e doesn’t look as they come back up; he’s absorbed in scooping up the last dregs of his stew, making sure the flatbread soaks up every bit of the sauce. When he does smile up, his eyes don’t linger especially on either. He does his best to look as if they’ve never left, or as if they’ve only jaunted off to do what you have to do even on a cold desert night. He smiles at ada’xa, whose words seem to be struggling round a stopper.
It’s Ipiwo that gets the engine started again, and they’re all happy enough to follow her lead.
Our celebrations, she says, with the tribes around Serkaih. He doesn’t spend much time picturing it, but he can’t help the brush of his thoughts against it – the boch maw he knows of Nkemi, climbing canyons and playing with goats. He can picture Ipiwo playing with the wick bochi even less well than he can picture her petting mischievous goats, but there’s a lot, he supposes, he can’t picture.
“It was the song before that woke me,” he says to ada’xa, setting his empty bowl aside. It’s been wiped fair clean by the flatbread.
He’s shifted to cocoon himself proper in the blanket. The wind is unexpectedly cutting; it’s nothing like the temperate, just-this-side-of-chilly breeze on the isles, and even less like the swelter of the day, though there’s a dryness to it – the smell of it, and the brush of it against his cheeks – that has nothing of winter about it.
He’s as bundled up as the prefect is straight-backed beside him, but she’s grinning, and he’s grinning. “I wasn’t sure, at first,” he admits, some of the politician gone from his voice. He feels the deepening of Nkemi’s caprise and returns it, grateful, letting go the last knot of his concern to unravel warm in the shared mona. But he’s telling Ipiwo this. “When they came around to me again, I thought it’d be a terrible shame…”
The sky is a map above; he’s never seen anything in his life like it. Once or twice, when the conversation drifts away from him, he catches himself looking up at it, so lost in the thicket of lights that he couldn’t begin to look for a hammer or a fish. He’s thought the shadows of the desert can’t get deeper or darker, or the wind cooler, or the sense of space greater, and all of them do, by the minute.
There is a weary, full-belly lull. The bowls have been taken; he’s firmly cocooned, now, occasionally tucking his chin into the warm scratchy wool. The fire light glints in Nkemi’s eyes, and he follows them – once – to the fire, where they’re scrubbing the bowls out with sand.
He’s a strange feeling; he searches for the man with the scarred face, but he can’t find him. The rustle of a tent-flap jerks his eyes away. Inis and Ole emerge with the instrument, Ole almost-smiling; another few natt are carrying out a couple of long-necked vessels and more than a handful of small clay cups.
If a flicker of tension ripples through his field at the sight of the vessels, it’s only a flicker. “Usa’dzosat,” he repeats, curious.
“Usa’dzosat?” He’s learned again somewhere through the wind of conversation that his name is Ofero. He won’t, this time, forget.
“An old tradition, ada’xa, sir.” Ada’xa Awaro sits near enough to hear, grinning. The spice kov is watching them pour a little water into the cups first, then a little tsenid, and pass them out. “It’s not wise to take much tsenid,” he goes on, “to mock Hulali’s gift, but it wouldn’t be a desert night without usa’dzosat.”
Awaro looks knowingly at Nkemi, still smiling. He, too, glances at her, lifting his brows, then back at Awaro. “It is not spoken of before the blessing, ep’ama,” he says to Ofero, “I’m sorry, sir,” to him.
He waves his hand as he takes a cup of the milky-white, licorice-smelling stuff.
He takes one, too, glancing up at a scarred face, meeting the glitter of eyes in the firelight. “Domea domea,” he says under the burble of Ofero and Ipiwo’s thanks, under Nkemi’s. The clay is cold in his hand; he shivers, looking down. Nobody is drinking just yet; he sees something in the prefect’s eyes that says to wait.
When all of the meagre party has a small cup, Inis takes her place by the fire with her instrument. She drinks, and then Ole beside her drinks, and then – the drink ripples through the camp.
It is, he thinks neutrally, tsenid. Fair strong tsenid, too; he hears a couple of cleared throats.
After a few moments of silence, Inis raises her voice. “How does it taste?” she asks. Her eyes skitter about the camp. Ole’s mouth is set deep in a frown, but Inis is half-smiling still, her eyes glittering.
“Like fennel,” comes a voice, finally, from somewhere in the camp, “from Dzil’uho’s own garden.”
Inis grins, but keeps looking round.
From beside them, Awar: “Distilled with all Hulali’s blessings.” He glances over and catches a wink from him; lifting an eyebrow, he turns back to Inis across the fire.
“Nothing walks among us tonight,” she says at last. He feels a sinking, a twisting, in his heart; he looks down at his cup, frowning.
There’s a flurry of other responses, and cups are raised to lips again, nothing like the first tense tasting. Inis has begun to test the strings of her instrument again, and the sound curls out warm over the fire. He hesitates, then finishes his own cup. Inis raises her hand after a time, and another hush falls.
“Those of you who know the prayer, please sing with me,” she says, “so that we may all sleep easy tonight, and in the nights to come.” Ole looks at her, intent.
He is silent, even when he recognizes words. The song is not so long, and almost all in Mugrobi. There’s a sad tilt to the strings; Uquwidi is uncharacteristically solemn. After the end, there’s another rush of spitting in the sand, and a scattering of whispered prayers, no two the same. He leans to spit off the carpet, but he doesn’t know what to pray for, in the end, and he mouths empty words. He thinks the taste of the tsenid has gone bitter in his mouth, after all.
The camp stirs. Inis and Uquwidi are at it again, but their audience dwindles. He catches sight of the scarred man talking to another kov in the shadows near one of the tents; the other man moves away.
“It was an honor to share the evening with you, ada’na, ada’xa,” he says to Ipiwo and Ofero, bowing once more. “I should retire; tomorrow will be a long day.” Should, not will. The man is in the corner of his eye, but he smiles at Nkemi, inclining his head.