“Dances. Saweya and baliya. All day.”
“Bah.”
“Look. I know you’d like some patterns to study, being a configurationist and all, but I have an even more urgent problem. I have to fight a man day after tomorrow. With knives. In front of the entire population of two villages.”
“With knives?”
“Right. Hunters wrestle. Sallenzii fight with knives.”
“Sallenzii?”—As Bob translated, “Competitors for a girl,” she transliterated: “Challengers…”
After a short silence she suggested, “Could you just give him the girl?”
“No. Honor, local pride, all that.”
“And she… she’s content just to be the prize pig?”
Bob nodded.
“The pattern is familiar,” she said, and then, abruptly, “Nothing—There is nothing alien about these people. Nothing!”
“What?”
“Never mind. Let me work it out. Ram has an idea… Listen, Bob, I think you ought to get out of this, even if you lose face. We can always move on. It would be better than you killing the fellow! Or getting killed.”
“Thanks for the afterthought,” Bob said kindly. “Don’t worry. I’ll cheat.”
“Hypodermic?”
“Karate ought to do. I don’t mind. It’s just that I feel so damned foolish. Public knife fights for a girl. Like a lot of stupid teenagers.”
“It’s a teenage society, Bob.”
“Locker-room aliens!” He scratched his lion’s mane of hair and stood up, stretching. He was very beautiful; no wonder the villagers had picked him for their champion. The fact that his physical splendor was informed and animated by an intellectual spirit of no less splendor, a passionate trained mind that sought the stuff of poetry for its own sake—this fact would mean nothing much to the Ndif, or to many people on Earth, for that matter. But Tamara, in that moment, saw the young man as what he was, a king.
“Bob,” she said, “say no. Beg off. We can just move on.”
“No sweat!” he said, and, grateful for her concern, gave her an affectionate bear hug. “I’ll clobber the poor bastard before he knows what hit him. And then give a lecture. Freshman Hygiene: Murder is Hazardous to Your Health. It’ll wow ’em.”
“Do you want me there, or not there?”
“There,” he said. “Just in case he’s a black belt too.”
She was down at the laundry beach next afternoon having an interesting discussion of menopause with Kara and Libisa when Ramchandra came out onto the beach from the peacock-colored forest. Watching him from her rock amid the swirling waters, she thought how foreign he looked, how alien, as Bob had said—like the shadow of somebody standing up in the front row against the marvelous flowing colors of a jungle epic on a movie screen: too small, too black, too solid. Kara saw him too and shouted, “How’s the belly, Uvana Ram?”
When he was close enough not to have to shout, he replied, “Askiös, Kara, much better. I finished the guo this morning.”
“Good, good. Another potful tonight. You’re all skin,” Kara said, not inaccurately.
“Maybe if he eats enough guo he’ll turn people-colored,” said Brella, studying him; Kara’s mention of skin seemed to have brought Ramchandra’s swarthy,dusky complexion to her notice for the first time. The Ndif were remarkably inattentive to details. Brella now compared the two foreigners and said, “You too, Tamara. If you only ate people-colored food, maybe you wouldn’t be so ugly and brown.”
“I never thought of that,” said Tamara.
“Tamara, we are invited to the Old Men’s House.”
“Both of us? When?”
“Both. Now.”
“How did you swing that?” Tamara asked in English, splashing ashore from the boulder she had been sharing with Kara, Libisa, and a lot of freshly washed loincloths.
“I asked.”
“I’ll come too,” Kara announced, splashing after Tamara. “Askiös!”
“Is it right for women to do, Kara?”
“Of course. It’s the Old Men’s House, isn’t it?” Kara dusted off her flat little breasts and brought the fold of her sari-like garment neatly across them. “Go on ahead. I’ll stop by and pick up Binira. She told me it’s worth listening to sometimes in there. I’ll see you there.”
Tamara, her wet feet rimmed with the silvery river sand, joined Ramchandra and entered the peacock forest with him on the narrow path.
She was intensely aware of his brown shoulder beside hers, his dark, well-knit, and fragile body, the excellent nose in the stern profile. She was aware that she was aware of this, but it was not the important thing just now. “Are they holding a ceremony for us?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t got some of the key words yet. My request to go there appears to be sufficient reason for a gathering there.”
“Is it all right to bring that?” He was carrying a tape recorder.
“Anything goes in Cloud-Cuckoo Land,” he said, and the stem profile softened with a laugh.
Two of the withered, shadowy, scarce Old Men of the Ndif preceded them into the House, a large decrepit dugout; six or seven more were sitting around inside. There was much muttering of “askiös” and a strong reek of poro fat. The two foreigners joined the ill-defined circle, sitting on the dirt. No fire was lit. No apparatus or atmosphere of ritual was apparent. Presently Kara and Binira came in and sat down muttering “askiös” and cracking mild jokes with the Old Men. From across the circle—the place was lit only by the smokehole, and it was hard to see faces clearly—somebody asked something of Kara. Tamara did not understand the question. Kara’s response was, “I’m getting old enough, aren’t I?” There was a general laugh. One more came in, Bro-Kap, said once to have been a famous hunter, still a big man but stooped, wrinkled, and turtle-mouthed from the loss of his teeth. Instead of sitting down he went to the empty firepit under the smokehole and stood there, arms at his sides. Silence grew around him.
He turned slowly till he faced Ramchandra.
“Have you come to learn to dance?”
“If I may,” Ramchandra answered clearly.
“Are you old?”
“I am no longer young.”
My God, Tamara thought, it’s an initiation—can Ram keep it up? And the next question, sure enough, she did not understand at all; there were no Young or Middle Ndif words in it. Ram, however, appeared to understand, and replied promptly, “Not often.”
“When did you last bring home the kill?”
“I have never killed an animal.”
That brought a hoot, laughs, and some critical discussion. “He must have been born fifty years old!” Binira said, sniggering. “Or else he is terribly lazy,” said a youngish Old Man with a simple look, very earnestly.
Two more questions and answers Tamara could not follow, and then Bro-Kap demanded, harshly she thought, “What do you hunt?”
“I hunt peremensoe.”
Whatever it was, it was right. Audible and tangible approval, backslaps, relaxation. Bro-Kap nodded once, shortly, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and sat down in the circle beside Ramchandra. “What do you want to know?” he inquired, in a thoroughly unritualistic and offhand manner.
“I should like to know,” Ramchandra said, “how the world began.”
“Oh ho ho!” went a couple of geezers across the circle. “Too old for his years, this one! A hundred years old, this fellow!”
“We say this,” Bro-Kap replied. “Man made the world.”