by Jo Clayton
In the days that followed she experimented with the cherar infusion and the slices of tung akar, at first alternating them, eating the tung one day, drinking the infusion the next day, then changing the number of the slices and the amount of the liquid until she finally found a balance where the Pandai were easy around her, but she could still hear the music in the drum.
The rains came and brought wild storms with them, but the bulk of the mountain protected Chiouti from the worst of the winds, and the only problem the Pandai had was bringing in enough food to supplement the dried fish that everyone but Lylunda kept in storage jars. They passed her around like a party favor; each night an invitation to share the evening meal came from another family, a call to join in the gossip and play games with the-children while the adults were absorbed in one of the intricate games they were addicted to, small distorted figures pushed about on a painted board at the whims of thin, intricately carved sticks cast from a tall cup. Klekool, they called it.
Seruchel had tried to teach her the game, but Lylunda found it impossible; she told herself it was probably something you had to be in the Bond to understand.
The craving for the tung akar came back and she couldn’t get up the mountain to fetch more cherar leaves-rain, rain, more rain, mud slides, trees, and thornvines blowing dangerously about, broken fronds, limbs, wheeling on winds that came howling round the mountain. She berated herself for not thinking of something so simple as uprooting one of the plants and transplanting it into a pot of some kind, one she could keep inside the house, but food was around every day and she hadn’t given a thought to what day after day of slashing rain might mean. When 1 can get up there, she thought, the moment I can get up there, I’m bringing a plant down. Maybe it’ll die on me, maybe I can’t keep it growing enough to make the new leaves I need, but I have to try.
She fought to limit what she grubbed from the tuber patch, but in the intervals when the rain lessened to a heavy mist, the smell of the tung blossoms crawled through the windows and tickled at her and she’d find herself out there, mattock in hand, digging tubers.
The drum sat in a corner of the kitchen collecting cobwebs and dust.
In the second month of the rains, she played her first game of klekool and almost understood the nuances of the moves. She was the bangg at the end, bangg being a bright colored fish of extraordinary stupidity and ugliness. The only reason the species survived is that no one-beast, fish, bird or Pandai-who ate one bangg ever ate a second. The taste of bangg was awful beyond the capacity of human description. The family teased her and laughed at her, and she plodded home through the rain feeling vaguely pleased with herself.
* * *
By the end of that month the heaviest of the downpour was finished. There was still a thundershower almost every day sometimes between noon and midafternoon,.but it was possible to go up the mountain again to gather fresh food and cut trees for fuel, bringing the chunks to the drying sheds where the fibers had been before.
Lylunda went to gather waxberries for candles; she had only one left of those she’d made and she needed to begin the long process of giving back all the care that had been taken of her during the rains. As she gathered the berries, she saw a patch of cherar nestling deep beneath the brambles. She felt a sudden strong revulsion, as if she’d seen a viper; in spite of that, she stared and stared at the dark succulent leaves with the brilliant red veins. She wanted to vomit, she was terrified, but she remembered why she knew the cherar and she understood that all she’d gained before the rains she’d lost. She’d have to start all over again, finding a new balance, fighting nausea and the runs again, fighting the pull of the tung akar.
The next morning she overslept, woke with the sun streaming through the cracks in the shutter onto her face. She fought the craving, ate a single slice of tung akar and took the basket of berries into the village so she could use the single big boiling pot the village had to boil them and skim the wax, then pour it into molds with the wicks she’d gotten for her help with the fibers. Working was hard and hot, she had to stir the berries constantly so they wouldn’t stick to the bottom and burn, but the work helped her forget the clamoring of her body as it demanded more tung akar.
The big green berries had a sharp, pleasant scent, and the wax she skimmed was a pale green with a muted version of that scent. Burning the candles perfumed the house, and they also kept away the small bloodsucking insects that were hatching now from every pool where rainwater was sheltered enough to turn stagnant.
By the end of the day she had two dozen candles. She left six for the use of the kettle, ladled the basket full of the pulp and took it uphill to spread it on her tung patch; it was useful mulch, gave nutrients to the soil, and it kept saw flies away from the vines.
All that night she sat at her-kitchen table, beating on it with a pair of spoons. She got no feeling from that sound, there was no rhythm beating in her blood, but it kept her awake. When dawn came, she took the bowl and pestle, left the house, and went up the mountainside.
When she pushed the waxberry vines aside, she could only find seven cherar leaves without the red veins. She plucked them carefully, mashed them, then carried them back down the mountain, walking slowly, warily. The tung was everywhere, it knew what she was doing, vines reached out to trip her, a flitterbat dived at her, nearly knocked the bowl from her hand, a frond from one of the trees cracked loose and almost crashed down on top of her But she threaded her way through these attacks, or what she thought of as attacks, her mind and body in a dark knot of suspicion and rage.
Though the infusion was weaker, the racking her body went through this time was considerably worse.
The next morning when she woke, the food basket was empty and no one, rattled the shell chain by the door. She was cut off again, isolated. When she went out to get fresh tung for her breakfast dose, the smell of the flowers nauseated her so much she could barely endure the time it took to dig up a small tuber. The smell and taste of the tuber when she got it washed off and sliced was so bad, she had to chop it into small bits with her knife because she couldn’t force herself to chew it. She got it down and spent the next ten minutes hunched over in the chair trying not to vomit.
When her stomach settled a little, she managed to swallow a few berries left over from yesterday’s breakfast; then she took the drum and went down to the beach to sit on the lava and talk out her problem, herself talking to herself because until she was stabilized again, no one from the village would see her and they wouldn’t understand anyway what she was fussing about.
She settled with the drum and began tapping out a rhythm, relaxing into a full-body smile as she felt the beat and responded to it. A tune came to her and she whistled a snatch of it and it was like cool water across her ears and along her nerves. Ignoring the short burst of rain that beat on her back and head, she drummed until her hands grew tired, then leaned on the drum and stared out across the water.
“The rains come twice a year they say. And even if I believed that lying letter, even if he does send for me, it’ll be four years. Four years! I can’t go through this again and again and again, each time worse than the last. Four years? No way. I don’t know. Maybe I should just give up. No! It’d be like killing myself. Maybe I should do that and cut out the middle man. Dead is dead. No problems left. No. I won’t give up, I’m not going to let him win. Or let the stinking Kliu off me, because that’s what it’d be, them pulling my strings. I’ve got to get away from this world somehow. Only one way to do that. Find a free trader and use his splitcom and call someone. Qatifa maybe. All right. That’s it. Now the only problem is how.”
She brooded over that for several hours, then trudged up the beach and over to her house. She left the drum there, went to gather food for her supper and breakfast. She’d be on her own for the next several days, until she’d gotten the mix right and the Pandai would notice her again.
10
Lylunda drew the pole knife across the torech vine, stepped back to l
et the sticky white sap drip from the cut, then finished slicing through the vine and used the hook set into the back of the blade to pull the vine away from the tree trunk, twisting it to break loose the tendrils that had knotted themselves into the fibrous bark. She grimaced as the black flies that she’d dislodged with the vine swarmed about her face and shoulders. She’d rubbed herself with juice from wax-berry leaves, but the effect was starting to wear off and the flies were landing and biting.
The vine rustled away as Seruchel and Beroos tugged it free of the tangle. The two girls would strip off the tendrils and the leaies and wind the length into a coil for Emiud to pick up when he came by and carry over to the retting ponds.
Before she started work on the next section of vine, Lylunda crossed to the water jug and poured herself a cup of water, then stood sipping at it and watching as the girls worked with their tiny crescent-shaped knives, nip nip scrape, tug another section in front of them. She pushed the hair back from her face. “The Berotong Pandai, Seru. Should we expect them soon?”
“Mm hm. They usually come around when the time of the big storms is past. You’ve got those pearls you found, you should be thinking about trading for a pot Me…” She giggled and poked her elbow into Beroos’ arm. “I’m going for stuff I need for my gonna-be family, you know, needles and a knife and maybe some beads just for me. Mam says it’s time to start thinking about gonna bes. She says probably next year I’m a woman and the year after that, maybe there’s a chebech feast and I go move in with…” She giggled again, blushed a little. “What you thinking about trading for, Berry?”
“I think those red dyes like Aleko got last year. I like red and it’s so hard to get a good bright color.”
“Red. Chebech color.” Seruchel dropped her knives and clapped her hands. “Who you gonna go with, Berry? Tommas? I saw you’n him the other night.”
“Silly Serry, ’tisn’t just for chebech mezus; your own Mam puts red in her batiks. Anyway nothing’s settled yet.”
Lylunda looked at the smiling pink face of the girl, shook her head, and took up the pole knife again. She couldn’t be more than fourteen. Not that I’ve anything to brag about where I come from. What do you call a teenage femme in the Izar? Mother. That’s what. Which brings up another thought. I’ve got my implants, but who knows what the tung is doing to those? Anyone around here want to wager that the Lung akar doesn’t like antifertility drugs?
She separated out a second vine of the proper diameter, cut one end free as high as she could reach, and hooked the vine away from the tree. Pulling with the hook and prying with the blade, she unraveled it as far as she could from the rope of smaller vines that looped from tree to tree, then cut that section loose.
When she finished, she looked back. Seruchel and Beroos were working over the vines again, the knives flying as they cleaned the stem, but they’d looped it around so their heads were close together and they were whispering and giggling together. A pang of longing and loneliness surprised her. She wanted that intimacy again. But not here. Never here. Back to dangerous hauls and high times in the Pits, belly dancing with Qatifa or another of the partners she’d found in the past five years. She wanted that so terribly that for a moment her eyes blurred. Then she shook off the malaise and went back to work cutting the Aries and trying to plan her escape from all this.
The Bemtong. the canoe Pandai… they traded with the Jilitera… maybe with other ships… Ordonai said only Jilitera came here, but maybe that was hope more than truth… maybe… this place is spooky enough to scare off some of the free traders I know… but not all of them… if there’s a reason to be here, there’ll be others… maybe the Canoe Pandai don’t tell the Jilitera everything… maybe? Odds are good on that if they’re anything like the Chioutis… if I can convince them to take me along… how? I have to talk with Outocha… she’s the only one who’s tried to help.. maybe… She sighed and moved on to the next rope of vines.
She worked at cutting vines until her arms were trembling and her joints started aching. This was something else that worried her. With the tung and the cherar warring inside her, she had no stamina at all. When I get away… when when when… let it be when not if… when I get back where 1 belong, I’ll spend some of the crystal money on a work-over at the nearest meatfarm. Jaink! 1 won’t go like my mother. 1 won’t!
She was sitting on the lava outcropping singing a sad song to the whispery tump to of the drum when she heard what at first sounded like an echo-but an echo louder than the source. She sat up and listened, her hands on the drumhead.
TOOM TOOM TOOM came across the water, blqwn on the brisk wind that swept the whitecaps off the waves. She set her drum aside and jumped to her feet, stood staring in the direction of the sound, holding her breath in shock and desire as a horn of some kind wove a simple tune about the drumbeats.
A raft came gliding around the end of the island. No, not a raft, a trimaran with three crescent-shaped bows rising dark and elegant from the water, a fenced floor built across the middle of the three hulls, a large triangular sail on a central mast and a smaller jib cleated to a stay from the tip of the central bow to the top of that mast. A Pandai in a red mezu stood on the floor in front of one of the structures built on it, beating on a broad drum half as tall as he was. Beside him a smaller figure wrapped in bright gold stood blowing into a huge shell.
As the beronta came closer, the size became more evident. It was huge. No wonder Seruchel said the Berotong Pandai spent most of their lives on their canoe. Their beronta.
She stood shading her eyes and watched it come sliding along the coast, moving at a speed that surprised her. When it was even with the outcropping, it was close enough for her to see children hanging perilously over the railing round the deck, waving at her. She waved back, then snatched up her drum and went running for her house.
By the time she reached the village, half a dozen small boats were tied up at the jetty, and the open space was swarming with Berotongs and Choutis. Standing in a ring of laughing preening girls, a teen boy blushed and smiled and was gradually recovering his poise enough to laugh and answer the girl’s teases with quips of his own that made them giggle and wiggle into the closest thing Lylunda had seen to a dance since she’d been here. She smiled and eased through the crowd until she was standing next to Outocha. “Who’s the boy?”
“He’s from Emtoched, that’s an island about two days west of here. All the girls on Emtoched are either too young or related to him, so he’s traveling with the Berotong till he can find a girl he likes and a village to settle into.”
“And we have several extra girls here. Do girls travel, too?”
“Sometimes. If she’s eighteen or more and no one’s come by that she likes.”
“I see. So they do take outsiders on those berontas?”
Outocha didn’t look at her, but as usual she cut through obliquity with the razor of her mind. “That might be a good idea, Luna. Perhaps the Berotong life would suit you better than ours. You are welcome here, but we do want you to be happy.”
Lylunda wandered about, listening to the gossip from the other islands, watching the rituals of trade, watching the boy maneuver around local boys his age, another sort of courting ritual. It couldn’t be easy, making himself welcome in a new place-even with the Bond to help.
She walked out to the end of the jetty and stood looking at the beronta, wondering what it’d be like to live so cramped together for so long.
“Her name’s Remeydang.”
Soaring House, she thought. Nice. And a bit disconcerting. She turned her head, smiled at the Berotong boy. “Pretty name,” she said. “How far do you go?”
“Round the world and round again.” He had sun spots like Seruchel, looked a little like her when he grinned. “Me; I’ve only been halfway so far.” His hand was closed in a loose fist and he was shaking it gently, two shells or stones or something similar clicking together inside the fist, making a small music. “Name’s Tudil.”
�
�Mine’s Luna, Tudil. Smarada diam.”
“Diam,” the boy said, then looked startled when he saw her catch and echo the beat, snapping her fingers and swaying her body; after a moment’s thought, his face lit up. “You’re the star woman.”
“Yes.” The Bond, she thought and groaned silently. “I miss mousika.”
“Huh?”
“That.”
“Oh. Chelideyr.”
“I don’t know that word.”
“Well, you wouldn’t. The land Pandai don’t have it. It’s only us Berotongs who can know what it is and that’s because it’s part of the sea dance.”
“1 tried making a drum. It’s not very good.”
“Would you like to see ours?”
“Oh, yes. I’d love that. Would your folks mind?”
“Why should they? It’s not like you’re going to steal the beronta.” He grinned again, slipped his clickers into a pouch on his belt, then swung over the side of the jetty into one of the boats tied there. “So come on down.”
“Mengar, toss the ladder. I’ve brought a visitor.”
One of the oldest Pandai that Lylunda had seen peered over the rail at them, his mouth stretched in a broad grin showing mostly toothless gums. “Star mama, hah? Treat her gentle, boy.”
Lylunda blinked, startled.
Tudil chuckled. “Omel oma, Luna, don’t be worried by him. Ol’ Mengar sniffs all the news in the world from the air that runs past that nose of his.” He caught the rope ladder as it unrolled down the side of the outer hull. “Can you climb if I hold this steady?”
“I can climb better if I do the following,” she said.
He giggled, shook his head. “Omel oma, watch close, then.” He went up the ladder as if he had fingers instead of toes, shook his narrow behind at her, then was over the rail with an easy kick of his feet.