“It was our speculating that egged her on,” I reminded him. “No, it’s more like… like they took her on.”
He was unconvinced when I told him what the Eye had promised. “Sure, that’s all they need, Jane hanging around after them.”
“I don’t believe they’d lie to her.”
“Why not, if it gets her off their backs?”
I couldn’t say why I was sure. “Mali wouldn’t lie.”
Cris laughed. “Maybe they’ve magicked you a little, too.”
After we ate, we went up to the plaza to search for the holo projectors we knew the Eye must have hidden somewhere. But the glowing green image had vanished with the coming of darkness, and though Cris carefully worked out all the math to plot exactly where they should be, we never did locate those projectors.
did locate those projectors.
THE MATTA:
When we went back to work, Te-Cucularit was waiting in the dressing room with all four of the women. Hickey nosed about in the back. “Got any empties to mix new paint in?”
“Gwinn-Rhys.” Cu’s greeting was nothing that could be called a welcome, but at least he remembered my name. “Tonight we will paint the Matta.”
“Great!” The ladies were a triumphant riot of color. I felt recharged just looking at them. “You look wonderful! Have you been to a party?”
Omea did a laughing pirouette. The folds of her garment flared wide, then settled around her in a spiral like a flock of landing birds.
“It is for the Matta,” said Cu firmly.
Tua tossed her head. “It is to make us happy!”
“Proud!” breathed Tuli.
The drab white dressing room shimmered with life. Each woman wore a seemingly endless length of brightly patterned fabric wound around the torso, tucked and wrapped in ways as magical and mysterious as Sam’s sleight of hand and lying loose below the hips. Wreaths of white flowers nestled against bare brown necks and shoulders. Lucienne wore red to accent her contrasting paleness. The headdresses were towering confections of plumes and flowers, woven into the shapes of birds and animals, trimmed with arching wisps of feather and tails of trailing vine.
“We do need a little pick-me-up,” Omea conceded, “after today.”
“Reede Chamberlaine.” I shook my head disgustedly.
“Howie Marr,” she corrected. “We don’t expect Reede to know any better.”
Tua adjusted her flowers in a mirror. “At home, we would go bare-breasted.”
Omea sighed. “Yes. But here it would not be understood.”
“I’d understand,” promised Hickey, slipping his arm around Lucienne’s tiny waist. She nestled against him and a most un-Hickey-like grin blossomed on his face.
I smiled on them benignly. So what if he looked silly?
Te-Cucularit muttered over his paint cans, pouring while Tuli stirred. Tuli was barely out of adolescence, with the gawky grace of very young dancers. Her tongue pressed the corner of her mouth as she gripped the stirring stick with both tiny hands. The sorcerer’s apprentice. I smothered a laugh.
“Cu does not sanction this dilution of tradition,” Omea noted. “But I say if our intention is pure, the Ancestors will approve.”
I gathered up the thick folds of the Matta from the counter. “Let’s do it out in the theatre where there’s room.”
“Wait!” Cu barked, then added more quietly, “Let Omealeanoo carry the Matta.”
Omea regarded me sympathetically as I surrendered the silky layers into her arms. “Come. The Matta ritual was my husband’s favorite. You will enjoy it.”
“Your husband?”
“My husband Seluk. Our first director, our first leading man. Seluk played the roles that Mali plays. He’s dead now.”
I recalled the name from Crispiri’s early research. “I’m sorry.”
“It was long ago.” Omea smiled. “Yet he is with us still. Tonight we will dedicate this Matta to him.”
I led the women down the hall, feeling distinctly underdressed.
“How’s Sam?” I asked.
“Doing well, thanks be.”
“Is he in a lot of pain?”
“Mostly he’s angry at having been taken by surprise. You know how men are.”
Not these men, I thought. They take violence so calmly. As if it was deplorable but nothing unusual.
Theatre Two was dark but for a tight circle of onstage work light. The three blunted triangles of seating faded to dim geometry split by the darker thrusts of the radial ramp-ways. Like roads into the void. You couldn’t help but be drawn into that blackness. An empty theatre holds such promise.
Onstage, the skeletal outlines of Micah’s set were taking shape. The back wall swept upward in bare ribs of plastic and steel, like half the hull of a giant boat. The steeply undulating deck was a forest of metal legs and cross-bracing. I was delighted to find four of Sean’s regular crew at work on the tracking support. A small crew but still hard at work, after hours. Up center, where the deck curled up to blend smoothly with the sweep, Ruth explained shop protocol to three new faces.
“Oh, hooray,” I murmured to Omea. “Micah found extra hands and Sean didn’t throw them out of the shop.”
“That’s nice,” she replied vaguely, reminding me that the shop problem was one the Eye wasn’t even aware of. I did not elaborate. I spidered across the decking framework.
“Ruth! Okay if we paint downstage?”
“Sure.” Her stifled yawn became a snort when she got a look at my ‘crew.’ “They’re gonna work dressed like that?”
“Some kind of ritual,” I explained.
“Oh. Right.” Ruth plucked unconsciously at her own stained coveralls. “Be my guest.”
I grabbed a broom to clear scraps and welding debris from the open space downstage. Omea laid the Matta on the floor, carefully restacking its layers to unravel fold by fold. Tua and Lucienne knelt on either side of the stack. Omea took up one top corner, Tuli the other. At Omea’s signal, they began a throaty, conversational chant, like two matrons singing gossip to each other. They swung slowly across the open stage, hauling out the fabric. They walked and sang, paused while the kneeling women chanted an answering verse, then walked and sang again.
Hickey and Cris brought paint and water from the dressing room. Te-Cucularit followed with the unpainted Puleales and two raffia-bound bundles of brushes unlike any we’d been using, slim and soft-bristled. Calligraphic brushes. The singing crescendoed as Omea and Tuli ran out of stage space and laid their end of the fabric on the deck. Their four-way chant swelled into the darkness beyond the work light. Closing my eyes, I pictured as vividly as if I were there the women calling to each other in the coffee fields. Remarkable, since I’d never been in a coffee field in my life, except through the magic of vids and holos.
Up by the back wall, the crew stopped work to listen.
As the women sang, Cu set out paint jars along the length of the fabric. He unbound his brushes. Their handles were like knotty twigs, shiny with use. He laid them out as you would rare treasures, and selected one. The women wove the four voices of the chant into a single drawn-out trill in minor key that ended like a question. Cu dipped the brush into brilliant orange and handed it to Omea.
Omea held the brush high in a heartbeat of pure silence.
From the darkened house behind us, a deep voice rang out. One phrase of solo declaration, joined soon by the rhythmic punctuation of wood blocks. Moussa stepped into the circle of work light, his arm raised like the hunter returning from the night. No-Mulelatu and Pen waited behind him, half in shadow. Ule held the blocks, Pen a small leather drum. My skin prickled. On cheeks and forehead, each wore a neat thumb swipe of vermilion paint. I was grateful for their gym shoes and jeans because a worrisome time slippage was beginning around me. Like gliding down a jungle river, vines and palm fronds whipping past, falling toward an older world of spirits and mysticism, a world I felt a stranger to but, unlike Mark, could not completely discredit. I looked to Cris, crouched b
eside Hickey. The avid lean of his body said he’d been waiting for the Eye to do something like this. Something weird.
But was it really so weird? A little face paint? The heated glint in Moussa’s eye? Cu did nothing bizarre. He continued to behave exactly as I’d come to expect of him. Sober and intent, he settled cross-legged facing the painters across the shining green river of the Matta. He beckoned Moussa to one side of him, Pen and Ule to the other. Perhaps the strangest thing was that for once, the others did exactly as Cu decreed. Ule passed his wood blocks to Moussa, took off his shoes, and drew a set of panpipes from his shirt pocket.
“What’s going on?” Mark dropped to the floor beside me. “You can hear music all over the theatre!”
“Shhh!” I said.
As Moussa shed his own shoes, Te-Cucularit began a new chant.
His light tenor was sure and sweet. It played harmonic chase games with Moussa’s bass when the musician joined him after a verse. Ule’s panpipes interwove a sprightly melody. The women knelt and began to paint.
Rows of symbols flowed out of their flicking wrists. Half letter, half image, they had the look of hieroglyphs born of rock and water rather than sand, the histories of the clan spun out in color and line. The women sang counterpoint to the men as they worked. Their speed and steady rhythm was mesmerizing. Joy informed each stroke, an infectious communal joy that poured over me as I watched. Because it was joy and not terror, I let it in without resisting, let it spiral me up, away, out of the dark, waiting theatre. Drifting skyward, I felt myself smile.
The music stopped. I woke from a daydream of open sky, marveling at how profoundly blue it was, and how inviting. Too inviting. I am not given to drifting off in the middle of things. It made me uneasy. No, more than uneasy. It scared the piss out of me.
“Good, aren’t they?” said Mark coolly. “But then we knew that.”
The first section of the Matta was completed. The thin, brilliant pigment that Cu had mixed was already dry enough to allow the fabric to be moved. Cris sat next to Moussa in the line of the men. Presumptuous, I thought, but the Eye didn’t seem to mind. Hickey squatted tentatively beside No-Mulelatu, as if being included in such activity was only slightly preferable to being left out.
“That was quick.” I tried to sound offhand.
Mark laughed. “We’ve been sitting here nearly an hour. Where have you been?”
I couldn’t answer that for the life of me.
A fresh length of fabric was unfolded. The women went back to work, singing and painting. I’ll keep my head better, I thought, if I don’t listen so hard. But the Eye’s music wouldn’t stand still for casual listening. It was too full of surprises, of suddenly syncopated rhythms, of shrill atonal ululations swooping up out of close and gentle harmonies while the pulsing support of a bass drone drops away like land at the edge of a precipice. I was drawn back into my sky dreaming when it became too interesting to resist. When I came to myself again, the Matta was nearly done. Mark was nudging me. Te-Cucularit stood in front of us.
“Gwinn-Rhys, your hand is needed.”
I stared up at him. He shifted, irritated by my lack of response. I glanced around. The women were still painting, the men still singing and playing. Cris had acquired Moussa’s wood blocks and was managing them rather creditably. The shop crew were on break, but Ruth lingered, sitting upstage on a sawhorse with one of the new hands, a big, scrawny kid with a red beard. They were swinging their feet to the music, enjoying themselves.
“We’re all here now,” Cu insisted. “You’re needed to complete the circle of the women.”
I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. I looked around again. While I’d been drifting, Sam and Mali had arrived. Sam! Bruised but upright, propped against a stack of flooring, nodding approvingly as Moussa beat out a complicated riff on a small quartet of lap drums. My joy at seeing him alive took me quite by surprise.
“Go on, G,” urged Mark as Cu held out his hand.
I took it distractedly. He pulled me smartly to my feet, then released me, and shoved a brush into my fist. I stared at it as dumbly as I’d stared at him. Sunlight gold glimmered on its tip.
“But I don’t know what to paint!”
Cu dismissed that with a flick of his head. “Paint your own tale. Paint as I taught you. It will be all right.”
My own tale? Why did this fill me with such unreasoning panic? I cast around for support. Cris, Hickey, Mark—all intent on the singing. Their joy now threatened with its single-minded intensity.
“What is the matter?” Cu hissed, in the tone of an actor whose colleague has suddenly gone dry on him. The honesty of it shocked me back to reason. How foolish. If I knew how to do anything, I knew how to paint. The brush was weighty and familiar in my hand, and the memory of my daydream vivid enough to reproduce in every detail. It didn’t even matter that the color was wrong.
“Nothing,” I said, and knelt to paint the confusion of a young woman winging skyward even while fully aware that she is sitting inside a darkened theatre, under a dome.
* * *
The formality of the ritual broke down spontaneously with the completion of the Matta. The women tossed their brushes down. Ule pocketed his panpipes. Moussa and Pen drew aside to play dueling drums. Sam groaned to his feet and limped over to inspect the painting.
His face was hard to look at, stitched and swollen and discolored. He mocked his own slurred speech, even as pain cut short every syllable. He wasn’t causing rare orchids to appear, but he was there, walking around when he shouldn’t have been able to.
“… magicked him” Jane’s voice whispered in my head. The women gathered around to make much of him.
Cris tried to formulate an apology that wasn’t too abject.
Sam looked up at him. “So, you thought I was the Conch.”
“Well, I…”
“Me, all by myself? I’m flattered.” Shrugging off Mali’s arm, Sam eased himself onto a pile of folded masking. “That’ll be the day, when they get the drop on the Conch, when they beat the living shit out of Latooea!”
“Oh, Sam!” Omea laid her brown cheek against his black-and-blue one. “You’re beating yourself up harder than they did.”
“You see where romantic foolery can get you?” Mali rumbled.
Cris shrugged. “Harmless speculation, I thought.”
“Listen, young Crispin: spend less time chasing Latooea and more worrying about your Closed Door League adding apprenticeship to its list of felonies.”
Upstage, the carpenters came off break and went back to their cutting and hammering. Two of the regular crew began setting up a rolling metal scaffold. The pipe was rickety and the men moved with the dull slowness of the deeply exhausted. I thought, Someone should send them home. But if we did, the show wouldn’t get built.
Omea swept up to admire my little bit of work, my “tale.” I smiled and nodded, convinced there could be no real sense to what I had done. I wasn’t sure it mattered. I felt oddly disassociated. A spacy sense of floating persisted from my sky-dream. I watched Mark sit down with Mali and Sam. Soon they’d be talking politics. Lucienne retired with Hickey to the dubious privacy of house left. He put one arm around her neck and buried the other in the flowers on her breasts. Cris eased away from the political discussion to “find” himself conveniently next to Tua as she helped Tuli pack up their paint. But I stayed where I was, cross-legged in front of the gold-flecked green of the Matta.
My eyes, scanning the stage with all the emotional awareness of a remote-sensing device, finally settled on Te-Cucularit, crouched over the Puleales, still hard at work. The unambiguous physicality of paint and brush and the purity of Cu’s intent were stabilizing to my unmoored state of mind. Soothed, I watched him paint.
“No use looking at him, he won’t have you.” No-Mulelatu lounged nearby, packing the bowl of his tiny pipe with dry greenish fibers.
I quickly shed my dreamy smile. “I wasn’t—”
“He won’t, you k
now. Saves himself for his pure-blooded woman.” Ule shaped a thin curl of rich, acrid smoke to twist around his finger like a lock of hair. “Now, me, I am not so narrow-minded. I see quality where it lies.”
The pipe went out and he lit a nearly invisible lighter to heat it up again. My eyes told me his thumb was on fire. My brain said: okay, perfectly normal for a Tuatuan.
“Or you could just keep on looking at him like that.”
“You don’t understand, it’s not—”
Ule chuckled. “No insult, ladykins. They all look at him that way. Even the men. Especially the men.”
“You’re jealous.”
He considered, sucking in smoke and holding it. “Nope,” he exhaled finally. “Rather my passionate heart than his glorious body. You think you domers are the only ones he’s hard on? He’s a stone, Cu is. Dried up inside.”
I was grateful for something concrete to focus on. “Nice way to talk about your friends.”
“Te-Cucularit is my clansman, for whom I would give my life. But he is not my friend. Now, Mali and Sam. That’s friends.”
“I see you with Cu all the time.”
Ule shrugged. “We’re from the same village. Fourth Clan, Earth—Nawki, the Death. Heavy burden, y’know? Somebody’s got to keep him out of trouble, with that stiff neck of his, obsessed with tradition and the past. A thing’s not real to him until it’s straitjacketed into ritual.” He smirked. “Sam calls him the Preacher.”
“So I hear. But you don’t think tradition is important?”
“Not for its own sake. Latooea writes, ‘Through the past we create the future.’ Cu only looks backward. No, my lady, you’re better off with me. I’m the safer bet.”
It was hard not to smile back at him. The offer was generously given. “No insult, No-Mulelatu,” I replied. “I’m already taken.”
“Are you?” He flopped back on one elbow as if to draw more deeply on his pipe, but his glance targeted Cris and Tua, shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the stage. Tua was talking earnestly. Cris was eager and predatory. “More’s the pity,” said Ule.
Out in the house, Hickey had taken Lucienne’s face between his hands and was kissing her deeply.
Harmony Page 29
