by Mary Mackey
"Do tell." Ama frowned. "This gets stranger and stranger." She reached out and lifted the man's eyelid. A sightless blue eye stared up at them.
"What do you think?" Sabalah bent closer. "Is he blind or isn't he?" Ama shrugged. "I have no idea. I've never seen anything like it. Maybe he's an albino. I suppose we won't know until he wakes up, if he ever does."
Sabalah nodded absently, preoccupied with her own thoughts. She wanted the stranger to live, of course, otherwise she wouldn't have been doing her best to warm him up, but she was worried about more than keeping him alive. The sight of him was bringing up disturbing feelings — half memories she couldn't quite put her finger on. She felt as if she'd seen tall men with yellow hair and beards before, but she couldn't remember where. And blue eyes — they too seemed familiar. Something told her that when he woke he was going to be able to see as well as anyone, but how did she know that? Where had the knowledge come from, and why did it make her so uncomfortable?
She suddenly had a horrible thought. Maybe he was one of the beastmen who were coming from the east to steal Marrah. But that didn't make sense. The Goddess Batal had given her a good look at the beastmen. It had been a terrible vision, the most terrible of her entire life, and even after fourteen years she hadn't forgotten a moment of it. The beastmen had traveled as fast as the wind, destroying everything in their path. They were monsters with six legs and two heads — one human and one a giant animal with wild eyes, foaming lips, and a short bristling mane. This man certainly didn't have six legs or two heads. He was just a strange-looking person who'd nearly drowned.
"What I don't understand is where he got all those scars."
"What?" Sabalah blinked and came back to the task at hand. "I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention."
"Those scars," Ama repeated. "I was wondering what he'd done to get so many at his age, especially that one — which makes him look as if something tried to rip his guts out." She pointed to the ugly red one that ran all the way across the upper part of the man's stomach. There were more scars on his chest and shoulders, not quite as bad, old and white with time, but still puckered at the edges as if the cuts had been deep. "Now the only thing I can think of that could scar a man like that would be a she bear defending her cubs, but if those scars had been made by a bear there would be several tracks where she raked him with her claws, not one long line like this one."
Sabalah looked at the scars, and suddenly a feeling of foreboding came over her. "I think he's been cut with a knife," she said.
Ama nodded. "My thoughts exactly. You remember that strange long knife he was carrying in his scabbard, the one with the sharp flint edges? Its blade would make just that kind of scar on a man. Now that's possible to imagine; I heard once of a woman who lived in a village near Hoza who slashed her lover with a hunting knife. They were fighting over something incredibly stupid — whether there was enough venison in the stew, I think — and she picked the knife up in a rage and went for him. He lived, but she was exiled. Her people cut off her left earlobe to show she was no longer human and cast her out of the village, and no one would take her in. And once, a very long time ago when I was a girl, a man actually killed another man on purpose when they were hunting together — put an arrow straight through his neck and claimed he thought he was a deer. Later he confessed to the dead man's clan mother, and she had him buried alive, which is the most horrible thing that has ever happened in my lifetime. But look at the scars on this stranger." Ama pointed again to the angry red lines.
"I can imagine someone attacking him once, but it looks as if he's been wounded dozens of times. These scars aren't all the same age. What kind of world does he come from where people use knives against each other this way? Do you know? You've come farther and seen more different kinds of people than anyone I've ever known. Does this sort of violence make any sense to you?"
Sabalah shook her head. "No, I've never heard of people who use knives against each other." Even as she spoke the words, she sensed they weren't true. She was lying to Ama. But how could she be lying? She had traveled all the way from Shara to Xori and never heard of people attacking each other with knives. There had been a few villages, far up the River of Smoke, where feuds had existed for generations, and people spat when they saw their enemies and sometimes even hit each other, but knives were another matter. You could kill someone with a knife. Murder was sacrilege against the Goddess Earth Herself. No sane person would even think of it.
The two of them worked in silence for a while, taking off the stranger's leather leggings, drying him, and wrapping him in sheepskins. Each was lost in her own thoughts.
"And another thing," Ama said, when they had the last of the well-wrapped hot stones tucked in at his feet and he seemed to be resting as comfortably as possible. "Those designs on his shoulder bother me. In the first place, they're cut into his skin, which seems like a terrible thing to do to a person; in the second place, they aren't like any marks I've ever seen before."
She pulled back the corner of the blanket, exposing one of the stranger's shoulders.
"These aren't the signs of the Goddess. There aren't any triangles, or circles of fertility, or snakes, or any of the other designs you'd expect to find on him if he were a priest. Look at this. What is it, a sun? And this one. Like Marrah said, it appears to be a lightning bolt, but why would he want to put a lightning bolt on his shoulder? And this strange animal. What do you make of it? It isn't a deer, that's certain, but what is it? Whatever it is, it must be important to him, because he had another one made out of copper hanging from his necklace. I suppose he might come from very, very far away, from somewhere so distant they don't know how to paint proper symbols on a man without hurting him, but frankly I don't like it. The whole thing makes my skin crawl."
"Mine too." Sabalah was getting more uncomfortable by the minute. Ama was right, there was something disturbing about the blue designs. That animal especially — the one with all the hair on the back of its neck — it wasn't ugly, but just the sight of it repelled her. Once again, she had the odd feeling she'd seen it before.
Ama replaced the blanket, tucking it in tightly around the man's shoulders. "If he lives," she announced, "I'm taking him to Hoza. We have to go there anyway to celebrate the raising of the new Goddess Stone; our young men are supposed to share the honor of lifting Her into place." She pressed her lips together and gave Sabalah a worried look. "I think the arrival of this stranger on our beach is something too important for the village council to deal with. Of course it's possible that he'll wake up and explain himself, but I suspect, when he opens his mouth, we aren't going to understand a word he says."
That night the young men of Xori and the surrounding villages danced for Marrah. They had braided heron feathers into their hair, put on leather loincloths, oiled their bodies, and painted gray herons on their backs so when they moved they seemed to be taking flight. Stamping their feet and moving their hips suggestively to the rhythm of the drums, they imitated the courtship of birds, singing to Marrah and asking her to honor them, for the man a woman took to bed on her coming-of-age night was considered blessed by the Goddess Earth Herself. The dance went on for a long time, growing faster and wilder until the ground itself seemed to be vibrating to the rhythm of the drums; the men stamped and leapt and whirled until they became a haze of half-naked bodies turning in an endless coil. It was a complicated dance, one that demanded endurance and skill, but there was a kind of innocence to it too, and a wild tenderness. "I will use my strength to give you pleasure," the young men sang. "Come, Marrah, stretch out your hands to me; take me to your bed."
At the end, a few of the strongest dancers made spectacular leaps over the fire, turning in midair and coming down as lightly and gracefully as wildcats. Then, as quickly as they had started, the drums fell silent, and the young men stood waiting for Marrah to make her choice.
The full moon drifted slowly across the sky. Beneath it, the forest came alive. Shadows of limbs and trunks and lea
ves reached out to embrace one another; frogs called to their mates; a tawny owl, hunting through the darkness, sent out a trembling eo-oo-oo, and small animals scurried to safety. Beyond the forest, the sea stirred against the shore, leaving a long thin curl of foam, white as a necklace of shells.
Beneath an oak tree, pillowed on a bank of soft moss, two lovers lay under a warm cloak lined with rabbit fur. Around them the sounds of other lovers drifted up toward the moon like thin fingers of mist: whispers and laughter, the rustle of leaves, a soft moan of pleasure. The festival was over. Marrah was a woman now, enjoying a woman's happiness.
Bere drew Marrah to him and kissed her lips for a long time, so long that their breath was like a soft rush of wings swelling in the darkness. Naked and curled into each other, they thought of nothing but pleasure. Their lovemaking was so slow that the moon moved and the shadows shifted before they did anything more. Finally Marrah sighed and touched her breasts and, understanding, Bere moved slowly from her lips to her nipples, kissing them until they were hard and sweet, like cherries in his mouth. He was in love with her, and he wanted to kiss and possess her whole body, but he would only move as she indicated. Nothing would be done that she did not invite. This was the way of the Shore People, and their men were trained to it from an early age.
More time passed. At last Marrah touched Bere's cheek and he moved away from her breasts. Now it was his turn. Starting with his lips, Marrah kissed her way down his body until he was twisting in a fever of excitement. For a long time she held him there, on the edge of pleasure, making it last. Then, just when he thought he could bear it no longer, she drifted slowly back up his body, finishing with his lips. Again and again, this sequence was repeated. Sometimes, it was Bere who did the long, slow body kiss, burying his head between Marrah's legs until she arched her back and bit her lips; sometimes it was Marrah who led Bere to the place where time ceased to exist. Finally they came, each in turn, clutching each other tightly, digging their nails into each other's shoulders. They cried out and laughed and cried out again as the final eddies of pleasure swept them up.
Afterward, they lay in each other's arms, relaxed and happy, talking about nothing in particular. Finally they made various arrangements: they turned, rearranged arms that were about to go to sleep, tucked in the cloak to keep out the cold, exchanged one more kiss, and fell asleep, their lips barely touching.
Marrah's coming-of-age night was over. It had been an important event, but — as was customary — mostly symbolic. Tonight, for the first time, she and Bere had been two adults making love instead of two children playing in the bushes, but they had done nothing they hadn't done together many times before. The Shore People did not think of the loss of virginity as a single traumatic event; in fact, they did not even have a word for "virgin." You could call a young woman ezhhaur, which meant "she-who-has-not-borne-a-child," or even bihotz, which meant "happy-by-herself' (that is to say, without a partner), but there was no word for a woman who had not yet had full intercourse. The Shore People delighted in sex and were experts at exploring ingenious ways to please each other, but it was not uncommon for a woman to pass the years between thirteen and sixteen enjoying herself in ways that would not produce children. Indeed, the Shore People were such a mixture of abandoned licentiousness and abstinence that it was hard to say if they were one of the most permissive people on earth or one of the most restrained.
Bere slept well, without regrets. He had expected that this night would be no different than any other, for although Marrah could choose to try to start a child now that she was a woman, he had hardly expected her to do so. True, he had allowed himself to hope that she might tap the inside of his thigh to signal that she was willing to have him enter her — what man wouldn't hope such a thing? — but the tap had never come, and he was not really disappointed. She had often told him she wanted to wait until she was at least sixteen to become a mother, and despite the herbs she had drunk to prevent conception, there was no surer way than the one she had chosen, so he felt neither surprised nor rejected. He was honored that she had picked him to spend her coming-of-age night with. So many young men had danced for her, yet when the dance was over, she had risen to her feet and held out her hands to him.
Marrah turned in her sleep. Without waking, Bere curled around her body and cupped her bare breast in the palm of his hand. The two lovers slept without moving again until the light turned purple and the first white-winged gulls circled in the cool salt air above the Goddess Stone.
In Ama's longhouse, the stranger turned restlessly under the sheepskin blankets. He was dreaming: not the calm dreams of Marrah and Here but confused, fevered dreams. Sometimes he dreamed he was in the dugout again, yelling to the traders that they were sailing too close to the rocks; in this dream the small sail would grow larger and larger until it became a tremendous brown wave. The wave would descend on them, roaring like an animal, and he would be thrown out of the boat, which would break into pieces. He would fight to keep his head above water, but the currents would suck him down and his lungs would fill and he would taste the fear of death. But mostly there was nothing in his dreams but fever and more fever and a burning feeling in his chest, and faces that came and went, women's faces mostly: his mother, long dead, and the brown faces of the savage women, and once the face of Jallate, Vlahan's first wife, who had died years ago when he was only a boy.
His lips moved but no sounds came out. He tried to pull in air, but it was liquid fire. Violent coughs shook his body. His lungs were filling with liquid; he was strangling. All night he coughed and burned and dreamed feverish dreams of fighting the sea.
"I think we may lose him," Sabalah told Marrah when she returned to the longhouse after her night with Bere. "His skin is as hot as a fire rock, and the worst of it is, he hasn't made a sound except that terrible coughing. He opens his eyes but we can't tell if he's conscious. As you said, he may be blind. But blind or not, he's not doing well."
Marrah, who had almost forgotten about the stranger, felt guilty that she had spent the night lying happily in Bere's arms while he suffered. "Poor old man," she murmured.
Sabalah remembered that of course Marrah didn't know. "Not old," she corrected, "young. About seventeen, Ama thinks, maybe younger. That's why he's lasted this long."
Marrah was surprised. She was about to ask how such a young man came to have white hair, when the stranger began to cough again: wet, racking sounds as if he were trying to spit up his lungs. "Come help me." Sabalah rushed over to the pallet by the fire where he lay shaking and drenched in sweat. "We can't stand here talking; we have to try to stop that cough and bring his fever down, or the only place we'll be taking him is back to the Mother."
For the next five days the three of them nursed the stranger, trying to pull him back from the edge of death. It was hard, exhausting work, made all the harder by the fact that they seemed to be failing, but they went on even when it seemed foolish to hope. Often people stopped by to sit outside Ama's longhouse for a while, chanting and praying as was customary when someone was very ill inside, and the news quickly spread that it would soon be time to build a new Tower of Silence in the forest.
But the women never gave up. First they tried to sweat the fever out of the sick man by wrapping him in a deerskin dipped in hot water, putting extra stones at his feet, bundling him in furs, and forcing oyster shells full of steaming willow-bark tea between his lips. When that didn't work, when he only began to rave and push them away, they tried alternating hot and cold. First they would bundle him in furs until he broke out in a sweat, and then, pulling off the blankets, they would douse him in cold well water. Sometimes this would appear to work; the fever would break, and he would stop shaking and rest for a few hours. But always, as the day darkened toward nightfall, his fever would rise with the moon, and by early morning he would be coughing and shaking again, speaking wildly in a strange language no one recognized. The only good thing that came out of all this was that they discovered that he was n
ot blind. In his lucid moments, it was clear that he not only could see them but recognized that they were trying to help him, and sometimes he would submit to the shock of the cold water with such a desperate, hopeful look that they turned away to hide their own tears of frustration.
On the afternoon of the fourth day, Sabalah called Marrah outside the longhouse. "There's a plant that grows in boggy places. It has a small, tough root that's covered with little red hairs. The flowers are very small too, white and only open in the sunshine, so you may not see them, but you won't have any trouble spotting the leaves." She knelt, picked up a stick, and began to draw an outline of the plant in the dirt. "The leaves lie flat, like this, and they have more red hairs on them. The hairs curve inward, like this, and each one has a drop of liquid on it that looks like a drop of dew." She stood up and brushed off her hands. "Bring back as many as you can find — remembering, of course, to leave at least two so more will grow." She looked back at the door of the longhouse and shook her head. "Ama and I are going to make a special drink for him. Some of the ingredients are dangerous and I hate to use them, but I don't think we have any choice."
Marrah hurried into the forest and spent most of what remained of the day searching unsuccessfully for the plant. Although Sabalah had trained her to be a priestess and a healer from the day she could walk, she had always taken this training casually. It had been her birthright, something she was expected to do, and she had often been restless and impatient when her mother stopped to spin out an endless tale of the curative powers of some drab little flower or fistful of moss. Now, with a human life at stake, she wished she'd listened more closely. Frustrated, she went from one boggy place to another, finding only mud, pondweed, and water lilies. Finally, when it was almost too dark to see, she spotted three flat-leaved, scraggly plants growing halfheartedly in the mud.