by Tiffany Tsao
And the words tumbling from her lips were a fragmented gesture straining to catch a glimpse of this explanation, to part the cosmic curtain: “Something that can’t be found by covering more ground.”
Murgatroyd had recovered enough from his amazement at the first sentence Ann had uttered to greet this next batch of words with an unfiltered, unabashed “Hah?”
“It’s what Yusuf said to me once,” said Ann seamlessly, concealing her own astonishment from Murgatroyd and even from herself without skipping a beat. One of the many tricks she’d learned well as a child.
“When?” asked Murgatroyd.
“When he was teaching me something.”
Murgatroyd’s eyes widened. “I thought he retired before you joined the Quest.”
“He did.”
Murgatroyd sighed, reminding Ann of what he had said back in Flee Town about conversation being important to people like him.
“He still came back every now and then,” she added. “When absolutely necessary. It wasn’t a complete break. And obviously, he told us about you. Sometimes he had information we needed. And he was always better at teaching new recruits when it came to certain skills.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about this before?” sputtered Murgatroyd.
Ann was genuinely surprised. “It never came up.”
“Yes, but . . . you know Uncle Yusuf was important to me. Is still important to me. How can you not—” Murgatroyd could see from Ann’s face that she had absolutely no clue why he was upset. “Never mind. It’s fine. Just tell me now.”
“Tell you what?”
“What Uncle Yusuf said!”
There was a long silence. At first, Murgatroyd was worried Ann was angry, but just as he was about to apologize for his outburst, she replied. Her voice was distant, as if to retrieve the answer, she had travelled very far away.
“The One was having trouble teaching me a particular skill, so she asked Yusuf to help. At the end of our last session, I asked him why he retired. And he said it was because he wanted to concentrate on something else. He said it was ‘something that can’t be found by covering more ground.’”
Murgatroyd felt a fresh gust of wonder sweep through him and puff out the sails of his heart. “What did he mean?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think he did either.”
Just as Murgatroyd was about to say something else, Ann sensed his desire to ask more questions and decided to change the subject. Enough was enough. “Mud. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” She pulled the peculiar leather pouch out of her bag, then pulled the peculiar notebook out of the pouch. Murgatroyd looked around.
“There!” he proclaimed, pointing in triumph to a slimy patch among all the stones. He trotted over, as did Ann, but upon attaining the mud puddle he was overcome by a sudden attack of knee wobbles and had to crouch down to stabilize himself. It took a few moments before he realized why. He’d stopped registering Cambodia-Abscond’s redness days ago, most likely because it had never bothered him in the same way it had Mildred. But now the sticky, coagulated dark substance before him served as a visceral reminder of what stuff the Territory was made of. As if roused by the recognition of kindred matter, the blood in Murgatroyd’s temples began to throb.
Ann extended one of the notebook pages and held it up to the light for comparison.
“Pretty realistic,” she said admiringly. “It looks stickier in person, though. And more clotted.” She extended a boot towards the mud and poked it with her toe. It squirted a little, which made Murgatroyd’s stomach turn. Then she turned to the drawings of the pebbles. “But these. They’re exactly like the real thing. Here, could you hold this open?”
She handed Murgatroyd the book, and he did his best to oblige, extending the page outwards and holding it up to the sky as Ann had been doing. Ann picked up a pebble, wiped it off on the cuff of her trousers, and held it next to the page for comparison.
“Would you look at that,” she said, taking a deep breath.
Murgatroyd did. It was as if he were truly seeing for the first time.
He saw that it wasn’t about which was the real pebble and which were representations, nor was it about how faithful the sketches were to, as Ann had put it, “the real thing.” Side by side, the pebble and drawings seemed to illuminate and augment each other, tuning up the frequency of each other’s essential nature so that all the pebbles, of stone and on page, sang out their pebblehood in unison, in a voice sharp and clear and in a pitch high and sweet, for the whole world to hear.
“Wow,” Ann said at last.
“Walau,” seconded Murgatroyd.
Then: an intense and ear-splitting silence.
As Murgatroyd crumpled to the ground, he saw Ann sinking as well, her expression startled at first, but then slackening. He saw the brief struggle—the widening of her eyes, the tensing of her face into a look of mingled alarm and aggression. Another wave of silence crashed around them, and everything about her sagged once more. And he too sagged, onto the stones, into the mud.
Before blacking out completely, he heard a noise penetrate the silence. No, a voice—raspy and low. “My notebook,” it said. Then silence flooded in once more.
Murgatroyd was eased awake by a gentle pitching motion, back and forth. He heard two voices—or rather, two nonvoices: one gravelly and low, and one wispy and high. They were speaking a language similar to the Nothing the Flee Town youth used among themselves, and yet it was entirely different. More effortless and fluid. So fluid he might not even have registered the nonvoices’ presence if it hadn’t been for the fact that his head was covered in some sort of bag, which made his hearing especially acute. All around him, he heard a sloshing sound, and every now and then a light drizzle would fall to his left or his right, sprinkling him with something he hoped was innocuous, like water. If he had to guess, he would say he was in a boat—or more precisely, attached to a boat, for he could not budge from the narrow bench on which he was sitting no matter how hard he tried. Upon attempting to use his arms to provide leverage, he discovered they were pinioned firmly to his sides. He tried frantically to free them, flailing his torso around in the process, but the boat gave a sudden lurch and he felt something flat and hard smack him on the thigh.
“Ow!” he yelped.
The low, gravelly nonvoice communicated a silence that was tangibly a threat.
Murgatroyd began to panic. Who were these people? And where was Ann? Swallowing his terror, he managed to squeak, “Hello, Ann? Are you there?”
To his relief, Ann answered from behind him. “I’m fine. Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes,” Murgatroyd sputtered, almost happy. “What’s going on?’
“We’re being taken somewhere.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” replied Ann. “I’m tied up and I can’t see.”
“Me too. Maybe we can ask?”
But before Ann could weigh in on this proposed course of action, Murgatroyd had timidly begun addressing their captors. “Erh, hello? Hello? Where are you taking us?”
His question was met with silence from the high, wispy voice—but he couldn’t understand what it meant.
“Come again?” he asked.
The same answer.
“Ah,” said Murgatroyd, not knowing what else to say.
He heard Ann sigh.
“Did you understand?” Murgatroyd whispered.
“No, why would I?”
“Because you understand lots of things.”
“Not this one. We’ll have to wait and see what they have in store for us.”
“Oh,” replied Murgatroyd. A grave concern popped into his head. “Do you think it’s bad?”
“Do I think what’s bad?”
“Erh, what they have in store for us.”
“Don’t know.”
“Oh,” said Murgatroyd gloomily, followed a few seconds later by, “I hope it’s not,” and three seconds after that, “Could we ask?”
Ann sighed again. “What makes you think we’ll understand the answer this time?”
But Murgatroyd had made up his mind. “Hello? Sir? Or Miss? What are you going to do with us?”
The two silences seemed to confer. And to Ann and Murgatroyd’s surprise, they heard someone clear a throat and begin to speak haltingly. It seemed to belong to the owner of the high, wispy silence, and it sounded as if the voice was trying its best to be menacing, with the result that it came out like a bark.
“We—are—going—” It paused, as if it were tired.
“We figured that much,” grumbled Ann under her breath.
The voice started again: “We—are—going—to—”
“Yes?” asked Murgatroyd, dying of suspense. “Where? Where are we going?”
The voice cleared its throat again, then hawked and made a spitting sound. It started again.
“We—are—going—to—”
“You said that already!” Murgatroyd cried.
“Murgatroyd, calm down!” exclaimed Ann. “Let it finish!”
There was another pause—an irritated one.
“I’m sorry,” Murgatroyd squeaked. “I won’t interrupt again. Please, where are we going?”
“We—” the voice started again, testily.
“We—” it repeated, as if taking several steps back to get a running start.
“We—are—going—to—eat—you.”
At this unwelcome piece of news, Murgatroyd blacked out once more.
Murgatroyd awoke to find that he had not yet been eaten. In fact, to his immense relief, it appeared that not even a tiny part of him had been consumed. He counted his toes. Ten. He counted his fingers. Nine. He gasped and recounted them. Ten. Phew. He grasped at his ears. Two. He pinched his nose. One. He looked down at his body and found not so much as a scratch, though in the course of patting himself all over he did discover a very enormous, very tender lump on the crown of his head.
He also realized that he could see, which meant that the bag had been removed from his head. And he realized that since he was able to grasp and pinch and pat himself, he wasn’t tied up anymore.
Then, to his horror, he realized that Ann was nowhere in sight.
He called out her name. There was no response.
The room in which he was imprisoned was clean, dry, and circular—and very spacious. The walls and floor were made of a pink claylike material covered with tiny scalloped indentations, and if Murgatroyd had been of a mind to inspect these surfaces more closely, he would have seen that the indentations were whorled and had been made by a very careful, artistic thumb. The walls curved inward as they rose from the ground, forming a dome overhead, but stopping just short of completion so that there was a large round portal in the ceiling’s centre, allowing sunlight to stream in from above.
Murgatroyd’s first thought was that he might be able to climb out through the opening, but as he squinted, he saw it was, in fact, covered with an iridescent veined material like the pages of the notebook he and Ann had been looking at immediately before their capture. Cutting or punching through it was the next idea that crossed his mind, but he then became aware of the absence of any apparatus that would help him reach it. The furnishings were spare, especially compared to the heavily pillowed interiors of the Bovquito Arms back in Flee Town. There was a very low wooden table, curved like the wall and pressed flush against it. There was a fuzzy grey rug upon which he had regained consciousness. But that was all.
Murgatroyd tried calling out again. “Ann! Can you hear me?” Still no response. “Hello? Anyone? The woman I was with! Where is she? Do you know?”
To his astonishment, someone came through the wall. She was dressed in a loose ankle-length garment, its rich pomegranate colour fading gradually into a deep orchid purple as the garment flowed from her shoulders to her toes. They’re real, thought Murgatroyd, recalling the ghostly cannibals the children had told him about. The savages are real.
He was too worried about Ann to shrink away. “My friend,” he demanded. “Where is she?”
Before the woman could respond, his eyes fell on the earthenware bowl in her hands, which was filled with a red meaty stew. He turned even paler than usual.
“My f-friend . . . ,” he stammered, before his voice gave way. He raised a trembling finger and pointed at the bowl. “Eaten?” he asked at last, unable to manage anything else.
The woman regarded the bowl’s contents thoughtfully, then looked at him again before making a funny snorting sound with her nose. “Yes,” she said.
Murgatroyd fainted for a third time.
When Murgatroyd came around, he was staring at the pale-pink sky. And juxtaposed against that sky was Ann’s head.
Murgatroyd screamed.
“Oh, pull yourself together,” said the head, which he then saw was attached to a body.
Murgatroyd sprang to his feet and threw his arms around her neck. “Ann! You’re alive!”
“Of course, I am!” she said, allowing herself to be hugged. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“She said you were eaten!” Murgatroyd whirled around and saw the woman standing behind them.
She snorted in the same way she had before. “Sorry,” she apologized in a low, gravelly voice. “I thought you were asking if she had eaten.”
“We are going to eat you!” someone yelled.
Murgatroyd screamed in fright yet again and spun around to find a curly-headed teenager—maybe around fifteen or sixteen—doubled over in silent laughter.
The woman communicated something to him in a stern, wordless voice, and the youth shot back a soundless reply, rolled his eyes, and walked away. From the sound of their voices—or rather, lack of voices—Murgatroyd realized that they were the two people who had captured him and Ann.
The woman turned to them and snorted for the third time. Murgatroyd realized that she did this every time she was about to speak. “That’s just what we say to scare people. It’s a protection tactic.”
“It’s horrible!” wailed Murgatroyd.
The woman beamed. “Yes, it is, isn’t it! You should tell Benn. He’ll be so pleased. He came up with it. Stew?” She pressed a bowl of it into his hands, along with a wooden spoon.
Murgatroyd wanted to ask who Benn was, but it occurred to him then that there were many other questions swimming around in his head and perhaps he should ask one of them instead. Under the circumstances, it was difficult for him to decide which one to utter first: “Who’s Benn?” or “Who are you people?”; “What are you people?” or “Where are we?”; “What are you going to do with us?” or “What’s in the stew?”
“Chicken,” said the woman, eliminating the last question.
“They call bovquitoes chickens,” Ann clarified. “You should have some. It’s very good.” She returned to the low wooden stool where she’d been sitting before the woman had dragged Murgatroyd out of the house. As if in further endorsement, she picked up her bowl from the ground and exhibited how clean she’d scraped it.
Murgatroyd lowered himself onto the stool next to her, and as he began to eat, he took in his surroundings. He and Ann were seated in the shadow of a pink domed structure—the same place, he guessed, he had been trying to escape from when the woman had walked in. A cloth of the same hue as the structure hung across the entrance, which explained why he’d thought that the woman had entered, ghostlike, through the wall. A few paces to their left was a low wooden table like the one Murgatroyd had seen inside the room. On top of it were two heavy-looking maroon pots, one containing the stew that the woman was now ladling out for herself, and one with its lid still on.
Surrounding the clearing where they sat were bloodwood trees—much larger than any he had seen in Cambodia-Abscond so far. And between their enormous trunks, he could glimpse other domes of differing sizes, but all of the same sky-pink hue. Small fenced patches of vegetation were scattered here and there—gardens, he guessed, because he could see people plucking and pruning and
uprooting things. And beyond, in the background, he espied a field, populated with grazing bovquitoes.
He heard Ann cough—the kind of cough meant to get someone’s attention—and he reined in his gaze. To his right stood the woman with her hand extended, waiting for Murgatroyd to shake it.
“My name is Nutmeg,” she said.
“Sorry,” Murgatroyd apologized, taking the hand. “My name is Murgatroyd.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” she declared too quickly, as if the ritual didn’t quite come naturally to her.
“Nutmeg,” Murgatroyd repeated. “Erh. Like the spice?”
Her face brightened. “You know it!” she exclaimed.
He did. Or rather, he thought he did. At the restaurant where he had used to work, his boss, Shakti, had made him taste a lot of foods in an attempt to “refine his palate.” He’d had to spend an entire day consuming nothing but spoonfuls of herbs and spices. The session had ended in severe stomach cramps.
Yet the expression on Nutmeg’s face had brightened so much at the news of Murgatroyd’s familiarity with her namesake that he felt he should say something more. “It tasted like spice!” he added.
Nutmeg beamed. “Exactly!”
“Why were you named Nutmeg?” he asked.
“Technically speaking, I wasn’t. My name is actually _____.” And here she emitted a short but unpronounceable silence. “It’s nutmeg translated into my language, but it means the same thing.”
“But nutmeg only grows in the Known World, doesn’t it?” he asked.
“True,” said Nutmeg, not quite grasping the reason for Murgatroyd’s puzzlement, “but my mother said by the time I had reached my naming day, I looked like a nutmeg: brown and round.”