Lantern Road: 8 by Cullen Read online

  The area around Castle Ramyon always had a certain unique smell, a floral-like scent of the tywix fungus. In fact it was the time of the tywix festival in the villages around Ramyon, for the fabled mushroom was in the beginning of its annual throe season, when it had soaked up just enough water to suddenly proliferate across the landscape in a myriad of dimly glowing saucer shapes big as a man's hand. And they had a certain smell—sweet as honey, musky as river flowers, mild as oats. They were prized among the finest of Oba's fungal wealth, and ships carried them all over the local galaxy.

  The night always had a certain charm and magic, Jory O'Call thought as he leaned on the parapets high above Lord Ramyon's castle, which itself overlooked a series of wildly plunging gorges above a forest, a lake, a small town, and, of course, the flow of lights five klix away on the Obayyo.

  While he waited for the baba to leave Lady Ramy's suite and retire to her own unknowable dark hole, Jory must have patience and wait. Ramy would be waiting for him, eager to share the latest poem, the silliest joke or gossip about the castle, and, of late, embraces that led to ever greater risk.

  Jory had grown up at the castle and knew the limits. He could get away with things no other human could. He was at the Lord Ramyon's pleasure, though the old warrior would have little speech with him. As long as Jory guided Ramyon's youngest and favorite daughter Ramy in matters of ancient Oba poetry and song, and did not transgress too badly, Jory was tolerated with a certain wink, a laugh, the patient air with which one treated a pet. After all, to see a human dressed in Oba court robes—moss-green silk coat, broad mint-white silk sash and camiss, ankle-length moss-green kilt, sturdy wooden sandals—was like seeing an animal dressed like a person. Ramyon had reason to be complacent. He was getting older. All three of his sons were married and in the field, keeping Ramyon's enemies at bay and the retainers in line. His house babas were strong in commerce and dark arts. All four of his daughters were married off and the matter of dowries finished. Only his youngest, Ramy, lived at home half the time, the other half at Dumonhi when her husband was home from the wars. Lord Ramyon, still fierce looking with his black robes and swords, could stride about the palace gardens picking moon roses, listening to Ramy's tinkling voice singsong ancient riddles and poems, and smiling at Jory as if the latter were a lap dog.

  As a human, Jory was wallpaper, as the retainers said. Early in his childhood, Jory had been chosen for his talents at art and music to become a child pedagogue to the Ramyon children. Whatever their lowly status, the humans could sometimes produce prodigious talent. Every generation, a few humans made their way to some of the larger castles as prodigies, as wonders, as teachers, as oddities who could singsong Shurian epics and short poems with the deeper, stronger voices of humans. Likewise, a few bull-strong human men always found their way into each warlord's army. It was said that the robber barons at the far haunted reaches had more than one human among their gangs.

  The Shurians took human children early, on the theory that they could be totally domesticated and would not bring any hostile ideas, such as stabbing the lord in his bed or throwing his children off a high wall—things that had happened in previous centuries, and were hideously punished, with entire human villages razed, and rows of chopped off heads strung for klix along the Obayyo as a warning to those humans carrying cargo on their shoulders.

  But Jory carried in him an ember of pride, a spark of rebellion. When Jory was a little boy of about 3, his uncle had taken him to a meeting of the Twelve Moon Society. That was a forbidden group of Shurian and human thinkers who schemed to liberate Oba from the warlords and give humans equality under the law. Jory had not fully understood the lofty words spoken around a warm fire in a dark underground warehouse while some 20 shadowy figures clapped and nodded assent. But he remembered the feeling he'd had, the infectious sense of freedom, the exhilaration of strutting about and speaking one's mind, even though he experienced those things through the mouths and animated expressions of others. Toward the end of the meeting there had been sudden chaos—the fire put out, smoke filling the room, men whispering in panic, feet thrashing this way and that, while Lord Ramyon's men beat the doors down with iron axes and tramped in waving their swords. His uncle had half dragged, half carried Jory to a window and handed him out to a passing cargo woman, a human who spirited him into the woods and then into a mountain hideout. When Jory was returned to his parents days later, he'd seen the rows of staves in the human settlement, in the main square. The men's eyes were gone, birds were busy about their lips, and their skin had turned black, but Jory could still recognize his uncle. His mother had let him see, as a warning, but briefly, before yanking him away. Up on the Obayyo, another row of heads on staves—the Shurian element of the Twelve Moon Society. The Lord Ramyon must have been satisfied that his informers had rooted out the entire nest, and his torturers put their skills to good use.

  Jory had gone to the House of Ramyon at age 7 with a little human girl named Xinda who was said by the babas to possess a healing touch. Xinda had first come to the castle officials’ notice because of her unusual hair and skin. She was that very rare human who had carrot-red hair, pale skin, and lots of orange freckles. That alone made her an oddity worth showing at the castle.

  However, Xinda was said to have sickened a baba through witchcraft. Kjirs later, Jory heard she had had her eyes put out by the castle babas one night, and the unfortunate girl had been sent out a back gate after midnight to the arms of her terrified parents. At the moment all he knew was that in the morning, when he woke up, her bed was stripped and her things were missing. She was gone, and nobody would talk about her. Life on Oba was hard, even cruel, but the Shurians rarely went out of their way to be cruel. They could be serene or cruel, because their laws and customs were unbending, and their warlords were desperate to keep all foreign customs out, even the evil spirit natural to humans.

  Jory had been terrified of the dark, groaning castle with its blackened stone exterior and its whispering, creaking wooden corridors of which there seemed to be klix. Jory had been terrified to live among aliens who bred in three genders—the male warrior who was lord of his house; the babawho was egg bearer, birth mother, and nurturer, and ran much of society to boot; and the female, who was sex object to both other genders, and egg source.

  The Shurian males and females were very human-like, while the babas struck little Jory as nightmare figures. The males and females had pale, almost translucent outer skin that covered a milky inner skin. Older men and women had visible blue or black veins just under the milky skin. Both genders tended to have a fuzzy globe of reddish-gold head hair like cotton candy. Because they were nocturnal, they had eyes half again as large as human eyes to gather light. Other than that, they might have passed for humans—although the very thought might have turned their stomachs. Some of the finer ladies, Jory found, were rather slender and attractive. Especially Ramy.

  The babas were the horror of Jory's childhood, and he often ran away to his parents’ house. Later, he would discover his parents, though they loved him, had accepted a handsome stipend for their son's services at the court. They always returned him, and he began to hate them. Later he just felt distant to them—he was court-educated, while they were ignorant laborers who could not read or write, and who had never left their village. Jory, by contrast, had traveled much of the Obayyo with Lord Ramyon's entourage, once even visiting the imperial palace. Jory had been 9 and had slept through large parts of that brief visit during which Ramyon had pledged obeisance while receiving the emperor's vow of eternal favor. Like so many things on Oba that were the opposite of what they seemed, this was a fiction, Jory would eventually learn, in which Lord Ramyon took 1,200 of his warriors and threatened to depose the emperor and murder his family if anything happened to the status quo. Hundreds of high lords did the same thing in revolving order.

  As he grew up at court, Jory found that the dark, shadowy babas went out of their way to tame his fear. They were larger than the ma
les and human-like females. They wore obscuring gowns over their round, bloated bodies. They moved cumbersomely like boats, on their swollen and aching feet. More than once, child Jory had nightmares in which babas with many arms chased him, like insects, though in reality each only had two very human-like pudgy arms with small hands. Their skin was dark, like a beetle's carapace, but soft as Jory's own. Their features were not as crisp and clear, or to Jory's eyes human-like, as the other Shurians'. Over the kjirs, he got used to them. They did him favors, though babas rarely spoke, and communicated in glances and signs; or had their female sisters communicate for them, which was more often.

  As he grew up, Jory developed a bond with his mistress, Lady Ramy. She as tall as he, with fine milky skin. Her skin was so full of microscopic healthy young capillaries that in places, in a certain light, parts of her had a faint bluish tinge. Her hair was a full ball of tawny fuzz, always fluffed out.

  Her tongue was deep blue, and twice as long as Jory's. As children, they had giggled and pulled each other's tongues. No matter how he tried, he could not stick his out as far as she could hers. Later they learned that sticking the tongue out was a raw sexual invitation among Shurians, and they never played that game again. Not until recently.

  Ramy's face was well-shaped and as pretty as any human girl's, though by Shurian standards she was considered average. Shurians had a higher regard for a female whose face was slitty like an insect's.

  Nobody, not even Ramy and Jory, ever suspected what would develop between the two. Like a kitten and a puppy, they romped and played innocently, laughing and wearing themselves out so they slept soundly after Story. For kjirs, until Jory began his own natural changes, the two slept together in the same bed in the women's quarters, under the watchful eyes of Ramy's father's old baba. Ramy's own baba slept in the mothers’ quarters, though Ramy often went there to sleep with her. Then Jory slept alone. He wouldn't go near the babas’ place, which was in a separate round tower of the castle, and had few windows. It had a coppery glow inside, and smelled somehow faintly of honey and ammonia.

  Between the Ramyon family—the retainers and their families, the soldiers whose families lived outside the walls, and the servants and slaves—some 500 persons lived in Castle Ramyon. In those close quarters, Jory could not help but learn the intimate details of Shurian reproduction. Although the men were often away fighting wars, it was their duty to come live as husbands for at least a few months of each kjir. Usually, that was in the Lissom Season, when Shur was inclined slightly more toward its star, and the gas giant glowed more aqua than usual, and spirits were said to mellow as the gods and demons relaxed from their fighting to loll on the meadows of heaven. Then the male would come to the female's bedroom and court her before hours of frequent love play. The younger, attractive females were usually slender and sensuous in their movements. They walked with a swaying step, each finger sending a signal, each cock of the hip or stride of the thigh an invitation to the Shurian male. Since they did not give milk, the Shurian females had no breasts—that was one of the functions of the baba—but they had vestigial nipples, like the males, that helped arouse. The baba stayed out of sight during the Lissom Season, busy with last season's offspring.

  The Shurians mated much like humans, though the kjoni thing was higher up rather than part of the pissing area, and the male's organ was correspondingly half way to the navel, so that the motions and amount of effort were comparable to those of humans—as were the passions, the sounds, the promises, the endearments. Jory and Ramy secretly whispered about these matters as their changes began, but neither thought of the other in such a light.

  At 13, Ramy was married in a great ceremony to a warrior prince, aged 15, of the Dumonhi family a day's journey along the Obayyo. They were a wealthy, powerful family, and the marriage was considered auspicious by both sides. The new husband ignored Jory all of the time, and Ramy most of the time, for he was a favorite son, and his father was training him to be a great general.

  Everything about the babas was disgusting to Jory, no matter how they tried to placate him with gifts of human candy and shining fungal balls called honeyed sea foam that tasted subtly like caramel. At least once each rotation of Shur around the gas giant, Ramy went to the quarters of her baba sister. There—Jory had never been to those quarters, and didn't want to go—the two females did something where they lay down together—with much the same passions and sounds, and endearments and so forth—and the baba thrust a long, thin quill from her mouth deep into Ramy's neck. As Ramy lay paralyzed and enraptured, the baba slowly sucked out the fruits of Ramy's lovemaking with Dumonhi.

  The baba would eat liberally at table—she was the favored recipient of the castle kitchen's stocks—and her babies would grow. After gestation, she would lie down while other babas tended to her. The newborns would slip out, encased in a transparent protein membrane. In more primitive times, the mother baba licked the membrane off and swallowed it—anything to feed her offspring. Nowadays, the attending babas would place the membrane on a ceramic plate and place it in a wall shrine with votive candles to Baba-Oba, the goddess of the world and of birth and of women. Ba meant ‘sister,’ and even the great island of life on Shur was named Oba.

  If the birth was male, it might be one or two twin boys. If, on the other hand, the offspring were female, it was always one girl and one baba, not twins exactly, but very closely interwoven females, the baba being about twice the size of the egg-carrying baby. Thus, Ramy and her baba had been born. Every Shurian woman had her baba. In olden times, if the baba died, the sister was put to death. Nowadays it meant she would simply never marry, and she would have no status, but her life was respected nonetheless—and at least nah filth like humans were beneath her status. The system caused sisters to take excellent care of each other. This was why Jory and Ramy never thought that, even if she discovered their actions, Ramy's baba would betray them.

  The men of Shurian society respected their babas as mothers, nurturers, witches, cooks, and so forth, but as adults hardly ever went near them. Men never slept with babas—that was the domain of their sisters. Shurians were amazed that humans could give birth to mixed male and female litters—further proof of their low animal natures. Shurians were also disgusted that human sex organs mingled physiologically with excretory organs. All three Shurian genders used the anus, situated like the human anus, for all excretion. The long ago sage had summed it up when he said: “To qif a lizard is to tenderize good meat for tomorrow's dinner. To qif a human is to qif what a lizard qifs."

  * * * *

  Going to Kusi-O was the only way for him to stay alive, Jory could see. No matter how many ways he factored the equation, the outcome was always the same. Die here for sure, or risk dying there, but take a chance of living. Maybe escaping to the stars? Could one hope?

  “Master, let's stop here for food and drink.” Yedy leaned on his stick and pointed to a row of multicolored balls that glowed with fungal light—paper lanterns above a road shop.

  “In my haste, I forgot to bring money,” Jory said. The truth was, he was famished, and he must either die of hunger by the road side, or steal a cloak and start begging.

  “My master has provided,” Yedy said with a wink. “What is your taste? No expensive castle fare here."

  “Any of the usual foods will do. You know what not to buy.” Humans and Shurians could eat certain foods—the white tubers that were staple; the rice that grew in moon pools; many vegetables and pale night fruits; the meat of most quadrupeds on the island, which included dogs, cats, monkeys, and horses (so called by humans based on mythological animals of the supposed ancient Earth that had most likely never existed and was a fiction of groups like the Twelve Moon Society). Humans could die or get sick from certain things the Shurians ate with gusto—small legged fishes with saw beaks that hid under rocks, spiders that pulsated and hummed to draw their victims in; batbirds that flew at night and sucked blood; these were just some of the most deadly poisonous animals tha
t Shurians ate raw. There were many dangerous fungi dishes also.

  “Sit down and rest, Master. I will be back in a moment."

  As the stranger walked with billowing robes toward the stand, Jory gauged the situation carefully. If Yedy planned to turn him in for a reward, he could already have done so. If he did not trust this brigand from the sewers of Anamo, what other way was there? Yedy disappeared like a phantom into the swirling mist. Jory watched his dark figure before the glowing stand as Shurians contemptuously slammed his purchases on the counter and took his coins as if they were dirty. Minutes later, Yedy returned holding a stiffened, folded paper tray with fragrant noodles and cooked white worms and some shreds of steamed meat in papered-rice wrappers. He also carried paper shells of soup, and from his wrist by a holder hung a disposable water jug.

  “Thank you,” Jory said sincerely.

  “I thank you,” Yedy said. “We must get you fixed up so that you will be safe and well. Here, Master, drink."

  Jory drank deeply, noting a pleasant spicy taste, for the roadside inns often added a complementary taste to cover the staleness of water that had sat for a while. Jory, as the warmth and satisfaction began to fill his stomach, felt the lightheadedness going away. For the first time in hours, he wasn't panting breathlessly. He began to notice that Yedy kept looking furtively over his shoulders, and had there been time, he would have asked him why. But Jory's thoughts were on Ramy, with grave concern. She boiled in his stomach, as a Shurian might say.

  The fog drifted by, and figures passed silently leaning on sticks. The scene reminded Jory of a 1000-kjir-old one-liner he'd learned at the court:

  Roadside shop, evening fog—colored lanterns hang-in-no-breeze.

  Yedy rose.

  “What is it?” Jory asked, noticing his own voice sounded funny—distant.

  Yedy ignored him, stepping away as if expecting someone.