Six Moon Dance (22 page)

“Listen, Ellin, in Kabuki, we get persons coming after us. What is the old word? Groupies? It is like singers or actors, persons writing notes, asking are we free for dinner, you know? Mostly, I am not paying attention, but a few times I am going to dinner to meet people. I am seeing me through their eyes, and I am finding this confusing. They are picturing me so differently. Some are men who are thinking they love the woman I am pretending to be. Some are women who think they are loving me, actor, because I am obviously understanding women and they are needing understanding. Some are being as you say, vice versus, backward, women in love with woman character, men in love with man actor.

“So, I am being confused, and some days I am looking at face in mirror and thinking, who is this? Is this male or female? Is this real person or only actor? Knowing father and mother is no help. They are being them, I am being me. They are not even knowing me. When I was being small boy sent home from school for being jokester, Mother was saying to me all the time she could not figure who I am being. I am thinking every parent is looking at every child sometimes thinking, who is this? So, when I am twelve, I am hearing famous Haraldson song and deciding I am whoever I am wanting to be! Who I am choosing to be!”

“But that’s just it! I can’t choose who to be! I never had a choice!”

He began to work on her ankle, drawing his brows together. “You cannot choose to be horse, or fish, or tree, no. But it is like this. You are like small seed, and this ship is like big wind, and it is blowing seed from small plant far, far away where is no other such plant. And plant is not saying, “Oh, oh, I cannot be oak tree, I cannot be bamboo, I cannot be cactus, I have no choice.’ Plant is not so silly as that. Plant is putting down roots of own self and growing! And while it is growing, when things are difficult, it changes a little bit, so when it is grown, it is not exactly like the plant it was coming from. It adapts.”

She caught her breath. It adapts. And she had adapted. Even if her clone didn’t have a brain, presumably she had adaptability. “So that’s all I am? A seed blown on the wind?”

He snorted. “Seed on wind and being adaptable. Same as me, Ellin. Same as everybody. All of us, seeds. Seed is ninety percent precursor mammal, like mouse. Seven or eight percent chimpanzee-human primate precursor. One point nine nine nine percent generalized Homo sapiens. Tiny fraction one percent me, or you, different from everybody else. One healthy creature being able to blow on wind and still live! Able to choose.”

He threw up his hands, scowled at her, then patted her foot with a gesture that was pleasant without being in the least threatening. There, there, he seemed to say. Settle down.

“Oh, go away,” she said, turning to bury her face in the pillow. “Very soon we’ll be meeting that other ship, and I don’t want to be all messed up in a frangle with you about my identity—or lack of it!”

“Lacking of it?” He grinned. “I make it rule only to talk to identities. Stop fretting and sleep.”

Though unconvinced by anything he had said, shortly after he shut the door, she slept.

Back in his own stateroom, however, Gandro Bao did not sleep. Instead he stared into the mirror, his brows tented in query, one nostril lifted, as though scenting a trail. “Here I am being helpful,” he murmured to himself. “Lecturing all about roots and growing in space where is nothing to grow on. Maybe is being only wind under us, and no place for us to hold to? Who is this Bao Bao Down to be giving Ellin Voy small contentments, like mama giving cookies?”

He smoothed his face, making it expressionless, calm, accepting. “Demand much of yourself and little from others,” he quoted to himself from the analects. “You will prevent discontent.”

That would have to do, for tonight.

B
ane and Dyre began harassing Mouche the moment they were moved into Consorts’ quarters, as they had to be very soon, for the protection of the new students. “Dirt rubs off,” as Madame was wont to say, and with Bane and Dyre dirt took all forms from attitudinal, to behavioral, to linguistic.

At first the two of them merely placed themselves within Mouche’s view and stared endlessly, the lidless stare of serpents. Mouche ignored them. Within a few days, Simon had them so busy they had no time for staring.

Nights were still free, however, so they moved from covert threat to overt violence. One night, as Mouche was returning to his suite, Bane and Dyre leapt out at him from behind a protruding pillar, grimacing in theatrical fashion, mouthing their intentions in voices far too loud for secrecy, and with knives snaking from between their fingers. The assault was interrupted by Fentrys and Tyle, who came around the corner too late or just in time, depending on one’s point of view. They were all wounded by the time it was over, and it took all three of them to put the two brothers down and send them off, bloody but still threatening.

“What started that?” Fentrys wanted to know.

“I told you about Duster,” Mouche said, dabbing at a cut on his hand. “Those two did it, and they recognized me the first day they were here. Now they want to punish me for what they did.”

“Well,” said Tyle, “if they’re that sort, they’ll want to punish all three of us. We’d better travel in company for a time, to watch one another’s backs.”

And so they did, sticking so tight with each other or around the instructors that they thwarted several more attempts at violence. Simon, whose job required keen observation, noted this collective stance almost immediately, but it took him several days to determine the cause. At that point Simon took an early opportunity to call Mouche aside and have an informal conference.

“What is this?” Simon asked the boy, after seating both of them comfortably in Simon’s quarters and pouring two glasses of wine.

“Those two used to live near my family’s farm,” said Mouche. “They killed my dog. Worse, they made poor Duster suffer!”

“What cause did they have for doing that?” Simon wondered. “Or was it random meanness?”

“Oh, they thought they had cause,” Mouche admitted. “Duster and I stopped their killing some little native creature, killing and torturing it, too, I’d guess. I didn’t hurt them any, and this business of trying to wound me or kill me just doesn’t make sense. Why are they doing it?”

“I’d say your not hurting them is part of the why,” said Simon. “Remember what Madame has taught you about gaming groups, packs, tribes? If you’d beaten them bloody, they might have fawned on you. Some men want more than anything to have a place in a pack and follow a lead dog. But if you won’t fight for the role of lead dog, then you’re an outsider, someone who interfered with their doing as they liked, and to men like Bane and Dyre, outsiders, particularly interfering ones, are the enemy. Prey, property, or enemy. You have to be one of the three.”

Mouche ducked his head to hide the angry tears at the corners of his eyes. He always teared up when he thought of Duster. “Do they get pleasure out of acting like that?”

Simon leaned forward and laid a rough hand on his shoulder. “Look, Mouche, you’ve got to understand what Newholme men are about, not from Madame’s point of view but from our own. Now most men get taught early on that being dutiful is good, so they think they’re being good when they work themselves into exhaustion and meanness. And most men know that pleasure distracts them from duty, so that teaches them pleasure is shameful. But at the same time, we have these restless brains inside that tell us to keep pushing toward the top so we can make a hole, crawl through, and see what’s up there. All of us, even Consorts and supernumes, figure we’ve got a natural right to be there, on top and we use whatever we’ve got to get there. Humor. Or eloquence. Or skill. Whatever.

“Bane and Dyre, now, they’ve got the idea mutual pleasure is sissy stuff, so the only pleasure they get is sniggering and bullying and destruction. And they don’t like duty either, so they avoid it. The only thing that gives them satisfaction is anger, so being angry is how they go looking for themselves, like vandals taking a city: throw, hit, break, kill, shatter—it’s all one to them. Destroy enough stuff, suddenly they’ll find the hidden door with heaven behind it.”

Simon looked at his glass, swirling the liquid in it, watching the patterns it made. “I try to tell you boys, best I can, that there isn’t any door. You climb over people, you push and shove and get up there on top, it’s empty. I try to tell you pleasure’s a good thing, and it’s easier with Hunks than most, because you’re being trained to give it. And I try to tell you that duty’s good, too, but you’ve got to balance it. And you’ve got to study yourself to know how much of each you need, for no one man is a measure of all.”

“What do you mean, study?” Mouche asked.

“If you want to know about a Purse fish, you don’t beat the fish to death or drain the sea dry. You look at the fish where it is. You study how it swims and what it eats and how it lives. You don’t take hold of it, or kill it, you watch it. So, if you want to know who you are, you don’t go laying around with a pickax. You try to catch yourself when you’re not pushed by anybody or anything and watch yourself. You see what you do, and you figure out why, and you decide how that makes you feel, and how it affects others, and whether it makes you joyful or proud.

“It’s amazing how many people don’t know their own nature, even though they can’t do anything with it until they know what it is. How can you move toward joy if you don’t know what makes you happy?” Simon shook his head. “Nobody’s required to live in pain. We should always try to move toward joy….”

He looked up to meet Mouche’s smile, suddenly radiant.

“Oh, Simon,” he said, “It’s not easy, but you’re right. And even the pain lights a road for you, doesn’t it? It beckons you to fix it! Like if you know something’s hurt, you can try to mend it.”

Simon, surprised into near silence, agreed it could.

He later mentioned the matter to Madame, when they were alone and very private, for she had asked him, as a favor, to come warm her bed that night and he had, as much from affection as duty, done so.

“Mouche is right,” murmured Madame, sitting naked on the side of the bed, her hair loose about her shoulders, while Simon knelt behind her, kneading her neck between strong hands. “They beg for murder, both of them.”

“Have you no pity for them, Madame?”

“Of course I pity them, Simon. I pity the mad dog that bites the child, the bull that gores the herdsman, the boar pig that tears the swineherds leg to shreds with his tusks. If they were wild creatures, we would say, with Haraldson, that they have the right to be as they are and the fault is ours for straying into their territory. The fact is, they are not wild creatures, they are protected and doctored and fed by mankind, and are thus kept according to mankind’s rules. So it is with Bane and Dyre.”

He went on kneading. “An odd thing happened when I was talking with Mouche. I was talking about discovering oneself, the lecture you often give …”

“… so our Consorts can help their patronesses discover their joys …”

“And their own. Yes. And he got this expression on his face. I’ve never seen such ecstacy on a face!”

She said softly, “Mouche is a good one, isn’t he Simon? Quite out of the ordinary. Something about him….”

Simon moved his hands to the other side. Yes, he thought to himself. There was something about Mouche.

A
t midwinter the people on Newholme took a long holiday which coincided, Mouche found, with the disappearance of the Timmys. When the Timmys went away, everything shut down, and in winter it stayed shut down for seven or eight days.

The holiday was called the Long Nights, or The Tipping of the Year, an occasion for family gatherings. Then kin-folk sat around the fire to tell over the names of ancestors, to honor those who had achieved g’ status or Haghood among them, to relax standards of neatness and laundering (in the absence of whomever or whatever might have been, at other times, responsible for neatening and laundering), and to give amusing gifts and consume traditional foods prepared by their own hands while telling old stories around the tile stoves.

Though Consorts would never be, strictly speaking, “family,” they needed to know how these occasions were managed, and House Genevois paid local families a generous stipend for hosting two or three youngsters in their homes during the Long Nights.

Mouche might have balked had the courtyard still been tenanted. His nightly forays had become an addiction, despite the feelings that flooded him at each watching. Initially, there was a kind of ecstacy in the watching, but gradually it turned to pain as if some huge thing was dying and unwilling to do so. The feeling exhausted him, and he had a sense the Timmys felt as he did, that they, too, were exhausted by the grief and weariness that came out of nowhere.

But the courtyard was empty, and he felt better for the respite. It was good, for a time, to have a simple skin-deep life, to be amused and think of nothing but singing or cooking or playing with children. He and Fentrys and Tyle always went to the weaving house of Hanna and Kurm g’Onduvai; their grown son, who supervised the looms, and his dowered-in wife as well as the eldest daughter, who had been dowered-in by a neighboring family, but who was visiting for a few days. There were also numerous merry and lively grandchildren.

Mouche and his friends enjoyed the annual give and take of the holidays. They played games with the children, taking them sledding on the nearby hill and ice-sliding on the frozen brook. In the evenings, they entertained by singing and playing on their instruments a number of songs everyone knew: “The Wind in the Chimney Corner,” and “Six Black Cows,” and the wordless melody of the “Lullaby for the Summer Snake.” Even the chatter was interesting, and it was from Hanna’s chatter, in fact, that Mouche first learned something on a subject he had been on the lookout for, the history of Dyre and Bane.

The conversation was between Hanna and Kurm, concerning some yarn Kurm had recently purchased from a local farmer.