They Fly at Ciron Read Free

of the reins, he was gone—to leave Rahm puzzled at their parting.

CHAPTER II
     
    N AÄ singsso prettily,” saidone.
    “Naä sings like a bird,” said another. “Like a lark.”
    And between the women Rimgia bent among the rows, that, rising up over her eyes, became a gold jungle webbed with Naä’s song. Rimgia wrapped her hands in the stalks and pulled. She’d been working some hours and her side was sore. In another hour the edge of her palms would sting.
    But Naä sang.
    And the song
was
beautiful.
    Did they really work better when the singer sang? From time to time, when one could pay attention to the words, it was certainly more pleasant to work that way. Most of the women
said
they worked better. And all of the men. And it was best, Rimgia knew, not to say too much at odds withwhat most people said, unless you’d thought about it carefully and long—and selected your words with precision. That last had been added to the village truism by her father Kern—a man known more for his silence than his volubility.
    While Rimgia picked and listened, the squeak-squeak-clunk, squeak-squeak-clunk of the water cart rose out of the breeze and the music. Rimgia stood up, to feel gas rumble in her stomach from hunger. The water cart’s arrival was her signal to cease and go home.
    Apparently, it was Naä’s too. At the end of the verse, when the jolly man, so strong and fair, kissed the girl with the raven hair, Naä hefted her harp on its leather strap around behind her back, unhooked her left knee from her right ankle, and pushed herself down from the rock. She shook her brown hair back, hailed stocky Mantice, the water-cart driver. (His name had three syllables, the last with the softest “c.” In that locale it meant a bird, not a bug.)
    Receiving the smiles and warm words from the working women, Rimgia, whose hair was the color of the central length inside a split carrot, got a dipper of water from Mantice at the cart; and, laughing at one woman and whispering to another about still another’s new boyfriend and giving a quick grin to another who stepped up, full of a story about someone else’s four-year-old daughter, she hurried to the path to fall in beside the singer.
    When she saw Rimgia coming, Naä lingered for her.
    They’d walked together a whole minute, when Rimgia asked: “Naä, what dost thou think happens to us when we die?” She asked the question because Naä was a person you could ask such things of, and she wouldn’t laugh, and she wouldn’t gotelling other people how strange you were, and you wouldn’t hear people talking and whispering about you when you came around the corner or surprised them by the well a day later.
    That was more the reason for the question than that Rimgia really wanted to know. Indeed, she rather liked the idea that the wandering singer sometimes found her, and her occasional odd thoughts, of interest enough to speak about them seriously. So—sometimes—Rimgia tried to make her own thoughts seem more serious than they were.
    “When we die?” Naä pondered. “I suspect it’s just a big, blank nothing, forever and ever and ever, that you don’t even know is there—because there is no knowing any more. That, I guess, is the safest thing to bet on, at least in terms of living your life the best you can while you’re alive.” She paused. “But once I was in a land—oh, three or four years back—that had the strangest ideas about that.”
    “Yes?” Rimgia asked. “How so?”
    “The elders of its villages were convinced that there was only a single great consciousness in all the universe, a consciousness that was free to roam through all space and all time, backwards and forwards, not only over all of this world but through all the hundreds and millions and hundreds of millions of worlds, from the beginning of time to its very end. You know the little signs Ienbar makes on his bark scrolls about each person he buries, up at the burial field? Even fifty