"LET ME TELL YOU HOW I LOVE YOU"

When Europeans discovered how to build tall world-circulating ships, moving on the great wind currents of the planet, they went to other lands, including the Americas and were startled to discover that people lived there.  But they were very different from the people they knew and therefore they misinterpreted what they found.  No one understood ecology or DNA or the interaction between the two.  With typical hubris, the explorers judged everyone in terms of themselves and were delighted that sexual congress was possible.

Much of native indigenous “racial” printed material has derived from that.  Then everyone realized that people everywhere are indigenous, living in small communities fitted to the land, each according to the local ecology: fish Indians, bison Indians, corn Indians, irrigation Indians, woodland Indians — and none of them were even from India.  Shaped by their circumstances, the individuals and — more importantly to them,  the communities — acted out dramatic stories, sometimes about warfare and other times about collaboration.  But almost all of them were near-invisible, as the growing “white” community tried to cope with the collection of Africans they had brought to this continent and used as slaves.

Europeans had developed a style of writing fiction that was based on all this.  It was “romantic,” which began in Europe, developing from the word “roman” or story.  The implication is that a romantic person was “better” in something like the same sense as religion.  It was a conversion, a transformation.

Here’s one definition:  “Definition of romantic for English Language Learners. : of, relating to, or involving love between two people. : making someone think of love : suitable for romance. : thinking about love and doing and saying things to show that you love someone.”  (Merriam-Webster)

Then later: “In the context of romantic love relationships, romance usually implies an expression of one's strong romantic love, or one's deep and strong emotional desires to connect with another person intimately or romantically.”  (Wikipedia)

“A romantic is a person who believes in romanticism, which is like a philosophy on life. Romantics love nature, old things like castles and churches, love poetry and beauty, and have a tendency to get carried away by ideas. This can be both bad and good, as most of the original romantics stood up for their beliefs and greatly helped England, but also went to help people in revolutions and got killed. They also tend to get randomly depressed, but this is because the weather and colors and beautiful things make them act differently than others.”  (Urban Dictionary)

Since 1492 “Indians” have always been everywhere, which makes sense because they were already here when Columbus showed up.  In my childhood in Portland, Oregon, there were at least two teachers at my school.  One was Mrs. Eagle who finally understood how to teach my brother to read.  (We were Scots/Irish.)  The other was Mildred Colbert, an elder in her Chinook tribe and the author of “Kutkos: Chinook Tyee,” written in 1942 and now reissued.  No one made a fuss, as they did later in Browning, MT, when the tribal people began to be teachers.  It was just how things were.  One of my classmates had a white father who spoke Chinook with Miss Colbert.  A man on our block was a student and friend of indigenous people and offered we kids each a sample of pemmican.

Teaching in Browning in the Sixties was not romantic — because life here is pretty tough, if only because of the weather — but it has been an effective anchor and measure of romanticism as I’ve tried to keep up with “Indian” literature.  And it has meant a wide exposure to “Indians” of all kinds, from the oldest leaders (Chewing Black Bone who was more than a century old in the Sixties, a Blackfeet)  He was as “exotic” and “different” from whites as possible in those times.  But the word, "exotic", is entirely inappropriate, since it refers to someone or something from far away, foreign.  Like James Mackey who lives in Cyprus, is not American, has only been on this continent in brief visits, and studied in England by mail with a Portuguese female professor who was expert on post-modern thought, barely understood on the American continent.  Yet Mackey insists on styling himself as an expert on American pan-indigenous writing.

Since most indigenous “romans” are oral and most scholarship is written, this was originally a sign that “Indians” were “dumb.”  (Those who are not like us are “dumb.”)  Then a scholarship (at first white and later more and more indigenous) grew up around this oral language.  An example is a book contemporaneous with “Smoke Signals” and praised by indigenous people in the former, “Smoothing the Ground, Essays on Native American Oral Literature” edited by Brian Swann, an Englishman teaching in Manhattan, a translator of indigenous people of many continents, highly romantic and poetic.  These books are love affairs, though they are non-fiction.

Partly what makes indigenous writing, particularly that of the Americas, so riveting for Euros and Euro-descent people is that it is so romantic, a romance with the “Other,” even if the otherness is quite diluted in young people these days — at least most of them.  Old ladies of a literary type come to reservations and strike up relationships with young men who want their brains to be respected.  But the old ladies never quite gave up control.

What I mean by “control” is someone like Adrian Jawort, http://billingsgazette.com/business/40under40/under-forty-adrian-jawort-freelance-writer-owner-off-the-pass/article_2bc11c9a-2910-505e-b3d5-2ef1b70001c6.html  He doesn’t worry about his publisher because “Off the Path” IS his publisher and “Off the Path” is HIS, along with partners.  He is enrolled.  The stories are about “now” and they are the kind of love stories that people write in war, because the poverty war is as real as any other, but secret.  There is a kind of hatred that is everted love, a desire to dominate and inhabit, to compel respect — on the “white” side the desire to escape guilt and on the “Indian” side the necessity of survival, two sides of the “roman.”

There’s so much more to say.  Much of it should be said by the indigenous people of this continent, whether or not they look like glamorous people waiting for you to save them, as a form of salvation for YOU, demonstrating your virtue.

THE MARRIAGE QUANDARY

An institution is nothing but an organized version of a paradigm, a set of culture concepts that people more or less assume to be true and so insist on.  As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, when the paradigm stops working, people stop believing in it.  The institutional paradigm of “marriage” is breaking down.  

Reasons include:

1.  Economics:  a woman needn’t be dependent on a man’s income and assets while many men -- maybe the majority -- no longer earn enough money to support a wife, children, and a home.

2.  Ability to control conception of children.

3.  Willingness to abandon or eject children.

4.  Genetic research indicating that monogamous mammals are practically nonexistent: they all get a little on the side if they can.  Birds are more likely pair-bonded, but not always.

5.  Longevity means that human “life-long” can now be a century instead of a few decades.  Relationships tend to be unstable, accumulating children with blurry claims.

6.  Institutionalized nursing, combat, home-maintenance, and urban living make it possible for individuals to survive on their own.

7.  Obvious suffering of women in the old systems.

8.  Belief that people should not be owned by other people.

9.  Reaching the limits of what people can earn.

10.  Punishing poverty with imprisonment and fines.

11.  Big anonymous cities (hide).

12.  Almost unlimited mobility (escape).

Religious institutions have lost their grip on ceremonies of dedication to marriage and children, let alone respect for celibacy.  What was once a serious matter worthy of counseling has slid into being a sort of party about coming of age, esp. for women.  In an effort to keep children born out of wedlock from being shamed, we have succeeded in making everyone shameless, to the point of frothy white wedding dresses designed for the pregnant bride.

Government has had somewhat the same fate.  Over and over guys who wanted to “throw a leg over” have insisted that marriage is just a piece of paper.  Laws that require a father to support his child, and the DNA proof of which child that is, ought to have a sobering effect, as do divorce laws that automatically award a percentage of the couple’s assets according to the length of time they’ve been married.  Very few people sit down to read the state’s laws about ownership and legal obligations in marriage, instead picking up a lot of miscellaneous ideas from television shows where the screenwriters have invented generic locations.  If marrying an enrolled Indian or an immigrant, legal or not, a look into the laws would be very very smart.

Avoid extraterrestrials

Another medical category is disease, fertility, and so on.  Since even microbes have DNA and even viruses have families, it is possible to discover who was contagious, the bug-donor.  Why should the public care?   Because we’re all at risk, because it’s expensive to fight epidemics, because the emergency room at a hospital and the welfare support system both pay out a LOT to people who are in over their heads.  That’s TAX money.

Government’s main job is to keep order and to provide benefits that can’t easily be provided by individuals, mostly infrastructure networks.  Often this extends into medical contexts, even unto death and burial, by dictating who has access to patients in hospitals or make decisions about their treatment.  Taxation, insurance, liability, inheritance and other matters may include weighting in favor of old-fashioned legally married people and their children.

Prince William and Katherine -- but you knew that.

More than any of that technical stuff, the emotional consequences of marriage take people by surprise.  Violence, for instance.  Loving someone more than they love back.  Discovering pasts that come by ambush to claim energy, money, caring.  One’s earliest experience of nuclear family dynamics can erupt into the present, distorting reality and sanity.  Demands from the partner may turn out to be extraordinary: coping with kidnapping or extortion, involvement in gambling, mutilating damage from burns or war, PTSD, surviving community natural disasters or just one’s home’s destruction, addictions of various kinds, chronic diseases.  Loss of a child.  Stigma.  Community hostility.  These days one cannot discount national revolution and riots.

If the love is a true and growing bond, it will ask for many compromises and heartaches, but on the other hand provide someone who is always there, holding out a hand, guarding your back, keeping the bed warm.  That means you have a lot to lose.

When an institution gets hold of a cultural paradigm, it builds it in, tries to make it a law so it won’t go away.  Think of the wedding industry!   If people are on their fourth marriage, unashamed and still prepared to go into debt for all the fancy stuff, it’s great for sales.  All those slick magazines!  All those teenaged girls escaping into fantasy!  All those middle-aged people marrying who can afford so much more!  All those pretty little churches available to rent by people who are sentimental, but not sentimental enough to have established a relationship with their own church.  By the way, wedding cakes and garters are not religious -- they're only merchandise.

But it is the religious institutions who hang on to marriage the hardest.  They muster all the energy they have to summon supernatural forces, though that often raises peculiar problems: if humans are physically reconstituted in heaven -- at what age? Do you get missing parts back?  If persons were married three or fourth times, how does that work out?  Or, changing institutions, don’t any of those insurgents realize how much trouble a hundred virgins would be?  Or maybe they’re not teenagers -- would that be better or worse?  Pruney old maids?  Does the fantasy include boy virgins?

Like contemporary political parties, today's religious institutions are sundered and splintered and contradict each other into paralysis.  The governmental institutions at all levels and in their various departments are just as bad.  No wonder they have no credibility when it comes time for one to curb the other.  It is all too clear that they are simply preserving their own authority and existence rather than trying to find ways to help the people who fund them and suffer from them.

But most humans hope for a special and significant other that matches well enough for the partnership to go on a long time, long enough to grow together and really know each other, share memories, not have to explain everything.  Synergy is the word for two things that are fine separately, but make a jump into much higher value and function when combined.

So what new cultural paradigm is forming?  Gays who marry -- some of whom adopt -- may require a good deal of economic jiggering, maybe require new legal documents stipulating how to handle property and parenthood.  Will some better way of handling abandoned children come out of this?  We can hope.  What will be the final outcome of all the people who so value genomic children of their own that they pay out huge fees and suffer physical pain and risk?  Even now a divorce settlement must include provision for sperm, ova, and conceptia that have been frozen for later activation into children.  Some people care a lot more about them -- since they’re only fantasy -- than about their own rebellious, desperate children.  The law now forbids using those biological resources for anything but becoming children of the donors -- will that change as the authority of religion institutions is weakened more and more?

What should be the minimum obligations of married people to each other?  What will automatically cancel the relationship?  Should there be two stages: one a commitment to intimacy and the other to the creation and raising of children?  (Margaret Mead suggested that many years ago.)   Should there be tests before people are certified for marriage -- not just for STD’s but for financial competency, home maintenance, child-management skills?  How would you enforce such a thing in a culture where people hook up with strangers in bars without so much as catching their names?  Should there be some system of something like kibbutzim for the raising of children in groups?  (How would they be different from old-fashioned miserable orphanages?)  What would the KIDS want?  I think probably a mom and dad, or a mom and mom, or a dad and dad, or at least a mom OR a dad.  Village optional.

AMBER EYES Part 5 Fantasy

The Twin began to walk out across the valley alone so she could think, being careful to go in the opposite direction of Tokas.  She had a favorite spot where a lot of blue flowers grew and that was where she went most often.  One day she realized that the littlest dragonlet had crept into her pocket and come with her.  It crawled over into her lap.  Without meaning to, she began to grieve for her Parsnip, her dear Burly lover Parsnip, and she began to weep, because not only was he dead, but she herself had killed him.  She wept and the little dragon lapped up her tears.  The more tears she consumed, the more she began to turn from red to blue.

This happened several days in a row and the little dragon was now as blue as the flowers, but it didn’t seem to hurt her.  In fact, now that she didn’t have to compete for blood, she seemed to do a lot better.  And the Twin was so charmed by this comforting that she began to be consoled.  So she could think again.

“A virus is code,” she thought.  “Withering is a virus of vulnerability.  Its code says not to defend, to surrender, to give up.  Rabies is a virus of attack, its code says rage, rage, never give up, attack!   It might be that rabies can cure Withering because of some part of its code.”  She went back and told Tokas this.  Then she sat down to study her glass reader.

The raven tapped on the black window that didn’t look outside.  There were pictures.  They showed the Mayor’s son and he was Withering.  The Mayor was saying they needed dragon’s blood NOW.  The little red dragons could fly by this time and they circled around the room, trying to understand what they were looking at, because they were frightened.  Tokas and his raven tried to reassure them, that they would be protected even if they had to leave the safe house, but they didn’t believe him.  Why would they?

The Twin said,  “I will go and explain to the Mayor.  Maybe he’ll let me bring the boy here.  I can take some medicines that might help.”

Tokas didn’t want her to go but it was the sensible thing to do.  She put on her cloak, looked down at the brooch that clasped it, amber set in silver, and had an idea.  There was a sharp pin on the back.  “Bring your own cloak brooch, Tokas!   We will mingle our blood and that way our twinness will become one.  We will have that no matter what else happens.”   So they did that and the little blue dragonlet flew in between them just as their blood mingled and she lapped it up.

The Twin set off, her cloak blowing in the stiff wind that had sprung up.  She believed that the blue dragonlet had stayed with the others where Tokas and the Raven would protect them.  She went over the Notch with no problem and walked into town  It was a little difficult to find the Mayor when people saw her amber eyes.  They thought the Mayor had enough trouble with his son dying and all.

She had a hard time explaining to the Mayor and his wife and the nurse and the doctor that she was an herbalist and that she had come from Tokas and that if they could just keep the son alive a little longer, they might be able to develop a cure after all.  But the people just had a hard time believing the Twin.

Finally she got to the boy’s bedside.  He had IV lines going into him and catheter lines coming out of him.  He was very pale and didn’t want to open his eyes.  She spoke to him softly.  Just then the little blue dragon crawled out of her pocket where she had been all along.  The boy’s eyes flew open.  He had never seen a dragon.  They had all been eliminated from this side of the rampart.  

Before the Twin could do anything, the dragon yanked out the boy’s IV needle and stabbed herself with it.  Her blood was as blue as she was and she smeared it onto the boy’s lips.  He licked it off in a reflex.  But he didn’t become blue.  Rather his cheeks began to flush pink and he laughed.  That is, he laughed until he realized that the little dragon had emptied itself and was now limp, exhausted. 

The Twin took from her pouch of medicines a little amber bottle and began to drip it into the dragonlet’s mouth.  The doctor picked up the bottle and took a whiff to see what it was.  “Why, it’s whisky!” he exclaimed. 

“Dragon blood is mostly alcohol,” the Twin informed him.  “You should never drink it.”  But it revived her blue dragon.  In a while the creature was well enough that she could take it in her arms and walk it home through the notch.  By the next day it was flying again.  The Mayor’s son had been cured, but it was impossible to tell whether the blood of the dragon had mutated because of the grief-laden tears or whether it had been the reuniting of the Twin blood that had made rage and vulnerability into one curative transformed thing.

Tokas never went back to the other side.  He built a second small house.  At first it had a kind of pigeon cote on top for the dragonlets, but they were soon fully grown and chose roosts in the cliffs until they flew away to look for mates.  The Raven missed them and went about moping for a while.  “GROK.”

But the blue dragonlet, which never got all that big, stayed in the stone house with the Twin, and slept behind the Twin’s knees, curled up like a cat on her mother’s dragonhide which clinked and jingled a little when it was moved, because dragon scales are metallic.  The Twin isolated the curative molecular substance in her blood and sent Raven with the formula over to the other side so they could cure all Withering.

In the end, Tokas and the Twin named the little blue dragon “Isabella.”  But only one other person besides this writer knows that.

AMBER EYES Part 4 Fantasy

IV.

When Tokas woke up out in the grass and threw off his dewy cloak, he had to think a moment where he was.  Then he went to the door of the small stone house, which stood open, and entered.  Moving on to the bedroom door, he felt wind on his shoulders and the raven blew in past him, a small furry thing squeaking and struggling in its beak.  Raven took the morsel to the bed where the seven little dragons were nestled in their mother’s hide.  The two biggest dragons pounced and pierced the breakfast morsel’s throat, but before they could feed, the raven moved it over to the runt of the litter, who lapped hungrily.

The twin was propped up on pillows with a sheet of glass in her hands, evidently reading off it.  She was unperturbed at all the goings-on.  He had hung his squirming jerkin over a chair last night, but it had not taken long for the little dragons to work their way out and find their mother’s familiar skin.  They were not particularly sentimental, but they liked their life and resented change.  Of course, growing would change them no matter what.

“You’re out of luck,” said the Twin.

“What?”

“The dragonlings do not have rabies.”

“What?”

“They cannot cure the withering with their blood.  I tested them and they do NOT have rabies.”

“Then I’ll have to expose them to rabies.”

“Good luck with that.  What’s your plan?”

“Are there no villages near here?  Villages always have pye dogs and pye dogs always carry rabies.”

The twin stared at him with her amber eyes.  “You will look like all the other people in this village -- we all have amber eyes on this side of the ramparts -- but the pye dogs will know you are different.  Especially if you go there wearing your jerkin full of dragonlings.”

“ I would go and catch the rabies and bring it back to the dragons, but I’ve been vaccinated.”  They both looked at the raven.  He said,  “Ravens can’t catch rabies.”  He thought a moment.  “But he could catch a striped stinko.”

The key to rabies was night-time.  Daylight killed the virus, the same as it shriveled vampires.  The stinkos slipped around at night, which is why they had to make their warning a smell instead of a sight, though it took very little light to see its black and white checkered back.

The Twin sighed and put down her sheet of glass.  She looked at the dragonlings, now fed and curling up together to sleep.  “It seems a shame.”  She rolled over and stuck her feet out.  “I suppose you want breakfast.”

“I do.”

She stood up. “You can eat anything you can find.  I have business.”

The writer took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.  She was getting too much into the fun of gender swapping and not paying attention to plot.  If this thing were going to sell, it would need some sex, but the two two main characters are twins, so that won’t work unless one wants to mess with incest.  There was another solution.  The female twin could remember her lover, the Burly.  That would be interesting.

The Burly was silvery and soft.  His long digging claws were ivory and his nose was black leather.  His eyes were big for a Burly and he looked at her kindly, though his sort were notorious for being remorseless and violent.  He had come to her small stone house with an infected wound that looked to her like . . .  well, she couldn’t quite tell what.  They didn’t seem like sword slicings or big cat rakings.  

To treat the wounds -- she assumed that’s what he was there for, since she was a plantswoman of sorts -- she had to shave his fur.  When she shaved his belly, she found words written on his skin.  The language was only semi-familiar, not so much like a foreign language but like an ancient version of the one she knew.  She copied it onto her glass reader before she prepared an unguent for the burly’s wounds, so she could study the writing even after the fur grew back.

So many times she read the strange words that they began to appear on her skin -- sentences on her arms, paragraphs on her thighs.  Finally there was a question that was not on the glass.  It appeared written in large letters across her belly and she could read it:  “Where is your Twin?”  The burly was looking at her intently.

She was flooded with emotion.  She had tried not to think about her Twin.  They had been separated when they began to grow into their self-hood but she didn’t know why and she couldn’t remember how.  Just the terrible stricken loneliness of the boy not being there anymore.  She began to weep and the Burly licked her face, his broad thin tongue tenderly sliding over her cheeks and across her lips.  She laughed.  His spit tasted like turnips.  But there was something pressing against her leg and it was quite humanoid.

Now she went back to her glass reader.  There was always so much to learn.

That night the Burly and she lay together on the curvy brass bed.  In those days she didn’t use conventional bedding, but heaped up the bed with hay of sweetgrass, sweet clover, horsemint and a little alfalfa. He clasped her to his shaven chest, he did, and she was surprised to learn that Burlies purr like cats, but she liked it.  He was warm with all that fur, softer than one might expect, but firmly muscled.  And after a week of nights like that, she curled up, he curled around her back, then she discovered what that humanoid thing was for.  She wished she could purr.  “Parsnip,” she said.  “Sweet parsnip.”

Got to get this story back to the withering.  This is just playing around.  The main plot point is the withering and the rest is window-dressing.  Maybe I should capitalize Withering.

One day she deciphered one word from the Burly’s chest:  Withering.  With that knowledge as her key, she finally began to unravel the words into sense.  That’s about the point she had reached with Tokas showed up.  

Now the dragonlets were growing quickly and outstripping what Raven could supply to eat, so that Tokas had to begin rabbit hunting.  The wrestling and growing heat of the little creatures made too much commotion for her to think.

AMBER EYES Part 3 Fantasy Fiction

Tokas had known that baby dragons were found along mountain fronts where they could learn to fly on the thermal air that formed and lifted there.  But he didn’t know much more than that.  The “other” side of the mountains didn’t seem so different from the side he had known all his life.  Maybe it smelled different -- more aromatic somehow, saltier.  It was drier on this side and the plants tended to be a little tougher, sort of medicinal and astringent.  He inhaled deeply.

Raven flew along the cliffs, which were just as steep on this side, and Tokas walked below, his bow and arrow at the ready.  When he came to an awful stench emitted by a low cave, he thought, “aha!”.  When he investigated, the floor of the cave was piled with tiny bones of mammals: voles, mice, varieties of rats and squirrels.  They were white splinters on the bottom, but the top layers still had flesh and fur clinging to them, green flies buzzing at them.  He hated to stick his head in, but it had to be done.  

He was looking up a chimney in the rock with daylight at the top.  Just barely, by the filtered light, he could make out what seemed to be old red leather gloves attached to the walls, except that they moved and pulsed.  Baby dragons.

Even if he had been able to force his way into the entrance at the bottom, maybe after raking out enough of the tiny interlaced bones to make space, he would not have been able to go up the chimney.  He was thinking about ropes and ladders when the raven dove into the top and pulled out by the nape one of the squirming and squeaking little creatures.  She flew it out the top and down to Tokas, who quickly cinched it into one of the pockets of his jerkin with only its head sticking out.  

The raven repeated this until nearly all were pocketed but then the last one was resourceful enough to twist in her beak and use its little thorn to stab the big bird.  Startled more than hurt (GROK!!) the raven dropped the last little beast from very high and it hit on a rock before it could spread its leather wings.  It took a few minutes to die, its tiny glittering eyes flickering back and forth desperately and its small red claws clutching at the air like hands, while the thin membranes of the wings went stiff, shuddering, then iimp.  For the first time Tokas thought of it as a living creature that wanted to live, just like any other creature.  Until now it might as well have been a pair of pliers.

He had seven pockets filled -- had only prepared eight.  He wondered how many baby dragons it would take to create a cure for the withering.  Why hadn’t he asked?  One of the seven seemed small and puny -- what if it died on the way?  He had been off-balance enough not to negotiate the bounty before he left.

Absorbed in such thoughts, he failed to realize the wide kiting keening and flaming shape coming down out of the sky was the mother dragon.  The raven dove down between Tokas feet -- as though he could protect either of them.  He pulled one arrow after another from his quiver and sent them in quick succession at the hurricane dragon, glittering with fire, but he only punched holes in her wings.  He could see sky through them, but it didn’t prevent them from keeping her airborne.  Her claws were reaching for his face when he used the last arrow.  He turned his head away to protect his eyes.

There was a great thumping and a sound like a tent collapsing, then sighing.  He looked.  There was the amber-eyed twin, staring at him, lowering her bow.  From the side she had transfixed the dragon’s head.  But she only stared for a moment.  Then she whipped out a knife with an antler handle.  “Help me turn her over,” she commanded.

“What?”

“You heard me.  If you don’t skin a dragon before it cools, it’s too hard to peel the skin back -- twice as much work.”  He complied -- stepping over the raven -- though the body was almost too hot to touch.  The animal’s scales steamed.  The women sliced down the front, out to the paws, and down the underside of the tail.  Together they clutched and tugged until they had dragged the skin off to the side.  It was huge, but light as silk.  

When he stood for a moment, he felt sharp stabs against his skin and a hullabaloo of desperate sounds from inside his jerkin.   The raven hopped to his shoulder and tried to peer down his neck.  The twin was staring again.  Then she said,  “Of course, they smell their dead mother.  We’d better get away from the body before the scavengers come.  There they are already!”  She pointed.  He expected birds, maybe vultures, but they were a cloud of iridescent butterflies with needle probosises.

“Hurry!” she commanded  “They’ll settle on the flesh.  They don’t care about the hide.”  They rushed away over the long grass which -- when bent -- was slick so that it was fairly easy to drag the dragonskin.  When he glanced back, he saw the brightly glorious wings had settled into a mass of moving pelage over the dragon’s meat, which was steadily diminishing and sinking under the injections of their acid-carrying needles.

In a minute, having used up the surge of adrenaline that powered them at first, they stopped to puff,.  Tokas knew he sounded like a fool, but he couldn’t help it.  “What will you DO with this dragonskin?”

“I need a new bedspread.”

 He wondered what sort of bedroom would shelter a bed with a dragon bedspread and imagined a great stone castle.  It was stone, right enough, but a small cottage.  They dragged the skin across the front room and into the bedroom at the back where -- oh, that was better -- a great curled brass bedstead was waiting.  The blood had evaporated off their hands and out of the skin.  “Dragon blood has a lot of alcohol,” she explained.  “Never drink it.”

He did not understand how she knew so many things.  “Reading.” she said, though he hadn’t said anything out loud.  She must be reading his mind.  The raven stood on a cabinet and tapped on a black window that didn’t open to the outdoors.  With every tap little marks appeared.  Some kind of code, Tokas assumed.  That must be reading.  The raven was actually doing it.

He tried thinking a question:  “Where are the burlies? “  

“Later,” she said out loud.  “You need to replace liquid so your babies won’t starve and you won’t become a husk.”

.

AMBER EYES Part 2 Fantasy Fiction

II.

The woman who claimed to be his twin refused to explain anything more than that.  He could understand that they looked alike, both had amber eyes, both had the same amber-set-in-silver clasps on their cloaks, but he had no memory of any twin.  He could remember learning to walk, but there was no twin then.  Where did she come from and why did she know, but he didn’t?  

The author stopped to ponder choices.  When we want to know about past generations of our birth families, we really just want to know about ourselves.  The fear, of course, is that we’ll find out something appalling: a fatal hereditary disease or a reputation for criminality.  But the hope is that there will be something revealing.  A family treasure waiting to be given.  A lost community now regained.  This last looks like the best option.  

The moons had crossed and set over their opposite horizons.  The woman lay down in the pool of blood around her Burly lover, up against his dead and hairy side, and went to sleep.  Tokas, who didn’t even know his twin’s name, went a little ways into the aspen grove and made a sort of nest out of his cloak.  The raven watched from a branch overhead,  At dawn she flew down to Tokas’ nest and laid an egg on his chest.  She had never done this before.  “GROCK!” 

Carefully he picked up the white egg, the right size to fill up his palm, and when it warmed from his hand, an image formed and flickered on the side of it.  The raven had laid a “seeing egg.”  Tokas had heard of these but didn’t know much about them except that they showed things you should know.  Before he could really focus on the little image, he was distracted by hammering.  When he left the grove and approached the house, he saw that the twin had loaded the Burly onto a kind of travois.  Not alone, 

She had another Burly with her, this one smaller and dark instead of silvery.  One whole side of the twin was caked with her lover’s blood.  Without saying anything to him, without even looking at him, the woman and the second Burly -- harnessed together -- set off with their burden on the path to the notch.  

“WAIT!” he cried out and raised his arm to get their attention, forgetting that he was holding the egg.  It fell at his feet -- splat.  Now only an ordinary broken egg, runny and two-colored.   The raven made a sound that could only be interpreted as swearing and looked off into the distance for a long time.  Then she ate the remains of the egg.  Tokas sat down, threw his cloak over his head, and wept.  There was nothing else to do.  The raven flew with the travois for a while, but turned back when they neared the Notch and crossed.

The writer thought,  “It’s always fun to mix the future with the primitive.  Except now that seeing egg would be a smart phone or something.  It could still drop and break.  The raven knows not to waste resources which shows it’s a smart bird.

Tokas was heart-broken, frustrated, angry, and stricken.  He didn’t try to catch anything for bounty and grew thin.  But then one day a messenger came for him from the town hall.  The mayor had an assignment for him.  The mayor’s son had caught the “Withering.”

“Oh, yeah,” thought the author.  Now she could begin to blend the dynamics between the two cultures on either side of the Notch with the class struggle on Tokas’ side.  This is the one he knows, but he doesn’t really fit, and he needs to fit so he takes on this crazy chore.  HIV-AIDS is the underlying pattern, of course.  The pandemic of our era.  Thus, blood.  But the grownups will breathe fire like predator drones.  They are related.  The whole desire to destroy enemies while saving one’s own.

There was only one cure for the Withering.  The babies of blood dragons had a thorn growing on their snouts which they used to prick the skins of animals so as to get the blood that gave them their names.  They were something like vampire bats.  Ir turned out that these thorn pricks could infect the victims with rabies, an old earth viral disease that was known to at least once cure cancer.  Someone in this valley had discovered that their viral rabies would also cure the Withering.  The trouble was that in order to control the rabies, all the baby blood dragons had been killed.  In fact, Tokas had done much of that killing himself.  

Now the mayor wanted him to cross through the Notch to try to collect baby blood dragons.  He really didn’t have much choice, but he thought maybe it was fate, since he had been going back and forth in his mind about whether to go look for his twin.  The mayor paid for rabies vaccination.   

After some thought Tokas went to the saddle maker to have a special garment made for himself, half-armor and half-jerkin.  It was stiff saddle leather on the outside, but when the front was held open, it revealed that it was lined with soft chamois pockets, each with a drawstring at the top.  Tokas knew that the baby blood dragons would have to be brought back safely, kept warm and dark.  Each pocket was about the right size and shape for a shoe, so he told the saddle maker that’s what it was, a way of storing precious shoes.  If people knew he was bringing back the blood dragons that had once been so deadly, they would have destroyed the babies -- too bad about the Mayor’s son Withering.  No thought for whether the Withering might be more deadly than rabies.

When he put on his strange garment and started down the path, the raven flew in a zigzag ahead of him, reconnoitering, looking for alternatives and problems.   But when they got close to the Notch, it was clear where the path went -- there was really no other way across.  The ramparts of the mountains were far too steep to climb.  Not even rock chucks went up them.  Nothing to eat at that altitude anyway.  A little snow fell there all year round.

To be continued

AMBER EYES: Fantasy fiction

Tokas had amber eyes.  Everyone else in his tribe had black eyes.  If his hair had not been as dark and glossy as the raven who followed him everywhere, he would have been looked on with suspicion, but with only the eyes different, he was merely distinguished, special.  His line of work was capture.  Not people but all the other shapers that slipped in and out of the tribe’s domain.  Sometimes they were big, sometimes little, sometimes dangerous and sometimes not.  He drew no salary and was provided no equipment.  He worked by bounty, so he could not get lazy.  He liked that.  So did the raven, bobbing its head up and down in assent.

But more recently he’d been slacking off a little -- not much.  The raven hopped up to him where he lay on his stomach. seeming to doze.  The big bird twisted its head from side to side, looking with one eye and then with the other, and calling out hoarsely  “NAAAA”.  Tokas laughed.  Not as lazy as he looked sprawled in the grass of the high ridge, he had been making plans.

“Sometimes a water stream must stop and pool up to find the best outlet,” he explained.  “It’s almost high enough to reach the notch now.”   There was no water -- it was a metaphor.  The notch in question was obvious enough in the distance, a pass between high mountains,  but water was not the problem.  The notch was where the burlys crossed.  There were far too many of them these past months and they were breaking into houses, which they normally did not do.  Their motive was always one thing:  hunger.

The writer stopped.  Maybe it was too obvious that “burlys” were a lot like bears, but since they represented one of her natural history expertises, it was smart to draw on them for the sake of coherence and resonance.  The raven was good.  But mostly she liked the amber eyes idea.  Heroes should be loners.  That was the entrance for the immersive reader.  People looking for immersion wanted to leave their ordinary lives.  Loneliness.  Imagine.  Escape. 

Should she go medieval or American Indian?  Was it possible to mingle the two?  She’d give it a try.

The burlys had never crossed through the notch until the authorities made the People put their dead in little houses instead of in the caves and tree branches along the rivers.  Burlys loved to eat People beyond all other foods.  So his plan was to build a little house with nothing in it, but a very strong little house that a burly could not break out of, then trap the animal in it.  

Tokas and Raven went out along the ridge towards the notch but before they got there, they saw a small house at the edge of a patch of aspen.  it was not a death house that he knew about, so he thought it would be an ideal way to speed things up -- he could reinforce THIS house instead of having to build one from the ground up.  Raven flew overhead as he carefully slipped up a grassy way that became a path to the house.  

“AAAAAWWWWW,” cried the raven in warning, and Tokas faded into the edge of the copse.  It was a burly, its high silvery shoulders rolling, coming along the trail from the other direction -- he could see it went past the house on up towards the notch.  The burly did not hesitate but went right into the open door of the house,

Moving soundlessly and readying his bow, Tokas came to the door and stood looking into the darkness of the interior, waiting for his vision to adjust.  The burly inside roared.  

Then there was a sharp clear cold voice just behind him.  “Put down that bow,” said a woman’s voice, “Or I will pinion you in my own doorway.”

“There’s a burly in your house!  I am protecting you!”

“That burly is my lover.  Kill him and you kill me, but not before I take you with us.”    

“GAAAAAH”  croaked the Raven.

Naw, thought the writer.  That’s too hokey.  I’d better have the Raven say something else.  I like getting sex into it and a warrior woman, but I’d better decide about this bird.  Is it a female in love and faithful to Tokas?  Or is it just a standard familiar, sort of a protective pet?  And is this burly a real bear or a guy in a bear cloak or something.  I like the idea of a real bear, though that means no human-type sex.  Is that so necessary?  Can’t there be a sort of fusion of hearts?  Most of the readers will be female.

The burly must have come to the door; he could smell its rank fur and hear its jaws clacking  -- even feel the heat radiating from the beast -- but he could not take his gaze off the woman’s face.  She had amber eyes.  She nocked an arrow and drew her bow.  He was frozen between her and her burly lover.  

Raven broke the deadlock with a hoarse cry and pummeling wings, sending a spray of ebony feathers into the air.  In the sky the two moons were converging as they always do at dusk, exchanging places through a momentary fusion before they passed on their separate paths.

Tokas ducked just as the amber-eyed woman let her arrow go.  There was no sound at all from the burly, then a crash, and a terrible cry from the woman as she realized what she had done.  Her arrow had pierced the chest of the burly, plunging through his silver fur to bury itself in his ruby heart.  Unable to bear the consciousness of what she had done, she fainted, closing her amber eyes, so thickly fringed with black lashes.

Hmm.  Better change “bear” to “endure,”   Double-meaning not intended.  And is that too many times to talk about the amber eyes?  They’re turning into a major plot point.  Maybe the deal is that this is his sister and that they both come from the country through that notch -- so what would be different about those other people?  Bear lovers?

Tokas was standing between two bodies.  He checked the burly to make sure it was really dead in it’s spreading pool of blood that had no place to go.  Then he stepped back to the sprawled woman.  For a moment he thought she had somehow seized his bow and arrow, but his grip on his own was tight, so they were unaccountably identical.  In fact, the clasp on her cloak, a twisted and carved chunk of amber mounted in silver, was identical to the one below his own chin.  The raven pecked at the clasp on the woman.  She opened her eyes.

Tokas demanded,  “Who are you?”

“Don’t you know?  I am your twin.”  The two moons in the sky met and merged.