Jo Clayton - Drinker of Souls

The flames vanished, the music stopped, the dance stopped. Brann stood very still in the center of the wagonstage, breathing rapidly, then flung out her arms and bowed to the audience. She ran up the ladder and vanished into the shadows to a burst of whistles and applause.

The drum began again, a quick insistent beat. Taguiloa leaped onto the railing. “People of Hamardan, see my dance.” He flung the broidered robe away with a gesture as impressive as it seemed careless for he capered high above the wagon and the court’s rough stone on a rail the width of a small man’s hand. He wore a knitted bodysuit of white silk flexible as chainmail, fitting like a second skin; a wide crimson sash was tied about his waist, its dangling ends swinging and flaring with the shifts of his body in that impossible dance. Behind him, flute and drums blended in familiar music, Hina tunes though the drum sound was more sonorous and melodic than the flat tinny sound of tradition. At first the flute sang in a traditional mode then changed as the dance changed, beginning to tease and pull at the tunes. Harra tossed Taguiloa’s shimmer spheres to him, one by one. They caught the light of the lampions and multiplied so it was as if a dozen tiny lamps were trapped in each crystal sphere, shimmering crimson, gold and silver as he put one, two, three and finally four into the air and kept them circling as he did a shuffle dance on that rail moving on the knife edge of disaster until he built an almost unbearable tension in the workers, who gave a soft whisper of a sigh as he capered then tossed the spheres one by one into the darkness behind him.

The drum hushed, the flute took up a two-faced tune; it had two sets of words, one set a child’s counting rhyme, the other a comically obscene version the rivermen used for rowing. With that as background he did a fast, sliding, stumbling comic dance on that railing, swaying precariously and constantly seeming about to fall from his perch. Each time he recovered with some extravagant bit of business that drew gasps of laughter from the crowd. He ended that bit as secure, it seemed, on his narrow railing as his audience were on their paving stones. With the flute laughing behind him, he flung out his arms and bent his body in an extravagant bow. The flute soared to a shriek. He overbalanced to a concerted gasp from the watchers that changed to stomping, shouting applause as he landed lightly on his feet and flipped immediately into a tumbling run. Above, the flute, drums, daroud began to weave together a music that was part familiar and part a borrowing from three other cultures, music that captured the senses and was all the stranger for the touch of familiarity in it. Taguiloa flung his body about in a dance that melded tumbling, movement from a dozen cultures and his own fertile imagination. The music and the man’s twisting, wheeling body wove a thing under the starshimmer and lampion glow that earth and sky had never seen before. And when the movement ended, when the music died and Taguiloa stood panting, there was for one moment a profound silence in the court, then that was broken with whistles, shouts, stomping feet, hands beating on sides, thighs, the backs of others. And it went on and on, a celebration of this new thing without a name that had taken them and shaken them out of themselves.

WHEN THEY COULD get away from the exulting Host and the mostly silent but leechlike attentions of the jamar and his jamika, they met in the inn’s bathhouse.

Steam rose and swirled about lamps burning perfumed oil, casting ghost shadows on the wet tiles; the condensation on the walls was bright and dark in random patterns like the beaded pattern on a snakeskin. Brann swam slowly through the hot water, her changed black hair streaming in a fan about her shoulders. Yaril and Jaril swam energetically about like pale fish, half the time under the water, bumping into the others, sharing their soaring spirits. Negomas paddled after them, almost, as much at home in the water as they were, his only handicap his need to breathe. Taguiloa lolled in the warm water, his head in a resthollow, his eyes half shut,a dreamy smile twitching at his lips. Now and then he straightened his face, but his enforced gravity always dissolved into a smile of sleepy satisfaction. Harm kicked lazily about, her long dark brown hair kinking into tight curls about her pointed face.

The first time the troupe had gone from a long hard rehearsal into Blackthorn’s bathhouse, Harra had been startled, even shocked, as the others stripped down to the skin and plunged with groans of pleasure into the water and let its heat leach away soreness from weary muscles. Communal bathing was an ancient Hina custom, one whose origins were somewhere in the mythtime before men learned to write. A bathhouse was rigidly unstratified, the one place where Hina of all castes mingled freely, the one place where the strictures of ordinary manners could be dropped and men and women could relax. After the Temueng conquest, the bathhouses were suppressed for a few years, Temuengs seeing them as places of rampant immorality, unable to believe that sexual contact between all those naked people was something that simply did not happen, that anyone who broke the houses’ only rule would be thrown out immediately and ostracized as barbarian. Harm’s wagon-dwelling people lived much like those early Ternuengs, with little physical privacy and many rules to determine the behavior of both sexes, rules born out of necessity and cramped quarters, though her life had been different from that of the ordinary girlchild of the Rukka-nag. She had no older brothers or sisters. Her mother died in childbirth when she was four, and the infant girl died with her. After that her mage father spent little time with his people, traveling for months, years, apart from the clan, taking Harra with him. Absorbed in his studies, absently assuming she’d somehow learn the female strictures her mother would have taught her, he treated her as much like a son as a daughter, especially when she grew old enough for him to notice her quick intelligence, though he did engage a maid to help her keep herself tidy and sew new clothing for her when she needed or wanted it. He began teaching her his craft when she was eight, training her in music and shaping, the two things being close to the same thing for him and her; they were much alike in their interests and very close; he talked to her more often than not as if she were another magus of his own age and learning. But there were times when he was shut up with his researches or visiting other mages in the many many cities they visited or stopping at one of the rude hermitages where nothing female was permitted; then he settled her into one of the local homes. She learned how to adapt herself quickly to local custom, how to become immediately aware of the dangers to a young girl and how to protect herself from those while making such friends as she could to lessen her loneliness a bit. Sometimes-though this was rare-her father stayed as long as two years in one place, other times she’d begin to take in the flavor of a city, to learn its smells and sounds and other delights, then he’d be going again. It was a strange, sometimes troubling, usually uncertain existence, and the burden of maintaining their various households fell mainly on her slender shoulders once she reached her twelfth birthday, but it was excellent preparation for survival when her father died between one breath and the next from an aneurism neither of them knew he had. And it let her assess at a glance the proper manners in a bathhouse and overcome her early training. Unable to control her embarrassment, she contrived to hide it, stripped with the rest and got very quickly into water she found a lot too clear for her comfort. She paddled about with her back turned to the others hoping the heat of the water would explain the redness in her face, but ended relaxed and sighing with pleasure as the heat soothed her soreness.