The Telling (12 page)

The actual flesh-and-blood Monitor must have left Okzat-Ozkat; she had not met him in the streets for weeks. It was a relief. She much preferred him as a minatory figment.

She had stopped posing the question about what the maz did. Any four-year-old could have said what they did. They told. They retold, read, recited, discussed, explained, and invented. The infinite matter of their talk was not fixed and could not be defined. And it was still growing, even now; for not all the texts were learned from others, not all the stories were of ancient days, not all the thoughts and ideas had been handed down over the years.

The first time she met the maz Odiedin Manma was at a telling where he told the story of a young man, a villager up in the foothills of Silong, who dreamed that he could fly. The young man dreamed flying so often and so vividly that it seemed he began to take his dreams for waking life. He would describe the sensations of flight and the things he saw from the air. He drew maps of beautiful unknown lands on the other side of the world that he discovered in his flights. People came to hear him tell about flying and to see the marvelous maps. But one day, climbing down a river gorge after a strayed eberdin, he missed his footing, fell, and was killed.

That was all the story. Odiedin Manma made no comment, and no one asked questions. The telling was at the house of the maz Ottiar and Uming. Sutty later asked Maz Ottiar Uming about the story, for it puzzled her.

The old woman said, "Odiedin's partner Manma was killed in a fall when he was twenty-seven. They had been maz only a year."

"And Manma used to tell his dreams of flying?"

Ottiar Uming shook her head. "No," she said. "That is the story, yoz. Odiedin Manma's story. He tells that one. The rest of his telling is in the body." She meant exercises, gymnastic practice, of which Odiedin was a highly respected teacher.

"I see," Sutty said, and went away and thought about it.

She knew one thing, she had learned one thing for sure, here in Okzat-Ozkat: she had learned how to listen. To listen, hear, keep listening to what she'd heard. To carry the words away and listen to them. If telling was the skill of the maz, listening was the skill of the yoz. As they all liked to remark, neither one was any use without the other.

WINTER CAME WITHOUT
much snow but bitterly cold, winds knifing down out of the immense wilderness of mountains to the west and north. Iziezi took Sutty to a secondhand clothing store to buy a worn but sturdy leather coat lined with its own silky fleece. The hood lining was the feathery fur of some mountain animal of which Iziezi said, "All gone now. Too many hunters." She said the leather was not eberdin, as Sutty had thought, but minule, from the high mountains. The coat came below her knees and was met by light, fleece-lined boots. These were new, made of artificial materials, for mountain sports and hiking. The people of the old way placidly accepted new technologies and products, so long as they worked better than the old ones and so long as using them did not require changing one's life in any important way. To Sutty this seemed a profound but reasonable conservatism. But to an economy predicated on endless growth, it was anathema.

Sutty tramped around the icy streets in her old coat and her new boots. In winter in Okzat-Ozkat everybody looked alike in their old leather coats and fleecy hoods, except for the uniformed bureaucrats, who all looked alike in their coats and hoods of artificial fabrics in bright uniform colors, purple, rust, and blue. The merciless cold gave a kind of fellowship of anonymity. When you got indoors the warmth was an unfailing source of relief, pleasure, companionly feeling. On a bitter blue evening, to struggle up the steep streets to some small, stuffy, dim-lit room and gather with the others at the hearth—an electric heater, for there was little wood here near timberline, and all warmth was generated by the ice-cold energy of the Ereha—and to take your mittens off and rub your hands, which seemed so naked and delicate, and look round at the other windburned faces and ice-dewed eyelashes, and hear the little drum go tabatt, tabatt, and the soft voice begin to speak, listing the names of the rivers of Hoying and how each flowed into the next, or telling the story of Ezid and Inamema on the Mountain of Gam, or describing how the Council of Mez raised an army against the western barbarians—that was a solid, enduring, reliable pleasure to Sutty, all winter long.

The western barbarians, she now knew, were the Dovzans. Almost everything the maz taught, all their legends and history and philosophy, came from the center and east of the great continent, and from past centuries, past millennia. Nothing came from Dovza but the language they spoke; and here that was full of words from the original language of this area, Rangma, and other tongues.

Words. A world made of words.

There was music. Some of the maz sang healing chants like those Tong Ov had recorded in the city; some played string instruments, plucked or bowed, to accompany narrative ballads and songs. Sutty recorded them when she could, though her musical stupidity kept her from appreciating them. There had been art, carvings and paintings and tapestries, using the symbols of the Tree and the Mountain and figures and events from the legends and histories. There had been dance, and there were still the various forms of exercise and moving meditation. But first and last there were the words.

When the maz put the mantle of their office—a flimsy length of red or blue cloth—over their shoulders, they were perceived as owning a sacred authority or power. What they said then was part of the Telling.

When they took the scarf off they returned to ordinary status, claiming no personal spiritual authority at all; what they said then weighed no more than what anybody said. Some people of course insisted on ascribing permanent authority to them. Like the people of Sutty's own tribe, many Akans longed to follow a leader, turn earned payment into tribute, load responsibility onto somebody else's shoulders. But if the maz had one quality in common, it was a stubborn modesty. They were not in the charisma business. Maz Imyen Katyan was as gentle a man as she had ever met, but when a woman called him by a reverent title, munan, used for famous maz in the stories and histories, he turned on her with real rage—"How dare you call me that?"—and then, having regained his calm, "When I've been dead a hundred years, yoz."

Sutty had assumed that since everything the maz did professionally was in defiance of the law, at real personal risk, some of this modest style, this very low profile, was a recent thing. But when she said so, Maz Ottiar Uming shook her head.

"Oh, no," the old woman said. "We have to hide, to keep everything secret, yes. But in my grandparents' time I think most of the maz lived the way we do. Nobody can wear the scarf all the time! Not even Maz Elyed Oni.... Of course it was different in the umyazu."

"Tell me about the umyazu, maz."

"They were places built so the power could gather in them. Places full of being. Full of people telling and listening. Full of books."

"Where were they?"

"Oh, everywhere. Here in Okzat-Ozkat there was one up where the High School is now, and one where the pumice works is now. And all the way to Silong, in the high valleys, on the trade roads, there were umyazu for the pilgrims. And down where the land's rich, there were huge, great umyazu, with hundreds of maz living in them, and visiting from one to another all their lives. They kept books, and wrote them, and made records, and kept on telling. They could give their whole life to it, you see. They could always be there where it was. People would go visit them to hear the telling and read the books in the libraries. People went in processions, with red and blue flags. They'd go and stay all winter, sometimes. Save up for years so they could pay the maz and pay for their lodging. My grandmother told me about going to the Red Umyazu of Tenban. She was eleven or twelve years old. It took them nearly the whole year to go and stay and come back. They were pretty wealthy, my grandmother's family, so they could ride all the way, the whole family, with eberdin pulling the wagon. They didn't have the cars and planes then, you know. Nobody did. Most people just walked. But everybody had flags and wore ribbons. Red and blue." Ottiar Uming laughed with pleasure at the thought of those processions. "My mother's mother wrote the story of that journey. I'll get it out and tell it sometime."

Her partner, Uming Ottiar, was unfolding a big, stiff square of paper on the table in the back room of their grocery shop. Ottiar Uming went to help him, setting a polished black stone on each curling corner to keep it flat. Then they invited their five listeners to come forward, salute the paper with the mountain-heart gesture, and study the chart and inscriptions on it. They displayed it thus every three weeks, and Sutty had come each time all winter. It had been her first formal introduction to the thought system of the Tree. The couple's most precious possession, given them fifty years ago by their teacher-maz, it was a marvelously painted map or mandala of the One that is Two giving rise to the Three, to the Five, to the Myriad, and the Myriad again to the Five, the Three, the Two, the One....A Tree, a Body, a Mountain, inscribed within the circle that was everything and nothing. Delicate little figures, animals, people, plants, rocks, rivers, lively as flickering flames, made up each of the greater forms, which divided, rejoined, transformed each into the others and into the whole, the unity made up of infinite variety, the mystery plain as day.

Sutty loved to study it and try to make out the inscriptions and poems surrounding it. The painting was beautiful, the poetry was splendid and elusive, the whole chart was a work of high art, absorbing, enlightening. Maz Uming sat down and after a few knocks on his drum began intoning one of the interminable chants that accompanied the rituals and many of the tellings. Maz Ottiar read and discussed some of the inscriptions, which were four or five hundred years old. Her voice was soft, full of silences. Softly and hesitantly, the students asked questions. She answered them the same way.

Then she drew back and sat down and took up the chant in a gnat voice, and old Uming, half blind, his speech thickened by a stroke, got up and talked about one of the poems.

"That's by Maz Niniu Raying, five, six, seven hundred years back, eh? It's in
The Arbor.
Somebody wrote it here, a good calligrapher, because it talks about how the leaves of the Tree perish but always return so long as we see them and say them. See, here it says: 'Word, the gold beyond the fall, returns the glory to the branch.' And underneath it here, see, somebody later on wrote, 'Mind's life is memory.'" He smiled round at them, a kind, lopsided smile. "Remember that, eh? 'Mind's life is memory.' Don't forget!" He laughed, they laughed. All the while, out front in the grocery shop, the maz' grandson kept the volume turned up high on the audio system, cheery music, exhortations, and news announcements blaring out to cover the illicit poetry, the forbidden laughter.

It was a pity, but no surprise, Sutty told her noter, that an ancient popular cosmology-philosophy-spiritual discipline should contain a large proportion of superstition and verge over into what she labeled in her noter HP, hocus-pocus. The great jungle of significance had its swamps and morasses, and she had at last stumbled into some of them. She met a few maz who claimed arcane knowledge and supernal powers. Boring as she found all such claims, she knew she could not be sure of what was valuable and what was drivel, and painstakingly recorded whatever information she could buy from these maz concerning alchemy, numerology, and literal readings of symbolic texts. They sold her bits of texts and snippets of methodology at a fairly stiff price, grudgingly, hedging the transactions with portentous warnings about the danger of this powerful knowledge.

She particularly detested the literal readings. By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law. But she put it all into her noter—which she had now had to unload into crystal storage twice, for she could not transmit any of the treasure-and-trash she was amassing.

At this distance, with all means of communication monitored, there was no way to consult with Tong Ov as to what she should or he intended to do with all this material. She couldn't even tell him she'd found it. The problem remained, and grew.

Among the HP she came on a brand that was, as far as she knew, unique to Aka: a system of arcane significances attached to the various strokes that composed the ideogrammatic characters and the further strokes and dots that qualified them with verbal tense and mode and nominal case and with Action or Element (for everything, literally every thing, could be categorised under the Four Actions and the Five Elements). Every character of the old writing thus became a code to be interpreted by specialists, who functioned much as horoscope readers had in Sutty's homeland. She discovered that many people in Okzat-Ozkat, including officials of the Corporation, would undertake nothing of importance without calling in a 'sign reader' to write out their name and other relevant words and, after poring over these and referring to impressively elaborate charts and diagrams, to advise and foretell. "This is the kind of thing that makes me sympathise with the Monitor," she told her noter. Then she said, "No. It's what the Monitor wants from his own kind of HP. Political HP. Everything locked in place, on course, under control. But he's handed over the controls just as much as they have."

Many of the practices she learned about had equivalents on Earth. The exercises, like yoga and tai chi, were physical-mental, a lifelong discipline, leading toward mindfulness, or toward a trance state, or toward martial vigor and readiness, depending on the style and the practitioner's desire. Trance seemed to be sought for its own sake as an experience of essential stillness and balance rather than as satori or revelation. Prayer ... Well, what about prayer?

The Akans did not pray.