A Bloom in the North

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  "It's to keep them from moving when the waves are high or fast," Kaduin said when he caught me glancing at them.

  "I see," I said. "Did they bring something to eat?"

  "Dried fruit and meat," Seper said. "There's water as well. We saved some for you."

  I ate while Kaduin worked on the slates he'd brought with him. For as long as I'd known him he'd been writing on something; even as the boy I'd taken from House Edze, he'd scribbled in dirt with sticks. When he'd discovered the pictograms in the ruins, he found his passion. I did all I could to encourage him. Kaduin had been born of my worst enemy and an anadi I'd despised, but he'd been like a son to me.

  "What are you writing?" I asked.

  "Notes on the voyage," he said. "What it's like, this ship, being on it. And I'm marking the days that pass too." He drew in a deep breath, ears sagging. "It helps me to not think about..."

  "I understand," I said.

  He glanced at me, rolling the stylus in thin fingers. "Will you carve? Ke Seper brought the tools."

  "Not tonight," I said. "I want rest."

  Among the Jokka I'd left behind that comment would have elicited an uncomfortable silence. But these two had kept me company too long for such things, Seper at my side and Kaduin often against my side; as a youth he'd sought me when his sleep had been disturbed, as if sensing that I too needed solace from dreams of loneliness and fear. So Kaduin merely made an affirmative noise and returned to his slate and Seper offered to help me undress. I let it because unwinding the cloth was cumbersome and the eperu had a way with it.

  I made a very unconvincing anadi. Jokka who Turn female grow heavy and rounded, with smoother skin and glossier hair. Their voices change. Their hips broaden. They even smell different: fecund, a smell that reminded me of new, wet soil.

  I was still hard and thin, with the toes, fingers and frame I'd been born with. My breasts were so small they could be covered completely with the palms of my hands; I bound them to maintain the silhouette I'd had since birth, because the attention my "condition" received if I didn't was often intolerable. My voice pitch hadn't altered. And if my smell had changed, it was such a minimal alteration that Seper had to press its nose behind my ear and breathe there for quite a while before it could detect anything.

  One of the settlement's few healers had examined me and been puzzled by my condition. I was now anadi, it said, but the result almost looked like an incomplete Turning. Such were rare enough that I'd never heard of one, but the healer had been trained by an eperu who'd seen the phenomenon once. The eperu had told me I was probably infertile. I never chose to investigate the possibility that it was wrong.

  But I did need more rest than I had before, so I curled up on one of the two cots. Seper sat on the floor beside me, its arm and head on the edge.

  "Three months," Kaduin muttered. "Trapped on a ship with a madman."

  "Don't worry about Roika," I said. "He won't trouble us."

  To be at sea... to be surrounded by it... it was beyond anything I'd known, and I had walked Ke Bakil from the southern forest all the way to the Birthwell. The land sank in the horizon with each passing day until at last there was nothing but water for as far as I could see: endless waves, gilt by the sun as it passed overhead, stained by it when the sun set, and then frosted by the moon that illumined the ship's ropes and deck but only the very crests of the waves. Beneath them was a bottomless mystery, one my eyes could not pierce no matter how long I stared over the rail.

  We had good wind those first weeks, and the ship was never idle. Its passengers were: we were superfluous among the Jokka who had learned this forgotten discipline. I had had reports of the empire, and knew that the camaraderie I saw among the emodo overseers and the eperu who fulfilled their commands was unusual. The master of the vessel was an emodo but his immediate subordinate was an eperu, and theirs was a close trust. They conferred on almost every decision, and when they didn't it was because the one had done what the other would have.

  I was not the only one who wondered at them. The one time I saw Roika on the deck in the weeks that followed, it was on the opposite side of the ship and like me he was watching them. I felt a frisson of fear for the two: was he gathering evidence in order to condemn them? Fugitives to the settlement had brought back stories of the penalties for daring to show too great a trust for someone not one's sex. And yet, what I could see of his posture was not hostile.

  Did he look at them and see what we might have been, had he not destroyed my House? Had he not taken Dlane?

  True to his promise, Roika had avoided all three of us since our departure. Since we were often on deck, I could only guess that he kept to himself in the chamber he'd been assigned. He'd brought no others... but then, he didn't need them. The crew of the ship was his and they were nearly a hundred strong. I sometimes wondered when I lay down on the cot if his was lashed to the same wall; if we slept close enough to touch, save for one thin panel of wood. Sometimes I thought I could hear him breathing. I strained to hear it to keep from sinking into the despair in my heart at all we had lost. At all I had lost.

  "You have magic, ke Thenet," Kaduin said to me. "You have kept him at bay for weeks."

  Would that I had stayed in the settlement and protected them instead.

  My sleep was no longer the twilight-dreaming of an eperu, but I did not seem capable of an anadi's full slumber, either. It often left me restless and our situation made it worse, in an unfamiliar room surrounded in foreign noises, left in the dark to contemplate the hole in my heart. On a night when my sleep patterns had been particularly erratic, I gave up trying to rest and slipped from my cot to dress for a walk. Seper was awake; it always woke when I did and had since we'd returned from het Narel with the children. I had never asked it to be my guardian and most of the time it did not act as one, for what eperu would have wanted a jarana? But Seper was a friend, and somehow I never found myself resenting its assignment to my side. I glanced toward it in the dark and whispered, "I'll be back."

  It dipped its head and curled back up on the floor beside my cot. Kaduin, dreaming through his dense breeder's sleep, did not even flick an ear as I vanished up the ladder, my tail whispering over the rungs.

  I found myself beneath a bright scythe moon, so sharp a white it made my eyes water as I looked up at it. How intense the stars were alongside it, like beads of blood scattered from its edge! A cold blood, for a cold light, like the skin of the avatar the Void had chosen. I chafed my arms and drifted toward the eperu who served the emodo master of the ship; for once it was idle, a silhouette leaning against the mast that supported the great sails.

  "Ke eperu," I said.

  It straightened and touched a hand to its chest, barely visible; it had black skin and black hair and the moon barely pricked it from the darkness of the sky. "Good evening. Is there something I can help you with?"

  "I am just curious as to our progress," I said. "And perhaps I wanted a walk."

  "It is a fine night for one," it said, smiling and lifting its sharp nose to the cool wind. "For now it's bright and clear... soon enough it will be too cold to be comfortable."

  "It will?" I asked, startled.

  "Summer was ending when we left, ke eperu," the other said. "Autumn on the sea is less forgiving than it is on land. We’ll be meeting the season’s strength soon enough though we’re making very good time." It smiled. "Perhaps the gods are with us at last."

  "You can say that without fear of drawing their attention?" I asked.

  It chuckled. "Oh, we have been through so much already, ke eperu. We have capsized, been overturned, foundered on underwater rocks, gotten lost, found ourselves becalmed, nearly starved or died more times than I can describe. I think the gods owe us this victory."

  "You're a braver Jokkad than I to say so," I murmured.

  It rested a hand on my shoulder. "Did not the avatars of the gods send us on this voyage? Have no fear, ke eperu. We will reach the shore."

  I smiled, flicking my ear
s back. "Then I'll take my walk while I can."

  "Enjoy it, ke eperu."

  I had once had such certainties. I no longer remembered what it was like, to be free of doubt and guilt. The cutting moon above me and its attendant blood-drop stars felt like an indictment of an endeavor I'd started in violence. Even before the incident in House Edze... long before, I'd taken the first step on this path by standing attendance at the bodily death of an unborn child and the mind-death of its mother. Did I try, I could still feel the sticky film of the birth scarf fluids on my arm. Perhaps it was no surprise that the second birth I'd tried to oversee had also miscarried. Even before Roika had razed the settlement, I'd been struggling to sustain it against the overwhelming weight of the empire's existence. To travel far enough to be free of the Stone Moon would have denied the Jokka fleeing it a refuge with us. But to be near enough to save them required us to stay small and mobile, and one cannot build a civilization from the back of a caravan. In all the years I'd labored at Dlane's work, I had not found a solution, and had feared that there was none. Worse, I'd feared that I was wrong: that we could not live separate lives. That we would fail because I had held myself and Dlane apart from the final third of the Trinity.

  These thoughts... they were too familiar. And yet for a while the cold off the ocean, the scent of the clear salt in it, the weight of the water in the wind, all of that washed my mind clean and left me empty of grief.

  In that state of mind I began my return to our room…and was interrupted. The door to the chamber alongside opened and then fell shut again on the sound of a great crash. Startled, I reached for the door, wondering where the crew was, why no one had come to investigate. And then one hand lit on my shoulder and I looked over it at the eperu who'd wished me a good walk.

  "We are under orders not to disturb the emperor," it said.

  From the narrow crack between the door and the deck I heard the muffled sound of coughing. I flattened my ears to my mane. "There's something wrong—"

  "We are under orders," the eperu said again, "not to disturb the emperor."

  "And do you always take orders from the emperor?" I asked.

  "He is my master," the eperu said.

  "He's not mine." I reached for the handle again and this time it didn't stop me. When I looked up again, the eperu had gone.

  So I opened the door and peered inside, and saw little but heard much. More of that thick, ugly coughing, and between attacks, wheezing. Was this Roika's room, then? Surely there was someone in there with him. Had they fought?

  I crept down the ladder and paused halfway down, straining for the sound of another person's breath, their movements. But I heard nothing but that stridor, growing increasingly desperate, and the coughing that interrupted it. I slipped all the way down, bracing a foot on the ground, and groped for the cord that led to the shade. All these chambers had little windows; at night one could tie a fabric cover over them. The one in this room was barely attached, so it came free easily and the edged light of that sickle moon fell onto the face of the emperor of all Ke Bakil, crumpled on the floor near the ladder. As I stared at him, he was wracked with another coughing fit, ugly barks that brought up dark, sticky masses that showed in stark contrast to the lighter wood of the floor.

  There have been moments in my life where everything seemed to stop, where even the World ceased to breathe—allowed me to live in the forever between its breaths—and the moment when I realized Roika was dying... what did I feel? Joy? Horror? Shock? Anger? All these things blocked my throat and the words I might have spoken. I thought to go straight back up the ladder and leave him to his suffering.

  But the cough kept on and on, and an animal need to make it stop moved me to his side. I put my arm under him and his torso was too light for the emodo I remembered dancing with at the Leaf Gathering. It should have been an effort for me to haul his dead weight upright against the wall, particularly after my change, but it wasn't. When he continued coughing, I held him in place and found myself praying for the paroxysm to end. I hated Roika, but to watch anyone asphyxiate was beyond me.

  I inhabited another one of those pauses between the World's breaths and could not count the time, and yet as interminable as it seemed to me it must have been far worse for him. But at last he began to draw uninterrupted breaths, even if they were labored. Beneath my arms I could feel his heart slowing from its crazed sprint. I lifted my hands from his shoulders just enough to see if he would list, and when he didn't I went through his chamber, looking for something I could use as a rag. I was somehow unsurprised to find several on the table beside the cot. I offered him one and after a long moment, he took it. I used a second to wipe up the floor, an act that kept my back to him. I didn't want to look at him. I didn't want to face this evidence of his frailty, his impending demise. A healthy Roika, alive and opposing me, I could encompass. A dying Roika robbed me of one of the motivating forces of my life.

  I didn't leave after I'd finished cleaning. I didn't know why, either. I just sat on the nearest cot and regarded him, the cloth crumpled in my fingers. One good look at its contents had told me everything I needed to know. I was no healer, but a jarana is intimately familiar with the diseases that show themselves in early infancy. It was that knowledge that prompted me to say, "How long have you known?"

  His eyes were just visible beneath the lids, wet glints in the moonlight. "A few... years. After I started... building the Stone Moon." He sucked in a breath, fighting for it. "In het Kabbanil."

  I frowned. "There was no sign of it in your childhood?"

  "None," he answered. "Healer... in het Kabbanil..." He stopped to breathe. "Said he'd never seen it... show up so late."

  "But it is what it looks like," I said. "The black-spit killer."

  He let his head dip toward his chest, then pressed it back againt the wall, mouth hanging ajar. His difficulties were easing but now that I'd witnessed them I saw their tracks everywhere else. From the moment I'd attacked him on the shore, the signs had been there in the slight thickness of his voice, in the pattern of his breath, not swift enough to be noticed but still too quick for a healthy adult.

  I'm not sure what I expected him to say then. The choices we make in our lives shape them forever after, even the small ones. What he decided to say next and the fear that shaped the words changed him in my eyes, no matter how much I wished otherwise.

  "Kaduin... he hasn't... tell me... he hasn't...?"

  My ears flattened. "No!" And then, worried, "But if you're right he's younger than you were when it rose in you."

  "Gods... spare him..." Roika said, and sagged. He stank of blood and panic-sweat, sharp and acrid, and his exhaustion was palpable, so I helped him to one of the cots. He did not protest and in his weary acceptance I read years of him facing that humiliation and learning to live with it, and was moved despite myself to pity.

  "Can you sleep now?" I asked.

  "Maybe," he rasped. He opened eyes gone cloudy with fatigue. "So... now you know my... terrible secret. Are you glad?"

  "No," I said, and was unwilling to expand on that. "Are you sure you'll be fine here alone?"

  "Nothing... anyone can do." He closed his eyes. "Either will make it... to the north and back... or not."

  In his place I would have resented sympathy and felt smothered by fussing, and we two... we were not as un-alike as I could have wished. So I left him to recuperate, climbing up the ladder and shutting the door. When I straightened I felt as if I had been in that room for hours; every joint felt outraged and all my thoughts ran white with blood and horror. The cloth was still balled in my fist.

  The eperu was waiting for me.

  "That's why he's never on deck," I said to it. "He's hiding in his room to keep everyone from discovering he's dying."

  It shook its head slowly. "No. He's staying in his room because he's conserving what little strength he has. We already know."

  I glanced up at it. "The empire knows its emperor is dying?"

  "We kn
ow," the eperu said, "because the Fire in the Void asked us to guard his health. What the empire knows, I cannot tell you. But surely what the emperor's favored aide knows is known by the ministers of the Stone Moon."

  I rubbed my arms. I had thought Turning anadi would have made me better friends with the cold but in this, as with many things, I seemed to have remained more neuter than female. "And you," I said at last, "You agreed to this. To guarding his health."

  It glanced at me. "I know this may be difficult for you to hear, but not all of us oppose the Stone Moon, especially among the eperu. We live to serve the Jokka, to protect the breeders so that they might perpetuate the species. Much that the emperor has done has been difficult, but beneath him the anadi bear more young and all the sexes have seen their mindspans extended... even the anadi. There are more of us now than there were before, and the population is not only growing, it is well-fed, it is prosperous, it lives longer."

  "The empire is not just," I whispered.

  "The empire is imperfect," the eperu corrected. "As all things that exist on the World are. But one must begin somewhere."

  I glanced at it. Then said, "What is your name?"

  "Marilin," it said. "I am of het Kabbanil's labor."

  "Ke Marilin," I said. "Thank you. You have taught me something tonight."

  "You honor me," it said.

  I returned to my assigned room and slipped beneath the blankets on my cot. Seper opened its eyes long enough to ascertain that I was well and returned to its doze. And I did my best to take my troubled thoughts to sleep and succeeded far too well.

  The master of the vessel was Denret, an emodo with skin the pale yellow of cream and a wild mane of black hair that the ocean wind was always teasing free of the braid he effected. When I started spending more time outside our assigned room Seper and Kaduin followed me, and the latter was often at the side of Denret, asking questions about everything. That was Kaduin: forever curious, forever seeking. Even when he spoke, it was always an eager tumble, words spilling out as if they were racing to catch up to his thoughts. I stood at the rail and listened to the two of them and learned, every day a different topic, a different tangent.