Sea of Silver Light (103 page)

Sam looked at him fondly. "You really love her, don't you?"

He did not speak for a moment, but a complicated set of emotions played across his face. "My people do not have a word that has so many meanings as your English word 'love' Sam. I care for her very much. I miss her badly. I am very, very frightened and unhappy that we cannot find her. If I did not see her again, my life would always be smaller and more sad."

"Sounds like love to me. Do you want to marry her?"

"I would like to . . . to try to have a life together, I think. Yes."

Sam laughed. "You may be from somewhere else, !Xabbu, but you've got the single-guy stuff down pretty well. Can't you just say it? You love her and you want to marry her."

He growled, but it was only mock-irritation. "Very well, Sam. It is as you say."

She guessed that his light-heartedness did not go very deep. "We'll find her, !Xabbu. She's here somewhere."

"I must believe it is so." He sighed. "I was going to tell you the story of the All-Devourer. It is frightening, but as I said, it is also a story of hope."

Sam settled in. "Go ahead."

!Xabbu was a good storyteller, active and involved. He changed voices for the different characters and punctuated the tale with broad gestures and even dancelike movements, leaping to his feet to show Porcupine journeying to her father's house, greedily scooping his hands toward his mouth as he portrayed the All-Devourer eating all that he found. When he crouched and said, in the flat, frightened voice of Mantis waiting for the monster,
"Oh, daughter, why is it so dark when there are no clouds in the sky?"
Sam truly felt the horror of seeing one's own sins come home at last.

When he had finished, she noticed that a few of the fairytale folk from the surrounding campsites had moved closer to listen. "That was wonderful, !Xabbu. But it's so scary!" It had not been the simple folktale she had expected. Something powerful that lurked in the unfamiliar images, in the confusion of motives, made her wish she understood better.

"But the story says there is light behind the greatest darknesses. Grandfather Mantis and his people survived and moved on." His face fell. "I thought that it was my job to preserve them, and with them the story of my people. I thought that was to be the work of my life, but I have done nothing to make it happen."

"You'll do it," she said, but !Xabbu's nod of agreement was perfunctory. She wanted to see him animated again, thinking about something other than Renie and their terrible situation. After all, it wasn't as if they were in a hurry anymore. They had nowhere else to go. "Can you tell me another one? Do you mind?"

He raised an eyebrow as if he suspected her motives, but said only, "Yes, but then I would like to go look for Renie again, in case new people have come in while we were sleeping." He looked out at the Well. "In fact, this place does bring another story to my mind—one of the greatest of my people's tales."

"Chizz," she said. "What's it about?"

"It is another story of Grandfather Mantis, about how the moon came to be in the sky . . . and about other things. You will see why I cannot help thinking of it in this place, beside this hole in the ground full of stars swimming in the waters of creation."

"The waters of. . . . Do you really think that's what it is?"

"I do not know, but to me it looks like the pictures I have seen in the city-school where I studied, pictures taken through the eyes of telescopes looking far away out into space—and back in time, too, as they explained to me, since the light itself was old when it reached us. To me this Well looks like a place where universes are born."

Sam felt a little shiver. She could not help wondering what it would be like to drown in that deep hole, to gasp out your last breath even as galaxies of light swirled around you. "Scanny," she said quietly.

!Xabbu smiled. "But the stories of my people are seldom of great things, of wars or stars or the creation of universes—or even if they are, they are spoken of in a small way. We are a small people, you see. We step very softly, and when we die, the wind soon has blown our footprints away. Even Grandfather Mantis, who once stole fire from beneath Ostrich's wing to give to his people so they would not fear the dark—yes, even Mantis, the greatest of us all, is only a tiny insect. But he is a person, too. All things in those first days were people." He nodded, eyes closed as he composed his thoughts, "This story starts with a very small thing indeed, as you shall see. A piece of leather.

"One day Grandfather Mantis was out walking, and discovered a piece of leather beside the trail. It was a piece from the shoe—you would call it a sandal, I think—that belonged to Rainbow, his own son. It had broken loose and been left, forgotten. But something about the shoe-piece called to Grandfather Mantis. Something about it seized his attention, this tiny, discarded thing, and he picked it up and carried it with him."

As !Xabbu spoke, his preoccupation and sadness dropped away. His voice rose, his hands fluttered into the air like startled birds. Sam saw that more refugees were moving toward them, drawn by his animation in this quiet, sad place.

"Mantis came to a pool of water," !Xabbu said, "a place where reeds grew all around, a hidden, fertile place, and he put the shoe-piece in the water—it was almost as if a dream had come to him and commanded it, but he was not asleep and he had not dreamed.

"Grandfather Mantis went away then, but he could not forget about it. At last he came back to the pool and called out, 'Rainbow's shoe-piece! Rainbow's shoe-piece! Where are you?' "

"But in the water the shoe-piece had become a tiny eland. Now, if you do not know it, to my people the eland is the greatest of the antelopes. My own father hunted one so long and so desperately that he followed it out of the desert which was the only world he knew and stumbled into the river delta of my mother's people. And Grandfather Mantis himself, it is said, when he wished to travel in dignity and power, would ride between the antlers of a great eland."

!Xabbu showed the proud stride of the eland in a sort of dance, head held high, so that Sam could almost see antlers worn like a crown. The throng of refugees was growing around them, several rows deep across the headland. Wide eyes watched the little man avidly, but !Xabbu did not seem to notice his swelling audience.

"But this eland in the pool was not great and powerful. It was small, wet, and shivering, so new that seeing it brought tears to the eyes of Grandfather Mantis. He sang a song of praise and gratitude but he did not touch it, for it was still too small and weak. Instead he went away, but when he came back he found small hoofprints in the earth beside the pool and he was so full of joy he danced. The eland saw him then and came to him as though he were completely its father. Mantis then brought honey, dark, sweet, and sacred, and rubbed it onto the little eland's ribs so it would become strong.

"Each night he returned to the pool and his eland. Each night he sang to it, and danced, and rubbed it with sweet honey. Then at last he knew he must go away and wait to see if the young eland would grow. Three days he stayed away from the pool, and three nights also, though his heart was very sore. When he returned on the morning after the third night, the eland walked out of the water in the light of the sun, its hooves clicking. It had grown to magnificent size, and Grandfather Mantis was so delighted he shouted out, 'Look, a person is coming! Ha! Rainbow's shoe-piece is coming!' For he felt that he had created the living creature from Rainbow's discarded piece of leather.

"But Rainbow and his sons, Mongoose and Younger Rainbow, were not happy when they heard what Mantis had done. 'He thinks to fool us with his stories,' they told each other, 'and keep the meat to himself. Everyone knows that old Mantis is a trickster.' So they went to the pool and found the young eland grazing on the bank. They surrounded it and killed it with their spears. They were very excited—it was a fine, big eland—and began to laugh and sing as they cut it up.

"Grandfather Mantis was coming to the pool when he heard their voices. He hid in the bushes and watched them, and soon came to realize what had happened. He was full of anger and sorrow, not just because they had killed his eland, but because they had not shared it with him, and had done everything without ceremony or even a dance of gratitude. He was afraid of them, though, because they were three and he was but one, so he waited in the reeds until they left, still laughing and singing as they carried away the meat from their kill, wrapped up in its own skin.

"Mantis came out of the reeds and walked to the place where the eland had died. Rainbow and the two grandsons of Grandfather Mantis had left only one thing behind, one of the organs from the eland's stomach, that which contained the black, bitter gall that not even my people, though schooled by need to eat almost anything, can swallow. They had left the gall hanging on a bush. Mantis was so sad and angry that he took his spear and hit the organ sack. From inside it the gall spoke to him, saying 'Do not strike me.'

"Mantis became even more angry. 'I will strike you if I wish,' he said. 'I will throw you down on the ground and step on you. I will stab you with my spear.'

"The gall spoke to him again, saying 'If you do, I will come out and cover you in with my darkness.'

"But Grandfather Mantis was too angry to listen. He lifted his spear and stabbed the organ. The gall came out as it had threatened, bitter, dark as a night without stars. and it covered Mantis in, even flowing into his eyes so that he was blinded.

"Mantis threw himself down on the ground, crying, 'Help me! I cannot see! The black gall has covered my eyes and I feel myself to be lost!' But no one heard him calling in that remote place by the pool, and no one came to help him. Mantis could only crawl along the ground, feeling his way, blind and helpless. 'Hyena will find me this way,' he thought, 'or some other hungry creature, and I will be killed. Grandfather Mantis will be dead—will that not be a sad thing?'

"But no one came to help him and he could only crawl on through the darkness. Then at last, just as he became so tired and fearful he could not move any farther, he put his hand down upon something. It was an ostrich feather, white as smoke, bright as a flame, and the heart of Grandfather Mantis was filled with hope. He took the feather and wiped the black gall from his eyes. When he could see the beauty of the world again, he took the feather and wiped off the rest of the bitter gall, which fell away, leaving the feather clean and untouched. Marveling at this wondrous thing, delighted with his escape, Grandfather Mantis threw the feather high into the sky where it stuck, a curve of white against a darkness as black as the gall. He danced and sang. 'You now lie up in the sky,' Mantis told the feather. 'From this day, you will be the moon, and you will shine at night and give light to all the people when there would otherwise be darkness. You are the moon, you will live, you will fall away, then you will live again and give light to all the people.' And it did. And it does."

!Xabbu fell silent, lowering his head as if saying "Amen" at the end of a prayer, Sam could not help noticing all the faces surrounding them in the unending twilight—childlike, expectant faces. The. crowd had grown larger still, pressing in like victims of a disaster pleading for information, until they surrounded the small knoll many rows deep.

She thought she should thank him for the story, although she felt again that she hadn't really understood—what was all that about some icky black
fenfen
getting all over the insect the story was about? And how could he be an insect but have a rainbow for a son? Also, she was puzzled why one kind of story, about making an antelope out of a sandal, had suddenly turned into another kind of story: it violated her sense of how stories were supposed to work. But she knew that these things were somehow important to !Xabbu, sort of like a religion, and she didn't want to offend anyone she liked so much.

A high-pitched voice called from the largely silent crowd. "Tell another!"

!Xabbu looked up, a little startled, but before he or Sam could make out where the request had originated, others were also asking, a growing chorus.

"A story!"

"Tell another."

"Please!"

"They want to hear more stories," !Xabbu said wonderingly.

"They're scared," said Sam. "The world is coming to an end. And they're all children, aren't they?" Looking around at the pleading, terrified faces, she felt herself fighting back tears. If Jongleur had been within reach she would have hit him, would have tried to knock him down and make him pay for what his cruel self-obsession had done to these innocents. "They have to be them," she said, as much to herself as to !Xabbu. "They have to be the stolen children."

She was arrested by a familiar face in the throng, although it took her a moment to remember where she had seen the handsome, dark-haired man before. He was a few rows back in me crowd, holding a bundle Sam couldn't quite see, watching !Xabbu with an unblinking, almost vacant stare. None of the fairy-tale children stood too near him, as though they could sense something wrong.

Sam pulled at !Xabbu's arm. "Look, it's that Grail guy—the one that disappeared when Renie disappeared!"

"Ricardo Klement? Where?"

"Over there," Sam said, but now there was only an empty space where Klement had stood. "He was there a second ago, no dupping!"

As they scanned the throng of refugees, Sam became aware of someone standing very close to her, a small child apparently made of mud. She tried to step around the tiny obstacle but the child moved with her and reached up a stubby hand to tug at Sam's Gypsy finery.

"He is not there now," !Xabbu said. "He is larger than most of these people—we would see him, I think. . . ."

"He couldn't have got away that fast," Sam said angrily. Beyond the crowd of refugees still begging for another story, the gray slope was empty for dozens of meters. "Not without us seeing him." The mud child was still trying to get her attention. "Stop pulling on me, will you?" Sam snapped.