Читаем The Children of the Sky полностью

The Children came up here sometimes, but in the warmth of day. The youngest didn’t understand about cemeteries. The oldest didn’t want to understand, but they didn’t want to forget their friends, either.

Ravna mostly came after dark, and when she felt the darkest. By that measure, tonight was most definitely the time for a visit. She walked along the main path, her shoes crunching the frost-stiffened moss. Night in the arctic autumn, even here near the channel currents, ranged from cold to deathly frigid. Tonight was relatively mellow. The clouds had come in around sunset, stacking deeper and deeper over the land, trapping the day’s warmth. The hillside breeze had dropped to nothing more than a faint, chill breath. Oobii said there would be rain a little later, but for now the sky was dark and dry and there was clear air down to the waters of the inner channel. Here and there, she could see lights on the north end of Hidden Island. Very close by, there were occasional glows of lavender. Glowbugs. The tiny insects put on a big show only two or three nights a year, and usually earlier in the autumn than this. As she walked on, there were more of the lavender glints. The occasional glimmer was not enough to light her way … but they were welcome.

Rows of graves lay on either side of the cemetery’s main path. Each place was marked by a headstone carved with a name and a star. The design was modeled after something she’d found in Oobii’s classical human archive. The little four-pointed stars were an early religious symbol, perhaps the most common in human histories, though she was not clear on the details. There were 151 graves in these four rows, almost all the inhabitants of the cemetery. One hundred and fifty-one Children, from less than a year old to sixteen, all murdered on the same summertime night, burned to death as they lay in coldsleep. The heather south of town was called Murder Meadows, but the actual killing field lay beneath the center of the New Castle, the central chamber where the Children’s Lander still sat upon charred moss.

Ravna had known none of those Children. They had died before she even knew they existed. Her pace slowed. There could have been more dead Children here; many of the surviving coldsleep coffins had suffered fire damage. Reviving Timor had taught her what she could safely do. Only a few of the original kids still slept in their caskets under the castle, along with the four miscarriages from the new generation, and two accidents; someday she would wake them all. Someday she would fix Timor, too.

Strange as it might seem, there were also a few Tines buried in the cemetery. Originally, that had been just twelve packs who had fully died in the Battle on Starship Hill. In recent years, Johanna’s Fragmentarium for Old Members had begun to change that—much to the chagrin of redjacket factions.

There was a thirteenth pack, buried just before Pham’s place: six little markers, each with the glyph of its one member, then a bigger one that marked the group: Ja-que-ram-a-phan and then the pack’s taken name, Scriber. Scriber was another whom Ravna had never met, but she knew his story from both Pilgrim and Johanna: Scriber, the gallant, foolish inventor who had persuaded Pilgrim to befriend Johanna, the pack that Johanna had reviled, and who had been murdered for his efforts. Ravna knew that Jo had her own midnight trips up here, too.

Just ten years, and so many people to remember. Sjana and Arne Olsndot. Skroderider Blueshell. Amdi was one of the few packs who came up here regularly—always with Jefri, of course.

Ravna had reached the huge glacial boulder that marked the end of the path. Pham’s stone made a shoulder in the hill, protecting the children’s graves from the north winds. But tonight, the air was almost still. The glowbugs didn’t need to hide in the heather. In fact, they were thickest in the air around Pham’s grave, so many that their pulsing was in sync. Every few seconds, there was a silent surge of lavender that washed around her like a welcoming tide. She had seen them in such numbers only once before. That had also been around Pham’s grave. It must be the flowers that she had planted here, now grown high. Ravna and the Children had put flowers round their classmates’ graves, but they had never taken quite so well as here. That was strange, considering Pham’s northern exposure.

Ravna turned off the end of the path, walking around to a special spot at the side of the rock. Funny thing about religion. At the Top of the Beyond, religion was the scary, practical matter of creating and dealing with gods. Down here in the Slow Zone, where humankind had been born … Down Here, religion was a naturally grown hodgepodge, mostly the slave of local evolutionary biology.

Still, it’s amusing how quickly our weakness makes us embrace these old ways.

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