Rola’a Under Siege (Chapter 1, Part 1 of 2)
Deep inside the planet’s belly he’d been forged and pieced together, a child of La’a herself. The first in eleven centuries. From his chest grew a ball of living metal, scooped from La’a’s outer core to fuse with bone and muscle. His skin was hairless and without pigment, the glow from his cooling heart only slightly dampened by his body’s translucence as he came up through her crust in a network of rapid underground currents where only blind fish swam. His blood ran dark and cold, giving the tunnel walls a bluish cast as he passed. Finally Mother La’a gave him up with with a watery burp and he flowed naked into the river La’am, his newborn body facing yellowsky for the first time.
——-
Hunla came out of her dwelling and joined several others already gathered near the ledge facing out into the canyon. They were all looking down, at the river. When she saw what they saw, that the water level had risen several bodylengths, she let out a sigh. There would be no fleen Harvest. The trees were underwater, and the plump fruits that grew ripe only for a handful of daycycles would be plucked off and sent with the current. She noticed the bitterness on the others’ faces, and some of the women seemed about to cry.
“It’s a shame. No fleenfruit this year. But we will figure it out.”
One of the women turned toward her, incredulous. Her name was Graspa, one of a younger generation, as her skin was redder than Hunla’s humble orange. “We will starve without the fleen harvest!”
“Hardly.”
They all turned toward her now, and Hunla realized she might have kept her mouth shut. Grell wouldn’t be happy if she told about the store - he had always hoarded the good news. She hastened to cover.
“I simply mean that when the river goes back down, there will be fish and fleen to gather. As well as sap from the trees.”
It might have satisfied them. “But why did it have to happen now,” Graspa said. “The Harvest was only two daycycles away. And how long until it goes down?”
“La’an only knows.”
The women turned back to their depressive watch. Hunla turned and walked back to her dwelling, thoughtful. A whole grove of fleen trees, picked clean. And the river La’andam hadn’t risen the whole time she’d lived in Yuuka with Marg. The Fleen Harvest was something the people here took for granted. And truthfully, she had begun to as well. She would miss it. The taste of the fruit was like nothing she’d experienced - it was truly a wonder. The Harvest was a time of wealth and merriment, as the people gorged on fleen and fleenwine and fleenjelly on bread. The binge was the only way, because three daycycles after Harvest the fleen would rot. If one had eaten enough, one could fast for nearly a month, surviving only on handfuls of water from the river. If anyone tried to go down there now, however, they’d be swept away. The architects of Yuuka had been wise to keep the dwellings well above the river, allowing only ladder shafts to reach that far down. Ladder shafts that were halfway filled with water now.
In her dwelling, which was dug out from the wall of her level’s common area in much the same way as all of the levels had been carved out from the wall of the canyon, on both sides, Hunla put a hand to a particularly dark spot on her floor and closed her eyes. Then she Listened. Her touch on the dark rock, which was called La’anite, gave her passive access to every other instance of La’anite throughout Yuuka and the surrounding area, though her range was limited. She’d occasionally been able to connect to her uncle in the mountain fortress of Roll, but only because he was of an earlier generation and had greater range, and only because he’d wished to connect to her. But the rock was prevalent even here, and had its uses. For the most part, La’anite was an igneous rock, and rather porous. Whole clumps of it lay underground and were useless for Listening - Hunla could connect to them but all she would learn about their surroundings was that it was dark and quiet. Over the years in Yuuka she had been able to memorize where the relevant La’anite was, and spent little time eavesdropping when she knew who she wanted to find. She worked quickly through all of the dwellings, and finally came to the surface. The plains, above the canyon. La’anite was prevalent there, as the embedded rocks were uncovered by wind and time. New relevant Listening posts were appearing all the time, and old ones being covered up. She finally heard Marg’s voice, along with many of the Yuukan warriors, atop the grainfields. That’s where she would find him.
Each level she climbed she found the same kind of grouping near the ledge - mostly women lamenting the loss of their Harvest. The men were less sentimental, but even so she could tell they were melancholy too. There seemed to be less men milling about than usual, however. On the fifth level, where meals were prepared and served, nobody gathered. That was odd, because even when it wasn’t mealtime there would be conversation and table games taking place. It was where most social interaction between levels happened, as you were always likely to see someone you knew well. Hunla kept climbing. There were twelve levels in all in Yuuka, and they housed nearly five thousand people. An equal amount lived across the bridges, on the other side of the canyon. Visits across the bridges were less common and hardly ever scheduled, as the canyon was often too windy to travel. The bridges were rope and wood, although plans had been in the works for a long time to find something stronger to connect the communities. As it was, only small groups of people travelled across, and these were usually those that had relatives on the other side. Some had grown up on one half of Yuuka without ever visiting the other, but this was more from lazyness than from legitimate hindrance.
On the surface, she found Marg engaged in a sparring session with a much larger Yuukan warrior. She waited patiently for him to dispatch the man, although her patience wasn’t much required. Marg stepped forward, parrying a spearthrust as he swept a brown-skinned leg under the other man, bringing him to the ground. His spearblade rested an inch from the other’s throat, and the warrior dropped his spear in defeat.
“Best seven out of thirteen,” the man on the ground said, but Marg had spotted Hunla and simply shook his head.
“No, Stregg, I’ve already beaten you six out of eleven.”
“How’s a man to better himself if he can’t win once?”
Marg pulled him to his feet. “Spar another one of your warriors. I have news to speak to my partner.”
Stregg walked away muttering. Hunla imagined it might be because Stregg was the strongest and most talented of any of the Yuuka warriors, and Marg was a Thra’an. One of the last remaining on the planet, after the Chyla’an race had all but wiped them from the face of La’a. Thra’a had been known for its warriors, and they had enough of them to keep a standing army of peacekeepers in each of the three main regions - Thra’a to the West, Chyla’a to the North, and Rola’a to the south. Until something had happened in Chyla’a. And the Reapers had come.
Now Thra was no more. Three centuries had passed since the Chyla’an Reapers had removed the Thra’ans, and those living in Rol’a had hope that the Reapers would leave them alone. Grell was the champion of this kind of thought, and he was the current elected leader of Yuuka. Only, recently, cities to the North but still a part of Rol had begun to fall. Survivors had been scarce, and none of them had been able to say if it had been Reapers who’d been responsible. The last time she’d connected with her uncle through the La’anite he’d been full of tension, wary that the time of the Rola’ans was coming to a swift end. And if the Thra’ans hadn’t been able to stop the Chyla’ans…
Marg came to her, meeting her eyes. She nodded back.
“It seems the river has flooded, and taken our Harvest from us.”
He nodded. “It may not have mattered anyway. I fear…another of our cities has fallen, and this time, we have evidence from one of the surviving Runners. It was Reapers.” Hunla shivered.
Reapers were monstrous-looking men who had been bred for stupidity and strength. They flew through the air on balls of metal, and were bearers of weapons that shot electricity. There was no fighting them - the Thra’an army had been trained soldiers, the best in all of La’an, but even they were no match for flying machines.
“Which city?” She asked. It mattered little. Yuuka was far to the North of the Rola’an territories, and there were precious few cities between them and the mountain range that stood between Rola’a and Chyla’a.
“Grob.” His voice was dark. Grob was the closest city to Yuuka, about a day’s walk North, and well-hidden. Its people lived underground, in a massive network of tunnels.
“My La’an. Have you told Grell?”
Marg nodded again. “He doesn’t care for the things I tell him. Half of the time I’m just a rumor-mongering Thra’an. The other half of the time he tells me there’s nothing we can do about any of it.”
“Did you tell him we need to evacuate? To go South?”
“I did. But in his mind, we’d be helpless in the plains, and then the desert. The Reapers would have no trouble finding us, and with the Greensky a week away, the Dust…”
“What chance do we have here?”
“None. But Grell is more interested in the loss of fleen Harvest. That’s his favorite time of year. He’s got men out hunting for pig, so we can all eat.”
So that’s why the levels and Meal Hall were so empty.
“We’ll have to organize a revolt,” Hunla said.
“There may not be time. The Reapers could be here tonight, at Redsky.”
“Still, we can’t leave everyone here to die.”
Marg looked away.
“No. Even if the Reapers are to find us all eventually…and Chyla’a takes over La’an…I won’t let my people die again. And these are my people now.”
The partners walked toward the cliff, hand in hand. Hunla looked down at the rushing waters.
“Organize a meeting in the Meal Hall. Tonight. Get the word out, and make it urgent. Even if the people only think of the lost Harvest. I will try to find a Listener on the other side of the canyon who can do the same.”
“We have to keep Grell out of things. Tie him up, if need be. Take him by force.”
“To Roll?”
“There is nowhere else larger or safer than your uncle’s mountain keep.”
She nodded. The escape plan had always involved Roll. Her home. She tried to catch Marg’s eye, but her husband was looking down. Not idly, as she’d been, but with a squint. He was rapt.
“There, in the river…do you see that? It’s moving.” He pointed.
She looked. To her, everything was moving. But there was something working against the current, flailing.
“It’s a man!” she said. Marg grunted, his suspicion founded. He left her side then, running along the cliff’s edge and upriver, looking down every few steps to judge the placement of the floundering man. Then, before Hunla even realized he’d been thinking of it, Marg launched himself into the air and leapt into the canyon.
Hunla cursed his Thra’an upbringing, and then ran to the surface entrance to Yuuka.
