by Jean Johnson
That had been over an hour ago. In the time that Ban had spent staring out at the rain, the reason why the children had been ushered out of sight was now clear, for the second strong scent in the air turned out to be the musk of sex. More blankets and cushions had been spread out on the tiers and on the dais . . . and the brown-tanned bodies of the humans weren’t the only ones indulging. Adan was still playing his metal drum, Keppa the animadj apprentice was playing a set of pan pipes, and two more whose names Ban hadn’t bothered to learn were patting drums and plonking on the bronze tongue-box, apparently still caught up in the trance that often came with a good session of music making.
Well, the musicians seemed mostly oblivious, save that Adan gave his mate, Fali, a smile now and then while she indulged herself horizontally with two of the human males just a short distance away. The Fae didn’t marry in the sense of possessiveness; they took mates to support each other in companionship, shared resources, and deep friendship. Permission could be sought and usually granted to share pleasures with others. Judging by the intermix of bodies scattered around the fan-shaped hall, it was an acceptable practice among the humans of this world, too.
Turning to head back the way he had come, Ban stopped when his eyes fell on a pale-haired figure indulging in another swallow of palraca from a green-glazed fajenz bottle. It had been molded in the shape of a fertility figure, big breasts and big rounded belly on one side, strong back and broad buttocks on the other, with small legs and arms tucked into the body as if seated in contentment. The stopper, a thick piece of spongy wood, served as the head, but Jintaya did not replace it. Instead, she poured more into the open mouth of one of her partners and laughed as he snapped at it, making the liquor splash.
Ban watched for a long while, to make sure she was not being harmed, then gave up and moved back down the tunnel to the outside, to stand watch against the rain.
A voice reached his ears, young yet wise. “The man named Death does not participate in life?”
Turning, he found Zuki standing at the entrance to one of the little rooms under the tiers. She had the hazel eyes that were not uncommon in the tribe, and the curling black hair, and from the shapes beneath her breast-band and loin-skirt, she was starting to gain curves of a young woman. Being the youngest of her mother’s mage apprentices had clearly given her a poise beyond her normal years, for she swept her hand at the interior of the theater behind her.
“We all know what the palraca does,” Zuki added. “It loosens the tensions of mind and body so that life can be celebrated, and perhaps even new life be made.”
She sounded far older than her, what, thirteen, fourteen years? Ban clasped his hands lightly behind his tattooed back. “You look old enough to consider participating, given the ages of some of the younger men in there.”
“Not quite,” Zuki dismissed, flicking her hand over her shoulder. She strolled up to join him, tucking her hands behind her back in unconscious imitation of him. “I would rather remember what I am doing, and with whom. Mother told me that, as an animadj, I will be able to sense and even call upon the anima raised by the vigors of lovemaking, so I determined that it would be best if I were fully awake and aware each time, rather than letting something like the palraca distract me. And it is recommended that a girl who becomes a woman wait a year before indulging, to make sure that her body is strong enough for childbearing. I have not had a full year yet.”
Such adult reasoning out of the mouth of a girl barely old enough to be called a young lady plucked at the corners of Ban’s mouth. “I see. If you are too young to participate, should you not be sleeping with the others? Or at least minding the younger ones while they sleep, as older children often do?”
“The elders, the ones who are too old to enjoy the effects of palraca, are tending them tonight. I am supposed to watch the celebration so that I learn how pleasuring is done,” she countered. “But I have already watched it before, and the Fae do nothing that is different, so I do not think I would learn anything new.”
Her answer was so serious, yet so cheeky, Ban actually laughed. The sound startled him, and he laughed harder for a moment, then let it fade with a sigh. A sigh, and a smile. Zuki tipped her head, studying him. “You do not laugh or smile very often . . . but it suits you. You should do that more often, Ban.”
“I have not had much to laugh or smile about. Thank you for reminding me I still can, but please do not try again,” he murmured, and headed up the tunnel toward the outside.
As he suspected, his warning had little effect. She skipped a little to catch up with him, then tried to stroll at his side. Given his foreign height versus her half-grown frame, she had to take three and four steps for every two of his. She eyed him, curls bouncing and frizzing a bit in the humidity of the evening. “Ban, why do you not wish to laugh, or make love, or celebrate joy? They call you Shae, not Fae, but does that not make you human like us?”
“Human, but not like you,” he corrected.
“How so?” she asked. Kaife had crafted benches along the sheltered outer walkways. Zuki gestured toward one, as if she were a hostess and he her guest. “You are taller, your skin is painted permanently with many colors, as if by magic . . . yet you have round ears, brown eyes, and brown skin, and you look very similar to us. How are you not like us? Other than that you are very tall, and your face shape is more round than long?”
“How many days are in a year?” Ban countered her questions.
“Three hundred and sixty. We think,” Zuki added. “Zudu is unsure how to measure it exactly.”
“Well, little one, those are merely the number of days in a year,” Ban said. He looked out at the rain, or as much of it was illuminated by the oil lamps in the theater’s external alcoves. Night had fallen in full, leaving them in silver-streaked darkness thanks to the thick cloud cover. “I have lived a number of years that are ten times that many, and more. That is one of the ways I am very different from you.”
She blinked at him. “You have lived thousands of years? But even Elder Tanuki is only seventy-three years old, not seven hundred and three. How can this be? Are you lying to me?”
“I am not from this world.” There. He’d said it. What the Fae did not want to have said, because these people were still primitive in many ways. Primitive, and superstitious. In his opinion, however . . .
“That . . . does not make sense, and yet it does,” Zuki stated, frowning as she thought about it. As Ban had known she would. “The world is the world. It is everything. What can lie beyond it?”
“Have you seen the stars at night?” he asked her.
“Yes, of course.”
“And the sun by day?”
“Of course,” she repeated, rolling her eyes a little.
“Each star is a sun, only it is so far away, beyond the clouds, the air, the sky, that it would take many lifetimes to build a bridge—even by using all the anima you could gather—to travel to those suns to find the worlds that they give heat and light to,” Ban explained to her. “There is another way to travel as well, and it is like simply opening a door and stepping into another person’s home, rather than building a bridge to it. But these doors are very carefully concealed and can only be opened in specific ways.
“I have come through such a door . . . and the door I stepped through was a cursed door.” He stopped for a long moment, remembering that day long, long ago. A deep breath eased some of Ban’s tension, though. “I can only die on my world. Every other one I have visited since . . . I neither age nor perish.”
“That’s . . . I don’t know the word for it,” Zuki told him, touching his forearm gently. “That someone named Death cannot die. It is funny and sad and strange.”
He thought a moment, concentrating on her language, then nodded. “It’s called irony. You find it ironic that I am Death but cannot die.”
“Are you really Death?” Zuki asked him. “Or are
you just pretending?”
“I am what I am,” he replied, shrugging. “And I will also be whatever Jintaya needs me to be.”
“Do you love her?” Zuki asked.
Ban considered the question as the rain continued to fall. Back inside the theater, the musicians brought their current performance to an end. Someone played a few more notes, a new melody, but the others didn’t pick up the thread.
“Do you love Djin-taje-ul?” the girl repeated.
“Probably,” he finally admitted. Ban didn’t know why, but it was easier to talk to her about these things than to anyone else. Even Jintaya herself. “But I have had more than three thousand years of life, most of it unhappy. If love exists, then I am still trying to relearn what it means.”
“That is not ironic, I think,” Zuki offered. “That would be sad. I hope you do relearn it.” She hesitated, then said cautiously, “At times, you seem angry without a cause I can see, and sad without a cause I can see. I am supposed to learn how to help heal minds and bodies. It is very clear to me that you are injured, Ban, but you do not speak of your inner wounds. I want to be your friend, and friends help each other, even if it is just by listening and learning.”
“You cannot fix what I went through,” Ban dismissed.
“I know. We are taught that, as animadjet,” Zuki told him. At his blink and frown, she explained, gesturing at the rain. “We are taught that we cannot stop the rain. It comes when it wishes, and leaves when it wishes. Rain can also be summoned by magic, or held off for a little while, but it is difficult to repair the land when a flood has carved deep changes in it. Yet it is important to learn about the changes, for sometimes good things can be found in the mud. Things which might not be noticed or realized for years.”
“You are older than your age,” the tall, tattooed human murmured.
“And wiser than my age. And I know that you need to talk,” Zuki said, her persistence implacable. “It is not just that you have lived many years, Ban. You are sad and hard because of what happened in those years. You carry the injury like a pebble between your foot and your sandal, yet you never pause to take off your shoe. Perhaps you should pause and do so?”
Sighing, he gestured at a nearby stone bench. “Sit.”
Zuki crossed to it and sat on one end, leaving him room to settle a double hand-span away. Ban adjusted his kilt, breathed deep, and organized his thoughts.
“A very long time ago . . . there were three of us. My brothers and I. Our father, hard and stern, set us a difficult task. We failed. We were punished.”
“I’m sorry you were punished,” she offered. “Did it hurt?”
Ban slanted a look at her. No one had asked that before. Not that he could remember. “It did,” he confessed. “One of the three brothers was . . . changed by his experiences, before and after. The other two brothers were very angry. They began listening to the wrong people. Bad things began to happen as a result of choices they made. Their brother tried to reason with them, and when that failed, had to oppose them. Of the other two, one became angrier and angrier. The other followed out of anger and loyalty, but grew more conflicted inside. In the end, one of the three brothers tried to betray humans to very bad beings called demons, and the other had to fight to save his fellow humans from the demons.”
“And the third brother?” Zuki asked. A moment later, her hazel eyes narrowed speculatively. “What happened to you, when your brothers fought?”
Her perception pierced his reserve. Ban looked away, staring at the stone wall across from their bench for a long moment before glancing her way again. “As I said, there was a door. It was cursed with powerful animadjic. The demons wanted to bring a taje of their people through that door to our world, to rule it in cruelty and war far worse than what your tribe has seen.”
Zuki studied him, her young face somber. “Was the curse you spoke of, the one that prevents you from dying, on the door that they wanted to bring this taje demon through?”
He held her gaze steadily. “It was. Had the taje demon stepped through, it would have been unstoppable.”
Her gaze dropped to the ground, and her toes scrunched on the smooth granite floor. The young animadj breathed deeply, let it out, and finally said, “I’m sorry you suffered so much. But I am not sorry you walked through that door.”
Ban frowned, confused.
She peeked up at him. “If you had not, then my people could have died of thirst and hunger by now, trying to find a home across the desert. We would have needed to scatter widely across all of this wadijt, trying to find enough water in the heat of high summer to survive. We would have been caught in flash floods and drowned. We would have been vulnerable to jackals and worse. But you walked through that door. You met the Fae. They brought you with them when they came here. You have had a say in giving us water and shelter and ways to find enough food. Things would have turned out differently, had you not been there and participated in everything.”
That twisted his mouth in distaste for her hero-worship. Bluntly, Ban told her the truth. “I told Jintaya when I first saw your tribe that it would be wiser to kill all of you, to keep the pantean’s existence a secret.”
“Yet Djin-taje-ul decreed we should be friends. In resisting your worst impulses, she insists on everyone following the best ones.” Zuki tapped the side of her head by one eye. “I have watched all of you carefully. All voices need to be heard, all opinions considered. If everything is darkness, we have no path to follow, and we will stumble and fall, hurting outselves. If everything is too bright, our eyes water and we grow blind from too much light—we learned this long ago in the brightness of high summer when trying to harvest the white sands for making fajenz. It became forbidden to go to the digging pits to work when the sun is too strong. Only in the contrasts found between shadow and light, strong ones and subtle ones, can we see a clear path.”
He eyed her short, slender form. “Are you certain you are not an elder of the tribe?”
That provoked a big heaving sigh out of her. “My mother and father say I think too much. I say that I am burdened with the oldest of anima in my bones. Older than stones.”
Chapter Seven
A sound squeezed out of him, staccato and odd. It also made his face ache. Only when she stared at him, mouth hanging slack, did Ban realize he was chuckling. Twice in one evening—twice in one conversation, she had him laughing. “No wonder you are drawn to me. We are both too old inside for anyone else to tolerate.”
She scrunched her sun-brown nose, but grinned and kicked her feet a little. “That could be. So how long was it, between going through that door, and bringing the others here? You mentioned a number, but I cannot grasp it.”
Ban considered the question. Tried to figure out how to explain it to her in a way she could understand. “How many years have you lived?”
“Fourteen years,” she admitted. “It will be fifteen, soon. Three hands’ worth of years.”
Concentrating, Ban murmured. A green dot appeared on the wall across from them, no bigger than a thumbprint, but visible in the dancing light of the torches lining the colonnade of the theater. “That is one year,” he told her, and added thirteen more. “That is how old you are.”
Slowly nodding, Zuki braced her palms on the stone bench. “And how many more are you?”
Ban concentrated, shaping his magics. A box encircled the fourteen dots . . . and then the box-and-dots replicated themselves four more times, for a total of five. “That is how many years one of the oldest elders of your tribe has lived. On my own world, that would be the same average age for my people. The span of years I should have lived.”
“And you, once you walked through that door? Or Taje Djin-taje-ul?” his companion asked, curious. “She says she is many times older than I am, for all she looks only twice my age.”
The boxes marched up and down the wall until there were forty-five
stacked in a column, not five. He added a few more dots, though not enough to make a full box. “That is approximately six hundred thirty-two years. Jintaya says she has lived that long. Her people expect to live this long, however.” The column duplicated itself once to either side, forming three of them.
Zuki blinked, awed. “How many is that? You taught us big counting numbers, so how many is that?”
“Around one thousand eight hundred. I have lived not quite this many.” Those three columns became five. “Over three thousand years. Most places I lived were not nice places. Most of the people I met were not kind people.”
Zuki stared at the dots for a long while. Eventually, Ban dismissed them. She breathed deep, still thinking, then looked at him. “The place that the door went into, the cursed door, was that where the taje demon thing came from? Its home? Like a mountain pass dividing one tribe’s lands from the next?”
“Yes.”
“And they were a very mean tribe?”
“One of the meanest I’ve ever met . . . and I have met many. Their realm, my people called a Netherhell, a place of nothing but suffering and cruelty.”
“How long did it take you to cross their territory?” she asked.
Dots reappeared. So did the boxes. Forty or so of them. “I found other doors, but it took several tries before I could actually escape through one.”
She stared until they faded, then said simply, “I’m sorry it took so long for you to get away from the bad tribe.”
Once, he would have sunk back into deep anger at the briefest memory of those years. Now, however, he simply said, “I learned how to fight, crossing their territory to that door. I did terrible things to survive. I had to keep doing terrible things, as I traveled from door to door. As you said, your people would be scattered and possibly dead, if we had not come here. But I did terrible things in traveling from there to here. Are you still not sorry I am here?”