People of the Sky (25 page)

This was harder. She tried to refine the olfactory image, give it reference and dimension. To do so, she had to interpret the picture in her mind that was being made by her nose. The only way to do it was via the language of sight. She thought of the odorous blotches as being clouds of luminous gas suspended in space before her. Mentally she measured the distance between them, comparing it to her own human dimensions for reference.

“Long as an arm from shoulder to elbow,” she answered.

Again, she surprised herself by being correct.

Tall or squat?”

She clenched her teeth. Each time was a new hurdle. All right. Now there were four odorous blotches glowing in her mental picture. She could almost see the outline of the object they delineated.

“Squat,” she answered.

Sahacat didn’t stop there. She changed the position of the jar in her hands and asked Kesbe for it. The shaman took up new jars without telling her. Sahacat challenged and stretched her growing capability until she imagined that her nose was aching from the strain, just as her eyes would. She had to stop to rub the annoying prickle high in her nostrils. Her stomach was warmed by the drink and the warmth seemed to stay for a long time, making her feel relaxed.

The teaching continued.

Not all of Kesbe’s education took place in Aronan Kiva with Sahacat. Although achieving mastery of
tewalutewi
would allow her to understand and communicate with Baqui Iba, there were also practical aspects to the partnership, such as mastering the skill of riding a flier. Since Sahacat did not teach this, another instructor was chosen: the child-warrior Pesquit.

On the first morning of aronan flight-school, Pesquit gave her a broad smile and led the way up the mesa trail. Kesbe followed, with Baqui Iba. When they reached the top, Pesquit said, “I will show you the first thing I learned about aronans. Hai, Baqui Iba, come to me and open your wings.” Her small hands flickered in a series of hand-signs in front of the flier.

Baqui Iba obeyed, lifting its wings slightly so that Pesquit could duck beneath. She crooked a finger at Kesbe, who crouched underneath with her. The wings were translucent amber, their jet-black veining and patterned hues making her feel as if she were beneath a stained-glass window. The colors played across Pesquit’s face as she indicated a leathery disk on the flier’s side below the base of its wingspar.

The structure looked like a raised drumhead set into the mat of bristles covering the aronan’s thorax. Pesquit clucked once to Baqui Iba, then clapped her hands softly near the tympanum. Kesbe touched her ear the girl nodded. First lesson. Baqui Iba wears its ears on its body.

Kesbe reached out to feel the tympanum, but Pesquit’s hand deflected hers. The child-warrior’s lowered brows made the message clear—no touching! She then had Kesbe sit on the aronan and showed her how to keep her feet well forward with heels away from the tympanum. Pesquit emphasized this point—you must never kick your mount in the eardrums.

Kesbe studied the position critically. Her heels would have to stray pretty far to cause a problem. Nevertheless, she resolved to be careful. She thought then that Pesquit would let her fly, but she didn’t. Instead Pesquit had her dismount and showed her some of Baqui Iba’s other features.

By gently manipulating one of the aronan’s forelegs, Pesquit showed her how the limb folded up against the body for flight. The claw on the tarsal limb segment bore spines on its underside that hooked neatly into a recess on the creature’s “elbow.” Both front and hind limbs worked the same way. Once Baqui Iba retracted its “landing gear,” the legs would stay locked in place without any effort. She wondered if this biological aircraft, like its mechanical cousins, ever got its landing gear stuck in the “up” position.

Apparently it did, for Pesquit showed her a small comb fashioned to clean the locking spines. If they accumulated too much debris, she explained, a leg could indeed get stuck. Keeping the spines and recesses clean was evidently an important part of Baqui Iba’s care. Pesquit emphasized this by insisting that Kesbe learn how to manipulate the spine-comb before learning anything else.

Kesbe guessed that aronans in the wild also got their legs stuck once in a while, but the problem wasn’t as critical since they didn’t have to land with the additional weight of a rider. Baqui Iba might have a problem coming in on only three points, especially with herself aboard, she thought. She resolved to be diligent with the spine-comb.

A little stiff in the knees, she stood up, hoping that the girl would now let her fly. No. She had more to learn. Baqui Iba’s wings, for instance. She had thought that they were a single large pair and gasped in dismay when Pesquit made a hand-sign that made the wings seem to tear lengthwise with an audible ripping sound.

Once she was reassured that the aronan had nqt deliberately mutilated itself, she looked more closely and saw that each wing was made up of a separate fore-and hind-wing, each with its own spar. Baqui Iba’s forewing was long and tapered while the hindwing was rounded and stubby. Matching arrays of tiny barbs mated to lock both wings together or separated to allow each beat independently.

Kesbe didn’t get airborne that day or the next. Her fantasy that flying the aronan would not demand the disciplined concentration necessary to pilot an aircraft crumbled in the reality of learning about the creature. There was so much to know, she thought she’d never get all of it. Unlike the old airplanes she resurrected, Baqui Iba didn’t come with an instruction manual. And she couldn’t talk to the aronan…yet.

No days pass for me. I dream through long nights. I lie cradled in darkness, feeling my body begin to change under the influence of the drink from the Kiva of the Brooding One. There are interruptions, but they seem vague, shadowy, not real. I am truly awake only when Sahacat comes and is alone with me, chanting her shaman’s magic in my ears or filling my belly with the strange liquid.

She speaks to me, telling me things that I must know as a Pai adult. I repeat them after her, but somehow they slip from my mind. I grimace with frustration. She soothes me, stroking my forehead. It does not matter, she says. It does not matter now.

I know that Chamol and Nabamida often kneel by my bedside. Perhaps also the woman Kesbe. They all seem as insubstantial as ghosts and my tongue will not move for them, nor will my eyes fix upon them. Sahacat tells me that they think I am still sick as a result of the blow to my head.

My skin becomes so sensitive that I can no longer lie on the pallet of pine boughs and I am moved to a bed of blankets. I feel a strange heat blooming in my belly in the place below my navel. When I stroke my face, the beard-hairs I was beginning to grow fall out.

At each of Sahacat’s visits, the drink she gives me grows less repulsive to my tongue. Now I
swallow it eagerly for it keeps away the bad dreams. Sahacat does other things when she tends me. She moves my legs and arms, to keep them from becoming stiff and losing strength.

She lays her hands on the warm place in my belly and says I will soon be ready to be moved to the Kiva of the Brooding One.

You have learned to perceive with
tewalutewi
,” said Sahacat, as Kesbe began her sixth
sukop
in the kiva. In acknowledgment of her progress, Sahacat had moved her down to a chamber further underground in the kiva. It was colder here and darker. She wished she had a blanket to draw around her bare shoulders as the shaman continued. “That is only part of what you must know. You must also learn to answer with
tewalutewi
”

What that meant, when the Pai concept had been translated into the language in which Kesbe thought best, was that she must use her own odor-making capacity to send information. She had even less idea of how to do that than she did when she was first asked to judge shape and dimension through her olfactory sense.

Sahacat told her to stand up and take off the short kilt she wore. She sensed the other woman approaching her. Somehow the embryonic beginnings of respect and empathy generated by the previous encounters vanished. Again she was wary of the other woman, even fearful. All the hairs on the back of her neck rose like the nape of a threatened animal.

“Lift your arms and stand with your legs apart,” the shaman said, her voice soft and husky. Her own smell was strong, mixed with the leather and grease scent of the robes she wore.

Kesbe shifted uneasily, hating the feeling of standing naked in blackness with the shaman-woman circling her like a hunter coming in on prey. What was all this for? she wondered, but could not ask. She felt something brush her upper arm. She flinched away. It was not the shaman’s hand that had touched her, but the woman’s nose! She was moving around Kesbe, smelling her closely like a dog on two legs.

Kesbe had to suppress a strong urge to lash out and catch Sahacat across the face with one elbow. She tried to analyze her feelings. What was so uncomfortable about this? It wasn’t just the dank coldness of the underground chamber. It was the utter vulnerability, the fact she was standing here with her breasts and crotch unguarded. She half-feared that something was going to spring wolf-like out of the shadows and penetrate her.

No, the only wolf-like thing was Sahacat, still sniffing dementedly around her body. Was this crazy witch supposed to be her teacher? She is a healer, Kesbe kept reminding herself, thinking of how Sahacat had cured the
wuwuchpi’s
bite on her knee. She is a healer.

Kesbe felt a current of air across her front as the shaman moved past her. Then a hand picked up her own and smeared something greasy across the back of it. She flinched.

“I will put different scented ointments on your body. It will assist you in performing the first tasks I set for you.”

Again in darkness, the shaman moved around her, wiping the ointments onto her skin with quick strokes. When that was done, she told Kesbe to sit, and retreated from her.

“Now you will do the opposite of what you did before,” said Sahacat. “I will tell you what messages to send me.”

She explained that the ointments were volatile. Raising or lowering the temperature of the skin in certain areas would produce a different mix of smells. This was a very crude way to begin, since the ultimate goal was to have control over the composition and mix of natural human body scents in order to speak a “language” of olfaction. This more sophisticated control would involve far more than just changes in skin temperature, but mastery of that in the first step.

Kesbe thought that she would never be able to do it. To her knowledge, humans just didn’t
have voluntary control over heat flow from the skin. The best she could do was to talk herself into a state of acute embarrassment (which was dismayingly easy) so that her face flushed. She couldn’t believe that people in the Pai society had such an ability.

After trying repeatedly to send Sahacat a scent-mixture in which the odor of the ointment rubbed on a specific part of her body predominated, she was ready to give up. Perhaps she could read the language of olfaction, but she didn’t see how she was going to write it.

Sahacat neither encouraged nor disparaged her efforts, telling her only that she was to return again the next day.

The priests of the Brooding Kiva are coming for me. I hear the soft tread of their feet in the sand outside. They are coming for me, unless this is a dream. It might be. Many things now have been dreams and now I do not know the difference between what has happened in life and what has happened in dreams. Perhaps there is none.

If all that I remember is a dream, then perhaps Haewi did not die. When I try to ask the shaman, Sahacat only turns her head from the shadows and smiles.

My body feels molten and liquid. I put my hands to the place in my belly that feels hot like a glowing coal. It does not hurt me. Indeed, it is pleasant, making me sleepy and languid. I think that is why the priests of the Brooding Kiva are coming.

I wait, I listen, and I hope. I hope the dreams are lies and that Haewi is waiting for me. I hear the muffled beat of a drum and the scrape of moccasins on a clay floor. The dried-herb scent of an aronan comes to me through the air. I want to believe it is the smell of Haewi. It might be. It must be.

I push myself up on my elbows, though my upper arms quiver. The priests draw closer. Now the first one comes through the doorflap. The scent about them is so strong…it smells so much like Haewi. I reach up to them. I want to be taken.

Hands slide beneath my body and bear me up. My heart rejoices. I am ready. The priests of the Brooding Kiva will take me to join with my aronan.

They cover me and carry me away. It is dark outside, with no stars. Whether is is just before sunrise or after sunset, I do not know. I have lost the sense that used to tell me.

I am borne feet-first down a long passageway. The rock echoes with the sound of chanting. The place in my belly glows like the embers of a campfire. It makes my male part stiffen. Sahacat told me I must become both male and female in one. The warmth in my belly and between my legs is the female part. It has grown because of the kekelt drink.

I sense the passage opening out and know I am in one of the rooms in the Kiva of the Brooding One. The aronan-smell surrounds me, so strong it makes me dizzy. Yes, it is Haewi, I say again and again. No one answers that it is not so.

A small fire burns at one end of the kiva. It is smoky and gives little light. I can only see the priests as figures moving in a backlit haze. They lay me on a high bench that slants my head toward the ground. Hands stroke my belly.

Other hands touch me on the twists, ankles and knees. They are positioning me, preparing me. There is no need for bindings, I laugh as they place cords on my body. I want this joining. I want Haewi.

And now the aronan-smell grows stronger and I hear the sound of aronan feet on the kiva floor. I am ready. The place in my belly has started to bum.

The smell washes over me, so powerful now that it loses its identity. For the first time I am unsure. Is it indeed the smell of Haewi or is my aronan dead as I dreamed? I strain my head up
to look. I see the aronan-shape, but its outline is mingled with that of the priests who are leading it to me.

For the first time I hear Sahacat’s voice from among the priests. She is standing near my head. “Give yourself,” she says and then makes it into a chant. “Give of yourself. Give to the other.”

And the the aronan moves over me, brushing the tops of my thighs and my belly with the stiff fuzz of its underside. Haewi. I wish to reach up and caress Haewi, but the priests have bound my arms. Why did they do that? Did they not know I would want to embrace Haewi, to touch and stroke the one who is most precious to me?

The female place in my belly flames and throbs. My maleness is stiff against the fuzz of Haewi’s underside. I want to love Haewi. Why have the priests tied my arms?

One side is loose. My thin wrist pulls from the bindings, my hand reaches up to touch the velvet surface of my flier’s wings. I want to feel them spread over me, around me, enfolding me within so that I become one with my beloved.

But there are no wings. My fingers feel only broken stumps of wingspar. The wings are gone…wrenched away…torn from the creature’s body by human hands. It comes upon me again: the sight of the girl Mahana, breaking the wings from her flier and leaving it a flightless cripple.

I didn’t do that to Haewi. Suddenly the truth comes to me, tearing through the wrappings of stupor placed on me by the kekelt drug. I remember now what Sahacat told me. It was Mahana’s aronan who would give me a gift, not Haewi. In my fear, I have killed Haewi.

The one atop me now is the creature mutilated by Mahana in her adulthood ritual. My love shrinks away, even though the place in my belly burns more than ever. I cry out that this is wrong, that I can not join with this creature. I feel Sahacat’s hand across my mouth. My hand is seized and bound once again. My knees are pulled apart and I feel the aronan’s weight on me. Its legs clasp me. I feel them tremble with the intensity of its need.

Sahacat chants, “Give yourself,” but I can barely hear her in my struggle to close myself away from this thing that is now probing at me more and more insistently. And then it finds what it seeks, the birthway opening that leads to a womb that the kekelt drink has caused to grow within me. Sahacat has said that the male
lomuqualt
are both man and woman together at this time. It is the woman’s part of me that I would have opened to Haewi. It is that part of me that this aronan seeks now.

Something hard pushes up inside my belly to the burning place that is my
lomuqualt’s
womb while I strain my head back screaming against Sahacat’s hand on my mouth
…

It would not have been like this with Haewi. But this aronan has no love, only need. I feel the egg, passing from the hardness of the aronan’s body into my womb. I am a thing to it, a container in which to implant its egg. That is the horror. Not the pain, not the lies, not the effect of the kekelt drug, nor the deception of the shaman.

I lie on the slanted bench as the aronan draws away. I am now lomuqualt. This is what I wanted. This is what I begged Sahacat to give me. She has.

My mind journeys to a far place and seeks refuge there.

Kesbe took her place in the kiva the next day and the day after that and the day after until the days seemed to form a long chain that wound back and forth. She came to know despair at the command that she strip off her garments and stand in darkness to be smeared with ointments for another attempt to master the second level of
tewalutewi
. She failed repeatedly.

Even Sahacat seemed puzzled. It was true that scent-sending was much more difficult to
master for an adult than a child-warrior, but still, it could be done. Kesbe wasn’t as sure. The only thing that kept her from giving up was the knowledge that this was the medium by which she could reach to Baqui Iba and learn what had happened during Imiya’s ill-fated flight from Tuwayhoima.

“Something is interfering with your control over your body,” Sahacat said at last, after a long and exhausting trial.

“I don’t have control of my sweat glands, dammit!” Kesbe retorted.

She felt a wadded-up rag hit her. “Wipe off the ointments,” the shaman commanded.

“Are you giving up on me?” She felt a surge of relief combined with the prickle of disappointment.

“No. I will examine you again to find the cause of the interference”

And so Kesbe stood once again, enduring the sound and feel of the shaman smelling every part of her body.

“Something is not right in your woman’s cycle,” Sahacat said and added bluntly, “Are you barren?”

“What has that to do with ability to control my smell?” Kesbe snapped. “And no, I am not infertile. I just…” She faltered, remembering her contraceptive implant. She seldom thought of the implant, having taken for granted the freedom it gave her to love as she wished without fear of impregnation. But it worked by modifying the normal hormonal chemistry. And hormones, in turn, governed the generation of odors. Sahacat was probably right. It was the implant affecting her. Should she conceal this truth from the shaman? No, it was no use. Sahacat couldn’t be fooled.

She explained, slowly and clumsily. The shaman’s reaction was the one she had feared Sahacat spoke seriously. “This amulet-beneath-the-skin that prevents conception will prevent you from gaining the mastery of
tewalutewi
that you seek.”

Unconsciously, Kesbe fingered the top of her right thigh where the implant had been placed years ago. The thought of giving up its protection upset her more than losing her chronometer. “Sahacat, are you sure that is what is blocking me?”

“There can be nothing else. Show me the site of this thing and I will remove it.”

“No.” Kesbe backed away. Had she heard the sound of an obsidian blade being drawn from its sheath? She felt her quickening breath dry her throat. “Sahacat, put that knife away! There must be an alternative.”

“The amulet-beneath-the-skin stands in your way. Why do you fear to give it up?” She paused and said almost slyly, “Or is it that you do not want a laden belly or the child that comes at the end of it?”

“I want the choice,” Kesbe said stubbornly.

“The choice or the control?”

“Both. Does it make any difference?”

“But you do not have mastery over your body. You have given it to this thing that lies beneath your skin,” said Sahacat contemptuously.

Kesbe bit her lip. So this was the real cost. If she was to have any hope of reaching Baqui Iba through
tewalutewi
she must give up the chemical guardian that had been placed in her body by the technological society she had left behind. Again came the temptation to turn her back on all this strangeness and fly away in
Gooney Berg.