The Magister (Earthkeep) (16 page)

A long embrace. 

Then Jezebel turned swiftly and ran down a labyrinth of tunnels to the bottom of the old elevator shaft.  When she lifted and floated to its top, she held herself suspended there for fully a minute while she watched the shallow breathing of Dicken's sleeping form, sprawled on the cold black floor.  She stretched out beside that body and received the flood of joy that threatened to consume her.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

It was hours before Jezebel could make words work for her, and days before she could articulate the urgency that she carried from the bowels of the West Virginia mountain. 

"I have to talk with Zude," finally she said to Dicken.  "Very soon."

6 - BELO HORIZONTE - [2088] C. E.]

Listening is the highest expression of wisdom.

Vade Mecum For The Journey

H-e-e-e-e-e-ya!

The sands and shadows by the rivers!

Seh nuh w-a-a-a-n-yu! The ayllu and all its people!

E-e-e-e-yan-wu!  Stones, hold me!

Stormclouds, shake the oleander blossoms!

I cover the fog with my hand!

My strong foot drags.  My follow foot awakens.

I breathe the air of change.

I drink the water of silence.

Hey ya anah ah ah!

Thus sang Eti, Acuai tribeswoman, with her wide mouth and big throat.  Similarly sang all of the tribespeakers of Nueva Tierra Sur's steaming green jungles.  They sang in response to the tidings brought by footpaths and windstreams, by runnels and brooklets, by drumsong and dreamshare.  From as far south as the waters of Rogagua, from as far north as the Guiana Highlands, across the broad continent from its mountainous western backbone to its eastern sea, came the news: The tribes, the People, die.

Whole villages in the selva realized simultaneously that few women were pregnant or that many who were, miscarried.  Babies not stillborn often lived healthily for months only to refuse to awaken one morning from their apparently peaceful sleep.  Increasingly, children below the age of puberty — some with white or gray hair, some balding, a few with unaltered brown or black or yellow locks — calmly announced their intention to die, then did so.  Children who had achieved full puberty lived as adults, without incident or apparent threat. 

Throughout the selva the outcries of grief throbbed long into the nights, long into the days.  In every corner of the forest, learning centers closed, small fresh graves filled up the burying fields, and streets and pathways grew quiet.  Parents and would-be parents encountered each other silently with hollow eyes, drawn cheeks. 

And always, always among the women and men of the People, one heart would speak to another to say, "Your loss is my own."

As on other continents, sexual activity was at an all-time high as efforts at conception intensified.  Both the hearths of midwives — who supervised ovular mergings — and the daily schedules of the men who could give seed were very busy.  Amid ceremonies of grief and loss, tribes danced in ceaseless rituals for fertility and virility.  Cults of child-worship emerged in some ayllus; sometimes a village's remaining children were lionized by the affection of stricken adults; sometimes adults would stay close to the children, insisting upon watching them even while they slept, until the children themselves had to hide in order to escape the obsessions of their elders.  Madness and suicide among adults increased in direct ratio to the amount of a tribe's industrialization.

But among the People, in every household and communal orb, there emerged as well another and more widespread response, for a radical understanding was settling upon their hearts.  After a hundred tales of barren women, after a hundred anguishings of impotent men, after a hundred goodbyes to those who had lived among them for such sweet short seasons, they knew with unshakable certainty that the time had come for their forest home to say goodbye to the only animals left within its depths.

Many believed that the demise of the People was the natural extension of the exodus of non-human animals.  They reminded each other that the People had become extinct many times before in the history of the forest, and that always they had respeciated and returned.  Many more believed that the vanishing of the People would mean a return to the selva of the boar and the monkey, of the black warbler and the slow anaconda.  All knew that, like the death of one woman or one man, the death of all women and men was but a sleep and a passing. 

And so they attended to their daily tasks, reflecting upon the dust stirred by the broom or the sway of water in the gourd.  Now and again they anticipated the changes to come and praised their gods and loved one another, especially their children.  They cleansed themselves in the waterfalls in order to be worthy of the unfolding that was upon them.  And they rested, as they always had, under giant ferns or babassu palms when they tired of their tasks.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

On the central plateau of that same continent, in Nueva Tierra Sur, lay Belo Horizonte.  It was near the Atlantic and more than a thousand miles east of the mighty Cordillera de los Andes.  Partly because it had been a planned city from its birth in the late 19th century, and partly because the crash of the meat industry and epidemics had inflicted huge population losses, Belo Horizonte had yielded gracefully to its transformation into a bailiwick. 

The city was surrounded by iron mines, returning forests, and plains once devoted to intensive livestock production.  The containment fields that marked its outlying sectors accommodated 2,200 bailiwick habitantes and the free citizens who chose to live near them or, in the case of habitantes who were trusties, with them.  Within the city, large buildings now housed modest bureaucracies.

Most of the city's pavements had long since been allowed to revert to dirt, historically a matter of hot contention in South Brazil's quarter-trapy web and in its demesne bar.  On this day, the streets that had been mud the evening before were now puffing dust with each footfall.  The air was sharp.  Paraná pines swayed with quick alertness to every change in the breeze.

In the southeast sector of the bailiwick, a large dust dervish erupted and began collecting a crowd.  At its center, two men rolled on the ground in a loud curse-filled contest.  Each attempted to strangle the other while spectators shouted encouragements and criticisms. 

In the adjacent square, from their cement bench and portable stools, four women left off their finger-weaving to watch. 

"It's Diogo.  Inés's  husband," Camila Lins Gonzaga informed the others.

"Where's Inés?"  asked Alfreda Gala do Rego.

"Who knows?" shrugged Tui Machado.

"The gringo is on the bottom," observed Camila.

"That's no surprise," commented Tui. 

The fourth woman had divested her fingers of the brightly colored cloth threads.  She brushed back a wisp of graying hair and looked for just a moment as if she'd join in the disruption.  Then she stilled herself and leaned back on the bench, her legs wide under her faded green print skirt. 

"What do they fight about, Ti Tui?" she asked.

"Who knows?" answered Tui.  Then she turned to a young man who stood nearby.  "Diniz," she beckoned, holding up bottled water.

Diniz moved closer and with a bow of thanks drank from the bottle.  "Craziness," he muttered.  "Pombal, there on the bottom, was delivering feijão to the food stalls."  He addressed the oldest woman.  "He said Diogo tripped him, Ti Camila."

"And that's all it took," nodded Camila.  She moved her threads with tight jerks. 

In the street the crowd was larger, the voices louder.  The fight was escalating to brawl proportions.

The woman in the green skirt fingered her long braid.  Then she took off her hemp sandal and deliberately dislodged a pebble from its thong.  Her eyes casually searched the streets, the square, even the sky.

The young man wiped his cheek on his sleeve.  "Pombal is dangerous," he said.  "His daughter just died.  Foot-Shrieves found him yesterday in the mercado with a knife.  He was asking others to stab him.  To kill him."

A shriek came from the crowd.  One of the bystanders threw himself into the brawl, pulling Diogo off the other man.  Diniz left the women and moved into the street.  The green-skirted woman stood up.

Camila pulled her down again.  "Leave them be," she growled.

"The Vigilantes.  Where are they?" whispered Gala.

"Who kn--"

Tui was interrupted by the arrival of Vigilantes, a gert of Flying Daggers who landed to flank the fight.  With strong hands the two Kanshou separated and subdued the men, got them to their feet, and began breaking up the crowd.  "Get along, now!" they urged.  "Show's over!"  As the crowd dispersed, the Vigilantes drew the three men aside, talking with them, listening and nodding. 

The woman in the green skirt watched the interchange until it seemed that all was well.  The two original assailants were grudgingly apologizing to each other.  The taller Kanshou, still in conversation with one of the men, eventually walked off with him.  Her partner, also still talking, went in the opposite direction with the other man and his friend. 

A sigh or two, and the women resumed their mid-morning finger-weaving.  "That is how it is these days," said Camila, pulling her strands tight.        

"How is that?" asked the fourth woman.

"It is the pain," answered Gala.  "The pain."

"Even here in the bailiwick," mused the inquirer, biting through a thin string.

"What do you think?" Camila exclaimed.  "You think just because these men are habitantes that they have no pain?  You think they do not mourn the loss of their children!  You
think. . ."

Gala overspoke the older woman.  "Roma visits us, Ti Camila, here in the bailiwick.  She visits Braga and Carolina.  In the trusties' sector.  She--"

"She has no understanding.  Or she would not ask such a question."  Camila yanked a strand of red into place. 

"A thousand pardons, senhora," said Roma.  "I spoke not so much a question as a reminder to myself that the whole world shares a great grief."

Mollified skepticism passed over Camila's face.  She grunted.

"I shall bind my tongue," Roma said.

"Never," Tui interceded, then addressed the older woman.  "No one can be hushed in these days, Camila."

"Speak then," Camila grumbled, waving her hand.

Tui took up the turn.  "I do not live with Basilio, my habitante," she explained to Roma, "for he is not a trusty.  But I have lived here, near his barracks, for five years.  This bailiwick has always been very orderly, maybe because so many free citizens choose to be here near their habitantes."  She

paused.  "Dying children have brought many responses.  Particularly from the men."

She held up her hand with its web of covered fingers so that Gala could splice its threads into the strings on her own hand.  Then she eased her hand out of the creation she had woven upon it and handed the fabric to Gala.  "Like this fighting," she finished.

"Some have tried to escape," said Gala, leaning forward on her knees as she integrated Tui's contribution into her own weaving.  "Some try to kill others."

"Do many try to kill?" asked Roma.

"No.  Only some.  Three days ago a man set a fire in the hospital saying, 'What does it matter now, since we will all die?'"

"Baboseira!" snorted Camila.  "Always we have known we will die."

Gala was patient.  "Ti Camila, he meant the way it happens, the way we outlive the children.  We die without the children."

Camila grumbled as she fished about in her string sack.  A stout woman with a small child approached the group.

"Chia," Gala said.  "And Fidela."  She took the child's hand and kissed it.  Fidela rewarded her with a smile.  "This is Senhora Roma.  And you know Ti Tui."  The child ducked her head in acknowledgement.

Camila grunted and pointed with her chin to the stool at her side.  She watched while the newcomer sat on it and withdrew a soft hairbrush from her bag.

Chia held the brush in front of Fidela's face and asked a question with her eyebrows.

Fidela smiled and nodded vigorously.  She drew Chia's tote bag under her and settled herself between the woman's knees.  Chia began brushing the child's long black hair.  For a moment all the women ceased their activity and watched as the child closed her eyes to permit the gentle stroking.

Tui broke the silence, tightening a new row of orange strings around her fingers.  "The world is changing," she said.  "Every person has been touched by losing the children." 

"First the animals," said Camila, "then the men."  She pulled on a single thread.  It responded by unraveling itself.

"Now the little ones," Gala nodded.

Tui added bright blue thread to her pattern.  "But it is not all fighting or frustration."

"No," agreed Gala. "There is also magic."  She tied off the juncture of her two fabrics and set them aside.

"Faugh!"  Camila barely refrained from spitting.

Gala pushed a finger-splayed hand toward Camila.  "It is true!  Watch the flat-casts, Camila!  Every day a thousand more people will do an impossible thing.  They move rocks with their minds, they levitate, they talk with the dead, and they dance with joy at funerals!"

Camila stared at Gala from heavy-lidded eyes.  "I watch the flat-casts.  And I do not see your magic.  I see the riots in big cities.  I see people who do not know what to do with their anger.  They attack public buildings.  Sometimes they attack Vigilantes.  I watch the flat-casts.  And that is what I see."

Roma, the visitor, listened and wound her threads. 

"In Diamantina," Chia said to Camila, "two men flew together from noon until dusk.  They flew.  Like spooning women.  Two men."

"You saw them, my Chia."  Camila pulled outward on each of her unraveling strings, ungloving her fingers.  "You of course saw them."

"No, but others did."

"Ti Camila," Gala urged, "a time like this has never been before!  Not just earthquakes and volcanoes.  The people of the selvas, they speak of forest noises.  And right here in this bailiwick there are huge religious services, all kinds, every day!  You have seen them.  You know it!  The people of the world stand on tiptoe, breathing great waterfalls of air.  They wait, Camila.  They wait."