Starfire Saga, page 39
Seeing Coney made me think more often of Kray, whose memory I had been able to put aside when Ashkalin went back to Salthome. Kray had been a part of us, all our lives. I missed him, but I was completely aware of the fact that Kray and my Lord Jemeret would have been matter and anti-matter, and the explosion would have been horrible for Kray. He always wanted to be so much stronger than he was, always thought his strength should have made all things possible. I admitted to myself, a little shamefacedly, that I had once thought my strength should have made all things possible, as well. I had learned that it did not; I wondered if he had by this time, too.
I wanted to confront the starfire again. Now that I had my sting back, encountering a living being was an attractive challenge. Jemeret and I dressed for the ceremony, which put me back in a talma for the first time since we’d left the Plain of Convalee. “Does every woman have to wear a talma to this?” I asked him as he pulled his tunic on. “If it’s all of us, the Boru are about to freeze most of their Sammats.”
“It’s just you today,” he answered, “and you can keep the cold out better than a less powerful woman could.”
He set his silver brow-crown on his head, then handed me a smaller circlet and nodded as, for the first time, I raised it and set it on my own head, its surface icy against my forehead for a moment before my body warmed it. It felt strange. Except for the crown on my head, we were dressed exactly as we had been on the Day of the Fire.
Numima had left bread and shilfnin on the table before she went to join the other Boru gathering on the gentle slope, now covered with blankets, table coverings, and wagon canvases. Jemeret and I ate a bite or two, drank a little, and then studied each other silently for a moment, our stings quiescent, before he held out his hand to lead me from the house.
Sometimes you know when your life is about to change, though you have only a vague idea of its exact dimensions. Before graduation, donning the golden helmet in my suite, I knew that it was the equivalent of a roll—emergence from the moment would be qualitatively different from entrance. Midwinter Song was the same. I had known things would never be, after graduation, what they had been before, but I had in no way been able to anticipate the nature and scope of the challenge.
I was suddenly struck with the fear that this, too, would be a change of unexpected dimension, and my hand tightened on his. “Jemeret.”
He looked at me, his even gray eyes curious.
“I don’t want to lose you, either.” I honestly hadn’t known I was going to say it. I was rewarded by the most completely happy smile I had ever seen on his face, and he drew me toward him and kissed my brow beneath the line of my crown.
We went out of our house into the day.
Tynnanna sat at the bottom of the steps, waiting for us. As soon as we emerged, he turned and began to trot off in the direction of what I secretly called the staging area. I tried to touch him with the sting; I felt nothing I could identify as more than “cat,” but then I had never tried to sting him before.
Venacrona, Mardalita, and the young male assistant priest, barely out of his adolescence, stood by the stage, beyond which sat the Boru, the children wrapped in fur or woolen robes, cloaks, and shawls. I looked along the rows of faces, finding most of them familiar and smiling at us. Shenefta waved surreptitiously and jerked her head to the left to make certain I saw that she was sitting next to Coney. I masked a smile and looked beyond her to where Sejineth sat, his face as serious as usual. Shantiah sat beside him, looking excited.
I thought to myself that that pairing made a lot of sense and could also solve a problem, and then Jemeret stung me lightly to tell me to pay attention.
Venacrona, once again in his starfire robes, came behind the stage to greet us. “My lord, my lady, I trust you’re ready.” He glanced at Tynnanna, now standing behind us.
“You may begin at any time,” Jemeret said quietly, letting go of my hand.
“When I signal, you should join us on the stage,” the priest said. “If the klawit chooses to accompany you, do not discourage him.”
Jemeret nodded.
Venacrona and his two assistants mounted the stage, each bearing a metal bowl. The crowd quieted. I glanced backward as I felt a warmth on my shoulder, and saw that Tynnanna had moved very close to me. He dropped his head, moved his nose forward, and nudged my hand with it, and I absently scratched between his eyes. Even as I was petting him, I looked back at the stage again.
Venacrona set his bowl down in the middle of the expanse and stepped around it, carefully drawing his robe out of the way so that it did not rock the bowl. Then he raised his arms. “People of the Boru, we gather again to sing the praises of the stars, whose children we are, and to thank them for the blessings they have bestowed upon us since the Day of the Fire. We come together because we recognize the debt the Samothen owe to the life from the stars. Everyone join hands.”
It took a moment, because people were not necessarily sitting in orderly rows, and Jemeret and I moved in front of the stage to make a pair of links between the Boru and the priests. We were not, therefore, holding each other’s hands. “My lord, my lady, the Boru are joined,” Venacrona said, and Jemeret swept through the priests and picked me up so that the two of us blazed through the tribe, linking everyone into one coherent being. I saw Coney’s eyes widen with wonder. Using my strength as well as his own, Jemeret held the tribe together for slightly longer than usual, then let the link fall away, and we dropped the hands we were holding and returned to the foot of the steps, where Tynnanna still waited.
“We stand together as a tribe,” Venacrona said. “As a tribe, we will sing together.” He and his assistants, still holding their bowls, began the first line of an obviously familiar song, which the Boru joined in. The hymn was the same one that had been sung at the Sacred Spring on the Plain of Convalee. The richness of the combined voices rose into the daylight.
I was used to starfire ceremonies taking place just at last light, but I realized that night fell quickly here in the winter mountains, and my three prayers alone could consume the better part of an hour. At least they were scattered throughout the ritual, so there would be plenty of time between them. It was going to be a very long ceremony. Distractedly, I wondered what would happen if some of the younger children had to relieve themselves, and then realized that they would probably have been taught that control before almost anything else. Being Class C had ceremonial advantages.
Jemeret must have sensed my thoughts wandering again because he stung me lightly.
The hymn was sung with words the first time through, and then a second time without words, its light, repetitive syllables contributing to a humming that I realized was in part an imitation of the unearthly hum of the starfire itself. Then the voices slid into a nearly flawless harmony, six hundred strong, some of the singers more enthusiastic than talented, but all fitting into the almost seamless whole.
Neither Jemeret nor I sang yet. We were leaders, and as such, we were to receive and absorb the opening hymn as if we stood for the connection between the world and the stars. Because I wasn’t singing, I was watching the ranks of the Boru, and I saw Coney begin to weep. He did it quietly, unobtrusively, as he’d done most things, his emotions always a gentle rippling under the surface of his equanimity, but he made no attempt to hide the tears. I reached out with the sting and touched him gently; the familiarity of his being was sweet to me. What he was feeling was so entirely a mixture of awe, regret, gratitude, and happiness that for a few moments I couldn’t understand what was happening to him.
And then I thought I knew. Most of his life, Coney had been a religious person, but he had been isolated in his faith. Those of us closest to him, while not deriding his choice, had never shared it. He had held to his convictions steadily in the high levels of the Com, where faith was scorned and devalued. Here, among the Boru, he was surrounded by, bathed in, a shining faith that, while not his own Epicyclism, was as genuine as anything he’d ever imagined and stronger than he could have guessed. He was not lonely; instead, he was feeling, perhaps for the first time in his life, completely at home.
I understood, and I rejoiced for him, even as he wept.
The song ended, trailing down until only the two priests and Mardalita finished it out. Then silence lay across the open area, and Venacrona turned and nodded to my lord and me.
As we took our first step up onto the stage, Tynnanna rose and, with a stately dignity quite unlike his usual bounding and darting, walked deliberately after us. Jemeret didn’t look at the klawit; he was, once again, stronger than I. I stared so hard I nearly tripped on the makeshift steps, and my lord caught my arm and stung me a little.
We walked forward to the metal bowl that Venacrona had set down, and as we reached it, Mardalita handed me her bowl. Simultaneously, the young priest gave his to Jemeret. Tynnanna remained at the rear of the stage, his tail switching in time to the soft murmur of Mardalita’s voice as she formally gave me the physical link with the stars.
Then Venacrona’s voice reached out over the assembly. “Once again, we have reached Midwinter, and stand on the peak of the year, poised to start downhill toward the summer. We are still a tribe. We stand before the stars, our parents, and tell them of the changes that have taken place in our lives since last we stood before them as a complete tribe.” He stepped to Mardalita’s side of the stage.
“Some have left us,” Jemeret said clearly. His level gray eyes moved up the tiers of his people—our people, I corrected. “Let their names be spoken again, in the presence of the stars and the community that gave them life.” He waited.
One of the young women, a weaver who was studying with Alissa, rose; the man beside her, who doubled as builder and farmer, released her hand as she stood. “Our son, Tal.” She sat down again, wiping tears off her face. Variel had told me that very few babies died, but that one had been lost in the mountains several months before the tribe had begun preparing to leave for Convalee.
I started to sting the young woman to help alleviate her sadness, but Jemeret caught my sting and contained it, saying out of the corner of his mouth, “No, let them mourn. It’s appropriate.”
One of the warriors had risen. “My mother, Halana.”
Slowly, two more people rose and spoke names, each allowing enough time for the name to echo off the faces of the mountain, for the person to be remembered.
Then Sejineth rose, his thin face hard, but emotion trembling beneath the facade. “My brother, Kowati,” he said firmly, his pale eyes locked challengingly on Jemeret.
Almost imperceptibly, my lord nodded. Sejineth stood a moment longer than the others had, then sat down again, the tautness sliding out of his shoulders. Shantiah slipped her arm through his and said something softly to him. I wanted to augment my hearing quickly to catch it, but I was too late.
Jemeret stung me lightly, and I sensed he was a little annoyed that I kept losing my concentration on the ritual, but I couldn’t help it. More than the ritual itself, the people of the tribe had become important to me.
Venacrona nodded at me, and I hesitated only briefly. I had never sung publicly without my nomidar, but I could gather to control the spate of nerves, and the first prayer, in the context of the spoken names of the dead, was the simplest of the three. It was also excruciatingly beautiful. As a representative of the Boru, I sang a plea for us all to be worthy of becoming spirit-bearers, vessels to contain the goodness of those who had gone, guardians of their memories. I interwove the names of the people who had been mentioned, even Kowati, though I had to swallow hard and gather harder to do it with equanimity after what he had done. The last part of the prayer spoke of the unity of souls and the continuity of the stars, an ongoing chain of unbroken life force, from which all of us emerged and to which all of us returned.
I thought as I finished, as objectively as I could, that I had at least hit all the notes. I hadn’t tried to project, so I wasn’t certain about the feeling content of the prayer, though the two women who’d spoken names were weeping.
Jemeret allowed the silence after the prayer to stretch on a little longer before he spoke. “Some have joined us, to become part of the river of our lives, enriching us with the gift of their selves. We will speak their names once here, and they will be part of us forever.” He paused briefly. When he resumed, his voice was strong. “My bracelet, Ronica.”
Mothers spoke for their newborn daughters; fathers, for their sons. One of the new Boru was a young cousin of one of the farmers, whose mother had been claimed into the Paj and who had asked to rejoin the Boru after his manhood ceremonial at Convalee. He had returned with us to Stronghome. In all, the births and the two of us who had joined as adults had increased the tribe’s membership to 619.
The second prayer was sung by Mardalita and the young male priest as Jemeret and I set our metal bowls beside the one Venacrona had put down, their rims touching with small, chiming rings. The prayer was one of welcome, of tribesfolk standing together as one people, casting one shadow in the light of the sun, in the light of the stars.
It trailed off into silence, and Venacrona raised his arms. “We all have secret wishes. We bear them in our hearts, and they are known only to us. Here, at Midwinter, when the cold lies deep and the spring is still only a promise, we nurture the stirrings of our wishes as we nurture the hope of the coming springtime, out of sight, but not out of possibility.” He held his hands outward, toward the tribe. “The stars welcome those wishes, and this is the time to speak them to the stars.”
With the now familiar whoosh, the three bowls filled with starfire, each bowl bearing all four of the colors in writhing, humming streams which climbed skyward. Their brightness seemed in no way diminished by the daylight, and the snow reflected back all of their colors, glittering red, blue, gold, and a silvery, ephemeral brilliance whiter than the surface that reflected it.
I stole a glance at Coney, seeing that he was as agog as I had been at the first sight of the power of the starfire.
Into the humming, the indistinct murmur of voices intruded, as those Boru who could verbalized their wishes. For a split second an old sense of scorn arose in me, superior, steeped in the science of the Com. Speaking a wish aloud was superstitious nonsense, a relic of the belief that it was easier to attain that which could be expressed in words. And then I looked at the unknown, unfathomable presence of the living starfire, and the scorn faded. I said softly, “I want to remember—whatever there is to remember.”
Jemeret, beside me, went very still. I knew he’d heard me. I knew it had affected him, but I had no time to try and figure out how. For whatever reason, I was transfixed by the force of the emotion pouring out of Shantiah.
Ever since we had worked the Ladder together, I’d begun to be more sensitive to the feelings of the woman warriors. I’d discovered that time spent linked to someone created a genuine bond. Now Shantiah was in pain, longing for something, and the bond drew me. I concentrated hard on the emotions, and it felt almost like mind-reading. I wondered if that was how Jemeret had always seemed to read my mind. But in the beginning, we hadn’t been linked nearly as long as I had been linked to the women I worked with. It impressed me even more with his power, that he had developed so solid, so accurate a link so quickly.
I kept trying to understand what Shantiah was experiencing, and it came upon me slowly that her passion was a hunger, edged in hopelessness, wrapped around a stubborn refusal to give in. But to what? The priests resumed singing, expressing a hope that the starfire would hear the whispered words, and I probed Shantiah patiently, hoping that I would. All at once, I thought I knew.
She wanted a baby. Morien had told me that the Ilto had hurt her very badly, and that she was not a skilled enough healer to repair the damage. I turned the sting and began to analyze what actually needed to be healed, and it was extensive, requiring rebuilding of cells from the formative stage onward. But her systems were there.
Jemeret might have done it, but I also thought, objectively, that Shantiah was unlikely ever to have told him. I knew, too, that I wasn’t supposed to leave the platform, but I wasn’t thinking of ritual; I was thinking of seeing if I had the power to grant one Boru woman a spoken wish that I hadn’t really heard. I thought, last, that these were my people, and if they were outraged by my actions, so be it. I believed that it would be right to try.
Moving deliberately, I turned away from Jemeret and walked past Venacrona toward the steps. Tynnanna backed out of my way, watching me with those burning eyes. No one tried to stop me.
Shantiah looked startled as I walked up to her, the Boru making a path for me. Sejineth’s face was wary, but I barely noticed him.
“Stand up,” I said to the other woman.
She obeyed, curiosity and apprehension struggling inside her.
The Boru had fallen completely silent, and the starfire, while it continued to writhe, had ceased to hum as well. In the quiet of the day, a bird called somewhere above us.
I put my hands on Shantiah’s waist and began to seriously diagnose her capacity and her incapacity. There had once been a massive infection, and I knew it had taken everything she was able to do to keep it from destroying parts of her reproductive system; in that she had succeeded. But she had destroyed cells when she destroyed the infection, leaving gaps in each fallopian tube and scars on the uterus and ovaries.
I assessed the right ovary to be healthier, as if I were assessing my own body, and then I slid into her consciousness as I had so often recently on the Ladder. Lending her the power of my own reserves to speed the process, I began to show her how to knit healthy cells together, how to change chemical keys so that they could build more of themselves, how to heal herself.
