Its two drivers, man and boy, were gray from cracked, callused toes to bushy beard (on the elder) and hair. The man raised an arm to Rahm, even as he frowned—as though the rock dust powdering his face and beard made a fog hard to see through. But the boy, who held a sack on his lap, suddenly pushed it to the bench, stood in his seat, and called out: “Rahm!”
Stopping, Rahm grinned. “Hey, Abrid—!”
Washed free of quarry powder, Kern’s hair and beard would be the same powder gray. But after a splash from the bucket, Abrid’s braids would be as red as his sister’s. And because I know that, thought Rahm, that’s how I know I’m home!
Kern halted the cart with a grunt. His frown deepened. He nodded to Rahm. But Kern’s frown was as welcoming, Rahm knew, as any smile.
Abrid jumped down from the bench and seized Rahm’s wrist the way a much younger child might, though the grit on his palms made the boy’s hand feel like an old man’s. “You will work again with us at the stone pits, Rahm?”
“No, Abrid.” Rahm shook his head. “I will stay in the fields—”
Inside the house Rimgia had put the dough cakes on the hot stones down at the fire and was tossing handfuls of cut turnips and sliced squash and chopped radishes into the bowl of lettuces she had torn up, when something in the voices outside caught her. She turned from the counter and stepped across the floor mat—she needed more water. As she went, she hooked two fingers in the handle of the jar sitting there; but it was already half full. Holding the jar, she pulled in the door with the other hand and stepped out onto the porch over the high sill (which kept the heavy winter rains from coming up to the door—Abrid better fix that loose plank soon). She looked out, to call: “Father, Abrid, come in and get your—!”
Her father, Kern, still sitting on the cart seat, and her brother, Abrid, already standing, looked around.
She saw Rahm.
Reaching up to run her hand, still moist from the water in which she’d washed the vegetables, across her forehead and into her hair, Rimgia set the water pitcher on the porch planks and, with a surge of delight, rushed barefoot down the steps. “Rahm! Thou wilt stay to eat with us…?” Again a hand to her hair to brush back some from her forehead (yes, Rahm thought, the same red as her brother’s beneath his work-dust); but her face was full of a smile that wanted to get even bigger, wanted to swallow all the sunlight and breeze around them. She wiped her other hand on her shift’s hip. “Come, stay—there’s more than enough! And thou canst tell us of all thy adventures in thy wander. Did you get back this morning? Or last night—?”
“I only tramped in by the southern fields ten minutes past, and glimpsed Tenuk—stalking his mule. I’ll come and see thee soon, Rimgia. But I haven’t even told Ienbar I’m here.”
Abrid jumped down and came around the cart—he almost bumped the corner, but swung his hip away—to stand near the steps. He lifted the pitcher, frowned into it, then poured some into his hand. He splashed his face, threw another handful against his chest. Water fell to darken the dust on one knee, the toes of one foot. Sitting on the step now, with two fingers together, he wiped his light lashes free of dirt. “Hey, why wilt thou not stay, Rahm?”
“I will, but some other time, boy!”
“Well, then.” Rimgia went to the cart bench to take down the sack Abrid had left on the seat. (In it, Rahm knew, would be pears—and some melons—Abrid had gathered from the orchards up near the quarry. Yes, he was home.) As she did so, the scent of the baked dough cakes came from the door. Rahm smiled—and Rimgia wondered if the scent was what he smiled at. (How many dozens of them had she seen Rahm, now sitting on the well wall, now walking across the commons, wolf down in the last year—?) “Then thou must come back soon.”
Climbing from the wagon beside her, her father turned and clapped Rahm’s shoulder. And still frowned, silently—but silence was Kern’s way.
Rahm said: “When I’ve seen Ienbar, I’ll return.”
“Thou mayest see Naä there,” Rimgia said. “Earlier, when I came with her from the fields, she too was off to talk with him.” These people here, my brother, my father, and Rahm (Rimgia thought), perhaps we are all a single consciousness and only believe ourselves separate, so that we are closest to the truth at a moment like this when we almost forget it. The notion, odd as it was, made her smile even more than the pleasure of her friend’s return.
And with all the smiling and nodding and grinning and waving—that seemed the only comfortable thing to do (or frowning, if you were Kern) when you’d been away and come back—Rahm left his friends and their father.
*
There was another young man in that village, who, though he had lost his parents during the same autumnal fever that had killed Rahm’s almost a decade ago, was as different from Rahm as a young man could be—for, though likely he loved it as much, he had a very different view of Çiron.
Qualt hauled a great basket of yellow rinds and chicken feathers and milkslops and egg shells and corn shucks from his wagon, to go, stiff-legged and leaning back against it, over the mossy stones to overturn it, rushing and bouncing down, at the ravine precipice into the soggy and steaming gully. A lithe and wiry youngster of twenty-two, given to bursts of intense conversation, long periods of introspection, and occasional smiles that startled his face but would linger there half a morning, he was the town garbage collector.
And Qualt was in love with red-haired Rimgia.
Qualt stood at the rocky rim, the empty basket in his big hands. (Unlike Rahm, Qualt’s hands—and feet—were the only things you might call big about him; oh, yes, and perhaps his ears, if his hair was tied back—though it wasn’t now. Really, he was a rather slight young fellow.) Qualt breathed slowly, not smelling, really, what lay among the rocks below.
A few weeks before, you see, when a number of Çiron’s young people, Qualt, Rimgia, Abrid, and Rahm among them, had gone for a full-moon swim at the quarry lake, they’d all sung songs (Rahm the loudest, Qualt the best), most of them learned from Naä, and cooked sweet-dough on sticks over the open fire (the way Ienbar had suggested they try) till very late, and finally gone chastely to sleep. Qualt and Rimgia had slept, yes, on the same blanket: Qualt’s blanket. Yes, Rimgia and Qualt—head to heel, heel to head—the water a silver sheet beside them. Qualt had woken, just at dawn and a bit before the others, to find Rimgia’s arm over his calf and her cheek pressed against his callused ball and wide toes. Her eyes had been closed and her breath had made the tiniest whistle he’d almost not heard for the sound of the current, the splash of small fish, and the morning’s first birds. But he’d lain, staring down over his hip, afraid to move lest she wake, his heart hammering harder and harder, so that it was all he could do to pay attention to the feel of—yes, he could move them without disturbing her—the toes on his right foot in the copper torrent, the cataract, the cool swirl of her hair.
Later, he’d decided she was a strange girl. But when, in all the nights between then and today, he’d drifted off to sleep, he kept finding a dark tenderness among his thoughts of her.
Suddenly Qualt smacked the basket bottom, turned it up to peer within its smelly slats, then dragged it behind him, rasping on rock, toward the dozen others that stood around the end of his wagon.
Rahm walked through the village, wondering at how well he knew his home’s morning-to-morning and evening-to-evening cycle.
In hours, Rahm thought, the sun will drop behind the trees, and the western houses will unroll shadows over the streets. Then, at dawn, the sun will push between the eastern dwellings to stripe the dust with copper. He strolled on, hugely content.
Reaching the burial meadow, Rahm glanced over the unmarked graves. (But Ienbar knew the name and location of each man, each woman, and each child laid here time out of memory, and kept all the scrolls about them.…) The visiting singer was coming toward the meadow up the road from the fields.
A chamois mantle hung forward over one shoulder but was pushed back from the other. A chain of shel
ls held her short skirt low on her hips. A strap ran down between her breasts, holding something to her back. Its carved wooden head slanted behind her neck. Rahm knew it was her harp. “And hello to thee, Naä.”
“Rahm, you’re back! Are you going to see Ienbar? I was on my way to visit him, but I stopped at my lean-to to replace three of my harp-strings—”
“Yes, Rimgia told me, only moments past,” Rahm said. “Kern and Abrid were just home from the stone pits.”
“And in your wander, what’d you see?” She fell in beside him. “That’s what I want to hear about!”
“Naä—” Rahm looked at the ground, where olive tufts poked from the path dust—”thou makest fun of me.”
“What do you mean, make fun?”
“Thou, who hast traveled over all the world, asketh me what I have seen that thou hast not, after a simple week’s wander…?”
“Oh, Rahm—I wasn’t making fun of you. I’m interested!”
“But thou hast come all the way from Calvicon, with thy songs and tales. What can I have seen in a week that thou in a dozen years hast not?”
“But that’s what I want you to tell me!”
He saw her glance over to catch his expression (he was still pretending interest in the tufted ridge of the path)—and saw her surprise that his expression was a smile. “But now thou seest,” he said, looking at her again, “I am making fun of thee!”
“We’ll go to Ienbar together, and while we go, you’ll tell me!”
“Naä, I saw antelopes come down across hazed-over grasses to drink at yellow watering holes at dawn. I found a village of folk who wove and plowed and quarried as we do, and live in huts and houses that might well have been built on the same plans as ours—though the only words in the whole of their language I could make out, after a day with them, were the words for `star,’ ‘ear,’ and ‘tomato plant.’ On the fifth day, as the rituals instruct us, I ate nothing from the time I woke, but drank only water, and stopped three times to purify myself with wise words. And, when the sun went down, still fasting I composed myself for sleep—hoping for a mystic dream.”
She grinned: “Did you have one?”
“I dreamt,” Rahm said, gravely, “that I walked by a great, rushing stream. And as the sun rose up, and I ambled along beside the current, the water began to sparkle. Then, in the dream, a little branch feeding into the water lay before me, so I decided to wade across to the other side. I stepped in. The water was cold at first—but a few steps on, as the water reached my thighs and finally my waist, it grew warm. Then, even warmer. And warmer. I woke—” He chuckled—“to find I had pissed myself, the way I used to when I was a boy in bed, a couple of times a week, even unto my fifteenth year—and my mother would become angry and say I made the shack stink.” The chuckle became a laugh. “Then she’d make me go sleep out in the tool cabin. But that, I’m afraid, was all there was of mystic dreaming!”
“Oh, Rahm—well, you’d better not tell Ienbar that.” Naä laughed outright. “Then again, maybe you should. He just might find something in it—if he just doesn’t find it funny, too.” .
“Then I found a very real, very un-mystic—” Rahm laughed again—“stream and washed myself; and went on my way. And this morning,” he finished, “I was attacked by a wild prairie lion and wrestled with her, to break her neck with my arm. Then I came home here.”
Naä shook her head. “Rahm, you folk amaze me.”
He looked at her as they walked, his amber eyes full of questioning.
“Three months ago, when I first came here, I’d never have believed such people as you existed.” Naä paused a moment, as if searching within for her answer. “Sometimes, I still don’t believe that you do.”
“Why, Naä?”
“Rahm, I’ve traveled to lots of places, through lots of lands. I know songs and stories from even more lands and places than I’ve visited—more lands and places than you could imagine. But most of the songs and stories I know are about fights and wars, about love that dies, about death and betrayal and revenge. Yet here there is…” She raised her shoulders, and looked up at the branches whose early summer green had begun to go smoky after the first bright hue of spring. “But I can’t even name it.” She let her shoulders fall. “Here, I go out and sing to Rimgia and to the other women in the fields. I come and exchange songs and tales with Ienbar, or go sit and talk with Hara over her shuttles. Sometimes I eat with you in the evening, or take long walks alone in the foothills of the mountains. If any woman of the village comes around a corner of the path, my heart leaps as happily as if it were my own sister coming to meet me. If any man of the village crosses my path, we smile and call to each other with the same warmth I’d call to my own brother.” She glanced at him, then glanced away. “Whenever a group of you get together, after work in the evening, or before a council meeting, and everyone turns to me and asks me to sing…well, I’ve never sung better!” Naä looked down at the dust. “The only thing any of you say there is to fear in the whole of this land are the flying creatures from Hi-Vator. And no one can even remember why that is—so even that’s awfully easy to forget; and since I’ve been here, I’ve only once seen what might have been a silhouette of one against some moonshot clouds, anyway.
“Rahm, the last time I was in my own father’s hut in Calvicon, when I and my four brothers and my sister were all together, it was when my stepmother, who had been so good to us once my real mother died, was so ill. We sat around, with my father, beside my stepmother’s sickbed, talking together about our childhood. And how joyful and wonderful and loving and free it had been, because of him, because of her. And as we sat there, talking softly and laughing quietly in the firelight, I kept thinking, ‘Nobody has a childhood as wonderful as we’re now all saying we did. I certainly didn’t.’ For, like any other parents, however much they loved us, often they had been bored with us, and sometimes they slapped us, and now and again they were sullen and angry that we weren’t interested in the things that concerned them—while they were wholly oblivious to what we felt was so important. Yet we all—my brothers, my sister, and me, too—went on talking about that time as if the moments of love and concern, my stepmother’s smile at a chipmunk my youngest brother caught for a pet, the corn cakes my father baked for a friend of mine’s party when I asked him, or the songs the two of them sang together once, just after dark by our bedside, had been, indeed, the whole of it. And while the flames fell back into the embers, it struck me: This isn’t a story of some real childhood that we’re telling of now. No, this story is a present we’re making for my worried old father and my sick, sick stepmother, for having been two very, very fine parents indeed—and who’d certainly given us a childhood fine enough. But once I realized what sort of present it was, I was happy to sit there for another hour, completing that present, weaving it together with my brothers and sister—I was happy to make it for them, happy to give it to them; and I went to sleep afterwards, content we’d done it. And three days later, I left on another journey, knowing I would never see that fine old woman again, and that there was a good chance I might not ever see my father again either—but thinking no more about the story we’d given them, those few nights ago, than anyone ever thinks about a present you’ve given gladly to someone who deserves it.” Naä was silent a few steps more. “At least I didn’t think about it until after I’d been here, oh, three weeks or a month. Because, you see, Rahm, you’ve all, here, given a present to me.
“You’ve given me—not another childhood; but rather a time like the story of childhood we put together that evening to help my parents through their final years. And, till now, I wouldn’t have believed a time or a place like that was possible!” They walked on together over the warm earth. “It’s beautiful here, Rahm. So beautiful that if I were anywhere else and tried to sing of this beauty, the notes would stick in my throat, the words would stall on my tongue—and I’d start to cry.”
They had reached a stretch of green graves and stopped to g
aze at where stone slanted from the smoky grass. “Yes,” Rahm said, after a moment. “It is beautiful, Naä. Thou art right.”
Naä took a long, long breath. “So you brought a puma back with you. Did you leave it down with Kern and Rimgia? I wonder what sort of stew Ienbar will make out of that—before he puts the claws on his necklace.”
“I didn’t bring it back,” Rahm said. “I gave it to a friend.”
“You gave it to someone in the village before you brought it to show Ienbar?” She laughed. “Now that’s the first thing I think you’ve ever done that’s shocked me!”
“Not a friend in the village. This was a man who helped me on my journey. As I fought the cat, a Winged One flew close. This man frightened it away with a powergun.”
Naä turned to look at him. “A powergun? In my home, Calvicon, a man came through once with a powergun. He used it to do scary tricks—set a bushel of hay on fire—in the market square. But he told my big brother, who was his friend for a while, that they could be really dangerous, if used improperly…Where was he from?”
Rahm shrugged. “He wore a black cloak. And black gloves. And a black hood. There was a silver crow on his shoulder—and on the sling which held his gun. His name was Kire, and I—”
“Myetra…” Naä’s face darkened.
“Possibly,” Rahm said. “But why dost thou look so strangely at this.”
“Crow, cloak, and hood, in black and silver, are the uniform of officers in the Myetran army. What would such a soldier be doing here—so close you could leave him in the morning and be here by noon?” She walked, considering. “And with a powergun. Were there others with him?”
“I saw only the one alone. He said he was a wanderer like me, out to see our land.”
“—with a powergun? It doesn’t sound good at all.”
“By why, Naä? We do not know them.”