She stood and watched him watch the moon for a long time from the shadow of the oleanders. She went then, following shadows all along, to the edge of Cheptash Vineyard, and sat down in the mixed dark and moonlight near the trunk of a long-armed vine. From there she watched the still man. When the moon was shining higher in the sky, she went along the side of the vineyard to the corner of the apricot orchard behind Generously Dwelling House, and stood in the shadow of the porches of that house, watching him. He had not moved yet when she slipped away, still following shadow, towards the galleries on the common place where the others of her troupe had camped.
Sahelm stood still, head now held back, face lifted, eyes looking at the moon steadily. To him the blink of his eyes was a slow drumbeat. Of nothing else was he aware but the light of the moon and the drumbeat of the dark.
Kamedan came to him saying his name, late, when all lights in houses were out and the moon was above the southwestern range. “Sahelm! Sahelm! Sahelm!” he said. The fourth time he said his name, “Sahelm!” the visionary moved, cried out, staggered, and fell to hands and knees. Kamedan helped him stand up, saying to him, “Go to the Doctors Lodge, Sahelm, please, go there for me.”
“I have seen her,” Sahelm said.
Kamedan said, “Please, go to the Doctors for me. I’m afraid to move the child, I’m afraid to leave him. The others are crazy, they won’t do anything!”
Looking at Kamedan, Sahelm said, “I saw Hwette. I saw your wife. She stood near your house. By the northeast windows.”
Kamedan said, “The child is dying.” He let go his hold of Sahelm’s arms. Sahelm could not stand up, but fell again to his knees. Kamedan turned away and ran back to Hardcinder House.
He hurried into his household rooms, wrapped up Torip in the bedding, and carried him to the outer door. Shamsha followed him, a blanket pulled round her and her grey hair over her eyes, saying, “Are you crazy? The child is perfectly all right, what are you doing, where are you going with him?” She called to Fefinum and Tai, shouting, “Your sister’s husband is crazy, make him stop!” But Kamedan was already out of the house, running to the Doctors Lodge.
No one was in the house of the Lodge but Duhe, who could not sleep under the full moon. She was reading in lamplight.
Kamedan spoke at the doorway and came in, carrying the child. He said, “This child of the First House is very ill, I think.”
Duhe got up, saying as doctors say, “Well, well, well, well, let’s see about this,” slowly. She showed Kamedan a cane cot to set the child down on. “A choking? A burn? Fever, is it?” she asked, and while Kamedan answered, she watched Torip, who was half-awake, bewildered and whimpering. Kamedan said in haste, “Last night and the night before he was in high fever. In the daylight the fever goes away, but when the moon rises he calls to his mother over and over. In the household they pay no attention, they say nothing is wrong with him.”
Duhe said, “Come away into the light.” She tried to make Kamedan leave the child, but he would not go out of reach of him. She told him, “Please talk quietly if you can. That person is sleepy, and frightened a little. How long has he lived in the Moon’s House now?”[19]
“Three winters,” Kamedan said. “His name is Torip, but he has a nickname, his mother calls him Monkeyflower.”
“Well, well, well, well,” said Duhe. “Yes, a little person with gold skin and a pretty little mouth—I see the monkeyflower. There isn’t any fever just now in this little flower, or not much. Bad dreams, is it, and crying and waking in the night, is that how it’s been?” She talked slowly and softly, and Kamedan did the same when he answered, saying, “Yes, he cries, and he burns in my arms.”
The doctor said, “You see, it’s quiet here, and the light is quiet, and a person goes to sleep very easily…. Let him sleep now. Come over here.” Kamedan followed her this time. When they were on the other side of the room, near the lamp, Duhe said, “Now, I didn’t understand well, please tell me again what’s been wrong.”
Kamedan began to weep, standing there. Tears ran down his face. He said, “She doesn’t come. He calls, she doesn’t hear, she doesn’t come. She’s gone.”
Duhe’s mind had been in the book she had been reading, and then her attention had gone all to the child, so only as he wept and spoke did she bring into her mind now the things Sahelm had spoken of in the afternoon under Nehaga.
Kamedan went on, speaking louder. “The grandmother says that nothing’s wrong, nothing’s the matter—the mother gone and the child sick and nothing is the matter!”
“Hush,” Duhe said. “Let him sleep, please. Listen now. It’s not good carrying him about here and there, is it. Let him sleep the night here, and you stay with him, of course. If medicine will help, we have medicine. If a bringing-in would be good for him,[20] we’ll hold a bringing-in, maybe for both of you. We’ll do whatever seems the right thing to do. We’ll decide that in daylight, after talking and thinking and watching. Just now here, the best thing to do is sleep, I think. Since I can’t do that when the moon’s full in the sky, I’ll be sitting on the porch by the door there. If the little one cries out in dream or waking I’ll be here, I’ll be awake, listening and hearing.” While she spoke she was setting a mattress down on the floor beside the cane cot, and she said, “Now, my brother of the Serpentine, please lie down. You’re as tired as your child is. If you want to go on talking, you see, I’m sitting here in the doorway; you can lie down and talk, I can sit here and talk. The night’s cooling off at last, it’ll be better for sleeping. Are you comfortable?”
Kamedan thanked her, and lay in silence for some while.
Duhe sang in undertone on a matrix word,[21] making an interval and place for his silence. Her voice control was excellent; she sang always more faintly until the song became inaudible breath, and then stillness. After a while she stretched and yawned as she sat by the door, so that Kamedan would know the song was done if he wanted to talk.
He said, “I don’t understand the people in that house, this child’s mother’s house.”
Duhe said something so that he knew she was listening.
He went on, “When a Miller marries into a family whose work is all in the Five Houses,[22] if they’re conservative people, respectable, superstitious, you know, that can be difficult. Hard on everybody. I understood that, I understood how they felt. That’s why I joined the Cloth Art, took up weaving, when I married. My gift is mechanical, that’s how it is. You can’t deny your gift, can you? All you can do is accept it and use it, fit it into your life with the others, the people you live with, your people. When I saw how people from Telina were going to Kastoha for canvas because nobody here was using the canvas loom or doing much broadcloth weaving here, I thought, there’s the place for me, that’s work they’ll understand and approve of, using my own gift and my training as a Miller. Four years now I’ve been a member of the Cloth Art. Who else in Telina is making sheeting, canvas, broadloom linens? Since Houne left the lofts, I do all that work. Now Sahelm and Asole-Verou are learning the art with me, doing good work. I’m their teacher. But none of that does me any good in my wife’s house. They don’t care about my work, it’s Miller’s work. I’m not respectable, it’s dangerous, they don’t trust me. They wish she’d married any other man. The child, he’s a Miller’s child. And only a boy, anyway. They don’t care for him. Five days, five days she’s been gone without a word, and they don’t worry about it, they say don’t worry, what are you upset about, they say, oh, she always used to walk down to the coast alone! They make me a fool—the fool they want me to be. The moon rises and he cries out for her and they say, nothing’s wrong! Go back to sleep, fool!”
19
The child, like his mother, belongs to the First House or clan, the Obsidian, which is also the Moon’s House. Duhe is simply asking how old he is.
20
“A bringing-in” is the general term for a Kesh healing ceremony, of which there were many varieties, many connected with curative procedures for bodily ailments, some directed principally to psychic healing.
22
The Cloth Art, of which Kamedan is a member, was under the auspices of the Four Houses of the Sky. Its work is thereby defined as “dangerous”—morally or spiritually risky in one way or another (broadloom weaving because it involves the use of electricity and complex machinery). Marrying Hwette, Kamedan became part of a family whose work was under the auspices of the five Earth Houses, and so considered “safe.” He feels her household distrusts and even despises him.