"I STAYED WITH HA’ANALA AND MY FOSTER MOTHER, SUUKMEL, UNTIL I was fourteen," Rukuei Kitheri would tell Emilio Sandoz years later. "I learned to sing with Isaac, and sometimes he would say the most extraordinary things. I came to trust his… judgment. He was very strange, but he was right: I was born to learn songs and to teach them. I spent nearly five years wandering through the Garnu mountains—I needed to hear and remember the story of each Jana’ata who had lived through those last days. I hungered for the lullabies and the literature. I wanted to understand the laws and the politics, and the poetry, to preserve some small portion of the intellect and art of a world that had died before my eyes."
"But eventually you went back to the valley," Sandoz said. "To Ha’anala and Isaac?"
"Yes."
"And by then, Isaac was ready to let you hear the music he found."
"Yes."
Isaac had met Rukuei at the mouth of the pass. Naked as ever, the ragged parasol high over his head, he did not look at Rukuei or greet him, or ask about his travels. He simply stood in the way.
"I know why you’re here," Isaac told him finally. "You came back to learn the song." A pause. "I found the music." Another pause. "It doesn’t have words yet."
There was no emotion in his voice, but driven by some inner dismay in the face of unresolved disorder, Isaac began to spin, and hum, and flap his hands.
"What’s wrong, Isaac?" Rukuei asked, schooled by then in others’ pain.
The spinning stopped abruptly, and Isaac swayed, dizzy. "The music can’t be sung unless it has words," he said at last. "Songs have words."
Rukuei, who had learned to care for his cousin’s bizarre brother before he’d left on his own journey, felt moved to comfort him. "I’ll find the words, Isaac," he promised.
It was a vow made in youth and ignorance, to be lived out in maturity and full understanding. Rukuei Kitheri would never regret it.