To add to his freakishness, Kalal lived alone with another male—in fact, the only other male in Al Janb—at the far end of the shore cottages, in a birthing relationship which made Kalal term him his father. His name was Ibra, and he looked much more like the males of Jalila’s dreamtent stories. He was taller than almost anyone, and wore a black beard and long colourful robes or strode about bare-chested and always talked in a thunderously deep voice as if her was addressing a crowd through a megaphone. Ibra laughed a lot and flashed his teeth through that hairy mask, and clapped people on the back when he asked them how they were and then stood away and seemed to loose interest before they had answered. He whistled and sang loudly and waved to passers-by whilst he worked at repairing the feluccas for his living. Ibra had come to this planet when Kalal was a baby, under circumstances which remained perennially vague. He treated Jalila with the same loud and grinning friendship with which he treated everyone, and which seemed like a wall. He was at least as alien as the tube-like creatures who had arrived from the stars with this new Season of Rockets, which had had one of the larger buildings in Al Janb encased in transparent plastics and flooded in a freezing grey goo so they could live in it. Ibra had come around to their haramlek once, on the strength of one of Ananke’s pop in evening invitations. Jalila, who was then nurturing the idea that no intelligence could exist without the desire to acknowledge some higher deity, found her propositions and examples drowned out in a flurry of counter-questions and assertions and odd bits of information which she half-suspected that Ibra, as he drank surprising amounts of virtually undiluted zibib and freckled aniseed spit at her, was making up on the spot. Afterwards, as they walked the shore, he drew her apart and laid a heavy hand on her shoulder and confided in his rambling growl how much he’d enjoyed fencing with her. Jalila knew what fencing was, but she didn’t see what it had to do with talking. She wasn’t even sure if she liked Ibra. She certainly didn’t pretend to understand him.
The sails thrummed and crackled as they headed towards the spaceport. Kalal was absorbed, staring ahead from the prow, the water splashing reflections across his lithe brown body. Jalila had almost grown used to the way he looked. After all, they were both slightly freakish: she, because she came from the mountains; he, because of his sex. And they both liked their own company, and could accept each into it other without distraction during these long periods of silence. One never asked the other what they were thinking. Neither really cared, and they cherished that privacy.
“Look—” Kalal scuttled to the rudder. Jalila hauled back the jib. In wind-crackling silence, they and their nameless and many-named boat tacked towards the spaceport.
The spaceport was almost like the mountains: when you were close up, it was too big be seen properly. Yet, for all its size, the place was a disappointment; empty and messy, like a huge version of the docks of Al Janb, similarly reeking of oil and refuse, and essentially serving a similar function. The spaceships themselves, if indeed the vast cistern-like objects they saw forever in the distance as they furled the sails and rowed along the maze of oily canals, were only a small part of this huge floating complex of islands. Much more of it was taken up by looming berths for the tugs and tankers which placidly chugged from icy pole to equator across the watery expanses of Habara, taking or delivering the supplies which the settlements deemed necessary for civilised life, or collecting the returning fallen bulk cargoes. The tankers were rust-streaked beasts, so huge that they hardly seemed to grow as you approached them, humming and eerily deserted, yet devoid of any apparent intelligence of their own. They didn’t glimpse a single alien at the spaceport. They didn’t even see a human being.
The journey there, Jalila decided as they finally got the sails up again, had been far more enjoyable and exciting than actually arriving. Heading back toward the sun-pink coastal mountains which almost felt like home to her now, she was filled with an odd longing which only diminished when she began to make out the lighted dusky buildings of Al Janb. Was this homesickness, she wondered? Or something else?
This was the time of Habara’s long summer. This was the Season of Rockets. Jalila was severely warned by Pavo of the consequences of approaching the spaceport during periods of possible launch when she mentioned their trip, but it went no further than that. Each night now, and deep into the morning, the rockets rumbled at the horizon and climbed upwards on those grumpy pillars, bringing to the shore a faint whiff of sulphur and roses, adding to the thunderous heat. And outside at night, if you looked up, you could sometimes see the blazing comet-trails of the returning capsules which would crash somewhere in the distant seas.
The beds of tideflowers were growing bigger as well. If you climbed up the sides of the mountains before the morning heat flattened everything, you could look down on those huge, brilliant and ever-changing carpets, where every pattern and swirl seemed gorgeous and unique. At night, in her dreamtent, Jalila sometimes imagined she was floating up on them, just as in the oldest of the old stories. She was sailing over a different landscape on a magic carpet, with the cool night desert rising and falling beneath her like a soft sea. She saw distant palaces, and clusters of palms around small and tranquil lakes which flashed the silver of a single moon. And then yet more of this infinite sahara, airy and frosty, flowed through curves and undulations, and grew vast and pinkish in her dreams. Those curves, as she flew over them and began to touch herself, resolved into thighs and breasts. The winds stirring the peaks of the dunes resolved in shuddering breaths.
This was the time of Habara’s long summer. This was the Season of Rockets.
Robin, Jalila’s hayawan, had now fully recovered from the change to her environment under Pavo’s attentions. The rust had gone from her flanks, the melds with her thinly grey-furred flesh were bloodless and neat. She looked thinner and lighter. She even smelled different. Like the other hayawans, Robin was frisky and bright and brown-eyed now, and didn’t seem to mind the heat, or even Jalila’s forgetful neglect of her. Down on the coast, hayawans were regarded as expensive, uncomfortable and unreliable, and Jalila and her mothers took a pride in riding across the beach into Al Janb on their huge, flat-footed and loping mounts, and enjoyed the stares and the whispers, and the whispering space which opened around them as they hobbled them in a square. Kalal, typically, was one of the few coastal people who expressed an interest in trying to ride one of them, and Jalila was glad to teach him, showing him the clicks and calls and nudges, the way you took the undulations of the creature’s back as you might the ups and downs of the sea, and when not to walk around their front and rear ends. After her experiences on his boat, the initial rope burns, the cracks on the head and the heaving sickness, she enjoyed the reversal of situations.
There was a Tabuthal saying about falling off a hayawan ninety nine times before you learnt to ride, which Kalal disproved by falling off far into treble figures. Jalila chose Lya’s mount Abu for him to ride, because she was the biggest, the most intelligent, and generally the most placid of the beasts unless she felt something was threatening her, and because Lya, more conscious of looks and protocol down here than the other mothers, rarely rode her. Domestic animals, Jalila had noticed, often took oddly to Kalal when they first saw and scented him, but he had learned the ways of getting around them, and developed a bond and understanding with Abu even whilst she was still trying to bite his legs. Jalila had made a good choice of riding partners. Both of them, hayawan and human, whilst proud and aloof, were essentially playful, and never shirked a challenge. Whilst all hayawans had been female throughout all recorded history, Jalila wondered if there wasn’t a little of the male still embedded in Abu’s imperious downward glance.
Now that summer was here, and the afternoons had vanished into the sun’s blank blaze, the best time to go riding was the early morning. North, beyond Al Janb, there were shores and there were saltbeds and there were meadows, there were fences to be leapt, and barking feral dogs as male as Kalal to be taunted, but south, there were roc
ks and forests, there were tracks which led nowhere, and there were headlands and cliffs you saw once and could never find again. South, mostly, was the way that they rode.
“What happens if we keep riding?”
They were taking their breath on a flatrock shore where a stream shone in pools on its way to the ocean, from which they had all drank. The hayawans had squatted down now in the shadows of the cliff and were nodding sleepily, one nictitating membrane after another slipping over their eyes. As soon as they had got here and dismounted, Kalal had walked straight down, arms outstretched, into the tideflower-bobbing ocean. Jalila had followed, whooping, feeling tendrils and petals bumping into her. It was like walking through floral soup. Kalal had sunk to his shoulders and started swimming, which was something Jalila still couldn’t quite manage. He splashed around her, taunting, sending up sheets of coloured light. They’d stripped from their clothes as they clambered out, and laid them on the hot rocks, where they now steamed like fresh bread.
“This whole continent’s like a huge island,” Jalila said in delayed answer to Kalal’s question. “We’d come back to where we started.”
Kalal shook his head. “Oh, you can never do that…”
“Where would we be, then?”
“Somewhere slightly different. The tideflowers would have changed, and we wouldn’t be us, either.” Kalal wet his finger, and wrote something in naskhi script on the hot, flat stone between them. Jalila though she recognised the words of poet, but the beginning had dissolved into the hot air before she could make proper sense of it. Funny, but at home with her mothers, and with their guests, and even with many of the people of her own age, such statements as they had just made would have been the beginning of a long debate. With Kalal, they just seemed to hang there. Kalal, he moved, he passed on. Nothing quite seemed to stick. There was something, somewhere, Jalila thought, lost and empty about him.
The way he was sitting, she could see most his genitals, which looked quite jaunty in their little nest of hair; like a small animal. She’d almost got as used to the sight of them as she had to the other peculiarities of Kalal’s features. Scratching her nose, picking off some of the petals which still clung to her skin like wet confetti, she felt no particular curiosity. Much more than Kalal’s funny body, Jalila was conscious of her own—especially her growing breasts, which were still somewhat uneven. Would they ever come out right, she wondered, or would she forever be some unlovely oddity, just as Kalal seemingly was? Better not to think of such things. Better to just enjoy the feel the sun baking her shoulders, loosening the curls of her hair.
“Should we turn back?” Kalal asked eventually. “It’s getting hotter…”
“Why bother with that—if we carry on, we’ll get back to where we started.”
Kalal stood up. “Do you want a bet?”
So they rode on, more slowly, uphill through the uncharted forest, where the urrearth trees tangled with blue fronds of Habara fungus and the birds were still and the crackle of the dry undergrowth was the only sound in the air. Eventually, ducking boughs, then walking, dreamily lost and almost ready to turn back, they came to a path, and remounted. The trees fell away, and they found they were on a clifftop, far, far higher above the winking sea than they could possibly imagined. Midday heat clapped around them. Ahead, where the cliff stuck out over the ocean like a cupped hand, shimmering and yet solid, was one of the ruined castles or geological features which the sea-leviathans had supposedly deserted before the arrival of people on this planet—a qasr. They rode slowly towards it, their hayawan’s feet thocking in the dust. It looked like a fairy place. Part natural, but roofed and buttressed, with grey-black gables and huge and intricate windows which flashed with the colours of the sea. Kalal gestured for silence, dismounted from Abu, led his mount back into the shadowed arms of the forest, and flicked the switch in her back with hobbled her.
“You know where this is?”
Kalal beckoned.
Jalila, who knew him better than to ask questions, followed.
Close to, much of the qasr seemed to be made of a quartz-speckled version of the same fused stone from which Jalila’s haramlek was constructed. But some other bits of it appeared natural effusions of the rock. There was a big arched door of sun-bleached and iron-studded oak reached by a path across the narrowing cliff, but Kalal steered Jalila to the side, and then up and around a bare angle of hot stone which seemed ready at any moment to tilt them into the distant the sea. But the way never quite gave out; there was always another handhold. From the confident manner in which he moved up this near-clifface, then scrambled across the blistering black tiles of the rooftop beyond, and dropped down into the sudden cool of a narrow passageway, Jalila guessed that Kalal had been to this qasr before. At first, there was little sense of trespass. The place seemed old and empty—a little-visited monument. The ceilings were stained. The corridors were swept with the litter of winter leaves. Here and there along the walls, there were friezes, and long strings of a script which make as little sense to Jalila, in their age and dimness, as that which Kalal had written on the hot rocks.
Then Kalal gestured for Jalila to stop, and she clustered beside him and they looked down through the intricate stone lattice of a mashrabiya into sunlight. It was plain from the balcony drop beneath them that they were still high up in this qasr. Below, in the central courtyard, somehow shocking after this emptiness, a fountain played in a garden, and water lapped from its lip and ran in steel fingers towards cloistered shadows.
“Someone lives here?”
Kalal mouthed the word tariqua. Somehow, Jalila instantly understood. It all made sense, in this Season of Rockets, and the dim scenes and hieroglyphs carved in the honeyed stones of this fairy castle. Tariquas were merely human, after all, and the spaceport was nearby; they had to live somewhere. Jalila glanced down at her scuffed sandals, suddenly conscious that she hadn’t taken them off—but by then it was too late, and below them and through the mashrabiya a figure had detached herself from the shadows. The tariqua was tall and thin and black and bent as a burnt-out matchstick. She walked with a cane. Jalila didn’t know what she’d expected—she’d grown older since her first encounter with Kalal, and no longer imagined that she knew about things just because she’d learnt of them in her dreamtent. But still, this tariqua seemed a long way from piloting the impossible distances between the stars as she moved and clicked slowly around that courtyard fountain, and far older and frailer than anyone Jalila had ever seen. She tended a bush of blue flowers, she touched the fountain’s bubbling stone lip. Her head was ebony bald. Her fingers were charcoal. Her eyes were as white and seemingly blind as the flecks of quartz in the fused stone of this building. Once, though, she seemed to look up towards them. Jalila went cold. Surely it wasn’t possible that she could see them?—and in any event, there was something about the motion of looking up which seemed habitual. As if, like touching of the lip of the fountain, and tending that bush, the tariqua always looked up at this moment of the day at that particular point in the stone walls which rose above her.
Jalila followed Kalal further along the corridors, and down stairways and across drops of beautifully clear glass which hung on nothing far above the prismatic sea. Another glimpse of the tariqua, who was still slowly moving, her neck stretching like an old tortoise as she bent to sniff a flower. In this part of the qasr, there were more definite signs of habitation. Scattered cards and books. A moth-eaten tapestry which billowed from a windowless arch overlooking the sea. Empty coathangers piled like the bones of insects. An active but clearly little-used chemical toilet. Now that the initial sense of surprise had gone, there was something funny about this mixture of the extraordinary and the everyday. Here, there was a kitchen, and a half-chewed lump of aish on a plate smeared with seeds. To imagine, that you could both travel between the stars, and then eat bread and tomatoes! Both Kalal and Jalila were red-faced and chuffing now from suppressed and impossible hilarity. Down now at the level of the cloiste
rs, hunched in the shade, they studied the tariqua’s stooping back. She really did look like a scrawny tortoise, yanked out of its shell, moving between these bushes. Any moment now, you expected her to start chomping on the leaves. She moved more by touch than by sight. Amid the intricate colours of this courtyard, and the flashing glass windchimes which tinkled in the far archways, as she fumbled sightlessly but occasionally glanced at things with those odd, white eyes, it seemed yet more likely that she was blind, or at least terribly near-sighted. Slowly, Jalila’s hilarity receded, and she began to feel sorry for this old creature who had been aged and withered and wrecked by the strange process of travel between the stars. The Pain of Distance—now, where had that phrase come from?
Kalal was still puffing his cheeks. His eyes were watering as he ground his fist against his mouth and silently thumped the nearest pillar in agonised hilarity. Then he let out a nasal grunt, which Jalila was sure the tariqua must have heard. But her stance didn’t alter. It wasn’t so much as if she hadn’t noticed them, but that she already knew that someone was there. There was a sadness and resignation about her movements, the tap of her cane… But Kalal had recovered his equilibrium, and Jalila watched his fingers snake out and enclose a flake of broken paving. Another moment, and it span out into the sunlit courtyard in an arch so perfect that there was never any doubt that it was going to strike the tariqua smack between her bird-like shoulders. Which it did—but by then they were running, and the tariqua was straightening herself up with that same slow resignation. Just before they bundled themselves up the stairway, Jalila glanced back, and felt a hot bar of light from one the qasr’s high upper windows stream across her face. The tariqua was looking straight towards her with those blind white eyes. Then Kalal grabbed her hand. Once again, she was running.
Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 8
