Jo Clayton: Moongather

“Curosh, Curosh!” Tayyan, whooped with glee as the macai came plunging toward them. “Come come come come!”

Serroi shrieked along with her shieldmate, her alto counterpointing Tayyan’s squeal, her premonitions forgotten as she surrendered to the noise and excitement around her. Yells. Curses. Stamping boots. Arms whacking into her back and sides. Wine bowls splashing over her. Flecks of gravel striking her face. Smells of mansweat and animalsweat washing over her. Bits of foam splattering her. Crowd roar. Surge of bodies pushing the two of them forward. Jostling. Yelling. Laughing. Crowd madness absorbing them as the watchers surged around the snapping winner.

The bubble burst. Serroi came back to sanity, dizzy from wine fumes, nauseated, her head throbbing. Tayyan was stuffing gold and silver coins into her money sack and talking energetically to a smallish man with hair like straw and a brown, weathered face like a withered old root. Serroi hauled her away and the two meien edged out of the scattering mob, crunching over the gritty earth toward the Highroad and the city gate.

Tayyan was still excited, pouring the contents of her money sack into her hand, counting her winnings, crowing her triumph, ignoring Serroi’s growing withdrawal. The eyespot was throbbing, each small nip a warning shout. Danger ahead. Watch out. She said nothing-there was nothing to say, the warning was unlocalized in time or space and there was nothing around them but the moonlit plain and the plodding sportsmen returning to the city. Even these grew quieter as they approached the gates. More than one of them had passed wine and coin to the guards on duty there, bribing them to leave the gates open a crack. By good fortune none of the guards belonged to the Flame. Or perhaps fortune had nothing to do with that. Domnor Hern enjoyed a good race; only harsh and unyielding pressure from counselors, wives and the Sons of the Flame had brought him to banning races and condemning the wagering that went on at them.

The two women passed unnoticed through the gate, but once, inside, Serroi walked faster, pulling Tayyan after her with some urgency. In the city there was a growing hostility to the meien, a hostility fostered by the Sons of the Flame. Domnor Hern still used them as harem guards but the other meien were gradually being dismissed by their employers. Outside Oras, in the small villages of the Mijloc, the priests of the Flame called them devil’s whores and other names even less polite, led campaigns against those followers of the Maiden who still sent problem daughters to the Biserica valley for training as weaponwomen, healers or Servants of the Maiden. The custom-its origins lost in the mists of mythic time-of providing sanctuary at the Biserica for runaway girls and women had created a reservoir of resentment among the more conservative Mijlocim that was easy enough to stir into revulsion and fear.

Tayyan dumped half the coins back in her sack and stepped suddenly in front of Serroi, grinning broadly as she hugged her shieldmate, then caressed the eye-spot with the back of the fisted hand that held the rest of the money. “Little borrower of trouble,” she said affectionately, still rather drunk with wine and excitement. “Here. This is yours.” She stepped back, caught hold of Serroi’s right hand and dropped a pile of coins into the palm. “I bet a couple of decsets on Curosh for you.”

“Tayyan, you know I don’t play those games.” Serroi tried to give back the money.

“You’ll spoil no sport tonight, love.” Tayyan laughed and danced away, lifting her hands to the gathering clouds, yawning and groaning with the pleasure of stretching her muscles. She stopped, hands on hips, grinned at Serroi. “I’m for bath and bed. Join me?”

Serroi nodded, unhappy because she couldn’t match Tayyan’s high spirits. She walked several minutes in silence, then she sighed and tucked the coins into her own money sack.

The boat heaved as the wind shifted. Serroi stirred, her tongue furry, her head throbbing. She pushed against the deck and lifted her upper body until she was sitting with her legs crossed before her, hands clutching at her temples. She swallowed, swallowed again. People, she thought. I need people. And water. And food. She focused her desire then followed the tugging of the eye-spot southeast toward the cliffs.

She beat her slow way against the wind to the distant shore but she was still some way out when the sun touched zenith and the wind dropped to an erratic series of puffs too weak to lift a feather. The sail flapped against the mast, then sagged, flapped, sagged. She shook the wineskin, unstoppered it and lifted it high, let the thick sour liquid trickle into her mouth. The sun steaming the moisture out of her until she felt her skin frying, she sucked at the wineskin, her eyes on the faint line of the horizon, the tantalizing dark line, so close and so impossibly out of reach. She dozed a little but sleep-brought the nightmares back; finally she kept awake, trying to drift without thinking.

Late in the afternoon a cooler breeze tugged at her hair and teased the sail into slapping noisily at the mast. Sodden with wine and sweat, she staggered to her feet, collapsed onto her knees as the boat rocked under her. She shook her head, groaned, then looked over her shoulder at the sun hanging low in the west, almost touching the flat line of ocean, tipping the waves with crimson. Crawling because she couldn’t stand, she got to the mast, pulled herself onto her feet, her head slowly beginning to clear. People, she thought, desired, then sent the boat where the eye-spot pulled her. The sail filled and the small boat danced lightly across the swells. She blessed the builder. A sweet ship, steady and responsive, built with love and maintained with love, skimming over the darkening water with a singing hiss.

As she drew near the white cliffs she saw another tappata with a pier angling past the outlet, small store-sheds, and a crude stone fort. Driven by wind and the incoming tide, the boat was a bird under her hands swooping down on the pier. The sheds and the fort were deserted, crumbling. She frowned with disappointment, but her eye-spot still tugged her strongly inland, so she settled back and let the wind blow her along the finger of water winding between perpendicular cliffs of chalk.

The Child: 1

The small dirty child was playing with the chinin pups, tumbling recklessly about on the tundra, mashing down grass and flowers, ignoring the prodding of scattered fist-sized rocks. The chinin were play-growling, small sharp teeth worrying at her torn and mud-streaked clothes. Tugging at the ankles of her boots, stomping on her, rolling on her as they wrestled with each other. She was filthy and wet, bruised, scraped in a hundred places, and she loved it, she bathed in the trust and warmth the chinin gave her, felt herself one of them, a chini among chinin. And forgot completely, or refused to think about the scold she’d get later on from her weary mother, the strapping her father would give her, the tormenting she could expect from her normal brothers and sisters. In this play she lived utterly in the present and was supremely happy.

“Serroi!” She recognized the harsh voice of her grandfather and got reluctantly to her feet. She slid her eyes to his face, then stared down at the toe-peaks of her boots. He looked angry and embarrassed. She sneaked a second glance at the man beside him, puzzled by the stranger’s presence. The green blotches on her skin and her smallness offended her grandfather’s sense of self-worth; she was a symbol of his son’s lack of control, conceived against custom at the radiant hot springs where the windrunners wintered, usually kept well out of sight when there were visitors to the camp. Yet now her grandfather was calling her to meet a tall man in a narrow black robe. She came scowling to her grandfather’s side, furious with him for spoiling her joy and too familiar with his heavy hand to dare show her fury.