by Marc Secchia
“Aye. Well, you’ve made a right sheep’s stew of this foot, trying to save me. What was that kick you used?”
“An ancient form of lamko dance,” he fibbed.
“Thanks,” she said, with just the right emphasis to convey that she knew he was lying, and why.
“For kicking aside a few bits of glass, or for trying to get you killed right before?” he asked drolly. “Seems like an apology is in order, o Choice Tytiana. I acted like an, uh – well …”
“Like a brainless excuse for a splodge of windroc vomit?”
Now, a genuinely surprised laugh sputtered free as Tytiana examined the deep cut in the sole of his foot. “Thanks for supplying the descriptive precision I lacked.”
“Pleasure. Two nice slivers of glass in here,” she announced, with the air of a butcher deciding how best to carve up a choice hunk of meat. She quirked her lips at him, which immediately made him squirm.
“Bite the diary?”
“Slobber on my best work? I should think not.” She yanked sharply.
“Aaaarrrggghhh!” The Dirt Picker sprawled on the ground as he snatched back his foot to check that she had not, indeed, chopped it off. “That hurt, you bl –”
One quirk of a manicured eyebrow shut him up quicker than a windroc struck through the heart by a crossbow bolt. That arch said, ‘You – what? Answer that question and you’ll regret it, you scum-sucking liar!’ Tytiana tapped her worktable meaningfully. He replaced his foot with studied respect this time. No wisecracks.
Apparently, this one might be teachable. She was feeling highly instructive. How virtuous.
“The other one’s jammed between the bones.”
“No!”
“I promise you, it is,” she retorted, picking up a pair of pliers, meantime considering belting him over the head with her walking stick. “Hold still. I think this should be able to twist off a couple of toes in a pinch. I wouldn’t want to have a nasty accident.”
He said, “I believe you may be angry with me, Choice Tytiana?”
And the brass dral dropped at last. She said, “No, really? Why might I be angry with a Dirt Picker of the Third Class?”
“Because you didn’t realise that you most likely have a dragonet’s egg in your cage?”
“Aha!”
“Ah … what? Simmering volcanic hells, you are one confusing woman – with all respect, o Choice. Could we complete one thought at a time, please? Just one? Such as, the Dragon wasn’t feral? Expand and conclude conversation.”
Tytiana whisked out the shard.
“Suffering caroli!” he bellowed, falling onto the back of his neck this time with his bleeding foot stuck up in the air. Elegance personified.
“All better now,” she said, even more sweetly than before. “Right. Let’s get you cleaned and stitched up. I forgot I had a jar of the numbing cream right here.” He coughed in anguish. “Before you bleed all over my nice arboretum, that is, you brave, brave lad. Sit. And this time, stay!”
With a look that mixed disbelief, shock and no small measure of trepidation, he picked up his rump a second time and seated himself gingerly on the traditional three-legged stool. He looked exactly as discomfited as every fire in Tytiana’s bones wanted him to be feeling at this instant. She was in an ornery mood; probably ornery enough to set off local seismic activity. And this blasted two-faced son of a Sylakian pirate was about to become her unwilling victim. Life could not get much better, could it?
“Do we understand each other, Dirt Picker?”
“Woof.”
She tried to smother her mirth, but it turned into a terribly fake cough. “What did you say?”
“Ruff-ruff. That’s a woof-firmative.”
Hopeless. Tytiana’s belly quaked with the force of her guffaws. He was just too much!
* * * *
Bending over his foot, the lovely torturer set about cleaning the wound with the now conveniently available numbing antiseptic paste, finding a couple more small fragments of glass embedded in the wound. These extractions proceeded much less dramatically, to Jakani’s relief. The young woman clucked over his slapdash bandaging and took him to task for his even worse hygiene with a breadth of vocabulary that he was truly coming to admire.
Admire? Stupid lamko!
Without any ado, she said, “The Dragon was not feral because he dropped a message scroll into the House gardens about one minute before he murdered your neighbour. The scroll is a demand for fealty and ‘protection treasure,’ as the contents politely phrased it. I believe that means, ‘contribute to our treasury forthwith or we will continue blasting you whenever we feel like it.’ ”
Jakani said, “Ouch.”
“Exactly. The powers that be are all running around like frightened fowl trying to shore up our defences, and sending missives in every possible direction to try to work out which roost wishes to rake in our riches with its talons.”
“Very many, I suppose?”
“The message wasn’t exactly signed with love and kisses from your scaly neighbourhood friends, no,” she retorted. “So, what do you know about this dragonet’s egg, boy?”
“Why don’t you wear a headscarf, o Choice –”
“Dirt Picker!” She held up her needle. “You are too forward by half. Hold still. Tell me about this egg.”
“It wasn’t laid by the – ouch – kitten. Are you quite sure you’ve numbed me enough?”
Punctuating her words with stabs and tugs at the thread, Tytiana set about her stitching. “Tell me when you planted the egg?”
“Huh?”
“My kitten doesn’t lay eggs.”
“No. Obviously. Eee … I mean, I’m just – yeow – guessing. I’ve never seen a dragonet’s egg before in my – ooh – life.” Tytiana’s grip was stopping the blood flow into his foot. She did not care. Liar! Thief! Charlatan! “They aren’t native to Helyon – oooh, could you not – suffering … ah! Look, I’m dead terrified of your little pet, alright? I couldn’t – oh mercy! I just wouldn’t –”
She turned the full force of her glare upon the sweating young man. “What is your name?”
“Whaa … it’s –”
“Impolite to ask?” Stab. “My question flouts some stupid caste rules?” Tug. “Why do you imagine I care for your lame-brained lamko sensibilities, you insufferable, lying, vicious little disease-carrying caroli?”
His jaw almost slapped down on his chest.
“Aye, just sit there and pretend everything is fine and suns-shine streaming over the hills, will you, you chattering monkey. You have some gumption, walking back in here when you plainly tried to murder me!”
“How can you say that? I saved your ungrateful hide –”
“Shut up, dirtbag! You sleazy smug-ugly, miserable, two-faced piece of excrement!” In her fury, Tytiana jabbed the needle deep into his flesh. “Vile assassin!”
Then, they both gaped at his foot, held in a grip of shimmering scarlet flame.
The young man leaned down and pointed with a shaking finger. “That’s … kind of … an interesting effect, wouldn’t you say?”
Chapter 4: Fruitful Conversation
TYTIANA SAID, “Ooh, I don’t feel so …” And she dropped like a log.
To his credit, Jakani did leap like a trout to try to catch her. A trout would have done a far better job than he, for his was a manful and doomed effort, given as his foot had been propped up on the workbench and his behind was perched on an unstable three-legged stool. He did end up cuddling the Choice in one arm as they landed on the paving beneath her workbench, and he received a thumping blow upon his jaw from her lolling head by way of thanks. He decided that was entirely in keeping with her character.
She was so pale. Her cheek, so near. So …
Jakani arrested the bent of his head before he committed the heinous crime of kissing a pretty girl.
Ralti-stupid!
He tugged his arm free with a horrified shudder. There was definitely something wrong with him. S
ure, his honour was a miserably malformed work in progress, but he had never been so inclined to evil, unconscionable desires as to imagine stealing a kiss from an unconscious girl – the Choice of House Cyraxana, no less! He was worse than daft in the head. He was vile. No assassin, but vile within. Did he want to die? And this girl must be touched in the head if she thought he was harbouring some sort of plot to kill her. Why would he plant an egg in a tiger’s cage? It made no sense.
Tytiana was just too volatile, too balanced upon a knife’s edge, for anyone to feel safe around her. That was what they feared, didn’t they?
Or was it her powers?
For she clearly had magic, and on Helyon, that was a perilous endowment – more curse than blessing, he imagined. Jakani peered at his half-healed foot. A touch of scarlet lingered around the needle that stood in his much-abused flesh. The wound barely hurt at all. Biting his knuckles in squeamish horror, he drew the needle out. The strange fiery effect seemed to sink away beneath his skin, and then the tiny puncture wound just … drew closed. Right before his breath expired in a shocked hiss. It smoothed over, leaving only a tiny pucker to show what had been.
The Island-World must be thumbing its nose and laughing at him today. He had just seen magic. Real, undeniable magic.
Poor girl.
Ruddy good thing he was sitting down, too, because when Jakani thought upon his run that morning, certain things began to link together in his gibbering cesspit of a mind and he was not happy about that at all. Something had changed when this girl had touched him. She had broken the taboo, and this was his curse, his punishment, his … he didn’t even believe in superstition. His hands shook very badly as he made an attempt at arranging her limbs in a graceful posture. He should get help.
His eyes shifted to her left foot. Obviously fake, inside that slipper. The prosthesis had no proper toes. When had she lost it? How?
No time for that. Jakani leaped to his feet, preparing his story. The Choice had fainted. She had seemed pale. Quick. He tidied up the medical equipment and set the stool to rights. Mop up the bloodstains, aye. They did not need any unanswerable questions. When all was good, he ran across the courtyard, a matter of some two hundred feet or so, to find help at the main house.
No servant questioned his story. They were conditioned to look to the Choice’s needs, not to the matter of some earth-grubbing lamko who tended a greenhouse. When they had whisked an unconscious and pallid Tytiana away on a litter, he returned to the arboretum and tried to decide what he should do. The tiger looked hungry. The cats were mewling, the monkey was screeching at the cats, and the plants and trees all seemed droopy.
He scratched his stubble. “Now, what would she do first?”
She was a neatnick. A neatnick would have a list, maybe even a prepared list of tasks for servants to perform … “Aha. The scroll racks.”
One problem. He wasn’t supposed to be able to read.
When he examined the scroll racks, however, he had to laugh. Not only was every single scroll perfectly arranged and notarised, there was also an index to refer to. One entry on that list had a pictorial beside it, a man kneeling in rich red dirt. Obviously, that would be him. Lamko. Jakani found the corresponding scroll on the rack as it also had a picture attached to it by a short string, and when he unfurled the scrolleaf, another laugh escaped his lips. “Perfect. You are so predictable.”
What he had found was a list according to times indicated by the chronometer on the wall. Each task stood alongside its appropriate time by the hour, and was presented as a picture. Dig. Weed. Prune. Feed. Clear the rubbish. Haul water. Haul more water. Tempt the cat into the ‘den’ part of its cage with meat that he must ask for at the kitchens. Slide shut the door, then enter and clean its scatterings and any old bits of gnawed-upon bone. Hmm. That meant he might be able to examine the alleged dragonet’s egg without expiring in a whirlwind of fangs and talons. Replace the sand in the other felines’ cages. Sweep the paths …
“Even a lamko monkey can manage this much,” he told himself.
There was something satisfying in simple labour. He had space and time to clear his head. Jakani set about tilling the soil in one of the wedges, working his way between the neat rows of fenturi saplings, trying very hard not to disturb the spiders. He thought about many things, such as what he might say to his parents, who still had not spoken to him since the incident at the funeral – and as little as he could upon the mystery of Tytiana and her effect upon him. He must not. That was like poking an active volcano to see if it might explode. Working around a wedge that harboured many exotic fruits he did not recognise, he tried to formulate decisions about how he would or would not act. He hauled water doggedly in the thick leather pails and then watered everything growing in her arboretum.
He could not bring himself to examine the egg. The tiger snarled at him every time he so much as glanced at it, and Jakani had not been lying. He was petrified he would turn and find a golden streak blurring toward his throat. He was in and out of that cage as quickly as he could manage.
Damp armpits. Ugh.
Tytiana did not return that day, nor the next.
On the third day, she was waiting for him when he arrived a few minutes before the appointed hour. She questioned him curtly but in exhaustive detail about the tasks he had performed, issued several corrections and clarifications, and then proceeded to treat him how he had always expected their relationship should work. Not even a relationship, in truth. Mistress and slave. She draggled her glorious locks over her work, and ignored him insofar as possible.
Truthfully, he was far more content with this arrangement than with anything that had passed before. This was normal. Expected. Exactly how life should be. He made himself as useful and unobtrusive as he possibly could, performing his tasks with exactitude and dedication, and received not a word of commendation from her. This, too, was as it should be.
They both disregarded the egg in the cage. Egg-laying cubs did not exist.
Yet it lay there like a gleaming question-rune scribed upon the scrolleaf of unreality. A reminder of her flame. His uncanny healing and fleetness of foot. The unspoken sense of awareness that consumed them whenever they came into close proximity; she seemed to know where he was at all times, and he wondered if her eyes lingered upon him as often as his did upon her. Most likely not. Yet the sense was there. A sense of watching and being watched, of waiting for the unforeseeable and unknowable, like two motes circling upon a warm breeze of fate.
On the evening of the eighth day of the week, the suns cast the arboretum into the glorious golden hues of a partial eclipse and the mellow notes of a skilled harpist gladdened the ear, coming from the direction of the main house. Jakani was preparing to leave for home and his day of rest, when the Choice glanced up from her scroll and said, “Boy. Do you see that ripe fruit cluster up there?”
He followed her outthrust jalkwood cane with his eyes up to the cluster. Fenturi fruit started off a fetching silver, which the spiders preferred, but became this deep wine-purple if allowed to mature. This process happened year-round. “Aye?”
“Strike it. With your foot.”
Her face was hard as stone; her back rod-straight. Jakani swallowed.
“Dirt in your ears, lamko? Do as you are bid before I take this delay in obedience for insult.”
Yesterday, for the first time, he had noticed she wore a traditional crimson headscarf. Today the conservative symbol sat uncertainly atop her curls and waves, like sackcloth unsuccessfully trying to corral a load of beets into perfect flatness. It was a doomed attempt. One bright curl had escaped beside her left ear, while another perfectly defined double helix attempted to abscond along the proud, slender column of her heron’s neck.
Another detail he should in no way be noticing.
He said, “Of course, Choice Tytiana. I was merely judging the height.”
“Judge faster.”
“I beg a moment’s grace,” said he, and stretched his back and wor
ked a few cricks in his neck into a state approaching looseness. All this dirt shovelling and water hauling. It was very different to crawling beneath the trees in search of the tiny black balls of spider droppings, which were another source of income for the House. They were used as the foundational component in many traditional medicines in the East.
He stretched quickly, but not quickly enough it seemed, for her manicured fingernails, sporting a deep purple out of keeping with approved House colours, began to drum impatiently upon her worktop.
Selecting his range, Jakani took a run up of six strong steps, whirled about his axis, and then powered upward into a roundhouse high-kick. Plok. He tapped the ripe fruit with his preferred left foot, but not strongly enough to break its stem. Ha. A decent touch, all of ten vertical feet, he estimated.
Tytiana’s right eyebrow arched. “Poor execution. That was not what I asked for.”
Suffering spiders!
What, had he expected a compliment?
He trotted back to his starting point, launched into three successive handsprings, and then executed a high double forward somersault, piking at the top so that he could extend his feet and pluck the fruit cluster as requested. He landed on his hands, collapsed into the tucked forward tumble as he flicked the fruit upward, and rolled right up into a standing position with his hands outstretched. Most of the fruit, he caught. One errant member of the cluster landed square on top of his head. Splot.
Purple juice ran down to his left ear.
Tytiana was on her feet, smiling and applauding in the Helyon way – five claps to the left and five to the right, at shoulder level. “Congratulations. You’re a clown.”
“Gymnast.”
She said, “What do you call that kick you performed the other day to save me from the glass?”
He could not fathom her changes of mood. Lightly she spoke, yet the waters of this conversation were fraught with clear and present peril. He replied carefully, “I said it was a form of dancing, firstly, because it is in a sense an art born in the traditional dancing games of our people, o Choice Tytiana. Secondly, I drew your attention to the discipline of dance because no lamko in his right mind would wish to be accused of practising martial arts. As you know, the law forbids our caste from – why are you laughing?”
