Two Dark Moons

by Avi Silver

  “It brings down the, the heat in your wounds,” Hei had said, wringing their hands. “Like when you’re angry, and you feel hot in your face and your ears. The whole body reacts that way when you injure it. It gets angry.”

  Unsure of what to say, Sohmeng had pressed cheeks, quietly pleased to see the way Hei flushed in response.

  Sohmeng’s body, about as vindictive as the rest of her, was indeed holding something of a grudge. Even with the help of the spiceroot, it took ages for her to get a night of sleep uninterrupted by the stab in her ribs, or to pee without a throbbing deep in her bruised kidneys. Impatient as she was, she spent most of those waking hours just trying to stave off boredom without injuring herself any further.

  “So are we just going to live here forever now?” she whined one afternoon after she had run out of rocks to throw. “I thought you said sãoni like to move around.”

  “They have a migration pattern, yes.” Hei nodded, sharpening a stick for the new shelter they were building around Sohmeng. “But, like I also said, it’s been interfered with. The colonies have been pushed further south—some of them are even starting to settle in one place. I imagine we’ll do the same while Mama and the others recover.” They paused, frowning. “It’ll be rough on the local ecosystem. It always is when sãoni don’t migrate.”

  “Why?”

  Hei smiled self-consciously. “You’ve seen how they eat, Sohmeng Par.”

  “Okay,” she said, poking at the shelter with her toe. “Then why bother settling at all? Why not just keep moving down the migratory breakfast line?”

  “Would you walk your hmun into danger?” Hei shrugged, spearing the stick into the earth. The movement brought Sohmeng back to the evening of the battle, watching Hei ride Green Bites as they drove their makeshift pikes through the throats of enemy sãoni.

  She swallowed. “I guess not. But . . . I mean, they’re sãoni. What could actually hurt them?”

  “Humans.”

  Sohmeng snorted.

  “I mean it,” Hei said. “The humans of your hmun might not be strong enough to fight back the sãoni. But there are others who crossed the Great River, who came from outside the valley’s network of hmun altogether.” They spat disdainfully into the dirt. “They glimmer in the light. Poisonous as silvertongue.”

  Sohmeng was about to make fun of their complete melodrama when something caught her ear. “Wait, the Great River?” she said skeptically. “That’s as far north as the hmun network goes. Do the sãoni seriously migrate all the way to the tip of the continent?”

  Hei set down their work, brushing aside wood shavings to reveal the damp soil beneath. They dug their knife in, treating the earth as a canvas and scoring a rough map of the migration cycle. “It’s a loop. Nearly all of the hmun fall along here, here . . .” They tapped at points outside of the loop. “Safely outside the sãoni’s range.”

  Sohmeng couldn’t help but be impressed by the ingenuity of her ancestors—there was no way that the placement of all those hmun was a lucky accident. Long ago, when the ancient civilization of Polhmun Ão had collapsed, the surviving humans made the choice to split into separate settlements—small hmun which carried the legacy of the last great city the valley had known. It was thought to be safer, to have some distance from each other; if the resources were better distributed, they would not lose so many people should another great catastrophe arise.

  Each hmun to itself, but all in harmony. When she was young, Damdão Kelho had told this story about a thousand times at the request of Viunwei, who listened with morbid fascination about the end of the world. It ached to think of it now.

  Luckily, Hei interrupted her thoughts. “The sãoni aren’t supposed to interfere with humans more than any other predator,” they explained. “But when a great big hmun plants itself here—” They carved a deep mark at the tip of their map, then scribbled messy lines to signify the sãoni colonies scattering. “—it throws everything out of balance.”

  It was a difficult realization. No one had understood why the sãoni had rushed Fochão Dangde the day of the last crossing, or where the swarm had even come from. The traders were bewildered; the Grand Ones called it completely unprecedented. It had been easy for Sohmeng to create a story where they were nothing but monsters out for easy blood. Now, even with this revelation, her bias was hard to let go of.

  It didn’t really seem fair, when Hei’s family were about as welcoming as sãoni could get. Sohmeng wasn’t stalked so much as she was investigated, and Hei was entirely confident in both of their safety. Overcoming her prejudice came with a profound sense of dissonance.

  “So if they got back on the migration route, everything would go back to normal?” she asked, brushing her knuckles over the top of the map.

  “Time only moves in one direction, Sohmeng Par,” Hei said with a queer, private smile. “But yes, it would help.”

  The longer Sohmeng spent in Eiji, the more her concept of ‘normal’ began to change. Her days played out beneath the misty shadow of Sodão Dangde, and as the phases passed overhead, the extraordinary nature of Eiji became ordinary. She spent less time gawking and more time appreciating. She watched magenta birds with great curved gullets swoop down the face of the mountain, seeking their prey. Much of nature, she came to learn, was an endless hunt, a tender dance with death. It took her less time than she would have guessed to adjust to it. Before long, the dying cries of the sãoni’s meals had become ambient noise, blending with the other sounds of the jungle.

  As her body repaired itself, it was easier to participate in her new life. In the mornings, she ate slices of bright pink guava alongside the birds’ eggs Hei pilfered from nearby nests. When she was done, she’d spit the seeds to the expectant hatchlings, who made a game of gobbling them up. And while she couldn’t help Hei with much of the physical labour needed to build their camp, she worked with whatever small tasks were given to her.

  Between these tasks, she wholly dedicated herself to finding new and exciting ways to annoy some answers out of Hei.

  “Okay,” she tried one evening. “Important question: are we married?”

  “Married?” Hei looked up from the sãoni skin vest they were sewing for Sohmeng.

  “You said I was your mate. You know, when you bit me.” She gave Hei a pointed look, but they didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, they turned their attention pointedly back to their stitching. “Isn’t that basically just marriage for reptiles?”

  “It’s not—I mean, not exactly . . .” they stuttered, clicking uncomfortably. “For sãoni, it’s mostly a matter of reproduction. Finding a mate who’s going to produce healthy hatchlings, to strengthen the colony.”

  “Yeah, I’m still a few years out from thinking about kids.” Sohmeng crossed her arms, leaning back against the tree and thoroughly enjoying the sight of Hei scrambling for an explanation. For someone who was so eager to rub their face all over hers, they sure were acting squeamish about this. “So where does that put me and you? Are we paired for life or what? Am I allowed to seek out other attractive, screaming lizard-people? Who’s laying the eggs here?”

  “I didn’t—” They groaned loudly, rubbing their face. “I didn’t want them to eat you, and I thought marking you as a mate would get you accepted into the colony! It was the only thing I could think of, and it worked, and—and it only needs to mean what we want it to mean. It doesn’t have to mean anything, if that’s what you’d prefer.”

  There was a jagged tension to the words, an agitated awkwardness. Sohmeng’s initial instinct was to keep teasing, but she stopped herself, realizing that this might actually be important to them. If all the growling and biting was any indicator, Hei was truly invested in living as much of a sãoni life as possible, and marking a stranger as a mate might be bizarre for them on a level Sohmeng couldn’t connect with.

  Even in the hmun, she hadn’t felt very comfortable with the bonds of romantic partnership. Sure, she experienced physical attraction to peop
le, but the idea of meeting someone and just feeling some powerful unspoken connection sounded . . . a little ridiculous. In her mind, if she ever met someone who she actually wanted to spend her life with, it would be more of a pragmatic choice.

  So she went the pragmatic route.

  “Could it mean telling me how to gender you?” she asked. This sort of thing had never seemed like particularly personal information to Sohmeng—in the hmun, sharing pronouns was a given, and one’s gender could be found based on their lunar name. But Hei remained tight-lipped as ever.

  “Is there a reason it matters?” they asked with a sigh, scratching at their mess of hair.

  “Well, it helps me know how to talk about you.”

  “Ah, yes, to the wide variety of human beings you spend your days with,” Hei bit back, rolling their eyes and tugging the sinew through the vest. Sohmeng couldn’t help but laugh, pleased to see some progress in her mission to grow Hei a sense of humour.

  “Okay,” she nodded. “Fair. I guess it’s more . . . it helps me know how to think of you?”

  “How to think of me,” Hei repeated, leaning back against their tree and squinting at her doubtfully.

  “Well, how someone’s gendered can tell you a lot about who they are, what they do.” Sohmeng shrugged. “I was raised in the feminine. Par, specifically—super feminine! I’m an arguer, direct. Even if my family didn’t like it, they encouraged me to grow into it. So if you met me and I introduced myself as Sohmeng Par, you’d immediately know I’d be the first to disrupt a peaceful gathering if I had a problem. But if I didn’t tell you, you might think I’m a jerk, or that it’s personal.”

  Hei gave her a playful look then that implied they thought Sohmeng might just be a jerk regardless, and she was getting ready to swat them when they asked, “How do you think of me now?”

  Sohmeng blinked, surprised by the question. She took a moment to consider what conclusions she’d come to about Hei, and gave her answer cautiously, not wanting to undo the success of actually getting them to open up. “I guess I gender you sort of neutrally. I’d use the ‘they’ pronoun.”

  “Why?” Hei asked, anxiety suddenly creasing their brow.

  “Oh!” Sohmeng stumbled over her words, unsure what to make of the reaction. Was she wrong? Right? “It’s not, I mean, I’m not assuming Chisong or Jão or Hiun or, or anything. It’s just . . . even if I don’t know the temperament of the gods who watched your birth, you were born in a realm they both share? Like no matter what, both were somewhere in the sky, so honouring both of their influence with ‘they’ seems like a safe bet. Plus it’s what the traders used to do when they didn’t know so I thought maybe . . .”

  Hei had gone quiet as she spoke, their sewing forgotten in their lap. After a moment, they nodded slightly, looking to the sãoni seeking out fish in the river. A few of the hatchlings’ throat stripes had developed in recent weeks, and they wore their emerging adolescence proudly, squawking up a storm as they splashed.

  “Do you mind?” Sohmeng blurted. The reasoning behind assigning Hei the neutral pronoun in her head had seemed sound, but it worried her to think her good intentions might still have been hurtful. “Me thinking of you that way? Calling you ‘they’ with all those people I talk to?”

  The corner of Hei’s mouth flickered with a smile for a second, but they stayed silent, considering. At last, they looked to Sohmeng with an earnesty that made her heart squeeze. “I don’t really think my gender is anything at all. But no,” they said, nodding more firmly this time. “I don’t mind being ‘they’.”

  “You’re more than just a pronoun to me, though!” She flushed the moment the words were out, realizing how intimate they sounded, particularly in the context of their discussion. Quickly, she followed it up with her closest approximation of Hei’s sãoni name, hoping that would be enough of an explanation.

  It was. The tentative smile on Hei’s face broke into a grin, feral and playful, and they echoed the sound back. A chirp and three clicks, easy on their tongue.

  “Okay babies,” Sohmeng said, catching the moss- coloured egg she had tossed into the air. A dozen little eyes watched her hand, unblinking. “Let’s see if any of you have learned a godless thing.”

  She steadied her feet, readied her arm, and pretended to throw her very best throw. The hatchlings went barrelling into the forest while Sohmeng cackled, shaking the egg still in her hand.

  “Never gets old,” she snickered to herself.

  From behind her came a curious noise, and Sohmeng turned to see one last hatchling, smaller than the rest, without any throat stripes. The little sãoni looked from the egg to Sohmeng and back, tilting its head.

  “Oh, you sneaky thing!” She crouched down, tutting in mock reproach. “Fine, it’s yours. Size really isn’t everything, huh? You just might be the smartest of the bunch.”

  The hatchling opened its mouth ridiculously wide for the egg, and Sohmeng laughed, stroking between the little nubs that would eventually become head spines. The hatchlings had provided her a source of entertainment during her long convalescence, and she’d grown fond of their antics. She chirped a friendly sound to the sãoni, who responded with a squeaky trill of its own.

  “Sohmeng Par?”

  Sohmeng looked up mid-chirp to see—

  “Oh godless—”

  —a hardly-clothed Hei returning from the Ãotul where they’d been bathing. She fixed her eyes determinedly on the hatchling, cheeks tingling. Hei was about as self-conscious as a toddler when it came to nudity, and brazen as Sohmeng was, she’d discovered that she had a certain weakness for well-toned weirdos.

  “Yes, Hei the Stubbornly Nude?” she responded, patting the hatchling with newfound fervour.

  “Have you seen my makeup?” They half-heartedly tugged on their sãoni skin top, leaning down to dig through the shelter the two of them had been sharing.

  “You buried it under banana leaves so the babies wouldn’t get into it.” Not that it was helping. More often than not the hatchlings would stumble over, slick with charcoal and palmfruit oil, looking far too pleased with themselves. She reached back, pushing aside the leaves and handing the small bowl to Hei. “If you’d use some silvertongue, they’d leave it be.”

  “But if the smell stuck, they’d never go near me again.” Hei clicked in gratitude nonetheless, and was just about to scoop up more of the concoction when Sohmeng swatted at their wrist.

  “Wait, wait—you’re seriously going to slap on more of that without cleaning off the old stuff first?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. Hei blinked, looking from the bowl to Sohmeng as though no one had ever mentioned to them that skin needed to breathe. For all Sohmeng knew, that might have been the case. “Feel your skin, you still have oil streaked all over! Weren’t you just bathing?”

  “I . . . rinsed it?” they replied, confusion wrinkling their brow. “But I didn’t scrub it like the rest of me. I’m just going to be putting on more makeup anyway—” At Sohmeng’s open disgust, their shoulders dropped in defeat. “Do I have to?”

  “Do you want to keep squishing your face against mine?” Sohmeng asked matter-of-factly. Hei rubbed at their nose, which had very quickly gone pink, and nodded. “Then yes, absolutely, no question about it. Get up, we’re going back to the river. Grab me a lime, too. Let’s see what we can do about your hair.”

  “What’s wrong with my hair?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it, exactly,” Sohmeng said, standing and tugging at Hei’s wrist. “I just think you ought to get someone to cut it who isn’t Green Bites.”

  “But Green Bites didn’t—”

  “Hei.”

  “. . . Joking?”

  “Joking.”

  They waded out to the large, flat rocks that broke up the river. It was one of Sohmeng’s new favourite places; the roar of rushing water all around muted the harsher sounds of the jungle, and at night she had a nearly open view of the stars that marbled the sky. Now
she sat across from Hei, using a scrap of her old clothing from the hmun to scrub limewater and coconut shavings on their face. They scrunched their nose and spluttered, garbling out a series of unhappy growls.

  “Oh come on,” Sohmeng said, rubbing at their cheek. “You’re acting like I’m killing you!”

  “Washing’s a lot different when—eghh!” They spat out a coconut shaving mournfully. “—when someone else is doing it!”

  “Yes, yes, you’re welcome for the help.” Sohmeng inspected her work. Hei’s eyes seemed to be permanently shadowed from the amount of charcoal they had smeared on over the years, but with the thickest of it gone, she could actually see how young they were. Nearly her age, perhaps a year or two older. How had she not realized this before? More importantly, how young had they been when they were exiled?

  “I guess it does feel less sticky,” Hei mumbled, touching their cheek suspiciously. As always, their eyes were striking, like the colour had been plucked from the jungle itself. But without the charcoal, they became softer. It was not a Hei Sohmeng was used to, and probably not a Hei that Hei themself was particularly comfortable with, but Sohmeng was grateful to be allowed a look, if only for a moment. They chirped, tilting their head at her, and she realized she was staring.

  She cleared her throat, leaning back and looking at Hei with a critical expression. “So. The hair.”

  “It grows funny and then it sticks to the back of my neck when I sweat, so I just take a claw and—” They imitated hacking at it wildly from all directions. Which made a lot of sense, given what they were currently sporting. Sohmeng blew out a puff of air and fluffed her own recently-trimmed bangs.

  “Alright, well. There has to be a better solution than that.”

  And so they found one. Sohmeng wasn’t sure how long they spent there, laughing and shoving, dunking Hei’s head to get out wash after wash of lime water. At one point, as she scratched at their scalp, she was pretty sure they were about to fall asleep in her lap. But in the end, with a lot of testing and the sharpest sãoni claw Hei had on hand, Sohmeng had shaved down the hair that troubled them, from midway down their ear to the base of their neck. She had done what she could to salvage the top, cutting it into something roughly consistent.