“No, you’re not. Diam, Luna.”
Lylunda eased herself around, scowled at Outocha. “Seru ran to get you, didn’t she. So I don’t want to be here.”
“We know. Sometimes, Luna, when you fight what is, you only hurt yourself. If you could just accept us, you’d have a good life here.”
“Turn Pandai?” Lylunda pushed away from the sink, made it to the table and lowered herself into one of the chairs. “Sit if you will, Outocha.”
“Thank you.” The Pandai woman arranged herself in the chair across the table from Lylunda, reached out and touched her wrist lightly, then drew her hand back. “Yes. As our elders did. Is our life so bad, Luna?”
“It’s a good life for those who like it, but for me, it’d be like cutting off an arm and a leg. I’d have to be someone else, not me. And I’d lose my mousika.” She watched Outocha’s eyes go blank. “You don’t have a word for it. You can’t even think about it. I want my life back, Outocha.”
“You won’t have any kind of life if you keep on the way you’ve been.” The older woman reached out again, wrapped her hands around Lylunda’s wrists, her thumbs pressed on the big veins; there was electricity in her touch, then a sense of drawing out, as if she pulled strength from Lylunda to augment her own. She closed her eyes, the vertical line deepening between her sun-bleached brows; when her voice came, it had a distant, hollow sound. “It is difficult… sometimes… to remember… my mother told me of… of a way to slow the closing of the bond.-She got the last words out in a rush, squeezed her ’eyes more tightly shut. “A tea… yes, an infusion of ahhhh… of cherar leaves.”
There was a long pause. When Outocha spoke again, Lylunda had to strain to hear the faint whisper. “It is dangerous; if you get the wrong leaves, gather them at the wrong time, try to store them, cherar will kill you. You must pick the pale green leaves without the red veins, they’re the youngest and the only ones it’s safe to use. And you have to gather them when it’s light enough to see but before the sun has cleared the world’s edge. No more than twelve leaves. You must take a bowl with you and a pestle and mash the leaves into a paste as soon as you’ve gathered the twelve. You bring the paste home, soak it in cold water, not hot water, never hot water. When the water turns a dark blue-green, you strain, it through cloth into a bottle with a wax stopper. You drink two fingers of the liquid a day until it is gone. Then you gather more.” her eyes went blank again, her hands left Lylunda’s wrists to rest on the table, wholly relaxed with the fingers lightly curled.
Lylunda leaned forward tensely. “Will you show me where to find cherar and what it looks like?”
“What?” Life came back to Outocha’s face. She frowned. “Why?”
For an instant Lylunda was as astonished as she’d been when Seruchel wasn’t allowed to be aware of music. This was the aspect of the Tung Bond that terrified her most; whatever acted to diminish that bond was counted as enemy and as much as possible not permitted to happen. The kindness of the Pandai woman could for a moment override this, but not for long. And that’s the joy of the telilu, she thought suddenly. It lets them remember what the Bond has forced them to forget. No wonder I thought I heard something like singing. Oy, Jaink help me, 1 have to get away from this world. Somehow… Aloud, she said “It’s part of my lessoning, isn’t it. To learn all the plants of the island, I mean. The bad as well as the good.”
“Are you feeling well enough to walk a while?”
“Slow and easy, if you don’t mind, but it’ll be good for me to get out. You’re right, I can’t sleep my days away without getting really sick.” Hope, she thought
Better than a hit of pelar. If only she shows me the right plant. With the Bond pulling her about, who knows…, when she took my hand she could override that.. maybe that’ll work, she points out the plant; I take her hand and ask if she’s sure… jojing tung…
10
Lylunda tilted the cup, then straightened it and watched the murky liquid oil back down the sides. Even after the straining it looked like cheap ink that was beginning to separate its solids from the liquid base. “Two fingers a day? I don’t know…”
Closing her eyes, she downed the mess, then groped for the water gourd so she could wash the taste from her mouth. Taste? As if something had solidified the stench off a slaughterhouse on a hot, steamy summer day.
Her stomach cramped. She staggered to the table, caught-hold of the edge, and crabbed around it until she reached one of the chairs. She lowered herself onto the sea, then she hunched over, hugging herself, rocking from buttock to buttock.
The cramps only lasted a few minutes, then the churning in her stomach and the pressure against her sphincters gave her just enough warning to let her reach the fresher and get herself seated before everything let go.
She spent the afternoon swimming in the sunwarmed seawater of the small inlet north of Chiouti. The sea cradled her and fed energy into her. When she reluctantly dragged herself from the water, wrapped a spare mezu around her shoulders and started walking back to her house, she felt more like herself than she had in weeks.
She walked through the village, greeting folk involved in the continual work of supplying themselves with the necessities of life. They smiled and nodded and answered her greetings, but it seemed to her that once again they were on the far side of a glass pane and not quite real as ancient museum dioramas were never quite real no matter how much art was expended in their making. In an odd sort of way it was comforting, a sign that her morning’s ordeal was not worthless.
When she showed up later in the afternoon to do her share of the work in the combing and spinning sheds, the women there seemed to have trouble remembering that she was among them though there was the usual laughter and jokes as they passed the hanks of dried fiber about, or wound the spun thread onto cones for the looms. They weren’t trying to be unfriendly, but the startled looks when they noticed her and their shaky smiles made her uneasy. She left the sheds after half an hour and went to sit on the lava pile staring out across the blinding blue of the sea.
She tossed a fragment of black rock into the water hissing about the foot of the pile. “I went too far,” she said. “Purged too much. I have to find a balance, something that will let me be here, but keep my roots shallow enough so I can tear loose without bleeding to death.”
After a while she heard a clunking sound, got to her feet, and looked down. The drum she’d spent so much futile effort on was bobbing in the water and bumping against the rocks, driftwood of a different sort. She lay on her stomach, caught hold of the cord that laced the heads on, and pulled it up. The chemidik wax on the wood had kept water out and the working of the sun and the sea had tightened the heads. Water had gotten inside, but only a little, just enough to slosh about when she shook it.
She settled back on the rock and tapped the head. The sound had changed. Or was it that she’d changed? It still wasn’t loud or like any drum she remembered, but it sang to her. She closed her eyes and called up the music she and Qatifa had danced to, it seemed a century ago. Tump tump ti tump ti tah tump ti tump…
She played till her fingers were raw and the day darkened toward sunset and the evening breeze came cold off the sea.
In the days that followed she experimented with the cherar infusion and the slices of tung akar, at first alternating them, eating the tung one day, drinking the infusion the next day, then changing the number of the slices and the amount of the liquid until she finally found a balance where the Pandai were easy around her, but she could still hear the music in the drum.