Diadem from the Stars

by Clayton, Jo;

  Chalak sighed and shook his head. “Aleytys …”

  She ignored him. “Azdar!”

  Her father didn’t answer; as she watched he seemed to shrink. With a low growl he turned his back on her. The three o’amalehha stepped in between them like a chunky wall, protecting the Azdar and defying the daughter. They were wide stocky men with deep-set fanatical yellow-brown eyes and straggly moustaches that covered their mouths. Twisted bast fibers ran in triple circles around their heads, pinning the sweat-stained headcloths close to the round skulls. Their abbas were made of heavy pan cloth and swung loosely about their bodies, emphasizing their width and compounding the impression of massive strength. They glanced repeatedly at her out of the corners of their eyes—eyes that glittered with a mixture of lust and fear that sickened her and at the same time heated even more the rage that boiled inside her. She took another step forward, angrily conscious that somehow she’d lost her momentum.

  “Aleytys, go back to the house.” Chalak’s voice sounded weary. She jerked her head around to look at him. His face was somber, frowning—but not hostile. Not hostile, she thought, with a flash of pleasure.

  “No,” she said quietly. “Not this time.”

  Mavas and Yurrish lumbered toward her, angry scowls twisting their round lumpish faces. Chalak checked them with a quiet gesture. Yurrish glanced uncertainly over his shoulder, waiting for a signal from Azdar to tell him what to do. Mavas stared at Aleytys, his face red, his small eyes filled with fear-born hate.

  Aleytys laughed shrilly, an ugly sound slicing through the tense silence, laughed as much at her own stupidity as at them, but only Chalak guessed that. Mavas hissed the breath out of his nose, simmering on the verge of explosion. Aleytys sneered at him. “You af’iha touch me and I’ll make you sorry.”

  “Aleytys …” Chalak’s low voice held a warning that she ignored.

  “Mavas,” Azdar said suddenly. “Get her out of here.”

  “No!” she screamed. “No! I want to talk to you, that’s all. Qumri is …”

  They brushed past Chalak and seized her arms roughly, strong thick fingers bruising to the bone. As they began shoving her back toward the door, she screamed angrily, helplessly, “Azdar! you kamdil! You fathered me. Af’i! Keep that bitch off my back. I’ll make you sorry, I’ll … oooohh.”

  The two men pushed her savagely through the door and down the ramp, not caring how they hurt her in the process. As they reached the bottom she calmed down a little and managed to get her feet back under her. “Muttahid, muttahid, come on, let loose.” She tried to free her arms. “I’ll go. I won’t bother you anymore. You don’t have to …” She wriggled in their grasp, trying to pull away. “I said I give up. Come on, be reasonable.”

  Mavas’s fingers bit into her shoulder and he shoved harder, forcing her to stumble and run along between him and Yurrish. She began to get angry again. With a grunt of effort she swung her feet out suddenly and thrust her weight down hard, breaking herself free. She sat down hard on the grass, knocking the wind out of herself.

  Mavas reached down and wrapped his fingers in her long hair. A tight grin on his face, he jerked hard, swinging her around till her arms flapped like a jointed doll. He laughed.

  With a scream of outrage and pain Aleytys scrambled onto her feet. Anger became a wild river of rage so strong it was almost tangible. She could feel the burning hot flow sweeping down her arms into her fingers. Without thinking she flung her hands out and slapped the faces of her captors. The rage tore through her palms.

  Mavas roared with pain and stumbled away from her. At the same time Yurrish shrilled a fervent curse and backed off, holding trembling hands in front of his seared face.

  Considerably startled, Aleytys stood frozen, mouth dropping stupidly as she watched the two hulking males who had been manhandling her so brutally just a moment before run away from her like terrified mikhmikhs. She lifted her hands and examined the palms. No change. They should be charred black, she thought. Her hands tingled like they usually did on a winter morning. That was all. Licking her lips, she stared after the fleeing men, then, with a soft frightened gasp, she wheeled and fled into the house.

  8

  Long shadows danced across the common—shadows of strange men and strange beasts, crossing and recrossing the trampled grass. The caravan was here. Aleytys pressed her nose to the window. No sound trickled through the heavy double glass, but she could imagine the mosaic of cheerful shouts and animal noises and hammers and creaking wheels, all the things she remembered, happening the way they always happened.

  Restlessly she twisted around on the bed and leaned back against the headboard, lifting her hot heavy hair into a knot on top of her head. “Ai-Jahann, I’ll be climbing the walls in a minute.” She let her hair fall and swung off the bed. The clock said sa’at nudham plus twenty. She stretched and glared at the door. “I won’t! Let them chew on Aschla’s toes, I’m tired to the bone with watching out for their delicate feelings.” She tugged the door open and flounced out into the hall.

  Some minutes later, after striding head high past asiri who averted their eyes and made the horn sign to ward off the bad luck she carried with her, she wriggled through the bushes at the far side of the charidan and stepped onto the river path. As soon as she was in deep enough shade she tossed the hood back and let the river breezes play in her damp, sweaty hair. Butterflies danced in the air around her and the cool air slid like silk along her body. Slowly the hard knot of resentment burning in her midsection dissolved under the soothing influence of the afternoon’s beauty and peace.

  She wandered down the path, enjoying the smells and sounds carried on the gentle breeze. A flat rock thrust out into the river sending the water dancing whitely around it. She slipped onto the cool granite, kneeling so that her fingertips rested inches from the spattering drops of ice-cold water. For a brief moment an almost unbearable sadness filled her eyes with tears. The thought of leaving this valley, this place that made up all of her life, tore at her heart. She dipped her fingertips in the water and flicked a few drops in the air. “Damn, I won’t cry.” She scooped up a double handful of the water and splashed it onto her face.

  Jumping to her feet, she walked on down the path, immersed in unhappy thoughts. She felt restless, uneasy, her body the center of a chaotic whirl of emotions compounding regret and anticipation, anger and excitement, and, above all, a deep abiding ache that worsened each time she thought of leaving her gentle, warm, and deeply wise dream-singer.

  A low stone wall filled in an eroding section of the river bank. Aleytys sank on her knees and rested her aching head on her hands, elbows propped on the wall. An old horan cast thick shade so she left the hood back and let her hair fall around her face. The gentle music of the water slowly soothed her troubled spirit and calmed her throbbing heart until her body was relaxed and receptive. She bent further until she was lying across the stone, looking deep into the river. Water—green shadows altering, bubbling cloud-white foam, fugitive fire glints from Horli sliding along the top, cool green depths darting into sapphire-blue points. Down. Down. Spirit … mind … soul … dissolving … floating … out … out … like mist to comprehend … cherish.… I/not-I … one … not-one … not same … one … one … time … time stretching out till time no longer had meaning … I drifting … up like a leaf on the wings of air … I was/was-not … Aleytys … fish … snapper … mavufiq … yehma … mikhmikh … insectfishanimalplant … all … awareness … drifting down on the wings of air.… I-to-Aleytys … and she was aware of a richly patterned tapestry of life around and underneath her. She looked out of her own eyes, but this time the tie didn’t break. Threads as numberless as stars dusting the night sky spun out away from her, spun out to life, life shared and cherished. Aleytys stood up very carefully, glowing with a breathless wonder. Slowly, very slowly, she turned her head, delight bubbling in her at the throbbing vitality that made up the vast web of life spun from ground to sky.

  Then she touc
hed something alien to the web. Like a leaping tongue of fire, it glowed a pale yellow cat’s-eye among the feral rubies and cool emeralds of the other lives. Warmth flashed out from her to encircle the other. She gathered up the abba and sped down the path.

  Just below the waterfall she saw him—a man of the caravan sitting on the bench, eyes closed, head back resting against the smooth bark of a young horan. His eyes opened—round, black, dreamy. He smiled at her.

  An almost audible click inside her head marked the end of her union with the all, but curiosity damped the sharp loss and she walked cautiously forward, stopping just beyond the scuffed toes of his black boots. He didn’t move, but his round brilliant eyes followed her.

  She examined him curiously. How strange black eyes look, she thought. Funny skin, too, so pale. She glanced down at the warm gold of her own skin. How really strange. Ugly. She blinked as his face altered. Is he reading my thoughts? she wondered. Madar! I hope not.

  His smile faded and his eyes went blank while his mouth dropped at the corners and trembled slightly. He pulled his feet up and wrapped his arms around them. Somehow they became a barricade between him and her. “Takhiyyeh, Caravaner,” she said. A puff of air blew a lock of hair across her eyes and she brushed it back with a smile. “Have you seen many rivers as lovely as our Raqsidan?” She nodded at the falls, where a rainbow hovered in the mist.

  “Takhiyyeh, zaujeha. It is indeed lovely. Will you sit?” He pulled his legs tighter against his chest and stared at her over his knees.

  With an amused chuckle Aleytys sat down. “I suppose a merchant has to be tactful.” She stretched out her arm and tentatively touched first the leather of his boots, then the coarse red material of his baggy trousers. “There’s one thing I always wanted to know,” she said.

  “What’s that?” It seemed to her that his wariness intensified. She frowned, then waved away impatiently his attempt to speak.

  “How do you wear all those tight clothes? Don’t you about die in high heat?”

  He burst out laughing, startled out of his caution much as she had intended. “Have you ever thought, zaujeha, what it would be like to ride a horse through woodland in a flapping skirt?”

  She considered this. “But the herdsfolk ride all the time.”

  “On grassland, not through heavy woodland.”

  As a picture of that formed in her mind, laughter bubbled up and spilled out. “Shredded!” Still chuckling, she tossed her hair back and grinned at him. “And probably scaring the poor beast out of what wits he has too.”

  “I think you’re right.” He touched his boots, his heavy trousers. “But this protects the rider too. Or he’d be shredded like skirts.”

  “Ah.” She smoothed her hands over her thighs and looked curiously back at him, sensing the barrier rising between them. For several minutes she sat on the bench, her hands absently pleating and smoothing out the silky green and gold material of her abba. Slowly, so imperceptibly that at first she thought she was imagining the whole thing, something intruded into her mind. This wasn’t like moments before, when she’d taken into herself the glow of the lives around her. This was a thrust as much sexual as it was mental. I should get out of here, she thought vaguely.

  He leaned forward, his eyes unblinking on her face, large round eyes growing, growing … black pools, pools to drown in … drown … drown … pulling … promising.… She tilted gradually toward him until something small and tough inside her sent out a spreading wave of protest.… Like a black fist in her mind, it struck at the intruder … to be smothered in a cloud of sticky softness, and again she was drowning in warm fog … drowning.… With a remaining glimmer of awareness she felt her body responding to the subtle intrusion as she would to her lover’s penetration. Her nipples hardened and there was a familiar burning itch in her loins.

  A deep repugnance stirred her resistance again into a hot searing flame. With a sharp cry she jumped to her feet and backed away from him, filled with a horror verging on nausea. “No!” she gasped. “No!”

  The pressure abruptly ceased and the man cowered back against the horan, stretching out trembling hands to fend off … something, she didn’t know what … as if her anger and rejection had a solid force that beat at him. He moaned softly.

  Breathing hard, she brushed both hands through her hair and nervously smoothed her abba around her body. “Aschla’s icy claws, what did you think you were doing?”

  “Don’t.” Tears welled from his pleading eyes.

  “Huh?” She stared at the shivering miserable figure, surprise cooling her anger.

  “Don’t be angry. Please. I’m sorry. I was wrong. Sorry. Please. Don’t hurt me. You hurt me.” His words came from quivering lips in a feeble whine that grated on her ears. She fell back on the bench too astonished to speak, still staring at that creature. He was sitting in the mottled shade from the horan’s sparse thatch of tight-curled leaves, looking sad and ridiculous. She slipped suddenly back into the dim half-tranced outreach and saw him as a scruffy little mikhmikh filled with pain mostly self-inflicted. It confused her. She shook her head, trying to clear her whirling brain.

  “What were you trying to do?” she asked more calmly.

  He seemed to shrink inside his skin. His black eyes watched her sadly over the tops of his knees.

  “Well?” She could just see the pink tip of his tongue flick over his lips, then he lowered his head as if trying to shelter himself behind his own knees.

  “I …” he began. She saw the dark eyes squeeze shut. “It worked before. Last year. They let me.…” He peered at her through slitted eyes. She frowned and he looked hastily away. “I feel what others feel. Happy, sad, hurt, strong. All. What they feel, I can change. Animals … they be easy. I control them … heal them when they’re hurt or sick. People be harder. They’re more dangerous. Women in the valleys, not so dangerous. I thought you … you be like them.”

  Aleytys rubbed her hands together absently as she considered the possibilities this new idea opened to her. Excitement grew in her as she remembered that glorious feeling of oneness. I never thought of that, she marveled. I can do it.… I’m sure I can do it.… She lifted her head and faced him, eyes glowing. “Teach me.”

  “How?” He inched farther away from her, crowding into the tree. His black eyes glanced furtively away down the trail. She could see a muscle twitching in his cheek and she knew he was preparing to run.

  “No!” She caught hold of his arm. He cringed, panting, his eyes screwed shut.

  “Please,” he whined.

  Aleytys shook his arm impatiently. “Don’t be such a dishrag.”

  “I can’t keep you out of my head.” He slid around on the bench and let his feet chunk onto the sparse grass. “Can’t keep no one out. All the time. Everything. You know what that means? All the time. Hour on hour. Day on day on day. Never be rid of other men’s passions, even their smallest itches.” He rubbed his hands up and down his legs. “They mix in my head like knots of worms and I don’t know … can’t know what be mine and what be others.” His hands kept at the rubbing, up and down, up and down, up and down the coarse crimson cloth.

  Aleytys shivered. Then she straightened her shoulders and said briskly, “Look, caravaner, pull yourself together. You said you can control animals. And women. Well, by Aschla’s bloody claws, control your own mind.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Nonsense. I bet you never tried.”

  “Zaujeha …”

  “By the Madar, caravaner, you nearly wiped me out a minute ago. And you try to tell me you can’t protect yourself? Hihdag! Put a little stiffening in your spine.”

  “Haaaah!” His face flushed red and his breath hissed between clenched teeth.

  “Go on.” She snorted impatiently. “Go to work on yourself. When they flood you, find … ah … do what you do in your own head and turn them off. Try it!”

  His mouth tightened. He looked at her, flat black eyes filled with dislike. Then he shrugged. “I t
ry. Later.”

  Aleytys sighed “It’s up to you, caravaner. Nobody else can help you.” She eyed him coolly. “Now show me how you control animals.”

  “How do I teach? I was born like this.”

  “Show me.”

  He shrugged again, his black eyes sliding away from her with deep-seated resentment hidden in them. He pointed. “There. That tree. There be mikhmikh halfway up.”

  “Where?” She scanned the horan but could see nothing.

  “Touch me. With your mind if you can. If you can’t we have nowhere to go.”

  She bit her lip. “Hmm … better let me.…” She slid off the bench and dropped onto the grass at the edge of the water, her back to the murmuring river. Leaning her chin on her hands, she let the sound of the water wash over her until her mind slid free. Once more the threads spun out from her. She touched the pale yellow flame and listened dreamily as he began to talk.

  “Feel what I do.” He glanced skeptically at her and she responded with an abstracted smile. “I make a finger with my mind. You see?”

  “Mmm.”

  “I touch him. See. He looks like a tremble in the air this way. I touch him again and he be quiet. Like finger stroking his fur. There’s a place inside where all the quivers circle around, that’s the place you touch. Like this. And he does what you want.”

  At first it was all very fuzzy and confusing. She watched and saw nothing and the rising frustration threatened to shatter the connection between them. Then something clicked in her head. It was as if the suns shone through a break in thick storm clouds. She listened in growing impatience as he kept talking and talking.

  “Watch,” he crooned. “Watch the tree with your body eyes. See. There he comes. Down trunk. There, just under that patch of leaves. See?”

  The small furry animal, its chameleon fur now the bright silver of the post-noon horan bark, backed down the trunk, small feet clutching busily at the bark, bright black eyes darting with perky alertness from side to side. With a fluffing of its fur it plopped onto the earth and trotted over to them, fur flowing from silver to green to sand and back to green.