by Clare Bell
She laid her blanket over the pine-branch pallet and stretched out on it. The fantasy still disturbed her. Yes, she felt strong affection for Baqui Iba, but it was the love one gives a beautiful and rare creature, enhanced by the closeness of dawning communication.
And yet the flier’s lingering image still danced through her mind. She inhaled through her mouth, smelling and tasting the scents in the room. No longer was the primary taste receptor her tongue. The enigmatic node of tissue in the arch of her palate had far surpassed her tongue in acuteness and discrimination. It was there she picked up the odor of the burning oil in the lamp, knowing from the tang beneath its smoky tone that it had gone slightly rancid. It was there that the clay of the pueblo room, the fiber of the blanket, the pine boughs of her bed, were sensed in their deepest reality.
She drew in the odors of her own body and realized now how strong they were. A rush of embarrassment flooded her face. God, she stank. She felt as though she hadn’t bathed since the ritual of hair-washing, which seemed like years ago. She felt sticky with sweat and clay-dust from the kiva. The vaginal odors of orgasm mixed with the scent of unwashed pubic hair.
She brought her fingers up to her face and felt how the corners of her mouth drew back in an unconscious grimace. She let the hand fall back.
What am I becoming? she asked herself miserably. There was no answer except the escape of sleep.
I stay one or two days in the kiva, eating and resting to get back, my strength. When I do leave, it is still too soon, for my limbs still tremble as I climb the ladderway from the kiva. Even so, I can not bear to stay there. The kiva is tainted with evil, the shaman’s and my own.
I carry the lomuqualt’s robe rolled up and tucked beneath my arm and wear only a sash and kilt. I have left with no real idea where I will go or what I will do. It is true that those who are lomuqualt have special religious duties, but would the priests allow me to perform them? If they did, would I have any heart for the rituals’? The answer is no.
I decide to go and rest in Chamol’s house while I think. I am on the path when I hear a great shout behind me.
“Imiya!”
I turn. My heart both rises and sinks. It is my friend Nyentiwakay. I want to see my friend, for I need understanding words. I do not want to see Nyentiwakay, for the lomuqualt’s belly is larger now than when I saw it before. The aronan-child within is growing. The two feelings fight within me, keeping me at a standstill on the path. My friend strides up to me.
Was Nyentiwakay that much taller than I or does my friend stand fully upright while I slump and cringe? I feel sweat breaking from my forehead even though the sun is not warm. My legs wobble. Nyentiwakay takes my arm and helps me to a courtyard with a stone bench where we sit.
I lean my hand back, letting the lomuqualt’s robe slide from my fingers. I catch the surprise on Nyentiwakay’s face as my friend realizes what the wadded bundle is.
“So you are gifted even though Haewi…” He does not say the final words.
“Even though in my fear I rode Haewi to death,” I spit harshly, then father my breath. “Mahana’s aronan had two eggs. The girl bears one, I the other.”
“Why, then, you are blessed by the spirits,” Nyentiwakay smiles, but the smile falters when the lomuqualt sees that I do not look like one who is so blessed. “Perhaps it is not easy to join with an aronan who is not your flight-partner?”
I close my eyes and nod, not wanting the trembling in my lips to betray me.
“But still, Imiya, you must be proud. Wear the robe that speaks of your achievement.”
“The sun is too hot,” I lie, trying not to shiver. “Later I will wear it.”
My friend leans toward me, brows bent. This one is lomuqualt like me yet does not understand. We are the same, yet terribly different. What was the joining like for him? I suspect that it was far from what I felt. Had Haewi lived to place its egg within me, would I have known the same joy that lights Nyentiwakay’s face? How can I tell my friend there is no triumph in being used?
I sigh deep within myself. It is of no use to talk about this now.
“Where do you go, Nyentiwakay?” I ask.
“To Aronan House. I tend the mounts of child-warriors who are in the kiva. Do you wish to come?”
Again I am torn. Like a small child, I dread being left alone, yet the thought of being near aronans repels me.
“Imiya, I think it would do you good to come. Working among the fliers is one of our duties.”
My friend speaks wisely. I can choose to wallow in the filth cast upon me or I can shake my spirit free and step once more into my Road of Life. I sense that if I flee from aronans now, I will turn from them all my life.
“I will go,” I answer. To show my acceptance, I extend my arms so that Nyentiwakay can slip the sleeves of the robe over them. I rise with the robe on my shoulders and follow Nyentiwakay to the entrance of Aronan House.
I am greeted in a different way when I pass the threshold onto the ground floor. No longer do I receive the shouts and thumpings that the child-warriors give each other. The children of Aronan House stand back from me now, just as I stood back from Nyentiwakay in the time when I was still a child-warrior and my friend had taken the next step on his life-road.
The round solemn eyes in the young faces dismay me. I feel I am being granted an honor I do not deserve, a respect I have not earned. I long to be a child-warrior again, to cross the canyon on the back of one I loved. No. I can not think of Haewi. Do these children know what awaits them? Do I walk among them, poisoned by the knowledge and the urge to speak aloud and warn them?
Perhaps Nyentiwakay knows what is in my mind, for my arm is taken and I am walked swiftly to the pole ladder that leads up to the flier’s Quarters. Once on the floor above, Nyentiwakay gives me a spine-comb. The young initiates in the teaching kiva can not spare the time to properly groom their mounts. We must do this task for them as well as tending to the aronans’ other needs.
The task is one my hands know well, for I kept Haewi’s locking spines meticulously clean. Never did my aronans legs fail to unfold because of interfering debris. I saw that happen to other mounts whose owners were careless. Yet it was Haewi who met death early and these others still live. I close my mind against any more thoughts and begin on the first creature, Pesquit’s Dancing Water.
I coax the blue and silver aronan down from its hanging-perch, but once alighted it is still restless, scuttling back and forth. I need Nyentiwakay’s help to calm it. My friend displays the same abilities I saw used when we gentled the rogue black and amber before the Cloud Dance. Soon Dancing Water stands still enough for me to clean the locking spines on both fore and rear legs.
‘You should be able to gentle the creatures yourself,” Nyentiwakay tells me. “I do not have any unique power. It is the state of being lomuqualt itself that grants me this ability. Aronans can sense it. They respond.”
My throat closes. Yes, I knew this before, but I have no wish to be reminded of it now. Anger flares. I have to grit my teeth not to shout back at Nyentiwakay. Must everyone and everything continue to dwell on what I am forced to carry in my belly?
I manage to do several more aronans without Nyentiwakay’s help, but it is more by force than persuasion that I make them stand still for grooming. I straighten up, thinking I am done, when Nyentiwakay motions toward one last aronan that has come out of the shadows of a corner. Black and amber wings flutter, but I don’t need the wing-colors to recognize Kesbe’s Baqui Iba.
Does Kesbe understand that when the time comes for her to walk that path with Bacqui Iba, she will end by tearing the wings from her beloved? Should I leave Aronan House, seek Kesbe out and tell her what I saw in the cave beneath the mesa? Yet is what I saw that terrible night really the truth or, as Sahacat has said, were my eyes touched with evil? The pain is that I do not know.
Bacqui Iba tosses its head and capers over to Nyentiwakay I follow after, scolding the creature to come back and be groomed. As the
lomuqualt turns, Bacqui Iba dips its head down to nudge Nyentiwakay’s stomach. With a deft twist of its muzzle, it flips apart the lappings of my friend’s robe.
Strong yet gentle hands capture Bacqui Iba’s head as the aronan tries to stroke Nyentiwakay’s abdomen with the plumes of its antennae.
“You know, don’t you, winged one. It is one of your kind taking shape within me,” the deep voice murmurs. My friend gives the aronan’s head an affectionate shake. It skips back. The velvet of its eyes scintillates and the minty flavor of its happiness wafts throughout the building.
“Look how it struts, as if it were the one who placed the gift I bear.” Nyentiwakay laughs again. I force a smile onto my rigid face. If I turn away, I would not see this. If I turn away Nyentiwakay will know something is wrong. My hand tightens on the spine-comb. My fingers slide along the long sharp teeth of the comb.
Bacqui Iba stops dancing and comes to me for grooming. I do the spines on its rear legs, then move to the front. It has exhausted its playfulness, I think, and I try to relax. Even as I place my comb for the first cleaning stroke, the aronan pivots away from me, ducking its head and nudging my stomach.
Rage, shame and grief boil up in me, propelling my hand in a vicious strike with the tines of the spine-comb. Another Imiya is born in that moment. He takes my body. He is screaming hateful words, chopping with the comb at the aronan s face. He is seized and dragged back.
I huddle on the floor. Nyentiwakay is wrenching the spine-comb from my hand. The other Imiya wants to lift his head to see the wounds he has made. I dread seeing what he has wrought. I dread even more to see what is in Nyentiwakay’s face.
“I was wrong, Imiya,” my friend says softly. “It is not good for you to be here.”
“I am cursed, I am blackened, I am painted with evil,” I cry and the tears spill from my eyes. I force myself to look at Bacjui Iba. It crouches defensively, mandibles extended and wings lifted. There are two small gashes across the top of its muzzle, like rips in leather.
Footsteps ring on the floor. I look numbly at Nyentiwakay. Now everyone will know…
My friend is gentling Bacqui Iba, placing a cloth across the wounds on its muzzle. “Fill the water trough,” the lomuqualt says sharply. I bend to lift the heavy jars, turning away from the boys who are scrambling up the ladder. Child voices demand to knew what has happened. I let the water splash loudly, drowning out the sound of their voices and Nyentiwakay’s answer.
It does not matter exactly what is said. I know my friend will protect me. He sends all the boys back down the ladder by saying that Bacqui Iba was fighting with another aronan. The creature’s reputation as a rogue makes that tale believable. But in protecting me, he has been soiled with having to lie. It is another shame added to those I already bear.
When the child-warriors are gone, Nyentiwakay rubs a healing salve onto the gashes on Bacjui Iba’s muzzle. Will he have to speak untrue words to Kesbe, telling her that her mount was damaged in an accident? Thank the gods that the other Imiya struck so wildly or I might be faced with the task of telling Kesbe that her flier had been blinded…
I move toward the ladder.
“Imiya,” the voice comes after me.
“I go to seek healing. Stay here. You must stay with Baqui Iba.”
The lomuqualt knows that the shock of such an unexpected attack could make the creature wary and vicious. It would not reflect well on Aronan House if Bacjui Iba bit Kesbe when she came to retrieve it.
“Go to your uncle,” Nyentiwakay says, still holding the cloth pad on the aronan’s muzzle. “Seek healing through him.”
I nod. Yes, I will go to Nabamida as I should have done before. I will tell him all. We will make pahos and pray. Under his guidance, I will make a sand-painting. That will heal me. The power of a well-made sand-painting is strong.
I find my way down the ladder and through the throng of child-warriors who seem to cast suspicious looks at me. It is all I can do not to run from Aronan House.
There came a day in the kiva when tewalutewi began to change even Kesbe’s perception of time itself. She was performing another perception exercise with Baqui Iba and Sahacat when the aronan began to move. The shaman was leading the creature slowly back and froth in front of Kesbe.
She expected to sense the creature moving. She “saw” much more than just that. With each step, the aronan left behind a fading scent-image of itself, as if it were a snake constantly casting off old skins. Its path was a trail of these images, superimposed over each other as if caught by freeze-frame photography.
It occurred to her that she was looking backward in time. The images were moments caught and preserved by the sense of tewalutewi. She could perceive the instant when Baqui Iba lifted its left foreleg and dipped its head in one phase of its gait.
The path of images was the past blending into the present. It made Kesbe feel strangely uncomfortable. For her, raised as she was in a Caucasian culture that stressed technology, time should be partitioned strictly into past, present and future. Having that distinction removed was unsettling. It yanked at the underpinnings of her physical reality, moving her into a strange mythological time where events of the past were as much alive as were the events of the present.
She remembered a philosophical question from her years in college. Could you place your foot twice in the same river without violating laws of time and space? It was strangely disconcerting to find a world in which you could.
And this, she realized, was Baqui Iba’s world, one in which time and space were reshaped into new forms by the sense used to perceive them. To the aronan, she did not exist just as a bundle of odors that had their existence strictly in the present. She was a path, a road of life that led backwards into the past, a road along which most people could travel only with memories. But for aronans and the Pai people who rode them, past and present were one. She was starting to understand what it was to be such a creature and she sensed that the understanding would lead her closer to the communion she so desired.
Yet something told her that it would not happen here in the earthy dark of the kiva. This was a training ground, intended to inhibit the sense of vision in order to allow other senses to grow. Now that her sense of tewalutewi felt mature, the kiva oppressed her and she wanted to take Baqui Iba out into the sunlight.
To her amazement, Sahacat agreed. “It is time to master the blending of the senses,” she said as she held the doorflap open, allowing Baqui Iba to pass by.
Kesbe had no idea what she meant by those words until she emerged with her flier at the top of the ramp that led up from the kiva. Baqui Iba gave a horse-like buck and began capering over the flagstones of the plaza.
So strong was the sunlight that its dazzle disoriented Kesbe and she closed her eyes, drawing back the corners of her mouth to use tewalutewi. The world-image she collected was stable and solid until she opened her eyes. The additional visual information that poured in on her overlaid and confused the images built up by scent. With a little cry of dismay, she staggered, suddenly overwhelmed by the influx, and clapped hands over her eyes and mouth.
She felt herself stumble into Baqui Iba and drew back, afraid the creature would shy and spring away. Instead she felt the aronan’s plumes stroking and twining around her arm while a comforting scent, like the odor of sun-warmed leather, surrounded her. The narrow muzzle bumped her and the moth-tongue tickled her, as if saying, “Don’t be afraid.”
She felt herself smile as she stroked the stiff mat of bristle on the aronan’s neck. It gave her the courage to open one eye on the world. This time she felt less confused as her mind began to knit together the images created by vision and olfaction. She opened the other eye and stared around the plaza, tasting/smelling and seeing its sun-warmed richness.
“That is why your training took place in the kiva,” said Sahacat’s voice behind her. “The knowing sense of tewalutewi had to grow strong enough to contest the dominance of the eyes. Now each must complement the other.”
/>
Kesbe turned toward Baqui Iba, who had begun to prance and dip its wings. It cast off streamers of scent so varied and intense that Kesbe seemed to see them as colored banners swirling from its wings. The hues of the wings and the grace and delicacy of the aronans form seemed to translate back into subtle odors. Kesbe drank it all in, no longer knowing or caring what impression was coming from which sense.
It took her several hours to achieve the integration that Sahacat spoke of. Even then, the balance was precarious and she would find herself sliding toward dominance by one perceptive mode or the other. The composite image would separate and she would have to stop and bring it together once again. But by the end of the day, she felt secure enough to ask Sahacat what the next step would be.
“Your senses are skilled in the Pai Way,” said the shaman. “Now you must learn to discipline that which lies deepest within. Meet me at dawn on the mesa-top, at the place where the Cloud Dance was given. Take Baqui Iba now to Aronan House and lead it to the mesa when you come.” She walked away.
Chapter 18
In the house of my sister, Chamol, I seek healing. Here, in an inner chamber, by the light of an oil lamp, I chant and let the colored sands run from my fingers. A sand-painting must never be done under open sky, only here, hidden from spirits that might turn the healing powers of the sand-painting against me.
This is the second room in Chamois house to be put to such a use. The death-image of Haewi and myself still lies undisturbed in the next chamber. Nabamida has let it remain. Does he fear that it will be needed?
No. These are not the right thoughts for one who is making a sand-painting. Letting them into my mind has disrupted my chant and the flow of red sand from between my fingers. The line is no longer even. The image has already lost a small part of its power.
