Chapter 53:

“Why did you bring Yathi?” Rajani asked Kebet.

“I told you already. I couldn’t shake her. Besides, you didn’t exactly warn me that we were going to be talking about… well, you know.”

“You’re sure she won’t tell anybody?”

“I told her not to. She’ll listen to me.”

Rajani wasn’t sure she was convinced. Yathi had seemed disapproving. It was true that Yathi had yet to betray them in the two full diurnals that had passed since their meeting, but would she persist in her silence?

Rajani sighed. “At least she was helpful.”

“Of course she was. She’s a Solonsa. We’re always helpful.”

Rolling her eyes, Rajani gave Kebet a light shove. He shook his head in laughing protest and touched his back-carrier. “Careful, I’ll tip over.” She grinned at him. Rajani liked bantering with Kebet. It was a good way to pass the time while they and three other hunters, all of them loaded down with skins, waited for the hunter closest to the shelterbelt to finish climbing through the gap in the trees that made up the bio-dome’s frame.

Although the gap was primarily used nowadays by Cursed hunters trading for Xhota goods, it was still known as the ancient gateway through which their ancestors had left the bio-dome proper to live in the space between the shelterbelt and the bio-dome’s edge. It had been created, and was maintained, by cutting out enough branch and trunk matter to make an opening large enough to fit a grown man and his back-carrier. The trees on either side of the opening grew thick and strong, their branches supporting the convex bones of the bio-dome just as they had been designed to.

The second hunter to cross over was Pratap. Rajani scowled. The hunters had returned to the bio-dome three and a half weeks ago, and still Pratap remained uncensured. Rajani was sure that it was Pratap’s status as a hunter that protected him to such an unmerited degree.

So absorbed was Rajani in her resentment that she misplaced a step while climbing down the other side of the shelterbelt. Her foot slipped and she skidded down, scraping her hands against the limestone-covered bark of the tree. The hunters who had already crossed reached out to help slow her fall, Pratap among them. He glared when she yanked away from his touch.

“What happened to the overbelters?” one of the other hunters asked.

Rajani looked up. The shacks on stilts that made up the Xhota urb still stood in their usual rows, but it was as if the hustle and bustle of the bazaar stalls housed beneath the shacks was under a gag. And the streets – they were alive not with merchants, but armed men.

“Maybe we should go back,” Kebet said.

Rajani could tell the other hunters shared Kebet’s uncertainty. She herself felt uneasy as well. But Chief had ordered their trade trip for a reason, and she didn’t want to give him any excuse to lash out at her again.

“We need the bioplastic parts,” she said.

“But the guards –”

“The Xhota permitted Cursed trade trips even during the Paxho Purge. If they left us alone then, they’ll leave us alone now.”

At Rajani’s urging, the hunters made their way across the stretch of shrubbery that grew between the shelterbelt and the start of the Xhota urb. But contrary to her prediction, they were stopped before they were even past the urb’s first row.

“Show us your travel passes,” the first guard snapped.

Of the six hunters, only Pratap and Rajani had learned how to speak Xhom with any fluency, and Rajani’s Xhom was better than Pratap’s. “We’re Cursed,” she told the guard. “We don’t have travel passes. We’ve never needed them before.”

The guard who had spoken looked at his partner. “Is this true? They don’t need passes?”

The second guard was a woman with an impatient scowl on her face. “Yes, yes, it’s true.”

“Where are you going?” the first guard asked.

“We trade with an old man named Yexin,” Rajani said.

The woman made a shooing motion with her hand. “Move along.”

One by one the hunters filed past the two guards. Rajani had just started to think they were in the clear when one of the guards gave a shout. Rajani spun around. The male guard had drawn his bow and was aiming a glistening, poison-tipped arrow at Kebet.

Rajani’s heart jumped. She took a step toward Kebet. The male guard swung his bow toward Rajani. “What’s a Chenta doing with you?” he snarled. “Are you spies? Did Lady Nari send you?”

“He’s not Chenta,” Rajani responded, her heart racing. “He’s Cursed.”

The man swung back to Kebet. “He sure looks Chenta to me.”

“What’s he saying, Ni?” Kebet asked, looking warily at the Xhota guard.

Rajani put out her hands. “He looks Chenta because his parents are Chenta. But he was born on the Cursed side of the shelterbelt.”

The woman slapped the male guard’s arm. “Look at his clothes, idiot. He’s Cursed, they’re all Cursed, just let them go, they don’t matter.”

Rajani held her breath as the man undrew his bow. He then grabbed Kebet’s sleeved arm and rubbed it with his thumb. It was obvious to Rajani even from a distance that the velvet skins on Kebet were different from the plant-based fabrics with which the overbelters clothed themselves. Anyone could see that.

Finally the man let Kebet go. “Yexin, you said?”

“Yes,” Rajani responded.

“I’ll follow up with him. Now get going!”

The hunters obeyed, pushing deeper into the urb. The few merchants they came across kept their heads down and their steps quick. Only Yexin seemed unchanged. “Good, good, I was afraid you weren’t coming. You have skins? Good. I have all the bioplastic you need.”

The hunters were eager to get home, so Rajani was generous in her bartering. At the end of the trade Yexin appeared pleased, even offering dates to the hunters. Rajani refused on everyone’s behalf. “We have to go,” she explained, although they would’ve declined the grown food regardless.

“Very well, very well. When will I see you next?”

Was it just Rajani, or did Yexin seem a little too interested in her answer? “I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll come when we come.”

With that, they were done, and out in the streets once more. Strands of breathflower vines, hanging from the bio-dome above, wept rainwater and sap onto their heads. After making sure her load of bioplastic parts was well-covered, Rajani strode through the paths back in the direction of the Cursed urb.

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The hunters were stopped at the same street as before. This time, though, the woman was not there. She had been replaced by a man with a sneer on his lips.

“There he is,” the original guard said, pointing. “There’s the Chenta, I told you!”

Before Rajani could say a word, both guards were on Kebet. The first grabbed his arm. The second pointed a blowpipe in the direction of the hunters.

“You don’t fool us,” he snarled.

Rajani made as if she was going to approach them. The second guard responded by placing the blowpipe to his lips. The panic Rajani had felt the first time Kebet was stopped spiked through her once more. I made a mistake, she thought wildly. I was afraid that if we returned without the bioplastic parts, Chief would lay the blame on me. But better that than lose Kebet!

“Let me go,” Kebet demanded in Cursed. He tried to pull his arm away but was hampered by his back-carrier. “Rajani, tell them to let me go!”

“He’s not who you think he is!” Rajani shouted.

She could hear behind her Pratap telling the other hunters to take their packs, and his, and go. Furious, she turned around to confront Pratap. The other four hunters, including Pratap, were old-Tabled Cursed. Kebet and Rajani, on the other hand, were myxte. But surely that didn’t mean they would abandon Kebet!

“Give Oveh your back-carrier too,” Pratap said to her. “Then the two of us will be free to get Kebet.”

Glancing over her shoulder, Rajani saw that the two guards had tied a leash around Kebet’s wrists, and that they were dragging him further into the Xhota urb. She wasted no time in shedding her back-carrier. “You attack from the right,” she said. “I’ll get them from the left.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“You distract them. Keep going after them. Demand our goods back. I’ll circle around through the bazaar stalls and crush them from behind with this.” He held up a long rod he had detached from his back-carrier.

“You want to take them on alone? That’s stupid!”

“One of us has to act as a distraction. Otherwise they’ll shoot us both.”

Kebet was being pulled further away with every passing moment. “Fine,” Rajani snapped. She tore down the street, ignoring the guards shouting after her, cursing when a dart whizzed by her arm. Gather and Hunt, if they started shooting in earnest at her…

But no other projectiles followed, and Rajani caught up with Kebet and the two guards outside a curtained bazaar stall. When they saw her, both drew their weapons.

“You don’t need our goods,” Rajani called out, keeping her distance. “Give those back to us, and we’ll let you have him.”

The two men looked at each other. The sneering one was saying something to the other but Rajani couldn’t hear his words. She edged closer. Both guards immediately trained their weapons on her.

She halted. Come on, Pratap, she thought. Come on…

She had just decided she could wait no longer when Pratap burst through the curtains hanging around the bazaar stall. He landed a blow across the back of the sneering guard’s head. The man crumpled. Rajani ran forward as Pratap swung at the original guard, who ducked and released an arrow that went flying – Kebet had thrown his weight against him.

Rajani jumped into the fray. Her onslaught forced the guard to stumble backwards into one of the corner posts of the bazaar stall. Pratap moved in to slam his rod into the guard’s face, once, twice, three times. Pratap’s eyes were shining with joy. For a moment Rajani found herself more frightened of Pratap than of the Xhota guards closing in on them. Her fingers fumbled as she tried to loosen Kebet’s bonds.

A pricking sensation caught her in the back of her neck. Rajani slapped her hand against the injury. A dart had just grazed her. She swore. She could feel Kebet’s still-tied hands prodding her forward through a curtain, but the rest of her senses were growing numb.

“She got shot,” Rajani heard Kebet say. To Pratap? She couldn’t tell. She was in a bazaar stall, bewildered Xhota faces scrambling to get out of the way. Furred creatures were fluttering around her in bioplastic cages. The press of people plowed through them and the animals soared out of their broken pens. Then she was in yet another bazaar stall, trampling over green shoots in trays of damp dirt.

The green burned Rajani’s eyes; she reeled. She was only dimly aware that someone had caught her and was carrying her forward. But even as her body surrendered to the overbelter’s poison, the sight of the green shoots stayed with her. Thrusting through the dark soil. Reaching for the light.

***

“If that dart had pierced you directly, you would be following Hunt on your final run right now,” the Cursed physician attending Rajani said, shaking her head. “Rest, drink this. You’ll recover.”

Her body’s weakness gave her no choice, so Rajani spent most of her time asleep. When she wasn’t sleeping, she would stare up at the glowing orange blossoms the Cursed used to illuminate and oxygenate their lodges. Over and over again she saw in her mind’s eye the cruel joy on Pratap’s face as he brought his rod whistling down.

She also saw the green shoots.

Cruel joy. Green shoots. Her mind went round and round, struggling to find the connection between them, a connection she knew was there, a connection that tugged at her even in her sleep. Green shoots. Cruel joy. Cruel joy. Green shoots.

Chudami rotated once, a seventy-five-hour effort – one diurnal. Three times the Cursed slept, three times they were awake. Sunstir led to daysleep, sunwake to first nightsleep, darkwake to second nightsleep. Dawn broke over the next sunstir, spinning their sun into view, and with it, and a gasp from Rajani, her cycling thoughts merged.

She could hardly wait to tell Lainla. When she did so, however, late that eventide after her other Table members had fallen asleep, Lainla at first did not reply. She was so still Rajani wondered if Lainla had fallen asleep too. But then her sister stirred, and the dim light revealed her troubled features.

“Rajani, agriculture is Tabu.”

In hushed whispers Rajani argued with Lainla. She tried to explain the cruel joy she had seen on Pratap’s face. “La, don’t you see? He’s a symbol for how the hunters have started valuing dominance for its own sake. If the Cursed copied the overbelters, though – just in this one area – and grew food-bearing plants, we’d be able to bring hunters like Pratap to heel.”

Lainla took off her glasses, closed her eyes, and recited, “We don’t wrest life from the ground. We receive with open hands the food that the gods give us. Nothing more. The Table Chronicles are clear.”

Rajani kept pressing. There was a difference between keeping a Tabu and true holiness. She gave Lainla an example. A lodge mother was responsible for educating her Table’s children, yes? Lainla nodded. That meant she had to make sure the children went to school until they were fifteen years old. But it wasn’t enough just to send them to school and be done with it. The lodge mother had to care about their education.

Sending your children to school was like following a Tabu, Rajani contended. Both were practices that reflected inner values. She drew the analogy into the lodge’s dirt floor next to her rubber bedroll. A line connected school and not doing agriculture. Another line connected a lodge mother’s heart, invested in education, to a Cursed citizen’s heart, invested in not being greedy. Didn’t Lainla see? What mattered was not the external behavior, but the internal belief.

“That’s ridiculous, and you know it. It doesn’t matter how much a lodge mother cares about education if she doesn’t educate her children.”

Even in her weakness, Rajani couldn’t help but laugh. “Fine. But I want to try this anyway. I want to at least look into it.”

“Count me out then. Agriculture is not the solution.”

After a few more minutes of whispered argument, Rajani, too tired to continue, relented. She told herself she would wait until she was healthy before raising the issue again.

But that daysleep, Rajani dreamed. In her dream, the az hedges withered and died, sprouting anew into pulse crops and grains. A figure – was it Rajani herself? – stood by and watched the re-birth, her head graced by the ceremonial hood of a lodge mother.

***

It made sense. It made too much sense. Rajani pictured the pulse crops and grains from her dream piling up into a mountain, then cascading down like an avalanche, pushing the hunters to the side, stripping them of their status, forcing them to behave. If the Cursed were able to grow food for themselves, if the Jinkari Table was able to grow food for itself…

Rajani could become a lodge mother.

But that’s not the reason I’m doing this, she told herself. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not.

Still, she kept the dream a secret.

She told Kebet and Jiat only about her idea to research agriculture. Both of them agreed to help her. They gathered trading records and historical studies from the hanging library, and with her hunted through them for references to plants. And on sunstir of the sixteenth diurnal of that year’s rainsoon season, the three of them agreed to meet that upcoming Gather’s Day to discuss their findings and decide upon a course of action.