Afternoon, 48 Roalis, 2717
Above the Cliff, Isla Dzum
Above the Cliff, Isla Dzum
Aremu stood, for a moment, at the edge of the cliff, and looked over the edge to the water below. He held, there, feeling the heat of the afternoon sun through the linen of his shirt, pounding steadily against his back. A gust of wind shifted the shadows over head, and he glanced up, sideways, at the Eqe Aqawe, held fast to its moorings and gleaming in the light.
He breathed in, deeply, and looked back at the edge of the cliff. His bare toes rested on the rocks, the cuffs of his pants loose against the bones of his ankles.
He began.
It was slow, still; it was a slow process, though he had learned not to rush it. His left hand came up, and the edge held his shirt against his chest; his fingers moved, carefully, button to button, making their way down the front of the shirt. When it was loose, or loose enough, he lifted his shoulders – lifted both arms – and pulled it over his head. He draped it over his right arm, the edge fluttering in the breeze over the place where his hand had once been, and watched, dispassionately, as his left hand moved through the motion of folding it.
Aremu set his shirt down on the rocks. He could not but look down, and so he did; his left hand worked busily at the waistband of his pants, and then the loose linen dropped, as well. He folded that, and set it atop the shirt, leaving a rock to hold it all in place. He breathed deep, again, and made his way to the edge of the cliff.
He had swum, since. Aremu, looking the long way down at the water below, knew he was not such a fool as that. He had swum, and he had climbed, at least the tsug trees in the depths of the orchard, where the branches were thick enough to break the worst of his falls, at least the palm trees that ringed the estate, where he had scraped the soles of his feet pressing them into the ridges of the bark, and limped home in the quiet dark. He had run, too, and found ways to keep the strength of his arm; he knew, though he did not wish now to look down at himself, that his chest looked nearly as it had – before.
He had swum, since, and he had climbed. He did not think he had forgotten the knack of diving, and if he had such fears, this was the best place to put them to rest; he had learned to dive here, and he knew well, still, the depths of the water beneath the edges of the cliff, where rocks threatened and where they did not, all the dangers that gleamed beneath the Tincta Basta, unseen.
He had, Aremu thought wryly, come to the edge before. He knew it; this was not the first time, these last months, that he had thought of diving, of testing himself against the fall and the plunge into the water below – and the climb which came afterwards, back up the cliff. There was no need to do it all, and he knew that as well; he could dive and swim along the cliff, back to the sandy beach and the little beach house that he had helped Uzoji build – when he had had two hands to do it with.
Self-pity crawled into his throat, and tasted sour on his tongue. Aremu swallowed it down, and came closer to the edge of the cliff, to the little lip forward where the water gleamed blue on his left and on his right. He watched the waves crash against the rocks for a moment, and he stood, still, and felt the sun summer-hot on his skin, and breathed in deep the drifting smell of tsug and sugarcane.
Aremu tried not to think any more, and he dove.
There was time enough, on the way down, for creeping doubts to make themselves known – to claw their way up from his chest, from somewhere deeper in the depths of darkness inside him, and for a moment – just a moment – he thought he knew the panic of heights, an overwhelming fear that seemed to press all the rest of him flat, to squish him and let him leak, steadily, from –
He hit the water.
It was cold, and deep; it closed over his head, and it washed all of it from him: all the fear, all the doubt, all the shame, gone, for the brief, beautiful moment of contact. And then he was dropping, down, the sunlight streaming through the surface far above, the bottom of the sea too far to hope to reach. He shifted; he turned himself, and kicked his legs, and his arms – both arms – moved in steady concert.
He came up to the surface, and broke through, and breathed in deep, scattering salty droplets of water from his short-cropped hair. He laughed, or something like it, and a wave splattered against the edge of his face, and left him grinning. He treaded water there, just a moment, and did not doubt any longer; he turned himself towards the cliff and began to swim, with even steady strokes of his arms and kicks of his legs, until he was close enough to begin the climb.
It did not go well.
It was never easy at the base; the rocks had been slippery when he had two hands to hold them. He dug himself in; he clung with his fingertips and toes, and found that he could wedge his forearm and elbow into the spaces between them, that he could press his chest and thighs against the stone still warm with the memory of the morning’s sun, and he could drag himself up, inch by painful inch. He found a path and he climbed; he fell, and he began again on another route; he fell again, and again, and again, until his palm was scraped, and the scars at his right wrist scuffed and bleeding.
Perhaps it was that he found the right path; perhaps it was only time. He found that he could climb, however strange and awkward; it was difficult, as the trees had been difficult, and all of him ached with the effort, focused like a gunsight on the cliff above. He climbed, through the shaking of his arms and legs, through the bellows-blowing of his lungs, until he pulled himself over the edge of the cliff and lay, facedown and closed-eyes, against the rocks there.
There was no one in the kitchen when Aremu came through the door, and he was glad of it. Ahura, he thought, must have been in the laundry or else somewhere in the rest of the house; there was a clamor of voices from the library, and he went silently up the stairs to keep from disturbing them, pausing and careful where he knew the steps to squeak.
He washed the salt from his skin and hair, and it stung where he’d brushed too hard against the rocks, and he found he did not mind. He ached; his shoulders, Aremu thought, worst of all, but his legs too, and the small and tender muscles of his feet, unused, as his toes had become, to clinging so. He was glad or all of it, or at least he was not sorry.
Uzoji found him dressed once more, tousled dry, sitting cross-legged on his bed with the ledgers he was still coming to learn propped open in his lap. Aremu glanced up at the sound of footfalls on the steps, and shifted, tucking his right wrist out of sight.
“Poa’xa,” Uzoji said, smiling, and leaned against the entry way to his room. “Come with me tonight," he said, and Aremu heard in his voice one who knows he will lose a battle, and yet fights anyway.
How long has it been, my friend, since you went to Laus Oma? Aremu, too, heard the question that Uzoji did not ask.
He was silent a moment; he wondered what Uzoji heard in his silence. And Niccolette? He did not ask, thinking of the careful, pointed silences at the kitchen table, the Bastian’s face set and her chin lifted.
Uzoji’s face softened into a smile; he didn’t ask. Aremu saw himself at the cliff, and understood, and when he answered, it was to put himself at the edge, for for all that he knew himself a liar, and for all that he knew well that he could not know truth, he had long ago promised himself that he should not like to lie to Uzoji.
“I’ll come,” Aremu said.
There was no need for a cravat, tonight, and Aremu was glad to put that off a little longer; a cliff, he supposed, he did not yet need to climb. The suit jacket was a vivid yellow – a gift, for a birthday some years ago, which fit as well now as it had then, even over a shirt thick enough to hide the straps of the prosthetic below. The wooden hand fit oddly at his wrist, and, pulled tight enough to hold, the wrist strap chafed his skin – worse, he supposed, today than usual, with the scraps of climbing still on his arm. They should have made it harder to wear; he knew it was not so.
The carriage ride went by, and the ferry too; Aremu leaned on the deck railing, face turned into the salt spray, his jacket folded over the back of a chair inside. Uzoji, wearing a bright patterned purple, sat beside it, reading a newspaper in the indoor lamplight.
“It’s not a long walk,” Uzoji said, cheerfully, as they went along the gangplank.
Aremu’s fingers lingered on the rope, and then he shifted, and tucked his left hand into his pants pocket, thinking – that was the point, he supposed, of the prosthetic. From a distance, he thought, and then he thought that he should have to learn how far it took for it to be mistaken for a real hand. He thought of himself bowing, steadily further and further, in front of a mirror, and something which was nearly hysteria bubbled up in his chest, and threatened to spew forth from his mouth, and make a liar of him.
This, he knew, was nothing like diving; he could at any time turn back. It was infinitely worse.
“Ada’xa Fedhe’s home is just on the water,” he heard Uzoji saying – oddly, almost distantly, for all the other man was just beside him. “Have you been?”
“I’m not sure,” Aremu said; his own voice, too, sounded to him strange. He blinked, and it was as if the world sharpened once more, and he knew himself – walking beside Uzoji, feeling the prickling heat of the other man’s field, his hand in one pocket and the prosthetic in the other. The jacket was a little warm even for the evening; Aremu shifted his shoulders, thinking that might re-settle it, but did not move his hand.
“Ada’na Atsi is performing,” Uzoji went on, and Aremu did not know whether he had truly heard nothing, or whether he was merely skilled at making it seem so. “Fedhe is known for his gardens and the generosity of his spirits,” Uzoji shot a grin at Aremu, and Aremu was not sure what his face did in return; he did not think it quite a smile, but he found his steps came a little easier than they had, smooth together. “It should be quite a pleasant evening.”
It was not a long walk, as Aremu had known it would not be.
The house was tucked just beyond the curve of the wharf, slightly up – looking down over the harbor lights below, and Laus Oma trailing behind. The city was vivid-bright, sharp with lights and smells and sounds, even at a distance. They came up the steps and a human, elegantly dressed, bowed them through the garden gate.
There was plenty to drink, as Aremu had known there would be. He found a glass of something which burned his throat and eyes on each sip in his hand; he kept his right wrist tucked against the edge of his pocket, and did his best to bow without the use of his arms. Uzoji patted him on the back and tucked himself off through the crowd, and Aremu held, at the edges of the room, and supposed that to be there was better than nothing.
The room was full; it was not quite dancing, not formally, but when Atsi sang most of the crowd swayed. One woman, laughing, let her partner spin her around; gold jewelry glittered along the curves of her ears and on her fingers, too, and seemed to catch the fullness of her equally gold skirt; there was, when she moved, the faintest hint of her side.
Aremu watched; she turned, and for a moment he thought she had caught his eye. He looked away, and when he looked back she was dancing once more, swaying from side to side.
In time, even the edges of it were too much. He slipped away, along the crowd and through the pale white pillars into the edges of the garden. A soft spring bubbled up in the midst of it, firey red flowers blooming all around, some dangling from vines and trees and others sprouting from thick bushes. Aremu stood at the edge of that, too, and glanced up at the sky.
“Aren’t you having fun?” he heard a feminine voice, and a little giggle from behind him. A question, he thought, asked to someone she found handsome; he thought he knew the tone of voice. He didn’t look; it didn’t seem to be his place. He watched the stars, instead, his fingers tight on the half-empty glass.
The delicate little hand on his arm caught Aremu by surprise; he caught himself, in time, and did not flinch, and turned to look at her. Gold sparkled on her eyelids, too, and somehow even on the curve of her lips; she grinned up at him, blinking, looking up through her lashes.
“I thought,” the woman in the gold dress said, giggling again, “you might come dance with me.”
Aremu’s throat moved, just a little; he shifted, and felt the edges of a frown on his face. “I’m not very skilled at dancing,” he said. He inclined his head, then, like a bow. Her hand was still on his arm; he was thoroughly aware of the warmth of it, which went straight down to the center of him, and seemed to linger there. There was a ring with a jewel on it on the fourth finger of her hand, and she did not look at it, and he did not either.
“Oh,” she said; her lips made a little pout, and her hand eased away.
Aremu swallowed. “I’d, uh… try anyway. For you,” he offered, uncertainly. He shifted; his right wrist drew out of his pocket, and he let it hang at his side. He felt, he supposed, a sensation not unlike the one he’d felt falling.
She glanced down, and then back up at his face again, and she giggled. “We can dance out here, if you want,” she said, smiling. “I’m Tsadha,” she giggeld, “by the way.”
“Aremu,” Aremu said. He hesitated, and he set the half-empty glass down on a bench, nearby. “Shall I…” he looked, just a little, down at her.
Tsadha came forward, and her hands settled around his neck; there was space between them, still, though her fingers were just brushing his bare skin. She giggled again. Aremu settled his hand around the curve of her waist, and he let her set the rhythm of it, and he found – however out of practice – that he could follow along. It wasn’t, he thought, quite like hitting the water; it was stranger, and more difficult, and showed no signs of growing less so.
But he danced; the strains of music drifted from inside, and Tsadha stood close enough that he could feel the warmth of her, and smell what must have been perfume, sweet and a little floral. Her chin tilted up, and she smiled at him, and to his surprise, Aremu found that he smiled back.
He breathed in, deeply, and looked back at the edge of the cliff. His bare toes rested on the rocks, the cuffs of his pants loose against the bones of his ankles.
He began.
It was slow, still; it was a slow process, though he had learned not to rush it. His left hand came up, and the edge held his shirt against his chest; his fingers moved, carefully, button to button, making their way down the front of the shirt. When it was loose, or loose enough, he lifted his shoulders – lifted both arms – and pulled it over his head. He draped it over his right arm, the edge fluttering in the breeze over the place where his hand had once been, and watched, dispassionately, as his left hand moved through the motion of folding it.
Aremu set his shirt down on the rocks. He could not but look down, and so he did; his left hand worked busily at the waistband of his pants, and then the loose linen dropped, as well. He folded that, and set it atop the shirt, leaving a rock to hold it all in place. He breathed deep, again, and made his way to the edge of the cliff.
He had swum, since. Aremu, looking the long way down at the water below, knew he was not such a fool as that. He had swum, and he had climbed, at least the tsug trees in the depths of the orchard, where the branches were thick enough to break the worst of his falls, at least the palm trees that ringed the estate, where he had scraped the soles of his feet pressing them into the ridges of the bark, and limped home in the quiet dark. He had run, too, and found ways to keep the strength of his arm; he knew, though he did not wish now to look down at himself, that his chest looked nearly as it had – before.
He had swum, since, and he had climbed. He did not think he had forgotten the knack of diving, and if he had such fears, this was the best place to put them to rest; he had learned to dive here, and he knew well, still, the depths of the water beneath the edges of the cliff, where rocks threatened and where they did not, all the dangers that gleamed beneath the Tincta Basta, unseen.
He had, Aremu thought wryly, come to the edge before. He knew it; this was not the first time, these last months, that he had thought of diving, of testing himself against the fall and the plunge into the water below – and the climb which came afterwards, back up the cliff. There was no need to do it all, and he knew that as well; he could dive and swim along the cliff, back to the sandy beach and the little beach house that he had helped Uzoji build – when he had had two hands to do it with.
Self-pity crawled into his throat, and tasted sour on his tongue. Aremu swallowed it down, and came closer to the edge of the cliff, to the little lip forward where the water gleamed blue on his left and on his right. He watched the waves crash against the rocks for a moment, and he stood, still, and felt the sun summer-hot on his skin, and breathed in deep the drifting smell of tsug and sugarcane.
Aremu tried not to think any more, and he dove.
There was time enough, on the way down, for creeping doubts to make themselves known – to claw their way up from his chest, from somewhere deeper in the depths of darkness inside him, and for a moment – just a moment – he thought he knew the panic of heights, an overwhelming fear that seemed to press all the rest of him flat, to squish him and let him leak, steadily, from –
He hit the water.
It was cold, and deep; it closed over his head, and it washed all of it from him: all the fear, all the doubt, all the shame, gone, for the brief, beautiful moment of contact. And then he was dropping, down, the sunlight streaming through the surface far above, the bottom of the sea too far to hope to reach. He shifted; he turned himself, and kicked his legs, and his arms – both arms – moved in steady concert.
He came up to the surface, and broke through, and breathed in deep, scattering salty droplets of water from his short-cropped hair. He laughed, or something like it, and a wave splattered against the edge of his face, and left him grinning. He treaded water there, just a moment, and did not doubt any longer; he turned himself towards the cliff and began to swim, with even steady strokes of his arms and kicks of his legs, until he was close enough to begin the climb.
It did not go well.
It was never easy at the base; the rocks had been slippery when he had two hands to hold them. He dug himself in; he clung with his fingertips and toes, and found that he could wedge his forearm and elbow into the spaces between them, that he could press his chest and thighs against the stone still warm with the memory of the morning’s sun, and he could drag himself up, inch by painful inch. He found a path and he climbed; he fell, and he began again on another route; he fell again, and again, and again, until his palm was scraped, and the scars at his right wrist scuffed and bleeding.
Perhaps it was that he found the right path; perhaps it was only time. He found that he could climb, however strange and awkward; it was difficult, as the trees had been difficult, and all of him ached with the effort, focused like a gunsight on the cliff above. He climbed, through the shaking of his arms and legs, through the bellows-blowing of his lungs, until he pulled himself over the edge of the cliff and lay, facedown and closed-eyes, against the rocks there.
There was no one in the kitchen when Aremu came through the door, and he was glad of it. Ahura, he thought, must have been in the laundry or else somewhere in the rest of the house; there was a clamor of voices from the library, and he went silently up the stairs to keep from disturbing them, pausing and careful where he knew the steps to squeak.
He washed the salt from his skin and hair, and it stung where he’d brushed too hard against the rocks, and he found he did not mind. He ached; his shoulders, Aremu thought, worst of all, but his legs too, and the small and tender muscles of his feet, unused, as his toes had become, to clinging so. He was glad or all of it, or at least he was not sorry.
Uzoji found him dressed once more, tousled dry, sitting cross-legged on his bed with the ledgers he was still coming to learn propped open in his lap. Aremu glanced up at the sound of footfalls on the steps, and shifted, tucking his right wrist out of sight.
“Poa’xa,” Uzoji said, smiling, and leaned against the entry way to his room. “Come with me tonight," he said, and Aremu heard in his voice one who knows he will lose a battle, and yet fights anyway.
How long has it been, my friend, since you went to Laus Oma? Aremu, too, heard the question that Uzoji did not ask.
He was silent a moment; he wondered what Uzoji heard in his silence. And Niccolette? He did not ask, thinking of the careful, pointed silences at the kitchen table, the Bastian’s face set and her chin lifted.
Uzoji’s face softened into a smile; he didn’t ask. Aremu saw himself at the cliff, and understood, and when he answered, it was to put himself at the edge, for for all that he knew himself a liar, and for all that he knew well that he could not know truth, he had long ago promised himself that he should not like to lie to Uzoji.
“I’ll come,” Aremu said.
There was no need for a cravat, tonight, and Aremu was glad to put that off a little longer; a cliff, he supposed, he did not yet need to climb. The suit jacket was a vivid yellow – a gift, for a birthday some years ago, which fit as well now as it had then, even over a shirt thick enough to hide the straps of the prosthetic below. The wooden hand fit oddly at his wrist, and, pulled tight enough to hold, the wrist strap chafed his skin – worse, he supposed, today than usual, with the scraps of climbing still on his arm. They should have made it harder to wear; he knew it was not so.
The carriage ride went by, and the ferry too; Aremu leaned on the deck railing, face turned into the salt spray, his jacket folded over the back of a chair inside. Uzoji, wearing a bright patterned purple, sat beside it, reading a newspaper in the indoor lamplight.
“It’s not a long walk,” Uzoji said, cheerfully, as they went along the gangplank.
Aremu’s fingers lingered on the rope, and then he shifted, and tucked his left hand into his pants pocket, thinking – that was the point, he supposed, of the prosthetic. From a distance, he thought, and then he thought that he should have to learn how far it took for it to be mistaken for a real hand. He thought of himself bowing, steadily further and further, in front of a mirror, and something which was nearly hysteria bubbled up in his chest, and threatened to spew forth from his mouth, and make a liar of him.
This, he knew, was nothing like diving; he could at any time turn back. It was infinitely worse.
“Ada’xa Fedhe’s home is just on the water,” he heard Uzoji saying – oddly, almost distantly, for all the other man was just beside him. “Have you been?”
“I’m not sure,” Aremu said; his own voice, too, sounded to him strange. He blinked, and it was as if the world sharpened once more, and he knew himself – walking beside Uzoji, feeling the prickling heat of the other man’s field, his hand in one pocket and the prosthetic in the other. The jacket was a little warm even for the evening; Aremu shifted his shoulders, thinking that might re-settle it, but did not move his hand.
“Ada’na Atsi is performing,” Uzoji went on, and Aremu did not know whether he had truly heard nothing, or whether he was merely skilled at making it seem so. “Fedhe is known for his gardens and the generosity of his spirits,” Uzoji shot a grin at Aremu, and Aremu was not sure what his face did in return; he did not think it quite a smile, but he found his steps came a little easier than they had, smooth together. “It should be quite a pleasant evening.”
It was not a long walk, as Aremu had known it would not be.
The house was tucked just beyond the curve of the wharf, slightly up – looking down over the harbor lights below, and Laus Oma trailing behind. The city was vivid-bright, sharp with lights and smells and sounds, even at a distance. They came up the steps and a human, elegantly dressed, bowed them through the garden gate.
There was plenty to drink, as Aremu had known there would be. He found a glass of something which burned his throat and eyes on each sip in his hand; he kept his right wrist tucked against the edge of his pocket, and did his best to bow without the use of his arms. Uzoji patted him on the back and tucked himself off through the crowd, and Aremu held, at the edges of the room, and supposed that to be there was better than nothing.
The room was full; it was not quite dancing, not formally, but when Atsi sang most of the crowd swayed. One woman, laughing, let her partner spin her around; gold jewelry glittered along the curves of her ears and on her fingers, too, and seemed to catch the fullness of her equally gold skirt; there was, when she moved, the faintest hint of her side.
Aremu watched; she turned, and for a moment he thought she had caught his eye. He looked away, and when he looked back she was dancing once more, swaying from side to side.
In time, even the edges of it were too much. He slipped away, along the crowd and through the pale white pillars into the edges of the garden. A soft spring bubbled up in the midst of it, firey red flowers blooming all around, some dangling from vines and trees and others sprouting from thick bushes. Aremu stood at the edge of that, too, and glanced up at the sky.
“Aren’t you having fun?” he heard a feminine voice, and a little giggle from behind him. A question, he thought, asked to someone she found handsome; he thought he knew the tone of voice. He didn’t look; it didn’t seem to be his place. He watched the stars, instead, his fingers tight on the half-empty glass.
The delicate little hand on his arm caught Aremu by surprise; he caught himself, in time, and did not flinch, and turned to look at her. Gold sparkled on her eyelids, too, and somehow even on the curve of her lips; she grinned up at him, blinking, looking up through her lashes.
“I thought,” the woman in the gold dress said, giggling again, “you might come dance with me.”
Aremu’s throat moved, just a little; he shifted, and felt the edges of a frown on his face. “I’m not very skilled at dancing,” he said. He inclined his head, then, like a bow. Her hand was still on his arm; he was thoroughly aware of the warmth of it, which went straight down to the center of him, and seemed to linger there. There was a ring with a jewel on it on the fourth finger of her hand, and she did not look at it, and he did not either.
“Oh,” she said; her lips made a little pout, and her hand eased away.
Aremu swallowed. “I’d, uh… try anyway. For you,” he offered, uncertainly. He shifted; his right wrist drew out of his pocket, and he let it hang at his side. He felt, he supposed, a sensation not unlike the one he’d felt falling.
She glanced down, and then back up at his face again, and she giggled. “We can dance out here, if you want,” she said, smiling. “I’m Tsadha,” she giggeld, “by the way.”
“Aremu,” Aremu said. He hesitated, and he set the half-empty glass down on a bench, nearby. “Shall I…” he looked, just a little, down at her.
Tsadha came forward, and her hands settled around his neck; there was space between them, still, though her fingers were just brushing his bare skin. She giggled again. Aremu settled his hand around the curve of her waist, and he let her set the rhythm of it, and he found – however out of practice – that he could follow along. It wasn’t, he thought, quite like hitting the water; it was stranger, and more difficult, and showed no signs of growing less so.
But he danced; the strains of music drifted from inside, and Tsadha stood close enough that he could feel the warmth of her, and smell what must have been perfume, sweet and a little floral. Her chin tilted up, and she smiled at him, and to his surprise, Aremu found that he smiled back.
