Ariah (38 page)

And then we tasted magic on the wind. Shayat spurred her camel to a gallop and caught up with Tamir, who rode well ahead of us. He had taken to avoiding me in those last few days in the badlands. I don’t know if he did it consciously, if he was aware of my gift, but he put as much space between us as he could, and for that I was grateful. “What’s all that, you think?” Sorcha asked.

“
I don’t know. Do you feel different? I feel like my head has cleared for the first time since Bardondour.”

“
Yeah, I do. I feel good,” he said. We watched them talk. Their camels stepped this way and that, they pointed north and sometimes east. Shayat whistled; she waved at us to follow, and then she and Tamir set off at a gallop together. Sorcha took the reins of my camel. He swatted his and mine, driving them to follow before Shayat and Tamir slipped out of sight. They rode up a rise of stone jutting from the dead earth, over a ledge, and disappeared. We followed them over. We rode up the ledge, our camels struggling for footing on the loose scree, and the world opened up before us. The sands came up and swallowed the boulders of the badlands whole. Dunes swept out in elegant arcs; the land ahead was dappled with shadows. It was midmorning when we got to the desert. I remember because you can track the time of day there by the color of the sand. The angles of light as the sun makes its way across the sky turn the sands pink, then orange, then gold, then a ruddy brown, and at sunset the sands glow as red as the sky. The sky was a pristine, cloudless blue. The sun was a hot, vicious yellow. And the sands were moving from orange to gold.

Sorcha turned our camels east. He’d spotted Shayat and Tamir in the shadow of one of the last boulders of the badlands, a huge shelf of stone jutting out into the Mother Desert like a tired sentry. They had dismounted. Tamir unbuckled his camel’s saddle while Shayat rooted through her pack. “We’re stopping?” Sorcha asked. I waited for the crush of Tamir’s endless anxiety, but nothing came. I was yet myself. I laughed. All eyes turned to me. Sorcha filled the silence. “Seems early to stop.”

“
We need to recover,” Shayat said. “Shake off the drain. And we need to stop traveling in the day, stick to traveling through the nights. It’s only going to get hotter from here on out. Give your camels some water. We’re camping here two days and finding the Lost River tomorrow night. It’ll take us up to Rabatha.”

“
The Lost River?” I asked.

Shayat coaxed my camel down and helped me dismount. I blushed like a school girl. Shayat seemed exactly the same as she always was: I know because Sorcha watched her like a hawk and reported this to me later.

“
It used to be a tributary of the Exalted Sea. It dried up hundreds of years ago; no one knows why. It should have been swallowed up, but the Mother Desert keeps it clear. It’s a natural highway up to Rabatha. It winds past the oasis at Iyairo, and then straight up to the market factory district. Good travel.” She smirked and caught my eye. “Good travel for those who can chart a path through the badlands and get through Bardondour.”

“
Which few besides you and your crew can pass through.”

“
Which none besides me and my crew can pass through. The compounders post sentries, and they’ve shot down bandits and tahrq caravaners two, three times since I started the crew. I had to register the route with the trade offices, and it has drawn some curiosity.”

Sorcha gave her a deferent nod. “Well played.”

“
Yes, I thought so.” She retreated to the shadow of the stone ledge and unwound her head scarf. She poured some water from her canteen onto her scarf and wrapped it around her neck. Sorcha and I sat next to her. Tamir began the long and punishing climb up the stone shelf, the better to survey the land and plot the next leg of the journey. Shayat settled herself against the stone, eyes closed. “Welcome, Sorcha, to the edge of the Qin Empire,” she said.

“
We’re in it now?”

“
We are.”

“
Thought there’d be a wall or something. Isn’t there a wall east of the City?”

“
There is,” she said. She smiled. “There’s a need for it up there. The desert is passable up there. If it weren’t for the Lost River, this might as well be an ocean. This is the deep desert, the Mother’s Womb; the land is border enough already.”

* * *

Shayat looked at me when Sorcha pulled out his pipe, her face an open question. The day was slow, unhurried. The day had space in it for distractions: herb was mine, and I was hers. I smoked and watched her set up her tent in the hard heat of the day. Sorcha watched me watching her. I knew he had curiosities about her, but he kept them to himself. When I was thoroughly stoned, he took his leave. He had questions for Tamir, he said. I told him Tamir would not answer. Sorcha shrugged and stared off into the desert. “No harm in asking, though, eh?” He took Tamir by the elbow and dragged him away from camp. The look on Tamir’s face when he did it—an expression of shock and irritation, and confusion—was priceless.

I watched them go. Tamir cast one last look over his shoulder, a failed attempt to catch Shayat’s attention. “Do you need a hand with your tent?” I asked.

She didn’t. The tent was already set up; she was pounding the stakes into the hard, packed sand of the badlands. She looked up and smiled. “All I need is company.”

I blushed. I grinned. I was chaotically taken with her, the burgeoning love and desire all tangled in strange configurations, spilling out and overwhelming me at odd times. She was more herself there in the desert than she had been as my student. She was at peace in her own skin there in the wilderness. I found in her the same halting struggle to fit in the confines of Semadran society I myself struggled with. She was better at contorting herself to fit than I was, but the toll it took on her was the same as the toll it took on me. It was a comfort.

Sex with her the second time, in the hot, dark confines of her tent, was as revelatory as the first time. It was, somehow, sweeter and rougher at once. She left marks: scratches on my shoulder, the fading bruise of teethmarks along the long, pointed lobe of my left ear. I wore them like badges of honor. I wore them like they were proof of something, though I couldn’t have said what. Afterward, we lay side by side in the dark retreat of her tent. I lay on my side, facing her, and she lay on her back staring at the roof of the tent while a satisfied smile played around her lips. For some time, we listened to Sorcha pester Tamir. He asked endless questions—Where had Tamir been born? How had he lost the eye? Did he have children? Had he ever been to the City? What was the debt the Bardondour compounder owed him, and how long did he think he could milk it? How much of his life, on average, did he think he’d spent on camelback? Tamir answered rarely, and when he did it was a gruff yes or no, unadorned and not illuminating. But Sorcha asked anyway. I could hear the humor in his voice. I knew him well enough to know that whatever legitimate questions he’d started with had long fallen by the wayside. It was a game to him now.

Sorcha asked Tamir a particularly invasive question, something about whether Tamir and his wife had any sort of “arrangement” since they were separated so long and so often. Shayat laughed and threw her hands over her mouth to stifle it. Sorcha’s brashness startled her out of her post-coital serenity. She looked over at me. “Has he always been like that, your friend?” she asked.

“
Yes, always.”

She smiled and ran her finger along the ridge of my hipbone. “Strange that you two fell in together. You’re so protective of your privacy.”

“
I’m not with him.”

“
Why not?”

I had no ready answer. There were never any ready answers to explain whatever it was between myself and Sorcha. I coiled a lock of her hair around my finger and tried to gather my thoughts. “Well, he…he is my roots,” was the best I could do.

Shayat batted my hand away. “Roots?”

“
Yes.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
Sorcha is…he keeps me grounded in myself. There is no need for privacy with him. There is no judgment, no expectations, just solace. Is any of this making sense?”

Shayat propped herself up on her elbows. She gave me a long look. “No wonder you ended up in Vilahna. You know, I always thought people were one way or the other, normal or deviants. I didn’t know someone could move back and forth from one to the other like you do.”

I was shocked into silence. I wanted to tell her how wrong she was, but I could not bring myself to say I was what she had decided was normal. The truth was a slippery thing that, perhaps, did indeed slide between categories. I sat up, rigid, unnerved. I threaded my legs through my pants in jerky, uneven movements.

“
You’re going?” she asked.

“
Yes.”

“
Can I ask why?”

I turned to face her. I pointed at her, then me, then back at her. “What is this, Shayat?”

“
I don’t know what you’re asking.”

“
I’m asking what this is, what we’re doing. Is this normal? Is this deviant? Does it matter?”

She sat up and pulled on her shirt, a frown already breaking across her face. “This is just sex, professor.”

“
All right. Fine. But who back home would see ‘just sex’ between you and I as a harmless thing? And we both know which of us—if people found out about this—would get shunned. Who the landlords would refuse to rent to. A sullied woman brings bad luck.”

She sat tall, the long line of her spine rigid and steely. Her face was a mask. “Get out of my tent.”

“
It isn’t right that you should be punished more than me. It’s not fair. If normal means you are shamed for something we both want, for something we both did, something that hurts no one, wouldn’t you want to be deviant? Some of these rules we have, that we struggle so hard to live by, sometimes they should be torn apart. I know they haven’t been, and I know they might never be, but they should be shattered.”

She cut a hard, dark look at me. I waited for her to throw me out. There was fire in her eyes. She looked away from me. She let out a mirthless, hostile laugh and looked down at her hands. “You are so strange.”

“
I’m sorry.”

“
None of the others has ever understood any of that. I swear the tahrqs are wrong, and we get reincarnated, too, and you must have been a woman in some past life.”

Silence settled heavy on the moment. “I will go if you want me to,” I said.

“
No, no, you can stay.” She chewed the ragged edge of a fingernail. She looked over at me, a rare conciliatory expression on her face. “I don’t know what to call it besides deviance.”

“
Does it matter? Do you have to call it anything? It’s personal. Let’s leave it at that,” I said. It came out harsher than I wanted, clipped and sharp. It came out defensive.

Shayat held her hands up. “All right. I guess…I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s strange, though, I’ve never…the others were unattached. This is strange.” She laughed. “My father wanted me to get married before I started up the crew,” she said after a few minutes of silence. “I even hired a matchmaker, but not much came of it. She was trying to match me when you were teaching me languages.”

“
I’d think you’d be an easy one to match,” I said.

“
Apparently you’re not the only one who isn’t marriageable. Caravaners are hard to match. The distance, you know. And some of the suitors told her I was too…willful. And there have been rumors about me. That I will bring bad luck. I spend a lot of time when I’m in Rabatha quashing those rumors. There’s always the chance they’ll kill the caravan if they are left untended.”

“
I will not contribute to the rumors.”

A grin flashed across her face. “Well, you’ll have enough of them to deal with on your own. The way you dress, the time abroad, and now you’re coming back with Sorcha. If I had questions, don’t you think the rest of the ghetto will have them, too? Honestly, Ariah, I’m not sure anyone would believe you if you told them everything. You’re the only one who poses no real danger.”

I laughed. “Mercy, you’re right.”

“
Yes, so let’s just wait and see who the landlords turn away.”

I laughed again. “You should have left me in Vilahna.”

“
I know,” she said. “Tamir tells me that every day.”