Someone online pitched in teasingly, “Eh... Don’t fight lah.” It was not Miz, and Eedric very nearly snapped at the guy too.
He stared at the screen, feeling suddenly defeated. He wanted to speak, but knew some dozen other people were listening in, ready to label him “pussy-whipped”, if he so much as tried to apologise. In this game, with kids being motherfuckers, he was not ready to make that sacrifice.
He made it through one game and was in the lobby waiting for another when Miz logged out, and then in private chat told him quietly, “Game over, brother. Go talk to her.”
Eedric clenched his jaw and palmed the buttons of his controller with force enough to break them. Finally, he tossed it aside and ripped the headset from his head. When he turned back to Adrianne, he saw that she was standing by his table, a thick tome opened up to the bookmarked page in her hands. He had not even heard her move.
“You might not want to read that,” he said before he could catch himself. “Too many hard words for you.”
Adrianne looked up at that. There was hurt. There was disbelief in her eyes, perhaps even fear. But she held up the book with one hand and he saw that it was a vintage annotated edition of the Tuyunri Almanac of Life that Ria had lent him. Acting on instinct, he sprinted up to her and took the book from her hand; rescued it, in fact, from the precarious way she was holding it by the corner of the cover such that the signatures were in danger of peeling right off from the spine. Adrianne didn’t notice that. In her other hand, she held the bookmark that had been inside.
“What is this note?” she demanded.
Eedric saw that the bookmark was a slip of paper with the words, “There may be a Ro’ ‘dal translation of this book now. Please, if you could, check it for me? You may be able to read the words in that version. Yang benar, Ria.”
“Who is this Ria?” Adrianne continued to demand, flicking the paper in his face, her expression the most livid he’d ever seen.
Mental images of heavy-lashed eyes peering up at him, of smokey smiles, and of slipping and sliding serpent bodies over a teasing neckline came unbidden to him. Accompanying them were the ringing sound of laughter and the smells of talcum powder mixed with an archaic rose scent. Adrianne’s arm clattered with the colliding bangles and charm bracelets she wore, but he found himself thinking of a seashell hanging from twine noosed around another’s wrist, wondering at the story behind it.
“She’s a friend,” he told Adrianne.
It must have taken him too long because Adrianne pressed the interrogation: “I don’t know this friend. Where did you meet her? From your history class?”
Adrianne was referring to the private part-time degree he’d told her he’d signed up for. “To while the time away between shoots and castings,” he’d explained.
There was no degree. Somehow, he’d managed to keep up the farce by picking imaginary classes that clashed with her own at the local university. In that span of time, he had gone down to see Ria, which was as good as any history class.
Nothing ever happened between him and Ria. There was just talking, of whatever topic came to mind, swinging easily from the profound—discussion of politics, sharing of past lives and moments— to the mundane—food, weather, him ranting about other people. There would also be silence, when neither wished to speak. Why he had skulked about had everything to do with the circumstances of Ria’s existence: from her past deeds to her lack of documentation, making her, by law, an illegal dweller within the country. Why he had felt that meeting her was a transgression…that had everything to do with the nature of—no, mainly the reasons for his continued visits to her. It had moved from intrigue, to simply being glad that he had a companion as unique and knowledgeable as she was; to having a friend besides Miz; someone with whom he could have a fresh conversation. But of late, his eyes fell involuntarily to her lips and watched the play of expressions on her face, not believing that the moment and the woman before him were even possible.
A thousand times he’d come to think himself as abnormal for admiring the greenish sheen of her snakes’ bodies as they teased her skin with their tongues. Yet in a thousand others he thought he knew her, only to be presented with a new angle, given a new perspective of the ways of the world, of its peoples, of the counter-corners people were made of. He sought blind spots in her every day: giving her a new picture on his tablet, letting her listen to a new song that she would immediately be able to sing along to, presenting her with a new chapter of a book on philosophy or a story in a newspaper. She was quick to learn and was always able to fill in the gaps of what she didn’t already know.
Her inquisitive way of cocking her head to one side, of letting her snakes fall across her face and over her shoulder, and that rare open smile she showed in her unguarded moments sometimes caused his fingers to twitch. It was as if there was a fishing line attached to each tip, a line that someone would jerk every time, every time a hinting ray of light shone through her grey facade.
He found himself examining the dress racks of department stores and boutiques, wondering what size she wore and how he was even going to find out such a piece of information without being called out. When he was not with her, he found himself staring at his phone at night, wondering what she was doing at the moment; wondering how she was doing, and he had caught himself thinking, “I shouldn’t text her too soon. Don’t want to seem desperate.”
To begin with, she was more likely to be communicating via carrier pigeon than a phone. And yes, he was desperate. For her approval and her regard; hell, for her to think about him as much as he was thinking about her.
“Yeah,” he told Adrianne, trying to play at nonchalance as he placed the book carefully on the bookshelf by his table. “She’s 58. One of the mature students there. Retired and looking for something to do, you know? She…uh…she’s not very good at finding things. In bookstores and shops. So she just needed me to help her a bit.” He rolled his eyes, made a show of exasperation.
Adrianne seemed to relax a little at that. “Okay,” she said. “Are you reading this for a project?”
Eedric nodded. “Yeah. Looking at Tuyunri history in Manticura. It is actually pretty interesting.”
“What do these two words in Sce’ ‘dal say?” she asked. He could see that she was trying to be nonchalant as well, trying to pry without seeming suspicious or insecure. Adrianne, who had never shown any curiosity about anything that didn’t fall within her areas of interest—beauty, fashion, her circle of acquaintances and mindless entertainment on cable—wasn’t fooling anyone.
Nonetheless, Eedric looked at the two words she’d pointed out. “The truth,” he explained, translating directly.
Adrianne frowned. “That makes no sense.”
“‘Yang benar’ is the Sce’ ‘dal phrase for ‘sincerely’. She is a very formal woman.”
“How do you know?”
Eedric considered her anew. Had she asked that question at a different time, under different circumstances, he would have told her that Sce’ ‘dal was his mother tongue. Only his father made him learn Mir’ ‘dal instead, the language of the Esomiri that didn’t have any use or significance in Manticura so many years after the Occupation. He wondered if this was where things had been wrong with Adrianne from the get-go. He thought he’d hit the jackpot. She being good-looking and well-groomed was a boost for Eedric’s ego, a validation of his sense of self and of his worth as a man. Father and Stepmother had been so relieved when he brought her home. Father had even shaken his hand, clapped his shoulder and given him a winking thumbs-up: his way of saying, “You did well, son.” It was all he’d ever wanted to hear from Father and Adrianne had helped him accomplish that.
But it had taken him these two years with her to make him desire companionship, bonding and connection. It would have worked if her world view was such that he could have told her about Mama and the part of his heritage Father had been so adamant about keeping secret, so that Eedric had, what Father always called “prospects�
��.
Perhaps if he had given her a chance, she could have proven to be a companion, someone he could at least live with under the roof of a magnificent condominium apartment. Perhaps. But in his gut, it all still felt wrong. It wasn’t just her views on people or the fact that he couldn’t bring her to a museum on a date because she would get bored. Or that he was five years her senior and no longer found clubs, with their pounding music and sweaty bodies, appealing. It was that they wanted different things in life: she wanted to go down the route of getting her degree and settling down; and he, after meeting Ria, knew he wanted more than that.
He realised that he had been in his reverie for a bit too long because when he replied, “Miz told me once,” Adrianne leaned forward a little as if to get a closer look at him.
“Dri,” he began suddenly, using the nickname he’d used when they were starting out, “I think we should take a break.” Then he watched as the shock drew over her features like the shadow of a cloud over a sunny field.
Surfacing
Eedric felt a sudden pressing need to right himself when he next saw Ria in the chamber, her face turned to the skylight. While he adjusted his jacket and pushed up its sleeves, Ria continued to stare up at what she termed, with a rather amused smile, “the bit of her sky”.
When he made his presence known, she greeted him so cheerfully that he was at first caught off guard. He saw that she was wearing the lilac dress he had bought her a week ago. The colour really suited her, though the dress was one size too big, so that she had to tighten the waist by fastening a safety pin at the back. All her snakes, except the dead one, seemed to bounce with her as she bounded up to him.
She was radiant, and he felt the need to focus on something else. He spotted the contents of the basket she was hugging to her front.
“Wah, not bad,” he remarked, gesturing towards the basket. “Wine and fruit basket.”
Ria cast only a brief glance down at it. “That is for the recently deceased patriarch of a family, from his children. The wine cost them half a month’s salary. Maybe even more.” Ria shook her head sadly. “A waste. The dead cannot drink.”
“Maybe they did not mean it for the dead guy?” Eedric suggested, stepping further into the chamber after a cautious look at the other entrance for anyone from the settlement—for an underground type of community, they were pretty relaxed about security even after he had made an appearance. But he could never be too sure. Assassintype Scerean maids and all.
“Maybe. Not as if that’s any better.”
She was always doing this, he thought. Swinging from glow to melancholia within the span of a short conversation. For someone who had the power to create statues with a well-placed glare, so much of her was transient to him. It made him want to reach out— that twitch again, of some blasted marionette seeking to disarm him.
“Do you drink?” he asked.
“No.”
He lifted a shoulder. “Then it is wasted.”
“Fruits rot…flowers too,” she put in. “I bring them home, to eat later.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Flowers?”
“Fruits,” she clarified. “Flowers I leave here to die.” She looked around. “Seems right that way.”
She was smiling when she turned back to him. “Anyway, I wanted to show you something.”
With that she stepped around him and, moving fast in that soundless way of hers, she led him out of the chamber and down a dim, lamp-lit tunnel. He knew the route by heart now and he wondered what more of it was there to see. However, she came to a sudden stop and, stooping down, told him rather breathlessly, “There, see!”
He looked and saw that in a break between two walls of sentient remains was a hole—newly-excavated, he would guess—just large enough for a person to crawl through. She dropped into a crouch and pushed her basket into the crawlhole before going in after on all fours. Once on the other side, she beckoned him to follow.
“Come! See this!” she urged. “I found it only this morning.”
“How?” he asked, gingerly examining the crawlhole and wondering how the hell she expected him to fit through it. “And damn it, Ria. This is too small for me.”
“Kicked some rocks by accident,” she informed him. “You have to see this. You will like it!”
“More dead people?” He was flat on the ground, stomach down, prone. Positioned that way, he inched through to the other side, getting stuck for just a bit when he was a little past his shoulders and scraping his right elbow on the rough stone in the process of struggling through.
On the other side, he found himself in a chamber that looked like a scaled down version of the main one. It was overgrown with vegetation that had crept in from the outside through a small skylight in the slanted ceiling. There was a stone table in front of an empty alcove, but it was broken right through the middle as if someone had dropped the blade of a headsman’s axe onto it. The walls were entirely covered in tiles like the ones lining the tunnel leading to the entrance. The floor was bathed in shadow. Eedric could just about make out the carpet of leaves and the bones of small animals that littered it. There were bound to be bodies too, he thought, and the chamber had a dank smell about it.
Ria was peering up at the wall that was best lit by the sunlight.
On seeing him, she gestured for him to join her. She pointed at one tile and he saw the carved image of two figures, unmistakably entwined in intercourse.
“W-why…would I like this?” he found himself asking, turning abruptly to her.
She didn’t seem to hear him as she traced the figures with just the tip of her right ring finger, as if afraid to deface the ancient carvings. He watched the delicate finger, watched the hand; though the nails were never clean and in certain light the knobby, bone-thinness of the appendages betrayed her real age. He found himself clenching his jaw, transfixed as if he was watching the finger trace the tender aureole of a nipple. She considered the carving with a ponderous tilt of her head, immersed in some distant thought that he, as always, was not a part of.
And then she said, “I may be wrong but it could be the tura-, hmmm, tura-is rebakara,” as if she was reading it off the image and what she was seeing was not a very clear one, “of the jar nah-uk’rh.”
“I don’t…” he began.
She turned to him with a start, eyes wide from interrupted reverie. Then, just as quickly, the look left her. She smiled sheepishly, lowering her gaze before turning it back to the images. “Tura-is rebakara,” raising her brows and nodding as if expecting him to understand. “Picture celebration,” she explained.
“They celebrate sex by drawing, I mean, carving pictures?”
“Yes!” Ria responded, brightening up.
“Okay...” Eedric went on slowly. “Like an ancient porno... Why?”
“Nothing so crass like your pornos.”
“Excuse me. How—”
As if she hadn’t heard, “I am guessing from this chamber that the act portrayed is likely a ritualistic one.” She paused, considering the picture again and then the symbols on the tiles beside it. “Tura means ‘woman’, or ‘one’. It gets more complicated than that, but I don’t know all the other vocabulary meanings. But I do know that tuis means ‘man’. Tura-is is ‘joining’, I think, so it makes sense that it denotes a sexual act.”
“Yes, but I still don’t get why it’s called a ‘picture celebration’.”
“A different way of writing tura-is can also mean ‘picture’ in Tuyunri. Tura is derived from the root word for rock and earth. Tis means the sky.” She grew quiet and then added, “So, tura-is also denotes ‘completion’.”
The way she looked at him, with that tilted head, the large blinking eyes, it was as if she expected him to know these things. His formal education meant that he was all numbers, business plans and profit margins. And useless knowledge of internet trends, because lectures and slow office days afford you plenty of time to go web trawling. He felt stupid for knowing nothing, nothing of the
things that interested and consumed her. He ought to be intimidated— standard protocol for any female that showed more intelligence than you, or drove a better car, held a better job: pick up sticks, grab the keys and the man-card, and get the hell out. Yet, he felt only fascination and admiration for her.
She said, “I didn’t mean to bore you...” What she didn’t know was that she could say anything in that smooth, soothing way of hers and he would listen. He didn’t tell her that. He asked teasingly instead: “Are you apologising?”
Her only response was to chuckle and shake her head. “Funny thought though.”
“What is?”
“Dinya’s the slum that they arrested Anten in. What is it about my kind and running to the lower worlds to seek refuge?” she wondered. Then she added, muttering, “Not a good sign.”
“Do you—” he began, “do you know why she did what she did?”
“Who?”
“Anten Demaria,” he clarified. “That other medusa. Who turned the general and then got—”
Ria averted her face and he thought he saw her shudder. “Executed? A great number of reasons,” she told him. “To protect…to preserve… Though I suspect money might be a good reason for why.”
“Money? You think she was paid?”
Her orange, reptilian eyes found their way back to his face. In the dimness of this new chamber, they appeared larger than usual. “Anten was from the Dinya Uk’rh slums. The people there couldn’t have had much money, and poverty has been known to make one do desperate things.”
“This is from experience, I take it?” he dared ask.
“Not myself. But I live surrounded by it.”
“But,” Eedric went on, still on the subject of Anten and the assassination, “there has to be some political affiliation on her part, right? I mean, she wouldn’t just...agree to kill someone as big and important as the general. And what,”—Eedric pointed out, finger towards the inscriptions, though they held no connection to the topic—“about the fact that she was just allowed into the Palaçade? Which should be one of the most guarded places in Manticura.”
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