At dinnertime, Tanesha came to him in his quarters and took him back outside. She wore a dress composed of earth browns and sky blues, dense, heavy fabric that looked handmade and much more traditional than anything he had seen her in.
Pungent food smells, the aroma of onions and garlic, potatoes and spiced beef drifted from kitchen units set up farther down the valley. There, the communal meal was being prepared by the young men and women of the tribe, in a ritual as old as the Ibandi themselves.
But now, before a circle of flaming torches, hundreds of young Ibandi men and women stood in a huge circle of packed earth. They stood swaying, gazing up at the sky, bodies moving in response to music that Aubry could not hear.
Then, at some unspoken signal, they took in a deep, sighing breath, and began to perform the Firedance, what Aubry had always called the Rubber Band.
The first thing he noticed was that they seemed boneless. Their motion was effortlessly fluid, and absolutely synchronized with their breathing. Somewhat shamefacedly, Aubry realized that he had allowed his own morning rituals to become unsynchronized, shamelessly sloppy when compared with the precise rhythms of this group.
They rolled and somersaulted backward and forward, making strange music with the thrum of their breathing, the impact of their young bodies against the hard-packed earth.
There was a fluidity to it that he had never achieved in his own practice. He wanted to weep.
The ritual lasted an hour. By the end of that time, they had twisted and contorted their bodies into a variety of shapes and clusters, and a very faint memory, far back in Aubry’s mind, said that what they were doing correctly was what he had done incorrectly for decades.…
Old Man came up from behind Aubry, so quietly that Aubry was almost unaware of it until they were shoulder to shoulder.
“This is the first level,” Old Man said. “And you see that they have the fluidity that you lack.”
“Yes—but it is still beautiful.”
Old Man nodded. “But there is more than beauty. There must be function. We have little need of the higher levels, the warrior levels, now. Thomas Jai was one of the last who understood the warrior-hunter ways of our people. We are miners, now.” Something in Old Man’s smile put the lie to those words.
He gripped Aubry’s shoulder. “But you… we would have you show us the extent of your knowledge. Some of us remember the old ways …” He smiled. “For tradition. Tradition is important.”