a surprising flash of scorn and amused condescension, that she was afraid to have her “picture” taken, that—like some primitive tribesman on Earth—she feared that the machine would steal a slice of her soul. Then, almost reluctantly, he realized that wasn’t so: her reaction was more complex than that, her reluctance stemming from aesthetic rather than superstitious grounds, arising from some opaque kind of philosophy or mysticism that he could not understand. Now he was the one to frown. He had been thinking of her almost as a human woman—in some vague way on “his” side against the strangeness of Aei—and to run into this unfathomable core of alien thought in her shattered the illusion, and left him cold and uneasy.
In silence, they went back down Cold Tower Hill into Lothlethren, the light dying behind them in long black and lavender bars across the pale plum sky.
As they came into the outskirts of Brundane, they encountered a ceremony of some kind in progress in Glassblower Square. Six or seven Cian men, elaborately and bizarrely costumed, were dancing in the middle of the square to the skirling music of a tikan and a nose flute, surrounded by a ring of about thirty spectators. Some of the dancers capered drunkenly about on stilts with great black bat wings flapping from their backs, some squirmed bonelessly across the cool blue tiles on their bellies, some whirled and hopped and genuflected, but the center of attention was a huge, grotesquely jigging false head—also on stilts—with three carved and painted faces: one looking straight ahead, one looking right, one looking left. The faces were inscrutable and fierce, so contorted and stylized that it was difficult to tell if they were supposed to be men or demons or beasts, or amalgamations of all three. The forward-looking face, done in dull gray and brown, had both eyes closed; the left-hand face. done in black and silver with streaks of orange, had its eyes turned upward toward the sky; the right-hand face, done in pale green and blue and yellow, had its eyes turned to the ground—the center face was inlaid with bits of ivory or bone; the left with flint and obsidian; the right with feathers and jade. The great three-faced head jigged ponderously around the square, tilting precariously first to one side and then the other, while a twizan stood at the edge of the crowd and declaimed in a sing-song dialect that Farber found hard to follow.
With a lightning change of mood, Liraun became voluble and enthusiastic and gay, and insisted on “explaining” the ceremony to him.
First of all, she told him, it wasn’t a ceremony. This was a secular performance, not a Mode—an interpretation of Danau sur Nestre’s classical poem-play The Exaltation of Little Dead Crawlers . The hero—heroine? the language was ambiguous—was a small worm who lived in the silt at the bottom of Elder Sea. For no reason that Farber could grasp, the worm one day changed into a crawling insect, and the crawling insect subsequently turned into a fish (a sort of flippered eel, actually). The fish (or eel) could have lived a long and peaceful life in the ocean, but as it turned out, the fish was “seahearted.” Farber could not quite tell, either from the twizan’s chant or from Liraun’s cryptic commentary, exactly what “seahearted” meant—possibly “daring,” possibly “restless,” possibly “extraordinarily pious” or “blessed,” possibly “incautious” or even “stupid.” At any rate, it was seahearted, and because it was it resolved to swim from one end of the Great Northern Ocean to the other. And so it did, but by the time it reached the farther shore it had built up such great speed that it continued to swim up onto the land, beating its flippers into legs against the rocky shoreline as it did.
This part of the poem-play was very long, and, to Farber, extremely tedious; it described the fish’s emergence from the ocean with an incredible profusion
In silence, they went back down Cold Tower Hill into Lothlethren, the light dying behind them in long black and lavender bars across the pale plum sky.
As they came into the outskirts of Brundane, they encountered a ceremony of some kind in progress in Glassblower Square. Six or seven Cian men, elaborately and bizarrely costumed, were dancing in the middle of the square to the skirling music of a tikan and a nose flute, surrounded by a ring of about thirty spectators. Some of the dancers capered drunkenly about on stilts with great black bat wings flapping from their backs, some squirmed bonelessly across the cool blue tiles on their bellies, some whirled and hopped and genuflected, but the center of attention was a huge, grotesquely jigging false head—also on stilts—with three carved and painted faces: one looking straight ahead, one looking right, one looking left. The faces were inscrutable and fierce, so contorted and stylized that it was difficult to tell if they were supposed to be men or demons or beasts, or amalgamations of all three. The forward-looking face, done in dull gray and brown, had both eyes closed; the left-hand face. done in black and silver with streaks of orange, had its eyes turned upward toward the sky; the right-hand face, done in pale green and blue and yellow, had its eyes turned to the ground—the center face was inlaid with bits of ivory or bone; the left with flint and obsidian; the right with feathers and jade. The great three-faced head jigged ponderously around the square, tilting precariously first to one side and then the other, while a twizan stood at the edge of the crowd and declaimed in a sing-song dialect that Farber found hard to follow.
With a lightning change of mood, Liraun became voluble and enthusiastic and gay, and insisted on “explaining” the ceremony to him.
First of all, she told him, it wasn’t a ceremony. This was a secular performance, not a Mode—an interpretation of Danau sur Nestre’s classical poem-play The Exaltation of Little Dead Crawlers . The hero—heroine? the language was ambiguous—was a small worm who lived in the silt at the bottom of Elder Sea. For no reason that Farber could grasp, the worm one day changed into a crawling insect, and the crawling insect subsequently turned into a fish (a sort of flippered eel, actually). The fish (or eel) could have lived a long and peaceful life in the ocean, but as it turned out, the fish was “seahearted.” Farber could not quite tell, either from the twizan’s chant or from Liraun’s cryptic commentary, exactly what “seahearted” meant—possibly “daring,” possibly “restless,” possibly “extraordinarily pious” or “blessed,” possibly “incautious” or even “stupid.” At any rate, it was seahearted, and because it was it resolved to swim from one end of the Great Northern Ocean to the other. And so it did, but by the time it reached the farther shore it had built up such great speed that it continued to swim up onto the land, beating its flippers into legs against the rocky shoreline as it did.
This part of the poem-play was very long, and, to Farber, extremely tedious; it described the fish’s emergence from the ocean with an incredible profusion
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