The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  The path wound gently upward, meandering here and there, following lines of passage through the old forest that had been made long before Fellirian and Pethmirvin; indeed, before the ler had assembled and moved to this place. Game trails, the trails of humans who had lived here long ago, remnants of old logging roads. It crossed others, some broader, some equally broad, others hardly visible, mere pressed-down places that trailed off to either side. The path they followed led northward from the mono line into the heart of the reservation, the Wolguron, the Flint Mountains. The name was somewhat of a misnomer, for the range consisted of low hills of no great elevation, and no particular distinction, save that they were higher and steeper than the rolling country which surrounded them. But it was an old range, and it once had been high and proud, although no person had seen it so; now it was the gnawed and eroded wrinkle-remnants of the creases and folds made aeons ago in the collision of two great continents, North America and Africa. It had been eroded many times. Some argued that the range had never been high and great; but to the ler who now lived under its shadow this was no great matter. The Flint Mountains endured. They survived.

  The rain had stopped, but under the many bare branches of November the icy water still dripped, and the creeks and streams were busy with the newly fallen water. The night was filled with water-sounds, drips, gurgles, rushing blurred sounds deeper in the woods. It was pleasant to hear, and it drowned out the distant sounds one heard when the woods were silent: the muted rumble of the civilization behind the lights. They found as they walked that they could see the path well enough, even with the overcast darkness and the weakness of the ler eye at night16, because of this very sky-glow. But they also had something more, for the night is never dark to those who allow their eyes time to adjust to it.

  From time to time, they could sense they were passing either near some solitary yos, far off deep in the trees, or by some small elder lodge. Both of them knew the way well enough, so much of their knowledge was what they called unbidden memory. But there were other hints: woodsmoke, odors of cut wood; barnyard odors, stables, compost piles. Someone lived nearby. In this area there were few elder lodges, and all of the ones that were hereabouts were small, hardly larger than family Braid groups. Members of such lodges felt more like a contained Braid than a commune, where the Braid identities were quickly submerged. Indeed, Fellirian’s own forefather and foremother lived in such a lodge; she saw them seldom now, but tried to drop in and visit from time to time on her way back from the Institute. From these visits, extended by Fellirian’s talkative forefather Berlargir until nearly dawn, had come the phrase, “visiting at Berlargir’s,” which meant being away for an indefinite period of time.

  The path passed close by one of the elder lodges, not the lodge of the former Derens, close enough that they would have been able to see it had it been daylight. Tonight they could not make out the buildings deeper down in a hollow, but before the entryway they could see flickering the ghostly blue of a spirit-lamp, a small paper lamp illuminated from within by a single tiny candle. It was a sign of mourning for the dead.

  They passed by no other dwellings. Ler did not build their homes, whatever phase they were, close to path or roadway, but always at the end of dead-end paths which terminated at running water. Custom and ritual, just as there was only one doorway into a yos. They saw no other lights. The hour was late, now near midnight, and all the folk who lived along this creek, Thendirmon’s Rivulet, had long since tumbled into sleep. Ler retired early.

  “A rainy night,” they would say, “and good for sleeping and dreaming under the rounded roofs while the raindrops fall from the branches overhead.” And acorns would also drop in the autumn, shaken loose by a sudden gust of wind, resounding hollowly as they struck. Fellirian found herself thinking just these thoughts as she and her nerhsrith walked silently as ghosts through the dark, damp woods. And after they arrived? To come into the hearthroom, eat and talk a while, and then climb into the broodroom, removing clothing and wriggling a cold, tired body into a warm down-filled comforter, close to someone and the kind of warmth only a well-known, long-time close body can provide. Yes. She remembered: back when they all had been in their fertile period, the second for herself and Morlenden, first for Cannialin and Kaldherman, as they had paired off with their two new co-spouses; at night they had hung a light print curtain across their common sleeping compartment, dividing it. Not for prudery, nor for jealousy, but for politeness and privacy. A rare privacy. They had all as a matter of course lived adolescences of active sexuality, with little hidden. But that was what one wanted to do. Fertility was different; compulsive, driven, almost a kind of desperate madness. The intensity of desire was of a different order entirely. Then they wanted seclusion, aloneness. It was as if children who had played games of war had suddenly found themselves in the manic violence, confusion, and panic of real war in all its horror. The playing and the fun were over: the real thing had begun. Thus, the curtain. Now it was down, packed away for the next generation. Fertility and desire had come and gone. Not their regard for one another. “Only a Braid after fertility,” went the proverb, and indeed it was true.

  She let her memory dig deeper into itself as they walked. Far back in their past, Morlenden—Olede whom Fellirian-Eliya could not remember not-knowing—had himself suspected that after the birth of Pethmirvin, Fellirian would bring to him for second-weaving the girl Cannialin, the Thes, younger outsibling of the Morens, the next Braid down the rivulet. Their ages were right, five years apart, and the Morens and the Derens always, rules permitting, exchanged younger outsiblings. Their own Kaentarier Srith had already so gone to the Morens. No surprise there, and indeed they had dallied off and on for years. But Fellirian had no idea who Morlenden would bring to her second-weaving. She had expected to be surprised, but not as astounded as she had been; she had never let the image of that day slip from the forefront of her memory.

  ... She had been feeling the first twinges of returning fertility, and this aspect of herself had begun to elicit subtle responses from Morlenden and Cannialin, although at this particular time the Moren girl had not yet moved in with them. But it had been a day late in the spring, with heavy, wet, sagging dark clouds presaging a storm, and she had been hoeing in the garden, all the while playing with Peth. And Morlenden had come strolling up the path from the yos, with a stranger in tow, and Fellirian, deeply embarrassed by the dust and sweat that streaked her, caught first sight of her co-spouse-to-be. Her immediate impression had been one of a truculent roughneck with a hard, severe face, rusty hair with more than a hint of curl in it, and almost a swagger to his walk. No doubt a bargeman from the River Yadh terraces.

  Now at this time Fellirian had just started going down to the Institute regularly, although she had been making sporadic visits since she had been about twenty. And as a result of her travels, she had gained a spattering of romantic ideals somewhat at variance with traditional ler visions of practicality. So in her imaginings she had wished Morlenden to bring her a poet, a dreamer, a gentle charmer. She had received, to Morlenden’s apparent vast mirth, what appeared to be a hewer of timbers and a piler of stones, showing along his limbs the visible corded muscles of a wrestler. She learned later that indeed he did hold a local championship for just that. But his home was far to the northwest, and she did not know him. More, as she found out later, he was Nerh in his own Braid, and much accustomed to having his own way among his contemporaries. And to add insult to injury, he was already full fertile. As they were introduced, and Fellirian made the ritual responses, she could already feel her own body responding to the exaggerated male-ness of him. Deep in his time, as they would say.

  Later, she had abused Morlenden as she never had before, and then run away into the forest, in tears and complete exasperation. But Olede had followed, patient as he always was, and after a time explained that his choice—undeniable for her as hers had been for him, except for narrowly specified reasons which almost no one used—had been intended
as a rare and subtle gift, a most high token of the regard in which he held his insibling, as she would find out, if she just would. As she did. Alone in the woods, she had stopped by a quiet pool of water, and had looked long at herself, seeing more therein than the outline and shaping of a face; and she had begun to see. And as usual, Morlenden-Olede had been right. The hints were there; for Kaldherman, Adhema she now called him, was a rare gift, indeed; for he had been as tender and giving in the reality as his apparent roughness had repulsed her at the first. Fellirian also knew herself to be no notable beauty, like, for example, the heartless flirt Cannialin; she was instead simple, direct, plain, and straightforward. But to Kaldherman, she had cast a dazzling light, Fellirian-the-wise, who walked among humans without fear, in their vast cities, levels of organization to which the ler possessed no parallel. He seemed to consider himself among the most fortunate of all outsibling Tlanhmanon; he had woven into a Braid containing Fellirian, a prize beyond words, and in addition the urbane Morlenden and the exotic Cannialin. And already with Pethmirvin, then a child of five, it also seemed that he would be the best of all four of them with the children.

  And so it had been all these years, she thought, returning to the present. Fellirian realized with a start that she had been daydreaming, and that they had come far while her mind had been elsewhere; they had been trudging steadily through the nighted, rain-wet forest. For an instant she felt disoriented, vertiginous, lost. She looked about for a landmark, some subtle reminder; she sensed they were near home. Yes. They were already past the forking in the path which led to the yos of the Morens, almost at the one that led to their own, far down the steep, root-strewn path. They rounded a curve in the maul path, and Pethmirvin lengthened her stride, anticipating.

  They came to the place where the path divided along a slight rise; from here, in daylight, one could catch a quick glimpse of the entire holding, the yos by the rivulet under a feathery canopy of ironwood, the sheds and outbuildings, the garden, the animal pens and yards, stone walls carefully laid. Now it was night and ahead of them were only suggestions of shapes, some dim lights showing in the translucent windows of the yos. The memory filled in what the eye did not actually see, and they felt a release, a happiness; they had arrived.

  Fellirian paused for a moment at the foot of the stairs to the entryway—the hearthroom section of the yos looming above them like the high stern of some strange ship, its elliptical shape distorted by perspective—not climbing the narrow wooden stairs, but instead turning, reluctantly, to the wash-trough to her right, closer to the rivulet. She looked long into the dark water gurgling into the trough from a large clay pipe communicating with the rivulet, in her mind already feeling the bite of the water on her skin.

  Pethmirvin did not enter either, but remained, waiting just by the foot of the stairs. Fellirian turned, not looking at the girl, and said, “Peth, dear, you don’t have to wait for me; go on in and tell the rest that we’ve come at last.”

  The girl hesitated, cleared her throat. “Can’t right now, Madheliya. I must take the ritual washing, too, much as I would wish not to.” Already Pethmirvin’s voice seemed to have the chatter of her teeth in it.

  For a long-moment, they stood silently in the dark and looked at one another. They both knew the rituals and traditions and obeyed them with little hesitation. Indeed, Fellirian sometimes stressed orthodoxy, as she felt she had an example to set. Morlenden avoided the trough as much as possible, although he was fastidious and would soak for hours in a huge washtub out back while Pentandrun and Kevlendos ran relays of hot water from the hearth. But there was the wash-custom, even in winter when it was a feat of daring to address oneself to the water. Fellirian knew that she would need to wet herself with the cold creek-water before she could properly enter her own house; she had been outside. Here the purpose was not cleanliness, for any excuse would do for a bath; rather, here was ritual, magic. Fellirian had been exposed to strangeness, alien values, and the wash invoked the cleansing power of the Water elemental to remove the dross of the outside. The pollen of the strange.

  Now as for Pethmirvin, she could have incurred the water obligation for any number of reasons; but Fellirian also remembered her own adolescence, and the occasions when she herself had stood before this very trough, trembling with fear of the cold water. She thought she knew the reason, although she was mildly surprised by the season and time of occurrence. Night and winter?

  Fellirian addressed Peth with mock severity, “Nerh’Emivi, by some accident did you meet a dhainman17 along the way to the mono?”

  The girl answered shyly, looking at the ground as she did. “In the shed by the mono line, Madheliya. Farlendur Tlanh Dalen. He walked with me when I came down to fetch you.” For a moment Pethmirvin looked up and held Fellirian’s eyes in her own gaze, unflinching. Then she looked down at the ground, shy again.

  Fellirian threw back the hood of her overcloak, and opening the upper part of her outer garment, retrieved the long single braid of her hair from behind her and began studiously to unfasten it. She smiled at Peth.

  “Well enough, for the didhosi. Nevertheless, I see you at least know your custom: a wash before the yos for each flower-fight outside it. Careful, Peth-Emivi18, that you don’t grow gills from all your dunkings!”

  Pethmirvin giggled, hiding her face, which was now blushing furiously. “Well enough, indeed. But now you must go first. You are Klandorh and Madh. You have the right of age, and besides, you’ve been outside.”

  “And warm the water for you? Certainly not! I waive my precedences and rights: into the trough with you! And by the way, was your tussling fun? This was never my season, although I never stinted in the warmer days ....”

  Peth shifted her stance from one foot to another, saying breathlessly, “Oh, yes, except that it was too cold and we had to . . .”

  Fellirian broke into the beginnings of what promised to be a long story whose purpose was to delay entry into the trough. “Never mind the details, please. If you must relate the entire circumstances, tell them to your toorhsrith Pentandrun. She has seemed a bit slow catching on. And for now, into the trough!”

  “Oh, Madh.”

  “Oh, Madh, nothing. You can go to bed and sleep. I will have to stay up, probably all night, and talk nonsense with the Perwathwiy. Go on, hurry up! Waiting won’t make the water any warmer.”

  Pethmirvin removed her outer overcloak reluctantly, stepping out of her boots and wincing at the cold touch of the wet wooden platform against her bare feet. She took a deep breath and quickly flipped off her overshift, undershift, and all with it, over her head, ruffling up the short, adolescent-cut hair, and stepped resolutely up to the trough, getting her courage up. The water in the wash-trough was nothing less than icy. Fellirian looked at the bare pale body before her. Pethmirvin was slender, graceful as a young sapling, sleek as a young squirrel. She had been well-named: Willowwand Windswaying was the sense of it, in the aspect of the Water elemental. Fellirian appreciated the young girl’s grace, her small breasts, hardly more than buds, her delicate pale ribs, flat belly, lean, strong thighs. Her skin was goose-pimpled with the cold.

  With no warning, Pethmirvin suddenly leaped into the wash-trough and began splashing madly, scattering water everywhere. Underneath the noise she made, Fellirian could hear the quick hissing of the girl’s breath. While Peth splashed about, spilling much of the water, Fellirian began removing her own clothing; outercloak, overshirt, winter undershift. And then she stood nude, feeling the bite of the cold now in earnest, looking down at her own bare body, almost as pale and spare as Peth’s, but more compact, shorter in stature, and accented with the riper curvings and lines of a longer life, of bearing children. Three, no less. Pethmirvin, Kevlendos, Stheflannai. Not bad, she mused. And so I still have most of the shape of my body left to me. Not that it does me any good, as it once did, except to know that there’s a lot of endurance remaining in it, a long life. But once I met lovers in the night, just as she does now, and Pentandr
un will soon. Once, in the spring of my life, twenty years gone and more, boys chased me through the woods and called “Fellir” after me, as they now call “Pethmir” after her.

  Peth finished her splashing and thrashing and ran gasping from the trough, gathering her clothes hurriedly as she ran.

  Fellirian, startled from her recollection, said, “Tell them I’ll be along. . . .” She stopped. Pethmirvin had already run up the stairs and disappeared into the yos.

  Fellirian shook her head, resigned. Peth could do this in haste, for what she rinses away is nothing more than a little sly fun. The water reminds her that fun is fun, a little thrill, but that tonight, she must leave this one, this Farlendur, at the door. The mystery of the stranger. Our ties in Braid are closer than blood and genetics. But what I wash away is something more subtle, a corrosive worry about which I have seen, after all, only the tiniest part. That Vance, as long as we have known each other and been associated, could allow himself and me with him to be recorded, investigated, observed, and, well, spied upon, without a protest, a word of warning! Yes, I know. He imagined to conceal it, when his body-language shouted truth. But an obscenity. To invade the awareness is no different than to invade the home, the body. Fellirian took a deep breath, releasing it in a long, controlled sigh, listening to the gurgling of the water in the wash-trough, allowing the random noise, the pleasant sound, to blank her mind of everything except the now, the razor-thin present, the edge between eternities. A last turbulent wave roiled the calming surface of her thought. We live in many ways an idyllic, slow-paced life, insulated from pressure. I who see the outside know these things that I cannot tell to the others. We have pursued the silence too long, set ourselves against one temptation, one pressure, for too many summers. I sense a shift of balances, different forces. We are not now an agile people to move with them; indeed, having sought the primitive, we have attained it in all its fragility; and the world always changes. I know fear.