Beneath the Eye of God (The Commodore Ardcasl Space Adventures Book 1)

by Payne, Lee

  She giggled. "But not now. I got the rest of the day off and we're going to wash and fix your hair."

  "Oh, well listen, if you've got better things to do, my hair can wait."

  Neali tried to look stern. "Well, honestly. You'd think you liked it that way, looking like a bird's nest. And I'm certainly not missing anything. After lunch we send the little kids out to play, hoping the cats will carry them off. The women come in from the fields and the old aunts finally come tottering out of their rooms and we all sit down and do the weaving and the dyeing. It's really kind of fun. Everybody talks about what everybody else is doing and the mothers talk about their kids and we sing songs and sometimes the old aunts get to telling stories about the old days, some of them quite risqué, if you know what I mean, and everybody talks except us girls who mostly listen."

  She jumped up and went out into the hall. "But I can do that anytime." She brought in a basket of water and a gourd filled with some kind of soapy liquid. "And we've got to do something about your hair," she grinned.

  ***

  "You can be married, spoken for, available or not interested," Neali explained opaquely. The soapy stuff had done an effective job and Leahn's hair was combing out nearly snarl-free.

  "What?"

  "Those are your choices. Of course there are all kinds of variations within each different type. Daddy won't let me wear the available style yet, but my girlfriends and I practice it a lot, creating our own personal designs. I've got one that's halfway between available and spoken for that's a knockout. All my friends say it makes me look really sophisticated.

  "Hey!" she shouted gleefully. "That might be perfect for you. Ohan said he would speak for you and . . . "

  "That's right. I was going to ask him what that was all about but I haven't seen much of him since then."

  "He's kind of cute but mamma says he's too old for me. They say he's been away to school. God, that's sophisticated."

  "What was it he said during that introduction business? Something about if anyone wanted to ask me a question . . . "

  " . . . he would answer for you. That's what he said. It surprised Vardara. Ohan was saying that if any unmarried men wanted to ask you out—not that any of them would—they'd be scared to death. Anyway, they'd have to ask him first. He was putting himself in the place of your father which really meant that he wasn't available to meet any eligible girls either because he was still responsible for you."

  "Why that little shit," Leahn laughed. "I was going to find him a nice girl and he took himself out of the running before I even had a chance. What were those choices of hair style again?"

  "Married, spoken for, available and not interested. That last one's not very attractive. It's mostly for old aunts."

  "Right. Let's try available and see if Daddy Ohan gets any inquiries."

  "Oh God, I love this. It's so sophisticated."

  Neali brought supper up to their room and it wasn't until early evening that Leahn strolled casually out onto the trunk where Ohan and the others were chatting and watching the sunset. Ohan started to greet her cheerfully, then paused and stared distractedly for a moment and finally fell into a coughing fit that had the Commodore quite concerned. By then Leahn had wondered happily off.

  She joined Neali and some of her girlfriends for a long soak in the steam room where they discussed men in general and Ohan in particular at great length, arriving at the conclusion that, smooth-skinned or furry, they were all alike.

  Back up in Nealie's room, the two girls discovered that they both had older sisters. Neali's had been courted by a visitor and had gone off to live with his clan. They told big sister stories and laughed far into the night.

  ***

  The clan's main steam room also served as the center of its religious life. A much larger room not far from the women's steam bath, it too, was dug into the ground with the trunk of the great tree as its roof. But its floor and walls were hard-packed dirt and its fire was in a pit in the center of the room.

  "The fire is placed deep in the earth," Vardara explained to the Commodore. "The earth that nurtures the forest is all around us and the body of the great water tree lies over our heads. The smoke from the fire carries our prayers up into the sky to be seen by the Eye of God. This is the center of our community where we are in touch with all the forces that sustain us. If they will not hear us here, then I fear we shall be truly lost."

  "And have these forces of the earth and sky always answered your prayers?"

  Vardara smiled. "Oh, I think they have. It's just that the answer is often 'no.'"

  "What do you do then?"

  "Then we work all the harder and wait all the longer for the world to change its mind."

  "Do the powers of the world actually speak to you?"

  "All the time. In signs and in dreams. Sometimes they speak clearly as when my dead husband came to me in a dream and told me to take the job as headwoman. But more often they speak to us in riddles that are hard to understand. And sometimes we search so hard for signs, we take the snapping of a twig for the word of the world."

  The Commodore laughed. "Yes, I've known a number of people who were convinced that the universe was mightily concerned with their own personal affairs. But I'm afraid it's what the universe thinks that really matters, not the other way around."

  He turned more serious. "What are we likely to experience here today?"

  They stepped aside to make way for several boys who were bringing in fresh-cut leaves and arranging them carefully on the floor. Two old men were building up a small fire beneath the rocks in the center of the room.

  "Each of us lives in the center of our selves," Vardara said. "We touch others only briefly and at the edges. You come from beyond my world with questions I cannot answer." She poked him playfully. "Now you want me to tell what answers you may find here? I can fill your belly and, if there weren't so many people always around, I might even consider your offer to warm your bed. But your heart and mind and soul are closed to me and there, I think, is where your answers lie."

  Girls had placed a row of mats along the walls of the room with gourds of water at each place. There were nine places along each wall and three at each end of the room. Now, others from the clan were wondering in and finding seats. Leahn entered wearing her white shift, her hair pulled straight back and braided with Neali's ribbon. An old woman directed her to a seat along the wall near the center of the room. The twins were seated together on the side opposite her. Ohan was led to a place at the far end while Vardara sat the Commodore on the same side as the twins but closer to the center.

  "Lean back against the earth and let its essence flow through you," Vardara said smilingly to him. "Relax, Commodore. It's going to take a while."

  The man and woman who led the singing the night before, began to chant. An old man threw something into the fire and an orange fireball seemed to fill the room. The Commodore jumped but Vardara only laughed. "That's to burn away any evil that might be lurking about. I've always thought it was mostly to get everyone's attention."

  She picked up one of her gourds of water, drank from it and threw the rest of its contents into the fire. "This signifies your willingness to participate. Water is part of your essence. You are adding it to the spirit of the room. If you're afraid the world might tell you something you don't want to know, this is the time to back out."

  "One doesn't become a mariner by sailing only on calm seas." He took a sip and threw the rest in the fire. "Ever onward."

  The rest followed in turn around the room and soon the air was heavy with steam. Then drums in each corner began to beat, summoning the spirits of the earth from each of its four ends. The old man fed balls of resin from the great tree into the fire.

  Ohan leaned back and closed his eyes. He had been here many times before. He could clearly remember the excitement and awe that filled him at his coming-of-age when he was introduced into these same mysteries in this same room—though with a different clan and far away
. It had been a great relief to learn that the powerful and often erotic dreams then beginning to stir in him were all a natural part of the opening of his adolescent mind to the currents of power that flowed between the forces of the world.

  He drank from the first of the cups that was passed around the room and breathed deeply of the herbs and resins that were being fed into the fire. The feelings of power he sensed here were stronger than any he had experienced before. Here there were no eddies and cross-currents of unbelievers and other ways that were so close around his people at the forest's edge. At school they had actively sought to debunk these sessions, to show the wind as molecules flowing from high to low pressure areas, the fertility of the soil as governed by the presence of nitrogen and other elements, the Eye of God as a galaxy of suns turning impersonally, far away.

  He accepted his teachers' explanations. He watched the winds blow the rain clouds away from the farmers' fields. He saw that the impersonal workings of a mechanical world left them with little solace when their topsoil and precious fertilizers were swept away in towering clouds of yellow dust. And he saw the dark things they did to one another in the night when they thought there was nothing but a distant galaxy of stars to see them.

  He drank deeply from the second cup and brought a picture to his mind of one of his teachers, what was her name? An earnest young woman, pretty in the way of those part-way between the smooth skins and the rich pelts of his own people. She stood before him, naked. He tried to sit her down beside him but her image twisted, then shimmered, broke up and drifted away. It was just as well, he thought. She would have been frightened in a room filled with dreams she did not believe existed.

  He thought then of Leahn and her image came clearly to his mind. She stood before him dressed in the traditional bark cloth of his people, her hair done as a girl who has not yet found a lover. She stood before him and his heart ached at the loveliness of her. She held out her hand and he rose to take it. They stood, facing each other, hand in hand. He dreamed himself taller, smoother, more powerful but he could go no further. She smiled and did not ask for more than his hand. It was almost enough.

  The chanting and the drums grew louder. His image of Leahn drifted away. Ohan drank from the third cup and passed it on. He opened his eyes and looked around the smoky room. He watched the third cup pass from hand to hand. Each person having drunk, came back into himself, blinking. Some, he knew, had been off searching other clans for marriage partners. Some of the elderly had been young again, others had visited the gates beyond life where friends awaited them. Ohan had always loved to soar above the treetops, sometimes almost to the Eye of God itself, free as the wind in the night air, wheeling over the world, then power-diving down on some hapless cat prowling the treetops, pulling up at the last instant and giving its tail a flick that left the creature looking around in bafflement.

  This time he had gone nowhere. He had stood the whole time before Leahn, holding her hands in his. The world must laugh, he thought, to see such foolishness. He looked down along the wall to where she sat quietly, without expression. He wondered where she had been and decided not to think on it. The fire was a dull flicker in the center of the room. Clouds of power, stronger than he had ever seen before, rolled around it, sometimes obscuring it from his view.

  The drums and chants had died away. His hands were held firmly by those on either side of him. The time of individual dreaming was over. They were linked into one being now, enclosing the power in the room, witnesses, should it choose to come, to the dreaming of the world.

  ***

  The clouds of power ebbed and flowed as if hesitating to begin their show. They glowed dull red. Occasionally a stray beam of the guttering firelight groped its way through to light, for an instant, a wide-eyed face along the wall.

  Then the room was gone and Ohan saw the twins rise up, great green reptiles, circling, entwining, weaving in and around each other until they were almost one, rising higher and higher beyond where the room had been, out among the stars. There also rose between and around them a furry brown figure. Ohan thought at first it was one of the people but then saw that it was an animal. Long snout, sharp teeth, tiny red eyes. It was the Commodore. Twisting, turning, weaving, a column of green and brown, scales and fur, the three of them rose among the stars and were gone.

  The stars remained. And ascending through them, Ohan saw Leahn, all in white, a pillar of white. And flame. She soared through the heavens, a pillar of white flame so bright he tried to shield his eyes but his hands were held fast by his neighbors and he couldn't. He closed his eyes and still saw her, lighting the faces of those who watched.

  He was next. He struggled to pull free but was held fast. So he sat and saw his heart cut out and spread around the green forests of the world, enclosing them within its thin still-beating membrane, stretched tighter and tighter until it burst and he woke up in his bedroll on the floor of the men's hall.

  "Rouse out, sleeping beauty." It was the Commodore. "Rise and shine. It's time to hit the road."

  Ohan opened his eyes. "Wait a minute," he demanded. "What happened? What did it all mean?"

  The Commodore stopped in the midst of rolling up his bedroll and bent closer, feeling Ohan's forehead. "Beats me, lad. Vardara says the world just lets us see its dreams sometimes. It doesn't explain them. Maybe it doesn't understand them either. She said you'd probably never been the star of the show before but she gave you some stuff and decided you'd probably survive."

  He stood up and gave Ohan a gentle shove with his boot. "So up and at 'em, lad. We can't hang around here all day."

  Ohan began pulling on his clothes. "Why not? Why can't we stay here just a few more days. I'd really like to find out more about what happened."

  "We'd all like to stay a while longer, lad. But think a minute. There are five of us and 60 of them. We're eight percent of their population and we don't help raise food. We just eat it. This community is carefully balanced on the edge of the land's ability to support it. That big banquet they gave the other night was pretty impressive and they enjoyed throwing it but it will put them on short rations for a month. No, lad. Much as we'd all like to stay, one of the secrets of being a good guest is knowing when it's time to go."

  Leahn folded her dress and packed it carefully away in her saddlebags. She and Neali hugged and cried in the little room and Neali promised to name her first child after Leahn, even if it was a boy. "If you do," Leahn laughed, tightening her sword belt, "I'll have to come back and teach the kid to fight."

  The whole community turned out to see them off. "If you're ever back this way, Commodore . . . " Vardara said. She was holding Neali's hand, while the girl made a special effort not to cry.

  "None of us shall pass near this continent again without making a detour to visit you," he promised. Vardara was standing part way up the trunk of the water tree and the Commodore leaned far out of his saddle to give her a long kiss full on the mouth. She blushed, the crowd laughed and they were off, down the rows of crops with children running after them, then into the twilight of the forest and silence.

  Chapter 9

  They rode through the day, each lost in his own thoughts. Supplied with food by their former hosts, they had no need to stop early to hunt. They rode well into the evening before picking a place to camp. They built a small fire and laid on their bedrolls at the edge of its light, with little conversation.

  The Commodore broke the silence. "Let's not brood, children. What dark thoughts have stilled your tongues?"

  "I was just thinking," Ohan said. "I've met and then left more nice people on this trip than I have in my whole life before. I don't think I like saying good-bye all the time. It's a lot easier to live in the same clan all your life with the same people."

  "There would still be partings, lad. The innocence of youth, grandparents, parents, friends, relations, our hopes for the future, wives, lovers, even children. They all leave us sooner or later. And one day we look around and we're alone and w
e're not the same person we started out to be."

  He slapped his knee for emphasis. "So by Odin's tooth, lad, if you can lose all that just by standing still, you might as well move around a bit and see some of the universe."

  "What I want to know," said Leahn, "is whether everybody saw the same things I did at that creepy ceremony. And while we're on the subject," she rose from her bedroll to a kneeling position facing the Commodore across the fire, "I would really like to know what all this is about, what we're doing out here, where we're going and . . . and everything."

  "A fair request," he said amiably. "The lady wants to know everything. Anyone else have a request?"

  Leahn shot a glance at Ohan who felt he had to back her up. "We have seen some strange things. It would be nice to know what it's all about."

  The Commodore looked around. "Is that everybody heard from? Leahn wants to know everything and Ohan is interested in what it's all about. I too, must confess to a little curiosity." He nodded toward the twins, one lying beside him, the other in his bedroll on the other side of the fire. "Only my reptilian associates seem to have no questions. That is because, as usual, they have all the answers. But let us plumb the depths of each other's ignorance and see if we can fill in some of the blanks.

  "First, Leahn wants to know if everyone saw the same things at the ceremony. She used the word 'creepy.' That's a good word. Descriptive. I would choose the word 'fascinating', and admit that I have never before witnessed a world's dreams. Some might put the experience down to mass hallucination induced by the ingestion and inhalation of various alkaloids, fungoids and whatever else was floating around in there. That, I think would be an error. I saw the twins' identical reptilian nature very clearly depicted. I saw my own background rather fancifully visualized as some sort of a rodent-like creature resembling, it seemed to me, a mongoose, a small mammal that delights in devouring the eggs of reptiles. Do either of you boys have any comment on that?"