DOT WAS VERY YOUNG. He was in the Bard’s house, asking about things, watching his manners.
‘This?’ said the Bard, taking it down from his shelf. ‘This is the House of the Three, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, Bard Jo.’ Dot sat himself to listen.
The Bard sat, too, placing the worn brown box on the mat between them.
‘Can you tell me the names of the Three, boy?’
‘Anneh, Robbreh and Viljastramaratan.’
The Bard nodded, and Dot glowed inside. ‘Anneh, she’s the one who wears the pants. She chops all the wood, she hoes the fields, picks the greens and cooks, and leads the animals around. We don’t know how she fits all that into her days, but she does, and all the time she’s humming and thrumming.’
Dot saw the women bent to the vegetable fields, saw his mother’s hands, fine and strong and always busy.
‘Robbreh, he’s a typical man,’ said the Bard. ‘He wears the comfortable robes, and he spends all his time in the tea-tent talking wisdom with the Bard. He’s happy with very little, as everyone should be. His voice is like a heartbeat. It’s so low, it’s hard to hear, but it’s there all the time.’ He raised his gaze from the House of the Three to Dot’s face, and nodded reassuringly.
‘And Viljastramaratan?’ said Dot politely.
The Bard rolled his eyes and made a bitter laugh in his throat. ‘Viljastramaratan? That one’s a mystery child. Viljastramaratan is not boy and is not girl, or is boy and girl together. Very high, like a mosquito, and distracting like that, and unrestful. Viljastramaratan is always bothering the other two to come and dance. They never do, of course; they just go about their ways and ignore him. So Viljastramaratan weaves song-stuff around them, crazier and crazier, finishing every time in a giggling heap. And when that’s quieted, we can hear Anneh and Robbreh again, steady in their song.’
Dot had already heard the Three singing, of course, in snatches of breeze as he lay, sleepless nights, under the starry eye of his house’s smoke-hole. But he would not meet them properly until he got to his middlehood, and was allowed to stay up later in the tea-tent. Till then, he was only to hear them accidentally: Anneh thrumming, Robbreh pulsing, Viljastramaratan in wild play around them.
The House of the Three was brown and fragile, like those dead people the wind sometimes uncovered, whose flesh when touched would turn to fine dust, blowing off the browned bones.
‘They only come out in autumn and spring, those Three,’ said the Bard, ‘when the air is damp and right for them. In the dry cold or the dry heat, they’re scared to dance and sing.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Dot. ‘They would break their own House.’
‘It takes Bard Jo and his gentle hands to coax them,’ said the Bard. His dark eyes were two points of safety; all sense came from them. ‘Only the Bard knows their House, and the corners where they like to hide. And the keys.’ Bard Jo’s white beard was trimmed short to show his strong chin; he touched one, then the other, of the box’s two yellow teeth with fingers kept neat by a wife.
DOT DIDN’T KNOW HIS FATHER MORRI, but he must have been a little taller, a little darker, than anyone else Dot knew. Dot’s mother, Bonneh, had taken a vow at Morri’s death, and would not offer the Bard any more children than the ones she brought with her, Dot and his sister Ardent. How Dot’s mother had attached herself to the Bard’s people, no one Dot knew could tell him, but she stayed by being everywhere, by doing everything, tending the plants and animals all through the daylight, working up thread and cloth deep into every night.
‘EVERYBODY TELLS OF WHEN THEY FIRST MET THE BARD,’ said Dot to his mother.
She went on grinding grain. Flicked a glance at him. ‘Oh, you want my story?’
She ground a little more. ‘It’s not a story. I came out here and found him after Morri died. I wasn’t part of the big move away, right at the beginning. I came later, when my life had readied me for existence in the Bard’s ways.’
Dot waited for more. ‘Go on.’
She glanced up. ‘Go on what?’
‘They all say more than that. Like what happened when their mums first saw him.’
Her eyes smiled. ‘How many of these kids has the Bard as their father?’
‘Not all,’ defended Dot.
‘’Cause it’s a love story for those ones. Mine is just a deal I did, like a merchant. Not a matter of the heart. It was a way to keep you and Ardent alive, in peace.’
‘Did you pay?’ said Dot, feeling sinful. He wasn’t supposed to be curious about money—none of the Bard’s people were.
‘I paid all we had, and all Morri had, and all Morri’s brother Temba had, who died in the same skirmish.’
‘Was that a lot?’ whispered Dot, feeling a little sick.
Bonneh went back to grinding, one eyebrow raised. ‘I suppose,’ she said carelessly. He knew she was hoping he would let it lie, but when she next looked up he was still there waiting.
‘Well, my peach … on one side there was the money, and Morri’s … associates, bothering for it all the time. On the other side? Some distance, safety, my two babies, and being left alone. You know I hardly saw your babyhood, with the maids? You remember?’
Dot shook his head. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been able to find her anywhere, and watch her hands in their work.
‘My father was a merchant, wasn’t he? Did you learn from him to make deals?’
‘My whole family were merchants and dealers. Like the Bard says, we were the core of the world’s troubles.’ She flashed him another smile. ‘We fuelled all the evil.’
‘But you repudiated that,’ said Dot, also bringing out some Bard-speak, but earnestly.
‘Well, I put it aside, let’s say. I was very bitter, after what happened to Morri.’ She pointed with her chin. ‘Move your sister now. That sunlight is starting to bother her.’
Dot went to the other end of Ardent and pulled the cloth she lay on until her face was in shadow again. That word skirmish—for a long time Dot had thought it was some kind of party, with cakes and other immoral things.
His friend Winsome tried not to laugh the day he mentioned that. ‘No, it’s a war thing,’ she said. ‘Like a tiny bit of war. Just a quick guns-going-off and then everyone runs away. Except, of course, the ones that gets killed.’
‘But guns go off at parties.’ Dot was momentarily confused; he’d had the cakes-and-colours picture in his mind for so long. ‘People shoot them in the air. I thought maybe the thing bounced off a ceiling or a wall and hit him. The bullet.’
Winsome shook her head. She had the kindest look on her face. ‘Out on a road somewhere, it would have been,’ she said. ‘The truck goes past, and the men with the guns fire from behind a rock, or a building or something.’
Dot had looked down through the Free-Stones game they’d been playing, making over his memory with this new information.
‘Something like that,’ said Winsome. She was anxious for him.
He gave a sage, Bard-like nod. ‘It’s your throw,’ he said, to move them both on from their embarrassment.
DOT’S SISTER, ARDENT, had got spoiled somehow, and never grew properly. She was even darker than Dot and Bonneh, and she was all elbows and knees. She was like a folding chair that was stuck halfway between open and closed. She could move her right arm a little; if you put things in that hand, she would appear to play with them. Her left elbow poked straight out in front; that hand was a claw at her right ear. Her eyes looked outward in different directions, and sometimes only one, sometimes neither, was able to fix on things.
Ardent could lie on her left side only, or be carried around in a bag. Bonneh carried her on her back most of the time while she worked during the daylight, or put her under a shade tree nearby. Ardent had to hear voices all the time; her mother’s was best, but Dot’s would do at a pinch. If you were going to be quiet, you had to let Ardent know you were still there, lean against her or put your hand on her pointed foot, or she would start to jerk and stress.
‘MY MOTHER SINGS ANNEH,’ said Dot, as the Bard got up and lifted the House back to its shelf. ‘A lot of the mothers do.’
‘And the fathers sing Robbreh,’ said the Bard with satisfaction.
‘Sometimes the mothers go as low as that, too,’ said Dot. ‘Or they beat an empty gathering-barrel, which makes something like that sound.’
The Bard frowned down at him.
‘It’s a better sound,’ explained Dot, ‘the two voices together.’
The Bard thought for a moment. ‘That’s true, Dot. For the one cannot live without the other.’
Dot was very young at this time; he couldn’t imagine his mother not living, entirely capably, should everyone else except himself and Ardent be taken away by storm or disease or war. But you didn’t argue with the Bard.
‘No one sings Viljastramaratan, though,’ said Dot.
‘Pah,’ said the Bard, swishing his robes and sitting down again. ‘Who would want to? Who would need to? The song of Viljastramaratan is around us all the time, in the racket of the birds and the goats’ complaining and all the carryings-on of the children as they play their childish games, or fall and hurt themselves. This song gives men the headache, and must be kept well away. The children, they will learn, when they reach their middlehood, to still their voices to Anneh’s or Robbreh’s song; as for the goats and the birds, and the myriad other voices of the world, we can do nothing more to calm those than hum Anneh, and throb Robbreh, loud enough to cover them.’
THE MEN WENT AWAY TO TOWN EVERY NOW AND THEN, when they had to fetch certain things such as medicines, or firewood, or for some relative’s funeral. Winsome had heard stories from her dad, about the little plastic house they stayed in, about the coffee-palace where they saw television, which was a box full of alarming music, and moon-faced people kissing each other, and sometimes the soccer. They took two days about it and came back tired and silent, the Bard always very angry until he had swum in his river, and all his children and wives had embraced him.
‘YOU NEVER SPEAK TO THE BARD YOURSELF,’ said Dot.
‘Don’t you worry.’ Bonneh was oiling Ardent, who otherwise grew dusty-looking, and twitched and moaned. ‘The Bard has plenty of people to talk to him.’ She paused to rub the oil in between Ardent’s clamped toes. ‘He doesn’t need my wisdom.’
‘And he never talks to you. Except when you’re in a bunch and he’s talking to everyone, telling them how much to put aside for market or something. He never says anything straight to you, does he?’
‘What would he say, boy?’ She smiled and swung into longer strokes up Ardent’s calves.
‘Like he talks to Winsome’s mum. Just about children, and work. Then maybe other people would talk to you, too.’
‘Darling-darling,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I had enough of talking, with your father and our families. Nowadays I haven’t the patience for people; I work and I watch. I keep this house quiet, for Ardent, and for you to come back to when you want peace. For talk, you can always go to Winsome’s house, or Toad’s, and soon you’ll be middling and visit the tea-tent, too.’
‘I’m not worried about me,’ said Dot. ‘It’s you. If the Bard would only act differently—be more friendly.’
‘Kids been taunting you about this?’
‘No. I’ve just seen it myself.’
‘Hmm. You want to watch those sharp eyes; you might hurt yourself on them.’
THERE WAS A BOY who must never have slept, and whose ears must have been especially strong to know the Three so well before his middlehood. Down at the river with the water to hide his voice he would hum Anneh, and b’dum Robbreh, on and on as he built jeeps and rocket-ships out of the mud. Then one day, when spring was on the way and they were all excited for the coming plenty, this boy threw back his head and sang … nobody knew who, but if Viljastramaratan had had four sisters and five brothers, dancing together, they might have brought these sounds out. Up shot his voice, as if by accident, wandering among the clouds and jumping from water-point to water-point across the river. Viljastramaratan’s baby-coughs and wheezes interrupted the slippery song and gave the boy breath to pour out more.
Dot and all the kids at first laughed. Then as this boy went on, the sounds fountaining out of his mouth so surely, they fell silent. World upon world opened at their ears, worlds of lawless noise and play.
The boy’s mother came running, shouting. She knocked him into the mud, waking him up from his singing. They looked at each other, both seeming very frightened. The door of Bard Jo’s house moved aside, and the circle of his beard was like a white eye in the shadow. He came out of the house; the way he walked, all the kids shrank together.
The mother stood at her son’s muddy head. ‘He should not make such a noise,’ she said to Bard Jo. ‘I’ll make sure he’s well beaten.’ She made herself sound angry to cover up fear.
Bard Jo looked from one to the other, his face all gathered in except the jutting beard. ‘I will beat him myself.’
‘I won’t sing again!’ cried the boy. ‘Forgive me, Bard Jo!’
‘He didn’t know what he was doing!’ wept the mother. By now she had one of the boy’s arms and Bard Jo the other, and the boy was like some grotesque stick doll pulled back and forth over the mud, and muddying the Bard’s white dress with his kicking. Dot didn’t even know what to be afraid of, but he was sick with it, still as a ghost. Winsome gripped his arm hard.
Bard Jo won the tug of war, being truly angry, while the mother was merely afraid. He got the boy, and the mother stood on the bank, her legs caked to the trouser-rolls in mud, her hands muddying her cheeks as she watched her boy dragged away. He screamed as he went; he quite lost himself, as does a much younger child. He was taken into Bard Jo’s house and beaten there, and Dot and the kids sat in the mud and listened to the terrible wordless sounds of Bard Jo’s rage, and of the beating, and of the boy. The boy’s mother bent and swayed, holding her head, grinding her eyes.
After too long—‘He is killing him!’ Winsome whispered—Bard Jo threw the boy out of the house onto his stripes. Mothers came running and took him quickly to his own house, but still there remained on Dot’s memory—on the memories of all those kids so that they could never talk about it—the back of that boy, furrowed and weeping like a scored peach from shoulders to thighs, beige dirt patching the slime of it, and the piece—whether dirt or boy they didn’t know—that fell from him as the mothers gathered him up.
That boy had always been strange and not talked much, but after that day no one heard a sound out of him. He hardly came out of his house, and even when his back had healed over, he moved all bent and carefully as if the cuts were still fresh.
Dot stayed a favourite of Bard Jo’s. He didn’t know why. He feared it was some kind of terrible trick the Bard was planning, to calm and please everyone until the time came for Dot’s beating, so that the beating would be a more shocking and frightening thing. Dot could see no reason why he should be favoured above Winsome, whose mother worked so hard and whose father spread the Bard’s wisdom every time he opened his mouth. Or above Fanty and Toad and all those cousins, who were like a lot of little Bards running around.
‘WHAT ABOUT WHEN YOU FIRST SAW MY DAD, then? Was that special?’
‘No.’ Bonneh laughed. ‘We were children and I hated him. He was one of those Simpsim boys. They were noisy and thought too much of themselves. I hated the lot of them.’
‘So how did you get round to marrying one of them?’
‘Well, I looked at Morri again, didn’t I? With new eyes.’
‘And your heart turned over?’
‘No, no. I just knew. Our parents were bringing us together, and I knew that it would work all right. He had ears, you see.’
Dot laughed. ‘As no one else did?’
‘He knew how to use them. He was a very careful man—until all that warring nonsense caught him up. You can hear too much, you know. You can think yourself able to do more about things than you really can.’
‘Don’t tell me lessons,’ sulked Dot. ‘Tell me about him.’
She laughed and went on sorting beans.
ON DOT’S TWELFTH BIRTHDAY, his mother put new white robes on them both and took him to the Bard’s house.
‘That’s a fine boy, Bonneh,’ said Winsome’s mother as they passed. Dot’s mother had Ardent on her back. Girls didn’t have a middlehood; but if they had, Ardent wouldn’t have got it anyway. Ardent wasn’t going anywhere.
When he came out his door, the Bard looked startled at Bonneh, then up and down Dot as if the boy were an entirely new kind of creature.
‘My boy is twelve today and ready to move between child and man,’ said Dot’s mother.
The Bard recovered himself. ‘Twelve already! From a babe in arms, as I remember him.’ He looked Dot over as you would judge a skinny sheep that had wandered into camp out of drought. Dot hadn’t been at all sure about this. He said nothing, looking at the Bard’s neat feet.
The Bard reached forward and pinched his shoulder to make him look up. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We go to market tomorrow, but Dot may sit with us tonight, to listen and learn.’
Bonneh touched Dot in the small of the back. ‘Thank you, Bard Jo,’ he said, and looked down again.
They went back to their house and took off the robes. Dot’s mother made grilled bean-pats for breakfast while Dot sat against Ardent, feeling miserable.
Bonneh put the platter in his lap and kissed him. ‘Don’t want to be a man, Dot?’ She sat to her own pats and smiled her eyes at him.
‘If I were a girl, I could come and work with you.’
‘Aah. You always can, anyway, if you want. You’re a little different. He won’t be hard on you like his own children.’
Dot pushed some bean between Ardent’s teeth and didn’t answer.
WHEN DOT ENTERED THE TEA-TENT THAT NIGHT, the Bard’s older sons looked at him as he had known they would.
‘How is Dot here?’ some said.
‘He turned twelve.’
‘As I said,’ said Pedder, ‘how is Dot here?’ and that caused some laughter.
Dot sat behind the other children in the tea-tent. He drank half a glass of tea, sweetened for his childish palate; even so, the bitterness puckered and numbed his throat, and he was still forcing down sips when the others were burping and clattering their glasses back onto the tray.
The Bard took up the Three’s box. He swung open the little brass door-hook, and the House sagged its pleated cardboard walls over his knee. Dot didn’t know whether it was the House or the Bard that gave out the dry gasp.
The Bard closed his eyes. His hands and wrists grew very large and beautiful against his lamplit white robes. Dot had never seen the Bard work before, but now he saw, with a sip of the tea trickling and burning into his stomach, the state of excellence to which his mother’s hands always aspired. The Bard had poor tools to work with—a broken box, puffing dust, two cow-bone keys—but his hands knew them so well that he could reach into the House and draw out, from its seemingly empty rooms, first Anneh, who was Mother of all mothers, then Robbreh, who began and ended Anneh’s thrumming, and gave it shape and purpose.
The Two were much, much louder right here in the tea-tent. Robbreh was in the ground, beating under Dot’s seat, and in the air, thudding at his skull; Anneh was like black treacle dividing against his brow, streaming around his head.
By the time the Bard found Viljastramaratan in the deepest corner of the House, Dot was unable to think his own thoughts. Viljastramaratan, being coaxed out by the Bard’s fine, giant hands, was like a string threaded with little blades, being pulled through Dot’s head. The child spun and squealed and wheedled, pitching its voice higher and higher.
Around Dot, the middle-boys and the men closed their eyes and swayed on their seats. Their faces shone with sweat. As wide-eyed Dot saw this, he felt fear spring and steam and sprout all over him, so strong he could no longer lift the halffull tea-glass to his lips, for fear the child Viljastramaratan would notice him, would turn in its dance and show him its awful squealing face.
Very slowly the child’s voice began to be muted, to giggle less, to be woven into the deeper and calmer songs of the Mother and the Father. There came moments when Viljastramaratan’s voice was indistinguishable within the music, and those moments lengthened, until Dot realised with shivering relief that the child was gone for the night, leaving behind it space for Dot to be Dot again. He lifted the glass to his mouth, caught the whiff of nightmare on its lip, and lowered it again without sipping.
The music finished; the Bard closed up the House. He spoke, but relief was running so strong in Dot’s veins that he hardly heard him; all he could think was how pleasant, how gentle and sensible the Bard’s voice sounded, after Viljastramaratan’s racket, after the Mother’s and Father’s humming and beating. The Bard talked in a soft chant about the Three, and how all the goodness of the world fitted into this dusty box, the working mothers, the fathers steady at the centre with all the wisdom. And how all the evil of the world danced also out of this same box, like a swarm of children and madmen running wild through the streets of a big town.
To Dot, the Bard seemed to say the same thing over and over; he listened for the Three’s names in the chant, hoping each time that this would be the last invocation. But the Bard showed no signs of ceasing, and the others still swayed and were silent, as if the Bard’s voice were also a kind of awful music that was to be endured, and after a while Dot gave up hope and dozed off.
Very late in the night, he woke. The middle-boys were getting up all around him. Winsome’s cousin Lute stooped for the tea-tray. Hurriedly, Dot clinked his glass onto the tray as it rose, when he had meant to replace it quietly when no one was looking. Yellow tea still swung in the bottom of the glass.
Lute looked from the glass to Dot. ‘You have to drink all of it to see any Meaning,’ he said scornfully, and he turned away with the tray.
Dot went home by himself and lay awake angry. All night, while he’d endured the singing, the women would have rocked babies by their own fire and murmured together, then one by one retired to sleep, when they chose. The house’s starry eye looked down at him; his family’s breathing—Ardent’s thick and snuffly, Bonneh’s steady—made the house seem alive, and he never wanted to leave the inside of that creature.
But that was middlehood, wasn’t it? He wasn’t a baby any more, was he? Wasn’t a child. Dot curled up on his side and crooked his arm around his head, like Ardent, and fell asleep that way.
DOT DIDN’T PLAN TO LEAVE. How could he? There never was such an idea. It was only that two days later, when the men came home from market, their returning woke Dot, and when they had settled, and there was no more movement outside, Dot was still awake. He rose and stood outside, under the tilted stars. And then he was walking without having decided to, following the fathers’ trail, which was quite clear in the starlight. He carried nothing, not even a thought, away with him.
HE REACHED THE WORLD MIDMORNING. His body was stumbling with thirst and confusion by the time he saw the town’s blocks and domes lifting out of the plain, but his gait firmed and his stance straightened as he approached them.
The market was over, of course, so the town was not the bustle he had expected. There were people about, but not a pushing crowd; there were animal-smells and food-smells, but they came one at a time as he passed along the streets, were not piled upon each other and inseparable. There were wonders—houses sheathed in pink-veined stone; penned animals feeding on bought-fodder; a purring, rolling vehicle that required no beast and no slope to move it. Every person wore the kind of cloth the Bard always railed against: a whirl of bright stripes with some emblem set all over—a crowned head, a burst of flowers, an embellished cake on a stand. And everyone wore gold or jewels about their person, the women great collars and earrings, the men heavy bangles and finger-rings. The more Dot saw of these adornments, the more he felt as if the Bard himself were walking at his shoulder, as if the old man was parading him, white-clothed and righteous through the evil world. Dot wanted to shake the Bard’s hand off his shoulder; he wanted to hide in stripes and emblems himself. He wanted to be a gaudy townsperson, who if he saw the Bard shining along the street would find him strange, and cast him just such a curious look as that woman had given him through her fringe of beads, and bite back an uncertain greeting, as had that tall boy in the turmeric-yellow trousers and azure swing-shirt.
Dot had never felt so hungry. There was a drinking place in the empty square; he filled his belly with water and sat to collect himself. Then he walked on and on, almost to the far edge of the town, which took him until early afternoon. There he found a tree dangling mangoes at him over a wall, fruit lying ripe and burst open on the road below. Three mangoes, and his mind was a little less lost; he cleaned his face and hands at a pump and went on.
Shortly thereafter he came to a goat-pen. There were more goats in the pen than Dot had ever seen in his life. Leaning over the fence to admire them, he noticed, straight away, six or seven that were languid and scruffy about the mouth.
He went up to the man at the door of the house next to the pen.
‘Who owns these goats, that they’re let to be in such condition?’
‘Why, the Baroness owns them,’ said the man mildly. ‘But what condition would that be?’
‘Well, several are quite bad with the mouth-rot. You’ll want to get them some rash-leaf, if the herd is to see out the winter.’
The man was to become a friend called Kooric, but My, what a blunt and old-fashioned way of talking you had back then, he would say. But blunt or no, Dot knew more about goats than anyone in the Baroness’s employ, and Kooric organised for him to be taken into her house. He was to learn worldly ways in return for his knowledge—knowledge of goats and gardens at first.
And of course, once your questions started, laughed Kooric, no one could keep up with you! You must know everything that a merchant does, or a cleaner of wash-houses, or a soldier, or a weaver, or the children of the slums playing Devil-Dare; you must drive every jintny or tractor and visit every fair; you must be six hundred people in one!
Show some kindness: he was starving, father, said Kooric’s son Samed. They had kept him pure and holy all his life, and now he must stuff his mouth with handfuls of dirt. And he poked Dot mid-robe with a be-ringed finger.
IT WAS ON A VISIT to an even larger world that Dot found the House of the Many. Walking through the terrible rottenwater smell, the smoking-fish smell of Port-of-Lords, with Kooric and Samed, he saw it in a display window, on a stand covered with black velvet. Where the House of the Three was made of worn brown wood, the Many’s seemed to have grown into its curves of blood-red glass, trimmed with silver lines. Where the Three’s had two yellow teeth, the Many’s bore a full set, dazzling plasticky white, slippery black and, at the other end, a grid of black buttons. Where the Three’s rooms were joined with a cracked fan of brown paper that shed dust, the Many’s had moist-looking red leather.
Dot went on careful feet to the window. The House glowed within. The Bard would abhor it; his beautiful hands would scorn to caress its newness. Where would be the virtue in making such easy music, with such a wealth of notes at your disposal? Dot had the feeling he was breathing in, and breathing in, feeding the laughter in his chest without ever letting it out.
Before too long, Kooric and Samed came back for Dot and moved him on, but that afternoon, while everyone slept, he came back to the shop to see if the House of the Many gave him the same feeling. If anything, it was stronger without the others there; he stood a long time with his hand on the glass, gently, inaudibly whooping to himself, gazing on the object that locked together the plainness of his past life, and the lustre and luxury of his present.
‘You play accordion, do you?’
The man had come out of the shop, was halfway through a cigarette. He was as neat as the Bard, as sober-looking as the Bard, but dressed Western, in a dark suit and a white shirt, the tie the only jewel on him, a knot and band of ruby that changed to emerald with the light.
Dot shook his head and went on looking.
The man finished smoking. ‘Come inside,’ he commanded. ‘I’ll show you.’
Which is how Dot came to be seated under a window, drawing the Many out of their gorgeous House, easy as honey, multitudinous as the wavelets on the harbour-water. And how when night fell and the man released him, he walked back through the streets of Port-of-Lords with his ears full of the new music, and his eyes full of the little dusty place, the river-muddy place, where dwelt Winsome and those others, and Ardent, and Bonneh his mother.
He spent none of the money he had brought to Port-of-Lords, even while Samed and Kooric went mad in the markets, holding up cloths against him and urging him to buy. He held onto almost all his earnings in the next months until his second visit to the port, when he gave his savings to the accordion-man.
‘HARSH COUNTRY,’ said Samed. His sunglasses had orange mirror-lenses that reflected the car windows, across which glided spine-tree and horizon.
‘I suppose,’ said Dot. ‘Though I hadn’t thought so until you said.’
‘But there’s nothing, nothing. It makes you thirsty just looking. And so boring.’
‘Boring?’ Dot laughed. ‘You don’t know boring. Boring to you is pausing between sweetmeats, or running out of women to woo.’
Samed grinned in a satisfied way under his blind orange eyes. He was dressed very gorgeously to go among the Bard’s people. He hadn’t believed there was a place, that wasn’t a hospital, where people wore plain white. No one else had believed Dot, either, when he went hunting for white cloth to make his new, man’s body—and Samed’s as well—some Bardclothes. The best he could do was plain Western white trousers and a loose-shirt with white-on-white embroidery. His arms felt light and naked without their rings and cuffs.
‘Is that the place, sah?’ said the driver.
‘Already? Why, yes, it is. But go slowly!’ Dot said alarmed. ‘We’re rushing towards it.’
And so they crept towards the houses, slowly enough for Dot to see piece by piece that things were not as they had been. The goat-pen had fallen in; there were only three goats tethered to posts among the houses. The Bard’s house, the little one to which it had been such an honour and a terror to be summoned, was a broken half-cylinder of mud-bricks, all the thatch gone, nothing inside. The tea-tent on its slight rise was only the posts and strings and a few shreds of cloth blowing from the nails. Dot had forgotten how every thing, living or not, was the same milky-coffee colour.
‘Oh, Dot,’ said Samed. ‘This is not a place for children.’ Dot knew Samed was thinking of the garden he grew up in, a moist world of caves and ferns and pools and cushions, lit with the colours of everyone’s clothes, set here and there with decorative town foods. He knew Samed was craving a guavaand-ice, in a tall glass with straws and a spoon. He knew that there was a good reason he had asked Samed to come, but caught here between his excitement and this sick feeling, he couldn’t recall it; he thought he ought to have come alone, perhaps on foot, carrying nothing. He ought to have tried harder to find white cloth; even he was too odd and ornamented for this place.
They stepped out into a stunning white heat. Dot felt the pupils of his eyes contract, and was almost blind for a few moments. The driver switched off the engine, and Dot was deaf as well, his ears stuffed with the silence.
The shapes resolved into people beside their doors—mothers and children only. From the farthest house emerged a mother with a rifle. She stood and assessed the car and the people who blossomed from it, then reached back into the house and propped the rifle there.
A mother came forward. A little one toddled after her, but was scooped back by its sister.
‘Is that Dot I see?’ asked the mother.
‘Why, it’s Winsome!’ said Dot. ‘Samed, remember I told you about—Winsome, meet my friend Samed.’
‘I’m sure it’s an honour,’ said Samed smoothly. Winsome looked at him as if he had two heads.
‘What has happened here, Winsome?’ said Dot. ‘Has the Bard died?’
She looked from Samed to Dot, even more disconcerted. ‘No, not yet. At least, he hadn’t when I left his food this morning.’
Dot looked around at the others, who had drawn forward in a crescent-shaped crowd to listen. He was very afraid of what else might have happened.
‘And my mother?’
‘She’s in your house, where she always is.’
The little crowd broke open in that direction. A mother started to speak, but was hushed. None of them would meet his eye. Dot looked uncertainly at Winsome.
‘Go on and see,’ she said. Her little one had fixed itself to her leg, and she put her hand to its head.
Reassured, he went towards the house. His steps slowed at the smell. They’re all mad, he thought. This is some appalling joke, some punishment.
‘Mother?’ he said into the smell at the door.
There was no answer. He folded himself into the house, the collapsing movements coming to him awkwardly in his man’s body. Raw earth, dead fire, unclean flesh—all these underlay the worse smell. Dot moved away from the door to let the light show what it would.
His mother sat cross-legged and naked. Her hair was clipped back to silver speckles. She watched him as if he were a bantam that had run in by accident, as if her eyes just automatically followed anything that moved.
Then the thing at her feet came clear to him: not the loom he had thought, but Ardent’s crooked legs. They didn’t jerk or tremble in recognition of him, for there was no breath in her body. That worse smell came from her. The nails of the upstuck, misshapen hand were varnished silver; there was a bangle on the arm. Ardent’s face was turned into the floor.
Dot’s mouth found some home-tongue syllables. ‘She was never meant to live out a full life, this one.’
His mother looked at him as if he had said something utterly without meaning. She spoke out of a throat that had not had food or water pass through it for a day or two. ‘My daughter hasn’t ever been sick in her life.’
Dot blinked away the woeful thought Mother, do you not know me? He nearly laughed. Look at her, he wanted to say, she was born sick! She’s sickness itself, just in the shape of a person. She was never meant to more than lie awhile here, then move on. But you couldn’t say that to the mother, could you? Not to the one who had tended Ardent, from the moment she was born a rubbery knot that couldn’t be untied, to the moment she ceased to be however little of a self. Not to the person who had actually done that thankless, pointless work, with no more acknowledgment than a snuffle, with no more reward than another job of filth to clean up. Especially when you had walked away, yourself, from that work, walked away, without a thought, from that and all the other work of being among the Bard’s followers. Walked away and not properly thought about that mother, or that work, for full years. And when you did think, waited further years before returning.
He went back out. Samed was seated in a crowd by the car. Children were taking off his rings and bangles and trying on his sunglasses. Mothers were laughing.
‘How goes it, Dot?’ he said.
‘My sister is dead and needs burying.’
‘This is the bent one?’ said Samed.
Dot nodded. ‘Winsome, is there a pick I may use?’
‘Can I give these little ones their treats?’ said Samed as Winsome led the way. ‘Or at least play them some music? ’Cause I’ll bet they’re good dancers.’
‘You go on and do that,’ said Dot, relieved. He knew in this state, with this skirmish going on in his chest, he couldn’t toss sweets to children, he couldn’t bring out the Many and make them dance as he’d planned.
The gardens had shrunk to fit only the needs of these mothers and children. The walled grave compound had once been their centre; now it was their edge and you walked across bone-dry ground to reach it.
And the earth inside the walls was like concrete. After a few strokes, Dot took off his white-on-white shirt and relaxed into the work. It took a long time; Winsome brought him water and some sweetened cheese to fuel him. The little gusts of Samed’s rich music, and children’s cheers, and mothers’ laughter—these too were like water and fresh blood to Dot’s muscles.
Winsome came and sat with him. She talked into the grave rather than to him, brushing flies away all the while. ‘Well, first the men left. That was maybe—oh, two years?—after you went away. The Bard tried to keep on. He took on everyone’s wives—I myself have two children of him. But things got quarrelsome, and the Bard, he gave us up, all of us. He lives along the road in the old cow-house now. We take him his food and drink, but he won’t talk to us, and he won’t have us talk to him. He says our high voices give him a pain in the head.’ She smiled to herself, then saw Dot’s dismay. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s not who he was.’
‘I thought it would stay forever the same,’ said Dot faintly, leaning on the pick.
‘You shouldn’t have gone,’ said Winsome. ‘We’ve talked about it. All the puff went out of him. You were the only one he could have handed on to, who wasn’t blood-related, who wouldn’t have caused quarrels.’
‘What about Pedder?’ But Winsome snorted. ‘Or Lean Jo—they were the ones in line.’
‘A line that never held firm.’
WHEN THE JOB WAS FINISHED, Dot went to the river and washed. He put his shirt on and walked back up to the houses. Samed’s party died down as he approached. Samed at the centre was the plainest Dot had ever seen him. Every child had some lump of jewel or gold upon it, but Samed’s only adornment was the House of the Many, its crimson clashing joyfully with his yellow and orange robe.
‘It’s done,’ Dot said lightly.
‘All right,’ said Samed, getting up. ‘Now, children, it’s time to be quiet and sad, isn’t it, when a person has to put his sister in the ground. I’ll play you some sad music, and we’ll all go together, slowly, to the cemetery.’
Dot returned to his house. ‘Better put on some clothes, mother. I’ve made a grave for Ardent, and we should take her there.’
Ardent was a lot smaller than he remembered, and lighter than he’d imagined she would be. Dot and Bonneh put her into her carry-bag, but then instead of putting her on Bonneh’s back Dot carried her out of the house in his arms. Bonneh walked beside him, bare-armed in a night-shift, her hand on Ardent’s head, and they proceeded slowly to the grave under the spell of Samed’s music, slow and spare and sad.
Bonneh got down into the grave, and Dot knelt and passed Ardent down to her. She laid her in there, and drew the bag-string tight closed, and knotted it. Then Dot and Winsome helped her out and there was a silence, except for the low drone of Samed’s music.
‘You want to say something, Dot?’ he said.
Bonneh was between Dot and Winsome, and they each held one of her hands in both of theirs. Dot looked over Bonneh’s head to Winsome. ‘I think you should speak, Winsome.’
‘Oh, all right. Let me think. Ardent.’ Samed gave her a little more music to think by, then faded it when she looked at him.
She began slowly, and left a pause between every phrase. ‘Ardent, she had a short life, and some of us might think it wasn’t much of one. But she felt the sun on her skin just like all of us do, and she tasted her food just fine; she smelt the smell of a good roasting fire, and of fresh rain just like us, and in her ears was the same birdsong. Best of all she liked the sound of people’s voices and to have someone near. Her father died when she was very young, but he didn’t run away and leave her the way a lot of kids’ fathers have done. She had a mother, Bonneh, who was with her every day of her life. And also she had this brother, Dot; he spent his childhood with her. Sure, he left when he got to his middlehood—but then, didn’t he come back? And isn’t he here now, at her graveside?’ Bonneh’s grip tightened in Dot’s hands.
‘We’ll start with the oldest, which is Safira. We’ll each of us put a handful of earth in on Ardent. Then the kids will strip off and push the rest of the earth in, and then we’ll all go down to the river and swim. And then, Dot’s friend Samed says he’s got some treats, so we’ll have something of a feast, and drink to Ardent’s life, and welcome Bonneh back from her place of mourning.’
Samed swelled the music, and Safira came forward. ‘I knew you would say the right things,’ said Dot.
‘Better than the Bard ever did,’ said Bonneh between them, watching the earth fall to the carry-bag. ‘He would have preached all over her and spoiled it.’
TOWARDS THE END OF THE FEAST, Dot walked away to the cow-house. The sun was lower and the world not so painfully bright.
‘Bard Jo?’ he said into the slatted darkness of the wooden hut. ‘It’s Dot here.’ And he went in.
The boards chopped up the darkness with planes of dusty sunlight. After a few moments the old man became visible on his bed against the far wall. His pale foot-soles pointed to the ceiling, and the pattern of his blanket was interrupted by his thin dark frame. He was lying on his back, breathing out illness from some serious place inside him; the hut was thick with the smell, which was of dead Ardent, with rotting wet lung added.
‘I came back for a visit, Bard,’ said Dot. If he called him by name, perhaps he could believe this really was the Bard.
The breathing worked up to speech, through spittle and twigs in the Bard’s throat, it sounded like. ‘It was Dot, was it, playing that great layer-cake of a music?’ Sweet cakes being things of evil and not proper food.
‘No, Bard,’ said Dot, into the horrible withering wind of the Bard’s disgust. ‘It was my friend Samed. But we both play.’
You must not retire like that, Kooric had told him after his first fight with Samed. You mustn’t bow your head and take it. You must speak back. You must not take Samed’s rubbish. But here in the Bard’s presence—even the failed Bard, even the corruptible Bard—keeping his back straight, and the idea of speaking, felt mannered and arrogant.
‘And you’ll have brought some rubbish for the children?’
‘A few bits of shine, Bard. Nothing harmful—’ He heard the fatal weakness of apology in his voice.
‘What would you know?’ The Bard jolted on the bed. ‘So harmed yourself, so prettied up, so taken in by all the shine and the music and the fun. Did you think it would be fun, to bring your worldly friends here, to amaze them with how spare and poor you used to be? To walk in like a god and scatter gifts, like a father, you thought?’
The Bard spat into something that had already been spat in many times.
He’s too clever a man, thought Dot, in the grip of the old fears. He’s too clever and too right. He knew me when I was only myself without any world-trappings.
‘The only father I knew never scattered gifts. He came home angry. He washed the town off himself as quick as he could—’
‘That’s not your father,’ said the Bard in a scribbly hiss. ‘Don’t try and claim that one.’ He cleared his clogged voice and spat again, and Dot could see and hear him shaking his head against the pillow.
‘Like I say, he was the only one—’
‘Your father—’ The Bard hoisted himself upon one rail of an arm, that was ragged with either flesh or shirt, Dot couldn’t tell which. A slat of light bounced off his yellow-white hair, and made a faint glow on the wall. ‘You knew your father just fine; he led you away from here as if he had a halter on your neck. He sent you back to us, all hung about and decorated with his cloths and jewels—you may think it’s you, but it’s just Morri Simpsim, making trouble again. All that’s missing is the bullet-belt and the foreign gun. And the soldier mates hanging off him for his money’s sake. The feeble mind is the same. Why could you not have grown up strong, like your mother, worthy of Bonneh as no other man could be—not even I.’ He fell back on the bed, breathing hard. The golden dust above him swirled.
There was other furniture in the cow-house. There was a wooden chest on Dot’s right. An unlit lamp stood on it, and beside it the Three’s House, hooked closed.
‘I am sure my mother has always respected and admired you,’ he said.
‘And I am sure she has not, for how could she? I was an embarrassment with my wives and my slave-men and my “wisdom”. I preached purity and lived a prince’s life. Bonneh preached nothing and lived purity. Her vow held her steady, and not all my glamour and power could ever budge that woman. She was before me as my lesson every day, yet did I ever learn?’
The Three’s House was quite a lot smaller than the House of the Many—but then, everything here had shrunk with the years: the curve of the river, the mothers, the Bard himself. Dot took the House to the doorway where he could see it. Oh, yes—smaller, and so much lighter. So brown, so worn. Even the healing hands of the accordion-man in Port-of-Lords could do nothing for this. It hardly existed as an instrument.
‘Take it,’ rasped the Bard. ‘Take the damned thing. Everything else you’ve taken, you might as well.’
‘Can it still sound?’
‘As much as it ever did. Go on, take its weight off my mind. And your weight, too. Leave me to die in peace and with nothing.’
Dot left the cow-house and walked back up the road to the village. Samed had got the balloons out; bright dots of colour were bounding and flying at the end of strings. There was a tiny pop as one burst, then a tiny child-wail. Dot held the dusty accordion to his chest, where he knew its ancient concertina-folds would leave long stripes of disintegrating paper. He felt haggard from exposure to the Bard’s bitter breath; his belly was sore from the tension it had carried all day.
He walked up the rise to the remains of the tea-tent. The tables and benches were weather-warped but still strong, and he sat where the last piece of worn cloth would shield him from the village. The breeze was very soft and steady, the sunlight yellow-gold, the shadows long.
He undid the catch. It was a while since the accordion had been used; Dot had to open it very carefully so that it didn’t tear itself apart, so that the fragile cardboard didn’t split in several places and take away the instrument’s last breath. He eased it open and closed slowly several times, wondering whether it could play a single note without breaking.
And as he wondered and worked the house’s hallway, Anneh idled out a side-door of the house just as she always had, her arms full of thatch, three piglets and a chicken following behind. She could go only so far, to the limits of her yard and beyond that to her farm patch, a bit farther, a bit fainter, before she faded from hearing.
Robbreh took some finding, some odd angles and pressures, but before too long Dot had him singing, and not long after that the two of them singing together, going about their separate businesses. Dot had tried for the same sound on the red accordion, but there was too much juice in it, too much harmony, not enough dust and age. The broken pieces that made the Three alive were missing.
Then, in the middle of one of Robbreh’s wheezes he heard a corner, an edge of an echo that was high and crazy and said anything that came into its head. He played more of the same part of Robbreh, coaxing and coaxing the little one out from behind the dad.
What was left of the flap of the tea-tent lifted, and there stood Bonneh, washed and dressed in her white. She came in and perched on a bench, inclined her head and listened. From his years out in the world, Dot read her movements as full of grace, the bones of her face and speckled head as smooth and beautiful.
‘Been a long time since anyone took that up,’ she said in a pause where Dot had lost the older Two and was working to find them again among the huffs and rattles. They jumped out again suddenly with Viljastramaratan blaring beside them, and Dot had to laugh, and his mother too smiled.
He played until he had all three moving somewhat in the old ways, Anneh busy with her work, Robbreh happy among the rumble of the men.
But Viljastramaratan came and went as Viljastramaratan pleased. When that one decided to sing, Dot could keep him going a little, but—
‘I can’t keep a hold on the child,’ he said to Bonneh.
She gave the smallest smile in the world, rose and left the tent. And when the fraying flap had fallen closed behind her, he wound the music down and finished. The wind in the cloth and the guy-ropes had more notes in it than the accordion, though it didn’t form what you’d call music.
Dot fastened the Three’s House closed and carried it down to the village. The shadows streamed away, endlessly long now. A sweet-wrapper tinkled past him. The car stood beyond the huts, its curves gathering the last sunlight into lines and points. Samed was walking slowly towards it like a carnival in his orange robe, the children running up to replace his rings and bracelets. He flirted with the mothers over the children’s heads, and they bumped shoulders with each other and laughed behind their hands.
But in the car, against the sunset, Dot saw Bonneh’s round head. Like the plainest wooden statue, she sat polished by life’s handling, beautified by the completion of her work. She waited while he wrapped and stowed the old accordion, while he said farewell to Winsome, and warned her children not to put these gifts of rose-scented soap in their mouths. She waited motionless while he went to the fields’ edge and stood over the fresh mound where Ardent lay, which the children had prettied with lolly-foils weighted with stones. When Samed and Dot entered the car, she eyed them out of a deep smiling thought, and then fixed her gaze forward again.
‘Bonneh, aren’t you bringing belongings?’ said Samed. ‘Your … your pots and things? Other clothes, maybe?’
Again she cast him that sideways joking glance and was silent.
‘Samed,’ said Dot. ‘You are my best friend, but you don’t know when to keep quiet.’
‘Is there such a time?’ laughed Samed. He took his sunglasses from a child’s hand poked through the window, and tried to kiss the hand before it was snatched away.
Dot tapped the driver on the shoulder. ‘We can go now,’ he said.