Starfire Saga, page 22
At the time, I had thought that removal from technology was the worst possible punishment. Now I regarded it as nothing very much. It all depended on what you considered important. I glanced in his direction, and found that Jemeret was studying me. “It’s time for the game of the Dibel,” he said.
VII. Open to the Sky
A stage had been set up at the front of the bowl, and Lyrafi stood on it, waiting for us. As Jemeret and I approached, she raised her hands to call for attention. The crowd seemed to have grown larger since the klawit cages were taken away, but I couldn’t guess whether it was because the Samothen were all nomidar lovers or because it was known that the competition would be between Jemeret and me. As the spectators grew silent, I found my heart pounding, and I gathered to calm myself. My nervousness was greater than I wanted. I loved playing the nomidar, and I knew at an almost instinctive level that I could play the wine-wood nomidar better than any other, but I didn’t like performing, and this audience was a huge one. For a moment I actually toyed with the idea that Jemeret was influencing me to nervousness, but then I recognized that I was just afraid that he would be far, far better than I. I brought up Tendoro’s reassurance and held on to it.
Lyrafi had gotten the silence she sought, and now she smiled. “Once again the Dibel have the distinction of putting on the most exclusive game in the Samoth, though this year the Nedi came close.” There was a ripple of laughter, filled with anticipation, and then Lyrafi’s clear, trained voice went on. “This year we chose a game of the nomidar, and as we have only two entrants, we have dispensed with the qualifying rounds and devised a set of seven exercises as challenges to the contestants. The winner will be the person the judges hold to score higher in four of the exercises.”
Jemeret took my hand. I jumped a little, not expecting his touch, and looked quickly at him. His gaze was warm, supportive, and genuinely affectionate, and he made no attempt to screen it from me. My instant, overwhelming response was a serene calm, and I knew he had not projected it onto me. Whatever happened, he was on my side at least as much as he was a competitor.
We got to our feet and went up two steps onto the stage where Lyrafi stood. She gestured, and Tendoro, Orion, and Dirian brought up onto the platform a brace of nomidars, among them the wine-wood nomidar I knew to be the prize of the contest. My fingers curled when I saw it. The men set the instruments down gently and waited.
Lyrafi spoke to Jemeret and me in a voice that carried clearly to the crowd as well. “You will agree to select one instrument, and you will both use the same instrument. In the game of the nomidar, the instrument itself can be a player.”
I looked at Jemeret.
“Go on,” he said. “I’ll accept your choice.”
I’d studied game theory; his tactics were intriguing. It stood to reason that if I chose, and he matched me on my choice of instrument, he would win. If I refused to choose, the advantage in such a tie would be mine. But I wanted to play the wine-wood nomidar, and if I refused to choose, he might select a different instrument.
I reached for it, and Tendoro handed it to me.
“You will agree which one of you will play first,” Lyrafi said.
“I will play first,” Jemeret said.
Again it was an intriguing choice. Mine would be the performance in each round with the opportunity to surpass. I nodded agreement and held out the nomidar, even though I was reluctant to let it go. Jemeret dropped my hand, took the instrument, and sat down at the edge of the platform. I sat beside him, watching the nomidar in his hands as the three Dibeli men picked up the other instruments and took them off the platform.
Lyrafi had remained. “The first exercise,” she announced, “will be a children’s song. Each of you is to interpret the rhyme, ‘The laba hops, the laba glides, the laba stops, the laba hides; it knows its way; it scents the air; it spends the day deep in its lair. The laba stays away from harms, and so do I, in mother’s arms.’”
I was nonplussed. In the first place, I’d never seen a laba, so I didn’t know what the creature looked like, even though I’d eaten servings of its meat on occasion. In the second place, I didn’t remember a mother, so I would be hard put to effectively capture a sense of absolute safety arising from the trust in another person. My trust had always been in myself and my own power, which was notably shaken right now. Third, I realized with a sinking heart that if the contest started with sympathetic music, every piece would be a sympathetic one.
Jemeret began to play, and I sensed in the music a small, quick, timid, perhaps even slightly comical creature. If I closed my eyes, I could almost see it. The piece was very short, and he did not make it sympathetic. It was a relatively simple rhyme, and he must have made the decision that it was so simple it did not need any augmentation. When I searched at the end for the sense of safety I expected, I couldn’t find it. I wondered if the fact that he was a man, a warrior, and a chief made him draw away from it.
And then I wondered if I could capture it.
The audience stirred, and I was aware of some whispers of approval. Jemeret handed me the nomidar. I cradled it gratefully, feeling its already familiar contours, warm from his hands and body.
I chose a higher register than he had and used the sympathetic strings nonsympathetically to create a background wash against which the swift, tinkling notes of the laba could dart. I brought up the background to a heartbeat rhythm, and repeated the rise and fall of the creature at a slower pace until the foreground notes blended into the heartbeat. I gave the heartbeat four bars alone, and then stopped.
Jemeret smiled, and I reluctantly gave him back the nomidar, but there was a challenge in his eyes as well. We both scored the first round to me—but it was only the first round.
Lyrafi nodded at each of us in turn. “The second exercise,” she said. “While we Dibel keep no warriors, we lean on the warriors of the others in the Samoth. We value the powers of those who have chosen the way of peril. Therefore we ask for an interpretation of one of the sayings of Romalux, once a fine warrior of the Genda: ‘To know whom to strike is competence; to know how to strike is skill; to know where and when to strike is art; to know why to strike is victory.’”
I didn’t agree with the saying, and I didn’t know if Jemeret agreed with it or not, but he was obviously familiar with it. He played brilliantly, his sympathetic tones a rousing to patriotism that I knew I would not be able to match, his melody more complex than it seemed, inspiring both dedication and admiration.
The nomidar felt like it carried some lingering harmonies of his when I rested my cheek lightly on its head. He had chosen the brigade approach; I chose that of the individual warrior. My melody was jaunty, a little discordant, a little risky, and I kept the sympathetic strings low, overwhelmed by the melodic line at the end. Jemeret’s was the better interpretation. I reckoned the score to be one-all.
Lyrafi rose from her seat at the back edge of the platform. “For the third exercise, we chose a saying from the time of the ancients, before the joining of the tribes into the Samoth. ‘Life which is here is life from the Fire. Only sleep lies in the spaces between the stars.’”
I jumped when I heard the saying. It had been days since I’d really thought about space, about traveling between worlds, about the strange regions of superspeed rolls where light and sound became intermingled, about the viewport filters that illuminated brilliant points of incandescence and long strings of gases in vibrant, changing colors. Jemeret played of blazing starfires and empty spaces between; I could not. I had seen too much of the spaces between the stars, and I knew they were far from empty.
I tried to shut the knowledge out of my mind when my turn came, but it kept seeping through into my playing, muddling the melody I had chosen. I probably didn’t play badly, but I don’t think I played well. I determined to make it up in the next round.
“Secrets,” Lyrafi announced, “are exercise four. Not a poem, but an idea to interpret. From the small parts of childhood kept from parents and friends, to the major intrigues of tribes and of nations. Secrets are hidden in all the relations between people and between peoples.”
She waited, as did we all. Jemeret seemed to retreat back into himself, head bent over the smooth curves of the nomidar. Although he was both motionless and expressionless, I sensed in him a turmoil so strong that it hinted of itself past his formidable shields, even to someone, like me, as deaf to other people’s thoughts as an untalented person was. Finally he lifted his hands to the strings, but he did not look up.
The first few notes were so muted I think almost no one heard them, and as the deep, rich tones began to rise in volume and make their way out over the crowd, I became aware that there were no sympathetic tones at all. Jemeret completely suppressed them.
I couldn’t call what he chose to play a melody. It was a stately series of tones, progressing until resolution seemed inevitable, but then avoiding it, so that a dissatisfying undertone of anxiety and restlessness set in. It built toward a strange sort of climax, in that the notes were not discordant, but they refused to let the listeners make a whole of them. It was becoming unbearable when suddenly Jemeret stopped playing. The echoes had died completely before I could reach out and take the nomidar.
I cradled it, but I hadn’t assembled any thoughts. I realized that the silence was stretching on, fastened my mind on the single word “secrets,” tried to tamp down my higher consciousness and just let my fingers play. Jemeret had suppressed all the sympathetic tones; I couldn’t amplify them without my Class A talent, but I could let the instrument resonate to them, and I did.
I don’t remember the melodic line. I was barely conscious of playing. When the song was done, I looked up and found Jemeret staring at me, white-lipped, his face pinched with an effort I didn’t understand. A murmur from the audience drew my attention, and I looked outward.
People seemed to have been deeply affected by my playing, even though I didn’t know what I had played. I reckoned the score at two-all.
Lyrafi sighed and rose. “We will observe a short pause now,” she said. “Too much nomidar is like too much rich food. Stretch—and reassemble in a handspan.”
I wanted to go on playing the nomidar, but it wouldn’t have been fair in the context of the contest. I set it down by the cushions Lyrafi had been sitting on and hopped off the platform. I wanted to go off somewhere, but the Plain of Convalee offered little in the way of shelter, and the tents of the Boru were a long way off. I didn’t realize that my whole body was trembling until a flurry of hair and talma embraced me to hold me steady. Shenefta said in my ear, “It was wonderful and horrible both, Ronica. How could you do it?”
I stared at her, bewildered. “How could I do what?”
She shook her head, and I saw tears in her eyes. Once again something had happened and I had missed it. I was trying to phrase a question when her gaze moved beyond me and she took a step backward. I glanced back, and it was Jemeret, just come down off the platform.
“Do you know what happened?” I asked him.
He nodded slowly.
“Tell me—will you tell me?” I corrected.
Just as slowly, he shook his head. “Not this day,” he said. “Perhaps after Convalee ends.” He held out his hand, and I put mine into it. I didn’t dispute his decision, because there was so much I didn’t understand that this was just a bit more.
“You play the nomidar very well,” I said to him, meaning it, not knowing I was only moments away from finding out how well.
“So do you.”
“I’m holding my own,” I said with what I thought was a fine sense of objectivity. “Considering I can’t do anything with the sympathetic strings except let them resonate.”
“That’s all most nomidar players can do,” he said. “Even those who can do more usually hold back.”
“Are you holding back?” I asked him.
He grinned, and the tiredness around him seemed to slip away. “I don’t think I dare to,” he said. “Not if I want to win.”
My hands suddenly itched to get back to the nomidar, but at the same time I felt my face growing hot. I, for so long used to so much adulation, was somehow embarrassed by praise from him. I tried to block it, but of course he sensed it at once and squeezed my hand, then let it drop.
“You’re growing up,” he said softly.
Lyrafi called the reassembled crowd back to order as Jemeret and I returned to the platform. This time, for some reason, I was aware of the individuals I knew in the audience, many of them Boru—but Ashkalin’s brooding presence was somehow prominent, too. I had not realized before that he was there.
“The Dibeli contest continues,” Lyrafi said. “There will be three more rounds, and for the first we will ask the contestants to interpret a piece of the Song of the Outcast Tribe: ‘Where pride walks, regret fills the footprints. In the stride of arrogance is the stumble of contrition.’”
Jemeret leaned for a moment on the nomidar, his hands resting lightly on the strings, and then he played. He chose to divide note by note, then chord by chord, then phrase by phrase, each alike yet very different, the first harsh, edging on dissonance, the second softened, harmonized, infinitely sad. It was a truly brilliant performance, perhaps the best I had ever heard.
And I realized as he finished that I was afraid to reach for the nomidar. It was as if something had taken hold of my arm and weighted it down so that movement was impossible. I felt a kind of panic rising inside me.
He must have felt it instantly. He looked up, emerging from the spell playing the nomidar can create, realized I hadn’t moved, probed me swiftly, and then made some adjustments in my mind that caused the panic to drain away.
There was some restlessness in the crowd, for the delay had been lengthy. I took the nomidar from Jemeret as slowly as I could. If I defaulted on the song, I would lose the contest, and I couldn’t allow that to happen. But I didn’t want to play this selection. Usually a strong challenge forced me to a greater effort, but something about this particular poem made me want to turn and run away.
I cradled the nomidar and looked directly at Jemeret. It wasn’t that I asked him to help, only that he hadn’t completely left my mind yet, and he knew I couldn’t play. So he did the absolutely impossible. He played for me, through me.
What the piece sounded like, I don’t know. I also don’t know if anyone suspected what was happening. Certainly Mortel John would have discounted the likelihood. We were both tired, even sweating, when he judged the piece to have gone on long enough to allay suspicion, and I imagine it wasn’t very good, but at least I was through it and we could continue. I gave him back the nomidar. It was only fair that he win that round—he was the only person who had played in it.
If there was a moment when it became possible for me to love him without reservation, it was that moment. I felt not the awe at his greatness I’d felt that night at the spring, not deference to his superior strength, not even the natural kinship of two like people. When he had saved my life, it had been against my will until the very end, and he had himself been the cause of my near suicide; but now he had protected me against public humiliation in answer to a very real plea of mine, without hesitating, without exacting any price. He was, I had to admit, unceasingly loving.
Lyrafi had risen and was speaking. I wrenched my thoughts around to pay attention to her. “...sometimes difficult to play both sides of an aigument with the same skill,” she was saying.
“We’ve set that test for these nomidartists. Having just played the fall of pride, we now play pride’s grandeur. The lines are from a verse of Jenothera: ‘The fires of the stars burn through time and are not consumed; there is no body great enough to contain the heart of a victorious warrior, or a mother with a newborn, or a lover who dances with Fire.’”
Jemeret, though tired, clearly knew the verse, and perhaps had even played it before. He began at once, with a stirring series of strong melodic chords that blended into a rousing melody, and subsequently into a series of melodies. Each series was grander, finer than the one before, and it was all brought together in an exquisitely rousing theme, uplifting and magnetic, whose resolution at last was immensely satisfying.
The audience was deeply moved, and very pleased, and so was I.I took the nomidar from him and cradled it. I was filled with gratitude to him for saving me in the last round of the contest, and gratitude is inimical to pride. I fastened on some of the specific words in the poem—fires, victorious, dances—and played them, instead of playing the poem as a whole. The fact that by my reckoning he had just won the contest did not seem to distress me, even though before we began competing, I had been certain that defeat would devastate me.
I was surprised when Lyrafi did not say that the game was over. Instead she announced the last round. “Our last exercise will celebrate love, that most elusive of emotions, whose description has challenged our finest poets and our most talented singers. The poem is of unknown origin: ‘To the hills and valleys of one world, the valleys and hills of another. The rhythms of two—joining, merging, continuing as one, through and beyond life, lighted in the face of the stars, in the glorious crimson heart of fire.’”
I was stymied. How could I sing of love when I was so convinced that I had never known it, when I had used Coney’s honest love for me in a selfish way, when I flung myself away from Jemeret when he tried to touch me?
Jemeret paused briefly. Then he began to play softly, steadily, a poignant and supportive tribute to all the beauty in the world, rising high, sinking low, growing more complex, then combining in an even warmer, richer theme. He built upon it the second time through, making it even more complex, with brilliance and clarity—like the bright flame of a rocket in space, hot and distinct against a background far away. It was over too soon.
He had to hand me the nomidar, because once again I couldn’t reach for it, but as soon as I had it in my hands, I knew what I was going to do. I believed that he knew more about the subject of love than anyone else I had ever known or was ever likely to know.
