People of the Sky

by Clare Bell

  A minty smell wafted toward Kesbe and she remembered it from the loma’asni. The creature was happy and pleased to see her. It rolled its tongue at her, then bumped her with its narrow muzzle as a playful horse would. She rubbed, scratched and fondled the aronan, then gave it a final pat. Sahacat was waiting.

  Kesbe thought at first that Baqui Iba would have to descend by the lashpole ladders as she and Sahacat did. Aronan Kiva, however, had been built to accommodate the fliers as well as their human partners. To one side of the kiva was a trap-door made of woven twigs. When opened, it revealed a packed-earth ramp leading to the lower chambers of Aronan Kiva.

  She hoped that Sahacat would, for once, supply some illumination so that she could see Baqui Iba. Sahacat obviously saw the need, for she carried a dish of phosphorescent moss that glowed against her palm.

  The shaman led Baqui Iba to one end of the clay-floored room, bid it stay, then returned to Kesbe. She held out a long cape that she had been carrying over her arm. “Remove everything you are wearing and put this on.”

  Kesbe shrugged. She was getting used to removing her clothing at request. The cape was light and finely woven, although she couldn’t see its color. It fell to her feet and tied at her neck. Her back and shoulders were draped. The rest she decided not to worry about.

  “You must know the winged one,” Sahacat said in a soft voice that had strangely powerful undertones. “Come. I will show you how”

  In the faint emerald glow from the moss, Baqui Iba looked eerie and insect-like. The subdued light caught and emphasized the horns above its faceted eyes, the eyes themselves and every point and spine on its cuticle. She had almost forgotten that Baqui Iba was an arthropod. Now she remembered. Facing it with the soft skin of her breasts and belly exposed, she felt vulnerable. She almost wanted to resist when Sahacat led her to the creature.

  The minty smell of happiness superimposed on the aronan’s background sage body-scent reassured her. It was easier if she closed her eyes.

  “That is right,” said Sahacat. “Now bend your head to each part of the aronan’s body and breathe in its essence. Use what you have learned of tewalutewi.”

  Baqui Iba stood still, letting her explore its odors. At first she thought she could only detect the generalized background mixed with mood-scent, but gradually she picked up differences. It was easier if she let her mind free-associate, letting the subtly changing mixture of smells generate images and memories.

  She buried her nose in the stiff fuzz of the aronan’s neck and inhaled the smell of baled hay. Instantly she was transported far back in her childhood. She was three, maybe four and she was jumping and playing on bundles of cattle fodder. She remembered how the hay itched and poked, but she was having so much fun she cried when her mother came to take her home. When and where was it? She didn’t know, but the incident was suddenly as alive in her mind as if she had become again a child playing in the hay.

  She knelt and ran her hands down Baqui Iba’s legs, stroking each segment and joint, bringing the aroma to her nose. Again, a smell-memory from long ago. Newspaper ink.

  She was sitting on her grandfather’s stomach, cradled in the curve of his lanky body while he read to her from the pages of his paper. It was an old-fashioned habit, her father had said. Everyone else used the compufax. Newsprint was clumsy, the ink got on your fingers, you had to throw the thing away. Bajeloga paid no attention and red his paper every morning for as long as he could get it. Eventually, though, newspapers became obsolete. She remembered how the old man had grumbled, then re-read his old ones until they fell to pieces. He could use the compufax terminal, but he just didn’t like it. Neither did she, for she missed those lazy mornings curled up against him and the soft rustle of each page as he turned it…

  She was recalled to herself by a touch on her shoulder from Sahacat. “Tewalutewi can seduce you into the past,” said the shaman. “That is something you also must master.”

  Kesbe moved on to Baqui Iba’s wings. In their scent was the remembered smell of wood shavings as they peeled from beneath the blade of her grandfather’s buck knife as he shaped a kachina-doll. Again, memory tempted her into the past, but this time she resisted, using the image to tag the scent-impression before finding her way by touch to the next part of the aronan’s body.

  Kesbe opened her eyes in the dark, abruptly aware that the moss-light was gone and Sahacat had withdrawn. Her first feeling was dismay her next, which surprised her, was a feeling of relief. A part of her intensely wanted privacy. In the close darkness only two existed in the world—herself and the aronan.

  And perhaps Baqui Iba felt the same way. Its odor “softened.” Kesbe felt its antenna stroking the side of her neck, then moving outward along her collarbone. The individual filaments rippled in a living wave against her skin. Like its insect cousins, the aronan detected scent with its antennae, for it had no olfactory organ in its muzzle. She knew that the gentle and invisible ballet of its plumes over her was the same sort of exploration she had made with her nose, though far less awkward and clumsy.

  What is my scent like to you? she wondered. Does it awake memories’? Feelings? Is it pleasant? Repulsive?

  The feathery caress of the aronan’s antennae spoke to her in a mute language, but one more eloquent than words. It told her that her scent was that of one beloved.

  And so she felt no sense of invasion or violation when the touch spread to her breasts, her belly, her inner thighs, even when it tickled through the hairs of her pubic area and explored her there. Now she knew why Sahacat had given her the light cape to replace her garments. The cape offered enough covering for warmth but would not hinder the aronan’s plumes. A down-soft touch ran over the curve of her buttocks and down the back of one thigh.

  It was the kind of touch she would permit only from a lover. Never had she imagined she would accept such intimacy from an alien. But Baqui Iba wasn’t an alien. Part of her felt as though she had known the creature all her life. It was in her dreams, in the pictures she had colored as a child of delicate little horse-like creatures with butterfly wings. She remembered how she had drawn them running up a steep grassy knoll and launching themselves from the top.

  Did I dream of you then, Baqui Iba?

  As the aronan’s antennae caressed her, gathering in her scent, she laid her face against its neck and drank deep breaths of its essence. No time passed there in the darkness and nothing else existed. Then the plumes withdrew, as if the creature had taken in as much as it could through that sensory channel. Kesbe too felt that it was right to end the contact.

  She called softly to the shaman. She heard footsteps and saw the lime glow of the moss-light.

  “Has the joining begun?” Sahacat asked.

  “The joining has begun,” Kesbe answered, leaving one hand on Baqui Iba’s neck as she turned.

  She did nothing but rest and eat each day when she was released from the kiva. The training wearied her and only sleep brought the necessary renewal of her senses. She was given the kekelt drink, receiving a little more each day. She noticed that the ball of warmth it created in the lower part of her belly took longer to fade and there came a time when it remained as a slight and pleasant addition to the rest of the feelings in her body.

  Her gift of tewalutewi grew more acute. It was accompanied by an itching and burning sensation high in her nasal passages and she wondered if the kekelt drink was causing the cells of her olfactory sense to expand and proliferate. She tried to formulate the question to Sahacat, but her command of the Pai language was inadequate.

  In the days and then the sukops that followed, she spent her time in Aronan House Kiva. Often she was left alone to explore her growing closeness with Baqui Iba. At other times, she was asked to sit apart and perceive the creature at a distance.

  At first her perception through tewalutewi was crude. Baqui Iba was only a collection of vague odor-blotches hovering in the dark of her mind. But as she learned the subtle shadings of scent on the aronan’s form, t
he image grew more refined. A day came when she could detect the contour of each leg and how it was placed. Now, through her nose, she could “see” the wings and know whether they were folded or spread. Her perception began to take on a three-dimensional quality with a resolution finer than that of sight.

  She found it hard to describe to Sahacat what she was sensing in the Pai words she knew. They were inadequate to describe the delicate gradations and nuances of aroma. The shaman taught her new words, ones that had no equivalent meaning in English. She felt as though she were moving on a road toward a great gate that stood far off in the distance. When she arrived at last, the gate would open. She knew that the opening of the gate would be the beginning of true communication between herself and Baqui Iba. It was something she wanted with an intensity that astonished and frightened her.

  Chapter 17

  The blackness around me lightens, thought I do not wish it. I feel my body once again, my arms lying at my sides, my fists clenching. When I move my fingers, feel crusted scabs beneath my fingertips where my nails drove into my palm. Someone opens my hand, gently cleans the wounds and wads cloth into my hand to keep it from curling into a fist.

  “Do nothing more for me’” I try to scream. “I am dead inside. I am dead inside and rotting like a corpse.” I jerk my hand away, but I have only twitched it and my call is only a whimper. The one who tends me takes no notice and does my other hand.

  I am dead inside, yet my body takes no notice. It breathes, it makes water, it hungers. Without my consent my throat swallows the broth put to my lips. My body is a disobedient thing-, it will not die. It is a distant thing, tied to me only by a slender cord. It is an ignorant thing, for it does not know how it has been used or what has been placed within the flesh. It does not know what I know and so it lives…

  Against my will, my eyes flutter open and see once again before I shut them. Odors come to my nose, make themselves felt upon my tongue. My muscles cry out to be used, torturing me with a restlessness that banishes sleep. And, at last, because I do not know how to fight my willful body, I sit up and swing my legs off the pallet where I have lain for so long.

  My movement summons someone. I hear footsteps. The shaman Sahacat comes. There is enough light to read her face as she enters. When she sees me sitting up, triumph lights her eyes. Her victory, I think, with a dull and hopeless rage.

  She brings me a bowl of yucca-wash to cleanse the sweat and dirt of the sickbed from my hair. Though she offers to do it for me, I refuse. Even though my arms tremble from weakness, I scrub my hair and my scalp, handing the bowl back to her in silence. The hairwash makes no difference, I feel I am still soiled.

  She brings me the robe I have seen Nyentiwakay wearing. I gaze at it dumbly.

  “The kekelt has died,” says the shaman. “The lomuqualt rises.” She places on my shoulders the garment that marks me now for what I am. Lomuqualt. It is a word that would once have brought great joy to me. Now it is evil and empty. It means only that I am the dung-pile in which the carrion fly has laid its egg.

  “Your feet are set once again on your Road of Life,” Sahacat intones. “May this journey return you to the hearts of your people.”

  Shaking, I stand. Do I already feel the weight of the thing in my belly? The shaman’s expression changes. She knows all is not good within me.

  “Lift your head, lomuqualt. The evil is past,” she says.

  I close my eyes. She knows that she does not speak truth to herself or to me either. Two things burn and smolder in my belly. One is the aronan’s egg. The other is a heavy anger that threatens to burst forth, sweeping away everything in a cascade of molten hate. It forms into words upon my lips.

  “The evil is not past, shaman.” I look at her directly, something only rage would make me do. “The evil is in what you have done.”

  Her face closes. Her eyes narrow. “I give you back the path to adulthood—one you had cast away.”

  “By lies, by treachery and by force you opened me to the egg of an aronan. That is the path to adulthood I walk now.” My voice breaks. “I would have taken Haewi’s egg willingly.”

  “It was not I who killed Haewi,” the shaman says very softly.

  Again the arrow of her tongue comes back and pierces me. Once it would have wounded me but now it only releases the burning flood. Quivering, I lunge at the shaman, who retreats in astonishment. My body is yet too drained to attack, the venom flows out through my words.

  “Yes you did kill Haewi. By refusing to give me the knowledge I hungered for, you and the priests have killed Haewi. By letting my fear grow without offering words to ease it, you have killed Haewi. By making the hateful ritual that strips aronans of their wings, you have killed Haewi.”

  “You saw what you had no right to witness…” Sahacat begins.

  “Why? Why was I denied the truth? Why was I forbidden to know what must come in my life?” Something inside is shrieking that I must not speak in that way to one who is a shaman, but I no longer care.

  “The truth would not be denied to one who obeyed and respected the traditions of his people,” says Sahacat coldly. “Knowledge must come at the right time and in the right way—through faith, discipline and patience. You have none of those, so you seek to steal it like a thief.” She steps closer, her eyes glittering with sparks of pain. “Would you hate me for making you lomuqualt? Very well. I can undo what I have done. I can make your body expel the egg if that is your wish.”

  She is bluffing. Both I and she know that she could never do such a thing. To her, the aronans egg is too precious to discard in such a way. She must be bluffing, yet I cringe away from her, knowing she has the power to strip from me the hope of ever becoming an adult within my tribe. Why I keep this hope when part of me aches to die, I do not know. But it lives as my body lives. The hope disarms me, dams back my anger. Once again Sahacat controls me.

  That realization makes the sparks fade from her eyes. She smiles once again and speaks with the hard edge gone from her voice. She says I speak this way because my spirit is in pain and out of balance. She offers to perform a healing ceremony with pahos and sand-painting.

  She is right. I hurt inside. I am almost dead inside. But to let her touch my spirit sends a shudder through my body. “No,” I say and my stomach heaves as if I am retching.

  But that is not all. I feel something moving, almost pulling, low down inside my belly. Sahacat catches the expression on my face and her own becomes keen and knowing. “Is the egg hatching?” she asks.

  I only stare back at her with my hands on my abdomen. She does not need my answer. “May the gods stay beside you, lomuqualt,” she says, turning away from me. As she is about to leave the room, she throws back over her shoulder like an afterthought, the words “You are free to leave the kiva.”

  I vow that I will depart as soon as I have gathered what remains of my strength.

  Kesbe sat cross-legged on the blanket in her quarters. She stared at her own shadow, thrown across the floor by the oil lamp burning behind her. She knew she was exhausted, knew she must sleep, but her mind would not quiet itself and let her eyes close.

  Her hand rested on her thigh, one finger touching the rigid line of the healing scar. She had never thought that removing the implant would cause so many changes, especially the development of the vomeronasal organ.

  Now she had grown used to the presence and extraordinary sensitivity of the new tissue at the roof of her mouth. She had even become resigned to her face slipping into the lines of an animal grimace whenever she smelled anything intriguing. But what she could not accustom herself to was the sense of vulnerability that came after the loss of her contraceptive implant.

  Not only was she bathed in the richness of odors flooding in on a newly awakened part of her mind, but her skin had become acutely sensitive to the lightest touch. Even the light kilt and sash seemed to chafe and she took both off and put them aside.

  She ran her fingers up the inside of her thigh. Her skin tingl
ed and quivered in response. She stroked her other thigh as lightly, becoming aware of the pressure against her vulva from sitting cross-legged on the floor. She smoothed the upper curve of her breast with her fingertips, marvelling at how acute her sensitivity had grown and how quickly her nipple hardened.

  She stopped even as she felt the warmth and engorgement begin in her labia, telling herself that she did not want arousal. It seemed cruel that her body should desire sex when there was no chance of having a lover.

  She sighed. Perhaps her body was only telling her that it had been a long time since her last encounter. She needed release. All right, fantasy and fingers would have to do. She closed her eyes and leaned forward, rocking slightly. Often she could make up images of partners who were more real and exciting than the ones she had actually known, but this time her fantasy wouldn’t gel. Her dream-partner remained faceless, diffuse and clumsy.

  She straightened her spine. Even her own fingers felt rough against the near-painful sensitivity of her flesh. She longed for a touch as light and delicate as the stroke of Baqui Iba’s plumed antennae. She drew in her breath. The flier’s perfume was still on her, mixed with the earthy scent of the kiva. In her mind, the aronan spread its wings and they were a soft velvet black, swirling with molten gold. In her dreams, it caressed her with those wings while surrounding her with a cloud of ever-changing scents that spoke more eloquently than any human word or touch.

  With plumes, wings and a touch so incredibly, inhumanly controlled and delicate, it cradled her in beauty and drew her to climax. Then, like all fantasies, it waned as the throbbing faded from between her legs. She lay back on her elbows, thinking of nothing.

  Through the lethargy of release came a strange feeling of disquiet. It was not that she had made love to herself that she had done many times. It was the fantasy that for an instant had seized her in a way that others never had. Never had she desired or even imagined sexual intimacy with any but her own species.