I didn’t understand at first. Why try to send Mum-mama away? Why did she refuse to go? Why couldn’t anyone find the baby?
And, the most important question to me: How, how, could the baby always sneak up on me?
I didn’t care so much about the rest. Until I realized what it meant to me.
Pappy was an amazing organizer. All those families, moving underground, all at the same time? Him. Getting food and supplies down before they were critical? Him. Making sure everything was shared? Also him. Training the fighters, since we could no longer rely on being able to sense people?
Him.
They felt like someone had cut off their eyes and ears. I felt like that too sometimes, but I still "heard" people. But I felt like I was drowning. I would wake sometimes, breathing hard, but my lungs were working fine. I think I was still searching for my brother.
Mum-mama’s reassurances that we would find him eventually didn’t help much. We didn’t find the Queen, either. But the water down here was ice cold, and once we could safely pump it out again, we’d find the rest of the missing. When we weren’t fighting guards. When we weren’t fighting for our lives.
Priorities. Secrets.
Lies.
Pappy didn’t mean to lie to me. He apologized years later, when I began to realize the shape of the world. He was doing so many things at once, that things like telling me everything I needed to know dropped to the bottom like a bright diamond in a sluice bucket.
Like that he used to be chief of the King’s Guard.
He failed, he said. So he resigned.
But now he felt responsible for the Queen’s death, too.
No, there was no body, but we all knew. She would not have allowed the guards to take over like they did, if she were still alive.
No, Pappy didn’t recognize any of them. They were all new. He showed me the differences in their faces, and ours, when he had a handy fresh corpse to demonstrate safely. Invaders.
Why?
Mum-mama taught me the value of diamonds.
She showed me pricing, carat weight, clarity. She wasn’t a good faceter, but if we ever got out of this mess, she was going to introduce me to those who could, to show me what all went into making diamonds sparkle like the sun.
But these invaders couldn’t find the diamonds either, not like we could. They could find the mine entrances, but with fighters actually fighting, using their eyes and ears, and using what Pappy taught them about skirmishing, guard bodies were piling up in empty houses in town.
How many more to come?
Pappy didn’t know. So he sent the “non-coms” away. That’s what he called the kids, and the ones that couldn’t fight. Oh, we had girls as well as boys that fought. Girls could swing hammers just as well as the boys, and were usually more accurate. Pappy trained them just the same. Didn’t teach me, though, said I was too young to fight. Slag if I’ve ever heard it, but fine, be that way.
I didn’t need to learn. Because I cheated.
I used the diamonds.
All of them in the upper caverns were so tiny you could barely see them. But they still didn’t like being trapped in the rock, wanted out, and sang a harmony to the melody I could hear from the bigger ones down below. Far, far below. Under water, with my brother and the Queen. And others, but they were there. Together.
Mum-mama said I was too obsessed with my brother. I would say I wanted him home, and I wanted him out from the cold. I could kind of feel them, but they weren't in pain. More like they were asleep and I couldn't wake then. Mum-mama would then mutter about drugging my food, and I would shut up.
All the things they were worried about, but they didn’t talk to me about it.
So there was this boy sniffing around. Even then, I really wasn’t into boys, I was into men. Well, later. Underground, that’s not the place or time for me to learn about that stuff. I was there to feel the diamonds, learn their song, follow it down the tunnels to the gems, break them out and pull them to the light. I wasn’t there so some boy can get all tingly.
Pappy tried to warn him off, but that didn’t work. All the more fool, he. The boy, I mean, not Pappy. If he didn’t need every fighter, Pappy would have shipped him off so fast with the others that his little twiggy should have shriveled up from the speed of travel.
Instead, he kept sneaking after me.
Was he that daft? Pappy says maybe, but there are also boys who try to sniff around things that look innocent. Mum and Mum-mama told me all about that stuff so I’d be prepared, when my body ripened. And I wouldn’t be surprised. And Pappy had already taught me how to get away from those who didn’t like that I said No, and I’d already had to kick a few of the thick-headed neighbors where it hurt in the past, so I wasn’t afraid.
But I was annoyed, and that was worse.
So I took to sneaking off, ducking down a tunnel, and grabbing a rock. Tunnels are great things for rocks, that’s for sure. I thought he’d gotten the hint when he’d come stumbling along, with a tiny lamp, and I’d throw that rock so hard it would leave chips spraying from the tunnel wall aside of his temple. He wasted so much lamp oil that Pappy restricted his supply.
I thought he had gotten the message.
I had gotten lazy. I’d found a nearby passage that hummed well, and I could lay there and listened to the song, and learn about facets and cleavage planes and applied heat-
So imagine my surprise when someone hopped on me, pinned my arms, and started kissing me when I didn’t ask for any of that.
Imagine how pissed the diamonds were, to have their song interrupted by some squishy unwanted activity.
The only nice part, is that I could feel something deep inside my mind finally understand one of the lessons. I suddenly knew what to do, so I opened my mind, and pushed.
And those little diamonds spat themselves out of the wall, aimed at the idiot’s head.
I didn’t like him screaming in my face, but I did like being able to sit up and move. He was stumbling around, holding his head, and howling. I hurried off and went to find Pappy, or Mum-mama. Pappy was usually busy around now, doing rebellion stuff.
Mum-mama was worse.
Pappy had kept it from her too, what was sniffing around, because he knew what she would do.
And she did. She’s amazing, what she can do with a knife.
Between her and the diamonds, the sniffer was blind and would never have children. The only kindness she gave him was that he felt no pain, but she made it exquisitely clear that it would change if he didn’t stay far, far away from me. He didn’t scream, but he did whimper a lot, tied down like he was. And with Mum-mama hissing at him, “How does it feel, not being able to move? Fight back? She said No, unless your brain’s defective, you know what that means!”
When Pappy came back, he wasn’t as kind. The sniffer got a thrashing, then retraining. Hopefully he learned to be a good listener, because that was his new job. Bound, gagged so he couldn’t give us away, but with a rope he could pull if there was noise outside. He wasn’t allowed to eat till after he’d listened for eight solid hours, and I don’t even want to know what they did about him having to eliminate at some point.
No, I never got an apology, so no, I don’t feel bad for him at all.
I was glad Mum-mama was there through all of that. She could fight, a little, but she stayed for the baby. That made no sense to me, why not send both off together? The baby would fuss if they tried to leave, and we couldn’t have noise tracking us. When they stayed, baby was happy as a nesting hen. But I caught Mum-mama and Pappy whispering fiercely one night, and staring at the baby, and whispering again. Then there were leashes, that Mum-mama knitted. When those didn’t work, Pappy found some strips of leather somewhere.
They didn’t tell me.
The baby had been trying to follow me.
Into the mines.
And was pretty good at it. Mum-mama had to grow more sets of eyes to keep the little one safe.
They finally explained to me when I came back for lunch one day and found her trussed up in the crib, crying soundlessly. We had a talk while I cuddled her to sleep. She could speak, a little, she wasn’t dumb. I mean, she wasn’t stupid, I knew she could talk. She just didn’t. Talk, I mean. I could feel her, just like I could feel where everyone was. If I had been paying attention, the sniffer wouldn’t have snuck up on me. So we experimented, a little – I would sneak into the mine a small piece, and hide, and we’d watch as the baby toddled right after me, heading straight for me no matter where I hid. She loved this game. Pappy was amazed, again and again.
Most times, I could sense her coming. But if she was concentrating hard, it was like she wasn’t there. I could see her coming, but not “hear” her coming. So strange, for someone who was used to “hearing” all the people in town around me from birth, just like everyone else.
Pappy muttered something about “foreign blood” and “strange influences.” I was curious, so Mum-mama and I put our heads together.
We started having picnics in the mines.
I wanted to see what the baby would do. Was she following me, or her own call?
It was so strange. The diamonds didn’t call to her. It wasn’t like she was an interloper, it was like she wasn’t real to them. Like if she were a dog or horse or something. And she didn’t go for the rocks that had a lot of diamonds in them. She picked up the ones that had little or no diamond material in them, just- well, rocks. She would pat them, and babble over them like they were pets, pile them up, try to take naps on them.
I would hand her diamond-flecked rocks, and she’d shrug and put them to the side. Again, not like they were bad or icky, but not interesting. She preferred “her” rocks, and tried to take some back to our tunnel niche. Mum-mama tried to stop her, but I asked to let her do it, and sure enough, she was sleeping better after stuffing them all under her bed.
Pappy had some chats with a few of the men who were artists before they were fighters, and he came back shaking his head. “Diamante-cradle,” he said. “The mother rock. It’s a form of peridot.”
Hunh.
Pappy suddenly busied himself with all sorts of important letters that had to be sent. I watched the baby play with rocks like they were blocks.
What if peridot called to her, like diamonds called to us?
She sure sang to them, like the diamonds sang to me.
Did we sing her the wrong songs?
Pappy was grinning about a month later, after a lot of fighting. Suddenly, we were winning, slowly but surely. The steady stream of guards replacing all the fallen ones stopped, and no more came. The baby grew, added words to her growing mind-library. “No ‘parkle, like cold-flash” became her favorite phrase. I had no idea what that meant, and neither did the diamonds. But if diamonds could roll their eyes, the ones in our part of the tunnel would.
And then Pappy came in, with bunches of letters in his hands. The responses to his letters, edges still ripped from hasty opening. “Reinforcements are coming,” he told me, and his face looked so relieved. “And answers. I hope.
“And then, we assault the castle, and take back what’s ours for Your Majesty.”
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