[Closed] [Mature] Dancing After Death

[Tom Cooke]

Riverside in the Three Flowers

Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

H
e had expected the pause – he’d caught the grin with a sheepish little smile of his own – well, dove, he might’ve said in private, except for the lockpicking, I didn’t get much better at it. That’s why it’s good you’re a pirate and an engineer; between the two of us we might be decent at burglary, and I reckon that’s love.

But he hadn’t expected Aremu to go on in that quiet, thoughtful way, as they stepped out onto the dock. He couldn’t help the tug of a smile when he looked over at Aremu, and Aremu caught his eye; he watched him lick his lips and almost held his breath, full of the river breeze and the hint of a night’s chill. Then he smiled a little and went on, and he tried to tame his own smile back down where a grin had almost wrestled its way out. He listened instead: he held on and listened.

He wasn’t quite smiling when Aremu trailed off. He nodded, glancing back at the open door to Dzid’oz’s shack with an eyebrow arched.

It was sparse, and there was nobody to brush with his field on the way to the table; he was grateful, feeling pricklingly aware of the mona hanging calm about him. The glances he caught were only glances; he’d’ve said there was more curiosity in them than anything else, and they weren’t only for him. All the same, he was grateful to sit, easing himself down onto the stool with no small twinge of his muscles.

Aremu went on, and he listened, rapt. He caught that edge of a smile – almost as if it were necessary for the shaping of Uzoji’s name.

Did you ever –? It wasn’t on the tip of his tongue, and it never would be. He didn’t think it was a question he had the words to ask, even if he’d had the permission. It wasn’t that he wanted to ask if Aremu had ever envied him; it wasn’t that simple. He thought he would’ve – he had, once, in his human way – but he was beginning to grasp there was more to this than he could understand.

Did it hurt, maybe, but he knew the answer to that, and it wasn’t at the heart of it, either. Aremu hadn’t asked him what he’d thought of those sprawling, polished floors, those vivid tapestries, as a starving lad. He’d no right to ask this, whatever it was he wanted to ask.

He thought what it must’ve been, to have had a qalqa warm and humming underneath your fingertips, and then to have an ocean between you and it.

But it was Aremu’s story, and he knew enough of stories to know that. And in Aremu’s story, Uzoji was a smile, and so he smiled, too, trying to think on the way Uzoji’d taken his hand firm and never talked down to him, even when he was looking straight up. A good friend, he thought, and left it there.

He saw Aremu’s jaw tighten. He inclined his head, quiet, thinking of – Iquwi, he remembered after a moment.

He was rapt still, smiling again, trying to picture the boch the man across from him had been. Beginning to picture it, with a mixture of excitement and something more tender – embarrassingly so – thinking of knobbly knees and a bold little voice just beginning to crack.

So the lad’s voice startled him, standing as he was just out of the light, just on the edge of his field; he turned, glancing over him, grinning sheepishly. “Ah,” he started, hesitant. I do, he almost said. “Thank you, ada’xa.”

“Tonight is tam’oqap eqi.” The lad was watching him; his gaze moved to Aremu, more hopeful but still sheepish. “Poa'xa’jara caught plenty of dzira’dzúru – the flood,” he added, grinning hesitantly.

“Efo’ru!” came a gravelly voice from inside.

The lad looked over his shoulder, then looked back, sheepish, grinning. He held up a hand as if to say, I’ll be back, then went, almost bumping into a woman as she turned to leave.

He looked back at Aremu, suddenly keen again, propping his head up on a hand. “What happened then?” he asked.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Late Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
Riverside, Three Flowers

Aremu inclined his head in a solemn nod when the boy looked his way; the smile had gone from his lips, though not, he thought, from the corners of his eyes. Maybe the boy saw it, or something else; he glanced away, then back, and he was still grinning when he left. Tom was smiling at him, something soft in the corner of his eyes, too, if it wasn’t just the dim wash of the light; his hair was just a little rumpled, still, and Aremu wanted more than anything to reach out and run his fingers through it.

“Then,” Aremu said, frowning a little; he looked down at the table for a moment, remembering. He’d climbed on to the footstool; he hadn’t known then and didn’t know now whether the instructor had believed him, or had meant to catch him out in the lie. He couldn’t conjure up the man’s face; he couldn’t remember anything about him, not the particulars: whether he’d set the footstool down with a smirk and turned to lift his eyebrows at the other boys, or whether he’d sat it down with a faint, encouraging sort of smile. Perhaps Aremu hadn’t known even at the time; he did remember adrenaline, electric, coursing through his veins.


From it, he’d been able to see over the edge – but not, he remembered, to reach, and not even close. He’d nearly backed down; he’d wanted to back down. I know how, he might have argued, it’s only that I can’t reach – and he’d thought they would all know him a liar, and Uzoji, too, and that had hurt worst of all.

The face he did remember was Uzoji’s; he’d glanced back, he thought, and caught his friend’s gaze in the crowd. Perhaps it wasn’t the face Uzoji had as a boy that his mind summoned up; he could put his friend in the uniform they’d worn in those days, slender and knobby kneed, both of them in the midst of shooting up, hair cut close, but he couldn’t have said if he was remembering his face too adult.

“I could only just see,” Aremu said; he was smiling, again, he thought, with a wistful ache. There were other, more complicated stories; there were moments that had been tense and difficult and strange, demoralizing, when he’d felt Evers away from the boy, and then the man, he’d always called his best friend. This, he thought, wasn’t one of them. “But I couldn’t have reached, and I knew it. I glanced back and caught Uzoji’s eye and uh…” his grin broadened, just a bit.

“He came over,” Aremu said, slowly, “and – I climbed onto his shoulders, and he climbed up on to the footstool – he was wobbling, both hands against the metal sheet, but he held – and I leaned over the top of it and put the piston ring in place.”

I don’t think, Aremu wanted to say, that was the moment when I decided to become an engineer. I don’t know that there was a moment; I’m not sure it works like that. There were many, perhaps, little snippets scattered from then on and maybe before, too, all the way up until I wrote Aremu Ediwo down on the exam and went to stand in front of the testing committee, and told them what it was I proclaimed.

It didn’t end there, either, he might have said; I chose it, every day – sometimes every hour – through all of Thul’Amat, and afterwards, too.

“We didn’t get in trouble,” Aremu said, instead, “or anything like that. If anyone said anything about it, I don’t remember. I climbed down, and we went back to watching the lecture; the instructor pulled the metal away, and the engine was as magnificent from the side as it had been from above.” Aremu smiled at Tom, sheepishly, his left hand on his lap, and the prosthetic on his right wrist tucked beneath the fold of his amel’iwe. The smell of fish and tamarind wafted through the air, and his stomach grumbled once more, like a strange sort of coda.

[Tom Cooke]

Riverside in the Three Flowers

Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

W
ater lapped gentle-like against the supports below; the docks creaked with footsteps. In the corner of his eye, he caught another curious glance – he heard the word orozem, and then imbala – but he couldn’t take his eyes away from Aremu’s face.

Aremu was looking down now, as if in thought. He studied him; he wondered for a moment if he hadn’t been meant to ask, or if the rest would be painful in the telling. But he didn’t think it was that sort of pause. The breeze ruffled Aremu’s amel’iwe, rippled shadows through the deep yellow. He looked more than anything like he was concentrating, like he did when he worked. He almost smiled, studying the familiar line between his brows, at the edge of his lips, wondering at how he’d come to know it.

There was something sad in Aremu’s smile when he looked up, finally, and went on.

He found himself anxious for the lad Aremu’d been; he could imagine, if only a fraction of it, the weight he’d felt on his shoulders standing there. A familiar weight by now, he thought wistfully, and thought again of Iquwi.

The grin broke out on his face to match Aremu’s. He laughed, picturing it. “Ah, damn,” he said, still grinning. Did you–? He still felt the edge of worry, but Aremu answered the question he hadn’t asked. There was an unexpectedly conclusive grumble, then – Aremu, he thought – and he laughed again, soft and a little tender, thinking of Aremu climbing off Uzoji’s shoulders, of a piston ring he couldn’t picture on an engine he almost could.

It was strange to think of Uzoji wobbling under his weight. He thought without meaning to of the great heavy pipes he’d lifted with poetry, a long time ago, while Aremu worked.

Before he could say anything, footsteps creaked up to the edge of the light, and steam wafted out over them.

The lad – not much older than the lads they’d been, then, he thought – was carrying the tray on his shoulders with the springy ease of youth. He felt looser; he grinned up at him. “Domea domea,” he breathed as the boy began to divest himself of a broad plate and a couple of battered metal bowls.

It wasn’t just the smell of curried fish; it was fried batter now, and chilies and coriander, and a whiff of cool coconut. There were tsoq’ud on the platter, a little too browned, along with a thick white chutney. He half stood to help the lad with his bowl, and he found himself looking down with raised brows. “Dzira’dzuru,” said the lad, grinning sheepishly, into the pause.

Along with the fish and curry leaves, something that might’ve been a mant shrimp was poking itself up out of the broth, all shelled and whiskered river-thing. He grinned more broadly, setting the bowl down. “Waters...” The Mugrobi was slippery in his head; he tried again, “Hulali carrying you of gentle waters,” smiling.

The boy looked surprised, then laughed, then quickly stifled his laugh. He bowed, hurrying back to the shack, leaving them to their spread of curried fish and vegetables, fritters and chutney. He came back with pot of tea, shedding steam that smelled like mint and something he couldn’t place.

“Ah, me, it’s been a while,” he said into the pause, breathing in the smells as they mingled unfamiliarly with the scent of the river. “How’s my Mugrobi?” he asked suddenly, glancing up; he tried to keep a straight face, but a grin broke out, and he raised his brows.

He looked back down after a few moments, finding the thread again, smile quieting. “Was that when you,” he started, then paused, uncertain. “You’d always wanted to work with engines? Even then.” And Uzoji knew it, too, he thought.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Late Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
Riverside, Three Flowers

Aremu let out a pleased sigh at the sight of the food, hunger prickling all through him. It had grown late, somehow, he thought, although he supposed that was always the way of time. The pale yellow of the broth was mixed through with small, bright green curry leaves, speckled with bits of pepper, floating chunks of tomato alongside strands of coriander, with thick white chunks of fish alongside the shell-crawler. Set down with the tsoq’ud and the chutney, it was more than enough.

He’d been in Thul Ka scarcely a month, Aremu thought, looking down at the spread, and the sight and smell of it prickled something behind his eyes and in the back of his throat. Thul Ka was his home, he told himself; on the islands, they all knew him for it. Yet, he thought perhaps it was homesickness, nudging at him – not for being alone in the large house that had once been filled with Uzoji, but for Ahura, at least, for the men who worked in the fields. For, he thought, smiling at Tom, the food.

His lips quirked at Tom's question; Tom grinned before he could, and Aremu grinned too. “Improving,” he said, smiling. “This looks great.”

He reached for the tsoq’ud and a spoon, and began; he pulled apart the ring of fried dough with his fingers to reveal its pale white spongy insides. It mopped up the tam’oqap effortlessly, soaking up the liquid, and he nudged a bit of fish into the curl of it; it tasted, Aremu thought, as good as it smelled, and that was really all one could hope for. If, by now, he could have said that Ahura made it differently – and something of how – he couldn’t have said he minded.

The question caught him by surprise, and Aremu glanced up. He frowned, briefly, thinking – surely, he thought, uneasily, he must have said, some time or another. They didn’t, he knew, talk of it much; he didn’t, he thought, talk of such things much. There rarely seemed to him to be a point; there wasn’t, he would have said, much to be gained from looking back.

But Tom wanted to know, Aremu thought; that was enough. That was, he would have said, more than enough.

“Yes,” Aremu answered, wiping his hand lightly and looking at Tom. “That is, I had wanted to before and I wanted to after. I was, uh…” his gaze flickered down towards the table for a moment.

“I struggled to stay away from them as a boy,” Aremu said, after a moment. He smiled; there was something crooked at the edges of it. “They weren’t…” his throat moved in a silent swallow, and he went on, “It’s hard to hide when you’ve been at an engine, in any case. I’d have spent hours happily handing tools to… whomever was working at them.”

There was more, he thought, he could have said there; there were memories he didn’t care to think too much about. There wasn’t, he might have said, much I was disobedient about. I tried; I tried, and I would have said I was honest, although I know now I couldn’t have known. Engines were always worth the risk, and even the punishment.

Another smile quirked at his lips, a fonder memory; he looked back up at Tom. “Just after I turned nine, I went to Dzum with Uzoji and his mother for Roalis and Yaris. We flew; I think I spent the whole of it in the engine room,” his smile widened a little more. “All the time, anyway, I wasn't on deck with Uzoji, pretending it was our ship.” He took a breath, in and then carefully back out, and reached to rip another piece off of the tsoq’ud.

“That,” Aremu added, “was when we first met Ahura.” He grinned at Tom, scooping up a pale green eighth of eggplant this time, soft and nearly slipping from the skin.

[Tom Cooke]

Riverside in the Three Flowers

Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

B
its and pieces.

He remembered; he knew that pause, felt the rhythm of the words break apart, though Aremu went on even and soft-voiced, even with a smile playing about his lips. I wouldn’t ask you to speak of that, he wanted to say, though he supposed now it was all tied together, and he wasn’t sure where the gaps began or ended. He still thought of it sometimes; it was hard to imagine that lad, harder than imagining him at eleven, twelve, fourteen, twenty. Even up to his elbows in grease, staining –

He could imagine it better now than he had then. He didn’t hesitate; there was a smile on his face – he didn’t hide the tenderness, or the interest, in his eyes, because he couldn’t quite bear to here – and he set about the tsoq’ud and the tam’oqap, finding a casual rhythm.

Did children, the thought came unbidden to his mind, ever wear white?

He’d rolled his sleeves up; he could still see it in the corner of his eye, underneath a swath of orange. The lanternlight made it look almost yellow. He tried to cast himself back to the cable cars, and he couldn’t remember. He hadn’t even noticed, those first weeks. He couldn’t remember.

It didn’t matter, and it struck him as a strange thought, here. Something else nagged at the edge of it. He set it aside, thinking instead of a lad’s quiet questions. That, he thought he could picture: familiar keen, thoughtful eyes, the flash of a familiar smile.

There was a smile on Aremu’s face now, and his own warmed. The chutney was cool and tangy, but somehow less hot than he’d expected. He remembered it all hot on the isles, tear-stingingly hot. That thought brought another smile to his face, a little wry.

Dzum. Uzoji’s fami’s estate. He raised his brows, listening, thinking of that lad in the belly of an airship; he’d seen only one engine room himself, and – he set that aside, shifting in his seat.

He could picture a young Uzoji less well, but he caught Aremu’s pause this time, too, the controlled rise and fall of his breath. He found himself wishing he could reach and press Aremu’s hand with his own, though he wasn’t sure if it was his place, in this.

“Ada’na Ahura,” he repeated, his own smile widening into a grin. He’d just scooped up a piece of soft tomato on a bite of tsoq’ud, and he paused to put it in his mouth, wiping his hand off. These motions were easier now, too: his hand didn’t shake on the tsoq’ud, and barely shook on the spoon.

He felt sheepish at first, even after the last time she’d come up, even after Aremu had asked him back. He’d left with the warm memory of Ahura in the kitchen, with the smells of curry and lamb; he remembered, too, Ahura’s husband, and staggering back with one of Aremu’s arms over his shoulder, tasting the iron tang of fear in his mouth, his throat paralyzed. But the breeze whisked through his hair and tugged at Aremu’s amel’iwe, and he was smiling, and it was hard to hold.

“You met her then?” he murmured. Of course he had; he remembered the history he’d felt between them nearly a year ago now, the laughing back-and-forth that’d drifted up through the window. And – in those strange moments – the worry in her eyes.

The tea was cool enough now, he thought. With a smile, he reached for the pot and began pouring Aremu’s cup, methodical and easy, steady hands.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Late Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
Riverside, Three Flowers

I did not know, he’d told Tom once, or near enough. He hadn’t specified, then, what it was he hadn’t known as a boy; he hadn’t quite known how to, for what he had learned was hard to explain to an Anaxi such as Tom had been. I did not know, he could have said, that I don’t have a soul. I did not know, he could have said, that I wasn’t the galdor they thought me. I did not know, he could have said, that there was nothing of honor in me, that I would never know if I spoke truth or a lie.

They hadn’t come back to it, since then, not so directly. I was a disappointment, Aremu had never said, long before that.

Uzoji was always as an escape, Aremu wanted to say, then, not knowing if it was true or not, and knowing that it wasn’t complete, at least. A dream of being free, he could have said, thinking of the Eqe Aqawe – the first words, perhaps, he’d ever shared with Tom, a long time ago, in the shadow of a ship and a man now gone.

“She cooked for us that summer,” Aremu said, smiling. “We ate a lot, as you can imagine; I think we spent most of it out of doors.” His gaze wandered down to the tea pot, watching steam curl off the streaming dark liquid into the riverside air; it drifted on the breeze, wafting away quickly enough, smelling of mint and lemongrass.

“The tsug were there then,” Aremu grinned, a brief flash of it which lingered at the edges of his mouth, “though not as they are now. There’s a tangle that still’s there at the heart of the rows, a handful of very old trees. I think we climbed every last one.”

He took the cup that Tom had poured, taking a sip; he reached for the tsoq’ud again, for the fish and the vegetables, a string of coriander dangling and dripping lightly; none splattered on the neat set of his clothing, or his amel’iwe.

“Uzoji found her again when he and Niccolette moved there,” Aremu added, carefully precise. He had been with them; he knew that. He and Uzoji had worked on the house themselves, shirtless in the sun alongside the laborers, had built the little hut on the beach with their own hands: four of them, in those days.

The thought didn’t hurt as much as it might have; when it came to stationary work, Aremu thought, he wasn’t so much worse off than he’d been. Slower, perhaps, but he made up for it by working hard; the tools he’d developed were – nearly enough. He didn’t look down at the curl of wood in his lap, eating, as best as he could, as if there had never been another hand.

“I remembered her fondly, even then,” Aremu added. “I’d never had anything like island food before; I liked it.” He grinned, suddenly, looking up at Tom. “We, uh – made ourselves sick, eating too much spicy food; she made uqikesediq.” Rayowa, he might have said, rubbed my back too. It was something of a paradise, he might have said; no tutors, no rules, no expectations but that we’d amuse ourselves swimming and climbing and running about and come back for meals.

He looked at Tom instead, across the table; he frowned, for a moment, studying the other man’s face, for all there was a kind, soft smile on his face, a fondness around his eyes. “It must be… strange for you to think of,” Aremu said, quietly. “Different,” he clarified, tentatively; perhaps it wasn’t quite a question, but his voice lifted, a little, at the end, and he didn’t look away from it.

[Tom Cooke]

Riverside in the Three Flowers

Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

I
can imagine, he wanted to say, soft and warm; he didn’t have to. He glanced down, careful as tea streamed from the pot to his small cup. Steam whirled up from both, mingled in the air: mint and lemongrass. It wasn’t, he thought fleetingly, Ahura’s mint tea.

And he smiled still, tearing into another round of tsoq’ud and fitting a little pulpy tomato on it. It was still warm, and his stomach still half ached with hunger. It was good to think of bochi and the sun and salt-breeze, like this; he could almost taste Ahura’s cooking, though it irked him he couldn’t think exactly what the difference was. But he could imagine laughter, and he could imagine Aremu scrambling up the trunk of a tsug tree, cradled in the twisting branches.

Did I see those? he thought to ask. The oldest ones. I don’t think we went so far into the grove…

I hurt you that day, he thought. I didn’t know how much. The skin of an eggplant floated across the broth, green dyed almost orange. He caught it with the curve of the tsoq’ud, folded it over once with the spoon, took another bite.

Found her again, Aremu said, and he glanced up. It occurred to him with a jolt: they must have been two arati boys to Ahura, that summer. And then an arata had come back with his wife and his closest friend, an imbala.

Humans, some detached part of his mind told him, don’t get attached, either. The unveiling’s after a year; you don’t name until then, if you’re smart, and you don’t hold onto hope before five or six. If you’re very smart, you don’t hold onto hope at all, though it gets harder in the summer, when they seem so strong. And it’s harder, the longer you go. It’s how Vita makes us, Deirdre told me once, though she never told me how she learned.

But ten years? And the boch still –

Aremu was grinning, pulling apart spongy tsoq’ud deftly with his left hand. He grinned back, raising his brows. “Uqikesediq’s easy on an upset stomach,” he said softly, fondly, thinking of nothing then but two lads with eyes bigger than their stomachs and bolder than their tongues. Easy on an aching heart, too, he thought, and his eyes softened.

Aremu’s frown caught him, and the edge of a question. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. He was finishing a bite of tsoq’ud and chutney; the tam’oqap was hotter than he’d thought. “Different?” he echoed.

The food? You, back then? he wondered. The isles?

Or all of them - what you’re not quite saying?

“Different,” he agreed, nodding slowly; then, “and similar, too,” with a spark of a smile. “I can’t quite imagine being a lad there, or being a lad brave enough to climb a tree. I can certainly imagine eating too much spicy food and being sick.” There was a mischievous tilt to his smile, for a moment. “And I… did spend most of my boyhood out of doors.”

A boch indoors is hard for me to imagine, he thought to add cheerfully, but found himself on uncertain footing. There wasn’t much of an indoors back then, he couldn’t bring himself to say, in his smooth Viendan accent.

He wiped the oil off his fingers and reached to cradle his cup of tea. “When I was – nine… Ah, that summer. You know,” he offered, as tentative as the almost-question, “I was a scrawny lad, then. The runt of the other lads.” He lifted a brow.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Late Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
Riverside, Three Flowers

Different, Tom asked. He frowned, a little; the smile slipped off the edge of his face, softening the lines around his mouth and along his cheek, and at the corners of his eyes. For a moment, perhaps more than one, Aremu thought he’d misstepped; he felt an uneasy pitching underfoot, a sliding, as if rocks he had thought solidly attached were shifting beneath the pressure of his foot.

Different, he wanted to say, again, thinking of Tom’s description of the tapestry, and not quite sure how to say that the study in the Vauquelin house reminded him of nothing so much as his own childhood. Different, he wanted to say, thinking of how Tom had described his childhood before and now too, though he knew too, uneasily, that they had found similarities where perhaps there should have been none.

Different, Tom said again, inclining his head in a slow nod. He smiled; Aremu smiled back, not sure whether to think he had climbed up another step, or whether the shifting beneath his foot had stopped after all, whether it had only been his imagination. He’d stopped with his fingers on the edge of the bowl, without thinking; he reached for the tsoq’ud once more.

He grinned, more easily, when Tom spoke of eating too much spicy food and being sick; it softened, in a way he couldn’t quite describe, at the term out of doors.

Aremu wasn’t sure he did know; he knew, though, something of the man Tom had said raised him, and so he inclined his head, very lightly. Was it a lie, if it was meant to straddle the line between different worlds? One couldn’t lie in silence; that was what he had always been told. A misrepresentation, then; something which wouldn’t have stained the honor he didn’t have, but which wasn’t true, either. There’s so much, he wanted to say, in the middle; I can’t make sense of it.

“You?” Aremu asked, reflexively; he grinned. “That is hard to imagine,” he wanted to take Tom’s hand, then, badly; his fingers twitched, but he took another piece of the tsoq’ud, instead, finding another piece of flaky white fish in the midst of the tam’oqap. “I suppose you didn’t have your beard yet, then…?” His voice lowered on the question, just a little; he didn’t look around. They were private enough, here, to say such things in the midst of the crowd, or so Aremu hoped; he wouldn’t, he thought, have gambled on it too much.

Humans and wicks, Aremu knew with certainty, didn’t have beards by nine. Most arati and imbali didn’t grow them at all; he was one of them, having never felt the prickle of hair on his cheeks. Most of those who did, from what he knew, came to them later in life – late teens or early twenties before there was more than a light dusting of dark hair on dark cheeks, even later before there was enough to call a beard.

He thought, somewhat fondly, of Tom’s hair; he thought of it wistfully but not sorrowfully, for it had been only a part of the man, and a small part of that, for all that he’d been fond of it. Put another way, Aremu thought, a little wryly, he’d never wanted to braid the hair of a stranger on the street; it had always been Tom, he thought, and not the details of him. If he hadn’t understood that before – if he hadn’t thought of it enough to say – he did now; there was no avoiding it, now.

Tucked in the question was the hope that Tom would go on; he tried to say it, with the little lift of his lips at the edges of his cheeks, with the careful raising of his eyebrows, with the way his gaze lingered on Tom. Not for this meal, his usual style of eating as if he thought of nothing else; he didn’t think he could have born it, here.

[Tom Cooke]

Riverside in the Three Flowers

Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

I
t was hard not to grin, when Aremu replied; he laughed, feeling a rush of tenderness. It was easier now, somehow. Aremu lowered his voice then, and he blinked – and his smile softened. Something about the quieting of his voice, as if anyone could begin to guess the truth of it. He was thankful and bemused all at once, and he wished again he could reach out and run a hand down the line of his cheek, or kiss that curious smile on his lips.

“No indeed.” He took a sip of tea, warm and cool all at once with the mint. “That was – when was…”

Do you–? he wanted to ask. He’d stayed the night with him enough to know shaving wasn’t a daily affair, even if he did. The sharp, elegant line of his jaw had always been so smooth; it’d taken him by surprise once, a long time ago, along with the smooth skin of his arms, his chest. He’d known a few arati with beards, old men all.

He wasn’t sure what sort of beard he could grow now. There was a spec of Anatole and his family tucked into a desk-drawer; he’d found it accidentally, and he hadn’t recognized him at first, with a glossy, well-groomed mustache on his lips. He’d almost recoiled.

He grinned. “I was starting to shave by – twelve, thirteen, I think – or I should’ve been. I had it in mind to grow a beard, and it was, uh…” He thought of the patchy, downy thing with a snort. “It was coming in proper when I was fifteen, I think.”

He thought through another sip of tea.

The other lads, he’d said blithely. He hesitated now. His lads, he might’ve said.

It’s not the same, he wanted to say, as – he wasn’t fooling anybody, though. Least of all Aremu, whose thoughtful dark eyes were lingering on him, whose hand was a little slower at the qalqa of eating tonight.

“There were seven of us at that time. Pickpockets, thieves, none of us much older than thirteen or fourteen; a man named Marleigh took us in, and we worked for him,” he said, clearing his throat.

I can talk about him, he wanted to say, in response to a question that hadn’t been asked, not even in spirit. Defiantly. Daven Marleigh was nothing but a mean old bat; plenty of those around. The AAF had given him that bum leg, and the stick too, and he took the lot of us in on his pension and fed us if we brought in enough ging for him. And if we didn’t, there were other –

“I was, really – the runt, I mean,” and the smile crept back a little, livened his eyes. “I shot up when I finally did, and I was like a wild chrove in an antique shop for a few years. But back then…” He grinned. “We made a game of it, especially in the summer, during those endless festivals in the Court and Cantile. A runt makes for a good pickpocket.”

He set down his tea and picked up the rest of his tsoq’ud where he’d left it, eying the prawn, gleaming with orange broth and flecked with pepper. He wasn’t sure he’d seen anything like that in tam’oqap on the isles, and he wasn’t altogether sure what to do with it here.

He scooped up a perfect wedge of eggplant instead, skin still on. “I brought in nineteen wallets on the solstice, that summer,” he said. “I got a good cut from it, and I took my little brother to the festival the next morning. We got sick, we ate so much hingle fry,” he laughed.

He paused for the bite, chewing thoughtfully, then looked at Aremu.

“Different,” he admitted after a moment, suddenly a little sheepish, with another lift of his eyebrow. “I did tell you I was a wild thing.”

I know a little something of – a different way of life, now, he wanted to say, but it felt presumptuous; he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to grow up among those things, and least of all what things exactly Aremu had grown up among. I don’t know what you must make of it, he wanted to say, but he didn’t think Aremu disapproved; he thought now he’d never looked down on him, not for what he knew or didn’t know, what he’d done or hadn’t.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Late Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
Riverside, Three Flowers

Tom was grinning at fond old memories, at the thought of the beard he had – or hadn’t had – as a boy. Aremu grinned; he could, at least, sit up straight rather than leaning in towards the other man, for all that he couldn’t seem to do much for the broadness of his smile.

It was, he thought, a balancing act. If he let himself look at the rest of the world too closely, if he let himself see the danger, then, he thought, this fragile, beautiful moment might shatter on the harshness of it. There was something about it, for the both of them, he thought – maybe it had been the conversation beneath and in the midst of the branches of the tree, maybe the way they had come together – the new way, Aremu thought, still with a warm glow as he thought of it, and the joy he’d seen in Tom during – maybe it was something about the quiet riverside air not so different from the rose, the warm smell of tam’oqap not so different from the isles, and the joining together of the two.

Marleigh, Tom said, carefully, dropping the name into the midst of them. Aremu had been in the midst of reaching for his food; he couldn’t have said why he drew his hand aside, took the cup of tea inside and sipped at it, the sharp, tangy lemongrass almost as bright as the cool mint.

Tom reached for his food again, and so Aremu did too; each word, he thought, uneasily, was like a gift he hadn’t asked for. He treasured them, and at the same time he found himself afraid of looking too closely, afraid, he thought, of realizing just how little he deserved them – that Tom, he thought, his chest aching, would realize. My little brother, Tom added, casually, and laughed.

He smiled, all the same, when Tom lifted his eyebrows, and he knew it was far more tender than it should have been, here and now.

Aremu cleared his throat; he shifted on the small, metal stool, adjusting his arms and legs and the fall of his amel’iwe, as if it would make him more comfortable. Let’s continue this back in the room, he wanted to say, and he couldn’t; he wasn’t sure he could have spoken about this so easily, tucked in the bed with Tom, and he couldn’t have said why. Maybe, he thought ruefully, it was because they could neither of them distract the other, here, and – while Aremu had no objections to such distractions, he had to admit they weren’t terribly conducive to discussion.

Maybe, he thought, it was because it was easier with something to focus on before them, with the food and drifting smell of the tea, with the faint chatter of conversation and the wash of moonlight rising over the water.

You have a brother? Aremu wanted to ask. I didn’t know.

He started to ask; he opened his mouth, and then closed it again. He looked down at his food for a moment, and then back at Tom.

“I didn’t spend a lot of time with my brother,” Aremu said, carefully. “He was a few years older, and we were both tutored at home. I remember him as always very busy with his studies.” I went to him, he wanted to say, once, for help with a math problem – the words stuck somewhere in his throat, because he wasn’t sure he could put anything light into the memory.

“But that’s not quite right, I suppose,” Aremu said, instead, looking up at Tom. He smiled. “If a man’s brothers are based on bonds and not blood, then – I had a brother, and I spent a lot of time with him, and I’m grateful for every moment.”