by Sharon Shinn
For the next three nights, Amram and Miriam joined Jossis in his small tent. After the first session, which seemed to pass for Jossis in a sort of ecstatic terror, the Mozanan man seemed to relax and actually enjoy the company. This might have been because, one night, Miriam and Amram began tickling and teasing each other, in the process climbing over Jossis and kneeing him in the ribs or—accidentally, of course—tickling him, too. This might have been because Amram hid a rabbit skull in the bottom of Miriam’s blanket or because Miriam crushed highly perfumed dried seeds over Amram’s pallet. In any case, there was much merriment inside that small tent for those three days, and Jossis could not help but join in the laughter.
On the fourth night, Amram elected to sleep in Bartholomew’s tent. Miriam elected to sleep beside Jossis as usual.
They had both stayed at the campfire circle as long as the circle held, lifting their voices on the group songs and listening quietly when someone rose to perform a solo. Over the past couple of weeks, Jossis had learned the harmonies to a few of the more common melodies, and had acquired the ability to produce the words at least phonetically, so he always sang along on the pieces he knew. Miriam liked to sit beside him and listen to his voice tentatively skip to the note he was not sure of, then strengthen when he realized he had it right. Conversely, she also liked to sit across the fire from him so she could watch his face shift between concentration and delight. He had not offered to sing a solo again. She thought perhaps he was shy about his voice, which was sweet but not particularly well-trained. She thought that perhaps that would be the next thing she would teach him: formal music.
There was so much to teach him. She was impatient for him to learn the words that he would need to acquire all the other knowledge he must have.
The singing hummed to a close and the circle began to drift apart. Miriam watched Amram go off to Bartholomew’s tent, first pausing to speak a few words to Thaddeus, who would mind the fire for the early evening shift. She waited till most of the tents were full for the night, and there were not many observant eyes turned her way, before going to the only tent with a single occupant.
Jossis was already lying on his pallet by the time she crept in, and he instinctively moved over to make room for her. She was settled in next to him, her back against his stomach, before he seemed to realize that something about the night was different.
“Amram?” he asked.
“Bartholomew’s tent,” she replied.
There was a moment’s silence, then Jossis spoke again, more urgently. “Amram? Now?”
“Not now,” Miriam said.
“Meerimuh!”
She hunched her shoulders in the dark, letting him feel the motion of the shrug. He knew that gesture well enough. “It doesn’t matter,” she added for good measure. “Warm.”
But this made him tense, and she could feel his coiled body refusing to relax against her. She mentally reviewed all the reasons he would find it unacceptable to be alone at night with a woman. First, of course, there seemed to be some privacy issues among the people of the Mozanan clan, and perhaps her mere closeness was a taboo that he did not know how to explain. Second, the aura of intimacy was impossible to mistake, and he might have all sorts of objections to sexual context: He might be a virgin, he might be celibate, he might be promised to some girl back on Mozanan and true to his vows.
Or he might simply be too young to be comfortable with the thought of sleeping next to a woman. She didn’t think that was it, though. She hadn’t had a chance to try to explain the concept of “years” and “age” to him, but she did not think, even in his own culture, he could be as young as Amram. For one thing, he had been conscripted to serve with his fellow clansmen on this perilous journey. Surely he must be a man by his people’s standards, though a young one. For another thing . . . well, she had seen him stretched out and naked, and he looked like an adult to her.
Of course, there could be another reason she made him uneasy: He might find her unattractive, and the idea of how he might be expected to relate to her might repulse him.
That was a dreary thought to sleep with on a cold winter night, she thought, closing her eyes. She decided that she would ignore all his fears, while simultaneously ignoring all the possibilities of the moment, and merely provide for him what she had set out to provide: warmth against the killing cold. She did not wriggle closer, but she did not move away, as she finally drifted off to sleep.
In the morning, Jossis seemed troubled and watchful; there was no move Miriam made that he missed. She guessed that he, too, was wishing they had progressed a little further in their ability to communicate so that he could ask her pressing questions or explain implacable restrictions. She could not imagine that her dolls would be much help here, though the thought of what she might demonstrate with them made her grin involuntarily.
“Did you find out what you wanted to know last night?” Tirza asked her as they worked over the cook pots.
“Not unless what I wanted to know was that Jossis is afraid of me,” Miriam replied glumly.
Tirza went off into a peal of laughter. Miriam added, “Or finds me too hideous to contemplate.”
“That, at least, is not the case,” Tirza answered, regaining her composure. “He watches you every minute of the day.”
“Because, after last night, he is afraid of what I might do next.”
“No, he has always watched you. Since he first opened his feverish eyes while he lay helpless on a sickbed. This is not a man who finds you disagreeable.”
Miriam made a gesture. “Anyway, I am not sleeping in his tent in the hopes that he finds me attractive. I am sleeping in his tent to keep him warm.”
“A great kindness,” Tirza said solemnly, but Miriam thought she was still laughing. “Surely that is not something that might be rejected.”
The day passed in the usual labor of staying alive. More men were dispatched to gather firewood than to hunt, since they were low on fuel but fairly well-stocked with game. Anna and Claudia pulled down their tent to repair a rip, then put it back up again. Miriam spent the day cooking with Tirza. Jossis went off with Amram and the other young members of the tribe to forage for additional wood.
That night, after the meal and camp songs, Amram joined Miriam and Jossis in the little tent. Miriam had snagged one of the short, smelly candles that Tirza sometimes made from tallow and string, and brought it lit into the tent with them. The practice was widely frowned upon, due to the risk of fire. Amram’s eyes grew wide at the infraction, but Miriam smiled and put a finger to her lips, enjoining silence.
“I’m not sleepy,” she said.
Amram pulled a sack of smooth stones from his pocket and proceeded to lay them out in the sequence of a gambling game that the Edori boys were fond of. Jossis gave a low exclamation of delight, for he had mastered these rather complex rules after a couple of sessions around the circle. Miriam smiled and took up her third of the stones. She was not very good at the game, but she understood it well enough to keep her place for half an hour. Jossis and Amram were still playing when she lay on her pallet and went to sleep.
The next day was a copy of the previous one, down to the session of gambling in the tent; and so was the following day, except that Amram slept in Eleazar’s tent that night.
Jossis did not seem so alarmed this time when he found himself alone with Miriam and a fresh tallow candle. He had watched her closely these past few days, though the look of trouble on his face had been replaced by a more speculative expression. She had made no attempt to be alone with him, or spend any more time with him than she did with anyone else. And so when she turned up in his tent, unaccompanied, she was able to be both friendly and neutral, as she would have been to Adam or Bartholomew or any of the women.
“Candle,” she named it for him again before setting it in a small earthenware dish.
“Cannel,” he repeated.
She glanced around for diversions, and found that Amram had left his gambling sack b
ehind. “Stones?” she asked, picking up and shaking the bag so its contents rattled.
Jossis took the sack from her but laid it aside. “Talk,” he said.
Miriam made her expression as encouraging as she could. “Ska?”
He was sitting cross-legged on his pallet, his spine straight, his face furrowed; he seemed to be thinking very hard. Miriam, by contrast, was quite relaxed, half reclined, leaning on one arm and stretching her legs out comfortably.
He held up his hands in loose fists as if to represent two separate entities. “Man, woman,” he said. She nodded. He brought them together slowly, so the knuckles touched. A kiss, perhaps; an embrace. “Good?”
She nodded emphatically. “Yes, very good. Good good.”
He flung his hands apart as far as they could go, the fingers still curled in balls of meaning. “Man, woman—bad?”
Was he asking if the separation of the sexes was always a bad thing, or if it was bad only if the separation occurred after a man and woman had come together? If a union was always taboo—or if it was merely wrenching when it failed? She did not know how to convey concepts so complex.
She had her little pile of sticks with her. She almost always carried them now, whenever she thought she might see Jossis. Sitting up so she could arrange them before her, she made a little grouping on her blanket. “Tirza and Eleazar—Anna and Bartholomew—Claudia and Adam,” she said, and he nodded. She picked up the sticks that posed as Tirza and Eleazar. “Tirza and Eleazar—happy.” They danced through the air to express their joy. “One day—Tirza and Eleazar apart.” She made the two sticks walk away from each other in slow dejected hops.
“Bad?” Jossis asked intently.
Miriam shrugged. “Sad,” she corrected. She laid the sticks down so she could be more expressive with her hands, putting her fingers to her cheeks to wipe away pretend tears, sniffling and sobbing like a brokenhearted woman.
“Sad bad,” Jossis pointed out.
Miriam couldn’t help smiling. She picked up the Tirza stick and let it sojourn back to its circle of friends, where new twigs had been added to the Lohora camp. “Tirza—new man,” she said. She picked up Eleazar and did the same. “Eleazar—new woman. Happy again.” And all the sticks danced together across her blanket.
He sat there a long time, watching the candlelight make patterns on her hands as she skipped the sticks up and down the coverlet. He appeared to be absorbing her little drama, both what she had said, and what it meant to him. A man can love a woman. The love can go away. They will both grieve, but they will mend. They are free to love again. And its corollary: I can love a woman of Samaria, and I can go away when I must. She will grieve for a short time, but she will love again . . .
She wondered how such matters were handled in his own clan. Even among the other races of Samaria, relations between the sexes were not quite so simple. Love might result in marriage, which was not quite so easily dissolved when one or the other of the parties wished to “go away.” And failed love could result in violence. She had heard that tale often enough, though she had never witnessed it among the angels. At the holds, love was a fairly carefree thing. The angels mated where they would—were encouraged to be promiscuous, in fact, in the hopes that their unions would produce more angel children—and even the angels who married were rarely entirely faithful.
Gaaron will be faithful, came the thought unbidden to her mind. She pushed it away. This was certainly not a time when she wanted to be thinking about her brother.
Jossis himself seemed lost in thought, so perhaps her little demonstration had not entirely reassured him. Miriam picked up two more sticks.
“Jossis,” she named the first one, and made it travel through the air to land beside the second one. “Woman? In Mozanan? Jossis and woman?”
He started at that, his eyes intent on hers as if amazed that she could read his mind. She wished she could. All she could tell was that he was thinking something over very carefully. “Yes,” he said at last. “Taralin.”
Miriam was surprised at what a blow this was. She felt literally sick to her stomach. But she tried to keep her expression open and smiling. She set the two sticks to dancing side by side. “Jossis and Taralin happy?”
He shook his head violently. “No. No, no, no.” He snatched the sticks from Miriam’s hands and then sat there, staring at them, as if unable to figure out how to show her just what made Taralin so terrible. At last he just laid them on the ground. “Not happy,” he said.
Then don’t go back to her, Miriam wanted to say, but even that collection of one-syllable words was too complicated to utter. She didn’t even know how to ask him what his exact relationship with Taralin was. Were they merely promised to each other, or were they already married? Did he hate her because she was stupid or because she was cruel? Why had he accepted her if he did not like her, or was the marriage arranged and entirely out of his hands? That he felt some duty to her was clear. Nothing else was.
She spread her hands and smiled at him, a gesture intended to be both helpless and reassuring. I can do nothing about this, but it’s all right, she meant to say. I still like you more than I can say.
“Sleep now,” she said, reaching for the candle. “Talk tomorrow.”
But he took the candle from her hand before she could blow it out and set it back on the ground. “Merrimuh,” he said, and reached out both of his hands to frame her face.
His touch was so gentle that it was not even pressure, it was a mere hovering sensation of skin next to skin. She could feel the coolness of his fingertips, though his palms were still warm from the hour before the fire. She could smell the scent of strong soap on his skin. They had both bathed in the river that morning, passing each other as she left the hot spring and he arrived. Soap and woodsmoke and leather and snow; he smelled of all of these things, and something richer that she could not identify. Himself.
She lifted her own hands to trace the bones of his face, the high cheekbones, the curved jawline, the elegant dome of his skull. Her fingers lost themselves in the crisp radiance of his hair, and he smiled as she made fists inside his curls and tugged. “Where could you possibly get hair this color?” she asked in a whisper.
He replied in an equally incomprehensible sentence, and then laughed at whatever it was he had said. “Don’t make fun of me,” she said sternly. “I’m the only true friend you have here.”
“Friend,” he repeated, catching the word, and shook his head. “Not friend.” He cocked his head to one side. “Ska?”
She could not help laughing. This was not a word she had thought to introduce into his vocabulary. “Ska?” she repeated innocently.
“Tirza and Eleazar. Claudia and Adam. Not friend. Ska?”
“Lover,” she said.
“Lover,” he repeated, and bent in to kiss her on the mouth.
For a moment she thought the candle had gone out; she was lost in darkness and sensation. Her hands went automatically to his shoulders, as his had gone to her back. He was pulling her closer with an unthinking insistence, cradling her against him with a motion that was both protective and demanding. The heat of his mouth was extraordinary, or perhaps it was the heat of her own body, for she felt herself flush from toes to eyebrows.
Whatever else they considered taboo on Mozanan, they certainly knew how to kiss.
She pulled away long enough to resettle herself more comfortably on his lap, then pressed her whole body against him when she kissed him again. He cooperated enthusiastically but not quite single-mindedly, for his hands were already going to the buttons and ties that held together her shirt. She giggled and drew back to help him, pulling off first the outer layer of her clothing, and then the soft cotton shirt beneath.
Half nude, she presented herself to him by the flickering light of a single candle. His expression was both awestruck and eager, and he loosed a torrent of words that only made her laugh and shake her head. He reached for her, but she pulled back.
“Now you,”
she said.
He lost no time divesting himself of everything, jacket, shirt, trousers, socks, so while he was disrobing, she pulled off the rest of her own clothes. Still on their knees, they paused to admire each other a moment. Sweet Jovah singing, he had filled out in these past few weeks. He was muscled and lean as any outdoorsman, with a fine keyboard of ribs showing through the glistening black skin of his chest. His flesh was so dark that she could not resist the temptation to spread her hand across the region of his heart merely to enjoy the stark contrast of colors. They were like snow and shadow, noon and midnight.
“Beautiful,” he said, another word she had not known he knew, and then he kissed her again.
She strained against him and they toppled over, laughing as they landed in a muddled heap on his pallet. “I’m cold!” she squealed and dove beneath the blanket, Jossis right beside her.
“Jossis warm,” he offered.
She pressed herself against him, her whole body against the length of his, and kissed him hard. “Very warm,” she agreed. “My lover.”
He responded very tenderly in words she could not decode, but she replied anyway. “I wonder what you know that is different from what I know,” she whispered. “I want to learn it. Show me now.”
And he showed her. And she learned, to her great satisfaction, that what they knew was very much the same.
In the morning they were silly, as all new lovers were silly. The whole camp watched them with indulgent smiles as they emerged from the tent and tried not to look self-conscious. Tirza came over right away with a pair of buckets, thus sending them to the river together where they could share a few more kisses and incidentally get clean. Anna made a great show of bringing them an extra set of blankets, saying, “I’m sure you must have been cold last night, only two bodies in the tent. That can’t be enough for proper warmth,” and everyone listening laughed. Bartholomew only winked at Miriam and slapped Jossis on the back, but did not make any knowing comments. Eleazar scowled at Jossis, but then he smiled at Miriam, and she was sure he was not entirely displeased.