Starfire Saga, page 26
“We have always argued whether to stand together or individually. We decide it each time, sometimes one way, sometimes another. Yet we stem from the same roots, and we all worship the stars. I believe we must address the question of uniting in peace as well as war, at Convalee and away from Convalee, as once we were, long ago.”
Ashkalin also rose. “I am concerned here in two ways,” he said. “First, the Marl need the tribes at this time, because without them, the Marl cannot get back to Salthome. I recognize that, and I welcome the support that has been offered. But the question of reunifying is more serious than this incident. It is a question of ‘Who rules?’”
“The Council does.” This, unexpectedly, came from Lyrafi. “No single person—aside from the High Lady—has ever ruled the Samothen.”
Venacrona raised his staff, and all eyes went to him. “We must recognize the Foretelling.”
Ashkalin started to speak again, but Tynnanna chose that moment to come running over a rise from the direction of the forest, carrying something in his mouth. The line of guards separated out of his path, and most of them kept looking over their shoulders into the circle when they reestablished their line. The klawit entered the Council circle between Ashkalin and Henion, dropped his speed to a prancing walk, came directly to me and proudly laid at my feet the carcass of something he had just killed. He then walked around and sat at my side, between me and Sheridar.
“We must,” Venacrona said again, with emphasis, “recognize the Foretelling.”
“Rule by the Council implies that we would live together,” Krenigo said, rising, “and that would mean changing our way of life. That is a serious consideration.”
“But not a necessary one,” Ginestra said unexpectedly. “The messenger system could keep us informed quickly. The ships of the Marl and the tivongs of the Boru can make communication regular and certain. These are details to be settled if we decide, not factors to keep us from deciding.”
Now Zunigar rose. “I, too, am concerned as my Lord Ashkalin is, as the Resni also have to cross the Honish lands to get to the Hive, and to conduct our trade. I believe we must consider unity, but not today, as the Foretelling has further steps to run. My question is, if we delay this choice, how do we get home?”
“More to the point,” Ashkalin said dangerously, “do the Boru stand with us or not?”
“Of course the Boru stand with you,” Jemeret said almost offhandedly, “but if there are to be losses—and we must face the possibility that there may—I believe those losses should be in a greater cause than the immediate one.”
“I agree,” Sandalari said firmly. “And I believe that tomorrow we will know more than we do today.”
Ashkalin leaped on that like a predator. “What do you mean by that?” he demanded. “What do you know now that makes you believe that?”
Sandalari was unmoved by his vehemence, and I reflected on how strong she had become, from the trembling, battered child I had known on Werd. “Why, only that the stars make their choices tonight,” she said gently. “And we will be able to see if they find her worthy, as indeed we can see that the klawits and the tivongs have found her worthy.”
As if he understood, Tynnanna chose that moment to lay his head in my lap, and I rested my hand on it almost absently. Part of me had started to bristle at the idea of being judged, but another part clamped down on it. I thought that my Lord Jemeret would not want me to make a scene of any kind now. At the back of my mind, however, I could hear Kray laughing, for Kray had always wanted me to defer to him, but could never make me do it, and now I was choosing to do it—though for someone else.
“Sorry, you weren’t man enough,” I thought at him, as if he could receive that thought on a world light-centuries away, as if the sting could carry words—as if my sting could; Jemeret’s had that power—as if I had a sting any longer.
And all those “as ifs” notwithstanding, I went on holding a one-sided conversation with Kray, looking at Danaller as I did so.
You wanted me, and maybe you did love me, Kray, but it was in your way, which meant trying to prove that you were better than me or stronger than me, and you weren’t, so you were basing yourself on a lie. You needed me to be less, so you could be more, and I couldn’t do it.
I realized suddenly that I had missed something in the Council meeting, that the voices had stopped, and that when Danaller looked over at me, it was because everyone else was staring at me, too.
Jemeret said carefully, “My Lord Ashkalin has asked you if you lay claim to the title of High Lady, Ronica. Our laws say that you must answer.”
I knew I had to rise to speak, and so I gently pushed Tynnanna’s head from my lap to do so. I looked directly at Ashkalin—so very like the younger man with whom I’d just had an inner encounter. Because he was so like Kray, I knew that part of the tension he held himself under now was caused by what he perceived as my ignoring his question. I thought of how Kray reacted to what he thought of as humiliation, and I wanted to soothe and reassure him.
“I beg your pardon, my Lord Ashkalin,” I said sincerely. “I was a long way away from here at the moment that you spoke. My name is Ronica McBride, and I am Lord Jemeret’s claim. If time and the stars show me a different path, I may have to walk it. But for now, I am content.”
Jemeret relaxed instantly, almost imperceptibly, but I saw him do it. The relaxation seemed to flow outward along the circle, until even Ashkalin, appeased by the response, nodded and sat down again, satisfied.
Venacrona raised his staff once more. “Let us agree, then, to defer until the morning any plan of action. We worship together only one day a year. We will dedicate this day to that worship and allow the stars to guide us.”
One by one the tribe leaders agreed, and the formal Inner Council began to dissolve. Sabaran nodded in my direction as he told Jemeret he’d see him later, but Sheridar, eyeing Tynnanna a little warily, came over to take my hand. “I hope you will honor me with a touch later.”
Not knowing fully what he meant, I remembered that Ashkalin had said a similar thing when I first met him. Sheridar needed a reply, so I said, “I will if I can,” which seemed innocuous enough. He squeezed my fingers briefly and was gone after his father.
Jemeret touched my shoulder, and I turned my face up to him and said softly, “Sometimes I wish I knew what the hell was going on around here.”
He smiled and kept his own voice low. “You did fine.”
Before he could say anything more, Lyrafi and Orion had come up to us.
“We wonder,” Lyrafi said, “if we could prevail on the two of you to spend part of the banquet at the table of the Dibel. No matter what happens tomorrow, we will soon be parted, and it is a sadness to leave talent such as yours behind. Music is, after all, what our tribe is supposed to be known for.”
“We would be honored,” Jemeret said with a genuine smile. “I hope you will play for us, as well.”
Lyrafi actually colored prettily. “It would be a pleasure.”
Jemeret took my hand and we walked back toward the edge of the Boru encampment, Tynnanna following along, tossing his kill in the air and pouncing on it on occasion. “We of the Samoth have been at odds for a long time,” Jemeret explained, “because our people have a history of being ruled separately by men and in unity only under a woman. But it’s been a long time since a woman was good enough, or strong enough.”
“Do you think I’m strong enough?” I asked it almost wistfully. All my life I had been told how important it was for me to be strong enough to shoulder the responsibilities the Com had for me. I had been so certain I was more than a match for whatever the Com could throw at me, and obviously I was not.
“Not now,” Jemeret said in reply, “because you still have a great deal to learn about both strength and goodness. But I believe you could be strong enough at some point if you wanted to.”
That confused me. “What does strength have to do with learning?” I asked. “You either have it or you don’t. Learning is a veneer on top.”
“You’re wrong,” Jemeret said, adding with a mischievous grin, “with all due respect. Strength and learning are tied together in very interesting ways. Each makes space for more of the other.”
Mortel John had taught us all sorts of things, from the basics of communications and access through advanced astrogation and politics. But he had never taught us anything about learning. The physiology of talent we got aplenty, the ethics of talent we studied to some degree, the political use of talent was a major concern in our final year, and the psychology of talent got only an odd mention now and then, as there had been one before our Tenday.
“What happens,” I remember asking him in class one day when I was about thirteen, but before I encountered the man M’Cherys, “if the person with the talent misuses it?”
“Renegades happen,” Mortel John said, “but they are almost always talents who have not been through the rigorous training the Com supplies to you. There is no place in the Com for a rogue talent.”
“But where do rogue talents come from?” I insisted, while Coney and Kray sat very still and stared at me as if I were crazy. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t talked about it by ourselves; the boys just didn’t want it brought up to an authority. In my view, they preferred their conjectures to a factual answer.
I smile now as I realize that I have always confused “facts” with the truth. I somehow thought that if Mortel John or the MIs told me that something was a fact, it had to be true. When Mortel John told me no renegade had ever been through training, I believed him.
Mortel John considered my question, and then asked, “Do you remember Sarai?”
Our heads dropped, and we looked down at our comsole tops. Of course we remembered, but it was still an embarrassment to us.
“Sarai was a renegade,” Mortel John said. We all looked up again in surprise, for that poor, broken child hardly fit our description of a renegade. “A rogue,” said Mortel John, “is someone in whom talent was not encouraged or encountered until it was too late.”
We all felt very comfortable, very safe with that explanation. We knew our talent had been identified and encouraged at the earliest possible moment in our lives—after all, we remembered nothing but being here on Werd in training.
What we didn’t know, and never thought to ask, was how anyone knew when it was too late.
The banquet was actually about fifty different banquets, from the guards out on the picket line to the priests and priestesses of every tribe. Many of the women had spent the entire day at the cooking fires, and all dishes were equally shared among the people gathered at Convalee.
Jemeret and I actually spent some time at a number of different tables, as some groups dissolved and re-formed in different configurations throughout the sunset and early evening. I learned the true meaning of the term “feast,” though I actually ate and drank very little, as we dined with our tribe, with Sabaran and Clematis and the people at their table, with Henion and his bracelet, Andala, Tatatin and his claim, Fidasya, and Lyrafi and Orion, and then later with some groups of people I barely knew at all. While we were with the Dibel, Jemeret and I played separate, short, lively songs on the nomidar, and Lyrafi played a haunting tune on her diplick, making the little harp sing with a genius I had barely suspected of her.
If anyone had asked me why I ate and drank so little, I might have said that I just didn’t want much, but the truth was I was apprehensive about what the evening would bring. The Council meeting had made me aware that something was to happen, and it would be meaningful. Not only did I hate not knowing what it was, I was afraid that, as during so many other important happenings, I would not notice it and would end up not understanding what was going on again.
Just as full dark fell, the women who had done most of the cooking cleared away the food and drink that was left, while the men took the benches on which everyone had sat and set them out along the sides of the bowl of Convalee, in increasingly large concentric circles, making a large stadium. The flat area inside the seats became a performing floor. By the time the setup was done, with several long aisles leading to the center, the stars were out overhead.
I still found it difficult to look up and see so few stars, but now I saw the beauty of it as well. Where the stars were massively plentiful, in the galactic core, no single star could pretend to beauty or singularity, but here where they were rarer, each individual star could truly be said to shine like a jewel.
The members of the Samothen began to gather on the rows of seats, more or less in tribal groupings. As always, the tribe leaders were to the front, but I noticed in a number of cases that they sat three or four rows back, not in the front row to which Jemeret led me, just at the end of one of the aisles, Tynnanna, who had also feasted when the dish was appropriately meaty, sat up in the aisle against my side.
“What happens now?” I asked Jemeret, but he said only, “Wait and see.”
There was a light touch on my shoulder, and I looked at the row behind me to see Variel, exquisite and flushed in her sky-blue talma. Beside her sat Gundever, looking proud and a little nervous. Both of them smiled at me, and I smiled back.
“You look wonderful,” Variel said admiringly.
“And so do you,” I responded, meaning it. She positively glowed with excitement and hope, and her gentleness magnified her beauty. Everyone looked their best for tonight, but Variel somehow surpassed all the other women. Farther back behind us, about ten rows or so, I saw Shenefta, still all bones and angles in a plain blue-green talma. She saw me glance at her and waved.
Behind me I heard music begin, and when I turned back to the floor, there were six musicians standing in the very center of the area, shoulder-to-shoulder in a circle facing outward. Two played stigols, two throms, and two canitas, making a breathy, reedy melody underlain by a strong beat, just slightly removed from the primitive.
Jemeret rose and held out his hand to me. All around us, in the front several rows, I could see couples rising as well. He started to lead me out onto the floor, but paused because Tynnanna had risen also. “Not this time,” Jemeret said softly to me. I looked down at the klawit and said, “Stay here.” The kitten sat back down again, and Jemeret and I continued out onto the flat surface at the center of the bowl.
This was not a dance. It was somehow more of a parade, with stately steps and patterned movements. My right hand remained firmly in Jemeret’s left. The couples were all in a line, women behind one another on the men’s left. The line made one circuit around the arena and then individual couples moved to other places on the floor. At that, many of the people observing came out onto the floor and went to couples they knew, each “touching” the free hand of the man or the woman. Sheridar and Ashkalin, true to their words, were the first to touch me, followed by many of the other Sammods I had acquaintance with, including, much to my surprise, Sejineth. Jemeret was claimed for a touch by Clematis, Lyrafi, Ginestra, Morien, and a number of other women, including—just at the end of the time—Shenefta, who came up quickly, squeezed his hand, and darted away, as if she really didn’t have a right to be there. When the music faded out, trailing off the notes of the song, the parade was over. We all left the floor and returned to our seats.
I have always believed in that old saw that a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. When I first encountered all that was to follow that night, I automatically relegated it to the realm of a technology so advanced that it was inexplicable to me. I had, after all, been raised to believe in the ever-increasing complexity of technology. I was wrong about that. What I was watching—what I continue to watch—is part of the ever-increasing complexity of life itself.
I’m stalling. I have to stop commenting and just tell the story.
Into the arena came Venacrona, followed by Sandalari, two priests, and another priestess, each of the four bearing on his or her upturned palms a large metallic silver bowl. All five people wore robes of a peculiar matte gray. The robes had hoods, but the hoods were folded back off their heads.
“Tribes of the Samoth,” Venacrona said in a voice that carried to the last row of people, “we come to pay homage to the stars, of whose stuff we are made, of whose stuff this world is made. We praise them for our very lives.”
Sandalari and the other three assisting Venacrona began to sing—at first quietly, and then with more and more power, first on the same notes, then each singing a separate note that blended with the others in a wonderful polyphony. As they sang, each set his or her metal bowl down onto the floor of the bowl of Convalee. The singing was sweet and pure, rising and falling hypnotically. After a moment or two, still singing, the four backed away from the metal bowls, which remained on the floor, equidistant from some center point. When the others were off the floor itself, Venacrona walked to stand between the bowls.
“Let the stars honor us with their presence,” he said. “Let them find us worthy enough to praise and thank them. Let them choose from among us those who are especially worthy.” Then he left the floor, and every light, which had been illuminating the floor from stanchions at the ends of the aisles, went out.
For a time there was only silence, the faraway cold silver light of the stars overhead, and the glow of the klawit’s eyes. Then the bowls began to softly give off light, each in a separate star color—blue, red, white, yellow-gold.
I was interested, but still a little detached. Then, without warning, from each bowl grew a column of live flame, which shot straight up to almost stratospheric height, illuminating the entire area with starfire. The priests and priestesses began to sing again, and in time to the singing, the starfire began to rock and sway, the columns to writhe, snakelike, to twine around and through one another, and to make organic patterns so surpassingly beautiful that I found them difficult to take in.
