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  The Third Eagle

  Lessons Along A Minor String

  R. A. MacAvoy

  For Dio Santiago, Clara Minor and Machdia Towee

  With thanks for all help

  and for Anthony Villiers

  The Green Sky

  ONE

  “Out of the black and shining vault,

  The black void, the shining night,

  To the golden mother, painted with light,

  We were born out of the belly of our father

  To the grace of two mothers,

  Bright beads on the Strings.

  We are like none other: the people.

  We are Wacaan.”

  THE RISING sun licked Wanbli’s bare back. He faced not the sun itself but west, where it was opening and revealing the estate to him. Tawlin’s flat-topped buildings went from mud color—they were mud—to white, glistening with the mica in the plaster. The stripe of cloud at the horizon, beyond Hovart and the single mountain in the plain, lit up in pink and purple as it prepared to dissolve.

  Though not a single alio stalk had exploded open for the day, there were already four black motes in the sky, leaving steam trails. One was close enough so that Wanbli could make it out as a private two-seater.

  Now, as he opened his mouth to continue, he heard the first alio pop.

  “Other men are the birds of the air.

  Other men are the hogs at the trough.

  We are those who live.

  We are those who die.

  We are those who remain people.

  We are Wacaan.”

  He spoke perfectly audibly, but not as one speaks to be heard. He took another breath, which wanted to become a yawn. He had to urinate very badly. Every morning when he recited the invocation and came to the word “void,” he was reminded of his full bladder. Nonetheless, Wanbli did not wiggle or grimace, and his hands on the hilt of the stone knife were steady.

  “I invoke the six directions upon this morning.

  I invoke the sun.

  I invoke the moons and their little sister that is coming,

  Who is my little sister.

  I am of the people of the sky.

  I am Wacaan.”

  He lifted the knife above his head so that the sun struck it and lifted from its obsidian blade a different glitter than it gave to the buildings. The light it reflected was green and red, like the growth on the golden soil of T’chishett.

  Wanbli lowered the knife in a more casual manner and laid it on his little altar cloth, which was spread out in front of his knees on the roof of his house. Flip, flip, left and right, top and bottom, he slapped the corners of the cloth over the blade and tied all ends in a knot that spanned the middle. He was protecting himself in all directions; enclosing himself in the earth as the knife was enclosed in the napkin. He did not feel particularly protected, however: only badly folded. Tawlin T’chishetti had been at it all hours of the day and night, and of course his Wacaan shared that burden with him. Now the Wacaan came to his feet with a groan and cracked his back with one brick-brown hand at his hip. He walked to the edge of the roof, snapped the toggle of the insect screen and urinated over the side.

  One very bad morning, after Tawlin T’chishetti had been especially troublesome, Wanbli had forgotten the toggle and had had to hose down the entire roof. Why he had to finish the invocation before voiding he did not understand. Usually it meant he woke himself up in the middle of the night so it would be easier to wait in the morning. Maybe that was the reason for the custom—to make him a light sleeper.

  Now he could yawn without offense to the earth or the sky. Or the sun or the moon or the six directions, separately or together. He yawned six times, once for each direction and then once more for good measure. Down below, one of the alios in the herbal border popped, shooting out the ratchett that had sheltered in its armored petals all night. The little creature landed rolling and then running. The darter that nested in the eaves missed it, but not by much. Wanbli watched without taking sides, and then turned away from the edge. Replacing the insect screen, which was invisible except for a slight shimmer and which also kept out dust, he stepped to the hatch and went down.

  The first place he went was to the kitchen, for a cup of tea. He made it strong and added a childish amount of milk and sugar. Sugar was more or less taboo for the Wacaan, and for that reason, he enjoyed it immensely. Long after the dextrose had let him down, the knowledge of his sin would keep Wanbli bright-eyed and smug. (He knew this about himself. He knew how and when to sin. He had learned it in school.)

  The next place he went, cup in hand, was to the full-length mirror in the dormitory. There he examined his image critically but with some enjoyment.

  His skeletal proportions were very balanced. Of course. He was a Wacaan. His muscular development left little to be desired also, and that was more his own doing. His coloring, which might have been cafè au lait on another, colder world, was bright russet, and the black hair shone with red highlights, even under the cool artificial light of the room. The eyes with which he regarded himself were dark, and of a garnet shade.

  This much was a given. So was his perfectly nice Wacaan face (to outsiders they were peas in a pod). It was not his face or head or even his general physique that held Wanbli’s attention, but his tattoos.

  Starting at the dimple at the base of the throat and running under the length of each clavicle were tattoos of feathers—long feathers, black with gold edging, which ended only at the top of the arms.

  Below, drawn from the solar plexus along the bottom of the rib cage and drooping gracefully down almost to the navel, was another pair, this time of blue just touched by green, like the dusty sky of T’chishett. It was also edged in gold.

  Lower, where they would be covered by any shorts or breechclout, were a still more graceful and drooping pair of feather tattoos, and this pair was entirely gold. Wanbli glanced down at this tattoo and had to grin, even though he had won it almost a year since. He had been known to suffer quite a bit of pain to pluck out pubic hairs that threatened to obscure the gold feathers.

  The training of a Paint was a very challenging thing. Many young Wacaan found themselves turning to other occupations: crafts, farming, even digging into the crumbly yellow sandstone of Southbay for its sparse minerals, rather than completing the ten years of study, workout, privation and ordeal that led to the Journeyman Eagle. Wanbli, who had earned all three Eagles in that same length of time, thought he was rather special among Paints.

  His education had been rewarding. He could wish the working life of a Paint to be half as much fun. Ten years climbing a ladder to find nothing on top. Nothing but day after day.

  His reflection was looking sour. He changed its expression.

  “You’ll do for one more day,” he said very severely to his image, and went to his shelf to decide how to cover his golden pride this day.

  For the different weathers of Neunacht he had three sorts of outfits: G-strings, breechclouts and thigh-length shorts. Nights were colder; at night he might wear a blanket affair with a hole in it for his head. It was not comfortable, but it was custom.

  As it seemed a temperate sort of day, he chose a woven breechclout. First he spread it down on his bed, along the striped blanket, made a small bunch in the middle of it and raised his fist. He hit the bed a blow that shivered the batting from one end to another, but the little hollow he had created in the fabric of the breechclout remained rigid. Then he poked it gently with a finger and it collapsed, as fabric should.

  It was a bother to perform this test every day, but once, as a s
tripling, Wanbli had found himself neglecting it and had gone out into practice with a broken seat belt. The first solid blow to the crotch had put him out of training for a week and made him the butt of jokes through his whole clan sept. He hated to be made fun of, so now he was careful.

  On the waistband of the breechclout he snapped his holster, which contained a stocky little gun with a funnel-shaped barrel: his blunderbuzz. On the other side went his wallet, a small leatherette bag containing his personal logic pad, his case knife, a pack of chewing gum and various items of magical import. Off the estate, he might also carry money. Most of the citizens of T’chishett wore their wallets around their necks, but the painted Wacaan made a taboo of that. One might be strangled by the cord, was the official explanation, but in fact the cord need not be heavy enough to be dangerous; the truth was that a wallet so hung obscured the wearer’s Eagles.

  Mimi’s bed was next to his, partitioned only by a half-wall. It was an unmade nest, as usual. Wanbli could close his eyes and see Mimi as he would be in another ten minutes, toppling into it; no doubt he was thinking of his bed even now. Had the T’chishetti continued acting up all night and into the rising sun? It was drugs again. Drugs and perhaps Ake Tawlin T’chishetti’s pride in his own bad reputation.

  A more substantial wall separated Mimi’s place of mess from Vynur’s cubby. Vynur had given notice over a month ago, but Tawlin T’chishetti had made no move to replace her. No doubt it would have to be taken up in Clan Council. Vynur had been out interviewing for two days now, which made it difficult for the other Wacaan. Perhaps she would not come back, and that was a scandal against all the Paints. But Wanbli was her first cousin and school-fellow and Mimi was at least an old lover. They had not said a word of protest (except between themselves). What else could the woman do, after all, when her employer refused to look for a replacement? Once she had found another berth, they could howl in unison, and Tawlin would run the danger of losing his Wacaan entirely.

  Sentence of death.

  Wanbli gazed lazily through the deep-set window, finishing the last of his tea and watching a pink sky. Had he not been so tired, Wanbli would have wakened before dawn and seen the stars out. As much as the day sky, he liked the sight of the stars.

  Out of the wind now, his ears could pick up snatches of orchestral music: not freestanding music, but the uneven sort that accompanies theatricals. The old man wasn’t asleep yet. Poor Mimi.

  Of course, the old man behaved that way because he was bored. Wanbli could understand that. He himself was bored. He behaved better about it, being Wacaan, but he was bored.

  He went out.

  The new sun was soft on muscles that were growing very stiff. This would make the third day he had had no time for training, and on the third day a painted Wacaan began to feel insecure. On the third day he started to lose ground. Wanbli rubbed his hand over his Journeyman’s tattoo—the green one—and he scratched surreptitiously over his gold. His fingers did not move quickly enough to engage the seat belt.

  T’chishett is in the equatorial regions of Neunacht, and except for one short season, there is no rain. The sunlight lifted Wanbli’s under-eyelids, making his eyes into garnet-brown crescents and in later years it was sure to give him the fan pattern of wrinkles the Wacaan called “wisdom.”

  Wanbli called it “headache” instead, but his ancestors had seen to it that he was built for the sun and it did him no real harm.

  From the outside the main buildings of Tawlin were very white and simple. They seemed to be floating on a shimmer of the air. If one took the main, sculptured, alio-lined path to the door (as Wanbli never did, on principle), one had the impression that Mount Hov rose out of the roof of the reception hall.

  Wanbli thought it a very silly effect.

  He came to the pale building through the loose sand, indirectly as a cat. He touched the blank wall and followed it to the door, which knew him and opened. Before entering, Wanbli took his blunderbuzz out of the holster and thrust it before him into the doorway. The air erupted in racket; he drew the gun back again and snapped out the battery, which he shoved under a rock among those in the border design. He could as well have hidden the logic module, since it was the combination of armory logic and power source that triggered the house alarm, but it suffered more from dust than did the battery. Wanbli’s only purpose in bringing the gun into the house was to test the alarm. He placed the inactive weapon into a box fitted into the inner wall which opened to the hands of the Tawlin Wacaans only. The shell of Mimi’s gun was still lying there.

  Inside, the desert lightness and the airy sense of infinity was squashed by Tawlin’s collected clutter. Ake Tawlin greeted the visitor with a two-meter-high blue statue of an ugly dog with bulbous eyes, ears, nose and teeth, which was pawing a flattened sort of ball which looked much like a second nose, equally bulbous. This dog, in fact, had bulbous everything except its hind end, which was completely inadequate to its size. It was this hind end which the Wacaan first saw, coming into the hall at change of shift. The creature was a reproduction of a relic of Tawlin’s Earth heritage, Wanbli had been told.

  Some relics deserved to be lost.

  The walls were lined with edged weapons, some of which were from Earth also, but none of which had any identifiable connection with the line of Tawlin. Wanbli disapproved of these displays more than he did of the blue dog. There was no place for random weapons in the household of one of the T’chishetti merchant princes, and especially one as unpopular as Tawlin. They were all in a shocking state of decay, but they could still cut his pouchy throat.

  He felt his second stab of disappointment that morning: that life should lead to nothing more than this. If it were not for the fact that Wanbli’s mother had worked here, and that he had been as good as raised on these grounds and apprenticed at Tawlin, he would have left with Vynur. For a moment he wished he had.

  Wanbli glanced around the room smoothly as the fiber mat sucked the dust from his feet. Panels with rotten scrolls. Perhaps reproduction rotten. Maces, morning stars, a labrys that could never have been used as a weapon (it was so big), a row of ash urns—they would have put his mother in one of those, thinking it a privilege—one lamp in the ceiling out, a tapestry of Mount Hov in raintime over two lost-looking rattan chairs, a recliner in cracked leather, two standing suits of radiation armor around a stone fireplace and a much-larger-than-life-size bronze of a sort of prehistoric darter which was called a dragon. Under all was a very busy multicolored carpet depicting the settlement of Neunacht (to be read from the left right and the top down), which had been imported at expense from the planet Selim FC, where they make such things.

  Other visitors took their shoes off at the door, but the Wacaan were by practice barefoot, hence the mat. Having one’s bare feet matted was unbearable to some people, but Wanbli was not in the least ticklish; he rather liked it. He stepped off onto the aniline red of the carpet, which felt slippery in contrast, and he padded toe-heel down the long room.

  No one ever came in this way except during formal receptions. Formal receptions had stopped entirely as Ake Tawlin aged and lost interest. This was exactly the reason Wanbli entered via the memorial hall so often. He was methodically unpredictable.

  The long passage running along the library had two more lights out. One of the Wacaan would have to talk to the housekeeper. “One of them” meant Wanbli, of course. The poor housekeeper was too frightened of the Other Paints to be reasonable in their presence. Wanbli himself was very approachable; that was one of his vanities.

  At the end of the passage began the personal living space of Tawlin himself. The moisture screen nipped at Wanbli’s lips and eyes as he passed in and his nose felt a moment of oddness, as though he’d been crying.

  Ake Tawlin T’chishetti had gone in for ferns a few years ago, and the huge things squatted spiderish against the wall or stood like open parasols on stands. To Wanbli these looked predatory. They offered concealment of which a Wacaan could not approve.
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br />   They were concealing Mimi right now, though not from the eyes of Wanbli. The night guard was a very tired rufous arc squatting against the white wall, under an opulent Nephrolepis. He looked up at his mate as one might look up at a savior on whom one had quite given up.

  “Long night, Aymimishett?” asked Wanbli. He poked the man lightly with his knee. “He never made it no easier?”

  Bad grammar was a Wacaan tradition.

  Mimi pulled his lips back: a gesture that would have to do in place of a grin. “The last guest left a dec or two after midnight…”

  “I know, I heard the cars.”

  “But he been waltzin’ out on his own since.” With Mimi, the erratic grammar was not merely tradition, it was all that he knew.

  He was a sad man, much older than Wanbli. Standard two Eagle Wacaan. He’d been tagged once, at Mondoc T’chishetti. There he had been happy for fifteen years and now he could not go back.

  Ake Tawlin did not appreciate him. He could not converse.

  “He was out there a couple decs ago, catching moons in his nightie. Peein’ the posies.”

  Urinating on the alios was a boy’s game. It made them pop open, even in the middle of the night. It wasn’t good for the flowers, however, and sometimes a boy would get hit in the member by a urine-stained ratchett. Sometimes the ratchetts bit.

  Wanbli sighed in sympathy. “What’s he been doing? Taking, I mean. Povlen? Pipe?”

  An odd sort of dignity settled on Mimi’s features. Superimposed on his tiredness, it made him appear drunk or very foolish. “What does a Wacaan know about trash like that?”

  Wanbli smirked his smirk. “This Wacaan knows quite a lot. Tawlin household is an education.”

  “You can have it,” said Mimi, rising. His back crackled. “This ignorant clanner is going to bed.”

  “Great. Go wrap yourself in that izzard’s nest of yours. Put a gel blindfold over your weary eyes. Commune with the Nine Protectors and return to us with new vitality.”