The Dream Vessel (9 page)

Sun reader dotscript

Portfolio 14

Page 27

Jersey Saple

Further historical notes, linguistic in particular, for possible inclusion in history of the Rafer race. Fact, theory and lore collected by self and Billister from interviews with incarcerated red-leggers.

The Rafer language, formally known to its users as Guller, appears to be an amalgam of ancient tongues, including American Indian dialects, Spanish, a whit of English, and a large measure from a pre-war European country called Africa, more specifically its sector called Sierra Leone. They are a darker-skinned people than the predominant mainland race, which itself is undoubtedly a mixture of ancient bloodlines. The Rafers owe their isolation and proliferation, in part, to homelands remote from the ravages of Big Bang Day (islands south and east of mainland Merqua, as well as swamplands rimming the Gulf of Texaco).

The Rafer gene pool has remained to a large part distinct. This is due in part to their religious devotion to the writings of an ancient named Rutherford Cross and to his “son” Pec-Pec, as well as an aversion to systems and regulation inherent in the current mainland government.

Guller would seem to have had some effect on mainland English. Witness the ancient word Guller itself, which aside from naming the language, also is a Rafer word meaning wisdom, understanding or fluency. To be fluent in Guller would have meant, to Rafers of long past, to have education, to have wisdom. It would seem to be the derivation of the mainland word gully, which of course carries precisely the same definitions. The word gully, by the way, is not to be found in any of the prewar English writings impounded in New Chicago, or in Revolutionary archives.

Government linguists, prone to disparagement and degrandizement of the Rafers, have argued that the word derives somehow from gullible, which would require that in the course of doing so it took on a nearly opposite definition. That would make it a rare case, indeed.

“Watch again. Watch me—closely.” Tym tapped her chest, indicating herself, not at all sure that the blond young man with the vacant stare knew a whit of the Rafer tongue, even before his injuries. She was glad now for the patience she had learned during her occasional classroom duties, the methodical persistence required to teach a child-like mind.

For the first time in her life she wished she knew enough of the Fungus People’s language, that sound like barking dogs.

“This is called the disc roll. It will make you strong—here. Strong.” She slapped her slender forearm. She paused, and then slapped her thigh. “And here. And it is a good defensive stance, impossible to attack.”

The man squatted naked outside of Tym’s bunker, obediently making an effort to concentrate. His wounds had healed into flat, silvery patches of hairless flesh, a round one on his forehead and a long salamander-shaped swath running up the back of his head, neck to crown. His left eye and the left side of his mouth sagged slightly with reduced muscle control. His head cocked to the side, like a spaniel begging for comprehension. A brilliant chest tattoo spiraled off to entangle his neck, arms, and crotch.

Tym sighed and began the maneuver. She stretched out over the soft earth, a black mixture of rotted jungle vegetation that would prevent the bruising of an inexpert student. She propped herself up on all five points—two feet, two hands, and her chin extended as far out as possible. Then slowly she lifted her chin and right hand, waiting for the blond man to observe. As she touched her chin to the ground, her right foot rose. As her right hand touched the ground, she lifted her left foot. So went the pattern. She repeated the motion, first slowly, then more and more rapidly—always two adjacent appendages in the air—until she resembled a spinning coin waddling against the ground.

When old Sey-Waage approached, Tym broke out of her spin and into a cartwheel. She rolled up his chest, flattening him to the dirt. She came to a standing stop on his sternum, one foot poised daintily above the gray thatch of hairs sprouting from his Adam’s apple. Sey-Waage sputtered with mild surprise, although it was not the first time he had been used as a fighting prop.

“Gragi, this you can do, and you must try—to keep your body fit,” Tym said to her student.

Sey-Waage hacked and rumbled his lungs under Tym’s spindly yet deadly heel. “May I rise, please,” the elder asked, “before you flatten my swallowpipe?” It was a high-pitched voice, but smooth and girllike.

“Ya,” Tym replied. She stepped back and brushed the flecks of dirt out of the patch of Spanish moss that grew from his chest, then helped the elder up. Three tiny calliamaw feathers dangled from his leather necklace, and one of their shafts was now bent. With a deft flick of two fingers, Tym straightened it as she brushed at his chest. She hoped he wouldn’t notice right away. He would find out eventually, of course—the next time Sey-Waage stitched and cleaned a wound with the feather—but perhaps by then he would not recall how the quill might have snapped.

To distract him, Tym returned to her demonstration. She had never known the old man to resist watching a lithe female body in motion. With the two men watching her now, young and old, she resumed the disc spin, kicking up a circle of peat as she whirled, rapidly this time, into a blur.

Sey-Waage stole a glance at this young one that Tym had taken to calling Gragi. The elder had been able to heal this Fungus Person’s mean head cuts, but obviously there was a rotting fever under the surface that did not allow his mind to reach full awareness. For an injured Rafer, the cure for such damage would be tedious but obvious, and none could do a better job of it than this old Healer.

But the mind of a Fungus Person was altogether different, an unfathomable maze that he would more quickly wreck through his blundering than repair. Tym had to be persuaded that her Fungus Person friend needed to return to his own people, his own Healers.

When Sey-Waage returned his gaze to the romp dirt, Tym had disappeared. His lips twisted in mock disgust at such a school child trick. The revered Pec-Pec, it was said, was able to literally disappear at will—one instant there and the next gone. But young Tym, a mere younger, just a Gatherer, a provider of fish and rock crawlers, was not so capable. She had spun off somewhere the second he had glanced at Gragi, and now she was hiding. Timing—almost as good as actually disappearing, if you catch your observer off guard.

Let’s see. Sey-Waage squinted and detected a minuscule rain of dirt particles settling to the ground. His eyes followed their line and came to a many-trunked banyan tree hunched at the edge of the clearing like a twelve-legged cat. Ah, that would make an amusing spin-climb for an immature young woman. The elder pointed into the leafy upper branches, even though he could not see Tym, and cried, “Hak, must be a jellyfish in the sky.” His visual hunt for her had taken less time than a heartbeat.

There was a disappointed rustle of branches, foul cursing, and Tym dropped out of the tree.

As Tym marched back, Sey-Waage turned his back to her and stepped away from Gragi and toward the village. Showing his back like that was a message to Tym that something vaguely troubling was in the air. As he moved his knee joints burned, and he told himself that at age 128 he should not be feeling old—mature, but not old. Perhaps it was the fatiguing sadness. The physical ache one feels for the decline of civilized people.

From this vantage point, looking up this hillside of Jonni Island toward the south end of the village, the elder could see nearly all of the huts and tents. He was awed by the varied designs, demonstrating influence from all corners of the Caribbean and beyond. All of the inhabitants were Rafers, all of them island-hopping nomads—but even then, what a hodgepodge of humanity!

The low tents with the hooping supports under a primitive stretch of animal skin—those would be from the remote Litus Archipelago, south and west of here, one of the few island regions said to be damaged irrevocably by the firebombs of the ancient war. The sturdier structures of tile and thatch would belong to more well-to-do traders, indigenous probably, who had never had the misfortune of being sold to the mainland to work the farms—had never lost their spouses to despairing remarriage, or their trading brass to envious neighbors, or their tongues to the slavers.

But most peculiar of all of the island’s structures was the new bunker Tym had just built for herself and the blond one. Its sloping walls were made of bricks of metal the color of the sun.

Tym was at his side now, a slender shadow above him against the electric blue sky, breathing hard, a defensive tone in her voice: “It will revive his coordination. It will give him a talent to survive by.”

Sey-Waage cleared his throat, a harumph meant to express disapproval. “Any child can learn the disc spin. Any child can learn to wheel away into the treetops.” He paused to let the barb sink in. “But your Gragi has an adult body, an untrained one, an incapable one, with a damaged mind. It is not the same as teaching the disc spin to a child. He will not learn.”

“Gragi improves every day,” Tym told the Healer. She was pleading, wringing her hands in the lap of her soiled trousers. “He makes sounds sometimes—I think they might be words in his own tongue.”

“Babble. Blither.”

“But it sounds the way that the Fungus People speak, like a kennel of animals.”

Sey-Waage snorted, signaling his final pronouncement on the subject: “The blond one needs the medicine of his own people, the Fungus People.”

“But he was aboard the slave ship! That is how they care for their own. They will sell him to the mainland, like any other red-legger. Perhaps it has to do with the tattoo—the death sun. Perhaps they think of him as part Rafer.”

Sey-Waage held his temper. He resisted the temptation to ask her if she pitied the blond one more than her fellow Rafers, whose population was being decimated by the slaving. Five Rafers, he wanted to remind her, were not able to scrabble their way out of the holds of the Lucia alive. But such a comment would start an argument, one that Tym was not capable of winning, and the elder decided to spare her that embarrassment.

“To never get well,” he said, “to never regain a full mind—that to me is a worse kind of slavery. It is a risk, one that must be taken. We do not know his past, save for the odd story written by the plains Rafers in Gragi’s tattoo. And we do not know his future.”

Sey-Waage could tell by the rise in her voice that the young woman was finding the impertinence to press the point. So he changed the subject, the privilege of an elder. He pointed by clapping his index finger and middle finger together in the direction of Tym’s bunker.

“You tell me that this is gold,” he said, “the measure by which Fungus People value themselves. If it is their power, then it is a power that can be used against them. Have you thought of that?”

Tym frowned, puzzled, and Sey-Waage wondered if she was frivolous enough to worry about losing her sparkling new bunker.

“But I have used it against them,” Tym responded. “It could be the gold of no one but the chief of slavers, Big Tom. It was I who showed our swimmers, our raftsmen, how to take this power from him. Now, among people of his kind, lack of power will be his undoing.”

The elder was nodding his head, agreeing politely. “But now Big Tom’s power is standing idle,” he said, pointing again with the clapping fingers. “It makes a sturdy home for you and your handsome pupil but no more. It is not even a practical home, for it lacks ready mobility. There are people among these islands, though—Fungus People, even—who would be willing to help us in exchange for some of this gold.”

“But…” Tym paused to consider the grotesque proposition. “That would be using it just as the Fungus People do.”

“Ah,” the elder responded, smiling. “Hmmm.”

Behind them, Gragi was down sweating in the dirt, practicing the disc spin. Arms, legs, and chin slapped into the dirt awkwardly, disastrously. He looked like a child smashing ants. A goat walked by him on its way to munch on the underbrush. It gave Gragi a quick glare.

Sey-Waage wondered whether he should mention to Tym the chest feather she had broken.

That night, Tym had almost lapsed into sleep when she awoke with a start in her hammock. Gragi was standing at her side and had cautiously caressed her right breast. Then quickly he climbed in with her, setting the hammock swinging dangerously in the dark.

He was against her, naked as well, breathing hotly, a flush Tym could feel all the way to her toes. He stroked at her hip gently. His intentions, and arousal, were apparent.

Gragi’s tattoo rippled with the excited breathing, and Tym remembered the peculiar story that Sey-Waage had translated from the art script contained within the swirl. It began, “The bearer of this death sun is a valorous man among the Fungus People whose continued life I hearby grant….” It was signed by Tha ’Enton, identified as a Rafer warrior and musician from the western plains of the mainland.

Tym hesitated. Oddly, she considered accepting Gragi—the tongues among the villagers could not wag any more disapprovingly than they already did. She studied his pale eyes for the understanding of what he was doing—that would help her decide. And when the answer came to her, Tym realized that old Sey-Waage had been right. About Gragi. About the gold. Everything.

As they neared the coast, Tym lowered the hinged mast on her catamaran—let the breakers, suddenly roaring just under them, carry their craft to the beach. Even under a new moon, an erect white sail could catch the eye of a beach wanderer, and that would not do. As she and Gragi lay clinging to the elastic beetle vines webbed between the two pontoons, Tym wondered why she had not thought to bring a dark sail for the night work. Her mind was in pain with this business about Gragi and—ach—too many lapses could be fatal.

Tym watched Gragi bowing headlong into the billows of sea foam, innocent eyes pressed shut, mouth open in a silent scream and filling with white water, draining, and filling again. During the hard sail over the last two days he had been so cooperative, eager, even, to meet a fate which he had no mind to comprehend. Now he leaned emphatically into the surf, vest and leg skins sopping in the wind, a lamb being born into a cruel and foreign terrain.

The pontoons skid-scratched into the sand. Tym pointed past Gragi’s nose to the docks east up the beach, and the lights of the pub house. She shoved him out of the cradle and he staggered into the cooling sand. He stood there dumbly, hair glistening even in the moonless dark—looking back at her, expecting her to lead him into this new life. He let out one sharp, barking whine—a sea lion croak.

Tym vaulted into the sand, too, her hands planted on the edge of the webbing, and proceeded to push her catamaran back into the surging sea. Quickly, she told herself. This must be done quickly.

But before she was even hip deep Gragi had splashed his way back to the boat’s webbing, his safe nest. Tym cursed and pulled the catamaran once again toward the beach. She wanted Gragi safe in the hands of his fellow Fungus People, but not at the expense of her own life—or her enslavement. This foul island….

On the sand again, Tym dragged the catamaran toward the camouflage of the rolling dunes several yards upland. Gragi caught on and helped, then delighted in the game of kicking at the sand to erase the furrows left by the pontoons.

Tym shed her skins and left them in the boat’s webbing. But Gragi, she decided, was too light skinned to be running around bare in the dark. Gragi’s eyes lingered on her, and she knew he would follow unquestioningly. Her throat tightened.

A quick survey of the upsloping terrain gave her an obvious destination—the tiered wooden structure halfway up Crown Mountain. It threw light from its many tall windows like a Ligkh High Priest’s lantern at a pyre ceremony. She would take Gragi up there and abandon him, where he could never thrash his way back to the waterfront. Given a chance, Tym was sure, Gragi would swim after her to his death. He must be lost away from the sea.

She took his hand and pulled him farther up into the shadowy dunes. Gragi followed with an overjoyed, twitching grin. His grip wrapped her hand powerfully.

The scream came just as Big Tom’s eyes rested on the clepsydra, the water clock. Its copper filigree pointer had edged its way to 10 P.M., but Big Tom had no confidence in its accuracy these days. Sometimes Moori filled the clepsydra’s drip bowl precisely by the sundial in the garden; when it slipped her mind until too late, she would fill it only part way with a cavalier shrug.

The house boy Billister had gotten it right every evening, Big Tom was thinking. And then the scream.

A desperate, tearful howl shattered the night’s serenity. Doubtlessly, there was no one in the house that did not think of Big Tom’s torture trees in the garden below.

The merchant moved quickly on his stubby legs, his crimson robe flying open behind him. Down the polished staircase past the row of decaying oil portraits; past the pillowed pleasure room with its pull curtains; down another staircase, the showy one that fanned into the foyer. He yanked open the heavy double doors.

On the porch stood a blond young man facing into the night, sobbing, his shoulders quaking like a cantering horseman’s.