Moonscatter

by Jo Clayton

  Tuli straightened, blinked up into the broad calm face. She thought of speaking but waited instead.

  “It’s very early to be sure, even for me, but there seems to be a possibility in you. Understand me well, Tuli, I can’t be sure, I’m not sure.”

  “Oh.” Tuli felt cold. “What can I do?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to stop it from happening,” Tuli cried. “Oh Zhag eat him, I could kill Fayd. I told him I didn’t want to do it, but he wouldn’t stop, he wouldn’t.”

  “Mmmmm. You’re very young.” The Ammu nodded slowly. “Young to learn we pay a price for all our acts, will-we, nill-we.” She laughed, shaking the tight-curled white fleece clinging close to her head. “There’s a bell somewhere about. Find it, will you, child? Ring it for me.”

  Tuli searched among the pillows, found the bell and shook it vigorously.

  “Enough, enough, you’ll wake the stones.” The Ammu’s voice quivered with laughter. “Do you do all things with such enthusiasm?”

  Tuli set the bell down. “Everything except sewing and cleaning.”

  “Hah, never met a candidate who did.”

  “I’m not a candidate.” She was getting tired of hearing that.

  The Ammu Rin wasn’t listening. She turned, leaning on her arm, fixed her unseeing eyes on the door.

  Vesset elbowed the curtain aside and stepped into the court. She carried a heavy tray with a pot of cha, two cups and a number of small pots with pipe handles on the lids. She set the tray down beside Tuli on legs she deftly unfolded from beneath it, saw it was steady, then got to her feet with a quick ripple of her body, perhaps a touch of extra grace to put the visitor firmly in her place. “Would you have a cup of cha, Ammu Rin?”

  “And don’t you make it better than any. Yes, yes, Vesset, pour me a cup of cha.”

  Vesset flushed with pleasure. A small smile on her lips, she put a dollop of honey in a mug, added a grating of sim and a pinch of paer, poured in the steaming cha, the heat of the liquid releasing a sweet mix of scents to perfume the air around them. She put the cup in the Ammu’s hand, waited until the old woman sipped and smiled, turned to Tuli and truly smiled. “Would you like the same?”

  Tuli nodded. “Oh yes.”

  As Vesset prepared the second mug, the Ammu said, “When you’re finished there, love, make an infusion for me of miska-pierdro and bring it here. This we won’t speak of, please.”

  “Yes, Ammu Rin.” Vesset handed Tuli the steaming cup. “Think of saving some of this to wash away the taste. You wouldn’t believe how foul it is.”

  Tuli sipped at the sweet spicy liquid, watching Vesset disappear beyond the curtain.

  The chair creaked as Ammu Rin settled back. “Miska-pierdro is a herb mix. Like Vesset said, it don’t taste so good, but it’s safe, quite safe. We’ve had a number of tie girls too young for marriage and unwilling to make lives here; they’ve returned to their homes, married later and produced healthy children in those marriages.” She cradled the cup between her large hands. “If indeed you later change your mind, child, and want children, then know there will be no physical result from what you choose to do now.”

  Tuli nodded, forgetting the Ammu couldn’t see, but the old woman smiled anyway seeming to know what she was thinking.

  “When Vesset comes back.…” The Ammu shifted again, wiped sweat from her face. “She’ll have the infusion with her. Swallow it now. You’ll get another dose of it after supper and a third in the middle of the night. We’ll wake you for that. You’ll have to spend the night here in the Healhall. Come the dawn, you’ll be feeling right miserable but on the way to recovering yourself, and without the burden you now carry. You will be riding out again when Rane leaves?”

  “I meant to, I will if she’ll wait the night for me. I’ve seen how little she likes to be here.”

  “Ah. A sad time, that. We did what we could, though it was little enough.” She nodded her big head. “Pardon mean old woman’s curiosity, child, but do you think you will be a candidate later?”

  “I don’t know,”

  “It doesn’t matter. Don’t let people push you into anything you don’t want.” She chuckled. “Not that I think you will.”

  Vesset came back carrying a small porcelain jar with a wide mouth and straight sides. She knelt beside the tray, took Tuli’s mug, looked in it. “Empty. Well, thanks be, it’s a big pot.” She prepared another cup and handed it to Tuli. “Keep this awhile yet.” She picked up the jar. “Open your throat, young Tuli, and throw this down. Try your best not to taste it.”

  Fingers trembling, the moment on her before she was ready for it though she thought she’d been preparing for it for near a passage now, Tuli took the jar. It was cool and slippery, the liquid inside rocked by the shaking of her hands. “Maiden bless,” she said and threw the liquid down her throat as she’d been told. Even so she could hardly keep from gagging. Vesset took the jar from her and helped her lift the cha mug to her lips. “A couple of gulps of this and you’ll feel better.”

  When she’d emptied the cup Tuli indeed felt better. She licked her lips and sighed. “Two more.”

  Vesset laughed and stood.

  Ammu Rin leaned forward. “Send young Dinafar to me, she’s labored long enough on her lessons.”

  “That I will.” Vesset nicked her fingers at Tuli and went away.

  Tuli watched the curtain sway and hang still again. “She’s going to be a healer?”

  “Vesset? She already is, Tuli. A healwoman, the best of my students. If times were other than they are, she’d be going out next summer on her first wanderyear.”

  “Oh. How long has she been studying?”

  “Ten years.” Once more the chair creaked as the Ammu shifted her weight.

  “Ten years!” Tuli stared at the old woman. The milky blind eyes opened. Ammu Rin smiled and nodded. “Does it take that long to make a meie?”

  “Some learn faster than others.” Ammu Rin scratched the side of her nose. “Put you off, eh Tuli?”

  “That’s almost as long as I’ve been alive.”

  “It goes fast, yes, it goes.” She turned her head to the door.

  Dinafar pushed past the curtain. “Ammu Rin?”

  “Ah. Dinafar. Take young Tuli here to the prieti-varou. And after that, if Rane is agreeable, show our visitor about. Take the afternoon free, Dina, you’ve studied enough for today.”

  Dinafar grinned, rubbed at her eyes. “Maiden bless, my head thanks you, Ammu Rin.”

  “So go, the two of you.”

  Tuli finished the last of the sweetened cha and put the mug on the tray. She scrambled to her feet, hesitated. “Should we take away the tray, Ammu Rin?”

  “No. No. But you could ring the bell again. Gently, this time, gently, child.”

  Dinafar knocked on the varou’s door.

  Rane opened it and looked out, saw Tuli, raised a thin blond brow. “Did you get your answer?”

  “Uh-huh.” Tuli grimaced. “I got to stay overnight.”

  “I see. That’s no problem. You’ll be ready to leave early tomorrow morning?”

  “That’s what she said. Ammu Rin. And she said Dinafar could show me around if that’s all right with you.”

  Rane grinned. “Enjoy yourselves, the two of you. You’ll be sleeping in the Healhouse, Moth?”

  “Yah.”

  “All right, you’re set.” She lifted a hand in one of her comprehensive gestures, stepped back and shut the door.

  Dinafar danced across the aste-varou. “Come on, there’s lots and lots to see. What shall I show you first? Oh I know, come on, come on.”

  The Watchhall magnified the sound of their feet. It was empty, no chairs or rugs on the floor, nothing, just a broad expanse of tile, black tile, dusky soft black like the sky on a cloudy night, a vast room, longer than it was wide, as high as it was wide, ceiling lost in shadow. On the walls also lost in shadow great tapestries stirred in the fugitive drafts that haunted the
corners of the hall. At the far end a long rectangle bolted to the wall above a broad dais glowed in the light of a row of lamps, a brightly painted collection of shapes set on a field of blue.

  Dinafar caught hold of Tuli’s hand, pulled her across the tiles. “It’s the whole world,” she said, her voice booming in the emptiness.

  “Ahh. Where are we?”

  “See that green bit there on the middle chunk of land?”

  “Yah.”

  “That’s us. And the yellow bit just above, that’s the mijloc.” She pointed. “See that little red dot? That’s Oras. If you go down the coast a little from that, see, where the blue goes in and out a lot, that’s where the fishers live, you had to see some of them at the Gather, that’s where I was born and grew up.” She wrinkled her nose. “And, Maiden bless, I’ll never see the stinking place again.”

  “That bad?”

  “Tell you sometime.”

  “What’re those black lines?”

  “Roads, sort of. Caravan routes. The one there in the yellow, you should know that one, it’s the Highroad.” She jumped onto the dais and dipped her hand into a silver box attached to the wall beside the map, pulled out a handful of silver pegs and let them rattle back into the box. “These are the meien, each one is marked. Come on up, let me show you.” She picked through the pegs while Tuli peered over her shoulder. “Trying to find someone’s I know. Ah! Look.”

  A glyph was stamped on the thick round head of the peg. “That’s for Leeaster, she’s my dance teacher. When the pegs are in the box that means the meien are back in the valley. Look over here.” She ran along the map, jumped up, touched a narrow violet strip dotted with red city spots. Two silver pegs were still in their holes. Back on her feet, she said, “Vapro and Nurii. Far as we know the Call-in hasn’t reached them yet. They’re Serroi’s agemates so she probably knows them.”

  “Serroi?”

  Dinafar flushed uncomfortably. “Oh, a friend of mine.”

  “Oh.” Tuli stared at the map, at all the black lines, the red dots that were cities, the silver pegs that marked the wards of all the meien still out of the Valley. She’d seen the Sutireh Sea for the first time at the Gather. She and Teras had climbed onto the city walls and looked out and out and out across water that didn’t seem to end. Now she saw the Sea was only a little wider than the widest part of the Cimpia Plain. And there were more red city-dots on the unknown land on the far side of the Sea. She’d never thought of there being land out there, and people living on that land. She stared and stared at that patchwork of colors, appalled by the sheer size of the world, so much bigger than she’d had any idea, so many lands, so many different people. And she didn’t even know much about how Stenda lived and they were almost close enough to spit on. And she didn’t know anything at all about Dinafar’s fisherfolk. “It’s big,” she said, awe trembling in her hushed voice.

  “Yah.” Dinafar patted her arm. “I remember the first time I saw this. Made me feel about so big.” She held thumb and forefinger half an inch apart.

  “And the meien go all over?”

  “Yah. Healwomen too.”

  “You don’t mark healwomen?”

  “Healwomen wander, they don’t have wards. No way to keep track of them.”

  All those places to go and see, all those places.… Tuli sighed. “Ten years,” she said and brushed her hand back over her hair.

  “Goes fast.”

  “So the Ammu said.” She walked down to the end of the dais. Hundreds of small copper rectangles were tacked to the wall, names incised in each. “What’s this?”

  “The roll of the dead. All the women who’ve lived here, the meien and the healwomen and the craftswomen, everyone. When someone dies, we watch the night away in here, everyone in the Valley. If the woman dies in the Valley, we burn the body to ash and give the ash back to the earth.” Dinafar’s voice was very soft, her eyes shining. “We spread the ashes on the fields and in the orchard so the dear one returns to us in the fruits of the earth.” She shook herself, laughed and jumped down from the dais. “That’s enough solemn things.” She danced away across the tiles and pushed the big door open. “Where you want to go next?”

  “The glass place. I want to see how you make glass.”

  “Well, you won’t, it’s all closed down. Too hot.”

  “I’d like to see it anyway.”

  “All right, you won’t see much.”

  A low blocky building. A big open box. High pointed windows with round bits of stained glass set in lead strips, painting colored rounds on the slick white floor. The melting furnace was a large square structure raised off the floor and backed against one wall. A charred wooden walkway passed in front of the round openings of the furnace, long blackened pipes and a hundred other enigmatic objects lay about haphazardly; she didn’t know what they could be for and wished she could see the place when it was working. She sighed. “You’re right, it isn’t much interesting like this.”

  “One. Two. Three. Four,” the stocky woman counted, echoing the count with beats of her hand. On near noiseless bare feet the girls moved in disciplined unison, one pose flowing into the next faster and faster until they were a blur of step-bend-turn.

  “The Cane dance,” Dinafar whispered. “Bend like bastocane before the wind.”

  “But why? What’s it for?”

  “Itself.” Hand over her mouth to hold back a giggle, Dinafar danced across the court and into the covered way. She turned to wait for Tuli.

  “Tchah!” Tuli said when she came up with her.

  “Well, that’s what they say. Actually, it’s part of teaching us how to make any fool sorry he bothered us.”

  Pottery. Fires out under the kilns. Too hot.

  Smithy. Women and girls sweating over spear points and arrowheads, the smell of hot iron and sweat, the clang of metal on metal, the hiss of metal quenched in cool water.

  Weaving hall. The great looms silent, the huge chamber dark, silent. “It’s usually full of noise,” Dinafar said sadly. “The weavers have moved outside until the weather breaks.”

  Kitchen. Pots, steam, noise, girls everywhere, irritation, laughter, fussing—like a seething stew, different ingredients popping to the top in turn to give a whiff of their own particular flavor. They were quickly chased from this place.

  Maiden Shrine. “Can’t go in there now. The Shawar are working there and they don’t like to be disturbed.”

  “Working?”

  “Fighting the Nor, you know, trying to fix the sun so it’s right again.”

  Smoking sheds. Posser haunches wreathed in pungent smoke, strips of dark almost black hauhau meat drying, black sausages dangling.

  Storehouses. Barrel on barrel of salt fish, salt meat, crocks of preserves, bins of grain, sacks of tubers, strings of dry fruit and wax-coated cheeses.

  Barns. Empty of stock except for some hauhau cows kept for their milk and a few macain. Stuffed with hay, more bins of grain. “Until the weather breaks,” Dinafar said, “most of the stock is up in the mountains.”

  Girls everywhere, a flood of girls drowning the older women, girls chattering, laughing, silent, intent, impatient, sullen, cheerful, glowing, lazy, bubbling with nervous energy, tie girls, tarom’s daughters, city girls from Sel-ma-carth and Oras, girls from distant places and distant peoples whose names and locations Tuli didn’t know. A culling of girls, the rebellious, the restless, the pleasure-loving, the pious, some fleeing the repression of the Followers, some seeking whatever it was the Biserica seemed to promise them.

  The promise of the Biserica. Tuli began to see how little anyone knew of the Valley, they knew the keepers, the meien, the healwomen, they knew nothing at all about the craftswomen, teachers, fieldworkers and all the rest. The promise of the Biserica. Whatever else it was, it meant hard work, accepting responsibility, and in the end a kind of freedom not found anywhere else in the world, not that she knew anyway, though she was forced over and over again to realize just how little she did know
.

  As the day wore on, Tuli grew silent and thoughtful. One moment she was sure this was what she wanted, that this was what she was born for. The next moment she missed Teras dreadfully, missed her mother and her father, Sanoni and the ties and all the familiar and comfortable things she’d grown up with.

  A vague nausea floated under her ribs and the revolting taste of the infusion kept coming up into her throat.

  In the middle of the night a hand shook her awake—Vesset, with the third dose of the miska-pierdro. Tuli sat up, scrubbed at her eyes.

  “Come, little one, one last gulp.” Vesset bent over her, stroked her tangled hair.

  Tuli shuddered. “Must I?”

  “Can’t leave the job half done.” Vesset’s high-cheeked face was tender in the shadowed light from the porcelain lamp sitting on the bedside table.

  Tuli sighed, took the small cylinder and tossed the liquid it held to the back of her throat. “Gahh, that’s awful.”

  “Here.” Vesset handed her a stoneware mug. “Juice. It’ll cut the taste.”

  Tuli took the mug gratefully and gulped down half the juice before she lowered it again. “Maiden bless,” she said.

  Vesset chuckled. “Be you blessed. Listen. In a little while you might feel some cramps—or you might not. This takes different people different ways. Even if it gets really bad, don’t worry. It’ll pass. By morning you’ll be sure enough you’re going to live.”

  “Oh marvelous.”

  Vesset bent down, touched Tuli’s cheek, then went quietly out, taking her lamp with her.

  Tuli sat in the quiet darkness, sipping at the juice, aware even more than before that she was in a strange room in a strange bed. She felt on edge, uncertain. She touched the sheet beside her, stroked her hand along the blanket pulled over her knees. Strange smells. Strange feel. Alone. She shivered, missing the soft night breathing of her family, she’d never slept in a room by herself before. Defying she didn’t know what, she tossed down the rest of the juice, fumbled the mug onto the little table, wriggled and bounced herself out flat on the bed, pulled the blanket up over her and lay staring into the darkness. She was tired but the first hours of sleep had taken away the urgency of her need. Sleep evaded her. When she forced her eyes shut, they popped open again. She yawned, stared up at the dark-lost ceiling and tried to relax.