Why didn’t she come in?
Songfather shook his head. Because the spirits of our beloved dead are holy, sacred, taboo. They couldn’t mix with ordinary people.
Then why did she come at all?
To see her girl Saluez grow, so Chahdzi said. To see her grandchildren born and watch them grow. To take delight from seeing us, to live among us until that time she would go on, sometime in the far future, to a blessed life that awaited her elsewhere.
I said I would go out and kiss her.
No.
I said I just wanted to hug her.
No, no forbidden. We must not touch the Kachis, even though they are people we love. But we can still care for them—her: feed her, love her, watch her dancing with the other spirits….
“Doesn’t she know who I am?” I cried. “Doesn’t she want to kiss me?”
Of course she did, but that, too, was taboo. Forbidden. We Dinadhi had been given this great gift, the gift of continued life, continued embodiment, the ability to live on with our families and those we loved. We must keep our part of the bargain. Our part of the choice.
Had I doubted then? Did it seem to me then that this pale winged form was a poor substitute for a warm and living mother? Then, when I was only what? Six or seven? Before I knew the whole story? Before I knew the other reasons it was taboo, or what the other side of the choice had been? Before I knew that songfathers had done the choosing but women had paid the price?
Possibly, without even knowing it, I was an apostate even then. Possibly my mother, even then, looking in through the window at me, saw my thoughts and knew I was unworthy. Perhaps then is when she started hating me for being so ungrateful. How else explain?
How else explain why it was she who led the pack that ate my face away?
I woke first in the morning, and my rising brought Trompe and Leelson from under their blankets. Lutha was a knobby lump beneath hers, and we were quiet, not to disturb her. I knew she must have been wakened during the night, probably more than once, for I had heard the boy moving around. He was sometimes a restless sleeper, a murmurer, given to odd little cries that seemed more curious than restless.
The two men and I had no sooner started to take the shelter apart, removing the pins from the fasteners, than Trompe said in surprise:
“This one is open.”
It was open, gaping, the pin removed and dropped onto the ground beneath it. Even with just one pin removed, the panels could be pulled apart, though it took some strength to do so. We turned immediately to the gaufers, looking them over for blood or wounds, but they were as placid as a rain pool on a rock, gazing liquidly beneath fringed lashes, jaws moving in the immemorial rhythm of the cud. So, our songfathers tell us, animals of the long ago twice chewed their food, even back so far as Old-earthian times.
“Something pulled it loose,” said Leelson, clamping his mouth into a grim line. “One of your beautiful people?”
“They couldn’t,” I said. “It’s made so they can’t. We must not have put it in tightly last night.”
“I did that side,” Trompe objected. “And believe me, it was as tight as it is possible to get it!”
We were still standing there, lost in that kind of slightly fearful confusion that readily leads to contentiousness, when Lutha came to the door of the wagon and asked in a plaintive voice, “Where’s Leely?”
I blurted, “Isn’t he curled up under the blankets? I thought …”
She turned back to rummage inside the wagon, crying almost at once, “He’s not here. Trompe, Leelson, he’s not here.”
“He’s only a child,” muttered Trompe. “He couldn’t have opened—”
“He’s strong as the proverbial nox,” grated Leelson. “If you haven’t seen that, you haven’t noticed much. He’s stronger than many men I know.”
“Oh, God, God.” Lutha’s voice rose in a shriek. “Where is he. Where’s my baby?”
The two men exchanged glances once more, pulled two more pins out, thrust open the loosed panels, and went in opposite directions, one up and one down the canyon, quartering the ground, looking behind stones and among low growths, calling, “Leely. Leely-boy. Leely.”
Lutha was out after them in the moment, barefoot as she was, her hair streaming behind her, covering the same ground and lamenting so loudly that the rock walls echoed with it.
“Hush!” bellowed Trompe. “Listen!”
Abrupt silence. Then I heard it. Softly, a little voice, not at all fearful or pained. “Dananana.” And again: “Dananana.” It came from upstream, in the direction of our travel.
Lutha darted in that direction, soon catching up with Trompe. Leelson trudged slowly back to the wagon and continued disassembling the panels as though nothing had happened. He had about him an air of frustration that had been growing hour by hour since Lutha had arrived at Cochim-Mahn. Everything she did irritated him, but he could not, for some reason, just let her be, so everything he did regarding her irritated him as well. By the time Trompe and Lutha came back, she carrying the boy, Leelson was muttering to himself angrily with the gaufers half-harnessed.
“What are you doing!” Lutha screamed. “My, God, Leelson, don’t you care about him at all!”
She lifted the boy in a dramatically hieratic gesture, as though offering him for sacrifice or dedication, drawing attention to his arms. There were several little red spots on the flesh above his wrists, no more than insect bites. Leely seemed undisturbed by them. He wasn’t scratching or whimpering, and even as I looked the redness faded. It was like watching a candle burn down, slow but perceptible. So
