(It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are.)
Lately you’ve spent your mornings on a work crew doing water-gardening: sprouting seeds in trays of wet cloth, then moving the resulting seedlings to troughs of water and chemicals that the biomests devise so that they can grow. It’s soothing work, and reminds you of the housegreen you had back in Tirimo. (Uche sitting amid the edible ferns, making horrible faces as he chewed on a mouthful of dirt before you could stop him. You smile at this memory before the hurt blanks your face again. You still can’t smile over things Corundum did, and that’s been ten—no, eleven—years now.)
In the evenings you go to Ykka’s, to talk with her and Lerna and Hjarka and Cutter about the affairs of the comm. This includes stuff like whether to punish Jever Innovator Castrima for selling fans—since market economies are illegal during a Season per Imperial Law—and how to stop Old Man Crey (who isn’t that old) from complaining again that the communal baths are too tepid. He’s getting on everyone’s nerves. And who’s going to step in if Ontrag, the potter, keeps breaking the bad practice pottery of the two people apprenticed to her? It’s how Ontrag was taught, but that’s also how one teaches people who want to learn pottery. Ontrag’s apprentices are only there because Ykka ordered them to learn the old woman’s skill before she kicks off. At the rate things are going, they might kill her themselves.
It’s ridiculous, mundane, incredibly tedious stuff, and… you love it. Why? Who knows. Perhaps because it’s similar to the sorts of discussions you had back during the two times you were part of a family? You remember arguing with Innon about whether to teach Corundum Sanze-mat early, so he wouldn’t have an accent, or later, and only if Coru ever wanted to leave Meov. You had an argument with Jija once because he believed putting fruit in the cold cache ruined the taste, and you didn’t care because it made the fruit last longer. The arguments that you have with the other advisors are more important: Your decisions affect more than a thousand people now. But they have the same silly, pedantic feel. Silly pedantry is a luxury that you’ve rarely been able to enjoy in your life.
You’ve gone topside again, standing silent on the porch of a gateway house in the falling ash. The sky’s a little different today: thinnish gray-yellow instead of thickish gray-red, and the pattern of the clouds is long and wavelike in lieu of the chains of beads you’ve seen since the Rifting. One of the Strongback guards says, looking up, “Maybe things are getting better.” The yellow of the clouds almost feels like sunlight. You can see the sun itself now and again, a pale and strengthless disc occasionally framed by the gentle drifting curves.
You don’t tell the guard what you can sess, which is that the yellow clouds contain more sulfur than usual. Nor do you say what you know, which is that if it rains right now, the forest that surrounds Castrima and currently provides a significant portion of the comm’s food will die. Somewhere up north, the rift that Alabaster tore has simply belched out a great waft of the gas from some long-buried underground pocket. Cutter, who’s come up here with you and Hjarka, glances at you, face carefully blank; he knows, too. But he doesn’t say anything, either, and you think you know why: Because of the guard, and his wistful hope that things are getting better. It would be cruel to break that hope before it fades on its own. You like Cutter better for this moment of shared kindness.
Then you turn your head a little and the feeling vanishes. There’s another stone eater nearby, lurking in the shadows of a house not far off. This one is male-ish, butter-yellow marble laced with veins of brown, with a swirling cap of brass hair. He isn’t looking at anyone, isn’t moving, and you wouldn’t have even noticed him if not for the bright metal of his hair, so striking against the haze of the day. You wonder, for the third or fourth time, why they cluster around Castrima. Are they trying to help, as Hoa helps you? Are they expecting more of you to turn to delicious, chewable stone? Are they just bored?
You can’t deal with these creatures. You push Butter Marble from your mind and look away, and later when you’re ready to set off and you glance that way again, he is gone.
The three of you are up here, following one of the Hunters through the forest, because they want you to come and see something. Ykka’s not along for the trip because she’s mediating a dispute between the Strongbacks and the Resistants about shift length or something. Lerna’s not here because he’s started teaching a class in wound care to anyone who wants to attend. Hoa’s not here because Hoa’s still missing, as he has been for the past week. But with you are seven of the Castrima Strongbacks, two Hunters, and the blond white woman you met on your first day in Castrima, who has since introduced herself as Esni. She’s been accepted into the comm as a Strongback, despite being barely over a hundred pounds and paler than ash. Turns out she was the head of a drover clan before the Rifting, which means she knows how to wrangle large animals and people with outsized egos. She and her people voluntarily joined Castrima because it was much closer than their home comm down in the Antarctics. The air-dried, pickled, salt-cured remnants of their last cattle herd have constituted Castrima’s only meat stores since the Rifting.
No one talks as you walk. The silence of the forest, save for the rustling of small creatures through the undergrowth and the occasional tap-tap of wood-boring animals in the distance, demands more of the same. The woods are changing, you see as you tromp through them. The taller trees lost their leaves months ago, sap drawing down to protect against the encroaching cold and the souring surface soil. But correspondingly, the shrubs and mid-level trees have grown thicker foliage, drinking in what little light they can capture, sometimes folding their leaves down at night to shed ash. This makes the ash thinner off the roads, so much that you can sometimes see the ground litter.
Which is good, because it makes the newest parts of the landscape stand out that much more: the mounds. They’re three or four feet high, usually, built of cemented ash and leaves and twigs, and on a brighter day like this they are easy to spot because they steam faintly. Occasionally you see small bones, the remains of paws or tails, poking through the base of each mound. Boilbug nests. Not many… but you don’t remember any, a week ago when you walked past this area of the forest. (You would’ve sessed the heat.) It’s a reminder that while most plants and animals struggle to survive in a Season, a rare few do more: deprived of their usual predators and given ideal conditions, they thrive, breeding wildly wherever they can find a food source, relying on numbers to ensure the species’ continuation.
Not good, regardless. You find yourself checking your shoes frequently, and you notice the others doing the same.
Then you’ve reached the top of a ridge that overlooks a spreading forest basin. It’s clear the basin is outside the zone of protection that Castrima’s orogenes maintain, because broad swaths of the forest here are flattened and dead in the aftermath of the Rifting. You’d be able to see hundreds of miles if not for the ash, but since this is such a bright, low-ash day, you can see perhaps a few dozen. It’s enough.