Their word for Life was Ahd, meaning the Journey.
Some humans who took an interest in the Madis—and they were few—believed that it was Ahd which kept the Madis apart. Others believed that it was their language. That language was a song, a song where melody seemed to dominate words. There was about the Madi tongue a complexity and yet an incompleteness which seemed to bind the tribe to its way, and which certainly entangled any human who tried to learn it.
A young human was trying to learn it now.
He had made attempts to speak hr’Madi’h when a child. Now in adolescence, his situation was more serious, and his lessons correspondingly more earnest.
He waited beside a stone pillar on which was inscribed a god symbol. It marked one boundary of a land-octave or health-line, although for that ancient superstition he cared little.
The Madis approached in irregular groups or in file. Their low melody preceded them. They passed him by without looking at him, though many of the adults stroked in passing the stone by which he stood. They wore, men and women, alike, sacklike garments loosely tied at the waist. The garments had high stiff hoods which could be raised against bad weather, giving their wearers a grotesque appearance. Their wooden shoes were primitively cut, as if the feet which had to bear them through Ahd were of no consideration.
The youth could see the trail winding back like a thread through the semidesert. There was no end to it. Dust hung over it, veiling it slightly. The Madis moved with a murmur of protognostic language. At any time, someone was singing to some others, the notes passing along the line like blood through an artery. The youth had once assumed this discourse to be a commentary on the way. Now he inclined to the idea that it was some kind of narrative; but what the narrative might concern he had no idea, since for the Madis there was neither past nor future.
He awaited his moment.
He searched the faces coming towards him as if looking for someone loved and lost, anticipating a sign. Although the Madis were human in physical appearance, their countenances held a tantalizing quality, their protognostic innocence, which reminded those who looked on them of animal faces or the faces of flowers. There was one common Madi face. Its eyeballs protruded, with soft brown irises nestled in thick eyelashes. Its nose was pronouncedly aquiline, reminiscent of a parrot’s beak. The forehead receded, the lower jaw was somewhat undershot. The whole effect was startlingly beautiful in the youth’s eyes. He was reminded of a lovely mongrel dog he had worshipped as a child, and also of the white-and-brown flowers of the dogthrush bush.
By one distinguishing mark could the male face be told from the female. The male had two bosses high on their temples and two on their jaws. Sometimes these bosses were dappled with hair. Once, the youth had seen a male with short stubs of horn emerging from the bosses.
The youth looked with fondness on the array of faces as it passed. He responded to the Madi simplicity. Yet hatred burned in his harneys. He wished to kill his father, King JandolAnganol of Borlien.
Motion and murmur flowed past him. Suddenly, there was his sign!
“Oh, I thank you!” he exclaimed, and moved forward.
One of the Madis, a female driving arang, had turned her gaze away from the trail, to look directly at him, giving him the Look of Acceptance. It was an anonymous look, gone as soon as it came, a gleam of intelligence not to be sustained. He fell in beside the female, but she paid him no further attention; the Look had been passed.
He had become a part of the Ahd.
With the migrants went their animals, pack animals such as yelk, trapped in the animals’ great summer grazing grounds, as well as the semi-domesticated animals: several kinds of arang, sheep, and fhlebiht—all hoofed animals—together with dogs and asokins, which seemed as dedicated to the migratory life as their masters.
The youth, who called himself only Roba and detested the title of prince, remembered with scorn how the bored ladies of his father’s court would yawn and wish they were ‘as free as the wandering Madi.’ The Madi, with no more consciousness than a clever dog, were enslaved by the pattern of their lives.
Every day, camp was struck before dawn. At sunrise, the tribe would be off, moving to an untidy pattern. Throughout the day, rest periods occurred along the column, but the rests were brief and took no account of whether two suns or one ruled in the sky. Roba became convinced that such matters did not enter their minds; they were eternally bound to the trail.
Some days, there were obstacles on the route, a river to be crossed, a mountainside. Whatever it was, the tribe would accomplish it in their undemonstrative way. Often a child was drowned, an old person killed, a sheep lost. But the Ahd went on, and the harmony of their discourse did not cease.
At Batalix-set, the tribe came to a slow halt.
Then were chanted over and over the two words that meant ‘water’ and ‘wool’. If there was a Madi god, he was composed of water and wool.
The men saw to it that all the animals of their herd had water before they prepared the main meal of the day. The women and girls took down crude looms from their pack animals and on them wove rugs and garments of dyed wool.
Water was their necessity, wool their commodity.
“Water is Ahd, wool is Ahd.” The song had no precision, but it recognized truth.
The men sheared the wool from their animals and dyed it, the women from the age of four walked along the trail teasing the wool onto their distaffs. All the articles they made were made from wool. The wool of the long-legged fhlebiht was finest and went to make satara gowns fit for queens.
The woven articles were either stowed on pack animals or else worn by male and female alike under their drab outer garments. Later, they were traded at a town along the route, Distack, Yicch, Oldorando, Akace…
After the evening meal, eaten as dusk thickened, all the tribe slept huddled together, male, female, animal. The females came on heat rarely. When it was the time of the female Roba travelled with, she turned to him for her satisfaction, and he found delight in that fluttering embrace. Her orgasms were marked by peals of song.
The path the Madis took was as pre-ordained as the pattern of their days. They journeyed to the east or to the west by different trails; those trails sometimes crossed, sometimes wandered a hundred miles apart. A journey in one direction took an entire small year, so that such knowledge of passing time as they had was spoken of in terms of distance—that understanding was Roba’s entry point into hr’Madi’h.
That the Journey had been in progress for centuries, and perhaps for centuries before that, was evidenced by the flora growing along its way. These flower-faced creatures, who owned nothing but their animals, nevertheless dropped things all along their route. Faeces and seeds were scattered. As they walked, the women were in the habit of plucking herbs and plants such as afram, henna, purple hellebore, and mantle. These yielded dyes for their rugs. The seeds of the plants were shed, along with the seeds of food plants like barley. Burrs and spores adhered to the coats of the animals.
The Journey temporarily laid waste the grazing along its entire length. Yet it also caused the earth to bloom.
Even in semi-desert, the Madis walked through an avenue of trees, bushes, herbs which they themselves had accidentally planted. Even on barren mountainsides, flowers blossomed which were otherwise seen only in the plains. The eastward and westward avenues—called ucts by the Madis—ran like ribbons, sometimes intertwined, right across the equatorial continent of Helliconia, marking an original trail of scumber.
Endlessly walking, Roba forgot his human connections and the hatred of his father. The Journey through the ucts was his life, his Ahd. At times, he could deceive himself and believe that he understood the murmured narrative that passed through the daily bloodstream.