Zadayi Red (17 page)

“Dahzi,” said Sunoya, “time to study.”

“Aw, Mom,” said the teenager.

Several of his fellow players grinned at him.

Su-Li wing-flapped off Sunoya’s shoulder and toward the skies. He didn’t like human squabbling.

“Just a little while longer,” said Dahzi. “One goal.”

They were playing the stickball game, where one team threw the ball forward with netted sticks until they scored a goal at the other team’s end. Dahzi wanted to play for the Soco team the next time they were challenged.

He was frustrated. His mother and grandfather were stalling him. He wanted to go on a vision quest. He wanted to go to war. He wanted to get rid of the damned guard who hung around him every moment. But to go on a vision quest you needed to be prepared and put on the mountain by a medicine man. This village had two medicine people, his mother and grandfather—Ninyu had long since been appointed Medicine Chief. Both were saying no to him.

He hated thinking about it.

“How about one more goal and I tell all of you a story?” She got a lot of hangdog looks. “You’ll like it. It’s about sex.”

Now she got some shrugs and smiles. “Go score your goal.”

She sat down next to the guard who still went everywhere with Dahzi. Since the year Inaj outwitted Tsola and Sunoya at
the Planting Moon Ceremony, the Tuscas had attacked with hardly a pause, and the Socos had fought back.

Sunoya was tired of the whole situation, and beyond tired. Everyone was, except apparently for Inaj. Sunoya felt like she was marching her life to funeral music.

She was also tired because this young man was a huge responsibility, the center of her duty not only as a mother but as a medicine woman. He would eventually answer the great question of her life. In the end would she wear her rawhide disc with the blue side out, for desolation? Or red for victory?

Unfortunately for her the guard didn’t boost her mood. His duty of watchfulness forbade talking.

When the boys had scored their goal (Sunoya didn’t notice which team did it), they walked down to the river with her, drank, lounged on the grass, and listened to the story. They all knew some of their people’s old stories, like how Buzzard shaped the country where the Galayis lived into high mountains and deep valleys; how the turkey got his gobble; how the rattlesnakes took revenge on the people, and then gave them a song that would cure snakebite; and many stories of the Little People, who stood only knee-high to a human being and lived in the rivers and owned powerful magic. But they didn’t know any that were sexy.

Su-Li landed and took a place on Dahzi’s shoulder now. Dahzi was the only person, aside from Sunoya, that Su-Li would touch. The buzzard liked stories, and he liked seeing boys get their egos tweaked.

“A young man named Namu was feeling very lusty,” Sunoya began, “and he got a clever idea. When he saw the women leaving the village to go to the river and bathe, he decided to sneak along after them and see if he could find a way to send his
do-wa
into one of them.”

The boys giggled.

“So he folded his
do-wa
up, packed it in a pouch, and carried it in on his back.

“A bluebird flew alongside and teased him. ‘What’s that you have in your pack?’ asked the bluebird. ‘Is that your
do-wa
? Your
do-wa
as long as twenty snakes tied together in a string? Your
do-wa
as big and strong as the tap root of the tallest tree? And your balls as big around as your head? Is that what you’re carrying in your pack?’

“Namu didn’t answer. The bluebird knew very well what was in there.”

The boys were looking at Sunoya with strange expressions.

“Well, men were different then—that’s the point of the story.

“Namu crept through the laurels and got down to where he could walk in the river. When he could see the women around the bend, he slid back into the trees and parted the branches for a peek. The women had left their dresses on the grassy bank, and they looked very beautiful. Maybe he liked the young ones better, and his eyes spent some time caressing their breasts and thighs. Every woman, though, even the oldest crone in the village, looked desirable to Namu.

“As he watched, he imagined how good the place between their legs would feel to his
do-wa
. Imagining this, he unfolded his
do-wa
slowly, and imagined some more, and he began to feel like he was dreaming.

“He slid his
do-wa
gently into the river and let it drift downstream. But it floated on the surface.

“ ‘That will never do,’ the bluebird said. ‘The women will spot that thing right off.’

“Namu drew his
do-wa
back and tied a stone to the head. Slowly, he fed the
do-wa
back into the river, and it slithered downstream. This time it ran along the bottom, well-hidden.

“ ‘That won’t work either,’ said Bluebird. ‘How’s it going to get up where it needs to go?’

“So Namu reeled his
do-wa
back in and this time tied a smaller stone to it. When he floated it back into the water, it was perfect.

“Down along the current and beneath the ripples his
do-wa
drifted, sneaking up on the women.

“What Namu didn’t know was that these women had seen this trick before and were wise to it. In the past they just got out of the water, pretending they didn’t notice anything. But this was one time too many.

“The old crone said, ‘It’s Namu—I saw him peeking out from behind the laurels.’

“The prettiest girl of all said, ‘I’ve had it with men doing this. Let’s teach him a lesson.’

“The old crone gave a wicked grin, grabbed her deerskin skirt, and picked a certain thistle with it.

“The other women giggled and watched in fascination, half afraid they knew what she was going to do.

“She took the end of Namu’s
do-wa
in one hand and with the other she stroked it gently with the thistle, handling the bristles carefully with the hide.

“Namu immediately got lost in sensual delight. This was wonderful beyond wonderful.

“What he didn’t know, but the women did, was that the milk in the thistle was poisonous. Inch by inch, it was making Namu’s
do-wa
numb. When he couldn’t feel anything on a section of flesh, the old woman would pinch it off and throw it to the fish. She worked her way right up to Namu pretty quickly, feeding the fishes as she went. When she got to him, he had dozed off in pleasure.

“The old woman left him with, well, about the length men have now, and let him sleep. So they say.”

Dahzi gave his mother a wicked eye. The boys shrugged and wandered away.

Su-Li jumped from Dahzi’s shoulder to Sunoya’s and made a rasping sound.

“Are you laughing at me?” she asked the buzzard.

He didn’t answer.

“Or them?”

I have a
do-wa,
too,
he said,
but it was never forty feet.

J
emel was a Moon Woman. She’d known that since she could remember, and it never bothered her. In fact, she liked it.

The people told all sorts of stories about Moon Women and how crazy they were. The first Moon Woman got the name because she stared at the reflection of a full moon in a pond until she lost her mind, walked into the water, and drowned. Most of the stories, though, were about women falling in love with men—wildly in love—and what trouble that brought everyone. One Moon Woman got so crazy that she ate her children. Another turned into a coyote and did nothing but howl at the moon for the rest of her life.

Jemel had heard these stories as often as any Galayi girl did. However, her mother changed everything—she made a point of subverting the teachings. According to her mother, these stories were just a way of getting women to give up whoever and whatever they really wanted. They made love seem like something that made you crazy—it took you over entirely, body, mind, and spirit, and brought you to a terrible end. Mother pointed out that the Galayi word for “moon,”
u-do-su-no
, was very much like the word for “crazy” or “lunatic,”
u-nah-su-no.

Mother had another way of undermining the stories, maybe
a better one. It was common Galayi wisdom not to get too excited, not to hope too hard, not to be eager, not to display emotion, and in fact not to feel it, to damp it down. Mother deliberately taught Jemel the opposite. When Jemel wanted something—a cloth sash for a dress, paint for her face, dyed porcupine quills to make a decoration—Mother always said how great that would be, and reminded Jemel constantly of how much she wanted it. Sometimes Jemel got what she wanted, and experienced a big vibration of thrill. Sometimes she didn’t, and disappointment burned her gullet.

When Jemel got hurt that way, Mother would say, “This is life. Pain and joy—both are real, both are sharp. Feel all of each one. Then you’re alive. If you mute the pain, mute the joy, you’re a ghost shadow.”

Mother also said the stories about Moon Women were a way of making girls marry men they weren’t interested in. Most Galayi marriages were arranged by the families. A love match was rare, and usually an object of sly smiles and predictions of woe.

“Jemel,” her mother said a hundred times, “what you love, doesn’t matter what it is, or who it is—that’s your heart and spirit, that’s you. Don’t let anybody talk you out of it, don’t let anybody get in its way. Otherwise you live with a hole in your heart.”

Then she would give the little girl a kiss and say, “The one I love is you.”

Jemel was her mother’s only child—her sisters came out of her father’s other wife—and she got lots of attention.

Until her mother died, when Jemel was twelve.

As Jemel got a little older, she started putting together a bigger picture than what her mother actually said. She came to understand that Mother had been unhappy all her life.
What if I wasn’t Mother’s biggest love? What if she wanted someone else and didn’t get him? Or something else?

The child Jemel had gotten hints of the story, but the teenage Jemel asked questions and put it all together. At sixteen Mother had fallen madly in love with a man her own age. Both families were dead set against the marriage.

In the end Mother’s lover was sent to another village to live with relatives. On the journey something happened to him, and he was never seen again. Mother was trapped into marrying her older sister’s husband. But Jemel, said some of the whispers, was the daughter of Mother’s lover, not her husband.

This kind of arranged marriage was the Galayi ideal. The man Jemel was raised to call “Father,” Katya, was a good husband and a good father. But he was like the other men of the village, and apparently all the Galayi people. He loved his wives in an amiable way, and the marriage turned into a sort of bargain—we’ll have sex sometimes, we’ll make a family, and we’ll run a house hold and raise children, make a good life. There was no wild attraction in Katya’s kind of love. Passion was ruled out. Even today Katya had a comfortable marriage to two of Mother’s sisters. Grown children lived with him, and plenty of grandchildren. It was a contented life.

What Jemel wanted—she knew this by the time she was twelve—was a grand romance. She kept her mouth shut about it. She’d already heard that she was a lunatic.

The hardest part of her life so far was waiting three entire winters after she turned twelve and watching her friends become women and be courted, while she remained a child.

She learned from the experience. She watched her friends flirt with various men, their own age and older, and saw the pointlessness of it. They liked some suitors better than others, disliked some, may have dallied with some, being careful about the time of the moon. But a feeling of ritual and convention infected the process. These weren’t affairs of the heart—they were a kind of commercial display. The woman went to the man considered most appropriate.

Jemel thought long and hard about how her friends could play such a foolish game, how they could marry into comradeship instead of passion. Maybe they were thinking that they could still have fun with anyone they wanted in the bushes. Jemel thought that was a dumb way to live. She didn’t understand it, and she didn’t want to.