The initial shock of having seen an outsider—and a Changer at that—after years of solitude, eventually gave way to an instinctive focus of eyes—her hair’s and her own—and the imposition of warning pain a split second before the transformation. Only, as if the fates had rolled a die that showed no number, the transformation never came. Instead, she had found herself in close proximity to a face that was Eedric’s and yet not; his features were seamed into a head that tipped the stalk of a neck, a bulbous growth jerking to sporadic beats as the open mouth full of teeth produced a collection of growls, too thick to be discernible words. But the sentiments of fear, guilt, and confusion had, at some point in that encounter, been unmistakable. He had seemed about to burst out of both his clothes and the cage of his creature’s form.
In a strange way, he reminded her of Acra—the same good humour and, she would find later, the same simplicity of ideals. He was tall and had a face like a finely-cut gem, on which thick, well groomed brows were set above intelligent eyes and volatile pupils. Garrulous, and so full of movement: a pulse in the corner of a strong jaw, a stray bit of hair in the valley of his parting. And facial expressions. So many facial expressions—frowns to raised eyebrows, flexible lips, nostril-flare.
She ought not to have allowed him to come back. He was an outsider to her world and to Nelroote. Far too good and too much of a liability to be part of what the settlement had become, where survival meant vice was a necessity. Yet his return always came with a sense of relief, and the growing familiarity made it harder for her to avert herself. Instead, as she started to see more of him, she started to put both a face and a living, breathing person to the name she would rather forget but couldn’t.
They moved, at first, within barely overlapping circles. When they were in the chamber, he would keep to one corner where he prodded the skeletons in a geli, revolted, but still wanting to touch sort of way. As she moved through the tunnels, he would trail after her at a distance and she could feel his eyes sweeping over her back. When she paused, so would he. He only stopped short at watching her prepare a body for cremation and interment. Perhaps because the first time, the body had only got to her after it had been dead for a while—one of those who had died of overdose in some hidden nook or a closed-up house by themselves—and he had run out of the preparation chamber heaving and retching.
Apart from that, he went where she went in the ancient catacombs. She was sure that wherever he came from, incessantly shadowing a person was illegal, but down here in the catacombs he probably felt that the laws of his surface did not apply. Not to him, no.
Conversation had begun sparsely, and sometimes felt stilted: him wary and always apologetic, Ria either holding back or layering responses with puzzles and obscuring it further with her dry and evasive humour, keeping the gaps of age and era impassable. He never pushed for answers, but was always forthcoming with information about himself: jobs, family, state of the worlds he lived in—Manticura, and the more intimate virtual spaces of his games. Leaning his back against the wall, right beside “Rafidah’s airman”, he would sit with one leg gathered up to him and the other stretched out, slim and long. In this way, he would run off like a continuous news feed, censored only by the limits of his knowledge. Sometimes he watched, living dangerously in the moment, as she lit lamps, painted or carved, paying homage to the sun she saw only in windowed form. He went about like this two, sometimes three times a week. No real schedule; he like he come, he don’t like he don’t come.
Deeper connection didn’t happen until about a month after. It began with the hand-held slab he carried around with him that, as he declared with complete austerity, “contained his life”. He’d seen her eyeing it when he looked up from the swiping and the blank staring—left, right, up, up, up, sometimes down; frowning, rolling his eyes, smiling, laughing a little to himself. So he had held it up and asked, “Have you seen this before, Ria? It’s called a phone.”
He always assumed that she didn’t know something. She had seen some of the young people in Nelroote use such a device, though most of them complained that you couldn’t get reception so deep underground. Nevertheless, she had shaken her head at Eedric’s question.
He had come up to her, close, too close, his proximity a danger to her control over her snakes. “It does everything”, he said, but showed her only pictures, mostly of food at first, shiny cutlery and edibles precisely and artfully arranged on pristine porcelain plates. Then of places when she wanted to see how people lived—corridors, interiors, streets and blocks, the countries he had been to, the sets of his photo shoots. People came later: pictures of him, with his friends, at functions, in between shoots, and with a young woman who was as tall, slim and beautiful as he. Ria considered this young woman, with her lush, long hair of black roots and auburn ends. A perfect marble statue with skin so fair and polished smooth, features so evenly placed and eyebrows such impeccable arches. In the pictures that he had shown, Eedric always appeared heavy-lidded as he posed pressed up close to the woman. Ria found her gaze lingering upon this stranger.
“That would be Adrianne,” Eedric had explained, suddenly uncomfortable. “We, uh…are not all right, right now.” Perking up, he then suggested, “Why don’t I take one of you?”
“Don’t. You can’t.”
“Why not? See this? You can do it yourself too,” he told her, and with that, he’d made some taps on the phone’s screen before showing it to her.
What she saw surprised her, a strange face, so different from her sister’s. Against the allure of both Barani and Adrianne, Ria was strange-looking, almost grotesque: eyes too wide-set, nose flat and ridged as if someone had tried to squeeze it as they would an accordion, face too broad up top and pinched below. Then there was her hair, black as night and moving more slowly than she’d initially thought they would be. She gazed upon her snakes, wondering if she could turn herself into stone if she tried.
“Not now then,” she heard Eedric say and he made to take the phone out of her hand, his movements quick as if frightened.
She did not let go at first, so the phone was a bridge between them as they each held on to both ends of it. He stretched out a finger, touched the inside of her wrist. When she finally did let go, he stepped away with what she believed was a puzzled expression.
“She’s a beautiful girl,” Ria found herself saying as she started to move away from him, feeling the sudden need for ample distance.
But he came, following as he always had. “Not beautiful,” he told her. She had looked back to see his mouth stretched downwards and curled into a distinct parabola of disagreement. “Pretty, good looking. Hot. But not beautiful.”
“What do you consider beautiful then?” she asked, starting to move.
She thought she could feel him smile behind her. “Would it be inappropriate if I said you?”
She said nothing, but considered it rather odd that a word inscribed upon a fire or warm weather could be used to describe a person too. And she thought about her sister, who had been going lately by “Bara” rather than “Ani”. Bara—Sce’ ‘dal for “ember”. “My sister, is she hot?” she verbalised, peering over her shoulder only to have Eedric look at her as if he was in sudden danger.
“But not beautiful,” he added before turning the conversation to other things.
His first gift to her was a set of books, a few days after he walked in on her squeezed and curled up in the alcove with the opened sarcophagus, reading one of the old books she still kept. He asked if she liked reading. She said yes, and showed him the book, watched first the purse of his lips as he let out a whistle, then later his blinding white teeth as he told her about the value antique books such as the one she was reading had up on his world. The books he got her had flimsy paper covers, although they were still more expensive in their twenties and thirties of dollars than hardcovers had been in the past. It was about what’s within, he told her, and she read the tales of loss and regret, of atonements and love that never ended in
tragedy, but never in happiness either. Somewhere in one a broken soldier looked on at a pretty little bird he could never have, and in another a man’s long journey ended with nothing but horror.
In their exchange of stories, he got to know about Cikgu, about the life she used to have on the surface, the first time she lamented her lost innocence during Kenanga’s petrifaction and how, to remember her deed, she’d tattooed the cananga flower—marquise petals veined—onto her skin using a needle cleaned in fire and dipped in black ink. She recalled how, after the repetitions of tiny stabs seaming the ink into her skin, she became numb to the physical pain. But not to the feelings that came with the memories of what she had done.
She expected judgement from him. She waited for his body to slowly back away from her, wanting nothing more to do with her. She expected words of wisdom no wiser than those from a newspaper, better suited to be made into cotton swabs for cleaning ears. Yet, he only asked, “What do those symbols around some of the flowers mean?”
“They are names,” she told him. In tiny letters written closely to the flower’s black outline: Nenek, Kenanga, Acra, Manyari. There was a gap cornering a petal’s tip, and then: Nelroote, Barani…
“Oh? And what language is that?”
“Tuyunri,” replied Ria.
He looked at the words inscribed into her skin and then to her, shaking his head. “Tuyunri. What’s that?”
He was seated next to her, separated from her by the sarcophagus. In spite of the weight of the things she had told him, all she could think about then was how little this man knew; for all of the education he had received up on the surface.
Finally, she explained, “It is an old, forgotten language; the one spoken by the Tuyuns before writing came to them, and before the language of the first occupiers—the Sce’ ‘dal of the Scereans from Su(ma) and the Cayanese and Feleenese of F’herak, and then Ro’ ‘dal of the Humans from the West and the North Continents. My cikgu once told me that it’s as old as the kerah, the dialects, still spoken in the F’herakian north. Interesting, isn’t it? How so much of what we say is borrowed?”
He was leaning over, peering around the sarcophagus. “Do you speak it? How do you say ‘Hello’ in Tuyunri?”
Ria chuckled. People always asked how to say ‘hello’ when they encountered new languages, as if it was at the very core of sentient being to learn to greet another.
“It is not something you can say in a word,” she revealed. “The ancient Tuyuns believed that they had a very close connection to the jungle they lived in. So greetings were likely sounds, like animal calls. When they greet each other in very formal settings, they say bcur’in, or ‘Day above’.”
“Why would they say that?”
Ria shrugged and shook her head at the same time. “Maybe life was precious to them. Mortality rates very high among their numbers. So to see day might have been significant.”
“Ah, I…see.”
Do you? She wanted to ask.
“Never heard of the language before. Is there a dictionary?”
“If there is, I do not know of it. The Tuyun lexicon is understandably small given the way they lived and it was not given time to evolve to be precise, to be relevant in modern communication. Often, it run circles around things, depending a lot on the context of the moment.”
“Context?”
Ria pondered the question. “There was once a town in the marshlands that was populated by early Scereans: Su(ma) Uk’rh, or Lower Marsh(land). ‘Uk’rh’ is often translated as ‘lower’ or ‘minor’, when actually its gestured meaning is ‘what it is not, yet could be’. Possibility, I think you would call it. In those days, the Scerean settlement was a home displaced—what is not Su(ma), their land of origin, and yet could be by the little things they did to make it feel like home.” A distant look came over her as she continued, “And when the Humans came and spoke of your Krow City, many Scereans left to seek their fortunes there. But, they could only get menial jobs. They were practically slaves, earning very little and regarded even less. As you already know, they lived in that slum. Dinya Uk’rh, they called it—Lower World. Not Su(ma) any more. They couldn’t bring themselves to name it after home. Out of shame or disappointment… I don’t know.”
“Scereans? We were talking about Tuyuns.”
“Yes, but due to racial interactions very early on, the Scereans in Manticura used to speak a form of Tuyunri. More words…the addition of Sumean prepositions and pronouns. Sumean is very similar to Tuyunri after all. Sce’ ‘dal was a…later development, when they had to communicate with the other ‘nees’es, namely those from F’herak.”
She paused and, smiling, added, “But I admit, my vocabulary is limited. I have only one book on Tuyunri and everything I know is from there. It is thorough but it is nearly two hundred years old and perhaps people who study languages have already come up with something new.”
He stared at her, as if she was something he didn’t want to forget and Ria realised she had never experienced scrutiny of such a nature before.
After a long pause, Eedric asked her in a quiet voice and with a great deal of care, “Do you remember why you turned the people in Kenanga?”
Ria thought she had reached an age where the events of that day could no longer affect her and where she would be able to approach it with an answer, the clarity of which would show both distance and understanding—a rationale behind the devastating actions of her child self. Yet, Ria found only silence stretching across the turbulent landscape of her mind.
She must have been mute for too long, because Eedric said, “If you’re not comfortable answering that, you don’t have to.”
“I was young,” she told him finally. “I thought that was where the enemies were. The villagers were the only ones who knew about us—so I thought at the time—and I thought, with them gone, we could live in that hut in peace forever, my sister and I. It had seemed like the right thing to do.”
“When did you know it wasn’t?”
“Immediately after.”
Silence descended upon them. Eedric studied the empty space of air in front of him, and whatever he saw made him heave a sigh. Ria saw him raise his brows; saw his eyes widen.
“And you have been hiding here all these years because of that?”
Ria nodded, though she said, “Maybe.”
“Do you feel…like you should—” He stopped and gestured around him at the statues. “Like, is all this a way for you to make up for it? You know, like an atonement, or something?”
“You cannot make up for killing with more killing, Eedric,” she told him.
“No—I meant—yeah. No.” He shook his head, eyes pressed shut to rid himself of some image she couldn’t see.
“Should I be punished in the court of justice?” she asked.
He looked at her, his expression pained.
“That is only fair,” she goaded him.
He turned away. “Not when you—” He paused, then turned back, a smile already adorned. “You know, I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that you speak Tuyunri. I bet only a Manticurean historical linguist knows the language…and that’s probably one guy, if either he or the title even exists.” Turning to her, he asked again, “So what are you? Referred to in Tuyunri, I mean.”
Ria scrunched up her face and closed her eyes as she thought. “Metu’ra,” she said. Me tuung ra, it sounded like. Serpent woman.
He nodded, appearing rather in awe now. “Nice. It suits you.”
Ria laughed then. She laughed because what he had said was so contrived; and she laughed because he made it sound as if he’d spent a lifetime telling the phrase to someone. Eedric considered her with a puzzled look before joining in.
When the laughter died down, he asked her, “So, what is Nelroote like? It must be quite something, huh? A city beneath a city? Is it busy? How do you keep it ventilated? Lit? Why was it built? And was it always a city?”
She looked at him and felt the urge to reach ou
t and right a hair out of place. She chose instead to give his thigh a light pat. “Another time lah, sayang. Another time.”
One more pat and she hoisted herself to a stand.
“How do you know when to leave each time?” asked Eedric, getting up after her.
Ria chuckled. “When you start looking at your watch a lot.”
5117 CE
Underbelly
For Ria, the daily move from tomb to home was seamless. She could not think of Nelroote apart from its vast network of tunnels and corridors. For everyone else, Nelroote was solely the flawed city with its narrow alleys, where the dying shared a dim space with the desperately living. The city had got crowded over the years as those finding themselves in Manticura without the proper papers and those who’d been ousted with nowhere to go found their way to the city through feelers working up on the surface. Without a sophisticated sewage disposal system, it had adopted a smell. It was the smell of waste and wasting, but it was the smell of living too: banana fritters being fried in big batches by someone trying to make a living selling them; soap for bodies wishing to be clean in spite of the place they were living in; the flowers people always hung in doorways and windows. There was a woman who lived along the route Ria took. Ria could always smell the scent of the oil she used to keep her dark coat shiny. She oiled herself in nothing but a towel every evening at seven o’clock. And there was a man who burned his incense right across from her doorway at exactly the same time. Prayers, he always insisted when Ria walked by and noticed him peeking into the woman’s home. Ria said little to the man. Sometimes the towel dropped off, she knew.
Nelroote was already a shanty town when Ria had arrived with Barani, and it looked set to be a shanty town for all eternity. There was little by way of rent to pay and most people had to scrape by anyway, so anything illegal was generally ignored unless it hurt someone directly. Then justice was whatever Pak Arlindi and Barani said it was during one of their trials.
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