Chapter 97:
The Xhota marched the Cursed through the dome to a red-walled cage guarded by soldiers who were not Xhota. After being counted and shoved forward through the entranceway, the gate was lowered with a bang! shutting them in. They were prisoners once more. But at least now, for the first time, they were alone among their own.
The questions started trickling in. The new soldiers had taken Sukren away, so Ishiah was the only one who could answer them. “We’re by LakeCentral Castle,” he told everyone. “The new soldiers are Eenta. I remember them from before I crossed the shelterbelt. Don’t make them angry. They’re very mean.”
“What is this place?” Mamai asked him, staring wonderingly at the red walls that hemmed them in on every side.
“It’s a greenhouse village,” Ishiah explained. “I used to work in one of these.” He pointed at the rows and rows of small green plants that stretched out from the huts by the greenhouse gate all the way to the red wall on the far side of the village. “They probably want us to care for them.”
Mamai looked horrified. “You mean… agriculture?”
Rajani started laughing.
She couldn’t help it. After all she had suffered to drag the Cursed around and over and past their Tabu against agriculture, to be surrounded in the end by plants, plants that she and the other Cursed had to tend… well, it was funny. And apparently she wasn’t the only one who thought so. Kebet’s face wore a wry smile, Jiat was shaking his head as he snorted, and even Lainla, heartbroken by Bharan’s death, even her eyes were touched by mirth.
“Oh Hunt, oh Gather,” Rajani breathed out, wiping her eyes. “Oh Hunt, oh Gather.”
Their names. That was all. Their names, the first prayer she’d uttered free of hate since the raid. Easy, simple, out of habit, like taking in a breath of air.
And something inside her unlocked.
Rajani looked out at the remnant of her people in front of the overbelters’ mud huts. “I saw something the night I was arrested,” she said to them. “I don’t understand what it means. I don’t understand how it’s possible. But I can’t deny my own eyes.”
Then Rajani stopped. How could she go on? How could she tell them of the urb lit up in glory and honor, of the light and life she’d seen even as the rain filled with radioactive particles poured down on her head? These were her people, who’d turned on her before. Of course they would turn on her again. And out here, Rajani was not the lead hunter of the Jinkari Table with a lodge of her own. Out here, Rajani was nothing.
Besides that, did Rajani herself even still believe what she’d seen?
Back and forth she went. Should she speak? Could she? What would she even say? The song had slipped; it was all sharps and flats now. Her vision would be a jarring, discordant note. It wouldn’t fit the rhythm.
In any case, it didn’t matter. Rajani couldn’t risk suffering any more rejection.
So she turned away from her people and went to Soti. Soti, Rajani could trust. And Lainla, and Abha-am, and yes, Mamai, and the Solonsa Table, Kebet and his father and mother Ishiah and Jedial, and his cousin Yathi, and she could trust Jiat and his cousin Kaliwa, and Mylin too, and her mother Erari, and maybe also Ahziel of the Shallum Table, and Guthi of the Ilhab Table, yes, Rajani could trust them as good hunters and fellow citizens as well.
“I saw the urb,” Rajani said aloud, facing Soti. “I saw the sun shining through the bio-dome on all of us. And not just us, not just you and me but the rest of our Table, all of us alive, even Tanush and Kishi…”
A sob from Abha-am interrupted her. Swallowing, Rajani held out her hand to her. “And the urb was filled with life,” she whispered. “It had lexikosts and hunters and lodge mothers and physicians and every kind of citizen worshiping together, all of us together, all of us, like it says in the Machir Table Chronicles about how all of us are of Hunt’s Table.”
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Here Rajani’s voice faltered. She didn’t know what else to say. What did her vision of light and life have to do with the red walls around them? How did it fit into the story they were living out right now?
Rajani felt her desire to keep going fade away. Another word, another sentence, and someone might erupt out of their own bitterness to blame and condemn her. Before the raid, back when Rajani was lead hunter of the Jinkari Table, she wouldn’t have cared, of course. She would have been eager to meet fire with fire. But she knew herself well enough to know that she couldn’t endure resistance anymore. Definitely not right then. And maybe not ever again.
Then Rajani heard someone say, “I saw it too.”
Rajani’s head snapped up. It was Sheerah of the Horon Table, a lodge mother around Abha-am’s age. She was twisting her torn and burnt sleeve with her fingers. “I saw it too,” she repeated, in barely a whisper. “The urb, just like you said. With all of us dancing between the lodges, in the atreola, everywhere, together. I was getting water from one of the wells and hurrying because it was getting dark. Then I blinked, and my next step was into a world of light. I… I didn’t understand it. It was beautiful, but I didn’t understand it.”
“That’s confirmation,” Rajani heard Jedial say. “Two people, that’s confirmation, it means it’s a true vision.”
“But what does it mean?” someone asked. It was Pispah, a hunter of the Ara Table. She turned to address both Rajani and Sheerah. “Our urb was destroyed and our people killed. How can it be whole and full of life again?”
“I have no idea,” Rajani replied.
Sheerah shrugged.
Pispah grunted, clearly dissatisfied. Others, however, seemed more hopeful. “Maybe it means the gods will punish the overbelters for taking the urb from us,” someone said. “Or maybe it means we’re all sleeping, and this is a dream,” someone else said, to actual full-chested laughs.
But it was Kebet who hobbled forward and caught their attention in the end. “Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “It means the gods are going to bring us back. It means the gods are going to restore our urb. It means all of this –” he waved his hands around at the brown huts, the red walls, the green fields “– all of this is going to become untrue.”
***
All of this is going to become untrue.
Later that night, after a meal of cooked grain – grown grain, forbidden food – Rajani pondered Kebet’s words. The debate had continued after he’d spoken them, with most people asking the right questions. How? The urb, maybe, could be re-built, but how could dead people come back to life?
Nobody had any answers. But for the first time since the raid, the Cursed were not lost in shock. Rajani could tell the difference. Some of them wept while they ate, but they were the kind of tears that came at the end of a trial, or at least at the end of the beginning of a trial. Now the seventy-odd citizens were drinking water from the faucets set into the greenhouse walls, although not too much, heeding Ishiah’s warning. “The greenhouse walls are hollow and overbelters store water in them, but mostly for the plants. If we take too much, the plants will die, and the soldiers will blame us.”
“What do you mean the water is for the plants?” someone asked him.
Jiat answered that one. “Plants drink water like us. But they’re like babies, they need someone to give it to them.”
Rajani cupped her hands under the spigot and waited for Lainla to turn it on. She drank eagerly as soon as her hands were full. Then it was Lainla’s turn. Rajani leaned against the red wall and twisted the faucet knob on and off. She was still thinking about what Kebet had said. All of this is going to become untrue. Oh, if only she, or Jedial, or any of them had something to write with, if only they had their Table Chronicles with them! Then they could write down the lessons they were learning, they could store the stories they were living, they could add to their Chronicles the way their ancestors had before them.
Well, maybe they still could. From what the others were saying, the Xhota had destroyed as much of the urb as they could, but maybe some books had made it through. Maybe some of the Table Chronicles had survived. Maybe a few of them could go back one day and gather the pages together, then make a book, a new book, of all that the Cursed had gone through before and after the raid.
And then Rajani would write the words she couldn’t let go of, the words burning in her heart. Either the gods are powerless, unable to stop the overbelters from destroying us, or they are evil, hating us and desiring to see our death – or Hunt and Gather are still the gods we’ve always known and their stories still true.
If I want to believe that you have the power to bring us back, then I have to believe you could have stopped the raid and didn’t.
And why didn’t you? I don’t know.
But I do know you.
That was as far as Rajani could go. The knot in her throat was still tight. The distance between herself and the gods still yawned deep. There was a hardness in her heart that wouldn’t melt; Rajani wasn’t sure that she even wanted it to melt. She might need it. Almost certainly she would. The overbelters had shown themselves again and again to be a cruel, cruel people. She had to meet them with starmetal and stone.
Otherwise, they would win.