by Marc Secchia
The girl’s smile threatened to swallow him up with combustive longing. Jakani dropped his gaze.
She said, “Thank you for explaining in this manner, Dirt Picker. It means, if questioned, I would have no need to lie in your defence.” Rainbows over Islands, she was far, far too intelligent for her own good! Tytiana added, “Even if one cannot speak, one finds ways to speak, is that not so?”
He nodded soberly, staring at the toes of her crimson slippers. Each had a neat red bow on the toe, a girlish touch not in keeping with her nature, he felt.
Indeed.
“Dirt Picker, there are things I would wish to know, and gestures I would wish to make, which might be misinterpreted even by elements within your own caste.” Now the heiress stood, and the graceful sweep of her arms encompassed the whole greenhouse space. “There are many ripe fruits in this arboretum. It would be a shame if they went to waste. The spiders prefer unripe silver fruit. Would such a gift … would it help your family? Would they enjoy some –”
“Very much!”
He could not fathom her changeableness. Worse than the weather! Jakani stared into her expressive violet eyes until he realised he was staring, for he saw there what he had never expected to find. Sympathy? Concern? Gratitude?
“Thank you for this bounty, o Choice Tytiana,” he said. “My name is –”
A tiny headshake strangled his words in his throat.
Tytiana inclined her head as if to express regret. In a new, harsh voice, she said, “Do not forget to harvest the ripe fruit again, Dirt Picker, or I shall stripe your back black and blue! My spiders grow hungry due to your negligence. And take the excess fruit to your miserable family that they might work harder this next week. The wastage would otherwise attract caroli.”
Jakani flung himself to the ground. “I apologise most humbly. I shall not be negligent again, o Choice of House Cyraxana.”
“No, you won’t.”
Behind him, the measured tones of High Master Juzzakarr shivered his spine as he heard the man purr, “You are too generous with the serfs, o Choice of the House.”
What had he seen? Or overheard? Oh, Fra’anior protect …
With a haughty toss of her head that almost unseated her headscarf, Tytiana said, “This one is scrawny but works hard, father. I promise I shall make him work twice as hard next week.”
“Huh. He lasted a whole week? A triumph,” chortled Juzzakarr, by the sound of his voice, departing the arboretum again. “The family council is meeting in ten minutes. Nothing of your playing here that can’t wait. Come along now.”
His knees felt like rickety reeds. That had been close. Far too close.
* * * *
Despite his hefty load, Jakani made excellent time to his house, arriving an hour after suns-down. He was late for dinner, but what did that matter? He would have loved to blame the basketful of fruit he toted upon his right shoulder for his excellent mood, but if he were honest for a change, that was only a secondary reason. He had also outrun four other lamko youths intent upon stealing his bounty.
His foot was completely healed – Fra’anior alone knew how.
The hut was modest and unadorned. One walked directly into the main room, which served the functions of dining, cooking and living. To his left was his parents’ small bedroom, which barely fit their bed and a battered chest of drawers. To the right were two small bedrooms, a tiny one shared by his two small sisters and another larger one for the three boys, who slept in a three-layer bunk bed. The floor was packed dirt. A frugal cooking fire had reduced to burning coals. The Dirt Pickers collected dry twigs and branches from the orchards at the end of each day to supply their needs – they picked everything as clean as a windroc’s bone, was the saying.
In the moons-light, the jog through the orchards had been magical, the silver fruit clusters gleaming like lustrous jewels amidst the burgundy boughs, but in the distance, he had spied Dragonships patrolling the skies. Many windrocs gathered higher still. Such numbers! He had several times seen the predatory carrion-eaters up close, and they were beyond impressive, terrifying a small boy with their great beaks and cruelly hooked talons, and earning a young man’s wary respect. Twenty feet of wingspan. Up to ten feet of height – they were creatures not to be trifled with. He had heard that Dragonship Steersmen loathed windrocs; they were forced to carry a complement of archers for the protection of their vessels because windrocs could shred a hydrogen sack. They were notoriously belligerent and territorial.
His father Hanzaki stopped mid-sentence at Jakani’s polite knock upon the lintel. “Who seeks entry?” he asked formally.
“A son seeks entry to the honoured house,” he replied.
There was a noticeable pause, just long enough to appraise him that all was not forgiven. “Enter.”
He ducked within. As Jakani’s place was still not at table with his family, there was none of the usual chatter or banter that would have accompanied his homecoming. Instead, a stony and even embarrassed silence greeted him. Rounding the table, he shifted the basket from his shoulder and placed it in a clear space in front of his mother. In contrast to his rangy, athletic father, Isimi was petite and small-boned, a woman of forty-six summers’ age who was still very handsome, in his unbiased opinion. She sat on a special raised chair which had carved handholds to allow her to ascend from floor level. Isimi was lame in both legs as a result of a childhood illness which had also affected Sokadan, his eighteen year-old brother. Their legs could not straighten, so they were forced to crawl from place to place. Even so, his mother had raised five children.
Isimi even said that the affliction made her a better Dirt Picker. Closer to the droppings. He marvelled at her serenity, when all within him was tumult and pain, not least when he thought upon her affliction.
Jakani said, “I’m sorry I’m late, mother, but I was offered a treat which took an additional hour to harvest.”
“Ripe fenturi fruit?” His mother sniffed appreciatively. “Sweet.”
“Where did you st – find these, son?” asked his father.
Not a wince, not an apology for his stumble and the implied insult. In a voice made strident by challenge, Jakani replied, “These were offered to me by the Choice of the House.”
There. How did that statement itch at his precious honour?
Hanzaki growled, “Is this an apology?”
Almost, his mother winced. Isimi’s hand moved to her spoon, a signal they had worked out years before. That meant nothing had changed. His stiff-necked father would not bend from his word, which seemed to mean more to him than life itself.
He thought of the fire that had touched his own wound. If neither would bend, something must break, must it not? He loved his father despite his rigidity.
Still, bitterness burned in his craw as Jakani said, “I have no idea what form of apology would eclipse that which I have already given, father. So I will say this. I am sixteen now, and a man, yet you treat me like a child. You say that I must earn my manhood, as if you are the one who determines what that is and when it might happen.” Hanzaki’s face was graven stone, the grey colour of his heart’s despair. His courage began to leak at the seams; his knuckles whitened upon the basket handles, and then he glanced at his mother’s knees, so thickly callused from years of crawling everywhere. He snapped, “So I ask you, how does grieving your wife by your behaviour –”
Hanzaki shot to his feet so fast, his chair toppled and cracked. “Get out!”
“Must I crawl, too?”
He could not believe what he had just blurted out. Open mouth, insert … oh, a Dragon’s paw at least, if not more! Fear and flame crackled inside his mind as he beheld his father’s expression, in that instant, turn from stone to repugnance.
“Get out of my home!”
“No.”
His father slammed his fist upon the table, a terrible crack of a blow.
Still Jakani stood firm, and in that moment, he realised that his obedience boiled down to fear, when
in truth, it ought to have been rooted in love. He was not a good son. Far from it.
More softly, he said, “No, because I love you, father.”
He saw the way, yet his father did not; a vein pulsed in his forehead as they locked gazes, and Hanzaki roared, “Must I throw you out myself, boy? Again and again you besmirch my honour –”
“I love your honour.”
“– and heap shame upon this household!”
“And I love all you have taught me, and every person under this roof,” he shot back.
Around them, the family sat frozen. Another battle. Yet another. His father’s left hand just pointed at the door, a rigid spear of denial.
The silence infuriated him beyond reason. Heat thundered like forge fires behind his temples. Jakani exploded, “I am sorry if I am not the son you wanted, father, but I realise I can never be. Your standards are impossible because they come at the cost of love. You say honour is everything. I say that honour untampered by love, is nothing. It is dust! When I saw that man beating you, I could not bear it. Every blow, every stripe, every lashing of blood that poured out of you – I wanted him to be beating me, to turn his anger from you to me, because I love you!”
He heard himself screaming across the table, heard the rawness cracking the terrace lakes of his heart, and he could no longer stop. Words flooded from deep within, like wounding weapons seeking to drink deep of enemy blood. “I love you and you never, ever give anything back … don’t you see? If that is what your concept of honour means, then I want nothing of it. You say discipline, honour, fidelity – I can parrot those values until I am sick of them. They are in me. They are me! So I ask you, whom are you punishing here – me? Our family? Yourself? What are you trying to atone for, and when will it be finished?”
Still his father stood unspeaking, and Jakani wondered if he had heard any word at all. All that fire that he had seen in Tytiana seemed to have infected him now, so that his words spat forth like emotional lightning bolts, searing and precise and ruinous.
“If I must bend for your sake, I will – but you will learn to see me and who I am, too. I am through playing your game of who will blink first. I delight in bringing my family a fine gift and all you can bring yourself to care about is a deficient apology. See me, know me, love me – or lose me, father. Is that what you truly want?”
He spoke to a stone. A stone! He could no more have halted a storm with his hands than resist the urge to hurt, hurt, hurt his father!
“Do you want to know what I’ve been doing?” he cried. “Did you wonder how I survived a week with the terrible Choice of House Cyraxana, your pick of honour-punishment for my wrongdoing? Aye, I know exactly how that posting came about! Father, I saved her life! I saved her life and was not summarily dismissed like the seventeen lamko before me. I evaded four boys who tried to waylay me and steal this gift on the way home. I did not fight them, I just ran faster. That’s what I did. Are you happy? Are … you … happy?”
“Happy?” Hanzaki croaked at last, as if he had never heard the word before.
The awful stinging had vanished from his chest. Jakani felt an unexpected surge of relief. There. It had been anything but pretty, but with the unburdening of feelings he had bottled up for years, he felt so light that he could have bounced off the Blue Moon. Yet how could he proceed now? His words were wildfires consuming the orchards of his family’s life.
He ducked his head, his eyes burning now. He knew he had ruined everything. Again. Always, he lashed out …
As his father sucked in a whistling, ragged breath, as if he had been badly beaten and now sought to recover, Isimi reached out to clasp his fisted right hand between her tiny palms, and whispered, “Enough. This is my table, too, and I want all of my family seated around it.”
His father began, “But –”
And Jakani said at the same time, “Mom –”
Isimi hissed, “Or I am kicking you both out and you can go fight in the fields like beasts and Dragons. And once you’ve finished belting the stuffing out of each other, maybe you can scrape together enough love and honour between the two of you to give the rest of your family a break from your relentless hostility. I would like some peace. Can you two men arrange that, please?”
He had never heard his mother speak like this; pleading, yet with an unarguable brand of iron strength underlying every syllable. Jakani knew a different shame, and realised he had not seen so clearly after all. It was easy to blame his father. Too easy, and while he had spoken much that was true, was there not also much darkness in his heart that he had warred against all his life, which produced a harvest of strife and rebellion and discord? He had never realised how deeply it saddened his mother.
Jakani gazed across the table through eyes dimmed with tears. Opposite, his father touched a glistening drop on his cheek with an expression of wonderment. He had never seen that before. Never seen him cry.
Then, proud Hanzaki bent forward into a stiff bow that seemed to take forever, dipping beyond the point of deepest respect until his forehead gently bumped his wooden plate. After holding that position for ten endless seconds, he raised his head again, and said, “Be welcome at this table, my honoured son. Always. I … I am … sorry. For everything.”
He did not understand all that Hanzaki meant, but he bowed deeply in return. His heart was fuller than he had ever known it to be. “Father, I’m so sorry. I love you.”
Chapter 5: Flying Serfs
DINNER in THE Cyraxana household was usually a lavish, formal affair, but this evening, the High Master had additionally summoned his Under-Masters and military advisors, most of whom were relatives. He had excluded all of the younger children and siblings. Tytiana was the youngest person present followed by Zihaeri, who represented their deceased mother’s line and her connection to House Jyrali, the House of Amber.
They dined in the secondary or informal dining chamber, which stood to the left side of the south-facing mansion’s main frontage, a vaulted room thick in the beam but high in the ceiling. Two great stone fireplaces bracketed the room to either end, roaring and crackling in a valiant attempt to keep the creeping chill at bay. This room always remained cool despite the thick crimson carpets that absorbed sound, and the fires. The grey stone walls between the fluted marble columns were adorned with portraits of dour, unsmiling relatives frowning down upon the living who dined at table below their aristocratic noses.
Not one had a stitch of red hair. Tytiana had checked, many times.
She was not stubborn. Merely … persistent.
The great mahogany dining table was a highly polished expanse filled with the family’s finest golden tableware. It seated fifty easily, sixty at a pinch, for Juzzakarr was not a man well acquainted with the words, ‘stint’ or ‘less.’ Tonight’s fare was the traditional fish dish for first course served on a bed of green rice, accompanied by a vintage Sylakian white wine. No less than twelve varied side dishes accompanied this course, ranging from braised vegetables to poached quails’ eggs. The second course was slow-roasted pheasant raised in the House’s own forests, accompanied by a new range of side dishes and delicacies, and a warm, spicy red wine to aid the gustatory process. After that would come the cheeses served with a variety of nutty breads, and Immadian iced delicacies accompanied by sweet dessert wines from the High Master’s personal cellar.
Traditionally, the first course was reserved for non-business chatter. Right now Juzzakarr was recounting a story from his youth about his rajal-hunting exploits on the Island of Yorbik, to raucous laughter and jokes from the men gathered at his end of the table. Rajals were black felines said to grow as tall as a man at the shoulder, who were highly territorial besides, but Tytiana’s studies had taught her that the Askarmyn Tiger was the heavier cat. Tigers preferred to live alone rather than in packs like rajals. The loners were dangerous. If they developed a fang for man meat, they never lost it.
Tytiana wondered what the Dirt Picker’s family must be eating this evening. S
he really must find out his name. It felt dim-witted and aggravating to keep calling him ‘Dirt Picker’. But his response when she had offered the fruit … Tytiana frowned down at her now-empty place setting, bracketed by an array of perfectly polished silver tines and knives. Surely her father fed the workers? Where did they get their food from, anyways? They must grow it. The House had a plentiful estate, the second-most extensive in all of Helyon. Then again – ugh – knowing her father …
When the crimson-liveried servants had cleared the first course, whisking away platter after platter of river-grown green rice, root vegetables and four different styles of freshwater fish, Juzzakarr ordered the hall doors to be shut and barred, and then he stood.
Instant hush.
As he threw back his shoulders, Juzzakarr touched the oval-cut ruby he habitually wore at his neck in a familiar gesture. It was called the Nestrakil, and had been passed down his family line for longer than anyone could remember. The central gem was fully three inches across, and depended from a thick, heavy golden chain that centred it upon his uniform at the level of his heart. Tytiana was so used to the mannerism, she thought nothing of it. But the gem – just now, she noticed again that whenever she looked at it, her fires seemed to run cold. When had that started? She tried again. Instant chill.
Taking a mental note, she listened to her father. He said, “There was a second Dragon attack at Lymarox yesterday.” The Yellow House. Tytiana sat up straighter, twisting her gloved hands in her lap. Please. Not the fire. Not now … “A watchtower and two lamko huts were burned, as well as minor damage done to the orchards. I don’t need to tell you how serious this is. We are certain that these attacks are coordinated, but as yet, we’ve received no formal response from the nearest Dragon roosts offshore of Helyon as to which beasts might be responsible. There has not been trouble with those roosts for a hundred years or more, since the heyday of Aranya, Princess of Immadia, the Shapeshifter Dragoness. As far as the other High Masters and I are aware, the peace accords remain intact and unbroken. We must wait to see why there is a delay in communication. Aye, Yarad?”