The Unfinished Song: Taboo (34 page)

The Vision ended.

A number of beautiful men and women stood in a circle nearby. At first, Dindi did not recognize them. Then, she understood. Gwenika and Gremo had finished their work. These smiling, shining beings,
who
each glowed in a bath of many colors, were the Shunned. No longer filthy or disfigured, but revealed as the whole selves they had always been meant to be, they wept and hugged one another with joy.

Svego stood apart from the others. Tears streaked his face. Gremo walked to him and placed a hand on his shoulder; Svego first tried to pull away, but then turned to Gremo and kissed him on the mouth.

Kavio was watching War Chief Nargano, not the Vooma, so he almost missed it. In the dancing area, the Blue Tavaedies simultaneously pulled the wooden planks of the stage away, revealing a precipitous drop. Brena screamed as she and the other Yellow Bear Tavaedies plunged through the trap door—and into the ocean. Kavio cursed himself for not recognizing sooner that all of Sharkshead was built on pikes over a lagoon.

Kavio would have jumped up, but Nargano grabbed his arm.

“All part of the competition,” said Nargano.

“They will drown!”

“No, there is a net. They will merely have a hard time getting out.” He flashed a feral grin. “We win. The Vooma, I mean.”

Kavio went still. “Very well. But let me free them from the net now.”

“First, my question.”

The damn question.
Kavio tried not to show his impatience. “Ask, then.”

Nargano’s breath smelled of beer and fish. “Do you know what a fool is?”

“Tell, then.”

“One who does the same thing and expects a different result.”

Kavio blinked at the War Chief in surprise. “Yes…yes. That’s exactly what I was thinking too, Uncle. We have to change the Pattern that traps us—”

“Then why do you take me for a fool, Kavio?” snarled Nargano. “Why do you come here promising peace when I know you bring poison?”

“Wh…what?”

“Your cousin told me everything.” Nargano clapped his hands. A masked man trotted out from one of the skin-covered huts nearby. Kavio didn’t need to wait until the man had lifted his mask before he knew whose face he would see.

His cousin Zumo grinned sardonically at him.

In the middle of the Vooma, the floor fell out beneath Brena’s feet. The sky and ground changed places, her feet flipped over her head and her stomach tried to heave out of her throat. For a brief, horrifying minute she felt herself plunge into darkness and she was certain she would crash and die. A loud sound roared in her ears, which at first she mistook for the wind, but after she hit the net, bounced once and landed again, facing down into the abyss below, she realized it was the sea. She stared directly down upon a rugged escarpment of little pools and black rock, surged over by waves. Things wriggled in the pools.

The other Yellow Bear Tavaedies had suffered the same ignominious fate, but not, she noted sourly, any of the Blue Water Tavaedies. Her suspicions that the fall had been engineered were confirmed when a rope lowered from above and Rthan dangled in front of her.

“Our side takes the Vooma for Blue Waters,” he said.

“Get me out of this net!”

He smirked. “Caught like a salmon during mating season.”

After a few swings on the rope he leaped to a wooden ledge built into the stone cliff,
half-way
between the tide pools and the outcrop of land where the tribehold stood. She hadn’t even seen the rickety wooden steps built snug against the rock face. Rthan tugged at the ropes suspending the net, swinging her into his arms. The net still bound her. Other Blue Tavaedies helped the rest of the Yellow Tavaedies out of the rest of the nets.

“Get this thing off me!” demanded Brena.

“I’ve half a thought to leave you netted,” he said. He slipped his hand down her bare back, under her manta. “You’re in Blue Waters territory now, wife. You belong to me.”

“I belong to no one! After the peace is sealed, you’ll stay here and I’ll go back to my people! Or have you changed your mind?”

The ocean spray from the tide pools filled the air with a salty mist, which made his skin feel slick yet salt-gritty against hers. He held her a long moment, his eyes dark with desire.

“Do you want me to change my mind?” he asked, low and husky. “Do you want me to go back with you? I will not go back as a slave. I must be your man, or not with you at all.”

“I don’t want a slave,” she whispered. “I never did.”

Triumph flared in his eyes. He bent and kissed her long enough to lick away the last taste of salt and leave only his own musky flavor on her tongue. “Let us go back to the feast and celebrate the peace.”

“Your cousin is a boat ahead of you, Kavio. Last year he explained that you wanted to start a war,” said Nargano. “You wanted Yellow Bear to wipe us out, because you knew if there were to be a war between Imorvae and Morvae in Rainbow Labyrinth, we would come to the aide of the Morvae. But you underestimated us. It is
we
who will wipe out our rivals. Then we will help the Morvae gain ascendency in Rainbow Labyrinth, as it was under the Bone Whistler.”

At the edge of his hearing, Kavio noted the dull thud of dozens of feet running, and out of the corner of his eye, he noticed shadows skulking by the huts. He was aware of his heartbeat tripping over itself, it thundered in his ears, as if it could run away without him. There was something even more important than the ambush, something in what Nargano had said, and he raked his thoughts until he pounced on the nugget.

“You said
last
year,” Kavio said slowly. He met Zumo’s eyes. “You have been allied with the Blue Waters tribe for a whole year? The hex in the mountains that I undid, and for which I was exiled…you were responsible all along.”

“Nargano assured me that spell was just a precaution,” said Zumo. He did not sound convinced himself, but he insisted, “No harm would have come to our people. I just couldn’t have you blundering about, revealing the fact that Blue Waters warriors were in the area.”

Warriors encircled the feasting area. They held notched bows.

“No wonder you wouldn’t testify at my trial,” Kavio said.

Zumo snorted. “I envy your ability to find the humor in any situation, cousin.”

“I’m not laughing.”

Nargano stood up. He towered over Kavio. The torchlight flickered weirdly over his tattooed body, making him look inhuman and monstrous. “There is still a chance for real peace, son of the Skull Stomper. If you will give up your games and prove yourself worthy of real compromise, as your father once did. All these years, though he overthrew my tribe’s ally, the Bone Whistler, I have kept peace with your father for one reason. He proved to me he would put the law of light and shadow over his own interests. Will you prove the same?”

Kavio stood up slowly. Drew a ragged breath. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as if being nudged already by the tips of arrows that the archers aimed at him. He must master his fear; if Nargano sensed it, then, like a dog, or a snake, he would strike. He must steady his
voice,
let nothing leak but strength, confidence.

“I want peace, Nargano. Let me prove it.”

The War Chief of Blue Waters raised his hand and lowered it, flicking his fingers in a signal to his guards. The archers parted, allowing another contingent of warriors to jog into the plaza. Behind them, another group shuffled in more reluctantly. The naked slaves had been bound neck to neck with ropes weighted by stone rings. Warriors whipped them with switches to keep them in line.

“What is this?” Kavio asked. Anger sparked, and he suppressed that too.

“You know of the Shunned?” Nargano asked. “They are ruined by their own foul magic, so they are unfit to live among us, but we allow them to live as
mariahs
, in case we need to shed blood without debt.”

“I don’t see…” Kavio began.

One of the naked men stepped forward. “My sweet Chief, listen to me, I beg you.”

Recognizing the voice, Kavio did a double take and gaped at Svego.

“We were wrong all along,” Svego pleaded. He spoke loudly and turned in a half circle, arms spread, to address
himself
to the whole crowd seated at the feasting mats. “We always believed that the Shunned had evil magic, which devoured their own bodies and ruined all it touched. But we were wrong! Look at all the men and women here…do you see any disfigurement? No! And…though you never knew it before now… I too was afflicted, but I have been cured!”

Svego flung his long hair to bare his slender back to Nargano. Nargano’s eyes flickered wide then narrowed. Kavio absorbed the implications of that brief flash of emotions: Nargano had already known Svego was
Shunned
but the rest came as a surprise—and a most unwelcome one.

“All we ask is to live as any of you do, not kept from serving our tribe in all the ways of honorable men and women. To cook for you, eat with you, work with you, fight with you. We are as human as
you,
we are not less or more. We ask only our own sip from the bowl, not less or more.”

Svego finished his appeal with a final turn to Nargano, and Svego’s whole soul seemed to shine from his eyes as he waited the big man’s reply.

Nargano stood with his arms crossed, scowling like one of the Blue Waters’ stone totem poles, withholding his words.

The crowd rose to take control of the silence he left them.

“Shunned!” shrieked a woman. She hurled an oyster shell at the back of Svego’s head, hard enough to knock him to his knees.

“Shun! Shun!” Instantly the whole crowd lurched to
their
the feet, taking up the cry. They began to chuck detritus from the feast—bones, shell and gobs of half-eaten food—at the hapless naked slaves.

“But we are healed!” yelled Svego, trying to plead with and hide from the mob at the same time. “You have nothing to fear from us!”

“Shun! Shun!” screamed hundreds of voices.

“Enough!” Nargano clapped his hands, and the yowling tamped down to a simmer.

In the sudden quiet, Svego’s cry sounded unnaturally loud. “We are not sick any more!”

“You were never sick,” said Kavio. His voice also carried, and he did not care if they all heard him. “It was never your own magic that did this to you. It was
theirs
. Their hate, their fear, their stupidity, the Shunning itself, is the only disease here.”

Nargano clasped Kavio’s shoulder in a paternal gesture, and his voice too sounded kindly.

“If you had been born to my wife, Kavio…if you had been my son, and had six Chromas instead of one pure Blue, I would have taken you to the sea seven days after you were born, trickled salt water on your cheeks and mine, and then turned my face from you, forever Shunning you.”

Nargano’s avuncular hug and his words did not match, so Kavio did not know how to stand after that speech, and he rocked on the balls of his feet, feeling physically queasy. He’d never expected a speech to make him feel seasick.

“Your father, however, would have felt the same if his mate had given him a baby like Zumo, with an aura of pure Blue.”

Not true
. Kavio glanced at Zumo, who stood behind Nargano, safely out of Kavio’s striking range.
Also, there’s
nothing ‘pure’
about Zumo
.

“We have our ways and you have yours. I will not convince you,
nor
you me. You said you would prove yourself ready to make peace,” said Nargano. “This is your chance. I will pay the thirty-one lifedebts that we owe you and you will pay us back the remaining lifedebts you owe us with the very same blood. There is only one way to do that, through the blood of sacrifices.”