by Jim Grimsley
She turned, and there was Brun, and Jedda’s heart began to pound. “My Krys,” she said.
The tall, broad-faced woman began to laugh. “I was afraid you wouldn’t recognize me after all this time.”
She was in a daze as Brun embraced her. She gripped Brun by the shoulders and looked into her face. “Opit?”
Brun closed her eyes and nodded. “Yes, he’s here.”
In the confusion that followed only the thought of Opit was clear to her, that she had found him, or stumbled on him, that she would see him again. Brun held her by the elbow while Vitter and Himmer piled into the forecourt of the house, and the staff of the place found them and began to welcome them. Jedda was needed to translate for a while, her questions would have to wait; only, now and then, she stopped to look at Brun to remind herself that this was real. Brun speaking Anin, the Prin speaking Erejhen, Vitter and Himmer chiming in with Alenke, the staff of the place with accents Jedda scarcely recognized, maybe even languages she had never heard before. Like being in the language lab at the university with half a dozen linguists at work around her.
She found herself alone with Brun in a well-furnished bedroom big enough for two Hormling apartments. Brun had waited patiently in the background while they were all settled, but Jedda saw the staff deferred to her in some way, even the Krii, to an extent. Now that they were alone, Brun said, “You’re looking so wonderfully well. Life has been good to you?”
“Yes, of course, whatever. How long has it been? Twelve years?”
She shook her head. “That long?” She seemed momentarily evasive. “Opit would know better than me.”
“Where is he?”
“With Malin,” Brun said. “With her people, at least. He’ll be here this evening, he’s anxious to see you again.”
The surprise of it all. “You’re both keeping very good company these days.”
“I can’t even begin to describe it,” she said. “I’m a long way from the dry dock in Charnos,” the place she had been working those years ago. “It’s Opit, you know. He’s become very important here.”
A piece fell into place for her, all at once. “Is he the reason I’m here, too?”
Brun blinked. She waited before she answered. “I suppose he is.” She stopped short of saying everything she knew, a flicker of something like resignation in her eyes. “You weren’t expecting this to happen?”
“No.”
She went no further with that line of questioning. Jedda remembered the look that had passed between Himmer and Vitter, and said, “The other two, Himmer and Vitter. Did they know this was going to happen?”
“I should let Opit explain,” she said, and moved away uncomfortably. “It’s all very complicated.”
“They did know.”
“I doubt it,” she said, emphatically, “I doubt they knew the circumstances under which they would finally meet us.” The “us” sounded quite particular, and Brun went on. “I’ll tell you this much, Jedda. Some of your people have been working with us since long before the gate was opened. Opit is part of that, and so are you, now.”
“Working with who?”
“With Malin,” she said. “I don’t understand it all, please don’t make me tell you any more than that, I’ll only get it wrong. I don’t speak Erejhen that well, you know, I don’t understand half what they say.”
She was being modest, Jedda could see. The two of them sat and talked, told what had happened through the intervening years, Brun’s marriage to Opit, their journey to Telyar, finding a guide who would take them into the far north, places where even Brun had never been before. The connection with the Erejhen government, which Brun glossed over. Their three children living here on the grounds, about whom she spoke in loving detail. Jedda told her own side of the story, her travels back and forth between Irion and Senal, her life in the Nadi women’s compound where her two daughters were adults now, with daughters of their own. Enough talk of that kind to fill the space between them, without room for additional questions on the subjects that Brun was clearly hesitant to address.
There came a certain kind of lull to the conversation and Brun said, “Look at the sun, the day’s nearly over. I should let you rest a while.”
Alone, Jedda stood at the window, unpacked her bags, and put away her clothes into the storage cupboards. She went to search for a hygiene room and found one a few doors away that offered four kinds of basins for flowing water: one for washing the face, one for defecating into, one for washing the anus after defecation, and one for washing the whole of the body. More plumbing fixtures than she had ever seen in one place, all for her own use.
The windows in her room faced the sea on one side, while on the other side were tall glass doors leading to the balcony. Watching the sea, she counted forty hoverboats on the water, some headed for the gate and some headed back from it. Two large water-borne ships were sailing away from Irion as well, and she fancied she could see Hormling lining the decks. Moving to the balcony, she examined the enormous pile of stones in which she was residing, soldiers in the garden and on the putter road outside, service people in the courtyard, the side of a huge wing of a building with windows two or three stories high. A stone bridge crossed from an upper floor of that building to another, rising from farther down the cliffs toward the sea. The thought of walking in the open air that high made Jedda shiver, and she remembered the gorges of Montajhena. This place attempted to re-create some of the feeling of that one, she thought. The Erejhen turn everything into a mountain. Or a forest, she added, noting the carving of the interior of the balcony, tree branches heavy with leaves and twined with vines.
A few moments later one of the house staff asked her to help to translate for one of her friends, for Himmer, as it turned out, who was trying to ask about dinner, knowing neither Anin nor Erejhen. He was embarrassed when Jedda came in. “I need to learn this language,” he said, a little blue in the face. “I can’t ask where’s the hygiene, even.”
She asked his questions for him and was pleased to have her own curiosity satisfied as well. The householder, a big, blocky Anin fellow named Arvith, explained, “The Chanii is the Thaan’s private guesthouse. We’ll bring you supper here.”
“Here, where?” she asked.
“A room,” he said. “After the lamp-lighting is finished, someone will send for you.”
“My friend Opit will be there?” Jedda asked.
“Your friend is here already,” Arvith said, and gave Jedda an odd look, almost as if he knew her.
“Yes?” she asked.
He made a sign with his hand and smiled. He had an ungainly nose, splayed a bit to the side. “He’ll be glad to see you, I’m sure,” Arvith said, and excused himself.
Himmer was sitting, staring at his hands. “They’re not very forthcoming, are they?”
“It’s not their way, I’m told. Though he’s Anin, and he’s still stubborn as a mule about answering a question directly.”
“That’s a bit more unusual, I take it?”
“Yes, a bit.” She shook her head. “You knew my friend Opit was here?”
Her question startled him some. Its directness. Somehow lacking in acknowledgement of the difference in their ranks. She found herself indifferent to her own rudeness. “Yes,” he said, “I knew. At least, I knew he was close to Malin.”
“Is that why you invited me onto the delegation? Because of him?”
He considered for a long time, then shook his head. “I didn’t invite you. I didn’t invite myself. So I can’t answer your question.”
“Himmer, there’s something you’re not telling me, and I think it has something to do with why I’m being detained here with you and Vitter.”
He went dumb and silent for a while. She waited.
“It will sound so deliberate if I tell it,” he began, “and in fact it’s all been quite an accident. None of it made sense to me until today.” He took a deep breath. “Your friend Opit is the one who asked for you to join the deleg
ation, that would be my guess. He’s become very important to these people. We’ve made contact with the Erejhen government through him, from my Ministry. This is a secret even from the Orminy.” He was actually afraid, she could see it. He was far from the harmless man she had thought him. “Maybe they did plan it all. Maybe Malin did. To get us here. Vitter as well. I expect he’s one of the other people working with my group; we cross Ministry lines for something as important as this.”
“As what?”
His face had become sober, almost comical. “As getting along with Malin. And getting access to what these people know.”
A moment later Arvith knocked at the door again, to ask Jedda if she could come with him to talk to the Chanii steward, who spoke only Erejhen but had questions about what sort of comforts the Hormling would require. She excused herself to Himmer and he gave her a peck on the cheek. “Chin up,” he said in Alenke, “this place may not be half bad once we get used to it.”
Arvith led her down the stone stairs. Conversation with the house steward took place in one of the huge ground-floor rooms, a vaulted ceiling painted with a scene that was obviously emblematic, three richly dressed women, archaic clothing, nothing like the Erejhen wore today, seated on horseback in a broad open meadow, with a piece of stone sculpture in front of them. The meadow was fallow and bare, as though in winter, and the trees beyond had a sparse look, the sky a winter blue. The sky, the meadow, the horses, the ladies, were all rendered in startlingly rich color, an actual painted image, a fresco, if she recalled her art history correctly. Someone had climbed up there on some kind of structure to paint it. The notion made her vaguely nauseous, she had no notion why. The image continued to draw her eye throughout the conversation, Jedda answering the steward’s questions, trying to explain cha, trying to explain what Hormling food was like. After a while the steward had heard enough, shook her head, and said, “We will give you the best that we have.”
With the session ending, Jedda asked a question of her own. “Who are the women?” she asked, indicating the ceiling.
“They are God’s sisters,” Arvith answered; this word, damzar, had a prefix sound that indicated none of the other prefix sounds could change the meaning of the word, which gave his pronouncement an air of curious finality. She had never heard that sound used in conversation before, though she had learned it. “They are celebrating the dark festival at midwinter.”
“What is that festival?”
“It’s called Chanii,” said a voice behind her. “You and I never learned about it because we never went far enough north.” She would have recognized that baritone anywhere, turned, and rushed to Opit and lifted him off the ground.
A display of affection is rare for a Hormling, but she had missed his odd face, his big ears that he refused to have altered to look like normal ears. He was over a hundred years old by now. He had been ninety when she last saw him, and tufts of hair were growing out of the lobes. He was dressed like an Anin trader, legged trousers, a blouse gathered at the waist with a belt. He had gotten stout and his cheeks were round as a baby’s. “You’re thinking how fat I’ve gotten,” he said.
“I can’t spin you around like I used to.”
He chuckled as she settled him onto the floor. He nodded to the house steward and Arvith, who retired from the room, closing the tall wooden doors behind them. He settled her onto a piece of furniture that looked like a settee and sat beside her with both her hands in his. Odd to be only the two of them in this vast room. “I’m so glad to see you again. It’s been such a long time.”
“I had no idea what had become of you, I searched for weeks around Telyar trying to find out where you’d gone.”
Opit was scratching one of his ears, looking at her as if he hardly knew where to begin. “It was necessary for me to get away without leaving many traces behind.” He sat there for a moment, studying his own hands, which he had withdrawn from her. A new ring on one of them, what looked like a ruby the size of a vending token. “I was in trouble with the ministry in Béyoton. My ministry, I mean, the Planetary Ministry. I had the feeling too many people knew me. And there were other factors, people I was working with at the time. Things I never told you.”
“You can tell me now,” she said.
“I can tell you part of it, at least,” he said. “The part you’ll believe.”
“I think I can tell you part of it myself,” she countered. “If that will make things easier. You were working with a group of people assembled secretly by the ministries. You were studying this place intensively, all of you, trying to find a way to make contact with Malin. You were working on this urgently, in secret, long before the Orminy became involved. Knowing that a day like this one was coming, when we would try to send an army here.”
He looked at her in mild surprise. “That’s pretty good. We weren’t trying to make contact with Malin, though, because she had already made contact with us. We were trying to convince her to trust us. How much more do you know?”
“I don’t know much,” she said. “I’ve guessed a lot. One hears things.” He would know what she meant.
“It was one of her Krii who contacted me. You’ve met some of them. They are officers in the Prinam. You remember that we were learning about the Prin when I left you in Charnos.”
“I’ve only had a few dealings with them since. The merchants I was trading with in Charnos were caught smuggling illegal technology by one.”
For a moment he looked like the teacher she remembered. “Have you drawn any conclusions about them?”
“They appear to run the place, as far as I can tell. But they have some connection to the religion that I’ve never understood. The mother-goddess.”
From his expression she could read nothing. He reflected on the ceiling above for a moment. “You’ve done very well,” he said. “It took me a while to figure that much out, even after I met the Krii.”
“A Kirin or a Kartayn?”
“A Kartayn,” he answered, laughing. “Though she did later tell me her true name.”
“How did you meet her?”
“She had me kidnapped, actually. Brun and I were riding north of Telyar; she had taken me to see the ruin of an old city that used to exist at the fork of the big river. The city was destroyed in one of their wars, but one of the towers is still standing at the site.” He used the Erejhen word shenesoeniis, which she translated in her head as “high place.”
“You saw it? You went inside it?”
“I saw it from a distance. Brun refused to go any closer, and as it was, we had already gone too close, though we didn’t know it yet. The city is nothing but a mound with grass and trees growing on it, but the tower shoots up out of the mound, exactly like the tapestries. It must have been five-tenths high. There wasn’t a soul in sight; this place is a sanctuary, Brun said, especially for the Erejhen, whose city this used to be.”
“Did she tell you the name of it?”
“Yes. Genfel. Genfynnel, to use the older name. She said the tower had a name, too, but she wouldn’t say it aloud so close to the place. Brun is isn’t usually superstitious, but she was on edge, that day.”
“I would give a lot to see that,” Jedda said. “I wasn’t sure the towers were real until I saw the ones in Montajhena.”
“They are magnificent, aren’t they?”
She simply shook her head. “Have you ever been inside one?”
He shook his head quickly. “No one goes inside them, except Malin herself. No one dares, not even her Krii, not even the Prin.”
“Why?”
He shook his head. “We’ll get to all that. But not now. I want to look at you.”
They sat in quiet for a while, studying each other peacefully. The day came down on her in the quiet, the whole long stretch of it. In her mind, she was watching the contented ships sinking slowly into the water, the placid ease with which the aircraft struck the surface, sank, and vanished. She was watching Tarma in the chair in the courtyard with the Erejhe
n guard commander in front of her. She said, “Thank you for changing the subject. I can’t take much more revelation. It’s been a very long day.”
“There’s not much more you need, for the moment. Just that I asked that you be sent here, and I asked that you be detained. I need to tell you that.”
She felt a flash of anger when he spoke so directly, she almost wished he had chosen to deceive her instead. She spoke before she understood the anger, asking harshly, “Why would you do that? Why single me out?”
The phrase that translates in Nadyan-Alenke as, “single me out,” is horrific. It is akin to the highest curse in the Hormling polite vocabulary, “May you always be one of a kind.”
He flushed slightly. “I did it because I know you love this place. And I know you love your own people. And I hoped you would be willing to work with me here.”
She was angry because she was grateful, and she preferred never to feel gratitude. She was glad he had given her no choice but to stay, and she resented how glad his presumption had made her.
“Also because,” he added, “you’re one of a handful of our people who has ever mastered the Erejhen language. The Erejhen will respect you for that.”
“You really don’t have to give me reasons, Opit. Or to flatter me. I’m glad to be here, I would have chosen to stay if I thought I had the choice. Things weren’t looking so nice at the consulate when Malin’s soldiers arrived.”
“What do you mean?”
She told him Vitter’s theory about Tarma, that she would have any knowledge of her own involvement in the debacle suppressed, by whatever means necessary. Her stomach turned over a little when she noted how easily he understood what she meant. “It’s possible your friend was right,” he said. “It is, after all, easy to make a Hormling disappear. There are so many to replace the missing one.” He looked at her, bemused. “Here I was, a little concerned that Malin sent troops to take the place. Maybe she understood what might happen.”
“It was lucky she did,” Jedda said. “Were you with her today?”
