by Mel Dunay
But for the first time, she realized that Vipin was capable of killing, and that right now, he was weighing whether to do that to Jabar.
“Vipin, please! He's not worth it,” She called out. “Send him back to town, and we’ll take the cart on to Barleyfields without him.”
She would have liked to press charges, but it sounded like the constable in Goatsfart was swamped, and Jabar had friends in high places in Barleyfields. Besides he might press counter-charges against her and Vipin for assault.
Vipin didn’t seem to react at first, but then he rose from his crouch, dragging Jabar with him.
“Go back,” Vipin told him.
“But my cart...my kefir...”
“We’ll send the cart back to you with the payment for the kefir, when we reach Barleyfields. In the meantime, you should go. Before Miss Rina changes her mind.” Vipin bared his teeth; it didn’t look at all like a smile. “Before I change my mind.”
He let go of Jabar’s shirtfront, and Jabar ran away back towards Goatsfart.
The buffalo, who was perhaps used to her owner getting into fights, had lurched to a stop about the time Jabar made his move, and when Vipin picked up the reins and urged her forward, she cooperated.
“Are you all right?” He asked Rina. “I figured we shouldn’t hang around, just in case that bottomfeeder decided he wanted seconds. But if you’re hurt or need to stop...”
“I am fine,” Rina insisted. “And you were wonderful.”
He blushed at that and didn't answer.
“I never knew an anthropologist who could fight like that,” Rina said truthfully.
She had known a few back in college, years ago. Some were weedy little intellectuals; one or two were outdoorsy and athletic, but they definitely didn’t have the reflexes or the instincts that Vipin had just shown.
“I’m surprised you haven’t. There are many different forms of martial arts all over this country-I just happened to pick up a little bit of them when I was younger. It was what got me interested in anthropology in the first place.”
Well, that was bizarre, but not really anymore bizarre than anything else about Vipin, Rina thought.
“So,” She asked him. “What have you heard about the Mountain King?”
“Amita called him Shaipinob, which is simply ‘King of the Mountain’ in the old languages. I’ve heard that others in these parts call him ‘the Zata,’ meaning the Old One. Zata is the name in the old religious scriptures for what most people today call guardian spirits.”
“That’s a lot of names to sling around,” Rina said.
“All names are labels, and most of them are incomplete labels,” Vipin said. “Sometimes it takes a lot of different labels to fully understand and describe a thing.”
“But do you have anything to go on besides labels, where Shaipinob is concerned?”
“Some of the stories that were told to me in Skymarket mentioned him without necessarily being about him.” Vipin said.
“What were they about then?” Rina asked impatiently.
It almost seemed like Vipin was being evasive, and about such a foolish thing too. But maybe he was one of these people who were cagey about anything they planned to publish in a scholarly paper. Rina had known some professors like that, back when she was in college.
“The stories were about someone the storytellers called a herald or a precursor. Some said it was the Mountain King’s brother, some said it was his sister, like Amita did. But it comes down from the peak around this time of year, before the marriage feast.”
“What does it do when it comes down, in these stories?” Rina knew the answer, but wanted to see what he would say.
He was silent for a long time. “You could call it a marriage negotiator, I guess. The Shapinob Bhana, the Mountain King’s Sister, is trying to persuade the villagers to give their unmarried ladies in marriage to its brother.”
Rina thought of the spidery black shape she thought she'd seen on the rocky slopes, and of the things in her dreams and shivered. “In the stories I remember, it wasn’t asking nicely.”
Vipin put his arm around her, somewhat tentatively.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. From the way you asked, I didn’t think you had heard those stories.”
“I hadn’t heard them told like that.” Rina said. “When you’re a little kid and your favorite aunt is due to be married to the Mountain and all the slightly bigger kids are trying to frighten you...you get all the gory details.”
Vipin's grip on her shoulders tightened.
“I won’t ask you then. If it makes you feel any better, some claim that the Mountain King and his sister-Shai and Bhana-are bogeys invented to frighten young women into marrying human men before the festival time rolls around. To keep them from getting too independent.”
Rina had heard that one before. Down in Rivertown, she even believed it, most of the time.
“What if the...marriage broker...thing was what we heard this morning? The Screaming?” She pulled away from him a little bit. “But I guess that’s all plain peasant superstition to you.”
“I try to keep an open mind about these things,” He said. “I don’t see why the screaming couldn’t be that, except...”
“Except what?” She asked.
“Well, did you ever hear of anything like that happening in previous festival years?”
“The word is masting,” She told him.
“A mass blooming is a masting, and the festival itself, and the festival year, is also called a masting. When it comes to things that happened in previous mastings, well, I was down at college in Rivertown when the last one happened. But my friend Kajjal from Barleyfields was married to the Mountain King at the last masting. She’s never mentioned anything strange.”
“Really?” His voice was neutral, encouraging her to talk rather than doubting her. She relaxed just a little back into the curve of his strong arm.
“Well, she didn’t have much to say about it at the time. She just came bouncing back to our dorm room one day and said, ‘Well, congratulate me, I’m now Mrs. Mountain King, along with ten other chicks from Barleyfields, and who knows how many from elsewhere. I need a drink.’”
“That doesn't sound like she enjoyed it.”
“Her parents had driven her crazy preparing for it, and while she was up there at Barleyfields she had a fight with her father. So parts of it were pretty unpleasant. But when my parents wanted me to participate this year, she didn’t imply that there was anything weird about the ritual.”
“Is there any reason why the masting would be different this time?” Vipin asked. He sounded cautious, like he didn’t want to upset her or stir up any crazy ideas, but felt like he had to ask this anyway.
Rina thought hard. She had the nagging feeling that she’d heard or read something which would make the answer yes, but she couldn't think of what it was.
“I feel like there ought to be a reason, but I can’t think of what it is. Maybe we’re jumping at shadows here. Maybe the screaming was just a panther. Maybe the thing climbing the slope was the same panther.”
“It seemed human to you at the time,” Vipin said quietly, more to himself than to her.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Rina said, and the ride was silent most of the way to Barleyfields.
When they started getting close, she called Kajjal’s mother, to let her know that they were almost there.
Kajjal’s mother found out who the kefir was supposed to be delivered to, and promised to let them know what the arrangement was.
“Don’t you fret, dearie. There won’t be any trouble at all about the man delivering the cart back.”
“But what about the feud...?” Rina asked. Normally, people from Barleyfields were not allowed inside Goatsfart, and vice versa.
“The man will put in a call to Jabar and have him collect the cart outside of Goatsfart. Nothing to worry about.”
“I had one more thing I need
ed to ask you, aunty...” Rina hesitated.
“Do you know of anywhere Vipin could stay?”
Barleyfields was one of the more prosperous villages, and had sent many of its children off to be educated and find jobs down in Rivertown and beyond.
For a major festival all those grownup children would be returning home with their spouses and their own children, and the houses were likely to be crowded.
“He’s staying with us whether he wants to or not,” Kajjal’s mother said firmly.
“If it’s not too much trouble...”
“Dearie, anybody who’s a friend of yours is a friend of ours.”
“But-”
“He helped save you from a bad situation, dearie. He could smell like a goat and talk like a herdsman and we would still put him up.”
“Thank you,” Rina said, feeling ashamed of herself.
When she hung up, she explained the situation to Vipin.
“Anything that I should know in order to stay out of trouble?” He asked.
“Not really. The village as a whole doesn’t acknowledge that Kajjal is still alive-they will tell you that the Mountain King took her. But her family still acknowledges her and talks about her.”
“I definitely plan to behave myself around your friends’ family,” Vipin said with a slight smile. “But mostly I was asking about the living arrangements.”
Rina frowned, trying to remember the time she and her family had spent the summer solstice with Kajjal’s family down in Barleyfields.
“They have a proper two-story house. Basically, when they have a lot of company, the women, girls and small children get the ground floor and the men and boys get the upper floor.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“They will probably makes us both take showers, given everything we’ve been through since the last time we bathed. They’d be happy to lend you some clothes, too.”
“I don’t think I have much choice about that part,” He said with a tone of resignation.
“They do have running water and electricity,” Rina said.
“There are only two laundromats on Mount Snarl, and Kajjal’s dad owns both of them. One’s in Skymarket and the other one’s up here in Barleyfields. You could probably have your old clothes back in a couple of hours.”
“Almost as reassuring as having you to introduce me around.”
Rina wasn’t sure what she thought about that.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Barleyfields is a farming community, but after a fashion that would surprise valley dwellers. The farmers’ homes and storehouses are all clustered together in town, but their terraced fields are on the slopes above and below the town proper.
The town is friendly to tourists, with handsomely decorated stone houses, picturesque views, and a lively business in barley-derived beer, but the difficulty in working one’s own fields without trespassing on anyone else’s tends to lead to internal feuds and sometimes external ones.
The hostility towards The Town supposedly started with goatherds failing to keep their animals out of the Barleyfields crops. Barleyfields has legal but sporadic access to electricity, often interrupted by avalanches, but only a primitive sceptic system.”
(Excerpt from The Tourist’s Guide to The Blue Smoke Mountains.)
They quickly left the cart, the buffalo, and the load of kefir off with Jabar’s customer.
Then Kajjal’s relatives, the Bardek family, swarmed them, and in all the excitement of meeting people who were almost like family to her, Rina exchanged phone numbers with Vipin and then left him to his own devices.
This year there would only be four or five brides for the ritual from Barleyfields, and only one from this family: a cousin of Kajjal’s named Jimil.
Once Rina had brushed out her hair and gotten dressed, she volunteered to help paint henna patterns on Jimil’s hands and feet.
There was a lot of giggling and gossip about village politics that didn’t mean much to her, but she didn’t feel excluded. Instead she flung herself wholeheartedly into the girliness and socializing.
She’d been alone too long with no real company except the self-centered Amita and the quiet Vipin, and she was enjoying every bit of the silliness.
She and Vipin were both invited to the dance that evening. Rina wore a bright-yellow sari and blouse trimmed with purple-a color combination which reminded her of a gaudy spring flower she sometimes saw down in the valleys.
Vipin wore a hot pink tunic shirt that came down to his knees, over a pair of blue jeans. It shouldn’t have worked, but Rina had to applaud the taste of whoever picked it out for him.
It seemed to make his skin glow even more golden than before, and added a playful touch that offset his sometimes stern face.
“You look great,” she told him.
“You look lovely,” He said. “Please bear with me-they gave me beer to drink.”
“Well, what did you think they did with all that barley?” She said with exasperation.
“The only reason they import kefir from Goatsfart is for people who need something with a lower alcohol content but don’t want to give up their liquor altogether.”
“No, no,” He said looking a bit dazed. “T’was nice of them. Couldn’t refuse. But I’m warning you, it means that I’m going to be very hyper.”
He proceeded to prove it when he got out in the town square, where the dance was supposed to take place. The music started to play.
At first he just stood grinning foolishly and clapping. Then when the drumbeats picked up speed, he just shimmied in place, twisting his hips and rolling his shoulders in time with the music.
Then all of a sudden Vipin cut loose. He moved out from the crowd of other men, with complicated cross-steps which had the young men of the village tripping over their own feet trying to imitate him.
When the wall of women moved in, Rina found herself pushed into the middle, even though she was a weak dancer and would have preferred to remain on the sidelines.
But Vipin came to her rescue, taking her by the hand and spinning her around til her hair was in her face. Then he let her stand and recover while he danced a literal circle around her, throwing out a kick towards the crowd at each step.
He did it so fast that it took only a handful of the drumbeats for him to complete the circle, yet he moved with so much grace that it hardly seemed like he was trying to leave the spot he was at. And all the while he was waving and clapping his hands in the approved Mount Snarl style.
Then he started spinning in place faster and faster as the music thundered to a close. At the climax of the music, he jumped up and landed in a feline crouch, exactly on the last note.
The Barleyfielders cheered with glee. Rina applauded but only weakly. There had been something slightly odd about his dancing style, but she had not been able to put her finger on it until that feline landing.
Even here, in play, there was something ferocious about the speed and grace of his movements, that made her think of his fight today with Jabar, and of that terrible moment when he had been weighing up killing the other man.
He moved through the crowd towards her, with a somewhat desperate and dazed look, that made her feel bad about what she had thought. His skin had flushed to a dark bronze, and his kurta was plastered to his chest from the sweat.
“Rina, I don't feel quite right,” He said softly. He sounded bewildered-all the hyperactive energy had been drained out of him by the dance.
“I’ll show you where you can lie down,” She told him. “Just don't throw up on me.”
“How ‘bout other people?” He drawled, as she put one of his arms across her shoulders so that she could support him and steer him.
“Definitely don’t throw up on other people, either,” She said, only to hear a deep-throated chuckle. Apparently he wasn’t too drunk to have a joke at her expense.
She sighed and rolled her eyes. Then she started to steer him towards the Bardek family’s house, on the outskirts of town.
Rina’s walk with Vipin took them far from the main lights and celebration, and there were no street lights in town-each house simply left a few interior lights on, either electrical or candles, for people to find their way back home.
She had to pick her way carefully, over the graveled road, and she kept expecting Vipin to stumble, but somehow he never did.
They were almost to the front door of the house when they heard the shriek of a small child. All of a sudden Vipin dropped his grip on her shoulders, so suddenly that she almost staggered.
“That came from the backyard,” he said. “Behind the showers, I think.”
He took off at a dead run, and Rina went after him. The screaming child had sobered him up awfully quickly.
The light behind the shower-building was extremely dim, and her eyes had trouble adjusting to the change.
She thought she saw a small girl-one of the ones from the henna-painting party earlier-sitting on the ground, sobbing quietly and twitching, while a dark, spidery shape swatted at the girl like a cat playing with a mouse.
“Let her go!” The words tore out of Vipin’s throat like a growl, and he ran at the thing in the darkness.
Rina caught a glimpse of red-orange eyes that widened and then seemed to vanish as Vipin charged.
He ran after whatever it was for a few yards, then paused about the time Rina reached the girl. There was that soft chittering noise again, followed by the piercing shriek Rina had last heard in Goatsfart.
Vipin stared up at the dark slopes of Mount Snarl for a moment, like a dog weighing up whether it had successfully run off the intruders or needed to chase them further.
He stood poised, every muscle tense, and then just as suddenly he wheeled about and came back towards Rina and the little girl.
“Are you hurt?” Rina asked.
She had almost asked “Are you alright?” but clearly the little girl wasn't.
The girl just shivered and hugged her. Rina gently checked her head, arms and legs for injuries. There were some bruises but nothing seemed broken.
“I’m going to have the nice man carry you back to the house, so that we can have a better look at you,” Rina said.
