The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  Georg told me nothing more than he had already said on the first day when he carried me to Alban’s house. But Kia took pity on my ignorance. She fed me, rations she said, but more than I was used to getting of late, and asked as Georg had asked if I could dance, sing, juggle, entertain? I said I didn’t know, I’d never tried.

  “Yet you’ve been heard to sing; so Georg said.”

  “The songs we sang in Croft,” I answered.

  “Well, they won’t do here! Here they want songs of love, child.”

  “Like this?—

  Pretty Rosie, bouncing Rosie,

  Why do you fly so fast?

  Stay a while and play a while

  With me while summer lasts,

  Bouncing Rosie come to play

  Upon the summer grass—”

  “No, no,” said Kia laughing. “Listen!” And she sang in a low voice, so beautifully that I was enthralled, but slowly:

  No music sounds sweet as my lover’s song.

  Song the sea sings to me, alas!

  The sea winds have blown away his adoration,

  The sea waves have washed me from his heart.

  Only in the wind do I hear him sing my name.

  She laughed again at my expression; I had never heard so sweet a voice.

  “You’re too young for that,” she said. “Though your voice seems good, and if it survives changing, and your face lives up to its promise as you grow, the young ladies beyond the wall will be sighing for you in a few years’ time!”

  “What young ladies?” I said. “What’s beyond the wall?”

  “The masters,” Kia said. “You’ve heard of the masters surely, even west of the mountains.”

  “I’ve heard of them, but I don’t know what they are.”

  Kia looked as if she thought I might be playing a joke on her, either that or my ignorance had no limit. Finally she saw the second thing was true and explained, but either she didn’t make a very good job of it or I couldn’t get my thought around what she said, because still it had no sense, It was a jumble of people who were different, who were rich, who ate without working for it, who had things I’d never heard of before, who did what they liked all the time. But maybe she explained it well enough after all, because even when I learned more about it, I never learned anything to contradict what I thought she’d said.

  Then Alban came home, and late though it was, when he found I’d never seen the sea he took me to it. We walked with the wind stirring round our ears through cold cobbled streets, the first I’d ever seen, always curving and curving toward the north with the wall and the soldiers’ houses at our right. And there were gates in the wall, with broad roads smoothly paved with stone leading straight to them; but they were closed, and over each one was a kind of little house with windows, and Alban said there were soldiers in them. Then far off I began to hear a sound, which was sometimes like thunder and sometimes like a hiss, and at last we came around a final bulge in the wall—which was not a perfect half-circle, but in places bulged out or withdrew—and the wind struck me with a force to take my breath away, and there was a glimmer of pale sand and beyond that the sea. The foam that rolled up on the sand was luminous, and the wind took it and blew it stinging onto my face. But out past where the waves broke, out to sea, there was nothing but blackness. It was so cold I shook, though I had still the warm cloak Mirrah had made for me just before leaving Croft, laughing and exclaiming on my growth, Soon I’ll have no time for anything but making clothes for Mikki— The salt wind brought wetness to my eyes. Alban said the sea went on forever. I had to turn my head to see light, and even the lights of the walled city were set well back from the sea, and they wavered with the wind and the blurring of my eyes. It was a bigger world than I had thought, this planet as Pavah had called it, it did not seem like a place where I might have been born.

  I think Alban talked a little, but I heard nothing of what he said; not that night. When he was done talking and thought I should be done looking, he said we must go home (though it was not my home), and we walked away in the dark.

  * * *

  I was used to working with my hands, stockherding, stone cutting, the dirt hot on my arms with the summer sun. The tricks Georg put me up to didn’t seem like work, and each day it was something different. The dancing-master made me twist, sway, wanted me to fly through the air, it seemed, and Kia made me sing; somebody they called the master of hands came once, tried to teach me an illusion or two but went away disgusted; still he told Georg there was hope for me later, when I was over the worst of my growth and the parts of my body didn’t run away from each other any more. Yet the dancing-master said it was too late, while Kia said soon it would be the wrong time for my voice, though it wasn’t yet. I couldn’t see what they wanted with me, didn’t see why they kept me there. But Kia one night while they drank wine, she and Alban and Georg and some others of the performers whose services were not needed behind the wall that night, she took my chin in her hand and turned my face to the light: “What a waste it’d be!” she said. Saw the question in my eyes, I think, and talked about faces and fortunes. At first it made a nonsense in my head. But I understood something before she was done: “Such a pretty flower to bloom for the countryfolk!” she said, and like a light breaking I knew how I looked through her eyes. It explained much, the exclaimings over me by Mirrah’s friends in Sutherland each time we went there as I grew, which went back as far as I could remember; it explained a man weeping with loneliness who had approached me in the barracks one night when the lights were turned out, though my sleepiness and ignorance had turned him away; and Georg, of course, what he had heard. I pondered it while they drank, seeing that in Croft they had been used to me from birth and so no one had ever commented on how I looked, or maybe didn’t really see me. I was Pavah’s son, Mirrah’s son, a hard worker, of easy temper and, I had been told, sweet nature, and those who knew me had not cared about my face.

  Then Kia, filled with wine, began to cry. They had taken me from my mirrah, she said, and from that passed into lamenting that she had no child. Alban was silent and grim, having heard it all before. And it was then by accident that they learned what I was good for, because one of the men, Norn by name, had brought with him an instrument, and it leaned in a corner; and as Kia wept, and Alban grew sullen, and it was plain that he felt himself accused and a quarrel was brewing, I crept to the corner to get away and began to play with the instrument. Norn, also wishing to escape, followed me and showed me its principles. Yet it seemed that I knew them and had only to be reminded how to turn my breath into music. Norn became silent, speaking only now and then in a whisper to correct my fingering or give me some other word of advice, and I played a song Kia had taught me, and then the one she had sung on that first night, and then a song I knew from Croft. I paid no attention to the others, only to Norn’s whispers, which I heard eagerly and which my breath and fingers translated without further thought. I was happy for the first time since the day of the walk to Sutherland, and more than happy, there was a wholeness I had not imagined before, nor could I name it in any way. And I was not conscious of doing or being anything remarkable, and when I looked up and saw that all of them stared at me, their eyes shining in the dim lamplight, my first thought was that I had done something wrong.

  But that was not why they gaped at me, as I learned soon enough.

  * * *

  “Still you must learn other things,” Georg said. So once a day the dancing-master came to teach me pliés, pirouettes, and other moves with outlandish names; also Kia kept teaching me songs to sing and telling me where to breathe. Norn also came a day or two to teach the flute, but then desisted. “I am afraid of doing more harm than good,” he said. His place was taken by a woman named Portia, who on the first day of her coming crashed into Kia’s kitchen crying, “Where is it? Where is this prodigy? I must see it!” And she was not awed as Norn had been, which was good, since I was getting a swelled head; but she listened to me play and said, �
�You have much to learn, boy!” And proceeded to teach, thereby earning my affection without ever doing anything else to get it. She did not need to do anything else.

  So the music was consolation and I needed consoling, yes, needed it. Otherwise when the novelty of being there had worn off, when it ceased to be a visit to a new place and became each day’s life, I would not have been able to bear it. Pavah since his death had visited me in dreams each night; now Mirrah came also, carrying Carmina. They smiled at me and told me what a good boy I was, a fine son whom they approved and were glad to have, which in truth was what they had always done; Mirrah was the one to say the words, but I had always known that she spoke for Pavah, too. And so now they were gone, Pavah into the gray country that has no end, and Mirrah might as well have been there, too, for all I saw of her. Yet I did hear a little from time to time, for Kia knew a captain whose men went each day to the camp, the same who had first brought me to the notice of Georg, and she got him to bring news of Mirrah, and carry news back. So I heard that she was well, and that Carmina talked now, really talked, and remembered Mikki. This helped, too; I do not know if music alone would have been enough. I think not. But together, they were enough.

  Thus the end of autumn passed away and the winter came in on great storms of wind that filled the air with flying snow. There were fogs that hid even the top of the white wall if I stood at its foot and looked up; and rains that lasted three or four days and consisted of a salty soup that did not so much fall as hover, creeping into houses and garments and covering everything with damp. But there were also days when the sky leapt high and blue over my head, and the Ring was a dagger-stroke across it for the sharp-eyed to see. In fair weather or foul I went about the town as I could, though with an easier heart when the day had been light, as if the sun illuminated my soul. I was not filled with any great curiosity, no, I was incurious as I had been on the day Georg first came to the camp, a truth which was not much like me, who had explored every stone, game trail, streamlet and grove within a boy’s reach around Croft; but I was drawn all the same, as if one stride led to another, though I thought I had no wish to walk on. There was little enough time for exploring, for between dancing and Kia and Portia and the lessons Portia set me I was busy all the day; but an hour or two of the dancing-master was not enough to satisfy my body, used as it was to climbing and running and rough play. The dark came early, and Kia had some notion I should not be out in the night, and I sought to obey, my own notion being that she stood in Mirrah’s place, and wanted for me what Mirrah would want; but the upshot was that I found it hard to fall asleep, and my legs of their own accord would kick and twitch, seeking all on their own to run. And after some days when my eyes were half-closed with lack of rest, Portia said that she would speak to Kia; and afterward Kia said I might go out at night, providing I were home an hour before the curfew, which came about two hours before the middle of the night.

  It was in the dark, then, that I roamed, learning by chance the names of the streets and alleys, and what kinds of people lived in them. In the Street of Wheelwrights an old lady took a fancy to my face and then to what I had to tell her, for she had never been away from the town and loved to hear about the mountains, here where she had only ever seen flat sand, fields, marshes: “And you have to look up to see the tops!” she said often, marveling. I found the docks from which the fishermen set forth each day, but hardly ever saw a fisherman, for their work began before dawn and was done by dusk. Still I saw one of the fishers once or twice, working by lamplight to mend a plank or a net, and he talked of the storms that might come without warning and take men, boats, and all to the bottom of the sea. And afterward I never had a bite from the sea without thinking of the brave boats going light over the ocean waves.

  So through the nights of that winter, while the wind blew cold and sharp, I went around the town. There were few children, which had also been true in Croft and Sutherland, and though those of the part of the town where I lived were friendly enough, it was different among the great buildings where the greater part of the people lived. None there wanted to join my rambles, or invite me into their games, or even talk to me, once they learned where I lived and what I was to be. “We want none of the masters’ garbage,” one said to me, a boy of about my own age, and another called names and spat at me, and a third heaved a stone at my head. I was no fighter, and was not angry but bewildered; and Kia told me there was jealousy among the mass of people for those who were attached to the masters, and worked for them or guarded or entertained them. But the boy who had thrown the stone, he had not even heard me speak, I had not opened my mouth, and Kia looked at me considering as if about to speak; but then she turned my question away and talked of something else. But she had been looking at my eyes, and I remembered what Pavah had said on the day of his death.

  “Whose eyes are these?” I said.

  She considered again a longer time, so that I thought still she would not answer. But at last she said, “Saddhi.”

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “They are one of the great families.” She waited again, but this time I saw she had more to say, so I waited, too. “We’ve talked of your eyes,” she said. “Georg did not know when he went for you that you had them. But perhaps they’ll be less conspicuous with age. Sometimes they fade.”

  “My pavah had them,” I said. I had never spoken of Pavah there before.

  “You’d best hope they’re not a pass back to the fields,” she said. “We’ve talked of hiding them.”

  “Hiding them? How?”

  “By way of small things that are put in the eyes, smaller than this.” Here she showed me the nail of her little finger. “It doesn’t hurt and does no harm.”

  “But why must they be hidden?”

  “It’s this way,” she said, and set out on a long and unclear explanation which she strung out so long and so confusingly, to suit her delicacy and my age, that I would have been none the wiser, except that when it was rendered out it amounted to the same thing Pavah had said—somebody might be embarrassed by the bastard in the house, or in this case the bastard’s son.

  Yet no one else in the barracks ever looked twice at my eyes, and though I saw none like them, I remembered what Pavah had said about their being in the factories and fields. And while I did not stop going to that other part of the town, I no longer tried to make friends, and only stood on the edges of groups of men or women and listened to their talk. Much of it was not good to hear. On one night, one night alone, I heard men talking of how rations had been cut again, and wondering what there’d be to eat by winter’s end, and women talking of an illness that had swept through a building which had been sealed and remained sealed, trapping those inside. They talked also of a baby which had died, though, they said with bitterness, those behind the wall had medicines which would have saved it. And at another gathering of men I heard that the fishers were being driven to sea even in dangerous weather, and told to bring back greater and greater catches.

  I learned nearly all that I learned from these walks in the night, slipping from one knot of men or women to another and seeking not to stand out; for Kia and Alban spoke of the people seldom, and slightingly, and I did not know that their feelings did not match their words, and the words were said as a concealment. But had they spoken to me freely, they could have told me only what I saw with my eyes: that the hunger was growing out there where the favored of the masters did not live, and with it sickness; and the people were not yet starving and so not in despair, but angry.

  * * *

  Finally there came a night of bitter cold when I was taken behind the wall. There was to be an event there, one of the gatherings that went on all year long, though more in the winter when life was confined—for the masters did not stay altogether behind the wall, I was told, and in the warm evenings of summer especially were to be seen walking in the town. And even in the winter they might go abroad, but I had never seen any of them. For this occasion Portia rehear
sed me with the flute in earnest, three songs only, and simple ones, one as an accompaniment to Kia’s singing. Though they were simple they were no less beautiful—only I was heartily sick of them in the end! For Portia made me play them so often that I would wake in the night with fingers moving and mouth puckered, still rehearsing. I was also required to wear a new suit of clothes of fabric so fine that the touch of a finger left a mark on it, so sensitive was the pile; and if I drew my hand across it, I shivered at the touch. There was a great bloused tunic over a singlet that fit close, and breeches which came only to the knee and white stockings under that, and soft crimson boots to the ankle, hard to walk in, for there was a stilt at each heel, which made me taller and tilted me forward; and Kia watched me learn to walk in those boots and laughed.