People of the Sky (26 page)

Baqui Iba danced through her memory, fluttering its wings in the sunlight. She knew she could never break the bond that drew her to the aronan. Equally as strong was the sense of
responsibility she bore for Imiya’s rebellion and Haewi’s loss.

The sound of Sahacat’s footstep on the clay floor increased her intense awareness of the shaman—and the glass-edged blade she carried.

“Show me where the amulet lies beneath your skin,” said the husky voice. Kesbe dropped down on one knee, placing her hand along her right quadriceps. Even in the absolute blackness, the shaman’s knife caught a stray reflection and glinted.

Kesbe heard her own voice catch. “No. Not here, in the dark”

“I do not need sight to perform this. The other senses serve me better. There will be no pain. The blade is sharp and has been seared to cleanse it.”

“I don’t care! Build a fire or take me to the upper levels. I don’t enjoy being blind while I’m being sliced open.”

“The knowing sense,” Sahacat began, but Kesbe cut across the shaman’s words, her own voice harshened by fear.

“Tewalutewi isn’t enough, curse you!” She listened to herself breathe, felt herself shake and wondered if she would lose control and fight her way past Sahacat out of this pit of a kiva.

The shaman spoke again in a low voice. “I thought this way would be easier. If you wish to see the skin part beneath the knife, then it shall be done in daylight.”

In a walled courtyard near the kiva, Kesbe drew back her kilt from the top of her thigh. She looked away while Sahacat made a shallow incision to remove the implant. The Pai shaman did not lie. She felt only pressure and a strange pulling sensation. When she brought her gaze back again, a cloth covered the wound. In Sahacat’s calloused palm lay a pale pink-gray lozenge, streaked with blood.

“This is the amulet,” the shaman said. Kesbe nodded.

Sahacat poked the implant with a fingernail. It looked soft, flabby, like something freshly dead. “That such a think could have mastery over the rhythms of a woman’s body,” she mused. “It has no magic. It has no beauty.”

Kesbe watched numbly, hating the feeling of vulnerability that was stealing over her. Sahacat pivoted sharply on her heel and tossed the implant over a low stone wall before turning to bind Kesbe’s thigh.

When Kesbe passed the wall’s far side on her way back in to the kiva, she saw that the implant had landed in a refuse midden. The gray-pink lozenge lay, gleaming like a wet jellyfish in the midst of a pile of fly-ridden entrails someone had cleaned from a hunting kill.

Sahacat looked slyly back over her shoulder and Kesbe guessed what she was thinking. She clenched both fists against the urge to snatch the thing out of the offal. Even if she were able to recover the implant and somehow re-sterilize it, she could not properly re-insert it. The idea that she might even want to try made her shudder with disgust.

She saw that her reaction brought a crooked smile to the shaman’s lips. Sahacat whipped her head around and walked back toward the kiva. Head down, Kesbe followed her.

Sahacat had been right, Kesbe concluded many days later. The implant had hindered her progress in the realm of
tewalutewi
.

Once deprived of the contraceptive’s influence, she had rapidly moved ahead. She had not fully mastered the skill of scent-sending, but she was so far advanced that she no longer needed the air of odoriferous ointments spread on her skin. Giving up control of her body in one mode had given her back control in another mode: namely the ability to shift the strength and
composition of her own body-scent in a way she hadn’t imagined possible.

She couldn’t describe to herself exactly how she did it. Perhaps it was that certain thoughts, ideas, images resulted in changes to the blood flow to her skin or chemical changes in her odor-producing glands. This ability was greatly enhanced by the draught that she took in greater amounts each day.

The effectiveness of the
kekelt
drink made her wonder how the Pai could produce such powerful drugs without the aid of technological methods. It was true that many of the Pai remedies resembled those of the outside world in their effects, although some, such as the
kekelt
drink, did not. After puzzling over the question, she guessed that the ancestors of the Pai must have kept their technology long enough to discover natural analogs to the modern synthetic drugs.

Though Sahacat’s answers to her questions were phrased in terms of legends and myths, Kesbe felt that the guess she had made was partially correct. The information gained by a now-forgotten technology had been combined with a thorough study of botanical sources by generations of Pai healers.

When Kesbe asked which plant was the source of the
kekelt
drink, Sahacat replied, “It does not come from any plant. It is produced by the aronans themselves, from a gland beneath the eyes.” She brought Baqui Iba out in the sun and showed Kesbe how running a finger along the aronan’s muzzle caused an opaque liquid to well up just beneath the faceted eyes.

For an instant Kesbe thought the creature was weeping and clenched her fist to strike Sahacat’s hand away. But there was no trace of sorrow or pain in Baqui Iba’s scent and her fingers uncurled. She tried to quiet her conflicting impulses as Sahacat caught the drop in a clay vial.

So that is what I am drinking. Aronan tears.

Technically they were not tears, for aronan eyes did not need the fluid that bathed the eyes of humans and other mammals. But Kesbe found that her draught was easier to take if she thought of it as tears rather than some other type of secretion that might come from an aronan’s body.

Several days after losing the implant, a place in the arch of her palate became tender and started to swell. She felt it touched it with her tongue. When she explored the roof of her mouth with her finger, she got another surprise. Not only was the bean-sized nodule highly sensitive to touch, it seemed to have its own taste receptors which caught the salt flavor of her fingertip.

Sitting on the blanket in her quarters, she smiled wryly to herself, remembering how amazed and frightened she had been when she blurted out her discovery to Sahacat. The shaman was startled too, not by the development of the new tissue itself but by Kesbe’s insistence that she had previously lacked it!

Not until Sahacat had guided Kesbe’s finger to the roof of her own mouth to feel the presence of the organ there did Kesbe believe that it was a normal part of human anatomy among the Pai Yinaye. It was part of
tewalutewi
, said Sahacat. It functioned in concert with the nose and tongue to detect and amplify scents. Kesbe remembered seeing the shaman pull back her lips in a half-smiling grimace and draw air over her tongue, directing it to the roof of her mouth.

It was the same strangely feral expression Kesbe had caught on many Pai faces and had never been able to fully understand or explain.

Now she knew. Sahacat and her people possessed an organ that was present in animals but thought to be vestigial in humans. The grimace was the same “flehmen” expression she had seen in a zoology textbook. It served to bring scents to the vomeronasal organ, located on the roof of the mouth.

The idea of adopting the same behavior seemed to threaten the very fact of Kesbe’s own humanity. It dismayed her later to find that she was unconsciously imitating the shaman in order to allow her developing vomeronasal organ to function as it should.

What am I letting myself become
? she wondered. She had no answer.

Baqui Iba danced in the plaza, fluttering wings of velvet and gold that seemed to flame in the mid-morning sun. Nearby stood Sahacat, looking somber in her shaman’s garb in comparison to the aronan’s shimmering colors. Kesbe quickened her step as she walked toward them. Today, Sahacat would bring Baqui Iba into Aronan Kiva with her. Now Kesbe and her aronan partner would learn together.

A minty smell wafted toward Kesbe and she remembered it from the loma’asni. The creature was happy and pleased to see her. It rolled its tongue at her, then bumped her with its narrow muzzle as a playful horse would. She rubbed, scratched and fondled the aronan, then gave it a final pat. Sahacat was waiting.

Kesbe thought at first that Baqui Iba would have to descend by the lashpole ladders as she and Sahacat did. Aronan Kiva, however, had been built to accommodate the fliers as well as their human partners. To one side of the kiva was a trap-door made of woven twigs. When opened, it revealed a packed-earth ramp leading to the lower chambers of Aronan Kiva.

She hoped that Sahacat would, for once, supply some illumination so that she could see Baqui Iba. Sahacat obviously saw the need, for she carried a dish of phosphorescent moss that glowed against her palm.

The shaman led Baqui Iba to one end of the clay-floored room, bid it stay, then returned to Kesbe. She held out a long cape that she had been carrying over her arm. “Remove everything you are wearing and put this on.”

Kesbe shrugged. She was getting used to removing her clothing at request. The cape was light and finely woven, although she couldn’t see its color. It fell to her feet and tied at her neck. Her back and shoulders were draped. The rest she decided not to worry about.

“You must know the winged one,” Sahacat said in a soft voice that had strangely powerful undertones. “Come. I will show you how”

In the faint emerald glow from the moss, Baqui Iba looked eerie and insect-like. The subdued light caught and emphasized the horns above its faceted eyes, the eyes themselves and every point and spine on its cuticle. She had almost forgotten that Baqui Iba was an arthropod. Now she remembered. Facing it with the soft skin of her breasts and belly exposed, she felt vulnerable. She almost wanted to resist when Sahacat led her to the creature.

The minty smell of happiness superimposed on the aronan’s background sage body-scent reassured her. It was easier if she closed her eyes.

“That is right,” said Sahacat. “Now bend your head to each part of the aronan’s body and breathe in its essence. Use what you have learned of
tewalutewi
.”

Baqui Iba stood still, letting her explore its odors. At first she thought she could only detect the generalized background mixed with mood-scent, but gradually she picked up differences. It was easier if she let her mind free-associate, letting the subtly changing mixture of smells generate images and memories.

She buried her nose in the stiff fuzz of the aronan’s neck and inhaled the smell of baled hay. Instantly she was transported far back in her childhood. She was three, maybe four and she was jumping and playing on bundles of cattle fodder. She remembered how the hay itched and poked, but she was having so much fun she cried when her mother came to take her home. When and
where was it? She didn’t know, but the incident was suddenly as alive in her mind as if she had become again a child playing in the hay.

She knelt and ran her hands down Baqui Iba’s legs, stroking each segment and joint, bringing the aroma to her nose. Again, a smell-memory from long ago. Newspaper ink.

She was sitting on her grandfather’s stomach, cradled in the curve of his lanky body while he read to her from the pages of his paper. It was an old-fashioned habit, her father had said. Everyone else used the compufax. Newsprint was clumsy, the ink got on your fingers, you had to throw the thing away. Bajeloga paid no attention and red his paper every morning for as long as he could get it. Eventually, though, newspapers became obsolete. She remembered how the old man had grumbled, then re-read his old ones until they fell to pieces. He could use the compufax terminal, but he just didn’t like it. Neither did she, for she missed those lazy mornings curled up against him and the soft rustle of each page as he turned it…

She was recalled to herself by a touch on her shoulder from Sahacat. “
Tewalutewi
can seduce you into the past,” said the shaman. “That is something you also must master.”

Kesbe moved on to Baqui Iba’s wings. In their scent was the remembered smell of wood shavings as they peeled from beneath the blade of her grandfather’s buck knife as he shaped a kachina-doll. Again, memory tempted her into the past, but this time she resisted, using the image to tag the scent-impression before finding her way by touch to the next part of the aronan’s body.

Kesbe opened her eyes in the dark, abruptly aware that the moss-light was gone and Sahacat had withdrawn. Her first feeling was dismay her next, which surprised her, was a feeling of relief. A part of her intensely wanted privacy. In the close darkness only two existed in the world—herself and the aronan.

And perhaps Baqui Iba felt the same way. Its odor “softened.” Kesbe felt its antenna stroking the side of her neck, then moving outward along her collarbone. The individual filaments rippled in a living wave against her skin. Like its insect cousins, the aronan detected scent with its antennae, for it had no olfactory organ in its muzzle. She knew that the gentle and invisible ballet of its plumes over her was the same sort of exploration she had made with her nose, though far less awkward and clumsy.

What is my scent like to you
? she wondered.
Does it awake memories’? Feelings? Is it pleasant? Repulsive?

The feathery caress of the aronan’s antennae spoke to her in a mute language, but one more eloquent than words. It told her that her scent was that of one beloved.

And so she felt no sense of invasion or violation when the touch spread to her breasts, her belly, her inner thighs, even when it tickled through the hairs of her pubic area and explored her there. Now she knew why Sahacat had given her the light cape to replace her garments. The cape offered enough covering for warmth but would not hinder the aronan’s plumes. A down-soft touch ran over the curve of her buttocks and down the back of one thigh.

It was the kind of touch she would permit only from a lover. Never had she imagined she would accept such intimacy from an alien. But Baqui Iba wasn’t an alien. Part of her felt as though she had known the creature all her life. It was in her dreams, in the pictures she had colored as a child of delicate little horse-like creatures with butterfly wings. She remembered how she had drawn them running up a steep grassy knoll and launching themselves from the top.