Angelica (58 page)

“And when you've learned, what else will you know that you don't know now?” Tirza said with a shrug. But she didn't stop Miriam from proceeding with her project.

The days had been too busy to allow two working members to skip out and play games, so Miriam didn't have a chance to show Jossis the dolls until after dinner that night. They sat a little outside the common circle, listening to the Edori sing, and letting the flickering firelight illuminate their charades.

“Miriam, Tirza, Eleazar, Bartholomew, Anna, Claudia, Adam,” Miriam said, naming the dolls she had constructed. She had also made a whole family of black-skinned dolls to
represent Jossis and his people, and these lay before him while he watched her with narrowed eyes. “Tirza and Eleazar,” she said, and mimed the two dolls holding hands, kissing each other on the face, dancing together to simulate joy. “Happy,” she said.

Bartholomew and Anna were also seen to be happy together. Then Miriam created the whole clan as a cheerful unit, insufficient rag arms around one another, cotton kisses pressed to cotton cheeks. “All happy.” She picked up the doll that represented Jossis and brought him into the circle. Bartholomew's thin arm went around Jossis' dark neck; Tirza put her embroidered lips to his black cheek. “Happy,” she said again.

Then she induced the Jossis doll to dance across the blanket to his fellows piled up before Jossis himself. “Happy?” she asked when the character was reunited with his clan.

But Jossis shook his head vehemently. “Sad,” he said.

He took the Jossis doll and set it aside, midway between the two camps, and frowned down at the pile of bodies before him. Then, with a sudden furious action, he dove his hands into the mass of dolls and flung them into the air. He grabbed one of the bigger dolls and used it to beat on the smaller ones, then the smaller ones turned on one another in equal violence. Snatching up a stick from the ground, Jossis held this to the hand of one of the figures and manipulated it so that it lashed across the faces of the others. But this didn't satisfy him. He looked around, his face still creased in a scowl. While Miriam sat watching in some stupefaction, he leapt to his feet, hurried over to the circle of Edori around the fire, and dipped his stick into the flames. The tip was burning when he came back to sit beside Miriam again.

“Mozanan,” he announced, and set several of the dolls on fire.

“Jossis!” Miriam exclaimed, but he sat there calmly, watching each little black hand, each crude face, go up in flames.

Then he reached for the doll that represented him and danced it back to its homeland. “Jossis,” he said, and set himself on fire.

A shadow fell over them. “What's going on here? What's
he doing?” Eleazar's voice demanded. “Are you trying to burn down the camp?”

Miriam stared up at him, so stunned at Jossis' actions that she was having trouble recalling speech patterns. “He's—he's showing me what life is like at home among his clan,” she said stupidly.

Eleazar made a sound like a grunt. “Well, that can't surprise you much. It's what his clan is like here, too.”

“I think they war against each other, not just us,” she said.

“Violent men are violent all the time,” Eleazar said. “That's what I've been saying about your little friend here.”

But Miriam shook her head emphatically. Jossis had not looked up, even when Eleazar came striding over. He was watching his friends, his family members, himself, burn away to cinders and ash. “Not Jossis,” she said. “He's different.”

Three days of bitter cold kept everyone in the camp, desperate for the warmth of the fire. They took turns keeping a nighttime watch so that someone could feed logs to the fire all night long and they would not have to wake to absolute zero. Even so, the mornings were almost unendurable. Miriam was, every day, the last one to leave the tent, the one most reluctant to pull herself from the shared warmth of friendly bodies and thrust herself out into the hostile chill of the day. She would cling to Tirza's hand when the older woman tried to rise, or grab Amram's foot and wrestle him back to the ground beside her, murmuring, “Heat, heat, heat, heat.” She only got up when the whole tent was empty and it was scarcely any warmer inside than out.

But she was worried about Jossis.

He still was sleeping solitary in a small tent that, even close to the fire, had no interior warmth. He would freeze to death, she was sure of it. She would go in one morning and find him a curled black stone of a man. She had procured extra blankets for him, which he accepted willingly, but he refused to go to any other tent at night.

She had tried to pantomime for him the benefits of communal sleeping. She had kept her dolls, and made another one to represent Jossis, and one morning she made little tents for them out of leftover fabric. The Jossis doll, lying solitary
under his canvas, shivered and could not sleep. When he crept over to Miriam's tent, though, and slipped between Amram and Tirza, he sighed and grew warm and instantly fell asleep.

Jossis smiled when she enacted this play for him, but he shook his head. “Why?” Miriam demanded in frustration.

Jossis picked through the dolls to find a particular one she had named earlier. “Eleazar,” he said, holding it up. Eleazar then confronted Jossis, shaking in a way that connoted anger. “Eleazar not happy Jossis.”

Miriam snatched all the dolls back and renamed them. “Anna, Bartholomew, Thaddeus, Shua,” she said, and walked the Jossis creation over to that shared tent. “Jossis sleep Bartholomew. Warm.”

But Jossis just shook his head. “No,” he said.

Tirza, when appealed to, did not seem too worried about it. “He hasn't died yet,” was what she said when Miriam expressed her chief worry. “Let him live the way he chooses to live, Miriam.”

“But his way is wrong!”

Tirza laughed at her. “And here I thought you were turning into a true Edori.”

Which made Miriam furious, but she realized the underlying criticism was true. She could happily camp year-round with a tribe of clansmen, travel the length and breadth of Samaria with them, living off the land, doing her share of the chores, celebrating the change of seasons—but she would never truly think like an Edori. She had too many opinions and was willing to express them too strongly; she had no deep well of tolerance to draw on, and not a great deal of patience, either.

“If a true Edori would let a fellow clansman die out of sheer stubbornness, then I suppose I am not one,” Miriam said sullenly.

Tirza laughed again. “But you will not let him freeze. I am very sure of that.”

Thinking that over, Miriam realized there was a way to save Jossis from himself.

Accordingly, that night after the campfire songs, she rounded up the ever-willing Amram, and they pulled their
pallets and blankets from their accustomed tent. “Where are
they
going?” Eleazar demanded.

“Elsewhere, for a little change,” Tirza said mildly, and Eleazar did not ask further questions.

Jossis appeared to have just wrapped himself in his own blanket when Miriam pulled back the tent flap and peered in. “Jossis?” she said, just to announce herself. “Miriam and Amram sleep here. Warm.”

“Ska?” he said, sitting up on his pallet, clearly unsure, at least for a moment, what this invasion meant. But Miriam pushed her way inside the small space, Amram behind her, and they proceeded to arrange themselves on either side of the other man.

“Meerimuh,” Jossis said in a scolding voice. He unleashed a torrent of words that sounded both disapproving and slightly panicked, but Miriam and Amram ignored him.

“Will you be warm enough there?” Miriam asked the boy. “Would you rather sleep between us?”

“I think we'd better keep him in the middle, or he'll sneak out before midnight,” was Amram's response.

Miriam stifled a giggle. “If he gets up in the middle of the night, you scream and grab his ankle.”

“What if he's just going to the water tent?”

“Then I guess he'll be embarrassed, won't he?”

They both laughed at that. Jossis was still talking to them earnestly, trying to explain something that clearly they were not going to understand. Miriam knelt beside him on her own pallet and gave him a serious look.

“This is the Lohora way,” she said.

And she put her palm flat against his chest and pushed him back to his pallet. At first he resisted, still talking, but a little more halfheartedly. “Sleep now,” Miriam said firmly. “Warm.”

“Jossis Mozanan,” he said, but he sounded less convinced. “Not Lohora.”

“Lohora now,” Miriam said, and pushed some more.

He lay down with a sigh, flat on his back and staring up at the top of the tent. Miriam glanced over at Amram, who nodded. As soon as Miriam lay on her own pallet and pulled her blanket up to her chin, she and Amram both scooted over,
to press Jossis between their two bodies. He yelped out some word of distress in his own language, but they laughed and stayed where they were. Miriam could feel the tension in his body, through her own blanket, through his, but she did not roll away. He would lie awake all night, alarmed and unhappy, or he would sleep; and if he slept, he would sleep warm; and if he did not sleep, he would be so tired that the next night he would have no choice but to fall asleep between them. He would have to accept their ways, which were good ways. He was an Edori now.

For the next three nights, Amram and Miriam joined Jossis in his small tent. After the first session, which seemed to pass for Jossis in a sort of ecstatic terror, the Mozanan man seemed to relax and actually enjoy the company. This might have been because, one night, Miriam and Amram began tickling and teasing each other, in the process climbing over Jossis and kneeing him in the ribs or—accidentally, of course—tickling him, too. This might have been because Amram hid a rabbit skull in the bottom of Miriam's blanket or because Miriam crushed highly perfumed dried seeds over Amram's pallet. In any case, there was much merriment inside that small tent for those three days, and Jossis could not help but join in the laughter.

On the fourth night, Amram elected to sleep in Bartholomew's tent. Miriam elected to sleep beside Jossis as usual.

They had both stayed at the campfire circle as long as the circle held, lifting their voices on the group songs and listening quietly when someone rose to perform a solo. Over the past couple of weeks, Jossis had learned the harmonies to a few of the more common melodies, and had acquired the ability to produce the words at least phonetically, so he always sang along on the pieces he knew. Miriam liked to sit beside him and listen to his voice tentatively skip to the note he was not sure of, then strengthen when he realized he had it right. Conversely, she also liked to sit across the fire from him so she could watch his face shift between concentration and delight. He had not offered to sing a solo again. She thought perhaps he was shy about his voice, which was sweet but not particularly well-trained. She thought that
perhaps that would be the next thing she would teach him: formal music.

There was so much to teach him. She was impatient for him to learn the words that he would need to acquire all the other knowledge he must have.

The singing hummed to a close and the circle began to drift apart. Miriam watched Amram go off to Bartholomew's tent, first pausing to speak a few words to Thaddeus, who would mind the fire for the early evening shift. She waited till most of the tents were full for the night, and there were not many observant eyes turned her way, before going to the only tent with a single occupant.

Jossis was already lying on his pallet by the time she crept in, and he instinctively moved over to make room for her. She was settled in next to him, her back against his stomach, before he seemed to realize that something about the night was different.

“Amram?” he asked.

“Bartholomew's tent,” she replied.

There was a moment's silence, then Jossis spoke again, more urgently. “Amram? Now?”

“Not now,” Miriam said.

“Meerimuh!”

She hunched her shoulders in the dark, letting him feel the motion of the shrug. He knew that gesture well enough. “It doesn't matter,” she added for good measure. “Warm.”

But this made him tense, and she could feel his coiled body refusing to relax against her. She mentally reviewed all the reasons he would find it unacceptable to be alone at night with a woman. First, of course, there seemed to be some privacy issues among the people of the Mozanan clan, and perhaps her mere closeness was a taboo that he did not know how to explain. Second, the aura of intimacy was impossible to mistake, and he might have all sorts of objections to sexual context: He might be a virgin, he might be celibate, he might be promised to some girl back on Mozanan and true to his vows.

Or he might simply be too young to be comfortable with the thought of sleeping next to a woman. She didn't think that was it, though. She hadn't had a chance to try to explain
the concept of “years” and “age” to him, but she did not think, even in his own culture, he could be as young as Amram. For one thing, he had been conscripted to serve with his fellow clansmen on this perilous journey. Surely he must be a man by his people's standards, though a young one. For another thing . . . well, she had seen him stretched out and naked, and he looked like an adult to her.