It was still a little while before he could begin. Closing his eyes seemed to help. “It has happened twice,” Aremu said, his voice a low whisper. “The first time, it was like being a thousand places at all once, too fast to process and too slow to ever stop. They swept through me, and I could see nothing else - hear nothing else - smell nothing else - feel nothing else. I was nothing else.”
Aremu sighed. “And then it was over, and I lay on the floor with a terrible headache. It stayed with me - it has stayed with me until today - but I never could make any sense of it.”
The imbala was silent a moment longer. “The second time was different,” he said, slowly. “It started much the same but - some of the images leaked from me - spilled forth from my mouth and nose and eyes and became real in the world. I could look at them and see them in a puddle before me, and I knew them for what they were - the mind of a man.”
There was more he could have said, then, much more - because Aremu had known who the man was, in his heart and in his mind, but those words he could not set free.
“As I understand it,” his voice was hoarse and aching now, slow and careful. “All men have minds, but what is in another’s mind is written in a language we do not speak, beautiful and terrible and unknowable. And yet for a moment, I see it - I can translate a page or two - not in my own mind, but outside of it. I cannot choose the man or the pages. It works through me, and I can but - hold.”
He stopped there, and he pressed his forehead into his legs, and he wondered if he had said too much; he wondered if this would be the end of it, if tenderness could not survive such knowing. And Tom’s hand rested on his back, slowly, and traced shapes that had no name, and Aremu was glad he did not know them.
*
They'd been silent for awhile, ’cause Tom hadn’t seen fit to say anything; there was nothing he could’ve said, he thought, that his hands couldn’t’ve said better. Aremu’d told, and it was time for Tom to show. To show what? Aremu had said it like he’d thought the knowing would twist him out of shape, would bring some nightmare alive to swallow them both; except, after he'd done, there was just Aremu, sitting with his face pressed between his knees, and Tom couldn’t think to do anything but hold him.
So they’d been silent for awhile, and Tom wasn’t sure how long they’d sat in it when he finally saw fit to break it. It wasn’t to say anything about what Aremu’d told him, ’cause he didn’t think he could, not yet. It was just a question, a quiet suggestion, an offer - and he floated it in the space between them like a whiff of incense. An invitation.
And then, he just held him close.
There was still something Yaris about the light, Tom thought, even though the leaves were already turning. It was still the long, lazy sun of Yaris looking through the dusty glass – stretching its languid limbs out over the scratched, scuffed hardwood, making shapes on the worn red rug. It was still the long sun, deep warm amber, with its pink evening skies that made skeleton shadows of the shedding trees; and Tom liked it, while it lasted, and he didn’t want to bid it farewell. Leastways, not without company.
For the last fleeting hours of the day, the house at Quarter Fords was full of that light. It was full of warmth, too; though the boards were still chill underfoot, the stove’d been burning for some hours. Faint smells of sage and patchouli and lavender and sandalwood clung to the rafters and the furniture.
Being honest, Tom hadn’t known what to think.
He wasn’t a man who thought he knew enough about the world to draw its borders thick and bold in his head. He was no stranger to ghosts, to all manner of strangeness, not for as long as he’d known hama; and he knew, having known all manner of tekaa, that voo could do some fair strange things. He knew the rattling in his own head, and he knew most things fell apart if you looked too close at them. Either you didn’t look, or you got comfortable with the dissolution. Tom’d done his fair share of both.
He hadn’t known, not really, why Aremu Ediwo carried it like a curse. He’d heard tell of them that burst into flame, or withered all they touched; he reckoned it made sense, then, for them to steer clear of the living, to carry it inside them like – spilled salt, or a horseshoe upside-down. He’d heard tell of them that really could scrag you on a stroke of bad luck, and he’d heard tell of them that didn’t know, one way or another, what they were capable of.
But it wasn’t just the fear of it; it was something in the way Aremu’d said whole, that day all the way back in Roalis, on the dock. Something about the way he’d said are you sure, like Tom had wanted anything more than to know him better, to know him better so that he might love him better.
The light was dying. Soon, he thought, and busied himself. He lit a match, hsssk, listened to the soft whisper of its burn in the quiet evening air. He watched the flame waver at his fingertips for just a moment, then heated the charcoal in hama’s old clay mabkhara. Shuffling round in the kitchen, he found the bakhoor, and soon enough, the smell of agarwood smoke was thick in the air.
He settled back back against the counter, shutting his eyes and breathing it in. Twilight settled like dust, softening all the harsh shapes of the day. The crickets were thinning out in Dentis, but they still sang; Tom could hear them out in the garden.
The mind of a man, he thought.
A language we do not speak.
Tom took a deep breath, crossing his arms over his chest. He shivered a little into his wool.
In the weeks since, with the Eqe Aqawe out somewhere over the Tincta Basta, Tom had had time to think about it. Rather, he’d had time to dream about it. The first dream was in late Yaris; he’d woken in a tangle of sheets, hama’s eyes wide with concern, murmuring about a man’s face glimpsed in spilt whisky. Then, he’d dreamt of blood – the imbala’s – he’d dreamt of images plucked from the mind of somebody he loved, somebody he’d never see again. (And he’d dreamt, disturbingly, of whispered Monite in Aremu’s voice, of the air grown heavy and thick and woobly around the imbala – but he tried to bury that one, ’cause it felt wrong.)
For all it’d troubled him, word that the crew was dockside had been fair pleasing. And for all it’d troubled him, it’d settled on him, and it was just another piece of how Aremu Ediwo was taking shape in his head; and the shape wasn’t any less pleasing than it’d ever been.
The candles cast the room into soft, wavering shapes, and Tom had settled back beside the stove with his eyes shut. As far as weeks went, it’d been an easy enough one, and for once, all his muscles didn’t ache; there were no fresh marks, ragged and laoso, to sting underneath the wool of his shirt. Still, all his scars tugged at him with the tilting of the seasons, and every year weighed on him. He’d half fallen asleep standing up when he heard the noise, and it jolted him back.
“Door’s open!” he called hoarsely, clearing his throat. He rolled his shoulders, starting away from the cabinet, only to feel something soft and wiry tangle itself up on his legs. “Godsdamn –”
A tiny voice went, pbbbbrt.
Tom caught himself on the counter and snorted. “Fuckin’ hell, nanabo, watch where you’re goin’,” he muttered, pressing the heel of his palm to his forehead, laughing. He ran his fingers through his hair. “Ersehat.” The cat slipped away, soft thump-thump-thump in the quiet.
“Come in!”