Queen of the Warrior Bees by Jean Gill

Author:Jean Gill [Gill, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: jeangill

Chapter Twenty

The ten volunteers were helped onto the dais, stumbling like sleepwalkers as they came to the front to address the Hall. Mielitta was relieved to see Drianne among them. The summons to the beehive could not have been worse-timed but what could she have done if she had been in the Citadel? Her attempt to use a scout bee for observation had been a near-disaster. But it had caused some damage, she thought with satisfaction.

Rinduran stood behind the volunteers and the black patch over his right eye was stark against his pale skin. She’d hoped he was allergic but no such luck. She had an idea how much the sting hurt, though. She could imagine the burning inflammation from bee venom in such a sensitive place, the blindness. Before she’d jerked free, she’d felt the sting splinter into two lancets, each saw edged needle impossible to withdraw. Underneath that black patch was a blind eye marred by a black dart. A fitting memorial to the little scout bee of whom he’d been so contemptuous. Let him think again before sneering at bees.

‘In the name of all that is Perfect,’ Magaram declaimed, ‘the representatives of the people bear witness to the wisdom of the stones.’ It was rare that speech-making began with such portentous formality and Mielitta’s stomach lurched. What had happened to these citizens in only twenty-four hours, that made them look ten years older? Of course, they had seen ghosts, but was the past so painful to confront?

‘Begin,’ Magaram waved his black-clad arm at the woman on the extreme left of the line, her face as pale as her hair. Drianne was at the other end; due to speak last, Mielitta assumed.

‘Thanks be to the stones, we don’t suffer weather!’ The woman’s voice broke on the dreaded word and there was a gasp in the Hall. ‘I was shown skin-burn and drought from the fiery sun, corpses as swollen as the rivers they’d drowned in, dwellings ripped from their foundations by gigantic windstorms, stones made of ice, water falling incessantly from the sky. Our ancestors had nowhere to go that was safe from weather. This horror was their daily life.’

There was a murmur around the Hall and people looked at each in the peaceful atmosphere and gentle greylight, trying to imagine weather.

Mielitta didn’t have to imagine it.

Warm happy. Flutter of breeze wings, the bees suggested, tentative.

Winds breaking trees, she thought. Sky crashing, breaking apart in blinding light like a sting in the eye. Huddling in the hive, while the wind wails and wants blood. It is all weather. You can’t choose only what is gentle. You let all the wildness in or you keep it all out.

She concentrated on the dais again, where the second volunteer was speaking, his voice enhanced by the speechcraft.

‘Our people are many colours, none better or worse than another,’ he said, ‘thanks be to the stones. I saw people ill-treated because of their colour. I saw fear and hatred of difference. Their eyes did not see people but only colours of people.

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