[PM to Join] Gains the More it Gives

[Tom Cooke]

Old Marlingspike Bridge • Over the Arova

Evening on the 10th of Ophus, 2719

T
he chill doesn’t sting him so badly anymore, but the air is heavier. It smells: not of the crisp breezes blowing snow off the mountain, not of frozen things and old stone, but of pavement and kenser-sweat and people. Even underneath the delicious spill of frying things, the not-too-distant acrid tang the factories’re coughing up, the wafting smells of tea and incense – people, teeming.

Tom grew up with that smell; he’s seldom been without it. If not on the airship, then in the Rose, in Vienda, in Brunnhold. The Isles were one thing, and he misses the mild breezes; Kzecka was another.

There’s so flooding much here, was all he could say, and you can’t see the stars. Not properly. You can see one or two; some nights, you can see a whole spread of them. But you can’t see the swirls of color, like dyes curling through dark water. Not like you can in the mountains, where the air’s thin, and it’s just you and the old stone and the big colorful sky.

The long, broad bridge into Thripping Bite is lined with stalls and packed with people. The Arova rushes, mysterious and dark, somewhere far underneath.

The sky’s darkening just enough you can see the faces of a few stars, peeping out beneath the great velvety blanket. It’s cloudy, so there aren’t many; cloudy and drizzly. It’s warm enough there’s a fog in the air, just enough the lanterns – some bobbing, some still; some red, some blue, and occasionally gold – all shed blurry haloes. Like moondogs; like glamours, drifting and mingling.

He can’t know what it’s like to see a city for the first time; he knows, now, a little something of being away and settling back into the bustle. He wonders if it’s a tenth of what Nkemi felt the first time she went to Thul Ka.

It’s been since Achtus he’s seen Nkemi pezre Nkese. He remembers the last meeting fondly as he’s remembered all the others; he finds himself missing his cheerful meditation partner, the sight of a bright patterned scarf and wide dark eyes crinkling at the edges with a grin.

Ophus is a busy enough time for the brigk, he knows, with the drunken trouble folk sometimes get into on Dally Day, with the unrest that builds from the Remembrance and spills out to Clock’s Eve. It’s a time for celebrations and unease. Uptown, too; there’ve been more parties, more whispers about the changing of the Symvoul, than he remembers from any other time in the year. He remembers Clock’s Eve last year, and dreads what’s to come at Pendulum.

But Anatole Vauquelin is more himself than ever, they say, aside from that strange clairvoyant field, aside from the threads of white drifting through the red and grey. His policies are bolder; he’s coming into his own, in his age. He’s even, they whisper, taken up singing again.

He has deepened the lines he does not wish to claim.

Since he’s come back from Kzecka, he’s been busy. He suspects the prefect’s been busy, too, for what it’s worth.

He thought about inviting her over for tea, for meditation. It’s the stories of Dkanat and strange-eyed goats and the big desert sky he misses; he could drink them up for hours. The tender acknowledgment in her eyes, too, of something he feels, though he still thinks he has been a liar to earn it.

But it’s not fair, to call her when his soul needs stories of Serkaih, and he’s afraid it won’t bring him back to himself this time anyway. Afraid he’s lost some of the man Nkemi called a friend. That face looks even thinner in the mirror, the sneers even easier, the eyes even colder. He wants to find that friend of Nkemi’s and give her a little of him.

There’s a party Uptown, at the Vauquelin house. Anatole is not at it.

They’re near enough Fly-Ash this bridge is mostly natt – most pale from the winter, worn rough, dark-eyed and dark-haired. Some Mugrobi, chatting fluently in their mother tongue. The Soots is mostly grey, but on the equinox, it’s a whirl of color and laughter, flashing teeth – crooked, missing – but smiling – warm smells. It’s almost like the festivals in the Rose.

He’s smiling, too, looking up through the mist, waiting for her in a niche at the Soots end of the bridge.

He catches a whiff of cinnamon and cardamom. Nearby, the shell of a crumbling gatehouse has been filled with steam and lights. A wiry old natt in a stained apron, a halo of grey round his head, ladles mulled wine into clay cups out of a mant vat.

A lass of twelve or thirteen stands at the table. Along with the dark plum liquid, Tom sees a flash of orange plop into her cup. When she turns, she’s beaming through the steam.

He takes a deep breath and shuts his eyes.

When he opens them, he sees a familiar bright scarf in the crowd round the gatehouse. He hesitates, for a moment; he feels some spark of anxiety all through him, a pit of something like sadness.

Then, setting himself, he steps into the crowd, catching a look of alarm as a big natt close by feels the brush of a second field. He ignores it; something about being a head below the canopy in this thicket irks him, anyway.

“Nkemi,” he says instead, with a tentative smile. Without thinking, his field mingles warmly with hers. “May She keep you through the long night.” The requisite words. “Thank you for ada’xa Ediqa’s book. I’ve tried one of the meditations — Amel’s Bond — it’s been more than helpful.”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 10 Ophus, 2719
Old Marlingspike Bridge, The Dives

A blue phosphor lantern gleams in the air of the bridge; something which is not quite rain drifts through the pool of light, thin sheets scattered by gusts of wind. Nkemi, too, is cast blue by the lights; she stands beneath one, bright-eyed, all the swirling magenta and crimson threads which trace paisley patterns through her dark purple head wrap darker and stranger and more brilliant for the gleaming.

There are so many people.

For a moment, her heart lifts and soars on the updraft of them – on the laughter all around, the bright smiles on pale blue, red, yellow and gold-shadowed faces. It is warm in the crowd, Roa-blessedly warm, wrapped all around her. Beneath them all the Arova rushes, dim and distant and ever-flowing, and even when Nkemi cannot hear it she knows it is there, and it, too, lives somewhere inside her chest, rushes beneath the beating of her heart like the breath in her lungs.

Nkemi is close to the Gatehouse; one gloved hands curls around the long metal pole of the blue lantern, and she hops half up onto the rain-slick brick, the rough tread of her boots clinging long enough. Up above the crowd she still cannot see Anetol; they are mostly human, this crowd, but there are wicks enough that she cannot find one head of cap-covered red hair. But it does not matter; Nkemi does not mean to see him so much as to let him see her.

And, too – she wishes to see the crowd. It writhes and flows like a river all its own, Roa’s lively counterpart to Hulali’s work below.

Nkemi lowers herself back down; a man jostles her, as he passes, freezes and mutters and apology beneath his breath.

“May She keep you through the long night,” Nkemi offers back, the words she has carefully memorized during the day.

The human stares at her; he frowns into the thicket of his heavy light beard, uncertain. “Half-veiled she greets us all,” he says, rough-voiced, and plunges back in the swirl of the crowd.

Nkemi does not let it trouble her; she has long-since learned better. She smiles, still, and waits; she trusts.

Anetol appears; the blue light catches his face, and traces the shadows carved deeper, now, into his thin cheeks. It glints through his hair; the red glows almost purple, the gray a little less dark. There are new threads, now, white as snow, which gleam fully blue, making a tapestry of him. Nkemi smiles; she cannot but smile, though some other emotion beats, too, in her chest. His smile warms at the sight, catches, glows a little brighter, and she reaches forward and takes her gloves in his, even as he speaks.

It is not the Anaxi way; she does not care.

“Anetol,” Nkemi says. His field is warm around her, friendly, and she lets it in without thought; all the mona around her, belike and unlike, greet him, and a bastly edge of celebration washes through it. “May She keep you through the long year.” The traditional response, the one Nkemi was taught; she is not sure of the difference between them, but it is the one she thinks to offer him.

“I am glad,” Nkemi says, brightly; her smile warms a little more. She lets go of Anetol’s hands, although it is with an air of reluctance; in Mugroba, she thinks, she would loop her arm through his. She does not hesitate, then; she does so, whatever small warmth she has to share beneath the buttoned up brown coat and the flash of bright red sweater and vivid orange scarf beneath tucked against his side. He has, still, her yellow scarf; she never took it back.

“Thank you for showing me this,” Nkemi says, too, looking out at the crowds around them. She has not imagined such a thing; before Anetol’s note came she had thought to spend the night on patrol. It would have been so different to have seen these crowds from chroveback; she is vividly, fiercely grateful to be on her feet amongst them.

“You are well?” Nkemi asks the question with a tiny hint of a grin alongside her smile, looking up at him. Dark eyes search his face; they miss nothing, but she asks, anyway.

[Tom Cooke]

Old Marlingspike Bridge • Over the Arova

Evening on the 10th of Ophus, 2719

I
t’s the first proper response he’s got all night; it washes over him, through him, like gold, and his field stirs bastly to meet hers. It’s strange to hear it in her soft Mugrobi accent, careful and practiced. He thinks it likely enough, if she’s been bandying about that phrase, that she’s gotten a few doozies herself. He smiles warmly through the cold chill, braces his warmth against everything. He clasps her hands, fingers warm through the gloves. She is wearing her purple head-wrap; he likes it best, the way the phosphor light dances through the gold.

But there was a time he’d’ve got another response. It’s on the tip of his tongue, even now, tucked away in his heart. May She deliver us from nightfall.

He’s heard it a few times tonight; fewer than he might’ve. It’s not a thing to say when certain folk are in earshot, but he’s heard it some, anyway. It’s like walking a long hall lined with open doors, watching them shut as the weak light from your candle stretches over the edge.

Nkemi loops her arm through his and holds close. He tenses; then all the tension melts. He’d forgotten, he realizes.

They’re warm in Hox, of course – they pour out of themselves in private, with all the weight that knowing and purpose can give. They weep. They laugh, sometimes, wide smiles with teeth, if you know them well enough, if you’re good as fami. He’s seen it, precious fleeting glimpses. But it’s nothing like this, and it’s been a long Hoxian Achtus.

The crowd jostles, breaks. There’s a grunt from a natt woman ahead of them, still a few inches taller, still impossible to see over. “Wochet!”

A tangle of wiry arms shoves past. In the gap left, another sooty boch dives through like some kind of flooding aeroship, picking up speed. The two lads go barrelling through the crowd, he sees, before a great man in a soot-stained smock slides into the gap; he sees them dart up the steps, nearly knocking a basket from a woman’s hands.

He smiles down at her, nudging her gently – playfully – with his elbow. “I imagine it’s not much like Thul Ka,” he says, “and it hasn’t got the – the same spirit as the Rose –”

It’s true. There wouldn’t be these looks, in the Rose. Or not as many of them. They move, or perhaps jostle, closer to the gatehouse with its rich sweet spicy smells. The absence of mona is stark, after he’s been so long among galdori; weeks in Kzecka, a week Uptown. The occasional brush of a glamor is strangely delightful; it feels like home, that wild lovely pulse, each one snowflake-cut unique, bastly, dzirak –

And not for him. It’s well, nonetheless; it’s well just to be breathing it, he realizes. Just to be among all this steaming breath, to see all these shadows moving through the mist. “It reminds me of a festival I went to as a lad.” The smile turns sentimental. I lifted so many wallets, he thinks. “I set fire to a Seventen’s coat; it was a night to remember, stumbling through the crowds with a b– an officer on my tail. Accidentally,” he adds, innocently. “I was a terrible child, Nkemi.”

He laughs.

You are well? The question might’ve been a heavy one; but it’s not always heavy, not even if you’re bound to truth. He mulls it over, feeling her warm looped through his arm, feeling the bright yellow scarf bundled beneath his chin.

The wine’s mulling in great vats. There’s a little of it drizzled down the side of one, and every clay cup comes away from the gatehouse with a bit sloshed on the side; many sticky hands and sticky gloves, tonight. There was a time when he wouldn’t’ve noticed, but he doesn’t dislike it. Up here, the light is soft and warm, the crumbling gatehouse wreathed with shadows. The smell of cinnamon and tsus’on is loud here.

The natt gives them a damned funny look, but a hat’s a hat, and the tips soon put him to rest. Soon, he and Nkemi have washed out to the edge of the crowd round the gatehouse, the edge of the bridge, the steps where a gaggle of bochi are playing with a little yippy dog.

“Tonight finds me in a fine mood,” he replies honestly, having thought it over. He grins.

It’s always uncomfortable, this. It’s almost more uncomfortable, now, when he feels himself, when he feels Tom inside this skin. Because he gets to worrying; he feels the alienness of all of it. He thinks what it must look like, and it feels a world away from what he really is.

But they say, among the Hexxos, to be comfortable with discomfort – or at least, that’s his takeaway. So he smiles all the brighter. “And you?” he asks. He glances down at her cup; floating there, just a thin strip of plum-stained something, he can see a bit of orange peel. “It’s meant to be a sign,” he says, and quickly adds, “among humans – a sign you’re in a good Ever.”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 10 Ophus, 2719
Old Marlingspike Bridge, The Dives

Nkemi feels the ripple of tension through him at the brush of her arm; she waits, patient. She feels it, too, when he relaxes, and settles back against her, and it is a brush of familiar soft yellow wool against her chin; she had not known it, cast green by the blue light, but she knows it now and is glad of it.

There is too, a ripple which moves through the crowd; this one does not spread from her, though Nkemi has grown accustomed to holding still against those as well. Anetol’s is the only other field she has felt, though even if the red hair had not given away a smattering of wicks, she would have known them by the brush of tangled, wild glamours - teeming, too, like all the rest, with life.

Anetol watches the long-limbed boys with some expression Nkemi cannot place; she watches him instead, although she knows how to keep an eye on a crowd.

“It is a night of prayer in Thul Ka,” Nkemi says smiling. “Darkness like the depths of the river, which yields to the surface in time; the holy men find themselves busy this time.” Nkemi thinks of breaking through the surface of the water at the dawn after the darkest night, breathing deep, the soft rays washing over her, in a crowd of other doing the same - not pushing each other down in their shared struggle, but pulling one another up. She is not as lonely as she might be, not with Anetol’s arm linked through hers.

Brr, he says, carefully. Officer. Nkemi giggles, but more at his laughter and the too-rare lightness in his voice. She is not offended; she is not so brittle.

Brigk. She had never heard it so much as in Vienda. She knows plenty of terms and not many of them kind; but there is a way brigk is said, sometimes, which crawls down her spine in a way she cannot place. This is not how Anetol has offered the first half-syllable, but it is a word which should be stranger on his tongue. She wonders if he would have said it, now a little more than a year ago.

Nkemi lets him lead her towards the warm updrafts of wine; she cradles the little clay cup in her hands and breathes deep this steam and these smells. She can see the water sloshing below, steady against the steps, and Nkemi thinks that no one will wash in the Arova tonight.

Brigk. She feels it through her and against her hip where the baton rests. She watches the boys and the little yappy dog. They dart in and out, weaving around one another - but when a hand extends it strokes over patchy, moonlit white fur, and is greeted with a tongue, and not teeth. Nkemi smiles, and puts what she does not need to hold aside, and turns back to Anetol.

It is colder here at the edge of the crowd, but Nkemi is holding a cup of rich purple steam and bathed in bastly warmth. Anetol is grinning at her and that, too, warms her through.

Nkemi looks down at her cup when he speaks, at the bobbing curl of orange. “I am well too,” she says, and the smile that curls over her face is warm and pleased. She takes a little sip of the wine. It is warm, too, and pleasant, too; these tastes are not her own, but she is grateful for them.

There it is; a distant figure in green, a lumbering dark beast beneath which parts the crowds. It is a green dark enough to be green even in the lantern lights. Nkemi watches the Seventen turn shy of the bridge, and lumber back into the dark, and in time, the space left behind fills once more with noise.

“Brigk,” Nkemi offers, careful. She peeks up at Anetol, cheeky; she grins, just a little, to show she does not mind. “It is a more difficult word here than at home,” Nkemi admits, too, because to make too light of it is a sort of dishonesty, even if not dishonorable, because this is a night of darkness too, however bright the lanterns.

[Tom Cooke]

Old Marlingspike Bridge • Over the Arova

Evening on the 10th of Ophus, 2719

H
e watches the river, turning Nkemi’s words over in his head. He’s taken his cap off and half-sat on a crumbling plinth. The water laps the stones, leaves a wash of glistening dark behind. He thinks he grasps something of what she means, but he can’t picture it, all those people bobbing up out of the water. He’s never swum; it’s not a done thing, among Anaxi natt, even sailors. He’s never been submerged in water, even, except for baths. He thinks of Aremu, diving.

Is it cold in Thul Ka, this time of year? Cold enough, maybe, that breaking the skin of the water and filling your lungs with warm air, air full of smoke and incense and river-smells – fireflies? – he thinks he can picture it. All coming up together, into life, nobody drowning.

He’s pleased to see Nkemi smile and take a sip. He realizes now he missed her; whoever he is, tonight, he’s warmly grateful for the mingling static and clairvoyant, all bastly together, and that familiar thoughtful voice.

Pleased still, to see the bobbing spark of orange in her cup.

He’s a man, he tells himself, not a boy, far past such silly rubbish. Still, he remembers his first Day of Fools, the flurry of autumn-leaves skirts – do they still dress with the seasons, in the Harbor? He doesn’t know – the curl of orange peel that seemed for all Vita to mark a prosperous year.

Over the scuffle-scrape of little dog paws and the laughter of bochi, another sound. Thump, thump, thump. The crowd, shifting; a murmur, beneath the rushing of all that joy and life. It’s easy to see a brigk on blackback – he reckons that’s the whole point.

He can’t read the kov’s face, not from here. It’s a flash of pale through the mist, between a crisp, high green collar and a green cap. A lantern on a pole swings, casting ghoulish light over the hollows of his cheeks, remaking his face in clay; he thinks he can see the flash of the officer’s gold eyes, before he turns out of view and lumbers off into the mists.

He feels some tension he didn’t know he was holding bleed out of his shoulders.

She offers her not-a-question with grin. “Ah,” he starts, blinking. She’s not catching him red-handed, not exactly; if the chill weren’t already stinging his cheeks, though, they’d be coloring.

Difficult, she says, thoughtfully. He watches her face, still warm and smiling, but with a knowledge – some piece of an understanding, maybe – in her eyes. It’s not hard to see, not even in the dim light. It brings out the echoes of red and blue in her skin; it turns her wrap almost as dark as the wine, and the gold seems as keja as the orange.

“Brigk,” he repeats, warming. He lets his accent broaden out just enough you can hear it – brrrrigkh, rolling the R with easy confidence.

This much, too, he can give; and if she can sit among all these strange lines, all these things about Anatole that don’t – can’t – line up, then he thinks he can oblige.

He looks back, at where the patrol is just a shadow and a blurry light in the distance. Headed deeper in the Dives. “It’s always been difficult in Anaxas, but never more since the order to revoke the writs – and then the repeal of the order – and then how nobody knows if the order ought to be enforced or not, but some brigk have their own opinions.”

He pauses, wondering if he’s gone too far; but he owes Nkemi as much, if he doesn’t want to make a liar of her with that word, friend. Clearing his throat, he takes a sip of wine.

“I remember a time when I thought I’d get dragged back Uptown, or carted off” – to Lady Alto, he could've said, but he remembers, and he shies away – “I had to hide this politician’s face of mine from patrols. I wish brigk meant more to most men than fear, but if wishes were kensers…”

He looks over at Nkemi, smiling. “I suspect you’ve gotten some – interesting – responses to that greeting, just for being a galdor down here. Not so stark in Thul Ka?”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 10 Ophus, 2719
Old Marlingspike Bridge, The Dives

Nkemi has learned something of Anaxi and how they speak, these last three months. She cannot place where an accent belongs on the map, not yet, but she understands what Anetol means when he lets the r roll out long and broad, and she is struck by the half-remembered feeling-smell of sage, and the pressure in the air like a thunderstorm all around. It is gone; it is as fleeting as a dream, and even more ephemeral, for it was never of her mind.

He is looking at her too, and his cheeks are shaded dark in the pale light, and the tip of his nose, too, pinched red by the cold.

Anetol looks away, and Nkemi watches him a moment longer.

Nkemi takes another tiny sip of her wine as he speaks; there is a spicy bite to it, and it still warms her all through. The order to revoke the writs, Anetol says – the repeal of the order, he says, – the confusion, Nkemi hears.

“It is hard,” the prefect offers, softly, “to reach up towards justice when the law quivers and shakes underfoot.”

She does not contradict him. Anetol is not a liar; Nkemi understands this about him, by now, without the need for it in words. She thinks of him sitting in the kofi har’aq, bathed in bright winter light, spitting his evil solemnly into a dented bowl. She knows that that time ended; she knows that he pledged himself to Roa once more at the end of it. But she does not think he has ever lied to her, not in his heart.

Fear, Anetol says, quiet, and then politician’s face of mine. Nkemi thinks of the first time he gestured at his face before her, and told her how hard it was with this. She smiles at him. “Not so stark,” Nkemi says, frowning. She looks down at the soft small white body darting between the legs of the boys; there is laughter from one of them, and they shift away; the littlest is crouched beside the dog, petting its head.

His friends call, and he darts away too; they are all of them gone, beneath the shadow of the bridge, leaving behind a small dog with a lightly wagging tail.

“Not so stark,” Nkemi says. “Those men I told you about, the imbala who sells oranges, the human and his yogurt – I have never thought them afraid of me,” there is a tiny little frown of her face, and Nkemi is quiet; she thinks of a smirking face on a rooftop, and the long fall to the dark waters below. She thinks too of shouting, of shaken fists. “I would have said it is only those who do wrong with something to fear,” Nkemi admits in a small voice. She does not fill in the rest.

“There are places with such separation,” Nkemi says, carefully, wanting to explain. She looks at Anetol. “And too, there are places where there is not. I think that is the difference.”

There is a tiny whining yelp from down below; there is a small white dog pressed back against the lowest steps, shaking. There is a pebble which is tossed against it, and another whimpering yelp. There are boys with empty clay cups, a little bigger than the others, and they are laughing. One cup shatters against the steps and sheds drops of dark red, and a small white body trembles harder as a boy comes close.

Nkemi has set her cup down and is halfway down the stairs already. Her coat comes undone, and one glove drops to the ground behind her. She whistles, sharp, two fingers in her mouth; the light glints off her baton. She is all brigk; she is astride a chrove; she is wearing green; she is standing comfortably on the firm ground of the law.

The boys scatter. They are afraid; Nkemi sees it in the hunching of their shoulders, in their wide eyes. There is a muttered curse beneath some breath, and Nkemi ignores it.

The Mugrobi crouches at the bottom of the stairs. There is a small white body shaking beneath her careful hands, and then there is a small red tongue lapping at the glove she has left. The prefect is smiling, and puts away her other glove, and her hands are combing through soft white fur, and a tail is wagging. She murmurs, soft, but it is in Mugrobi, and if there are any words Anetol knows, the river carries them off.

Nkemi comes back up the long wet stairs, and a small white dog trots behind her.

[Tom Cooke]

Old Marlingspike Bridge • Over the Arova

Evening on the 10th of Ophus, 2719

O
nly those who do wrong with something to fear. He looks at her a moment longer; he looks away, with something like a minute shrug. Tonight’s not the night to pick that fight, boemo. And there’s a familiar frown on her face, one that says she’s working through the evidence, only she might not have all of it to work with. Well – who does?

But you can’t always wait to have all the evidence, when you’re a brigk. Tom frowns. He reckons that’s the problem, all told. When the law quivers and shakes, she says, as if there’s ever enough footing, as if there were ever a time when the law was firm as Vita for everyone.

There’s more he could say, being honest. It drifts uncomfortably close to a dark spot in his mind, like an eclipse. What’s another word for brigk? Guard; enforcer. Who else guards? Who else enforces?

So many nights he’s lost. Not lost; he never had them to begin with. Drunk off his fucking erse. Brigk don’t drink on the job; Brothers do. Hawke’s service demanded one thing: you give me a job, I do it. Nothing in the small print about who else gets hurt, or what else gets done. Most of Hawke’s men couldn’t read the small print, anyway. Most of the ones on Sharkswell and Voedale, “enforcing”, couldn’t even read.

Does he think there ought to be separation? Maybe. Sure as hell would’ve said so when he was alive. How maybe there wasn’t enough separation. Didn’t want to spend his evenings putting up with golly garmonshit; spent too many of them doing that anyway. Somebody decided he was the kov who put up with gollies. Could keep up with gollies.

He remembers that, too. “I understand,” he says, slowly. He watches the water lap round the steps. Shadow-on-shadow, down there. It’s hard to see, except for a little white darting shape, blurry. “What we have here – I don’t think it’s just separation,” he adds, watching the lads. “It’s nothing so organized.”

Shouts, from below. Laughter. Laoso laughter. Drunk laughter. Busted clay.

That’s the way of the world, he thinks, taking another long drink of warm wine, looking away from the squirming scrap of white. His lips twist bitterly. He thinks to put it aside; he thinks to say, there’s plenty I want to show you, the tsat fortune-teller from Red Gate, near Rookwen, with her drifts of memory from Manatse, who’ll read the cards like hama used to.

Then Nkemi is in motion.

Something is shed – that thing which made him comfortable. Suddenly there’s – it’s not violence, no, in the hard line of her back, in the sharp whistle that makes him jump and near spill his wine. It’s not violence, though there’s a promise of firmness in the snap of the baton out into the misty air.

She disappears into the dark; it’s hard to see, down there, with these eyes. But he sees the flash of the lads’ eyes, and he knows it for fear. He thinks he knows something of it, that look.

He thinks he remembers scattering lads himself in Berret Park, doing mischief too close to where Hawke’s work was being done. There was no dog, then; just ging and drugs.

Distant light catches the gold looping through her headwrap, dizzying in all the folds. One of the lads skitters into the shadows underneath the bridge, and a few tear past him; he feels the breeze, and catches a couple of startled looks as – taking another sip of wine – he flexes his field, casually. He raises his eyebrows at the last, though all he hears is a smattering of breathless, slurred curses.

And another, softer voice, at the foot of the stairs, barely audible above the lapping of the water and the burble of festivities behind. Nkemi is knelt beside the dog. It’s a little thing, with a skinny flipping tail and a pointy nose.

When the prefect comes back up the stairs, Tom is smiling, just a little. Dog’s following her; he feels a little antsy, all told. They chase, in the Harbor, and bite. He expects it to dart away anyway at the feel of his field, but it doesn’t.

He is presented, as Nkemi resumes her place, with a snuffling wet nose.

He clears his throat awkwardly, smiling up at Nkemi, then back down at the – dog.

There’s a little curly fur at the crown of its head. Its scratchy little paws are spotted with mud. He’s not sure where he’s supposed to pet; he doesn’t know if it’s like a cat. If you’re used to petting cats, you pet dogs too lightly (and the other way around). Hesitantly, he reaches up and scratches the little curly fur. But the dog is much more interested in the prefect.

Loose round its neck, a scrap of something catches the light, only a shade darker than the white fur. It’s a surprisingly elaborate braid, this twine; it’s a surprisingly well-kept dog.

Tom frowns, glancing over at Nkemi. “You’ve got a new friend,” he says. To his surprise, there’s something frayed in his voice – something like relief, maybe. Or gratefulness. “I feel like I’ve seen this collar before.” He reaches out and loops a thin hand under it, before the dog’s enthusiasm twitches it out of his reach.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 10 Ophus, 2719
Old Marlingspike Bridge, The Dives

Nkemi sheds the weight of the green coat as she climbs the stairs; she leaves it behind, and the chrove too, on the riverbank, as if she can be parted from them. It is not hard, not with the small dog whose skinny tail beats hard at her calves, so she can feel the steady thrum of it through the wool of her pants. She stops on the way up for her discarded glove, and a wet nose thrusts giddily into her hand, so that she has to stop and rub his head, and let the nose brush hers as well, although she giggles and shies away from the lapping of a wet tongue.

Anetol is standing at the top of the steps, looking down at her; his face is shaded in darkness as Nkemi approaches from below, and she can read nothing in his shadows. He smiles at her, and looks down; he reaches a careful hand towards the soft curl of fur on top of the dog’s head, and scratches his fingertips over it. Their fields are comfortably entertwined, as if nothing has changed.

Nkemi has crouched again, picking up the little clay cup with the orange peel. There are mud-splattered paws on her leg then, and the dog is sniffling curiously at the cup; his tail wags thwap-thwap-thwap against the incumbent’s leg. Nkemi giggles and set the cup aside again and buries her hands in the dog’s fur.

“You precious thing,” she promises him in Mugrobi, murmuring, lilting over the consonants and the vowels. “You shine as bright as the stars in the sky.” Nkemi dodges a wet tongue aimed at her face, her hands pressing circles over the dog’s shoulders.

Anetol’s voice is easier to understand than the darkness in his face. Nkemi still cannot place it, not quite, but she smiles up at him at the sound of it; she gives the dog a last, tender rub, and rises once more. He rests comfortably against her shins, tail still wagging, and does not try again to drink any of her wine. Nkemi takes a little sip of it instead. If it were not so cold, she would sit; she does not fear the dirt, but she also does not wish to carry the dampness away with her.

“Seen it before?” Nkemi asks, curiously. The dog’s collar is a little bit of twine; it is neatly braided, and if it is damp, too, it is not so frayed as she expects. It glints in the light; it is not quite white, and through the dirt Nkemi can see a little hint of color. She catches it in her hand; she rubs her thumb over it. The dog twists away to thrust a cold nose against Anetol’s hand, and the edge of a pool of pale lantern light catches it – not quite white, not as she had thought, but a pale glint of something like yellow, or maybe orange.

Brigk, Anetol said, and he rolled the r out long, so that she could not mistake it.

Nkemi’s coat is still open; she feels the baton at her waist. She realizes that, too, she has lost her remorse; she is not sorry. There are times when it is hard; there are times when she does not know where she stands; just now, she stands half-entwined with the dog, and she feels again the thwip-thwip of his tail against her legs. She buttons up her coat once more, and is glad of the way the baton rests against her hip beneath it.

“Here?” Nkemi asks, lifting her eyebrows up at the Incumbent. She feels her way carefully through the heavy mist of the topic; she has not asked, and did not intend to, whether he has attended these festivities before. She has not asked, and did not intend to, what name they might know him by. “The same dog?” They are all questions; she lets them drift off. She thinks he will answer.

[Tom Cooke]

Old Marlingspike Bridge • Over the Arova

Evening on the 10th of Ophus, 2719

D
og’s snuffling round in his palm. Reluctantly, he takes off a glove and lets it.

He’s not sure how to feel. The warm mingling of fields keeps him steady, and that murmured Mugrobi – he doesn’t know any of the words except that for star, but it warms him, the way she looks at the dog. It’s fixed in his mind, that tongue lapping out for the prefect’s smiling face, her gentle hands dark against the white fur. Brigk, he hears again, looking at her with the twine in her hand, watching it glint against her palm.

But he’s just not sure about that tail thwapping on his legs.

Still, when the dog comes to snoop about him, he takes off a glove and lets it. The nose is very wet and very cold. Snuffsnuffsnuff, then a warm tongue in his palm. He raises an eyebrow at Nkemi.

He catches the look that goes with the question, oes. The raised eyebrows. She’s careful; she treads softly, leaves the unspoken unspoken. She does not trace out the lines of the pieces she’s put together – she lets the unfinished puzzle lie. Even standing with her coat open, with the light occasionally catching the handle of a baton at her belt. Brigk, he thinks, not without humor. Not without fondness.

So he thinks carefully. All he knows is it’s familiar; if she were to ask him bluntly, he couldn’t answer. He wonders what she wonders. He wonders what she might think he’s withholding; he sets it aside, because this is a dog, not a stolen seerstone or a life.

“No, I’ve never seen a dog with it.” He frowns, sucks on a tooth. “Here, lad, let me…” With the pup all attentive to Nkemi, now, balancing with its muddy paws on her trousers, he crouches to get a closer look.

He sets his cup of wine aside, remembering the way the pup investigated Nkemi’s cup.

It’s easier to loop his hand through the length of twine, this time. He runs his thumb over the complex braid, studying the way each glistening band of threads snakes and tucks over the next.

He frowns deeper. “Not a dog, a boy. There’s a lad – one of the chimneysweeps in Marlingspike, not too far from Fly-Ash – wears something like this round his wrist. In orange, too.” It summons up an image: young bochi playing round a dog. Not like the drunk tsuter on the steps; there’d been other boys, earlier. He hadn’t been paying attention, then. “D’you remember…”

His haunches ache. The strain of all those flooding stairs in Kzecka hasn’t worn off. He lets go of the collar, so it dangles back loose round the scruffy white curls at the dog’s neck. With a grunt, he starts to get to his feet.

Pup has other ideas. He swivels from Nkemi; Tom feels a pair of paws scuffing his trousers.

It’s enough he falls back on his erse on the top step – a development which, while unintended, seems to please the pup. Suddenly there’s a pointy snout nosing in his lap, sniffing at the buttons of his coat, two glistening dark eyes bright on him.

He meets them. They’re the color of mahogany; there’s something almost person-like about it. The little fringe of white lashes.

Unexpected even to him, he laughs, and grins. He runs a hand over those white curls, still too light, still too much the way you pet a dog if you’ve never been acquainted with a friendly one. He remembers the circular motions of Nkemi’s hands in the fur and tries to match them.

He avoids the jaws with their pointy teeth, but the lolling little tongue manages to catch him anyway, and everything feels a bit wet.

It bleeds into his field, mingled as it is with hers. Not quite bastly; more a curling, warming spring green.

“Help me up, Nkemi?” he says through the laughter. The flipping tail is smacking her legs, now. He offers his hand, just one, because the other is too busy scratching round the velvety fur behind the ears.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 10 Ophus, 2719
Old Marlingspike Bridge, The Dives

Anetol sets his cup of wine aside, carefully; he crouches next to her with a frown wrinkling his face. It settles in to all the wrinkles around his eyes with the weight of familiarity, dragging them along familiar paths, but his lips are lighter than they might be. Nkemi busies herself with the soft clean fur beneath her fingers and palms. It is patchy; it is rough. There is a little nick on one of the dog’s ears, there; there is a scar beneath the fur, here. But there are plenty of spots the dog likes to be petted, and Nkemi knows something of easing around tender places.

A chimneysweep in Marlingspike, Anetol says. Now the frown is in his lips too; now it casts shadows all around his eyes. They are only half in the light, here above the steps that lead down to the Arova; his great gray eyes are hooded and dark when he turns his head, just a little, and Nkemi can see nothing in them at all.

She smiles.

Anetol shifts and starts to rise, with a little grunt; the pup shifts, too. Nkemi felts the jolt of surprise through her when he sits, hard; but he does not cry out, and although the pup is standing on his lap, he does not shoo it away. He looks it in the eyes; he laughs. Nkemi grins, too, and crouching only a little ways away. She does not bother trying to brush muddy pawprints from her pants; she wears them with pride, and all the more so now that Anetol will have a matching set.

He is absorbed in the dog, rubbing thin, freckled hands over its back, and they do not shake too much, just now. The dog licks his somber politician’s face, only it is not so somber anymore, and Nkemi hides her smile in glancing down at the river, over towards the teeming crowds and bobbing lanterns. Her field meets his, twining, and she is bastly; she bubbles over with her joy, and it spills forth to froth against his.

He is still laughing, and Nkemi does too, a little giggle. She rises herself; she takes the offered hand, and snaps the fingers of her other. “Ts'awa, on'oza,” she says in Mugrobi - come here, sweet boy - and she gestures lightly. There is a wet, cold nose against her hand then, and Anetol is left with muddy footprints on his pants, and the warm remembrance of soft white fur beneath his fingertips.

“Someone cares for him,” Nkemi says, nodding, once Anetol has found his feet once more. Their little cups of wine are both left behind on the ground; she has found something else to warm her, and she thinks he has as well. She looks down at the dog, her hand still busy in the scruff of his neck; his tail wags so hard the whole of his lower half is shaking.

“He is clean and well-fed,” Nkemi gestures with her hand at the line of the dog’s ribs. They are hidden beneath the surface, although only just, and one can feel them easily with their fingers; this is a busy, active dog. He has a neat trim little waist, but not so stark, and for all he is a little sticky with wine-covered fingertips and his paws spotted with mud, all the rest of his fur is neat and clean, without any tangles even in the long curls.

“Small boys like dogs,” Nkemi offers, and grins. “In Mugroba, anyway, if they do not know too many who are wild.” There are wild dogs in Windward Market; there are a few which roam in packs at night, and hide out of sight in the heat of the day. There are others, far wiser, who have made friends with a shopkeeper or two, who know where to find a bone to gnaw and friendly fingers for petting. There are cats too; they have the knack, Nkemi thinks, of looking indolent at all times, except when they are silent-stalking some vermin through the shadows. There are parrots, sometimes; there are even monkeys. There are few herd animals, though, most times, although occasionally one sees a string of clever little goats being led, or a moa, or else one of the great lumbering desert camels.

This dog, Nkemi knows, is one who has found a good hand for the scratching; she suspects, like most who do, he joyously returns all the love sent his way, with patience and good heart.