Much later, Dad said casually, “Pretty little kid, that Charm.”
He wasn’t fooling me with his light tone. The remark was fraught with deep significance. He couldn’t have failed to note the incredible beauty of Charm, webbed feet or no. Anyway, she’d been wearing shoes.
We stilks get used to following trains of thought. In our case, though, the train might wander through the memories of many ancestors. And I knew what had prompted Dad’s remark.
It was the sight of Mister McNeil’s residence on the hillside, surrounded by outlandishly bright flowers.
A big round humanbuilt thing, like an umbrellafish, like no shape you ever see in a normal house. Shining silvery-red in the light of the setting Phu. And clinging to the side of it like a parasite was the tumble-down shack of the Nowhere Man.
It didn’t happen in my lifetime, this local scandal. But Granddad — Yam Ernest, who was stabbed in the back some years ago — remembered it clearly from his younger days. And I’m privy to those memories, right up to the time Granddad and his woman lay together one summer day behind the lox stables, and conceived Dad. Since then, well, Granddad could have committed Phu knows what crimes, and I’d know nothing about it. This is why we tend to conceive children as late in life as is reasonable, to make sure the maximum memories are passed on. You wonder how I can speak your language so well? It’s because I possess the human vocabulary learned over the generations by my ancestors. Important knowledge must not be allowed to die.
The problem is, shameful memories don’t die either.
When Granddad was twenty he took a friend for a joyride on the Yam motorcart. He was next in line for chiefship, so he could get away with that kind of behavior. I’ve stardreamed this incident and I can picture it as vividly as if it were a first-hand memory. The track to Noss, bright and dusty. The narrow lane beyond Noss men’s village that rises through seasuckers, past the sacred forest of anemones and cuptrees to the cliff top. The terrified screeching of a grummet snared by a tree. Windswept open ground at the cliff top. The grume-thick sea, white with distant birds like snowflakes. The rocky coastline ending in far-distant Pallahaxi, the ancient holy town showing as a knobby smudge on the horizon.
And young Granddad and his friend Hodge, chatting lazily in the sun.
And soon, mild boredom and temptation.
We’ve all tasted distil. Normal curiosity. It burns the mouth at first, but later you start to feel good. Later still you feel pretty rotten, but who thinks that far into the future? The past is what’s important to us stilks. Granddad reached into the motorcart, chuckling, and took down a can of distil. I can feel it as though it were in my hand right now, red and metal and human-made, heavy with the contents slopping about inside. Granddad unscrewed the cap and took a sip, and passed it to Hodge. I can feel the shame in Granddad’s memory for what happened after that. He blamed himself. I, more pragmatically, blame Hodge.
I’m surprised Granddad didn’t place the memory under geas, the taboo we use on memories we don’t want investigated… .
Two Noss girls arrived panting at the cliff top and stood regarding the motorcart with respect, no doubt thinking these two young men must be very important to drive such a vehicle. They were pretty girls, fun-loving and game for a sip of distil too.
Before long four drunken young people lay beside the motorcart, laughing and singing dirty fishing songs.
Granddad’s memories become blurred after that, but he remembered Hodge and one of the girls drifting off somewhere. Then, sobering up rapidly, he remembered the arrival of a posse of Noss men and women including the womanchief. He remembered the shouting and the recriminations.
And, late that year during the drench, he remembered the deputation from Noss arriving at Yam, and diplomatic relations between the two villages being broken off.
The child was raised in Noss — in the women’s village, as is the custom with all children. He was a boy, so at the age of five he moved to the men’s village as boys do. Normally boys will then be taken under their father’s wing. But this boy had no father in Noss; no father in Yam either, since Hodge had left the village to start a new life in Alika. The child was an orphan and an oddity, the product of miscegenation, a freak and a monster who just happened to look like a normal person. I didn’t know whether he had webbed feet or not. Probably one of each. With nobody to take responsibility for him he became a problem in the village and, by the time he came of age, he was completely out of control.
In fairness to him we must remember all his ancestral knowledge came from his Yam male antecedents. Ancestral memories are sex-specific. He was mixed up, trying to fit into a fishing culture that meant nothing to him. After a number of incidents they threw him out.
He disappeared for a while; people said he went to Pallahaxi and prayed a lot. Then one day he was seen walking the coast road, and shortly afterward he was reported to be splitting wood near the human agent’s residence. Soon he’d built a lean-to shack for himself against the silver wall. An appropriate place, since it’s half-way between Yam and Noss. People waited for the agent to kick him out, but it never happened. Years passed, agents changed, Mister McNeil arrived, but the Nowhere Man is there still.
And all this had prompted dear old Dad to say, “Pretty little kid, that Charm.”
It was a double-edged remark. One: Charm, and by extension you, Hardy, are too young to savor the sweaty delights of sex. And two: You’d better keep your hands off her, you dirty young freezer, because she’s a flounder and therefore forbidden fruit.
So I said, “Uh.”
There followed a pregnant father-and-son silence. I could tell Dad was still brooding about miscegenation. Bearing in mind Charm’s beauty I wouldn’t have minded brooding about it myself, but the subject had to be changed before Dad became morbid.
“Is it that bad, the crops and stuff, Dad?”
“Huh? Oh, yes. I was talking to Wand yesterday, and she tells me we’re looking at a yield about a quarter down on last year.”
Yam Wand is our womanchief, a real pain in the ass. But even allowing for her love of scare tactics, the situation was clearly serious. You could tell just by looking at the village fields. Winter was long, spring came late, summer was cool and the grain crop was half its usual height.
“And last year was worse than the year before.” I said gloomily, showing a proper concern for our society. I’d noticed a lot of people wasting their time praying in the Yam temple lately, always a barometer of public morale.
Hunger overtook us about then, and we stopped for a mug of stuva tea, using hot water from the motorcart’s boiler. Dad brought out a bag of smoked fish, doubtless a gift from the besotted Lonessa, and we gnawed on that. Darkness and cold was coming on, which would have been frightening if we’d been on loxback, or walking. But we finished our meal, climbed back onto the motorcart and felt the blessed warmth of it, and Dad opened the throttle. The funnel uttered its reassuring chaff-chaff-chaff and we rumbled on our way by the feeble glimmer of the running lights.
“She’s a nice old lady, that Lonessa,” I said casually, having had plenty of time to compose the exact wording of the remark.
I know Dad shot me a glance of deep suspicion because the firebox door was open at the time, but I don’t think he could see my face so clearly as I saw his.
Then he chuckled. “You’re a cheeky young freezer, Hardy,” he said. “One of these days it’s going to get you in big trouble.”
I laughed too, and soon we were running past little knots of people chatting around the public heaters on the outskirts of Yam. We drove on, waving, turned the motorcart into Uncle Stance’s yard, dropped the fire in a smoldering heap and chaff-chaffed into the covered shed on the last of the steam in the boiler.
So ended my seventeenth birthday.
“So what really happened to the boat, Hardy?” asked Caunter.
“Yeah, what really happened to the boat?” echoed the oafish Trigger.
/>
I’d avoided them for two days, and on the third day I’d walked down the Totney road for a while, then turned off down a narrower track to a tiny tree-fringed pool; a favorite spot of mine when I wanted to be alone. The pool is almost circular and less than ten paces across. A Stardreaming Place; we all have them. I’d seated myself comfortably under a yellowball tree and pulled out my pipe and pouch of hatch. The sun was high but my spot was shaded, and buzzflies zoomed around, neatly avoiding the clutching frondflowers. A snowdiver splashed into the pool almost vertically and emerged safely with a little fish in its beak; there were no ice-devils in this inland water.
I filled and lit my pipe. It was time for stardreaming.
I slipped into Dad’s memories first. Dad is different from most, because he has this unhealthy relationship with my mother, Yam Spring.
Any normal fellow breaks off contact with a woman once the sex thing has been performed. But I’m seventeen now and Dad still sees Spring often, although covertly. Many times I’ve come across them by the riverside, sitting together looking at the water, talking quietly, holding hands. Bizarre! Men and women have nothing in common. A man’s memories pass on down the male line, a woman’s down the female. This makes for two different cultures.
What do Dad and Spring talk about, for Phu’s sake? Men aren’t interested in agriculture. Women aren’t interested in hunting. And their ancestral memories are totally unconnected and seen from separate viewpoints.
Dad refuses to explain. He seems embarrassed about it all, as well he might. I wanted to get to the bottom of this, maybe via Dad’s memories. So on that warm morning three days after my seventeenth birthday I lay back and began to stardream.
I remembered Dad meeting Spring. She was from Totney and he met her on a hunting trip with Granddad. I could see her in my mind’s eye, gathering winternuts on the fringe of the empty moorland. She looked very beautiful to Dad. My mind was filled with the warmth of that meeting; there’s a lot of emotion in stardreamed memories. She left Totney the same day and accompanied Granddad and Dad back to Yam on the back of Dad’s lox. She and Dad went through the usual niceties, then they had sex.
And at that point my access to Dad’s memories ends. The sex-linked chain of memory genes feeding the central lobe of the brain — a phrase of Mister McNeil’s — had been passed on to the ovum. I had no memory of what happened to Dad and Spring afterward; no explanation of what kept them seeing each other. Maybe the answer lay in their courtship behavior, as Mister McNeil calls it. I began to remember this more carefully, in more detail.
That was when Caunter and Trigger arrived noisily, shattering the dream.
“I did not run that freezing boat onto a freezing rock!” I shouted, in response to Caunter’s next question.
“They’re saying you were rescued by a little flounder girlie,” piped Trigger, with a whinny of derision.
“Whoever said that is a freezing liar.”
“They’re saying you were screaming like a stuck snorter. They’re saying she had to slap your face to make you shut up. She was eight years old, they’re saying.”
“She was sixteen at least!” Rax! I could have bitten my tongue off!
“Aha! Aha!”
I switched to the offensive. “Who knocked a hole in the bottom, that’s what I’d like to know!”
That shut them up. Caunter said tentatively, “You’re serious, Hardy?”
“Of course I’m serious. Rax, can you imagine what it’s like, a boat sinking under you like that? Whoever holed that boat could have killed me! If I thought it was either of you two freezers I’d—”
“Well, it wasn’t,” said Caunter hastily.
I’d been thinking about it over the past couple of days. “Dad brought the boat up from Noss by loxcart seven days ago for my birthday. It was sitting outside our door for a few days, right way up. We wouldn’t have noticed a hole in the bottom. It could have happened any time.”
“And it could have been bad Noss workmanship,” suggested Caunter.
“Come on!” cried Trigger, who’d been tossing pieces of dried meat into the water in the hope of arousing something vile down there. “This place is no fun. Let’s go down to the river!”
So we made our way to the river and found a likely looking pool in a water meadow, and threw in the remainder of Trigger’s food.
There was a faint crackling sound as the water crystallized.
I don’t know why we enjoyed scaring ourselves like that; as we were to find out, there were real enough dangers coming our way. But we could never resist triggering off an ice-devil in a pond. It always gave us a frisson of fear, because it could have been us imprisoned in that crystal. I’ve seen animals as big as lox trapped by the jaw, having unwarily tried to drink from such a pool. And the ice-devil will hold them there until they suffocate or even starve, and then de-crystallize the pool, and eat its prey.
“I can never understand how they do it,” said Trigger wonderingly, staring at the glittering surface.
“Mister McNeil calls it a saturated solution of some salt or other,” said Caunter vaguely. “Much thicker than the grume, even, although you wouldn’t know from looking at it. He says the ice-devil waits until something splashes, and then crystallizes the pool by releasing a bit more salt from its body. Then it decrystallizes the pool by pissing, or something very like that.”
The explanation was prosaic but the situation fun. We cut squares of matweed from the river shallows and laid them on the crystal, and retired a short distance. Then we sprinted forward, leaped onto the matweed and slithered across the surface to the far side of the pool, yelling with excitement.
Occasionally we would catch a glimpse of the ice-devil lurking below the surface, a head-size many-tentacled thing, itself imprisoned — but only for a while. In days — or hours or minutes — the pool would just as suddenly turn to water again. And if its prey was still struggling, it would recrystallize.
That was the excitement, as we slid to and fro that summer afternoon. We were dicing with death, but the odds were on our side.
For the time being.
Speaking of dicing with death, we had a prime practitioner of that art in Yam.
Silly May was an oddity, a girl born with no memories. She will be alone for the rest of her life, with no ancestors to guide her. This defect only happens occasionally, fortunately for the species, and such people are discouraged from having children. Consequently May can only learn from her own experiences, and is given to social and practical errors. Since her defect was discovered she’s been banned from the usual women’s work in case she makes some costly mistake, such as setting fire to a grainfield.
“I refuse to turn that girl loose on my crops,” our womanchief, Wand, said many years ago, and shortly afterward Silly May was appointed the Yam arborist. It’s an important enough job from the religious angle, but it’s simple and straightforward and there’s not much can go wrong with the crops. However, plenty can go wrong with the arborist. They are looked on as expendable.
Our previous arborist had been strangled by an anemone tree while taking cuttings for her nursery. Fortunately she’d almost finished her spring cutting by then, and Silly May had a full summer to get used to tending the nursery plants before the thanksgiving planting at the end of the grume.
That was three years ago and May was now sixteen, a bright and pretty girl, although still liable to make outlandish statements.
“We should load all the scions onto a cart,” she told me the day before the thanksgiving pilgrimage to Newt Wood, “then they wouldn’t be so likely to get damaged on the journey. We could pull the cart behind the motorcart. Much easier and quicker.”
I regarded the nursery, collecting my thoughts. Two hundred or so miniature anemone plants and the same number of tiny cuptrees grew in neat rows in the most fertile area of our fields, cleared of popweed, palpater and spreadweed. Tomorrow the templekeeper would come here in his robes and b
less the crop, for what that was worth, and each villager would take an anemone in one hand, a cuptree in the other, and walk the dusty road to Newt Wood, and stick them in the ground. And the templekeeper would bless them again.
It had been done that way as far back as my visited memories went.
“And we wouldn’t have that awful business of the anemones clawing at the people carrying them,” she said.
“It’s a good idea,” I said nicely because she was pretty, even though it was impossible to think of mating with a defective, “but I don’t think this is the time to suggest it.”
“Why not? It’s the very best time, with the pilgrimage coming up tomorrow.”
While I was trying to think of a way to tell her without insulting her, my Uncle Stance strode up. He regarded me with no more interest than he would regard a lorin. This was a relief, because it was not a good thing to be seen getting over-friendly with a defective girl. Just suppose — a remote possibility — we were to get together and May should have a girl child, that child would only have one generation of inherited memory. Bad for the species. May was destined to live her life a virgin.
“I have a suggestion, Yam Stance,” said May before I could stop her.
Uncle Stance inflated himself visibly. I guessed what he was thinking. Any suggestion from May was an insult. Did this slip of a girl — with no memories — think she could come up with something that he, the manchief with countless generations of experience behind him, had missed? Impossible! Outrageous!
“Yes?” he said menacingly.
She explained while he rocked to and fro on his feet, legs astride, growing progressively redder in the face.
“Sacrilege!” he yelled before she had a chance to finish. “We’ve always carried the plants to Newt Wood by hand and we always will! Have you no feeling for tradition, girl?”
Pallahaxi Page 24
