by G. Howell
“Calm down,” the Rris was saying. “What is...” then it glanced down toward the knife and I heard, “Ah. I was trying to trim the dressing.” A hand shifted, pointing.
I looked: one arm had already been dressed, as had my leg. A clean white bandage held a poultice over the throbbing gouge on my calf. I’d slept through that? The gauze on my other arm was in disarray, the bandage unraveling and the dressing fallen to the mattress, which was liberally smeared with dark, congealing stains. So, that was honest enough, but my heart was still hammering.
“You understand me?” the Rris asked carefully. “Mikah?”
I nodded slowly, not even thinking that that gestured wouldn’t be understood. “Who are you?”
“It has been a while, but I’m surprised you don’t remember me.”
“I can’t see you.”
“Hai, that’s right: I forget. This is still too dark? Ah, well, but I can see you’re growing your fur long again. Looking very inelegant as well, after all that work I did on it.” A hand lifted into the lamplight and there was a slim bracelet around the wrist, woven from some pale fibers that looked very familiar. I looked up at the features that were shadow and fur.
“Esseri?” I ventured.
“Escheri,” she corrected. “Hai, you see? You do remember.”
Escheri. A Mediator. The last time I’d met her had been in Lying Scales. Chihirae’s hometown. The town to which Shyia had taken me after my time in Westwater. She’d been assigned as a steward to help me in my brief time there, a long time ago. She’d been friendly toward me; she’d helped me make myself presentable for Shyia’s immediate superior at the tie. And she’d kept some of the hair she’d cut, to make that bracelet. Said it’d be unique. It was, but I also realized that I couldn’t see her features. The Escheri I’d met had had distinctive eyes: one almost brown while the other was the more common amber. In that gloom I couldn’t see her eyes and, well, anyone could wear a bracelet, couldn’t they? But she’d said some things that not many people knew.
“What’re you doing here?”
“The same thing as everyone else: trying to stop those ripples of yours drowning someone.”
Manacles and chains clinked as I worked myself upright, sitting on the mattress with my back to the wall. I had to lift both my manacled hands to brush tangled hair out of my eyes. Night outside, that was why it was so dark. There were distant sounds drifting in from outside: an owl hooting, far-off Rris voices, the sounds of night sneaking in along with a ghost of moonlight mixing with the glow of the small oil lantern sitting on the table. She was kneeling, watching me with her head tipped to one side. On the floor at her side a small bag was open and some pots, vials, and gauze strips were spread out on a white cloth. That much I could see. And behind her the door was securely closed.
“There are guards outside,” she told me matter-of-factly as she saw where I was looking.
“Ah, good. That makes me feel much safer.”
I saw her head tip the other way and then she coughed a laugh. “That was a joke, a? That means you’re feeling better?”
“Better?”
“They told me you collapsed. Upstairs. You could barely walk.”
“I was... tired.”
“Tired enough to sleep through my [something],” Escheri said. “Most of it.”
“A. But I have felt better.” I reached up to rub my eyes and the chains clattered again. “Could you take these off?” I asked.
She tipped her hand. “Sorry. Orders.”
“Of course,” I sighed.
“Then do you mind if I finish up?”
I nodded. Her muzzle wrinkled, but she knew enough about me to know what that meant. She gestured for my arm. I slowly raised it and her coarse fur and leathery finger pads pressed against my flesh as she worked at retying the loosened bandage. “Just claw scratches, but they seem bad on you. Thin skin, a?”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Huhn!” she grunted and used the back of a claw to trace a scar running up my arm. “You’ve picked up a few more scratches since I last saw you. Rotted patchwork quilt now, aren’t you? Your leg there. And your back... rot me. You’ve been flogged. How did that happen?’
I felt the flinches run up my spine. That was something I didn’t want to talk about, but I wasn’t sure of where I stood. Could I refuse to answer? And that indecision stretched the moment out until she filled it by saying, “That bad, a? I won’t chase it.”
“Thank you.”
“Others might,” she said as she took up the little scalpel again and sliced off the excess gauze. “Hai, there,” she laid the blade down and rolled the remaining bandage. “Done and done,” she told me as she packed the gauze away and then reached down to my feet. I flinched and she gave me a reproachful look. I sighed and let her lift one foot and then the other, examining them like a pack animal’s hooves.
“The soles shouldn’t be that color, I think,” she noted, poking carefully. “Bruising, a?”
“A.”
“Huh. Unpleasant, but they are healing. No infection. Your leg... how does that feel?”
“Sore,” I said. It was, aching.
“Huhn, watch it. It looks inflamed. I cleaned it and applied a [something], but it could be better. Watch out for it.”
I snorted. “So it’ll be good and healthy when you execute me?”
“Don’t be like that. Shyia is trying to take things by the throat.”
And what did that mean? “Shyia?” I half-laughed, “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
Her ears went back. “You know he’s been trying to help you.”
“To what? Make my life a living... a nightmare come true? He’s been very successful at that.”
Those ears stayed back. “He’s kept your ragged hide intact,” she said. “You have no idea what he’s done for you.”
“No, I don’t.” I leaned back against the wall and regarded the half-lit shadow of the Rris kneeling opposite. “What has he done for me? What is going on? What is going to happen? People are saying tribunal... I don’t know what that is. I thought I was on trial, but his Lordship said he was the one being judged. Can you tell me?”
Her hands moved. Glass and metal clinked as she tidied her kit away but otherwise there was silence.
“Will you?” I ventured.
There was a low exhalation. A sigh or a hiss, I wasn’t sure, but she looked at me. “Listen, there are things I can’t tell you...”
“Can’t as in don’t know or are not allowed to.”
An irritated twitch. “Not everything is clear water. Now, listen: I can tell you that tribunal is used for Guild affairs. If a decision is made by a Guild Lord that is deemed... inappropriate, it can be challenged. Another Mediator can call tribunal.”
“Just like that?”
“Not just like that. He needs seconds... he needs other Mediators to support the claims; reputable officers who’ll sponsor his challenge. If those are forthcoming, the tribunal is formed from representatives of the Guild, of other guilds, of city lords. They weigh and decide.”
“And Shyia’s doing this,” I said.
“A,” Escheri said, taking her kit and seeming to flow to her feet with that grace inherent in her species.
“Why?”
Her eyes flashed as she looked at me. “What do you mean?”
“Chasing me, trying to kill me, then this... it wasn’t leading up to this?”
Ears twitched. “Mikah, I can’t tell you too much. It could unduly influence things,” she said and scratched at the door. Bolts on the other side rattled and she took her lantern.
“You don’t think he’s just doing this to increase his standing in the guild? Get rid of the current lord? Make room at the top?” I said to her back.
/> The heavy white-painted wood of the door swung open, silent on well-oiled hinges. In the doorway, a shadow behind the light of the lantern, Escheri turned and her ears were flat against her skull, “Mikah,” she almost hissed, “understand this: the one who calls Tribunal can never – never - rise to high rank in the guild. Now, good night. Sleep. You’ll need it.”
The door swung closed with a dull thud and the lantern light was gone. In the feeble glimmer of moonlight seeping through the slit of a window high in the wall I leaned back and sighed. What she’d said, that changed things yet again.
------v------
The cell was lit by the rising sun streaming in through the small window, casting an incandescent rectangle on the white plaster wall opposite. I woke squinting into that glare and then at the faces of the Mediators in the open door. None of them were familiar and all looked as though they’d had their sense of humor forcibly removed.
They had some breakfast for me. It was a simple meal of bread and meat and water, but the bread was fresh and the meat had been cooked to something I could eat and the water seemed clean. They gave me five or so minutes to eat and after that I was taken upstairs again, to a room paneled with maple and shelves and fronted with tall latticed windows. It was a classroom of a sort I was getting to be quite familiar with. Low stools – square cushions upholstered in emerald green squatting on stubby curved legs of dark oak - were arranged in a gentle arc before a single cushion, a low desk and black slate hung on a wall. The shelves around the room were loaded with all sorts of bric-a-brac, from stones to small stuffed animals and scrolls and books. The expressionless guards told me to sit myself on the cushion and wait, and then they took positions by the door. I wondered just what exactly I was waiting for.
It turned out to be that examination the Mediator Lord had called for. They hadn’t wasted any time. The Mediators had gathered biologists of sorts, all the specialists and physicians and doctors and quacks they could find: Mediator medics and physicians, life studiers and naturalists from the university, even a local merchant whose interest turned out – to my disconcertion – to be taxidermy. Over a dozen individuals in all. They’d all been gathered there at his Lordship’s request, solely for the purpose of finding out just what I was. Apparently my explanation hadn’t satisfied him.
At least it wasn’t an open forum. They were brought in one at a time. Some of them had seen me before – we’d been introduced before, under less extraordinary conditions, but there were more than a few for whom I was a new experience and they gawped and stared and poked and prodded and when I tried to protest the Mediators stepped in and insisted I comply. So when a studier from the local university wanted samples, to compare with other beasts’, I was forced to relent to giving blood, dripped from a needle prick into a glass vial and used for god-knew-what. And I started getting really scared at what sort of medieval torture of a medical procedure they might insist on next.
That turned out to be wanting more samples: urine, bile and semen, nail and hair clippings. Things that made me, things that really weren’t that important but in which the fledgling Rris sciences placed stock, even though they’d be of very limited use to them. And that time the Rris wasn’t interesting in hearing what other techniques I might be able to offer, he was only interested in sticking a tube down my throat to harvest bile. So I was uncommonly relieved when Escheri chose that time to appear in the doorway, pausing to mutter to the guards and then exchanging words with the Rris scholar. He protested. Her ears laid flat.
“No,” the resulting exchange boiled down to her telling him, “You were asked what else he could be. Whether you knew of others like him, if your studies had any records of such. We weren’t granting you leave to add to your samples. Simply do as we require.”
And that was that.
It was her, in the daylight I was more convinced of that. There were the things she knew, but there were also her eyes. The parti-colored eyes were the same as I remembered from Lying Scales, so I was fairly certain she was who she claimed to be. I did as she asked and submitted to more poking and prodding while academics pondered whether or not I might be some freakish sort of bear. An ape of some sort, perhaps. I’d been through this sort of thing before, all with various levels of lack of success. So I’d resigned myself to listening to them talk and speculate and ultimately come up with nothing. Until one, a raffishly-attired academic on a visit from the southern country of Bluebetter, was ushered into the room, took a look at me and his ears came up; “A, I’ve seen the like before.”
I felt an electric shock run up my spine. Other ears went up and Escheri looked from him to me and back again. “You’re sure?”
“A. Quite,” he said, stalking over to peer at me through spectacles that looked oddly familiar.
I managed to find my voice. “You’ve seen people like me before?” I choked and he recoiled two steps.
“It talks!” he snarled in astonishment. I felt somewhat affronted.
“You were told,” Escheri said.
“Indeed, but ... I thought noises like a [something] bird. Hearing it is something else altogether,” he said, adjusting his spectacles and staring again.
“You said you’d seen his kind before.”
“Huhn? Oh, ah. A, that’s right. There are several specimens in his lordship’s menagerie back in Red Leaves. Although they don’t talk. Not that I’ve heard.” He scratched at his chin. “It’s dangerous?”
“I don’t believe you’re in any danger,” Escheri said quietly.
“But... you said you’ve seen more of my kind?” I had to say again. Was he telling the truth? It was incredible that someone could walk into a room and just say, ‘oh, one of those,’ if he hadn’t seen other people. My kind of people. And that one little concern suddenly eclipsed all my other worries. “Have you? Like me?”
“Mikah,” Escheri cautioned me with a glare and I subsided, reluctantly. With her tail still lashing, she turned back to the life studier. “Now, you say that ah Thes’ita actually has some of this kind in captivity?”
“A,” he said, walking around me and leaning in to squint through the glasses, to sniff, to cock his head. “Although, they weren’t nearly as tall. They did seem... darker. And there was more hair. And their scent was different, I recall.”
I opened my mouth and Escheri snapped, “Mikah!” Then she calmly asked, “Where did they come from? Do you know that?”
“Oh, Africa,” he said. “A, they were brought back by an expedition.”
“Apes,” I slumped.
“A. Like yourself, no?”
“No,” I sighed. “No. Not quite.”
“No? I must say there is a remarkable resemblance. Perhaps a freak specimen?”
I started to offer a retort to that and caught Escheri’s look. I shut up. She nodded her muzzle just once and turned back to the biologist. “We want to consider all possibilities. Your suggestions will be noted.”
‘Will be noted...’ I shuddered and gritted my teeth. Would they really listen to something as preposterous as that? It was ridiculous. It was as bad as... as saying I was something from a parallel reality. From another world. What was more believable? What was the court more likely to believe?
So while the biologists and learned scholars came and went and poked and prodded, I had enough time to worry away at those questions. I just did as they asked: turned this way, raised this or that limb, answered questions that I’d been asked so many times that they’d become rote while I churned my own problems over in my head. And the answers I kept coming up with didn’t do anything to reassure me.
So, some time later it was a while before I realized that the last quack physician had just left and nobody else had come in. The room was empty, save for the guards and Escheri. Tipping her head as she regarded me sitting on that cushion, as she probably had been for the past minut
e or so. Outside the windows over her shoulder I could see the day had turned dark. Fleeting sunbeams peeked through scudding purple clouds. “I said, ‘we’re done’,” she told me.
“Oh,” I said, then nodded. “That’s all?”
“For now,” she said and tipped her head the other way. “You seem... preoccupied.”
I think I managed a grimace of a smile. “I’ve got a lot to think about.”
“Perhaps you might be better concentrating on matters at hand?” she suggested.
“A,” I nodded resignedly.
She sighed and scratched her jaw, “Just as I remembered you: flippant, but still so nervous.”
My jaw twitched. “You think I haven’t got reason?”
“Huhn,” she huffed and stalked around, circling around behind me. “I think you’ve got excellent reason.” I half turned my head and froze when a hand ruffled my hair; claws curling through overgrown strands to lay on either side of my neck. “But perhaps...”
“Perhaps?”
Another soft snort and the hand patted my head. “Mikah, just do as you’re told. That’s all I can tell you.”
“I’m trying,” I shuddered and Escheri stroked my neck. “Dammit! I’m trying. But it’s just... It just feels like I’m running out over a cliff.” I twisted around, looking up at her as she pulled her hand back. “Nobody is telling me anything. I’m not on trial, but you keep me here. In chains. What am I supposed to do? How can I...”
Her hand moved again and I stopped talking. A finger was under my jaw, a single claw digging in just behind my chin. “Enough,” she said quietly and slowly she crouched, to squat in front of me, those amber eyes regarding me dispassionately.
With a human it’s the muscles around the eyes that offer the emotion clues: fractional flickers of features that we’re programmed to read from birth. All our lives, all our history, we’re exposed to those cues and learn them at a level that must rival the instinctual. Look into the eyes of something not human and those cues aren’t there. They’re completely absent; or they’re replaced by movements that might be tantalizingly familiar but mean something utterly different.