And it seemed most of my wants extended back to childhood dreams and fantasies. My mother had painstakingly tutored me in what I should want from life: a powerful husband, strong sons and beautiful daughters, to dance well enough to make my family proud and please said powerful husband, to become empress and thus be free of my mother’s power over me.
That last I’d arguably truly wished for, from the bottom of my heart. Never mind that she herself had taught me the consequences of being in her power. And look at me. Not empress, but so far from her and all of Dasnaria that it surely counted as free. None of them could touch me.
I squandered water freely to rinse my face and the dye from my hair, hoping at least the tree would feed from it. Yes, I was free, and now I wanted something—my own idea of something, not what my family selected for me, not something born of a furious hatred I suspected had the power to destroy me. I wanted something for myself, and the path to having it had been offered to me.
I had to take it.
But where would I live? I supposed I could continue to sleep outside as I had been, though it would be far more comfortable to have a bed again. When those rains came, however, I’d need a dry place. One up on those stilts. And I would have to eat, which meant I needed to provide some service.
I doubted anyone in that peaceful valley needed protection, even if I found it in myself to do better than slash away in some sort of red trance of fury I couldn’t control. But I would find a way. Step by step.
I would let Danu guide my feet.
~ 14 ~
Up close, the D’tiembo house proved to be even larger. At the far end of Nyambura, it presided over a straight stretch of river, elevated on a hill.
“Granite,” Ochieng explained, pointing to the shelf of rock. “Even when the river rages, it cannot eat away at our foundation.” His smiled broadened and he ducked a nod at me. “Not for thousands of years, anyway.”
Beneath the house, a tributary of the river wended in and fed a large lagoon. It might remind me of the ones at home, but this one lacked the lovely tiles, and muddy water filled all of one side. On the other, the water stood clearer, though still nothing like at home, instead thick with small trees and tall green grasses. The muddy section extended into a wide ring around the lagoon, growing drier until it ended in cracked, baked dirt.
“The elephants bathe there,” Ochieng said. He’d become quite adept at reading my interest and offering explanations. When I gave him a look of disbelief—why would anyone bathe in mud?—he laughed. “You will see.”
To my utmost disappointment, none of the elephants we’d spied from the heights seemed to be nearby. But they’d been in a meadow on the other side of the house. I would see them later. For the time being, I listened to Ochieng’s narrative about the D’tiembo family history, how his ancestor had founded Nyambura and built the first part of the house.
“You’ll see once we’re inside,” he assured me. “Have you played with those dolls, the kind where there’s one inside the other?”
I shook my head, with no idea what he meant. We walked alongside the carts to a large structure at the bottom of the hill, the house above us now. It rambled with many levels, numerous stairs in stages up to it and in some cases even appearing to spiral.
“No? I’ll have to show you. Anyway, the first house was but one room: barely a platform he wove from dried grasses to make a level space on the stone and four poles to hold up the grass roof. The poles are usually the most difficult to come by, of course, as Chiyajua has so few in general. But upriver a ways there’s a forest lining the river. My ancestor carved the first pillars himself, and those poles are still Nyambura’s chief export. Our wagons were full of them on the way to Bandari. Anyway, family lore holds that though he meticulously carved the roof uprights, he had no curtains until he married. He fell for a lovely woman who agreed to move to the middle of nowhere, but she refused him until he could provide privacy for the marriage bed. Begging your pardon,” he added, frowning at himself, a momentary dimming of his boisterous delight at returning home.
I shrugged, keeping my face impassive. The glancing reference hadn’t bothered me. In truth, I never seemed to be able to predict which remarks might crack open the old wounds. The emotional scar tissue ruptured without warning, making me ill—or throwing me into a trance–before I felt the pain, as happened at the Temple of Danu with Kaja. Ochieng and I had never discussed the reasons for my vow of chastity. Naturally we had no verbal exchanges about anything at all, but I mean that he carefully skirted the topic entirely, apologizing when he brushed up against the edges of anything to do with sex. I had no idea what he thought my reasons were for the vow. For that matter, I didn’t know what any other person’s reasons might be. But Ochieng regarded the topic as off-limits and I never indicated otherwise.
Much easier and simpler that way.
“Well, as such things go,” he continued, waving away the unmentionable particulars, “they soon had a baby. That worked fine for sharing their bed, for a time, but babies grow into children and when new babies come along—begging your pardon—they need to sleep quiet. So they built on another room, then another, and another. The rock is rounded.” He sketched the outline of the hill above them. “Which meant they needed stairs to go down a level, and more stairs for lower levels. Then someone in the next generations had a brilliant idea—if you can go down, why not up? So they built rooms on top of the existing ones, and more out the sides. They’ll be unloading the wagons in a moment—quite the operation, you’ll see, so best get your things out now or they might be stowed on the third level.”
The drivers’ song stopped as we reached the big shelter at the foot of the hill. It consisted of a very long series of the woven platforms suspended on stilts, with several more similar layers above that, all under a long grass roof. People hailed Ochieng, descending on the carts and setting to unloading the goods, quickly forming a chain and passing things along. Hart joined in to help. A rope hoist with a smaller platform lifted some of the containers to the higher levels.
“The river doesn’t get this high every year,” Ochieng gestured at the lowest level, “but if it does, we can move goods to the upper levels. See those marks?” Rings had been cut into one of the thickest posts, one that must have been a truly great tree for Chiyajua, though nothing compared to the ones in the forest around the Imperial Palace in Dasnaria. Characters were inscribed next to the rings.
“Those are the high water marks for every year going back to my first ancestor,” Ochieng showed me with great pride. “He also built this storage platform early on—some say before the first room of the house—in order to keep the hay for the elephants dry in the rainy season.”
He pointed at the highest level, where what I’d taken for an unusually dense grass roof turned out to be mounds of dried grasses. Hay. The Common Tongue word wasn’t so different from the Dasnarian one for the stuff, a word I’d first learned crouching in a stable when Harlan helped me escape. I’d waited for him in the prickly hay, my heart racing as I feared discovery and the certain torture and likely execution that would follow. That hay had smelled sweet and golden, like the burnished grasses we’d traveled through. I sniffed the air, but it was laden with too many new scents.
Still, I thought that this hay might not be the same. How interesting.
“We have to keep it up high,” Ochieng was saying as I tucked those memories away again, “or the elephants will raid it. They’re clever, but have no foresight and don’t understand we need to save it for the rains. In fact, some say that my ancestor created a second level platform, a great oddity back then, entirely to foil the elephants. Ready to see the house?”
I nodded, feeling that I should, like Hart, have jumped into the unloading line, but the moment had passed and they seemed to have a rhythm going that I’d only disrupt. Still, I turned away reluctantly, having hoped one of the elephants would wander by.
“Or would you like to meet the elephants?” Ochieng asked, gaze on my face, then laughed. “You may not speak with your tongue, Ivariel, but your expression speaks what the poets flog themselves to write. Come with me.” He eyed the declining sun. “They should be coming down to the river about now.”
I followed along, my steps brisk, having to restrain myself from outpacing Ochieng. Was my face so expressive? Ochieng had a tendency to wax eloquent, embellishing his tales with over-the-top metaphors like that. I understood why his mother would have chided him for it. It wasn’t at all circumspect of him. Perhaps men shared that trait, however. I recalled the night of my debut and how the men told bold stories of their battle and hunting exploits, which had seemed unlikely to me at the time, even in my sheltered ignorance, and now I knew to be downright impossible in some details.
We followed a path below the house to the riverbank, then along it beneath the bluff of granite that rose stark against a sky turning rose-gold with the setting sun. From there, nothing of the house itself showed, but steps snaked along the rocks to the small gravel beach along the curve of the river.
“We have to rebuild those every year, once the rains stop,” Ochieng noted, “as the river inevitably washes the lower parts away. And every year I argue with my mother that we should take down at least those to the first landing there and store them, so we don’t lose so much precious wood, but she won’t hear of it.”
I raised my brows in surprise, both at the implication that his mother lived here—which, where else would she live?—and that she’d object to such a practical suggestion.
“Oh, she thinks that it’s bad luck,” Ochieng explained. “First of all, it’s arrogant for mere humans to try to outguess the river, as it will rise to whatever level it wishes to and if we assume it will only go to the first landing, then it will go to the second, to teach us humility.” He shook his head, laughing. “My mother is big on teaching humility, you’ll see. And second, that the wood the river takes is a tribute. The river grows the forest, so it’s only fair that it takes some of its own back again.”
The path led around the little beach, then reached a platform like the others, but set directly on the ground. Ochieng stepped onto it, looking inland. A larger path came from around the other side, and on it I spied round footprints bigger than my head. “It can get muddy here, but also the elephants expect to see us in this spot, so we won’t frighten them by being in an unexpected place.”
Frighten an elephant? They were the biggest creatures I’d ever seen, save the whales I’d seen in the ocean. What could something so large and powerful possibly fear?
Ochieng nodded, looking from the elephant path to my face and back again. “Elephants are not predators, but prey. They are herbivores and must evade the smaller, but fiercely weaponed meat-eaters like tigers and lions. Think of them as very large mice.”
I laughed at that, but for once Ochieng didn’t laugh with me. He regarded me almost somberly. “In their minds,” he insisted, “they are not large and powerful, but mice only. They don’t know their strength unless pushed. But I’ve seen a group of elephants trample a lion to death to protect their young.”
Cocking my head a little, I tried to read what Ochieng might be saying under the words. In the seraglio, I’d been a master of hearing the unspoken, meticulously tutored by my mother in the art. With Ochieng, however, I seemed to have lost the knack. Perhaps because he always seemed to openly voice everything on his mind without reservation. He was not a man who kept secrets, even from himself. So I hadn’t thought to pay attention to what he didn’t say—except those things he withheld out of care for my unseen wounds, whatever he guessed them to be.
This, then, must be part of that. My lips parted and I nearly asked him a question. I wasn’t yet ready to frame it, so the words didn’t leap to my tongue. In that, too, I’d grown rusty. Or perhaps Danu’s hand stayed me, keeping me to my vow.
Ochieng’s gaze remained on my lips a moment longer, then rose to my eyes, surprising me with the storm of unspoken feeling in his. Then it receded as swiftly as it had arisen, his eyes going clear and sparkling. In this light, I could see that they were a very dark brown and not black at all, like banked coals where the fire showed only if you stirred them. His face transformed with it, smile wide, only sheer joy in it.
He nodded behind me. “Here they come.”
~ 15 ~
The elephants swung down the path, emerging from the stippled shadows, moving with the grace of their undersea counterparts and just as silently. Something that large should not be so quiet, and Ochieng’s words came back with increased resonance. In their minds they are mice. A smile widened my cheeks, the skin and muscles protesting their disuse. They moved as quietly as mice evading the cat.
But with relaxed happiness, too. Their shoulders rose higher than their hips, making them bob almost comically as they strode along. Huge ears flapped and their heads swung with their trunks as they ambled along the path to the water, reminding me vividly of the elderly ladies of the seraglio making their way to their favored couches along the lagoon. Then the lead elephant—the largest of all—lifted her trunk in the air, making it curve like a cobra snake I’d seen in Ehas, and let loose a blast of sound such as I’d never heard.
I startled at it. My heart raced to full pounding. The elephant broke into a gallop, almost like a horse, remarkably light on its feet for its bulk, and headed straight for us.
I hid behind Ochieng.
That’s right. I did not draw my sword or my knives. Gone was the fierce warrior of the oasis. I darted behind the nearest man and quivered there, revealed as the fraud I was.
Ochieng didn’t laugh at me, though, simply reached behind him and patted my hip. “Steady. Remember: big mouse. And she’s a special friend who is happy to see me.”
The elephant skidded up to us. Then, to my utter horror, she knocked off his hat and wrapped that enormous trunk around his head. She’d crush it. Or pop it from his shoulders like plucking a grape from the stem. I fumbled for my sword, my palms so cold-slicked with sweat that I couldn’t get a grip.
Ochieng’s laughter penetrated my terror. I took a few steps back. Then a couple more. Ochieng had his arms up, embracing the trunk as if he returned a hug from family. More elephants trotted up, shouldering against each other, their trunks waving and weaving in to snuffle at his body. He returned the touches with caresses of his hands, like the handshake greeting of the Twelve Kingdoms.
Gradually he extracted himself from the crowd, looping his arm around the trunk of the big female to keep her from winding it around his head again, speaking to her in his language as he did. Craning his neck, he spotted me where I hovered at the far edge of the platform, still no blade in my hand.
“Are you all right, Ivariel? I would have warned you, but I didn’t expect such a greeting. I’ve been away longer than usual and Violet here is reminding me of that.”
I hesitated, not at all sure about coming closer.
“Wave a hand or something so I know you can hear me.” Ochieng turned more fully in the circle of Violet’s trunk, the tip of it questing up to snuffle against his ear, like a toddler smearing his mother with kisses.
Lifting a hand, I discovered it was shaking. All of me trembled, like the Valeria tossed by the big waves in a storm, my bones creaking and flesh shuddering with the impact.
Elephants. Violet stood twice as tall as Ochieng, her trunk as thick as his whipcord body. The others were nearly as big, shouldering in around the platform, making whuffling noises with their questing trunks and small squeals of delight and impatience as they all tried to get near him. I’d wanted to see elephants without knowing what it was I wanted. These animals so much larger and more vivid than I’d ever imagined. Huge and clumsy, yet graceful. Ancient looking hides and youthful vivacity. Comical in their movement, yet somehow wise, their eyes bright as they studied me, the
ir round feet sending up puffs of dust to turn the air even rosier.
“Want to come meet them?” Ochieng asked, more gently than I’d ever heard him. No—with the exact same gentleness as at the oasis when I’d killed the ruffian and Ochieng had coaxed me to wash. I wondered if he saw something of the same thing in my face now as he did then. “Or we can wait,” he added. “Go up to the house and try again in the morning.”
That would be the coward’s way. And I still wanted this. Feeling like I was the mouse, as Kaja had dubbed me and I surely was, far more than these magnificent creatures, I wiped my palms on my leather pants and took a step forward.
Ochieng spoke to Violet and she released him, as if she understood what he said. The others quieted in their questing trunks, all watching me with what I realized was keen curiosity, not malevolence. He met me partway and held out a hand. Not a demand, but an offer of support. Since I needed it, I placed my hand in his, surprised by the softness of his skin, the steadiness of the clasp. He enfolded my hand in his, then drew me forward. As soon as I followed, he eased the pressure, so we only walked side by side.
We approached Violet, who stood with her head turned to watch me with one bright eye. Oddly, the sharp intelligence in it framed by calm power reminded me of Kaja. Perhaps because Kaja had been on my mind just then, for surely an elephant wouldn’t be like a person in any way.
“Violet,” Ochieng said, just as he’d introduced me to other people in Common Tongue, “may I present Ivariel, Priestess and Warrior of Danu. She serves a goddess of wisdom and justice, which you will appreciate, no doubt. Ivariel, may I present Violet, leader of the D’tiembo tribe.”
As soon as he finished, for all the world as if she understood him, Violet lifted her trunk, holding it up like a question. Ochieng drew my unresisting hand forward, turned it over and tenderly opened my fingers so my palm lay flat. Cupping my hand in his, he extended it out. Violet turned the end of her trunk to whiffle over my palm, while I stood rigid in delighted terror.
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