by Marc Secchia
“P-P-Pip,” Arosia stammered as Pip drew her hands into Hunagu’s palm.
“Make nice, Hunagu,” Pip ordered him.
“Me Hunagu,” the Oraial rumbled, in Island Standard. “Please meet lady.”
Pip rolled her eyes. “I taught him better than that, Arosia.”
“He speaks?”
“You speak?” Pip echoed rudely. “Of course he does.”
“Arosia!” Her father stood at the second gateway, ashen-faced. “Get away from that Oraial at once. Pip, how dare you put my daughter in such danger? You ought to know better.”
Oddly, Pip experienced a pang of joy at the tone of his rebuke. Her parents used to say things like that. Only, they might have said, ‘Pip, don’t shoot arrows at your friends,’ or, ‘Pip, that snake’s dangerous. Put it down.’
When Hunagu ambled off to find a patch of suns-shine, Balthion said, “I’ve someone for you to meet, Pip. This is my son Durithion. We call him Duri.”
Entering the stone room, Pip held out her hand for the big person blowing-signing-kissing routine which Balthion had taught her. Duri, however, turned ten shades of puce and did not seem to know where to look. He said, “She’s not wearing any clothes, Dad.”
“She’s a Pygmy,” said Balthion.
“I’m not crossing swords with some naked little savage,” said Durithion.
“She’s not a savage.” Balthion seemed flustered. “Islands’ sakes, boy, haven’t you listened to anything I’ve been telling you? Very well. Arosia, will you lend Pip your over-tunic to save your brave brother from fainting?”
Pip burned inwardly as she pulled on the unfamiliar garment. Stupid boy, calling her a savage. As if clothes made any difference to the person wearing them. Those big people who had torched her village had been fully dressed. They were the real savages.
“I brought Duri here, Pip, because he needs a sparring partner,” said Balthion. “His grades with the sword are disgraceful. If he wants to attend the Academy, he needs the kind of training I cannot give him because of my disabilities. But I’ve seen you with your bamboo sticks, Pip. Would you be willing to help my son?”
Duri sniffed, “Bamboo sticks? I’ve been studying the blade for–”
Balthion gestured to a servant, who had been waiting outside the second gate. He passed several shields and weapons through the metal bars. “Shields. Training swords–blunted, but they’ll still hurt.” Balthion passed one hilt-first to Pip. “You know how to use one of these?”
It was heavier than she had expected. Pip nodded.
“Shield?”
“No, thank you.” Pip swished the sword through the air. It felt very large for her. Did Pygmy warriors use blades this heavy? Or … no, she remembered them wearing a long dagger at either hip.
“Dad, you expect me to fight a girl to improve my skills?”
Pip had never met a more aggravating person. Five years of stares through the crysglass windows were not a shade on what she felt now. This big person boy thought he was too good to fight a Pygmy warrior? A little girl-savage? She’d savage him, alright.
Her feet slipped into a ready position. Copying what she had read in a story, she said, “Guard yourself, Sylakian rogue.”
A wicked chuckle issued from Balthion’s mouth.
Duri slipped a shield onto his arm and raised his sword in a mocking salute. “I’ll try to be gentle, little girl.”
“How noble of you,” she retorted.
Pip feinted to his right, to his sword hand. Gladness burned like fire in her throat. This felt so right. How could a person so love battle, the heft of a sword in their hand, the clash of wills across the space that separated her from a hated enemy? Well, not an enemy as such, but a spoiled Sylakian brat. Side-stepping his clumsy thrust, Pip struck his shield. She kicked out, making Duri stumble. Now she recalled her Pygmy warrior-instructor. His dry voice filled her mind. ‘Shift your weight like a cobra. Coil and strike. Always watch the eyes. The eyes mirror the soul. Read the signs.’ She read his overhand attack easily. The heavy sword slowed her return blow.
‘Use the warrior-passions. Flow with them like a river pouring over the Island’s edge into the Cloudlands.’ The forms were there, carved into her memory. She needed a second blade. But a warrior should know how to fight one-handed, or both. Pip defended herself, deflecting the boy’s cautious blows with an economy of movement. He was gaining in confidence after an awkward beginning. His eyes narrowed. He knew he was in a real battle.
Now she slithered into the attack, swaying past his flickering blade to jab her elbow into his side. Duri gasped. Pip sprang lithely upward, spinning on the axis of her body before letting her blade snap out suddenly. She pulled the blow, showing her control.
“You’re dead.”
The blunt blade rested against his neck.
“Good,” said Balthion, drily. “Pip, a better swordsman would only have killed you four times before then. Let’s discuss where you went wrong.”
* * * *
Pip missed Balthion in the cold season. He slipped on the icy cobbles on his way to the zoo and injured his back. She begged and begged the zookeeper to let her see him, with all the power of her new command of Island Standard. In the end, she was allowed to accompany Arosia in her litter, chained hand and foot, with a dozen sworn, life-and-death promises that Pip would be returned safely. The zoo owner was travelling in the warm Southern Islands for the cold season.
She had not set foot outside of her enclosure in six and a half years.
Rain sheeted across the dull grey, slate rooftops of Sylakia Town. The four male servants carrying their light, covered litter were already soaked. Pip knew her eyes were enormously round as they jogged the half-league into town. The buildings grew grander with every step. She perceived many things she had words for, but had never seen–bakeries and shops, tanneries and pony-carts, children floating boats in the puddles and dogs as tall as any Pygmy.
She fingered the cloth of the dress Arosia had brought her. It was the finest linen she had ever worn, soft and comfortable. People wore clothes. Beasts in zoos wore nothing at all.
“Here we are,” said Arosia.
Her eyes rose, awed. Three stories tall and many rooms wide, the house was larger than the village she remembered. How could big people need so much? Pip had never felt smaller as she ascended to the front door, which was twelve feet tall in carved mahogany hardwood. One servant smiled warmly at her. The other sniffed as though he had just seen a scrawny rat crawl up the stairs.
The chains jingled softly as they entered a towering hallway, so large it housed an entire prekki fruit tree. Arosia led her upstairs, to her parents’ bedroom, she said. Pip took in the fine furnishings and paintings on the walls, the trophies of Balthion’s time in the Crimson Hammers, the elite armed forces of Sylakia’s Island, where he had been a powerful commander, a Second War-Hammer. He had lost his leg in a battle against a wild, feral Dragon. The same Dragon had burned much of his left arm and side, leaving scars he had once allowed her to finger in melancholy fascination.
Pip was only just tall enough to see over the mattress of his vast bed. But there was Balthion, bright eyes crinkling into a smile, his hair and beard neatly trimmed for the first time since she had known him. He gave a glad cry.
Arosia helped her clamber onto a stool at his bedside.
They talked Pygmy. It was like old times. They ate a Sylakian delicacy together, a pot of slow-roasted ralti meat stew served with saffron rice, curried yoghurt and crusty mohili bread. Pip ate until her stomach creaked at the seams. Arosia kept breaking off more chunks of bread for her and scooping out the best portions of meat.
Balthion introduced her to his children. Duri was away visiting relatives, but she met his four younger brothers and Balthion’s wife Shullia, who welcomed Pip with a hug and a kiss on her forehead. “So this is the imp who has stolen your heart, Balthion? What a sweet child.” Shullia’s eyes twinkled. She had iron-grey hair and a way of looking so
directly at Pip, she felt as though Shullia knew everything about her already. “You’d hardly make a rajal’s dinner, girl. They could feed you a little more.”
Shullia’s sweet, potent perfume made Pip cough. “You’ve been helping our Duri, I hear,” she said. “His grades have shot from the Cloudlands to the moons above. Balthion says you’re quite the fighter.”
“Not too many compliments, Shullia,” Balthion advised gruffly.
Pip ventured a smile. “Thank you, Lady Shullia.”
“Oh, lady this and lady that? Nonsense, child. When I was your age, I ran barefoot through the puddles of lower Sylakia Town. I was quite the scamp. As poor and homeless as one of those monkeys they have you living with.”
Just then, boots click-clacked in the hallway.
“Daddy.” A girl swished in through the doorway. “I’ve come back from the Academy of–oh, roaring rajals, is this the native from the zoo? The one you’ve been trying to civilise?”
A chill breeze seemed to have swept into the room. Pip was aware her mouth had dropped open, but the girl’s tone of casual contempt caught her so by surprise that she could think of nothing to say. The girl was half a head taller than Arosia, also fine-featured, but beneath a formal white headscarf her eyes were the grey of stormy skies. They dismissed Pip without need for speech.
“Telisia,” said Balthion. “May I present Pip? Pip, this is my eldest daughter–”
“I thought I smelled monkey droppings on the way in,” said Telisia, pinching her nose delicately. “And you’ve lent the native one of your dresses, Arosia? Adorable. Don’t forget to burn it afterward.”
Pip caught a stricken look from Balthion as she dropped her gaze. She felt sick. Beside her, Arosia and Shullia stiffened until they resembled the bars of the climbing frame in Pip’s cage.
“How’s the Academy, petal?” asked Shullia.
“Lots to tell,” said Telisia, touching one slim hand to her forehead. Pip had no words. Telisia was pretty, but the ugliness that came out of her mouth …
“Oh?” Master Balthion prodded.
Telisia affected a huge sigh. “Later. I’ve a headache, which the stench in here isn’t helping. Dad, haven’t you learned that you can dress up a monkey, but you can’t make them Human? Honestly.”
And with that, she swept out again, leaving a nasty silence in her wake.
“Oh, she can just go jump in a Cloudlands volcano,” Arosia snarled.
Balthion sighed. “That girl, I swear … Pip, I’m so sorry.”
Pip swallowed back a hard, sour lump of misery. “I thank you for this outing, Master Balthion. But I’d like to go home to my cage, now.”
Chapter 7: Hair Today
ARoSIA HAD BEEN pallid with rage. When she held Pip’s hand in the litter, she was still shaking. Pip did not know why Arosia felt that way, nor why she sat in a thin-lipped silence as her gentle friend dwelled on her thoughts. She looked at her fingers. Arosia’s fine, soft hand had clutched hers all the way back to the zoo.
The zookeeper unlocked her manacles. Slipping free of the unaccustomed dress, Pip handed over her outfit. “Thank you.”
The girl only nodded. Her eyes had a wounded-animal quality about them.
The cage door slid shut behind a loincloth-clad Pygmy girl. With a click, her world became bars and walls once more. Although her feet felt too heavy to move, she managed, somehow, to trace back the steps she had taken so lightly earlier. Why was Arosia acting so hurt, she wondered? She wasn’t the one relegated to the world of animals.
“Pip smell funny,” Hunagu murmured, half-asleep.
Pip crawled beneath the new shelter she had built them, drew the rajal skin about her frame and pulled Hunagu’s arm around her.
What did that make Hunagu? Some undefined half-Human half-animal?
That night, the shadow chased her through the jungle again. Pip jerked awake with a shrill scream. She could not seem to get warm, despite hiding completely beneath Hunagu’s arm. Had she sensed the creature again? Was it still hunting? Now every shadow in their enclosure seemed to gleam with dark, oily menace, to hide loathsome and fearful creatures of the dark. Pip admonished herself to stop jumping at shadows. But she did not calm down for hours.
Exhausted, she slept. The shadow brushed the edges of her mind.
Arosia and Shullia arrived early the following morning by pony cart, with three servants in tow and a list of demands that had the poor zookeeper hopping like the giant khaki grasshoppers her tribe used to fry and eat for a treat. Pip watched in mounting astonishment as a tub, a brazier, metal pots, five barrels of water, a mound of large green towels and three cavernous bags of outlandish implements made their appearance. She began to feel a little frightened. Some Pygmy warrior she was.
Hunagu grunted, “Water? Pygmy-girl wash? Pah.”
Shullia had a kindly but implacable air about her as she beckoned Pip over. “Right, petal. We need to have a talk. There are things my husband, that gruff old rajal, cannot teach you about being a woman. How old are you?”
“Fourteen summers, I think,” said Pip. “I don’t remember very well.”
“And you’re such a tiny sparrow,” said Shullia. “Actually, Duri’s been calling you a sparrowhawk behind your back. I think you rather scared him. That zookeeper. Says you shouldn’t get too clean. Ha. Kick his scabby rump to the next Island, I will. My Balthion calls you the most natural warrior he’s ever seen. He sent you something. Arosia?”
Pip’s head spun as Shullia’s thoughts jumped about. A natural warrior? Balthion had been drilling her and Duri mercilessly. In his first ten seconds of instruction, he had wiped out her smugness. Her bruises had multiplied since.
“Oh–they’re wonderful, Arosia.”
“They’re only training blades,” said her friend. “Do you like them?”
She turned the twin blades over in her fingers. They were a foot and a half long, perfectly balanced, but clearly blunted for training purposes. She struck a martial pose. “Prepare to die, thou beautiful … er, scoundrel.”
Arosia laughed merrily. “I am not unarmed, Pip.”
“You aren’t? But …” Pip’s voice trailed off.
“Look for my blades. I dare you.”
The servants emptied several barrels of water into the small tub. Steam rose into the frosty morning air. They lifted a screen into place. A screen! Pip chuckled to herself. These big people were too funny. They just weren’t comfortable in their own skins.
She shook her head. “You’re unarmed.”
“Even in the jungle, not all is as it seems,” said Arosia, putting her hands up to her hair. “Didn’t somebody just teach me that? Watch the ribbons.”
Arosia had twisted her hair around two crossed wooden pins. Pretty turquoise ribbons formed several bows behind her head, and trailed halfway down her back. They came away in her hands. Her hair tumbled free. Pip realised that the pins were in fact, wooden handles for the ribbons. The way they hung, five feet long, they had to be heavier than they looked.
“Razor ribbons,” said Arosia, whirling them about her head. “A weapon my Dad invented. They’re reinforced with a flexible metal thread. The actual blades are the last third of the ribbon.” Pip reached out. “Careful. They’re as sharp as Immadian forked daggers. Well, close.”
She touched the ribbon gingerly. Arosia was right. Any more blade, and the tying process would slice off one’s hair. She said, “Pretty deadly.”
Arosia chuckled. “Good joke. I’ll teach you how to use them, if you’d like.”
“Really? I’d love that.”
“After your bath,” said Shullia, clucking her tongue like a mother hen. “My Telisia might be wrong about many things, but she was right about the contents of your hair. When last did you wash this bird’s nest?”
“Not since she came to the zoo,” said Arosia.
Pip grumbled under her breath as she climbed over the tub’s rim. But she sighed as she sank into warm water for the first time in her li
fe. Delicious. No wonder the scrolls had described baths with enthusiasm.
Pensively, Pip asked, “So, do you truly think I’m a person, Shullia?”
“Heavens above and Islands below, girl,” Shullia scowled. “You’re not some project we spend our pity on.”
Arosia smiled at her mother, and then at Pip. “Pipsqueak, my Dad finished his research … oh, last year, I think it was. Why do you think we keep coming to see you?”
“So you can watch me beat up your brother?”
But Pip knew that was not the real answer. She looked from mother to daughter, searching with her heart, indeed, with her entire being.
Shullia nodded at Arosia, who hesitated a long time before saying, “We–our family, that is–tried to buy you from the zoo, Pip. But the zoo owner said you were too big an attraction. He wouldn’t take any price.”
“Pygmies are not people, under Sylakian law,” Shullia added.
“The law is wrong, mother.”
“Ay, petal, that it is,” said Shullia. “My Balthion wants to change the law. He hopes his research into Ancient Southern languages and Pygmy culture will change hearts and minds. But I fear it’ll take a very long time, Pip. Perhaps longer than your lifetime or mine.”
Pip sank down in the water. “I’m … I don’t know what to say. I’m grateful.”
“I’m sorry we failed you, Pip,” said Arosia.
“You haven’t. You’re my friends. That’s enough for me.”
Three washes of her hair later, and a great deal of talk about the ways of women and big people and Pygmies, Pip examined herself in a polished crysglass mirror. Her curly dark ringlets, oiled and brushed out after much tugging and muttering on Arosia’s part, gleamed like the darkness of a stormy night. Her eyes were as black as her hair; so dark that one could barely discern the pupils. She touched her hollow cheekbones. Shullia had complained to the zookeeper about her diet. Pip wondered if she was looking at a stranger–it felt so queer, seeing the person Pip in the mirror, knowing the thoughts within her, but not recognising the exterior.