Laus Oma, Mere Tauthua
The breeze over the Tincta Basta drifted through the trees, and carried with it snatches of distant life: a sound like a woman singing, faint drumming, and once loud cheering drifting from the shore. Aremu put it all aside, and the gentle lapping of the waves and chirping of the crickets too.
There were other signs of life.
Behind him, Tom struggled. He had taken Aremu’s hand without a word, his field heavy and buzzing around them both, and climbed carefully over the railing. Aremu had held still and solid, and waited. Tom’s hand was warm in his, and the light glinted off of his blade.
There was no pretending, Aremu thought. There was no mistaking this hand for another which, once, he had held so tenderly. The moonlight had caught a flicker of pale skin, gleamed against a scattering of freckles, and Aremu had felt a visceral ache, somewhere deep, for scuffed, scarred knuckles and the silvery nicks of scars. He put those thoughts aside too; this was no place for them.
Tom’s shoes scraped softly, here and there, against the heavy roots. There was the soft scuffle of his balance lost and found again, more than once. Aremu could track him by the scraping of his field; when it drifted out of range, Aremu would wait, against the trunk of a tree, until it found him once more.
He said nothing, but he thought of Tom walking back from the tsug grove with aching feet, slowly, red in the heat. Do you like it, Aremu had asked, sir. The Rose.
He kept walking. There was no straight path, not for them; better, Aremu thought, to curve around through the trees and emerge far from the festival hall. The mangroves touched the shore only twice - once at the hall, and once, distant, down the beach. But it was a long walk, and his arm ached. The bleeding had slowed and begun to stop but it throbbed steadily with each step, and the weight of the prosthetic, the pressure of the straps, was beginning to become unbearable.
When Tom stopped, Aremu stopped too, and waited at the edge of his range. He crouched on the curve of a root, and glanced back once to see the other man doubled over. He said nothing; what was there to say? They would need to move again; they both knew it.
I think it’s easy to get lost in, Tom had said. Aremu’s eyes fluttered shut. Asshole, he thought, with a sudden, sharp pinch of pain. Does it amuse you? Do you like it, knowing more than other men? Or did you want to make yourself sympathetic to me, to find words you knew I would feel?
Or -
Aremu glanced up when Tom drew closer, feeling the field scrape against his skin. He had not felt kind, for all that he held still and silent and said nothing, his thoughts his own behind the smoothness of his liar’s face.
Someone’s tried to cast on me, Tom said.
Aremu rose, then, his eyes flickering from side to side. He glanced up, searching the tangles of branches overhead, what little he could see in the flickering light. He reached behind his back, and found the pistol holstered in the curve of his spine, and drew it slowly. For a moment, all was silent and flickering light, and the distant pounding of the drums.
And, then, for a moment, there was only pain.
A slim figure swung from the trees above, and two bare feet slammed firmly, unerringly, into Aremu’s wounded arm, pressing it back against his side. A burst of red flowers scattered forward, swept up from the vine and thrown through the air.
Aremu cried out and fell; the gun scattered from his hand and caught in a nest of roots, and he found himself plunging into the brackish water, more than half-caught in the roots. He jerked; he twisted - the water closed over his head.
A small, dark figure, a strange shifting quantitative field hovering in the air around him, landed neatly on the root Aremu had left behind, his footprints slick with Aremu’s blood. He turned towards Tom, and began to approach.
Yesufu spoke as carefully as ever. It was strange, Niccolette thought, how muddied the waters of honesty could be. Once, she would have thought him sincere; once, she would not have understood the ways that a man could hide himself, in the truth. Uzoji had taught her something of that, and when the surface of his smooth water had rippled, she had thought she knew pain. Now, she knew, it had been nothing of the sort.
It should have hurt too much to feel; it should have guided her away. It burned bright in her chest, that pain; she breathed it out into the world, and let it return, and Niccolette felt herself sharpen.
Niccolette kept the rhythm of her breath. The waves lapped at the supports beneath her, and drum and voice and oud wove a song together. Niccolette never lost the count of her breath, but she wove it into their music, too, as if the drumbeat were the pounding of the blood in her veins. The oud was her breath, she thought - and the song?
The candles shivered and rose again, and Niccolette saw the shimmer of it on something behind the corner mangrove. She knew, then; she knew.
Niccolette turned back to Yesufu, and smiled. An honest Mugrobi, she thought. It concerns your husband, he had said. A trap, well-baited with honesty. Niccolette felt the distant breeze trickle through the windows, and snatch up a few strands of her heavy hair, tangling them over her neck.
No, Niccolette thought. He knew something; he must have. Not a scrap, not a trickle of useless muddy water about men seen on the island. Something real. It was better than she could have hoped for.
Niccolette put Vauquelin from her mind; she could not think of what she had done to him. Aremu was there, she told herself, and she knew what she had done to him too. Was there anything, Niccolette wondered, she would not give? She had thought to burn herself in pursuit of bloody vengeance. How much of the world would she leave alight?
Niccolette looked at Yesufu, and nothing showed on the soft smile of her face. Her breathing was steady, and even, and her field held full and bright around her.
“By the will of men, and not only by the gods,” Niccolette agreed, looking at the white-haired Mugrobi. The gods put you in place; it was your will which made it real. Her field burned bright around her, and Niccolette knew well its strength.
”You have said it well indeed,” Niccolette lowered her chin, and looked back up at Yesufu. “I would only add that the will of women, too, may be made real.”