Fish Tails (26 page)

At this evidence of real danger, Xulai cried, “Who was stealing women?”

“It wuz some little towns off inna woods, kinda strange ­people, had this notion stealin' women wuz . . .” Gum made a two-­handed gesture of puzzlement. “It wern' so much t' gettin' of some women.
It was more the kind of women they got!
Raiders said a only way 'ey cud get a
good
fee-­male wuz stealin' one.”

Xulai pursued the question. “And they're still watching for them to come back?”

“Oh,
cata-­pull-­it,
NO, lady! I SAID! Non'uv'm come t'Saltgosh
fer seventy years
! See, back 'en, the Goshians here got ridda big bunch uv'm, n' they never come back.”

Though Xulai felt an actual physical pain at letting go of any possible danger that she might intervene to prevent, she did get the point. As Gum said, Goshians weren't geese, but there was this one little thing that bothered her. “If the villagers don't steal women anymore, why do the Goshians still keep the watch during wintertime?”

At this, Gum's speech slowed into his
important mode:
the pipe withdrawn from his mouth, each syllable separately enunciated and containing all the consonants habitually ignored. “No, no, lady, they keeps the watch
all
times. Daytime. Nighttime. All year round! Maybe those women-­stealin' crazies don't come no more, but it don't matter! Now, y'see, keepin' watch is
tra-­di-­shun
! When a boy outgrows singin' t'high notes, gets his man-­voice, t'sing, y'know, then he gets ee-­ni-­shee-­ated to the Watch. Takes a oath an' all.” Gum's voice deepened, he intoned: “
‘Will not rest, will not sleep, faithfully my watch I'll keep.'
Then his daddy gives him a red hat with a badge on, gives him a drink a' beer. Ever'body in t' Watch cheers, an' they have a feast! Makes a boy proud t'do his part: watchin'! That room up there, it's so high up, they saw you afore you even came the wet way inta the valley.”

“Ah!”
said Xulai, with satisfaction. “Rite of passage,” content to let it be so, now that she had properly categorized the matter.
“Male solidarity system.”

Abasio, however, though he did not react outwardly, felt his body tense. If they had seen over that wall, then they had seen into the valley beyond. He smiled and nodded at Gum, resolving yet again to meet, very soon, with Melkin.

Next day they carried the babies up the path and walked through the village as they routinely did, showing the babies, explaining, letting the villagers follow them back to the pond in the meadow to see the babies at play. The Goshians had displayed the usual fascination, asked the usual questions—­though with none of the hostility shown in many other places. Then, at lunchtime, they had gone into the Tavern, and it was there that they learned what occupied the Saltgoshians during their free time, for Gum announced to all assembled that these folks from Tingawa had never heard local music.

There was immediate enthusiasm. ­People went up the path to fetch ­people who were in the town. ­People came hastily down again. Chairs were arranged. All the instruments were kept in the Tavern back room, as the Tavern was the only place large enough to hold everyone who wanted to take part. Accordingly, though the music was mostly vocal, the back room was plundered of its astonishing variety of drums, gongs, bells, and chimes so that Saltgosh might offer its visitors an impromptu concert. Virtually everyone except the young children and some of the very old wore a red hat with a badge and had a vocal or instrumental part. The director was an elderly man, possibly retired from work in the mines or relegated to less physical work, but he had acquired extensive musical knowledge from somewhere, for he held the music in both mind and heart as he directed his musicians.

It seemed almost everyone in Saltgosh was part of the music. The singers covered the entire range of the human voice from a basso so deep that it made Xulai's bones rumble, to one clear, elegantly crystal soprano that lilted and leapt, utterly unstrained. That singer was part of a cluster of soprano, contralto, and tenor voices that rang out like bells from a group of five dark-­haired young ­people who stood together and looked much alike. Too close in age to be siblings; Xulai thought they were probably cousins.

Xulai had not heard such complex harmonies or memorable melodies since she'd left Tingawa. The words of the songs praising trees, wind, birdsong, and other natural things were simple, but their effect was not. Xulai heard the music with her whole body. “Deep mine” songs were dense, in men's voices only, giving Abasio shivers about lost men who walked galleries far under the earth. Xulai's favorite was one they called the “rain song,” which started with a patter of rain on a tom-­tom, the sound of rain on a roof, built into a thunder of barrel drums, a lightning strike of gongs and cymbals, all the while the voices building in a rush of air, a torrent of wind, the storm rushing this way and that, on and on, finally fading into the patter of rain, once more, slowing, slowing, ending with a serious-­faced five-­year-­old girl child's solo on a treble drum the size of an apple: a delicate, two-­fingered
tap-­tap-­ping, tappity . . . ping . . . ping . . . ping
. . . and silence except for a distant mutter of barrel-­drum thunder, fading . . .

After the concert, they went to congratulate the director, Burn Atterbury, who flushed with pleasure to hear the singers praised. Xulai asked about the youngsters she had particularly noticed, and his smiling mouth turned down sadly for a moment, then smiled again.

“Ah, they are happy here, I think, for all their tragedy so early in their lives. They were just babies, not two years old yet, when they came here to our Home. They're orphans, the children of three brothers, Pembly was the name. The youngest brother fathered the two girls and one of the boys, Brian. The older brothers each fathered one of the other two boys, and they had older children as well, but the older children were with the adults when the tragedy happened.”

“A tragedy?”

“It was some kind of family celebration, grandparents' birthday or anniversary, something of the kind. The five littlest ones were left at home together with a ­couple hired to look after them, rather than subject them to a rather arduous journey, and all the rest of the three families went to the celebration. They were staying together in the little town there in the mountains where the grandparents lived, and there was an avalanche! That was a terrible year for snow. They had a string of them that year, and not one since!”

“How did they end up here?” Xulai asked, in wonder. “Someone related to them?”

“No. It was a very unexpected thing. Turned out the family had been very fond of music, and their business had taken them back and forth traveling through here many a time, so they had had occasion to hear Saltgosh music many times, even going out of their way sometimes just to hear it. We do sings for ­people, you know, when we have a bunch of 'em here. Don't remember the Pemblys, myself, but we have visitors coming through from snowmelt to snowfall every year, and no way we'd remember 'em all. Anyhow, the Pembly brothers had left wills if anything ever happened that left family members needing care due to age or health, if our Home would take them in and let them share in our music, the Home was to receive the family estates. They were very well-­to-­do, the Pemblys, so it was quite a fortune, altogether.”

“Your Home?” asked Xulai. “I don't understand . . .”

“No reason you should, ma'am, we don't make a big thing out of it. I'm sure you know that many jobs can be dangerous, and mining—­even salt mining—­is no different. Sometimes there's accidents and ­people may get crippled up, or maybe some young ones are orphaned. Folks get elderly and can't quite manage on their own, maybe it gets to be too much for them even to go up and down stairs to the Summer Town. They're our ­people, and they don't want to be sent away somewhere among strangers, none of them. So, it was over a hundred years ago the miners' 'sociation—­that's who owns and runs the mines, ma'am, and all of us here, we're members of it—­we built a Home back up in the woods, real pretty south-­facing clearing with a pond in it up there, little garden for folks as like to putter planting things, not far away, and o' course, ­people that planned it put a nice warm underhome below it for winter. The 'sociation sees to it there's good ­people hired to do the cooking and cleaning and caregiving. Tavern here does the food buying and storage for them.

“Well, that's where the young Pemblys grew up. We already had a dozen grown-­ups and seven or eight orphaned little ones up there, and figured with the Pemblys added on, we'd maybe need another good schoolteacher and music teacher. We've got our own school here at the mine. Have to! Can't let the children grow up ignorant. The Home's connected by a tunnel so the little ones from there can go to school with the little ones from here. We got us some edubots, too, and I got involved, oh my, yes!
I got involved right off, because way before those Pembly babies could talk more'n a few words, they could sing!
”

“Sing? Words to songs?” Xulai marveled.

“I'm saying
before they could say the words, they could sing the music!
They could sing. In harmony! Hear a tune one time, and the five of 'em could sing it in harmony and make it sound like they'd rehearsed it for a year! We bought a lot of instruments, too, and later on they learned instruments as well. Some of the old folks are pretty good musicians, too, and sometimes the Home gives the rest of us a concert. Last time, all the music they played and sang was composed by one or another of the Pemblys. Truth to tell, ma'am, I think their folks had more than just an inkling about how talented those little ones were goin' to be, somehow, because with all of the elder Pemblys lost at one time like that, well, those families left quite a sizable amount to our Home just because they'd been real impressed by our music.”

Xulai murmured, “Well, one doesn't ordinarily think about marvelous music and salt mines at the same time, so I can see why you said it was unexpected.”

Mr. Atterbury frowned. “Oh, if you lived here you'd think of 'em at the same time, ma'am. Sometimes we hire an outsider, or I should say, sometimes we don't have a young one coming along to take a certain job that needs filling, so we have to bring someone who's qualified in from outside. No matter how qualified somebody might be, he or she wouldn't stand a chance of gettin' the job if they can't make music. Why, we'd all go crazy back here alone in these winter mountains if we didn't have our music.”

As they were helping put away the instruments in the back room, Xulai and Abasio noticed several stacks and baskets of little carved animals, ­people and creatures, most of them quite funny. According to Gum, the children in Saltgosh were born with music in their throats and carving knives in their hands and the carved toys were part of the “what all” that was done down below, in winter. The small wooden creatures had cleverly jointed arms and legs, or wings and fins, or—­later, after Willum had informed the entire village about “first-­generation changers” (Abasio had not thought to silence him on that matter), multiple tentacles, each tentacle with a dozen or more joints that writhed with an amusing jerkiness. If the Sea King were to see them, thought Xulai, he would be most offended.

Abasio immediately bought a quantity of toys to take with them, letting it be known at the same time that he would buy all the sea-­children toys modeled on Bailai and Gailai that the carvers could come up with in the next few days. All that afternoon, carvers came to peer intently at the babies, who, now that they wore Bertram's jackets, were unmistakably male or female. Abasio and Xulai had agreed that mer-­toys would be excellent selling tools. “Who could be afraid of a creature that looked exactly like a doll one had played with as a child?” asked Abasio. “Maybe one with a jacket and hat that a child could put on and take off?”

Xulai's eyes lit up! Dolls! That was the word she'd missed! Yes!
Soft dolls!
The kind of thing one put into cradles with infants! She had had such toys, and Abasio remembered having a fuzzy bear with a red, red tongue. Others recalled piglets, raccoons, yarn-­haired little-­boy and little-­girl dolls. No doubt there were women in Saltgosh who would enjoy making extra money by sewing dolls, soft, stuffed sea-­person dolls, sea-­baby dolls, for the cribs of ordinary babies, so they could get used to the shape and the idea. Yes. They subsequently spoke with Bertram's sister Liny, offering her a sizable sum in advance to pay whatever women might enjoy making the dolls.

“You can send batches of them on to Bertram with this letter from us asking him to send on to Woldsgard and Wellsport. He may also want to sell some of them to ­people who come to his shop.”

Liny gave him a searchingly mercantile look. “But your real wish is not so much that they be sold for profit as that they be sent far and wide, eh?”

“Oh, profit was not the point at all,” said Xulai. “No, our needs are supplied by the ­people who planned and worked on the sea-­children project. Selling the dolls simply gets the wherewithal to buy materials to make more of them! Spreading the image, getting the shape to seem natural to ­people was what we wanted to do.”

Liny nodded. “Well then, I think we can do that on our own, take our own modest profit, and thank you for the suggestion. The women of Saltgosh have always sold handicrafts of the needle, the loom, the carving knife, or the oven. A nearby sun-­pocket farm raises ginger root for us, and our hard ginger wafers are in great demand by the wagoners—­they keep very well. Though it's not apparent this late in the season, this route through Saltgosh is well traveled, it's the only wagon road that fords the Big River and goes on to the coast. Wagoners who come here take our orders for things we need and bring them on their next trip and buy our crafts here to sell elsewhere.