[Closed] Something Foreknown to Me

[Tom Cooke]

Not Alone • Eastern Erg

Sometime on the 28th of Bethas, 2720

H
e listens as his hands search through the dark. There’re grains caught between his toes and his sandals, so he takes them off and shoves them aside; with his bare feet, he can feel the boards better, can crouch and crawl better. This isn’t, he thinks, the floor of the wagon. A wall has become the floor, and the floor has become the ceiling.

Anfe gave it to him. The smile on his face hurts; if he could see it, he’s not sure it’d be a smile. It’s more of a twist, a tightening of the muscles. He blinks, and a tear spatters against the back of his hand.

Kafo pez Halef, he thinks. Now it makes sense, the look on Anfe’s broad, scarred-up face. All the rest of it makes sense, too.

I like it, comes Kafo’s soft voice.

He squeezes his eyes shut, holding still. He sniffs in deep. He’s not sure why it aches so. When he opens his eyes, it’s still dark, and a few more tears stream down his cheeks.

Ada’na Ipiwo’s breath is louder and louder. There’s another snort, a catch. The smell of blood’s not so strong further from Kafo – so he hopes – but still the back of his neck prickles as her field laps round him. He pats a drift of sand on the boards, then more rough wood, then what feels like a hard leather shell. It’s not roped down; it must be the one that slipped out.

Kafo has been silent. He’s said nothing himself; he’s barely processing – numb mind, senses all too-sharp in the dark – but then the voice comes again: Ah nah to leh, vaw ke lin. He pauses, feeling his way round the loose case.

“My – tser’úxiraw,” he repeats first. The word on the lips of a natt rattles him; something in it seems tsuter wrong. Natt don’t go in Thul’amat, much less Ire’dzosat. An arata would never – the realization washes over him slowly, and he rocks back on his heels, crouching silent for a moment.

He realizes his mouth is open and he’s holding his breath. He shuts it; he continues moving, and his mind lurches back into motion. “No,” he says simply. It’s easier than any of the questions. “Anatole is the name of the one that came before me. I don’t – like it,” he admits.

He stops himself before more can come spilling out. But then, he’s not sure why he must stop himself. There’s ada’na, but anything she hears, she’ll put down to a laoso dream. If, he thinks, she wakes up.

Cooke, he wants to say. Thomas. Tom. That’s my name. Kafo has been so honest. “I don’t know if I have a right to my old name. Sometimes I think Anatole is one of my names – the way Nkemi says it, anyway.” He reaches out and feels rope. It’s pulled taut against more boxes. He inches along the luggage with his hands, waddling on aching haunches. His bruise smarts.

Then he’s a fistful of soft leather, and he’s grinning. Nothing’s fallen out. He unties, unbuckles, opens the bag and rustles round among his grimoire and his chalk case, gets out the bottle wrapped tight in the spare amel’iwe, the smaller bag with its bandages and tape. Then he finds the matchbox, and nearly cries.

When one hisses to life, throwing wavering dim light over the wagon, he hears Kafo yell. He blinks, and looks once before he looks away: at the other end, down a slight slope, Kafo is a tangle of dark limbs and white fabric, face covered with his hands. Behind him, there’s – sand.

He fights down a surge of panic, looking down and away.

“Ep’ama,” he murmurs, “I should’ve warned you.” He tries to keep the panic out of his voice; he finds it even, after all.

He finds a gas lantern by the coppery glint of the handle, lying on its side near the case. There’s a crack shot up through the glass, but only a crack. Careful-like, he lights the wick; more light shivers over the inside of the wagon now, softer yellow light, but the crack’s shadow is a scar stretched over the wall. He puts out the match.

He goes to ada’na Ipiwo first, who’s lying on her side near the luggage. No blood is slick on her head, on her hands; she snorts and makes small noises with her throat, but he can’t see that anything’s broken. Must’ve hit her head, he thinks.

He rises on shaky legs and walks back to Kafo, this time, feeling along the wall-floor with his fingertips. He doesn’t take the lantern too close, just close enough to see him well by; he sets it nearby. When he comes within four steps of Kafo, he pauses, then continues more slowly.

Kafo has been looking at him through squinting eyes, his long neck craned. He tries to smile at the other man, for all the first sight of him sent shivers through him.

It hurts, he thinks. When you bleed, it hurts as much as when I bleed. If you told Anfe, would he understand that it’s still you? That you’re still a man who hurts and bleeds, who moves with another man’s touch, who thinks and feels, that you’re still Kafo?

A man I love did, he thinks, but not all men are like him. He looks at him. His fingers are covered in glistening dark, and his face is smeared with it. It’s hard to tell with the shadows, but it looks like it’s coming from a gash on his head. There’s something uneven about the rise and fall of his chest, but he’s no living conversationalist, and nor is he a sawbones; if it doesn’t bleed, there’s nothing he can do for it.

“I need to come closer, Kafo,” he says, “and touch you. It’s going to hurt, even just cleaning it with water. Tell me when you’re ready.”

He edges closer on his knees, unwrapping the bottle of whisky. Anxiety worms in his chest, chewing at his heart. “I have a lot of names already,” he goes on, “but there’s one – someone dear to me gave it to me.”

He takes the canteen from his belt and opens it, tipping out some water onto the scarf.

“Risha.” This smile hurts, too. There’s no need, he thinks, to explain the name, not to one like him. “I like it,” he adds, blinking wet away from his lashes. “It’s a secret. It’s my name.”

He raises the wet cloth, but he then waits, lowering his eyes to Kafo’s. He raises his brows.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Morning, 28 Bethas, 2720
Untethered

There’s light now in the wagon. The lantern has a crack in it and it casts a shadow and the shadow falls over everything and even Kafo. The light hurts his eyes and the shadow does too; neither of them are the dark.

Not-Anatole comes back and he brings the light with him.

“Risha,” Kafo says, lilting. He looks at Risha through the dark, looks down at the scarf which is being steeped in shadows, darker and darker. He nods.

“I know about secrets,” Kafo says quietly. “Sometimes I forget but I won’t forget this one,” he looks at the other man; he looks into the gleaming place where the light finds his eyes and he blinks and he looks again. “Risha,” he whispers again, quietly, to himself.

He had to remember Kafo. He doesn’t know who Anfe means sometimes. Sometimes he learns it again and it’s as special as it was before and it’s his - once more - like being given it all over again. Sometimes he forgets to keep silent but mostly not; he is good at silence. It is better to hold in all the thoughts so he does not make a mistake. Anfe tells him this; Anfe keeps him safe.

It does hurt when Risha touches the cloth to him; he writhes away. His fingers hold nothing and he cries out and he twists. It stings and he doesn’t know what to do with it and he twists again and that hurts worse. He pants and strange noises come from him.

Kafo presses back against the wall. It crumbles behind him. Sand spills around his hands and he grabs hold of it; he squeezes tight and holds it in his palms. It is his breath which is loud now, short sharp shallow pants, his eyes very wide except when they close. But he doesn’t like the dark, and he opens again, and the noise is coming from his throat and it hurts - a long low whining which stings at the back of it.

He’s staining the amel’iwe; he’s the shadow now, he’s the shadow.

“Risha,” Kafo whispers to himself, again and again. He holds it close so he won’t forget. “Risha, risha, risha.”

Tseq’ule Caravan, Above the Sand

Nkemi prays. All of the circle is as one; what one knows the others also know. There are times for Hulali and there are times for Roa. Here is the desert she calls on Roa; she asks her to lay her hands over Anetol and hold him safe. She asks her to bend down and stoop to cover him, he who has pledged himself to her.

With the last of the water she has inside her she crouches down against the warm flank of the camel, and she lifts the bottom of her wrap and spits into the sand; the precious offering whispers away deep into the swirling grains of it. She closed her eyes, and presses her forehead against the rounded side of the camel, and gives herself over to prayer entirely, empties her mind of all thoughts but the asking.

She feels the sandstorm still. The wind rushes over her, past her, around her. Sand finds every crevice of her and seeps inside and snatches at her skin. Sometimes the wind snaps and all she has jumps against her. Next to her Mawaro has his back to the camel and his eyes shut; his is the only voice she hears over the howling wind, and he too prays.

It ends in time, as it must. They do not move, at first; such storms may have false endings. After a moment, and then another, and then only scattered gusts, Nkemi climbs up to her knees; her hands rest on the camel’s back.

She turns; she sits down, again, her legs shaking and weak, and looks down the hill.

All the world is changed, Nkemi thinks, her face stinging numb. There is nothing there but smooth slopes piled high; there is not the faintest trace of pale green fabric.

Her eyes close behind her glasses; she curls forward, sandals coming to rest against the ground, and she presses her face against her knees and shakes. There is no water in her to cry.

Nkemi takes a deep breath, then; she climbs to her feet.

The sky is clear, uneasy brown-gray. Some of the caravan are starting to straggle up, slowly.

Nkemi makes her way through the sand; unsettled, it sinks and shifts beneath her feet and she fights on, steadily, unyielding, until she reaches Inis’s camel at the front of the caravan.

“Anatole,” Nkemi says, her voice even, “and Ipiwo too. They were in the wagon which fell.” She speaks truth; her back is prefect straight, and her eyes red-rimmed behind her goggles. She breathes in deep, and out again, and looks from Inis to Ole, and asks without the need for words.

[Tom Cooke]

Above and Below • Eastern Erg

Sometime on the 28th of Bethas, 2720

L
ittle whimpers, choked little sobs. This body doesn’t have the strength to hold him in place. He gives a little, he gets a little: he cleans some of the blood off Kafo’s scalp, and then the other man squirms away, knocks his head against the sand. There’s sand all down his shirt, smeared on his long dark fingers; he’s clenching it in his fist and scattering it. He gets another glimpse of the scar at his wrist, peeking out from under the hem of his sleeve, then it’s swallowed by shadow.

Risha, risha, risha, he repeats, risha, risha. He keeps a steady hand with the bloody scarf, even as he blinks away more tears.

Kafo knows of secrets, of this he’s no doubt; he’s not sure Kafo’s so good at keeping them anymore, but he doesn’t think that matters much right now. Kafo knows his name; it’s alive in the air between them. He’s not alone.

Little by little, painstaking, the blood – some of it already crusty and matted – comes away.

He lets out a breathless laugh. “Not so bad, Kafo,” he says, over the ragged whine that comes from somewhere in his throat. He pronounces the name, Kafo, deliberate and careful. “Not bad at all. It’s just the skin.”

If he’d thought some of the man’s rambling confusion was – boemo, no, he’s intact. The cut’s deep but clean; he must’ve caught himself on the corner of a box.

He’s always heard to clean it with alcohol, but – he hesitates, thinking of the twist of the other man’s face, the laoso animal noises convulsing up from his throat. His chest is still heaving under his shirt, and the shadows dig deep hollows in his face.

They won’t be here so long; somebody’ll dig them up, and then there’ll be clean bandages and junia. Tseq’ule has a woman with a practiced, if not gentle, hand.

Instead, he takes out his bandages. Best keep him talking, thinking on other shit. “So you like the stars?” he asks, remembering his question the night before. I don’t think Anfe does, he thinks, smiling faintly down into his bag. He wonders if he saw the observatory once, in some other life.

“I don’t know if you drink,” he adds, “but it might settle your nerves.” Risha unbottles the whisky and offers it to Kafo with a raised brow.

Ole’s holding her tight, fingers caught in hers like in a snare. Under the howl of the ule’udu, she’s heard her brigk praying fast and steady, prayers so old she doesn’t stumble over a word. “You are in the soil and the rock and the mud,” she prays, “and the things that grow up from you, and the bochi born of your blood… you are in every grain of sand and the wind carries you…”

“El’detua,” repeats Inis, muffled by her scarf, “el’detua, el’detua.” Prayer enough for her.

Somewhere uliam cry.

It dies down, as it always does; the wind gets tired of its mad caoja, of tossing Vita to and fro wherever she likes. The spirits are falling back asleep, settling down like birds in the nest, and the air no longer grates the face. Still they stay still ‘til they know. Caoja’s not over ‘til the durg’s asleep, they know well.

They’re both covered in it head to toe. Ole gets up first, the motion shifting a waterfall of sand off her shoulders; she ruffles her scarf with one gloved hand and more sand scatters on the air. Inis is wiping it away from her goggles with her fingers, squinting now through the scuffed glass.

Ole doesn’t ask. Inis doesn’t know yet. A muscle in her upper back is hung. When she shifts her shoulders, there’s a crack crack crack, and she stifles a cry. She squeaks in her throat, and now Ole’s hands are both on her arm, pulling her firmly to her feet.

She holds to Tsaw’ape’s firm warm flank, then curls her fingers around the saddle. She can’t stand even to her meager height, but with her neck craned, she looks over Vita’s rearranged face. She knows each color to look for: blue, red, green, white. Blue, she finds rightaway; hasn’t budged. Red’s half-sunk on its side, the wheels buried, and that’ll take some doing.

Green – not accounted for. White’s benny, perched between the dunes where the landscape hasn’t changed much.

Guests’ things were in the green wagon. Not good news for anybody. Et’oso was riding in green yesterday, but he rejoined the rest of them this morning, and she saw him not too far away when the winds started kicking up. Ada’na Ipiwo? The orozem? The jent had both started the morning out camelback, but there’s no telling.

“Do you see – ah!”

“Inis,” cries Ole.

Scraping thirty-five maw and it’s worse every year. She stumbles in the sand like the lopsided boch she used to be and nearly goes down, only Ole has her by the arm and supports her weight until she finds her feet again. Any direction she moves in, any twist, could be like a knife in some knot of muscle. It’s not fair, but Vita isn’t.

“My stick,” is all she can say. Ole finds it for her, tied to the camel’s saddle. She leans on it; the tip buries deep in the sand.

“Ada’na Nkemi,” says Ole, then.

The prefect’s straight, shoulders squared, wind rippling in the fabric of her clothes. Inis looks across at her; she can just see her eyes through both their goggles. Neither she nor Ole bothers to bow.

She nods abruptly, then raises a hand. It’s Uqasah who comes over, then Udo with his beard full of sand. “Spread out, adame, spread the word, search the dunes,” she tells them, “for anything green.” Her throat is dry and her breath is coming poorly. Her chest feels squashed under the weight of the pain at her back.

Udo nods grimly; Uqasah’s eyes widen, and he looks to Nkemi, but he goes stomping off across the sand, too.

Ole’s frowning deeply; it’s hard to read her expression, but she’s looking down at Nkemi silently.

“Did you see where it fell, ada’na?” Inis asks, fingers tight round her stick. She pulls herself as far up as she’ll go, raising her chin. The wind tugs at her hair.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Morning, 28 Bethas, 2720
Untethered

The world around Kafo blurs. He blinks and it is clear again for a few moments, and then it blurs once more. He blinks again, and the face that Risha wears swims into view, frowning and serious, holding the amel’iwe which is all shadows, now. Kafo hurts; not only where Risha is touching, he hurts all through and he doesn’t know why. He remembers what it is to take a deep breath; that hurts, too, but it feels good at the same time and he doesn’t know why.

Kafo nods; there is a thin, high pitched noise coming from his throat and he doesn’t know how to make it into words. The cloth goes down, down, not to the floor because the floor isn’t beneath them, anymore. It’s behind; he can see it’s behind with the light that Risha brought. There’s a crack through the light, not-light, not-shadow.

“I like the stars,” Kafo remembers how to make words. There’s darkness again, but it is only that he has closed his eyes. He remembers to open them, and the face that Risha wears swims blurred before him once more.

Kafo reaches out and takes the bottle from Risha. He takes a sip of the whisky; it burns, going down, but he remembers that and that it’s the good sort of pain. His hand is shaking and so he holds the bottle back out. If his hand shakes too much there will be no more whisky; he remembers that. Anfe got angry with him for that.

“I like the stars,” Kafo says. He doesn’t remember if he said it before but he remembers that Risha asked; he remembers that Risha asked the night before, too. He remembers standing by the tent and watching him and Anfe too; Anfe didn’t know and Risha didn’t know either. Kafo didn’t know he was Risha, then, but he knew what he was. He was the only one who knew and it was lonely, then. It isn’t lonely now, and it isn’t dark, but it does hurt.

“They’re always there,” Kafo says. It’s dark again, but he knows it’s because his eyes have closed. It doesn’t hurt as much, now; he feels the hard press of the sand behind him. “We go and we come back and they’re always there. Others go away, but the stars stay. I don’t know if they remember; I think they forget or maybe they never know. But they don’t leave.”

Kafo can hear his own breathing; it isn’t like it was before. It hurts with each breath and each hurt surprises him. He quiets it; he can hear Risha’s breath, if he listens. He can hear Ipiwo’s breath too; he can’t remember how it was before. He remembers that he wanted to know if she was still breathing; she is. He is too, and Risha is, too.

The wind has stopped.

Kafo cranes his head up; he listens. He twists, and a noise comes from his mouth; he crawls on all fours to the place he was before, where he could hear the wind and he feels the boards on the side of the wagon beneath his hands and his feet. He listens again; he presses his ear against it.

“The wind,” Kafo says. He turns; he comes back. He can feel his mouth open and his breath on his tongue, and he hears another noise come from his mouth, but then he is back at Risha, back where he can see the light with the darkness through it. “The wind.” He says again, trying to remember. “It isn’t breathing.”

Tseq’ule Caravan, Above the Sand

Nkemi glances over and down; she turns, and looks at the long sweep of the sand below. She looks back.

Inis is standing with her stick; her fingers are white-knuckled tight on the handle of it. Her face is tight too, twisted and knotted, and she lifts herself even though she is leaning. Ole’s face is all frown; there are shadows in it, scattered beneath the sand and the folds of her wrap and the goggles, and they, too, cast shadows through her.

A scatter of sand drifts through the three of them. Nkemi closes her eyes against it, even though she wears her goggles still. She opens them once more; she turns and looks down the sweeping hill of sand.

“It came down there,” Nkemi traces a path through where she thinks the world was, in the before. She knows it by the camel where she crouched with Mawaro more than the dune, because the camel did not move, and neither did she, not until the storm ended. Sand tumbles from every fold in the fabric of her clothing when she moves; it scatters across the loose sand. She is ankle-deep in it; sand claws with tiny pinpricks into the folds of her pants and between the ties of her sandals. She does not adjust herself.

Nkemi’s eyes flutter shut; she thinks. She knows to remember; to be a prefect is to remember what one sees. This is not something learned at Ire’dzosat. She straightens up. It doesn’t not matter how she feels. She imagines herself standing in court, before a magistrate; she sees herself before the committee only a few days before, back straight and chin lifted, offering only truth.

She looks at Inis and Ole once more; she shakes her head. She would not speak, for fear of lying. “I do not know more,” Nkemi says; her voice is raw.

“Ipiwo?” Ofero is on his feet, now; he is stumbling, made dusty by the sand, all the folds of him shedding it. He surges through the sand; it catches him beneath the feet and he comes down to his knees. “Ipiwo!” He calls his wife’s name, louder, looking around; he fumbles his goggles up.

“Where is she?” He staggers to Inis and Ole; he looks, down, where Udo and Uqasah are making their way down the hill, and the other men are coming with them.

“Kafo was with them,” the man with the scarred face made no sound; he stands a little removed. He has removed his goggles; his eyes are red-rimmed and swollen. He shifts when they look at him; he turns and looks down, and all Nkemi can see of his face is the twist of his scar against it.

He breathes, deeply. “I saw him close the ties,” he says, carefully, through the thickness of his words. They slur but they are even enough to understand.

Ofero is shaking; he makes a noise like a choked sob, and he turns away.

Nkemi understands what he means; she cannot bring herself to hope. She closes her eyes for a moment; she thinks. When she has herself steady, it is Inis she looks to, Inis and no one else.

“If Roa is good,” Nkemi says, evenly, “and the Circle and the mona bless me, I may be able to find them.” She makes no promises; she does not take her gaze from Inis’s. She holds herself upright, and there is no hint of a smile beneath the once-bright color of her headwrap.

[Tom Cooke]

Above and Below • Eastern Erg

Sometime on the 28th of Bethas, 2720

K
afo takes a sip and eases back, his eyes shut. He nods, taking a moment to find his reading glasses in his bag. The rims catch the lantern light, wiry gold. The lenses are unbroken, to his relief. He sets them on his nose, then takes the whisky back from Kafo’s shaking hand. It nearly spills, but it doesn’t, in the end.

It’s not until Kafo repeats himself that Risha rises to his knees again, finding the glistening line of the cut, still welling with sap, and begins his work. Kafo keeps talking, and he keeps laying on the bandages, half holding his breath with hope. He listens close, edging round the tender skin that’s been pulled at by the blow.

He thinks he could’ve imagined the answer, even if Kafo hadn’t spoken. Others go away. The knot in his throat is now impossible to swallow.

He’s never told anybody this; he’s hinted at it to her who’s seen him lose so much, but there’s no one else it wouldn’t shame him to tell. Hama’s face is already hazy at the edges. One day, he thinks all he’ll remember is the vaguest touch of calloused fingers, and he’ll know to look for the stars, but that’s it. Maybe the lasses with curly dark hair and straight dark hair will blur together, throwing fists and writing letters. Maybe he’ll forget them, too.

It’s easy for such thoughts to grasp at him in the dark. He’s got the last of the tape on when Kafo grunts and crawls away. He’s too tired to protest; he eases back against the soft sand and takes a swig of whisky.

The wind, he says. For a moment, he looks up with hope; it isn’t breathing, Kafo says, and his heart leans sideways.

“The storm’s over.” Or they’re buried so deep they can’t hear it anymore. He doesn’t know if that can happen. Glancing back at Ipiwo, her chest rising and falling slowly, propped against a few soft cloth bags, he’d prefer not to think of it.

Kafo comes back. He’s still breathing unsteady, making funny noises in his throat now and then.

It means they’re coming, he thinks, but that’s over the line and into a lie. He tries a smile instead, feeling the tear tracks prickle and smart against his dry cheeks. He hasn’t bothered to take his glasses off; he looks over the glinting rims. “I knew a man,” he starts, “who sometimes imagined the night sky as a blanket full of holes. Not stars up there – little, tiny holes to someplace full of light.”

He shrugs, taking another big swig of whisky. If ever a man’s allowed to.

(Where do you think we go, at the very end? Is it just dark? Do we just stop –)

“I don’t think it matters if they remember,” he says, barely able to speak past the knot, “so long as they don’t leave.” His smile hurts; he looks down at his hands in his lap.

It’s happened before, of course. Anfe knows, for whatever else he might be. Ofero doesn’t. She can tell by the way he’s just managing to keep his sobs in. He’ll dry himself out weeping – more water lost. He staggers off, looking in a way that’s not looking, and nobody tells him, because there’s no flooding point.

She remembers the first time she felt ixup’osúf take hold. She lived in it for a year after her first brigk went back to the Cycle. She wonders sometimes if Ole knows it well enough to get by; she wonders what it would be like if it were her under the sand, Ole up here with the prefect. Time tells. She won’t be there to find out, when it happens.

The prefect certainly knows. Inis has watched her shut her eyes, the thoughts moving behind her thick goggles and her scarf and her small serious face. She’s young, but Inis supposes that’s what being a brigk in Thul Ka does. She holds her sand-dusted headwrap high.

Another thin drift of sand. Inis pulls her scarf down under her chin. Her stick wobbles in the sand.

“Very good,” she says to Anfe in Mugrobi, nodding abruptly. There’s no need to speak Estuan here. That’s all she says; there’s nothing else to it. It doesn’t mean the ties didn’t break, or the wind didn’t blow the covering open. But it means there’s a point, and when looking for something to hold onto, anything will do.

Ole’s silent, deferential. She begins to think. She’ll go until the evening, but not into the next day. It’s Tsogeq’dzawa in green and black, spitter that he is, that Nkemi gestured to, and she can see the way the landscape is around him now, even if she can’t guess what it was like before. There’s a starting place; there’s shifting sand one section at a time, turning the land over carefully bit by bit. But to keep digging and searching after nightfall is an errand for the dead, and there’s water enough to outweigh ada’xa Ofero’s weeping.

Ada’na Nkemi speaks again. Inis meets her eye.

If Roa is good, she says. This much Inis understands. Arata tsate’súwa she doesn’t. Nkemi isn’t looking at Ole, and neither is Inis, though she can feel her stiffen at her side. She can imagine dark kohl-rimmed eyes boring into Nkemi.

It’s a moment before she speaks. She inclines her head. “What do you need?” she asks. Ole’s jaw works, but she doesn’t protest. No more questions for her to ask; she holds herself and her field separate.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Morning, 28 Bethas, 2720
Untethered

Kafo listens, crouching. He looks, too, through the blurring in his eyes, at the shape of a man leaning against the sand.

A blanket full of holes, Risha says. Kafo nods; he comes closer again, and this too hurts. He rests himself against the sand and he lets the darkness come for a little while. He tries to imagine it; he tries to imagine a blanket draped over the world. Like a mother tucking in a baby, he thinks; the Circle lays it down over them, the blanket. But the weave isn’t tight, and they slip through – sometimes they slip through –

He hears a different kind of hoarse noise, something which aches in his chest, and he doesn’t want to be alone.

He crawls along the not-floor on his hands and knees. He feels the rough scrape of the boards and past them the soft place where the fabric is and the sand beneath it. He comes, close and closer still, until he is close enough to feel the warmth Risha’s body has.

He goes slowly; he touches the other man’s arm, first, with careful fingers. He holds there a little while; he comes closer, then. He rests the side of his head which does not hurt on Risha’s shoulder; he closes his blurring eyes and feels something trickling down his cheeks. A few more noises escape him, and he pants, quietly, through the ache of it.

“I’m not ready to leave,” Kafo says, very softly, so softly he isn’t sure whether he said it at all or whether he only thought it. Usually it’s the other way around; usually he doesn’t mean to say it but he does, sometimes, he does, when he doesn’t mean to. This time he means to; he doesn’t want to be alone. He doesn’t want to be alone.

He doesn’t want to be alone in the dark.

Tseq’ule Caravan, Above the Sand

Nkemi sees the straight line of Ole and the tension in the muscles beneath her clothing. She never looks away from Inis, not even for a moment, meeting the caravan leader’s gaze through two sets of scratched, scuffed goggles. She can see the glint of her eyes well enough to hold, and hold she does.

She feels them at the edges of her field, the brush of two glamours. She makes no more attempt to caprise or brush into them now that she has all along; she does not flex, or pulse, or signal. She only stands, with her feet planted deep into the sands, and she holds. When Inis nods, Nkemi bows her head, lightly. This is a weight of responsibility; she asked for it, and she accepts it, and lets it settle onto her and press her down, deeper, into the sand.

“Water,” Nkemi says, evenly. Her voice is scratchy and hoarse. "Thank you."

There is a ripple which runs through Ole, then; there is a noise which does not make it out of her mouth. Whatever Inis thinks, she keeps it locked inside and she says none of it.

Nkemi has traced plots into sand before. In Tseli, it is done; in Tseli, it is popular to use sticks and tools to draw elaborate plots deep in the sand rooms, to meditate in the midst of them, to make your motion and your steps a part of the plot, so that you may walk amongst it without disturbing the lines. There is a beauty and an elegance to it, a meditate art, to both the drawing and the sitting.

The wind gusts again, and scatters the sand wide.

Nkemi finds a flat enough place. She finds a place behind one of the wagons, where she is sheltered from the worst of the wind and some of the sun. She takes the waterskin, what they could spare, and she takes a small handful. She turns her hand, slowly, and lets the wind scatter the droplets into the sand, offering it to Hulali and through him the Circle. She watches; the spots where the water fell stay damp, darker than the sand which surrounds them.

Nkemi knows once she begins, there will not be much time.

She settles her goggles around her neck; she unties her wrap, and ties it again around her head, for speaking clearly with the mouth and nose covered is harder than speaking clearly through the occasional taste of sand. She finds with her gaze the edges of her plot; she adjusts the waterskin, carefully, and turns it slowly, her hand clenching tight into a fist at the opening.

Nkemi breathes in deep, and exhales it out. She breathes in deep again, and exhales it out once more. She settles herself; she calms. She begins to draw the plot; she does not draw a circle, but dots the water at points around herself, makes an arrangement which is broken – interrupted – at the edges. She does not encircle herself, but rather stretches out through the plot, to the world beyond.

Inside, she writes; here and then, as she can, she draws symbols of monite with wet fingers dragged over the sand. Her mind is empty of all but the plot and the monite, though prayers thrum through her still.

At last, Nkemi kneels in the center of it. She drinks the last of the water, letting it coat her mouth and her throat.

She begins with the invocation. She chants steadily through it, greeting the mona, calling to them. She feels them in her field, all around her, clairvoyant and static both twined together, the page and the ink. She breathes in and out through the spell, and she lets the invocation go on, a little longer.

When she is ready she moves into the espial. She reaches out to Anetol; she reaches out through the fear and pain and confusion, and asks the mona to help her find him. She slips the borders of her body and the borders of the sand; she lets herself drift like a lantern up and out of herself, and she reaches with everything she has.

There is nothing.

The wind rattles, and gusts against her face; Nkemi’s eyes open. She knows not to stop chanting; she holds the ley channel open still, though all of her is straining and shaking, though the plot is drying in the sands around her, though she knows that it may be that all she has is hope.

She reaches out again; Nkemi sinks deeper into the spell. She is the sand, shifting and smooth and even; she is not afraid, because fear will do her no good. She roots herself deep in Roa’s earth, and she plunges her hands deep into the sand, almost to the elbow, and she chants, tasting the drifting sand on her tongue and the wind which has carried it so far.

She casts; she casts, and though she feels an ache in her throat and a dryness which reaches down through the core of her. She does not yield; she roots herself in the earth, and she reaches out once more. In the middle of the desert, she looks for a garden.

Rolls

Difficulty of clairvoyant cast: Sidekick
BOTToday at 1:23 PM
@moralhazard: 1d6 = (2) = 2

[Tom Cooke]

Above and Below • Eastern Erg

Sometime on the 28th of Bethas, 2720

I
t’s quiet in the low light. The wagon wall creaks as Kafo shifts closer. He doesn’t jerk when he feels fingers on his forearm, feather-light; he sits still. All the little hairs on the backs of his arms stand up. He relaxes, and he feels Kafo ease himself into his side and rest his head on his shoulder.

If he hadn’t been so close, Risha doesn’t think he’d’ve heard him. He feels him, more – feels the stirring of his breath, the low vibration of the words in the space between them. He feels a drop of wetness on the cloth at his shoulder, and then another.

He takes off his glasses and bows his head. He squeezes his eyes shut but it doesn’t do any good; they come spilling out, one after the other. His breath hitches once, and he takes a deep breath in.

He shifts closer to Kafo, and – fair slowly – wraps an arm around him, careful of his rib cage. “Neither am I,” he says.

For a dead thing, Kafo’s warm; he’s warm, too, he supposes. His head’s resting against Kafo’s, his short hair prickling against his forehead.

He’s not sure how much time passes so. There’s not much else to say. If we have to leave, he wants to say, there’s a place in Hox – wherever you can find a warm body to live in, head up there, to Kzecka, and they’ll know how to take care of you. If we have to leave, he thinks of saying, this isn’t fair, there aren’t many of our kind – I’ll find a body, I’ll find you; I’m young, I’ll remember –

Something tells him Kafo doesn’t have many rounds left in the gkacha. He sits still, listening to the labored sounds of Kafo and Ipiwo breathing. The lamplight blurs. He shuts his eyes and smells dried blood and whisky, sand, cold sweat.

He starts humming softly, rhythmically, nothing in particular.

When he feels it, he doesn’t know it, not here. He’s not sure if he’s felt it at all. Then there’s a pressure, like a bird alighting at the back of his mind, and he tastes a whisper of colors.

His breath comes faster. “Kafo, I can feel something,” he says, “epa’ma, I have to…”

He straightens up; he feels Kafo shift, too. A flicker runs through his field. He finds the invocation somewhere and speaks it, and begins repeating it, over and over.

Kafo’s warmth is gone, then. He moves away unevenly; Risha feels a tug of guilt, hearing him grunt in his throat, hearing his labored breathing. But he straightens and shuts his eyes, knotting a fist in the fabric of his trousers. Invoking, invoking, he kicks his tired mind: he begins to make a vestibule.

What he finds in himself, in this narrow dark place choked with sand, is – the salt-sea smell. That’s where he starts. The filmy scattering of foam on his face, too, the dark green-limned waves; the Mahogany at night comes into focus, and he holds onto it white-knuckled, building, weaving until it holds.

The wind tangling through his hair, stirring up the smells of lavender and incense. Cold glass bottle neck in his clammy warm hand, Low Tide tang in the back of his throat, chill breeze brushing and tugging at his shirt.

It’s a glimpse: I’m here, says the Mahogany, says the feeling of remembered strength, I’m here, I’m awake, I’m here. Held breath for lightning on the horizon.

He focuses on these senses; he relaxes the clench of his mind, bit by bit, his field stirring etheric around him. He welcomes her into his mind, best he can. He doesn’t know what he must do to help her find him, or if he must do anything at all. What he can do is hold onto the vestibule, hold onto the ley channel, open his mind.

“A waste of precious time,” snaps Ole.

Out of earshot of the prefect, Ole has been uncharacteristically insubordinate. Inis has said very little. Ole knows she can speak freely. Ole knows her words don’t mean a hill of sand if Inis Aqem has made her flooding mind up. But she can speak if she likes.

Inis watches. She shouldn’t be curious. Ole’s field is all bristle and bite beside hers. She watches, leaning heavily on her stick. The wind still carries handfuls of sand in fits and starts, so she’s pulled her wrap back over her nose and mouth. Her goggles haven’t left her face. Through them, she watches ada’na Nkemi spill more of their precious water in the sand than Hulali demands – Ole goes on like the uliam about this too – but she thinks, if wika can understand anything of arata, she understands why.

They watch ada’na Nkemi draw. They watch her kneel.

“We searched the sand around Tsogeq’dzawa, Inis. At least a man’s height deep.” Above his wrap, through his dark goggles, Uqasah’s gently lined face is sad. “We haven’t gone further in that direction,” he says. “Don’t know if we should check closer up the line first.”

“It won’t have gone that far.” Ole’s voice, sharp. “Go up the line. Search around Adok.”

Uqasah bows his head, nodding. He waves to a clump of men over by the camels and heads back, kicking sand.

The weight on Inis’ shoulders is heavy. Her legs prickle; one is weak. She kneels, watching Nkemi do the same, then sits. Ole stays standing beside her. “How long, Inis?”

She doesn’t speak. Nkemi is kneeling, incanting monite that’s almost familiar. Almost.

Inis watches her eyes come open; they shut again. Inis just shakes her head and waves a hand. She keeps watching.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Morning, 28 Bethas, 2720
Untethered

For a time Kafo feels his own breath and the movement of himself, in and out and pain, in and out and pain. But he feels too beneath it other movement; he hears Risha’s breath and it hitches in his throat, and Kafo understands that he is crying.

Kafo understands that he too, is crying, that the wetness on his face amidst the bandages is tears. His vision blurs; the darkness comes.

There is something around his side, warmth; it is the arm of Risha’s body, and even though they can’t reach all the way anymore, they can’t reach through the gaps, he feels it and it reaches far enough, and he knows he is not alone.

There is a noise which hums through him; he doesn’t know where it comes from at first. There’s light, and then dark again, and the steady breathing of the three of men, the woman and Risha and Kafo.

“Risha,” Kafo murmurs, and he hears a thickness in his own voice, as if it comes from a long way off.

Sorry, Risha says.

Kafo feels it, then; he hears it too. He cries out; he gets away from it and away and away through the pain. There are things that are worse than the pain; he is panting and strange noises come from him and he goes, far, to where the floor is and he presses himself against the wood and he cradles his face in his hands.

Here he can’t feel it but he can hear it, still. Don’t, don’t he wants to say, don’t. He knows he is waiting but he doesn’t know what he’s waiting for; there is a high pitched keening noise and Kafo realizes that it comes from him.

He quiets. Concentrate, he thinks; concentrate.

Kafo whispers aloud. He remembers; he chants too, along with Risha, and offers the words of the invocation into the air between them. He closes his eyes and he repeats them, again and again, his breath falling into the rhythm of Risha’s. He comes back, slowly, hands and feet and knees on the floor; he doesn’t cross the boundary at the edge of Risha’s field but he lingers there, and watches and listens and speaks.

Tseq’ule Caravan, Above the Sand

Nkemi searches; she flings herself high into the sky and she reaches low into the earth.

She finds him; she finds him and she climbs on, she digs in and holds. Her arms are shaking; her hands clench the sand. She feels him; he is the brush of water, the lapping smell of sea and a prickle of something along the back of her neck.

He holds; he holds too.

Nkemi splits herself and she finds the words she needs. She goes deeper into the spell and she asks for what she wishes to take away. She cannot spare the energy to speak with him, to whisper even a word of reassurance; she knows she would lose him, if he was not holding on.

She finds the leybridge. The static mona stir in the air around her. It is not ink, this time, but sand; she has never done it this way before but there is no map to worry about, to describe; there is only the wide arcing expanse of the desert.

She finds the words of the spell; she pours herself into them and into the sand and she feels the brush of the breeze and tastes the lightning and the sand all at once. Nkemi is stretched thin - she is fraying - and her field stirs around her.

The mona are sluggish; they are slow. She tries again, new words, a different way. Everything aches; she holds fast to the sand and to Anetol and to herself and does not slur. She holds fast -

This time she feels it. Nkemi’s eyes open wide; she breathes in and keeps casting.

The mona are warm around her; both the clairvoyant and static mona are etheric now.

The sand ripples from her hands; two lines trickle out, flattening down before her, glittering beneath the sun. They inch out through the desert; they ease together and sink deeper and wider into the sand, a single track, slowly creeping inch by inch.

They race forward. Nkemi lets go of Anetol; she cannot hold him any longer, and she finds the amandation and she curls the spell, but the mona are working, still.

The sand stretches from her and flattens wide and broad; it makes a shining path from her and stretches diagonally down the slope, down further, and stops. It swirls; it sinks, the tiniest bit, and the movement falls away.

Nkemi gasps for breath; she has forgotten it. She has forgotten everything; she is on her feet, running through the last traces of the plot, uncaring; she is stumbling down the dune, and she falls and skids in the sand and keeps running. She is aware of noise and motion, and she comes to the bottom of it, her footsteps mirroring the swath of sand carved by the mona, and drops to her knees at the bit of faded green cloth exposed to the surface.

“Anetol!” She cries. Nkemi presses her hand to the tent fabric, shaking, and waits, staring down through streaming eyes.

[Tom Cooke]

Above and Below • Eastern Erg

Sometime on the 28th of Bethas, 2720

T
hey’ve been invoking together for some time before he realizes it. All of him’s been spent in the weaving, in the making of a vestibule which holds against the taut strain of his mind and doesn’t tear. It’s only when the weight eases off his mind, when the presence he felt goes quick as it alighted, that he knows the gentle hand that steadied him.

He opens his eyes to the pina wooden coffin. It’s still full of lamplight and the sound of labored breathing. The lamplight is blurry; the tears keep coming, now. He repeats the invocation even though there’s no reason for it, even though his field’s settling back from etheric and his vestibule is scattering like sand on the wind.

And Kafo’s speaking it, too, with the ease of practice. His lanky frame is crouched four paces away, just out of range of his flexed field. His eyes are shut. His long human face is slack with concentration, with remembering. His chest rises and falls on counts of four, slow deep breaths.

Risha knows better than to stumble or choke. He only lets the sob out when he’s done with the last repetition, as clearly-enunciated as Kafo’s.

His shoulders shake. His head’s in his hands, tears streaming steadily down his face, spattering on his trousers, smearing the dirt and sand on his palms. He tries to recapture his steady breathing; he doesn’t think it’s any help to Kafo if he breaks now.

But Nkemi was there, and now she’s gone. He can’t bring himself to say it. He felt the strain in her when she alighted; he knew she couldn’t stay for long.

“We’re not alone,” he says instead, forcing himself to smile up at Kafo.

The second could’ve been hours, years; he knows it’s over when he feels the shifting of the sand. A little cloud of it wisps down from somewhere. It shifts behind him. Either rescue or a collapse, he thinks. Then, up the slope of the wall, a flicker of light pours around the piled luggage.

Ada’na Ipiwo snorts.

He looks at Kafo with wide eyes, then crawls past him. Anatole! he hears. His politician’s body aches with the strain, but he clambers over the boxes as far up as he can, to where the fabric is lit brilliant green by the sun. He feels the brush of her field, first, still with the taste of etheric in the mona – he reaches out to mingle, frenetic like a puppy jumping and licking at a face.

He sees the silhouette of her small dark hand, then, and presses his hand to it. “Nkemi,” he says, sagging against a tied-down case. He laughs raggedly. “Kafo and Ipiwo are down here with me – they’re all right, but – Kafo’s not breathing well, and Ipiwo’s unconscious…”

He hears a sharp whistle from somewhere behind Nkemi.

“Thank you,” he breathes. “Thank Circle.”

Inis has never been one for voo or tricks. Not when there’s work to be done with your hands. They took her to the il’úpúr as a crooked sapling of a boch, and she tastes the tang of tekaa monite as one with the memory of pain. She has respect for the mona – any gods honoring creature does – and she listens to the dzol’úpúr like Ohihú with the reverence of any caravanner who loves Roa and fears and accepts Naulas.

She knows too the walls the arati build around their halls of magic. This is not voo. She has seldom had the chance to see it done in front of her eyes. Arati cast even less than wiki, by and large. They don’t trade water with the air or the earth or mend a cut that could heal on its own.

She smiles under her covering. The sand parts in front of the prefect’s hands. She watches it, glittering like dewdrops – like an invisible snake is slithering fast through it, all the way to the far dune.

The men have begun to move away, like Ole said. They are checking further up the camels, like sweet Bash-headed Ole said. But the prefect’s invisible snake shoots past Tsogaq’dzawa, who raises his head and bats his long eyelashes at the disturbed sand with confusion. It arcs like a bird’s shadow and follows the slope down, and down.

She expects stony silence from Ole. What she doesn’t expect: “Glass,” says the brigk.

Inis twists, cranes her head to look up at the tall woman. “Glass, love?” They’re alone for a few yards, and their voices are low.

“Glass.” It’s all Ole says. Inis can’t read her face under the wrap and the goggles. She jerks her chin, then rolls her shoulders in a shrug.

Ole’s strong, earthy glamour is mingling deep with hers. She feels something through it she can’t put words to. They know much of the earth, the folk she came from, and more of voo and how it works than the western tribes.

Inis thought arati mostly worked with one thing or another. A merchant traveling with her once used a seerstone to reach Thul Ka in the aftermath of a bad storm. He couldn’t have lit a fire. She doesn’t think he could’ve done this. “What did the prefect do? Do you think.”

If Ole was smiling before, the hint of it is gone from around her eyes. But maybe it was the goggles playing tricks all along. “Arati magic,” she says, jerks her scarf down around her chin, and spits on the sand. She mutters to Vita.

The prefect is running, stumbling, kicking sand. The plot she’s laid out careful in the wet sand is a smear of broken lines now. Inis is on her feet again with Ole’s help, and interest gives her the strength to move to the plot. She looks at the pieces of lines, frowning, as Nkemi kneels not far away.

“Best not to look too close,” says Ole. “Should I go after her?”

Inis turns. The prefect’s headscarf is just visible above the sloping line of the dune, where the sand has parted. She hears the Anaxi’s name. The prefect’s voice is not so even now.

Inis shakes her head. “Go get Tsif’úsir.” Ole nods, pulling her scarf back into place, and begins to stride off. Still leaning, Inis whistles – the sound cuts like a knife over the wind. She raises a hand.

Uqasah is there. “Inis?”

“Tell the other men to start digging. Everyone in.”

Uqasah’s dubious face – his eyes have been following the glittering trail; it’s strange stuff – breaks into a grin.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Afternoon, 28 Bethas, 2720
The Southern Desert, Tseq'ule Caravan

For a moment, a terrible lengthy moment, Nkemi hears nothing over the pounding of her heart in her ears, the whooshing of her breath in her chest. Then she feels it, first – it mingles bastly at the edges of her field and Nkemi chokes back a sob and lets down all the last of her barriers. He rushes into her and she feels the press of a hand she can picture against hers, slim and freckled and veined and holding, firm, against the fabric.

“Roa preserve you all,” Nkemi prays, shaking. “Thank you, Hulali – thank you,” tears trickle down her cheeks and a few wet droplets splatter onto the fabric.

It is easier to sew fabric together then to leave men trapped. They cut a long line in it, large enough even for Kafo’s bony shoulders. Anetol comes out first, climbing up the cases; Nkemi’s hands are there, on his, but the rest of the men of the caravan are there, too, and she eases him out. She does not go, even when she has him standing on the sand, squinting, his eyes shaded from the sun.

Kafo’s head is wrapped in a bandage; he is hunched, curled sideways as he stumbles out, and his eyes are squinting-streaming in the bright light, but he nods to a few of the other men of the caravan, and goes to crouch, dizzy, in the shade; he takes some water from the man with the scar – Anfe, Nkemi has learned – and does not throw it up. She sees Anfe’s hand resting on Kafo’s back, and she does not look, because he too is shaking.

Uqasah is one of the ones who climbs down into the wagon; they bring Ipiwo out between them. Tears are streaming down Ofero’s face; she twitches at the brush of the light, and her eyes flicker open, and he holds back until they have her carried up the long slope to Po’felo, who is setting out the junia, the dinzith, the valerian. Ofero crouches next to her, and takes her hand in his, and Ipiwo squeezes it, lightly, and smiles at him, before her eyes close again.

This all and more Nkemi sees through eyes which long to shut. Anetol is only bruised; his voice is clear and strong, but she knew his strength already from the brush of his field and the way he held his vestibule. All the same she knows relief, and it sustains and carries her like an updraft, until in time it is, all of it, more than she can bear.

There is shade in the drape of Tsotusú’s limbs; the camel sits, peacefully, ignorant of all which has passed, bits of sand still clinging to her. Nkemi lays out her headwrap and curls up on it in the camel’s shade, and lets her eyes shut, in time, lulled by the sound of digging and the grunt of men’s voices and the creak of wood, the occasional soft press of a camel’s flank, and soft lips which flap, gently, once, against her scalp.

When Nkemi wakes her mouth is dry; she rolls over and finds her canteen tucked against Tsotusú’s side. She takes a small sip of the lukewarm water; she shuts her eyes and curls against Tsotusú, and drinks a little more. Tsotusú huffs her irritation, and Nkemi giggles, and shifts to stand on her own feet. She puts the canteen back, and shakes out her headwrap, and fixes it into place once more, tucking all the folds together.

It is well into afternoon, now; the sun has slanted past its zenith. The men are crowded around pale red fabric; in the patches of shade across the camp there are other sets of people. Nkemi looks down to where the wagon still sits, at the bottom of a long gleaming stripe of glass.

She walks to it; she crouches, and sets her fingertips on it. It is hot, holding all the sun’s heat even more strongly than the sand; she trails her fingertips to the side, where she can see the thinness of it against the ground. Nkemi bows her head over.

She follows it down, slowly and evenly winding her way down the hill where only hours earlier she ran without minding her stumbling. The wagon sits at the bottom of it, upright now, a slit in the side flapping once in the drifting breeze; the ground around it in a mess, all heaps of sand and scattered traces of things they once called theirs. Nkemi studies it; she comes around to the back, then, where the flaps are still half-shut. She unties them, with careful fingers, so light trickles in; she climbs up and in, and makes her way slowly to the open trunk of her things.