Ariah (53 page)

Koro came and sat before me at the mouth of the tent. Both ve and I stared down at the paper in vis hands. “I was able to echo because of the song. ‘Have you come to take us?’ I asked. ‘No, I’ve come to find someone,’ ve said. ‘Who is out here in the grass for you to find?’ I asked vim. Ve went dark, troubled. I’m an echo, not an empath, but even I could feel it without amplification. ‘My roots,’ ve said. ‘My roots, ve is out here.’ The settler asked if I’d seen a silver elf, not a slaver. A person who ran east, a person with silver skin and white hair and green eyes. Thin, with large hands. Black birthmark on the ribs.”

My breath came shallow. Halaavi sat up tall, alert, like a rabbit a half-second before it bolts. “Did the settler you spoke to—did this person, did ve have red hair?” Koro nodded. “Dark skin?” Koro nodded again. “You say you found vim far west?”

Koro nodded once more. Ve handed me the slip of paper. “The settler said if I found this person, this green-eyed silver elf, to give vim this.” Koro tapped the paper, nodded to Halaavi, and left us there in the borrowed privacy of vis yurt.

My hands trembled as I unfolded the paper. The creases were worn through in places; the paper had gone from stiff and structured to soft and cloth-like. The note had been written in pencil, which the years had smudged and worn away. I held the letter up to the light.

I love you. We keep on look out. Me and Shayat going southways.

“
What does it say?” Halaavi asked.

“
My…my people are looking for me. Laavi, they’re looking for me.” I read and reread the note three or four times in quick succession. I stopped when tears slipped down onto the fragile paper. I hadn’t realized I was crying, but I was not ashamed by it. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I was not ashamed by it. I folded the paper and tucked it in my lefta. I looked over at Halaavi. Ve took my face in vis hands, careful, worried, asking a thousand questions with a glance. “With you I have a shared skin. I have a…a shared heart with two others. And, Laavi, they’re looking for me. All these years and they’re looking. Together! Together, they’re looking for me! I have to go south!”

Halaavi’s grip on me tightened. Vis mouth turned to a hard line. “South?”

I held onto vis forearms and nodded. “Yes. South. I have to go south.”

“
How far south?”

“
I don’t know.”

“
What do you mean, shared heart?”

“
Like
triloshilai
, but with sex.”

Laavi pulled back; vis hands dropped to my shoulders. “Three
triloshilai
?”

“
Yes. Sort of.” I wiped the tears off my cheeks with the back of my hand. “I thought I’d lost them. I thought I’d lost them forever. But they’re looking.”

Halaavi gently coaxed me upright, and gently coaxed me to a shady spot in the shadow of a cook tent. Ve brought me stew and water and nudged me into eating it. But ve was dark and distracted, and I could not bring myself to care.

CHAPTER 36

Goods were traded back and forth between the Avolayla and the Allunga. Some of our unpaired drifted over to the other clan, and some of their unpaired drifted over to us. The mood in the clan—both clans—was buoyant, hopeful. Eventually, neither camp was really Avolayla or Allunga, but some thorough mix of both. All of us Avolayla were siblings, but the Allunga were our cousins. Family is family; among the Droma, family, like time, is endless. They traded stories, lore, news of other clans. Sikelat got a very young healer for training. But fall crept up, and in fall even the abundance of the Slide grows too thin to support two clans’ herds. Soon enough, it was time for the clans to part.

The Avolayla were to head east, into the familiar scrubby steppes. The Allunga’s route took them south. Halaavi and I didn’t discuss it. I didn’t discuss it with anyone. No one was surprised when I spent more and more time in the Allunga camp. Halaavi followed me over, and on the day the Allunga broke down their yurts, Nalunghai Koro advocated for us. We became Allunga Boonu Ariah and Allunga Boonu Halaavi. There is always room for those with skills.

The Allunga are a big clan, and harmony is harder to keep the more people you have around. Before we joined, they had three Yavinaha wanderers, one in each of the three oldest sibling groups. Halaavi made a fourth. The Yavinaha wanderers kept council together, not in any official way, but when they spoke together, they were awarded authority. They were together most of the time; Halaavi was the only one of them who had paired. The rest were oddly isolate. They welcomed Halaavi. Halaavi came back from conversations with them a little dazed. “It brings back my childhood,” ve said one night as we lay together. “We wanderers, we’re a different breed than the clansfolk. Just a little different, not so different you notice if there’s just one of us. But with four of us…you can see it plain.” And ve was right: the Yavinaha kept their elaborate, unofficial council, and the Allunga waited to do anything until they had Yavinaha guidance. Like the Avolayla, they built consensus slowly, inch by creeping inch, but it was a more directed thing. The Allunga had a clearer sense of hierarchy, and the Yavinaha were at the top. Halaavi very quickly became the voice of the Yavinaha. The other wanderers saw something in vim. The Avolayla had seen it, too, I think, but with less clarity. The Yavinaha wanderers of the Allunga clan regarded Halaavi with a sort of reverence I had not realized the Droma were capable of. One night, at dinner, I happened to wind up next to a Nalunghai wanderer. It was deep winter, and some of the antelope were struggling. A group of emergent leaders were trading stories, circling around and around the question of whether to cull the herd. Each time one told a story, everyone in the group looked at Halaavi. The Nalunghai wanderer pointed at Laavi. “Your pair, ve is only half elf. Halaavi is one with the land; ve feels its beating heart, its pulsing blood. I am a wanderer, yes, but Halaavi is a voice. Rare as a flower in winter.” The wanderer took a long look at me. “Someone so Droma, and ve paired with you, Boonu Ariah. The world twists like a grass snake.”

“
You say what Laavi does is rare?”

“
Oh, yes.”

“
Then it’s not so strange we’ve paired. I know a thing or two about gifts others don’t understand. I know what it is to be odd. I know what it is to want someone who does not understand that you’re odd.”

The Nalunghai wanderer made a noncommittal noise, half-snort, half-laugh, and glanced me over. Ve raised vis eyebrows and shrugged. Let the world twist, vis shoulders said. Let it twist into knots only to unwind again.

I say all this to say Laavi was happy with the Allunga. Ve was happy with the Allunga, but there was a seed of chaos in our yurt. We were all right, I don’t mean to say we weren’t. Halaavi came with me to the Allunga of vis own accord, and I was grateful for that. The love was still there, the easy intimacy always was there, but there was a sadness in vim that neither of us could ignore. Ve asked me many times what Sorcha was to me, what Shayat was to me, what they were together to me. I explained it as best I could, but Laavi could not quite understand. To vim, skin did not stretch that far. To vim, the only way it made sense was if I split myself apart, shredded my skin to ribbons, and handed out the bloody pieces. It nagged at vim, and it nagged at me that I could give vim no comfort, but Laavi was Yavinaha, and Laavi had long ago perfected a submission to the present moment, and Laavi did not want to prematurely confront something with that much chaos wound up inside it. And I, I was a coward. There is no other word for it, no better way to explain it. I knew what would happen, and I drank Laavi in anyway, held vim close, shared a bed and a life like the days weren’t limited. There were nights as we traveled farther and farther south when I listened to vim sleep and thought of Liro. I thought of how Liro took Dirva in, coaxed him back to the living, and I remembered that desperate pain he carried across borders when Dirva left. At the time I’d thought Dirva heartless, callous. I knew I’d never do that to anyone. But night after night I lay there with Laavi, doing it to vim.

* * *

The Allunga took us far south, but not far enough.
Southways
, Sorcha had written. For him, for Shayat and myself, the only thing that could mean was all the way south, to the southern coasts and beyond to the Pirate Isles. The Allunga was a large enough clan to be brave, but certainly too large to be stupid. They took us south, and lingered long enough to pass me off to the Kivvni before they turned north to safer plains again. The Kivvni were a small, spare clan, hard-eyed and haunted, a group of people who seemed to only find harmony in grave suspicion. They didn’t want to meet with the Allunga at first. They were a small clan pushed farther and farther south because the larger clans needed more pasture for their larger herds. It wasn’t malevolent or forced, but the Kivvni had learned to be as wary of other Droma as they were of everyone else.

When the Kivvni crossed paths with the Allunga, the Kivvni sent many of their youths and children over to the other clan. It was a bleak thing. They accepted no one in return; the flow of people from clan to clan was unidirectional. “This clan is dying,” Halaavi said. A glance at the Kivvni camp showed it was true: the yurts were threadbare and paltry. There were no chickens, and the goats were thin. They had more yaks than they could herd effectively, and the lactating yaks cried mournfully when the Kivvni could not manage to milk them all. The Kivvni themselves were gaunt and underfed. A dark knot of mistrust was woven deep in them, each and every one, to the point that scarcity and stress and bad luck made them mistrust each other. They knew the Kivvni were done for. They passed off the children to better clans and resigned themselves to hard, bitter lives. This was a clan pushed to the frayed edges of the Droma world. But they were going south. It was not by choice: every turning of the seasons they lost more livestock to the desolate southern stretches near the coast. They went south because they had to. The other clans shoved them out, shoved them down, until at last only the southern stretches were left. When I asked if they were going south, a Kivvni person leaned on vis walking stick and laughed. Ve was a herder, but then again, all the Kivvni were herders. There were not enough people in the clan to differentiate the work. Ve laughed a hard laugh and nodded. “Yes, Allunga settler, we go south.”

“
Far south?” asked Halaavi.

“
We go so far south the rivers turn brackish.” Halaavi frowned at that. The Kivvni person’s chin jutted up. “We go so far south I can speak patois. And I am no echo.”

Halaavi and I were not offered a place to sleep at the Kivvni camp, and we didn’t ask for one. We trudged back to the Allunga camp, which was only there that far south, that far into the turning, for me. That night, neither of us got any sleep. Laavi lit a fire in the firestone and sat next to me. I draped an arm around vis naked waist, and ve leaned vis cheek against my shoulder. We watched the dancing flames together. We sat in silence for a very long time. I felt hollowed out, like half a man. Finally, Laavi spoke. “I can’t. I can’t join the Kivvni.”

I had known it was coming, this gentle refusal, but it still hurt. Sometimes, I think, it hurts more when you know an injury is coming than when it sneaks up on you. I cried and tried to hide it. Like a fool, I tried to hide it. “Laavi, I…” But I found nothing to say. What was I going to do, ask vim to come with me? Risk capture by pirates? Demand that if ve was somehow not captured, but instead by some miracle allowed to accompany me to whatever pirate port Sorcha and Shayat had landed in, that ve live a settled life in a settled town where ve would be confronted by the slavery of vis cousins day after day? Time is endless; this would be nothing but an endless torture.

The loss of Halaavi was a thing that swallowed me whole. It was a black thing, a terrible hungry thing. I tried again to speak. “Laavi, right now, in this moment, I wish I’d never gotten that note.”

“
But you did get it.” Ve pulled vimself upright and looked at me. “And that’s all right. That is…that’s all right. I am happy for you.”

I dropped my face into my hands. “I’m sorry, Laavi.”

“
I am, too. I keep trying to let the moment pass, to slip deep into the land, but it’s hard. It will get easy again, I know, but for now it’s hard.” Laavi laughed. “Maybe I should go with the Kivvni. I am in their harmony right now.”

“
I’m sorry.”

Ve put a hand on my back. “Ariah. Vrala Ariah. You know, Kishva had things to say to me about the pairing. ‘Laavi, always a risk? Of everyone, you are drawn to vim, who has one foot here and one foot there? What happens if ve ends up with both feet there?’ And I said, ‘What happens if ve ends up with both feet here?’ and Kishva said to me ‘Laavi, if ve was one to end up with both feet here, you would not be drawn over.’ And you know Kishva. Kishva is always right.”