Warrior of the World

by Jeffe Kennedy

  Usually his sunny attitudes and philosophies amused me. This time, however, with the anger already riding me, the dark frustration at being asked to explain and then him brushing it off… I stood. “I’m going back.”

  “All right.” He stood also.

  “Alone,” I clarified.

  He put a hand on my arm, stopping me, not flinching when I glared at him with all the imperious poise in me. “You can give me your daughter-of-an-emperor stare-down all you like,” he said without rancor, “but I’ve been dealing with powerful females my entire life. If I can handle Violet, I can handle you.”

  I contemplated the several layers of meaning there. The elephants never frightened Ochieng, even though they could easily crush him in their might and occasional furies—or panics. He waited me out, calm as ever.

  “Mull that over,” he finally said. “In the meantime, I’m not letting you climb all those stairs alone, because you’re weaving on your feet right now. You don’t have to marry me. You don’t even have to let me help you, but I won’t let you endanger yourself.”

  Something in me broke, and the anger drained away, leaving only the weariness behind. Surprising myself, I leaned against him, finding there the same warmth and strength as in the elephants. I’d surprised him, too, but after a moment his arms came around me, and he held me with infinite tenderness I didn’t deserve.

  “I’m so tired,” I admitted, pressing my face into his wet shirt.

  “Then rest,” he murmured, cupping my head and smoothing his fingers through my hair. “The rainy season is for resting, not for going out in the mud.”

  “I feel like I’ll never be dry again.”

  He laughed a little. “So say we all. But the rains always end, and in the hot and dry of summer you’ll dream fondly of the cooling rains and think that maybe you’ll never see a cloud again.”

  “Is that another philosophical lesson?”

  “Not a lesson—an observation. With time, things change. But you can’t force them to your schedule.”

  “I didn’t think I was doing that.”

  “I think…” He hesitated. “You’re tired. We can talk about it later.”

  “No.” I pulled back, looking into his face, but didn’t pull away. “You might as well give me all your truth at once.” And despite my brave intentions, I wasn’t quite ready to face the climb.

  He smiled, brushing my hair off my forehead, where a few strands had hung into my eyes. “Your hair is growing longer, and more white now than black.”

  “I should cut the black off. It probably looks odd,” I replied, pulling a strand around so I could see it. Which wasn’t much, as my hair was longer than it had been, but not that long. After Rodolf, I’d decided to stop dying it. Well, some of that had been because I’d been asleep or weak as a kitten for so long. By the time I could get up and do the job, it had seemed pointless.

  “I like it, the half and half.” Ochieng’s gaze wandered over my face and hair. “Though it will be interesting to see you with all of your own hair.”

  “The real me,” I pointed out, feeling more than a little grim about it, “emerging no matter what I do.”

  “The way of the world,” he agreed.

  “Tell me what you were going to say. You think what?”

  He sighed a little, mouth curving in a rueful smile that he hadn’t distracted me. “I don’t know what it’s like to grow up as you did, expecting to rule all around you, but I imagine it gives you certain habits of thinking.”

  No more princess! I heard Kaja telling me. How I missed her. “You’re saying I expect everything to fall into place as I order it?”

  Ochieng regarded me gravely. “I wouldn’t have put it that way, but… perhaps so.”

  I nodded, aware of the weakness in my legs. “I’ll think on all of this.”

  “Tomorrow is soon enough. Or the day after that. Or the day after that. Will you let me carry you back up?”

  It sounded so good. Such a relief as I wasn’t sure I could make it on my own. My pride would be wounded far worse by falling or failing than by having him carry me. “Do you think you can?” I asked.

  His face cracked into a wide smile, the sun banishing the rains. “Oh yes. I carried you before. And you weigh less now than then. A bird weighs more.”

  “I’m trying to eat,” I grumbled. He sounded just like his mother, badgering me about putting on some weight. And it hadn’t occurred to me that someone would have had to carry me back to the D’tiembo house, up all the stairs, and into bed. I didn’t know how I felt that it had been him.

  “I know,” he soothed, and for a moment I thought he meant about him carrying me before. “Ready? Is there anywhere I need to be careful not to touch you?”

  “Well, if I turn into a wild thing and try to kill you, not that spot.”

  He laughed, throwing his head back. “Ah, good. A joke is a very good sign. You don’t frighten me, Ivariel. I’m not so easy to kill as that. Put your arms around my neck.”

  I did, more aware this time of the shock of bodily contact. He crouched a little, sliding one arm under my knees and the other behind my back, lifting me easily. It made me remember another time, so I shared that thought aloud, rather than keeping it to myself. Another sort of practicing, starting out with easy steps.

  “Harlan carried me like this once,” I told him.

  “Your brother, yes?”

  “Yes, my baby brother. On my wedding journey, I rode in the carriage and smoked opos, to kill the pain in my body and the fear in my heart.” I waited while Ochieng sprinted across the open area, ducking my head against him and the worst of the downpour. “One day he rode with me—which wasn’t easy for him, because he had to pretend to be cold, so the men all teased him for being weak—and he made me stop taking the opos smoke, which numbs pain and all the unpleasantness of the world. He told me that he was going to help me escape, and when we arrived where we were to spend the night, I pretended to be weak and fainting, so he had to carry me. That way he could see the interior of the seraglio, so he’d know how to break me out.”

  “A clever plan,” Ochieng replied, swishing his feet in the tub of water kept there to prevent everyone from tracking in the worst of the mud. Then he began climbing the steps with enviable vigor and speed. “Brave of you to dissemble so.”

  “Well, it didn’t take much on my part. I’d lost a lot of blood and hadn’t been eating well then either.”

  “How long ago was this—can you count it?” Ochieng was aware that I’d only recently learned to count. I’d gotten better at it, but I still had to plod my way mentally through the numbers that came so easily to others.

  “Let me think. Ten days after my wedding, which was on my birthday.” I stacked up the tens in my mind. “I don’t know exactly because I haven’t counted every day. But I’ve had my menses four times since then.”

  He was quiet a time. “Not even half a full-turn of the seasons then. A short time to expect yourself to have recovered from so much.”

  “I am an Imperial Princess,” I informed him loftily. “We have high expectations as a rule.”

  He laughed, and pressed a fleeting kiss to my temple. “Then I shall have to do my best to live up to that.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” I protested, stricken.

  “A joke only,” he assured me. “So far as I’ve been able to ascertain, your high expectations seem to focus entirely on yourself. You could do with expecting more of the people who claim to be your family.”

  Ouch—that stung a surprising amount. Though of all the family I’d been born into, only Harlan had tried to help me. And he’d given up everything to do that. Before I killed him, Rodolf had told me that Harlan had taken refuge in the Skablykrr, a sort of philosophical training that allowed him to make binding vows no one could attempt to break. Funny how we’d both resorted t
o oaths of silence to escape the family fist.

  “What happened—is she hurt?” Zalaika interposed herself in our path the moment Ochieng set foot on the house level. She scrutinized me, holding out her hands as if she might pluck me from Ochieng’s arms.

  “I’m fine,” I told her, in their language. Zalaika sometimes forgot how much I’d absorbed—and still hadn’t quite gotten in the habit of expecting me to reply. All the D’tiembos did that, habitually turning to Ochieng to translate for me as he’d always been unerringly good at reading into my unvoiced communications. Part of what made him so good at working with the elephants, who thought a great deal, but said nothing. “Just weary today.”

  “She’s fine, Mother,” Ochieng chimed in, sounding both cheerful and exasperated. “Can’t a man cuddle his woman without an interrogation?” He stepped neatly around his mother and carried me to a chair under an overhang. Rain fell off the grass sheaves in a torrent in that spot, carried away in a trough carved into the rock. “Put your feet under the fall,” he told me.

  I extended my feet under the water, bemused enough by his kneeling to carefully wash my feet not to protest him calling me his woman. Apparently he’d decided to stake his claim. The wording wasn’t as legally definitive as it would be in Dasnarian, but was certainly possessive enough to have Zalaika looking terribly pleased. Better than the alternative, of resenting her eldest son’s interest in a damaged foreign woman. From comments she and Ochieng’s siblings had dropped, they had expected him to settle on a spouse for quite some time. The clan didn’t lack for next generations—in fact, I’d discovered that Ayela and Femi were the grandchildren of Ochieng’s older sister, Palesa. But they all seemed concerned that Ochieng hadn’t found anyone to marry—Zalaika particularly so.

  Perhaps all mothers work to marry off their children.

  Zalaika beamed at me and handed me a towel to dry my hair. “You will learn to stay out of the rain,” she admonished me. “The elephants have thick skin, not thin and pale like yours. I’ll make you a bone broth with plenty of duck fat. That will bring color to your cheeks.” She hastened off, singing one of her cooking songs.

  I groaned and Ochieng raised a brow at me, taking the towel to dry my now clean feet. “I’m going to turn into bone broth and duck fat,” I explained.

  He laughed, standing and offering me a hand. “My mother’s cure for all things. Welcome to being a D’tiembo.”

  “Ochieng…” I hesitated, and he watched me expectantly, not helping. “I haven’t agreed to anything,” I said. In fact, I thought I’d explicitly not agreed.

  “I know. And that’s all right. I’m a patient man.”

  “Your patience may yield you nothing.”

  “I’m aware of that also.” He laced his fingers with mine and drew me deeper into the house. “Let’s sit by the fire and dry off.”

  “I’m not sure I believe there’s such a thing as being dry,” I grumbled.

  “Oh, there is. Remember: all things change in time.”

  I would have to harbor tender feelings for an incurable optimist. Perhaps I’d simply been attracted to the furthest kind of person from Rodolf I could find.

  Perhaps, too, when I’d rested, I’d try some dance steps.

  ~ 4 ~

  The next morning, instead of visiting the elephants, instead of slipping out of the house and into the rain—which, of course, still fell, as unrelenting as ever—I went to the first room, which Ochieng had said they’d cleared for me to dance in.

  I’d had every intention of at least trying some the day before, but with a belly full of bone broth with duck fat, and a bowl full of the rich duck meat as well, I’d fallen asleep in the comfortable chair by the fire. I and the three D’tiembo elders napped the afternoon away in our pillowed chairs, only awakening long enough to be fed dinner before we shuffled stiffly off to our beds.

  Perhaps because they’d pried me out of it long enough, my room had been refreshed, with clean—dry!—bedding in place and even my sodden interior curtains swapped out for dry ones. Not that they stayed that way for long, but that and the warm brazier that greeted me made for a good, long sleep. I didn’t know how much one person could sleep. If Ochieng counted my numbers correctly, it had been half a year since I turned eighteen. I must have spent most of it asleep.

  In the morning, however, as if some sort of timer had flipped over, its sands falling the other direction, I truly did feel better. Enough to say so with some enthusiasm when people asked. I ate my breakfast in the interior kitchen—grain with bone broth and duck fat—listening to the conversations, as I hadn’t done since before I got hurt.

  “The river is up another knot,” Ochieng’s brother Desta informed everyone, walking to the fire to dry. As most of them did, he’d shed his wet clothes in one of the outer rooms, then wrapped himself in a loose robe to come deeper inside. The way the house was constructed, with square rooms formed by four wooden poles, built on top of, beside and below its neighbor, the more interior the space, the drier it remained, due to the buffering of the others. Some of the D’tiembos simply left wet clothes hanging up in one or two of the exterior rooms to wear out into the rain. I hated putting on damp clothes, but that was apparently just me.

  “The next flight of steps?” Ochieng asked.

  Desta swept his hand across. “Gone entirely. That’s four flights this season.”

  “The river will take what’s hers,” Zalaika sang out, as if vastly amused. “That will teach you to predict short rains. I hope you’ve learned some humility.”

  Desta gave her the same fondly exasperated look Ochieng often had in dealing with their mother. “Yes, well, if the rains don’t end soon and we reach two more marks, we’ll have to move the stores from the first level.”

  “If the rains don’t end soon,” Ochieng’s sister Palesa replied, “we’ll have to pull out of the top level rooms. We’re starting to get leaks. The grass sheaves are saturated.”

  Desta threw up his hands. “That amount of work should inspire enough exhausted humility to satisfy even you, Mother.”

  “Ah, and the river? We shall see what satisfies her.”

  “What about the elephants?” I asked, startling everyone, heads swiveling to look at me. They still forgot I possessed a voice.

  “We won’t forget them, Ivariel.” Ochieng smiled at me from across the way. “They will always be first priority with the D’tiembos.”

  “Fortunately,” Desta added, “the elephants can move themselves and require no heavy lifting.”

  I blushed a little at the teasing. “I didn’t mean to imply you would forget them.”

  “Your concern does you credit, Priestess.” Zalaika came to take my bowl away, patting my shoulder in approval that I’d eaten it all. “You may not be born of D’tiembo, but you have the heart of one, always thinking first of our elephant kin.”

  Desta made a snorting sound, but Ochieng’s two sisters sitting nearby, weaving cloth, sent up a chiming song of happy agreement, one that I’d decided translated roughly as “we love our elephant kin,” if a Dasnarian were ever to say something so bizarre. Ochieng still smiled at me, but it deepened somehow, in a warmly intimate way, and I had to avert my gaze.

  “We should begin moving stores to the higher levels now,” Desta returned to his point. “No sense waiting.”

  “If we pack things too tightly, we’ll get mold,” Palesa replied. “And rot.”

  “Rain means mold and rot,” Desta retorted. “There’s no avoiding it entirely.”

  “There’s avoiding it mostly,” the other sister Thanda put in, never looking up from the thread she spun. “And that means not packing things in more tightly than we absolutely have to.”

  They fell into an intense debate on the topic and I made sure not to insert my opinion. Instead, I left them to the arguing—which they seemed to enjoy as much as storytelling—and went to
the first room.

  The first room, as implied by the name, was the first built by Ochieng’s ancestor when he first settled in Nyambura. Removing his beloved elephants from danger, and changing his name to D’tiembo, he’d come to this great rock outcropping at the curve of the river and established a safe home for all of them. He built the first room, which was the entirety of the home he shared with his wife and first child for many years.

  As the family grew, so did the house, one room adding onto the next. Because it sat at the center and bottom, the first room felt cave-like in its darkness, the floor the simple granite foundation, polished smooth over the generations of feet. The rooms on three sides were used for storage, and the fourth served as a connector to a much bigger room, where we’d eaten breakfast and the family tended to gather during the rains.

  Nobody much liked to use first room, because it was smaller and darker than the others, but they also felt disrespectful using it for storage. So they kept it clean and tidy, with a few treasured family mementos displayed, and pillows for reclining on. These last Ochieng had moved—or more likely, had the children move—to the back corners, leaving a clear space in the middle. It made for a smaller space than I’d danced in back in the seraglio, but substantially larger than my cabin on the first ship I’d sailed on, the Valeria, when I’d danced in the dark by myself, to keep from losing my mind entirely.

  I liked first room for its coziness and sense of history. Pausing a moment, I admired one of the four wooden posts that served as the foundation for so much. Bigger around than three of Ochieng, they must have come from truly great trees—which could only be found in the forest a few hours’ journey by elephant from the town of Nyambura that had grown up around the house. D’tiembo used his elephants to harvest the trees and float them down the river, to be caught in the weir he’d built across it for the purpose.

  A clever man, D’tiembo. I always pictured him in my mind as Ochieng, which I knew wasn’t accurate, but the image stuck that way, perhaps because it was Ochieng who had told me the stories. His voice carried from the other room, jovially talking over Desta, saying something about patience.