The Solarpunk Mammoths Novel: part 11
Mar. 17th, 2019 07:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7The tag containing the previous 10 entries is here (I post a link mostly because it's easiest for me that way, LOL, when I come back to find where I left off)
So this is where it being an alpha draft starts to be noticeable, I think. At this point I wrote about 20,000 words that I later cut, and started again, and stopped again, and decided, well shit, how about a scene break/ time jump. So here we are.
Also this past week I've written a lot and changed some assumptions about Ula's character, so she will at some point slightly shift and I'm not sure where. I decided her mother should have backstory, so. I think I must have mentioned her mother before, and it'll be wrong now, but I haven't gone back to fix it. Oh yes I think this section actually has some stuff I'll have to come back and fix now, but it's all right, I'll leave it as is for now because I'm still not sure how it'll settle out.
I have the feeling that as I'm writing this in disjointed chunks and then trying to join it back together, there are a lot of things where I had the idea, wrote about it, then later was writing again and wrote about the idea because I didn't know I'd already written about it. The story's long enough now that I can't go back and reread the whole thing every so often; you can do that with shorter works and use that to build momentum for your next bit of writing, but once the thing's big enough if you try you'll spend 110% of your allotted writing time just reviewing. Anyway at that point I feel like you can start to feel the subtle rings around the story where it calcified and got hung up and the author had to try to work backward past the block instead. And this is one of them, right here, the break between this scene and the previous one; it's a big mark on the side of the mug where the tea level was for too long, and maybe it got microwaved like that, and anyway it's going to be a devil to get off of there and it may never come off.
So with that ringing endorsement, let's move on.
____
The first benefit of traveling with a mammoth was that, if she was properly motivated, she’d delightedly wind up your kinetic banks to capacity every day without any of the members of your party having to lift a finger. The caravan they joined at first was a large one, with most of its members only going to the nearest settlement, and it had among its members several troubadours.
Apparently they didn’t get many troubadours out as far as the winter pastures where the mammoths met Ula’s people, because Edurni was absolutely enchanted with them, and it was the promise of performances from them that got her to wind up all the kinetic banks every evening without fail. Alik improvised her a new winding lever, because she had such enormous strength in her trunk that she could easily take advantage of some absolutely brutal gearing, that Alik took it as a challenge to put as much efficient resistance into as possible. He built the new lever their second day of travel, sitting in the back of one of the wagons and gearing it up so that one turn equaled several hundred turns of the regular, meant-to-be-used-by-humans lever.
Edurni turned it pretty easily, and so it took her about thirty seconds to wind up the kinetic bank that the one troubadour’s traveling companion had been prepared to spend an hour pedaling to charge. Which was better than her spending half an hour turning a lever that was so easy she could barely keep a grip on it.
“It won’t stand up to a lot of use,” Alik reflected, poking a little ruefully at the cobbled-together assemblage. He had a proper welder with him, but it hadn’t seemed right to break it out-- he’d have to stop to set it up, and didn’t want to give up his evening’s rest. This had been a nice break from riding, because it turned out he was sadly out of shape and already sore from their first day.
“It doesn’t need to,” the troubadour whose bank Edurni had just effortlessly charged said, eyes shining a little as she jacked her equipment into the generator.
These troubadours had all been staying in a guildhall in town, and were all freshly loaded up with new media. Alik had seen and heard most of their source material, but of course, the real point of the troubadours was how they remixed and augmented the recorded media they all shared at every opportunity. And when they came together in groups, they tended to inspire one another and swap styles and pick up influences, and it made for a fantastic flowering of creativity. This group were all leaving from the same place, but they’d peel off and travel different routes as the caravan continued, and they’d each make an individual wending way across the countryside until they reached the next troubadours’ guildhall and shared their new material with one another, after performing and recording on their own for months.
And no two troubadours ever had the same archive with them. Every troubadour was a data hoarder, to be sure; they all carried as much memory as they could possibly hold, at all times, in their data banks, but every one had a different curatorial touch, and no one could carry infinite media so everyone had to make choices. And they would record new musicians everywhere they went, and incorporate those performances into their endless remixing. The traditional exchange was that they would use their recordings to teach the musicians new songs everywhere they went, and so there were endless iterations of new musicians learning from recordings that they then changed and re-recorded, that the troubadours remixed.
Some of the troubadours-- most of them-- were also musicians, and could perform their memories of recordings, or would perform alongside their recordings, or would perform in lieu of their recordings when the kinetic banks inevitably, at some point, ran out or failed, and they found themselves somewhere without electricity or any other form of power to play the recordings.
(There were non-traveling troubadours who never ran into these problems, and some of them were also quite skilled performers, but they rarely left the cities and so weren’t something most people encountered. Alik knew a few, but they didn’t even call themselves troubadours. Someday, he thought he’d have some spare time to spend coming up with better power packs for the troubadours to use when they traveled, but he was forever overcommitted and never had more than an idle afternoon to spend sketching plans. Someday, perhaps.)
Tonight, they were going to have a collaborative performance. Alik helped them set up, taking the opportunity to scope out all their traveling rigs. Someday maybe he was going to work on that project, so he was building a mental database of what the current standard equipment was. He was pretty familiar with most of it already, but it didn’t hurt to broaden his experience.
And it was a damn sight better than giving himself much free time to think about, well-- everything. The drama of his departure, the uncertainty of his reception, the myriad difficulties awaiting him at their destination. Mostly he was consumed with guilt over leaving Amina to deal with the drama. He’d threatened Dean Sabira with resignation over the matter, and he’d watched her contemplate calling his bluff. The issue had been sidestepped, however, by Ula’s tribesman Harki having appealed to the governor, who intervened with a pointed notation that the mammoths were in fact protected by a treaty that in no uncertain terms stipulated the mandatory maintenance of those radio collars.
It had been a huge mess, and in the end Alik wasn’t sure Dean Sabira had understood that by tacitly taking Yovak’s side, by leaving him in his position, she was giving Alik real fodder to consider actually resigning. It had come to him suddenly, the impulse to threaten it, but the more he thought of it, the more it seemed… well, there were no shortage of institutions who’d love to have him, and if his lack of lineage was allowed to be thrown in his face at any provocation, there wasn’t much incentive to stay. Being even farther away from his ancestors didn’t matter if he never had leave time to visit them.
But it was a rash impulse, and he was guiltily glad to have a good excuse not to be pushed about it for a few weeks. It would take some time to get to the repeater, and now all the other deadlines were Amina’s problem.
He didn’t want to leave her, but he had no choice. And honestly, maybe she’d be better out from behind his shadow. If she hated Alik correcting people’s assumptions that he did most of the work, maybe she’d be happier without people being able to make those assumptions in the first place. She had Anora now instead, and while Anora was too junior to know much, she was also too junior to be assigned the credit.
(And it was Anora who’d torn that impulsive threat of resignation out of Alik: Yovak had proposed to send her, and Alik had looked at her, at her innocent young face, and had thought about her facing down bandits with that innocent young face and her naive faith in humanity that was based on literally never having been further from the city than the waterfall, and he’d instantly realized he’d absolutely have to resign if they tried to do that. He could never forgive himself if something happened to her. And he’d understood, then, he couldn’t stand to send anyone else on this trip. Not even Amina.)
Alik looked up from where he’d been stripping a wire and fitting a new connector to replace a worn one because someone was standing slightly too close, looming a little. He’d zoned out working on the connector and hadn’t noticed the person until just this moment.
It was Ula, and she had her arms crossed over her chest in a kind of resignedly patient manner. Alik hadn’t seen much of her on this trip, she’d been with a passel of livestock drovers since the first day-- distant kinsmen; none of her actual relatives had come along on this trip. At any rate, Alik had assumed she was more interested in them than him, and had taken what he assumed was the hint to leave her alone. He wasn’t always great at people and wasn’t feeling up to making the effort.
“Hi,” he said, blinking as he refocused on her with an effort.
“Are you used to having people take care of you, or what?” she asked.
That was unfair. “What?”
“It’s nearly dark,” she said, “and you’ve done nothing but fidget with electronics all day. Who is feeding you dinner?”
Alik looked around vaguely. Oh, it was nearly dark. Some of the caravan’s outriders, at this point, had taken charge of preparing the food, because there were too many people to leave it up to everyone to make their own little fire. But they’d probably already served dinner, and he hadn’t thought of it.
Well, just like last night, he’d probably scrounge up something during the evening’s entertainment. He had some things with him. He blinked at her again-- okay, he’d probably been working a little too long, his head was a little fuzzy-- and frowned. “I’ll figure it out,” he said. “I don’t need a caretaker, I’m grown. I’m just busy.” And out of practice, but he wasn’t going to admit that. It was… a very long time indeed since he’d been away from the city, where you could just walk down some of the streets and buy something already made. Or where people would bring you food at the Academy if you asked, and sometimes if you didn’t.
Oh, and then he remembered Ula pushing in between him and Yovak, and remembered that the folk of the hills didn’t let men hold leadership positions.
She crouched down next to him. “I told those animals to save you a portion,” she said, and actually reached out and took the pliers out of his hands. “I can finish putting a connector on. Go eat something, you look peaky.”
Alik didn’t snatch the pliers back, because it would make him look like a petulant child, but he did frown at her. “I don’t need to be cared for,” he said. “I’m not a child.”
“Of course not,” she said, smiling indulgently. It was hard not to give in to the charm of her expression, because she was so good-looking, but Alik scowled. For some reason this made her laugh. “You look like my little sister when you do that,” she said. “Go on, eat, those assholes aren’t scared enough of me to save your portion very long.”
Alik considered that one more moment, watching Ula’s capable hands working on the connector. She did know what she was doing, at least. And if she was comparing him to a sister then it wasn’t because he was a feeble man. Or maybe it was and she was just aware he’d react badly. But he was, now that he considered it, really hungry. “Fine,” he said, and pushed to his feet, pausing to let his circulation catch up-- okay, he was really hungry-- and then he grudgingly added, “Thank you,” mostly to distract Ula, who was looking concerned at his light-headedness.
She smiled, strangely fond. “I need you to survive long enough to fix the radio thing,” she said. “Anyway you’ve got to let me have a chance at charming the troubadours,” and she winked.
“Oh, is that what this is about,” Alik said, mollified somewhat. He nodded his chin toward the connector she was working on. “That one’s Mileta’s, is she your type?”
Mileta was a petite, wiry little woman with a halo of curly black hair studded here and there with wild silver hairs that sparkled, and a startlingly rich alto voice. She wasn’t not Alik’s type. But she coincidentally bore just enough of a resemblance to his little mother Istaso that he couldn’t quite manage to flirt.
Ula looked a little faraway for a moment. “She’s not not,” she said. “I’m not that picky about things like types, though, you know? And go, go eat, I’ll come gossip with you once I know you’ve kept that food from disappearing down the greedy gullets over there.”
Alik laughed, despite himself. “All right,” he said, and went over to the fire where the caravan’s temporarily designated chuck wagon was parked. A couple of Ula’s drover friends were sitting around shooting the shit, and one of them spotted him.
“Mammoth Mama’s little boy,” he said, not cruelly, “have you come to get your supper?”
“She took my pliers away,” Alik said ruefully. He was a little nervous; livestock drovers were a group of people he encountered fairly frequently, and they tended not to be all that friendly to outsiders. They spent enough time in the city to be used to it, but they had their own social structure. And they tended to almost all be male, and be spectacularly unconcerned with most of the city’s little polite-society rules, so Alik had endured a few slightly unpleasant encounters in his day, though he did know firsthand that if you ran into them on the road, they were good people to stay close to. They tended to have good road security, and nobody messed with them-- neither bandits nor civil guard patrols wanted to get on their bad side.
The drovers laughed. “She’s mean to us too,” the one who’d spoken said.
“You don’t argue with a mama like that,” another one said. He got up and retrieved the bowl of what was obviously Alik’s saved portion of that night’s meal. It was a one-pot dish, rice-based, pleasantly greasy, with some browned meat and stir-fried vegetables and then all of it stewed in the rice so the flavors were all mingled.
“You don’t, do you?” Alik said. He considered that, looking around at the drovers as he tucked into the food. He was a lot hungrier than he’d realized.
The drovers were all men, mostly young, if weatherbeaten. One of them was a bit older, maybe middle-aged. He leaned forward, and said to Alik, “Maybe you don’t know how it is with us, but that one’s got some rank, so generally, if she asks us to do something, we do it. We might argue, but we generally won’t win.”
“Rank,” Alik said. No, this wasn’t something he was very aware of. He’d assumed Ula was along on the journey because of her relationship to Edurni, not because she was important in her own right, but he could immediately see that it made more sense if she had some stature too.
The older drover nodded slightly. “She’s not from our lineage, so we don’t really know her, but you can read her tattoos to know for sure. She’s young but she’s got a few achievements, she’s a woman of some significance according to our ways.”
“The pilgrimage,” Alik said, thinking of her story about intimidating the boys.
“Right, she’s done the whole migration,” the drover said. “That’s not nothing. And she has a herd-sister she’s so close to, that’s not something just anyone does. On top of it, she’s a collar technician, that’s specialty stuff. And she’s borne and weaned a child for her bloodline, that’s a big one.”
Alik blinked. “How can you--” But they’d already told him, her tattoos told it. He’d been thinking of Ula as a little younger than himself, probably, and he hadn’t expected her to be a mother. “Wow, you can tell all that.”
“The herd-sister thing’s not a tattoo,” one of the younger drovers said, “we just have, you know, basic awareness of our surroundings.”
“It’s hard to miss an entire adult mammoth.”
“Fair,” Alik said. He contemplated that a moment longer, making himself not just inhale the food but chew it too. “Do you get tattoos for fathering children, or only bearing them?”
The older drover pulled his sleeve up. “Fathering children’s an accomplishment,” he said, “but not the most important one.” He showed Alik three smallish designs intertwined down the outside of his arm. “It’s a considerable honor to be chosen, but you know, the father has a lot less to do, you know? What with not doing the gestating and all.”
This was possibly the most friendly a band of drovers had ever been to Alik, and he tried to think of how to ask them about that, but as he admired the man’s tattoos and asked about his children, it struck him that the answer was in his hands. Ula had set this bowl aside for him and told him it was not to be touched. That meant she’d more or less marked him as under her protection, as far as these men were concerned.
He nodded politely as the older drover finished explaining about how proud he was of his youngest, a daughter, and looked up to see Ula approaching the fire, holding his pliers.
“You can have these back now,” she said.
“Ah,” he said, smiling, “thanks.” He held up the now-empty bowl. “And thanks for this, it’s better than what I would have found for myself.”
“I’ve got to keep you healthy,” she said. To one of the drovers, she said, “Have you seen Edurni?”
The drover shook his head. They were mostly acting as the outriders for the convoy during the day, keeping an eye on the road ahead and the surroundings. Not that one had to be exceptionally vigilant, two days’ journey from the city, only a day out from most of the biggest farming settlements and the composting installations and the like. This was a heavily-occupied area, though it was thinning out. The previous day, they’d actually brought enough hay so Edurni didn’t have to go and forage, but could just eat it off the back of the wagon. There was still a fair amount left of that and of several barrels of apples and cabbages they’d brought for the same purpose, because there wasn’t likely to be much unattended pasturage that nobody would mind a mammoth foraging through.
“She’s with the troubadours,” Alik said. “I made her that crank for their kinetic banks, and she used it, and she’s sitting over there so they can play her recordings and sing her songs and pet her. She’s their best friend now.”
Ula nimbly climbed up onto the wheel of the chuck wagon to peer around, frowning, and Alik could not help admiring her; she was so substantial, so sturdy, and yet so nimble. Her looks were really the opposite of what was in fashion in the City, which was all about willowy androgynous grace; Ula was the very model of femininity, with no straight lines on her entire body, round bulky thighs and broad hips and a generous bust and big round arms that absolutely rippled with muscle as she pushed herself up over the top of the wagon for a few extra inches’ advantage of field of view.
“Ah,” she said, with some satisfaction. “There she is.” And she let herself down, the wagon creaking in protest. “It’s just unnerving, you know, to lose track of a whole mammoth.”
Alik had to clear his throat to laugh, and he pushed to his feet to go clean off his bowl and put it back with the others. “Don’t worry,” he said, “she knows where she is.”
Something about this made Ula beam at him, like he’d said something very clever. “She does,” she said.
So this is where it being an alpha draft starts to be noticeable, I think. At this point I wrote about 20,000 words that I later cut, and started again, and stopped again, and decided, well shit, how about a scene break/ time jump. So here we are.
Also this past week I've written a lot and changed some assumptions about Ula's character, so she will at some point slightly shift and I'm not sure where. I decided her mother should have backstory, so. I think I must have mentioned her mother before, and it'll be wrong now, but I haven't gone back to fix it. Oh yes I think this section actually has some stuff I'll have to come back and fix now, but it's all right, I'll leave it as is for now because I'm still not sure how it'll settle out.
I have the feeling that as I'm writing this in disjointed chunks and then trying to join it back together, there are a lot of things where I had the idea, wrote about it, then later was writing again and wrote about the idea because I didn't know I'd already written about it. The story's long enough now that I can't go back and reread the whole thing every so often; you can do that with shorter works and use that to build momentum for your next bit of writing, but once the thing's big enough if you try you'll spend 110% of your allotted writing time just reviewing. Anyway at that point I feel like you can start to feel the subtle rings around the story where it calcified and got hung up and the author had to try to work backward past the block instead. And this is one of them, right here, the break between this scene and the previous one; it's a big mark on the side of the mug where the tea level was for too long, and maybe it got microwaved like that, and anyway it's going to be a devil to get off of there and it may never come off.
So with that ringing endorsement, let's move on.
____
The first benefit of traveling with a mammoth was that, if she was properly motivated, she’d delightedly wind up your kinetic banks to capacity every day without any of the members of your party having to lift a finger. The caravan they joined at first was a large one, with most of its members only going to the nearest settlement, and it had among its members several troubadours.
Apparently they didn’t get many troubadours out as far as the winter pastures where the mammoths met Ula’s people, because Edurni was absolutely enchanted with them, and it was the promise of performances from them that got her to wind up all the kinetic banks every evening without fail. Alik improvised her a new winding lever, because she had such enormous strength in her trunk that she could easily take advantage of some absolutely brutal gearing, that Alik took it as a challenge to put as much efficient resistance into as possible. He built the new lever their second day of travel, sitting in the back of one of the wagons and gearing it up so that one turn equaled several hundred turns of the regular, meant-to-be-used-by-humans lever.
Edurni turned it pretty easily, and so it took her about thirty seconds to wind up the kinetic bank that the one troubadour’s traveling companion had been prepared to spend an hour pedaling to charge. Which was better than her spending half an hour turning a lever that was so easy she could barely keep a grip on it.
“It won’t stand up to a lot of use,” Alik reflected, poking a little ruefully at the cobbled-together assemblage. He had a proper welder with him, but it hadn’t seemed right to break it out-- he’d have to stop to set it up, and didn’t want to give up his evening’s rest. This had been a nice break from riding, because it turned out he was sadly out of shape and already sore from their first day.
“It doesn’t need to,” the troubadour whose bank Edurni had just effortlessly charged said, eyes shining a little as she jacked her equipment into the generator.
These troubadours had all been staying in a guildhall in town, and were all freshly loaded up with new media. Alik had seen and heard most of their source material, but of course, the real point of the troubadours was how they remixed and augmented the recorded media they all shared at every opportunity. And when they came together in groups, they tended to inspire one another and swap styles and pick up influences, and it made for a fantastic flowering of creativity. This group were all leaving from the same place, but they’d peel off and travel different routes as the caravan continued, and they’d each make an individual wending way across the countryside until they reached the next troubadours’ guildhall and shared their new material with one another, after performing and recording on their own for months.
And no two troubadours ever had the same archive with them. Every troubadour was a data hoarder, to be sure; they all carried as much memory as they could possibly hold, at all times, in their data banks, but every one had a different curatorial touch, and no one could carry infinite media so everyone had to make choices. And they would record new musicians everywhere they went, and incorporate those performances into their endless remixing. The traditional exchange was that they would use their recordings to teach the musicians new songs everywhere they went, and so there were endless iterations of new musicians learning from recordings that they then changed and re-recorded, that the troubadours remixed.
Some of the troubadours-- most of them-- were also musicians, and could perform their memories of recordings, or would perform alongside their recordings, or would perform in lieu of their recordings when the kinetic banks inevitably, at some point, ran out or failed, and they found themselves somewhere without electricity or any other form of power to play the recordings.
(There were non-traveling troubadours who never ran into these problems, and some of them were also quite skilled performers, but they rarely left the cities and so weren’t something most people encountered. Alik knew a few, but they didn’t even call themselves troubadours. Someday, he thought he’d have some spare time to spend coming up with better power packs for the troubadours to use when they traveled, but he was forever overcommitted and never had more than an idle afternoon to spend sketching plans. Someday, perhaps.)
Tonight, they were going to have a collaborative performance. Alik helped them set up, taking the opportunity to scope out all their traveling rigs. Someday maybe he was going to work on that project, so he was building a mental database of what the current standard equipment was. He was pretty familiar with most of it already, but it didn’t hurt to broaden his experience.
And it was a damn sight better than giving himself much free time to think about, well-- everything. The drama of his departure, the uncertainty of his reception, the myriad difficulties awaiting him at their destination. Mostly he was consumed with guilt over leaving Amina to deal with the drama. He’d threatened Dean Sabira with resignation over the matter, and he’d watched her contemplate calling his bluff. The issue had been sidestepped, however, by Ula’s tribesman Harki having appealed to the governor, who intervened with a pointed notation that the mammoths were in fact protected by a treaty that in no uncertain terms stipulated the mandatory maintenance of those radio collars.
It had been a huge mess, and in the end Alik wasn’t sure Dean Sabira had understood that by tacitly taking Yovak’s side, by leaving him in his position, she was giving Alik real fodder to consider actually resigning. It had come to him suddenly, the impulse to threaten it, but the more he thought of it, the more it seemed… well, there were no shortage of institutions who’d love to have him, and if his lack of lineage was allowed to be thrown in his face at any provocation, there wasn’t much incentive to stay. Being even farther away from his ancestors didn’t matter if he never had leave time to visit them.
But it was a rash impulse, and he was guiltily glad to have a good excuse not to be pushed about it for a few weeks. It would take some time to get to the repeater, and now all the other deadlines were Amina’s problem.
He didn’t want to leave her, but he had no choice. And honestly, maybe she’d be better out from behind his shadow. If she hated Alik correcting people’s assumptions that he did most of the work, maybe she’d be happier without people being able to make those assumptions in the first place. She had Anora now instead, and while Anora was too junior to know much, she was also too junior to be assigned the credit.
(And it was Anora who’d torn that impulsive threat of resignation out of Alik: Yovak had proposed to send her, and Alik had looked at her, at her innocent young face, and had thought about her facing down bandits with that innocent young face and her naive faith in humanity that was based on literally never having been further from the city than the waterfall, and he’d instantly realized he’d absolutely have to resign if they tried to do that. He could never forgive himself if something happened to her. And he’d understood, then, he couldn’t stand to send anyone else on this trip. Not even Amina.)
Alik looked up from where he’d been stripping a wire and fitting a new connector to replace a worn one because someone was standing slightly too close, looming a little. He’d zoned out working on the connector and hadn’t noticed the person until just this moment.
It was Ula, and she had her arms crossed over her chest in a kind of resignedly patient manner. Alik hadn’t seen much of her on this trip, she’d been with a passel of livestock drovers since the first day-- distant kinsmen; none of her actual relatives had come along on this trip. At any rate, Alik had assumed she was more interested in them than him, and had taken what he assumed was the hint to leave her alone. He wasn’t always great at people and wasn’t feeling up to making the effort.
“Hi,” he said, blinking as he refocused on her with an effort.
“Are you used to having people take care of you, or what?” she asked.
That was unfair. “What?”
“It’s nearly dark,” she said, “and you’ve done nothing but fidget with electronics all day. Who is feeding you dinner?”
Alik looked around vaguely. Oh, it was nearly dark. Some of the caravan’s outriders, at this point, had taken charge of preparing the food, because there were too many people to leave it up to everyone to make their own little fire. But they’d probably already served dinner, and he hadn’t thought of it.
Well, just like last night, he’d probably scrounge up something during the evening’s entertainment. He had some things with him. He blinked at her again-- okay, he’d probably been working a little too long, his head was a little fuzzy-- and frowned. “I’ll figure it out,” he said. “I don’t need a caretaker, I’m grown. I’m just busy.” And out of practice, but he wasn’t going to admit that. It was… a very long time indeed since he’d been away from the city, where you could just walk down some of the streets and buy something already made. Or where people would bring you food at the Academy if you asked, and sometimes if you didn’t.
Oh, and then he remembered Ula pushing in between him and Yovak, and remembered that the folk of the hills didn’t let men hold leadership positions.
She crouched down next to him. “I told those animals to save you a portion,” she said, and actually reached out and took the pliers out of his hands. “I can finish putting a connector on. Go eat something, you look peaky.”
Alik didn’t snatch the pliers back, because it would make him look like a petulant child, but he did frown at her. “I don’t need to be cared for,” he said. “I’m not a child.”
“Of course not,” she said, smiling indulgently. It was hard not to give in to the charm of her expression, because she was so good-looking, but Alik scowled. For some reason this made her laugh. “You look like my little sister when you do that,” she said. “Go on, eat, those assholes aren’t scared enough of me to save your portion very long.”
Alik considered that one more moment, watching Ula’s capable hands working on the connector. She did know what she was doing, at least. And if she was comparing him to a sister then it wasn’t because he was a feeble man. Or maybe it was and she was just aware he’d react badly. But he was, now that he considered it, really hungry. “Fine,” he said, and pushed to his feet, pausing to let his circulation catch up-- okay, he was really hungry-- and then he grudgingly added, “Thank you,” mostly to distract Ula, who was looking concerned at his light-headedness.
She smiled, strangely fond. “I need you to survive long enough to fix the radio thing,” she said. “Anyway you’ve got to let me have a chance at charming the troubadours,” and she winked.
“Oh, is that what this is about,” Alik said, mollified somewhat. He nodded his chin toward the connector she was working on. “That one’s Mileta’s, is she your type?”
Mileta was a petite, wiry little woman with a halo of curly black hair studded here and there with wild silver hairs that sparkled, and a startlingly rich alto voice. She wasn’t not Alik’s type. But she coincidentally bore just enough of a resemblance to his little mother Istaso that he couldn’t quite manage to flirt.
Ula looked a little faraway for a moment. “She’s not not,” she said. “I’m not that picky about things like types, though, you know? And go, go eat, I’ll come gossip with you once I know you’ve kept that food from disappearing down the greedy gullets over there.”
Alik laughed, despite himself. “All right,” he said, and went over to the fire where the caravan’s temporarily designated chuck wagon was parked. A couple of Ula’s drover friends were sitting around shooting the shit, and one of them spotted him.
“Mammoth Mama’s little boy,” he said, not cruelly, “have you come to get your supper?”
“She took my pliers away,” Alik said ruefully. He was a little nervous; livestock drovers were a group of people he encountered fairly frequently, and they tended not to be all that friendly to outsiders. They spent enough time in the city to be used to it, but they had their own social structure. And they tended to almost all be male, and be spectacularly unconcerned with most of the city’s little polite-society rules, so Alik had endured a few slightly unpleasant encounters in his day, though he did know firsthand that if you ran into them on the road, they were good people to stay close to. They tended to have good road security, and nobody messed with them-- neither bandits nor civil guard patrols wanted to get on their bad side.
The drovers laughed. “She’s mean to us too,” the one who’d spoken said.
“You don’t argue with a mama like that,” another one said. He got up and retrieved the bowl of what was obviously Alik’s saved portion of that night’s meal. It was a one-pot dish, rice-based, pleasantly greasy, with some browned meat and stir-fried vegetables and then all of it stewed in the rice so the flavors were all mingled.
“You don’t, do you?” Alik said. He considered that, looking around at the drovers as he tucked into the food. He was a lot hungrier than he’d realized.
The drovers were all men, mostly young, if weatherbeaten. One of them was a bit older, maybe middle-aged. He leaned forward, and said to Alik, “Maybe you don’t know how it is with us, but that one’s got some rank, so generally, if she asks us to do something, we do it. We might argue, but we generally won’t win.”
“Rank,” Alik said. No, this wasn’t something he was very aware of. He’d assumed Ula was along on the journey because of her relationship to Edurni, not because she was important in her own right, but he could immediately see that it made more sense if she had some stature too.
The older drover nodded slightly. “She’s not from our lineage, so we don’t really know her, but you can read her tattoos to know for sure. She’s young but she’s got a few achievements, she’s a woman of some significance according to our ways.”
“The pilgrimage,” Alik said, thinking of her story about intimidating the boys.
“Right, she’s done the whole migration,” the drover said. “That’s not nothing. And she has a herd-sister she’s so close to, that’s not something just anyone does. On top of it, she’s a collar technician, that’s specialty stuff. And she’s borne and weaned a child for her bloodline, that’s a big one.”
Alik blinked. “How can you--” But they’d already told him, her tattoos told it. He’d been thinking of Ula as a little younger than himself, probably, and he hadn’t expected her to be a mother. “Wow, you can tell all that.”
“The herd-sister thing’s not a tattoo,” one of the younger drovers said, “we just have, you know, basic awareness of our surroundings.”
“It’s hard to miss an entire adult mammoth.”
“Fair,” Alik said. He contemplated that a moment longer, making himself not just inhale the food but chew it too. “Do you get tattoos for fathering children, or only bearing them?”
The older drover pulled his sleeve up. “Fathering children’s an accomplishment,” he said, “but not the most important one.” He showed Alik three smallish designs intertwined down the outside of his arm. “It’s a considerable honor to be chosen, but you know, the father has a lot less to do, you know? What with not doing the gestating and all.”
This was possibly the most friendly a band of drovers had ever been to Alik, and he tried to think of how to ask them about that, but as he admired the man’s tattoos and asked about his children, it struck him that the answer was in his hands. Ula had set this bowl aside for him and told him it was not to be touched. That meant she’d more or less marked him as under her protection, as far as these men were concerned.
He nodded politely as the older drover finished explaining about how proud he was of his youngest, a daughter, and looked up to see Ula approaching the fire, holding his pliers.
“You can have these back now,” she said.
“Ah,” he said, smiling, “thanks.” He held up the now-empty bowl. “And thanks for this, it’s better than what I would have found for myself.”
“I’ve got to keep you healthy,” she said. To one of the drovers, she said, “Have you seen Edurni?”
The drover shook his head. They were mostly acting as the outriders for the convoy during the day, keeping an eye on the road ahead and the surroundings. Not that one had to be exceptionally vigilant, two days’ journey from the city, only a day out from most of the biggest farming settlements and the composting installations and the like. This was a heavily-occupied area, though it was thinning out. The previous day, they’d actually brought enough hay so Edurni didn’t have to go and forage, but could just eat it off the back of the wagon. There was still a fair amount left of that and of several barrels of apples and cabbages they’d brought for the same purpose, because there wasn’t likely to be much unattended pasturage that nobody would mind a mammoth foraging through.
“She’s with the troubadours,” Alik said. “I made her that crank for their kinetic banks, and she used it, and she’s sitting over there so they can play her recordings and sing her songs and pet her. She’s their best friend now.”
Ula nimbly climbed up onto the wheel of the chuck wagon to peer around, frowning, and Alik could not help admiring her; she was so substantial, so sturdy, and yet so nimble. Her looks were really the opposite of what was in fashion in the City, which was all about willowy androgynous grace; Ula was the very model of femininity, with no straight lines on her entire body, round bulky thighs and broad hips and a generous bust and big round arms that absolutely rippled with muscle as she pushed herself up over the top of the wagon for a few extra inches’ advantage of field of view.
“Ah,” she said, with some satisfaction. “There she is.” And she let herself down, the wagon creaking in protest. “It’s just unnerving, you know, to lose track of a whole mammoth.”
Alik had to clear his throat to laugh, and he pushed to his feet to go clean off his bowl and put it back with the others. “Don’t worry,” he said, “she knows where she is.”
Something about this made Ula beam at him, like he’d said something very clever. “She does,” she said.
