the channeling schedule record keeping to Val so he can straighten out the supply problem.” With so many strange channels trying to work together, it took an experienced channel to keep everything moving, so Val had to add Benart’s record keeping and communicating tasks to her usual job of assigning the channels’ work schedules. The new arrivals were in no condition to help yet.
Jhiti only sighed. “Like I said, elections don’t seem a priority.”
To Fort Rimon natives, maybe it isn’t, thought Del Rimon, but every decision he made without Council backing would be chalked up to some strangely twisted motive and by spring the Tanhara folks would be taking sides, splitting and fracturing the temporary unity forged during this emergency. He supposed the distrust of him arose because none of them could zlin him, Lexy or Aipensha well enough to know how he really felt about things. Not to mention how I just ignored the Fort rules, climbing the walls during an attack.
He swallowed hard and tried not to think of Aipensha as he watched people gather at the edge of the ever-growing cemetery, grouping themselves around the flat boulder as they had too many times recently.
He scuffed at the boulder’s surface, noticing that someone had chiseled it flatter here and there.
Just after noon, they’d held a brief ceremony over the mass grave of the Freebanders. Raiders never collected their dead.
The dead stock animals had been stripped of all useful parts and the remains buried down past the fields.
Four more of the injured had died, so the ceremony had been delayed to dig the additional graves.
Now three long, neat rows of new graves had been opened with a few others scattered about next to previously deceased family members. Some of those graves were for tiny bodies. Eighty-six had died, including the Tanhara dead, plus a hundred ninety-two Freebanders. And Clire.
The bodies were laid out beside their respective resting places, shrouded in plain cloth. Rimon heard the rhythmic tap of hammers doing emergency repairs of burned sections of the Fort. Guards were posted on the walls, and around the cemetery to protect the path back up to the stockade in case of another attack.
Several search parties, foraging parties and scouting parties were out. Rimon had seen to it that all those missing the funeral had volunteered to do so, and not because they couldn’t yet face their grief.
Finally, Rimon saw Lexy and Kahleen coming down the hill. He stepped up front and signalled the musicians. They struck a low, long chord of howling grief, a cry of bereavement, the traditional opening to funerals.
Rimon grabbed the ambient nager to inject his own sick loss, anguish, shock, and ragged disbelief into the emotional atmosphere, working them toward the catharsis they’d been suppressing since the previous day.
He had watched Clire Farris Kill Solamar’s Companion, Losa. His daughter, Aipensha, had been trampled to death trying to save Clire from her kidnappers. Neither would have been outside the shelter if it hadn’t been for his disregard for the oldest of Fort laws.
Solamar stepped up beside him, and joined as they had when the two of them had stood upon the Fort wall and become a beacon of blazing Gen nager for the Raiders. Only now, they raised grief, shame, remorse, guilt and all that went with being unable to save a loved one.
Kahleen joined Solamar, dressed in her best and flipping her unbound auburn hair behind her shoulders. Lexy slid against Del Rimon’s other side, her field work impeccable, blending her channel’s nager into theirs seamlessly. She took a moment to mutter, “The selyn audit is finished. Tanhara lost a lot of renSimes, so they’re arriving here Gen-high. We’ll have enough selyn to support the workers and get the new buildings done. The Companion situation looks good too with Aipensha....”
She just plain blew the fields to pieces sending shards of flashing emotion slicing through the crowd. In that split second, Rimon was undone.
He turned in front of Lexy, grabbed her tight to him, rolled so his back was to the crowd and tried to block all Lexy’s Farris nageric power from the crowd while he rocked against the hollow pain they shared.
It’s not your fault, Father.
It was a whisper on the wind, an icy twist to the ambient. He looked over Lexy’s bent head with eyes and Sime senses. At the edge of the graveyard, near the Farris plots, mist oozed from between the tall evergreens. Against that mist, made of that mist, shrouded in misty nageric clouds, stood Aipensha clinging to Zeth Farris, her grandfather.
Behind her gathered rank after rank of the dead. Rimon recognized many from the names on the slates he held and others from his own distant childhood. The wraiths whispered as if singing to the music. “It was not your fault. You saved the Fort. Live now, grow stronger.”
Aipensha’s voice led them, her accent, caroling her irrepressible joy in life. His father’s voice blended with hers. Behind Aipensha the chorus chanted her words, an echo that passed back to the farthest rank under the trees, in the depths of growing shadow. “Father,” she sang. “Del Rimon,” sang the others. “Rimon Farris!”
A stiff breeze whirled through the valley, rattled the trees, dispersed the tendrils of mist as if they’d never been. The musicians fell silent.
Kahleen and the other Companions on the boulder beside them had moved to contain the raw nageric outburst.
Rimon, still sheltering Lexy, turned to the gathered mourners to see what they had made of the mist turning into people who spoke as if chanting to the music of grief. The audience looked up at him with no trace of awareness of what he’d seen. Seen not zlinned he realized. There had been nothing to zlin. There had been nothing there.
Beside him, Solamar whispered, “Who was that?”
Solamar saw that? I don’t believe he saw that. “Aipensha. My daughter. Zeth, my father. Others who died yesterday, or years ago. They’re together now.”
Their eyes met, and he knew Solamar had seen.
While he stared at Solamar, Lexy pulled herself together, hugged him one last time and stood away. The three channels once again orchestrated the tenor of the ambient nager in a more staid fashion.
Nevertheless, they had shared their naked grief and guilt with everyone there, heaping it on top of what others felt. Rimon was ashamed.
He began the ceremony. “We gather to bid farewell to eighty-four of the finest people who have ever lived and two of our children. They gave their lives so that we could go on and realize their dreams. We stand as one with them all, carrying the responsibility they so ably shouldered.”
He brought up the slates. The light was dimming fast now, the air cooling. First came the Tanhara dead, and leading that list was Losa, Solamar’s Companion.
Solamar had to be prompted to step forward and say a few words on her behalf while she was lowered into her grave, and the attendant, a Tanhara Gen, began covering her over with reluctant strokes of his shovel.
Before they’d finished, Rimon read the next name, and very quickly Solamar picked up the rhythm of it. Rimon went through the dead of the other Forts among them, each with a channel to speak for them, and finally came to Fort Rimon’s own dead. Benart had listed Aipensha last, right after Clire, or Rimon would never have gotten through his part of the eulogies.
By the time Aipensha had been lowered into her grave, they were standing in the dark, a full moon on the horizon. Still the sound of shovels echoed. They couldn’t walk away from these graves only to fall to bickering again. The world inside this Fort had to unite against the groups arrayed against it from outside. Rimon spoke.
“Fort Intalace was the first to be overrun. Clire Farris arrived here with four others from Intalace who gave their lives defending Fort Rimon leaving her the sole survivor. Intalace was destroyed by the juncts of the town they had settled near.
“Fort Butte was defeated by drought and a bout of plague and sought refuge here last year.
“Fort Unity, a large and thriving community,