“They say only women’s blood makes the lichen grow like this,” said Melanie. “Women of reproductive age, preferably nursing mothers. It has to do with the hormones.”
“To make this stuff grow? What is it?”
“P’naki,” said Joncaster, watching her narrowly.
She turned aside, retching, “They gave me P’naki, once. When I was a child. To protect me from the fever.”
Melanie shook her head. “No, Genevieve. They gave you powdered bonebush, probably. It’s evil-tasting stuff, and they told you it was P’naki, a protection against the fever. They told you that it came from Mahahm. You grew up thinking that only P’naki from Mahahm could protect you from the fever, and that explained why Mahahm was important, why the Lord Paramount traded with Mahahm instead of conquering it.”
“I don’t understand,” she cried, as Joncaster dragged her to the fourth body. He rolled it over and removed the veil. Red hair tumbled across the sand, green eyes stared emptily at the sun, a soft mouth curved toward Genevieve, the lips slightly open, as though in a moment she would wake and laugh!
Genevieve wailed, the high, hopeless cry of a child, man or creature, lonely and lost. “Oh, oh, no … no.”
Melanie grasped her by the shoulders and shook her, not gently. “Genevieve, stop it! Who is it!”
She sobbed, “Barbara. My schoolmate, Barbara. She married . . . she married Viscount Willum, of Halfmore. Oh, for the love of heaven, why? Why?”
“You haven’t been listening to what we’ve been telling you!” snarled Melanie, shaking her. “Stop this!”
Genevieve shuddered herself silent while Joncaster felt along the body, coming away with a bundle that moved slightly. “Another boy child.”
Melanie took it from him, a baby larger and older than the other had been. She took a nippled water bottle from the scrip at her side and thrust the teat into the little mouth.
“This is what you come for?” Genevieve said, wiping her face on her sleeve. “To save the babies?”
Melanie nodded. “The ones we can. There are other teams out covering the other locations. We have many among us now who were once children of the candidates.”
Genevieve, kneeling to replace the veil over Barbara’s white face, scarcely heard. “Will we bury her?” she cried, wiping her eyes as she stared about at the quiet bodies. “Bury them?”
“No,” said Joncaster, rolling Barbara’s body back onto her face, as he had already done the others. “We will do nothing except take this one living child back to the refuge. When he is strong enough to travel, he will go to Galul.”
“Just leave her? Like this?” she cried.
Joncaster pulled her to her feet. “We will leave her with the others, so when the flagman’s crew comes at the next holy season, they will see nothing except what the desert itself has done: perhaps a scattering of bones that the bonebushes have not eaten, which he will tidy away so the candidates won’t be frightened by them. There are many carrion-eaters on the sands.”
Melanie said, “Besides, if we buried them, the Mahahmbi might catch on to us.”
“But surely the people from Mahahm-qum already know you’re here,” Genevieve said. “The refuge isn’t hidden.”
“Of course they know we’re here,” said Melanie. “But they don’t know who ‘we’ are. Just as they hide P’naki in plain sight by defining it as something else, so we hide ourselves in plain sight by calling ourselves malghaste. So far as they’re concerned, we’re malghaste, therefore unimportant. They don’t concern themselves with unimportance!”
“And the lichen isn’t P’naki?”
“It isn’t P’naki if you mean a preventive of a purely fictional fever,” said Joncaster. “It is P’naki if you mean the stuff that Mahahm lives by, the stuff that is taken from here to a well-guarded storehouse just outside the south gates of Mahahm-qum, from which it is traded with the Lord Paramount for food and fabric and machines, that is then traded by the Lord Paramount with other worlds for all manner of things. It is P’naki if you mean that which the Lord Paramount uses to reward his faithful followers, just as the Shah uses it here in Mahahm. This stuff can extend men’s lives indefinitely. Both the Lord Paramount and the Shah Effulgent have grown centuries old upon P’naki, and they grow craftier and greedier with age, while those of Haven who want to grow older grow more numerous, and they, too, become more and more greedy. Those on far worlds, the powerful old men who trade off-world luxuries for P’naki, also grow greedy, always wanting more, and more and more.”