Bones of the Past (Arhel) (17 page)

Roba sighed and picked up her notes. “Come over to my apartment tonight—will that be soon enough?”

“I suppose it will have to be.”

* * *

The Wen kids had, after considerable debate among themselves, accepted sleeping mats—which they had then unrolled under the eaves in the central garden. They would not sleep in the house, no matter how Nokar and Medwind tried to reason with them. They ignored the rain, and refused to come inside. When Medwind checked on them early the next morning, the rain had stopped again, and they were pacing around the enclosed courtyard, pointing at various plants and flowers—and Medwind’s b’dabba—making quiet comments in their odd, musical language. Kirtha had joined them and was trying diligently to communicate with the little blonde Wen child.

“You gots no shirt,” Kirtha announced in her high, piping voice.

The Wen child said something to the bigger girl, who, in Hraddo said, “She no speak you words. You speak Hraddo, I tell she what you say.”

Medwind watched without calling attention to herself. Kirtha, at two, didn’t know Hraddo any more than she knew whatever language the Wen kids used among themselves. The Hoos woman was interested in seeing how Kirtha would solve the dilemma of not being understood.

“You gots no shirt,” Kirtha said to the older girl, in loud, firm Arissonese.

“Talk Hraddo,” the older girl said. “I no talk you words.”

“I gots shirt.” Kirtha lifted the skirt of her tunic and showed it to both girls. “I gots nice shirt.”

All three Wen kids conversed, and the older girl shrugged. “I no understand you talk,” she told the child patiently. “You no talk Hraddo, I no talk you talk.”

“You take my’s shirt,” Kirtha said, and pulled her tunic off over her head and handed it to the older Wen girl. “I gots lots.”

The Wen girl took the tunic, her eyes wide with surprise. Medwind shared her amazement. Kirtha had never shown any inclination to share—was, in fact, territorial about her possessions to the point of bloodthirstiness.

The girl looked at the tunic, and after a moment’s thought, put it on the little Wen kid, saying something vehemently at the same time. The blonde girl looked like she might resist, but, after a glare from the older girl, allowed the foreign clothing to be pulled over her head.

The arms and skirt of the tunic were too short, but the Wen child was terribly thin. It was no tighter on her than it had been on Kirtha, who surveyed the results with evident delight.

“Pretty. Good shirt,” she announced, and smiled broadly, and hugged the smallest Wen child, who was still a head and a half taller than her, vigorously. Then, without another word, she strode across the garden—her baggy peasant pants tucked into her little boots; her fiery red hair swinging; bare as the day she was born from the waist up.

Medwind smiled. Kirtha was a constant source of surprises.

She waited until the little girl had banged through the garden door and stomped down the breezeway to the room she shared with her mother. She waited yet another moment until she heard Faia exclaim, “Kirtha, what did you do with your shirt?!”

Then Medwind walked out into the garden.

The Wen kids were instantly on the defensive.

“She no steal that,” the older girl said, pointing to the little one. “Red-hair girl give her. You want back?”

“We have more clothes,” Medwind said. “You want for you? I give you shirt, pants.”

The kids looked at her warily. “Why?” the boy asked.

“You need. I give you.”

The two older kids exchanged suspicious glances, and the girl asked, “Why you give?”

Medwind looked at the three scrawny, half-starved kids and said slowly, “Because you need. You want?”

“This is trade? You say give, you mean trade, yes? We no trade
beck
for shirt. We trade food only. Many many food.” The girl crossed her arms over her chest and glared fiercely. The boy, with the First Folk tablet still strapped to his back, hooked his thumbs into the thong that held up his loincloth and nodded his agreement.

Medwind sighed. “Give. I say give, I mean give,”
you suspicious little brats
, she added silently. “Come,” she told them, and went into her b’dabba. The kids followed her inside. She knelt and rummaged around in her kit bag, and pulled out two old staarnes and two worn pairs of blue-dyed leather breeches—clothes that had seen better days. “Take these,” she said, and turned.

The kids weren’t looking at her. They were looking, instead, at the huge assortment of drums hanging from the b’dabba’s bone struts. They took the clothes she offered, but their eyes never left the dangling instruments. All three of them exchanged whispers, and at last the older girl turned to Medwind. “We touch?” she asked.

So they like drums.
“Yes,” the Hoos woman said, and watched as they carefully pulled down several of the smaller drums. They exchanged excited comments, pointing out structural details, trying riffs with their fingers, and cocking their heads to listen to the varied sounds. They finally settled on a shopo, a tunable drum with a musical, carrying sound. Each of them took turns pattering away on it—irregular Wen drumming exactly like the noises that kept Medwind awake at night.

Let me strike a blow for cultural harmony, she thought
. She took the drum away from them, sat cross-legged on a pillow, and said, “No. Play drum this way.” She set up an easy four-beat rhythm with her right hand, then added a six-beat rhythm with her left. The drum sang, and the shifting, melding patterns filled the goat-felt hut. When she finished, she handed the drum to the older girl. “You try like that.”

The girl stared at her, baffled. “Why? You say nothing. You just make lot noise.”

It was Medwind’s turn to be bewildered. “What you mean—’say.’ I make music.”

The older girl made a deprecating noise through pursed lips and sat with the drum. “This drum talk,” she said. “Like this.”

“
Tagnu fnaffigglotim—fnaffigchekta hekpeknu
.” She said the words slowly, and drummed an irregular riff.

Medwind caught her breath. She noted similarities in the pattern of the girl’s speech and her drumming and formed a theory about the Wen drumming. “Do again,” she said.

“Tagnu fnaffigglotim—fnaffigchekta hekpeknu,”
the girl repeated, pronouncing each syllable precisely. Then she drummed again. Each drumbeat mimicked a syllable of the girl’s speech.

Medwind was stunned. She could hear it clearly—things the girl did with her fingers made the drum seem to talk. The mystery of the rhythmless Wen drum concerts was solved. Medwind had been eavesdropping on long-distance conversations and hadn’t even known.

“What those words mean?” she asked.

The girl grinned. “I drum-talk—trade drum with you.”

“You want drum?”

The skinny kid nodded vigorously. “I want. I trade. It good drum—loud.”

“What you trade?” Medwind would have given the kid that drum—it held no particular meaning for her. But she was curious what the kids thought the drum was worth. They had nothing, at least that she had seen, but their First Folk tablet.

And they had already made it clear they weren’t taking anything but food—and lots of it—for that.

“I give you shirt,” the girl said, offering back the staarne Medwind had just given her.

Medwind just barely kept herself from laughing. The situation was both funny and pitiful. The kids had nothing—absolutely nothing. But they wanted that drum.

Medwind pretended to consider the offer. “Why you want drum?” she asked.

“Other tagnu, he have us drum. He fall in river. Dead. Drum gone—we need.”

Medwind wanted to ask them more about their friend with the drum, but Hraddo simply didn’t allow the complexity of real communication. It was a trade tongue, nothing more.

She had an idea. “I trade for drum,” she told them. “I make good trade. You teach me drum-talk, I give you drum.”

The Wen kids stared at her as if she had started frothing at the mouth and howling at the Tide Mother. They huddled, muttering in their rapid-fire speech, looking up at her from time to time. Finally the girl said, “You trade drum for drum-talk. That right?”

“That right,” Medwind agreed.

“What you get for drum?”

Medwind tried to figure out how to explain the value of knowledge in Hraddo and gave up. “I get words,” she told them.

“That trade you want?”

“Yes.”

“We take—you no change trade, understand?”

Medwind nodded solemnly. “I understand.”

“We take.” The girl took the drum and handed it to the boy, then shook her head and stared at the Hoos warrior with a worried expression. “You no smart. We get drum. You get nothing.”

“I get words,” Medwind said. “I need lot words.”

Both Wen kids were busy putting on the hand-me-down Hoos garb. They didn’t say anything out loud, but their eyes told the Hoos warrior they thought she was out of her mind.

She smiled at them—a reassuring smile. Let them think she was crazy as long as they would. The words were good—understanding the Wen drum speech would be a wonderful asset. But that was nothing compared to the time she’d bought—time for Nokar or her to find out where that tablet came from.

That
was even better.

* * *

Seven-Fingered Fat Girl, swathed in her peknu clothes, fingered the drum the peknu woman had traded her. It didn’t make sense to her that the woman would give her the drum in exchange for words. Nothing that had happened since she walked into the market made sense to her, though.

The old man wanted the tablet—but instead of trading Fat Girl food for it and sending her on her way, he brought her to his house and insisted on feeding her and her tagnu. His mate gave them clothes and good drums and made terrible trades. Fat Girl thought the peknu woman would have starved long ago if she’d had to live by her trading skills.

Fat Girl munched on some bread—a peknu food the people of the house kept giving her. She liked it. It filled her stomach, and she looked around, trying to figure out what kind of plant bread grew on. She wanted to get some of those plants in trade.

While she munched, she wondered how long it would take to teach the peknu woman drum-talk. She wondered if she could drag it out until the end of the rainy season, so that when she and her tagnu crossed back into the jungle, they could do so without having to fight the swollen, deadly river and the horrible flash-floods.

She decided she could probably count on free food and a place to sleep for at least that long. Anyone stupid enough to trade a perfectly good drum for nothing would take a good long time to learn her nothing.

* * *

One cycle of the Tide Mother later, Seven-Fingered Fat Girl was forced to revise her estimate. While the worst of the rains were over, they would still come and go for at least another cycle—but Medwind Song and Faia Rissedote and Nokar Feldosonne were drumming their way intelligibly through simple messages. And they spoke Sropt, the True Language. Not well, but better than Fat Girl had learned their tongue in the same length of time. She could barely understand the demands of little Kirtha, while she suspected the three peknu followed the better part of her conversations with Dog Nose and Runs Slow.

The peknu made her uneasy. She liked them, and this worried her. She sat in Medwind’s b’dabba, drumming the odd rhythms the peknu woman favored, trying to understand the peknu, and what it was they wanted from her.

Dog Nose peeked into the b’dabba. “I want to talk.”

Fat Girl nodded toward the cushion not already occupied by Hrogner, the compound’s thieving, fire-starting cat.

The boy leaned over on his way past and kissed her, a peknu thing he had learned watching Medwind and Nokar.

She grinned at him and stopped drumming.

“I think we need to trade our
beck
and get away from here,” Dog Nose said.

Fat Girl closed her eyes. Her grin died. The journey that lay ahead of them, back through the jungle, through the domain of the Keyu, unrolled in her imagination. She was afraid to go back into that green-roofed hell—more afraid with every day that passed. And the reward at the end of the trail became less tempting as well. The cold, sere city perched atop the mountains waited in her mind’s eye. It would be lonely without Spotted Face and Three Scars. There would be no Toes Point In to dance from house to house, telling stories about the pictures on the walls. Laughs Like A Roshi’s wild laughter would never fill one of those empty rooms again.

“What if we didn’t go back?” she said.

Dog Nose sat back on the pillow and stared at her. “What?”

“I’ve been thinking.” Fat Girl rolled the ends of the drum’s hide wrappings through her fingers and stared down at her feet. “We could stay here.”

Dog Nose made a disgusted noise. “I knew you were starting to think that. You’re getting soft, Fat Girl. You’re acting like these peknu will let you stay.” He leaned forward, palms pressed flat on the b’dabba floor, and stared into Fat Girl’s eyes. “The Keyu didn’t want you. Your own parents didn’t want you. And when these peknu decide they don’t want you anymore, either, they will make you go away. You will have forgotten how to live in the jungle, and the Keyu will kill you.”

He averted his eyes and whispered, “And then I will be alone.”

Seven-Fingered Fat Girl looked down at the drum nestled in her lap.
That’s what has been bothering me about the peknu
, she realized.
Something inside me knows they will make me leave—but I didn’t want to believe it
. She listened to the noises emanating from the big house. Faia was laughing, telling some story to a man who’d come to buy the things she made. Kirtha yelled, “Medwind! Medwind! Look’a me! I’m tagnu,” in her shrill, piping voice, while Medwind said, “Hush, monster. I’m working. And put your shirt back on.” Nokar whistled, busy in his workroom.

All the peknu would gather in that same workroom later to trade drum riffs and tall tales with the tagnu. Kirtha would climb on Fat Girl’s lap and play with her hair. They both had the same color hair, a coincidence that delighted the peknu child.