Hienama (11 page)

What he’d actually done was go straight
to the kitchen and hack at his wrists and throat with the sharpest
blade he could find. I imagine it made quite a mess.

I didn’t want to hear what
Gesaril had said, as Ysobi – and later Tibar and the other hienamas
– had patched him up. But Ysobi wanted to tell me so I had to
listen. ‘If I’m dead, I won’t be a bother to you any more. I won’t
be a bother to anyhar. Let me die.’ And so on.

Was this really a plea from the
heart from a damaged soul or a calculated dramatic act? I wondered
if I was just exceptionately hard-hearted and cold. After all, here
I was, surrounded by supporters and Gesaril was lying alone,
virtually under guard, in a bedroom of the Nayati. Ysobi was here
with me and I held against my side the one thing that was perhaps
my most potent weapon in this war. If it was a war.

At least Ysobi accepted that Gesaril
was too reliant on him, and agreed to let Sinnar monitor the har
for the next few days. Gesaril was removed to the phylarch’s house,
and Ysobi carried on working with Orphie. I knew Orphie was
disgusted by the whole affair and shared my views. But that might
just have been because he cared for me.

I was unaware of public opinion
over the Gesaril business, or even how much others in the community
knew about it, but my friends tactfully kept quiet on the subject.
They came to visit me all the time, and one night, I got blissfully
drunk with Fahn, Minnow and Vole. We laughed a lot. There was no
mention of Gesaril.

Ysobi came to stay with me more
often. Once, I said to him, ‘Will Gesaril be sent home now?’

Ysobi hesitated before answering.
‘We’ve sent a letter to Kyme.’

‘Meaning?’ A hard edge had come
into my voice. I couldn’t help it.

‘We can’t just abandon him,
Jass.’

I thought I could abandon him
quite easily, preferably naked, on an exposed hillside during a
snowstorm. ‘Are you still going to try and work with him?’

‘He has to work on himself,
mainly. I think most of his fears are imaginary.’

‘You think it’s possible to
help him, then?’

‘I don’t think it’s
impossible.’

I wanted to say more, but held
my tongue. I’d decided that arguments should not be part of my
arsenal.

Before I continue with the
story of Gesaril, there has to be an interlude. I have to talk
about my son.

The harling came into our lives
properly about a week after the equinox. I noticed the pearl had
gone brittle and cracks appeared in it. Transfixed, I put it on the
kitchen table and sat next to it, watching. I drank some wine as I
did so. Eventually, it fell apart completely and a weird little
animal crawled out. We stared at each other for some moments. It
was most disorientating. I said, ‘Hello, creature,’ and the harling
lifted its head, on a neck that seemed a little too long and thin,
and sniffed the air. I had some cream cheese in the cold room and
went to fetch it.

When I returned, after only a
few seconds, the harling was examining the broken pieces of the
pearl. He turned quickly, defensively, when he heard me approach. I
offered the cheese and he ate it from my hand like a wary horse,
flinching back if I made any sudden movements. I could not imagine
how this creature could in any way grow to be a har. He was
intelligent, that was obvious, and more like a colt or a calf than
a cub or a pup, since he could move about and eat immediately after
hatching. He was alien to behold because he wasn’t at all like a
human baby, but more like an older child in miniature form. He had
a sense of survival and cunning. His first noises were hisses.

Orphie found me attempting
communication with my alien son. He walked in through the kitchen
door, stiffened in horror at what he beheld, and said, ‘Jass, it’s
freezing in here! The window’s open. Get a blanket for the harling.
He needs bathing as well. Are you mad?’

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I
said. ‘Look at him.’

Orphie picked the harling up.
At first he struggled and hissed, then became quiet. ‘He’s
shivering,’ Orphie said. ‘Get a blanket, Jass.’

‘He’s had some cheese,’ I said.
Then I went to fetch a blanket.

In the bedroom, I nearly passed
out. I’d given birth and it was a monster. Somehow I got back
downstairs.

The harling was asleep in
Orphie’s arms and now appeared less alien. He was covered in a
viscous fluid, which must have protected him inside the pearl. I
saw then he had an umbilical cord, or rather had once had, as it
appeared Orphie had cut it. Orphie wrapped the blanket I’d brought
around the harling; it draped down to the floor. ‘Are you drunk?’
Orphie asked, rather sharply.

I shook my head. ‘No. I’m just
concussed by life.’

‘It’s a good job I’m here,
then. Get some warm water. We’ll bathe him.’

We dabbed at the sleeping
harling with wet cloths and as I did so, I was thinking:
This
came out of me. This is mine.
I thought I should be feeling
something more than shock.

Strangely enough, I didn’t
consider sending Orphie to fetch Ysobi. I was content for it just
to be Orphie and me dealing with this unhinging event.

‘He’ll sleep a lot at first,’
Orphie said. ‘And eat, of course. They grow very quick, Jass. You
can almost see it happening.’

‘We don’t know each other,’ I
said. ‘How does it work, all that hostling stuff? Shouldn’t I be
feeling sentimental or something?’

‘I’ll help you,’ Orphie said.
And that was that.

I named him Zephyrus, for the
wind that had blown in through the open kitchen window, right over
him as he’d crawled from the pearl. It shortened nicely to Zeph.
When Ysobi was staying overnight, he slept in his own room, but
when I was alone he’d slither under my blankets and curl up on my
chest like a cat, an ear pressed to the place where my heart was
beating beneath the skin. It was a strange relationship we had, a
sort of mutual wary respect that I hoped would one day turn into
affection and trust. He trusted me completely, but I didn’t trust
him. I thought he might try to smother me in my sleep. It was
because he had a thinking mind and I didn’t know what was in it.
Surely, a hostling should be closer psychically to his son than I
was? Zeph was part of me and yet not. I couldn’t hear his thoughts,
even when I tried really hard. One night, I woke from a dream of
falling. I woke up gasping, my limbs twitching. Of course, Zeph was
on my chest, like an incubus of nightmare; too heavy. He woke up
too and murmured, ‘Sleep, Jassy. Good.’ Then he settled down
again.

They were his first words. I’d
have been less surprised if my pony had said my name, I think.

Zeph followed me around, or
Ysobi, or Orphie, as if he was a duckling following the mother
duck. He tended to regard all three of us as equally responsible
for him. On the nights Ysobi was with us, Zeph would sleep in his
own room without getting out of bed and wandering around. He was
too sensible to do things that were dangerous to his body, like
human children often did. He’d come to the vineyard with me and
suck at the preserved fruits on the table where I worked, his
fingers and lips stained blackberry purple. He’d sit in the Nayati
while Orphie and Ysobi were meditating, and there he liked to play
with water; the fountains in the garden, the shallow pool filled
with water lilies and sleek black fish. We quickly learned he had a
thing about water. He was not particularly fond of strangers and
seemed to prefer a small group of friends, or rather family. He was
impatient when hara tried to fuss over or handle him and would
usually spit at them if they tried it, or else run up the curtains
like a cat, which often almost terrified hara. Despite this, other
hara liked him. You couldn’t really help it: in his face was the
beauty he would one day become. He would permit only Orphie and me
to hug him, although he did like to climb Ysobi’s legs and cling to
a thigh as his father walked around. Occasionally, he’d climb
further, like a kitten, until he was perched on Ysobi’s shoulders.
He liked Ysobi’s hair and enjoyed biting and chewing it.

This creature, this little
alien, was a marvel. I enjoyed discovering his developing quirks
and preferences. Sometimes, we’d both stop what we were doing and
stare at each other for some moments: I think we both wondered what
we felt, and what we should feel. One day I said to him, ‘I think I
love you, after all.’

He nodded. ‘Yes.’ He reached
out to pat my face, as if to tell me everything was all right.

But it was not all right. Not
yet. Zeph knew nothing about more adult concerns, of course. But
others did.

It might have been coincidence,
but the bad dreams I’d had when Ysobi had first initiated arunic
arts with Gesaril returned. They were hideous waking dreams, when
I’d wake up into utter blackness and sense there was something
malevolent in the room with me. Sometimes, I’d hear voices outside
the house, even though beyond my window there was no longer any
world, only a spinning void. I’d catch my breath, then wake up and
find I’d been dreaming. I’d get out of bed and go down to the
kitchen to get a drink, but when I reached the bottom of the
stairs, blackness would creep in on me again and I wouldn’t be
alone. I’d catch my breath and wake up again. The sequence could
happen many times in a row and lasted for what seemed like hours of
torment.

I told Sinnar about it,
wondering if it was an after-effect of pearl bearing, and he seemed
to think it might be. ‘You’ve had to adjust dramatically to the
soume aspect of your being,’ he said. ‘Even though you’ve
assimilated it on the surface, I think you’re still churning things
around, deep inside.’

To help me, one afternoon we
performed a simple majhahn of healing together in a private
open-air Nayati, deep in a part of the woods not many hara used.
Neither he nor I mentioned our intentions to anyhar, which at the
time I didn’t really question, although now it seems strange. We
called upon the dehara, and visited the astral realm in meditation.
Sinnar guided our inner journey to the astral palace of Aruhani,
who although is a dehar of aruna, birth and death, also has a
vicious side. Sinnar asked him to protect me.

When we came out of the
meditation, I asked him why he’d done that. ‘Do I need protection?’
I asked.

‘Sometimes we need protection
from ourselves,’ he answered. It was a bright winter day, but
freezing cold. We sat upon large stones that had been arranged in a
circle to create the boundary of the Nayati.

I shivered, and pulled my
goatskin coat closer around me. The long goat hair around my neck
moved in the wind. I was surrounded by a smell of animal that was
turning to carrion. ‘The dreams I have…’ I almost didn’t want to
speak, and I noticed Sinnar wasn’t too keen to meet my eye. ‘They
could be a symptom of psychic attack, right?’

‘I’m sure it’s not that,’
Sinnar said. He looked at me then. ‘You’re strong. It would take a
very strong soul to reach you in that way.’

I put my head to one side,
raised an eyebrow. ‘
Sinnar
,’ I said meaningfully.

He sighed. ‘I meant what I said. I
don’t know anyhar capable of hurting you… who would want to.’

Yet still he’d felt the need to
add that little coda to our ritual. I didn’t want to believe it was
possible either. I didn’t want Gesaril to have the ability to wield
that kind of power.

I said nothing of that
afternoon to Ysobi, or to anyhar else, but I kept alert. I watched
for signs and omens, I prowled my house like a cat after dark, but
unfortunately I paid less attention to what was going on in my
inner world.

A new student had arrived; a
boisterous young har called Aeron, who had recently been incepted
into a phyle further east. He was not dislikeable, although a
handful in a different way to how Gesaril was. He was of the type
that thought he knew everything, and tended to challenge Ysobi and
argue with him. I think Ysobi rather enjoyed this. In appearance,
Aeron was long-faced and thin, a har not yet altogether comfortable
in his new skin. I could tell he was unable to see beauty in
himself, which was probably why he was so stroppy. If you
complimented him, he’d get aggressive in his embarrassment. For
this reason, hara used to tease him a lot. Most of the time, he
didn’t know whether to shout at them or cry. I thought it prudent
to invite Aeron to dinner sometimes too, as we did with Orphie.
Ysobi was spending a lot more time with the students; Orphie and
Aeron worked well together, surprisingly. Consequently, I was
beginning to go out in the evenings alone, or rather I took Zeph
with me. If he got tired, he’d find a corner near my feet and go to
sleep. If he was awake, he’d watch hara and occasionally condescend
to interact with them, if he was in the mood. It was almost as if
Gesaril had left Jesith: nohar talked about him, and I never saw
him about. I assumed Sinnar had him under control, and once Kyme
had sent word about him, a decision as to his future would be made.
My bad dreams diminished after the majhahn I’d done with Sinnar;
maybe our secret fears had been misplaced.

One evening, Zehn and I had an
argument. To be more accurate, Zehn once again took it upon himself
to take me on. No, that’s not accurate at all. I’ll just say what
happened.

I’d gone to Willow Pool Garden
to see one of the inevitable travelling bands that played there
regularly. Most of my friends were there and I joined their group.
Spring was surging over the land and everyhar was in high spirits.
Zeph was feeling sociable too, which meant we both got a lot of
attention. I noticed Zehn come in. He cast me a glance and stared
at me expressionlessly for some moments – I was laughing loudly at
some joke or another. Then he shook his head. He went to the bar. I
stared after him for a few seconds, then forgot it. Zehn was Zehn.
There was nothing I could do about it. After he’d downed a few
drinks, he came to my table and sat down.