Crystal Heat

10

Lylunda tilted the cup, then straightened it and watched the murky liquid oil back down the sides. Even after the straining it looked like cheap ink that was beginning to separate its solids from the liquid base. “Two fingers a day? I don’t know…”

Closing her eyes, she downed the mess, then groped for the water gourd so she could wash the taste from her mouth. Taste? As if something had solidified the stench off a slaughterhouse on a hot, steamy summer day.

Her stomach cramped. She staggered to the table, caught-hold of the edge, and crabbed around it until she reached one of the chairs. She lowered herself onto the sea, then she hunched over, hugging herself, rocking from buttock to buttock.

The cramps only lasted a few minutes, then the churning in her stomach and the pressure against her sphincters gave her just enough warning to let her reach the fresher and get herself seated before everything let go.

She spent the afternoon swimming in the sunwarmed seawater of the small inlet north of Chiouti. The sea cradled her and fed energy into her. When she reluctantly dragged herself from the water, wrapped a spare mezu around her shoulders and started walking back to her house, she felt more like herself than she had in weeks.

She walked through the village, greeting folk involved in the continual work of supplying themselves with the necessities of life. They smiled and nodded and answered her greetings, but it seemed to her that once again they were on the far side of a glass pane and not quite real as ancient museum dioramas were never quite real no matter how much art was expended in their making. In an odd sort of way it was comforting, a sign that her morning’s ordeal was not worthless.

When she showed up later in the afternoon to do her share of the work in the combing and spinning sheds, the women there seemed to have trouble remembering that she was among them though there was the usual laughter and jokes as they passed the hanks of dried fiber about, or wound the spun thread onto cones for the looms. They weren’t trying to be unfriendly, but the startled looks when they noticed her and their shaky smiles made her uneasy. She left the sheds after half an hour and went to sit on the lava pile staring out across the blinding blue of the sea.

She tossed a fragment of black rock into the water hissing about the foot of the pile. “I went too far,” she said. “Purged too much. I have to find a balance, something that will let me be here, but keep my roots shallow enough so I can tear loose without bleeding to death.”

After a while she heard a clunking sound, got to her feet, and looked down. The drum she’d spent so much futile effort on was bobbing in the water and bumping against the rocks, driftwood of a different sort. She lay on her stomach, caught hold of the cord that laced the heads on, and pulled it up. The chemidik wax on the wood had kept water out and the working of the sun and the sea had tightened the heads. Water had gotten inside, but only a little, just enough to slosh about when she shook it.

She settled back on the rock and tapped the head. The sound had changed. Or was it that she’d changed? It still wasn’t loud or like any drum she remembered, but it sang to her. She closed her eyes and called up the music she and Qatifa had danced to, it seemed a century ago. Tump tump ti tump ti tah tump ti tump…

She played till her fingers were raw and the day darkened toward sunset and the evening breeze came cold off the sea.

In the days that followed she experimented with the cherar infusion and the slices of tung akar, at first alternating them, eating the tung one day, drinking the infusion the next day, then changing the number of the slices and the amount of the liquid until she finally found a balance where the Pandai were easy around her, but she could still hear the music in the drum.

The rains came and brought wild storms with them, but the bulk of the mountain protected Chiouti from the worst of the winds, and the only problem the Pandai had was bringing in enough food to supplement the dried fish that everyone but Lylunda kept in storage jars. They passed her around like a party favor; each night an invitation to share the evening meal came from another family, a call to join in the gossip and play games with the-children while the adults were absorbed in one of the intricate games they were addicted to, small distorted figures pushed about on a painted board at the whims of thin, intricately carved sticks cast from a tall cup. Klekool, they called it.

Seruchel had tried to teach her the game, but Lylunda found it impossible; she told herself it was probably something you had to be in the Bond to understand.

The craving for the tung akar came back and she couldn’t get up the mountain to fetch more cherar leaves-rain, rain, more rain, mud slides, trees, and thornvines blowing dangerously about, broken fronds, limbs, wheeling on winds that came howling round the mountain. She berated herself for not thinking of something so simple as uprooting one of the plants and transplanting it into a pot of some kind, one she could keep inside the house, but food was around every day and she hadn’t given a thought to what day after day of slashing rain might mean. When 1 can get up there, she thought, the moment I can get up there, I’m bringing a plant down. Maybe it’ll die on me, maybe I can’t keep it growing enough to make the new leaves I need, but I have to try.

She fought to limit what she grubbed from the tuber patch, but in the intervals when the rain lessened to a heavy mist, the smell of the tung blossoms crawled through the windows and tickled at her and she’d find herself out there, mattock in hand, digging tubers.

The drum sat in a corner of the kitchen collecting cobwebs and dust.

In the second month of the rains, she played her first game of klekool and almost understood the nuances of the moves. She was the bangg at the end, bangg being a bright colored fish of extraordinary stupidity and ugliness. The only reason the species survived is that no one-beast, fish, bird or Pandai-who ate one bangg ever ate a second. The taste of bangg was awful beyond the capacity of human description. The family teased her and laughed at her, and she plodded home through the rain feeling vaguely pleased with herself.

By the end of that month the heaviest of the downpour was finished. There was still a thundershower almost every day sometimes between noon and midafternoon,.but it was possible to go up the mountain again to gather fresh food and cut trees for fuel, bringing the chunks to the drying sheds where the fibers had been before.

Lylunda went to gather waxberries for candles; she had only one left of those she’d made and she needed to begin the long process of giving back all the care that had been taken of her during the rains. As she gathered the berries, she saw a patch of cherar nestling deep beneath the brambles. She felt a sudden strong revulsion, as if she’d seen a viper; in spite of that, she stared and stared at the dark succulent leaves with the brilliant red veins. She wanted to vomit, she was terrified, but she remembered why she knew the cherar and she understood that all she’d gained before the rains she’d lost. She’d have to start all over again, finding a new balance, fighting nausea and the runs again, fighting the pull of the tung akar.

The next morning she overslept, woke with the sun streaming through the cracks in the shutter onto her face. She fought the craving, ate a single slice of tung akar and took the basket of berries into the village so she could use the single big boiling pot the village had to boil them and skim the wax, then pour it into molds with the wicks she’d gotten for her help with the fibers. Working was hard and hot, she had to stir the berries constantly so they wouldn’t stick to the bottom and burn, but the work helped her forget the clamoring of her body as it demanded more tung akar.

The big green berries had a sharp, pleasant scent, and the wax she skimmed was a pale green with a muted version of that scent. Burning the candles perfumed the house, and they also kept away the small bloodsucking insects that were hatching now from every pool where rainwater was sheltered enough to turn stagnant.

By the end of the day she had two dozen candles. She left six for the use of the kettle, ladled the basket full of the pulp and took it uphill to spread it on her tung patch; it was useful mulch, gave nutrients to the soil, and it kept saw flies away from the vines.

All that night she sat at her-kitchen table, beating on it with a pair of spoons. She got no feeling from that sound, there was no rhythm beating in her blood, but it kept her awake. When dawn came, she took the bowl and pestle, left the house, and went up the mountainside.

When she pushed the waxberry vines aside, she could only find seven cherar leaves without the red veins. She plucked them carefully, mashed them, then carried them back down the mountain, walking slowly, warily. The tung was everywhere, it knew what she was doing, vines reached out to trip her, a flitterbat dived at her, nearly knocked the bowl from her hand, a frond from one of the trees cracked loose and almost crashed down on top of her But she threaded her way through these attacks, or what she thought of as attacks, her mind and body in a dark knot of suspicion and rage.

Though the infusion was weaker, the racking her body went through this time was considerably worse.

The next morning when she woke, the food basket was empty and no one, rattled the shell chain by the door. She was cut off again, isolated. When she went out to get fresh tung for her breakfast dose, the smell of the flowers nauseated her so much she could barely endure the time it took to dig up a small tuber. The smell and taste of the tuber when she got it washed off and sliced was so bad, she had to chop it into small bits with her knife because she couldn’t force herself to chew it. She got it down and spent the next ten minutes hunched over in the chair trying not to vomit.

When her stomach settled a little, she managed to swallow a few berries left over from yesterday’s breakfast; then she took the drum and went down to the beach to sit on the lava and talk out her problem, herself talking to herself because until she was stabilized again, no one from the village would see her and they wouldn’t understand anyway what she was fussing about.

She settled with the drum and began tapping out a rhythm, relaxing into a full-body smile as she felt the beat and responded to it. A tune came to her and she whistled a snatch of it and it was like cool water across her ears and along her nerves. Ignoring the short burst of rain that beat on her back and head, she drummed until her hands grew tired, then leaned on the drum and stared out across the water.

“The rains come twice a year they say. And even if I believed that lying letter, even if he does send for me, it’ll be four years. Four years! I can’t go through this again and again and again, each time worse than the last. Four years? No way. I don’t know. Maybe I should just give up. No! It’d be like killing myself. Maybe I should do that and cut out the middle man. Dead is dead. No problems left. No. I won’t give up, I’m not going to let him win. Or let the stinking Kliu off me, because that’s what it’d be, them pulling my strings. I’ve got to get away from this world somehow. Only one way to do that. Find a free trader and use his splitcom and call someone. Qatifa maybe. All right. That’s it. Now the only problem is how.”

She brooded over that for several hours, then trudged up the beach and over to her house. She left the drum there, went to gather food for her supper and breakfast. She’d be on her own for the next several days, until she’d gotten the mix right and the Pandai would notice her again.