Later, Aan told Grandam, “I hope they will put the burial ground somewhere protected, where the graves will not be disturbed again. A cave would be good. Like the one I hid them in on Vhiliinyar. The bones were easy to guard there, and the cave could always be collapsed upon them if outsiders came to disturb them again.”
Grandam told Acorna about it later, when Aari had returned to the Cw^wwith food for Becker. “I got the strongest impression that what he intends to do the rest of his life is guard the burial ground.”
Acorna could not suppress a shudder. “I suppose that’s what the Khieevi did to him that none of our horns can touch.”
“Yes, well, perhaps. But it’s nonsense. That is a brilliant young man. He excelled at every aspect of our culture and had already traveled to other worlds as an ambassador and educator. He is like a shell, from which the little creature within has been stolen. No-I exaggerate. Perhaps his essence is only hidden, but hidden from himself as well as from others.”
Later, when the Council decided that each clan would be responsible for burying its own dead in separate burial places, Aari insisted on attending all reinterments. The clans whose dead were not returned to them with the rest of the bones did not mention the missing remains, which Acorna found odd. However, the entire city of Kubiilikhan was actively, prematurely, mourning the ones now believed to be lost in the cosmos and so a few absent dead from the past mattered less than the burial of the many bones reclaimed.
Acorna accompanied Aari as he attended the first reinterment.
The sky looked like an open wound that day, yellow, with huge red and burgundy clouds boiling in the west, split now and then by the green lightning she remembered from before. The pavilions creaked, extruding and retracting their ramps like snakes’ tongues, raising and lowering their floors as the breezes and dampness shifted.
Aari was very quiet and Acorna felt from him confusion and grief, and sensed this might be coming from the Council’s decision to have no central burial place, so that even the tenuous position he had found for himself as guardian of the dead was now lost to him.
This was confirmed when she noticed that when a few people addressed him, he ignored them.
“Aari,” she said softly, “Technoartisan Maarye just greeted you.”
Aari looked genuinely startled. “Oh. I’m sorry. That -was real then?” He passed his hand over his face. Healed and wearing the prosthetic horn Becker had devised for him, he seemed a handsome, stalwart example of Linyaari manhood.
“Of course it was real,” she said. “You looked right through him.”
“I’m sorry. I should apologize. I’ve kept company with phantoms for a long time, Khornya. They don’t generally expect manners, or even answers.”
Thunder cracked just then and the rain drenched everyone within a single moment. No one ran for cover, however. This was a solemn moment. All of Kubiilikhan and most of the rest of narhiiVhiliinyar was here. All of the clans had at least sent representatives, gathered up in the shuttle belonging to the new ship being assembled by the technoartisans. Only one communications officer remained on duty at the spaceport, and even that officer was frequently relieved so that everyone could attend the appropriate burials.
The rain was welcome, even fitting. It made the new ground softer for burial of the old bones. The Ancestors were in attendance, and that alone kept the procession from speeding its slow, mournful pace.
This was the burial ceremony of Clan Neeyeereeya, the clan with the most members to be interred, and the most above ground, though many of the latter were far too young to remember those buried on the world they had never known.
And yet, the atmosphere was as heavy with sorrow as the sky was with clouds. Clansmen with heads bowed against the torrential rain carried the burial baskets containing the remains of their kinfolk to dark holes in the long blue grass. Acorna had sorely missed her dear, departed Mr. Li, but though her loss had been new while these losses were old ones, she had not previously experienced the raw expression of grief she felt from the other Linyaari. Unlike the grief of men, this feeling carried no morbidity about it, no consciousness of the flesh rotting or ghoulish fascination with death. There was no threat or anger here, only a kind of wounded wonder at the mystery of how a loved one who had walked, slept, and eaten beside you could be rendered to a few calcified fragments.