Gus found his friend’s hand and squeezed it tight. Domino’s black eyes were dead when he turned them toward him.
“Hey,” Gus whispered.
He applied gentle pressure on the nichan’s fingers. It was not enough. After that night of anguish he wanted to hug Domino tight against him, to let himself go in his arms. As if the same need was awakening in him, Domino rolled to the side to face his friend, turning his back on Ero, who merely watched them in silence.
Domino’s eyes were already blushing behind a veil of tears. “Tell me it’s a nightmare. I . . . I’ll wake up. It’ll be over. Just say it. I’m begging you, Gus.”
Gus gritted his teeth to keep his own tears at bay. He bent down and placed one kiss and then another on Domino’s fingers. There was nothing to say because nothing would change what had happened. But Domino had to know that Gus would stay with him. Whatever he’d done, whatever he was, whatever the others’, Ero’s, or Matta’s opinions, Gus would take care of him.
Sobs carried Domino away, irresistible, filling every space in the room. Unable to hold on, Gus drew Domino to himself, providing all the comfort he had to offer. Domino buried his face in his neck, Gus stroked his hair. Closing his eyes, relegating his suffering to the back of his mind, Gus hugged his friend in his arms and closed his valid wing around them as much as he could.
Soon after, Ero stood and left them alone.
A few minutes passed, then Domino’s body stiffened. He backed away suddenly, sitting halfway down on his bed with terrified round eyes. “No. You have to get out.”
Still leaning over the edge of the bed, Gus froze. “What is it?”
But Domino spoke over his words. “I’m dangerous. You have to get out of here.”
“No.”
“You have to stay away from me.”
“Domino, stop—”
But the nichan was getting up. His long legs were confused, as if trapped in an invisible net, and he lost his balance. Gus stood up to help him, but it scared Domino away, and he leaned against the opposite wall. He reached a hand out in front of him to keep Gus away.
“Domino,” Gus repeated, cramps in his stomach.
His friend had never pushed him away. Whatever the reasons, it was a situation Gus had never thought he would ever have to face.
He took a step, opening his arms slightly to welcome Domino into his embrace. It was all right; they could get through this. Together. But Domino, releasing a new flood of tears, panicked as if the human was threatening him with a blade.
“Gus, please, no!” Domino begged. Gus stopped, a cold sweat running down his back. “Don’t come near me. Get out of here.”
“Where do you want me to go?” Gus didn’t know what he was saying anymore. He meant don’t leave me, let me take care of you. But his thoughts tripped on one another.
“Anywhere I can’t hurt you,” Domino said in a trembling voice, tension tightening the muscles of his neck. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m—”
“Don’t apologize,” Gus whispered.
He had to pull himself together or he would fall apart too. Gus was in pain, but Domino couldn’t know that. The burden the nichan carried on his shoulders was heavy enough to crush him and prevent him from ever getting up again.
So Gus obeyed. One step at a time, he forced himself away from the one person he wanted by his side. Then he went outside.
He sat for a long time behind the infirmary, where no one could see him, where Domino’s incessant weeping reached him for hours on end.
X I V
Domino stayed in the infirmary for two more days. As the mournful silence gradually gave way to conversations that didn’t require murmurs, and as the nichans patrolled more than ever around the village, in the valley, and the hills to the north, Domino ended his convalescence with the agreement of the herbalist and his uncle.
Physically, he felt fine. After lying in bed for days, his legs lacked exercise. He hadn’t eaten since the accident and the bottom of his stomach felt as if it were covered with mud, but he wasn’t hungry. His muscles were slightly sore, as if they’d been stretched too hard. Apart from that, he wouldn’t have been able to detect the slightest change in his system—perhaps because there was none and what was inside him had always been there. He didn’t wish for an answer. If he could walk and run, so much the better. That beast in him would stay where it was: hidden.
Gus had tried to visit him. He’d come by that morning, food in hand, only to be denied access to the infirmary. Ero, who’d stayed with his nephew most of the time, had ordered him to leave. Gus had said something that Domino hadn’t heard.
“You’re really looking for shit,” Ero had replied.
Then Gus was gone.
His smell, recognizable among a thousand—a subtle mixture of soap, warmed leather, and human sweat—had evaporated with him. Turning his back on the infirmary door, Domino had sighed with relief as well as misery. He’d begged Gus to stay away from him, but half his thoughts were focused on his best friend. He wanted to see him. He needed to see him.
He was about to leave this room of thousands of heady, sometimes disgusting scents, and was putting on the clothes brought for him, when Ero stood in his way.
“Just a moment,” Ero said, leaving enough distance between them so his intervention wouldn’t be interpreted as a threat. Domino didn’t bother to look up at his uncle. “How’s your leg?”
“It’s fine.” Nothing but the truth. He didn’t want to bring this subject back. The concept of his own clothes trapped beneath his skin was as sickening as being a murderer. Part of him wished Ero had never told him about it.
“Good,” his uncle said. “I know things haven’t always been easy between us.”
That was an understatement that under other circumstances would have made Domino chuckle. The blade skillfully slicing his cheekbone, missing his eye by a hair . . . Ero had made the decision to mutilate him on a whim. The gesture had only served to punish Mora, to teach him a lesson the hard way. If Ero and Domino had ever had a chance to get along, to understand each other, Ero had trampled on it before spitting on it.
Domino let his uncle continue.
“But I know what it feels like to lose someone you love.”
Do you know what it feels like to have killed them yourself? Domino thought. He didn’t want to have this conversation, not now, not ever. But he lacked the strength to fight his uncle, or even tell him to fuck off. So he’d endure what the man had to say to him, and then he’d leave to mourn his brother somewhere else.
“You probably have no reason to do this, but you can come to me if you need to,” Ero said. “We are family.” Domino bit the tip of his tongue. “All that happened . . . it’s a terrible burden on your young shoulders. Your true nature has been revealed, and you haven’t learned to live with it. We may be nichans, but we’ve forgotten what it feels like to be pure blood. To be . . . complete. But there could be good, in the end. Someday. This is an amazing opportunity for you—”
“I’ll stop you right there,” Domino said, finally looking his uncle in the face. “There’s nothing amazing about this.”
“Domino—”
“This shape . . . I’ll never transform again. Never.”
He gritted his teeth and pulled away when his uncle’s hand rested on his shoulder. It was Mora who used to reassure him with a hand on his shoulder and words of utter tenderness. Ero could keep his compassion drawn out of nowhere and put it wherever he wanted.
“It’s all right. No need to talk about it now,” Ero said, raising his hands in a sign of peace, a reaction he would never have had before today. “For now, try to eat. Get your strength back. Get some rest.”
“Can I go now?” Domino pressed him, eyes on the door behind his uncle.
“Of course.” Ero stepped aside, and Domino left the infirmary, sneaking through the barely opened door.
First he turned and headed for his hut by pure reflex, then he stopped in the middle of the s
quare, patch of black smoke drifting low in the sky. Gus would probably be there. Domino was dying to see his friend. Gus cared about Mora. They should mourn together. But that wasn’t all. Domino was afraid. Afraid of himself, afraid of what it would change in his life, in Gus’s life. Without being able to determine how his entire existence had crumbled under the weight of his actions, he knew that nothing would ever be the same again.
He wasn’t ready to face it.
He resisted the need to seek comfort, to return to where he would feel safest, and turned away from that path.
Soon, discomfort wagged in him, all around him, like a shift in the atmosphere. Something had changed beyond his brother’s overwhelming absence.
With a single circular glance, he noticed the clues. The few nichans in the square or in front of their huts looked at him. A woman sitting on the step of her porch sharpened a short blade without taking her eyes off him. A couple scratched the crust of earth on their vegetables before washing them, interrupting their conversation to observe him from a distance, slipping quiet words to each other. Arms laden with animal skins, Memek stopped not far from Domino, studying her cousin with her mismatched eyes.
Where once was indifference grew mistrust. Curiosity too. Perhaps everything was different. Now he was the clan’s real nichan. The clan’s miracle.
A baby started crying in a nearby hut. It captured Domino’s attention. The cries came from Mora’s house.
The clan’s monster. That’s what he was.
Domino could no longer stand those looks on him, fearing he’d vomit under all those stares of nichans who would find no answer to their questions in this contemplation.
He decided hastily, without thinking. He turned north. One step ahead of the other, again and again. His legs seemed to weigh a ton, as if sucked into the earth. He ordered them to press forward. He wasn’t to stop, or he’d collapse and might never get up again.
When he reached a large house of stone and wood, the suffocating heat of burning water enveloped him and obscured his view. With the door still open behind him, daylight playing with the clouds of steam, Domino froze. There were people inside: a hunchbacked, dark-skinned, hail-stained nichan dean, and a middle-aged man, his son, who helped him dry his feet. The younger one turned around to greet the newcomer, looking indolent. Like the others, his expression tensed as he recognized Domino. After a short moment of hesitation, the nichan picked up his clothes and his father’s, and guided the old man to the exit. The entire time, the man kept his distance. The door slammed shut behind them.
Water dripped lazily on the stone. A draught came through the back window, making the shutter creak. Domino loosened his fists and finally realized where he was. The baths. The fountains on the opposite walls, the cold-water basin almost empty, the other, larger, filled with steaming water despite the ambient heat. It was the most outlying building in the village. Like the two men who’d just left, whoever would come up here for their ablutions would find Domino standing motionless in the middle of the fog.
He stayed like this for a while, long enough for sensations to abandon the soles of his feet, then he settled down by a fountain. And he waited. He couldn’t stay here forever. Other nichans would come in for a bath at some point. It was rude to force them all to accept his presence or run away.
The clan’s monster. The one who’d killed his own brother.
He would have liked to cry, but for the first time, he was unable to summon any tears. He felt empty, both locked out of his body while trapped inside his own thoughts. A ball in the bottom of his throat, he raised his hands before his eyes. His palms were pale, rough. The other side, darker, was a little dry but without a scratch.
Panic gripped his throat when he noticed the blood under his fingernails.
Blood.
His own?
Mora’s?
An image materialized before his eyes, like a memory. It wasn’t a memory, but rather a projection of his imagination, an insidious thought. Domino saw himself in the bestial form of an ordinary nichan—not the form Ero had spoken of. Not that of a beast. So it couldn’t be true. Yet the image filled every gap in his mind. His clawed hand slitting the air before it meeting his brother’s throat. A movement so violent Domino could experience the shock reverberating through his muscles. Mora’s head going backwards, the wound spreading like a fan, coral blood splashing around…
Domino flinched, breathless. The image then repeated itself, all the more violent.
Sudden nausea overcame him.
He pushed back this flash, this thought that, because he was desperate to suppress it, gained in power, in verisimilitude.
“Stop it,” he begged in a tearless sob.
His pulse raced. He scratched at the dried blood, trying to reach and dislodge the orange-red filth. He couldn’t do it, as if it’d become one with his fingernails.
No, it’s got to go!
Bumping his back against the faucet of one of the fountains, the metal scraping his skin to the point of drawing blood, he straightened up and searched frantically around him. Under a pile of dishcloths he put his hand on a scrubbing brush. Domino abruptly activated the pump. Water flew. He wet his hands hastily and rubbed harder and harder. The harsh boar bristles helped. Not enough. It would never be enough. He could taste the blood in his month. A metallic yet sweet taste, like an overripe fruit.
He rubbed until his own blood appeared and mingled with the one he wished to erase. And he rubbed. A groan came out of his throat. What was he doing? It wasn’t working. It would never work. That blood would stay there forever.
“Fuck!” he shouted. His fist hit the wooden wall reinforced with stones and lime.
He struck again and again as his perverse imagination spilled his brother’s blood in his mind. His skin peeled from the meat and bone of his hand. His own blood ran down the wall.
It had to stop. He hit the wall again, this time with the corner of his head. He didn’t count how many times his forehead collided with the wood. He just slammed his head hard, begging for unconsciousness. A little dazed, he slumped into the drainage ditch, dark spots replacing his thoughts before his eyes. Breathless, blood-pulsing nails drilling into his skull, the joints of his hand raw, he stared at the wall in front of him.
Time lost its substance, impossible to quantify, but Domino remained conscious.
If anyone visited the baths in that lapse of time, Domino didn’t hear them. He curled up on the slabs for long hours, his hand closed against his chest, the other dripping on the floor, blood crystalizing ever so slowly on his knuckles. He would have wanted it to break, for every bone to pierce the skin. This hand that would remain forever stained with his brother’s blood. He opened it, closed it. In his condition, he couldn’t even tell one pain from the other.
When he woke up much later, it was dark. He summarily rinsed out the crystallized blood between his swollen fingers, tried to ignore the blood under his nails, and looked for a place to spend the night. He wouldn’t go back to his hut. He wouldn’t go to the sanctuary. No one was to see him or come near him.
A cool, fine rain bounced off his face and stuck his hair to his forehead. Someone was coming.
“Domino, can you hear me?”
Always the same question.
Each drop seemed heavier than the last. The boy half-opened his eyes, and Ero’s features appeared behind a sleepy haze. Domino put a hand to his forehead. He grimaced as his fingers met the open, swollen flesh on the edge of his scalp.
His uncle’s hand then grabbed his wrist and he inspected the boy’s fingers. “Can I leave you alone for two minutes without things going out of control?”
Domino tried to yank his hand back. Around him, the leaves of the trees under which he was lying swayed as the wind and the rain increased in intensity. Domino stood up, struggling to remember how he’d landed here. He’d wandered for a while in the village woods. At that time it wasn’t raining yet. He’d probably considered this tree and the black fe
rns surrounding its base to be an appropriate bed.
“You spend the night here?” Ero asked.
Domino pulled on his hand again for his uncle still refused to release him. “Let go of me.” He tried to get up.
But the blows he’d inflicted on his own skull tripped his balance—like when his mother had given him a sip of almond liquor when he was little to soothe him to sleep.
“Did you eat yesterday?” Ero said, studying his face more closely.
“Leave me the fuck alone.”
Before this day, Domino would never have dared to utter such words. Ero was the chief of the clan, his Unaan. Domino’s tone was close to blasphemy. He felt it in his core, in that part of his being attached to the man, bound by the blood oath. It squeezed, contracting his muscles, pressing against his rib cage, wrenching a groan out of him. For an instant he shivered, pressed himself against the trunk of the tree under which he was slumped, and stopped pulling on his arm.
Facing him, Ero shook his head. “It’s unpleasant, indeed,” he said, guessing what discomfort was tormenting Domino. “I’ll let this insubordination pass. Just this once. Now, you’ll get up and follow me.”
“Don’t order me.”
Domino heard these words spoken by his mouth, expelled from the depths of his soul. He hadn’t anticipated them. Yet the fear was there, oppressive. The fear of being forced to eat, to return to his hut, to a normal life, in plain sight. Fear that his clan leader would order him to transform. Domino would do it. The oath he’d sworn was that powerful. He would try to resist, of course, with all his might, but only to break under his uncle’s will.
This too Ero seemed to have guessed. His hand released Domino, and he sighed long and hard before wiping the beads of rain from the surface of his black beard. “I won’t do that,” he said. “I’m not here to torment you, so stop playing the martyr. I just want you to get better.”
What if I can’t get better? What if what you see here is all that’s left of me?
The Nichan Smile Page 18