“The Ularians?”
“Nobody knows what happened. They just disappeared, that’s all.”
“There have been a lot of Nantaskan-speaking worlds that colonied out. Arriving from any of them makes more sense than this hole-in-the-ground story.”
She glanced at him sidewise. “There is a real site for the supposed emergence, Trompe. As a matter of fact, it’s in a wide valley not many days’ travel from Cochim-Mahn. Or so the maps say, at any rate.”
“A sacred site, no doubt,” he said flippantly.
“Oh, very sacred! It’s the omphalos. Extra-special rites every third year, a Dinadh year being six hundred and a fraction days. Every third year they draw an additional day out of the omphalos, the navel of time. That doesn’t quite do it, so every sixtieth year they have to pull two days. Tahs-uppi, the ceremony’s called.”
“Meaning what? You’re further along with the language than I am.”
She mused. “Tahs-uppi. Tasimi means the edge or the border. Well, actually it means ‘our borders’,’ plural possessive. Tahs probably means something like end, or limit. There’s a word … uppas, uppasim, uppasimi.” She fell silent.
“So?”
“I was trying to figure out the ending. It has something to do with selection, I think. Part of the litany of Weaving Woman gives her the name of K’loch mahn uppasimi. Selector of our patterns. Well, not quite that. Chooser, intrinsic.”
“I don’t quite get that.”
“Well, in our language we wouldn’t say the rain chooses to fall. It just naturally falls. Weaving Woman is pattern, she doesn’t choose it.”
“So the name means what? The end of pattern?”
“The crux, the fulfillment. That would fit. Every hundred standard years, more or less, they reach the fulfillment of the pattern, pull out an extra day or so, and start over.”
“With feasting, I suppose. Processions.”
“More likely fasting and prayer. Actually, I don’t know. The chips you gave me merely mention Tahs-uppi and gave the date for the preceding one. When a ceremony is very holy, taboo, it’s hard for an outsider to learn the details.” She stared down into the abyss they were skirting. “The pattern is due to end fairly soon. Maybe we’ll get a chance to ask about it.”
“I wonder what would happen,” Trompe mused, turning the vehicle away from the canyon and toward the forest, where the road disappeared around patches of thorny growths, “if they didn’t find one.”
“Find one what?” she asked, startled.
“An extra day. When they went to fish one out of the navel hole.”
She laughed. “You’re an idiot, you know, Trompe. What an idea.” She chuckled, thinking about it, a kind of black joke on the Dinadhi. The high priest, or whoever, dipping into the omphalos with his what? His wand? His day hook? Slowly withdrawing it to the sound of drums and flutes, only to find it empty. No extra day. Gradually, as she thought on it and considered the implications, she stopped finding the idea at all funny.
Toward evening they arrived at the hostel, the first one between Simidi-ala and Cochim-Mahn.
“And not a moment too soon,” Lutha muttered as she parked the vehicle and heard the doorlocks make a solid thunk as they disengaged. “I’m exhausted.”
Leely was sitting up, looking around himself with some interest.
Lutha got out, sniffed the fragrant air, sighed, stretched, held out her arms to the boy, who came slowly into them, head turning as he tried to see everything at once.
They were at the top end of yet another of the endless canyons, its branches and ramifications receding into the distance: carved buttes, slender pillars and towers, stepped ziggurats of stone, vertical walls pocked with caves, some of them occupied by busy hive communities or by the lonely bulk of abandoned hives, all thrown into brilliantly colored contrasts of fire and shade by the level rays of the setting sun. Sound came softly from the canyons, voices and drums, the high shriek of a bone flute, the hissing rainsound of rattles.
“Evensong,” Lutha said. “Farewell to Lady Day. And that, too, is about time.”
“We’re more tired than we should be,” said Trompe as he slowly removed their belongings from the vehicle. “The trip wasn’t that arduous.”
She agreed with a weary brush at a lock of hair that dangled at her forehead. “Indeed, Trompe. We are scarce begun and I am so weary I can hardly see. What is it about this place?”
He considered the question soberly. “I think it’s the fact that we have no sense of distance traveled toward our goal. It’s been like a maze. One goes and goes, then comes a turn, and one goes back almost the way one came. It takes hundreds of lateral marks back and forth among these canyons before we make much progress toward the goal. I’m conscious of frustration in myself. I can certainly feel it in you.”
“That’s it,” she said, almost relieved to have identified her feelings. “Trompe, you’re right. It’s all the same—mark after mark of thorn forest and herds of woolly beasts, then the road emerges onto an utterly astonishing prospect. We look out on marvel, complete with rising song and smoke from the occupied hives and mysterious silence from the abandoned ones—”
“More abandoned ones than I expected,” he interjected.
“—then we turn back, almost the way we came; mark after mark of thorn forest once more, another astonishing prospect, then turn again, like a shuttle in a loom. Back and forth. Back and forth. After a time one’s sense of astonishment wanes.”
“But the landscape demands astonishment, nonetheless, so one is left feeling naughty to be so ungrateful.” Trompe grinned wearily at her. “At least, that’s how I felt! One more breathtaking view and I would gag. Especially considering we could have flown the distance in an hour or so.”
She sagged under Leely’s weight as the boy gripped her more tightly around the neck, murmuring his usual “Dananana,” moistly in her ear.
“He’s hungry,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“I just know. Or perhaps I assume he is
