Jo Clayton: Fire in the Sky

The whistle form of the name had them buzzing more loudly. The boy called out a few words she didn’t understand. She whistled again: wait, this is a friend, wait, help comes.

The boy and his companion rested head against head, talking in low hums with descanted trills. They didn’t try speaking to her again, but after a moment, the six Bйluchar retreated to the far fence and sat down, legs crossed, hands resting on their knees.

Shadith drew in a long breath, let it trickle out; head throbbing, she trudged to the gate and waited impatiently for it to open.

“Amazing.”

Shadith blinked away pain-tears, looked up at the tall Yarak. “You repeat yourself, Goлs Koraka. And overstate. Whistle calls are generally simple and much alike from culture to culture. Like many musicians, I have a gift for the patterning of sounds.” She had little patience now for his complicated strokings; it was all surface, in any case. Should he decide to have her probed, it would be done with the most elegant suavity, and if she died under that probe, he would mark her passing with a trope or two and none of that would touch the steel beneath. She glanced at Aslan, sighed, remembering the lectures about keeping the Director sweet. “By your favor, Goлs, pardon my abruptness. I’m very tired.”

“As we all are, Shadith.” Aslan set her hand on Shadith’s arm. “We appreciate your interest, Goлs Koraka, but we do need to confer and organize ourselves for tomorrow’s meeting.”

The sun was brilliant, vaguely greenish in a sky whitened by heat haze when Shadith walked through the enclosure gate with Aslan, her Aide Marrin Ola, and Duncan Shears, the University folk a ragged knot with a pair of guards marching ahead of them, another pair behind. Beyond the paved trade ground, the land turned into a field of low ground cover plants, not grass but something like it, pale gray-green spears with ocher strips; it felt crunchy when Shadith walked on it and there were small gray green scuttlings with every step as if each spear had its own miniature ecosystem.

Strewn through the ground cover, small woody plants grew in pentagons, some complete, some partial, always at least three bushes, always the same distance apart no matter what the age of the plant; the ground cover plant didn’t extend to the area within the pentagons, instead there was a scabby growth something like a lichen, pale yellow and grainy. Scattered more irregularly, there were taller plants, clumps with brown fuzzy growths at the end of long stems thick as Shadith’s forefinger, plants that looked like the bulrushes on a world that no longer existed. Shayalin, blown to atoms before the life on this world was more than one bacterium contemplating another with speculation in its nonglance. Shadith sighed. Nostalgia was a disease she didn’t seem to recover from even when she shifted bodies.

On both sides of the river, trees were dark masses set in shallow curves that bent with the brilliant blue of the water.

Half obscured by the haze above the trees, a number of the aerial folk floated like exquisite golden dreams above the forest, the sucking disks on their tendrils glittering diamond bright in the sun. They were singing/speaking. Like an organ miles wide, chords of splendid complexity, cadenzas, single notes as emphasis. She listened, shivering with pleasure. And with an ache growing in her head that told her it wasn’t merely this world’s equivalent to birdsong but speech.

The Goлs Koraka hoeh Dexios and his angry young phora walked ahead of them, Koraka with his hands clasped behind his back, head turning as he scanned the line of trees, watching the fliers. Shadith wrinkled her nose at his back. At it again, oh dear Goлs. Making us markers in your games. Despite his graceful assurances of free inquiry, he was there to set his seal on them in the eyes of the Bйluchar; he didn’t want the locals getting ideas about playing University against Yarakan.

A man moved from the shadow of the trees, a golden flier hovering above him, pulsing and glowing in the sunlight. Maorgan, if Koraka had it right.

“Glois and the Meloach aren’t there,” Maorgan growled. He inspected the guards, then snorted with disgust. “Careful of his hide, our mesuch.” He looked past the Director at the straggling group of strangers. “Those are the ones he wants to foist on us. Which one do you think is teseach?”

Simple-speech came through the tentacle touching his shoulder. *The Yellow-hair. It is to her the mesuch looks when he looks back. I am cast low, sioll, Utelel sang that the harper promised they would be free.*

“Utelel is Meloach. Xe may turn sioll one day, but xe hasn’t seen much more’n a decade of sun-returns. Xe trusts us single-lives too much.”

Rippling laughter from the Eolt. *Sioll Maorgan, you remember the harp and are jealous.*

“T’ck. I’m remembering xe said the harper learned the whistle talk as easy as a rebekii gulps bait.” *But you know how clever harpers are.*

“And how sarcastic Eolt can be. Shall we go to meet them?”

*As before, sioll Maorgan, and keep your temper tight, good friend.*

Maorgan left the shadow of the trees and walked the five kaels into the choa and stopped in the center of an oim korroi pentad with two points dead, the living bushes between him and the others; should flesh guards try laying hands on him, they’d discover the defenses of the oim, it was only the steel ones that made him worry. He swung the harpcase around and set it before him on the scab, wondering as he did so if he’d have a chance to play for the offworld harper and hear what she could do.

The yellow-hair watched him quietly from eyes blue as bits of storm-dark sea-clever eyes, calm eyes, eyes measuring him, lifting to Melech, returning to Maorgan. And the yellow of her hair was more a brown with amber lights. And when she smiled at him, the light spread over her face and leaped but from her and heated him.

He looked away before he fell too deeply into her web, and found himself meeting the eyes of the harper. She was strange in a way he couldn’t comprehend; he touched his finger to Melech’s tentacle. “What is it about her, sioll?” he murmured, keeping his voice low so the mesuchs wouldn’t hear him.

*This xe can’t find her song, sioll Maorgan. The yellow-hair is simple beside her. The others are servants, of no importance.*

“Sfais, despois,” the mesuch with the fur face boomed at him. That was a man sure of his importance, pushing it off on everyone around him.

“Fes,” Maorgan said. It was something the traders said to each other, some kind of greeting; he didn’t care. Made things go easier when you followed the other party’s rules. If you wanted them to go easier.

The Eolt Melech withdrew his tentacle and glided higher, rising and falling, using the layered currents of the air to oscillate in place above Maorgan, song speech flowing through the interstices of the word-exchange between Maorgan and the mesuch.

Telk a telk a telk, the time ticked past as they went over the same ground they’d gone over day after day. Yellow-hair listened, impatience glinting in her sea-storm eyes. The Harper watched Melech except when her eyes glazed over and she shut them tight. And when that happened, the air around her wrinkled with pain and implication.

From the corner of his eyes, while he tried to find a way to shut off the mesuch so he could deal with Yellow-hair, he watched the harper.

She knelt beside the case, opened the catches, and took out an instrument both like and unlike his own. Though it was made and not grown, it had the beauty of its essence and the track of loving hands along its wood. She played a tune on the case with her fingertips and he saw the thing he hadn’t believed when Melech relayed Glois’ tale.