by Sharon Shinn
He was crouched flat-footed before her map, studying it intently, and she had no idea how much he was absorbing. She didn’t think she would understand if the situation were reversed and he was trying to explain his world to her. But then, as she had told Tirza, she thought Jossis was very intelligent—smarter than she was, smart enough to understand anything he was shown.
“Stick?” he said, holding out his hand, and she passed him her stylus. He bent lower and began scratching a few more designs into the dirt, and Miriam had to repress a smile. He had not understood her, after all. He thought she was demonstrating drawing techniques or basic topographical distinctions. When he was done making improvements, he picked up a few pebbles and embellished his finished masterpiece with carefully placed rocks. “Samaria,” he said, gesturing proudly.
Still smiling, Miriam bent over to have a look at what he’d done. But her smile faded almost immediately. For with the stick he had sketched in more mountains—the Heldoras in Jordana, the Corinnis in southern Bethel, the few ragged peaks that housed Mount Sinai and Mount Sudan and Monteverde. With his rocks, he had marked the most prominent cities of the three provinces—Luminaux, Breven, Semorrah, Castelana—as well as the exact placement of all three angel holds. Each stone, each pointed peak, was as precisely placed as the imperfect limitations of Miriam’s map would allow.
“Meerimuh?” he asked, when she did not speak. “Meerimuh?” He crouched even lower, bending around to try and peer into her averted face. “Samaria, yes? Meerimuh?”
She nodded, feeling her throat tighten to the point where words were difficult. Eleazar was right, of course. Jossis was a member of a clan that had come here to destroy them. Here was the evidence, a detailed and meticulous surveying of her entire world, more accurately drawn than she managed herself. Mountains here, rivers here, unprotected city dwellers there . . .
“Meerimuh? Sad?” he asked now, reaching out to touch her shoulder. Happy and sad. Those were two words she had taught him, for those had been easy enough emotions to convey. Terror, that would be a harder one, though not impossible, with the right look of horror and fear. Betrayal. She was not sure how to explain that one.
“Meerimuh?” he said, his voice and his hand both more insistent. He tugged her around to look at him, now putting his hand under her chin to tilt her face up. “Sad?”
She let him turn her, let herself meet his gaze, the whole while examining his face. He looked so innocent and so hopeful, his blue eyes blazing with the excitement he always showed upon mastering a new skill, but his mouth pursed, his eyebrows drawn down, in an expression of concern for her. “Sick?” he asked now.
She shook her head. “Not sad,” she said. “Not sick.” She spread her hands in the I don’t know gesture, this time meant to convey I can’t explain. It was his turn to explain something. She came slowly to her feet, crossing back to where she’d left all the twigs stuck in the ground. He rose and followed her. She passed over all the sticks except one, which she held up in front of him. “Jossis,” she said, shaking the twig a little. Then she handed him that one as well.
He looked down at the bundle in his hand, frowning, but not as if he was confused—more as if he was trying to decide how to create a concept that she would understand. He nodded, then bent to lay all the twigs on the ground and went off in search of more props. He returned a few minutes later with a whole pile of kindling in his hand and motioned her over. He had found another level place on the ground, next to the map that represented Samaria, and he smoothed away the rocks and small debris that had piled on top of the mud.
“Meerimuh—Samaria,” he said, pointing first at the woman, then to the map. “Jossis—Mozanan,” he added, pointing at himself and then the outline he was producing in the soil. Miriam nodded.
He didn’t trouble with many details this time. Clearly, he was not so interested in showing her the arrangement of lakes and oceans on his home world. As soon as he had roughed in what looked like three or four large land masses, he began poking sticks and twigs into the mud. He bunched them so closely together that soon he could thrust more sticks into the forest and they would not even need to reach the mud to stay in place. More sticks—more—an overcrowded, claustrophobic, chaotic representation of a world.
He looked at Miriam seriously and spoke a few words. She nodded, though she didn’t understand him, but she knew what he meant. There were too many people in his home, wherever his home was. There was not enough room for everybody.
“Now, Jossis,” he said, and plucked one of the twigs from the stand of sticks. He reeled off more names and drew more sticks from the mud, then bundled them together with a length of dried grass. Then, holding this package between his hands and making silly whistling noises, he made the bundle fly through the air, up and down, in the direction of the map of Samaria.
Miriam nodded again. Some of this was taking shape for her. She knew, though only vaguely, that the original settlers of Samaria had come from some other world, both overpopulated and prone to violence, and that Jovah had brought them to Samaria to start anew. How they had traveled here was unclear—the Librera claimed that Jovah had carried them in his hands—and Miriam had never really given it much thought. But that men could move through the starlit alleys from one world to another she had always accepted on faith, and it seemed like Jossis and some of his companions had done just that.
She had another thought, but it was hard to get her mind around it. Had Jossis come from the same planet as the original settlers had? Could that explain the familiarity of his shape, his expressions, the fact that he looked very much like every other man she had ever encountered? True, there were some superficial differences in hair color and skin color—but even among Samarians, there were several races, all with some differences, all with great similarities. Could Jossis have come from another race that had not been among those to emigrate to this new world—until now? Was his history a shared history with hers? Could that explain the song he had sung at the campfire the other night, a song that the angels had brought with them from their home world, and that Jossis had learned on that same planet? Was he tied to her even more closely than she had thought?
And if he had not come from that world . . . then how many worlds were there, populated by people who looked enough alike and thought enough alike that they must be related in some way? Had they all been created by the hand of the same god and scattered throughout the planets of the universe? Or had the nameless one placed them all on one homeland and allowed them to move, in slow stages as the mood took them, to fresh worlds warmed by newer stars? Miriam could not grasp all the implications of this theory; she could not get her mind to comprehend the logistics.
Jossis was looking at her, hopeful again, wanting her to acknowledge that she understood. She nodded and repeated the gestures. “Samaria,” she said, pointing to the map of her own world. “Mozanan.” There was another word he knew; maybe he would grasp it in this context. “Far?” she asked, pointing again between the two worlds.
He nodded emphatically, then frowned a little, trying to figure out how to convey distance to her. Then he ran over to the blanket to pick up one of the seed pods, and handed it to Miriam. “Samaria,” he said, and she nodded. He held up a second pod. “Mozanan.”
She nodded again, and he took off running. They were in a semi-enclosed space, so he could not get far before he ran out of level land, but then he began climbing. He clambered up a few tumbles of rock, awkwardly, using only one hand to pull himself up because he still had the seed pod grasped in his other.
“Jossis!” Miriam called, because this was dangerous; she did not want him to hurt himself.
He turned to face her, still waving the pod in his hand. “Far!” he exclaimed, and threw the pod away from him as hard as he could. Miriam watched, but she could not see where it landed. Nonetheless, the message was clear. Jossis’ home world was so far from this one that the distance was unimaginable. She could not guess how he had gotten here, bu
t she was beginning to understand why he—and his people—had come.
Two days later, Miriam and Jossis played with more sophisticated toys. Miriam had spent a couple of evenings using rags and string to create dolls with a little more personality, though Tirza had laughed when she showed them to her.
“That’s supposed to be me?” the older woman said. “I like my hair.” It was a single swatch of black fabric culled from the ragbag and tacked to the doll’s cotton head.
“Mine isn’t much better,” Miriam said. She had cut a few scraps of yellow fabric into strips and sewed each of these to a misshapen head. “But I’m not going to try to sell these in a Luminaux market, you understand. I’m just trying to get a point across. And learn something.”
“And when you’ve learned, what else will you know that you don’t know now?” Tirza said with a shrug. But she didn’t stop Miriam from proceeding with her project.
The days had been too busy to allow two working members to skip out and play games, so Miriam didn’t have a chance to show Jossis the dolls until after dinner that night. They sat a little outside the common circle, listening to the Edori sing, and letting the flickering firelight illuminate their charades.
“Miriam, Tirza, Eleazar, Bartholomew, Anna, Claudia, Adam,” Miriam said, naming the dolls she had constructed. She had also made a whole family of black-skinned dolls to represent Jossis and his people, and these lay before him while he watched her with narrowed eyes. “Tirza and Eleazar,” she said, and mimed the two dolls holding hands, kissing each other on the face, dancing together to simulate joy. “Happy,” she said.
Bartholomew and Anna were also seen to be happy together. Then Miriam created the whole clan as a cheerful unit, insufficient rag arms around one another, cotton kisses pressed to cotton cheeks. “All happy.” She picked up the doll that represented Jossis and brought him into the circle. Bartholomew’s thin arm went around Jossis’ dark neck; Tirza put her embroidered lips to his black cheek. “Happy,” she said again.
Then she induced the Jossis doll to dance across the blanket to his fellows piled up before Jossis himself. “Happy?” she asked when the character was reunited with his clan.
But Jossis shook his head vehemently. “Sad,” he said.
He took the Jossis doll and set it aside, midway between the two camps, and frowned down at the pile of bodies before him. Then, with a sudden furious action, he dove his hands into the mass of dolls and flung them into the air. He grabbed one of the bigger dolls and used it to beat on the smaller ones, then the smaller ones turned on one another in equal violence. Snatching up a stick from the ground, Jossis held this to the hand of one of the figures and manipulated it so that it lashed across the faces of the others. But this didn’t satisfy him. He looked around, his face still creased in a scowl. While Miriam sat watching in some stupefaction, he leapt to his feet, hurried over to the circle of Edori around the fire, and dipped his stick into the flames. The tip was burning when he came back to sit beside Miriam again.
“Mozanan,” he announced, and set several of the dolls on fire.
“Jossis!” Miriam exclaimed, but he sat there calmly, watching each little black hand, each crude face, go up in flames.
Then he reached for the doll that represented him and danced it back to its homeland. “Jossis,” he said, and set himself on fire.
A shadow fell over them. “What’s going on here? What’s he doing?” Eleazar’s voice demanded. “Are you trying to burn down the camp?”
Miriam stared up at him, so stunned at Jossis’ actions that she was having trouble recalling speech patterns. “He’s—he’s showing me what life is like at home among his clan,” she said stupidly.
Eleazar made a sound like a grunt. “Well, that can’t surprise you much. It’s what his clan is like here, too.”
“I think they war against each other, not just us,” she said.
“Violent men are violent all the time,” Eleazar said. “That’s what I’ve been saying about your little friend here.”
But Miriam shook her head emphatically. Jossis had not looked up, even when Eleazar came striding over. He was watching his friends, his family members, himself, burn away to cinders and ash. “Not Jossis,” she said. “He’s different.”
Three days of bitter cold kept everyone in the camp, desperate for the warmth of the fire. They took turns keeping a nighttime watch so that someone could feed logs to the fire all night long and they would not have to wake to absolute zero. Even so, the mornings were almost unendurable. Miriam was, every day, the last one to leave the tent, the one most reluctant to pull herself from the shared warmth of friendly bodies and thrust herself out into the hostile chill of the day. She would cling to Tirza’s hand when the older woman tried to rise, or grab Amram’s foot and wrestle him back to the ground beside her, murmuring, “Heat, heat, heat, heat.” She only got up when the whole tent was empty and it was scarcely any warmer inside than out.
But she was worried about Jossis.
He still was sleeping solitary in a small tent that, even close to the fire, had no interior warmth. He would freeze to death, she was sure of it. She would go in one morning and find him a curled black stone of a man. She had procured extra blankets for him, which he accepted willingly, but he refused to go to any other tent at night.
She had tried to pantomime for him the benefits of communal sleeping. She had kept her dolls, and made another one to represent Jossis, and one morning she made little tents for them out of leftover fabric. The Jossis doll, lying solitary under his canvas, shivered and could not sleep. When he crept over to Miriam’s tent, though, and slipped between Amram and Tirza, he sighed and grew warm and instantly fell asleep.
Jossis smiled when she enacted this play for him, but he shook his head. “Why?” Miriam demanded in frustration.
Jossis picked through the dolls to find a particular one she had named earlier. “Eleazar,” he said, holding it up. Eleazar then confronted Jossis, shaking in a way that connoted anger. “Eleazar not happy Jossis.”
Miriam snatched all the dolls back and renamed them. “Anna, Bartholomew, Thaddeus, Shua,” she said, and walked the Jossis creation over to that shared tent. “Jossis sleep Bartholomew. Warm.”
But Jossis just shook his head. “No,” he said.
Tirza, when appealed to, did not seem too worried about it. “He hasn’t died yet,” was what she said when Miriam expressed her chief worry. “Let him live the way he chooses to live, Miriam.”
“But his way is wrong!”
Tirza laughed at her. “And here I thought you were turning into a true Edori.”
Which made Miriam furious, but she realized the underlying criticism was true. She could happily camp year-round with a tribe of clansmen, travel the length and breadth of Samaria with them, living off the land, doing her share of the chores, celebrating the change of seasons—but she would never truly think like an Edori. She had too many opinions and was willing to express them too strongly; she had no deep well of tolerance to draw on, and not a great deal of patience, either.
“If a true Edori would let a fellow clansman die out of sheer stubbornness, then I suppose I am not one,” Miriam said sullenly.
Tirza laughed again. “But you will not let him freeze. I am very sure of that.”
Thinking that over, Miriam realized there was a way to save Jossis from himself.
Accordingly, that night after the campfire songs, she rounded up the ever-willing Amram, and they pulled their pallets and blankets from their accustomed tent. “Where are they going?” Eleazar demanded.
“Elsewhere, for a little change,” Tirza said mildly, and Eleazar did not ask further questions.
Jossis appeared to have just wrapped himself in his own blanket when Miriam pulled back the tent flap and peered in. “Jossis?” she said, just to announce herself. “Miriam and Amram sleep here. Warm.”
“Ska?” he said, sitting up on his pallet, clearly unsure, at least for a moment, what this invasi
on meant. But Miriam pushed her way inside the small space, Amram behind her, and they proceeded to arrange themselves on either side of the other man.
“Meerimuh,” Jossis said in a scolding voice. He unleashed a torrent of words that sounded both disapproving and slightly panicked, but Miriam and Amram ignored him.
“Will you be warm enough there?” Miriam asked the boy. “Would you rather sleep between us?”
“I think we’d better keep him in the middle, or he’ll sneak out before midnight,” was Amram’s response.
Miriam stifled a giggle. “If he gets up in the middle of the night, you scream and grab his ankle.”
“What if he’s just going to the water tent?”
“Then I guess he’ll be embarrassed, won’t he?”
They both laughed at that. Jossis was still talking to them earnestly, trying to explain something that clearly they were not going to understand. Miriam knelt beside him on her own pallet and gave him a serious look.
“This is the Lohora way,” she said.
And she put her palm flat against his chest and pushed him back to his pallet. At first he resisted, still talking, but a little more halfheartedly. “Sleep now,” Miriam said firmly. “Warm.”
“Jossis Mozanan,” he said, but he sounded less convinced. “Not Lohora.”
“Lohora now,” Miriam said, and pushed some more.
He lay down with a sigh, flat on his back and staring up at the top of the tent. Miriam glanced over at Amram, who nodded. As soon as Miriam lay on her own pallet and pulled her blanket up to her chin, she and Amram both scooted over, to press Jossis between their two bodies. He yelped out some word of distress in his own language, but they laughed and stayed where they were. Miriam could feel the tension in his body, through her own blanket, through his, but she did not roll away. He would lie awake all night, alarmed and unhappy, or he would sleep; and if he slept, he would sleep warm; and if he did not sleep, he would be so tired that the next night he would have no choice but to fall asleep between them. He would have to accept their ways, which were good ways. He was an Edori now.