The Enigma Score (27 page)

‘The Ones Who,’ mused Prime Priest Favel. ‘I have not been this way in a generation. I had forgotten how beautiful they are.’

Bondri looked at them, startled into perception of them as newly seen. Indeed, when not considered as a barrier, they were very beautiful. Pillars of diamond lit with rainbow light, their varying heights and masses grouped in such a way that the heart caught in the throat when one saw them at dawn or at dusk. ‘They are beautiful,’ Bondri agreed. ‘But perverse. They do not respond honestly to us.’

‘Like a young female,’ Favel sighed. ‘Singing tease.’

Bondri was surprised at this. ‘Tease?’

‘Yes. She is too young for mating yet, she has nothing to give, really, but she sings tease. The Loudsingers have a word for it. Flirt. She sings flirt.’

‘Tineea,’ Bondri sang softly. ‘The songs of maidenhood.’

‘The Ones Who are like that. They flirt, tease, sing tineea to entice us. But they have nothing yet to give us. Perhaps one day, they will.’

‘That is true,’ whispered Bondri. Newly awakened to loveliness, he stood beside the old priest for a long time more, wondering if The Ones Who could perceive their own beauty.

‘Enjoy the aspect, old one,’ he said as he returned to the others of the troupe.

‘Is he at peace?’ inquired the giligee as she busily grated brush bark, using a crystal-mouse jawbone as a grater, onto several criss-crossed and immature tree fronds. When heaped with grated bark, the fronds would be folded, then twisted to press out the refreshing bark juice, a drink for all in the troupe to share. Both the mouse jaw and the tree fronds were in keeping with viggy law concerning tools. Tools were expected to be natural, invisible, undetectable, as were the etaromimi themselves.

‘Prime Priest Favel admires The Ones Who,’ Bondri warbled, watching as the first juices trickled into an ancestor bowl.

‘Take him drink,’ the giligee said. ‘It is your giligee’s bowl, Bondri. A good omen.’

Bondri picked up the bowl and looked at it. It was a good bowl, clean and gracefully shaped. It was a good omen, bringing to his mind many memories of his giligee. He shared a few of these with the nearby troupe members before mounting the hill once more.

‘Whose bowl is this?’ Favel asked courteously, allowing Bondri to identify the bowl and sing several more little stories concerning his giligee. The time she climbed the tall frond tree and couldn’t get down – that had been before Bondri was even depouched the first time. The way she used to cock one ear, making everyone laugh. Bondri was smiling when he left the old priest, and Favel, left behind to sip his bark sap, was contented as well. It was good to share memories of the troupe.

Memory was such a strange thing. A viggy would experience a thing and remember it. Another viggy would experience the same happening and remember it as well. And yet the two memories would not be the same. On a night of shadow and wind, one viggy might sing that he had seen the spirit of his own giligee, beckoning from beside a Jubal tree. Another viggy might sing he had seen only the wind, moving a veil of dried fronds. What had they seen, a ghost or the fronds? Where was the truth in memory? Somewhere between the spirit and the wind, Favel thought.

When the troupe traveled down a tortuous slope, one would remember pain, another joy. After a mating, one would remember giving, another would remember loss. No one view would tell the truth of what occurred, for truth always lay at the center of many possibilities.

‘Many views yield the truth,’ Favel chanted to himself, very softly. This was the first commandment of the Prime Song. Only when a happening had been sung by the troupe, sung in all its various forms and perceptions, could the truth be arrived at. Then dichotomy could be harmonized, opposition softened, varying views brought into alignment with one another so that all aspects of truth were sung. Not Favel’s view alone, but the view of dozens, the view of all members of the troupe, if one had a troupe.

Oh, one must. One must have a troupe. Favel blessed the hour he had been adopted into Bondri’s troupe. As a male, he should have lived out his life in the troupe to which he was depouched, but the continuity of his life had been broken when the second commandment of the Prime Song was broken.

The second commandment was almost a corollary of the first. ‘Many views yield truth,’ said the first part of the Prime Song. Therefore, be not alone,’ said the second.

Favel had been alone. He had been alone for a very long time, which meant there were gaping, untruthful holes in his memory of his life. When he sang these parts of his life, there were no other views to correct and balance his own – no joyous counterpoints to relieve his pain, no voices of hope or curiosity to relieve his own terrified horror. Favel had been a broken one – broken and abandoned.

It had happened long ago – how long ago? Fifteen years? Twenty? A lifetime. Favel had been a young male then, almost a mateable age, had long since given up trailing his giligee in favor of being with the adventurers, as the young ones thought of themselves. It had been in Bondri’s pouch troupe, the troupe of Nonfri Fermil, Nonfri the Gap-toothed with the beautiful voice, and it was Nonfri’s trade daughter Trissa that Favel had set his song upon.

She had not been in the troupe long, only long enough to get over her first pain of separation, only long enough to learn a few of the troupe’s memories so that she did not sit utterly silent during evening song. To Favel, she was Trissa of the frilled ears, for the edges of her wide ears were ruffled like new leaf fronds, the soft amber color of dawn, only slightly lighter than her song-sack. Her eyes were wide and lustrous, but so were those of all the people. Her voice, though – ah, that Favel could remember, but he had to sing it to himself all alone, for none in Bondri’s troupe had ever known her. ‘Softly resonant,’ he sang quietly to himself, ‘plangent in the quiet hours, rising like that of the song mouse to trill upon the sky.’ Ah, Trissa. She had sung tineea and turned his soul.

A small group of youngsters had gone one evening to gather brush. Some of the elders of the troupe had a taste for bark sip, and the young ones were searching for a juicy growth. Favel was older than the gatherers and too shy of his awakened senses to invite his own group to go with him, so he broke the second commandment of the Prime Song and went alone. Alone to lie in the brush and watch Trissa, hear Trissa. Alone to imagine himself and Trissa mated.

Her group started back, laden with juicy brush. Favel, hidden at the foot of a ’ling, waited for them to pass. One of them, a silly young male, threw a bit of crystal at the ’ling, the very ’ling that Favel lay beneath, hidden in the grasses. The ’ling had been excitable. It had broken.

When he woke, there was blood on his head and his legs were broken beneath the shattered ’ling. When he pulled himself to the place the troupe had been, the troupe had departed. Days passed, and nights, and he found himself beside a Loudsinger trail. Days passed again, and nights, and a Loudsinger caravan came by.

After that was pain as the Loudsinger tried to set his legs, then less pain, and finally only the songbreaking agony of loneliness as he waited to die.

‘Why did you not die, Favel?’ Bondri had asked him later.

‘I was too sick to die,’ he had replied. ‘My brain-bird could not settle on it.’ And it was true. Despite the ban, despite the taboos, Favel had not died. Perhaps curiosity had kept him alive.

Favel learned Loudsinger talk. It gave him something to do, and it was not particularly difficult. One word served many purposes. No word was particularly precise. The Loudsingers made no attempt to find truth, each merely asserting his or her own vision of history. ‘I remember it this way,’ one would say in a disagreeable tone. ‘You’re wrong, this is the way it went,’ making Favel writhe at the rude arrogance of such statements.

The man was named Mark Anderton, and he kept Favel in a cage made of stuff Favel could not bite through. Favel considered the question of taboo and finally allowed himself to chitter words and phrases at him in order to get food.

‘Listen to my little frog-monkey,’ Anderton would say. ‘Like a ruckin’ p’rot, in’t it.’

‘What’s a p’rot?’ someone always asked.

‘Urthian bird. Talks just like people,’ he would say, with a guffaw. ‘I got me a Jubal p’rot.’

‘See the pretty viggy,’ they would chant, stuffing bits of meat through the bars at Favel. ‘See the pretty viggy.’

‘Pretty viggy,’ Favel would say, without expression, grabbing for the meat, while the Loudsingers broke themselves in half laughing. He was breaking the taboo by not dying, but he was not breaking the taboo when he used words. They did not know he understood what he said.

‘Ugliest thing on six worlds,’ one said. ‘Pretty viggy my pet ass.’

Favel had never considered whether he was pretty or not. It wasn’t something generally considered important. Trees were beautiful, of course. Presences, most of them, were beautiful. Voices were beautiful, some more and some less. But viggies?

It was a new thought, one that perplexed him. Had he thought Trissa was beautiful? After much thought he admitted to himself that he had. Yes, the sight of her had gladdened his song. She had been beautiful.

In time Mark Anderton had tired of having a viggy and had sold Favel to another man, who had sold him in turn to Miles Ferrence as a gift for his older son.

There were two sons – and how weirdly strange it had seemed to Favel to have sons – and a woman and a man in Miles Ferrence’s troupe, and by that time Favel had figured out how it was the Loudsingers got by without giligees. There was something strange about the Ferrence troupe, something wrong. Some days there was such ugliness in the voices that Favel buried his head under his arms, trying not to hear. Favel’s cage was hidden on a high shelf for a time. Then he was given to the younger boy, but the older boy took the cage into the night and set him free.

‘I am Lim Ferrence,’ he had told Favel. ‘I am not debauched. I am Lim Ferrence, and I can sing as well as anybody, better than anybody, and I am not debauched, and if I can’t have you, nobody can have you, so you go back where you came from….’

As soon as he was far enough from the cage to make recapture unlikely, Favel had stood forth and sung his thanks to Lim Ferrence, seeing the blank oval of the boy’s face staring into the darkness, incredulous at this torrent of song. ‘I owe you a debt,’ Favel had sung. ‘I owe you a debt unto the tenth generation…. ’ He had sung it in Loudsinger language, breaking the taboo. A debt of honor took precedence over any taboo, but afterward he had wondered if the young Loudsinger had even understood.

The debt should have been paid long ago. Why hadn’t that debt been paid?

Favel mused, hearing the soft sounds of the giligee who was grating the bark, the young ones who were pressing the sap, the gatherer females who were sorting through their pouches of seeds and roots. The sound of a troupe. How long had he wandered before he found a troupe once more, a troupe that would take him in?

Long, memory told him. ‘Long, lonely,’ he sang, his voice rising over the troupe-song below him, so that the others muted their voices and sang with him, letting him know they knew the truth of what he sang. Long, lonely, and wandering. He had not paid the debt then because he could not. He had not the means.

Until he met the troupe of Bondri Nettl, which took him in and learned his memories as though he had been a young trade daughter. Because he had a retentive memory and knew the language of the Loudsingers, he became a priest, then a Prime Priest. Now there were several troupes who knew bits of the Loudsinger language and viggies of many troupes who knew the memories of Favel, who knew the long loneliness of Loudsinger captivity – though they would never know the truth of it, for Favel did not know that truth himself. Sometimes Favel wished he could sing to Lim Ferrence and Miles and the younger son, Tasmin, and the strange woman, Thalia. Perhaps they would have seen enough of what really happened to make a truthful telling.

Bondri Nettl was gone now. Bondri Gesel was his heir. And though he had searched for the troupe of Nonfri Fermil, their paths had not crossed in all the years. There had never been another like Trissa, with the frilled ear edges and song that stopped his heart.

There was a flutter in his mind as he thought of this. A little flutter, as though something were trapped there. He understood, all at once, without any preliminary suspicions, why it was the troupe had stopped and why it was he had been given this comfortable couch on which to rest.

Below, where the members of the troupe nibbled and drank, the giligee heard a silence where the Prime Priest had lain. She looked up to meet his eyes.

‘Tell Bondri Gesel the Prime Priest believes it is time to depart,’ Favel said, trying with all his mind to remember everything, absolutely everything he had ever done.

Bondri heard. In this sparsely grown location, it would not be a fully ceremonial departure, but neither would it lack care. Bondri was not one to scamp the niceties, nor would he allow slackness in his troupe.

Within moments some of the young ones were leaping off to gather fronds for the Couch of Departure, and even before they came leaping back, waving the fronds above them, the old priest had sighed, sagged, and bent his head into the posture of submission. When the fronds had been laid out, he staggered toward them, disdaining the assistance members of the troupe tried to give him.

‘I hope that giligee of yours is halfway skillful,’ he hummed to Bondri as he laid himself down. ‘Making no bloody mess of it.’

‘Very skillful, old one. It did my own giligee not long ago. It was very clean. You, yourself drank from her cup.’

‘Well, I’ll be glad of that. I’ve seen some botched ones in my time.’

‘No fear, Prime Priest. The giligee of Bondri Gesel will do you honor.’

‘May I find both honor and sustenance in your troupe, Bondri Gesel.’

‘I am gratified, old one.’

The giligee was hovering at the edge of things, a bit nervously, but it came forward quickly enough when Bondri gestured, and the troupe began the Last Chants as though rehearsed. Well, in a way they were. They had done them several times not long since.