Glory Season

cleared her voice, then dryly called adjournment.

Despite the tension, I left feeling stronger than I have in months. How much of that was due to the release of openness, I wondered, and how much did I owe to ministrations I’ve received lately thanks to Odo, under the sign of the ringing bell.

If I survive this day, this week, I must go back to that house, and celebrate while I can.

21

Dragons’ Teeth. Row after row of jagged incisors, aimed fiercely at the heavens.

I should have realized, Maia thought. On first seeing these islands in the distance, I should have known their name.

The Dragons’ Teeth. A legendary phrase. Yet, on contemplation, Maia realized she knew next to nothing about the chain of seamounts, whose massive roots of columnar crystal erupted from the ocean crust far below, rising to pierce surface waves and bite off hearty portions of sky. Their lustrous, fluted sides seemed all but impervious to time’s erosion. Trees clung to craggy heights where waterfalls, fed by pressure-driven springs, cascaded hundreds of meters, forming high, arched rainbows that mimicked aurorae, and gave Maia and Brod painful neck cricks as they sailed by, staring in awe.

Their gunter-rigged skiff threaded the tropical archipelago like a parasite weaving its way through the spines of some mighty half-submerged beast. The islands grew more densely clustered the deeper the little boat penetrated. Packed closely together, many of the needle isles were linked by natural causeways, even narrow, vaulting bridges. Brod always made a sign across his eyes before steering under one of those. A gesture not of fear, but reverence.

Although Brod had lived among the Teeth for several months before being taken hostage, he only knew the area near Halsey Beacon, the sole official habitation. So Maia took care of navigation while he steered. Their chart warned of shoals and reefs and deadly currents along the course she chose, making the circuitous path just right for folk like them, not wishing to be seen.

Clearly, Maia and Brod weren’t the first to reach this conclusion. Several times they spied evidence of past and present occupation. Huts and coarse, stony shelters lay perched on clefts, sometimes equipped with rude winches to lower cockleshell boats even smaller than the one they sailed. Once, Brod pointed and Maia caught sight of a hermit quickly gathering her nets as the skiff entered view. Ignoring their shouts, the old woman took to her oars, vanishing into a dark series of caves and grottoes.

So much for getting advice from the locals, Maia thought. Another time, she glimpsed a furtive figure staring down at them from a row of open casements, half-collapsed with age, part of a gallery of windows carved long ago, partway up one sheer tower face. The construction reminded her of the prison sanctuary in Long Valley, only vaster, and indescribably older.

Shadows cast by innumerable stone towers combed the dark blue water, all pointing in the same transitory direction, as if the stony pinnacles were gnomons to a half-thousand igneous sundials, tracking in unison the serene march of hours, of aeons.

This was a place once filled with history, then all but emptied of a voice.

“The Kings fought their last battle here,” Naroin had explained shortly before parting with the surviving castaways on their captured ketch. Maia and Brod had been about to board the resupplied skiff, in preparation to turning south. “All o’ the united clans an’ city-states sent forces here to finally squash the man-empire. It’s not much talked about, to discourage vars ever thinkin’ again about alliance with men against the great houses. But nothin’ could ever really stop a legend so big.” Naroin had gestured toward the sere towers. “Think about it. This is where the would-be patriarchs an’ their helpers made their last stand.”

Maia had paused to share her friend’s contemplation. “It’s like something out of a fairy tale. Unreal. I can hardly believe I’m here.”

The sailor-policewoman sighed. “Me neither. These parts ain’t visited much, nowadays. Way off the shippin’ lanes. I never pictured anythin’ like this. Kind o’ makes you wonder.”

Wonder, indeed. As she and Brod sailed deeper among the Dragons’ Teeth, Maia considered the unreliability of official history. The farther they went, the more certain she grew that Naroin had told the truth as she’d learned it. And that truth was a lie.

Maia recalled the riddle of the pit—that awful, glassy crater back on Grimké Island, where she and the others had been marooned. Since setting course southward on their separate journey, she and Brod had seen other peaks bearing similar stigmata. Seared tracks where stone had run molten under fierce heat, sometimes tracing a glancing blow, and sometimes…

Neither spoke while the steady wind took them past one ruined spire, a shattered remnant that had been sundered lengthwise by some power beyond anything she could imagine.

I don’t know about Kings and such. Maybe the patriarchists and their allies did make a last stand here. But I’ll bet a niche and all my winter rights they never caused this… devastation.

There was another, more ancient story. An event also seldom spoken of. One nearly as pivotal to Stratos Colony as its founding. Maia felt certain another enemy had been fought here, long ago. And from the looks of things, it had been barely beaten.

The Great Defense. Funny no one in our group made the connection, telling stories round the campfire, but that battle must also have raged here in the Dragons’ Teeth.

It was as if the Kings’ legend served to cover up an older tale. One in which the role of men had been admirable. As if those in power want its memory left only to hermits and pirates. She recalled the ancient, eroded, bas-relief sculpture she’d found amid the buried ruins at the temple in Grange Head, depicting bearded and unbearded human forms grappling horned demons under the sheltering wings of an avenging Mother Stratos. Maia added it to a growing collection of evidence… but of what? To what conclusion? She wasn’t sure, yet.

A formation of low clouds moved aside, exposing the expanse of sea and stone to a flood of brilliant light. Blinking, Maia found herself jarred from the relentless flow of her dour thoughts. She smiled. Oh, I’ve changed all right, and not just by growing tougher. It’s a result of everything I’ve seen and heard. Renna, especially, got me thinking about time.

The clans urged single vars to leave off any useless pondering of centuries, millennia. Summerlings should concentrate on success in the here and now. The long term only becomes your affair once your house is established and you have a posterity to worry about. To consider Stratos as a world, with a past that can be fathomed and a destiny that might be changed, was not how Maia had been raised to think.

But it’s not so hard, learning to picture yourself as part of a great chain. One that began long before you, and will go on long after.

Renna had used the word continuum meaning a bridge across generations, even death itself. A disturbing notion, for sure. But ancient women and men had faced it before there ever were clones, or else they would never have left old Earth. And if they could do it, a humble var like me can, too.

Such thoughts were more defiant than measuring constellations, or even playing Game of Life puzzles. Those had been mere man-stuff, after all. Now she dared to question the judgments of savant-historians. Seeing through maternalistic, conservative propaganda to a fragment of truth. Fragments are almost as dangerous as nothing at all, she knew. Yet, somehow, it must be possible to penetrate the veil. To figure out how everything she had seen, and been through, held together.

How will I explain this to Leie? Maia mused. Must I first kidnap her away from her reaver friends? Haul her, bound and gagged, somewhere to have the meanness fasted out of her?

Maia no longer meditated wistfully on the missed joy of shared experience with her sibling. The Leie of old would never have understood what Maia now thought and felt. The new Leie, even less so. Maia still missed her twin, but also felt resentment toward her harsh behavior and smug assumption of superiority, when they had last, briefly, met.