Huggable’s daughter stood by her side, but she did not look to the spring water. Her eyes were turned up to watch I’s face. I expected her to ask something, if the not-a-person would kill anyone else, but the girl said nothing.
Nightskin stood nearby, her left hand grasping a large limb, torn from a tree, most of its branches broken off. She held it like one might hold a staff and stood there firmly, as still and as strong as the piece of wood she held.
She had used her stone knife to shape it last night so the healer and she could pull the body ashore. Nightskin had left one branch on so that end of the limb curled round like a hook. She now lifted the limb off the ground, reached out with it, and snagged the body with the curved end.
The body did not come easily. It rolled in one direction, then the other. And soon Nightskin, who had stood with such dignity, now moved her feet this way and that, leaned forward, pulled back, and Huggable’s daughter had started to giggle, when the body unexpectedly rolled over, and its face rose from the water, its eyes open and blank. Huggable’s daughter cried out and ran to hide behind a thickbark tree.
All the questions the girl had asked I on the journey here came back. Why can’t the body be left there? What about the true body? What if it can be breathed in? Maybe it would be better to leave her body there. There was plenty of water to drink elsewhere. A leg was a leg; why couldn’t the healer fix the second animal’s leg without looking at this animal?
But I wanted to see what the body was like.
She wanted to know what a not-a-person was.
And Nightskin, unlike anyone else, understood that.
Huggable’s daughter was now and again peeking from behind the tree when the body hit against the bank and while Nightskin and the healer struggled to get the body onto the dry ground.
Then it was on the grass, and what it wore now became the color of the ground, the colors of mud and grass, and Nightskin stepped back. It was surprising to see Nightskin so scared.
The not-a-person’s mouth and eyes were open. The eyes looked more like those of a fish than those of a person. The skin was wrinkled, and it had become the color of ashes. The stink of death soon chased away all other scents.
Nightskin said, “I will take the daughter back to hut and hearth. I have food to share if you are hungry later.”
“I have food to share for all your help.”
Huggable’s daughter did not argue when Nightskin took her away, leaving I alone with the body. The sounds of the forest surrounded her. The sounds went on as if nothing of importance was happening here in this tiny clearing around the spring.
She removed her medicine knife from its sheath and set it by the body. She took several steps back. She placed the bag on the ground. Her vest followed. On top of that she placed her pubic apron. It was easier to bathe than to make new clothes. From her leather bag she took out one of the pieces of cloth she had traded for, and she tied it around her face. Her lips and nose were covered. She could breathe, but she hoped once again no true body could enter like air through the cloth.
To start was harder than she had imagined. Like the other bodies she had cut open, it belonged to someone she did not know. The woman had not shared food or fire with her. But so much of the past days had been controlled by this woman’s presence, that I felt like she knew this not-a-person—this woman who’d worn a plain, ugly kaross—even though she had only been given the opportunity to say three or four words.
I touched what Ugly Kaross wore first. The skins were smooth to the touch, but every now and then you could feel a thin line that ran along the length of what she wore. I found where the arrow had struck the arm, where the blood must have been spilled. It did not look like the kind of injury that could kill, but a lightfoot could be felled with a lesser shot. At the waist were several pouches. She pulled at the tops, and each pouch came open. One had something black and shiny as a rock; in its center was something flat that looked like water. Was this the object Ugly Kaross had looked at while walking along the paths she didn’t know? Another pouch had an object just like I had found in the second not-a-person’s hand. She placed this one in her carry bag to bury by the first one. On the other side of the body, one pouch held something small and round. I placed it in her carry bag. The last pouch was shaped like a sheath to hold a knife, and it was empty. Had this sheath held the knife that killed Huggable? Had Old Sour Plum and Flatface been right about this woman, this not-a-person, this animal?
It did not take long for I to find out how the skins came open. The eye could hardly see it, but when she tugged at the neck, the whole thing came undone in a nice line from neck to loin. But the body was too stiff to twist her arms out of the skin, and this made I wonder how long had it been since the animal, the woman, had died. How had she ended up here in this spring?
I cut away at the skins. The body, even dead, the skin wrinkled, the muscles of one arm gouged by an arrow, was something to look at. The shape of the legs, of the arms, the look of the muscles and how they showed you the way they were used, all gave a body beauty. You could only stare and admire such beauty when the body was dead.
And this body, this body like none she had ever seen before, had its own kind of sense. It struck I almost with a force, like a strong wind that halted you in your tracks, how similar and how different this body was. I could not help but reach out and touch one of the teats, then press it. It was solid. Not the solidity of muscle, more like the firm softness around the waist and buttocks during the fall, when food seemed to ripen faster than one could eat it. The teat was not just a sack of milk that would shrink away once an infant stopped nursing. These teats remained.
And there were the genitals, which were covered with hair, which was odd. The lips were shaped differently. They were thinner and did not seem to hang from the body. She did not touch anything else.
She could spend all day looking at the body, but there was the leg to consider first. What were the bones like? She went back to the carry bag, took out her stone, and sharpened the knife.
The warrior still slept.
Esoch forced his head up, the pain along the back of his head returning, making everything inside him waver, awakening the reciprocal pain in his leg. He wanted to see the clearing where Slazan N!ai had built her fire. The land was bathed in light. He laid his head back, the hard rock of pain dissipating into a vague mist. The sky above was perfectly blue. It had to be close to midday. If this was the second day, then it was too late.
The slazan locals had to have carried them here, so they couldn’t be too far away from the clearing. The warning siren would be loud enough that it should sound like a distant wail, Once he heard it, he would know that he was stranded here forever.
He waited and heard nothing.
Through the hole in the hut’s roof he watched a large white cloud float overhead, eclipse the sky, then float away, trailing blue behind it. He wondered where Slazan N!ai was, why she’d been gone so long, Could there be some council of slazans deciding their fate? The one who came at him with a knife must surely be dead. Someone would want retribution.
Time passed. The warrior slept. The light shifted.
It had to be past midday. He hadn’t heard a siren. He had one more day to make it back to the shuttle.
It was close to midday when I was finished. The sun shone through the break in the canopy and lit up the grasses where she had worked, where the blood had spread like a darkness around the woman. High up, leaves had started to change colors. I looked at the woman’s face and wondered what thoughts had gone on behind those eyes. It was then she saw the darker marks on the woman’s dark neck. This skin bruised like a person’s skin. I touched fingertips to throat. It was easy to find it, shaped like a tiny tree trunk, where a person could feel herself swallow, I touched along the length of the throat, felt it again, thumb on one side, fingertips on the other. She could trace where it had been crushed.
What I felt was so enormous that she had no words to describe th
e emotion that fell through her like a rock through water. First Clever Fingers. Then Huggable. Then Hugger. And now this not-a-person, this woman who had worn an ugly kaross. Who would get mating close to the not-a-person and kill her?
I bathed in the river. She took handfuls of mud and pebbles to scrape away the blood on her body. She had always thought that a person was worth healing just because she was a person, and now she wondered if that was no longer true.
In the distance she heard Old Sour Plum’s long call, and she found herself paying attention to the up and down of its music, to where in the woods the old man might be. All this blood, and desire still persisted.
She wanted to think of other things, thus she made it that her mind’s eye did not see corpses, but instead saw both a bone and a broken bone. She saw muscles around each bone. She was already building the splint, knowing it wouldn’t be much different from the splint she would have made before she had seen the body. But her mind was thinking music, patterns, of reaching out into the not-a-person, now knowing more about what to listen for in response. She knew what music to try to play. Did the not-a-person know how to listen?
There was a roundtail caught in one of her snares. It wasn’t much meat, but it was some. Another snare had caught a pointed-ears, who was still struggling to escape. I, who had no love for pointed-ears, left it to hang there.
Flatface was waiting for her at I’s hut and hearth. Flatface did not stand by the cooking fire as she did when she called to I and I was still in the hut. This time Flatface stood by the waiting fire.
I did not know how long Flatface had been there. Perhaps she still wanted to share the important words she had spoken of yesterday, or perhaps she wanted to know if I had mated with the man who had built a nest nearby. But now important patterns were playing through I’s head, and she wanted her fingers upon the keys. She wanted to set the splint and play the music.
“I am here,” said Flatface.
“I am here, too. You came with words to share.”
“Yes.”
“I have words, too. The not-a-person is dead.”
Flatface said nothing, and I knew what words she had to share.
“Huggable’s daughter said her mother had hunted the not-a-person. She said that another woman was with her and fired an arrow at the not-a-person.You went with her and shot the arrow.”
“No. The woman you call Huggable shot the arrow.”
“Did you then track down the woman and kill her?”
Flatface looked away no. “Huggable and I had tracked her to the swamp. She fired at the animal after it had gone into the swamp. Then the animal disappeared. We could not see it. Huggable grew fearful. I was scared, too. The animal disappeared, like it hadn’t been there. We returned to the river as quickly as we could.”
“Why?”
“What are you asking why about?”
“Why did you hunt the not-a-person?”
“The animal. We hunted an animal. Nothing had gone right since its boulder fell from the sky. Huggable had been waiting for it to leave the clearing. She thought all her problems would end if the animal was gone. She had asked for my help when she saw the animal leave. The tracks were easy to follow until they came to the river. We headed south. We thought she might go to where there were fewer people. We lost her trail, but we ran into a man who had seen her. She was in the river and trying to come out. He had heard of the animal and was scared, so he pushed her back in. Huggable and I followed the river until we found the tracks where she had emerged. We followed the tracks until we found her near the swamp.”
I heard the words, heard what they meant, but she couldn’t help but turn away. Flatface could speak to her back.
“Healer,” said Flatface, “it was an animal. And we should have tracked it down. It later killed Huggable. If it hadn’t died, it might have killed me.”
I wanted to say something. She wanted to say how the hilt of the knife had changed shape, how things the Stranger had held also changed shape. But she couldn’t say this without making up her own lie. What the woman had worn had a sheath. The sheath was empty. Had she lost her knife? Or was Flatface right? Had Ugly Kaross killed Huggable?
“Healer, you act like one who has no words to share.”
“The not-a-person had done no evil. It walked out of the rock. That is all. One, then another, did the evil. A woman hit Roofer. Roofer hit the woman. Huggable shot an arrow at Roofer, and the arrow killed someone else. Why hunt the animal?”
“A small boulder with legs landed near the river’s mouth. It did many strange things. The boulder with legs was destroyed, and nothing evil happened at the river’s mouth. Here, by the river, the boulder stayed. The animal in it stayed. Look what has happened.”
“So you listened to Nightskin.” I faced Flatface, her eyes wide. “So you want to impress Nightskin. Is that why you hunted an animal who looks more like a person than an animal? Is that why you shot an arrow at her? Do you want Nightskin to share her meat with you? Do you want to share words with her? Do you like the feeling of safety? Destruction didn’t start with the animal. It started when Nightskin arrived.”
“You share words, Healer, but they are full of envy. By the river’s mouth she destroyed the small boulder. Here the larger one falls from the sky. The animal comes out, you play music, you watch, and a person dies. You follow the animal, and you lose its trail You go to the Many Huts and find no wisdom. And another person dies. You will make sure the second animal lives, and another person will die. Yes, you are the healer. No healer would help a wounded pointed-ears, but you will heal the animal in your hut, and you will make the Stranger lose his solitude by lying close to it. You are the healer. You are used to how another listens to your voice. You want each set of ears to hear only your words. Nightskin might have better words. You say what you say for no good reason.”
I could not think of one specific thing Nightskin had done that could be truly called wrong. I could think only of Huggable’s daughter, shivering and hungry by the fire. She could think only of Nightskin’s search for mates, the easy way desire came to someone who was no longer a newly-ripe woman or an almost-a-man who had just discovered his erections. She could think only of the way Nightskin had offered her a dead body. She wanted to tell Flatface about Nightskin’s genitals, but she wanted to say that only to poison Flatface’s feelings. And how could she say anything, when Nightskin had made it possible for I to do something that Flatface would find terribly wrong? It was then that I knew that she was behaving just like a woman from the river’s mouth. I could accept Nightskin only when she had done something so important that I had no choice but to share food and words with her.
Flatface had no further words to share. She spoke no soft words this time. She averted her eyes, then let her feet follow what her eyes saw.
For a while I could do nothing. She stood there and remembered everything she had done. What could she have done differently?
Esoch couldn’t decide which was worse, the sharp pain in his right leg or the dull coating of pain along the back of his head. He had rested too much to sleep, and all the energy in his body asked for movement.
The voices he had heard, the ones that had awakened him, had stopped just a while ago. How solitary a species was it if two of them could go on talking at such length? How much of what he knew about slazans was propaganda? How much was misunderstanding?
The light in the hut diminished; there was the sound of movement. N!ai must be standing in the entrance way. Esoch wanted to raise his head but couldn’t. The warrior said a word.
Esoch could make out the sound gza, which meant medicine, in the sense of something that heals, but the other sounds slipped around him.
“I am here,” N!ai said.
The warrior said more. The sound gza again, then a word for carrying—or was it the word for bag?—followed by the word for back.
N!ai said no. The words came out. She spoke more slowly than the warrior, but the sounds still came ou
t too quickly.
The warrior spoke again, enunciating his words more carefully. Esoch did not know if this was because he was trying to control his anger or if he thought N!ai was too stupid to understand, but the words had to do with gza in a bag he wore on his back. He used the word die.
N!ai said nothing. Esoch wanted to raise his head, see the expression on her face. She spoke then: the words death, destruction‚ the foul version of a word that meant to hug‚ the word death again, then the word no—no medicine, no bag, no more destruction.
The warrior spoke, using the word music; no, not music, some other word built around gza.
The last time N!ai had spoken, there had been a tension in her voice, much like the way her voice and the other voice had sounded when they had talked to each other. This time her voice was quiet. Esoch felt like there was defeat in the voice, but how could he tell? “I will play,” she said, the word play being the word used when one talked about playing music. It was also the kind word for touch‚ as in a mother touching a child.
The warrior used another word for death. It was the compound verb, make death. Did that mean to kill? Had he threatened to kill Slazan N!ai? No, he had used the word for me‚ the object, not the word for /‚ subject. Had he said that N!ai would kill him?
There was more motion outside. Esoch forced his head up this time, and it felt like a block of pain supported his head, holding it up off the ground. But he could make out N!ai in the afternoon sunlight. She held the tin piano in her arms. She set it down tenderly, and she sat behind it. The music sounded. She started with a simple pattern that she kept repeating. Esoch lowered his head back to the ground. He imagined himself with his thumb piano. That tune he could play on his thumb piano; at least he could capture its rhythm. He imagined what keys he would touch, in what order, at what length, but the pattern had become complex, complex enough that he couldn’t find a pattern at all. He had lost the logic of the notes. Then for a moment he had it again, Was he hearing a slazan mother speak? He listened again to the voices he had heard during the language experience—he listened again and again to the mother’s words—and he now could make sense of the last two visitors. Slazan N!ai had spoken this morning with a woman, and last night she had spoken with a girl.
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