[Closed] Share in Evening’s Cool and Quiet

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 25 Bethas, 2720
The Etoririq’dzwei, the Turga

Ur’dzúxas,” Nkemi repeats, smiling at Anetol. It is a comforting tradition here on the soft bedspread, with blue light washing over the both of them and the Turga lapping at the walls. He says it again, slow and careful and deliberate, and he smiles, and Nkemi smiles too. She thinks of his careful ule’eana, and the softness with which he tries to shape the n – not touching his tongue to the roof of his mouth, as she has come to understand the Anaxi do, but letting it ripple and flow like the waves, and the sound too.

He frowns, then, and looks down as well, back at the chalked lines of monite on the floor.

Nkemi remembers the brush of sage in the air, soft and slippery; she has a fleeting impression of glass tinkling against a roof, and shifting scents, mint and junia filling the air. The glass tinkles, or perhaps it is low, soft laughter from somewhere distant, somewhere she cannot make out – somewhere she does not try to reach.

It is imprinted upon her, still.

She wonders if he knows that they do not usually last so long, the brushing of minds – even when guided together by ada’na Ugoulo’s connection, even when the reaching of each mind to the other is long, and lingering, and cognomancy direct, not filtered in the slightest. There is a difference, Nkemi knows well, between reading and doing.

She cannot close her eyes and picture this garden which he so badly wanted to show her; but she knew it, then, like a wave rushing over her. She cannot pick out the droplets – the flowers, the scents – but she remembers the peace of it.

She thinks Anetol does too. She does not expect him to speak on it, but he goes on. The man I knew, he says, and she thinks of his words the day before, of journeys in the desert and truths glimpsed through smoke. His eyes flutter shut, and Nkemi wonders what he sees, behind his eyes, whether he can picture this garden still.

Nkemi’s hands are soft in her lap; she looks down at the sprawl of chalk across the floor. She smiles, when he winds back around to ised’usa, offering the word as carefully as he has all the rest. He looks up at her and smiles.

Nkemi smiles too. “I did,” she says, quietly. “In my last apartment before Vienda,” her hands fold together, though she does not grab hold. She sits in the midst of it, and does not shy away from looking at him. This smile is softer; her eyes crinkle at the edges, but that sorrow, too, she faces. She thinks of a shattered pot – of dirt spilling across the floor, and a kofi plant tumbled sideways, roots sprawled bare.

She thinks, too, of a planter box on a windowsill, and the sandaled footprint left within, the places where the tread crushed the mint, down, into the dirt, the scattering of dirt on the floor and the single leaf within.

Nkemi lets this, too, wash over her as it will. These memories are sharp; they are not soft impressions, but rather vivid, every outline clearly defined. There are spells she knows well, which every prefect learns, to heighten the memory and sharpen one’s recollection. What is thus seen cannot be unseen; it cannot be put aside so easily. Nkemi breathes in, deeply; there is the fresh smell of the water outside, drifting, and the wash of the cool breeze over her face. Cooler, she knows, than any in Thul Ka.

Nkemi goes on. “Plants like devotion, I think,” she smiles. “It seems to me those who care to know them keep them best.” Her eyes trace the lines once more; she turns and smiles up at Anetol. “A plant needs you to listen, but cannot speak. Perhaps this is why Ur’dzúxas is prized so highly among means of meditation.”

[Tom Cooke]

The Etoririq’dzwei • The Turga

Nighttime on the 25th of Bethas, 2720

T
hey’ve been sitting in Tseli, both of them. He doesn’t chide himself for asking the question, not really; he expects the softening of her small face, the way her eyes move down. No seedlings for you, he thinks wistfully, in Vienda. He doesn’t look at her hands folded together in her lap, or his folded in his. Instead, he breathes in deep the river smells and unfurls his legs from underneath him, only frowning slightly at the creaking stiffness of his legs.

He supposes there’s nothing to say. The lapping of the water and a few calls – men, this time, not river-birds, men laughing, made dreamlike by the distance – whispers in to fill the silence better than any words could.

He imagines what plants Nkemi pezre Nkese might’ve grown, other than kofi. The bright freshness about her has always put him in mind of lemongrass, though he’s not sure how well it grows indoors. No, he thinks – a waterfall of rosemary perched in a tiny pot on a windowsill, spilling out fragrance as it drinks in the morning sun slanting through the window-panes. Or maybe mint, with its noodling delicate stems and its green leaves roughly-cut.

He smiles over at her, his brow furrowed. She must’ve had to give them away, going to Vienda. He thinks of them living even now in pots on someone else’s sill, gratefully tended by a friend or a cousin; he thinks of Nkemi giving them up before she left.

He supposes that’s a sort of meditation, too – in the sense of ised’usa, as little as he understands it – on change, maybe, or loss. It’s easy to picture, an apartment full of growing things and light, close enough to the bustle of Windward Market to catch the smells of yogurt and kofi in the morning. This isn’t the place she showed him, when she showed him how to listen for the push of another mind. He wonders if she goes there, still, and wonders what that meditation garden teaches.

She is looking back down at his ward when she speaks again. When she smiles, he can’t bring himself to look back at her – not quite. Without meaning to, his eyes catch on a stream of monite and flick away, following a curve round to the very center, where there’s an emptiness with room only for him to sit.

“It is difficult,” he agrees, “to listen to what can’t speak.” He tilts his head. “To what can’t be spoken,” he adds more softly, without knowing why.

His neck prickles. He wishes now he’d erased it. It’s a dishonorable wish; it’s a foolish wish. He’d like an excuse to erase it, even now. Sitting with it sprawling out is its own meditation – he doesn’t know what for.

He smiles at last. “Ur’dzúxas doesn’t speak, either,” he adds, “for all you can listen to it, for all you can watch them tend it and care for it all around you, for all it’ll tell you.” He turns to Nkemi. “I was walking through a meditation garden without knowing it.”

As usual. There’s a mischievous tilt to his smile; he breathes a sigh. When he sets his feet on the floor, the boards are cold under the soles. He’s left his sandals behind, sitting just to one side of the cracked door, only the edge and the swirl of a strap peeking out.

“Thank you for sharing this meditation with me.” He looks again at the chalk, considering, then back at Nkemi. “If you’re not too tired – I think I’ve a little left in me – would you share another with me? Tsiwow’af,” he attempts with a softer smile, extending a pale hand as he starts to rise.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 25 Bethas, 2720
The Etoririq’dzwei, the Turga

Nkemi feels the words all through her. To what can’t be spoken, Anetol says, and her eyes flicker shut and hold there, for a long moment. She breathes in, steady and deep, in and out.

There are things, Nkemi knows, which cannot be said; there are things which are not said, whether out of shame, pride, vanity, or even kindness. A Mugrobi learns to listen in the spaces between; a Prefect, doubly so. She would have thought, once, that it would be the same for a Seventen; she knows now it is true only for some of them. And for an incumbent? Nkemi does not look, but she holds Anetol’s face like a vestibule in her mind, all the familiar creases that wrinkle his forehead, and the grin that, sometimes, creeps out boyish, when perhaps he thinks no one sees.

Nkemi’s eyes open once more when he speaks again; she smiles up at him once more, and she nods, softly. “Just so,” Nkemi says, cheerfully. “You will find it too, in drifting smoke – in candle flame – in the stars – in even camel riding,” Nkemi giggles, “if you learn to look.”

“Tsiwow’af,” Nkemi repeats, and lets Anetol say it back to her once more. She comes to her feet, easily, in a quick grateful motion. She bows her head, lightly, and takes Anetol’s pale hand in her small dark one. “You honor me,” Nkemi says firmly. “I would be glad to share this with you.”

“First,” Nkemi says, cheerfully, looking down at the chalk lines traced over the floor of the cabin, “we search for ised’usa,” she grins brightly at Anetol.

They clean in silence for a little while, the soft push of the broom and the scrub of the rag. In time, Nkemi’s soft voice fills the air, smooth and gentle. “The whole of the body fills every movement,” she says, just loud enough to be heard over the whisk and the splash. “The breath fills the body; and so in every movement, the breath flows and searches. Feel it, as you breathe; exhale out all that is within you, and feel it come from your mouth, your nose – your lungs deep within – your belly, beneath them, where the last of the air is stored. When you think it is gone, all of it, push deeper – push harder – and find the last which waits within. Hold, there – not long enough for pain, but long enough to acknowledge your breath, and your body both.”

There is the faintest of pauses, there; Nkemi inhales. “Fill your stomach first,” she says, “and let it expand outwards with the strength of your breath. Your lungs, next; see them in your mind, and let them fill up. The breath spills out through you; it is in every bit of you, from your fingers to your toes.”

“Breathe,” Nkemi says, softly. “In, and out.” She counts the rhythms of their breath, then, slow and steady; each time there is the faintest pause between, enough to feel, and not more.

In time the floor is clean; in time Nkemi rises. She smiles at Anetol, and takes his chalk-dotted hands in hers. “This meditation is called push pull,” Nkemi says.

It begins with a movement; Nkemi’s two hands clasp together at her chest, curled in. She slides them around each other; she pushes them outwards in a long, straight line, her whole body turning to follow the motion. She pulls them back in, slowly, turning them once more, so the backs of her knuckles face out.

She shifts; she turns the other way. She pushes, once more, her hips and legs and feet all turning, and her hands gliding outwards, palms out, pressing through the air.

There is no more to it than this, for a long time.

Once there is a rhythm – once every movement is the same, steady, measured, whole-self, Nkemi casts. “Push,” she says to the mona, with the breath of intent. Her hands glide out; there is not much in the way of pressure of them, only the slightest guiding force. “Pull,” she says, as they come back in. She turns. “Push,” she presses outwards with the mona, her whole field gentle-guiding. "Pull.” She comes in once more.

There is a stillness, a silence between the monite; there is ised’usa within the tsiwow’af, an empty-mindedness. They are children’s spells, cast as children might, but Nkemi focuses on them with all her mind and all her clarity, every movement of her body together with the cast. “Push,” she says again, steadily, lifting her gaze to Anetol to join her. “Pull.”

[Tom Cooke]

The Etoririq’dzwei • The Turga

Nighttime on the 25th of Bethas, 2720

A
t first, it is surprisingly difficult to hold himself steady while cleaning the ward up off the floor. He’s not a boch who’s been caught with a sweetmeat; he tells himself this, over and over. He doesn’t need to watch her, and all the same he does, out of the corner of his eye. When they go to fetch the water and the rag, there’s no reason for him to stay back – and he knows the prefect’s mind well enough to know that if he scrubs one bit away with his hand, if he re-writes any of the monite, she’ll know.

As they start, her small bare feet move delicately round a curve, balance carefully at the edge.

It grows easier, the sweeping and the scrubbing. Her voice is there, somewhere under the sounds of the cleaning and over the lap of the water and the creak of the steamship. He becomes occupied in the breathing, and watches her less and less.

The whole of the body. The scrubbing becomes rhythmic; it’s not unlike a dance. The breathing, too. He smiles on the inhale, feeling the air whisk into his belly and fill it up.

If there’s anything he likes about this body, it’s the lungs, the diaphragm, the straightness of the spine. It’s funny to think of it in such terms; instead of thinking, he just breathes, follows the shape and form of a hundred speeches and rippling arias. If there’s anything he’s grateful for, when it comes to having a body at all, it’s breath. If anything in Vita is the opposite of ised’usa, it’s the antelife – breathless, thoughtless frenzy.

Push deeper, push harder, she says. He pushes; he expects to feel pain in even these lungs, but he finds more, just as she says.

By the end, he doesn’t know who’s swept up the top right corner, or the targeting clause. He scrubs with a rhythm, pushing and pulling the rag, wetting it at even intervals. When the floor is clean and drying, not a trace of the lines or the monite left, Nkemi tells him the name of the meditation; he’s only just gotten to his feet, and it’s impossible to suppress the grin.

He lets it fade as it will, replaced by a solemn expression. He’s still breathing as she’s told him, and so is she, her thin chest rising and falling underneath a swath of fabric.

The light dances silky in all her clothes. When she turns, the blues in her pants seem to ripple like the water outside. She pushes and pulls, and it looks to him like the gentle push and pull of the Mahogany’s tides, or the push and pull – he smiles, thinking of the map – of the Turga after an overflow. Flowing out, flowing in. When he breathes in, this time, he imagines himself overflowing his banks; he turns and begins to follow the motion.

For all he has the lungs of a singer, he doesn’t breathe so easy as her, once the motions start. He feels the ache in his back and legs, where he’s been correcting himself against the shifting of the deck. The deck shifts even now; sitting on the bed and walking down the hall, he wasn’t aware of it, but as he turns his body toward the window to push out with his hands, he sees the glimmer of moon– and starlight on the waves. Everything’s moving.

He swallows dryly. The breathing keeps the churning at bay. Soon enough, Nkemi’s voice comes again, and even in her lilting accent the syllables have an edge. It’s a word he doesn’t know, rightaway, but when he feels the stirring in the air he learns.

She meets his eyes, inviting him, and he meets hers. He hesitates. He doesn’t speak, at first. He has never cast this spell that all bochi have cast.

They turn. She speaks, and he’s silent. His soft clairvoyant field is calm around him, though, and after the third or fourth motion, listening close to how she says one word and then another, he repeats after her.

It’s more of a spark than a glowing in every vein; the mona aren’t as etheric as they are during the ward. It’s a little spell, but he feels it rush from him; he feels it pull back in.

He pushes and pulls, and pushes and pulls, and pushes and pulls. They push and pull together, for how long he doesn’t know. The thought dissolves, eventually; all of him is the inhale and the exhale, the swell and recess of the tide, and he feels as if he’s blurred into the water. Not even the shifting underfoot disturbs him.

He tires quicker than she does. It’s when his voice starts to fray with the pain in his back and his knees – with the strain through all of him, eventually – that he slows and stops of his own accord. He doesn’t want to go so long that his motions grow sloppy, and he knows better than to slur or wheeze in monite. There’s a small prickle of sweat at the back of his neck, but he’s smiling.

When – and only when – she stops, he smiles. “You honor me,” he says. “It’s like breathing with them. All the little casts… Like stretching the lungs.” He shifts to roll his shoulders and he’s surprised to find his field flicker with the motion, as if from practice; he breaks into soft, breathless laughter.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 25 Bethas, 2720
The Etoririq’dzwei, the Turga

Push, pull; push, pull.

This is not the first time Nkemi has meditated so on the crossing of the Turga. This is a meditation she learned long ago, as a schoolgirl, but one that is more precious to her for its familiarity, not less.

She has taught it as well - to a class full of shifting, squirming pupils with eddles tangling in one another, standing at the front of a courtyard with the sun beating down hot from above. The movement first - as long as it takes until even the last fidgeter has felt the shift of it. It is about the striving, not the doing; there is no such thing as a perfect meditation. It is not a failure to shift or scratch one’s nose or to find the mind wandering; it is a failure to let such end the meditation before you are ready.

These lessons and others she repeated, standing and flowing back and forth with her arms, shoulders, hips and legs, before them all. She let her stillness and movement ask for theirs.

Then they begin to cast. At such an age they can play for hours beneath the hot sun and never feel it; even the sturdiest of them begins to gasp, before long, casting even the simplest of spells over and over.

Those who start out too strong - pushing as if to off-balance their neighbor, pulling so strongly they themselves stumble - are often the first to falter. Sometimes small hoarse voices pop in backlash; sometimes a student would simply sit, abruptly, sending a cloud of dust up into the air to be pushed and pulled by the movement of their fellows.

There are others who start out soft and quiet, whispering the monite, barely asking anything of the tentative fields around them. Some of them grow in themselves in the repetition; others do not, in this one lesson, but they go through the motions, and they will come to it, in time, if they wish to. Nkemi thinks of her own careful girlhood casting, and she knows this well.

When she thinks of this meditation, if she does, it is between these little hoarse voices and the determination on wall set faces, and of casting, herself, shifting back and forth on the deck of a boat like this one. She had found for herself the place where the boat stretched out above the Turga, where the swell of the waves rocked the deck, back and forth; she had let Hulali find the rhythm of it for her, then, pushing and pulling with the sweep of the waves, searching not for perfection but for balance.

Anetol stops, before his voice does more than to fray at the edges, before his hands shake but slightly, before there is anything like strain in the field caprised so deeply into her own. Nkemi sees this and feels this too, but she does not stop her own meditation then; she shifts, instead, and searches for the rhythm of the waves, closing her eyes to feel it beneath her feet, and goes on a little longer. She settles; she stills, in a place deep inside which had churned. When she is ready - it is not long, though she does not count the time - she stops, and draws her hands in, and opens her eyes.

He smiles, and Nkemi smiles too; it wells up from all her stillness and brims forth, and her field meets his, bastly, and they twine together. She laughs too, at the flicker of movement and the surprise on his face and his own joy; she bows, and takes his hands in hers.

It is not long before she goes; his shoulders are drooping, and his eyelids too, and Nkemi finds that now - yes - she is ready to sleep.

The phosphor lantern is shuttered, by the time Nkemi returns to the cabin; it is full of the soft shifting susurrus sounds of sleep. She surrenders to them, and gladly; she curls up in the hammock, rocked by the waves beneath the warmth of her blanket, and relaxes into it.

This, too, Nkemi thinks in her last drowsy moments, feeling the shifting of the ship and the hammock, feeling the movement of her own breath, this is ised’usa.

[Tom Cooke]

The Etoririq’dzwei • The Turga

Morning on the 26th of Bethas, 2720

I
did not see you there, sir,” he says.

The sky is the soft, pale blue of morning, more the inside of the robin’s eggshell; it’s scattered through with wisping eggwhite clouds. One side of the sky is still dark, with hints of stars poking through the blanket in faint, no longer glittering pinpricks. The yolk is only just coming up over the water, down the river eastward, where Thul Ka has disappeared somewhere in the night.

“I only just came up, ada’xa,” he replies honestly.

He does not say, Nor did I. The galdor is leaning, looking over the railing; the steamship has drifted close to one of the banks, where the wind sweeps through tangled grass and mud, and a slope upward obscures anything beyond. His shirt hangs on him asymmetric, fashionable, a riot of red and orange in contrast to all the blue and white, one toned arm bare. The sun sparks off his scalp; it slants over the panes of his broad, thoughtful face.

The galdor eases off the railing and grins. “Efo’dzase pez Dzo,” he says as he turns, bowing deeply. When ada’xa Efo’dzase reaches out for a caprise, he finds – to his surprise – a quantitative field with a soft, analytical bent, a slight curious press to the caprise, bold.

He bows in return, and lies even more easily than he did the day before.

He lingers, turns his face to the wind that picks up over the water. It ruffles his hair, ripples the cloth of his wrap, this morning a deep crimson embroidered with gold thread.

Already the night’s chill is leaving, replaced by the first familiar pricklings of heat at the back of the neck. Here, closer to the bank, he can hear insects chirruping and singing. He turns to take a seat under the covering nearby. He’s wandered up a little early; he hasn’t seen Nkemi yet. There’s folk milling about on the deck, but not many. Most of the voices he’s heard are hushed behind closed doors.

There’s a smell beginning to stir in the air of kofi. It’s slowly being joined by more smells, almost-familiar – eggs, for one, and warming butter, and frying tomato and onions, though with a blend of spices he can’t name – and sharp tangy yogurt.

Louder is the smell of Efo’dzase’s cigar, which dangles now graceful-like from two long fingers. He expects the galdor to turn away; instead, he finds Efo’dzase leaning back with his forearms braced against the railing. Against the bright pale sky, beyond the covering, it’s hard to see his expression.

“The ebb and flow of talk is one of Hulali’s blessings, but one does not wish to sail into the wind.” It rolls off Efo’dzase’s tongue.

He sits a moment silent, uncertain. He holds a book in his lap, over his crossed legs, but he doesn’t open it. He looks up at Efo’dzase’s silhouette.

The galdor takes an easy drag, blows out fragrant smoke, and laughs. “Do you welcome conversation, Mr. Vauquelin?”

A smile twitches across his face. “Very much so, ada’xa.”

“To where are you bound?”

“Tsaha’ota,” he replies, remembering; he thinks, and doesn’t add.

Efo’dzase grins again. “I am also. Then north, to Holaga,” he adds. “Or rather, to Iri’iqizera, a kilometer further north.” He pauses, as if he’s meant to get a response; then he laughs. “I see you haven’t heard. Forgive me; I saw you board yesterday, and I assumed you were on university business.”

“Heard, ada’xa?” He begins to smile. “I’m southbound to Serkaih; I’m visiting friends in Dkanat.”

“Dkanat! It’s been some time since I have heard that name. I studied Serkaih briefly at Ivuq’way, but my tseruh has me studying a rather different set of practices,” he goes on, and pauses; though he cannot see his face, he’s the sense of a change of expression. “I am consulting with the archaeologists at Iri’iqizera. It is an ancient – ah – tsel’uwo... a burial place, perhaps.”

He thinks he understands. “Do the practices differ, ada’xa?” he asks, hoping his sails have caught the right wind. Efo’dzase scratches his beard, but when he replies, there’s a hint of a smile in his voice.

There’s ebb and flow. The smells grow stronger; more folk wander up from below. He stands, hat and book tucked under his arm, and leans on the railing with Efo’dzase, both of them looking out toward the banks.

He grew cold in the night. For a time, he’d felt the push-pull, and it had lulled him to sleep; but he’d grown cold, and in had crept the dreams. He doesn’t remember them, only that he woke touching the tender flesh of his throat, expecting to feel bruises under his fingertips. He has the impression of a glowing crawl of monite, of endless circles, of horror in Nkemi’s wide dark eyes.

The sunlight’s warm on the back of his neck, now. There are what look to him like mant bulls moving slowly on the bank, with thick horns that sweep out on either side like nothing he’s ever seen; they bear the weight of them like crowns, dipping their strong-necked heads to graze. Water buffalo, he thinks, smiling, trying to put the word to the sight. Efo’dzase offers him the cigar.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Morning, 26 Bethas, 2720
The Etoririq’dzwei, the Turga

There is little which resembles privacy with four hammocks tucked against the walls of the cabin. Nkemi wakes in the night to the soft breathless sounds of sobbing; in the dark, there is no way of knowing where it comes from. It softens out, in time, but Nkemi does not find sleep, right away.

She does not rise – she knows that that, too, will ripple through them all, and from the soft shushing of breath, she thinks not all at yet awake. Benea is waning, half-full overhead, but soft clear light tumbles through the open window, along with the cool rushing air from the water. Nkemi curls herself a little deeper beneath her blanket, feeling the softness of it against her, the cool brush of the hammock against bare skin. Her breath flutters against the soft fabric folds, and she feels the faintest echo of it back against her face, like a canyon.

All this stillness and more she knows, and she wishes it for anyone who may weep.

There is early pre-dawn light trickling through the window when Fera and Poro rise; Nkemi shifts, eyes coming just open, to see the two women climbing from their hammocks, talking low-voiced to one another so it is not audible in even the small cabin, and closing the door carefully behind them as they go.

Nkemi dozes, a little while longer; she wakes to the quiet thump of Alefa’s footsteps on the floor, a faint shuffling sound. The light is brighter now, steady and even; the boat will turn through the course of the morning, cutting south along the lines where the Turga is more like a lake than a river; even now, it shifts, and the light shifts too, and spills differently.

In the gleam of it, Alefa’s eyes are red-rimmed, the sensitive skin which rings them puffy and swollen.

Nkemi sits, slowly, curled up still in her hammock, wrapped in her blanket.

Alefa does not look at her; as far as Nkemi can tell, the younger galdor does not notice her. She is fumbling with the lock on her drawer; finally, the key slides in, and she opens it, riffling through.

“However the night, the dawn will yet come,” Nkemi says.

Alefa jumps; her hands shake. She closes the drawer, and glances back over her shoulder at Nkemi, scowling. She looks very much her age; from the brush of her field, with her set face, Nkemi might have thought her twenty; she thinks now she may be younger, sixteen or seventeen only.

Alefa sniffles. “So it always has.” She wipes a hand over her eyes; she snatches the wrap she was looking for from the drawer, and stalks off; the door does not quite slam behind her, but it shuts, firmly.

Nkemi sits a little longer, thinking. She comes to her feet gracefully, in time; Fera and Poro are back a few minutes later, bright-eyed with the morning chill. They lower their voices as they enter, but at the sight of Nkemi awake, they greet her, laughing.

Nkemi goes with them to breakfast, and she is laughing too; the three of them pile through the swinging doors into the dining room.

There is a kofi pot, steam whistling from the top. There is a big bowl of crushed beans, cooked with spices and salt, with tomatoes, olives, salty cheese, yogurt, onion, and thinly sliced small green peppers nestled in cups next to it. By its side sits a platter of still steaming eggs, mixed with red onion, chopped tomatoes, and bits of the green peppers; next to it all there is flatbread, not as spongy as the meal in Thul Ka, but rounded, thick enough that the center can be eased apart.

Nkemi takes a full plate, her stomach grumbling loudly, and kofi besides; she finds Anetol and Efo’dzase, and they talk of burial customs over the sound of metal spoons, ripping bread, the click of kofi cups, the distant calls of birds, and the rushing of the water.

Fera and Poro are still eating, deep in conversation with a slender wick with a head full of beaded braids, when Nkemi goes. She takes a plate with her, bread, a small scoop of eggs, yogurt and kofi, for she knows who she has not seen in the small room. She stirs in a pinch of ginger to the kofi as she goes.

Alefa is sitting on the floor, her back resting against the wall in the cabin; she is looking down at a book, though she does not turn the pages. She looks up when Nkemi enters, her shoulders tensing.

Nkemi smiles; she sets down the plate. “The sway of the river is often easier to bear with something in one’s stomach,” Nkemi says, “and with sitting where one may see the horizon.”

“Thank you,” Alefa says, hoarse. She looks down at the plate; she is still looking as Nkemi goes back out, book tucked beneath her arm, to find a place to sprawl on the deck, to read in the wash of sun with the water like music echoing beneath her.

[Tom Cooke]

The Etoririq’dzwei • The Turga

Morning on the 26th of Bethas, 2720

H
e hasn’t realized how hungry he is until the sight of yats; then, it’s everything he can do to pace himself. This is ised’usa, too, he thinks. Efo’dzase returns with a plate that’s piled almost higher than the one Nkemi brought, and he doesn’t know how many cups of kofi the man’s had before the morning’s out. He knows that somewhere between the mouthfuls of beans and tomatoes and herbs, the tseruhk’s blasé, free-and-easy air has melted away. It puts him in mind of Professor Natete going on about dzutan.

The sun is a ways up from the horizon when they finish and Nkemi goes back in. For all he’s begun to sweat, he stays out with Efo’dzase, sinking into the chairs under the ruffling canvas and letting their full bellies settle.

Some of the caution that bled away when Nkemi joined them is back now. He’s listened to what isn’t said, the spaces in between. When Efo’dzase spoke of it at all, he used the word dura, and only to Nkemi, as if an Anaxi doesn’t know that arati don’t bury their dead. He asked a question, once – he can’t remember how he phrased it now – something about the people in Holaga; Efo’dzase looked at Nkemi before he replied, and then spoke with a careful politeness that didn’t much suit him.

They speak of little things, now. They drift away from the banks, but if he shields his eyes, he can see the shapes of long-legged birds fishing with long thin beaks, or grooming long thin feathers. They speak of the birds, the water buffalo, of a great beetle that buzzes by and catches the sunlight with its shell.

“Have you seen a camel yet, Mr. Vauquelin?” he asks at one point, grinning.

He feels the brush of a glamour, eventually; a tall, sinewy wick, one arm a scrawl of tattoos, comes to speak with Efo’dzase. The tseruhk’s face turns grim; they scowl back and forth in Mugrobi, and Efo’dzase shakes his head, and then they both laugh. “Rest and good company are nourishing to the traveler,” he says, with another winning smile, “but there is much ground to cover. Float you well, Mr. Vauquelin.”

The spoke doesn’t spare him more than a moment’s suspicious glance – and a bow, and a muttered, sir. There are no birds on the bank now, but a beetle is crawling up one of the poles that holds up the covering, glistening black. He looks down at the book in his lap, a volume of poetry he’s never read before.

Then he tilts his head back and rests it against the back of the seat, knitting his fingers over his stomach. If he shuts his eyes, he can hear laughter and talk, bits of Estuan and Mugrobi snatched up and carried to him on the breeze. The smell of yats hasn’t faded, not really, and he can still taste the cool bright tang of yogurt on his tongue.

He finds himself wondering what Nkemi’s up to; he saw her earlier on the deck with a book, soaking up the sun and the breeze. He thinks to go and find her now, but his limbs have turned to stone. He hasn’t, he thinks, slept as well as he’d thought. He settles in, drifts, dreamless and content in the warm sun.

He dozes in snippets. Once, he thinks he opens one eye just a crack to see a boch crouched by the supports, staring at him with wide dark eyes, sucking on a thumb. His eyes drift shut again; when they open, there’s another, younger, sitting nearby. As he shuts them again, one whispers in Mugrobi.

The sun is high up overhead when he wakes, and the insects are singing at a feverish pitch.

Push, pull. Everything’s moving once again; he pushes himself up on the arm of the chair, and finds the lingering ghost of breakfast on his breath not so pleasant. His stomach lurches. A group of lasses in bright-colored, asymmetric dresses are laughing over by the railing, and they’re moving, too.

Well – he’s made it half a day, he reckons.

He’s not sure how long he’s spent in the small water closet, only there’ve been knocks at the door at intervals. (One came with a soft huff and a sandal-tapping, until he retched again; in the silence afterward, he heard feet moving swiftly back down the hall.) He doesn’t go back up on the deck, after that; feeling hollow and red-eyed, he slinks to his cabin and lies down on the bed, and makes several more trips down the hall in the hour afterward.

It’s the smell of yats again that puts his spirit back in his body. The light outside has tilted; it’s not quite the gold of late afternoon, not yet, but it has something of the evening about it, some breath of warning. It hasn’t cooled down – in fact, it’s only gotten hotter – but he can feel the breeze drifting over his face now, and he can listen to the water.

There is a beetle climbing up the frame of the window over the bed. This one is black and shaped like an almond, its shell edged in warm orange.

A young voice calls, laughing, from somewhere down the hall. He tests his feet on the hardwood he and the prefect cleaned the night before, rises to his feet, and goes to clean up. He changes out of his dark reds and back into his white and turquoise; as he opens up his door, he stops to let two bochi stumble-run down the stairs and down the hall, toward the benny smells and voices.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Morning, 26 Bethas, 2720
The Etoririq’dzwei, the Turga

Nkemi comes out to find a whiteclad crew member stretching a careful awning over half of the deck. She grins at him, and sprawls herself comfortably out on one of the chairs well outside it, letting the morning sun lap over her. She wears yellow today, a loose pale shirt and darker trousers, wide-legged, just long enough to skim her ankles. She strips off the shirt and folds it into a pillow, tucking it against the vivid orange of her headwrap, and settles back, comfortably, to greet the skin with her torso bare but for her breastband.

Nkemi reads, and when the words begin to blur before her eyes on the page, she turns her cheek against her shirt, and lets sleep lap over her. She wakes to find herself glowing warm; the sun has risen high, now, though the cool breeze cuts the heat and keeps her warm and comfortable. She shivers, and rolls halfway over, and closes her eyes once more.

When she opens them, there is a small child crouched just in front of her, frowning into her face.

Nkemi giggles; she sits up. “Hello, little one,” she says in Mugrobi.

“Hello,” the little girl says; she comes and climbs onto the side of Nkemi’s chair, and sits cross-legged, small bare feet dirty from the deck of the boat. “I saw you with the pale man.”

“He is an Anaxi,” Nkemi explains; she grins. She, too, sits cross-legged, comfortable and easy; there is more than enough space for the both of them.

The little girl scowls, skeptically. “I know Anaxi. They wear funny clothing.” She looks up at Nkemi, and raises her chin in challenge.

“Very funny,” Nkemi agrees. “They like to wear all those layers because it’s very cold, where they live. They get used to it, and many forgot they may take them off when they come to Mugroba. But some of them may remember.”

The little girl nods. “You are not Anaxi.”

“No,” Nkemi grins at her. “I’m from Dkanat.”

There is a nod, firm.

Nkemi resumes her reading with a small girl tucked into her side, squinting at the page next to her. She goes slowly; sometimes, when asked, she reads aloud, and offers a translation from the Estuan as needed.

“And so she reached up,” Nkemi says, “to pluck a star from the sky; she held in her hand a glowing orb, and cupped it between them, and blew on it to cool it. When it was ready, she swallowed it down, to keep it safe inside her – ”

“Did she really eat a star?” The girl asks.

“Perhaps,” Nkemi says, solemn. “I have never known anyone to eat a star, but this does not mean it cannot be done. And perhaps not; it may be a metaphor.”

“What is a metaphor?” The girl cranes her head back at the sky, as if she might see a star hovering overhead.

Nkemi smiles. “A metaphor is a way to wrap a truth in another truth,” she says. “We speak of one thing, but we might mean another. In this case, maybe those who told these stories meant that the girl found hope, even lost in the desert, or that she used the stars to find her way.”

“Hm,” the little girl grumbled. She curled against Nkemi once more. “What did she do? Once she ate the star?”

“Jafrela!” It is some time still when the girl sits up, glancing towards the door at the sound of her name. Her father is there; he smiles, sheepish, white-clad. “I am sorry, ada’na,” he bows, and comes closer; his face is solemn behind its beard. He stops, half-distant, far enough that Nkemi can look up at him easily. “She is a girl of great curiosity,” he says, eyes lowered.

“You are blessed, to have such a daughter,” Nkemi says.

Jafrela gets up and goes to her father; she puts her arms around his waist. He smiles, and touches her hair with his hand. “Thank you,” he bows. “Jafrela?”

“Thank you,” Jafrela echoes.

“Thank you, ada’xa, ada’na,” Nkemi agrees.

“If you are hungry, ada’na, they are serving lunch,” the man says. He smiles once more at her; he takes a firm hold on Jafrela, and leads her off.

Nkemi sits a moment longer, legs crossed; she traces a hand over the book in her lap. Then she shuts it; she puts her feet in her sandals, and tugs her shirt on over her head, and follows her nose and grumbling stomach towards the food.

[Tom Cooke]

The Etoririq’dzwei • The Turga

Morning on the 26th of Bethas, 2720

T
here’s a way about her when she speaks of Dkanat. There’s a way about her when she speaks of anything, of course – he supposes wryly it’s the ised’usa – but he thinks, not for the first time, that the closing of the distance doesn’t shrink down the homesickness; he thinks he knows of it well enough himself, or at least he knew it when he transferred between aeroships in the Rose. Even in Vienda, she glowed to speak of the funny-eyed goats and the canyons and the scrublands, but here, the glow is even brighter, as if it’s absorbing the sun.

He feels lily-pale and petal-frail when he gets to the dining room, but he spots Nkemi rightaway, with another well-stocked plate. There’s no need to speak of it, and nobody brings it up, though a couple of young gollies give him looks that are some parts sympathy and some parts humor.

There’s no need to speak of it, in the merry cacophony – fields, glamours, voices and laughter, sun-warmth clinging to skin and clothes.

He keeps thinking he’ll tire of his voice saying the words Tsaha’ota, Serkaih, Dkanat, of asking the new, familiar question, Where to? in its many forms; he never does. Not with the ebb and flow of conversation, the dance of the give and take, and with Nkemi there again, guiding him prefect-graceful. He asks about Dkanat whenever he can, not because he doesn’t know what she’ll say, but because he likes to hear her tell the stories.

It’s a small room, but for all it’s packed, they flow in and out like a river; there are eyes crinkled in thoughtful smiles, and when his shaky legs command him to sit, there’s room for him to.

For all the smell brought him out, he doesn’t take much food, this time, and paces himself, eating slowly. Lunch isn’t unlike what they had at the rooftop cafe, with its soft, spongy bread that looks like cloth, and the dozen colorful, flavorful things you can dip it in. It’s all hands tearing at bread, bright smiles, talk of home. He doesn’t speak much – he’s afraid to tempt fate again – but he listens.

By the time he and Nkemi swish through the swinging doors, his stomach is settled and he’s managed to put a little more in it. Still, her arm is looped through his, this time. As they move up again toward the west deck, he looks askance down a side corridor and catches a small shape looking at him with intent dark eyes, lips set grim.

They spend the afternoon and early evening together, and in various company. The sun’s high over the Turga, and a lazy sprawl’s taken hold on the deck. They find ada’na Keraxa again dozing in the chairs under the canvas, the folds of her lovely bright dress spilling over its arms, fanning herself.

A couple of bochi – old enough to have eddles – chase each other round the deck, laughing. Over by the railing, a group of women with bright head-wraps are singing at turns, and dissolving into laughter when they can’t quite manage harmony. It’s nearby that he and Nkemi settle, and spend a while reading and talking. Once, a da wanders by with his little lass, and he sees Nkemi brighten and wave back at her, like a shared secret. The lass’ eyes linger on him, intent, before her solemn da pulls her along.

Eventually, the heat gets to him. Here, too, he knows his limits, and he goes back down before he’s red as a tomato, leaving the prefect in the company of Keraxa. It’s cooler in his cabin, though not so cool he doesn’t feel sluggish, and he finds himself sprawled on the bed, holding up a volume of ada’na Tsadi.

The light begins to tilt, eventually, toward gold, and the rippling water outside shimmers with it. He hasn’t seen his beetle again, but he’s seen many other strange things out the window, and fish leaping and flopping out of the water. The breeze that brushes in begins to taste of evening, and then, eventually, of frying oil. And fish, he thinks, taking off his reading-glasses and shutting his book.

He shuts the door behind him, not bothering to lock it; he only locks it when he is inside. When he turns, a ways down the empty hall, there’s the little lass.

They look at one another for a moment. She takes one step, then another, closer. “Ada’na,” he says awkwardly, bowing.

“How many?” she asks, with a heavy accent.

He blinks. “Excuse me?”

She takes another step closer, just at the edges of his field. “Spots,” she says, tapping at her arm with a tiny finger, and then her face. “How many?”

“I – I don’t know,” he says, genuinely baffled.

“As many as the stars?”

He pauses, looks down at the scattering of freckles on his hands, then looks back up. He half-expects to see the lass smiling, but she’s a positively dour expression. “Not so many,” he replies, “I think.”

“As many as the fish in the sea?”

“I can’t say I know how many fish –”

“Jara!” she cries suddenly, and takes off past him, in the direction of the stairs. He turns to see her tackle the kov from earlier.

They watch each other for a moment; there’s something on the other man’s face he can’t name. “Ada’xa,” he says, bowing; the man holds himself a little apart, and he starts to take a step forward – to reach out with a caprise – and then pauses, hangs back himself. The furrow in his brow smooths out, and he smiles.

The man doesn’t quite smile, his hand firmly on his lass’ shoulder, but he says, “Sir,” and looks back down at his girl.

“How many?” the lass asks her father, this time.

He smiles.

He steps aside and lets them go on ahead. He’s halfway to the dining room, the smell of fried fish unmistakable now, when he intercepts Nkemi, coming down from the east deck. He smiles at her, and the clairvoyant and static mona settle into each other once again.