They Fly at Ciron (3 page)

“But what’s all this reading of all of us for?” Rimgia laughed. (Naä’s notions could sometimes be odder than the questions
that prompted them.) “Is it to learn something? To learn what life is about—the lives of gnats and people and flowers and hens and bugs and goats and trees?”

“That’s where the theory gets rather strange,” Naä explained. “What that great, single consciousness-that-is the-here-and-now-consciousness-of-all-of-us is trying to learn is what life…
isn’t:
the greater Life that is its own complete totality. You see, after it’s finished reading you, it knows that, however important and interesting and involving the various parts of your life were, that is not
really what Life
is about. But only after it’s finished reading through the whole of your life, only after it’s actually become you and experienced the length of your years, can it know that, for certain. And only after it’s finished reading me, does it know that my life was not the essence either. And so it goes, with every wise old hermit and every mindless mosquito and every great king who rules a nation. And when it’s completely finished with all the things it could possibly read, from the life of every sickly infant dead an hour after birth to every hundred-year-old hag who finally drops into death, from every minnow eaten by a frog to every elk springing from a mountain peak and every eagle soaring above them, to every chick dead in the egg three days before it hatches, only then will it be released from its reading, to be its wondrous and glorious self, with the great and universal simplicity that it’s learned. That’s what those elders thought—and that’s what they told their people.”

The two young women walked silently.

Then Naä went on: “I must say, though I found it an interesting idea, I’m not sure I believe it. I think I’d rather take the nothing.”

“Really?” Rimgia asked, surprised; for, as an idea to turn over
and consider, like the petals of a black-eyed Susan, it had intrigued her. “Why?”

“Well, when I was a little girl, playing in the yard of my parents’ hut in Calvicon, and I’d think about such things—death, I mean—the idea of all that nothing after my little bit of a life used to frighten me—terribly, so that my mouth would dry, my heart would hammer, and I’d sweat like I’d just run a race… from time to time I’d almost collapse with my fear of it; there it waited, at the end of my life, to swallow me into it. Nothing. Nothing for millions of billions of years more than the millions of billions of years that are no part at all of all the years there are. Really, when such thoughts were in my head, I couldn’t sing a note! But then, a little later, when I heard this other idea, it occurred to me that, really,
it
was much more frightening! If I—and you—really are that great consciousness, and really are one, that means I—the great consciousness that I am—must go through
everyone’s
pain,
everyone’s
agonies,
everyone’s
dying and death, animal as well as human, bird and fish, beast and plant, and all the unfairness and cruelty and pain in the universe: not only yours and mine, but the pain of every bug anyone ever squashed and every worm that comes out of the ground in the rain to dry up on a rock.” Naä chuckled. “Well, it’s all I can do to get through my own life. I mean, doesn’t it sound
exhausting?”

They walked in the dust a while. Finally Rimgia said (because this was something she had thought about many times before): “I wish I could change places with thee, Naä—could just put my feet into the prints thy feet leave on the path and from there go where thou goest, see what thou seest. I wish I could become thee! And give up being me.”

“Whatever for?” Naä knew
how much the youngsters were in awe of her; but, whenever it came out in some open way, it still surprised her.

“Once every three years,” Rimgia said, “I’ll go on a wander for a week—maybe tramp far enough to find a village so much like Çiron that I might as well not have started out. Or I’ll sit in the woods and dream. And the most exciting thing that’ll actually happen will be that I see a Winged One from Hi-Vator pass overhead. But thou hast been to dozens of lands, Naä. And thou wilt go to dozens more. Thou hast learned the songs of peoples all over the world and thou hast come to sing them here to us—and thou makest us, for the moments of thy song, soar like men and women with wings—while all I do is go home from the fields to cook for my brother and father.” She laughed a little, because she was a good girl, who loved her father and brother even as she complained of them. “So now thou knowst why, for a while at any rate, I would be thee!”

“Well,” Naä said, “I must cook for myself—and though most days I like it, some days are lonely. Nor is the lean-to I live in all that comfortable.” Even saying it, Naä was thinking that she wouldn’t change her life with a king’s. For the friendly, gregarious, and curious folk of Çiron made real loneliness a difficult state to maintain. “Right now, though, I’ve got to see Ienbar in his shack at the burial meadow. I told him I would come by today, once the water cart passed. But I shall see you tomorrow—and, who knows, maybe make a song about a wonderfully interesting red-headed woman who, while she cooks for her brother and father, takes her questions to… the very edge of death and back!”

“Thou’rt the one going to the burial field,” Rimgia said, pretending
not to be desperately pleased at the prospect of being the subject of a song. “And thou’rt the one who has heard all the strange ideas of the world—not I. Yes, I would change places with thee, if I could, Naä—though if those foreign elders’ strange idea is right, it means that I may
have
to live your life, and you mine, someday—that we might change places yet!”

“Or that we already have,” Naä said. “In fact that’s one reason, I guess, I have trouble with it. But, when I see you tomorrow, I’ll tell you what Ienbar says. That’s next best to going to see him, isn’t it?”

“And some time soon thou must come and eat with us. And sing this new song for Abrid and my father—Father likes thy singing almost as much as I do.”

And, laughing, the two women parted to go their different ways through the town.

When he reached the first field, Rahm paused to fill his chest with the scent of grain under hot sun and to listen to the roar of crickets, to grass spears brushing one another, and to sparrows and crows and jays which all, with another breath, would again become what, at any other time, he would think of as silence.

Halfway across the field, Tenuk the plower looked up, halted his animal, and waved. Ahead of the plow, the mule was the hue of cut slate. A distant ear twitched—and, waving back, Rahm imagined the rasping blue-bottle worrying at the eye-lashes of that diligent, tractable beast.

With more humor than reproach, Rahm thought: Tenuk’s only three days further along than when I left … They’ve missed me here.

Beets grew to Rahm’s right. Kale stretched to his left. He walked
along one field’s edge. The earth was soft. Yellowing grasses brushed and itched his sweating calves. Moist soil gave and sprang back to his bare soles. Even as he tried to take in all that was familiar about his fields, his country, his home, one new bit of the familiar was wiped away with the next.

He turned onto the path toward town. Moments later, trotting out under lowering oak branches, he saw the woman at the stone-walled well halt, clay jug at her hip; she recognized him—and smiled. Rahm grinned back, as four children careened from behind the door-hanging of the hut across the way, a dog yipping among them. (Three years ago and a head-and-a-half shorter, in her dirty hands the oldest of those children had held that dog up to him as a puppy, and Rahm had said, “Why not call him ‘Mouse’? A big mouse—that’s what he looks like,” and the girl and the others had laughed, because it was such a silly idea—calling a dog a mouse!) They ran toward him, not seeing him. As they broke around him, he caught up the youngest and swung her to his shoulder as she squealed. And suddenly he was among them, the others jumping around him and clapping. The little one grappled his long hair, and her squeal became laughter that, somewhere in it, had his name. And he said all theirs, and their mothers’, and their fathers’, then theirs again (“Hello, Jallet. Hey there, Wraga…How is thy mother, Kenisa? Jallet, dost thy fat old man Mantice still waste his time with the water cart…? I did not see thy uncle Gargula in the fields today. Perhaps he’s still doing some work for thy mother? But thou must not let Veema work him too hard, Nugo! Tell her I told you so, too! Let Gargula get back to the beet fields, where he’s needed! Wraga, so long…”), and called them all out again in farewell,
because it pleased him—almost surprised him—that, after a week in the wild, those names that he had not thought of over all the adventurous days, names that he might as well have forgotten, came back so quickly to his tongue. A step more, and he set the little girl down. She grabbed hold of his forefinger, now, tugging and calling for another ride. But Rahm laughed and freed himself. And they were running on.

Where she’d carried her loom out into her yard, to sit cross-legged on the ground, Hara looked up from her strings and shuttles and separator plank and tamping paddle. A breeze lifted the ends of the leaf-green rag tied around hair through which white flowed like currents in a stream; it moved the hem of her brown skirt back from browner ankles. Her breasts were flat and long, the aureoles wide around dark dugs. Her eyes were black and glittering within their clutch of wrinkles—that deepened when she saw him. “Hello to thee, young Rahm!”

Rahm came over, to stand behind her and look down. Crouching now, he frowned at her pattern: blue, orange, green, cut away sharply by the unwoven strings. “What makest thou there?”

“Who knows,” Hara said, her smile more full of spaces than teeth. “Perhaps it’s something thou mayest wear thyself one day, when they decide in the council house that a bit of youth’s foolishness has gone out of thee and more of the world’s wisdom has settled between thy ears.”

That made Rahm laugh. He patted the weaver’s shoulder—and stood, still able to feel where the girl, gone now, had sat on his.

Hara slammed down the treadle. The shuttle ran through quivering threads, drawing gray yarn.

Rahm loped off between
stone and thatch buildings. Toward him from an alley end, an ox lugged a creaking cart. The side slats were woven with wide leather strips, the bed piled with rocks.

Its two drivers, man and boy, were gray from cracked, callused toes to bushy beard (on the elder) and hair. The man raised an arm to Rahm, even as he frowned—as though the rock dust powdering his face and beard made a fog hard to see through. But the boy, who held a sack on his lap, suddenly pushed it to the bench, stood in his seat, and called out: “Rahm!”

Stopping, Rahm grinned. “Hey, Abrid—!”

Washed free of quarry powder, Kern’s hair and beard would be the same powder gray. But after a splash from the bucket, Abrid’s braids would be as red as his sister’s. And because I know that, thought Rahm, that’s how I know I’m home!

Kern halted the cart with a grunt. His frown deepened. He nodded to Rahm. But Kern’s frown was as welcoming, Rahm knew, as any smile.

Abrid jumped down from the bench and seized Rahm’s wrist the way a much younger child might, though the grit on his palms made the boy’s hand feel like an old man’s. “You will work again with us at the stone pits, Rahm?”

“No, Abrid.” Rahm shook his head. “I will stay in the fields—”

Inside the house Rimgia had put the dough cakes on the hot stones down at the fire and was tossing handfuls of cut turnips and sliced squash and chopped radishes into the bowl of lettuces she had torn up, when something in the voices outside caught her. She turned from the counter and stepped across
the floor mat—she needed more water. As she went, she hooked two fingers in the handle of the jar sitting there; but it was already half full. Holding the jar, she pulled in the door with the other hand and stepped out onto the porch over the high sill (which kept the heavy winter rains from coming up to the door—Abrid better fix that loose plank soon). She looked out, to call: “Father, Abrid, come in and get your—!”

Her father, Kern, still sitting on the cart seat, and her brother, Abrid, already standing, looked around.

She saw Rahm.

Reaching up to run her hand, still moist from the water in which she’d washed the vegetables, across her forehead and into her hair, Rimgia set the water pitcher on the porch planks and, with a surge of delight, rushed barefoot down the steps. “Rahm! Thou wilt stay to eat with us…?” Again a hand to her hair to brush back some from her forehead (yes, Rahm thought, the same red as her brother’s beneath his work-dust); but her face was full of a smile that wanted to get even bigger, wanted to swallow all the sunlight and breeze around them. She wiped her other hand on her shift’s hip. “Come, stay—there’s more than enough! And thou canst tell us of all thy adventures in thy wander. Did you get back this morning? Or last night—?”

“I only tramped in by the southern fields ten minutes past, and glimpsed Tenuk—stalking his mule. I’ll come and see thee soon, Rimgia. But I haven’t even told Ienbar I’m here.”

Abrid jumped down and came around the cart—he almost bumped the corner, but swung his hip away—to stand near the steps. He lifted the pitcher, frowned into it, then poured some into his hand. He splashed his face, threw another handful against
his chest. Water fell to darken the dust on one knee, the toes of one foot. Sitting on the step now, with two fingers together, he wiped his light lashes free of dirt. “Hey,
why
wilt thou not stay, Rahm?”

“I will, but some other time, boy!”