The Hienama

by Storm Constantine

  ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘It won’t go any further.’

  ‘You can tell Ysobi,’ Orphie said. ‘I suppose I should tell him myself but…’ He looked at me meaningfully. ‘It’s easier with you.’

  I reached out and squeezed one of his hands. ‘I’ll respect that.’

  Orphie smiled. ‘You know, I’ve made a decision. When I go out into the world, I’m going to find a har like you to be chesna with, and I’ll bring him back here to meet you.’

  ‘I’d like that. I know you’ll find yourself a wondrous har, Orphie.’

  ‘I’ll never forget your goodness,’ he said. ‘Shall I fetch the pearl now?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘It’s not the harling’s fault,’ Orphie said.

  Ysobi did not come to see me until the morning, but at least he arrived early. I’d waited for him all night, getting more and more anxious by the minute. I’d asked Orphie to go back to the Nayati, but he wouldn’t. No matter how much I pleaded, he remained obstinate. When Ysobi finally did turn up, he looked wretched, with dark marks beneath his eyes. His hair was lank. I wanted both to hug and hit him. I was so angry that I couldn’t speak, since anything I did say would come out as an incoherent rant.

  Ysobi sat by the bed. He looked so serious. A tremor of fear went through me. I thought he was going to tell me our chesna bond was over. There was a distance between us. ‘I’m sorry, Jass,’ he said.

  Still, I could not speak.

  ‘You probably know what happened.’

  I shook my head, and then found my voice. ‘I only know what happened to me. I don’t care about anything else.’

  ‘I should have been with you, I know,’ he said. ‘But I couldn’t, Jass. I couldn’t leave a student of mine in such a terrible state, and I knew you had Sinnar and Orphie with you, perhaps others. You have lots of friends, who care for you deeply. Gesaril has nohar.’

  ‘He has you,’ I pointed out sourly.

  Ysobi didn’t dispute that, which only made me angrier.

  ‘And you might as well drop the “my student” thing, Yz,’ I said coldly. ‘He’s Gesaril to you, a har, not just a student.’ I sighed, and it hurt my chest. ‘I suppose we have to talk. I need to know what’s changed. We have to talk about the future, because of what we’ve created.’

  ‘Nothing’s changed, and we’ll talk about our son’s future all you want.’

  ‘If nothing’s changed, then I want you to send Gesaril away.’

  There was a deep uncomfortable silence.

  ‘I mean it, Yz. I’m tolerant. It’s not just about being petty and jealous over you spending time with students. I don’t mind about Orphie. But I do mind about the other one. He wants you. He’s obsessed with you. And if you can’t admit that, you’re either blindly stupid or lying to yourself.’

  Ysobi rubbed his face with both hands. ‘You know I can’t send him away, Jass. We’ve talked about all this. If you’re truly my chesnari, you’ll ride this out with me until Gesaril is ready to go home. You’ll trust me.’

  ‘He’s dangerous. Can’t you see that?’

  Ysobi stared at me steadily. ‘No, actually, I can’t. He’s damaged, but not dangerous. Why would you think such a thing? He’s pathetic and to be pitied, if anything.’

  These words did nothing but kindle my fury. ‘Oh, really! Then answer this: Would the wise hienama Ysobi usually throw one of his students out, simply to cater to the demanding whims of another?’

  Ysobi looked taken aback. ‘What?’

  ‘Orphie came to me yesterday. He was upset you’d thrown him out just because Gesaril barged in. You humiliated him, and that isn’t like you. You should have ordered Gesaril out, not Orphie. And it’s not just that. Orphie is confiding in me, when he should be confiding in you. You’re ruining your professional relationship with him, and… excuse me… wasn’t that once so important to you? What’s wrong with you? Stand back and look at the situation, will you? It’s unhealthy.’

  Ysobi’s expression had become hard. He didn’t like to be criticised like this. ‘I’m sorry Orphie was upset, and I’ll speak to him about it, but Gesaril needed attention. I have to be there for him. I opened him up, and it’s my responsibility to help him become whole. He needs me more than Orphie does.’

  I actually snarled. ‘He needs you? Listen to yourself! Yz, I think you need to examine this whole situation properly in your head, because to tell you the truth I’m really starting to suspect that you feel something other than teacherly concern for that har. If you want him, and it’s the kind of want that excludes a chesna bond with me, then I have to know. I won’t share you with him, Yz. You have to make a choice. He’s saying the same thing to you, but in a different way. He’s using emotional blackmail. He wants you to make a choice too.’

  ‘You’ve done this,’ Ysobi said, abruptly. It didn’t sound like his voice. ‘You made me open up too, and this is the result. I’d closed myself down to all involvement. Perhaps, when I let you seduce me, I forgot why I’d done that. Now, I remember.’

  ‘Get out,’ I said.

  He didn’t move.

  ‘I mean it. Get out!’ The final two words were a shriek that was no doubt audible for a radius of several miles around the house.

  Ysobi stared at me hard for some moments, then got up and left the room without another word. I heard him punch the wall in the hallway.

  I was overwhelmed by grief, and wept uncontrollably for hours. Orphie came running to my side the minute Ysobi had left the house, but could do nothing to console me. By now, my friends must have realised something was wrong, because Orphie still wouldn’t let them in the house – and it’s not unlikely some of them heard me yelling. I didn’t want to have to face Minnow or any others, because I was ashamed of my own stupidity, the insane notion I could have a life with Ysobi, the hienama of arunic arts. I wanted to pretend everything was all right. I didn’t want pity. I had to make plans for the future. Would that involve leaving Jesith? I could leave the pearl with Ysobi. He’d made me have it; now he’d done this to me. Let’s see how he’d cope with satisfying all the needs of his students with a harling to look after.

  My dream of a life had just shattered.

  However, in the early evening, Ysobi came back to me. He came into the room and stood staring at me for some moments. I must have looked a real mess, my eyes swollen from weeping. He, on the other hand, looked radiant. There was a fire in him.

  ‘What I said to you earlier was unforgivable,’ he said, ‘as was the fact I wasn’t here for you yesterday. I know you needed me too, and I was wrong to abandon you. I should have got Tibar to deal with Gesaril and have come to you instead. I won’t ask you to accept an apology, but I am deeply sorry.’

  He was going to say more, but shook his head, looked at the floor. It was at that moment I resolved I’d fight for him, and if I had to use wiles as underhand as Gesaril’s then so be it. I stared at him with wide eyes that I willed to fill up with tears. I pulled back the blankets of the bed to show him the pearl lying beside me, as if it had been there all the time, which it hadn’t. Orphie had had to bully me to warm it. Ysobi came to my bedside and knelt on the floor. He put his face in his hands.

  ‘This is what’s most important,’ I murmured. ‘It was made in love. We will be strong.’

  He uttered a soft cry and fell upon me.

  I held him close. ‘Tell me what happened,’ I said.

  What happened was this. Ysobi had stayed overnight with me the night before the pearl arrived and while I’d slept he’d laid his hand on my stomach to feel the pearl. He liked to do that; more so than I did, anyway. He’d felt movement inside me, and psychically he’d begun to suspect my time was near. This feeling had nagged at him during the morning, and he’d decided he would come to me in the early afternoon. Then the episode with Gesaril had occurred. ‘I intended to give him half an hour of my time,’ Ysobi said. ‘I intuited Orphie would come to you, so I knew you wouldn’t be alone, but it wasn�
�t my intention not to be part of the pearl drop.’

  ‘So he hurt himself to keep you there?’ I asked.

  Ysobi sighed. ‘I tried to dismiss him, as gently as I could. But he begged me not to leave the Nayati. He said he was terrified of something and he wasn’t making it up, Jass. I could tell. He said he could see faces all around him that wished to harm him.’

  Ysobi had been firm, or so he told me. He’d told Gesaril that there were no evil influences around him. But Gesaril wouldn’t accept this. He’d reminded Ysobi that he was responsible for his students. In return, Ysobi had told Gesaril that most of his fears were in his imagination, and he’d got to start taking more responsibility for himself. He’d also said why he wanted to come to me, which perhaps had been a mistake. Eventually, Gesaril had calmed down and left the room. He’d spoken about wanting to use the bathroom before he left.

  What he’d actually done was go straight to the kitchen and hack at his wrists and throat with the sharpest blade he could find. I imagine it made quite a mess.

  I didn’t want to hear what Gesaril had said, as Ysobi – and later Tibar and the other hienamas – had patched him up. But Ysobi wanted to tell me so I had to listen. ‘If I’m dead, I won’t be a bother to you any more. I won’t be a bother to anyhar. Let me die.’ And so on.

  Was this really a plea from the heart from a damaged soul or a calculated dramatic act? I wondered if I was just exceptionately hard-hearted and cold. After all, here I was, surrounded by supporters and Gesaril was lying alone, virtually under guard, in a bedroom of the Nayati. Ysobi was here with me and I held against my side the one thing that was perhaps my most potent weapon in this war. If it was a war.

  3

  At least Ysobi accepted that Gesaril was too reliant on him, and agreed to let Sinnar monitor the har for the next few days. Gesaril was removed to the phylarch’s house, and Ysobi carried on working with Orphie. I knew Orphie was disgusted by the whole affair and shared my views. But that might just have been because he cared for me.

  I was unaware of public opinion over the Gesaril business, or even how much others in the community knew about it, but my friends tactfully kept quiet on the subject. They came to visit me all the time, and one night, I got blissfully drunk with Fahn, Minnow and Vole. We laughed a lot. There was no mention of Gesaril.

  Ysobi came to stay with me more often. Once, I said to him, ‘Will Gesaril be sent home now?’

  Ysobi hesitated before answering. ‘We’ve sent a letter to Kyme.’

  ‘Meaning?’ A hard edge had come into my voice. I couldn’t help it.

  ‘We can’t just abandon him, Jass.’

  I thought I could abandon him quite easily, preferably naked, on an exposed hillside during a snowstorm. ‘Are you still going to try and work with him?’

  ‘He has to work on himself, mainly. I think most of his fears are imaginary.’

  ‘You think it’s possible to help him, then?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s impossible.’

  I wanted to say more, but held my tongue. I’d decided that arguments should not be part of my arsenal.

  Before I continue with the story of Gesaril, there has to be an interlude. I have to talk about my son.

  The harling came into our lives properly about a week after the equinox. I noticed the pearl had gone brittle and cracks appeared in it. Transfixed, I put it on the kitchen table and sat next to it, watching. I drank some wine as I did so. Eventually, it fell apart completely and a weird little animal crawled out. We stared at each other for some moments. It was most disorientating. I said, ‘Hello, creature,’ and the harling lifted its head, on a neck that seemed a little too long and thin, and sniffed the air. I had some cream cheese in the cold room and went to fetch it.

  When I returned, after only a few seconds, the harling was examining the broken pieces of the pearl. He turned quickly, defensively, when he heard me approach. I offered the cheese and he ate it from my hand like a wary horse, flinching back if I made any sudden movements. I could not imagine how this creature could in any way grow to be a har. He was intelligent, that was obvious, and more like a colt or a calf than a cub or a pup, since he could move about and eat immediately after hatching. He was alien to behold because he wasn’t at all like a human baby, but more like an older child in miniature form. He had a sense of survival and cunning. His first noises were hisses.

  Orphie found me attempting communication with my alien son. He walked in through the kitchen door, stiffened in horror at what he beheld, and said, ‘Jass, it’s freezing in here! The window’s open. Get a blanket for the harling. He needs bathing as well. Are you mad?’

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said. ‘Look at him.’

  Orphie picked the harling up. At first he struggled and hissed, then became quiet. ‘He’s shivering,’ Orphie said. ‘Get a blanket, Jass.’

  ‘He’s had some cheese,’ I said. Then I went to fetch a blanket.

  In the bedroom, I nearly passed out. I’d given birth and it was a monster. Somehow I got back downstairs.

  The harling was asleep in Orphie’s arms and now appeared less alien. He was covered in a viscous fluid, which must have protected him inside the pearl. I saw then he had an umbilical cord, or rather had once had, as it appeared Orphie had cut it. Orphie wrapped the blanket I’d brought around the harling; it draped down to the floor. ‘Are you drunk?’ Orphie asked, rather sharply.

  I shook my head. ‘No. I’m just concussed by life.’

  ‘It’s a good job I’m here, then. Get some warm water. We’ll bathe him.’

  We dabbed at the sleeping harling with wet cloths and as I did so, I was thinking: This came out of me. This is mine. I thought I should be feeling something more than shock.

  Strangely enough, I didn’t consider sending Orphie to fetch Ysobi. I was content for it just to be Orphie and me dealing with this unhinging event.

  ‘He’ll sleep a lot at first,’ Orphie said. ‘And eat, of course. They grow very quick, Jass. You can almost see it happening.’

  ‘We don’t know each other,’ I said. ‘How does it work, all that hostling stuff? Shouldn’t I be feeling sentimental or something?’

  ‘I’ll help you,’ Orphie said. And that was that.

  I named him Zephyrus, for the wind that had blown in through the open kitchen window, right over him as he’d crawled from the pearl. It shortened nicely to Zeph. When Ysobi was staying overnight, he slept in his own room, but when I was alone he’d slither under my blankets and curl up on my chest like a cat, an ear pressed to the place where my heart was beating beneath the skin. It was a strange relationship we had, a sort of mutual wary respect that I hoped would one day turn into affection and trust. He trusted me completely, but I didn’t trust him. I thought he might try to smother me in my sleep. It was because he had a thinking mind and I didn’t know what was in it. Surely, a hostling should be closer psychically to his son than I was? Zeph was part of me and yet not. I couldn’t hear his thoughts, even when I tried really hard. One night, I woke from a dream of falling. I woke up gasping, my limbs twitching. Of course, Zeph was on my chest, like an incubus of nightmare; too heavy. He woke up too and murmured, ‘Sleep, Jassy. Good.’ Then he settled down again.

  They were his first words. I’d have been less surprised if my pony had said my name, I think.

  Zeph followed me around, or Ysobi, or Orphie, as if he was a duckling following the mother duck. He tended to regard all three of us as equally responsible for him. On the nights Ysobi was with us, Zeph would sleep in his own room without getting out of bed and wandering around. He was too sensible to do things that were dangerous to his body, like human children often did. He’d come to the vineyard with me and suck at the preserved fruits on the table where I worked, his fingers and lips stained blackberry purple. He’d sit in the Nayati while Orphie and Ysobi were meditating, and there he liked to play with water; the fountains in the garden, the shallow pool filled with water lilies and sleek black fish. We qu
ickly learned he had a thing about water. He was not particularly fond of strangers and seemed to prefer a small group of friends, or rather family. He was impatient when hara tried to fuss over or handle him and would usually spit at them if they tried it, or else run up the curtains like a cat, which often almost terrified hara. Despite this, other hara liked him. You couldn’t really help it: in his face was the beauty he would one day become. He would permit only Orphie and me to hug him, although he did like to climb Ysobi’s legs and cling to a thigh as his father walked around. Occasionally, he’d climb further, like a kitten, until he was perched on Ysobi’s shoulders. He liked Ysobi’s hair and enjoyed biting and chewing it.

  This creature, this little alien, was a marvel. I enjoyed discovering his developing quirks and preferences. Sometimes, we’d both stop what we were doing and stare at each other for some moments: I think we both wondered what we felt, and what we should feel. One day I said to him, ‘I think I love you, after all.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes.’ He reached out to pat my face, as if to tell me everything was all right.

  But it was not all right. Not yet. Zeph knew nothing about more adult concerns, of course. But others did.

  It might have been coincidence, but the bad dreams I’d had when Ysobi had first initiated arunic arts with Gesaril returned. They were hideous waking dreams, when I’d wake up into utter blackness and sense there was something malevolent in the room with me. Sometimes, I’d hear voices outside the house, even though beyond my window there was no longer any world, only a spinning void. I’d catch my breath, then wake up and find I’d been dreaming. I’d get out of bed and go down to the kitchen to get a drink, but when I reached the bottom of the stairs, blackness would creep in on me again and I wouldn’t be alone. I’d catch my breath and wake up again. The sequence could happen many times in a row and lasted for what seemed like hours of torment.

  I told Sinnar about it, wondering if it was an after-effect of pearl bearing, and he seemed to think it might be. ‘You’ve had to adjust dramatically to the soume aspect of your being,’ he said. ‘Even though you’ve assimilated it on the surface, I think you’re still churning things around, deep inside.’