But For a Single Drop of Solace
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Dawn was woken by the sound of rain pattering on a tin
roof. The soft, tinkling sound was a welcome reminder of her companions’, and
thus her, good fortune. She sat up slowly, stretching out her arms. The crates
were better than the ground, but they were still making her back ache. She
looked up at the ceiling, expecting to see the metal roof there, vibrating
gently under the rain. A frown marred her face when she realized that the
ceiling was stone. If it was stone, where was the sound coming from?
She walked out of the storage room and through the store.
When she got to the door, she peered outside. It was dark, but dry. The rain
hadn’t fallen yet. The source of the rain sounds turned out to be her musician
friends. They were entertaining the villagers, who seemed to like the odd
music. The orth were still milling around, eating and talking casually.
Dawn stepped around Marni, who was sitting on the ground,
and moved out from under the awning. She looked up at the sky, wondering if the
rain would ever fall. The moonless night was dark, the sky an opaque black. Why
did they think that it could possibly rain?
She was staring around, shaking her head, when something
plopped on the top of her head. She reached up, expecting to find a stone, or
maybe an insect. There was nothing there, however. She looked around, trying to
find the culprit of the strike.
Then she felt it again, on her shoulder. She brushed at
her shirt, pausing when her hand rubbed against something…moist. Dawn frowned,
looking over at her clothes. Had that been a raindrop?
A few more plops made her look around more. She could just
see the ground near the musicians take on a stippled look—little dark spots
that were barely visible in the lamplight. The orth had taken notice of the
impending rain and motioned for the musicians to begin playing in earnest.
Dawn watched as the villagers gathered themselves into the
central courtyard, singing and staring up at the sky. Meanwhile, Duens had started
a high-pitched wail on his cyar’val. Marni
accompanied him with a driving, thumping drumbeat. Still, only a few drops of
rain struck here and there.
Everyone fell silent as a bolt of lightening zigzagged
across the sky. For a moment, the entire village lay blanketed in silence. Then
thunder shook the earth. When the vibrations stopped, the noise didn’t. Dawn looked
around, puzzled. Shouldn’t the thunder have stopped? A weird movement in the
distance caught her attention.
What looked like a solid wall of gray was moving toward
the village. The closer it grew, the louder the rumbling became. The musicians
were playing to compliment the sound, whipping the villagers into frenzy. Dawn
realized when it neared the wellhouse that the wall
was rain—solid, driving rain.
She looked around frantically for shelter. She’d get
soaked to the bone in mere seconds, as hard as that rain was falling. Seeing
where the musicians were safely ensconced, she began to run back toward them.
She never made it. The rain swept through town, beating
everything to a pulp. At first she bowed her head and tried to endure it, not
even trying to go anywhere. How could she when she couldn’t even see? The music
continued to grow more frenzied, demanding that the villagers interact with the
storm.
And interact they did. Dawn watched as they danced and
howled, reveling in the onslaught. She didn’t see how they could; the pure
pressure of the water was driving her down. It had to let up soon;
thunderstorms like this didn’t just go on forever—they petered out in a couple
of minutes.
The weather wasn’t cooperating at all. The longer Dawn
stayed out in it, the harder the rain fell. Soon it wasn’t the least bit
refreshing as the drops pounded her skin, scraping at her clothes and stinging
her eyes. She’d never experienced rain so harsh and unforgiving.
She was abruptly reminded of where she was—a desert. The
land was a wasteland, barely able to support a few struggling villagers. It
gave little and took a lot. Even when it did rain, the gift was double-edged.
With this amount of water it was sure to flood. And still the torrent
increased. Dawn fell to her knees with a moan, pushed there by the unrelenting
flood. She huddled on the ground, curling her face in to protect it.
She had never felt so alone. All of a sudden the world she
was on was a very lonely place. She dimly heard the villagers screaming and the
music ululating, but none of that touched her. There was nothing here; no
people and no friends stood by to greet her. She had thought that Sunnydale was
a hostile place, but what was that compared to this? At least you could fight
what made the Hellmouth a bad place. How could you go up against nature?
Dawn felt like this strange world was trying to get rid of
her. She’d been dumped in an inhospitable desert, sent like a lamb to a bunch
of slavers, and then pushed under the machine-gun fire of a downpour to rival
Noah’s.
Tears poured out of her eyes but were washed away
instantly. The significance of that didn’t escape Dawn. This place was
determined to annihilate her; not even her grief could survive for very long.
Sobbing uncontrollably, she lay down on the ground, sinking into the sandy mud
that was pooling in the streets.
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Unbeknownst to Dawn, Zhaen was keeping careful watch on
the girl. She noted with worry that Dawn didn’t seem to be enjoying the rain
festival like the villagers were. When the downpour started, she got even
worse. In just a few minutes, the little human was huddling on the ground like
a beaten, wounded animal.
When Dawn lay down in the deepening mud, Zhaen set aside
her den-liow and rose to retrieve her. At the rate
the water was falling, she was in real danger of drowning in the stuff,
particularly since she wasn’t showing signs of getting up.
Zhaen ignored the pouring rain as she bent down and picked
Dawn up. The girl was in such poor condition that she didn’t even notice the
change in her surroundings. With a nod to the others, Zhaen carried Dawn to the
wellhouse, which would be quite empty considering all
the water that was currently outside.
The first place Zhaen stopped was at the south pool, where
she quickly dunked Dawn into the water up to her neck. The mud and grime
swirled away from the human as Zhaen wiped the remaining stuff from her face.
Once she was a little cleaner, Zhaen removed her from the water and carried the
girl into the west chamber. It was the most likely to have a comfortable place
to set the girl.
Once she’d set Dawn on a low bench, Zhaen went to the
south chamber to fetch a towel and some blankets. By the time she returned, the
girl was shivering and quaking uncontrollably. She encountered no resistance as
she stripped Dawn down and dried her off, although when she wrapped the girl in
a couple of blankets a brief look of relief lighted her eyes up, before being
covered over by despair.
Zhaen sighed and pulled Dawn into her arms, cradling her
gently. Something about the rain had broken Dawn, leaving her defenseless and
alone. “Do you wish to talk about this?” Zhaen asked softly. Dawn shook her
head. She didn’t want to talk at all. Her shaking continued, as did her tears,
although they now ran down her face to soak into the blanket that kept her
warm.
The dalhari waited a few minutes. Perhaps the girl just
needed a little time. “Are you thinking about your friend?”
Dawn shook her head. While Xander had been a thought at
one point, this wasn’t really about him. “Alone,” She whispered. “Lost.”
Zhaen frowned, only partly understanding. True, her friend
probably was lost, and alone, if he was in this world. But that was something
Dawn had known before she got over here. Maybe, though, she wasn’t talking
about this Xander person—she could be referring to herself.
It made perfect sense that the girl felt that way, although
she was at a loss to explain why this breakdown had been triggered now. Perhaps
it was that Dawn didn’t share in the villagers’ appreciation and enthusiasm for
rain. The dalhari rocked the girl, cooing quietly, to try to calm her. It
wasn’t working, though, because Dawn kept bawling and withdrawing into herself.
Zhaen’s experience comforting people was
limited to children who had hurt themselves, usually by trying to fly too
early. Dawn wasn’t a child, though, so she wasn’t sure if the standard method
for soothing a dalhari youth would work. But there were lessons to be learned
from the stories adults told children, ones that Dawn could do well to hear.
“Did you know, Dawn, that a long time ago, before time
knew that it should be counted like prhang, dalhari didn’t have wings and were
all the color of the sky? This was before the every(no)thing
that is and isn’t, which we often call the saá but is
also called other things, knew that there was such a thing as existence, and
that there was a beginning and an ending to such a thing.” Zhaen paused,
feeling Dawn still just a little as she oriented on Zhaen’s
soft voice. This might just work, even as a temporary fix.
“The sky wasn’t the color it is now, though. Back then the
moon wasn’t pale and the sun wasn’t bright, because the sun hadn’t gotten
jealous of the moon’s happiness—but that’s another story altogether; this is
about the dalhari. The dalhari lived near the mountains, where they roamed in
the valleys and the plains. There was plenty to eat and many rivers and
streams, and it was always warm and pleasant. In short, the dalhari wanted for
no comfort.”
Dawn sniffled a little as her tears tried up. Zhaen’s story was a little distracting, so she couldn’t
focus completely on her grief.
“But the dalhari weren’t happy. Actually, they were most
miserable. They looked at themselves and saw that they were of the sky when
they lived upon the earth. Why should they resemble the sky, then? They saw a
lack within themselves, because they did not contain any of the earth that they
so loved. They wanted to belong to the earth,” Zhain
said, pausing briefly afterwards.
“One day the dalhari began to shout at the Saá. They lamented their state and railed and cried. They
said, ‘How can we be of the earth when we are not of the earth? Look at our
world! The world is not this color; it is every color. Look at the other
creatures of our world. They have eyes that see, where we have eyes that can
only reflect the sky. The gaugha has wings so that it
can see the earth from the sky. We can only look upon the sky from the earth.
Why must we be of the sky, when the earth surrounds us?”
Zhaen looked down at Dawn, seeing that now the girl was
paying close attention to the children’s tale. “The saá
heard the dalhari’s cries. It was the first thing the saá
had ever heard. It wondered at the sound, that what it was could be such a
thing as sound. Next it heard not just the words, but what they were saying.
The saá was saddened that this part of itself was
discontent. It saw, though, that what the dalhari wanted wouldn’t give them
what they wanted. The saá saw the truth—that the
dalhari were no more not of the earth than they were of the sky. The sky and
the earth were the same thing, although to the eyes of the dalhari they looked
different. So the saá remained silent, because what
could be done?
“But the dalhari would not accept that. They continued to
complain, to cry and to shout. They wanted the saá to
do something, not just be. They didn’t care that they had already destroyed the
perfect balance of the saá by voicing themselves as
they did, and it never even occurred to them that what they were asking for
would further that damage. For a very long time—we don’t know how long, because
time didn’t exist then, the dalhari yelled and screamed.” Zhaen checked on Dawn
again. The girl was still paying attention.
“Eventually the saá relented,
driven nearly mad by the dalhari’s incessant complaining. For the first time
ever, the Saá’s voice was heard. It was no more than
a whisper, so soft that even the most attentive dalhari could barely hear it.
But it didn’t matter that the voice was soft, because a soft voice is not a
weak voice. As soon as that voice reached the dalhari, they began to change.
“The dalhari began to grow wings and a tail like the gaugha they so admired. Their eyes grew and moved, becoming
like an animal’s eye, that judged the world for its worth. Then the dalhari
began to change color. Each one turned a different shade, so that no two were
exactly alike.
“And the dalhari rejoiced, even as the saá
mourned. Surely with these changes they would become one with the earth. After
all, now they were like that which was of the earth—the animals and the
flowers. The saá knew differently, but what could be
said? It was not the saá’s place to tell anyone how
to live.” Zhaen stopped talking then, waiting to see what Dawn would do.
After a few minutes, Dawn realized that Zhaen wasn’t going
to continue. “What happened to the dalhari?” Dawn asked her.
Zhaen frowned. “That’s an even longer story, Dawn. Are you
sure you want to hear it?”
Dawn nodded. “You can’t just stop stories right in the
middle. It’s not fair.”
Zhaen grinned. “As you wish.
Well, the dalhari spent a while rejoicing in their new selves and discovering
what they could do. Going high up into the sky did indeed prove to be glorious;
they could look down on the earth they loved, seeing its beauty as the sky saw
it. Of course, they didn’t think about the fact that the sky and the earth were
the same thing, and who looks at themselves without a mirror?
“Some of the dalhari flew even higher—higher than the
highest peaks of the mountains near their homes. They flew right over the
mountains, wondering if the earth looked different there. After all, each tiny
spot on the earth looked a little different from the next one. When they
reached the other side, they found more people—ones they’d never seen before.
“These people didn’t look like the dalhari, even before
they had petitioned the saá to change them. Instead
of being the color of the sky, they were the color of the sun—which wasn’t very
bright yet. The dalhari went down to see them. The new people looked in awe at
the dalhari, because each one looked different, where all of them looked the
same. They said, ‘Who are you, who are so different?’ The dalhari looked down on the new people,
who were so plain, and said, ‘We are dalhari. Who are you?’ ‘We are the siv.
Why is it that you are the colors of flowers, and have the wings and tail of a gaugha? And how is it that you came to have eyes that can
see?’ Asked the new people. And the dalhari answered,
‘We demanded that saá make us this way, so that we
may be one with the earth.’ The new people looked at each other in confusion.
They had never thought about asking that saá make
them different. You see, the siv had no desire to be one with the earth.
Instead, they wished that they could be one with the trees that they loved so
well. But back then the siv didn’t have tails, or hands and feet made for climbing, or fur to protect them, so they could only live on
the ground, when they really wanted to live in the trees, to be a part of the
trees. The siv got together and thought about what the dalhari had said. Why
shouldn’t they do the same? The saá should give them
the fur of the rkaeme, the paws of the whiva and the knowledge of the trees they so wished be. Why
should they not be able to be with their trees as those animals were? And why
should the saá change the dalhari and not the siv?
“So the siv discussed and discussed some more. Eventually
they began to protest to the saá that they wanted to
be changed too. Now, the saá wasn’t happy about this.
After all, it had only been a little while since the saá
had started to realize that it actually existed, and it was beginning to suspect
that something called ‘time’ existed as well. The saá
didn’t want to be the thing to which these people shouted for favors; it was
not their keeper or their creator—they were the saá
just as the saá was them. The saá
didn’t understand why these people wanted to distinguish themselves from each
other, or from anything, for that matter. But the siv, like the dalhari, were
loud, and very persistent. Eventually the saá gave in
and whispered through the treetops. The siv, like the dalhari, rejoiced in
their changes, even as the saá was saddened by them.”
Dawn pursed her lips after Zhaen finished that part of the
story. “That still doesn’t tell what happened to the dalhari. Is there more?”
Zhaen nodded. “A lot more, but we should go find the
others. They’re probably quite worried about you right now, and I am rather
hungry. There should be food at the festival.”
Dawn’s face fell at the mention of the festival. She
didn’t want to go back to it; the very idea of celebrating anything made her
feel even worse. She didn’t deserve to have fun doing anything, since she’d
mucked things up so bad.
“Come on, Dawn. You don’t have to like it, just eat
something and go to bed,” Zhaen remarked as she stood. The girl was very easy
to read—it was obvious that she was feeling extremely guilty for what she’d
done, and overwhelmingly lost and alone. That had been the point of the story,
although the meaning was perhaps not clear yet since it wasn’t finished. Maybe
Dawn would think back on it and understand, or at least consider the
possibility of moving on.
Dawn silently followed Zhaen outside, where they found
that the rain had stopped. The ground was no longer sloshing with mud, so they
must have been in the wellhouse for several hours.
Orth were still gathered around outside, enjoying the mild, humid weather and
the camaraderie of the festival. When they got back to the shop, they found the
other musicians taking a break and eating dinner.
Zhaen procured a bowl of some sort of soup for Dawn,
explaining that it was considered good luck, since it was made with fresh
rainwater. Dawn shrugged and took the stuff, figuring that she should have
something. She might be feeling pretty bad about herself, but getting sick
wasn’t a good idea.
The soup was a lot better than she’d expected, although it
was surprisingly sweet. She was hungry enough to want another bowl, which
seemed to magically appear next to her. A brunette orth woman held the bowl out
to her, waiting for her to take it. Dawn looked over at Zhaen, who nodded. She
took the bowl, guessing that it had either been paid for or was free. Maybe
that was part of the festival.
The musicians picked up their instruments a few minutes
later and began to play again. Dawn was exhausted from her emotional breakdown,
but she didn’t know where they were staying and didn’t want to ask the
shopkeeper to borrow his storage room again. Instead of just napping there in
the street, she leaned back against the wall and enjoyed the music. The
festival continued, with music, dancing and lots of food, until dawn began to
color the horizon a sharp pink. Duens called a halt to their performance as the
festival ended abruptly and Dawn shook herself back to full awareness as her
companions began to head off toward the only inn in town.
They were all dead tired when they got to the inn. The
innkeeper was still in a good mood from the festival and gladly provided them
with two rooms, free of charge. Dawn, Zhaen and Duens took one while Prall and
Marni claimed the other. When Dawn got to her room, she dropped her pack and pulled
off her boots and damp, dirty clothing. She reached in for something to wear,
but growled in frustration as she failed to locate anything but a pair of
socks. Just as she was about to upend her pack, a soft shirt fell over her head.
Dawn stood up, startled. After a moment, she stuck her arms in the sleeves and
pulled the shirt down. She smiled gratefully at Duens and collapsed on the bed.
A few minutes later Duens moved her aside as he and Zhaen joined the
unconscious human for a long day’s rest.