Jo Clayton - Moongather

Raiki finally acknowledged this by clucking in distress and leading Serroi into her tent. The air inside was warm and saturated with the woman’s smell. Accustomed to the antiseptic cleanness of the Noris’s tower, this casual attitude to dirt and smell repelled Serroi. As Raiki pulled out a sleeping rug and tossed some pillows into a corner of the tent, Serroi struggled to hide her disgust. She settled on the cushions until Raiki left, then she pulled the rag off her head, ran her fingers through her hair, stroked them across her eye-spot, then concentrated on the pillows, evicting the vermin in them and in the sleeping rug, driving them before her to the tent wall and out into the gravel beyond. She heard a chuckle behind her and wheeled, feeling hot in the face. Raiki stood just inside the tent, hands on hips, a twinkle in her liquid eyes. Serroi lifted her hands, dropped them. “I didn’t mean to…”

“Insult me?” Raiki threw back her head and roared with laughter. Still chuckling, wiping at her eyes, she shook her head. “Little one, you don’t. Those small lifes sneak in through my tightest spells.” She cocked her head and examined Serroi with considerable interest, reached out and stroked her face. “The patches are starting to meet. You’re a misborn of the windrunners.” Her wide mouth spread into a grin. “Do me, by the Maiden.” She swung her massive arms out and up. “Chase ‘ em , child.”

Serroi giggled, then both were laughing as the small forms skittered down Raiki’s arms and legs and scuttled away.

Raiki sat on the cleaned pillows beside Serroi. Quietly, soberly, she touched Serroi’s hand, her thumb moving gently over one of the few remaining rosy patches. “Best keep away from the rest of the mouscar; they don’t understand difference, meto.” She was becoming more fluent in mijloc as she continued to speak it. “And be careful of Yehail. She’ll try to hurt you if she can.” Raiki sighed. “I don’t know what the Maiden means with her; weren’t for the fact she’s the only one with sign of talent, I’d run her home before tomorrow dawn.” She shook her head, passed a hand over her forehead. “And I’m old.” Her voice low and dispirited, she murmured, “Yehail’s jealous and simmering with more resentments than these pillows had fleas. Worse, she’s greedy and short-sighted, not in the eyes but in the way she looks at things. She hasn’t the temperament to be a good janja. I’ve searched them all, not a touch of the talent, even the unborn.” She sucked in a deep breath and let it whoosh out. “You, meto. Let me teach you.”

“No!” Seeing the hurt in Raiki’s face at her sharp refusal, Serroi went on hastily, “I’ve seen… I’ve felt… No, I can’t touch power, Raiki-mother, I’m not fit.” She closed her eyes, the Noris’s face dark in her mind. She remembered the sick triumph in her when she shared the Noris’s victory over his challengers. Remembered what the quest for power had done to him and everything around him. Shivering and weeping, tired and afraid, she huddled on the pillows until Raiki caught her in her warm arms and rocked her back and forth, cooing to her, comforting her.

The next morning Serroi drifted awake, feeling warm and content, opened her eyes and saw with momentary confusion a slanting tan wall rising close beside her. She freed her hand from the tangled rug and touched it, feeling the coarse yarn and the tough, tight weave. As she blinked and smiled, memory returning, she heard voices outside raised in argument. She pushed the rug back and yawned, ran her fingers through her hair, wondering if she could have a bath, wrinkled her nose because she still smelled strongly of jamat.

The tent flap was jerked aside and Raiki came storming in. When she saw Serroi sitting up, her scowl shifted into a smile. “You slept hard, meto.”

Serroi yawned and smiled sleepily at her. “I was tired.”

“Got some things for you.” She dropped a pair of old sandals beside Serroi, then shook out a long wool robe, a tubular garment woven of undyed berbec wool. Serroi looked dubiously at it, unhappy at the thought of putting on another person’s dirt, though it seemed clean enough. Raiki looked thoughtfully from the robe to Serroi and back. “Might be a bit long,” she said after a moment. “Try it on, see how much fixing it needs.”

As the days of summer drifted slowly past, Serroi was Raiki’s shadow. She continued to refuse to learn Raiki’s magic, recoiling from it with a fear that was burned deep into her; she wanted nothing to do with magic. What she did with her life she was determined to accomplish through the strength of mind and hand alone, it seemed a cleaner way of living, though she couldn’t deny Raiki’s goodness and the need her people had for her. She sternly repressed all mention of her initiation dream in the desert, refused to dream again.

The Pehiiri mouscar counted five families, the most that their barren territory could support. This territory wasn’t so much a slice of land as a migration route and series of wells that the mouscar had dug and now maintained. They moved in a year-long loop, south in the winter along the inner line and north in the summer along the outer arc of the loop. When Serroi joined them they were close to the northernmost well.

They camped at the present well for another passage, then packed the tents and moved on. Serroi helped Raiki fold up the tent and lash her belongings on the jamat’s back, then walked beside her as the mouscar began its leisurely progress to the final well.

The days were hot and dusty and slow. They were forced to move no faster than the grazing berbeci. Serroi walked silent beside Raiki, a small dark shadow, listening while the janja schooled her apprentice. Yehail never forgot that Serroi followed. Her eyes continually swiveled around to her, glinting with triumph when she thought she was monopolizing Raiki-janja’s attention, glaring with hate when her inattention to the lesson brought her a scolding.

Nights were hot and breathless. There was no water for bathing; hardly enough water for the ritual glasses of cha the men took around their lire at night. Food was scanty; there was no time for searching out the wild grains, roots and herbs to supplement the greasy stews. The families slept in their clothes, huddled in a mass of rugs, women on the inside, their men in a ring of hot snoring flesh around them. Raiki and Serroi slept apart, but the night sounds of the uneasy sleepers surrounded them, then groans and snores, the wails of hungry babies, sharp staccato slaps at wandering sand fleas. In the rope corral, jamati shifted about, pawed at the sand, honked mournfully, resenting their daily burdens, restless under the moon’s. A bit farther out, the berbeci whined and cried out, rose and wandered aimlessly about, sometimes dodging and twisting to get away from the night-herds. When one succeeded, the boy who was nearest would curse, call to his companion, then trot out into the shadowy plain to chase down the escapee through the shifting moon-shadows that made such intrusions a continual stumbling and falling.

The mouscar reached the Northwell at the end of the ninth day. The tents went up as the women and girls worked quickly to spread the tent cloth and set the poles and drive in the pegs. The men had scattered to look over the grazing lands, checking grass and browse to see how well they’d renewed themselves in the passages of rest. Serroi helped Raiki set up her tent, arrange the rugs and pillows inside and quietly drive out the vermin that had crept back from the jamat and the sand they’d slept on during the trek. Yehail had returned to her family for the night, leaving the two janjai in comfortable silence, stalking away, seething with anger and jealousy.

Serroi frowned over her cha, watching the girl until she merged with the dark cluster of figures around her family fire. “Raiki, she’s going to make trouble for you. Because of me. She doesn’t even try to understand.”