The Honored Dead
? Chapter Sixteen
THE STORY SO FAR: Determined to prove to the young people that they are indeed their ancestors, the Eagles ask Rainera and Dalton to follow them.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Eagle Mother, seeing the fear in Rainera’s and Dalton’s faces. “Trust us a little longer. We would never harm you. Follow us, and you shall see.”
“What choice do we have?” said Rainera.
“Choice? Why, you could leave now,” said the giantess. “The choice is yours. As it has always been and hopefully shall always be.”
“But what about the gun?” said Dalton.
“The gun? Ah. I see. Again we have not been aware enough. It is not a weapon. Though in the wrong hands, it could be. Still, if we were going to use force to make ourselves a home here, don’t you think we would have done that long ago?”
“Yes,” said Rainera after a minute. “I guess so.”
Dalton nodded.
“Then come,” said the giantess. “Please. It is not an order. Only a request.”
The Eagles rose, and Rainera and Dalton, still nervously holding hands, followed them back across the meadow. When the Eagles reached the middle of the field, they stopped. The woman nodded, and the man holding the gunlike device pointed it at the ground. The device began to hum and buzz. Its translucent tip glowed brightly. Suddenly a beam of light shot from it. Then slowly, carefully, almost gently, the giant man began to sweep the light beam back and forth over the solid ground. As he did so, the grass and earth peeled smoothly back to reveal the dark moist soil beneath. Rainera and Dalton gasped. It was as if the man were slicing off the top of the meadow with a knife of light. As he dug further down, big, flat, weathered stones appeared. Some were toppled over, some leaned crazily, and some were almost upright. All in all, the man cleared an area that must have measured several hundred feet across.
Rainera breathed in the odor of freshly turned earth. The big, flat stones looked old. Words seemed to be written on them, words so worn that they were hard to read. “They’re tombstones,” thought Rainera, her mouth going dry. “Old tombstones.” A number – 2125 – was still incised faintly on one. She deciphered several words as well: Our dear departed …
The Eagle man turned the gun off. The buzzing died. The silence was deafening. The Eagles looked at one another somberly.
“Open one,” said the giant woman.
The man turned the gun on again, pointed it at the base of one of the stones, and let the light beam dig deeper.
Rainera stifled a scream. Dalton yelled.
Lying in the pit before them were bones – human bones. Huge human bones.
“Shhh,” said Eagle Mother to Rainera and Dalton. “Be easy.” She turned to the man holding the tool. “That’s enough,” she said.
“Now, Most Honored Emissaries of the People, what do you see?”
“B … bones,” stammered Dalton with a shiver.
“A skeleton,” whispered Rainera. “Yes,” said Eagle Mother, and she wiped her eye. “Bones. From the time before we left Earth. Hardly more than a decade ago for us, but more than a thousand years back for you, this was a graveyard. The city filled the entire plain. So we buried our dead here, at the top of the mountain. Antigravity and other flying devices made it simple to bring our departed ones up here.”
Then she paused and asked, “Are these bones the size of your people, or of ours?”
“Yours,” whispered Dalton and Rainera together.
“Yes,” said the giant woman. “This was the size we all were before the Darkness. Now do you believe me?”
Rainera bit her lip. Then, in a very small voice, she said, “I do. And now I know, too, where the expression Going Up the Mountain comes from, and why it means someone has died.”
“Dalton?” asked the Eagle woman.
“Yes,” he said, staring down into the grave. “I believe you.”
“This, too, is why we make it summer. So we can sit comfortably in the meadow near the graves of our dead. Now, here is more proof,” said the woman.
She lifted a glass vial from a pouch in her gleaming suit. With a pin, she jabbed the tip of her finger and let a few drops of blood drip into the vial. Then she carefully sealed it. “Rainera, you say your father is the doctor?”
Rainera nodded.
“Tell him to do a DNA scan of this with the instrument we gave the previous doctor. He will know then whether we are what we claim to be or not. Blood does not lie. And we will give you one more thing for him to scan as well.”
The Eagle woman spoke quietly to one of the men. Then, with a nod, he climbed into the open grave, gently removed a finger bone from the huge skeleton, climbed back out, and handed the bone to the giant woman, who wrapped it reverently in a piece of cloth.
“Take this, too, Rainera. It will prove our story is true. Your father will soon see that we, you, and the dead lying here are genetically all the same. When he is done scanning, we will replace the finger bone and reseal the grave. Now, stand back while we temporarily seal it.”
“Wait,” said Rainera. She walked into the meadow and returned several minutes later with a bouquet of wildflowers
“A gift for our ancestor,” she said, tossing the bouquet into the grave.
The Eagles nodded, and Eagle Mother motioned to the giant holding the gunlike device.
As the light beam resealed the opened grave, Rainera thought of the proof she held and of what would happen when she presented it to the People. There would probably be turmoil. But whatever happened, she believed the Eagles now. “No one would willingly give such clear proof,” she thought, “unless what they said was true.”
She just hoped that everyone would agree – and that she hadn’t missed anything in the logic of it all.
• NEXT WEEK: The Proof