Skylene nodded. She let her gaze linger over the city a little longer and then she turned and walked back toward the arch, down the slope, and onward. Beside Tunnel, she was as slim as a reed, a figure drawn with the smooth lines of a thin brush. Her skin powder white, nose the elongated point customary of selected Kern slaves, hair tufted in a manner that made her otherwise peaceful visage look potentially savage, touched with avian anger. She might need some of that for the meeting they headed to, the first summit of leaders of the clans of the quota slaves of Ushen Brae.
Randale of the Wrathic had called for a full gathering of the people; Dukish of the Anet and Maren of the Kulish Kra had balked, saying they should decide some matters at the level of the chieftains before airing their differences in public. Skylene did not welcome talk of chieftains. Nor did she like that they already defined themselves by the clan groupings of their enslavement. She agreed to attend only to buy time until Mor returned-and the elders, too, if that was possible.
Since Mor had left her in charge of the Free People of Avina, Skylene lived a troubled life. Part of it was being without her lover. They had slept entwined together for several years. Trying to find slumber by herself proved difficult, and her dreams rushed unpleasantly at her when she did sleep. She woke most mornings knotted in her sheets, more desolate for realizing it was only linen that bound her, not Mor’s shapely limbs.
The Avina she found on kicking off those sheets challenged her in new ways each day. In the first days of freedom the city’s occupants huddled nervous, unsure that what appeared to have happened really had. The Auldek gone? All of them? The divine children with them and many of the other slaves as well? They had all watched it happen, but they stayed in the same rooms, in the same buildings, finding it hard to believe that the Auldek would not appear again suddenly, ready to punish them for even daring to think themselves free.
Some youths rode out of the city on an antok. They returned a week later with verification that the Auldek carried on to the north, making haste, none of them looking back. At Skylene’s suggestion, the People agreed to set up watches to the north of the city to provide a warning should the thing they feared return to them. With that in place, they rejoiced. People ran through the streets, reveling in their new freedom. They were as giddy as the children they had not been allowed to be, laughing and dancing, feasting and making love and dreaming of what they would do with a city-an entire continent-all their own. It was too much for them, vast and filled with another race’s history-such a challenge, but a challenge all their own now. The very thought of it made them drunk with joy.
Skylene made speeches often during these early days. She reminded the revelers that the Free People had always planned for this day. The Council of Elders had lived far from them, but they had never ceased laboring for them, taking in the abandoned, hiding those who had run from abuse, keeping alive a dream of unity once they were as free in reality as they were in moral truth. Soon, she told them, Mor and Yoen and the others would join them. Together they would build their nation. It sounded wonderful. It was all true and all possible. But barely had the tail of the Auldek migration slipped over the northern horizon before the problems started.
By the end of the second week one man had killed another in a dispute over who had rights to an estate. The slain man was of the Kulish Kra; his murderer, an Anet. Skylene was at the trial called to decide the matter. She was one of the many who agreed to the punishment of a tattoo identifying the Anet as a murderer to be stenciled across his shaved scalp. Before the sentence was carried out, a group of Anet mobbed the chamber in which the man was imprisoned. They bashed their way in, freed him, and fought a battle in the streets to escape. They claimed the trial had been unjust. It was biased against Anets. Only other Anets had the right to try their kind, they claimed. How could they know justice was done otherwise?
The one who led them was a short man named Dukish, an Anet who had once been a golden eye, one of the quota slaves who handled financial affairs for the Auldek. He had been a man of some station, but he had not been chosen to go with them. Declaring himself the clan’s chieftain, he called on other Anet slaves to join him in putting clan interests first, saying none should govern them but themselves. Many flocked to him. He armed them, seizing a weapons cache he knew of from his former work. Before anyone could organize to stop them, they took control of a portion of the city, including a warehouse stocked with grain and beans and salt, great vats of vinegar and wine.
It got worse after that. Former household slaves laid claim to their master’s palaces, while field workers were kept at a distance. Golden eyes and others who had held higher offices for the Auldek claimed that those privileges should be transferred to positions of a similar rank in the new order. A gang of young Kulish Kra men harassed Kern women. It began as a joke played on one avian clan by another. But it grew violent, sexual. Before long the rumors were that the Kulish Kra youths had taken to raping and molesting Kern women. The Kern formed armed groups against this, to which the Kulish Kra responded in kind; and still other armed groups formed in response to the increasingly violent tension in the city, further fueling it. The league returned. They plied the water in their ships and in the Lothan Aklun’s soul vessels. It became clear that they were establishing themselves on the barrier isles, and everyone wondered how long it would be before they landed on the mainland.
Skylene tried to speak reason to them all. For a time she found ears listening, but as the weeks passed she was surprised at how often her perfect reason fell only on the back of people’s heads. She forgot, perhaps, that as Mor’s lover and as an active member of the Free People she had learned to look past the clan markings more than most. To many, their clan members were their kin, not just the arbitrarily selected other slaves. It was in households and fields with others of their clan that they had labored. It was to the Auldek masters of those clans that they had looked with fear, with eyes first of children, then of clan members.
Skylene knew this. It had been her life, too. Still, she had expected to manage the peace for a few weeks. Instead, she scrambled to prevent a riot that would ignite the entire city. To hear her, the people had to truly listen, to understand, to be brave. To heed men like Dukish, one only had to feel fear.
“We must be careful,” Tunnel said as they walked the last corridor that would take them to the meeting. “I don’t like this one.”
“I don’t like Dukish either, but that’s part of the reason we have to speak with him.”
The chieftains and their seconds met at a ring of chairs in the center of the same massive chamber in which the Auldek had slaughtered Sire Neen’s group. The circle of chairs looked tiny beneath the high ceiling, dwarfed by the pillars and the shafts of light that fell diagonally from openings in the ceiling. The men and women milling around hardly seemed capable of making decisions for the mass of people that could have filled the entire chamber.
“We shouldn’t be meeting like this,” Skylene muttered as she moved to take her seat. “We should all be here together. All of us.”
Tunnel grunted his agreement from where he stood behind her chair. He crossed his bulging arms over his chest and reached up with one hand to pull contemplatively on a tusk.
“Who is going to begin?” Dukish asked before everyone was fully settled.
“You just have,” Plez, a thin woman with the same Kern features as Skylene, said.
When Dukish smiled the scales on his face shifted in a manner that Skylene always imagined must feel uncomfortable. “But I am not the one with complaints. I am happy. Let the complainers complain.”
Than, the leader of the Lvin, scowled at him. He had only light clan marks: pale white shading around his nose and eyes, steel whiskers, the ends of which he pressed often with his fingertips. Still, he had a fierce demeanor akin to his snow lion totem. “I am no complainer,” he said through gritted teeth, “but I have much to say against you.”