by Clayton, Jo;
Dinafar knew from the heat and tightness in her face that she was blushing scarlet. She stammered, “I’m not … I’m.…”
The meie smiled. “Relax, Dina.” She continued to work on Dinafar’s knotted calf muscles until she’d worked out most of the soreness and stiffness, then she stood and stretched, finally looked down. “That better?”
Dinafar sat up. “Yes.” She pulled her legs up, wrapped her arms around them and examined the place with considerable curiosity.
She was sitting in the center of a tiny lush valley almost like a deep hole in the rock. The turf under her was cool and green, thick-set Blades of short springy grass. By one wall a spring bubbled clear, cold water into a pool that never seemed to fill. Above the spring, carved with some delicacy into the living stone, was a great-eyed figure, generously female but obviously not human. “Who is she?”
The meie glanced at the carving. “The Maiden,” she said quietly. “As the creasta shurin see her. This is a shrine-place.”
“Creasta shurin?” Dinafar frowned. “I thought they were just children’s tales.”
The meie laughed. “No, that they most certainly aren’t.” She unbuckled her weaponbelt and let it fall beside Dinafar. “Just shy and content to be unnoticed.” She unclipped her bow and set it down more carefully, laying it on the belt to keep it off the grass. “For very good reasons they keep away from men, too many of them have been killed for their pelts, but they are allied to the Biserica so a shuri should answer my call. We need a guide to show us the quickest and easiest way through the mountains; Maiden bless, the Kapperim don’t usually come above the treeline.” She shook her head then, looking troubled. “Can’t count on that, I’m afraid. Nothing holds the way it should this year.” She glanced at the carved figure. “I don’t understand what’s happening.” She shook her head. “No matter. In a little while I’ll call a shuri and see what problems the mountains will present us with.”
“Already?” Dinafar was dismayed; she’d thought they were settled for a while, this mountain cup felt safe and her body rebelled at the thought of climbing back on the macai.
The meie got to her feet and started toward the beasts who were grazing placidly not far from them. “I’m sorry, Dina, but I warned you. I’m pushed for time, I.…” She sighed, shrugged. “You’ll have to keep up as best you can.” But when Dinafar started to get up to help her with the gear, the meie stopped her. “Rest now, you’ve got a hard night ahead of you.”
When the macain were stripped, the meie brought her saddlebags to the edge of the pool, knelt on the grass and started digging in one of them. She pulled a round loaf from the bag, glanced at Dina who lay sprawled comfortably on the grass watching her. “Catch.” The loaf landed with a little bounce on Dinafar’s stomach. She giggled and sat up. The meie dug farther and tossed over a parcel of fish paste. “Make us a sandwich; careful of this one.” She lobbed a long-bladed knife to Dinafar. It landed with its handle toward her, a foot from her hand. “This too.” The meie threw a tin cup to Dinafar and jumped to her feet, a flat pan in her hand. She nodded at the pool. “Good water.” For a moment she stood frowning, her fingernails clicking against the bottom of the pan. “I’ll get us some brambleberries. There’s a vine over there.” She nodded her head at the bramble web climbing the rock in a mist of green and purple.
Dinafar caught the cup, gazed at it, then at the meie as she searched through the leaves for the berries, dropping them like purple rain into the pan. Her fingers trembled. The fishers wouldn’t let her touch anything they ate from. She’d drunk from an old cracked mug that she washed herself and hid from children’s malice. Some of the boys broke her things whenever they could find them. She’d eaten from a wooden dish flung at her head, using a warped horn spoon she’d scavenged from the midden behind the Intii’s Hall. She’d been beaten for that, for having dared to touch it without begging permission—begging. They let her keep it, since it was already defiled by her touch. She looked down at the meie’s drinking cup, shared so casually, down at the loaf of bread and the fish paste and the knife. She set the cup gently aside and picked up the knife.
The meie came back, the pan heaped with berries. She took the sandwich from Dinafar, cut it in half, took half and raised her eyebrows at the empty cup. Her eyes searched Dinafar’s face, then she took the cup, filled it at the pool and brought it back. “Drink,” she said. There was pain in her face: Dinafar lowered her eyes, uneasy; the meie read her too deeply. “Drink.” the meie repeated softly.
Dinafar took the cup in shaking hands and sipped at the water. She handed it back to the meie who deliberately turned it and touched her lips to the spot on the rim where Dinafar’s mouth had been. She drank, then dropped onto her knees. Saying nothing—no words were needed—she placed the cup halfway between them and wriggled from her knees to a cross-legged comfort on the grass. She picked up her half of the sandwich and began eating.
Dinafar hesitated. She tried to trust what she saw, but the years of conditioning made it hard. Her body was stiff as she reached for a handful of berries, then began eating the sandwich. She reached awkwardly for the cup to wash down a mouthful of bread suddenly too dry. She drank, her hands shaking, water spilling from her lips, embarrassing her. She carefully wiped the rim of the cup against her sleeve, then drew her arm across her mouth. When she looked up, the meie was smiling gravely at her.
“Go gently, child,” the meie said. The quiet understanding in her face should have soothed Dinafar’s unease, but instead stirred her anger. It was an intrusion into places where the meie had not been invited. The meie shook her head. “Relax and accept what you can. You have to learn. There are no castes at the Biserica.” She watched Dinafar a moment longer then settled into a physical tranquility that was curiously infecting.
Dinafar caught that infection and gradually managed to relax into a drifting dreaming state beyond irritation and anger. She ate slowly and when she was finished she brushed bread crumbs from her mouth and lap, then sat quietly across from the meie, her hands folded in her lap, letting the stillness of the shurini shrine-place and the serenity of the meie bring her a peace unlike anything she’d felt before.
The tiny valley was filled with sound—the macain cropping at the short succulent grass, the wind whispering through spindly trees growing in a thin line along one cliff, the water gurgling in its basin, an occasional bird singing a soaring song, a lazy insect drone. The sun was hot as it slid off zenith, but it was not uncomfortable. In a little while she stretched out on the grass and slipped into a deep sleep.
THE CHILD: 4
She was beginning to know him. After three years in the tower she knew his moods, when he could be coaxed into talking about himself, when he was unwilling to be touched in any way. That he had some affection for her she knew. That it was shallow rooted she also knew. She was never too secure with him, aware always that his feelings for her would stand little strain. She knew these things without working them out; in her eighth year she still had no words for much of what she knew from instinct, not logic. She watched him, tried to please him, gave him the love that filled her and tormented her, the love that no one had ever been willing to accept from her—no one but her animals. She struggled to be what he wanted her to be although often she couldn’t be sure just what that was.
He was cool and precise with a passion for detail and a demand for perfection that sometimes drove her into angry rebellion. During the past two years he’d tested her again and again to find the limits of her special talents, what the organ behind the eye-spot was capable of, how far its influence reached and the number of things it could do. She worked herself to utter weariness to please him but he was insatiable. She survived and thrived because she shared with him his thirst for knowledge. She learned small spells to handle wind and water. She learned to deflect lightning and lift small stones. She watched the Noris dip into the sub-worlds and call forth demons, even talked with them when he let her. He continually touched the eye-s
pot, stroking his fingers over it, resting them on it as if he tried to absorb its substance through them. Sometimes he hurt her; sometimes he frightened her; sometimes it seemed to her that he was trying to slip into her skin he probed so deep into how she felt and what she knew when she woke the spot.
Everything he learned about that organ she learned also. She already knew that she could call animals; the Noris told her how she did it—enticing them through their pleasure centers, giving them a pleasure reward when they did what she wanted. The longer she knew a particular animal, the stronger her control grew until it went far beyond the original crudity of the pain-pleasure response—almost as if she and it grew together into one complex being. She learned also that the organ could find anything she desired, the finding and desiring being reaction and trigger. Anything she could picture in her mind, she could locate, establishing a direction line and following it until she came as close as she could to the thing. This need to have the image in her mind limited her to things she knew, but her limits were rapidly broadening as she learned to read.
Her days passed quickly, were packed with activity. She studied her books, tended the plants that always died no matter how much care she lavished on them and were always replaced, played with her animals, fed them, talked to them, kept them healthy. She knew them all now, even the sicamar. In the evenings she’d let him out of his cage. He’d run wildly around the court, leaping and teasing invisible prey like a great savage kitten, he’d lick her with his rough tongue until he nearly rasped her skin off, he’d butt his head against her, he’d stretch out on his back, four huge feet waving in the air, and beg her to scratch his belly. Sometimes in the roughness of his play he’d knock her sprawling, sometimes he sat with his front end in her lap, purring frantically as she scratched behind his ears, her hands buried in his thick green ruff. Of all the animals, though, her favorites were the chinin. They had free run except when the sicamar was out of his cage, she took them up the stairs into her room while she studied, the three pups slept on her bed, curled up at her feet.
To her astonishment, she found that there were more languages than there were kinds of speakers. She could puzzle out five of them now, though she couldn’t speak them. She spent long happy hours bent over the scrolls stored in her room, drinking in knowledge of strange things and strange places.
Evenings she joined the Noris to talk a little, get his answer to things that puzzled her, or simply sit in quiet companionship. He was her father, her family, her teacher. She trusted him, finally, as much as she ever would trust anyone. And she loved him in spite of the unexpected chill he could wake in her when he went away, retreated into that mind space where she couldn’t follow.
She was rolling on the floor of her room, playing with the new batch of pups when the Noris opened the door and looked in. Serroi sat up, startled, then jumped to her feet. “Ser Noris?”
He looked around the littered room, lifted his brows, then beckoned to her, eyes twinkling. “I’ve brought you something else to play with, Serroi. Come see.”
The rock opened for them again, melting into a narrow spiraling staircase that circled high into the tower until they came to a bronze slab blocking off further rise. Serroi ran up the last stairs, then jerked to a stop. There was no hook. She looked over her shoulder at the Noris.
“You’ll have to have my servants open this for you when you come here.” He leaned over her and touched the bronze. The door swung slowly open.
The room inside was much barer than hers. There were a bed and a chair, some pegs on the wall with small tunics hanging on them. The window was high on the wall and barred. There was nothing else visible until a small blond boy came around the end of the bed and stood staring at them, sucking on his thumb, his eyes wide and frightened.
Serroi hated him immediately. Pressing against the Noris’s leg, she said, “I don’t want him. Send him away.”
The Noris patted her curls and pushed her forward. “No, Serroi. We’re done with animals for a time. I want you to learn to command him as you do your chinin.” He stood in the doorway watching her.
She glared at the boy. He was three or four, almost as tall as she; his eyes were a deep blue like distant seawater; his tunic was as blue as his eyes; his feet were bare; his skin shone a golden glowing brown like amber in sunlight. He was frightened of the Noris, even frightened of her. She socked her fists onto his hips and scowled at him. “Boy, come here.”
“Nescu-va?” The shrill voice trembled, tears filled his eyes.
“Ha!” She pounced on him, pinched his arm, then pulled him out into the middle of the room. “What’s your name, boy?” She poked his finger at the middle of his chest. “Name.”
He stared silently at her; his thumb came up and he put it in his mouth; the tears crept down his dirty face, cutting runnels in the dust.
“Serroi.”
At the sound of her name she turned. The Noris was watching her, a lazy amusement in his eyes. “Use this.” A shiny black pebble was suddenly in the palm of his hand. She took the thing and scowled up at him.
“I don’t like that boy,” she said.
“No matter. Learn to control him.” The Noris bent and brushed his fingers gently across her eye-spot. “When you want to leave, call the servants.”
Commanding humans was harder for her. They were slippery, with stubborn, strong egos. The boy resisted her. The more she slapped and pinched and yelled at him, the more he slipped away from her. Even with the black pebble to translate for her, she never got close to him. Her intense jealousy was one reason, the boy’s own implacable hostility was another. She was jealous of him because he was male, able to be a Nor if her Noris so desired; she could never be.
She stood in her own small pentacle as he summoned a firedrake and used him to spin a strange and beautiful thing of gold and moonstones and crysoberyl. Part of it curved from view as if it dipped right out of this world; in the center of the tangle was an oval emptiness. Though she ached with curiosity, she knew enough to keep still until the Noris was finished and the firedrake returned to his subworld.
“What’s that for?” She hugged her thin arms across her flat chest and stared with fascination at the construct in his hands.
“Be still!”
Serroi shrank back; his anger hurt her. She needed to please him. Her hand pressed against her mouth, she nodded, watched as he completed the thing he was making.
The anger faded from his eyes as he turned away. He held the construct in one hand, used the other to draw lines of blue fire in the oval vacancy, complex lines that might have been the symbolic representations of the great WORDS he used to command. The designs wove tighter, blurred into a shimmer then smoothed out into a blue-silver surface that filled the vacancy completely. A mirror. Serroi bit down hard on her lip to hold in an exclamation of delight. She watched as the Noris touched the immaterial shimmer, stroked it solid as if he froze light into metal fit to take the image of a face.
The hands carried the mirror away. Serroi watched it go, wistfully thinking that she’d never know now what it was for. She looked up to see the Noris smiling down at her. She started to go to him, stopped at his upthrust hand.
“Don’t cross the lines of the pentacle, Serroi. Not yet.” He spoke a WORD and the lines drawn on the floor melted into mist. “Come now.”
In her room the mirror was sitting on a small table under the rack of scrolls. Serroi danced over to it, then looked back at the Noris. He smiled and waved her around. She knelt in front of the mirror and looked down at the image of her greening face.
“What would you like to see?”
Serroi frowned. “See? The vinat herd?”
“Touch the mirror.”
Serroi looked up at him, then touched the shining surface. It was cold and hard under her fingers. She trembled, bent closer. The blue-silver shimmer rippled, then cleared. She saw a vinat herd pouring across the tundra under the long sun. The grass was green and lush, the limul flowers thick,
brilliant patches of red and yellow dotting the green, the sky clear, blue, cloudless. She could almost feel the whip of the brisk wind across her face as she watched small high-wheeled carts moving along beside the herd. She soared over them as if she were a hunting bird sailing through that crystalline blueness. Wondering if the people were her own or from another clan of windrunners, she bent over the mirror and peered at the miniature figures, trying to make out features. The mirror answered to her desire and the focus altered until she was hovering just above the carts. She saw her grandfather sitting on the lead cart, singing as he was wont to do. He looked content, well-satisfied with his life. Her brothers rode vinat beside the cart. Inside, her mothers and sisters were sitting as she’d sat so many times. She blinked. Seeing them made her feel uncomfortable.
The Noris dropped a scroll beside her. She picked it up and began unrolling it. Then she smiled. The scroll was a geography of the western continent. She looked at the paragraph by her thumb. Sankoy. The rug weavers. She touched the mirror again. When it cleared, she saw a long narrow room with a loom stretching from floor to ceiling. A dozen girls worked small fingers over the vertical threads, tying and tying and tying knots, never stopping, their fingers like machines, eyes large, glazed, in pinched and unhealthy faces. Serroi shuddered and touched the image away.
“Use the mirror to learn, Serroi.” The Nori sounded pleased.
She turned; he was in the doorway watching her. She rose from where she was kneeling and confronted him. “I want to, be a Noris.”
After a startled second, he brooded over what she’d said, obviously troubled because he didn’t know what to say to her. Slowly, he shook his head. “That is not possible.”
“Why? I’m not stupid. I can learn. You’ve already taught me some spells. I can learn more. I can.”
“You’re female.” He said it with a quiet finality as if that were the only explanation necessary.
She refused to accept it. “I can learn as fast as any stupid old boy. I’ve been here three years now. I’ve learned lots of things. I can learn to be a Noris.”