Jo Clayton: Shadow of the Warmaster

1. A short while before the meeting, less than an hour.

Quale’s Nest/Telffer.

I was out in the back yard working on a harpframe, lovely wood, dark and resonant, didn’t have a name, Herby snagged the tree out of the river and took it to his curing shed. Herby’s a neighbor upstream, he belongs to one of the settlement families, his land’s tax free so long as he or his kin own it; got the temperament and habits of a mudweasel, but he keeps to himself unless he scavenges something he thinks he can sell me, so he’s not all that bad as a neighbor. Where was. I? Ah. The harp. The shape sang under my hands and looked like music; whether it would sound as good, well, I was hoping. It was almost ready for stringing; I was carving a design into it, most complex pattern I’ve attempted, double spirals and woven lacings, amarelo buds and leaves in oval cartouches, took concentration and more patience than I thought I had until I started working on it. I’d put together frames before this one, trying one thing and another, different shapes, different woods, you get the idea; I wanted to make the sound as perfect as the shape. Far as I could tell. My ear’s not so bad, but my fingers are all thumbs. The last one before this had a warm rich tone, I was quite pleased with it. When Shadith sent word she was coming, I got it out with a couple more and tuned them. I wanted to know what she thought.

Back yard’s a comfortable place. I spend a lot of time here, working, reading, contemplating my navel, whatever. Got a plank fence around it to keep the vermin out. Flowering thornbushes grow in stripbeds against the planks. A sight to see, they are, come spring when every cane is thick with bloom. No roof, but there’s a deflecter field for when it rains, keeps the wet out without ruining the skyview, which can be spectacular during summer storms. One of them was blowing up the day I’m talking about, clouds were gathering over Stormbringer’s peak, they’d be down on us in an hour or so. I’ve got the ground under my worktable paved with roughcut slabs of slate. Some of them are cracked; griza grass grows in these cracks and between the slabs, that’s a native grass, dusty looking gray-green, puts out seedheads in the spring, not the fall, they stand up over the blades like minute denuded umbrella ribs. Beyond the stone there’s mute clover, griza doesn’t have a chance against it. There are stacks of wood sitting around, some roughcut planks, some stripped logs. I’ve got a largish workshed in the south corner, the roof is mostly skylight; I store my tools in there but don’t work inside except in winter when it’s too cold to sit in the garden. Or when I need to use the lathe or one of the saws. There are two viuvars (like short fat willows) growing beside the shed and a tendrij in the north corner. The tendrij was here on my mountainside before I built my house. The trunk’s a pewter column a hundred meters tall and thirty around; branches start about fifty meters up, black spikes spiraling around the bole; the leaves if you can call them that look like ten meter strips of gray-green and blue-green cellophane. When the storm winds blow them straight out, they roar loud enough to deafen you; on lazy warm spring days like this one, they shimmer and whisper and throw patches of shifting greens and blues in place of shadow.

My worktable is a built-up slab of congel wood. Tough, that wood, takes a molecular edge to work it, but it lasts forever; a benefit to living on Telffer, you pay in blood for congel offworld. Mottled medium brown with patches of gold like a pale tortoiseshell.

Pretty stuff, which is a good thing because it won’t take stain any way you try it and even paint peels off, something about the oil, they say. I had the gouges I was using laid out on a patch of leather close to hand, the tool kit beside it, the frame I was working on set in padded clamps, the finished harps down at the far end waiting for Shadith to try them.

Butterflies flittered about, lighting on the thornflowers, feeding on their pollen; a sight to add pleasure to the day, but it meant I’d got worms in the wood and I was going to have to fumigate the yard. There were quilos squealing in the viuvars. Quilos are furry mats with skinny black legs, six of them, and deft little black fingers on their paws. Never been able to find any sign of eyes, ears or nose on them, though they’re fine gliders and can skitter about on the ground like drops of water on a greased griddle. They drive the cats crazy, how can you prowl downwind of a thing that’s got no nose or chase something that can switch direction without caring which end is front? I had five cats last time I counted and they’re all neutered, so that should be that, but none of them are black and two days ago I saw this black body creeping low to the ground, going after a quilo who was chewing on a beetle it picked off a thornbush, it’s why I tolerate a few of the things about, they keep the bug population down. I threw a chunk of wood at the cat and it streaked off. A young black tom. Pels says he thinks there’s something mystical about black toms, there’s never an assemblage of cats without one of them showing up, he says he’s convinced they’re born out of the collective unconscious of cats, structures of unbridled libido created to assuage cat lust. He may be right.

Pels kurk-Orso. Let’s see. He’s my com off and aux pilot. He’s got a thing with plants and keeps my Slancy green; he’s heavyworld born and bred, Mevvyaurang; not many have heard of it, Aurrangers aren’t much for company or traveling. 2.85 g. Where they have three sexes. Sperm carrier (Rau), seed carrier (Arra), womb-nurse (Maung). He’s Rau. Hmm. There’s a heavy burden he has to bear. Drives him into craziness sometimes. Females of every sentient species I’ve come across, even the reptilids, want to cuddle him, they all think he’s devastatingly cute. Fluffy little teddy bear with big brown eyes. Barely up to my belt which is small even among his own people. Talking about the Aurrangers, they’re agoraphobes in a big way, live in huddles underground. Funny, they’re frightened of just about everything and they’re the best damn predators I’ve met. You ought to see Pels stalking something. That fuzz of his isn’t fur at all, when he’s up for hunting, it kicks over into a shifting camouflage that beats hell out of a chameleon web. Thing is, he was born a misfit, always going out on the surface, fascinated by space and the stars that gave the night sky a frosty sheen; he was different enough to be miserable with his own people. He applied for a work-study grant to University and got it, being very very bright, but once he got his degree, with an honors list a km long, no one took him seriously enough to hire him. He was too damn cute.

When his money ran out, he had a choice between scavenging for scraps and a life of little crimes or living in luxury as a family pet. He was a reasonably competent burglar by the time I put my Slancy Orza into orbit park over Admin/University.

I was finishing a job for some xenobiologists, delivering a cargo of rare plants. The com off I had on that trip, she had a sweet paper trail and was a golden goddess for looks, but she was a whiner. Kumari and me, we came close to strangling her, but we held off till we reached University. We fired her without recommendation; it was safer than pushing her out a lock if not so satisfying. We turned over the plants and went out to celebrate our freedom from that rockdrill whine.

Sometime round dawn we got tangled up with Pels who was committing mayhem on what looked to be half the thugs on StarStreet. Amazing thing to watch. We hauled him loose and took him home with us because Kumari was curious about him. No, she wasn’t about to go motherly over him. I talk about her as she, because she looks female, but she’s a neuter, got the sex drive of a rock and her maternal instincts could be engraved on a neutrino with a number ten nail. Most of her energy goes into curiosity.