Jo Clayton: Fire in the Sky

The stuff of the case flowed and folded and in moments was a three-legged stool. She shifted to the stool and began to tune the harp, a pleasant distraction that worked into the mesuch’s notice and brought an instant’s irritation to his fur-masked face.

She plucked a string, and the sound with its brother tones was an insistence.

She sang, her voice rich and true, the words infused with all the fringes that only a near-term Eolt could manage, the silences filled with as much to think on as the sound phrases had, the strangeness of her, age and youth combined, present so powerfully she drew the drifting Eolt like a whirling wind-trap.

She sang:

value fleeting moment understand

necessity/insistence no escape

emptiness will be filled no way to avoid understand

we/sympathy/sorrow we/pride/completeness

knowledge/trade value for value/we/you strength/wisdom

friendship/limited opening of doors

let there be hearing/a coining to touch.

The Chorus of Eolts sang their astonishment and pleasure. The chords grew and blended as they discussed the phrases and intervals, as they debated what to do about the strong warning of complications and pain from the outsiders, a warning that what was done could not be undone, that they were found and must make a choice, that the choice should be grounded on knowledge, a warning that knowledge opened many doors they might want to stay closed, that change was inevitable, that there were ways to mitigate the damage as well as exploit the opening. The combinations and permutations of that short burst of song from the harper held a promise of endless play with meaning and possibility. There was fear and excitement in the chords of the Eolt, yearning and revulsion-and finally decision.

They sang:

It must be done let it be done.

3. The Sorrows of Ard

In the small bare room where he slept when he could sleep, a work shed built in a corner of the Ykkuval Hunnar’s Dushanne Garden, Ilaцrn, no longer Ard, fed his harp her oil and wax, slid his hand along the curve of her neck, feeling the live wood arch under his hand, responding like a cat to the caress. He didn’t know why he kept her when he couldn’t bear to play her. His Dushanne perhaps, if he had the concept right, his contemplation of the twists of the life-thread. He’d sworn not to play again when his sioll… he stumbled to the cot and sat holding his head in his hands, acid tears dripping through his fingers.

“Cho!”

The shout brought his head up, his mouth spasming to match the twist in his stomach. Boy. He brushed at his mouth, looked at his hand; it was shaking-and wet. He scrubbed at his face with a corner of a blanket. I was a man when he wasn’t a thought. I’ve learned a new thing from these Chandavasi. To keep your power, diminish those who are ruled in your eyes and their own. He got to his feet, smoothed strands of lank white hair from his face, settled his hands in their required position, the left flattened on his diaphragm, right flattened on top of left, used his shoulder to nudge the door open, and walked out, head down and humble.

The Chandavasi Ykkuval Hunnar ni Jilet soyad Koroumak stood by the curve of the small stream he’d had his techs run through the garden for him, its water an enclosed system that never left the garden, continually monitored for foreign, potentially lethal substances. In the past year the Ykkuval had rambled on about poisonings, challenges, sabotage, and other maneuverings that would have shocked Hewn if he’d had much feeling left.

Hunnar was as broad as he was tall, with a massive torso and legs that seemed too short for his body. His movements were not without grace, but tightly controlled. The first time Ilaцrn had seen these mesuchs moving about Chetioll’s Patch with their metal slaves, they bounced in a peculiar way when they walked, as if good earth were feathers in a pillow, but now only the newcomers moved like that, the rest were like Hunnar.

His hands were broad with short fingers and shiny black claws instead of nails, hooks that he kept retracted except when anger took him. In the same way, anger brought transparent membranes dropping over his copper-colored eyes, making them shine as if they were wet. They were shining now.

“That!” The Ykkuval jabbed a thumb at a small patch of gray among the greens, maroons, and ambers of the vines growing tight against the stream bank. “It’s dead. I told you. Leave nothing dead in this garden. How do I possibly achieve dushanne with death in my face?”

Ilaцrn touched his tongue to dry lips. “O Ykkuval, this one hesitates to contradict the exalted, but that is melidai in its dormant phase; it sleeps, it is not dead. A spore must have come in on your clothes or mine or those of a visitor.”

Hunnar dropped his hand, the black hooks retracting; his inner lids pulled back as he squatted, peering at the tiny gray blotch. “It looks dead. Is it good for anything or is it just a weed?”

The garden turned to haze for a moment as the tension drained out of Ilaцrn. Then he was angry again, though he didn’t dare show it. He didn’t know how, but the Ykkuval had somehow managed to plant an obsessive fear of death in him, a fear that took hold of him whenever the impulse to resist strengthened to a certain level. His own fear, Ilaцrn thought. I’ve got his fear in me. Even a pinch of sleepy melidai terrifies him.

He steadied his voice, said, “O Ykkuval, it is a vesicant with several applications. The leaves are macerated and made into a paste. Weavers use the paste to draw moisture from c’hau bark so it can be pounded into fiber and spun into thread. That is woven into c’hau cloth which we find useful though ugly because when it is painted with boiled sap from a komonok tree, it is waterproof. Your procurers secured a number of bolts from the stoang um… market room of the Kabeduch weavers.”

Hunnar got to his feet with the bouncy quickness that always disconcerted Ilaцrn. “Vesicant? Hmp. Dig it out, bag it, and give it to one of the techs. And make sure no more got in. I don’t want it spoiling my peace.”

Hewn bowed. When he straightened, the Ykkuval was walking away, heading for the waterhouse among the flowering trees. These bloody-handed death givers with their stupid pretensions… dushanne dreaming… peace… meditation on… Chel Dй curse him… He started trembling and couldn’t finish the thought, too much pain, too much… everything. Silently blessing the stray spoor that germinated so opportunely, he plodded to the lean-to with the garden tools. Hunting the melidai was something to focus on, to shut out thought and memory. To push away the acid bath of loneliness.

Ilaцrn dreamed.

He sat in the sunshine, tuning-in a new harp as Eolt Imuл drifted over him singing the pleasures of the late summer day. The songs of other Eolt came distantly into the small meadow, mixing with the rustle of leaves and the whistles of the angles fluttering from nest to ground to scratch among the spores and budlings under the kerre trees. Drawn by the plucking of the harpstrings, an angi whirred over to him, settled on an oim bush, its shimmering wings folded against a green and gold carapace, its soft charcoal eyes fixed on his hands as he set the intervals of the strings in the bul mode he preferred. The angi’s broad blunt beak quivered as it sang to hint.

Then it stopped singing, lifted its head; with a harsh scream of alarm it darted into the trees.

Ilaцrn stilled his hands, listened. A buzzing… no… a whine… both… a strange sound, not one he’d heard before. “Sioll Imuл, what is that? Can you see it?”