YAAN-1
“Come on back here, you!” These words resounded in Farmer Green’s muddy little cowyard, harshened and amplified by the cold, still, air of Lhael that Nanatoi had yet to chase away.
The speaker of these words was Tolan Blabb, a tall thickboned farmhand wearing a heavy brown wool jacket and large mud-caked boots.
They were spoken to Estobbias, who regarded Tolan with one eye but continued to munch on the little tornleaf bush in the corner of the little cowyard.
“You hear me, you dumb goat? Right now, I’m warning you! You’re gonna get it!” He made a mad rush at him.
“Tolan’ll never catch Estobbias,” I said to Rook, who was sitting beside me on the rickety wooden post-and-pole fence of the cowyard, watching Wonseeba, Ukots, Froob, Dallyappi, Yubian, and the rest. This was an activity we often undertook together, especially when Farmer Green was grazing them in the little cowyard instead of the big one.
“Estobbias?” Rook arched one of his dark eyebrows while tilting his head just enough to regard me.
I pointed at Estobbias, as he nimbly avoided Tolan’s assault, navigating the muddy ground with short, sure steps as he maneuvered around the tornleaf bush.
Tolan arrived at the place where Estobbias had been but wasn’t now at a velocity that on the muddy ground was too great for him to divert his considerable bulk from its trajectory. He continued on past the place where Estobbias had been, clutching in vain at the tornleaf bush as he went by, and slip-sliding across the mud until he slammed into the fence beyond, which groaned and shuddered under the force of the impact, but held to.
Jake, who was by the cow barn slinging heaping shovelfuls of old manure from a humongous pile onto a flatbed wagon, watched this duel, or chase, with a sparkle in his eye and a twitch of his lip, but refrained for now from making one of his famous comments. He was attired in a coat that differed from the one Tolan was wearing in the sole quality that it had a hood, which, however, was pulled back, so that the delight on his rough unshaven face, revealed in that subtle sparkle of his eye and twitch of his lip, was unmistakable even from a distance of fifty or sixty paces.
“Everybody seems to call him Billy,” Rook remarked, as Estobbias trotted to a different tornleaf bush. The cows watched him dispassionately as they nibbled at patches of brown-green grass and from the hayhack in the center of the cowyard.
“He told me his name was Estobbias.”
That wasn’t quite true. The pattern lines of his entity, translated as best as I could translate them into the words of our language (a several-step process, still difficult for me at nine years old), came out of my mouth as “Estobbias;” but Mom had forbidden me from talking about the patterns of existence with anyone except her, and so I had to do yet another translation, from an authentic explanation of how I had come to know him as Estobbias, into nine-year old child speak, i.e., “He told me his name was Estobbias.”
Rook nodded, but said nothing. Had I made such a claim to any of the other human inhabitants of the farms surrounding The Corner, which was the name by which Mom and I referred to our home since it was at the corner of four farms, I would have been indulged, or condescended to. My listener would in all likelihood have pretended to believe that I conversed with the animal inhabitants of the four farms, and indeed, might well have given me an encouraging smile and asked, “And what else did Estobbias say to you?” or some other question of a similar bent. But Rook wasn’t one to discount the statements even of the young, or ignorant. He heard my words, and considered them, neither accepting them, nor doubting them, just allowing them to exist alongside the reality he perceived, and waiting with patient unconcern to see whether they would prove to mesh with that reality, or perhaps alter his perception of it, or not.
Unlike Jake and Tolan, he wasn’t wearing winter clothes, just his customary short-sleeved cotton shirt, light blue today, along with long grey pants of a thin knit. And as usual, he seemed as comfortable as a woolly goat. I was wearing a quilted wool jacket, along with gloves and a wool-lined hat that fastened under my chin, and still I could feel the chill; but he, in his autumn garb, was unfazed—“immune from the elements,” as Rushlight Fox described him—and this despite his body being smooth and hairless (not counting the thick mass of black on top), instead of all rough and hairy like most of the other farmhands.
“Rook?”
Without looking at me—he could have been watching the cows eating at the hayhack, or Tolan chasing Estobbias, or Jake shoveling piles into his wagon—he said, “Lady Yaan?”
Splap. That was the sound of a Jake shovel-full of manure landing at the peak of the growing hill on the flatbed. I always noticed sounds like that when I was talking with Rook. He was a Silent One: Not quiet—he was sociable, and not untalkative—but silent. His spirit was silent: he was always at ease, always devoid of anxiety. Never was there any indication of tension or even concern, about anything, in his bearing, his voice, or his mood.
When he and Jake had been hired, and this was before my memory, the other farmhands wanted to dislike him (this I heard from Mom). Here, as Mom described it, was a greenhorn who was younger than any of them, taller, thinner, who to look at him, with his smooth olive skin, long uncalloused hands, and fine features, had never done a hard day’s toil in his life—they wanted to dislike him, but they couldn’t. They teased him at first (and Jake’s sharp tongue was noticeably absent from his defense, Mom said), they snickered behind his back, they assigned him the jobs nobody else wanted to do.
They expected him to chafe at their jibes, to defend himself, and in time to lose his temper and initiate a physical altercation, which they would answer with strong-armed finality. It was a baiting strategy, Mom told me, employed upon many a young “cock,” as they were known by the grizzled fieldhands on farms in the area. But Rook took their early jibes and slights in such stride, and was so willing to do the worst of tasks without complaint, in fact with the same ease and unbothered relaxedness with which he did everything; and moreover, belying the slightness of his frame, he was such a strong and tireless worker (he could drive a plow as long as the oxen would go, for example, and push a wheelbarrow through six inches of mud, loaded with such weight that anyone else would have trouble moving it on dry land) that they couldn’t dislike him. They liked him from the beginning.
“Why aren’t you cold?” I asked him. I had often wondered about his uncanny resistance to the elements, but I’d never remembered to question him about it.
“It’s Nanatoi, is it not?”
“That has nothing to do with the temperature.”
“Really? Yon Exeter,” he nodded at Jake, “was just reciting to me some numbers the other day, and if I recall, the average temperature during Nanatoi is quite a bit higher than the average temperature during Lhael.”
“That’s a clever evasion,” I told him, “but it doesn’t alter the fact that everyone else out here is dressed in winter clothes, and you’re not and yet you’re not cold, or even chilly.”
He shot me a sidelong glance, a silent smile of appreciation on his face, and then said, “Point taken. But still you have to admit that even though everything’s still brown and gray out here…” He paused for a moment, his eyes taking in, first, the cowyard, which was bare and brown except for a few tornleaf bushes and an irregular patchwork of soggy grass, and then sweeping over the barren fields beyond the cowyard and the craggy forestline in the distance. Then, he reiterated, “Even though everything’s still brown and gray, the land is, the land is…” He raised his voice, and called to Jake, “Hey Exeter, what was that you were saying this morning, about the land?”
Taking up another heaping shovelful of manure, Jake, raising his own voice, said, “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“About the gleam. I said there was a gleam, and you…”
“Oh,” Jake stopped his shoveling for a long moment during which his pile of manure seemed to settle with a slurping sigh; then, turning towards us, he said, “In a moment of ridiculousness, I said that though still gray and brown the land is alight with that certain early sparkle that heralds the blossom. Why are you bringing up that garbage again?”
“Yeah, that’s it!” Rook said to me, smiling, and then lapsed into a silence that lasted some while as we watched the world exist.
“Rook?” I said, when I judged that our wordlessness was about to usher my question into the realm of the forgotten.
He looked at me with his dark eyes, and said, with a gravity and seriousness he seldom evinced, “Actually, it’s not Rook, per se. We’ve known each other for awhile, Lady Yaan, I believe I am bound by friendship to come clean.”
“Huh?”
“Rook is just something yon Exeter started calling me as a youth, because of my rook-like appearance.” Once again, he nodded at Jake, who had resumed shoveling piles onto his flatbed while yet keeping an eye on Tolan and Estobbias.
I waited, examining the beautiful lines of his entity pattern in a concentrated effort to translate them into his language-name.
I wasn’t fast enough: “I’m properly Shamodrin III. I’m a prince; and it’s quite possible a king, depending on whether or not my father is still alive. But you can continue to call me Rook, if you prefer.”
I’d heard him tell people that he was from a place called Shamokin, but I’d assumed it was a city in Lenima somewhere. “You mean Shamokin is another place—another country?”
“Actually, it’s another planet.” The unaccustomed seriousness of his demeanor persisted.
“Planet?”
“Out there,” he said, indicating the heavens with a sweeping gesture, “beyond the sky.”