by Jo Clayton
“I changed my mind.” She stared out the window at the darkening sky. “Besides, my absence is a lot more welcome than my presence.” She unhooked cramped fingers from her knees and leaned back until her shoulders were pressed against the wall. “He was being polite, that’s all.”
“Polite!” The word exploded out of him, then he pressed his lips together, turned away from her and began uncovering the dishes, loosing warm spicy smells into the room. The light through the unglazed window was darkening to red, turning her skin black where it touched her. More calmly, he said, “He appreciates the healing and what it costs you. Show the grace, meie, to let him pay his debts.”
“Cost me—hah! He hasn’t the faintest notion. You either.”
“It’s difficult to sympathize when you spend your time sulking in corners.” He stood. “Come over here and eat something.”
“I’m not hungry.” She drew her fingertips nervously across the front of her robe, glanced at him, looked quickly away.
“But you will eat. As a matter of grace and necessity.” His voice was soft now, hardly more than a whisper.
“Necessity?”
“Right. Eat or I shove food down your little throat.”
She slid around, stared at him. After a long tense moment, she laughed. “Hello, Dom. I recognize you now.” She got slowly to her feet, smoothed the robe down over her hips and came across the tiles to the table. She settled herself on a pillow, bent over a bowl with meat chunks in a thick gravy. Rather surprised, she said, “I think I am hungry after all.”
“Tst,” he said. He kicked a pillow against the wall, lowered himself onto it and sat, watching her eat.
For several minutes the only sound in the room was the ting and scrape of tableware against fine porcelain.
“They have no vocabulary of swords here.”
Serroi looked up startled, a skewered piece of meat halfway to her mouth. “What brought that up?”
He laced his fingers behind his head. “A little non-threatening conversation.”
“Oh.” She popped the chunk of meat into her mouth, patted her lips with a square of linen from the table. She chewed quickly, wanting to laugh at the teasing look on his face, a little irritated, knowing that he’d recognized her struggle and had wanted to help, hadn’t known how to help, had raged against his helplessness, though now she realized even if he didn’t that he’d given her what she needed, simply by being there to touch and care what happened to her. She smiled tentatively at him. “They live too close together. Swords would be more a danger to them than to their enemies.”
“Their arrowpoints and spearpoints are porcelain, or something like that.”
“The Nasri-fenekel ceramics are much prized. We have some of their work at the Biserica.” She rubbed at her nose. “They glazed the walls of Skup.”
“Mmm. They’re expecting the majilarn raids at the end of the passage. They’re unpacking and oiling their bowstaves. Seem to take better care of them than they do their children.”
“Wood’s scarce here.” The food in her belly was warm and comforting, a weight to weigh her down; it tied her to the earth, brought her back to the smells, the textures, the colors and tastes, that she had a tendency to float free of when she wasn’t healing. “Thanks, Dom.”
“Hah. Hekatoro’s got a cousin.”
“I’d say he has a lot of cousins.” She sipped at the hot herbal infusion. It was rather bitter, but it had a cleansing effect on her mouth and a very faint aftertaste that was pleasant and rather minty.
“This cousin has a boat.”
“Oh.”
“Uh-huh. And he knows a way through the Kashinta marshes.”
“Smuggler?”
“It was not mentioned.”
“Mmmm.” She glanced at the window. The sky outside had gone dark, all the color faded. “We could use a little luck.”
“True.”
“Shinka’s a bitch to get through without money.”
“Which we don’t have.”
“Too true.” She broke a roll apart and sat holding the pieces in her hands. “A chance to avoid Shinka isn’t something to pass up unless.…”
“Unless the price is too high?”
“Right. What is it?”
“I’m not quite sure.” He frowned at the white-over-gold glow of the porcelain lamp. One corner of his mouth twisted up; he pulled his hands from behind his head, spread them quickly wide then dropped them into his lap. “Your services, I think.” He shrugged. “Past and future.” His eyes flicked over her and away; he was frowning, worried about her she knew, wondering perhaps if the mention of the healing would upset her since the healing seemed to be so disturbing to her for reasons he couldn’t know.
She bit into the tough white bread, smiling as she chewed, letting the silence stretch out between them. He stared at her openly now, gravely at first then amused by her as he saw that she’d shifted out of that difficult neither-nor state of the past ten days. It was odd even to her that she’d come so suddenly from it, perhaps simply because she was tired of suffering. She laughed, put the bread down. “I’m tired of suffering.”
“That’s good.” He leaned against the wall, his eyelids drooping over lazy grey eyes. “The Cousin is in Tuku-kul now, hell be there another few days. Hekatoro says he can get us places on the boat.” He yawned, patted the yawn. “Down the river, through the Marsh, across the Sinadeen to Low Yallor and the freeport market.”
“As easy as that.”
“It could happen.”
“You think it’s likely?”
He smiled suddenly; slitted grey eyes twinkled and invited her to share his amusement. “What’s likely about any of this? Why not an easy glide along the river, a moonlight flit across the sea?”
She started tearing the bread apart and dropping the bits into congealed gravy. “Hern?”
“Mmm?”
“Do you want to go back to living in the Plaz?”
“What? No.” He got to his feet and went to stand at the window, staring out at the patch of stars visible from that small square. She felt his withdrawal. He’d exposed more than he’d wanted to—to her and to himself. He reached out and closed his hand around the molded cane inset. “No,” he repeated, his voice muffled. “Maiden’s tits, I spent a lifetime there bored out of my mind. Doesn’t matter what I want, I’m going back. Mijloc’s mine. They’re mine, my mijlockers, taroms, ties, traders, all of them. I won’t let that bitch Floarin have them.” He laughed suddenly, mocking himself, but she heard the truth in the words that he wouldn’t admit to himself. “Not while I have blood in me,” he said and thought he was joking.
“Then we leave tomorrow?”
“Like we came, a little cleaner and not so ragged. Atoro’s taking us along with a packload of trade goods. He likes the thought of doing us a favor. Doing you a favor. I’m not quite sure what he thinks you are but he’s sure a little propitiation couldn’t hurt.”
She stroked the nape of her neck, considering this. “You know him, I don’t.”
“Not his fault.”
“I know. I know. You’ve spent the last nine days telling me.” She threw her arms out, stretched them up over her head, pulled them down again, straining the muscles of shoulders and back. “I don’t like losing control.”
“What?” He turned, settled himself on the bench, shoving a pillow behind his back, stretching sturdy legs out before him. “Never happen.”
“Hah! Much you know. You think I want to sit all day under that damn tree? Hunh. Wave a wound at me or a disease and bang! I’m locked to it. No choice. Listen, things get rough, you better plan on dropping me. Stick a spear in some idiot and first thing you know, there I’ll be on my knees beside him, healing him.”
“Come here.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Since when do you give me orders?”
“I wouldn’t dare. Come here.”
She pushed away from the table and
stood, a tingling warmth spreading up through her. She touched the ties at her neck, her fingers trembling, wanting him with a sudden urgency that rather startled her. She walked slowly to him, stretched out both hands and saw as he took them his composure was as false as hers. She pulled her hands free, touched his face with soft stroking circles, his clean-shaven face. She smiled, traced the chiseled curves of his wide mouth then drew her hands down his chest, feeling the hard flat muscle beneath the thin cloth of his fenekeln shirt; she slid her hands inside his shirt. He laughed, scooped her up and carried her across the room to their blankets and sleeping mat.
The night was shut down good and tight by the time they got close enough to smell the river and the effluvia of the many kilns. Clouds hung heavy over the town, and off-and-on wind swept cold and noisy along the road. She shivered, not from the cold but the boiling, seething clouds of foreboding that poured out of the city and settled around her. Something waits, she thought. She looked back at the lumbering vachai loaded high with trade goods, looked past him to the east at the plateau it was too dark to see. I wonder, could they be waiting for us?
Hern and Hekatoro walked ahead of her, talking now and then, unaware of the chill that shot through her. She rode the rambut again, the heavy material of her linen robe bunched up above her knees. She’d have preferred to walk but Hekatoro insisted and too much protest would have been a breach of courtesy so she yielded and consoled herself with the thought that Atoro could ride the beast back, the placid dehorned vachai pacing behind him, its load consigned to the Cousin. Sitting beneath the lacetree tending the endless stream of complaints, she’d seen from the corner of her eye a staccato series of still images—huddles of women, of men, excited children shouting lists, rapid calculations on long brown fingers. She hadn’t understood then but it was clear now what was happening, had come clear when Hern told her about the Cousin and stirred her from her brooding, her morose rebellion against a fate that had swallowed her in spite of all her furious fighting.
Healwoman? No. Shawar? Who could say. Not me. Heal-women use herb-lore, not what works in me. She wiggled her shoulders, uncomfortable even out here away from the sick and the hurt and the needing; she felt a thousand phantom tugs from the town ahead as if she walked past a corral where flying spiders had pasted their silk, long strands drifting on the wind, brushing against her, trying to cling to her, neither painful nor individually irritating. It was the number of them, the number of the touches, the unremitting small tugs that tormented.
The gates of the town were open. It wasn’t Raider’s passage yet and the Heks of the Plain were coming in every day with their packs to meet the river captains in discreet back rooms of the many waterside taverns, nothing so blatant as to provoke fury in the Shinki ductors. No one disputed that they knew what was happening, it would be impolite to assume otherwise. And it would be both impolite and impolitick to conduct such illegal transactions within view, forcing the ductors to act against their own comfort, something equally discreet presents attempted to assure against.
A guard leaned in a lower window of one of the gate towers idly watching the stones sit, smoking a short clay pipe stuffed with duhanee, dreamy eyes now and then on the flat spurts of pale smoke he blew out into the chill air. When the three entered the baffle below him, he took the pipe from his mouth and called down, “Who goes?”
“Hekatoro, cousin, come a-visiting.”
The guard chuckled, a slow drawn-out sound. “Ah,” he said. “How could I be forgetting that Olambaro’s galley be nuzzling a wharf this ten-day. Eh-Atoro, have a care to your feet, a new ductor’s laying dung about. Got an itch he’s looked to scratch on some blockhead’s corners.”
“Not me, o-eh cousin, not me.” Hekatoro laughed and strolled on. The guard sucked on his pipe again and went back to contemplating the stones.
The old fenekel led them around the baffle wall and into a dark and empty street. They wound their way through other silent streets, past lamplit, noisy courts, the life inside shut away from the street by high mud-brick walls. Tuku-kul was a city of inner courts where no outsiders would be welcome or find anything but idleness and boredom. Serroi’s sense of foreboding increased until she was sick with it. And sick with the healing compulsion. And glad now she rode the rambut, there was no way she could walk.
Light rose against the sky, a dim torchlight glow shining between the dark bulks of the walled houses. At every turn it seemed just a street or two ahead of them.
Foreboding blacker and blacker. Alert—a stabbing into her gut. Serroi gasps, dives off the rambut, shoves Hekatoro off his feet, slams into Hern, sending him staggering, hits the ground, rolls onto her feet in front of them, her hands outstretched as three Sleykynin come rushing round the corner, roaring a challenge, the leader with a sword, the other two holding whips loosely coiled, She is not-thinking, not-acting, seized by a sudden irresistible force that surges in great waves up through her shaking slight body. Green light pulses about her hands, pulses from her splayed-out fingers.
The light hammers at the assassins who freeze in mid-stride, their mouths gaping below the velater half-masks. They begin to change. Slowly, horribly, they change. Their bodies writhe, their skin hardens, turns papery, their heads elongate, bifurcate, the two portions spread apart and grow, up and up, divide again, grow up and up. Eyes, mouth, all features are absorbed, gone. Their arms strain upward, stretching, thinning, their fingers split into their palms and stretch outward from the wrists whiplike branches spreading in a delicate fan. The velater hide is absorbed into their altered flesh but there is a short rain of metal objects, buckles and rivets, knives, swords, whips, a pouch of coins.
The green light dies. Her arms fall.
Hern came hesitantly around to stand in front of her. “Serroi?”
She dropped to her knees and began vomiting. He knelt beside her, held her. When she was finished, he wiped her face, lifted her onto her feet and held her until her shaking stopped, warning Hekatoro to silence with a glare and a shake of his head.
When she was calm again, he cupped his hand under her chin and lifted her head. “Serroi?”
“Yah, Dom.” She moved her shoulder, worked her mouth. “Looks like I’m not such a dead loss after all.”
He looked past her at the three twisted trees. “No,” he said. “Looks like.” He took his arms away, frowned thoughtfully at her. “You together again?” When she nodded, he went over to the trees and began poking about among the odds and ends of metal and accoutrements dropped about the new-made trunks.
Hekatoro sidled closer, his eyes rounded, irises ringed with white, mouth dropped open. He flattened himself on the ground by her feet. “Beiji-behandum,” he said, his voice rumbling against the dirt.
“Oh get up,” she said irritably, shoving at her hair, rubbing at her forearms. “Maiden bless, you don’t think I meant to do that, do you? Stand up, Atoro-besri. Please,”
Hern came back with sword, knife and whip—and a small heavy pouch that clinked. He shook it, “Repaying what they took from us,” He pulled the pouch open and inspected the contents. “Well, well, repayed with interest.”
“Enough to buy passage?”
He glanced at her, suddenly still, his outline bold and black against torchlight still a street or two away. “Possibly,” he said.
Hekatoro was silent, looking from one to the other, sensing things unsaid behind the words. He read his own meaning into the exchange. “Favor for favor,” he said, breaking the silence. He nodded, grinning, back on his trader’s ground, much more comfortable there than on his face before mystery. He snapped his fingers. “Buy passage, no. I pay. You ride, no fuss. I get rid of obligation sitting on my head. Hah.” His eyebrows wriggled wildly, then dragged down and together. He trotted off to round up the rambut and the vachai.
“Would it matter that much, being hired to heal?” He rubbed the back of his hand against her cheek. “If that thing in you makes you heal anyway?”
She leaned into
his caress then moved away. “I suppose not. But I’d rather be compelled from inside than out, if you see what I mean.” She swung round to stare at the gnarled and twisted trees. “That scares me, Hern.” She ran trembling fingers through her hair. “What am I turning into?”
Hekatoro pushed open the door and stepped into the tavern, Hern and Serroi close behind him. The taproom was noisy, hot and dim, lit by thick crockery lamps with holes pierced in the sides to let light from the burning oil through, though not enough light to cut the thick shadow and smoke. The stench of hot oil was strong enough to overwhelm the other stinks in the room, the sweet stale mead, the clouds of rank duhanee, bitter ale, raw spirit, sweat, farts, body odor, particularly pungent because of the mix of races within the room. In a back corner of the room, surrounded by silence and space, two black clad men with the honey-gold faces of Shinka sat scowling at the others, at pale northards, amber shinkin a little nervous under the eyes of their countrymen, fenekeln dark as new-turned earth, scrawny unhappy majilarn brooding over kifals.
There was a shout. Another fenekel who might have been Hekatoro’s twin was pushing through the crowd and in a minute was pounding him on the back and shouting extravagant compliments. A slight figure slipped out past them, a skinny whey-faced, bulge-eyed northard. “Mus’ll take you beasts around back and see the packs brought up.” The words were a gentle murmur flanked by Olambaro’s more boisterous questions and answers. He led them across the room, a shoving circuitous path around busy tables through the noisy throng moving between the bar and the tables. After a word with the man behind the bar the four of them—Olambaro and Hekatoro trading stories in a dialect so thick and with allusions so personal they were incomprehensible, Hern and Serroi silent behind them—the four of them went through an inconspicuous door at the bar’s end and up a narrow flight of stairs to a small tight room on the second floor.