Harmony (34 page)

“Sean, I know how—”

“No, Micah, you don’t.” Sean’s eyes were oddly focused, as if at a great distance. His fingers pressed deep grooves into the padded arms of his chair. “I gotta say I’m fucking sick of taking all the shit when this theatre gets in a scheduling mess! You guys are always coming up with these bright ideas—anyone ever ask
me
if it’s worth it? Anyone ever thank me or my crew when we kill ourselves bailing you out?”

“Yes,” said Micah fervently, “I do. Always.”

“We all do,” Rachel added, because she knew she must. For a moment I was almost as angry with her as Sean was.

Softly Micah said, “Sean, just get us through this one.”

“What’s the problem if they play a few previews unfinished?”

“Please. This one is important. I’m asking for your help.”

“You think they’re all important! Every one, life or death! When is this ever going to stop?” Sean stared at Micah as if he was a stranger. “More crew is not the answer.” He rose abruptly and Rachel shrank away as if he might hit her. “The answer is, this one doesn’t get finished on time, maybe you’ll think twice next time. Answer is, you keep Howie outa that theatre and we might be done by opening.”

He turned and walked out.

I learned later from Flick that Micah’s friend and hero, the imperturbable Sean Reilly, returned to the shop, walked straight into the crew room, and hurled a wooden chair into tiny splinters against the gray concrete wall.

“If I hadn’ta been there to see it, I wouldn’ta believed it,” she muttered. “That Sean, I tell ya, he’s in a bad, bad way.”

TE-CUCULARIT:

Micah was stunned, of course. He made a few lame excuses for Sean’s intransigence, but the pain in his eyes was so naked it might have embarrassed me if I hadn’t been equally devastated.

Rachel straightened more paper clips. “It seems that he has us over a barrel.”

Micah roused himself. “No. No. I’ll find a couple of good men—if they just show up in the shop, he’ll put them to work. But first of all, we keep Howard out of the theatre.”

Rachel said, “You’ll have to convince him.”

“I will.”

* * *

Micah went home tight-lipped. I scurried back to prop duty, shaken to the core. Hickey tried to calm me with gloomily sympathetic noises and promises that at least his part of the job would be done. But he made it plain he intended to remain clear of the whole controversy. “When this one’s all over and done with, Sean and me’ll still be here having to work together.”

Jane was another problem. She’d retreated to the furthest reaches of the dressing room, practically in the showers, working in silent distraction. I had to watch her constantly, to remind her to keep her colors consistent and her lines clean, the sort of things you never had to worry about with a detail expert like Jane.

I was concentrating poorly myself. That enervating futility was creeping up on me again. I tried not to be short with Jane, but now it seemed that these props, the one aspect of
The Gift
that I had some control over, had to be extra-perfect. The scene in Rachel’s office haunted me. I replayed it over and over. How could a long friendship be so abruptly put on the line? Then without warning, Te-Cucularit arrived. I feared if he threw a tantrum about finding his precious totems in the hands of infidel women, it might just send me over the edge with Jane.

But he came in quietly. I held my breath when he stopped at my shoulder to study my work.

“This will do,” he remarked gruffly.

Relieved beyond measure and not knowing what else to do, I continued painting. Cu hovered for a bit, examining each prop, checking each color I’d mixed according to his precise formulae. Finally he searched among the brushes resting in my water jar, drew one out, and dipped it in the rich turkey red I’d just used for the outline of a fish. He pulled up the chair next to me, destroying what little was left of my concentration. He was so close I could feel the heat of his body. I was thankful he didn’t walk around half naked like Ule or Moussa. Jane eyed us from her corner.

“But,” he said, “it could be better done like this.”

He edged my brush hand out of the way. In the center of the flattened top of the Gorrehma, he deftly shaped a fantastical bird. What good angel had made me leave that space for last? He laid in the body and head with clean intersecting arcs, then the bird’s feathers with quick parallel lines that echoed the crosshatched background. The sure economy of his stroke imparted a mythic quality to the entire image. It was at once the specific bird of his imagining and every bird in the universe.

“Beautiful,” I murmured. “Really beautiful.”

He settled himself more comfortably in his seat. The tension that shadowed him evaporated as he worked. With a single sweep, he surrounded the completed bird with a graceful red oval.

Beside his, my own birds as well as my fish and lizards and other animals looked crabbed and contrived.

“I’ve been keeping things a bit too literal,” I noted.

“Of course. You lack the resonances of the history to guide your hand.”

I laughed nervously. “Like having to recite a poem you’ve learned in a foreign language.” I’d never had to do that, either, but Songh had told us once about singing in Latin.

“Yes.” He said it as one placates a child without really listening, filling his red oval with tiny texture lines.

I inched my chair back to leave us more breathing room. This perfect beauty of Te-Cucularit’s drew you whether you wanted it or not: the radiant brown skin, the exquisite modeling of his cheek and jaw. He was like an expensive artwork you would never consider buying but could not help looking at. I wondered if he was comfortable with it, or if his sour habit had developed as a defense against a world compelled to stare at him with hunger in its eye.

Now he gave total concentration to the laying in of the ground around his oval. I wanted to ask how the tales were contained within these daubings on the wood. What were the actual mechanics of the telling? What syntax of line and image resolved itself for a Tuatuan eye into coherent narrative? But in my head, all my questions sounded like skepticism.

“You work very fast,” I said instead.

Cu rinsed his brush, looking about. “I need the darker brown.”

I passed him a cool burnt umber.

He worked from that jar for a while, then set it aside and sat back. “The ease of it will come, even though you lack the sense of it. You see how already you improved…” He touched the tip of his brush handle to the precise spot where I had laid in my own first strokes. He drew it lightly to where I had just been working.

“It’s that obvious where I started?”

“To me.” His shoulders twitched diffidently. “For Mali and Omea, their tales come in words, Moussa’s in music, No-Mulelatu and the girls, in the language of their bodies. Mine is here in the lines.”

He caressed the Gorrehma’s upper bulge, just where it flattened to provide the sitting surface now decorated with his fantasy bird. “You did not start in the proper place. The tale must be born here and grow this way”—he traced a spiraling curve across the shining wood—“or its power will never awake. Now, yours…” His finger wandered drunkenly with the zigs and zags of my cross-hatching. He seemed to be fighting off a smile. “No worry that you profane the secrets here. As even you can imagine, your story is somewhat incoherent.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. Cu let the smile curl the corners of his mouth. He wet his brush and used the umber to add a row of dots just inside the oval framing the bird.

“He’s like a firebird,” I said. “Or a phoenix.”

“
She
is Akeua. Her magic is far older than Phoenix and her power is very great. She is Moussa’s totem.”

I listened as I had as a child to my grandfather’s stories of Before, which were as much strange magic to me then as these Tuatuan totems now.
Please, Grandpa, tell us about
… “Tell me her tale.”

Cu’s brush hand stilled, then relaxed. He resumed his rows of umber dots. “That I cannot.”

“Oh.” It was like hearing an ominous crack when you’d been sure the ice was a good eight inches thick. Lulled by his reasonable mood, I ventured out on it anyway. “How come?”

He sat back, stiffly angry. “To speak it is not allowed. Would you offer up your clan secrets so easily?”

Taboo. I’d walked right into it but innocently, because I was feeling comfortable with him and dreaming about my dead grandfather. I felt my trust had been abused. “I don’t know. I don’t have any. I don’t have a totem. I don’t even have a clan. I have a mother and a father whom I’ll never see again!” It just leapt out of me after lying dormant for three busy years. I blinked and tried to shove it back where it had risen from, cursing its inconvenient arrival and the tears it brought.

Cu stared at me.

“When you leave home, you’ve still got it to go back to,” Jane accused.

He glanced down the long counter, then back at me. In his eyes was a very normal male horror at the prospect of hysterical females, but beyond was a bleakness that put my small tragedy to shame. “Every time we return, less of it belongs to us. Every time, less of it is.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it.

He laid the shaft of his brush across the back of my hand in obscure benediction. “You. What is your name?”

I told him.

“Gwinn-Rhys, observe carefully and do as I do, in mirror image, beginning over there.” He held the brush poised while I filled my own. “You needn’t know the tale of Akeua to help with the proper telling of it.”

THE ATTACK:

Cris arrived after studio hours with Mark and Songh and enough purloined dinner for ten of us. We feasted among the drop cloths and paint buckets. I thought he’d come to do something nice for me, but turned out he was mostly curious.

“What happened over here today?” he demanded. “Micah came back, turned up the music full blast, and worked all afternoon without saying a word.”

I described the confrontation in Rachel’s office. “We need to work extra hard for him now.” After dinner, I gave lessons in the rudiments of Tuatuan totem ornament and set everyone to work cross-hatching.

“How’s your research coming?” I asked Mark.

He talked as he worked. “Beyond the letter of the contract, there doesn’t seem to be a body of apprentice-related law. But there are what we might call some rights of precedent.”

“Precedent to what?”

“Actions were taken by apprentices to address certain problems in the past. When those actions were recognized by the Town government, they gathered an unofficial kind of legitimacy.”

“What kinds of action?” I asked cautiously.

“Well, the right to petition, for one.”

That made me thoughtful, and quiet for quite a while. It was late when we quit for the night and my back was cramping, but Te-Cucularit had approved my work and the elation still buoyed me. “We actually got something done today!” I cheered as we retrieved our bikes from the stage door rack. I tossed Mark a salute. “Thanks for the help, guy.”

“Anytime. I like painting.” He looked down at his ***candy-striped bike and ran a finger along the orange handlebar. “Bela and I used to…” He faltered, then gave a sad little smile and I was glad he no longer felt obliged to hide his grief. He seemed relieved, too, as he brushed at a nascent tear and laughed at his own discomposure. “Bela would’ve had a good time tonight.”

“I know.” I smiled and swung onto my bike.

With the theatres both in turnaround, Fetching Plaza was empty, bathed in the sullenness moonlight acquires when it passes through a dome. The white cylinders of the Arkadie loomed like a ruin. As if catapulted from a sling, I wheeled out in sweeping curves across the spread of coolly shining marble. Cris and Mark and Songh followed, whistling and whooping, while Jane bisected our joyful arcs in a slow, straight line to the far side of the plaza.

Cris swooped near. “What’s with Jane?”

“Oh, the usual!” I banked away from him, thrilled with speed and the freedom of open space after a long day in a tiny one. “Is this what it’s like to be Outside, do you think?”

“What?” he yelled.
“What?”

“Never mind!” I sailed across Jane’s bow, out of the plaza and onto the market street, broad and tree-lined, with fountains of natural rock murmuring in the middle. The greengrocers and bakers and
boucheries
were closed up for the night. The taller trees rustled as a gust sighed past above, on its way to wherever the weather computer directed it. A small sidewalk café remained lit. People sat in the leaf-shadow, shimmering in candlelight, drinking wine, and arguing aesthetics.

At least that’s what I imagined, in my euphoric state. Several of the debates seemed quite heated to one whizzing past at light-speed. My companions raced to catch up with me.

I pedaled harder. I veered off onto a narrow lane that was less well lit but made a more interesting trip home, and nearly ran down two people crossing the street in front of me. I swerved around them and swept past without a second glance. “Signal next time!” I yelled.

“Gwinn!”

Grinning, I glanced around. Cris had used this ruse before to win a race, and I wasn’t letting him win anything now.

“Come back!” he shouted.

They’d stopped at the crossing, Songh and Jane and their bikes in a cluster mid-street. Crispin’s lay tossed in a dim pool of streetlight. He was helping someone to the sidewalk.

I circled back. “I missed those people! What happened?”

I braked beside Songh. He’d gathered up Crispin’s bike and held it ready, glancing up and down the street. Jane supported Mark’s bike with one rigid hand as she gazed in horror at the dark huddle on the pavement.

“Get him over here, against the wall,” a familiar voice ordered. “No, away from the light! Let him get his breath.” A tall silhouette straightened out of the huddle and called to Songh. “Anything?”

“No sir, not yet.”

I stared into the darkness. “Mali?”

Songh sniffed back tears. “Sam’s been hurt.”

I dropped my bike and ran over.

Sam lay propped against a closed shop window, heaving and coughing. Even in the dull moonlight I could see he was spitting blood. I thought I should throw myself down to cradle his head in my lap like women always do in the vids, but I’d never had someone’s blood all over me before. Besides, Mark had beaten me to it.