Chapter 58:
“Rajani! Rajani!”
Someone was shouting her name. It was a man’s voice. Rajani’s hunter instincts took over and she sprang to her feet, wide awake. All around her on the Jinkari lodge floor her Table members were still asleep – all except for Lainla.
“Who’s calling for you?” her sister asked, throwing off her fur blanket. “Is it Kebet?”
“I don’t know,” Rajani said. Stepping over the sleeping bodies of her Table members, she made her way through the orange-lit darkness to the broad sill at the southern end of the lodge. She climbed on top of the sill, then peeled open the door flap and stepped outside.
Sukren stood at the entrance, Mayah in hand. Sweat gleamed down his face. It had been almost a week since he’d stopped eating at the Jinkari meal bench; Rajani was surprised to see him now.
“They’re rioting,” he told her.
She gaped at him. It was one thing to talk about the threat of riots, and quite another thing to be told they were actually happening. “What?” she sputtered.
“The Saranai, I mean, the overbelters, they started shouting –”
Biting back her shock, Rajani stopped and listened to the noises assaulting the nightsleep. The blare of Chief’s horn, signaling all hunters to come to him – the surprised shouts of awakening Cursed – and a distant roar of rage.
Rajani jumped back into her lodge and began barking at her Table members to wake up. “Shib-vyn! Jyotsa-am! Abha! Mamai! Get up! The Gather’s Children are rioting! Get up!”
The adults got to their feet, blinking away their sleep. Rajani gave them their orders. “Mamai, Jyotsa-am, Shib-vyn, guard our smokehouse. Lainla, get to the atreola. Abha, go around and wake up as many Tables as you can to tell them the news. Soti, Tanush, Kishi, stay inside the lodge.”
Rajani’s Table members rushed to do as told. Once the adults were outside, and Lainla and Abha gone, Rajani then found herself approached once more by Sukren. “Please, can you keep Mayah inside your lodge with your cousins?”
“Yes,” Rajani said. As Mayah hurried into the lodge, Rajani pointed at Sukren. “You stay here and stand guard.”
At once Shib-vyn protested. “He’s one of the Gather’s Children! He’s more likely than not to join them in their looting!”
Rajani shook her head. Sukren’s persistent sacrifices had earned her trust. He would keep the lodge safe, especially since Mayah was in it.
“He’s guarding the lodge, not the food,” Rajani said.
“Still –”
“You will obey me.”
At that, Shib-vyn blinked, but he also closed his mouth. With one last look around to make sure her Table members were properly equipped, Rajani ran west for the atreola towards the sound of Chief’s still-blaring horn. She arrived just as Chief ordered the milling hunters to get into formations.
“Make groups of three,” he shouted. “Keep track of each other. Push the Gather’s Children back to their ditch and keep them there.”
Rajani found herself in a group of three that included the tall hunter who had attacked her and Jiat in the rubber forge. If he recognized her, he gave no sign. “They’re going to pay for doing this to us,” he hissed to her.
Rajani didn’t know how to reply. Her thoughts were too muddled. She didn’t condone the destructive behavior of the Gather’s Children, but she understood why they were rioting. She would do her part to repel them with minimal violence and hope that the outpouring would open the eyes of her fellow Cursed to see the need for more food, to make sure this kind of rampage wouldn’t have to happen again.
A small, irrational part of her was upset that the Gather’s Children were rioting now, before she’d had the chance to submit her proposal. Couldn’t they have waited one more diurnal?
Pushing aside her thoughts, Rajani raced through the urb with her two partners. They came across a dozen overbelters ripping stored meat out of a smokehouse. Despite her determination to be fair to the Gather’s Children, Rajani found herself seething. She pictured the same rioters ransacking the Jinkari smokehouse for meat she and Lainla had poured out their sweat and blood for. Damn them!
Rajani pointed the spear she had been handed in the atreola at one of the Gather’s Children. “Get back!” she shouted.
Most of the Gather’s Children retreated at once. One of them, however, lunged for her. Rajani didn’t want to kill him, so she tried to turn her spear around so she could hit him with the shaft. Unused to the weapon, she was slow, much slower than she was with her hand ballista. Too slow.
The Gather’s Child toppled into her. He was a big man and knocked her to the ground with ease. A rock was in his raised fist. Rajani flung herself to the side as he brought it down. Fear flashed through her, ripping out all remaining empathy. When the Gather’s Child pinned her legs under his, and brought the rock up again, a hot and bitter anger surged up inside her. She wanted to kill him. She wanted to take her spear and jam it into his flesh.
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But she was trapped. Trapped underneath his weight, helpless to avoid the rock coming down –
With a shout, the tall hunter thrust his spear through the overbelter’s back. The man reeled backwards, tears in his eyes. He was shoved to the side by the tall hunter, who then offered his hand to Rajani to help her up. She took it. She tried to wipe the blood of the dead man from the front of her tunic, but only managed to smear it in further.
“Let it alone,” the tall hunter said. “You can wash it out later. Come on.”
Rajani followed him. They rejoined the third member of their team, and together drove the last of the dozen overbelters back into the ditch. Soon Rajani was standing guard at its edge, feeling sick. Many of the hunters around her looked as dazed as she felt. None of them had used hunting weapons on humans before.
Kebet found her after almost an hour. “We can go back to our lodges now. Chief is putting up a detail to guard the ditch.”
Rajani nodded. She walked back with Kebet. They passed by ripped-open lodge roofs and treaded on torn pieces of rubber. Even the wildflowers, direct descendants of ancient seedlings from Earth, had been trampled underfoot.
Back at her lodge, Rajani was told that the hunters had driven Sukren to the ditch as well. “They didn’t listen to us when we said he was helping us,” Jyotsa-am said.
Rajani took a deep breath. “And Mayah?”
“She’s still in our lodge.”
“Good,” Rajani whispered, not sure what she meant. “Good.”
***
They had all expected the riots. They had talked about them for weeks. But Rajani could tell from the shocked faces of her fellow citizens that the violence had still taken them by surprise. Even Rajani, who had made plans based on the riots happening, was reeling. To narrowly miss having her head smashed in by a rock, to stumble past gutted-out smokehouses… who could have known that this was what rioting would bring about?
The lodge mother moot held an emergency meeting early the next day. Mamai came back and told them what they had decided. “All Tables that weren’t looted are to share with those that were.”
Because the eastern half of the urb had suffered less damage than the western half, this decision meant the burden of sharing fell mostly on the myxte Cursed. Fearful of old-Tabled Cursed resentment, nobody pointed this out, not even Rajani. Instead, after spending the rest of darkwake carrying loads of mammole meat across the atreola, Rajani summoned her Table members to sit with her at the Jinkari meal bench.
Tanush ran to her when she called. “How are you doing, Shu-shu?” she asked him.
He clung to her leg. “I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
Rajani watched Tanush struggle to put his fear into words. Finally he asked, “Will we be okay?”
“The Cursed have always come through,” Rajani responded. “Think about our history. When we were freed from Earth we didn’t even know where we were going. But we made it. The gods brought us here. They gave us this planet. You remember that from the First Recitations, don’t you?”
Tanush nodded. Stroking his hair, Rajani asked, “Can you recite the Recitations for me?”
She wasn’t asking just to ask. She knew that she, Tanush, and the other members of her Table needed to hear a reminder that they would indeed be okay. They needed to hear a promise that if the dread of the previous nightsleep descended upon them again, the gods would pull them through.
Tanush squirmed to his feet and stood before them, hands behind his back. “Earth was falling,” he intoned. “Falling, falling, its people falling into dust, once, twice, a thousand times, falling. Into a dark pit, they fell, your ancestors did, but as they fell, they cried out, and lo! Their cries were heard.”
Rajani led her Table members in the response to the gods. Mayah stood by, watching them in silence. “You hunted us down. You gathered us in. You brought us together and delivered us – out of the pit, off of the land, into the sky.”
Tanush glanced at Rajani. He looked hesitant. “You’re doing well,” she told him. However young his voice, Tanush was telling the ancient story of the Cursed – their story. Generations of Cursed had echoed these First Recitations. Table to Table the sacred words had been passed on. It was a holy thing to hear them now.
Tanush’s little face brightened. He took a deep breath, then continued. “You will call yourselves the Cursed so that you will never forget who you were before we brought you to this planet and told you to be free.”
“Our ancestors accepted your gift of the vadda trees,” the Jinkari Table members responded. “With them we formed the bio-dome; with them we created the shelterbelt. But once inside, encircled by our own safety, we began to forget you.”
Someone had come to stand to Rajani’s right. It was Kebet. He had brought Yathi as well, and one of his sisters. A few citizens from the lodges nearby were also coming to join them. Tanush faltered when he saw the new faces, but before anyone could say anything, Lainla went to him. With tenderness in her heart, Rajani watched as her sister knelt and took Tanush by the hand.
Together Tanush and Lainla recited the next part, the gods’ response. “Yet among you was a remnant who did not forget. You met together and said, are we not the Cursed ones? Did we not escape Earth to begin anew? This place has become another Earth. Where can we go?”
A dozen voices lifted up the sacred verse. “Then you opened our eyes, and our ancestors realized the shelterbelt was not protection: it was a wall hemming us in, keeping us from life. Our eyes opened, we fled the bio-dome and came to live here, in the space between the shelterbelt and the edge of the dome. We became hunters and lodge mothers, we became Tables and true worshippers.”
“Six hundred and twenty-two years, now, it’s been, since the Cursed crossed over the shelterbelt.”
The gathered crowd, Rajani among them, responded. “Since the Cursed crossed over the shelterbelt and became a new people.”
New people, Rajani thought, and the god words burned in her heart. This is what we need. To become a new people…
That entire darkwake Rajani had wrestled with the gods, trying to understand the broken lodges and frightened faces of her people. Finally she thought she knew. This storm had come upon them because the gods brooked no disobedience to their commands. The Cursed had stopped giving their holy portion to Gather. Hunt had responded. Hadn’t Tanush just said it? Earth was falling. Falling, falling, its people falling into dust, once, twice, a thousand times, falling.
Rajani thought once more of her proposal, to be argued before the lodge mother moot the next sunwake. Here was a way to set things right. Here was a way to keep the Gather’s Children from starving. Here was a way to stop the hunters from falling even further into dust.
Here was a way for the Cursed to become a new people…