[Closed] All These Colors Fade For You

[Tom Cooke]

Al’aqas on the Turga

Evening on the 37th of Bethas, 272o

I
t’s well for me,” he says with his own little smile in return. “Thank you.” Nkemi, he almost addresses her, but the name sticks in his throat; he can’t say it so easily anymore. He doesn’t feel as if he has permission. A relief, he almost says; I don’t think I could’ve stood another night like last. His eyes linger on her face for a moment – a little too long, he thinks, and feels badly for it – before flicking away.

There’s no phosphor up here, no oil lamps; there’s no light but what the stars trickle around and between the drifting clouds, and what can be seen of Ossa and the tiny sliver of Benea, now and then. He smooths the blanket over his bedroll.

He hasn’t bathed. The rain’s no longer misting, but the air is still wet, and the dew glistens on whorls of shifting leaves. The wind picks up, ruffling the hangings; far below, he can still hear the chatter of the village winding down, along with the ever-present rush of the Turga.

She’s stretched out, looking up at the stars.

In time, he crawls onto his bedroll. His mouth is dry, and he takes out his waterskin for a few swallows. He watched the lights dampen over the edge of the roof for a little while, the prefect at his back; they were silent then, too, both of them on their stools. He was breathing in the sage and thyme with his eyes shut, thinking to say –

First rains, he wants to say dumbly, as he lies down on his back. One hand rests against his mud-spattered, sand-dusted shirt. The rest of him’s no better; he can feel it in his hair, clinging to his skin in the humid evening.

The only tastes lingering in his mouth are that of the stew and the fried groundnut paste he had afterward. It wasn’t for want of being offered. He wandered slippery Al’Aqas on aching legs, watching the drummers laugh at their ease, rolling out their sore glistening muscles. There wasn’t far to wander; he thinks he could’ve wandered farther – further, more like – with a few cups of wine. Once or twice, he caught sight of Nkemi’s small straight frame, wandering back through a scattered flock of chickens; the wind snatched up and carried to him a familiar high voice, and he wandered around and away.

It’s a long time before he says anything. The night deepens and darkens, or maybe it’s the last of the lights in Al’Aqas gone out. The rain has begun to dry, as she’s said, but any heat is cut through by the night’s chill. Clouds drift across the sky, fast enough he can watch them come apart and reform themselves.

The night deepens and darkens, until the silence seems to him too thick to cut with mere words. They’re both silent, but the back of his neck prickles; he doesn’t think she’s sleeping. The prickling grows worse and worse, and the night deepens and darkens.

“Nkemi,” he says quietly, looking up at the stars.

He pauses. He wishes at first he hadn’t spoken. Tonight is the last night they’ll have to spend together; there’ll be separate rooms on the steamship, and people all around, and when she disembarks, the busy streets of Thul Ka will wash it all away.

Will they? “I read the ancient arati used the stars as a map,” he says, “to get across the desert. In ada’xa Dhe’fere’s book.” How dare you say his name, he thinks. “I don’t recognize any of these; there are too many clouds tonight.”

He swallows a lump, shifting.

“My name is Thomas Cooke,” he says very, very quietly. Perhaps this is another stone in the pocket. But he’s already told her too much; he wonders if she feels, too, that only one foot is over the crack, and the chasm is widening. It’s all he can think to give, that isn’t even more horrifying than what he’s already laid at her feet.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Night, 37 Bethas, 2720
Al’Aqas, On the Turga

Toemas Kuq,” Nkemi repeats, only a little louder than he has offered her the name.

She is lying on her back on the bedroll, gazing up at the stars. Her sandals are tucked neatly alongside it, and her legs are stretched out on the thick, spongy roll. She has unwrapped her headscarf quietly in the dark, and folded it up, and her small dark hair rests on it.

The clouds drift busily over the sky; some are no more than small scraps of white. Sometimes Nkemi picks one or another to follow, and she watches the wind chase it through the landscape of stars and clouds, watches as pieces wisp away and others join. Sometimes she loses it as it drifts away; sometimes it reaches the other end, and she wonders if any piece is still the same as when it began, and if so, whether it is still the same cloud.

What of her is Nkemi-of-Dkanat? She thinks of the small girl who held a strange moon-lit hand in the midst of graves, who turned her head back and was held forward; she thinks of waking in her father’s arms, of her mother holding her hand as the priest brought water for her to drink. She thinks of all this and more, and she watches the clouds, and she does not rest.

She thinks too of her grandfather’s books, which she has read, so many times. She thinks of him – Toemas, Nkemi thinks, slowly – returning the book to her when he offered the gift as well.

“In this same chapter,” Nkemi replies, “Grandfather writes of the story I told you once, of the brothers in the desert, Okwe and Ikwe. He writes of it not to tell it, but only in passing, in the mentioning of how arati also used animals as their guides.”

Nkemi shifts on the bedroll; she looks up at the stars overhead, quiet. “When I told you this story,” Nkemi goes on, “it was to speak of truth and intent. This is so, and this is true. It is also so that for all their searching, Ikwe and Okwe never regain their sight. Whether this cautions us not to lie or not to call another a liar, I have never known.”

When she told him this story, they stood on the docks of the Arova, on a cold misty morning in Vortas; Nkemi can scarcely imagine it here, with only the chill breeze off the Turga to cut through the warm desert night. The air around them is still damp with the memory of rain, and it smells of sage and thyme, of sand and goats; it smells of home. She wonders if now, knowing the sand, he thinks of the story differently.

When she told him this story, he had asked her what a man should do if his name did not feel like his; he had asked her if he might be called by it, anyway, even if it surprises him to hear it. She told him, then, yes; she thinks so, still, in the considering of it now, that it is not dishonorable to ask so. It is not Anetol, Nkemi knows, which he is asking her to call him now. She does not think there is dishonor in the asking; she does not think there is dishonor in the accepting.

This is, she knows too, not the same as wishing to accept.

“In the story,” Nkemi’s voice is quiet; she has not known these words were inside her, but she understands now that they have lived in her chest for many days, through all the camel steps and the washing of the sand against her face, “Okwe searches, and Ikwe follows, and does not search on his own. It is so, too, that they are equally to blame for their lack of finding. This, too, is true.”

[Tom Cooke]

Al’aqas on the Turga

Evening on the 37th of Bethas, 272o

H
e remembers her saying how she’d always wondered which of the two of them was a liar.

He never thought he’d hear his name in her voice, long-voweled, not much like the Thul’amat accents he’s heard wrap around it. Did he want to hear it? He can’t say, now.

He remembers Dhe’fere’s mention of the story, too, though he didn’t think much of it at the time. Now, he wonders if he ought to’ve. He hears Nkemi shift against the bedroll, and he listens to her go on. He knits his fingers over his stomach, studies the rolling and curling of the clouds. The wind ruffles through the hangings and rustles the leaves of the sage and thyme, whisking up all their smells. Nkemi speaks quietly under all this, but he hears her as if she’s deafening.

He takes a very deep breath, frowning. He’s never thought to ask whether the swelling of Okwe and Ikwe’s eyes went down, whether they got their sight back when they learned to trust the goats’. He’d always assumed they had; that’s how it would’ve gone, if it had been an Anaxi story.

Equally to blame.

I’m not good at this, he wants to say, right off; he knows his mind is tired, but he can’t be any more tired than she is. Less Mugrobi, maybe.

Do you think you’re to blame in this? he wants to ask. It was him who should’ve told her earlier, he thinks, or else never told her at all, though it’s still the truth of his heart that he did right by telling her then. He’d been afraid, before then, that if he tried to tell her, she would think –

“I told you the story of Arete and the magistra,” he replies softly, after a moment. “Back then. Or two variations. A kind one and a cruel one, or one I – thought was kind. Where she suffered in silence for hundreds of years at the Lady’s behest, so she could find what she was looking for alone.”

Stilled the moons, he thought. He thinks of poor Arete now, golden-haired and bright, worn from seeking and sorting. Full up with all that timeless time nobody could ever know about. That wasn’t Dee’s version of the tale, where Vita gathered up all the lentils; that was his. That was what he had thought was kind, when he’d thought to give the lass a kind ending. And he’d been surprised to hear Nkemi point it out.

This, too, is true, Nkemi had said in her quiet, matter-of-fact voice. He thinks he can picture the set of her face, prefect-straight, in the shape of the words. It doesn’t waver, any more than she did when she rose to her feet earlier – or climbed the stairs with him behind her, one step at a time, her back ramrod and her small hand firm on the railing.

He shuts his eyes. “Okwe and Ikwe were in a sandstorm,” he says thickly, “and both of them must’ve been so afraid, when they came out and saw how different the world looked. Of – of course Okwe kept chasing after mirages; of course Ikwe got angry with him. Of course they were both blinded.”

When he opens them, the stars are smeared; he takes a deep breath and palms them away.

“What could Okwe and Ikwe have done differently, Nkemi?” he asks. “Would you tell Ikwe he deserves it – to have been blinded – because he fought his brother when they were both afraid? Or because he didn’t think to follow the goats sooner?” His lips press together, thin.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Night, 37 Bethas, 2720
Al’Aqas, On the Turga

His voice is rough beneath its deep smoothness, with a thickness to it. Nkemi looks up at the stars and the drifting clouds, and does not look over towards him, even through the darkness.

Nkemi remembers a ribbon of gleaming glass atop sand; she remembers running, half-stumbling down the dune, and the place where it had tumbled free at the bottom, and the sand-washed green of the tent canvas. She remembers the brush of a field against her own, and the hand that pressed hers through tent.

She remembers the way he squinted when he first emerged, and the wetness that gleamed in his eyes at the sudden brush of sun. She wonders how the world looked to him then, what he could see through the tears in his eyes. She did not understand, before, what truths could have passed so between too such men, trapped together in the dark. She understands, now.

“No,” Nkemi says, evenly, and she does not look over at Toemas. “They share the blame among them, what blame there is to be shared. This is not the same as to say they deserve it.”

In most versions of the story, it is as she told it to him, that it is the sand and its irritation which blinds them, a byproduct of their fighting. This is the way Nkanzi told her this story, when she was a young girl listening and learning, wide-eyed, coming to understand honor and truth and consequence. This is how she knows the story, in her memory, in the place where it lives inside her.

There are other versions; there are versions where the blinding is deliberate, cruel, where Ikwe in his rage does so, and Okwe in the last of his strength does the same to his brother, where they wake hours later entangled in one another’s arms, never knowing if another sandstorm has swept over them.

“There is another truth to this story,” Nkemi says, her voice quiet; she gazes still up at the stars. “They are blinded twice. They are blinded first by the sandstorm, which strips from them all that we used to see. They are blinded again by rage and fear. In most tellings, there is no blame in the first; the sandstorm comes upon them suddenly, and there is nothing they may do.”

With no warning, Nkemi thinks, or way to resist.

“If they were not careful,” Nkemi goes on, “if they ignored the gathering clouds on the horizon and pressed through, then there is blame, yes. So it is in the second time; they are deceiver and deceived, or perhaps they are both deceived, for neither sees clearly.”

Nkemi finds herself wandering, and she does not mean to. She is quiet a moment longer; she thinks it over again, carefully. The wind whisks cool over her face, and dries the tears which trickle down from the edges of her eyes, and spill soft over the cheeks. She does not reach up to wipe them away; her hands rest on the edge of her ribs, one on top of the other, fingers curled.

“It is not justice, what happens to them,” Nkemi says, in the end, and she finds she is very tired, far more than she knew. She does not think she can say anymore. It is not, perhaps, all that she wishes she could have spoken; it is not, perhaps, that which is most right to say. Her hands seem to shake as badly as his on the clay of the truth, and she finds she knows nothing of where she is, or what she shapes. “For all that perhaps it could have been avoided, it is not justice.”

Nkemi rolls onto her side, then; she curls up, and closes her eyes, and breathes in deep the scent of the fresh green plants in the night breeze. There are more tears, then, and she lets them fall, and breathes evenly through them; she does not try to fight.

[Tom Cooke]

Al’aqas on the Turga

Early Morning on the 38th of Bethas, 272o

H
is brow furrows, but he listens, quiet and still, his fingers knit over his chest. Nkemi’s soft voice goes on; the breeze rustles the leaves, carries up the smell of the rushing Turga to mingle with the herbs. He can hear a few insects, but he doesn’t know their names.

Another truth, she says, and he listens.

What is this, he wants to ask, if not a punishment? Punishments are deserved; they’re earned, merited. There’s no other way to think about it, except deserving. What’s blame, if not the acceptance of a punishment you deserve? This is, he thinks, a punishment. He knows he deserves it; he can’t bear the thought that she now feels the weight of it.

The deceiver and the deceived, she says, or perhaps they are both deceived. His eyes prickle hot. The muscles around his left cheekbone ache, when he squeezes his eyes shut. He thinks of Kafo asking him quietly, in the dark, that Anfe not be told. Anfe will never know, now.

I am the deceiver, he wants to say, but then – the blame of being deceived would just fall on her. He feels something of it for the first time, rippling down through him like shock. Her hands chafing warmth back into his on the study floor; the festival, the little white dog, mulled wine and Ette and lanterns. Oti’uqaq, her guiding him carefully up the steps to the rooftop; giggling over dzutan at Ivuq’way. At dinner with her fami, Nkese telling him to eat well, Ifran sparing his words for him, halting and precious. The secret she thought she knew him worthy of. Osi, drifting and dissipating on the horizon. Embarrassment, he imagines, and a whole lot of other things, too.

The worry blooms through his field, deep purple as his bruise, though he doesn’t reach to caprise her deeper.

This is what I did, Nkemi, he wants to say. This is not yours. None of this is yours; you didn’t take me here unknowingly.

But what was she, then, if not blind? I’m a good liar, he thinks; you can’t be blamed for not seeing the monster. But she’s a better prefect than he is a liar. She touched his mind; she walked in his vestibule, and he walked in hers, and she still saw fit to guide him.

She’s gone quiet for a few moments, and he wonders if she’s drifted off; he thinks it’s too much to hope for, even here, under the stars. When she speaks again, he feels the cold trickle of a tear down his cheek. “It’s not,” he murmurs, hoarse. He doesn’t know anything about justice, but he thinks he must know that, at least.

When he hears Nkemi shift on her bedroll, he glances over. She’s a small shadow in the moonlight, a narrow back and soft dark hair and knees drawn up.

He turns a little, resting his cheek on the back of his hand. “You’re not blind.” He tries to keep the shake out of his voice; he swallows thickly. “You did me honor with your trust, and you never called me a liar,” he says softly. “Not even now, when anybody else would’ve fallen on me and taken my eyes out. You…”

You trusted a monster, he seems to himself to be saying; you knowingly trusted a monster. “You saw something in me,” he says, “I don’t know what, but something I wanted to be. I can’t see the dishonor in that. I’m sorry, Nkemi.”

He falls silent. The wind picks up; he thinks he can see Nkemi’s breath rising and falling in the soft movements of her ribs. She doesn’t say anything else.

He shifts onto his back, looking up at the clouds.

He’s not sure if he sleeps. He knows he wakes, so he must’ve slept. There’s a little heat in the air already, thicker than the dry desert’s, and his blanket is a tangle about his ankles. The sky is a soft grey, not quite light yet, but there are no stars. The sun begins to catch on the leaves of mint and sage, the rooftop covered in soft green.

He’s lying on his side, with his back to the prefect’s bedroll. As he pushes himself up, reaching for his water skin, he hears it: a cry from somewhere down below. He hears the sound of a steamship, then.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Afternoon, 38 Bethas
Ip’ixúp Steamship, the Turga

Nkemi dreams of piles of lentils, red and brown and green and yellow; they gleam like jewels, polished clean. She kneels in the midst of them and she sorts. She knows nothing of time; there is only her hands, and the endless lentils before her. The piles behind her grow, steadily, but those in front of her never diminish.

She looks down at her hands, and they are strange, old, thin and veined and dusted with red hair; she blinks, and they are her mother’s hands, and she cannot remember what she saw before. She blinks again, and they are her own, and she goes back to it, slowly, separating them one by one.

She wakes to the horn of the steamship.

Afed brings them each a small steaming cup of kofi; Nkemi drinks hers on the edge of the rooftop, watching Ip’ixúp pull steadily closer along the riverbed, cutting through the swirling early morning mists. It is almost chilly, now, with the breeze which whisks along the Turga rising to greet them. If she glances behind her, she can see only the suggestion of the dunes, for all that she knows they tower over Al’aqas during the day.

The men of the steamship, clad in draped gray, and carrying the trunks down by the time Nkemi and Toemas arrive. The walk down is as slick and uneven as Nkemi remembers; Toemas’s hand is tight and shaking on her shoulder, and their feet squelch through the mud. They do not fall, either of them.

The men in the boat take his hands, one each, and lift him over the last of the sucking mud; Nkemi waits behind. They reach for her next, and she sets her hands into theirs, and she, too, is lifted over into the boat.

The whistle blows, again, and they cut down the river once more, drawn steadily towards Thul Ka.

Nkemi bathes; there is hot water, here, and she scrubs every inch of her skin, rinsing herself clean of the desert sand and the rainy mud. She washes her hair, digging soapy fingers through the short thick inches of it, and by the time she is done she is pinched, aching, and smiling still.

The girls in her cabin are coming from Demoga; they have never seen Thul Ka before, one offers, shyly. Nkemi sits cross-legged on her hammock and tells them about Windward Market, and their eyes grow wide and wider still. They ask and ask again, and Nkemi grows almost hoarse describing the wandering corridors of spice merchants, the dzutan, the fabrics, the clockmakers, the books.

The afternoon Nkemi spends laying out on the deck; there are drifting clouds in the sky above, and damp patches here and there where the sun has not reached. She takes none of these; she drags her chair into the fullest part of it, and stretches out. For a little while she reads; for a little while she sleeps; for a little while she only sits, somewhere apart, and soaks up the warmth.

“Anaxas, ada’na!” The young woman in the chair next to her is wide-eyed, smiling; her field tangles curiously with Nkemi’s, soft clairvoyant mona belike, though there is only a thin drift of them, by comparison. The little girl on her lap is wide-eyed, legs sideways, curled against her mother’s shoulder.

“It seems a strange place,” she says, smiling.

“It can be,” Nkemi says, smiling back. She grins down at the little girl, who stares solemn up at her. “This time of year they will be having the last of their snow, I hope.”

“Snow!” The woman shivers. “Do you remember about snow, Kimi?” She bounces her knees lightly.

The little girl shakes her head.

“When it is very cold,” Nkemi says, smiling down, “colder than any part of all of Hulali’s Turga, then it is not rain which falls from the sky, but small flakes of frozen water. This we call snow.”

“Snow,” The little girl repeats. She frowns up at the both of them, small eyes narrowing.

Nkemi giggles. “Yes.” She glances around. “Come,” she beckons.

Nkemi crouches at the edge of a puddle of cool river water, in the shade of an overhang; it sways, softly, with the steady forward motion of the ship.

Kimi clings to her mother’s hand, making her way across the unsteady deck; when her mother kneels, she tucks herself into a fold of her skirt, one hand resting possessively on her knee, and watches Nkemi from there.

Nkemi breathes in, deeply; she closes her eyes, remembering the spell Nkese showed her in her old grimoire, when they took the trunk together back to the attic. She opens them. She begins to cast, steadily, the static mona in her field shifting etheric. She cups the water in her hands, lifting it up evenly between them. The air around them shifts, and grows a little warmer, and Kimi gasps; her mother, too, is wide-eyed.

Nkemi curls the spell; her palms come apart, just a little. The water which swirls and shifts down is snow, perfect, gleaming flakes of it; the puddle on the ground stirs, and shrinks, and comes up into the air, and for a moment – for just a moment – there is a little snow storm all around. Kimi is shrieking with laughter, eyes wide; her mother is laughing with her; Nkemi laughs, too, her heart soaring light, and watches snow fall in the midst of the Turga.

Rolls

Snow spell: Sidekick BOTToday at 11:15 AM
@moralhazard: 1d6 = (6) = 6

[Tom Cooke]

On the Turga

Evening on the 38th of Bethas, 272o

S
now,” Hedha says, and gives a great belly-roll of a laugh. “You didn’t hear?”

“No, ada’xa, I didn’t.” He’s smiling a little.

The dining cabin’s already full when they step in. The smell of fresh-caught fried salmon, and rich warm sauce, hits him like a wall; his stomach growls aloud, and Hedha laughs again, his caprise flaring bastly. He pats his stomach with a plump hand. “This is almost worth the wait,” he says with a broad, white-toothed grin. “It’s still quite the shiner,” he adds, peering over at his face. “I take it you’re in better spirits, all the same?”

He inclines his head.

A boch stumbles out of the cabin, nearly tangling up with Hedha’s legs; the merchant’s laughing even harder. He catches the smell of anise on his breath. “Bhe,” he mutters, and then calls something in Mugrobi over his shoulder. The boy’s halfway down the hall, and he doesn’t turn back as he tears round the corner toward the stairs to the deck.

It’s different from the Etoririq’dzwei. The cabin’s a little wider, but the tables are set even closer together. All he can see of the stove is a whirl of steam up and out the window, over which the Turga’s glistening dark. It’s a thicket of sound and light, of grinning faces, of steam and the smells of yats. Hedha’s a small man, around Anatole’s height, but what he lacks there he makes up for in girth and enthusiasm; the crowd parts for him, and he’s happy to let it, weaving easily through by his side.

Hedha grins as they come closer to the stove. “I heard from ada’xa Inas’efo,” he says brightly. “Hulali has blessed that man and his family. Ah, please, adame, if you’ll allow me.”

They turn away with warm plates full of fish. It’s perch, this time; three glassy, crusted-over eyes peer up at him from the plate, three oily mouths open in tiny surprised ‘o’s. The sauce that’s drizzled over them is different this time, green and smelling of mint and lime, with onions spilling about the charred scales.

“Isú says it’s all her little girl can talk about now. And may Hulali fill the sorceress’ cup, too; I don’t remember if he got her name,” says Hedha, frowning.

“Nkemi,” he says.

His and Hedha’s fields both reach out to caprise the prefect’s. “Dzifú’dzewi, ada’na! A fine evening.”

His smile tilts sad for just a second, when he meets her eye; a little warmth shivers through his caprise, and it’s a soft nudge, though it doesn’t reach any deeper. The table is big enough he sits across from her without being packed in. Hedha sits down next to him, and before too long, there’s a boch tugging her mother’s skirts toward the stool beside Nkemi, her mother with an apologetic little smile.

“I should have known,” Hedha says, chortling.

He hasn’t seen Nkemi since they boarded. Her headwrap and clothes are crisp, blue and green; there are still shadows around her eyes, but her smile is bright as ever. He thinks there’s a tired edge to her voice, even as it spills out soft around questions and answers.

Isú’s lass, Kimi, is staring at him whenever she gets the chance. He thinks she thinks he doesn’t know; he doesn’t meet her gaze very often, but as he works at the fish with shaky fingers, her eyes are on him. He saw her gasp and hesitate, tangled up in her mother’s skirt, when she saw his bruise.

“Do you know where Vienda is?” Isú asks, and Kimi shakes her head sharply. “You learned about this,” she says, “remember? The Turga goes into the Tincta Basta, and if you follow it far enough, you will be following the Arova through Anaxas. All the way through, to Vienda. Do you remember?”

Kimi shakes her head, one small fist balled in her mother’s skirt.

He tries to imagine Nkemi in a whirl of snow on the deck of the Ip’ixup, smiling her mother’s smile, except for her warm deep eyes.

He tells Isú and Kimi a little of the Rose, when they ask him about Anaxas. He speaks of the Fords and the smell of kofi and flatbread in the morning, and an old bakery he used to go to. He speaks of when the harbor froze over, and his voice falters once, like the skipping of a stone, but he describes it anyway, smiling softly.

The sun drops down, and the lamps warm, and Hedha finds himself leaning forward on his stool to tell a story to a gaggle of bochi. They all laugh, even when Hedha goes back for another fish and drops the slippery thing on the way to the table.

He manages to slip away early, the warmth still printed on the backs of his eyelids, and pad down the hall to his room. He shuts the door quietly behind him. He thinks to search for tsiwow’af, but he doesn’t know he can bear to make the ward that calls him what he is. Instead, he sits on the bed, watching the blue phosphor light shift over the floorboards. He searches for ised’usa in the brush of the breeze and the smell of coming rain.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Morning, 39 Bethas
Ip’ixúp Steamship, the Turga

Nkemi dozes off to the sound of three small voices, whispering more loudly than speech, too excited for silence. The girls have taken down their hammocks and are piled together on them in the corner of the room, other blankets spread out beneath against the creaking wood floor. Nkemi wakes every so often to a sudden burst of giggling amidst the wash of pale moonlight over the boards, and she smiles for the sound, curls herself up, and drifts back to sleep.

Eventually in the middle of the night, there is silence; she wakes then, and can hardly bear it. She glances over to see the three of them, fast asleep now, the blanket rising and falling over them in a strange, uneven rhythm; two hands, one larger than the other, are tangled together still over the edge of it.

It is harder, this time, for Nkemi to sleep; eventually she eases off into it once more, to the soft lapping of the waves and the steady set of three breaths.

She wakes early in the morning, long before the three of them; she slips out silent from the roof, and goes up to the deck; she sits with her legs over the edge of the ship, arms tangled through the railing, and lets the mist roll through her. A gray swathed man finds her, eventually; Nkemi follows him down to the dining room, and she finds her stomach grumbling.

Kimi comes running to her side when she and Isú enter the room. Nkemi grins at her, and wraps another bite of egg in spongy flatbread, and begins the story of the man who trapped a hama koketa in his stomach, or so it is told.

Ip’ixúp has three decks; Nkemi climbs to the highest when she has finished eating. She dozes in the sun a little while; the sky is spotted with clouds, today. She wakes to the brush of rain on her face; Nkemi yawns, and drags her chair beneath the overhang, and dozes to the steady patter of rain overhead. She wakes to find the sun steaming the rain from the boards.

Nkemi rises, in time; her sandals are set one next to the other by the chair. She moves to the center of the boards; she stretches her hands up, and up, far over her head, and she bends forward, slowly, and touches her toes. She goes forward, and plants her hands on the deck; she lowers herself down, and arches her back up, her head too. She folds herself back, hands still planted, and rises, slowly, arms arching over her head.

She does it again, and again; she does it very slowly, every motion careful and deliberate. She does it fast, though always controlled; she does it through the aches in her legs and shoulders, and the tightness of her back.

In time there is a quiet thump on the boards next to her, and she looks up to see Kimi lying alongside her. Isú is fast asleep on a chair in the shade, her chest gently rising and falling. Nkemi grins, and arches her back up, and Kimi plants small chubby hands on the deck and does the same.

“This is a way we greet the sun,” Nkemi says, arching her face back, feeling the wash of it on her.

“Hewwo sun!” Kimi cries.

Nkemi giggles. She comes up, and folds herself back.

Kimi does the same, wriggling about.

“Then we rise, like the sun,” Nkemi explains, and climbs back up to her feet.

Kimi hops up as well, and wraps small arms around Nkemi’s leg. “Story?” She asks.

Nkemi giggles. “Yes; I will tell you the story of this movement,” she says, running a hand through thick, wiry curls. “First, we stand together,” She takes Kimi’s small hand in hers. “And then we begin.”

[Tom Cooke]

A Dock in Thul Ka

Afternoon on the 39th of Bethas, 272o

H
e rises with the sun the next morning, or maybe he never slept; he remembers lying awake, though he doesn’t know for how long. It’s been so, the past few nights: he thinks sleep’ll never take him, and then it does, because perhaps he’s too tired to resist, because perhaps he’s past the point of losing sleep over things like this.

He thought of going to her the night before, after the dining cabin emptied out and the noise died down. Asking her to walk the deck with him, to find someplace quiet with him - a monster - alone - the thought failed him. His mind wandered from the breeze and the soft coverlet underneath him to thoughts of what he might say or do, worming in and out of his head. Perhaps she’d never believed him, he told himself; she’d never said she had, not outright.

Or perhaps, if she did, she’d find a way to set it aside – perhaps she already had. Perhaps that was the only way. Maybe Thul Ka’s streets are full of things like him, hiding in the skins of unfamiliar men and women; maybe they aren’t. He’s afraid, still, he’s given her a map without a key, but he doesn’t know if it’s his to name the landmarks, or if anything can make this map easier to read.

But by the light of day, with hands – even if they aren’t his – that are warm and solid and full of blood, it’s hard to think of such things. Maybe it’s so for her, too. Maybe sunlight darkens the shadows and hardens their edges.

He thought often of Ikwe and Okwe and blame. He didn’t dream, but he heard her voice at the edge of his mind. Not justice, she said, her voice quiet under the breeze and the rustling of the leaves, not justice.

You’re not to blame, he still wants to say, though he feels as if he’s shouting into the dark. That’s not, he knows, for him to say.

When the grey light’s enough to shaft through the window, he gets out of bed and smooths the covers. He takes out his chalks, and for a little while he lives in the soft scratch of them against the floorboards, the ache in his back and in his hips. He listens to the aches, and he knows to slow or pause when his hands are unsteady.

There’s a tightness in his chest, but he knows better than to push it down, to try and hide anything from the mona. When he sits in the middle of the circle, what’s left of his grimoire – what wasn’t given to Roa – on his knees, the cool breeze dries the tears on his cheeks. More come, and he doesn’t try to wipe them away. He incants until the mona flock to him, warm and etheric, questioning and firm.

His jaw locks, at first, when they bind him. He can feel their fingers running along the cracks between his body and his soul. He relaxes the muscles in his back and loosens his jaw, and he lets them.

He doesn’t come out to break fast. He sees the lights of Thul Ka budding the riverbank out the window, and he spots the curved horns of water buffalo, too, fur damp with the morning’s mist. He sits most of the morning on the bed, his knees drawn up, watching the brightening sunlight spark on ripples on the water. He listens to the patter of feet on the boards outside, soft warm voices through the ceiling and the walls. He’s inside, and they’re outside; he breathes in and out, and he finds peace in it.

He hums an old chanty when he packs his books back and buckles his case, and he goes to shave his face in the washbasin. The bruise aches on his cheek, sickly-yellowing now at the edges and darker along his cheekbone, though the swelling’s gone down.

It’s early afternoon when the Ip’ixup docks and the horn blares. One of the men in grey comes for the key and his case; he lets him carry it out, and moves out himself.

He expects to meet her in the hall, when he does; it’s not his hall, but one of the ones adjacent. “Sana’hulali, Nkemi,” he says. When his caprise meets hers, it’s warm; he doesn’t push deeper, but he smiles as the man carries his case past. The sounds of the lapping river and Thul Ka are loud outside, but muffled; the hall isn’t quite empty, a few doors open, laughter leaking out.

“How was your morning?” he asks quietly, taking a few steps down the creaking hall. He breathes through the ache in his chest, and the mona in his field are warm, and he smiles.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Afternoon, 39 Bethas
A Dock, Thul Ka

S anahulali, ada’xa,” Nkemi greets him with a polite smile and a polite caprise. She is still warm with the flush of sunlight, with dangling on the railing with Kimi and Isú beside her, and watching Thul Ka grow close.

In the time after he told her, Anetol did not seem wrong. It was what he had asked her to call him, once, and so it was what she had called him, then. My name is a Toemas Kuq, he told her two nights ago, quiet in the darkness beneath the stars. He did not ask her to call him Toemas, nor Mr. Kuq; he did not tell her either to call him Anetol. She thinks of him wreathed in the mists of the dock and the quiet request which came there. He is now smiling before her, as small and slight as ever, wrapped in the brightness of his new wardrobe, only a little dimmed by the dust of the trip and the purple bruise on his cheek.

“Warm,” Nkemi says with a fond smile. “And yours?”

There is the heavy think of the gangway being laid down outside. The corridors are full around them, all the passengers trickling out; Thul Ka is always the last stop. One of the gray clad men holds the door open for all of them, his voice a low steady murmur of thanks and blessings.

“May your waters be still,” he says politely to the two of them.

“May there be nothing hidden beneath yours,” Nkemi replies with a smile. She squints in the light, gleaming bright through the buildings of Three Flowers. There are clouds here too, dancing through the sky, and telltale glimpses of water or at least its remains, tucked into whatever shadows remain. There is the smell of flood season on the air, excitement and knowing mingled together, and Nkemi feels the rhythm of the drums in the beat of the shipyard.

He goes before her, slow footed down the narrow wood, his hands on the railing. Nkemi follows behind, and at the bottom they go without speaking of it to the trunks, to bring them to the carriages; one is already waiting from the Crocus’ Stem, despite all the uncertainties of the journey.

He turns to her.

Nkemi takes his hands in hers, gently. She looks down at the two sets, his thin and freckled and veined, marked by someone else’s many years of writing and studying. She wonders what those of the man he was before would look like; she knows nothing of it, and she cannot picture them, and she finds the effort uneasy.

Nkemi squeezes, gently and warmly, not hard enough to hurt, but enough for him to feel the pressure. She does not deepen the caprise between them; neither does she shut him out entirely. It is there, and despite its shallowness, it is warm.

“I am grateful to have had you as my guest,” Nkemi says, firmly, meeting his eyes. She lets go of him, then; she steps back, and she bows.

He bows too, and when he comes up he meets her gaze once more, unblinking. “You know me,” he says intent, “and I know you know where to find me.”

Nkemi inclines her head in a nod, and she turns; her trunk comes with her to a shared carriage, pulled by two sturdy kenser; it is hauled up to the top and secured there. She climbs in, and settles down on a narrow seat, and she does not look back. The past is a river, Nkemi reminds herself, and she does not look back.