Kabardan Chapter 11

CHAPTER ELEVEN

They ate at a small low table at a Pelun restaurant: saffron-flavored rice with minced flamefish from Sardiud, egret eggs boiled in tumeric and parsley, and fried rice-bread dripping with sweet sauce.  They spoke of Pelun, and of Elusivhir, and of the customs of the Val, and Akrava told many humorous anecdotes of growing up in his nurture-tower; but after drinking three goblets of a thick brown raisin wine and feeling very warm and happy inside, Domojon decided to tell them that he was, after all, considering Nok Dragon's request.
"Come, you're trying to kid me!" Akrava exclaimed.  "You can't seriously be proposing to go off on a journey across a Human-infested wilderness in the blaze of autumn. . .through trees, not to mention worse dangers that I can't imagine. . .just to please a Godking who isn't even a Godking anymore?"
"A wilderness voyage?" said Etlzonat.  "What for?"
"To grab a prize away from Gorban before he can use it," Akrava told him.  "The fabled Colindon of Aramkai."
Her mouth dropped open.  "This is existing?  Not a myth?"
"It is real," said Domojon, "And Nok Dragon knows where.  I may be questing after it."
"Hmpf.  Surely there are armies to be doing such things!" he exclaimed.  "For a single Human to attempt this appears like subtle foolishness to me.  Also pride."
"Not necessarily," Domojon said.  "I could find a worthy Human to wear the Colindon. . .or even wear it myself."
"Wear it!"
Domojon nodded.  "Then the Human would be united.  We could have a home again."
"Your home is in Tregonëv," Akrava said in his pouting voice.
He began to recall the speech he'd been formulating in his mind.  "Where we are not allowed to own orchards or fields?  Where judges refuse to hear our testimonies?  Where our Humanish language may not be spoken beyond our own courts?  So many restrictions, so many that you call mandates of the gods, but are really the whims of our Kabard overlords?"
"I'll admit that the Kabard social system has problems," said Akrava.  "But what makes you think that you, out of all the millions of Human who have lived on Tulë since the beginning of the Solitude, can just pop up to Humanan and find the Colindon and make everything right?  Are you Aramkai?  Even a Human  Queen?"
"No, of course not," Domojon said softly.  "I'm nothing like that."
"Then why don't you leave matters of state to the kings and presidents?  The gods have ordained that you be a dream-seer, so be one!"  He paused, and his eyes widened with alarm.  "You've never talked like this before.  Who's been giving you these ideas  -- Nok Dragon?"
"Not Nok Dragon -- myself."  He looked away.  "No one else -- myself."  And in horror he remembered when Gorban had said those same words long ago Moreveq.  He reached for his hand beneath the table and squeezed it.  "Help me, Akrava," he whispered.  "The mind-call is subtle."  Suddenly dizzy and slightly nauseous, he lay his head down against the table.
"Is the Human sick, yes?" Etlzonat asked.  "Too much of the drink, I am suspecting!"
"Probably," said Akrava.  He called for the bill, wrote his name and "Guest of Nok Dragon, Ruéboram House" on it, and pulled Domojon up from his stool.  He allowed herself to be half-carried from the restaurant and laid into the back seat of a steamcar.  "Human don't usually drink, and that wine was potent."
"Still, we cannot speak in the wine what we would not be at least thinking otherwise."
They spent the fall and winter in Ruéboram House, rather pleasantly, for with his duties as dream-seer and Human Domojon had never had time to pursue his passion for history.  Now he could roam the great museums of Rikáng looking at funerary urns from Nuísomein, solar batteries from lost Tzatr, even feathered caps and phylacteries from Human cave-cities.  Akrava excused himself from such intellectual pastimes, but Etlzonat was always ready to go along, for he loved old books, old things, the monuments and everyday artifacts of long-dead civilizations.  Besides, as he said once, "We are both really exiles.  You have come from a community to loneliness, which is your word erëktilit, and conversely I have come from loneliness to community.  We have much in common."
They spent many days wandering the vast, musty helves of the old royal library of Rikáng, past great stained-glass lions and portraits, beneath great tesselated domes where light streamed through dust motes, past great iron-spiked doorways and carpets and desks where scholars from all nations studied.  Many of the old, brittle books were printed in Classical Pelun or Old Western Ibarii or Old Human, languages which Etlzonat could read fairly well; and others, those in Runoen or the Tzortzan language of Pachala, Old Runoen and Uterash and Ceraine languages, could be taken to the professional translators who sat in booths in the vast entry hall; but those books most precious to Domojon were in languages he didn't understand, hinting of cavern-cities lost beneath the earth, of battles and quests and the bright high voices of the gods (though, as Etlzonat pointed out, they might just as easily be tax records).  And, when they got special permission, an ancient librarian unlocked the ancient rooms where parchments were kept in cool low-humidity, far below the reach of the sun, and there they found parchment manuscripts in Old Sarkani, baked-clay tablets in Old High Lnavo, hundreds of untranslated or untranslatable documents in the Moravtha of ancient Estoran and the Eivorrhi of the Nuísomein.  Running his finger over those precise mystic symbols gave his a sense of wonder: people long ago, uncountable generations ago, had searched for the same things he had: community, peace, a home in the wide world.
When he wasn't browsing through musty archives, Domojon was learning the Human language of Pelun: if he was to become a dream-seer in this country, he reasoned, he would have to be fluent in the language.  The main problem was with the writing system, rows of intricate designs that could be read right to left, left to right, or in little clumps like planets around a star.
"You seem to read very quickly," he said one day, looking over Etlzonat's shoulder as he scanned through screen after screen of a Pelun news magazine.
"Oh, really quite simple it is, better than Tilach," said Etlzonat, "And it was a Kabard's idea, after all."
"I beg you pardon?"  Akrava looked up from his mystery novel.  "How could a Kabard make up such a bizarre language as Pelun?"
"Not the language itself, of course.  The Terrans brought with them no writing, but soon they were inventing one symbol for every word, 50,000 in all, so as you can see even other Humans were finding it difficult to learn.  And when the Kabards conquered Pelun, hmpf!"  He gestured wildly in the air.
"You'd be learning symbols during all of your life," Domojon said.
Etlzonat nodded.  "But then as you know Kabards liked Pelun so much that they were even moving their capital to Rikang.  This was when the great Kabard Emperor Tomheron was being alive."
"I know," said Domojon.  "The King of the Golden Age, when there was no poverty in Kabard dominions, nor any sickness, nor any old age.  When the nations were not separate, but one indivisible cloud-house."
"You needn't get sarcastic!" Akrava exclaimed.  "So, Etlzonat, wise Valak scholar, tell us what happened then?"
"Tomheron asked a Pelun named Tzu Ta-Sji, the Teacher of Great Wisdom, to make the language fit for human eyes.  He was working, Tzu Ta-Sji, for many years before he found the 120 symbols we are using now: the sixty first-syllable vowels and consonants, dzi-dji-yu, and next being sixty second-syllable vowels and diphthongs, dzi-dji-ra."
"Haven't they tried phonetic alphabets," Domojon asked, "Like Tilach?  Like all Kabard languages, for that matter?"
Etlzonat chuckled. "This was being tried when the Pelun drew into worship of Eluse, but no one liked it.  Conservative are the Pelun: even today the Academy of Semantics here in Rikang is keeping new words out.  They cannot even be saying Eluse: he must be called He Lyu-Shu, 'Goddess of the Blue Book,' and datarod is Dlao Sshiu, 'Deep Words.'"
"Humans must be so exact!"  Akrava snorted.  "They try to constrain their language as if you were to squeeze someone's head in a vise until it became a perfect square!  This is another example of the Human lust for containment: everything must be packaged, numbered, classified, understood.  Lists, calculations, numbers!"
One morning as Domojon wrote out flashcards of Pelun nouns in his red-draped cloud-house, Akrava rapped at the door post. "This is odd," he said, grinning heepishly, "Very very odd.  And for once I'm coming to you for advice."
"What is the problem?"  Domojon asked.
"I think I'm becoming. . .can you believe it?  Moved
. . .erotically. . .by Etlzonat!  Hard to understand, isn't it?"
Domojon stared at him for a moment, tasting his conflicting emotions of relief, betrayal, and embarrassment, but he managed to keep his eyes a serene summer-blue.  "Not at all difficult to understand," he said.  "Etlzonat is intelligent, interesting to talk with, attractive -- if you like your partners brash and forceful, like a barbarian."
Akrava drew close to Domojon, and wrapped his arm around his shoulders.  "It's all right with you, isn't it?  I mean, in the wilderness my passion was hard to control.  I thought that you and I might. . .you know, but we didn't, so. . . ."
He took his hand.  "I'm nowhere near ready yet," he said softly, "I may never be.  And I can hardly expect you to wait for what may be years."  He stood and motioned to the twin scarlet ottomans by the wallscreen.  "Besides, if I'm going to be a dream-seer again, I'll need counseling practice.  Now, what seems to be the problem between you and your passion for Etlzonat?"
He sat across from him.  "For one thing, what gender is he?  Kabards aren't like Humans, you know: we care about the gender of the people we fall in love with.  Not so much the tribe: Humans, Humans, they are all divided into males and females, so you can tell immediately who will stir your passion.  But the Val have three sexes, and Etlzonat is the third.  A carrier."
"To you, what makes someone female?" Domojon asked, adopting his best dream-seer cordiality.
Akrava thought for a moment; then his golden skin grew fire-red with embarrassment.  "I think you know that!  But I looked it up on infonet.  He has a pouch instead."
Domojon laughed.  "Beyond the obvious, then?  Breasts?"  Human, Human, and Kabard women all had breasts; Etlzonat's chest was very muscular, to accomodate massive lungs, but smooth as a lin-tree, so Domojon assumed that Val carriers did not nurse.
"He does have breasts, but they're very tiny, in the pouch!"  Akrava grew pensive, calm.  "He bears his nurselings without a partner, not like Human and Humans, but as Kabard women do; he nurtures them in the pouch until they're about a year old, and then cares for them until they become adults, like the Human soulparents."  He chuckled.  "There's a Val insult -- 'Aren't you out of the pouch yet?' like our 'Are you still in the nurture-tower?'or the Human 'Does your soulfather still cut your meat for you?'"
"What are you saying?"
"That he can be a mother.  But can he be a woman?"
"Are there any other requirements for a person to be female, in your tower?  Anything non-physical?"
He raised open palms to indicate confusion.  "Sure.  Grace
. . .charm. . .a certain confidence, as if he knows what he wants in the world and knows he has the ability to get it.  Ease of movement, not like the male swagger or the mincing-about of dried-up old scholars."
At that moment Etlzonat rapped on the door-post.  He was carrying a fishing pole under one arm and a wicker basket in the other.  "I'll bet you have been speaking about me!" he said, cocking a mud-brown eye.  "But I am not to be carrying grudges.  The fish are biting today, sleek juicy ones.  Who is to be coming?"
"We won't be going out on a boat, will we?" Akrava asked with a little wince.
"No, of course not.  It is being a dock."
"Then I'd be glad to."
"Not me," said Domojon.  "You carnivores go on ahead."
"Are positive?  Then goodbye for now -- maybe I will be cooking them for supper, and then you will be carnivore, too, I am thinking!"  He turned away; Akrava grinned for a long moment at Domojon and then followed.
During the fall and winter and early spring, Domojon found that he knew enough Pelun to decipher wallscreen news, he became more and more anxious.  In early fall Jerei Bear of Chiokërang marched rather foolishly into Pachala to "war against the heretics," thus threatening the neighboring Human nations.  He was puhed back across the border, his Kabard troops decimated.  Then one day Gorban flew into Chiokërang with a fleet of twenty airships, defeated Jerei Bear quite easily, and establihed "the worship of the Godking from utter north to utter south."  With considerable fanfare, he moved the Court of the Divine Wind from its exile in Tregonëv back to Tregon.  "A new day has dawned for the Kabards," he said in a mid-winter interview.  "A day in which all nations, Kabard and Human alike, will revere the Godking."  Now armies of Kabards, and of Human, were building up in the mountains near Pelun's border.   Domojon was forced to turn the newscast off, and though he had been sleeping alone for many weeks, to seek out Akrava in his cloud-house to stave off the nightmares.
Human do not dream.  Some say this is because Tulë is in fact their land of dreams, and they visit their far-off waking world only when they appear to others to be asleep.  For this reason they walk the cavern-sky of Tulë at night, and worship Aramkai, He of the Endless Dreaming.  But who does not realize in moments of clear thought that even Kabards and Humans walk a world of dreams?
The dreams of other tribes do not portend future tragedies: they reflect the present or resurrect the past, shifting events and places and people to stain them red with passion, white with terror.  But on those rare occasions when Human seem to recall their dreams, they are really seeing the things that are in our world now, or what will be.  So Domojon knew it was an omen of the future when, the next morning, he remembered this dream:
He was walking in a small walled garden of night-dark dzürmethér and deadly blue tupán, flowers that puhed out from the frozen ground of the north during its short, chilly summer.  It was night, bracingly cold, pale from stars and the electric blue flickering of the aurora borealis.  Akrava walked a little way in front of her; all he could see was his warmth, the black glitter of his mane, his hips moving back and forth, his feet padding the soft newly-turned earth in Kabard sandals.
"Will you stay with me?  Will you stay with me here?" he called in dream desperation.
"Sorry -- I don't like the cold up here," Akrava said in a startlingly plain, matter-of-fact tone.
"We could form a new clan here, you and I and the others."  In the dream who the "others" were seemed obvious.
"Kabards do not live in clans.  Solitude, like that of the Val, is our love."
"But I abandoned my clan for you," he cried, and it seemed to be the truth.  "I became erëktilit for you."
"It is not enough.  You are still Human, and this is a Human nation.  I must have the cloud-houses and slim towers of the south."
And he awoke.
"Akrava!" he called, shaking him until he bruhed at his with his arms, opened his eyes.  "Akrava, wake up!"
"Hmn?"  He stared blearily at him.  "What's up?"
"Akrava, I've decided to leave Pelun, to go to Humanan after all."
He groaned.  "What a piece of news to hear the first thing in the morning."  He stretched, yawned, and rose from the palm leaf-bed.  "Just let me gargle -- my mouth tastes like last night's poached squid.  Want some tea?"
"Did you hear me, Akrava?"  Domojon asked in a desperate, bitter voice.  "I'm serious this time."
He heard him in the bathroom, relieving himself, then gargling.  "You're not thinking of putting on the Colindon, like some long-dead-and-now-risen King of Kings?" he called.
"No.  Someone wants me to wear the Colindon.  I don't know who, but I have an idea."  He waited until he came out of the bathroom, went to the sideboard, and was staring glumly at a teapot.  "Gorban wants to use me to control all of the Human in Kabard lands, so that he can war against the Humans."
"Why you?" he asked.
"Because he confided his madness in me: he feels that we share a bond.  But you see, Akrava, he wants me to wear the Colindon, so I must find it and destroy it, or I will never be at peace."
"Yes, yes."  He poured water from a glass pitcher into the teapot, and pulled a jar of yellow moss tea from the helf above the sideboard.  He obviously didn't believe him.
"Akrava, I've been dreaming!" he cried.
He stopped short, and turned slowly to face him.  Horror had drained his face of its ruddy gold.  "Why. . .why haven't you mentioned this before?"  He sat on the palm-leaf bed and put his arms around him.
"I try to explain them away," he murmured, pressing his face against his warm chest.  "I say that I am merely worrying or fantasizing on the edge of sleep, not dreaming.  But I am fooling myself: the dreams do come, and no Human can dream for long and hope to remain sane."
"And you think that finding Aramkai Roham, finding the Colindon," he asked, "Will stop the dreams?"
"Then we'll go north and find Aramkai Roham -- but not until spring.  No sense borrowing trouble."
"We?" Domojon asked.
"Of course." He grinned and held his tighter.  "You don't think I'm going to let you have all the fun, do you?"
After showering, changing clothes, and calling on Etlzonat to explain the situation, they went to see Nok Dragon.  He sat them down on a petto overlooking the honey-colored Val beehive compound and a spray of blue silk trees, and the whipping wind beyond.  Attendants served them a Pelun breakfast: boiled egret eggs with pepper and ground mace, rice bread with raspberry jam, and Maxwell House coffee imported at great expense from the storehouses of Runoe.
"I am delighted that you see the wisdom of my plan," he said, stroking at his mane, "And sorrowful, of course, for the journey will be very dangerous.  If, as seems true, Gorban desires that you wear the Colindon, the physical dangers will not be so great as the dangers to your mind and soul."
"How does one destroy the Colindon?" asked Akrava.  "Should it be stamped on, or shocked with electricity, or. . .or thrown into a volcano?"
"No, no."  Nok Dragon smiled.  "The ancients knew the ways of the greatdoors, and how to see across the vast spaces, and how to drive men mad with a glance -- but they knew nothing of simple Terran explosives.  I will give you a pocket-sized grey bomb.  You place the bomb near the Colindon, pull a switch -- run far away -- and in fifteen seconds, the Colindon is bits of charred metal!"
"Sounds simple enough," said Akrava.  But Domojon wondered what would happen to anyone setting off a Terran bomb in a cavern-city like Aramkai Roham!
"And now for your route. . . ."  He called for a map, and waited a few moments for one to be brought.  "Gorban will no doubt be searching for you, so I suggest a disguise. . .perhaps as pilgrims on a tour of the shrines."  He thought for a moment, then smiled.  "Ah, I know.  Human worship Eluse, or a goddess quite like his -- you can be Elusivhir converts taking the pilgrim's path through the shrines of Pachala, Runoe, and Hizorán.  Then across the forests of Firuun to Humanan."
"How will we find Aramkai Roham?"
His eyes gleamed.  "More coffee, anyone?  No -- then here's how we will handle the espionage.  Akrava will be told how to find Aramkai Roham, and Domojon how to find the Colindon itself.  Neither will know anything else about it, so that if Gorban happens to capture you, hah!  And nothing written down, of course.  He glanced at Etlzonat for a moment.  "And are you going with them, my good Val?"
Her eyes widened, and he shifted nervously in his chair.  "I had not been thinking of it, for I have been considering this quest a flight after cloud-castles."  He looked across the table at Akrava, then at Domojon.  "But among the Val those whom one draws close enough to touch thus --" He lay a hand on Domojon's shoulder.  "Are few, and valued beyond price.  So I should find such a journey honoring."
"We can't ask you to put yourself into such danger," Domojon protested.
"Cannot ask, I know," he said, his left eye glowing.  "Yet I can answer.  And this journey will give me chance to see Valmarkum again, and even more -- Hizorán, where is being the foundation of my religion!"
"Excellent," Nok Dragon exclaimed.  "Kabard and Human traveling together might look suspicious, but add a Keftuin, and you're a Transcendent Ktil, as innocent as Wanderlings!"
"A what?" Akrava asked.
"By Kensor, you really must read about the Humans!"  He called the attendant for a bottle of green pear wine.  "Eluse spent his career preaching the doctrine of the Transcendent Ktil."
"Yes," said Etlzonat.  "That the godly ideal is a clan of each tribe: Human, Kabard, Valak, Ceraine, Morev, and Human.  Throughout Human lands devout Elusivhir keep trying to make the six, but with one tribe living here, another there, and some not being very often Elusivhir, they usually cannot count more than three tribes in a clan."
"You'd look perfectly devout, and perfectly ordinary," Nok Dragon said, nodding his head back and forth until his mane trembled.  "And now, some green pear wine to. . . ."
He paused to listen to a crashing like thunder or a hundred falling trees.  "Toward the east," Etlzonat said.  They stood and looked out across the housetops and streetlamps of Rikang, and in the eastern hills saw thick, heavy smoke, as black as Aramkai, rising in a harried funnel.  An airship, no more than a silvery dot against the sky, was droning toward the east.
"Something has caught fire, no doubt," Domojon said uneasily.
"No, no. . .it was a bomb," said Nok Dragon.  "And I know what lies just to the east of Rikáng -- the greatdoor between Pelun and the Terran nation of China."
"The greatdoor?" Domojon repeated.  "Do you think Gorban has had the. . .the madness to bomb a Terran greatdoor?"
"I don't doubt it."  He turned and placed his hand solemnly onto Domojon's back.  "The war is beginning, Domojon.  What you have to do, do quickly."