Chapter 50:

Rajani was elated. Most mammoles claimed at least a few lives before falling to the pikes and cannonspears of the Cursed, but this hunt had been bloodless. She could tell the other hunters were in good moods, too, with myxte and old-Tabled Cursed congratulating each other even across racial lines for a job well done.

By the time they had finished skinning and packing the mammole meat, the sun was low in the western sky. Eager to get back to their waiting Table members, the hunters loaded up their packs and hiked down the volcano into the valley. Shriveled az leaves crunched under two hundred pairs of sheathed boots as the hunters made their way to the Cursed urb at the bio-dome’s southern end.

Rajani stopped, as she always did, at the urb’s eastern edge. With a pang in her heart, she watched the lodge mothers. Going to and fro between the dirt lodges, they were collecting meat from their Tables’ smokehouses and returning to their meal benches to cook. Above them the bio-dome’s crisscrossing branches stretched out like a canopy. Leaves, woken by nightfall, unfurled. Their blue and green veins cast a soft glow onto the landscape rising up from the soil below.

Someone jostled her from behind. It was Kebet. “Don’t be sad,” he said, grinning. “Maybe someday your lodge mother will ask you to take over her role.”

Laughing, Rajani shoved Kebet back. That would never happen, and Kebet knew it. He was just teasing her, the way he teased everyone. His sisters, parents and cousins were the same way. Virtually every member of the Solonsa Table shared a taste for cheekiness, it seemed.

“Rajani-am! Rajani-am!”

It was Tanush, barreling towards her as fast as he could on eight-year-old legs. He threw his arms around her and launched into a story about a mammole bone knife he had carved. Grinning, Rajani removed her breathflower mask and waddled to the Jinkari meal bench with Tanush dangling from her waist. She arrived just as Abha, one of her cousins, emerged from the Jinkari dirt lodge.

“Tanush!” Abha scolded her son. “Let Rajani-am be!”

Rajani liked Abha. Despite being ten years older than Rajani, Abha had always been respectful of Rajani’s lead huntership. “It’s fine,” Rajani told her. “Tanush is going to help me take off my pack, right, Shu?”

Tanush released Rajani and scrambled on top of the meal bench’s circular seat so that he would be tall enough to reach Rajani’s pack. “When I grow up I’m going to bring home a hunter’s pack too!” he exclaimed.

“Where’s Lainla?” Abha asked.

Rajani glanced behind her. All around them rose the structures of the urb: the rounded mounds of dirt lodge roofs, the squat cylinders of the smokehouses, the rubber-lined meal benches. On the ground below grew untended patches of Earth wildflowers and plicatus berries.

“There.” Rajani pointed. “La’s talking to someone, I think it’s Yathi. Where’s Mamai? Or your parents, for that matter?”

“Someone called an emergency meeting of the lodge mother moot,” Abha explained. “I told your mother to go, that I could handle the eventide meal. My parents are inside the lodge still. Papai’s old injuries are bothering him.”

Rajani made a sympathetic face. Her uncle Shib, Abha’s father, had been a hunter before getting slammed into a ravine wall by a berserking mammole while trying to rescue Abha’s husband from the same fate. Unlike Abha’s husband, Shib-vyn had survived the attack – but only just.

Tanush had pulled Rajani’s pack off of her back and onto the meal bench. She leaned over to help him pull out the slabs of mammole meat. “Let’s carry these over to the smokehouse, okay?”

“I’ll do it!” Tanush said.

“We can do it together.”

“No, you’re a hunter.”

Rajani gave him a look. “Being a hunter doesn’t mean you don’t help with chores.”

Tanush seemed skeptical. Rajani grabbed an armful of meat and nudged Tanush towards their smokehouse. “What do you think hunters are for?” she asked him.

“Hunting,” he responded promptly.

“Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Hunters don’t do anything else?”

Tanush smirked. “They stop you from being a Gather’s Child.”

Rajani frowned. It was true that if a Table lost its last hunter, its members became Gather’s Children. But there was a dismissiveness in Tanush’s tone that Rajani found troublesome.

“Is it a bad thing to be a Gather’s Child?” she asked him.

She knew Tanush would think the right answer was no from the way Rajani had asked the question. Yet Rajani could see he was struggling not to respond with a yes. “Maybe?” Tanush finally ventured.

“And why would being a Gather’s Child be a bad thing?”

“Because then your Table doesn’t have a hunter.”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

At that, Rajani laughed. “All right, Shu. Let’s finish up and help your mother cook.”

“Did I say the wrong thing?” Tanush’s little face was full of concern.

“No, no.”

“Did I say the right thing?”

“Almost,” Rajani said, smiling. “Almost.”

***

Later that night, after the feast, Rajani led her Table members in the eventide chant. When it was over, she felt a surge of relief. Leaning against her sister as the rest of her Table members continued to talk around the meal bench, Rajani closed her eyes. Yawning, she let the murmur of voices wash over her. Finally, now, she could snatch a few moments to rest, to relax, to shed a little the responsibility of lead huntership. It was a responsibility she’d been carrying for seven years, ever since she was fifteen, and while she didn’t find it unbearably heavy, she also didn’t mind the thought of letting it go. But the rules of the Cursed didn’t allow for that. Over the years the Jinkari Table hunters had died, or, like Shib-vyn, been too injured to hunt anymore, leaving their Table with two hunters: herself and her sister. Rajani was the older twin by three minutes, and for that reason, and that reason alone, she had to be the lead hunter.

“– it was a girl, a Gather’s Child girl, who was attacked –”

Rajani sat bolt upright. She turned and leaned into the meal bench so she could see Mamai, who was seated on the other side of Lainla. The two broke off their conversation and looked at Rajani.

“What did you just say?” Rajani asked her mother.

Lainla answered. “Someone reported to the lodge mother moot that a hunter attacked a Gather’s Child girl last week.”

“What?” Rajani’s mind was spinning. “When – who –”

“Last week, so it had to be one of the hunters Chief sent back with the eleventh mammole’s meat.”

Rajani’s body tightened with rage. It was infuriating to think about a hunter attacking a Gather’s Child. Gather’s Children didn’t have hunters of their own to bring charges on their behalf! What kind of person would hit someone who couldn’t hit back?

“Which one of them did it?”

Mamai met Rajani’s eyes. “I don’t know. Do you remember which hunters Chief sent back to the dome last week?”

“I think two Vadyan Table hunters, someone from the Mehen Table, and maybe…” Rajani paused, trying to remember.

Lainla leaned forward. Her face was grim. “Yathi told me she heard Pratap of the Vadyan Table bragging about it.”

Rajani’s eyes flashed at the sound of Pratap’s name. That fool, again. “The lodge mother moot needs to create a central body of enforcers,” she said out loud, “so that Gather’s Children can take perpetrators to trial, too.”

“The lodge mother moot may make decisions for the Cursed,” Mamai answered evenly. “But we are dependent on the hunters to enforce those decisions. Any vote we make that cuts away at hunter power may not be enforced by them.”

Rajani could tell she had made Mamai nervous. Sure enough, after a few moments of gazing at the firepit built into the center of the meal bench, Mamai said, “Don’t stir up trouble, Ni.”

“I’m not!”

“Good.”

Annoyed, Rajani stood. She managed to keep her voice even. “I’m going on a walk.”

“I’ll come with you,” Lainla said.

Side by side the sisters walked to the edge of the bio-dome where the giant trees that made up the dome’s frame were rooted. They looked out at the planet’s surface through a hexagonal gap framed by bole and branch. Through the gap Rajani could see the red-stemmed az hedges that surrounded the bio-dome, a gentle rain upraising their long leaves.

Far above, high in the night sky, danced the soft green and gold lights of the aurora kaikilas.

“Remember the lodge mother story about how Gather and Hunt blessed each other with their gifts?” Lainla said. “Gather gathered nectar from the breathflowers and prepared it for Hunt to drink. Hunt hunted the largest mammole and killed it for Gather to feast on.”

“You shall not wrest life from the ground,” quoted Rajani. “You shall receive with open hands the food that we give you.”

“And then they danced,” whispered Lainla.

Rajani leaned against the nearest trunk. Her fingers grazed the yellow limestone that fringed each tree in the bio-dome’s frame. The smell of wood and sap and limestone rested on her as she watched the aurora kaikilas do its nightly ballet. “A million charged particles streaming through the atmosphere,” she marveled. “And the gods set them in place just to show us what harmony looks like.”

“And then they gave us the Table Chronicles to open our eyes to the laws that govern human harmony.”

Rajani gave her a look. “I’m not mad at Mamai.”

Lainla laughed. “Sure you’re not.”

“She always blames me! Even when nothing’s happened, she acts like I instigated that nothingness.”

“Take it as a compliment. Mamai thinks you’re so capable, she attributes everything to you. You’re the cause of all things, good and bad.”

Rajani rolled her eyes. “If only I had that much power.”

“Me too. Then maybe we could actually do something about the hunters.”

Lainla’s voice had turned dark. Rajani put her arm around her sister’s shoulders and drew her close. Lately there had been rumors about hunters taking advantage of their superior status to mock the Gather’s Children. Thus far Rajani had been able to ignore her discomfort by focusing on the fact that it was old-Tabled Cursed hunters like Pratap, and not myxte Cursed like herself, that were making trouble. But attacking a Gather’s Child girl, that was going too far.

“Who was the girl?” Rajani asked.

“One of the newer emigrants, an overbelter.”

Rajani closed her eyes and pictured the urb in her mind. The atreola, an open strip of land, divided the urb in two. On either side of the atreola, the huntered Cursed lived in their Tables’ dirt lodges, stored meat in their Tables’ smokehouses, and ate at their Tables’ meal benches. The Gather’s Children, on the other hand, lived in a ditch that lined the far western edge of the urb.

The ditch itself was new. In the past, when a Table lost its hunters and its members became Gather’s Children, those members would keep on living in their Table’s lodge. Recently, however, more and more overbelters had been emigrating from the other side of the shelterbelt. Hunterless by definition, lodgeless from the start, they lived in what used to be called “temporary shelter” but what was now known as the Gather’s Children ditch.

It was late, and Rajani was tired. Still, she couldn’t help but feel a deep sense of unease. Something was changing. Something was shifting. A storm was in the air, in the soil, in the rocks.

“Let’s go back,” said Lainla. “We have to be up for tomorrow’s ablution in the holy place.”

Rajani nodded. They made their way beneath the blue and green leaves of the bio-dome back to the Jinkari dirt lodge. The urb all around them was quieting down. Most of the other Cursed had gone back inside their lodges to sleep until darkwake.

“Of my Table, of my flesh,” Rajani recited. It was a verse used to mark endings, of days, of lives, of relationships. Rajani and Lainla often used it to bid each other a good night.

“So the gods feel towards us,” Lainla recited in turn. “We are their people. We are the Cursed.”