by Tim Lebbon
After all, Rhiana had offered a meal that they would never forget.
“ IT’S THE LIVER that's poisonous,” Rhiana said. “Make sure you remove that whole and the rest of the meat is wondrous. Watch.” She had the dead lizard on the ground before her, laid across a few wide sheets of bark.
The others were leaning against their saddles, relaxing in the warmth from the fire and sipping the remainder of the root wine from their mugs. Only Noon was absent, sitting somewhere away from the camp, on watch. Ramus sat quietly against his saddle, his backpack within easy reach. He was not actively ignoring Nomi, yet since her return from the hunt he had not gone out of his way to talk to her.
Beko was as relaxed and casual as ever. He smiled at her, and everything seemed unchanged. She was glad. She would hate there to be tension between them.
Rhiana heated her knife in the fire, turned the lizard onto its back and sliced. With a few deft swipes of the blade the animal lay open and bare, steaming slightly in the fading light. The Serian leaned back to view the corpse then worked with the knife again, lifting out a glistening mass and dropping it into the fire. Then she took a root-wine bottle and poured a good slug into the wound.
“There,” she said. “All the nasty stuff burned away, all the good stuff left. Now to really make the meal.”
Nomi felt a brief sense of disgust when Rhiana chopped off the animal's head and legs, stripped its scaly skin and started slicing chunks of meat and dropping them into a pot. But she thought again of what Ramus had said, and disgust turned to satisfaction that she had at least been involved in the hunt. She'd seen the animal killed, knew that it had died quickly and cleanly, and now it was being prepared with casual skill by someone who knew the value of good meat.
“This is when I turn good to great,” Rhiana said. She started crushing berries, slicing fine washed roots and tearing leaves into the pot with the meat. “This is a good place for herbs and berries,” she said. “It's the water that rises with the spring, fresh and clear and untouched by the sun or moons. Spends its life underground, picking up all sorts of hints of nature, and when it comes up here it seeps through the soil and gives these plants life. Don't know why it's so good. Just know it is.”
“Very good,” Ramin said. “Sends your mind away!”
“What do you mean?” Nomi asked.
“He means we're going to get swayed,” Ramus said.
“Oh.” Nomi had never been one for such things. Wine, yes, in reasonable quantities, but she liked maintaining control of her mind. She glanced at Beko and their eyes locked briefly before they both looked away. Thinking the same thing? she wondered. Perhaps. She was thinking about loss of control. “Is that really safe?” she asked.
“Gives you less of a headache than that pissing root wine,” Konrad said.
“I mean, with us camping so close to the border.”
“We can still fight if we're swayed,” Lulah said.
“And Noon is on watch.”
“Don't worry,” Beko said. “It's not like the sky-root you get in the city. That's meant to lay you out cold. This is all natural, all fresh.”
Rhiana finished chopping, crushing and slicing and stirred the meat and plants together. Then she poured in half a bottle of root wine and hung the pot over the fire. “It'll take a while.
Time for a talk or a poem, a song or a story. Which will it be?”
“I'd like to hear a story from Nomi,” Beko said.
Nomi laughed and shook her head. “I'm no storyteller. You Serians are the ones known for that. In fact, Ramus and I only hired you for your cooking and storytelling skills.”
“That's right,” Ramus said. “We can look after ourselves.”
He spoke it so seriously that it was a few beats before everyone started to laugh.
THE SMELLS FROM the cooking pot were wonderful. After some haranguing, Beko stood and recited a poem, part of something old augmented by some improvisation . . . or so he claimed. To Nomi, it sounded like something he had prepared long before. It spoke of the moons shedding their light on unknown lands, the curve of hips against rolling landscapes, the smell and dust of the trail washed away in pure waters, the caress of trees against a sky heavy with rain, the rivers flowing like Noreela's bloodlines. The camp remained silent and contemplative after he finished, and then Rhiana clanged the pot and announced that the meal was ready.
The meat was wonderful—rich, tender and moist, and the spices, herbs and root extracts complemented it perfectly. It cut a warm path down into her stomach, driving any chills from the inside out, and she found herself chewing and swallowing with eyes half-closed. Every one of Nomi's senses was focused on the meal. She looked at her plate and perceived patterns in the food there; a face with one eye, a bird impaled on a thick thorn of a lightning tree, clouds striving to resemble something else. The smell was continuous, warm and smoky. Tastes grew and faded with each mouthful, the meat providing a perfect canvas on which the other ingredients painted their own particular images. Her mouth and tongue became her prime organs, swilling the food around to make the most of its touch, listening to the sound her teeth made grinding through meat, cracking seedpods and grinding leaf stalks. It was a sensory experience, and the satisfaction the food brought to her empty stomach was almost an afterthought.
When she had finished, she ran her finger around the plate, gathering juice and errant herb shreds and licking them off. Her eyes were still almost closed, and she was reveling in the results of the meal. Because though the eating was over, she was beginning to understand what Rhiana and Beko had said about camping here. It was indeed a special place. She was more aware than ever of her body, where her limbs lay, the sensation of the ground pressing at her rear and legs, the touch of the evening breeze through her hair, and across her stomach where Beko had touched her, and in her fingertips she felt the memory of that touch as though she had made it herself. She frowned, inhaled quickly and remembered the other way he had touched her soon after, and then she felt the heat of that touch in her own hand. She opened her eyes dreamily and checked that her hands were not drifting anywhere they should not, but no, it was an imagined sensation.
“That was a meal,” Ramus said. He nodded slowly, thoughtfully, and said the same thing again, as though keen to make sure everyone knew.
“This is good,” Beko said.
“Not too bad, Rhiana,” Ramin said. “Meat could have been . . . a bit more tender.”
“Piss on you,” Rhiana said.
“What, out here where the moons can see us?”
Rhiana giggled softly. “You wish.”
Ramin stood slowly—Nomi watched, and it seemed to take almost forever for him to stand—and stretched, fingers reaching for the mysterious stars as though there was a very real chance he could grab them.
“What a statue he would make,” Lulah said. “Dark as the night, bald as a baby, ugly as a seethe-gator's cock.”
Ramin laughed out loud, holding his stomach and bending over when it became too much. He laughed until he gagged, and then fell to his knees. “You're only jealous of my finely sculpted body,” he said. He crawled to her on all fours, tongue lolling like a tamed wolf's.
Lulah laughed. It was a low, rumbling chuckle, like a basket of stones being rolled, and Nomi found it endlessly fascinating. She sat up straighter and stared at the one-eyed Serian with frank amazement, wondering what she would say next, what she would do.
Lulah's legs fell open, Ramin crawled forward, and then she clamped her legs closed around his neck. He still giggled, even as she started gently slapping him around the face. “Ramin should learn manners,” she said, punctuating each word with a slap. None of them was hard, and the affection these two had for each other was palpable.
Nomi stood and swayed with the rapid influx of information. It was as though she had suddenly grown a hundred steps tall and could see much farther, hear more, taste and feel more of the land than she ever had before. She was standing on a living map of the
area, rising up and reading it. Beyond the trees there was more hillside, and then an old fence marking the boundary of an abandoned farmstead. The buildings were low and dark, but even though the farmstead was a mile distant and hidden by the folds in the land, she knew it was a ruin. She wondered where the farmers had gone, and suddenly their fate was clear to her: the disease and death, all of them rotting into the ground or being taken by carrion creatures. It was sad, but part of the risk of working the land. She turned slowly and saw past the stream, the horses and the marshy ground, down into the woods where they had killed the lizard. She could picture the paths and hillocks, the streams and fallen trees, the nesting birds and the marching ants as though she were there. And, if she breathed in deeply enough, she could smell that place.
She looked across the campfire at where Beko lay against his saddle, eyes closed and hands crossed on his stomach. And she knew that he was there as well.
“What is this?” she said.
“Swayed, that's all,” Rhiana said. “Something under the ground, maybe. Something that flows with the water. It touched the plants, we eat the plants and we're swayed.”
“Poor Noon,” Konrad said. “He's up there in the shadows. Can't see him, but—”
“Picking his nose,” Beko said, and he snorted laughter. Others joined in, and Nomi turned and looked uphill to where Noon had hidden himself away. She could sense him up there, and when she closed her eyes she could almost see him as well.
And then suddenly she was back in the forest once more, below that tree where Beko had killed the lizard. She went slowly down to her knees and stared at him across the fire, and he was looking at her with hooded eyes, his face shimmering with the heat rising from the flames. Nomi blinked and smelled the forest, and she wondered whether she would feel him touch her again.
She lay down with her head on her saddle and closed her eyes, eager for more.
RAMUS HAD NEVER felt anything like this. He had been swayed on dried sky-root several times back in Long Marrakash, and each time its effect upon him had lessened. It was a relaxant that slowed the heart and made bad things seem good, and good things seem better. He drank root wine regularly, and sometimes Nomi would give him a bottle of her Ventgorian wine as well. He had even tried flail—a liquid drug derived from the spawn of wolf frogs in the wetlands west of Long Marrakash. It had pumped through his system and lit the darkness, but the illumination hurt like fire. Flail had been unpleasant, hurtful and probably addictive, and he had never returned to it.
But this . . . this was different. His perceptions were opened, not relaxed, sight and touch enhanced as though he could rise and expand from the weak flesh-and-blood thing he was.
He could feel the landscape around them. The sun was down now and darkness had fallen, but the lie of the land was more illuminated than if it had been daylight, and he stood atop the hill, looking out and seeing rather than feeling. He was afraid to test how far his senses went, but he knew this hillside and stream, the forest and barely used paths beyond, the deserted farmstead to the east and the hill rising above, back the way they had come.
It was extraordinary. He could even feel the black heart of his illness, a shadow on his senses like a blank spot in the vision of someone going blind . . . which he supposed he was. The growths behind his eyes could crowd in at any moment and steal his sight, and if he was five hundred miles from home when that happened he was finished. Swayed, perceptions so much wider and clearer than ever before, he even tried to interrogate his sickness. But though it was a shadow within him, it offered up nothing. It would take more than some unknown drug from the ground to help him see that deep.
He opened his eyes and glanced around the camp. Konrad was sitting on his saddle with his head bent back, looking up at the stars and moon and the darkness in between. Lulah still sat with Ramin clasped between her legs, and he could hear the gentle mutter of their voices. There was nothing at all sexual about their pose, and affection radiated from them in waves. Rhiana had returned to the cooking pot and seemed to be picking scraps of something from what was left of the food, making delighted noises as though it was the first time she had tasted anything. Beko and Nomi . . .
Ramus was sure that they were still there, but when he looked directly at where they had been, they were there no more. Nomi's saddle was bare, gleaming in the moonlight, and Beko's weapon roll and saddle lay some way off, across the other side of the fire.
No one else seemed to notice that they had gone.
Ramus closed his eyes and sensed the camp. It was like looking at a map of the place, and he was one of the best mapmakers he knew. There was the fire, the Serians and himself lying within its influence, the horses standing still and quiet in the trees, the ring of tents and, beyond the fire's light and within the undergrowth to the east, Beko and Nomi.
Ramus sat up and opened his eyes. It was not his business. Timal had not been his business, either, not really, but . . .
They were only sitting together, barely touching. Perhaps they were not even talking.
Ramus felt tired. His eyelids drooped and behind them he felt exhaustion closing in, blanking out the effects of the food, swaying him back down from high to the lowness of true sleep. He looked around the camp and saw the others drifting off as well, and the empty spaces where Beko and Nomi should have been, and as sleep took him he looked to the east once more.
They were still there, within those bushes, but now he could only make out one form. Entwined, moving beneath the moonlight, and as he was dragged down toward unconsciousness he did not know whether the cry he heard was Nomi in ecstasy, or himself in pain.
IT HAD NEVER been like this. She could feel Beko within her, and she could feel herself around him, and as she looked up into his eyes, she knew that he was feeling something similar, sensations from both of them mixing and merging as though drawn from the same warm spring. She was gasping with the wonder of it all and Beko breathed into her mouth, and she locked her legs around him to make sure they stayed together.
They had come here to talk, and even then she had not been sure whether she was dreaming. Beko had been mumbling something about the lie of the land and how beautiful shadows were in the darkness, and then the world had turned onto its side and her cool skin had grown warm where he touched her.
He lowered his head so that they were cheek to cheek, and Nomi looked up through the trees at the sky. Light danced as leaves shifted in the breeze, reflecting campfire and stars. Beko began to move faster, she clasped him harder, and then she heard a cry that should have been both of them together, but was not.
“The voyage starts so well!” Ramus shouted, his laughter high and uncontrolled. “It starts so well, and then our Serians get us swayed, and then the fucking begins!”
Beko withdrew and knelt, and Nomi cried out at the overwhelming sense of abandonment. She sat up and reached for him, seeing the same feeling reflected in his eyes. But there was something else there too. Anger.
She pulled her shirt closed and brought her knees up to her chest.
“Don't cover up for me!” Ramus was carrying a burning brand from the fire, and Nomi noticed the taint of scorched hair and skin on the air.
“Ramus, what have you done?” she said.
“What have I done? Me?” He took a step forward and Beko stood, tucking himself back into his trousers and moving between Ramus and Nomi.
Ramus laughed. Shook his head. And Nomi saw the tears on his face, though whether they were from the pain of the burn on his arm or something else, she did not want to know.
She was still swayed, but the shock had driven much of the effect away.
“This is nothing to do with you, Ramus,” she said, hating the appeal in her voice. Isn't it? she thought. She could not hide a flush of guilt, but at the same time she wished that he would piss off and let her and Beko finish what they had begun.
Ramus staggered slightly, and when Beko moved aside again, Nomi could just make out the ugly burn on his ar
m.
“Your arm!” she said, aghast.
“I woke myself up. They put us to sleep but I woke myself up, because the truth needed seeing.”
“The truth of what?”
“You,” Ramus said, but already the anger was leeching from his voice. “You two.”
“As Nomi said, it's nothing to do with you.”
“No?” Ramus said, and his voice sounded weaker than ever. “Really?”
Nomi stood. “Oh, Ramus, I didn't realize . . . I didn't know . . .”
Ramus fell and Beko caught him, knocking the still-smoldering brand from his hand and lowering him gently to the ground.
“Rhiana!” Beko called. He glanced across at Nomi. “You should dress,” he said quietly.
Nomi pulled on her trousers, the cool breeze no longer pleasant against her damp skin. She wanted to go to Ramus, hold him, but now there was a shadow between them deeper than simple night. It was shaped from his surprising anger, and her own resentment at what he had done.
“Is he all right?” she asked.
“He's fainted,” Beko said. He was still holding Ramus, one hand behind his head to keep him comfortable. The Serian could have let him fall to the ground. And though there was anger in his eyes when he glanced at Nomi, she saw compassion there as well.
“You're a good man,” she blurted, looking away in embarrassment. Brought down from their sway by the sudden events, the sex hung heavy between them, and now Nomi was complicating it even more.
“I feel like slitting his pissing throat,” Beko said, then chuckled. “Couldn't he have left it another few beats, eh?”
Nomi laughed gently.
Rhiana burst through the undergrowth. She carried an oil lantern in one hand, a short sword in the other. She glanced around the small clearing beneath the shrub's overhang and seemed to make sense of things in a heartbeat. She threw a brief smile at Nomi, sheathed her weapon and knelt beside Beko and Ramus.
