by Micah Yongo
Neythan stood. He worked his jaw and spat. His spittle, sticky and dry, rested in the dust like a snowflake. He felt queasy.
“You’re not the monkey man,” the little boy concluded. His face was remarkably calm. “Zahia said he’d be here, but he isn’t.”
Neythan glanced around. Where was Caleb? He looked back to the boy, his words now making sense, and nodded. “I’m looking for the monkey man too,” he said. “Maybe your friend Zahia knows where he went and can help us find him.”
The boy continued to stare, then frowned a little. “You’re not looking for him. You were asleep.” And with that he turned and calmly walked away into the house. Neythan watched him go and looked around the plot, then back at the wall behind him where he and Caleb had climbed over the night before, exhausted and cold and still damp from the river they’d washed in.
The plot was so quiet – like the stodgy, lonely silence of midday in Ilysia, the time of day Neythan used to love most, that stale thick stillness when all the villagers would disappear, migrating to the shadows to nap a while from their work as the sun climbed to its bright searing zenith, leaving him free to roam.
He turned as the nervous cluck of a hen somewhere interrupted the quiet, then the muffle of voices. There was a second doorway at the side of the house. He brushed himself down again and went toward it. A foot-long pestle leant by the near corner of the wall, heavy looking and wooden, like a club. The coppery smear of smashed lentils or spices crusted its blunt weighty end. Neythan picked it up, then winced, feeling the forgotten spiteful ache of the arrowhead still in his shoulder. He craned his neck and squinted at the snapped shaft jutting from the top of his arm, and then hefted the pestle in his grip, wielding it like a mace. No telling how many occupants within: the boy may have alerted a father, or someone else who’d be wary of a stranger lingering unannounced on the grounds. Trespass on a man’s dwelling and he loses all reason.
Neythan patted the wooden pestle against his palm a few times, weighing it – less harmful than his sword, better to cripple a man than kill him – then walked with it around to the side of the house where the doorway waited.
The door was open. The voices, muffled before, drifted out to him along with the smell of cooking vegetables. Neythan cocked the pestle two-handed at his shoulder and edged slowly toward the door. He’d just glance in, see if he could pass by unseen to the street. He steadied himself by the jamb, shifting his grip like an axeman’s, and took a crab’s pace closer, about to peer in, mace lifted in case, when Caleb’s jaunty voice leapt up from the mild din of chattering others inside.
“Well, that’s why I said a monkey – fleet of foot, hand and thought,” he said.
“But they’re ugly,” came the voice of a woman. “Those little faces of theirs, like a starved baby. And who’d want to look like a starved baby?”
“You’re asking me that?” Caleb said.
More laughter, all female, some of it childish sounding.
“What about a giant ape?” A girl this time.
“A giant ape? There’s no such thing,” the woman said.
“There is.”
“Where?”
“The Summerlands, in the mountain forests.”
“No doubt you’ve been there.”
“I was told.”
“Oh, well if you were told…”
“You hear the vendors talk sometimes,” the girl persisted. “By the baudekin on market day. I heard one say he’d seen them himself, twice the size of any man, and black, apart from some, the biggest ones, the oldest. He said the hair of their backs grow grey, just like with your hair, mama.”
“My hair is not grey.”
“Well, if the vendors speak of it,” another girl, sardonic whining singsong, “it must be true.”
“It is.”
“True or no,” the mother said, “I’d not want to be one.”
“Why not?”
“Me neither. What would you eat?”
“Whatever’s in the forest.”
“There’s no sheep in the forest though,” the little boy’s voice. “No goats or anything.”
“You and your meat–”
“Leave him alone, Yoani.”
“I think a lion would be best, that way you’ll have your fill of meat and not too many others to bother you.”
“I don’t think that’s quite how it is for lions, Zahia.”
“I’d be a hare,” the boy said. “Hares are fast and you can’t catch them.”
“Hares don’t get to eat meat, Petur.”
“I only like meat because I’m a boy. If I was a hare I’d eat grass and other things.”
“Hares don’t eat grass either, silly.”
“Yoani. I said don’t speak to your brother that way.”
“Ah, Neythan.”
Neythan stood halfway in the door now, watching.
“We thought you’d never rise. This is Neythan, everyone. Neythan, the discussion is wild beasts, and which we’d want to be if we could choose.”
Neythan looked at Caleb, then the others. A young girl, twelve, thirteen maybe, sat in the corner with a weaver’s pin and a patch of cloth, staring at him. Beside her stood the little boy from the yard, clutching a fistful of the girl’s dress. Caleb sat at the table in the middle, slouching forward, gazing at Neythan like a friend at a banquet. Neythan looked at him. Caleb said nothing, only smiled. Neythan dipped his head through the doorway to find two others, an older woman with a brazier and skillet in her hands, standing over a stone hedged bench against the wall piled with ashes, frosted white from use. And next to her another girl, slim, older than the weaver in the corner, around Neythan’s age, holding a pot of stew or soup. They were all looking at him.
Neythan, still grasping the makeshift mace in one hand beyond view of the doorway, slowly lowered his arm and dropped the weapon by the outer jamb.
“Come. Sit,” the mother said quietly, and nodded him in. “There’s a seat by your cousin at the table.”
Neythan looked at Caleb. Cousin?
Caleb smiled.
Neythan went in and sat at the table. No one spoke for a while. The older girl with the pot decided to break the silence.
“Your cousin says he’d make himself a monkey,” she said. “I say a lion is best. But Yoani,” she nodded to the smaller girl on the stool in the corner. “Well…” she trailed off, shook her head.
“A giant ape,” the girl said from the corner.
“Beasts that are real are the rule,” Zahia said.
“Giant apes are real.”
The mother’s head wagged wearily.
“She’s right,” Neythan found himself saying. He must’ve been tired. It’d been a while since he’d sat to meditate. He looked around. Everyone’s gaze had settled on him. “I mean… there are such beasts.”
The girl grinned triumphantly. “See.”
The mother looked at Neythan disapprovingly and shook her head, then to Caleb. “What is it with these young ones today? All of them, so given to fanciful things.”
Caleb nodded in commiseration.
“What about you?” Zahia said, still looking at Neythan. “Which beast would you choose, if you could?”
The room turned to him. The mother had put down the brazier pot and was now placing a bowl of soup in front of him.
She nodded for him to eat. Neythan again looked to Caleb for guidance but he said nothing. Neythan looked back to the bowl of soup; it smelled good. He picked up the spoon.
“And we will have to see to that later,” the woman said, gesturing at the broken shaft in Neythan’s shoulder.
Neythan looked again to Caleb, who still remained silent. He looked at the woman. “Erm. Thank you.” And continued quietly with the soup, resolving to eat the food, say as little as possible, and wait for the chance to speak with Caleb alone to have all this explained to him.
“Go on,” the girl on the stool was saying. “You’ve not answered yet.”
“Don’
t be so rude, Yoani. Let him eat,” the mother said. “He needs to eat.”
“It’s alright,” Neythan said. The soup was good. He decided to play along. “Perhaps an eagle,” he said.
“Why an eagle?” Yoani said from the corner.
“You see?” the mother said. “You shouldn’t encourage her.”
Neythan swallowed his mouthful; the soup was stocked with beans and some sort of root vegetable he didn’t recognize. “They can see long distances,” he said. “And they can fly.”
The boy nodded sagely. “I think that’s a good choice,” he said, and then to the rest of the room, “Eagles eat lots of meat.”
It carried on this way for a while, the merits of almost every beast under the sun being announced and bounced between them. The mother’s name was Gaana, it turned out. Though there was a silence concerning the whereabouts of the father.
“Dead,” Caleb told Neythan outside when he was finally able to speak with him alone. “Sickness, apparently. Gaana says he started coughing one day, and never stopped. A year later he was dead. You can imagine how nervous she’d have been when she found us in her yard like that, thinking we were robbers. I awoke to a pestle hovering over my head, ready to crush my skull should my explanation for being there prove less than satisfactory. A widow can be a skittish sort. A widow with children to keep and feed, even more so. I told her we were revellers. That we’d got drunk and been robbed on the way here from Hanesda. When she looked us over, both of us covered in mud and you with an arrow in your shoulder, she believed it. Probably wanted to believe it. So, I told her we’d work for our keep, if she’d let us stay a few days. Of course, when I say ‘we’ I mean you.”
“Work? At what?”
“I don’t know. At whatever she wants. Oh, and teach the boy fishing. His father was a fisherman and a potter. They still have his things but the boy no longer has anyone to teach him. Too young when he died. He’s no more than five or six now, and they need whatever income they can get. Do you know anything about fishing?”
“A little.”
“Good. That’ll do. You work, teach the boy fishing, lick your wounds, recover your strength.”
“And what are you going to be doing, exactly?”
“Thinking up what we are to do next, of course. Someone has to do the hard work around here.”
Twenty-Seven
R E V E L A T I O N
Yasmin hadn’t expected tears. She sat watching as Bilyana, slumped on the chair, whimpered quietly from the corner by the candle, which was low now, a soggy stump of wax, slick and wasted and waning on the dirty shelf by the door. Hassan had told the chamberlain the night before to see to it but he must have forgotten. Less than an hour’s worth of light in it now, and they’d need more time. Bilyana had entered mere moments ago, cloaked and hooded, stepping cautiously into the chamber like hunted prey. Her face seemed different, paler. She’d looked briefly around the chamber, a small empty house Hassan kept in the city’s eastern quarter for discreet meetings not wholly unlike this.
“Zaqeem used to do the same,” Bilyana had said, not bothering with greeting. “In Hanesda, in Sippar, Qadesh, Qareb, he was a man of means after all, as you know. Who knows how many cornerhouses he kept, and in how many cities. And how many women… like me.” And then the weeping. Thinking about it, it made sense – Bilyana; Zaqeem’s mistress. Yasmin had often noticed there was something in the way they were together, something bashful and smiling and coy, a secret swapping between their timid smirking glances. Poor Tobiath. Perhaps it was this he’d discovered. Perhaps it was why he’d gone missing. Over a month and still no word from him.
The chamber was short and empty mostly. Windowless. A table, a couple of chairs, the flattened candle, an old basin of dirty water in one corner with a towel that neither Yasmin, Hassan nor Bilyana had felt inclination to wash their feet with. Bilyana sat on one side by the door, Hassan and Yasmin on the other, watching her cry.
“Now,” Bilyana said, her eyes flicking up to them, clearing abruptly, sober though still moist. “You mustn’t tell Tobiath, there would be no need.”
Yasmin nodded, the simple gesture somehow inviting more tears. She waited for a pause in the whimpering before asking. “He has never suspected?”
Bilyana, sniffing, shook her bowed head. “Tobiath is a trusting soul,” she said.
“When did it begin?”
“With Zaqeem? Oh, a year or so before his death… that time he came to visit his vineyard and invited us all to taste the produce. Tobiath was in Tresán. I forget why. And… I don’t know… I’d been so bored that summer… Zaqeem was kind to me.”
Yasmin nodded. In the end they’d had no choice but to wait until they’d made it all the way back here to Dumea from the Summerland village to talk with Bilyana of what she knew. Yasmin, as eager as Hassan to hear Bilyana’s divulgences and unwilling to allow him to speak with her alone as he wished, had argued with him throughout the entire journey back. Which was difficult. Hassan had never been the argumentative kind. He seldom even got angry. When he did he’d grow quiet and affect a slightly condescending smirk, as though you were part of some game or ruse he’d seen before. Or he’d simply walk away. But now they seemed to be arguing about everything. About the burden she’d agreed to on their behalf. About what he knew and was refusing to tell her.
And then there was the journey itself, which became longer and more difficult than the one there. There were heavy rains the first and second day. The guide had decided to change their route, delaying them an extra few days, so as not to be caught along the muddy passes of the Súnamite plains where the red and runny dirt would be poor footing for the camels. And then when they finally managed to return to the city they had to wait a further week with all the preparations around Noah’s Judgment. All of which granted Yasmin more time to argue with Hassan, eventually persuading him they should speak with Bilyana together. She deserved to hear her secrets too.
She looked up at Bilyana, whose gaze had slipped to an uninteresting stain on the wall. The lids of her eyes were pink and swollen.
“Something I don’t understand,” Yasmin said. “Zaqeem was often away, at court, in Qadesh, or the crown city…”
“My trips there or to Qalqaliman for dresses…”
Yasmin nodded, of course. Yasmin had always wondered how Bilyana was able to afford the garments she returned with. “You were in truth going there only to see him.”
“Yes…” Bilyana sniffed and heaved an exasperated breath, looking up to the ceiling. “The first few times, it was so much fun. I’d go and we’d eat and then he’d send me off to the bazaars or the city market with some measure of gold. Fifty, eighty shekras, it mattered little to him. Spend as you please, he always said.” She smiled sadly; her gaze dropped to the floor. “Make your heart glad, he’d say. Then I’d come again by night when the gold was spent and show him the things I’d bought, and then, well…”
Hassan, sitting beside Yasmin, nodded and sighed, lifting a palm, needing to hear no more.
“Toward the end he became different,” Bilyana said, quietly. “He was quieter… stiller. I’d ask what was wrong but he’d only smile, say he was an old fool, that nothing could be wrong when I was near… Then, there was one time I came to him and he was so anxious it frightened me.”
“Anxious how?” Hassan said.
Bilyana’s shoulders lifted halfway to a shrug, her neck thickening with the gesture as she slowly shook her head. “Every room we entered, he’d look out the door to see if anyone had followed before he closed it. Even when he closed it, he’d get up again to see that it was shut fast. He’d be asking me, how was my journey, did I see anyone on the way. Of course I’d seen someone. I’d seen many. How can a journey be made without doing so? It worried me… like how, if you see a spider sometimes, or beetles, it makes you itch. That was how it was with Zaqeem, the more anxious he became, the more nervous did I. And so I told him… I made some excuse, I cannot remember what it was, I
told him I couldn’t see him anymore, that Tobiath was growing suspicious. The thing had only begun for fun.” She looked up at Hassan like a plaintiff before a judge, eyes wide and wet. “There was no more fun,” she said, looking at him, waiting, though for what Yasmin couldn’t tell – understanding? Appeasement? Forgiveness? “That was when he started… talking, saying things. He was like a madman, crazed, just talking.”
Hassan sat forward. “What did he say?”
Her head was wagging slowly, her gaze fixed to a spot on the floor. “It’s because they know, it’s because they know. Over and over again, he kept saying it. He was so frantic. I’d never seen him that way before, he’d been feverish that night, his skin was like fire. I reasoned it was the fever.”
“What else? What else did he say?”
“He said he knew things, had learned things, things to do with the sharíf.”
“Yes?”
“He said the sharíf’s throne was not truly his own… He said… he said there were secrets, things that had been kept hidden, about the sharíf, about his line and blood. He said the sharíf’s throne is false.” Bilyana’s voice dropped to a whisper. “He has a brother, he said, the sharíf does, an older brother, who is the true heir.”
“Sharíf Sidon’s brother died when he was a child, these things are known.”
Bilyana shook her head, trembling. “No. Zaqeem said it is a lie, he was never taken ill, he never died. They put him away, secretly, because his father was displeased with him, some flaw in him, he said, some kind of strangeness.”
“What strangeness?”
She shook her head again. “I don’t know.”
“Where is he then, the brother?”
“Zaqeem never told me,” Bilyana said. “I don’t know if he knew. He said only that he’d been banished. Put away.”
“And he was certain the brother lives?”
“He was.”
Hassan just stared, disbelieving, thinking.
“I thought it all meaningless, what he’d said, that his words were because of fever. But he kept saying it. Repeating. And he was so scared. He kept saying: They know I know. He said they were going to come for him, kill him, to make sure no others would learn what he had… I thought he was just trying to frighten me. Make me stay. It made me so angry. To think that he’d lie like that, to me… And so I left. I left him.” And then she started to cry again, louder this time, but muzzled, burying her growled sobs in her shawl as she held it by the collar against her face in clenched fistfuls. “It was the last time I saw him… It was only… it was only when I heard the tidings…” Her tear-streaked face gazed out at them, cheeks reddened and glistening. “That he’d been killed… it was only then that I knew that he’d been telling me the truth all along… How hard it must have been for him to finally tell me, how alone he must’ve felt, and my only answer was to call him a liar.” And this time she cried aloud, not bothering to hamper and hide her sobs with the shawl.
