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!”
“Well, then.” Rimgia went to the cart bench to take down the sack Abrid had left on the seat. (In it, Rahm knew, would be pears and some melons Abrid had gathered from the orchards and fields up near the quarry. Yes, he was home.) As she did so, the scent of the baked dough cakes came from the door. Rahm smiled — and Rimgia wondered if the scent was what he smiled at. (How many dozens of them had she seen Rahm, now sitting on the well wall, now walking across the commons, wolf down in the last year?) “Then thou must come back soon.”
Climbing from the wagon beside her, her father turned and clapped Rahm’s shoulder. And still frowned, silently — but silence was Kern’s way.
Rahm said: “When I’ve seen Ienbar, I’ll return.”
“Thou mayest see Naä there,” Rimgia said. “Earlier, when I came with her from the fields, she too was off to talk with him.” These people here, my brother, my father, and Rahm (Rimgia thought), perhaps we are all a single consciousness and only believe ourselves separate, so that we are closest to the truth at a moment like this when we almost forget it. The notion, odd as it was, made her smile even more than the pleasure of her friend’s return.
And with all the smiling and nodding and grinning and waving — that seemed the only comfortable thing to do (or frowning, if you were Kern) when you’d been away and come back — Rahm left his friends and their father.
There was another young man in that village, who, though he had lost his parents during the same autumnal fever that had killed Rahm’s almost a decade ago, was as different from Rahm as a young man could be — for, though likely he loved it as much, he had a very different view of Çiron.
Qualt hauled a great basket of yellow rinds and chicken feathers and milk slops and eggshells and corn shucks from his wagon, to go, stiff-legged and leaning back against it, over the mossy stones to overturn it, rushing and bouncing down, at the ravine precipice into the soggy and steaming gully. A lithe and wiry youngster of twenty-two, given to bursts of intense conversation, long periods of introspection, and occasional smiles that startled his face but would linger there half a morning, he was the town garbage collector.
And Qualt was in love with red-haired Rimgia.
Qualt stood at the rocky rim, the empty basket in his big hands. (Unlike Rahm, Qualt’s hands and feet were the only things you might call big about him; oh, yes, and perhaps his ears, if his hair was tied back — though it wasn’t now. Really, he was a rather slight young fellow.) Qualt breathed slowly, not smelling, really, what lay among the rocks below.
A few weeks before, you see, when a number of Çiron’s young people, Qualt, Rimgia, Abrid, and Rahm among them, had gone for a full-moon swim at the quarry lake, they’d all sung songs (Rahm the loudest, Qualt the best), most of them learned from Naä, and cooked sweet dough on sticks over the open fire (the way Ienbar had suggested they try) till very late, and finally gone chastely to sleep. Qualt and Rimgia had slept, yes, on the same blanket: Qualt’s blanket. Yes, Rimgia and Qualt — head to heel, heel to head — the water a silver sheet beside them. Qualt had woken just at dawn and a bit before the others, to find Rimgia’s arm over his calf and her cheek pressed against the calloused ball of his foot and his wide toes. Her eyes had been closed and her breath had made the tiniest whistle he’d almost not heard for the sound of the current, the splash of small fish, and the morning’s first birds. But he’d lain staring down over his hip, afraid to move lest she wake, his heart hammering harder and harder, so that it was all he could do to pay attention to the feel of — yes, he could move them without disturbing her — the toes on his right foot in the copper torrent, the cataract, the cool swirl of her hair.
Later he’d decided she was a strange girl. But when, in all the nights between then and today, he’d drifted off to sleep, he kept finding a dark tenderness among his thoughts of her.
Suddenly Qualt smacked the basket bottom, turned it up to peer within its smelly slats, then dragged it behind him, rasping on rock, toward the dozen others that stood around the end of his wagon.
Rahm walked through the village, wondering at how well he knew his home’s morning-to-morning and evening-to-evening cycle.
In hours, Rahm thought, the sun will drop behind the trees, and the western houses will unroll shadows over the streets. Then at dawn the sun will push between the eastern dwellings to stripe the dust with copper. He strolled on, hugely content.
Reaching the burial meadow, Rahm glanced over the un-marked graves. (But Ienbar knew the name and location of each man, each woman, and each child laid here time out of memory, and kept all the scrolls about them.) The visiting singer was coming toward the meadow up the road from the fields.
A chamois mantle hung forward over one shoulder but was pushed back from the other. A chain of shells held her short skirt low on her hips. A strap ran down between her breasts, holding something to her back. Its carved wooden head slanted behind her neck. Rahm knew it was her harp. “And hello to thee, Naä.”
“Rahm, you’re back! Are you going to see Ienbar? I was on my way to visit him, but I stopped at my lean-to to replace three of my harp strings — ”
“Yes, Rimgia told me, only moments past,” Rahm said. “Kern and Abrid were just home from the stone pits.”
“And in your wander, what’d you see?” She fell in beside him. “That’s what I want to hear about!”
“Naä”—Rahm looked at the ground, where olive tufts poked from the path dust — “thou makest fun of me.”
“What do you mean, make fun?”
“Thou, who hast traveled over all the world, asketh me what I have seen that thou hast not, after a simple week’s wander?”
“Oh, Rahm, I wasn’t making fun of you. I’m interested!”
“But thou hast come all the way from Calvicon with thy songs and tales. What can I have seen in a week that thou in a dozen years hast not?”
“But that’s what I want you to tell me!”
He saw her glance over to catch his expression (he was still pretending interest in the tufted ridge of the path) and saw her surprise that his expression was a smile. “But now thou seest,” he said, looking at her again, “I am making fun of thee!”
“We’ll go to Ienbar together, and while we go, you’ll tell me!”
“Naä, I saw antelopes come down across hazed-over grasses to drink at yellow watering holes at dawn. I found a village of folk who wove and plowed and quarried as we do, and live in huts and houses that might well have been built on the same plans as ours — though the only words in the whole of their language I could make out, after a day with them, were the words for ‘star,’ ‘ear,’ and ‘tomato plant.’ On the fifth day, as the rituals instruct us, I ate nothing from the time I woke, but drank only water, and stopped three times to purify myself with wise words. And when the sun went down, still fasting, I composed myself for sleep — hoping for a mystic dream.”
She grinned. “Did you have one?”