by Jo Clayton
“It’s possible we might do a bit of trading, besri, this and that for what we need and perhaps a tale or two to while away the hours after supper?”
The old man’s eyes darted once again from one to the other, his brows contorted with lively curiosity. “A tale or two, that is a good thing. The evenings, they’re long this piece of year.” He nodded at the rambut, short brisk jerks of his head. “Seeing your lady she healed the hurt, it being only right she ride.”
Hern bowed with a pared-down grace, the bending of his back a courteous recognition of courtesy. He gave his spear to the old man to hold for him, bent with ease to retrieve hers. She watched him go down and up and saw lines of force dance through his body. He reached out his hands to her. She looked at them. They were strong and beautiful. She touched them and they burned her. He lifted her with ease onto the rambut’s back, swung her up as if she weighed less than nothing which was not far from truth. His hands spanned her waist and swept her up and deposited her on the rambut’s back before she was ready. She had to scramble to crook her leg up, swing it to the far side of the beast. He took his hands away, she was sorry for that, she looked down at him, not smiling, and saw in narrowed gleaming eyes that what had been dead or difficult between them for so long had come powerfully to life. She smiled then, felt a rollicking inside her, remembering as suddenly her telling him so gravely once that passion was only decoration and not necessary and she saw that he was remembering that also and laughing a little at her, a little with her. “Bath and bed,” she murmured.
He patted her thigh with a subtly exaggerated possessiveness calculated to stir her fury which she felt a little of but which was mostly drowned by the deep-pooled laughter bubbling in her. They knew each other so well now that tiny muscle twitches spoke volumes of implication and association.
The old man watched them, a little puzzled, but more complacent perhaps because the offer to trade put them on familiar ground. “Bath and bed for sure, young friends. For sure.” He tugged on the leadrope and started east along the road with the rambut pacing behind him, head bobbling by his left shoulder, Hern walking by his right. “Harvest is in and the Seed-moons blessing celebrated so things be extra quiet this end of the Seed-passage. And the Raider’s moon is not yet. The majilarn they watch their herds too far in the north yet for the raiding, or so the scouts they tell us. Not a vachai alone within a hundred marches. No. Not a one, not a herd. So it’s quiet and quiet do be good for raising quarrels in the kin. The tales we know we’ve heard a thousand times though some be willing to repeat forever like some foolish tinkitink singing evensong over and over till you think you throw a brick at it and knock its silly head off.”
The leather on the rambut creaked, the wind blew a ceaseless whine. The butt of Hern’s spear thumped rhythmically on the hard earth, syncopated with the thud-squeak of his boots. And the old man talked. Hekatoro he was, he said. Atoro of HoldHek where they were going. They passed fields growing quickly more prosperous even in their nudity. The crops were in, the stubble plowed back into the soil and a winter crop planted. The earth was dark brown and glistening, new-turned in some fields, the plowed furrows hard-edged. Others had a softness of wind, wear and time, the winter cover already seeded and sending up the first new leaves in a mist of green. Neatness, skill, hard work—all visible in these fields stretching away from the road to the horizon. Hekatoro rumbled on about the fine season they’d had, the harvest that had their storerooms groaning, about his fifteen sons and their families and his grandchildren, more numerous he said than the grit blowing south on the Raiders wind.
They turned a grove of squat trees and a clump of dry cane with stems thicker than her arms and long yellow leaves stiff and thin, rustling, whispering, rattling like strips of paper. Hard against the horizon sat a solid structure, long and heavy, hugging the ground, three towers at its center point, one at each of the far points of the tetrahedron. They moved forward along the rutted dirt road, Hern and Hekatoro talking quietly as they walked, gravely, in slow bursts as things occurred to either. She paid no attention to what they were saying, but watched the movement of Hern’s shoulders, the side of his face as he turned to look at the old man. She saw the twitch of his wide mouth, the dart upward of a brow, the liquid gleam of dark eyes. The too-draining closeness they’d shared was gone but neither could be quite the same. Though he didn’t seem aware of it, right now he was blending her knowledge and her unconscious assumptions with his own skills and experience to achieve just the right note of detached politeness and unobtrusive interest, using the language he’d acquired without effort from her, using the knowledge she’d had tucked away about fenekeln customs. She smiled. So wholly different from the brittle sparring outside Skup. The rambut twitched his ears, pulled gently against the leadrope so he could look around at her. It seemed to her he was smiling at her, inviting her to share in some enigmatic rambut joke. She leaned forward and scratched slowly through the bristling scarlet mane growing along the top curve of his neck, laughing silently, herself aware of the changes in herself, not sure just what they were or how deep they went, but there was time now, even the pseudo-urgency of their quest couldn’t change that. Time. Distance. All of that stretching between her and him who pursued and troubled her. She’d reached a peak of terror and died of it before the plateau, now she felt on a gentle slide into a new calm she wasn’t yet prepared to question.
HoldHek drew closer. Walls. Yellow white, spreading back in a shallow vee from a central point between two tower-shadowed gates, a higher tower broad and powerful between the gates behind the obtuse angle of the tetrahedron’s front corner. The gates were purplish-brown—rather, one was, the other stood open, too narrow a target for eyes at a distance.
Closer. A tight roll of dark green almost black at the base of both walls. Thornbush. Evergreen, a tangle of black crooked limbs and inch-long needle thorns coated with an irritant dust, a sticky drop of poison on each thorn point. The hold had come away from the horizon and stood blocky and powerful midway between the three of them and the skyline.
Before the Hold. The bricks of the wall were waist-high and man-long, starting to crumble at the corners. They’d been whitewashed once, long ago before the thornbush was planted, but the whitewash was cracking and flaking off in spots. High up, near the crenels, a frieze of skulls. At first she thought they were carved, then she saw they were bone, real bone, sunk halfway into the mud and left to stare from blank eyeholes at land they’d once ridden over, majilarn skulls gathered in the bloody warfare of the Raider’s Moon.
The gate curved in a quarter-arc between two high walls with crenellation that would let defenders fire down, devastating any attackers foolish enough to break down the gate and ride through. When they turned into the hold, the sound struck her like a blow in the face—the high honking brays of rambuts, the howling of chini, the ring of metal against metal, the shouts of children and through it all, a hum of voices high and low, female and male. She winced. The soft thick mud bricks of the curtain wall absorbed sound so that from the outside there was little evidence of the sheer volume of noise contained within.
As they rounded the baffle curve they turned toward a large rectangular building two stories high, the top story half the width of the bottom, the setback, like the court beyond the corner, filled with working women and playing children. Lacy rails of molded polished cane were planted in the brick of the lower story, fired brick this, a pale ocher like thick cream. Behind the rails very young children (the older ones were set to work carding wool and chewing leather) played ancient games inherited from their elders, women young and old sat in groups pounding grain, whirling spindles, sewing leather into sandals, stabbing needles at cloth held taut in tambour hoops, weaving in small hand looms, doing the thousand small things that kept the fenekeli clothed and fed. As Hekatoro led them past the end of the structure, several women came and leaned over the rail, exchanging low-voiced, comments, low-voices and inaudible to those below because they were a
polite people, these fenekeli. They looked quickly at the strangers, looked quickly away, bright black eyes shining with curiosity quickly hooded—not at all polite to stare even if your visitor has green skin and is for some reason riding the headman’s favorite rambut.
They turned the corner of the crowded dwelling and moved into a long rectangular court equally busy between the first structure and a similar one on the far side and a third square dwelling at the back only a single story high. Stretching out into the open space, slanting down from near the top of the first story, painted awnings provided a little protection from the bright, small winter sun. Painted. Dusty broad stripes, chartreuse and carmine, amber and azure laid down thick on the heavy cloth whose fusty odor mingled with the other smells—sweat and musk, cooking food, the pungent oils of the sweetsop trees growing through the worn cream bricks that paved the court, their leaves touched to a light bright yellow by a few frosts but not yet starting to fall. Near the front of the court a group of women in busy-patterned robes congregated in a laughing, chattering group about the waist-high coping of a broad well each waiting her turn to dip her double-handled water jar.
The rambut’s hooves clicked sharply on the bricks. Hekatoro led him past the well, dropped the leadrope and turned to speak to her.
She heard him but the words were meaningless to her and she ignored them, though she didn’t like to appear rude, because there was something else that demanded her attention, demanded it so imperiously that she had no mind left to give to him. There was a trembling inside her, in her legs and in her belly, like nothing she could remember except perhaps the first night she and Tayyan made love and curled about each other in her narrow bed, a fluttering as if the soul within her trembled and prepared to yield to a pull—a pull, yes, a line squeezed round her viscera, tugging, not painful only insistent. She stood with her hand flattened on the saddle, its leather warmed by her body, feeling that fugitive warmth as the noise in the court swelled around her. Distantly she heard the old man say something to Hern, heard Hern reply, the sound only, not the words not any words.
She stepped away from the rambut, swayed. The beast stood watching her, ears pricking. She circled about a suddenly silent group of women seated in a rough circle about a flat basket heaped with linat wool, the redbrown spindles shiny with much handling and the oil from the wool, held quiet now in long-fingered hands of glistening umber, the women not-looking at her, not-looking at each other, graceful necks stiff under the elaborate braided loops of their coiffeurs.
She saw them in passing, brief vivid image, and left them, forgetting them.
She walked diagonally across the court, passing, with small note, crawling naked infants, old men coming out from the shade of the awning to look obliquely at her, line drawings cool blue shadows on skin like burnt honey with red honey lights. Small ragged dusty figure she moved across the court drawn toward a back corner where a dusty tree grew up past the end of the awning, an older tree than the others, a lacetree with fragile openwork leaves bleached fire red by the frosts. She felt age like a dry, sweet perfume coming out from it to shroud her—and another sweetish smell, not so pleasant, the smell of rotting flesh. Her feet dragging, she moved slowly into the shade of the tree and stopped before an ancient man, gnarled and hard like the tree he crouched beneath. His matte umber skin was dry, hard, a little dusty like the tight-grained satinbark of the tree. He squatted quiet beneath the tree, his not-quite-yet-dulled eyes shifting to show slices of their yellowed whites. Black flies walked on a stiff stained bandage wrapped around a forearm he laid across his thigh as if its stringy round was a tray for holding something he didn’t want connected with himself. She smelled more strongly that sticky sweetness and felt the pull jerk her toward him.
Saying nothing, everything fading from before her but that ulcerated wound, she knelt and closed her hand as gently as she could about it.
Pain. It slides into her hands, into her arms, it is warm and strong like hot cha inside her. Slowly, tenderly, she strokes her other hand along his arm, moves fingers feather light about the oozing wound beneath the rag. Her touches are on the edge of pain now. He begins to sweat copiously.
She feels a tickling, he feels a tickling, as she weaves new flesh layer on layer, fiber by fiber, warm and clean. He smiles, opens a wide toothless mouth and laughs. She laughs. Both sweat. Both breathe fast and shallow. She strokes the knot of the soggy bandage and it comes loose under her fingers. She unwraps the wound. The ooze and pus are crusted on new clean skin supple and pale against the cracking dark umber skin on the rest of his arm. She sits back on her heels, dropping the filthy bandage beside her. He touches the healed wound, presses his thumb down hard, jumps to his feet, yelling, snapping his fingers, slapping his hands in a dance of jubilation.
Serroi sat back, dazed with weariness. She heard a cry from the watchers, then a woman thrust a child with a great lump distending its throat in front of her and the pull was back, demanding and inescapable. She reached out, flattened her palm against the lump. There is a wrenching wrongness in the flesh, it sickens her, she fights to set it right, dimly she feels wonder because her body seems to know more than it possibly could about this healing, and she feels a touch of fear because it is magic, magic she has fought against all the years of her adult life, and as she thinks all this, the thing in her that heals keeps working, the lump is absorbed back into the boy’s body, the wrongness in him is corrected. She drops her hand and the pull is back, another child is laid on her knees, a scrawny sickly child with an obstruction in him that keeps him from swallowing solid food, she heals him, telling the body to absorb that obstruction, and another is set before her and she reaches out to him and the clamor in the court is unbearable, she is sick with exhaustion and the pulls keep coming. Then there is more noise and a shadow pools around her and the pulls retreat.
She looked up. Hern was standing over her, scowling at the others. She looked past him. The fenekeli had withdrawn, the noise smoothed out like pond water grown quiet once the wind has dropped. Hern reached down his hand. She took it. It was warm and strong and comforting in a way that disturbed her because it seemed to her she needed that comforting a bit too much. The thought of depending on him, on anyone, was not one she relished. With him half lifting her she got to her feet. He was worried. He felt her withdrawal though she hadn’t actually tried to pull away from him; as she knew him, so now he knew her, from the inside out, most unfair, she thought, he could read the shift of muscle, the small tautenings of her body she couldn’t even see, unfair, unfair. She freed her hand and pushed at her dirty hair. “What now?”
“You all right?”
“Tired. A little scared.”
“Want to go on, get out of here?” He touched her cheek very gently; she felt the anxiety in him and the deep caring, reached up and touched his fingers with hers.
“I don’t think it matters where I am, things won’t change, not for a while.” She looked down at her tattered sleeves. “And we need clothes.”
He laughed then, dropped his arm around her shoulders and turned her toward the single-story building at the back of the court. “Hekatoro’s got a room ready for us and water heating for baths.”
“Baths, Maiden bless, right now my idea of bliss.” Though the ailments of the fenekeli kept pulling at her, giving her a wobbly feel inside, Hern’s strength gave her strength to break away from them. He walked her though the silent staring groups of people and took her into the cool darkness of Hekatoro’s clan hive.
They stayed at HoldHek a tenday, living in a quiet corner of the big house. Because she was driven to, Serroi sat under the ancient lacetree and healed those that came to her or were brought to her. A strange and rather terrible time. When she came out in the morning the noise in the courtyard bit off, there was a subdued and strained silence, awe perhaps, more than a little fear, uneasiness and wariness as if she were a strange animal whose potential for danger was suspected but unknown. ClanHek was healthy in the main, but
there were always accidents, a crushed foot to be straightened and reformed, an abcessed tooth, skin cancers, injured eyes, shingles, boils, rashes and a thousand other non-lethal but nagging disabilities. And some came to her without physical ailment, needing just to talk, their spirits trapped until the fragile wings tattered in the web of intense and unremitting communal living.
Because Serroi was driven to the healing, she hated it. It was as if a stranger had crept inside her body and taken over its functions. It wasn’t the healing itself, it was the loss of control that troubled her. This brought back too many bitter memories, the Noris using her body to drive her beasts into exhaustion and death, using her for his drive to extend his rule into the realm of the living, making her do things that sickened her. As she had wrestled with Ser Noris, so she wrestled with the compulsion to heal, wanting nothing to do with anything that smelled of magic. When she wasn’t healing she sat in somber silence staring at a wall of the room Hekatoro had given them. At night she joined herself to Hern, seeking in a frantic passion exhaustion and escape from the dreams that tormented her.
Hern came into the room carrying a tray. Serroi was sitting on a wooden bench in the corner by a window, her head and torso in shadow, her hands tight on her knees, the late afternoon sunlight painting gold patterns on the heavy white linen robe, picking out green-gold highlights on her small straining hands. Lips pinched tight together, he squatted beside the low table that occupied the center of the room and transferred the bowls and pots from the tray to the table. When he was finished, he put the tray on the tile floor behind one of the pillows drawn up to the table, sat back on his heels and gazed at her, his face troubled, a muscle jumping at the corner of his mouth. He watched her a while, then lit the wick of the white porcelain lamp in the center of the table. She glanced at him, looked away again. “Atoro was disappointed,” he said. “You told him you’d join him for the evening meal.”