[Closed] First and Fierce Affirming Sight

[Tom Cooke]

A Rooftop in Dejai Point

Afternoon on the 23rd of Bethas, 2720

I
t’s only a few days away, and somehow it’s like a sheath of clouds covers all of it.

Now, it is all crisp: it’s Nkemi, sitting across from him, the warm and living feel of her hand in his warm and living hand; it’s the way the light flickers over the canvas overhead, the way it shifts and shudders, the shock-blue sky beyond unfurling into the distance and meeting the city at the horizon in its endless sprawl. It’s the scent – not just of what they’re eating, though that’d be enough – it’s the scents of many foods, so many scents he’s no name for them, like the brush of dozens of fields.

It might be dizzying, in some places; here, delirious as he is from the long nights on the aeroship, he feels there is firm ground under his feet, and he doesn’t have to look forward. The market will be what it will be. The desert will be what it will be. She’s promised she will be there, through all of it, and he doesn’t try to see a mirror in her eyes.

(Though he knows he cannot help it – he has a sense, creeping slow, of what may come in the desert, in Serkaih, as she brings the thing that he is into her family’s home.)

But all of that is so far away from the spread of food before him, and her watchful – but cheerful – eyes. When his hand comes away from hers, it goes to his water; he takes a thoughtful sip, though he conserves it, eying the meat and thinking he may need the lot of it before the Thul’amat dasher comes back.

Yes, she says, and there’s a pause. He feels remembrance in the gap; even when she goes on, there’s more in the gaps than in what she says, and it reminds him even more – achingly, for all it doesn’t seem a galdor’s snide glimpse of tekaa, as he knows galdori – of the gaps he used to listen to such a long time ago.

At the question, he pauses; he still feels the ache. It’s the feel of a casual question, for all he can feel her eyes on him; she’s taking another bite, easy-like.

The wind ruffles the covering, picks up so it tangles through his hair and creaks the supports. He breathes in deep. He’s smiling, still. “He spoke of,” he starts, then pauses, thinking of how she’s said it. All of the sudden, he laughs; it’s unexpected and lovely, the feel of it bubbling up.

The thought of him has been so sad for so long; this remembrance is anything but sad.

“He was a child,” he explains, tearing off another bit of bread – not his final piece, in the end, he thinks wryly; he seldom listens to his body, but it’s got more of an appetite than he expected. He manages to check himself from saying boch, but only just. “He was afraid, I think, wind on the heart, though he never said it that way to me,” he goes on, “and coughed on the incense, for all he grew to love it. There is much smoke, he used to say – and through it, clarity.”

He expects it will be difficult, saying it aloud. Repeating those words. It’s not; there’s not even a prickle in his eyes.

He smiles looking out over the city, at all the carefully-tended greenery on the rooftops.

“He spoke of it with a certain – weight.” He coughs suddenly, just as unexpected as the laughter, the lingering bite of meat stinging. He takes a sip of water, then looks at Nkemi. “He used to tell me that those crossing the desert have a… different mindset, though he never explained what he meant.” He used to say, he doesn’t say, that I was a flood in the Rose, and him a sandstorm in the desert.

He eases back; he tries not to dwell on how astonished he is at how well he’s eaten. He feels at ease, full-but-not-too-full, and he lets it settle through his body, and he doesn’t fight it. “I don’t think he ever thought I’d see it; I think he thought it was a thing that must be seen, a thing that’s hard to put in words.”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Afternoon, 23 Bethas, 2720
Oti’úqaq, Dejai Point

Anetol laughs, unexpected, a sound like a gust of drifting wind; Nkemi smiles, letting herself be carried along by it, although she does not know why. His eyes are soft at the corners, but the smile reaches them now – or perhaps it did all along – and pulls some of the harsher lines of his face away from themselves, opening him open.

Nkemi nods, when Anetol speaks of much smoke and through it clarity; she smiles. He smiles, too, at the memory in his heart, with a look in his eyes as if he sees back into the past. He eases himself back from the table, shifting heavily against the seat.

Nkemi takes a last tug of flatbread; she scoops up the last of her meat with it, letting the warmth of the spices be the last taste on her tongue for a long few moments. She washes it down, then, with the sweet of the lime drink, and wipes her hands clean once more.

“I could not imagine Vienda,” Nkemi says. “I tried, in the in between – when there was wind leaping in my heart,” she smiles. “After being there, now, I think it – like Thul Ka – like all places – has many sides. The desert of his childhood may not be the desert you see now; the incense may have changed, and the smoke may be thicker or thinner, blacker or grayer, than what he knew.”

The student returns; he takes the plates away, when Nkemi confirms they have finished, and brings back bowls. Nkemi washes her hands clean once more; he goes, and comes back with small cups of steaming kofi, and one plate each of soft orange pumpkin, boiled in sugar water until it is firm and soft together, earthy and sweet but not too rich. This comes with small spoons, set on the edges of the plates.

Nkemi picks hers up, happily; she slices off a bit of the edges, and tastes it with a smile. This she did not find in Vienda, not anywhere; she had not forgotten it, nor how much she likes it.

“And too,” Nkemi says, thoughtfully, “the desert with me is perhaps not the desert as it would have been with him. But I think that to see it will unfold his words for you; that you will place them on the map of the desert.” She grins at Anetol, and takes a tiny sip of her kofi.

They finish the dessert and the kofi too, in time, or at least as much as they care to eat; they go back down the steep, narrow stairs, one slow step at a time. Nkemi thinks of vraun again, of apples and fish in green curry, of a vision she has yet never understood in a bowl of water, of scrubbing a floor clean, and carrying, slowly, a bucket, step by step. She thinks of maps and the lines upon them, and the unfolding thereof.

Nkemi takes Anetol’s arm again, as they emerge into the streets; it was the end of the lunch hour when they went upstairs, and they have largely cleared out now, students having bustled back into all their many lives. “There is much to see in Thul’Amat and Dejai Point,” Nkemi says, prefect-solemn, “as many sights as there are dishes at an emperor’s banquet. But even the emperor cannot taste them all in the same meal.” She pauses, and grins cheekily up at Anetol.

“Are you hungry still?” Nkemi asks, not quite able not to giggle, extending the metaphor. “Or would you like to rest before the feast still to come?” She can think of many things she would show him: there is a book shop she thinks he will like, one of the oldest in the city, galdori-run, known for their collection of clairvoyant texts; there is a poet’s café, where words are painted fresh on the walls every so often, some indeterminate length of time passing between, so one never knows what they will find; there is a wandering priest, who can often be found in the fountains at this time, who performs the Haras’turga with prayers so beautiful they prick the eyes with tears. There are all these sights and many more; Thul Ka is a city full of such wonders, and Nkemi knows that even she cannot name them all.

But it is Anetol she looks at, her arm nestled through his; these sights will be here, still, when they return – when she returns, Nkemi thinks. If they are not the same, then there will be new ones; Thul Ka is a city of change, and it does not mind the changes within her either.

[Tom Cooke]

A Rooftop in Dejai Point

Afternoon on the 23rd of Bethas, 2720

N
or the dessert, he thinks, smiling up at Nkemi. It’s not sadness, exactly, in his face, but it’s not untouched by it. But there’s the pumpkin, then – or so he thinks it is; it’s vivid orange, another color in the vibrant spread – and he’s testing it with his spoon as she does hers, finding the edges soft and easy and pleasant to slice through.

And then he’s asking what it is, and they wind on through the last of lunch, buoyant on the colors and the earthy-sweet gourd, sweeter for the burn of the spices still lingering about his mouth like a ghost. The kofi, too, though it’s not the kofi they had with Natete.

The stairs are harder in the going down.

She is quiet; their footsteps creak, the wind creaks through the wood. With his arm tangled through hers, the two of them close, he wonders if she is thinking better of the decision.

They are not here, he would like to think, as prefect and incumbent. The Vyrdag hasn’t settled on the city yet; Anaxi faces are scarce – scarce enough, at least, that he gets stares and giggles. She’s plainclothes, though she has been recognized, once or twice, by eyes if not by words. He would like to think this is the responsibility of a friend to a friend, and not a prefect to an incumbent.

But you can’t cut the strings of all of it; he knows that better than most men, being what he is, tied not just to the flesh but everything that follows it. He thinks she knows it, too, very well indeed.

Perhaps Jaeli was right – if indeed that was what Jaeli thought – the man he knew will never sit in the smoke and listen to an elder’s incantation. So much for the changing of the desert and the city, he wants to ask: what of the changing of me? Of us? He thinks she must’ve thought of this, and not just with Thul Ka and the shifting sand; anybody who’s left home and come back knows that you never feel the change more than in your home.

The shaded streets of Dejai Point tame his thoughts. It must’ve been the changing of the guard when they’d gone up, because now, there’s only the brush of one field – polite clairvoyant – as a serious-looking young man passes, turning the corner at the end of the street as if he knows precisely where he’s going. A cafe a few buildings down has a handful of lads lounging about the table, a few scattered saucers with nothing but crumbs, the drifting of fragrant smoke.

He smiles at Nkemi. She is as straight as ever, and her face has the solemn, serious prefect’s set. Are you hungry? She asks, and giggles.

He grins; he looks down, letting himself laugh, long and low. I am a hungry ghost, he wants to say; I am flooding insatiable, always. “Of course,” he says, softly, “or at least, my heart tells me I am.”

He doesn’t want to listen to his body. It’s not just his body, anyway; it’s his narrow, pinching shoes, and the sweat prickling in the small of his back, and all the scratchy cloth. It’s, too, the passerby looks – never pitying, but not quite not – the knowledge that his face is red to the roots of his hair, and he hasn’t slept in days, and he doesn’t want to give Nkemi’s day a turn for the worse when he bites off more than he can chew.

“It’s like Sparrow-picker’s Lane,” he breathes, holding there by the door to the cafe. He looks up at the narrow strip of sky between the buildings. “It’ll change from meal to meal, but you must know your limits. You lose places,” he says, not quite petulant, but sad. “Some places” – he smiles wistfully at the cafe behind – “not, but…”

And you return to them different, he wants to say, too. He has a feeling of stormclouds ahead; the wind leaps in his heart. The world has already changed so much it’s unrecognizable, and he has lost people, too, as he’s lost himself. Will he get another chance to walk the streets with her?

She has never stopped watching him, not really, even through her grin. Their arms are still linked; he lays a hand on her forearm. He looks down at her. “I should rest,” he says, calling himself wise and mung. “But have you the time to stay awhile at the hotel? I haven’t tried their kofi” – he smiles, finally – “but it’s never the same, from place to place.”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Afternoon, 23 Bethas, 2720
The Streets of Thul Ka

Nkemi does not wish to tell Anetol of the spreading stain of red which has spread between his freckles, one by one, weaving them indistinguishable into the color of his cheeks. She does not wish to say anything at all of the trembling that wracked him as they went down the steps, one at a time, slow and careful, for she had the strength to hold his arm up with hers, and never minded in the least. Even now, she does not wish to say, his breathing is heavy enough that it seeps through his words, and the rest between them is a little longer.

He comes to it himself, in time, or perhaps he was always already there, and never needed her prompting after all. It is new to her still, being a guide – being Anetol’s guide – and Nkemi listens, and does not try to look forward. She nods, pleased; she is happy to take kofi once more.

“Natete told me once that no two sips of kofi are ever the same,” Nkemi says, giggling again. She squeezes Anetol’s arm lightly with her small bare one; the asymmetric colorful hem of her skirt swishes around her calves as they set off, once more, down the street.

“I understood,” Nkemi says, “how it is that no two cups are the same; even the same plant, grown two years apart in the same spot, may taste different – according to the wind, to the rain, to the sun and clouds. And too, how two cups made from the same beans may differ also, according to the menda or sugar or the subtle differences in brewing.”

She takes him back a different way through the streets of Dejai Point; they wind along through shade paths. The wind whisks the sound of laughter out of the edge of preparatory schools, and of instruction, too. Not so distant, they pass a burbling fountain, and a man who stands at the edge of it, dipping his hands into the waters and lifting up palmfuls so carefully not a drop spills, before he wills it so.

“And even within the cup,” Nkemi continues. She is talking to fill the space; she is talking to hold Anetol, who is a little slower and quieter, now, on her arm, though he holds himself straight upright and takes his even steps in heavy shoes, “that kofi cools as it is drunk, that the sugar settles; that the menda may clump together, and so each sip may be different from the last.”

“I said all this to Natete,” Nkemi smiles; she guides Anetol carefully up onto the platform. The cablecar platform is no quieter or less full now, though all those waiting are pressed tightly together in the shade, and the only space left between is that which means they do not touch one another. “He told me that I was not wrong, but that too the drinker changes; that who you are on the first sip may not be who you are on the second, for by the second you have had the taste of the first, even if nothing else changes.”

There is a distant screeching; the cablecar swings around and settles to a stop before them. People flood out the other side, in smooth even waves; Nkemi and Anetol climb on. She guides him to a seat, this time; she does not push or press, but nonetheless they move firmly through the crowd, and there is a stiffness to her which brooks no argument. She sits him down, and stands next to him, clinging to one of the poles.

There is a little human boy next to him, his father holding a strap overhead. He looks up, wide-eyed at Anetol, and he giggles, and reaches for his father’s hand, his small fingers wrapping around two of his father’s larger, rougher ones.

Three stops later, they climb down, and make their way off the platform.

Nkemi waves at one of the puller men on the side of the road; he comes over, bare arms holding to the poles which extend from the seat, and stops before them with a grin.

“Ada’na, ada’xa,” he says, looking between the two, curious. Another man pulls up, next to them; a human woman in an elegant wrapped dress with her arms full of bundles climbs in.

“Ada’xa,” Nkemi says, cheerfully. “We go to the Crocus’ Stem, up the hill,” she points. “Can you take both of us?”

“Does the Turga overflow its banks?” He flexes, and gestures back with his chin at the small, shade-covered seat.

Nkemi settles herself in next to Anetol; she takes his hand in hers. They start; the puller weaves them deftly through the traffic, calling cheerful obscenities with the sound of greetings in Mugroba to several other drivers.

“There,” Nkemi says, leaning forward; she points. “A taste for you,” she tells Anetol with a grin.

There is a camel, there; it is all neck and long limbs and strange, squat body, all green scales which ripple in the sun, with four sharp clawed feet. A long tongue flickers out to taste the air; slit-pupiled eyes flicker back and forth. Traffic flows on, and it shifts out of sight.

Soon they are on the shady streets of Cinnamon Hill once more; if the climb bothers him, the puller gives no sign of it. He sets them down at the door to the hotel; Nkemi thanks him and gives him his coin.

“Ule’elana,” Nkemi says, cheerfully. “May you keep your head above His waves.”

“Ule’elana,” the puller echoes, and nods to Anetol as well. “Float you well.”

[Tom Cooke]

The Crocus' Stem • Cinnamon Hill

Afternoon on the 23rd of Bethas, 2720

S
he has told him, Mugrobi-frank, that we change with the changes around us. In the pinching of his shoes and the heavy weight of holding himself straight, he’s not sure what to think of it; he loses himself in the words, in the imagining of kofi warm and cold, of menda thicker in one drink than the next and the heat of the spices making the next sip milder.

He doesn’t say what he thinks; he doesn’t know if Nkemi knows what he is. The drink is so, too, he thinks. When you’re a lad, two pints of strong beer’s enough to show you what it’s called tipsy for – but you come to each sip softer and warmer than the last, and you want each sip the more you have. Three-drinks of a year ago is fair different from three-drinks of now.

Kofi, he thinks with a smile, is more benevolent. He thinks he might’ve always liked it better, so long as nobody tells.

The shaded streets were easy to follow, at first, and then harder, until it’s sleepless-delirious snatches of images: the one that sticks against the inside of his skull is a man dipping his hands in a fountain, all of him swathed in white, his hair dusted with snow. He chose when to let the water go, over and over.

He finds himself sitting on the cable-car, he’s not sure how. Nkemi has guided him there, firm-gentle, through a crowd that parts more politely than any in Vienda. He feels the brush of a glamour here, a field there, but mostly the absence; and as he sits, his field laps over a lad and his papa.

The lad’s face swims into focus – giggling, wide dark eyes. The man beside him is a face he can’t see, the sun bright around it, making of it a dark cut-out. The hand the boy takes is rough and calloused; he watches it, the tiny dark hand holding to large rough fingers. He looks down at the hand in his lap, turns it over and flexes the fingers, studies the nails. A bitter smile flickers across his face – for just a moment – he looks back at the lad, makes a silly face, and snorts.

The walk up Cinnamon Hill does not trouble him like the weaving through the streets. They come from the covered platform to the full sun, his arm still tangled in hers as they step off.

It’s not a litter, exactly. He remembers, once, in the Rose – in King’s Court, during a festival – but this is nothing like that, the line of natt in strange livery like something out of a picture-book set in the time of the War, a flock of fields and rippling bright cloth and glinting jewelry on the back. Still, when Nkemi hails it, he glances over at her, his brow furrowed for just a moment – then he glances at the kov who’s just dropped the poles.

He raises his brows. His lip twitches once as he looks him up and down; he does not smile.

The man flexes an arm, the bright sun glinting off sweat-slick muscle, and his frown deepens, though he hides it by inclining his head.

Another puller pulls up; a tall woman – tall enough, he thinks, though he can’t be sure – climbs in delicately, her bright-patterned straight hems shivering about her sandals. As Nkemi helps him up into the not-litter, he eases back into the seat, too grateful to care much. Her hand slips into his; he glances over, and he does smile, finally.

The puller picks up with one strong, deliberate heft; his muscles go taut, and the line of his back is straight. Tom watches him shifting his center of gravity, sharing the strain on each of his muscles, easy-like with his qalqa. They weave through the crowd, and he settles his head back, and he watches, expressionless, through half-lidded eyes.

A breeze whispers through his hair, flutters across his face. He leans to look when Nkemi points; his eyes go wide, flick to follow the curl of the tongue. “Lady,” he breathes, and grins at Nkemi.

A man calls out; the seat jolts, the wheels rattle. “Tsaf’upúw!” It’s damned skilled, the little flourish, the way the natt heaves the poles and jerks his chin into the crowd with a brilliant white grin. His back is rather slick with sweat; he supposes, he thinks neutrally as they pass onto Cinnamon Hill, interesting himself again in the balconies with their waterfalls of hanging plants, that a living conversationalist might have a field day.

They’re climbing down finally, at the Stem’s familiar shaded facade. His feet don’t take his weight well; a sharp pain lances up through the tendons, and he’s half a mind to jerk his shoes off right then and there. He smiles through the pain instead, as Nkemi bids the puller farewell.

He looks up at him with a mild politician’s smile; he reaches into his waistcoat for his own wallet. If she has paid him the full amount, he will tip. “Úle’elana, ada'xa,” he offers to the man’s Estuan farewell, and bows.

The natt lets out a benny guffaw as he heaves up the poles again, and he finds himself laughing, too, though the kov doesn’t favor him with another farewell.

Inside the Crocus, he feels like a woodstove shedding heat. He takes a deep breath; he sees the map on the wall, and finds – with a smile in Nkemi’s direction – it makes a little more sense to him.

“Good afternoon, sir,” the human woman at the counter says, as they approach, “ada’na,” smiling.

“Afternoon,” he says, a little breathless. He clasps Nkemi’s shoulder for a moment, disentangling their arms. “I’ll freshen up, if you don’t mind.” His voice isn’t exactly apologetic, but there’s something sheepish about his smile; he’s well aware his shirt is plastered to his back, under the waistcoat. “I’ll be back down in a moment, Nkemi.”

There’s much unpacking – and packing – and note-sending ahead; his mind whirls with it. He’ll be grateful of the break, he thinks, and of the company, before he goes to wrestle what of the beast he must wrestle alone.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Afternoon, 23 Bethas, 2720
The Crocus' Stem, Cinnamon Hill

Good afternoon, ada’na,” Nkemi says, cheerfully. Anetol untangles his arm from hers and goes, walking stiffly and gingerly, every step with a careful edge to it.

“The Incumbent and I would be glad to take kofi,” Nkemi says to the woman, smiling. “May it be arranged?”

“Of course,” The woman flashes a grin of gleaming white teeth. “He would not prefer tea?”

Nkemi does not think it over, though she wonders, afterwards, if she should have. “Kofi,” she says, smiling.

When Anetol returns he will find Nkemi sitting, legs crossed on her chair, sandals left on the ground next to it so she does not dirty the cushion with her shoes, sideways to the map. There is a tray set in front of her, with a gleaming kofi pot on it, two small cups, menda, sugar and milk, and a small bowl of pistachios in their shells.

Nkemi has a small handful of nuts, and she is eating them, slowly, cracking them open one at a time, discarding the shells and nibbling at the sweet green nuts inside. She is not watching the stairs; rather, instead, her eyes are fixed on the smooth sweeps of the Turga overhead, the thin lines etched to show the walls, old and new, of Thul Ka.

She turns at the brush of his field, and grins at Anetol. Their caprise has been nearly constant, these last hours; just as this morning, she settles back into it as if it had never been broken, the soft, warm mona of her field wrapped comfortably within his.

Nkemi leaves the pot for him, to pour; Thul Ka is her city, and Thul’Amat her school, and she has been his guide all morning since he stepped off the airship. But this is his home, for the time he passes in Mugroba; he has invited her to share it with him, and offered her to take kofi within.

“It is a good map,” Nkemi says, solemnly. She looks up, once more, her head scarf tilting and catching the soft phosphor light. Her skirt is spread out over her lap, more than enough to cover her; her legs have all but disappeared, crossed as they are beneath the colorful fabric. They are the vague shapes of knees, and little more.

“There are different maps for different purposes,” Nkemi goes on, grinning, with the weight of a familiar, comfortable topic in her voice. “There are some which show us the detail of a place, which put all of its smallest pieces into context. There are others which show us that which we cannot see, for all that we may know it – the sweep of water beneath the ground, the height of a climbing hill.”

“In every map, the maker decides what to put on and what to leave off,” Nkemi says, quietly, lifting her gaze once more. She studies the map with the slightest of frowns, and her eyes trace the sweep of the Turga once more. She rises in a smooth even motion, and comes closer to it, barefoot; careful fingertips touch a broad curve in the river.

“Here,” Nkemi says, softly, “two years ago, in rainy season, there was a mudslide; the river does not curve like this anymore,” she traces the edge lightly with her finger, “but extends out,” she shifts the tip of her finger over, onto what was once stable ground. She lingers there, for a moment, solemn; she comes back to the chair and sits once more. She thinks of great muddy slopes, and churning dark waters, frothing with foam and mud; she thinks of all which was swept out into the places beyond, where the river is as wide as a lake, where Hulali may keep many things for Himself, there in the dark distant depths.

“A map which traces the exactness of the Turga must change with it,” Nkemi says with a little shrug, and another smile, this one, too, chosen deliberately. “A map which reminds you only of what Thul Ka is can be constant; its exactness lies elsewhere.”

[Tom Cooke]

The Crocus' Stem • Cinnamon Hill

Afternoon on the 23rd of Bethas, 2720

I
t’s with great chagrin he puts his fucking shoes back on.

He considers, for long enough to decide: he remembers Nkemi taking her shoes off easily in his study, so as not to track on his leather-upholstered chairs. Staying with Aremu and Niccolette, going bare-foot in the house was well. This is not a house of Brothers, or even a house of acquaintances; this is a hotel, and he is a guest, and perhaps most importantly, he is Anaxi – an Anaxi galdor, an Anaxi politician – and a stranger.

He changes everything else – shirt, waistcoat, socks – he thinks to leave off the vest, to go down in his shirtsleeves; he would’ve been able to, once, but of late, he feels disrobed without it. He picks a light waistcoat at least, and leaves off a jacket altogether. He splashes his face with water and takes out his vial of lavender oil for a dab on his wrists.

He comes down the stairs easier than he went up, brushing past a succulent with twisting, speckled leaves. He’s glimpsed himself in the mirror briefly, but long enough to see that his face is no longer scarlet. He can take his hand off the railing long enough to adjust a cuff link, and if his feet are killing him, he suspects he can handle it a bit longer; he is, after all, already dead.

He does not feel dead when he sees Nkemi cross-legged in a low chair, her bright lovely skirt pooling round her, nibbling pistachios one at a time out of her hand.

He missed the caprise; he always, he realizes, misses the caprise. He notices right off the tray with the gleaming kofi pot, and smiles at the empty cups – and smiles wider, and shivers bastly through his field. Bastly, today, is the smell and taste of kofi; it’s deeper than gold, and warm, and soft.

It’s as he sets himself to pouring that he notices the sandals beside the chair. He flicks a glance up at her; the kofi burbles from the spout.

He looks at the map when she does. He hasn’t spoken once; she picks up the thread comfortably, wherever it has lain, as always. He sets her cup nearest her chair as she rises to her feet and steps toward the map. He eases himself into his own, but stays on the edge, watching.

He is struck again by the sight of her framed by the map; the top of her head brushes the dark thick arc of the river, and her fingertip lingers on the land-that’s-not-land-anymore, before it falls.

He smiles back at her as she sits. It’s a moment before he speaks; he must look at the map again, his own smile falling away to something more thoughtful. “It’s like a soul, then,” he says. “The soul of Thul Ka.”

There’s nothing embarrassed in his smile, now, or sheepish. Deliberate, he crosses a stiff leg and unlaces one shoe, taking it off; he crosses his legs the other way and repeats the motion. When he gets them off, he lays them side-by-side by the chair. In his clean white socks, now, he takes a little of the menda and stirs it into his cup.

“Or a portrait, maybe. Every portrait of a – a politician, say,” his smile goes narrow and crooked, “looks different, at least, to me.” There are two in the Vauquelin house, both in a dusty old storage room on the first floor. One had been hanging in the study, before he removed it; it’s him in profile, his chin lifted, seated straight-backed in a chair with his legs slightly apart and his jaw set. The other – he doesn’t know where it once hung, only it was in storage when he found it. Anatole is looking at the painter, a faint smile on his face, one hand on his knee.

That one is hard to look at. He has never seen that man; it’s a map, like she says, of the water beneath the ground.

He eases himself back into his seat with his kofi, breathing it in. A muscle in his back twitches painfully; then it relaxes, and he thinks he might melt.

“A portrait, more than a soul; none of mine look like me. They’ve each got a purpose, but I don’t always recognize the landmarks.” He laughs, looking back up at the sweep of the river. “Whoever mapped this one traced round all the old walls – all washing outward. They couldn’t track the changing of the river, but it seems to me they wanted to show you how Thul Ka is always spilling its borders. Always changing.” Resting his head back, he looks at her. “Does a map make an argument?”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Afternoon, 23 Bethas, 2720
The Crocus' Stem, Cinnamon Hill

By the time Nkemi comes back to her chair, a small steaming cup of kofi is waiting for her. She takes it with a smile, and stirs in a pinch of menda and a spoonful of sugar. She has made herself comfortable once more, feet up; she is not still entirely sure it is the right way to sit, in such a place, but the woman at the reception desk smiled at her as she left the tray.

Nkemi cradles the cup in her hands and takes a small sip. Anetol has leaned back in his chair; she can make out the freckles dotted over his skin once more, and when the smile slips from his lips, it leaves behind echoes in the curve of his cheeks and the corners of his eyes.

The soul of Thul Ka, Anetol calls it. Nkemi looks up at the map, wondering. Of walls and rivers? Is that the part of her city which is reborn, again and again, whatever may come in each life?

Anetol wanders onward with his argument; a portrait he says instead, of a city always changing. Nkemi smiles; she nods. If a city can be said to have a soul, she likes the idea of Thul Ka’s being rooted in change; she likes the idea of it ever evolving, ever overflowing, like the Turga around which it is built. She thinks of the flood season to come; she thinks once more of the buildings swept away in the Turga’s eager churning. This, too, feels right.

“A portrait does, I think,” Nkemi answers, smiling at him. She looks up at the etching once more. “And so I suppose if a map is a portrait, then it can too; if the soul of a city is change, perhaps there is no other way.”

Nkemi takes another little sip of her kofi, and sets the cup back down. She thinks of the portraits in her aunt’s house, here in Thul Ka, the set solemn faces of her grandparents. She remembers studying them as a girl and searching for her own face, or her father’s, in those careful not-quite frowns.

There is no portrait of her mother’s father in Dkanat; there is one in the cultural center, in the room where many such paintings rest in remembrance, but not in the house. Nkemi asked once, she remembers, as a girl, after one such trip to Thul Ka, when they had returned still and quiet to the house at the edge of Dkanat. She asked Nkanzi, who took her by the hand and led her to the sitting room.

Nkemi knew even then that the painting on the wall there was by Nkanzi; it is all colors, shifting and winding together in long strips, like the canyons of Serkaih. This, her aunt had said, looking up at it, is your grandfather’s portrait. Later, Nkemi has gone back to the room herself, and sat and studied it, and tried to see her mother, her sister and herself, in all the winding colors. That she had found easier to do.

“You will see,” Nkemi says, looking forward at Anetol, “some of my aunt’s paintings. There are some in my family’s home at Dkanat; there are some in the cultural center of Serkaih.” She hears the glow of warmth in her voice; she knows the smile on her face. She has spoken to Anetol of her childhood in the plains and rocks, of goats and wick caravans and time spent alone; he knows something of the errands she ran, and she has told him, she thinks, of her father; she has painted a picture with her words of what she thinks is at the heart of him.

“I think,” Nkemi giggles, unexpected, through the rising warmth in her chest and the tight ache that comes with it, “Nkanzi would laugh at the idea that there are portraits which do not make arguments. She does not paint portraits - she paints landscapes - but I am not sure that she would say it is any different.” Nkemi picks her cup up for another sip of kofi.

She has opened the door, she knows; this they have discussed even less than the journey. It is cool and quiet in the Crocus’ Stem, and the kofi is hot and fragrant. Nkemi is glowing-full still from the lunch, from the sour bread and the warm spices, and, too, from so many memories. She thinks of the swaying of a boat on the Turga, and the slow steps of a camel beneath the desert sun, and she looks now at Anetol and smiles.

[Tom Cooke]

The Crocus' Stem • Cinnamon Hill

Afternoon on the 23rd of Bethas, 2720

A
re all our souls change? He thinks of it, looking at the map, but he doesn’t think he could bear to ask it. Thul Ka, at least, knows what its name is; everybody calls it such, and has for hundreds of years, thousands. Thul’amat, he thinks, not so much, finding its curling, sprawling shape on the map. There’s a mark roughly where the Stem is, too, a carved crocus; he tries to trace their path to the university through the streets, but his eyes are strained, and he loses the pursuit.

Nkemi has put a bit of sugar in her kofi with the menda. He smiles; he might’ve expected it. He’s always thought of sugar as going with milk – in tea, at least, and in Anaxas, where folk tend to like their tea taupe if not white. He’s never taken either, but the next time he pours a cup, he doesn’t think a little sweet would hurt.

He looks at her and smiles. If his eyes widen slightly, nothing else on his face changes. He keeps it smooth and steady, though a little more warmth pinches the edges of his eyes.

“I look forward to it,” he says.

A painter, he thinks. Nkemi’s skirt is a pop of color and dizzying patterns against the dark polished wood of the chair, the patterns made even more complicated by the folds of it around her knees. Her shirt stands out bright sun-yellow against her skin, her headscarf the vivid orange-peel color he remembers from Vienda, matching the reflections of soft phosphor lights in her dark eyes. When she speaks, he can feel the warmth in her voice, glowing out the slightest bit into her field, the mona bright and richly-colored as ever.

He takes another sip of kofi, then leans to set it down and pick a pistachio. “What are they like?” he asks, though he pauses with a sheepish smile; he’ll see them eventually, he knows. But he tries to imagine a woman who looks something like Nkemi, sitting and painting the sweep of a canyon in dark, muted colors – “Colorful, I imagine,” he adds, with a wry smile and then a laugh. “Shall I meet her?”

He thinks to paint a landscape full of colors, to bring out the red or the green or the blue, or even to drain it of color – all of this is an argument, one way or another. He’s no hand at painting himself; he can’t imagine.

He cracks the shell, nibbles the pistachio. The nutty taste mingles pleasantly with the rich, bitter dark of the kofi, though he thinks the salty might be better, too, with a little sweet.

He imagines himself taking tentative steps, at the edge of the canyon, when he has only the fragrance and the memory of colors. There are questions he could ask, that he won’t: he can’t imagine if it’s Nkemi’s father’s sister, the father he has heard a little of now, or the mother who told her cautiously that a boch can slip through cracks between Evers. There are questions he can’t – he wonders, now, looking at her, whom she favors more, and if he’ll see Nkemi in their faces when he visits. Not even she can tell him that.

This is like the brush of another mind, only he’s not prepared to be the recipient, just the invoker. He’ll be her guest, soon enough, and perhaps that’s right. But he feels again she’s sat, easy-like, in the midst of all his confusions and all his gaps, and has offered of herself anyway, and he doesn’t know how to feel about it.

He feels sad for a moment, searching for what he might offer her in return. My brother, he wants to say, carves – but he can’t. Re-phrasing it, a man I once knew, would sour the taste of the kofi. He has told her of Deirdre as his governess.

“A poem might be like a portrait or a map – I sent my daughter some books of poetry,” he says, “ada’na Tsadi, ada’xa Adopu. Everything, for her, is an argument.” His lip twitches; he sighs, taking another sip of kofi, looking down into the dregs. “I’ve never painted, but I’ve written poetry, and I suspect you – you put something of yourself in them, when you’re painting something the way you see it. Or the way you want to see it.”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Afternoon, 23 Bethas, 2720
The Crocus' Stem, Cinnamon Hill

Colorful,” Nkemi agrees, smiling fondly; she giggles.

“I do not think so,” she says, in answer to his question, “or at least, not in Dkanat. She is there, sometimes, but I do not think she will be, these next few weeks. If Hulali blesses her journey, she will return to Thul Ka before the end of the rainy season.” Nkemi smiles, fondly.

She writes Nkanzi; Nkanzi was the first person she ever wrote a letter to, even before she left for Thul’Amat. She remembers carefully, intently forming her letters, writing shaky greetings and news of goats to her aunt, and offering the letter to the mother; she remembers Nkese taking it with a solemn, approving smile, folding it, and tucking it in the folds of her envelope alongside whatever she had written.

She remembers, too, sitting next to her mother on the couch, eagerly reading the letter she had gotten in return aloud, navigating her aunt’s swirling handwriting and the bright green ink she wrote with; Nkemi remembers, too, turning the page over and admiring how pretty the green was from the other side, when held up to the light.

“She paints with watercolors, mostly,” Nkemi says, smiling. “The paintings she is known for are the ones which make you feel as if you could be in a place – as if you are beside her on the shores of Hulali’s handprints, or in the caverns of Serkaih, or in the midst of the desert. You feel the cool wind of the distant clouds, or the dry crackling heat of the sand dunes.”

“The paintings which are nearest to her heart,” Nkemi goes on, “are those where the exactness falls away; they are shapes and impressions which ask you to fill in all the rest. They make you work,” Nkemi says with a grin, “but it is guided work; she suggests in the lines and colors where to go, but it is to you to decide, in the end.” Nkemi does not add that more of such works are selling, these days; she knows when they do not from the gaps in Nkanzi’s letters, still written in inks of all sorts of brilliant colors: yellows which are hard to read, reds so vivid they can be felt through the envelope, purples and blues and browns; Nkemi never knows how Nkanzi chooses, but she knows the choice is always well made.

My daughter. I’ve written poetry, Anetol says, lightly. Nkemi’s face does not move; her gaze is settled evenly on him. She sets the kofi down, and pries a few more pistachios loose from their shells, nibbling on them. She is not hungry, but they are a joy to eat. There are things he has not mentioned before, either; she does not remark upon them, but she is grateful, too, that he has met her open door with an opening of his own.

“I do not know much of the making of painting or poetry, myself,” Nkemi says, thoughtful and quiet. “I draw maps, sometimes,” she grins, sheepishly, “or try, at least, to trace them, or to know their tracing.”

Her work is amateur; Nkemi knows that. She does not see herself as a cartographer; she knows, reverent, what lifetime study such work entails, to be done well. She does not mind being called a hobbyist at the conventions she has attended, with all the dismissiveness such a term can convey. She thinks fondly of tracing paper set over maps, of copying them from one surface to another, and finding the careful smoothing of the lines with her own pen.

She pauses, thinking the conversation over; she goes on, tentatively. “Is it a reflection?” Nkemi asks, curiously. “Is it a putting out of that which you see in the world? Or is it…” her eyes lower; she thinks a little more, her brow lightly furrowed, “is it an asking? Like an argument,” Nkemi says, “is the purpose to convince another?”

She grins; she finds the metaphor then, and goes on. “When you are the painter, or the poet, or the mapmaker, are you the scryer or the recipient?” Nkemi smiles “Do you reach yourself out, or do you prepare yourself to receive?”