Ariah (51 page)

Halaavi laughed. “Who says I like you?” I pointed at Halaavi, then at the clan, and smiled. The gift was an ever-present thing then. Old Idok Arvada took to bringing me into vis yurt when ve trained Kishva. I was a noted empath among the Avolayla. Halaavi laughed again. “Yes, fine, I like you.”

“
No secrets in the clan.” The Droma word for secret is indistinguishable from the Droma word for lie, and both have roots in the Droma word for chaos. I ran the shuttle back and forth, back and forth through the loom. “Where I come from, we hold the truth to ourselves.”

“
We all hold truth to ourselves,” Halaavi said.

“
No, I mean…where I come from, we are all like islands. We’re all like our own separate clan, a clan of just one person, and we hold truth just to ourselves, just to that singled-out clan.”

Halaavi raised vis eyebrows. It intrigued vim. Ve was not secretive, not the way you and I think about it, but ve was an oddity among the clan. Halaavi had perfected a way of thinking, a way of feeling that, though shared, was at times impenetrable to the rest. Halaavi was a voice of the Yavinaha, a band of ascetic monks whose spirituality was deeply embedded in the land. Halaavi had been born to the Yavinaha, raised among the faithful, and joined the Avolayla as a sort of spiritual adviser to the clan. Part of vis raising was a deep tradition of meditation; Halaavi could make vis mind absolutely blank, absolutely still, and absolutely empty, which ve did whenever ve was troubled and did not want the rest to know. There was no judgment from me. I knew of Yavinaha teachings only what I could glean, and I’d lived such a bounded life that Halaavi’s questioning, restless mind never struck me as a danger. Halaavi could be intrigued by such things in my presence. Ve worked a while embroidering a lefta. “There are times,” ve said finally, “that I wonder about the old ways and how useful they are in this new world. The Yavinaha, the root is change. The world changes: the seasons change, the land shifts, and so must we. I worry about those of us who are taken, who can’t hold truth to themselves, and who can’t ignore the truth of others. I worry how they fare on their side of the plains.”

“
The ones taken lose luster quickly. They adapt, or they die.”

Halaavi nodded. “And yet the cities birthed you, and here you are, accepted by the Avolyala.”

“
No accounting for taste, I guess.” Halaavi elbowed me, and I laughed.

That night, an orgy broke out in the yurt. And I…the day had felt like a new start, a break with what I had been before. I joined it. I let the crush of bodies fold me in, envelop me. The gift poured out, and I lost myself, but it seemed all right this time. It was a pulsing thing, regulated like tides. I lost myself and came back draped in Vrala arms. The urge took someone else and pulled the gift over, and I lost myself again only to wake in the arms of someone else. Kishva and I seemed drawn together by some inexorable magnetism of the magic. Some fury of the gift brought us together over and over again, night after night. It took me some weeks before I realized I never found myself in Halaavi’s arms. Sex was a free thing, a wild thing, a rush of desire and acceptance among the Droma. They stuck fairly close to generational lines, but not exclusively. The Droma give themselves over to it, all of them. I had not seen them discriminate between partners. At first I thought them like the red elves—a culture which embraces an inclusive idea of sexuality. The Droma were biologically differentiated, just like everyone else, but like the red elves same-sex pairings were as common as opposite-sex pairings. But it was more than that. I knew that the Droma didn’t conceive of gender and gendered differences like I did, but it was only in living among them that I began to grasp how profound a difference this was between them and me. The lack of discrimination was not an indicator of fluid sexuality but of politeness. It wasn’t so much a preference for one kind of body over another so much as the idea that to say no to some people was impolite and to say yes to some others was just as impolite. It was a wholly different way of navigating sex. It took me some time to learn it. It took me some time to notice, for instance, that when sex broke out in the unpaired’s yurt, never once did I land next to Halaavi.

First it made me curious, and then it began to nag at me, and of course the rest picked up on my anxieties, and of course they gave me a wide berth. Halaavi brought it up, not me. I sat on the edge of camp, distracted, as annoyed that I’d sowed chaos with the rest as I was about this peculiar pattern. Halaavi came and sat next to me. “Vrala Ariah,” ve said. “You are troubled.”

“
Yes.”

“
Would you tell me why?”

I didn’t want to. Such frank discussions of sex still embarrassed me. They embarrass me even now. I blushed, and I stammered, and Halaavi looked on in amusement. “I never wind up with you,” I managed, finally, to get out. “Anyone but you.”

“
I’m right here. We’re together now.”

“
No. Well, yes, we are, but that…no, I mean in there. In the yurt.”

“
We share the yurt.”

“
No! I mean—ah, those nights, the…when the fire breaks out, I lay in the ashes with everyone but you.”

“
Oh.” I stared hard at vim, willing vim to answer me, but ve looked off thoughtfully at the grass. Halaavi was quiet for a long time. Halaavi had a way with quietness, a consonance with it. “I thought you were fluent in Droma,” ve said.

“
I am.”

Ve cracked a smile. “You’re not.” Ve looked at me, head cocked slightly to one side. “This is a simpler thing with us, you know. Had you been gold on the outside, too, we wouldn’t need to talk about it. You’d understand, and we’d land in a yurt. I forget, sometimes, how much you don’t know. I had wondered why it was taking so long, but it’s not a thing to rush.”

“
What isn’t a thing to rush?”

“
A shared skin.”
Triloshilai
, ve said. About the two of us.

“
You think we’re a pair?” I asked.

“
You think we’re not?” Halaavi said. Ve said it with humor, like it was a foregone conclusion. Which, perhaps, it was.

“
How does this work, exactly?”

“
It doesn’t work, it just is. It is a fact. A stability. We just…live together, in rhythm. In balance.” Halaavi felt my confusion. “Pairs usually don’t have sex, Ariah. It’s not done.”

“
Why not?”

“
Sex is chaos, yes? No balance there. The body wants what it wants, and the heart needs what it needs, and rarely the two come together for long. The unpaired, they bring the chaos, and the paired, they bring the harmony, and together the clan stays in balance.”

I tried to understand it, but it made no sense. I thought of Sorcha, and Shayat, and how sex and love with them were all bound up together. In the City, in Rabatha, in Alamadour, desires buffeted me one way or another. Thickets of them, mazes of them, all negotiated or hidden, or displayed like fancy plumage. A constant shifting dance of them. I hadn’t noticed that in the clan there was none of that. Sex happened when it happened, and little importance or attention was paid to it. The way I was troubled by what I saw as Halaavi’s rejection of me was utterly foreign to them. Ve was right: I was not as fluent in Droma as I thought I was. I didn’t understand it, but Halaavi and I set up a yurt together anyway. The clan brought us blankets, a firestone, lanterns—gifts like we’d wedded. We slept together, naked and chaste, on a single pallet. The yurt was nestled in the heart of the camp, and children drifted in and out, sometimes piling into bed with us, and sometimes dragging their own bedrolls into the yurt.

I’d missed the feel of another’s body next to mine in the night. I’d missed the whispered conversations as one drifted off to sleep. I’d missed the patter of children. Ve didn’t want me, and that was all right. There was the unpaired’s yurt for that. It didn’t occur to vim to want me, just to love me, and it did not take much time before I forgot to want vim.

CHAPTER 35

It was nearly six years before I saw anyone but a member of the Avolayla clan. In that time, the clan changed: children were born to the Vralas and some of the oldest Idoks died. Sometimes Halaavi and I slept with babies and little children between us, and sometimes we sat through the night with the bodies of the dead. With every one of these rituals, I was woven a little tighter into the clan. My universe shrank to this single clan out in the wilds, but time enough passed that my universe expanded again. Clan meetings out in the vastness of the eastern grasslands is a rare thing, avoided because of the mechanics of pasture and the way an unknown person can disrupt an entire clan’s mood. But there are times when a clan meeting makes sense. When there are goods to trade, or when the unpaired grow restless and forlorn. When they need news. It had been at least ten years since the Avolayla had had outside contact, and the Idoks suggested it was time to seek another clan out. Decisions are slow and careful among the Droma; it took months for the other generations in the clan to agree or disagree with the Idoks’ suggestion. Kishva and I spent a lot of nights facilitating discussion amongst the Vralas. Decisions are unhurried; discussion is circuitous. No direct suggestions are made, only stories that imply one view over another. Kishva and I were there to make sure everyone was heard, and that those who had stirrings of doubt were pushed to speak. It was exhausting. I found the inefficiency of it maddening. In the Empire, where we have so little control over our own lives, we are not used to so much drawn-out participatory consideration. Eventually, the clan reached consensus. We decided to seek out the Shallai.

The runners spent weeks consulting maps. There was no rush to get to the Shallai, no urgency. It was a decision of patient pragmatism, not of any particular need. The runners mapped out a route, settlement areas, that brought us on a slow arc towards where we thought the Shallai might be. The runners recruited a few promising Rishnallas, the batch of siblings just reaching maturity. If we were tracking another clan, Halaavi explained to me, we would need more runners. We struck camp, moved west again into the familiar westlands as spring brought the grass, green and tall, once more. The Vrala runners trained the Rishnallas. The retired Idok runners drilled them when the Vrala runners went scouting. Slowly, the young Rishnallas developed stamina and grace and grew to know the limits of their own bodies. When we struck camp again as spring turned to summer, and the land dried out and the rivers withered, the Rishnallas were ready. We moved south instead of farther west this time. The livestock seemed perturbed at the unfamiliar foothills and the slightly different variant of grass that blanketed the land. It turns reddish instead of pure gold there, a sort of copper. The runners sent the Rishnalla recruits further south and west on forays, looking for tracks of the Shallai. They looked for the telltale remnants of old floorwork and kept an eye on the height and quality of the grass. You have to be careful when you change a clan route, especially if it’s to find another clan: the other clan has livestock, too, and you run the risk of winding up in places where the pasture is already bald. Starved livestock is death for a Droma clan.

We Avolayla moved with a patient sense of purpose, moving from one settling place to another as the land and weather shifted us to and fro. The runners ran, the weavers wove, the herders cajoled the goats along. Children grew, and some old folks died. Kishva and I kept an eye on the Vralas, feeling them out and making sure we stayed in harmony. One of the Rishnalla, a lanky youth named Raiwari who Idok Sikelat was trying to train as a healer, found a wounded kestrel in the chicken pen. Ve used the few skills Sikelat managed to teach vim to nurse it back to health, and the bird stayed with us, circling and circling the camp day after day. Sikelat frowned and sighed, hemmed and hawed to the point that the rest of us left vim alone, and then declared that Raiwari had a way with animals but not with elves. But a way with animals is still useful to the clan.

“
Maybe,” Sikelat said at dinner one night, “if we find the Shallai, they’ll have a spare healer we can switch for.” Raiwari’s kestrel cawed in response.

The runners found remnants of a Shallai camp while they were scouting for a good autumn settlement. It was an old camp, they said. New grass broke through the rotting floorwork, but what could be seen showed the coiled grass snakes of the Shallai clan. Idok Nardu, the oldest and most experienced runner in the clan, had the runners lead vim to the abandoned camp. It took nearly a week for Nardu to get there and back: ve was old; ve walked with a pronounced limp. Sikelat said all those years of running destroyed Nardu’s knees. But still, when it came to cartography and land reading, there was no one better among the Avolayla than Nardu. Ve still had a runner’s mind. When Nardu returned, ve and the runners called a meeting in the long house. “The camp’s been dead four, five walks,” Nardu said. Ve had a rasping voice, dry as gold grass in the droughts. “We found rich dirt and bones where dead had been buried. Many dead, but only elves. No livestock.”