Moonstar (2 page)

And like our gods, we too hold our breaths until the time when both we and the new person discover who she is to be.

—in a hurricane.”

“There was howling winds and bright flashes of lightning, and I am told that I screamed with fear and pain for hours afterward. It was more than four months before I smiled.

“I remember nothing of this, of course; I learned it only many years after as a special confidence of Sola, the deviate. My birth was a day of storms and other ill omens, and I believe that my life has been darkly colored not just by my own pain, but also by my family's knowledge of my uneven beginning.

“I was born too soon—my mother stumbled while running for the shelter. There was no Watichi with her to chant and pray. The bless-father had died in a boating accident, and I was born in no shelter at all, with loud flashes all around.

“Hojanna had to lie on her back, while Grandpere Kuvig yanked me from her womb, stripping a veil from my face and slapping me to make me gasp for breath—there was not time for anything more while the weather raged around us; she cut the cord almost immediately and wrapped me in her coarse storm-jacket, still covered with the blood of my mother's pain. Then, as the trees continued to crash around us, they stumbled and ran the last half-kilometer to the shelter.

“There is no way to go back and undo the damage done to your birth. I was born and I was here. There were no songs, no prayers, no reassurances until long after I had already learned that this new place could be hard and cold and uncaring. By then it was too late for reassurances.

“For a time, I was called ‘the dark child.' I did not know of it until Sola told me, and yet I knew somehow that there was something about me that set me apart. It was the family's intention that I should never know that there was anything different about me, but that is one of those things that you cannot keep secret from a person. I could not help but know that somehow I was special. I could not help but sense a perceived ‘inferiority' somehow, and I cherished that knowledge as if it somehow also made me superior to the others by making me different.

“It was vague apartness, not one that I could define or describe, and perhaps one that I was not even consciously aware of until I could step out of myself and look back. It wasn't until the time of Blush and thereafter that I realized what it was that made me so unlike my fellow small victims of Entropy—they at least moved with the knowledge that they would be somebody someday; not even Entropy could destroy an identity once established. But me, I moved tentatively, cautiously, unsure that I would ever be anybody. Where others might be souls, I might be only a small smoldering core of fear, easily extinguished and forgotten.

“So when Sola told me the facts of my birth, it was not so much discovery as confirmation of something I had known for all my life already, that I moved in a vacuum created by the held breaths of the gods.

“And yet—even with that terrible knowledge—my early life was filled with joy—wistful, perhaps, muted, like haunting chords on Dakka's pipes—but all of the days were signposts by Choice, but by how I learned to deal with it.

“I was born, I was here, and I had to make the best of it.”

Three days after the storm, a Watichi's sail was sighted on the horizon. Grand-Uncle Kossar raised a flag of welcome and the craft turned and headed inward toward the island. A Watichi is a holy person, a voice of Reethe and Dakka in the world of the commonhood; she owns nothing of her own, she has no need of ownership—being of the gods, she trusts her life to their winds; they will provide for her. And indeed, it is a blessing to give food and shelter to a godvoice—it is equally a sin to refuse her needs. (There have been Watichi who have sometimes lost their sense of god, and that is why Watichi are forbidden—like perverts—to stay more than three days in any one place without permission.) This Watichi was on her way from somewhere in the past toward somewhere in the future; she was on a pilgrimage of purpose specific only to Watichi and beyond the simple understanding of the commonhood.

She was tall and bony, her skin was pale as a painted piece of parchment. Her hair was white and floated in a wispy cloud around her head—was she old? Or just albino? Her eyes were red and hollow in their sockets—she looked haunted and she twittered like a bird. Her hands would flutter in the air before her as she spoke. Her voice was like a child's high-pitched piping. Her robe was spotted with brown and yellow stains, and she smelled not of the sea, but of decay and illness. She spoke of omens she had seen, but her very presence was an omen in itself.

She put three poles in the sand and stretched a silken cloth across the tops to make a shade; then she laid a woven mat beneath the shade and sat herself upon it. Then she waited. Soon the family began to lay their gifts upon the mat before her. It did not matter that Kuvig and Suko disapproved of Watichi's legalized begging—they called it “spiritual extortion”—Grand-Uncle Kossar still believed and she insisted on the rituals. Tradition must be honored. She laid out a spread before the Watichi of the family's finest wealth, the softest clothes, the sweetest wines, the richest dishes in the household, a feast of offerings. The Watichi rejected most of them and Suko did not know if she should be relieved at that or just insulted. This Watichi seemed beyond the comprehension of the pride of well-made objects; wealth was like sand to her. She tasted at what pleased her, but the only object that she took was the gauzy scarf of scarlet silk that little Dida laid before her in imitation of her elders. (“Hmph, a modest Watichi,” said William under her breath. “Wonders will never cease.”)

Finally, the Watichi spoke of Reethe and Dakka, and the coins that bear their visages. “We toss the faces and we cast the runes by their expressions. We learn not of the past, nor of the future, but of this moment—now—in which their currents intersect. Three days ago, I saw an omen.” The godvoice wavered, her hands crept toward her heart and throat. “I did not understand it then, but an otter climbed aboard my raft and told me to sail west. I came here, and now I understand that it is not necessary for me to know the meaning of the omen, merely to report it. This omen was for you and I am just a messenger.”

She lowered her head and fell silent. The family, seated in a circle on the sand around her, waited. Kuvig laid out three coins before the Watichi. Two of them showed the smiling face of Reethe, the third grimaced with the frown of Dakka. “We have had a birthing here,” said Suko. “And a storm.”

“A birth omen, then—a strange one, though. I saw a boat, an empty craft with broken mast, torn sails, desolate in shape and manner. She was old and gray and listing on a glassy sea. She looked like a boat of death lost over from the years of plagues. As I turned my sails toward her, suddenly there came a bird—large and white, like none I'd ever seen before, too big to be a gull, too sweet of voice. Her cry was something joyous. She came from the east, as if created from the Nona moondrop, flying out of it as I turned to watch. She flew above the boat and toward the moonstar up above, she circled beyond. She disappeared beneath the moondrop of the Lagin. The last cry that floated back to me was neither joyous nor despairing—only questioning. But she still flew—and I saw hope. When I looked down to the sea again, the phantom boat was gone.”

She giggled. “What does it mean?” She looked around at all her watchers. “Nothing? Everything? Perhaps it symbolizes Choice. The new person can drift despairing in her life upon a sea of desolation. Or she can fly. It is not a happy omen, but neither is it dreadful. It speaks of doom and joy together. Someday our air will be thick enough and all of us may fly like birds.” Her voice cracked and sputtered, she wheezed and whispered into silence. Her breath came like a whistle. “This is the omen I have seen three days before I stood upon this shore. If it is meant for you, then I have delivered it and I am done.” She bowed her head into her lap and was still for so long that Suko wondered if perhaps she might have fallen asleep, or passed out, or perhaps died. It was not unknown for Watichi to die in extraordinary fashion.

But she raised her head and said a prayer to Reethe and Dakka. She took the coins up from the mat and kissed them each and laid them down again. She stood and touched the children then, each in turn, and called them to the attention of the gods; she spoke kind words of the island, its dwellers and its crops—she forgave all unbelievers, for even in their unbelief they still were servants of the flows of Reethe and Dakka. And as she spoke that last, she grinned knowingly at Kuvig and Suko. Then she gathered up her woven mat, her silken tent, its poles, and the offering of Dida's scarf, and sailed off into the east and north.

Watching as her sail drifted toward the pink edge of the world, Suko snorted skeptically, “An expensive pantomime, a beggar-show, a masquerade to tell us what we already know. A baby is born to Choice. We do not need a Watichi to tell us that.”

But Uncle Kossar touched her arm and spoke of tolerance. “Have care, Suko. I feel that this visit had a meaning all its own.”

Perhaps it did. Did Uncle Kossar hear a different message from the specter on the shore? Three days later she took to her bed, and within a second triad after that she was returned to the sea to sleep with her mothers.

“My earliest memory is of being tucked into my crib at night by one of my cousins. Dida it was, and although Dida had not made Choice by this time, I suspect that Dida's mind had been made up long before first blush; she wanted to be a birth-mother, and her care for me and the other infants was part of its earliest expression. Dida made a fine mother, and in later times also proved her other strengths. During the famines that followed the shield disaster, she held her marriage together, when all about families were collapsing into anarchies, ours included.

“The earliest memory that any of my family members have of me—that is, the first time that I displayed any kind of individuality that stuck in their minds—is the ‘wuppersticks' incident. It is the story that I have heard the most and have come to loathe; but its popularity at family gatherings must mean something, and I suppose its significance is the fact that up until then I had been merely one more blob of pink flesh that had to have food stuffed in one end and shit cleaned off the other.

“It was a family gathering of some sort, no one remembers—the family has argued for years about the reason for the occasion, although none of them have ever forgotten the story itself. I was in a high stool. It's my theory that it was the Sea Harvest celebration of 288; that would have made me about two years old, just the right age for the story. It was probably the first time I had been allowed to eat with the family, so I must have had some experience to prove myself with solid food.

“Members of the great-family were there from all over the Crescent, including many from difstaff side. At some point in the meal, I am told, I began asking for ‘wuppersticks' and would not cease my crying and insistence. I just kept pointing and wailing, but no one could figure out what a ‘wuppersticks' was. My older siblings (I was the youngest at table) could not figure out what I wanted, neither could Dida or Hojanna, nor any of my other mothers. Not even Grandmere Thoma, who was supposed to be the most child-experienced of all. My aunts—whom my parents had been trying so hard to impress—were annoyed that the family could neither control nor quiet its youngest. Those who were there always embellish the telling with vivid descriptions of how Aunt William became so distressed that she started yelling at my fathers. “For Dakka's sake, give the little rodent a “wuppersticks!” (This is probably why there is confusion as to where and when the incident took place. Aunt William's outburst was a subject of delighted discussion for months afterward, whenever the family got together, thus blurring the memory of the origin of the incident with the subsequent retellings of it.)

“Anyway, I merely kept pointing and crying, I am told. There were meat-breads on spice skewers and savory yams, and pickled corn and onion sweets and baked ducklings in sour-sauce and lots of side plates of raw fish and dippings. The relatives offered me everything on the table to see what I wanted. It wasn't until one of my uncles—and no one seems to remember which one exactly, so it must have been one of the transient ones—picked up her chopsticks with which to dip a piece of fish that I began to point again and holler, ‘Wuppersticks! Wuppersticks!'

“Suppersticks!—only I couldn't pronounce my S's too well yet. Of course, I was nowhere near coordinated enough to use them properly, but I had made the connection in my mind between supper and sticks and I wanted them.

“There is no real point to the story, no pearl of truth with which to point at the future events and say, ‘Here, here this is the reason.' The story does not even demonstrate that I was precocious, only self-indulged, like any baby—but whenever groups of my relatives would gather, particularly ones who had not seen me in some time, I was always reintroduced as the ‘wuppersticks baby,' or someone would say, ‘Look how big little wuppersticks has gotten.'

“I personally have no memory of the incident, so I always felt like I was carrying around a piece of someone else's very annoying baggage. I used to dread family greetings because of the inevitable retelling of the story, if not for those who hadn't heard it, then always for my benefit because of my continual mistake of insisting that I remembered nothing of it at all. In some way, this set me apart (at least in my own head) from the other children. Fortunately, they found the story as stupid as I did, and none of them ever thought to tease me about ‘wuppersticks'—for which I am grateful. They teased me about a lot of other things instead.”

By the Holy Calendar, Jobe was four when she first learned that adults were divided into different kinds. There were ones with sagging breasts and there were ones who had no breasts at all.