[Closed] Share in Evening’s Cool and Quiet

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

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

Nkemi is sitting cross-legged in her hammock once more, listening bright-eyed.

“… the lentil capital of Mugroba,” Fera pezre Eraca says, grinning. She takes another groundnut from the rustling back, crackling it open and popping the bits into her mouth. She passes it along; Poro pezre Ndere takes one for herself, and hands the bag on to Nkemi with a grin.

Nkemi takes it, carefully, and withdraws another peanut for herself; she turns to Alefa pezre Lesina, who is lying on her back in the hammock, lantern pulled close, squinting at her book. “Would you like a groundnut, ada'na?” Nkemi asks.

Alefa glances up; her perceptive field flutters, once, against Nkemi’s own and then goes still. “No, thank you,” she looks back down at her book.

Fera and Poro are looking at Nkemi as she hands the bag back. Nkemi grins, and cracks the groundnut open, eating the tender bits of nut within. “The lentil capital?” She asks.

Fera laughs; she goes on. “In the next five years,” she says, firmly. “Most of the lentils we eat here in Mugroba come from the lower Steppes, where it’s cool enough to be grown. Dermoga, though, is actually well-suited climatically for lentils; we’re close enough to the Tincta Basta that it stays cool most of the year, and it’s well watered in the split of the Turga. Our first crops have been magnificent; it’s an effort by the whole community, all together. If we rise, we rise as one; every family, from the largest to the smallest, has a stake in the place.”

“Community is a blessing; each droplet smooths her neighbor's path through the water,” the bag comes around again; Nkemi takes another peanut. “Have you found it easy to sell the lentils in Thul Ka?”

Fera grins; Poro laughs. “Easier this trip than any others! We have decided to start a stall in Windward Market – there is a good man in Thul Ka, the son of a friend from Dermoga, who is already working in the market…”

Nkemi brightens. “Perhaps I may know him! What is his name?”

The night winds on in cheerful conversation. The fifth berth is still empty; the steamship will not stop again before Tsaha’ota, and so Nkemi knows they will be only four.

The water laps outside gently against the ship; in time, Alefa rises and stumbles outside, clammy-skinned; they hear her retching over the deck. Poro clucks her tongue; Fera shrugs.

“I shall go and check on my traveling companion,” Nkemi says, smiling. There are a few more words exchanged, and she slips her sandals on once more and makes her way down the hallway. She doesn’t realize until she is at the door that the noise above the echo of the engine in Anetol’s voice; the moment she does, she knows it for monite. There are no mistaking the harsh syllables; even Anaxi Estuan does not sound so.

Nkemi eases back, away from the door. She stands in the hallway, a long moment, silent; her small face is set. She looks at the door; she thinks of strange faces in water bowls, and Natete’s words. She thinks of They Are Heard, and she thinks of the quiet scratching of a pen in the night, the familiar echo it makes through a wooden door. Slowly, with small, silent steps, Nkemi comes closer again, and listens in the gaps between the wood, closing her eyes and focusing to hear him.

She is right; he is casting. It is a ward; it is not a ward Nkemi knows, but she can hear enough to understand. He is beckoning the mona close; it is not other spells, she understands slowly, which he wishes to intercept, but – she knows these modifications. She remembers them; she remembers the brush of inky black darkness and the cold which seeps all through it. She has read of them, since.

The silence when he curls the spell falls heavy. Nkemi does not hold her breath, but she breathes too quietly to be heard. She eases away, silent, past his door on the other side; she opens the door up to the upper deck as slowly and quietly as she can. She stands in the cold, crisp night air for a moment; she breathes deep.

Then Nkemi turns; she comes back through the door, and makes her way down the steps with a quick, light step – not deliberate noise, but not bothering, either, to soften her footfalls.

“Anetol?” She raps lightly on the door; she calls his name, softly, as if she does not wish to wake him, if he is asleep. If he is focusing, Nkemi thinks. She waits there, silent.

[Tom Cooke]

The Etoririq’dzwei • The Turga

Late Afternoon on the 25th of Bethas, 2720

T
he voice isn’t a porter’s; it’s Nkemi’s, and it comes soft and quiet through the thick wooden door and through the thickening mona.

“...tole?”

It’s the way she says it, he knows, with all the consonants soft except the T. But he hears a different name underneath the lap of the water outside and the distant call of voices. He snuffs the sudden flickering up of fear; there’s nothing to do with it, and nowhere to go, besides. He tries to speak rightaway, almost without thinking – with what sliver of his mind he can spare beside the upkeep – and his jaw is stuck, his lips and his throat paralyzed.

There’s silence outside the door. He lets go of the upkeep, slow and steady. The etheric swell of his field begins to settle, though not all those he’s gathered close depart. The room’s still full of a sense of warmth and movement just out of sight.

He opens his eyes. He sits in the midst of the lines. This time, he doesn’t open his mouth to speak, not yet.

The glow of the phosphor lamp is soft; he thinks there must be some blue creeping underneath the door, but only just. Maybe, he thinks, he likes to sleep with the glow, especially in such a strange place. He’s a poor enough hand at moving around on land, and this much she knows, if her kindness and her arm looped through his is any judge. Maybe he likes to leave the light on – for when he wakes in the night and toddles to the loo, as men his age increasingly do. That, he thinks wryly, is not a lie.

(How long has she been outside? Not long, he thinks; if he heard a creak of the floorboards, it might’ve been a passing porter – and he thinks he heard the door to the upper deck shut quietly, just a few moments ago. He’s almost certain he did, and he didn’t hear it open before that.)

His heart, he realizes, is skittering. He presses a hand to his chest and then to the open page in his lap. It’s one of the books Ezre gave him a long time ago, Oz’iru’s grimoire on warding and monic interference; the binding creaks, and the print is fading, the pages thin as moths wings.

“Nkemi,” he calls, putting a smile on his face so it warms his voice. He closes the book in his lap, and begins to rise to his feet. “Just a moment.”

The book was published before even ib’vuqem; it’s had better luck with publication since, but it’s not, he thinks, your typical clairvoyant curriculum, even at Thul’amat. The book he tucks back into his case between a dzúta of bright orange cloth and more white linen, and he shuts the case careful-quiet.

When he turns, he pauses only for a moment, scanning the chalk lines spread out on the floor. He doesn’t want to take the time to brush it aside; he doesn’t want her to think he’s hiding something, for all the things he is hiding. She has no reason, he assures himself, to know it. Most of the written monite is for drawing the mona near, and interference has many applications.

But there’s one clause, nestled in the top right corner. He pauses. He looks at it, his lips pursed, his smile gone.

She has no reason, he reminds himself, to know that piece of monite.

A gust of wind ripples the water outside, brushing through his hair and his wrap. He breathes in, centers himself, and goes to the door, feeling his way along the wall, unsteady-footed. There are no mirrors, but he’s touched his upper lip and found no blood; he thinks he must look tired from the casting, but he doesn’t feel like the dead, for all it’s ironic.

When he opens the door, there’s a warm smile on his face. He’s still wearing his soft white wrap, though the scarf is folded on the bed. “Good evening, Nkemi,” he says, opening the door a little wider; he reaches out with a caprise, their customary friendly mingling. The clairvoyant mona all stir in the air, still with their light etheric tang. “I was only meditating,” he adds with a sheepish laugh. “Would you like to come in?”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

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

Nkemi holds at the edge of the door, listening. Blue phosphor light spills out onto the ground below, trickling through the crack. As close to the door as she was before, she could not feel the etheric press of his field; she cannot feel it now. She does not know whether he is upkeeping the spell – whether he may be too deep in meditation to bear interruption – whether he has gone down the hallway to the washroom in the time she breathed in the cool air of the deck. All of these are possible.

She waits a moment more; she will draw back, she thinks, and leave him be.

Nkemi, he calls through the door; just a moment.

Nkemi holds in the hallway; she waits. There is, perhaps, the creak of movement from behind the door. Perhaps it is instead the settling of the boat; perhaps it is the wind. Perhaps it is from the next cabin over, or up on the deck. She is not sure enough that she would speak on it, nor can she make out any sounds beyond something which might be movement.

Nkemi thinks of standing at a door and listening; she thinks of not knowing what she will find, if she opens it, whether the sound which comes through is the scratching of desert crickets in an empty library or else a pencil. But the floor rocks gently beneath her, and the smell of the Turga’s fresh water reacts her; she is still just barely damp from the spray outside. She tingles with the cold, but it is, too, very pleasant, to be so close to Hulali’s waters.

The door opens; pale blue light spills out. It limns Anetol from behind; it glows through his white wrap and casts a strange shadow through his hair, as if she is seeing him underwater. With his back to it, his face is all shadow, deeper in some places than others, hard planes and dark circles. He is drawn again; his thin hand shakes ever so slightly on the door, and Nkemi thinks she could nearly see through the skin in places, he is so pale. She knows better; she knows she cannot.

Nkemi smiles too, though, her face lightening, because he is wearing the white wrap, still, comfortably, and she sees behind him the vivid colors of his scarf folded on the bed. “Good evening,” Nkemi says, politely. She receives his caprise, and reaches back, friendly and even; she can feel the lingering sense of slipperiness to his field, the calm blueness that even the most indectal field has after meditation. Her fields warms to it, melting in against it.

“I would be sorry to have disturbed you,” Nkemi says. He invites her in; she nods and smiles, and steps across the threshold. She knows his hand, in monite, in chalk circles; even if she didn’t, there is no one else who could have drawn the sprawling circle across the floor. She grins up at him. “A ward as meditation! For,” her eyes skim over the monite; they catch the top right corner, and she does not linger there, “monic interference?" Nkemi asks, curiously.

She is no warder herself, but no clairvoyant conversationalist graduates Thul'Amat without an understanding of wards, even if her focus and her tseruh both were in scrying. She has done her best to remember what she learned then, these last months, and has studied deeper as well. She looks back down at the ward once more, her gaze tracing the monite again; she lets it linger on the upper right this time, and then looks back at Anetol, but she does not ask; she only smiles. She knows all the words in this plot; she would not know enough to discern the spell, if she had not heard him cast, but it reinforces any lingering uncertainty she may have as to the interpretation.

“It is not my wish to ask unnecessary questions,” Nkemi says; her tone is just barely sheepish. She smiles at Anetol. “I came to ask whether you are comfortable, for the night?”

[Tom Cooke]

The Etoririq’dzwei • The Turga

Late Afternoon on the 25th of Bethas, 2720

H
e hasn’t used the exclusion clause, at least. This he couldn’t bear, he thinks as she comes inside, as he lets her shut the door or leave it ajar as she will. The thought of her standing in the soft blue glow, in the room wreathed with shadows, with the monite for what and who he is scrawled all over the floor in glowing white chalk – and him standing in the middle of it, smiling warmly and pleasantly.

Even if she wouldn’t, couldn’t, know what it meant, it would’ve felt like a bizarre nightmare. She’s already inviting the thing that he is into her family’s home; what would he be, if he mocked her so for it?

It’s hard to read her expression at first, as she stands at the edge of the ward and looks over it. Her face is full of heavy shadows, though there are reflections of soft, ghostly blue in her skin, glitters of it in her eyes. He sees them flick here and there; he sees them catch, and then flick away.

Then he sees a flash of white – she grins, and he grins back, and inclines his head and shoulders, glowing for a moment with it, if a little embarrassed. He’s wondered more than once in the last hour what she would think of it, this way of meditating.

Her eyes move back to the top corner and linger. Is it because, he wonders, she does not know them? Or is it because she does? He watches her for only a moment. The shadows make the sash at her waist and the deeper blues sweeping through her hems as dark as ink. The lamp catches on the threaded silver; even it looks blue, here. He forces himself not to study her face, though he meets her smile when she looks up at him.

You are well, now?

In the pause, he moves back to the bed. He pushes the suitcase aside to make room. “Quite comfortable, domea. I’ve never slept this close to water. I thought I was going to unpack, and all I wanted to do was meditate.”

He turns back.

“You haven’t disturbed me. No question’s unnecessary,” he adds more slowly, settling himself on the bed and crossing his legs, shifting the soft white cloth over them. He smiles through the shifting dark. “Not just monic interference,” he says, looking out over the floor, “a monic – invitation. I could’ve kept drawing lines, further and further out, drawing more and more of them in.”

No question is unwelcome, he hasn’t said; he doesn’t wish to, as much as he knows how much he can’t say. His eyes rove round the plot, tracing the curls outward from the clearing in the center where he was only just sitting. As much as he’d like to let his eyes skim over the clause as if it means nothing, he can’t. He avoids it; the smile still on his face, he reads over the clauses that ask the mona closer, that beseech them to listen to his request – and then to the lines that close the spell, sweeping back toward the middle, all criss-crossing and encompassing the spell’s target.

He smiles at her, patting the bed nearby him. The linens are undisturbed, and the suitcase sits behind, between them and the window. There’s nothing scandalous in it, he thinks; there might be in Anaxas, or with anybody else, but he’s an incumbent and she’s a prefect, and they’ve gone through Thul Ka arm in arm without a sideways glance.

Besides, it’s comfortable here, with the soft water-sounds and the ghostly lights echoing across the ripples and waves. The water’s close enough beneath the window that the light off the shifting surface of it casts rippling shadows on the walls, echoing moon-white through the phosphor-blue.

He ought to light an oil lamp, he thinks, but for now, he’s content to sit in it. “This is how I began to reconcile with the mona,” he says, folding his hands in his lap. “Have you ever meditated with a ward?”

He pauses, then smiles up at her, sheepish.

“It’s not my wish,” he repeats, “to ask unnecessary questions, if you need to rest. I’m thankful you came to check on me, Nkemi.”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

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

Nkemi lingers at the door; she leaves it open – not fully, but enough that a wash of blue light spills out onto the boards beyond, still, and that the breeze from the window and from the hall wash through the room. In the darkness outside, there is just enough light to see the skimming shape of something over the water, dropping down and gliding upon the surface before soaring away.

The blue light gleams along the chalk lines he has traced onto the floor, catches the monite too. The lines trace across one another; the words invite the mona in, and the lines pull them towards the center, swirling them to sit thick around the caster.

Anetol pats the bed next to him.

Nkemi comes; she eases her sandals off by the door and sets them one beside the other. She comes around the edges of the plot barefoot, arching up on her tiptoes where need be, and settles cross legged on Anetol’s bed with an easy grace. She smiles at him, sitting comfortably – not sprawling out lounging on his bed, but with a slight curve to her back.

“These questions, too, are not unnecessary,” Nkemi agrees, cheerfully. “I am not yet tired, tonight.” She will be, Nkemi thinks, in time. It was a long day; yesterday, too, was very long. In time, the tiredness will catch her; in time, it will crest and sweep over her, and she knows better than to fight it. For now, the journey tingles all through her still; for now, the excitement is too much to bear. She is no child, to cling to her aunt’s hand, but it is a sort of longing which threatens to overwhelm her all the same, and she finds she is not yet ready to be alone with it.

Nkemi looks back down at the floor once more, at all the sweeping lines. The blue light on the water outside dances with each forward pulse of the boat, with each sweep of the currents. It shifts in strange patterns over Anetol’s face, over the bedspread; Nkemi looks down, and sees it catch the vivid blues of her pants, darkening them here and lightening them there.

They spoke often of reconciliation at Thul’Amat; she knows prefects who have backlashed, powerfully, in the pursuit of justice. She knows that every ritual is different; she knows that every caster must find their own way to hold the mona close once more. She wonders, sometimes, how long it would take – if one had not cast, if one could not cast – she pictures Constable Inspector True’art, and the sneer on his lips as he spoke of Anetol’s field, and the way he grimaced at the word embarrassment.

She has never heard of ward meditation for monic reconciliation; she knows of interference wards, that they exist and can be used to thick the air. Not just monic interference, Anetol said; a monic invitation. She thinks of it – of asking the mona to come closer, once more – of calling to a new type of mona – and she wonders at it.

Now, their fields are comfortably intertwined; it is the clairvoyant mona which are closest, still and always, sliding softly into one another. But the static, too, are twined all through; their subtle warmth stretches through the mingling, and does not stint.

“I have not meditated with a ward,” Nkemi says. “With spell circles, yes; and I have warded, too. We are taught to ward at Thul’Amat,” she smiles at him, “but I studied more of scrying.” She does not mention candle wax dripping over down her fingers, breathing through a ward with inky blackness crawling all around; she does not mention the monite in the upper right side of the ward.

“What is it like?” Nkemi asks. She lifts her gaze to Anetol; she smiles at him once more. There are many ways, Nkemi thinks, to answer such a question. She makes no expectations; she only sits, and prepares herself to listen.

[Tom Cooke]

The Etoririq’dzwei • The Turga

Late Afternoon on the 25th of Bethas, 2720

H
umbling,” he says, frowning thoughtfully down at the ward.

She’s come to sit cross-legged beside him on the bed, and she’s said she’s not yet tired. He pictures her cabin, the two berths he glimpsed earlier through the door – or more, out of sight – and wonders if there’s been silence, if there’s been the low strain of tension he knows from Bastian and Anaxi aeroships. He wonders if prefects wonder as much as incumbents about enemies in shared spaces. He wonders if there’s laughter and talk nonetheless; that seems even more difficult to imagine.

His last shared cabin had been a night-long journey back from Brunnhold, to collect his things before the private ship to Mugroba. The other kov had been nothing but a twitching mustache and a monocle behind a newspaper, with the occasional crinkle and polite smile.

She is looking at the ward, the same as he is. She hasn’t brought up the corner or lingered on it, that he can tell; she’s a blur of blue and silver in the corner of his eye, and he doesn’t watch her closely to make sure. She’s smiled at him as she’s asked, open and direct, with no edging-round, no delicate prying. She’s offered of herself, too, casual-like, not in the way of one who expects a return.

He follows the sweep of one line with his eyes. It moves outward, through one of the clauses that contains the ward within the lines.

Different, he thinks to say, from meditating otherwise. “Different,” he says, pulling his own legs up and folding them beneath him, “but then – outside of wards, I’ve only meditated twice. A physical meditation with another clairvoyant, and ada’na Ugoulo’s spell circle.”

He smiles over at her, then looks back down at the ward. Humbling, he’s said – that’s a path he can’t follow, he thinks, chagrinned. Of course it’s humbling; all meditation is, in one way or another. But he can’t tell her the why of this humbling, for all there’s no clairvoyant spell that will hold a normal galdor in place, as sure as a living paralysis spell will freeze the muscles.

“At first,” he starts, thinking hard, “the chance of backlash was… not small.” Backlash, among other things, he thinks. They could’ve split him from himself at any time.

There’s no trace of shame in his voice; he speaks evenly, knowing what she likely has already guessed. “I’ve known casters who meditate with heat, or who move with the mona, but that wasn’t possible for me, then. Drawing the lines slowly, bringing them closer, then sitting with them all around, despite the risk – that was what I could do.”

He’s caught another bit of spellwork tucked into a curve, the targeting clause. He’s modified the spell slightly with another of Oz’iru’s to focus it on the caster; without context, it might be an extra layer of protection against possession. He’s not sure if it made much of a difference, but he thinks – feels – the constriction amplified, less incidental, and he’d’ve sworn on his grave he could feel amusement in the mona.

He forces himself not to scrutinize the ward further. Instead, he smiles over at her again, watching her profile limned in blue. “You know already how little I’ve studied of scrying. Less – nothing at all – of the static conversation.” This smile’s playful; he shifts in his seat, tilts his head. “How do you prefer to meditate?”

Her field has settled comfortably in his, with the static mona woven through like twining silver. There’s a calm and ease to the caprise that reminds him of when they sat in the midst of Ugoulo’s connection, resting against each other, after; even though she hasn’t been casting tonight, it’s as if the mona warm to it. For all he’d meant to spend the evening alone, he’s glad to feel the calm and focus spread through both of their fields, like swallows catching an updraft.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

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

Nkemi smiles back. She nodded, as he spoke; it does not seem in the least strange to her that he might meditate so. To draw the lines – to ask the mona close – to sit still and silent among them – to quiet the mind with an external focus and so to look inside.

Nkemi grins when he mentions static conversation. She breathes in, deeply. “We are taught to search for meditation in all things,” Nkemi says, thoughtfully. “In Mugrobi, we distinguish between two types of meditation. There is that which clears the mind, ised’usa; there is that which reaches to the mona, tsiwow’af. I have never heard this distinction made, in Estuan; perhaps it is only that to achieve tsiwow’af, one must first find ised’usa.”

Nkemi shifts, lightly; she adjusts her posture a little more, finding a more comfortable way to sit against the soft bedspread. The blanket is warm, as is the one which is folded in her hammock; it is cold, on the Turga at night, between the wind and the water.

“Ire’dzosat is not where I first learned of meditation, but it is where I first understood what it meant,” Nkemi says. Her eyes flutter closed, now; she sits, calmly, her hands on her lap. She reaches out; she deepens into the mona, flowing into them and her caprise with Anetol just as he flows back into her.

“Before, it was a sitting-in-stillness,” Nkemi says, softly; her voice lilts even more than usual, flowing between the syllables, pooling around the consonants and drawing the vowels out like the rushing of the river. “In Iz, I learned to let go, and to yield to the water around me; in Tseli, I learned of sitting still in one’s memories; in Úvew, I learned of focus, to reach with my whole self for a sight or sound; in Ifús, I felt, and did not think.”

She thinks of the two of them, sitting still and together in Iz; she thinks of the water swirling beneath, glowing cool. She thinks of Anetol asking if they may sit, a little longer, together in the stillness. She wonders what it was to him, if not meditation; she wonders if this is of Anaxas, or of Anetol, and wonders, too, whether she will ever be able to tell.

Nkemi’s eyes open; her gaze is soft across the room. It lowers back to the drawings Anetol has made on the floor. “A spell may wash around you like water, or hover in the air; it may harden, solid and unmoving, or burn like the flames. We are taught to find the garden which speaks to us, when we need it; to make a place for it in our mind and heart, so that we may go there with our focus.”

She could tell him more; she would not mind. This is easy to speak of; she did not know that it was not taught at Brunnhold, not until she mentioned it to another Seventen and found it so. There are many ways to hold the upkeep of a spell; this, too, is as meditation. This, too, is a search for clarity and focus, a yielding of oneself to something else. Spellcasting as meditation; she watches blue light shift over the pale chalk lines, and finds she understands very well indeed.

“But my favorite meditation has always been in movement,” Nkemi grins at Anetol now, bright and cheerful; she thinks of youthful hours spent in movement without purpose or thought, before she would ever have known how to call it. She thinks of walking in the desert – of riding on the back of a camel, focusing on the movement so that it is all there is in the world – of slow, even movements with her hands or her baton, of endless practice which stretches out to fill all of one’s senses. “Perhaps this may not surprise you. Did you find it clarifying, your physical meditation?”

[Tom Cooke]

The Etoririq’dzwei • The Turga

Late Afternoon on the 25th of Bethas, 2720

I
sed’usa. This is a word he’s heard before, or so he thinks; he feels as if he’s read it in a book without understanding it. He thinks of the books Nkemi left for him after their meditation, of the exercises he didn’t – some impartially; some not at all – understand. He pictures them as he listens to her speak of the gardens, remembering sitting in the soft whisper and flow of the water in Iz.

Many of them had diagrams. One, simply called tsútaqa, was an exercise of the mind; this he found the most difficult. It asked the meditator to visualize a square, and then a box; then, to visualize each side with a different texture, and to turn it round and hold all of these things in his head at a time, imagining the feel of the stone or moss or glass underneath his fingers, imagining the colors, remembering where each side was in relation to the others. He’d barely been able to picture a box, much less each of its sides, and he’d grown frustrated, wondering what in hell any of it had to do with the mona.

Perhaps, he had thought then, it was something a human could not do. He had sat on the floor of the study with the book in his lap, wondering if it wasn’t only magic that separated his kind from theirs, from his body’s.

Others, he’d found easy.

Yielding to the water in Iz, he thinks, sitting with one’s memories – even those jagged enough to cut – in Tseli, narrowing one’s focus in dizzying Úvew, letting oneself feel in Ifús. (At the last, at least, he thinks he knows a caster who’s adept.) He thinks he knows which Nkemi goes to, the soft blue glow illuminating every river and stream of her clothes.

He wonders which of the gardens would speak to him the most; he’s only been to one, and only seen one room. Of all of them, he finds himself the most frightened, strangely, of Tseli.

They sit on the bed, with the breeze growing more and more chill over the Turga. He takes his bright amel’iwe from behind him on the bed, unfurls it and wraps it about his shoulders. When she grins, he grins back. He thinks of her shooting off through the flat in Fly-Ash, bounding up the fire escape, darting across the roof. “It doesn’t surprise me, Nkemi,” he agrees. “I think – I…”

He glances again down at the ward. His eyes wander toward the door, where a little blue light spills out into the hall.

“My young friend says that I sit too much.” The smile breaks out again. “It wasn’t always so,” he adds, tilting his head, looking down now at the hands folded in his lap. The veins look very blue; the freckles might be black over the pale skin.

There had been movements that felt to him – briefly – like throwing a fist or thrusting a knife, without hesitation. He’d never’ve called fighting meditation; he doesn’t know if he can call it that, being what he used to be.

Is ised’usa to be found in drinking? He thinks of all the nights he knew what he needed, to center his mind and plant his feet on the ground, to remind him what sort of animal he was. It was orderly, almost: he’d drink until his mind dispersed, until he felt the fire in him and did not think. Just thinking about it now made him want it.

“I learned that the mona move with me even when I’m not reaching out to them,” he says. Their fields have settled together; the edges of his blur, drift among those that linger from the ward, light and warming against the cold. “That’s what he meant to teach me, I think – that neither of us move separately. That their will’s in all things.”

He pauses, then looks back at her, lifting an eyebrow. “If ised’usa is moving and sitting-in-stillness, isn’t everything a sort of meditation?”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

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

Nkemi smiles at Anetol, when he talks of sitting too much. His gaze is fixed on his thin pale hands, dotted with dark freckles; the curve of his amel’iwe falls against his arm, bright against the white of his robe and his skin both, even cast blue by the phosphor light. Nkemi looks at it, and she sees the veins, stark against the skin, the faint tremble in it.

She thinks of Natete, bounding down the stairs – and back up them, as they left, scarcely touching the railing, making his way steadily to the floor above. She thinks too of her father, and his slow, shuffling sort of walk, the slope that his shoulders have taken, as if they remember all the hours which were spent leaning forward and looking down. Last she thinks of her mother, her smiling face and all lines which crinkle around her eyes when she laughs, standing stick-straight, bustling around with goats and brooms or through the kitchen.

Nkemi knows better than to tell Anetol that her mother is, she thinks, nearly his age; she knows the year he graduated from Brunnhold, and she knows her mother’s age as well. She knows better than to say that Natete is older than him – so, too, is her father, although not by many years, and his have not passed easily.

Imaan has his wisdom, Nkemi knows; she does not speak of it to Anetol.

Anetol goes on, sorting the lentils of his thoughts. He pauses; he turns to her, and raises the red arch of an eyebrow.

Nkemi beams at him; she sits up straight, delight spilling from her and bubbling bastly through her field. “Yes,” Nkemi says, summoning up solemnity in the midst of her joy, for this is very important indeed. “If you search for it, ised’usa may be found in walking in the midst of a crowded street – in watching the sunset over the Turga – in riding on a camel,” Nkemi cannot help a little giggle, although her face is set and earnest.

“I did not,” Nkemi says, looking at him, “tell you of the largest of Thul’Amat’s meditation gardens.” She smiles. “It is known as Ur’dzúxas. We saw students learning ised’usa in the midst of it, as we went; there are few students who may leave Ire’dzosat without having tended to a garden. Ised’usa is there, too – in the pulling of weeds, and the watering of plants, in placing seedlings in a new home or simply cleaning debris from the ground. It asks the student to put their mind away from their studies and their troubles – away from the many thoughts which occupy us – and to turn it instead to the earth, to green and brown plants, to their needs and whims.”

Nkemi smiles; her gaze is soft, fond. “This is, I think, the meditation that most carry with them. During your time in Thul’Amat I think you may visit many homes; in the homes of many arata, even in the midst of the city, you will find kofi plants, growing and tended well. This is the other side of kofi har’aq; for some, it is as a chore, a necessity, which they must tend to reach the kofi. For others, it is a reminder of ur’dzúxas.”

Nkese’s kofi plants are tucked in the shadiest part of their home, in Dkanat; the weather does not lend itself well to kofi. Her mother tends to them daily; she knows by touch if the soil is too wet or dry. She knows by the waxy feel of the leaves if the kofi will grow this cycle; she brushes her fingers along the branches to find where they will grow.

Nkemi is smiling, still, open and wide and friendly, and she is watching Anetol, too; it is out of the corner of her eye, only, still, but she is aware of when his smile fades into a pinched brow, and when it blossoms back again; she is aware of his gaze drifting over the lines chalked against the floor once more. She turns her head, too, a little more, and looks down at the sweep of them once more.

[Tom Cooke]

The Etoririq’dzwei • The Turga

Late Afternoon on the 25th of Bethas, 2720

A
h,” he says, as if something’s taken shape in his mind, like the understanding of a word that’s only just been ink on a page. “Ur’dzúxas,” he repeats slow and careful, the old tradition; if she corrects him, he will speak it again, trying to separate the x from the s, hard as it is to hear, much less to speak. There’s ised’usa in this, too, he realizes, and it brings another smile to his face.

For him, he supposes it was always for the kofi. It’s here that his brow knits, in the end, and he looks down intently at the scrawl of monite on the boards.

The kofi, or the fresh sage and thyme in the stew, or the junia that eased the sting of many cuts and scrapes. Once or twice he had to tend the garden himself; he’d no green thumb, so they called it, and he’d thought it a mystical talent, the sort that only gods-blessed natt and wicks possessed. He thinks of a green thumb and long-fingered hands, and it’s here that all the furrows smooth out.

He isn’t watching her, not exactly – only in the corner of his eye. He isn’t watching where she’s looking, though she hasn’t for some time looked at his ward; he half wonders, knowing himself, if he only imagined her eyes catching and lingering.

No, her eyes were looking someplace else when she spoke of the gardens. The smile on her face was soft, not – he thinks, for all his face betrays him; he knows the smile in his soul – not unlike his. There’s a richness of memories behind the lilt of her voice, still even and soft as if she’s reciting monite. Not jagged memories, these, not memories that cut.

He almost wants to ask: do you keep plants? He holds his tongue. He thinks of what she must’ve left behind in Thul Ka, coming to Anaxas for gods know how long. He thinks the lodgings for a subprefect in Thul Ka are much different from the barracks in chilly, dark Anaxas.

There’s much he’s left behind, too. More than she’ll ever know – or maybe not. He’s thought often about what she said to him in ada’na Ugoulo’s connection, holding his hand and resting her head against his.

He doesn’t hesitate, now. There’s as much fondness in his voice as there was on the rooftop a day ago, and perhaps even less grief. “The man I knew once kept a garden. He was devoted to it. Even when he came to Anaxas, he knew the names of every plant he saw; he made it his work,” he goes on, “to know them. If there was something you thought he couldn’t grow, he’d take it as a challenge.”

He settles into the blurring, easy blue of the drifting mona, his back an easy arch to mirror hers, his head lifted, his eyes fluttering shut whenever a breeze brushes its way through his hair. When he opens them, his eyes find the ward again. She's looking at it, too; he wonders what she does see in it, after all. An old man’s ward; nothing more.

A reminder of ur’dzúxas, he thinks. Each ward takes its own blend of patience and action – like any qalqa, he supposes. You always said I was impatient, he thinks. What would you say to see me now?

He laughs, sighing. “You see why his garden is the place I come back to. I’d never have thought it a meditation garden – it was full of… tomatoes, and junia – but maybe it was. I don’t know what to call what he did, if not ised’usa.”

He doesn’t hesitate, now. “Do you keep them? Plants?” he asks, glancing up at her with a smile. He won’t dishonor her by taking the question back. It was her who told him the past is a river.