Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

The Treeci Saleff interrupted them with a long-drawn-out hooting call. There was a response in kind from the shore. “There’s Isle Point,” he said, turning to her with his cocked-head smile. She looked shoreward to see the water moving around the end of the island, and a little way westward another island, the long line of land broken only by this narrow strait. A village gathered itself beneath the trees, small wooden houses, curling smoke. A mixed group of humans and Treeci stood on the shore, old and young.

“Will you be my guest?” Saleff asked. “Burg would ask you, I know, but he has a houseful just now. New grandchild.” Medoor Babji bowed as best she could in the tilting boat. “I would be honored, Saleff.”

“You’ll be better off,” Burg snorted. “Saleff’s mama—Sterf, her name is—she’s a finer cook than my wife is, that’s honest.”

“My mother will welcome you. As will my nest sister and the younger siblings.”

Medoor Babji bowed again. She was already lost. She had already told them about her need to find the Gift. It would seem rude and ungrateful to mention it again so soon. And yet their invitation had had an air of complacency about it, as though there could be no refusal nor any limit to her stay. She cast a quick look at the horizon. Where was Thrasne? And her people? She swallowed, smoothed the lines out of her forehead, and set herself to be pleasant. The boat was rapidly approaching the shore, and half a dozen people of various kinds were wading out to meet her.

Blint told me once there are fliers who can talk, or at least that some people say they can. At first this seemed a silly thing to believe, but as I got to thinking about it, I wondered if it wasn’t sillier to believe that talk was something only men could do. I’ve heard the strangeys calling, and the sounds they make are so large and complicated they must be words of some terrible, wonderful kind. But the sounds the fliers make, if those are words, they are short words and hard words. And I wish I’d heard the Treeci talk, those Pamra spoke of, for if they can talk, then surely the fliers can, too, and all we’ve thought about them for all our lives must be lies.

It would be interesting to talk with fliers, and strangeys. Except their words may not mean what our words mean at all, and it would be worse to misunderstand them than to just have them a mystery.

From Thrasne’s book

At Isle Point, the house of Saleff squatted beneath a grove of stout trees with ruddy-amber leaves that filtered golden light into the rooms and onto the many porches where Saleff’s kin moved about like orderly ghosts. Medoor Babji was at first amused by and then solicitous of the silence.

“We have a habit of quiet,” Saleff’s mother, Sterf, told her. “Originally adopted, I’m sure, out of rebellion against the cacophony of the Thraish. Later it became our own, particularly satisfying trait. The children tend to be a bit loud, of course, and must learn to go into the woods or out on a boat if they wish to shout or yodel or whatever it is they do.”

There were three children in the house, three young ones, at first alike as puncon fruit in Medoor’s eyes, each then acquiring a mysterious individuality that she found difficult to define. Mintel was the serious one, the quietest. Cimmy was graceful, with a lovely voice. Taneff was the most delightful, curious, always present, full of whispered questions, ready to run quick errands, even without being asked. The three soon named her Cindianda, which meant in their language, they said, “little dark human person.” Medoor Babji thought they might be fibbing to her, that the name might mean something very disrespectful, though Sterf assured her not.

“How old are they?” she asked, watching them cross the clearing with amazement. They moved like darting dancers, lithe as windblown grass.

“Oh, just fifteen,” Sterf said, a little wrinkle coming between the large orbs of her eyes. It was one of the things that made Treeci so like humans, the way their faces wrinkled around the eyes. If one looked only at the eyes, not at the flat, flexible horn of their beaks, they could have been humans in disguise, got up for some festival or other. “Just fifteen.” There was something vaguely disquieting in her tone, and Medoor Babji thought back to everything Pamra had told her about the Treeci. Hadn’t there been something? She shook her head, unable to remember. During that time Pamra Don and Medoor Babji had known one another—a misnomer of sorts, Medoor felt, since she did not feel she knew Pamra Don at all—Medoor had been so busy wondering what it was about Pamra that held Thrasne in such thrall she had paid too little attention to what Pamra had said.