Authors: Jo Clayton
“Baths, Maiden bless, right now my idea of bliss.” Though the ailments of the fenekeli kept pulling at her, giving her a wobbly feel inside, Hern's strength gave her strength to break away from them. He walked her though the silent staring groups of people and took her into the cool darkness of Hekatoro's clan hive.
They stayed at HoldHek a tenday, living in a quiet corner of the big house. Because she was driven to, Serroi sat under the ancient lacetree and healed those that came to her or were brought to her. A strange and rather terrible time. When she came out in the morning the noise in the courtyard bit off, there was a subdued and strained silence, awe perhaps, more than a little fear, uneasiness and wariness as if she were a strange animal whose potential for danger was suspected but unknown. ClanHek was healthy in the main, but there were always accidents, a crushed foot to be straightened and reformed, an abcessed tooth, skin cancers, injured eyes, shingles, boils, rashes and a thousand other non-lethal but nagging disabilities. And some came to her without physical ailment, needing just to talk, their spirits trapped until the fragile wings tattered in the web of intense and unremitting communal living.
Because Serroi was driven to the healing, she hated it. It was as if a stranger had crept inside her body and taken over its functions. It wasn't the healing itself, it was the loss of control that troubled her. This brought back too many bitter memories, the Noris using her body to drive her beasts into exhaustion and death, using her for his drive to extend his rule into the realm of the living, making her do things that sickened her. As she had wrestled with Ser Noris, so she wrestled with the compulsion to heal, wanting nothing to do with anything that smelled of magic. When she wasn't healing she sat in somber silence staring at a wall of the room Hekatoro had given them. At night she joined herself to Hern, seeking in a frantic passion exhaustion and escape from the dreams that tormented her.
Hern came into the room carrying a tray. Serroi was sitting on a wooden bench in the corner by a window, her head and torso in shadow, her hands tight on her knees, the late afternoon sunlight painting gold patterns on the heavy white linen robe, picking out green-gold highlights on her small straining hands. Lips pinched tight together, he squatted beside the low table that occupied the center of the room and transferred the bowls and pots from the tray to the table. When he was finished, he put the tray on the tile floor behind one of the pillows drawn up to the table, sat back on his heels and gazed at her, his face troubled, a muscle jumping at the corner of his mouth. He watched her a while, then lit the wick of the white porcelain lamp in the center of the table. She glanced at him, looked away again. “Atoro was disappointed,” he said. “You told him you'd join him for the evening meal.”
“I changed my mind.” She stared out the window at the darkening sky. “Besides, my absence is a lot more welcome than my presence.” She unhooked cramped fingers from her knees and leaned back until her shoulders were pressed against the wall. “He was being polite, that's all.”
“Polite!” The word exploded out of him, then he pressed his lips together, turned away from her and began uncovering the dishes, loosing warm spicy smells into the room. The light through the unglazed window was darkening to red, turning her skin black where it touched her. More calmly, he said, “He appreciates the healing and what it costs you. Show the grace, meie, to let him pay his debts.”
“Cost meâhah! He hasn't the faintest notion. You either.”
“It's difficult to sympathize when you spend your time sulking in corners.” He stood. “Come over here and eat something.”
“I'm not hungry.” She drew her fingertips nervously across the front of her robe, glanced at him, looked quickly away.
“But you will eat. As a matter of grace and necessity.” His voice was soft now, hardly more than a whisper.
“Necessity?”
“Right. Eat or I shove food down your little throat.”
She slid around, stared at him. After a long tense moment, she laughed. “Hello, Dom. I recognize you now.” She got slowly to her feet, smoothed the robe down over her hips and came across the tiles to the table. She settled herself on a pillow, bent over a bowl with meat chunks in a thick gravy. Rather surprised, she said, “I think I am hungry after all.”
“Tst,” he said. He kicked a pillow against the wall, lowered himself onto it and sat, watching her eat.
For several minutes the only sound in the room was the ting and scrape of tableware against fine porcelain.
“They have no vocabulary of swords here.”
Serroi looked up startled, a skewered piece of meat halfway to her mouth. “What brought that up?”
He laced his fingers behind his head. “A little non-threatening conversation.”
“Oh.” She popped the chunk of meat into her mouth, patted her lips with a square of linen from the table. She chewed quickly, wanting to laugh at the teasing look on his face, a little irritated, knowing that he'd recognized her struggle and had wanted to help, hadn't known how to help, had raged against his helplessness, though now she realized even if he didn't that he'd given her what she needed, simply by being there to touch and care what happened to her. She smiled tentatively at him. “They live too close together. Swords would be more a danger to them than to their enemies.”
“Their arrowpoints and spearpoints are porcelain, or something like that.”
“The Nasri-fenekel ceramics are much prized. We have some of their work at the Biserica.” She rubbed at her nose. “They glazed the walls of Skup.”
“Mmm. They're expecting the majilarn raids at the end of the passage. They're unpacking and oiling their bowstaves. Seem to take better care of them than they do their children.”
“Wood's scarce here.” The food in her belly was warm and comforting, a weight to weigh her down; it tied her to the earth, brought her back to the smells, the textures, the colors and tastes, that she had a tendency to float free of when she wasn't healing. “Thanks, Dom.”
“Hah. Hekatoro's got a cousin.”
“I'd say he has a lot of cousins.” She sipped at the hot herbal infusion. It was rather bitter, but it had a cleansing effect on her mouth and a very faint aftertaste that was pleasant and rather minty.
“This cousin has a boat.”
“Oh.”
“Uh-huh. And he knows a way through the Kashinta marshes.”
“Smuggler?”
“It was not mentioned.”
“Mmmm.” She glanced at the window. The sky outside had gone dark, all the color faded. “We could use a little luck.”
“True.”
“Shinka's a bitch to get through without money.”
“Which we don't have.”
“Too true.” She broke a roll apart and sat holding the pieces in her hands. “A chance to avoid Shinka isn't something to pass up unless.⦔
“Unless the price is too high?”
“Right. What is it?”
“I'm not quite sure.” He frowned at the white-over-gold glow of the porcelain lamp. One corner of his mouth twisted up; he pulled his hands from behind his head, spread them quickly wide then dropped them into his lap. “Your services, I think.” He shrugged. “Past and future.” His eyes flicked over her and away; he was frowning, worried about her she knew, wondering perhaps if the mention of the healing would upset her since the healing seemed to be so disturbing to her for reasons he couldn't know.
She bit into the tough white bread, smiling as she chewed, letting the silence stretch out between them. He stared at her openly now, gravely at first then amused by her as he saw that she'd shifted out of that difficult neither-nor state of the past ten days. It was odd even to her that she'd come so suddenly from it, perhaps simply because she was tired of suffering. She laughed, put the bread down. “I'm tired of suffering.”
“That's good.” He leaned against the wall, his eyelids drooping over lazy grey eyes. “The Cousin is in Tuku-kul now, hell be there another few days. Hekatoro says he can get us places on the boat.” He yawned, patted the yawn. “Down the river, through the Marsh, across the Sinadeen to Low Yallor and the freeport market.”
“As easy as that.”
“It could happen.”
“You think it's likely?”
He smiled suddenly; slitted grey eyes twinkled and invited her to share his amusement. “What's likely about any of this? Why not an easy glide along the river, a moonlight flit across the sea?”
She started tearing the bread apart and dropping the bits into congealed gravy. “Hern?”
“Mmm?”
“Do you want to go back to living in the Plaz?”
“What? No.” He got to his feet and went to stand at the window, staring out at the patch of stars visible from that small square. She felt his withdrawal. He'd exposed more than he'd wanted toâto her and to himself. He reached out and closed his hand around the molded cane inset. “No,” he repeated, his voice muffled. “Maiden's tits, I spent a lifetime there bored out of my mind. Doesn't matter what I want, I'm going back. Mijloc's mine. They're mine, my mijlockers, taroms, ties, traders, all of them. I won't let that bitch Floarin have them.” He laughed suddenly, mocking himself, but she heard the truth in the words that he wouldn't admit to himself. “Not while I have blood in me,” he said and thought he was joking.
“Then we leave tomorrow?”
“Like we came, a little cleaner and not so ragged. Atoro's taking us along with a packload of trade goods. He likes the thought of doing us a favor. Doing you a favor. I'm not quite sure what he thinks you are but he's sure a little propitiation couldn't hurt.”
She stroked the nape of her neck, considering this. “You know him, I don't.”
“Not his fault.”
“I know. I know. You've spent the last nine days telling me.” She threw her arms out, stretched them up over her head, pulled them down again, straining the muscles of shoulders and back. “I don't like losing control.”
“What?” He turned, settled himself on the bench, shoving a pillow behind his back, stretching sturdy legs out before him. “Never happen.”
“Hah! Much you know. You think I want to sit all day under that damn tree? Hunh. Wave a wound at me or a disease and bang! I'm locked to it. No choice. Listen, things get rough, you better plan on dropping me. Stick a spear in some idiot and first thing you know, there I'll be on my knees beside him, healing him.”
“Come here.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Since when do you give me orders?”
“I wouldn't dare. Come here.”
She pushed away from the table and stood, a tingling warmth spreading up through her. She touched the ties at her neck, her fingers trembling, wanting him with a sudden urgency that rather startled her. She walked slowly to him, stretched out both hands and saw as he took them his composure was as false as hers. She pulled her hands free, touched his face with soft stroking circles, his clean-shaven face. She smiled, traced the chiseled curves of his wide mouth then drew her hands down his chest, feeling the hard flat muscle beneath the thin cloth of his fenekeln shirt; she slid her hands inside his shirt. He laughed, scooped her up and carried her across the room to their blankets and sleeping mat.
The night was shut down good and tight by the time they got close enough to smell the river and the effluvia of the many kilns. Clouds hung heavy over the town, and off-and-on wind swept cold and noisy along the road. She shivered, not from the cold but the boiling, seething clouds of foreboding that poured out of the city and settled around her.
Something waits
, she thought. She looked back at the lumbering vachai loaded high with trade goods, looked past him to the east at the plateau it was too dark to see.
I wonder, could they be waiting for us?
Hern and Hekatoro walked ahead of her, talking now and then, unaware of the chill that shot through her. She rode the rambut again, the heavy material of her linen robe bunched up above her knees. She'd have preferred to walk but Hekatoro insisted and too much protest would have been a breach of courtesy so she yielded and consoled herself with the thought that Atoro could ride the beast back, the placid dehorned vachai pacing behind him, its load consigned to the Cousin. Sitting beneath the lacetree tending the endless stream of complaints, she'd seen from the corner of her eye a staccato series of still imagesâhuddles of women, of men, excited children shouting lists, rapid calculations on long brown fingers. She hadn't understood then but it was clear now what was happening, had come clear when Hern told her about the Cousin and stirred her from her brooding, her morose rebellion against a fate that had swallowed her in spite of all her furious fighting.
Healwoman? No. Shawar? Who could say. Not me. Heal-women use herb-lore, not what works in me
. She wiggled her shoulders, uncomfortable even out here away from the sick and the hurt and the needing; she felt a thousand phantom tugs from the town ahead as if she walked past a corral where flying spiders had pasted their silk, long strands drifting on the wind, brushing against her, trying to cling to her, neither painful nor individually irritating. It was the number of them, the number of the touches, the unremitting small tugs that tormented.
The gates of the town were open. It wasn't Raider's passage yet and the Heks of the Plain were coming in every day with their packs to meet the river captains in discreet back rooms of the many waterside taverns, nothing so blatant as to provoke fury in the Shinki ductors. No one disputed that they knew what was happening, it would be impolite to assume otherwise. And it would be both impolite and impolitick to conduct such illegal transactions within view, forcing the ductors to act against their own comfort, something equally discreet presents attempted to assure against.
A guard leaned in a lower window of one of the gate towers idly watching the stones sit, smoking a short clay pipe stuffed with duhanee, dreamy eyes now and then on the flat spurts of pale smoke he blew out into the chill air. When the three entered the baffle below him, he took the pipe from his mouth and called down, “Who goes?”