It took me most of the day to find the theater. When I did, the hall was occupied and I was deterred from my vague wanderings about the rafter space by a young woman who told me that it was a closed rehearsal and asked me to leave the building. She did give me a cup of water first.
The sand had long ago fallen from my clothes and hair after walking all day through the heat and the city. Such buildings. So many people. I had no food, no coin, no Nanda. I sat there, the chill of the stone step seeping through my borrowed pants, staring at the droplets of moisture forming on the slick cup in my hands.
I had abandoned Nanda and baby Donja at Voferen Kahago as well as all the folk who had come to secure my circlet. I was supposed to be ruling a nation and forging it back into a single entity of peace and cooperation. But I was here, helping no one. I sat there for an eternity absorbed in self-pity before the real world—or whatever this place is—interrupted. A crash sounded and a man screamed in pain somewhere ahead of me. My legs carried me toward the sound even as my brain registered the noise.
On a large green fronting a glass building, two men stood huddled over a figure who was hidden from me by the wooden boards and rope lying on and around him.
“Call 911.”
“He’s just stunned, he didn’t fall more than ten feet.”
“It was twenty at least.”
The figure in the middle screamed out as I approached, “Call the friggin ambulance! My leg’s broke.”
He was lying in the midst of a platform of some sort that still hung from a pulley system rigged high up on the roof of the glass building. His leg was twisted at an unnatural angle and blood spotted the grass. The man’s face was pale behind his thick beard.
“Hello. Can I be of assistance?” Even as I asked this question of no one in particular, I knelt by the slight man of about forty and took hold of his wrist, watching, at the same time, the pulsing of the great vein bulging from the side of his neck. “Just lie back. Breathe deeply and tell me what happened.”
He told me about the fall and I listened carefully, asking questions where he skimped on details, all the while checking for hidden injuries. He was plainly bleeding from a gash on his skull, but was diverted from that slight and far more serious pain by the visible misalignment of his leg.
“‘Anklebone connected to the kneebone.’ That’s what my daughter sings. This ain’t that!”
I took a firm hold of his thigh with my left hand. “Tell me, where did you feel the most pain when you landed?”
He lay back and gazed up into his memory, “Well, I’d say when the pulley landed on my FAAAAGGGHHH! Shit!”
I finished pulling his legbones back into alignment as the gentleman ran through a string a profanities, the majority of which I recognized from Nanda’s rich vocabulary. One fellow had run off to fetch help and once the other uninjured worker finished heaving, he sat heavily back in the grass breathing raggedly and staring with great concentration anywhere except at the now properly set leg.
It was difficult to practice healing without the aid of nature. I couldn't convince the fractured skeleton to fuse itself back into a whole. I couldn't distract his senses from the pain as I worked or ease the shock he was experiencing. Even as I forced the bones into the proper relationship I questioned my ability to do so without natural aid. But his breathing gradually slowed and the pain in his eyes was overcome by amazement.
“It don’t hurt so much! You fixed my damn leg!”
I placed a hand on his shoulder, “I haven't repaired the damage. I just started it on its way.”
I took a cloth I saw in an upturned bucket and gently held it against his still bleeding skull. “Now, calm yourself, breathe, and imagine your heart beating slowly, sending warm blood down to heal your leg.”
A horrendous wailing approached in the form of a large white vehicle and I was pushed aside by uniformed attendants who took charge of my patient and his green-tinged friend. Questions flew, but none were directed to me, so I slipped away and took myself back to the stone steps of the You I See Theatre.
The sun continued its hot descent into the buildings of the city. Shrieking laughter floated on the waves of cold that accompanied the people who emerged from the building at my back and passed by me. At the same time, a silent figure approached slowly from across the road.
Sensei, Nanda’s friend, handed me a bottle of water and sat down carefully on the step. I nodded to thank him for the water, but he stared ahead. I drank slowly in companionable silence.
After a bit, Sensei took a small bunch of grapes from the pocket of his jacket and, taking one, handed them to me. I nodded again and ate them.
“Still here, huh.”
From a man who spoke so rarely, I took this statement of the obvious as a prompt. “I would like to go. But I am not sure where the place I came from is.”
He turned his head and raised one eyebrow, “Amnesia?”
I took my turn to stare straight forward, “Let us simply say that what I have known does not match what I am experiencing.”
We sat silently again, my thoughts drifting back to Kaveg. I was so blind to what my people needed. Mobious sent me out on this stupid quest to find the girl with my heart but my people didn’t need me to find some legendary love. They just needed some truth and direction. I could have given them that. I could have prevented that battle at Kahago, prevented all those deaths. Instead I had gone out, wandering the land while my own aunt Fierell plotted for power. My birth and ascension were intended to prevent exactly that sort of usurpation.
Sensei leaned back on his elbows. “Do you have family around here?”
Family?
For two hundred and eighty frseason, my family has guided a generally peaceful nation of people. Those who were not chosen to rule went out and in their own ways supported our growing and prosperous society. But now. The first son to be chosen, I plunged my people into civil war. As I was carefully groomed to my position, first my uncle Ko then both of my parents were lured to their deaths by my own blood. To be safe, my aunt Fierell also murdered my remaining uncle, her own foster mother, both of my grandfathers, and most of the population of my father’s birth home.
As I wandered about the countryside in search of some elusive, fiery-headed maiden, she and her minions went about trying to kill me and plunge the nation into an era of rule by force which Fierell may have accomplished by this point if Nanda, Mobious, and our friends were unable to prevail in the battle from which I had disappeared two days ago.
“No. I have no family around here.”
“She didn’t think so,” Sensei looked carefully at me.
I set the empty grape stems on the step, “Who?”
“Nanda.” He handed me a chunk of bread, “She was frantic when you left last night.”
“She threw me out!”
“That’s Nanda.”
It sure is.
∞
Our, what? First? Second moon? in Forte, she was well satisfied to sit in our newfound dining hall sampling the variety of preserved foods. I found a living, breathing, grazing side of meat.
I had wandered into the small courtyard escorting two of the younger Sapets, a green and a purple with yellow markings. My attention was on the little green avian who had taken up a perch in the crook of my right arm, leaning on my bicep and gazing indolently about him. I was wondering how to move him as my muscle was beginning to seize up when the purple who was flying independently near my head squawked, ruffled my hair, and flew up to the high windows. The green and I looked into the courtyard and saw the unicorn at the same time. The clumsy green boy fell out of my arms and nearly hit rock before his wings unfurled.
The unicorn was methodically grazing on the benches, neatly trimming rather than destroying them. Occasionally, she would use her long horn to pick out in-grown vines. She looked up at the purple’s noise. Still chewing. She looked me up and down undisturbed by the sapets, flared her nostrils twice, and wandered over to a patch of ice on
the ground. Her mottled brown coat was shiny and she certainly had meat on her haunches, so I gave only a passing thought to where she had come from before I sidled past her and into the maze where I raced for the kitchen.
“What could you possibly need that knife for that your minni can't handle?" Nanda stopped me as I retraced my tracks back out of the kitchen.
I hadn’t seen her on the floor by the bread niche, writing on her sheets for the day.
“Food!” I trumpeted. “Fresh meat!”
She pursed her eyebrows at me, “Meat? Like something other-”
“other than sparrow. Yes. Grazing in our courtyard.”
She should have leapt up and beat me to the scene, but Nanda merely creaked her slow way to standing and ambled out of the kitchen. “You ever heard of a mirage, protein deficient pal o’ mine?”
The courtyard was nearly empty when we arrived. The sapets were flying out a previously unnoticed passage through the hedge to the north. I vaulted the nearest bench to follow them. Nanda hefted her skirts and tripped after me.
“Geoffrey! Geoffrey, you psycho, hold up! Geoffrey, what are you on? Have you finally fallen-”
She took the third turning in time to find me, knife raised, looming over the small unicorn.
“No!”
Nanda launched herself onto my back from two greg behind me. The fresh meat bleated furiously and scampered out of the way as Nanda, knife, and I crashed to the ground.
“Don’t kill that goat!”
“It’s a unicorn! Oof.” I landed on my face, “A fat unicorn.”
The woman took a firm grasp of my hair and pulled, “And she’s got a kid.”
Looking where she pointed my head, I saw the unicorn had dashed away to stand between us and a tiny version of herself. The white-faced baby was lying in straw blinking at the wrestling match through its dam's front legs.
Were my mouth not already levered open by Nanda’s hold, my jaw would have dropped. Of course. That’s why the unicorn’s belly was bulging.
“Milk.” I murmured.
“Now,” Nanda dropped my head, “how do you milk a goat?”
Later that night, over our first fresh glass of milk, she strenuously denied having knocked me over.
∞
Sensei drove me back to Nanda’s apartment where she hugged me desperately.
I looked in her eyes, hoping she was the woman I'd spent the past seven moons with. But I still saw the sad truth.
“You don’t know me.”
She looked in my eyes, “My dad told me we were different from other people. He said I'd need to trust my instincts. You could’ve killed me and you didn’t. And...” The cavalier left her then and she looked away, at her fingernails, at the doorknob, “And those guys would have hurt me if you hadn’t been there.”
Thank you? No.
I’m sorry? No.
Yes, I’m the same Ananda you met in Kaveg and yes I love you too? No.
She gives me food. She gives me a pillow. She gives me a job.
∞
So here I am, being eaten alive by every sort of bug, waiting to see where she leads me tomorrow. For the first time in a frseason I have no unease about sleeping unguarded in the open. Wherever Arinaud and his four are now, they can’t hurt us. They can hurt any of the rest of my people, but this Nanda and I are safe. There is something torturously calming about knowing that you have absolutely no power.
Nanda is sleeping in the car, afraid that we’re being followed by the Chicago police. She is also scared of me, I think. Sensei warned me before we left, after she invited me to come along on this trip for safety’s sake. He told me she’d keep me distant. He told me that she thinks I’m good people and she’d do anything to help, except let me close. He said he knows her better than most men because he has no designs on her and he’s patient. He also told me that if I tried anything or hurt her, he’d kill me. And I believe him.
But it’s hard to understand this frightened Nanda. She was fearless in Kaveg. And she laughed. Often it was a frightening little laugh but I thought it kind of her to let me know, before she attacked, that I didn’t stand a chance. First time I heard that frozen smile giggle was right after I stole all her skirts the day we found the hidden courtyard.
∞
I stood just inside the great dining hall, struggling into the reddish half-coat she had left in the foyer when she caught up with me. My left arm was apparently too much for the article and to cover the small ripping sound I took a dive, rolled, and attempted to remove the jacket whilst on the far side of the table.
She smiled, bent over a little to brush some wet leaves off of her legs, and threw a shoe at me.
“To complete the ensemble,” she said.
I got the jacket off and flung it deeper into the room in time to almost block the second shoe which was followed immediately by its occupant foot, the attached leg, and so forth. After Nanda slid neatly over the table, having kicked me full in the chest, she landed on her bottom.
She fell because I took her offending shoe, foot, leg, etc. with me as I went down. I was slightly hampered by the volumes of fabric I was unused to wearing. She rolled out and was crouched in a menacing weaponless en guarde by the time I got my legs and clothing sorted from each other. I stood slowly, hands up, palms out. Completely innocent, I.
She remained en guarde. I turned my hips this way and that, swishing the skirts and batting my eyelashes. I clasped my hands, raised my eyebrows, and glanced playfully over my shoulder at her. She smiled. She relaxed her stance. Victory was mine!
Then, she laughed. Slowly. Deadly. She held out her hand.
I should have turned tail and run right then. I should have given back her clothes and apologized, from a distance. I should have done anything except what I did.
She rotated her hand, displaying the small circlet of leather and colored bones on her wrist. “Don’t you want the right Esprit de Mode?”
I had no idea what that meant, but she was clearly offering the jewelry to me so I reached out with both hands to pull the bracelet off.
She knocked me flat on my back, flipped my skirts up over my head and straddled me. Whereupon she reached expertly up the sides of my jerkin and tickled.
I tried kicking but she had my legs pinned down with her feet. I tried grabbing, but I couldn’t get my hands free from the tangle of skirts. I was dying, laughing too hard to breath and suffocating underneath the heavy fabric. Then I bucked. I raised my hips suddenly and knocked her off balance. Her feet fell off trying to grab some purchase, freeing my legs; her hands flew out for counterbalance, freeing my muscles from laughing.
I pulled the skirts down and I rolled Nanda over. But losing my balance, I fell forward until I caught myself, my hands still gripping the fabric which pinned her arms at her sides. By now the screeching in the air was no longer only mine but also Nanda’s infectious laughter.
I caught myself in that fall forward at the last possible moment before I would have hit her. As it was, my cheek was barely a petal’s length from her lips. Her eyes up close were such a dark brown they were like deep pools of water sparkling with the reflection of a million stars. I watched as one by one, each star winked out and left only the deep, deep pools of moonlight. I watched a breath ripple over them. I realized we weren’t laughing anymore.
I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to devour her. I mean I wanted every bit of her to be mine. I wanted everything I couldn't have.
Instead, I rolled off of her and went in search of the jacket. I found that I had thrown her jacket right through a modest little doorway that led into a humble little kitchen which contained an immense coldroom and pantry, as well as a nicely stocked in-ground wine cupboard.
We cooked up a feast and were both so completely soused by the time it was prepared, that we couldn’t taste a thing. It was the most marvelous meal I’ve ever sat down to, and stood up to, and danced around with.
Nanda took charge of dessert. She made a dish she called b
read pudding which I believe she made up as she saw ingredients appear before her. The one ingredient she forgot was sugar or anything particularly sweet. It was she who declared it awful with the pronouncement that dessert without sugar was like dancing without music. It was I who proclaimed we’d do both.
And so, with forkfuls and fistfuls of buttery bread pudding, we danced gracefully around the great hall only occasionally running into tables, falling over chairs, tripping off the dais, and bumping into walls.
I recall dancing to the corner of the room where she’d first caught me putting on her skirts. I stopped her mid-turn and held us up against the spinning. I slipped the last forkful of pudding into my mouth, tossed the fork away, and held her hand as I bowed. I turned her hand over and kissed the palm side of her wrist. Then I turned myself, marched quickly out through the courtyard, up to where I imagined my room to be, opened the door and fell on the floor. I decided the stones were comfy enough and wrapped myself against the cold in the nearest things to hand. I slept long and soundly, curled up in Nanda’s skirts.
Nine
∞ Nanda Junior’s journal ∞
Winter
Forte, Kaveg
A few of the tapestries we’ve found indicate that our apple tree held special meaning for Forte’s people. One shows a queen holding a child up to pick an apple, but the child is distracted by a great flaming dragon flying over the castle. Not gay, breathing fire. It's an amazing work of art. The colors are indescribable. I was particularly amazed at the silver of the brow bands on queen and child and the gold in the scales of the dragon.
“All the tapestries I’ve seen were faded with age.”
“That was woven before I was born.”
“I meant hundreds of years of age.”
“Feels like it sometimes.” Geoffrey stood leaning on the ladder we’d set aside after hanging the rug in the Great Hall. He turned to the first one I had found. “This one was woven later, after she and the partner.”
Geoffrey's Queen: A Mobious' Quest Novel Page 10
