19 (part I) - Hunting and learning
In two parts again. The second part makes the first part seem pale and irrelevant, though it didn’t seem that way when it actually happened. But that’s a writing problem. The second part is a lot harder to write because it needs to be exactly right.
After the last village —where we left the cheese the shepherd had given us, these people had barely enough to eat themselves and still shared it with us— we travelled through the wood for a couple of days. We ate a very strange beast, from the water but with four legs and a firm flat tail. It didn’t taste very nice, strong and greasy and a bit rancid, but according to Tao and Mazao it was good for us, “especially as it’s almost winter.” We’d have to eat one of these every few days or we’d get ill. “Until we get to the Plains,” Mazao said, “then we can eat groundhogs.” I didn’t know what groundhogs were, but they must be nicer.
In the evenings we practiced semsin, trying to teach the boys what Vurian had taught us. First to see everybody with their mind. “Do you feel it when somebody sees you?” Tao asked, so we practiced seeing without and with touching. Mazao had it figured out at one point and tickled Tao and made him giggle.
Before we went to sleep Zendegî I looked around to see if we could find other people, and we found the village we’d just left with people asleep in it, and also someone else in the other direction, alone and awake. This person was too far away for us to see properly and wasn’t moving, but when we told Tao and Mazao they kept watch anyway.
The mule was a bit lame, and Mazao borrowed my knife (kissing my hand, and the knife, before taking it) to get a small pebble out from between the shoe and the hoof. It was bleeding a little, and I cleaned it and put some ointment on it that the apothecary had sold us in case our own feet got sore. But when I tried to put a seal on the wound to stop the bleeding altogether, it slipped off as if the mule’s foot was polished stone. Zendegî couldn’t do it either, though she can often do things better than me because she’s more cautious. “Mules are very different from people!” she said. But the ointment seemed to help the foot, and we put a cloth around it at night so it could work even better. It was four days to Tal-Borin from here, Mazao said, but with the mule going slowly it would take about five.
Because we were going slowly and had to pause often, we had a lot of time to learn hunting, and Zendegî caught a kind of little goat with her sling! She hadn’t killed it, just knocked it out with a stone at the back of the head, and she had to cut its throat. Tao and Mazao thought of it as a privilege, “you caught it, you get to kill it!” It bled an awful lot. They took the heart and liver and lungs and guts and everything out, and showed me the liver, “can you tell if it’s sick?” No, I couldn’t, because goats aren’t people any more than mules are, but I’d seen a person’s sick liver and this liver didn’t look like that, it just looked like liver. “We’ll give it to Mizran anyway, to Mazao” Tao said, and Mazao punched him for that. So “Mazao” meant Mizran, like Síthi girls can be called Dayati after Timoine!
Then Tao helped Zendegî skin the goat and showed her to scrape the skin and rub it with salt and ashes. “And in the morning you have to piss the salt and ashes off! It’ll turn into leather that way.” “Really?” Zendegî asked. They were very firm about that, so she did it, though she didn’t have the right equipment to aim like boys do. In fact after a few days of rubbing and pissing it started to look and feel much more like leather and much less like skin. “You can wear it,” the boys said, “as a cloak, but it’s a bit small for that, or on your butt. Or make a bag out of it to keep things in.” She thought a bag was a good idea— I wish I had brought my sailmaking tools, but the boys would probably have a way to sew leather anyway.
That evening we had a very good dinner, the back legs of the goat, rubbed with salt, crushed black berries that tasted sort of sharp, and some onions that Tao found. The rest of the meat went into a bag with salt, and we put the bones with scraps on them into the cooking-pot with water and more onions to make soup for breakfast. But not more of the black berries, because the boys said they give you a belly-ache if you eat too much.
Then we had another semsin lesson. This time the boys learnt to find one another, and us, with their eyes closed. Tao hid behind Zendegî and that made it very hard for Mazao to find him, because he saw her and decided that it was one or the other of us girls and didn’t look any further. “How did you know?” Zendegî asked. “Can you tell the difference?” Yes, he could, but he couldn’t explain exactly how, except that Zendegî was more amó and I was more tsheveh. “Are those colours? Or shapes? Or flavours?” I asked, but it was none of those, it was just the way we were.
We couldn’t see the strange awake person this time, but that could also be because we were all tired.
In the morning the fire had gone out and there was a kind of pudding in the pan, jelly with meat and fat in it. We fished out the bones and ate it with wooden spoons. The boys liked it a lot, but it was a bit too fatty and slippery for me though very tasty.
That day the boys taught us more of their language, words for colours (very different from the words we had, they called a lot of things brown that we would have called black or red, and on the other hand much fewer things were blue to them) and also whole sentences, but that was hard! Because Ishey words change when there are other words next to them, the beginning, the end and sometimes the middle too. Also they couldn’t teach us some things because we weren’t supposed to learn the boys’ language, and if they knew the girls’ language they weren’t supposed to speak it even to teach it to us.
When we passed a quiet pool in the middle of the day, I wanted to catch something too, and I caught a big shiny fish! It wasn’t quite dead, so I took it by the tail and slapped it on a rock and the boys cheered. All the other fishes had swum away, of course, but later I caught another one in a different pool so we had both fish and meat for dinner. Tao showed me where to find onions, and I put some in the belly of each fish and wrapped them in leaves and put them in the ashes of the fire to cook.
The lesson that night was about protecting yourself. The boys managed to pull an Ishey mantle/blanket of spirit around them —each with exactly the same gesture— but they were still thin and translucent. “Guess we have to practice that, right?” they asked. It was strange, but when I demonstrated by putting on my own spirit cloak it turned out to be made of dark red velvet! I wonder where I picked up that one, probably in the princess’ palace.
When we were all in our real blankets I looked around again to see if the awake person was back, and there he was, just on the outskirts of the little clearing we’d made camp in! I called softly to the boys and they went after the person, who ran away but they came back with him a while later. It was an Ishey boy about the same age of our boys, with a big mop of hair. His name was Veh, and he was on his way to the temple on the Plains to become a man. “I was so hungry!” he said. “And you were eating a lot of delicious-smelling meat, I thought I’d sneak in and grab some when you were all asleep.” I gave him a bit of leftover foreleg. “Did you catch that?” he asked. “She did,” I said, pointing at Zendegî. Veh looked impressed for a moment, then ate the meat like he was starving. He probably was! “I couldn’t catch anything,” he said, “they’re hunting with dogs around here and that makes all the animals run away.” “Aren’t dogs to keep the herd together?” I asked, proud that I’d learned something from the boys in the goat-house. “Yes, ours are, but these are hunting-dogs, they’ve got them at the castle.” “Is the castle itself Tal-Borin, or is it in Tal-Borin?” I asked. “Well, there’s the castle and the village, and in the village there’s Lava, she’s nice, I’ve been there before. But the people from the castle are no good.”
