Marrying a Monster

by Mel Dunay

  The rowdy went on laughing at her and calling her names for a minute or so, and Rina turned her back on him, resolved not to give him any more attention.

  She heard some shuffling and murmuring behind her, the sounds of someone trying to push their way up to the front, but turning around would just make her look afraid of the scumbag.

  Then suddenly she heard the rowdy yelp with pain-an easy sound to recognize because she’d been imagining what it might sound like.

  Before she could turn round, the tall man with the rumpled clothes pushed past her, dragging the young man by the arm.

  “Slow down,” the tall man told the driver. The hint of a growl in his voice had grown into something more.

  Rina was not surprised to see that the driver who had told her off reacted to the growl by meekly shifting gears. He slowed the bus down to a little above walking speed and opened the door.

  The tall man tossed the troublemaker out as casually as if he were a piece of luggage, and the driver shut the door again.

  Rina craned her neck to peer out the window and caught a glimpse of the young man picking himself up off the ground before he disappeared round a turn in the road. That was okay by her-she wasn’t bloodthirsty enough to want him permanently damaged.

  The tall man stationed himself behind Rina, about where the young rowdy had been, and for a moment Rina was reminded of a very old saying the river fishermen on the outskirts of Rivertown had, about escaping the jaws of the crocodile only to get shot by a dacoit.

  But this one behaved himself much better. He must have had the balance of a cat, because he barely jostled her even when the bus lurched through potholes big enough to hid a dead body in.

  When he did jostle her, it seemed to be by accident and he said “excuse me” quietly.

  As night fell, the bus drove on through the darkness and the pain in her feet was the main thing keeping Rina awake, along with the overhead light that was supposed to help people look for anything they dropped by accident.

  She was glad to be kept awake. She could doze standing up when she had to, but she preferred having a wall to prop herself up against, and Kajjal or another friend with her when she did.She did eventually get drowsy enough to have trouble staying upright when the bus lurched around the curves as it climbed up towards Summertown in the foothills.

  On one of these lurches she lost her balance and bumped into the tall man. The collision of her shoulders with a deep, muscular chest jolted her fully awake.

  The words “Excuse me, sorry!” came out of her like a small yelp, the moment before she turned back to make eye contact with the man.

  “Shh, you’ll wake the rest of them up,” he said. His voice came out as a soft, nasal drawl without any of the menace he had put into it when he was bossing the driver around earlier.

  He smiled a slow, lopsided grin that went further up the left side of his face than the right, and seemed to quiver with laughter.

  The unevenness should have made the smile look tougher or crueler, but instead there was a kind of vulnerability to it-forcing the right side of his face to smile seemed to take a real effort on his part.

  She found herself wondering if he had been hurt very badly sometime or other, and that was the reason his smile looked like that.

  Then she felt impertinent for wondering about it, blushed, and said “Thank you” for no particular reason except for what had happened earlier, and turned to face the front of the bus.

  The bus pulled up to the station on the outskirts of Summertown just before dawn. Rina staggered as she picked up her bag, and the stranger caught her elbow.

  “Are you all right?” He asked gently. “You look tired.”

  “I’ll be better once I get some caffeine into me,” She said, “Tea, coffee, soda pop-it doesn’t really matter right now.”

  She let him carry her bag down from the bus. Theoretically, he could have been planning on stealing it, but she was too tired to care. Besides, she still kept a tight grip on her purse, and that had most of her real valuables in it.

  “Is someone meeting you?” The tall man asked.

  “A friend of mine,” Rina said. “Who works in politics,” She added, hoping this made Amita sound suitably formidable and not someone whose friends should be kidnapped or tampered with.

  The tall man tilted his head on one side and looked at her like a large, inquisitive bird.

  “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to stay with you until your friend arrives,” He said. “At least let me stay with you until you manage to buy some tea. Someone’s got to make sure that you are getting the correct change.”

  “You’ve been up at least as long as I have,” Rina pointed out. “I don’t know that you're going to be any better at figuring out the change than I am.”

  He smiled again-it was if anything an even more charming smile by daylight-and ducked his head with a shy chuckle. “Perhaps I need your help more than you need mine,” he said.

  Rina relented, but did not ask his name, because she did not want to give him hers.

  She checked the arrival time for the bus headed up Mount Snarl, and sent Amita two texts, one to let her know that she had arrived and one to remind her what time they needed to be on the bus.

  The arrival and departure times for all the buses were approximations at best, but Rina did not want to be stranded in Summertown overnight just because Amita was lazy, and ditching her for being tardy was unfortunately pretty much out of the question.

  Then she set out to look for a tea stand close to the bus stop. She found one that seemed reasonably priced and had a decent variety. It didn’t seem to have much of a line, which may or may not have anything to do with the fact that it was run by a Gnosha.

  She ordered “whatever your special of the day is” and got black tea with cream and cinnamon in it.

  The tall man ordered unsweetened green tea with cream, and paid extra for it because the Gnosha had to make it from scratch. Neither of them had any trouble getting the payment right, nor did the Gnosha try to cheat them on the change.

  Rina sipped slowly at the hot tea without saying very much, and the world began to brighten almost at once, both because of the caffeine and because of the rising sun.

  The tall man finished a little bit ahead of her and returned the cup to the tea-seller so that he could wash it and use it for his next customer.

  "Feeling better?” The tall man asked.

  “Much better,” She told him. “The world almost begins to make sense again.”

  Except for the part where she was going up to her old village to get married to a creature that didn’t even exist, so that her parents wouldn’t have to pay fines to the town council, who unfortunately did exist.

  The tall man’s lips lifted slightly, but there was a sadness in his eyes that kept it from turning into a smile this time.

  “I know that feeling," He said. Rina found herself wondering what was in his past that seemed to burden him.

  Her phone dinged with a text message just after she returned her empty cup to the Gnosha who’d sold them the tea. She checked it and frowned.

  “Is your friend coming?” The tall man asked.

  “This is from my mother,” Rina said with a sigh. “She wants me to pick up some Summertown tea while I'm here.”

  Summertown had two main industries: entertaining the politicians when Parliament was not in session, and selling the tea that grew on the surrounding plantations.

  “They do grow good tea here,” The tall man acknowledged. His eyebrows raised as he looked at Rina’s face. “But you don't like the idea.”

  “I don't like what the plantation workers have to do to earn a living,” Rina told him. “Some of the smaller plantations don’t treat them too bad, but on the big ones they're practically slaves.”

  She paused. “Maybe you don't believe me-I own a small business, and I've hired people who got away from the big plantations. They’ve told me their stories.”

  “S
he is telling the truth,” The Gnosha told the tall man as he served tea to his other customers.

  “Some of them come to the Stetemo Hive for work, but we rarely need human help, either for the orchards or for what is left of our tea plantations. The Queens usually make sure that there are enough workers born to handle all the tasks on our lands.”

  “Believe me, if the Stetemo Hive sold tea in fancy decorative tins like the Royal Summertown Tea Company does, my mother would probably like it just as much,” Rina said.

  The froglike smile broadened on the face of the Gnosha tea vendor.

  “It so happens that I have a clean, empty tin box from the Royal Summertown Tea Company,” He said. “It could be yours, filled with Stetemo tea leaves...for a price.”

  The tall man chimed in with a price, a little lower than Rina would have quoted, and he and the tea vendor haggled back and forth for a little while. Finally, they settled on a price close to what Rina would have said as a starting price, and she paid it.

  “A pleasure to do business with the lady who helped things go smoothly at our toll gate yesterday, and the man who knows how to address the Queens properly.” The Gnosha said.

  “Thank you,” Rina said. Each Gnosha hive shared information telepathically among its members, so she was not surprised that the tea vendor knew about what had happened yesterday. She was surprised to have made such a favorable impression on the Stetemo Hive, though.

  “Sorry for intervening.” The tall man said after they had walked away from the tea vendor’s booth. “You looked tired, and I didn’t think you wanted to haggle very much.”

  “I didn’t," Rina said. “I’d probably have named a price and then he’d have named a price, and I would have paid what he wanted just to be done with it.”

  The two went back to the bus stop, and bought their tickets. Rina was surprised when the tall man ordered a ticket that would take him to Barleyfields, Kajjal’s former hometown: the end of the bus line on Mount Snarl.

  “I didn’t realize that was where you were headed,” she said to him.

  “You are going there too? I thought maybe you were, from the accent.”

  The alarm bells that his general helpfulness had silenced earlier started up again in Rina's head. Had she picked up a stalker?

  “I would be headed up even if you weren’t,” he said as though reading her mind. “I’m an anthropologist, I study old customs from all over the country.”

  “And you want to take a look at the smokeflower festivals?” Rina said.

  “Yes,” He said.

  “Well, you’d be better off studying some place a little less remote. There’s smokeflower festivals all over the Blue Smoke Mountains, that you can get to by decent roads. The people would be friendlier to outsiders too, at those places,” She added.

  That just drew a lopsided smile from him, as if he liked the idea of a challenge, and she remembered the way he'd dealt with the scumbag yesterday. This man could probably handle himself.

  All he said was: “I am going to Mount Snarl because it has not yet become commercialized, and the people only tell their stories among themselves. The stories change when they are told for tourists.”

  “They change even when they’re told to each other,” Rina retorted.

  “When I was in college, there were several students from Mount Snarl besides me, mostly from different villages. When we compare notes about the Mountain King wedding, for example, everyone had heard a different version of why we do it.”

  “Perfect,” The tall man said, “More stories for me to record.”

  Well, it was a more plausible reason for going up Mount Snarl than she would have thought. The average stalker would not have come up with it.

  “I suppose I should ask you your name,” she said at last.

  “Vipin of the Rijal family,” he said, and went on to give his city and district, which was typical of people who do not have a family member everyone had heard of, like a politician or a cricket player.

  The city didn’t mean anything to Rina but she recognize the district. It was well to the north of here: a harsh, arid place which produced mostly soldiers, cattle and athletes.

  In all the old stories, the strangest creatures and the toughest invaders always came from that part of the world.

  “My name is Rina,” she offered. She didn't give her father’s name; he could probably learn it in Barleyfields if he figured out who to ask.

  “May I ask whether you are going through the ritual? I would be interested hearing in your thoughts about it.”

  She decided it was none of his business-although, again, depending on who he chose to ask in which village, he could probably find out.

  “I can give you my thoughts anyway, as someone who grew up on Mount Snarl. But you don't seem to have done your homework, or you would know that only young, unmarried maidens go through the marriage to the Mountain King.”

  Not that she was old, exactly, but she would be older than most of the other women participating.

  He tucked in his chin and ducked his head nervously. “You look young enough to me.” He said softly.

  She laughed at that. “Flatterer. But it is the right thing to say even if it’s not true.”

  He chuckled. “It is true. I would not have said it if I didn’t think it, although you are right: if I did not think it, I would have had to come up with something else polite to say.”

  “Rina! There you are!” Amita all but pounced on Rina, even though Rina had asked her to text her when she was about to show up.

  Amita very ostentatiously air-kissed Rina on both cheeks, even though they would barely see each other once they were back in their home village.

  “Who’s your friend, Rina?” Amita cooed, eyeing Vipin up like a piece of meat.

  Rina had previously noticed that the plain black slacks he wore rode low on a well-shaped pair of hips, and emphasized a long, lean pair of legs.

  She had also noticed that his plain white dress shirt was unbuttoned to the sternum and had the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, showing off a pair of strong, wiry forearms. Somehow, with Amita around, Rina found herself noticing all over again.

  Amita had a way of throwing that kind of thing into high relief. When she was properly dressed up, which she was not, at the moment, she looked like a goddess, with her huge doe eyes and pouty lips, and a lean but busty figure.

  Amita bought clothes from Rina’s shop occasionally on credit, always using her father’s status in the village or her vaguely hinted political connections as an excuse not to pay.

  Most of the time, Rina didn’t mind: Amita should have been a model instead of a political intern, and just her wearing their clothes and occasionally remembering to tell people where she bought them when asked brought Rina and Kajjal quite a bit of business.

  But somehow seeing Amita alongside this soft-spoken man with the sad eyes bothered Rina. If Amita decided she wanted him, she would have him; most men couldn’t resist her.

  But she would always go back to her minister of agriculture, and if this Vipin had a heart capable of breaking, she would probably break it. So Rina introduced the two to each other reluctantly.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Amita,” Was all that Vipin said.

  He surveyed her and her white miniskirt and her hot pink sleeveless blouse with a kind of detached appreciation. it was not the strongest reaction Rina had ever seen Amita get from a man.

  But she had seen men fall hard for the woman after starting out with no more interest than that, if Amita felt like turning on all her charm. Which, since she would likely be bored on the trip up with nothing better to do, she probably would.

  The three of them boarded the bus together. Amita tried to get Rina to carry her bags for her, but Vipin stepped in and volunteered. The bus headed for Mount Snarl was not as full as the one Rina had come into town on, and the three had no trouble getting seats together.

  Amita complained of the stink of the bus, and wanted to sit ne
xt to the window until she realized that Vipin planned to sit on the outside. Then she changed her mind and wanted to sit in the middle.

  Rina had mixed feelings about that. She would’ve preferred that he take the middle seat, so she would not have to talk to Amita. But the window seat, would give Rina more fresh air, and after all, Vipin could fulfill his self-proclaimed role as protector more easily on the aisle seat.

  “I don’t know about you, but this is like, way earlier for me to be out of bed,” Amita said after the bus had started to move.

  She looked at Vipin as she spoke. “I think I'm going to take a nap now.”

  She closed her eyes and dropped her head in a way that would not have fooled a five-year-old. Rina watched as Amita took advantage of every bump and turn in the bus’s movements to lurch towards Vipin.

  He did not seemed comfortable with this: his golden skin flushed with embarrassment every time her head landed on his shoulder or tilted down so that her cheek would rest on that strong chest. He kept trying to squirm into different positions, again using the bus's movements to jostle her back into an upright position.

  Rina found this funny, and the fact that these contortions always seemed to pull his shirt open, and force him to button it back up to the sternum, was an added bonus.

  But eventually the caffeine wore off and Rina dozed off herself. She woke up with a start to find the sun in the west ahead of them, and a sheer rock face outside the windows on the right ride of the bus.

  Outside the window at her left elbow, she could see a long steep slope and the foothills below it, both covered in smokeflowers. When the sun was higher, the flowers will have shown the smoky blue of their name, but with the sun low enough to turn the sky orange, the vast carpet of flowers looked almost purple.

  This species of flowers only bloomed once every nine years, and Rina had read an article or two saying that this was a much heavier year for the blooming than the botanists had ever seen before.

  She wondered if there would be any stories about that in the villages, and what Vipin would make of them when he heard them.

  Rina glanced at her companions. Vipin was out like a spent light bulb, leaning so far sideways in the aisle that he blocked the path. Amita was pillowing her head on his left arm, and her right hand was spread out on his thigh. Rina leaned over and tapped Vipin on the shoulder.