52—Leggers, Tunnelers, and Assorted Traffic
Ashes rode westward like a man possessed by a dream, waking occasionally into a fit of anger, then falling into his reverie once more. His sons trailed behind him, lagging as much as they could without stirring him into a rage, whispering together so he would not hear them, for whenever he heard them he demanded to know what they were saying, what they were thinking, what insurgency they were planning.
“You’ll do what I tell you,” he said, not once but a dozen times when he came to himself. “You know what’s good for you, you’ll do what I tell you.”
“He’s got to have somebody to boss around,” whispered Bane. “If we’d been girls, like he planned, he’d have been just the same with them, made them do whatever he wanted. He’d have hitched them up to Mooly, prob’ly. Or one of those others.”
“I can’t figure why Marool took us away from our mama,” said Dyre, who’d been puzzling over this for the better part of a day. “He said she was jealous, but she didn’t seem jealous over men. She had plenty of men. Why’d he want her dead? Specially, since she couldn’t smell him. Seems like he’d have rather kidnapped her, brought her out here to keep around. She wasn’t old. Maybe she’d have had a daughter for him.”
“Other thing,” mused Bane. “He never said how our mama died, did he?”
“Never said what her name was, nothin’.”
“Somethin’ else. There’s this pond he talks about. So, you go in there, you can’t die, right? So, how come when our mama was sick or hurt or whatever, he didn’t take her there and fix her?”
Dyre looked crafty. “Maybe he hated her. Maybe he just as soon she died.”
“That don’t make sense! He wanted children, and he went to all that trouble, why would he let her die?”
“Maybe he couldn’t tell her what to do, so he decided he didn’t want to bother.”
“Maybe Marool was her,” said Bane, not thinking what he said, his unconscious prompting him to a truth he immediately recognized and wanted to unsay.
Dyre said nothing. He pretended not to have heard. He did not want to have heard because … well, because. They’d killed her, was why. And they’d done … lots of other things. And if she had been, well then, Ashes had lied to them. But if she had been, then why hadn’t she known? Why hadn’t they known? Why had they grown up in that place near Nehbe, and at Dutter’s farm? She hadn’t kept them by her, and she should have. If it was so. Which it probably wasn’t.
Bane did not repeat himself. What he had said did not bear repeating. Not that it was wrong. Ashes had told them sons of thunder couldn’t do wrong so long as they did what they wanted to. Whatever they wanted to do was right. It’s just that he should have been told. If what he had said was right, he should have been told. Ashes said people back there on Thor, they killed off a lot of people who didn’t believe what they did: mothers, fathers, kids, made no difference. So, it wasn’t wrong to have killed her. It was just … Well, it was the way it happened. There could have been a better way than that.
Late in the afternoon, as the three rode abreast along a wider stretch of the trail, Ashes pointed off into the west at a certain high, ragged line of mountain.
“That’s the edge of the chasm,” he said.
“How deep?” grunted Bane.
“Well, there’s a shallow crater and a deep one. The deep one’s maybe five, ten kilometers to the bottom,” said Ashes. “Before the pond, we used to have a member of our brotherhood named Maq Bunnari, Bunny the Book, we used to call him because he was always reading. He read everything, he knew anything there was to know about anything. So, just before we left Thor, Bunny was in charge of looking around for a place for us to go. There wasn’t a lot of choices in the nearby sectors, but one of them was this place, so Bunny got the geological report, and according to him, the chasm was an ‘anomalous feature.’ Seems like that the chasm was a two-mouthed volcano to start with, pretty much dead, so the two domes fell in and that made two pot-shaped valleys, right? So, just like it was aiming for the bull’s eye, a meteor fell right into the southern valley, and it punched a pretty big hole. The report said there was a hell of a big, deep cone-shaped hole down inside that mountain.