by Jeffrey Hall
Your father’s optimism is impressive, said Moso, suppressing an untimely smile as Wish and his father continued to argue.
“You’re a fool,” said Wish to his father. “You’ve spent too much time in that house by yourself and have forgotten the way the world works.”
“I’m the fool? You’re the one so deep in the jungle that you can barely see the light of the city. I know what I need, and your protection isn’t one of them.”
Wish hurried him forward, not even mindful of the stress he was putting on his father’s injured arm as he did.
“Damn you, boy. If you’re in such a hurry to get rid of me, why even bother protecting me at all?”
Wish tensed. Did his father really want an answer? He felt his jaw tighten as he tried to come up with something with substance, but found nothing. And the fact that he could find nothing terrified him.
Why did he still help his father? Out of duty? Because he was family and that’s what families were supposed to do for one another?
Those were answers, but answers that felt hollow. Untrue.
He shook his head in disbelief with himself, amazed at how cold he had become. At how foreign feelings were. Was his father really nothing more than a chore to him that needed to be dealt with before returning to the jungle, like a child would wash a floor before going out to play?
How would he feel if he just let go and left him for good?
Free, he answered. Finally free.
He grimaced, trying to rid himself of the thought.
You’re a monster, Wish, he told himself. A beast of the jungle just as they say. No wonder children look at you in horror. No wonder Marli wants you nowhere near your own daughter.
But if he just let go then he wouldn’t have to deal with them either...
They arrived at the Nest just in time to save himself from his own thoughts. The door stood chipped, its two handles bent and worn, as if the moonlight beating on its face were attempting to break it open.
“You call this place safe? A jagrall’s fart would crumble it to the ground,” said Wish’s father as he readjusted the box that contained his mother’s bones in his hand.
“It’s safer than the Trough,” said Wish.
Are you sure about that? From the way you act, the Green Men and the king’s soldiers seem less frightening.
He knew he was a masochist for putting himself in front of Marli’s words again, but he had no other choice. The Trough would implode within days. His father wouldn’t last long in the harsh streets of Fangmora, nor would he survive the jungle. Wish was not fool enough to think that others felt as comfortable as he within the forest, beneath the eyes of its creatures. To survive it a person must know it, and the only piece of the forest his father ever understood was the grove of bluis fruit trees that he once picked as a job before he fell and broke his leg, and that was relatively safe. Besides, his father’s arm was injured. It would heal as crooked as his legs if it wasn’t tended to properly, and he couldn’t afford to go to a medicine man who’d charge lunars for tinctures and rare remedies.
Marli and her people were his only hope at keeping him safe until he and Moso could finish this job. Once he did that then maybe he wouldn’t need to worry about his father any longer if that’s really what he wanted.
Wish pushed aside the door, ignoring his partner’s comments.
He found Risa and two of the minor priestesses kneeling before a cluster of eggs, humming a song that sounded like birds from the deep jungle. Risa signaled for the song to stop as the three entered the main chamber.
As soon as she saw Wish her brow furrowed, and she had to fight to keep from baring her fangs.
“You brought others to ensure you haven’t misheard the priestess’s words? I assure you they will hear no differently—”
“It’s not that.” Wish cut her short, hoping he could keep the woman’s anger from spiraling into a tirade. “It’s my father. He is injured. He needs the care of the priestesses.”
Risa ran a claw over the longest of her whiskers. “You and everyone else who just survived that massacre outside our walls. Just because one hobbles on a cane doesn’t mean they are wounded.”
“Show her.”
“You should be the one begging for their help. Why don’t you show them your fingers? Your cuts? Compared to my—”
“Just show her.”
Wish grabbed his father’s arm and rolled up his sleeve. The bruise that took up the majority of his elbow had already started to darken and swell.
Risa poked it, and his father swallowed a yelp. “A minor injury that should heal up in a week’s time.”
“A minor injury? His arm is clearly broken. Surely the Great Bird can see that from its perch high in the darkness.”
Risa smiled, glaring at Wish. “The Great Bird sees everything, including those who use his name in jest.”
You were right about this woman being shoulder-deep into her own teeka, signed Moso as he stared at the two other priestesses, who lingered at the end of the chamber.
“Please, Risa. This isn’t about Marli. It’s about him. See to it that he heals, and in the end I’ll make a large enough donation to you and your cause that you’ll be able to rebuild these walls from the bones of jagralls.”
“I doubt the pockets you’ve sewn into that ridiculous outfit are deep enough.” Risa sighed. “But it is the work of the Great Bird. We will help him. We will ensure that he is well, but it won’t be her that does it. Hatchling Inga.”
As one of the minor priestesses walked down the center of the chamber, Wish’s father whispered to him. “They don’t seem like the type to be lied to. You better come through on that donation for your own sake.”
“I will.”
“Yes, Grand Priestess?” said the one Risa had called Inga.
“Escort this man back to your chamber. He is now your new care.”
“As you wish,” said Inga. The minor priestess hooked his father’s arm. “Come with me, father. With the help of the Great Bird we shall ensure that your arm is back to normal within days.”
“Surrounded by women and yet my heart still flops in the filthy pit of my stomach,” whispered his father to Wish and Moso as he followed Inga down the chamber. “You think I’m going to willingly let you leave me here while you throw yourself into the jungle again on my behalf?”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“Says who?”
“Your legs.” Wish snatched his father’s cane from his hand, holding onto his shoulder to keep him from falling.
“Damn you!” cried his father.
Wish handed the cane over to the priestess named Inga. “Make sure he gets this back only when he’s in your room. He’s senile enough to think it’s a machete. Only the gods know what he would in such a dense place as this.”
Inga nodded as she received the cane. She started to pull his father away, but his father’s grip on Wish did not lessen.
“You are saving no one, Ati. You think you’re doing this for me, but you’re not. You must see that.”
Wish shook free of his grip and turned his back to him.
“If you want to stay blind, then promise me this.”
“What?” grumbled Wish, annoyed, in a hurry to leave.
“Live, Ati. Make a father’s heart finally feel safe inside his own chest and live. Make sure that he does, Moso.”
Moso tail flickered, Enjoy the company.
Wish watched his father go as Priestess Inga pulled him away, whispering to him softly. Whatever she said, he did not listen. He kept his eyes on Wish’s as if afraid if they left him he would never see him again.
Fool of an old man. There’s nothing to fear in the jungle, Wish thought as he stared back.
Soon the same hallway that held Marli and his daughter took his father too. It was a place that was only a few steps away, but a place that felt like a dark void he could not enter easily for fear of his soul never returning. He just hoped that same void would ke
ep them safe.
“Heal him. Protect him,” said Wish to Risa hastily.
“It’s not us who do such things, it is the—”
“The will of the Great Bird. Yes, I know. But when the predators come knocking and this bird of yours decides to stay perched, it will be your hands that they’ll look to.” Wish turned before she could respond and exited the doors. Moso followed.
It’ll only be a few days. By the end of the week he’ll be sipping rum from a bowl made of charmwood, forgetting all about that nonsense he spit at you.
Wish looked south down the Gold Row. The head of the jungle rose over the distant wall. A soft wind was rolling down the Knotted Mountains causing the treetops to sway as if they were green hands waving him back. All he wanted to do was answer their beckon and hide in its darkness from the choking complications of the city and its people, and let the chatter of its creatures drown out worries that rattled in his head. Soon, he thought. One more job and then there’ll be enough money that everyone will be safe and I can just walk into the woods without worry whenever I please.
Moso continued signing, And you, you’ll still be drinking from the fight-fish-infested streams of the forest like a hoatzin.
Moso’s comment snapped Wish from his temporary dream. “Sorry.”
Moso shrugged. Nothing to apologize for. Look at you. Can’t imagine how much blood you lost during our last escapade. Can’t imagine the last time you slept either. You’re just as exhausted as I am. So, what’s the plan to finish this up and finally get some damn sleep?
Wish rubbed his brow. “I’ll go to Boz, see if he can translate the next riddle. You take the brooch, ask some of your associates. I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but the people you run with have a tendency to incorporate themselves with secrets.”
Attack this thing from two fronts, I like it.
“Stay away from the Leg Holes.”
Nothing to worry about here.
“Moso, I’m serious.”
The smile left his face as his tail flickered. And so am I. As soon as this job is done, you’ll never see me near those places again.
“Then let’s hurry up and finish it.”
Works for me. Moso fished into his pocket and handed over the traced sentence of the box, and Wish handed him the brooch. Moso tossed the thing in his hand like a lunar. Wonder how much this would get me at the pits?
Wish knew he should have been amused, but he couldn’t muster a smile, not with the shadow of the Nest looming over him like a stalking monster. “Find out where its owner’s hideout is and you’ll be able to fill those pits with moons.”
Moso stuffed the brooch in his pocket, licked his hand, and ran it through his fur. I’ll bet you a lunar I’ll find my information first.
“Boz is an easy conversation. I’ll have the whereabouts of the next box within the hour.”
And I’ll have the Limbs’ hideout in half the time.
“How is that?” said Wish.
Because you move too slow.
Moso leapt to a nearby building, climbed up its side, and scurried along the rooftops to avoid the traffic of people clogging the Gold Row, leaving Wish standing in place.
Wish put his hands to his mouth and yelled up to his partner. “Meet back here when you’re ready to hand over that lunar.”
Moso flashed his five fingers, Fuck off, before disappearing over the rooftops.
Wish was once more left to face the tide of people rushing down the main street, threatening to sweep him away and cast him out with the rest of the jungle’s debris kicking about their feet.
Marli watched him standing upon the steps to her home, blinking, looking far down the street into the head of the forest peeking over the walls like a curious giant. He looked like a child who had been lost or abandoned, thrown into an unfamiliar world with no one to guide him or tell him the rules. But his scars, the ones that healed ragged on his skin and the new ones, still fresh, red, and raw, which he had no doubt obtained from some new excursion or adventure, were the marks of no lost boy. They were the lines of a man who knew his place in this world, a man committed to violence and all it did to further his purpose and the jungle’s own. He did not stand idle, waiting for some god to swoop in and solve his problems. He raised his spear and unsheathed his machete and cut them down until they were nothing but trampled scraps beneath his boot.
If only he was willing to eventually put down those weapons, then maybe there would be a place for him by her and her daughter’s side. But would that ever happen?
She heard his father’s voice coming through the walls. It sounded so much like Ati’s, except gruffer. Wiser. And as she held her daughter against her chest, and the questions stormed her mind once more, she found herself tired of trying to answer them herself.
She put her daughter down within her crib and peeked her head into the hallway. There she saw Minor Priestess Inga helping the man down the hallway, his balance poor, the cane in his hand a weapon against the travesty his crooked legs were looking to cause.
“I suppose I should say thank you for all this...” he was starting to say to Inga when he looked up and saw Marli staring at him.
Her throat went dry. His eyes were as dark as Ati’s, things barely discernible from the shadow. His cheeks too, though wrinkles ravaged them where scars marred Ati’s. It was as if she were looking into her own imagination at a time when she and Ati were together. A time when she had daydreamed and saw their future as one of the old couples she’d sometimes see wandering about the inner city, holding hands, carefree, knowing they’d beaten back death for long enough and no longer feared it coming too early. She’d pictured him with wrinkled and grey hair. She’d pictured him bent, relying on a cane. But then she’d pictured him stuck in a chair beside her, and that image was chased from her mind from the absurdity of it. But now here it was again, alive and huffing to stay upright as it walked towards her.
“Good evening, my sasa,” he said, an old term for daughter in the Holler tongue, a language popular amongst the farmers of Fangmora. She wondered if he knew the acts she and his son had committed, but soon realized it was nothing more than a formality as his attention turned back to Inga. Before their conversation could recommence, Marli intervened.
“Good evening, pagi,” she answered in Holler tongue. It was a language she’d picked up from the fruit stands she’d hover about and wait for scraps from when she was on the streets. “It seems the Great Bird has plucked us a person with manners from the garden of cruelty that propagates these streets.”
“It seems your Great Bird has been fooled. I’m nothing but a rotten fruit that’s learned to pose as a ripe one.”
Marli laughed. “Inga, you look tired. Your last care only left last night. Allow me to take this rotten fruit from your basket.”
“Priestess Marli, Grand Priestess Risa insisted that I be in charge of him.”
“She also insisted that we stop seeing our seed-bearers, yet the creak of your window and the squeaks of your bed say otherwise.”
Inga smiled back, her lips quivering. “If you would like the added responsibility, then by all means. The Great Bird will look favorably upon you.”
“Responsibility? More like pleasure,” said Marli, looping the man’s arm with her own. Inga bowed, glared at her, and turned away.
Wish’s father laughed. “And here I was thinking I’d never have women fighting over me before I die.”
“Tell me, pagi,” said Marli, trying to keep their immediate comfort with one another, “where does it hurt?”
He chuckled. “A man my age? Everywhere. My leg cries every time the clouds crawl down the back of the mountains. My knuckles and fingers feel like harga beetles have burrowed between where they bend. My back too. Now my elbow has swollen like the throat of a frog all because of fools with too much anger and not enough sense.”
“The story of many injuries we see between these walls.” She guided him through the doorway to her room and pointed to a bed
standing against the wall. “Here will be our quarters. I shall attend to you, nursing you to full strength like the Great Bird has done for his own progeny.”
“What fine accommodations. Perhaps I should not have been so quick to chide my son for leaving me here like—”
“Like what?” she said, but the man’s face was frozen. She followed his gaze to the corner of the room where her daughter lay asleep in the crib. Ati’s father removed his arm from hers.
She had her answer then about Ati keeping that part of his life secret.
“It’s you, then,” said Ati’s father.
Marli did not know what to say. She hadn’t thought further than trying to figure out what Ati had told his father. Now that she had her answer, she wasn’t prepared to answer his questions. “You’ll have to be more specific than that,” she said, hoping if she played coy perhaps he would think he’d confused her for someone else.
“It’s you who tore away the last finger I held onto my son with and cast him into the jungle.” It was clear Ati’s father was a man to hunt down and tear apart cowardice with his bluntness just like his son.
“He was lost to the woods long before I met him. I simply found him and gave him shelter for a while.”
His father clenched his jaw and shook his head. “Not lost. There were still times when he would crawl back through our window and lay his head upon our family’s floor before you and your demonic hands wrapped around his soul.”
“Demonic hands? That is a harsh description for what men and women have been doing since before we walked out of the jungle.”
“Seduce a man, make him fall in love with you, take his seed, and deny him the result? That isn’t some common, misshapen relationship. That is the work of a monster.”
The baby isn’t his, she wanted to say, but it would only be more coyness. She decided to try a different tactic. “It’s what the Great Bird requires.”
His father hobbled over to where her daughter slept. A prickle ran up Marli’s spine. If he raised a finger she would take it and more from the old man, but all he did was speak and look down