The Fall of the Infinite Empire

Chapter 25

Tytus sat outside while Myra sang Corus to sleep. He had been away from the compound only for a few hours, but the fright of the event had been enough that the children all, even Brun, wanted him in the house with them the entire night following. The following day Tytus had tried to keep as normal as possible. They had walked together as a family to get the food and the water. They had cooked together and did what little cleaning was necessary in the small house they had constructed. He had told the story about his trip to the Rakatan city and the Great Temple. The children had difficulty comprehending the scale of what he had seen, and he had not done a great job of making it clear to them. Myra did not seem surprised by any of it, and Tytus wondered whether Zhed-Hai had taken her into the city before. Tytus wondered a lot about what happened in the weeks Myra was here and he and the children were not.

As was normal, they combined the telling of stories with the singing of songs. The song Myra sang was a traditional one. Tytus' own mother had sung it to him when he was a child. It was a song about a child getting lost in the caves and finding their way home again. His mother had sung it to him as a lullaby, but also because the song had some useful lessons. Myra sang it to Corus, who would never see those caves again, who did not need to be told to memorize the turns she took in the dark, or to crawl if you had never been in a passage before. Myra sang it because it was a song she knew, and because Corus had always liked it. It was a vestige of their life before, like the clothes she was still weaving with them. Clothes made of a fiber far softer and stronger than the fiber harvested from the cave growths. It normally took years to weave a new cloak, just as it took years to find stone that could be shaped into the traditional staff, the gaderrfi. The staff was not traditionally made out of rock of course. That had been an adaptation to the caves. The fibers from the cave moss were not strong enough to form anything like a staff, and there were no trees in the caves, so they turned to stone. He knew that the northerners still did things the traditional ways, though how they could find enough wood was a mystery. But the cloaks, the gaderrfi, the song, they were all ways of holding on to the past. They were all things that Tytus was increasingly confident needed to be left behind them.

But, still, he was happy with the song, because it delayed the conversation he knew had to come, but that he had turned away from anytime it seemed about to happen. With every verse of the song, Tytus could feel his anxiety growing. These moments before the hard truths had to be faced were awful, but they would also be the last moments before everything changed, and so Tytus held on to each one. But eventually, as it had to, the song came to an end, and Myra walked out of the house. To Tytus she seemed calmer and happier than she had been in a long time, maybe since before they had been captured. Was it the song and its tie to home? Or had she thought he would not come back from his excursion with Zhed-Hai? Maybe she would have been happier for you to die. The bitter thought had come unbidden and Tytus pushed it away. It was unworthy for him to think or to be thought of her. When Myra wanted things she went out and did them. She didn't wait for those things to just happen on their own. But maybe she would have been happier. Ever since they had come to this world Tytus had felt he was nothing but in the way. Myra had always been special, lucky. Now, though, she could do things that Tytus could not have imagined back in their caves. Back when they were both happy. She had spoken of casting her mind out and feeling her way through parts of the compound she had never seen. She could understand what the Rakatans were saying, and sometimes what they were thinking when they weren't speaking. And then there was what the other people at the watering hole would whisper about what she had done to Halvor's friend Usment.

Halvor. Even with all that was going on, all that Tytus knew must be done, he could not take his mind off the northerner. He could not take his mind off of what he knew full well had happened, but which he had never heard confirmed. It was so trivial. They were going to be turned into slaves. They were going to be used to conquer for their oppressors. They were going to have their families held hostage to ensure their obedience, and Tytus could not stop thinking about Halvor, and his mocking smile.

It had taken some time for Tytus to reconstruct in his mind what had been said in the council meeting. While it had been going on he had only been able to catch a few words, but they have been enough to make him try to remember and understand the other things the Rakatans had said. He did not understand this ability, which Myra made use of so easily and which he struggled to use at all. He had worried that it would only work in the moment and that once away from those speaking, and once out of the moment in which they spoke, that he would not be able to make any more sense of what they had said than the first time. But that had not been true. Myra had helped him. They had sat together, and she had held his hand. It had been such a sweet feeling. Tytus wondered whether that was the last time they would have one together. He shook his head at how morose and mopey he was being. There was no point thinking that way. What would happen was about to happen, and thinking about how sad he might be wouldn't help him avoid that sadness.

Tytus sat outside the house after the children had all fallen asleep, waiting for Myra, who liked to watch them for a while after they drifted off. Eventually she walked out of their little house and sat down alongside him, and Tytus knew the moment had arrived. And so he began.

"We have to get out of here," he said. He had decided it was best to open the discussion with the threat from the Rakatans.

"Yes," she answered softly.

"We have to do it before they start shipping us off to these slave worlds," he continued.

"We don't know when that will be," Myra reminded him.

"You need to find out. You need to talk to Zhed-Hai," Tytus replied.

"Do you think he will tell me the truth?" Myra asked skeptically.

"Maybe. He has shown interest in you. You seem to be important to his plans. We just need to know more about what those plans are," he said.

"I can ask. I don't know when he will call me to his office again," she explained. She was worried about what would happen in their next meeting. She was worried that he would see in her mind that she had been speaking to the creature below. Could she hide that from Zhed-Hai?

"While we wait for that, we have to start organizing with the others. You said you had worked it out with Halvor the day they took me," Tytus said.

Myra could not miss the emotion in Tytus' voice when he said Halvor's name, and hesitated to answer. It took no special power to see that they were at a crossroads, and that the paths the future might go down included many Myra did not want to walk. A "Yes" was all she managed.

"So? Tell me about it," Tytus said.

"You are going to fight in the circle, but he is going to tell them they can't use the Force. I will be there. If anything gets out of hand I can stop it," Myra responded.

"If you have to do that, then matters will be worse," Tytus replied.

"If we are going to really become part of the group, we have to take the risk." Myra wondered why he seemed to be reconsidering what had been his decision in the first place.

Tytus could tell he was trying to stall, by repeating old points that he already knew weren't any good. He felt disgusted with himself for his cowardice. There was nothing to do but force the choice.

"We have to bring the others in on this. We can't escape on our own. It would be wrong to escape on our own anyway. If we make it out, where do you want to go?" Tytus asked.

"We can't go home," Myra answered.

"I know that. They would find us. And we can't stay on Lehon. We are going to have to go somewhere else. And we probably can't all go together," Tytus said.

"Why not?"

"Put us all together and one slip up dooms everyone. And we don't gain anything from keeping our numbers up. We aren't going to fight our way out of here. We are going to have to sneak out."

Myra could see where this was going. "That makes sense," was all she said.

"And some of the people here are not going to want to go with Halvor. I am sure plenty of people below won't, but some of them will. There are probably northerners below who will want to go with him. But there are people on this level who don't like having him in charge of things, and aren't going to want it to become permanent," Tytus explained.

"He doesn't have to be in charge," Myra replied.

"You would have to kill him to take that from him," Tytus shot back. "Are you willing to do that? And if you do, are you willing to take his place? Do you really want to be in charge of all these people?"

Myra knew that Tytus knew the answer to that question already. When their families had left the larger tribe all those years ago, it had been in part to avoid a conflict like this. They had been marginalized within that tribe, and faced with having to fight to get their status recognized, or leaving to start their own tribe, Myra had consistently wanted to go it alone. Tytus had been unsure. He had seen the value in numbers in that situation, though he also recognized the problems. A single cave system could only support so many people. But Myra had not supported leaving for ecological reasons. She wanted neither to command others nor to be commanded.

After waiting for a time without Myra answering, Tytus continued, "Halvor will have his group, but there will be others. The question is, what group do you want to go with?"

Myra turned to glare at Tytus and asked, "What?"

"I am not going to go with him. I am not going to live under him. He is dangerous and the way he runs things is wrong. I just don't know what you want to do," Tytus answered.

"Why are you asking this? Of course I want to stay with you…"

"Not of course," Tytus interrupted.

"I am going to be with my family! How can you wonder whether that's true?"

"You know full well that you have given me reason to wonder," Tytus answered.

"I didn't know whether I would ever see you again," Myra said quietly.

"It was a few weeks…" Tytus began.

"It was two months! I was alone here for months. With nothing but the word of a killer that I would ever see my family again. Can you imagine what that is like?"

"I had the same number of months thinking I would never see you again," Tytus responded.

"You had the children," Myra said bitterly. "It wasn't that I was lonely. I thought I wasn't going to see the children ever again."

"Well I wasn't exactly thinking you were missing me," Tytus responded equally bitterly. He could tell he was being needlessly cruel. This wasn't going the way he had wanted it. He had wanted to be rational and calm. But knowing he had lost control was not the same thing as getting that control back.

Myra shook her head. "Everyone else is allowed to be weak from time to time. But not me. Never me. It was one mistake. It hasn't happened again. I haven't wanted it to happen again. I didn't even really want it then."

"So the betrayal, that was just a whim?" Tytus asked, knowing as he said it he was being unfair.

"We never promised each other anything!" Myra answered, knowing she was focusing on the wrong thing.

"I didn't think we had to make promises, there was no one else…," Tytus began.

"Exactly!" Myra regret at her outburst came so fast that it seemed like she regretted it before she said it.

Tytus stood up and started walking away. Myra leapt up to follow him.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean that, I…" Myra started to say.

"It is what you have always thought. I was just the only man around. No other families would go with yours, so you were stuck with me. And now you aren't. And that Myra, that is why I am asking what you intend to do. Because now that you have your choice, I know you aren't going to pick me. I just want to know if you are going to pick us, our family. Because maybe now you miss those days when it was just you and Halvor."

"Halvor is nothing!" Myra cried.

Tytus had rarely heard that tone in Myra's voice. It was the tone of desperation and defeat. Had he ever heard it before? Even when the Rakatans had caught them in the caves, she hadn't really sounded like this. She had been afraid, but ready to fight, ready to do what was needed. She doesn't know what to do, Tytus thought to himself. He felt a moment of guilt. What Myra was feeling was no good for anyone, and must be all the worse for her for being unfamiliar. But then, he reminded himself, it was not his fault. He had not violated her trust. But his heart was not in this argument anymore. He hated to see her suffer, and that had won through against his anger. There was no point to it anymore anyway. He had said what he needed to.

"Think about your answer. Let me know when you decide. But we have to start planning this. I don't think we have much time." At that Tytus walked away, not back to the house, but towards nothing. He just needed to walk.

Myra stood where Tytus had left her. She had ruined it. Broken it. Broken her family. It was her job to keep them together and she had failed. And she was going to lose them. That thought, the thought of a life coming her way that did not have her children in it, or took their father from her children, called forth an old feeling. It was the feeling she had when she had descended into the deep caves, looking for water that year that their spring ran out. It wasn't hope. It wasn't fear or anger. It was insistence. The world would not take her children from her. It would not rip her family apart. She would not allow it. The future she pictured, of her standing alone, of her children crying without her there to comfort them, that future was pushed out of her mind. There was no room in the world for that future, for she would leave no room for it. There was no reason to think about it. Tytus was right, they needed to prepare. Prepare to leave. All of them.

"I need your help," she called out with her mind.

"You shall have it," answered the voice from below.