Blood Indigo

by Talulah J. Sullivan

Anahli had been dead. Dead. Tokela had saved Anahli’s life, somehow, and Tokela all bloody from it… only it wasn’t blood, couldn’t be blood. It seemed more like the tales of the creatures of Šilombiš’okpulo, Shaped things with ichor in their veins hued akin to lapis and indigo.

  How could this be happening?

  If I was… gone, like Nechtoun. If I was to go away, go to River, be outlier… would you love me then?

  Madoc had been insulted by the question. Then.

  Making someone outcast because they do something, hear something, feel something—that’s right? Is that the sort of leader you want to be?

  This was it. Answer, question, all of it circling. Into this.

  If I was… gone…

  Madoc wanted to run. He wanted to growl curses, scream denials, swim away and never look back.

  Instead, he heaved himself, both arms and one good leg, through the shallows.

  It took forever. It took a span of heartbeats. It roiled pain up his swollen ankle and into his hip, and Wind made chill the wet upon his flesh. Madoc ignored all of it, making stolid progress to gain Tokela’s side.

  Anahli still coughed, pale and sodden, trying to wriggle out from beneath Tokela; trying to unwrap Kuli’s tight grip around her ribcage. Dismal, the failure to do either.

  Madoc ended up rolling Tokela over with a great heave and grit of chattering teeth, lost hold; he was limp and lifeless as Anahli had been mere heartbeats earlier. Madoc dragged closer, watching for some sign of life. Anahli heaved herself—and thusly a weeping Kuli—closer, merely to collapse against Tokela’s shoulder.

  It seemed all ceased until a breath—ragged, hoarse—finally lifted Tokela’s chest. Madoc extended trembling fingers to the leached, indigo-streaked throat; it pulsed erratic, but strong. Found himself charmed with a horror he could not voice, with which he could not react. Not now.

  How many orisons had he offered up for answers to Tokela’s oddities? He’d railed and wanted to strike out, to hurt Tokela for the lack of those answers, furious in the wake of wanting. Now Madoc had them within reach, and he was not going to let such a capricious thing as fear take them from him.

  Mine, he growled. Mine.

  Anahli reached up a hand to Kuli’s face and smiled, tried to speak. Instead she sank back down against Tokela, unconscious.

  “She’s still breathing,” Kuli said, all quavery, then scooted over to Madoc. “But… Tokela? What’s wrong with Tokela?” It came out as a growly hiccup. “What’s on his face? It’s on Anahli, too.” Still gravelly, but curious. There was no fear, even as Kuli peered at the indigo on his hands. “And me, now.”

  “To have no fear isn’t brave, just stupid.”

  Then both of them were stupid, it seemed. There was no fear, only what had to be done. Madoc turned, put his hands, one then the other, to Kuli’s face and held it. Said, quiet and deliberate, “We have to wash it away, all of it. Wash it from Tokela, and Anahli, and the rest from us. Take care!” he snapped as Kuli moved to obey. “Tokela went to all this trouble to help Anahli, so if you drown, I won’t let him save you.”

  The grass-hued eyes seemed to glimmer—like River, like dull copper flecked with hectic verdigris. They slid to take in Tokela’s prone form then dimmed, glossed with uncertainty as they turned back to Madoc. It gave Madoc a sudden, inexplicable shiver—he shook it away.

  “We have to do it, Kuli. Now. They’ll be coming, and we have to wash it away before anyone comes.”

  As Kuli obeyed, looking for something to use as an impromptu bowl, Madoc reached out and snatched up a hank of grass from near the bank. It was damp from splash; nevertheless he dunked it in the water and leaned over Tokela, used the grass quid to scrub at the strange indigo substance. It had begun to congeal, sticky. It had the taste of metal and moss, like to blood. Yet it couldn’t be blood. Blood was what still oozed upon Tokela’s forehead. That was…

  Natural.

  Gritting his teeth, Madoc kept scrubbing.

  “Here.” A subdued Kuli knelt and handed Madoc a discarded shell filled with water. “What is that stuff?”

  Madoc didn’t answer. Surprisingly, Kuli didn’t press. Even River seemed restrained. FishKin kept running, but not so frantic. They had come some ways from the fall, though it still rumbled upstream.

  A shout rang into stillness, thin with distance, then several more.

  “They’re coming.” Kuli sounded worried.

  Madoc answered, firm. “His indigo ran. It’s new laid, and he must’ve mixed it wrong. That’s what it was and nothing more.”

  Kuli didn’t question, for once. He stayed so quiet that Madoc slid a glance towards him.

  Demanded, “Do you understand me?”

  The shouts were drawing nearer.

  “I understand.” Kuli’s narrow face was set. “Some things cannot be spoken.”

  Wind deserted Madoc, then, making his hands shake. “Here,” he said to cover it, “you’ve missed some on your face.” He used the grass to scour Kuli’s chin.

  The uncanny quiet retreated, leaving behind a ahlóssa of eight summerings with new tears spilling over the face Madoc had just cleaned. “Tokela saved Anahli’s life. But…” A huge swallow. “Tokela’s sick, isn’t he?”

  “A’io,” Madoc growled. “And no one can ever, ever know.”

  22 – Fates & Dreamings

  Asleep…

  He is asleep, but he is aware. His eyes are closed, but he sees what she does. He dreams, but he knows her. His breathing resounds in the quiet, but it is she who swallows jagged inhalations, moving slowly over to where he lies in his narrow, soft-draped bed. One of flyingKin starts warbling outside, heralding dawn; it is she who quickly lowers the hide over the narrow opening to mute the bird’s call, it is she who steps back to the bedside, picking up a thick woollen blanket that has fallen onto the floor.

  She hugs it to her breast, stares at him, and he sees himself through her eyes, her sight. “There will never be a better time.” Her spouse, thinking her asleep as well, has gone to see to the ewes; he’s not left her alone lately, particularly with their son. Talorgan is, somehow, afraid.

  But that fear is nothing to hers. She is indeed afraid; not of her son but for him.

  He is asleep, but Tokela senses it—senses her—as if within his own heart. He has never known such fear and longing and sorrow. She will not see him come of age, she will lose him before she even comes to know him, and he will lose… he will lose…

  Everything.

  Asleep. He needs to wake. He tries to wake, but cannot, though he must, if he wants to stop it.

  “Be still, my own.” Lakisa’s voice sighs like Sea and Wind in a curved shell. “Soon it will be done, it will be over.”

  He doesn’t want that. Something tells him what it could mean.

  “We’ll Dance into the Starlight, my son, my Eyes of Stars. You will be where you belong. Where we all belong, before they took Them from us, disallowed our Dreamings…”

  This is Dreaming. And therefore real.

  Fear and fate, sound and sight, all opened and turned inside out. Sun settling across River, a shining, glittering Hoop. Wind in the darkness, born of Earth and cast in Fire, a mystery graved deep within his being, in what he has been, what he will be.

  Lakisa Sees it, whispers to herself, to the golden FireHoop, to the ahlóssa asleep in his cot. “I gave you life, to end in this? It cannot be. I shall not let it be!!”

  Yet he cannot know this, cannot remember this. He is hearing voices… he is hearing her voices, the possession that took her… how it is possible?

  She steps closer, still holding the blanket, tears streaming down her cheeks, heart hammering in her ears. Lakisa bends over her son, the blanket clutched to her breast and her fingers going to his head, lacing into his hair. The song within her heart, fear and longing and fate.

  Put a stop to it. You know what will happen to him. You know what they’ll do to him. Don’t let them hurt him. Stop it. Now.

  N
ow, Tokela pleads, soundless.

  Tears and touches laid upon his brow. Warmed yeast and Rainwater, the wool of the blanket whisper-soft in her fingers. Cloth folds over his face, into his mouth and nose; her voice folds about him, and he realises—I… can’t breathe…

  Asleep. Dreaming. Stars and Fire, Wind and Water and Earth, singing Truth to the drumming of his heart.

  “I have to stop it, my heart.” Lakisa’s whisper chokes with tears, her heart beating as if to burst—as if his own, as if he still lies enwombed beneath it—and she trembles, a-Fire with horror and purpose. Fixed, in sway of that purpose, she holds him as she has done only once before: when he was… was made.

  “Just lie you quiet”—her murmur is a mourning—“and it will be over.”

  He shifts beneath her, a small sound looses itself from his throat. He nestles closer, nuzzles her arm. It freezes her, breath rattling in her throat at his trust of her touch.

  N’da, she cannot quail, not now! She has given everything for him—can she not give this last? A kindness, really, it would be. Never would this changing take him, ruin him—never would he have to suffer!

  Never either would he live, or love, or see Moons, or Stars, or Sun.

  Slowly, inevitably, she draws the blanket aside. Her son takes a deep, soft breath, mutters, a frown twitching at his brow as if his dreams are unquiet, and she knows. She knows she hasn’t the courage, she cannot do this.

  And she turns to see Talorgan blocking the door, brown face sepulchral even in the warm candlelight.

  “Lakisa,” he whispers in numb, almost fascinated horror.

  The blanket drops from nerveless fingers to the floor. She sees a reflection of herself in his eyes—as if she Sees through his eyes: half-dressed, wild-eyed, her hand snarled in her slumbering son’s hair, pulling his head back as if baring it to the knife.

  “Lakisa.” Talorgan’s eyes are black and half lit, even nightsight shadowed, unreadable. His voice twists from horror to accusation. “What are you doing?”

  Dreams. Truths…

  Apparitions.

  With a choked cry, Lakisa runs. Talorgan grabs hold of her, shakes her. His eyes are shadowed, panicked—it feeds her own panic, gives her strength beyond her means. She yanks away, flees from the wykupeh and outwards. The branches snag at her hair. Sobs hitch at her ribs as she runs; they nearly fell her but she keeps going.

  River winds before her, a ribbon set ablaze in the last rays of dusk. Fire rises into the morning, circling above her. A shining, glittering Hoop of air and darkness, glittering gold and malice, a ring of death and madness…

  And Dreaming… shifts.

  Snatches Tokela back in his own heart, his own body, and he sees—though his eyes are closed, his body asleep, how can he see?—he sees his father standing above him. And in that instant he realises what his father was.

  A buffer of sanity. Of silence. Of blessed, blessed stillness.

  Talorgan’s eyes are dark, unfathomable with emotions he finds uneasily admitted, and now the pain of holding them within is a scream within Tokela’s memory. Shaking fingers touch Tokela’s lips, trace down his throat. A sigh, almost a sob, escapes Talorgan as he discovers the pulse beating there, strong and steady.

  Then he reaches down, brushes his son’s forehead with gentle fingers, then bolts out the door after Lakisa.

  no, don’t go, don’t go, don’t…

  Fire sucks him back, blazing in his heart, rising into the morning, circling above him… above her the glittering Hoop of Stars and darkness wheels, cast from Earth and born in River. For she is trapped and so he is trapped, and it is, in the end, the same, with only one way to extinguish the conflagration within their mind…

  River is chill; the shock forces the breath from Lakisa in a clutch of bubbles, scoops her deep. Without air she sinks, and a copper cloud rises about her, silt wafting upwards through her hair, obscuring her vision, quieting her heart.

  Stillness. Peace.

  Something tugs at her hair. She struggles but it’s strong, snarling tight to drag her away from the soft, dark cocoon. She twists, weightless, gains her freedom but the damage is done and she shoots back up like an arrow.

  Talorgan is there, ungainly and frightened, leaning too far over in the small dugout and calling her name. He cannot swim; to come out in the boat at all shows how desperate and afraid he is. He might have been drinking but neither is he drunk—he is more sober than she has seen him in months, and there is a knowing in his eyes. Knowing, and other things that she has no name for, things that rouse the ever-present panic.

  In this Dream, thisnow, Tokela can name them—he knows them, all too well.

  Fear. Devotion. Surrender.

  He knows what his father, cornered and driven past any reason, did—and will do.

  But Tokela didn’t/doesn’t want to know. He didn’t/doesn’t want to be held within this sway of memory/Dreamings, doesn’t want to be there, again, as it happens. Yet he is dragged along in his dam’s wake, as it has been since he was Shaped within her womb—don’t let my son die, i cannot bear to lose another—tangled and twined fast in a song of Other.

  Though he tries to break away, tries to stop it, stop it, stop it. As his world heaves about him and the Dreaming takes him back, as

  Talorgan snatches at Lakisa, voice harsh and shrill with fear, as he lunges too far and the dugout tips. Falling atop her, suddenly and painfully, driving the breath from her lungs as he slams into her then struggles underwater, his body heavy with wet and flesh, flailing and clutching to her, trying to help and merely sinking them further. For precious seconds she feels air upon her fingers, touches the wood of the boat, clutches at it as

  in a narrow bedshelf her son lies, eyes closed against Stars, his heart a-blaze and dawn-hot wings snarled by cloying, gossamer threads. In unconscious reaction he reaches out to stop the pain, as

  a broad, strong hand clamps to her wrist and seizes. Lakisa tries to take them up but instead is dragged down, down, into the silt and the inky shadows. Talorgan is gone and in his place is an empty shell of sinking stone, taking her with the undertow, taking them all into the copper-cool depths until

  the Dreamings die and Tokela tears free from the awareness—stops it, silences it—and their Fire is smothered with Rain and Earth, shut away with only the faintest glimmer of Sun fading into the river bottoms, and

  it is like giving birth again, only this time her son is truly gone, separate in soul as well as flesh, all strands of contact severed by a knife of thought, a terrified act of pure survival. He is separate, he is safe.

  Suddenly River is warm—inexplicably so—upon her eyelids. So warm, so welcome, this current and this soft hum and this shadow, and it is peaceful, so peaceful… The curious promise claims her, and finally she submits, opening her mouth and her eyes and her lungs to the heat of Her finality, and

  he is alone, alone as he has never been but it is worth it—his wings are broken and web-tangled, but they will dry and heal and he is free. Tokela gasps and somehow it is Wind, not River, that fills his lungs. But nevertheless it is dark, and peaceful, and he is here.

  Here.

  He is now, and instance, and impulse. He knows nothing else, feels nothing else, has somehow been emptied of all save the simplest and most basic drum of life:

  Survival.

  Dreaming. Asleep. Oblivious. The strange foresight, the Star-voices, the crippling awareness, all of it he locks away. All of it he makes still, silenced, never to be wielded again, never to emerge again…

  Until now.

  “I HAVE no reason to lie, Mound-chieftain. He was my playmate. I mean him no harm. But I saw what I saw.”

  Akumeh was scared.

  His honest fright skittered into Inhya’s own breast. It twisted chill about the thick, turbulent knot that had lain there, tight-spun, since Laocha had come running to the main fishing grounds with news of tumult at falling weir. Then Akumeh—steady, cheerful Akumeh—had come as well, babbling of dr
ownings and madness and blood that was not.

  They had descended upon the Fall with ropes and slings and plenty of strong backs, and brought their children home.

  “I know you’re not lying, Akumeh,” Sarinak reassured, walking across the chieftain’s gathering den. Akumeh knelt on the rug in its centre, eyes steady upon Sarinak as he laid a hand upon Akumeh’s shoulder, then his head. “I do not question your honour. I don’t doubt what you saw. I merely question your interpretation of it.”

  “Mound-chieftain, I—”

  “You were, all of you, pushed past any reasonable limits. I’m thankful all of you are alive.”

  All of them. Anahli, swathed in furs in her dam’s tipo, with Kuli and Aylaniś in constant attendance. Madoc, sitting proud and propped on a narrow shelf, watching Akumeh with narrowed eyes. The ankle was swollen, to be sure, and painful, but instead of a bone snapped, it had been the ligaments that had torn; longer healing, perhaps, but less chance of deadly infection.

  Tokela, on the other hand…

  He’d been unconscious from the time Sarinak had hefted him, limp, over one shoulder and carried him across on the barge they’d brought. He’d remained unaware when Sarinak lowered him—remarkably gentle—onto a rush-stuffed pallet on the floor of their bedding den.

  “You are troubled.” Sarinak took a few paces sideways, eyes upon Akumeh. “Still.”

  Akumeh looked over, spoke to Madoc in a voice that quavered. “You were there, after. Tell him what you saw. Tell me”—a plea—“what it was. It looked like he was bleeding. Bleeding from his nose and eyes, only it wasn’t. Blood.”

  The chill ran up Inhya’s spine and lodged between her shoulder blades.

  “That is true. It wasn’t blood.” Madoc met Akumeh’s gaze with a composure quite unlike his normal fierce defensiveness. “Tokela was already bleeding, didn’t you see the gash on his head?”

  “A’io. The weir must have hit him.” Akumeh took a breath, let it out slowly. “I pulled you both from beneath the fall. Tokela almost submitted to River, but we made him breathe. It was truly blood, then. But after?”