by Tara Maya, Elle Casey, J L Bryan, Anthea Sharp, Jenna Elizabeth Johnson, Alexia Purdy (epub)
The travelers had stopped an hour before sunset to eat evening meal and camp by the river. The two groups of adults were too busy talking amongst themselves to bother about enforcing the No Talking rule among the Initiates. The boys had gone hunting together.
Dindi had hoped to spend some time alone, but Gwenika had found her, as usual, and now Dindi heard the voices of other Initiates meandering toward the log bridge.
“Your mother is a Zavaedi and you dance just as well as she,” Jensi was telling Gwena, the elder sister. Kemla and five or six other girls were with them too. “They say you’ll be invited to join the Tavaedi for sure.”
“So you’re that good, are you?” Kemla, nearby, shoved her way into the conversation. “What can you do? Let’s have our own little Vooma.”
Gwena looked coy. The Tavaedies were out of sight behind some trees around a bend in the river. “You know we can’t perform tama.”
“Who said anything about tama? I just want to see what you can do. Do you see that log? Can you do this?”
Kemla ran to the log and cartwheeled across it. She held her arms up in a V on the other side. “Well?”
“That’s so easy I can do it with one hand behind my back,” said Gwena. She cartwheeled over the log with one hand resting in the small of her back.
“Who needs hands?” said Kemla. With a rush back across the log in the opposite direction, she executed a no-handed cartwheel, landed on the log and did a handstand off the edge of the log to drop to the bank again. She crossed her arms and smirked at Gwena.
“Fa!” said Gwena. “Babies could do as much. Try this.”
Bending over backwards, Gwena flipped swiftly across the log in two successive back handsprings.
Kemla immediately followed by attacking the log with a round off back handspring.
Gwena replied with a full-twisting double back leap, an amazing move that ended with two backwards somersaults in the air before she landed several paces past the log.
“That’s nothing,” Jensi said loudly.
Kemla and Gwena both swiveled their heads in her direction.
“You think you can do better, Jensi?”
“Not me. I’m not insane. But I’ve seen Dindi do flips like that on a branch half as thick and twice as high off the ground. Haven’t you, Dindi?”
Dindi turned flame red. “Jensi, what are you doing?”
“You’re better than both of them put together. Show them what you can do!”
She wanted to sink into the earth and dissolve. “Um.”
“Yes, Dindi, show us what you can do,” Kemla said like sticky sweet poison.
“Sure, Dindi, give it a go,” Gwena said, more kindly. “It’s all in fun.”
Urged by the other girls, Dindi stood up. She ran toward the log.
“Dindi, wait, don’t you—” began Jensi, but her warning came too late.
Dindi flipped herself into a handstand at the end of the log before she realized she had forgotten to take off her shoulder basket. Turned upside down, the flap at the top snapped from the pressure and the entire contents spilled over her, down the log and into the river.
She squealed and tumbled out of the handstand. She caught her fall in a roll in the soft mud of the bank, so she wasn’t hurt, but the fall must have looked less controlled than it was because Jensi screamed, Kemla laughed and Gwenika gasped, “Mercy! Are you all right?”
True enough, it made a mess. When Dindi stood up, river slime coated her face and hair, not to mention her white wrap. Worse yet, her beautiful white dancing costume had fallen in the river, fortunately just in the shallows, and was covered with mud as well. Several of the heavy stone tools had rolled in deeper, and Dindi had to wade into the chill water up to her thighs to find them all. Was that everything?
The corncob doll.
She didn’t see it either on the bank or in the water. She was just starting to panic when she heard Kemla burst into another peal of laughter.
“Fa la, Dindi, is this your totem doll?” Kemla asked, holding up the ratty cob by its torn dress.
“Give it back to me,” said Dindi. The water reeds in the river tangled her feet as she struggled to climb back up the riverbank to grab the doll.
“Just look at it! Have you ever seen an uglier doll?”
Kemla threw the doll to Gwena, who sniggered. “She’s bald!”
The girls played keep-away with the doll, throwing it from one to another every time Dindi tried to snatch it back.
“She has no face!”
“All the beads have fallen off!”
“It looks a hundred years old!”
“What a disaster of a totem!” Kemla cried. “How—appropriate!”
The other girls on the bank laughed. Even Jensi. Not Gwenika though.
“This isn’t funny,” Dindi tried to jump and catch doll from out of the air, but Kemla caught it first and did a one handed cartwheeled over the log with the doll in her other hand.
“You have to come get it,” Kemla said. “Cross the log for it—on your hands. If you let your feet touch the log, I’ll throw Baldy here in the water.”
Gwena led the rest of the girls in a slow, rhythmic clap. None of them would help her. They thought this was just a game. If Dindi tried to warn them of the real danger, they would laugh and tease her.
Clap.
Clap.
Clap…
What choice did she have? She couldn’t think of any clever way to put them in their place. If her fae friends were here, she would have at least had allies. But the only faery watching was a blue haired rusalka who lurked in the deeper currents at the center of the river. Feral glee swirled in her eyes and her waterweed hair swayed with the whitewater eddies of the river. If anything, she seemed to take more pleasure from Dindi’s misery than the human girls—rusalki were nasty Blue fae who enjoyed drowning humans. Fae weren’t always nice either.
Dindi handstanded onto the log. Her muddy skirt flipped down over her waist, revealing her loin girds, which caused more giggling. She grit her teeth and ignored it. Palm by palm, she hand-walked down the log. The moss slipped under her fingers, but she grasped the grooved bark underneath to keep her grip. It had been easy when she’d been practicing by herself, but now she felt self-conscious and clumsy.
“You have to ask nicely,” Kemla shouted from the far bank as Dindi neared the center of the log.
“Can I please have my totem doll back?” Upside down and covered with mud, she felt like an utter fool, but she had to have the doll back before it hurt somebody.
“Sure, Dindi. Here it is!”
Kemla threw the corn cob doll as hard as she could right at Dinid’s solar plexus.
Light flashed all around her. No, not now, was Dindi’s last thought before she tumbled into the water below and into the other mind.
Vessia
Vessia found Danumoro in a place where people lived on three hills, which they called the Tors of Yellow Bear tribehold. The people here wore much gold and they snickered at Vessia when she walked the rows between their houses without even a single gold necklace to grace her neck. “Another grubby exile from the Rainbow Labyrinth,” the women commented loudly to one another as she passed. “I don’t mind the outtriber Initiates, at least they pay their way, but the exiles are too much. Dirty beggars.”
Danumoro, in contrast, expressed delight that she had come. His only disappointment was that she had not come to marry him.
“The local secret society here knows I am a Yellow Tavaedi, but the dances I know are different than theirs, so I do not dance with them,” he explained to Vessia. “But they don’t bother me if I dance healing for those in need, and that’s how I barter for my needs. Also, when I first came here, I healed Hertio, who is now War Chief for the whole tribehold, and he still counts me as a friend.”
Vessia nodded, though she didn’t understand. The intricacies of people’s social exclusions and inclusions layered over one another like autumn leaves accumulating on the
forest floor, obscuring and transforming the underlying foundation past recognition.
“You can accompany me on my rounds,” he added. “Do you know any dances of healing?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can teach you what you don’t know yet. I know you can dance Yellow. I’ve seen you.”
“I dance what I dance,” she shrugged.
So wherever he went, she followed him. She watched. She learned. Not just the dances he performed, which she found stilted and simple, but his manner with people, which she found astonishing and complex. Sometimes Danumoro would spend much time tending people with small complaints. Though he did little for them, they would put corn, meat, shells—even pebbles of gold, which he said were most valuable of all—into his travel basket when he departed.
“Why do you dance so long for them?” Vessia asked. “You could have healed them with a gesture.”
“I know,” he admitted. “But if they perceive my tama as taking a long time, they will give me more. They don’t want to be told that they are spoiled squawk birds. They want to be fawned over and catered to. That’s the real reason they fill my basket.”
“So what matters is filling the basket?” she asked, trying hard to understand. “But then why do you also go to the people who don’t fill your basket?”
He grimaced. “I tend the wealthy only so I can afford to tend the poor. If I could, I would only dance for those who can’t fill my basket, but I need to eat too.”
Many of those who couldn’t fill his basket were the “dirty beggars” of whom the gold-clad women of the tribehold spoke so scathingly. Exiles from the Rainbow Labyrinth, these people were dirty, and they did beg in the streets, where they slept. Hertio had found a way to keep them from being idle all day; any who wished could go work dragging dirt and stones to build a new tor a short distance from the three tors already in the valley. In return, at the start and end of the day, each worker would be given a handful of corn gruel. But some were too young, too old, too weak in body or too weak in mind to do even that much. These were Danumoro’s patients.
She learned how he healed. He used herbs and leaves, teas and poultices, but this was only a part of it. An aura of light, woven like a basket into different patterns, surrounded each person. Danumoro kneaded the aura with gestures over the patient’s body. In more serious cases, he drew strands of the patient’s aura into his dance to reshape it and redeploy it. “I never really heal anyone,” he explained to Vessia. “They heal themselves. I just show their aura how to do it.”
Except he couldn’t always stop the weave from unraveling. Once, he could not save a hollow-eyed orphan child from falling asleep. When none of his dancing would wake the child, he wept like a child himself.
“Some wounds never heal. Sometimes it’s better to let go. But it’s hard, Vessia, it’s hard to let go, even when it hurts us more to hold on.”
“Why does it bother you so much?” Vessia asked.
“Eight years old is too young to die,” he said. He dashed away his tears and punched the air. “The Bone Whistler murdered that child, as surely as if he did it with his own hands. How I wish I could kill that monster.”
Another time, Danumoro tended a man with boils under his arms. Rather than dance healing, he said to the man’s family, “The plague yeech have already conquered him. You must send him away to the Tor of the Stone Hedge right away, and burn his house, or more yeech will come.”
“What does it mean to go to the Tor of the Stone Hedge?” asked Vessia after they hurried away from that house and the wailing family.
“It means the man is already dead,” said Danumoro. “I can’t help him. The Deathsworn must finish him before others die.”
“The Deathsworn?”
“Sometimes,” Danumoro explained reluctantly, “there are those who are too sick or injured to live. There are those who are old and never had children to care for them in their last years. And there are criminals and witches who break the law of light and shadow. Such people go to a place marked by a black stone. The Deathsworn come to take them.”
“Take them?”
“Kill them, Vessia,” he said gently.
She couldn’t understand why one would try so hard to make some live, and so hard to make some die.
Vessia heard many rumors and opinions about a person called the Bone Whistler, none good. Then one day, a new rumor swept through the tribehold: The Bone Whistler’s army is marching on Yellow Bear. The exiles panicked. Some fled immediately, heading toward the Green Woods. Others heeded the call of the War Chief Hertio to join his warriors and “face the blooded spear like men”.
Danumoro stayed. “I’ve already run once. I wish I could dance Red.”
“Not to heal.”
“No, not all dances are for healing,” he said.
Soon new exiles arrived—not Rainbow Labyrinth tribesfolk, but Yellow Bear tribesfolk whose clanholds had been razed by the advancing army of the Bone Whistler. They begged for help on behalf of other clanholds in the Bone Whistler’s path. Hertio agreed to send Tavaedies and warriors out to help them.
Danumoro volunteered for the mission. He forbade Vessia from accompanying him, but she followed anyway. By the time they arrived, however, the battle had already ended. Wounded littered the field.
“It looks like I will be healing after all,” Danumoro said grimly. In these times, the Yellow Bear Tavaedies did not object when he joined their circle of dancers.
The Tavaedies divided the wounded into two groups. They treated one group kindly and began to dance healing for them at once. They tied up the men in the second group.
While the healers busied themselves with the first group, Vessia wandered over to the tied up men. One in particular caught her attention. The man had strong masculine features and an athletic physique, which Vessia had learned meant he was to be considered handsome. That wasn’t what drew her. Rather, it was the way he looked at her, directly, unafraid.
“Why did they tie you up?” she asked him. “Why aren’t they healing you?”
He looked amused. “They would rather piss in our teeth.”
“Why do you serve the Bone Whistler?” she asked. “Nobody likes him.”
“The Bone Whistler does not aspire to be liked,” said the man. “He aspires to be loved. And people love most what they fear most.”
Vessia wrinkled her brow. “That is not how Danu explained love to me. He’s often told me he loves me, but never that he fears me.”
The prisoner studied her. “I’m not sure why, but I think I should fear you.”
She looked him up and down. Gashes crisscrossed his bare chest. His arms were pinned behind his back. Nothing remained of his leather legwals but shreds and he hadn’t shaved in several days. Blood, sweat and muck smudged the muscles of his chest and arms.
“Well, I don’t fear you,” said Vessia.
The prisoner laughed. It was a low rumble almost like a purr. “You wound me more than any of the weapons I have faced in battle, beautiful one.”
The Tavaedies had finished healing everyone in the first group as best they could. Now they approached the second group with drawn knives.
“Ah,” said the prisoner, jerking his chin in their direction. He smiled defiantly as he said it. “Here come my executioners.”
Danumoro stepped in front of the prisoners. “Don’t.”
The prisoners looked surprised. Vessia noticed that they all glanced at the handsome strong one for direction. Which was strange, she thought, because he wore no marks of leadership. In fact, he wore less than the other men. As if he had removed his outer garments to hide the markings on them.
He’s their leader. But he doesn’t want us—his enemies—to know.
“You of all people should rejoice in the blood of these murderers, Herb Dancer,” the Yellow Bear Tavaedies told Danumoro.
“Then listen to me when I plead for the lives of these enemies,” Danumoro said.
After much argument, th
ey finally gave in to him. But none of them would heal the wounded warriors of the Bone Whistler. Danumoro crossed his arms and addressed the prisoners.
“If you give me your parole that you will not try to run, I will dance healing for you,” he said.
Again, the men’s eyes slid subtly toward the handsome one, who inclined his head slightly.
“We’ll do it,” said a gruff warrior who held an unconscious man in his lap. “Start with Bapio, here. He’s in a bad way.”
One by one, Danumoro took aside the wounded enemy warriors and healed them to the best of his ability. Not all survived, but Vessia could tell by his dancing that he tried as hard to save them as he had his own people. The handsome one sent all the other men before himself to be healed. He insisted his wound was not that bad. Finally, Danumoro gestured for him to come. Only then did Vessia realize that the entire time the handsome prisoner had been holding a broken arrow still in the flesh where it had punctured his lower back.
Danumoro was furious. “This is a terrible wound! You should have let me treat it right away!”
“I’m fine,” the handsome one said. Now that she knew what to look for, though, Vessia realized that his smile was pinched with pain. He had to have been in ghastly agony the entire time he was sitting there sending his men to be helped before himself. Grumbling, Danumoro directed the prisoner to the center of his healing circle. He pulled out the arrow—the prisoner grunted, but clenched his teeth rather than cry out—and staunched the wound with special leaves.
An aura of light surrounded the handsome prisoner. All people had auras, but some, Vessia had noticed, were stronger and more colorful than others, and his aura gleamed brilliantly. Danumoro noticed it too. After he finished his dance, the hole in the man’s lower back looked better, but Danumoro frowned.
“You’re a Tavaedi,” he accused the prisoner.
The handsome prisoner lifted an eyebrow. “If you were going to kill me, you should have done it before you drained your aura healing me.”
“Tell me your Shining Name,” demanded Danumoro.
“No.”
“You owe me your life, but you won’t even give me your name?”