The Telling (16 page)

Odiedin was writing these for a family, Tobadan was dispensing herbs and salve to another family, and Siez, having finished the chant, had sat down with the rest of the population to tell. A narrow-eyed, taciturn young man, Siez in the villages became a fountain of words.

Tired and a little buzzy-headed—they must have come up another kilometer today—and liking the warmth of the afternoon sun, Sutty joined the half circle of intently gazing men and women and children, cross-legged on the stony dust, and listened with them.

"The telling!" Siez said, loudly, impressively, and paused.

His audience made a soft sound,
ah, ah,
and murmured to one another.

"The telling of a story!"

Ah, ah,
murmur, murmur.

"The story is of Dear Takieki!"

Yes, yes. The dear Takieki, yes.

"Now the story begins! Now, the story begins when dear Takieki was still living with his old mother, being a grown man, but foolish. His mother died. She was poor. All she had to leave him was a sack of bean meal that she had been saving for them to eat in the winter. The landlord came and drove Takieki out of the house."

Ah, ah,
the listeners murmured, nodding sadly.

"So there went Takieki walking down the road with the sack of bean meal slung over his shoulder. He walked and he walked, and on the next hill, walking toward him, he saw a ragged man. They met in the road. The man said, 'That's a heavy sack you carry, young man. Will you show me what is in it?' So Takieki did that. 'Bean meal!' says the ragged man."

Bean meal,
whispered a child.

'"And what fine bean meal it is! But it'll never last you through the winter. I'll make a bargain with you, young man. I'll give you a real brass button for that bean meal!'

'"Oh, ho,' says Takieki, 'you think you're going to cheat me, but I'm not so foolish as that!"'

Ah, ah.

"So Takieki hoisted his sack and went on. And he walked and he walked, and on the next hill, coming toward him, he saw a ragged girl. They met in the road, and the girl said, 'A heavy sack you're carrying, young man. How strong you must be! May I see what's in it?' So Takieki showed her the bean meal, and she said, 'Fine bean meal! If you'll share it with me, young man, I'll go along with you, and I'll make love with you whenever you like, as long as the bean meal lasts.'"

A woman nudged the woman sitting by her, grinning.

'"Oh, ho,' says Takieki, 'you think you're going to cheat me, but I'm not so foolish as that!'

"And he slung his sack over his shoulder and went on. And he walked and he walked, and on the next hill, coming toward him, he saw a man and woman."

Ah, ah,
very softly.

"The man was dark as dusk and the woman bright as dawn, and they wore clothing all of bright colors and jewels of bright colors, red, blue. They met in the road, and he/she/they said, 'What a heavy sack you carry, young man. Will you show us what's in it?' So Takieki did that. Then the maz said, 'What fine bean meal! But it will never last you through the winter.' Takieki did not know what to say. The maz said, 'Dear Takieki, if you give us the sack of bean meal your mother gave you, you may have the farm that lies over that hill, with five barns full of grain, and five storehouses full of meal, and five stables full of eberdin. Five great rooms are in the farmhouse, and its roof is of coins of gold. And the mistress of the house is in the house, waiting to be your wife.'

"'Oh, ho,' said Takieki. 'You think you're going to cheat me, but I'm not so foolish as that!'

"And he walked on and he walked on, over the hill, past the farm with five barns and five storehouses and five stables and a roof of gold, and so he went walking on, the dear Takieki."

Ah, ah, ah!
said all the listeners, with deep contentment. And they relaxed from their intensity of listening, and chatted a little, and brought Siez a cup and a pot of hot tea so that he could refresh himself, and waited respectfully for whatever he would tell next.

Why was Takieki 'dear'? Sutty wondered. Because he was foolish? (Bare feet standing on air.) Because he was wise? But would a wise man have distrusted the maz? Surely he was foolish to turn down the farm and five barns and a wife. Did the story mean that to a holy man a farm and barns and a wife aren't worth a bag of bean meal? Or did it mean that a holy man, an ascetic, is a fool? The people she had lived with this year honored self-restraint but did not admire self-deprivation. They had no strenuous notions of fasting, and saw no virtue whatever in discomfort, hunger, poverty.

If it had been a Terran parable, most likely Takieki ought to have given the ragged man the bean meal for the brass button, or just given it for nothing, and then when he died he'd get his reward in heaven. But on Aka, reward, whether spiritual or fiscal, was immediate. By his performance of a maz's duties, Siez was not building up a bank account of virtue or sanctity; in return for his story-telling he would receive praise, shelter, dinner, supplies for their journey, and the knowledge that he had done his job. Exercises were performed not to attain an ideal of health or longevity but to achieve immediate well-being and for the pleasure of doing them. Meditation aimed toward a present and impermanent transcendance, not an ultimate nirvana. Aka was a cash, not a credit, economy.

Therefore their hatred of usury. A fair bargain and payment on the spot.

But then, what about the girl who offered to share what she had if he'd share what he had. Wasn't that a fair bargain?

Sutty puzzled over it all through the next tale, a famous bit of
The Valley War
that she had heard Siez tell several times in villages in the foothills—"I can tell that one when I'm sound asleep," he said. She decided that a good deal depended on how aware Takieki was of his own simplicity. Did he know the girl might trick him? Did he know he wasn't capable of managing a big farm? Maybe he did the right thing, hanging on to what his mother gave him. Maybe not.

As soon as the sun dropped behind the mountain wall to the west, the air in that vast shadow dropped below freezing. Everyone huddled into the hut-tents to eat, choking in the smoke and reek. The travelers would sleep in their own tents set up alongside the villagers' larger ones. The villagers would sleep naked, unwashed, promiscuous under heaps of silken pelts full of grease and fleas. In the tent she shared with Odiedin, Sutty thought about them before she slept. Brutal people, primitive people, the Monitor had said, leaning on the rail of the riverboat, looking up the long dark rise of the land that hid the Mountain. He was right. They were primitive, dirty, illiterate, ignorant, superstitious. They refused progress, hid from it, knew nothing of the March to the Stars. They hung on to their sack of bean meal.

***

Ten days or so after that, camped on névé in a long, shallow valley among pale cliffs and glaciers, Sutty heard an engine, an airplane or helicopter. The sound was distorted by wind and echoes. It might have been quite near or bounced from mountainside to mountainside from a long way off. There was ground fog blowing in tatters, a high overcast. Their tents, dun-colored, in the lee of an icefall, might be invisible in the vast landscape or might be plain to see from the air. They all held still as long as they could hear the stutter and rattle in the wind.

That was a weird place, the long valley. Icy air flowed down into it from the glaciers and pooled on its floor. Ghosts of mist snaked over the dead white snow.

Their food supplies were low. Sutty thought they must be close to their goal.

Instead of climbing up out of the long valley as she had expected, they descended from it on a long, wide slope of boulders. The wind blew without a pause and so hard that the gravel chattered ceaselessly against the larger stones. Every step was difficult, and every breath. Looking up now they saw Silong palpably nearer, the great barrier wall reaching across the sky. But the bannered crest still stood remote behind it. All Sutty's dreams that night were of a voice she could hear but could not understand, a jewel she had found but could not touch.

The next day they kept going down, down steeply, to the southwest. A chant formed itself in Sutty's dulled mind:
Go back to go forward, fail to succeed. Go down to go upward, fail to succeed.
It would not get out of her head but thumped itself over and over at every jolting step. Go
down
to go
up
ward,
fail
to
succeed....

They came to a path across the slope of stones, then to a road, to a wall of stones, to a building of stone. Was this their journey's end? Was this the Lap of the Mother? But it was only a stopping place, a shelter. Maybe it had been an umyazu once. It was silent now. It held no stories. They stayed two days and nights in the cheerless house, resting, sleeping in their sleeping bags. There was nothing to make a fire with, only their tiny cookers, and no food left but dried smoked fish, which they shared out in little portions, soaking it in boiled snow to make soup.

"They'll come," people said. She did not ask who. She was so tired, she thought she could lie forever in the stone house, like one of the inhabitants of the little white stone houses in the cities of the dead she had seen in South America, resting in peace. Her own people burned their dead. She had always dreaded fire. This was better, the cold silence.

On the third morning she heard bells, a long way off, a faint jangling of little bells. "Come see, Sutty," Kieri said, and coaxed her to get up and stand in the door of the stone house and look out.

People were coming up from the south, winding among the grey boulders that stood higher than they did, people leading minule laden with packs on high saddles. There were poles fixed to the saddles, and from them long red and blue ribbons snapped in the wind. Clusters of little bells were tied into the white neck wool of the young animals that ran beside their mothers.

The next day they started down with the people and the animals to their summer village. It took them three days, but the going was mostly easy. The villagers wanted Sutty to ride one of the minule, but nobody else was riding. She walked. At one place they had to round a cliff under a precipice that continued vertically down from the narrow ledge of the pathway. The path was level, but no wider than a foot's breadth in places, and the snow on it was softened and loosened by the summer thaw. There they let the minule loose and instead of leading them followed them. They showed Sutty that she should put her feet in the animals' tracks. She followed one minule meticulously, step by step. Its woolly buttocks swaying nonchalantly, it sauntered along, pausing now and then to look down the sheer drop into the hazy depths with a bored expression. Nobody said anything till they were all off the cliff path. Then there was some laughter and joking, and several villagers made the mountain-heart gesture to Silong.

Down in the village the horned peak could not be seen, only the big shoulder of a nearer mountain and a glimpse of the barrier wall closing off the northwestern sky. The village was in a green place, open to north and south, good summer pasturage, sheltered, idyllic. Trees grew by the river: Odiedin showed them to her. They were as tall as her little finger. Down in Okzat-Ozkat such trees were the shrubs beside the Ereha. In the parks of Dovza City she had walked in their deep shade.

There had been a death among the people, a young man who had neglected a cut on his foot and died of blood poisoning. They had kept the body frozen in snow till the maz could come and perform his funeral. How had they known Odiedin's group was coming? How had these arrangements been made? She didn't understand, but she didn't think about it much. Here in the mountains there was much she didn't understand. She went along in the moment, like a child. "Tumble and spin and be helpless, like a baby...." Who had said that to her? She was content to walk, content to sit in the sun, content to follow in the footsteps of an animal.
Where my guides lead me in kindness, I follow, follow lightly...

The two young maz told the funeral. That was how the people spoke of it. Like all the rites, it was a narrative. For two days Siez and Tobadan sat with the man's father and aunt, his sister, his friends, a woman who had been married to him for a while, hearing everybody who wanted to talk about him tell them who he had been, what he had done. Now the two young men retold all that, ceremonially and in the formal language, to the soft batt-tabatt of the drum, passing the word one to the other across the body wrapped in white, thin, still-frozen cloth: a praise-song, gathering a life up into words, making it part of the endless telling.

Then Siez recited in his beautiful voice the ending of the story of Penan Teran, a mythic hero couple dear to the Rangma people. Penan and Teran were men of Silong, young warriors who rode the north wind, saddling the wind from the mountains like an eberdin and riding it down to battle, banners flying, to fight the ancient enemy of the Rangma, the sea people, the barbarians of the western plains. But Teran was killed in battle. And Penan led his people out of danger and then saddled the south wind, the sea wind, and rode it up into the mountains, where he leapt from the wind and died.

The people listened and wept, and there were tears in Sutty's eyes.

Then Tobadan struck the drum as Sutty had never heard it struck, no soft heartbeat but a driving urgent rhythm, to which people lifted up the body and carried it away in procession, swiftly away from the village, always with the drum beating.

"Where will they bury him?" she asked Odiedin.

"In the bellies of the geyma," Odiedin said. He pointed to distant rock spires on one of the mighty slopes above the valley. "They'll leave him naked there."

That was better than lying in a stone house, Sutty thought. Better far than fire.

"So he'll ride the wind," she said.

Odiedin looked up at her and after a while quietly assented.

Odiedin never said much, and what he said was often dry; he was not a mild man; but she was by now altogether at ease with him and he with her. He was writing on the little slips of blue and red paper, of which he had a seemingly endless supply in his pack: writing the name and family names of the man who had died, she saw, for those who mourned him to take home and keep in their telling boxes.