by Mark Angel
“That steam looks inviting doesn’t it?” she asked.
“It does,” he replied, watching her add a few drops of dark-blooming jasmine, peppermint tinctures and some cool water to balance the temperature. The scent flowed over him, opening a door to childhood memories not fully formed.
Tyna stepped over and began to undress him. He stood rigidly, neither resisting nor assisting, astounded by the care with which she performed her task.
She unbuckled his sword belt and hung the weapon on a horn of her saddle.
“Did you really have to bring this with you?” she asked. “I promise I’m not that dangerous.”
“I don’t like to be without my weapon.”
“Well, I think we are safe enough here on the plateau, especially among the rexes.”
“I know a man who could walk among them like a rexrider, slip into your tent like a filcher and have your life like a slayer as if it were free for the taking, with you a willing victim. I don’t intend to be caught off guard.”
Tyna pursed her lips and shrugged before lifting the roomy red tunic over his head and hanging it near his belt. She unbuttoned his undergarments down to his bellybutton and then went around behind him to peel the garment down from his shoulders until it gathered around his knees.
She waited.
Tamik remained motionless.
She cleared her throat. “You have to step out of them or you’ll fall over the first step you try to take,” she said playfully.
He lifted one foot at a time, as she removed the garment. The next thing he knew, he was naked and blushing at his uncovered fullness, glad Tyna was squatting behind him as she stowed his clothing near the entrance.
She gently placed her hand on his muscular back and pushed him forward toward the bath.
“Please,” she said from behind. “Sit,” she commanded.
He stepped into the liquid warmth and sat down in the basin as she came around to the front. Her heavily lidded eyes betrayed immense expectation. And bliss. Yes. They struck him as blissful, like the feeling flowing over him now.
From top to bottom, she methodically washed every part of him with a soft, wet cloth and citrus-spiced emulsion. Tamik could see that she was enjoying herself, quietly but thoroughly—likely as quietly and thoroughly as he.
She lathered his hair and scrubbed his back and shoulders, chest and legs right down to his toes, which tickled as she touched them. Lastly, she poured warm scented water over his hair, massaging crushed minty herbs and tingling extracts into his scalp—careful not to get any in his eyes—before rinsing him off one final time. By the time Tyna was finished and stepping back to admire her work, she, too, was dripping from shoulder to ankle. In the process, her wrap had become quite transparent.
“Stand up,” she said softly. He obeyed and she dried him with a clean chamois where he stood. A large salt crystal, rounded at one end, appeared in her hand.
She lifted his arm and began to rub the hard, but smooth odorant in his armpit.
Tamik made a face. Tyna stopped.
“You have seen a salt rub before?”
“It’s just that I feel like a little boy. Meera used to make me use that stuff.”
She sighed expressively as she grabbed his other arm, lifting it to perform a second identical rub. “I don’t think you are a little boy anymore,” she said, briefly glancing toward his groin. “Now help me dump the bath.”
Tamik turned his back to her and stepped out before taking his side of the basin obediently. They carried the vessel outside and tipped it downhill to drain the water away from camp.
When they went back inside the tent, Tyna secured the flap. “Would you mind?” she asked, and turned her back to him, touching the tie at the back of her neck.
“I was wondering when you were going to dry off,” he joked.
She tilted her head downward and pulled her russet hair to better expose the knot, but all he could see was the whiteness of her neck. “Why,” she replied, “don’t you like it when I’m wet?”
“Mystery take me!” Tamik blasphemed to himself. Events certainly were taking on a life of their own. It was time to try to relax and enjoy whatever would happen during the balance of the dark time.
He stepped forward rather hastily and began pulling apart the knot of Tyna’s garment. When it came loose, she gathered it into her hands and hung it near his sword. Taking a dry chamois, she rubbed her body slowly. The languid motions succeeded in drying her thoroughly. On Tamik, they had quite a different effect.
That was just fine with him.
The next thing he knew Tyna was draped in a dry, diaphanous sleep gown and unfurling her bedroll. She pushed him out of the way with her rump and then stumbled, giggling onto the soft spread. He followed. They lay together for a few moments, shaking with barely restrained laughter.
Tamik remarked how much more luxurious her sleep-skins were than his. She nodded and opened a small flask of candlenut oil, which bore the sweet springtime smell of its mother tree in bloom. She poured some onto her hand, and then straddled his waist, slathering it over his shoulders and chest. He felt her moist readiness as she sat on his sun-browned belly. He savored the ongoing moments of preparations, yet felt vaguely terrified of what lay ahead as she untied her wrap and let it fall to her waist, revealing her full, round breasts, completely naked to his view for the first time.
“Is it anything like you imagined?” she asked as she continued to rub his chest.
He closed his eyes and flashed back on his youthful fantasies of her, only now coming to realize how shallow they had been, but he remained silent.
“Tamik?”
He opened his eyes to see her playful frown above him.
“Is it?”
“All I know is that you are wonderful,” he said, easing the words out of his throat, “more wonderful than I could ever have imagined.”
She leaned down, chest on slippery chest, and wrapped her long arms around his neck and head. She kissed him deeply. He kissed back.
As her hips slipped across his, a wave of anxiety crashed over him, so intense it was almost painful, and he started to writhe underneath her. He managed to turn onto his stomach and bury his face in the head cushions.
“Wha—?” she questioned from above.
He stammered fretfully, “I don’t think I can do this.”
“Did I do something wrong?” She still straddled him, but now sat upright on the small of his back, her hand covering the purple blemish on her chin.
When he heard the insecurity creeping into Tyna’s voice, he regretted his own words. But try as he did to answer, he could not speak, and only shook his head.
She slipped off his back and lay down beside him, gently caressing his hair. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
He rolled on his side, his back to her. “Since I was a boy I have dreamed of having this kind of moment with you. You didn’t do anything wrong . . . you couldn’t have.”
“What, then?” she pleaded, reaching around to his chest.
“It happened . . . a long time ago.”
He sensed her digest his words. Then with an insight that dismayed him, she asked, “Does this have to do with your sister?”
His eyes widened considerably. “Pako said the same thing when we were sparring the other turn. What does everyone think happened to my sister?”
“Well, everyone—at least some of us rexriders—have heard rumors.”
“The skywatchers made us swear on Kazak’s Tomb never to reveal the proceedings of that incident or the circumstances surrounding them.”
“I don’t mean to make light of this,” she said somewhat briskly, as if relieved, and traced his ear with a finger, “but do you really think oaths of silence like that keep people from talking?”
“I never talked about it.”
Tyna kissed the back of his head. “Then you are a better man than most.”
“And all this time, I thought it was some great secret that I wa
s forbidden to share . . . my burden alone.”
“Don’t be silly. We all have burdens. But most of us share them, at least with those we trust. How could we survive otherwise?”
The lamps flickered in a draft that slipped through the skin coverings. Some, but far from all, of the tension melted away from him.
“Hmm,” Tamik affirmed, and rolled onto his back as his throat tightened. To ward off the ache, he tried to think of something different and stared up at the judiciously sewn hutch-cover shaped to fit perfectly over the lances and saddle hood. Several spears were positioned outside the skin, anchored to loops that firmed up the walls. Structurally, it was similar to his father’s hutch, but inside it was a different world. He realized that in all his sars of service to the rexriders, he had never spent much time inside a she-rexrider’s hutch.
Tyna touched her hand to his shoulder and gently cuddled up against him as he rolled back to his side. He pressed back against her. The brittle mental wall he had tried to construct by distracting himself crumbled, like a stone wall built with saltwater mortar. He began to sob.
“It’s safe to talk about it,” she reassured him. “I will keep your secrets safe.”
“He didn’t stop when I entered the room, but when he lifted his hand toward me I was immobilized. He made me watch . . . I couldn’t get the vision out of my mind!” he choked.
“I understand…”
“I was worthless. . . ”
“Helpless and worthless are not the same,” Tyna murmured as she pushed her fingers though his fine hair. “Tell me, Tamik. Tell me what happened as if you were a teller recounting history. Perhaps, if you distance yourself from the event as you recall it, you'll be able to see it from a different perspective; a healing or, at least, a more objective one.”
“You mean like a story?”
Tyna nodded.
Tamik rolled back onto his back, somewhat fearful to recount the events that had darkened his spirit 12 sars before. As frightened as he was, he also realized that if he did not make some effort to come to terms with it, potentially wondrous events—like the one he wished to take part in now—might never be his to enjoy.
So he started to speak softly, as if in a trance. Tyna wrapped her arm over his and listened, staring at the flickering shadows which danced upon the cover-skin.
The touch of Power is a mighty force—
It heals or destroys equally well.
The greater one’s command of this Power—
The greater one’s onus to use it rightly.
— Guardians’ Axiom
FLASHBACK: Revelations
Stonehaven at dusk, 02/11/1630--
Darkness comes early under the heavy fog that whirls through the chilly canyon realm. Dressed in his newest long-sleeved wormthread tunic, a short jerkin fashioned from tanned flatbill skin, and his shiny black knee-high parade boots, Tamik skips over the wet and rutted streets of Stonehaven on his way to visit Meera. It is only his second visit to his sister’s new home since she was conjoined with her spouse Tel-Rudanomi, the lead teller of the Western Kith. The sun has just set and Tamik realizes that he is arriving earlier than planned, but he does not see how that would matter much.
Tamik passes through Fen Plaza, which lies between his father’s humble rexrider dwelling down in the East Barrier and the more extravagant upper canyon communities. His short brown hair glistens in the lamplight with droplets of canyon mist, as he penetrates the long tunnel beneath the Skywatchers’ Plateau. Beyond the tunnel, the luxurious dwellings of Highland Coulee rise up on each side of the cobbled street, carved into the high cliffs above, their lights stacking in layers like the cells of a luminescent beehive. This part of the city is home to many influential people. Only recently did it become his sister’s neighborhood.
As the boy exits the wide passageway into Highland Coulee, a light-keeper, clad in padded leather, traipses by on long wooden stilts, stopping at each lamp to turn its valve on and ignite the flammable gas fuel, piped in from the fire swamps northwest of the protectorate.
The first time he saw his sister’s new home was during the celebration of her nuptials. It was a sun-drenched affair, and the abode had been suffused with light and joy. He recalled the spectacular vista from the dwelling’s veranda, which views the Kazak Valley over the Highland Coulee’s impassible scree slope. In the dark it looks much different, and now he feels apprehension approaching the empty place. His imagination plays with his feelings about the teller’s place, as if it were haunted by the countless figures carved life-size into the limestone surrounding it.
Tamik is distracted by the tempting scent of spicy street food that emerges from a nearby cook-cart. The aroma teases his nostrils and causes his stomach to rumble in anticipation of the evening meal. The tantalizing smells hang in the cool, smokey air like a fog of delicious comfort that clings to the lower canyon and muffles the bustling sounds of dusk in the city.
Then, through the blanket of semi-transparent haze, Tamik spies a cloaked figure—bereft of any symbol of rank or order—cautiously descending a steeply raked flight of steps, a rarely-traveled path leading down from the Plateau and into Highland Coulee. Tamik crouches in a shadow, watching the shrouded one approach the landing. A flicker of lamplight reveals a ghostly pale visage beneath a hood.
Tamik needs only this glimpse to know the man is a skywatcher, his wan complexion a testimony to the order’s compulsive adversity to sunlight. Their darktime activities magnify both the rumored and real secrets, secrets that swarm around them like night-flying muskbats.
The skywatcher slinks through the soggy passageways of the carved canyon-bound city, careful to avoid contact with those bustling about the civic center. Tamik wonders if he is the only one seeing the pale man in the shadows. The boy follows from a safe distance, his sharp hunger temporarily overpowered by an even sharper curiosity.
The skywatcher turns up the narrow cliff path that leads toward Meera’s community. Whatever he's up to, it's certainly not sky watching: there's no sky to see this deep in the valley fog.
The skywatcher’s head rotates slowly as he surveys his surroundings. This motion comes to a sudden stop when he faces Tamik, even though the boy slinks into a shadowy crevice. Reflexively, Tamik holds his breath, his heart pounding in the darkness as the still figure continues to peer in his direction.
The skywatcher springs into action again, but his graceful if not sinister movements are now applied to climbing the carved rock stairwell leading to the walled veranda of an especially ornate dwelling. Every limestone façade, even the railing, is carved to depict key scenes from the mythic history of Rex, motifs transitioning from the astronomical to the parochial, from jungle scenes to battles between rexes. In the shadowy dimness, the life-size stone figures gaze out. This is the home of the teller who recently wed Tamik’s sister.
When Tamik sees the skywatcher enter Meera’s abode without knocking, stealing through an unlocked door instead, a feeling of wrongness drapes over him like a heavy garment. He leans fearfully against the stone wall, momentarily succumbing to the weight of apprehension, but driven by curiosity and concern he scampers up the steps as lightly as he can, and dashes across the patio to peer through the open cookroom window. The smell of meat and tubers simmering would reignite his hunger under most circumstances, but he is too enthralled by the intruder to notice.
There is a certain unreality to the scene in front of him, given the malevolent aura that has come to cloud him. In the dim gaslight coming from within, it is evident the place is decorated with an elegance surpassing anything the rexrider’s son has seen. The large colorful floorskins and masterfully painted wall-murals depict celebrated and significant moments from the past. Further on, in the eatingroom, he catches the image of his sister, dressed in a house gown with a simple, yet elegant cut. She is manipulating two long knitting needles and a ball of lavender wormthread. Her chestnut hair falls freely about her shoulders. She looks little older than a blossoming girl
though she is nearly twice Tamik’s present age.
Her image disappears. With a start, Tamik realizes the skywatcher has moved into his line of vision, his back to the window.
What business does this man have with Meera? Tamik wonders.
Though alarmed, Tamik feels it is not in his place to interrupt.
The skywatcher turns slightly—his beaklike nose amply profiled—and focuses his gaze on Tamik’s sister. Tamik senses the strange man is studying her somehow, as if he were an alleyskitter looking for the right angle with which to tackle a skittish rodent. Tamik shivers at the thought. Time passes and then more time and Tamik shivers again, his stomach twisting in an odd, almost nauseating way.
Meera has not yet seen the skywatcher.
How can that be? He’s right here, Tamik thinks.
Tamik sinks lower into the alcove on the veranda. Only his forehead and eyes are raised above the window sill. Though his mind is confused and his emotions entangled, in his heart he feels an unusual sensation and discovers he is calm—too calm.
Meera looks up. She seems to recognize the man and says something, perhaps his name.
Their voices are but a murmur through the window, and Tamik cannot make out what they are saying. The skywatcher takes a few more steps into the salon and pulls back his hood, revealing curly black locks and eyes as blue and distant as the stars they watch. His soft, well-trimmed beard is as black as his hair, a stark contrast to his colorless skin.
Jidar. Tamik thinks he recognizes the man now—someone from his sister’s past. Had she not rebuffed his advances? For a moment the boy wishes he would have been more attentive to the details of life going on around him.
Meera’s voice seems to take on more of an edge, but is still unintelligible to the eavesdropper. Then she seems to giggle at what he replies.
The man’s expression is oily with condescension.
Meera stands up and lays her needles on the work table. That she exhibits no fear reassures Tamik, but his sense of well-being soon evaporates as the skywatcher takes a few more slow steps toward Meera that are gentle, yet seem somehow menacing at the same time.