Lo Hawk came too. “Come hunting, Lo Lobey. There’s a bull been seen a mile south. Horns as long as your arm, they say.”
“I feel rather non-functional today,” I said. Which is not the sort of thing to joke about with Lo Hawk. He retired, humphing. But I just wasn’t up to his archaic manner.
When La Dire came, though, it was different. As I said, she has great wit and learning. She came and sat with a book on the other side of the flat rock, and ignored me for an hour. Till I got mad. “What are you doing here?” I asked at last.
“Probably the same thing you are.”
“What’s that?”
She looked serious. “Why don’t you tell me?”
I went back to my knife. “Sharpening my machete.”
“I’m sharpening my mind,” she said. “There is something to be done that will require an edge on both.”
“Huh?”
“Is that an inarticulate way of asking what it is?”
“Huh?” I said again. “Yeah. What is it?”
“To kill whatever killed Friza.” She closed her book. “Will you help?”
I leaned forward, feet and hands knotting, opened my mouth—then La Dire wavered behind tears. I cried. After all that time it surprised me. I put my forehead on the rock and bawled.
“Lo Lobey,” she said, the way Lo Hawk had, only it was different. Then she stroked my hair, like Easy. Only different. As I gained control again I sensed both her compassion and embarrassment. Like Little Jon’s; different.
I lay on my side, feet and hands clutching each other, sobbing towards the cavity of me. La Dire rubbed my shoulder, my bunched, distended hip, opening me with gentleness and words:
“Let’s talk about mythology, Lobey. Or let’s you listen. We’ve had quite a time assuming the rationale of this world. The irrational presents just as much of a problem. You remember the legend of the Beatles? You remember the Beatle Ringo left his love Maureen even though she treated him tender. He was the one Beatle who did not sing, so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day’s night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatles returned, finally at one, with the great rock and the great roll.” I put my head in La Dire’s lap. She went on. “Well, that myth is a version of a much older story that is not so well known. There are no 45’s or 33’s from the time of this older story. There are only a few written versions, and reading is rapidly losing its interest for the young. In the older story Ringo was called Orpheus. He too was torn apart by screaming girls. But the details are different. He lost his love—in this version Eurydice—and she went straight to the great rock and the great roll, where Orpheus had to go to get her back. He went singing, for in this version Orpheus was the greatest singer, instead of the silent one. In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.”
I said, “How could he go into the great rock and the great roll? That’s all death and all life.”
“He did.”
“Did he bring her back?”
“No.”
I looked from La Dire’s old face and turned my head in her lap to the trees. “He lied, then. He didn’t really go. He probably went off into the woods for a while and just made up some story when he came back.”
“Perhaps,” La Dire said.
I looked up again. “He wanted her back,” I said. “I know he wanted her back. But if he had gone any place where there was even a chance of getting her, he wouldn’t have come back unless she was with him. That’s how I know he must have been lying. About going to the great rock and the great roll, I mean.”
“All life is a rhythm,” she said as I sat up. “All death is a rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life resumes.” She picked up my machete. “Play something.” She held the handle out. “Make music.”
I put the blade to my mouth, rolled over on my back, curled around the bright, dangerous length, and licked the sounds. I didn’t want to but it formed in the hollow of my tongue, and breathing carried it into the knife.
Low; first slow; I closed my eyes, feeling each note in the quadrangle of shoulder blades and buttocks pressed on the rock. Notes came with only the meter of my own breathing, and from beneath that, there was the quickening of the muscles of my fingers and toes that began to cramp for the faster, closer dance of the heart’s time. The mourning hymn began to quake.
“Lobey, when you were a boy, you used to beat the rock with your feet, making a rhythm, a dance, a drum. Drum, Lobey!”
I let the melody speed, then flailed it up an octave so I could handle it. That means only fingers.
“Drum, Lobey!”
I rocked to my feet and began to slap my soles against the stone.
“Drum!”
I opened my eyes long enough to see the blood spider scurry. The music laughed. Pound and pound, trill and warble, and La Dire laughed for me too, to play, hunched down while sweat quivered on my nape, threw up my head and it dribbled into the small of my back, while I, immobile above the waist, flung my hips, beating cross rhythms with toes and heels, blade up to prick the sun, new sweat trickling behind my ears, rolling the crevices of my corded neck.
“Drum, my Lo Ringo; play, my Lo Orpheus,” La Dire cried. “Oh, Lobey!” She clapped and clapped.
Then, when the only sound was my own breath, the leaves, and the stream, she nodded, smiling. “Now you’ve mourned properly.”
I looked down. My chest glistened, my stomach wrinkled and smoothed and wrinkled. Dust on the tops of my feet had become tan mud.
“Now you’re almost ready to do what must be done. Go now, hunt, herd goats, play more. Soon Le Dorik will come for you.”
All sound from me stopped. Breath and heart too, I think, a syncopation before the rhythm resumed. “Le Dorik?”
“Go. Enjoy yourself before you begin your journey.”
Frightened, I shook my head, turned, fled from the cave mouth.
Le—
Suddenly the wandering little beast fled, leaving in my lap—O horror—a monster and misshapen maggot with a human head.
“Where is your soul that I may ride it!”
Aloysius Bertrand, “The Dwarf”
Come ALIVE! You’re in the PEPSI generation!
Current catchphrase (Commercial)
—Dorik.
An hour later I was crouching, hidden, by the kage. But the kage-keeper, Le Dorik, wasn’t around. A white thing (I remember when the woman who was Easy’s mother flung it from her womb before dying) had crawled to the electrified fence to slobber. It would probably die soon. Out of sight I heard Griga’s laughter; he had been Lo Griga till he was sixteen. But something—nobody knew if it was genetic or not—rotted his mind inside his head, and laughter began to gush from his gums and lips. He lost his Lo and was placed in the kage. Le Dorik was probably inside now, putting out food, doctoring where doctoring would do some good, killing when there was some person beyond doctoring. So much sadness and horror penned up there; it was hard to remember they were people. They bore no title of purity, but they were people. Even Lo Hawk would get as offended over a joke about the kaged ones as he would about some titled citizen. “You don’t know what they did to them when I was a boy, young Lo man. You never saw them dragged back from the jungle when a few did manage to survive. You didn’t see the barbaric way complete norms acted, their reason shattered bloody by fear. Many people we call Lo and La today would not have been allowed to live had they been born