the deep moans round with many voices

I have mentioned a few times over the years that I am working on a story called "Small Mysteries," wherein Ekanu meets Ain Taylak, the man she eventually marries, while she is on assignment as a chapterhouse inspector on the continent of Yanomy. I am not anywhere near done with the story, but I have a section that more or less stands on its own as an introduction. It will be 1/4 to 1/3 of the finished story.

Ekanu is about 25 years old here. Ain is 24, but he acts older. "Small Mysteries" is set after Harvest and before Getting to Know You and Nor Good Red Herring. There is brief reference, in one of the songs Ekanu sings, to the events of For Want of a Nail. Also, I stole the first verse of the Ramchad funeral song from Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, but the rest of the verses are my own, as is the tune I sing it to. *grin* (2,950 words)

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Small Mysteries, part 1
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One thing most people in Yanomy agreed upon -- and those things were few and far between -- was that traveling the borders of Kengush alone was utter folly.

"I know you can't wait for me and Machiyoge to recover," Barathia told Ekanu, "but at least wait until they send to Osillipin for an escort. We'll send heliographs to Pythas so they understand the delay." Then she rolled over in her bed and vomited into the waiting bucket.

Ekanu held her fellow chapterhouse inspector's hair away from her sweaty face, handed her a mug of water, and helped her lie flat again with a damp cloth over her forehead and eyes. "You worry too much," she said. "First, I'll take the ridge road, not the trade road, and I hear the Sheng rarely venture more than a handful of miles into the forests. Second, I'm as much of a barbarian as they are -- if an educated barbarian -- and I know perfectly well how to hide from danger." Ten years away from the Ice and the word 'barbarian' still lingered sharp and sour in her mouth, but she'd learned when to fight it, and when to twist it to her own advantage.

Barathia pushed the cloth off her eyes and graced Ekanu with an unamused stare. "One day, someone will call you on that trick. 'Barbarian is a useless word,'" she quoted. "'It lumps together all people whose societies don't fit arbitrary standards of complexity in certain areas, and disguises their vast differences under that one superficial similarity.' You're not Sheng. You hate horses. You're used to snow, not semi-desert -- and yes, I know you lived in Bahur-Semrin, but that was in a city with aqueducts."

Ekanu smiled and tilted her hand back and forth, refusing to answer.

Barathia sighed. "You'll do what you want, won't you. Fine. But if you die, I want a signed and witnessed statement to prove that I tried to talk you out of this."

"That's simple enough," Ekanu said, and left to fetch paper, pen, and one of the teachers who ran the local paginarium and doubled as the town's healers and scribes.

The next morning, she loaded her guitar, her bag, some food, and several packets of reports and books onto a borrowed donkey, and set out along the ridge road toward Pythas.

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The Pakarrin hills were dry, as was most of central Yanomy, but their peaks collected enough rain to maintain patchy forests in the valleys. Like the plains, the ridges were windswept, grassy, and offered little cover. Nevertheless, since horsemen would have to traverse the woodlands to reach the peaks, Ekanu felt reasonably safe in her assumption that any Sheng raiders would concentrate their attention on the richer lowlands and the trade road.

The ridge road wound through the heart of the Pakarrins, where they rose toward true, if weary and weathered, mountains. Now and again Ekanu passed a herd of sheep or goats grazing in the distance; once a pair of shepherds and their dogs chivvied a flock along the path, forcing her up a gravel slope to one side for long minutes. She gestured with an open hand as if casting seeds on the wind -- a common greeting among the Harulin peoples of eastern Yanomy -- and one of the shepherds swung his own arm in response, his wide, short sleeves catching the wind like bright-colored flags.

Ekanu thought he called something about a house and sunset, but she had only learned Tourian and Pythran in any depth. Harulin hill dialects were a bit beyond her, especially blurred by wind, distance, and the bleating of sheep.

That night Ekanu left the path as twilight shaded across the sky, and camped beside a tiny pond, fed by a trickle of water down a damp rock. She filled her water-bag first, then let the donkey drink freely -- the drain and slow fill of the pool slowed the animal's pace without requiring her attention. She considered setting a trap for rabbits or squirrels, but decided against the effort. Her supplies should hold for another three days, five if she stretched them, and that would be more than enough time to head downhill and find a village.

She stowed her guitar and the documents in a tree for safekeeping. Then she persuaded the donkey to lie down and slept against its back for warmth.

Less than a hour after she set out in the morning, she passed a small sod hut dug into the ground by the side of the path. So that had been what the shepherd meant -- if she'd walked a touch faster, she could have spent the night in shelter.

Ekanu shrugged. She'd spent ten years living in stone or timber buildings, but childhood habits and skills never completely deserted a person. Open country would do her good.

The wind blew through her unbound hair. The path stretched before her, winding along the ridges. The spring sun shone warm on her back and shoulders.

Ekanu smiled.

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As the crow flew, she made slow progress over the next sixday; the ridge road traversed nearly as much vertical as horizontal distance. She stopped once at an inn nestled in the saddle-crook of an east-west pass through the Pakarrins, where she traded her skill as a scribe in return for food, but for the most part she slept under the sky or in the occasional sod huts that graced the steep meadows.

The emptiness of the sky and the wind singing free through the long grass soothed a tightness in her heart that she hadn't felt until it eased.

It was an honor to be a chapterhouse inspector, to be one of the people trusted to guide the vast, clumsy vessel of the University, to keep the store of human knowledge growing and mostly united. It was also an unending torrent of strain, abuse, and petty irritations. No chapterhouse council liked interference from Vinaeo, and they expressed their affront with great creativity, edging right up to the line between careful questioning and the outright insubordination for which they could be cited and stripped of their certifications.

After two years of inspections in Yanomy, Ekanu was bone-tired of diplomacy.

"One year only left of my pledge," she told the donkey as they trudged up yet another hill. "Once I am free, I wonder what I should do. I do not wish to settle in one chapterhouse and to teach, not when there still are many, many places I have not---" She couldn't find the right word in Pythran and switched back to Arhadikim. "So many places where I haven't journeyed."

The donkey flicked its ear at a passing insect and ignored her.

Ekanu laughed at herself for expecting any other reaction. Horses and their cousins were useful enough, but they had scanty empathy for humans, not like dogs. This was no ground for a sled, but a team could easily pull a travois over the rough trail. She'd have to stop earlier in the evenings, to give them time to hunt, but the companionship would make up for the delay.

Her dogs were long dead, of course.

She hoped they and Kadeotak had done well by each other.

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On the eighth day of her journey, Ekanu passed a wayside hut two hours before sunset, and decided she might as well take advantage -- there was no telling when she'd next pass a usable spring or stream. She tethered the donkey behind the sod hut, kindled the firewood a previous traveler had neatly stacked beside the hearth, and boiled porridge for supper.

Still restless, she opened her guitar case and sat by the narrow doorway, pushing the sheepskin curtain aside so the light streamed in unhindered. She spent the remaining daylight checking the wood for cracks, and allowing the wood to breathe in steam from her simmering cook-pot. She'd seasoned and shaped this guitar in Shimat-Mek, taking full advantage of the dry climate, but it was always best to be careful.

As rose-gold sunset faded into purple and black, she tuned the strings and began to play. First chords, then arpeggios, then a wandering melodic line over a simple three-note harmony that gradually settled into a Dorian modal thrum, slow and unadorned.

"You have to walk a lonesome desert.
"You have to walk it all alone.
"No one else can walk it for you.
"You have to walk it all alone.

"You have to climb a stony mountain.
"You have to climb it all alone..."

Denifar had sent her this song while she was in Shimat-Mek, before their stormy reunion in Ileara. Technically she was singing a funeral chant -- from the Ramchad hills in southern Kemery -- but the tune, lonely and open, suited these hills and her mood.

She continued on through a frozen wasteland, a raging river, and the path of shadows, which she thought was the Akhite term for life, or temptation, or the discovery of truth, or dreams, or maybe all four at once and more besides. Akha was a difficult religion to pin down.

"You have to face the Mother's mercy.
"You have to face her all alone.
"No one else can face her for you.
"You have to bear your sins alone.

"And at the far end of the darkness
If you bend your knees and pray--"

Ekanu broke off, abruptly. Something or someone had turned off the road and started up the hill toward the spring, footsteps crunching over the dry grass and stones.

"Who comes here?" she called in Tourian. "Friend or unfriend?"

"Friend, I hope," a man answered in the same language, his accent better than hers. "Do you speak Pythran?" he added, switching languages. He pushed the ragged sheepskin curtain away from the doorway, but stayed outside, presumably waiting for an invitation.

"I learned Pythran, but I seldom have used it," Ekanu said, setting her guitar aside. "Please enter. I am named Ekanu Thousandbirds." She gave her family name in Common out of habit, and then caught herself. "Ekanu One Thousand Birds," she repeated, this time in Pythran.

"Ain h'sut chung h'Ril," the man said, gesturing to himself with his free hand, "or Ain Taylak, whichever is easier to remember. Thank you for sharing the roof." He ducked into the small hut and folded himself down on the other side of the hearth, dropping a handful of sticks and a dead rabbit to the dirt floor.

Ekanu studied him. Ain Taylak was tall and lean, and while she thought he was within a handful of winters of her, his age was hard to place with certainty.

His origin was also hard to place. His hair was straight and his complexion seemed dark bronze in the firelight, which said he was ethnic Yanomese. His names sounded Sheng, lending weight to that theory. He spoke Pythran with a pure city accent, and his dust-gray shirt had loose cuffs instead of the tight laces or leather wrist-guards the nomads favored, which suggested he might be from the communities of outcast Sheng that grew around the outskirts of the cities that bordered the vast, dry heart of Kengush. But outcast Sheng rarely traveled, let alone learned more than one language; they kept to themselves, surviving on the strained sufferance of the settled peoples. Also, his eyes were the shifting gray of rainclouds and his face was sharp instead of round, which didn't fit any ethnic group she knew of on this continent.

He was a puzzle.

"You translated your name," Ain said, picking up two sticks, each with a Y-shaped fork at one end, and jabbing them into the earth on either side of the fire. "The first version was in Common. I assume you're not from Yanomy?"

Ekanu nodded. "True. In the most recent past, I come from Vinaeo, but I now make my home in Estara. I before that made my home in far north Arina, where I was born."

Ain picked up the rabbit, which Ekanu now saw had been skinned, gutted, and wrapped in its own fur for easy transport. "Interesting." He set the fur aside, skewered the rabbit, and set it over the flames, balanced on the two forked branches. "Have you eaten? If not, I'll share the meat."

"Thank you," Ekanu said. "I have bread and water."

"Good," said Ain, and lapsed into silence. Ekanu waited a while to see if he had any further conversation, then picked up her guitar and resumed her playing. The funeral chant wandered into an old Shosan ballad of Ammerdan and Efraika, whose adulterous love had ripped asunder the alliance between the kingdom of Ionniqué and the Toramen, and thus left southern Estaria and the Kaitaru vulnerable to the expanding Empire. It was a depressing song. If only Efraika had remained faithful to her husband, or if Ammerdan had been more loyal to his king, or if their secret had been kept quiet instead of revealed in the middle of court...

If only love could be controlled and understood.

"Heavy thoughts?" Ain asked, turning the rabbit on the spit.

Ekanu shrugged and deliberately modulated into a more cheerful tune: part of her former student Soshimu's operetta about the wise woman Inathulo, who outwitted even the Estarin Emperor. "Yes and no. I think of my past, and I think I for now prefer to forget. I want to remember who I am underneath what I am."

Ain smiled, a flash of sharp white teeth against his shadowed face. "I know that feeling. I'll respect your wish so long as we share a camp."

An interesting way to phrase it. "Which direction do you go?" Ekanu asked. She'd enjoyed her time alone, but if he was traveling to Pythas, it might not be a hardship to share the road. If nothing else, he could help her fix her grammar and moderate her accent so she wouldn't sound hopelessly foreign to the Pythran chapterhouse council, and so they would find it harder to talk fast and confuse her.

"South, to Pythas," Ain said. "You?"

"Also to Pythas."

He lifted the rabbit from the fire and prodded it with his knife. "Almost done. I wouldn't mind a companion on the road. Shall we travel together, Ekanu One Thousand Birds, and leave our pasts in the dust for a time?" He settled the rabbit back onto the forked sticks and offered a callused hand, his eyes clear and open despite whatever secrets he might be guarding.

Ekanu reached across her guitar, past the fire, and grasped his wrist. "Yes."

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The night was cool -- autumn was approaching, and the wind blew strong over the hilltops -- but the sod walls were thick and held in the heat of the banked fire. In the morning, Ekanu unearthed a few nearly dead coals, blew on them gently, and fed them a steadily increasing diet of dried grass and twigs until she had enough heat to boil water in a small three-legged pot. Ain sat against the opposite wall, his hands resting open on his thighs.

"Why tea?" he asked, when Ekanu dropped a pinch of leaves into the bubbling pot. "The water is clean."

"I like tea," Ekanu said, wrapping her hands in her spare socks and lifting the pot from the flames. "I never until I came to Yanomy drank any, but I like the flavor. I like how the steam clears the nose and opens the mind." She pulled her wooden cup from her pack and then paused. "I only have one cup. We can share, if you want."

"I have a cup," Ain said, pulling a small tin saucer from his belt pouch. He laughed at Ekanu's skeptical look, turned the saucer upside-down, and shook it. The metal ridge slid downward, revealing another ring inside it, and another inside that, and one more inside that, each catching on the lip of the previous ring until they formed a small, conical cup. Ain tugged at the largest ring until something clicked, and then flipped the cup right side up.

"Shtala!" he said with that sharp, white smile. "Just like magic."

"Oh!" Ekanu said, reaching forward involuntarily. "Who did the metalwork? Whose idea was that? I have to tell Denifar--" She cut herself off.

"You've never seen a journey cup? Strange. It's an old trick," Ain said. He slipped the cup into Ekanu's hands, watching as she turned it over and around. "Legend says the Andarkin made them first, out of wood grown and shaped by magic. But it's difficult to make wooden rings exact, so Merinese artificers began to make them of tin instead, to supply their armies."

Ekanu ran her finger along the geometric pattern pressed into the outermost ring. "A strange army, to decorate their supplies."

Ain shrugged. "I made this cup."

Ekanu examined the metalwork with a sharper eye. It was excellent, so far as she could tell: strong, precise, and more graceful than strict practicality demanded. She set the cup on the bare floor of the hut and filled it with tea. It didn't leak.

Was Ain a smith, then? Or was he a mechanist, or a-- what was that word he'd used-- an artificer? Like Denifar...

Did she truly want to know?

"Drink before it cools," she said, and handed the cup back across the fire.

She didn't want to know, she decided. Whatever Ain did for a living was irrelevant here, just as her own ties to the University were irrelevant, unless they chose to remember and tell each other. Until then, they were simply chance-met travelers sharing a path.

Ekanu raised her own cup, pressing the solid wood between her hands, and breathed in the steam from the tea.

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To be continued, whenever I get around to writing more. :-)