He looked to the warrior, whose head turned to face him. There was a different kind of look in his eyes. Esoch thought he saw despair, but the set of the eyes and mouth made it look so much like contempt. The warrior spoke in Nostratic. “She has the medicine. She won’t give it to me. I will die.”
“I am unable to move. My leg is broken.”
The warrior looked to the roof. “She’s primitive. She thinks music heals. I will die.”
She thinks the music heals. So that is why she brought it down to the shuttle and played it. It wasn’t a superstitious exorcism. If you try not to touch with fingers, you touch instead with sound. He thought of the trance dances, of the men who had learned to control n/um‚ how the boiling energy would rise through their bodies, and how they would pull out the arrows of sickness shot at their bodies by the spirits of the dead or by God; nothing at all like the medical ward where machines had read his body and recommended his diet, nothing at all like the planetside hospital where they had laid out Ghazwan’s body, surrounded by machines with all their readouts and nonmelodic beeps.
The warrior did not believe at all in the music, so it would do nothing for him. Esoch knew nothing of the music, and so what could it do? Music, like trance dancing, couldn’t knit together a broken bone. He wasn’t going anywhere soon. Tomorrow, at midday, the alarm would sound.
I had heard them speak, and though she had tried to ignore that fact while she played for the Stranger, she found the thought of it overtaking her later while she made preparations to heal the not-a-person. She used a stone knife to shape the wood for the splint and thought about how softly they had spoken, how she had been unable to hear their words. She cut strips of leather to tie the splint and wondered why the Stranger would speak more with the not-a-person than with her. She touched fingers to the keys of her gzaet, never pressing down, never playing, just trying out the patterns she might play once the bone was set, but she kept losing the trail of her thought. The not-a-person could do more than force out a word or two. He could speak, and that was truly upsetting.
When she returned to the hut, two splints in one hand, leather thongs in the other, she found the Stranger sleeping fitfully, his body rocking back and forth, much like an infant struggling with a bad dream. If there was no improvement by tomorrow, she would have to dig up the bag.
The not-a-person’s eyes were open. He was watching her watch the Stranger. He averted his eyes when she knelt by him and laid wood and leather by his injured leg. He continued watching her. She let her eyes meet his. “Do you have words to share?”
He looked up at the roof. “No,” he said.
I left the hut, and she stayed outside for the longest time. She did not understand how one word could affect her so strongly. But it was late. Night would soon wean the day of its light. Yesterday’s tension had returned to her genitals, and she wanted to leave and return before the woods were hungry with darkness.
She stopped in the opening. His eyes were open. She told herself to act like a woman, and she stepped forward. How would he react when she touched him? The Stranger had said these people liked to touch. She knelt down by his leg. She spoke slowly. “I have words to share.”
He said something. She heard his words over again in her head before she knew he had said, “I am listening.”
“Your leg is broken. Do you understand? Your leg is broken.”
He said nothing for a moment, then: “My leg is broken.”
“I am going to put the bone together properly and then tie it in place with a splint.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I am going to put the two parts of the bone back together. I am going to tie the bone in place with a splint.” She raised the strips of leather and the pieces of wood so he could see them.
There was another pause, then: “You are going to tie the leg so it is together back.”
“You don’t have to say what I say.”
“Good.”
“It will hurt.”
“I know.”
“It won’t hurt as much later.”
“I know.”
“May I touch you?”
He said nothing.
This worried I. Maybe the Stranger was wrong. Maybe they didn’t like to touch. Or maybe when they spoke like a person spoke, they came to like solitude the way a person did. She said again, “May I touch you?”
Another pause.
I worried more. Should she ask a third time?
“Yes,” he said.
Esoch raised his head to watch. The dull pain felt like increased pressure. His head felt light. Maybe he shouldn’t watch. Her arms stretched out. Her skin looked softer than he remembered. The red of her hair was fading into a dull brown. Her fingers took hold of the blanket and made several folds underneath, then set it again down on his thighs. Her fingers reached out again, and he readied himself for the pain.
He watched her touch his other leg, tentatively, at first, as if she expected some electric jolt, though of course she wouldn’t know what electricity was. He watched her face and tried to read the look of concentration or the look of anxiety. And maybe he had seen enough in the language experience to understand that her expression contained a mixture of both.
He had to lie back down again. He could only feel the way her hands clasped his healthy calf, how they pressed around it, how fingers probed the contour of muscle and felt for the way muscle met bone. He thought: this is the first human leg she has touched. This is how she learns how to set it. But tomorrow he would not be able to walk back to the shuttle and disarm the self-destruct.
But the rushing thoughts seems less and less important as her fingers and hands touched his leg. He tried to count to himself how many days since he had swum ashore from the coffin, how many days it had been since another’s skin touched his. He remembered Hanan tracing the scar along his leg. The sensation nourished something deep within his body, and he let himself give away to the feeling.
She said something. He made out the words touch, other‚ and leg. He readied himself.
The pain was excruciating.
When she stopped, he felt the concise pressure of the splint and heard her rise, he found he was relieved. He lay there, faint, and he found that the solitude had made his body perverse: he yearned against all logic for her to reset the splint; he was willing to accept that pain, if only her fingers would touch his skin again.
I fed the cooking fire, and she began to prepare the food. While she skinned the roundtail‚ placed the meat on the coals, and pounded leaves into a swallow paste, she thought about the not-a-person and the easy way he had accepted her touch. She liked the freedom she’d had to truly feel the shape of his leg, to feel how that compared with the dead skin, the dead muscle of the leg she had cut open. She respected his strength. He had ground his teeth and tensed his muscles, but he had said nothing when she had tied the splint. He only let out a long, terrible sigh once she had left the hut.
But, still, what was she to think of one who accepted touch so easily, of one who had no solitude worthy of respect? Why did she feel differently toward this creature than she did toward Hugger? Perhaps it was because she had never seen this one touch another, but once or twice she had already imagined the woman alive and mating with him. She was surprised how the vision stayed in her mind, like the memory of something she had seen. When she thought of the mating of two nightskins or two lightfoot, it was like thinking about making an arrow or removing bones from a fish, but when she thought of this not-a-person mating with another, it aroused feelings she wanted to forget.
She brought the food to each one, setting a portion first in front of the sleeping Stranger, setting the other portion beside the wakeful not-a-person. He watched her crouch down, he watched her place the food in front of him, he watched her rise, and she was sure he watched her leave. She was stepping over his legs to get to the opening when he spoke: “I have no thing to share.”
She stopped. She did not know if she want
ed to face him. “Can you make the boulder move?”
“I don’t understand.”
“The rock the first”—she searched for a word that would not be offensive—“one of you came in. The rock you lived in after she left. Can you make it move?”
“The one who left. Do know you where she is?”
What would he think if he knew? “No. She left, and no one has seen her.”
He made some kind of sound she didn’t understand. It was a low sound, mournful. She turned to look at him. He had turned his eyes toward the wall, as if he could see something there. “What I call you?” he said.
At first she did not know how to answer the question. She said, “One or another call me Healer.”
“Healer?” The word sounded truly strange coming from his lips.
“Yes.”
“One or another call me…” It was two sounds, but it was not a word she knew.
“It makes no sense.”
“Yes. No sense. Call me No Sense.”
“No. It is not something to be called.”
He said nothing.
She wanted to ask about the rock again.
He stared at the wall, then said, “Healer. I need to urinate. I don’t want to urinate myself again.”
She had chosen the wood from which she would shape crutches, but they were still not made. She looked at him, considered what it meant to lie there in his own urine. She told herself that it would be like touching a child, like handling an animal. She walked up to him and held out her arms. His hands grasped hers. They were strong, firm hands. The blanket fell away, and his injured leg leaned against the ground, and he cried out. Then she had his arm around her shoulder, and she stood straight up, his body rising with her, the foot of his injured leg rising from the ground. He breathed heavily. She was sure he wanted to scream out in pain. She led him outside the hut, and in the sudden overflow of light she could look down and make out how soiled his skin was. She hated having this body so close to hers, his skin rubbing against her skin, his weight pulling across her shoulder. She was tempted to let go of his hand. They walked away from the hut to the closest tree.
She should have averted her eyes, but her curiosity was too strong. She remembered Flatface and the way she had watched when each of her children was old enough to walk away from the hut and wet the ground on their own; she remembered how Flatface watched, as if this were something new to be seen. Now she watched him take his penis in his hand, and she watched the liquid fly out in an arc to leave its marking upon the tree.
While going through the slow, painful process of leading him back, she thought of having him lie down in the open. It would be easier to play the music for him then, but she recalled the woman floating in the cold spring waters, the gouge in her arm, the bruises upon her throat. No one would enter her hut. No one would attack him there.
Once she had laid him upon the fouled ground and had covered him with the blanket, he said again, “I have no thing to share.”
“The rock,” she said. “The rock you live in. It came from the sky. Can you make it go back?”
He looked at her, as if trying to understand what she wanted.
“Can you make the rock go away?”
“Yes.”
“Will you?”
“Yes.”
She did not know what to say.
He said, “There. Carry me. Will leave. Now.”
“When you can walk.”
“Now. Better. Carry me.”
She looked away no. “Later. When you can walk. And then the rock will be gone.”
“Yes.”
His voice was a falling off, but he had said it himself. The rock would leave. All the problems would be gone. She touched the food she had laid out for him. “I share this food with you. I have more to share if you are still hungry. I will play music for you, and when you can walk, I will take you to the rock.”
She left him to his solitude.
Standing in the clearing, she felt like she could still feel his arm around her shoulders, his hip against her hip. The whole thing suddenly repulsed her. She wanted to be away from here, away from this not-a-person, away from the Stranger. She wanted to be pregnant, she wanted to have a daughter, and she wanted a daughter so that she would never have to heal again. But if she could heal the not-a-person, if she could heal No Sense, then the rock would be gone.
The healer started to play.
Esoch had propped himself up on his elbow, in spite of the pain that coated the back of his head, and tried to eat the mashed food. It was easy to swallow, he knew he needed it, but the nausea was almost unbearable. He lay back down and listened to the music. He recognized a few of the patterns. They had become familiar enough that he considered them songs.
Was she playing music for him?
And what if it could heal him? He had to make it to the shuttle by midday tomorrow, and she had said, if he understood her properly, that she would not take him until he could walk on his own.
But how could music, on its own, heal?
He thought of his ruined thumb piano and how little it had accomplished. Perhaps her tin piano would help a sickened slazan who expected it to work, but the music wouldn’t touch him. Where he had grown, the healing happened when women clapped and sang well, when men danced until the n/um boiled in them.
The healer had started to play a new song, and the rhythm of it reminded him of the rhythm of the dances, of women clapping and singing. He raised his hands and clapped, trying to remember the rhythm of the claps, the songs the women sang when the men started to dance.
I started by first playing the top two rows of keys. She played songs her mother had sung, songs Flatface had sung to her when her mother had gone away to heal someone. She started slowly, each pattern clear; then she played faster, letting notes flow into the others like rushing water. She slowed again, and she started to play the patterns she had thought out after cutting apart the woman’s dead body. She wanted to hear how they sounded, to hear how her fingers played them. They did not sound as good in the air as they had in her head, so she changed them. She played the new patterns, made more changes, then played until they came to her easily, until she had changed them enough that they sounded akin to the patterns as she had first imagined them.
He remembered: when his sister Kwoba married /ontah‚ when she menstruated for the first time, when he killed his first antelope, when there was tension in the air, when many were gathered near the waterhole, when two groups had come together and something unnameable was in the air, or when his sister Kwoba was terribly sick not long after their father had died, a group of women have built some fire and have begun to clap and to sing and soon they sit in a circle around the fire, and the men have put the rattles on their feet, and they have started to dance through the circle, around the fire, their feet hitting ground, digging into sand, everything easy at first, stops and starts, bantering and teasing, then the clapping and singing growing more energetic under the night sky, darkness closing in, the fire lighting faces and hands, the clapping, the feet, the rattles, the singing, all, enthusiasm growing.
Now that she was happy with the patterns, she lowered her left hand to the lower keys and pressed down lightly, feeling for the resonance. She looked at the not-a-person, at Broken Leg, and she concentrated the music on him. The resonance felt wrong. She changed several of the patterns she played, felt for the resonance, and it was worse. She returned to a simple song, something to keep her fingers busy, while in her mind she tried to listen to him, to hear his voice, and once she heard it—the way he had said, “No sense. Call me No Sense”—she played out the rhythm of it, and the resonance was not so harsh.
But now she heard what she had been concentrating too hard to hear in the first place. He was clapping. She returned her fingers to the top keys, played a simple pattern, and listened to the way his palms came together, a teppity-teppity-tep‚ that wove about through the air like a flathead wove its way through the brush. She p
layed until she had matched the rhythm, then tried to find a melody for it. It was an ugly melody, but when she played it on the lower keys, the resonance was smoother. She hesitated, unsure how to play such ugly sounds, yet continued because music and healing were not two different things.
He thought of circles when he remembered the dance. First there is the fire, built in a circle of sand, around which every other circle completes itself. The circle of women surrounds the fire. The men dance through this circle and around the women, their feet imprinting another circle. There is the circle of children and young men and women who are watching. There is the circle of small fires where those who are tired and who do not want to clap or dance can sit and watch. Around this is the darkness of night, of the bush, and waiting there are the //gangwasi‚ the spirits of the recently dead, who are attracted by the music, who long for the kin they have left behind, who want to make them sick to have them come with them so they will not be as lonely in the land of the dead. Around that is the horizon, a distant dark circle separating earth and sky, and encircling them are the stars.
And the dance has gone on, from the fading of light to the clarity of the stars. Male feet pound the ground in rhythm, male bodies are coated with sweat, their eyes like smooth crystal, and the men shout out, gu tsiu‚ gu tsiu—pick it up, pick it up, and the women’s voices and handclaps have a new energy, a louder rhythm. An older man, his father’s uncle, falls. Several other men move over to him, help him sit up, rub sweat into his body.
Soon he stands, his body trembling, and he walks over to Karu‚ and his hands touch her shoulders. He trembles, he gurgles, he shouts. He pulls the arrows of sickness from her, and he moves on to N/ahka‚ who is sitting next to Karu. They clap and talk to each other while his uncle lays hands on N/ahka‚ then on the son in her lap. He moves from person to person, /gau’s n/um has boiled and he has entered !kia‚ his body trembling, his eyes glassy. He places a hand on ≠oma’s back, another on his chest, /gau calls out. ≠oma’s uncle is now standing pulling sickness from N!ai. Next to N!ai is his mother, next to her is Kwoba, whose eyes have a different glassy look. She has burned with fever for several days, and people have started to say she might die.
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