by Mel Dunay
By all rights, he should have jumped three feet into the air, waking Amita up and causing all kinds of chaos. Instead, Rina saw his body tense, and heard him give off a quiet sigh.
The first thing he did was take Amita’s hand firmly by the wrist and remove her hand from his leg.
She did not try to fidget or put it back, or wake up and act flirty about him holding her wrist, which meant that Amita was out cold. Then Vipin very slowly eased himself into an upright position, which in turn moved Amita into an upright position.
A bump in the road lurched her onto Rina's shoulder. Rina groaned, and leaned forward so she could glare at Vipin.
He shrugged and said quietly: “Better you than me.”
Apparently, Amita had not managed to charm this one into submission. Well, that was better sense than Rina would have given him credit for, and watching him trying to cope with Amita “napping” all over him had been less painful than trying to carry on a conversation with Amita would have been.
Perhaps she did owe him. Rina decided not to shove the other woman away just yet.
CHAPTER TWO
“Skymarket, as the name implies was originally a trading post founded by a group of valley dwellers, to barter with the inhabitants of Mount Snarl. The cinderblock houses are far from picturesque, and the shrine to the Mercantile Guardian Spirit is of limited historical interest. The views of Capital Valley, though picturesque, are not very different from those available in Summertown.
The real interest still lies in its bazaar, which features most of the goods produced on Mount Snarl, including butter, honey, cheese, kefir, beer, mead and various textiles. There is also illicit trafficking of Stayout’s ergot-dust; due to this and to the relatively large amount of money flowing through Skymarket, the town has a higher crime rate than the other towns on Mount Snarl.
Tourists are generally considered to be off-limits by the criminal elements of the town. This is the only town on the mountain with both a fully developed septic system and reliable, legitimate electricity.”
(Excerpt from The Tourist’s Guide to The Blue Smoke Mountains.)
The evening was uneventful. The bus made an overnight stop at the first major village up the slope, Skymarket. Skymarket was big enough to have a clean, fairly cheap hostel at the bus stop, with running water and electricity.
The yawning, newly awakened Amita agreed to split the cost of a room with Rina-a proper room, with two beds and a full bathroom. Vipin took the cheapest lodging that the place offered, a hard narrow bed in a men-only dormitory.
The two women had dinner together in silence and but they had hardly reached their room before Amita’s phone rang.
“Hello, honey,” She cooed.
From Amita's adoring tone, Rina figured that this was the minister of agriculture. Amita’s side of the conversation quickly took a turn for the graphic, and Rina decided this would be a good time to claim the bathroom. She showered quickly and washed her hair slowly, and came out to find Amita glaring at her.
“Are you done wasting the hot water?” Amita snapped.
“Trust me, there isn't any to waste,” Rina said. This was not the first time she had roomed with Amita; she knew that the only chance she had of getting any warm water at all was to get in first, unfortunately the hostel’s water heater didn’t seem to be working.
While Amita dug out her special mango-cinnamon body wash from one of her bags, and her coconut-scented shampoo from another, Rina dried and brushed her hair in from of the mirror.
What she saw in the mirror was a lean woman on the tall side of average, twenty-eight years old, with an angular face that was rather wide at the cheekbones but tapered to a narrow, pointed chin. She had a wide, rather full mouth with a cute little bow in it when it pouted, which it really only did when she was modeling her creations for her shop advertisements. It tended to look rather too broad and manic when she smiled.
Her nose was long and straight. Her eyes were omewhere between a dark green and a dark hazel. In a country where probably seventy percent of the people had brown eyes, they were somewhat unusual.
She had strong, arched eyebrows, which she groomed and shaped but did not attempt to reduce to a pencil thin line.
Her hair was long and wavy, and she generally wore it loose, to show off. She had a decent figure, meaning that she was skinny in most places with not quite enough curve in her hips to carry off a sari the way Kajjal did.
Her fingers were long and slim but strong-she’d done enough sewing of her own to make them that way.
Rina stretched out on the bed and caught up on her mobile novels while Amita showered, but the blissful silence came to an end when Amita emerged from the bathroom with her hair in a towel and cold cream plastered all over her face.
“There’s something odd about that guy,” She said.
“What guy?” Rina asked without looking up from the novel on her phone.
“That Vipin guy. He's got a damned fine body but his face is all scarred if you look closely.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed any scars,” Rina said stiffly.
She felt annoyed that Amita had seen this and she hadn’t, but she also felt an aha! moment-so that was why his smile was crooked-and a twinge of sympathy.
“They’re the same color as his skin, maybe that's why you didn’t see them,” Amita said smugly.
“But that’s not the strangest part about him. He’s very nice, and as best I can tell he’s not gay, but he just doesn’t pay attention to me the way a straight man would.”
“Maybe he's straight and not interested in you,” Rina said.
Amita managed to look smug through the cold cream. “That never happens.”
In all fairness, Rina thought, that’s not too far from the truth.
“Maybe you’re wrong and he is gay,” Rina said uncomfortably. It wasn’t any of her business whether he was or not, but somehow she didn’t like this conversation
“I have way better radar than you for that, and I say he’s not. Unless you’ve known him very long?”
“Bumped into him on the bus yesterday evening,” said Rina.
“I don’t know anything more about him than you do, Amita. He’ll be good for keeping the rowdies off our backs until we reach Barleyfields, though. He was nice about that on the trip to Summertown.”
“I don’t suppose he’s going all the way up to Thundermouth like us,” said Amita thoughtfully.
Rina groaned. “Why don’t you ask him yourself in the morning? All I know is he bought a bus ticket to Barleyfields about the same time I did.”
This solution apparently hadn’t occurred to Amita before. “That’s a good idea,” she said. “I’ll have to try that.”
Just then the wind picked up outside. Something about the direction it usually blew, and the shape of the rocks on Mount Snarl gave it a deep growling sound like an angry lion at the zoo.
It was very different from the sound the wind made around the taller buildings in Rivertown, or in towns around the foothills, like Summertown.
It startled Rina for a moment, and she remembered being afraid of the sound as a child, but a moment later, Amita’s phone rang with another call from her lover, and the raunchy conversation quickly drove Rina's childhood fears out of her mind.
When she fell asleep, she had strange dreams. The wind was still roaring in the background, but it rose and fell in synch with the sound of an obnoxious pop song she'd heard in Rivertown.
She was on a dairy farm like the ones scattered around Thundermouth, in the corrals where people gathered up their goats and buffalo in the fall before herding them into the barns for protection against the winter snow and ice.
There was a man lying sprawled on a stone in the middle of the corral. Rina stood off to his left, and could see him clearly in profile except for his head, which was turned away from her. And then in the way of dreams, she glided up to him in an instant.
When she touched his face and turned his head towards her,
she thought it was Vipin but his cheeks looked like they had been clawed in a fight with some creature. His eyes were shut tightly, and his jaws clenched just as tightly, as if he were in pain.
She wanted to let go of his head and back away, but she couldn’t. She tried to scream but no sound came out. Dream-Vipin reacted to her silent scream by opening his eyes.
There was a terrible, dead sadness in those eyes, as if the soul behind them had stopped believed it could ever be happy again, and she thought there might be tears forming up in them. Then the next moment, he smiled and sat up. His face was no longer bleeding, but she could see the scars that Amita had mentioned. She hugged him, more in relief than anything else, and he seemed to lean into the embrace...
The wind rose from a growl to a full-throated roar, and the sound jolted her awake.
I have definitely been spending too much time around Amita, she thought, and rolled over and went back to sleep.
Her dreams after that were very ordinary, and Vipin was not in them.
The bus driver had no intention of setting out early the next morning, so the two women found themselves with nothing much to do. Rina put on jeans and a tee-shirt, while Amita put on gym leggings and a sweatshirt.
The hostel owners put out a simple but tasty breakfast of hot, savory pastries filled with mutton and mashed root vegetables which Rina ate heartily and Amita picked at, complaining about her diet.
“I need to go to the gym,” Amita said. “I don’t have your insane metabolism and ability to eat anything without gaining weight.”
“Oh come on, you’ve been here before. You know there’s no gym at the hostel,” Rina protested through a mouthful of food. “I don’t think there’s one anywhere in town, come to think of it.”
“That’s all you know about it,” Amita said. “The fancy new hotel that opened up across town has one."
Rina found herself wishing there was a way to wipe that smug look off Amita's face for good. And wishing that Amita had decided to stay at the fancy new hotel last night. But maybe the young political intern had already spent both her official and unofficial paychecks for the month, or most of the money from each.
“Please, get here back in time,” Rina said. “The bus driver said he wanted to leave by noon.”
Amita tossed her head. "Like he's ever been on time in his life."
Skymarket was the place where all the villagers from further up the peak brought goods to sell and trade with each other and the people from the foothills. The town would have been at its busiest just before the smokeflowers bloomed, with everyone buying supplies for the upcoming festival, but there were still plenty of traders at the local bazaar, shooing away monkeys and calling out to potential customers, when Rina walked over there.
She was looking for leather and wool for her winter collection. The leather selection was not too great this time, and since her father owned a tannery, among other things, she could probably do better in her own town. There were some very nice bolts of soft, undyed wool cloth, and she negotiated with the seller to take them down to her shop in Rivertown, with half the payment now and half on delivery.
She spent a good part of the transaction on the phone, messaging pictures of the cloth to Kajjal and making sure both her partner and the cloth merchant understood what date had been agreed on for the delivery. She was still on the phone with Kajjal as she walked back towards the bus stop.
“So how’s Amita?” Kajjal asked.
If the two of the had been sitting and chatting back in their shop, Rina would have said: “Trampy as always,” but that would have raised a few eyebrows here if anyone overheard her, so Rina said. “Hold on, let me send you a picture.”
She scrolled through her picture gallery and found a shot she'd taken yesterday morning, of Vipin squirming out from underneath Amita.
It was a better picture of him than it was of Amita: it didn’t hurt that his shirt buttons were undone clear down to the navel, and the weight of Amita’s head on his shoulder pulled the shirt even further open. But anybody who knew Amita would recognize what she was up to in a heartbeat.
Rina sent the picture. “Does that answer your question?”
“Well, yeah, but it makes me want to ask about ten new ones. Starting with, who’s the guy and where did you find him? And how come he's immune to Amita? Is he gay?”
Rina rolled her eyes. “Amita says not, and according to her she’s an expert.” She briefly recapped what she knew about Vipin.
“He sounds like a pretty good guy, as these things go. Maybe a little too good to be true. I wonder why he's latched onto Mount Snarl as a place to do his research. The Skymarket people would probably be pretty open about this stuff, but I can't imagine the jerks at Barleyfields opening up to him. What about Thundermouth? I wouldn’t have thought they were the type either, but you know your town better than I do.”
“No, you’re right,” Rina agreed. “I don’t think they’d be all that open about the festival either. But he says most of the places that celebrate the smokeflower festival have become too commercial-he’s looking for more authentic folklore.”
“That’s a crock,” Kajjal said. “I have family in the South Blue Mountains, and they celebrate the smokeflower festival too. They aren’t overrun with tourists but they’re pretty friendly, and the mountain they live on is a lot easier than Mount Snarl.”
“So...what are you saying?” Rina asked. “You think I've picked up a stalker?”
“Maybe that, maybe someone posing as an anthropologist for his own reasons, although spirits only know why anyone would bother. Maybe he’s just a weirdo. All I’m saying is, be careful. I don't want to have to run this shop all by myself.”
“I’ll be careful,” Kajjal promised. Further down the street, she spotted Vipin holding a small recorder out towards the face of a little old man, who was sitting out in front of a leather-working shop.
It wasn’t one of the old-fashioned tape recordera that students used to record the professors’ lectures when she was in college. This was the new kind: basically a memory stick with a microphone at one end, that you could plug into any computer. Vipin had a pleasant smile, and he carried himself in a relaxed way, but the old man stared at him strangely, like a rabbit hypnotized by a king cobra.
Was the old man freaked out by the recorder maybe? No, he wasn't staring at that, he was looking straight into Vipin's face. He seemed frightened by what he saw there, but also frightened to look away.
By the time she reached them, Vipin had shut down his recorder and was thanking the man for talking to him. The look on the man’s face had hardened from fear into hatred.
He spat at Vipin’s feet. “I need no thanks from an Oldblood,” he snapped.
Vipin flinched at the last word, and mumbled something in an embarrassed way before walking away from the man, in the opposite direction from Rina.
For her part, Rina was relieved to find out that the old man was reacting that way out of superstition. Oldbloods were creatures with strange powers in the old stories, half human and half guardian spirit.
So the man was freaked out by Vipin's recorder after all! Rina thought. He must have thought it was some kind of magic, and that’s why he called Vipin an Oldblood.
“Hey,” Rina called out to Vipin. He didn’t jump or start, but his body tensed for a moment at the sound of her voice, as if he hadn’t expected to find her there.
“Hello,” he said softly when Rina caught up with him, and turned his head towards her.
Now that she knew what she was looking for, she could see the scars Amita had talked about: two very faint, roughly horizontal ridges, the same golden color as the rest of his skin, that started at the corners of his mouth and stretched back to his ears.
They were barely visible, though the one on the right side seemed slightly more raised than the other one, and criss-crossed a couple of other very faint scars, which made sense because that was the side that seemed to have trouble smiling.
; The memory of her nightmare stirred, but she shoved it down. It was only a dream. On a weaker, younger face, the scars might have been a problem, but somehow they harmonized with Vipin’s strong jaw and beaky, slightly crooked nose and the curving sensual lips she hadn’t quite noticed before.
“I’m sorry that man was so superstitious,” Rina said. “I just want you to know that we aren’t all like that up here on the Peak.”
“I hope you’re right,” Vipin smiled at her.
“I know I’m right,” Rina said firmly.
It was only the very oldest residents of the Peak who still believed in guardian spirits, or Old Ones, to use the scriptural name for them.
One day those jerks who think women shouldn’t have jobs or a say in choosing their own husbands will be as old and scarce and harmless as that frightened old man, She thought. It was a cheerful idea, and she smiled to herself.
“Is the joke something you can share?” Vipin drawled good-naturedly.
His eyes had been clouded and unhappy earlier, even when he smiled at her, but now they were alive and bright, like a dog watching a child wave the stick before throwing it.
Rina shook her head. “It’s a female thing,” she said. Then she realized how that might sound, and added: “It’s not that you wouldn’t get it, or that you would think it were gross, it’s just not the kind of thing that interests guys very much.”
Vipin laughed. “Okay, next time I see you smiling to yourself I won’t ask.”
Rina had been holding her phone by the strap at the end of its case, letting her hand dangle at her side. It was then that one of the monkeys in the bazaar ran up and snatched the phone.
“Oh, you-!” Rina snapped. The monkey ran up the pole of the awning over a nearby fruit trader’s stall. Sitting at the top, it stared down at Rina and chattered defiantly.
Rina turned to Vipin. “I don’t suppose you have any chocolate or cigarettes on you? Or even a shiny coin or two? The last time a monkey stole something from me, I had to trade a treat to the dratted beast to get my stuff back.”