Moonscatter (37 page)

The old man holds the carved knife up, tries its balance, throws it suddenly at the boy. It turns in the air, end over end, the boy watches open-mouthed, it comes at him, a little to one side, going to go over his shoulder. On a sudden impulse, giggling, the boy snatches the tumbling knife from the air. He runs his hand over it, delighted by the fine detail of the carving.

“Bring me it,” the old man says. His voice is brusque, abrupt, but not unfriendly.

The boy looks down at the knife. His small, sweaty, chubby hand is closed tight about the hilt. He doesn't want to give the knife back. He looks up at the old man, meets stern, dark pewter eyes. Reluctantly he gets to his feet. Feet dragging over the paving, he takes the knife back to the old man.

The old man takes the knife. “Go back,” he says in the same abrupt, not unfriendly voice. “Sit where you were.”

The boy is puzzled, but the voice of the old man has charmed him. The man is neither shouting at him nor cooing over him. He turns and rushes back, settles himself with that incongruous grace that no one ever notices. The old man sees it with interest.

“Catch it again.” The old man flips the knife at him. The boy snatches it from the air, picks the wheeling knife out of the air by its hilt with a quick neat snap of his hand. He starts to get up to bring the knife back to the old man. The old man smiles, a small tight upcurve of his stern mouth. “Keep it,” he says. The boy settles back, feeling a warm glow of pleasure as he fondles the carving.

The old man lifts the sword in its sheath and gets to his feet with a quick smooth flexing of his body as if he is much younger in the body than in the head. “Come back here tomorrow,” he says. He taps the sword and smiles again. “You're old enough to begin training.”

SERROI'S DREAM: She is in the courtyard playing with half-grown chini pups. The sky is cloudy, the air is heavy, getting a little too cold for comfort. Beside her the tower of the Noris rises brown-black and massive. It would be forbidding if it weren't so familiar. It starts to rain, first a few large drops then an inundation. Laughing, the little girl runs into the tower, the pups at her heels. In spite of the grimness of her surroundings, the miserable weather, she is intensely happy as she is always intense about whatever she is. The chini pups are responding to her mood, bounding up the stairs behind her, around her, before her. Sourceless light travels up the stairs with her, winding round and round the spiraling wormhole. She bursts into her own room, pulls to a stop, startled.

A tall lean man is standing in the center of the pleasant room. He is not smiling. He wears a gold ring through one nostril from which dangles a glittering ruby in the shape of a teardrop. It glitters and shifts with each movement of his lip as he speaks, but for a moment he says nothing, no muscle in his face moves. She laughs with delight and rushes toward him, though the chini hang back silent in the doorway. She doesn't quite hug him. He shows no response for a moment then a small smile curls his delicately chiseled lips. The ruby flashes fire. His austere face softens. Something of the small girl's joy is reflected there. He reaches out, touches her hair, draws one silky sorrel curl through his long pale fingers. Then he fixes his fingers in her hair and flings her onto the bed.

She scrambles onto her knees. “I tried,” she whimpers. “I tried.”

Shaking with rage, he speaks a WORD and sets pain on her. Without looking at her, he runs from the room.

She moves a hand, brushes it against her thigh and gasps as pain sears through her. The pain gets worse, burning all over her body. She tears off the soft robe that is suddenly a nettle shirt. Her body is bathed in sweat. She pushes off the bed. The soles of her feet burn. She sits on the bed again and feels fire searing her buttocks. She stands. The air presses against her skin and burns. She weeps, knowing that he has done this to her out of the knowledge he has gained through her, weeps, feeling tears roll like drops of acid down her face. Weeps, too, knowing there is no way she can satisfy him, no way she can take him into the Golden Valley. She tried, she really tried, but she couldn't do it. She forces her fingers closed over the latchhook intending to make her way to him and beg him to remove his curse. Her fingers slip off the latch. She tries again. The door is locked.

The torment goes on and on. The night passes. She burns. She can't think. She can't move. After an endless time the door opens and the Noris steps inside. “Please,” she moans.

He speaks a WORD. As the fire dies out of her skin, he lifts her, carries her to the bed. She cringes away from him, lost in terror, unable to think, unable to control her body. He blurs and clears, blurs again as she tries to see his face. There is sadness in it but she cannot accept this. He puts her on the bed, sits beside her and tries to untangle her curls until he sees how stiffly she is lying. He lifts her and holds her until the stiffness melts in her. She starts shaking, he holds her until the shaking goes away. He lays her back, touches her cheek, smiles and leaves.

The Noris is standing at the foot of her bed, his face somber. He waits in silence while she rubs the sleep from her eyes, then he says, “Get dressed, Serroi.”

She scrambles into one of her white silk robes and pulls the soft slippers onto her feet. Hesitantly, her eyes on his still face, she takes his hand.

The room blinks out, changes into rolling hills of sand with scattered clumps of scraggly brush. The Noris speaks. A dark robe drops onto the sand and rock beside him. He speaks again, a small WORD, and a banquet is spread out beside the robe, steaming savory food on delicate porcelain, wine in a single crystal glass, a crystal pitcher full of water.

Serroi and the Noris are standing on a slight rise in the middle of the most barren and inhospitable land she'd ever seen. Her eyespot throbs but she can find no touch of life anywhere close, only ripples of rock and sand, cut across by straggling black lines where rainy season run-offs had eaten into the earth. A little frightened, still aching from the agony of the past days, she looks up at the Noris.

He lays a hand a moment on her head, then steps back. “Good-bye, Serroi.” And she is alone in the middle of a desert.

“Why?” she whispers. She stares at the empty space where the Noris had been. “Why?” She turns helplessly round and round. “Why? Why? Why? WHY?”

Serroi pushed up, wiped a hand across her eyes, struggling to hold herself separate for a few minutes at least. Hern sat up, wiped a hand across his eyes, struggled to hold himself separate from her for a moment.

“Dream?” he said.

“Yours?” she said.

“More a memory,” he said.

“A kind of memory. Squeezed up,” she said.

“Why did we dream them?”

“Don't know. Why any of this?”

“Don't know.”

“Don't know much, do we.”

“Not much.”

the fifteenth day
—
the dragons of glass

Serroi looked at her hands, wrinkled her nose. “I'm turning into a twig,” she said with Hern's voice; with her voice she said, “We been doing better than I thought. Should be almost halfway across.”

Hern said in his voice, “Our little friends.” He smiled, she smiled, at the antics of the fliers air-dancing for their own pleasure over the water she'd just called forth. In her voice, he said, “Putting on a show. They like that water.”

A small jewel form flitted past, plunged into the spring, fluttered up again, shedding crystalline drops of water, a very small dragon shape, long and sinuous with small spiky wings, transparent as glass, like a glowing glass statue given magical life. Brilliant rainbow colors rippled across the small snaky form, ruby and topaz, amethyst, emerald and aquamarine. The tiny thing was voiceless, its voice was the pulse of colors along its wavering length, she couldn't read it, Hern couldn't read it, they knew it was speech nonetheless. Hern held out Serroi's finger, laughed with Serroi's voice, his voice also, as long-toed feet tightened about the finger.

More of the tiny dragons arrived and darted into the water, playing joyously with the fliers and dancing with them in tumbling, slithering, shimmering, fluttering exuberance.

the sixteenth day
—
more dragons

Hern stood in Serroi's spring scrubbing himself with a handful of sand, whistling cheerfully, Serroi could feel the abrasion of the sand against her skin as she lay stretched out on a patch of grass, her hands laced behind her head, smiling lazily up at a cloudless sky. A shimmering form drifted into view, a glass dragon undulating in vast loops, delicately etched against the clear blue of the sky. More of the giants floated past, singing intricate silent chorales of colored light, the faceted bodies pulsing with light, winding about each other in knots of celebration.

The tiny dragons continued to dart about Hern, weaving their small sparks into a spirited capriccio. Slowly Serroi stood. Slowly she walked to join Hern in the water. Without interrupting their jubilant song, the tiny dragons split apart to let her through their shell. Hern dropped his arm on her shoulders, she pressed herself against him; both seeing through both eye-sets, they watched the play of the giant dragons through the quicker shimmers of the small ones.

As the days passed Hern and Serroi ceased to search for food, ate only what the fliers brought them and what the small dragons gave them (not food exactly, more like bee stings, not as unpleasant as that, little jolts that gave them energy with each touch of the cool smooth bodies). Hern and Serroi walked hand in hand as a beast with four feet and two heads. The great glass dragons drifted over them singing their soundless songs in praise of the day, winding in slow dances one about the other. Each night Serroi-Hern called water and watched their companions play in it, the tiny dragons bits of sun and sky, the flier kits noisy and funny, filling them with another sort of joy, a laughter that celebrated the earth and the things of the earth, love and friendship and rollicking delight.

When they slept they dreamed, most of those dreams memories good and bad of childhood and adolescence. They didn't speak of them, for one thing it was very hard by this time to separate one from the other enough to be aware that another spoke. They did speak sometimes, but it was more like one who takes a leisurely walk to mull over some problem and talks aloud to himself.

The days passed and the miles crept past unnoticed beneath their feet. They forgot everything but the present moment, they were children of the present moment, bound to the now, all anxieties washed away with memory, all agonies gone except in now-and-then-dreams and those were distant things like reading a story in a book. They played with the days like happy children, all sadness exorcised into the night.

Unnoticed, the miles did pass. One morning there were no more glass dragons in the sky to celebrate the dawn. One night there were no small dragons to dance in the newborn spring.

One day Pa'psa circled about them, chattering his distress, the little brown females flew around them singing a high sad song—a song of farewell.

One day Hern and Serroi woke and looked at each other and saw the other as other.

Aches and pains came flooding back, the old tensions and urgencies came flooding back. Hern rubbed at his jaw, his hand rasping over the short stiff beard that blackened the lower half of his face. He started to jump to his feet, grunted as his knees threatened to give, pushed himself up more cautiously to stand looking west across the plateau. “How long?” he whispered.

Serroi crooked her leg, inspected the leathery dusty soles of her feet, fingered the tattered bottoms of her trousers. “You know what I know.”

He swung around, stared at her, gave a short bark of laughter.

Chuckling a little at her unintended double meaning and at his appreciation of it, she got to her feet. “We manage to bring the spears with us?”

He looked around, saw them thrown down beside the new spring. “Seems we did.” He bent carefully, picked them up, stumped back to her. “Just as well. I'm hungry.”

They were both reduced to rags. All excess flesh was burnt away though they suffered few of the debilities of extended starvation. Serroi nodded when she felt her stomach knot at Hern's Words. She took the spear from him and started probing about for tubers and tulpa. A moment later he joined her. “How far to the end of this?” He pushed his hand through his hair. She saw with a touch of sadness that the streaks of gray in the black had broadened into bars and his face looked lined and weary. Involuntarily her hand rose to touch her own hair, wondering if the sorrel was peppered with white. She thought of asking him, glanced at him and changed her mind.

“Don't know,” she said. She pointed east. “Where that cloudbank rises, I think.”

The next three days were painful. They quarreled a little, not much, it was too dangerous, there were still empathic links between them that were activated by strong emotion. They made love and that was difficult also, the feeling went too deep and their bodies were to feeble still to contain the emotions unleashed. And from the shared dreams they knew far too much about each other's vulnerabilities. If they lost control each could wound the other too deep for healing. It put a constraint on them that only gradually wore away as the soreness scabbed over and they rediscovered the safer uses of tenderness and affection.

About midmorning on the fourth day they stood on the eastern rim of the plateau.

Far to the east there were brilliant flashes of blue, the Ocean of Storms. In the south they saw a dark mass that had to be the walls and towers of Shinka-on-the-Neck. Directly below them, stretching to that distant coast, the land was a patchwork of fields and a dotting of dark blotches that were living compounds scattered along a yellow road that led to a larger blotch nestled in the loop of a large river winding down to Shinka. At their feet a path zigzagged down the steep slope of the scarp.