Deep magic second coll.., p.49
Deep Magic - Second Collection, page 49
part #2 of Deep Magic Collection Series
By the end of their third year together, Eshi had learned how to gather herbs, mix poultices, set bones, and suture wounds. There was little more for him to learn from Kana, for the most potent feats of healing relied on Soothing Voice. His mother told him often how proud Grandmother Sul would have been to see him learning a Healer’s skills, but he knew that his grandmother had died ashamed of him and his useless zephyr.
He was not useless anymore. While Kana spent her time with those who could only be helped by Soothing Voice, Eshi tended the less gravely ill and injured. As the years passed, few who could be helped died of illness or injury on Eastwind Island, and word began to spread to other islands that Kana of Eastwind was as skilled a Healer as any, even as skilled as Madam Saro of Coralrock.
When Eshi was not helping Kana, he spent his time caring for the island’s children, for though he and Kana had tried to have children of their own, they had been barren. Fish Callers and Deep Divers and Flint Knappers could not do their work with children underfoot, however. Grandmothers who had earned the right to easy living after decades of hard work would gather in the center of the village and gossip while they watched the children. Eshi did not visit them every day, but when he did, he told short, simple versions of the stories he had learned from Rabba, and he led the children in the games that would teach them their skills and hint at their gifts. The children loved him. He was more entertaining than the most energetic of grandmothers.
“Kana,” he said one evening while he lay in bed with her; she smelled like sweat and sweet herbs. “I am worried about one of the girls.”
“Oh?” she said, tracing her finger along the line of his jaw.
“Orra. You know her. She had a difficult birth, and you helped her mother. That was five years ago now, so you may not remember.”
“What about her?”
“She has grown quick, and strong, and clever,” he said. “Not the best at everything, but good at many things. Too much like me.”
“I am sure she’ll be fine.”
Watching Orra with the other children bred a gnawing worry in Eshi. Fears and frustrations he thought he had buried a decade ago when he and Kana began their relationship and he began to accept himself were rekindled. He had given up too soon, he decided. Orra was like him. If her talent was the same as his, she too would have no one to teach her. If only he had not given up. She would suffer as he had, because of his weakness.
“Orra,” he asked her one morning while the other children played a chasing game. She watched them, visibly annoyed that he had drawn her away.
“What do you like to do, Orra?” he said, kneeling and meeting her eyes. “Chasing? Swimming?”
She shrugged. “I like everything, I guess.”
“I know, Orra, and you are such a talented young girl,” he said. It took effort to keep his eyes from wandering to her formless zephyr. He had to help her. Now, before it was too late, before people rejected her for her uselessness, as they had rejected him. If she began her search now, while she was still a child, while it was still acceptable for her to learn and explore, she could come of age with some direction.
Maybe her zephyr would be an empty bowl, like his. Maybe, through her, he could discover his gift.
It was too much to hope. And cruel, to use her in that way. This was for her sake, Eshi told himself. Her sake. Not his.
“What is it you love most of all? If you could only do one thing, what would it be?”
Orra frowned and tapped her chin. Her eyes lit up for a moment, and Eshi felt a pulse of happiness. Then she looked away, ashamed, and shrugged again.
“Orra, what were you thinking of just now?” he said gently, taking her hand.
“It’s silly,” she murmured. “And mother says I’ll catch a cold.”
“Nothing is silly if it brings you joy,” Eshi said. “People tried to tell me that I was silly to learn Speaker Rabba’s stories. But no one else can tell them, no one but me and her. Silliness can make us special, Orra.”
She smiled nervously, then waved him closer. He leaned toward her, and she cupped her hands around his ear.
“I like dancing in the rain,” she whispered. “Especially when it’s windy, and there’s lightning on the bay.”
Eshi smiled at her, and her anxiety disappeared.
“That’s wonderful, Orra,” he said. “What do you love about the rain?”
“It just makes me feel alive,” she said, shrugging, gaining confidence. “The feel of the raindrops on my skin, the sound of the wind and thunder, the bright flashes over the deep water.”
“I think I know what you mean,” said Eshi. He touched her on the nose, and she giggled, pulling away from him and smiling. “Orra, no matter what anyone tells you, don’t forget how much you love dancing in the rain. Mind your mother, of course. But don’t forget. Do you promise?”
She touched his nose and grinned.
“I promise.”
* * *
Eshi tried it, once. He stood out in the middle of a rainstorm and tried to dance. It was enjoyable, for a moment, till his clothes soaked through and he began to shiver from the cold. He dashed back into his hut and huddled by the fire while Kana fretted over him.
“What were you doing?”
“Nothing,” said Eshi, staring into the fire. She brought him an herbal tea to keep off the chill, then sat beside him, draping a blanket around their shoulders.
“Are you alright, Eshi?”
“I’m fine,” he said. In truth, he felt empty. If Orra’s gift had something to do with her love of rainstorms, Eshi did not share it. That ought to have made him happy, he scolded himself. Perhaps Orra’s gift would be Seawind’s Whip. So long as her zephyr was different from his, she might avoid his life of lonely uselessness.
It would have been less lonely, he reflected, if someone had shared his zephyr.
“You don’t seem fine,” Kana said softly.
He smiled at her, but he saw in her eyes that she knew his heart. She kissed him.
“Do you want to talk?”
The flames danced in their pit, as Orra danced in the rain.
5. The Man from the Sea
After the winter, when the first stormy month of spring had passed, the people of Eastwind Island gathered driftwood along the shore. It was something Eshi could do as well as anyone, for there was no zephyr for gathering driftwood. He walked with Orra, laughing as the girl tried to carry a log as big as she was.
For every ten steps she managed, the log overbalanced her and she toppled to the sand. Speculation swarmed around her as it once had swarmed around Eshi. He did not participate, and he always told Orra not to forget who she was, not to forget how she loved the rain, and not to worry about her gift. He knew how harmful that sort of attention could be.
Orra paused and threw her driftwood log to the sands. Just beyond her, in the surf, lay a man clinging to a broken spar.
“Stay there, Orra,” Eshi said.
“What is it, Eshi?”
“Just stay there.”
The man was unconscious. Hair as light as dry bamboo hung in matted locks around his pale, beardless face. Deep bruises darkened his arms and torso, burned bright red by the sun. One of his feet had tangled in a strip of crimson sailcloth. The ankle was broken. Eshi felt for the man’s breath and was relieved to find him still alive.
“Orra!” he called. “Run and get Kana!”
* * *
Eshi set the man’s leg on the beach with a splint made from the spar that had saved him and the crimson sailcloth that had caught his ankle. Kana whispered with her Soothing Voice, which was enough to break the man’s fever. They carried him to their hut, covered him with blankets, and fed the fire despite the warm spring air.
“Unless he is very lucky, he’ll never walk again,” Kana said. She felt along his ribs. “Two are broken. His lung may be punctured.”
“Who is he?” Eshi wondered aloud. “Have you ever seen anyone so pale? And what happened to his beard?”
“Some men on Coralrock scrape their bears away with seashells,” Kana said.
“But their skin is like ours,” Eshi said. “And he has no zephyr. This man is not from Coralrock.”
Word spread quickly of the strange man Eshi and Kana had found on the beach. Rumors said his hair was red as fire. Others said he had teeth like a boar. Still others claimed his skin glittered like glassfish scales. People would go out of their way to pass by Eshi and Kana’s hut, hoping for a glimpse of the stranger.
“He’s sick in bed!” Eshi scolded, time and again, shooing prying eyes away. “Leave him alone!”
Rabba, who sighed continually at the constant traffic across what had once been her private stretch of beach, came to see the man at Eshi’s request. Perhaps one of the old stories told of people with light hair and pale skin that burned from the touch of the sun.
“Other than silly children’s tales of sea demons and fire spirits, no,” Rabba said, watching the man take short, shallow breaths. “I’ve never heard of anyone like him.”
He woke in the night of the third day. His scream roused Eshi and sent his blood racing with panic. The man thrashed against his blankets. The stink of sweat and fear poured from him. Eshi ran to his side and held his shoulder.
“Calm, calm,” Eshi said, but the man’s eyes rolled sightlessly, and he uttered only ragged gibberish. Kana knelt beside him, but her Soothing Voice did nothing to calm him.
“Does he not know how to speak?” she said, astonished. Even the strangers from the islands to the far west, who came every few years by sailboat and Seawind’s Whip, knew how to speak.
The man’s eyes settled on Eshi. After a few shuddering breaths he grabbed Eshi by the front of his shirt and began muttering frantic syllables, unintelligible, but Eshi saw in the man’s bright eyes a need to be understood.
“Eshi,” Kana said, afraid.
“He’s speaking,” Eshi said. “Of course he is. He’s a man, isn’t he? But he’s far from home, and we can’t understand, and he’s terrified.”
Eshi took the man’s hand in his and made comforting noises of the sort he made to soothe an upset child. The man frowned, and growled a string of angry syllables, but Eshi only shook his head. Finally the man gave up. He flopped back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling, but he let Eshi continue holding his hand. Eshi hummed a song his mother had sung for him long ago until the man fell into fitful sleep.
* * *
They began to teach each other with gestures and single words. Eshi held up a starfruit and named it. The man from the sea replied with a word of his own. Eshi pointed to his arm, his head, his eye, his foot, and said the words. The man from the sea said his own words in turn. By pointing through the smoke vent in the roof of the hut they taught each other the words for day and night, for the sun and the moon and the stars. Eshi pantomimed jumping, swimming, throwing, and running. The man from the sea frowned and pointed to his broken ankle.
“Foot,” he said, in Eshi’s speech. “I walk?”
Eshi tried to think of a way to pantomime “I don’t know” without shrugging his shoulders, which seemed too flippant a way to tell a man he might never walk again.
“Not this day,” Eshi said.
A week after they had brought the man from the sea to their hut, his bruises had begun to heal, but his breath still rattled in his chest. Kana brewed an herbal medicine that would send him into a deep sleep so that he would not suffer the agony of her prodding at his ribs. He clamped his teeth shut and glared at Kana. Eshi explained—as best he could; he spoke the man from the sea’s speech like an infant—that Kana wanted to help. The man from the sea looked doubtful.
“Foot?” he asked.
“Foot, yes,” said Eshi. He touched his side. “And ribs. Broken.”
Soon the man slept soundly as a newborn. Even with him sleeping under the blanket of medicine, his breaths were thick and pained. Kana probed along his ribs with her fingers. Her face darkened.
“One of the ribs is healing, but the other is still broken, and his lung is slowly filling with blood,” she said. “He will die, Eshi.”
Though Eshi had only known the man for a week, Kana’s words were a twisting knife in his heart. The man had raised a thousand questions. Where had he come from, where people’s skin was so pale and their hair so light? Where they spoke a language all their own? Where was the man’s zephyr?
Eshi’s curiosity burned for answers. He longed to learn how to speak to the man from the sea, to talk with him as grown men talk, to satisfy his curiosity. Not since Eshi had abandoned his search for the use of his zephyr had he longed to learn so strongly.
“Eshi,” Kana said. “I can’t save him.”
She looked down at the man. She wore horror and sadness on her face. Kana was used to death—she eased the passing of the old, as she had done for Eshi’s mother a summer ago—but few had died of trauma or sickness on Eastwind Island since she had become Healer.
Eshi held her, feeling foolish. He had been upset that the man would die, but only because he would lose an object of curiosity. He had mourned the loss of learning, while Kana felt the sudden hollow of a young life ending. She cried quietly, watching the man from the sea breathe his ragged breaths, and Eshi kissed her tears.
The next day Eshi carried the man from the sea down to the beach. They sat beneath a warm spring sun and spoke of scuttling crabs and clinging lizards and all manner of living things. They taught each other the words for the waves, and the seashells, and the white gulls over the bay.
As the sun set, through analogy and great effort, Eshi told the man that he was going to die.
* * *
By the high heat of summer, when the spring rains had ended, but before the monsoons began to sweep in from the east, Eshi and the man from the sea could speak as children speak. Their words were simple, but sufficient—with the aid of occasional gestures—to express any but the most complex of ideas.
The man from the sea would die soon. His breathing had become a loose rattle like the wind through dry trees. Every morning he woke coughing. Every day Eshi carried him out to the beach, so that he could spend his last days beneath the sky, feeling the wind.
“When my people die,” he said one day, watching the sunset, “our souls go down to the deep sea.”
“Is that where your zephyrs live?” Eshi asked.
The man gave him that strange look he always gave when Eshi spoke of zephyrs, then glanced at Eshi’s shoulder. The man usually avoided looking at Eshi’s zephyr for long. This time, his stare lingered.
“We do not have zephyrs,” the man said. He looked out at the dark, rolling silhouettes of the waves in the moonlight. “We have bigger gods. Deeper gods.”
“Gods?” It was a new word for Eshi.
The man from the sea waved a hand toward Eshi’s zephyr. He opened his mouth to speak, but a fit of coughing seized him. Eshi held his shoulders and pressed a cloth to his lips for the blood till the fit passed.
“Like your zephyrs,” said the man from the sea, when he found his voice again. “But ours do not sit on our shoulders. They keep huts in the deepest places of the sea. They only give their gifts in ... trade.” He took a jagged, shuddering breath. “Do you fear your zephyrs, my friend?”
“No,” Eshi said. “Their gifts help us to live.” He thought of his own zephyr, empty of any talent. “At worst, they give us nothing,” he said quietly.
“Is yours such a one?” said the man.
Eshi felt the sting of shame, but soon curiosity overcame it.
“Why do you ask?”
“I have felt the power of your woman’s zephyr when she whispers healing words to me,” said the man from the sea. “I have seen the men and women in their fishing canoes fill their nets. I have heard the old woman’s voice carry for a thousand paces. But I have spent my days with you.”
Eshi craned his neck to look at his zephyr, wind spun into an empty bowl, always spinning, doing nothing. The man from the sea followed Eshi’s gaze with an unspoken question in his eyes.
“No one has had a zephyr like mine before,” Eshi said. “No one knew how to use it, and I never found out on my own.”
“You are a young man, my friend,” said the man from the sea. He smirked. “‘Never’ is a word for the dying.”
Eshi scoffed. His beard had grown to cover his neck. Gray streaked the hair at his temples, and Kana often teased him about the deep furrow in his brow.
“I do not feel young.”
They sat in silence, listening to the waves and watching the first stars come out of hiding. They taught each other the constellations. Eshi pointed out the Charging Boar and the Spearfisher—the Ox and the Soldier, as the man from the sea called them. Many were the same, but some were different, as Eshi had found was the way of most things that he and the man from the sea discussed.
After a time, the man from the sea turned away from the sky to stare at Eshi’s zephyr. His gaze lingered longer than it ever had. Eshi began to feel an itch, like salt on his skin after swimming in the bay. He craned his neck. His zephyr was as it had always been, a useless bowl of wind.
“My people have a saying,” said the man from the sea. “An empty cup wants water, and the full cup gives. We say it when we want another drink of wine, or a few extra coins in bribe. But it has an older, deeper meaning, my friend. An empty cup wants water as the young want to learn. The old have lost their curiosity but can teach the young. You are still in some ways young, I think.”
“What is the use in going on learning and learning?” Eshi said. “You cannot drink from an empty cup.”
“Ha!” said the man from the sea. “What do I know? I am only a dying sailor.”
There were other things Eshi wanted to say, but his voice caught in his throat. Sadness welled in Eshi to think that the man from the sea would die soon. He had not had many friends—not since his childhood, anyway—and though they had known each other for only a few months, he felt as much for the man from the sea as he felt for Rabba, or for Kana, or for Orra.
