ROWAN-7
A group of travelers rested together in a grove of trees, speckles of sunlight illuminating their faces. I recognized the freckled girl, the scarred man, and the woman with the hyacinth eyes among them; but there were others I didn’t know. A big boned man with a heavy brow but a gentle and thoughtful face struck me, as did an older man with laughing but somehow serious blue eyes, big strong arms, and a belly. And there were several others. They had arranged themselves in a rough semi-circle, some sitting cross-legged, some with their legs stretched out in front of them, and some with their backs against the trunks of trees.
This scene I related to Romulus, in paint-dripping detail. Specifically, I said to him, “A bunch of people were sitting in a grove of trees. They liked each other—I think.”
He gazed at me with blank incomprehension for a moment or three, waiting for his mind to disengage from what he was doing. Focus came like a floating ghost into his eyes, which were the color of maple bark, but still he was silent, waiting for the words I had said to replace whatever thoughts and considerations had hitherto been foremost in his brain; and finally into his face, which was the color of the cap of an acorn and the texture of the smoother variety of walnut, came the expression of absorption and curiosity, of me, of the moment, of the world, that I knew so well, and loved.
“Why do you think they liked each other?” he asked, over-enunciating the Leniman words, as was his way.
“The way they acted, it reminded me of how we act together—you and me.” I spoke in his language—and indeed as our conversation continued, we switched freely between languages, sometimes mid-sentence. A linguist might have been able to pinpoint why we said what in which language, what types of ideas or word formations we expressed in one language and which ones we expressed in the other. I only knew that it was fun to say one thing in one language and the next in the other and to have Romulus understand me, and respond in the same, two-language way.
“They were children, then?” Romulus spoke using his own language, though for the adverb he used mine.
“No, they were adults.”
Romulus was silent. He stared at the gray bars of his cage, his walnut face as blank as a numberless clock. As usual, twin serpents of urine and feces fought for control of the general miasma of the room, though not with the house-filling ferocity they had the time the Fatheads had neglected to come for two days, but Romulus seemed not to notice this sense-assault, his face marked by no tincture of aversion whatsoever. He was expressionless, motionless even. As I came to know later, Jaji faces seldom betray any emotion or thought. Romulus, himself, told me this once, after he asked me what I thought he was thinking about and I told him that I assumed his mind was completely barren of thought. “Your faces often seem grotesque to Jaji,” he told me, “even though your features are not so different from ours; and it’s because when you’re happy or sad or mad or thoughtful, your faces change so much. No doubt the lack of change seems as strange to you as the changes do to us.” I thought about it, and told him, in simpler terms, that probably because the forest, where Jajis live, is dark, expressions can’t be seen very well, and so what is imparted by humans with facial expressions must be imparted a different way by Jaji. That seemed sensible to me, and he agreed. “Yes,” he admitted, “we do wave our arms and move our fingers about, and wriggle our bodies and so forth much more than you do, and probably such movements are easier to see in the dimness of the woods than facial expressions.”
Finally, after perhaps forty-five seconds of silent, stench-filled reverie, he asked, “What species of tree were they sitting under?”
“Big ones.”
Asking for no elucidation, he nodded, and sank back into thought. Another forty-five or fifty seconds passed as he pondered. Finally, he said, “They must be Vaens.”
We’d taught each other a great many words from our respective languages, but this one I didn’t know, and I asked him what it meant. He thought in silence for yet another forty-five seconds or so, wiggling his forefinger as if searching through all the words of my language that he had learned from me or on the Grail, for the right one. Finally, he said, “Uh, the free ones, you know, the servants.”
Thinking that in his imperfect knowledge of Leniman, he had got himself mixed up, I told him that could not be so, that servants and free ones were antonyms not synonyms, and that therefore these people could not be both.
He said, “Yes, there seems not to be a word,” at which he suddenly grabbed the Grail, which he was, as usual, borrowing, ran his fingers over it excitedly this way and that, searching for something, then said, greatly satisfied, “Ah, yes; they’re vagabonds.”
A man younger than Dr. Mulgar but in no way resembling a youth, with a shrewd but pleasant face and eyes the color of blueberries, spoke to a woman with a face that seemed knowing yet wondering, serious yet laughing, and bright as the clear Sporch sun that shined down upon the two of them. His eyes danced and the edges of his mouth twitched as he asked, “And yet more?”
The two of them were eating across from each other at a table of yellow wood on the patio of an ornate cabin constructed of that same yellow wood. Plates of meat, broccoli, and beans, along with bowls of soup and cups full of an unknown liquid, lay under their noses, separated, one set from the other, by platters of extra servings. It was one of these platters that the man proffered the woman, along with his look of playful affection.
“Well, my dear Mr. Exeter,” the woman said, one side of her mouth smiling as she accepted the platter as well as his smirk, “your daughter needs some, too.” She patted her stomach in, it seemed to me, self-satisfaction. Where their daughter was, I couldn’t see.
“Daughter?”
“That’s right.”
“Hm.”
“Don’t ‘hm’ me, big boy. I can tell.”
Their eyes met, and I could tell that they were better friends even than Romulus and me…
The man, older now, his hair partly gone and half gray, and his face showing the roads of many a hard journey, stood on a green in front of a large green tent, along with a different woman—the woman with the scar under her eye, in fact—facing a group of four hungry-faced men with bulbous noses and brows as dark and glowering as the clouds overhead, each of the four hefting a different variety of club or mace.
“I wish you would go,” the woman said to the four of them in a voice strong but quiet, as the blue-eyed man looked on with mischievous glee, “I have no wish to hurt you, despite your less-than-enlightened views on male-female re…”
“I’ll say it again,” one of the men interrupted, pointing with a thick, gnarled, finger at the tent, “Them’s ours in there!”
“lationships,” the woman continued, “and there being four of you, I may not be able to immobilize you without injuring a couple of you. I will do what I can, but it really would be best if you would just go home.”
One of the men growled something that sound vaguely like, “Get outta the way!” and another added something that sounded like, “This ain’t none of your concern, Woman!” and yet another started to say something similarly aggressive, but the blue-eyed man interrupted him.
“Actually, it is her concern, Chuckles, and mine,” he said, with meaningful non-seriousness, which drew a look from the woman that could have been disapproving or exasperated, or a caricature of either of those. “They came to us asking for protection from you. They don’t consider themselves to be ‘yours.’ If you’ve gotten the impression that they do, it’s only been because they were afraid of the consequences, and…”
Enough of this!” One of the men bellowed, and the four of them came at the woman and the man in a charge that could have been an attempt to get past them, or a direct attack on them.
I didn’t see the woman pull out a blade. As the attackers swung their weapons, she slid through them in a sort of spinning dance, like a Jaji stepping through a cluster of willows during the Festival of Imbhyran. Only when she stepped away from them did I see her blades, two daggers, which disappeared into pockets or folds in her cloak of crimson and clover, as the four men collapsed as one, at least one of them the victim of one his companion’s weapon rather than the woman’s blades.
A second passed. The four of them lay on the ground groaning or unconscious, one bleeding profusely from his neck, another from his hand.
The woman looked unhappy. She knelt beside one of the fallen men, and offered him a white cloth she pulled from inside her cloak. “Here,” she said gently, “this is narcloth. It will staunch the bleeding.” He accepted it, seeming none too happy but perhaps afraid he would bleed to death if he refused her out of spite. She checked the eyes of the unconscious one. “I really am sorry,” she told a third.
“Well, you warned them,” the blue-eyed man quipped, as she rose with effortless nimbleness. Eyeing his own blade before he sheathed it, he said, “I guess this was extraneous.”
As the woman turned to go into the tent, he added, “Aren’t you going to finish them off?”
She looked at him as if he were being absurd.
Perceiving the dubiousness in her expression, he assured her, with a wry smile, “I’m serious. They’ll just do it once we leave.”
“Do it? Do what? These girls are coming with us.”
“Do what they do.”
The woman sighed. “I suppose. But maybe one of them will spend a moment or two reflecting on his behavior.”
“Nope.”
“You’re that sure of it?”
He nodded, and explained, “Quite. Of course, I’m not an idealist, like you.”
“I think,” she said with a meaningful half-smile, “Our differing attitudes can be explained by you being the idealist, and me the realist.”
Disregarding her comment, he said, “So the best thing would be to finish them off. They’re wasting space, and air and nutrients. They’d kill you, were your positions reversed.”
“Well,” she said, with an air of finality, “I’m certainly not going to pattern my behavior after what I think they would do. Are you?”
“No,” he admitted, “but nevertheless…” He made a chopping motion. “It would be best for the world.”
From her boot, the woman pulled a dagger which was different from the ones she’d returned to the unseen confines of her cloak, smaller and straight. It looked so sharp that it seemed to drip blood even clean. She offered it to the man.
They’re eyes met, and he started to say something, stopped, and then said only, “Okay,” with a smile of admission, and she put the blade back in her boot.
These scenes I reported to Dr. Mulgar, and he was happy, though if I were to judge not nearly so happy as he’d been the day of my “first” vision. He said, in shrewd deliberation, “I’ll record what you’ve seen. It’s something that is going to happen, somewhere, some time; what it means, I don’t know. It might become apparent later. Good job, Romulus, good job.”
In a field of stones, a young man, tall and raven-haired, with, I thought, an odd dark but bright complexion, wielded a sword of his own against two creatures that appeared to be made of stone and clay, and both of which gripped blades that were almost indistinguishable in form and color from their bodies, perhaps, indeed, extensions of their bodies. An incessant chant, low, and expressionless yet oddly insistent, like a creaky wagon wheel, issued from their mouths: “Donk donk donk donk donk donkeyadonkey, donk donk donk donk donk donkeyadonkey…”
Though knowing nothing of swordplay, if I had been asked to judge, I would have said that this raven-haired man lacked the skill with a blade that the woman with the scar under her eye had demonstrated, but he was strong and quick, and held the clay creatures at bay with nifty footwork and a long reach, in fact after a time taking the battle to them.
Swinging the sword back and forth like a brawler with a cudgel, each swing seeming to lend him more energy and more strength, and with this accrual of energy and strength each of his swings cutting through the air with more speed and power, he eventually overcame them, his blade first cutting deeply into the chest of one, who fell, and then taking the head off the other. Strangely, the blood of these clay men was red.
Sheathing his sword, he pulled a small dagger from his belt and with a look of distaste, perhaps unhappiness even, he cut into the head first of one and then the other, and in both cases after digging around in a colorless ooze (the red blood of these creatures evidently restricted to the body, not the head), extracted a serrated circlet of a cloudy whitish-clear substance. These objects he took to some nearby rocks and smashed into powder.
This scene I described to Dr. Mulgar, and he said, “Well, well, Romulus, very good, very good, indeed. You’re discovering some things that, well let’s just say, some greedy powermongers wouldn’t want you to discover. Those things are the product of black magic. They’re called donks because of that sound they make, which is a side effect of the magic. They’re tracking devices, essentially. They’re an unholy amalgam of mineral and alloy and human flesh, held together by magic, and designed to zero in on magic. Usually, they’re created to find some magical device and bring it back to the wizard or sorcerer who made them, or to the person whose pay that wizard or sorcerer is in.” He added, after some thoughts that he kept to himself, “You’re doing great, Romulus. Keep it up. We will need some direction pretty soon, but for now, this is great!”
The girl with hyacinth-tinted eyes chased some boys who were younger than her away from a yet-younger boy they were tormenting. She came charging like a bothered buffalo down a dusty road between ramshackle houses of warped wood; and before this onslaught, the boys scattered like unto the many dogs of this little village greased by cooks in post-supper, dust-peppered, sunshine as they scavenged for leftovers. It wasn’t my impression that their aim was actually to torment him, but to bask together in the intoxicating fellowship of laughter.
He had emerged from the dark recesses of a shop wholly engaged in the sublime act (if one were to judge by the apparent spiritual joy he drew from it) of tearing into some licorice strips; and waiting for him in attitudes of agreeable pastime around and upon an empty hitching post, they had begun peppering him with questions that with either the patience of a teacher or the fear of a slave, he forbore without objection.
These questions were designed to demonstrate his ignorance of the world: anybody his age would be expected to know the answers to them, and even I, much younger than he was and without a day of experience in the world, would have had no problem answering them; but they were quite beyond him, which was amusing to the boys, who kept one-upping one another with easier and easier questions. With each incorrect answer or look of dumbfoundment, fresh peals of laughter shook the boys and echoed up and down the road, which was nearly empty but for ranging dogs and an old couple on the porch of a nearby dwelling who kept glancing in the boys’ direction, brows drawn in disapproval.
The boys thought their victim as devoid of emotion as of knowledge and therefore that their interrogation, while providing great entertainment for themselves, wasn’t hurting him; but this wasn’t the case. He grew, to my eyes, more and more upset with every question put to him, the serene innocence of his face that had been apparent before their questioning began replaced by confusion and a slowly growing awareness of the meanness visited upon him.
After chasing the boys away, the hyacinth-eyed girl sat down on the doorstep of some dusty rag shop, followed by the boy, who, discomfited by the harassment of his tormenters, seemed to need guidance. He stood beside her as she sat, his arms rigid at his sides, until she motioned for him to sit beside her, which he did, as if accustomed to being told what to do and believing that she, because of the command offered by her manner, was somebody who should be obeyed, like a parent or teacher. The command of her manner was an illusion, however; to my eyes, she was quite uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure what to do, or to say. She squeezed her fingers, twisted her hands, looked at her feet, glanced at him, who was watching her from the corners of downcast eyes, and finally asked, “Are you all right?”
He nodded his head with enthusiastic vigor, told her he was fine, and then, judging by the inclination of his head and the expectation on his face, waited for her to ask him another question, as if, perhaps, believing that the friendly questions he sensed she would ask would erase the painful memory of the boys’ unfriendly ones.
She, perceiving that he wanted her to ask him questions, asked, “What’s your name?” and he responded, “Gaorg,” and then after hesitating as if unsure whether or not it was okay for him to ask questions, “What’s yours?”
She said, “Well, sometimes it’s one thing, and sometimes it’s another. Well, it was something, but I renamed myself because it, my previous name, that is, was more suitable for a beautiful person, and I wasn’t, I’m not, beautiful, and now it’s…” Seeing that he was baffled, she smiled and said, “It was Tahain.” Her exposition was, to me, opaque, and yet her manner was open and frank.
He said he liked Tahain, by which I didn’t know whether he meant the name or the girl herself. She said, “I like Gaorg,” and then asked, “So where do you live?” and he pointed down the road. She said, “I live that way,” and pointed in the opposite direction; and the two of them kept asking each other questions as the evening dew drew the afternoon dust to the ground in the draining sunlight.
This scene I described to Dr. Mulgar, and he said, “Another good one, Romulus, you’re doing great,” but I could tell he wasn’t interested in the hyacinth-eyed girl or her new friend. His mind was elsewhere, fighting one of his eternal battles.
The white freckled girl I had seen with the scarred man in the cave sat at the end of a pier beside an old, old, wrinkled woman, both of them gazing out across a blue lake, smooth as a polished table, that smelled only faintly of mineral and lakeweed and not at all of fish (odors that I of course couldn’t identify at the time, but for the sake of vividness have added to my description). The sun, three-fourths of the way down the sky behind them, cast a golden streak upon the blue water, so that they, their faces shadowed, seemed, from a distance, to be dark beings of dirt and bark gazing into an otherworld of light.
They spoke not a word; the water, as still as the sunset within it, laughed not against the shore; no person, nor creature, stirred on the abandoned dock behind them; silence was complete. To judge from the postures of the two, the way they leaned towards one another, and the expressions on their faces, it was the freckled girl who was old and the wrinkled lady who was young, the freckled girl serene, compassionate, assured, the wrinkled lady scared, unsure.
They sat thus in timeless reverie until, perceiving that the old lady’s mien matched her own, the freckled girl arose, and, her fingers brushing her companion’s shoulder like a leaf of softsage, departed, the old lady’s dark eyes acknowledging her with a subtle embrace as she went. She walked the thirty or forty paces across the rickety uneven pier to the shore, where she joined the girl with hyacinth eyes cross-legged on the dock. The two sat there together in longskirts and cloaks, the freckled girl’s longskirt scarlet and cloak goldenrod, and the hyacinth-eyed girl’s longskirt purple, and cloak cobalt, until at length, tilting her head towards the old lady at the end of the pier, the freckled girl said in a voice both childlike and ancient, “She has gone into the Infinite.”
This scene I related to Dr. Mulgar, and while not taken with it to the degree he was by my first “real” vision, of the white girl and the scarred man, his intellect was piqued by it.
“That’s quite interesting, Romulus,” he said, “quite interesting, indeed. You’ve seen that same girl twice, now. You could quite literally see any of an uncountable number of people, and yet you see the same person twice in the span of a few days.” Almost as if to himself, he added, “This could be meaningful—or perhaps it could be explained by subliminal desire: This girl was part of your exciting breakthrough vision and you want to recreate the excitement of that first vision.” Then, addressing me directly again, he finished, “You do have control, Romulus, you see? We’ve just got to make it a conscious control!”
A large, stern-browed man who I thought at first must surely be as unfriendly as Dr. Bowusuvi sat at a large desk of faded sousewood in a small sweaty-looking windowless room lit by two oil lamps hung on nails in the wall. Roll upon roll of scroll were stacked upon stack on the desk amid mechanisms that reminded me of the black boxes in my bedroom. The man had been writing upon another, open, scroll with a baga bird feather pen, but had paused, lost in, as I perceived it, angry thought.
An adult Jaji came unannounced into the room, and said not in Jaji but in Leniman—clearer Leniman even than Romulus spoke, with almost no mispronunciation or over-pronunciation of syllables—“The Calib-er has discovered that her mother has departed.”
The big man disengaged himself from his thought, and said in a voice that belying his gruff countenance was unassuming and friendly, “All went well?”
The Jaji didn’t address the question directly, but Romulus-style, offered up a related fact that could be interpreted as an answer. “She ran with me. She stayed close.”
The big man’s heavy brow went up in surprise. “Were you going full-speed?”
“Nearly.” The Jaji’s face was unreadable.
“Did that surprise you?”
“She is the Calib-er.”
The big man’s eye was caught by his own writing upon the scroll in front of him. Frowning, he mumbled, “Oh, yeah,” and scribbled something. Then, he looked back up at the Jaji and said, “What was the upshot?”
The Jaji just gazed at him, exuding, as Romulus often did with me, magnanimous forbearance of his obtuseness, and the big man clarified, with a negligent wave of a heavy hand, “What was her reaction to the disappearance of her mother?”
The Jaji thought for a moment and then said, “It was my impression that after initial alarm at her absence, she looked for her, and found her.”
“Found her? What do you mean? Her mother is half a continent away by now.”
“Saw her.”
“I repeat, she’s half a continent away!”
“Saw her in the way she sees things that you and I do not.”
“But that far?”
“She is the Calib-er.”
The big man blew out a long exhalation of air. “Okay. Good. Now the hardest part. We wait.”
The Jaji tilted his head, Romulus-style, in the slightest of sideways nods.
The big man stood up, stretched his back, rotated his neck, crossed his arms in front of his body, and grabbed one ankle and then the other, stretching his legs; then, his deportment changed abruptly from officious to informal.
“Come on, old friend,” he said, slapping the Jaji, who he towered over by half a head, on the back, “Let’s go have some supper. We’re having some blueberry lhaelweed hash. It’s sorta like a Jaji meal, there’s no meat. It’s a mixture of the blueberries Von—uh, Della—brought down from Roncala, and the lhaelweed sprouts so common around here, and some other stuff. It’s pretty good, if you put some pepper on it. You’ll probably like it plain, though.”
They walked out of the room together, the big man moving on to a new topic as they did. “I’ve recorded some music for you, by the way—Vorticon and I, he’s got quite a knack for music.”
“Like the Calib-er?”
“Yeah, sort of. One movement has a Jaji spirit but with Camasacan instruments, and one movement a Camasacan spirit but using Jaji instruments, the ones you gave me. Pretty interesting; if I get the time and instruments, I’m going to try the same thing with different combinations…”
This scene I kept to myself, because it was evidence that Jajis were as intelligent as humans, and if Dr. Mulgar knew this rather than just suspecting it at a half-conscious level at a dark and unexplored edge of his all-consuming obsession with me, I thought it wouldn’t be good for Romulus.
In the dusk of a gray autumn day, four scary creatures surrounded two men in a puddle-strewn alleyway that cut between two crumbling brick houses. The two men, large, rough, bearded, and strong, and dressed in gray-brown laborers’ denim, seemed to be unable to move. The naked blades of knives flashed in their hands, but their arms hung limp at their sides. Their backs were against the wall of one of the buildings as if to limit the number of directions the creatures could attack them from, yet they just stood there, undefiant, wide-eyed, mouths part-way opened, as the creatures closed in on them.
The creatures themselves were each about the size of an average human man, as I perceived that to be—broader than Dr. Bowusuvi, not as broad as the Fatheads. About like Dr. Mulgar, I suppose, but a little shorter. They wore torn cloaks black with blood, three of them, to judge by the shapes of their torso, male, and one female. Their skin appeared to be black, though not in the vibrant black-brown sense of some people, but cold obsidian with perhaps a hint of purple in it, with faces that were white, again, not in the pink-white sense of some people, the freckled girl, for instance, but like snow, yet somehow giving off the impression of dirtiness, with black lips, black eyes, black nostrils, and sharp teeth.
Jagged, twisted weapons that looked to me like swords, axes, and maces that had been run through a magical grinding machine hung loosely in clawed hands; these they brandished in slow, mesmerizing circles. They moved in circles, themselves, as well, around each other with an unearthly smoothness, as if they were floating, though upon close inspection I found that their feet were touching the ground. They circled each other thus in silence for what seemed an obscene and unneeded length of time, and then stopped, hung upon a hypothetical tick of the clock, and letting loose a deafening screech, they rushed upon the men, two to each man.
One of the men they killed: one of the creatures sliced his neck open as the other drove its weapon into his gut, and twisted, opening him up, the withdrawal of the deformed blade yanking out entrails. This man collapsed at the feet of his killers without uttering a sound and without having lifted a hand to defend himself. Once he was dead, the creatures stopped screeching, and fell upon him like hungry wolves.
The other man was luckier, or perhaps unluckier. The two creatures attacking him stopped short of killing him; instead, with their weapons a finger’s breadth from opening him up, they stopped, sheathed their blades, ceased their wild screeching, and began observing him like kittens, their faces almost touching his. Like the other man, this man didn’t defend himself, but looked at them in mindstolen fear, like a beast hunted to utter exhaustion. If their delay in killing him gave him hope, he didn’t show it. They observed him for a few moments, and then one of them took a familiar object from its belt: a syringe, in the cylinder of which was the purple-black substance I knew so well.
As the man stood there, motionless, a little foamy spittle escaping a corner of his mouth and a pitiful gasping whine escaping his throat, the creature jabbed the syringe into the meat under his collarbone, injecting the substance into him. His eyes, already glazed over, crossed, and he went limp, sliding down the wall. Then, the two creatures that had accosted him joined the other two at the dead man’s body. It took me a minute to realize they weren’t eating him, just decimating his body with their sharp teeth. After awhile, the man who had been injected got up, gazed impassively upon this industry for a few moments, and then walked away.
This scene I related to Dr. Mulgar, and he said, “Those creatures are called cage wraths, Romulus. Named after a dead city, I believe, Ek-Kur, where they first appeared generations ago. I wouldn’t worry about them. You’re unlikely ever to run into one, they’re rare nowadays; but if you do, avoid them at all costs.” He laughed, patted me on the head, and assured me, “Really, you’re about as likely to be struck by lightning as to be attacked by a cage wrath; it’s not something to spend another moment worrying about,” as if he thought I was afraid they were going to break into the house that night and eat me.
Two men and a woman crouched against a rough rock wall in a garden, the woman clutching a dagger and the men clubs in postures of aggression, with faces of fear, in a twilight which under a canopy of decorative trees left the garden so dark that at first I couldn’t see the object of their concern.
My eyes adjusting to the dimness, however, I soon saw that facing them about three paces away was what one would have to describe as a half-wolf, half-man being, although in spirit it seemed neither man nor wolf. It stood on two legs, which appeared to be too short for a two-legged creature, while conversely, its torso seemed too long, and thick, front to back, but strangely narrow side to side, and covered with patches of coarse gray-black fur. Its arms were muscular but stringy, ending in gnarled, clawed hands. It didn’t have the snout of a wolf, but it had an odd, deformed face, a small nose, and fangs, and eyes neither human nor wolf-like, black, beady, piercing, and malevolent.
As it stood there, it morphed into a long-haired man, bare-chested