Tepper,Sheri - Six Moon Dance

by Six Moon Dance(Lit)

  At sixteen, the boys entered upon the most demanding part of their education. Four hours of physical training each day were coupled with five hours of classroom work, and to this was now added the actual practice of amatory arts. The women who came to House Genevois to assist in this education were masked during the sessions, no one knew who they were except Madame, and Madame did not even hint at who they might be. Some were young and shapely, and some were not, but the quality of work expected from a Consort was to be the same, regardless. In fact, the highest prices would be paid for those from whom the pleasures given a thirty-year-old wife and a sixty-year-old grandmama were indistinguishable. What these women had to say about the students was perhaps more important than any other assessment they might receive.

  Amatory arts required, Mouche found, a good deal of concentration, the acquisition of certain autohypnotic abilities, and careful attention to his physical health. There were certain drugs that helped in certain cases, either taken by the Consort or by his patroness, though Madame did not recommend their use except in cases of extreme need.

  "In this respect, graduates of House Genevois are unlike the graduates of, say, House Fantuil. In House Fantuil they do a great deal of drug-induced work, but in my mind such sensationism—I do not call it sensuality, which is a natural effect—not only suffers in comparison with the natural modes, but also shortens the lifespans of its practitioners. Of course, given the clientele to whom House Fantuil sells, perhaps the drugs are necessary! I am proud to say that House Genevois never expects the impossible from its graduates!"

  Mouche now paid strict attention to the lectures, usually given by Madame but occasionally by other women, concerning the nature or natures of women, for he now could put the theory into action. He decided women were more complicated than he had imagined possible. At night, in the Consort suites, there was a great deal of talk about these complications, about natural versus unnatural modes, and all the middle ground between.

  Naturally, the boys discussed other things as well, with particular attention to the mysterious, the unmentioned, and unmentionable. There was exchange of misinformation about the invisible people. There was more of the same about the fabled Questioner, who was rumored to be interested in Newholme. This rumor had more substance than most, for Tyle had a sister married to the family man who managed the space port, and a trader captain had told the manager, who had told his wife, who had told Tyle.

  "What does the Questioner do?" asked one boy.

  "It destroys worlds," whispered someone else, "if they don't conform to the edicts."

  None of the boys knew much about the edicts, but most of them supposed Newholme didn't conform.

  "I mean," said Fentrys, "we've got all these things we can't talk about, but if we conformed, we could talk about anything."

  "So she wipes out Newholme?" asked Mouche skeptically.

  "No. Not if we can keep her from finding out."

  This topic was hashed and rehashed until it grew boring and was replaced with newly heard stories about Wilderneers. No one had actually ever seen a Wilderneer, but stories about them nonetheless abounded.

  In general, Mouche enjoyed his life. The Consorts-in-Training had, so Madame stressed, a better diet than other men, a more healthy lifestyle, a more certain future, and fewer sexual frustrations than anyone on the planet. The days went by without upheaval in an atmosphere of general kindliness, and the only thing that saddened Mouche were his dreams: often of Duster and sometimes of the sea. Each time he dreamed of the sea, it became wider and darker and bigger, until eventually he dreamed of a sea of stars with himself sailing upon it.

  In accordance with Madame's instructions, Mouche had managed to let go of his father and mother. He had ceased to grieve over the animals and the farm itself. But Duster and the ever widening sea ... those things he wept over still.

  18—Ornery Bastable, the Castaway

  The freckled, red-headed "boy" named Ornery Bastable had been bought onto the freighter Waygood at age seventeen and she had stayed there ever since. Because of her (his) early "mutilation," a story that Ornery frequently told and by now had considerably embellished, she was allowed to be somewhat reticent about natural functions. She had no beard and her voice was rather high. Nonetheless, she was strong and resourceful, and though she could not participate in all the recreations indulged in by her companions, she was a good shipmate, always eager to offer a hand or stand a watch for a friend. Had Ornery been prettier, the subterfuge might not have worked, but "he" had remained a plain, lean, energetic person who over the years had become an accepted member of the crew.

  In general, Ornery had found the life healthful and interesting. So far as recreations went, Ornery enjoyed the society of her fellows, she had found a close lipped and empathetic female Hagger in Naibah with whom she could occasionally be "herself," and every now and then she traveled up the river from Naibah to pay dutiful visits to Pearla. Though most of her life was relatively routine, it was not without adventure, including, on one occasion, being marooned.

  Freighters sailing westward from Gilesmarsh customarily refilled their water barrels a dozen days' sail down the coast at a sweetwater spring which was separated from the shore by a strip of forest so thick and overgrown as to be impassible except by the laboriously created trail maintained by the shipcrews who watered there. Ornery was part of a work party sent ashore on the duty of chop and fill, but despite the trail being well marked and Ornery herself having traversed it many times, she somehow got herself separated from the rest of the party. She sat down to figure out where she'd gone wrong, and just at that moment the world started to shake.

  She was under a tree; a branch whipped off the tree, struck Ornery on the head, and she rolled down into the dirt, dead to the world, in which state she continued until the Waygood sailed away without her.

  She wakened along about moonfall, figured out where she'd gone wrong and made an unsteady way to the beach, where she found a note from her mates saying they'd return in eight or ten days, and, "If you want picking up you'd better stay on the sand, but watch out for tidal waves, because there's more tremors all the time."

  They left her a few rounds of hardbread, as well as a packet of cheese and jerky, so she wasn't as badly off as she might otherwise have been. She had her belt knife, hatchet, and canteen. There was fruit in the trees. The spring was close enough for drinking water, the rations were sufficient, the knock on the head had left a painful lump but no lasting damage. She hacked herself a few fronds from the nearby trees, built a shelter of sorts high on the beach between two erect pillars of stone that had long served as a landmark for the spring, a space partly screened from the sea by a pile of other pillars, similar though recumbent. She then lay back in her lean-to awaiting rescue, staring at the moons at night and swimming in the sea in the daytime—a delight she almost never had the privacy to indulge in and one she considered almost worth being marooned for.

  Three of the biggest moons were out when the ship left, one almost at full but the other two at waxing half and new, so the tides weren't enough to make her move and she felt no tremors. On the third night, however, she wakened to a sound: not a loud sound, not even a threatening sound, but certainly an unfamiliar one. It conveyed, she thought, the sense of an exclamation. Or, maybe, an exclamatory question, as though something very large had asked from the direction of the sea: Who is that person camped on my beach? Or, more accurately, Who is that person camped there on my beach?

  Ornery went from there to somewhere else in a panicky skulk that ended with her in the trees, prostrate upon some uncomfortably knobby roots, peering out at the place she had just left. The waxing half moon was low in the sky; the new moon had long since set, but the full moon was just past the zenith, casting enough light for her to see the bulky though sinuous shadow that flowed upward from the water to her left, squirmed across the beach to the stones, fumbled about with them for what seemed a very long time, then went back as it had come. Th
is was accomplished without any noise whatsoever and without any evidence that the shadow knew or cared where Ornery was. Where there had been two pillars standing in the moons' light, there were now five, each casting a bifurcated shadow like a lopsided arrowhead, pointing away from the place Ornery lay.

  Ornery stayed where she was, replaying what she had seen in her head: the shadow coming out of the sea and squirming across the sand. Now that had been one thing, one single thing, she was sure of that. But then, when it had fumbled around with the rocks, some of it had separated itself and moved away from the other part of it, so it must have been more than one thing to start with.

  Except for that very distinct impression it was one thing at the beginning!

  At the first light of dawn, Ornery crawled back to her shelter. The rations were pressed quite deeply into the sand but otherwise undamaged. The fronds that had sheltered her were scattered and the area smelled like ... well, she couldn't quite say. Not a bad smell. Not a stink, but nonetheless, something quite distinctive and possibly to be avoided. Ornery gathered up her belongings and found a place at the other end of the beach to make her bed. Having done so, she fell asleep, without even thinking about it. She knew it was the only thing to do

  Later in the morning she woke with the word "Joggiwagga" moving about in her head. Moon dragon, she said to herself, wondering where she had heard such a thing. Her memory didn't at that moment stretch as far as the invisible person who had nursed Oram and Ornalia as babies, telling them stories and singing them songs. She had been told to forget that time, and though she had by no means forgotten, she had obediently stopped thinking of it. The word soon evaporated, like dew, and she remained astonished at herself for having slept at all since she had a rather frightening memory of the night's happening.

  When the ship came by on its way back to Gilesmarsh she told her mates about the experience, and they teased her a good deal. Castaways always told stories about hearing things and seeing things and being wakened in the night, or having their things moved about. Ornery accepted this with good grace but without believing a word of it. She'd seen the stone pillars lying in the sand and she'd seen them standing erect, and each of the stones had been far too heavy for her to have raised it herself. Something had set them up, and Ornery had seen the shape—or shapes—of the somethings.

  19—The Invisible People

  Late in his sixteenth year, Mouche fell prey to a peculiar illness, one with few and subtle outward symptoms, one to which, however inadvertently, he exposed himself.

  It began one evening rather late when, in the course of restoring certain volumes of erotic tales to his bookshelf, Mouche jostled a particular carving in an unusual way, and the whole bookshelf rotated on its axis to display a gaping black doorway out of which drifted the sound of music and an enticing odor. The smell made his mouth water even as it made his nose wrinkle, as if he scented something marvelously luscious but, perhaps for that very reason, forbidden.

  After experimenting with the bookcase to learn how it opened and closed and how the latch might be opened from the back side, Mouche lit a candle and went through the dusty, webbed opening. He briefly considered asking Tyle or Fentrys to go with him, but they were at fencing practice, and Mouche did not want to wait.

  He shut and latched the door behind him and began exploring, finding no single route that led from his suite to somewhere else. Instead he was in a maze of passageways that branched opening onto narrow catwalks that crossed open space to small, dark balconies from which, ascending or descending by ladders, one came upon narrow adits leading to crawlways that went hither and thither in all directions through the ancient fabric of House Genevois. Everywhere along the route were small access panels into rooms of House Genevois, and doors that would have opened had they not been closed from the back by long rods that thrust into the surrounding woodwork. There were also a great many peepholes that looked out into the corridors and suites. When Mouche applied his eyes to some of the holes, he saw his fellow students. When he peered through others, he realized he was peering through the painted eyes of those quite terrible pictures in the halls.

  Throughout his rather lengthy exploration, he kept moving toward the sound of the music, arriving finally at one end of a level and uniform passageway stretching in a straight line for some considerable distance and pierced with tiny glazed openings along both sides. Since the passage was scarcely wider than his shoulders, he could look through the openings by merely turning his head. To his left he saw the moonlit roofs of the buildings north of House Genevois; to his right, the open space of the large courtyard. When he stood on tiptoe and craned his neck to peer downward, he could see the torch-lit dock and a firewood wagon being unloaded.

  The corridor continued straight on, eastward past the courtyard, over the roofs of the lower buildings and along yet another open space to end finally in a cul-de-sac with two leaded windows of colored glass, one to his right, one straight ahead. Putting his eyes to a missing segment at the corridor's end, Mouche gained a view of the muddy river, dully gleaming in moonlight, like hammered copper. The window to the right was unbroken and so dirty he could see nothing at all through it, though it was ajar just enough to admit both the sound and the smell that had enticed him.

  No one had ever warned Mouche not to do what he was doing. No one had considered for a moment that he or any other student might fall into it by accident. While some parts of the maze were too low and narrow for most persons to traverse, other parts had been built by long ago mankind, but then closed off and forgotten. The straight stretch of cobwebby corridor where Mouche found himself was actually inside the north wall of House Genevois, a wall that began at the street and ran eastward to the riverside.

  On inspecting the windows, Mouche saw that the slightly open one to his right was not merely ornamental, though the hinges and the latch were so corroded from long exposure to the weather that they might as well have been. After a moment's hesitation, he decided to force it farther open. The hinges were on the left, and when Mouche leaned his full weight against it, it cracked open with a scream of alarm followed by utter silence.

  Mouche held his breath and waited until the rhythmic sounds of voice and instrument resumed. He then used the music to cover the sound as he forced the reluctant casement a fingerwidth at a time, opening it enough that he could lean out and look below.

  He stared down from the northeast corner of an earthen courtyard enclosed on the north and east by walls, on the south and west by brightly painted dwellings, their colors and designs revealed by the leaping flames on a central hearth. Around the fire were dancers. Not people dancers. Far too slender for people, and too graceful. For a long moment, it did not occur to Mouche who the dancers were, and then the heaps of brown, shapeless garments lying near the firepit wakened him with both a thrill of recognition and a shiver of dread. What he was doing was improper. What he was doing was forbidden. He should not be here watching, for the dancers were invisible people, people who did not exist.

  His first thought was that he'd done it, he'd overstepped, he was done for. He'd be blue-bodied for sure, or at least beaten into insensibility. In a moment this guilty fear passed as he realized he was alone, after all. No one knew he had come here. He needn't ... well, he needn't tell anyone. And since no one knew where he was, he needn't go back, not just yet.

  In truth, he could not have made himself leave what he saw, what he smelled, what he heard in the music: the new, the strange, the marvelous. He was so intrigued that he sat down on the sill and settled into being a spectator.

  He pretended to himself that he did not know who they were. If he ever got caught, he thought, the "ever" coming to mind quite clearly, if anyone "ever" asked him, he would say he didn't know who they were. How could he? After all, he might not have noticed the garments that defined invisible people. How could he tell these were people who did not exist?

  People who nonetheless were! People who leaped and spun around the fire in e
cstatic, delirious movement, like willows in wind, their hair flowing like swirls of lovely water. They were more slender than people, almost sylph-like, and their skin had a sheen of opalescent gold, the ocher-apricot glow of freshly fired clay pots. And they sang! Their voices were like birds and breeze and the burble of water. Their hair was much more luxuriant than people's hair, thicker and longer, and it almost seemed to rise and fall of itself, besides being of gorgeous and opulent colors: all the blues of the sea and the sky, shading to dark purple, all the greens of the forest and the fields shading to pale yellow. Mouche had seen hair colored so brilliantly only once before, on the small furry thing that he and Duster had befriended.

  The dancers below him were clad only in diaphanous shifts, though after a time it struck him that the swirling veils weren't clothing at all. The dancers had a sort of web that flowed from beneath their arms and down the outside of their legs. So far as Mouche could tell, they were all of one sex, whatever that sex was. They didn't seem to have breasts or genitals, but each was definitely an individual, easy to distinguish from the rest. One particular form brought his eyes back again and again, a girl or youth he supposed one might say, one with soft moss-green hair flowing to its ... no, her knees in a liquid stream that seemed to pour forever across his vision. His eyes went away and returned, went away and returned, unable to ignore the magic of that hair and the pattern of light that shifted along it like a fish sliding among eddies. Once or twice he caught the glimmer of her eyes, a startling mirror silver in the firelight.

  Adding to his enchantment was music full of unfamiliar harmonies and rhythms, the tunk-a-tunk and tongy-dong of tuned wooden blocks and metal rods being struck with soft hammers. Also, there were marvelous odors from the foods seething over the fire, exotic spices and resinous smokes, all part of a marvelous and fascinating whole that gave him new sensations and awarenesses that caught him by the throat. What he saw, smelled, and heard wrapped him in a tingling web of stimulation that burned like a warm little sun, ripening him as a fruit on a vine, making him swell with sweet juices. His foot tapped, TIKa-tikaTUM tika-TIKatum. His eyes crinkled, he caught himself smiling as he could not remember smiling ever before. After the first few moments, he was lost in the spell of it.