Kire felt a smile nudge among his features. “Thank you.” A smile was not the expression he’d thought to use with this Çironian youth. So he stepped back, to lean against the boulder. “Rahm?” Kire glanced at the sky, then back. “How is it you travel the land naked and without a weapon?”
Rahm shrugged. “The weather is warm. My arms are strong.” Here he frowned. “A weapon?”
“You don’t know what a weapon is…”
Rahm shook his head.
“Suppose you had not been able to kill the puma with your bare hands?”
“Eventually she would have gotten frightened and fled — once I’d hurt her enough.” The youth laughed. “Or she would have killed me. But that could not happen. I am stronger than any animal in this land — except, perhaps, the Winged Ones.”
“And what are they?”
“They live in the mountains of Çiron, at Hi-Vator. Their nests are far up the rocks, in the caves among the crags and peaks.”
“Çiron,” the lieutenant repeated. “And Hi-Vator…But Çiron is at the foot of the mountains.”
Rahm nodded. Through the remnants of his own smile, Rahm found himself looking into a face not smiling at all.
“Do all Çironians go about so?” Kire asked. “Are you all so peaceful? Perhaps you, boy, are just simpleminded.”
“We are peaceful, yes. We have no guns, if that is what thou meanst. Many of us go naked — though not all.”
Black cloth hanging close around, the lieutenant chuckled.
And Rahm laughed with him, putting his feet wide and taking a great breath to support his laughter, throwing back black hair — so that he seemed to overflow the space naturally and generously his. “But thou art the first ever to think me simple!”
“Where are you coming from now, Çironian? Who are your parents? How do you live?”
“I come from a week’s wandering out in the land. It is our village custom that every person so wander, once every three years. My parents both died of a fever when I was a boy. Old Ienbar the gravedigger took me in, and I work with him — when there is need. At other times, I help in the grain fields.”
“Those muscles are all from gravedigging, hoe hefting, and plow pushing?”
“Some, yes.” Rahm raised an arm to make an indifferent fist. “I always take a prize at the village games. But much comes from the year I unloaded stones with Brumer and Heben and Gargula and Tenuk, who works with me now in the fields, and the other boys on the rock crew — for our new council-building foundation!”
“And you don’t even know what a weapon…” From the rock he’d settled against, Kire stood and turned — like a man who suddenly finds the joke empty enough simply to walk away. As he tramped back up the hill, his heavy cape, which no wind made billow or belly, moved only a bit, left and right. The mare raised her head. Kire took up the reins, grasped the saddle horn, and raising one boot to the stirrup, swung up and over.
“Friend Kire!” the Çironian called. “The lion! Wouldst thou go without my gift?”
As the mare reared and turned, Kire called back hoarsely: “I haven’t forgotten.” He guided the horse down the slope.
Rahm grasped a hind leg with one hand and an opposite forefoot with the other. He hefted the corpse high, its head hanging back.
The mouth was wide.
The teeth were bared.
The horse shied at the dead thing, but Kire bent down to grab a handful of loose fur. He tugged — while Rahm pushed — the puma across the horse’s back. The gift in place, Kire leaned down and, with his black glove, grasped the Çironian’s shoulder. “I will not forget it,” and he muttered, wheeling, “…though someday you may want to.” But the last was lost in leaf chatter under the horse’s hooves and the general roughness of his voice.
Hooves beat the earth — and Rahm leapt back.
Kire of Myetra gained the rise, while his cloak slid no more than from haunch to haunch on his mare’s mahogany rump. With a flap of the reins, he was gone — to leave Rahm puzzled at their parting.
Chapter Two
“Naä sings so prettily,” said one.
“Naä sings like a bird,” said another. “Like a lark.”
And between the women Rimgia bent among the rows, which, rising up over her eyes, became a gold jungle webbed with Naä’s song. Rimgia wrapped her hands in the stalks and pulled. She’d been working some hours and her side was sore. In another hour the edge of her palms would sting.
But Naä sang.
And the song was beautiful.
Did they really work better when the singer sang? From time to time, when one could pay attention to the words, it was certainly more pleasant to work that way. Most of the women said they worked better. And all of the men. And it was best, Rimgia knew, not to say too much at odds with what most people said, unless you’d thought about it carefully and long — and selected your words with precision. That last had been added to the village truism by her father, Kern — a man known more for his silence than his volubility.
While Rimgia picked and listened, the squeak-squeak-clunk, squeak-squeak-clunk of the water cart rose out of the breeze and the music. Rimgia stood up, to feel gas rumble in her stomach from hunger. The water cart’s arrival was her signal to cease and go home.
Apparently it was Naä’s too. At the end of the verse, when the jolly man, so strong and fair, kissed the girl with the raven hair, Naä hefted her harp on its leather strap around behind her back, unhooked her left knee from her right ankle, and pushed herself down from the rock. She shook her brown hair back, hailed stocky Mantice, the water-cart driver. (His name had three syllables, the last with the softest c. In that locale it meant a bird, not a bug.)
Receiving the smiles and warm words from the workingwomen, Rimgia, whose hair was the color of the central length inside a split carrot, got a dipper of water from Mantice at the cart; and laughing at one woman and whispering to another about still another’s new boyfriend and giving a quick grin to another who stepped up, full of a story about someone else’s four-year-old daughter, she hurried to the path to fall in beside the singer.
When she saw Rimgia coming, Naä lingered for her.
They’d walked together a whole minute when Rimgia asked: “Naä, what dost thou think happens to us when we die?” She asked the question because Naä was a person you could ask such things of and she wouldn’t laugh, and she wouldn’t go telling other people how strange you were, and you wouldn’t hear people talking and whispering about you when you came around the corner or surprised them by the well a day later.
This was more the reason for the question than that Rimgia really wanted to know. Indeed, she rather liked the idea that the wandering singer sometimes found her and her occasional odd thoughts of interest enough to speak about them seriously. So sometimes Rimgia tried to make her own thoughts seem more serious than they were.
“When we die?” Naä pondered. “I suspect it’s just a big blank nothing, forever and ever and ever, that you don’t even know is there — because there is no knowing anymore. That, I guess, is the safest thing to bet on, at least in terms of living your life the best you can while you’re alive.” She paused. “But once I was in a land — oh, three or four years back — that had the strangest ideas about that.”
“Yes?” Rimgia asked. “How so?”
“The elders of its villages were convinced that there was only a single great consciousness in all the universe, a consciousness that was free to roam through all space and all time, backward and forward, not only over all of this world but through all the hundreds and millions and hundreds of millions of worlds, from the beginning of time to its very end. You know the little signs Ienbar makes on his bark scrolls about each person he buries, up at the burial field? Even fifty years after someone has died here, Ienbar can go to his scrolls and tell you what his name was, where she lived, who were their children, and what work and what good deeds and bad deeds were once remembered about each person in the village. Well, according to those elders, you and I are not really alive — we’re not really living our lives here and now as we walk along the path, pushing the branches aside that grow out of the underbrush.” She caught and released a branch; it whooshed back behind them. “What we think and feel and experience as our own consciousness, living through moment after moment, is really the one great consciousness reading over our lives, from our birth to our death, as if each one of us were just an entry in Ienbar’s scrolls. At whatever here-and-now moment, what you’re experiencing as your present awareness is just where that consciousness happens to be — what it’s aware of as it reads you over. But that one great consciousness is the only consciousness there is, now believing it’s Rimgia the grain picker, now believing it’s Tenuk the plowman, now believing it’s Mantice the water-cart driver, now believing it’s Naä the singer. While it reads you, of course, it gets wholly involved in everything that happens, in every little detail — the way you might get involved in some song I sang last evening, in the darkness when the fire’s coals were almost out, when the song seems more real than the darkness around. But that one consciousness reads through the full life not only of you and me and every human being — it reads the life of every bug and beetle and gnat, of every worm and ant and newt, the life of every hen whose neck you wring for dinner and every kid whose throat you cut to roast; and of every grass blade and every flower and every tree as well. It reads through every good and friendly and helpful deed and happening. It reads through every painful, harmful, and hurtful thing that has fallen to anyone or any creature either by carelessness or conscious evil.”