341 - We live under the same moon

I met with Vaneesh the next evening. I’d told her I wanted to speak with her. Piat, I wasn’t even sure why, except that she, not me, was going to be the mother of Chevenga’s next child. She becomes family, except that she and the child will be Roskat, while we will be in… I was going to say, Vae Arahi. I guess it’s Arko. But when the child is old enough, there’ll be visits.

I think I’ll be happier living there when it’s in the Marble Palace, not the Mezem.

We are coming, my friend.

But what was I going to say to her? “So! You’re going to be the mother of Chevenga’s next child!” Then what? I wanted to see what kind of person she was, I guess. People show more when it’s just you and them. I took the pehahka.

She is tall and shapely and beautiful in a white woman’s way, with red-brown hair that is almost curly as a Yeoli’s and falls spectacularly around her face. She has black eyes, that look into you very deeply, so they’d be scary except there’s love in them all the time. She wears red, like a Yeoli monk, but a thigh-length tunic instead of a long robe, with the knotting, curving Roskati patterns embroidered in black. She’s so calm you can’t imagine her being angry. It’s her Goddess in her, close to the skin. You can feel it. She’s like a young, white, Wasteega Foa.

Priestesses drink in Roskat. I poured us some in my little shell-cups, and let her choose one.

“You were lovers with him when he was betrayed... to help him through that, right?” I asked her.

“Thank you.” She speaks Enchian in a thick delicate Roskati accent. “Yes, I was two aspects for him.”

“Two aspects?” I ask. “I don’t understand.”

“First I was the Mother and a comfort to him. I held him as he wept for his lost friends and siblings. Then I was the Lover, to draw him back to the path of Life.”

“So it is part of your being a priestess... I understand that. I don’t know how you can do that... be so... chameleon-like to be what people need...” Did that sound like an insult, Piat? “I don’t intend to insult you, I’m sorry if it comes across like that,” I added quickly. “I’m still a little jealous of your time with him...”

“You needn’t be,” she said. It seemed kind of… light. I ignored the emotion. “When I am the Lover, I am all women, so in some way I will be you to him,” she said. “You have a beautiful child together... I am trying to recreate that.”

“He’s still sensitive as a canoe with no outrigger in a high sea,” I say. “More than when you were with him last. If there’s a Goddess aspect that is Healer, you might need Her... too.” Why do I feel like I’m giving him to her? I’m going to get him back. Besides, it’s not like I own him. This strange image comes into my mind: two commanders dividing up conquered territory: Chevenga North and Chevenga South.

“There is, of course,” she says. Her voice is sort of mellifluous, like a talking flute. It’s soothing. “When I was with him last he had just been betrayed... it is hard to imagine him being more unstable when he has his family around him.”

“It’s because he was tortured. By Arkans. Don’t ask him to talk about it, because he can’t… it’s what they did to him.” She gets this look on her gentle face as if she heard but hoped it wasn’t true, and it hurts to find out.

“I will be the Healer as he needs it.”

“You know I actually had to pursue him in the Mezem?”

“No, but Yeoli men are coy like that.”

I tell her the whole story, sipping now and then to clear my mouth of some of those memories. “I had my heart set on him no matter what arguments I had with myself against the notion…” I look at her to see what she thinks of this. “I suppose that sounds a little silly, doesn’t it?”

She signs charcoal. The way she moves is gentle, all the time. “No, not silly, but rather brave in the face of dire circumstance.”

“You think so? I suppose that love and warmth in the face of all that death seemed sensible to me. Vaneesh, that’s what you do as Priestess, then? Remind people that love is stronger than any fear?”

“People are only people,” she says. “They forget.”

The pehahka was warm behind my cheekbones and sweet, sending its calm all over me. I could tell by the redness of her cheeks that she was feeling it, too. “Vaneesh, you should tell me when your fertile time of the month is, is so I can make sure not to, heh, empty him out, so to speak. My egg is falling in about four or five days, so I will not be having that kind of sex with him around that time.”

“You’re holding off having another because of the war,” she says, smiling. She has a smile on her face almost always, Piat. Only time it went away was while we were talking about Chevenga being tortured and some of the bad stuff in the Mezem. “We live under the same moon… mine will start the day after tomorrow.”

“Oh, good!” I say. “But I just made love to him yesterday... after I noticed that Mirko was looking at my rear and Chevenga noticed too... he’s normally not possessive at all but it was fun! He’ll be a full cistern in a couple of days.”

Vaneesh smiles with a bit of a twinkle in her eye. “With young men, it is like a cup that is ever filled.” Hers was empty, I noticed. I filled it again. And mine.

“I think I’m going to like being Vastagi Niku to this child,” I say. “That means, em, related to a child by marriage... close enough. It’s a little strange to find out that a whole country wants to get into my affianced’s loincloth, though I can see the attraction.”

She laughs. Her laugh makes me think of sex, and I don’t think it’s just the pehahka. “Yes, you have excellent taste, I must say,” she says.

“Oh, there’s no one quite like Chevenga,” I giggle. “I had to climb in his window and convince him to make love to me, and him poking a tent-pole hole in his sheets, even as he’s saying ‘No!’”

“Yeoli men like to play hard to get,” she says, chuckling.

“My friend Merao says so too, and she’s Yeoli!” You remember I told you in that other letter, we finally hooked up in Terera. Got to see each other grown-up, and got drunk together. We were laughing about it, too.

“Who better to know the truth than another woman?” Vaneesh giggles.

I imagine the Wasteega Foa giggling, and just about fall off the couch laughing. “Oh dear, I might be a little drunk… yes! And then with Chevenga... it’s semana kra on top of that! He’s primed to... hee... be less than aggressive, shall we say? Primed to obey his people?” Oh Piat, I am bad, I am so bad, telling her that.

“We live under the same moon, or it’s luck,” she says, getting a little more serious. “How many days, with you?” I straighten up, stiff. This is business. “With you trying not to have a child by him, and me trying to, it would be perfect if we were bleeding in rhythm.” Oh, yes, it would. Just pass him back and forth between us, no disputes, no rough edges, no bother.

“My bleeding was all over the place, before I had Vriah. Now, with some problems if I take my training too hard—that’s one reason why I conceived one in the Mezem, I didn’t think I could—I’m usually twenty-five days... a little short.”

“It’s luck, Niku,” she says. “I’m twenty-seven, reliable as a bead-clock. We might have to take… em… extra measures…” What is this, Vaneesh of Roskat looking shy, tripping over her tongue? She hasn’t even once the whole time I’ve known her.

“Extra measures?” I say, peering at her hard, partly to see her clearly.

“You know that two women… can get their moon-bleeding matched by… breathing the scent of each other’s libidinous juices?”

“Their… libid… libi… ibid… inous… juices?” I’ve never heard that word but I think I know what it means. I want to almost fall off the couch again, but she’s serious! Piat, if this were a tavern, I’d know it was a pick-up line. But it’s the high priestess of Roskat, we’re in an Arkan mayor’s palace and we’re planning the founding of a demarchic dynasty.

“Yes,” she says. “The fluid that runs from a woman’s loins when she is sexually aroused. It would be… most… practical.” She talks about it as if it’s something sacred. That, and how beautiful she is, is suddenly waking the fire between my legs. It all wreathes around with the pehahka and the thoughts of Chevenga.

“How might we get sexually aroused?” I whisper, leaning closer to her, so our shoulders almost touch. How did we get on the same couch?

“I have one or two ideas,” she says, her eyes gazing into mine. This close, they seem deep as the sea.

“The day after tomorrow,” I say. “So now would actually be a good time for you to have him.”

“That was one of my ideas,” she says. Our foreheads almost touch. I feel her hair against mine. I’m just wearing my pareo, because the fire makes it nice and warm in this parlour. I feel the warmth of her closeness on my breasts.

A finger taps on the door. “Niku, Vaneesh, sorry to interrupt,” Chevenga says, “but I think Vriah’s stuffed bat got left in there; mind if I come in and get it?”

Vaneesh and I look at each other, and understanding passes between our eyes. We get up in unison as if we’ve been doing practice drills for it for years, and move to flank the office door. “Of course, omores, come in,” I say casually.

“I’ve got her in the crib finally,” he says as he opens the door, “but you know how she absolutely refuses to sleep without that bat now oh oh oh oh ohhhhhh All-Spirimmph—”

You can gather what happened then, Piat, once we got Vriah her bat. Except perhaps how we arranged ourselves. Let’s just say it was what was necessary for the mission: I got Chevenga North and she got Chevenga South.

Hold on, hold on, hold on, my friend. Be strong. We are coming for you.

Love,
Niku

I am standing on a plain of glass, barren and fused as if the flames of the Fire breathed down on it, mirror-smooth like the walls of Arko.

Shininao comes… it is this again, he will seize my heart through my mouth, but he changes. His bird-head turns into the skull of a cow, with horns as wide as arms; his body becomes bones, of all different people and animals, asymmetical and chaotic and yet somehow able to move, twined with husks of dried flesh. He clatters rhythmically as he shambles limping towards me, metallic, the ten curving knife-blades he has for claws clinking. Below him, his mirror-image on the white-green glass shambles, too, faded as if by distance. He smells like the lion-trench in the Mezem of Arko, but of smoke, too, and rot becoming earth.

He turns his black eye-holes towards me, and they are full of flames, orange and blue. From the motion, a rain of maggots falls, pattering softly like drops. I feel passive, as if the danger from him does not matter.

Then I am in another place… a cottage of square logs, full of strange things I cannot name. For some reason, I am chopping vegetables. A man comes in the door, slapping his gloved hands against his hips to warm them. Shininao in his Arkan aspect—the Summoner—starts to introduce us formally, and we both say at once, “We’ve met.” Everything fits together and made sense, like the whack of a blade through spine.

“Shefen-kas.”

“Triadas.”

[Acknowledgments: Shirley for writing the Niku part of yesterday's post (though of course the Chevenga lines are mine) and Blue for playing Vaneesh for today's.]