by Marc Secchia
But our true enemy was tiredness. It seeped into our bones like the chill of a stormy Alldark night slithering about the psyche of a superstitious man. What worked for P’dáronï was napping on my back while I carried her through the night. She was able to sleep at the drop of a brass terl while I ran at a healthy trot that ate the leagues. However, I struggled to find any kind of rest. P’dáronï’s transitions, as she termed her teleportation through space, invariably disturbed me–and there was always the spectre of the Wurm lurking at the edge of my consciousness, always imminent, always … slithering was not the right word. Snakes slither. Monsters that carve new channels for rivers? And squash forests for fun? Ay.
“A bath together?” asked P’dáronï.
“They think we’re Matabound. It’s quite normal to bathe in the Fiefdoms–”
“You know, Arlak-nevsê, there are some few times I wish I could see. This is one of those times.”
My hands moved automatically to cover myself with my drycloth, and then I chuckled. “You want to see me naked?”
“Isn’t that normal?”
“Why don’t you … oh.” I coughed and immersed myself in the pool of steaming water. According to the common Umarite design, the bath was a tiled depression in the ground a pace and a half deep, fed from below by hot spring water. This one was housed in a small, private room, one of several in the House establishment, with a smooth wooden decking surrounding the pool on all sides.
“Why don’t I use my hands?” I could hear P’dáronï smiling, even if I couldn’t see her. “You Umarite barbarians are most ill-mannered. Imagine that?”
I jumped slightly as she trailed her fingertips across the nape of my neck. “P’dáronï, I’m sorry … oh!”
“It’s hardly fair, not so?”
“Unfair is me relaxing in a gorgeous, hot, scented bath after working up eleven days of sweat running from an impossible, magical monster while the woman I love, the most splendid and desirable creature in all of Mata’s creation, is standing behind me, fully clothed. I feel unfairly … alone.”
“Who says I’m clothed?” I jerked in the water, staring fixedly ahead, until I heard her low chuckle and let out an answering hiss of annoyance. “Ah, Arlak-nevsê. You’re so gullible. And sweet. We must hurry, though. Close your eyes. And tell me all that ‘oh’ meant–never was a single syllable so laden with import.”
After a whisper of cloth, the water lapped at my chin as she stepped in–onto my leg at first, but she corrected that with grace–and slipped downward until she was immersed up to her chin.
P’dáronï gasped. I picked up a piece of soapstone and passed it to her. Good quality soap, I thought, not the harsh lye soap sometimes palmed off on customers in these places. “Wash. Truly told, P’dáronï-nishka, that is exactly what I intend. Essentially, you will be borrowing my eyes.”
“But … I don’t know how.”
“Nor did I know about onions and Dissembling until you taught me. I’ve never tried this before, but I think it will work. Did we not share some of Janos’ memories with success?”
“Causing us both an almighty headache.” She flicked water in my direction. “Arlak, you surprise me. Here I am thinking you simply wanted me unclothed in order to take advantage–”
“That too, truly told.”
“–and in reality your mind is rushing to other things.”
Beneath the water, I twined my feet with hers. “See if you can follow me now.”
Together, we concentrated deeply. After a time, P’dáronï murmured, “No, not that.” And soon she breathed, “Oh … a flicker … something. Oh, dear Mata! I see something moving … oh, Arlak-nevsê! Is that me? The colours … oh, my head’s exploding with colours!”
Abruptly, she broke off the contact, panting in apparent fright.
“Too much at once,” I said, reaching out for her. “Come here. You need to give your brain time to process the images, P’dáronï-nishka. It’s never had that kind of input before. All is new. Sit on this ledge and I’ll wash your hair. Would you like to try again?”
We tried with and without skin contact, but the best we could manage was for P’dáronï to see vague shapes, shadows, and colours, before she began to feel overwhelmed. She rubbed her temples angrily and denounced her traitorous mind. For only the second time since I had known her, she cried. The first was when I departed Eldoran. After that I received the housemaster briefly at the doorway of the pumphouse, and returned to the poolside with new clothes for P’dáronï.
“Ah, I’d forgotten the colour of your hair,” I teased.
She retorted, with a smile that lit her face like a Doublesun dawn, “And I cannot any longer smell you from ten paces. We should hurry. I’m beginning to sense the Wurm again.”
“The Wurm is leagues distant, P’dáronï,” said I, putting the bundle of clothing aside on a stool so that I could rejoin her in the steaming tub. “I ran relentlessly last night in the hope it would create time, today, to show you a thing or two about how badly we barbarians can behave.”
“Oh … I tremble,” laughed P’dáronï, doing anything but.
“Barbarians do not take ‘no’ for an answer,” said I, bending to kiss her neck delicately, “my precious louanfire petal.”
P’dáronï breathed in my ear, “Then, Arlak-my-soul’s-song, you need learn the difference between ‘no’ and ‘oh’.”
“So it’s ‘oh’?”
“Oh,” she agreed, supple to my embrace. And later, “Oh!”
Our passion, we discovered, caused the Wurm to accelerate. Mark my words, P’dáronï and I did not linger in the shadow of every bush in the Hakooi lowlands, but neither could we have enough of each other. We were caught in the flush of love, trapped as surely as insects in a green-backed hornbill’s beak, and it caused the vast leagues of the Hakooi lowlands to fly by beneath our feet. The Wurm burrowed. It blasted through the lowlands aside from the river, and caused no greater turmoil than at one point to cut through a tributary of the Nugar River and turn it to a new path, flooding a low meadow leagues wide and turning that area into a shallow lake. We found ourselves fleeing faster and faster. At some point after our passions cooled–three or four makh, I estimated–the Wurm would slow to its previous pace, but even that was beyond a jog. Had we hired a jatha cart after noon, we would have been overtaken before the orisons were sung.
I observed with concern that P’dáronï was beginning to wear thin–and she was hardly the plump paragon of a Hakooi ode to begin with. The body requires time to rest and replenish. We discussed and exchanged notes endlessly, trying to discover ways of healing each other beyond merely relieving an aching muscle or a blistered foot, but I own even as El Shashi, sleep is a precious mystery. Good, healthy, undisturbed sleep has a unique healing power which cannot be replaced by ought else. Our every meal was hurried. Every nap was snatched as from the clutch of avaricious hands. And, after one morn when we missed being eaten by a salcat’s whisker, even our lovemaking proceeded as with a weather-eye open to the horizon.
How to stop a wildfire? How to slow passion made immeasurably more urgent by our precarious situation? By the issues at stake? I had no answers.
One sweltering afternoon, as we rested briefly in the shade of a towering hardwood tree to fill our hollow bellies with roundel sweetbreads purchased in the last village, I said to her, “Do the Armittalese Matabond according to the Umarite and Eldrik traditions?”
P’dáronï oriented toward the sound of my voice. “I believe it’s a very similar tradition, Arlak-nevsê. Don’t forget how young I was when I left–”
“But surely there are bonds between slaves? Or even between slaves and Eldrik?” At her nod, I pressed, “Why, then, have I never seen a newborn Armittalese babe in Eldoran? Where are all the Armittalese children?”
“The mothers return for the birth.”
“All
the way through the mountains to Armittal?”
She nodded again. But there was a peculiar, evasive quality in what I sensed of her grephe, something imperfectly hidden. P’dáronï had taught me that the more intimate persons become, the harder it is to keep secrets. For this reason I had told her many of mine on the road, reasoning thus: better now, and willingly, than later in grief and hurt.
She rose. “We should press on.”
Used to our many discussions on medical matters, I asked, “So, did you know that the Frenjj do not allow a baby to touch the ground until its seventh season after birth? Tell me a little about the Armittalese customs around birth. I’m curious.”
“Isn’t this sweetbread delicious, Arlak-nevsê?”
My eyes snapped sideways. “Excuse me?”
“What?”
“I asked you a question.”
“Arlak-nevsê, that’s a tygar’s growl. What have I done to so offend you?”
I was about to throw another coal into the furnace when I paused. Something in this conversation, as the Roymerian saying went, stank like a jatha’s digestion. Taking her hand in mine, I said as casually as I could manage, “So, truly told, when an Armittalese slave returns to Armittal for the birth–”
“I yearn for your touch, Arlak-nevsê,” she interrupted, clutching my arm with both hands and pressing the slender length of her body suggestively against mine. “Shall we tarry here awhile?”
My sweetbread turned into a stone in my mouth. By sheer force of will, I moved my jaw up and down. Never mind that she almost undid my self-restraint at a stroke–this was not P’dáronï! She was passionate, truly told, with frankness and abandon that sometimes startled me, but not in the manner of a cheap brothel wench.
“Tell me how you Armittalese pair up, man and woman.”
“Liaisons are formed between families of similar social standing, Arlak. The young men and women of each such pool of families–they are large; the word is irahi in Old Armittalese–choose from among their peers, most often for love. The vows are called oe’e lorai yohii and are made for life.”
“And would they have children immediately?”
“Most will wait a time, perhaps three or four anna–”
“Are any … not useful … amongst Armittalese society?”
P’dáronï slipped her arm about my neck. “Have I tired you out, El Shashi?” And she kissed me passionately. Almost, almost I threw her from me as I might a snake. “What’s the matter, Arlak-nevsê?”
‘You!’ I wanted to shout. ‘Who by Nethe’s hottest hells are you?’ Instead, I kissed her ardently in return, and ran my hands up and down her back–which surely amounted to no hardship whatsoever–and meantime tried to think furiously through what I had perceived, which was by far the harder task given my body’s response to her flirtation. This was what Orik Sorlakson had bequeathed me. Seventy-odd percent ownership of a group of perfect slaves, who never ran away, always worked hard, were perfectly loyal and trustworthy and … were they Nummandori spies in Eldoran? No, surely not. But P’dáronï was certainly inhabited by something I did not understand. Something that issued mental commands. A demon? Mata forbid!
She was uncannily beautiful. One kiss from her could drive a man to distraction; her repeated kisses were tearing holes in any logical framework I attempted to form in my mind. Succubus kisses? Kisses controlled from elsewhere by another being or creature or … or by P’dáronï herself?
Was this the signature work of the Nummandori Overlords? If so, then there were evidently more ways of controlling a populace than the gyael-irfa and Banishment!
And I had allowed this woman into my mind?
“Dear sweet Mata!” I muttered–minded of some demonic beast about to sink its fangs into my jugular, I rather wished she were not nibbling so sweetly at my neck.
Oddly, P’dáronï herself did not seem at all aware of those interruptions in her thoughts. Perhaps only I, as El Shashi, could have detected them. As we tumbled onto a grassy spot beside the trail in a tangle of limbs, I muttered, “I shall withhold no longer, P’dáronï–I want to have a child with you.”
I shuddered at the tenor of that cold, unfeeling mental command. Had I not as much asked for an answer to the Armittalese methods of birth control? Focus, Arlak! I had to see through what I suspected, if I could … but P’dáronï, meantime, had contrived by some magical artifice to drop my trousers to my knees and was shucking her own clothing with wild abandon.
But I shuddered within my quoph, saying, “You’re so gorgeous. Mmm … tell me, P’dáronï, how the–oh, that is heaven–how the Nummandori … oh … control you?”
P’dáronï slumped upon my chest.
“Larathi! What–P’dáronï! P’dáronï-nevsêsh! Oh Mata, what have I done?”
Thank Mata! Slow and steady, I felt her pulse throb beneath my fumbling fingertip touch. My own was leaping about with frantic haste. Me and my idiotic, bloody-minded determination to prove my suspicions–at what cost?
So here was a turn for the most vulture-minded of men. Mentally, I threw up my hands and levelled a huge sigh at the heavens. Unbidden, Janos’ voice commented dryly in my head, ‘Learn to fight one battle at a time, Arlak!’ This was in reference to my struggles to simultaneously train to the glove a falcon chick I had rescued, and protect my rimmerwort crop from the damage of an early frost.
That chill breeze swelling from the east was the harbinger of my first battle. The Wurm. I rolled her off and winced as P’dáronï’s head struck a stone. I healed her with a brief touch, shuddered as I denied my healing power’s rising to quarry that thing out of her mind, and rescued my trousers absent-mindedly. My eyes skated over the sculpted planes of her cheekbones to her eyes, as unseeing now in repose as ever she were awake. What lay hid within? Was her blindness the lesser … problem? Handicap? I found myself flailing about for a good word like a madman threshing hewehat stalks with his hands.
Rising, I scooped the unconscious form of P’dáronï of Armittal up into my arms and kissed her tenderly. “Sorry, my beloved. I am so sorry. Father Yatak says that to heal is to extend Mata’s grace, one precious person at a time. But how will you ever receive this grace, not only for your sight, but for what lurks within you?”
A secret as deep-hidden as my Wurm.
I squared my shoulders. Would I have committed my life into her hands had I known these things? I told myself I would still rather walk this road with her than without.
“Priority?” I chuckled, harshly. “Priority one, don’t become a Wurm’s lunch; two, don’t get killed by the woman you love; three, ransack Janos’ memories for clues; four, find passage to Eldoran; five … deal with the Sorceress. Ay, Arlak? With the luck you’ve enjoyed all your life?”
What did luck have to do with anything?
Chapter 36: Stormtide over Gethamadi
I own one morn Gethamadi was a town. The ocean rose. And then it was gone. Such was the fate of Gethamadi.
Soihon al’Thab kin Tar’ka, When Gods Walked: Untold Tales of El Shashi
I stood with my beloved upon the heights of a headland. Holding hands, we gazed out over the rippling turquoise waters of the Gulf of Erbon. A briny breeze ruffled our hair and plucked our clothes mischievously. The rugged peninsula dropped in monumental dark cliffs down to the sea, far below. A great bay curved around to our right hand, a sweep of dramatic splendour broken in places by tiny cream beaches upon which the shy seribik sea-serpents nested–I could see the dots of their sandy nests even from where we
stood.
Truly told, a blind woman did look, and did follow what I pointed out to her–imperfectly, but effectively, I believe.
This is the seventh sense. The secret seventh sense, which, in order to forestall a lengthy philosophical aside, I shall reduce to calling ‘the sense of magic’. Some call it ‘second sight,’ although it should more accurately be called the third, as it follows the sight and insight of the grephe-sense. It underpins the gyael-irfa of the Eldrik. It allowed P’dáronï the power of magical sight. It sang together in our very souls, needing no physical joining of bodies as man and woman to bind us together irrevocably, to whisper along the pathways of our thoughts at all makh and even through the night. It is the sense that caused me to claim: ‘No other has ever loved as I.’ A delicious untruth, I own, but a nectar sweeter than the quoph can bear to refuse.
“Gethamadi lies directly across the bay,” I said. “We must tarry there for food.”
“Our very bones groan a paean of pain,” agreed P’dáronï. “Our daily orison to Ulim.”
“P’dáronï-nevsêsh, I don’t believe that,” I disagreed, but gently. Even exhausted as I was, I wished to be gentle with her. She marked it well and wondered at the change in me, I knew. “The Wurm is but an instrument.”
“Wielded by Jyla.”
“Ay.”
“She is down there.”
“Mata’s breath!”
P’dáronï tapped my hand insistently. “Arlak, you’re stronger than you think. Please.”
“Sorry.” I shook my head. “Sorry, a hundred times over … it’s Jyla? Are you certain?” I massaged her fingers and eased the bruised joints with an automatic touch of my mind.
“Is Doublesun hot, Arlak-nevsê? Is the ocean wide? Is the beauty of Eldoran celebrated by the poets–”
“Fie, woman! Be at peace,” I laughed. “A foolish question, truly told, of which I repent.”
“You Umarites always question the obvious,” P’dáronï noted, but rose upon her toes to punctuate each word of her response with a kiss upon my stubbly cheek. “You’re scratchy.”
