The journey to Bol Mutiar had been shorter than she’d expected; though she’d been unconscious for part of it, it couldn’t have been much more than eight days ’splitting. Which meant they were still within the Pseudo Cluster, just a hop from Hutsarte and perhaps even closer to the nameless heavy world where she’d landed Prangarris and his stolen arrays. Which was a rather unfunny joke on her when she thought about it.
There was another word that haunted her. Why? So many whys.
Why were the Jilitera treating her so well? Why were they teaching her all this?
She knew free traders and how fiercely they protected their markets; she’d heard stories about the Jilitera, who were the most secretive of them all. What she was learning was inside information, something traders never sold or told. Daddy dear, she thought. No doubt he paid them well, he’s not stupid, but he has to have some hold on them, he has to know something so bad they’ll do anything rather than let it come out. Jaink! It’s only a guess, but what else explains this!
“Lylunda ’njai, will you come to the Bridge, please. It is time that we blessed you.”
The smoke that hung thick and greasy in the unmoving air caught her in the throat, and she coughed as she stepped through the door. There was a wide shallow brdzier in the center of the floor, wood reduced to coals filling it, the red of the coals muted under gray ash. A layer of resin crystals was spread over them; these were subliming into the air, spreading a heavy sweet perfume. Beradea and Merekea knelt beside the brazier, stripped to the skin, their bodies covered with lines and whorls of thick paint, black and white mostly but with dots of crimson and amber.
Ordonai the Pilot/Owner stood on the far side of the brazier, stripped also, painted white from hairline to heels, with fmgerdrawn designs laid on the white in a glistening wet black that kept its sheen after it dried. He beckoned her forward, then flicked his hand up, palm out to stop her when she’d come far enough. “Eschewat ched doo ayal,” he chanted. “Desu telab. Desu telab.”
She stood erect and very still, fascinated because she knew she was hearing the secret tongue of the Jilitera, at least that part which she could perceive. And ’frightened because she shouldn’t be seeing this or hearing that, not that she could understand a word of what was being said.
“Dabuxoo devoo,” he chanted and held out a hand. Beredea put a shallow bowl in it, a bowl filled with a viscid golden fluid.
Lylunda’s eyes blurred and she started getting dizzy. She concentrated on keeping her eyes open and her body still; disrupting this ceremony didn’t seem like a very good idea.
“Degoo watuhbey.” He held out his other hand. Merekea dribbled a coarse meal into it until the curve of his palm was filled.
“Da oocid al di sec.” He brought his hands around in front of them, held them into the incense rising from the brazier, then let the meal trickle into the fluid. “Lerxuadid.” He mixed them together with his forefinger. “Ki ti ada.”
Merekea and Beradea rose with a disturbing sinuous grace. For an instant Lylunda saw them as twin serpents, the paint marks converted to scales. They each took one of her arms and led her around the brazier until she was standing before Ordonai.
He chanted something else, but this time she couldn’t separate the sounds from the pounding in her ears. At the same time he dipped his fingers into the bowl, scooping up a mixture of liquid and meal. Still chanting, he smeared the thick sticky mess across her brow, down her cheeks, then thrust his finger into her mouth and put another dollop on her tongue.
She concentrated grimly on keeping the contents of her stomach where they belonged.
The women’s hands tightened on her arms and Ordonai slapped her lightly on the right ear, then the left, then shouted a great word at her.
It was as if he blew out the lights when his breath touched her face.
5
When she woke, she was stretched out on a patch of grass staring into a clear blue sky. “Huh?”
She got to her feet and touched her face. Someone had washed her clean; the honey mixture was gone. The memory of Ordonai’s finger in her mouth hovered queasily for a moment, then she pushed it aside and looked around.
On her right the land sloped steeply down to a narrow white sand beach and beyond the beach blue sea glittered unhindered to the horizon. A short distance off to her left, she saw a wide path paved with white shells that glittered in the brilliant yellow sunlight.
She looked down. She was wearing a clean shipsuit and at her feet was a well-stuffed backpack. And a small square envelope was pinned to the pack.
When she opened it, she snorted. A message from her father.
Lylunda Elang,
I won’t ask for your forgiveness, only your understanding. I could not protect you here. I will have trouble in these next weeks protecting myself from those who would be delighted to use you to get at me. I have spent on you what I kept for my own safety. I have never forgotten your mother, nor
– how it felt when she put you in my arms. If Hutsartg were a different place or I were a different man… a zuz, there’s no point in that. Whatever happens to me, 1 have made arrangements to free you from your exile if at the end of four years you still wish to leave. You will find all your gear in the pack, including your credit chip. Don’t try bribing a free trader to take you offworld. The only traders who land there are the Jilitera and they would be more likely to kill you than offer you any help. Be patient, daughter, and stay alive.
She turned the letter over, but there was no signature, nothing to point to him, and the glyphs were carefully drawn, all character erased from them. “You’re a cautious man, Father,” she said and began tearing the paper into small pieces, listening to the ripping sounds with a fierce satisfaction. When she was finished, though, she remembered the strictures and stuffed the pea-sized bits into a pocket of the backpack, then checked the ground to make sure none of them had blown away.
“No point in standing around here any longer.” She lifted the backpack, got her arms through the shoulder straps, settled it in place, then crossed the strip of grass and started walking along the path, the shells crunching under her boot soles.
“Lylunda Elang who was once a happily busy smuggler with her own ship, free to go wherever she took a notion, and who is now a beachcomber exile on a backwater world, sits in her hand-carved chair at her hand-made table and prepares to eat her daily ration of tung akar.” Lylunda wrinkled her nose at the thin yellow slices of tuber laid out on the shell someone was using as a plate. “Which, begging your pardon, 0 mighty tung, tastes like mildewed cardboard.”
The Pandai in the village had cleared out this house for her and furnished it with bits and pieces from all their houses. She didn’t ask to whom it had belonged before or what had happened to them, and the villagers didn’t say. The adults brought her fruits and berries and fish they’d cooked for her, and the children took turns teaching her how to survive here and provide for herself. Friendly people, the Pandai.
She ate one of the slices, swallowed hastily, and dipped up water from the bowl in the center of the table to wash the taste from her mouth. “Seruchel says in a few days I’ll like the taste. Don’t know if I believe her. Don’t know if I want to believe her. That’s what someone told me about pelar and I suppose I was close to getting addicted to the stuff.” She ate another slice and reached for the gourd dipper.
Water wasn’t a problem here. There was an artesian spring on the side of the mountain that rose like an enlarged pimple in the center of this island. The Pandai had built a system of covered flumes that carried water to the cisterns in all the houses, the overflow dumping into a pond in the round open space at the center of the village-the Belau they called it, the Navel of the World-where the locals kept pet goldfish, five of them, each one longer than her forearm and supposedly as old as the island itself. She’d been introduced to them. Siochel, Blibur, Chadil, lodes, and Nagarak. Rough translation: Precious, Goldie, Seaflower, Coin, and Halfmoon. With the Pandai watching, all smiles and expectation, she put her hand into the water and one by one they came, rubbing their mouth barbels against her palm, tickling her Then they circled round her arm, brushing against it as if they were some form of aquatic cats.