The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  “Indeed? For what? What did you have in mind?”

  Morlenden looked away from the intense, eager face for a moment. All the time he had been on his pilgrimage, he had turned every possibility, looking for the flow, the current, the onrush of the one single magic meeting. Now he felt the undertow, the pull of a powerful current indeed; and both of them of Fire aspect, strong in will. He could interpret this drift and flow only one way: that they both were working powerfully for what was to come, whether they would admit it to themselves or not. He glanced at her again, out of the corner of his eye, seeing the warm honey color of her skin, the streaks and shadows where her muscles ran under it. She was thin, but wiry, angular and strong; he could not deny her beauty, her sense of earthy, pungent sexuality; there was something wild in her, something desperate. The rumpled, unrepaired overshirt. Contrary to this, he also thought that this Sanjirmil was not exactly what he had walked all over half the reservation for. He wryly added to himself that if it had come to molesting thirteen-year-olds, there were several much closer to home he perhaps would have preferred. Those were second-thoughts. There were third-thoughts as well. Morlenden told himself that she wasn’t really his type, that he preferred amorous adventures with girls who wove flowers in their hair for their meetings, who were softer and rounder . . . and he didn’t really know how he could tactfully disengage himself from the piquant, earnest face before him.

  “No,” he said, “I didn’t have anything in particular in mind; except going home tomorrow myself. As you have doubtless guessed, the vayyon leads us to few of the great adventures it seems to promise. You may see that later; or perhaps you are precocious there as well.”

  Now she looked away, sadly, he thought, as if she were reviewing some painful interior knowledge. Then she turned back to him, fixing him once again with that odd, sightless yet penetrating gaze. She said, “No . . . it’s not precocious. But I do know it. That’s why we don’t go on it; none of the Players. There are things we have to give up. The vayyon is one of them. So we get our little dash of freedom earlier, Morlenden.”

  “And later?”

  “We are the Players of the Great Life Game; we do things that others do not even dream of . . . even now, I can already do some of them. . . .” She trailed off, making odd fingering motions with her hands. She grew self-conscious, rubbing her hands nervously, almost as if she were on the verge of saying too much.

  Morlenden knew well enough that there were two Braids of the famous Gameplayers in the ler world, and that their line had been maintained from the beginning with a focused sense of purpose which defied all reason, for the Players did nothing to integrate themselves into the elaborate structured relationships of ler society, except barter some occasional garden produce. All they did was play the Game with their rival Braid. They were curious and secretive, and did not answer questions. Most put them out of their minds, for the Game was cerebral and difficult and had few partisans. Suddenly he felt very much out of his depth.

  Sanjirmil continued, “Yes, and we . . .” She stopped, biting her lower lip. “Yes, just so. Indeed we do. But I may not speak of them with you. Please understand, it is not you yourself; you are not one of the elect, and you are not of the Shadow. I may not speak of it with you. But personally . . . I think I like you. For instance,” she added cheerfully and matter-of-factly, with disarming candor, “I should rather sleep with you tonight than spend the darkness in the freehouse.”

  Morlenden looked at the harsh, determined face, the thin mouth with the faintest trembling hint of a smile trying to form on it. After a time, he said, “I hadn’t really thought so far ahead. . . .”

  “I know.”

  “Very well, then. As you have seen, I am free and without commitment. I shall invite you to repair to my cabin, which I have taken yonder in the grove.” Having taken the step, he suddenly felt awkward, uncertain as to how brash he could be. He added, “I hardly know you, no more than just now, and I wouldn’t have you take offense.”

  “I saw, before, and I knew it would be so. I watched you; that is why I came to you.”

  Morlenden pushed his chair back. “You will come with me, then?”

  “I will, later. I have to go wash first. I have been running a lot and should not come to you as I am.”

  “Never mind that. I took a special place, one with a fine bath. You can wash there.” He paused, and then added impulsively, now swimming full in the current he had released himself into, “As a fact, if you will, I’ll wash you myself.”

  “Oh, very good! What girl could resist such an invitation in the least. Indeed so I will come.”

  “Do you need to gather your things?”

  She gestured at herself. She said, “These are my things.” The gesture took in a rather bedraggled, rumpled girl, barefoot, whose sole visible possession seemed to be a smallish waist-pouch slung carelessly over one hip.

  All the time they had been talking, the girl had remained standing; now Morlenden arose from his chair uncertainly. He hesitated, then offered his hand to her shyly. She took it into hers with an exaggerated gesture of gallantry, almost as if she were playacting. Morlenden looked about to see if anyone might be watching. But there was no one; the pavilion was now deserted. Far down the lakefront, one of the elders was blowing lamps out, carefully tending the colored paper lanterns that hung along the beach and cast their reflections out into the lake surface and the night. One by one, the lanterns were going out, and the dying sense of summer gaiety as well. Soon there would be nothing save some boarded-up sheds and cabins, and the winter darkness. He listened, and heard a wind rising back in the pines and arborvitae, rushing along the sharp needles and sprays of delicately scaled branchlets. There was a sudden spatter of cold rain, gone in an instant. He turned and set out in the direction of the cabin, the girl following, grasping his hand tightly.

  Along the way, they kept silent, saying nothing more to each other. Morlenden listened to the wind, now alive all around them up in the trees; there was a chill in the pungent, resinous air. Impulsively, he placed his arm about Sanjirmil’s shoulders. She was shivering, ever so slightly.

  Once inside the rented cabin, Morlenden set about getting a fire started in both fireplace and water-heater, while Sanjirmil brought in armfuls of wood. They did not talk, waiting for the water to heat, but sat quietly looking into the fire. Once, perhaps twice, Sanjirmil looked at him shyly from under her eyebrows, a faint, tentative smile forming in her face in the moving, dancing firelight. This touched Morlenden; for he had expected once that his great adventure would be with a brilliant conversationalist, one who would engage him completely, as they savored the last fling to the very end; but here they sat, and said nothing, save what their eyes said in quick little glances. That was everything. Yes. He was beginning to enjoy the idea.

  The water began to groan in its tank, and testing it, Morlenden pronounced it hot enough and began filling the tub, a huge round wooden tub on a low stand. Sanjirmil stood, stretched, removed her waist-pouch and carefully laid it on the rough platform where the sleeping-bags were. Then she slipped her pleth upward, over her shoulders; her motion was graceful, but fatigued as well. She tossed it into the water, and feeling as she went, followed it into the tub.

  The only light in the cabin came from the fire in the stove, and in this weak light, even weaker to his eyes, Morlenden looked at the body of the girl who was going to spend the night with him. Her body was muscular and hard, but thin, a little paler than the sun-browned face, but still a deep olive color, streaked and shadowed in the firelight, where the muscles and tendons showed; Sanjirmil was thin and wiry, yet she was also smooth and supple and utterly feminine. She sat slowly, gingerly into the hot water, wincing from the heat of it. As she finally settled completely into the water, Morlenden pushed his sleeves back, soaped his hands, and began scrubbing her back. Sanjirmil leaned back against the pressure of his hands and turned her face to the dark ceiling, her eyes closed.

  And after a
longer time, and many scrubbings, when her skin had become rosy, she finally said, very softly, “You should know that I told you a little lie back there at the pavilion; I did not want you to think I was such a little beggar. The truth is that my little bit of adventuring-money ran out several days ago. But I kept on staying, as long as I could, longer, grubbing, borrowing, stealing a little . . . because . . . because when I go back there, there will be no more holidays for me, no more adventuring. I’m almost fourteen, and that is when the insiblings of the Terklarens are initiated. This autumn. I know some things already; you can imagine it if you watch closely . . . there really isn’t any other way it could be, or so I think. But after initiation, the real work starts and one must learn, learn, learn, master it, control it, impose oneself upon it. One fourteen and two years to become a master of the Game, and a fourteen more before the next crop of brats. And then you teach and guide and end up in the Shadow, a Past Master. People think we are idle, that we do nothing, but it isn’t like that. It is the hardest Braid-role of all. Already I can feel it drawing me to it. And so our time for adventuring is very short and we usually do not get so very much of it. And I want it all, both the Game and the Life; yes, the power but also the lovers and the dreams that all the others I see have. I hoped you would want me.”

  “I didn’t, at first. I thought you were just another of the urchins; but there is a likeness between us now, and I see through the years that separate us.”

  “Say no more of separating; I would have you speak of joinings and meetings.”

  “So then I will: ours now-tonight.” He stood up from his place by the washtub and offered Sanjirmil his hand.

  She stood, wet and dripping, now soft and flowing curves and firelight shining along planes of wet skin. She said, almost in a whisper, “You are more loving-kind and giving than you know; I hope that you have fortified yourself for a long night.”

  “Indeed I have done marvels in the way of abstinence in the last few weeks.” While he searched for a towel, Sanjirmil retrieved the much-abused overshirt, and wrung it out. Morlenden brought her the towel, and she dabbled absentmindedly at her body with it. She swayed a little, balancing on one foot, and Morlenden reached to steady her.

  Sanjirmil laughed, turning to him. “You should remove that fine heirloom of the Derens that you wear, for I shall surely dampen it if you leave it on.”

  He slipped his overshirt off over his head and laid it aside, and stood bare in the firelight and resin-scented air just as she had before; she looked at him as he had looked at her. Morlenden felt a curious distortion of time from the intensity of their upwelling emotions, as if the whole of his past, or most of it, had occurred within this cabin, the water and the tub and Sanjirmil’s bare, wiry body before him, and his future only extended as far as the next few moments. This sense of distortion was not static, fixed, but a growing, dynamic process, happening now, still working its alchemy upon his perception; there was a tense silence in which he could hear his own heartbeats. He reached forward, palms out, and stroked Sanjirmil’s shoulders softly, following along the angular line of her collarbone to her neck, following with his eyes the soft shine of her skin in the dim light. She stepped out of the tub unsteadily and to him, touching him all at once, lips, limbs, body. Morlenden felt the bath-hot, strong, vital body touching him, the smooth skin, and knew madness in his heart, wildfire, and time collapsed into a dimensionless present moving forward at the speed of light. The salty taste of her mouth, the childlike, musky scent of her person close about him. She moved her body, pressing hard against him. Her legs moved.

  Her mouth moved to his ear, and she said, almost so softly that he missed it under the roaring in his ears, “Now.”

  “Yes, Sanjir, now,” he said, brushing his face in her coarse, dark hair, moving, half carrying the girl to the sleeping-bag, half falling to the platform, never quite disengaging themselves enough to retrieve the covers, while they performed that which made one where two had been before. The fire sank and the air in the little cabin cooled before they became aware of it. . . .

  And some time later, with the fire now diminished to a bed of glowing coals, they moved under the covers for warmth, side by side, yet engaged still, touching their noses. Morlenden felt completed, perfected, arrived at last; but in this completion and ending he sensed beginnings, too. Many beginnings. He sensed above all that he and Sanjirmil were not finished with each other, and would not be when their time in the now ran out. By him, she breathed deeply, evenly, seemingly relaxed, yet he also knew that she was not asleep.

  He said, “Truly, you are Sanjir to me now.”

  She answered, “Would that we were Ajimi and Olede, if you will. We are something more than casual lovers coupling on the path.”

  Morlenden lay quietly, feeling their legs rub together, a distant warmth, a rustling sound in the quiet dimness, a hard foot. He tested the feel of the girl’s body-name in his mind, projecting, wondering if it had gone that far. He could not say; at once, he felt that they had not come to that, and that they had gone far beyond it. Yes, that was the great secret here—they had gone beyond it and were in a region of desire where there were no guides and no landmarks save those monuments they chose to erect.

  “Ajimi . . .” he mused aloud, “and yet we have known each other but hours, and we are being taken away by currents in time that cannot be denied.”

  “And gathered by the same,” Sanjirmil added. “I know. And consider—are we not both Fire aspect? Were we not here for the same thing? And are we both not soon to change?”

  “My life passes through its progressions more or less in the traditional manner, prescribed by the rote of orthodox ways. My individual variations are my own, but no one else will do them, I think . . . you know that well enough, well enough to know me. But I know nothing of what you will do.”

  “It is simple enough, as much as I can say here to you: we got to the Magic Mountain and master the subtleties of the Game, expand its scope, delve deeper into it. It has no end, no limits, you know.”

  “No. I know nothing of it.”

  “It is something I would have us share besides what we already have, but even what little I know I cannot give you, even though I shall call you Olede and always think of you so. At initiation, I know that I will not be able to face the foremother of my foremother if I do, when she will ask me if I have spoken of the Game to others who are not of the Shadow.”

  Morlenden chuckled at her sudden seriousness. “You could lie.”

  She put her fingers over his lips, abruptly. “No, no, we must not even talk about such a thing! She will be able to read that in my face, my every move. She is the great Past Master: she reads truth from the traces and ripples that acts leave behind them. You and I, even such as we, we can read the guilty face immediately after the sin, the worry after the crime, can we not? But she can read faces and see—literally see, with the eye of projection, things as they happened long ago. And so tonight by love I shall tell you what I know to keep you, and sixteen years hence I will stand before her in the smoky lodge of the elders of the Game and hear her denounce me and describe how we lay together.”

  “What would be so vile about that, Ajimi? This is sweet beyond my wildest dreams.”

  “You do not understand. There are others there, too, who have power over the non-Game parts of our lives. Not only do I lose the Game; I lose place, Braid. As strangers are made honorary insiblings, shartoorh, by arbitration, so are made sharhifzeron, ‘those to be designated outBraid bastards.’ I could, if so judged, lose my life. We Players know well the saying, ‘and Tarneysmith spoke aloud of the Game in the market, and what person now remembers Tarneysmith? It23 did that which caused its23 name to be stricken from the lineages and records and totems. Where one smile was of opened knowledge, now there are two.”

  “Ajimi, you lose me. I don’t understand.”

  Sanjirmil took a deep breath, and shuddered. “In plain perdeskris24, so I am led to believe, one called T
arneysmith, whom no one knows now as Tlanh or Srith, spoke of the Game openly, or carelessly perhaps, or displayed knowledge to impress others—who knows? They cut its throat. Then they expunged all the records and made everyone forget. There is left only the name as a reminder. To die is bad, but to be erased is a horror.”

  “And your fear is real.”

  “My fear is real.”

  “Then I am endangered as well. I have bedded down . . .”

  She interrupted him. “No, say it not! Not true! For I have not told you secrets. The danger is to me and all the others of the Players. What we have is a thing to be desired over all things, even love. But we see others as yourself and envy your lives, you who have all your didhosi years to have lovers and dreams, to make liaisons, to absorb the ordinary things of life. But for us the fun ends at fourteen. And I want something sweet to remember.”

  Morlenden felt a warm arm laid over his, pressing his back. He searched for Sanjirmil’s thin mouth, kissed her lightly. “Yes, and I, too.”

  Sanjirmil moved her body, her limbs, pressing herself closer still. Muscles moved invisibly beneath warm skin. Morlenden, who had been lazing in post-love contentment, suddenly felt something awaken in him, deep down, illogical, apersonal, animal. And she felt it as well. He felt sharp white teeth along his neck, shoulders, and heard her whisper, “Again, yes?”

  They moved slowly, deliberately, again knowing the rushing surge of anticipation. He whispered back, “Slowly, slowly. We have time. And what we have not we can make, for a little.”

  She replied, distantly, as if from miles away: “You do not know how much we have to make in what little time.”

  “But we do not have to go our ways tomorrow, either, Ajimi.”

  And Sanjirmil did not answer him immediately, but moved closer to Morlenden, if that were possible, embracing him yet more tightly. And she said, “No, Olede. But someday soon.”

  “And until then . . .”

  Then their senses were fully awake, and for that night at least they talked no more. At any rate, they said little more of explanations and histories and legend.