Harmony (37 page)

“What’s going on?” Mark dropped to the floor beside me. “You can hear music all over the theatre!”

“Shhh!” I said.

As Moussa shed his own shoes, Te-Cucularit began a new chant.

His light tenor was sure and sweet. It played harmonic chase games with Moussa’s bass when the musician joined him after a verse. Ule’s panpipes interwove a sprightly melody. The women knelt and began to paint.

Rows of symbols flowed out of their flicking wrists. Half letter, half image, they had the look of hieroglyphs born of rock and water rather than sand, the histories of the clan spun out in color and line. The women sang counterpoint to the men as they worked. Their speed and steady rhythm was mesmerizing. Joy informed each stroke, an infectious communal joy that poured over me as I watched. Because it was joy and not terror, I let it in without resisting, let it spiral me up, away, out of the dark, waiting theatre. Drifting skyward, I felt myself smile.

The music stopped. I woke from a daydream of open sky, marveling at how profoundly blue it was, and how inviting. Too inviting. I am not given to drifting off in the middle of things. It made me uneasy. No, more than uneasy. It scared the piss out of me.

“Good, aren’t they?” said Mark coolly. “But then we knew that.”

The first section of the Matta was completed. The thin, brilliant pigment that Cu had mixed was already dry enough to allow the fabric to be moved. Cris sat next to Moussa in the line of the men. Presumptuous, I thought, but the Eye didn’t seem to mind. Hickey squatted tentatively beside No-Mulelatu, as if being included in such activity was only slightly preferable to being left out.

“That was quick.” I tried to sound offhand.

Mark laughed. “We’ve been sitting here nearly an hour. Where have you been?”

I couldn’t answer that for the life of me.

A fresh length of fabric was unfolded. The women went back to work, singing and painting. I’ll keep my head better, I thought, if I don’t listen so hard. But the Eye’s music wouldn’t stand still for casual listening. It was too full of surprises, of suddenly syncopated rhythms, of shrill atonal ululations swooping up out of close and gentle harmonies while the pulsing support of a bass drone drops away like land at the edge of a precipice. I was drawn back into my sky dreaming when it became too interesting to resist. When I came to myself again, the Matta was nearly done. Mark was nudging me. Te-Cucularit stood in front of us.

“Gwinn-Rhys, your hand is needed.”

I stared up at him. He shifted, irritated by my lack of response. I glanced around. The women were still painting, the men still singing and playing. Cris had acquired Moussa’s wood blocks and was managing them rather creditably. The shop crew were on break, but Ruth lingered, sitting upstage on a sawhorse with one of the new hands, a big, scrawny kid with a red beard. They were swinging their feet to the music, enjoying themselves.

“We’re all here now,” Cu insisted. “You’re needed to complete the circle of the women.”

I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. I looked around again. While I’d been drifting, Sam and Mali had arrived. Sam! Bruised but upright, propped against a stack of flooring, nodding approvingly as Moussa beat out a complicated riff on a small quartet of lap drums. My joy at seeing him alive took me quite by surprise.

“Go on, G,” urged Mark as Cu held out his hand.

I took it distractedly. He pulled me smartly to my feet, then released me, and shoved a brush into my fist. I stared at it as dumbly as I’d stared at him. Sunlight gold glimmered on its tip.

“But I don’t know what to paint!”

Cu dismissed that with a flick of his head. “Paint your own tale. Paint as I taught you. It will be all right.”

My own tale?
Why did this fill me with such unreasoning panic? I cast around for support. Cris, Hickey, Mark—all intent on the singing. Their joy now threatened with its single-minded intensity.

“What
is
the matter?” Cu hissed, in the tone of an actor whose colleague has suddenly gone dry on him. The honesty of it shocked me back to reason. How foolish. If I knew how to do anything, I knew how to paint. The brush was weighty and familiar in my hand, and the memory of my daydream vivid enough to reproduce in every detail. It didn’t even matter that the color was wrong.

“Nothing,” I said, and knelt to paint the confusion of a young woman winging skyward even while fully aware that she is sitting inside a darkened theatre, under a dome.

* * *

The formality of the ritual broke down spontaneously with the completion of the Matta. The women tossed their brushes down. Ule pocketed his panpipes. Moussa and Pen drew aside to play dueling drums. Sam groaned to his feet and limped over to inspect the painting.

His face was hard to look at, stitched and swollen and discolored. He mocked his own slurred speech, even as pain cut short every syllable. He wasn’t causing rare orchids to appear, but he was there, walking around when he shouldn’t have been able to.

“… magicked him”
Jane’s voice whispered in my head. The women gathered around to make much of him.

Cris tried to formulate an apology that wasn’t too abject.

Sam looked up at him. “So, you thought I was the Conch.”

“Well, I…”

“Me, all by myself? I’m flattered.” Shrugging off Mali’s arm, Sam eased himself onto a pile of folded masking. “That’ll be the day, when they get the drop on the Conch, when they beat the living shit out of Latooea!”

“Oh, Sam!” Omea laid her brown cheek against his black-and-blue one. “You’re beating yourself up harder than they did.”

“You see where romantic foolery can get you?” Mali rumbled.

Cris shrugged. “Harmless speculation, I thought.”

“Listen, young Crispin: spend less time chasing Latooea and more worrying about your Closed Door League adding apprenticeship to its list of felonies.”

Upstage, the carpenters came off break and went back to their cutting and hammering. Two of the regular crew began setting up a rolling metal scaffold. The pipe was rickety and the men moved with the dull slowness of the deeply exhausted. I thought,
Someone should send them home
. But if we did, the show wouldn’t get built.

Omea swept up to admire my little bit of work, my “tale.” I smiled and nodded, convinced there could be no real sense to what I had done. I wasn’t sure it mattered. I felt oddly disassociated. A spacy sense of floating persisted from my sky-dream. I watched Mark sit down with Mali and Sam. Soon they’d be talking politics. Lucienne retired with Hickey to the dubious privacy of house left. He put one arm around her neck and buried the other in the flowers on her breasts. Cris eased away from the political discussion to “find” himself conveniently next to Tua as she helped Tuli pack up their paint. But I stayed where I was, cross-legged in front of the gold-flecked green of the Matta.

My eyes, scanning the stage with all the emotional awareness of a remote-sensing device, finally settled on Te-Cucularit, crouched over the Puleales, still hard at work. The unambiguous physicality of paint and brush and the purity of Cu’s intent were stabilizing to my unmoored state of mind. Soothed, I watched him paint.

“No use looking at him, he won’t have you.” No-Mulelatu lounged nearby, packing the bowl of his tiny pipe with dry greenish fibers.

I quickly shed my dreamy smile. “I wasn’t—”

“He won’t, you know. Saves himself for his pure-blooded woman.” Ule shaped a thin curl of rich, acrid smoke to twist around his finger like a lock of hair. “Now, me, I am not so narrow-minded. I see quality where it lies.”

The pipe went out and he lit a nearly invisible lighter to heat it up again. My eyes told me his thumb was on fire. My brain said: okay, perfectly normal for a Tuatuan.

“Or you could just keep on looking at him like that.”

“You don’t understand, it’s not—”

Ule chuckled. “No insult, ladykins. They all look at him that way. Even the men. Especially the men.”

“You’re jealous.”

He considered, sucking in smoke and holding it. “Nope,” he exhaled finally. “Rather my passionate heart than his glorious body. You think you domers are the only ones he’s hard on? He’s a stone, Cu is. Dried up inside.”

I was grateful for something concrete to focus on. “Nice way to talk about your friends.”

“Te-Cucularit is my clansman, for whom I would give my life. But he is not my friend. Now, Mali and Sam. That’s friends.”

“I see you with Cu all the time.”

Ule shrugged. “We’re from the same village. Fourth Clan, Earth—Nawki, the Death. Heavy burden, y’know? Somebody’s got to keep him out of trouble, with that stiff neck of his, obsessed with tradition and the past. A thing’s not real to him until it’s straitjacketed into ritual.” He smirked. “Sam calls him the Preacher.”

“So I hear. But you don’t think tradition is important?”

“Not for its own sake. Latooea writes, ‘Through the past we create the future.’ Cu only looks backward. No, my lady, you’re better off with me. I’m the safer bet.”

It was hard not to smile back at him. The offer was generously given. “No insult, No-Mulelatu,” I replied. “I’m already taken.”

“Are you?” He flopped back on one elbow as if to draw more deeply on his pipe, but his glance targeted Cris and Tua, shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the stage. Tua was talking earnestly. Cris was eager and predatory. “More’s the pity,” said Ule.

Out in the house, Hickey had taken Lucienne’s face between his hands and was kissing her deeply.

Behind me, Mark said to Mali, “I got hassled by some German tourists yesterday. If the tourists are picking up on it now…”

This seemed a safer conversation. I offered Ule a parting grin and crawled over to listen in.

“Time to air your issues more publicly.” Sam struggled the words past his swollen jaw. When I joined them, he nodded at the Matta. “You do nice work, Rhys… for a girl.” He couldn’t quite manage a grin.

Mark chewed his lip. “The rights of petition are clearly in place, but we don’t have the numbers.”

“Maybe you do.” Mali’s bony frame was folded up like a mahogany deck chair tossed carelessly on the floor. “You say there’s less than two thousand active apprentices, but think a little further: what about those who once were apprentices? Or those living with ex-apprentices, who might be convinced with a little talk?”

“There’s also sympathetic Second- and ThirdGens like Songh who’ll go with you,” added Sam. “If the CDL were sure of their majority, they wouldn’t be bothering with these e-mail games. You’d have all been Out long ago.”

I was impressed. In Harmony less than a month, if you didn’t count their quarantine, and they already had as good a grasp on its sociology as we did. Maybe better. We saw ourselves as helpless chaff in the wind. These two didn’t believe in helpless.

“There are more of you than you think.” Mali extended a palm and fisted it. “There’s power in those numbers and the CDL knows it and wants you to think otherwise. They want you demoralized and distracted. Don’t let them fool you with this dangerous-radicals talk. We’re just the bait, bro. You are the prey.”

Sam frowned faintly. I wasn’t sure he agreed.

Mali scavenged a splinter of wood from the floor and stuck it in his mouth. “On Tuatua, we are two minorities—one rich and in power, one poor but”—he smiled—“well organized. We struggle for control of a mostly apathetic majority.”

Sam nodded. “There’s your job: convince the quiet uncommitteds to speak up in your favor. Write that petition. Start airing your grievances, like the CDL airs theirs.”

“Their way’s too sneaky,” said Mark.

“And so far it’s worked,” Sam replied.

“We don’t really have grievances,” I said. “We just don’t want to get thrown out.”

“Some jerk hassles your friend on the street and that’s not a grievance?” Mali spat his splinter into the air behind him. “Ah, Sam, what are they teaching our children? Everything about enjoying the freedom of the artist and nothing about how to hold on to it!”

Mark felt his hard efforts being dismissed. “I suppose you can teach us better?”

“What the hell,” returned Sam softly but not particularly kindly, “do you think he’s been doing?”

With a rustle of skirts, Omea dropped gracefully beside me. “There! That’s done. Except he’ll want us to dedicate it properly, but that can wait ‘til it’s dry.” She raised both arms to her hair to undo some complicated fastenings, removed the tall feather headdress, and set it aside as if it were any old hat. She peered at the men’s faces. “Problems of the world time, is it? How are you, Sam? You shouldn’t be thinking with your head all swelled up like that.”

Mali regarded Sam with wry fondness. “The organizer’s gearing up.”

“I don’t take well to being shit-kicked,” Sam growled. He leaned forward, swept the floor with his bandaged palms as if scratching battle diagrams in the dirt of some rebel hideout. “Listen, kid: first you have to set your style, right?”

Mark eased back and let go of his sulk.

Sam returned the best he could do for a grin. “Good lad. Now, the CDL’s already stolen the media angle. But you have your squeaky-clean image: innocent youth. Very potent. And because it’s important for you to represent the constitutional, the legal and democratic side of the argument—”

Upstage, a warning yell rang out, then a metallic groan and more panicked shouting.

“The scaffolding!” I gasped.

Mali turned, rising.
“Pen! Moussa!”
He was already scaling the decking framework. Two tired crewmen struggled at the base of thirty feet of tipping scaffold. Tools scattered from the top walkway where the bearded kid, one of the new hands, hung on for dear life. Sam lurched up to follow Mali, swearing harshly as Omea and Mark held him back. He was too weak to shake them off.

Moussa beat Mali to the scaffold. He threw his solid bulk against the angle of its fall and planted his feet. Pen and Mali hauled on the other end and the scaffold swung back. Cris reached it and grabbed hold as it steadied and settled back on its legs. The crewmen sank to the deck in relief and exhaustion.

The kid clambered down the still-vibrating metal frame. “Piece o’ shit scaffold!” He grabbed Moussa’s hand. “Saved my life, man!”