“Have you come to learn to dance?”
“If I may,” Ramchandra answered clearly.
“Are you old?”
“I am no longer young.”
My God, Tamara thought, it’s an initiation—can Ram keep it up? And the next question, sure enough, she did not understand at all; there were no Young or Middle Ndif words in it. Ram, however, appeared to understand, and replied promptly, “Not often.”
“When did you last bring home the kill?”
“I have never killed an animal.”
That brought a hoot, laughs, and some critical discussion. “He must have been born fifty years old!” Binira said, sniggering. “Or else he is terribly lazy,” said a youngish Old Man with a simple look, very earnestly.
Two more questions and answers Tamara could not follow, and then Bro-Kap demanded, harshly she thought, “What do you hunt?”
“I hunt peremensoe.”
Whatever it was, it was right. Audible and tangible approval, backslaps, relaxation. Bro-Kap nodded once, shortly, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and sat down in the circle beside Ramchandra. “What do you want to know?” he inquired, in a thoroughly unritualistic and offhand manner.
“I should like to know,” Ramchandra said, “how the world began.”
“Oh ho ho!” went a couple of geezers across the circle. “Too old for his years, this one! A hundred years old, this fellow!”
“We say this,” Bro-Kap replied. “Man made the world.”
“I should like to know how he did it.”
“In his head, between his ears, how else? Everything is in the head. Nothing is wood, nothing is stone, nothing is water, nothing is blood, nothing is bone; all things are sanisukiarad.”
In her frustration at never knowing the key word, Tamara watched Ram’s face as if she could interpret from it; and indeed he understood. His eyes shone; he smiled, so that his features rounded out and grew gentle.
“He dances,” he said. “He dances.”
“Maybe so,” Bro-Kap replied. “Maybe Man dances in his head, and that makes sanisukiarad.”
Only with this repetition did Tamara hear the name “Man” as a name, a Ndif name or word which happened to coincide in sound with the English word “man”—but she had taken it to coincide in meaning—
Did it?
For a minute everything fell apart into two levels, two overlapping screens or veils, one of them sounds, one of them meanings, neither of them real. Their overlap and interplay, their shift and movement, confused everything, concealed or revealed everything, in that flow there was nothing to take hold of, not even once can you step into the river unless you are the river. The world began and nothing was happening, some wizened old men and women talking nonsense with Lord Shiva in a smelly hut. Talking, merely talking, words, words that meant nothing twice.
The parted veils closed again.
She checked that the tape was running in the recorder, and turned up the gain a little. Replaying all this later, with Ram to interpret and explain, maybe it would make sense.
They did dance, at last. After much talk Binira announced, “That’s enough peremenkiarad without music,” and Bro-Kap rather ungraciously said, “All right, askiös, go ahead.” At which Binira began to sing in a small unearthly creaking voice; and presently one old man, and then another, got up and danced, a slow dance, the feet close to the ground, the torso still and poised, intensity concentrated in the hands, arms, and face. It brought tears to Tamara’s eyes, the dance of the shadowy old men. Others joined; now they were all dancing, all but Kara and herself. Sometimes they touched one another, lightly and solemnly, or bowed like cranes. All of them? Yes, Ram was dancing with them. The golden dusty light from the smokehole flowed along his arms; lightly and softly he lifted and set down his bare feet. An old man faced him. “O komeya, O komeya, ama, O, O,” sang the creaking cricket trill, and Kara’s hands, Tamara’s hands patted time on the brown dirt The old man’s hands were lifted as in supplication. Ramchandra reached to him, the flowing arm, the poised and separated fingers; smiling, he touched, and turned, still dancing, and the old man smiled and began to sing, “O komeya, ama, ama, O...”
“Do we have a session on tape for you to listen to!” Tamara said, but she said it mainly to distract Bob from his hangdog mood as they went together down the path towards the clearing where the duel was to be fought. The path was littered with lamaba-fruit rinds, as most of the village had preceded them.
“More love songs?”
“No. Well, yes. Love songs to God... You know what God’s name is?”
“Yes,” Bob said indifferently. “Old man at Gunda told me. Bik-Kop-Man.”
The duel went nearly, but not quite, as planned by both parties. Since it was the one group action by the Young Ndif besides saweya and baliya dancing which seemed to be a genuine ritual or meaning-focussed act, Tamara diligently taped, filmed, and note-took the whole thing, including the redheaded Potita’s expression (and here she is, Miss America); the infliction of a knife stab in Bob’s thigh by Pit-Wat, the Gunda Challenger; Bob’s fine gesture throwing away his long-bladed knife (a glittering arc into the pink-flowered puti bushes); and the karate throw that stretched Pit-Wat flat and apparently lifeless on the ground.
Bob did not stay to deliver his lecture on the unhygienic aspects of murder. His wound was bleeding hard, and Tamara cut off the movie camera and got to work with the first-aid kit. Thus the jubiliation of Hamo village and the discomfiture of Gunda were recorded only on sound tape; and the tape recorder was off when Pit-Wat revived, to the discomfiture of both Hamo and Gunda. Slain sallenzii were not supposed to come alive and get up, staggering but undamaged. By this time, however, Bob was on the homeward path to Hamo, white-faced and not unwilling to hold on to Tamara’s arm. “Where’s Ram?” he asked for the first time, and she explained that she had not even told Ram a duel was to take place.
“Good,” Bob said. “I know what he’d say.”
“I don’t.”
“Irresponsible involvement in native lifeways—”
She shook her head. “I didn’t tell him because I didn’t even see him today, and I thought—” She had in fact forgotten about the duel, it had seemed so silly, so unreal, compared to that dancing in the Old Men’s House; it had all been a stupid annoying joke, right up to the moment when she saw the color, the splendid and terrible color of blood in the sunlight; but she could not tell Bob that. “He’s made a kind of breakthrough. By getting involved himself—he spent all day in the Old Men’s House. I want him to talk with you tonight. Once we get your leg looked after. And he’ll want to know what the people in Gunda said about Man. About God, I mean. Look out for that vine. Oh, Lord, here come the football fans.” A troupe of Young Women were pursuing them, halfheartedly pelting Bob with puti flowers.
“Where’s Potita?” Bob muttered, setting his teeth.
“Not in this lot. Are you really fond of her, Bob?”
“No. It’s that my leg hurts. No, it was just fun and games. I just wondered if Pit-Wat got her or I did.”
It turned out that Pit-Wat got her, since he stayed on the field of combat and performed the Victory Dance, rather shakily to be sure. Bob was relieved, since Pit-Wat was certainly better suited to Potita by temperament and circumstance; and as for the Victory Dance, a two-minute fit of stomping and posing, they had already got several films of champion wrestlers performing it. “All we needed was a movie of me beating my chest,” Bob said. “Christ! With my leg spouting. And feeling like a prize ass all round anyhow.”
“Ass all round, curious image,” Ramchandra said. They had got a fire going in Bob’s hut. It was raining—it rained only at night on Yirdo—and Bob had lost enough blood that a little extra warmth and cheer might do him good. The air got smoky, but the ruddy light was pleasant; it made Tamara think of winter, of rain and fire-fight in winter, a season unknown to Yirdo. Bob lay stretched out on his cot and the other two sat by the hearth, feeding the fire with dried lamab
a rinds, which burned with a clear flame and a scent of pineapple.
“Ram, what does peremensoe mean?”
“Thinking. Ideas. Understanding. Talk.”
“And peremenkiarad, is that right?”
“About the same. Plus a connotation of... illusion, deception, trickery—play.”
“Is this Old Ndif?” Bob inquired. “If you’re making dictionaries, let me see ’em, Ram. I couldn’t understand anything the old boys were telling me in Gunda.”
“Except God’s name,” Tamara said.
Ramchandra raised his eyebrows.
“Bik-Kop-Man made the world with his ears,” Bob said. “And that is the Ndif equivalent of Genesis, Book One.”
“Between his ears,” Ramchandra corrected coldly.“With them or between them, it’s a pretty poor excuse for a Creation myth.”
“How do you know, if your vocabulary is inadequate?”
Why did he take that tone with Bob? Supercilious, pedantic, offensive, even the voice high and schoolmarmish. Bob’s solid good nature shone by contrast in his reply: “It’s taken me weeks to realize that if I’m after myth or history the only people here who may have them are the Old Ones. I should have been checking in with you much earlier.”
Ramchandra stared into the fire and said nothing.
“Ram,” Tamara said, profoundly irritated with him, “Bob should know about this thing we talked about the other night. The derivation of Young Ndif.”
He went on staring into the fire, mute.
“You can explain it better than I can.”
After a moment he merely shook his head.
“You’ve decided it was a mistake?” she demanded, more exasperated than ever, but also with a flash of hope.
“No,” he said. “The documentation is in that notebook I gave you.”
She fetched the notebook from her hut, lighted the oil lamp, and sat down on the floor by Bob’s cot so he could read over her shoulder. For half an hour they went over Ramchandra’s orderly and exhaustive proofs of the direct derivation of Young Ndif from Modem Standard English. Bob laughed at first, taking the whole thing as a grand scholarly joke; then he laughed at the sheer lunacy of it. It did not seem to disturb him, as it disturbed Tamar.
“If it’s not your hoax, Ram, it’s still a hoax—a terrific one.”
“By whom? How? Why?” Tamara asked, hopeful again. A mistake made sense; a hoax made sense.
“All right. This language,” and he tapped the notebook, “isn’t authentic. It’s a fake, a construct—invented. Right?”
Ramchandra, who had not said a word all this while, agreed in a remote, unwilling tone: “Invented. By an amateur. The correspondences with English are naive, unconscious, as in ‘speaking in tongues.’—But Old Ndif is an authentic language.”
“An older one, an archaic survival—”
“No.” Ramchandra said “No” often, flatly, and with satisfaction, Tamara thought. “Old Ndif is alive. It is based upon Young Ndif, has grown out of it, or over it. like ivy on a telephone pole.”
“Spontaneously?”
“As spontaneously as any language, or as deliberately. When words are wanted, needed, people have to make them. It ‘happens,’ like a bird singing, but it’s also ‘work,’ like Mozart writing music.”
“Then you’d say the Old Ones are gradually making a real language out of this fake one?”
“I cannot define the word ‘real’ and therefore would not use it.” Ramchandra shifted his position, reclasping his arms round his knees, but did not look up from the fire. “I would say that the Old Ndif seem to be engaged in creating the world. Human beings do this primarily by means of language, music, and the dance.”
Bob stared at him, then at Tamara. “Come again?” Ramchandra was silent.
“So far,” Tamara said, “working in three widely separate localities, we’ve found the same language, without major dialectical variations, and the same set of very rudimentary social and cultural patterns. Bob hasn’t found any legends, any expressions of the archetypes, any developed symbology. I haven’t found much more social structure than I’d find in a herd of cattle, about what I might find in a primate troop. Sex and age determine all roles. The Ndif are culturally subhuman; they don’t exist fully as human beings. The Old Ndif are beginning to. Is that it, Ram?”
“I don’t know,” the linguist said, withdrawn.
“That’s missionary talk!” Bob said. “Subhuman? Come on. Stagnant, sure. Maybe because there’s no environmental challenge. Food falls out of the trees, game’s plentiful, and they don’t have sexual hangups—”
“That’s inhuman,” Tamara interjected; Bob ignored her.
“There’s no stimulus. O.K. But the Old Ones get shoved out of the fun and games. They get bored; that’s the stimulus. They start playing around with words and ideas. So what rudiments of mythopoetics and ritual they’ve got are their creation. That’s not an unusual situation, the young busy with sex and physical competitions, the old as culture transmitters. The only weird thing is this English-Ndif business. That needs explaining. I just don’t buy telepathy, you can’t build a scientific explanation on an occultist theory. The only rational explanation is that these people—the whole society—are a plant. A quite recent one.”
“Correct,” Ramchandra said.
“But listen,” Tamara said with fury, “how can a quarter of a million people be ‘planted’? What about the ones over thirty? We’ve only had FTL spaceflight for thirty years! The Exploratory Survey to this system was unmanned, and it was only eight years ago! Your rational explanation is pure nonsense!”
“Correct,” Ramchandra said again, his clear, dark, sorrowful gaze on the flickering fire.
“Evidently there’s been a manned mission, a colonising mission, to this planet, which the World Government doesn’t know about. We have stumbled into something, and it begins to scare me. The So-Hem faction—”
Bob was interrupted by the sudden entrance (the Ndif never knocked) of Bro-Kap, two other Old Men, and two baliya dancers, beautiful half-naked sixteen-year-olds with flowers in their tawny hair. They knelt by Bob’s cot and made soft lamenting sounds. Bro-Kap stood as majestically as he could in the now very crowded hut, and gazed down at Bob. He was clearly waiting for the girls to be quiet, but one of them was now chattering cheerfully and the other was drawing circles around Bob’s nipples with her long fingernails. “Uvana Bob!” Bro-Kap said at last. “Are you Bik-Kop-Man?”
“Am I—Askiös, Wana!—No. Askiös, Bro-Kap, I don’t understand.”
“Sometimes Man comes,” the old Ndif said. “He has come to Hamo, and to Farwe. Never to Gunda or to Akko. He is strong and tall, golden-haired and golden-skinned, a great hunter, a great fighter, a great lover. He comes from far away and goes away again. We have thought that you were He. You are not He?”
“No, I am not,” Bob said decisively.
Bro-Kap took a breath that heaved his wrinkled chest. “Then you will die,” he said.
“Die?” Bob repeated without comprehension.
“Die how? Of what?” Tamara demanded, standing up so that in the press of people in the little hut she was brought face to face with the old man. “What do you mean, Bro-Kap?”
“Gunda challengers use poisoned knives,” the old man said. “To find out which ones from Hamo are Bik-Kop-Man. Poison doesn’t kill Bik-Kop-Man.”
“What poison?”
“That’s their secret,” Bro-Kap said. “Gunda is full of wicked people. We of Hamo use no poisons.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Bob said in English, and in Ndif, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“The Young Men thought you knew. They thought you were Man. Then when you let Pit-Wat wound you, when you threw away your knife, when you killed him but he came back to life, they weren’t sure. They came to the Old Men’s House to ask. Because we in the Old Men’s house have peremensoe about Man.” There was pride in the old man’s voice. “Thus I came to you. Askiös, Uvana Bob
.” Bro-Kap turned and pushed his way out; the other old men followed him.
“Go away,” Bob said to the smiling, caressing girls. “Go on now.” They left, reluctant, swaying, their pretty faces troubled.
“I’ll go to Gunda,” Ramchandra said, “see if there’s an antidote.” And he was off at a run.
Bob’s face was dead white.
“Another damned hoax,” he said, smiling.
“You bled a lot, Bob. Probably bled out the poisonright away, if there really was any. Let me have a look at it... It looks absolutely clean. No inflammation.”
“My breath’s been coming short,” the young man said. “Most likely shock.”
“Yes. Let me get the medical handbook.”
The handbook had no recommendations, and Gunda had no antidote. The poison acted on the central nervous system. Paroxysms began two hours after Bro-Kap’s visit They increased quickly in severity and frequency. Some time after midnight, long before dawn, Bob died.
Ramchandra struck the tenth useless blow over the stopped heart, raised his arm to strike again, and did not strike. The dancer’s raised arm: creator, destroyer. The clenched, dark fist relaxed; the poised and separated fingers hovered above the white face and the unbreathing chest. “Ah!” Ramchandra cried aloud, and dropping down beside the cot broke into tears, a passion of tears.
Wind gusted the rain against the roof. Time passed and Ramchandra was silent, as silent as Bob, beside whom he crouched, his arms stretched across Bob’s body and his head sunk between them; exhausted, he had fallen asleep. The rain thinned and weakened and then beat hard again. Tamara put out the oil lamp, her movements slow and certain, full of the knowledge of what they meant. She added the last of the fuel to the fire and sat down at the little hearth. One must watch with the newly dead, and the sleeping should not sleep unprotected. She sat awake and watched the fire die out, and long afterwards, the grey light reborn.
Ndif funerals were, as she had expected, graceless. There was a burying ground not far off in the forest, which nobody talked about or ever visited except for burials. Gravedigging was the Old Men’s task. They had dug a shallow pit. Two of them, plus Kara and Binira, helped carry Bob’s body to the grave. The Ndif used no coffins, dumped their dead naked in the earth; it was too cold that way, too cold, Tamara thought with rage, and shehad put Bob’s white shirt and trousers on him, left his gold Swiss watch strapped on his wrist since he owned no other treasure, and wrapped the long, silky, bluish leaves of the pandsu carefully about him. She lined the shallow grave with leaves before they laid him in it; the four old men and women watched, expressionless. They laid him on his side, his knees a little bent. Tamara turned for a flower to put by his hand, but the pink and purple blossoms sickened her; she broke the chain around her neck, on which hung a little turquoise her mother had given her, a fragment of the Earth, and put that in the dead man’s hand. She had to be quick; the old men were already scraping the dirt back over the grave with their crude wooden shovels. As soon as that was done all four Ndif turned without a word and went off, not looking back.
The Compass Rose Page 19
