Starfire Saga, page 24
During a partner-changing dance, I spun away from Sheridar, laughing at something he’d said, and found myself partnering Ashkalin. As we made the required opening bows to one another, I said softly, “I apologize, my lord, if I was—unwise.”
Without smiling, he said, “You are, my lady, a woman of very strong opinions.” And then the elaborate figures of the dance and its very newness made me concentrate on my steps. Once or twice I caught sight of Shenefta, dancing with an earnest young man of the Genda or with Dirian, and another time with a Boru adolescent.
The dancing continued most of the day, its practitioners changing as some people rested and others arrived. In the middle of the afternoon, breathless and laughing, Lyrafi, Clematis, and I sat sipping shilfnin and nibbling on clover cakes. Lyrafi complimented me on my dancing, and I told her, almost shyly, that I was learning it as I went along. “The way I learned to shoot the agerin.”
Lyrafi swallowed hastily. “You weren’t learning to play the nomidar as you went along! Who was your teacher?”
I thought about that long and hard, and then answered slowly. “It’s a complex question. There was a blind man named Maur who made me a nomidar when I was eight years old and taught me the fingering and chords. But from that point on, I listened to nomidartists and took what I believed was good about their work.”
The other two women exchanged a glance, and Clematis said softly, “Imagine what she could become with a nomidar teacher!”
“I think,” I said, almost with wonder, “that I wouldn’t know how to behave with a teacher. I’ve been on my own for so long now.”
“And you’re very good,” Clematis said seriously. “It would be hard to find a teacher who had greater skill.”
“Jemeret could teach her,” Lyrafi said to Clematis, with a sidelong glance at me, “but it might be unwise.”
“Why unwise?” I asked.
Clematis broke another piece off the clover cake in her lap as Lyrafi answered. “You and the Lord Jemeret seem to compete in a number of ways, and it seems—important to you that you do well against him. You would have to let go of that competitive spirit.”
My first thought was that everyone around here knew everyone else’s business, and my second thought was that it would probably do me a lot of good to escape any need to compete with Jemeret. My third thought was that it wouldn’t be an easy thing for me to do. “Is Jemeret truly so much better a nomidartist than I am?” I asked Lyrafi. I wanted her opinion, because I respected it greatly. I was also fishing for compliments, because after all, the score had been four to three the day before. Now that I had lost the unshakable foundation of Class A status, it was even more important for me to seek security in other areas.
Clematis started to shake her head, but Lyrafi gestured to her and considered her answer. “It’s difficult to describe,” she said at last. “As far as technique is concerned, the two of you are different, but about on a level. Neither of you has had the practice time to attain full mastery of the technical details, but we don’t have time to miss that when you play because the emotional elements are so rich. What Lord Jemeret has is—a fullness of soul. It may come from his age and experience, or it may come from something in himself.”
“What you’ve just said is that what makes him better is something that can’t be taught,” Clematis observed before I had a chance to say the same thing.
Lyrafi smiled. “I didn’t say that at all,” she said serenely. “All I said was that Jemeret could teach her to be a better nomidartist, and that is true.”
I became deeply concerned with the composition of the shilfnin, and Clematis diplomatically changed the subject, debating with Lyrafi who might be braceleted on the Day of the Fire, and who might ask and be turned away. Of course they concentrated their analysis on the Genda and Dibeli couples, as well as one cross-tribe Dibeli-Paj match.
“I think Variel and Gundever of the Boru will be in that group,” I said when there was a pause in the conversation. “They seem very attached to one another.”
And Lyrafi stunned me by asking, as she brushed the crumbs off her lap, “But what has that to do with it?”
“Pardon?” I asked.
“The attraction between people sometimes isn’t enough,”
Clematis said, “and the stars have the final choice. Variel and Gundever have been together only since a midsummer ago. Sometimes the stars will approve, and sometimes they will not. We will have to wait and see.” Briskly she rose to her feet. “I want to dance again.”
Lyrafi and I also got up, but more slowly, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Jemeret disengage himself from a group of men and move to intercept me. He had been careful to remain somewhere near, but he was never intrusive, and I was grateful.
The dancing went on into the night, and under the stars we parted and returned to our separate encampments. While Jemeret was consulting with his guards over night positions, I set two cups on the table and filled them from the flask of clogny. Then I sat down in a chair and waited for him to come in.
It was quiet in the tent, and I was at ease, feeling calm and strangely contented. All at once it came to me that sometime during the day I had recognized that I belonged here. I had ceased to view this world, this place, as transitory or as alien. I believed now that I was here to stay, and I was determined to make a success of it. It could, realistically, have been a lot worse.
I had just reached the dangerous part of the conjecture—the part where I would try to deal with the fact that I didn’t think I was fluctuant, and therefore would never be a Class A again—when Jemeret came in and sealed the tent flap. I put the thought aside as he turned and looked curiously at me and the two cups.
“I want to talk,” I said.
He came to the table and leaned back against it, near my chair, picking up the closest cup of clogny. Silently, he waited. I was having a hard time choosing the words I wanted. He sipped some clogny, his face impassive, his gray eyes disconcertingly fixed on my face.
After a very long pause, he grinned. “You certainly don’t expect me to start, do you?”
I laughed with him, and suddenly it was easier. “I would like to ask you if you would consider teaching me more about the nomidar.”
He was taken by surprise, and he didn’t try to hide it. “You are an excellent player,” he said. “The contest proved that. Why would you want lessons at this point?”
Without thinking about it, I answered, “Well, I’ve never had a nomidar teacher, because the nomidar wasn’t something the government thought was worth my learning, and I’m used to studying. I just never got to choose what I’d learn before.”
He considered it at some length. “There’s a saying on this world: ‘We can learn something from even the smallest blade of grass.’ I don’t know if I can teach you anything about the nomidar, but when we get to Stronghome, we can begin to play together. Will that do?”
Slowly I nodded. I finished my clogny and carefully set the cup back on the table, aware in the silence as he studied me that there was a sting in the tent and that he wielded it.
Meeting my gaze when I at last looked up, he slowly shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “We are too close to the Day of the Fire now.”
I didn’t understand what he meant, but I was grateful for the delay. “You probably don’t have to worry about me trying to run away any longer,” I said, and he laughed.
“I haven’t been worried,” he said. “Not for days.”
He extinguished the stanchion lamps.
The Day of the Bell
It occurs to me now that one of the reasons I like classes and structured learning is that they encourage—and contribute to—the belief that life is orderly, that things happen when they are supposed to happen, that actions have predictable results, and that events are controllable. The Com fostered this belief, and every Class A scenario is built on this foundation. Now I suspect that it is not only illusory, it is destructive. And even knowing that, I cannot escape its seductiveness.
I went to the tivong pen early on the Day of the Bell, because I wanted to ride again. Jemeret had not given orders that I could not ride alone, and I felt fairly safe on the plains between the two rivers. Most of the people in the Samothen knew who I was now, and the story of Evesti had gotten around. In addition, I was a Boru, and no one else was likely to make the mistake of the Ilto. As soon as I neared the pens, the tivong that had presented itself to me on the day I chose a prafax broke away from the herd and trotted up to the fence.
“Working today?” Sejineth had come up behind me, and I had been hardly aware of him because I was concentrating so hard on the grace and power of the tivong, whom I had named Rocky. I turned.
“No, I’d like to ride this morning, and my friend here wants me to ride him,” I said. “I’ll saddle him myself, and I’ll rub him down when I bring him back, so you won’t have extra work.” It came out faster than I would have wanted.
He bowed shortly and walked away. There were only a few hundred tivongs left now, for most of the huge herd had been traded or sold on the Day of the Sheaf. Across the compound I could see Shenefta and the boys mixing feed, and when she glanced in my direction, I waved, and she smiled back and shouted a greeting.
In less than a handspan, I had the tivong saddled and was riding off down the plain, feeling the wind whip my hair around my face. I had forgotten how much I loved this.
Pelhamhorses were different from tivongs, in that they were closer to the primitive horse stock. Unlike the tivongs, there was no predator strain in their breeding. Kray and Coney and I loved every opportunity we got to break away from training and ride on the bridle paths of our study complex on Werd. Kray was proud of his breeding stock, and because he wanted to race them, he bred them for speed. When we really wanted to let them run, they had the stamina to oblige us.
With a sense of fairness that governed few of my other actions, I refrained from stinging my mount to urge him to win. The race had to be fair because it was a test of Kray’s horses, not of us. Sometimes I lost, but I didn’t mind. A horse was a wonderful companion, strong, beautiful, happy, and utterly focused on running, which gave it a selfless joy, and I opened myself to it completely, because it was one of the few times I ever felt pure, uncomplicated emotion. I fed on it.
A tivong was much more intelligent, and therefore much more complicated. It, too, loved to run. That seemed to breed true down all the mutations in horse stock. But the purity of its joy was tempered, even as it is in human beings, by wariness, by an apprehension about what might be around the next bend or over the next rise. A horse lived second to second, but a tivong, like a person, lived in the moment and in the future at the same time.
Rocky sped up a hill and paused at the top. From here I could see most of the separate encampments of the Samothen, and both rivers. The view was really breathtaking. It was closer to the forest than I had thought when I let Rocky choose his own path up here, but I suspected no menace from it, so I dismounted and let the reins drop. Rocky might wander a little, but he would never run off and leave me. Tivongs didn’t.
I sat cross-legged on the hilltop in the waving grasses, encircled my legs with my arms, and started to concentrate on relaxing, only to discover—to my complete surprise—that I was already relaxed. Rocky dropped his head to graze idly at the grass, and I watched the breeze stir the edges of the trees and listened to the singing of birds as they swooped overhead.
Perception is an amazing thing. It differs for each of us, because each of us is different, and we filter it through that different self. What each of us knows about objective reality, we know through our subjective senses—an unyielding paradox. So when I describe what happened next, I describe it through my own senses, and while I ordinarily trust my senses concerning the external world, the next hour had such a hypnotic quality to it that I’m not sure I’m reporting it accurately.
On the hilltop, despite the distance I could see, Rocky, the birds, and I seemed to be the only living beings in the world. If people stirred in the encampments—and I’m sure they did—I simply was not aware of it. Strangely enough, I don’t even know what I was thinking about.
Between one moment and the next I realized that there was movement along the edge of the forest, where the trees met the grassland. The movement was gentle, and in many places at the same time. Even Rocky seemed to sense no menace. And as I watched, idly attracted by the motions, face after face appeared, distinct from the trees and undergrowth.
They were klawits, about twenty or thirty of them, their eyes aglow with their inner fires, but the normal feeling of predator that surrounded them like a halo was somehow absent. Slowly, but not cautiously, four or five of them stepped from the camouflaging trees into the open field. From this smaller group, two continued to move forward—one a huge female, and the other, at her side, a much smaller, younger male. The male almost qualified as a kitten. The curiosity on its face was evident as it cocked its head and looked at Rocky and me. Beside me, Rocky lifted his head and looked at the cats, but after a moment he lowered it and pulled at some grass again.
The two klawits came closer; then the female put her head down and nudged the kitten out in front of her. They proceeded up the ridge that led from the forest to the hill on which I sat. There the female stopped. The kitten looked back at her over his shoulder, and she nodded him onward. He turned toward me again.
Moving slowly, partly not to startle him and partly because of the peculiar lethargy that hung over the scene, I got to my feet. The kitten’s ears reached almost to my waist as he approached. When he was close enough to touch, he stopped and sat on his haunches, looking at me.
His eyes glowed mutedly, but still entirely without menace, and he showed neither claws nor fangs. Rocky went on grazing as if there were nothing unusual about this. I was fascinated by the kitten.
When I still hadn’t moved after a minute or so, the kitten came even closer but without getting up from his sit, lifted his paw, his claws still retracted, and rested the pads against my knee. He was waiting for me to do something, and so was the much larger cat behind him. I thought idly that I could recover quickly from any injuries the kitten might inflict, but the big cat would be a problem.
The kitten pushed firmly at my knee, which had the power to almost stagger me. Clearly, I could not just do nothing. I reached out and laid my hand on his head. His paw dropped from my knee and he made a noise I could characterize as a “purr” the same way I might have characterized the galaxy as a “place.”
I scratched the slightly speckled baby fur, which was amazingly soft to the touch, and the kitten wriggled and rolled onto his back. The large female moved closer until she was so close to me that she had to lower her head to put it on a level with mine. She turned her face past me, and her whiskers stroked across my forehead, tingling. I stared at her as she looked back at me, where I stood over the upended kitten, and her eyes were opalescent, as well as lit from within. We confronted each other directly for a moment or two, and then she dropped her head, nuzzled the kitten, turned and walked away, back into the trees. The other klawits retreated, too, and the forest was still, except for the breeze’s movement of leaves and branches.
Rocky, the kitten, and I were left alone on the rise. I could not help but feel that the mother cat had just given me her kitten.
Wonderingly, I sat down beside the kitten, who squirmed his huge head into my lap, purring away. Rocky took a step closer and nudged the kitten’s side with his nose. It gave him a glance, but did not otherwise pay attention. I rubbed its upturned belly, where the fur was even softer and paler. The edges of things seemed somehow hazy. I went on playing with the kitten, who responded enthusiastically, rolling and even licking my hand with a raspy tongue big enough to envelop it.
I was conscious of the sun on my skin and the breeze ruffling my hair.
The feeling was a kind of calm, relaxation, and satisfaction I almost didn’t recognize. Even now I have a difficult time believing that I was, at that moment in my life, fully happy for perhaps the first time.
By the time the sharpness returned to the edges of things, it was mid-afternoon. The kitten had curled up against my thigh and was sleeping. Rocky had grazed his fill and rested his nose on my shoulder, almost dozing himself.
It occurred to me that I probably should be getting back. I shook myself as if to doff the lethargy, but when I was sure I was awake and the dream was gone, the kitten was still there beside me.
“Will you come back to camp with me?” I asked him as if he would understand. It might have been the first time I had spoken aloud since I got to the hilltop. The kitten got up, his movement not as graceful as it would grow to be, not as powerful. He yawned and stretched, first front, then rear, and then stood still, waiting. I swung up on Rocky and picked up the reins, expecting the kitten to run alongside as we headed down the hill and back across the plain, but with a balanced leap, claws still fully retracted, he leaped up behind me onto Rocky’s broad back.
Rocky glanced around, but otherwise did not react to what might have instinctively been seen as an attack. Soft-pawed, the kitten lay down. “All right,” I said. “Let’s go back.”
We were never taught that happiness was something to be desired or sought after. Happiness was the logical result of doing our duty, serving the government and the Com. We got no lessons in being happy.
Once, in a class when we were about fourteen, Mortel John was having us study different forms of poetry. We were reading examples of a form called “sendav,” in which syllables were rigidly defined and vowel sounds were limited in relation to one another. The poem we were studying was:
