Upper leg bending and lower leg out, Kire crabbed the slope, coming down in a sideways slide around a boulder.
Startlingly closer, the Screeeeeeee sliced low leaves.
Kire stepped around broken stone, stopped—and breathed in:
A man, a beast—
Yellow claws slashed at a brown shoulder. The shoulder jerked, the head ducked; black hair flung up and forward. Bodies locked. Braced on the ground, a bare foot gouged through pine needles.
Canines snapped toward a wrist that snatched away to lash around behind the puma’s neck. This time, as the Screeeee whined between black gums and gray, gray teeth, something…cracked!
A broad paw clapped the man’s side—but the sound failed. The claws had retracted.
Kire let his air out as puma and man, one dead, one exhausted, toppled onto their shadows.
Before Kire got in another breath, another shadow slid across them. On the ground, the man raised himself to one arm and shook back long hair. Kire stepped forward—to see the shadow around them get smaller and darker. He reached for the man’s shoulder. At the same time, he looked up.
The flying thing—sun behind it burned on one wing’s edge: Kire could see only its size—dropped. Kire’s gun barrel cleared the sling. The report ripped the air…though the shot went wild.
Above, it averted, wings glinting like chipped quartz, then flapped up to soar away.
At Kire’s feet, the naked man rocked on all fours by the beast.
“It’s gone, now,” Kire rasped. “Get up.”
The man pushed himself back on his knees, taking in great breaths through lips pulled up from large, yellow teeth. Then he stood.
He was taller than Kire by a hand. A good six years younger too, the lieutenant decided, looking at the wide brown face, the hair sweated in black blades to a cheek and a forehead still wrinkled with gasps from the fight. The eyes were molten amber—wet and hot.
(The lieutenant’s eyes were a cool, startling green.)
Pulling up his cape and throwing it over his arm, Kire reslung his gun. “Who are you?”
“Rahm.” Still breathing hard, he reached up with wide fingers to brush dirt and puma hair from his heaving chest and rigid belly. “Rahm of Çiron.” The lips settled to a smile. “I thank thee for frightening away the Winged One with thy…” He motioned toward Kire’s black waist cinch.
“This is my powergun.” The tall youngster’s dialect, Kire noted, was close to Myetra’s. “Rahm…” The lieutenant snorted; it sounded like a continuation of whatever roughened his voice. “Of Çiron, ’ey?”
The Çironian’s smile opened up. “That is a…powergun? It’s a frightening thing, the…powergun.” He moved his head: from where it clawed and clutched his shoulder, black hair slid away. “And who art thou, that hast become Rahm’s friend?”
“I am Kire.” He did not give his origin, though with Kirke on left breast, cloak, and sling, he could not imagine the need.
“Thou art a stranger in these lands,” Rahm said. “Whither dost thou travel?”
“Soon to the Çironian mountains. But for now I am merely a wanderer, looking at the land about me, to learn what I can of it.”
“So am I—or so I have been. But now I am returning to Çiron.” Suddenly the black-haired youth bent, grabbed the puma’s yellow foreleg, and tugged. “Here.” He thrust one dark foot against pale stomach fur to shove the beast over the pine needles. With its closed eyes, the puma’s head rolled aside, as if for the moment it wished to avoid the bright brown gaze of its murderer. “Thou shouldst have the lion for saving me from the Winged One. I had thought to carry it home—it’s no more than three hours’ walk. But thou hast a horse.” He nodded up the slope. “ ’Tis thine.”
Kire felt a smile nudge among his features. “Thank you.” A smile was not the expression he’d thought to use with this Çironian youth. So he stepped back, to lean against the boulder. “Rahm?” Kire glanced at the sky, then back. “How is it you travel the land naked and without a weapon?”
Rahm shrugged. “The weather is warm. My arms are strong.” Here he frowned. “A weapon?”
“You don’t know what a weapon is…”
Rahm shook his head.
“Suppose you had not been able to kill the puma with your bare hands?”
“Eventually she would have gotten frightened and fled—once I’d hurt her enough.” The youth laughed. “Or she would have killed me. But that could not happen. I am stronger than any animal in this land—except, perhaps, the Winged Ones.”
“And what are they?”
“They live in the mountains of Çiron, at Hi-Vator. Their nests are far up the rocks, in the caves among the crags and peaks.”
“Çiron,” the lieutenant repeated. “And Hi-Vator…But Çiron is at the foot of the mountains.”
Rahm nodded. Through the remnants of his own smile, Rahm found himself looking into a face not smiling at all.
“Do all Çironians go about so?” Kire asked. “Are you all so peaceful? Perhaps you, boy, are just simpleminded.”
“We are peaceful, yes. We have no guns, if that is what thou meanst. Many of us go naked—though not all.”
Black cloth hanging close around, the lieutenant chuckled.
And Rahm laughed with him, putting his feet wide and taking a great breath to support his laughter, throwing back black hair—so that he seemed to overflow the space naturally and generously his. “But thou art the first ever to think me simple!”
“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 gravedigging, 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 tramped back up the hill, his heavy cape, which 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 mahogany rump. With a flap of the reins, he was gone—to leave Rahm puzzled at their parting.
chapter two
“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, which, 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 workingwomen, 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.
This 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 anymore. 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, backward and forward, 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 plowman, 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 it 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 re
ally 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 redheaded woman who, while she cooks for her brother and father, takes her questions to…the very edge of death and back!”