Chapter Fifteen
The Seventeenth Day
The woman who called herself Nightskin did not move. She stared at the river of sky that ran between the treetops‚ and she watched the clouds float from one side to the other. The daughter tried to make fire from coals and only got coal dust all over her face. She cried. She said she was hungry. Nightskin just looked up and tried to ignore her. There was only the sky and her. The daughter went off to find wood, to find leaves to eat. Had her mother taught her which leaves were safe to eat?
When Nightskin had said the words last night, they had been easy to say. The passion had run through her. The words had been right. The idea had been right. Nightskin remembered a night when she had lived near the dunes. She had been with the woman she called Soft Bottom, who was later called Huggable by one woman and another. The wind had been chilled that night on the dunes. Soft Bottom had come to Nightskin for warmth, and she had called out yes yes yes just like the healer would call out years later. After giving birth to a daughter, Soft Bottom came to the river’s mouth, looking for Nightskin’s warmth. When Soft Bottom gave birth to the second daughter, one woman and another from the river’s mouth made Soft Bottom bury the infant before it could breathe. So Soft Bottom headed south to live by a sunset fruit tree and mate with Rival, who one and another called Hugger and who now was dead.
Nightskin thought of the story her mother had told her, about the one who had killed the woman who ate children. The woman who killed her had to leave hut and hearth, and she died alone in the winter. I did not bury you, her mother had said. Remember, I did not bury you.
Nightskin considered leaving this hut and hearth and finding another place to live before the growing child within her started to show. She would also have Soft Bottom’s daughter, who would help her when the infant inside her was born. She could find a place where no one would have heard of how the second animal and the Stranger had died, and each woman who lived there would share readily with a new woman who could hunt well, and then she would not die like the woman in her mother’s story.
But she did not want to leave the river. She wanted each woman to look to her with the same respect Nightskin had seen in the face of each woman who lived by the river’s mouth after she had destroyed the small boulder with legs. But here she did not want each face to look at her with the kind of respect that hid obvious fear. The woman the healer called Flatface had told Nightskin that she wanted to throw rocks at the boulder. The next animal, the one who would come after the second animal, would see this and know it was not wanted.
Nightskin had asked: what if the next animal came and had nowhere but the boulder to live? Perhaps they should make the insides of the boulder a poor place to live.
Flatface had had no answer. Nightskin could not tell the old woman how she had sat on the hillside, how she had watched the animal go in and come out. She had seen where he had placed his hand to make the entranceway appear. When the animal was gone, Nightskin, too, had placed her hand on the round surface the color of crystal. The boulder had not opened to her. If she had the animal’s hand, if she pressed it to the round surface, then they could go in, then they could destroy whatever was inside the boulder. When the next animal came, it would find another animal’s hand lying on the floor, it would see the destruction, it would be sure to leave, and no animal would ever return here again. If Nightskin could make that happen, then she would not have to leave, and each woman would look to her with respect and awe.
Still, the thought was easier than the action. A giant white cloud stretched from one line of trees to another and didn’t seem to move at all. The ground against her back was hard. To kill from a distance was an act of cowardice—it was unwomanly. To kill bravely meant getting mating close. To get mating close and to kill were equally disgusting.
Death had to come with surprise: the animal alone, emerging from the swamp, stumbling more than walking, head turning this way and that, confused, her lips speaking words, asking for help. Or death had to come with anger: Soft Bottom refusing to mate, preferring the rival almost-a-man who made nothing well, turning her back, walking away. But to think out death, to plan it as a woman plans a hunt, was something even more terrible. She wanted to hate the second animal, but she couldn’t. The second animal had done nothing. She heard her own voice: You want the Stranger gone. You want the not-a-person gone. Do you want me to make them gone? And she heard the urgency in the way the healer had said yes, yes, yes yes yes while she held the healer from behind, feeling herself inside the healer, ready to do anything she asked, to make for some desire, some need for those words to be more than air, which vanished like a breeze that touched you and was gone. She imagined the animal’s chest gouged open, the Stranger’s throat cut where he breathed and bled, and she imagined the healer opening herself to Nightskin, taking her in, enjoying the pleasure of the freedom that only Nightskin could bring.
She knew such a thing would never happen. She knew the healer would despise her. But still she saw the healer open to her, she saw the two dead bodies, and she kept the pleasure she would feel rushing through her, waiting release. She rose from the ground to get what she needed.
Esoch imagined his return. He imagined the circle of huts, a fire in front of each one, the voices back and forth, some women talking to each other from their hearths, several men off making arrows, another group of men standing around a man who was throwing his oracle discs into the air to see where they would fall, several children running around the center of camp, tossing a melon back and forth; and N!ai rising from her parents’ hearth, rising from beside her mother, turning in his direction, her eyes upon him, alone, no other man, no child in her arms, and he lifted hi3 arm to wave, and her arm too made its way skyward, a smile, radiant in the early-morning light, taking her face, making him welcome.
And Esoch opened his eyes because it was too good to be true. Everything had the bright sheen of the early-morning gray, a dusty hue, like something old and forgotten. In the desert reserve he would have seen the sun rise, he would have a secure sense of how long it would be until the sun touched the center of the sky and erased all shadows. If he didn’t make it to the shuttle today, he would never return home.
Esoch sat up. The slazan was still breathing. In this light his skin was sapped of color. Esoch looked at the slazan’s fingers, scraped and dirtied; they still looked like the fingers of someone who did not work with his hands. Perhaps the slazan told the truth; perhaps he was an ethnographer, not a warrior.
The fire between them was nothing but coals, orange and gray, faint heat against the morning chill. Alongside Esoch were what could only be crutches. The craftsmanship was crude, nothing like the nests he had seen, or the bows, or the straight accuracy of the arrows. There was the one long leg, and affixed like the top of the Nostratic letter T was a bar of wood where he could rest his armpits. Lower down were two small stumps, where he could press down with his hands. A hole had been bored through the main leg, and a rounded stick had been jammed through. It took him a while, and a good deal of pain, to figure out how to rise. And then he stood there awkwardly, wearing the upper half of his onesuit, the rest cut off from the waist down.
He eased himself out of the hut. The dimensions of the crutches had not been well calculated: his hands barely reached the grips, and cross pieces jammed into his armpits.
The fire at the center of camp was nothing more than gray heat. The healer was curled up and sleeping soundly, her hair almost as brown as other slazan hair, just a few traces of red. Behind her a leather blanket covered something, the tin piano?
“Healer?”
She didn’t move, and Esoch feared to wake her. She had been up most of the night, and he did not want her exhaustion to foul her mood, to have her speak to him the way she had last night. He needed her cooperation.
The morning was fresh, the sun not yet visible above the trees. Esoch tried to believe there was enough time.
He heard water flowing nearby. He
re was a way to present himself well before the healer, not as some half-naked creature with skin caked with shit. He maneuvered himself toward the sound. Thirty-two agonizing swings forward on the crutches, each landing on his right leg, jarring the left and renewing the pain. But the water was clean, clear. The area where he stood had been cleared of vegetation, and the slope of the land eased into the water.
Movement behind him, a rustling in the leaves. He tried to swivel around, panic making the movement hard and urgent, and he almost fell in the attempt. A tiny black animal scurried off at the sound of him. It wasn’t a slazan. No one was hunting him. Maybe the ethnographer had lied. Maybe no one had ever hunted Pauline.
It took longer than he had imagined to undress the upper half of his body and make his way, on crutches, into the river. There was the constant fear of slipping, of the splint being damaged, of the way his leg had been set undone in such a way to make the pain unmanageable. But the flow of water itself, the chill of it, was tremendous. His stance was precarious. His attempts to splash water onto his face with his right hand were feeble. But the water flowed around his chest, and he could feel the way it flowed about his thighs, around his abdomen. He took a crude, childlike pleasure in giving up his wastes to the river and knowing that all of it, all of it from the past two days, would be carried away with the current. He emerged from the water covered with goose bumps, his whole body shivering, his whole body clean. He would return to the healer with nothing of the past days’ stink.
But the healer was still asleep.
The sky above was a clear blue. The air was cool, and he shivered. It was still early morning. The sun had warmed nothing. He had hours, he told himself, hours. How many hours would he need to convince the healer to help them?
“Healer,” he said. His voice was a whisper. Why such fear? He asked himself. He spoke her name a second time, louder, then a third.
I heard her name and did not recognize the voice. The hard ground was comfortable. The chill air pushed all warmth to the core of her body, and she clung to the warmth. She did not want to uncurl her body, she did not want to get up, but the voice kept calling. She just wanted to sleep. She became aware of the rawness in her hands from shaping the wood, the stickiness along her thighs from last night’s encounter, the stinging along her cheek and her shoulders. It was then that she remembered Nightskin and the terrible promise I had exacted from the other woman.
She opened her eyes and saw Broken Leg standing at a respectful distance. He looked as if his body had collapsed upon the crutches. He was naked, but he showed the proper modesty. He bunched up the remains of his skins—I was amazed how small so much skin could become—and held it over his groin. He now seemed more naked than before, and she became more aware of the penis hidden behind the skins. Only a woman feeling desire, thought I, would think about the penis of a not-a-person.
“Sit down,” she said. “I have food to share.”
Broken Leg stood there, as if thinking. The dark lines, scars, that marked off one arm had also been cut across his chest.
I realized that he did not know how to show his respect by politely refusing. Or perhaps he did not understand. She said, “I have food to share. Sit down.”
She watched him struggle to find a way to sit. A breeze caused leaves to whisper; she heard something behind her move. She turned; saw nothing. Nightskin would soon be here. Nightskin would not turn away. If she warned Broken Leg, then he might kill Nightskin, making I the true killer.
The bunched-up skins fell to the ground, and he was naked again, His healthy leg was bent, and he was holding the injured one still above the ground. He lowered his bottom closer and closer until he could not help but fall back, his bottom slapping hard against the ground. The muscles on his face tightened; she was surprised how easy it was to read the pain upon a not-a-person’s face. He grabbed the skins and spread them over his lap.
She gathered what food was left in the hut and hearth, set aside a portion for the Stranger, and returned to the fire. She placed half of the food down in front of her. She leaned forward with the rest. Broken Leg cupped his hands and held them out before her. It was an odd gesture. She laid the food out in front of him. His hands were at his sides, as if he had never held them out, the sudden movement much like the jerky movements of a child learning to be respectful, the incorrect gestures or words quickly and awkwardly changed.
Broken Leg ate slowly. I did not touch her food. She felt no hunger at all. In her mind’s eye she saw what she had not truly seen—Nightskin’s belly near I’s bottom, the penis rising from Nightskin’s vulva, the hard skin easing into her. She closed her eyes against her vision, but her mind refused to close itself, and she still saw Nightskin press against her, she still heard her own voice say yes yes yes: yes, she desired her solitude.
She placed the rest of her portion in front of Broken Leg.
Broken Leg looked at the food. “It is yours,” he said.
“Eat.”
He placed half of the portion in front of her before eating the rest. While he ate, she found her stone knife. She sat before the fire and pulled the leather cover off the gzaet. “I will make you something to cover yourself.”
He looked to her.
“Clothes,” she said. “I will make you clothes.” She slid fingers over her own pubic apron.
“Make it I can,” he said.
She considered this. She had wanted to make one stay-away gift after another to insure that he would stay away once healed, but she also wanted to see how much craft was in his fingers and hands. It wasn’t until she had pulled the knife from its sheath that she stopped. They flock like birds in the sky. Perhaps a not-a-person would not consider it evil to kill someone while mating close. She handed him the knife anyway. Next she handed him the leather. He spread it out across his legs, touched it carefully, drew invisible lines with his fingers. He unsheathed the knife and examined that. He did not even look at her.
Esoch began to cut the leather with the knife and found it difficult. He vaguely remembered the shape of a breechclout‚ the way a knife eased through a duiker’s tanned hide, but here, so far away, the memory did not come to his hands. The healer had moved away from him and had started to play the battered tin piano. For a while all he could do was stare. He had never been so close to it. The metal was dented, stained with years and years of use since this woman’s ancestors had settled here, but the keys were spaced so evenly, the music so clear and precise. It no longer jangled, no longer sounded alien; it was as if the music’s logic made sense to him, even though he liked little of what she played. He wondered about the source of the piano’s technology, if it used some kind of ultrasonics to achieve its medicinal effect. And while he mused, he returned to work, hacking away at the leather, blunting further this stone knife so he could wear something and not feel so naked, so aware of his penis, his balls, his vulnerability.
He had to lie down and struggle to get the breechclout under his butt, to tie it firmly so it wouldn’t slide down his hips. It was then he was overtaken by a terrible urge to pee.
The healer pointed the direction to go. He swung on the crutches—twelve agonizing swings—to where he had heard the healer do her business. The stink wasn’t as bad as he had feared; it was as if the insects took care of the worse of it, buzzing as they did around the remains of shit.
It was only two swings back and he recognized a different kind of disorder among the midden’s own disorder. There was a place where the earth did not have its own undisturbed flatness, its own random tangle of new growth. Is this where the healer had buried the slazan’s pack?
I played on while she watched Broken Leg return. The breechclout was well made, though oddly cut. She should have made one for him. He struggled to sit close to the fire. He crossed his arms and held himself as if he were cold. The day had taken on some warmth, but the not-a-person still shivered. Perhaps they flocked together for warmth.
When would Nightskin come?
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��I have words to share,” said I.
Broken Leg turned his face in her direction but respectfully eyed the ground.
I found that she could not tell him about Nightskin, about last night’s promises. She said, “You come from very far.”
“Yes.”
“Does the Stranger come from very far?”
“I don’t understand.”
“The one in the hut. The person. Does he come from the same place as you?”
Broken Leg said nothing for so long that I was certain he didn’t understand. Then he said, “Yes. I and he come from same the place.”
“How many days does it take to walk there?”
His answer came out as a jumble of words, and only after he finished did she realize that he hadn’t answered the question. He had said something about healing.
“Say it again.”
“The one in the hut.” The next words were blurred, something about healing, about the ground. She realized he had found where she had buried the Stranger’s bag. “Die he will. Needs he the healing.”
“I will play the gzaet for him soon,” said I, even though she already knew her music would do no good.
Broken Leg raised his eyes to meet hers. He spoke slowly. “Where live I and the one in the hut is played healing. Have I a tiny gzaet.” He pushed down one finger on each hand as if playing music. “So tiny it one finger and one finger needs. But make it only sounds. Only sounds.” He stopped. Somehow, on his face, she could see that he struggled with words in the same way he had struggled to rise and to sit. “Only sounds. No healing. Tiny gzaet I play to bring together people.” He took his hands and hugged himself. “Hands use I to hug. Tiny gzaet sounds use I to touch. But sounds, no healing. Use we other healing. In bag.”
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