Crystal Heat

7

By the end of her first month on Bol Mutiar, Lylunda knew how to choose her own tung akar-that when the tubers were too young they gave her the runs and a low fever, when they were too old the smell got so bad she couldn’t put them in her mouth. You could tell the age by the leaves. Seruchel recited a rhyme for so she could remember what the shapes meant. Long and narrow, stomach harrow, five holes, too old, three in sight, just right.

She didn’t have to look far to find the tung. As with every other house in the village, the western wall of her house, the one that was away from the shore, had no windows, just a thick covering of vines. Some with flowers, some with seed pods that exploded at a touch when they were ripe. The harvest area was a semicircular patch that grew at the base of the wall.

Her days were filled with little things. Digging shellfish for her meals, collecting fruits and berries from the Common Land. Walking around, exploring the island to see what was on the other side. And going with the children into the jungle that grew on the sides of the mountain and cutting vines for the retting pond or beating the rotted veins to separate out the fibers, rinsing the fibers and spreading them over the mats in the drying sheds on the shore side of the Belau. The Pandai demanded nothing from her, but they asked her if she’d help and it was something to do to fill the long hours of the day. Besides, she felt better when she was paying her way, not depending on the charity of others.

And they all knew why she was here, patting her on the shoulder, shaking their heads, telling her what a good father she’d got, wanting to make her safe. They were cheerful about it, too, expecting her to settle in like they had. Some of us and all of our ancestors come from somewhere else, for all sorts of reasons. It’s better here. Each of the adults made a point of telling her that. It takes a while to relax, they told her, but in a little You’ll feel the tensions and the armor you ware from the old time peeling away. Like a snake sheds its skins and is beautiful in its bright new colors.

They meant well, but she didn’t want to shed her old habits. She wanted to get back to a place where she could practice them-especially her preferred sort of pleAsures when it came to getting high or having sex. From everything she’d seen so far, she wasn’t going to find many beautiful fur persons to belly dance with her. Celibacy and sobriety for four stinking years did not appeal.

There was another thing that did not appeal. The Lung akar was starting to taste good to her. She found herself wanting it at other meals. Somehow everything tasted better after she’d crunched down a few slices of the tuber.

If she ate too much, if she became a part of the Tung Bond, would she be stuck here, for the rest of her life?

She had nightmares about roots corning up out of the floor and wrapping round her, growing over her face and into the openings of her body.

“Grinder!” Lylunda brought the beating stick down hard on the soggy heap of rotted torech ignoring the spatters it sprayed over her. “Father!” Another blow, another spray of stinking green fluid from the vine pile. “Ma!” Another. She laughed and straightened. Using her body like that felt good, and shouting the names seemed to blow away some of the anger that simmered in the pit of her stomach.

Behind her she heard an odd creaking, then a crash. She swung around in time to see a spray of fronds quivering on the ground a short distance up the slope from the beating ground. She. dropped the stick on the vines and made her way through snaky twists of vines and small brushy trees to the fronds, followed the trunk along to the men who were glugging down gourdfuls of biang beer to celebrate the success of their efforts. There was a two-handed saw on the ground by their feet and a pair of axes, the first metal tools she’d seen since the Jilitera had landed her here.

“Meki, Gebar, what’s this, huh?”

“Wood for fires, Luna. In a couple months it’s going to be rainy season, so we need to get green wood dried by then. Gets colder’n you think it would some of those nights and if we want hot meals, we get the wood for cooking now. Even if you think you’ve seen rain, you don’t know what real rain is.”

“Ah.” She frowned at the fat bottom of the tree, an idea churning at the back of her head. “You think you could cut me a round off that, say about as long as my forearm?”

“Sure. Why not, we’re going to be cutting it up anyway.”

When she finished beating out and washing the torech fibers, she carried them into Chiouti, spread them out on the drying mats, then went back for her chunk of wood. It was light wood, with a papery texture. As she rolled it down the mountain and around to her house, she told herself it was still green and would harden up as it dried.

She set the chunk of tree on her kitchen table and gazed at it while she ate the supper one of the women had made for her.

There was no music on this world.

At least, not on this island. She’d seen birdlike things flying about, but she’d never heard them make a sound. When Seruchel taught her the leaf rhyme, she didn’t sing it, didn’t even chant it. Nobody whistled here, none of the Pandai sang while they worked. They were cheerful, friendly people, they worked, though not hard, enough to keep themselves in comfort, they carved every surface they could set a knife to, they made bright colored dyes for the cloth they wove. But she’d never seen them dance and she’d never heard them sing.

The food was dust on her tongue and the craving for tong akar was like a fire in her, but she fought it off and continued to stare at the trunk. “Smarada diam, log. You’ll be a drum some day. When I’m finished with you. And someday I’ll dance to your sound.”

For the next month she labored over the piece of stump, hollowing it out chip by chip. She had to be very careful because the grain was so straight, the texture so soft she could break the round she was trying to create with the slightest extra pressure or a careless cut with the knife. A chisel or a gouge would have been better, but the knife was the only tool she owned; her father had carefully removed her weapons before he returned her belongings. Perhaps he was afraid she’d commit suicide with them, but knew she’d need the knife. Or maybe it was the Jilitera who’d purged her pack. It didn’t really matter.

As the hole through the middle grew larger and larger, she had to work to restrain her impatience. She wanted to dance. She needed to dance even more than she was coming to need the tung akar. Since she was born, she’d been immersed in music of one sort or another. Her mother was a singer and had clapped hands for her when she was a baby and sung songs for her to dance to when she was older. On her ship she had a library of recordings she played constantly so she lived in sound like a fish in water, only marginally aware of it most of the time, yet needing it for her soul’s health.

Seruchel climbed onto the black lava outcropping where Lylunda was sitting and crouched beside her, watching her hands as she chipped away at the interior of the log section. “Diam, Luna. What you making?”

“Diam, Seru. I’m hoping it’ll be a drum.” Lylunda brushed chips of wood from her mezu, watched them splash into the sea water lapping gently at the base of the rock.

“Oh. I know drums. We don’t make them, but the Berotong Pandai have some.”

“Berotong Pandai?”

“Mm-hm. Canoe people. They come by two, three times a year.” Seruchel wrinkled her nose. “Weird folk, they make me feel itchy when I think about them. They’re Pandai like us, but they’re unh! different.”

“How different?” She turned the log a few degrees and began working on a new section, tucking away the shudder in Seruchel’s voice to think about later.

“Omel oma,” Seruchel tapped a short stubby finger against her knee as if she were counting the ways of weird. “They live on those berontas all the time, they’re biiiig, like they’re two sometimes three boats with a floor built across them and house on that floor. They brag they go all the way round the world each trip. I’ve never seen the same ones twice, so maybe that’s true. We trade stuff with them. Like for axes and knives and needles and stuff like that. They get them from the starmen, they say, and maybe that’s true also because Pandai-don’t work metal.”

“And they have drums?”

“They beat on them to let us know they’re coming so we can bring out our trade.”

“Do they chorous?”

“What’s chorous?”

Lylunda stilled her hands and stared at the girl, startled. The language didn’t have a word for dance. She’d used the interlingue without thinking about it. She must have been doing that all along when she thought about the drum and dancing. ’Moving to mousika ah! You don’t have a word for that either. I’ll show you.”

Lylunda carried the knife and the log to the end of the outcropping, set them down out of the reach of the wind, and jumped to the sand. “Stay up there and watch, Seru. And listen.”

She moved a few steps until she was standing on sand that was damp enough not to drag at her feet. For a moment she stood with eyes closed, clapping her hands to catch the rhythm she wanted, then she began one of the stamping swaying dances she’d learned from the Tiker worlds, a child’s version of the voor tikeri. She wasn’t a good whistler, but she did manage to improvise a few trills to the clicking of her thumbs and fingers.

When her mouth went dry, she stopped and walked back to the lava outcrop. “That’s chorous and a bad attempt at mousika, Ser…” She broke off. The girl’s eyes were glazed and she was staring out across the water; it was obvious-and disturbing-that she hadn’t seen or heard any of Lylunda’s performance. “Never mind,” she said. “Best, I suppose, that we just forget it. Come on, teach me how to find more tiauch, I’ve got a want in my mouth for tiauch stew.”

When Lylunda had the inside and outside of the wooden ring rubbed smooth, she passed her hands over it, smiling with pleasure in her work. Then she set it aside and went looking for waxberries and chedik vines. The Pandai used the berries to make candles for their scraped shell lamps and, mixed with chemidik, they made good polish for furniture and the inside walls of their houses since that mix kept insects away from the wood. Chemidik came from sap milked from chedik vines and cooked over a slow fire for several days.

Lylunda was getting more than a little tired of things like that. Every time you wanted something, it took days, maybe even months and lots of planning. If you wanted a new mezu, you had to go cut enough pieces of torech vine to fill up the retting pond and wait till the fibers rotted clear of the rest, then you had to beat, the fibers, get them spun into thread, then the length of cloth woven on a loom, then you had to dye the cloth, either a solid color or spend yet more time with the tedious process of batiking to get a pattern dyed into the cloth; to set the colors so they wouldn’t wash out or fade, you had to steep the cloth in mix of cold water and oma which you made by macerating a fungus that grew from the roots of lalou trees. Everything was like that. The Pandai shared the jobs, but they were always working with an eye on the months ahead, getting things ready so they would be there when they were needed to get other things ready. It wasn’t hard work or even unpleasant, it was just so damn constant.

When she first walked up that white sand path that ran along the beach, she thought with despair: How am I ever going to get through the days? What will I do?

She shook her head. “Idiot that’s what I was.” The more she had to do for herself, the more she wanted additional hours in the day to give her time to get it done.

Lylunda stroked her fingertips down the smooth wood; after the waxing, it had a lovely golden brown glow. “I need something for a drum head. Which could be a problem. They don’t do leather, and the cloth they weave is too coarse, too soft, no snap to it. Maybe I should wait until the Barotongs come drifting by.” She shivered. “And maybe not. If I cut up the gearsac it’s got some bounce anyway… borrow a needle from Outocha and hem it so the cord doesn’t pull through… I’m not going anywhere… I wish I knew what I was doing…”

The drum looked good when she was finished, with its matte black heads, its greenish cord, and the golden wood. She reached toward it, drew her hand back. Not yet. It has to be special. Moonlight. Yes. I’ll take it to the beach. I’ll play my drum in the moonlight.

The sky was clear of clouds, filled with the brilliant glitter of the closely packed stars of Pseudo Cluster, enough light to turn the beach into an abstract painting in black and white. The two moons were already high, the outer one a hairline crescent, the nearer, several hours behind it, in its gibbous phase.

She stood, her feet cold on the damp sand, but not so cold as she was inside as she realized just how long she’d spent working on the drum. Days had sneaked away on her… weeks… no, more. At least a month and a half. What else had she lost?

She climbed onto the lava outcrop and walked slowly to the pillow humps at its tip, working her tongue in her mouth, seeking to taste how much tung akar she’d eaten without being aware of what she was doing. She couldn’t, of course, and it was a silly thing to try, but she had to do something to push back the billows of panic that kept trying to drown her.

She settled herself on the cold stone with the drum between her knees, closed her eyes, and tried to call up music she knew, let it flow through her body. It was hard. As if she were being pushed away…

When she could finally feel a simple beat, she set her fingers on the drum head and began to tap it out.

The sound was thin, dull. There was no resonance. It wasn’t music. It wasn’t even noise. She could barely hear the sound above the siss siss of the waves.

Maybe it’s me,. she thought. I don’t know how to make it talk to me. She closed her eyes and struggled to remember what she’d seen drummers do, but the memories were faint as faded watercolors and they kept slipping away for her.

“Aahhhhh!” she screamed and flung the drum away from her, then sat with her head resting on her crossed arms, her body heaving as she sobbed out her frustration, fear and grief.