‘Where are the men?’ she whispered. ‘How far back?’
‘They saw you come this way,’ the viggies sang. ‘Even though we wiped the lands clean of your feet, still they search.’
‘What are we to do?’
‘We will take you where they cannot go, woman of Lim Terree, honored be his name.’
They guided her. She carried Miles, and two of the viggies ran along at her sides, their hands on her thighs, pushing or tugging ever so slightly to keep her on the right path. Bondri had introduced himself, as they went he named off the others of the troupe. Sometimes they slowed, sometimes to allow others of the troupe to clear a way ahead, sometimes to allow those who had been clearing the way behind to change jobs with others. Always they sang, sometimes in their own language, sometimes in hers. So she learned the story of Favel, the broken one, and of his release by the Loudsinger child. She wanted to laugh, then to cry. Lim hadn’t done it out of generosity. He hadn’t done it out of sympathy for the poor viggy, either. He’d done it out of spite and wounded feelings and jealousy and pain. She tried to tell Bondri this, and he listened with one ear cocked backward to hear her.
‘Good,’ he said at last. ‘This is what Favel wanted. Another view to make his song more true.’
It made no sense to her. Only that they were saving her, and Miles. That made sense.
They went eastward to the end of the ridge, then northward, into the crystal range. Now the viggies were singing in their own tongue exclusively, quieting the earth that trembled beneath them, opening ways that would be closed to those who followed. Some of the troupe climbed to the tops of peaks and yodeled into the night, while all those below opened their ears wide, listening.
‘What are they doing?’ she asked Bondri.
‘The troupe of Chowdri goes around near here. They keep watch on the Mad One, the one you call the Enigma. I have a daughter to trade with Chowdri, and we will sing of Favel’s death so the word may go east and south.’ He did this all in one breath, a kind of recitatif, and she shook her head in amazement. Lim had been an accomplished musician, perhaps a genius. But Bondri could do things with his voice Lim could never have attempted. Of course, Lim hadn’t had a song-sack on his neck to hold several extra lungfuls of air, either.
At dawn they stopped. The Enigma towered above them, a little to the east, like two bloody swords stabbed upward into the sky. Several weary viggies ran up from the south, singing as they came.
‘The men have gone back the way they came, still looking. They did not find any sign of the woman or the child. They say they will go to Deepsoil Five, that the woman must eventually come to Deepsoil Five.’
Well, she had left some of her few belongings on the wagon, in a carton. Undoubtedly whoever was after her and Miles had found them.
‘They cannot come in here,’ Bondri said. ‘Your people have no words to let them into this place.’
‘But I cannot stay with your people forever, Bondri Wide Ears! Someday I must go to my own people.’
‘Someday is someday. We will sing that later. Just now we eat.’
Miles woke up. He looked at the viggies with total wonder, then politely offered Bondri his last cooky. Bondri took it gravely and ate half, returning half. In return, Bondri gave him a cup of bark sap, which Miles shared with his mother. When she had drained the cup, she looked at it carefully, paling as she did so.
‘What … what is this?’
‘An ancestor cup,’ Bondri replied. This one belonged to Favel, who honored your husband’s name. Favel who laid his debt upon us that good should be returned for good.’
Gently, she laid the skull cup down. Nothing in the Tripsingers’ reports had prepared her for this, but native good manners did what preparation could not. ‘I am honored,’ she whispered, listening carefully while Bondri sang several songs of Favel’s life. She joined the troupe in eating settler’s brush, though she gave Miles his breakfast from rations he was more accustomed to.
And when they had finished, she joined the troupe in singing the song of her own rescue. That she had little or no voice did not seem to disturb the viggies. Miles more than made up for her.
‘He has a good voice, your son,’ they sang to her. ‘When he is big, he will be a troupe leader.’
‘If he lives to get big,’ she whispered. A giligee patted her shoulder and crooned in her ear.
At midmorning, word was received from Chowdri’s troupe, and they began to work their way east, ever closer to the Enigma.
‘Isn’t this dangerous?’ she asked Bondri. ‘Aren’t we going into peril?’
‘Not into peril,’ he sang. ‘Not to the Mad One’s roost. Only to the edge of the skin where the songs keep it quiet.’
‘Skin?’ she asked, not sure she had understood.
‘The outer part,’ Bondri explained, searching his more limited Loudsinger vocabulary. ‘The hide, the fur, the …’ he found a word he liked, ‘the integument.’
‘Of the Presence?’
‘Yes. The part that only twitches and slaps, like your skin, Lim’s mate, when a wound fly crawls on it. The skin of the Mad One is not mad. Only the brain of it is mad, and we will not come close to that.’
By evening, they had come closer to the Enigma than Vivian wanted to, and yet the troupe of Bondri Gesel showed no discomfort. Six of the viggies were delegated to sing quiet songs to the skin, and these six were replaced from time to time by six others, one at a time slipping into and out of the chorus so that it never ceased. The music was soothing, soporific. Vivian found herself yawning, and Miles curled up under a Jubal tree and fell deeply asleep,
