The Solarpunk Mammoths Novel: part 1
Jan. 1st, 2019 09:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7I wrote up a whole intro post about this already, but to sum up, this is the alpha draft of a novel I've been working on, which I'm posting, mostly under privacy filters, not for beta-reading but just because organizing my writing for an audience is a great way for me to work it out in my own mind, and get to have conversations about it, and in general keep myself motivated with deadlines and such.
So, this is part 1, and I'm posting it unlocked; if you want to read the rest, comment and let me know to add you to the filter.
This does not obligate you to provide feedback! I'm not looking for spelling and grammar, I'm not even particularly looking for structural notes; this hasn't been beta-read yet. I wouldn't mind a conversation, and I have a burning desire to discuss the worldbuilding, but the point of this is not assigning homework, it's motivating me to post and hopefully giving you, the reader, something fun to read.
Tentative schedule is weekly updates of no more than 5k words, but, that's subject to change of course, and the whole story might wind up going a completely different direction anyway. But, meanwhile, divert yourself, and keep me company on this journey, for a little while anyway.
And, as I said in the intro post, while I don't have a good way to do this if you're not a Dreamwidth user, it's okay, stay tuned and check back, I'm planning to post this in other formats in the future.
Chapter One, part 1:
“I know how to handle myself in a city,” Ula said wearily, buckling the strap that held her bedroll to the back of her horse’s harness.
“I’m just saying--” Dotsen said, grinning obnoxiously. He was her second cousin, and she had never had much patience for him. He was five or six years older than she was, and he worked as a drover so he traveled the road between the city and their clan’s territory twice a year at least, but he was only a drover and didn’t know all that much about how the world worked.
“You can stop saying,” Ula said. “I’m not a child, I’m a grown woman, and I’ve been here before.” Her status in their tribal band was higher than his, because she was a mother, but she didn’t need to point that out. Surely he knew that, and it was driving some of his obnoxiousness.
There was really nothing worse than a man who didn’t know his place, but Ula wasn’t going to let him bait her into an immoderate response. She was, after all, a grown woman.
“Well,” Dotsen said, “don’t come crying to me when you get into a situation you don’t know how to get out of.”
“I will absolutely not come crying to you,” Ula promised. In the outrageously unlikely event she got herself into some kind of unforseen trouble, there were several thousand people, most of them complete strangers, she would rather cry to than Dotsen. She checked the saddle girth one more time, double-checked the straps on all her saddlebags, and looked over toward the road. There were six riders in their little group, most of them distantly related to Ula, and she was the only woman in the group. Well, sort of. “Are we ready, Harki?”
“Mostly,” said the group’s unofficial leader. He was an older man, close to fifty, and was the only one in this group not related by blood to Ula-- he was the husband of one of her great-aunts, and the father of several of her second cousins. Not Dotsen. One of Harki’s sons, Eb, was on this trip, and he was a sweet-faced youngster she’d always been fond of. “Not sure about your friend.”
By your friend Harki surely meant Edurni, who was nominally a friend of all of them, but in practice was naturally closer to Ula than any of the others here. They were herd-sisters, after all. “I don’t think we have to worry about her,” Ula said, looking around. Edurni wasn’t anywhere nearby, but that wasn’t surprising; she was neither nocturnal nor diurnal, but kept to her own schedule as she pleased. “She has such a sense of smell, she’ll find us.”
“I’m more worried at her coming up to the city without an escort,” Harki said. “Especially since the troubles with the translators.”
“Fair,” Ula said. “But can’t we just warn people when we go in?”
Harki didn’t say anything for a moment, but finally shot her an indirect look, not meeting her eyes but considering her anyway. “It’s not like there’s a door,” he said, “or a gate or something, where we can leave a message, or-- it just doesn’t work like that, here. What are we going to do, bang a pan and shout to everyone we go past?”
“I suppose not,” Ula said, though she’d been vaguely considering something like that. She’d been to the city before, but she’d been quite small at the time. Most of her traveling since then had been to little settlements and the encampments of tribes like her own, where it was perfectly reasonable to assume you could have a conversation with everyone you passed on the road, and there’d always be someone either at the gate or nearby, who you could tell to keep an eye out.
Fortunately, Dotsen had wandered off, so he wasn’t listening to this conversation and wouldn’t feel the need to point out how young and naive Ula was. “Well, she’s going to do as she pleases anyway. Should we set off, or how long do you want to wait for her?”
“I was wondering if we should try calling to her,” Harki said. “I know she’s got good hearing.”
“Her people do call over long distances,” Ula mused, “but they use lower frequencies than I can manage.”
“That’s true,” Harki said. “For the long distance stuff.” He scratched at the back of his neck. “Well, we’ve got a little ways, we could at least set out, and hope she catches up, and if she doesn’t, we can re-evaluate. I don’t much like the idea of hanging out here to no particular purpose for who knows how long, but I also really don’t like the idea of her trying to get into the city on her own.”
“I should’ve had a word with her yesterday,” Ula said, “but I just didn’t think of it.”
“We’ll sing as we go,” Eb said brightly. “She likes when we sing.”
That was true. Edurni liked songs. Harki smiled and tousled Eb’s hair, and Eb rolled his eyes a little but didn’t resist. He was so sweet-natured, and Ula knew she shouldn’t think of him as a child anymore, but it was hard not to. He’d had his coming-of-age ceremony at midsummer last year, the same time as Ula had undergone her ritual to mark having survived childbirth, and he’d spent the rest of the year out with the men in the more remote pastures.
“Good idea,” Ula said. Everyone was ready, everyone’s horses saddled and the ashes from the campfire tamped out, so she swung up onto her horse and settled herself. “So, Eb, what song shall we sing?”
Eb blushed a little as everyone looked at him, but gamely named a tune, one of the calling songs the cattle-drovers used. “What if she gets offended by that?” Dotsen pointed out. It was a functional song, meant to keep the cattle in line, and had lyrics addressed to the cattle themselves, exhorting them to come along. Ula had always wondered if the cattle understood the words after all.
“She won’t,” Ula said; she understood why the others were worried, but they didn’t know Edurni like she did.
“Still,” Dotsen said.
“Fine,” Eb said, “why not a travel-song instead? Last Day’s Journey?”
As the others mounted up, Ula picked a note she knew they could all reach, and started the song.
I’m so tired, I’m so weary, my butt is so sore
I want to get home and don’t travel no more
It worked; they had only been riding a little while, and sung three songs (only Eb and the next-oldest man, Yaki, were really singing with her; the others were mostly distracted and talking amongst themselves), when they heard Edurni chirp from somewhere behind them.
“Oh, thank the Ancestors,” Ula heard Harki say out loud; he must really have been worried about Edurni coming alone to the city. Ula still wasn’t sure what the big deal was, but didn’t want to seem ignorant by pressing him further, so she was relieved too.
Ula’s horse tossed its head nervously, and a moment later, Edurni burst out of the brush beside the road a little ahead of them, shaking out her tusks, which were tangled with greenery. She let out bright trumpet of greeting, and Eb laughed and shouted back to her.
Edurni looked magnificent, still in her full winter coat; she was a handful of years younger than Ula, and while her tusks were long enough to show her maturity, her coat was still sable-dark like a baby’s, and glossy. She really was a glorious specimen of young adult mammoth-hood.
“There you are, sister,” Ula said, leaving off her song. “Harki was worried about you going into the city by yourself.”
Edurni chirped again, shedding the last of the greenery from her tusks; she had been rooting around, and Ula spared a moment to worry about the locals, here, and whether Edurni had done any damage to anyone’s crops. That was the sort of thing one needed to worry about, near a city; in that moment she had an inkling of perhaps what Harki was so concerned about.
Ula’s horse’s head went up a little in nervousness; even the bravest of the horses weren’t entirely sanguine about any of the mammoths coming too close. Unperturbed, Edurni fell in beside Ula, and reached over to caress her with her trunk in greeting. She rumbled, and her translator buzzed to life to say, “Here, crowded.”
“It is,” Ula said. “I mean, that’s the point of a city, Edurni.”
Harki slowed his horse to fall in next to them, despite his horse’s obvious reluctance. The horses ought to be used to Edurni by now, and most of them had been occasionally interacting with mammoths all their lives, but somehow none of the horses Ula knew ever quite became entirely reconciled to mammoths. “Honored niece,” he said to Edurni, “if you recall the conversation we had before we began this journey, when we spoke with your honored grandmother?”
They’d had a long debate about the logistics of Edurni traveling through human-dense territory. Ula hadn’t been paying very close attention to it, because she’d been so focused on her own assignment. Edurni nodded an affirmative-- it was a sort of cute thing she’d done, as a calf, learning some human gestures, and she’d kept it up into adulthood. With the present difficulty with the translators, it had come in handy, and was one of the reasons she’d volunteered to come on this trip. She’d spent more time closely among humans than most of her people, and much of it in Ula’s close company.
“So you recall, then, that I was very concerned about our entrance to the city,” he went on, and his tone was diplomatic. Ula thought he didn’t really need to try so hard; Edurni was unlikely to take exception to his tone. But he was likely more accustomed to speaking with the matriarchs, and maybe some of the bulls-- the men encountered them more often, in the remote pastures. And Ula well knew that the older mammoths were a great deal more sensitive to humans displaying proper deference in their modes of address.
“So, so,” Edurni said, by way of agreement, nodding again. It had been a very cute gesture when she was a calf; now, because of her meter-long tusks, it was slightly alarming, or at least Ula’s horse thought so, and sidestepped into Harki’s horse. Ula clucked reprovingly at the horse, steering it back to a straighter course. “Concerned, I, also,” Edurni added. “Where to step.”
“That’s exactly the concern,” Harki said.
“What to eat,” Edurni added. That was undoubtedly what she’d been up to, for half the night and the dawn hours-- foraging. Mammoths needed an enormous amount of forage. Most of it was stuff humans wouldn’t miss-- or, didn’t, up in the mountains. Around here, where everything was plowed up and planted, it was hard to say. They’d tried to explain to Edurni what the people here were likely to mind, but it was hard to describe it in a way a mammoth would be able to make any sense of.
That was what it came down to, really-- the Ancestors had given the mammoths the kind of intelligence that let them command language, with some technological assistance, but they hadn’t altered the fundamental, underlying nature of mammoth brains, which were in some ways very similar to those of humans, and in other ways, very very different. There were just certain concepts it was impossible to get them to care about, not even with a shared language.
Mammoths were not big on private property. As it happened, neither were Ula’s people, generally. But the farmers down here were, more so, and the people in the cities as well. “I made arrangements, remember,” Harki said, “with our relatives in the city-- if your forage has been bad, don’t worry.”
“Hay,” Edurni buzzed, indicating that she remembered the conversation-- the tribe often brought herds to the city to sell excess animals, and since it was easier to move them on the hoof they brought them live, which meant they needed fodder here, so it was easy enough to come by. There was a patch of pasturage within the city, near the dormitory where the drovers stayed while they were in town. Edurni accompanied her comment with a rumble, which might have sounded disgruntled but Ula knew Edurni so well, she knew it was interest, especially by the way Edurni’s ears came forward.
Ula looked over at Harki, who was hard to read but seemed satisfied by that. “I hope there’s enough.”
“We won’t be here that long,” Harki said, which at first seemed hopeful, but then he shot an inscrutable look over at the mammoth. “One way or another.”
Edurni moved forward a little bit, and found Eb, caressing him with her trunk in greeting. He was used to her; he’d been a tiny baby when she’d first begun to spend a lot of time with Ula, so she was in his earliest memories. “Sing,” Edurni said. “Sing more!”
Eb laughed, and started in on the cattle-calling song Dotsen had talked him out of, before. Edurni chirped in delight, and fell back a little so as not to crowd his horse, so that she could toss her head and sing along.
Her singing wasn’t much like a human would sing, and she had no real notion of rhythm. Sometimes the sounds she made while they sang were more or less at random, just vocalizations of enjoyment. But sometimes she really did make a little bit of an effort, and produced sounds that actually more or less went along with the song. She did better when it was songs she knew, and she didn’t know this one. Despite Dotsen’s worry, she didn’t seem to think the lyrics were directed at her.
They passed a little while in singing, and Ula tried not to gawk at the scenery like a rube. They were coming down out of the foothills, now, into some built-up areas. They’d passed through most of the farmlands already, and now they were starting to come into the land that directly supported the city. Off to the south a little, there was a windbreak grove and then the huge stretch of field of a composting facility, all rigged with thermal power generators to harvest the heat generated by the city’s waste. One of the windrows rippled visibly as they passed, being turned from below by a big screw-structure to aerate it and make it break down faster. Ula had studied them in school. But out in the hills, their own compost piles were much smaller, less-efficient; they turned them once or twice a year by hand, or just ignored them, because they didn’t rely on them so much.
To the north was the river, and the waterfall was coming up soon-- it was a big landmark, and was one of the few things Ula clearly remembered from her last trip here. The waterfall was partially dammed, so that the diverted water could run through the millraces of the dozens of huge water-powered manufacturing facilities that made damn near everything around here, but some of it was still allowed to fall. More in the spring, less in the summer. They had a waterfall, back in their own territory, and they made no small use of it-- it was the reason their radio tower was as powerful as it was, among other things-- but this waterfall was bigger, and Ula was looking forward to Edurni’s reaction.
A caravan was approaching, outbound from the city, and as they drew closer the caravan slowed and finally stopped. Edurni’s ears went up, and Ula could see she wanted to run over to it and look. The mammoths often encountered caravans on the mountain roads, and were always curious about them. Most of the caravans who went those routes were used to it, and had treats for them or would play with them or at least greet them courteously. But from the attitude of this caravan, it was not one that went on a route where it encountered mammoths. As they drew closer the caravan’s outriders seemed to be clustered almost defensively.
Harki rode out ahead to speak with them, and Ula listened with interest. Her hearing wasn’t as good as Edurni’s, though. “What are they saying?” she asked the mammoth.
“Fear,” Edurni buzzed; the translator’s voice was, as ever, emotionless, but she looked displeased, and gestured somewhat violently with her trunk. “If I rampage they know already.”
“Rampage,” Ula said, indignant.
They were close enough now that Ula heard Harki’s voice, raised in amusement or indignation or possibly both. “Herding her! We’re not herding her. You don’t herd mammoths. She wanted to come with us, and we’re here on business. She knows how to behave herself on a road.”
“Bad idea, I speak,” Edurni said, regarding Ula closely with one eye, but the way she tilted her head it was obvious it was meant to be a question.
“I don’t think so,” Ula said, “as long as you don’t move too quickly toward them.” They’d had a lot of discussions about what kinds of movement humans considered aggressive. It was something mammoths had apparently made a study of, on their own, because Edurni had contributed a lot of shrewd observations to the conversations.
“So, so,” Edurni agreed. Then, “Ula, come with.”
“Of course,” Ula said.
Edurni put out her trunk and held Ula by the arm, shaking her shoulder slightly, and lifted her foreleg. “No, with-with.”
Ula understood, then: Edurni wanted her to climb up and sit on her back. Ula had done such a thing many times when they were children, but hadn’t on this trip. “Are you sure?” It wasn’t common; most adult mammoths only let children sit on them.
“Humans won’t shoot a human,” Edurni said.
Humans weren’t supposed to shoot mammoths either, but there were exceptions if the mammoth was behaving dangerously. Unsurprisingly, every time a human shot a mammoth, they argued that the animal had been dangerous. This was a level of cynicism Ula hadn’t expected from Edurni, though.
“Humans are as likely to shoot other humans as mammoths,” Ula said, “and nobody’s likely to shoot anybody this close to a city.” But she dismounted and gave her reins to Eb, who was hovering nearby in concern, then went over and climbed Edurni’s proffered foreleg to settle herself on the animal’s neck.
She had many fond memories of sitting here as a child. Now, though, she was rather higher up than she’d been, back then. Fortunately, the collar with the radio beacon and translator on it made for a sturdy handhold. Edurni’s was a new collar, beautifully decorated; every year Ula’s tribe repaired or replaced the collar of every mammoth in their sister-herd, and gave new ones to the new babies who were old enough to be taught to use the translators.
“Good,” Edurni said, and, head down and ears flat, moved forward. She approached the caravan a little sideways, as if she might be going past it, but was moving diagonally, keeping an eye fixed on it, making no particular motion of her head or tusks, keeping her gait very smooth with no lurching or lunging, Mammoths had their own rules for body language, which Ula and most of her people were so familiar with as to forget they weren’t in common with humans, but they’d all been racking their brains to think of how humans signal non-aggression to one another.
Ula remembered one thing, and held up her hands, palms outward, elbows slightly flexed, showing she was unarmed. Harki watched them approach, but said nothing until they had come within distance for the translator to be able to carry that far. He said, then, “This is my honored niece Ula, of the line of Bixenta, and her herd-sister Edurni, of the line of Zakiyah. The two of them have a particular errand within the city.”
Edurni let out a series of chirps, and her translator buzzed, “No closer, scare horses. Greetings.” She raised her trunk, then let it fall, as if waving.
The caravan’s riders all just stared at her, rudely, and silence extended for a moment. “I don’t think they’ve spoken to mammoths before,” Ula said quietly. “They don’t know the etiquette.”
Edurni growled quietly, not seriously angry but not pleased either. “Rude,” she said, and shifted her weight, slowly turning away.
“If you won’t be polite, then we won’t either,” Ula said, loud enough for the caravan riders to hear her, and she pointedly turned her face away as Edurni shuffled back to the other side of the road, and kept walking.
“A word of advice,” Harki said, just barely within Ula’s hearing, “if you meet mammoths on the road, you should try being polite to them. It helps a lot.” He also wheeled his horse away and rejoined their little band, and they filed past the uncourteous caravan without particularly looking at them.
Edurni huffed a little, but her body language settled as they kept walking, and after a moment her ears resumed their waving, more normal than the way she’d kept them pinned flat against her neck for the entire encounter. “Rude,” she buzzed again, and gave a more robust little growl.
“Yeah,” Ula said, and patted Edurni’s neck. “They’ll probably be rude in the city too. They were rude to me, when I came here last.” The others had all brought clothes to change into, to less-obviously be from the hills. Ula had brought a few garments, but since she traveled so rarely, she didn’t have anything that would fit in, in the city. So she’d sort of resolved to herself that she might as well look like what she was.
It wasn’t self-flattery to recognize that she was a reasonably magnificent specimen of young adult womanhood, by the standards of her people, as much as Edurni was for hers. Ula wasn’t particularly tall, but she was of average height for her people, and had learned somewhat smugly in school that women from her tribe trended slightly above the average of the wider population. It had been a mild enough winter that she was in quite good condition; she’d been nursing her firstborn until recently, and as such had been favored with a richer diet than most. In the couple of months since weaning, she’d had ample opportunity for exercise, so she was currently glossy and well-muscled, and her hair was growing out from the ritual childbirth haircut two years ago. Her mother had elaborately braided it for her before they’d departed, and she’d had plenty of time to maintain it on the trip here.
She knew how she’d be treated in the city, knew that all the things that to her own people marked her as high-status,-- her tattoos, the style of her hair, the bright embroidery on her shirt, the elaborate tooling on the leather of her jacket-- all of those would look exotic, rural, even savage. She knew fine well what city-dwellers thought of her kind. And she also knew that she couldn’t look like anything other than what she was, any more than Edurni could, so there was no point pretending otherwise.
Edurni grumbled a little, but didn’t bother translating herself, and Ula worked her fingers deep into Edurni’s thick coat, trying not to worry about anything.
Update: continue reading here! Chapter 1 part 2.
So, this is part 1, and I'm posting it unlocked; if you want to read the rest, comment and let me know to add you to the filter.
This does not obligate you to provide feedback! I'm not looking for spelling and grammar, I'm not even particularly looking for structural notes; this hasn't been beta-read yet. I wouldn't mind a conversation, and I have a burning desire to discuss the worldbuilding, but the point of this is not assigning homework, it's motivating me to post and hopefully giving you, the reader, something fun to read.
Tentative schedule is weekly updates of no more than 5k words, but, that's subject to change of course, and the whole story might wind up going a completely different direction anyway. But, meanwhile, divert yourself, and keep me company on this journey, for a little while anyway.
And, as I said in the intro post, while I don't have a good way to do this if you're not a Dreamwidth user, it's okay, stay tuned and check back, I'm planning to post this in other formats in the future.
Chapter One, part 1:
“I know how to handle myself in a city,” Ula said wearily, buckling the strap that held her bedroll to the back of her horse’s harness.
“I’m just saying--” Dotsen said, grinning obnoxiously. He was her second cousin, and she had never had much patience for him. He was five or six years older than she was, and he worked as a drover so he traveled the road between the city and their clan’s territory twice a year at least, but he was only a drover and didn’t know all that much about how the world worked.
“You can stop saying,” Ula said. “I’m not a child, I’m a grown woman, and I’ve been here before.” Her status in their tribal band was higher than his, because she was a mother, but she didn’t need to point that out. Surely he knew that, and it was driving some of his obnoxiousness.
There was really nothing worse than a man who didn’t know his place, but Ula wasn’t going to let him bait her into an immoderate response. She was, after all, a grown woman.
“Well,” Dotsen said, “don’t come crying to me when you get into a situation you don’t know how to get out of.”
“I will absolutely not come crying to you,” Ula promised. In the outrageously unlikely event she got herself into some kind of unforseen trouble, there were several thousand people, most of them complete strangers, she would rather cry to than Dotsen. She checked the saddle girth one more time, double-checked the straps on all her saddlebags, and looked over toward the road. There were six riders in their little group, most of them distantly related to Ula, and she was the only woman in the group. Well, sort of. “Are we ready, Harki?”
“Mostly,” said the group’s unofficial leader. He was an older man, close to fifty, and was the only one in this group not related by blood to Ula-- he was the husband of one of her great-aunts, and the father of several of her second cousins. Not Dotsen. One of Harki’s sons, Eb, was on this trip, and he was a sweet-faced youngster she’d always been fond of. “Not sure about your friend.”
By your friend Harki surely meant Edurni, who was nominally a friend of all of them, but in practice was naturally closer to Ula than any of the others here. They were herd-sisters, after all. “I don’t think we have to worry about her,” Ula said, looking around. Edurni wasn’t anywhere nearby, but that wasn’t surprising; she was neither nocturnal nor diurnal, but kept to her own schedule as she pleased. “She has such a sense of smell, she’ll find us.”
“I’m more worried at her coming up to the city without an escort,” Harki said. “Especially since the troubles with the translators.”
“Fair,” Ula said. “But can’t we just warn people when we go in?”
Harki didn’t say anything for a moment, but finally shot her an indirect look, not meeting her eyes but considering her anyway. “It’s not like there’s a door,” he said, “or a gate or something, where we can leave a message, or-- it just doesn’t work like that, here. What are we going to do, bang a pan and shout to everyone we go past?”
“I suppose not,” Ula said, though she’d been vaguely considering something like that. She’d been to the city before, but she’d been quite small at the time. Most of her traveling since then had been to little settlements and the encampments of tribes like her own, where it was perfectly reasonable to assume you could have a conversation with everyone you passed on the road, and there’d always be someone either at the gate or nearby, who you could tell to keep an eye out.
Fortunately, Dotsen had wandered off, so he wasn’t listening to this conversation and wouldn’t feel the need to point out how young and naive Ula was. “Well, she’s going to do as she pleases anyway. Should we set off, or how long do you want to wait for her?”
“I was wondering if we should try calling to her,” Harki said. “I know she’s got good hearing.”
“Her people do call over long distances,” Ula mused, “but they use lower frequencies than I can manage.”
“That’s true,” Harki said. “For the long distance stuff.” He scratched at the back of his neck. “Well, we’ve got a little ways, we could at least set out, and hope she catches up, and if she doesn’t, we can re-evaluate. I don’t much like the idea of hanging out here to no particular purpose for who knows how long, but I also really don’t like the idea of her trying to get into the city on her own.”
“I should’ve had a word with her yesterday,” Ula said, “but I just didn’t think of it.”
“We’ll sing as we go,” Eb said brightly. “She likes when we sing.”
That was true. Edurni liked songs. Harki smiled and tousled Eb’s hair, and Eb rolled his eyes a little but didn’t resist. He was so sweet-natured, and Ula knew she shouldn’t think of him as a child anymore, but it was hard not to. He’d had his coming-of-age ceremony at midsummer last year, the same time as Ula had undergone her ritual to mark having survived childbirth, and he’d spent the rest of the year out with the men in the more remote pastures.
“Good idea,” Ula said. Everyone was ready, everyone’s horses saddled and the ashes from the campfire tamped out, so she swung up onto her horse and settled herself. “So, Eb, what song shall we sing?”
Eb blushed a little as everyone looked at him, but gamely named a tune, one of the calling songs the cattle-drovers used. “What if she gets offended by that?” Dotsen pointed out. It was a functional song, meant to keep the cattle in line, and had lyrics addressed to the cattle themselves, exhorting them to come along. Ula had always wondered if the cattle understood the words after all.
“She won’t,” Ula said; she understood why the others were worried, but they didn’t know Edurni like she did.
“Still,” Dotsen said.
“Fine,” Eb said, “why not a travel-song instead? Last Day’s Journey?”
As the others mounted up, Ula picked a note she knew they could all reach, and started the song.
I’m so tired, I’m so weary, my butt is so sore
I want to get home and don’t travel no more
It worked; they had only been riding a little while, and sung three songs (only Eb and the next-oldest man, Yaki, were really singing with her; the others were mostly distracted and talking amongst themselves), when they heard Edurni chirp from somewhere behind them.
“Oh, thank the Ancestors,” Ula heard Harki say out loud; he must really have been worried about Edurni coming alone to the city. Ula still wasn’t sure what the big deal was, but didn’t want to seem ignorant by pressing him further, so she was relieved too.
Ula’s horse tossed its head nervously, and a moment later, Edurni burst out of the brush beside the road a little ahead of them, shaking out her tusks, which were tangled with greenery. She let out bright trumpet of greeting, and Eb laughed and shouted back to her.
Edurni looked magnificent, still in her full winter coat; she was a handful of years younger than Ula, and while her tusks were long enough to show her maturity, her coat was still sable-dark like a baby’s, and glossy. She really was a glorious specimen of young adult mammoth-hood.
“There you are, sister,” Ula said, leaving off her song. “Harki was worried about you going into the city by yourself.”
Edurni chirped again, shedding the last of the greenery from her tusks; she had been rooting around, and Ula spared a moment to worry about the locals, here, and whether Edurni had done any damage to anyone’s crops. That was the sort of thing one needed to worry about, near a city; in that moment she had an inkling of perhaps what Harki was so concerned about.
Ula’s horse’s head went up a little in nervousness; even the bravest of the horses weren’t entirely sanguine about any of the mammoths coming too close. Unperturbed, Edurni fell in beside Ula, and reached over to caress her with her trunk in greeting. She rumbled, and her translator buzzed to life to say, “Here, crowded.”
“It is,” Ula said. “I mean, that’s the point of a city, Edurni.”
Harki slowed his horse to fall in next to them, despite his horse’s obvious reluctance. The horses ought to be used to Edurni by now, and most of them had been occasionally interacting with mammoths all their lives, but somehow none of the horses Ula knew ever quite became entirely reconciled to mammoths. “Honored niece,” he said to Edurni, “if you recall the conversation we had before we began this journey, when we spoke with your honored grandmother?”
They’d had a long debate about the logistics of Edurni traveling through human-dense territory. Ula hadn’t been paying very close attention to it, because she’d been so focused on her own assignment. Edurni nodded an affirmative-- it was a sort of cute thing she’d done, as a calf, learning some human gestures, and she’d kept it up into adulthood. With the present difficulty with the translators, it had come in handy, and was one of the reasons she’d volunteered to come on this trip. She’d spent more time closely among humans than most of her people, and much of it in Ula’s close company.
“So you recall, then, that I was very concerned about our entrance to the city,” he went on, and his tone was diplomatic. Ula thought he didn’t really need to try so hard; Edurni was unlikely to take exception to his tone. But he was likely more accustomed to speaking with the matriarchs, and maybe some of the bulls-- the men encountered them more often, in the remote pastures. And Ula well knew that the older mammoths were a great deal more sensitive to humans displaying proper deference in their modes of address.
“So, so,” Edurni said, by way of agreement, nodding again. It had been a very cute gesture when she was a calf; now, because of her meter-long tusks, it was slightly alarming, or at least Ula’s horse thought so, and sidestepped into Harki’s horse. Ula clucked reprovingly at the horse, steering it back to a straighter course. “Concerned, I, also,” Edurni added. “Where to step.”
“That’s exactly the concern,” Harki said.
“What to eat,” Edurni added. That was undoubtedly what she’d been up to, for half the night and the dawn hours-- foraging. Mammoths needed an enormous amount of forage. Most of it was stuff humans wouldn’t miss-- or, didn’t, up in the mountains. Around here, where everything was plowed up and planted, it was hard to say. They’d tried to explain to Edurni what the people here were likely to mind, but it was hard to describe it in a way a mammoth would be able to make any sense of.
That was what it came down to, really-- the Ancestors had given the mammoths the kind of intelligence that let them command language, with some technological assistance, but they hadn’t altered the fundamental, underlying nature of mammoth brains, which were in some ways very similar to those of humans, and in other ways, very very different. There were just certain concepts it was impossible to get them to care about, not even with a shared language.
Mammoths were not big on private property. As it happened, neither were Ula’s people, generally. But the farmers down here were, more so, and the people in the cities as well. “I made arrangements, remember,” Harki said, “with our relatives in the city-- if your forage has been bad, don’t worry.”
“Hay,” Edurni buzzed, indicating that she remembered the conversation-- the tribe often brought herds to the city to sell excess animals, and since it was easier to move them on the hoof they brought them live, which meant they needed fodder here, so it was easy enough to come by. There was a patch of pasturage within the city, near the dormitory where the drovers stayed while they were in town. Edurni accompanied her comment with a rumble, which might have sounded disgruntled but Ula knew Edurni so well, she knew it was interest, especially by the way Edurni’s ears came forward.
Ula looked over at Harki, who was hard to read but seemed satisfied by that. “I hope there’s enough.”
“We won’t be here that long,” Harki said, which at first seemed hopeful, but then he shot an inscrutable look over at the mammoth. “One way or another.”
Edurni moved forward a little bit, and found Eb, caressing him with her trunk in greeting. He was used to her; he’d been a tiny baby when she’d first begun to spend a lot of time with Ula, so she was in his earliest memories. “Sing,” Edurni said. “Sing more!”
Eb laughed, and started in on the cattle-calling song Dotsen had talked him out of, before. Edurni chirped in delight, and fell back a little so as not to crowd his horse, so that she could toss her head and sing along.
Her singing wasn’t much like a human would sing, and she had no real notion of rhythm. Sometimes the sounds she made while they sang were more or less at random, just vocalizations of enjoyment. But sometimes she really did make a little bit of an effort, and produced sounds that actually more or less went along with the song. She did better when it was songs she knew, and she didn’t know this one. Despite Dotsen’s worry, she didn’t seem to think the lyrics were directed at her.
They passed a little while in singing, and Ula tried not to gawk at the scenery like a rube. They were coming down out of the foothills, now, into some built-up areas. They’d passed through most of the farmlands already, and now they were starting to come into the land that directly supported the city. Off to the south a little, there was a windbreak grove and then the huge stretch of field of a composting facility, all rigged with thermal power generators to harvest the heat generated by the city’s waste. One of the windrows rippled visibly as they passed, being turned from below by a big screw-structure to aerate it and make it break down faster. Ula had studied them in school. But out in the hills, their own compost piles were much smaller, less-efficient; they turned them once or twice a year by hand, or just ignored them, because they didn’t rely on them so much.
To the north was the river, and the waterfall was coming up soon-- it was a big landmark, and was one of the few things Ula clearly remembered from her last trip here. The waterfall was partially dammed, so that the diverted water could run through the millraces of the dozens of huge water-powered manufacturing facilities that made damn near everything around here, but some of it was still allowed to fall. More in the spring, less in the summer. They had a waterfall, back in their own territory, and they made no small use of it-- it was the reason their radio tower was as powerful as it was, among other things-- but this waterfall was bigger, and Ula was looking forward to Edurni’s reaction.
A caravan was approaching, outbound from the city, and as they drew closer the caravan slowed and finally stopped. Edurni’s ears went up, and Ula could see she wanted to run over to it and look. The mammoths often encountered caravans on the mountain roads, and were always curious about them. Most of the caravans who went those routes were used to it, and had treats for them or would play with them or at least greet them courteously. But from the attitude of this caravan, it was not one that went on a route where it encountered mammoths. As they drew closer the caravan’s outriders seemed to be clustered almost defensively.
Harki rode out ahead to speak with them, and Ula listened with interest. Her hearing wasn’t as good as Edurni’s, though. “What are they saying?” she asked the mammoth.
“Fear,” Edurni buzzed; the translator’s voice was, as ever, emotionless, but she looked displeased, and gestured somewhat violently with her trunk. “If I rampage they know already.”
“Rampage,” Ula said, indignant.
They were close enough now that Ula heard Harki’s voice, raised in amusement or indignation or possibly both. “Herding her! We’re not herding her. You don’t herd mammoths. She wanted to come with us, and we’re here on business. She knows how to behave herself on a road.”
“Bad idea, I speak,” Edurni said, regarding Ula closely with one eye, but the way she tilted her head it was obvious it was meant to be a question.
“I don’t think so,” Ula said, “as long as you don’t move too quickly toward them.” They’d had a lot of discussions about what kinds of movement humans considered aggressive. It was something mammoths had apparently made a study of, on their own, because Edurni had contributed a lot of shrewd observations to the conversations.
“So, so,” Edurni agreed. Then, “Ula, come with.”
“Of course,” Ula said.
Edurni put out her trunk and held Ula by the arm, shaking her shoulder slightly, and lifted her foreleg. “No, with-with.”
Ula understood, then: Edurni wanted her to climb up and sit on her back. Ula had done such a thing many times when they were children, but hadn’t on this trip. “Are you sure?” It wasn’t common; most adult mammoths only let children sit on them.
“Humans won’t shoot a human,” Edurni said.
Humans weren’t supposed to shoot mammoths either, but there were exceptions if the mammoth was behaving dangerously. Unsurprisingly, every time a human shot a mammoth, they argued that the animal had been dangerous. This was a level of cynicism Ula hadn’t expected from Edurni, though.
“Humans are as likely to shoot other humans as mammoths,” Ula said, “and nobody’s likely to shoot anybody this close to a city.” But she dismounted and gave her reins to Eb, who was hovering nearby in concern, then went over and climbed Edurni’s proffered foreleg to settle herself on the animal’s neck.
She had many fond memories of sitting here as a child. Now, though, she was rather higher up than she’d been, back then. Fortunately, the collar with the radio beacon and translator on it made for a sturdy handhold. Edurni’s was a new collar, beautifully decorated; every year Ula’s tribe repaired or replaced the collar of every mammoth in their sister-herd, and gave new ones to the new babies who were old enough to be taught to use the translators.
“Good,” Edurni said, and, head down and ears flat, moved forward. She approached the caravan a little sideways, as if she might be going past it, but was moving diagonally, keeping an eye fixed on it, making no particular motion of her head or tusks, keeping her gait very smooth with no lurching or lunging, Mammoths had their own rules for body language, which Ula and most of her people were so familiar with as to forget they weren’t in common with humans, but they’d all been racking their brains to think of how humans signal non-aggression to one another.
Ula remembered one thing, and held up her hands, palms outward, elbows slightly flexed, showing she was unarmed. Harki watched them approach, but said nothing until they had come within distance for the translator to be able to carry that far. He said, then, “This is my honored niece Ula, of the line of Bixenta, and her herd-sister Edurni, of the line of Zakiyah. The two of them have a particular errand within the city.”
Edurni let out a series of chirps, and her translator buzzed, “No closer, scare horses. Greetings.” She raised her trunk, then let it fall, as if waving.
The caravan’s riders all just stared at her, rudely, and silence extended for a moment. “I don’t think they’ve spoken to mammoths before,” Ula said quietly. “They don’t know the etiquette.”
Edurni growled quietly, not seriously angry but not pleased either. “Rude,” she said, and shifted her weight, slowly turning away.
“If you won’t be polite, then we won’t either,” Ula said, loud enough for the caravan riders to hear her, and she pointedly turned her face away as Edurni shuffled back to the other side of the road, and kept walking.
“A word of advice,” Harki said, just barely within Ula’s hearing, “if you meet mammoths on the road, you should try being polite to them. It helps a lot.” He also wheeled his horse away and rejoined their little band, and they filed past the uncourteous caravan without particularly looking at them.
Edurni huffed a little, but her body language settled as they kept walking, and after a moment her ears resumed their waving, more normal than the way she’d kept them pinned flat against her neck for the entire encounter. “Rude,” she buzzed again, and gave a more robust little growl.
“Yeah,” Ula said, and patted Edurni’s neck. “They’ll probably be rude in the city too. They were rude to me, when I came here last.” The others had all brought clothes to change into, to less-obviously be from the hills. Ula had brought a few garments, but since she traveled so rarely, she didn’t have anything that would fit in, in the city. So she’d sort of resolved to herself that she might as well look like what she was.
It wasn’t self-flattery to recognize that she was a reasonably magnificent specimen of young adult womanhood, by the standards of her people, as much as Edurni was for hers. Ula wasn’t particularly tall, but she was of average height for her people, and had learned somewhat smugly in school that women from her tribe trended slightly above the average of the wider population. It had been a mild enough winter that she was in quite good condition; she’d been nursing her firstborn until recently, and as such had been favored with a richer diet than most. In the couple of months since weaning, she’d had ample opportunity for exercise, so she was currently glossy and well-muscled, and her hair was growing out from the ritual childbirth haircut two years ago. Her mother had elaborately braided it for her before they’d departed, and she’d had plenty of time to maintain it on the trip here.
She knew how she’d be treated in the city, knew that all the things that to her own people marked her as high-status,-- her tattoos, the style of her hair, the bright embroidery on her shirt, the elaborate tooling on the leather of her jacket-- all of those would look exotic, rural, even savage. She knew fine well what city-dwellers thought of her kind. And she also knew that she couldn’t look like anything other than what she was, any more than Edurni could, so there was no point pretending otherwise.
Edurni grumbled a little, but didn’t bother translating herself, and Ula worked her fingers deep into Edurni’s thick coat, trying not to worry about anything.
Update: continue reading here! Chapter 1 part 2.
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Date: 2019-01-01 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 04:13 pm (UTC)Really neat!
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Date: 2019-01-02 01:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 08:31 am (UTC)If you'd like me/us to comment about questions that arise in my/our minds(s), as I/we read, please let me/us know!
From what you wrote about readers, I'm guessing that offering you questions about the story at this stage would be more of a distraction than a help.
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Date: 2019-01-02 07:23 pm (UTC)it's just, like, it's an alpha draft, the wrong use of "to" isn't going to matter when I shear off that entire storyline, you know? That's all I mean; feedback's probably wasted on anything beyond a really broad scale. I'm not even committed to this being the opening of the novel, y'know?
And I also meant, like, it's fine to just read for fun, I'm not trying to hassle people into doing homework.
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Date: 2019-01-03 06:27 am (UTC)That said, here are the questions that came up for me, while I was reading part 1 of Solar Mammoths:
1. About how many human people are in the traveling group that currently includes Ula? (Just those named so far? A few more? A lot more?)
2. When the story starts, are they right at the beginning of a journey to the city, or are they just at the beginning of one day's traveling, already several days into a multi-day journey?
3. Is
DatsunDotsen along for the whole journey, or just hanging around as the group gets ready to start out?Since I don't want to be assigning homework either, it's totally up to you what you do with these questions, if anything, and if so, when. 🐣
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Date: 2019-01-03 05:13 pm (UTC)Does any of that matter? Does literally any of it matter? Do we need to know exactly how many days they've been traveling? Will it be enough to find out whether Dotsen has any more lines beyond this introduction? Or will it be answered enough by continuing to read and finding out? I feel like the scene establishes that they're about to arrive at the city, which would imply they're near the end of their journey, and since the scene goes on to describe them arriving at the city, that would be answer enough?
I figured this was enough exposition, and to stop the opening scene to list the names of everyone in the party and describe the journey so far would be more detail than we needed, but again, without having the whole scene, it's hard to say if this is enough to really launch you into the action or not.
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Date: 2019-01-03 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 09:16 pm (UTC)I'm curious as to what scale a city is in this world; it sounds like this story is post-uplift but trades and tribes and Ancestors mean there was probably some kind of collapse a long time ago that they've had to rebuild from somehow. What 'city' means is the sort of question that will likely be answered in the next update or so, I expect. :)
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Date: 2020-08-25 02:57 pm (UTC)