The estrane.
[A piece of fiction as world-building exercise. Cross-posted to Anamnesis.]
The sky was yellow. The air was heavy and smelled of rain. I was sitting on the woman’s porch writing a letter to the boy who’d stayed behind in Evangeline. The screen door opened with a ragged croak and the woman stepped out to the porch steps, sniffing. She dusted flour from her fingers and went out into the yard to take down the laundry. Her son’s shirts snapped in the wind, struck a brilliant white by the last of the sunlight. There was a burst of flute-song from an unseen pipe. She stopped, stood still, her wife’s dress the color of turmeric heavily damp in her hands. They came over the hill then, one two many of them, under the lowering oak.
The first was pale and wore a dirty sheepskin vest. He carried a flute in one hand. With his other he drew a long skinny knife from a sheath bound to his bare thigh. Behind him a girl carried a tambur like a small club. Her hair was matted with blood from an old wound. The man capering behind her, eyes wide, arms dangling, wore filthy dungarees and a tall black formal hat. A tarnished trumpet flopped loosely in one hand.
The woman did not move as the boy with the knife slunk up to her. He reached out for the heavy orange dress in her hands. No, she said then. One of them yipped. The boy tugged at the dress. Please don’t, she said. He waved his knife in her face. She flinched. —Stop that, said someone, loudly.
Under the tree stood the tuner.
He wore a pack on his back that towered a foot or two above his frizzled head. As he stepped out from under the tree pots tied to the bottom of the pack clanked hollowly.
Stop it, he said. Let her alone.
The boy with the knife whined. The grey-skinned woman in the striped singlet sang a harsh mocking seven-note phrase. I set my letter aside and stood up.
Storm, said the tuner. Blowing in. Could we borrow your roof awhile?
The woman looked up at me. There were seven of them, all told. Her wife was gone with the truck. Her sons wouldn’t be back for another ten days. No one else was staying at her house, not that late in the season.
Yes, she said.
The rain was loud. Gusting winds dumped rattling loads of it that drowned out the low mutter of far-off thunder. The woman whose house it was sat at the kitchen table shelling peas, dropping them into an orange bowl, the shells into a plain metal can half-filled with polchassa stems, coffee grounds, eggshells, olio husks. The boy in the sheepskin vest sat across from her, grinning, tugging at his half-hearted erection.
The youngest of them, an adolescent girl, leaned against the icebox. She wore grimy yellow socks and a single kneepad that might once have been white, and breathed a tuneless rill in and out of the ocarina she wore on a string about her neck. The grey-skinned woman in the striped singlet sat at her feet, rocking back and forth. The wide-eyed man did tricks with his hat, sweeping it off his head and sending it tripping back up along his arm, knocking it off with a seemingly clumsy finger that caught it and spun it like a ring. He began to hum a deep, maddeningly rhythmic line, the same note pulsed six times, bottoming out suddenly, returning to hit a note midway between them and over and over again above the drumming rain. I would later learn that it was one of his contentment-songs. The grey-skinned woman began to rock a little faster, keeping time with the wide-eyed man. She started to chatter some fast-paced sing-song nonsense that tugged the girl’s ocarina after it, turning her breathy rills into a hesitant, repetitive tune. The boy at the table looked at the woman who was still intently shelling peas. He looked at me, still stroking himself absently, lifting one hand to chew at his thumbnail. Abada, he said, very clearly, and then he wiped both hands on his knees and picked up his flute from the table and began to play.
I sat there on the floor of the woman’s kitchen, listening, my pen unnoticed in my hand, the letter to the boy in Evangeline forgotten in my lap.
The girl with the scabbed hair nudged my hip with her foot. Hey, she said. I looked up at her. She waved her tambur at me. Hey, she said. She nudged me again.
Can you tune it? said the tuner.
He stood in the doorway of the kitchen sipping from a clay bottle of the woman’s homebrew. The music around us had ebbed away. The grey-skinned woman’s chatter was ragged, meaningless. The girl’s ocarina tootled randomly. The boy’s flute squeaked and shrieked as he blew angrily into it, his fingers twitching along its clattering keys. Only the wide-eyed man kept humming his eight-note contentment-song, his hat still dancing in his hands. The girl with the wound on her head squatted before me, holding out the tambur. I said to the tuner that I didn’t know. He shrugged.
The rain’s fury had since passed. I took the tambur. Its twelve strings seemed sound, but made a sour, nasal jangle when I strummed them.
Tune it, she said.
I looked up at her, startled. Tune it, she said again. The wound on the side of her head glistened a little in the electric light. It was an ugly puckered red around the edges that I could see. The dried mat of blood was a dull dead patch of black in her glossy black hair. The tuner hummed something almost to himself, too quickly for me to catch. They all began to laugh, all of them. The grey-skinned woman looking up at the young girl who bit her lower lip and giggled. The wide-eyed man barking pounding one hard heel on the linoleum. The angry boy leaping up from his chair, looking me directly in my eyes, shooting his laughs at me from his belly like stones. Then spinning around and stomping past the biggest of them, the quiet shaggy one who smiled into his beard, stomping past him to the back door and throwing it open and leaping out into the gentling rain.
Well? said the tuner to me.
The young girl blew a note into her ocarina. She blew it again. I plucked the lowest pair of the twelve, tightened the over-and-under pegs, plucked them again, sweetening them to match each other with the young girl’s ocarina. The girl with the wound on her head lay down on the floor in front of me, on her side, pillowing her head on one arm folded like a wing.
When the rain stopped I told the woman whose house it was that I would be leaving with the estrane. I asked her for the balance of the cash that I had paid up front. She frowned. Outside in her yard the wide-eyed man began to play his trumpet, fast blatting little runs of notes that never went where they were going.
It’s not, she said, chewing the words slowly, my concern that you are not to stay the entire time you’ve paid for.
I see, I said.
So I don’t think, she began to say.
I see, I said.
Her wife drove up as we were leaving, the hard white lights of the truck catching us at the edge of the polchassa patch. The tuner strode on into the copse beyond. The rest stood still looking back at the house. As the woman’s wife shut off the engine, killing the lights, the biggest of them, the quiet shaggy one, lurched forward suddenly, throwing his arms wide. Roaring. The woman whose house it was stood on the porch, peering out into the darkness at where we were. Her wife stood by the truck in a yellow dress and black rubber boots, one hand still on the truck’s ladder. The engine tocked and gurgled once in the silence.
Bitch! I yelled then. Thieves!
The woman did not move from the porch. Her wife looked up at her. I might have said something else, I’m not sure what, but the boy in the sheepskin vest shoved my shoulder, knocking me off-balance. The rest of them were ghosting off after the receding clatter of the tuner’s pots into the copse and beyond.
For the next hour or so as we picked our way between the little farms that littered the valley floor the boy would erupt with surprising bursts of laughter. Thieves, he would say, stretching the word into meaninglessness. Thee thee theeeef theeeeefs! The wide-eyed man hummed a hypnotically rolling eight-note marching-song.
There were glorious sunsets that year. Late the next afternoon we stopped, the estrane, the tuner, and I, up under the heavy rock ridges grey as stormclouds that beetled the southeast end of the valley. A chill darkness hunkered somewhere behind us, but we lazed on warm rocks in a pool of orange light. Above us the day-blue sky spilled into a lavender marbled with violent orange. Long cloud-fingers rippled like wet sand at low tide hung over us from the north. Strange colors chased their bellies, yellows and reds and oranges like fresh paint, piercing greens, blues like ice, greys like some rare smoke. The girl with the wound on her head sat behind me on the same rock and leaned back against me. At midday, resting by a stream far below, I had taken her hand and led her to a calm, sunstruck pool where I carefully washed the old blood out of her hair. She flinched, and jerked her head, and yelled, and leaped away from me, her feet splashing. I stood there patiently with my sponge in my hand. She would always come back and lay her cool cheek against my open palm. Fresh blood still seeped from the gash when I was done, but only a little. I cut the tail from one of my cleaner shirts and gave it to her to hold against it. Better than nothing. A few hours later, climbing the knees of the ridge, I noticed she’d already lost it.
As the sun set she cradled her tambur and strummed three lofting chords. It was out of tune again, but the jangle was pleasant, somehow. She found two pairs bent into a weird new discord and worried at them.
Hey, said the tuner. He was doing something to the intricate valves in the guts of the wide-eyed man’s trumpet, but he was looking up and out. He pointed west with the jerry-rigged pick in his hand. Hey, he said. Quiet. Ships.
I didn’t see them at first. And then I spotted one, so far away it hung immobile in the fiery sky, and then another, and then a dozen: like grains of pepper, like grit caught in the smokey calluses of the cloud-fingers. A wing of them coming south with the clouds.
The girl with the wound on her head turned the sweetly sour notes into a thrumming rhythmic line that spread out like a floor for dancing. The biggest of them, his shaggy hair stubbornly blue even in this lurid light, began to slap the stone in front of him, striking a sharply popping tattoo. The boy in the sheepskin vest leaped to his feet and he and the young girl sent their pipes skirling madly after each other, fluting runs too urgent to bother with melody. Hey, said the tuner. Cut it out. The wide-eyed man reach up and snatched his trumpet from the tuner’s hands, bounding out to the edge of a stubby pier of rock. He lifted the horn and blew one long loud note into the sunset. The other estrane churned along beneath him. He lowered the trumpet. With one swift jerk he yanked the tall black hat from his head and sent it sailing out over the valley. Then he began to play.
It grew colder. The green washed out of the sky. The oranges cooled to reds and purples. The lavender bled away. The tuner stood then, said something, fuck this, you’re all idiots, go to hell, I don’t know. He spat. Took up his pack as the big one grinned at him, hands popping against his chest, his thighs under his big coat, the rock in front of him, rolling the clatter of the tuner’s pots into his drumming. The tuner stalked out of that little pool of dying light up towards the dark cleft in the rock. The boy with the sheepskin vest pulled his flute from his mouth and threw back his head and howled at the far-off, immobile ships.
We did not light a fire. The tuner clipped a little light to his collar and shone it on a bundle of thick rubbery felt which he unwrapped. Inside was a soft brick of quivering fatty stuff, greyly translucent in the white light, like old ice. He cut slices each as thick as a finger and passed them around. As he tossed me a slice, gelid and moist, already spotted with dark floury dust, he asked me if I had ever been to Cabester. I told him I had not. The stuff smelled like everything else this close to the battlefield: arid, harsh, like cold truck fuel, like shredded metal. The wide-eyed man laid his slice flat on his palm and slapped his hands together, then held it up. It jerked and twisted a little, pinched between his thumb and fingers, shivers of luminescence chasing across it. The grey-skinned woman slapped hers and wolfed it down almost at once. The girl with the wound on her head clapped her hands together twice then pressed the slice tightly between them and held it up before her nose and mouth, closing her eyes. The boy in the sheepskin vest slapped his slice against his upper arm and tossed it into the air. I began to smell something faint, something slick and warm, like frying oil. The young girl shivered and burrowed closer to my side, trying to wind my blanket more tightly about herself. I had already learned to plant the opposite corners under my foot and my pack to keep her from pulling it completely off us. She didn’t take a slice.
In Cabester, said the tuner, there is a festival. The Cloghogow. Estrane who play there and play well are given toys and trinkets, metal coin, meat, vitamin pills. I slapped my slice of the stuff between my hands and nearly dropped it as it instantly began to heat up. Then you could actually cook something in those pots, I said. I closed my hands about the stuff and let it shiver against my skin.
New instruments also, said the tuner. And warm clothing. Winter’s on its way.
So maybe you should head south, I said.
He smiled. The stuff was mushy and melted to a sludgy slick on my tongue. It tasted of nothing at all but left a vague astringency at the back of my throat. I gobbled it down. The girl with the wound on her head squatted beside me and tugged at my blanket. I lifted it and she crawled into my lap. The young girl whined. I had given my other blanket to the grey-skinned woman, who now curled up tightly within it, wriggling it up over her nose and ears until only her tufted hair could be seen. The boy in the sheepskin vest pulled out his flute but did not put it to his lips. He began stalking the darkness about all of us, grunting, waving it in the air. The wide-eyed man sat down in front of the biggest of them who rolled his coat about them both as they lay down together. The wide-eyed man breathed out a single phrase of slurry, sleepy music, another contentment-song. Hey, said the tuner, reaching up to grab the boy’s wrist. The boy glared down at him as the tuner carefully pried his flute from his hands. Have you ever crossed a battlefield before? he asked. From his pack he pulled two pairs of needled pliers. One of them was held together with a thick wad of black tape. In the sharp white spot of his collar light he used them to pick at the wire hinges that held the flute’s keys half open.
Yes, I said. With a guide.
There are no guides for estrane, said the tuner. In my lap the girl with the wound on her head had shifted a little and her hands under the blanket plucked at her tambur, unraveling the same chord over and over again. The boy, his fists tucked under his sheepskin vest, muttered something harsh and guttural, kicking rocks. We, said the tuner, holding up the flute with one hand, shining his light on his work, do not need guides. You can tune.
The girl with the wound on her head had nibbled her chord down to one note plucked slowly. Both strings just enough out of tune to make richly sour sounds. I suppose, I said.
Can you sing?
Not too well, I said.
The tuner smiled again. We’ll see, he said. He reached up and laid a hand on the angry boy’s bony elbow. The boy started. The tuner held up his flute and the boy snatched it and ran away, up to the broken slope of scree beside the huge boulder that overlooked our little campsite.
We could have lit a fire, said the tuner, listening to the rocks tumble and clatter from the boy’s feet. Wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference. How’s she doing?
I looked down at the girl with the wound on her head, who had stopped picking at her note. Her eyes had finally closed. She snored, softly. The young girl curled up at my side reached out with one hand to almost touch the cleaned wound. Her skin still chilly against my arm.
The grey dust of the battlefield slouched down and away from the other side of those ridges under a high white sky. On the far side across the desiccated corpse of an old river looped along the floor of it could just be made out a thin haze of yellow and brown—old grass, burnt half dead by the relentless end-of-summer sun, but still the only thing alive that we could see before us. All the rest was grey dust and broken rock, a sharper, darker grey, marred with streaks of clean jet black and chalky white.
It took us three days and nights to cross. Some time in the cold thin afternoon of the third day the boy in the sheepskin vest left us curled in our blankets in shallow ditches dug by the wind. We found him that evening, an hour after we set out. He lay curled on his side in the dust. His skin was cold. Dust clotted his closed eyelids and caked in the corners of his face. The young girl squatted and tugged at his sheepskin vest. The wide-eyed man helped her, wrenching the boy’s arms up and back so she could work the vest off them without ripping it.
The tuner shuffled away from our little knot, his eyes on the dust. The wide-eyed man looked up from the boy’s body, his trumpet dangling from one hand like an afterthought. He lifted it to his lips, then, and held it there a moment, but lowered it without playing anything. The tuner stooped suddenly some ten or fifteen meters away and picked up the boy’s flute. He jerked to his feet, yelling at the rest of us. Go on, he shouted. Sing! Play! Do you want the soldiers to find us? —The silence I had not heard until he shouted was startling and terribly clear. I could hear the dust squeaking as the breeze rubbed it. The grey-skinned woman wrapped in my blanket began to chatter something, but it was jagged, harsh. Out of place. She stopped. The tuner stalked back toward us. Behind him the last fiery arc of the sun was curling under the horizon. The dead white sky had filled itself with all the colors the battlefield had leached out of the world, the reds and oranges, the yellows and blues, pure colors, powerful colors boiled up into the sky by some arcane distillation. Spread there like great flags turning to look a moment at the oncoming night before hurrying away to somewhere else. The tuner spat harsh squally notes from the dead boy’s flute. —Come on! he said, shaking the flute at us. Keep walking! Keep singing! Move!
But it was not until the boy’s body had been swallowed up behind us by the starlit dust that the biggest of them began once more to clap his hands along with his rolling, clockwork gait.
It had started there at the very edge of the battlefield. The biggest of them drew a great breath into his chest and sent it booming out in great deep notes that rolled out over the dust before us. The grey-skinned woman’s glossolaly chattered after him. Startled, I looked at the tuner, who shrugged. The young girl clutching my other blanket tightly about her lifted her ocarina to her mouth and blew random fluttering notes. The girl with the wound on her head hummed after, her tambur dangling from the strap I’d made out of a bit of rope. Aren’t you worried about them hearing us? I said to the tuner. He grabbed my arm and pulled me down to squat with him there on the edge of the dust. It’s not the hearing, he told me. Not here. Not now. The boy in the sheepskin vest marched past, his sing-song muttering under the hums and whistles and slapped beats. There’s nothing out there, the tuner told me, nothing to keep the soldiers from smelling our thoughts. So we have to hide them away. Can you sing?
The wide-eyed man spinning his trumpet around one finger began to sing then, and the boy in the sheepskin vest lifted his flute and together his flute and the wide-eyed man’s voice went looking for and found a song, a simple song, a nursery song, a losing, hiding, lost song, and they sent it billowing out into the darkening air about us. And we could not hear the dust squeak beneath our feet and we could not feel the cold bite of the wind and we did not mark the stars as they wheeled so slowly above our heads until the sky turned grey and yellow and even a little white and green at the edges of it and we found ourselves sinking into the dust, throats raw, lips caked, heads swimming, eyes gritted, legs shaking, arms inexplicably sore. A bottle of water was passed around. No one could muster the energy to take more than a sip. Some hours later, long before sunset, the tuner began cutting slices of the fatty stuff. Already singing, we took it from him. Walking on through the dust, we slapped them to life and ate them, singing.
For three days and three nights I sang that song. There was nothing in my world but dust and that song, the thoughtless song, the walking song, the endless I-am-not-here lost song. I can’t tell you what that song sounded like.
I don’t know if the girl with the wound on her head ever played her tambur along with it. I don’t think the wide-eyed man ever sounded his trumpet as we crossed the battlefield, but I can’t say. I have no idea if the song sounded different without the boy’s angry mutterings, his bursts of flute-song. I never heard the tuner sing, though. I know that. I never heard him play the boy’s flute himself as we walked. His eyes I remember never looked at us. They looked at the dust, the horizon, the harshly hazed sky, full of tense white light that would just before nightfall relax its hold on all its so many colors. His eyes never stayed put.
Some mornings I wake up and know that I have been hearing it again, just before I woke. Some days when I walk down the boulevard here, when I move through the medina on a rainy weekend afternoon when it is deserted, everyone inside with their coffee and radios, sometimes the way my legs are moving, the way my arms feel will make me realize that I am remembering something, but by the time I figure out that it is the sound of that song I will have forgotten it again.
I think sometimes that the reason I am still here and not somewhere else is because of those almost-moments. I can’t leave until I remember the song because here is where I’ve come closest to bringing it back.
It was late on the third night, near to morning, when the ship found us.
I stumbled out of the song and fell to my knees in the dust. The wide-eyed man—perhaps?—was singing something that faltered, fell away like the hands of the biggest of them dangling from his stilled wrists as we all looked up into the utterly starless sky. It was not silent, though. The air was filled with something too regular to be called noise, too heavy to be called quiet, too much everywhere at once to be coming from anywhere at all. The dust under my hands was vibrating, ghosting into the air, a soft fog about our toes and ankles. I felt queasy. A dull ache began in my eardrums and spread to my skull, my jaw, my chest.
The lights came on.
The ship filled the sky, the size of a city, and spots of blue-white light in lines like great avenues crisscrossing its belly flickered to life. We stood in a blue-white haze of drifting dust, our many shadows small and indistinct. A kilometer north of us or so and hundreds of meters above a pregnant ball the size of a stadium slowly began to turn, adding a grinding basso thrum to the whelming sound about us and within us. It was a gun, I think. Someone moved, then—the grey-skinned woman threw wide her hands, threw back her head. Her mouth hung open beneath her open eyes. Her throat and jaw jerked and trembled. She was howling.
The lights about the gun changed colors. Some flickered to green, some blue ones sparked, smaller, brighter, some long lines of neon yellow chased the base of the ball. Red lights flashed one at a time crawling down the curve of the ball toward its tip at the very bottom of the ship. All of us were howling, I think. I could not hear. I couldn’t hear anything but the smothering cocoon of sound from the ship itself.
We all looked down at the same time.
Whatever it was that came out of the gun lit the battlefield until the dust itself was white. Our shadows jerked madly as it flashed and snapped above us.
Somewhere far away as the light died there was a roar. Something fell.
One by one the avenues crisscrossing the belly of that ship went dark as it began to climb into the sky above us. The stars came out again from behind its receding edges. The emptiness about us had been stretched so closely to some breaking point by the size of it and the noise that still rang and thrummed in our ears, our blood, our trembling muscles. I spat something tasteless, thick, the color of water and watched it darken the grey dust, clump it to a wet greenish black, and realized then that the sun must be rising. We looked up and there before us in the light not a hundred meters away were the first brown leaves of dead baked grass.
When we got to Cabester everyone was already dancing.
There was a crowd of them milling about the square beneath the big electric clock. They’d clap their hands above their heads and move about with long, loping steps that changed direction with sudden, exaggerated swivels of their hips. They were out of step with the jouncing beat being squeezed out of the little red crate the small dark boy held aloft, as if the dances they danced were meant for other songs. They didn’t seem to mind.
The music was thin and scratchy, loud but somehow also far away. It jangled and bounced and someone was singing words that made sense until I tried to put them together. It all came from a round speaker there on the side of the crate that wasn’t much bigger than someone’s head. A radio, someone said. The biggest of them laughed and clapped along, there at the edge of the dancing crowd. The wide-eyed man lifted his trumpet and bounced it along with the music, suddenly sent a blatting run out to play with it, but the song ended suddenly as he played. Someone from the radio said something loudly and very quickly about liberation and the freedom of music and then a new song began, full of different jangles and thumps. The crowd cheered and laughed. The wide-eyed man lowered his trumpet, frowning. They were all dancing still, much the same. The grey-skinned woman hummed a sharp little eight-note phrase and then began throwing some of her clattering nonsense syllables together in nervous scats.
No one seemed to notice them, standing there.
The tuner pots clattering led us to a dark hall he remembered from the last time they’d been to Cabester. There was a radio there, too, playing much the same music, and men with white shirts and glossy mustaches dancing together without touching. The tuner asked the host of the hall what it was. A radio, said the host. The latest thing. A caravan brought them from Evangeline.
The soldiers won’t like this, the tuner said.
The soldiers have come and gone, said the host. The ships won’t be back for another year.
What about the festival? asked the tuner.
This is the festival, cried the host, and the dancing men all cheered.
When the pink and orange streetlights began to flicker to life we were all, the tuner, the estrane, and I, in an open-air cafe in the middle of the main boulevard. There was a counter where the keeper sold brown bottles to people who sat on stools and drank. On the counter was a radio, loud and fast and blue. The tuner still wearing his pack with the pots clattering leaned over the bar and told the keeper that the estrane would play music for metal coin, for vitamin pills and instruments, for food. The keeper shrugged. I already have a radio, he said.
What is that? asked the tuner. What music is that?
Who knows? said the keeper. It’s old music. Centuries old. Out of the air. The keeper fluttered his hands in the air as if to catch at notes. The biggest of them, wrapped in his coat, began turning in circles, stepping in time to the jouncing, humming tunelessly. The wide-eyed man kept running his hands through his matted hair, one then the other, tossing his trumpet back and forth. The young girl in the filthy sheepskin vest pressed herself up against me, tugging at my pack, until I reached into it and pulled out a blanket she could cover herself with. Some of the people on the stools were staring.
The blue radio was on a corner of the long counter. The tuner shrugged out of his pack and dropped it to the floor. He put a worn banknote on the counter, faded and rubbed to a furry smoothness like an old map, and pointed to the cooler behind the counter. The keeper swept up the note and fetched him a fresh brown bottle. The tuner drank half of it in one gulping swallow, set the bottle quite deliberately on the counter, walked down to the end of it, picked up the radio, and threw it to the floor.
There was a squawking burst of noise, but the music didn’t stop. The tuner picked up the radio again as a voice came out of it saying very rapidly something about the power of the old music and the liberation of the airwaves. The tuner brought the radio down hard against the edge of the counter. There was a crack and the new song dissolved in a hissing rush of thin white noise. Jagged bits of plastic spattered to the floor. Again, and again, until it broke open in a spray of colored wires and thin green beaded cards. The speaker lolled out of the shattered case, a flat brown cone of cardboard held by a thick black cord. The tuner dropped the radio to the floor. Well? he said.
Get out, said the keeper.
Well? said the tuner. Play!
The grey-skinned woman walked out of the open-air cafe, squeezing between a truck and a sedan parked there at the edge of the mostly empty boulevard. After a moment the wide-eyed man followed her out into the street.
Come back! said the tuner. The biggest of them shuffled over to the remains of the radio and prodded them with his battered boot. People were setting their bottles down on the floor or the counter and leaving as the keeper said again, get out, get out of here, you’re scaring my customers. The girl with the wound on her head slumped to the floor by the tuner’s pack. Well? said the tuner. The young girl looked up at me, pulled at my sleeve, mine, as the tuner said again, well? What are you waiting for?
I told the young girl she could keep the blanket. She bit her lip.
The tuner was the only one of them I ever saw again, though he wasn’t a tuner, not anymore. I walked past him without realizing who it was and by the time I did and made my way back through the noontide crowds, he was gone.
This is what I remember: his hair had grown long and matted, and he had lost his pack, his coat, he had long since lost everything but a pair of ragged coveralls and the dead boy’s flute, which he held in one hand and did not play. I don’t think the girl who shook the empty cup at passersby was the girl who’d had a wound on her head. She did not have a tambur.
There were glorious sunsets that year. I later heard from someone that it was because one of the soldiers’ great ships had gone down somewhere else, to the west, over past Menkil maybe. It had been shot down by another of those ships, they said, and it burned for fourteen, fifteen months, and the smoke filled the sky with those colors. I have not been able to confirm this, though, and by the time I was deep within my first winter here, the sky had turned mostly grey again, with only an occasional blue day, and the sunsets were nothing much to speak of.
Author’s note.
As my character in Becca’s game is only now coming to realize he might have a self to express, I don’t imagine I’ll be posting anything from his point of view any time soon. Instead, I thought I’d do pieces, or at least a piece, describing things he’d seen and been involved with from other perspectives. The first to elbow their way to the front were the estrane (also ostraine, estraney, strahna), with whom he spent some time before ending up haphazardly in Evangeline. (I would not recommend them as a “player character race.” Those who are so inclined are hereby invited, however, to do up packages in GURPS or the Window or whatever system strikes their fancy.) If you’ve read your Paul Park you’ll doubtless realize what a bad job I’ve done of filing the serial numbers off his antinomials and biters, and profuse apologies are owed; if you’ve read your William Vollmann, you probably won’t hear much of an echo in this, but the first scene was sparked by a glimpse from a Mexican train of “laundry under a tree in a sunken space” in “Spare Parts,” and the tenor overall has something to do with The Atlas, I guess, so.
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