Halo: Primordium (6 page)

“What’s the difference?” I asked.

She looked at me with a squint. “Gamelpar knows more than I do. He’s very old.”

I glanced down at the filthy rags that covered me, then raised my arms in query—was I presentable?

“He doesn’t care about that,” she said. “Mostly, he goes naked, night and day. But sometimes he talks like you—crazy talk.

Nobody wants him in the vilage now. They’d kil him if they could.

But they don’t dare hurt him because he knows the great way,
daowa-maadthu
.”

Again the Lord of Admirals stirred.
Daowa-maadthu . . . Fate
is off-center, the wheel of life is cracked, the wagon will hit a
rock, jolt hard, and fall apart for all of us—eventually
.

“You know that truth?” she asked, studying my expression.

“I know of the broken wheel.” How odd that we were now actualy riding inside one. I had first heard of the great way from Riser. He had caled it
daowa-maad.
If the Lord of Admirals knew

of this, then it was a very old teaching indeed. I felt a spark of hope.

Maybe this Gamelpar had heard about the great way from Riser.

Riser might be out there now, waiting for me, afraid to enter a vilage of large, strange humans.

“Sometimes it’s al Gamelpar talks about.” Vinnevra shrugged.

“He wishes I understood more. Maybe he’l stop pestering me if I take you to him. Are you coming?”

Dark was perhaps an hour away. “Yes.”

She walked ahead quickly on long, skinny legs. I had to hurry to catch up. We skirted the confines of the vilage—realy just a circle of huts around the central meeting house.

“They say Gamelpar brings them bad luck,” she said. “I suppose he could if he wanted to, but around here, bad luck comes al by itself.”

In a few minutes, we crossed the bare, tramped-down dirt and entered a forest of low trees and brush. At last, night slipped down over us, and we folowed the distant light of a campfire.

The old man was squatting and tending the fire. He was as black as the girl. His long legs and long arms were like gnarled sticks, his fingers like square-cut twigs, and his square head was topped by a pure white fringe. His mouth stil held a few yelow teeth, but if he let it, his chin could almost meet his nose.

Around the fire he had laid out the skin of a smal animal he had skinned and cleaned, which he had roasted in the coals and was now eating. The second he had cleaned but not skinned. They looked like rabbits, and confirmed my suspicion there were other familiar animals here on the hoop. The Librarian’s colection might be large and diverse.

Vinnevra stepped forward out of the reflected glow from the sky bridge and into the firelight. “Old Papa,” she said. “I bring a fig from the first garden.”

The old man looked up from the bone he was gnawing, somewhat ineffectualy. “Come close, fig,” he said, his voice a soft, rattling squawk. He was looking at me. I was the fig.

Stil chewing, he waved greasy fingers that glinted in the firelight.

Meals for him were no doubt long affairs. “Tel the fig to strip away those rags.”

Vinnevra cocked her head at me. I puled off my rags, then stepped in toward the fire, feeling a little awkward under the old man’s calm scrutiny. Finaly, he turned away, smacked his gums, lifted the bone to his lips, and took another bite. “Human,” he said.

“But not from the city dwelers, nor the ones near the wal. Show me your back.”

I slowly turned and showed him my naked back, looking over my shoulder.

“Hm,” he murmured. “Nothing. Show him your own back, daughter’s daughter.”

Without shame or hesitation, Vinnevra turned and lifted her ragged top. The old man waved his greasy fingers again, for me to look close. I did not touch her, but saw imprinted, in the skin of the smal of her back, a faint silvery mark, like a hand clasping three circles.

She lowered her top. “This is the one who fel from the sky and lived,” she said. “He claims to come from a place caled Erde-Tyrene.”

The old man stopped chewing and lifted his head again, as if hearing distant music. “Say that again, clearly.”

“Erde-Tyrene,” she obliged.

“Have
him
say it.”

I spoke the name of my birth-planet. Now the old man rotated on his ankles and rearranged his squat, arm resting on drawn-up knee, the half-eaten rabbit leg dangling from one outstretched hand.

“I know of it,” he said. “Marontik, that’s the biggest city.”

“Yes!”

“Outside lie the lands of grass and sand and snow. There is a place where the land splits like a woman, deep and shadowed, and mountains of ice rol between mountains of rock and grind and drop big stones from their jaws.”

“Have you been there?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Not since I was a babe. I don’t remember it. But my best wife was older. She came from there before me,” he said. “She caled it Erda. She described it. Not like this place.”

“No,” I agreed.

Now the old man switched over to the language I had been raised with. He spoke it fluently enough, but with an odd accent, and using some words that were not familiar. He motioned me to come closer and sit beside him, while he said, in my birth-tongue,

“That wife was a teler of the finest stories. She filed my life with great flares of passion and dream.”

“What’s he saying?” Vinnevra asked me.

“He’s teling me about his favorite wife,” I said.

Vinnevra lay down on her elbow on his other side. “My mother’s mother. She died in the city before I was born.”

“We have been here for many long nights—many
years,
” Gamelpar said. “My best wife would be eager to hear about Marontik. How is it now?”

I described the old city and its baloon rafts and farm-to-market squares, and the power stations left nearby by the Forerunners. I did not go into my experiences with the Manipular or the Didact.

Now was not the time.

“She said nothing of baloon rafts,” he said. “But that was long ago. Vinnevra tels me you lost a friend somewhere out there. Was he one of the smal people with sweet voices?”

“He is,” I said.

“Wel, some of them are here, too, but not in the city or nearby.

Way over toward the far wal. We saw them long ago, and then they walked a long walk. They were honest, in their way, but had little respect for size or age.”

Riser had been quite old when he took me under his guidance.

Cha
manush
lived long lives.

Finaly, Vinnevra said, “Gamelpar, we are hungry. We have come from the vilage where there is no good food. You remember.”

“I sent you there to look when the sky burned and the stars fel,” the old man said, nodding. “They stil don’t like me there.” I could not keep track of the windings of al these stories. Which were true? Perhaps for these People, on this broken wheel, it didn’t matter.

“They have no rabbits,” Vinnevra wheedled.

“They eat al the game and leave none to breed, and then they go hungry. They burn al the wood and then go cold, they flee the city but live nearby and fear to leave . . . and then they vanish. But it is not their evil. Forerunners carry some off to the Palace of Pain, and now the vilagers are stiff with fear and don’t want to do anything.

Pfaaah!” He threw the bare bone out into the bushes.

“Share your meat and I’l tel you what I know,” I said.

Gamelpar stared into the fire and softly cackled. “No,” he said.

Vinnevra glanced at me reproachfuly. She knew how to deal with Gamelpar, it seemed, and I did not. “We went back, and the dead Forerunners are stil there. Nobody has come for them.” The old man looked up, reconsidered for a moment, then made up his mind. “Here, clean this branch,” he said to Vinnevra, “and I wil spit and cook the second rabbit. It wil be for both of you. I have eaten my fil.” When Vinnevra had stripped away the bark with teeth and nails, he thrust the stick through the rabbit, then tossed it directly into the fire, skin and al, and used the end of the stick to shift and turn it.

And so we settled next to him, waiting for the second rabbit to cook, beneath the fitful stars, with the bright silvery band of the sky bridge high above.

Gamelpar turned the rabbit again on the coals. The smel of burned fur was not appetizing. Was he trying to punish me for my presumption?

“Rabbit cooked in its skin is most succulent,” Vinnevra explained.

“Smels bad, eats fine,” Gamelpar agreed. “Tel me what you saw. The fire in the sky, and the brightness, and you faling—what did it look like, from up there?”

I told him a little of what had happened. “The Forerunners were angry at each other, last time I was with them. And the dead ones

—”

“You were with
them
?” Gamelpar lay down on his side, then on his back, and contemplated the bridge.

“I did not know them. It could be they were carrying me someplace.”

He nodded. “Shooting stars—dying ships. Lots of ships. But the brightness—the sky turning so white the eyes and head hurt—I don’t know what that is. Do you?”

Gamelpar was proving remarkably astute. Stil, he wasn’t exactly teling me the truth, about not understanding—not knowing. He knew something, or at least he had made a decent guess, and now he was testing me.

Ask him who
else
he is.

“Why are you scowling?” Vinnevra asked me.

I shook my head. I was not about to serve as a go-between for two old, dead warriors—not yet. I fancied I was stil my own person. For now.

“There,” he said, indicating a blotchy patch about a third of the way up one side of the band, “is where a big ship crashed into the hoop, before the brightness and the shooting stars, just before you fel from the sky.” He reached for another, thicker stick, handed it to Vinnevra, and blew out through his lips. She showed the stick to me. There were many notches already. “Mark another double handful,” the old man instructed. “A day or so doesn’t matter.” Vinnevra took the stick and removed a sharp rock from her pocket. She began to carve.

“Many mysteries,” the old man said. “Why are we here? Are we like animals in a pit that fight to amuse the Forerunners?”

“We have something they want,” I said.

The old man shifted the rabbit again and bright orange sparks flew up into the cool air. “Can’t let the skin go black al over,” he murmured. “Can’t let the legs burn through. Why do they move us around, why do they take us to the Palace of Pain . . . why treat us so?”

I itched to ask about this Palace of Pain, but the time did not seem right—the look on his face as he said those words . . .

“Humans defeated Forerunners, long ago,” I said. “Forerunners stil resent it.”

Now the old man’s expression realy sharpened. His jaw firmed and dropped a little, making his face look younger. “You remember such times?” he asked. He fixed me with an intense, if rheumy-eyed, stare, then leaned toward me and whispered, “Are there old spirits inside your head?”

“I think so,” I answered. “Yes.”

Vinnevra considered both of us with alarm and moved away from the fire.

“Does he have a name?”

“No name . . . just a title. A rank.”

“Ah. A highborn, then.”

“You’re
encouraging
him!” Vinnevra accused from the shadows, but who was encouraging whom, she did not make clear.

“Pfaah,” the old man said, and lifted the rabbit. “Break off a leg. I wish we had some salt.” He poked the now-bare spit over his shoulder, toward the part of the bridge spinning into shadow. The blotch where a ship had crashed was a dark gray smear, tapering in one direction, and then flaring outward with the marks of burning debris.

“Before the strange brightness, the sun was different—true?” I asked.

Vinnevra had moved closer again, and she answered this time.

“Golden-red,” she said. “Warmer. Larger.”

“Did you see the sky bridge—the hoop in the sky—disappear into the brightness, before al the rest?”

The old man favored me with a gap-toothed grin. “So it did.”

“Then it
is
a different sun,” I said.

“Not different,” Vinnevra insisted, her brows arching. “It changed color. That’s
all
.” Any other explanation was too vast for her.

Perhaps too vast for me as wel. Moving something the size of this Halo the way the Didact had moved us from Erde-Tyrene to Charum Hakkor, then out to the San’Shyuum world . . .

But I did not back down. “Different suns,” I insisted.

The old man pondered, his nearly toothless jaw moving up and down. I began to regret this discussion—we were distracting him from portioning out the rabbit.