Radix

"Why then does he live in the desert?"
Who can say? He's unknowable as the clouds. Drift fed small bits of bark into the flames. What I do know, from having spoken with Bir and the magnar, is that Bonescrolls is an ancient yawp—one of the first. Perhaps he's outgrown his life in Sarina. Perhaps after so many centuries he has bored of being a yawp.
The cry of a screech owl sliced across the darkness of the river. "Until today I thought everything the Mothers had taught me was foolishness."
No—not foolishness. The Mothers are narrow. The tribe means more to them than any person or vision. But they have knowledge. I can see myself that they've trained you well. What you experienced today you can repeat now at will, I'm sure.
Sumner leaned forward and singed the hairs on his knees. "Are you serious?"
Drift blinked. Of course.
Sumner looked up at the steady stars through the writh-ing skyfires and concentrated on calming his suddenly racing heart. When he looked back at the ne, his heart was still thudding. "How?"
Your body knows. It did it today. If you relax yourself, you'll remember how it felt, and you'll be able to do it again.
Sumner didn't wholly believe him, but the idea clouded his thoughts for the rest of their journey. On their return to Miramol, he sequestered himself in the chamber the ne had set aside for him, and he practiced the tension routines he had learned. His desire to repeat his experience in Sarina was his greatest obstacle, and it took him over a week finally to fix the tension at the tip of his spine. Then began the slow, awkward process of remembering exactly how it had felt to unfurl that tension. Futile days passed, and if he hadn't already experienced such deep joy in Sarina, he would have given up. The feelings, at first, were too subtle.
But then it happened. Not as quickly or as totally as it had seized him in Sarina. It was different, but it was good.
Guided by his memory, the tension unwound along the narrow length of his spine, so softly he might have imagined it except for the sudden itch haloing the round cope of his skull. And then came the familiar serenity blissing his whole body. He wasn't shaken, not as before. It was more gentle—a tensile sense of the moment expanding, opening to reveal sounds, shadings, odors that had been uninteresting before: the refraction of a fly's wing narrowing the orbit of his vision, distant root scents dazing his nostrils with an olfaction of mud. He was happy—sincerely joyful.
Several years before in Dhalpur he had known ecstasy when his body and mind became one. But the joy he had felt then was thin compared to the bliss he called out of his body now. Standing up in his dugout in a glade freckled with light, he uttered the sacred name for an otter. His call was an exultation, not a test, because otter tokens were everywhere: Rocks drowsed in leaf-strewn shallows, milk fog tangled among ferns, and white roots curled out of the water.
The call did not just vibrate from his throat; it bled out of his chest and joined the invisible otter-energies in the rocks and fog and ferns. With that sensation, Sumner understood that he was connected by a vague and pervasive energy to all the otter symbols around him. He was the glade—the spalled light, the lapping water, the ferns and the rocks.
The length of his spine itched, and he felt the psynergy that had drained out of him suddenly returning, curving back through the antlers of the tree branches, arcing over the pollen-dusted water, returning to the taut cords of his body.
It was just as the Mothers had said: The whorl was in all things.
The water ruffled, and a dozen slick black heads ap-peared across the glade. The otters' noses twitched as they stared about, and then several of them crawled onto flat rocks and rootloops, trailing shawls of water. They peered at Sum-ner, black bead eyes unflinching, dark fur sleek with wet. A giddy laugh tightened in Sumner's belly. Everything was connected. Everything was itself and the same. Bonescrolls was a puma and a raven and an old man. And Sumner could be also. It was all a matter of letting go. His mind reeled, and he laughed aloud.
The otters rolled into the water and vanished. Two stood up again farther off, stared at Sumner, and then were gone.
From a sandbar culvert of spiny palms Ardent Fang watched. He was returning from Ladilena, a nearby Serbota village, where he had been reviewing new brides. The women had been long and beautiful as the new moon, and their rituals had exalted all the good feelings in him. Yet that rapture had dropped away when he heard the ecstatic music turning behind the sandbar. It was true music: bloodflow rhythms, mothertides, the desire he had always wanted to open with his devil harp. But when he whisperglided up to the sandbar and peered through the spiny palms, the music was gone, and he was surprised to see Lotus Face commun-ing with the otters.
Ardent Fang crouched in his dugout, bending far for-ward, the hair of his monkeyfur vest limp in the water. His hearing was still frothed with the visionary music he had heard, and he clutched the dog-crucifix thonged loosely about his neck and silently invoked Paseq. At that moment, though Ardent Fang had made no sound, Lotus Face turned and stared directly at where he was hidden.
Ardent Fang rose, returned Sumner's stare shamefully, and then disappeared. The boar-tusks of his prow appeared among the stilt-root palms, and he slid into the glade. As he swung his canoe around a tussock of myrtles, he heard the music again—dulcet as the sunplucked water—and, like the turning of a lens, his sight sharpened. He hadn't even realized that his vision had gone slack over the years. Reflexively he rubbed his eyes.
Weirdly wonderful—he saw beauty more clearly than ever. He sensed that his eyes had been healed by the music-energy coursing through Sumner. He looked at Lotus Face as his canoe drifted into the glade and saw the rainbows spin-ning in the mist around him. Is this being a god or a demon-delusory?
"Don't be afraid," Sumner said, signaling him closer.
Ardent Fang stood up stiffly. "I'm not afraid," he re-sponded sharply, then realized that he was still clutching his dog-crucifix. He let it go and then seized it again, rocking backwards in his canoe with the more powerful realization that he had understood Lotus Face. The man hadn't spoken in Serbot.
Ardent Fang sat down.
"Don't be afraid," Sumner said again in Massel. He punted gently, and the lotus-carved gunwale of his canoe hissed across the lapse of sun-hot water. "Everything we've always wanted is all around us."
The ear-tricking music was unfurling with the swamp mist in the shadows of the big trees. Ardent Fang stared into the blackness of Sumner's face with defiant apprehension. "Who are you?"
"You know me," Sumner replied, the whorl of power flexing almost visibly between them.
"You're a god," Ardent Fang said, his own voice sounding strange to him.
Sumner smiled. "If I were a god, the whole world would look like this." He spread his arms out and opened his body to the water's broken sunlight and the enormous walls of flowering trees. And something drifting, immense, and un-known moved through them.
Ardent Fang released the dog-crucifix and gazed with astoundment into the peaceful heart of the forest. Each tree was so huge in its inturned feeling that the breeder trembled to look at them. In their shadow he was merely a being of dew, fragilely, helplessly sparkling. Words, thoughts, dimen-sions—the whole mind-world was a realm of the dead.
He stood up and raised his arms and his heart into the upstreaming of light and love.
* * *
Sumner wandered the riverain forest entranced by the outleap of consciousness in everything. A light greater than sunlight was shining out of the old trees. In their shade thoughts and sounds came together, and the visual became visionary.