Light on shattered water, p.21
Light on Shattered Water, page 21
“What’s so important?”
“Shyia,” I asked. “What is going on?”
“Later,” he told me. “In.”
I stepped past him and got first impressions of small and white.
“Wait here,” Shyia was telling me. “Just, stay here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“How long. . .” I started to say as I turned to find myself talking to a closed door. There was no latch on my side. “Hey!” I yelled at the voices I could hear outside and pounded on the black wood: almost broke my hand and there was no reply as the voices faded away. “Hey,” I said, to myself.
It was a spartan whitewashed room. There was a low-woodframe bed with white sheets. A plain little wooden table with a stool and a candle in its holder sat in a corner. Sunlight streamed in through a slit of a window high up in the far wall, my breath visible in the light. Nothing else: an antiseptic little vestibule, not quite a cell. I touched my broken arm and sat down on the bed to wait. It’d been a long day with too many new things that I was still trying to assimilate. It was a very long wait.
------v------
I woke suddenly, blinking at a plaster ceiling illuminated with a flickering orange light. Shit. I licked my lips. I’d dozed off, still fully dressed, but something had woken. . . I jerked my head around to see a Rris standing there with a raised lantern in one hand, staring at me squinting into the light. Finally it said, “I brought you food,” and pointed to a tray on the table.
Slowly I sat up. “Thank you,” I said carefully then glanced at my watch: about six hours. The Rris was still there, watching me curiously. No shock there, just watching with odd-colored eyes. “I know you. We met earlier, didn’t we.”
“A.”
I tried to remember the name. “Eseri?”
“Escheri,” she corrected my pronunciation. “A. You didn’t remember?”
“I’m sorry. I have trouble telling Rris apart. Mostly.” Those eyes were distinctive and that helped. I looked at the dishes: covered by small woven baskets but the aroma seeping through set my mouth watering. She took a single step back when I reached over to lift a cover.
“Shyia said you liked your meat overcooked,” she volunteered. “You have some time to eat that, then the commissioner wants to meet you.”
My watch had said 02:47 in the morning. “Now?”
She looked me up and down. “They seem to think you’re important enough. Hurry up and eat that.”
And they’d got it right: Cooked meat, gravy, and a heavy, warm bread with a mug of water. My stomach growled eagerly. I took up the Rris fork and ate while the female Mediator leaned against the wall and watched me intently. When I’d finished she was still staring. “Thank you,” I told her.
She cocked her head, her ears twitching. “That was all right for you?”
“Very good. Thank you.”
She smiled then, that pursing of her face. “Good. Now, please come with me.”
I did. There were a pair of guards outside the door and they were staring at me like they hadn’t known exactly what they were supposed to be guarding. With their ears still back the pair fell in a few steps behind us. Escheri led the way back along the dimly-lit hall, through more doors and around one of the balconies in the atrium; I could see stars above the rooftops, my breath frosting in the chill air. The opposite wing was warmer, furnished differently with more paintings and lamps casting their eerie orange-tinted light. A loud bang made me jump violently and stare at the Rris who’d just come out of his room and slammed the door. Escheri in turn had flinched and was staring at me with her ears plastered flat against her mane and the guards had half-drawn their swords. I just froze, afraid to move and for a second that tableau held, until she shook her head and glanced at the interloper who ducked his head and scurried off, then she turned back to me, “Just a door. Nothing to worry about.”
I looked at my hand: I was shaking. I clenched my fist, trying to keep control. “Sorry.”
“Nervous?”
“How did you guess?” I asked.
She touched my arm then; just a tap to get me moving again.
The commissioner’s office was situated in the corner of the building. Escheri scratched at the door, then opened it and ushered me in. I stepped inside and hesitated, taking stock: a simple room, plain white-plaster walls with a couple of small black and white portraits hung up, some shelves with a couple of books and other curious trinkets, a potbellied stove shedding heat from a corner. Across the room red drapes were drawn and in front of them squatted a desk, set low to the ground like a table in a traditional Japanese tea room. My laptop was sitting there alongside a weird-looking lamp and other items of mine: toiletries, clothing, flashlight, medical kit, compass on top of my opened map, my notebook, all strewn across the desktop.
Shyia was there, watching me from an ornately tooled leather beanbag-type cushion, a similar unoccupied cushion beside him. The other occupant of the room was a dark-pelted Rris just as bulky as the Mediator with streaks of gray through its mane watching me from his seat on the far side of the desk. ‘He’, I was fairly certain. Amber eyes looked me up and down, then he grunted and said, “Thank you,” to Escheri. She ducked her head and closed the door behind her. The Rris - the Commissioner - studied me again, “Mikah, that is your name?” Deep voice, the gutturals of the Rris tongue like growls.
“Yes, sir,” I nodded.
He was expecting it, but I still caught the flinch; a dilation of the pupils and nostrils, the ears jerking. He scratched a clawed hand through his cheek fur and gestured at the second cushion, “Please, sit.”
I did so. He watched as I moved, as I lowered myself into the Rris-designed cushion. It was leather, felt like it was stuffed with. . .what? Tiny beads? Maybe real beans. “How well can you understand me?” he asked.
“I do not know a lot of words. Stay simple and I will manage.”
“Huh,” he breathed and glanced at Shyia, then reached out to touch the laptop’s keyboard. “This is yours.”
“Yes, sir.”
He sighed and said to Shyia, “Shave me. Shyia, you do find a way to present me with interesting puzzles.” He looked at me again: “Why don’t you tell me your story. Why are you here?”
With the time that Shyia had been in there he’d had plenty of time to relate my story. The Commissioner probably wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth and see how it corroborated with the Mediator’s. I took a second to gather my thoughts. “I was taking some time away from my job. . .”
“A job?” The Commissioner glanced at Shyia: something he’d neglected to mention? Sheesh, if that went on we’d be there all night. “What did you do?”
“I was a. . . an artist.” That was as close as I could come to commercial graphic designer with my fingerhold on their language.
“Ah,” he cocked his head at that but didn’t ask me to elaborate. “Go on.”
“I. . . I was taking some time away from work, coming up north to rest. . .”
I told my story again and for the most part they listened. When my voice began to falter from the strain of speaking Rris for such a prolonged period they gave me a glass of water and some time to rest. Five minutes maybe, then I was talking again. How long did it take? With the questions the Commissioner asked, maybe two hours. When my watch read 04:16; my throat was aching. I started to raise my glass and found it empty.
“You make yourself difficult to believe,” the commissioner told me. “If it wasn’t for your equipment I think I would be [something] to trust you.”
“I tell you the truth.”
“A. You sound bad. More water?”
“Please.”
Ice water. It helped. I sipped while the commissioner watched me. “You really don’t remember anything about the Rris you saw in the barn?” he asked.
“No sir. They looked. . . they looked like Rris.” I shrugged, it was all I could say.
“What kind of Rris? Male? Female? Young, old. . . If you saw them again, would you recognize them?”
Shit. I’d been through this with Shyia. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, but I just can’t say.” Hell, I didn’t even know for sure that the commissioner WAS male. At least he hadn’t corrected my use of the masculine honorific.
The commissioner glanced at Shyia who tipped his head, maybe a gesture like I told you so, then he settled back in his cushion and clicked his claws together. “You ARE going to give some people real problems.”
“So I’ve been told.”
He chuckled at that. “We will talk more tomorrow. I am interested in seeing what this,” he indicated the laptop, “can do. Shyia, see him back to his room. Anything he needs.”
“Sir,” Shyia ducked his head and gestured for me to follow him out. The guards waiting in the corridor fell in behind us. The Mediator looked me up and down: “How are you doing? You seem a bit shaky.”
“I’ll live,” I resettled my broken arm in its sling. “It’s been a long day. Tired.”
“A,” he ducked his head, “Do you want anything?”
I touched my coat, my beard. “A bath? Clean clothes? Shaving?”
He snorted and scratched at his chin, “The first two are a no problem; good idea. That last: we’ll see.” At my door he stopped. “Get some more rest, a? I will call for you in the light.”
The door closed behind me: heavy wood, no way to open it from this side. Once again I laid myself down on the soft bed, just taking time to kick my boots off before sleeping.
------v------
The water was deliciously warm, enveloping and soothing. I sank down into the copper tub, luxuriating in the first real bath I’d had in months.
It was light outside. They’d let me sleep late before Escheri came with my wakeup call, a breakfast, then taking me to their version of a bathroom: a small room lined with glazed brown and azure tiles, a drain in the floor, a baroquely-ornate brass faucet and sink, a small table, a stove with pots of water simmering and a hammered copper tub. Rris-sized. A bit cramped, but I wasn’t complaining. Escheri told me how they used it: rinse the worst off with warm water before getting into the tub. She showed me the brushes and abrasive clothes they used, most of which were capable of taking my hide right off, then left me to my own devices.
I’d rinsed, then soaked, dunked my head to try - not so successfully - to dislodge some of the fleas I’d picked up, the first time I’d been clean in. . . How long had it been? That July an eternity ago when I’d been happy and knew where I was and where I was going, then months of hiding and running and hurting. Five months. December now. Huh, December 1st. Back home they’d be looking forward to Christmas and the New Year. Jackie had been dropping hints about wanting to go skiing, so I’d been going to spring a weeks vacation in Colorado on her. What was she doing at that moment? She and everybody else I’d known must have thought I was dead by then, fallen off a cliff somewhere, swept away in a flash flood, kidnapped by Elvis in a UFO. . . any number of gruesome accidents. And there was no way I could get word to them. Looked like I’d be spending Christmas alone.
I sighed and sank down to enjoy the last of the warmth the water offered. The sound of the door opening made me jump. Escheri stood there, an armload of clothing hugged to her chest, staring at me with a sort of stunned expression. I looked down at my exposed chest and flicked water, smiled slightly, “Different, a?”
She grimaced, “I thought. . . I thought you might have more fur than. . .” she just trailed off and gave a little shake of her head, not the same kind a human might give. “I’ve got some clothes for you to try on. They should be the right size. It was difficult to find someone who might have something that would fit.
After my time with Chihirae any hang-ups I might have had about nakedness in front of a Rris had been pretty much hammered out of me, and while the Rris themselves don’t have any real problems with nudity, I was a novelty: Escheri cocked her head and stared openly when I got out of the bath and began to carefully and one-handedly towel myself off, her eyes roving openly. “Those marks,” she ventured after a while, “they’re not normal, are they?”
“These?” I touched some of the red streaks winding around my arm and said with a twinge of bitterness, “No, not since I came here.”
“How. . .”
“Crossbow,” I interrupted, pointing them out one after another, “Crossbow, sword, teeth, claws, more claws, and some more claws. You have a lot of claws.”
She didn’t seem to be able to take her eyes off the scars. Slowly her ears wilted, then she shuddered and tore her eyes away. “It’s a pity you couldn’t have met us on more [amicable] terms.”
“Believe me, nothing would have pleased me more,” I laughed wryly, then hurried to placate her when she flinched. “Sorry, that’s how I smile.”
“By showing your teeth?” she eyed me like she wasn’t sure that I was being entirely straight with her. “That is. . . that’s not something to joke about, Mikah. It could get you hurt.”
“So Shyia keeps telling me,” I sighed. “It’s not a joke. That’s how I smile.”
“Oh.” Her tail lashed back from behind her legs, agitated. “You can’t smile properly with those ears, can you. I suppose those teeth can’t harbor too much anger. Just be careful who you do that to. Now, see how these fit you.”
I looked through them. All Rris outfits. “What about my clothes?”
“They all be cleaned and we’ll try to have them repaired,” she told me. “Wear these for now.”
She’d brought me a green tunic that came down past my hips and was too tight across the shoulders. Over that there was a tan quilted jacket, also too tight across the shoulders and chest. While I gingerly eased my broken arm into the sleeve Escheri was inspecting the pants she’d brought. Then I heard, “Oh.” She was holding up a gray pair, poking a finger through the hole intended for the tail. “I forgot.” She looked - if I may anthropomorphize - sheepish.
“It shouldn’t be too difficult to sew it up,” I said.
“I never thought I’d be asking someone to do that,” she said, hanging the pants out in front of her, then tossing them over to me. While I sized them up she watched me, her head tipped to one side, then asked, “Are you usual for a male of your kind? I mean, your genitals are. . . strange.”
Strange? It was something that’d been mentioned before, but I wasn’t about to ask. I turned away slightly, “I haven’t had any complaints.”
“Huhn.” A twitch of her ears and a wave of her hand. “Well, don’t try [something] with females. That might scare them off.”
I just stared at her, not sure what to say. It hadn’t been something I’d been thinking of, and looking at that. . . person in front of me, the thought was ludicrous, the idea was. . . it was. . . it brought to the surface memories of a night with someone who’d come to mean so much to me, holding each other, afraid to say what I was feeling unless I was stoned. In some indefinable way I’d wanted to love her, I’d wanted her to be a woman, but what had she wanted from me? There had been nights she came to me, she’d kept me warm. Why? A hollow sensation caught at my gut and I had to turn away from Escheri, embarrassed, confused.
“Didn’t worry that teacher too much though, a?” Escheri said after a short time.
I looked at her face: impassive now, studying me, and I realized that for a Rris who’d first seen me under 24 hours ago she was damned relaxed. “Shyia told you quite a lot, didn’t he,” I said.
“Not as much as I’d like to know,” she came back. “He’s right about you, you know: you are going to cause some real ripples in the pool.”
“Escheri,” I hesitated, not sure how it was going to sound. “Has there ever been. . . have you ever heard of anything like me being here before? Any story. . . or something?”
She watched me again. “No. No, never. Then, I’ve never been one for the old literature. Maybe someone in Shattered Water will be able to tell you more.”
“Maybe.”
An ear flickered again. “Come on, stop standing around like a water spout and get those pants on. I’ll find someone to fix that hole for you. The Commissioner wants to see you again, preferably sometime today.”
------v------
Today the drapes were open in the Commissioner’s office. Winter sunlight ebbed in through the windows overlooking the outer courtyard, refracted by the warped panes into myriads of rainbows and prism-smears on walls and papers on the desk. The Commissioner was seated, waiting. A pistol sat in prominent view beside him, primed and most probably loaded. He’d stared at me when I came in, as though he thought the previous night had been a dream, as though he still didn’t quite believe I was real.
We talked. He had questions of course, a lot of them. Parts of my story he wanted me to repeat, parts to clarify. He wanted to see more of what my laptop could do: the multimedia, the games, the films. It was late evening when I was taken back to my cold little room and once more the door was locked.
Shyia brought my food that night. He closed the door behind him and set the tray on the rickety table with its flickering candle. “A long day?”
I dropped down off the bed, where I’d been standing to get a view out the window to the courtyard and open world beyond. “A good way to describe it. “ I sat down and raked my fingers through my hair, clean for the first time in a long while. “I could get tired of these very quickly.”
