Gift of the Unmage (6 page)

And through it all the melody would run, the melody that spoke to her of age and of a newborn power all at once—
I am old and I am new and I was here before the world was born, I was the thing that the world was built on….

She still didn’t know what it was, or what it
signified, and although she occasionally caught herself humming a snatch of it out loud she somehow never did so in Cheveyo’s presence. It was as though this was her own mystery, something that she herself had been flung to try to solve and, whatever else Cheveyo was there to teach her, it was not how to make herself remember this tiny essential part of herself.

In some way she was aware that it was this—or something very close to this—that would allow her to return to the Barefoot Road, and this time to actually walk upon it, to feel through the soles of her bare feet the holy ground on which it had been made, as had been decreed in law and legend many generations before.

Cheveyo didn’t stop the Barefoot Road expeditions just because they kept failing to reach their destination. On the contrary, he kept their walks in search of the Road a regular part of their routine, setting out almost every day. Several times they had managed to glimpse it, flat and mocking, beyond some expanse of tumbled stone—but they could not quite get to it, and Cheveyo’s sandals stayed firmly on his feet, just like Thea’s own.

Thea whimpered when she had seen the
mirage of the unattainable hanging before her, separated from her by a gulch she could not cross or a desert of thorns, close enough that if she threw a rock she would hit it, but too far away for her to dream of stepping upon it. But Cheveyo’s response to that was a frown, too close for comfort to that expression of disapproval that Thea was so afraid of seeing on his face.

Driven in equal part by an insistent echo of her elusive piece of half-remembered music and a sudden stab of fear that the Road would remain forever out of her reach, Thea tried making a run for it on one occasion, when it shimmered particularly close to her, calling to her and yet forbidding her to come any closer. She launched herself toward the Road, heedless of the scratches that long thorns were leaving on her skin or the cuts that rough stones were gouging into her feet, bare within their flimsy sandals. For a moment, a breathless moment, she thought she could see the barriers melt out of her way—she stood on the edge of the Road itself, flat, level, straight as an arrow and pointing north, only a step away—and then Cheveyo’s arm came out of nowhere and snatched her from it, whisking her away,
and the Road receded as though it had been torn from her, reverted from a solid and tangible reality back to just a tantalizing image beyond an impassable ditch, and then disappeared altogether from Thea’s sight.

“What did you do that for?” she wailed, struggling against the arm coiled around her waist. “I could have touched it—I could have stepped on it—I was
this
far away and you didn’t let me try to…”

“Catori,” he said, “the Road is not a thing to steal. It is a thing to win. It is something that you will find spilling from your feet when you are ready to take your first steps upon it. But you cannot force it, you cannot fool it, you cannot make it do your bidding. And if you try, you will pay the price. When someone stops you from doing foolish things, be grateful that they were there.”

It hung unspoken in the air between them, his perennial directive:
Don’t whine
.

Thea sniffed, shook herself free of his arm, and dusted imaginary fluff off her cloak.

“We will try again,” Cheveyo said, and his voice was almost gentle, for him. “The Road does not hide from you. It merely tells you that
you are not ready to know it.”

“But when—,” Thea began, and then bit off the rest of the sentence, turning away. Patience, he had said. She snatched at what scraps of it she possessed and wrapped them around her. If she had to, she could outwait him. She
could.
All she had to do was keep a guard on her tongue.

2.

A
fter that, instead of constantly asking, she watched him. There were things that he did that seemed absurdly simple, a part of everyday life. But although she could reproduce the movements of his fingers when she watched him play with strands of light, she could never duplicate their effect. Cheveyo could weave whole ribbons of it—she watched him weave an entire intricate pattern that wore every bright hue of a particularly vivid sunset, and he did so without appearing to pay attention to what he was doing at all. His fingers seemed to move independently of his will, reaching for a touch of orange to blend with the thread of bright gold he already held ready, trailing ribbons of improbable scarlet and keeping in reserve the hues of the sky darkening into purples and deep blues on the far horizon. When
Thea tried to reproduce what she had seen him do, she grasped at nothing and watched empty air flow through her fingers. And when he clicked his thumb against his middle finger in a loud snap to summon the little flame with which he often lit their path if they stayed out after sunset, perching it atop his staff, where it shimmered brightly without burning the wood, it seemed a simple matter. But when Thea duplicated that snap, exactly and precisely and sometimes even more sharply than Cheveyo could, she summoned precisely nothing.

As the days wore on, it was beginning to seem depressingly familiar. There were tasks others did without thinking that Thea could not perform when she poured every ounce of her energy into them.

She had crept out of Cheveyo’s house one evening and climbed to the top of the mesa, clambering behind rocks that hid the pueblo from sight, in time to watch the splendor of the sunset. She remembered Cheveyo’s sunset, the one she had seen him weave into his pattern, and tried to reach for the light and color, to will it to come to her hand. Every fiber in her strained to do it, every last bit of passion and yearning she
could muster was thrown into the task. But the sun sank inexorably behind the horizon, taking its colors with it, and Thea finally sighed, hanging her head, having failed to achieve her objective yet again.

Cheveyo’s voice, when it came from behind her, startled her into nearly falling off the boulder she had been perched on.

“You need to be one with the sun,” he remarked almost conversationally. “You’re stalking the light instead.”

Thea turned to face him, her eyes sparkling with frustration, impatience, defiance. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Long enough,” he said, typically cryptic, no answer at all. He sighed, leaning a little more heavily against the staff from which he was rarely parted, and lifted his eyes to the sky where, in darkening amethyst, hung the pale golden orb of the almost full moon. “It might have been better if they had sent you here after Crow Moon waned. This is the moon of difficulties and obstacles and hard roads. It would have been better if you had come in Grass Moon instead, in the moon of calm and of belonging….”

Thea had followed his glance, and now, after scrutinizing the moon in question, turned her own eyes back to his face.

“I know I ask too many questions,” she said, “but tell me about the moons.”

“Where you come from, they do not mean anything?” Cheveyo said, giving her a question-for-a-question answer, the kind she hated the most.

“Depends on who you talk to,” Thea said, parrying, crossing her arms across her narrow chest and lifting her chin.

“Cay’ta, Canyan’ta, Tuani’ta, Mura’ta, Sui’ta, Taqu’ta, Chuqu’ta, Sunyi’ta, Senic’ta, Loviqu’ta, Matay’ta, Raqu’ta,” Cheveyo said, almost chanting, speaking a language Thea did not understand. She stared at him, strangely taken by the music of his words, but completely mystified.

Cheveyo, seeing her expression, smiled. “Here,” he said, “every full moon has a name, and the moon hangs in the sky in the name of something—it may be strength, it may be sorrow. You came here when Canyan’ta was in the sky, the Whispering Wind Moon—the moon that heightens sensitivity, opens eyes. Perhaps that is why you stood on the Barefoot Road so early,
once, while that moon was still in the sky.”

Thea’s heart sank a little. “So if the wrong moon is in the sky, I’ll never do it again?”

“There are moons when it is good to start on journeys, and moons when it is good to stay home,” Cheveyo said. “There is a Hunters Moon that stands for seeking, and a Harvest Moon that stands for achievement and success. And then there’s Tuani’ta. Crow Moon.” He indicated the pale orb in the sky with an economical little tilt to his head. “The moon under which everything is a rock to be tripped over. And, alas, I do not think that you are finding this aspect of our lore to be anything less than truth in these days.”

“You’ve been spying on me,” Thea said accusingly.

“I’ve been watching you,” Cheveyo said. “That is my duty. I may not know everything that you have tried to do, but I am aware of the attempts. No, I have not been spying on you—but I
have
been waiting for you to ask.”

“Ask what?” Thea said. “You’re always telling me I am asking too many questions.”

“Not so,” Cheveyo said. “If anything, you are not asking enough questions. What I have chided you about is that you ask the wrong sort
of questions.”

“But that’s going backward,” Thea said.

Cheveyo raised an eyebrow at her in lieu of spoken word.

“I have to keep backpedaling,” Thea said. “In order to figure out what to ask, I have to figure out how to phrase the question first.”

“So what is the problem with that?” Cheveyo asked calmly, without giving the least impression that he was bothered by mention of pedals and the incongruity of the concept in his own world.

“The problem is that if I knew precisely how to phrase the question so that it satisfies you, I’d pretty much know the answer to it already,” Thea said.

“Yes?” Cheveyo said, his voice rising at the end, making the single word an eloquent question.
So what is the problem with that?

“I…,” Thea began, and then uncrossed her arms and flung them out in a gesture of pure frustration. “I don’t know how to say anything anymore!”

“That is a temporary condition,” Cheveyo said. “You can blame the Crow Moon for that, if you like. It will pass, and when it does you will find that you have an entirely new clarity of
expression.”

“And I can answer all my own questions,” Thea said.

“Perhaps,” Cheveyo said.

“Then I can go home,” Thea said, her voice breaking on the last word, just a little.

“Perhaps,” Cheveyo said, but there had been a pause before he had spoken, a barely noticeable one, but it had been there. Thea had heard it. She narrowed her eyes to stare at him, trying to read his expression, but as usual he was giving nothing away. Instead of making any further direct response, Cheveyo snapped his fingers, summoning his flame. “And perhaps we had better turn in. There are others in these hills after moonrise, and you have not learned their language.”

As if in response to his brooding words, somewhere in the tumbled hills—far enough away for it not to be immediately threatening but close enough to make Thea shiver—a coyote sent a mournful echoing howl into the night.

“Supper,” Cheveyo said, as if an afterthought, “is waiting.”

He turned and began walking away, his guiding flame hovering on top of his staff as usual, making the customary assumption that Thea
would follow.

She hesitated for a moment, dividing a long speculative glance between the pale orb he called Crow Moon and the retreating flicker of the magic flame.

“Someday,” she whispered, squaring her shoulders.

A faint echo of the melody,
her
melody, came drifting out of the hills in the wake of the coyote’s call, as if in response to her words.

Cheveyo gave her something the next day, a strange-looking contraption that Thea stared at in pure confusion.

“What is it?” she asked, and then, after a moment’s thought, qualified her question. “What does it do? What am I supposed to make it do?”

Cheveyo allowed himself a small smile of approval before he responded. “Weaving,” he said. “Perhaps you should try it with a skein of real thread before you reach out for the sun. For some things, it is best if you go back to the beginning.”

“Is this how you learned it?” Thea said, curling her fingers around the thing he had given her. It was a short wooden cylinder, hollow in the
middle, with four wooden pegs driven into the rim at one end. She inspected it, trying to figure out where the thread would go.

“No,” Cheveyo said, with his usual annoying serenity. “Weaving is women’s work.”

Thea’s eyes snapped up to his face. Her expression was made up of equal doses of outrage and incomprehension. “It’s a girl thing?” she said, the cliché taken straight from a background of being the only girl in a brood of brothers, of sometimes being excluded from their world simply and solely because of that fact.

“Catori,” Cheveyo said patiently, “my mother and my sisters had those in their hands all the time. No, my fingers did not learn to weave. My mind did, watching their fingers fly with the skeins. But I cannot teach you like that, because I never learned to do it. You cannot watch me weave—not the earthly weave, not the weave that will give you the knowledge of how the thing works. So it is needful that you learn it with your hands first. For what it is worth…”

“What?” Thea said when he paused.

“For what it is worth, female child, for you it is not going to end here, as it did for my sisters,” Cheveyo said. “It is rare enough for my people to
teach such things as you are eager to learn to a girl-child. My sisters, who share my blood, who could have shared my knowledge, were never considered for it after they learned to weave a simple ribbon on their spool. For them, it was the end of the road. For you, it is perhaps the first step toward the Road—the Barefoot Road, which maybe only a handful of my people’s women have walked in their time.”

Thea stared at him. “Have you had…pupils…before?” she asked carefully.

“Some,” Cheveyo said, an admission that admitted nothing. And then he broke his habit, and answered her question precisely and completely, even the parts of it she had not quite asked out loud. “But you are the first who is not of my kindred, and you are the first who was born a daughter instead of a son.”