“I should be taking care of you. I am your feeder,” she said, but her voice held no conviction and her eyes kept moving toward her son.
“So is Likari. Tend to him for now. If I require you, I can send for you.”
“As you wish,” she said with relief, and even before Soldier’s Boy had left the tent, she had moved to Likari’s side.
Soldier’s Boy followed Wurta and her assistants. They took him to a steam hut. It was small and tightly built of branches plastered over with earth. Inside, a big copper kettle boiled over a fire pit. All of them stripped before entering the hut, and once they were inside, with the door shut tight behind them, the heat and steam were close to unbearable. “First,” Wurta told him, “we must open your skin, so that the salve can soak into you.”
This involved him sitting in a chair while heavy cloths were dipped in the boiling water. The feeders allowed them to cool enough so that they could wring them out, and then immediately began to wrap him in them. They were not scalding, but hot enough to be unpleasant. Soldier’s Boy gritted his teeth and endured the treatment. When they removed the cloth, his skin was a bright scarlet by the firelight. His specks showed dark against the redness. The feeders went to work quickly, rubbing the salve into his flesh. As quickly as they covered his skin with the slippery stuff, they wrapped him afresh with the hot steaming cloths. Between the heat and the minty pungency of the salve, he felt giddy. The meal he had just eaten coiled and squirmed in his belly. He began to fervently wish that Olikea were there, to protect him from Kinrove’s feeders.
I agreed with him. “They will kill you with this treatment,” I warned him. “Listen to your heart beating. You can scarcely breathe for the steam and the stink. Tell them to let you go; they’ll have to listen to you. You’re a Great One. You have what you came for; Likari is restored to you. You should leave and take him and Olikea back to the kin-clan. Let us find another way to solve our problem.”
It was getting hard for him to breathe. The air was hot and the pungent aroma of the salve seemed to only make it worse. Yet he said, “I will do whatever I must—”
And the words died on his lips. For the briefest moment, he breathed music, not air. It lifted him weightlessly; he felt himself rise with it, float on it, towed away from the bonds of earth and up into the air.
Just as abruptly, he was back in his flesh, and fighting, not for air, but for the music he had breathed but a moment before. “—to regain Lisana.” He finished his thought in a hazy voice. He opened his arms wide, trying to bring the music back.
“Do you feel that?” Wurta asked in wonder.
Several of the others murmured awed assents.
“He will dance,” Wurta said, but her tone conveyed far more than her words. “Kinrove spoke true. When he is one, he will be a river for the magic. The dance has already found him. We must hurry to be sure he consumes the rest of the food he will need.”
But it was already too late.
They led Soldier’s Boy from the steam hut, still swathed in the hot wraps that held the herbal unguent against his skin. As we emerged from the darkness into the forest light, he took a deep breath of the clean, cool air that greeted him. And the blood that flowed through his body turned to music. He began to dance.
The feeders cried out in alarm. Two seized his arms and tried to restrain him, shouting, “No, not yet, not yet! You are not prepared!” Someone else shouted, “Tell Kinrove! Run, run!” and yet another one cried out, “Fetch his own feeder! He may listen to her.”
When Olikea came running, I heard her voice. But Soldier’s Boy did not. He was caught up in a rapture of sound and movement, far past drunkenness, deeper than unconsciousness. I shouted for him and then reached for him as one might plunge an arm into a deep, cold lake to retrieve a comrade who had fallen overboard. But I could not reach him. No part of us touched anymore, and that realization terrified me. Instead of uniting us, Kinrove’s magic seemed to be separating us even more completely.
Olikea rushed to him and seized his hands. “Oh, I should not have let them take you! I should not have listened to you at all. Nevare, Nevare, stop, stop dancing. Come back to me!”
But he did not. Instead, he tried to pull her into the dance with him. He gripped her hands and dragged her along as he stepped and turned and bowed. Kinrove’s feeders cried out in fear, and four of them seized her and pulled her from his grasp. Then they fought her, holding her back as she shrieked and clawed and struggled to get back to him.
“It will do you no good! He cannot hear you. If you let him seize you, he will drag and dance you to death. Remember your son, remember your boy! Stay here and care for him!”