[Closed] Whose Heart Would Not Take Flight

[Tom Cooke]

The Outskirts of Dkanat • Eastern Erg

Late Afternoon on the 29th of Bethas, 2720

T
he sun’s fallen behind the rooftops by the time he sees it, the spark of a bright headwrap bobbing along the empty street. He ate, at first, voraciously – but maybe it’s the sun that’s sunk into him, even through the shade; he feels it not in his skin but aching in his bones, in his muscles, turning his stomach over and over. He’s cleaned up most of the millet, almost all the dried okra and chickpea stew, but he knows when one more bite’s too many.

So he settles back, thinking he might have more, knowing in the end the churning in his stomach’s not going to get easier before the night is out. But there are stars, as the last of the light drains out of the sky, more and more and more of them, spreading across the sky.

His head has soaked up too much of the sun, too. He can’t think of anything except the cool breeze lapping over his face, ruffling through his hair occasionally when the wind picks up. He’s tilted his his head back, shut his eyes a moment; he’s imagined Nkemi and Nkese going home, imagined her jara seeing that bright orange.

He floats above all of it, now. Not Anatole – or Anitol, or Vakelin, or Voklin – or Tom, hiding in his skin; just a spirit, like a circling hawk, watching. As if none of it has anything to do with him; as if he is not, after all, the guest they are welcoming into their homes, but someone else, someone whose skin he might be wearing – fleetingly –

He’s half forgot what he’s seen on the street below when he feels her caprise settle into his. It’s this that opens his eyes, first to the long low table and the picked-over tray in front of him, then over and up.

She doesn’t say anything, but comes and sits next to him with her legs folded up underneath her. So he, still looking out at the stars, settles back again; he knits his fingers over his full belly, wondering how he keeps finding it in him to eat like a wolf, and with such pleasure. Maybe it’s that man he’s living in, stirring to life; maybe he’s turning into something else; maybe this isn’t such a lie, after all. Maybe this isn’t a lie at all.

He watches out the window through half-lidded eyes. There are no clouds; Benea is just rising over the horizon. She’s startlingly clear and bright, and a half-moon, so it looks like somebody’s eaten half the pie.

He turns his head to look at Nkemi when she speaks. She’s half-turned, too, looking out. The moonlight limns her face on one side, the lamplight on the other.

He smiles; her caprise is warm, comfortable, and that comfort and warmth laps through his, whispers through like dye in water, color where there was none before. “I’m glad to be here,” he says, smiling. “Very, very glad.”

Anatole’s voice sounds soft even to him; he can hear the rasp of the last few days in it, but the warmth of this calm, quiet moment too, the first in a long time. The low light picks out the places where Nkemi’s face is shadowed, even despite the brightness of her smile.

Sounds of laughter and chatter drift up from downstairs, through the window – snatched by the breeze – and through the floor.

“How are things?” he asks, and leaves the question there and no further, to be shaped however she’s comfortable with. “Have you been to see Iki’dzof?” His smile tilts playful.

He starts to say something else, and then – with no warning – a yawn is yanked out of him, such that he barely has time to cover his mouth. “Circle,” he says, and laughs.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 29 Bethas, 2720
The Heart of Dkanat

Nkemi yawned like an echo after Anetol, her eyelids fluttering and her hand lifting to cover her face. She had thought him asleep or nearly so when he came up the stairs, his face soft and easy and his body almost boneless against the chair, the scattered remains of his supper set before him. She would not have begrudged him the rest.

Nkemi had taken off her shoes as she sat, before she had crossed her legs; now she curled into the chair, shifting, relaxing herself against it.

They are sun drenched still. It is hard to think that a night ago she slept hard on the floor of the dunes; it is hard to think that this morning - this afternoon! - she rose Tsotusu, although the aches in her body do much to remind her. Her bath loosened them, and she knows that if there is stiffness lingering tomorrow, by the next day it will fade.

She had grinned at Anetol’s questions. “Iki’dzof was very pleased to see me,” Nkemi says, smiling soft and easy. “He came running up and butted my head with his thigh. He is a little older now, but still a troublemaker.” She stifled another yawn; she shifted, settling comfortable now.

She had wore colors again, an even hemmed skirt in vivid purple and green, and a matching blouse which only just covered her shoulders; her headwrap, almost the same purple, was neatly tucked. There would be no sandstorms within Dkanat, not tonight, and she was grateful to have carried this clothing with her such a long way.

“The kids are lively,” Nkemi giggles, the laughter thick in her voice. “Strong and healthy, every one,” it is pride now, and all of it infused with warmth. “They have not yet found their names, but Juela tells me she thinks of calling the gray one Tsas’ixup, for the plaintive way of her bleeting.”

“Will you like to meet them?” Nkemi asks curiously, lifting her gaze to Anetol. She smiles at him.

She does not think she could have imagined Anetol in the midst of goats when they first met. She knew by then not to say it was impossible; she knew by then more than she had of how strange life could be. But she remembers him in his suit and waiscoat and the cravat ties over the bruises at his throat.

She remembers, too, the stiffness in him at the little white dog, their companion of a few hours on the solstice night. She remembers a careful crouch, and a hand which brushed over an enthusiastic head, and the slow deepening of pets; she remembers meat tugged off the skewer and dropped to the ground, and the look of tufts of white fur on rich cloth.

“Oh, yes, they butt,” Nkemi says with a giggle. “It does not hurt but they are strong in their necks and shoulders; if you are not ready it can knock you down! I fell sometimes as a child, but mostly because I wished too.”

It is not long before she winds towards Serkaih. “I thought it best to go first in the day time,” Nkemi says; she does not look at the tired lines of Anetol’s face. “It is beautiful on a clear night, lit only by the lanterns and the lights of the sky, but the colors are grays, then, a thousand shades of it painted over the canyon walls. It is best to see it first in the sun’s light, when they may be known.”

“If you wish, we may leave early,” Nkemi goes on. “The sun is here as in the desert; it reaches high overhead and beats down, and there is little of shade between here and there. Within Serkaih it is cooler; the canyon knows much of shade.”

“Is there anything you wish to ask?” Nkemi takes Anetol’s hand. She knows what brings her to Dkanat; she does not know what brings him to Serkaih. She has never asked, and this is not what she asks now. The wind winds in through the edges of the window; it brings with it an echo of distant laughter, the sound of small shuffling feet on the ground, the faint traces of spices and kofi from dinner. The lights are flickering out now, some; others hold bright against the night, carving out a few soft-lit more moments before one yields to sleep.

[Tom Cooke]

The Outskirts of Dkanat • Eastern Erg

Late Evening on the 29th of Bethas, 2720

T
hey butt,” he repeats, grinning broadly, raising both eyebrows.

Nanabo tough, he almost says; he stops himself, even though he knows she knows – not what he is, but who he is, in one way or another. She wouldn’t be offering, if she didn’t know that; she wouldn’t be letting him get headbutted by curly-horned, funny-eyed goats, or introducing him to trickster Iki’dzof.

More than that, Tek doesn’t feel right on his tongue here. He thinks he’s coming to understand it, the way they mingle over thin, translucent lines. Lines you feel rather than see, but know when not to cross, and not because a brigk will keep you from it.

There are others whom he would – must – speak so around; with Nkemi, with what she knows, it would make him feel like a lost old man grasping at pieces of lives that aren’t and can’t be his. He draws lines round himself, here, as he always does, catching the reflection in her eyes. Even comfortable, even lying back with a full belly and a mouth full of the taste of spices, he settles into the lines round him.

But he laughs, too, and anyway, he imagines his grin tells her all she needs to know what he thinks of that. “I would,” he says brightly, inclining his head. “Especially this Iki’dzof. I’ve a feeling we’ll get along.” Still a mischievous smile in his eyes. “Tsas’ixup,” he repeats after a moment, tilting his head and looking at her; “ixup is – heart, and tsas must be…”

At they have not yet found their names, Risha’s smile had softened, and a little something had shivered through his field.

He hears it in her voice, speaking of the kids, the warmth. It’s the other side of the way she looked in Tsaha’ota, frowning at the passing goats with their skin and fur clinging to their ribs. He’ll take Nkemi’s word for it, how goats ought to be brought up; Nkese, too, he has an easy time imagining among them, running her small hands – so like Nkemi’s, even if the calluses speak of different paths – through curly white fur.

They weave round toward Serkaih.

He has expected it; he’s looked forward to it, all this time, riding through the sands. He doesn’t know how to account for the tightening in his stomach. He no longer sprawls; he sits up a little, listening.

“Best to leave early,” he agrees, nodding slowly. He’s still sore in the thighs, and he thinks it won’t be much better – worse, no doubt – in the morning.

But – he glances over her, the vivid, lime-green and deep purple patterns on her skirt, pooling fold over fold in her lap, the breeze tugging at loose fabric on the tie of her headwrap. He looks askance, out the window, at the broad spread of stars above, vaster than Vita. He shuts his eyes for a moment, and the smell the wind whisks in gives him the briefest – but strongest – of impressions: moving down into the canyon beneath the broad blue sky, with the sounds and smells of color breathing all around him.

She takes his hand in hers, and he opens his eyes, still smiling.

Why? he thinks, first – why are you taking me? Why do you trust me?

Why do the ghosts go here? He can’t ask that, either; she knows as much as he does, if not less. Why do they follow the lanterns to Serkaih? Do they pass on there? Do they find peace?

“Should I prepare anything?” he asks instead, straightening in his seat now. He’s tired, but his drowsy smile has gone, and his eyes are intent. “To pay respects,” he explains. “Is there anything I should bring for the memory-homes, the tsan’ehew – or anything that is done?”

He remembers how she explained it in Ophus; he remembers being touched at the thought of so much care for the dead and their place. He doesn’t know if he expects an answer – there may not be one – but the asking is important to him, sitting and holding Nkemi’s hand among the places of her childhood, with all the explanations he owes and can’t give.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 29 Bethas, 2720
The Heart of Dkanat

Nkemi is grinning too, and she finds she can imagine Anetol running his hand over Iki’dzof’s head. “Tsasi means to exclaim,” Nkemi explains. “That is what juela feels, that Tsas’ixup exclaims her heart when she bleats so.” She thinks of the little goat’s long legs, her upright head, and her astonishingly loud, soft bleats. Her smile too is soft and warm.

Nkemi does not remember a time when she did not know goats. She never saw a miraan or an osta as a child, although she met both in Thul’Amat; there are leira in the desert though, camels of both sorts, and beetles too, although few enough that she would have played with as a girl. But there were the goats, and she grew up comfortable with them; she knows she played with them even in the days when a newborn goat could walk better than she could, leaping and bounding comfortably.

The newborns are not so young now; they are growing into their bodies and their coats, with each their own vivid pattern. The wobbliness lasts only a week or two, and this time for them has already passed; there are four mothers across the six, and they are nursing still, although Nkemi knows it is now a mix of this and grazing.

She has become accustomed to this, that in her absence things grow and change. It is slow and steady, the drawing on of time, Hulali’s waters flowing onwards beneath Alioe’s gaze. Sixteen years have passed since she lived in Dkanat year round; even as a girl, home for her school breaks, she saw the changes sweep the landscape around and within.

Now Nkemi’s hand is soft on Anetol’s. She watches him; his eyes shut when she speaks of the canyons. She sees them flicker beneath the lids, sees his lips move and smooth out into a smile once more. He opens his eyes, and he smiles still.

Nkemi shakes her head lightly at his question. “Not generally. If you visit the tsan’ehew of one beloved to you or yours, then perhaps.” She thinks of her mother dipping her palm into a bowl of water, and pressing her hand down firmly on the smooth stone outside the tsan’ehew at the back of the canyon. She remembers, too, feeling the damp water on her own hand, and setting it down next to her mother’s, the lines of her fingers and palm with gaps between, and sitting, watching wide-eyed, as the air slowly whisked them away.

“You may see someone bringing water to a tsan’ehew,” Nkemi says, softly, “or a stone. Others will bring a plant, or a candle, or a bit of honey milk. This is not for the one who has passed, but for the ones who remain,” she smiles at him. “There is no sadness when the days of visiting pass for a tsan'ehew; it is itself a remembrance and a sign of love. Though it is may not be known, in this day, the name of the man or woman for whom it was built, it is known that they were loved.”

Nkese explained this to her, a long time ago, when Nkemi liked to ask about this tsan’ehew and that one, when she asked why rocks sat inside some and not others.

“It is the work of those who tend Serkaih to keep them neat,” Nkemi says, smiling at Anetol, her hand still tucked inside his, “but never to recarve. There are those so old that the wind has worn down the edges of them, so the lines are soft where once they were hard. Juela told me that so, too, it is with grief; it remains, always, but in time the hard edges are dulled.”

Nkemi does not look away from him as she speaks, but neither does she do more than speak; she does not squeeze his hand or soften her eyes. She goes on. “They tend the lanterns, too,” she says, smiling. This, too, is her father’s work; she remembers, more than once, seeing him limned in lantern light, all the lines and shadows on his face cast bright.

[Tom Cooke]

The Outskirts of Dkanat • Eastern Erg

Late Evening on the 29th of Bethas, 2720

T
sasi is exclaim; he knows the word for proclaim, too, now. It’s hard not to smile, thinking of a little goat bleating out – not a declaration, but a crying out of every bit of its heart – so young and full of life that the exclaiming is enough. He still smiles as they speak of Serkaih, though his look grows heavier and more intent.

I do not visit anyone there, he doesn’t say; he nods slowly, listening, studying her face. All the same, this isn’t the first time he’s thought – what does she think of him, wandering among others’ dead?

The dead aren’t there anymore, he supposes, listening to her go on. It’s strange to him, for all he feels no less like an interloper. Now, he’s a dead thing in a place of the living, a thing that can’t move on in a place of moving-on.

The breeze picks up, outdoors; downstairs, there’s no more laughter or talk loud enough to be heard here, and though the wind carries the patter footsteps in the street, there’s a feeling of slumber that has settled over all of it. The wind brushes through his hair, flutters in the cloth that’s folded up by his tray.

It must take a long time for such a wind to grind down the edges of a tsan’ehew. Something merciless about time, for all he thinks it should be kind; for all it should be kind, the way she speaks of it, words passed down from her juela – words with weight – for all it should be kind, the softening of grief.

She doesn’t look away from him, and he remembers struggling to hold the edges of hama’s garden for her. She doesn’t squeeze his hand, this time, but merely goes on, careful and indifferent, though not without warmth.

Some days, he wakes up with the names on his tongue, and he has to say them over and over as if that’ll keep him from forgetting them, in the end. How can it not be a sad thing, when nobody visits anymore?

Kafo is at the edge of his mind, lingering there; he wonders. He knows they’ve probably moved on by now, him and Anfe with Tseq’ule – he never asked where they were bound, and they never said – and still, he can’t but wonder.

Nkemi’s told him once this is her jara’s qalqa. The lanterns, she goes on, and he – thinks to ask, but he doesn’t know how.

She hasn’t spoken of him much, so far. When he found he could think again, somewhere round the first yats, he began to wonder about it. He’s never known a Mugrobi man who won’t take the kofi har’aq; back in Vienda, it was a thought of a distant place, a person he couldn’t picture – now, in the daylight, he could look out his window and find the rooftop, he thinks, if he knew where it was.

“So you can always find your way,” he says. He thinks to say it seems to him an honorable qalqa, to be the warden of such a place; the word honorable seems strange to him, and he doesn’t think it’s a judgment he can, or should, pass. “I’m told they’re there to guide both the living and the dead, such as may wander there. To find – peace.”

Sliding his hand from hers, he draws his legs up into the seat with him to sit cross-legged, leaving his sandals behind. The motion is stiffer than hers, but no less easy; he smarts in many places – aching and chafing both, and he’s not sure which is worse – but he holds stronger than he thought he would.

“It seems a place for finding and being found,” he says, “and – for loss, all at once.”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 29 Bethas, 2720
The Heart of Dkanat

To guide both the living and the dead.

“So it is said,” Nkemi agrees, smiling at him.

She thinks of a ward which she heard from the hallway, of the monite written in the upper right corner of a spell circle, of wards cast as meditation. She thinks of They Are Heard; she thinks of scattered pages of a grimoire half-buried in the sand, and the words written in spindly handwriting upon them.

But Anetol wanders on.

“The cycle means that our losing becomes another’s finding,” Nkemi says. “You know now the desert, and of its journeying,” she thinks of her ancestors, galdori wrapped in cloth with something precious clutched against their hearts, wandering the desert sands and the scrublands in search of peace.

She wonders what Anetol brings with him to this place, what offering he would set down for his own loss. She wonders at the thought of his pale, freckled hands holding the chisel, of him crouching in the windswept canyon day after day, shaping the tsan’ehew.

“The journey, too, is a place of losing and finding,” Nkemi says, with a faint little frown; it lightens into a smile, and she looks at Anetol once more, holding his gaze across the dimly lit room. “Dzúdidú’edoe’oz dzúqawúq, I am told was often said. By the lantern, I return.”

Morning, Bethas 30, 2720
The Edge of Serkaih

IIt is not such a long walk from Dkanat to the canyon’s edge; in the early morning, just past the edge of dawn, pale blue light gleams over the horizon, and the air is still crisp with the night’s chill. The ground is dry, scattered with dust, with the barest hint of moisture left from the night, already beginning to fade; in a few hours, Nkemi knows, it will be hot and cracked, as if the night never was.

Nkemi knows this landscape still, for all she has been gone; the edge of the canyon does not come up so suddenly, but five, even ten minutes away, it is all but invisible. But she knows the trees, scraggly and strange though they are, and she knows the rock shaped like a sitting camel, and she knows the length of the path, even walking with her arm through Anetol’s.

Then, not so suddenly but suddenly enough, the edge of the world drops away, like a gash carved into it. The sun is rising more, now; clear light streams over them, with no hint of color to it, and no distant warnings on the horizon, for all that they have both brought goggles, cloth and Anetol a hat. It is high enough – it is light enough – to catch on the canyon wals beneath them.

They stop at the edge of it. There are pebbles scattered to either side, a little trail of stones which grows larger; there is, standing just below the rim of the canyon, a lantern which sways, lit, in the breeze.

The sun touches their edge of the canyon, not yet the other, but it is high enough that it hides nothing. The walls are swirled color, slow, arching and tucked over and below one another, not bright but unmistakable all the same: red and orange and yellow and pink and purple, even if they are not yet caught by the light. The wind ruffles over the now dry ground behind them; it billows through the folds of Nkemi’s pale yellow pants and top.

Now, slowly, the sunlight caught at the pebbles at their feet; it gleamed on the slightest hint of green-gray moss at the canyon’s edge. The sky was lightening, overhead, not yet its own brilliant blue, still tinged with the gray of the night. There was another brush of wind, and the lantern danced, and light shifted and caught on the stone beneath their feet, sparking unseen color before settling back into place.

Nkemi holds on the edge, Anetol’s arm tucked through hers. She has seen it many times, but it takes her breath away again, as it always does. She does not take the first steps over onto the narrow winding trail down the edge, but smiles at Anetol, and offers him the smallest of bows.

“Welcome,” Nkemi says, smiling, “to Serkaih.”

[Tom Cooke]

The Edge of Serkaih • Eastern Erg

Late Evening on the 29th of Bethas, 2720

I
f he slept dreamless awhile, it was only a brief respite. That night, with the chimes singing in the desert breeze that sweeps in through the window, he dreams. In one, he hears Nkemi’s tongue rolling over a familiar Mugrobi phrase; he wanders through a strange, sightless world, feeling the thrum of life in little creatures that skitter over the cracked earth, stealing it from hardy, tangled things that cling to the walls of canyons, withering all he passes. He breathes the distant echo of color, and it guides him on.

In another, he kneels in a swirl of purples and reds and pinks and oranges, with the echo of footsteps just out of sight all around him. Anatole’s hands shake; it’s slow-going. As all the colors turn to grey, he hasn’t carved the first tenth of it. They’re coming soon, and he must finish.

In another, he finds it, beyond all logic, as he and Nkemi wind down the canyon path. Its angles are fresh and sharp. A bunch of dried lavender has been left in the shadow of it; a scattering of knuckle-bones; a cracked, empty whiskey bottle; and a lock of wavy dark hair. He reaches to touch it – he knows he shouldn’t, not with Nkemi in company, not and dishonor them all – when he wakes.

And again, and again, and again.

The morning passes in a whirl. It seems that seconds after waking and testing his aching legs, he’s walking along the path with Nkemi, among sparse, scraggly trees just limned by the morning sun. He hasn’t yet begun to sweat underneath his broad-brim hat; it’s chill, a sort of chill he can feel up from the ground. But he feels it in his legs and in his back (and in all the places that chafe) as he hasn’t last night, as he hasn’t the morning before.

Still, he totters on, warm with gratefulness, drinking in the strange-shaped rocks as they pass them, wondering. He breathes easily, but he has the strange sense of holding his breath. He doesn’t feel it yet, though he sneaks looks askance at Nkemi’s small, set face underneath the pale yellow of her headwrap.

The sight comes together slower than he thinks it will, slower than he remembers. Such it is with firsts: when the earth drops away, when the sun begins to wind its way down, his mind has to catch up with what it’s seeing; it’s not so easy as a feeling of color, as a feeling of vastness. But when it strikes him, when they wind to the edge of the canyon, it strikes him all at once.

Ipi’wu. It rocks him. He’s grateful for Nkemi’s arm through his. He’s dizzied by it, the sight of something he’s only felt before.

Color bleeds from the earth, but it’s only beginning to glow. There are shadows where the rock ripples, where the twisting patterns and striations lap from vivid to shades of grey. It’s soft instead of brilliant, and somehow both blurrier and sharper than he remembers. Shadowy moss creeps along the edges, scraggly little clinging plants he can touch, if he can reach them. He smiles as he catches sight of the lantern, swaying and shedding shifting light in the gloaming.

Stranger than ipi’wu is the feeling of absence. There was something in the colors, in the rock, even in the lantern, before – something that’s gone now, as if he’s looking at a landscape that was once a person.

Welcome to Serkaih, she says, and shifts in a slight bow.

Not gone, after all.

He swallows dryly; he hasn’t realized his mouth has been partway open. He turns to look at her, the wind tugging at the folds of her clothes. He looks out over Serkaih, a lump in his throat, and takes off his hat, holding it against his chest. “Domea domea, Nkemi,” he says, feeling mung; it’s all he can say. He bows, too.

He looks down at his feet, still half in shadow and ghostly light from the lantern. This ipi’wu has a hundred layers, it seems, all folding and unfolding. It’s like seeing a familiar place for the first time after a trip.

She pauses here at the lip of the canyon; it’s him who has to move, who has to remember that he’s body and legs and feet as well as mind, and can step over the threshold. He takes the first, and then the second; she moves with him. The twin sounds of sandals in the dust is its own brilliant strangeness; so is the feeling of the wind on his face, and all the shadows cast by all the little pebbles.

As they move deeper, he can make out more lanterns along the path, though they are dimmer and dimmer as the light grows. They sway – almost like swirling constellations. He has to stop once, because he can see them against his eyelids, moving upward into the dark.

“They aren’t phosphor,” he says softly, as they pass the next. He looks to Nkemi, the reflection of it swaying in her eyes. The more they walk, the higher the walls; his voice sounds strange to him. “They’re lit every night, aren’t they?”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Morning, Bethas 30, 2720
The Valley Floor, Serkaih

The path down the side of the cliff is cut wide, smoothed flat, with a curve up at the edge between the lamp posts. It turns, winding back and forth down the high cliff, and it, too, takes on the brilliant colors of the rock underfoot. There is always a sturdy cliff wall on one side; there is space enough for three to walk abreast, or for two to leave space between them while passing one another.

They descend, out of the early warmth of the sun; it lingers behind, and they cross the line into the shadow of the canyon, where it is cool and still just a little damp. The light comes from the glowing lanterns, which shift and sway in the gentle breeze. For all that the sun has not reached them yet, there is light enough to distinguish color, to make out the changing world of the walls around them and underfoot.

“Yes,” Nkemi says, smiling at Anetol. “It is a ritual, even now,” her arm tucks through his again; the path has widened even a little more, and there is plenty of space to walk side by side. “They are lit every night from the cultural center out, along the paths that wind through the tsan’ehew, and up along this path to the ground above. They are darkened only when the sunlight reaches the valley floor.”

They are almost all of them glass, now, the lanterns; occasionally, they pass one which is instead a thin sheet of metal, dancing holes and slits punched through, so that the light gleams out and casts itself in pale whirls on the ground and cliffside. Now, in the morning, there is only the faintest shape of it.

They come around a bend in the cliff, further along than they have before, and suddenly it sprawls below them.

The cultural center is made of stones from the canyon’s walls. It sits not so far from where the path descends from the ground, with lanterns wrapping around it, glowing bright; it is encircled in rocks from the cliffs, which extend outwards in slim bumps and lines.

Before it, after it, all around it, there they are: the tsan’ehew. There is no one shape, just as there is no one way; Nkemi finds herself explaining.

“The oldest, perhaps, never looked like what we call houses,” Nkemi says. They switch back again, away from the sights below, to look instead at the curve of the cliff. The sun is rising higher now, light gleaming over the uppermost edges of the canyon. “I think they were once tents; some are now so old that only the shape remains.”

They walk a little further; they turn around, again. Now, lower, it is easy to see that the cultural center looms large in the midst of it all, for all that it looked low to the ground before. Now, too, it is easy to see that while some of the tsan’ehew are quite small, others are tall indeed. They sprawl to the very walls of the canyon; some even shift in to it, careful and delicate.

From this height, beyond the edges of the cultural center, they can see around a curve of the canyon; the tsan’ehew stretch on out beyond, into the distance.

The ground of the canyon is not flat, not quite; the walls rise steep and sharp enough that it looked it, from above. But it rises and falls itself. They turn and turn again, and then they are stepping down to the floor of it, standing in the soft gleam of a lantern, almost invisible now against the rising brightness of the day.

Nkemi tilts her head back, and looks up. The multicolored walls stretch impossibly high over them; in the distant above, the sky gleams blue and clear, its color heightening all the while. Nkemi sighs, soft and joyful, and turns her smiling face to Anetol. “There comes a time, I think, for the guided to lead,” she grins at him.

[Tom Cooke]

Serkaih • Eastern Erg

Morning on the 30th of Bethas, 2720

I
t’s only just gloaming; it’s only faint patterns of light that flicker and whisk across Nkemi’s face, shifting the shadows across her smile. As they descend deeper, he nods, listens.

The curve is gentle, but he’s still grateful for Nkemi’s arm, and grateful for the firm wall of the canyon beside him when the way is too narrow. As they draw into the shadow of the shape he now knows is the cultural center, he looks up at it, ringed with lanterns. Serkaih sprawls out before them; as they move down into it and pause, he hears Nkemi sigh and looks over to catch her grin.

The light’s barely visible, with the sun beginning to catch on the glass of this lantern. Still, it’s cool down here, and his hat is still tucked under his arm. He inclines his head wordlessly, grinning himself, and then leads her deeper, following the path marked by these lanterns.

This one’s edges are still sharp as if they were carved yesterday. They must not’ve been carved too long ago. It’s adorned with many things: chimes hang from a stand nearby, and a waterfall of greenery spills

A very old woman, her shock-white hair close-cropped, kneels in front of it. There’s a small bowl of water next to her; he doesn’t watch – doesn’t look close – but he sees in the corner of his eye that she takes some in her hands and drinks it and spits it out at intervals. Then she bends her head close to the stone and prays, again and again. There are no tears in her rheumy eyes, but as they wind closer, he can hear her voice heavy and wavering. She doesn’t look up; nothing breaks her concentration.

The cultural center is gone round the colorful ripple of a bend, now. It’s dizzying to walk among the walls, now more than ever as the light’s beginning to brush the colors even brighter. The stone underfoot isn’t flat; there are seldom corners where it sweeps up into the walls, more curves, soft and worn as if by rushing water.

With the walls stretching up all round, bands of pink and red and purple, he’s begun to forget why he came here in the first. He wondered what he’d see, what he’d feel, walking among all this color and fading memory; he wondered if it would feel like passing into another life. Now, he’s not sure what he feels.

It was ib’vuqem brought him, those pages of They Are Heard well-tended in the cultural center. But there’s plenty of time to linger there – this will not be the only trip he makes to Serkaih, in company or alone, in the next week – and something draws him deeper into the canyon, his arm still twined through Nkemi’s. He’s not sure if he expected such as his last visit to a phasmonia, either; but if there are ghosts in this place, he cannot feel them here.

The wind sings softly against the rock, promising to fade and reshape. It whispers in his hair, against his face, but it can do nothing to take the sharp edges off him, not yet. Nor to sweep Nkemi away, though he hopes someday her bright soul will fall back into the wheel all the same. It’s a strange thought; he doesn’t linger on it, not with her warm beside him.

Here and there, tsan’ehew look like the small houses in Anaxi phasmonia, though their furnishings are different. “You asked me once,” he says softly – he lowers his voice to a hush, because voices carry so well here – “what Anaxi do, when we return to the Cycle. I forgot to – it seemed so…”

He shakes his head, looking up at the band of sky. “We make little furniture for the houses in our phasmonia. Chairs, mantles to set tiny photographs on, beds.” Ghosts, he remembers learning as a boy, are much smaller than people. He’s not sure where his words are finding him; he falls quiet.

He pauses in front of one of them, carved from the canyon wall behind. He might’ve missed it, if it weren’t for the cluster of offerings in front of it. A small potted plant in soil and sand, stretching spotted, spiny fronds out like a flower. A folded slip of paper, tied with twine and weighted down with a rock; on the inside of the fold, he can just see the the edges of colorful paint, and a few letters in a childish script.

The tsan’ehew itself is faded almost to unrecognizability; it’s as if it’s melting back into the canyon-side. It was very tall, once, he thinks, if the faint impression of it far up the wall is to be trusted.

He glances over at Nkemi when he pauses in his step in front of it, smiling sheepishly.

A slim shape winds slowly up the path, coming from somewhere in the direction of the cultural center, quietly putting out lanterns as she goes. Her hair is a little longer than Nkemi’s, and she looks only a little older. As she nears, she says nothing; he glances up, inclines his head, and feels a gentle perceptive caprise.

She smiles. “Sana’hulali Nkemi,” she says, her eyes warm with surprise, and then bows her head to him, her smile a little uncertain. “I am Ife pezre Yejide, a tsorerem to Serkaih. I must finish my work, but my path will take me back this way, should you have any questions.” After a brief introduction, she moves on, carefully working at the metal lantern just before the path winds round another wall.

He hangs there a moment longer, looking down where a half-melted, unlit candle sits, the wick sooty and black as if recently-lit.

“I see what ada’xa Idowu meant,” he says after a while. “About Serkaih teaching him to listen.”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Morning, Bethas 30, 2720
The Valley Floor, Serkaih

They wander; there is no need to rush.

The ground is hard and cool underfoot; they are not the first visitors, but neither are the grounds full of wandering visitors, as they sometimes are. The air fills slowly with light; it smells like the desert, like home, and Nkemi breathes it all in, deep, and is grateful.

“I do not know if the soul is smaller than the body,” Nkemi says, solemnly, lifting her gaze to Anetol as he speaks, listening intently to his words. She tries to imagine it: Anaxi-style houses, with furniture set in them. She looks down at the houses around them, scattered on either side of the path, set here and there – ordered by nature, carved where there was space and stone enough.

“Perhaps memory is,” Nkemi says; she looks down at the houses around them, and then up at Anetol. It is not quite a smiling matter, but the look on her face is soft and kind nonetheless, not a frown. Her arm slides through his once more, and she squeezes lightly. “Or perhaps it is so large that it cannot be contained; perhaps the tsan’ehew is like the anchor of the ship, which, though it is much smaller than all the wood, is heavy enough to hold it in place.”

This is what she thinks of as she drifts onwards; she thinks of a heavy mass of black, writhing, of a water soaked chamber and the cold marble of an Everine’s grave. She looks around her, and thinks of memories soaring overhead like lanterns – like the balloons of an airship – drifting up with ropes of love anchoring them to the ground. For a moment, blinking, she thinks she can see it, but it is only the distance gleam of the sun.

“Sana’hulali, Ife,” Nkemi lets go of Anetol’s arm to bow, deeply; she meets the other woman’s field with her own, caprising gently. Her face is a warm, friendly smile. “This is Anetol Vakelin, a guest of Serkaih.”

They do not wander much further, but there is a quiet scraping sound from not too far. Nkemi does not follow it through the tsan’ehewi, but stops; she does not yet need to shade her eyes to look. Her gaze traces a path through the wandering memorials, and follows the sounds to the wall. There, where the shade must be cold still, a man kneels.

Nkemi knows him after a moment – Kawero, Ipiwo’s oldest brother. She did not ask, though she wondered; she bows her head, gently, and whispers a prayer to Hulali, thanking Him for His mercy; she thanks Him too that the sad occasion is not further marred. Kawero has a brush and a chisel; he sweeps something away, and goes back to his work, slow and deliberate. The tsan’ehew is nearly done; Nkemi could not say how many more days of work he has before him, but she does not think it many.

“Sometimes it is one hand which holds the chisel,” Nkemi draws Anetol away, slowly, with her arm through his; she takes him towards the other side, where one of the tallest tsan’ehew still stands, carved through three closet together brilliant colors of rock, one for each story. “Sometimes many. There is no shame in leaning on others in the building; the greater shame is in not asking for help.”

They leave the path now; the lanterns which they pass have been dampened by Ife’s work, but the sunlight is curving over the edge of the canyon now at its broadest points, and it gleams on the rock down the cliffs, here and there, brilliant and bright. They walk through the tsan’ehewi, off the path, although they do not stray too far.

Here, the edges of the canyon do not quite meet; in the still-dark of the gap, they can see more tsan’ehew stretching distant where the shade swallows them whole. Nkemi lets Anetol lead once more; she keeps herself shy of the houses, leaving a small border around them, but otherwise wanders free.

“In the daytime, the paths here are those we make,” Nkemi says. “At night, it is best to keep to the light. It is best not to touch the tsan’ehewi.”