by Victor Poole
She thought of what the young Slavithe man, Chad, had said, about Jerome pulling animals and vegetation down from the clouds, and she wondered if there were anything different in the clouds here than anywhere else in Leopath. The sky seemed closer here. She wanted to see some great creature curving through the clouds, or to see the white masses broiling apart, and revealing a magical land in the sky.
Ajalia wanted to escape, and there was no escape. She wanted to escape from the way that she lived, from the place that was her experience within her own skin. She wished that she could go home. A niggling doubt rose up in her mind at this thought. Did she mean the East, she asked herself, or did she mean the place she had come from? The East, she answered herself quickly. She did not want to go home.
Home meant the narrow, cluttered house, with the dirt in the corners, and the crooked, uneven floors. Home meant her little brother, and the endless, relentless, continuous series of days that did not change. Home meant trying to make her mother and father happy, trying to make them peaceful, trying to make them satisfied, and failing, and failing, and failing.
Ajalia closed her eyes, and tried to press the memory of the dark, shadowy closet in her childhood house out of her mind. She could not. The closet was dark, and it smelled of musty clothes, and everyone had known she was hiding there, but it was the only place with three walls and a door, where she could close herself in and pretend to be hiding.
Ajalia wanted more than anything in the world to hide right now. She wanted to disappear, to cease to exist. She had thought for a long time that dying would solve her problems, but then she had lived longer, and she had stopped believing that death would change anything of how she felt. Then she had begun to think that her parents could die.
Ajalia sighed. She turned around, and put her arms against the trunk of the tree. She did not want to hide her money any more. She thought about throwing it out into the trees. She would watch it fall heavily through the branches and the leaves, and hear it make a muffled thump against the ground. Her arms were tired. Her heart felt old, and sleepy. She felt like an old sponge that had grown ragged, or a broom that had lost most of its sweeping parts, and was scraping ineffectually against the ground.
Ajalia heard a crackle of leaves and broken twigs, and looked down.
A young man was picking his way through the underbrush. He was looking at the ground. He came to the bottom of the red tree that Ajalia had climbed first, and looked up through its branches.
"I'm up here," Ajalia called.
The young man peered up at the tops of the trees. She saw that he couldn't see her. He was not looking at the right tree.
"What do you want?" Ajalia asked.
"Nothing," the young man said. He was still looking up at the leaves and branches. Ajalia didn't move. She was irritated. The young man was wearing the usual Slavithe garb, but his hair was sandy blond, and he had a slightly vacant expression in his eyes. She did not say anything else, and after a long time, the young man sat down against the yellow tree, and seemed to go to sleep. Ajalia couldn't see his face any longer.
She did not want to climb down while he was there, and she did not want to hide her money while he was there. She did not know she had been followed, and she was annoyed that she had not checked beforehand, though why anyone would follow her was beyond her. If the young man was a thief, he was a very stupid one.
When the young man seemed ready to stay at the bottom of the tree for all eternity, Ajalia began to climb down. He looked up at her as she descended.
"Oh, there you are," he said. "I couldn't see you in the tree. I don't think I ever would have found you."
"Why are you following me?" Ajalia demanded.
"I'm not following you," the young man said. His forehead crinkled into a puzzled crease. "I saw footsteps and broken leaves, and I followed them."
"That's the same as following me," Ajalia pointed out.
"But I wasn't following you," the young man said. He looked angry. "I was following footsteps."
"Well, they were my footsteps, so go away," she said. She did not know why he was so irritating to her. She did not think she would normally have been so flustered.
"I don't have to go away," he pointed out. "This is my forest."
"It is not your forest," she snapped.
"More mine than yours," he said.
"Well, you're dumb," she said.
"You're ugly and stupid," he said.
They stared at each other. The bugs buzzed and the branches rustled. A slight breeze moved through the leaves, and the smell of rotting fruit passed through.
"Are you hungry?" he asked.
"No," she said. She wanted to add that she didn't eat with dumb people, but she held her tongue with an effort.
"Bye," he said. He turned away. The neck of his clothes was pulled over a little to one side, and his skin was showing. She wanted to make fun of him for this, but could think of nothing suitable to say.
"Fine," she said, when he was almost out of earshot. He ignored her, and she seethed. She began to walk another way, and after two steps she stopped, and examined the ground. She took an inner resolve to not be followable again, and began to step more carefully through the undergrowth. A shiver of irritation wriggled over her skin, and she shook herself. Ajalia felt as though the young man had tainted her somehow, or made her less than she usually was. She felt embarrassed. She was still angry. She wanted to turn around and follow the young man, and yell at him for being an annoying person. She felt sure that he had made her call him names.
THE HOLE IN THE WALL
Ajalia had forgotten about hiding her money, but when she came to a dense patch of forest and sighted a jumbled heap of big white rocks, she stopped. The rocks were thrusting up out of the ground, and there was a wonderful fat crack between the two largest boulders. It looked like a place where a vicious creature might live, and where any sane person would hesitate to thrust their fingers. It was just large enough for the leather pouch to fit.
Ajalia put the pouch down, and looked all around her. She could not see the young man.
"I know you're there," she called.
"No you don't," he shouted back.
She smiled, and then she frowned.
"I told you to go away," she yelled.
"No you didn't," he said. "And I can still follow your footsteps."
"You have very bad manners," she said. She still couldn't see him.
"What are you trying to hide?" he asked.
"I'm not hiding anything," she said automatically.
"What's in your bag?" he asked.
"Come out where I can see you," she said.
The young man wandered out of the trees. He had a leaf and part of a crushed beetle in his hair. Ajalia stared at the beetle, and tried to imagine crushing a bug, and leaving it against the side of her head. She could not imagine this.
"You have something in your hair," she said. Her nose wrinkled up.
"What's in your bag?" the young man asked. She could not determine how old he was. He had the stature of an adult, but the expression of a child.
"You have a bug in your hair," she said. He didn't move to take it out, so she went and took it out for him. The guts of the bug left a trail of squished fluid against her fingers, and she wiped them on a leaf. "That's disgusting," she said.
The young man took the leather pouch out of her hands, and looked inside. "It's just money," he said.
"Money is nice," Ajalia said. She took back to pouch.
The young man crouched down beside the heap of rocks, and put his hand into the crack. "There's nothing there," he said.
Ajalia didn't say anything. Her fingers tightened on the leather.
"That's the first place I would look," he said.
"What's your name?" Ajalia asked.
"Delmar," the young man said.
"Are you from Slavithe?" she asked. The young man looked at her.
"Where else would I be from?" he asked. His eyes we
re a pale blue.
"I'm going," Ajalia told him.
"Okay," he said. He stood there, in readiness, as though he were waiting for her to go somewhere so that he could follow her again.
"How did you find me?" she asked.
"I told you," he said. He shrugged.
"Did you follow me out of the city?" Ajalia demanded. The young man didn't answer. "Why did you follow me?" she asked.
"I'll show you a better hiding place," he said.
"I don't need a hiding place," Ajalia said. The young man moved off to the left, and Ajalia followed him. Ajalia didn't know what to say. She didn't know why she was following him. She didn't know why she was not acting like she usually did. She did not feel as though she were in control of herself. She did not know what was happening. She felt like a child; she felt blind, and dumb, and at the mercy of the elements. She began, very suddenly, to feel overwhelmingly tired. She wanted to lie down in the clustering ferns on the ground and go to sleep.
Delmar's back was bobbing and passing gradually through the foliage before her. He was leading her towards the city. Ajalia felt a crest of frustration. I am not going to be able to bury my money today, she told herself, and gnashed her teeth gently. I hate it when this kind of thing happens, she also thought. She did not know what "this kind of thing" was. She could not think of a time when something like this had happened before.
"Where are you taking me?" Ajalia asked.
"It's just over here," Delmar said. She could not put a finger on what he was like. He was disheveled, and blank somehow, like a child. He was not a child, and she did not get the impression that he was mentally deficient. He seemed to be merely absent. His face was well put together, and if his eyes had been active, or his cheeks thrust out with energy, he might have been handsome. But his mouth was slack, and his eyes were vague. His hair fell sloppily over his eyebrows, and his shoulders sloped lazily over his hips.
Ajalia began to study the young man more closely. He reminded her of something, of some kind of animal. She could not put her finger on the vague discomfort that he caused her. She felt as though she had always known him, but she could not think of a time that she had felt this way before.
"Have you always lived here?" Ajalia asked him. He was a little ahead of her, and he turned his head to the side.
"What?" he said. "I can't hear you."
Ajalia thought that she had spoken perfectly clearly. Another surge of irritation welled up inside of her, and she realized that she was angry. She wanted to tell the young man that she was angry with him, but she felt that revealing how she felt would somehow put her at a disadvantage. She stopped following the young man, and threaded her way towards the road. She was not quite lost yet. The trees were thick, and the foliage was dense, but she was still sure that the road lay to one side, and she picked her way through the trees, watching where she stepped.
She was no longer thinking of the young man named Delmar; she was thinking of getting back to work. She had half decided to go and see the black horse that she had bought, and brush him to pieces, when a crashing of leaves and sticks made her turn around. Delmar was running up behind her.
"What?" Ajalia asked.
"I told you to follow me," he said. He had a look in his eyes that was somehow accusatory, as though he was a baby dog and she had abandoned him somewhere. Ajalia was about to snap at him when she saw that he did not know what he was doing. He did not realize the incongruence of the situation. She felt that if she told him to get away, she would hurt him somehow.
"How far is it?" she asked.
"It's just over here," Delmar said. He shrugged towards the city wall that lay beyond the trees. The wall was not visible through the tree trunks, but Ajalia could see the rim of the wall's top arching up over the tops of the leafy trees.
"Tell me about it," Ajalia said. She felt vaguely suspicious. Delmar shifted his weight slightly. His mouth pushed out into a gentle frown.
"I wanted to show you," he complained.
"You aren't thinking of a place," Ajalia accused. "You're just trying to get me to follow you." The young man's eyes lit up at the same time that his mouth curved into a tiny, almost unnoticeable smile.
"No," he said.
"Yes, you were," Ajalia said. She could see from his face that she was right. "Why did you do that?" she asked.
"I didn't do anything," he said. He was smiling.
"I'm leaving," Ajalia said. She thought later that she ought to have been angry, or at any rate displeased, but she felt only vaguely wearied, as though a misty rain was splashing into her eyes.
"Where are you from?" Delmar asked. He was bouncing on his heels, traipsing along beside Ajalia as she worked her way towards the road. "You're going the wrong way," he added. Ajalia kept going the way she was headed. "I'm from the East," she said.
"That's really far away," he said. "You are probably going home soon."
"No," she said. "I'm staying here."
"You won't like it here," he added.
"I like it here," she said. Ajalia was growing annoyed.
"Your accent is terrible," he said knowingly. "I have a much better accent than you do."
Ajalia stopped walking, and stared at Delmar. "Go away," she said clearly. Delmar grinned.
"No," he said. He looked like a boy who has thrown a ball against a wall, and is waiting for the ball to bounce back for him to catch.
"Is there something wrong with you?" Ajalia asked him. A hunted look came into his eyes. He looked almost on the verge of tears.
"Come and see the thing," he said.
"What thing?" she asked.
"I have a good hiding place," he said. His voice had changed. He was no longer trying to trick her. He sounded sad, and alone, and like a person who is looking for a friend. "I can share it with you."
Ajalia did not know why she trusted him, but she did. He couldn't lie to her. It was as though he was revealed to her in all his nakedness, and she was seeing through him and over him and around him. Ajalia did not have a name for what was happening; this kind of interaction, so brief, so potent, so all-encompassingly filled with something that she did not know, had never come her way before. The one thing that she was sure of was that it was not love.
"Okay," she said, and Delmar began to lead her in the opposite direction.
"There's a really great hole in the wall," he said chattily. "Some of the stones have crumbled, and no one knows about the place except for me. I keep my books there, when I'm not using them."
"What books?" Ajalia asked. She had not seen many books in the city of Slavithe. She liked books, but the East was not big on books. The East was bigger on scrolls and decorative paintings of phrases over the walls. Ajalia liked scrolls, but they were irritating to read, and they were expensive. She had been in a city on the west coast before, and had met an old man that had a library in his house. She had not been able to read any of his books, but she had wanted to.
"They're just some books I have," Delmar said. "What books do you have?"
"I have no books," Ajalia said grudgingly.
"Oh," Delmar said knowingly, and she heard him decide in his mind that she was poor.
"I am not poor," Ajalia said defensively. "I travel a lot."
"But you're a slave, too," Delmar said. "And that means you can't own anything. Did you steal that?" he added, gesturing at the leather pouch.
"No," Ajalia said. "What are the books about?"
"I haven't shown anyone else where my hiding spot is," Delmar said.
"Well, maybe you're the only one who has things to hide," Ajalia said. She resented Delmar now. She could not keep her thoughts focused on what was happening. She could not remember what he had said, or what she had said before that. She felt as though she were being dragged behind a cart with a rope. She couldn't remember what had just happened.
"No one else understands about hiding stuff in rocks," Delmar said. "You like hiding stuff in rocks."
"You don't know
that," Ajalia said, but he was right. They had come up against the city wall, and Ajalia could see again the impossible height of the white stone wall. It stretched up to what looked like the rim of the sky, and then it seemed to stretch up a few feet beyond that.
Delmar began to unpack a series of small stones from around a larger block of white rock. The spot he was working over was about five feet up from the ground. Delmar made a careless stack of the smaller rocks on the ground at his feet. Ajalia watched him. She still didn't like him, but in the shadow of the wall, she could see how he had the potential to be nice to look at. He was not, she iterated to herself, good to look at, but he could have been, if he had had a firmer chin, or a stronger jaw. There was something weak and childish about his neck, and his mouth.
She had an urge again to ask him why he was this way, but sensed again that he would not know what she meant, and that she would only hurt him somehow. This feeling of inability to talk about what she saw frustrated her, but she put it to one side. She sat down by the pile of white rocks, and began to stack them into a pyramid.
"You have to do this," Delmar said, wrapping his arms around the big block of stone, and shifting it from side to side, before pulling it out of the wall, and heaving it down to the ground. Ajalia looked at the rock, which was about as big as she was, and then at Delmar. He was a lot stronger than he looked. He looked like a string of limp cloth, but the stone was extraordinarily large. Ajalia put her foot against the stone, on the side where Delmar couldn't see, and pushed it gently. She couldn't make it budge.
Delmar was lifting out a bundle of wrapped shapes. He laid the bundle down on the ground and unwrapped the fabric from four large books. The books were bound with fine leather, and they had thick pages of a yellow material. Delmar opened the book on the top, and Ajalia saw that there were thick purple letters along the top of the pages, in an old script that she did not recognize. It was not the Slavithe writing that Ajalia had learned to read before coming here.