“Where are you coming from now, Çironian? Who are your parents? How do you live?”
“I come from a week’s wandering, out in the land. It is our village custom that every person so wander, once every three years. My parents both died of a fever when I was a boy. Old Ienbar the gravedigger took me in, and I work with him—when there is need. At other times, I help in the grain fields.”
“Those muscles are all from grave digging, hoe hefting, and plow pushing?”
“Some, yes.” Rahm raised an arm to make an indifferent fist. “I always take a prize at the village games. But much comes from the year I unloaded stones with Brumer and Heben and Gargula, and Tenuk who works with me now in the fields; and the other boys on the rock crew—for our new council-building foundation!”
“And you don’t even know what a weapon…” From the rock he’d settled against, Kire stood and turned—like a man who suddenly finds the joke empty enough simply to walk away. As he tromped back up the hill, his heavy cape, that no wind made billow or belly, moved only a bit, left and right. The mare raised her head. Kire took up the reins, grasped the saddle horn and, raising one boot to the stirrup, swung up and over.
“Friend Kire!” the Çironian called. “The lion! Wouldst thou go without my gift?”
As the mare reared and turned, Kire called back hoarsely: “I haven’t forgotten.” He guided the horse down the slope.
Rahm grasped a hind leg with one hand and an opposite forefoot with the other. He hefted the corpse high, its head hanging back.
The mouth was wide.
The teeth were bared.
The horse shied at the dead thing, but Kire bent down to grab a handful of loose fur. He tugged—while Rahm pushed—the puma across the horse’s back. The gift in place, Kire leaned down and, with his black glove, grasped the Çironian’s shoulder. “I will not forget it,” and he muttered, wheeling: “though someday you may want to.” But the last was lost in leaf chatter under the horse’s hooves and the general roughness of his voice.
Hooves beat the earth—and Rahm leapt back.
Kire of Myetra gained the rise, while his cloak slid no more than from haunch to haunch on his mare’s mahagony rump. With a flap of the reins, he was gone—to leave Rahm puzzled at their parting.
CHAPTER II
NAÄ sings so prettily,” said one.
“Naä sings like a bird,” said another. “Like a lark.”
And between the women Rimgia bent among the rows, that, rising up over her eyes, became a gold jungle webbed with Naä’s song. Rimgia wrapped her hands in the stalks and pulled. She’d been working some hours and her side was sore. In another hour the edge of her palms would sting.
But Naä sang.
And the song was beautiful.
Did they really work better when the singer sang? From time to time, when one could pay attention to the words, it was certainly more pleasant to work that way. Most of the women said they worked better. And all of the men. And it was best, Rimgia knew, not to say too much at odds with what most people said, unless you’d thought about it carefully and long—and selected your words with precision. That last had been added to the village truism by her father Kern—a man known more for his silence than his volubility.
While Rimgia picked and listened, the squeak-squeak-clunk, squeak-squeak-clunk of the water cart rose out of the breeze and the music. Rimgia stood up, to feel gas rumble in her stomach from hunger. The water cart’s arrival was her signal to cease and go home.
Apparently, it was Naä’s too. At the end of the verse, when the jolly man, so strong and fair, kissed the girl with the raven hair, Naä hefted her harp on its leather strap around behind her back, unhooked her left knee from her right ankle, and pushed herself down from the rock. She shook her brown hair back, hailed stocky Mantice, the water-cart driver. (His name had three syllables, the last with the softest “c.” In that locale it meant a bird, not a bug.)
Receiving the smiles and warm words from the working women, Rimgia, whose hair was the color of the central length inside a split carrot, got a dipper of water from Mantice at the cart; and, laughing at one woman and whispering to another about still another’s new boyfriend and giving a quick grin to another who stepped up, full of a story about someone else’s four-year-old daughter, she hurried to the path to fall in beside the singer.
When she saw Rimgia coming, Naä lingered for her.
They’d walked together a whole minute, when Rimgia asked: “Naä, what dost thou think happens to us when we die?” She asked the question because Naä was a person you could ask such things of, and she wouldn’t laugh, and she wouldn’t go telling other people how strange you were, and you wouldn’t hear people talking and whispering about you when you came around the corner or surprised them by the well a day later.
That was more the reason for the question than that Rimgia really wanted to know. Indeed, she rather liked the idea that the wandering singer sometimes found her, and her occasional odd thoughts, of interest enough to speak about them seriously. So—sometimes—Rimgia tried to make her own thoughts seem more serious than they were.
“When we die?” Naä pondered. “I suspect it’s just a big, blank nothing, forever and ever and ever, that you don’t even know is there—because there is no knowing any more. That, I guess, is the safest thing to bet on, at least in terms of living your life the best you can while you’re alive.” She paused. “But once I was in a land—oh, three or four years back—that had the strangest ideas about that.”
“Yes?” Rimgia asked. “How so?”
“The elders of its villages were convinced that there was only a single great consciousness in all the universe, a consciousness that was free to roam through all space and all time, backwards and forwards, not only over all of this world but through all the hundreds and millions and hundreds of millions of worlds, from the beginning of time to its very end. You know the little signs Ienbar makes on his bark scrolls about each person he buries, up at the burial field? Even fifty years after someone has died here, Ienbar can go to his scrolls and tell you what his name was, where she lived, who were their children, and what work and what good deeds and bad deeds were once remembered about each person in the village. Well, according to those elders, you and I are not really alive—we’re not really living our lives, here and now, as we walk along the path, pushing the branches aside that grow out of the underbrush.” She caught and released a branch; it whooshed back behind them. “What we think and feel and experience as our own consciousness, living through moment after moment, is really the one great consciousness reading over our lives, from our birth to our death, as if each one of us were just an entry in Ienbar’s scrolls. At whatever here-and-now moment, what you’re experiencing as your present awareness is just where that consciousness happens to be—what it’s aware of as it reads you over. But that one great consciousness is the only consciousness there is, now believing it’s Rimgia the grain picker, now believing it’s Tenuk the plower, now believing it’s Mantice the water-cart driver, now believing it’s Naä the singer. While it reads you, of course, it gets wholly involved in everything that happens, in every little detail—the way you might get involved in some song I sang last evening, in the darkness when the fire’s coals were almost out, when the song seems more real than the darkness around. But that one consciousness reads through the full life not only of you and me and every human being—it reads the life of every bug and beetle and gnat, of every worm and ant and newt, the life of every hen whose neck you wring for dinner and every kid whose throat you cut to roast; and of every grass blade and every flower and every tree as well. It reads through every good and friendly and helpful deed and happening. It reads through every painful, harmful, and hurtful thing that has fallen to anyone or any creature either by carelessness or conscious evil.”
“But what’s all this reading of all of us for?” Rimgia laughed. (Naä’s notions could sometimes be odder than the questions that prompted them.) “Is i
t to learn something? To learn what life is about—the lives of gnats and people and flowers and hens and bugs and goats and trees?”
“That’s where the theory gets rather strange,” Naä explained. “What that great, single consciousness-that-is the-here-and-now-consciousness-of-all-of-us is trying to learn is what life…isn’t: the greater Life that is its own complete totality. You see, after it’s finished reading you, it knows that, however important and interesting and involving the various parts of your life were, that is not really what Life is about. But only after it’s finished reading through the whole of your life, only after it’s actually become you and experienced the length of your years, can it know that, for certain. And only after it’s finished reading me, does it know that my life was not the essence either. And so it goes, with every wise old hermit and every mindless mosquito and every great king who rules a nation. And when it’s completely finished with all the things it could possibly read, from the life of every sickly infant dead an hour after birth to every hundred-year-old hag who finally drops into death, from every minnow eaten by a frog to every elk springing from a mountain peak and every eagle soaring above them, to every chick dead in the egg three days before it hatches, only then will it be released from its reading, to be its wondrous and glorious self, with the great and universal simplicity that it’s learned. That’s what those elders thought—and that’s what they told their people.”
The two young women walked silently.
Then Naä went on: “I must say, though I found it an interesting idea, I’m not sure I believe it. I think I’d rather take the nothing.”
“Really?” Rimgia asked, surprised; for, as an idea to turn over and consider, like the petals of a black-eyed Susan, it had intrigued her. “Why?”
“Well, when I was a little girl, playing in the yard of my parents’ hut in Calvicon, and I’d think about such things—death, I mean—the idea of all that nothing after my little bit of a life used to frighten me—terribly, so that my mouth would dry, my heart would hammer, and I’d sweat like I’d just run a race… from time to time I’d almost collapse with my fear of it; there it waited, at the end of my life, to swallow me into it. Nothing. Nothing for millions of billions of years more than the millions of billions of years that are no part at all of all the years there are. Really, when such thoughts were in my head, I couldn’t sing a note! But then, a little later, when I heard this other idea, it occurred to me that, really, it was much more frightening! If I—and you—really are that great consciousness, and really are one, that means I—the great consciousness that I am—must go through everyone’s pain, everyone’s agonies, everyone’s dying and death, animal as well as human, bird and fish, beast and plant, and all the unfairness and cruelty and pain in the universe: not only yours and mine, but the pain of every bug anyone ever squashed and every worm that comes out of the ground in the rain to dry up on a rock.” Naä chuckled. “Well, it’s all I can do to get through my own life. I mean, doesn’t it sound exhausting?”
They walked in the dust a while. Finally Rimgia said (because this was something she had thought about many times before): “I wish I could change places with thee, Naä—could just put my feet into the prints thy feet leave on the path and from there go where thou goest, see what thou seest. I wish I could become thee! And give up being me.”
“Whatever for?” Naä knew how much the youngsters were in awe of her; but, whenever it came out in some open way, it still surprised her.
“Once every three years,” Rimgia said, “I’ll go on a wander for a week—maybe tramp far enough to find a village so much like Çiron that I might as well not have started out. Or I’ll sit in the woods and dream. And the most exciting thing that’ll actually happen will be that I see a Winged One from Hi-Vator pass overhead. But thou hast been to dozens of lands, Naä. And thou wilt go to dozens more. Thou hast learned the songs of peoples all over the world and thou hast come to sing them here to us—and thou makest us, for the moments of thy song, soar like men and women with wings—while all I do is go home from the fields to cook for my brother and father.” She laughed a little, because she was a good girl, who loved her father and brother even as she complained of them. “So now thou knowst why, for a while at any rate, I would be thee!”
“Well,” Naä said, “I must cook for myself—and though most days I like it, some days are lonely. Nor is the lean-to I live in all that comfortable.” Even saying it, Naä was thinking that she wouldn’t change her life with a king’s. For the friendly, gregarious, and curious folk of Çiron made real loneliness a difficult state to maintain. “Right now, though, I’ve got to see Ienbar in his shack at the burial meadow. I told him I would come by today, once the water cart passed. But I shall see you tomorrow—and, who knows, maybe make a song about a wonderfully interesting red-headed woman who, while she cooks for her brother and father, takes her questions to… the very edge of death and back!”
“Thou’rt the one going to the burial field,” Rimgia said, pretending not to be desperately pleased at the prospect of being the subject of a song. “And thou’rt the one who has heard all the strange ideas of the world—not I. Yes, I would change places with thee, if I could, Naä—though if those foreign elders’ strange idea is right, it means that I may have to live your life, and you mine, someday—that we might change places yet!”
“Or that we already have,” Naä said. “In fact that’s one reason, I guess, I have trouble with it. But, when I see you tomorrow, I’ll tell you what Ienbar says. That’s next best to going to see him, isn’t it?”
“And some time soon thou must come and eat with us. And sing this new song for Abrid and my father—Father likes thy singing almost as much as I do.”
And, laughing, the two women parted to go their different ways through the town.
When he reached the first field, Rahm paused to fill his chest with the scent of grain under hot sun and to listen to the roar of crickets, to grass spears brushing one another, and to sparrows and crows and jays which all, with another breath, would again become what, at any other time, he would think of as silence.
Halfway across the field, Tenuk the plower looked up, halted his animal, and waved. Ahead of the plow, the mule was the hue of cut slate. A distant ear twitched—and, waving back, Rahm imagined the rasping blue-bottle worrying at the eye-lashes of that diligent, tractable beast.
With more humor than reproach, Rahm thought: Tenuk’s only three days further along than when I left … They’ve missed me here.
Beets grew to Rahm’s right. Kale stretched to his left. He walked along one field’s edge. The earth was soft. Yellowing grasses brushed and itched his sweating calves. Moist soil gave and sprang back to his bare soles. Even as he tried to take in all that was familiar about his fields, his country, his home, one new bit of the familiar was wiped away with the next.
He turned onto the path toward town. Moments later, trotting out under lowering oak branches, he saw the woman at the stone-walled well halt, clay jug at her hip; she recognized him—and smiled. Rahm grinned back, as four children careened from behind the door-hanging of the hut across the way, a dog yipping among them. (Three years ago and a head-and-a-half shorter, in her dirty hands the oldest of those children had held that dog up to him as a puppy, and Rahm had said, “Why not call him ‘Mouse’? A big mouse—that’s what he looks like,” and the girl and the others had laughed, because it was such a silly idea—calling a dog a mouse!) They ran toward him, not seeing him. As they broke around him, he caught up the youngest and swung her to his shoulder as she squealed. And suddenly he was among them, the others jumping around him and clapping. The little one grappled his long hair, and her squeal became laughter that, somewhere in it, had his name. And he said all theirs, and their mothers’, and their fathers’, then theirs again (“Hello, Jallet. Hey there, Wraga…How is thy mother, Kenisa? Jallet, dost thy fat old man Mantice still waste his time with the water cart…? I did not see thy uncle Gargula in the fields toda
y. Perhaps he’s still doing some work for thy mother? But thou must not let Veema work him too hard, Nugo! Tell her I told you so, too! Let Gargula get back to the beet fields, where he’s needed! Wraga, so long…”), and called them all out again in farewell, because it pleased him—almost surprised him—that, after a week in the wild, those names that he had not thought of over all the adventurous days, names that he might as well have forgotten, came back so quickly to his tongue. A step more, and he set the little girl down. She grabbed hold of his forefinger, now, tugging and calling for another ride. But Rahm laughed and freed himself. And they were running on.
Where she’d carried her loom out into her yard, to sit cross-legged on the ground, Hara looked up from her strings and shuttles and separator plank and tamping paddle. A breeze lifted the ends of the leaf-green rag tied around hair through which white flowed like currents in a stream; it moved the hem of her brown skirt back from browner ankles. Her breasts were flat and long, the aureoles wide around dark dugs. Her eyes were black and glittering within their clutch of wrinkles—that deepened when she saw him. “Hello to thee, young Rahm!”
Rahm came over, to stand behind her and look down. Crouching now, he frowned at her pattern: blue, orange, green, cut away sharply by the unwoven strings. “What makest thou there?”
“Who knows,” Hara said, her smile more full of spaces than teeth. “Perhaps it’s something thou mayest wear thyself one day, when they decide in the council house that a bit of youth’s foolishness has gone out of thee and more of the world’s wisdom has settled between thy ears.”
That made Rahm laugh. He patted the weaver’s shoulder—and stood, still able to feel where the girl, gone now, had sat on his.
Hara slammed down the treadle. The shuttle ran through quivering threads, drawing gray yarn.
Rahm loped off between stone and thatch buildings. Toward him from an alley end, an ox lugged a creaking cart. The side slats were woven with wide leather strips, the bed piled with rocks.