Freedom Has Many Faces

Chapter 1

One minute she was with them. The next, she was not. The same thing happened every morning.

Sometimes Matuei acknowledged that it was rather odd that she should be able to remember the old feelings so clearly at the very moment when she was most conscious of them no longer existing. As the sun began to blot through the translucent green membrane of the leaf hammock around her, illuminating each reddish vein and washing the shadows of the occupied leaves immediately above hers across her face, she heard the chattering hum begin to rise. A moment later her eyes opened, and it cut out.

There were times when this eerie hum seemed to collect into a regular, gently throbbing melody; it was only when you focused on one component in particular that the lack of synchronicity between the individual signals became obvious. There were some members of the Omaticaya who never felt an overarching rhythm, even in these first quiet moments when they were waking up. This was not entirely unsurprising: discriminating between the numerous frequencies and feelings was essential to navigating the forest and to hunting, and so for most of the clan a more general grasp of nerval sensations was not only unimportant, but also tended to interfere with their concentration. Moreover, they all knew from the devastation of Hometree that immediate awareness of one's surroundings from the first instant of awakening could make all the difference between life and death. One of the few times Matuei considered herself lucky was when she heard from her friends how they would occasionally sit up with a start in the middle of the night, senses screaming, every muscle tensed and ready for escape. More often than not a chain reaction would kick off, and tens of clan members would be hit by the same feeling within seconds of each other. The next morning, whoever started the chain would apologise.

'I can't help it. That ash has settled in my brain. I thought I had brushed it all off my body, but my eyes drank it up too quickly for my tears to wash it away. Sometimes my dreams kick it up and it clouds my head.'

Secretly, Matuei was embarrassed by her reaction to these incidents. They upset her, of course, but in a perverse way they often felt like her only connection to the way things had once been. The clan's night terrors were a phantom feeling, just like the stirrings she sometimes felt at the base of her skull. The original stimulus was long gone, but it still resurfaced every now and again. Whenever the destruction of Hometree charged back unbidden into the collective consciousness of the Omaticaya, the faint wail she sometimes heard in the distant sky no longer felt like her individual burden. For a few precious, horrible moments, the pain was shared.

She sighed and gently unfolded her hammock. The branches around her were dotted with other older clanspeople eating and filing splinters off their bows. A small group of younger warriors were already clambering up to the canopy via a tight vertical cluster of vines and branches, nimbly hopping from one foothold to the next and summoning their ikran with short sharp barks.

'Out hunting this early?' Matuei murmured.

Her friend Nikal looked up from her bow. 'Nah, they're just bored. One of the men thought he saw something interesting floating belly-up in the river and now they're all going to take a look. Some Sky-People rubbish or something.' She plucked a large pink fruit from a makeshift leather thong that hung on her hip. 'I've brought you some breakfast. I took a bite already, hope you don't mind.'

Even with a full mouthful missing from it, the fruit was still big enough that Matuei needed to hold it with both hands. 'A little … over-generous, isn't it?'

'Not for the work we're doing today, it isn't,' said Nikal. 'Tilling, remember? We've all got to build up our strength.'

It had been decided soon after the conflict with the Sky-People that the site where the Hometree had stood would not be left unoccupied. Instead it was to be restored, and this meant that the ashy soil had to be tilled. Seeds had begun to fall on the ground almost immediately, but most of them had failed to grow. Just as they needed to take from nature, the Na'vi had to give something back, and in this case it certainly needed an extra helping hand, or rather, a thousand helping hands, of which Matuei and Ninal were only two pairs. They worked with tools carved from the unburned remains of Hometree, hoping the blessed wood would speed the process along, but it was still very hard work.

'Aik, look at your queue!' Nikal smacked Matuei's arm. 'You've been scratching it again. The poor thing's red raw.'

'I have not!'

'I know you, Matuei, you are a compulsive liar! Why do I bother when all you do is pick at it. You may not think I see, but I do!' She gestured towards her face and bore her fangs. 'These are the eyes of toruk! I see everything!'

'Well, you clearly didn't see that this fruit is going mouldy.'

'What gratitude!' Nikal grabbed Matuei's head and pulled it towards her. She placed her hand below the pink stump that was all that remained of Matuei's queue and sighed.

'I'm sorry that I shout at you like this. I'm not really angry at you. I'm angry at that bastard Suhaa-'

Matuei's shoulders drew up tense about her neck. 'Please, Nikal, don't say his name.'

'If I don't, it only robs you further of your dignity. I love you too much to reopen this scar he has left. If Suhaar had had his way, you would have been lost to us altogether.' She cupped Matuei's chin in her hands. 'Don't live in shame.' Then, with a small smile, she withdrew and prepared to descend down the branches below. 'And don't pick.'

Matuei sighed and returned to her breakfast, chuckling at the gaping hole where her friend had bitten right through to the core. She knew that Nikal took a quiet delight in showing her reluctance to care for her, and one that often expressed itself through pretending to give her 'table scraps'. Nikal would protect Matuei to the last breath, but in no way would she ever let herself become a maid. Just as the line of respect between the two appeared to have been re-established, Nikal would always push it, would never let herself be taken for granted. Gestures like this bite said it all, but always with a smile: I still have my pride. Show me that you still have yours, my friend, if you dare.

Nikal, after all, had been a brilliant hunter in earlier years. Like all Na'vi she had a firm respect for the overriding sanctity of communal life and she chanted no less enthusiastically than anyone else when gatherings called for it. Yet she treasured self-sufficiency and the thrills of the lone chase above all else. She had in fact been as close to ruthless as a Na'vi hunter could be. When others would give up on the pursuit of especially tricky prey, muttering that fate clearly had other intentions, Nikal simply decided that she was waiting for her second wind and battled through her exhaustion. Even when her legs were ready to collapse under her, her eye remained steady. When she finally let her arrow fly, she rarely missed.

'Just her and I,' she had recounted some years before, after a particularly intense and lengthy trek. 'The most beautiful yerik, standing proud in the twilight of her life. Her fan was torn and tattered, her hide tattooed with scars. An exceptional mother who, I have no doubt, must have battled any creature that tried to snatch from her numerous litters within an inch of its life. It rained soon after I first caught sight of her and the shower washed away all but the slightest trace of her passing. There was blood in her footprints. I knew the wound was fatal and extremely painful, maybe a bite from a nantang. She was going somewhere quiet and isolated to die alone. She knew it would be very slow and that there would be weeks of suffering before she went.

'I tracked her for three days. She knew I was there the whole time. Our eyes met several times before I finally took her down. I swear to you now, I have never seen such a level of understanding pass between myself and another.'

'So much for your seduction techniques, Kith!' shouted one of the men, slapping Nikal's mate hard on the back. The other men listening to Nikal's story burst into raucous laughter and beat the ground with their fists.

'Lost your mate to a yerik! Classic!'

'That's what you get for spending so much time hanging out at home whilst your woman warrior here does all the legwork!'

'Or is it not only your bow that's starting to rot from disuse?'

'Okay, okay, that's enough!' smiled Kith in his usual good-humoured manner.

Nikal was still caught up in reverie. 'At one point she looked me straight in the face. No fear. I could almost hear her say it: I know who you are and why you have come. Hold, and don't worry: when it is time we will both get what we need. Just this look of total acceptance. The following day she led me to her last resting place.' Nikal grinned, mainly to herself. 'She still put up a hell of a fight when I lifted my bow. Crazy yerik wasn't letting me get away without any bruises. But when it happened … she looked almost grateful. Like she couldn't have hoped for a better end to her life.'

Age caught up with Nikal eventually, and her accuracy began to deteriorate. She was starting to stiffen up. It was sad to see those same urges still flickering behind her eyes from time to time, even if she seemed to think that she hid them well behind the pleasure she took in the smaller tasks closer to home that made up her days now. No more three-day hunts for her. Most of their people had looked quietly apprehensive, if determined, before the great battle with the Sky-People, but Nikal had looked strangely relieved. Her old self had been given a chance to stretch its legs. Despite knowing the high stakes involved, she fought with gleeful abandon.

Matuei smiled and took a final bite from the fruit, carefully avoiding the softer dark patches where it had started to rot. She hadn't exactly been a shrinking violet herself during the conflict. She had taken several lives with her spear that day and for a brief moment she again felt at one with the clan. She immersed herself in the studied precision of their movements together and their tiered system of attack, where the lines of warriors rose and fell like waves to allow each row time to reload their bows. Like the growing kinship she felt when others were shaken by their memories of the destruction of Hometree, she had felt some guilt in enjoying that now rare feeling of complete union. Did it really take the loss of so many lives – lives on both the Na'vi and human sides, with individual histories, family, friends – for her to feel whole again?

She turned back to her leaf hammock and reached inside, taking out a small jar carved from stone and a rolled up leaf about the size of her hand. The jar contained an anti-inflammatory salve she had mixed together from sap and several plant oils. She applied it to the nub at the back of her head and winced: the severed nerves still stung a little when touched. She sealed the small leaf around them and lifted her hair clear of the freshly bandaged stump.

Unmounted ikran circled lazily overhead, their vast shadows breaking through the morning light that shone through the canopy. Matuei stretched her body out to its full length and eased backwards then forwards like a cat, pulling the muscles of her back and legs taut. For a moment her pupils dilated, judging the distances and depths below and searching for obstacles to her descent, and then she leapt into freefall.

The familiar sounds of the forest were beginning to reclaim the site where Hometree had stood only seven months before. For a long time after the attack it had been completely silent around here. Because nothing was growing from the ash-choked ground, no animals went there to eat, so most of the time the area was completely deserted save for scores of clan members working to clear the charred debris. Once or twice they had to stop and form a clearing for the occasional herd of angstik that had once marked the woodlands directly adjacent to Hometree as their territory. These were tense moments: the enormous hammer-headed creatures were clearly anxious and unsure, and if one bolted out of nerves the rest would undoubtedly stampede. The older Na'vi regarded these passings with glaring, tight-lipped expressions. The bombardment hadn't just thrown the Omaticaya into chaos; it sent entire ecosystems reeling too.

Matuei was one of the first to arrive that morning, and the day's work hadn't really started in earnest. She spotted Nikal a little way off, talking with her mate. Kith was sitting before a loom suspended from the branch from a tree at the edge of the clearing. As he spoke with Nikal, his long fingers moved gracefully over the threads stretched over the wooden framework, steadily weaving them together with seemingly automatic movements. When he saw Matuei coming towards them, he grinned and stood up.

'Kaltxi Kith,' called Matuei, raising her hand to greet him. 'So you're finally back?'

'Not a moment too soon, believe me,' said Kith. 'I was just thanking Nikal for the collar you girls put together for me.' He slipped his thumb under a string of beads made up of various shells and pieces of dried fruit from the trees native to this part of the Omaticaya's territory, some of which Kith had already removed and eaten during his absence, as had been the intention. 'I can't remember how many times I needed a reminder of home whilst I was out there. I really appreciated having this with me.'

'You're very welcome, brother,' said Matsuei. 'Was there much to do?'

Kith's ears dropped. His whole body seemed to sink. 'Too much. My group hardly made any headway. Nine days out there, and we didn't even make it past the first point on our planned route.' He squeezed his eyes shut and sat down at the loom again. 'There were times out there you couldn't tell the human bodies from the Na'vi. I saw the next group in the neighbouring grove. They'd given up trying. They were digging a mass grave. You tell yourself each one deserves a proper burial, but really … I was glad whenever a nantang appeared to snatch a corpse away.'

Nikal bent down beside her mate and rubbed her brow soothingly against his, murmuring words of reassurance to him.

'I see you, my brave one. Your pain is mine. Find relief in me.'

Matuei grasped her left arm, feeling rather guilty that she had asked Kith anything at all about the expedition. These trips had become so frequent that it was obvious without even questioning the returned parties that the entire process was progressing extremely slowly. The forests were still full of bodies from the battle with the humans, and whilst they remained unburied they posed a significant health risk. The various tribes of Pandora were already too far diminished to withstand further unnecessary losses from disease. Numerous groups were sent out in rotation to perform burial rites, and several higher ranking members of the tribe, including the new Olo'eyktan Jake and his bride Neytiri, had stationed themselves outside on an almost permanent basis to manage the lengthy operation.

Presently Kith straightened up. 'I think it's turning out well.'

He gestured towards the banner draped over his loom. The threads were dyed in rich greens and streams of burgundy, colours that simultaneously denoted death and rebirth for the Omaticaya, and woven into a startlingly intricate pattern centred around a repeated series of diamonds strung together end-to-end. It was a classic cyclical motif usually only featured at the holiest sites during periods of plague that tended to arise when Eywa found it necessary to counter the threat of overpopulation. In loose terms the motif signified, 'Wherever Eywa strikes with fist or fever, she forever nurtures. Though she may feed us from the cup of death, the drink itself is mother's milk.'

'It's beautiful,' said Matuei, tracing the pattern with a finger that barely touched the fabric. 'You must feel very honoured to be permitted to weave this motif, Kith. I have seldom seen it more brilliantly executed.'

'Peh! You have no idea what a pain it is for your mate to become head weaver!' hissed Nikal, swinging her arm around Kith's shoulders protectively. 'All these young girls always making eyes at him every opportunity they get, draping those skinny little bodies of theirs over the nearest tree. If I thrash my fangs any harder at them, I'll grind my teeth down into dust within minutes!'

Kith surreptitiously stuck the tip of his tongue out between his teeth and shook with silent laughter. Matuei giggled back. Nikal noticed and gave one of his ears a hard tug.

'He loves it, of course! Those girls have no idea what a wet blanket he was when he was their age. You remember, Matuei? You remember all those conversations the two of us had at night when we were finally able to get away from all the other boys who were chasing us around?' She raised her voice a few octaves and gently swung her body from side to side in a girlish gesture. '"Oh, Nikal, don't be so hard on Kith! It's obvious he adores you! Riding his ikran back to front doesn't necessarily mean he was dropped on his head as a baby. I'm sure he was just doing it to … to impress you!" Oh, I was impressed, I was very impressed. That squealing he was making the whole time was magnificent! I've never met a female Na'vi who could reach that pitch before, much less a man! Pfffffft! Here he is, the love of my life, the great Ikran Makto!'

Kith stood up with his arms akimbo and struck a mock-heroic pose, then joined in with the women's laughter. Suddenly several thundering drum beats shuddered through the air.

'Well, back to work,' sighed Matuei. 'Good luck with your banner, Kith.'

Kith thanked her, and she trudged to the edge of the clearing to fetch her and Nikal's ploughs. They worked alongside hundreds of other Na'vi men and women each assigned an individual three-foot wide strip of ground, dragging the tools through the soil in regular heaving movements in time with the steady rhythm of three gourd drums at the centre of the site. Despite the monotony of the work time seemed to pass quickly, and soon the shadows of the trees stretched over Matuei. The head drummer called for a short break, and she fell to her knees, puffing heavily and wincing at the shooting pains across her shoulders.

'You only feel it when you stop, don't you?' panted Nikal, who was wiping the sweat from her face with a thin papery leaf taken from her belt. 'I swear they're beating those damn drums faster than they were yesterday. I'll go and see if Kith has any drinking water going spare.'

Matuei nodded and shook out her hair. She noticed with some annoyance that the ground behind her plough looked almost identical to that in front of it. In truth, their tools weren't made to deal with a job of this scale, and it showed. She cursed under her breath and tried to think of ways to improve the plough's efficacy. As she considered this, she looked around her. She hardly paid attention to what she was actually seeing until something unexpected made her stop.

To her right she spotted a human crouched beside the edge of the bare soil, examining something she could not see from her angle with great interest. She recognised him as one of the humans Jake had allowed to remain on Pandora out of friendship and services rendered to the clans. She could not remember exactly, but she vaguely recollected seeing him speak in Na'vi. She got to her feet and approached him tentatively. From over his shoulder she could see that a small outcrop of purple flowers had caught his attention. He was moving his hands around them warily, not daring to touch the plant but instead apparently judging its height, estimating the level of its growth.

'Luxae,' she murmured.

'Woah!' The human shot to his feet at the sound of her voice and stumbled backwards, words tumbling out of his mouth in what she assumed to be some Earth language, his mother tongue. 'Uh, I didn't touch it, I wasn't touching anything, I-' He readjusted the visor-like mask over his face nervously and spoke in Na'vi. 'Sorry, you scared me.'

'Sorry. I was just curious to see what you were looking at,' Matuei said, taking a step back. She pointed at the plant. 'Luxae. They're a good sign. The forest is coming back.'

'Yes, very good.' He coughed. 'Great, really. More and more of them are sprouting up every day around here. Most of them are pretty well hidden in the undergrowth, but there must be hundreds of them now.'

He was starting to settle down again, his voice gradually becoming steadier. Matuei was surprised by how clear and accurate his elocution was. He even compensated in some measure for the words and sounds that were not so well-suited for a human mouth. She would never have guessed by looking at him that he could speak with such grace. He was tall and gawky by human standards and his movements were awkward, as if he hardly knew how to handle his limbs. His face was long and his features jagged, little softened by a sandy dusting of hair about his chin and lips. His skin was pitted in places and rather unclean, as if he had not washed his face in several days.

'We're doing a good job here. I mean-' He lowered his head and smiled. 'You're doing a good job here. Me, I'm just digging around in the mud.'

'No. We need that kind of perspective. We need to notice more of these things. It's very, um, mechanical, working like this. Sometimes I spend so long going over the same few inches of ground I forget to look up and see what's already growing around me.'

'Oh! Well.' The man pointed up at a canopy of blue leaves beginning to stretch out from the edge of the woods and traced his index finger along the plants in front of them. 'Well, there's cyato, I didn't expect to see that here so soon, uh, and there, I don't know the Na'vi word for them, but those are glassroots. There's some pamtseoll starting to come back to the left of them. Those were all burned away when – um, when it happened. They're pretty resilient, though, so I'm not surprised to see them sprouting again.'

'What a relief this all is,' sighed Matuei with a wide grin. 'You know, there were many who thought nothing would ever grow again here.'

'Well, uh, Eywa will always find a way.'

It was the first time he had sounded artificial. There was much of the human in how he said that, as if he were clumsily appropriating a Na'vi 'catchphrase' he had learned. She realised then that this man had had little direct contact with the People. She did not doubt that he was knowledgeable about their ways, but it was just that: knowledge. Clinical, remote, quite different from actual experience. He had probably read a great deal, but it had not been field-tested – yes, she knew some of those curious human phrases too. For a Na'vi there was little difference between knowledge and practice, and things were learned primarily through application. No matter how much anyone tried to prepare you for your first flight with your ikran, when it came to bonding with it you were still on your own, learning from your own mistakes as you went along. She had not really considered that for some human beings, the path was quite different.

'Matuei.'

'Huh? Sorry, I don't think I know that word.'

'It's my name.'

'Oh! Right! Nice to meet you, Matuei. I'm Norm.'

Matuei had heard that name somewhere before. She recalled that this particular person had been singled out in a previous meeting.

'Did you ever walk with us, Norm?' she asked. 'As a dream-walker, I mean.'

'I don't know about "with", but, yeah, I did have an avatar.'

'What happened?'

'I was … it was fatally wounded when we were fighting the RDA. It's as good as dogmeat now.' He adjusted his mask again. Behind the glass, he was smiling sadly. 'I was incredibly lucky, really. That kind of thing can send the human driver's body into shock, even cardiac arrest.'

'Driver?' Matuei shook her head. 'I'm sorry. It is a little out of my experience.'

'Avatar, dream-walkers, whatever term you prefer, they're remotely controlled by human beings. By their minds, I mean, whilst the human body's at rest in a sort of cocoon, I guess you could call it. It wasn't designed to be continuous, though. For the purposes our avatars were intended to work towards, we'd have to rotate between being conscious as avatars and conscious as humans. It's a link between two bodies, through one mind. I'd compare it with your neural bonds with the creatures out here – tsahaylu – if that weren't considered, y'know, a form of blasphemy. But there are similarities. Both bodies share the pain if one gets hurt, for example.'

Matuei looked over her shoulder and spotted Nikal standing with her back to her. Every now and again she would glance at Matuei with a quizzical tilt of her head. Norm kept talking. His experience had caught up with his academic knowledge in this instance.

'I like that term, dream-walker, but it's much more complicated than that. It's never just like waking up. It's extremely disorientating, going from Na'vi back to human. Lots of confusion, nausea, obviously you feel like you've lost four or five feet of your body in the space of a second.' Norm laughed. 'Matter of fact, it's the one part I don't miss. But yes, it can be extremely dangerous, and in the early days people did die because of it. Tens of them. Trauma can pass from the avatar to the original body so easily. It's a problem the scientists never managed to iron out completely.'

He cleared his throat, noticing that Matuei was now gesturing to Nikal with an impatient but submissive shake of the palm of her hand.

'Sorry, I'm probably boring you here. This stuff is completely irrelevant now.'

'No, no. I can understand in a way,' murmured Matuei. She looked back over her shoulder again and bit her lip. 'It's nice talking to you, Norm, but perhaps I had better get back to work.'

'Yeah, me too.' He slipped a small dog-eared notebook out from his pocket. 'Maybe I'll see you around.'

'Maybe.'

Norm pulled a sharpened pencil out of the notebook's wire binding and started to sketch the rough outline of the crop of purple flowers nearest to him, marking each constituent part with an approximation of its length. As Matuei's shadow slipped away, he happened to look after her and saw the wrapped-up growth on the back of her head hanging stiffly among her flowing black hair. He stared down at his feet silently. He continued drawing.

Author's note: Wow, I haven't been back to in years. Please excuse the cheesy title and the heavy reliance on OCs – yes, yes, I know, the road to hell is paved with eyeball-searingly bad self-insertionist "original" characters. Since I'm not really a fan of 'chosen one' narratives (just one of several reasons I can't say I particularly 'loved' Avatar) and since the communal aspect of the Na'vi seems such a significant element, I figured that in this case shifting the focus to other members of the Omaticaya wouldn't be so much against the spirit of the original text as it might be in another franchise. I have tried to manage my OCs carefully, without turning them into either Mary Sues or angsty tortured souls. I'm headed for an upbeat if hopefully unconventional ending with this one, not a tragic wander around in the doldrums. I have also done my best to respect the canon couplings established in the film. In saying this, I understand that some might see Norm/Trudy as a canon coupling, but personally I thought one of the better aspects of Avatar was that it didn't shoehorn Trudy into one of those hastily set-up relationships between incompatible secondary characters. As the best character in the film, the one who most successfully maintained the tradition of more intriguing female characters in James Cameron's films, and one whose personal struggle was already sadly neglected through much of the script, Trudy deserves so much better.

I hope that you enjoy this first chapter and I thank anyone who takes the time to read it and indeed post a comment/review on it.

P.S. I made up some of the flora featured here. The animals, meanwhile, are all from the film. Given the Na'vi pov, I decided to use their Na'vi names, even if it did involve many tedious wanderings around the Avatar Wiki site.