Pump Six and Other Stories(30)

The Jai women all laughed as Bia' Hanna continued, recalling Raphel's childhood transgressions: rock sugar that disappeared whenever a woman blinked, electrostatic masks reversed, goats with flaming tails, the tales poured out of her golden mouth. Finally, her fountain of memory apparently depleted, she paused and eyed Raphel. "Tell me, revered Pasho, do the Keli people really eat fish? Straight from their lakes?"

Raphel laughed. "They ask if we really eat coyote."

"Yes, yes. But custom, Raphel . . . you didn't eat fish, did you?"

The women fell silent, watching him, their breath unconsciously held for the answer.

Raphel smiled slightly. "No. Of course not."

Bia' Hanna laughed. "There, you see Jai Bia'? Blood will tell. You can take the Jai to Keli, but blood will tell. Blood always tells."

The women nodded knowingly, pretending satisfaction, but their eyes betrayed relief that he had not broken Jai custom. A Jai would die before eating tainted flesh. Jai observed the old ways.

The women's conversations began again. Raphel was forgotten in the speculation over what day the rain would come and whether Bia' Renado's daughter had been seen too often in the company of a married hook hand.

Raphel glanced toward the doorway. Sunlight burned in the courtyard beyond. Male voices filtered in with the heat and light: his father and his hook-hand friends. Soon he would join them. They would push a ritual cup of mez toward him, and then step back carefully, keeping Quaran. Ten heartbeats later, he would raise his cup from the courtyard stones and they would toast the blue sky, pour a splash into the dust, and drink until the harsh liquor evaporated from the baked earth. They would perform the ritual again and again, pouring and drinking, getting drunker and drunker until the sun touched the horizon and the bones of the old city turned red in the failing light.

If Raphel listened carefully, he could make out the men's conversation. His father's voice, laughing: "He didn't get his smarts from me. It must have been his grandfather," and then all the hook hands laughing as they recalled Old Gawar, a man whose hook knives swirled like tornadoes and who spat on the graves of the Pasho he had delivered during the Keli crusade. Legendary deeds from a legendary time. Now, Keli's fat wheels wandered the Dry Basin with impunity, Jai children listened to earbuds full of Keli transmitter stations and spoke with Keli slang, and Old Gawar's grandchild was stained from head to toe with the Keli Pasho's secrets.

Raphel remembered his grandfather: a withered skinny man who wore his red robes cut open so that the virile white fur of his bony chest tufted out for all to see. A man among men. A great Jai, even at a century and a half. Raphel remembered the old man's black hawk eyes, piercing, as he dragged Raphel close to whisper deeds of bloodshed, teaching him a Jai's understanding of life, muttering darkness into Raphel's ears until his mother caught them and dragged Raphel away, scolding Old Gawar for frightening the boy, and Gawar, sitting paralyzed in his chair, watching and smiling and content, his black bloody eyes on his descendant.

Raphel shook his head at the memory. Even in far away Keli the old man had whispered bloodshed into his dreams. A hard man to forget. In Keli, more so. Vestiges of his presence lingered everywhere: monuments to the Keli dead, lakes poisonous with burn residue, the hackings of hook knives on marble statues, the skeletal ruins of buildings burned and never reconstructed. Where Raphel dreamed of his grandfather, the Keli people tossed in nightmare.

Raphel stood carefully and wrapped his robes around him. The women swayed back, unconsciously keeping Quaran, three meters indoors, two meters in clean sunlight, and so it would continue for ten days or until he was dead. Tradition. In Keli, they no longer observed the old ways. Here, it was pointless to explain that the scourge was long gone. The custom was too deeply ingrained, as rigidly respected as handwashing before meals, and planting days before the rains.

Raphel slipped into the oven heat of the courtyard. His father and the other hook hands called to him. Raphel waved, but did not join the drinking. Soon he would join them and drink himself into a mez stupor, but not until his pilgrimage was complete.

"Mez, is, of course, poisonous in large doses, and even in small amounts the toxins build up over time, impairing a disproportionate number of the male population.

"The Jai follow a ritual of distillation for the desert plant that renders its toxins less potent, but custom dictates that they allow a certain percentage to remain. Early efforts to reform the brewing of mez were met with hostility. If a Pasho were to seek to reform the practice, it would best come from within the community as there is too much distrust in the Jai for outside influences."

—Pasho Eduard, CS 1404.

(Recovered document, Dry Basin Circuit, XI 333)

The haci was old, older than most in the village, and sat near its center, at the joining of three alleys. It commanded a good killing view of their confluence and its walls were thick, built for a time when bullets had been more than myths and blood flowed down the alleys many times each generation.

Up close, the haci showed its age. Settlement cracks crept along its clay walls. Long lines like vines threaded across its face, breeding ruin into its structure. Its thick wooden doors were thrown open, exposing peeling sky-blue paint and silvered splintered wood. A fraying electrostatic curtain swayed in the doorway, black and red interwoven, in Jai traditional style.

Raphel stood at the haci's curtained doorway, peering into the darkness. From inside, metal scraped rhythmically. It was a comforting sound. A Jai sound. He had grown up listening to that familiar rasp, listening at his grandfather's knee as the old man told stories. The metal continued its scraping. In his mind, Raphel was eight again, sucking sugar rocks and squatting beside his grandfather as the man whispered bloodshed.