking with Zayn gave me more questions, and Water Woman’s given me some answers. Your talk was only more of the same.’

  ‘I can understand that.’

  They sat down together and watched the fire, leaping from the dry spongy wood of the Midas trees. It would take a long time, Ammadin realized, to truly understand everything Loy had told her, simply because there was so much of it. There remained the largest question of all: who were the gods that the comnees carried with them? She felt peculiarly unready to ask it. The gods and their Banes lay at the core of comnee life. If they were – she shook her head and shuddered, shoving the question away. The gesture caught Loy’s attention; she studied Ammadin’s face so intently that Ammadin laughed again.

  ‘I’m not going to burst into tears or fall apart,’ Ammadin said. ‘Or curse you, either.’

  ‘Oh good!’ Loy grinned at her. ‘But you do understand about the Treaty now, don’t you? Your ancestors and the ancestors of the Kazraks made my ancestors promise to lie. And for some bizarre reason, we’ve honoured those promises for eight hundred years.’

  ‘Not bizarre at all, if it was a promise. Honourable.’

  ‘Think so? Maybe.’ Loy paused, watching the flames leap. ‘When you get back to the plains, what are you going to tell your people?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I have to think about it, and it might depend on what Sibyl has to say. I see why your people decided to live on the other side of the Rift. You could keep things to yourselves that way.’

  ‘Yes, there used to be a law in the Cantons about travellers from either the Kazraks or the Tribes.’

  ‘I’ve heard of that. You killed anyone who rode beyond Nannes.’

  ‘That’s right. A stupid law, and I’m glad everyone stopped obeying it. God, we’ve kept each other ignorant, haven’t we? How would I have learned about Chursavva being a Great Mother if you hadn’t told me?’

  ‘You could have asked the Chof.’

  ‘None of the Chof I’ve met would have told me that. When they found out I could hear them, they were willing to chat, but they set up definite limits and boundaries.’

  ‘Where did you meet them, anyway?’

  ‘In this awful little town called Shairb on the Burgunee border. That’s where they come to trade for cloth. When I was a graduate student, I spent time working in the mart to learn what I could about them.’

  ‘But you never went across the border?’

  ‘No one wanted to risk coming out here uninvited. They wiped the N’Dosha settlement off the face of the planet, didn’t they? We didn’t want to be next. It’s the Treaty again, set up to keep the cultures apart. Stupidly!’

  ‘Stupid? The Kazraks didn’t want to know the truth. You said yourself that they were happier than the Cantonneurs were, knowing what you’d lost.’

  ‘What’s more important? Being happy or knowing the truth?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Ammadin considered for a long moment. ‘But it’s a question I’m going to have to answer before I go back to the grass.’

  Just at sunset Zayn had saddled up and headed west, but although he left his gear tied to the saddle, he walked and led the sorrel to spare its strength. If they ran across that pack of meat-eaters, their best hope would lie in outrunni
ng them, and for that, his horse needed to be fresh. He wished he knew how they hunted, by smell or sight, because if they tracked by smell, he could perhaps throw them off by taking the gelding into the shallow river and wading through the water.

  The Herd was just cresting the eastern hills when he realized that the land was beginning to slope downhill, just a gradual descent, but one that would spare his legs and the sorrel’s, a piece of luck when he needed every piece he could scrounge. As they picked their way along through the ruts and stones in the road, Zayn found himself thinking about Idres and Jezro. How far had they been taken, he wondered, and where had they ended up? Somewhere among the hills of N’Dosha, most likely. At least these ChaMeech seemed determined to treat their prisoners decently, unlike – he shoved the memories down fast.

  At that moment he realized that he was picking up some sound at the threshold of his hearing. Animals, a lot of them, howled and yapped. The sorrel tossed up its head, sniffed the wind, and pulled at the reins with a nervous toss of mane.

  ‘Steady on!’ Zayn patted its neck. ‘They’re ahead of us.’

  He hesitated, considering the river. The yaps and howls neither diminished nor grew louder; they apparently were moving at right angles to the road, some way away still. Zayn mounted, then rose in the stirrups, scanning for the threat, and saw, far down the road at the end of the view, a bright dot of gold, glimmering. A fire, a campfire – Soutan? That it might be Ammadin crossed his mind, but he doubted if he could ever be as lucky as that. The sorrel snorted and danced under him.

  ‘Wait, just wait, old boy,’ Zayn murmured. ‘Let’s see which way they’re going.’

  The howling changed to a steady, distant yap, a sound like clapping hands on the night air. It seemed to be moving off, then suddenly grew louder, as if the pack was running a zig-zag route, crossing the road, coursing a long way out, then turning and coming back again. Zayn dismounted.

  ‘Well, if they hunt by sight, nothing’s going to save us.’ He spoke aloud to keep the horse calm. ‘But if they hunt by smell, the river might do the job, so what the hell, let’s head for the river.’