by Jo Clayton
Anger at herself and the body that wouldn’t obey her fading as the heat from the balm sank into her muscles, Wintshikan managed a twisty smile. “Worn-out old mapha fit for the stewpot and not much else.”
Zell’s lefthand fingers fluttered in an anya-giggle. +Oh, we need our Mama-mapha for more than eating. Now, see if you can bend thoSe knees. And I’ll go behind and shove.+
On their second day in hohekil, the Remnant of the Shishim Ixis walked north along their Round Path, foraging as they moved. The pickings were small, though it was high summer; it was as if the land itself had grown weary from the war and was turning hohekiL
Adding to that, they’d already passed this way, and there’d not been enough time for the land to renew itself.
It was a quiet day, wind whispering through the treetops though the air down on the trail was still and hot. Somewhere in the distance she heard a boyal’s coughing bark. Songbirds twittered and shrieked at intruders, a celekesh sent an exquisite trail of notes to the sun, a hudahuda’s harsh cry following it like a clown after a bride dancer. Around her, mayomayos and sasemayos rustled through the underbrush. The red dust puffed up round her feet, its hot acrid bite filling her nostrils.
Wintshikan hadn’t walked so much in years, not since she’d gotten stiff and unwieldy and her knees started going on her. She’d ridden the ixis wagon, sitting beside Oldmal Yancik who took care of the team of maphiks that pulled it. She wasn’t a young fern; Her malbond Ahhuhl was only two years older and he was fifty when he took the spear and a little later laid down his life in one of the early battles against the Impix. And there were the ten years she’d gotten through since. It was hard, so hard to move this old body. The first day of this trek she’d had fear and anger driving her. And stubbornness. Today the only thing left was stubbornness.
Luca and Wann scouted the country ahead of them, watching for Pixa as well as Impix phelas. With the ixis bonded in hohekil all fighters were their enemies and dangerous.
As the hard, weary miles slipped behind them, Luca was suddenly strong and happy, shouldering her new responsibilities with a zest and joy that set Wintshikan to flaying herself with the knowledge that she’d been remiss for a long time, coasting on the comfortable pillow of custom, not searching for and healing the sores within the ixis. The war had made everything so difficult that custom was the one place where she could relax, the one support that was always there.
I am not clean in God’s Sight, she thought. I’ve let my ixa-daughters stray from the Path. It’s good that we’re going to Linojin. A Holy Place will turn thoughts back to the Right Way.
She thought about Luca’s continued absence from all Praise, the shutters that dropped before her eyes when any of the others spoke of God or the Prophet. It was as if the femlit were trying to be polite enough not to rail against
God in the hearing of the others, though she no longer walked the Path. I don’t know what to do. If I say anything, it will just drive her farther away. I wish we were in Linojin now, the Speakers of the Prophet will know what do, they have to know. How can I bear it if her soul is lost to the Pixa, never reborn among us? It’ll just drift about until it fades to nothing. And it will be my sloth that did it.
Zell worked balm into Wintshikan’s limbs again when they made camp that night, wrinkled her nose at the smell, and took her blankets upwind.
Lying along for the first time in years, breathing in the vapors rising from her shoulders and arms, Wintshilcan stared up at the moon riding in the arms of a tree killed by lightning sometime last year; she thought about the children of her bond. They were long gone from her, one way or another. Her son Hanar joined a Pixa phela and was killed in a raid two years ago. Her daughter Kulenka married out-ixis into a-clan from the far north, her new Round centered on the Meeting Ground Isilo. It was an ache to see her go, but she was Heka’s daughter and couldn’t stay with the ixis she was born to. Her two anyas, little brown Mali and golden Mishi, they had bonded into equally distant clans, and she and Zell hadn’t seen them for over five years. She didn’t even know if Kulenka, Mali, and Mishi were still alive.
On the other side of the banked fire Xaca made whimpering sounds in her sleep. She was dreaming again. Wintshikan grimaced. To help Xaca purge the night evils, she listened to those dreams as they walked. Evil indeed. Torments. Hidan didn’t dream, but xe stayed close enough to Nyen to touch her again and again, as if xe saw Impix in every shadow, ready to jump out and eat xe.
Hidan and Nyen. A bond, maybe? It would be something good from this terror, she thought. Xaca… her anyabond is bones now I have to think up something she can do to take her mind off her fears… she’s worrying the children… nightmares… food, not enough for anyone, hm… wonder if it would help if I put Xaca in charge of the foraging. She’d have to mind something besides her own fears…
In the middle of worrying over that problem, she finally fell asleep.
On the ninth day of the walk, near sundown when the shadows were long on the trail, Luca burst round a bend and stopped in the middle of the Path. “Husssshhh.” She waved her hands to stop the questions and went on in a low, intense voice. “Don’t want them hearing you. Impix, downslope, some fifteen minutes away.”
Hidan started trembling. Wintshikan gripped xe’s arm, glanced rapidly around.
“Xaca, take Hidan and the children, and find cover. Kanilli, you and-your cousins go with them. Uphill. Impix’re less likely to climb if they feel like looking around. Nyen, get a handful of bracken and brush away our tracks, but don’t spend more than a minute or two at it. Good work, Luca. Get back to Wann, and the two of you go to ground.”
Zell trembled as xe listened to the Impix strolling along the Round below them as much at ease as if they were in their own home streets.
Wintshikan tapped xe’s arm, signed, +Not much woodcraft to this lot, they made more noise than a rogue skazz in must.+
Zell wobbled xe’s hand in silent laughter.
Words drifted up to them, phrases, casual laughter, broken bits that like the inlay of different colored woods on the ixis wagon’s sides told a story. An ugly story. Another chapter of that tale the two phelas before them had begun.
Disregard and death. The currents of war shaping phela to phela, Pixa to Impix until they were mirror images staring at each other.
Open-eyed and silent, Wintshikan wept for her own folly and that of her people.
3. Yseyl’s homecoming
Yseyl flew the disruptor out to the Fence-out beyond the Prophet’s Finger, that stony barren headland where no one bothered to come, not even smugglers.
In the end, Cerex had been more generous than he contracted, giving her a stunner and the skip along with a medkit and several packs of emergency rations when he dropped her off in her home mountains.
“The Lady watch over you, and if you survive this, give me a call.” He handed her a small gray square. “My drop box on Helvetia. Get to a Splitcom and shove the flake in the code slot. Leave a message, and I’ll come fetch you.”
He touched her cheek, his fingertips silky and delicate, then turned away and busied himself with the sensor board, doing things she suspected were essentially unnecessary. They’d gotten to know each other rather well on those long insplit journeys when there was nothing else to do. Different species, oddly alike despite that.
We’re sports born to be pinched off and thrown away, she thought. Nobody loves us. We should go eat worms.
She smiled as she opened the case and took out the disruptor. Worms and wormholes. Maybe I’m even making sense. She pointed the business end of the thing at the Fence, a round patch that was blacker than any night she’d ever known, touched the trigger sensor.
For the longest time nothing seemed to be happening. Maybe Cerex had lied after all. She stared at the Fence and tried to ignore the coldness in her stomachs.
The flickers developed paired waves, one dipping and the other rising. The waves turned into a swirl about a circle of emptiness, a circ
le that grew and grew until the bottom edge dipped below the water and the emptiness was big enough to run a steamer through. The growing stopped, but the hole stayed.
She camped on the Finger and watched it, waiting for the Ptaks to notice, wondering how long it would last.
At the end of the third night it flowed together until there was no sign anything had happened. No visitors either. The disruptor was all Cerex had claimed.
Yseyl’s mouth tightened into a grim line as she checked the alignment of the peaks. When she was sure she’d reached the Wendlu Round, she eased the miniskip below the treeline, maneuvered it into a thicket of young mutha saplings, and let it settle to the ground near the decayed giant whose fall had made room for them.
With a groan of relief, she left the saddle, stood rubbing her mistreated buttocks, and muttered to the birds and the air, “Why do offworlders who know so much about everything, make something so miserably uncomfortable?”
Air and birds having no answers for her, she removed the packs strapped to the skip’s carry grid and set them on the crumbling trunk. She settled beside them and pulled off her boots, then sat wiggling her toes and enjoying the feel of the earth against her feet. It was good to be back where all the tugs on her body were familiar, where the smells and colors and textures felt right.
The Wendlu Round.
The next peak over marked the camp where she was hatched. “By Minyarna Stream I first saw light/Dancing waters blue and bright,” she sang as she kicked her heels against the trunk, her voice a breath on the breeze that rustled through the pale green mutha leaves. “By
Minyama Stream I first knew pain/My love is gone, won’t come again…”
The memories were hard ones. She forgot them when she was away from here, but when she set her feet on the Round, they were back again. Always back again.
Her Mam and Baba were killed in a rockslide while she was still in egg. Her anya went into howling grief and was kept tied to the ixis wagon after xe tried to fling xeself over a cliff. A week after Yseyl hatched, a vein burst in the pouch and nearly drowned her as the anya’s body emptied itself of blood. The Heka saved her life and ordered the anya Delelan to pouch her. Crazy Delelan whom nobody would bond with. The ixis fed xe and looked after xe, but otherwise stayed as far from xe as they could. And as far from Yseyl as they could when she emerged from the pouch.
Delelan didn’t care. Xe had xe’s voices and the ghosts that xe saw with such conviction that sometimes Yseyl thought she could see them, too. As she grew older, there were moments when she hated Crazy Delelan, blaming xe for the weirdness in her that made the other children afraid of her; they tormented her because they were afraid. They called her Crazy Yseyl. They yelled at her that she’d killed her anya. They pinched her and bit her and fought with her and stole her food and broke her things. Delelan protected her as much as xe could and loved her in xe’s odd way, comforted her when the dark closed round her, when she wondered if the taunters were right, if she were a death-dealer from the egg.
It didn’t help when her God-Gifts began manifesting themselves. When she discovered she could make people see whatever she wanted them to see, even if there was nothing there. That she could pull the shadow of shape around her and be anyone. That she could make radios play even when the batteries were dead. She didn’t say much about these Gifts, but people saw her using them and that was enough to make her seem odder, more frightening to the others. And so more isolated.
In the eighth year after her hatching, she found the caves that twisted through this mountain, hugged the secret of them to her heart, and spent hours exploring them, crawling recklessly through convoluted, cramped spaces barely larger than she was, a handlamp she’d stolen from a peddler at the Yubikha Meeting Ground shoved out ahead of her, batteries long dead but still glowing at her touch.
When the shadows from the saplings crawled across her toes, she clicked her tongue and got to her feet. “You can loll around watching grass grow when this is over, Crazy Yseyl.” She stretched, yawned, set to work organizing the packs she was going to carry up the mountain, getting them balanced properly on her back so she’d have the mobility she needed to reach where she meant to go.
Sketchily concealed by the leaves on the crooked red branches of a silha bush growing from the weathered stone, Yseyl dropped to a squat beside the boulder she used as a marker and contemplated the triangular aperture in the side of the mountain that she knew better than the lines in her own palms.
She sat very still, waiting for the web of small lives to quiet and scanning the gravel and coarse sand in front of her for sign of intruders. When she was satisfied that no one had been interfering in her business, she dropped onto her belly and wriggled into the mouth of the cave.
For a moment she thought she was going to get stuck in the right angle bend that came just before the tube widened suddenly into a large chamber, but a twist of her body and a shove of bare feet against a fold of stone pushed her around and she burst free of the tube with scraping sounds from the packs and a loud rip. She wrinkled her nose. “What I get for being lazy.”
She slipped out of the straps, eased the packs onto the floor, and got to her feet.
Sunrays dancing with dust motes poured through the cracks in the stone, painted fluttering leaf shapes on the thick gray dust that covered the floor, playing shadow games with the tracks in the dust, the three-clawed mayornayo prints, the larger sasemayo spoor, and the scuffs of her bare feet from the last time she’d been here.
On the inner side of the chamber were half a dozen holes, some hardly large enough to admit a sasemayo, the rest of varying heights. One of them was low and broad, rather like a partly open mouth.
Yseyl stretched, yawned. “Hoy-ha, ol’ fem, get your body moving. Have to get away from here by sundown.”
Her way lit by a handglow she’d bought at Marrat’s Market, she inched into the mouth hole, pushing the disruptor case.ahead of her this time. The case kept getting hung up on bulges and cracks in the floor, and several of the turns required a lot of wriggling and shoving, but she managed and some ten minutes later emerged into a second chamber.
Lumpy and echoing, a stream hardly wider than the span of a mal’s hand meandering along the back wall, it was considerably larger than the first and filled with a velvet darkness that seemed reluctant to yield to the light from the handglow. The flattest surface was that next to the entrance hole and there Yseyl had built a knee-high platform from mutha branches, binding and knotting them together with grass rope saturated in nivula sap. On this platform she’d built herself a small hutch with a three-sided storage shed. The front of the shed was closed off by a piece of heavy canvas.
Setting the disruptor case on the platform, she climbed up beside it. She untied the canvas, fetched out a box of candles from the half-a-hundred she had stored in the shed, a candelabra that had taken her fancy once in Icisel, and a blanket which she shook out and dropped beside the box. She twisted the candles into the holes and lit them, smiling as the gentle wavering light woke the shadows she called Delelan’s Ghosts.
She watched a moment, then went back for the rest of her gear.
For a while she played with her treasures, all sense of time lost in counting and caressing them, the hand-hammered gold and silver coins of the Pixa, the machine-struck coins of the Impix, a long necklace of polished turquoise and jasper beads, a bronze statue of a running boyal, a soaring celekesh carved from jet, a Fieka’s ring broach, a mosaic prayer icon that had belonged to a group of Bond Sisters, all the bits and pieces that had stuck to her fingers from the years when she’d been only a thief, before her calling came to her and she began hunting arms dealers.
Finally she sighed, put most of her treasures away, and slid the disruptor case into the slot she’d left for it. She kept back one sack of coins and a few pieces of jewelry for living costs in Linojin, then tied the canvas into place and left.
Yseyl came to the Outlook where the Pilgrim Road began mid-morning
of the next day, a hot, still summer day, so quiet and filled with peace that the War could have been a nightmare she was waking from.
Beyond the patchwork fields of the farms and the nubbly green of the fruit orchards, there was the city-white marble lace on an emerald green ground, the streets like darker threads winding through it, the ponds and fountains jewels on those threads. And the radio tower, rising above them. And the fishing village to the south, a dull, ugly blot that only emphasized the beauty of the rest.
And out where the sky met the sea, was the Fence. Yseyl stared at it. You aren’t so great. Not any more. I put a hole in your gut, and you didn’t even know it.
The first time she’d seen the Fence, there was an agony in her head as if someone pounded a nail from temple to temple. That was gone. I put a hole in your gut. I watched it ooze shut, but I can do it again, any time I want.
She turned away because she couldn’t think while she was looking at that THING, sat down on the half-moon of polished stone, and pulled off her boots. She added the boots to her pack and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. Slow, she thought. Be careful. You don’t know who you can trust. Be the proper little Pilgrim. Be like all the rest. Have your story ready. Who am I? Yes. I’ll take my mother’s name. Lankya of Wendlu iris. Visit the Prophet’s Grave. Gahh, just the thought makes me sick… I have to do it. I have to find someone who can lead people. I can escape, but I can’t lead. I knew that. I didn’t think it through. Someone HAS to know how to use that thing. Drive holes through the Fence, let the people out who want to go, let the killers keep on killing. God! I wish I could still believe… I wish…
She shook off the sudden malaise and rose; feet dragging at first, she stepped onto the Pilgrim Road and started for Linojin.
The Road was paved with yellow brick, hollows worn in it by thousands of bare pilgrim feet over centuries of use. The bricks were warm from the sun and gritty from the dust the summer breeze blew across them. How strange to walk here. Yseyl felt old ghosts rising in and around her-warm and slightly stale ghosts like threeday-old bread in greasy sandwiches, shoved into a back pocket for lunch that never got to happen.
