Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

She did not need to complete the thought. The old plan had been fifty years in the making, thirty in implementation. Here and there across the steppes were great complexes of tunnels dug secretly by the Noor. There beneath the steppes were towns, cities. There beneath the scattered grainfields were dormitories and meeting halls and storehouses now beginning to hold some grain and roots hidden from the tax collectors. Timbers supported the corridors beneath the earth, timbers bought from the Queen’s coffers, moved at night, hidden by day. Clever mechanisms brought air into the depths, mechanisms paid for from the Queen’s funds. Melancholies went south into the cities and returned with goods and coin, and both went into the underground cities Queen Fibji was building. Fifty thousand of the Queen’s people dwelt beneath the moors already, and more were descending every day. In twenty years more, or thirty, all would have made themselves a redoubt within the earth. Then, the scouts would watch for Jondarite balloons, would signal the approach of armies, but those armies would find no one on the open steppes, no one to enslave, no one to tax. Or if they did, they would fight tunnel by tunnel, room by room, against strong defenses.

And across the breadth of the steppes hundreds of thousands of mud graves stood mute evidence of the soil dug out in the dark hours. If any had had sense to see it. How could so sparse a people have had so many dead? But the Jondarites had not asked that question.

“And yet,” she whispered to herself, “and yet, in that thirty years or fifty years, how many more will really die?” The young men grew belligerent in the underground places. If they could not fight the Jondarites, they fought one another. Queen Fibji had made a rule that boys could dwell below only until they had fathered two children; then they must return to the nomad tribes above. Which made it more peaceful below but left the children without fathers to learn from. She sighed. Thinking again of Fatterday, she wondered how many of her people might be saved if there were truly a South shore and she could find some way to come to it.

Now her near-kin were saying the same things over and over, worrying the subject to rags. Her mind wandered, remembering.

On one particular day long ago she had walked with her father across a stretch of the arid lands, away from the tribe, free for the moment from servitors or petitioners. He had

taken her on these walks sometimes, talking and talking, as though to gift her with the essence of his thought to store for some future time. She was his only child.

“The young always want to go to war,” he had said. “And the old are too often eager to send them. The young revel in thoughts of battle. They think blood is wine, that it can be spilt without consequence and a new vintage bought for tomorrow’s feast. And the old are sometimes willing to have young men gone, to have their exasperating numbers thinned to a biddable fraction, for they, the young men, are the source of dissent and confusion. It is among them that revolution breeds, often to no point. But what good are dead warriors, Fibji?”

He stopped, as though taken by a sudden memory. “Long ago, when I was only a youth and my father was yet King, I came upon a Jarb Mendicant sitting on a stone here on the steppe, wreathed in the smoke of his pipe. I was joyful and sanguine then. I said to him, ‘Mendicant, give me a prognostication for our people.’ He looked at me through the smoke, as they do, and said at last, ‘I see peace and prosperity for the Noor, Prince, but only when the ruler of the Moor can answer the question, “Of what good are dead warriors?” He brooded again. “I have never answered the question, Fibji. See the mud graves of the dead as we pass. Is our way not marked with the bones of our people? And what good do the dead do themselves or us?”