Perilous Travels (The Southern Continent Series Book 2) (5 page)

“Maybe you can show me how to make it myself, so that you won’t have to,” Grange suggested.

“That’s work for the women,” Lastone spoke for the first time since Grange had entered the hut.

“If I don’t have anything else to do, I wouldn’t mind preparing my own ointment.  I had to mix some of the potions precursors during my apprenticeship in Palmland,” Grange replied.

“What’s this?” Shaylee asked, lifting the flute off Grange’s small pile of belongings.

“It’s a flute,” Grange replied, as he watched her fingers run across the row of holes, while she tilted it up and down.

“I use it like this,” he gently removed the instrument from her fingers, then raised it to his lips and played the first two bars of a slow ballad.  He raised his eyes as he played, and he saw that Shaylee had tilted back on her haunches and was observing him with a rapt expression on her face.  There was a movement in the corner, and he saw that Lastone was abandoning his work to creep over closer to the source of the music as well.

Grange paused, then shifted the tune to a jig, one of the dancing songs that had been popular in Fortune.  Shaylee smiled at him, and began to clap her hands softly in time with the tune.  The two of them smiled at one another, as Lastone came and knelt beside his daughter.

Grange stopped after playing ten bars of music, and Shaylee clapped appreciatively.

“Thank you!  We haven’t had a decent musician since Kanu and Eomel were in the same canoe that got caught on the reef,” Lastone told him.  “The village was going to have to hire someone to come play for us and teach a new musician for us.”

“I can teach someone to play,” Grange answered, glad that he had at least found something he could do for the village.

“I’d like to learn!” Shaylee’s hand and voice both rose.

It was silent outside, Grange suddenly noticed.  The questions and answers had ended.  He twisted and looked at the door behind him.  The view of the circle was blocked by the number of people who were standing together staring into the room.

“What are you doing?” Layreen asked.  “Where did you get that?” she nodded towards the flute that was cradled softly in his hand.

“I was just playing music for Shaylee,” Grange began.

“No, no, no – he was playing music and Shaylee heard it.  He did not play it for her!” Lastone interrupted and said emphatically.

Grange turned to look at him, unable to comprehend the reason for the outburst, and saw that Shaylee had both hands covering her mouth and nose, laughing, her crinkled eyes sparkling with delight.

“No, you were not playing for Shaylee,” Layreen told him sternly, “that is something we talked about, remember?”

Grange shook his head no.

“You do not understand this, do you?” the mother asked, after seeing the confusion in his face.

He shook his head again.

“Go along everyone, go along.  We’re done for now.  I will talk to you later,” she shooed the crowd away from the entrance to the home.

“You two go out as well.  I need to explain something to our guest,” she told her own family.

They immediately stood up and left the room, Shaylee laughing.

“Teesh, you won’t believe what,” Grange heard her voice fade as she ran to talk to a friend.

“In our village, a man presents music to a woman when he wants to marry her,” Layreen said.

“But how?  I thought there weren’t people here who played music,” Grange protested.

“Precisely,” Layreen said emphatically.  “Without our musician, our couples cannot use our traditional means of entering marriage.”

“Does just one musician play music for all the women in the village?” Grange asked faintly, his face displaying his confusion.

Layreen stared at him for a moment, then burst out with hearty laughter.

“A man who wishes to seek a woman in marriage – or a woman who wishes to seek a man – goes to the musician to request that he play a certain song, at a certain time, in a certain place, when the prospective couple is there together.  When they hear the music, the one who is being asked knows that the question is at hand, and they answer.

“The musician leaves after the song is finished, and is not involved in any further portion of the couple’s wooing,” the mother laughed as she explained.

“Of course the musician plays public music at festivals and ceremonies and other activities as well, but his main duty is to allow the couples to carry out their courtship.

“If you’ll be here for the next few weeks and you’ll be able to provide musician services to the people until we can bring in a musician of our own, you will have no problem fitting in to the village – all your troubles will go away,” Layreen smiled.

“Just play music and get along?” Grange asked skeptically.

“It’s as simple as that,” she insisted.

“I don’t have anything to lose, do I?  It’s a deal,” he agreed.

“I’ll go tell folks.  There’ll be some who will come to you right away wanting your services, some who will never come to you, and some who are going to wait and see how you do,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Are there specific songs? Who can teach me the songs you use?” Grange asked.

“Lastone knows them all.  He proposed to me three times before I accepted him,” the woman smiled at the memory.

“Can he sing them?” Grange asked.

“He is not such a good singer.  Ask Shaylee; her friend Oleen has a sweet voice,” Layreen suggested. “That’s a better choice,” she decided.

“I don’t have to sing, do I?” Grange asked in sudden horror.  He knew his singing voice was of little value.  “I’ll be playing the flute so I won’t be able to sing,” he pointed out.

“No, no singing from you – just learn the tunes,” the imposing woman stood up and went to the door.

“Shaylee, Oleen, would you come here please?” she called.

The girls were there in just five seconds; they’d obviously been close by.

“Grange is going to be our village musician,” Layreen said, and the girls squealed with joy and clasped hands with each other.

“And he needs to learn our songs in a hurry, so I want the two of you to teach him every one of our songs that you know,” the mother instructed the two shiny-eyed girls.

“Oleen, you’ve got the better voice, so this is mostly your responsibility,” Layreen continued.

“Mother!   That is most unfair.  I found him; he’s mine, you know,” Shaylee said.  “He should be my responsibility.”

“You are a wonderful girl with many terrific features, but your singing voice does not compare to Oleen’s,” Layreen told her daughter in a no-nonsense tone.  “But you can work with him to teach him to make his own ointment for his sunburn.

“Wait until the sun goes down, then the three of you can go off somewhere and practice his music.  Don’t let him get in the direct sunlight!” she warned the eager girls, as if she were directing them in the care of a livestock animal.

“I’m going to go tell my mother and my sister!” Oleen declared, and she left in a hurry, with Shaylee on her heels.

“Are you the queen of this village?” Grange asked.  “You have done everything, made every decision since I arrived,” he observed.

“I am the chief,” she agreed.

“Thank you for all that you’ve done for me,” Grange said gratefully.

“Perhaps I should thank you,” she smiled.  “This may turn out to be a very advantageous arrangement while you are here among us.”

That afternoon, Grange sat quietly in the home, while Lastone worked on tanning the hides he had piled by his work station, and Shaylee visited with her friends, entering the door every few minutes to make sure Grange was still there. 

Grange was tired, and a little weak, and hungry, but unwilling to ask for food.  He sat and reapplied dabs of ointment to his sunburn as the pain intensified, and he tried to talk to the jewels.

“Are my friends alright?  Did the ship make it through the storm?” he asked softly.

“Did you ask something?” Lastone looked up from his work.

“I was just talking to myself,” Grange replied weakly, and he remained silent thereafter.

When the sun had dropped down towards the horizon, Oleen and Shaylee and two other girls came bounding into the house.  They all unselfconsciously wore the village costume of bared torsos, and Grange blushed uncomfortably as they crowded around him.

“Let’s go!  We’re taking you to the mountain top,” Oleen said, and the four girls raced through the village, Grange self-consciously following them past the residents of the settlement, up a trail through the jungle, and to the top of a small hill, one of three hills that appeared to be the girls’ definition of a mountain.

Grange stood at the summit as he arrived in the girls’ footsteps, and he looked around.  He could see water on all sides of the island – it wasn’t very large, he noted.  There were other islands visible to the west, their details lost in the glare of the setting sun.  He asked the girls about them.

“No one lives on most of those,” Shaylee took the lead in talking to him; the others apparently recognized her ownership of him.  “Our men go hunting on those islands for food.  The closest island with people is five islands away.  It takes most of the morning to paddle the canoe there,” she informed him, just before they all sat down and Oleen began singing the first lovely song.

It was a love song, one of many that were fed to Grange over the following days.  He struggled to learn them all.  Oleen sang in a sweet voice, one that hadn’t matured yet, so that it was high and pure.  Some of the songs she sang were not so pure, however, Grange was shocked to learn, as they left little to the imagination of what the proposing suitors hoped the future happy couple would do upon their wedding night.

After a week, Layreen came to him in the evening, instead of the girls.   “I’m going to test you,” she said, and she was the one who escorted him up the hillside to the empty glade among the trees, and began naming songs and asking him to play them for her.

He played nearly three quarters of the songs she named.

“You’re almost good enough.  We’ll say one more week,” she told him, and so he continued practicing the music that Oleen sang.  The other girls stopped coming after a few days, but Shaylee insisted on joining them for every session.

In the meantime, Grange’s sunburn gradually healed.  First the pain ended, then his skin peeled badly, causing another round of village gossip about him.  “Is everything going to fall off him?” Grange heard the question asked more than once.

And after that, he began to develop a golden brown tan through careful exposure to the sunlight, a tan that grew darker with each day, and allowed him to go outside more and more, though he failed to come close to matching the islanders’ ebony tones.  His hair, meanwhile, seemed to grow whiter and whiter in contrast.

And he and Shaylee did one other thing, something that embarrassed Grange at first, but that he then came to enjoy and to look forward to.  They began to wrestle.

“How did you knock me to the ground the first day?” Grange asked her as they were walking up to their musical practice with Oleen.

“I just used the palm tree move,” she answered conversationally.

“What is it?” he tried asking again.

“It’s more aggressive than the ant lion move, but I thought you seemed a little weak and confused after being in the water so long, so I thought it would work, and it obviously did,” she explained.

“Your battle moves are different from the way people in my land fight,” Grange told her.  “I didn’t know how you knocked me down.”

“Would you like for me to teach you to fight like us?” the girl asked eagerly.

Grange thought about his conversations with Brielle, in the armory in Palmland, when he had asked for training in fighting hand-to-hand.  She had discouraged him, telling him he needed to fight with weapons because his size and build put him at a weight disadvantage.  But Shaylee had shown that size and build didn’t have to matter if a person fought in a different way.

“Yes, I would like to learn your ways of fighting,” he agreed, and she had eagerly committed herself to teaching him.

That training had lasted one day.  After that, Grange did most of his training with the girl’s father, Lastone.

He had found himself sweating nervously in the hand-to-hand battles with Shaylee, as he found few places he could comfortably place his hands on her body in their first grappling matches.

Embarrassed, he explained, in halting language, his desire and wishes to Lastone, and the man readily agreed to help him learn the concepts and moves of leveraging, of patiently waiting for the other fighter to attack, and then finding the vulnerable opportunities.  The lessons seemed unnecessarily painful to Grange as he developed a multitude of bruises and aches, but he began to understand the demonstrations, and slowly began to hold his own as their practices became daily exercises.  And every few days Shaylee would still challenge him to a new contest to judge his progress.

He fell into a routine of practicing music and fighting for a few days, until Layreen declared him ready to fulfill the musician duties in the village.