Maeve

by Clayton, Jo;

  Aleytys nodded, got silently to her feet and followed the cludair back under the trees. As they moved away from the clearing, the forest blocked out some of the noise so that it was possible to talk. She thought over what she had seen as she followed the silent, grieving forest man. Then she quickened her pace until she was walking beside him. “I suppose you tried driving it off.”

  “Too many died. Uselessly.” She could hear the pain in his voice. “We couldn’t touch it.”

  Aleytys frowned at the leaf-padded earth that muffled the sound of their feet. “I see. You want to know if I might have a way to kill the machine.” She rubbed her throat and considered the problem. “I think I do. They’d repair it, you know.” She shook her head as he caught eagerly at her arm. “They will repair whatever I do. And they’ll retaliate, hunter. Are you ready to face what that would mean for your people?”

  His first elation faded, replaced by a thoughtful optimism. “The forest is large. And you can break the machine again.”

  “I don’t know this Company, Tipylexne. They might keep fixing the machine for months. I can give you a little of my time but I can’t stay forever.”

  Tipylexne nodded briskly. “I understand. The council will consider.”

  Gwynnor watched the two emerge from the shadows, walking quickly together in quiet companionship. He clenched his fingers into fists until his knuckles ached, wanting to drive them into that exotic face, wanting to hit hit hit the starwoman until she lost that bone-deep certainty that marched her imperiously toward some goal; that gave her power over men who fumbled about in pain and confusion for the little self-knowledge that life seemed willing to allow them.

  Unconsciously, he drew his body in on itself, wrapping his arms around his knees, untying his fists and wrapping hands tautly about his calves, pulling himself as far as he could from contact with the silent cludair beside him. The slight, sweet oily smell of their mottled fur nauseated him. He tautened the muscles of his throat rather than humiliate himself by vomiting in front of them. He pressed his face against the hard bone of his knees and cursed the peithwyr whose attack had forced them off the plateau into this mess. A sharp spasm of shivers went through his crouching body and he wanted desperately to be back on the open plain, the gentle welcoming maes where yellow broom glowed like butter tucked in amid the grassy swells.

  The forest men drifted, silent as motes in a light beam, to cluster around Aleytys and Tipylexne. They spoke briefly, then Aleytys moved past them, coming to stand over him, eyes irritated, amused, understanding. He resented her understanding even while he desired it. The ambivalence she generated whipped him to and fro.

  She spoke. “You can return to your people, Gwynnor, if you want to.” Her voice caressed his ears. Again … again … the tart sweet fragrance from her body nearly brought him to sexual readiness. In a total embarrassment, tears gathering in his eyes, he fought for some kind of equilibrium. Leave her … leave … go back to the simple, uncomplicated life on the plains. Or stay … and endure the continual vertigo from having his world turned upside down repeatedly … and suffer … continual uprootedness as his certainties were undermined. Go? He struggled with the idea until he knew that there was no way he could force himself to do what he knew he should do.

  Aleytys looked down into the flat green eyes, all surface with no depth to them. She sighed, annoyed by his persistent abhorrence for living beings other than his own cerdd. Even her empathetic outreach that brought his stomach churning, disgust vibrating into her nerves along with his alternating surges of desire and despair, didn’t help her understand what created this furor in the cerdd. She felt his head jerk as she touched him. Letting her fingers move down over his ears to his neck, she wondered if she should try to heal that sickness in him. Then she looked into his eyes again.

  He watched her with a kind of puzzlement in his face, the brief sexual response dying with the anger it provoked.

  She pulled her hand away, shaking her head with disgust at herself. What right did she have to rearrange his personality without his consent and understanding? She stepped back and rubbed her hands down the sides of her tunic. “Well, if you want, come with us.” She jerked her head at the waiting cludair. “There’s a problem with starmen from the city. I think I can help. So. We go to talk over the implications of interference.” She smiled at him. “You’ve done all you need for me, my friend. I know you don’t like being here.”

  “You want me to go?” In spite of his obvious effort to speak calmly, his voice shook. She had to block out the blast of anguish flooding suddenly from him.

  “No. Of course not,” she said quickly. She dropped to her knees so that her eyes were closer to a level with his. “Gwynnor, I have to admit I don’t understand why you want to stay since you don’t even like me and you find the cludair repulsive.” She stared into his unresponsive face and shook her head. “Gwynnor, they’re people. Like you and me. People. Not animals.”

  He wrenched his eyes away. “They smell bad,” he muttered.

  “Damn.” Aleytys dropped back onto her heels. “How do I deal with that?” His sense of smell was considerably keener than hers. She glanced over her shoulder at the cludair waiting patiently for her. Their noses, though broader and less defined than Gwynnor’s suggested that they, too, had a strong dependence on odor for information. She sighed, recognizing her inability to understand a world where the nose was as important as the eyes in making value judgments. “It’s up to you, Gwynnor. I’ll be sorry to see you leave, but if you can’t endure these people, it would be better for you to go.”

  Gwynnor hugged his knees tighter. He felt hunted. He couldn’t explain to her that he wanted desperately to go away, but knives turned inside him whenever he thought of leaving her. Biting his lower lip, he turned his head and met the eyes of one of the cludair males. He jumped up. “I contracted to take you to the sea, gwerei. A matter of honor.”

  The starwoman stood. “I see,” she said. “If you think you can manage.” She nodded at Tipylexne. He turned and strode arrogantly down a nearly invisible trail, his hunters falling into line behind. As they followed, the starwoman turned to him. “Remember, my friend, I’m a healer. If this gets too bad, I can help.”

  He shivered and walked faster.

  “Gwynnor.”

  “What?” He threw the word back over his shoulder without slowing. He didn’t want to listen to her.

  “Smell works below the level of consciousness so you’ll be feeling queasy awhile.”

  “Huh?” Distracted, he tripped over a root and nearly fell. She caught hold of his arm, steadying him on his feet. Embarrassed, he walked beside her, staring fixedly at the green haze that shrouded everything more than a few meters off.

  “What I’m trying to say is you’ll get used to these strange smells quickly if you don’t keep tensed up all the time. Let yourself relax. Remember, even though you’re a stranger here, the cludair accept you.”

  “Because of you.”

  “So?” She chuckled suddenly, the sound startlingly loud against the background of small constant rustlings. “You ought to be cheering the cludair on, Gwynnor. They want to get the aliens off Maeve as much as you do. Maybe more.”

  He looked thoughtfully at the back of the cludair just ahead, feeling a little lightheaded as she forced him to examine once again the beliefs that ruled his life.

  Silence settled thickly around the line of walkers.

  Chapter VII

  “I see them, Lee. Give me time, will you?” Shadith’s purple eyes narrowed in a thoughtful frown. Using Aleytys’ farseeing gift, she probed into the machine as it ate slowly through the forest, spewing out lumber and debris. The sawteeth ripped through the scent glands in the wood, releasing gouts of odor until the stench was as overwhelming as the noise.

  Aleytys followed Shadith’s exploration, understanding nothing, feeling bewildered and lost in the complex of lines and forces the singer was sorting out to her obvious satisfaction.

/>   Shadith’s laughter gently mocked her. “I call them, you pull them, Lee. You don’t have to worry why.”

  “Huh.” Aleytys shifted on the uncomfortably knobby branch, looked briefly at the ground, shivered and wrenched her eyes away. “Well?”

  “Just be a good girl and listen.”

  “Girl!”

  Shadith sobered. “Look. There. You can see the power flowing like thin lines. Very close but not touching. All you have to do is force a conduit from one to the other. Then, whoosh! Pieces of machine raining from the sky. I’ll pick the spots. Mmmm. At least two, I think.”

  Aleytys wrinkled her nose. “It seems such a tiny thing to stop that monster.”

  Shadith’s laughter was full and warm. “Lee, a short between power lines carrying that load! Well, it’ll be effective. Believe me. You won’t be disappointed.”

  “If you say so.” Aleytys backed carefully down the limb to the trunk, then swung down to the forest floor.

  Qilasc fingered the nine rule-beads laced on a heavy thong that hung between her high, shrunken breasts. Tipylexne, reserved and impassive, stood beside her, hands tight on the short powerful bow that was the sign of his manhood. Behind him, six nameless cludair squatted calm and ready, expert hunters, with only their skills to worry about, not the life or death of a people.

  To one side, Gwynnor waited, back pressed against a tree, unhappy and tautly nervous. She smiled at him and, by effort of will, he produced a twitch of his lips in answer. Slowly, with her help, with the healing effect of the passage of time, with the growing familiarity with a naturally dignified and open-hearted people, he was breaking free from his instinctive revulsion for the cludair. Teaching the cludair boy, Ghastay, the first steps in playing the flute was helping the alteration in his attitude move faster and a good deal more easily. Aleytys’ smile widened as she saw him fingering the flute. She gazed thoughtfully at the finely crafted instrument, remembering the meeting in the long house …

  “I can’t be sure yet,” Aleytys said.

  The calm, strong face of the old woman was undisturbed by her uncertainty. Qilasc nodded. “Sister of fire,” she said quietly, looking once around the still faces of the women to gather their agreement for her words. “You can injure the harvester. I know it. And I know that we wish this.”

  “There’s something else to consider. Have you thought about reprisals?”

  Qilasc frowned, her hand going automatically to the heavy wooden beads. “The forest is big. What could they do? Attack women and children?”

  “The Company men have the morals of a starving wolf. Or worse. If you hurt them badly enough they might quarter the forest with their energy weapons until there was nothing left but ash.”

  “What choice have we?” The old woman shook her head. “Better to die in struggle and free than to lie down until we are nibbled to death.” She turned her head slowly around the silent circle of women. Each in turn nodded agreement. “Father of men?”

  Tipylexne nodded shortly, not wasting breath on unnecessary speech.

  A sigh exploded out of Aleytys. She rested her hands lightly on her knees. “I can’t stay too long with you. I’m on quest. My baby son was stolen from me by a crazy woman and I now travel in search of him.” She sat very straight, her face stern. “As you must see, people of the forest, I can let nothing hinder me.”

  “I understand.” The beads clacked again as Qilasc settled back to listen.

  “Eventually you’ll have to make some kind of bargain with the starmen. In the meantime, I need a distraction, something to mislead the Company men when I do my bit with the machine. One thing I’ve learned in my travels—starmen are bundles of superstition where groundings are concerned. Anything that smells of native magic scares hell out of most of them.”

  Qilasc stirred. “The only magic we know is that of fostering, the magic of growing things.”

  Aleytys smiled briefly. “I thought so. The spirits of the earth on this world are gentle and lazy. But the starmen don’t know that.” She snorted. “Anyone who’d ravage a forest with that hideous creation has the sensitivity of a …” As she sought an adequate comparison, she glanced at the somber faces around her, halting at Gwynnor who sat huddled near her in one corner of the torchlit house. “Of a peithwyr. So I suggest we play on the fears they already have. The physical they handle with contemptuous ease. As you have already seen. Shall we see what magic can do?”

  Qilasc frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t mean real magic. I mean tricks. I do my tricks with the machine and you provide a cover that should convince the Company men that you’re doing the things I make happen.”

  “How will that help?”

  Aleytys sighed. “From my experience,” she said patiently, “the only thing some Companies respect is power. If you bargain from a position of power, then you have a chance of getting what you want. Otherwise, they’re likely to ignore you.”

  A sudden smile lightened Qilasc’s straining face. “Like facing a rutting bull weywuks. You don’t argue about who rules the path unless you have a spear in the throwstick.”

  “Right.” She frowned. “I don’t find a word in your tongue for …” After struggling for a way to say what she meant in the limited tongue of the cludair, she went on slowly, “for the making of pleasant sounds like bird talk.”

  “Bird talk?”

  “Damn. That’s the closest I can get to …” She shook her head. “Though one can scarcely say the birds here make a pleasant noise.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

  “And I’m explaining badly. Never mind. Showing’s better anyway.” Aleytys turned to Gwynnor. “You carry a flute with you. Do you play it?”

  He nodded mutely. Then he shook his head. “I did,” he said, his voice barely louder than a whisper. His fingers fumbled with a thong crossing his shoulder, and pulled the instrument around in front of him. As he spoke, he ran trembling fingers up and down the slender length. “I don’t anymore.”

  Aleytys moved over to kneel beside him. One hand touched his face. “I need you,” she said softly. “The cludair don’t know music and I need music. I need you.”

  His mouth worked nervously. Then he stammered, “I can’t, Aleytys. Ay-aiiii … don’t ask me.”

  “You still have the flute. You haven’t thrown it away. I think you remember how to play it. Gwynnor, you’ll be fighting men you hate, fighting the Company men. Play a few notes for me. Please?”

  He licked his lips, glanced around uneasily. Then he raised the flute. At first, the sound that came out was harsh, cracked. Qilasc grimaced, made an impatient movement. This brought anger glowing in the boy’s eyes. He licked his lips again and stared blankly into the darkness at the curving top of the long house. When he played again, the sound steadied to a gentle lilting tune that rippled through the dim torchlit council house, startling grunts of delight from the councilors.

  “Gwynnor.”

  At the sound of Aleytys’ voice, the cerdd broke off his playing, looked uncertainly around, then stared down at suddenly shaking hands.

  “That is what the cerdd call music. The sound Gwynnor made with the wooden tube. On many worlds music is used to accompany magic, expecially the greater magics. The starmen will expect it and it will cover the reality. What I do is not magic, Qilasc, at least … I don’t know, I’m not really sure what people mean by magic anyway … this I do know—if they suspect what’s really happening, they have ways of detecting me. Now. Even if you don’t have the word for that,” she waved a hand at the flute, “have you anyone who makes sounds like that?”

  The old woman sighed. “We’re a silent people, fire sister. This is a new thing.”

  Aleytys frowned. “Does the sound offend your ears or your beliefs?”

  “No.” Qilasc looked vaguely wistful. Once again she glanced around the circle of women, checking their agreeing nods. “It is pleasant.”

  Turning back to Gwynnor
, Aleytys chewed on her lip a moment, looking thoughtfully from his instrument to his face. “Think you could teach one of the cludair to play a simple tune?”

  Gwynnor shrugged. “Depends on aptitude.”

  “How long did it take you to learn that thing you played?”

  “My life.” His mouth twitched into a brief smile at the shock in her face. “There are lesser degrees of proficiency, Aleytys.” Sadness darkened his young face. “I was apprenticed to a master eileiwydd—a maker of songs—when my gift was found at the Discerning. But …,” the words stumbled painfully from his lips, “he was killed a year ago by the Company men. They came hunting maranhedd and hit the caravan we were traveling with. He … he fell on me … protected me by his body … died as he lay over me … I felt his body shudder … after that I … I couldn’t go home … I joined Dylaw. I haven’t played …” He dropped into silence.

  Aleytys rubbed her finger along the crease beside her nose, then dropped her hand to cover his when she made up her mind. “We need you. Will you try?”

  After a minute he lifted dull eyes. “I don’t want to.”

  “If it would hurt the Company men? Hurt them where they’d really feel it, in their profits?” She felt anger flare in him, partly directed at the Company men, but partly at her for forcing this painful decision on him.

  “I’m going to try to teach them to respect the cludair and their forest. I’m going to make them feel cold fear run along their bones whenever they hear the sound of your flute. I want you to wake such terror in them that they’ll turn tail and stampede. Will you help me?”

  His face flushed then paled. Unable to speak he nodded once. Then nodded again, the hunger in him so intense it battered at her. She clutched at her sliding senses and raised her shields. “Good. How long would it take to teach a cludair a simple tune?”