“Besides,” Maccis said, his eyes half-closed, “technically, all we are, are the illegitimate children of the youngest son of the last king.”
“Oh, not true. Father’s recognized all of us. And we all get to wear the clan tattoos and the kilt in its proper colors,” Eisa retorted, hotly.
“I’m just saying, that we’re nobody in particular.” Maccis shrugged. “I’ll worry if Lady Erida or Zhi tells me not to come around anymore. No one else.”
Eisa looked around, and rapidly changed the subject. “Were you practicing your dancing? I want to watch. Mother says Chaldean and Egyptian dances please the spirit and body at the same time.”
Zaya flushed, distracted “Oh, no, no, I’m terrible—”
“Learning to perform in front of an audience is part of dance,” her pedagogue told her, calmly, and started the music once more.
“No different than practicing kata,” Eisa told her, finding a chair. “Come on! Show us!”
Maccis, after seeing her fumble two or three times, shifted to wolf-form and folded his paws in front of him. Zaya always laughed when she saw him shift, clothed—the way the shirt and kilt stayed on the white wolf’s form was highly amusing—and that got her to relax and just dance. “Much better,” her pedagogue told her. “Mistress Eisa, are you here to practice languages with Mistress Zaya?”
“No, she’s taking different ones than I am, unfortunately. I’m taking Hellene and Nipponese this year.” Eisa swung her feet. All of the Matrugena children were, by default, polyglots; they spoke Gallic at home, Latin at school, and had absorbed Hebrew from their schoolmates and teachers. Zaya, by comparison, was being educated as a Magus—which meant that she was learning to translate cuneiform tablets written in ancient Sumerian. Aramaic. Persian, of course, as well as Latin and Hebrew. “No, we came over to . . . get out of the house, really. It’s weird with our mothers and Da not being home. Latirian’s off on the Persian front, so that means Inghean came home to take care of us all.” Eisa rolled her eyes again. “And she yells at everyone to be quiet so she can study her biochemistry or whatever. At least tonight, everyone will be at the bonfires. Though not Inghean. She won’t go without Rig.”
I like it when it’s quieter at home. Maccis’ tone was sleepy. Why don’t you come back with us, when you’re done with languages, Zaya? You could even come with us to the bonfires. We’re all going together.
Zaya’s eyes widened. She’d really wanted to go, but she hadn’t wanted to go alone, and getting her parents to take her had seemed . . . unlikely. When she went to get permission, it was surprisingly easy to obtain from her mother. But before she left her mother’s chambers, she asked Erida, tentatively, “Would it be possible . . . for you to remind the butler . . . that every visitor . . . .” She hesitated.
Her mother’s eyebrows rose. “Yes?”
“That every visitor should be treated with respect!” Zaya blurted out. “That my friends shouldn’t be told they smell like wet dog any more than the Chaldean ambassador-in-exile should be!”
Erida’s topaz eyes crinkled at the corners, and she slid a hand over her mouth “Certainly,” she said, after a moment. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Thank you!” Zaya said, on a rush of gratitude, and headed out the door—but this time, they did take the family car, a plush Hellene Epibintores XII model with air conditioning and heated seats. And Maccis made sure he was in human form as he scrambled into the backseat.
At the Matrugena house, controlled chaos, as the oldest siblings who weren’t off fighting somewhere came together for the holiday, and looked after the younger ones. Smell of bread baking, and cherry blossoms, drifting white and pure over the back fence, from the ben Maor yard. Zaya flopped down into a hammock behind the Matrugena house and stared up at the blue sky in perfect contentment. A couple of toddlers—Esico and Senecita, she thought, but wasn’t sure—ran past, chasing the cherry petals on the wind, and Maccis came out of the house and handed her a paper cone filled with lemon ice before shifting form and flopping on the hammock next to her, fully wolf. “Stop that!” Zaya yelped, laughing, as a cold nose touched the side of her neck.
I’m banking on you spilling the lemon ice. It was the last one in the house. Anything you drop, I can clean up. His tongue lolled out, and the puppy rolled to his back in the hammock, sprawling and trying to get comfortable in spite of the shirt over the fur.
“Go back human and I’ll share it with you.”
If I go back human, all we’re going to hear is ‘Maccis has a giiiirl, Maccis has a giiiiirl.’ Besides, I want to get out of these stupid clothes, and I can’t do that when I’m human.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to take the clothing off if you were human? You know . . . fingers?”
Much, but I am not explaining to your parents why I got undressed in front of you while human. Besides, you can help me, once you finish eating that.
“I am putting this in your fur and making you groom it all out.” Zaya held the paper cup out, threateningly, and blinked as the wolf’s body became a blur of motion, and Maccis’ jaws closed, very gently, on her wrist. “Maccis . . . let go.”
You smell good. The wolf released her, and licked her hand before lounging back again.
Zaya settled in, her feet near his head, and his tail thumping the pillow her head lay on, and ate half the lemon ice, before holding out the paper cup so that Maccis could lap up the remainder, appreciatively. “Do you know where your parents are?” she asked, idly.
Africa, somewhere. I think it has to do with Uncle Kanmi. I remember him doing the best tricks at birthday parties when I was little. Aunt Minori was so sad when he left, but she always smells happy and excited when she leaves with Aunt Lassair on these long trips. And she smelled really, really excited this time, but worried, too. Maccis’ tone was thoughtful.
“Do you think he might be coming home? My mother will be pleased. I know they used to be friends.” Zaya was vague on why Kanmi Eshmunazar had disappeared. Everyone knew he had, and everyone knew that Minori was practically a widow because of it, but if they’d found her husband, then everyone could be happy again.
Maybe. I don’t know. Maccis squirmed around until she relented and helped him unlace his shirt, and removed it, and the kilt. You could pet me, you know.
“What?”
My ears are itchy.
“Oh, gods, do you have fleas?”
No. The wolf rolled around on the hammock, making it rock wildly, and wound up with his head on her stomach. Just pretend I’m any other dog in the world and scratch—oh, gods, yes. Right there. A low noise, somewhere between a rumble and a whine, emanated from his chest, and Zaya began to laugh, which made his ears perk back up again, and one blue eye rolled around to peer at her, while he kept his face mostly pointed the other way.
“We should do some of our homework.”
I need to get Inghean to help me with my mathematical formulae. I’ll never get to be a biochemist like her, or go terraform Mars, if I don’t get better grades in math.
“No more pilot dreams?”
Mother says I’m going to be my dad’s size, or close, when I’m grown. I probably won’t fit in a cockpit. A disappointed whine. But . . . Uncle Adam didn’t get to be a pilot except recreationally, either. And I can more or less fly without a plane.
“You’d do better if you’d pick something that has feathers and living relatives to emulate.” She worked her way from ears to ruff, and felt his tail beating happily against her ankle now.
Yes, but a condor is no fun, and I’m already too heavy for the wingspan. A pteranodon has more class.
“You know, your sister Vorvena . . . she always wears feathers in her hair.”
Yes.
“And most of the rest of your brothers and sisters, they . . . do something that makes them stand out.” She paused. “Why don’t you?”
He lifted his head, and looked at her. You mean, besides the kilts, the long, braided hair, the wrong color hair . . . bec
ause those of us who aren’t fire-heads look like albinos, like me? No, Zaya, we do everything we can not to stand out. The others aren’t doing it by choice. Vorvena just likes feathers. That’s about the only difference. He settled his head back down again. She tried dying her hair brown last year. First time she changed form, the dye was gone, and it went back to being white. I told her she should just think dirty thoughts and see if she could change it without the dye. He paused. Mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud . . . .
Zaya began to laugh, and told him, “Stop that!”
Is it working?
“No.” Zaya paused. “I just wondered why you don’t do something like Vorvena does.”
Feathers in my hair would make me look like a girl, or worse, like I was trying dress like I’m from one of the petty kingdoms of Caesaria Aquilonis. I’m a Pict.
“You’re being difficult on purpose. I meant, why don’t you do something from one of your favorite forms when you’re being human?”
I expect you want me to walk around with a tail and ears, the way my mother does? Oh, I know, tyrannosaurus teeth. Tyrannosaurus teeth and full body fur. Gets me out of wearing clothes all year. But that’ll get a nice parent-teacher conference for me, too.
Zaya couldn’t stop laughing by this point, mostly because he’d turned and put long, triangular, serrated teeth in his wolf mouth. “No! Just the ears, just the ears!”
Why?
“Because then I could tell what you’re listening to all the time. And I can tell when you’re happy or mad, just by the way they perk up or shift down.”
I think there are other ways you can tell that.
“But they’re cute.”
Tell you what. If I can put my head down in your lap in the cafeteria and you’ll pet my wolf ears with the gods and everyone else looking on? I’ll wear wolf-ears all you want. Till then . . . no. He shifted up and licked her face from jaw to hairline, and Zaya recoiled, squealing, and almost fell out of the hammock. Learn anything new and interesting in the archives?
“It’s always pretty boring,” Zaya muttered, recovering. “It’s all useless to me, too. What does a non-mage need to know Sumerian, Hittite, Akkadian, ancient Egyptian, ancient Chaldean, and Aramaic for, anyway?”
You could become an archaeologist. Spend your days finding lost cities. And then I’ll take you to Mars and if any aliens happened to study us five thousand years ago, they’d have left their message in the dominant language of the times, so you’d be able to read it.
“Oh, come on.”
It could happen. Uncle Adam showed us a film like that last year, anyway.
“Aliens vs. Gods? You actually watched that?”
The special effects were great. He paused. Archive stuff. I’m interested. Tell me something.
Zaya tilted her head back and sighed. “Um . . . all right. My mother finally explained the rest of the process by which an Immortal is really made. She said she hadn’t wanted to give me bad dreams when I was younger.” Zaya paused. “You know how I told you a spirit’s dropped into the living body, and the . . . person inside is killed? The memories are there, the skills are there, so it’s . . . still a functional soldier, just . . . gelded and everything?”
Yes. He shuddered.
“She said that they stumbled across the process back long before the Battle of Thermopylae by studying the trepanning techniques used by the Egyptians to relieve pressure inside the skull from battle wounds. Once you’ve, well, opened up the skull, that’s . . . sort of an invitation to the average doctor to poke around.” Zaya shifted, feeling cold. “And if you don’t expect the patient to survive anyway, you might poke around more, right?”
I think Latirian and her husband would not like that comparison, but I guess so. So, they bored a hole in some guy’s skull . . . .
“Yes. And they performed the world’s first frontal lobotomy. Oh, it wasn’t called that, and it was probably more like . . . amputating the frontal lobes, at the time. The techniques have been . . . refined, since then.” Zaya felt ill, just admitting to this. “They lobotomize the person. Put the spirit in. And then tattoo binding marks all over the body, because . . . this is now the spirit’s container. It’s the jar, a mobile one. So it’s not quite a golem and definitely not a ghul and not quite possession, either. And even a Magus as powerful as my mother only has a . . . small chance of knocking the spirit out of the body.”
Sounds like something she and my father need to work on together.
“You think they’ll come up with something no one’s thought of in over two thousand years?”
I don’t know, but I don’t want those things marching down here.
“Me, either.” She still woke in the middle of the night sometimes, thinking the Immortals were at the door of the house, but she never told her mother that. Her father, of course, probably already knew.
Just then, a rumble shook the ground, passing through the hammock. Zaya sat up a little. “Was that one of the supersonic jets?”
No. My ears aren’t ringing from the noise. Whoa, here comes another one. Maccis leaped off the hammock to the ground, as the trees on either side of them began to shake, gently, though there wasn’t a breeze in the air now.
Zaya swung her legs to the ground, and happened to be looking up when she saw a white streak passing through the sky. “No, I think it’s a plane. Look. It’s got a contrail and everything.”
Without warning, Maccis crouched on the ground beside her in human form, naked, but his face shifted, rapidly, as his eyes became those of a hawk. “That’s not a plane,” he told her.
“What is it? A meteor?”
“Too slow for a shooting star, I think. I don’t know what it is. It’s white, and I . . . huh. Maybe it’s an efreet. There’s a vortex there, but it’s not oriented towards the ground. Weird.” He snaked out a hand and grabbed his kilt, turning his back to put it on, but still looking upwards. “Zaya . . . I think maybe we should get the little ones inside.”
The earth shook for a third time, and this time, the toddlers actually noticed it, as it was hard enough to topple them off their feet. “Inside doesn’t sound like a good idea!” Zaya replied, her voice rising in pitch, but she grabbed one of the children and stood there, uncertainly, trying to keep the toddler from crying, as everyone else in the house started to boil out into the garden.
The speck in the sky, whatever it was, arced north, completely ignoring the town below.
After a few minutes, they all went back inside, and Inghean turned on the far-viewer. “Seismology experts place the epicenter of the three massive earthquakes as central northern Africa, in the middle of the various Carthaginian provinces, very likely near the inland salt lake known as the Chott el Jerid. The region is not known for any major fault lines, and seismologists are puzzled that such a relatively stable geological area has produced such massive quakes.” The news anchor, a Roman man in a white shirt, and a dark cloak thrown over his shoulders, looked avidly alert, as reporters often did when first reporting bad news. “The first precursor quake measured 7.5 on the Rihtære scale. The second, more powerful quake, measured 8.2—more powerful, in fact, than the 1950 quake that damaged large sections of Burgundoi in Caesaria Aquilonis. The third earthquake, recorded only minutes later, was an almost inconceivable 9.5. This is the most powerful earthquake recorded since seismologists devised the Rihtære system.”
Zaya found a chair and sat down, staring blankly at the screen. Maccis slipped down to the ground beside her legs, and one of the toddlers promptly came over and sat on him. “What does that even mean?” Zaya asked. “The numbers sound . . . big, but . . . .”
“Listen,” Inghean said, tersely, her fingers clenching and unclenching, and Zaya hushed.
“Port officials and ships at sea all over the Mediterranean have reported huge tidal waves spawning as a direct result of the quakes—the survivors of some ships report waves as tall as a ten-story building. Residents of Sicily, Crete, Sardinia, Corsica, and Majorca, Rho
des, Hios, Samos, Lesbos, and all other islands in the Mediterranean basin are urged to evacuate to higher ground within the hour.” The news anchor paused, and wiped at his face; he was sweating on-camera, and the living room was silent now. “The waves are predicted to make landfall as far to the west as the Iberian Peninsula and as far to the east as Asia Minor, Tyre, and the shores of Judea, within about three hours.”
Zaya did a little mental math, and whispered, “Wait. Even if a ten-story building is only a hundred feet tall . . . .”
“Crete might be all right,” Inghean said. “Mountains. Sicily . . . people should be able to evacuate to the mountains there, too . . . assuming that they don’t all get caught in gridlock on the roads, trying to get away from the ocean.” She paused. “Wait. Mount Etna is there.”
“That’s a volcano, and it might be a little cranky right now,” Tasalus agreed in his low, pleasant voice. Zaya was terribly, horribly shy around Maccis’ older brother. He was, by far, the most handsome man she’d ever seen in her life, but was saved from mere prettiness by a broken nose he’d acquired in school at some point. “Gods. They might be caught between fire and flood.”
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