Afternoon, 29 Loshis, 2720
Walk of Tsed'tsa, Thul'Amat
Walk of Tsed'tsa, Thul'Amat
There were students laughing and shrieking as they hurried notebooks back beneath covered awnings, those few who had dared to try and shift outside in the brief period of sun now struggling to keep themselves and their work dry. Aremu made his way to the edge of the street, where those who still moved shared the narrow strips at the edge of the road, half-covered by awnings and trees and other such shelter.
By the time he reached Tsed’tsa, the rain had shuddered off again; the sun shone through the gaps in the clouds, gleaming in puddles. One bookseller and then the next opened his doors once more, and students poured out from cramped close quarters in cafes and beneath trees as the sun steamed the damp ground drier in preparation for the next storm.
Aremu wore brown, dark enough not to turn transparent with the damp, and light enough that he, too, seemed to steam dry in the sun; his amel’iwe was a rich bright purple, laced through with a lighter tan, and he wore it draped over his shoulders, one fold just shifted to hide the slant of his left arm.
It was not, Aremu thought wryly, his first trip to Thul’Amat since graduation; it was not his first trip since losing his hand, or since Uzoji’s death, or even since arriving in Thul Ka. In fact, he had spent half of the last week in Dzit’ereq, enmeshed in the preparations for the presentation he would be making at the Exhibition. There was no reason to be nervous; this was his place, even with all its familiar strangeness, and he should have been sure of the ground beneath his feet.
He had dreamt, Aremu remembered, the night before, of a different sort of nightmare. There had been no blood or violence, no drowning or death, no reflections in the water of dead men, no sparking hot engine and no sharp knife edge. This was an old nightmare, one that had once been a dream, and he would rather not have remembered it, in the end, although he knew such things could not be put aside. Those pains faded, after all; it had been many years since he had last dreamed so, and he had thought he had put it behind him.
He had thought, Aremu went on to himself, that he had put all the aches of this place behind him. Hadn’t he accumulated other aches, since? How could the man he was now – the airship pirate, the Bad Brother, the plantation manager – be reduced back to an anxious student by virtue of standing in the midst of Tsed’tsa, and waiting for a man he loved?
Aremu glanced up at the sky; the last of the sunlight had gone, the clouds thickening into place once more. There was a distant crack of thunder, though no storm this time, not here; rain began to trickle down, misting damp through the air. Cupboards closed all the same, though no students ran for shelter this time, and the ball and balances games which had begun went on, boys laughing at those who slipped and fell as the ground turned slick.
One bookseller took out a large, dramatic umbrella and snapped it open; an inquiring student came over, and beneath the shelter of it he threw open the cupboard doors, the two of them looking intently at rows of books through the damp.
Aremu didn’t move either; he didn’t retreat further beneath the trees. He was where he had told Tom to find him in the politely exchanged letters, all sir and ada’xa, in which they had arranged for this tour of Dzit’ereq; he was just beneath the edge of the branches of the only tsug tree which grew along the walk. There, he waited; there, he told himself not to fear.
