The Crocus' Stem • Cinnamon Hill
Afternoon on the 23rd of Bethas, 2720
S
hapes and impressions, which ask you to fill in the rest. He’s smiling down into his kofi, where there’s nothing but a swirl of dark against glistening lacquer, the smile written into every line on his face.
He’d’ve thought once that wasn’t very Mugrobi; he’d’ve thought – once – given what he knew from Aremu of honesty and dishonesty, that such a thing skirts misrepresentation like a riff skirts a cheek shaving. But now he knows it’s the opposite. If one knows the truth of one’s heart well enough, one trusts one’s hand not to slip. And the truth of the heart, maybe, is more in shapes and impressions than it is in exactitudes. He thinks of the two paintings again, and then he thinks of asking to speak with eyes closed.
He wonders at the door she leaves open, smiling, telling him of Nkanzi returning to Thul Ka in the rainy season. He doesn’t dare guess – he feels oddly, sadly grateful for everything he can’t repay.
Nkemi’s words bring his eyes up. He feels a kindling in his chest, deep underneath his heart, at her sudden sheepish grin. He grins back, no less sheepish; he might smooth the smile over, might cover all of it up with thick-daubed confidence, with a portrait of a politician, but he chooses not to.
Eyo’xaw i’xupo, he thinks to say. Look at us, making maps and writing poetry. You’re better at maps than I am at words, he ought to say, but that’d cheapen it, somehow, this moment of sharing. And he wants, for a moment, to be proud of what he has said.
He’s still never seen it, Nkemi making a map with clairvoyant and static mona – but that, he thinks slowly, is not what she means, if the expression on her face is anything to judge by. He remembers something she said once about going to the Rose. Plugit, he remembers, with the map convention. He realizes with a start she must’ve gone by now.
He thinks he’ll ask, though maybe not today; maybe when there’s unsteady ground beneath his feet, and unfamiliar clothes on his back, and unfamiliar sights in his eyes. He thinks he’ll ask what she thought of the Rose, if she ever got out to see the Fords. And how, he thinks, suddenly oddly delighted, the mapmaking convention went. He pictures her bobbing about waterlogged Plugit in her bright scarf and her bright sweater and her dark coat, breath steaming, studying maps.
She’s looking down, one familiar line between her brows, her lips not quite smiling but never too far from one. He glances down himself, listening – thinking – and he shuts his eyes, his fingertips on the edge of his empty cup.
No, he wants to say right off, I don’t think so. But then she finishes, seizing on the image through the smoke, and he grins, too.
“Or host and guest,” he offers, not quite able to keep himself from his aches, not quite daring to look up at her.
He’s halfway through shelling another pistachio, and he pops it in his mouth and chews. He glances over at her cup of kofi, up at her face, and smiles.
Setting his own down on the table and uncrossing his legs, he reaches for the kofi pot. “It seems to me the painter’s reaching out,” he says, offering hers first; if she permits, he pours her another cup, slow and easy, his hand much steadier, “and whoever’s looking – is reaching out to the painter, too. Or the map-maker, or the poet. Maybe they’re both – both at once, like an exercise of ada’na Ugoulo’s. You paint a vestibule, and you let the scryer in; but the scryer’s letting you in, too, and you have to know that what you’re making will find itself in strange countries.”
The phrase brings another smile to his face, oddly ticklish; he laughs, and then pours himself another cup of kofi. He cradles it in his hands, warm. “Or maybe it’s like a caster and the mona,” he says softly. “Or a caprise.”
His field gives a little pulse against hers, and he feels her pulse back. The static and clairvoyant mona are comfortably a-mingle with his, belike and unlike. He laughs again; a little of the warm, rich, not-quite-bastly shivers out into his field, all full of the smell of kofi, and spreads round, and he feels a breath of bright watercolor wash through.
He reaches for the sugar, and stirs a pinch into his cup.
He settles back; the conversation winds on, like the river on the wall, spilling its borders. He's no sense of the time here, none at all, but he lets it go, and they talk and laugh through the afternoon.
hapes and impressions, which ask you to fill in the rest. He’s smiling down into his kofi, where there’s nothing but a swirl of dark against glistening lacquer, the smile written into every line on his face.
He’d’ve thought once that wasn’t very Mugrobi; he’d’ve thought – once – given what he knew from Aremu of honesty and dishonesty, that such a thing skirts misrepresentation like a riff skirts a cheek shaving. But now he knows it’s the opposite. If one knows the truth of one’s heart well enough, one trusts one’s hand not to slip. And the truth of the heart, maybe, is more in shapes and impressions than it is in exactitudes. He thinks of the two paintings again, and then he thinks of asking to speak with eyes closed.
He wonders at the door she leaves open, smiling, telling him of Nkanzi returning to Thul Ka in the rainy season. He doesn’t dare guess – he feels oddly, sadly grateful for everything he can’t repay.
Nkemi’s words bring his eyes up. He feels a kindling in his chest, deep underneath his heart, at her sudden sheepish grin. He grins back, no less sheepish; he might smooth the smile over, might cover all of it up with thick-daubed confidence, with a portrait of a politician, but he chooses not to.
Eyo’xaw i’xupo, he thinks to say. Look at us, making maps and writing poetry. You’re better at maps than I am at words, he ought to say, but that’d cheapen it, somehow, this moment of sharing. And he wants, for a moment, to be proud of what he has said.
He’s still never seen it, Nkemi making a map with clairvoyant and static mona – but that, he thinks slowly, is not what she means, if the expression on her face is anything to judge by. He remembers something she said once about going to the Rose. Plugit, he remembers, with the map convention. He realizes with a start she must’ve gone by now.
He thinks he’ll ask, though maybe not today; maybe when there’s unsteady ground beneath his feet, and unfamiliar clothes on his back, and unfamiliar sights in his eyes. He thinks he’ll ask what she thought of the Rose, if she ever got out to see the Fords. And how, he thinks, suddenly oddly delighted, the mapmaking convention went. He pictures her bobbing about waterlogged Plugit in her bright scarf and her bright sweater and her dark coat, breath steaming, studying maps.
She’s looking down, one familiar line between her brows, her lips not quite smiling but never too far from one. He glances down himself, listening – thinking – and he shuts his eyes, his fingertips on the edge of his empty cup.
No, he wants to say right off, I don’t think so. But then she finishes, seizing on the image through the smoke, and he grins, too.
“Or host and guest,” he offers, not quite able to keep himself from his aches, not quite daring to look up at her.
He’s halfway through shelling another pistachio, and he pops it in his mouth and chews. He glances over at her cup of kofi, up at her face, and smiles.
Setting his own down on the table and uncrossing his legs, he reaches for the kofi pot. “It seems to me the painter’s reaching out,” he says, offering hers first; if she permits, he pours her another cup, slow and easy, his hand much steadier, “and whoever’s looking – is reaching out to the painter, too. Or the map-maker, or the poet. Maybe they’re both – both at once, like an exercise of ada’na Ugoulo’s. You paint a vestibule, and you let the scryer in; but the scryer’s letting you in, too, and you have to know that what you’re making will find itself in strange countries.”
The phrase brings another smile to his face, oddly ticklish; he laughs, and then pours himself another cup of kofi. He cradles it in his hands, warm. “Or maybe it’s like a caster and the mona,” he says softly. “Or a caprise.”
His field gives a little pulse against hers, and he feels her pulse back. The static and clairvoyant mona are comfortably a-mingle with his, belike and unlike. He laughs again; a little of the warm, rich, not-quite-bastly shivers out into his field, all full of the smell of kofi, and spreads round, and he feels a breath of bright watercolor wash through.
He reaches for the sugar, and stirs a pinch into his cup.
He settles back; the conversation winds on, like the river on the wall, spilling its borders. He's no sense of the time here, none at all, but he lets it go, and they talk and laugh through the afternoon.
