Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (40 page)

The Old Hunter, her own kit still bound with soiled human regs, her gumbone stained and pitted, her face scales dull and ragged came a few steps down the slope. ‘Stand forward, Marq Dyeth.’

I set down my bow, stepped forward, then, in place lifted first my left foot, then my right. ‘Thank you for permeating these dry healthful airs with the taste of my name.’

‘Ready yourself for song, Marq Dyeth.’

As the Old Hunter came down a few more steps, I looked at the woman across from me. Her facial scales, with only the light dust of a day’s outing, held none of the damages of a life addicted to cerebral radar transfers in the wild; her gear was strapped with the traditional cord, rather than the cultural intrusion of fabric; her sharp claws spoke of much time spent in the better-tended, frequently refloored runs; and her proportional age was not far above mine.

We were all quiet for five, six, seven minutes. Knowing the difficulty humans can have with such pauses in communication, I wondered whether it was the synapse-jamming or simply life on Rhyonon that held Rat through the silence.

Ollivet’t finally said: ‘I see, Old Hunter, you do not know my companion. Allow me then to usurp the tongue movements of the Introducer. Stand forth, Shalleme.’

The human woman crouched expertly to shrug from her bow. Her finger and toenails were painted gold, which meant she had been born far to the north, or wanted to be mistaken for someone who had been – though in the south fewer and fewer humans paint their nails each year, which, as long as the custom continues other wheres, becomes a sign of origin in itself. She came forward quickly to stand by her companion, lifted one foot, then the other, so quickly and slightly one had to know the action to think it more than a flexing of her knees. She said, with a contralto richness that, in humans, still surprises me (though it shouldn’t): ‘Thank you for permeating these dry, healthful airs with the taste of my name.’

The Old Hunter said: ‘Ready yourself for song, Shalleme.’ After another wait of about three minutes, the Old Hunter went on: ‘I know this last young hunter, but I have not been privileged with the recitation of her name. Now I must choose between my right of relinquishing my privilege as Introducer, or my right of conferring a name on anyone who survives in my memory under the sign of the tiny yellow dragon.’ The Old Hunter came down the rest of the slope, moved over to Korga, bent her head to flick one of her tongues at his smaller toes (remember those foot troughs in the run), then ambled over to taste the dust on Ollivet’t’s midclaws, then stepped towards Shalleme’s gilded feet but did not actually touch them, then came to me and licked first one of my testicles, then my knee, then walked back to Korga.

He watched her but (and I was thankful) did not say anything; and didn’t put down his bow. I began to let Thantish memories leave me.

One tongue waved over one of Rat’s feet, then over the other; two others darted out and retreated. The Old Hunter looked up, narrowing her eyes at Iiriani’s glare. She took a few steps backward, up the slope, unfurling one wing, blackened on both sides with age, and folding it again, slowly. ‘I have chosen between my rights. I shall confer a name on you, youngest of hunters. I name you the Yellow Dragon’s Daughter.’

Korga carefully and awkwardly shrugged off his bow: first from his neck brace, then from behind his chest supports. Two legs ground in gravel – it teetered … but he steadied it, so that it didn’t topple. For moments, he stayed crouched, looking at it as though the third leg might suddenly collapse.

Carefully, he stood.

Then he stepped forward.

He glanced at me, lifted his right foot, next his left. (I winced: it was the wrong order, but no grave matter.) His eyes, burning, moved from mine to the Old Hunter’s, to Ollivet’t’s, to Shalleme’s. ‘Thank you … for permeating these dry, healthful airs with the sound of … no, the taste of my name.’

As he glanced at me again, I grinned at him. His pitted face absorbed it.

‘Ready yourself for song, Yellow Dragon’s Daughter.’

The Old Hunter, with her six-legged gait, moved a few more steps back up the slope, shrugged her own bow off on to the sand (a perfect three-point landing, despite the incline), raised her foreclaws, expanded her gills, opened her mouth, and sang.

3.

It was a simple, beautiful, traditional song – I’d heard it fifteen or twenty times on various hunts (‘I have come to carol my search for a quarry of the mind, only to encounter in the mind of another …’); I was both moved and disappointed. There are flamboyant songs, sung with seven or more tongues at once, full of buzzings, clickings, and poppings, highly rhythmic, where one tongue actually slaps and vibrates against the others – songs designed almost exclusively to impress and excite humans, true. But if a human is untutored to the ways of dragon hunting, dragon singing, it never fails to convince her that she has encountered something truly beautiful, alien, and strange. They are vulgar songs; most hunters consider them somewhat cheap. Yet, oddly enough, because evelmi invented them for us, they make an astonishingly good bridge by which a human mind can move on towards an appreciation of true evelm singing. Then there are a number of songs that are complete appropriations of human musical pieces – evelmi have, after all, many tongues to sing with and can create an impressive range of sound with each – which, if only for the respect it shows directly for a human art, opens up the way for a mutual appreciation to grow. But the song the Old Hunter chose was of neither type. Its barking roughness, its single-voiced drone, its limited tonal variety drifting about within a four-note range, required a thorough appreciation of the hunting song tradition, and in its most local form, in order to appreciate its rich beauties. And Rat possessed that appreciation no more than a Thant. But he listened, quietly if not attentively. By the end of it, the song’s loveliness had touched me again, even if
Korga could not really share it: its rendering was, finally, impersonal, meticulous, exquisite – which are all high compliments in this tradition.

When the song was finished, after the slow, final minutes of looser rhythmic improvisation on a single note, the two strangers smiled at the Old Hunter; so did I; Rat turned to me to see what he should do – a cloud passed from little Iiriani-prime, and, as he turned back, his eyes, which had the while gone human, blazed like mirrors. The human woman stared, blinked, frowned …

Nobody spoke though – it would have been unbearably out of place.

A minute later, Ollivet’t began to sing, and I thought I recognized the stress repetition pattern; almost immediately Shalleme began to sing with her, a partially improvised duet, of a sort that I’d heard had become popular in the far oest. (Oest of what? It simply reflects the northern orientation of the humans on Velm.) The idea is that the single-tongued human adds her voice to the multiple voices available to the evelm, to increase the complexity rather than to compete, with only an impoverished instrument. As Ollivet’t now brought two more, now three more of her tongues to the stressed and unstressed syllables, I marked the song of the dragon-flight’s multiplicity, richness, and beauty, and marked how my world’s culture had changed, under the impact of humanity, to make me, a human, part of it.

Their song completed, I silently smiled my approval. There are detailed commentaries enough to occupy a lot of human lifetimes and a good number of evelm ones on how the nuances of the performance may reflect (or pervert) the experience they represent. A year spent travelling along any of our world’s university-chains, and you will have been exposed to more such commentary
than anyone should be expected to bear. Suffice it that I was impressed.

When I looked at Korga, he was standing with both hands joined before the groin of his pants, heavy human knuckles masking the jewels that extended his perception, his concentration, his comprehension. He was the only one of the five of us, I noticed, who wore clothing. Was it a sign of his alienness? Stripping myself of thought, I bent my head a moment, then began my song.

I don’t know how well it went over. There is a tradition among the Dyeths, which dates back at least to Vrach Dyeth, Gilda’s first adopted child, that humans should learn to sing as well as we can by our own standards in order to render our music. I took endless singing lessons – went around
breathing
all over everything – as a child, from human and evelm teachers, as have many, if not quite most, humans in the south. I have a pleasing voice, and a fair comprehension of the hunting song’s fine points. I sang an old single-voiced form I thought would be appropriate: ‘Here when I hunt with a friend, phantasms of flight …’ It alternates highly formal sections, on which I rather outdid myself, with improvisatory sections, that now seemed just lame – there
was
no way I could sing of what was unique for me about this hunt, at least not through any spontaneous outpour.

I finished. And the Old Hunter, as well as the pair of strange hunters, was smiling – the strangers more because of what my approach to song meant about me, and therefore about what one was likely to find in the world around here. After all, they were from a good ways away. I don’t know what, if anything, they thought of it
as
song. But that, as Santine once said to me, is what you can never know and I can never tell you.

Only a little too quickly, Rat took a step forward. His eyes were closed. (I’d never heard anyone sing a hunting
song with eyes closed.) When he opened his mouth, just a little at first, as if to taste the air, I was suddenly overcome with a cascade of anxieties. Did he even know what a song was? Only hours ago, he had completely misjudged hunting! In that inter-cultural presumption which may obliterate the intelligence of even the most experienced diplomat
₁
, had I simply presumed my total surround was his surround in a way which the first sound from him would make all too clear?

The first sound came. (Why didn’t he open his eyes?) I have heard some evelmi say the untutored human voice is generally more pleasant to them in song than the trained one – even though they respect the training’s intention. The rougher vibrations more resemble the multiplicity of sounds from multiple tongues. The speech impediment that blurred his accent leached all pitch from the note; but pitch is not the priority in hunting songs. That’s why evelmian concepts of harmony, which are quite complex, are nevertheless so difficult for human ears. What I heard first, by whatever part of the ear meters and measures and counts despite all conscious intention, was … well, as clear as any pattern I’d heard that many times: dactyl, spondee, dactyl, trochee – the second beat of the spondee alliterating with the first beat of the second dactyl, and the alliterating sound repeated a third time on one or the other of the trochee’s syllables. That, at any rate, is how Vondramach began her description of the form. Though Okk invented her own language, Okk scholars have been debating for years where she took her terms for prosody from. The only thing everyone agrees on is that they’re not hers, and go back a ways. Spondee, double trochees (that rhyme), spondee, with the stressed syllable in the following anapest alliterating with the first syllable of the initial dactyl; then iamb. Now the first cesura: then dactyl (its first two syllables
alliterating), trochees, second cesura; anapest, trochee … What was coming out of Rat’s mouth was the form which had once taken me three months to master: Vondramach’s version of a kahoud’di’i’mar. The words, however, were improvised and his own. I’ve written them out for you once, though without their rough melody: ‘Doubled in one sense, skewed in four others, my wings under-thundered grey sand in a dragon’s …’ I listened, searching for explanation. (‘… Rat, written all over her, at least to my tongue, rose up, flapping wings, body bending …’) There’s a fairly simple one, though my mind had to scurry after it in the midst of my astonishment. On the high-silver soil and shale about, convocations of rock can act like reflecting antennae; and partial overlay of his hunting experience into my memory or mine into his was certainly possible if his bow shot or mine had hit such a hidden silver mass at the proper angle. Partial exchange? It had happened to me two or three times before and hunters’ tales are full of them. But such a complete one? The only reason I could put together how he could have lifted the whole songform from my mind to fill it with his own roughly accented language was simply that we had another example of Japril’s decimals at work. Through his recital, I watched Rat, then the Old Hunter. She seemed pleased with her young hunter, the Yellow Dragon’s Daughter. Well, she had reason. But watching her, hearing him, I realized that most of my fears for the stranger loose in the alien land were unnecessary. Whether he observed the proper information on his own, picked it up by whatever method from me, or figured it out on his fingers, whatever labour he laid to the task, the transition to my home world seemed for him no more than the rushed flights of gnats returning to the surface of some oil slick, perturbed perhaps because of the shifts in its rainbow colours, but
still recognizing the basic scents they had left it with when they had abandoned it in the morning. I looked at the two women as Rat concluded his song. (After an anacrusis, the initial spondee repeated, followed by the four final dactyls, terminating with a long tough unstressed syllable:) ‘… cerebral surface that, neurally congruent, women and dragons share –’

When Rat finished, the Old Hunter was already turning, already moving away – we Velmians on this side of the Fayne-Vyalou are great on greetings but not much on good-byes; and the Old Hunter had heard many songs, would hear many more. A hasty departure was another of her rights.

But both the women stayed; as I waited, curious, and Rat waited for me to finish waiting, Ollivet’t took a few steps forward. She said: ‘Nice singing,’ with one tongue out the side of her wide scaled mouth and her head cocked to one side.

‘Yours too.’ Tell me how I knew they were tourists in our area; they weren’t in reds. ‘Has the hunting been all you hoped?’ Tell me
if
Korga knew.