People of the Sky

by Clare Bell

  Kesbe thought that she would never be able to do it. To her knowledge, humans just didn’t have voluntary control over heat flow from the skin. The best she could do was to talk herself into a state of acute embarrassment (which was dismayingly easy) so that her face flushed. She couldn’t believe that people in the Pai society had such an ability.

  After trying repeatedly to send Sahacat a scent-mixture in which the odor of the ointment rubbed on a specific part of her body predominated, she was ready to give up. Perhaps she could read the language of olfaction, but she didn’t see how she was going to write it.

  Sahacat neither encouraged nor disparaged her efforts, telling her only that she was to return again the next day.

  The priests of the Brooding Kiva are coming for me. I hear the soft tread of their feet in the sand outside. They are coming for me, unless this is a dream. It might be. Many things now have been dreams and now I do not know the difference between what has happened in life and what has happened in dreams. Perhaps there is none.

  If all that I remember is a dream, then perhaps Haewi did not die. When I try to ask the shaman, Sahacat only turns her head from the shadows and smiles.

  My body feels molten and liquid. I put my hands to the place in my belly that feels hot like a glowing coal. It does not hurt me. Indeed, it is pleasant, making me sleepy and languid. I think that is why the priests of the Brooding Kiva are coming.

  I wait, I listen, and I hope. I hope the dreams are lies and that Haewi is waiting for me. I hear the muffled beat of a drum and the scrape of moccasins on a clay floor. The dried-herb scent of an aronan comes to me through the air. I want to believe it is the smell of Haewi. It might be. It must be.

  I push myself up on my elbows, though my upper arms quiver. The priests draw closer. Now the first one comes through the doorflap. The scent about them is so strong…it smells so much like Haewi. I reach up to them. I want to be taken.

  Hands slide beneath my body and bear me up. My heart rejoices. I am ready. The priests of the Brooding Kiva will take me to join with my aronan.

  They cover me and carry me away. It is dark outside, with no stars. Whether is is just before sunrise or after sunset, I do not know. I have lost the sense that used to tell me.

  I am borne feet-first down a long passageway. The rock echoes with the sound of chanting. The place in my belly glows like the embers of a campfire. It makes my male part stiffen. Sahacat told me I must become both male and female in one. The warmth in my belly and between my legs is the female part. It has grown because of the kekelt drink.

  I sense the passage opening out and know I am in one of the rooms in the Kiva of the Brooding One. The aronan-smell surrounds me, so strong it makes me dizzy. Yes, it is Haewi, I say again and again. No one answers that it is not so.

  A small fire burns at one end of the kiva. It is smoky and gives little light. I can only see the priests as figures moving in a backlit haze. They lay me on a high bench that slants my head toward the ground. Hands stroke my belly.

  Other hands touch me on the twists, ankles and knees. They are positioning me, preparing me. There is no need for bindings, I laugh as they place cords on my body. I want this joining. I want Haewi.

  And now the aronan-smell grows stronger and I hear the sound of aronan feet on the kiva floor. I am ready. The place in my belly has started to bum.

  The smell washes over me, so powerful now that it loses its identity. For the first time I am unsure. Is it indeed the smell of Haewi or is my aronan dead as I dreamed? I strain my head up to look. I see the aronan-shape, but its outline is mingled with that of the priests who are leading it to me.

  For the first time I hear Sahacat’s voice from among the priests. She is standing near my head. “Give yourself,” she says and then makes it into a chant. “Give of yourself. Give to the other.”

  And the the aronan moves over me, brushing the tops of my thighs and my belly with the stiff fuzz of its underside. Haewi. I wish to reach up and caress Haewi, but the priests have bound my arms. Why did they do that? Did they not know I would want to embrace Haewi, to touch and stroke the one who is most precious to me?

  The female place in my belly flames and throbs. My maleness is stiff against the fuzz of Haewi’s underside. I want to love Haewi. Why have the priests tied my arms?

  One side is loose. My thin wrist pulls from the bindings, my hand reaches up to touch the velvet surface of my flier’s wings. I want to feel them spread over me, around me, enfolding me within so that I become one with my beloved.

  But there are no wings. My fingers feel only broken stumps of wingspar. The wings are gone…wrenched away…torn from the creature’s body by human hands. It comes upon me again: the sight of the girl Mahana, breaking the wings from her flier and leaving it a flightless cripple.

  I didn’t do that to Haewi. Suddenly the truth comes to me, tearing through the wrappings of stupor placed on me by the kekelt drug. I remember now what Sahacat told me. It was Mahana’s aronan who would give me a gift, not Haewi. In my fear, I have killed Haewi.

  The one atop me now is the creature mutilated by Mahana in her adulthood ritual. My love shrinks away, even though the place in my belly burns more than ever. I cry out that this is wrong, that I can not join with this creature. I feel Sahacat’s hand across my mouth. My hand is seized and bound once again. My knees are pulled apart and I feel the aronan’s weight on me. Its legs clasp me. I feel them tremble with the intensity of its need.

  Sahacat chants, “Give yourself,” but I can barely hear her in my struggle to close myself away from this thing that is now probing at me more and more insistently. And then it finds what it seeks, the birthway opening that leads to a womb that the kekelt drink has caused to grow within me. Sahacat has said that the male lomuqualt are both man and woman together at this time. It is the woman’s part of me that I would have opened to Haewi. It is that part of me that this aronan seeks now.

  Something hard pushes up inside my belly to the burning place that is my lomuqualt’s womb while I strain my head back screaming against Sahacat’s hand on my mouth…

  It would not have been like this with Haewi. But this aronan has no love, only need. I feel the egg, passing from the hardness of the aronan’s body into my womb. I am a thing to it, a container in which to implant its egg. That is the horror. Not the pain, not the lies, not the effect of the kekelt drug, nor the deception of the shaman.

  I lie on the slanted bench as the aronan draws away. I am now lomuqualt. This is what I wanted. This is what I begged Sahacat to give me. She has.

  My mind journeys to a far place and seeks refuge there.

  Kesbe took her place in the kiva the next day and the day after that and the day after until the days seemed to form a long chain that wound back and forth. She came to know despair at the command that she strip off her garments and stand in darkness to be smeared with ointments for another attempt to master the second level of tewalutewi. She failed repeatedly.

  Even Sahacat seemed puzzled. It was true that scent-sending was much more difficult to master for an adult than a child-warrior, but still, it could be done. Kesbe wasn’t as sure. The only thing that kept her from giving up was the knowledge that this was the medium by which she could reach to Baqui Iba and learn what had happened during Imiya’s ill-fated flight from Tuwayhoima.

  “Something is interfering with your control over your body,” Sahacat said at last, after a long and exhausting trial.

  “I don’t have control of my sweat glands, dammit!” Kesbe retorted.

  She felt a wadded-up rag hit her. “Wipe off the ointments,” the shaman commanded.

  “Are you giving up on me?” She felt a surge of relief combined with the prickle of disappointment.

  “No. I will examine you again to find the cause of the interference”

  And so Kesbe stood once again, enduring the sound and feel of the shaman smelling every part of her body.

  “Something is not right in your woman’s cycle,” Sah
acat said and added bluntly, “Are you barren?”

  “What has that to do with ability to control my smell?” Kesbe snapped. “And no, I am not infertile. I just…” She faltered, remembering her contraceptive implant. She seldom thought of the implant, having taken for granted the freedom it gave her to love as she wished without fear of impregnation. But it worked by modifying the normal hormonal chemistry. And hormones, in turn, governed the generation of odors. Sahacat was probably right. It was the implant affecting her. Should she conceal this truth from the shaman? No, it was no use. Sahacat couldn’t be fooled.

  She explained, slowly and clumsily. The shaman’s reaction was the one she had feared Sahacat spoke seriously. “This amulet-beneath-the-skin that prevents conception will prevent you from gaining the mastery of tewalutewi that you seek.”

  Unconsciously, Kesbe fingered the top of her right thigh where the implant had been placed years ago. The thought of giving up its protection upset her more than losing her chronometer. “Sahacat, are you sure that is what is blocking me?”

  “There can be nothing else. Show me the site of this thing and I will remove it.”

  “No.” Kesbe backed away. Had she heard the sound of an obsidian blade being drawn from its sheath? She felt her quickening breath dry her throat. “Sahacat, put that knife away! There must be an alternative.”

  “The amulet-beneath-the-skin stands in your way. Why do you fear to give it up?” She paused and said almost slyly, “Or is it that you do not want a laden belly or the child that comes at the end of it?”

  “I want the choice,” Kesbe said stubbornly.

  “The choice or the control?”

  “Both. Does it make any difference?”

  “But you do not have mastery over your body. You have given it to this thing that lies beneath your skin,” said Sahacat contemptuously.

  Kesbe bit her lip. So this was the real cost. If she was to have any hope of reaching Baqui Iba through tewalutewi she must give up the chemical guardian that had been placed in her body by the technological society she had left behind. Again came the temptation to turn her back on all this strangeness and fly away in Gooney Berg.

  Baqui Iba danced through her memory, fluttering its wings in the sunlight. She knew she could never break the bond that drew her to the aronan. Equally as strong was the sense of responsibility she bore for Imiya’s rebellion and Haewi’s loss.

  The sound of Sahacat’s footstep on the clay floor increased her intense awareness of the shaman—and the glass-edged blade she carried.

  “Show me where the amulet lies beneath your skin,” said the husky voice. Kesbe dropped down on one knee, placing her hand along her right quadriceps. Even in the absolute blackness, the shaman’s knife caught a stray reflection and glinted.

  Kesbe heard her own voice catch. “No. Not here, in the dark”

  “I do not need sight to perform this. The other senses serve me better. There will be no pain. The blade is sharp and has been seared to cleanse it.”

  “I don’t care! Build a fire or take me to the upper levels. I don’t enjoy being blind while I’m being sliced open.”

  “The knowing sense,” Sahacat began, but Kesbe cut across the shaman’s words, her own voice harshened by fear.

  “Tewalutewi isn’t enough, curse you!” She listened to herself breathe, felt herself shake and wondered if she would lose control and fight her way past Sahacat out of this pit of a kiva.

  The shaman spoke again in a low voice. “I thought this way would be easier. If you wish to see the skin part beneath the knife, then it shall be done in daylight.”

  In a walled courtyard near the kiva, Kesbe drew back her kilt from the top of her thigh. She looked away while Sahacat made a shallow incision to remove the implant. The Pai shaman did not lie. She felt only pressure and a strange pulling sensation. When she brought her gaze back again, a cloth covered the wound. In Sahacat’s calloused palm lay a pale pink-gray lozenge, streaked with blood.

  “This is the amulet,” the shaman said. Kesbe nodded.

  Sahacat poked the implant with a fingernail. It looked soft, flabby, like something freshly dead. “That such a think could have mastery over the rhythms of a woman’s body,” she mused. “It has no magic. It has no beauty.”

  Kesbe watched numbly, hating the feeling of vulnerability that was stealing over her. Sahacat pivoted sharply on her heel and tossed the implant over a low stone wall before turning to bind Kesbe’s thigh.

  When Kesbe passed the wall’s far side on her way back in to the kiva, she saw that the implant had landed in a refuse midden. The gray-pink lozenge lay, gleaming like a wet jellyfish in the midst of a pile of fly-ridden entrails someone had cleaned from a hunting kill.

  Sahacat looked slyly back over her shoulder and Kesbe guessed what she was thinking. She clenched both fists against the urge to snatch the thing out of the offal. Even if she were able to recover the implant and somehow re-sterilize it, she could not properly re-insert it. The idea that she might even want to try made her shudder with disgust.

  She saw that her reaction brought a crooked smile to the shaman’s lips. Sahacat whipped her head around and walked back toward the kiva. Head down, Kesbe followed her.

  Sahacat had been right, Kesbe concluded many days later. The implant had hindered her progress in the realm of tewalutewi.

  Once deprived of the contraceptive’s influence, she had rapidly moved ahead. She had not fully mastered the skill of scent-sending, but she was so far advanced that she no longer needed the air of odoriferous ointments spread on her skin. Giving up control of her body in one mode had given her back control in another mode: namely the ability to shift the strength and composition of her own body-scent in a way she hadn’t imagined possible.

  She couldn’t describe to herself exactly how she did it. Perhaps it was that certain thoughts, ideas, images resulted in changes to the blood flow to her skin or chemical changes in her odor-producing glands. This ability was greatly enhanced by the draught that she took in greater amounts each day.

  The effectiveness of the kekelt drink made her wonder how the Pai could produce such powerful drugs without the aid of technological methods. It was true that many of the Pai remedies resembled those of the outside world in their effects, although some, such as the kekelt drink, did not. After puzzling over the question, she guessed that the ancestors of the Pai must have kept their technology long enough to discover natural analogs to the modern synthetic drugs.

  Though Sahacat’s answers to her questions were phrased in terms of legends and myths, Kesbe felt that the guess she had made was partially correct. The information gained by a now-forgotten technology had been combined with a thorough study of botanical sources by generations of Pai healers.

  When Kesbe asked which plant was the source of the kekelt drink, Sahacat replied, “It does not come from any plant. It is produced by the aronans themselves, from a gland beneath the eyes.” She brought Baqui Iba out in the sun and showed Kesbe how running a finger along the aronan’s muzzle caused an opaque liquid to well up just beneath the faceted eyes.

  For an instant Kesbe thought the creature was weeping and clenched her fist to strike Sahacat’s hand away. But there was no trace of sorrow or pain in Baqui Iba’s scent and her fingers uncurled. She tried to quiet her conflicting impulses as Sahacat caught the drop in a clay vial.

  So that is what I am drinking. Aronan tears.

  Technically they were not tears, for aronan eyes did not need the fluid that bathed the eyes of humans and other mammals. But Kesbe found that her draught was easier to take if she thought of it as tears rather than some other type of secretion that might come from an aronan’s body.

  Several days after losing the implant, a place in the arch of her palate became tender and started to swell. She felt it touched it with her tongue. When she explored the roof of her mouth with her finger, she got another surprise. Not only was the bean-sized nodule highly sensitive to touch, it seemed to have its own t
aste receptors which caught the salt flavor of her fingertip.

  Sitting on the blanket in her quarters, she smiled wryly to herself, remembering how amazed and frightened she had been when she blurted out her discovery to Sahacat. The shaman was startled too, not by the development of the new tissue itself but by Kesbe’s insistence that she had previously lacked it!

  Not until Sahacat had guided Kesbe’s finger to the roof of her own mouth to feel the presence of the organ there did Kesbe believe that it was a normal part of human anatomy among the Pai Yinaye. It was part of tewalutewi, said Sahacat. It functioned in concert with the nose and tongue to detect and amplify scents. Kesbe remembered seeing the shaman pull back her lips in a half-smiling grimace and draw air over her tongue, directing it to the roof of her mouth.

  It was the same strangely feral expression Kesbe had caught on many Pai faces and had never been able to fully understand or explain.

  Now she knew. Sahacat and her people possessed an organ that was present in animals but thought to be vestigial in humans. The grimace was the same “flehmen” expression she had seen in a zoology textbook. It served to bring scents to the vomeronasal organ, located on the roof of the mouth.

  The idea of adopting the same behavior seemed to threaten the very fact of Kesbe’s own humanity. It dismayed her later to find that she was unconsciously imitating the shaman in order to allow her developing vomeronasal organ to function as it should.

  What am I letting myself become? she wondered. She had no answer.

  Baqui Iba danced in the plaza, fluttering wings of velvet and gold that seemed to flame in the mid-morning sun. Nearby stood Sahacat, looking somber in her shaman’s garb in comparison to the aronan’s shimmering colors. Kesbe quickened her step as she walked toward them. Today, Sahacat would bring Baqui Iba into Aronan Kiva with her. Now Kesbe and her aronan partner would learn together.