Fire in the Sky tst-1

by Jo Clayton

  She glanced at Aslan. The Xenoeth had one of the Ridaar pickups pasted to her throat and was busily subvocalizing into it. It was the first time she’d seen Aslan at work and was surprised by the intensity of the woman, the sudden sharp focus which excluded everything except what she was observing.

  The red-haired boy saw the harp and whistled something that Shadith almost caught. Along with one of the Others, he moved cautiously toward her.

  He nodded at the harp, made a gesture of playing.

  Shadith smiled. She dropped the stool, settled herself, contemplated him a moment, then drew her fingers across the strings. She played a lilting dance tune, brought to mind by the whistle talk since it had the same quick, sprightly movement.

  The red-haired boy glanced from Shadith to Aslan. He grinned, pursed his lips in a whistle that was silent until he’d figured out intervals and tones, then he snapped his fingers and wove a sweet liquid line around her playing. His companion joined him.

  The rest of the captives listened a moment longer, then they began whistling and dancing round and round the two women.

  “Amazing.”

  Shadith glanced around but kept her fingers busy.

  The Goлs was talking to Aslan. She sighed and listened to them.

  Aslan clicked off the Ridaar. “Oh?”

  “How simple it is and how profound to bring a harpist to a world soaked in music.” He sighed. “The Yaraka are many things, but musical we’re not.”

  “Credit your report, Goлs Koraka.”

  “Do you have enough from this meeting? The sun is nearly down and I’d prefer to button up here before long.”

  “I’ve enough to think about. There is one thing you might change. The harpist is also an empath; she says the tinglers cause real pain in the moss-children. If you could decrease the settings to minimum…”

  Shadith played a last chord, stilled the strings, and looked up. “Let me try something, will you?”

  The Goлs mobile ears went up as a Cousin might lift a brow, then he nodded. “As long as it doesn’t mean trouble. You understand me, I think.”

  “It may prevent trouble.” She stood, shifted the harp, closed her eyes, and rubbed at her temple; her head was throbbing still from the Translator’s activity. When she looked up, the Bйluchar children were moving restlessly, getting ready to rush the gate. She thought a moment, then whistled a warning phrase. For the first time she heard ordinary speech from them, fragmentary whispers, but words nonetheless. The pain stabbed inward more strongly than ever. She ignored it, whistled again, a complex trill that said something like: wait, danger, help comes, wait, Maorgan comes.

  The whistle form of the name had them buzzing more loudly. The boy called out a few words she didn’t understand. She whistled again: wait, this is a friend, wait, help comes.

  The boy and his companion rested head against head, talking in low hums with descanted trills. They didn’t try speaking to her again, but after a moment, the six Bйluchar retreated to the far fence and sat down, legs crossed, hands resting on their knees.

  Shadith drew in a long breath, let it trickle out; head throbbing, she trudged to the gate and waited impatiently for it to open.

  “Amazing.”

  Shadith blinked away pain-tears, looked up at the tall Yarak. “You repeat yourself, Goлs Koraka. And overstate. Whistle calls are generally simple and much alike from culture to culture. Like many musicians, I have a gift for the patterning of sounds.” She had little patience now for his complicated strokings; it was all surface, in any case. Should he decide to have her probed, it would be done with the most elegant suavity, and if she died under that probe, he would mark her passing with a trope or two and none of that would touch the steel beneath. She glanced at Aslan, sighed, remembering the lectures about keeping the Director sweet. “By your favor, Goлs, pardon my abruptness. I’m very tired.”

  “As we all are, Shadith.” Aslan set her hand on Shadith’s arm. “We appreciate your interest, Goлs Koraka, but we do need to confer and organize ourselves for tomorrow’s meeting.”

  4

  The sun was brilliant, vaguely greenish in a sky whitened by heat haze when Shadith walked through the enclosure gate with Aslan, her Aide Marrin Ola, and Duncan Shears, the University folk a ragged knot with a pair of guards marching ahead of them, another pair behind. Beyond the paved trade ground, the land turned into a field of low ground cover plants, not grass but something like it, pale gray-green spears with ocher strips; it felt crunchy when Shadith walked on it and there were small gray green scuttlings with every step as if each spear had its own miniature ecosystem.

  Strewn through the ground cover, small woody plants grew in pentagons, some complete, some partial, always at least three bushes, always the same distance apart no matter what the age of the plant; the ground cover plant didn’t extend to the area within the pentagons, instead there was a scabby growth something like a lichen, pale yellow and grainy. Scattered more irregularly, there were taller plants, clumps with brown fuzzy growths at the end of long stems thick as Shadith’s forefinger, plants that looked like the bulrushes on a world that no longer existed. Shayalin, blown to atoms before the life on this world was more than one bacterium contemplating another with speculation in its nonglance. Shadith sighed. Nostalgia was a disease she didn’t seem to recover from even when she shifted bodies.

  On both sides of the river, trees were dark masses set in shallow curves that bent with the brilliant blue of the water.

  Half obscured by the haze above the trees, a number of the aerial folk floated like exquisite golden dreams above the forest, the sucking disks on their tendrils glittering diamond bright in the sun. They were singing/speaking. Like an organ miles wide, chords of splendid complexity, cadenzas, single notes as emphasis. She listened, shivering with pleasure. And with an ache growing in her head that told her it wasn’t merely this world’s equivalent to birdsong but speech.

  The Goлs Koraka hoeh Dexios and his angry young phora walked ahead of them, Koraka with his hands clasped behind his back, head turning as he scanned the line of trees, watching the fliers. Shadith wrinkled her nose at his back. At it again, oh dear Goлs. Making us markers in your games. Despite his graceful assurances of free inquiry, he was there to set his seal on them in the eyes of the Bйluchar; he didn’t want the locals getting ideas about playing University against Yarakan.

  A man moved from the shadow of the trees, a golden flier hovering above him, pulsing and glowing in the sunlight. Maorgan, if Koraka had it right.

  5

  “Glois and the Meloach aren’t there,” Maorgan growled. He inspected the guards, then snorted with disgust. “Careful of his hide, our mesuch.” He looked past the Director at the straggling group of strangers. “Those are the ones he wants to foist on us. Which one do you think is teseach?”

  Simple-speech came through the tentacle touching his shoulder. *The Yellow-hair. It is to her the mesuch looks when he looks back. I am cast low, sioll, Utelel sang that the harper promised they would be free.*

  “Utelel is Meloach. Xe may turn sioll one day, but xe hasn’t seen much more’n a decade of sun-returns. Xe trusts us single-lives too much.”

  Rippling laughter from the Eolt. *Sioll Maorgan, you remember the harp and are jealous.*

  “T’ck. I’m remembering xe said the harper learned the whistle talk as easy as a rebekii gulps bait.” *But you know how clever harpers are.*

  “And how sarcastic Eolt can be. Shall we go to meet them?”

  *As before, sioll Maorgan, and keep your temper tight, good friend.*

  Maorgan left the shadow of the trees and walked the five kaels into the choa and stopped in the center of an oim korroi pentad with two points dead, the living bushes between him and the others; should flesh guards try laying hands on him, they’d discover the defenses of the oim, it was only the steel ones that made him worry. He swung the harpcase around and set it before him on the scab, wondering as he did so if he’d have a chanc
e to play for the offworld harper and hear what she could do.

  The yellow-hair watched him quietly from eyes blue as bits of storm-dark sea-clever eyes, calm eyes, eyes measuring him, lifting to Melech, returning to Maorgan. And the yellow of her hair was more a brown with amber lights. And when she smiled at him, the light spread over her face and leaped but from her and heated him.

  He looked away before he fell too deeply into her web, and found himself meeting the eyes of the harper. She was strange in a way he couldn’t comprehend; he touched his finger to Melech’s tentacle. “What is it about her, sioll?” he murmured, keeping his voice low so the mesuchs wouldn’t hear him.

  *This xe can’t find her song, sioll Maorgan. The yellow-hair is simple beside her. The others are servants, of no importance.*

  “Sfais, despois,” the mesuch with the fur face boomed at him. That was a man sure of his importance, pushing it off on everyone around him.

  “Fes,” Maorgan said. It was something the traders said to each other, some kind of greeting; he didn’t care. Made things go easier when you followed the other party’s rules. If you wanted them to go easier.

  The Eolt Melech withdrew his tentacle and glided higher, rising and falling, using the layered currents of the air to oscillate in place above Maorgan, song speech flowing through the interstices of the word-exchange between Maorgan and the mesuch.

  Telk a telk a telk, the time ticked past as they went over the same ground they’d gone over day after day. Yellow-hair listened, impatience glinting in her sea-storm eyes. The Harper watched Melech except when her eyes glazed over and she shut them tight. And when that happened, the air around her wrinkled with pain and implication.

  From the corner of his eyes, while he tried to find a way to shut off the mesuch so he could deal with Yellow-hair, he watched the harper.

  She knelt beside the case, opened the catches, and took out an instrument both like and unlike his own. Though it was made and not grown, it had the beauty of its essence and the track of loving hands along its wood. She played a tune on the case with her fingertips and he saw the thing he hadn’t believed when Melech relayed Glois’ tale.

  The stuff of the case flowed and folded and in moments was a three-legged stool. She shifted to the stool and began to tune the harp, a pleasant distraction that worked into the mesuch’s notice and brought an instant’s irritation to his fur-masked face.

  She plucked a string, and the sound with its brother tones was an insistence.

  She sang, her voice rich and true, the words infused with all the fringes that only a near-term Eolt could manage, the silences filled with as much to think on as the sound phrases had, the strangeness of her, age and youth combined, present so powerfully she drew the drifting Eolt like a whirling wind-trap.

  She sang:

  value fleeting moment understand

  necessity/insistence no escape

  emptiness will be filled no way to avoid understand

  we/sympathy/sorrow we/pride/completeness

  knowledge/trade value for value/we/you strength/wisdom

  friendship/limited opening of doors

  let there be hearing/a coining to touch.

  The Chorus of Eolts sang their astonishment and pleasure. The chords grew and blended as they discussed the phrases and intervals, as they debated what to do about the strong warning of complications and pain from the outsiders, a warning that what was done could not be undone, that they were found and must make a choice, that the choice should be grounded on knowledge, a warning that knowledge opened many doors they might want to stay closed, that change was inevitable, that there were ways to mitigate the damage as well as exploit the opening. The combinations and permutations of that short burst of song from the harper held a promise of endless play with meaning and possibility. There was fear and excitement in the chords of the Eolt, yearning and revulsion-and finally decision.

  They sang:

  It must be done let it be done.

  3. The Sorrows of Ard

  1

  In the small bare room where he slept when he could sleep, a work shed built in a corner of the Ykkuval Hunnar’s Dushanne Garden, Ilaцrn, no longer Ard, fed his harp her oil and wax, slid his hand along the curve of her neck, feeling the live wood arch under his hand, responding like a cat to the caress. He didn’t know why he kept her when he couldn’t bear to play her. His Dushanne perhaps, if he had the concept right, his contemplation of the twists of the life-thread. He’d sworn not to play again when his sioll… he stumbled to the cot and sat holding his head in his hands, acid tears dripping through his fingers.

  “Cho!”

  The shout brought his head up, his mouth spasming to match the twist in his stomach. Boy. He brushed at his mouth, looked at his hand; it was shaking-and wet. He scrubbed at his face with a corner of a blanket. I was a man when he wasn’t a thought. I’ve learned a new thing from these Chandavasi. To keep your power, diminish those who are ruled in your eyes and their own. He got to his feet, smoothed strands of lank white hair from his face, settled his hands in their required position, the left flattened on his diaphragm, right flattened on top of left, used his shoulder to nudge the door open, and walked out, head down and humble.

  The Chandavasi Ykkuval Hunnar ni Jilet soyad Koroumak stood by the curve of the small stream he’d had his techs run through the garden for him, its water an enclosed system that never left the garden, continually monitored for foreign, potentially lethal substances. In the past year the Ykkuval had rambled on about poisonings, challenges, sabotage, and other maneuverings that would have shocked Hewn if he’d had much feeling left.

  Hunnar was as broad as he was tall, with a massive torso and legs that seemed too short for his body. His movements were not without grace, but tightly controlled. The first time Ilaцrn had seen these mesuchs moving about Chetioll’s Patch with their metal slaves, they bounced in a peculiar way when they walked, as if good earth were feathers in a pillow, but now only the newcomers moved like that, the rest were like Hunnar.

  His hands were broad with short fingers and shiny black claws instead of nails, hooks that he kept retracted except when anger took him. In the same way, anger brought transparent membranes dropping over his copper-colored eyes, making them shine as if they were wet. They were shining now.

  “That!” The Ykkuval jabbed a thumb at a small patch of gray among the greens, maroons, and ambers of the vines growing tight against the stream bank. “It’s dead. I told you. Leave nothing dead in this garden. How do I possibly achieve dushanne with death in my face?”

  Ilaцrn touched his tongue to dry lips. “O Ykkuval, this one hesitates to contradict the exalted, but that is melidai in its dormant phase; it sleeps, it is not dead. A spore must have come in on your clothes or mine or those of a visitor.”

  Hunnar dropped his hand, the black hooks retracting; his inner lids pulled back as he squatted, peering at the tiny gray blotch. “It looks dead. Is it good for anything or is it just a weed?”

  The garden turned to haze for a moment as the tension drained out of Ilaцrn. Then he was angry again, though he didn’t dare show it. He didn’t know how, but the Ykkuval had somehow managed to plant an obsessive fear of death in him, a fear that took hold of him whenever the impulse to resist strengthened to a certain level. His own fear, Ilaцrn thought. I’ve got his fear in me. Even a pinch of sleepy melidai terrifies him.

  He steadied his voice, said, “O Ykkuval, it is a vesicant with several applications. The leaves are macerated and made into a paste. Weavers use the paste to draw moisture from c’hau bark so it can be pounded into fiber and spun into thread. That is woven into c’hau cloth which we find useful though ugly because when it is painted with boiled sap from a komonok tree, it is waterproof. Your procurers secured a number of bolts from the stoang um… market room of the Kabeduch weavers.”

  Hunnar got to his feet with the bouncy quickness that always disconcerted Ilaцrn. “Vesicant? Hmp. Dig it out, bag it, and give it to one o
f the techs. And make sure no more got in. I don’t want it spoiling my peace.”

  Hewn bowed. When he straightened, the Ykkuval was walking away, heading for the waterhouse among the flowering trees. These bloody-handed death givers with their stupid pretensions… dushanne dreaming… peace… meditation on… Chel Dй curse him… He started trembling and couldn’t finish the thought, too much pain, too much… everything. Silently blessing the stray spoor that germinated so opportunely, he plodded to the lean-to with the garden tools. Hunting the melidai was something to focus on, to shut out thought and memory. To push away the acid bath of loneliness.

  2

  Ilaцrn dreamed.

  He sat in the sunshine, tuning-in a new harp as Eolt Imuл drifted over him singing the pleasures of the late summer day. The songs of other Eolt came distantly into the small meadow, mixing with the rustle of leaves and the whistles of the angles fluttering from nest to ground to scratch among the spores and budlings under the kerre trees. Drawn by the plucking of the harpstrings, an angi whirred over to him, settled on an oim bush, its shimmering wings folded against a green and gold carapace, its soft charcoal eyes fixed on his hands as he set the intervals of the strings in the bul mode he preferred. The angi’s broad blunt beak quivered as it sang to hint.

  Then it stopped singing, lifted its head; with a harsh scream of alarm it darted into the trees.