A Bloom in the North

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  "How long ago?" I asked.

  "They don't know," Kaduin said. He was lying down now; I could just see the tip of his nose and the gleam of his eyes in the shadows of the blanket he'd pulled up to his chin. "Hundreds of years ago. Maybe thousands?" He yawned.

  "Rest," Seper said. "There is much to be done."

  "Yes," he said and closed his eyes.

  The two of us sat by the fire while he drowsed off. At last I said to my companion, "What do you think?"

  "I think there is much to be done," Seper said again.

  The warmth off the fire only made my limbs feel colder by contrast. "I'm tired, Seper."

  "Then sleep," it said gently.

  In the morning I found a narrow plate awaiting me by the fire, and on it three rich small cuts of meat wrapped in bright green leaves. There was a similar plate next to Kaduin, but not beside Seper. I brought my plate with me when I went in search of the anadi. She was tending to Roika, who was awake and sitting up. I pointed to the plate and she narrowed her eyes and mimed eating it.

  "Do you feel well enough to write?" I asked him.

  "Yes?" he said.

  I brought him the paper and said, "Ask her why Kaduin and I have these plates but not Seper. Doesn't it need breakfast?"

  The anadi looked over Roika's shoulder as he wrote and snorted when he finished. She plucked the pen up, dipped it in the inkwell and scrawled a quick note beneath his.

  "She says that breeders need more and different food from eperu and don't we know anything." He glanced at me. "It seems not."

  The anadi tapped him on the shoulder and said a word slowly, then motioned for us to follow her. So we did... to breakfast, where Roika had his first experience of northern cooking and the rest of us learned that our first meal was no anomaly. The first meal of the day was served with small flat cakes made of something shredded and sweet, hot from a pan and glossy with fragrant oil. With this, some combination of vegetables I didn't recognize and strips of pale meat marinated in a tangy yellow sauce. Everyone ate from the same bowls and plates, but I noticed the two northern anadi had narrow plates like the ones Kaduin and I had found by our fire.

  Afterward, several more Jokka came to call, one of them with a stack of paper. The meeting that followed was a laborious one, involving not only writing back and forth, but reading aloud, something the herbalist insisted on. But from these people we learned that the northern Jokka were astonished at our arrival and wanted very much to know about us and the remains of the civilization they'd fled. Roika, who'd been propped up against a wall with several pillows, said to me, "Don't make any promises."

  "Don't we want what they have?" I said to him, ears flicking back.

  "I did not build the Stone Moon so foreigners could take it from us," Roika said. "Ask them how many of them there are, about other towns."

  Kaduin scowled but I said, "Please." So he asked, and one question led to the next. The answers were surprising: there were only two other towns and a scattering of single-family homesteads in between. This town had some nine hundred people in it, and while it was the smallest of the three the others weren't much larger: apparently they considered having grown their population to this size a great accomplishment, for very few of them had made it to this continent at all. This town traded the products of the forest and sea to the other two, which sent back cloth and metal. There was almost no infrastructure, certainly no empire.

  "But then," Kaduin said as he read one of their responses, "why would they need it? They live among riches. They don't need one another to survive the way we do." He glanced at me. "Can I tell them now about the ship and our plans?"

  "Go ahead," I said.

  This explication brought on exclamations of surprise and then speculative looks amid the general excitement. The newcomers consulted with our hosts, and the anadi growled something to them that set their ears back. She pointed at us and spoke at length, gesturing with her hands. Then one of them handed her the pen.

  "She wants us to bring the ship to... someplace. I'm not sure what that means. And she wants to see all the Jokka on it. The more of us she can see, the more likely she'll understand what's wrong with us."

  I glanced at Roika who said, "We may as well. We won't be leaving here for months anyway."

  "Months!" I exclaimed.

  "The seas are rough in winter," Roika said. "It's safer to wait until spring before making the return trip."

  "Months would give us time to see if their aid really does help," Seper offered.

  I sighed. "Let it be done, then. And Kaduin..." When he looked up, I said, "You'll be in charge of arranging all this."

  "Ke eperu?" he said, startled.

  "You're the most facile with writing," I said. "Until we can speak with them, it's the only way."

  As he dove back into the one-sided conversation with the northerners, Seper murmured, "You give him the task he wants very much to do."

  "Do you want me to assign you to him as well?"

  Seper grimaced, ears flicking back. "Someone should go with him."

  "And someone should stay here."

  It glanced at Roika before saying, "Is that necessary?"

  I held its gaze until it relented. With a sigh, it said, "As you will."

  "You could have gone with them," Roika said later, lying on the healer's couch while she thumbed through stacks of records at her table. "They could have used the help."

  "Kaduin needs to do something for himself," I said. "He's ready. He deserves the chance to prove he can accomplish great deeds on his own."

  Roika smiled, eyes closed. "You've raised him well."

  I sought any possible sign of sarcasm and heard none. So I said, "And I gave him the task because I'm tired."

  "Not too much longer now, ke eperu," Roika said. "And then it will be over."

  "I'm not an eperu anymore," I said.

  "Do you think of yourself as anadi, then?" he asked, parting his lashes just enough to study me. At my expression, he said, "I didn't think so."

  "To deny what I am now would be to deny what you did to me," I said.

  "So why do you do it?"

  I looked at my knees and squeezed my eyes shut. "There's only one anadi in my life, Roika. I'm not her."

  "And now you know why I call you ke eperu," he said, quiet, but when I looked up in surprise he refused to say more.

  That evening after another astonishing meal, Seper, Kaduin and I repaired to our blankets in the front room. Outside the windows a deep blue twilight had fallen and through it I could see the lamps hanging from the eaves of other wooden houses, casting warm reddish lights in the autumn dark. Seper rebuilt the fire from the coals with wood that smelled like incense when it burned, sweet and fragrant and rare.

  “Their cove is about an hour’s walk away,” Kaduin said to us as we settled in. “Nobody seems to ride around here, I gather the trees are too thick? Have you seen any riding beasts, ke Thenet?”

  “None,” I said. “But I haven’t left the house.”

  “Well, it’s not important,” he said, more to himself than to us. “The cove is where they fish, there are several boats tied down there. Nothing the size of ours, but the place is large enough for us to bring the Endurance. The northerners say it will be safer from storms there. So we walked back to the beach and ke Denret says they’ll sail the ship there tomorrow. He was amenable to having some of the Jokka up here at the settlement, so once they anchor at the cove we should be seeing them.” He watched Seper feed the fire. In profile, I saw the resemblance to his father more strongly, particularly with the new confidence that squared his shoulders and raised his chin. There was a little of his mother Magun in him too, in the strength of his nose and the ember-red of his eyes.

  But then he smiled at me, that same bright eager smile he’d given me since childhood, and all resemblance to his parents vanished. “I think I’m beginning to understand them a little, too. They often use the same words we do, it’s just that they pronounce them
differently. This place for instance. They call it a het and it’s spelled ‘het,’ just like at home. Except they don’t say ‘het,’ they say ‘aith.’”

  “That doesn’t sound at all like het,” Seper said, sitting next to me.

  “No, no of course it doesn’t,” Kaduin said. “But if you start listening, you notice that a lot of the words with ‘eh’ sounds now have ‘ai’ sounds. And a lot of the ‘t’ sounds have become 'th.' They have a different rhythm when they speak, so it’s hard to pull those changes out, but if you pay attention when they’re reading aloud from what they’ve written you can hear it. Plus, they seem to have different versions of a word when it speaks of one single object or several—“

  Our looks must have been instructive, for he trailed to a halt and flushed at the ears. Laughing, he said, “I know it sounds crazy. But once you start listening for the changes, they really do start making sense.” He looked past us and added, “Yes?”

  “Yes,” said the healer, who was standing at the door with a tray of steaming mugs. And though I could hear a hint of the accent Kaduin had been explaining, I understood her quite well.

  “They’re learning how we speak too,” Kaduin added. “Pretty quickly now that they’ve heard the shipboard Jokka too.”

  The healer brought our tray and set it down, and amid the mugs there was a slip of paper. Kaduin peered at it and read, “These are for warming the stomach before sleeping. Because it’s cold out.” He looked up at her. “Thank you.”

  She inclined her head. Then tapped her chest. “Loë.”

  “Loë?” I said. “Some new word we don’t know?”

  “Loë,” the healer repeated, pointing to herself. She pointed at me and arched her brows.

  “Ah, names,” Kaduin said. He pointed at me. “Thenet.” And at Seper and himself, repeating the exercise.

  Satisfied, the anadi said, “Kaduin. Thenet. Seper.” And added something that was perhaps ‘good night,’ for she left us then.

  “Sae-dwyn,” Kaduin repeated, bemused. “I almost like it better that way.”

  Seper glanced at me. It was not the only one who saw Kaduin’s enthusiasm. I said only, “You’ve done well, Kaduin. Keep going.”

  “Yes, ke eperu,” he said, beaming.

  The following day Kaduin, Seper and the eperu and anadi who were—what could I say? Joined? Mated? Left early to go to the cove and wait for the ship. Loë stood with me at the door, breath curling white from her mouth; when they’d vanished amid the general bustle of the het, she drew me back to her workroom where Roika had resumed his seat after eating with us. He was reading through a handful of sheets left from the conversations that had happened since we’d arrived, and as I entered, he said, “They use a lot of words I’m not familiar with.”

  “Kaduin said some of the vocabulary is particular to them.” I stopped as the anadi waved me over, so I joined her at the table as she unwrapped a leather package and brought forth from it a great stack of papers bound together with a cover. I had not seen so much paper in one place ever and when she opened it to reveal a page covered in tight, neat writing and accompanied by painted illustrations I drew in a sharp breath.

  “What is it?” Roika asked.

  “Come see."

  He joined us then, moving without grace but not needing help. For some time he said nothing, staring at it. Then at last he whispered, “Gods of the Trinity.”

  “What does it say?” I asked, glancing at him.

  He touched a finger lightly to the picture, a pale flower tipped in lilac with a scattering of amber pollen on one petal. “I don’t understand a great deal of it. But it’s something about the medicinal uses of this flower. Where it’s found, when. How to prepare it.”

  My ears flattened. “How many flowers and plants are in this book?”

  Roika glanced at the anadi, hand hovering over the bottom edge of the page. When she gestured assent, he flipped to several pages at random. The catalog was extensive and the flora described unfamiliar to me.

  Loë offered some comment, then pointed to another of these compendiums. That one had anatomical illustrations. “Disease,” Roika said, and not all the thickness in his voice could dilute the awe in it. “And how to treat it.”

  The anadi opened to a page that had been marked with a thin strip of leather and tapped one entry. Roika leaned over it and I saw him go gray at the ears.

  “Roika?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The terminology is… I can’t read most of it. But they seem to know an adult form of black-spit.”

  “Is there any information about curing it?” I asked.

  “There is treatment information,” he said. “There is nothing here about curing. Unless one of these foreign words involves that.”

  “Ask her,” I said. “Ask her if she can make you well.”

  I expected him to find the paper and pen, but all he did was raise his head and meet her eyes. The regret that softened her gaze was more eloquent than words. She touched his shoulder, then groped for the pen and a scrap of paper, jotting something down on it and offering it to him. She pointed to the words as she spoke them out loud.

  “She says she’ll do what she can,” he said.

  “How long?” I asked, soft.

  Roika looked at the paper and shuddered, and in that moment I felt a terrible, unwilling tenderness at the revelation of his fear. “Thenet… Thenet, I don’t want to know.”

  I drew in a breath and nodded. “Well. We should find some way to occupy ourselves then.”

  “You could join the others,” he said.

  “Kaduin has that matter well in hand,” I said. I glanced at Loë. “Maybe we should learn to understand her better instead. It would give us something to do.”

  He glanced at the anadi, who was listening to us with pricked ears and a considering expression.

  “So it would,” he said, and pulled the paper back over.

  That evening Kaduin returned with Marilin and two of the emodo from the vessel. Loë was watching when they bowed deeply to Roika, and she was very attentive to how he spoke to them and the respect in their responses. I wondered what she made of it, given how little we'd said to her of our relative importance at home. After a time, she withdrew to have a low, intent conversation with her housemates and I joined Kaduin and Seper to hear how their day had gone. Denret was still with the ship for now, it seemed, but a good twenty Jokka had come with Marilin and were now being settled in houses near the healer's. They would be along during the day to speak with Roika, Kaduin reported with a stiff face but an even voice. If this situation was giving him the opportunity to work on his comportment among those with whom he disagreed, I judged the practice would serve him. I doubted the world we returned to would be very much like the one we'd left.

  In the morning Loë allowed Roika another two such meetings and then sent the Jokka away. She showed him a piece of paper: "Now your health." He acquiesced. I followed them because she seemed to expect it, and this involved my first trip out of the house and into the het at large. The clearing it occupied was surrounded by trees so enormous that some of the houses had been built into them or against them. I found it curious that such a perfect open space existed in the forest and soon discovered why when we passed a series of homes built into part of a fallen log. Roika caught me glancing at it and said, "The danger must have been immense."

  "If they cleared it themselves," I said. "Maybe it was like this when they came."

  Loë brought us to what looked like another small house, but we entered into a narrow room bordered in four doors. She stopped us and pointed Roika at one of them, saying something authoritative. A swell of dry heat engulfed us when he opened the door, startling after the chill outside. The anadi went into the room and patted the bench in it, making a show of taking deep, slow breaths.

  "All right," he said to her. "I understand." He vanished into the room and the anadi tugged on my arm. I followed her obediently out the large door in the back o
f the house onto a deck with a beautiful view. Decoratively arranged rocks boxed in a spring that extended well out toward the encroaching forest. The steam rising off the water smelled tangy, like salt and metal, enough to make my mouth water.

  The anadi smiled crookedly at my confusion and started undressing. Leaving her clothing neatly folded on a bench she slid into the waters and beckoned to me with an expression that drew an unwilling laugh from me: she looked so much like a handler trying to entice a recalcitrant rikka. I wanted to tell her how tired this rikka was of the harness and the work of pulling its burdens, but lacking the words I settled for shedding my clothes and following her. I didn't miss her studying the evidence of my stunted Turning, but her regard was so clinical I couldn't find offense in it. And the water... the water made the exposure worthwhile. It was so hot it hurt before my limbs acclimated, and it felt so heavy that the pressure on my body made it hard for me to breathe. And yet I felt so light and the waters so soft. I shivered and let my head hang, sucking in the steam, tasting the metal sting on my tongue, inside my nostrils.

  When next I opened my eyes there was a cup of cold water sitting on the rim of the spring alongside me. I drank and then drifted back into the warmth until the creak of the door drew me from my reverie. Roika was carefully shedding his pants to go with the shirt he'd left on the bench beside Loë's.

  From his throat swung a golden ring on a black cord. My eyes seized on it. When he straightened and saw my face, he smiled a little. "You kept hers. I kept yours. It seemed fair." He looked down at it, touched it with a finger. "Though I don't wear it when I think it might be seen, and disrespected." When I didn't say anything, he stepped into the water and said, "Besides, it goes with the chunk of flesh you took out of my shoulder."