Jo Clayton - A Gathering Of Stones

The sun slid down its western arc; shadow crossed the stream and crept around her, cold and silent. Depressing. She was tired and hungry and she hadn’t managed more than a moment or two of real meditation the whole futile day. Her stomach cramped repeatedly through that interminable afternoon, at times she could think of nothing but food. She dreamed of roast chicken with brown-gold gravy pooling round it. She thought of shrimp fried in a batter so light it might have floated off at a breath of wind, succulent pink shrimp. Peaches, peeled and golden, dripping with a rich fragrant nectar. Strawberries. plump tartsweet, floating in whipped cream. She wrenched her mind away and contemplated a blade of grass she pulled from a clump beside the blanket. She considered the greenness of it, greenness as an abstract idea, greenness as it was expressed in this particular physical object, mottled with lines of darker color, with pinpoints and patches of black and tan; she considered the edge where the blade left off and the air began, the finely toothed edge that was not so much green as an extraction from the colors combined into green, a pale anemic yellow fading to white, to no-color.

The sky put out its sunset flags and the wind rose, chill enough to knife through Korimenei’s coat and pullover, stir the hairs on her arms and along her spine. Gentle Geidranay came walking along the mountain peaks. He squatted among them with his head against the sun, his fingers grubbing among the pines, absurdly like the shadow of the Old Man in his garden, grotesquely enlarged and cast against the drop of the darkening sky. The Groomer of Mountains came closer, his fingers swept across the small meadow, brushed against Korimenei and passed out without noticing her. The fingers were like semisolid light, translucent, melting through the air without agitating it, dreamlike and disturbing, a beautiful nightmare, if such could exist. Korimenei shivered and shut her eyes.

A dozen heartbeats later she cracked a lid; the god was gone. She sighed and broke posture. Her head was swimming, but the diriiness faded when she had moved about some more. She went to the stream, refilled her cup and stood watching the water darken to black glass as the last color faded from the sky. She carried the cup to the dead trunk, sat down beside her rucksack and took sip after slow sip until the cup was empty. The largest bulge in the sack was a heavy, knitted laprobe. She thought a moment, then with some reluctance took the laprobe out and dropped it on the blanket; dying of pneumonia was not a desirable outcome of this minor ordeal. She plucked a handful of dry grass and went deeper into the trees to void her bladder; when she was finished she washed her hands at the stream, using sand for soap.

She settled onto the blanket, folded her legs properly and pulled the laprobe about her shoulders.

In the distance an owl hooted. She thought about the Old Man, wondered vaguely who and what he was. Some odd manifestation of the Earthsoul, thrust from the soil as stones are ejected by a combination of earth and thaw? Or a creature as ancient as old Tungjii, perhaps even a kind of kin to himmer? Older than the gods themselves, older than the earth she sat on? Or was he the face of the Mountain itself? Was her blanket spread across his flesh? She moved uneasily, that was an uncomfortable thought. She considered the Old Man and the Mountain and Geidranay, Tungjii and her brother, Maksim and his assorted peculiarities, whether he’d managed to rise above his prejudices, sexual and social, and take her as an apprentice. She wanted that rather desperately; she knew by study and experience now what she’d guessed the first time she saw him: there was no one like him. If he taught her… if he taught her, maybe she wouldn’t be so afraid of what she sometimes saw in herself, what she scurried from like a scared mouse whenever she caught a glimpse of it.

The laprobe trapped warmth around her; sleep tugged at her as she grew more comfortable, threatened to overwhelm her as the night turned darker. A fat, mutilated crescent, the Wounded Moon was already high when the sun went down; its diminished light fell gently on the quiet meadow, cool and pale, drawing color out of grass and trees, turning Korimenei and her blankets into a delicately sketched black and white drawing. Moon moths flew arabesques above the stream, singing their high thin songs. Fireflies zipped here and there, lines of pale gold light, the only color in the scene. A white doe came from under the trees on the far side of the stream. For a long moment the beast gazed at Korimenei, her eyes deep as earthheart and dangerous, Korimenei felt herself begin to drown in them. The doe turned her head, broke contact; as silently as she came, she vanished into the inky shadow under the pines.

A fragment of old song drifted into Korimenei’s mind, one of Harra Hazani’s songs which had been passedwith another gift from daughter to daughter down the long years since she came to Owlyn Vale. Korimenei was born with that gift, Harra’s ear for pitch and tone and her sense of rhythm; she’d long suspected it was a major part of her Talent, when she thought of Maksim’s extraordinary voice she was sure of it. “I am the white hind,” she breathed into the night; the darkness seemed to accept and encourage her, so she sang the song aloud. Not all of it, it had hundreds of lines and three voices, the white hind, the gold hart and the fawn; the hind spoke, the hart answered, the fawn questioned both. Korimenei lifted her voice and sang:

/ am the White Hind

Blind and fleet

My feet read the night My flight is silence

My silence summons to me Free and bold

The Gold Hart.

I am the Gold Hart Artful and fierce I pierce the night My flight is wildfire Desire consumes me She looms beside me Fleet and unconfined The White Hind.

Korimenei let the song fade as the doe had faded into the darkness. Why? she thought. What does it mean? Does it mean anything? She closed her eyes and banished memory and idea, accepting only the sounds of the stream. Fragmented images prodded at her but she pushed them away. Hear the stream sing, she told herself, separate the sounds. First the coarse chords. She heard these, named them: the shhhh of the sliding water, the steady pop of bubbles, the brush-brush tinkle against intruding stones and boulder, the clack-tunk of bits of wood floating downstream, bumping into those boulders, swinging into each other. She listened for the single notes of the song, teased them from the liquid languorous melliflow, concentrated on one, then another and another, recognized them, greeted them. Concentrate, she told herself. It’s gone, it’s gone. Narrow your focus, woman. You know how, you’ve done it a thousand times before. It’s gone. Get it back. Concentrate, separate, appreciate, she chanted. Symmetry, limitry, backbone, marrow, she chanted, the phrasemaker in her head plundering her wordstore. Separation, isolation, disseverance, disruption, rent, split and rift, cleavage and abruption, she chanted, the words drowning the water wounds.

The Wounded Moon slipped down his western arc, crossing the spray of stars with a ponderous dignity that dragged at Korimenei’s nerves, setting her to wonder if this interminable night would ever end, if she could possibly get through two more nights like it.

Sometime after moonset, she felt a presence come into the meadow. It was a small meadow with young pines clustering tightly around it. She sat in the center like a rat in a pit. Owl eyes looked at her, immense golden eyes. Owl flew round and round the pinepit meadow, his wings stretched wider than the grass did, but somehow Owl flew there round and round Korimenei. Feathers touched her, wings brushed her head, her shoulder, she smelled him. She trembled, her bones turned to ice. She heard Owl cry something, voices spoke inside her head, there was something they were saying to her, she could not quite understand them.