Six Moon Dance (20 page)

Fentrys said, “I heard Madame talking to Simon. She sent word to someone, some large personage or other. She awaits that personage now, in the parlor.”

“Let’s listen,” suggested Tyle. “Can we?”

It wasn’t consortly behavior, certainly, since it reflected an unhealthy interest in other people’s business, but neither was it disobedient, strictly speaking, since they had never been forbidden to hide in closets and eavesdrop. They found room in the same closet Fentrys had hidden in before, one that backed on the parlor, though once hidden in it they had a stuffy time before Madame’s summoned guest arrived. They could not see him. They could only hear his words, uttered in a deep, flat voice with no resonance at all, though, Mouche thought to himself, that might be because they heard him from a closet.

“Madame Genevois.”

Madame’s voice came not only flat but curiously muffled, as though through a handkerchief. “Sir. I have today received the two boys you paid me some time ago to take and train. They are a good deal older than my usual students, and they seem to be of the opinion that they need no training and that they are in charge of House Genevois. If this is your intent, you have misjudged me. I have not spent my life acquiring a reputation so meaningless that I would cast it away for so little. I can and will refund your money, sponsors be hanged.”

A long silence. Then, “I’ll see to the boys.”

“Indeed,” said Madame with a gasp.

There was the sound of the parlor door opening and closing, and Madame’s footsteps going away toward the welcome suite, breathing deeply. There were then other doors opening and shutting, mutters in the hallway, an uncouth clattering and chatter, then the parlor door opened and closed once more.

“Oh,” said a young voice. “It’s you.”

“I thought you’d got it in your head about this,” replied the deep voice. “And here you go, startin’ off just like usual.”

“That old bitch …” said another voice, deeper, almost adult. Mouche shivered inside. He knew that voice.

Then there was a sound, not a sound the listeners could identify. It might have been a burning sound, a kind of sizzle and pop. Again, it might have been something else. It was followed by a gasp and a whimper. It came again and was followed by a moan, almost a scream.

“If I’ve got to come down here another time, it’ll be the last time,” said the deep voice. “And you won’t like it, I can guarantee.”

The door opened and closed once more. Heavy feet went to the foyer. The front door opened, letting in street noises, and closed. Then a long silence. When it had gone on for a very long time, Fentrys opened the closet door, and they slipped out into the corridor, stopping there with wrinkled noses, for the air smelt foul. When they peeked into the room where the interview had been held, they saw two boys on the floor, one very large, one smaller, both slumped against a huge, carved sofa, eyes half open, mouths fully open, drool at the corners. The smell of the corridor was far worse in the room, and it was a smell that Mouche remembered all too well.

He was staring around the corner at the larger of the boys when the boy’s eyes came fully opened and looked at Mouche with total recognition. Mouche drew back, breathless. It was the larger of the intruder boys, from that time long ago, the boy who had poisoned Duster. Older, he was, and strong looking, like an ox, but it was he, nonetheless, and the boy beside him was the other one from that day.

Mouche’s immediate reaction was fury. If he had been home, in his own place, and if there had been a weapon at hand, or even a rock to crush a skull, he would have moved to violence. Since coming to House Genevois, he had been drilled in the avoidance of violence, however, and the more recent lessons held him wavering, readying himself, taking a moment to decide.

It was Tyle who broke his indecision, tugging Mouche by the arm, muttering at him. “Let’s get out of here.”

They got out, though Mouche felt someone listening, someone following his footsteps. If he had recognized that smell, those faces, the two new boys had also recognized him.

They made it as far as the landing before people came into the hall below, and when Simon and others came past the foot of the stairs, the three friends were occupied with an ostentatious concentration on the notice board. Mouche turned to look after the people below. The two new boys were being assisted, almost carried, and he met the gaze of the larger boy, his face quite empty but his eyes blazing as his mouth formed the soundless words: “Farm-boy, I’ll get you.”

Behind them, in the hallway, the strange smell still lingered.

“We don’t say anything about this,” whispered Fentrys. “Not a word!”

The other two nodded. Though an account of this happening would be very interesting to all their mates in Consort Country, they knew instinctively that Fentrys was right. The smell in the room and the hallway was of a particularly unpleasant kind. It was not to be talked of. Not with anyone; not even among themselves lest they be overheard. So, Mouche had no one to share his gratitude that the new boys would not be coming upstairs to Consort Country, not for some little time yet.

T
hat one whom Mouche adored, the Timmy who was called by other Timmys,
Fauxis-looz
, which meant something like “Flowing Green” stood in one of the small painted houses in the rear courtyard, staring through the open door at the strange little tower gracelessly perched at the corner of the thick wall, built long and long ago by the first settlers as part of their riverside fortress. It was what the Timmys called a pretend wall: one that the humans pretended kept the Timmys in; one the Timmys pretended to be imprisoned by. The truth was there was no manmade enclosure that did not have doors in its walls and floors, no cellar without tunnels along its foundations, no loft without sneakways between the rafters. No place had ever been built that tim-timkwi could not get into or out of whenever tim-timkwi wished.

Nonetheless, for now, these tim-timkwi, those called by infant mankind “Timmys,” remained in the courtyard while Flowing Green kept her eyes on the tower window, which until some days ago had been almost closed but now was quite widely ajar.

“Tim saw his light again tonight,” the green-haired one said. “Tim saw it, when tim-tim were come inside.”

“Yes,” the speaker was answered by another who stood beside tim. “He comes every night.”

“This is the one Corojum spoke of,” said Flowing Green.

An older voice spoke from shadows. “Who knows what is to come? Not even Corojumi, dance weavers; Bofusdiaga, sun singer; Joggiwagga, moon watchers, setters up of stones.”

Silence. Then the whisper from another, “Niasa is restless and She is awakening. We cannot settle Her.”

“I have seen what I have seen in the dreaming time,” sang Flowing Green in a long, sustained flow of notes, a minor strain as plaintive as a nightbird.

“And who is tim to dream?” asked another, almost angrily. “Who is tim to say ‘I,’ ‘I,’ as though tim were a mankind? Is this one standing here a many-times-rejoined one? Is tim Bofusdiaga? Is tim Kaorugi Itself! Who is Flowing Green to know of dreaming?”

“I am who I am,” said Flowing Green. “I was made to watch these mankinds. I have the juice of one of them within me. I was created for this purpose. I have watched, I have learned. When I have been remade, what I had learned was not taken from me. I say this Mouche is the needful one.”

“Already lost are the gemmed gardens under Mist-mount,” sang the old voice from the corner shadows. “Fallen are the stone skies of Great Gaman and all the living stars that shone within them. If we do not find the dance, all will be lost.”

“Tim-tim still have some of it,” mused Flowing Green.

“In fragments,” said the voice from the corner, with only a hint of resentment. “What tim-tim have is thin, too thin, like gauze, like mist, like the wandering sound of little winds, unsure and unsettled. The power of it has leaked away. And now the gathering approaches, the Joggiwagga are setting up the stones, the tide comes with the moons; Niasa turns in sleep and She dreams restless dreams. The world trembles. Already the waking has begun.”

The corner tim spoke the truth. Even mankind had heard the word being called in the wilderness and had seen the pillars erected on the shores. Mankind did not know it was the Great Eiger who called or Joggiwagga who read the moon shadows. Mankind spoke of volcanoes and earthquakes, but mankind knew it was happening. Destruction threatened. Not at this moment, no. Nor tomorrow. But soon.

“I say once more, this one who watches us is the key,” said Flowing Green in a firm voice that said tim did not care whether they believed or not. “A Corojum spoke to me saying:
This one, Mouchidi, is not jong. He may not go gau when the waters close over him
. These were the words of the Corojum, and when I had heard the words of the Corojum, I dreamed of myself in the Fauxi-dizalonz, and this Mouchidi, he was with me.”

Only shamed silence greeted this. Such a thing was an abomination. Bofusdiaga had tried it with the jong long ago, and it had been a disaster. Surely Bofusdiaga would not allow it again! The tim-timkwi began to murmur, but the voice from the corner came again, admonishing.

“Bofusdiaga made strangely this one called Flowing Green, this one who says, ‘I,’ like mankind. Perhaps Flowing Green is a new thing in an old form.”

“Or perhaps Flowing Green is timself gau, bent, a monster,” said another-tim.

“Tim-tim will know soon enough,” murmured the corner voice ironically.

There was a wave of bitter laughter, a sound that overflowed the one little house to run among the other little houses in a freshet of real mirth as tim-tim repeated what tim had said. “Soon enough, too soon, enough.”

“Tim-tim will know,” said Flowing Green in her dreaming voice. “And I will know. And I will remember my dreaming and the words of the Corojum and this watcher from the wall.”

*   *   *

The Timmys were not the only thinking beings who remembered old times in the evening. Aloft on her balcony, D’Jevier remembered, not what she herself had seen, but what she had read in the secret journals of the Hags.

When the second settlement arrived, there were no Timmys. Years went by, and suddenly, there were Timmys, intelligent seeming beings. Speaking beings. And if they belonged here, mankind did not, according to Haraldson, so mankind had tried to drive them away.

The Timmys stayed. The Timmys gathered in great mobs to dance. There, on their dancing grounds, mankind had killed them, piling their corpses in stacks to be burned.

It hadn’t worked. For every Timmy killed, another arrived, and they still danced. They also started doing things for people: washing clothes, weeding gardens, cleaning dwellings.

Meantime, the mankind population grew slowly, and since the people were too few to do everything that needed doing, they began to depend upon the labor of the Timmys. In no time at all, the Timmys became the cleaners and cultivators and carriers. The Timmys became the miners and millers and child-minders. They were ubiquitous and industrious about mankind’s business, but they still danced. When they danced, they did not work.

Now their dancing was regarded as a dereliction of duty rather than an opportunity for slaughter, and once again mankind had interfered. Though the Timmys were never mentioned in either written or spoken edicts, “the sound of drums” had been forbidden, as had the “unprofitable shuffling of feet.” “Coordinated and frivolous movement” had been tabooed, as well, and there had been more than a few cases of maiming and murdering of Timmys in an effort to enforce the rule.

Mankind had always had a propensity for trying to govern the ungovernable and to control what was uncontrollable. Mankind had always relied upon laws and rules to direct those drives that did not care about laws or rules. Pragmatism had at last prevailed. Mankind upon Newholme had conceded that creatures who did not exist, who had no brains, could not be expected to modify their behavior to accord with mankind’s desires. Indeed, one Hag had been heard to say in confidence that forbidding the Timmys to dance was like forbidding a horse to piss. The horse would do it, somehow or other, somewhere or other, and though inconvenient and embarrassing, the best thing to do was ignore it.

The Timmys who had overheard this comment from their spyholes in the walls were not offended. Well, they nodded, it is time these folk saw sense.

Still the Timmys danced. The Hags knew it. The Men of Business knew it. They did not know why. Only the Timmys knew why.

Now and then they filled their courtyards or canyons or lava tubes with whirling dedications to zoological or botanical divinity, with ecstatic miming of many wondrous creatures. Now and then they did the slow omturtle dance, accomplished in pauses and silences; now and then the twirling rapture of the Great Eiger, the windbird, the four-eyed flier, who saw all, who knew all. Now and then was mimed the circular slithing of Joggiwagga, the moon dragons, simulated by stroked tambours and the throb of water drums. Now and then was the reed dance done, and that of the quiowhat tree and the little fluttery dances of all the beings-who-do-not-know-themselves, the fishy swimmers and birdy things and lesser vegetables who, unlike the Timmys, were not individually made by Kaorugi the Builder but were allowed to reproduce independently to serve as food for all creatures.

All these dances were done for enjoyment, and for practice.

For sometimes mere enjoyment gave way to necessity. Sometimes Niasa, summer-snake-in-the-egg, who dreamed of life, would become restless. Whenever this happened, Timmys did the little amusement dances for Her-Who-Hatches-Niasa, small simple dances, the first ones the Corojumi had created for Her. Then, every decade or so, when the moons lined up and pulled roughly, Niasa-in-the-egg would almost be wakened, and for these times more powerful and hypnotic amusement dances were needed, with many rehearsal sessions beforetime. Many Timmys were required for these, but the dance was always done for Her on time, and however restless it might be, Niasa slept on, dreaming as it had done forever.