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People asked questions about the coffin Luocha carried everywhere he went. He had anticipated questions once he arrived on the Xianzhou, considering that coffins were not the custom there, but even on the way there he was being stopped and asked about it. He supposed that's what he got for carrying the coffin himself instead of getting a more formal procession...
And he'd thought that his cover as a merchant would work, but it turns out having a Massive Suspicious Coffin isn't enough to convince some people.
So here he was, standing by a riverbank on some swampy planet, shoes sinking into the mud as he listened to an elderly local give a eulogy over a funerary raft. The body was covered with the skins of native animals, each one a different shade of brown or green for optimal camouflage. He shifted his weight to try and get a better look at the patterns--just so he had something else to focus on--and only felt his shoes go even deeper into the dirt. Ugh... How did he get roped into this again?
Something jostled his side. "That's your queue," muttered a soft voice beside him.
Ah yes, she was the reason he got into this. This poor girl just lost her... father? Grandfather? And they were short a priest to lay him to rest properly. He'd told her about a dozen times that he wasn't a priest, that the coffin was just a tool of his trade and he really did have to make the next ship off of this planet, but... Well, the girl had spirit, he would give her that much.
"I still don't know what you want from me," he whispered back. "I don't know your custom."
"You getting up there is the custom," she hissed. Her patience with this stranger was wearing thin. "Go stand where Baba just was and let his spirit sing through you."
"Sing?"
The girl growled something under her breath, the words either too quiet or too foreign for Luocha to catch properly. "Yes. Go up there and let my grandfather's--" Aha! Grandfather! "--spirit move you so I can mourn without having to coach you!"
Her voice was starting to raise, and with no one up by the riverbank speaking, her scolding was drawing people's attention. The eyes on him were pointed, and he didn't have the time to argue. With a sigh and a sidelong glance at the coffin he carried--the thing that got him into this mess in the first place--he walked up to the riverbank.
The eyes followed him, but he kept his on the girl who'd gotten him here in the first place. He just stood up there, in his muddy shoes, and gathered his thoughts. If this had been a funerary custom he was used to--he recited a prayer or a Path's teachings, everyone wept, then went home--he would've been able to push through just fine, but singing? Did it have to be something specific? He didn't know the man who died, much less the planet he had lived on and the culture that followed, and he was already on a time crunch...
His chosen observer mouthed something at him.
A wind started to blow through the marshlands. Gentle at first, but it picked up fast, causing the tall grass by the riverside to bow its many heads, the leaves to whisper, and the water itself to tremble. The mourners stood fast in the face of the breeze, even as their hair blew into their faces and their cloaks flapped like the wings of doves. No matter how much the wind whorled around them and the trees shook and shuddered, no one dared leave this riverbank.
The wind reached his ears, and in the strangest way... it sounded like music. Not something that could be heard on a radio or at a show on a busier planet, but... music all the same. There were notes, there were tones, there was a melody.
But no words.
There didn't have to be.
Luocha hummed along, just to catch the wind's rhythm, and after maybe two or so bars, his lips parted, and the humming became vocalizing, a simple "ah" sound that rose and fell as the wind did. He grew more confident, more proud of his simple sound as time passed, the seconds ticking into minutes. It began to feel almost like the wind was his own voice, that he was the one making the grass bend and the water ripple.
The wind passed. His voice faded. Silence fell on the little congregation.
He looked at the girl in the crowd. She wasn't looking at him. She had her arm around the elder who had been standing where he was now and was holding her tight as she wept. That was probably his cue to leave. Luocha bowed to the crowd and murmured an excuse.
He trudged through the mud, dragging Tayzzyronth's coffin behind him. If the girl who had dragged him here called him to stay, he didn't hear it. This had been nice, but the moment had passed. He had somewhere to be.