18 - To the Mera
Missed another clue— I-the-player saw it, but Venla-the-character was too scared to investigate. Wondering whether to break character next time or give the poor GM a hard time again.
[Apropos of nothing: I don’t remember how it came about that we (I think Tao’s sister and Venla) talked about the fact that a nut is the same shape as a brain so perhaps it dreams, but what it dreams of when it does is clearly becoming a high tree.]
I remember only a lot of confusing detail about the lessons at the end, so I’ll skip that for now. Let’s just assume that people learnt things.
From Lady Jerna’s house we went north through the forest. “There’s a road to the Mera,” the boys said, “but it’s crowded and it goes all the way round the mountain, this is quicker!” It was a scrawny-looking kind of forest, all high straight skinny trees with a few thicker trees among them, and occasionally a really big tree with very black wood. “Ebony,” the boys said, “very good to build houses from, it’s the strongest there is and beautifully black!” “Won’t your house be very dark then?” I asked, but the black was only for the beams, most of the inside would be white. And the wood got blacker all the time with age when it was inside the house, but grey on the outside.
There were lots of animals in this wood, birds and rabbits and deer and mountain goats. It was really a mountain we were climbing over, it got higher and steeper all the time, but we didn’t get much of a view because of the forest. The skinny trees didn’t have branches low enough to climb, and there were some abandoned groves of orange trees but those weren’t high enough to see anything.
After a while we started going down again, and more to the west. Mazao said that the Mera was in the west, and we’d go there first and then north along the river to the trading-post. “You’re not in any hurry, are you?” he asked, and we said no, as long as we arrived eventually. “Those people who wrote the letters aren’t going to come after us anyway to see that we deliver them.” Then suddenly a thought came to me. “Perhaps the king is looking at the casket right now and wondering what it’s for!” The boys didn’t know about the casket, so we showed what size it was, and said that it was solid gold, “much too heavy to carry, that’s why we didn’t take it!”
It was very nice weather now, only in the mornings it was so cold that Zendegî and I lay close together with a blanket around us. We woke up with damp faces in the morning, and there were drops of water on the grass too. “That’s dew,” the boys said, “best water there is!” We licked it off our skin, and it did indeed taste very nice, and walked through the damp grass barefoot so our feet washed themselves.
We arrived at the foot of the mountain, where there was still forest but almost completely flat, going down to the river. “Now we’ll go to the Mera where my mother lives,” Tao said, “and then north to the border, and to Hokayi.” “Is that the trading-post?” I asked, but no, it was the other place where Ishey lived, the trading-post was the trading-post. The border was the end of the land belonging to the king, and between that and Hokaji there was a lot of land where nobody much lived, it didn’t belong to anyone except perhaps some bears. Bears eat people, but you’re not allowed to catch them because they belong to Mizran.
In the flat land there were villages again with fields and orchards. The houses were very strange, like nothing I’d seen in other places. They were very solidly built and decorated on the outside with all different sorts of plaster. Finally we came to a larger village, where Tao got all bashful: it was where his mother was the boss. “But Mazao’s mother is the boss of this whole part of Idanyas,” he said, “she lives in the city.” He took us to a large white-plastered house, and inside, mule and all, through a narrow low passage to a courtyard. A little boy of about six came running up and embraced him. “Your brother?” I asked. “Yes, this is Yulao.” The boy took the mule away, and Tao took us into a room behind the courtyard where some women were sitting who reminded me of Khapo’s mother, dressed the same way and just as plump. Tao’s mother Teteh greeted us warmly, but with a question in her eyes that she wasn’t asking. “No, we’re not going to marry them,” we said, “we’re messengers.” And we let Tao tell her where we came from and where we were going and why they’d been asked to take us there, because that needed a different answer for every place.
“I suppose you’ll want to wash,” Teteh said, and promptly there were two girls about our own age who took us to some rooms that smelt very much like women, especially after all that goat and boy we’d been smelling lately. Soap, flower scents, and women’s sweat, and everything together was much too sweet for comfort. One of the girls told us to take our clothes off and stand in a particular place on the tiled floor, and she did the same, and the other girl pulled on a handle and water came out of the ceiling and fell on us! Warm water, too. That was a nice way to wash! “My mother invented that,” one of the girls said. “There’s a hole in the roof to make the rain fall into a basin, and then the sun warms it and you can open this hatch to make it come down.”
All our clothes were dirty now, and we washed most of them, but now we had nothing to wear! And we couldn’t wear some of the girls’ clothes, because even Zendegî was taller than they were (and I’m taller than Zendegî), and much bigger-chested. So they brought us women’s clothes, much like Iss-Peranian wraparound stuff so Zendegî was better at putting it on than I was, made of soft white fabric with embroidered borders and patterns, all in gold thread. The girls were wearing long white shirts, also with embroidered borders. “This is a Valdyan shirt,” one said proudly, and it did look like that a bit except for the gold thread.
Nobody in this house was in the Guild of Anshen, and it was still Idanyas so I didn’t expect people to be in the Guild of the Nameless, but there were gifted people all right. They were like Lan or Erian, if they’d learned anything it wasn’t something I could recognise.
We went downstairs in our Ishey clothes to see if we could do something and ended up in the kitchen where women were cooking. After a while we discovered that they were also judging. There were two women who had one man between them and both said they were pregnant by him. The woman judging them was Ashi, large and very fat. She turned out to be the girls’ mother, the inventor of the water basin in the ceiling. Zendegî thought she’d be able to see with her mind whether either or both of the women were pregnant, and she rather thought the taller one (called Ezem) might be, but she’d have to touch them to be completely sure. We told that to Ashi, and she promptly made both women uncover their belly so Zendegî could touch them, and then she found out that Ezem was indeed pregnant, with twin boys, and the other one, Asuye, wasn’t and had never been. This made Asuye very angry, of course, “she’s stolen my baby!” and it was all we could do to explain that it’s impossible to steal a baby from its mother’s belly before it’s born. It was useful that they all thought we were doctors already, and we’d given up trying to make it clear that we were only apprentices. The Ishey have a tale about Timoine doing that, but I’d never believe it of Timoine!
Then it was dinner-time. We all sat on cushions around a low table full of dishes, some of wood, some of copper, heaped with rice (from the rice fields down the Mera, Tao’s mother said) and fruit and pastries and goats’ meat and little bread rolls. After that came the sweets, five courses of sweets, and we’d already eaten so much of the other food because it was all so delicious. No wonder all those women were so fat; even the girls were plump. When we said we wanted to go to bed, we got a large platter of sweets to take upstairs.
We got a room on the gallery around the basin that the rainwater fell into, small and neat with a nice bed. It had a door that closed but didn’t lock, and a small barred window on the outside of the house. After talking about it for a bit Zendegî put a seal on the door but not on the window and then fell asleep almost immediately, and I lay listening to the sounds of the house for a while.
In the middle of the night I woke up because of a noise. Zendegî had had a horrible nightmare, and woken up screaming. There were two dark figures in the room— Tao and Mazao! “Did you come through the window?” I asked a bit stupidly. “No, through the roof,” they said, “we couldn’t get the door open.” Tao’s sister had told him that we had a platter of sweets, and they’d thought we wouldn’t want them… But they were just in time to catch Zendegî in a panic and help calm her down. “Perhaps you should vomit,” Mazao said, “you’re too full of food!” But she didn’t want that, and anyway she felt better when she got up and walked around a bit. Then she also told us what she had dreamed of: gods stealing eggs from her belly and planting them in the field, where babies came up like plants and the boys’ goats ate them. (And by that time the boys had eaten all of our sweets. Well, we weren’t going to eat them anyway, though I loved the ones with the little bits of greenish nuts on top.)
In the morning we went down to wash, and to breakfast, and found the boys already in the courtyard with the mule. “We thought you’d prefer to leave now, and not have another dinner like that,” they said. They’d thought right! Some of the clothes we’d washed were still damp, but we could hang them on the mule to dry in the wind. Tao’s sister ran after us when we were leaving and gave us the Ishey clothes we’d been wearing, neatly folded and wrapped in a linen cloth. “Keep them,” she said, “so you can wear them and remember us!”
We went north for a few days, along the river at first, through a number of Ishey villages. Here people were working in the fields, and boys were herding goats and some sheep. Even the women were a lot thinner than Tao’s mother and her friends. In some villages we could eat with a family, their grain and our meat. The boys taught us the bird song: every bird its own sound and phrase. When they sang it in the forest —especially Mazao has a very good voice— the birds first listened and then started to sing along! Once they sat at the riverbank and sang to one another, each as a different bird, having a conversation or perhaps an argument. The river was very broad here, and shallow at the edges but in the middle it was too deep for a horse to cross.
Finally we came to a place that had a wooden wall around it, a real Ishey town. This time it was Mazao who was anxious, because it was the place that his mother was the boss of. “Not to put you down or anything,” he said to Zendegî and me, “but you should really be riding the mule into town, and wear something stylish.” So we washed in the river —in fact the boys washed us— and we dressed in the best clothes we had except for the Ishey clothes, so I looked Valdyan and Zendegî Iss-Peranian, and rode the mule while the boys carried the bags. As we entered the town we saw some soldiers patrolling, all women. “Do you have women soldiers?” Zendegî asked. “I thought that was men’s work?” “Well, the high-up soldiers are women,” Mazao said.
We went into a large white house —the houses here were very straight and square, mostly without windows on the ground floor but with little windows high up— through a passage even lower and darker than in Tao’s mother’s house, and came out in a courtyard again where we climbed off the mule and a woman who looked a lot like Tiney came to greet us. She turned out to be Temeh, Mazao’s mother, Tiney’s cousin. “Welcome to my house,” she said, and called girls right away to show us to the bath, not only us girls but the boys as well. “They’re a bit more old-fashioned in Tao’s village,” she said. Here, too, water came out of the ceiling to wash with.
When we were clean and our things were in a guest room, the boys took us to see the town. All the streets were straight and very clean, and the houses too, and there were men and women around doing all kinds of things, mostly Ishey but some Valdyans too. There even was a Valdyan inn at the quayside. We went to have a beer there, but when we got inside there were two men in the Guild of the Nameless sitting at a table by the window and another —a woman— in the courtyard, and one of the doors inside had a big seal of the Nameless on it. I made myself a little more invisible— very invisible, it turned out, because Mazao had a hard time seeing me until I touched his arm. “Can we sit outside?” I asked, and we sat at a table with benches in front of the inn and drank beer. It wasn’t as nice as at the feast in Albetire, or perhaps my taste had changed in the meantime.
Then the woman came out of the inn and stood looking upstream and downstream, as if she was waiting for a boat to come. There were lots of boats, but none of them seemed to please her. I was still invisible enough for her not to see me, and I think I made the others invisible too because she didn’t pay attention to them either. I was so frightened! And at the same time I wanted to know very much what was behind that sealed door, and what the woman was waiting for. If I hadn’t been carrying the letters for the king I think I might have investigated, scary or not. The boys noticed that I was uncomfortable and we left early, our beer only half-drunk.
In the evening, when we were in our room, Mazao’s mother knocked on the door and came in without waiting for us to say that she could. “You are of Arkahan, aren’t you?” I knew enough by now to understand that as the Ishey god who is both Anshen and the Nameless but has two faces, and I said yes. She sat down on our bed and said “My son should become a man soon, and take one of the gods as his own. Will you tell him about Arkahan?” “Er, yes, of course,” I said, a bit confused, because I didn’t know all that much myself. “You know that Arakhan has two faces— he should learn only about that face that the king belongs with.” “Yes, that’s our side,” I said, and she seemed relieved. “Don’t the Ishey always serve both sides of that god?” I asked. “One can choose,” she said. “I know it’s Tao he’s in love with, but he can’t stay a boy forever. He must choose to serve Arkahan, to become a man, to get married. —Perhaps to you?” “You do understand that they haven’t brought us here to marry us?” “That’s what my son says, but you are the right age for it— fourteen, fifteen?” “Only thirteen,” I said, “I don’t want to get married yet! But I do understand that Mazao can’t stay a boy forever.” She nodded, rose and left. “I seem to have said exactly the right thing!” I said, but Zendegî thought that perhaps Temeh had left before I could say the wrong thing.
We left early the next morning. Mazao couldn’t stay with his mother long! “Say,” he said as soon as we were outside the town walls, “I really do want to know about the gods, both of us do, but do you mind telling us in the boys’ house, just here up the hill, among the goats? The first bit, at least? It would feel a lot safer for us.” No, of course we didn’t mind, though I wondered whether goats were as obnoxious as sheep when they were in a house. “Goats don’t walk all over you,” Tao said, “they lie down and stay put.” And he was as good as his word: it looked as if each goat had its own place and lay there, chewing. We all sat around the fire, after Tao and Mazao had explained why there were girls in the boys’ house, “they’re practically boys, they can walk as well as we can, and hunt a bit, and sing!”
“What was the last time you really talked to Arkahan?” Mazao asked, and I said “In Lady Jerna’s house, in the little temple with the fire.” “Can you ask him if it’s all right to teach us?” and I looked into the fire and tried to recall how I’d prayed in Lady Jerna’s house, and also remembered the fire in the house of the Order of the Sworn in Albetire. There weren’t any words, but thinking in Anshen’s direction gave me a strong feeling that we were doing the right thing and I told the boys so. “Oh, it’s the silent face of Arkahan,” someone said, “there’s also the face that talks, and he talks a lot of nonsense and lies but the silent face is usually right about things.” Then we told Tao and Mazao and anyone else who cared to listen (and a lot of goats, but they didn’t seem to be listening) a few things about Anshen, and about being gifted but it was hard to come up with the proper way to say it. “So you can do some things because Arkahan has touched you, like talk to each other without sound? And see whether a woman has a baby in her belly?” “Yes—” I said, “but you have to learn to do it, from someone who already can.” “Can we learn it?” “You can,” I said, indicating Tao and Mazao, and looking around I found another boy who looked gifted, “and you.” This made the boys laugh. “Clumsy Lan! So the god has touched you and made your body jittery!” “Well, perhaps!” Zendegî said. “If you want to learn what to do with it,” I said to Lan, “don’t ask the people at the Valdyan inn because they belong to the face that speaks, but go to Selday and speak to Khapo, he’ll know who you need.”
“So will you teach us?” Mazao asked, and we said yes, but we hadn’t learnt much yet ourselves, it would be like finding out together. They didn’t mind one bit: it was another thing to do while we were travelling, like teaching us to hunt and to sing. (And reading and writing, though we’d been doing hardly any of that.) And we did that while travelling north along the Mera, almost every evening.
